No Book but the World: A Novel (10 page)

I stuck my hands on my hips: “I want to learn cursive and fractions and I want to hatch a butterfly.”

Untroubled, Neel stroked an earlobe: another of his stock gestures. He looked around at the walls of his study, feigning interest in the many black-and-white images. I myself never tired of examining these photos of students and staff doing all sorts of interesting-looking things: trying on masks, putting up a tire swing, making gigantic soap bubbles, painting the Art Barn mural, toasting sausages over a bonfire, building something with straws, running, hugging, sleeping, wrestling. One picture showed Margo, Neel’s second wife, kneeling in the community garden, a heap of just-dug radishes on her lap. A short, stoutish woman with white hair and thick glasses, Margo had died before I was born—but not before June joined the school’s faculty as its youngest member.

Sometimes I tried to imagine June as she would have been on her first ever visit to Batter Hollow. She went as part of an avant-garde puppet troupe invited to perform for the students. I imagine her willowy and confident, striding around campus with frank curiosity, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her long peasant skirt. She had no training as a teacher, having spent her early twenties touring Europe with the puppeteers, but Neel liked inexperience in his staff and preferred hiring them as novices, unmolded by what he referred to as a
mania for instruction
. After the performance, June was persuaded to stay on for a few weeks to organize the painting of the Art Barn mural. By the time the mural was done, she’d been offered a place on the faculty.

Neel and June always maintained they had not become a couple until after Neel’s marriage to Margo ended, but even before I was old enough to note the careful semantic contortion (they did not say “until after Margo died”), I held the belief that Neel must have been smitten from the start. That June had been drawn to Neel—a man twenty years her senior—strained my credulity not in the least. After all, Neel was
Neel
, bathed in the glow of his admirers’ gaze. To me, their offspring, the notion that romance had kindled between them from the moment they had first laid eyes, et cetera, et cetera, could not seem anything but right and true.

I’d never seen a photo of Neel’s first wife, Roberta (Robbie Robbins, this had briefly, cinematically made her). June explained that Robbie and Neel had been “ridiculously young” when they married, both just twenty, and that within a year she’d “run away” with a trombonist. I pictured Robbie as an indistinct blur, her hair streaming out horizontally behind her as she ran. Despite or because of how little was ever said about Robbie Robbins, a kind of glamour accrued to her. She seemed a more threatening rival to June than Margo had ever been, and the thought of her made me want to throw my arms around Neel, less to comfort him for having been abandoned, perhaps, than to remind him bodily of where his heart’s home lay.

Now, though, standing in the study, I had no desire to comfort or cling to him; he was being, in his deceptively benign way, infuriating. “What’s cursive?” he queried, scraping the back of his fingers against his neck.

“Don’t play dumb, Neel. It’s that fancy writing grown-ups do.”

“Hm.” He put on a contemplative face, then rummaged around his desk. “You mean like this?” He handed me a scrap of paper, the beginnings of a grocery list, written in what June liked to call his “abominable chicken scratch.” I could barely make out:
COFFEE AVOCADO FETA BUNS APRICOTS.

“Not that, but you know what I mean. And I want to learn fractions and hatch a butterfly,” I reminded him.

Here he smiled with such delight I knew before he spoke that I must have made a blunder. “Ava, my daughter,” he said, “there I cannot help you. A butterfly must hatch itself.”

In the end, Neel did teach me fractions over the next several weeks, mostly using ordinary objects that fell naturally into the course of our daily activities: cutting up an apple or dividing a handful of raisins, folding the laundry, pointing out the Dasher’s fuel gauge. One night after June washed her hair, she allowed herself to be used as a fractions lesson for Kitty and me both. She sat obligingly on the flowered couch with a towel around her shoulders, and Kitty and I, each armed with a comb, climbed up on the radiator behind her, whereupon Neel talked us through a succession of steps: parting her wet hair down the middle, separating each side into first two, then three, then four equal hanks. Then back into thirds again. “Now,” directed Neel, “each of you take the one-sixth from near her face and place it between the other two-sixths on your side.” In this way he taught us not only fractions but how to make braids.

Neel correctly interpreted the rest of my educational demands as being less tied to the particulars than to a general desire not to be excluded from the experience of “real school.” For that desire he held little regard, but he suggested I appeal to Kitty, who, when approached, was only too happy to re-create the school setting as she remembered it. Up in her bedroom, which had been crafted out of a corner of the barn’s former hayloft, she laid out the family’s supply of washcloths. These were “mats,” she said, for the “students”—some dozen stuffed animals, Freddy and me. We took our seats and then she stood before us with a yardstick and led us in “lessons,” singing and spelling, mostly, before sending us to the little sink she did indeed have in the corner of her bedroom, where she watched over us sternly as we washed our hands, then had us sit back on our “mats” where she handed out “snack”—marshmallows snuck from the pantry and spoonfuls of grape jelly she insisted on feeding us out of a jar. “We’re not playing babies,” I objected. “We’re playing school. Anyway I’m not using the same spoon as him.”

Freddy, meanwhile, having appropriated the spoon and scraped out all the remaining jelly, decided he was finished with school and wandered out. We watched him go: half the class, if you didn’t count the stuffed animals.

“All right, students!” Kitty clapped her hands smartly. “Naptime!”

“How about I be teacher now?”

“You don’t know how.”

“Neither do you—second-graders don’t nap.”

“Do too. I’ve
been
to school.”

“My father
ran
a school.”

“Not a
real
school.”

“Was too.”

“Was not.”

I shoved her then, partly in defense of Neel but more because it dawned on me that she had knowledge of both worlds—the world of regular neighborhoods and schools, and the world we inhabited here in these five cottages tucked into a woods. I was then just coming to understand how much these worlds differed, how limited and odd my own known world apparently was. The shove was harder than I’d intended and the back of her head knocked against the wall with a crack. We looked at each other in surprise. Kitty raised a hand slowly to her little cap of fair hair, and her mouth began to wobble and her eyes to fill. I fled the house aghast, pounding down the stairs, tearing through the front door and flying over the front steps without touching a single tread. I did not see her again for the rest of the day.

Our first fight.

“What did you think of school?” Neel asked later that evening.

“Ah-like, ah-like jelly,” said Freddy, speaking around his thumb. I could understand him easily, but Neel only smiled in a vague sort of way. This was around the time that I was beginning to realize how often other people, even Neel and June, had difficulty parsing Freddy’s speech.

“You liked it, eh?” Neel guessed, and turned to me. “And you?”

“It was all right,” I said airily, wanting neither to give Neel satisfaction nor to confess how the game had ended.

•   •   •

T
HAT FALL
M
IDGETROPOLIS BEGAN.
I don’t remember who thought up the name; it felt as if we’d discovered the place rather than invented it. That was its glory: how real it was. What greater artistry, what finer power did we yearn for at that age than the ability to make our make-believe real? Coax fantasy to life. Once named, that part of the woods was forever transformed, and I could no longer regard that patch of ground without spying the order, the architecture, hidden within the growth.

Midgetropolis: a glade off one of the paths that crisscrossed the woods maybe half a mile behind the five cottages. It lay in a shallow dip marked off by a dense swath of ferns on one side, a stand of silver birches along the back, and at the low end, a rocky swale that became a running creek after every rain. In places the ground was laid with a bright emerald patchwork of moss; elsewhere it was roots and rotting leaves. To anyone just happening by, it offered nothing visually noteworthy. To us it was a dominion unto itself, bearing no relationship to the world of the cottages, or to Freyburg or New York or for that matter America. It existed apart, immune from the rules and customs of those realms.

It was Freddy, really, who started it all. He’s the one who found not only the kettle but the slab. It was October, not bitter yet, but brisk, the air laced with the fragrance of wood smoke. We’d gone looking for salamanders, Kitty and Freddy and me, without success, pushing farther and farther into the woods, seeking out the dampest places, and when Kitty went capering off the path into a lush, low-lying area, Freddy and I followed.

We squatted among mossy rocks and rotting logs, turning them over, checking the undersides of leaves, searching for a flicker of orange but finding only brown beetles and spiders, until after a while Kitty said offhandedly, “Salamanders can start fires, you know.”

I eyed her consideringly. Already I’d noticed her penchant for volunteering sketchy-sounding facts on an exuberant array of subjects. The vexing thing was that I could not say with certainty she was making things up; she had, after all, lived in the city and attended real school, and her fonts of knowledge included not only two older siblings but also a wealth, it seemed, of worldly uncles and aunts and cousins, themselves apparently expert in a great variety of fields.

“With their tongues,” she clarified.

“That’s not possible.”

“Yes it is. My sister’s a biologist.”

I did not know what a biologist did, but I’d heard my parents speak admiringly of the Manseaus’ older daughter in Malawi, and decided against mounting a challenge on this front. Freddy had moved away from us, wading through ferns that grew high as his waist. I could see him running both hands through their feathery fringe. His head, tilted skyward, oscillated slowly back and forth, and he was half humming, half crooning tunelessly, his lips open to the trees above.

“Freddy and I have caught loads of salamanders,” I informed her, “and no fire’s ever come out of them.” All they would do is promenade over our fingers with their astonishing, delicate toes.

“But have they ever stuck out their tongues?”

I could not recall.

“That’s why, then.”

How certain she was, how assured. She blinked her chicory eyes.

“S’ah!” cried Freddy. “Hey-ah!” Or maybe it was, “Ava!”

“What’d he say?” asked Kitty.

“C’mon.”

We scrambled up from the damp swale and pushed through the ferns toward where he stood, in a hidden little clearing checkerboarded with late-afternoon sun. As we approached, a clang sounded, then another, and I could see Freddy striking something with a stick.

Kitty and I reached him and saw what he’d found: a rust-mottled, broken-handled teakettle with a long curvy spout. “Let me see,” I said, stilling his arm and picking up the kettle. It was heavy, like our cast-iron pot at home. The bottom was plastered with wet leaves and its lid was stuck fast. “Who left it here?” I wondered, looking around. Freddy let out a chortle and went to thwack the kettle with his stick again, but I held back his arm, afraid he’d hit me by accident, so he discharged his excitement by beating the ground instead.

It made an odd sound.

Kitty and I exchanged a glance. Freddy beat the ground some more, and it did not sound like earth. We began to kick back the leaves and clear away the vines that had grown over what turned out to be a stone slab the size of a room. “What is it?” wondered Kitty. “A grave?” But it was much too big for an ordinary grave, and as soon as she said it I saw in my mind the giant that must be buried underneath, his massive skeleton moldering in the brown earth, and then for an instant I felt more of them, everywhere: dozens of giants laid out beneath us in warrens beneath the ground, an entire subterranean population of them, and we no bigger than salamanders in their eyes. But when we had finished clearing away the debris, we found no grave markings on the stone. “Maybe it’s an entrance,” I suggested, “some kind of trapdoor,” imagining with pleasurable dread the chamber that might lie under so great a door and what it would hold. But we found no handle or hinges either.

“What
is
it, then?” Kitty wondered.

“S’ah f’oor,” said Freddy. He removed his thumb. “Ah-floor!”

Kitty lifted her pale eyebrows at me. Of course he was right. This was a dwelling, or had been. The teakettle still dangling from my hand must have belonged to this place, this ancient, tiny, lonely house, tucked deep in a corner of the forest, abandoned who knew how many years ago, how many centuries back?

We turned slowly around, filling in the details. Stone walls and thatched roof. A big fireplace at one end. A chimney emitting popcorn puffs of smoke. A front door split horizontally, and a bonneted woman resting her arms on the closed bottom half, looking out the open top. With almost no conversation then the three of us set to work, piling leaves into a bed in one corner of the slab, dragging over logs for benches and stools, carrying in stones to mark off the hearth. Freddy found a clump of mushrooms with deep red gills, which we picked and laid for embers. As we worked, the little house itself seemed to spring forward and assist in its reincarnation, so that each task we completed achieved more than the anticipated effect, and when we located, just beyond a thicket of dense bushes, what must have been an old trash heap, we were not surprised; it was as if the house, pleased by our attentions, were yielding its treasures to us. Among the artifacts we found were the working end of a hammer, a button, a spoon, and a glass bottle caked with dirt, which, when rubbed clean on our sweaters turned out to bear letters reading:
HOAGMAN APOC SAFE SPIRITS
.