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

kitchen table there was always a tumbler full of flowers: nasturtiums or moss roses or petunias; anything the old man had happened to grab out of his tangled garden to stick in amongst the mint and chives and parsley that he kept there. Today there were some dark red raggedy chrysanthemums, picked too short, and a sprig of basil. Under the table the cat-basket was empty; before long Mr. Titus’s cat, Battledore, would bring more kittens to it; her last ones had grown up and gone off to seek their fortunes. His dog, Hambone, lay beside the splendid stove, which crackled lustily as it devoured its coal fire. Hambone was really old, much older than Isaac, and instead of getting up when the children came in he lay where he was, looked at them, and whacked the floor with his tail.
    â€œHim and me we feel the damp at our age,” said Mr. Titus. “Hard to get up, hard to lay down; harder to set. The joints, they get corroded, just like old pipes. But then I never hankered much after exercise. Have a seat, have a seat.”
    Randy sat on the good old rocker with its flattened cushion and Oliver crouched on a footstool. Both of them had noted instantly that, though there was a clock on the shelf by the window, it was just an old-fashioned alarm clock, and above it hung the bird cage which housed Tibbet, the canary. He was yeeping away at the top of his lungs; goodness knows his voice was never silent except when he was sleeping, so it couldn’t be that clock.… Pretty soon—after the cookies, perhaps—one of them would ask to examine the grandfather clock in the hall.
    Mr. Titus sat at the table spooning cookie batter out of an old crockery bowl onto an old work-scarred cookie sheet. Everything about the place was old: owner, dog, stove, utensils. Tibbet was not young. Even the calendars were venerable, some going back as far as fifteen years. The current one was hung inside a cupboard door. “Don’t like the picture on it,” Mr. Titus explained. “I like a calendar with a real nice scene on it; moonrise on the water, maybe, or an Indian in a canoe. These young women they got on ’em nowdays—all dressed up in bathing suits and cowboy outfits and all grinning—they don’t appeal to me.”
    â€œThat’s what I like about this place,” said Oliver frankly. “Everything in it is good and old. It makes you feel comfortable. I like oldness.”
    â€œEverything’s pretty antique all right,” agreed Mr. Titus. “I bought this cookie sheet in nineteen seventeen. This bowl, this same bowl, I used to lick the leavin’s of the icin’ out of when I was a boy no bigger’n Oliver. My Aunt Effie’s bowl, it was.”
    â€œIn our house things don’t last so long,” said Randy. “They break or wear out or the dogs chew them. They get bent or lost, and sometimes they turn up in queer places. We found the eggbeater, after searching for days, in with Oliver’s chemical set.”
    â€œI was doing an experiment,” Oliver explained. “I wanted to see what would happen if I beat an egg or two in with some iron sulphide, just for fun.”
    â€œWhat happened was a smell,” said Randy. “Oliver lost interest in this experiment and let it stand there for a week, and pretty soon the smell began to put out feelers like an octopus, and they had such strength that they dragged us up the stairs to where they were coming from, and that’s how we found the eggbeater.”
    â€œYes, but another time, Mr. Titus—this was neat—Cuffy couldn’t find her umbrella anywhere. Nobody could find it,” Oliver said. “I did, finally. It was up in a tree, opened out nice and tied to a branch. Randy’d put it up over a robin’s nest once when it was raining; she thought the mother robin would appreciate a roof. She didn’t though; she and the father robin were insulted. They went away and built a