At home, Mother has made cookies. Ben, Vanessa’s three-year-old brother, looks like he’s been eating them all day. Amused, Vanessa brushes golden crumbs from his blond ringlets and is rewarded with a wet, milky smile. Mother comes up beside her with two honey and corn cookies on a clay plate, and fresh milk in Vanessa’s favorite lacquered cup. Intently, Vanessa stirs the milk with a finger and watches as blobs of tawny cream rise to the surface. She dunks in a cookie and carefully licks each drop of cream clinging to its sweet, crumbling mass.
Eight years ago, when Vanessa was five and her grandparents drank their final draft, the family moved to this house, leaving the old one for Mother’s sister. Like most of the island houses, it is built almost entirely with wasteland wood, treated with a water-repellent tincture from the dyer Mr. Moses. While the house itself is well constructed and sturdy, the Adams’ kitchen is the finest on the island. Father, who likes to build things, set to work on the kitchen as soon as his parents were buried, adding special drawers that could be filled with flour or grain, and metal rods at different lengths from the hearth fire, with a clay door to shut so the room wouldn’t fill with smoke. He laid dove-gray and lavender stones fanning out from the oven door, the closest of which could be used to keep food hot. Vanessa remembers Mother walking around the new kitchen in a daze, smiling and giving Father joyful glances filled with a strange longing Vanessa couldn’t quantify.
The crowning jewel of the entire house is the kitchen table, also made of wasteland wood, but shimmering with rich, iridescent tints of gold and crimson. Father’s family has passed it down over the decades, and it bears the stains of use: a burnt-black spot in the middle, scratches along the legs that scar blond. To protect it from further injury, Mother has covered it almost completely with a rough woven mat, but Vanessa likes to lift up the edges and run her fingers over the blushing wood, watching as the oils of her skin make a greasy film on top.
“Watch you don’t spill,” says Mother as Vanessa presses her fingers into the table. “Father wants you to go to bed early tonight,” she adds. “He says you don’t sleep enough.” Vanessa looks at her, but Mother is busy scraping burnt crumbs into a bucket by the wall. Sighing, Vanessa dips her fingers into the milk and presses them into the remaining cookie crumbs, making a paste. “Oh, and Janet Balthazar is birthing soon, so we’ll be attending that. Probably in the next couple of days.”
Vanessa winces. Janet Balthazar has had two defectives, born blue and slimy and dead like drowned worms in a puddle. If she has a third defective, she won’t be allowed to have any more babies. Her husband, Gilbert, will be encouraged to take another wife. Occasionally, women choose to take the final draft rather than live childless. Pastor Saul likes to commend those women.
Vanessa can’t imagine quiet, boring Gilbert Balthazar making any big decisions. He and Janet will probably grow old and sad, and then die quietly and without fuss when he is too useless to do anything. Hopefully he’ll have taught someone else how to forge by then. All the boys want to learn, betting that he won’t manage to have children and will have to train someone’s second son. He is constantly swatting them away from his fire and yelling at them to go play.
“Do we have to go?” says Vanessa. She remembers Janet’s birthing of her last defective, which was horrifying and repulsive.
“It’s our duty,” says Mother, which means yes.
“Can I go into the library?” asks Vanessa.
“If your hands are very clean,” says Mother. Vanessa recites the next phrase under her breath with Mother: “I want you to remember how lucky you are to have books at your fingertips. Nobody else on the island has that privilege.”
All wanderers are also collectors. How could they not be, wading through the detritus of civilization past? Each wanderer family not only inherits a pile of treasures, but adds to it each time the wanderer visits the wastelands. Sometimes it’s all a jumble: delicate flowery plates and glittering jewels and pieces of machines. Sometimes there’s a theme; the wanderer Aarons have pictures and sculptures of horses, their strong legs unfolding while their delicate necks arch forward, eerie to island children who have never seen anything larger than a sheep or faster than a dog. Father, like all the Adams back to their original ancestor, brings back books. Their library is nearly as big as the rest of the house’s rooms put together. Father hid some books in a secured chest, saying they are only for the eyes of wanderers, and Vanessa has never been able to budge the lock. But most of the books are just stories, and these he keeps standing proudly on simple shelves that run around all four walls. The books are staggering in their variety: some as tiny as the palm of a hand, some so big Vanessa has to prop them on her stomach to lift them. They are covered in buttery leather finer than she’s ever seen, or cloth woven so tightly it hurts the eyes to pick out the warp and weft, or thick paper splashed with illustrations that never flake off. Vanessa thinks the prettiest is the book that has a very thin layer of gold on the peripheries of its pages, so when it’s closed, it looks like a shining treasure. Despite its outward glory, The Innovations of the Holy Roman Empire has no pictures to tell Vanessa what the Holy Roman Empire was, and no definitions to tell her exactly what it invented.
Father scratches out the publication dates of all his books, saying wasteland years are meaningless, but he leaves in the names of the authors and everything else. The names bowl Vanessa over with their strangeness. Maria Callansworth. Arthur Breton. Adiel Waxman. Salman Rushdie. On the island, everyone bears the family name of an ancestor. First names are approved by the wanderers, the names of someone on the island who is already dead. Vanessa thinks her name is boring; she’d much prefer to be named Salman.
They have books at school, huge ones that students share during class time. At school they don’t scratch out the dates, but that doesn’t mean much because nobody knows what year it was when the ancestors touched shore. As in Father’s books, the names of the publication locations are exciting and impossible to pronounce. Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Quebec, Seattle. The students have made up stories about what these places were like before they all became the wastelands. Philadelphia had tall buildings of gold that shone in the sun; Albuquerque was a forest always on fire; Quebec had such cold summers that children froze to death in seconds if they went outside; Seattle was under the sea and sent books up to land via metal tunnels.