“The policeman said you stole something,” he said.
Sam folded his arms across his chest.
“What did you steal?” Oliver leaned against his brother.
“What did the policeman say I stole?” Sam asked.
“I couldn’t understand him.”
Later, the McWilliamses sat around the kitchen table with their grandparents, Noli making raisin bread for breakfast. It was almost midnight. The lights were out, and they sat in candlelight in case the patrol car was circling the block.
“If they’re looking, they’ll be able to see us in candlelight as well, Noli,” William Lucas said.
“I don’t think so, William,” she said.
She asked Sam to get under the kitchen table just in case, since he was supposed to be in West Virginia. But he refused.
“Do you have an alibi?” Oliver asked Sam.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done,” Sam said.
“According to the police officer, you took two lengths of metal pipe and a Coleman flashlight from Hechinger’s Hardware this afternoon,” William Lucas said.
“I see,” Sam said.
“Maybe he needed it,” Julia said.
“Grandfather means I stole it,” Sam said reasonably. “Whether I needed it or not is unimportant.”
“That’s right, Sam,” William said, his temper growing.
Noli was sprinkling raisins over the flat, damp dough.
“I wish you weren’t making bread, Nicole. It’s the middle of the night. You’ll be up till morning.”
“We needed bread,” Noli said pleasantly.
“It’s fine, Grandfather,” Charlotte said when, in a gesture of despair, her grandfather had sunk his head in his hands. “We are out of bread for breakfast.”
William Lucas was satisfied with small things, his work in particular, immensely patient with details. But sometimes in the last years, especially after the trouble with Sam in Michigan, he thought he could go crazy. A man of his age with such responsibility. Something could happen. An accidental slip of the mind, a heart attack, a stroke, a loss of memory of who he was in the world—a minor artist, noted for the exactitude of his drawings, a certain lyricism in his use of color. He was almost seventy. Too old, he thought, too literal-minded and simple to be the guardian of Samuel McWilliams. He wasn’t up to it.
He folded his hands, speaking without emotion.
“The officer knows you took these things from Hechinger’s because you were seen by a girl in your class. He didn’t make it up, Sam. The girl identified you by name.” He leaned across the kitchen table. “And then the officer asked me a question I ask you now, because I don’t know the answer. Why would a boy need an industrial-size flashlight and two lengths of pipe?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said, answering quickly for his brother. “Maybe Sam does.”
Sam rested his chin in his hands and looked at his grandfather directly. He didn’t want his grandfather to know why he had stolen, but he wasn’t afraid of being caught. Caught he was, although for the sake of his family, he didn’t intend to tell the truth exactly. He was more curious than nervous, wishing to know what had been going on around him at Hechinger’s while he took the flashlight and pipe, who had been looking when he dropped them in the black nylon case he carried, a bag large enough for schoolbooks and other things.
“I didn’t steal anything today,” Sam said truthfully. “I wasn’t at Hechinger’s. I was at the library after school, so you can tell the policeman that when he comes back.”
“He’s not allowed back,” Noli said. “This is a private home and you’re in West Virginia.”
“What if they come up with evidence?” William Lucas asked. “What if the girl is willing to step forward?”
“I’ll say it’s a case of mistaken identity,” Sam said. “I don’t want you to worry, Grandfather. I don’t want you to have a bad time with me.”
He meant that truly. Sam had genuine sympathy for his grandfather, his substitute father, not a role William Lucas had by choice, and he had done it well, refusing to bend under the weight of duty, refusing old age.
“But if you were to have been at Hechinger’s,” William Lucas began, turning to Sam. “Or let’s say any boy stealing a Coleman flashlight and two lengths of pipe—why that? Why those items, of all things?”
“To make a bomb shelter,” Sam said. “That would be my guess.”
Sam had been building a bomb shelter under the garage for almost a year, working steadily and in secret. When his family thought he was at school or at a friend’s house or playing basketball on the blacktop at Lafayette Elementary, he was actually digging a hole under the floor of the garage which in time would become the size of a room, large enough for the six of them to occupy in relative safety for several weeks. He had read extensively about bomb shelters in books he found in the local library after Mr. dePaul, his seventh-grade history teacher, had described the one his parents had built in their backyard in the fifties during the Cold War.
“My father did it himself,” Mr. dePaul told Sam. “It wasn’t difficult. It just took a shovel and a very long time.”
The first thing Sam took from Hechinger’s was a shovel. It was an expensive shovel, almost $35.00, four feet long, with a slightly pointed blade. He hid it under his grandfather’s long yellow rain slicker and walked out of the store unobserved.
In time, he had needed other things that were not available among his grandfather’s limited supply of tools—pipe to create a retaining wall and rope and wooden rungs to make a rope ladder from the ground level in the garage to the underground room.
His plan was simple. He used a basic design from one of the books he found in the library—Bomb Shelters for the Ordinary American Family—a ten-foot-deep passageway into a 9 × 12 × 7 foot room. By the time he was caught shoplifting, he had finished only the passageway, large enough for a grown man to climb down the rope ladder without getting stuck. In the plans, there was room for six cots, stacked like bunk beds, three across, a trunk for dried food and water, shelves for the boxes of his parents’ letters, his father’s paintings, their photographs, a few other personal possessions.
When he’d studied ancient Egypt in elementary school, Sam had been drawn to the Egyptian ceremony for the burial of their dead. He was particularly struck with the great care taken by the living, the gathering of treasured possessions, even beloved pets, to travel with the dead to another world, which seemed as agreeable, at least in concept, as the one they had left behind. He began to imagine the bomb shelter as a place of safety for all his family, living and dead.
The work was slow, days of shoveling, of carrying dirt from the expanding tunnel out the back door of the garage into the alley, distributing it in various back yards. He planned to be finished by spring, maybe late April or early May. Then he’d make a ceremony of it. Take his family into the garage, lift the wooden door he’d built to cover the hole, point his flashlight into the tunnel.
“There,” he’d say, watching them climb down the rope ladder into the new room. “I’ve made a shelter for us.”
Charlotte lay under the covers listening for the policeman to come back, listening to her grandmother padding around the kitchen in her soft slippers, making bread in the middle of the night.
“Charlotte?” Julia whispered from under the bed. “Do you think Sam stole?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “I haven’t thought about it.”
But she did know.
Out of the dream corner of her eye, she saw Sam walking up Nebraska Avenue from Alice Deal Junior High, a figure in faded jeans and black jacket, the nylon bag he carried everywhere slung over his shoulder, headed toward Wisconsin Avenue with a plan.
She saw him in Hechinger’s Hardware, not bothering to notice if a girl from his ninth-grade class or a clerk or a manager was watch
ing him unzip his bag and drop the pipes and flashlight in. And the girl, following him to Hechinger’s with a group of other girls who had crushes on Sam, lurking behind the display cases, watching him from an aisle away, would be the one to turn him in. Such was the perversity of romance.
“A boy in my class has shoplifted,” she would say to the manager. “His name is Sam McWilliams, and he lives on Morrison Street.”
But by then, Sam would have dropped underground with his booty, into the metro at Tenleytown.
“Sam?” His grandfather had followed him upstairs and was standing in the doorway to his room. “Why didn’t you ask me for money if there was something you needed?”
“I should have,” Sam said. “I’m very sorry, Grandfather.” But he couldn’t explain why it was that he didn’t ask his grandfather to pay for a bomb shelter. The subject of his parents’ deaths never came up with his grandparents. Instinctively the children knew that they could speak of James and Lucy living but they should avoid mentioning their deaths. The reason Sam hadn’t asked his grandfather for money was kindness, or such was his thinking. A bomb shelter would suggest the bomb in Orvieto, and so he decided, without remorse, to take what he needed from Hechinger’s, because he needed it very much. Sam’s code of ethics—and he had one—was simple. He did what was necessary to protect his family. Stealing didn’t figure as a breach of principle.
William Lucas sat on the end of his bed in his undershorts and slippers, staring across the room at nothing, at the table full of bottles of perfume, which Noli collected, and kaleidoscopes, which she also collected, and rings, at the mirror over the dresser, which reflected their heavy oak bed, dark as a casket in the mirror.
He listened.
Sam was leaning in the door talking to Oliver in that language they had together, a kind of gibberish. He heard Charlotte and Julia mumbling back and forth and Noli on the stairs bringing him hot milk, which he didn’t want, never wanted, but she brought it anyway, insisting it would make him sleep.
“He didn’t do it, William,” Noli said, walking into the bedroom with his mug of hot milk. “I know you think he did, but it’s not possible.”
“Of course he did,” William said. “He was seen.”
“By an unreliable girl,” Noli said, putting her soft, fleshy arm around her husband’s shoulder, her cheek against his cheek. “Don’t worry, William.”
“I suppose if he’s in jail, we’ll have less to worry about,” William said. “We’ll know where he is.”
“He’s normal, William,” Noli said. “Maybe he’s more sensitive and suspicious than other fourteen-year-olds, but he’s a perfectly normal boy, I promise.”
William Lucas couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he heard the policeman stop in front of the house, and then he’d get up to look out the window at the black night. Once, he thought he heard someone in the kitchen and went to the head of the stairs, but it was only Noli.
“You don’t seem to be sleeping,” Noli said, padding into the bedroom after 3 a.m., smelling of hot bread.
“Bad dreams,” he said.
She climbed into bed, pushed up against him, a shift in the blankets, a whiff of gardenia. She reached down and took his hand.
“I wish Sam didn’t make lists,” she said. “He’s sitting up in bed doing one now. All these categories of this and that. It’s not a family trait from my side. List making.” She turned toward William, closing her eyes, lying on her side.
“Did you hear what Sam said about a bomb shelter?” William asked.
“No, I didn’t,” Noli said sleepily, and just in case William had plans to repeat the conversation, she added, “I don’t want to talk tonight. Let’s go to sleep quickly.”
Sam sat propped up in his bed, a long-necked lamp pulled half over his lap, shining in a yellow circle on a notebook page with a list of names he was recopying from old file cards scattered in piles on his bed.
Saul Frankel, age 37, and his son Amos, age 7. Killed October 13, 1977, in a bomb explosion at a grammar school in West Jerusalem.
Mavis O’Leary. Age 19. Killed on December 14, 1977, in Belfast in an explosion at the West End Public Library.
Marshall Felder. Age 47. Killed June 18, 1978, in the Rome International Airport in a bomb explosion.
Sara Ross. Age 7, daughter of Henry and Rebekkah Ross. Killed in the Rome International Airport.
From time to time, he listened for the policeman. Twice he thought he heard someone trying to get into the garage, which was kept locked, but when he got out of bed, turned off his light, and looked, no one was there, unless it was a raccoon he had heard scrambling in the garbage. In the front room, he could hear his grandfather tossing and turning, his grandmother speaking above a whisper. He heard her talking about his lists.
Sam collected stories of terrorists from newspapers and magazines, listing the names of victims and their families on file cards, smudged and dog-eared from reading over at night when he couldn’t go to sleep.
He had started the collection one spring when he was ten and they were still living in Grand Rapids. In the afternoon, he used to go to Blazer’s Drugstore to read the daily paper, since the bad news of the world wasn’t permitted inside the Lucas house. He would settle on the floor beside the stacks of magazines, eating a Clark bar and reading. Charlotte would meet him after her dance class, picking up Oliver on the way, and they’d all walk home together.
One particular afternoon when he was ten—he had the date in his notebook—October 13, 1977—a news story caught his eye and took his breath away: front page, top of the fold.
American father and child die in school bombing in West Jerusalem.
According to the news story, the family was from Erie, Pennsylvania, working in Israel for two years. The father, a visiting professor of Jewish Studies at Hebrew University, was picking his son up at school, while the mother remained at their apartment in West Jerusalem with their baby girl. Saul and Rebecca Frankel and their children. Amos was seven, Sam’s age on June 11, 1974. He tore the article out of the paper and stuffed it in his pocket.
When Charlotte arrived at the drugstore with her dance bag and library book and Oliver, Sam was sitting on the floor beside the stack of newspapers, looking off into the middle distance.
“I guess you’re sick?” Charlotte said in that motherly way she had, placing her hand on his forehead.
“I’m fine,” Sam replied. But when he stood up, his legs were weightless, cut off at the knee. “Maybe I am a little sick,” he said.
“Don’t throw up in the drugstore,” Oliver said.
“I never throw up,” Sam said.
The walk home was endless. He had the sense of moving through waist-high mud, of disassociation, as if his head, filled with helium, was floating just above his reach, as if he were passing into a war zone right there on Maple Street under a canopy of cherry trees in full bloom.
Once home, he went to his room, took out the newspaper article, his composition book, and wrote a letter.
Dear Rebecca Frankel,
I am writing to express my grief to you and your baby for the terrible deaths of your husband and son, Amos. I read about you in the Grand Rapids paper today after school. I want you to know that on June 11, 1974, my brother and sisters and I were on our way to Rome with our parents when the lunch car where our parents were buying us lunch exploded.
So I understand how you feel.
Your friend,
Samuel Lucas McWilliams. Age 10
He called the Grand Rapids newspaper for the address of Rebecca Frankel, and they gave him an address for her mother in Erie, Pennsylvania, and he sent the letter to her.
It was months before Sam heard back, and in the meantime, Matthew Gray, recovering at the hospital from a ruptured spleen, had made his accusations about Sam, and the Lucases were packing up to move to Washington.
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The letter from Rebecca Frankel came in June, the day the Mayflower moving van arrived.
Dear Samuel,
Thank you for the kindness of your letter. My life will never be the same, of course, and neither will yours. An act of God is one thing. An act of man another, and leaves a person blacker in his heart than he ought to be to survive this world of changing seasons.
They have caught the two young men responsible for the bomb that killed my husband and son, and they will die for it. But that isn’t sufficient.
In the mornings after I have tried to sleep with very little success, I go into my baby Miriam’s room and she is lying on her back, thinking maybe, maybe not, and laughing, laughing, laughing, as if there is something on the ceiling entertaining her. It helps that I have this baby who thinks something is funny.
I go into the kitchen and warm her milk, make her oatmeal, add a little brown sugar, which she loves, lightened by the sound of laughter in the next room.
I have told you this story about Miriam in the hope that it will matter to you later as you grow up.
I send my best wishes to you and to your brother and your sisters.
Your friend,
Rebecca Frankel
Sam kept the letter with the news article. He didn’t exactly understand what Rebecca Frankel had written about her laughing baby daughter, but he sensed the spirit in which it was said and the kindness of it. And he understood that what she had written about laughter was in particular addressed to him.
He didn’t write her back, but her letter turned him to a different, secret task. He began to read every newspaper he could find, daily, in search of victims.
After William and Noli had fallen asleep and Sam had finished updating his terrorist file, he set the alarm for 5 a.m., slid the clock under his pillow so it wouldn’t wake his grandparents, closed his notebook with the names of the dead, and turned out the light.
When the alarm rang just before dawn, he was already awake. Perhaps he had not even fallen asleep. He couldn’t tell.
He dressed for school—which he had in mind to skip, one skip a week, he figured. He wore everything but his shoes, which he carried so no one could hear him. In the hall, he stood for a moment undecided whether to wake Charlotte or Oliver. But Oliver was already awake, lying on his stomach reading comics with a flashlight.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 4
