by Rae Craig
Two matching doorways led out of the entryway’s back corners. Harriet slowly walked through the one on the right where conversation drifted out from the next room. Tucked under the stairs, coat-hooks lined the wall next to a doorway into a tiny restroom.
“Bang.” Someone slammed the entry doors and heavy footsteps pounded up behind Harriet.
“Get out of my way, outcast girl.”
Harriet and Stevie fought through the doorway shoulder to shoulder, bursting into the schoolroom like corks from a bottle. They were the last to arrive and by far the most riled up.
Stevie surveyed the room and pronounced. “There’s a pitiful crippled boy outside. Unless he’s got wings on that wheelchair, there’s no way he’s getting in here. People like him don’t belong here.”
Curious, Harriet turned around and went back out, everyone else following. A boy who must be Tomas rolled his wheelchair up to the steps and Harriet could see Stevie was right, there was no way he would get into the schoolhouse.
He looked up at Harriet, his golden tabby-cat eyes flashing a grin. “Hello cousin.”
He pressed a button on his armrest and raised the wheelchair up onto two wheels. He surveyed all of them and pointed his thumbs at his chest. “Tomas Donnellson, ready and willing.” He pressed another button and the chair climbed the steps by placing the front wheels on the first step and the back wheels revolving around to boost up to the next.
Jordy met him, his hands reaching forward. “Can I touch it? Where is the gyroscope? How often does it get serviced?’
Tomas and Jordy talked about the chair as they went inside. Tomas patted his armrest. “Lucy’s a prototype model so an engineer comes every month to check it out. I’ll let you know when she’s coming, so you can meet her.”
Jordy grinned.
A semicircle of desks faced the front of the schoolroom, each supplied with graph paper, ruler and drawing pencil. From the front of the room Dad said. “Take a seat. When my mother taught here, the grade school used this room and the high school was upstairs.” They settled in. “I wanted our first project to be a surprise; I hope you’ll enjoy creating maps.”
Dana and Ella glanced at each other from under lowered eyelids, while Harriet tried to figure out how Tomas fit right in from the very first moment he appeared.
Dad passed out more papers. “These will help you get started. You can choose to map a large area like the entire valley or just your bedroom. Any area can be mapped, so pick something you’re interested in; it’ll be more fun.” He stood at the blackboard. “The papers I handed out show how to draw to scale, although you don’t have to do that. There’s a sample map, but don’t just copy that. There’s no correct way to lay out this map- there’s just the way that’s right for you.
“You can practice on the small graph paper before you draw your real map on the large one.” He pointed to a map taped on the blackboard. “I left my scale lines on the sides of the map, but if you don’t want to keep them you can layout the scale on strips of paper and attach them to your map with drafting tape.”
There were beginnings and quick endings as mistakes were made and corrected. Dana asked. “Is it okay if I work at the old brewery? I know where I found bottles.”
Dad said. “You’re welcome to dig there anytime.”
Harriet offered. “I have a book showing how to draw archaeology site maps, would you like to use it?”
Dana considered for a moment. “I’ll figure out my own way.”
Dad asked the others, “Have you decided what to map?”
Jordy was laying out his scales on the large graph paper. “I’m doing the old quarry and I’m going to explore up-river and include that too. Maybe I’ll make two maps or maybe I’ll make one and use a larger scale in one section and a smaller scale on another.”
Dad said. “I like how you’re being creative.”
Tomas rolled up to the blackboard and studied the sample map. “I’ll start a map of the valley showing the people I meet and the places I go.” He turned to Dad. “I’m going to double the scale.”
“Well then you’ll need another sheet of graph paper.” Dad said.
Ella drew every which way on her practice paper. “I’m mapping the farm. How should I draw the buildings?
“Any way you want. Try different ideas and see what feels right.”
Stevie stood and grabbed her papers. “I’m not sitting next to you pitiful outcasts.” She slammed her stuff onto a desk in the farthest corner and immediately attacked her graph paper.
Dad acted as though that exhibition was normal behavior. “That’s fine; you can work on your map anywhere you want.”
Harriet couldn’t figure out why Dad didn’t react to that girl’s rudeness, although Stevie was careful to keep the outright cruelty away from the adult’s hearing. Dad walked around offering encouragement. “Fread, what are you working on? It looks very complicated.”
Fread worked away with her head down. “Trees. Each tree is good for a different kind of carving.”
Dad said. “I have a walking stick your mother made years ago. She’d be proud of the beautiful beater you carved.” Fread tucked her head down even more, if that was possible.
Harriet saw Dad heading her way, so she spoke to Ella. “Ella, will you include the rock walls that Seth Scyld’s building for you?” They launched into a discussion of the Matta’s new herb garden and Dad turned away. Harriet leaned over and wrote on Ella’s practice paper. “Will you map the Rose garden?”
Ella wrote. “I’ll start tonight.” Her eyes danced.
Harriet asked Dad. “Could Ella please have another large graph paper, I don’t think this one’s big enough.”
Stevie snatched up her papers and marched out, her eyes rolling in disgust.
Jordy called after her, oblivious to her nasty attitude. “See you at Helen Hoier’s next week, Stevie! We’ll play the focusing music.”
“Like crap!” The entry door slammed.
A second later they heard that door open again. Everyone watched the doorway to see what Stevie would say when she came back.
“So, this is where you’re hiding!” With that greeting, Grandma Hoier walked into the room, herding Stevie in front of her. Everyone relaxed back into their seats.
Grandma plopped the scowling girl into a chair and pulled another one up for herself. She looked around the circle. “Even though you don’t start worklearners till after HomeComing, it will be helpful to think over your assignments ahead of time.”
She swiveled in her chair to include all of them. “Everyone got one of their choices, but Dana, you got your first choice and Jule Gribes is excited for you to start. Here’s the list:
-Dana- pottery with Jule Gribes
-Ella- Herbology with the Toishs
-Tomas- Blacksmithing with Bryn Towers
-Jordy- Farm equipment maintenance with Jery Shire
-Stevie- Store clerking with the Clarks
-Harriet- horse care with Tozer Jempsen.
-Fread- saw mill with Hetric Rethic.
Harriet frowned: Ella would finally get to see the Toish’s garden, and who knew Dana wanted to make pots, but Harriet had not asked to work with horses. Her brother was the one who liked animals and anyway she had not seen a single horse in Shi-octon. Also, Tomas could not learn blacksmithing; he was in a wheelchair.
Grandma said. “This first worklearn will last six weeks. After that you can change to a different worklearn or stay where you are for six more weeks.” She put the chair back. “We can talk about it some more at our concert next week.”
On their way out, Tomas asked Fread how he could add carving to his beater and her face lit up. But she didn’t linger with the others. As she rode away on her bike, her rear fender fell off with a clatter and she had to stop to pick it up. Harriet turned away, knowing Fread would not get a new bike because of her.
Chapter Twenty
Carbon14
“Ella, stop!” Riding behind the blue-ey
ed girl, Harriet spotted an apple just about to tumble from her basket.
Ella skidded to a stop on the graveled road edge, expertly staying in control. Dana rode back from up ahead. “Why’re we stopping?”
Ella snagged the escaping apple and crunched into it. She mumbled around the big bite. “Dana, these are the last of the river apples. Dad found a basket from last year’s harvest stored in the milk house cellar and took them to market.” She took another bite. “Your mom bought the last of them, so I couldn’t let this one get away.”
Harriet said. “How can you eat that enormous apple after the chili soup Rosa fed us for lunch?”
Dana considered. “It’s safer inside her than outside her.” They laughed and turned onto the path to the outlet tunnel.
All this past week Harriet had thought about sneaking back inside to gather the carbon14 samples. This morning Dad called after her as she rode away. “We’ll see you at Menja’s for the cookout tonight.”
Supplies shifted in their baskets as they bounced along the dirt trail. Because trees screened them from the village, they felt unwatched.
The open tunnel looked much less mysterious during the day, but the entry ledges were just as narrow, and the fast moving water between them was too wide to jump. Inside the opening, they switched on flashlights and walked single file with left shoulders brushing the wall.
Harriet said. “I brought Mom’s spelunking lantern; it’ll light up everything.” She switched it on and the first chamber lit up: the hearth in the center, the stone shelves, the tanks and the dark doorway on the far side. Stacked granite stones enclosed them, each ring of stones a little smaller, until it all came together at a point high above their head.
Dana gazed up. “Looks like the old-fashioned bee hives that Threda Mac makes for Market.”
Harriet walked over. “You would only need these tanks if you were storing something wet.”
Ella said. “I keep tadpoles in a tank and watch them turn into toads; after that they live in our garden and eat bugs.” She leaned over to run her finger along the tight joints in the corners of the tank. “Whatever they kept in here would have to be alive or it would rot fast.”
Dana said. “Or….something that turns sour on purpose so they could store it-- like sauerkraut.”
Harriet remembered. “Grandpa Jameson used to make sauerkraut in a crock and that’s kind of like a tank.”
Ella laughed. “They really must have liked sauerkraut!”
Harriet added. “Way better than me!”
She went over to kneel by the hearth, setting the items in her pack out onto the flagstone floor. “Maybe we’ll find charred wood in here. That would be good for the carbon14 test.”
She divided the hearth into squares, dragging her trowel through the dirt to mark the lines. They each chose a square, gently scraping off layers of dirt. Dana huffed, sat back and reached in again, using his scraper’s point to isolate a lump. They watched a piece of charred wood appear.
Harriet said. “Now we know for sure it’s a hearth and when we get the carbon14 results back we’ll know how old it is. The fact that only an inch of dirt covered it means it isn’t very old.” She turned to Ella. “Do you have the sterile containers?”
Ella said. “Dad didn’t ask why I needed his milk culture containers, and that’s strange.”
Dana reached into his bag for the sterile sampling spoons he had asked for from the cheese factory. They were careful not to touch or breathe on the sample and after the lid was screwed down tight, Harriet labeled it H-1 and Dana fit it into a mailing box.
Harriet drew the sample’s location on graph paper and they went back to scraping, finding more and more charcoal until the hearth was solid with it.
Harriet looked down. “I’ve got something here that’s not charcoal.” Using the tip of her trowel to scrape away the dirt, the lump slowly became a piece of broken pottery with rings within rings built up like rope on the surface. Harriet drew it on the site plan, popped it out into her palm and cleaned the dirt off with a small brush. Shi-octon rings stood out in a line just below a rounded edge.
Ella said. “That’s the top rim of a pot! Maybe we’ll find more.” She reached over and took it from Harriet, running her finger over the line of rings. “I have something to show you.” She took a folded bandana from her pack and unwrapped a flat chunk of granite.
Harriet remembered Ella slipping something into her pocket the day they had discovered the hole in the reclining stone. “Is that from the Rose garden?”
Ella nodded and passed it to Harriet. “It was sitting on the stone’s edge, like a loose puzzle piece.” Dana silently followed the movements back and forth.
Harriet ran her finger over the Shi-octon rings carved into the stone. She set it next to the pottery shard. “These are the same rings they found on that island I told you about and they also found triple spirals like the ones around the opening back there,” She waved her hand toward the smallest chamber, making Dana rub his eyes. “The archaeologists also found rows of scratches that looked like writing on the stone walls, but they said it couldn’t be writing because people back then didn’t know how to write.”
Dana picked up the shard and held it about a foot from his nose, his eyes crossing slightly. After a moment of study, he set it down. “Those archaeologists need to pay more attention to what they find.”
They packaged two more charcoal samples, each deeper than the one before and packed up their equipment.
Out in the tunnel, standing on the ledge above the water. Dana hesitated. He backed up a few steps into the chamber they’d just come out of, and took a running leap across the channel into the doorway on the other side.
Harriet shouted. “Now what!” She and Ella ran outside, balanced over the boulders scattered in the stream below the waterfall, and hurried back inside along the far ledge.
Dana was kneeling down with his head hanging over the water “There’s a wide notch in the stones here and over there.” He beamed his light along the far side.
Harriet scowled. “Most people can’t jump that far, so I’m sure a bridge went across here.”
Ella laughed. “They didn’t have Dana’s legs.”
The first room on this side had a hearth in the center with various types of shelves and tanks around the wall. The doorway to the next room led toward the lake.
Ella said. “Over here the rooms don’t go back into the hill.”
The second room had shelves, two tanks, and the usual hearth. On the left a doorway opened back into the outlet tunnel, but on the side toward the lake a small opening spilled darkness out into the room.
On hands and knees they stuck their heads through the hole, swinging their flashlights around a chamber completely ringed by stone shelves with a hearth taking up the entire floor.
Ella said. “Maybe it’s for storage.”
Harriet said. “Then why the giant hearth?”
Walking out the tunnel on the lake side, they squeaky-crunched across a flat area over to the lake’s edge. Dana looked down and shuffled his feet. “This isn’t gravel.”
Harriet squatted and pulled out a sliver of shiny black rock. “It’s not.” Sunlight flashed off the rock into Harriet’s eyes.
Dana and Ella picked up more glass-like chips and Harriet warned. “Be careful of the sharp edges.”
Ella said. “It’s obsidian chips! Lots and lots of chips. Where did they come from? I’ve never seen any obsidian in the valley.”
Harriet’s eyes sparkled. “Another mystery to solve.” She remembered the obsidian on the rockfall trackway, but wanted to surprise them with that when she took them there.
They biked across the commons that smelled of freshly mowed grass and gathered two samples from deep in the bonfire mound. That filled their box and the Post was their next stop.
When the Everything’s door jangled shut behind them, Del Clark called out from the back. “Be right out; doing surgery on my thumb.”
They
slid their box into the outgoing slot built into the counter. Hoping to get out without talking to Del, they opened the door. Dana reached up to quiet the bell.
“What trouble are you three into?” Del strode toward them, heavy boots clomping against the wood floor. She wore her usual work uniform of frayed overalls, but had added an enormous white bandage wound around her left thumb. “Isn’t it pretty?” She stuck it up. “Got a huge splinter and didn’t have time to see that new doctor or Tee.” She barked out a laugh. “And it’s lucky I decided to open up on After-Market day, because that Dr. Menja had an x-ray machine delivered here this morning.” She smiled importantly.
“See by your fingernails you’ve been digging.” Del nodded toward Dana’s raised hand and stuck out her hand. “Looks like mine” Another bark of laughter sent them out the door, afraid she would guess exactly what they had been doing.
Chapter Twenty-One
Cookout
“Cousin!” Tomas shouted at them from over in front of Giffin’s. He rode across Center Road as they straddled their bikes.
Harriet was annoyed that Tomas was butting into their afternoon, but at least he hadn’t seen them go to the outlet tunnel.
“Follow me!” She stand-up pedaled out of the village, past the sorghum mill and onto the ring road. In front of them the river erupted from its canyon, splitting into a swift main channel and a lazy backwater. A muted roar poured out the chasm and Harriet realized that during spring flood she had heard that roar from as far away as her backyard. They lined up straddling their bikes, Tomas back up on two wheels after going to four for speed. The river held their attention.
A voice like a buzz saw shouted right behind them. “You juveniles, come and assist me.” They turned in surprise. There stood the man who had played the accordion on May Day. He raised his amazing caterpillar brows over eyes that saw too much. “I’m Sunny Kensen. I received a new boiling pan and can’t levitate it by myself. Come this way.” They followed him to the sorghum mill. Tomas silently mouthed ‘levitate?’ toward Dana and they smiled.