Alice At The Home Front Read online

  “That’s the problem, Sir, my mind isn’t too clear. That morning I was operating as a sub chaser, heading offshore about fifty miles out. The wind shifted, and I found myself in the midst of a nor’easter, which they hadn’t predicted in the morning report. Personally, I’m scared of nor’easters.”

  Most everybody smiled; some nodded seriously in agreement. Alice could tell they all felt the same way.

  “I thought to be safe I’d better head back, but the storm overtook me.” He frowned, thinking back. “I remember struggling to keep the plane level, and then the visibility faded completely. I began to get confused, because I couldn’t orient myself, and finally I couldn’t tell up from down. I mean, whether the sea was below me or above me. That’s when I panicked.”

  Jimmy paused and took a breath. Alice could see how drawn his face was.

  “A common problem in that kind of storm, especially in a Piper,” said Mr. Hopkins. “Take your time, Jimmy.”

  “I had no idea where I was. I knew I wasn’t far from land, but with all the rivers and estuaries in the bay, there was no telling where I might land if I tried.”

  Jimmy stopped a minute to get his strength back. He’s still weak, thought Alice. Good thing I brought some fudge.

  “So what did you do?” Alice prompted, and Mother said, “Shush.”

  “I circled round and around trying to get my bearings and trying to guess where to land. I was using up gas so fast that I knew I would have to make up my mind. So I began the descent. Through the rain and gunk on the windshield, I thought I saw a little stretch of land, and then it seemed to disappear. My plane hit the water instead, and I bailed out as fast as I could in case it sank. Then I started swimming hard and fast so as not to freeze, hoping to reach that bit of land but without a clue which direction it was in or if I’d really seen it. I just kept going.

  “I finally hit the shore. A little stretch of sand about the size of a bath mat (Alice heard laughter around the room) and dragged myself up on it.”

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen, was Spar Island,” interrupted Mr. Hopkins.

  “Why, I’ve never heard of it!” said Mrs. Brownell. “I thought I knew all the islands around Narragansett and Mt. Hope Bay: Conanicut, Prudence, Block Island … there’s a lot of them, but I never heard of Spar Island.”

  “That’s because, Mrs. B, it’s about the size of your living room and dining room combined, and that’s at low tide,” said Mr. Hopkins.

  “Yup,” said Gramp. “I remember it. Used to aim for it in the Merry Maiden when I was a young’un, sailin’ out there with a pretty girl at the bow. He, he. Instead of runnin’ outa gas like with a car, I’d get becalmed and have to land! Worked just as well.”

  Mother looked at him wide-eyed.

  One of the men said, “Attaboy, John. Always up to tricks.”

  Alice couldn’t figure it out.

  “You have to imagine it. I ain’t got a map here,” said Mr. Parker. “Suppose this whole living room was Mt. Hope Bay. Now in the middle of the room would be Spar Island, about the size of Alice’s left shoe, there. It’s smack in the middle of the bay if you can find it on a map, which usually you can’t. Sometimes part of it is under water, dependin’ on the season, but most of the time the tip’s showin’. Little bunch of eel grass, some flotsam and gypsum. Go on now, Jimmy. Sorry for interruptin’. Tell us how you survived on the bath mat.” He pulled out a pipe and lit it.

  Most everybody smiled, and Mrs. Brownell heaved a sigh.

  “I lay there for I don’t know how long. Then I looked around, and I could just make out the hull of a rowboat upside down, all busted on one side, so, of course, I crawled in there for shelter. In the bow there was a bit of tarp covered with sand. I brushed it off and rolled myself up in that. The next thing I found, luckily, was an old rusty tin with some brackish water in it, so I took little sips. Then I dug it into the sand, so it would stay steady from the gusts and collect the rain from the occasional showers. The hail almost tipped the darn thing over more than once. I was freezing, and there was nothing I could do about that except wrap myself in the tarp, which was cold and slimy. I must have slept even so.”

  Mr. Parker interrupted again. “So what did you eat then, Jimmy? All those days, you must have eaten something? Couldn’t have caught bluefish without tackle, and pike is too scarce.”

  “That was the miracle, Sir. It must’ve been a miracle, because a couple of times a day the sand around me would be covered with flounders! Baby fish!” He looked at Alice. “I couldn’t believe it, you know. Like manna in the Bible, but instead of dropping from heaven, they washed up on shore. So I ate them as best I could. I just had to. There was nothing else. Where they all came from, I didn’t have the energy to guess.”

  “Ugh!” cried Alice, “I can’t imagine it—cold and raw and wiggly, with the eye looking up at you!”

  Mother gave her a withering look.

  Mr. Hopkins was taking notes and needed a minute or two to catch up.

  Mr. Parker tamped ashes from his pipe into the ashtray and filled it up again. “Durham Pipe Tobacco,” Alice read to herself.

  Jimmy went on. “The storm would die down for a bit, and I’d get some sleep. Then it’d start up again. Gosh! It must have been days like that! And sure enough, the flounders kept coming up. But only juveniles, for some reason. I don’t think I’ll ever eat another one, though.” He looked at Alice. “Even if it’s cooked. In the end, I was more scared of freezin’ to death than of starving to death. But then, I must have passed out for good, ’cause I don’t remember nothin’ after that, I’ll confess.”

  “Anything,” corrected Alice.

  This time Mr. Hopkins spoke up. “Maybe I can clear up the mystery, seeing as how I was working on the preservation and ecology of the bay awhile back.”

  Everybody grew quiet.

  “You know, flounders have always been the main edible fish around these parts, and the most plentiful. Well, they began disappearing a few years ago, and we didn’t know why.”

  “I know why!” exclaimed Alice. “It’s because of pollution—all that gunk running down the rivers into the bay from Lee’s River and Cole’s River, and now the bottom creatures have taken over, and all the fish are swimming away to a nicer place.”

  Mother gave her a stern look that held a little admiration behind it.

  “You’re probably right, Alice. And that’s why ecologists are tracking them—the flounders—making maps and studying their routes. We’ve found their habitat is now mainly in the estuaries and mouths of the rivers. The fishermen have given up on them. They have almost completely disappeared from the bay except for one tiny area. And can you guess where that is?” He looked at Alice.

  “Spar Island?”

  “Yep, right you are! Around Spar Island there is a permanent nursery of young flounders, hundreds and thousands of them. No place else in the whole bay. That’s why, Jimmy, with the storm, it was natural that they would be washed ashore, and lucky for you, by gumbo. They saved your life.”

  “A toast to the baby flounders, then!” announced Mrs. Brownell, offering a choice of tea or Postum (instead of coffee that took so many ration stamps). “A toast to Spar Island!”

  Alice took her plate of fudge from the kitchen, unwrapped it, and went from one person to the next, whispering, “Don’t take more than two, because they’re mainly for Jimmy to give him back his strength.”

  And when she got to him, she said, “Eat plenty of these. They’ll rid you of the taste of that raw, live, disgusting flounder!” And he laughed.

  But Alice could see it still hurt him to use his fingers, so she picked up a few pieces and placed them on a napkin for him, and he smiled and winked. “Bright girl, Alice. Good to see ye again.”

  And Alice let the warm rush of his words flow over her, like a tropical wa
ve, and she could swear she’d never felt so happy.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Victory Gardens

  “Be quiet!” Alice ordered as she pulled the bedcovers over her head. What a racket. P-e-e-e-p! P-e-e-e-p! Chirp! Chirp! Alice threw down the covers and let out a loud “Shhhhhh!” But the spring warbler outside her window was not going to take orders from a little girl, she realized soon enough. The sun—a bright, warm sun, not a cold, make-believe winter sun—was streaming in through her window. Nobody turns it on like a bedside reading light, thought Alice. It just comes on when it wants to. Mother Nature never seems to know which season it is. According to the calendar, it was not even spring yet. Thank God Jimmy was already on his feet and back to work. Alice had run into Moses on Thayer Street last Tuesday and had asked him, “So what do you hear from Jimmy?”

  “Aw you know Jimmy, Alice. He’s not going to write. His mom says he’s fine, though. Told her on the phone he’d actually spotted a U-boat and had turned it in. Got kudos for that. My opinion, he’s takin’ an awful risk for a handful of dimes.”

  Alice was on the point of telling him about the spy in the black raincoat but then thought better of it. Maybe the cashier had told everybody how she’d called Mrs. Schnitzer a spy, and Moses would say, “What? Ol’ Mrs. Schnitzer a spy? Wait’ll Ted hears that one about his aunt.” Alice would be be mortified. Instead, she said, “Okay, Moses. Good to see you again,” and went on her way.

  Alice was glad she’d kept quiet. She yawned and rubbed her eyes.

  When she opened them, she saw something on the table by the window she had never expected to see again. There was her spotter’s log and beside it the pearly binoculars. Oh thank God for spring! Thank goodness for Mother Nature’s mistake. She giggled. Now she could spot again, and no one would stop her, because finally it was warm enough, and this was a sign Mother would allow it.

  “Lovely day, isn’t it, Alice?” Mother called out from the garden when she had finished breakfast.

  Alice went over to the bench where Mother was sitting and lay her head on Mother’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mother, for giving me back my book and my glasses.”

  Mother slipped her arm around her and gave her a huge hug and a kiss. “I think it will be all right now, if you’re careful.” She stood and walked back into the house. “Come over here, why don’t you, and help me decide what to plant in the victory garden.”

  Still in her pajamas, Alice dragged her slippered feet across the floor to the couch. Mother picked up a seed catalogue called “Victory Gardens” and showed it to her.

  “Why victory gardens? Suppose all the plants die?” asked Alice. “Then it’ll be a defeated garden.”

  “Everything’s called victory these days, because they want you to remember the war effort. Most of the nation’s produce, along with everything else, goes to the boys at the front, so the rest of us have to help out by growing our own vegetables here at home.”

  “Is that what you plan to do?”

  “Yes, what we plan to do.”

  “Not me.” Alice’s gray eyes widened. “The last plant I had was a Venus flytrap, and it died because I ran out of flies.”

  “Think of life, Alice. Think of something positive.” Mother squeezed her forearm with affection.

  Alice was reminded of a hit parade song, and she began singing it so Mother could hear: “Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive, e-lim-i-nate the neg-a-tive, something-or-other the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In Between. Know that song, Mother?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard it. Go ahead and sing it to your heart’s content. It’ll do you good.” Mother smiled for some reason.

  Alice said, “But there’s one big problem you’re going to have to face right off the bat. And I don’t want anything to do with it.” She sat up straight and talked to Mother in a grown-up way.

  “What’s that?”

  “No digging. Absolutely no digging up that grass. Not for me. I don’t dig. Get a bunch of dogs or something.”

  “I’m not so sure I can dig either, Alice. We’ll have to find another way.”

  “But if you don’t dig, you’ve got no garden. And all we’ll have in the backyard is grass.”

  “Right you are, Alice. We won’t have to do that.” She nodded firmly.

  “We won’t? You’ll get somebody to do it? Then it’s not your garden. It’s the gardener’s garden, and he’ll get the victory, not us.”

  “Oh, we’ll have plenty of work to do. Don’t worry,” Mother assured her.

  “Maybe if we pay him, he won’t share in the victory part of it.”

  “Yes, Alice, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll pay him to prepare the garden for us.

  Mother brought out the list of vegetables she was going to plant in the garden and handed it to Alice. “Read through these, Alice, and tell me which ones you’d like us to plant.”

  Alice read through quickly. “Carrots and white and sweet potatoes.”

  “But those are all root vegetables, Alice, you can’t live on those. Choose something healthy and green.”

  “Asparagus—maybe. Tomatoes—maybe. Anything else is yucky.”

  Mother sighed, “All right. But there will be plenty of other greens—”

  Alice got up to leave and called back over her shoulder, “Don’t forget to plant a spaghetti tree.”

  Running back to her room with her newly found logbook and binoculars, Alice settled herself down at her desk. She leafed through her logbook and noted the new date. Then she consulted the manual and found she could remember every plane, just as before. She made some notes about the ones she had noticed during the winter without her binoculars and felt relieved that not one enemy plane, as far as she had heard, had crossed the skies. Swell! She was back at work.

  * * *

  A month or two later, after the first spring crop had appeared, Mother called Alice to come outside where she was working in the new victory garden. Alice sauntered out the back door and joined her. “The garden is growing just beautifully, Alice, even better than I had expected. Except for one thing. We have a mystery on our hands,” she said. “I’ve been noticing a series of holes between the new tomato plants and under the cucumber vines. Look, the holes are causing the new plants to die. Now, I’ve asked Tim—our garden helper—if he knows what kind of animal would do that, since none of the tomatoes, peppers, or cucumbers have been chewed or even touched. He told me that a gopher would have pulled the whole vegetable down into its hole, so it certainly wasn’t a gopher. He thought it might be something larger, although he didn’t say what. Do you know anything about those mysterious holes, Alice?”

  “Those holes over there?” Alice pointed vaguely toward the back.

  “Yes, you seem to know that there are holes over there.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Alice. She’d read “ma’am” in Tom Sawyer. It sounded good to answer with, in case you were in trouble.

  “Then do you know what or who made those holes?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I did, Ma’am.”

  “Why on earth would you make holes all over the garden? You told me you’d never dig.”

  “That’s a good question, Ma’am.”

  “Don’t you ‘that’s-a-good-question’ me, young lady. What I want is the answer!”

  “It was Mr. Chase’s idea, Ma’am. Gramp’s friend from down the street.”

  Mother waved a hand at her. “Stop that ma’am-ing. You’re not a servant. What could Mr. Chase possibly want with you?”

  “It was a business matter.”

  Mother actually laughed. “Go on,” she said.

  “Well, I’d told him about the victory garden when we were waiting in line to pick up the Sunday paper, and he said, ‘A garden, eh?’ And then he told me I could make some good pocket money if I wanted to, not selling the veg
etables or anything but just for me alone. ‘It would be real easy, by gum,’ he said. And then he asked me if I was afraid of slimy critters, and I said I loved slimy critters. But curly-haired girls don’t. ‘They don’t like ’em,’ I told him. Then he spat some tobacco and said, ‘Worm critters?’ And I said ‘You bet.’ And that’s how it started—digging up worms for a business. For him to go fishing with, and he would give me a penny a worm.”

  “Is that so? And did you earn good pocket money?” asked Mother.

  Alice thought back on the hour she’d spent digging and shrugged. “Sort of.”

  “Well, let me tell you something, Alice.” Mother shook her apron, stamped the garden dirt off her shoes, and sat on the bench. She tapped the bench with her hand for Alice to sit beside her. Alice didn’t want to hear a lecture, but at the same time, she was curious.

  “Those worms are more valuable than the time you’ve spent digging them up and the pennies Mr. Chase paid you. Worms play an important part in our garden. They wiggle through the dirt, letting the light and fresh air in. It’s called, aerating in grown-up terms. That way the soil stays healthy and not all packed down hard. That’s how the roots can find their way easily to where they have to go. Then our vegetables will grow big and healthy and juicy. You see? ”

  Alice nodded.

  “Good. Then no more selling our worms?”

  “No, Mother,” said Alice. “Our worms.” They’re our worms, she realized, imagining them standing at attention under her very feet.

  Mother went to put away some tools, and Alice chewed on a strand of hair. She thought about buying the worms back from Mr. Chase, but he’d probably already used them for bait. She hauled Bagheera up on her lap for a consultation. Wouldn’t it be a better idea, she asked the cat, to get Gladys to dig in her garden for worms? She could trade with Alice: five big, fat worms for a small piece of Elsie’s fudge. Then she’d raise the price of worms on Mr. Chase. Two pennies a worm, take it or leave it. “What do you think of that, oh, Meowkins?” she asked, staring back into his green eyes. That seemed like a good idea, but it could get complicated if she had to provide Elsie with the butter and sugar. Alice twisted her mouth. Mother would ask where the ration tickets would be coming from. She shook her head. It was giving her a headache, so she decided to let sleeping worms lie. She hated digging, anyway.