Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze Read Online Free PDF Page B

Francis just laid down and was sick. I cried some, but in a couple of minutes we was both all right again, and then it seemed good—so good—just to lay there and breathe the warm air and feel the solid earth under us! Even the gnats seemed good. After a while Francis said, ‘How we gointa get back?’ I couldn’t tell him. ‘They’ll find us,’ I says, but I wasn’t sure of it: not many folks came that way, no road or houses or anything, and as it turned out we never saw a mortal soul all that afternoon or evening; nothing but three strayed cows across the water, chewing and staring at us, and wandering away. The island we were on was small, bout ’s big as this house I’d say, and there was nothing on it but spearmint and nettles and willow shoots. Nothing to eat. And then as evening came on the mosquitoes started up. My soul and body! They’d starved for generations, I guess, and we were like manna from heaven. I never was so bit, not all my life! They made me irritable so I snapped at Francis. ‘It’s all your own blame fault,’ I says. ‘You knew you wasn’t supposed to go in that water! If you wasn’t so stupid and so selfish and so proud of yourself we’d never been in this mess, neither one of us.’ And he was humble about it. ‘I know it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why you’d ever forgive me. Saving my life and all, too.’ Well, naturally that made me feel bad, so I said it was all right after all, and somebody’d be sure to find us. But the evening wore on and the mosquitoes kept biting and it was just pure misery, that’s all, pure misery, and you know how it is: sharing a miserable predicament can make lifelong friends or enemies of a couple of folks. It made friends of us two. Between the slapping and the scratching we had to keep up all the while, we talked a lot. We confided in each other. One of the things Francis confided about was how he hated his long hair; he said his papa didn’t like it either, but his mama’s, Mrs. Wellgrove’s, heart was set on it and there wasn’t nothing they could do. ‘I want to look like a boy,’ he says. ‘I want to look just like Homer.’ So I had an idea and I said: ‘If we ever get out of here and home I’ll fix it so you’ll get a haircut all right, and nobody’ll be mad, either.’ So anyway we were pretty good friends by the time night came, and that was lucky because it began to be real scary on that island; black as pitch, there wasn’t a star overhead and not even a firefly that time of year. And then, well you wouldn’t believe it, it began to rain! Yes, round about ten, eleven o’clock there was a thunderstorm, and out in Wisconsin those storms aren’t the play-acting kind we have around here. I mean the sky splits open, wide open, and the ground shakes like fire engines was going over it, and the lightning licks around every place, not just one place, and it keeps a-going all the time; no stops between, where you can get your breath. The water, the rain, is solid, too; you might be sitting under a dam. Willow shoots, even willow trees, aren’t much to shelter under; their leaves are always kind of stingy. We had no place to hide, so we just cuddled close together and bowed our heads and prayed the lightning wouldn’t strike us. We never slept one wink. The storm kept up and up and then went off down river, and then came back and played with us all over again like some big mean cat with two wet mice! But finally it went away and the night was over. Oh, I never saw a morning as beautiful as that! The mist laid on the river in a band; you couldn’t see the river, only hear it, and the sun was red and lighted every single drop on every leaf so it was red, too, like a ruby, and birds flew in and out of the mist, appearing and disappearing, and the air all