“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” said Caspar.
“You’re going to get it anyway,” said Maddy, suddenly fierce. “You turned a crazy old guy into an enemy in less than two minutes. You did it. You’ve done it over and over, I’ve seen you: you approach people like an enemy and bam!, they turn into one, whether they were to begin with or not.”
“It’s my policy to be ready to defend myself,” Caspar said, scowling. “At any moment.”
“Fine,” said Maddy. “So now, because of your policy, we’re out four cakes instead of two, and we have a lot of dirt on the rest.” She closed the chest, stood up, and glared at Caspar with a mixture of anger and scorn. “If you ask me, making friends is a better defense than making enemies.”
“I didn’t ask you,” said Caspar.
On the fourth day, they went uphill hour after hour. The heat was terrible. The only water they found was at the bottom of a deep ravine. All three of them scrambled down, half stepping and half sliding, carrying Caspar’s biggest pots, and, sweating and gasping, they lugged the filled pots back up so that the oxen could drink.
Then they went uphill some more. It was late afternoon by the time they came to the top of the ridge. Lina was so tired by that time and so hot that she felt like a boiled vegetable, limp and runny. She was a bit dazed, too, only half awake, and so she was startled when the truck jolted to a stop and she heard sharp exclamations from Caspar and Maddy. She jumped down and went around to the front. A tremendous view of land and water lay before her. Such immense water she had never seen—green-blue, glinting in the rays of the late sun, white ripples racing across its surface. To her right, it stretched as far as she could see, but straight ahead she could see the shore on the other side—green trees covering the ground, and hills rising beyond.
“The bay,” said Caspar. “This means we’re almost there. We go around the end of it and then north.”
“When do we get to the city?” Lina said.
“Tomorrow,” said Caspar. His wide face broke into a grin, and he laughed his high, weird laugh. He opened and closed his fingers, stretching and gripping, as if he were imagining taking hold of something. “We’ll be there tomorrow, and then our work begins.”
CHAPTER 17
Doon Accused
Word of the tomato throwing, and Torren’s accusation of Doon, spread quickly through Sparks. Some people believed Torren, some didn’t. But no one could prove who was telling the truth. Torren said he’d seen what he’d seen in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep and took a walk to the field to look at the stars. Doon said he’d been home all night, sleeping, and that his father and the others in his room knew it. But people said he could have slipped quietly out without anyone knowing, couldn’t he? He could have gone down there and done his mischief and come back, and they all would have thought he’d been sleeping the whole night.
At noon that day, when he and the others showed up at the Partons’ house for their midday meal, no one spoke to them. Martha let them in, and they sat down at the table, where places had been set for them as usual. Doon’s father said, “Good day,” and Mrs. Polster said, “How are you?” and Miss Thorn and Edward Pocket looked around at the family’s stony faces and tried to smile. Ordney put food on their plates (was it an even smaller amount than usual?) and passed the plates to them. Kenny ate tiny mouthfuls. His eyes darted nervously from face to face. But no one spoke.
Finally Doon’s father said, “Excuse me, but perhaps there’s been a mistake.”
Martha looked at him coldly. “I don’t believe so,” she said.
“Perhaps you’re thinking,” Doon’s father went on, “that my son Doon actually did what he has been accused of.”
“In this household,” said Martha, “we do not approve of wasting food.”
“Neither do we!” cried Doon. “I would never do such a thing! I didn’t do it.” All eyes turned toward Doon. He could feel a red flush rising in his face. “Really,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “I didn’t.”
“Who did, then?” said Ordney.
“I don’t know,” said Doon.
“No one knows,” said Mrs. Polster in her firmest voice. “Certainly we aren’t going to believe the word of one unhappy little boy against the word of this young man, who has proved himself so outstanding.”
“Why not?” said Martha. “Torren Crane is a decent boy, as far as I know. I don’t see why you call him unhappy.”
“All you have to do is look at him,” Mrs. Polster said.
Miss Thorn nodded. “I do think she’s right,” she murmured.
“Well, one of you people must have done it,” Martha said. “Certainly none of us would have.”
“Nothing has been proved one way or the other,” said Doon’s father. “It would be unfair to draw any conclusions.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Everyone focused on eating. When it was time to leave, Kenny passed out the food parcels, and as he handed one to Doon, he silently mouthed three words: I believe you.
At least one person was on his side, Doon thought. It made him feel better, but only a little.
In the end, because it was one person’s word against another’s and there was no proof either way, nothing was done. Officially, the identity of the tomato thrower remained a mystery. But the effect of all this was to make the people of Sparks and the people of Ember even more resentful and suspicious of each other than they had been before.
Doon felt unfriendly eyes following him wherever he went. At first he tried to explain when people glared at him that way. He spoke reasonably. “Why would I get up and walk all the way into a field in the middle of the night to throw tomatoes at a wall?” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.” But people didn’t seem interested in reason. He was one of them, and that meant he was strange and might do anything. So Doon stopped trying to explain. He kept his eyes on the ground and ignored the people who muttered darkly as he passed by.
It wasn’t just Doon who suffered from the tomato incident. It was all the refugees from Ember. Sometimes the villagers called them names right out loud on the street. It was as if those smashed tomatoes had brought all the quietly rumbling resentments out into the open. The town simmered like a pot about to boil over.
One morning Doon found a crowd gathered in the plaza when he came into town for work. Both Sparks people and Ember people were clustered together, looking at something. He edged between them to see what it was. Across the pavement, someone had scrawled a message. It looked as if it had been written in mud. The sloppy, runny letters said:
THEY MUST GO!
The crowd stared at it silently. A few of the villagers seemed embarrassed. They looked sideways at the Emberites and shook their heads. “Mean,” someone muttered. But others scowled. One man, noticing Doon, glared at him so angrily that Doon felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. This message was there because of him; he knew it. He put his head down and hurried away.
At the hotel that night, people were upset. They clustered in buzzing groups out by the front steps, talking about the words painted on the plaza. Doon saw Tick striding among them, speaking with everyone, his face flushed and his eyes glittering. When he came toward Doon, he paused. “They’ve turned against us,” he said. “I knew they would. We mustn’t stand for it.” And he plunged back into the crowd.
A day passed, and then another. The sun blazed down, but Doon felt as if darkness had invaded him. Protests and questions raged through his mind. Why had Torren pointed at him? Was it just at random, or had he singled him out for some reason? Why did Chugger believe Torren and not believe him? Who had written the muddy message on the bricks of the plaza?
Lina did not return, and this added to Doon’s glumness. According to the note she’d left Mrs. Murdo, she should have been back by now from wherever she’d gone. Doon’s feelings about her were divided between worry and anger. He tried not to think about her, since there was nothing he could do.
Whene
ver he had a free moment, he holed up with a book and tried to forget about what was happening in the village. Edward Pocket brought him a steady supply. Edward was obsessed with his job. Every now and then Doon would ask him how it was going, and Edward would get a feverish look in his eyes and say, “Ah! It goes by inches, young Doon. By millimeters. I’ve done this much”—he held his thumb and forefinger a tiny distance apart—“and this much remains to be done.” He stretched his arms as far apart as they would go. “It’s a gargantuan task. I press forward, but will I finish in my lifetime? It is doubtful.” His fingers black with dust, he often came home in the evening later than the workers who went into the village, and he was so tired by then that he usually went straight to bed right after dinner, even though it was still light. Doon would hear him mumbling in his sleep inside the closet. He could make sense of only a few words. “Caterpillars,” Edward would say. “Cathedrals. Cattle. Chemistry. Christmas.” Then he’d groan and thrash about, banging his bony limbs against the closet door, and go silent for a while. When he muttered again, he’d be on to a different letter: “Hamlet. Harry Potter. Hawaii. Heart surgery. Hippopotamus. Hog farming.” Doon imagined that Edward’s mind was so stuffed with information by now that there wasn’t room for any more, and the excess had started leaking out in the night.
Sometimes Doon passed the Sparks school on his way to work in the morning. It was a small building with a wide, open porch all around it, where the students often sat to do their lessons. The children of the village—there weren’t very many of them—went to school only a few hours a day, and only until they were ten years old. Kenny Parton went there. He would wave to Doon when he saw him going by, and before the trouble with the tomatoes, the other children would look at Doon curiously, a few of them smiling. But the first time Doon passed the school after the tomato trouble, he saw fifteen or twenty cold-eyed faces turned toward him. Someone shouted, “Get out of here!” and someone else threw a crumpled wad of paper over the porch railing at him. He walked faster, looking straight ahead. A moment later he heard the teacher scolding the class for rudeness, but not very sternly.
The next day, as Doon and the others arrived at the Partons’ for lunch, Kenny peeked out from behind a corner of the house and beckoned to Doon. His eyes wide, his voice even softer and more timid than usual, he said, “You know at school yesterday?”
Doon nodded.
“I was sorry they yelled at you,” Kenny said. “They shouldn’t. You didn’t do it.”
“How do you know?” said Doon, who was feeling crabby just then at all residents of Sparks. “Maybe I did.”
Kenny shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” said Doon.
“I can just tell,” said Kenny. “I can tell about people. You wouldn’t.” He gave Doon a quick, shy smile.
Doon was touched. Kenny looked like a timid little wisp, but there was something strong inside him.
“I wish you didn’t have to leave,” Kenny said.
Doon smiled. “We’ll be here for a few more months,” he said.
“Then what?” Kenny asked.
“We go away and make our own town.”
“Where?” asked Kenny.
Doon shrugged. “I don’t know. Out in those empty places somewhere.”
Kenny looked down at his feet. He stood for a minute in silence. Then he said, “That will be really hard. How will you get food?”
“Grow it, I guess. Just the way you do here.”
“But you’ll be leaving in the month of Chilling. That’s the beginning of winter. You can’t grow food in the winter,” Kenny said, looking up at Doon with worried eyes.
“Winter?” said Doon. “What’s winter?”
“You don’t have winter where you came from?” Kenny’s eyes grew very round. “You mean it’s always summer there?”
Doon was confused and slightly alarmed by Kenny’s tone. “I don’t know those words,” he said.
Kenny stared at Doon, his face blank with surprise. “Seasons,” he said. “They’re the seasons. In summer it’s hot. In winter it’s cold.”
“That’s all right, then,” said Doon, relieved. “We’re used to cold.”
“But you can’t grow food in the winter. It’s really cold. And clouds come over the sun. And it rains.”
“Rains?”
Kenny was so amazed that his mouth dropped open. He flung his arms up and wiggled his fingers like drops sprinkling down. “Rain! When water comes from the sky! And the river rises, and sometimes it floods! And the dirt turns to mud!”
Doon felt as if his mind had suddenly stopped. He stared at Kenny’s wiggling fingers and tried to grasp what he was saying. Water dropped from the sky? But—people’s clothes would get wet. Everyone would have to stay inside. And if they couldn’t grow food . . . “Wait,” he said. “You mean the town leaders know it will be winter when we leave? They know it will be cold and wet?”
“I guess so,” Kenny said. He lowered his eyes, then looked up again. “Probably they mean to send food with you,” he said. “To get you through the winter. That must be it.” He gave a small, hopeful smile. “That must be it,” he said again, and he darted away toward the front door and went into the house.
Doon followed. His vision of the future, already shadowed by anxiety, had just grown several shades darker.
One morning a week or so later, as Doon came out the door of room 215, he nearly bumped into Tick Hassler, who was running at full speed down the hall. “Something’s happened!” Tick called to him.
“What?” said Doon, breaking into a run himself to keep up with Tick.
“I don’t know,” Tick said. “But I heard people out in front, shouting.”
Tick must have jumped out of bed and not taken time to do anything but throw on his clothes, Doon thought. He hadn’t combed his hair, he hadn’t tied his shoes, he hadn’t even washed his face—there were gray smudges on his neck and below his ear. In the usually well-groomed Tick, these were signs of serious alarm. Doon’s heart beat faster. He took the stairs three at a time, crossed the lobby, and, still following Tick, pushed through the front door.
Outside, a crowd stood in the field, staring up at the hotel. Doon ran out to join them and turned around to see what they were seeing.
Someone had scrawled words on the walls of the Pioneer—tremendous black letters, rough and scratchy, as if written with burnt wood. “GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE,” said the message, over and over. “GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE. GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE.” The few ground-floor windows that hadn’t already been broken were broken now.
Doon stood staring for a minute, feeling sick, and then anger rose in him. This was the work of whoever had slopped that mud message onto the plaza—another ugly message, bolder this time. Around him the others were rushing forward, shouting, staring at the scrawled words. Some of them stood silent and glum, with arms folded or hands in pockets. Others shook their fists in the air and vowed revenge. Tick was more furious than anyone, but he didn’t yell. Doon watched him weaving through the crowd, seizing one person after another by the arm, talking in a voice as sharp as a blade but low and steady. His light blue eyes glinted like steel.
“It’s what I thought,” Tick said. “This shows it. They’ve pretended to be kind, but their kindness isn’t real. Here’s what we can know from now on: they hate us.” He narrowed his eyes, lowered his voice almost to a hiss, and said it again. “They hate us. They want to get rid of us. Well, I’ll tell you what.” People all around turned toward him. “They want us to leave, but I’m not leaving. Are you?” He scanned the crowd.
“No,” said someone.
Doon thought about what Kenny had told him: winter, cold, rain. Maybe Tick is right, he thought. They do hate us.
“Do you like being called cavepeople?” Tick cried. “Do you like being told to crawl back into a cave?”
And angry voices, twenty, fifty, a hundred of them, cried, “No, no!”
Doon w
ent up close to the wall of the hotel and examined the words scratched there. He pictured the people who had done it, clutching their burnt chunks of wood, writing with big, angry strokes in the dark of the night. Yes, Tick was right. Hatred seethed in those jagged letters. He felt almost as if their strokes had scraped open his skin.
The Second Town Meeting
The three town leaders called a meeting after these unpleasant incidents—the tomato-throwing, and the graffiti on the plaza and on the hotel wall. They met in the tower room of the town hall to talk.
“This is unfortunate,” Mary said. “I’m afraid these spiteful deeds will cause bad feelings to get worse on both sides.”
Wilmer nodded. “Feelings are already bad,” he said.
“These cavepeople,” said Ben, “are not as civilized as we are. People who will destroy two whole crates of tomatoes might do anything.”
“We don’t know for sure that one of them did it,” Mary said.
“Come now, Mary,” said Ben. “I think it’s safe to assume.”
“And what about the people who wrote ‘Go Back to Your Cave’ on the hotel walls?” said Mary.
“The problem is,” said Ben, “we don’t know who did that. But I must say that I think they were expressing an understandable frustration. These cavepeople have adversely impacted our way of life. The food we give them comes out of the mouths of our own people.”
“We do have a bit of a surplus in the storehouse,” said Mary.
“But why should we use it for them? It’s our protection against hard times.” Ben smoothed his beard and went on. “I have a rule to suggest,” he said. “I think it would be best if the cavepeople didn’t eat in the homes of families anymore. I think it’s too hard on our families to have strangers eating with them every day. It would be better if the families simply hand them their food parcels when they arrive. They can eat somewhere else.”
“Where?” asked Mary.
Ben waved a hand in the direction of the river. “On the riverbank,” he said. “Or at the edge of a field. Or on the road. I really don’t care where they eat,” he said, “as long as they don’t intrude on our households.”