1
In her nightclothes in the early morning light, Donut perched on the chair at the small desk in her room. She held a number sixteen glass eye with a clamp, lining up the iris so it looked forward and to the right. Once before she had so concentrated on the socket and the wood glue drying that she had popped the eyeball in backward. There was no fixing it. That little deer mouse would forever gaze into the pitch-black of its own empty skull.
It wasn’t so much the mice and birds themselves that fascinated Donut. It was the precise steps needed to put them back together. Sam had taught her how to prepare the skins and stitch them up all perfect, stuffed with cotton batting, dusted with arsenic powder to kill the lice and other vermin. It was making them almost as good as new that gave her the patience to undertake the tiny stitches with linen thread and curved needle.
Donut could hear Aunt Agnes downstairs clanking the door to the woodstove, filling the teakettle. Since her aunt had arrived three weeks ago, she’d been arguing with the old stove—loading the firebox with too much wood, burning the bread and biscuits. “Like cooking in the Dark Ages,” she grumbled.
Donut slipped the glass eye into the left socket.
“There you go,” she whispered.
She kept her taxidermy private, stowed away in her mother’s cedar hope chest. Three voles, eleven mice, two chickadees, three house wrens, a cardinal, and a bluebird—practice specimens. The mice and voles came from traps that mostly broke their necks. Her best friend, Tiny, brought her the birds, offerings from Bangor, his Maine coon cat, who left them on the rag rug right inside his kitchen door.
Aunt Agnes didn’t approve and Donut suspected that her mother, whose delicate porcelain knickknacks lined the shelves in the parlor, would not have allowed the chemicals, skins, scalpels, and such. But then, Donut and her mother had crossed paths just the once, on the day Donut was born, the same day her mother died. Her mother, Rose, probably would not have approved of Donut’s nickname, either. Dorothy was the name she’d picked out. Pops said that if the baby was a girl, Rose had wanted her to have a proper name, three syllables, unlike her own. But the name Dorothy had faded away without her mother there to protect it. And then there was the colic.
Her pops couldn’t abide baby Dorothy’s fussing and crying due to the colic and discovered that one of Mrs. Lamphere’s maple-cream donuts always did the trick. Gumming at the sweet frosting sent her right to sleep. That probably explained why she had no fear of rodents, as her crib often had visitors late at night—field mice, deer mice, gathering crumbs and bits of icing twisted up in the blanket. Her pops had told her of the scampering, the sprinkling of tiny black mouse droppings that he shook out of the bedding every morning.
Aunt Agnes would have keeled over in fright at the thought of all the small mammals visiting Donut as a baby, like furry fairies. The thought made her smile as she inserted the second eye.
Donut examined her work. The mouse’s body was so light in her left palm. Without the feel of the scrambling feet, the sharp toenails digging in, there was nothing left. What was it like to be dead, stuffed and preserved by an eleven-year-old girl, eyeballs and guts gone, empty like the seashell on the windowsill whispering the sound of the ocean up against her ear?
“Where are you, mouse?” she said, sitting very still. There was no answer.
Donut wrapped up the mouse in a square of red flannel and stowed it in her mother’s chest. She pulled on her pants and a wool shirt. Not bothering with a brush, she braided her long brown hair. With a tight fist she tapped her Rand McNally World Atlas, second edition, three times for luck.
Her pops had said that a big part of geography was rivers. Towns and cities grew up along waterways like pearls on a necklace, so she’d decided to organize her study of geography river by river. She’d finished the Nile, and now she was learning the names of towns and cities strung along the Mississippi.
“New Orleans, Baton Rouge.” Donut reeled them off. “Vidalia, Arkansas City, Helena, Memphis, St. Louis, Hannibal, Keokuk, Davenport, Dubuque, La Crosse, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Bemidji. Got it.”
It was Saturday—launch day. Pops had designed and built his boat at Mr. Daniels’ factory, where he’d worked. Newfangled furnaces, manure spreaders, and milk coolers were their business, but her pops had big dreams for his little boat. They’d been waiting for the spring, for the ice on Dog Pond to melt.
“You and me, Donut,” he’d said, “in the footsteps of Henry Hudson, Lewis and Clark, the Wright Brothers, Ernest Shackleton. We’ll launch my folding boat and make history or get very wet trying.” He’d laughed at the thought of it.
“Ready-made shipwreck,” Mr. Daniels said. “I told him it’d never sell. A surefire drowning bucket.”
Well, she and Tiny were going to prove him wrong.
Copyright © 2018 by Daphne Kalmar