I’d never been to the Rez, though I knew the other boys went there. As I’d sat alone on the bus, my bookbag clasped tightly to my chest, I’d heard them talk about swimming there, fishing for bass, spearing bullfrogs five times as big as the little frogs in Bell Brook.
I knew I shouldn’t be there, yet I was. Slowly I moved to the side of the wide trail that led to the edge of the deep water, and it was just as well that I did: Their bikes had been stashed in the brush down the other side of the path. They’d been more quiet than usual. I might have walked up on them if I hadn’t heard a voice.
“Gimme a drag,” a voice said, just over the edge of the bank. I slid back, my heart pounding so hard I knew that it sounded like a drum solo.
“You let it go out, jerk,” answered another voice that I could barely hear over my deafening heartbeat.
“I’ll light it.”
I’ll light it. Not, There he is. Let’s kill him? I hadn’t been heard or seen! I was still safe. But I was as curious as I was afraid. What were they doing? I had to see.
I picked up some of the dark mud with my fingertips and drew lines across my cheeks. Grampa had explained it would make me harder to see. Then I slid to a place where an old tree leaned over the bank, cloaked by the cattails that grew from the edge of the Rez. I made my way out on the trunk and looked. What I saw shocked me. Pauly and Ricky and Will were worse boys than I’d thought. They were really bad! They had a cigarette and they were smoking it.
“Gimme,” Ricky said again. “I’m the one who brought it.”
“Stole it from your Mommy’s handbag, you mean.” Pauly held Ricky at arm’s length as he puffed and then coughed. “An whyn’t you get more than one?”
“If I stole a fresh pack, she would’ve known for sure. Gimme! I’m the one’s gonna be in Dutch if she finds out.”
No, I thought. You’re wrong. All of you are going to get in trouble after I tell Grama what I’ve seen and she gets through calling all your parents.
As I watched, they shared the cigarette, alternately puffing at it, coughing, dropping it, and relighting it. Finally, when Ricky had puffed down to the filter, the last to get it, their smoking orgy was over. Ricky flicked the butt into the Rez and stared out at the water. “It’s not gonna come up,” Ricky said. He picked up something that looked like a makeshift spear. “You lied.”
“I did not. It was over there. The biggest snapper I ever saw.” Will shaded his eyes with one hand and looked right in my direction without seeing me. “If we catch it, we could sell it for ten dollars to that colored man on Congress Street. They say snapping turtles have seven different kinds of meat in them.”
“Crap,” Pauly said, throwing his own spear aside. “Let’s go find something else to do.”
One by one, they picked up their fishing poles and went back down the path. I waited without moving, hearing their heavy feet on the trail and then the rattle of their bike chains. I was no longer thinking about going home to tell Grama about their smoking. All I could think of was that snapping turtle.
I knew a lot about turtles. There were mud turtles and map turtles. There was the smart orange-legged wood turtle and the red-eared slider with its cheeks painted crimson as if it was going to war. Every spring Grama and Grampa and I would drive around, picking up those whose old migration routes had been cut by the recent and lethal ribbons of road. Spooked by a car, a turtle falls into that old defense of pulling head and legs and tail into its once impregnable fortress. But a shell does little good against the wheels of a Nash or a DeSoto.
Some days we’d rescue as many as a dozen turtles, taking them home for a few days before releasing them back into the wild. Painted turtles, several as big as two hands held together, might nip at you some, but they weren’t really dangerous. And the wood turtles would learn in a day or so to reach out for a strawberry or a piece of juicy tomato and then leave their heads out for a scratch while you stroked them with a finger.
Snappers though, they were different. Long-tailed, heavy-bodied and short-tempered, their jaws would gape wide and they’d hiss when you came up on them ashore. Their heads and legs were too big to pull into their shells and they would heave up on their legs and lunge forward as they snapped at you. They might weigh as much as fifty pounds, and it was said they could take off a handful of fingers in one bite. There wasn’t much to recommend a snapping turtle as a friend.
Most people seemed to hate snappers. Snappers ate the fish and the ducks; they scared swimmers away. Or I should say that people hated them alive. Dead, they were supposed to be the best-eating turtle of all. Ten dollars, I thought. Enough for me to send away to the mail-order pet place and get a pair of real flying squirrels. I’d kept that clipping from Field and Stream magazine thumbtacked over my bed for four months now. A sort of plan was coming into my mind.
People were afraid of getting bit by snappers when they were swimming. But from what I’d read, and from what Grampa told me, they really didn’t have much to worry about.
“Snapper won’t bother you none in the water,” Grampa said. If you were even to step on a snapping turtle resting on the bottom of a pond, all it would do would be to move away. On land, all the danger from a snapper was to the front or the side. From behind, a snapper couldn’t get you. Get it by the tail, you were safe. That was the way.
And as I thought, I kept watch. And as I kept watch, I kept up a silent chant inside my mind.
Come here, I’m waiting for you.
Come here, I’m waiting for you.
Before long, a smallish log that had been sticking up farther out in the pond began to drift my way. It was, as I had expected, no log at all. It was a turtle’s head. I stayed still. The sun’s heat beat on my back, but I lay there like a basking lizard. Closer and closer the turtle came, heading right into water less than waist deep. It was going right for shore, for the sandy bank bathed in sun. I didn’t think about why then, just wondered at the way my wanting seemed to have called it to me.
When it was almost to shore, I slid into the water on the other side of the log I’d been waiting on. The turtle surely sensed me, for it started to swing around as I moved slowly toward it, swimming as much as walking. But I lunged and grabbed it by the tail. Its tail was rough and ridged, as easy to hold as if coated with sandpaper. I pulled hard and the turtle came toward me. I stepped back, trying not to fall and pull it on top of me. My feet found the bank, and I leaned hard to drag the turtle out, its clawed feet digging into the dirt as it tried to get away. A roaring hiss like the rush of air from a punctured tire came out of its mouth, and I stumbled, almost losing my grasp. Then I took another step, heaved again, and it was mine.
Or at least it was until I let go. I knew I could not let go. I looked around, holding its tail, moving my feet to keep it from walking its front legs around to where it would snap at me. It felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds. I could only lift up the back half of its body. I started dragging it toward the creek, fifty yards away. It seemed to take hours, a kind of dance between me and the great turtle, but I did it. I pulled it back through the roaring culvert, water gushing over its shell, under the spider web, and past my hidden pole and creel. I could come back later for the fish. Now there was only room in the world for Bell Brook, the turtle, and me.
The long passage upstream is a blur in my memory. I thought of salmon leaping over falls and learned a little that day how hard such a journey must be. When I rounded the last bend and reached the place where the brook edged our property, I breathed a great sigh. But I could not rest. There was still a field and the back yard to cross.
My grandparents saw me coming. From the height of the sun it was now mid-afternoon, and I knew I was dreadful late.
“Sonny, where have you . . . ?” began Grama.
Then she saw the turtle.
“I’m sorry. It took so long because of . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence because the snapping turtle, undaunted by his backward passage, took that opportunity to try once more to swing around
and get me. I had to make three quick steps in a circle, heaving at its tail as I did so.
“Nice size turtle,” Grampa Jesse said.
My grandmother looked at me. I realized then I must have been a sight. Wet, muddy, face and hands scratched from the brush that overhung the creek.
“I caught it at the reservoir,” I said. I didn’t think to lie to them about where I’d been. I waited for my grandmother to scold me. But she didn’t.
“Jesse,” she said, “Get the big washtub.”
My grandfather did as she said. He brought it back and then stepped next to me.
“Leave go,” he said.
My hands had a life of their own, grimly determined never to let loose of that all-too-familiar tail, but I forced them to open. The turtle flopped down. Before it could move, my grandfather dropped the big washtub over it. All was silent for a minute as I stood there, my arms aching as they hung by my side. Then the washtub began to move. My grandmother sat down on it and it stopped.
She looked at me. So did Grampa. It was wonderful how they could focus their attention on me in a way that made me feel they were ready to do whatever they could to help.
“What now?” Grama said.
“I heard that somebody down on Congress Street would pay ten dollars for a snapping turtle.”
“Jack’s,” Grampa said.
My grandmother nodded. “Well,” she said, “if you go now you can be back in time for supper. I thought we were having trout.” She raised an eyebrow at me.
“I left them this side of the culvert by 9N,” I said. “Along with my pole.”
“You clean up and put on dry clothes. Your grandfather will get the fish.”
“But I hid them.”
My grandmother smiled. “Your grandfather will find them.” And he did.
An hour later, we were on the way to Congress Street, the heart of the colored section of Saratoga Springs. In the 1950s, Congress Street was like a piece of Harlem dropped into an upstate town. We pulled up in front of Jack’s, and a man who looked to be my grandfather’s age got up and walked over to us. His skin was only a little darker than my grandfather’s, and the two nodded to each other.
My grandfather put his hand on the trunk of the Plymouth.
“What you got there?” Jack said.
“Show him, Sonny.”
I opened the trunk. My snapping turtle lifted up its head as I did so.
“I heard you might want to buy a turtle like this for ten dollars,” I said.
Jack shook his head. “Ten dollars for a little one like that? I’d give you two dollars.”
I looked at my turtle. Had it shrunk since Grampa wrestled it into the trunk?
“That’s not enough,” I said.
“Three dollars. My last offer.”
I looked at Grampa. He shrugged his shoulders.
“I guess I don’t want to sell it,” I said.
“All right,” Jack said. “You change your mind, come on back.” He touched his hat with two fingers and walked back over to his chair in the sun.
As we drove back toward home, neither of us said anything for a while. Then my grandfather spoke.
“Would five dollars’ve been enough?”
“No,” I said.
“How about ten?”
I thought about that. “I guess not.”
“Why you suppose that turtle was heading for that sandbank?” Grampa said.
I thought about that, too. Then I realized the truth of it.
“It was coming out to lay its eggs.”
“Might be.”
I thought hard then. I’d learned it was never right for a hunter to shoot a mother animal, because it hurt the next generation to come. Was a turtle any different?
“Can we take her back?” I asked.
“Up to you, Sonny.”
And so we did. Gramp drove the Plymouth right up the trail to the edge of the Rez. He held a stick so the turtle would grab onto it as I hauled her out of the trunk. I put her down and she just stayed there, her nose a foot from the water but not moving.
“We’ll leave her,” Grampa said. We turned to get into the car. When I looked back over my shoulder, she was gone. Only ripples on the water, widening circles rolling on toward other shores like generations following each other, like my grandmother’s flowers still growing in a hundred gardens in Greenfield, like the turtles still seeking out that sandbank, like this story that is no longer just my own but belongs now to your memory, too.
“When I think back on my childhood and the old house that I lived in with my grandparents, two images always come to mind. The first is books. Shelves and bookcases in every room filled with everything from leather-bound sets of Kipling and Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain and the Romantic poets to Reader’s Digest condensed volumes which arrived in the mail every month. The books were my grandmother’s, but as soon as I could read — and I was reading everything I could get my hands on by the time I was in second grade — I thought of them as mine, too. Grama was glad to share them with me, first by reading them aloud and then later by knowing just the right book to pull down from a high shelf and put into my hands.
The second image is of the little piece of forest behind our house — ‘The Woods’ as my grandfather called it. Although Grampa Jesse could barely read a newspaper, he knew how to read the woods better than anyone I ever knew. The trees, the birds, the trails the animals made, he saw them all and shared them with me. Sometimes he did it without saying anything, just directing my attention the right way at just the right time — so I would see the robin’s nest deep inside the spruce tree, its eggs as blue as a clear sky, so that I would realize those twigs and stones at the bottom of the stream were really the movable camouflaged homes of caddis fly larvae. He taught me to be careful about how I walked, about never taking too much of anything — whether it was the May flowers we picked to make bouquets or the trout from Bell Brook — and always to give something back. It might just be a word of thanks, but even a small gift meant something. It kept the balance.
My grandmother loved the outdoors, too, but her love was for the gardens she kept, the gardens I mention in this story. She always kept those gardens overflowing with flowers close to the roadside where everyone could see them and enjoy their beauty, so carefully planted that they were patterned like a patchwork quilt.
I think it was those two worlds — the world of books and the natural world that surrounded me as a child — that made me a writer. I wanted to share the things I saw and heard, the things I imagined. My grandparents were always sharing, and it just seemed like the natural thing to do. And whenever I wrote a poem or a story, both Grama and Grampa were eager to hear it and quick to tell me they had never heard anything quite like it before. So I kept on sharing and always trying to give something back.
That is why I chose to tell this story, a story that shows a little of those roots my grandparents nurtured.”
NORMA FOX MAZER wrote many highly acclaimed novels for young adults, including After the Rain, a Newbery Honor Book; Taking Terri Mueller, winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Novel; A Figure of Speech, a National Book Award Finalist; and Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year. Many of her novels have also been named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. She passed away in 2009.
RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA was raised in Seaside, California, and Jamaica, New York, where she currently lives. Her first novel, Fast Talk on a Slow Track, was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and an American Library Association Quick Pick and won the PEN/Norma Klein Award and a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor. Her second novel, Like Sisters on the Homefront, is a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. One Crazy Summer won numerous awards and honors, including the 2011 Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the Scott O’Dell Prize for Historical Fiction, and was also named a National Book Award Finalist. Its sequel, P.S. Be Eleven,
won the 2014 Coretta Scott King Award.
PAUL FLEISCHMAN is the award-winning author of many books for children and young adults, including Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, winner of the Newbery Medal; Graven Images, a Newbery Honor Book and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book; Bull Run, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction; Saturnalia, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book; Dateline: Troy, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults; The Dunderheads; and The Dunderheads Behind Bars. He lives in California.
JANE YOLEN has written and edited more than two hundred books and anthologies — for all age levels and in genres ranging from picture books to fantasy to science fiction. Her numerous awards include a Christopher Award for The Seeing Stick; the National Jewish Book Award for The Devil’s Arithmetic; the World Fantasy Award for Favorite Folk Tales from Around the World; and several honors for her body of work in children’s literature, including the Kerlan Award, the Keene State College Children’s Literature Festival Award, and the Regina Medal. She and her husband divide their time between western Massachusetts and Scotland.
HOWARD NORMAN has translated and edited several collections of stories for young readers, including Trickster and the Fainting Bird and The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese and Other Tales of the Far North, which won a Parents’ Choice Honor Award and the Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award, and was nominated for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award. In addition, it was named a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year. Two of Howard Norman’s novels for adults, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, have been chosen as National Book Award finalists. He and his wife, poet Jane Shore, and their daughter, Emma, divide their time between Washington, D.C., and Vermont.
E. L. KONIGSBURG, the author of novels, short stories, and picture books, won her first Newbery Medal for the second novel she ever wrote, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. That same year her first novel, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, was named a Newbery Honor Book. With The View from Saturday, published almost thirty years and more than fifteen books later, she won her second Newbery Medal. She passed away in 2013.
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two Page 11