Building Blocks

by Cynthia Voigt

  Suzanne and Hannah shared a bedroom. Hannah was asleep, but Suzanne was sitting on her bed playing with a teddy bear. She hid it behind her when she saw the boys.

  “Hey, Brann, you look like you’ve got some guts, you wanna come swimming with me?”

  “In that river? Not on your life.”

  “Not in the river—I’m not stupid. I know a house that’s empty. They went away somewhere for the summer. They left the pool full. It’s risky, you could get caught, but the pool’s just waiting to be swum in. what do you say? Kevin never will—he’s a sissy.”

  Brann looked coolly at her. “I might,” he said. He waited for her victorious smile to get settled on her face before he added, “and I might not.”

  Billy had a big room all to himself. He was sitting at the window. “I’m here so get out,” was all he said.

  “Stevie will sleep in with Billy when the new baby comes,” Kevin explained to Brann as they went down the hall. “That’s my parents’ room and that’s Stevie’s. There’s a guest room.” They climbed up the dark attic stairs.

  “How come you’re upstairs, not with the rest of them?” Brann asked.

  “So I can keep an eye on my grandparents,” Kevin explained. “In case something happens, or they need something.”

  “Because you’re the oldest.”

  The two old people sat in a small living room across from their bedroom, at the end of the hallway. A fan pulled warm air through the low-ceilinged room and out the one window. The man was looking at a magazine, his face expressionless. The woman was piling their lunch dishes onto the tray. “It’s ready, Kevin,” she said, in her airy voice. “Hello. Are you a friend of Kevin’s?”

  Brann hesitated. He had already met her at breakfast, but maybe she had forgotten.

  “It’s Brann, Brann with two n’s,” Kevin said, with a smile to take any criticism out of his words. “You met him at breakfast, but you forgot. I’ll take the tray down, Grandma.” He picked it up and left the room. Brann was left standing.

  “It’s good for Kevin to have a friend over,” the woman said to Brann. “He doesn’t have enough friends. Did you meet him at school? Kevin’s going into the fifth grade next fall. I had a teacher in fifth grade—long division, Miss Mead. That was my last year at school.” She tilted her head and looked up at Brann through her washed-out eyes. “I surprised you, didn’t I? But it was—we left school earlier in those days, but you wouldn’t remember that. Do you remember Miss Mead?”

  “No ma’am,” Brann said.

  “She always wore a sprig of something pinned on the collar of her blouse. In the fall it would be a mum or a maple leaf. In winter, holly or a bit of pine. But in spring, you never knew what it would be, daisies or crocuses, roses, jonquils, hyacinth, quince or cherry blossoms. . . . She wasn’t happy—surely you recall that. No young man would want to marry the school teacher, of course. She went away, or so I heard. I don’t know for sure—I’d left years before. When will you leave school?”

  “After college, I guess,” Brann said, without thinking.

  But that was all right. She wasn’t listening to him. Her mind was far away. Brann edged towards the door. Kevin came back into the room and stood beside Brann.

  “It was always oatmeal for breakfast, all my life,” his grandmother complained.

  “You had pancakes this morning, Grandma.”

  “Don’t talk about this morning—this morning doesn’t count. It was always oatmeal. Thick, pale, pasty. Stick to your ribs, she’d say. I could have thrown it up.”

  “Anyway,” Kevin said.

  “What do you know about it? What did I know then? I was your age once, just you remember that. All the oatmeal days. All the oatmeal people. Not you, Kevin.”

  Kevin shook his head. “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re oatmeal with honey then, or crumbled maple sugar that coats the top and melts down the hills of it. But it won’t make any difference. I’m sorry, Kevin.” Her hands rubbed nervously against one another.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Kevin said. “Shall I make your breakfast tomorrow and bring it up on a tray? Scrambled eggs, the way you like them. And toast with the crusts cut off and raspberry jam to put on it.”

  “I wouldn’t want the jam,” she said, quieter.

  “The coffee in your best china cup, from the cupboard in the dining room. And on the tray—I’ll put a lace doily and I’ll get a rose in a vase; a rose that’s just coming into bloom so it’ll last for days. I’ll make the tray and I’ll carry it upstairs and I’ll knock on the door.”

  “They won’t let you.”

  “We can pretend. Can’t we? Brann’s got to go now.” He signaled Brann with his eyes. Grateful, Brann sidled out of the room.

  “Who’s Brann?” her voice asked, getting high again. “Should I know him? Do I have a grandchild Brann?”

  “Brann’s nobody, you don’t know him.”

  “I didn’t think so.” The voices followed Brann down the hall.

  Kevin’s room was as he remembered it, with one window and the bed up against the rest of that wall. Blocks lay scattered around on the floor. Brann closed the door behind him and crouched down to pick up the mess he’d made last night, waking up.

  What was he going to do?

  How was he going to get out of here?

  He began stacking the blocks into piles, to avoid thinking.

  On the back of the door, a picture had been taped to the wood. It showed a farmyard and some hills beyond and an orchard. It was pretty crude and childish, done in pencil then crayoned in; but the house and barn looked solid, as if they were really there. The lines of the house and barn were strong, and the perspective was right. Brann’s father had taught him about perspective. There were some animals in the picture. Brann’s attention was caught by the chickens who scrabbled around for the feed being thrown to them by a stick-figure woman. Those chickens were good, really good. They looked alive, as if in a minute they would start moving around. Brann stood studying the picture, holding one of the curved blocks in his hand. The block felt familiar, and that comforted him. It should feel familiar, he thought; they were his same blocks, just paler than he was used to, light white-yellow. He rubbed his hands over the block, knowing that the oil from his skin was sinking invisibly into the warm wood. He could almost see the dark workroom and the shape of his father’s worktable and himself, asleep in the fortress his father had built out of these same blocks.

  Kevin jarred him out of his dream, opening the door and entering the room. But Brann had figured it out. It was simple after all. It was impossible, but simple. It was the blocks. They had brought him here and they would take him back. So he wasn’t trapped in the past. He could get out whenever he wanted, and he knew how.

  Relief made him giddy. It was all impossible, of course. Blocks couldn’t do that. But he was here, in this now that wasn’t his own.

  He dropped the block. Kevin’s face, looking at the farmyard picture, came into sharp focus. Brann grinned and put a hand on Kevin’s shoulder. He could feel happiness spreading out from him. “You drew that, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like the chickens—they’re really good.”

  Kevin studied it. “You think so? I thought so too. But there’s an awful lot wrong with it. The barn is always in the shadow of that big elm—see it? I drew it from memory, but I didn’t get much right.”

  “What is it?” Brann asked, although he had already guessed, and he knew he was right—his brain was swinging fast and sharp.

  “My Uncle Andrew’s farm. Where I go every summer, to work, and to get out from underfoot. I like that place.” His eyes were dreaming into the picture.

  “Why?” Brann asked. “I mean, farming’s really hard work, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” Kevin said. “But it’s—I don’t know. You’re working and you’re tired, all day long, but—Uncle Andrew’s funny, he makes me laugh. He talks, all the time, but not about what to do next,
about what life is like, sort of. It sounds stupid. But it’s interesting, and I have ideas there, pictures and things. It’s an easy place to live. He’s my godfather, anyway. He married my mother’s sister and he made me these blocks when I was four. He worked on them all one winter.”

  Kevin sat down among the blocks. Slowly, placing each block thoughtfully, he began to build a tower with them, and connected it by arches to a series of small outbuildings. Brann watched.

  “I’m gonna have to give them to Billy soon,” Kevin said. “He doesn’t take care of things, but my father says I’m too old for blocks now and Billy’s old enough. Then Stevie will be. I wish I didn’t have to.”

  “You can get them back in the end,” Brann said.

  “Then this new baby boy—”

  “It could be a girl.”

  Kevin shook his head. “Mom says it’s a boy.”

  “Anyway, you can get them back when everybody else has outgrown them. For your own kids.”

  Kevin shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “People grow up and marry people,” Brann told him impatiently. “And they have kids.”

  “I’d only want a small family.”

  “I have a small family,” Brann said.

  “Only one or two.”

  “What about three?” Brann asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Kevin said.

  “Can I build a wall along here?” Brann asked.

  “Could you build it over there?” Kevin pointed to a line of floorboard six inches farther away. “It’ll look better. More as if it was real. You don’t mind playing with blocks?”

  “Not a bit,” Brann said. “Not these blocks.” His relief had turned into a feeling of secret celebration, that danced inside of him. Because he was the one, Brann Connell, who had done this, gone back in time; that made him pretty special, special and terrific. There must be some special reason that got him back here.

  Kevin was looking at him, smiling shyly. He was such a little kid, Brann thought, and not much of a little kid at that. About the opposite of special. “Are you my friend?” Kevin asked, with the same hesitating smile, his eyes slipping away. “No,” he said, right away before Brann could think of an answer, “That was stupid. Forget I said it, OK? I mean, I know you’ll be moving on and all that.”

  “I’ve got to,” Brann answered. Now I know how, he thought to himself. Besides, he’d go crazy living in this house. He wondered hwy Kevin hadn’t gone crazy already. “I really have to,” he said. “It’s fate.”

  That was what you said when you couldn’t possibly explain.

  Four

  The two boys had finished the castle close. That was Kevin’s name for it. Brann would have named it a fortress. It was a castle enclosed by a tall wall, like a fence around a farmyard. The boys made little buildings inside the wall, sheds and storage barns, for animals and for supplies; an overseer’s house, a blacksmiths’ forge, a silversmith’s hut, a mill and a granary, a gardener’s hut (because the castle itself had extensive vegetable gardens). Kevin explained that the serfs would have had their homes outside the close, near the fields. The gateway, built up as high as Brann’s knees, was broad enough to let to wagons through. It would have had a heavy spiked gate that was lowered every evening and raised in the morning. If the lord was away from his castle, the gate would always be kept down and only raised to admit people who were recognized by the lady or the steward. But if the lord was home then the castle gate was kept raised during the day, because he could fight to defend it.

  “What if he was too old to fight?” Brann asked. “What if he was a bad fighter, or a coward?”

  “He wouldn’t have the castle if he couldn’t fight to hold it. He’d have lost it to some other lord and he might go be a monk and illustrate manuscripts, or be in service to some stronger lord. If he was old—like my grandfather, you mean? He’d have his sons, and the eldest son would run things and the lord would move into a tower or someplace out of the way.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I read a book,” Kevin said. “My grandparents didn’t have any sons, only daughters.”

  “It’s hot up here,” Brann said. With the door closed, the one window didn’t draw any air in. Brann’s whole body felt sticky with sweat. He went to stand by the window, looking down at the yard and the roof of the garage and the big house behind this one.

  “Because it’s a river valley—the Ohio River Valley—and the air goes along the river. It’s always hot and muggy here in summer.”

  “And the caves go right under the river? Like a tunnel?” Brann asked.

  “That’s what they say. But not like a tunnel. Because they’re caves formed when rocks shift, or slide, the strata, you know? Not by erosion like caverns.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing those caves. Have you ever been in them?”

  Kevin shook his head. Of course not, Brann thought, looking at him; he’d be too scared.

  “What’s that farm like?” Brann asked, just to be doing something, even just talking. Kevin told him about the hills and the river there, the same river, the Ohio, only dirtier because of the big mill towns along it, between Sewickley and the arm. Kevin talked about harvesting hay, about milking cows so early in the morning that stars still shone in the sky, and about mucking out the stalls and the mingled smells of manure and dry hay and warm animals. He talked about spending all morning on a tractor, to weed out the long rows of corn, and the way the sun beat down until the skin on your hands cracked, and you had to hold the wheel so hard—because if you didn’t the sweat would make it slip out of control and you’d rip out the young corn plants—that you could barely unclench your hands at the end of the day. His Uncle Andrew talked all the time, stories and advice about life, jokes.

  “You really like your uncle, don’t you?” Brann asked. He wondered why his father had never talked about Uncle Andrew.

  “Yeah. I guess I do. And he likes me,” Kevin answered. “He really does.”

  “Are you going to be a farmer when you grow up?” Brann expected the answer to be yes.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to be. I’d like to draw—magazines have a lot of drawings in them and someone must do them. Or greeting cards and calendars. My mother says that’s all well and good, but I should be practical. She says I should look for something that uses drawing, because otherwise I won’t be able to earn a living.”

  “Does she like your drawings?”

  “She likes them OK,” Kevin said. “She says, I’m no genius but I have some talent, and you have to work on talent to train it.”

  Brann nodded. That was good advice, even if it didn’t sound exactly enthusiastic.

  “She wouldn’t say that if she didn’t mean it,” Kevin announced, with confidence.

  “I guess not,” Brann said. “Why didn’t you tell her it was Suzanne’s fault this morning?”

  Kevin shrugged. “Anyway, it was my responsibility.”

  “When can we go out again?” Brann asked. He was getting really restless, with this feeling . . . exploding inside him, waiting to find out what the special thing would be.

  “When my mother calls.”

  “Show me some drawings, will you?”

  When the phone rang three times, then stopped, the two boys were sitting on the bed, looking at some drawings Kevin had made of faces. (He didn’t know how to make noses. He drew a nose in one line and then put two nostril dots beside it. Brann’s father had taught him how to make noses by shading.) Kevin took the three little children down the street to stay with a neighbor. “They go there two afternoons a week, when my mom does the books,” he explained to Brann. “The Grynowskis have six kids of their own, and she feeds them supper. Other days their kids come to our house.”

  “I’m glad I came on a day when yours are going there,” Brann said. Suzanne stuck her tongue out at him. Brann decided to wait for Kevin on the back steps.

  “You won’t go away, will you?” Kevin asked. �
�I’ll only be five minutes, maybe ten. Then we can do something.”

  Brann couldn’t possibly fall asleep in five or ten minutes. He wasn’t even tired. All of his nerves were jangling. “I’ll be here,” he said. He felt trapped, even though he knew the way to get out, even though he was waiting for his adventure to begin. Every hour in this place—time—was like a year, a heavy and hopeless year. And thinking about Kevin—about his father—who lived there—it made Brann feel even more jangled. He really wanted to go back home—except he was curious to know why this was happening for him.

  Kevin was running when he came back. He stopped in front of where Brann sat on the porch steps. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “I want to see the caves.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve never seen caves.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kevin said. “We can’t. We’re not allowed.”

  “But who would know? Is it far?”

  “No, but—”

  “Have you got a flashlight?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Let’s get it.”

  Brann had made up his mind and he just swept Kevin along, because the kid was easy to sweep along. The way to do it was just not to give him time to answer. The flashlight was in a kitchen drawer, a heavy metal one, and Kevin ran upstairs to tell his grandparents he was going out now.

  “We aren’t allowed,” Kevin reminded Brann.

  “You aren’t allowed,” Brann told him. “Nobody’s said anything to me.” That was a weak argument, he knew, but he also knew how to win arguments with Kevin, like his mother did. “Look, I know you’re scared but you don’t have to go in or anything. I just want to see them. You won’t be breaking any rules or anything. You aren’t scared just to take me there, are you?”

  Kevin shook his head, no, his face ashamed.

  “Then let’s go,” Brann urged him.

  They crossed a couple of streets, then went up a road that wound with steep curves up a wooded hillside. They trudged up the hillside, with Brann urging Kevin to go faster, to keep going. “I’m sorry,” Kevin said. Brann didn’t answer, just grunted his impatience.