said this with some menace.
“You think I’d tell her?”
“These days I don’t know what you’d do.”
Albert grabbed a handful of my shirt, and pulled me close. He’d already freckled a lot, and his face looked like a bowl of soggy cornflakes.
“I’m all that stands between you and reformatory, goddamn it.”
Albert almost never swore. Although he’d spoken quietly, Mrs. Frost heard him.
She straightened up from her hoeing and said, “Albert.”
He let me go with a little shove. “Someday you’re going to do something I can’t save you from.”
It sounded to me like that was a day he might be looking forward to.
We took a break for lunch. Mrs. Frost gave us ham salad sandwiches, which were wonderful, and applesauce and lemonade, and we ate together under a big cottonwood on the bank of the Gilead.
Mose signed, Where does the river go?
Mrs. Frost said, “It joins the Minnesota, which joins the Mississippi, which flows fifteen hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Long way, Mose signed, then gave a low whistle.
“I’m going down it someday,” Albert said.
“Like Huck Finn?” Mrs. Frost asked.
“Like Mark Twain. I’m going to work on a riverboat.”
“I’m afraid that era has passed, Albert,” Mrs. Frost said.
“Can we go canoeing, Mama?” Emmy asked.
“When the work is done. And maybe we’ll swim, too.”
“Will you play something, Odie?” Emmy pleaded.
I never had to be asked twice. I pulled the little harmonica out of my shirt pocket and tapped it against my palm to clear the dust. Then I launched into one of my favorites, “Shenandoah.” It was a beautiful tune, but in a minor key, so there was a sadness to it that settled on us all. As I played on the bank of the Gilead, the sun glancing off water the color of weak tea, the shadows of the tree branches lying shattered all around us, I saw tears come into Mrs. Frost’s eyes, and I realized I was playing a song that had been one of her husband’s favorites, too. I didn’t finish.
“Why’d you stop, Odie?” Emmy asked.
“I forgot the rest of it,” I lied. Immediately, I launched into something more rousing, a tune I’d heard on the radio, played by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies called “I Got Rhythm.” I’d been working on it but hadn’t played it for anybody yet. Our spirits picked up right away, and Mrs. Frost started singing along, which surprised me because I didn’t know there were words.
“Gershwin,” she said when I finished.
“What?”
“Not what, Odie. Who. The man who wrote that song. His name is George Gershwin.”
“Never heard of him,” I said, “but he writes pretty good songs.”
She smiled. “That he does. And you played it well.”
Mose signed and Emmy nodded in agreement. “You play like an angel, Odie.”
At that, Albert stood up. “There’s still work to be done.”
“You’re right.” Mrs. Frost began packing things back into the picnic basket.
After he’d finished scything the orchard grass, Mose joined Albert and me to help with the rabbit fence. When the work was done, Mrs. Frost, as promised, sent us boys down to the river for a little free time and to wash off the dust and dirt while she prepared supper. We stripped off our clothes and jumped right in. We’d been sweating all afternoon under a hot sun, and the cool water of the Gilead felt like heaven. We hadn’t been in the river long when Emmy called from the bank, “Can we canoe now?”
We made her turn around while we climbed out and put our clothes on. Then Albert and Mose lifted the canoe from the little rack at the river’s edge where Mr. Frost had always kept it, and they slipped it into the Gilead. I grabbed the two paddles. Emmy got into the middle with me, while Albert and Mose each took a paddle and their places in the bow and stern, and we set off.
The Gilead was only ten yards wide and the current was steady but gentle. We canoed east for a while, under the overhang of the trees. The river and the land on both sides were quiet.
“This is nice,” Emmy said. “I wish we could go on like this forever.”
“All the way to the Mississippi?” I said.
Mose laid his paddle across the gunwales and signed, All the way to the ocean.
Albert shook his head. “We’d never make it in a canoe.”
“But we can dream,” I said.
We turned around and headed back upstream to the Frost farmstead. We set the canoe on the rack beside the river,