The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens Read online

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A brilliant light exploded across the land, where moments before the monstrous dragon had flown. Vanessa and Alexander tumbled down, down, and came crashing to the sand. Little Janie and Frank sprawled beside them as bolts of lightning flashed from the sky and a huge dragon-shaped cloud erupted from the earth. It spun wildly into the greatest tornado the world has ever seen, and vanished into space.

  A cheer exploded from the hundreds of people clustered about the edge of the forest. Some of them ran to help Vanessa and Alexander and Frank and Janie. The boys were ponies no more, once again wearing their golden bronze tunics. Frank climbed unsteadily to his feet, but Alexander, his broken leg twisted beneath him, simply lay there, in pain but with a huge, thankful smile on his face.

  The dragon was gone forever.

  Someone rescued Kathy and Tristan from the ocean. Others ran to the foothills and the meadow to bring back Alyssa and Aaron and Grace and Spencer. Christina and Steven regained consciousness, and everyone walked toward the forest, with Aaron and Steven helping Alexander to hobble along on his one good leg.

  “Welcome to Paximus,” said Princess Melisande as they left the desert and stepped beneath the cool shade of the trees. “Everyone has been hoping for the day when you all would be set free.”

  “Thank you, your Majesty,” Christina said.

  “You’re welcome to stay here with us,” the Princess said.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Alexander replied, “but I think we all want to go back to our own world now.” He looked around at the others, who were nodding their heads. “We have our whole lives to catch up on.”

  Vanessa was troubled. “What will happen to Partequineus now?” she asked. “When we’re gone, will it go back to being grey and lifeless again, the way it was before Guaryntis captured Janie?”

  “No, dear,” the Princess said. “The happiness that children bring can never be destroyed or forgotten. Partequineus will become a part of Paximus now, and even the desert will soon bloom with beautiful flowers.”

  “We have to go,” Grace said excitedly. “Excuse me, your Majesty, I don’t want to seem rude, but… Well…”

  “I understand,” the Princess said. “But remember, you can always come back to visit. The purple mist will enter the house on Chestnut Street every Friday at four o’clock, and you’ll always be welcome here.”

  “Thank you,” everyone said in unison, and Christina said, “Who wants to be first?”

  “Me!” shouted Janie. “But I’ll miss you all,” she said sadly.

  “We’ll miss you, too,” Christina said, “but you have to go back. It’s where you belong.”

  Janie smiled. “One, two, three!” she cried out, and she hopped backwards and vanished in a puff of purple smoke.

  “Her mother and father will be so glad to see her,” Vanessa said.

  “Of course they will,” Aaron said, “but they won’t know where she’s been. Where Janie is now, it’s still two hundred years ago.”

  “I’m going right now,” Evan announced, and took three steps backward and disappeared.

  “Me, too,” Alyssa said. One by one the children vanished, going back to their interrupted lives, until only Vanessa and Alexander were left.

  “You saved us,” Alexander told her. “If not for you, we would never have figured out how to defeat the dragon.”

  “I think you would,” Vanessa said, “sooner or later. But I’m glad I could help.”

  “Will you ever come back to Partequineus?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Not right away, anyway. It will be nice to have my life settle down for a while.”

  “I feel the same way. Let’s go. But you’ll have to help me.”

  “It will be my pleasure.”

  Alexander leaned on her shoulder, and she put one arm around his waist. “Count with me,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Partequineus!” Vanessa shouted. She helped Alexander to hop backwards on his one good leg. “One! Two! THREE!”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Vanessa was just eleven years old. She was sure of that now, because the world was back to normal. In fact, she wasn’t absolutely sure that her adventures in Partequineus hadn’t simply taken place in her imagination.

  Two weeks had passed, and Vanessa sat in Mr. Carson’s English class during reading period. She was just finishing the last chapter of The Abandoned. After her visit to that strange, bright land of her dreams, Paul Gallico’s fantasy about a boy who thought he was a cat no longer seemed so odd and extraordinary to her.

  She looked up as she heard the classroom door open, and Mrs. Watkins, the principal, walked in.

  “We have a new student joining us today,” Mrs. Watkins announced. “He just moved here to our town. I hope you’ll all make him feel welcome.”

  She stepped aside so everyone could see the handsome boy who stood in the doorway. “His name is Alexander,” she said, “and he’s had a little accident. He’ll need your help to get around until the cast on his leg comes off.”

  Vanessa grinned at the newcomer, at his crutches, and at his oh, so familiar face. Alexander grinned back at her. It was all real, she thought to herself. I can never tell anyone else what happened, but Alexander knows. And I just know we’ll be friends forever.

  The Summer of

  the Kittens

  Dedication

  The Summer of the Kittens honours two very important people in my life. I chose the young narrator’s name in loving memory of my maternal grandmother, Hanna M. Hulse, gone from this earth since 1966, but still very much alive in my memories and so often in my dreams. And the story is especially for our son Kendrick, keeper of tadpoles, nurturer of cats and hamsters and guinea pigs, and rescuer of birds and mice and baby skunks. Francis of Assisi would have been as proud of him as I am.

  Acknowledgements

  Shelley Hustins, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, was kind enough to offer her guidance and expertise concerning the care of orphaned kittens, for which I am deeply in her debt. I also owe a special vote of thanks to Taffy, our tiny bottle-fed kitten, who slept warm and cuddly on my lap and kept me company as I edited this manuscript. And I will be forever grateful to Joanne Hudson, who cared for Taffy so lovingly after he lost his mother when just four days old.

  The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

  Edmund Burke

  Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.

  Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt

  “Try to Remember” (The Fantasticks)

  MY VERY OWN DIARY

  Hanna McCormick

  Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada,

  North America, Earth, the Universe

  May 16th

  Hey, Diary!

  I’ve got lots to tell you. Something happened today that got me wondering about a lot of stuff.

  My mother thinks that most of the people in the world are good. At least that’s what she says, although the way she talks about some of the neighbours makes me wonder if she really believes it. Our minister says that good and evil exist side by side in the world, and that everybody gets to choose whether to be one or the other. And my Dad? Who knows what he thinks. He isn’t around much anymore.

  I’m not sure if Mom is right about most people either, ’cause there’s like about six or seven billion of us in the world, right? And I only know the ones who live on my street, and some of the people who work in the stores downtown, and the kids and teachers at school and our relatives, maybe forty or fifty people in all, so I don’t have much of a data base to work from. And Reverend Davis is a nice old man, but he’s so boring that I’ve given up listening to him. I only go to church because Mom says I have to, and two minutes after he stops preaching I can’t remember anything he said. His sermons never have anything to do with me.

  Dad won’t go to church, not even on Easter Sunday or at Christmas time. I guess he doesn’t believe in God.

  You know what I think about the go
od and evil thing? I think that most people aren’t either one or the other. Not good, not bad. What they are is indifferent. They just don’t pay much attention to the consequences of the things they do, at least until they get caught doing something bad. Whatever they decide to do, no matter how it might affect other people, they just go ahead and do it. Like the three college students who drove down our road today when I was sitting in the tree in our front yard. Jimmy was there too, but he wasn’t up in the tree, of course. We’d just come home from school, and we had to get dressed up for our class pictures today, and I hadn’t even changed my clothes yet.

  I sit up there a lot, in the big old elm that’s been there for maybe a couple hundred years. Dad hammered some boards into the trunk like a ladder so I could climb up. That was back when he still paid any attention to me. It’s really huge, and about four metres off the ground there’s this really thick branch, almost half as big as the trunk, that curves out before it goes up at a steep angle and makes a kind of seat like a horse’s saddle, and I like to sit up there and watch what’s happening. Except that nothing much ever does.

  Anyway, the university had its graduation ceremonies over the weekend. My Dad’s a professor. Every year he puts on his old black robe and that stupid square hat with the tassel and some sort of cape made of maroon velvet with a blue and white silk lining. He calls it a hood, only he doesn’t wear it on his head, so I don’t know why it’s called that. If he did put it over his head, maybe it would cover up that dumb-looking hat. Then they all line up in front of the gym, him and all the other professors and the students who are graduating, and when somebody tells them to, they all walk across Main Street and go up the road to University Hall. You ever see that movie, March of the Penguins?

  So with graduation over (“It’s not graduation,” Dad keeps telling me, “it’s Convocation!”), a whole bunch of the students clear out of the dormitories and apartments and go wherever it is they go during the summer. But since I don’t live on a main road, they don’t often come by here on their way home.

  Only this time three of them did, in an old, beat-up car that was white with one faded red fender that must have been put on after some accident, and brown rust all around the wheels. There was a guy and two girls, and they had so many boxes and suitcases in the hatchback that they had it tied part way open, and some other stuff piled on the roof. Oh yeah, and a mountain bike mounted on the bumper. The car had an Ontario license plate. They turned off onto our street about three-thirty in the afternoon and just sort of coasted along as if they were looking for something.

  Jimmy and I had been talking like we usually do after school, me in the tree and him down there in his wheelchair. He’s my best friend, and I guess I’m his. Jimmy doesn’t have many friends, ’cause he can’t do stuff like the other kids do, only he never seems to mind. At least if he does, he doesn’t let it show, ’cause he’s always smiling like he’s really happy. Mom says the sun follows Jimmy around like he owns it.

  We argue a lot, but we never fight. I like him.

  I was watching Mr. Harding, the old man who lives next door, behind the big fence that Jimmy can’t see over, but I can from the tree. He was hunched over kind of double in a scratched-up old rocking chair on his front porch with his elbows on his knees, just sort of staring out at the woods across the street.

  “He’s there again,” I told Jimmy, as softly as I could so Mr. Harding wouldn’t hear me talking about him.

  “What’s he doing?” Jimmy asked. Jimmy’s curious about everything and everybody, only his world isn’t as big as mine, so sometimes I have to be his eyes.

  “Just sitting,” I said, “like he does most days.”

  Mr. Harding doesn’t like kids. Dad says he doesn’t like anybody, even himself. Especially himself. One day I accidentally rode my bike across one corner of his lawn when he was sitting out there, and he yelled at me something awful. I don’t know what he was so upset about, his crumby old grass is mostly weeds anyway, but he called my Mom about it. She told me just to stay away from him, that he was an unhappy old man and there wasn’t anything anybody could do to change that.

  “I wonder what he’s thinking about,” Jimmy said. He always seems to be super curious about Mr. Harding, because the man sits around so much, just like Jimmy, even though he doesn’t have to, ’cause he can still walk, well, sort of limp I guess. He’s got to be at least a hundred, don’t you think? Jimmy figured that anyone who could walk ought to do it as much as possible.

  “He’s probably wishing it would rain or something,” I said. “That way we’d all be sad like him.”

  “You think maybe he’d like that? For everybody to be as miserable as he is?”

  “I’m just kidding. Who knows what he thinks about? He doesn’t talk to anybody, and no one ever comes to visit him.”

  “He must be lonely,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy knows a lot about loneliness, I guess.

  “He probably likes it that way,” I said. “Otherwise he’d make some effort to get along with people, instead of being so disagreeable all the time.” I was tired of the topic. “How’s the new airplane coming?”

  “Almost finished. I just have to hook up the battery and the servos. Dad’s gonna take me out to the field on Saturday to try it out. Wanna come?”

  “Sure.”

  Jimmy builds model airplanes. They’re neat, with little engines that sound like miniature chain saws, and they go really fast. He’s got this radio thing with a couple of joysticks on it and lots of switches, and he sits in his wheelchair and makes the planes take off and land and do loops and all kinds of things. He’s pretty good at it.

  Jimmy says he’s going to fly some day. Himself, I mean, not just his models. He says they can put hand controls in airplanes, so it doesn’t matter that he can’t use his legs because of his spina bifida that he was born with. He says that the airplane will be his elm tree, and let him see the whole world.

  He was describing how his new plane looked, blue and silver with flaps and a low wing and almost no dihedral, whatever that is, so it would go really fast and do lots of tricks, and a whole lot of other stuff I didn’t really understand, when the car with the college kids drove past. Jimmy waved, and one of the girls, the one sitting in the back seat, saw him and smiled and waved back.

  Most people will wave and smile at a cripple if they don’t have to stop and say anything.

  They drove past Mr. Harding’s house, which is the last one on our street before the railroad tracks. On the other side of the tracks, the road turns to gravel and goes out over the old dykes that the Acadians built to keep the Bay of Fundy from washing away their crops a few hundred years ago. Only now there’s a gate across the road and a big No Trespassing sign.

  “Where are they going?” Jimmy said. “The gate’s always locked, isn’t it?”

  The car coasted across the tracks and up to the gate and the guy who was driving put on the brakes. The right hand stop light was burned out, and blue smoke came out of the tail pipe. He got out and looked at the big chain and padlock that somebody put on the gate, and then got back in the car.

  “I bet I know what they’re up to,” I said. “Just watch.”

  The car sat there for a few minutes. I saw the girl in the back turn around and look toward Jimmy. I guess she thought he was all by himself, since she couldn’t see me way up in the tree. She looked kind of nervous, like she didn’t want anybody to see what they were going to do. I wondered if she even saw Mr. Harding on his porch.

  Then the car backed up and turned around and started toward us again, close to the curb on the other side. It stopped beside the vacant lot. I was pretty sure what would happen next. It’s just a big empty lot, it gets all overgrown with weeds every spring, and there’s always somebody dumping trash there for somebody else like my Dad to have to cart away. The dumb college kids are the worst. They clean out their apartments at the end of the term and have a bunch of trash to get rid of, so they sneak around and dum
p it on any vacant lot they can find.

  I could see them through the windshield pretty good. The two in the front seat, the guy and the other girl, were talking - arguing I guess, from the way they were going at it - and the guy was pointing at the vacant lot. He was talking fast, too soft for us to hear because of their noisy engine, even though the car windows were open, and the girl kept shaking her head. He kind of shrugged and folded his arms in front of him, like I’m not driving until you do what I want.

  They just sat there for a few minutes, and then I saw Mr. Harding get up from his chair and climb down off his porch. He hobbled down the front path toward the street, past the end of the fence so Jimmy could see him too. I think he was mad, although it’s hard to tell with Mr. Harding, ’cause his eyes are always all dark and angry, like the mean old crows that sometimes land on Mom’s bird feeder and spill sunflower seeds all over the lawn. He reached the curb and stopped, his hands on his hips and his chin sort of thrust forward like the figurehead on a pirate ship.

  The guy behind the wheel looked at him and then turned toward the girl again. I heard her say, much louder than before, “All right!” She opened the door and reached down on the floor in front of her. I couldn’t see what she did next, but as soon as she shut the door again, the guy put the car in gear and took off really fast. They disappeared around the corner, going in the direction of the highway.

  “What was that all about?” Jimmy said.

  “I thought they were gonna dump some garbage,” I said, “but I guess they changed their minds when they saw Mr. Harding watching them.”

  Mr. Harding was staring after the car. Then he turned around and started to walk back up to his porch, but suddenly he stopped, as if something across the street had caught his eye.

  “Son of a (you know, Diary)!” he said, really loud. He took three little steps back toward the street - it always bothered me to watch him walk, as if his legs hurt him real bad - and glared at the vacant lot. “Damned college kids.”