Haymarket: A Sharlie Adventure Short Story

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  Haymarket: A Sharley Adventure

  Peg Lewis

  Copyright © 2012 by Peg Lewis

  For Noah, With Thanks

  I waited and waited for Mom’s baby to come. And when she did, I found I had a new best friend.

  That lump of a baby was not very interesting, despite the cute ears and toothless mouth and very small toes. She didn’t do anything much, and she needed Mom for all of it, the feeding, the clean pants, the holding while she cried. And she cried a lot.

  But my new best friend and I had plenty to do and pretty soon I paid no attention to Mom and Baby Sissy and headed out for adventures with Dad instead.

  We had so much fun! We’d go pick blueberries up near the woods. We’d get out our gloves and throw the baseball back and forth, and he showed me how to hold the bat and how to pitch when it was his turn. We drove all the way to the shore and shivered and threw rocks in the water and he showed me how to skip them. On rainy days he sat on my bed and read to me or we took turns, and every night we did another chapter in Lord of the Rings.

  Of course my dad went to work most days, but there was time for adventures, too. I could hardly wait till he got home, and when he did, he always threw me into the air a few times, which made my insides jiggle.

  Most afternoons we could go out and play baseball for a short time before we needed to come in and start supper. I stood on a chair at the counter while he chopped and stirred. He taught me how to be careful with a knife, so I started cutting the beans into short pieces. I also peeled the onions so he could cut them up, and I stirred the cornbread until the lumps were gone.

  In the winter it was nearly dark out when he got home. Even so, we took a few minutes to do bellyfloppers on my sled, or go down the hill together, him in the back holding the ropes, me in the front ready to put on the brakes with my feet.

  One day Dad said, “Let’s go to Boston, to Haymarket!”

  “What’s Haymarket?” I asked him.

  “It’s a huge outdoor market where you can buy all kinds of things, vegetables of all sorts, honey, meat…” he answered. “And I need someone to help me carry everything. What do you think? Can you do that?”

  “SURE!” I said.

  It turns out we went on the subway. In all my five-and-a-half years I had never been on the subway! Dad went on it every day to work.

  We took some old cloth bags out of the closet. They had straps. I remember using them once when I was really little to put apples in when Dad and I had got some from under the old apple tree one day. Now we put the bags on our shoulders. I had one, Dad had two. We said good-bye to Mom (and Sissy) and got in the car. In a minute we were at the subway station.

  I got the bag back up on my shoulder and Dad and I headed toward the train tracks. There was no train anywhere. Dad said we had to wait for the next one.

  I looked down the track. It was coming. It looked very big, and it was horribly noisy. I moved back behind Dad and held onto his leg. It came up right next to us and stopped, hissing and screaming.

  The doors opened and Dad took my hand and in we went. There were seats and poles, and doors on both sides. And there were some people but no other kids. Dad put some money in the little box for me and showed the driver his pass. The train started up. We bumped along for a while. I saw the backs of houses, fences, trees, some cars in a parking lot. We stopped, more people got on, and we saw more houses and cars. Then all at once we went into a tunnel and all I could see were some yellow lights. I grasped Dad’s hand tightly.

  He said, “Now we’re underground, under the city, under the streets and cars. This way we don’t have to stop for them and they don’t have to stop for us.”

  I looked at him. That meant that cars were driving on top of us right now! I wondered if the tunnel could be strong enough.

  We kept going for a short distance, then the brakes squealed and we stopped. The doors opened and some people got out and others got in. We started up again, and then stopped several more times. Dad said, “We’re looking for a sign that says ‘Haymarket’ and we’ll get out. When we see it, we need to get up and get out before the door closes again, ok?” I said ok and squeezed his hand tighter.

  A few more stops went by. Each time we slowed down, the driver yelled out the name of the stop. He didn’t say Haymarket and after a while I stopped listening. Then Dad said, “Here we are! Haymarket.” The driver yelled out Haymarket right then too, the subway came quickly to a stop, and the doors opened. We were outside in a moment.

  Dad kept a hold of my hand as we turned to the left and followed some other people down the tunnel. We went up a stairwell, and then I was very happy to see we were outside again.

  Crowds of people were wandering all over the place. We walked a short distance till we came to a tiny outdoor store with a terrible smell, like fish. “Here’s the fish stall,” said Dad. “We’ll come back here at the end so the fish we take home is as fresh as it can be.”

  So we wandered on, looking at everything in every stall. It was so interesting! There were big folded pieces of cloth all stacked up. The colors were none that I had names for, but kinds of reds, kinds of browns, kinds of greens. And some had gold and silver threads. In the next stall over there were hats of all kinds. Dad put a big straw one on my head. It fell right over my eyes. Dad laughed and put it back on the stack.

  Then we came to the potatoes. The whole little store, the stall, was filled with them. Brown ones came in all shapes, some of them little and some very very big. Blue ones, red ones, yellow ones, skinny ones, perfectly round ones, these were all stacked up in tall piles. And the man behind the table where all the potatoes were was just adding some to a fire that had been made in a big barrel, and taking some black ones off it. Dad held out a dollar and the man gave him a potato in a tiny brown bag. He squished it open and the man poured some melted butter over it. Then Dad sprinkled some cheese from a shaker over it and handed it to me.

  The wind was blowing and the hot potato warmed my hands. I nibbled around the skin and sucked out the hot butter and squeezed the potato from the bottom up until it was all gone. While I was eating I had followed Dad as he went to other stalls and picked out turnips and a cabbage and squeezed them into one of the bags, and then I watched him add a bunch of carrots and their green feathery tops into the other and add some onions too.

  Into my bag he put some apples and pears. They smelled good. He paid the woman at the stall and then he slid some coins into my jeans pocket. He said they were for my piggybank at home. I patted them: it felt like a lot of money! I had never had money in my pocket before.

  And now we were out of room in our bags for anything else, and there were so many things to see and buy! Dad said, “It looks to me as though you have a spare hand! Can you carry one more thing?”

  “Yes,” I said as bravely as I could, and I threw my shoulders back to look even stronger for him. The bag of apples and pears was really very heavy, but I thought I could hold something in my other hand.

  So Dad took me over to a small cart on wheels and said something to the man there, and came up with an ice cream cone, vanilla! It was my favorite!

  Right there at the ice cream cone cart a line was growing longer and longer. I couldn’t see why. Where were they going? And then I noticed it: a gigantic colorful puffed-up something that was held down by ropes. It had a basket at the bottom and people were taking turns getting in it, then going up into the air, then coming back down and getting out. A fire that roared was in the middle of it and it looked to me as though the people were going to get burned.

  But Dad said no, it was safe. It was a hot-air balloon and the heat from
the fire made it go up by making the air inside the balloon hot. And then when they turned off the fire, the air inside cooled down and the balloon came down again.

  I could believe the air inside cooled off without the fire. It was getting really cold outside and the wind was blowing all the time and I stayed in the bright sunshine as much as I could, though it really wasn’t helping that much.

  Dad said, “Let’s get in line. We can go up in the balloon, too! Wouldn’t you like that?”

  I thought about it. It looked very big and the idea of going up was rather scary. But everyone who went up looked happy. And they kept pointing down at us and laughing and yelling at us how small we were!

  So I said ok, and we got in line and Dad paid for some tickets (and he gave me some more money for my pocket) and before I was even sure I wanted to go up, it was our turn. We got into the balloon basket through a special door, along with a few other children and many grown-ups. Then the man who had taken the tickets turned on the fire and up we went. I felt frightened and hung onto Dad.

  When we got as high up as the ropes would let us go, the man turned off the fire so we could go down.

  But instead of stopping, the fire burst up into a huge flame like a ball and that whole colorful balloon started to burn. At first it seemed we would go even higher, but the ropes held us in place. Everyone was