The Mirk and Midnight Hour by Jane Nickerson Page A

what we need for food. We would have possum and squirrel for supper every night.”
    “You make my mouth water. In some places where our poor soldiers haven’t much to eat, they’re devouring rats. They say fat ones taste like squirrel.”
    “And we would have rats too,” he assured me. “Anytime you wanted them. Last year before—last year I asked Father if I might have a gun for Christmas, and he said he had one all picked out. But then afterward—nobody remembered that. Aunt Lovy gave me a hobbyhorse. She thought it would make me like horses better. It didn’t,” he finished with disgust.
    Poor little boy. His parents had both succumbed to diphtheria the previous spring and had died within two weeks of each other.
    “Now”—I indicated the little dell, creamy with clover—“can you find the entrance to our hiding place?”
    Seeley meticulously inspected tree trunks, as if he expected concealed doors to pop open on springs, and poked beneath brambles and bushes.
    “Do you give up?” I asked.
    “No,” he said—then, “Aha!” The ground beneath him had yielded a bit.
    Michael had made a trapdoor and covered it with dirt and a mat of tangled creepers, undetectable unless someone was looking for it and stepped right on top. I showed Seeley the handle. He lifted itwith some trouble but, refusing all help, revealed the black, gaping hole beneath.
    We descended the ramp, which Michael had made sturdy enough to support our stock. I warned Seeley that there was always an inch of water seeped into the floor below.
    An odor of damp earth and fungus hit us. Inside, in the murky light, we could just make out the shelf, which held a stub of candle and my family’s few pieces of silver, wrapped in burlap sacking.
    “At the first sign of Yankees,” I said, “we’ll stash anything here they might be interested in. So, would Heath Blackstock approve?”
    “It’s a good hideout,” Seeley said.
    On the way back to the house I showed him the big magnolia tree with branches spaced so perfectly it was almost like climbing up stairs. It was the same one Laney and I had often played house beneath. “I still go up there to read sometimes, just so I can suddenly look at myself and think, What an unlikely place I’m at . And so no one will ever suspect in a million years where I happen to be.”
    Seeley scaled the branches. When he came down, I taught him how to suck honeysuckle nectar and fight off the attack geese in the kitchen yard.
    It was a splendid afternoon, and at suppertime Seeley seemed more relaxed because of it. He still twitched some, but he spoke more easily, and didn’t put on the sulky face he had previously worn with the others. He told about his adventures that day. “Violet likes to read books up high in the magnolia tree,” he announced.
    Sunny rolled her eyes. “Really, Vi-let?”
    I smiled brightly back at her. “I do. When the wind blows, it’s like being in a green ocean.”
    “Whimsical …,” Dorian murmured, so softly that only I heard.
    “Tomorrow I’m going to stay up there all day,” Seeley said. “I’ll take one of Rush’s books that has pictures of the Huns riding around with heads tied to their saddles.”
    Sunny made a face. “Horrid child,” she said. “Look at how he relishes that sort of nasty thing.”
    Seeley laughed out loud at being called a horrid child.
    “Just be careful when you’re climbing, Squid,” I said.
    “I know, I know,” Seeley said. “Why do you call me Squid?”
    “Because I like that word and I like you, so the two of you just sort of go together.”
    “My mother always called me Seal.” The smile faded from my little cousin’s face.
    “Tomorrow,” I announced, changing the subject, “I’m going to help at the courthouse hospital.”
    “Why must you go to that foul place?” Sunny asked. “They’ve got other folks to nurse those fellows now—all the snotty women from Mobile who think they’re so vital to the Cause.”
    “I