Secret City

by Julia Watts

  Copyright © 2013 by Julia Watts

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First Bella Books Edition 2013

  eBook released 2013

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designed by: Kiaro Creative

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-390-5

  Some of the locations in this book are actual places, but the characters and story are fiction.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  About the Author

  Julia Watts is the author of numerous novels for adults, young adults, and middle-grade readers, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning Finding H.F. A graduate of Spalding University’s M.F.A. program, she teaches at South College and in Murray State University’s low-residency M.F.A. program. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her family and many pets.

  Dedication

  For my mom and dad, in celebration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  October 5, 1944

  “Monkeys!”

  That’s the first thing Baby Pearl said once the guard who checked our papers let us through the gate.

  I looked around, expecting to see real, live monkeys. They wouldn’t have been any stranger than what I was seeing: a black and white sign reading Military Area: Stop No Firearms No Liquor No Cameras, green-uniformed soldiers as identical as gingerbread men, barbed wire twisting over a tall fence, a guard tower that put me in mind of a prison movie. And the mud. There was no grass underfoot, just mud so deep my Sears and Roebuck saddle shoes squished in it all the way to my bobby socks.

  Baby Pearl squeezed my hand. When I looked down at her moon-round little face, she used her free hand to point. “See?” she said. “Monkeys. Like at Granny’s house.”

  I followed the line of her chubby pointing finger, and I finally did see. Hanging on the side of the guardhouse was a poster of three little monkeys, one with its hands clapped over its eyes, the next plugging its ears, and the last covering its mouth. Back home, Granny had a figurine of these same little monkeys with a caption in the base that said, See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But the monkeys on the poster came with a different caption:

  What you see here

  What you do here

  What you hear here

  When you leave here,

  Let It Stay Here.

  The words made me wonder if soon somebody was going to tell us what was going on—was going to tell us why the government had built a whole city where a year ago there had been only farmland. If somebody had told me, I would’ve kept my mouth shut. I was—and am—as anxious for us to win this war as anybody.

  But we’ve been here about a month now—Mother, Daddy, my sisters and me—and I don’t know any more than I did when Baby Pearl first showed me those monkeys. All I know is the government is working on something here, and whatever it is, it’s big enough to make people come from all over for jobs.

  Compared to a lot of people, we didn’t come far—just from Kentucky, the next state over. Daddy had been having bad luck for a while. He’d worked in the sawmill when I was a baby, but it closed down when the Depression hit. He was out of work like everybody else for a long time, until he got a job at the grocery store, stocking shelves, sweeping up, sometimes carrying out groceries. He stuck with it because he had a growing family and needed the money, but he hated it. “Seems like the only kind of work I care about is building things,” he used to say.

  Daddy is good at building things. He built our old house all by himself out of odds and ends he brought home from the sawmill. It’s just a two-roomer that sits on the back of my grandparents’ little patch of land, but it’s probably the best house ever to be built out of scrap lumber.

  One day when a fellow came into the grocery store and mentioned that the government was giving out jobs near Knoxville, Tennessee, that there was a lot of construction work to be done there, Daddy took off his stock apron for good and told us we were moving. Those government jobs, the man had told him, paid top dollar.

  We didn’t have much stuff to pack, which was a good thing since we didn’t have anything to pack it in. We didn’t own a suitcase because we’d never been anywhere, so Mama just rolled up our clothes in one quilt and our kitchen things in another. She cried to leave our little house and her parents and the patch of land she’d lived on all her life, but Daddy promised we’d come back home just as soon as the war was over and with enough money in our pockets to build another two rooms onto the house.

  My sisters cried, too. Opal, who’s thirteen, cried about leaving the boy she was sweet on even though, as far as I know, she’d never actually gotten up enough nerve to talk to him. Garnet’s ten and didn’t want to leave Granny and Papaw. And Baby Pearl—who we really ought to stop calling Baby because she’s five years old now—cried about leaving the mama cat and kittens that lived in Granny’s barn.

  I didn’t cry. I was glad for the change. Maybe it was because I just turned sixteen, or maybe it was because there’s always been a restlessness about me. I love my sisters, but we don’t have much in common except that our mama named us all after jewels we’re too poor to afford. I don’t reckon I have much in common with Mama either, except for her mousy brown hair. I got my blue eyes from Daddy. His blue eyes and his restlessness.

  So for me, coming to Oak Ridge has been an adventure, or the closest thing to an adventure I’ve ever had. Mama and Opal and Garnet would’ve been happier staying back home, but Mama said, “Well, war changes things,” and she seemed to accept the move as her duty the same way a young man accepts being drafted. But I wouldn’t have had to be drafted to live this life. I would’ve volunteered.

  Back home, living like sharecroppers on Granny and Papaw’s land, I was lonesome…lonesome and bored. We were too far away from town to walk there, and I had read every single book in the school library at least twice. Nobody else in my family reads except for the newspaper and the Bible on occasion, so I don’t reckon they feel my need, a need that is as real and deep as the need for food and water, to fall into another world, to escape into words. Or, if they do, listening to the squawking voices on the radio is enough to satisfy them.

  Here, everybody’s right in town, and the public library over in the Ridge Recreation Hall is the best thing that ever happened to me. I go there after school at least twice a week, and every time I open the door the smell of books hits me, and I breathe in and smile.

  Another thing that’s good about here is the high school. The teachers like it that I read. Back home if I talked too much about books, the teachers would tell me I was getting above my raising, that soon enough I’d be quitting school and getting married and dropping such foolishness. Here, though, Miss Connor—she’s my English teacher who came straight down here from New York University, if you can imagine that—smiles when she sees me with my nose in a book.

  One day when she saw me reading Now, Voyager by Olive Higgins Prouty (for the third time, but I guess she had no way of knowing that), she said, “If you’re going to fill your head with romantic notions, they might as well be beautifully written ones.” She grabbed a book off the shelf behind her desk and handed it to me. Jane Eyre. And for a full week, my head was full of Jane and th
at crazy woman Mr. Rochester kept locked up in the attic, and the wind whooshing through the moors—not that I’d ever seen a moor, or knew what one was before I read the book.

  It’s funny what Miss Connor said about romantic notions, though, because except when it’s in a book, I don’t think about romance at all. I’ve never met a boy my age who had anything in common with Mr. Rochester, and I don’t tend to go out and socialize with other kids much.

  I pretty much keep to myself and love my books and my time in the library and my classes in school, especially English literature. It was that class that gave me the idea to write things down like this. We were reading some of the diary of this fellow Samuel Pepys—I thought his name would be pronounced like “peppy,” but you say it like the sound baby chicks make. Mr. Pepys lived a long time ago in London, and he wrote about the things that happened to him every day: what he saw, who he talked to, what he was thinking about.

  And I thought, maybe I can write something like that, too. Between studying for school and reading my books and helping Mama with the house and my sisters, I won’t have time to write every day. But I want to write as much as I can about life in this strange, new place which is strange and new not just to me, but to everybody who lives here. And maybe one day, some girl will be reading my diary in her high school literature class. But probably not. You can see why Mama says I’m a dreamer and don’t have a lick of common sense.

  October 9, 1944

  This afternoon I was outside with Mama hanging out some wash, and this fancy-looking woman passed by the house. She had on a hat and gloves, and her high-heeled shoes were so mired up in the mud she had to do some high stepping just to walk. She looked at Mama and me for a minute without saying anything, so finally Mama said, “Hidy.”

  The woman wrinkled her nose and looked at the clothes on the line, then looked at Mama like she was on display at a carnival. “I do so admire,” the woman said, in a nasal accent as flat as a prairie, “how you maintain your dignity despite living under such harsh conditions.”

  “Harsh conditions?” Mama laughed. “Shoot, lady, you shoulda seen where we was living before.”

  Whoever that lady was, she probably lives in one of the big houses on the hill where all the scientists and generals live—Snob Hill, people call it. We live in one of the many “prefabs” the government plopped down in the mud to house workers. It’s a funny little house. Called a flat-top because there’s no pitch to the roof, it looks like a white box sitting on top of stilts. It’s not cute like the little house Daddy built back home, but once you’re inside it’s right comfortable and roomy. Because we’re a pretty big family, we qualified for two bedrooms, so we have a living room/kitchen area with a big stove in the middle of it, a bedroom for Mama and Daddy, and a bedroom for us girls. At our old house, we all had to sleep in the same room—Mama and Daddy in the iron-frame bed and all of us girls on pallets on the floor. Daddy used to say it was like a game, trying not to accidentally stomp on little girls when he got up to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night.

  This evening when we were sitting around the table eating some soup beans that would’ve profited from a hunk of fatback (with war rationing, meat is scarce), Mama told Daddy about the lady who watched us hang out our wash.

  “Harsh conditions, my foot,” Daddy said. “She oughta see the barracks where the single fellers is squeezed together like sardines. Or the hutments where they make the coloreds live. The roofs on them shacks don’t even look like they’d keep out the rain.” Daddy pushed back his sopped-clean plate. “Nah, me and my girls is doing all right, ain’t we?”

  My sisters and I all said “Yes, Daddy,” but Mama didn’t say anything. Her eyes looked far away and sad like they did when she was missing home, like they did most of the time. Daddy must’ve noticed, too, because he reached over and patted her on the hand and said, “And my best girl—is she doing all right?”

  Mama smiled a little and let her gaze rest on Daddy instead of the faraway place she’d been staring at. “Well, it ain’t heaven, and it ain’t home, but I reckon I’m a little more all right with every paycheck you bring in.”

  “Daddeeee,” Baby Pearl whined, “you just called Mama your best girl. I’m s’posed to be your best girl.”

  Daddy scooped up Baby Pearl from her seat and swung her around, then tickled her. “Mama’s my best grownup girl, and you’re my best little girl.” He circled round the table and patted Garnet on the head. “And Garnet’s my best bigger girl”—then he patted Opal—“And Opal’s my best next-to-the-biggest girl.” His hand was on my head. “And Ruby’s my best biggest girl.”

  By that time, we all were laughing, even Mama.

  Daddy set down Baby Pearl and kissed her head, then looked at me. “And speaking of you being my biggest girl, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  He sounded serious all of a sudden, and I couldn’t figure out if I should be nervous or not. “I’m not in trouble, am I?”

  Daddy grinned, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners. “And when was the last time you was in trouble?”

  It was so far back I couldn’t remember. Opal and Garnet and Baby Pearl got whippings from time to time, but I never did. Goody Two-Shoes was what Opal called me when she was mad at me.

  Daddy sat back down at the table, took out his tobacco and papers, and started rolling a cigarette. “I just wanted to tell you about somebody I talked to today. I was over at the cafeteria, bellying up to the trough for some slop. Well, the girl who was dishing mine up wasn’t no bigger than a minute. She had this curly blonde hair, so I said, ‘Say, Curly, are you old enough to be working in this place? I’ve got girls at home that don’t look no younger than you.’ She told me she was sixteen. She said there’s lots of girls her age, working jobs here and making good money. And I said, huh, I got a girl at home that just turnt sixteen.”

  “You want me to get a job?” I was starting to think that maybe I had been right to be nervous.

  “Oh, I ain’t telling you what to do. It’s just something to think about is all.”

  “But…” I watched Daddy’s work-hard hands roll the cigarette. “If I got a full-time job, I’d have to drop out of school.”

  “Shoot,” Opal said, “I’d drop out of school to make me some money.”

  “Me, too,” said Garnet.

  “Me, too,” said Baby Pearl, who’d say she wanted a sock in the eye if her sisters said they wanted one.

  “Baby Pearl,” Garnet said, “you’ve got to start school before they let you drop out of it.”

  Everybody laughed but me.

  “I was just thinking,” Daddy said, “with you and me both working, this family’d have more money than we ever seen. Course, you could keep some of what you made—buy yourself some pretty things, go to the picture show any time you wanted to. And since you’d be working for the government, you’d be making good money and helping the country win the war, too.”

  “I reckon I would be,” I said. “But I was kind of thinking I’d stay in school till I graduated.” Even as I said it, I felt guilty. I didn’t want to disappoint my daddy or my country, either one.

  “Hmm.” Daddy’s mouth was set in a straight line. “I just thought as grown up and independent as you are, you’d like going out and being a wage earner like your daddy. For two or three years anyway, till you get married.”

  “I don’t want to get married,” I said.

  Mama, who was clearing the table, looked at Daddy, and they both laughed. “That’s what girls always say until the right feller comes along.” She put her hand on Daddy’s shoulder as she leaned forward to clear his plate. “And your daddy come along when I wasn’t much older than you are now.”

  It’s funny. People live their lives a certain way, and they can’t imagine that somebody else would want something different than they do. Because I’ve got my nose in a book every chance I get, Mama and Daddy should know I want to stay in school. Because I’ve never given a boy so m
uch as the time of day, they should know I won’t be getting married any time soon. But they judge me by what they’ve done instead of by what I do. Sometimes the people who ought to know you best are the ones who know you the least.

  Since it was my night to do the dishes, I said, “I reckon I’d better head down to the wash house before it gets too dark.”

  “Listen at her changing the subject,” Opal said. “You’d think she wanted to be an old maid.”

  I ignored everybody’s laughter, grabbed the bucket, and went outside. I was trying not to cry.

  I love my family, but there are things about me they’ll never understand. Like how having a high school diploma in two years means more than making some pocket money right now. I don’t know what I want to do once I get that diploma, but I know I’ll have a lot more choices with it than I would without it. Then I think of my daddy’s eyes—the same blue as mine—and how they shone full of hope when he said if I took a job, I’d be helping out my family and my country. Am I letting my family and country down out of pure selfishness?

  October 13, 1944

  This morning everybody was joking about the bad luck they were going to have because it’s Friday the 13th. “Don’t you walk under no ladders today,” Mama told Daddy when he got up from the breakfast table.

  “Walking under a ladder on Friday the thirteenth—that’d do me in for sure, wouldn’t it?” Daddy said, laughing as he put on his hat and jacket. “Don’t you girls break no mirrors nor let no black cats cross your path now.”

  I may not believe in that kind of bad luck, but I sure believe in bad moods because I’ve been in one ever since Monday night when Daddy suggested I might want to get a job. I kept stewing and turning it over in my mind, but it’s hard when you know the one thing that would make everybody else happy is the very thing that would make you miserable. What I needed was somebody to talk to, but it would do no good to talk to anybody in my family because I knew what they’d say. Mama would say having another wage in the family would be a big help, and Opal and Garnet would just go on and on about all the candy and trinkets an hourly wage could buy. I needed to talk to somebody who didn’t stand to gain or lose anything from my decision.