by Leila Sales
“Mom,” I said. “I will be literally down the road from you. If I scream loud enough, you will be able to hear me. And if there’s a question I can’t answer, I’m sure the boss at the graveyard will know.”
This was the other thing I’d learned from my weekend of being grounded: that there was absolutely no way I would be able to survive ten weeks in the silversmith studio, day in and day out with my father, and his rhetorical questions, and his know-it-all attitude. I would snap. One or both of us would not live to see September.
Plus, Bryan Denton was going to be apprenticing at the silversmith’s this summer. And the only thing that could be worse than Bryan relentlessly hitting on me from nine to five every day would be my parents witnessing every second of it.
My dad told me about Bryan’s apprenticeship over brunch on Saturday, sounding very pleased. He has always been a Bryan Denton fan. “That boy has a good head on his shoulders,” Dad said, to which I replied that if the only positive thing you can say about a person is that he has a “good head,” then there is probably something malformed about the rest of him.
Dad just laughed at me and said, “You know what it means when a girl criticizes a boy, don’t you?”
I tried ignoring him.
“You know what it means, right? When a girl protests that really she hates a boy? You know what that means?”
The “ignoring” plan never works. “Does it mean that she really hates him as much as she says she does?” I snapped.
He chuckled superiorly. “No. It means that she really has a crush on him.”
I immediately left the kitchen and called Mr. Zelinsky.
“Elizabeth Connelly!” he cried into the phone, like the past sixteen hours of not speaking to me had been abject torture. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“Mr. Zelinsky,” I said, “I need to work somewhere that’s not the silversmith’s studio this summer. Anywhere. I don’t care. Actually, I do care: If you could put Fiona and me together, that would be best. If that’s not possible, fine, I will accept that, but just please, for the love of all that is holy and Colonial, get me away from the silversmith. I will make shoes, I will make barrels, I will make soap, but I cannot make silverware.”
Mr. Zelinsky made some sympathetic murmuring noises. “Did you know, Miss Connelly,” he said pensively, “that, unlike with iron, you cannot strike silver while it’s hot? Should you strike silver while it’s hot, it’s likely to shatter.”
“Sure,” I said, because I found that out for myself years ago.
“Would you consider this symbolic?” Mr. Zelinsky asked.
“No? Wait, what would it symbolize?”
“The heart? If you strike it while you are hot—that is, angry—”
“Mr. Zelinsky, I can’t handle metaphors today. I am begging you. I need to be reassigned.”
So I got the burying ground. Fiona got assigned to the milliner’s, which is where the cool girls work—though saying someone is “cool” by Essex standards is not saying much. Although I wished Fiona and I were placed together, I didn’t need to spend every day sewing shifts and listening to Anne Whitcomb, Patience Algren, and Maggie Fairchild gossip about which Colonials are hooking up with one another and how far they’ve gone.
The only people assigned to the burying ground this summer are me and Linda Osborne, an adult interpreter. So there’s no potential for drama, like the time last summer when the milliner girls cast Maggie out of their group for a few days (because she had made out with Patience’s ex-boyfriend at a party). That was drama. But with only two of us in the burying ground, and one of us being a married woman in her thirties, probably no one was going to get cast out of anything. I suspected that Mr. Zelinsky assigned me to the burying ground because I am unfit for human company.
After I said good-bye to my parents and reported to the burying ground, Linda explained to me that my job was to wander atmospherically amongst the gravestones and answer people’s questions if they had any.
The morning got off to a brisk start with five different people asking me if I was hot in my costume. I said, “Who’s wearing a costume?” and, “Certainly not!” I wasn’t even totally lying, since it was early enough in the day that the temperature hadn’t gone up to a hundred degrees, yet.
A little girl in a floor-length gown, bonnet, and sneakers approached me. “Are you . . .” she asked, then trailed off, looking toward her mother for support. Her mom nodded encouragingly and snapped a couple photos with her expensive-looking camera.
“Are you Felicity?” the girl finished bravely, squinting into the sunlight to see my face.
“Nay,” I said. “My name is Elizabeth Connelly.” I curtsied.
The girl looked confused. “I don’t have that doll.”
“I am not a doll,” I said with a laugh. But this chick wasn’t laughing.
“Mama, why don’t I have an Elizabeth Connelly doll?” she demanded with a scowl.
“We’ll get you one at the gift shop,” her mother promised. “They do have those at Ye Olde Shoppe, right?” she asked me, pronouncing it like Ye Oldie Shoppie.
I cleared my throat. “Well, Elizabeth Connelly isn’t a doll. She isn’t, er, an American Girl.”
When I can’t think of what to say while reenacting, I say “er” instead of “um.” For some reason I believe that “er” sounds more authentically Colonial. I don’t know why. This is probably not true.
“If you aren’t Felicity,” the girl said, yanking her bonnet back on her head, “and you aren’t even an American Girl at all, then where are the real American Girls?”
I looked to the mother for help, but she just smiled and said, “We drove all the way down from New York to see the real-life American Girls. Jessica loves her American Girl dolls, don’t you, sweetie?”
“I have all of them,” Jessica confirmed. “Only not Kirsten’s bed. I don’t have Kirsten’s bed.” She glared at her mother.
“Er, you do know that the Colonial times actually happened, right?” I said, more to the grown woman than to her kid. “America was actually a bunch of Colonies that belonged to England. There was actually a Revolutionary War. A lot of people died. American Girl dolls are made-up.”
They both stared at me blankly for a long moment.
“Let me get a photo of the two of you,” the mother broke the silence. “Just go stand in front of that big grave so it looks real. Okay, say cheese!”
A click of the camera, and they were off, the girl tripping over her long gown.
It’s funny how little time it takes for kids to stop being cute and start being annoying.
I wondered how many photographs I appear in that belong to people who I don’t know, whom I will never see again. Thousands. It must be thousands. I imagined myself going to college and getting some boyfriend from really far away—like Oregon, or Ireland. And he’d take me home to meet his parents, and we would look through their old photo albums, and I’d come across a picture of myself, Miss Elizabeth Connelly, at the age of eleven, in full Colonial regalia.
Assuming, of course, that I would someday fall in love with a guy who wasn’t Ezra Gorman. Which might or might not ever happen.
“You just killed that darling child’s dream,” Linda said, walking over. “While you were at it, why didn’t you tell her that Santa Claus is fake too?”
I shrugged. “I was educating her. That’s what they come here for.”
Linda is a tall, sturdy, maternal-looking Colonial who always speaks in a dry monotone, so I can never tell when she’s kidding, even though I’ve known her for years now. She couldn’t actually think that brat was darling. But I wasn’t positive.
A family approached us with a couple of young teenage boys in tow. “What a fabulous cemetery!” the mom enthused. Her sons rolled their eyes and looked like they wanted to die.
“In fact, it’s called a burying ground or a graveyard,” Linda said. “The word ‘cemetery’ doesn’t come into use until the 1800
s, during the Romantic period. In Colonial times, we don’t use fancy words like that—we just call things what they are. Plus, cemeteries need not be connected to churches, but burying grounds almost always are.”
“You hear that, boys?” the mom said. “Wow!” My heart went out to her poor children. They clearly wanted to be at home, playing video games. Couldn’t she have just let them play video games?
“Do you have a question for the nice ladies?” the mom asked.
The boys shook their heads.
“Sure you do. Remember you were wondering why so many of the gravestones have skulls and crossbones carved into them?”
“Oh, yeah.” One of the boys heaved a sigh. “Why do so many of the gravestones have skulls and crossbones carved into them? Like, are they pirates? Or what?”
“Nay,” Linda said. “Colonial gravestones often have the skull and crossbones on them. It symbolizes mortality. We don’t think it’s scary.”
“Oh.” The boys seemed depressed to learn that they were not walking on the remains of pirates.
“While we may not have any pirates buried here, we do have two signers of the Declaration of Independence,” Linda said.
This had no impact whatsoever on the boys, not even after their mother nudged them and said, “You know about the Declaration! Remember, you did that play about it in third grade?”
“Also,” Linda said, “you see that small grassy mound over there? With the metal door built into the side of it?”
The boys shrugged their affirmation.
“That’s where we bury the unbaptized babies. Every time an infant dies, we just open that door and stick it in. There are hundreds of dead babies in there.”
The boys’ eyes lit up. “Dead babies!” one exclaimed.
“Cool!” added the other.
They ran off to inspect the hillock more closely. Whoever said history was boring knew nothing about sudden infant death syndrome.
I went back to wandering atmospherically. I had never before spent much time in the burying ground, but I liked it here. It felt more peaceful than the silversmith’s ever did, and not just because my dad wasn’t stomping around, holding court. There was grass here, and big oak trees casting shade on the graves. I liked the slightly crumbling slate headstones and the engraved old-fashioned names. “Here lyes the body of Mary Jackson, wife to Jacob Jackson, aged 42 years.” “Samuel Otis, born in Essex, January, 1734. Died May, 1818.” “Here lyes the body of Elisabeth Connelly, daughter of Seamus Connelly, aged 15 years. Deceased February 12, 1706.”
I stopped and reread it, in case I’d made a mistake. But no, that was the inscription, as clear as could be. Here lyes the body of Elisabeth Connelly. . . .
I wanted to show Fiona immediately, but she was working down the road, so for now Linda would have to do. “Come here!” I called to her during a gap between moderners.
“Do you have a question?” Linda hurried over. Historical interpreters love to answer questions.
“Look at this headstone!” I pointed to Elisabeth Connelly’s grave.
“I know,” Linda agreed. “It seems unusual for Irish Catholics to be buried in the graveyard adjoining a Protestant church, but this is more of a town burying ground than a religious one—”
“Not that. She has my name! And she died when she was practically my age!”
Linda squinted at me, then at the grave, then back at me. She seemed maybe not as excited by this coincidence as I was. Of course, it would be out of character for Linda to act excited about anything, be it a coincidence, a bouquet of balloons, or a free pony.
“Don’t you spell your name with a Z?” she asked. “‘Elizabeth’?”
“Well, maybe. I mean, I never write it down. I could spell it with an S if I wanted. Anyway, don’t you spell ‘lies’ with an i? Spelling is clearly not this gravestone’s best subject.”
“And aren’t you sixteen?”
“I used to be fifteen, though. Not even that long ago.”
Linda shrugged. “Okay.”
“How do you think she died?” I asked, gazing at Elisabeth’s headstone. I didn’t care what Linda thought; this was my doppelgänger. My forebearer. We had a soul connection.
“A fifteen-year-old girl in 1706? There are any number of ways she could have died. Childbirth, disease, an accident . . . There aren’t very good records on these people, except for the famous ones. Tell whatever story you want, and it’s bound to be true of someone in our graveyard.”
Then Linda went off to yell at some kids who were climbing on the table tombs, and I went back to roaming around and reading headstones, even though I had already decided that Elisabeth Connelly was my favorite.
Eventually it was time for my lunch break. I walked along the dusty main road to Bristol House, where I found Tawny eating lunch under a tree. I crouched down next to her, and an overweight modern man snapped a photo of us, exclaiming to his overweight modern wife, “Lookit, a Patriot eating a sandwich!” Which is why there’s a rule that we’re not allowed to have lunch where moderners can see us. But Tawny doesn’t care about rules.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said to me, immediately springing to attention. “I’ve had a brilliant idea.”
“Great,” I said. “Hey, how was your first day of work?”
Tawny furrowed her eyebrows at me, like I was completely insane for trying to discuss anything other than the War.
“Forget it,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
The spark flashed back into her eyes, and she leaned forward conspiratorially. “We’re going to take them down from the inside,” she muttered, then quickly looked around her, as if for spies.
“Cool,” I said. “How does it work?”
“We’re going to make our own Civil War uniforms,” she hissed. “And then we’re going to waltz right in there like we belong, and they’ll think we’re Civil Warriors, and we’ll use that inside access to tear the place down. You never suspect one of your own.”
Now that I understood it, I saw that Tawny’s plan actually was brilliant. More than a hundred people worked at Reenactmentland; they wouldn’t all recognize one another, especially not this early in the season. Even if they thought we looked unfamiliar, they’d assume we were Civil War reenactors from a visiting regiment. If we were properly costumed, they would never suspect us of being Colonials.
“Except they’d recognize me and you,” I pointed out to Tawny. “Since they just kidnapped us on Friday and all.”
Tawny flipped her hand dismissively. She’s a visionary, not a details person. This is why she needed a Lieutenant in the first place. “We’ll send a few of the guys,” she said. “No big deal. It doesn’t have to be the two of us.”
Too bad. I would have enjoyed taking Reenactmentland down from the inside, if only because it would have given me the chance to see Dan again. But all I said to Tawny was, “I like it.”
“Good.” She grinned. “’Cause I already enlisted the milliner girls to start sewing Confederate uniforms.”
Ladies and gentlemen: Tawny Nelson.
Our strategizing complete, Tawny leaned back against the tree and returned to her anachronistic sandwich. I continued on to the silversmith’s, to get my own lunch. The upstairs of the silversmith’s workshop, like the upstairs of a lot of buildings at Essex, is modernized. There’s a fan and a refrigerator, where my cheese sandwich was waiting for me.
A few moderners stopped me along the way, asking for directions to the cooper’s or wanting to take a photo with me. I wanted to say, “No, I don’t have to, I’m on my lunch hour.” But I didn’t. Because I am a professional.
“Hello, Mother. Good day, Father,” I said when I entered the silversmith’s studio. Even though I was on break, Mom and Dad were working. Bryan Denton was too, but I ignored him. The moderners watched us, waiting for something exciting and historical to occur.
“Good afternoon, Elizabeth!” Mom gave me a big hug. She was sticky with sweat, but I couldn’t complain,
because so was I.
“Would you like to see this silverware that I am engraving with our family’s monogram?” Dad asked me.
“Nope!” I gave him a smile. No way was I going to spend my hour-long lunch getting dragged into historical playacting with my dad. I’m on break here, people.
I had almost made it to the stairs in the back of the workshop when Bryan came out from behind his workbench and cornered me. “Miss Connelly,” he said. “May I escort you?”
“Oh God, Bryan,” I said, then noticed the moderners still watching us. “I mean, how kind of you to offer, but that shan’t be necessary.”
“I insist,” he said, taking my elbow and leading me out on to the porch.
“Okay,” I said once we were outside. “What? I have thirty-seven minutes left for lunch, if you were wondering.”
“I’ve been thinking it over,” Bryan said, “and I’ve decided that, because I am your dad’s apprentice this summer, it would make a lot of sense for you to be my girlfriend.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yes. I’ve done a lot of research on this, and apprentices often court their masters’ daughters. Then they get married and continue in the family business. So you and I would just take over being the silversmiths when your father gets too old.”
“Gross, Bryan, I’m not marrying you.”
“I’m not saying us. I just mean, that’s what they would do. So we should too. It would be so historically accurate, for the silversmith’s daughter to date the silversmith’s apprentice!”
“Wow, how romantic of you.” I heaved a sigh and leaned against the wooden porch railing. “This may be hard for you to believe, but I don’t actually decide to date guys based on what would be the most historically accurate. And also?” Unbidden, a memory popped into my mind: Dan, lounging on a tree stump in Reenactmentland, half-grinning at me. “I don’t want to be someone’s girlfriend just because it would make a lot of sense. Making sense has nothing to do with it.”
I curtsied at Bryan, then went back inside and stomped upstairs. The lamest guy I know wants to date me. My ex-boyfriend wants to be friends. The only guy who has any potential lives ninety years too late. I hate boys, and my life is a joke.
