Memory was in the hallway, but she didn’t speak to Lee. She only passed by, invisible as always, humming a tune that was deep and minor-keyed. The back screen door squeaked open, caught in the grasp of an unseasonably warm November wind. Then the door clattered against its frame, and the humming faded away.
Lee peered into the parlor. Mrs. Derry had left, and Judith sat alone in her wicker chair, looking at the jade and pearl bracelet around her wrist. Lee had heard the history of that bracelet more than a dozen times over, but he never tired of it.
As a young apprentice to Death, Lee’s father had found the bracelet beneath a boulder at the base of Boone Falls, just at the point where the white water hit hardest. The bracelet had slipped from a crevice and landed perfectly in Vince Vickery’s outstretched hand. He’d lost his balance immediately after and slipped into the water, conking his head on the rocky river base. His coat had snagged in a bramble bush overhanging the river, and it had been there that Judith Birdwhistle—young apprentice to Memory—found him, unconscious. She’d lugged him out on her own and pressed her lips to his, breathing air back into his lungs. Soon after Vince had revived, he gave his newfound bracelet—which he’d meant to pawn for winter supplies—to his rescuer, along with a promise of eternal devotion.
That day had been Halloween, when Death had been on vacation, and Memory, too, had been otherwise occupied. Neither Shade had been watching their apprentice, but the third Shade had: Passion. Thanks to Passion, Judith and Vince had fallen in love fierce and fast, before Death or Memory could prevent their rival apprentices from speaking. The other two Shades only had a say in things later—a say that became an Agreement.
“All done?” Lee asked his mother.
She started and looked up.
“Last patient of the day,” she said.
“They were bad memories.”
“Yes.” Judith’s face was off-color, as it often was after sessions. “You sealed them well?”
Lee had been handling jars since his tenth birthday, and Judith never failed to ask him this question. If a jar broke or its lid came loose, the contents would be set free. That memory would no longer belong to the patient who had surrendered it, but to whomever stood nearest the damage. Or, if no one was near, the memory would simply disappear, lost forever.
Even though he knew these risks, Lee had a habit of carelessness in the canning room. Many times before, he’d tied orange ribbons where green ones ought to have gone or shelved memories of People with the memories of Love, which resulted in patients returning to Judith to say how they felt a sudden affection for their grocer, without knowing why. Even worse, just last month, Lee hadn’t properly sealed a memory of a Triviality, and it had evaporated overnight.
Memory had not been happy about that. Though she’d said nothing to Lee, he’d heard her arguing with his mother late into the night, and the next day, he’d heard Memory’s moody humming at his ear as he sealed and stored a new set of jars. She’d kept close by him for weeks after that, to be sure he did his job correctly.
“Very well sealed,” Lee reported. “I think I’ll go out to the porch for a while.”
“Supper in half an hour,” his mother replied.
She knew that Lee went out to the porch to meet with Felix, the son she could never know. If Lee thought on this for long, it made him unspeakably sad. So he did not think about it tonight. He tromped out to the front porch and settled on its top step. There he stared into the dark of Poplar Wood, his hearing ear perked for the sound of Felix’s footsteps.
Felix placed the last of the white snakeroot inside his satchel. His knuckles were stiff from so much plucking and digging. Even so, Felix liked herb collecting on days like today. Here in the wood, he was far from the chill of the house and the sight of Death and the stench of the red candles burning in the cellar.
This was the last of the warm autumn days—Felix was sure of it. True November was about to arrive. That was why Felix had been hard at work all day, collecting each herb itemized on his father’s list. Now, his satchel heavy and fat, Felix walked home, carrying with him a pungent mingle of smells.
A lit lantern shone from the west end of Poplar House. Lee. Felix could remember a not-too-distant time when his brother had waited on him with eager eyes and a book in hand. In those days, Lee had been so sure there was a way to break the Agreement. He’d checked out dozens of books from the Boone Ridge library, with titles like Magic and Its Practicalities and The Art of Spell-Breaking. Lee had been full of hope then, convinced he would soon hear his father’s stories in the east end’s parlor and that Felix would cook with his mother in the west end’s kitchen. But that had been before. Before Felix had been thrown in the cellar and Lee was sent in the dead of night to Forgetful Pond, where he’d emptied memories until the break of day. Light punishments, Death and Memory had told them, for attempting to fool the Shades.
Felix drew nearer the porch, and at last Lee noticed and waved him closer. “Took you long enough! I thought the gloaming goblins had got you for sure.”
“Ready to run?” Felix asked.
Their attempt to break the Agreement had mostly been Lee’s idea. He had done the reading and dreaming and planning. When that was over—over for good—Lee had diverted his energies into something else: running. Lee would often run circles around the house, begging Felix to watch the clock and root him on toward his best time yet. Felix didn’t mind, because Lee was happy when he ran, and Felix had worried for a while that Lee’s smile might have disappeared forever.
“Don’t feel much like running tonight,” said Lee. “Just talking.”
“Bad memories?” Felix asked, sitting beside him.
Lee sometimes got into a funk when he had canned too many Bad Things.
A silence wound around the boys, tight like thread pulled around a spool.
Quietly, Lee asked, “Do you think you could ever do it? Sign the contract?”
Felix shook his head. “Don’t be stupid.”
“So first I’m a coward, and now I’m stupid. I see how it is.”
Lee returned his gaze to the trees, and Felix’s heart sank to his stomach, sloshing around in acute discomfort. He wished he had never accused Lee of being a coward on Halloween night. He had meant to apologize, to tell Lee that he’d been upset, and the word had burst out like water from a weak dam. But he hadn’t found the right way to say so.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Felix said. “Of course I think about it, and I know Death does, too. He’s already planning a way to trick me.”
This was no idle worry in Felix’s mind, but a fear born of reality: Both his parents had been tricked into their apprenticeships.
Felix knew their mother’s story from Lee: Judith’s mother had died in childbirth, and her father was all she had in the wide world. Matthias Birdwhistle had been Memory’s apprentice before her, and he had been a kind man and a good father. He worked in an apothecary, where he snuck the town children toffees from the register jar, though he was supposed to charge a quarter. At the end of each day, he made up for the lost change from his own pocket.
Judith helped him with his work, tying ribbons and shelving memories the same as Lee did now. But Matthias had told Judith she could do far more than an apprenticeship would ever allow her. He wanted her to leave Boone Ridge and attend college, far away.
And Judith had meant to do just that. Until the day a bad man came to her father’s shop, with a canvas bag in one hand and a pistol in the other. As Felix’s grandfather picked up the phone to call the police, the bad man killed Matthias Birdwhistle, then and there, with a bullet.
That had been Judith’s sixteenth birthday.
That day, Memory revealed herself to Judith, full of tender sympathy, and she made a deal: If Judith would sign her apprentice contract, Memory would take away all remembrance of her father’s death.
So Judith signed, and even now she could not tell Lee a remembered detail of the robbery and murder. She only knew what sh
e had read in the town newspaper about the crimes, nothing more. The worst of it was wiped clean, Judith’s pain numbed from existence.
And then there was the boys’ father. His family had long served Death. They had lived farther away from Boone Ridge proper, close to a coal mine where Vince’s family worked. Mining was hard and unsafe, and Vince watched as his uncle and cousins came home late in the evening, faces darkened with soot, lungs filled with poison. But Vince’s father was spared that fate, serving instead as Death’s apprentice.
“As you will serve one day,” Vince’s father had told him. “You should be grateful for your higher calling.”
But Vince had different ideas. When he turned sixteen, he was going to escape forever, hitchhiking up to Knoxville, or beyond. Only, when Vince turned sixteen, there was an accident at the mine, which crushed and suffocated men beneath the earth. That day, Vince begged Death to spare them—kind and good men with families to support.
“If you serve me,” Death told him, “I can save their lives.”
So Vince had signed his life away, and the line of Vickery apprentices continued.
Shades could not work without apprentices like Judith and Vince. Such helpers were hard to come by, and it only made sense that apprentices would train up their children to follow in their steps. And so apprentices’ children were indentured until their sixteenth birthday. That was no Agreement, but standard practice. It meant far less work for everyone involved.
Only, Felix hated Death, and he hated his father’s work and everything about Poplar House’s east end. Felix did not mind about rarely seeing town or the people who lived there. But he did wish, dearly, that he could go to school. Though his father taught him reading and mathematics in the late afternoon, Felix envied the stories Lee brought back from Boone Ridge Middle: classes in science and even in painting and singing. A world of knowledge Felix would never know simply because Death kept him from it—simply because he was the less fortunate twin.
When he turned sixteen and Death handed him the contract to sign—that was when Felix would be free. He would refuse, rip the contract to shreds, and escape to a place where he could learn with no restrictions. He planned to go, go, go and never look back.
Only, he knew, his father had once made that very same plan.
And his father had not succeeded.
“We won’t sign those contracts,” Lee said now. “I sure hope we won’t.”
Hope. Lee used that word so often. How could he still hope anything after they’d tried their scheme and failed? Even if—when—they broke free from this house, the Agreement would remain in place.
So Felix would never be entirely free. Never free to see his mother, or hear her laughter, or tell her how much he loved her hot cheddar biscuits. Lee would never meet his father and memorize the lines of his face, take comfort in his kind smile. And Vince and Judith Vickery would never, ever meet again. No matter how much time passed, no matter what contracts were signed or unsigned—that Agreement remained in place.
Felix didn’t hope. Still, he hated the Agreement. He hated it with a thick hatred that had pooled inside him since the day his father had sat him on his knee and told him the whole story of how he and Felix’s mother had met.
A jade and pearl bracelet, caught in a riverbed. A misstep, a rescue, and a kiss. They had fallen in love that day, so fast and wholly. It was not until later that they discovered the small purple flowers tucked into their clothes and realized who the other was and, more importantly, who the other belonged to: a rival Shade.
Most towns’ Shades lived with relative disinterest in each other’s business. Death claimed lives and Memory remembrances and Passion fervent unions. They did what they pleased, on their own time. But in Boone Ridge, things were different. The Death and Memory of Boone Ridge despised each other with enduring ferocity. It was because of an argument they’d had years ago. Death had interfered in Memory’s work, or perhaps it was Memory who had meddled in Death’s—the details were murky now, so not even Felix’s father knew them. What mattered was that the two Shades loathed one another, and a union between their apprentices was unthinkable. Impossible.
The Passion of Boone Ridge knew the depth of this hatred, and that was why Passion threw young Vince and Judith together that Halloween. For fun, to wreak havoc on two fellow Shades. So really, it was because of Passion that the Agreement existed, and though Felix had never met Passion, he hated that Shade as well. Hate made more sense than hope. But it was, Felix thought, more exhausting than hope, too.
Felix wondered at how quickly his good mood had soured. He no longer felt like talking to Lee for hours. His bones were suddenly weary from all his work.
“I’m tired,” he said, clutching his satchel close. “It’s been a long day.”
“Oh. Okay.”
These porch meetings, when Lee was through with school and Felix had finished the brunt of his chores—they were special. Only sometimes, they hurt too much. They reminded Felix of what could be, and what wasn’t. They reminded him that they would never be a normal family that ate meals together and at night sat happily around a crackling fire. They were not a normal family in the slightest. They were just two brothers, one half-blind to all but Death and the other half-deaf to all but Memory, cursed to part ways at the end of each day.
Felix got to his feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yes. Okay.”
Lee was still looking out to the wind-shaken wood.
Felix opened the east-end door and slammed it shut behind him. He crossed the kitchen without speaking to his father, who was stirring yet another herb broth on the stove. He stopped in the darkened doorway of the examination room. Here, Felix had watched Death remove fragile human lives with metal pincers as easily as Felix might discard a used tissue. He had seen the life flicker and fade from patients’ eyes. He’d seen fear in those eyes, too, and a fight to push against the coming darkness until the last of their light was swallowed up. Every life had its appointed time—the moment its corresponding candle was set to extinguish forever, sending up curling blue smoke in the cellar. Felix had watched countless wicks sputter until no flame remained—lives gone, never to be relit. He had seen enough to know: You could not fight Death. So he did not know why the urge to do so remained thick and strong, knotted beneath his chest like a second heart.
He moved on down the hallway, slid shut the latch of his door, and lay upon his bed. It had begun to rain. Drops of water pelted against the house until a downpour sheeted his bedroom windows. Then Felix saw it, through his right eye, which could not see the rest of the world: a hand, pale and smooth, pressed against the window nearest his bed. The rainwater spewed around the fingers and into the empty flower box below. Felix stared harder, and a nose and white-lipped mouth appeared, distorted through the glass.
Death was looking in on him.
Felix shuddered and slipped his eyepatch back on, and the ghostly face disappeared. All that remained was an unaccountably odd pattern of rainwater against the windowpane.
Felix knew there were schemes hidden inside Death’s dark stare. Schemes to entrap him, to keep him here forever, to lighten Death’s load. He hid from that stare, for now at least, beneath his quilted bedcovers.
“Gretchen, for the last time.”
“Uhhh!” Gretchen groaned and threw down her soupspoon. It clanked against her bowl, then slipped into a watery grave of chicken broth.
“Heaven’s sake,” said Gram Whipple, “now look what you’ve done.”
“It’s not my fault,” Gretchen protested. “This spoon is unmanageable.”
“And are you also unmanageable?” said Gram. “No. You can manage your temper. You can manage your manners. Now take your soup to the kitchen and fetch a new bowl.”
Gretchen grabbed her bowl from the table and trotted to the kitchen, where she fished out the sunken spoon and glared at the utensil—the source of all her woes.
She hadn’t meant to slurp, hadn’t rea
lized she was being the least bit loud. But then her grandmother had made a big to-do about it three separate times, until the last time, when Gretchen had drowned the confounded spoon in a fit of rage. It wasn’t fair to treat innocent cutlery like that, she knew. But it also wasn’t fair that her grandmother picked and poked at Gretchen about every last thing she did.
Gretchen returned to the dining room, new bowl and spoon in hand. When she took her seat, something hard smacked into her shin, and Asa snickered at her from across the table.
“Stop kicking me,” she hissed.
“Asa, stop kicking your sister,” said Mayor Whipple distractedly, his voice a distant breeze.
Mayor Whipple was looking at a stack of papers propped to the side of his place setting. Important business. Occasionally, he would lift a sip of soup to his lips. Then he would blot his mouth and return to reading over his papers. It was infuriating. Gretchen wanted to stand up on her chair, storm across the table, and crash her foot into her father’s food. She wanted to scream, “I’m here! Your daughter. Wake up, wake up!”
But Gretchen refrained from causing such a commotion, and Mayor Whipple didn’t look up when she yelped at Asa kicking her other leg.
“Gretchen Marie!” cried Gram. “I’m not going to tell you again. You are thirteen. Act accordingly if you wish to attend the gala this year.”
This wasn’t a good threat on Gram’s part. Gretchen had no desire to attend Boone Ridge’s annual Christmas gala, an event that required her to wear itchy tights and a petticoat and shake the hands of all her father’s boring friends.
Gretchen stared sullenly at her soup. A carrot floated by, then a chunk of celery. She spooned the carrot into her mouth and closed her lips in an awkward glom. She would not slurp, she would not slurp. Slowly, she squeaked the spoon from her mouth and set it back carefully in the bowl, slurp free. Gram Whipple did not notice this impressive feat. Her thoughts, it seemed, were wholly consumed by the Christmas gala; lately, it was all she talked about.
The House in Poplar Wood Page 4