Stephanie S. Tolan
/spring 1972
GRANDPA
“Stern military boy / Watching a century begin”
BY STEPHANIE S. TOLAN - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, SPRING 1972
current work
Flight of the Raven
(Copyright 2001)
Part One, Militia
DAY ONE
Amber Landis pushed her blond hair behind her ears and wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was hot and muggy in the basement computer room. It was also dark. The only light was a crack of sunlight at one side of the narrow window up near the ceiling where the blind had curled at its edge. She hadn’t turned on the light because she wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Wait,” her father had said when he left the compound. “Look after your brother, do what Cassie says, and just wait. When news of the mission gets onto the nets, it’ll be full of lies. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”
“But what is the mission?” she had asked. He hadn’t answered. He’d only gone to join the group of camouflage-clad men milling around the truck that was revving its engine in front of the old barn.
There are things you’re better off not knowing, she’d heard all her life. She hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it! How would she ever be part of her father’s mission, how would she ever make a difference in the world, if she wasn’t even allowed to know what they were doing till after it was done?
Cassie, her stepmother, knew, and she was worried. She was doing her best not to show it, giving Amber and Kenny their stupid homeschool assignments as if everything was perfectly normal. But she had taken the radio into her room as soon as the men left, and Amber knew she listened to it early every morning and late every night. Amber couldn’t understand why nobody wanted her and Kenny to know what was going on even now, when it surely had to be over, or nearly over. It wasn’t as if they’d tell anybody. It wasn’t as if there was anybody to tell. Since the men had left, she had not seen one single person except Kenny and Cassie.
She’d thought about the possibility that this mission was so much more dangerous than usual that something bad—really bad—might happen. If that was true, Cassie might be trying to protect them from finding out. Amber couldn’t see what difference it would make when or how they found out about it if the news was that bad.
The mission was different from anything the Free Mountain Militia had ever done before. Different and very, very big. That she knew. For weeks the air had been charged with a new energy as the men had prepared for it. There had never been so much coming and going from the compound, lots of it at night.
It was the fifth day since the men had driven away in the truck, her father following in his black Honda. Five long, hot days. No mission had every taken that long. Amber was tired of wondering, tired of waiting, and even more tired of trying to look after Kenny. Her ten-year-old brother insisted he was a soldier, a soldier who didn’t need looking after. Especially not by a sister only two years older than he was. “You’re just a girl,” he’s sneered that very morning when she reminded him he wasn’t allowed to go out in the canoe without a life jacket. “You can’t tell me what to do.” So he’d gone without the life jacket. If he drowned, it wouldn’t be her fault.
She listened at the door for a moment, then clicked the lock on the doorknob and switched on the computer. When it had run through its wake-up pattern, she sat down and took herself out onto the nets. And found immediately the lies her father had warned her about:
>Path:
>Laurel.grt.com!news.amherst.edu!news.mtholyoke.
>edu!111-winkenllnl.gov!agate!bass!clarinews
>From: clarinews@clarinet.com (AP)
>Message-ID: militiaUR237_eb6@clarinet.com
>
>PLATTSURGH, NY (AP) No leads have been
>reported in the most devastating terrorist attack ever
>launched against American citizens in their own
>country, bigger even than the bombing of the federal
>building in Oklahoma City. The death toll from the
>bombing of two overpasses on Interstate 87, the
>highway known locally as the Northway, has risen to
>183 with the confirmation that two buses carrying
>Canadian tourists home from a visit to DisneyWorld
>were among the vehicles lost in the bomb blasts and
>the ensuing explosion of a gasoline tanker truck.
>According to sources, identification of bodies will not
>be completed for some time, but both buses were
>carrying 45 passengers.
> The Free Mountain Militia, an anarchist fringe
>group never before suspected of terrorism, has taken
>credit for the bombing. Local police have been joined
>by the FBI, the National Guard, and large numbers
>of citizen volunteers in an all-out search of the area
>surrounding the highway south to Lake George and
>north to the Canadian border, where the RCMP is
>conducting its own search.
> United States President Daniel Harris and
>Canadian Prime Minister Jacques Martier both arrived
>this morning to survey the scene of the devastation and
>are assuring their citizens that the perpetrators of
>this atrocity will be found and dealt with to the
>fullest extent of the law.
> In an unrelated story, an eight-year-old African-
>American boy suffering from autism has disappeared
>from Laurel Mountain, a private mental institution
>near the site of the bomb blast, and is lost in the
>extensive Adirondack wilderness where the search
>for the terrorists is being conducted. A separate
>search has not been initiated for the boy; searchers
>have been asked to keep an eye out for him as they
>go. “We’re determined to cover every square inch of
>forest,” National Guard Officer Lester Cunningham
>has said. “There’s no way we’ll miss that little boy in
>the process.”
Amber read the piece again. Lies, her father had said. Of course. The government always lied, and the media were controlled by the government. She knew that. She’d always known it. But which were the lies?
The line of five men in camouflage fatigues was moving quickly through the forest, guided upward on the mountain not by a trail but by compass reckoning. In spite of the dense shade under the trees, the heat was oppressive, and they were soaked with sweat. No one spoke as they moved, one or another taking a quick drink from a canteen now and again. It was well past noon, and they’d been on the move since dawn, stopping only for small rest breaks and to listen briefly to a battery operated radio.
Suddenly the man in the lead, dark hair curling out from beneath his camouflage cap, stopped, and the man behind him nearly ran up his back. Behind them, the others came to a ragged stop, looking at one another questioningly. “What’s up?” the second man whispered.
The other didn’t answer. He merely pointed. A huge moss-covered tree was lying at an angle, its upper branches caught among other trees, a tangle of roots nearly head high reaching into the air from a mound of moss and ferns. Next to the roots, spaced next to each other as neatly as if they’d been placed beside a bed before retiring, stood a small pair of ragged navy blue sneakers. The dark-haired man, a finger to his lips, motioned to the others to fan out around the tree. They did so, indicating with no more than raised eyebrows and shrugs their question about what they were doing.
The leader bent to peer under the trunk, where a mass of fir branches stuck out, their tips at odd angles almost as if they’d been woven together. He took hold of one branch, moved it slightly so that the others moved as well, and then waited. After a moment he gave a gentle tug, again moving the tangle of branches and pulling the one he was holding a few inches toward him so that a small opening appeared behind it. He looked through the opening and then stood up, nodding.
“What?” the man next to him mouthed.
“What are the odds?” the dark-haired man said, his voice at normal volume now. “A few yards either way, and we’d have missed him.”
“Missed who?”
“That black kid who ran away from the mental hospital. The one they’ve been talking about on the news. Not that it does him or us any good. He’s dead. Must’ve fixed himself a bed here last night. Can’t imagine what killed him; it wasn’t cold.” The man began pulling branches out from under the tree trunk and gestured for help. After a few moments they could all see what he had seen. A small barefoot boy, a metal bracelet around one ankle, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, lay curled in a fetal position, one dark fist clutched tightly beneath his chin, the other over his head as if to protect himself from a possible blow.
“Leave him,” a blond man with a flat, smooth face said, kicking at the pile of branches they had pulled free. “Dump those shoes in there with him, and put the branches back. We don’t need nobody else finding him and seeing that somebody besides the kid was here. This whole place’ll be crawling with feds and soldiers soon enough.”
The dark-haired man stood for a moment, looking down at the tiny figure, frowning. “Too bad,” he said. “We could’ve taken him along. Kept him as a hostage. A trade. You never know what sort of bargaining chip you might need.” He took his cap off and ran a hand through the hair that was stuck to his neck with sweat. “I have an idea. Get a picture of him, Ham. Nobody would know he isn’t just sleeping. He looked peaceful enough.”
The man he’d spoken to, heavyset and crew-cut, nodded and pulled open a side pocket on his pack to take out a 35-mm camera. He stepped closer and bent to get a good shot in the shadows. When the flash went off, the boy stirred. The movement wasn’t large, and the child didn’t open his eyes. But he’d moved. They’d all seen it.
The leader leaned in and laid a finger against the boy’s throat. “He’s got a pulse. Very slow, but steady.”
“So?” the flat-faced man said. “We can’t drag some little kid back with us; we got too far to go.”
“Of course we can, Virgil,” the dark-haired man said. He put his cap back on and reached down to pull the boy from his nest. The child made no sound, but his body uncurled as he was dragged free of his hiding place. The arm he’d had over his head moved to join the other, its fist still clutched tightly under his chin. “Wake up, kid!” the man said, and tried to stand the boy on his legs. He might as well have tried to stand a rag doll. “Well, give me a hand with him somebody!”
The man named Ham reached to help, taking the boy under the arms and slinging him against his shoulder as the other man stood, brushing the leaves and dirt from his knees.
“I’m tellin’ you, Mack, we should leave him,” the blond man said. “There’s something wrong with him. He was in a loony bin, after all. You don’t know what kind of trouble he could be. Besides, he’s a black kid!”
The leader turned on him. “You better not let Landis hear you sounding like a racist. He’d have you outa the Cadre, out of the Militia for that matter, before you could blink.”
The blond man kicked at a rock, his face flushing pink. “Ah, who said anything racist, for cripe sake? I just said he was black. He is black!”
“Yeah, well the operative word here is kid. People want lost kids back. As long as he’s alive and tradable, he could come in handy. We’re taking him.” He looked from one to the other of the rest of the men. “Anybody else have objections?”
The others shook their heads.
“Okay, then. Let’s get going. Somebody get his shoes.”
When they’d rearranged their packs, they went on, moving as steadily and swiftly as before. There was no sound from the child and no movement. He had not opened his eyes. As he was carried roughly, slung over ham’s shoulder, he kept one hand, fist tightly closed, tucked under his chin.
From the top of a white pine next to the fallen tree, a raven lifted itself silently into the air and flew over the men as they moved.
When Elijah felt himself pulled from his nest beneath the tree, rough hands dragging him into a world of sunlight and the roar that was and was not sound, the roar of violence he had been running from when he left Laurel Mountain, filled his head again, louder than he’d ever heard it. He kept his eyes tightly shut, let himself go limp. Mountain, he thought, trying to retreat into the consciousness of the great stone presence. Men’s voices intruded, but he blocked them out. Mountain! Silence!
He felt himself lifted and flung across the hard shoulder of a man whose huge hand clasped his legs as they began moving. Elijah’s head jolted with every step the man took. Tree branches brushed at his back. Clutching his marble tightly, Elijah reached with his mind, sending it out into the mountain until he could hear nothing, feel nothing. Concentrating with fierce intensity Elijah Raymond turned himself to stone.
Amber heard the truck engine laboring up the long hill and the wheels scattering gravel. “It’s them!” she yelled. “They’re back!” She leaped off the porch steps and ran to stand in front of the barn, where she could see the truck the moment it made the last turn out from under the trees. She put a hand up to shade her eyes against the sun, still hot and bright, which was resting on the edge of Bald Hill. It sounded like only the truck coming, no car behind, but her father would be in it, surely. He had to be.
The screen door behind her banged, and Kenny came out onto the porch, followed by Cassie, wiping her hands on a dish towel, her dark face impassive, her eyes fixed intently on the gravel road. Kenny, a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, was stuffing another into his mouth. Amber hadn’t been able to eat the beans and tomatoes and hamburgers they’d had for dinner, and the cookies hadn’t tempted her. Her mind had been too full of the story she had read on the nets, the story she wasn’t supposed to know about. Cassie had asked her to string the beans for dinner, and she’d watched Cassie shape the hamburgers, slapping the meat with a kind of tense ferocity. Her stepmother had been even more silent than usual, distant and preoccupied as if her mind too was on a story that was part truth, part media lies.
At the table, while Kenny groused about not having caught any fish, Amber had sat, pushing her food around her plate and worrying. Everybody knew Charles Landis headed the Free Mountain Militia. Were the cops and the feds looking for him now? Had they found him already? And if not, would they come here? And if they did come, what would happen then?
The truck appeared at last, its gray and green and brown camouflage tinged with gold as the sun began to slip behind the hill. Ham LaFontaine was driving, she saw, his beefy, sunburned arm resting on the open window frame, his cap pulled low on his forehead. Behind him, on the passenger side, she could just make out her father’s upright figure. Amber felt the air rush out of her as if she’d been holding her breath since she first heard the truck. Her father was back. Not hurt and not caught. The truck stopped with a grinding of brakes only a foot or so from where Amber stood, its back wheels skidding slightly sideways.
“Scared ya!” Ham said and spit tobacco juice out the window near her feet.
“Didn’t see me flinch!” she said.
He shook his head and grinned, his teeth stained with dark juice. “Nah, you’re pretty good.”
Charles Landis opened the truck’s other door and stepped out. When he left he’d been wearing a business suit, but now he was dressed like the other men in camouflage. Amber did her best to keep her expression as impassive as Cassie’s, as if this was just an ordinary homecoming. Her father didn’t know she knew what they’d been doing or how serious it was.
Her father nodded at the three of them and then turned back to the truck, to get something out of the cab.
The other men were climbing down from the back of the truck now. Mack Sturdivant and Virgil Conway, followed by Duane Bruder and the O’Donnell brothers. She didn’t know how many men had been involved in the mission altogether, but these were the Cadre, the men her father trusted. Most of all, he trusted Mack, his second-in-command, who’d had guerrilla training in Central America and the Middle East. Mack, strategist and explosive expert, would have led the mission.
“Cassie!” her father called. “Is that old mattress still down in the basement?”
“Sure. What do you want it for?”
“Duane and Virgil, you boys go down and bring it up to the toolshed. Cassie, dig up a sleeping bag and bring it out here.” The three people who’d been given their orders moved hurriedly to carry them out. Charles Landis backed around the open door of the truck, and Amber saw what he’d been retrieving. It was a kid, a black kid, asleep or unconscious, as far as she could tell. His head hung down, and his legs and one arm dangled limply in her father’ arms. Was it somebody hurt in the bombing? Or was it maybe the kid the news story had talked about? The kid who’d escaped from the mental institution?
Her father turned to her, then, blue eyes vibrant in his tanned, lined face. “Amber, you go inside and fix this kid a sandwich or something. He hasn’t eaten in who knows how long.”
She couldn’t ask if it was the crazy kid, of course. She wasn’t supposed to know about him.
Charles Landis took the boy to the toolshed that leaned at an odd angle against the barn, and kicked open the door. “Kenny, go find me a padlock.”
“Yes, sir!” Kenny said, and pushed the other cookie into his mouth as he headed into the house.
“Amber, what’re you waiting for? Get this kid some food!”
As Amber turned to go, a huge bird drifted down and landed on the roof of the barn. It seemed to come out of nowhere, like a shadow appearing as the sun sank lower in the sky. Inky black, it looked like a crow, but was bigger. Much bigger. It ruffled its wings a couple of times and then stood, looking down, its attention fixed on her father as he stepped into the shed with the boy in his arms. It opened and shut its heavy black beak but made no sound. Amber rubbed at the back of her neck, where she’d felt a sudden chill. And then went inside to get something for the kid to eat.
Amber sat cross-legged on the floor of the shed next to the stained mattress that took up most of the available floor space. The plate she had brought out with its peanut butter and jelly sandwich tilted slightly where one side rested on the edge of the tattered sleeping bag and the other on the mattress itself. Droplets of water had run down the can of cold soda and made a little puddle on the floor. The boy had not moved since she set the can and plate down for him and told him she’d brought him supper.
She wanted to be in the house right now. Her father might be telling Cassie about the mission, explaining what had really happened, what they had done, what they were going to do now. Kenny was in there. He hadn’t been sent out on some stupid errand to make this kid eat. Maybe she could just leave the food. It wasn’t her fault if he didn’t have the sense to wake up and eat it. Her father couldn’t very well blame her for what some crazy kid did or didn’t do. But as much as she wanted to go back to the house, she didn’t get up. For a reason she couldn’t explain to herself, she just sat there, looking at the kid.
He was lying on his side on top of the open sleeping bag, his eyes closed, both clenched fists beneath his chin and his knees pulled up almost far enough to meet those tight fists. His chest moved only slightly as he breathed. The light from the fluorescent camping lantern shone on his dark skin and hair, on his striped shirt and the jeans with the frayed hems, and glinted off the metal bracelet lying on the floor next to the mattress. It had been around the boy’s ankle before her father had cut it off with tin snips. The thing, her father said, that was meant to keep kids at the hospital from running away. This one hadn’t worked.
It was still warm in the shed, warmer than it was outside, now that the sun had gone down and the twilight mountain chill had begun, “If you don’t eat, you’ll starve, you know,” she said to the unmoving figure.
As she said it, a memory suddenly rose in her mind. Baby rabbits. She’d found them, two of them, in a shallow, fur-lined hole in the ground in the backyard of one of the apartments they’d had in Plattsburgh. It was an old, old memory, but so clear now that Amber felt almost as if she’d slipped back in time, as if she was six years old again, picking the rabbits up from their nest. They had been tiny, smaller than her fist, their eyes not open yet. She could almost feel again their hearts beating fast under her fingers, their tiny ears like velvet against her cheek when she held them close.
She had put them in a shoe box lined with one of Kenny’s old frayed diapers, taken it inside, and hidden it under her bed. She had wanted the rabbits to be hers. Only hers. She didn’t want Kenny even to know about them. She wouldn’t have trusted Kenny with them. Not since the bad time. That was when he’d started being mean. Little as he was, his meanness had begun to scare her sometimes.
She’d gone to the refrigerator and gotten some lettuce to feed them. She wanted to give them a carrot—she knew rabbits ate carrots—but there weren’t any in the vegetable drawer. So she made do with lettuce, which she put into the shoe box along with a saucerful of water for them to drink.
But they hadn’t eaten the lettuce. The next morning she couldn’t even tell if they had drunk any of the water, because it was all spilled. The rabbits were curled up in one corner of the box, their fur dark and wet.
All that day, whenever she could get away from Kenny and the baby-sitter, she had tried to get the rabbits to eat the lettuce. She tore it into little pieces that didn’t look too big for their tiny mouths. But they wouldn’t open their mouths any more than they would open their eyes. Finally, she tried forcing their mouths open, forcing the lettuce in, all the time telling them, “Chew, bunnies, chew it up. You got to eat!” She had felt like crying about their not eating.
She hadn’t though. It was the first summer after the bad time, the summer her father had started being away all the time, leaving them with people they didn’t know. She had cried about it the first time, and her father had told her about the war he was fighting. He’d made her and Kenny promise to be his very best soldiers. Soldiers, he told them, didn’t cry. Not ever.
The next morning she’d waited till Kenny had gotten up to go to the bathroom before she pulled the shoe box out from under the bed. The baby rabbits were dead. They were cold and stiff, their still-wet fur all matted and clumped. She didn’t cry then either. She had wanted to bury them in the backyard, but she couldn’t remember now what had happened to them. The memory seemed to end there: pulling the box out, finding them dead. There were lots of things she didn’t remember from that summer.
Amber shook herself a little, bringing herself back to the present, to the warm shed and the crazy little boy. She reached out one finger and gingerly poked him. Elijah, her father had said his name was. It was just about all he had said about him. Nothing about a search for him. But then he hadn’t talked about the other search yet either or about the bombing.
“Elijah,” she said now, and shook the boy a little. There was no response. “Elijah. Wake up. You have to eat something!”
Amber couldn’t remember the word the news bulletin had used, the kind of crazy he was. She wondered if he was dangerous in some way. But he didn’t look dangerous. No more dangerous than the rabbits. “Elijah!” she said again, louder. She thought she saw his eyelids flutter a little at the sound of his name. “You gotta eat!”
Elijah lay very still, his eyes closed. A pain in his stomach reminded him that he was hungry, more than hungry. It was hunger that had melted his intention to keep himself stone. He did not know where he was. But wherever he was, it was quiet. The roar of violence had faded. The air here was hot and still. He smelled the musty smell of the sleeping bag beneath his cheek and felt a trickle of sweat sliding down his neck.
A tiny sound, like a breath, told him he was not alone. Unmoving, he sensed outward. Whoever was here did not seem to be a threat. But that didn’t make him safe, he knew. Whoever was here was related in some way to the others, the men with big hands and hard shoulders who brought the roar of violence and the white-haired man with the wolf tattoo and the icy cold eyes.
“Elijah.” The voice was a girl’s voice, like honey on burned toast. Soft and sweet over something crisped with fire. “You gotta eat!”
He did his best to ignore the voice, but his stomach responded on its own, rumbling again so that he knew the person who had spoken must have heard. He could smell the unmistakable scent of peanut butter now and longed to respond. Instead he squeezed his eyes more tightly.
He felt the marble in his hand, imagined the look of it, the blue and white swirl in its center like the earth, as his great-grandmother had said when she gave it to him. “We’re all in that little ball together,” she had told him, “looking up and out at the hand of God.” He wanted to take himself into that blue and white center. But he couldn’t keep the image of the marble clear in his mind. It blinked out, and in its place came another. It was a cardboard box, with a wet, frayed white cloth folded inside. Huddled in the corner were a pair of baby rabbits. Dead.
With that image came an overpowering sense of loss he knew all too well. It was like his own. Like the loss of everyone who had ever mattered in his life. No!
“You gotta eat!” The voice came again. He opened his eyes and found himself looking into the face of a girl with long, straight blond hair. He closed his eyes again, gripping the marble in his right hand more tightly, trying to think his way into it, or into the mountain, anywhere away from this girl.
“I brought you some supper.”
It was too late. The rabbits had been her rabbits, he knew. But the loss was deeper than any rabbit babies, as deep in her as in himself. A connection had been made between them. Whether he wanted it or not made no difference.
“You gotta eat!” she said.
a note from the author
After writing poetry throughout my college years and my twenties, while I was pregnant with my son and therefore not acting in the theatre company where we lived, I decided to try writing a novel for kids (or more specifically for the kid-reader I’d been—since kids read books with such passion).
That first novel was dubbed “too old-fashioned” by the editor I sent it to, so I began reading recently published kids’ books. This was in what I call the “golden age” of books for young readers—e.g. Harriet the Spy, Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting. Aware now that one could be a serious writer and write for young readers, I wrote Grandpa—and Me, which found an editor, a publisher and an agent for me. I’d always written plays as well as poetry, but when novels seriously entered my life I quit writing poetry altogether. The necessary long term focus on storyline--character, setting, plot—changed the way I encountered the world.
I went on writing plays, collaborating with Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia. At this point I’ve published 30 books, most for young or intermediate readers (only one picture book) and young adults, and a few nonfiction books for adults. One of my intermediate books, Surviving the Applewhites, won the Newbery Honor in 2003. The novel excerpt here is from Flight of the Raven, the second book in what will be a trilogy, that began with Welcome to the Ark. I'm currently at work on Within the Dark, the third one.
Stephanie S. Tolan has published poetry, plays, nonfiction, and thirty books, most of them fiction for children and young adults. Her novels have won various honors and awards, including the Newbery Honor for her 2003 New York Times best-selling novel Surviving the Applewhites, and the Christopher Award for her 2006 novel, Listen! The Applewhite family appears again in Applewhites at Wits End (2013) and Applewhites Coast to Coast written in collaboration with her son, R.J. Tolan, in 2017.. After co-authoring Guiding the Gifted Child in 1982, Tolan became a consultant on the needs of unusually bright children. Her novel Welcome to the Ark (first book of a trilogy, the second of which is Flight of the Raven and the third in progress) concerns four profoundly gifted young people finding a mission for themselves in a violent and troubling world. 2016 saw the publication of a collection of her essays about the needs of the gifted, Out of Sync, Essays on Giftedness, and her blog about the subject is www.welcometothedeepend.com.
