My Brother Louis Measures Worms Read online

  “Now, just stop that,” Rhoda said. “I’m not crazy—you’re the one who’s supposed to be crazy!”

  At this point a neighbor, attracted by the noise, stuck her head out a window, saw the pile of baby equipment and caught disjointed, but arresting, scraps of the conversation. And of course this news, such as it was—either my mother or Aunt Rhoda or both were either pregnant or crazy or both—spread through the neighborhood with the speed and spark of electricity and kept everyone alert and interested for a long time.

  Mother refused to be embarrassed. She said it really didn’t have anything to do with her . . . that she had simply been the calm center around which all the high winds blew. Aunt Rhoda was pretty mad, but eventually she cooled off too. My father said it was a good lesson for Louis and me.

  “What did you learn from all this?” he asked.

  I hadn’t really learned anything except that Mother wasn’t crazy, which had never occurred to me in the first place, but I knew that wasn’t the right answer.

  “Louis?” My father looked at him. “What do you have to say?”

  Louis was ready. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave. . . .” he said.

  My father was absolutely delighted, but I was pretty sure that Louis didn’t know what he was talking about, and I was right.

  “What did I say?” he asked me later. “Dad loved it.”

  “It was exactly right,” I told him. “It meant that if you tell lies, or don’t tell the truth, or make things up, you’ll get in a big mess. That was the lesson.”

  He frowned. “What about the other one?”

  “There wasn’t any other lesson, Louis.”

  “Sure, there was.”

  I could see that he meant it, that in all the confusion he had found some scrap of wisdom.

  “If you’re lost,” he said, “find someone who isn’t, and follow them.”

  The Adoption of Albert

  There were so many children in our neighborhood that my mother was never surprised to find unfamiliar ones in the house, or in the backyard, or in my room, or in Louis’s room.

  “Well, who’s this?” she would say, and she would then go on to connect that child with whatever house or family he belonged to.

  But when Louis showed up with his new friend Albert, Mother had other things on her mind: the family reunion, which was two days away; the distant cousin who would be staying at our house; most of all, my Aunt Rhoda’s famous Family Reunion cake, which, in Aunt Rhoda’s absence, Mother felt obliged to provide.

  Aunt Rhoda’s absence, and the reason for it, were both first-time events: She had never before missed a family reunion, and neither she nor anyone else had ever before been called into court to testify about anything. Aunt Rhoda was to testify about an automobile accident she had witnessed—the only automobile accident in local memory, my father said, that did not involve Aunt Mildred.

  All in all, it was a complicated time for Mother—cake, cousins, company—and when Louis appeared at the kitchen door and said, “This is Albert,” she was too distracted to ask her usual questions.

  Nor did she ask them at suppertime. By then she was up to her elbows in cake batter and left the three of us to eat alone with my father, who also didn’t know Albert, but assumed that everyone else did.

  I didn’t know Albert either, but there was no reason why 1 should. He was Louis’s friend, he was Louis’s age, he even looked a lot like Louis—small and quiet and solemn—and it didn’t occur to me to find out any more about him. 1 did ask, “Where do you live, Albert?”; and when he said, “Here,” 1 just thought he meant here in the neighborhood instead of someplace else.

  Mother thought the same thing. “Where does that little boy live?” she asked me the next morning, and I said, “Here,” and she said, “I wonder which house?”

  Albert had spent the night, and there was a note propped against the cereal box: Albert and I have gone to dig worms.

  Louis had been collecting worms all summer and measuring them to see how long a worm got to be before it died. “I think that’s what kills them,” he said. “I think they die of length.”

  So far his longest worm was between four inches and four and a half inches. All his worms were between one size and another because they wouldn’t hold still. “It’s really hard,” he said. “I have to stretch them out and measure them at the same time, and if I’m not careful they come apart.”

  “Oh, Louis,” I said, “that’s awful! What do you do then?”

  He shrugged. “I bury the pieces. What else can I do?”

  Of course, most kids wouldn’t even do that, but Louis was neater than most kids.

  It was late afternoon when he and Albert came back, and they had big news. They also had two coffee cans full of worm parts.

  “I thought you buried them,” I said.

  “I didn’t have to! Albert says . . . Albert says . . .” I had never seen Louis so pleased and excited. “Tell her what you said.”

  “It doesn’t kill them,” Albert said. “The tail ends grow new heads, and the head ends grow new tails.”

  I looked in the coffee cans, but I couldn’t tell the difference between head and tails. Louis said he couldn’t tell the difference either. “But it doesn’t matter,” he said, “because the worms can. They know. We’re going to keep them, and watch them grow, and measure them . . . and maybe name them.”

  “They’re no trouble,” Albert said. “They just eat dirt. We’ve got some.” He held up another coffee can.

  They took all three coffee cans up to Louis’s room, and this worried me a lot because I knew I would have to sleep in Louis’s room when everybody came for the family reunion.

  My father said he was always astonished that there was anybody left to come to the family reunion. “Your whole family is already here,” he told Mother, “living around the corner, or three streets away, or on the other side of town.”

  “Not everybody,” Mother said. “There’s Virginia and Evelyn and Clyde . . .” She reeled off the names—cousins, mostly, whom we knew only from Christmas cards, and from their annual appearance at the reunion.

  Some, in fact, had already appeared and were upstairs unpacking their suitcases. Mother, who was busy catching up on their news and shuffling food around in the refrigerator and getting out all the dishes and silverware, either didn’t realize that Albert was still with us or just didn’t remember that she had ever seen him in the first place.

  My father had gone off to borrow picnic tables for the next day, and since I didn’t want to sit around and watch worms grow, I went next door to play with my friend Maxine Slocum and forgot all about Albert.

  That night when I took my sleeping bag into Louis’s room, he was already asleep in a mound of bedclothes . . . and there was another mound of bedclothes beside him.

  “Louis.” I shook him awake. “Who is that?”

  “It’s Albert,” he said.

  “Why doesn’t he go home?”

  Louis looked surprised. “He is home. He’s going to live here now. Remember? He told you. . . . Don’t worry, Mary Elizabeth,” he added. “You’ll like Albert.”

  “I already like Albert,” I said, “but I don’t think he can live here. I think he has to live with his parents.”

  “He doesn’t want to,” Louis said. “He even told them so. He told them, ‘I don’t want to live with you anymore,’ and they said, ‘All right, Albert, you just go and live someplace else.’”

  I had never heard of such a thing, except when my friend Wanda McCall baptized the hamsters with her mother’s French perfume. The house smelled wonderful, but all the hamsters got sick and so did Mrs. McCall, and Mr. McCall gave Wanda two dollars and told her to get lost. But he didn’t mean forever.

  Neither had Albert’s parents, I decided. They would probably call tomorrow and tell him to come home.

  “Louis.” I shook him again. “Where are the worms?”

  “They aren’t worms yet,” he reminded me. “The can
s are in the closet.”

  I didn’t think either half of a worm could go very far, but I put my sleeping bag on the other side of the room anyway, just in case.

  When I woke up the next morning Louis and Albert were gone, but they had made the bed and folded up their clothes and left a note that said, We’ll be back for the picnic. Please don’t move the worms. There was a P.S.: Tell the lady cousin in the purple underwear that I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was in there. Then there was another P.S.: It was really Albert, but pretend it was me and tell her I’m sorry. Or if you don’t want to, just find out who she is and I’ll tell her.

  That was nice of Louis, I thought, but I really didn’t want to ask around about everyone’s underwear.

  “I guess not,” Louis said later. “It’s okay . . . Albert felt bad about it, that’s all.”

  “Where is Albert?” I asked.

  “Over there.” Louis pointed to where Mother’s brother Frank was taking pictures with his new Polaroid camera.

  “You’ll have to get closer together,” we heard him say, “and put Clyde’s boy in front of you, Blanche.”

  “Who is Clyde’s boy?” Louis asked me.

  “I think it’s Albert,” I said. “He’s the only boy there.”

  I was right. “Looks just like Clyde,” we heard Aunt Blanche say.

  I thought Albert looked a little worried, but Louis said he was just worried about the worms. “We’re going to move them someplace else,” he said. “Albert thinks they might get out and crawl around—especially the head parts, Albert said, because they could see where they were going.”

  That made me shiver, so I hoped they would put them somewhere up high.

  By then Aunt Rhoda had arrived, to everyone’s surprise. She never did get to testify, she said, because “the litigants” had to go to the police station to look at “mug shots” and “supply ID’s.” Aunt Rhoda had picked up a whole new vocabulary.

  “Mug shots?” my father said. “ID’s? Now, what does that mean? This was a traffic accident, not a holdup.”

  “I don’t know,” Mother told him. “Rhoda just said they had to study mug shots of children.”

  “There is no such thing as mug shots of children. Mug shots are of criminals. Rhoda’s got it all wrong.” He went to question Aunt Rhoda further and stumbled into the one event he always tried to avoid: the Big family photograph, with everyone in it.

  Uncle Frank had set up a different camera and lined everybody up, but he was missing some people: my parents, Aunt Mildred . . . “And Louis,” he said. “And Clyde’s boy. Clyde, where’s your boy?”

  Clyde looked surprised. “He’s in the Army.”

  “I mean the little one.”

  “Looks just like you,” Aunt Blanche put in.

  “He doesn’t look one bit like me,” Clyde said.

  “He looks like his mother.”

  “No,” Aunt Blanche said stubbornly. “He looks like you.”

  Clyde was stubborn too. “How do you know what he looks like, Blanche? You haven’t seen him in six years!”

  “I saw him fifteen minutes ago!”

  “Who?” my father said, arriving on the scene with Mother.

  “They’re talking about Albert,” I said. “Louis’s friend Albert.”

  “Albert!” Mother looked amazed. “Is that little boy here again?”

  “He never left,” I said.

  So I was sent to get Albert, and find out where he lived, while Mother explained to everybody who he was (which was hard, because she didn’t know who he was), and my father pressed Aunt Rhoda for more details about her experiences in court—fearful, he later said, that she had wandered into the wrong courtroom and the wrong trial, and was now mixed up with a bunch of criminals.

  I found Louis crawling around the floor of his room. “We dropped some of a worm,” he said, “but only one, and I’ll find it. We took the rest of them out of the closet.”

  “Mother wants to know where Albert lives,” I told him.

  “You mean . . . besides here?” Louis was being stubborn too, just like Aunt Blanche and Clyde. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what’s Albert’s name?”

  “You mean . . . besides Albert? I’ll ask him.”

  “But, Louis—don’t you know?”

  “I only met him day before yesterday,” Louis said. “He was sitting on the curb outside the model airplane store, after his parents told him to go live someplace else. He didn’t know anyplace else, so I told him he could live here. And after that, all we talked about was worms.”

  Albert didn’t know where he lived either. “I can’t remember,” he said. “We haven’t lived there long enough for me to remember. I think it’s the name of a tree.”

  Albert was right. He lived on Catalpa Street, and his name was Henderson. But it was Aunt Rhoda, of all people, who supplied the information, while Louis and Albert were upstairs looking for the missing worm.

  Aunt Rhoda recognized Albert in the Polaroid picture because, when she witnessed the automobile accident, she had also witnessed Albert in one of the cars with his parents—the very same people, she said, who were at this moment examining mug shots at the police station.

  “Isn’t it a small world!” Aunt Rhoda said . . . and everyone agreed, except my father.

  He had assumed, all along, that Mother knew who Albert was and knew where Albert came from. “And I suppose,” he said, “that Albert is staying with us now because his parents have to be in court—but didn’t the Hendersons mention why they had to be in court?”

  “I don’t know the Hendersons,” Mother said.

  “Well, did Albert . . .”

  “I don’t know Albert either.” Mother was getting testy under all this cross-examination. “Obviously, Louis said it would be all right for Albert to stay here—and it is all right,” she said. “Those poor people have enough trouble. That’s the least we can do for them.”

  In the meantime Louis and Albert came downstairs—“We found the worm,” Louis assured me—went to get more fried chicken and potato salad, and ran into Aunt Rhoda, who said she was certainly surprised to see Albert again and to see him here.

  “I live here,” Albert said.

  “Oh, no,” Aunt Rhoda laughed. “You live on Catalpa Street.”

  “Not anymore,” Albert said.

  Of course Aunt Rhoda reported this to Mother, who was by then completely mystified about Albert, and pretty fed up with all the sketchy bits and pieces of news about him. She left Aunt Rhoda to cut the Family Reunion cake and make the coffee, and went off to find Louis. My father, having also concluded that Louis was the key to it all, had done the same thing.

  Between them, they quickly figured out that Louis did not know the Hendersons and that he barely knew Albert . . . and that Albert had left home and was prepared to live with us forever.

  My father called the police station, where the Hendersons were indeed studying pictures of missing children and supplying information about their own missing child . . . and in no time they arrived at our house and were reunited with Albert.

  This was exactly the kind of happy ending my mother loved best—even Albert seemed happy to be back with his family.

  “Well, now he has a friend,” Mrs. Henderson said, beaming at Louis. “That was the trouble. He didn’t know anyone, didn’t have anyone to play with or talk to. Thank goodness for you, Louis!”

  The Hendersons obviously saw Louis as the hero of it all, which exasperated my father.

  “I don’t know why you’re so grumpy,” Mother said. “Just suppose Louis hadn’t come along and found Albert outside the airplane store—then what?”

  “Then Albert would have gone home where he belonged,” my father said, “and none of this would have happened.”

  “Exactly!” Mother said. “And he would still be a lonely, unhappy little boy . . . way over there on Catalpa Street.”

  She invited the Hendersons to stay for cake and coffee, and to meet all
the relatives. Aunt Rhoda said she couldn’t meet them officially, or talk to them, because of being a witness, but she waved to them from the back porch, and Mrs. Henderson waved back and called to her, “Your cake recipe is wonderful!”

  “Have some coffee,” Mother said. “It’s Rhoda’s coffee, too.”

  Aunt Rhoda said later that it was pretty silly to call it her coffee just because she’d made it, and she also said that she didn’t feel one bit responsible for what had happened.

  “In my house,” she said, “if a can says coffee, that’s what’s in it, and it wouldn’t occur to me to look.”

  Mother said, in all fairness, it wouldn’t occur to her to look either. . . . “Except, of course, I don’t keep my coffee on that high shelf, so I might have looked.”

  My father, who had been the first one to sip the coffee—and, therefore, the only one to sip the coffee—said he wished someone had looked.

  “Was it the can full of dirt?” I asked Louis, and he shook his head no.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Louis,” I said, “but you and Albert can get some more worms.”

  “And it was only the tail ends, anyway,” Albert said . . . although I hadn’t really wanted to know that.

  Marcella and Me

  Until he was seven years old, Louis thought he would eventually catch up with me, and we would be the same age.

  “Then what?” I asked. “Would we be the same age forever?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to?” Louis said. “We could be seventeen.”

  Like most of Louis’s ideas, this one was wonderful but weird. “Sure I’d like to, Louis,” I said, “but it won’t work. I’m always going to be older than you are. I’ll be seventeen before you are and then I’ll have to go on and be eighteen, and you will, too. We can’t do anything about it.”

  He was looking stubborn, so I said, “Believe me, Louis. It’s like being who you are. We can’t do anything about that either.”

  “I don’t want to do anything about that,” he said. “So far, I like that, don’t you?”