The House in Poplar Wood

by K. E. Ormsbee

  As Gram annually reminded the family, the gala was everything. Everyone who was anyone attended the party, from several Tennessee state senators to the governor of West Virginia to Jessup White, a local millionaire. It was an extraordinary turnout for so small a town as Boone Ridge. Each year’s gala had to be perfect and, moreover, better than the last one.

  Mayor Whipple had the easiest job of it. In the days leading up to the gala, he stayed at his downtown office, often straight through suppertime. He claimed the overtime was work-related, but Gretchen had seen him stumble tipsily up the driveway more than once on a late November night, calling out to the suited, laughing men who dropped him off. She was jealous that her father was the only one who could really dodge Gram’s sour mood, but then she also thought it was sad that a grown man could still be afraid of his own mother.

  All that morning, Gretchen had done as Gram had asked her, polishing silver and scrubbing floors and dusting furniture in the places the family didn’t even use, like the back parlor and the guest bedrooms. Gretchen knew when she’d put in enough work for Gram to not throw a fit. If she followed orders for the morning and early afternoon, Gram would leave her alone for the rest of Thanksgiving. That was why Gretchen had chosen tonight to meet with Lee. That was why she was escaping now.

  Asa was at the top of the stairs, lying with his head hanging off the top step. He was listening to music, a slamming bass raging out of his headphones. Asa’s only responsibility that day had been to rake up the leaves in the yard, a task he’d accomplished within an hour. Now he seemed so positively deadened to the world, Gretchen wondered if she might sneak past without him noticing. She tiptoed up the stairs, and when she reached her brother, she stretched her foot over his shoulder, touching the carpet with just the tip of her sneaker.

  Asa’s eyes snapped open.

  Gretchen shrieked, stumbling down the top two stairs. Her hurt ankle throbbed in protest, and Gretchen cursed. Asa sat up, his hair staticky from the carpet, a mess of black curls. He yanked off his headphones, fixing an even glare on Gretchen.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  “You’re in my way.”

  Asa smiled. “So?”

  What would Asa say if he knew Gretchen had stolen the Book of Rites? Would he be proud of her? Or would he yell at her and yank her arm the way he had in Hickory Park? She could still feel the hard grip of his fingers and his cold, sharp words: There won’t be a next time.

  What would Asa say if Gretchen asked him, right here, about Essie Hasting? Would he deny it, grow angry, yell? Would he explain why he’d lied about knowing her? But no, Gretchen stopped and reflected. Asa had never said that he hadn’t known Essie. Gretchen had simply never asked; that possibility hadn’t seemed remotely possible. As to the other thing Lee had said, about them being . . . in love. That couldn’t be. Lee must’ve seen that memory wrong.

  I know your secret, Gretchen wanted to say. But she couldn’t risk Asa’s anger now, especially when she partly deserved it. She needed to know all the facts first. She needed to hear the last of his memories from Lee. Then she’d decide what to do.

  Asa retracted his legs, bunching them to his chest, and motioned for Gretchen to walk past. She thought it was a trick. She felt sure Asa would try to scare her, or grab at her still-tender ankle, and her feet prickled in anticipation. But Asa did none of those things. He really let her pass. Gretchen did not acknowledge this, or Asa, at all. She walked on, head held high, toward her bedroom.

  “Ten bucks says Jolene quits before the gala.”

  Gretchen stopped, turned, looked at her brother. Was Asa attempting to joke with her?

  “Uh . . . yeah,” she said through confusion. “Gram’s worse than usual this year.”

  Asa smiled. Not a wrong smile, just a smile.

  Gretchen took a deep breath. Then, against her better judgment, she returned to where Asa lay, and took a seat beside him.

  “Too bad we can’t quit,” she said.

  The faint guitar shrieks coming from Asa’s headphones cut out.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Too bad. We’re stuck being Whipples.”

  “Asa. What you said . . . about us being cursed. About people dying because of us. What did you mean by that?”

  Asa bit at some spare skin hanging from his thumb. “Nothing. Just trying to scare you.”

  “No, you meant it,” Gretchen insisted. “Do you know real people who’ve died? Because of summoners? Because of Rites?”

  “Give it a rest, Gretch,” Asa groaned. “You and your stupid hypotheticals. If I were you, I’d be worried about real problems. Like . . . wild dogs on the loose.”

  Gretchen turned red, guilt stinging her chest again.

  “I warned you,” said Asa. “A Wishing Stone does what it wants, it only causes trouble.”

  “It didn’t cause trouble for me,” Gretchen protested. “I meant for it to mess up the house. And anyway, it’s not like anyone got hurt.”

  Asa looked up sharply. He laughed one short laugh. “Right. Yeah. No one got hurt.”

  “I’m sorry I used it,” said Gretchen, “but I had a good reason.”

  “Whatever. It’s gone now, isn’t it?”

  Gretchen nodded.

  “Then good. It’s for the best.”

  “Jolene, where are the crates? Jolene. jolene.”

  Gram’s shrill soprano echoed down the hallway, and Gretchen and Asa exchanged a quick look.

  “Later,” said Asa.

  “Yeah,” said Gretchen.

  When she was safe inside her bedroom, Gretchen reflected on what had just passed. Asa had talked to her, simply talked. Would wonders never cease? Asa almost nice, and the Vickeries her allies. When Gram was the only constant left, it was a topsy-turvy world indeed.

  Felix did not move yet, though he’d seen the lantern flick on and heard the creak of the west end’s screen door. He waited for a good hour, until after he had washed and put away the dishes from supper, and after his father had gone back to the examination room with Death to look over the most recently dried herbs.

  It was Thanksgiving, according to the calendar Lee had brought back from Boone Ridge Middle at the start of the school year. There, on the fourth Thursday of November, in small red print, read the words Thanksgiving Day. In the world at large, these two red words meant something. But in the east end of Poplar House, November’s fourth Thursday was another ordinary day.

  “It’s for people with large families,” Vince had told Felix one year, when he had been younger and silly enough to ask his father a question like Why don’t we celebrate Thanksgiving?

  Felix had accepted his father’s explanation and left it alone, even long after he found out that people with the smallest of families still ate turkey and cranberry sauce and watched parades on television. This hadn’t bothered Felix much. What bothered him was that just a wall away, at the west end of Poplar House, his mother and brother did celebrate Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a feast, Lee had assured Felix—just a well-salted country ham, a green bean casserole, and a pecan pie. This week, Felix had watched as Lee brought back the groceries from town, stooped from the weight of the sagging paper bags.

  Felix and his father did not eat food from the grocery store. The contents of their vegetable stews came from the back garden, and Vince’s cured patients often brought basketfuls of homemade food during the holiday season. All in all, these patients were good cooks, but no food of theirs compared to Judith Vickery’s. Every Thanksgiving night, Lee would bring out a hearty slice of his mother’s pecan pie for Felix to eat. Every night, that is, until this one. Felix still hadn’t spoken to Lee, or met him in the usual way, in the conservatory. And if there was no meeting, there would be no pie.

  Felix regretted the way he’d pushed Lee away, hiding his feelings. He hadn’t meant to go so long without speaking. Only, with every passing day, it grew harder to even think of opening his mouth. Shame welled inside of Felix—the shame of his punishment, and of keep
ing his brother out for so long, when Lee was the only one who could really understand. But today was Thanksgiving, a time for family, and tonight could be a night for setting things right.

  Felix went out to the conservatory, where Lee was sitting, reading a thick book propped on his knees. A rotting board creaked under Felix’s shoe, and Lee looked up.

  “What do you want?” he asked—his first words to Felix in over two weeks, and less than friendly.

  Felix said, “To talk again.”

  They looked at each other in silence. November wind pressed against the conservatory glass, dragging out mournful creaks.

  “Did he lock you down there?” Lee asked in a small voice. Felix nodded, and Lee said, “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

  Felix shook his head. “I chose to follow you. It’s not your fault, and I shouldn’t have made you feel like it was.”

  Lee looked at the book in his lap. Felix was close enough now to see the cover.

  He’d seen this book once before, in the Whipple library, locked behind glass. What he did not know was how Lee had managed to get his hands on it. Something cracked between Felix’s ribs—a quick, breath-punching pain. He and Lee had not spoken for days, and that quickly, he knew nothing of his brother’s life.

  “Gretchen and I got it,” said Lee.

  Felix didn’t speak right away. “Before,” he said, “I didn’t think we could do anything about the Agreement.”

  “And now?”

  Felix glanced nervously at the house’s east end. “We shouldn’t talk about it here.”

  Lee closed the book, and the boys walked into the wood, a good five-minute hike toward town. Lee was silent, clutching the Book of Rites to his chest beneath his winter coat and breathing heavily into his scarf. Felix stopped under a maple tree. Even after the first snow of the season, its leaves clung stubbornly to their branches, blood red from the strain. Lee was staring at Felix with a new expression—curious, or maybe excited, and that made Felix more nervous about what he had to say.

  “If you and Gretchen Whipple think there’s really a way to break the Agreement, then I want to try it.”

  Lee’s eyes shone. “You mean it?”

  Felix nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it. A lot.”

  “Me too. But now that you’re finally on my side . . .”

  The spot between Felix’s ribs cracked wider. “I wasn’t ever not on your side. I just didn’t want you to get hurt. Messing around with the Agreement is dangerous.” He heard the sizzle of a single red candle going out—a reminder of Death’s punishment. “Really dangerous.”

  Felix grabbed at the lowest-hanging maple leaf. He broke it off and twirled the stem between his fingers. “I’m tired of watching people die. I’m thirteen. I shouldn’t have to watch people die every day.”

  “You have it tougher than me,” Lee said abruptly. “It’s worse for you, living with Death.”

  A short stillness fell on the brothers. Felix looked at Lee, and Lee at him—a silent acknowledgment of a truth they had always known.

  “That’s not your fault,” Felix said.

  “I know, but I still feel bad about it.”

  Felix took a deep breath. “Don’t. Tell me what you’ve been doing with Gretchen instead.”

  Lee slipped the book out from under his coat. The gold-leaf title gleamed, and though Felix was expecting them, the words rattled his insides all the same: Book of Rites.

  “I’ve got a lot to catch you up on.” Lee held the Book of Rites toward Felix. “Gretchen and I, um . . . borrowed this. I stayed up all night reading it. We’re meeting up at school tonight to decide what to do next.”

  “Which is what?”

  Lee said, “We’d better sit down for this.” So the brothers settled upon the frost-hardened ground.

  “It’s not just Rites in here, see,” said Lee, flipping to the book’s first pages. “There’s history. Stories about the summoners and what they used to do. And stories about Shades, too.”

  Lee ran his finger down the page, along two columns of small text. Felix looked at the headings, scrawled in green ink, each signaling the start of a new story:

  memory’s work at the first boone

  ridge orphanage, 1801

  the whipples take office

  industry—the featherstone cannery opens

  “A history of Boone Ridge,” Felix whispered.

  “There’s stuff in here I didn’t know about. Summoners aren’t always bad people, Felix. They aren’t supposed to just rule towns and make deals that get them rich. They’ve got a purpose. A good one, like Gretchen said. They’re supposed to look out for their towns and keep the people safe. There are rules about how Shades can behave, to keep them from getting out of control, and summoners are the ones who enforce those rules. At least, they’re supposed to. Look at this.”

  Lee touched a heading that read Death and the War Plague. “Way back during the War of 1812, there was an epidemic in town. It wiped out a whole fourth of the population here in Boone Ridge. We studied it in school. But the book says things our teacher didn’t tell us. It says the epidemic wasn’t because of poor sanitation or a muggy summer; it’s because Death got out of control. He started killing people whose time wasn’t up yet, taking them for the fun of it. That’s when Mayor Whipple—an old Mayor Whipple, I guess Gretchen’s great-something-grandfather—stepped in. He did something called a Trial Rite. According to this, it’s the most important Rite a summoner can do. It calls forward all three Shades when one of them has broken the rules. Then the Shade who’s broken the rules is put on trial by the summoner, while the other two Shades sit in judgment. So back then, the old Mayor Whipple did the Rite, and he and Passion and Memory banished that Death from Boone Ridge. Then another Death came to fill his shoes, and the ‘epidemic’ ended. Everything went back to normal.”

  Lee flipped the pages and pointed to another heading: The Incident of 1922.

  “Or here, when the mining towns near us weren’t official towns yet, and the Memory of Boone Ridge was in charge of them. She stole the miners’ memories and left them walking around with major amnesia, just because she didn’t like how dirty the town had gotten. Those men couldn’t even remember the names of their wives or children. People said it was because of too little oxygen way down there in the mines, but the Mayor Whipple back then knew the truth. He did a Trial Rite and Death and Passion banished Memory, and a new Memory—my Memory—took her place. Everything was set right, like it was supposed to be. Because that’s the Whipples’ real job: They protect the town; they keep everything balanced, keep power in check.”

  Lee flipped forward to a page of only one column of text. The rest of the page was blank. “But look at this. The entries? They stop here, in 1998. Something changed then. Or some one. Gretchen’s dad, maybe. I think the Whipples forgot what their job was. Maybe they decided to forget on purpose. All the money and power, the good marriages and long lives—maybe those corrupted them, and they couldn’t be good, fair summoners anymore. Whatever the reason, the Whipples aren’t doing their job.”

  Through all of this, Felix had remained quiet, thoughtful. Now, the suspicion that had been welling inside him burst: “What happened with Mom and Dad—the Agreement—do you think that was Death and Memory breaking the rules?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lee. “But if it was, there wasn’t a good Whipple around to punish them. Who knows what bad things the Shades have been doing since 1998. If they’ve been acting wrong, then a Whipple’s got a right to put them on trial, but if the Whipples have been letting all the bad stuff happen in the first place . . . well.”

  Lee flipped the pages once more. The text in this part of the book was arranged differently, not in columns, but spaced wide apart, in short lines, like poems. At the start of each poem was a title, painted in spindly gold. Between each title and poem was a short list—ingredients and instructions, as though from a cookbook. Rites. And Lee had stopped at the page marked Trial Rite. />
  Felix felt chilled to the muscle. He flipped up the patch from his right eye and looked around, gripped by a sudden fear. If Death were to hear so much as a whisper about this . . .

  Lee guessed his brother’s thoughts and grabbed his hand, reassuring. “We won’t let him find out. You know what this means, right? If we can get the other two Shades to banish Death, then it says here all his deals will be null and void. Which means—”

  “Death can’t enforce the Agreement,” said Felix. “So . . . the Agreement will be broken.”

  Lee’s breaths were quick with excitement, but Felix wasn’t smiling. He didn’t feel safe yet. “You really trust Gretchen with all this information?”

  Felix noted that Lee’s cheeks were quite suddenly rosy. “I really think she’s on our side,” Lee said. “We need a Whipple right now. And I think . . . I think we can help her, too. She needs stuff from us she couldn’t get otherwise.”

  “Dad would be so angry if he knew we were talking to her.”

  “Mom too. But they don’t know Gretchen. And they don’t know what this book says. I think if they did, they’d understand.”

  Felix thought of Death, skulking outside his bedroom window in the pouring rain. Death, holding his iron pincers above the heart of a sickly old miner.

  He thought of what his father had said the night before: I’m a bad man.

  He thought of the cellar.

  “Let’s do it,” Felix said. “Whatever needs to be done.”

  Lee’s grin got bigger. This time, Felix smiled back.