Applewhites Coast to Coast Page 8

  “I thought he’d scare ’em good.” Destiny’s shoulders drooped. “I really, really wanted to see ’em faint,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “You know,” said the farmer in his slow drawl, “it ain’t rightly faintin’.”

  Destiny blinked up at him. “It ain’t?”

  The farmer shook his head. “Nope. Just that when they gits skeert, their muscles go all stiff and they fall over.”

  Next to Jake, Melody snorted and elbowed him. “Oh, they don’t faint, they just fall over,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Without thinking, Jake joined in. “But only when they gets skeert,” he said, and Melody laughed some more.

  The farmer turned sharply to Jake and squinted. “Welp,” he said slowly, around his stalk of grass, “to call it by its right name, it’s a neuromuscular condition. Myotonia congenita, they call it. But I find most folks got no problem sayin’ they fall over when skeert.”

  Jake’s face started to burn, and he noticed E.D. a step beyond the farmer, looking at him in disgust.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to . . .” His apology trailed off and he looked at his toes. He hadn’t really meant to say it loud enough for the man to hear.

  “How’d they get to be like that?” asked Destiny. “We gots two goatses, and they don’t ever fall over. Wolfie doesn’t get scared of anything, either. Not ever!”

  “These goats are born like that,” said the farmer, turning away from Jake. “That’s what the congenita part of the condition means—‘born with it.’ Every one of ’em is descended from four goats brought down by a feller name of Tinsley from Nova Scotia. You know where that is, little feller?” Destiny shook his head. “Way up in Canada. Area called the Maritimes. They call it that ’cause mare is the Latin word for ocean and the folks up there spend a whole lot of time in boats.”

  Zedediah leaned over to E.D. “I officially admit I was wrong,” he said. “There’s something to be learned here after all. I can think of a great many follow-up questions. Science, history, geography—”

  Destiny looked out over the goats, still calmly munching away. His chin trembled a little. “Even if it isn’t real fainting,” he said, “I still wanted to see them do it.”

  The farmer looked at him thoughtfully, then ambled off to his barn. To Jake’s horror, he came back out with a big old shotgun, hanging open where the barrel met the stock. For one wild second Jake thought maybe all this old man’s chatter had been camouflage and he really was a deranged killer. As he returned, the man was staring right at him! Jake fought an impulse to step back.

  The farmer turned his attention to Zedediah. “You trust this punky-lookin’ youngster with a gun?”

  Zedediah looked Jake up and down almost meditatively. “I suppose so, properly supervised.”

  The farmer nodded, fitted a shotgun shell into one of the barrels, and snapped the gun shut. He walked over and held it out to Jake.

  Jake just stared at it, too scared to move. He had never even seen a real gun up this close, let alone held one. He wouldn’t have dared to let the tough guys back in Providence know that, of course. Hard to do a good imitation of the “bad boy from the city” when you were terrified of so much as touching a gun.

  “Go on, boy,” the farmer said. “Take it. Jist keep yer fingers away from the trigger.” His eyes twinkled a little as he added, “Don’t be skeert.”

  Jake clenched his teeth, then as casually as he could manage, reached out and took the shotgun, the smooth wood warm in his hands. He was surprised at how heavy it was. The farmer showed him how to raise it to his shoulder, and helped him aim it off over the trees, then looked at Melody and Hal. “Might want to get those cameras runnin’ again.” Two little red lights came on, Hal’s pointing toward the goats and Melody’s pointing right at Jake. “All right, son,” the farmer said, “let her rip.”

  Jake felt the trigger under his finger. He thought of all the movies and TV shows he had ever seen where shooting guns was nothing at all, and realized that his heart was pounding so hard he could hear blood rushing in his ears. But everybody was looking at him and he didn’t want them to think he was “skeert.” It took all his concentration to make his finger squeeze that trigger.

  There was an almighty boom and Jake felt as if he’d been hit in the shoulder by a freight train. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back in the Tennessee dirt. The farmer was laughing so hard he had to bend over and rest his hands on his knees.

  As the ringing in his ears started to fade, Jake saw that Destiny was jumping up and down clapping, a huge grin on his face. Through the wire of the pen, Jake saw the goats lying on the ground, eight sets of goat legs sticking straight out, some to the side, some right up in the air like a cartoon animal. He sort of knew how they felt.

  Before he had managed to sit up, the goats were already getting to their feet. E.D. walked over to Jake and looked down at him. “The Rutherfords are right, I guess,” she said, her hands on her hips. “You never know when you’ll run into a learning opportunity.” With that she turned on her heel and walked back to the bus.

  Chapter Eleven

  E.D. was fuming. It wasn’t her fault that her father had smashed the back of Brunhilda into the fainting goat pen and knocked down a whole corner of it (which was enough, Destiny was overjoyed to see, to make all eight goats fall over again). It wasn’t her fault that the only campground within one hundred miles didn’t have pull-through sites, or that her father was so unnerved by the accident with the goat pen (and the money he’d had to give the farmer to fix it) that he backed Brunhilda straight into a tree next to the campsite and got into a screaming match with Archie about it. It wasn’t her fault nobody liked the canned chili they’d had for dinner—it was the only kind the last grocery store had in big cans! She definitely didn’t appreciate Destiny announcing that it looked like barf.

  Hal, already sulking that the campground didn’t have any Wi-Fi, slumped down at the table next to her and announced huffily that nobody could get a signal on their phones. As if E.D., on top of everything else, was supposed to be responsible for the orderly distribution of cell phone towers throughout the state of Tennessee!

  “How will we find out what our next destination and subject are?” Hal wailed. “Jeremy was supposed to e-mail that to us!”

  “No doubt this place has a landline,” Zedediah observed. “I’ll just have to call Jeremy.” He gathered up the cards he was using to play solitaire at Brunhilda’s table and headed for the camp office.

  Cordelia swept in, wrapped in a terry cloth robe and clutching her towel and shampoo. “Those campground bathrooms,” she declared, glaring at E.D., “are not fit for swine!”

  “What’s swine?” Destiny asked.

  “The three little pigs!” she answered, and closed herself into Brunhilda’s tiny bathroom to try out the shower Archie had rigged. A few minutes later she emerged, wrapped in her towel, her hair covered in a foamy helmet of shampoo. “Something’s wrong with the shower. It ran out of hot water before I could rinse!”

  “It’s a ten-gallon hot-water tank,” Hal pointed out as she struggled, soaking wet, back into her robe. “Barely enough for a couple of goldfish.”

  “Next time, check out the bathrooms before you choose a campground,” Cordelia said to E.D.

  “Next time,” E.D. answered, “you find the campground! Plan dinner and do the grocery shopping, too, while you’re at it!”

  “Maybe I will! Maybe then we’d have some vegetables!”

  “VEGETABLES ARE REALLY EXPENSIVE!” E.D. shouted. She may have sounded angry, but she felt like she was going to burst into tears.

  Then Zedediah came back from the campground office fuming about highway robbery. “Twenty dollars he charged me for a ten-minute call to California!” But the cost of the call didn’t seem to be the only reason he was fuming. “Family meeting in the screen house in fifteen minutes!”

  “Make it half an hour!” Cordelia y
elled as she started toward the campground bathrooms with her damp towel over her arm and her hair still full of suds.

  When everyone had gathered in the screen house they had set up around the splintery picnic table half an hour later, Randolph asked what the next destination was.

  “Memphis,” Zedediah said.

  E.D. noticed that Melody, who had started filing her nails a moment after she sat down, looked up, her eyes suddenly alight with interest.

  “That’s still in Tennessee,” Randolph protested. “How do they expect us to get all the way across the continent if we have to stop twice in one state?”

  “And the subject area?” Sybil asked.

  “That’s one of the problems. There isn’t a subject area,” Zedediah said in an outraged tone. “They’ve started to call the stops challenges now. Like some sort of reality TV show. And they’re naming them. The name of ours is ‘Mining Memphis.’”

  Now it was Destiny who perked up. “Does they gots mines in Memphis? Gold mines? If we go to a gold mine do we gets to keep some of the gold? Pirates always gots chests of gold! I really, really, really want some gold!”

  “This isn’t about real mines,” Zedediah explained the moment Destiny stopped for breath. “We’re to mine Memphis for interesting and creative educational challenges.”

  “Got one!” Melody said. “Beale Street! Home of the blues!”

  “A strip of bars and restaurants is not an educational opportunity, Melody,” said Zedediah with a sigh.

  “The Rock ’n’ Soul Museum!” Melody insisted. “It’s a museum, it has to be educational.” Zedediah pointedly ignored her.

  “I have a friend who runs a theater company there,” Randolph said. “We could see what show he has running. He does some interesting avant-garde work, very modern.”

  “The national ornamental metalworking museum is in Memphis!” Archie said. “I’ve been meaning to visit it for years!”

  Lucille pointed out that Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home, was also in Memphis. She was immediately shouted down by the others. “I didn’t say we should go to it, I just pointed out that it’s there.”

  “There’s plenty of time to decide what we’ll do in Memphis,” Zedediah said. “It’ll take at least half a day to get there from here. But Jeremy gave me some other news. It turns out that right now we’re in fourth place.”

  “Fourth place? What does that mean?” Randolph said.

  “It means that the video Hal sent in from the Clayton library workshop didn’t get as many viewings as three of the other groups’ first videos.”

  “Viewings?” Sybil asked. “What’s a viewing? Where? By whom?”

  “Online,” Zedediah said disgustedly. “All the videos have been posted on a website called Follow the Expedition and now they’re out on social media.”

  “I didn’t know they’d be public,” Hal said. “Not before the end of it, on the big TV show they’re doing in California! Not before the final editing and everything. I just sent raw videos. I thought they were just going to Jeremy.”

  “You surely don’t mean they’re going to do the judging that way,” Sybil said.

  “Jeremy says no.” Zedediah shook his head. “But even he didn’t know they would be posted. Somebody in the foundation office made them public. Jeremy says the actual judging is still to be done by education and arts experts.” Zedediah shook his head again. “Putting them online is just supposed to generate interest and begin to pull in an audience. He says they call it ‘creating buzz.’”

  “But we’re in fourth place?” E.D. said. That, she thought, was like getting a C—no, a D! She had never even imagined having a D in her entire life!

  “I told you,” Melody said to Lucille. “Competition! Everything is competition.”

  “We need to see the ones that are first and second,” Jake said.

  “As soon as we can get online!” E.D. agreed.

  “Absolutely not!” Zedediah banged his fist on the table. “We will not get ourselves into a popularity contest! What those other groups are doing on their Expeditions is their business, and the Creative Academy is ours.” E.D. wilted and felt her cheeks burning. All day everyone was treating her like everything was her fault, and now her grandfather was yelling at her!

  “When we’re on the road tomorrow,” Zedediah continued, “E.D. will go online and check out what all is available in Memphis. Make a list, and we can decide how to ‘mine Memphis’ when we stop for lunch. But do not”—he looked around the picnic table at each of the kids in turn, his eyes narrowed threateningly—“Do not go looking to see what those other groups have done. We will do this our way or no way! You get me?”

  E.D. just nodded silently. Across the table, Jake was looking as sheepish as she felt. Hal and Cordelia nodded, too. And Destiny nodded ferociously, even though he was the one kid who regularly ignored any adult rule he didn’t care for, including his grandfather’s.

  Melody wasn’t nodding. “No,” she said, calmly and loudly.

  Zedediah blinked. “What’s that?”

  “No,” Melody repeated. “No, I don’t get you. I don’t get you at all. You say this isn’t going to be a competition? Open your eyes! This is already a competition—and we’re losing!”

  “Not from where I’m sitting,” Zedediah replied. “From where I’m sitting, this is a school!”

  “Well then where you’re sitting is in the dunce corner for old dummies,” Melody muttered. E.D. gasped. Even Jake goggled at Melody in disbelief.

  “I’m sorry,” said Zedediah evenly, “I didn’t quite catch that. Would you care to repeat it?”

  E.D. was sure he had heard every word.

  “Nope,” said Melody, flashing a sudden bright smile, innocent as the morning. “I’m good, thanks!”

  “Well if that is everything,” Zedediah went on, not once taking his eyes off Melody, “we have some planning to do.”

  “Contentious,” E.D. read in her well-worn paperback dictionary the next morning, as the dinette table in Brunhilda vibrated beneath her. Likely to cause disagreement between people with differing views. This was an extremely useful word. Despite E.D.’s best efforts, the plans for their trip to Memphis were proving to be contentious. She read the second definition: argumentative; frequently engaging in and seeming to enjoy disputes. That one was a practically perfect description of her family.

  Among the many educational possibilities she had found, she most wanted to visit the National Civil Rights Museum, which had been built on the site where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. E.D. had done a whole history project on Dr. King last January. But Aunt Lucille immediately declared it “too traumatic” and nobody else seemed eager to argue with her, so E.D. had to let it go. A children’s museum that had won some kind of big award was her next favorite. She had read the description aloud from its website and Destiny had been practically delirious about all the exhibits it had—his only regret was that it didn’t have a gold mine. Cordelia, on the other hand, declared it worthless because she was not a “child.”

  Archie insisted on the Metal Museum, and Zedediah agreed that it would offer intriguing new possibilities for their work back at Wit’s End. Not one single person other than Melody was willing to consider Beale Street and the Rock ’n’ Soul Museum.

  Eventually they had come up with a plan. Randolph would drive Brunhilda, with Lucille, Sybil, Destiny, E.D., Cordelia, and Hal (with the video equipment) and also Winston, to the children’s museum, while Archie, Zedediah, Jake, and Melody would explore the possibilities of ornamental metalworking. E.D. strongly suspected that Melody’s sole interest in metalworking was that Jake had chosen it. But she dared not go there herself after she had worked so hard to sell everybody on the children’s museum.

  E.D. closed her dictionary and her vocabulary notebook and put them on the seat next to her. Things had calmed down since the crankiness of the last campground stop. Hal was filming the countryside going past the window as they drove toward Memphis,
Cordelia had earbuds in and was waving her hands gently in the air before her—probably, E.D. thought, choreographing a dance in her mind. Lucille was reading, with Winston upside down and snoring next to her, on the bed in her parents’ bedroom. Destiny had taken out markers and a drawing pad to make a pirate treasure map to a gold mine.

  When E.D. took a deep breath, and just really looked around, it was still pretty neat, rolling across the country in the big bright inside of the giant, loud, rattling bus. Seeing new places. Meeting new challenges.

  A couple of little worries nagged at her, though. She wondered what Melody and Jake were doing in the Pageant Wagon. She wondered why the Applewhites were in fourth place, and who was beating them. And she wondered why it mattered to her so much.

  Chapter Twelve

  The weird thing was, Jake thought, the Metal Museum was really cool.

  He’d been walking through with Archie, getting swept up in his enthusiasm. Archie was in his glory. “Look at the curve of that copper!” he’d shout, hurrying over toward a furled and folded bowl on one side with the video camera he’d brought. Then he’d rush across the room the other way. “Look at the intricacy of the etching on this lock!” he’d cry, or “How do you suppose he thought to use silver just here?” It was fun. And the exhibits really were beautiful. Jake could see why Archie would be considering expanding his work to include metal. Some of the pieces were as strange as his own Furniture of the Absurd, like the coffee table that was the first thing of Archie’s Jake had ever seen—a sleek and shiny, elegant wooden object that looked somewhat like a hippopotamus, and couldn’t possibly hold a cup of coffee.

  Then Melody was next to Jake, her phone out. She slipped a hand into his and he felt a tingle go all the way up his arm. “Come with me,” she whispered so close to his ear that he could feel her breath. Now he had a tingle and goose bumps, both. She tugged him down a hallway toward the bathrooms. Jake had the fleeting thought that she was going to kiss him. But she didn’t. Of course not, he thought—that was just silly. Right?