Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

conspiracy and had no choice except to carry on. Brooke, Jane, Bridget, Peter, Bill. We graduated very nicely in age, all of us together. The spread was perfect. When Jane and I were nine, Bridget was seven, Peter was six, and Bill was five. Not only were we a conspiracy but an extended family, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design. Who knew? We talked about it among ourselves, but certainly our parents never discussed it with us and I can’t remember how or when we discovered that once upon a time, before any of us had been thought of, our mother and their father had been married and very much in love. We had all grown up half a block away from each other in Brentwood, and had simultaneously moved away, we to our farmhouse in Connecticut and the Fondas to an enormous piece of property up on Tigertail Road. Bridget, Bill, and I were often taken there to play; our station wagon would pull up the long dirt driveway, we’d all pour out, and the five of us would go absolutely crazy.

Although Jane and I as the oldest were the ringleaders in most of our capers, it was Peter who, casting around madly for a way to make a contribution, first stumbled on the idea of smoking. He staged his corruption scene well, looking forward to an occasion, the next time we all got together. Bridget, Bill, and I were driven over after school one day; Peter was waiting for us expectantly out by the gas pump that the Fondas had installed to fuel their tractor. He was sitting under an umbrella in his red wagon with a display of cigarette butts he’d been assembling from ashtrays around the house, and a supply of paper Stork Club cigarette holders he’d filched from his mother. We were all sitting around smoking and coughing—with Peter in a state of glory, about to conclude his lesson by showing us how, if we punched holes in the butts, they would burn up and we wouldn’t have to drag as much—when his mother’s masseuse caught sight of us and rushed back into the house to report us. “Mrs. Fonda, all the children are smoking!” That was the end of it. Jane and Peter were punished by having to chain-smoke a full pack of Pall Malls each until they retched (Jane, being more clever than Peter, pretended to get sick right away, but Peter held out and kept smoking until he actually got sick and vomited), and, as usual in these matters, the Haywards were banished from Fonda territory for weeks.

The Fonda territory was nine acres of farmland that Hank had built up from scratch: redwood fences, compost heaps, a chicken coop, a stable, a tennis court, a pool, and lovingly planted trees—oak trees, beech trees, fruit trees, and behind the pool, his real pride and joy, pine trees, with special retaining walls constructed around them to hold in the water that was needed to soak the arid ground. Hank used to stand and water them for hours in the hope that someday they would grow big enough to surround the house.

There was a big open field up in back—the North 40, Hank called it—where Bill and Peter used to have rock fights. One of them would position himself in a trench and the other in the log cabin that Hank had built as a playhouse, and with a characteristic lack of antagonism, they would chuck rocks and pieces of brick at each other, using ashcan tops as shields. One time, incited by Jane and me, the five of us hid behind the pine trees and methodically threw rocks, pine cones, clods of earth, anything we could find at every car that passed us on the road until finally we hit one. Its enraged owner got out and chased us across the field, but we were too nimble for him—all except Peter, who was nabbed in a clump of beeches, whereupon Jane and I, overflowing with adrenalin and bravado, wheeled around and went back for him, screaming at the man to let go of him that minute. Frances Fonda made an appearance, and the Haywards were sent home fast.

Another time Bill and Peter, out of idle curiosity, struck a match and set fire to the dry grass in the North 40. Pleased with the results, they settled down to see how quickly the blaze would spread, which was so much faster than they had anticipated that they had to jump up, scamper down to the tennis court for some empty tennis-ball cans, race over to the pool to fill them with water, and then dash back up to the fire. By that time it was raging out of control, so the fire department had to be called; before the afternoon was over, one fireman had been bitten by a rattlesnake and the whole North 40 burned up.

As soon as the Haywards were allowed to return after that episode, Jane and I plotted a sneak attack on the old doctor who lived at the top of a sinister brush-covered hill adjacent to the Fonda property. We had been observing him—or the lack of him, since he seldom showed himself—for some months, patiently biding our time and waiting for the perfect opportunity to catch him in one of his evil scientific experiments. The ideal moment to strike turned out to be Halloween. Gladly followed by the others, we inched our way up the hill on our bellies, maneuvering toward our objective with supreme stoicism through the burrs and brush and cactus. We had almost made it, when suddenly, down in the Fonda driveway, we heard the loud clanging of the dinner bell: it was our governesses imperiously recalling us to the house. We stumbled all the way down the side of the hill, crashing into trees, scraping our knees, tearing our clothes, total wrecks when we arrived at the bottom, where we were lectured very heavily about