Prophet of Bones A Novel

by Ted Kosmatka

  “We’re practically neighbors,” he told her.

  Paul rode his bike up her driveway. The screen door squeaked as she opened it, but she didn’t step inside.

  “Those papers,” she said. “What were you drawing?”

  For a moment, Paul wasn’t sure how to answer. She must have sensed the hesitation. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to,” she added.

  Her saying that made it possible. So he told her.

  “What do you mean, ‘cages’?” she asked. She let the screen door close and sat on the stoop.

  He pulled the pad from his paper-route bag. “Here,” he said.

  Rebecca took the papers, and her cousin leaned close.

  “Construction plans, I guess you’d call them,” Paul said.

  She flipped to the next sheet. This one showed his largest cage, drawn out in intricate detail.

  “You built this?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t that hard.”

  “It looks hard to me. Where is it?”

  “In the attic over my garage.”

  “Can we see?”

  Paul glanced in the direction of his house. “No, I better not.”

  Rebecca flipped the page and studied the final drawing carefully. “It must have taken you a long time to put all this together.”

  “Months.”

  “What are they for? I mean, if these are cages, what’s supposed to go inside?”

  “Mice.”

  She nodded to herself. “Mice,” she repeated under her breath, as if it made perfect sense. “Where’d you get the stuff? All the wood and nails.”

  Paul shrugged. “Here and there. Just scraps, mostly. Other stuff I had to buy.”

  The little cousin finally spoke: “My parents don’t let me have pets.”

  “Neither do mine,” Paul said. “But anyway, the mice aren’t pets.”

  “Then what are they?” the boy asked. He stared over his cousin’s shoulder at the drawings.

  “A project,” Paul said.

  “What kind of project?”

  Paul looked at the graph paper. “I’m still working on that.”

  * * *

  The bell rang at two thirty-five.

  By two forty-nine, school bus No. 32 was freighted with its raucous cargo and pulling out of the parking lot, headed for the highway and points south and east.

  Paul sat near the back and stared out the window, watching the Grand Kankakee Marsh scroll by. Around him, the other kids talked and laughed, but only Paul sat silently, fidgeting with the large blue textbook on his lap, waiting for the road to smooth out so that he could read. As they crossed the bridge, he finally opened his life sciences book.

  Today Mr. Slocam had gone over the study guide for the test.

  Figure 73 showed two ellipses graphed like a crooked half-smile between an x- and a y-axis. The caption explained that the first slope represented the number of daughter atoms. The second slope represented the parent atoms. The point of intersection of the two slopes was the element’s half-life.

  “You will need to know this for the test,” the study guide declared in bold heading, followed by a series of bullet-pointed facts.

  The study guides were always like this.

  Need to know this for the test. The common refrain of the public schools, where academic bulimia was the order of the day—and tests simple exercises in regurgitation. Paul knew the drill.

  The bus made several stops before finally pulling to rest in front of his house. Paul climbed out.

  His father was out of town again, at another scientific conference, so dinner that evening was a quiet undertaking. Later that night he went up to his room and copied his study guide onto a series of flash cards. Just before bed, he found his mother in the kitchen. “Will you quiz me?”

  “Of course.” His mother’s doll face shattered into a smile.

  They sat at the dining room table, and his mother flipped the first card, on which was drawn two crooked lines on an x- and y-axis. “Describe the point of intersection,” she said.

  “It’s an element’s half-life.”

  “Good,” she said, flipping to the next card. “When was radiometric dating invented?”

  “In 1906, but the results were rejected for years.”

  “Rejected by whom?”

  “By evolutionists.”

  “Good.” She flipped to the next card. “In what year did Darwin write On the Origin of Species?”

  “In 1859.”

  “When did Darwin’s theory lose the confidence of the scientific community?”

  “That was 1932.” Anticipating the next question, Paul continued: “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating.”

  “Why was this important?”

  “The new dating method proved the earth wasn’t as old as the evolutionists thought.”

  “When was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?”

  “In 1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago.”

  “Good,” his mother said and flipped another card. “And why else was he known?”

  “He won the Nobel Prize in 1960, when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the earth was fifty-eight hundred years old.”

  3

  Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father’s old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul’s father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He’d met Paul’s mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm in Nanjing. Paul’s mother had been one of the scientists at the university there, and she sometimes told Paul stories about working in a lab, about her home in China, and about meeting his father. “He was so handsome,” she said.

  After they married, they’d continued to work on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul’s father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

  Paul’s father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul’s mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

  Paul’s father was a force of nature, a cataclysm. As unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. Over the course of his childhood, Paul became an expert on his father’s moods. He learned to interpret the tone of a brooding silence, could read whole volumes of meaning into a single blue-eyed glance around the side of a clenched periodical. He had two fathers, he learned. One who smiled and charmed and made people laugh. And another, who stormed. The attic over the garage was a good place to retreat to when the dark clouds gathered.

  Paul studied his mice like Goodall’s chimps, watching them for hours. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. At first he gave them names, borrowed from characters from his favorite books. Names like Algernon and Nimh. Later, as the population grew, he started giving them numbered codes instead, saving names for only the most special.

  Mice are social animals, and he found that within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other. Mice could war.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations slowly expanded to fill the new territories he’d created for them. The habitats thronged. The babies were born pink and blind, and as their fur came in, Paul began documenting coat colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, banded, and broken marked. In later generations, new colors appeared that he hadn’t purchased, and he knew enough about genetic
s to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

  Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transport of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next.

  Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well mapped and well understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream, that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. Three gene pairs lining up in just the right way, each diluting the coat pigmentation by a certain quantum, until you were left with a mouse with almost no coat pigment at all. But not an albino, because albinos had red eyes.

  In November the school sent home an announcement about the science fair, which would be held in the spring.

  “Are you going to participate?” his mother asked him as she signed the parental notification.

  Paul shrugged. “If I can think of something,” he said. He knew instantly that his mice were the answer, though he wasn’t sure how exactly.

  It wasn’t enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He’d need to do real science. He’d need to do something new. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas. His parents were pleased with his sudden analytical interest and bought him what he asked for.

  But mice, Paul quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand.

  The electronic scale, however, proved useful. Paul weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics—but he wasn’t sure what characteristics to look for. He imagined that his special new strain would be useful to science someday, a genetic model destined to play a role in some far-future discovery, but he didn’t know where to start.

  He imagined winning the science fair. He imagined his father proud of him, clapping him on the shoulder with his big hand.

  Paul was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date but a mouse, January-17. The seventeenth mouse born in January.

  He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. Over the previous several months he’d become good at handling the mice. It was a knack you picked up without realizing it—the ability to hold the mice softly, so that you didn’t hurt them, and yet firmly, so they couldn’t get away. This mouse was not particularly fast or hard to catch. There was nothing obviously special about it. It was rendered different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he’d written there.

  Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he’d ever weighed.

  * * *

  In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God’s word. God wrote the language of life in four letters: A, T, C, and G. A family of proteins called AAA+ initiated DNA replication, genetic structures conserved across all forms of life, from men to archaebacteria—the very calling card of the great designer.

  That’s not why Paul did it, though: to get closer to God. He did it because he was curious.

  It was late winter before his father asked him what he spent all his time doing in the attic.

  “Just messing around,” Paul answered.

  They were in his father’s car, on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”

  Paul fought back a surge of panic. The lie came quickly, unbidden. “I built a fort a while ago.”

  Paul’s father glanced down at him. “What kind of fort?”

  “Just a few pieces of plywood and a couple blankets. Just a little fort.”

  “You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t want your grades slipping.”

  “All right.”

  “Your grades are what you should be focusing on right now, not screwing around with kids’ games in an attic.”

  Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said, a third time, “All right.”

  The car slowed to a stop at a red light. “Oh,” Paul’s father added, almost as an afterthought. “There’s something else. I don’t want you hanging out with that girl from up the street.”

  “What?” Paul said. “Who?”

  “The Nearhaven girl.”

  Paul blinked. He hadn’t realized his father knew.

  His father added, “You’re getting too old for that, too.”

  The light turned green.

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

  He watched his father’s hands on the steering wheel.

  Though large for his age, like his father, Paul’s features favored his Asian mother; he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn’t help being what he was.

  Paul watched his father’s hand on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that’s how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn’t false but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.

  4

  Winter stayed late that year in the land of marshes and highways. A mid-March storm came howling down across Lake Michigan, laying waste to an early spring thaw. Murdered stalks of corn jutted from the snow, turning roadside farms into fields of brown stubble.

  On most days, Paul lingered inside after school. But on some afternoons when his father wasn’t around, Rebecca would meet him, and on those days the two of them ventured into the woods. They explored the frozen marshes that sprawled behind the back fence of the subdivision—a wild place beyond the reach of roads and sidewalks and parents.

  Instead there were cattails, and sway-grass, and old-growth oaks. Dark water hidden under whole plains of snow. And the marshes extended for miles.

  On that cold Saturday afternoon, Paul and Rebecca walked the trail down to the river. The morning had dawned cold and windy—northern gusts raking through the trees, a twenty-degree temperature drop from the day before. Their breath made smoke on the frigid air. They didn’t speak as they walked; it was too cold to speak. They rounded a final bend in the trail, and the river lay before them: the Little Cal—a blank white ribbon that cut a swath through the heart of the wetland snowscape. Stubborn patches of dogwood and black oak clung to the riverside floodplain. In the spring, Paul knew, whole acres of lowland marsh would be transformed, submerged, become river itself. But in the cold months, the river retreated to its banks, dug deep, and capped itself over in ice.

  It was a crazy thing to do, to play on the river ice. They knew this.

  “Come on,” Rebecca said.

  “I’m coming. Hold your horses.”

  They walked the ice like a winding roadway.

  Even in winter, the wetlands teamed with life; you could read the signs all around—animal tracks like lines of grammar on the snow. Sometimes deer came bounding through, graceful as dancers—just another shape in the woods until a white flash of tail drew your attention. Where one ran, the others followed, by some instinct staying clear of the ice.

  Months from now this place would be unrecognizable. A burst of foliage, and the low shrubs would hide their bones in green. Everywhere he looked, Paul saw it—the endless cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. A cycle old as the first day. O
ld as God saying, Let it be.

  The children’s feet crunched on snow. They hunted lures that day, knives in hand, serrated edges making short work of twenty-pound-test line.

  For three seasons of the year, the river belonged to fishermen—casting their lines into coffee-colored water through a web of low-hanging branches. Inevitably, some lures got hung up, and the fishermen would curse and pull on their lines, until those lines snapped; the lures would dangle over the river like unreachable, low-hanging fruit. The anglers fished three seasons of the year, but winter belonged to the children.

  So they walked the ice like a roadway, serrated edges parting twenty-pound-test like strands of spider silk. They gathered red-and-white bobbers, and colorful spinners, and desiccated egg sacks wrapped in white nylon mesh.

  The first to see the lure earned the right to claim it. There was no running on the ice. No rush to grab. They moved slowly, six feet apart to disperse their weight. They respected the ice and worked hard to learn its rules.

  Paul was larger and heavier than Rebecca, so some lures only Rebecca could dare.

  That Saturday, they walked the river south.

  Here are some of the rules of ice. The ice is thinner near the shoreline, so getting on and off can be difficult. The ice is thinner near bends in the river, where the water moves quickest. In places where the snow cover is darker, slushier, the ice beneath is sure to be rotten and soft.

  Last year, when walking alone on the ice, in that last leap to shore, Paul had broken through, his leg plunging into frigid water up to his knee. He’d been close to home, but by the time he’d been able to peel off his boot, his foot had been blue. A warm bath had brought it excruciatingly back to life.

  But today he wasn’t close to home. Today they were miles out to the south, and the day was colder. Today they walked in the middle of the river, like it was a roadway, knives drawn, tempting fate.

  “Do you have science fairs at your school?” Paul asked as they rounded a curve.

  “Yeah, every year,” Rebecca said.

  “Have you entered?”