All the girls wear braids, smooth and sinuous over their shoulders, and they toy with them when nervous or excited. It’s a deeply ingrained fidget, and when girls turn to women and put their hair up, their fingers flutter uselessly in the air as they try to remember what is missing. Hems are another favorite target for irritable fingers, and it is a rare girl’s dress that bears a neat, well-stitched edge. Today they are dressed in whatever their mothers saw fit for May, which leaves some chilly and some sweltering. A few of the dresses are pink from berry juice and others yellow from roots, while some are simply the undyed off-white of light wool. The dresses are smudged and stained, darkened at the armpits and splattered with the remnants of messy eating. Summertime is for intensive weaving and sewing, and the dresses will either be let out or let down, firmly scrubbed and reused, or given to a family with a younger girl. While the older girls often wear new, fresh dresses, the younger ones are always swimming in threadbare smocks ready to fall apart.
As Mr. Abraham drones on, Vanessa wishes there was enough paper for drawing, but the wanderers decided a few years ago that the island should produce its own paper, instead of relying on leftover sheaves from the wastelands. Mr. Joseph the arborer has been experimenting, but this year’s batch is an extravagant failure; the paper crumbles and separates almost at a touch. Even so, they know better than to waste it. When Bobby Solomon drew a sheep breathing fire on one of his sheets, his teacher Mr. Gideon whipped him so badly he limped for days.
The clock seems to run slower when three o’clock approaches, the hands creeping and stuttering. Vanessa wonders if Mr. Abraham remembered to wind it this morning. It’s a beautiful thing, beaten from wasteland copper and full of the tiniest gears and wheels possible, like infinitesimal tawny beetles, so small they could fit on a forefinger. As much as Pastor Saul likes to talk about sin and war, Vanessa can’t help but think that they were doing something right in the wastelands if they invented such miraculous devices.
Gabriel Solomon brought some parts to school last year, filched from his clockmaker father, who received the precious objects from the wanderers. The children gathered around, always impressed by wasteland goods, begging to touch the miniature glimmering shapes. Sometimes when Vanessa sees the stars, she imagines little sprockets and gears from a broken clock, flung up into the black. She wishes her father were a clockmaker, even though a wanderer is much more important. The holy wanderer walks the wastelands without becoming part of the disease, Pastor Saul likes to say. Vanessa once asked her mother which disease he was talking about, but Mother didn’t know. She asked Father, and he talked of the diseases that ravaged the wastelands after the war. He wouldn’t tell her about the war itself, though; he never does. Vanessa has attempted various charming ways to ask Father questions—he likes her cleverness, but despite her efforts, he refuses to discuss it. She can’t find anything about it in their library either. Everything that ever happened must be in books, somewhere, but none of the ones she has access to have proved helpful.
Finally the clock reaches five to three. Mr. Abraham erases the large slate in the front of the classroom, wiping clean the chalky detritus of learning, and the children stand automatically with their heads bowed and hands clasped. Ceremoniously, Mr. Abraham takes down a copy of Our Book, the only book ever written on the island. It’s handwritten on wasteland paper and bound in the strongest leather, but he still has to use a finger to keep loose pages from fluttering to the ground like dead, holy leaves.
“From the fires of wickedness we grew forth, like a green branch from a rotten tree,” he reads. “From the wastelands of want came the hardworking men of industry and promise. From the war-stricken terror came our forefathers to keep us safe from harm.” Like everyone else, Vanessa mouths the words along with him. “From the cleansed and ravaged dust of the scourge came the flowerings of faith and a new way. With the ancestors to guide us, we will grow and prosper on a straight and narrow path. O ancestors, the sanctified first ten, plead with God on our behalf, and save us from impurity. Amen.”
“Amen,” repeat the girls. They file quietly out of the room and then scatter, their heels clacking on the wooden floor like a handful of pebbles tossed to the ground. The girls mingle with the other classes, streams of boys in ragged pants and long shirts, younger children shrieking and running happily ahead. Sarah Moses catches Vanessa’s arm as they run down the stairs and into the humid air.
“I bet it will rain soon,” Sarah says, squinting up at the hazy sky. Her hair is frizzy with moisture and outlines her head in a jagged halo.
“It’s not even June,” Vanessa replies crossly. “It never rains before June.”
“The woodbirds are burrowing into the trees already,” Sarah says gleefully. “Mother says that’s a sign. Tom’s been sharpening rocks all winter.”
Vanessa rolls her eyes. Tom Moses has dreams of making weapons, but so far all he’s ever done is throw rocks and dart away, hooting. “Shouldn’t he be helping your father weave?” she asks Sarah pointedly.
“He does,” Sarah says. “We’ve made lots of cloth this winter, Mr. Aaron’s thread is good this year. We’ll have mountains after summer. The new sheep they brought from the wastelands really helped. Sometimes the lambs are speckled.”
“I know,” Vanessa answers. Everyone went to stare at the spotted lambs when they emerged from their mothers. Grown, they look like they’re splattered with mud, although the rains haven’t started yet. “Does that mean the thread is brown?”
“Kind of tan,” Sarah says. “Not dirty-looking, just different.” Vanessa nods thoughtfully, wondering if the wanderers had to round up each sheep separately, or if they’d stumbled across a whole pen of them. New animals are rare, but this was a stroke of luck; about half of the lambs on the island had begun dying from some unknown illness, and the wool had been brittle and weak for years.
Despite the damp warmth, Vanessa enjoys her walk home. Blackbirds are muttering in the trees, and the tall, slender grasses shiver with unseen animal life below; the rhythmic swoop of a rabbit or the whispering rustle of a hunting cat. Dodging the fields of shorter green pasture, she walks in the amber, knee-high meadows, letting the blades brush her legs with swift strokes.