Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online Page B

much of a knife: rusty, with a chipped blade; and when it was folded into its holder, it was very small. Still, it was both frightening and exciting that Charles had a knife.
    "Where did you get it?" I whispered.
    "Found it by the railroad tracks," he said.
    "Maybe it belonged to Willard B. Stanton."
    "
Who?
"
    "The guy you told me about. The one who got flattened by the train."
    Charles shook his head at me and rolled his eyes. "Elizabeth, you so dumb. Willard B. Stanton got flattened about twenty years ago. This ain't his knife. Anyway, it don't matter who it belonged to. Because now it belongs to me. This here is
my
knife."
    "What're you going to do with it?" Please, God, I was thinking, don't let Charles want to be blood brothers with me. Pulling down our pants was enough. I don't want to cut myself with that knife, not even to be blood brothers with Charles.
    "I dunno. We could go up to the woods and stab them turtles."
    "No."
    "Elizabeth,
some
time we got to go."
    "No. Maybe sometime. Not yet."
    "Well," said Charles, "we could scare Ferdie Gossett."
    "
Who?
" Why did Charles know about so many things, so many people, that I didn't know about?
    "You never seen Ferdie Gossett? That crazy guy who walks around town talking to hisself?"
    I shook my head. "I'm not allowed to go away from this block."
    Charles sighed, and we both were silent, thinking.
Everything worth stabbing or scaring was too far from Grandfather's house.
    Except Noah Hoffman.
    "Charles," I whispered, "we could scare Noah Hoffman."
    Charles brightened. I was scared, myself, for having thought of it, but pleased that the idea appealed to Charles.
    "Yeah," he said. "First we scare him. Then we
stab
him."
    I cringed. "Not stab him, Charles. Not
kill
him."
    "I didn't mean kill him, stupid. Just stab him a little bitty ole wound. Maybe in his leg or something. Remember what he done to that cat?"
    I shuddered. A little bitty ole wound would serve Noah Hoffman right. Charles and I had watched him when he killed the cat. We had done nothing, had not known what to do.
    "You and me, Charles," I said guiltily, "we're really no-account."
    "Yeah," grinned Charles, putting the knife into his pocket. "But Noah Hoffman, he's the no-accountest of all. Let's go look crost the hedge and see what he's doing."
    ***
    Noah and Nathaniel Hoffman, who lived in the house next door to Grandfather's, were twins. They
were the only twins I had ever known, and the circumstances of their birth intrigued me in the strange, secret way that birth intrigues all children. "They grew together in their mother's stomach," my own mother had told me, when I had asked how two brothers could both be seven years old at once and why they looked so alike. It had been before my brother's birth; Mama's stomach at the time was so overwhelmingly large with what she assured me was only
one
baby that I didn't see how it could be possible to have two at once. And Mrs. Hoffman was smaller than Mama had ever been: a tiny, thin woman with the nervous mannerisms of a bird. I looked at her stomach, flat behind her flowered housedress, and pictured Noah and Nathaniel both inside like a wooden key-ring puzzle I had once had: entwined, interlocked, separated by someone who knew the secret.
    As was true of Jess and me, and Charles, there was no father at the Hoffmans' house. There had been one, once. But he had not gone to the war. He had simply disappeared, sometime during the night, while Mrs. Hoffman and the twins were sleeping. Nathaniel told Charles and me that one afternoon when he visited us shyly in Grandfather's yard.
    "Our daddy just went away," he said, "and we didn't ever see him again. He left a note."
    Later, from the hallway's shadows where I frequently hid and listened to grownup conversation, I heard Mama discuss the Hoffmans with my grandparents.
    "I was talking to Margaret Hoffman today," Mama said, "and she told me that she's taking one of the twins to a psychiatrist in Harrisburg."
    Grandmother