Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos

  “For those of you interested in the history of hardworking people, Mrs. Slater died on the same day as Wat Tyler in 1381. Wat Tyler, who was the heroic leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt, was killed for wanting equality between peasants, who owned no land, and the Royalty and the Church, who owned all the land.

  “All Wat Tyler was asking for was that the land be equally divided so that every peasant family could farm and feed themselves. The peasants fought hard with Wat against the king’s army and finally Wat and his force of common people entered London and were poised to take over the city.

  “At that time King Richard II was only fourteen years old, but he was surrounded by rich and powerful lords. Wat Tyler was invited to have a private talk with King Richard to solve the land problem. But he was tricked! At the meeting the Lord Mayor of London stepped forward and stabbed Wat in the neck, then had his head chopped off and spiked onto a tall pole as a gory lesson to all who would defy the king and revolt for equal rights.

  “After their leader was beheaded the peasant army fled. But for those of us who live in Norvelt—a town of common people who own our own land—we should never forget Wat Tyler and his revolt to make life better for his own people!”

  She was really worked up as she paced back and forth and swung her arms around like a windmill. I wrote as fast as humanly possible and did a pretty good job getting it down considering it was my first job as a scribe.

  “Any questions?” she asked once she had concluded. “Anything seem unclear to you?”

  “Why did you add the part about Wat Tyler?” I asked. “It’s not like Mrs. Slater was alive in 1381.”

  “Connect the dots,” she answered impatiently. “Our dear little Norvelt was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew common people like us wanted equality just like Wat and his people. Our hunger is related to their hunger. Our desire to work hard is related to their desire to work hard. Working people always share the same history of being kicked around by the rich.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I get that part. So what is A-38? I never heard of that.”

  “Look at the map,” she said, pointing above my head with a finger that was like a bent nail. “See house number A-38?”

  I stood up and turned. Mounted behind me was a large needlepoint map of Norvelt which spread across the entire wall. On it were hand-stitched all the streets and houses and gardens and yard animals and businesses and municipal buildings and creeks. There were five sections: A, B, C, D, and E. Beneath each house a number was sewn in next to a last name.

  “Take a red-topped map pin from the corner and stick it into house number A-38,” she said. “Emma was the last of the Slater family in Norvelt.”

  “What’s this map?” I asked.

  “It’s the town you were born in,” she said irritably. “Don’t tell me you are too ignorant to know where you are from?”

  “It just doesn’t look like this anymore,” I said. “It’s changed. Like, the Huffer Funeral Parlor isn’t on here. Or the baseball field. Or the hardware store. Or Fenton’s gas station and bar. And you have a Chicken Farm and Community Farm on here that I’ve never seen.”

  “You’re looking at the original Norvelt,” she said. “There are two hundred and fifty houses in five sections on this map with the names of the original owners. If you count up the red pins you’ll see that all but nine—eight now that Mrs. Slater has passed—of the original owners have died or left since 1934.”

  “That’s a long time ago,” I said.

  “Not for me,” she replied. “Now, I don’t have time to give you a Norvelt history lesson today because you have to type that obituary up and run it down to the News.”

  “I don’t know how to type,” I said, wilting a bit.

  “A trained monkey can type,” she snapped, and nearly popped her eyes right out of their sockets with exasperation. “Now bring your notebook and sit over here.”

  I did as she told me and sat in front of a tall black Royal typewriter that was sitting on an unused sewing table.

  “This is really old,” I remarked, and gently touched the chrome-rimmed keys.

  “The government gave it to me,” she said proudly. “When Mrs. Roosevelt hired me to be the chief nurse and medical examiner of this town I was given a typewriter so I could keep health records on the original two hundred and fifty families. Now it’s my closing tribute to Mrs. Roosevelt that I write their final health report—which, in this case, would be their obituary. So put a sheet of paper in the roller and turn the wheel on the end.”

  “Miss Volker,” I said about as politely as I knew how, “do you think you will outlast the rest of these original people?”

  “I have to,” she said. “I made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt to see them to their graves, and I can’t drop dead on the job—so let’s get going.”

  She stood behind me and told me where the Shift key was for making capital letters, and where the punctuation keys were, and the space bar, and when I made a mistake she showed me how to back up the carriage and type a slash through the bad letter and then keep on going. It was slow work but I liked the machine. It smelled of oil and made a sharp clacking noise like a train running down a track as the keys snapped against the carriage.

  While I typed she sat down and slid a book off a tabletop and muttered that her hands had cooled back down and were so bad she couldn’t use her fingers to turn the pages. I offered to help her but instead she just held the book up to her lips and blew on the bottom edge of the page and flipped it over with the strength of her breath. She caught me watching her. “I’m full of tricks,” she said proudly. “Now back to work!”

  After I rolled the obituary out of the typewriter she pointed to her overstuffed bookshelf and to the piles of books stacked up against the opposite wall as if she were building a farmer’s fence out of fieldstone. “Take one as a gift,” she instructed. “I’m too old to read anything twice.”

  “Mom said I can only take food stuff,” I explained.

  “This stuff is brain food,” she replied. “Now pick a book and get moving so we don’t miss the deadline. And if someone else drops dead I’ll call your mother and have her send you down and I’ll teach you a few more things,” she continued. “You need to know the history of this town because if it dies out someone will have to be around to write the obit.”

  “How does a town die?” I asked.

  “One old person at a time,” she said deliberately. “Now, what kind of books do you like?”

  “History or real-life adventure books, mostly,” I replied.

  “Take that one,” she suggested, and pointed the scuffed tip of her hard black shoe at a large book that was decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was titled Lost Worlds. “When Mrs. Roosevelt spoke at the opening of the school she told the students to learn their history or they’d be ‘doomed to dust’ like one of the Lost Worlds.”

  I bent over and picked the book up off the floor with both hands. “Tha-anks,” I groaned as I stood up.

  She smiled and waved her ruined hand toward the door. “Now scat,” she ordered. “Beat it!”

  I did. I held the big book against my chest and ran all the way down to the Norvelt News where Mr. Greene, the publisher, was inking up the printing press.

  “Another dead one?” he remarked as he put on his ink-smeared reading glasses and sorrowfully shook his head back and forth mumbling through the obituary except to pause here and there to decipher what I had written.

  “Be careful with the spelling,” I warned him in a voice that was wormy with shame because I didn’t do well in that subject at school.

  He nodded. “And tell Miss Volker you got it to me on time,” he replied.

  “Will do,” I said, then turned and staggered back home with my new book which was as tall, wide, thick, and heavy as a tombstone.

  3

  Life in Norvelt was pretty quiet but I could still never get any sleep. Even though it was a Sunday Mr. Spizz stopped by the house and r
apped his chunky monkey knuckles crazily on the front door at about seven o’clock in the morning. “Anybody home!” he hollered. The volume on his raspy voice was stuck on maximum and he nearly blew you down like the Big Bad Wolf when he talked. He was a heavy breather on account of his asthma, which was why he didn’t fight in the war even though he had a military flattop haircut that looked like an airport for paper airplanes.

  He told my mom that the weeds in the public gutter along the front of our property had grown too high. He pulled out a tape measure and showed her what twenty-eight inches looked like. “Regulation weed size is only six inches high,” he informed her. “Yours are twenty-two inches too tall.”

  If I was Mom I would have swatted him with a cast-iron skillet and left him conked out in the gutter until the weeds grew up through him.

  “I’m a deputy of the volunteer police and fire department, and next time I come by if those weeds are not cut down to proper size I’ll write you a ticket for intentional gutter clogging,” he added.

  “Yes, sir,” Mom said politely, and closed the door, and when she walked down the hall past my room I heard her sing, “You’re not the boss of me, no you are not the boss of me, you might be the boss of you but you’re not the boss of me.”

  That must have made her feel a lot better.

  In a few minutes Mom called me into the kitchen for breakfast. She always used the newspaper for place mats because she didn’t like to waste anything. So as I ate I read through the local news. The volunteer police reported that escaped turkeys had attacked a passing Amish buggy and driver, so we all needed to keep an eye on our turkey pens. There was a warning that honeybees had taken over the post office mail drop box, “so don’t open it unless you want to get stung.” The Question of the Day was: Which president is on the two-dollar bill? I didn’t know. I had never seen a two-dollar bill.

  My favorite article was always a column of two or three facts called This Day In History, which was written by Miss Volker. I may have been bad with my spelling but Mr. Greene was equally bad with his dates. Today was June 17 but he had the history for the next day.

  June 18, 1812: War declared on Britain. The British took it badly and burned down the White House which caused First Lady Dolley Madison to save the famous portrait of George Washington. Her slave, Paul Jennings, said he was really the one who saved the portrait, but slaves were not allowed to contradict white people. Years later, after President Madison had died and Paul Jennings had won his freedom, the ex-president’s wife was broke and living in poverty. There was only one person kind enough to help Dolley Madison out—her ex-slave, Paul Jennings.

  June 18, 1873: Susan B. Anthony fined $100 for attempting to vote.

  June 18, 1928: Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Everyone said a woman could never do it, but she proved them wrong.

  I loved proving people wrong about me. Somehow I was going to have to prove to Mom that I didn’t know there was a bullet in that Japanese sniper rifle.

  “Hey, Mom,” I asked, “how come Miss Volker can’t write the obituaries anymore but she can write the ‘This Day In History’ column?”

  “Because she wrote it ages ago when she was younger and could use her hands. The newspaper just repeats the column from year to year. I read the same column when I was your age. It’s history, so it really doesn’t change.”

  “Unless you get the date wrong,” I pointed out.

  Mom shrugged. “Time moves so slowly in this town it doesn’t much matter,” she replied. “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all about the same to me.”

  But when it came to my chores she wanted me to move quickly. After breakfast she sent me out to the barn for the hedge shears and told me to hurry up and go cut down the gutter weeds before Mr. Spizz gave us a ticket for not following the community rules. I moseyed out front and was cutting them down when he furiously pedaled by on his new giant adult-size tricycle that towed a little red wagon full of what looked like shoe boxes. “Mr. Spizz,” I hollered as he bounced past, “are these weeds short enough for you?”

  “Not now, Gantos boy,” he shouted over his right shoulder, and rang the shiny new bell on the chrome handlebars. “I’m delivering Sunday dinners to the elderly. I’ll check on the weeds later.”

  I had seen him on the tricycle a couple of weeks ago and mentioned it to Dad.

  “There must be something wrong with him upstairs,” Dad remarked, and tapped himself on his noggin as if to say that Mr. Spizz was nuts.

  “How can you tell if he’s cracked?” I asked.

  “How many adults do you know who ride around on a giant kindergarten tricycle?” he replied.

  I didn’t have to think about that for long. “None,” I replied. I had never seen a giant adult tricycle before.

  “That UFO must have zapped him with a ray gun,” Dad said. “He’s a freak! One of these days he’ll flip his lid and hurt someone, so stay out of his way.”

  I definitely didn’t want to get in the way of Mr. Spizz’s whizzing tricycle.

  4

  A couple days later I woke up early and hungry and staggered out to the front porch to see if the milk had been delivered. I didn’t find the milk. The Norvelt News had arrived and as I picked it up I saw that on this day in history, General Mills had introduced Cheerios in 1941. “Great,” I griped out loud. “And I don’t have milk!”

  Then when I turned around to go back into the house my eyes bugged out. “Oh, no,” I said angrily. Taped to the door was a three-dollar ticket for WEED OBSTRUCTION OF GUTTER WATER. I knew what it meant—more trouble. Sunday, after I had cut all the weeds, I piled them up in a big stack in the gutter. I was going to get a bag to haul them away and chop them up for our compost heap, but first I took a break and drank all the milk and then Mom caught me making a mess in the kitchen and chased me back to my room and I started reading about the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Bunker Hill and General Prescott’s order to his men: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”

  His troops obeyed. When the first line of British Redcoats got real close, the patriots aimed their muskets and started blasting the eyes out of the Redcoats at point-blank range, which must have been a bloody mess, especially for the Redcoats standing just behind the ones having their brains blown out. And then I wondered why the British soldiers would allow themselves to die so easily just because their king told them to go march up a hill and fight. I was thinking that I would tell the king to go fight his own war and then I started singing Mom’s “you are not the boss of me” song to the king and I forgot about cleaning up the big stack of weeds, but Mr. Spizz must have whizzed by on his super kindergarten tricycle and spotted the pile and evilly given us the nasty ticket.

  “What a creep!” I said, and looked down the road but he must have been off bugging other people. I ripped the ticket from the door and folded it over and stuck it in the waistband of my pajamas and made sure no one could see as I quickly ran into my room and hid it deep under my mattress. I knew it was going to have to be a secret I’d pay for myself. If Mom saw it she would never let me out of my room again. Dad had returned during the night from an out-of-town job and if he saw the ticket he’d go ape. But I didn’t have any money. None. I’d have to figure it out on my own.

  Since I was so worried about the ticket I couldn’t lie in bed and read, so I just got dressed and went outside and started mowing the lawn with the tractor. I liked to mow patterns or pictures in the grass and had just finished the outline of something that looked like the Sphinx from the Lost Worlds book when Dad strolled out toward me. I could tell by his squinty eyes and tucked-in chin that whatever he was thinking about was more important than my next chore.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. “See that new corn?” he shouted over the tractor’s engine.

  I looked beyond his shoulder. There was a half acre of green corn that Mom had planted. She was going to sell it, then use the money to buy food for the charity dinners sh
e cooked. The stalks were about a foot high.

  “Yeah, I see it,” I replied. “It’s doing great.” Yesterday Mom had made me weed it.

  “Mow it down,” he ordered. “Then later we’ll put the heavy rake on your tractor and dig up all the roots.”

  “Why?” I asked, then quickly added, “Mom’s not going to like this.”

  “Just hurry up and do what I say,” he said, and glanced toward the kitchen. He wasn’t angry. He was nervous because he knew Mom was going to erupt when she saw her corn cut down.

  I didn’t argue with him because I wanted to stay on his good side. Since he returned, Mom hadn’t said anything to him about me firing off the sniper rifle, but she was a ticking time bomb and sooner or later she would blow up and tell Dad what I had done. I wanted to put that off for as long as I could, plus I had another reason too. I really wanted a car. A few older boys I knew were allowed to have a car once they learned how to drive a tractor. And now that I did all the tractor work around the house Dad said that if I could get a car for free he would help me fix it. I had found an old junker while snooping around in the woods behind Bob Fenton’s gas station. It was a rusty brown 1936 Ford coupe with big bug-eyed headlights mounted on the fenders. The old tires were flat and the horsehair upholstery was ripped up inside but I loved it the moment I discovered it stored in a mossy old garage whose sagging roof beams were about to collapse. I had asked Mr. Fenton about it and he said he wanted a hundred bucks because it had historic value. “Eleanor Roosevelt was driven around Norvelt in it,” he crowed proudly, hooking his thumbs behind the straps on his farmer overalls. “It will be in a museum someday once she dies. She’s sick so it won’t be long before I cash in.”

  Every time her name was mentioned everything went up in price, which was so backward because she wanted everything to go down in price.