Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson Read Free Book Online Page B

my full name. “But, Sara Louise Bradshaw, this medal is yours. You have earned it with your great cunning and bravery. Keep it and hand it down to your children’s children.”
    I would smile, a slightly ironic little smile. “Do you think, Mr. President, with the life I lead, that I will live long enough to have children?” That question never failed to reduce Franklin D. Roosevelt to silence touched with awe.
    In my dreams I always went in alone, but in real life it seemed selfish. Besides, I was used to doing things with Call.
    â€œOkay, Call. First we got to work out a plan.”
    â€œA plan for what?”
    â€œTo catch this kraut in the very act of spying.”
    â€œYou’re not going to catch him spying.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause he’s not a spy.”
    What can you do with a man who has no faith? “All right. Who is he then? Just answer me that.”
    â€œHiram Wallace.”
    â€œGood heavens.”
    â€œYou’re cussing again. My grandma—”
    â€œI am not cussing. Cussing is like ‘God’ and ‘hell’ and ‘damn.’”
    â€œSee!”
    â€œCall. How about pretending? Just for fun, pretend the guy is a spy, and we’ve got to get the proof.”
    He looked uncertain. “Like one of your jokes?”
    â€œYes. No.” Sometimes Call could be perfectly sensible and at other times you could have gotten more sense out of a six-year-old. “It’s like a game, Call.” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Come on.” I started running for the path through the salt meadow marsh with Call puffing behind me.
    If Call’s family was as poor as my grandmother said they were, I could never figure out how Call got so fat. As a matter of fact, both his mother and grandmother were fat. I thought that if you were poor you were skinny. But the evidence seemed to contradict this. And Call had other problems with running besides his weight. Like all of us, his shoes came from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. To ordershoes from a catalog, you stood on a piece of brown wrapping paper, and your mother drew a pencil line around both your feet. These outlines were sent to the mail-order house, and they sent you shoes to fit the brown wrapping-paper feet. But the brown paper outlines didn’t tell the mail-order house how fat your feet were on the top. For that reason, poor Call never had a pair of shoes that would lace properly. The tops of his feet were so fat that once he got his shoes laced up, there was nothing left to make a proper bow. So when he ran, his shoes often came unlaced and flapped up and down on his heels.
    It was low tide, so I left the path and began making my way through the marsh. My plan was to give the old Wallace house a wide berth and come up on it from the south side. The old man would never expect people from that direction.
    â€œWait!” Call cried out. “I lost my shoe.”
    I went back to where Call was standing on one leg like an overweight egret. “My shoe got stuck,” he said.
    I pulled his shoe out of the mud for him and tried to clean it off on the cordgrass.
    â€œMy grandma will beat me,” he said. It was hard for me to imagine Call’s tubby little grandmother taking a switch to a large fifteen-year-old boy, but Iheld my peace. I had a greater problem than that. What would Franklin D. Roosevelt say about a spy who lost his shoe in the salt marsh and worried aloud that his grandma would beat him? I sighed and handed Call the shoe. He put it on and limped back to the path.
    â€œSit down,” I commanded.
    â€œOn the ground?”
    â€œYes, on the ground.” What did he expect, an easy chair? Then I cleaned his shoes and mine as best I could with my handkerchief. My mother had trouble persuading me to carry one because I was a lady, but I now realized that a handkerchief was an invaluable tool for a counterspy—to erase