The Pumpkin War Page 6

  I leaped off the porch and walked over to him as I ate my pancake in two big bites.

  “Don’t worry, little lady!” he said. “I’ll get rid of these nasty pests for you in no time. And you’ll be happy to know that I use all-natural ingredients.”

  He pumped my hand so hard, I felt like a bobble-head doll.

  I walked him to the tree house. He went up the winding ladder before me, and I followed. At the top, he stood in the middle of the floor, rocking back and forth in his mud-caked work boots. At least, I hoped it was mud. He also raised pigs, so it was hard to say for sure.

  “Well?” I said.

  He stopped rocking and started scratching his head. He frowned, and a ridge of flesh popped up between his eyes. When he raised his eyebrows, the ridge would wiggle.

  “You got a real problem here,” he said.

  No kidding, I thought, as an ocean of ants scurried around us.

  “Hear that?” Ricky said, holding his hand up like a traffic cop.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  “You got field ants, but you also got deathwatch beetles,” he said.

  “Deathwatch?” I said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “That’s not a fake name. In the old days, people thought those beetles came around when someone was about to die. But that’s just a bunch of silliness. That sound? That tick…tick…tick. That’s their mating call.”

  Great. So even as those beetles were invading my tree house, they were trying to get girlfriends.

  Ricky kneeled down and opened his toolbox. “Let me get to work here,” he mumbled.

  Ricky started mixing up his concoctions while I went to my patch. I walked up and down each row, careful not to crush the tangled green vines underfoot. No pesky intruders. So far, so good.

  Right after I finished soaking the dirt around each pumpkin with water, my grandma’s Jeep turned into our driveway. I slowed my steps as I walked toward her.

  “Boozhoo,” she said when I reached her. That was Ojibwe for “hello.” She was dressed in her ceremonial robe, with a yoke made of tiny cowry shells and beading all the way down the front.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She tried to give me a quick squeeze, but I wiggled away from her. She gave me a look, but I pretended not to see. I still felt bad about the fish.

  She looked up the hill and saw Sam watering his patch.

  “Sam!”

  He looked up.

  She waved for him to come over, so he turned off his hose and jogged down the hill. When he ran up, he smiled at me while Grandma reached into her bag and pulled out a white muslin shirt with quillwork embroidered all down the front. She’d hand-sewn dyed porcupine quills in a geometric pattern across the front. She tossed it to me.

  “Give it to him.”

  I walked over and gave it to him. As I did, my hand brushed his, and I remembered how his hand felt when we danced the polka. Warm and dry, and a little rough, like fall leaves dried by the sun.

  “That’s a traditional Ojibwe shirt,” she said. “I want you to be my guest at the powwow today.”

  I stared at her.

  Sam looked at me. I crossed my arms and looked back at him. Grandma watched us.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled. I knew Sam would never be rude to my grandma.

  Grandma smiled and went to grab another bag from her car.

  “Have you figured out the stumper?” he asked.

  “Would you stop bugging me about that stupid stumper already?”

  He shrugged, turning away.

  “Have you?” I asked. I couldn’t resist.

  Sam turned back, all excited. “No, but I did learn all about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Besides E = mc2, it’s his most famous discovery. And he came up with it when he was only twenty-five years old. He figured out that space is curved. It’s like if you drop a bowling ball onto a mattress. Earth is the bowling ball, and the mattress is space. The ball curves the mattress. Earth curves space. And when space is curved, it affects time. So he invented a thing called ‘space-time.’ ”

  “Space-time?” I said. “Really?”

  “What, you don’t believe Einstein?”

  “Last time I checked, the space around me wasn’t curved.”

  I went inside to get ready for the powwow.

  Through the kitchen window, I saw Sam head up the hill, his new Ojibwe shirt in his hand.

  “Hello, ingozis,” Grandma said to my dad as she breezed through the kitchen door right behind me.

  Ingozis means “my son” in Ojibwe. Maybe she should’ve said niningwan, which means “my son-in-law.” But she says my dad was the son she never had.

  “Pancakes?” he asked as she pulled three jingle dresses from her bag. They were for Marylee, Cami, and Turtles. Even though Cami and Turtles didn’t have any Ojibwe blood, powwows were for everyone, a time to celebrate our heritage with old friends and make new friends.

  When the doorbell rang, Dad wiped his hands on a kitchen towel and went to see who it was. Most people we know walk up the driveway to the back door.

  It was the silence that made me follow him.

  The man in the cap who knew so much about honey stood in our doorway. He stared at my dad. My dad stared back. Mom came down the stairs, holding Joey, who was asleep, and Grandma wandered in from the kitchen.

  “Hello, Declan,” the stranger said quietly.

  Dad stood there like he was seeing a ghost.

  “What are you doing here?” he finally asked. Anger and sadness were having a knock-down, drag-out fight inside him. Anger was winning.

  “Tabhair dom logh.”

  “Nuair a reonn ifreann os a chionn,” Dad replied, using a language I’d never heard him speak.

  “Declan…Son…”

  Dad slammed the door in his face.

  No one said a word.

  Until Mom made the mistake of asking, “Declan, was that your father?”

  “That man is not my father! That is just some stranger who thinks he has a place in my life! He will not spend one night in this house, and none of you—NONE OF YOU—are to talk to him or pay him any mind at all! Do you hear me?”

  Joey woke up and started waving his tiny fists like a baby boxer.

  “DO…YOU…HEAR…ME?” Dad yelled, jabbing his finger at me.

  Marylee came down the stairs, dragging her favorite blankie. “Why is everyone yelling?”

  “WE’RE NOT YELLING,” Dad said, before storming out the back door.

  We trailed behind and watched him stomp down the driveway. When he reached his truck, he climbed in, slammed the door, and drove off, his tires spitting gravel.

  His dad-not-dad was leaning against the fence by the street.

  My dad didn’t even look at him.

  After Dad’s truck disappeared over the rise, I slowly walked down the driveway until I was face to face with my new grandpa. We stared at each other silently. I looked back at my mom. She was still standing on the back porch with Joey in her arms, both of them sandwiched between Marylee and Grandma. She opened her mouth to speak, then snapped it shut, like a fish gasping for air. Finally, she seemed to find her words.

  “Please,” she called out. “Come in.”

  But my grandpa just tipped his hat and said, “I’ll not be comin’ in until my son invites me himself. Good day, now.”

  “Wait,” Grandma said as she came down the porch steps. “We’re having a powwow tonight. Come. As my guest.”

  “No, no,” he said, backing away. “I won’t be intruding.”

  She walked down the driveway until she stood beside me. “Please. I insist.”

  A long look passed between them.

  “As you wish,” he said. “But only because it would be as rude as rude can be to refuse an invitat
ion from the likes of you.”

  With that, he headed down the street.

  All of a sudden, he looked back and winked at me. I winked back.

  Dad said I couldn’t talk to him. He didn’t say anything about winking.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” Grandma locked her eyes on mine.

  I love how when grown-ups fight, they get mad at kids, like it’s our fault. I didn’t get sassy back because that wouldn’t go anywhere good. I just rolled my eyes at the sky.

  * * *

  I had to make the kneeldown bread—or nitsidigo’i, as it’s called in Ojibwe—for the powwow that night. I’d had the same job the year before. The tribe elders had said that it was the best kneeldown bread they’d ever had, so I was “invited” to make it again this year. When an Ojibwe elder invites you to do something, you don’t say no.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about my newly discovered grandpa. I had so many questions. How come he’d never come to visit before? Why was my dad so mad at him? And why had he come now, after all these years?

  As I rolled these questions around, I headed across the meadow.

  There was a fire pit where we cooked the bread, at the edge of the tree line by the big field where we always had our powwow. My dad had already started the coals and dumped off a bushel of corn and the stone mortar and pestle.

  Just as I was about to go hunt for kindling to build the fire, Cami walked up, loaded down with maple leaves, ash kindling, and sun-dried pine logs.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, dumping the wood onto the ground.

  I grabbed some kindling and threw it onto the fire.

  “Are you a bit taciturn today?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Are you a bit truculent?”

  We grinned at each other. “Thanks,” I said.

  Pretty soon the pine logs were blazing.

  As we let the fire burn down to hot coals, we started shucking the corn.

  Before long, the ground was covered in tendrils of corn silk.

  I sliced the kernels off into the stone mortar. As I reached for the pestle, Cami grabbed it.

  “You hate this part,” she said, and she started mashing up the kernels. It was a hard job. You had to lean into it with your whole body to make the pale yellow mush. Pretty soon, she was sweating.

  “So?” she said.

  “So…what?”

  “What was all the yelling about? We could hear it all the way down the hill.”

  “Turns out I have a grandpa,” I said.

  “From Ireland?”

  “No. The North Pole.” Then I said, “Sorry. Yes, Ireland.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “We’re not allowed to talk to him.”

  “That should be easy for you,” Cami said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You’re good at ignoring people.”

  “Like who?” I demanded.

  “Really, Billie? Like Sam. People like Sam.”

  “He deserves it.”

  “What is wrong with you? Why’re you still mad about that stupid race?”

  “Because Sam cheated me out of my win, and then he lied about it!”

  “It was last summer! That’s like a million years ago! Maybe he cheated, maybe he didn’t! You told me yourself you didn’t see him hit you! It doesn’t even seem like something Sam would do. And what if he did tell a lie!? It’s not like you’ve never told a lie! Why can’t you get over it already?”

  “What am I supposed to do? Pretend it never happened?”

  “Isn’t it enough that he always let you win at everything else?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For being so smart, you sure can be dumb.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said. “I can finish up.”

  Without a word, she threw the pestle on the ground and left. She didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t, either.

  As I watched her walk away, I realized I was shaking my head back and forth.

  Sam never let me win at anything.

  Ever.

  * * *

  As the sun sank and the lightning bugs came out, we all formed a giant circle around the drummers. As each dancer entered the circle, the drummers tapped their drums softly. Grandma introduced the dancers by their Ojibwe names while Turtles, Marylee, and I twirled in our jingle dresses, a thousand tiny bells joining together.

  After the last dancer was introduced, the drums grew quiet and the tribe elders sang the prayer song. When it ended, Grandma read from the ceremonial birch bark we kept in the cabinet in our living room.

  “Five hundred years ago, seven Ojibwe prophets told us to leave the salt water and find the place where food grew on fresh water,” Grandma began. Hands joined and we all grew still and quiet.

  “Our ancestors traveled far and wide until they came to Mooingwanekaaning, the Ojibwe name for Madeline Island. Here we found wild rice growing on water, just as the prophets promised.”

  The chirpy whistle of an orange-breasted robin and the cry of a blue jay cut through the air. My dad says robins and blue jays are the poets of the bird world.

  “The Ojibwe settled here and raised the Three Sisters,” Grandma said. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it was a voice that people listened to. Even the birds seemed to quiet down.

  “Maize. And squash. And beans. The Three Sisters grew together and fed the Ojibwe for hundreds of years. And they still feed us today.

  “We take the offerings of Mother Earth. We take them with gratitude, love, and hope for a peaceful future.

  “Ondaas! Niwiisin.”

  That was Ojibwe for “Come! We are hungry.”

  There was a swirl of color as people headed toward a row of tables longer than a football field. We found Cami near the front of the line. As she pulled us in beside her, she looked at me and shrugged. I shrugged, too. This was how we apologized without words.

  The tables sagged with kneeldown bread and wild rice and squash and stink fish, which was as gross as it sounded, but grown-ups loved it. I took a giant scoop of Grandma’s wojape, a thick pudding made from cooked berries all mashed up together.

  We loaded up our plates and sat under the giant canopy of an old ironwood tree, eating until our bellies were stretched tight. Turtles put Hector right on her plate and let him eat some of her squash.

  I didn’t see my new grandpa. Or Sam. Not that I was looking for him.

  When the sky was silky black, the wild dancing started around the giant bonfire in the middle of the field.

  The drums throbbed and pulsed as the grass dancers began, their bodies swaying in buckskins dripping in feathers and silky fringe, war shirts covered in fancy beading. I loved watching the dancers twirl past, their bodies moving to the beat.

  As the first dance came to an end, I saw Dad standing in the flickering shadows of the bonfire.

  I thought he was looking at me, so I gave him a little wave. But he wasn’t. I turned to see what he was looking at. My grandpa was standing by the edge of the field near the trees, but the light from the fire still found him. His eyes were locked on my dad.

  They reminded me of the two betta fish Mom had bought me three years ago.

  At the pet store, I picked out a big glass fishbowl to put them in and brought it to the counter, where my betta fish were waiting for me, each one in its own clear plastic bag. The man at the cash register looked at the fish. Then he looked at the fishbowl.

  “If you put them in the same fishbowl, they’ll kill each other,” he said.

  So I asked Mom if we could get a sweet puppy instead of killer fish, but she said no.

  I bought t
wo fishbowls.

  When we got home, I put the fishbowls side by side on my dresser. Hour after hour, their fins waving in rhythm, my fish would stare at each other through the glass.

  It wasn’t a friendly stare.

  That’s what Dad and Grandpa were. Two betta fish.

  I thought about Sam and all the time I’d spent being angry at him over the last year.

  It started out small, a sliver of feeling hiding in a dark corner of my heart, and then, when I wasn’t looking, it secretly traveled from my heart and wedged itself in the middle of my brain.

  And I got used to it.

  But deep down, I knew it wasn’t good.

  Ever since Grandpa showed up on our doorstep ten days ago, my dad avoided him, while I avoided Sam, and the days limped by.

  This morning, as I sucked in the sweet smell of jasmine riding in on a chorus of cicadas through my window, I wondered what my new grandpa was doing. He’d been sleeping in the barn or by the grape arbor, under the stars, rolled up in a faded sleeping bag that looked like it wouldn’t keep a flea warm.

  Wrapped in my warm blankets, I got worried. What if he got tired of waiting for my dad to talk to him and turned around and went back to Ireland? I never knew my other grandpa. He died before I was born. I’d never had a grandpa till now.

  Right then and there, I decided that even though my dad wouldn’t talk to his dad, it didn’t mean I couldn’t talk to my grandpa. Besides, Dad was out on the lake. I knew he wouldn’t be home until after lunch. What he didn’t know couldn’t get me in trouble.

  I threw back my covers and skittered down the ladder from the top bunk. Marylee was snoring so loudly, the bed was practically vibrating.

  I went downstairs and hit the button on the coffeemaker. As soon as the coffee was ready, I poured a big cup, with two heaping spoonfuls of my elderberry honey and plenty of fresh cream. That was the way my dad liked it, so I figured my grandpa might like it that way, too.

  Outside, the cold, wet, dewy grass licked my feet, and the steaming mug of hot coffee warmed my hands as I walked up the hill toward the barn.

  I found Grandpa burrowed deep in his sleeping bag under the tallest spruce tree on our farm. I knew it was a spruce because we’d learned about trees in Science last year.