The Buried Book (3 page)

CHAPTER 4

Tell me about your mother. What kind of woman was she?

The rustle of the corn drowned out the sound of his uncle’s voice as Jasper ran through the field. Leathery green leaves clawed his face and shoulders as he pushed his way down the unbending furrow between the rows. Stalks towered over his head, blocking out the sky. The hot air was thick with dirt and pollen. It was like breathing mud. He was drowning in corn. He didn’t even know where he was going.

Jasper stopped and forced himself to take ten deep breaths, just like his mother had taught him to do when he’d wake up screaming with nightmares.
Just breathe, baby. Everything will be okay,
she’d say. But it wasn’t okay. He couldn’t breathe.
One, two, three . . . four . . . five . . .

Jasper grabbed a thick cornstalk to steady himself. Uncle Leo had told him once that if he listened
real hard
, he could hear the corn grow. It sounded exactly like the kind of stupid nonsense grown-ups liked to tell little kids. But Jasper listened for the corn despite himself . . .
six . . . seven . . . eight . . .
All he could hear was the faint buzz of hidden insects and the hiss of his own ragged breath. He strained again before giving up . . .
nine . . . ten
.

No one could hear corn grow. Jasper whacked his forearm against a cornstalk, hoping it would break in half. It just swayed back and forth like it was laughing at him. His uncle had lied. His mother had lied too.
She isn’t coming back soon.

A white cloud passed over his head through the long stems. He was smaller than an ant in the grass. He was Jack looking for his beanstalk. Any second a giant would shake the ground, stomp over, and pluck little Jasper off his lawn.

“Fee . . . Fi . . . Fo . . . Fum,” he whispered.
It wouldn’t be so bad to be eaten,
he thought and began walking again. The world would go red, then black, and then there would be nothing. He would be okay with that. His skin was itchy with pollen and sticky with sweat. He scratched at a mosquito bite until it bled.
Feeling nothing would feel better than this.

Jasper’s feet had found their way to the end of the cornfield. He’d never seen this part of the farm before. It was a foreign country. He wouldn’t have been surprised if some person in odd-looking clothes approached him, speaking a language he didn’t understand. But there was no one.

Instead of corn, neat rows of short leafy greens stretched before him for over five hundred feet before turning into tall brown wheat near the horizon. A hundred feet to the left, there was a split-rail fence and then more corn. Three hundred feet to the right, there stood a field of bushy-looking grass that rose up to his chest. At the far end, he could just make out something tall and bulky hidden behind a stand of trees. He puzzled at it.

Jasper picked his way through the leafy greens he suspected were sugar beets and into the thick, bushy grass.
Oats,
he thought. These were probably oats. Uncle Leo always answered his questions about the different crops. He didn’t say much else, but his uncle never tired of talking about farming. Leo even let Jasper steer the tractor a few times. He’d stand between his uncle’s knees while his enormous work boots operated the metal levers.

Uncle Leo isn’t so bad,
Jasper told himself. Even if he wanted to shoot his own sister for being a bad cow, he never would. Even as he thought it, he couldn’t help but worry.

She must be dead then.

She can’t be dead,
Jasper argued with himself. He ran his hand over the tops of the long grass. The blades tickled across his palm until he squished a handful in his fist.
The idea that someone might’ve killed her is just silly.
He could hear her voice saying the word
silly
.

Your head’s just inventing more nightmares, Jasper. It can’t ever seem to keep still, can it? Stop worrying over every little thing.

Jasper looked down at his muddy socks. He hadn’t bothered to put on shoes. One of his toes was poking out of a new hole he’d just made in the left one. She’d be furious if she could see him standing there in the middle of a field, upsetting everybody. She’d told him to be good. Jasper looked back over his shoulder at the empty rows of corn behind him. He’d probably get a beating for running off. He probably deserved it. He thought about turning back for a split second but thought better of it. If he was going to catch a whupping either way, he might as well put it off for a while. He wanted to see what was out there hiding behind those trees. Jasper kept heading through the field toward the horizon.

She just went out shopping. That’s all. She’s just over the bridge in Windsor, buying more of those flowery teacups she loves. Dad’s always complaining she cares more about those silly knickknacks than . . .

Bare splintered wood emerged from behind the branches like a shipwreck on the shores of Lake Huron. As he rounded past the trees, the shipwreck became a house. Or what was left of a house.

An overgrown path at the edge of the field led to the falling-down front porch. Half the house was charred away. Black and gray ash had devoured the siding and roof shingles. The windows were cracked and clouded in soot. The roof had caved in along the west eave, making the house as crooked as a bent old man. The front door hung halfway open from a broken hinge, beckoning him inside.

Jasper circled the wreckage of the lonely building. He scanned the surrounding fields and overgrown front yard. The road that had once led to the house had been plowed over and planted. They had just left it to crumble. They hadn’t even bothered to tear it down.

It was twice as big as Uncle Leo’s cabin. The first floor contained twelve windows and a front and back porch. The second floor was tucked up under the roof with only one window peeking out from each end. It was more of an attic, really, before the roof had caved in.

The handrail for the front porch steps toppled over into the weeds when Jasper gave it a tug. A small creature scurried out from under the deck and into the field on the opposite side.
Badger?
He shivered wondering what else might be living under there. He pounded his foot on the first step and jumped back, waiting. A bird flew out from its nest up under the porch roof. That was it.

Jasper tested the first step with his weight and then the next and next until he was tiptoeing across the porch toward the open front door. A bouquet of dead flowers hung from a wire above the door knocker. They fell apart at his touch. The door hung crooked from its one good hinge. The heavy wood wouldn’t budge.

“Hello?” he called out, poking his head through the narrow gap between the door and jamb. It was rude to enter a house uninvited. He waited for several seconds, but no one answered. He turned sidewise and slipped through the broken door into the front room.

Inside, the smell of smoke still hung in the air. The floorboards were largely intact except for the ones near the burnt openings in the walls. He kept wide of the blackened boards, taking four tentative steps inside, half expecting to fall through. The cracked window glass rattled, and the boards creaked as he inched his way from the vestibule into a dining room. Several broken chairs lay strewn across the floor. Sunlight filtered in through the tarry grime, casting a brownish glow over everything. The shadow of a table big enough to seat sixteen men still lingered on the damaged rug. He could almost hear the workmen laughing and the clink of silverware on plates as he walked past a chair. The bird had returned to its nest in the porch rafters and chirped at Jasper through the hazy window.

On the other side of a narrow corridor, he found a kitchen twice as large as the one where Aunt Velma did her baking. A huge cookstove with six burners stood in the corner. Its kindling bucket was still full. In the opposite corner, an old icebox stood open and empty. Everything else was gone. All the dishes and the pots and pans had been taken from the hanging racks and shelves. The washtub was gone. The plaster walls were blackened with smoke, but none had been eaten away by flames. Jasper looked back at the cookstove. It didn’t seem to have been touched by the fire. He ran a hand over the dirty glass in the back door and looked out to see flowering weeds growing through the slats in the porch.

At the opposite corner of the kitchen, a set of steep stairs led up to the attic. They were covered in fallen leaves and debris from the trees outside. A ray of sunlight came pouring down the steps through a hole in the roof above. Jasper stared up at a piece of sky that had no business being inside the house.

It wasn’t a good idea. The floor at the bottom of the stairway was littered with animal droppings and mud. Warning bells rang between his ears as he mounted the first step. The handrail held steady when he tested it. He gripped it hard and took another step. He shifted his weight slowly from foot to foot as he went, listening for a fatal crack, waiting for a step to give way. None did, and step by creaking step he made it to the top.

The roof rafters were black where they hadn’t fallen away. Some hung in broken splinters or were cracked at their middles, and others had collapsed completely onto what remained of the attic floor. Through the ripped-open roof, Jasper could see out over the fields that stretched from the west side of the house for over a mile until they reached the sky.

He watched his feet as he stepped away from the stairwell, testing the floorboards one at a time. On the opposite side of the attic, away from the missing rafters, he found what was left of two beds tucked under the eaves of the house. The blackened mattress covers bled white feathers onto the ground. He took a few tentative steps toward them and could see that some small creature had piled the stuffing into a makeshift nest in the far corner. It might be a raccoon, he realized, stopping in his tracks.
Raccoons are mean little critters,
that’s what his uncle had said. One of them had killed his last hunting dog. It had rolled under the old boy and ripped his guts to shreds.

Jasper gave the nest a wide berth as he made his way across the floor to a small chest of drawers on the opposite wall. A wood dollhouse sat on top of the bureau. Between the warped and water-stained boards sat six tiny rooms. All the paint on the little blocks of wood that had served as furniture had worn away. Two blocks shaped like beds sat on the second floor of the dollhouse. Jasper picked one up and looked back at the torn-up beds behind him. The “Jack and the Beanstalk” feeling came back, and he imagined a giant hand reaching in through the hole in the roof and lifting him from the house. He quickly put the little block bed back down into its place.

He tried to open the drawers of the bureau, but the wood was too swollen with rainwater. The bottom drawer was the only one to give an inch, and he wrestled with it until it finally popped open with a puff of damp, moldy air. Jasper sneezed twice, then held his nose so he could inspect what lay inside.

A pile of dresses or nightgowns—it was hard to tell which, but whatever they were, they belonged to a girl because they had bows and flowers. He pulled one out and held it up to his chest. He laid it gently on the ground and tried to imagine the girl who had worn it. She would be taller than him. He pictured her long black hair set in braids. For a fleeting moment, he could see her standing in a doorway. Her dark eyes staring into his, pleading with him as though he had something to tell her. Jasper frowned and wadded up the dress.

In the bottom of the drawer lay a small book and a rag doll.

He picked up the doll and quickly set it back down. It was sticky and smelled like it had been buried in the dirt. The brown leather binding of the book had grown stiff and brittle. The edges of the pages were wavy and damp, but when he opened to the middle, they weren’t stuck together.

Jasper couldn’t read the scrawling writing, but he could tell flipping through that the letters were drawn by hand. Someone had filled page after page with swirly words set in narrow, straight lines. He squinted, not able to decipher any of them. The book was only half full. He flipped to the front, and his heart contracted.

Someone had written
Althea
in the middle of the first page.

Jasper looked up to the dollhouse then down to the dresses on the floor. It was her bedroom, he realized, glancing at the two beds behind him. It must be. Back when she was just a girl.

He tried to picture her again, sitting right where he sat, playing with her dollhouse. But he couldn’t. The girl with the braids and dark eyes he’d imagined watching over his shoulder wasn’t her at all. There were no pictures of his mother as a girl back home, and Jasper realized right then that he’d never seen one.

“Where did you go, Mom?” he whispered.

The doll in the drawer just stared up at him with dead button eyes.

He read the name
Althea
again, then hugged the book to his chest and cried.

CHAPTER 5

Let’s start with something simpler then. Any brothers or sisters?

“Jasper?” a voice called from outside the burnt house. It was Wayne. “Jas? You in there?”

It took a few seconds to find his voice. “Yep. I’ll be right out,” he called back, wiping his tears. The book was still in his hands. He had to hide it. If Wayne saw it, he might take it away or give it to Uncle Leo. Something told Jasper that his uncle wouldn’t approve of him taking it or snooping inside the burnt-out house in the first place. It felt wrong and not just because the floors were crumbling.

Footsteps creaked below him. He slipped the book into the back of his pants under his pajama shirt before heading down the stairs.

Wayne was in the kitchen, waiting. “Whatcha doin’ in here?”

“I don’t know. Just curious, I guess.”

“Don’t ever let Pop see you in here, alright? He’ll skin ya for sure.” Wayne grabbed him by the arm and led him through the house and back onto the front porch.

“What is this place?”

“Used to be Grandma’s house before she died. Pop grew up inside, you know.”

“Did—did my mom grow up here too?” Jasper already knew the answer but wanted to hear it from Wayne.

“Sure enough. Pop, Aunt Althea, Uncle Alfred, and Aunt Pearl.”

“What happened?” Jasper asked, pointing to the hole in the roof.

“There was a fire, dummy!” Wayne tousled his little cousin’s hair.

Jasper squirmed away. “I’m not a dummy. I can see that. But I mean, why? How did it catch fire?”

“No one knows for sure. I heard it was wild Injuns!”

“Really?” Jasper’s eyes grew wide. The closest he’d ever come to a real-life Indian was listening to the
Lone Ranger
show on the radio.

“Yep. See, the old Fox and Sauk tribes used to live around these parts back when it was nothin’ but a forest. They used to fight the Iroquois nation in these great battles with bows and arrows and knives made from bone.” Wayne fired an imaginary arrow at Jasper. “They buried their dead braves right where we’re standin’.”

Jasper looked down at his feet.

“They didn’t like white folks like us buildin’ a farm here, so one night they crept up on the house.” Wayne lowered himself into a crouch and crept low through weeds toward the house. He reached behind his back for his imaginary bow and quiver. “They let loose flaming arrows right through the windows and sent the whole place up. Whoosh!”

Wayne leapt up making fire flames with his hands. “Poor old Granny! She didn’t have time to get out.
Aaaahhh!
” he screamed and fell to the ground as if dead.

“She burned up in there?” Jasper whispered, staring slack jawed at the fallen roof. It wasn’t funny. He’d never met his grandmother. She’d died long before he was born. Wayne seemed awfully lighthearted about the whole thing. Like it was just a story he’d heard on the radio.

“Yep. Pop came a-runnin’. He jumped on old Ginger and galloped after those Indians. Chased ’em clear to the next county.” Wayne made a gun with his hand and galloped across the overgrown yard.

“Did he kill any of ’em?”

“Might’ve. Can’t be too sure how many. See, that’s why nobody comes out here no more. Those Injuns might come back for their revenge. Got it?”

Jasper nodded even though most of the story didn’t make sense. If the Indians wanted revenge, they could just go to Uncle Leo’s cabin down the road and burn that house down too. But there was no doubt that something terrible had happened there. He stared up at the broken window looking out from the attic over the fields and tried to picture her face behind the tarry glass. All he could muster was a shadow.

“We gotta get out of here before Pop sees us. He’d tan our hides for sure.” Wayne led Jasper away from the house and back through the cornfield.

“Isn’t he gonna skin me anyway?” Jasper asked. The corn leaves slapped at his cheeks, reminding him of the whupping that was waiting for him back at the cabin.

“Probably not too bad. He knows it’s been tough on you.” Wayne stopped and turned to Jasper. “You just got to start acting grateful’s all. Pop thinks he’s done saved you from a slow death in that city.”

“A slow death?” Jasper immediately thought of his mother.

“‘Can’t no one breathe right there,’” Wayne imitated his father’s gruff voice. “‘If you ain’t livin’ off the land, you ain’t livin’ at all.’ And that sort of thing.”

Jasper nodded. The smoke of the mills and car factories did get thicker than fog in downtown Detroit. Then there were the streets he wasn’t supposed to go near after sundown.
Does my mother think I’d die a slow death there?
he wondered.
Is she trying to save me?

He dismissed the idea. All his life, she’d hated spending time at Uncle Leo’s. After a few hours, she’d bellow from the front seat of the car that it was time to go, and Jasper would have to climb down from the hayloft in the barn or wherever he’d been playing. He usually threw some sort of fit about it, and she’d end up dragging him screaming through the dirt back to the car.

You get any dirtier, I’m gonna leave you here for Leo to plow under,
she’d growl.
The only thing anyone gets in this godforsaken place is stink.

But she’d left him there anyway. Jasper glanced back at the burnt house. The book in the small of his back pressed uncomfortably against his spine. Her eyes were red with dried tears the morning she left him. She looked scared.

Promise me you’ll keep him safe.

The image of Wayne’s wild Injuns crept through his thoughts, but he shooed them away. He doubted his mother had ever met an Indian in her whole life, but she was scared of something.

Wayne was too busy talking about other things to notice the frown on Jasper’s face. “School’s startin’ in a couple weeks. Pop says you’ll be walkin’ with me this year. I think you’ll like Miss Babcock. She’s not as strict as some of them teachers I’ve heard about. You like school?”

I’m not going back home for school?

“I said, do you like school?” the older boy repeated like his cousin was thick.

“It’s okay,” he mumbled. Jasper had just finished third grade back in Detroit. His teacher mostly ignored him. He’d learned not to ask too many questions in class since all they seemed to do was irritate her. The older boys called him shrimp and stole his milk money every Friday. He wasn’t going to see them in the fall. He might not see them ever again.

“What’s your favorite subject?”

“I don’t know.” Jasper found them all fairly boring. He planned to say nothing more about it until another thought occurred to him. “I really want to learn to read better. Especially that curly writing people do.”

“Cursive? Well, I can help you with that, kid. I’m the best.” Wayne threw his arm around his cousin’s shoulders.

Jasper shook it off, worried that his cousin might discover the book stuffed in his pants. “Isn’t Uncle Leo going to be mad at me?”

“Nah. Just apologize . . . and offer to clean the chicken coop as penance. That should make Pop feel better.”

The two boys had reached the road and headed back toward Uncle Leo’s small house. It was so much smaller than the one that had burned down, and Jasper wondered for a moment why that might be. Up ahead, he could see the large man standing at the end of his two-track drive. He was holding a pitchfork in his hand, a pitchfork that might be meant for one ungrateful nephew. Jasper swallowed hard.

“Where’d ya find him?” Uncle Leo asked Wayne as they walked up.

“Down in the hay field. Think he must’ve got lost.”

Jasper nodded pathetically, not looking his uncle in the eye. Leo put a palm on his shoulder. It felt like a boulder. The man’s hands were strong enough to snap a nine-year-old’s spine in two.

“This the last time you’re planning on running away?” Uncle Leo squeezed Jasper’s shoulder hard enough to bring tears.

“Yes, sir. I—I won’t do it again. I’m sorry. Can’t I do something to help out, like . . . clean the chicken coop?”

Uncle Leo let go and folded his enormous arms. He turned his iron stare to his own son. “What an interesting suggestion.”

“I was gonna help him, Pop. I know it’s my chore to do. He just felt so bad worrying y’all like that, he wanted to help. Right, Jas?”

Jasper nodded.

“C’mon. Let’s get started so we don’t miss breakfast.” Wayne grabbed the younger boy by the arm and dragged him away before Uncle Leo could lay down a more severe punishment for them both.