Thursday, August 16, 2018

Ten Days at Federal Hill: Chapter Ten

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Chapter Ten: Edward

All the children squealed and a general ruckus erupted from the alcove in Julia’s room. Above this din a woman’s voice pealed out.

“Children! What is going on in here?!”

Aunt Velma sailed into the room, her arms flung overhead. Her curly red hair bounced and her eyes flashed. She marched to the alcove and yanked back the curtain.

“My word! What a noise!” She glared at Julia. “Why weren’t you at breakfast?” Then she saw the state of the children’s clothes. Her jaw dropped but she found no words to express her dissatisfaction. “Have you been out rolling in the mud this early in the morning? Look at your clothes!”

As all children obediently do, the three of them looked down at themselves. They were covered with cobwebs and red clay. Julia’s bed was a frightful mess. The children’s shoes, caked with filth, had spread grime and muck on books, toys, pillow, blankets, windowsill, and curtain. Julia could hear a rumble under her bottom as she sat on the sill. Ten was pushing on it, and she was gently pushing back.
Both girls began laughing and giggling loudly to cover up the noise from the tunnel.

“Sorry, Mom!” Julia bellowed. “We’re just … we’re ….”

Cecil rescued her. “We’re … in a silly mood. A really silly mood!” And Cecil laughed an unnatural cackle. Both girls stared at him.

“Well!” Aunt Velma retorted. “I want quieter children, cleaner children, and --” here she turned to Julia – “children who eat breakfast when I cook it!” And quick as she came, she stomped from the room.

The children all collapsed in relief. Julia held her head in her hands. “That was so close! I’ve been gone almost 24 hours. She might’ve found out!”

“She ought to know!” Carla hissed through clenched teeth. “I’m sick of being in this kind of danger without any adults helping us! I can’t do it anymore!” She fell onto Julia’s pillow in tears.

“Carla, we do have grown-ups helping us,” Cecil said quietly. “We’ve had Lucie and Mrs. Lambert, and --”

“Who?” Julia asked.

“Nothing,” Cecil answered her. “Besides, we’re done with this situation. You don’t have to go back to that house. There’s no kids there. We’re done ….”

Knock. Knock knock.

“We’re – done – we’re ….”

Knock knock knock. KNOCK!

Julia felt the banging rumbling under her. “We have to let him in.”

“We have to keep him secret,” Cecil said.

Carla sat up. “We have to find a place to put him!” she said. “Ever think of that?”

At last Julia scooted off the windowsill, and the children raised the wooden seat and brought Ten into the alcove. He was dirtier than they were. Cecil slipped to his room and retrieved some ill-fitting clothes for the boy. Cecil was quite a bit chubbier than Ten, who was rather a good bit taller. While Aunt Velma tended to Grandmother Julia, who was still feeling unwell, they sneaked Ten to the bathroom to get clean. To avoid Frances, who might reclaim her bedroom at any moment, the children climbed the second, narrow set of stairs into the attic, where several small servants’ rooms used decades before still lay under a coating of heavy dust. The children chose a room at the end of the narrow, dark hall with its low, sloping ceiling. Panels of sunlight slanted across the floor from the vent in the gable end of the room, and motes of dust floated around them as they sat cross-legged on the floor. The sloping roof encased them like a cave.

Cecil began. “First of all, I want everybody to know what’s going on here, what Carla and I know. Ten,” here he turned to the boy, “Carla and I have been to your world before, to the workhouse. Do you remember? Last year? Some of the children left?”

Ten nodded. “Yeah. I wasn’t there. Fen had traded me off to a farm, but I kept runnin’ off, so she brought me back to be under her thumb. When I got back, I heard about you and these girls.”

“The other girl is our sister, Connie. She’s not here right now. She’s sick.”

Julia watched the boys, mystified. “Wait. Wait! Are you telling me that you and Carla met him before, or ...” she shook her head as if to clear it, “or kids like him, somewhere else, some other world?”

“Yeah,” Carla whispered. “We rescued them. Fourteen of them.”

“Fifteen,” added Cecil. “Don’t forget the baby.”

“Fifteen,” Carla agreed.

The boy Ten squirmed and made a gruff noise. “Rescued? Is that what you call it?”

Cecil and Carla turned to him. He fixed his eyes on them.

“Those kids disappeared. They never came back. Their brothers and sisters and friends were left alone!” He kept his voice low, but there was anger in it.

Carla regained courage to defend herself. “We were willing to bring everybody! We begged them to come.”

“Come where? They didn’t know where you were taking them!”

“We were taking them here!” Cecil rejoined.

“What’s so good about here?” Ten asked.

Cecil became exasperated. “Oh … I dunno! Food maybe? Safety? People who love you? Not sleeping on a hard floor in rags and being afraid of being beaten and made to work until your hands bleed! Not being afraid of every adult in your life!”

Ten sneered slightly. “Oh, like that screaming woman before? You seemed pretty nervous about her.”

Julia stood up. “Hey! That’s my mom!” She glared down at Ten. He looked up at her, then at the other two. His tight face slackened and his eyes dimmed.

Quietly he asked, “What’s a mom?”

Then Julia turned to her cousins and asked, “Been hiding any more secrets?”

The room was quiet until Cecil spoke again. “Ten, we’re glad you’re here. We hope we can show you a little of how we live. I don’t have a clue how you can stay here though. Julia’s parents will want to know where you come from, and I honestly don’t know how we can tell them. Plus,” and he looked at Carla for agreement, “the place you really should go isn’t this house … or this world … it’s a different one.”

Julia gasped. “Another one?!”

Carla interrupted. “It’s a house better than this one, with the kindest grown-up you could ever meet. Her name’s Lucie. All the other children from the workhouse are there already. That’s where they really moved to.” She looked keenly at him. “And they are very happy. We’ve visited them there.”

“Well, I’d like to go visit them too,” Ten said.

“Ten,” Cecil broke in, “it’s not that easy. We don’t know how to travel to Lucie’s house from here, from Julia’s home. Carla and I live far away, and it’s from our house that we know how to get to Lucie’s.” Ten looked confused and disappointed. “It’s complicated. I’m sorry.”

“So, what are we supposed to do with him now?” Julia asked. It was the obvious question, but one no one else wanted to ask. “If he can’t stay here, where does he go?” No one answered. All the children looked at each other. The silence became heavy.

Finally Cecil asked, “How far is it from the house where you were sleeping, to the workhouse? It must take you days – even weeks – to walk that far. Did you see people on the way? Are there other houses, other adults, in your world?”

Ten studied Cecil’s face, looking for some meaning there. “Days? Weeks? Are you kiddin’? At a quick pace, I walk from the workhouse to the empty house all night, from sunset to sunrise.” He paused. “How long is that?”

Cecil whistled low. “That’s ten hours maybe.” He stared at Carla. “That’s not possible. From our house to Federal Hill – that’s Georgia to Virginia. That’s a full day’s drive in the car on the interstate.” He turned back to Ten. “Are you sure?”

“’Course I’m sure! I walked it, didn’t I?”

“I wish we could talk to Lucie,” Carla moaned. “She could answer so many of our questions. She could tell us just what to do!”

Cecil nodded, and then held his bent head in his hands. He rubbed his crew cut above his ears because he was thinking hard. Carla and Julia knew to wait while he was thinking this way.

“What we need to do,” said Cecil at last, “is find out how to reach Lucie’s world from here. If there were three versions of our house, there must be three versions of Federal Hill.” His voice rose. “There’s a Federal Hill house in Lucie’s world. That’s the house we need to find. That’s the next thing we need to figure out!”

Carla shook her head. “No. The next thing I want to find out is who that creature was that chased me down the tunnel. The woman with the bulging eyes.”

No one answered her, but Ten nearly said something, and then pursed his lips. Cecil and Julia wondered if she’d imagined it all, in her terror of the tunnel. Finally Julia said, “Well, the next thing I’m gonna do is wash Ten’s clothes while I can.” She held out her hand. “Give ‘em over. I can smell them from here.”

“Watcha gonna do to ‘em?” Ten asked as he put the bundle in her arms.

“I’ll put them in water and soap and get the dirt and smell out of them.”

He jumped up and grabbed the clothes back from her. “Hang on! I gotta get somethin’ first!” And the boy rifled through a tattered pocket on the pair of pants he’d given her. His grimy hand clutched a frayed piece of cloth.

“What’s that?” Carla asked.

“Nothin’,” he replied. “It’s just somethin’ I’ve had a long time. Long as I can remember. Some little piece of cloth from the clothes I wore before, when I was a young’un. It’s a pretty little thing.” He smiled and handed it to Carla. She thought it was the first time she’d seen him smile. “It’s the only precious thing I got. I don’t know what it is, rightly. Just swirly things in thread.” He glance at Julia and added, “Like the little papers you left me before.”

Carla looked down at the patch of fabric in her palm, a scrap from a child’s sweater, or maybe a bib. On it, embroidered in cursive script, was the name “Edward.”


(To continue on to the next chapter, please click here.)


[Ten Days at Federal Hill is copyrighted in its entirety by the author, M.K. Christiansen.]

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