Sons of Liberty

by Adele Griffin

  He watched Liza in, and then turned to look at the door of his own classroom, Mrs. Lewin, 7B. He should be in eighth grade; he was more than a year older than Liza, but he’d done second grade over, since he’d spent most of that year getting in fights instead of learning how to spell and subtract and whatever else it was that second-graders did; it was hard to recall, even after two times through.

  A better idea than going into Mrs. Lewin’s room turned Rock away at the door just as he was about to enter. He ducked his head and slinked quickly away from 7B and down the hall, then up the stairs to the library.

  “Rock, what are you doing out of class?” Ms. Manzuli, the librarian, looked up from her desk. She was sort of beautiful and awful-looking, Rock had decided long ago, with skin so pale it looked as if the sun had never once basted it, and hair the soaking-red color of cafeteria spaghetti sauce. She always wore shapeless clothes that seemed like she shopped for them at retirement homes, but her body underneath was strong and young.

  Rock never got along too well with teachers, but he was always impressed by Ms. Manzuli; how she could tell him anything he needed to know, like stuff about baseball or Saturn or different types of poison oak, and how she could zip to the exact location of any book in the entire library without cheating by looking at the Dewey decimal chart.

  “Mrs. Lewin said it was okay for me to come,” Rock lied. He looked her straight in the eye. But Ms. Manzuli didn’t seem to weigh the truth of Rock’s story. She just smiled, white teeth shining in white skin.

  “Okay, then, what brings you to these parts, Mr. Kindle?” she asked, leaning over her desk and propping her chin in her hands.

  “I was thinking, um. I have a paper, that midterm Revolution paper. It’s due at the end of this month.”

  “Aha, so maybe you need some extra reading?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  But she was already bounding away from her desk, toward one of the blond-wood bookshelves.

  “You’re my best history buff, Rock. The other day I was telling my husband about you. He’s ravenous for any book about the big wars, too, although I confess to being more of a queens-and-kingdoms type of history reader myself …” She chatted lightly as she bent and peered at spine titles, occasionally pulling a book off the shelf and placing it into Rock’s hands.

  Rock felt squeamish, thinking about Ms. Manzuli telling her husband how Rock liked history books. Mr. Manzuli probably thought Rock was some big library nerd. He better not have said any jokes about him. Rock clenched his hands.

  “That ought to keep you, for a while anyway,” Ms. Manzuli finally pronounced, after half a dozen titles were stacked in his arms. “Let me know how it goes, okay? I’m interested to see what you do with this paper. I could really see you becoming a wise old history professor one of these days. Then I could say, ah yes, I knew Professor Kindle when he was brilliant young scholar at Sheffield Junior High.”

  “Ha,” said Rock, half smiling. Ms. Manzuli was sort of freaky sometimes, the way she’d just let her imagination go on talking. Now she looked up at the wall clock. “But I guess you should probably get back to class now. Come back soon.” She waved. “And give me updates.”

  “So you hurt Brian Briggs’s kid. What you do that for?” His father’s eyes shone as they stared at Rock from over his beer that night at supper. “Your ignoramus principal calls me down at the yard to say you’re gonna to be washing windows for a week. I said to him, Well, if my son’s got a grudge against Brian Briggs’s kid, then I’m not one to interfere. Huh.” He nodded emphatically and sipped from his glass. “Not exactly the answer he was looking for. But now I got to ask. Did you have to settle a score? Did you need to do it? Hurt that kid? What’d that kid do to you, Rock?”

  Rock was quiet, studying the little bit of zucchini bread left on his plate. Maybe his dad was serving up a trick question. A test. Rock tried to think. Had he needed to hurt Briggsie? A shuffle of images: Briggsie’s pained face, the school nurse’s slash-down mouth, Cliff’s bloody wool scarf, Liza’s thumbs-up, her smile. The Sunfish; the lobster dusted with ashes.

  “You needed to do it, didn’t you, Rock? You can tell me.”

  Rock felt everyone at the table looking at him: his worried mother, annoyed Cliff, silent Brontie, and of course his father, whose expression was impossible to crack.

  “Yeah.” Rock exhaled slowly. “I think so. That kid, Briggsie, he puts me down. Some snob. Thinks he’s the greatest.”

  “Well, then.” His father swallowed and stared thoughtfully into his drink. “Maybe you rightfully took the law into your own hands.”

  “Yeah,” Rock answered uncertainly. “I guess I did.”

  Rock had trouble sleeping that night. What his dad had said about taking the law in his own hands—it made him feel reckless, like an outlaw or a rebel. Rock couldn’t tell if he liked the feeling. Those colonist guys who protested about the British—Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere—they were rebels, too. Sons of Liberty, they called themselves. But it wasn’t really the same; it wasn’t exactly about liberty, what Rock had done. It was more about just being kind of a jerk.

  He tried to kill the bad feeling by saying a few prayers, asking God to take care of all his grandparents; and Misha Kindle, the best dog ever to live; and even Ms. Manzuli, just in case she did any prayers for him. He also asked God to help out Mom, maybe talk her into getting some friends, a new haircut—something to cheer her up. He yawned.

  “You. Up.” Lights. His brother’s face, white and tight, as if a sheet of exhaustion had been stretched around it.

  “Cliff? What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t have a problem, dumb butt. You do.” Cliff bent close, prodding Rock on the shoulder. Rock smelled toothpaste.

  “You’re so lame. Get out of here, out-out-out. Outa my room. It’s after midnight. You can’t interrupt my sleep.” Rock kicked one leg out from under its trap of blankets and slammed his foot into Cliff’s thigh. But his brother was bigger, if not stronger, and in a minute Cliff had pounced on Rock, sitting upright on Rock’s heaving chest while his fingers trapped Rock’s wrists, then yanked and pinned his hands above his head.

  “Listen up.” Cliff’s spitty whisper tickled Rock’s ear and he jerked his head away. “I know you think it’s okay that I had to sit in Mr. Faella’s office and listen to about ten minutes of garbage about honor codes because my freak brother thinks it’s cool to throw rocks at fat kids. But then to hear Dad compare you to Jesse James and the Sundance Kid or something? Meanwhile I had to take the second late bus to school—failed my Spanish quiz, not that you care, O great lord of D-minuses. But you’re not getting off that easy. ’Cause you can do me a favor tonight.”

  “What’re you—” Rock squirmed and tried unsuccessfully for another kick.

  “Since Dad thinks it’s so cool for you to beat up Briggsie, way cooler than me passing a Spanish quiz, I was thinking you could help me out with my homework.”

  Rock sat up in bed as Cliff rolled off him.

  “What are you talking about? You’ve been out of control ever since you barged in here.”

  “Follow me. I mean it.”

  Rock got up and mutely trailed Cliff into his room. It stunned him to see his brother so angry. It wasn’t something that happened very often.

  Cliff pulled back his desk chair and pointed for Rock to sit; then he clicked on his Tensor lamp. “See this?” He waved a slice of ruled paper in the air. “I wrote down all the words I don’t know from this extra-credit essay we’re supposed to read. So what you’re gonna do is look up all the words in here.” He rapped his knuckles on a chunky Spanish—English dictionary that rested on the desk. “And then you’re gonna copy their meanings next to the words. Got it?”

  “Cliff, no way I’m gonna do this.”

  “If you don’t, then I call war. No joke. Starting with me pitching your bike in the pond, and second, I’ll tell Dad that you were the one who set off those fi
recrackers in the Superfresh last year. That’s just to start.”

  “Why’re you being so, just, like my worst enemy?” Rock asked in a small voice, feeling like a baby even as he spoke.

  “Look, Rock, we already have one bully in the family, if you haven’t noticed. And his name is George Kindle. And being a bully isn’t gonna be contagious in this house, not if I can help it. You start writing now, you’ll be done in under an hour. And try to make your penmanship so I can read it.” With these parting words, Cliff ducked and scrabbled like a cockroach under his bed. Soon all Rock heard was the whisper of Cliff’s pencil tracing out his latest house design.

  El cielo, Rock read. Los abogados. Las películas. There were about forty words. He picked up the dictionary. Rock would have considered it a favor if Cliff had made him miss a Spanish quiz, but Cliff took school pretty seriously. Rock decided that he owed it to his brother, though, since the Detonator had given Cliff more problems than it should have.

  He wrote carefully, copied intently. He felt bad. Spanish seemed tricky; it must be pretty tough to pass a quiz, even with enough sleep the night before.

  “I’m done,” he said finally, stifling a yawn. Cliff wriggled out from under his bed, flipping his notebook up on his nightstand.

  “Great.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Rock lied. Cliff looked over the paper, nodded, and then folded it into his Spanish workbook.

  “Wonder how Liza’s doing.”

  “Timmy’s gone until next Monday.”

  “Oh yeah?” Cliff looked up. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. But, so Timmy’s gone, well good, that’s real good, then. ’Cause by after the weekend, it won’t be such a big deal. Remember how last time she got in all that trouble—and it wasn’t so long ago, right? Last time, when Liza wrapped papier-mâché all over that other girl, what was that girl’s name?”

  “Ugh—Tanya Wallace. Snob. She deserved it.”

  “You and Liza love that excuse, that the other kid deserved it.”

  “ ’Cause it’s usually true. Anyhow, you’re right. Last time it wasn’t so bad for Liza, and the Wallaces even called over to the house. So.” They stood and stared at each other, remembering. “Not so bad,” Rock repeated. “Night, Cliff.”

  “Night, sport. Thanks for the Spanish words.”

  “Not like I really had a choice.” Rock yawned and rubbed his hands through his hair. He bet he looked especially hamsterish now.

  “You’ve always got a choice,” Cliff said. “So happens you made a good one. Now scram.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  EMERGING PROTESTERS

  THE KINDLES MOVED FROM San Diego, California, to Sheffield, Connecticut, at the end of the same March that Rock turned eight years old. Cliff was ten and Brontie was still a toddler just learning to walk. Touching down at the New Haven airport was the first time any of the three kids had seen real snow. Cliff and Rock had dashed out of the airport to the parking lot, to the brown hills of plowed slush and ice, excited to stomp and kick it. Even dirty and half melted, the giant snow piles were like a miracle.

  “We need a new coastline,” their father had explained when the decision was made to move. “The only thing that’s constant in this world is change.” Connecticut wasn’t a true change for their father, though, since he’d spent all his growing-up years in Sheffield, in his aunt Cass’s house, which was gone now, “along with the inheritance money that the lawyers and tax people stole out from under us,” their father would recall with a hard little smile.

  “All we Kindles got left in Sheffield is legacy,” he told his family. He spoke truth, though; Sheffield was rich with Kindle lore. Kindles had fought with the Blue Coats during the Revolution and with the Union during the Civil War. Cliff and Rock had discovered cemeteries filled with Kindle tombstones, some with etchings worn fingernail-shallow, the stone smudged green with lichens and mosses. Rock often repeated those dead Kindle names softly to himself, especially when he was mad at some kid and was chasing him down to pound him.

  “Jeremiah Kindle. Robert Xavier Kindle. Christian Price Kindle.” Heroic colonist soldiers all of them, he bet. A legacy of bravery that Rock liked to think he personally kept alive, seeing as Cliff wasn’t much of a fighter.

  “Kindles been living in Sheffield since before it was called Sheffield,” their father told them, pride lumped in his voice. “You might’ve been born on your mother’s side of the country, but you boys are Yankee blood through and through.”

  One of Rock’s strongest memories of Sheffield was also one of his first. It was during move-in week, when brown cardboard packing boxes had created an obstacle course through their cottage, and the unpacking was like a celebration, their same old things transformed into treasures to reopen and appreciate all over again.

  The day of Rock’s eighth birthday, his mother had baked a lemon cake from scratch, and his father barbecued shrimp and chicken. After lunch and cake the whole family had lolled in the living room, drinking icy Cokes from their father’s frosted German beer steins and sharing a family-sized bag of peanut M&M’s. Everyone had watched, even baby Brontie, as Rock, the star of the day, slowly opened his presents. Slot cars, he remembered. He’d seen the box in the car trunk the day before.

  Then his father unexpectedly had told him to pick out a game to play.

  “Anything.” He’d spread his arms expansively. “Something fun for the whole family.”

  Rock had bristled with surprised joy and jumped up to locate the box where the games were packed. He’d picked Monopoly, a tedious game that no one really liked, but it took the longest time to play. Before anyone could protest, though, Rock had the board and cards neatly set up on a packing box. He’d even let Cliff be the race car, to pacify him. But soon the whole family was caught up in it—cheering and slapping their foreheads and clapping for each other, just the way the people did in commercials.

  They’d played all the way up through hotels, and Brontie had fallen asleep on the couch, with little green houses stuck over the tips of her fingers. After they packed the game away and put Brontie to bed, their father built a fire in the fireplace, and they sang rounds of “This Land Is Your Land” and “Hotel California,” other songs too, and then they’d all eaten more cake, with herb tea that his mother served from her special-occasion tea set.

  Rock had wanted to savor each minute of the afternoon the way he ate an M&M, holding it safe on his tongue, letting the candy shell and chocolate dissolve into a sweet, thick puddle, his teeth cleaving the softened peanut into two halves. He still carried the candy-bright images of that birthday tucked into a dark, safe place in his brain. He’d always thought of that day as a good-luck sign, like a bottle of champagne broken over the prow of a boat, launching the Kindles toward their new life in New England.

  Cliff had confided to Rock that their old life in San Diego was full of problems, which was the real reason they’d all moved. First, their father’s car-servicing franchise had gone out of business. Then Mr. Sugar, the boss at their father’s next job, in the security department of the Jefferson Armory, fired him, “for mouthing off,” Cliff explained. And his job after that, working the graveyard shift at the gasworks plant, didn’t make enough money to support a family of four, soon to be five.

  Cliff remembered the details of all the fights: how their mother cried a lot, and that when she was gigantically pregnant with Brontie, she’d left them for a month to visit Aunt Louisa in Arizona, where Brontie had been born. “Which I think half explains why Brontie’s so unconnected,” Cliff told Rock. “I thought Mom would never come back, though.”

  Rock’s clearest memory of San Diego stood inside that same tiny and unsettled corner of time when their mother had left for Arizona, because he remembered how Cliff had taken over preparing Rock’s school lunches, using way too much jelly and forgetting the napkins.

  “Yeah, it’s lucky she decided not to stay in Arizona,” Rock agreed. Aunt Louisa in Arizona. It sounded like a hillbilly song
. Rock had met his mother’s sister only twice, but he knew she owned a small pottery store called Tucson Terra Flora that earned her enough money to visit Paris and Hawaii. Their mother would stick her postcards on the refrigerator, word side up. “And I’m glad we live in a place that doesn’t make Mom cry.”

  Their Sheffield home stood inside a circle of cottages that ringed the edge of Moose Hill Pond and were within walking distance of the Sheffield Yacht Club, where they weren’t members, and Blackfoot Beach, which you didn’t need to belong to. The house itself was tiny and not meant to be lived in during the winter. The two upstairs bedrooms were unfinished, built with high rafters and uninsulated doors and windows. The miniature fireplace was mostly for show. There was only one bathroom, downstairs.

  It would be just for a little while, their mother had explained when they first moved in. They’d find a better, permanent house before winter.

  The cold weather had arrived early, a brutal September snap that had caught them off-guard. It whistled behind the walls and froze the floorboards and crept inside the tips of their fingers and noses. Their cottage was never warm, even when their father bought a cord of wood so they could feed the tiny fireplace with a platoon of sturdy logs. Their mother bought nylon blankets, six packs of heavy ragg socks, and warm bathrobes from Woolworth’s. But the windows rattled and the hot-water pipes froze. Rock kept his fingers warm at dinner by sitting first on one hand, then the other, trading off his fork from left hand to right.

  “Aren’t we leaving?” Cliff had asked one night at dinner. “Aren’t we moving to a real house? A permanent one? Practically nobody lives on Linwood Drive as a year-rounder.”

  Rock had nodded in silent agreement. The summer people had long since departed to New York or New Jersey or other parts of Connecticut, leaving their furniture shrouded in white sheets and mothballs until the next summer.

  “If we can stick out our first New England winter in this cottage, then we’re prepared for anything,” their father explained. “Plus, the rent’s low, and even though I got steady work at the boat yard, it’s not the job security I’d need for a down payment on a bigger house.”