The People of Sparks (27 page)

Mrs. Murdo unpinned her hair, which fell around her shoulders in strands clumped together with soot. “I have something to say to you,” she said to Lina.

Lina’s heart sank. Whatever it was, she was sure she deserved it.

“I saw what you did,” Mrs. Murdo said. “You did a remarkable thing, running out alone like that. Quite courageous.”

“Well, I had to,” said Lina.

Mrs. Murdo raised her eyebrows questioningly.

Lina was too tired to explain about trying to do a good thing to change the direction, and how she had hoped that someone else might do it so she wouldn’t have to, but nobody did. So she just shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.

Mrs. Murdo ran a comb through her hair. “I believe a great many of us were thinking of doing the same thing,” she said. “But no one quite had the courage. Only you.”

“I didn’t feel courageous,” said Lina. “I felt afraid.”

“That makes it all the braver,” said Mrs. Murdo.

Lina felt a glow, like a little flame inside her—no, not a flame, a light bulb, that was better. A little light bulb was glowing in her heart.

“I believe I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my life,” said Mrs. Murdo. “And tomorrow there’s more to face.”

“Tomorrow?” For a moment Lina couldn’t remember what had to be faced tomorrow.

“Well, yes,” said Mrs. Murdo. “I suppose tomorrow we’ll find out if they’re still planning to make us all leave.”

                    
The Fourth Town Meeting

That night, the wind cleaned the smoke from the air, and in the morning the sky was a brilliant blue and the air felt tingly. The sunlight was warm, but it had a new quality, thinner and sharper. The season was changing.

A messenger from town arrived at the hotel that morning. Doon, who happened to be the first person up, ran into him on the hotel steps. “Tell your people,” said the messenger, “that the leaders of Sparks wish to meet with the people of Ember at noon today. They will come to the hotel ballroom.”

Doon conveyed this message to the next several people he saw, and they told others, and soon every-one knew. At noon, they assembled in the ballroom. Doon stood with his father in the midst of the crowd. All around him, he heard uneasy murmurings. Would this be more bad news? He heard Miss Thorn whisper to someone, “I’m so nervous, I have a stomachache.” He was nervous, too; his hands were damp.

At a few minutes after twelve, Mary Waters and Wilmer Dent came into the ballroom. With them were four men carrying a stretcher on which Doon saw a blanket-draped figure. The stiff gray beard jutting up from the chin told him it was Ben Barlow. Dr. Hester walked beside him, and with her were Mrs. Murdo, Lina, and Poppy. Other townspeople followed, lining up around the edges of the room—Doon recognized storekeepers and team leaders (including Chugger), along with many of the families of Sparks. The Partons were there; he saw Kenny trotting behind his parents.

Doon raised his arm and called to Lina, and she came to stand beside him. “Is Ben badly hurt?” Doon whispered.

“I think so,” Lina whispered back. “The doctor says he was hit in the shoulder. She said the blast almost blew off his arm.”

“Listen,” Doon said. “I have to tell you something important.” And in the next few minutes, as the town leaders and the men carrying Ben mounted the steps to the stage, he whispered to Lina what he’d discovered about Tick.

“Really?” she kept saying. “
Really?
How
could
he? I can’t
believe
it!”

“And last night,” Doon whispered, “I went and found Tick, and I told him I knew, and he said—”

But at that moment, Mary Waters held up her hands for quiet. Doon stopped whispering and turned his eyes to the stage. The men had set the stretcher down and propped one end of it on a chair, so that Ben lay at a slant. A bandage covered one of his eyes. He glared out at the audience with the other.

When Mary spoke, there was a slight quaver in her deep voice.

“We are here to talk of serious matters,” she said. “Ben was badly injured yesterday, but he has insisted on coming. We all wish to speak with you face to face.” She paused. “First of all, I must tell you this.”

Doon felt his stomach lurch.

“We have realized,” Mary said, “that we cannot ask you to leave here. Your generosity yesterday has helped us remember our own.”

No one spoke, but the people of Ember glanced at each other and let out breaths of relief. Doon bumped his shoulder against Lina’s, and they grinned. “Yesterday,” Mary went on, “when our Weapon exploded and the fire went out of control, a child of Ember crossed the line that divided us from each other. We are grateful to her for leading the way.”

“Lina! Lina!” cried a few scattered voices—Lina thought she heard Maddy’s voice among them. Doon startled her by yelling, “Lina the brave!” right in her ear.

“I want to say,” Mary continued, “that we have made mistakes and we are sorry for them. We had good intentions, at the beginning. We did our best to help you. But when it got hard, we closed our hearts.”

Wilmer Dent smiled apologetically. “We were worried—” he began.

Ben interrupted him. His voice was hoarse and weak, and he seemed to be having trouble breathing. Doon strained to hear him. “We were justifiably . . . concerned,” he croaked. “About critical . . . food shortages. Attempting to ensure . . . the safety of . . . our own people.” He made a kind of wheezing, gasping sound. “Under . . . standably,” he added.

Wilmer shrugged his shoulders, still smiling nervously. “It was just that we were—”

“Afraid,” said Mary. “We were afraid, let us say it right out. We were afraid that you would ruin everything for us. We were almost on the edge of prosperity. We feared that you would push us back into deprivation.”

There was a silence then in which no one knew what to say.

“So we tried to get rid of the problem instead of solving it,” Mary went on. “Fortunately, both our plans and yours were thwarted.” She stepped forward and gazed out at the crowd. Her eyes met Doon’s and held them for a second. “Just last night,” she said, “I learned two things that have changed my picture of what has happened here. The first is this: we still don’t know who wrote the muddy words on the plaza—we may never know—but the other attacks on the people of Ember, the ugly writings on the walls of the Pioneer and the poison oak on the doorstep, were not carried out by Sparks villagers at all.”

The Emberites turned to each other with puzzled looks and murmured confusedly. “But how could—” “But who would—” “What does she mean?”

“It was young Doon Harrow who explained it to me,” said Mary. “I’d like him to explain it to us all, if he will.” She nodded to Doon and gestured upward with her hand.

So Doon stood up. He told the assembled people the same thing he’d told Mary the night before when he came to her house late in the evening.

“It can’t be true!” someone cried out—Doon thought it was Allie Bright, who had been Tick’s right-hand man.

“It
is
true,” Doon said. “Tick told me himself last night. He said it was just good strategy. He said he knew there was going to be war, and he needed to raise a strong army. When people are attacked, he said, they get mad, and angry people are the best warriors. So he decided to
make
people angry. He told me he got a good idea for how to do it when he saw those muddy words in the plaza.”

At that, a roar swelled up and filled the ballroom. People shouted, “Where is he?” and twisted around to look for Tick. A few of them began barging through the audience trying to find him.

Doon called out, “Wait! Listen! He isn’t here.”

The commotion quieted down. People turned toward Doon.

“Last night when I talked to him, Tick was stuffing everything he owns into a sack,” said Doon. “He told me he was leaving. He said he couldn’t live anymore with cowards and traitors. He’d heard a roamer was coming through the village today, and he planned to catch a ride with him. Some others are going, too. They’re going to the settlement in the far south, Tick said, where they hope to have a better welcome than they got here.”

A great clamor greeted this announcement. Some people laughed, some shouted, “Good riddance,” and some just grumbled and shook their heads.

Finally Mary raised her hands again and called, “Please! Quiet! I have more to say.”

People grew silent again and listened.

“I said that I had learned
two
things,” she said. “The second is this: the incident that set off this chain of violent events did not happen as we thought. It was not Doon Harrow who destroyed those crates of tomatoes.”

This came as no surprise to the people of Ember, who had never believed Doon guilty in the first place. But the villagers at the meeting looked startled. Doon saw Martha Parton flick her eyes toward him, her eyebrows flying upward, and he saw Ordney give him a quizzical look. Behind them, Kenny smiled a sunny smile.

“Torren Crane has taken back the statement he made,” Mary said. “He did not, after all, see Doon Harrow throw those tomatoes. He still refuses to say who
did
throw them. We must make up our own minds about that. But I believe we can be sure that it was not a person from Ember.”

At that, a cheer arose from the crowd, a loud, disorderly cheer, and Doon was so astonished that he nearly fell over. Lina grabbed his arm. “I made him write it down on paper!” she yelled into his ear. “I took the paper to Mary last night!”

When the cheering subsided, Mary continued. “We should take note,” she said, “of how easy it is to bring out the worst in us. The actions of a few troubled individuals fanned resentments into violence. Only an accident kept us from murdering each other.”

She turned around to face Ben, whose head was lolling sideways, his eyelids drooping. “Ben has something to say now. Ben? Are you able?”

The doctor, standing next to Ben, nudged his shoulder gently, and Ben opened his eyes.

“Can you make your statement, Ben?” asked Mary.

Ben frowned at the ceiling. The audience waited. Finally he spoke. “I have been told,” he said, “. . . that Doon Harrow . . .” He stopped. Frowned again. “I wish to thank . . . young man named Doon Harrow . . .” He took a shaky breath. “For rescuing . . . foolish nephew.”

What? thought Doon. What’s he talking about?

Ben scowled. He appeared to be gathering his strength. “Foolish nephew Torren Crane,” he rasped, “in the . . . pine tree. Who could have been killed . . .” Ben’s voice sank to a whisper, and the audience strained to hear. “. . . By my foolish actions.”

Doon stood stunned. Torren was Ben’s nephew? That was a surprise. But it was even more of a surprise to hear Ben almost apologizing for what he’d done.

Lina was thumping Doon on the back. Someone behind him cried out, “Three cheers for Doon!” and three cheers rang out in the ballroom. Doon just stood there, with what he thought was probably a silly smile on his face.

Then Mary stepped forward and called for quiet again. Her voice grew steady and businesslike. “Now,” she said, “we must look to our future. You will not get everything you want. Neither will we. All of us will suffer, perhaps even be in danger. There will be more mouths to feed—but more hands to do the work, too. And though we may have a shortage of food, we have no shortage of work.” She paused. She smiled a little. Her eyes passed over the people in the room, and Doon felt her gaze almost like a reassuring touch. “The main thing,” she said, “is this: we will refuse to be each other’s enemies. We will renounce violence, which is so easy to start but so hard to control. We will build a place where we can all live in peace. If we hold to that, everything is possible.”

Someone clapped. Doon turned around and saw his father, clapping with his hands held high in the air.

“There is much to be worked out,” Mary said. “It won’t be easy, but we’ll talk about it together.” She paused for a second, and a change came over her face—the beginning of a smile. “One more thing,” she said. “We will no longer speak of ‘the people of Sparks’ and ‘the people of Ember.’ From now on, we are
all
the people of Sparks.”

A rustle swept through the crowd. Both Doon and Lina felt a pang of sorrow. To call themselves people of Sparks meant leaving behind the last trace of their old home—its name. The villagers, too, felt a pang; for them it was a pang of fear. These were their people now? Could they really live peacefully together?

But the sorrow and the fear lasted only a few seconds. Everyone was tired of sorrow and fear. Whatever lay ahead, they thought, would probably be better. They were willing to try it.

After that, they turned to the practical details.

“Actually,” said Alma Hogan, the storehouse manager, “there’s a fair amount of food in the storehouse. It’s just that we never like to use it all up. This year, we’ll expect to use it all and hope we can replenish it next year. I’m afraid a great deal of it is pickles, though. By the end of winter, we may all be eating more pickles than anything else.”

Doon’s father mentioned politely that the hotel residents would have to have decent houses sooner or later. Mary said they would start building some of them now out behind the meadow. The best of Sparks’s builders would be in charge, and they would teach the Emberites construction. “The houses will be small,” Mary said, “and we’ll be able to build only a few before the rains come. Most of you will have to spend the winter in the hotel.”

Clary stood up to announce that her garden was producing well; in addition to cucumbers, melons, and peppers, she had grown nearly a hundred butternut squashes, which would keep well through the winter. That would help a little. The villagers looked at her curiously. Butternut squashes? They had never heard of them. “I grew them from seeds I brought from Ember,” Clary said. “I brought all the seeds I had, all kinds. Next year I’ll be able to grow more.”

Mrs. Murdo said she had learned a great deal in her time with the doctor. She would like to be Assistant Doctor. “It’s clear that this community needs more than one,” she said.

“I know something about plants,” said Maddy, speaking up for the first time. “I wish to be Assistant Hotel Gardener, with Clary Laine.”