Oliphant Island: A Tale of Three Sisters

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OLIPHANT

ISLAND

A TALE OF THREE SISTERS

MARY DAVIS

OLIPHANT ISLAND: A TALE OF THREE SISTERS

Copyright © 2014 by Mary Rothwell Davis. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher. The Song of the Rose Fairy, by Cicely Mary Barker, is reproduced with permission of Frederick Warne & Co and Penguin UK.

CONTENTS

Dedication

With gratitude…

The Oliphant Family Tree

Ducks

A Long Time

An Island in the Middle of Nowhere

So—Now What?

Not the List Again!

Yippee-Ti-Yi-Yo

Failure Is Not an Option

My Island, My Rules

Where the Sun Never Shines

What Is Left and Who Is Right?

Martha Lou the King

Since You Asked….

Heaven above and the Sea Below

Believing Is Seeing

The Little Dog Laughed

The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

Hey, Everybody, Watch This!

What’s in a Name?

Little Wonder

Your High Horse Has Arrived, Madam

Just When We Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Better

Train Now Leaving the Station!

My Kingdom for a Horse

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Till It’s Gone

There Is No New Thing under the Sun

A Sight for Sore Eyes

If That’S How You Want to See It

The Bear Went over the Mountain

And What Do You Think He Saw?

Click Here to LIKE This!

So Little to Do, so Much Time

With a Little Bit of Luck

The Magic in the Books

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

And That’S How You Do It

The Disaster, or All Good Things Must End

Words Can Never, Never Tell

Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too

Goodness, Where Did the Time Go?

About the Author

For Sara, Charlotte and Phoebe

Three kind and good-hearted girls who are the best stories of my life

With gratitude to Cathleen Bell, Fiona Donovan, Emily Fox Gordon, Suzanne Crow and Evan Davis for generous readings, warm encouragement, and gentle nudging along a very winding trail. Additional thanks to Stewart Williams for creating a beautiful cover and to 52 Novels as well as Debbi Wraga of Shires Press for publication assistance.

I’ve got a mule

Her name is Sal

15 years on the Erie Canal

She’s a good old worker and a good old pal

15 miles on the Erie Canal

DUCKS

4Racing into the musty old house, the Oliphant girls immediately began turning the ducks. Brown and green and orange and dusty, the ducks sat on a ledge above the rickety, rattlety glass doors that opened to the porch overlooking the lake. Great-grandmother Felicity Oliphant had amassed a collection of wooden decoy ducks that now numbered in the many dozens. Each June, the moment the girls arrived at the house after the long journey from New York City, they turned the ducks around to make them fly north, as ducks always do when winter ends. And that meant summer, with all its promise, had sprung fully to life.

Once that was done, however, there was just about nothing else to do except look forward to turning them south again at Labor Day.

A LONG TIME

4The Oliphants had spent summers at High-Top, their family camp in the Adirondacks, for 120 years.

EVERY summer here feels like 120 years! grumped Lulu, the middle Oliphant daughter, on the second day of their summer vacation. There is NOTHING TO DO! She shouted this last part, stressing each syllable with equal irritation, so that Auntie Ariel, sitting downstairs at the kitchen table, heard her clearly.

Well, Lu, said Miranda, her rather (okay, very) bossy older sister. How about you straighten your drawers? They’re disgusting. Do I really have to share a room with you for the whole summer?

Lulu glowered, but fell silent. Miranda was never idle. Lulu attributed Miranda’s irksome air of cheerful industry to an unnaturally high tolerance for extremely boring activity, such as creating color-coded file folders for her school coursework. Miranda’s prize possession was her electric 3-hole punch. Really, did Lulu have to tell you any more?

Auntie Ariel overheard all of this, but gave the bickering almost no thought. The girls’ mother, Ariel’s sister-in-law Katherine, had warned her that they would be out of sorts for at least the first three days, after the initial excitement of arrival. Ariel just hadn’t expected the initial excitement to last a mere five minutes. But she understood. The girls were accustomed to city life, where adventure shimmered all around them even as they dozed fitfully in their beds high above Riverside Drive. In the city they kept up a relentless schedule of schoolwork, sports, music lessons, and enriching, if rather dull, cultural outings. The quiet here at Island Camp was more deadly than the Egyptian rooms at the Met.

I made it to 1000! cried a voice just outside the back door. It was Allegra Katherine, the youngest Oliphant, who was never called by her real, much-too-long name. She was always known as Leggy, or, to make her mad, Alley-Kat. Her sisters had thought that Leggy was a hilarious nickname when Leggy’s legs were barely longer than a strand of spaghetti, but now she really was getting to be quite tall for her age. Whew! Leggy exclaimed, letting the screen door slam behind her. That is my world record! I need a cold drink! She dropped her jump rope on the old linoleum tile next to the sink, thrust her head under a stream of cold water pouring from the faucet, and then rummaged through the cupboard for a glass. Of course, it had already crossed most everyone’s mind that Leggy couldn’t actually count all the way to 1000.

There’s not much point in mentioning that the kitchen linoleum was old, because everything at High-Top was old. Really old. Not antique or fancy or charming or retro; just OLD, as in: dingy, decrepit, dank, dusty, disintegrating, and disgusting, and all the other dreary D words, such as dirty, dated, dreadful, depressing, dolorous, dilapidated, doomed and dumpy.*

This summer, however, there would be something new: destruction and danger. A distant beeping sound, floating over the lake, went right past the girls, unnoticed, so used they were to clanking street noise. Something was coming, and coming soon.

*Dismal, dark, downtrodden and dim would also be descriptive. Also, dubious. Go back

AN ISLAND IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

4The girls’ great-great grandfather, Roderick Oliphant (known as Roderick the First in the family tales), had made an enormous fortune in shipping, as one of the builders of the Erie Canal. According to the fashion of the time, he had purchased thousands of acres of wilderness deep in the Adirondack Mountains, and then, at great inconvenience to everyone, set up a household suitable for a duke upon the most remote spot within that vast tract of land. Native American Iroquois guides had led resentful servants carrying silver soup tureens through bramble and around rock slides in order to furnish High-Top. His long-suffering wife Beatrice had spent many dubious summers overseeing lavish entertainment of guests who, once there, stayed for weeks on end to avoid the arduous trip home. Unfortunately, though, so much Oliphant effort was put in to making High-Top a viable summer estate that it was nearly impossible to give it up, even long after the many drawbacks of the arrangement had become undeniable.

The particular home of the girls’, however, was even more remote. Island Camp had been built as a hideaway on an island in the middle of Lake Millicent, named for Roderick the First’s beloved mother, Millicent. (Why anyone would need a hideaway when that person was already in the middle of nowhere was something Lulu found mystifying.) Cal, the grumpy caretaker who seemed to have been working for the Oliphant family the entire 120 years of their time there, ferried the girls out to the Island in mid-June, and most summers they rarely left High-Top again until the end of summer.

Island Camp wasn’t too different from the remote, craggy islands to which dangerous criminals were condemned in scary books. Except that instead of crazed criminals, the prisoners of Oliphant Island were three kind and good-hearted girls, who had to make do with their harsh and limiting circumstances. A sad tale, indeed!

And where was all this Oliphant luxury now? It had gone the way of the Erie Canal, which few children today have even heard of. There was no money at all left in that trickle of muddy water! Once upon a time the Erie Canal had been a magical gateway from the old, Eastern part of the country to the young and growing Midwest. People and supplies could go all the way from New York City to Chicago using the canal and the Great Lakes. Over the years, trains, and then roads, and then airplanes and highways had eliminated the need for a water canal. Sal, the tired old mule who towed a barge 15 miles on the Erie Canal in the song, had enjoyed more lasting fame and fortune than most of the Oliphant family.

SO—NOW WHAT?

4The girls were huddled at the old computer in Daddy’s study, composing a letter to him:

Dear Daddy,

We miss you VERY MUCH and wish you were here RIGHT NOW. Miranda was so bossy on the trip up.

She listened to her iPod the whole way and yelled at us anytime we tried to sing or play games or have any fun at all. It was horrible!!!! LOVE, Your DEAREST LEGGY

Daddy, this is Miranda. Don’t listen to Leggy! They were terrible. They fought and whined the whole way and I thought for sure Aunt Ariel was going to cry or turn around and take us home. We are at the house now, thanks to me, only. Everyone is doing a little better and except for how boring it is here we are okay. We miss you but hope you are getting a lot done on your book.

Love,

Miranda

Oh yeah Daddy don’t worry about us!! We are totally fine here in the middle of a falling down house with no parents and almost nothing to do except keep the house from falling down! You just have a great time writing your book and eating in fancy restaurants and having tea with the Queen and all that hard stuff you have to do while we slowly die of boredom and bug bites.

Love,

Lulu

No seriously Dad we love you we are fine have a great time!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

They printed out the letter on the ancient printer, the one where all the paper was connected together in an enormous chain, and the girls had to tear little perforated strips off the sides in order to make normal sheets of paper. The old computer couldn’t have connected to the Internet even if they’d had the capacity, which (of course) they did not. So the computer was boring, unable to do anything, really, except save shopping lists, letters and Lulu’s old The Amazing Lulu! stories on large, thin plastic discs nearly the size of Frisbees. They carefully addressed an envelope, using the address Miranda had been given just before they had left:

Professor Roderick Oliphant IV

The Ruskin Hotel

23-24 Montague Street

Bloomsbury

London WC1B 5BN

ENGLAND

When they finished, they lingered a moment in Daddy’s study. Thousands of books filled the house, with most here in the study, arranged carefully on carved oak bookcases, from floor to ceiling, many old and rare and in Latin or German or Italian or another unreadable language, but far more were in English, from every decade since the printing press had been invented, it seemed, and many with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations carefully bound in leather. Great-grandmother Felicity had loved words in every form.

Lulu loved to spend time in here, looking through the volumes, occasionally reading chapters straight through. Much of what she read she didn’t understand, but sometimes she found a book she understood perfectly, and she was always amazed and a little excited to discover that the foreign land of grown-ups was not so different after all, that grown-ups were silly and dreamy and mean and sad, just like Lulu. It was like discovering that she was already fluent in a language she’d thought she’d have to struggle to learn. She always returned each book to its proper place. Professor Oliphant was strict about that; plus, she didn’t like anyone to know what she’d been reading. The top shelves could only be reached by ladder, and the ladder was not in good repair. The girls were forbidden to take down the books from the higher shelves. Lulu could just make out the titles of a few. One in particular always caught her eye: DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT. She was dying to look at that one. Her grandmother Ollie always said that there was magic in her books, but this one seemed especially promising in that department.

NOT THE LIST AGAIN!

4They brought the finished letter to Ariel, who promised to have Cal mail it. Having taken care of Daddy, Ariel said, it was time to make The Summer List.

At the start of a normal summer, Professor Oliphant would gather the children around the kitchen table on the first morning, and divide a sheet of paper into three columns. He would write at the top of each column, MIRANDA, LULU and LEGGY. Ahem, he might say. Ahem. Now each of you name ten interesting activities that you should like to experience this summer. It was actually rather difficult to suggest ten interesting things without repeating something on another sister’s list, and the children would rush to claim the most thrilling and obvious—S’Mores! Kayaking! Berry-picking!

There would be discussion as to how unanimous enthusiasm had to be for an activity. Leggy had left the table in tears last summer over the reaction of her sisters to her offering of Search for Fairy Houses! Miranda, almost 15 and going into 9th grade, had had quite enough of Leggy and her pesky fairies. Leggy had been reading a fairy series for more than a full year now. In Miranda’s view, it was a tedious, repetitive set of tales in which tiny, adorable fairies faced the same basic challenges over and over again from a persnickety ogre from Faraway Land, with only slight variations in name, weather, and costume. Leggy greeted each new volume as a wondrous, original marvel, and delighted in recounting the plots to Miranda in mind-numbing detail.

The List, once completed, was tacked prominently to the bead-board wall by the refrigerator, over mysterious graffiti