Four Octobers Read online

  Glancing up quickly, I saw that the sun was starting to drop behind the horizon. If my mother came home and found me out here, not in bed where I was supposed to be, she’d be really upset with me, but I no longer cared. I had to find out what this thing was.

  Almost blind with desperation, I scraped and dug and clawed into the earth, clearing it away in large handfuls that I threw over my shoulder without looking where they landed. Eventually, I exposed the whole top of the metal thing, a flat, rectangular piece of metal with a small handle lying inside a dented impression on the top.

  It looked a lot like the top of a metal filing box, like the one my father used to keep his important papers. Panting from a mixture of excitement, exertion, and a deep, winding fear, I dug down around the sides of the box until I had pushed aside enough dirt so I could try to pull it free again.

  Grunting with the effort, I wiggled it from side to side, moving it like an old, rotten tooth, but still, it didn’t come free.

  “Come on… Get out of there… You lousy son of a bitch!” I muttered, using an expression I’d heard my father use a time or two but which I would never have dared say out loud if there had been any adults nearby.

  Sweat was streaming down the sides of my face and falling onto the ground, making loud plopping sounds as it hit the soil like heavy drops of rain. My hands and forearms were throbbing from the effort, so I shifted around and sat back in the hole, positioning my heels on the top of the box. Bracing myself against the wall of dirt, I pushed on it until my pulse was thundering in my ears. I closed my eyes, and sweat ran into the corners of my eyes, making them sting, but I didn’t stop pushing until the metal box finally shifted. Then with a grunt and a roar, I let out the breath I’d been holding and sagged forward, totally spent. I kept my eyes closed until my racing pulse finally began to slow down.

  Now what? I thought as I opened my eyes and stared at the box.

  It was pushed back several inches, and a wide wedge of darkness had opened up in front of it. I thought I might have broken it or bent it out of shape, but the top looked undamaged as I knelt down and started scooping away the dirt I had loosened. After wiggling the box back and forth a few more times, I lifted and it came free so fast I fell backwards and landed hard. The box banged against my knee, and I was pretty sure that it had cut my leg even through the thick denim of my jeans. I didn’t care, though, as I lurched forward and fumbled the box around to find the latch.

  I was afraid it might be locked.

  If it was, I would have to get a screwdriver from my father’s tools so I could pry it open. There was no way I wasn’t going to find out what was in it. I was surprised how easy it was when the latch clicked open when I pressed down on it with my thumb.

  My heart seemed to stop beating as I raised the lid and looked inside. If I’d been hoping to find some kind of treasure, maybe some money or jewels, I was sorely disappointed. My heart sank into my stomach when I saw nothing but a piece of folded paper. I’d been expecting an antique treasure map or something old and valuable, so I was disappointed even more when I saw that the sheet of paper was crisp and white. Still, my hands were shaking almost out of control as I smoothed the paper flat against my leg and, leaning my back against the edge of the hole, opened it up.

  My disappointment grew even bigger when I saw that the only thing folded up inside the paper was a newspaper clipping. This, at least, looked old and might be valuable, I thought, but my jaw dropped when I read the date at the top of the page.

  Friday, October 11, 1957.

  “What the heck?” I muttered.

  I frowned and shook my head, trying to let this sink in. I may have passed out yesterday morning, and I may not have slept well and been feeling a little sick this morning, but I was positive that today was Tuesday, October 8.

  Wasn’t it?

  I shook my head in bewilderment as I unfolded the paper and saw a single line of flowing script at the top. It wasn’t difficult to read, but I had to scan it four or five times before what was written there sank in all the way. In ink, someone had written—

  Whatever you do, Johnny, don’t go fishing with Billy on Thursday.

  The air left me with a loud whoosh.

  What was going on?

  How could something like this, apparently addressed to me, be buried out here in Grandfather’s field?

  And how could this box have a page in it from the Gloucester Daily Times that’s dated three days from now?

  My first and almost only thought was that I must have been sicker than I realized.

  Maybe when I passed out, I had been in a coma or something for a couple of days or even longer. Maybe I really was heading to “Coffee Hill.”

  But as I sat there on the cold dirt, staring in amazement at this newspaper clipping, I didn’t doubt that I knew what day it was.

  It was Tuesday, the eighth of October.

  And it was getting late.

  If she wasn’t already home from shopping, my mother would be soon, and I would catch holy hell for leaving the house like this. I couldn’t remember if I’d even bothered to lock the doors, like my parents were always telling me.

  I knew I had to get back and clean myself up, but before I did that, I opened up the newspaper and scanned the headline on the front page.

  LOCAL BOYS HIT BY TRAIN ON BRIDGE

  There was a photograph of Andrew’s Bridge, the train bridge all of us kids used as a shortcut whenever we were going out to the quarry, either to swim in the summer or fish for sunnies in the spring and fall.

  A heavy pounding sound filled my head as I stared at the newspaper article, not daring to believe what I was reading. It reported that my friend, Billy Tyler, and I had been struck and killed by a train late in the afternoon on Thursday, October tenth. The engineer of the train was quoted as saying that he never even saw us until it was too late.

  “But this… this is two days from now,” I whispered.

  I know I said it, but it seemed as though someone else was close behind me, whispering those same words into my ear.

  I turned around quickly, half expecting to see Chucky standing there, smiling at the joke he’d played on me, but the field was eerily empty. The dead grass rattled as it swayed in the wind, but I couldn’t hear or feel even the slightest breeze. That same curious hush, like my ears were packed with cotton, settled around me.

  “This can’t be… This can’t be real!”

  I kept shaking my head, all the while wishing I could close my eyes and make everything just go away.

  But I couldn’t stop staring at the newspaper, reading again and again how the train had run over both Billy and me before it could stop. The funeral service—my funeral!—was scheduled for next Monday, October fourteenth.

  I no longer noticed the tears that were streaming down my face. A hot, sour taste clogged the back of my throat, gagging me and making my stomach churn. I wanted to get up and run away from the hole and the metal box, but I didn’t know where to go or what to do. My parents weren’t home, as far as I knew, and anyway, I didn’t want to show them this.

  I couldn’t.

  They wouldn’t understand it any more than I did.

  Who did that leave?

  I had to talk to someone!

  Not my sister, certainly. She’d just accuse me of making it all up to get attention or whatever. And I didn’t think any of my other friends would understand either… not even Billy, if I showed him.

  The person I needed to talk to about this was Chucky, but he was… God only knew where.

  My shaking hands were so out of control I could hardly hold onto the papers. When I stared down at them, my vision telescoped, and they looked impossibly far away. They might as well have belonged to someone else, for all the control I had over them. After a while—I have no idea how long—I realized there was something stuck to the bottom of the newspaper. It was a small, square piece of yellow paper that was glued to the page. When I pulled it off, it peeled away easily withou
t tearing the paper. On this little slip of paper was another message, in the same handwriting.

  I remember that Roy was—or is—a Yankees fan, so if you want to win a Coke or maybe a couple of packs of baseball cards, bet him that Milwaukee wins the World Series this year. The Yankees will lose the seventh game. Trust me on this.

  —Your friend, Chucky.

  “Trust me on this,” I whispered with a heavy sigh.

  That was what Chucky always said, especially when he was trying to convince me to do something really stupid.

  I stared at the little square of yellow paper until my vision blurred. Shaking my head in disbelief, I turned it over and rubbed my thumb across the thin strip of glue that had made it stick to the newspaper. I had never seen anything like this before. I carefully stuck it back onto the newspaper clipping, and folded both back inside the sheet of paper. As I leaned forward, about to put everything back, I noticed something else in the bottom of the metal box.

  I could barely breathe as I put my hand inside the metal box. The air inside it was cool and moist. It felt like I was dipping my hand into the quarry to check the water temperature, and I cringed, waiting for it to snap suddenly onto my hand like a mousetrap.

  Instead, my hand closed around a rounded object. I was trembling as I slowly drew it out into the sunlight and stared at it.

  It was an old Bird’s Eye orange juice can with a hole punched out of the bottom. A piece of string about six inches long was knotted on the inside and hanging down. The string wasn’t like any kind of string I’d ever seen before. It was really thin and had a shiny, slippery feel to it, almost like it had been waxed or something.

  But I knew what this was.

  It was an old tin can telephone, at least half of one. My hand and wrist started to ache when the can began to vibrate like a tuning fork in my hand. Another, stronger wave of dizziness almost overcame me, and I could feel myself fainting. When my eyes fluttered closed for a moment, a high-pitched buzzing sound filled my ears, sounding like a swarm of bumblebees in the field. I had no idea if the sound was inside my head or coming from somewhere nearby, but after a while—again, I don’t know how long—I was positive that I was listening to a voice, speaking to me. It was faint and tinny, like the voices I heard over the crystal radio I’d made from the Radio Shack kit my father got me for Christmas last year, and I couldn’t make out what it was saying.

  When I opened my eyes, my eyelids fluttered as I looked all around. I felt absolutely dazed. I had been expecting the voice to fade away, as if it had all been inside my head the whole time, but I could still just barely hear it. I still couldn’t make out anything it was saying, but I could tell by the sound of it that someone—maybe two people—were talking.

  I had a quick impulse to raise the orange juice can to my ear so I could hear the voice better, but I froze.

  The newspaper article about Billy and me being hit by a train was scary enough. I didn’t need to hear any disembodied voice, no matter how real it might seem, talking to me from a tin can telephone.

  My first impulse was to stash everything back into the box and bury it. Winter was coming, and maybe—hopefully—in the spring, once all the snow was gone, I wouldn’t even be able to see where I had been digging.

  I had no idea where the metal box had come from or who might have buried it out here. I supposed Chucky could have written the note and buried it, but it sure didn’t look like his handwriting. It looked like an adult had written it. And the voice I had heard… Now that I thought about it, it had sounded like an adult talking.

  Not knowing what else to do, I kept both notes, the newspaper article, and the Bird’s Eye orange juice can, but I reburied the metal box. As it turned out, my mother was already home when I got back to the house, and I got scolded for leaving the house and for getting so dirty. I lied to her and told her that I’d dropped my binoculars in the field when we were out looking for Sputnik, and that I had been crawling around looking for it. I hadn’t even taken my binoculars with me, and I was pretty sure she knew I was fibbing. All she had to do was look out in the field and see the hole I’d dug to find out what I’d been up to. But I didn’t get into any more trouble once my father got home from work.

  I didn’t mention anything about any of this to anyone except Billy. When he asked me on Wednesday to go fishing with him at Nickerson’s Quarry the next day after school, I told him that I couldn’t because of the homework I’d missed by not being in school on Tuesday. I tried really hard to convince him not to go. I practically begged him not to. I even promised to buy him a Coke if he came down to Frank’s Store with me instead, but he had his heart set on going fishing, and he went.

  The next day, my parents told me that he had been hit by a train while crossing Andrew’s Bridge, and he was dead.

  I wasn’t at all surprised, but now I was really scared.

  That would have been me, too, I kept thinking. I would have died!

  The only other thing I did on Wednesday, the day after I did all that digging, was make a bet with my friend Roy Lee that the Yankees would lose the World Series, which they did. I didn’t want to be greedy about it, and I didn’t really trust what the note had said, so all I won was a quart bottle of Coke and a package of Hostess cupcakes. I should have bet a lot more.

  As it turned out, the police never found Chucky or any sign of him even though they kept searching for him right up until it started to snow. Some folks around town speculated that he might have run away from home while others thought he must have died in the woods or maybe drowned in one of the quarries and just not been found yet. They said if he’d drowned, his body would probably float up to the surface come spring.

  All I knew for sure was that I had lost my best friend, and I was upset for a very long time.

  Eventually, though, I got over it, and after a few years, the grass grew back over the area where I had dug that hole, so no one could tell there had been a hole there except for the shallow depression in the field. No one ever seemed to notice it or, if they did, they never mentioned it to me.

  But over the years, I never stopped missing Chucky.

  He was the closest friend I’d ever had. None of the friends I had all through high school and then at college and later on in life ever seemed to match what Chucky and I had.

  Over the years, I also couldn’t stop thinking now and then about the metal box that must still be buried out there in my grandfather’s field. I figured it must be rusting away beneath the soil, but I also had a creepy feeling that it would look just as new and shiny if I dug it up today or thirty years from now.

  And there’s one other thing I can’t stop thinking about.

  It’s the Bird’s Eye orange juice can.

  I kept it in my bedroom all through high school, and I took it with me when I went off to college at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the mid-sixties. Even after I married Elizabeth, I kept that old tin can in the top drawer of my desk. The few times Elizabeth ever asked me why I kept it, I simply told her it was for sentimental reasons. She seemed satisfied with that.

  After all, it was just a kid’s toy, right?

  An old tin can telephone with a piece of string hanging from the hole in the bottom.

  Every now and then, though, I’m tempted to take it out of the desk drawer, hold it up to my ear, and listen.

  I’ve never done it, though.

  Although I’m curious as hell, I’m not sure I really want to hear what I might hear. I have no doubt that I’ll hear Chucky’s voice, buzzing like a bumblebee in my ear.

  And I’ll tell you one other thing: I sure as hell don’t want to think about where the end of that string with the other tin can telephone is. It’s a connection I’m not ready to make.

  Miss Henry’s Bottles

  October, 1961

  Part One

  Andy Draper couldn’t remember when he first heard about Miss Henry or—as all the kids called her—“Old Lady Henry.” Like most of the adults
Andy had encountered in the first twelve years of his life in the small North Shore town of Stonepoint, Massachusetts, Miss Henry had simply always been there. A fixture in the town as much as anyone or anything else.

  Andy’s clearest impression of her, in fact his only impression of her—other than the mental images generated by the wild stories some of the older kids told about her—was of a crazy old lady who was nothing more than a black silhouette framed by the window of what, he assumed, was her living room.

  It didn’t matter what time of day or year it was. It could be a warm spring evening, a sweltering July afternoon, or a frigid January morning—Miss Henry seemed always to be sitting at her front window, staring out at the street, just waiting for a chance to yell at anyone who passed her house on the corner of Curtis and Granite Street. On winter days, when Andy and his friends walked by on their way to the school bus stop in front of the town library, she would rap so hard on the window pane that Andy feared she would break the glass. She would start yelling at the top of her lungs, but her voice, muffled behind the closed window, was nothing more than an indistinct buzz. Even on warmer days when the window was open, they could never make much sense of what she was saying.

  The message was clear enough, though.

  Stay away from her house and keep off the dry, weed-choked mess she called her front lawn, or else she’d either call their parents or come right out there herself and give them the whipping they so richly deserved for being such pests.

  Most of the kids in Stonepoint, especially the younger ones, gave her house a wide berth, either crossing to the other side of the street or running by her house so fast she wouldn’t have time to see them, much less start yelling.