Thirteenth Child Page 4

  I missed Mama from the very first minute. We all did. I think Papa missed her worst of all, though of course he didn’t say anything to us. The boys didn’t say anything, either, but you could tell they felt the same as the rest of us by the way everyone just happened to be right around the front porch every day about the time Papa brought the mail home.

  It was a good thing Mama left when she did, because she hadn’t been back East for even a week before Julie had her baby. Papa opened the letter right there at the Post Office, and came home with a big smile on his face, so that we knew the news even before he got in the door. “Your sister Julie has had a little girl,” he told us.

  “Hurrah! I’m an uncle!” Jack said, and everyone started talking at once.

  Everyone except me, that is. I was feeling a little peculiar. I hadn’t thought about being uncles and aunts until Jack spoke up. Then Nan said, “And Papa is a grandfather!” and I felt even more peculiar. All sorts of memories came rushing back, and I shivered. I didn’t want to be like my aunts, not even like Aunt Tilly, and I didn’t want my sisters to be like them, either. I didn’t want my brothers to be like my uncles. And I most especially didn’t want Papa to be like our grandfather.

  Then I thought that maybe it took a long time and a lot of nieces and nephews to get as mean as all the aunts and uncles had been to me. After all, there were twelve ahead of me just in our family, and all my older cousins, too. I swallowed hard. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe all the aunts and uncles had been fine until a thirteenth child came along. If that was it, then as long as none of my siblings had thirteen childings, they’d be safe. It would be a long time before anybody got close to having thirteen babies. I’d have plenty of time to convince them to stop before then.

  “What are you thinking about so hard, Eff?” my father said in my ear.

  I was so startled that I said, “Being an aunt.”

  Papa laughed, and I saw that he didn’t understand what I meant.

  “It’s a big responsibility,” I said, but he only laughed harder. I didn’t really want to explain in so many words what I’d been thinking.

  Papa still didn’t understand. He lifted me up right off my feet and hugged me, and then he went through the whole family hugging everyone. He read Mama’s letter out loud to all of us, and we had roast chicken for dinner that night even though it wasn’t Sunday.

  Mama wrote every few days, though her letters were very short because she was so busy. Three and a half weeks later, she wrote that Sharl had had a baby boy, and we went through the whole thing again. I was happy to have the roast chicken, but I wasn’t sure about the fuss that went along with it. After all, we wouldn’t be seeing either of those babies for a long, long time.

  The rest of the summer got steadily worse and worse. Mostly, that was because Mama had to stay in Helvan Shores longer than she’d expected. Sharl took sick the week after her baby was born, and for a while it looked like she might die. Mama’s letters got shorter and shorter, though she tried to send something every day or two so we wouldn’t be so worried.

  I wasn’t worried, exactly. My first thought, when we got Mama’s letter, was that if Sharl died then maybe I wouldn’t be counted as a thirteenth child anymore. Then I saw how upset everyone else was, especially the older ones and Papa, and I wondered if I was really as evil as Uncle Earn said, to have such thoughts. I was glad I hadn’t said anything out loud.

  I stayed out of the way as much as I could for the next two weeks, so that I wouldn’t have to pretend to feel bad when I didn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Lan. When the news came that Sharl was out of danger, I felt like a sham. Nobody noticed. We all sent letters to Mama and Sharl, and then settled down to wait for Mama to come home. But from then on, I knew that Uncle Earn had been right about me. I was a real thirteenth child at heart, and if I didn’t look out extra-sharp, I’d end up doing horrible things to somebody one day.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE REST OF MY NINTH-YEAR SUMMER WAS NO BETTER THAN ITS beginning. Some of that was because of Rennie. Since she was the oldest girl still at home, she took over running the house while Mama was away. Before Mama had left, I’d overheard her telling Mrs. Callahan, who came twice a week to help out with the cleaning, that she hoped that once Rennie saw the work it took to manage a household, she’d be in less of a hurry to have one of her own.

  It didn’t work out the way Mama planned. As soon as Rennie got over missing Mama and feeling all worried about Sharl, she started bossing the rest of us mercilessly, like she wanted to prove that she could handle the householding better than Mama. She even tried to boss Mrs. Callahan, but only once. The rest of us learned pretty quick to do our real chores—the ones Mama had left for us—and then take off the first chance we got.

  The boys mostly went out to the experimental farm that the college ran to educate the agricultural students. It was only about four miles away, next to a little creek that the students used for some of their irrigation projects, and they could swim and fish. Jack and Hugh built a rat trap and set it out by the fields. They wanted to have rat fights with the other boys, but Papa found out before they’d caught enough rats. They didn’t get in as much trouble as you might expect, because Professor Wallace, who was in charge of the agricultural school and the farm, also found out about it. He thought counting all the different sorts of rats would be very useful, and said he’d pay them a nickel a rat if they kept track of exactly where they’d caught each one. For the rest of the summer, they caught rats, and they made three dollars and thirty-five cents apiece.

  Lan didn’t spend much time out by the farm. In the three years we’d been in Mill City, he’d made a lot of friends, and nearly every morning one of them would come by our house to see if he wanted to play ball or collect wood for the miniature fort they were building. He always went. I tried to go along the first couple of times, the way I always had before, but the other boys made it plain as day that they didn’t want any girls along. I could see it made Lan uncomfortable to stick up for me, though he did it, so I stopped trying.

  It was the first time I’d spent much time apart from Lan, and I passed most of it on my own. I knew most of the girls from the day school, but I wasn’t really comfortable with them. I was sure that if they knew I was a thirteenth child, they’d behave just like everyone back in Helvan Shores. Besides, if I did really, truly make friends with someone, and they didn’t mind when they found out I was a thirteenth child, I might drag them down when I went bad.

  So I spent most of that summer on the roof of our porch. There was a window at the end of one hall that you could crawl out, next to a little niche where the storeroom stuck out. If I backed into the niche, I was invisible from the window and really hard to see from the ground unless you knew just what to look for. Rennie never found me, and I could sit and think, or read, or write in the little diary-book that my sister Diane sent me for my ninth birthday.

  Things perked up around August when Mama came home, and then it was fall and Lan and I started the fourth grade. That was how they listed us, at least—Lan and I were both in fifth-grade history and natural science, and they decided to put me all the way up into sixth grade for reading and composition. Schools out in the territories weren’t so strict about keeping people all in one grade, the way they did back in Helvan Shores. We had one girl in our fifth-grade natural science class who was only seven, and there were a couple of older boys who were back with us in arithmetic.

  Everyone was excited about fourth grade. Our very first class was with Miss Ochiba, who taught most of the classes in magic at the day school. For fourth grade, that meant theory and background; we wouldn’t be doing actual spells until we were ten. The magic classes were the one area where nobody was ever put ahead in school, though if you were slow about learning you might be kept back. Hardly anyone was slow—magic was too important. Out past the Great Barrier, it could save your life, even if you weren’t a full magician with the strength and knowledge to cast one of the Majo
r Spells.

  Usually, the fourth grade was split into three classes, but for the basic magic class we were all packed together into the big classroom at the end of the school. The boys were on one side of the room, and the girls on the other, so I couldn’t take a seat next to Lan. I picked a spot near the front, next to Debbie Buchowski, where I could see the big blackboard without craning my neck to look around somebody’s head.

  The blackboard in Miss Ochiba’s classroom was half hidden behind a big painting in a carved frame. The painting showed a forest of towering pines, coming down to the shore of a lake. Right at the edge, you could just see a group of people and tents down along the water, and three raw stumps where some trees had been cut.

  “Hey, Kristen, do you know what that’s for?” one of the boys called, pointing at the picture.

  “No,” the blond girl in front of me yelled back. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.” She turned to the girl next to her and said in a lower voice, “My sister took this class last year, and he thinks she told me all about it.”

  “Didn’t she?” the second girl asked. “Didn’t you ask ?”

  “Of course I asked,” Kristen replied. “But she said Miss Ochiba never does class twice the same, so there’d be no point to talking.”

  “I heard that she never takes attendance or looks at the class list, but she always knows who’s skipped,” the girl on the other side of Kristen said.

  “Hsst! Here she comes.”

  The general ruckus ebbed just a bit as Miss Ochiba took her seat at the table in front and opened a little blue book. She paid no mind to us one way or the other, so after a minute or two the noise picked up again. I was starting to wonder if she was going to let us go on for the whole time, when the school bell tolled the last time to mark the start of the day.

  Miss Ochiba closed the book with a snap and stood up. The noise started to die down, but not fast enough for Miss Ochiba. She gave it a second or two, then raised her left hand and said in a soft voice, “Silence.”

  The noise stopped. I could see Jack Murray’s mouth moving over on the other side of the room, but no sound was coming out. His eyes went wide as ever they could stretch, and so did everyone else’s. We all turned back to the front, but there wasn’t a rustle or a scrape or a squeak to mark it. The only sound in the whole world was Miss Ochiba’s soft voice saying, “In the future, I expect your silence and complete attention at the bell, without the necessity of enforcement. I trust I am clear?”

  We all nodded, and for almost the whole rest of the year, silence just slammed down on that classroom the minute the school bell rang for the last time, without Miss Ochiba having to even raise her eyes.

  “Very good.” Miss Ochiba lowered her hand and the little rustling and scraping and coughing sounds came back. “Let us begin.” She stepped to one side and pointed at the painting that was hanging in front of the blackboard. “Who can tell me what this is?”

  Several hands went up. “Thom,” she said.

  “That’s the timberlands up north, by Three Forks,” he said. “My father works there,” he added, as if he thought he’d better explain how he came to know such a thing.

  Miss Ochiba nodded. “That it is,” she said. “Thank you, Thom. What else is it? Kristen?”

  “It’s a lumber camp,” Kristen said. “You can see the tents, and the place where they’ve been cutting down trees.”

  “Very observant,” Miss Ochiba said. “Thank you, Kristen. What else is it?”

  Miss Ochiba didn’t have very many hands to pick from this time. “Susan?”

  “It’s a forest? And .. . and a lake, or maybe a river?”

  “Excellent. Thank you, Susan.” Miss Ochiba paused. “What else is it? Anyone?”

  The silence was as profound as it had been when Miss Ochiba had called the class to order. We all stared at the picture, wondering what else it was a picture of. There didn’t seem to be anything left that hadn’t been mentioned. I felt a prickle down my back, and all of a sudden I knew the answer—or at least an answer. I waited for someone else to see it, but nobody raised a hand, not even Lan. Miss Ochiba just stood there, waiting, as if she could wait and say nothing for hours, for the whole rest of the day.

  Finally, I lifted my hand from the desk. “Yes, Eff?” Miss Ochiba said.

  “I-it’s a picture,” I said. “A painting.”

  Miss Ochiba nodded. “Yes. Thank you, Eff.” She looked around and everyone tensed, wondering if we would have to think of something else. “This is a painting; a picture of a lumber camp; a picture of the northern timberlands; a place where a forest meets a lake. All these things are true, and they are all true at the same time. What you see depends on how you look. And it is one more thing.” She turned and waved her hand past the picture, and it shimmered and disappeared, as if folding itself up too small to see. “It is an illusion.” There was a quiet sigh from the class.

  “This is the most important lesson you must learn about magic,” Miss Ochiba went on. “There are many ways of seeing. Each has an element of truth, but none is the whole truth. If you limit yourselves to one way of seeing, one truth, you will limit your power. You will also place limits on the kinds of spells you can cast, as well as their strength. To be a good magician, you must see in many ways. You must be flexible. You must be willing to learn from different sources. And you must always remember that the truths you see are incomplete.”

  Miss Ochiba paused. We all stared blankly for a minute, and then heads started bending and chalk scraped on slates as everyone took a note. Miss Ochiba smiled and went on. “We will begin the year by taking a general look at the three great theoretical systems of magic: the Avrupan, the Hijero—Cathayan, and the Aphrikan. We will then review some of the great magicians of history from Socrates to the present day their contributions to the development of modern magic theory and the spells and techniques they invented or discovered.

  “First, last, and always, however, I expect you to learn to see. Therefore—” Miss Ochiba picked up a piece of chalk from the desk in front of her and tossed it to one of the boys in the front row. “How many different ways can you see this? What is it?”

  We spent the rest of the class looking at ordinary things and thinking up all the other things they were, that you wouldn’t just up and pick straight-out. Miss Ochiba’s blackboard chalk was a mineral and a cylinder; Debbie Buchowski’s blue sweater was a birthday present; Jamie Fremont’s lucky piece was a Cathayan coin, a souvenir.

  When we got home that day, William was waiting impatiently on the front porch. “Hey, Lan!” he yelled. “Where’ve you been? I got Father to give me the afternoon, and now it’s almost gone.”

  “School,” Lan yelled back, and added “dummy” under his breath. Then he ran for the porch, with Robbie right behind him. I trudged along after, knowing that they’d talk with me for a moment or two before they went off to their fort, if only out of neighborliness. When I came up to them, they were arguing about Miss Ochiba’s class.

  William was at his most annoying, all superior and know-everything; Robbie was bouncing around like the lid on a kettle getting ready to boil over; and Lan was looking as cross as ever I’d seen him. William seemed to think he was better than the rest of us because he was getting private teaching at home, and had been memorizing basic spells for nearly a year already, though he was the youngest of us all and couldn’t actually cast any of them yet. He didn’t think much of Miss Ochiba’s different ways of seeing, and he didn’t think much of learning Hijero—Cathayan and Aphrikan magical theory and history, either.

  “After all, we’re Avrupans,” he said. “And our magic works better than anyone else’s. That other stuff is just a waste of time.”

  “The United States isn’t in Avrupa,” Lan corrected him. “We’re Columbians.”

  William waved that away. “We all came from Avrupa to begin with. From Albion, or Gaul, or Prussia, or somewhere. That’s what’s important.”

  “Says you!” Ro
bbie said. “Why should we learn about Avrupa, when we went and had a revolution to get away from them?”

  “That was almost a hundred years ago!” William said. “Avrupan magic is the best, and we should learn the best.”

  “How can you know it’s the best, if you don’t learn about anything else?” I said.

  All three boys turned and looked at me. “Everybody knows already” William said. “Like knowing water is wet, or rocks are hard, or which way is up.”

  “Magic makes its own rules,” Lan retorted.

  William looked shocked. “That’s from Plato! How do you know that?”

  “It’s something Papa says,” I put in quickly. It was actually something from one of the lessons Lan had with that tutor, back in Helvan Shores, but if we started in on that, sure as anything William would end up asking awkward questions, and the whole thing about Lan being the seventh son of a seventh son might come out.

  Lan grinned suddenly. “Hey, school’s out! It’s dumb to waste time arguing about it. Let’s go finish the fort before somebody comes around with chores.” As they ran off, he looked back and winked at me, so I knew he’d understood.

  The boys vanished into the bushes behind the house. Looking after them, I wondered suddenly what William was, that wasn’t what you’d first see in him. The notion kept me thinking for the rest of the day, and on after supper when the boys came back, and for many days after. It felt like an important question, but I couldn’t think why, and I couldn’t seem to get an answer for it. Eventually, other things pushed it out of the front of my mind—schoolwork, and chores, and Kristen Olvar asking me to join her sewing club, and planning for Harvest Feast, among other things. But they couldn’t push the question out of my head altogether. It sat waiting in the dark back of my mind, waiting for me to have time to come back to it. And eventually, I did.