Dead End in Norvelt (22 page)

“Better sharpen your pencil,” she called over to me. “I’m in a mood today. Mrs. Hamsby was one of the good ones. I hate to see her go—though it is for the better.”

It was always hard for me to think that death was for the better, but there was nothing I could say to Miss Volker to change her mind because I knew she thought it was for the good of the town that the old ones move on.

“When the sun goes down each day it turns its back on the present and steps into the past,” she started with a strong, even voice, “but it is never dead. History is a form of nature, like the mountains and sea and sky. History began when the universe began with a ‘Big Bang,’ which is one reason why most people think history has to be about a big event like a catastrophe or a moment of divine creation, but every living soul is a book of their own history, which sits on the ever-growing shelf in the library of human memories. Sadly, we don’t know the history of every person who ever lived, and unfortunately many books about historic people, like the lost Greek and Latin and Arabic texts, are gone forever and are as lost as the lost world of Atlantis.

“But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died today at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as
undeliverable
in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not
unwanted
. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories.

“Each room has its own motif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with human stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. There is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost history we citizens of Norvelt thank her.”

“That was a good one,” I said quietly with admiration, finally looking up from my pad. “I’d love to see the inside of her house.”

“You might,” she replied. “Or maybe your dad will haul it off to West Virginia, where I bet they’ll rip every one of those letters down and toss them in a furnace.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Would they?”

“It’s been done before,” she said. “Which is why we have to save the history we have. You never know what small bit of it might change your life—or change the whole world!”

I turned my pad to a clean page and sharpened up my pencil. She looked me in the eye. I looked her right back. “Hit it!” I said.

“On this day in history, August 1, 1944, a book of letters written by a child was close to being destroyed in the blink of an eye. This was the day that Anne Frank, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, last wrote in her diary of the two years she and seven of her family and friends hid in the secret rooms above her father’s office building, while the Nazis searched for Jews to deport to concentration camps. Three days later they were betrayed and captured. Anne and her sister, Margot, were sent to the Bergen-Belsen death camp.

“Anne’s diary, which the Nazis thought was so meaningless, was thrown onto the floor of her hiding place. The diary was recovered by a friend and carefully preserved so that someday she could return it to Anne, but Anne and her sister died of typhus in the concentration camp just weeks before the camp’s liberation.

“Only her father, Otto Frank, survived, and he was given the book when he returned to his building after the war. After reading the diary he decided to have it published, even though many people did not find it worthy. But in the United States, one person who felt the true power of the diary—a diary as loud as the six million Jews who lost their voices—was our own Eleanor Roosevelt. She wrote the introduction to the first American edition and was so deeply moved by this young girl’s words that she said the diary was ‘one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.’

“We are proud in Norvelt that our men and women fought in the war to liberate oppressed people and allow their found voices to record the history of that terrible time.”

“That was really important,” I said to Miss Volker as I raced to get her words down on paper.

“Anne Frank can never be forgotten,” she replied with reverence. “And it is yet one more reminder why I stay to take care of this town. Mrs. Roosevelt is the greatest American woman who ever lived and she has always been devoted to those who suffer. And to this day she herself is suffering from a terrible illness, so how can I give up my duties when she has given so much of her life for us?”

I got this one typed up as Miss Volker stretched out on the couch and took a restorative nap. She always needed to recharge her batteries after a passionate obituary. She was still sleeping when I finished. I covered her with the old knitted afghan and walked down to see Mr. Greene.

“It can only mean one thing when you walk into my office,” he said as he tapped out his pipe.

“Yep,” I said, and handed him the obituary.

He read it on the spot. “Those old ladies seem to be dropping like flies,” he said, and pressed more tobacco into the charred bowl of his pipe. “A real shame. Someone should look into all these deaths.”

“Isn’t that what the newspaper is for?” I asked. “To look into things?”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said. Then he lit a match.

22

“It’s time,”
Dad announced, and rubbed his hands together as he stood up from the breakfast table, “to get an elevated perspective on Norvelt.”

“What’s that mean?” Mom asked suspiciously, looking up from Mrs. Hamsby’s obituary with tears in her eyes.

I knew what Dad meant.

“Time for me to join the birds,” Dad said smoothly as he flapped his arms. “Just look out the window.”

I leaped from my seat and nearly cracked the window glass with my forehead. The J-3 was sitting at the beginning of the runway and was polished, painted, and poised to fly. “When did you pull it out of the garage?” I asked without taking my eyes off the plane. I just had to take a ride in it. And secretly I wanted to fly it!

“Early this morning,” he said casually, and tilted back in his chair, full of satisfaction from finishing a job Mom thought he couldn’t complete. “When I returned from dropping another empty Norvelt house in West Virginia, I had a couple of the workers help me move the J-3, then lift the wing in place so I could bolt it on.”

“Can I go with you? Can I? Please?” I begged. I wished I had never traded Mom my ONE FLIGHT IN THE J-3 ticket.

“No, you can’t get in that plane,” Mom said firmly, and she meant it. “It’s not even inspected.”

“Oh cheeze-us-crust!” I grumbled.

“I wish you would stop that fake cursing,” she scolded. “It’s just as rude as the real thing.”

“A test flight is all the inspection it needs,” Dad replied. “But Jack can help me get her ready.”

“Whatever you need,” I said excitedly. “I’ll be your ground crew.”

“Then follow me,” he replied.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll watch from the porch,” Mom informed us, and stood up to clear the table. “That is, unless you need me.”

“I’ll handle it,” I said to her. It was finally my chance to be a part of the airplane crew. Dad didn’t want me hanging out in the garage with him because it annoyed Mom. She thought that fixing up the J-3 was too much fun for a kid who was being punished. She liked it a lot more when I was digging the bomb shelter in the sun.

In a few minutes we were standing in front of the J-3 as Dad explained my duties with military precision. “Your job will seem scary,” he said, summing things up as he put his hand on my shoulder. “But it’s not dangerous as long as you do everything the right way—just like gun safety. Follow the rules, okay?”

“Okay!” I shot back, then took my place standing at the rear of the plane. I didn’t want to mess anything up like I did when we went hunting.

Dad placed both hands on the varnished wooden propeller. He rocked it back and forth a few times to get the fuel flowing into the engine, and once he smelled it he put his entire weight into a big swing. The engine started, and the sound of the spinning propeller was as loud as a thousand-pound wasp. My hair blew straight back but the plane didn’t budge forward because Dad had the wheels chocked with big wedges of firewood. I gripped the tail and watched him make sure to stay out of the path of the propeller as he trotted around the wing and back to the fuselage, where he opened the flimsy cockpit door. He hopped up into his seat, closed the door, and stuck his hand straight out the window and gave me the thumbs-up.

That was my signal. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled forward alongside the humming body of the plane. The prop wash peppered me with stinging bits of loose dirt and small gravel, but no big rocks. When I reached the left-side wheel under the fuselage I pulled away the wood chock in front of the tire. Then I rolled over twice under the belly of the plane to the other wheel. Once I removed the chock I scampered back to the tail and waited. When Dad waved the back flaps up and down that was my cue. I ran and jumped into the shallow bomb shelter, then flipped myself over and peeked up over the edge. He gunned the engine and the J-3 began to jitter and lean forward, and once it started rolling down the runway it quickly picked up speed. I jumped out of the bomb shelter and ran after it like I was Orville Wright chasing after his brother, Wilbur.

“Wait for me!” I yelled. Maybe he had waited, but I couldn’t tell because by the time I reached the very end of the runway I didn’t know if he was off the ground or under it because I was covered by a thick brown cloud of loose dirt. I squinted and coughed and covered my face.

“Jackie!” Mom shouted from the back porch. “Where is he?”

I still couldn’t see him but I could hear him. “I’m not sure,” I shouted back, and scanned the sky for any trace of him. “Maybe he’s going to Kitty Hawk.” I had been reading about the Wright brothers. “Or to New York to fly circles around the Statue of Liberty.” Wilbur had done that and I was sure it was a stunt that Dad would try.

“He’ll be back,” Mom reasoned. “He has more empty houses to truck to West Virginia. And knowing him, he won’t pass up the chance to make this town disappear so he can fly out of here for good.”

In the distance we could faintly hear what sounded like a mosquito coming our way. It was quickly growing louder and we knew he was circling back, but before we could spot him he flew in low over the house and Mom and I hit the deck.

“Jerk!” she yelled, and waved her white-knuckled fist at him as she popped up from the porch, but by then he was already beyond Fenton’s gas station.

“That looks like fun,” I gushed. I just couldn’t wait to fly the plane.

“
Dangerous
is what you mean,” she remarked as she brushed dirt off her knees. “He keeps saying that plane is our ticket out of here,” Mom said derisively. “But all I want to do is slap it out of the sky.”

“Are you afraid he’ll crash?” I asked.

“That is a really foolish question,” she said with her voice rising sky high. “Of course I’m afraid. He’s my husband and your father and he’s flying around somewhere up there like a kite that broke away from its string. Now go get me those Jap binoculars again. I want to see what he is up to.”

I dashed off to the garage and ran inside and flipped open the trunk and grabbed the binoculars and was heading out the garage door when he came in low over the rustling trees and just missed the back porch. Mom screamed and her legs buckled as she plopped down on her rear.

“I’m going to kill him for that alone,” Mom swore as she swatted more dirt off the back of her pants.

“He’s just playing,” I said, trying to make her relax even though my heart was pounding.

But she was serious. “You better tell Miss Volker to start writing
his
obituary, because he is sure to kill himself.” She reached for the binoculars.

“But he’s not an original Norvelter,” I said as she scanned the air. “It won’t matter to her.”

“Now what is he doing?” she asked in her huffy voice as she concentrated her attention through the binoculars.

I looked where she looked and to me he was about the size of a toy. He was dive-bombing a house like the Japanese did when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He was roaring down toward the roof, then he would pull up and circle around and do it again.

“He’s really lost his mind now,” Mom uttered. “I think he just buzzed one of those empty houses and threw his shoe out the window as he flew by.”

“Really?” I asked. “He threw his shoe at a house?”

“Yes,” Mom said, confirming what she had seen before. “Now he just threw his other shoe!”

“He’s like one of those flying aces from World War I who would just throw the bombs at their targets like hand grenades,” I said.

“Or,” she said without enthusiasm, “he is like a mentally ill criminal who should be locked up!”

“He’s just having fun,” I cried out.

“What if you lived in that house?” she asked. “Would you think it’s fun?”

“You said it was empty,” I reminded her.

“I hope I’m right,” she said. “If some old lady is in there she just might drop dead.”

That was a good point. Then suddenly I saw him in the distance as he nosed the plane down toward the far end of the runway. I could feel my chest tighten as the wheels got closer and closer to the ground. “You can do it,” I said to myself. “Come on. Bring it in!” And then the wheels touched down and he bounced up a bit but stayed in control, and in a minute he cut back on the throttle and rolled right up to our end of the runway.