My One Hundred Adventures Part 14

"You were in love with Mr. Fordyce and H.K. and the clothes hanger man, back then, weren't you?"

"Well, yes, I guess in a way, but I really loved Ned and when he came back I loved him all over again. On this car trip we took, we stayed one night on the prairies. It is so beautiful in the gra.s.slands. You can see the wind before you hear it, moving the long gra.s.ses. You can see the weather before you feel it. We stayed with some of Ned's friends in a farmhouse they owned in the middle of nowhere. You could look out of any window and see nothing but flat ground to the horizon. Imagine. I was helping Freda, his friend, make pies with cherries she had picked from her own tree. We were rolling out the dough and you could feel the barometric pressure drop. She looked out the window. It made her nervous. There was a quiet excitement in the air. Even the birds stopped and the horizon grew black and lightning flashed from up high in the sky all the way to the ground. The men were out scurrying to bring in the horses. Freda kept watching for funnels coming down from the clouds. They'd had tornadoes before. And everyone was worried but I was rolling out pie dough, so contented, so peaceful, so stilled with everything else, waiting for the storm."

My mother's face is alight with the memory and I realize that I don't need to worry about her leaving this place. To her all places are this place.

"Those kids better not pee on any of our beds," I say.

"We'll put rubber sheets on them before we leave," says my mother.

"We'll put rubber sheets on everything," I say.

The next day Ned and I walk into town to buy rubber sheets.

"I thought you didn't like having a stationary job and being settled," I say as we walk slowly through the sand, no hurry to do anything today, we're really just waiting to leave for Saskatchewan.

"Well, with that poet sniffing around your mother I knew I'd have to do something or I didn't stand a chance. I had to have something to offer her. That's why I went back to Canada. To see what I could scrounge up in terms of a stable job. Oh, say!" He reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out some snapshots and hands them to me. "I got these from the car the other day and in all the excitement forgot to show them to you. There's the house, and that's what the countryside looks like. I know it looks kind of empty with nothing much to see."

It is endless waves of land with nothing on it. It is bleak and barren and empty with nothing much to see. But where have I heard these words before? Then I remember and gasp.

"Well," says Ned sheepishly, "it's not so bad as that. I grant you your first views of Saskatchewan are like, Who the heck would live there? But between the broiling-hot summers and the freezing-cold winters, the tornadoes and flies, why, it's practically a paradise."

"It's not that," I say. It is Madame Crenshaw's words coming back. How soon I was to go "someplace empty with nothing much to see." I had stopped believing in mystic happenings and miracles. I had thought Madame Crenshaw nothing but a con artist and a thief. Not a visionary. But it appears she can be both.

"What's the matter with you?" he asks.

"I'm just trying to figure something out," I say. I cannot tell him about Madame Crenshaw. I look at him and wonder if he is my father. If I want to know whose father Ned is or if he's anyone's, now is the time to ask. But the moment pa.s.ses and with it my nerve. I cannot ask him any more than I can tell my mother all my adventures any more.

Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them? Is this why my mother likes to have Ned around, so that she has someone to whom she can always tell her adventures? Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone? Will my mother have adventures she won't even tell Ned?

"Figure out what?" Ned asks as he turns to look down at me, maybe because I have been staring at him.

"I am thinking that if I count my adventures this summer, there weren't one hundred and I am wondering when the rest will come. Or if they will. I want my life to be a series of adventures. I want a hundred."

"Bibles, you're going to CANADA. You're going to have nothing BUT adventures."

The last few days of summer I spend on the beach. We build fires at night and Ned shows us how to find the North Star by looking first for the Big Dipper. I cannot go out at night now without seeing the Big Dipper and it feels to me as if it is looking at me, aware of me too. There is the sound of Canada geese in the mornings, honking and flying south, as we will be going north. We are just changing places. The Big Dipper will find us all in new locations. We are not moving so far from its perspective, perhaps.

Maya and I have started a lucrative restaurant with a menu of minnows and sand pies and crayfish. Her paper dolls come to order meals there. Sometimes Hershel does too. We have had to tell him twice not to eat the things we serve. Max does not see whales anymore. I see summer's curtain closing and behind it something closing for him as well. More often than not, when my mother sits on the porch steps now, we are totally silent. I think we are memorizing the sound of the waves.

Saying goodbye to Ginny is the worst. I go over to her house the night before we leave, but she solves the problem by telling her mother she won't see me. She will write to me in Saskatchewan. "I don't say goodbye," says the note she has left her mother to pa.s.s on to me, and I think of Ginny with her breaking heart, and leaving her alone now with all that drive and desire, and I figure that will give me something to worry about all the way to Saskatchewan.

On the way home through town I see Nellie stumping along with groceries and I call out, "Nellie! Madame Crenshaw was right! About going someplace barren? I'm going to Saskatchewan." She stops and gives me a long look and then trots on, busy and driven as Ginny, with her dreams and obsessions.

The next day Mrs. Gourd and her children come over. My mother shows her the jars of jam. She tells her that next summer she will teach her how to make her own. Mrs. Gourd says she can't afford all the berries but my mother takes her for a walk. She shows her the blueberry bogs and the clam beds and the places where the wild orach grows.

about the author.

Polly Horvath is the highly acclaimed author of many books, including the National Book Award winner The Canning Season, the National Book Award nominee The Trolls, and the Newbery Honor Book Everything on a Waffle. Publishers Weekly has described her writing as "unruly, unpredictable, and utterly compelling," adding that "Horvath's descriptive powers are singular...her uncensored Mad Hatter wit simply delicious, her storytelling skills consummate."

Polly Horvath lives in Metchosin, British Columbia.

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