The Old Meadow Read online

  But everyone was wrong.

  * * *

  “And the beet greens are marvelous!—this year.”

  “Oh, beet greens! Oh, beet greens! I must retire below.”

  * * *

  The Old Meadow was inhabited, and not only by the field folk, although the field folk knew more about the man who was living there than any human being did.

  Edward Stroke the Second, along with the Old Meadow, had inherited a lonely soul. And this neglected human being was just as alive—and just as determined to stay alive—as the wild morning glories that covered the old stone wall.

  * * *

  “Mr. Budd is also inventing a new kind of squash this year.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes! And Walter, don’t you laugh! Snakes could learn to like squash, too.”

  “Oh—boy.”

  * * *

  Mr. Budd had become, at the age of sixteen, a success in the Old Meadow. This was his only happiness, since he knew that outside Tuffet Country, Pasture Land, the brook—outside his green world—he was a failure.

  He’d always been a loner, but never by choice. Few people are. And, at sixteen, to be a loner hurts. Abner Budd was sixteen when he ran away. His parents had died when he was so young that about the only thing he remembered was milk. He’d been taken in by a well-meaning neighbor, a single man with a crippled arm, who tried for years to do his best by the boy. But in those days, which were years in the past, most people felt that whopping a boy was how you made him learn to behave. Also the neighbor—his name was Paul Santelle, and he owned a little delicatessen, and he was quite nice, or at least he wanted to be—Paul went to the principal of the school where Abner was studying, and the principal said, “Keep him in line!” That meant whop! when necessary.

  Abner Budd, at sixteen, decided that it was no longer necessary. And he got only one whopping more. This one, strangely, did what the other whippings hadn’t; it gave him a sense of right and wrong. He’d run off and hidden himself in the Meadow. Farmer Pett, the last who lived on the land, found him sleeping beneath the bushy vines on the east side of the wall. It was August, and Abner had planned to eat some corn—raw. When Pett heard that, he decided that he’d been whopped enough. After lunch, after dinner, Abner ended up as the hired hand of Luke Pett.

  Luke grew to think of Abner as kind of a wild son, an accidental gift like the irises the Old Meadow gave him every year. Those were happy years for Mr. Budd, who wasn’t Mr. Budd as yet. He was “Abner” or “Ab” or “Kiddo” when Luke was in an especially good mood. Happy years—the happiest in the boy’s life. He found that he really did like farming; he liked Luke Pett very much—and most of all he liked not getting whopped anymore. But the years of feeling like a family, if only a thrown-together one, didn’t last very long. In the very month of Abner’s twenty-first birthday, Luke Pett got killed by an oil truck that went out of control on Mountain Road. That afternoon, with its sudden emptiness which the boy felt within his heart, may have been the day when Abner turned into Mr. Budd, the cantankerous character of the Old Meadow.

  It didn’t help either, that same afternoon, that Edward Stroke appeared on the scene and told Abner he was fired. As long as his tenant farmer was gone, he was going to take a tax loss on the whole place. Just let it sit. He’d be glad if Abner was out in a week.

  He was out in a night. He packed his few things from the room he’d fixed—a corner of the attic, hung with unused curtains and draperies, to make it warm and colorful—and rushed them all across the brook. He buried them, and the calendars, too. But after the cabin was built, they all were molded to earth, and not a single thing could be used. He’d run through the cornfield, the apple orchard, and settled down at last, like a thief—which he wasn’t yet—in a far-off, hidden thicket in the northwest corner of the Old Meadow. No goodbyes—to anyone: there was no one to say goodbye to—and no words in his throat anyway. He ran.

  And stay hidden two weeks. And now he really did become a thief. Stole apples from the orchard and whatever little vegetables he thought the Strokes wouldn’t notice.

  Mr. Stroke, who had chosen not to live there, put boards on the windows and locks on the doors, and the great homestead stood alone.

  However, that farmhouse was not uninhabited. Mr. Budd, after two months of living beneath the trees and sleeping on pasture grass, ventured back—and pried open a cellar window. He made himself a bed of leaves and luckily found four moldy blankets. And for that first winter he lived on the vegetables—boiled in brook water—he’d been able to collect. The turnips helped, and the fire to cook them kept him warm, almost.

  But he didn’t dare make too much of a fire: someone might suspect that a human soul was living there, and finding his food in a meadow that had been let go.

  That first winter was the worst: the coldest and the loneliest. Mr. Budd had to stay covered up by those blankets for days at a time. But he had no place to go. He was big enough now not to be whopped by anyone. But the trouble was—there was no one he knew! No one even cared enough to whop him now. Luke had gone—he’d always called him Mister Pett—and in all Abner’s green, golden, snowy world there was no one he knew. Or knew him. Or he liked. And he knew that no one could ever like him. And in summer, winter—in spring and fall—in all the wide, terrifying world, there was only one place where he felt at home: the Old Meadow. Where he was alone.

  The second year was much better. Abner ventured out of the sagging farmhouse, which creaked as the joints settled into each other, and got a few odd jobs around town. When anyone asked him where he lived, he just waved his hand vaguely, off toward the west, and said, “Oh, over there.” Now he could buy a few necessary things, like a kerosene stove with a very low flame, and a couple of candles. But he didn’t unboard the windows, because he knew he was really trespassing in somebody else’s house. Even though that someone—those somebodies, the Edward Strokes, both senior and junior—could not care less about the fate of this old and beautiful, living home.

  Still, every so often, from the roads all around the Old Meadow—and there got to be more and more of them—a light, a glimmer of yellow candle flame, could be seen from the boarded, blind windows. The farmhouse was thought to be haunted.

  It was. By Abner Budd. At the vigorous age of twenty-one he’d become a ghost—a candle in an abandoned house. He was young and he was handsome, kind—at least all the animals thought he was, when he fed them in the winter. And sensitive: he could understand the many moods of the morning glories that bloomed along the old stone wall. He had black hair and a black mustache, which he kept trimmed as best he could with a knife. Scissors would have been very expensive, and he needed the money from mowing and painting, tidying up after other people, for kerosene and canned food for the winter. He was six feet two and very strong, from nature’s kindness and working to keep himself alive. Above his mustache and a nose with a little ridge in it were gray-green eyes, which were thoughtful because he looked at the brook so much and wondered about its current. But sometimes those eyes were frightened, too. Mr. Budd was afraid of the future and afraid of the world outside, by which he meant everything that wasn’t the Old Meadow. Tall, strong, there was still something in him sixteen years old, despite Luke’s efforts to grow him up. The love hadn’t lasted long enough. So there Abner was: young, handsome, strong—and inside himself as worried as a chipmunk. For a long time he tried to trim his mustache, but after the waiting—maybe twenty years—when the first gray had splashed his hair, he gave up. No one would ever notice, he thought—neither him nor his face—and he gave up his cheeks to a scraggly beard.

  * * *

  “We have the best vegetables in Connecticut! And always have—since Mr. Budd began growing his own.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, between mustache and beard, a lot happened Outside.

  The biggest thing was the Great Depression. When Abner first heard those words, from a younger man whose garage he was roofing, he thought th
at the earth might be sinking. It wasn’t. But everyone’s money was. The Strokes’ money, too. They sold the farmhouse and all the acreage on the other side of the brook to be a driving range. Those words were also a mystery. Ab found out later it meant a golf course where no one played golf—just hit the little balls into nowhere to see how far into nowhere they’d go.

  But, one morning, tractors and trucks and men were outside about to tear down the farmhouse. Shuttered up though he was, Abner Budd had begun to think of that house as his own—but it wasn’t. That’s all he could think of—“I have no home!”—as he gathered up his four moldy blankets, clean now they’d been washed so often, and dashed across the brook. From the other side he watched them demolish the farmhouse and start to smooth out the field for the range, so no little golf ball would ever get lost.

  When he couldn’t stand the sight anymore, he fled away, deep into the meadow. By fate, luck, or deep memory, he found himself in the very same spot he’d sheltered in five years before—the day he’d run away.

  Abner had to act fast: build some kind of shelter. It was October. And although the various golds of autumn were a treasure in his heart, he knew what they meant: winter coming—beware! He patched together a rickety shelter on the safe side of the brook. But still it was a good beginning, like his love for Luke Pett. There were poplars all around; a giant oak hung over it; and a thick good hedge hid the driving range where little white balls were whacked nowhere.

  On the first night of destruction, the farmhouse half down, Abner managed to sneak back to what had been home and salvage a few things: a kerosene stove, held high above his head as he managed the passage of the brook, those blankets and a load of vegetables from the cellar. He thanked the stars that were out that night that no guards had been left to protect the trucks and tractors. The loneliness that he’d felt as a boy closed all around him again as he tried not to drop and drown the stove. But when he reached the stream’s other side, a different feeling was waiting for him. It was freedom, a little bit of freedom, his own, contained in the wildness of an old meadow surrounded by roads and a busy town.

  The shelter grew rapidly into a cabin. The kerosene stove held off the frost, and the first snow stayed where it should—outside. Mr. Budd borrowed stones from the tumbled stone wall to make a fireplace and chimney. Where they didn’t fit they were held together by two dollars’ worth of cement. Two dollars was quite a lot in the time of the Great Depression. Of course, most of the cabin was made of wood. Mr. Budd raced the wreckers—they ruined by day, he built by night—to salvage enough from the old farmhouse for the walls and the roof of a hidden little cabin. Glassine windows—that’s something transparent, but unlike glass, it unrolls—could be bought for the price of an ice-cream cone. Mr. Budd’s odd jobs helped a lot, in the earliest, anxious days. His favorite windows faced south and west—the strength of the sun and its glorious colors at sunset.

  Most precious of all the things that Mr. Budd snatched from destruction—the farmhouse was almost gone by now—was a three-legged stool. Luke Pett had made that stool. And he loved very much to sit on the work his own hands had done. He said the world looked better from there. It looked better to Mr. Budd, too. On a stoop of flat stones he’d built out in front of his only door, Mr. Budd sat on that stool, alone, and let the seasons pass through him. Spring, summer, fall—even winter. After a snowfall, a hard one too, Mr. Budd would bundle up in the raggedy clothes he stitched for himself, or people gave him, or he found in trash cans, and he’d sit, alone, in a world made white. Snow seemed like fate: it was everywhere. But then, in the air, a blue appeared which shone on the snow. It got brighter and brighter—in the sky, everywhere. Mr. Budd loved those hours most of all—although, unless he was well wrapped up, his teeth and his toes began to chatter.

  Years passed. They all felt different—the leaves, the colors—but they all were the same—the brook and Mr. Budd.

  Sometimes he cried, when the loneliness of an owl’s hoot reminded his heart of something else. But often he laughed, like the time he saw a high-spirited squirrel chasing a rabbit in circles.

  Mr. Budd knew he had to do two things if he was going to keep alive in this satisfactory cabin of his.

  The first was—plant a garden! He knew a lot about gardening from his years on the farm. And he also knew where the seeds were kept—in a shed behind the house. The wreckers got there last of all, and when they did—well, they wouldn’t have known good seed from bad.

  But Abner did. Tomatoes—all radiant red, and fat as babies, and solid little yellow jobs, but sweet as Popsicles. Squash, lima beans, peas—and string beans too, not Abner’s favorites—but they all had a place. Abner knew how good green was. He decided he’d eat something green every day. But the other colors enticed him, too. Yellow squash—pale moon-colored melons—and best of all the red of beets!

  Abner planted a garden.

  The second of Abner Budd’s adventures, which took more courage than planting seeds, was—he adopted a dog. The feeling of being by himself, when the blue came through the snow or the sun came from under a cloud in August, became unbearable. There had to be someone to share the splendors and sadness with.

  The first dog he bought came from the pound. “I want one that’s hopeless,” he said. “I’ll buy the one you can’t get rid of. The runt.” The name of the first was Ida, a strange mix of poodle and beagle. Then Roger, an even stranger combination of Afghan and bulldog.

  Ida had—almost—liked peas. Roger put up with green beans. And the next one, Nate, ate broccoli stalks as if they were big green bones, with a wistful look that seemed to ask, ‘You’re not gonna take this away, are you?’ For one thing these dogs had in common: they had to like vegetables. Those were all Mr. Budd could provide: the vegetables that he grew.

  At first he’d say to the little puppy—“Come on now, try this asparagus,” depending on the season. And he’d cuddle the puppy, as he waved a stalk under its nose. But after years, when his patience ran out, it was—“That’s all there is! Eat squash or starve.”

  Both methods worked. And generations of mongrel dogs had been turned into vegetarians. Some did make Mr. Budd laugh too, which wasn’t all that easy. Jimdandy did especially. He had a passion for boiled beets, and after a month or two Jim’s muzzle was red as a ruby. Mr. Budd would roar every time he saw him.

  But after Jimdandy got old, got fat, and finally got tired—even of beets—Mr. Budd gave up the pound. He didn’t like the atmosphere there, and somewhere he heard about Puptown. Dubber was the runt in this case—a pretty fat runt—and Mr. Budd got him for twenty-five cents.

  * * *

  “And the escarole is so tasty this year.”

  * * *

  At first, Dubber Dog had been afraid of vegetables. Since he’d mellowed out on chocolate ice cream and marshmallow sauce, peas seemed like a letdown to one fat runt. But there was something about that shack. Cabin, rather: Mr. Budd’s home. The love of the dogs who’d lived there still lingered. And so did Mr. Budd’s love for them.

  * * *

  “And speaking of escarole—”

  “Always a challenging subject!”

  “—the tomatoes are coming up lovely, too! So are Robert Rabbit’s carrots.”

  “What does this have to do with me? I eat leaves! And occasionally a blade of grass.”

  “Don’t fly off the handle now, Chester. But you did save the meadow—with those friends of yours from New York. Before, it was just a wild place—weeds, and trees whose roots were strangling everyone and each other. In those days Mr. Budd and his cabin were just some more wildness. No one noticed. But then you saved it, and paths were put in, and our shack became an ‘eyesore.’”

  “But ’twasn’t Chester’s fault.”

  “I know, Simon. But Mr. Budd isn’t safe anymore. You field folks are safe. And the insects, too. And Mr. Budd loves you all. He’s never, ever killed a spider. And Donald Dragonfly’s his good friend. But in the old days—the overgrown d
ays—he knew his place and expected you to know yours, too. Now even a skunk cabbage isn’t safe. You’re saved, all right—but not Mr. Budd. And, Chester—”

  “What—?”

  “Don’t twitch your antennae! I know that means you’re mad. Those men—from town—I heard them agree that at the very least our vegetable garden had to go.”

  “Oh, vegetables! I’m sick of that word!”

  “You water snake! If ever you got hungry enough, you’d eat a vegetable! Even those little green slimy things that grow at the bottom of Simon’s Pool. Where you slip and slide!”

  “I’d eat dog—in a pinch!”

  “I’d eat you both!” shrieked Chester Cricket. “If it would stop you bickering!”

  Luckily, something happened to interrupt the nasty fight that was thickening in the air. The unexpected is always welcome, but the beautiful is a gift. From upstream a melody came caroling down, as if afternoon had found a voice.

  “What’s that?” asked Chester, as the notes of the song flowed through his small chest, made it bigger and bigger inside its shell.

  “Oh, him,” said Dubber. “That’s only our mockingbird.”

  THREE

  Ashley

  “Your mockingbird?” Chester tried not to hear the song for a moment, to concentrate on Dubber’s answer, but his heart yearned for it to go on and on.

  “Well, he’s sitting on our cabin. He can be the Old Meadow’s mockingbird, if you want. We’ve had them here before.”