From Norvelt to Nowhere (Norvelt Series)

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From Norvelt to Nowhere (Norvelt Series) Page 13

by Jack Gantos


  After that I kept my mouth shut and drove like a racing maniac all afternoon. I loved the thrill of highway driving and felt I could motor nonstop around the world.

  After we made a pit stop for snacks and gas, Miss Volker slept. As the road started winding and rolling into the Appalachian Mountains I was getting drowsy, but suddenly Miss Volker snapped open her eyes and yelled out, “Hit the brakes!”

  I did and we screeched to a stop, causing the car following behind to swerve around us. The driver honked his horn and shook his fist at us as he passed.

  “What are we stopping for?” I asked. In the rearview mirror I saw two smoking lines of burnt rubber behind us. If there had been ice on the road, we would have slid to Tennessee. “I didn’t see a deer or a squirrel in the road.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “You only see what you already know. Now back up and read that historic marker on the side of the road.”

  I did. “It says this is where the Proclamation Line of 1763 passed by,” I said. “I never heard of it.”

  “Because they don’t teach it in school. This is stuff you learn from reading books all your life,” she explained.

  “Or from listening to you,” I added.

  “One of these days I’ll be dead, so you better not count on me to spoon-feed you brains forever. This Proclamation boundary,” she explained, “was between Native Americans and the British Crown. It was meant to keep Colonial settlers from crossing into Indian Territory. Basically the treaty stated that all the rivers that flowed from here to the Atlantic Ocean marked the territory for the Colonists. And all the rivers that flowed from here west to the Mississippi belonged to the Indians and they could keep their land as pure as their ancestors always kept it. But the treaty didn’t hold, and once again there was trouble in paradise. The moment the Colonies won independence from the British, they celebrated their new freedom by making sure the Indians lost theirs.

  “Frontiersmen stepped over the line and invaded Indian lands. That caused trouble, so our new government set new treaties and then broke them, and with each broken treaty we always wanted more land and less Indians. The great Shawnee chief Tecumseh said about his people, ‘They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun.’”

  I put the VW back in gear and headed west like an old-time settler. That history had already passed us by, but if I could ever go fast enough to catch it from behind, I’d change things around and give the Indians back their land.

  “Even Lincoln,” she said with shame in her voice, “as he fought to free African Americans from plantation slavery with one hand, he fought with the other hand to make reservation slaves of the Native Americans. His worst moment came after the Dakota War when in 1862 he had thirty-eight Sioux braves hanged in Minnesota territory—the largest one-day hanging in American history, ordered by the greatest president in American history.”

  “Jekyll and Hyde,” I remarked, and mashed down on the gas pedal with all my strength. Now I really wished I could catch history and give the Sioux braves back their lives too.

  “Nobody is pure,” she echoed. “On the white man side of the Line of Proclamation, Lincoln is a hero. On the Native American side, he is a villain.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “You do now,” she replied. “And never forget this rule of U.S. history—America always loses a war it fights against itself.”

  We didn’t talk for a while, which was good because when you learn important lessons you need time to remember them in ink.

  About an hour later she shifted around in her seat like a dog getting comfortable. “Well, I figure you might be curious about the town of Rugby we’re going to visit and why my family got kicked out.”

  I was still driving like a possessed demon chasing the setting sun over the horizon. I hadn’t given Rugby any thought whatsoever, but that didn’t stop her from telling me.

  “Rugby began as the greatest utopian town in America, and it was started by Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s School Days.”

  I slapped my hands on the steering wheel with excitement. “Well, I have news for you,” I said triumphantly. “I’m not as stupid as I look. I own that book!”

  “You mean you have the Classics Illustrated version,” she said with contempt, making it clear that I had the moron version of the book.

  “Yes,” I said, staring out between the letters on the windshield. “I have it in my suitcase.”

  “Well, maybe I can convince you to read the real book. When Thomas Hughes was a boy he went to a private school called Rugby in England. There was a tradition in those days of older boys bullying younger boys. Hughes was bullied a lot. After he finished school, he wrote Tom Brown’s School Days, which is all about the evils of being bullied. The book was an instant success and Hughes made oodles of money, and with it he decided to build a perfect community in the wilderness in 1880—a utopian paradise that was free of bullies and full of freethinkers. So he came to America and bought a lot of cheap land far in the hills of Tennessee and began to construct a small English village and advertise for good people to join him.

  “My parents were attracted to the idea of a community where each day people would learn how to be kinder to each other, and more responsible for their own behavior. Other people felt the same too, and right away the town took off. Cottages were built for families. There was a charming Victorian inn, and a library, and farms, and workshops for canning goods, and in the evenings there was music and gatherings of all sorts—and everyone was equal.

  “I remember one night as a girl I was milking a goat and my father walked into the barn. I had both hands working the goat’s udder and the milk was splish-splashing into the bucket in a one-two, one-two rhythm. My father listened to that rhythm for a little while and then he just said to me, ‘Milking sets the cycle of the mind. You begin life by believing what you see, and then you question it and arrive at another conclusion. Then you believe in what you concluded, and then you question that. Tick-tock, tick-tock, question-answer, question-answer, one-two, one-two. This is how you listen to yourself, or read a book, or anything else that moves your mind, until one day the clock stops and you hope your milk bucket is full of nourishing wisdom.’ I always remember him saying that,” she said. “What he meant was, the moment you think you know something for sure, then you darn well better question it.”

  “I like that too,” I agreed. “If you question everything, then there is no one way to do anything.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Except for the church. They didn’t question themselves. They only questioned everyone else.” I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Utopia for the preacher was not heaven on earth in Tennessee. Utopia could only be eternal life after death if you went to God’s heaven. And you could only get to heaven one way, and that was through following the teaching of the Bible.”

  “That led to a problem, right?” I guessed.

  “Big problem,” she replied firmly. “Just like the Puritans in Boston. They were the same way. They left England for America to start a ‘Shining City on a Hill’—a new world of religious purity—but look out if you questioned any of their religious beliefs. They hanged witches, impure thinkers, and non-Puritans on the Boston Commons as a warning to freethinkers. Anne Hutchinson was a freethinking Puritan, a woman who dared to believe that she could pray directly to God and receive His grace without the need of a preacher. Well, the Puritan church did not want that kind of freethinking. After they hanged Anne’s Quaker friend Mary Dyer, they chased Anne out of town. She fled to Providence but then heard the Puritans were still after her so she went farther south into the Dutch territory—to a place called Split Rock just above New York.”

  “This isn’t going to have a happy ending, is it?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said grimly. “Anne Hutchinson and her family were scalped and killed by Indians who were already angry with settlers for taking their land.”

>   “Trouble in paradise,” I said.

  “Jekyll and Hyde,” she echoed. “But she would have still been living safely in Boston if the Puritans had allowed for freedom of religion and had not driven her into hostile territory.”

  I pulled around a truck full of turkeys stacked in wire pens. They were headed for the wrong side of Thanksgiving dinner.

  “So what happened to your family?” I asked.

  “Funny you should ask,” she replied.

  “But it’s not funny, right?” I guessed.

  “Right,” she said. “My father was a big tick-tock thinker and he liked Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s vision for America was farmland for everyone to grow their own food. Everyone could be self-sufficient in communities of good people where everyone helped each other. Another thing my father liked about Jefferson was that Jefferson secretly made his own Bible. When Jefferson read the Bible he was more interested in what Jesus said about how to live, and how people should treat one another, and about love and humanity and good deeds and kindness. Jefferson was not so interested in what others said about Jesus—which made up most of the Bible. So he cut out the parts of the Bible where Jesus said something important and pasted them together to make his own secret Bible. It had to be a secret because Christians were still very much like the Puritans—they accepted only one Bible. Making your own Bible was frowned upon, even punished.

  “Well, my father did the same thing as Jefferson, but somehow his Bible was found and it made a lot of people upset. Like me, he was a big talker, and he was probably talking loudly about it and one thing led to another, and after a lot of church debates about who believed what, we were asked to leave. And we did. It was like my parents were Adam and Eve and my sister and I were their sinful kids and we were kicked out of Eden. But I never forgot Rugby because it is Eden in my memory. The truth is, Rugby didn’t last long after we left. There was a terrible typhoid outbreak in the beginning, a bad fire, and arguments over land ownership that made neighbors enemies. As more original settlers left, it became a ghost town, but it is forever the home of my childhood and that’s why I’m looking forward to going again. I want to visit in honor of my sister and the happy time we had there together. And Spizz will be there. I know he will. He loved Rugby.”

  “Why was he kicked out?”

  “He wasn’t. He always followed the rules. Remember what a pest he was in Norvelt? Giving people tickets for having weeds in their yard and stopped-up gutters. Spizz was perfect for Rugby because he didn’t question anything. For him, there was no such thing as a bad rule, and when he follows the rules he is a very happy man. He only ran away from Rugby because he loved me. He followed our family around like a dog and lived in all the towns I lived in with my parents. He’d rent rooms and have sketchy jobs as a handyman and bother me, and eventually when I got the nursing job in Norvelt he moved there too. He thought we’d get married.”

  “Now that you mention marriage, there was something I didn’t tell you,” I said sheepishly, not wanting to get her worked up. “On the train, when Spizz cornered me in the bathroom, he said he had returned to Norvelt the night Mrs. Custard died because the two of you were planning to run off and get married. He said you agreed to marry him because you lost the bet and were the last old lady standing in Norvelt.”

  “He’s hallucinating,” she protested. “He returned to kill Mrs. Custard because he’s an insane old-lady serial killer.”

  “I’m just telling you what he told me,” I stated. Then I took my life in my own hands when I added, “And he told me you killed Mrs. Custard because you wanted to be the last old-lady Norvelter so you could marry him.”

  “Now I’m really determined to kill that liar,” she vowed. “He’s worse than I thought.”

  “And you are sure he’ll be at Rugby?” I asked.

  “Positively,” she said with vengeful confidence. “He always shows up wherever I go. I can’t shake him. That’s why I have to bury him.”

  “So are you Jekyll and he is Hyde? Or is it the other way around?” I inquired.

  She crossed her arms and gave me a stern look.

  “And what about Huffer?” I asked. “I think I may have seen him get off the train in D.C. with a casket. I was going to go ask him what he was doing when you fell and fired off the shot.”

  “He may have been changing trains,” she guessed. “He told me on the phone he’s traveling down by rail. He’s probably in a hurry to get to Florida so he can fix up my sister for her memorial service and pick up a check. But he has plenty of time to get there now, because when we get to Rugby I’m going to set a trap for Spizz and it will begin with you digging a single grave.”

  I kept driving.

  11

  When you slowly dig a grave in hard dirt with a shovel, you have a lot of time to think, and the first thought I had as I threw dirt over my shoulder was that the farther Miss Volker and I traveled from Norvelt the less Norvelt-like we had become. But how could I know what defined us now? I had never been away from home for a week without a parent, and I certainly had never been part of a plan to kill someone. Norvelt was a “helping hand” town, with neighbor helping neighbor, but if planning a murder was a test of my Norvelt values, I had failed. I was “helping out” but in the wrong way. I know my mother asked Miss Volker to tutor me in history and she was doing a great job on that subject, but when it came to being a good Norvelt citizen, my own mother would have given me a failing grade.

  Since leaving Washington, D.C., I had been driving on skinny back roads like a bug-eyed maniac for two days on the way to Miss Volker’s old hometown. At night I never got any rest, because we stayed in run-down roadside motels where I let her have the moldy-smelling rooms, while I slept out in the Beetle like a dog, all curled up with a blanket on the small backseat.

  When it came to eating, I realized why my mother grew garden produce and sent nourishing dinners down to Miss Volker. She only liked to eat bags of chocolate chip cookies, ice-cream sandwiches, popcorn, and boxes of oyster crackers and salty pretzels, which she washed down with quart after quart of buttermilk.

  We were in a hurry to get to Rugby, so she wouldn’t stop and let me have a sit-down meal. I hadn’t had any green vegetables for days. In fact, I was lucky to find a green hot dog or a furry sandwich at a gas station snack stand, so I ended up eating the same junk Miss Volker ate. My stomach felt like a vending machine.

  By the time we arrived in Rugby, late in the afternoon of the third day, I was hungry, exhausted, and slumped over the steering wheel. I was eager for a clean bed, a good meal, and a pay phone so I could call home. But when we arrived at the center of town I knew those wishes were hopeless dreams.

  “This is Rugby,” she announced grandly as she gestured toward an overgrown weed-tangled dirt street that was lined with boarded-up wooden buildings. Everywhere I looked—north, south, east, and west—Rugby was an abandoned ghost town that time forgot.

  “This is the Eden on earth where Spizz and I were born, and played together as kids, and where we learned Esperanto—the international language of peace. At one time this town was even greater than Norvelt, but it died out, and now this is where Spizz will come to be buried.”

  I had barely turned off the engine and staggered out of the car to stretch my aching legs and sore back when she led me to a graveyard behind what was left of the buckled walls of a decaying church.

  “See,” she said, pointing past the toppled steeple toward a row of graves at the far edge of the cemetery. “On that wide stone are carved the names of Spizz’s parents. And the empty plot next to theirs belongs to him.”

  Off to the side was a weathered old shovel stuck nose-down in a pile of dirt. It looked just like the one Dad gave me to dig the Norvelt bomb shelter.

  “The way you catch a murderer,” she said in the hushed voice a sportsman might use while tracking wild game, “is to dig him an irresistibly comfortable grave.”

  “This is a bad idea,” I said. “And it makes
me uncomfortable.”

  “It’s only a bad idea for someone who can’t see a good idea. Now do as you are told and that will make me comfortable.”

  I tried to change the subject. “Where are your parents buried?” I asked.

  “Certainly not here,” she crowed, and puffed out her chest. “Once we were kicked out of paradise, we never returned.”

  And then she got a busy look on her face and began to walk off.

  “Wait!” I called after her. “Where are you going?”

  “To put together a plan to catch the Norvelt killer,” she replied over her shoulder. “To do that I need some supplies, and maybe while I’m digging around I’ll uncover some memento to put into my sister’s casket. She loved it here. Plus, I need to find my old harpoon.”

  “A real harpoon?” I asked. “We are landlocked out here.”

  “The Rugby blacksmith made one for me,” she answered. “He had been a blacksmith on Nantucket whaling ships till he got old and tired of being bounced around on the ocean. He joined Rugby to live out his life on a farm. He’d gather us kids up and tell salty yarns about whaling on the high seas. I begged him to forge me a harpoon, and he did. It was beautiful and deadly. I used to throw it at logs. Even then Spizz annoyed me. Once, I hurled it at him so hard it got stuck in a tree. Maybe it’s still there.”

  “If you find a pay phone,” I said without much hope, “let me know so I can call my mom.”

  “There is no phone out here,” she replied. “Not even phone lines. If you suddenly died and were buried out here, nobody would find you but the worms in the ground. Now start digging—that grave has to be six feet deep to be legal. I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  Then she tramped off through the weeds and brush.

  And so I grabbed the shovel and started digging a legal grave for an illegal death. To tell you the truth, I felt a little sorry for Spizz, because what she and I were planning to do to him was worse than what he wanted to do to us.

 

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