Free The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen Page A

are you doing?” and I called back: “Reading!” The lie was justified: I was now God’s Instrument and had work to do.
    I gave the cat a blue collar and one white paw and took a chip out of his ear, just like Oscar, though I couldn’t remember which ear and hoped it didn’t matter. I made an old woman in a black dress and gave her a high lace collar and little black boots and pushed very small beads in the sides of the clay for buttons. I gave the lady black curly hair, glued pieces of cut-up staple in her hair for clips, painted her face white and her lips red. I made a trail of cat prints leading through the snow to the old lady and put the cat on her lap and made sure he was curled up and didn’t look like he was going to get up again. I sewed his eyes closed and tucked his paws in. Then I said: “Come home Oscar.”
    When I had finished, I wondered what might actually happen if the miracle worked. Would Oscar’s whiskers be singed after being flown back from wherever he was at the speed of light, or would his fur stand on end after being brought back to life with a bolt of lightning? Anyway I went round to Mrs. Pew’s and knocked on the door. I saw her wobbling head and smelled the secondhand-shop smell and felt a bit queasy, but I stayed where I was and when she opened the door I said: “Don’t worry about Oscar, Mrs. Pew. I have a feeling he’ll be home very soon.”
    She turned up her hearing aid and I said it all over again, and then she said: “Oh, I do hope so. I do hope so!”
    I said: “Have faith, Mrs. Pew.”
    Then she said: “Pardon?”
    And I said: “HAVE FAITH!”
    Her hand fluttered at the base of her throat and she said: “Oh. I certainly will.”
    She watched me go down the garden path. When I was at the gate she said suddenly: “You’re Judith, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    She said: “Thank you, Judith. It was nice of you to come by.”
    I said: “You’re welcome, Mrs. Pew.”
    When I got back, I wrote up the miracle in my journal, then turned over three pages and wrote: Has Oscar come home yet? and then I wrote the same on the next.
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    I WAITED FOR Oscar all that day and the next day too but it just went on snowing. In the meantime I decided that even though I didn’t want to go back to school, because of Neil Lewis, the snow would have to go. Father kept talking about how much work he was missing and accidents were happening on roads and old people like Joe were getting sick. Father said Joe had gone into the hospital and Watson was being looked after by a neighbor. So that afternoon I undraped the gauze and peeled back the cotton wool and blew away the flour and broke the icicles off the houses. I rolled up the cotton and dismantled the blizzard and packed up the snowmen and wiped away the shaving foam and put the blue back in the sky and turned on the sun.
    On Saturday night the wind dropped. The next morning, blue sky appeared. By the afternoon the sun was quite warm. Icicles dripped outside my window like someone playing jars of water. The snow in the street became slushy and broke into platelets of ice. Father said: “I knew it couldn’t last.” I didn’t say anything but went and stood on the pavement and listened to water running into the drains at the side of the pavement and said: “Thank You, God. You have me again.”
    But there was no Oscar. I waited all day and I waited all evening. I said: “Did I do it right, God?” But God must still have been busy with the four horsemen or something, because He didn’t answer.
    I sat up in bed that night and watched clouds crossing the moon and veiling and unveiling the Land of Decoration. I watched the sun come over the mountain and blink a bleary red eye, striping the sky pink and yellow like a stick of rock. But there was still no sight of Oscar.
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    I WAS STANDING in the garden with Father after the meeting the next day when the fourth miracle happened.
    Father was clearing the