On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

smile.
    “Oh, thank you, ma’am,” I said. “That’s a relief !” A grin, exactly like my dad’s very own, widened across my face.
    “You saved our bacon, Oscar,” piped up Willie Sue.
    Aunt Carmen frowned at Willa Sue and put her finger to her lips.
    “Mama, that’s what you said on the bus ’fore Oscar came home: ‘Oscar Ogilvie Jr. certainly saved our bacon today.’ I heard it with my own ears.”
    “Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen, “you did remarkably well today.”
    “Thank you, ma’am. I sure know that poem by heart.”
    She asked me, “Did you know, Oscar, that the town of Cairo celebrates the Fourth of July with a fifth-grader reciting a speech from history? Each year one boy or girl is chosen from the schools. You might be the one selected if you practice. Perhaps we should prepare you for a few more recitations.”
    “It would certainly make Mama look good,” said Willa Sue. “If you got to give the Fourth of July speech in front of the whole town, why, everybody’d know you were Mama’s nephew! We’d get lots more jobs and a pay raise. ’Course you’d have to do it without messing up!”
    “Hush, Willa Sue,” said Aunt Carmen, but the cat was out of the bag.
    “More speeches?” I asked. I stopped midspoon in my attack on the navy-bean-and-cod-cheek casserole. I knew all about the Fourth of July. Dad and I never missed the town picnic. We loved the band concerts. We marched in the parade. But when the hour came and some pasty-faced kid with glasses got up to deliver Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Dad said, “Let’s get out while the getting’s good!”
    Aunt Carmen did not read the thoughts in my head. She plowed on informatively as she ate. “There’s Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena, of course. Then there’s George Washington’s Farewell. How about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? That’s a good one!” she said.
    I felt the color drain from my cheeks and the sense from my mind. “Why don’t I . . . look some of them over,” I finally managed to suggest.
    Famous Speeches of Famous Men
was on my bedside table that night.
    Aunt Carmen and I arrived at a bargain, without ever discussing a single detail of it out loud. She would allow me to visit my trains in the First National Bank in the afternoons after lessons. I would have Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address committed to memory by the next July Fourth.
    “Well, howdy!” said Mr. Applegate when I pounded on the doors of the bank. He flipped the alarm switch off and swung open the fifteen-foot-high bronze doors to let me in. He showed me how to slip the dead bolt bar that relocked the doors and flip the alarm back on again.
    “All we need, Oscar,” said Mr. Applegate, “is a false alarm. The cops’ll come swarming down here, sirens blazing, and we’ll be in trouble up to our keisters with old Pettishanks!”
    Mr. Applegate made enough money from his new job as night watchman to buy a thermos bottle and hot chocolate to fill it. This we shared every afternoon before tackling the trains. In front of the massive lobby-wide layout was a small coin-operated box decorated with holly and red Christmas bows. The sign said
    Y OUNG S AVERS — J OIN THE F IRST N ATIONAL’S C HRISTMAS C LUB !
    E ARN A DIME FOR EVERY DOLLAR SAVED .
    O NE DIME RUNS THE TRAINS FOR FIVE MINUTES !
    I did not have to join the Christmas Club. Mr. Applegate knew how to run the trains for free by using a dime glued to a string over and over again. I kept the dime hung around my neck along with my Holy Name medal.
    Mr. Pettishanks had placed my Blue Comet train on the South Shore Commuter Line. It ran the round-trip from South Bend to Chicago. I watched it run several loops before taking my eyes off it. No question it was my own train. On the side of the engine was a small scrape that my dad had carefully sanded and afterward repainted with cobalt-blue enamel. In its observation car were the two seats Dad and I had adjusted just so for perfect