“Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not really that good at composing…. I mean…”
“I’m relying on you,” the Pooka said, flaring his nostrils and clomping one mighty hoof on the ground. “We all are.”
“Okay then,” Smoker said. “I’ll try.”
“And hopefully we’ll make history,” the Pooka said. “The quiet kind of history that is invisible, that runs beneath the surface of world events. The history of our kind.”
Oscar heard distant scratching, but it wasn’t coming from overhead. It wasn’t the sound of cleats scraping the rubber. It was coming from the wall beside his head, and it sounded like tiny, clawing paws.
The noise coming from deep inside of the dirt wall beside Oscar’s bed began as a small scratching but grew louder quickly. He sat up and watched as the dirt in one spot began to crumble, leaving behind a little hole. He saw sharp teeth and a small, furry muzzle emerge from the hole, and then the weasel heaved herself out with her small paws. Her fur was rumpled and dirt caked, and a little mud was packed into the thin gap between her front teeth—but she was smiling.
“What is it?” Oscar asked.
She started snapping so quickly that his decoding skill couldn’t keep up. He had to stop her. “Start over,” he said. “Go slower.”
She snapped, “The Pooka has the baseball. It’s hidden in a box in a cabinet in the wall.” She explained everything that she saw: the rubber center ball, the winding of wool and then string. “And then he put the skins around the ball and held it in his hands and cried.”
“Wait,” Oscar said. “Where was the red stitching? The two red threads that lace up the skins?”
The weasel shrugged and then went on. She described how the Pooka went to the slit and peered out, saying, “There she is!” And he was gazing at the Banshee. The Banshee! The weasel stopped speaking. Her eyes went glassy, but then she pressed on. “The sun came up. He ducked inside and then undid all of his work, put the wool and string and skins back in the box, back in the cabinet.”
Just at that moment, the door flew open and a very huffy Auntie Fedelma charged in, threw off her coat, and slumped in her bleacher seat. Oscar and the weasel could hear Auntie Oonagh and Oscar’s father ask a flurry of questions, but Auntie Fedelma said, “I’m going to sleep. I need to shut my eyes and think!”
Everything went silent then. Oscar and the weasel started again.
“He was looking at the Banshee,” Oscar said. “I saw her dancing once in the outfield, and the slit in the wall was glowing…. She’s waiting for someone to meet her, isn’t she? She’s waiting for him.” Oscar tapped his temple, thinking.
The weasel snapped, “On the ride back to Fenway Park, he was in a hurry. He worried that he wouldn’t be able to see her. Remember?”
“I asked him about it. I asked who. And he said no one. But it’s her. It’s the Banshee. And he has an endless task—just like all pookas must. His is to wind the baseball, but he’s missing the final thing.”
“The red threads,” the weasel snapped.
“He could break the Curse himself, maybe, if he had those threads. Where are they?” Oscar asked the weasel.
“He should know,” she snapped. “He’s the one who made the Curse in the first place.” The weasel shook dirt from her fur.
“But would he turn himself into that pooka?” Oscar asked.
And then another voice sounded in the crawl space—Oscar’s father. “He didn’t mean for that to happen. No one expects to turn into a pooka, I guess.” He appeared at the top of the ladder, his face puffy. There was a quiver to his lips. He looked about to cry. “All these years he’s been so close….”
The weasel burrowed quickly under Oscar’s blanket before Oscar’s father spotted her.
“How long have you been standing there?” Oscar asked.
“Long enough,” his father said. “Long enough.” He looked behind him at the two aunties in their bleacher seats. “They don’t know. Only me.”
“You aren’t supposed to know.”
“It’s okay, Oscar. You didn’t break the rules. I found out on my own.” Then Oscar’s father stammered a bit before he could come out with it. “Listen, Oscar. You’re right. I have to have more faith in you. But you have to have more faith in me, too. I guess.” He let out a gusty breath that rattled his chest. “The Curse has to be broken. The Red Sox have to win. Do I know everything now? Really, come clean.”
“Well, there is this,” Oscar said. He threw back the quilt, and there was the dirty weasel.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were just talking to yourself. Is that one of Weasel-man’s weasels?”
Oscar nodded. “I think she’s my weasel now, or I’m her boy,” Oscar said. “I mean, we’re friends.”
The weasel smiled bashfully.
“Hello,” Oscar’s father said. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning.”
Oscar told his father all about disobeying him, going through the doorway of the Door to the Past and meeting Babe Ruth. And then the weasel took over and started snapping out her part, about meeting Oscar in the tunnels to get him to the Pooka.
“I don’t speak weasel,” Oscar’s father said.
“I’ll translate,” Oscar said, and he did. He translated everything as the weasel went on, ending just at the part where the Pooka didn’t have the red threads but that Oscar hoped that he might send a message somehow.
Oscar’s father was quiet, sorting it all out, running over it all in his mind. “So, let’s make a game plan,” his father said with some real conviction in his voice. “We’ll find the red threads and put the baseball together once and for all. Let’s reverse the Curse.”
“Yes!” Oscar said, relieved that he wasn’t in terrible trouble.
“But I have only one requirement,” he said.
“What’s that?” Oscar asked.
“That we work as a team, okay?” Oscar’s father put out his hand, palm down.
“Yep,” Oscar said, putting his hand on top of his father’s.
“Yip,” yipped the weasel, putting her paw on top of Oscar’s.
They threw their hands (and one dirty paw) up in the air. A team.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A New Coded Message
OSCAR AND HIS FATHER CRAWLED onto their pallets. The weasel curled up near Oscar’s feet.
Oscar tried to sleep but was fitful. He was so bruised and sore from the Pooka’s ride that it was hard to find a comfortable position to try to fall asleep. He stared at his Fenway Park model and wondered what would happen in the real Fenway Park the next day. Would the Red Sox be able to turn it around? His stomach churned with nerves. He closed his eyes and listened to his father snore and the weasel purr and two aunties rustle occasionally like birds in eaves and the third auntie occasionally blurt out something evil (“May your souvenirs turn to balls of fire that destroy all you know!”). The night kept racing through Oscar’s mind. Of all of the strange things that he’d seen, it was his father’s face that kept coming back to him: weak and trembling when he learned that Keeffe was the Pooka, expectant and cheeky while he waited to hear of Oscar’s ride, but mostly the way the anger melted away so quickly when he found Oscar in Smoker’s cloud. You’re home. That’s what his father had said. You’re home. You’re home. And what was amazing to Oscar was that it felt true. He was home. This was home.
Oscar slept so deeply that when he woke up later that day, he barely remembered his dream. At first it was just a blur of blue sky, some clouds. He was on the back of the Pooka trying to stitch the clouds together with endlessly long pieces of red thread. It was one of those crazy dreams that was more a feeling in your body than images lingering in your head. He woke up a little disoriented.
It didn’t help that the weasel was up and running in circles, and that the aunties had radios blaring and someone had scalded some hot cocoa and the room smelled of freshly burned chocolate.
Oscar had overslept. The weasel snapped, “The fans
are already pouring in! The game is on! Skies clear!”
Oscar jumped up. “Really? The skies are clear?”
The weasel nodded.
Oscar scooped her up and climbed down the ladder.
Auntie Gormley was still sleeping. Auntie Fedelma was rocking in her bleacher seat. Auntie Oonagh was knitting an unevenly stitched afghan.
“Where’s my father?” Oscar asked.
“Is the hot cocoa ready?” Auntie Oonagh shouted. Then she saw the weasel and screamed.
“Oh, no! Infestation!”
Auntie Gormley tossed in her sleep.
“It’s a weasel, a friend of mine!” Oscar said.
“Oh, so he’s a thief too!” Auntie Fedelma shouted. “He stole that weasel from Weasel-man! Old Boy! Did you hear that?”
Oscar wished Auntie Gormley weren’t still asleep. He needed her now. How could she sleep with all of this noise? Oscar’s father ambled into the room from the kitchen. He was holding a steaming pot. “What is it?”
Auntie Fedelma ignored him and smiled sickeningly. “It’s no matter.”
Oscar didn’t like the way she seemed to give up so easily. It wasn’t like her and made him even more nervous.
Making matters worse, the radios were tuned to pregame chatter.
The weasel snapped her teeth in objection.
“She’s right!” Auntie Oonagh cried. “We always lose like this!”
“No,” Oscar said. “We don’t have to if we work together as a team!”
“A team!” Auntie Fedelma snorted. “Ha!”
The radios were tuned to pregame chatter.
“Looks like the Sox are in for an uphill battle. Down two games. This is the crucial game. No one’s ever come back from a three-to-zero deficit in a playoff situation—no one in the history of the game. Never. If they lose this one, well…”
This was too much. Oscar couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m sick of it!” he said. He turned to the nearest radio and twisted the knob. It went silent. He reached for another.
“What are you doing?” Auntie Oonagh said.
“The boy is wild!” Auntie Fedelma shouted.
“Old Boy, can’t you control him?”
Oscar turned off another radio and another. The room got a little quieter, and then a little quieter still.
“We never turn off the radios before a game!” Auntie Oonagh said anxiously.
“Are you going to do nothing, Old Boy?” Auntie Fedelma shouted.
Auntie Gormley gave a restless snore. The weasel snapped her teeth.
Oscar’s father stood back and let Oscar turn off all of the radios, and soon the only thing they could hear was the organ music. It wasn’t a chant. No. It was a haunting and beautiful song.
Oscar stood still. He listened to the tune. It was a sad song, filled with loss and longing. But the tune also felt trapped, confined; and, ever so softly in the background, Oscar could hear the Banshee singing in a lonesome cry.
“That’s us,” Oscar’s father said. “That is the song of the Cursed Creatures.”
Auntie Oonagh was the first to start crying; but then the weasel started up, and tears slipped down Oscar’s father’s cheeks. Auntie Fedelma pushed her tears off of her face quickly; and, oddly enough, Oscar even saw small tears on Auntie Gormley’s sleeping face.
Oscar was the only one who didn’t cry. He was too excited. The notes of the song were lining up. They made sense somehow. He said, “I don’t even know how to read music. I only know what Mrs. Calendar taught me in music class. But there is something in the notes.”
“There is?” Oscar’s father asked.
“A message?” the weasel snapped.
“Yep,” Oscar said.
“The Pooka’s coded message: B, A, B, E. Those were the first four notes Smoker played. They spell, of course, ‘Babe,’” Oscar said.
“Ruth,” Oscar’s father said. “Go on.”
“Then it gets trickier: E, E, E…F, F, F…B, B…F, F, F…C…A, A…E…D.”
“What does that mean?” the weasel asked.
The song had ended, and Oscar was thinking furiously. “Well, ‘Babe’ was easy because notes run A through G. And the first four letters are all found in the first seven letters of the alphabet. But then,” Oscar said, pacing in a circle. “Smoker had to find a way to show the letters in the alphabet that come after G. Well…”
“Well?” Oscar’s father asked.
“He started with double notes,” Oscar explained, staring at the transistor radio in his hands. “H is two As played in a row. I is two Bs played in a row. J is two Cs played in a row. And when he got to O, he had to dip into triple notes. O is three As; P is three Bs. See?”
“Kind of,” snapped the weasel. Auntie Gormley snorted in her sleep.
“Not a bit, deary,” said Auntie Oonagh.
“Oh, just get on with it, smarty-pants!” Auntie Fedelma shouted.
“What does it spell out?” Oscar’s father asked.
“And then he played C—G, G, G—F—F—E, E, E.” Oscar held the weasel tight, turned to his dad. “Babe stitched cuffs!”
Oscar’s father’s face fell. “But, but that doesn’t help!”
The weasel snapped, “Oh, but it might!” She looked up at Oscar.
Just then there was a quick knock at the front door and it swung open wide. There stood Smoker, breathless. Oscar barely recognized him at first. He was only smoking one cigarette. Had the others fallen from his mouth on the jog there? The cloud was just a bit of gauze hovering over his head.
“Did you hear it?” he asked Oscar, wheezing.
“Did it make sense?”
Oscar nodded. “You spelled out ‘Babe stitched cuffs.’”
“Am I allowed to say yes now that you’ve guessed it?”
“I think so,” Oscar said.
“Well, then, yes! Right! I did it!” Smoker pulled the cigarette from his mouth, tamped it out in a Styrofoam coffee cup sitting on a table nearby. He cheered. “I did it. I don’t know how I did it, really. I mean, I caused a diversion. Someone smelled smoke. Kantor rushed out of the .406. I rushed in, and, well, I played!”
“You played beautifully!” Oscar’s father said. “It was perfect!”
“I felt some other presence there,” Smoker said.
“I can’t explain it. Some other sad and lonesome presence.”
“The Banshee,” Oscar said.
“You’re right,” Smoker said. “It was the Banshee. I could feel her presence somehow.” And then he stopped, pulled a new pack of smokes from his shirt pocket, suddenly anxious again. “But it still makes no sense. How will cuffs help you find the baseball?”
“Well, we aren’t looking for a baseball. The Pooka has that. We’re looking for the red threads to stitch it up.”
“Oh, I have red thread,” said Auntie Oonagh.
“I’m quite a seamstress!” She pointed to her sewing basket sitting by her cleats.
“Not just any threads,” Oscar’s father said.
“No, not just any threads,” Oscar said to Smoker.
“We can figure this out.” He reached up, plucking the pack of cigarettes from Smoker’s hand and giving it to his father, who balled it up. “We can do this.”
“Oh, can we?” Auntie Fedelma said venomously, flipping a radio back on. She pointed to the clock on the wall. “You’re too late. Radio is announcing the first pitch.” The fans were pounding their feet overhead. Auntie Fedelma was right. Over the pounding rhythm of the fans’ feet on the bleachers, Jerry Trupiano was reporting, “And here come Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky, heading out on the field to throw the first pitch of Game 3 of the 2004 American League Championship Series….”
“Johnny Pesky,” Oscar’s father said sadly.
“The goat who held the ball? They got the goat to throw out the first pitch. He ruined it for us in forty-six!” Auntie Fedelma smiled nostalgically.
“It wasn’t his fault the Series was lost,” Oscar’s fat
her said. “Why won’t you let that go?”
But Auntie Fedelma wasn’t paying attention. “Listen. I hear her again.”
Oscar heard a cry, but it wasn’t the same cry that had accompanied Smoker’s composition. No, this time it was high-pitched, anguished, grieving. He’d never heard anything so horrible before. It made his chest ache. The weasel heard it, too. She wriggled in Oscar’s arms; and even Auntie Gormley, who’d slept through all of the earlier noise, couldn’t sleep through this distant cry. She wrestled awake. Her eyes opened, and she sat up and stared at Oscar. The weasel jumped out of Oscar’s arms and scurried to a corner, suddenly frightened.
“The Banshee,” Auntie Gormley signed with her eyes, now fully awake.
“She’s already mourning the loss!” Auntie Fedelma said. “And that’s not all! My team is coming for you, boy. Do you hear that, too?”
The bass of footsteps were pounding in the tunnels, getting louder and louder, drowning out the Banshee’s cry.
“My team isn’t going to let you foul up the Curse! My team is going to put a stop to you, boy, once and for all!”
“Fedelma!” Auntie Oonagh cried.
“Have you lost your mind!” Oscar’s father shouted. “No one is going to lay a finger on Oscar. Do you hear me?”
The door flew open again. This time Weasel-man shoved his broad body in, trailed by his weasels, Stickler, and the Bobs. The weasel in the corner bounded over, anxious to be back with her pack. Everyone started shouting at once—about Oscar, the Curse, the Red Sox, the awful unknown of the future. Stickler went right for Oscar’s father and poked a finger in his chest. “Been waiting a long time for an opportunity to sock it to you,” he said.
Oscar’s father poked back. “Back off, Stickler. This isn’t about us!”
Oscar stood in the middle of it all, awestruck.
He wasn’t sure what to do, and then he felt a tug on his sleeve. It was Auntie Gormley, small and bent over. She pulled Oscar to the side of the living room; and in one swift motion, she scooped up the loose weasel. They slipped into the kitchen.
“What is it?” Oscar asked.