Backwater

by Joan Bauer

  This is how we get up the mountain

  Mountain Mama revved the jeep up, up. “Here’s the shortcut to the trailhead.” She made the last steep climb, rammed the jeep into second gear, heard the big wheels spinning in ice, rammed it forward, shouting, “Hold on, Breedlove, and shine her steady!”

  I clung to the frame with both hands as the jeep twisted and turned up the narrow trail to something that only a wilderness guide could see.

  Mama pulled the jeep between two pine trees and jumped out. I flopped forward, trembling.

  She marched over to my side, slapped me hard on the back. “Chapter seven, Breedlove—Celebrate your Victories, No Matter How Small.”

  “Whoopee,” I said weakly, and covered my face.

  Books by

  JOAN BAUER

  Backwater

  Best Foot Forward

  Hope Was Here

  Rules of the Road

  Squashed

  Stand Tall

  Sticks

  Thwonk

  JOAN BAUER

  backwater

  For my mother,

  Marjorie Good,

  with love

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,

  Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1999

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2000

  This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

  Copyright © Joan Bauer, 1999

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Bauer, Joan, date. Backwater/Joan Bauer, p. cm.

  Summary: While compiling a genealogy of her family of successful attorneys, sixteen-year-old history buff Ivy Breedlove treks into the mountain wilderness to interview a reclusive aunt with whom she identifies and who in turn helps her to truly know herself and her family.

  [1. Genealogy—Fiction. 2. Aunts—Fiction. 3. Lawyers—Fiction.

  4. Birds—Fiction. 5. Survival—Fiction. 6. Hermits—Fiction.

  7. Family life—Fiction. 8. Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.)—Fiction.]

  I. Title. PZ7.B32615Bac 1999 [Fic]—dc21 98-50729 CIP AC

  Speak ISBN: 978-1-101-65786-7

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Special thanks to several people who brought life to this story:

  To my daughter, Jean Bauer, for her keen historical knowledge; and to Chris Manteuffel, for his abundant command of history. Their insight into how teenagers contemplate and respond to history is used liberally throughout this book. Their correspondence to me provided much of the energy for Ivy Breedlove’s character.

  To Jean Brown, who shared her family stories with humor and grace.

  To Karen Baehler and Jon Foley, who taught me both wolf and wilderness discernment.

  To my husband, Evan, wilderness guide extraordinaire, who has seen me up and down many Adirondack Mountains, and whose patient review and criticism of this manuscript, as always, enhanced my work immensely.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  1

  I knelt in the snow in front of my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s gravestone, took my bristle brush and cleaned the surface, working the bristles deep into each engraved letter. When you’re making a gravestone rubbing you have to care about every detail or you might as well stay home. People want to rush the process, slap on the paper, whip out a waxed marker, and bam, instant history. But I tell them you can’t rush connecting to the past, you’ve got to respect it.

  I attached thin, wide paper over the stone with masking tape, took out my colored waxed cakes, and rubbed them across the paper slowly until the image came out—first the crossed gavels, which meant he was a lawyer, then the eye underneath, which meant that even though Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa was dead, he was still watching. A few of the papers shifted during rubbing, but I worked carefully, making sure Millard Breedlove’s message was preserved for generations to come.

  O, wouldst that all my sons be lawyers

  Lest my heart break with the anguish

  That they have become lesser men

  It was the big guilt number from the grave, and it worked. There have been scores of Breedlove lawyers in my family ever since.

  I was not going to be one of them, however.

  I was going to be a historian and spend time in quiet research libraries and find new insights into the past to help people in the present.

  I lived for historical perspective.

  I was diligently practicing my craft, too. I had sixty-three days left to finish writing and researching the Breedlove family history in time for Great Aunt Tib’s eightieth birthday celebration. Sixty-three days sounds like all the time in the world to finish something, but anything can happen when you’re wrestling with antiquity.

  Deadline pressure was just one of my problems.

  The other one was my father, Daniel Webster Breedlove, a prominent trial attorney, who became positively rankled at the thought that his daughter (me) would desert the family cause. He constantly warned that his father, William Washington “Iron Will” Breedlove, the great circuit judge of Massachusetts County, would roll over in his grave at such a notion.

  We’ll see.

  I walked across the old family cemetery to Iron Will’s gray-slate gravestone. Justice was his chief end, it proclaimed.

  “I’m not going to be a lawyer,” I said to Iron Will’s grave. “Get used to it, Grandpa.”

  I waited.

  I listened.

  Nothing rolled over.

  I looked at Winsted Attila Breedlove’s gravestone—only his name was engraved in the cold black marble. He was the most feared professor at Harvard Law School at the turn of the Century, a man so fierce that first year law students were reported to have fainted dead away when he called on them in class.

  He was one of Dad’s heroes.

 
“Nothing personal,” I added, just in case.

  People think it’s exciting being part of a family with so many successful lawyers. I tell them it’s like being a goldfish swimming in a tank stocked with snapping turtles—it’s hard to keep a lasting presence.

  I sat in the snow, surrounded by the whispers of my dead relatives. It was the day after Christmas and pandemonium reigned at the old family house in Plum Lake, New York, where twenty-three Breedloves had gathered to argue away the holidays. No one lives permanently at the old house since Grandpa died. It’s a rambling three-story white frame with a huge wrap-around porch. I love to stand on the porch and gaze at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest mountains in the United States.

  Mountains draw you to a deeper place in yourself.

  The suburbs don’t do that. I live five hours due south in Marion, New York, with my father and my Great Aunt Tib—she moved in with us ten years ago when my mom died from cancer. Tib tucked me under her wing like a mother bird protecting her own. I don’t know what I’d do without her.

  Historically speaking, Christmas is a trying time for my family. Dad and his brother Archie start quarreling on the way to the candlelight Christmas Eve service every year, and by the time “Silent Night” is sung and the little white candles are raised in reverence in the darkened cathedral, half the family isn’t talking to each other. As my Great Uncle Clarence says somberly as we drive off to church every year, “‘Silent Night’ is just the beginning.”

  As a rare form of Breedlove (non-aggressive), I’ve wondered how I got dumped in this amplified family. If it wasn’t for the fact that I possessed the Breedlove chin (long, square, intractable) and the Breedlove hair (thick, sandy, impossible), I could easily believe that I’d been mistakenly exchanged at birth and, in truth, belonged to a gentle, caring family who hated conflict and noise and didn’t feel the need to turn every occasion into a verbal sparring match.

  “You’re doing the death thing again.”

  I didn’t have to look up because I knew it was Egan, my cousin once removed. He was breathing hard, which did not mean he was a degenerate. He was a cross-country runner, the star of our high school team. I was on the cross-country team, too, but less for the thrill of victory than for the required phys ed credit.

  I put the gravestone rubbing in a plastic seal to keep it safe and put it in my backpack. “I’m connecting to our ancestors, Egan.”

  “Fiona’s got the movie camera out,” Egan said ominously. “It’s going to start after dinner, Ivy, and no one can stop it.”

  I sat deeper in the snow. Fiona is my aunt by marriage to my Uncle Archie—she’s one of those adults who doesn’t think teenagers can do anything. Last month she announced that no one had time to “weed through a huge family history of names, stories, and dates” and that she was going to have a video family history put together “lickety-split.” That’s one of her stupid sayings. Fiona is a time management consultant and believes everything can be done quicker if you listen to her and watch her cable TV show “It’s About Time.” I watched the show once. Fiona showed how to cut breakfast preparation by mixing pancake batter the night before and keeping it in the refrigerator. The fact that you had to take time to do it the preceding evening didn’t bother the audience. They just yelled, “It’s about time!” and applauded like mad when she raced to the shortcut board and read a helpful hint from some brain-dead viewer.

  So when most of the family rallied around her and said a video was just what everyone wanted, I wanted to crawl off somewhere and evaporate. The power of cable television is fierce.

  Aunt Tib supported me. She always has. As a retired history teacher, Tib knows about perspective. She started researching the Breedlove family tree because she wanted to get the sense of who this family really was, find the values we all shared, the ones we’d misplaced, the stories we had in common, and the ones we’d pushed aside. And when her eyes started going bad two years ago, she picked me to be her assistant, which was a great honor because at the time I was only fourteen. Down through the ages, there have been Breedloves who collected family information, but Tib and I are the first ones to put it all together. We drew a chart of the Breedloves through history, beginning with our early roots in England to our immigrant status in New York and New Hampshire, to what Tib called “the great Breedlove expansion across America that has made us what we are today—entrenched.”

  Then, sadly, her eyes gave out and it was up to me to see the project through. Tib wouldn’t let anyone feel sorry for her, either. She got a cane and went to classes to learn how to get by.

  “You finish what I started,” Tib told me. “That’s history’s way.”

  Plenty of people didn’t like that, saying how an adult should be doing it. Adult is a magic word with some individuals who think that becoming one is like getting sprayed with instant insight. But I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life—gathering family stories, pouring through old diaries, letters, scrapbooks and family Bibles, crawling around dusty attics in search of heirlooms. I’ve read wills and insurance papers until I’m blue in the face, gone through hundreds of old photographs. There are a million things a family historian has to do.

  Egan kicked snow in my direction and made a face. “She’s got scripts and make-up and she says she’s picked out music.”

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. His life lay easily before him. Law school in a few years, clerking, partner in a Breedlove law firm. Cross-country runners had it made; they knew about looking ahead. When you’re a historian, you keep looking behind you; that’s death to a runner.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m supposed to tell you dinner’s at six.”

  “You told me.”

  “Are you going to sit there in the snow?”

  My butt was freezing. “Yes.”

  I sat there.

  He stood there.

  “I just want to say, Ivy, that you won the history prize at school for the past two years, and that if it wasn’t for you helping me with my term paper on FDR and the New Deal, I would have never stayed on the Honor Roll. You understand how things connect more than anyone I know. You’ve always been that way.”

  Egan took the cemetery stone wall in an easy hurdle, and ran off around the corner.

  Wet snow soaked through the seat of my blue jeans.

  I thought of my fourteen file folders of family research back home in the huge plastic container with the emerald green dust-free top, sitting there, undervalued.

  I thought of the fifty-two pages of text I had already written and Aunt Tib’s and my years of genealogical labor being preempted by a quick-fix filmstrip.

  I squeezed my eyes tight to keep in the tears.

  My father can’t wait for me to finish this project. He’s concerned that I’m obsessing on it. I feel that’s extreme.

  Compulsing, maybe.

  But what does a kid do when she has so many questions? Do you just swallow them like they don’t matter? I want to know things. I’ve always been that way, and at sixteen I’m sure not changing now.

  What influenced my parents?

  Who were my grandparents, and great-grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins down through the ages?

  What part of them do I share?

  Where did they come from? What did they care about? What were their victories? How did they fail? Did they make a difference in the world?

  Can I?

  I’ve tried to explain my feelings to Dad. He just looks at me blankly and asks if my homework is finished.

  I tell him that homework is nothing compared to having the canals of history stretch before you and get no reply. I could fight dirty at this point, remind him that Mom was a great history lover. But Dad can’t talk about Mom. It’s too painful. So we talk about the letter.

  Back in 1776 one of my relatives, Eliza Breedlove, dressed like a man and joined George Washington’s army when she was sixteen. She died at Valley Forge, but not before she’d marched cle
ar across New Jersey, half starving with a bullet in her arm. The doctor sent a letter to her parents saying she was one of the finest soldiers he’d ever known. The first time I read it, I felt a shock wave through my body. Lots of kids study a historic period, shrug and think, okay, it happened, but what’s it got to do with me? You’re connected, I tell them, you just don’t know it.

  Dad said the letter corrupted my mind.

  “It freed me, Dad.”

  “Freedom, Ivy, is the state of being released or liberated. You are totally enslaved by this obsession!”

  “I could be on drugs, Dad. I could be smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. I could be—”

  “Getting ready to study the law!”

  I could almost mouth the words.

  “When I was sixteen, Ivy, I had already read every piece of literature there was to read concerning America’s great law institutions where fine men and women learned to love the law, learned to defend it to the death, learned to not take no for an answer.”

  “Learned to bill by the hour,” I added, and Dad said that as God was his witness, a law education was the cornerstone of a successful, fulfilled life.

  “You know, Dad, there are important people in this family other than lawyers.”

  He coughed.

  “What about Mercy Breedlove who lived in the time of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement and believed so strongly that women should have the right to vote that at seventeen she embroidered the front and back of a dress with Susan B. Anthony’s words of freedom: Men, their rights and nothing more. Women, their rights and nothing less. And she wore that dress day in and day out with everyone pointing at her and her father screaming at her to stop. That was long before anti-perspirant, too.”

  “Embroidery,” Dad sputtered, “is not a proper Breedlove career.”

  “What about Iza and Baldwin Breedlove, Dad, the fifteen-year-old twins who lived during the Depression and quit school and got a total of eleven part-time jobs per week to support their family. And when some of those jobs dried up, they taught their dog tricks and performed in the street for food.”