Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

About the Author

Also by Jack Gantos

Copyright

For Anne and Mabel

1

School was finally out and I was standing on a picnic table in our backyard getting ready for a great summer vacation when my mother walked up to me and ruined it. I was holding a pair of camouflage Japanese WWII binoculars to my eyes and focusing across her newly planted vegetable garden, and her cornfield, and over ancient Miss Volker’s roof, and then up the Norvelt road, and past the brick bell tower on my school, and beyond the Community Center, and the tall silver whistle on top of the volunteer fire department to the most distant dark blue hill, which is where the screen for the Viking drive-in movie theater had recently been erected.

Down by my feet I had laid out all the Japanese army souvenirs Dad had shipped home from the war. He had been in the navy, and after a Pacific island invasion in the Solomons he and some other sailor buddies had blindly crawled around at night and found a bunker of dead Japanese soldiers half buried in the sand. They stripped everything military off of them and dragged the loot back to their camp. Dad had an officer’s sword with what he said was real dried blood along the razor-sharp edge of the long blade. He had a Japanese flag, a sniper’s rifle with a full ammo clip, a dented canteen, a pair of dirty white gloves with a scorched hole shot right through the bloody palm of the left hand, and a color-tinted photo of an elegant Japanese woman in a kimono. Of course he also had the powerful binoculars I was using.

I knew Mom had come to ruin my fun, so I thought I would distract her and maybe she’d forget what was on her mind.

“Hey, Mom,” I said matter-of-factly with the binoculars still pressed against my face, “how come blood on a sword dries red, and blood on cloth dries brown? How come?”

“Honey,” Mom replied, sticking with what was on her mind, “does your dad know you have all this dangerous war stuff out?”

“He always lets me play with it as long as I’m careful,” I said, which wasn’t true. In fact, he never let me play with it, because as he put it, “This swag will be worth a bundle of money someday, so keep your grubby hands off it.”

“Well, don’t hurt yourself,” Mom warned. “And if there is blood on some of that stuff, don’t touch it. You might catch something, like Japanese polio.”

“Don’t you mean Japanese beetles?” I asked. She had an invasion of those in her garden that were winning the plant war.

She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she switched back to why she came to speak to me in the first place. “I just got a call from Miss Volker. She needs a few minutes of your time in the morning, so I told her I’d send you down.”

I gazed at my mom through the binoculars but she was too close to bring into focus. Her face was just a hazy pink cupcake with strawberry icing.

“And,” she continued, “Miss Volker said she would give you a little something for your help, but I don’t want you to take any money. You can take a slice of pie but no money. We never help neighbors for cash.”

“Pie? That’s all I get?” I asked. “Pie? But what if it makes her feel good to give me money?”

“It won’t make me feel good if she gives you money,” she stressed. “And it shouldn’t make you feel good either. Helping others is a far greater reward than doing it for money.”

“Okay,” I said, giving in to her before she pushed me in. “What time?”

Mom looked away from me for a moment and stared over at War Chief, my uncle Will’s Indian pony, who was grinding his chunky yellow teeth. He was working up a sweat from scratching his itchy side back and forth against the rough bark on a prickly oak. About a month ago my uncle visited us when he got a pass from the army. He used to work for the county road department and for kicks he had painted big orange and white circles with reflective paint all over War Chief’s hair. He said it made War Chief look like he was getting ready to battle General Custer. But War Chief was only battling the paint which wouldn’t wash off, and it had been driving him crazy. Mom said the army had turned her younger brother Will from being a “nice kid” to being a “confused jerk.”

Earlier, the pony had been rubbing himself against the barbed wire around the turkey coop, but the long-necked turkeys got all riled up and pecked his legs. It had been so long since a farrier had trimmed War Chief’s hooves that he hobbled painfully around the yard like a crippled ballerina. It was sad. If my uncle gave me the pony I’d take really good care of him, but he wouldn’t give him up.

“Miss Volker will need you there at six in the morning,” Mom said casually, “but she said you were welcome to come earlier if you wanted.”

“Six!” I cried. “I don’t even have to get up that early for school, and now that I’m on my summer vacation I want to sleep in. Why does she need me so early?”

“She said she has an important project with a deadline and she’ll need you as early as she can get you.”

I lifted my binoculars back toward the movie. The Japanese were snaking through the low palmettos toward the last few marines on Wake Island. One of the young marines was holding a prayer book and looking toward heaven, which was a sure Hollywood sign he was about to die with a slug to a vital organ. Then the scene cut to a young Japanese soldier aiming his sniper rifle, which looked just like mine. Then the film cut back to the young marine, and just as he crossed himself with the “Father, Son, and Holy—” BANG! He clutched his heart and slumped over.

“Yikes!” I called out. “They plugged him!”

“Is that a war movie?” Mom asked sharply, pointing toward the screen and squinting as if she were looking directly into the flickering projector.

“Not entirely,” I replied. “It’s more of a love war movie.” I lied. It was totally a war movie except for when the soon-to-be-dead marines talked about their girlfriends, but I threw in the word love because I thought she wouldn’t say what she said next.

“You know I don’t like you watching war movies,” she scolded me with her hands on her hips. “All that violence is bad for you—plus it gets you worked up.”

“I know, Mom,” I replied with as much huffiness in my voice as I thought I could get away with. “I know.”

“Do I need to remind you of your little problem?” she asked.

How could I forget? I was a nosebleeder. The moment something startled me or whenever I got overexcited or spooked about any little thing blood would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames.

“I know,” I said to her, and instinctively swiped a finger under my nose to check for blood. “You remind me of my little problem all day long.”

“You know the doctor thinks it’s the sign of a bigger problem,” she said seriously. “If you have iron-poor blood you may not be getting enough oxygen to your brain.”

“Can you just leave, please?”

“Don’t be disrespectful,” she said, reminding me of my manners, but I was already obsessing about my bleeding-nose problem. When Dad’s old Chevy truck backfired I showered blood across the sidewalk. When I fell off the pony and landed on my butt my nose spewed blood down over my chest. At night, if I had a disturbing dream then my nose leaked through the pillow. I swear, with the blood I was losing I needed a transfusion about every other day. Something had to be wrong with me, but one really good advantage about being dirt-poor is that you can’t afford to go to the doctor and get bad news.

“Jack!” my mom called, and reached forward to poke my kneecap. “Jack! Are you listening? Come into the house soon. You’ll have to get to bed early now that you have morning plans.”

“Okay,” I said, and felt my fun evening leap off a cliff as she walked back toward the kitchen door. I knew she was still soaking the dishes in the sink so I had a little more time. Once she was out of sight I turned back to what I had been planning all along. I lifted the binoculars and focused in on the movie screen. The Japanese hadn’t quite finished off all the marines and I figured I’d be a marine too and help defend them. I knew we wouldn’t be fighting the Japanese anymore because they were now our friends, but it was good to use movie enemies for target practice because Dad said I had to get ready to fight off the Russian Commies who had already sneaked into the country and were planning to launch a surprise attack. I put down the binoculars and removed the ammo clip on the sniper rifle then aimed it toward the screen where I could just make out the small images. There was no scope on the rifle so I had to use the regular sight—the kind where you lined up a little metal ball on the far end of the barrel with the V-notch above the trigger where you pressed your cheek and eye to the cool wooden stock. The rifle weighed a ton. I hoisted it up and tried to aim at the movie screen, but the barrel shook back and forth so wildly I couldn’t get the ball to line up inside the V. I lowered the rifle and took a deep breath. I knew I didn’t have all night to play because of Mom, so I gave it another try as the Japanese made their final “Banzai!” assault.

I lifted the rifle again and swung the tip of the barrel straight up into the air. I figured I could gradually lower the barrel at the screen, aim, and pick off one of the Japanese troops. With all my strength I slowly lowered the barrel and held it steady enough to finally get the ball centered inside the V, and when I saw a tiny Japanese soldier leap out of a bush I quickly pulled the trigger and let him have it.

BLAM! The rifle fired off and violently kicked out of my grip. It flipped into the air before clattering down across the picnic table and sliding onto the ground. “Oh sweet cheeze-us!” I wailed, and dropped butt-first onto the table. “Ohhh! Cheeze-us-crust!” I didn’t know the rifle was loaded. I hadn’t put a shell in the chamber. My ears were ringing like air raid warnings. I tried to stand but was too dizzy and flopped over. “This is bad. This is bad,” I whispered over and over as I desperately gripped the tabletop.

“Jaaaack!” I heard my mother shriek and then the screen door slammed behind her.

“If I’m not already dead I soon will be,” I said to myself.

She sprinted across the grass and mashed through a bed of peonies and lunged toward me like a crazed animal. Before I could drop down and hide under the picnic table she pounced on me. “Oh … my … God!” she panted, and grabbed at my body as I tried to wiggle away. “Oh dear Lord! There’s blood! You’ve been shot! Where?” Then she gasped and pointed directly at my face. Her eyes bugged out and her scream was so high-pitched it was silent.

I tasted blood. “Oh cheeze!” I shouted. “I’ve been shot in the mouth!”

With the dish towel still clutched in her hand she pressed it against my forehead.

“Am I dying?” I blubbered. “Is there a hole in my head? Am I breathing?”

I felt her roughly wiping my face while trying to get a clear look at my wound. “Oh, good grief,” she suddenly groaned, and flung her bloodied arms down to her side.

“What?” I asked desperately. “Am I too hurt to be fixed?”

“It’s just your nose problem!” she said, exasperated. “Your dang bloody nose!” Then she pressed the towel to my face again. “Hold it there tightly,” she instructed, “I’ll go get another one.”

She stomped back toward the house, and I sat there for a few torturous minutes with one hand pressing the towel against my nose and breathed deeply through my mouth. Even through the blood I could smell the flinty gunpowder from the bullet. Dad is going to kill me, I thought. He’ll court-martial me and sentence me to death by firing squad. Before I could fully imagine the tragic end of my life I heard an ambulance wailing up the Norvelt road. It took a turn directly into Miss Volker’s driveway and stopped. The driver jumped out and sprinted toward her house and jerked open the porch door.

That’s not good, I thought and turned cold all over. If I shot Miss Volker through the head Mom will never believe it was an accident. She’ll think I was just trying to get out of going to her house in the morning.

I lowered myself down onto the picnic bench and then onto the grass which was slippery from my blood. I trotted across the yard to our screen door. I was still bleeding so I stood outside and dripped on the doormat. Please, please, please, don’t let me have shot her, I thought over and over. I knew I had to say something to Mom, so I gathered up a little courage and as casually as possible said, “Um, there happens to be an ambulance at Miss Volker’s house.”

But Mom was a step ahead of me. “Don’t worry,” she said right back. “I just now called down there. She’s fine. You didn’t shoot her if that is what you are thinking.”

“I was,” I admitted. “I thought I shot her dead!”

“It wasn’t that,” she said, now frowning at me from the other side of the door. “The shock from hearing the rifle go off caused her to drop her hearing aid down the toilet—I guess she had it turned up too high.”

“So why’d she call an ambulance? Did she get her arm stuck going after it?”

“No. She called the plumber, but he’s also the ambulance driver so he made an emergency call. Really,” she said with some admiration, “it’s good that people around this town know how to help out in different ways.”

“Hey, Mom,” I said quietly before going to wash my face at the outside work sink, “please don’t tell Dad about the gun accident.” He was out of town but you never knew when he’d finish a construction job and suddenly show up.

“I’ll consider it,” she said without much promise. “But until he returns you are grounded—and if you do something this stupid again you’ll barely live to regret it. Understand?”

I understood. I really didn’t want Dad knowing what had happened because he would blow a fuse. On top of him not wanting me to touch his stuff he was always trying to teach me about gun safety, and I figured after this gun episode he might give up on me and I didn’t want him to.

“Here,” she said, and handed me a wad of tissues so I could roll them into pointy cones to plug up my nose holes. “And before bed I want you to take a double dose of your iron drops,” she stressed. “The doctor doesn’t want you to become anemic.”

“It’s just a nosebleed,” I said glumly.

“There may be more to it,” she replied. “Besides, given that stunt you just pulled, it’s in your best interest to do exactly what I say.”

I did exactly what she said and cleaned all my blood off and took my medicine and went to bed, but firing that rifle had me all wound up. How could that bullet have gotten into the chamber? The ammo clip was off. I thought about it as I tossed back and forth, but couldn’t come up with an answer. Plus, it was hard to fall asleep with my nose stuffed with massive wads of bloody tissue while breathing through my dry mouth. I turned on my bedside lamp and picked a book from one of the tall stacks Mom had given me. She did some charity auction work for the old elementary school over in Hecla which was closing, and in return they gave her a bunch of books including their beat-up Landmark history series, which had dozens of titles about famous explorers. I was a little too drifty in school so she thought it was a good idea that I read more books, and she knew I liked history and adventure stories.

I started reading about Francisco Pizarro’s hard-to-believe conquest of the Incas in Peru. In 1532 Pizarro and fewer than two hundred men captured Atahualpa, the Inca chief, who had an army of fifty thousand soldiers. Pizarro’s men fired off an old flintlock blunderbuss and the noise and smoke scared the Inca army and Pizarro jumped on Atahualpa and held a sword to his neck and in that very instant the entire Inca empire was defeated. Amazing!

Pizarro then held Atahualpa hostage for a ransom of gold so the Incas brought Pizarro piles of golden life-size people and animals and plants—all sculpted from solid gold as if the Incas had the Midas touch while they strolled through their fantastic cities and farms and jungles and everything they even gently brushed up against turned into pure gold. But no one will ever again see that life-size golden world because once the conquistadors got their greedy hands on the gold they melted it down. They turned all those beautiful golden sculptures into boring Spanish coins and shipped boatloads of them back to the king and queen of Spain, who loved the gold but wanted even more.

Pizarro then raided all the temples and palaces and melted down the gold he found and sent that back. Still, it wasn’t enough for the king and queen. Pizarro even dug up the dead when it was discovered that they were buried with gold. He had their jewelry melted down and sent back to Spain. But it still wasn’t enough. So Pizarro’s men forced the Inca people to work harder in the gold mines. They melted the gold ore and sent that back to Spain, and when there was no more gold Pizarro broke his promise and strangled the Inca king. He turned the Inca people into slaves and they died by the thousands from harsh work and disease.

Finally, one of Pizarro’s own men sneaked up and stabbed him to death because he thought Pizarro was cheating him out of his share of gold for helping to conquer the Incas. Gold had driven the conquistadors crazy and they ended up killing themselves and all of those poor Incas. It was a really tragic story. I just wished I had been with Atahualpa and his army when the conquistadors fired off that blunderbuss. I could have told Atahualpa that I had fired off a rifle too and that it was scary, but not to panic. Then we could have ordered the Inca army to capture the gold-crazed conquistadors and saved the Inca civilization, and history would have been different. If only …

2

I must have fallen asleep because I was dreaming of Pizarro’s crazed men melting down the golden statues of people into a big pot like when you melt a plastic army man over a burner on the stove when your mother isn’t looking. That’s when my alarm clock went off. It was five in the morning. I knew I had set it for six, but after I fell asleep Mom must have reset it. I was just going to roll over and go back to sleep when she tapped my shoulder and whispered, “Jack, are you awake?”

“I’m dreaming of gold,” I moaned. “Lots of gold.”

“Stop dreaming,” she ordered, and pinched my toe. “And hurry up. Miss Volker has probably made your breakfast already. She’s been up for hours.”

“I thought I was grounded,” I said nasally, and plucked out my bloodied nose plugs.

“I’m just loaning you to her for a while,” she explained. “When you finish with her come straight back home. Understand?”

I understood.

When she left I pulled on the same sweaty clothes I had peeled off the night before. I didn’t care that there were bloodstains spattered down the front of my shirt because every shirt I owned was decorated with bloodstains. I glanced at my hair in the mirror. My brown curls stood up on my head like a field planted with question marks. There was no reason to brush it. The question marks would just stand up into exclamation points and then wilt back over into question marks. Besides, I was a boy. It is okay to be a boy slob because moms think they still have time to cure you of your bad habits before you grow up and become an annoying adult slob for someone else.

“Change that nasty shirt,” Mom ordered when she spotted the crusty bib of dried blood across my chest.

I looked down at my shirt. “Hey, how come this blood is brown?” I asked. “Last night it was red.”

“It is too early in the morning to mess with me,” she replied. “Just change the shirt and get moving. I’m going back to bed.”

I didn’t change the shirt. Only a few spots of blood had soaked through, so I just turned it inside out as I walked down the narrow hall, past my small room, through the airless living room, and out the front door and down the three porch steps. All the Norvelt houses were built to look the same. It was like I was stepping out of one of those little green houses in a Monopoly game.

The dark grass was wet with morning dew and a little squeaky under my sneakers. It was tall enough for me to cut. I might be a slob but I kept the yard looking tidy because Dad allowed me to drive our big garden tractor with a mower attachment on the back. I’d love to drive a car, and just thinking of that word, drive, made me look toward the drive-in on the hill and wonder if the bullet I fired had passed cleanly over Norvelt and punctured the screen. From where I paused, the screen was a solid black square and I’d never know if I had hit that tiny Japanese soldier and put a hole in the screen unless I got up close to it, which I promised myself I would do before the summer was over.

Above the screen the western sky was still dark and the stars looked like holes from missed shots. It was a good thing John Glenn had orbited the earth back in February. If he’d still been up there last night I might have shot his Friendship 7 space capsule out of the air and started a world war. That would be just my luck. My uncle who had painted the pony claimed he had seen a UFO come down over that very same hill before the drive-in was built. He was in the newspaper and said he had “touched” the UFO and that it was “covered in a strange Martian language that looked like chicken feet.” My dad called my uncle a nut, but it wasn’t so nutty when the army sent troops and a big truck to take the mysterious UFO away and afterward military police went door-to-door to all the little towns around here, warning people not to talk about “the fallen object” with any strangers as they might be Russian spies.

Because my mind wanders in the morning my feet are always a few steps ahead of me and suddenly I found myself on Miss Volker’s back porch. There was a large heart-shaped box of chocolates covered in red foil leaning against her door. I bent down and picked up the box. A small note card was tucked under the decorative red lace ribbon. I knew I shouldn’t read it, but I couldn’t help myself. I loved to know other people’s personal business. Mom called me a gossip lover. But I called it whisper history, so as quickly as I could I pulled out the card and flipped it over. It was from Mr. Spizz. The handwriting was all chunky printing that leaned forward just like words blasting out of his mouth. It read, I’m still ready, willing and waiting. Your swain since 1912 with the patience of Job.—Edwin Spizz.

He was patient—1912 was fifty years ago. Waiting for what, I wondered. I didn’t know what a “swain” was. I put the card back into the envelope and slipped it under the ribbon. Mr. Spizz was with my uncle the night they found the UFO. Dad called him the town busybody. Mr. Spizz was an original Norvelter and worked for the Norvelt Association for the Public Good. He thought he was a big deal around town, but he was kind of sinister and lived and worked out of a tiny office in the moldy basement of the Community Center.

I rapped on Miss Volker’s door with my knuckles. “Miss Volker!” I called out loudly because her hearing aid might still be waterlogged from the toilet. “It’s Jack Gantos. I’m here to help you.”

“Come in!” she cawed like a pirate parrot.

I pushed the door to and stuck my head inside. “Hello?”

“In the kitchen,” she squawked.

I followed the smell of bacon and entered the kitchen where I was surprised to see her leaning over the gas stove with her hands inside a wide, tall pot and her face all screwed up in agony. I could tell by the leaf-size flames under the pot that it had to be scalding hot, and right away I was wondering if she was melting herself down. Mom had always said she was worth her weight in gold to our little town. But before I could start a conversation about Inca gold she said, “Sit and eat,” and nodded her stiff bush of bluish cotton-candy hair toward a chair at the kitchen table where a plate had been set with bacon, eggs, and toast.

“I found these chocolates on the porch,” I said, and offered her the box.

“Put them on the table!” she ordered without removing her hands from the pot.

“There is a card too,” I pointed out.

“You can just throw that in the trash!” she snapped.

“Trash?” I asked. “Don’t you want to know who it’s from?”

“It’s from the same hopeless case as always!” she said. “Now trash it!”

I tossed the card in the trash like she said. I put the chocolates on the table and when I sat down she began to talk as if someone were sticking her with sharp pins. “Thank you for coming!” she cried out, and did a spastic tippy-toe dance. “Today,” she squeaked, “we are about to embark on a great experiment!” Then she took a deep breath, shifted her hips around, and grimaced.

“What kind of experiment?” I asked fearfully, and stared at the pot where I was sure her hands were melting.

“Oh, gosh,” she said in a strained voice, and jerked her head back and stamped her thick old-lady shoe heels on the kitchen linoleum. “This is really, really scalding hot but let’s still keep talking and pretend like nothing at all is wrong.”

“Miss Volker,” I asked quietly, trying to be ridiculously calm like when doctors talk to insane people in the movies. I didn’t want her to snap and try and kill me like some psychotic lunatic. “You do realize that you are cooking your hands down in that big pot?”

“Of … course … I … do … dear,” she sputtered, and bit down on her lip and hissed as if her words were driven by steam. “Now … please … turn … it … off.”

I sprang out of my chair and twisted the knob on the stove and the flames doubled in size.

“Jeez Louise!” she shouted crossly. “I said off!”

“Whoops, sorry,” I apologized, and quickly turned the knob the other way.

“Agrhhh!” she cried out. “I think I may have really melted them this time.”

She lifted her hands out of the pot and they were melting. Lumps of glowing yellow flesh oozed down her forearms and spattered onto the floor.

“Oh mercy!” I cried, and fidgeted up and down like a terrified squirrel. “Miss Volker, what have you done to yourself?”

“Turn the cold water on over the sink!” she ordered. “I think I may have done permanent damage.”

I nearly flew to the sink and turned the spigot handle. “Give me your hands,” I said. “Quick.”

She stumbled toward me, then held out the sagging stumps of her melted arms. I hesitated, but there was nothing else to do except run away screaming, so I grabbed what I thought were her wrists. Oh cheeze! The warm, lifeless flesh squished between my fingers as I tugged her forward and held her ruined hands under the water.

She stamped the floor and groaned in horsey agony as her eyes rolled back into her head.

“You’ll be fine,” I jabbered about five jittery times in a row, and each time my mind echoed back, “You won’t be fine … you won’t ever be fine because you just melted your hands off!”

“Ahhh,” she sighed with a relaxed shudder, and after a moment her eyes leveled out. “That feels better,” she said calmly. “Now turn off the water.”

I did and she held her arms up. “Now peel it off,” she ordered.

“Peel what off?” I asked.

“The sticky stuff on my arms,” she said impatiently, and then she held a rounded stump up to her mouth, bit off a cooked chunk, and spit it into the trash.

I felt faint. I staggered back a few steps and by then my nose was spewing like an elephant bathing himself. “Please … Miss Volker,” I said with my voice quavering. “Please don’t eat your own flesh.” Oh cheeze-us-crust. Mom didn’t know Miss Volker had gone insane, and I knew I would go insane too if I had to watch her cannibalize her own body down to the white boiled bones.

“You’re bleeding all over the floor,” she said, turning her attention toward me as if she wanted to wash her flesh meal down with my blood. “Let me have a look at you.” Then she reached toward me with her deformed stumps and touched my face and at that moment I yelped out loud and dropped over dead.

When I came to I was alive and stretched out on Miss Volker’s kitchen floor. I was covered with blood but I didn’t know if it was nose blood or blood from after she started eating me. I lifted my head and turned it left and right to check if she had eaten through my neck. I was fine but she was standing above me and pulling long, rotten strips of flesh off her arms and hands as if peeling a rotten banana. She wadded them all up, leaned to one side, and dropped a ball into the large pot on the stove.

“Am I dead?” I asked. I felt dead.

“You fainted,” she replied. “And I fixed your nose.”

“You touched me?” I asked fearfully, and reached for my nose to see if it was still on my face.

“Yes,” she said. “After I got the wax off my fingers they were working okay so I folded some tissues into a wad and shoved them up between your upper lip and gum. That’s what stops a nosebleed.”

“You have fingers?” I asked, confused. I had seen them melt off like the Inca gold being melted down.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m human and I have fingers. They don’t work well because of my arthritis so I have to heat them up in a pot of hot paraffin in order to get them working for about fifteen minutes.”

“Hot what?”

“Hot wax,” she repeated impatiently. “You saw me doing it when you came in. Did that smack on your head when you hit the floor give you amnesia?”

I sat up and rubbed the lump on the back of my head. “I thought you were melting your fingers into gold,” I said. “I thought you had gone crazy.”

“I think you’ve gone crazy,” she replied. “You’re delusional. Now let’s not waste any more time. I have a deadline.”

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Writing an obituary,” she revealed.

“Mine?”

“No! You are fine—you’re a spineless jellyfish, but not dead enough to bury. Now take a look at these hands,” she ordered, and thrust them in front of me. They were still bright red from the hot wax and curled over like the talons of a hawk perched on a fence. “I can’t write with them anymore,” she explained, “or do anything that requires fine motor skills. My twin sister used to write out the obituaries for me but her jug-headed idiot husband moved her to Florida last month. I was hoping he’d just have a spasm and drop dead and she would move in with me—but it didn’t work out that way. So you are now my official scribe. I got the idea from reading about President John Quincy Adams. He had arthritis too and when his hands gave out he had a young scribe who wrote for him. I’ll talk and you’ll write. You got that?”

“Sure,” I said, and then she caught me sneaking a peek at the glowing kitchen clock which was in the shape of a giant Bayer aspirin. It was six-thirty in the morning.

“That,” she said proudly, and aimed her chin at the clock, “was given to me by the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company after I gave out over a quarter million of their aspirin tablets to coal miners here in western Pennsylvania who suffered with back pain and splitting headaches.”

“That is a lot of pills,” I remarked, not knowing what else to say but the obvious.

“In nursing school,” she said, “I was taught by the doctors that the role of medical science is to relieve human suffering, and I’ve lived by that motto all my life.”

“What about your hands?” I said, pointing up at them.

“Someday science will solve that. But for now, get up off the floor,” she ordered. “We’ve got to get this obit to the newspaper in an hour so Mr. Greene can print it for tomorrow morning’s edition.”

I stood all the way up and staggered into the living room.

“There’s your office,” she said, and pointed a shiny red hand toward an old school desk and matching chair. “Lift the top.”

I did. There were several pads of lined paper and a bundle of sharpened pencils held together with a rubber band.

“I’ll talk, and you write,” she explained, setting the rules. “If I talk too quickly then you just tell me and I’ll slow down. You got it?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was really ready to do anything that would clear my head from thinking about this old lady melting her flesh in a kitchen pot.

Miss Volker stood by the fireplace mantel and took a breath so deep it straightened out her curved spine.

“Emma Devers Slater,” she started, and sharply enunciated each flinty syllable as if she were using a hammer and chisel to phonetically carve the dead woman’s name onto a stone crypt, “was born on Christmas day, 1878, and died on June 15, 1962, while attending to her prize honeybees, which were once essential for pollinating crops at Norvelt’s community farm. She and her husband were original members of the two hundred and fifty families that started the Homestead of Norvelt in 1934, occupying house A-38, a two-bedroom model.

“The Slater family, which she married into, is an old name in these parts and famous for offspring with extremely hard heads. I remind the reader of the true story of the Slater ‘girl’ who was captured by Indians in the 1830s, knocked unconscious with a war club and scalped with a knife, but still managed to abscond with her life and survive hairlessly to live to a ripe old age beneath a wig made of curly hamster fur.

“And who can forget Emma Slater’s brother-in-law, Frederick, who was tamping an explosive charge into a coal vein with a metal rod when the charge accidentally exploded and propelled the rod up through his cheek and clean out the top of his head? He survived and lived a long life as a traveling medical-miracle circus attraction and made money by charging people a dime to stick their finger into the damp hole in his head. Frederick married another circus attraction who when she was a girl had a piece of white picket fence driven through her upper torso during the great Johns-town Flood of 1889.

“Emma Slater is survived by four loving children who grew up in Norvelt, but none of them live in town any longer, having left to find jobs. Her husband, Herbert Mark Slater, passed away twenty-three years prior from black lung disease after working in the mines at Mutual Shaft all his life except during his military service in World War I and the Great Depression years when the mines were closed. Mrs. Slater belonged to the Mothers’ Club of Norvelt, the Fancy Hat Club, and the Lutheran Church.

“We are grateful for her community service, especially her years as a school crossing guard where she was much loved by children. An open viewing and memorial service will be held at the Oscar Huffer Funeral Parlor next Friday from six until nine in the evening followed by a potluck buffet at the Community Center, where her exceptional needlepoint portrait of our town’s esteemed founder, Eleanor Roosevelt, will be on display.”

Then she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and quietly said a little prayer for Mrs. Slater.

By the time she opened her eyes I had put my pencil down. “Is that it?” I asked, and caught myself panting as if I’d run a marathon. My hand was feeling as cramped as hers looked.

“No,” she replied, “but you can take a break. That’s just the family part I have to write. I’ve done the best I can for Mrs. Slater. Writing obits is doing my duty for Mrs. Roosevelt, but it also allows me to write things that people wouldn’t normally read around here. I guess you could say the obits are the honey to attract readers. Now here is the part I want to write, so stretch your fingers and get your pencil revved up—people may die but we’ve got some important ideas to keep alive.”

Then she awkwardly palmed a small history book with one hand and raised it into the air. Her twisted fingers looked like the rough old roots of a tree that had grown around a clay brick. She puffed herself up like a tent preacher and began to belt out the other half of the story.

“For those of you interested in the history of hardworking people, Mrs. Slater died on the same day as Wat Tyler in 1381. Wat Tyler, who was the heroic leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt, was killed for wanting equality between peasants, who owned no land, and the Royalty and the Church, who owned all the land.

“All Wat Tyler was asking for was that the land be equally divided so that every peasant family could farm and feed themselves. The peasants fought hard with Wat against the king’s army and finally Wat and his force of common people entered London and were poised to take over the city.

“At that time King Richard II was only fourteen years old, but he was surrounded by rich and powerful lords. Wat Tyler was invited to have a private talk with King Richard to solve the land problem. But he was tricked! At the meeting the Lord Mayor of London stepped forward and stabbed Wat in the neck, then had his head chopped off and spiked onto a tall pole as a gory lesson to all who would defy the king and revolt for equal rights.

“After their leader was beheaded the peasant army fled. But for those of us who live in Norvelt—a town of common people who own our own land—we should never forget Wat Tyler and his revolt to make life better for his own people!”

She was really worked up as she paced back and forth and swung her arms around like a windmill. I wrote as fast as humanly possible and did a pretty good job getting it down considering it was my first job as a scribe.

“Any questions?” she asked once she had concluded. “Anything seem unclear to you?”

“Why did you add the part about Wat Tyler?” I asked. “It’s not like Mrs. Slater was alive in 1381.”

“Connect the dots,” she answered impatiently. “Our dear little Norvelt was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew common people like us wanted equality just like Wat and his people. Our hunger is related to their hunger. Our desire to work hard is related to their desire to work hard. Working people always share the same history of being kicked around by the rich.”

“Okay,” I said, “I get that part. So what is A-38? I never heard of that.”

“Look at the map,” she said, pointing above my head with a finger that was like a bent nail. “See house number A-38?”

I stood up and turned. Mounted behind me was a large needlepoint map of Norvelt which spread across the entire wall. On it were hand-stitched all the streets and houses and gardens and yard animals and businesses and municipal buildings and creeks. There were five sections: A, B, C, D, and E. Beneath each house a number was sewn in next to a last name.

“Take a red-topped map pin from the corner and stick it into house number A-38,” she said. “Emma was the last of the Slater family in Norvelt.”

“What’s this map?” I asked.

“It’s the town you were born in,” she said irritably. “Don’t tell me you are too ignorant to know where you are from?”

“It just doesn’t look like this anymore,” I said. “It’s changed. Like, the Huffer Funeral Parlor isn’t on here. Or the baseball field. Or the hardware store. Or Fenton’s gas station and bar. And you have a Chicken Farm and Community Farm on here that I’ve never seen.”