Vampire High Sophomore Year

9



Ephemera. Bits of paper that don’t have any permanent meaning. Bits of paper that survive a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years, and suddenly become important because they have survived.

That’s what Mercy Warrener’s journal was. Ephemera. But she had tried to give it meaning across the years.

The first page said:

I, Mercy Warrener, do leave this book for a remembrance to my family. These journals I have kept since I was a girl. Now, as I see the end of life approaching at last, these memories of the old times may serve to instruct and warn those whom I love so much. May God forgive any vain design I have in doing so. In my heart I wish only to leave a token of the life of our family to our family. May it continue in spite of all that has happened, and all that is to come.

Mercy Warrener, 1818

The journal was really just a collection of odds and ends from Mercy Warrener’s long life. Her personal ephemera. Most of what she had left behind was just the kind of thing that anybody might write about daily life. Of course, this was a daily life that had begun in 1650 and ended in 1820, which was kind of unusual, but nearly everything she had written was stuff like:

March 14, 1664

A warm day and so we did wash the clothes after this long winter. They made a mound as high as the eaves of the house. We do all be very tired from the work. The blueberries will not soon be ripe to pick.

The next page was a recipe for robin pie.

But every once in a while, in the earliest entries, there would be a note at the bottom of whatever she was writing about.

Thomas Thornton taken to Crossfield.

Allen Ames taken to Crossfield.

Hope Carlton taken to Crossfield.

These were names I knew. Names of the selkie kids on the water polo team. Friends. These were their ancestors, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what “taken to Crossfield” probably meant.

Those entries stopped after 1676. That was when the Compact of New Sodom had been signed. From then on, the jenti families had done their drinking outside the town limits, and the gadje had left them in peace. That was something I’d learned from Justin. So nobody was taken to Crossfield after that.

But Mercy Warrener had lived through a lot of history besides the local battles between her people and the gadje. Once in a while, it had touched her.

April 20, 1775

There is great stir and doing. The militia have gone to join the army besieging Boston. The British did try to seize the stores of powder and shot at Concord, and have been sent back beaten by our men. I knew nothing of this until today, for I have been ill with the flux, and had my own war a-raging in my innards. Better today.

It is a terrible thing to be at war again, but this time all the folk of New Sodom do be of one heart. Our company be divided into one platoon of them and one of us. We hope they may do much good, and come home soon.

Then she had something about buying a calf and naming her Rose. But then came:

May 1, 1775

The flag I have been charged with making for the militia company be finished. I think it most handsome and fitting. No more will we see the Angel of New Sodom of the gadje nor the silver eagle of the Mercians. They be put away, it may be forever. One new flag for all. There be two rattlesnakes twined together about an Angel of Liberty and the words “Don’t Tread On Me” about them, all on a field of red. At the top of our banner in gold letters I have worked “New Sodom Combined Militia Company.”

I had thought to put the words “Death to Tyrants” or “An Appeal to Heaven” about the snakes instead of what I have writ. It was young Nathan who did persuade me otherwise.

“Ancestress,” he did say. “They are fine-looking snakes ye have made and I tell ye, ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ is good advice and the Britishers should take it.”

“I will do as you ask, descendant,” I told him, “if ye will promise me to hunt no more rattlesnakes, but just to kill the ones that God may send ye.” For he is fond of killing rattlesnakes and takes great pride in being called colonel though he is yet not thirteen.

“All right, then, ancestress,” Nathan did say. “But only if ye will let me go to Boston with ye when ye present the new flag.”

There was nothing in the journal about whether Nathan the rattlesnake killer (and colonel—what was that about?) had gone along to deliver the flag or not. But in April 1776 there was this:

April 18, 1776

The Company are home today. They came marching back from our freed Boston following the flag I had made for them. Captain Mathers did let Nathan carry it into the town hall, where it is to hang until wanted again. God grant that be not soon, but Captain Mathers believes the war is not over yet.

Fife and drum played “Yankee Doodle.” ’Tis a song I have never liked. An Englishman wrote it some years back to mock our militia. But now our men have taken it and made it ours. The joke is on the English, for they are fled from Boston and Massachusetts is free of them. Now I do love that song.

It was wonderful in my eyes to see our two folk marching home in ranks, one people under the flag I had made. It is the first time ever that we have truly been as one. It is my heart’s wish that we may remain so. I do wish that there were some place where all of New Sodom might gather to share songs and stories and where the women might work quilts and the men carve furniture or do other work of the hands together. Then we might always be bonded, in peace as well as war. But I fear that, old as I am, I shall not live to see it.

And she hadn’t. And she didn’t ever mention it again. But I had the feeling it was on her mind from time to time. She wrote with such pleasure about doing things with her hands. She was so proud of Nathan for his beautiful singing voice. I was sure that her idea of bringing New Sodom together for what she called “play parties and work” had come back to her over and over.

And, by the end of that afternoon, I knew Mercy Warrener’s mind better than anyone had in almost two hundred years. You couldn’t not know somebody when they told you so much about the odds and ends of their life. When you have somebody’s recipe for robin pie, and how many children they had, and the names of their cows, they become real to you in a way. I could hear her flat, soft voice, like Justin’s but higher. I imagined her small, brown-haired, quiet, and strong, wearing a simple gray dress, and wooden shoes for working in her yard. It was like she was whispering in my ear.

There was another thing: Mercy Warrener had a broken heart. Every February 13 there would be the same note:

__ yeares since my Beloved did fly from me. And the wound be yet as fresh as the day he left.

Never anything else. Never any mention of the Beloved except for the one back in 1676. I wanted to know who that guy was. To go wherever he’d gone and tell him to get his fanged self back to New Sodom and the woman who loved him.

The key rattled in the lock. Ms. Shadwell came in and saw what I had done with the books.

“Goodness, Master Cody, you have developed an interest,” she said.

Oops. Time for plan B. I didn’t want Ms. Shadwell to know what Mercy had told me about Crossfield. I had a feeling that, if Ms. Shadwell knew what I had come across, it wouldn’t be here the next time I wanted it.

“Let me help you put these back,” I said, sliding Mercy’s journal onto one of the stacks.

I put the book on the shelf where I’d found it, but I hid it at the back, behind all three volumes of Flora and Fauna of Gomorrah County, Massachusetts.

“I hope you found something to get you started,” Ms. Shadwell said from the top of the ladder.

“I might have,” I said. “Do you know what a rattlesnake colonel was?”

Ms. Shadwell laughed.

“Oh, yes. Back in colonial times rattlesnakes were quite a problem around here. And the settlers were terrified of them. There was nothing like them in England. Hardly any poison snakes at all there. Certainly nothing that lets you know it’s about to bite you. So the colonial assembly—”

“The General Court,” I chirped.

“The General Court,” Ms. Shadwell said. “The General Court passed a law that anyone who killed a rattlesnake could call himself colonel if he wanted to. It got to be quite a joke to call someone a rattlesnake colonel.”

“Even if someone was just a kid?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. That was part of the joke. We had one young fellow in town, Nathan Warrener. He loved to hunt rattlesnakes. Took to calling himself colonel when he was younger than you. Folks laughed, but he didn’t care. He ended up with more than a hundred rattlesnake skins. You might ask Master Justin to show you the skins sometime. Last I heard, the family still had the collection.”

You know how it is when you find out something new and you can’t stop thinking about it? That’s how it was with me and Mercy Warrener. It was almost like being a little kid and having an imaginary friend. But the thing was, Mercy Warrener hadn’t been imaginary. She had lived where I lived. Her descendant was my best friend. So when I went home that afternoon, it was almost like I had two sets of eyes. I saw everything twice.

“Those are cars, Mercy,” I said in my head. “That big thing’s a bus. The trees on this street are awful old. Did you see them when they were young, or was this part of town not built yet? That’s First Congregational over there. I know you went there. Not the building you remember, though, right?”

Dad noticed at dinner I wasn’t my usual charming self.

“Is everything all right, Cody?” he asked. “You’re being quiet.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m thinking about this woman I sort of met today. A relative of Justin’s.”

“Oh, ho. Does Ms. Antonescu have a rival, then?” Dad said.

“Not exactly,” I said. “She died in 1820.”

“Then I predict this relationship will go nowhere,” Dad said.

“Hah,” I said. “Very funny.” And went on thinking about Mercy Warrener.

As it would turn out, the joke was on Dad.

That night, I dreamed about Crossfield burning, Mercy Warrener running for her life. I heard some notes of “Yankee Doodle” and saw a couple of rattlesnakes crawling together across a sunny rock. I dreamed a heck of a lot more than I could remember when I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. But I had the feeling that, at the end of the dream, Mercy had said something to me. I couldn’t remember the exact words. But they had been something like “I do long for it so.”

Long for what, Mercy? In the dark, at three in the morning, it seemed like an important question.