Mama takes his arm and together they follow Lucy.
“Jake, you coming?” says Billy, making me smile.
“I’m coming, Billy.”
And then Billy stops.
The house stands with the sun on it, outlining every brick. Jesse is up on the ladder, finishing laying the branches. The Russian olive bushes that I’ve left sit at the corner where Billy’s first sod house was. But, of course, Billy doesn’t know that yet.
Billy’s mouth opens and closes. He looks sideways at Mama. Then they walk closer. Billy’s old lawn chair sits on the small flat rise where the house is built. Jesse turns, and Lida and Papa come around the house. Billy sits in the chair.
“That roof sod goes with the grass part facing the sky, you know!” he says, making us all laugh. “And”—he points to the corner of the sod house—“that’s my old house, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
That is when the tears come down Billy’s face.
15
Old Home, New Home
We have never seen Billy cry in our whole lives, Jesse and Lida and I. But Mama and Papa don’t seem upset. Mama smiles actually.
“We left the last piece of roof sod for you, Billy,” Papa says.
Billy looks at the ladder.
“You do it, Jake,” he says softly.
“Me?”
“You.”
I take the piece of sod and climb up the ladder.
“Grass to the sky,” says Billy.
I smile and put the last sod piece in place. I feel a little shiver when I do it. Like it is something important and final.
“Why don’t you go inside the house, Billy?” says Mama.
She opens the door and hands Billy his cane.
“Go inside.”
Billy is very quiet when he walks into the sod house. He looks at the pictures on the wall, the bed with the quilt, and his mama’s rocking chair. Lucy jumps up on the bed, turns around once, and lies down. Billy looks at us outside the house.
“Thank you all,” he says.
Then he reaches out and shuts the door of the sod house, leaving the rest of us outside.
I look at Mama.
“He has to rest,” she says. “And he has to think about all of this. Alone.”
Billy has never closed the door on me before. Jesse touches my shoulder.
“Let’s go eat pie,” he says.
Jesse and I walk down the hill. He reaches out to tag me suddenly and then ducks out of the way when I try to tag him back. We laugh all the way down the hill, trying to tag each other. Lida catches up, and at the bottom of the hill we turn around and look up at the house, so peaceful in the afternoon light.
“He loves it,” says Lida.
“He loves it,” says Jesse.
Jesse puts his arm across my shoulders.
“Yes,” I say.
Billy stays inside the sod house all afternoon. Papa goes out to the fields, and Mama cooks soup on the stove.
Dr. Miller’s car comes down the dirt road, sending dust up behind it. She stops out front, lifts her black doctor’s bag from the front seat, and comes into the kitchen.
“Billy?” she asks.
“Up in the sod house. With Lucy,” says Mama.
Dr. Miller nods.
“Of course,” she says. “I’ll just take a walk up there.”
“He cried,” I tell her as she opens the door.
She stops.
“Of course,” she repeats.
“I’ll walk you up,” says Lida.
And then they’re gone.
I frown at Mama and Jesse.
“I don’t understand anything,” I say. “I don’t understand why Billy cried. I don’t understand why he’s in that sod house all by himself. With that dog,” I add.
“Yes, you do,” says Jesse, “even though you’re just a kid. He cried because it was a gift. You were the one who gave Billy this gift. I’d never have done it on my own.”
I stare at Jesse. I’m not sure he’s ever said this many words to me before in his life. Then he says one more thing.
“And ‘that dog’ is his angel.”
Mama turns from stirring the soup on the stove and smiles at Jesse.
“Once you thought that was crazy!” I say.
“I did,” says Jesse. “But I don’t think it’s crazy anymore. Not anymore,” he repeats softly.
And then, before I can answer, the door swings open and Billy and Dr. Miller come in with Lucy.
“Now for the next thing, Jake,” says Billy happily. “All I need is an outhouse!”
16
The Gift
The days go by. The nights are cooler.
Soon it will be fall. And school.
I don’t want the summer to end.
Billy spends days with Lucy in his sod house. Sometimes he invites me in, too. But it is Billy’s house. As Jesse tells me, “You built it, but it is Billy’s house. That’s what a gift is.”
In a way I have made something happen that separates us. Billy and Lucy have their own space now. I didn’t mean for that to happen.
“You built that sod house for Billy so he’d get well,” Lida reminds me.
“And he did,” I say.
Most nights Billy comes back to the farmhouse to eat dinner and sleep in his own bed.
“I think we should build another room or two,” he says to me one night, “so you can have a room there, too.”
I feel tears and can’t speak.
Billy pats my head, one of his small taps that means “I love you.”
Some days when it is cool outside, Billy builds a fire in his yellow stove. We have hot chocolate, all of us gathered around. There is, in the sod house, a smell of prairie and wildflowers and good earth.
“There is nothing like this in the whole wide world,” says Billy. Then he looks over at us. “Heaven maybe,” he says.
The hummingbirds still come to Billy’s window feeders. Their young come, too, squeaking and swooping.
“They’re filling up before they go south,” says Billy. “I’ll miss them when they’re gone.”
“You used to say that about your old sod house,” I say to him. “That you missed it.”
“I did, didn’t I?” says Billy. “I have nothing much to miss anymore.”
There is something sad about Billy that I don’t understand.
“You’re supposed to be happier,” I say. “That’s why we built your sod house.”
Billy looks at me for a long time.
“I am happy,” he says.
The day is warm for mid-September, though geese are flying high above. Fall is coming.
Billy has taken his cane and invited me for a walk around the slough with Lucy.
“This will fill up with water,” he says. “The ducks will come.”
I smile. Billy is telling me things I know because I live here.
Some of the bushes by the slough have changed to yellow. Some of the fields are yellow, too. We walk down the hill, where Billy speaks to the calf Billy, who is very peppy today.
“Hello, kiddo. Hello, girls.”
The horses run along the fence with us, hoping Billy has carrots. Which he does.
“I’m tired,” says Billy. “Tell your mama I’ll be there for dinner after my nap.”
“I will.”
I watch him go up the hill with Lucy. Lucy walks ahead, then stops and waits for Billy.
I walk back toward the house.
“Hey?”
Billy calls to me.
He looks down at me. Lucy looks, too.
“I’m happy,” he calls. “I’m happy, Jake.”
I wave. He waves back, smiling.
He doesn’t close the door of the sod house.
Lida is setting the table for dinner. Jesse is sampling something out of a pot on the stove. Papa washes up.
“Billy will be here,” I say. “In a while.”
Mama nods.
“We’ll go ahead without him. He’ll be
along.”
After a while we sit down for dinner, six places at the table. Five of us there.
And then there is a scratch at the door.
I get up and open it.
Lucy stands there looking at me. She has never scratched at the door before. Ever.
“Lucy?”
I turn and see Mama getting up, almost in slow motion. Papa moves to the door.
“Lucy?” he repeats.
And I’ll never forget the sound of his voice. It is almost a cry.
I know right away. I know.
Papa runs up the hill to the sod house, Mama behind him.
Jesse and Lida and I sit at the table.
We know.
Lucy doesn’t follow Mama and Papa. She stands, looking at us, her eyes steady and large.
Billy dies in his mama’s rocking chair, leaning back as if he were napping. The door is open to the slough. The quilt on the bed is mussed, as if a dog has been lying there.
The sun goes down.
17
Leaving
We never see Lucy again. But a few days later Jesse brings me a newspaper story of a dog who has visited a woman’s sick mother in the next town, making her life much better. There is no picture of the dog.
“This dog is a jewel,” the woman says. “She makes my mother’s last days happy.”
“Angel Dog,” says Jesse.
Sometimes I think Lucy comes back to the sod house. Sometimes I think there is a shadow there, the door left ajar, a small dent in the quilt.
But I never see her.
Jesse and Lida and I sit in the sod house.
“I built the sod house so Billy would get well and stay,” I say to Lida. “Remember?”
Lida nods.
“But what you really did was give him the place he wanted so he could leave,” Jesse says.
Geese honk high in the sky outside.
And the morning after we bury Billy, the hummingbirds are gone, too.
Excerpt from The Truth of Me
Read on to discover another poignant story about a boy, his dog, and a special grandparent, from beloved author Patricia MacLachlan.
This is a true story. The truest story ever.
You may not believe it. Your loss.
But it’s true.
I have a witness.
1
All About Me
My name is Robert. There are many Roberts before me—a family of Roberts. There are my uncles, my great-uncles, a grandfather and a great-grandfather, and on and on. I think of all those Roberts when I go to the ballpark and see a line of men waiting to go to the bathroom. All those Roberts.
I am an only child.
My parents call me Robert, and when they do, I feel like a child dressed up in grown-up clothing. I’d rather be called Rex or Bud or Duke.
Once I asked them if they would please have another child.
My mother said, “Why would we want another child? We have you.”
How dumb is that.
They did get me a dog from the shelter: a brown hound mix named Eleanor—Ellie for short. Ellie surprised us all by being obedient. She does everything we ask. Someone trained Ellie very well and then let her go. That makes me sad. Why would anyone do that?
Ellie is my best friend. Actually, Jack and Lizzie from my class are good friends, too. But they have gone to summer camp, off to swim in icy lake waters on cold mornings, to go on long hikes and forget their water bottles, to make lanyard bracelets that will unravel. They would rather go to Maddy’s house with me.
So Ellie and my grandmother Maddy are my two best friends for the summer. Most kids are best friends with their dogs. Not all kids are best friends with their grandmothers. But I am.
My parents are musicians. My mother, I think, likes her violin better than she likes me. At least she spends more time with her violin than with me. But that is the way of musicians, Maddy tells me.
“That’s my fault, Robbie. I gave her a half-size fiddle when she was six years old to keep her from telling me what to do all the time,” says Maddy.
My father (yep, named Robert) is a composer and violist. He has four pianos. There’s a very big Steinway that I played under when I was little—I used to hide my glasses of milk there because I didn’t like milk. The milk curdled and was cleaned up by the housekeeper much later. She never told my mother. Maybe she didn’t like milk either. My father has two baby grand pianos, too, and a spinet—and a keyboard for traveling. Maddy says he is “overequipped.”
Maddy calls me Robbie, which I like. And she makes my parents nervous because of the stories she tells.
I make my parents nervous, too. Which is another reason I love my grandmother.
In school we had to write a description about an actual event we witnessed. This is what I wrote about my mother auditioning a second violinist to play in her string quartet.
AUDITION OVER
The second violinist who auditions wears the same dress as the first violinist and if you can believe it, the same shoes.
The first violinist cannot stop looking at her.
The first violinist cannot stop disliking her.
AUDITION OVER.
A tall man with a sneer auditions. He makes a grand mistake. He accuses the first violinist of being “just a trifle flat.”
AUDITION OVER.
A small woman with the body of a Jack Russell terrier auditions.
She hums.
“You’re humming,” says the first violinist.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“Are.”
“Not.”
“Are.”
“Not.”
AUDITION OVER.
My teacher, Miss Cross, laughed a lot when she read it. But she didn’t think it was true. Often my teachers don’t think what I write is true.
Maddy read “Audition Over” and laughed, too. But she knew it was true. She is my mother’s mother, and she knows.
My parents don’t exactly trust Maddy. That is, they don’t trust all that she says. They whisper and murmur about her, wondering if she’s going “over the edge,” as my mother puts it. Once my mother called Maddy’s doctor, Henry, to tell him what she thought. I know all this because I know pretty much everything.
I know Maddy says she has lots of animal friends in the woods. I know she says she once shared corn bread with a bear, the two of them sitting on a log.
But I also know something my mother and father don’t know.
Maddy has powers all her own. Powers that other people don’t have.
Jack and Lizzie know this, too. They have met Maddy.
“Maddy has gifts,” says Lizzie.
“Do you mean magic?” I ask.
“No. Gifts,” says Lizzie. “That’s different. Remember when she was here and the birds came down from the trees to see her?”
“And a fox came?” says Jack. “It came right up to her? The animals seem to know that she is safe.”
“They want to be close to her,” says Lizzie. “That’s her gift. They trust her.”
I don’t care if Maddy tells stories.
Lizzie and Jack don’t care if she tells stories.
But my parents care.
And my parents are very nervous.
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About the Author
Patricia MacLachlan is the celebrated author of many timeless books for young readers, including Sarah, Plain and Tall, winner of the Newbery Medal. Her novels for young readers include Arthur, for the Very First Time; The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt; Skylark; Caleb’s Story; More Perfect than the Moon; Grandfather’s Dance; and Word After Word After Word. She is also the author of many much-loved picture books, including Three Names; All the Places to Love; What You Know First; Painting the Wind; Bittle; Who Loves Me?; Once I Ate a Pie; I Didn’t Do It; Before You Came; and Cat Talk; several of which she c
owrote with her daughter, Emily. She lives with her husband and two border terriers in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.
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Other Books by Patricia MacLachlan
Sarah, Plain and Tall
Skylark
Caleb’s Story
More Perfect Than the Moon
Grandfather’s Dance
Arthur, For the Very First Time
Through Grandpa’s Eyes
Cassie Binegar
Seven Kisses in a Row
Unclaimed Treasures
The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt
Mama One, Mama Two
All the Places to Love
What You Know First
Three Names
Who Loves Me?
Word After Word After Word
The Truth of Me
written with Emily MacLachlan Charest
Painting the Wind
Bittle
Once I Ate a Pie
Fiona Loves the Night
I Didn’t Do It
Before You Came
Cat Talk
Credits
Cover art © 2012 by Erwin Madrid
Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
KINDRED SOULS
Copyright © 2012 by Patricia MacLachlan
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