Aunt Helen wiped her feet on a mat, parted the curtains, and stepped into the library. She looked around and found her niece crouching beside the fireplace holding a walking stick vertically above her head. Ordinarily she might have been astonished, but she was thoroughly distracted by her own cares.
“Oh, hello,” said Aunt Helen drearily. “Don’t let me bother you. Go on with what you’re doing.” She closed the door and crossed the room. She stretched her skinny frame out on the couch. She was so light she barely sunk in. She began staring at the library ceiling. “Please, pretend I’m not here. Go on doing whatever you were doing before.”
With Aunt Helen on the couch, lying pale and still and saying nothing, Stephanie dropped the blackthorn stick beside the brass gong and joined her aunt, dragging a small chair to a spot right beside Aunt Helen’s head, which lay on a large yellow pillow, which was embroidered with pheasants. Stephanie sat on this chair primly and then scooted around a bit to see if the legs were as wobbly as they looked. They certainly were wobbly. If she could get glue later, she could probably fix the wobble, she thought.
“What’s wrong, Aunt Helen, you look kind of sad and strange and lost?” asked Stephanie.
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Aunt Helen staring up at the ceiling. “Nothing is wrong at all.”
“Well, if nothing is wrong, can I please put a teeny braid in your hair? Right here?” Stephanie asked lifting a small section of her aunt’s hair near the front. Aunt Helen nodded grimly and Stephanie clapped. “Oh, goodie!” She went to work.
“Hum-de-dum-dum,” said Stephanie, “This is going to turn out great.”
Granny Hilda peeked in at the door (she had been at the kitchen window never once losing sight of her daughter) and her big gray eyes took in the scene at the couch.
“Stephanie,” said Granny Hilda sharply to her granddaughter, “let’s not worry your aunt.”
“No, Mom, let her be,” said Helen and Stephanie smiled a satisfied smile of superiority at her granny.
Granny Hilda hesitated, and then decided they looked peaceful enough for the moment. “I’ll bring you girls a late snack. The lasagna I’m making is not cooperating.”
“Okay, we’ll just be here together doing stuff and playing,” said Stephanie smugly.
When Grandma Hildegard had gone, Stephanie sighed and waited politely for her aunt to talk. She remembered she was not supposed to pester her aunt, but talking in a friendly fashion might not be pestering.
“It’s terrible that you look so strange and sad-like.”
Aunt Helen didn’t say anything.
“I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
“That’s all right,” said Helen.
“This braid will help you.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, um, I happen to know so. People with braids in their hair hardly ever look sad. Except on the cover of a book called Misunderstood Moll. And maybe that girl named Heidi did look sad when she was in that sled seeing her grandfather chase her down the mountain, you know? ‘Heidi! Heidi!’ and all that stuff.”
“Uh huh,” said Aunt Helen blandly.
“The teeny braid is finished,” said Stephanie, “It’s the best one I ever put in anyone’s hair. It looks beautiful in yours. I wish my hair was sort of skinny and flat like yours.”
“Thank you.”
When the tea and cookies came (on a tray Granny Hilda set on the table with a worried look at the two of them), and they were alone again, Stephanie tried to stay quiet but eventually she broke down. “Listen, Aunt Helen. I have this terrible secret to tell you.”
“What?” asked Helen blankly.
“Oh, it’s been just terrible for a whole long time. I gotta tell somebody.”
“Are you in love with a boy at school?” asked Aunt Helen in a disinterested monotone.
“No! Aunt Helen, that’s sickening.”
“Okay.”
“What it is is I have been wanting something very, very much,” said Stephanie. She scooted the chair around to get closer to her aunt’s head.
“Hmmm?” said Aunt Helen, lost in her own thoughts.
“It’s a thing. Guess. Guess what it is that I’ve been wanting so much,” Stephanie whispered into her aunt’s ear.
The guessing game went on for quite an interval, there being so many sighs and lengthy pauses on Aunt Helen’s part between the half-hearted guesses like “did you want a pretty doll with a china face?” or “did you want a lot of candy?” Finally, Stephanie revealed that what she had wanted for many, many years was her very own brain.
“What do you mean?” asked Aunt Helen in horror.
Of course, what she meant by that, as she quickly explained to her confused aunt, was that she had wanted someone else’s brain, or a small piece of it, possibly in its own ornate Japanese wooden box with a clever sliding lid, because someone at school had opened one of those in front of Stephanie once and she had loved that box. Yes, a box with its own brain in it would suit her. She explained to her aunt that she had been frustrated for most of her life of eight years by people not letting her have the things she wanted to have, like her own brain. Everybody was always stopping her from having things, Stephanie complained. Her parents would search her room and throw out some of the things, or forbid her to have others. Aunt Helen perked up a little at this complaint, seeing an element of her current predicament in her young niece’s words, and thereafter she managed to speak in something other than a monotone and even asked her niece for more details. Stephanie provided these, and how!
She explained that she had wanted a whole bunch of things that people wouldn’t let her have like her own snake—a corn snake would do if they wouldn’t let her have a real rattler—and a plastic German World War Two helmet, which didn’t have to have a Nazi sign on it if it upset them so much, but it had to look real, so that she could play with Melvin Jonson sometimes, and her parents had gotten mad at her for that and talked and talked about how that was bad until they made her cry, and a book called Horrible Ghost Tales, and more importantly, her very own piece of a brain and she intended to get them all anyway. Today, she explained, she wanted the brain. She thought she might get a piece of brain out of one of those animal heads hanging on the walls.
Aunt Helen thought for a while about what Stephanie said.
“You know, what you just said was pretty important,” said Aunt Helen, “It’s important, even for adults to know what they really want. If you want that piece of brain, you should try to get it. That is the very thing you ought to do. Do it today. Do it now. Don’t wait for somebody else’s permission.”
Stephanie explained that whenever she wanted to do anything like that—getting a brain piece—something called ‘her fertile imagination’ was blamed.
“I’m not going to blame that,” Aunt Helen said earnestly, “A fertile imagination is better than an infertile one.”
This surprised Stephanie, who was used to opposition, and when Stephanie explained that she had picked the elk trophy to attack instead of the snarling javelina or the mountain lion because its head stuck out the farthest, Aunt Helen said it made sense, though it didn’t really. Aunt Helen also explained briefly that she thought Stephanie’s curiosity exceeded her knowledge of taxidermy; Aunt Helen added that Stephanie might be laboring under the false impression that the taxidermist had left a dried up chunk of elk brain inside the elk head, but such a belief was only logical and who knew but what it was true? Stephanie asked what taxidermy was. Aunt Helen said that was not too important and Stephanie should just go ahead with what she wanted. Such notions grip you when you’re eight, Aunt Helen explained. The difference was when you were older you stopped yourself from doing anything. Well, she wasn’t going to stop Stephanie.
Stephanie stood back and looked at the silly elk head.
“Here I go!” she proclaimed.
With Grandpa Drummond’s blackthorn stick held level, Stephanie marched toward the elk. The poor head stared stoically ahead when Steph
anie stomped to a halt beneath it and to one side, flipped the stick around, and braced the blackthorn branch against the seat of a wing chair. She used the tall stick to help her step onto the seat.
Once she was standing on the chair, Stephanie raised the stick in the air quickly. Intending to give the innocent elk a solid whack aside its head, she lost control of the long heavy stick again and watched in horror as its tip dropped and neatly harpooned a beautifully illustrated gardenia on the library’s wallpaper. The rubbery tip stuck to the old paper and then ripped a crooked gash through several feet of wall covering.
“Oh, my gosh,” said Aunt Helen, taking slightly more interest in the world around her as the stick ripped the enormous gash.
Next, the momentum of the falling stick catapulted Stephanie over the armrest of the wingchair. Stephanie and the stick fell with a terrible clatter and the stick struck a large blown glass vase on the table in front of Aunt Helen. The vase shattered into three pieces that shot dangerously in as many directions.
“Golly!” said Aunt Helen. With the smashing of the vase directly in front of her, Helen blinked twice and seemed to become partly human again. “You took quite a fall there. Are you okay? Any part of you broken?”
“No, I’m okay,” said Stephanie cheerfully from the rug. “I fall off of stuff all the time. All I broke was that dumb old green vase. I thought it looked like a big old ball of snot anyways. Did granny like it?”
“No, don’t worry about it. It’s just something Mom and Dad had around the house. It was Finnish or something. They have lots of stuff. Too much stuff,” said Helen, sniffing. “What do you want to do now?”
“I’m not giving up on the brain,” said Stephanie. “I’ll just hide the broken glass.” Stephanie got up from the rug quickly and gathered the pieces of the vase. She lifted a pillow at Aunt Helen’s feet and placed the glass lumps in the corner of the couch. She propped the pillow back in place.
“I won’t stick my feet there,” said Aunt Helen, cooperatively.
Stephanie didn’t reply because she was busy dragging the stick back to the chair. Once she had returned to the front of the wing chair, she placed the black branch against the chair arm, and stepped back into the seat. Slowly, she lifted the stick once more. This time when she wielded it above her head she moved it carefully.
Stephanie treated the elk to several head bonkings, and with every whack Aunt Helen seemed to cheer up and pulled herself to a sitting position on the sofa with the tea cup and saucer in her hands. She was watching everything happily, eagerly from her position on the couch across the room. It was refreshing not knowing what was going to happen next and feeling that it might be something big and awful. A certain part of her shattered psyche felt guilty for not stopping her niece, but another part was enjoying the whole spectacle of someone doing exactly what they wanted.
BOOM! The large moldering elk head took a jarring smack on the thick side of its neck. BANG! Stephanie hit it below its large ears and under the antlers.
The violated elk head emitted a great and terrible groan.
“Oh my goodness,” said Helen, her eyebrows rising, “This is terrible,” she giggled.
The groan continued, long and loud; it resonated in the room. Dust rose in puffs, a fine shower of elk hairs dropped on the rug, but nothing else happened. Then, they both noticed a stream of adobe dust sieving out from behind the trophy; it ran straight down in front of the gardenia wallpaper so thin and fast that it seemed as though the flowers were quivering. A crumbly brown pile of adobe was accumulating on the carpet against the high baseboard. “Uh-oh,” Stephanie said, unable to take her eyes off the pile of dirt, yet attempting a rather ineffective and painfully slow scramble off the chair. She put her hand down in places where the chair wasn’t and her legs didn’t seem to know which direction they usually bent.
What followed was a lengthy, ripping noise, a tearing asunder of some terrible proportion, undetectable by the human eye, and causing no corresponding movement besides the falling dirt.
Then, suddenly, the huge head shot forward with a severe nod.
“Oh-h-h-h-h!” Stephanie gasped as she leapt back.
A cataract of adobe opened behind the stuffed elk head.
“God! This is funny! I’ve hated that thing for years!” said Helen.
The head kept coming forward and the wallpaper ripped. The head and the stick and Stephanie hit the floor.
“Oh my gosh!” cried Helen.
The elk head fell, bounced on the carpet, and rolled to a spot near the wall.
There the ravaged elk head lay, placidly staring at the ceiling.
“Whew!” Stephanie said, relieved that the falling head had missed her. She propped herself up on both elbows, rolled to her side and grabbed the walking stick again.
The elk head, which was near her, could not have been more detached and disinterested, though there was a certain swarthy sadness around its glass eyes. Perhaps it sensed what she was up to?
“This is terrible, just terrible,” said Stephanie, standing over it and realizing what she had done.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Aunt Helen placidly. She took another sip of tea. “Everyone hates those heads except for Dad and I really think he doesn’t like them all that much either. He just thinks they’re historical. He doesn’t really care about them. No brain, though?” she asked, peering around the side of the coffee table to see. The whole operation of the head being hit and ripping off the wall had revived her spirit even more than before. She talked like a normal person.
“No brain,” said Stephanie standing above the head and sighing. Stephanie tried jamming the stick up a nostril and with a mighty thrust, she probed and pushed and explored, whirling the stick like the handle to a music box, and prying upwards. Nothing. “If I had scissors, I could cut its head open, but I don’t know—maybe there isn’t a brain in there.”
“Don’t you think so?” asked Aunt Helen.
“No. No brain for me.”
Stephanie went to the wing chair and flopped. She sat looking sad until suddenly she cheered up a bit thinking that she would have to do something really special to the mountain lion.
“Oh, the lion now?” asked Aunt Helen, seeing Stephanie heading for it. “Yes,” said Stephanie slowly. She tried to think what it could be that she could do to it that would be fun. Hitting it didn’t seem to be enough. She put the blackthorn stick down. She wondered if she ought to paint it. But paint would be too hard to find. She knew she couldn’t get the little cans in Granny Hilda’s sliding kitchen drawers open; she had already tried. There ought to be something she could do to it that would use something in the room.
Something, something. She paced the room like a caged animal. All at once she saw a short, but sharp, letter opener stuck as a place holder in a coffee table book. She pounced upon it, yanking it out of the book happily.
“I might be able to get the glass eye out of the lion,” said Stephanie.
“But would you want one of those?” asked Aunt Helen. She knew as she was saying this that she ought to be telling her niece not to damage another trophy, but she couldn’t stand the idea of stopping anyone’s fun.
“I wanted a brain more,” Stephanie said, “but I guess it would be kinda fun to have a glass eye. Yes, a glass eye from a lion in its own little sliding box!”
Spurting over to the chair again, she began dragging it across the carpet to the east wall. The chair was heavy and it took her quite a while until it was under the mountain lion head. Once it was there she stepped into the seat again and onto the arm of the chair. She jabbed the letter opener around the stuffed head thinking about how she might be able to get at the eyes. Finally, she found a vulnerability. It seemed to her that if she sank the letter opener into the outer corner of the left eyelid she could make a prying motion at the glass eye and with luck the thing would pop out.
Getting that glass eye out would be quite a prize! Who else had the glass eye of a stuffed lion?<
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She got right to work. She pried and pried on that lion eyeball.
“Come on, little old lion,” coaxed Stephanie.
“Any luck?” asked Aunt Helen.
“Not yet,” said Stephanie grimacing.
She kept working until she heard a ripping sound and got the result she wished for with a suddenness that astonished even her.
PLOP! The lion’s glass eyeball shot out of the head in a funny, crazy way and arced across the library where it hit the big brass gong covered with Chinese words and the gong went BINK and the glass eye ricocheted off and struck a table and rolled across the carpet.
A real glass eye out of stuffed lion head!
Aunt Helen laughed and clapped. “Bravo! Bravo!” she cried.
Gee, this was great, thought Stephanie. An eye out of a lion. And it was hers. This was going to be a wonderful day. And she had cheered Aunt Helen up.
“Now all you have to do is find it,” said Aunt Helen.
Which proved easier said than done.
Aunt Helen watched her niece crawling around on the carpet until she thought of something. She placed her cup and saucer down on the coffee table and stood up. “I’m going to help,” she said dramatically, and she dropped onto her knees on the library carpet. Aunt Helen hadn’t crawled anywhere for a long time, maybe since she had been a little girl. Gee, she thought, as she did it, crawling was therapeutic. Stephanie crawled frantically this way and that looking for the glass eye on the rug.
“This is a great! What a good game! Aren’t we really having fun?” said Aunt Helen, crawling around wildly with her niece. She did sense vaguely that her knees might be receiving some rather nasty carpet burns. “This is so much fun!”
“Aunt Helen,” said Stephanie, sitting still, “crawling around on the floor isn’t much of a game. How long has it been since you played anything?”
Aunt Helen sat back on her heels. “Well, I guess it’s been too long if I think this is so much fun. Am I useless?”
“You gotta play more. Hey, we’ve got all weekend,” said Stephanie excitedly.
“Yes, but first we have to find that eye for you,” said Aunt Helen.
Wherever it had gone, that glass eye had gone there thoroughly, because they couldn’t see it on the Persian carpet pattern no matter which way they crawled or how often they rested their heads down close to the carpet fibers, because glass might glint that way. Helen even strained herself trying to stick her arm as far back as possible under the couch.
“Hey, where you going?” asked Stephanie.
“I was thinking about starting a painting,” said Aunt Helen, and she had a small amount of interest in her voice, “I really, really want to. And right now! I’ve got an idea of what I want to do for my first painting. It’s come to me after all this crawling!”
Stephanie thought about Granny Hilda’s words, about how she was supposed to let Helen do whatever she wanted. “Okay, then,” she said, a little sadly.
When Aunt Helen was walking out of the library, Stephanie spoke under her breath to herself. “I knew you wouldn’t last long playing with me.”
Stephanie kept crawling and scooping her hand under the couch again and again and scooping along the carpet over the pattern. She lifted some pillows and peeked under the curtains.
Gee! She mustn’t lose it. Where could it have gone?
She slouched back in front of the lion. She stood below it, looking up. How much better it would look completely shaved rather than having that bald halo; it was a shame but someone had locked Grandpa Drummond’s bathroom door and she couldn’t see an easy way to break the lock.
Chapter Five