Vampire High Sophomore Year

13



We told Mom and Dad we had found some space for Turk in Crossfield, but it would need some repairs.

They were surprisingly cool about the whole thing. Mom was so glad that Turk and I were doing something together that she didn’t care what it was. Dad was relieved Turk wasn’t nagging him to buy her a mill. He had no curiosity at all about what we were doing.

I figured there was no need to lay the whole thing on them until we’d gotten a lot of work done and showed them we were serious. There would be time later to let them know they had a couple of pioneers living with them. So we were on our own, at least for now.

Justin and Ileana were a different story.

“That sounds crazy,” Justin said when I told him.

“But homesteading,” I said. “Living history. Resurrecting the past. A-plus from Gibbon.”

Justin gave me a stony look.

“What about your Mercians?” I said. “All those old-time families. Would any of them be interested in helping out?”

“Nope,” Justin said.

“Civic improvement,” I said. “Community—things. Isn’t that what you do?”

“No,” Justin said. “Anyway, not that kind.”

“Well, what do you do, just sit around and wait for the redcoats to attack?” I said.

“Look, Cody. Just don’t do it. Please,” Justin said.

And when I told Ileana, she looked at me over clasped hands and said, “I hope that you will fail.”

Turk went crazy buying things that week. Buckets, mops, paper towels—if it cleaned, she loaded up on it. Our garage started to look like a janitorial supply store.

“Where are you getting all the money for this?” I asked when she came home Thursday with the 179th load of sponges.

“Art, Cuz,” she said. “My brilliant career pays for it all. I sold two big pieces just before I came. But they’re nothing compared to what I’m going to do when my art center’s up and running.”

“Ah, yes. Your art center,” I said. “The living flame to your eternal genius.”

“Yeah. Something like that,” Turk said.

I wasn’t around much while Turk was busy with all this. I spent most of my afternoons with Justin, getting help with my math, or upstairs in my room trying to figure out on my own whether the giant panda was taxonomically a bear or a raccoon (no fair checking the DNA) and why, in either case, a meat-eater had evolved into a bamboo-eater without giving up carnivorous dentition. Fun times.

Or I was in the special collections room with Mercy, going over her journal, page by page, feeling that strange connection that came from looking at her spidery handwriting. Feeling her life touching mine.

To make sure that Ms. Shadwell didn’t discover Mercy’s journal and take it away to be cataloged or something, I always hauled out several of the ephemera collections along with it and pretended to look into them from time to time. This worked. When I told her the title of my report was Comparative Ephemera of New Sodom in Colonial Times, she was as happy as a clam at high tide.

So Mercy remained my secret.

The more I reread her words, the more questions I had. Some of them were things like “You actually ate robin pie?” and one was “Who was that lover you missed so much for the rest of your life?” But most of them were about the Mercians.

I was really interested in those guys. I made a note of every mention of them in Mercy’s journal. She wrote about them fairly often during the Revolution, and then never again until the War of 1812. Then it was just:

August 8, 1812

The New Sodom Militia, Mercians and gadje alike, have voted not to go to the new war. The whole town do be against this fight with England.

After that, nada, zip, zilch.

Mercians. Whatever they had been, they were still around. But if they weren’t a militia, what were they, and why wouldn’t Justin talk about them? There couldn’t be anything wrong with them, or Justin wouldn’t be one. But why act like a conspiracy when you’re not?

Then Saturday came and I had other things to think about.

When we drove up to the mill at nine, Gregor was already waiting. The back of the Volkswagen was filled with cleaning stuff, gardening tools, and a couple of hatchets.

I had something of my own, tucked into a Styrofoam cooler, for later. A surprise for Turk and Gregor.

“The first thing is to stake our claim,” Turk said. “Then clean up.”

Gregor sneered. “You had better use a different word than stake if you want my help,” he said.

I handed him a hatchet. “Come on, Gregor. You and me. Let’s get the poles for the wigwam.”

But Turk picked up the other hatchet.

“I’m doing the wigwam,” she said. “You start the corn patch.”

“But I read up on the wigwam,” I said. “I pulled some stuff off the net.”

“So did I,” Turk said. “And I’m smarter than you. Dig.”

“She is right, you know,” Gregor said. “She is smarter.”

“Wigwam,” I said. “We’ll all help.”

We walked down to the river, where some thickets of small trash trees were growing. We found some young ones that were about the right size, and flexible enough to bend.

“We need sixteen for the basic frame,” Turk announced. “And a lot more besides that for crosspieces.”

Gregor didn’t say anything. He just took his hatchet, slashed at a tree, and cut it down with two strokes.

“Fifteen,” he said.

“It’s too big,” Turk said. “You can’t bend them if they’re that thick.”

“You cannot bend them. I can,” Gregor said, and cut down the next.

“Stop it,” Turk said. “Cut the small ones.”

“I will cut the ones I think are best,” Gregor said.

And that was all it took. Turk and Gregor got into a long fight about poles, who was in charge, and why the other one was stupid. End of tree-chopping.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Some of us showed up to work.” And I took Turk’s hatchet and went off where I couldn’t hear them so well.

I loved cutting the trees down, seeing my stack of saplings get bigger, and if it took me more than two whacks to get one, so what? The sun was bright, the air was warm, the breeze was coming up off the river, and I was having fun.

When I had a dozen, I checked back with Turk and Gregor. They had added one more to the two Gregor had cut when I left.

“Don’t cut that one, it’s too thick,” Turk was shouting.

“The only thing that is too thick is your head,” Gregor said.

I wondered cheerfully which of them would use the hatchet on the other first.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “If I end up building this thing myself, I get to make the rules about who gets in.”

“Take this cousin of yours and help her to start the corn patch,” Gregor growled. “I will finish here in an hour and I will join you.”

“Like hell,” Turk said.

“Come on, Turk,” I said. “He’s right. Neither of you is getting anything done.”

“One hour,” Turk said. “And the poles had better be the right size.”

Turk and I carried my poles up to the mill.

She was still grumbling—that’s a polite word for it—about having to help with the corn patch.

“Anyway, doing that will take all day,” she snarled. “I want to get the wigwam up, not scratch around in the dirt for some corn that isn’t going to come up anyway.”

“You’re not thinking,” I said. “The act says, ‘plant corn.’ But it doesn’t say what defines a corn patch. It doesn’t even say that it has to grow corn. All it says is, we have to plant it. And I’ve got what we need.”

“I got everything we need,” Turk said. “I bought hoes and seeds and stuff.”

“Did you buy the dead fish?” I said.

I opened my cooler.

“Voila,” I said. “Twelve dead fish. That’s how the Pilgrims fertilized their corn. One dead fish to each three kernels.”

“Who told you?”

I wasn’t going to tell Turk that Mercy Warrener had mentioned it in her journal.

“A friend,” I said. “Dig.”

Turk cheered up a little at the prospect of handling dead fish, and we got to work. By the time we had a dozen holes dug, filled with dead fish and corn, and mounded up, Gregor was coming up from the river dragging a load of poles stripped of their bark. So we had more than we needed.

We’d brought sandwiches and drinks from home. We had lunch, and Turk and Gregor fought about how to do the wigwam. This was really very interesting, because Indians made wigwams for centuries before we showed up, and the technique is not exactly secret. When I was done eating, I got started.

To do a wigwam, the first thing is to make a circle on the ground. Take a stick, pound it in someplace, then tie a rope to it and trace your circle with your heel as you pull the rope around. Then dig little holes at regular intervals around the circle for the poles you’re going to use. That’s it.

And if you do it on the opposite side of a building from where the people who are supposed to be working with you are having their fight, you can get it all done before they show up.

“I am not ashamed to be better than you,” Gregor was saying as they came around the corner of the mill.

“I didn’t say you were ashamed to be better, I said you people are ashamed to be vampires,” Turk said.

“Same thing,” Gregor said. “Vampire equals better than gadje. And we are not ashamed of it.”

“So why do I never see anybody flying around?” Turk said.

“I ‘fly around,’ as you put it,” Gregor said, “whenever I wish.”

“I mean other people,” Turk said. “The rest of you. You’ll show off your money, you’ll show off your brains. But you won’t show off the thing that makes you different.”

“Possibly we have more important things to do than to amuse you,” Gregor said.

Clearly, these two had not finished their fascinating discussion.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve started on the wigwam. Bring the poles.”

Turk stopped fighting with Gregor and walked all around the work I’d done.

“Who told you we were going to put it here?” Turk said, looking at the holes I’d made.

“Dang. Forgot to ask your permission,” I said. “Bring the poles.”

“I was going to put it by the entrance,” Turk said.

“I got tired of waiting for you to finish snarking at Gregor,” I said.

“Well, I want it at the front,” Turk said.

Gregor had been looking at the plans.

“Hah. Eight sticks in a circle. Nothing but a basket turned upside down,” Gregor said, ignoring Turk. “Simple.”

“It had better be simple if you’re going to work on it,” Turk said.

Gregor disappeared around the corner and came back with the poles.

“With my vampire strength, things will go quickly,” he said.

“But—” Turk opened her mouth, then bit down on unsaid words.

“Score,” I thought.

While Turk and I struggled to get one pole into the ground, Gregor forced the other seven into their holes. Jenti strength. But there was something more going on. Intensity. I figured he was trying to show Turk how much better he was.

When the poles were pointing to the sky like bony fingers, we tied them into pairs so they made arches. Gregor bent them together like they were straws, and Turk and I tied the knots. We had the frame of our wigwam, and it hadn’t taken an hour.

Then we took the next eight poles and did the same thing. Now we had a pretty complicated framework. We made hoops.

The hoops were four rings that ran around the outside of the framework. We made them by tying the saplings we had left together in twos and threes. Then we lashed them to every pole they crossed. We finished just as the first cool breeze of evening came up from the river.

I was panting. So was Turk. Even Gregor was breathing hard. But the thing was real. It didn’t look like a playhouse or a joke. People had lived in these things, and they had been strong enough and warm enough to protect a whole family against a Massachusetts winter.

I crawled inside and looked up through the lattice of poles we’d made. The sky was turning a deeper blue, and the sun was just above the trees.

It hit me for the first time: We’d done it. We’d actually homesteaded this place. We’d made it ours.

“It feels right,” I said. “It feels like we belong here.”

“Gadje,” Gregor said. “Gadje fantasies. You think you are pioneers now. Cowboys.”

“What’s your fantasy?” I asked.

“My fantasy is that you two forget about this place and never come here again,” Gregor said.

“You’re right,” Turk said. “That is a fantasy.”

“Anyway, we’re done here,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“You want a ride, Gregor?” Turk said.

Gregor laughed and threw out his arms, jumped into the air higher than any gadje ever could, and changed. His wings unfolded, and he hovered over us. He seemed to fill the sky.

“Tell me when you want to work again,” he shouted down.

Gregor beat the air three times and pushed himself up to the level of the mill roof. He tilted his wings to catch the river breeze, and rose a little more. Then, screaming something in high jenti, he angled away from us and flew toward the night.

“I guess that meant no,” I said.