Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Page B

grew out, and were streaked at the ends with pink and green; closer to their bodies, they were thick and white: real duck feathers. I thought them beautiful. I thought their loyalty, as they waddled behind the twins in squat postures of devotion, a heroic, humbling thing.
    But my heart went out to Donald Duck. Donald was Noah's; and my heart went out to him from behind the hedge in throbs of sorrow and despair. Noah had
devised a game. He had wanted, from the beginning, to leash Donald, and had tried an old dog collar and leash, but the duck's head was too small. Donald slipped loose from any device that Noah concocted. Noah kicked him, sometimes, in anger and frustration, the way I had often seen him kick Pixie. But Donald was stupid, dependent, and humbly submissive; he refused the collar but followed Noah still, walking flat-footedly behind him around the Hoffmans' yard. A leash on a duck that loyal, it seemed to me, was unnecessary. But Noah kept trying.
    Finally he found a bizarre method that worked. He discovered that if he fed Donald something of which he was particularly fond, like rye bread, and tied a thread around the bread first, Donald would swallow the thread as well. Then Noah; triumphantly holding the other end of the thread, would lead Donald, gagging and choking, around the yard, dragging him faster and faster as the duck tried, on his short legs and clumsy webbed feet, to keep up. Eventually the thread would break. Then Noah would begin tying up the next piece of rye bread.
    Nathaniel timidly pleaded with him to stop. He tried to bribe him with promises of new, unread, unrumpled comic books. For my part, behind the unwieldy and protective hedge, I tried prayer. I cried, silently, watching poor Donald fluttering frantically
at the end of the taut, diabolical leash. But Noah continued the game. It made him laugh.
    And now Noah was sick, and Charles and I were invited into the Hoffmans' yard to help feed the ducks. Maybe, I thought, pushing through the hedge happily, prayer works after all.
    Donald waddled into my lap as I sat on the ground, and I fed him little pieces of bread to which I had attached no threaded traps; and he fluttered and settled down and peed warm onto my leg. I felt the stubby grass under me and the sunshine on my face, and I was blissful, knowing that Noah was upstairs with a temperature of a hundred and four.
    "When you think Noah gonna get better?" asked Charles, patting the pink-and-white back of Daisy gingerly. I knew he was thinking of the little knife in his pocket. But the knife didn't matter to me now. I prayed silently that Noah would not get well. Not yet, anyway.
    Nathaniel shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe tomorrow."
    Charles looked gloomy. He had to go home that evening.
    The next day, Noah was worse. I went alone into the Hoffmans' yard where Nathaniel was sitting again on the porch steps.
    "His temperature is a hundred and six," Nathaniel
said, with a kind of wonder. "The doctor came again. Noah sees things that aren't there—faces on the ceiling—and my mother had to stay up all night, rubbing him with alcohol.
    "He has pneumonia," Nathaniel added.
    "Noah pneumonia," I repeated dreamily, liking the sound. "Noah pneumonia."
    We got the ducks out of their pen, sat on the grass, and stroked the mottled feathered backs. "Which one do you think can swim faster?" I asked.
    "Daisy," said Nathaniel with satisfaction.
    "I bet Donald can," I said. I was already thinking of Donald as mine. "You want to have a duck race?"
    Mrs. Hoffman appeared on the back porch. She looked tense, tired, and distracted. "Noah's asleep," she said to us. "I have to go to the drugstore to get some more medicine. Is your mother home, Elizabeth?"
    "Yes. She's feeding the baby."
    She stood there indecisively, holding some prescriptions in her hand. Finally she said, "I'll only be gone about fifteen minutes. If you children hear Noah wake up"—she looked up toward his bedroom window, open to the