Free Us and Uncle Fraud by Lois Lowry Page A

airplanes with our construction paper, calling loudly across the room to special friends, all of us outraged that our outdoor world had spurned us and was keeping us prisoners here in a chalk-smelling room.
    Many school desks were empty. The buses still came in every morning from the country, but only the girls from the farms came to school. Their brothers were kept at home to help try to save their land, for the interminable driving rain was pulverizing the rich topsoil and washing it away, and the mud-filled river was rising and threatening the fields. In my sixth-grade class, the Sorenson twins, Anders and Karl, were absent; and sturdy Nicholas Rostov was gone, though his sister Lydia still came every day to third grade, running from the bus with her kerchief tightly knotted under her chin and rain streaks on her ruddy face.
    Father was tense and agitated in the evenings and was frequently on the telephone. The robbery at the
Leboffs' house, though still unsolved, was old news now; there were more immediate concerns. The river was higher already than it had been in years, the rain was still coming down, and if it didn't stop, there would be a flood.
    Yet in other parts of the country, there was sunshine. Marcus and I knew because Claude sent us a postcard to tell us so. Claude was apparently in Denver, far to our west.
    "In Denver the sun is shining," I told Mother, holding the treasured postcard.
    "Actually," I went on, looking at the card again, "the sun is
shinning
in Denver. At least that's what he says."
    It still bothered me that Claude—a man who'd been to the edge of the Baltic Sea—couldn't spell. "Well," the postcard addressed to me and Marcus read, "hear I am in Denver, Colaraddo, would you beleive it? The sun is shinning."
    I didn't want Father or Tom to know and to ridicule Claude. But privately I showed the card to Mother and watched her face as she read it. She simply smiled and gave it back to me.
    "He must have been in a hurry when he wrote it," I suggested. "See how he spelled things wrong? Same as the note he left for us. And I know he was in a hurry then, to catch the train."
    But she said no. "That's just Claude," she said. "Such a talker—he always was, even as a child. But reading and writing came hard for Claude. He was never much for school."
    I told Marcus what she had said, and he rubbed his tongue across his jagged-edged tooth and nodded. "Like you and diving," he pointed out matter-of-factly.
    I glared at him for a moment. But he wasn't needling me, not this time; he was simply stating a fact. And it was a fact. I was an excellent swimmer, "a veritable fish," Father always said proudly. Every summer we spent a month in a rented cottage on the shore of the small lake fifteen miles east of town. I had learned to swim there so long ago that I could no longer remember the learning. The water was like air to me; I felt at home in it, and every morning, even when it rained, I ran across the tiny pebbled beach and, without pausing, continued into the lake until I was submerged. Then I would simply go on, running merging naturally into swimming, and I moved easily, weightless and supple, through the cold green fluid world. I never tired. Sometimes for hours I propelled myself through the lake, under the water or on its surface, occasionally so far out that I could look back toward shore and see the cottage and my family on the beach, flattened in perspective like cardboard scenery on a stage. From the distance I could hear Mother's voice: "Not so far, Louise!" and I would knife my way back, slicing through the water, to placate her, peering through my beaded, watery eyelashes until she waved and smiled, reassured.
    I was as buoyant and facile in the lake as Claude was with speech. But I couldn't dive. Tom was an
agile, competent diver who had won awards at Boy Scout camp. And even Marcus, a thrashing dog-paddler easily given to panic if he couldn't feel the stony bottom under his feet,