Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze by Elizabeth Enright Read Free Book Online Page A

voice.
    â€œShould we go look now?”
    â€œOh, it’ll be dark too soon, and I have stacks of homework. We’ll look tomorrow.”
    Another silence; then another shout.
    â€œHerron! Mark’s our brother, now, and called Melendy; but his name was Herron before we adopted him and that’s a bird’s name, too.”
    â€œSpelled differently, but I don’t suppose it matters,” yelled Randy. “Only his family didn’t come from around here.”
    Cuffy arrived at that moment. She had walked home from the village where she had gone to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Ed Wheelwright and obtain a recipe for jelly doughnuts.
    â€œMy lands, what’s all this hollering about?” was her first remark. “I could hear you clear up on the highway, bellowing like cattle on a prairie. Lost cattle bellowing.”
    â€œCould you hear what we were saying?” asked Randy.
    â€œNo, just the tone of voice.”
    â€œThat’s good, though it wasn’t anything wrong. We just shouted because Oliver was busy in the Office and I was busy down here and we had things to tell each other. Look, isn’t Isaac beautiful?”
    â€œYes, he is,” said Cuffy warmly. “You’ve done a real good job.” She took off her shoes and sighed. “Oh, my feet. That’s a long walk when you’re stout like I am. I’ll be glad to get to heaven and be given wings.”
    â€œDon’t you talk that way!” scolded Randy. “You have to live just as long as we do, Cuffy, and help take care of all our children. You rest there, now, and I’ll go up and get your slippers.”
    Cuffy sat where she was, smiling contentedly. They’re turning out real nice, she thought; they’re lovely children, all of ’em. I never really worried.
    Nevertheless she was rather puzzled when Oliver and Randy for the next two days spent the hours after school in the Carthage cemetery, arriving home a little late for supper; and she was something more than puzzled on Saturday when they requested a picnic lunch and announced that they were going to Braxton “to spend the day in the graveyard.”
    â€œI can’t understand why you’re all of a sudden so taken up with tombstones,” grumbled Cuffy. “I declare I wonder if it’s healthy.”
    â€œIt’s research we’re doing, Cuff,” said Randy. “The inscriptions on old tombstones are very interesting; some of the Carthage ones go back to seventeen thirty. When people have been dead as long as they have, you don’t think of them as real at all; more like people in a book, invented people. Some of them had pretty names.”
    â€œSome of them had funny ones,” said Oliver. “Gideon Wallop, for instance. Gottlieb Fusswinkel.”
    â€œOh, you’re making them up,” scoffed Cuffy.
    â€œNo, honest I’m not! I can show them to you, both of them, in Carthage cemetery. Simeon Snail, too.”
    â€œBut there are pretty ones as well,” insisted Randy. “Araminta Carew, for instance: she died when she was seventeen, in eighteen hundred and six. And Sophronisba Stellway. She lived to be a hundred.”
    â€œSome of the poems on them, though, gee!” said Oliver. “‘Smile not, oh, passer-by, beware! The next opening sepulchre may yawn for thee,’” he quoted, shivering comfortably.
    The truth was that the young Melendys were acquiring a taste for old cemeteries. There was something very peaceful, they thought, about the quiet places; the tilted stones patched with lichens, standing in a bee-humming tangle of myrtle and wild asters. It was pleasant to walk between the stones, tracing the half-eroded names, the epitaphs, some beautiful, some sadly funny, some grotesque. Pleasant as it was, however, they had not, so far, found the due they sought. Plenty of jewel names, yes: Pearls and Rubys and Opals galore. Plenty of bird names, too;