The Children's Crusade Read Online Free PDF

hopped his yellow piece around willy-nilly, jumping over the other pieces or knocking them off the board. They tried to play Tinker Toys, but James kept initiating duels with the wooden sticks.
    Toward noon they went outside and sat under the oak tree. They figured she’d be getting to the cookies soon. The older two sent Ryan to check, and he came back and said yes, she had the big bowl out. They went around the back of the house so she wouldn’t see them through the kitchen window, then stopped before they reached the sliding door. The sun was high, and there was no shade. They began to sweat. They heard the clack of one pan of cookies going into the oven, followed by the rattling of another as she began to drop balls of dough onto it. Robert and Rebecca exchanged a nod, and the four of them stormed in.
    “Now we can help, right?”
    “Can we roll the dough?”
    “We’ll wash our hands. James, come on, we need to wash our hands.”
    “We roll it in little balls, right?”
    “Can we have one bite of dough? Just one small bite?”
    “No,” Penny said. “I’m sorry, no. I have too much to do.”
    “But it’s the cookies!”
    “What did I say?”
    At the sound of her raised voice the children fell silent. Worse, they fell away from one another; in spirit they did. Each was alone and disappointed. Robert thought that if it weren’t for the younger boys, he’d be allowed to help. Rebecca thought the same. They both believed themselves to possess special maturity.
    They watched. She ripped pieces of dough from the giant hunk in her bowl, rolled them between her palms until they were smooth and slick, and plunked them haphazardly on cookie sheets. Rip, roll, plunk; rip, roll, plunk. Rebecca thought it would make more sense to set them in straight lines—she thought you could get more on each sheet that way—but she didn’t say so.
    Then a faint smell of smoke came from the oven. “Oh, no!” Penny cried, yanking open the door and grabbing a pot holder. From where they stood, the children could see that the first batch of cookies was burned. Not black, but a fairly dark brown. “Damn it!” Penny shouted as she yanked the pan from the oven and dropped it on the stovetop. “Damn it all!”
    Their father didn’t like the word “damn,” so naturally each of the children thought of him: Robert remembered the stomachache he had to report, Rebecca recalled her father’s promise to help her invite a friend to come play, Ryan thought of the praise he’d received from his father on the care he was giving Badger, and James simply wailed the two syllables that formed the heart of his emotional life: “Dada.”
    “Of course!” Penny exclaimed. “Who else? All of you, out! Now!” And then—regretful and reaching for kindness but ending up with its poor relation, charity—she took her spatula, freed the cookiesfrom the pan, and said, “Here, take these. They won’t be terrible. Just take them and go.”
    Robert gathered the burned cookies in a paper towel and led the way to the front door. Rebecca’s hair hung in front of her shoulders in two long, thin braids, and for some reason he thought of how he used to sit on her—she would be lying on her stomach—and hold the braids like reins, nudging her sides with his knees and yelling, “Go, horsie.”
    They sat together under the oak tree, James settling with his legs in their customary W, a contortionist with dirty knees. Ryan reached for one of the cookies and took a nibble. “It’s not bad. It kind of tastes like toast.”
    “I don’t want a burned cookie,” Rebecca said. She hesitated and then grabbed one and threw it into the bushes. This made Robert mad, the fact that she’d thought of it first, and he threw one cookie after another down the long driveway, leaving only a few for his younger brothers. He kicked the cookies into the bushes, then continued down the hill, the driveway twisting near the end so that when he reached the road, the house