She pointed to the Door to the Past. Oscar pulled out the key on its long golden ribbon, and unlocked the door. Auntie Gormley shoved the weasel into his arms then. “Take this too,” she signed, pulling a transistor radio off of the counter and putting it into his hands. “So you can keep up with the game.” Oscar balanced the weasel and the transistor radio, bobbling them a bit.
“The weasel will know the plan,” she signed.
“As soon as I can find a place to drift off and dream again. My little parlor trick at work.”
Oscar remembered that his father had told him that was what she called her gift: her little parlor trick. “It was you?” he asked. “You were inside of the weasel?”
“And I will be again,” she signed.
Just then the rowdy crowd thundered into the kitchen. The Bobs negotiated the narrow doorway by sliding through sideways. Weasel-man ducked down.
And in the center of the ruckus, Auntie Fedelma roared, “Where is he?”
Stickler snatched Oscar up by the back of his shirt, jostling the radio from his hand. It clattered to the ground. “Here he is!” Stickler announced.
“Let him go!” Oscar’s father roared.
Oscar kicked out as hard as he could, and Stickler caught Oscar by one ankle and then the other, holding him upside down.
Oscar’s father rushed Stickler. “Leave him alone!”
His father started shoving Stickler, and an awkward scuffle broke out. The Key to the Past fell out of Oscar’s pocket and skidded across the kitchen floor. Oscar’s father got Stickler in a headlock, and Stickler lost his grip on Oscar. Oscar tumbled to the floor right next to the Door to the Past.
Auntie Oonagh trilled, “Stop! Stop! Don’t!” and started banging Weasel-man on the back with a pot. The Bobs tried to wrestle the pot from her. Auntie Fedelma was cheering wildly. And Auntie Gormley was gone!
Oscar got as low as he could, trying to find the key; but there were too many frantic feet. He had to go, even if he didn’t have the key. The transistor radio was right there, the announcer calling the end of the first inning: the Yankees, 3, the Red Sox, 0. He grabbed it and crawled through the doorway of the Door to the Past. As he turned around to close the door, there was the weasel, scampering toward him. He knew immediately that it was Auntie Gormley.
“C’mon,” he whispered. “Hurry!” His hand grabbed hold of the edge of the door. Auntie Gormley—the weasel—slipped through. But just as he started to close the door, a pair of eyes caught his—a pair of milky, nearly blind eyes. There was Auntie Fedelma on her hands and knees, staring at Oscar through the mayhem of scuffling legs. She smiled at him—a grim and evil smile—and ever so slowly lifted one hand to show him something: a gray, wrought iron skeleton key on a faded golden ribbon.
Oscar slammed the door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Race Through Time
“AUNTIE FEDELMA HAS THE KEY,” Oscar told Auntie Gormley in her weasel shape. They were crawling as quickly as they could down the dark tunnel on the other side of the Door to the Past.
“No!” snapped Gormley. “What do we do now?”
Oscar had been churning over the new clue. “‘Babe stitched cuffs,’” he repeated to himself. “‘Babe stitched cuffs.’ Stitched. And what do you stitch things with? Thread.”
Auntie Gormley snapped, “Is that where Keeffe hid the red threads?”
As Oscar’s mind sped up, his crawling slowed down. “Maybe Keeffe got Babe to stitch cuffs to sleeves using the red threads?” He was breathless. He turned to Auntie Gormley, who was twitching her weasel nose.
“But,” Auntie Gormley snapped, “in 1919 when the Sox traded Babe Ruth, he wasn’t a tailor. He was a ballplayer. Keeffe couldn’t have gotten him to stitch anything by then. Unless…”
“Unless he went through the Door to the Past, unless he was the one who stole Auntie Oonagh’s key. And he found the young Babe Ruth, before he was Babe Ruth—back when he was just an orphan from St. Mary’s learning a trade in a tailor shop instead of going to real school, back when he was…a big-handed boy learning to stitch seams. It’s right there in the Curse!”
Oscar paused and pounded his fist in the dirt. “And where is the shirt now? Is that what we’re looking for?”
“We can’t look for the shirt,” Auntie Gormley snapped. “It’s gone. Pookas lose everything they own when they turn into pookas. The shirt disappeared!”
Then Oscar froze. He imagined the moment: Keeffe only feeling the change at first, maybe a stiffness in the bones of his feet as they hardened into hooves and a bristling on his skin as the fur began to inch up and cover him; his clothes becoming thin and then dusty and then disappearing altogether; and finally, his head probably growing heavy as his jaw lengthened, and his eyes being swallowed by the glowing holes in his giant horse head. Oscar shivered at the terrifying image. One thing was clear now. He turned to the weasel. “The shirt and the red threads were lost in the Curse! The Curse took the one thing that we need to break the Curse!”
Light flooded the tunnel. The Door to the Past had been opened. Oscar jumped forward. The weasel squeaked. “It’s Auntie Fedelma!”
Oscar started crawling again, faster than before; and his thoughts kept up with him. “But we’ve already gone through the Door to the Past. If Keeffe visited the tailor shop once, like he said, just once, then we can, too. We can find the young Babe Ruth and get him to, get him to…”
Oscar could hear voices now. One of the Bobs shouted, “I can’t fit!” Stickler said, “No, no. Let me in!” Weasel-man offered to give a shove. Auntie Fedelma was telling everyone to shut up and let her through. And Oscar’s father was calling, “Oscar! Oscar!”
“We have to rhyme,” Oscar said. “And fast. That’s the only way out, really.”
Auntie Gormley snapped, “We have to get to Babe after Keeffe’s given him the threads but before he’s started stitching.”
“I can’t think straight.” Someone was crawling in the tunnel now. A shifting shape blocked the kitchen light through the door.
“Yes, you can!” the weasel snapped. “You’re not a little boy anymore. We’re relying on you!”
“Where is he?” Auntie Fedelma was shouting.
“I can’t see anything!”
Oscar grabbed the weasel and, with one hand, hustled forward. He needed a simple rhyme. “Um, um. We need to get to Ruth’s tailor shop really fast, when Keeffe used the Door to the Past.”
Auntie Fedelma called out. “Don’t try to run away from me! I’m after you!”
Oscar closed his eyes tight, blocking her out. “Take us to the moment after Keeffe leaves. Before Ruth starts to stitch the sleeves!”
There was light ahead of them now. Oscar raced to it.
And soon enough, Oscar and the weasel popped out through a small panel of ductwork in the back room of a tailor shop.
It was after hours. The back room was barely lit. The shop seemed empty. There were rows of machines, shelves filled with bolts of cloth. Oscar could feel that cold coming on again. They were away from Fenway Park; they were already growing weak. He picked up Auntie Gormley, who already sounded wheezy in her small, weasel lungs.
“What if he’s not here?” Oscar asked. “What if we can’t find him? What if we’ve gotten it all wrong?”
But then they heard the hum of a small motor. They looked down the empty rows and saw the bulb of a sewing machine. A young man was curled over the machine, pumping the pedal while wedging material under the thrumming needle. In Oscar’s hand, the transistor radio was still on. Trot Nixon homered, bringing Varitek in with him. Suddenly, back in the future, the Red Sox were only down by one.
“It’s him,” Oscar whispered. “It’s Ruth.”
Ruth didn’t hear them coming—the machine was chugging too loudly. He didn’t notice Oscar until he stopped hitting the pedal and the machine went quiet. Ruth looked up and was startled, almost knocking over his chair.
“Sorry,” Oscar said. “I didn’t
mean to scare you.”
“You nearly gave me a heart attack and kilt me,” Ruth said. “Geez, kid.”
Oscar thought it was funny that Ruth called him kid even though they looked to be the same age. He smiled a little.
“What’s wrong with you? Should I punch that smile right off your face? What are you doing here, anyway? And what’s that? Some kind a badger you got there?”
“It’s a weasel,” Oscar said. “It’s a pet, kind of. Look, I can explain everything.” But just then the transistor radio broke out into applause. The announcer was shouting the news. “Tie game!” Damon had gotten a single and Mueller had scored. The sound was tinny and echoed in the dusty room.
Ruth stared at Oscar, amazed. “What did you say?”
“That wasn’t me,” Oscar explained. He held up the radio. “It was the radio.”
“A radio?” Ruth said. “It talks? Is it magic or something? A box that talks?”
“One day everyone will have these.” He handed it to Ruth. “Take a look for yourself.”
Ruth held it in his big hands. He fiddled with the dials, making the volume louder, then softer; losing the station, then bringing it back; turning the radio off, then back on. “That’s really something,” he said. “Where’d you get that?”
“Um, well, it’s hard to say exactly,” Oscar said with a sneeze. “I’m from the future.”
“Ha!” Ruth laughed. “The future? Very funny, kid. Very funny.”
“I am,” Oscar said. “I know, for example, that you’re going to become the most famous ballplayer of all time.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
Auntie Gormley was watching everything, her narrow weasel head zipping back and forth between them.
“What kinds of numbers?”
Oscar had all of Ruth’s stats memorized. He said, “Your career mark of 714 home runs will stand as the all-time record for thirty-nine years.”
“Who’s going to beat me?”
“Hank Aaron’s going to hit his 715th on Opening Day of the 1974 season.”
“It’s hard to believe that it’ll be 1974 one day. Will people wear space suits and fly around, you know, with rocket packs on their backs?”
“No,” Oscar said. “But Aaron will seem like it, he’ll be so fast. Everyone still talks about you as one of the all-time greats! I already read your life story three times—how your parents worked at that bar, and your father was rough on you.”
Ruth looked down at his machine. “That’s no good to print.”
“There’s good stuff, too. I know all about St. Mary’s. And how you’ll get discovered by the Orioles as a pitcher. All of that.”
“Huh.” Ruth stood up. He was tall for his age, a good bit taller than Oscar. He looked around the tailor shop. “I won’t be a bum all my life.”
“Nope, you sure won’t. They’ll call you the Sultan of Swat.”
Ruth looked down at his hands. “That’s not what they call me now,” he said.
“I know what they call you now. I’ve been called stuff, too; but, you know what? One day I’m going to learn from you that it isn’t something wrong with you. It’s something wrong with them.”
“Today just keeps getting stranger and stranger.” Ruth sat down, wide-eyed.
Oscar felt dizzy, and grabbed the back of one of the sewing tables. “Was somebody else already here? A guy who wanted a special favor maybe?”
“Maybe,” Ruth said defensively.
“Maybe it was a man named Keeffe, and he had some threads. Red threads, and he wanted you to stitch them into the cuffs of a shirt?”
“Maybe,” Ruth said.
“I’d like you to use some other red thread,” Oscar said. “I need the ones he brought in with him.”
“We’re in a tailor shop. We’ve got all colors of threads,” Ruth said. “But why do you need those?”
“To break a curse, actually. To break a curse on the Red Sox.”
“A curse?” Ruth asked, his head cocked. “What do you mean?”
“What’s going to happen is, you’re going to help the Red Sox win a World Series in 1918, and then they’re going to trade you.”
“Trade me? But you said I’m going to be the best!”
“Yeah, well, it’s going to be a big mistake,” Oscar said.
“It sure as hell will be,” Ruth said.
“But after they sell you to the Yankees, you’ll single-handedly out homer the entire Boston team in ten of the next twelve seasons.”
“Okay then,” Ruth said, hiking up his pants.
“Well, okay. That’s better.”
“But see, right now the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since they sold you—eighty-six years ago.”
“Serves them right.”
“But—” Oscar started to cough again. The weasel sneezed.
“But what?”
“But there are people stuck in the Curse, too. Cursed Creatures of various kinds. Orphans, really, cursed along with the Curse.”
“Orphans?”
“Yep.”
Ruth walked to the window and looked down at the street. “Is my pop ever going to see me play in the big leagues?”
“Yep. He will. Just once, though.”
“Do I play good that game?”
“You play good every game.”
Ruth tugged on his pants again. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I got behind today. Boss told me I had to stay extra. I was just about to put those threads in.” He walked to the sewing machine, flipped open a small drawer, reached in, and pulled out two long, thick pieces of thread. “Here,” he said. He lifted them up.
From the radio in Oscar’s hand came the thin voice of the announcer reporting that the Yankees had come back three runs in one inning, the Red Sox rallying only with two. The score was tied again 6–6 in the bottom of the third.
And just as Oscar reached forward and took the threads from Ruth’s hands, they disappeared.
Laughter—high-pitched chirrups—sounded from the heating duct.
“What happened?” Oscar asked, his cheeks flushed with fever. “Where did they go?”
Ruth looked off in the direction of the laughter. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Now, all of a sudden, I remember a cleaning lady who laughed like that. She came by my station. She told me to look out the window because there were fireworks. But there weren’t any.”
“Skinny old woman? Thick glasses?”
“Yep. It’s strange, because I didn’t remember it and now I do. It’s like it just happened, but a while ago.” Ruth shook his head, confused.
Oscar ran to the heating duct. The weasel was already ahead of him. “Thanks, Babe!” he shouted down the row of machines.
“Babe? Who’s Babe?”
“You are!” Oscar shouted, using all of the air in his weak lungs. He scooped up the weasel and crawled into the duct.
Everything blurred and then snapped back into focus. Oscar and the weasel went back in time to catch Auntie Fedelma stealing the threads. By this point, it was the top of the fourth inning, and the Red Sox were losing again, 9–6.
As they started to climb back out of the heating duct into the tailor shop—Ruth down the rows, working at his noisy machine—again there was a blur and then a sharp focus. Auntie Fedelma was there, about to climb in. The sight of them startled her. Oscar grabbed her by the wrist. The weasel snapped at the threads, caught them both in her jaws, and pulled. The threads slid from Auntie Fedelma’s grasp. She looked weak and exhausted, but with enough energy to pounce; and, like a cat, she swiped Oscar’s arm, leaving three long scratches that beaded up with dots of blood. Oscar reared back, grabbing his arm, breathless.
But then, with a hazy blur, Auntie Fedelma and the threads were gone. She reappeared up the chute—a dirt tunnel again. She was laughing and coughing.
“How did you do that?” Oscar shouted, his voice going hoarse. He looked down at his arm. The scratches were gone, except for the one th
at was raw and scabby.
“Once you start meddling with time, you can always go back and erase! That time I stole faster and got by you two before you appeared! Ha-HA!”
“What do we do now?” the weasel snapped.
“She’s getting weak, since she’s away from Fenway,” Oscar said, “like my dad gets.”
“But she can always go to the present and get her energy and come back full force.”
“That’s right,” Oscar said, kicking at the dirt.
“We could beat her by going way back, to the moment when Keeffe took the baseball apart to set the Curse. We could get the threads from him!”
“I don’t think he’d ever give up those threads. Not ever. We can just go back and warn Babe, I guess.”
“Not to be distracted, to guard the threads better so that they’re there when we come to trade them later.”
“Exactly,” Oscar said, but he didn’t have much conviction in this plan. He was tired, his muscles were aching, and he had chills. Auntie Gormley was shivering in his pocket. This time travel struck him as a bad thing, a waste of time, an endless loop.
When Oscar and the weasel went back in time to tell Ruth not to leave his sewing machine, even if an old cleaning woman told him there were fireworks out the window, the Red Sox score was even worse: 11–6.
This time, though, Ruth had the pair of red threads in his hand. Oscar tried not to eye them greedily. He and Ruth had the same old conversation about the transistor radio and a similar talk about the future, but Oscar was antsy this time. If the Sox lost this game, they would be down three games to zero. One more loss and the Yankees will have swept the playoffs. Time was running out. He had to confront Auntie Fedelma once and for all.
“Can we hide nearby?” Oscar whispered. His throat was sore.
“Sure, kid,” Babe Ruth said.
And so Oscar and the weasel crouched under a sewing machine in the back row while Auntie Fedelma told Ruth about the fireworks. He didn’t budge. “No thanks,” he said. “I been warned about you.”
“By a boy and his weasel?” She was sagging under her own weight, coughing into her knotty fist.