My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson

Author:Barbara Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Adoption of Albert

There were so many children in our neighborhood that my mother was never surprised to find unfamiliar ones in the house, or in the backyard, or in my room, or in Louis’s room.

“Well, who’s this?” she would say, and she would then go on to connect that child with whatever house or family he belonged to.

But when Louis showed up with his new friend Albert, Mother had other things on her mind: the family reunion, which was two days away; the distant cousin who would be staying at our house; most of all, my Aunt Rhoda’s famous Family Reunion cake, which, in Aunt Rhoda’s absence, Mother felt obliged to provide.

Aunt Rhoda’s absence, and the reason for it, were both first-time events: She had never before missed a family reunion, and neither she nor anyone else had ever before been called into court to testify about anything. Aunt Rhoda was to testify about an automobile accident she had witnessed—the only automobile accident in local memory, my father said, that did not involve Aunt Mildred.

All in all, it was a complicated time for Mother—cake, cousins, company—and when Louis appeared at the kitchen door and said, “This is Albert,” she was too distracted to ask her usual questions.

Nor did she ask them at suppertime. By then she was up to her elbows in cake batter and left the three of us to eat alone with my father, who also didn’t know Albert, but assumed that everyone else did.

I didn’t know Albert either, but there was no reason why 1 should. He was Louis’s friend, he was Louis’s age, he even looked a lot like Louis—small and quiet and solemn—and it didn’t occur to me to find out any more about him. 1 did ask, “Where do you live, Albert?”; and when he said, “Here,” 1 just thought he meant here in the neighborhood instead of someplace else.

Mother thought the same thing. “Where does that little boy live?” she asked me the next morning, and I said, “Here,” and she said, “I wonder which house?”

Albert had spent the night, and there was a note propped against the cereal box: Albert and I have gone to dig worms.

Louis had been collecting worms all summer and measuring them to see how long a worm got to be before it died. “I think that’s what kills them,” he said. “I think they die of length.”

So far his longest worm was between four inches and four and a half inches. All his worms were between one size and another because they wouldn’t hold still. “It’s really hard,” he said. “I have to stretch them out and measure them at the same time, and if I’m not careful they come apart.”

“Oh, Louis,” I said, “that’s awful! What do you do then?”

He shrugged. “I bury the pieces. What else can I do?”

Of course, most kids wouldn’t even do that, but Louis was neater than most kids.

It was late afternoon when he and Albert came back, and they had big news.

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