Book 3: Unanticipated Consequences
Susanna trundled up a steep and narrow staircase carrying a box of toys. At the top Jimmy sat on the floor of a small room with exposed studs and joists. The previous owners of their new home hadn’t finished the landing before they moved away. Pieces of an Erector Set lay scattered around him.
She stopped and spoke authoritatively. “You have to put that up. Mamma says we can’t play until everything’s moved in.”
“I’m not playing,” he barked. “I dropped it. The pieces went everywhere, and it’s too dark to find them.”
“Turn on the light dummy.”
She adjusted her grip on the box and carried it into an adjoining room that ran from one end of the house to the other. It would be the bedroom for Jimmy and their younger brother, Charles, but a space at the far end had been set aside as a playroom for all the Carter children. Susanna set the box down next to the only window.
When she walked back Jimmy used his nicest voice and asked, “Will you turn the light on?”
She looked around the walls for a switch that didn’t exist then looked up at the unfinished ceiling when he pointed at a chain dangling from a porcelain socket with a bare light bulb. “I can’t reach it.”
“Climb up the pipe.” He pointed at a six inch, black, cast iron pipe that came through a hole in the floor from the downstairs bathroom and cut diagonally at a forty-five degree angle across the landing before it disappeared through another hole in the ceiling.
After assessing the situation she shinnied up the pipe, pulled the chain, and crashed to the floor. The fall knocked her breath out, so she couldn’t cry even though her arm throbbed.
Jimmy laughed. Before she had come upstairs he had climbed the pipe to turn on the light, and the moment he yanked the chain, electricity had run from the socket, through his body, and down the pipe into the ground like a bolt of lightning. He too had found himself lying dazed on the floor with a throbbing arm. Though shaken, he recognized an opportunity for a prank and didn’t complain or tell his parents. Susanna was his first victim, and when she called him a dummy, she had sealed her fate.
He immediately ran to her and said, “Don’t tell Mamma or Daddy.”
She caught her breath and wailed. “It hurts!”
He put his hand over her mouth and said, “I know, but it’s a joke.”
“It’s not a joke!” she screamed. “When you hurt me you always say it’s a joke, but it’s not funny.”
