The Changeling (4 page)

When Martha started to cry, Tom said, “Now stop that. That’s not going to help. You and Ivy start catching them, and I’ll go look for a box. The first thing you’ve got to do is take them back down to the slough, because if they’re still here when Dad gets home, they’re all going to wind up in the freezer.”

That made Martha cry harder than ever. She could barely see for tears all the time she and Ivy were scrambling around the bedroom after the ducks. The ducks, once they were unoiled, seemed to be feeling much livelier; and catching them turned out to be a wet and messy free-for-all. But they were all safely in the box by the time the next Abbott got home. This time it was Cath.

For once, instead of teasing or complaining, Cath was very helpful. Perhaps it was because she had just gotten home from Girl Scouts and had a Good-Deed-for-the-Day on her mind, or it may just have been that one look at Martha and her bedroom, convinced her that Martha was in for enough trouble already. Anyway, whatever the reason, she had a very helpful idea.

Cath, who at times really seemed to know almost as much as she thought she did, pointed out that if the ducks were returned to the slough immediately they were sure to die.

“What did you wash them with?” she asked. When Martha said detergent, Cath said, “That’s what I thought. You’ve removed all their natural oil, along with the black stuff. They won’t be able to float. They’ll just sink right down to the bottom and drown. I learned all about it when I earned my wildlife badge.”

Then, even before Martha could start crying again, Cath went to the phone and called the Humane Society, and in a very short time an animal ambulance truck pulled up in front of the Abbott’s house.

The truck driver was very sympathetic. He told Martha and Ivy that the ducks would be set free in a safe place as soon as their feathers had had time to regain their natural coating of oil. He put the ducks carefully in the back of the truck, and just before he drove off he said, “By the way, girls, have your folks seen you? I mean since you saved the ducks.”

Martha shook her head.

“Well,” the man said, “maybe it would be a good idea if you tried a little scrubbing on each other before they get home. You know what I mean?”

Martha looked at Ivy and down at herself. She knew what the man meant, all right. She and Ivy were both wet and muddy and oily from one end to the other, and Ivy even had a couple of duck feathers caught in her curly hair. Ivy started laughing, and Martha managed a weak smile.

Ivy said it didn’t matter about her. It was an old dress anyway and probably no one would even notice. So she went on home, and Martha went back to Cath for advice about her new skirt and her bedroom.

But this time Cath only said, “Ugh, that’s your problem.”

It was a problem all right. Several different cleaning establishments visited the Abbotts’ house before everything was back to normal. And in the meantime Martha was forbidden to play with Ivy for a week.

“It’s not that I blame Ivy for what happened,” Martha’s mother said. “After all, I don’t suppose she’s had much training about such things. But you certainly should have known better, Martha.”

“I know better,” Martha said. “I just wasn’t thinking about it.”

“Perhaps a week without Ivy will make you remember the next time.”

“But I promise to remember,” Martha begged. “I promise the next time I find an oily duck I’ll remember not to put it in my bedroom.”

But Martha’s mother only shook her head. And even after the week was over, she always shook her head when she came home and found Ivy there with Martha. Or if she didn’t actually shake her head, she managed to look as if she were thinking about it.

So, the Abbotts’ house wasn’t too good a place for Martha and Ivy; and of course, the Carsons’ house wasn’t even a possibility. One time—just one time—Martha tried going home with Ivy. It was not long after the duck incident, and Martha’s parents hadn’t yet gotten around to forbidding her to go to the Carsons’ house. They did forbid it soon afterwards, but by then it wasn’t necessary. Because Martha had already been there and nothing could have made her go back.

She hadn’t wanted to go, even that first time. But Ivy was on her way home just to get a rope they needed for a game they were playing, and she asked Martha to come along. “Come on with me, okay? We’ll get the rope and come right back.”

Martha stammered, not knowing what to say. She couldn’t say no without telling Ivy that she was afraid. It was hard not to be afraid when all her life she’d been hearing stories and rumors about the Carsons and about the decaying old wreck of a house by the freeway. But how could she mention that to Ivy, who was a Carson?

“Okay?” Ivy said again, and Martha nodded, swallowing hard, and went along.

They came upon the house suddenly, breaking out from between the trees of the orchard straight into its spreading shadow. The shadow filled and overflowed a hardpacked area of orchard land that served as a back yard. The yard was cluttered with parts of cars and motorcycles, and stacks of boards and boxes. The orchard trees nearest the house seemed to be dead or dying, and the house itself had a diseased look, with its stained and crumbling walls and its broken windows like dead eyes.

Ivy led the way up a sagging flight of stairs to what seemed to be a back door. The first room they passed through was rather ordinary, at least it was recognizable as a kitchen. But beyond that there were no real rooms at all. In fact, it seemed less like a house than an immense dark cave, lit only by dim slits of light from far distant windows. In between—everywhere—near and far—there were only rough support posts. Stripped of the walls they had once supported, the ragged posts were hung with bits of plaster and wire and studded with protruding nails. Here and there were a few pieces of old furniture, and in several places Martha could see stacks of cardboard boxes and wooden packing cases. The roar of the freeway seemed to come from directly overhead, and from somewhere very near, came the steady crying of a baby.

They found the baby lying on a blanket near one of the windows. Boxes had been piled around it to form a playpen, but at the moment it didn’t seem to be trying to get away. It was lying on its back and wailing steadily. When it saw Ivy, it sat up and smiled. Ivy leaned over the box and made strange noises at the baby, and the baby made noises back, smiling all over its round wet face. Martha never knew what to say to a baby, not having had much experience with them, but she could tell that this one and Ivy were well acquainted.

“Who’s baby is that?” she asked.

“My mother’s,” Ivy said. “Her name is Josie.”

“It seems to like you,” Martha said.

“She likes to talk with me,” Ivy said. “Babies like talking with people.”

They left the baby, and Ivy led the way around stacks of boxes to a wide curving flight of stairs. The second floor was better. At least all the walls were still there, and it seemed more like a house. There was a wide hallway with many doors, and at the end of the hall a smaller staircase led to the third floor.

Ivy’s room was on the third floor, and it was very small; but it had a balcony and a vine growing up around the window. The bed was only a camping cot, but there were pots of flowers and pictures from magazines pasted on the walls. Ivy was getting the rope out of the closet—her own rope that she had brought with her from Aunt Evaline’s because a rope was such a handy thing to have—when suddenly the motor roar from the freeway seemed to get louder and closer. Looking down from the balcony, they saw a red truck bouncing over the dirt road that led to the house.

“Who’s that?” Martha asked, feeling trapped and frightened.

“My father, I guess,” Ivy said. “And maybe some of my brothers. Max, probably, and Randy and maybe Bill. We’d better go now.”

On the way down the wide staircase to the main floor, they met a woman carrying a load of clothing. The woman was very thin and gray, and she smiled at them vaguely without saying a word. Ivy hurried Martha through the dim cavern of the ground floor and out the back door. The truck was parked not far away, and several people were standing near it. Most of them were big dark-haired men, and they were talking in loud rough voices.

As Martha and Ivy walked quickly and quietly across the yard, someone yelled at them, “Hey Ivy. Who you got there?” Martha looked around and saw that it was Jerry, the Carson boy who was in Tom’s room at school. Ivy grabbed Martha’s hand and went on walking. Then someone, Jerry probably, threw a beer can in their direction. It bounced near Martha’s feet with a clang, and she jumped and made a funny frightened noise. Ivy scooped up the can and threw it back at Jerry; and as she and Martha reached the orchard, they could hear a roar of laughter following them as they ran.

Martha ran frantically, stumbling on the furrowed ground, as if all the horrors she had ever heard about that house and those people were close behind her. She ran and scrambled until exhaustion stopped her near the crest of the hill. When she dropped, panting, to the ground, Ivy sat down beside her.

Ivy glanced at Martha once or twice without saying anything. Martha panted and gasped and tried to smile. Ivy picked up a rock and tossed it carelessly in her hand. Finally she threw the rock hard against a tree and said, “That crummy Jerry!”

Neither of them mentioned the event after that day, but Ivy never asked Martha again, and certainly Martha never considered going back to the Montoya House. In fact, Martha thought about its existence as little as possible. When she thought of Ivy, she tried to think of her in other places, especially, in Bent Oaks Grove.

T
HE WIND AT BENT OAKS
grove, sweeping almost constantly over the crest of the hill, skimmed through the topmost branches of the old oaks with a sound like distant voices. The voices raved and moaned or breathed in brushy whispers, according to the mood of the weather; but either way they seemed to be speaking always of secrets and mysteries.

Bent Oaks Grove was a natural place for secrets; and as Martha and Ivy began spending more and more time there, secrets collected around every part of the grove. Each of the rocks and boulders, and many of the favorite climbing spots in the old trees, acquired secret names and sometimes long and complicated legends. There was, for example, the Fortune Table. The Fortune Table was a small smooth boulder top that almost always had a few fallen leaves on its surface. When you needed to have your fortune told, you swept away the leaves before you went away, and the next day you counted the ones that had fallen on the table during the night. An odd number meant NO, and an even number meant YES; no leaves at all meant that the table had refused to answer.

The Fortune Table, like most of the early secrets of Bent Oaks Grove, was based on suggestions made by Ivy. Ivy had an almost endless supply of information about magical things. In fact, she seemed to have an endless supply of information about almost everything—and nearly all of it, she said, she had heard from her Aunt Evaline.

It wasn’t very long until Martha knew a great deal about Ivy’s Aunt Evaline. She knew that Aunt Evaline was not really Ivy’s aunt at all. She was actually a distant relative of Ivy’s father, who lived in the little town where Ivy’s father had grown up. Ivy’s father had once owned an old house in Harley’s Crossing and the Carsons went there from time to time. They had been there when Ivy was born, and afterwards her mother had been very sick and had had to go away for a long time to a hospital. It was then that Aunt Evaline had started taking care of Ivy, and by the time Ivy’s mother got home everyone was used to the arrangement.

“Besides, I wanted to stay there,” Ivy told Martha.

“You mean even after your mother got well?” Martha asked.

“No, I mean right away. As soon as Aunt Evaline took me home when I was two days old, I knew I wanted to stay there with her.”

“That’s silly,” Martha said. “You were just a newborn baby. You can’t remember when you were just a newborn baby.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I don’t know. But you just can’t. Everybody says you can’t.”

“Well I can,” Ivy said, and Martha believed her. She believed that Ivy had decided when she was two days old that she wanted to live with her Aunt Evaline, and she believed that Ivy’s Aunt Evaline was probably the most wonderful person in the world, because Ivy said that, too.

But if Ivy talked a great deal about her Aunt Evaline, she talked very little about the rest of her family. Martha was curious about the Carsons, of course, particularly after the day she visited the old Montoya house, but right at first she didn’t ask any questions.

There were so many things to be curious about, though, that not long after the visit she decided to ask at least one. She was sitting on a tree root at the time, watching Ivy who was getting ready to climb high into the tallest tree to hang a rope for a swing. Ivy was sitting on the ground taking off her shoes and stockings.

The question Martha had decided to ask seemed safe enough—not anything that Ivy might not want to answer. Martha said, “Ahh,” to get Ivy’s attention and then asked, “That woman we met on the stairs at your house—who was that?”

“On the stairs?” Ivy said, standing up and tucking her skirt into the legs of her underpants. “Oh, that was my mother.”

Martha was so surprised she forgot about politeness. “Your
mother?
” she said incredulously.

“Sure,” Ivy said. “Why? Who did you think it was?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Martha said. “I just didn’t think about it being your mother. I don’t know why.”

Ivy glanced at Martha who blushed, wondering if Ivy was thinking that she was thinking how different their mothers were. How different her own brightly beautiful mother was from the ghostly gray woman on the stairs.

“I guess it was because she didn’t stop us to ask any questions,” Martha said. “Like some mothers always ask where you’ve been and where you’re going and everything. She didn’t seem as—as curious as most mothers.”

“I know,” Ivy said. “I guess she’s had so many kids she’s used up most of her curiosity already.” Ivy jerked a knot into one end of the rope. “Besides she drinks too much. Sometimes she hardly notices anything at all.”