Sophomore Year

by Douglas Rees

“No problem,” I said. “Would you like fries with that?”

  “I need space,” Turk said. “I need a real studio. In real towns, places like that would have been converted years ago. Hey, in some places, they give artists tax breaks to move in. Those things are just sitting there. Waiting. Waiting for me. Your dad’s got to help me find out who owns those places and how I can get into one.”

  “So you want Dad to buy you an abandoned mill so you can have a place to paint?” I said.

  “And sculpt,” Turk said.

  “Great idea,” I said. “At last you’d have enough space for your whole ego.”

  “Listen, jerk,” Turk said. “Do you know why cities turn buildings like that over to artists? Money. Money follows art around like a lost puppy. Even Uncle Jack can understand that. I’ll cut him in.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Dad’s always wanted to be part-owner of an abandoned building with a wannabe painter in it.”

  “I am not a damn wannabe,” Turk snarled. “I produce. I sell.”

  “Good night, Turk,” I said. “Good luck with Dad.”

  I went back down the ladder.

  I heard it thump up behind me.

  I had to admit, I was glad Turk was home safe. But what kind of nut job cousin did I have?

  “Buy me a mill, Uncle Jack. I want to paint my pictures there.” It was like she was still making spaceships out of cardboard.

  But as I got into bed, I thought that maybe Crossfield could be the topic of my impossible research paper for Gibbon’s history class. It wasn’t a blinding flash of inspiration. I wasn’t even very interested in it. But Turk was sort of right about the place. It hadn’t been beautiful, but it had been intriguing in a twisted kind of way. Like a car wreck. There might be a story there.

  8

  Mom, Dad, and I were sitting around the breakfast table the next morning. We looked just like one of those paintings of happy families you see on old magazine covers, except that we didn’t look happy. Dad was scowling, and Mom’s lips were a thin line in her face.

  Turk slouched into the room, poured a cup of coffee, grabbed my toast out of my hand, stuffed it into her mouth, and swallowed it with the coffee.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Good morning, Turk. It’s nice to see you. Are you all ready for school?”

  “Turk, we were very worried about you last night,” Mom said. “We had no idea where you were, or if you were all right. You could at least have called. Please don’t do that again.”

  “I didn’t have anything to say last night,” Turk said. “But I do now. Uncle Jack, I need some space of my own. Like one of those old mills in Crossfield.”

  “What is this with Crossfield?” Dad said.

  “It’s the next big thing,” I said. “Urban decay. Better catch the wave while you can, Dad.”

  “Cody!” Dad said. “Anyway, Turk, do I understand you correctly? Are you asking me to buy you an abandoned mill?”

  “Yeah,” said Turk. “I know just the one I want.”

  “Oh,” said Dad. “Good. Just wanted to be sure. No. I will not buy you an abandoned mill.”

  “I knew it,” Turk said, and slammed out of the kitchen. She got into her car and peeled away from the curb, leaving me to wait for the school limo.

  I relaxed in the car with the usual morning crew: Anton, Istvan, Janos, Anastaizia, Gizi, and Trescka. They were the same kids who’d snubbed me last year, walling me out behind their special language. Now things were different.

  “Come and rest beneath the shadow of our wings, O radiant horse,” Gizi said, and giggled.

  “Your horse is beyond deserving,” I said.

  And then we all switched to English.

  New Sodom went past the windows slowly, and it was another beautiful day, the morning sun bright on the houses and the shadows extra dark under the trees.

  It was perfect—the weather, the quiet car, the jenti chatting softly about little things with each other and with me.

  So I said, “Hey, anybody know the story on Crossfield?”

  And the chatting stopped and the car was real, real quiet.

  Finally, Istvan said, “No.”

  And Anton said, “Not really.”

  And Janos shrugged.

  And Anastaizia, Gizi, and Trescka looked out the windows.

  When we got to school, everyone hurried off and left me except Gizi, who said, “Some things…,” and shook her head.

  Which was clearly all the explanation I was going to get.

  Now I was really curious. And when I was curious about anything jenti, I could always ask Justin for a straight answer.

  But Justin and I didn’t have classes together in the morning. And it wasn’t until dinner that we saw each other.

  Ileana was with us, and there was an empty seat. Turk had started sitting at a table by herself. She was across the room, writing in a black notebook and shoving her food into her face without looking at it.

  “Listen,” I said. “Turk visited Crossfield last night.”

  No reaction from Ileana.

  Justin said, “Oh.”

  “So anyway, she came home with this weird idea that my dad should buy her one of the old mills and let her turn it into a studio. The whole thing.”

  “Hm,” Justin said.

  Ileana put down her fork.

  “But then I got to thinking—why doesn’t anybody talk about Crossfield, or go there? And why is it just a ruin? It doesn’t make sense.”

  I waited for an answer.

  Justin pushed something around on his plate. Ileana didn’t do anything.

  Finally, she said, “This is not a good place to talk about it.”

  “Oh,” I said. If Justin had said that, I would have said, “Okay, where can we go to talk?” But the way Ileana said it sounded like there was no good place on earth to answer my question.

  “I’ve been thinking I might do my local history project on it,” I said.

  “Bad idea,” Justin said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Excuse us, please, Cody,” Justin said.

  And that was the end of our conversation. He and Ileana got up and walked out of the dining hall.

  It looked like if I ever wanted complete privacy at Vlad, all I had to do was say the word Crossfield and I’d get it.

  What was there about Crossfield that was so awful that Ileana and Justin would both walk out on me? Some weird New Sodom secret that everybody knew and nobody talked about?

  I had one more idea. And after my last class, I went to the library.

  Ms. Shadwell, the librarian, greeted me like she was a starving wolf and I was a sandwich. Since Ms. Shadwell was one of those jenti who turn into a wolf at times, this made me a little nervous. Actually, Ms. Shadwell always made me a little nervous. She wasn’t much like your usual librarian.

  “Master Cody,” she practically roared. “It’s so nice to see you again. Did you have a good summer? I’ve got some great new books I’ve just finished cataloging. Let me show them to you. Do you like fantasy? I forget. Anyway, we’ve got that new trilogy everyone’s talking about. Oh, and I have some new histories. Do you like the Civil War? Oh, and there’s this fascinating book on diesel engines if you like those—”

  “Actually, I am here about history,” I said. “I have that project on New Sodom to write this year.”

  “Excellent,” she said, like I’d given her a present. “We have everything on New Sodom. Population stats, public records, newspapers, ephemera—would you like to see my ephemera collection?”

  “What would that be, exactly?” I asked.

  “Oh, ephemera are so much fun,” she chortled. “All kinds of things. Posters, notices, little commemorative booklets and souvenirs. I have broadsides that go back to the sixteen hundreds advertising anvils for sale. Lots of wonderful things.”

  “I’ve been thinking about writing about Crossfield,” I said.

  Ms. Shadwell stopp
ed chortling. I saw the wolf come into her eyes.

  “Oh, I’m afraid there’s nothing,” she said. “That place wasn’t regarded as local.”

  “But it’s part of the town, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I suppose you might say that it is now,” she said. “But it wasn’t originally. So I’m afraid there’s nothing. We do have a nice collection of sewer maps.”

  “Well, maybe I could take a look at those ephemera, then,” I said. I thought it might be a good idea to pretend to be interested in something. And the ephemera, whatever they were, had to be better than sewer maps.

  “Excellent,” Ms. Shadwell said, happy again.

  She took me across the room to a big wooden door and unlocked it. A sign over the door said SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.

  On the other side of the door was a room that looked like it had been built to store nightmares. High, long, narrow, and dark, with a single table running from the door almost to the back wall, it was filled with shelves that ran to the ceiling and were crammed with books bound in black leather. A tall ladder on rails ran to the ceiling. There were little lights with green glass shades spaced regularly down the table’s length, and along the table were two long benches, one on each side. A chill rose from the dark slate floor. There was one window high up, which looked like it had been meant for shooting arrows through. No light from it reached the floor.

  “It’s so good you’re getting an early start on your project,” Ms. Shadwell said. “You can have the entire room to yourself today. Later in the year there’ll be students at every one of these lights. Now let’s find those ephemera.”

  She took me all the way down to the end of the room and pulled two huge volumes off the shelves. She held them as if they were as light as a couple of paperbacks.

  “These are the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” she said. “Of course, there’s a great deal more in the nineteenth. Three volumes, in fact. And the twentieth—well, I still haven’t got all that cataloged. And the 1950s are at the bindery in Boston. Seven volumes. But they’ll be back soon if you want to see them. But why don’t you start here and see if anything piques your interest? Would you like to see those anvil advertisements?”

  “Well, sure,” I said.

  Ms. Shadwell left me with my own pair of white gloves from a box in the room and went out.

  “I’ll be back when we close,” she said as she left. “I’m afraid I have to lock you in. Most of these things are irreplaceable.”

  “Me too,” I said. “So please don’t forget I’m in here.”

  She laughed and locked the door.

  I turned on one of the table lamps. It had been specially designed to give as little light as possible. A small circle of pale yellow fell onto the dark wood. The rest of the room was almost totally black. Turk would have loved it.

  I didn’t. So I went around the table and turned on every one of the lights. That was better. Now the dark spines of the books glinted where their gold titles hadn’t faded, and the table shone. It was almost comfortable.

  I flipped open one of the books Ms. Shadwell had given me.

  “At sale A Fine Milch Cow of Three Years,” said the page I opened to. “Two Pounds Sterling.”

  I tried another.

  “A Substitute for Militia Duty is Defired. Twenty fhillings for fix weeks’ Service. Apply to William Fletcher at the Fletcher Farm.”

  I could see why Ms. Shadwell was so interested in these things. The suspense was killing me.

  I looked around the room at all those closed black books, filled with things the jenti had saved from their long years in New Sodom. I felt like they were smirking at me.

  “Think you know our secrets, gadje? Think we’ll tell you about anything that really matters?”

  Ms. Shadwell had put me in here to overwhelm me with this stuff, but that didn’t mean I had to be overwhelmed. She’d be back in an hour and a half to let me out. Meanwhile, I was going to play on the ladder.

  I climbed up to the top and pushed myself around the room as fast as I could. That wasn’t very fast, but at the top of a twelve-foot ladder it felt a little scary. I reached the opposite side of the room and did it again, from the middle rungs this time. Not as much fun.

  Then I had another idea. I would pile all the books I could onto the table and leave them for Ms. Shadwell. One good overwhelming deserved another.

  “Gee, Ms. Shadwell, it’s all so interesting I couldn’t decide where to start.” That’s what I’d say.

  So I started unloading the shelves. Up and down the ladder, just pulling stuff off at random until I had an armload, then setting it carefully on the table, making higher and higher stacks. Pretty soon, I had something that looked like the skyline of a fairly big city. But all the buildings looked the same, except for their heights. I wanted some variety. So I started scouting through the shelves for the smallest books I could find, making little pyramids on top of my favorite skyscrapers.

  I named the tallest one the Ileana Tower. Another was the Warrener Building. And there was the Elliot State Building.

  I checked my watch. Forty-five minutes to go.

  Small books, small books.

  I found The Ploughman’s Guide to Successful Corn Husbandry, A Brief Treatise on the Metallurgy of Copper, Proceedings of the New Sodom Reform Society, 1845. Great stuff for the tops of buildings.

  And I found The Journal of Mercy Warrener.

  If its spine had ever had gold letters, they were long gone. The covers were worn and brown, not black. And inside, the paper was of different kinds. Some was as fine as the pages of a really good Bible. Some was yellow, and crackled when I touched it. Some was rough-edged and smaller than the rest. All of it had been written on in a strange, beautiful hand that swooped across the page in a way I’d never seen.

  I wondered if Mercy Warrener had been an ancestor of Justin’s. That would make this journal a lot more interesting. And it was possible. In some jenti families, the husband took the wife’s name, if the family was important. Ileana’s family was like that. But then, they were royalty. As far as I knew, the Warreners were just old New Sodom.

  I flipped the book open and read this:

  February 18, 1676

  The men came and took Father. He fought mightily, but they were too many. They have taken him to Crossfield. Mother and Prudence and the baby and I were all hid in the secret place which Father did make for us against this day. They made to burn our house, and so find us out, but Captain Danforth came with his men and did prevent them. Two of the enemy were slain and drunk from, but the rest were safe in Crossfield.

  All this we were told when Captain Danforth, who knew where we were, did come to us and convey us to this place of safety. We see the fires now against the night, and know that our house must be one of them. Captain Danforth says we shall take the town again, but our men are so few, and the militias from Boston and the towns around it do make the enemy stronger by the hour.

  If my Beloved were here, I believe that this never would have happened. He and Father together might have stood off the whole company of gadje until Captain Danforth and his men appeared under their double-headed eagle. But he is far away and will not return to me.

  Mother do hold the baby and rock, humming a song that is not a song. I fear she may be mad, or near it. Prudence asks where Father be, and when he do be coming. I know, but cannot tell it. I cannot speak a word. My tongue be stone. But I write this, that this night may never be forgot.

  When Ms. Shadwell came back, I didn’t hear the door open. I was a long way away, with Mercy Warrener.

  9

  Ephemera. Bits of paper that don’t have any permanent meaning. Bits of paper that survive a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years, and suddenly become important because they have survived.

  That’s what Mercy Warrener’s journal was. Ephemera. But she had tried to give it meaning across the years.

  The first page said:

  I, Mercy Warrener, do lea
ve this book for a remembrance to my family. These journals I have kept since I was a girl. Now, as I see the end of life approaching at last, these memories of the old times may serve to instruct and warn those whom I love so much. May God forgive any vain design I have in doing so. In my heart I wish only to leave a token of the life of our family to our family. May it continue in spite of all that has happened, and all that is to come.

  Mercy Warrener, 1818

  The journal was really just a collection of odds and ends from Mercy Warrener’s long life. Her personal ephemera. Most of what she had left behind was just the kind of thing that anybody might write about daily life. Of course, this was a daily life that had begun in 1650 and ended in 1820, which was kind of unusual, but nearly everything she had written was stuff like:

  March 14, 1664

  A warm day and so we did wash the clothes after this long winter. They made a mound as high as the eaves of the house. We do all be very tired from the work. The blueberries will not soon be ripe to pick.

  The next page was a recipe for robin pie.

  But every once in a while, in the earliest entries, there would be a note at the bottom of whatever she was writing about.

  Thomas Thornton taken to Crossfield.

  Allen Ames taken to Crossfield.

  Hope Carlton taken to Crossfield.

  These were names I knew. Names of the selkie kids on the water polo team. Friends. These were their ancestors, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what “taken to Crossfield” probably meant.

  Those entries stopped after 1676. That was when the Compact of New Sodom had been signed. From then on, the jenti families had done their drinking outside the town limits, and the gadje had left them in peace. That was something I’d learned from Justin. So nobody was taken to Crossfield after that.

  But Mercy Warrener had lived through a lot of history besides the local battles between her people and the gadje. Once in a while, it had touched her.

  April 20, 1775

  There is great stir and doing. The militia have gone to join the army besieging Boston. The British did try to seize the stores of powder and shot at Concord, and have been sent back beaten by our men. I knew nothing of this until today, for I have been ill with the flux, and had my own war a-raging in my innards. Better today.