Lottery Rose by Irene Hunt

Author:Irene Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was still dark when he awoke, refreshed and ready to begin an important day. When he heard the bell in the front tower chime four times he thought he couldn’t live through the long line of hours that must pass before he would walk across the street and into the garden for his promised visit with the rosebush.

He was wide awake and tired of any bed after many days of illness and inactivity. He sat up and looked across the street where darkness covered everything, allowing only gray outlines of the big white house to show through the night and the blacker shadows of tall palms on the school ground to shift lazily in the breeze. He could barely recognize Timothy sound asleep on the mattress beside him; the dim figures of the other boys sprawled a short distance away.

He breathed deeply of the fragrant air that drifted across from the garden, feeling almost giddy with the heavy perfume and the softness of the night air. Above him the sky had stars scattered all over it, some so low that a boy able to climb the highest palm with an arm suddenly well again, might pull some of them down and watch the light flash in them as they were dropped from one hand to the other.

He dreamed of that possibility for a while and the earliness of the hour together with the darkness pushed the real world away from him. He seemed to hear voices all around him. “How did you ever get them out of the sky?” the voices wondered. “What are you going to do with them stars, Georgie?”

After a while he heard Timothy, excited and pleading: “Can I hold one of them, Georgie, just for a little while?”

His own voice had grown deep and quiet like Mr. Collier’s when he answered: “No Timothy, you can’t. They belong to Mrs. Harper’s boy—the one that would be as old as us if he wasn’t dead—”

After a while another voice called him. It was faint and far away, but it insisted that he listen. “Why do you have to wait all those hours till tomorrow, Georgie? I need to talk to you—right now.”

He rose quietly from his mattress and stood listening intently. After a minute he walked very slowly across the wide lawn and into the street. “Of course,” he thought, “of course I have to do it.”

Out in the street he stood with his good arm outstretched, his face turned up to the starry sky. He laughed softly to himself as the light wind ran through his hair.

“I am like the boy in the story—I am all alone in the night and nobody can see me.” He wished that he could sing as the boy in the story sang, but he didn’t know a single song although that evening his throat had tightened as if it had wanted very much to sing when he heard Sister Mary Angela’s music coming from the chapel.

“But anyway, I have a rosebush!” That was enough.

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