CHAPTER 14

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Something Strange

Kenny Parton wasn’t feeling very good. He was a little bit cold and a little bit hungry nearly all the time, and this was disagreeable, but even worse was the general dullness of everything. School, where he went a few days a week, seemed like a waste of good time. Most days, there were hardly any students. They stayed home to help care for sick brothers and sisters and grandparents, or to help repair leaking roofs, or because they weren’t feeling well themselves. The students who did come often dozed off during the lessons. Still, the teacher, Eenette Buloware, showed up almost every day. For three hours in the morning, she told them stories from history or explained how things in the world worked. She had flimsy gray hair and a long neck and nervous hands that moved around in the air as if trying to draw pictures of what she was talking about.

“Today,” she would say, “we are going to discuss Ancient Forms of Transportation,” and her right hand, with its forefinger pointing, would travel out to her right side, weave back to the left, and move right again, in case anyone didn’t know that transportation had to do with moving around. She would make a hand fly over her head when she talked about airplanes, and she would chug her elbows back and forth when she talked about trains.

Their lesson that day was on Appliances of the Ancient World. They would learn about this, Ms. Buloware said, because someday they would learn how to make these helpful things again. “Some of you in this very classroom,” she said, “might learn to make a washing machine, or a stove, or a flush toilet.”

“What is a flush toilet?” asked one of the smallest students.

Some of the others snickered, but Ms. Buloware was not embarrassed by this subject. “A flush toilet,” she said, “causes human waste to be swept cleanly away. You can see them in the rooms at the Pioneer Hotel. They are white, shaped like a very large bowl, with a sort of box at the back.” She made the shape of a bowl with her hands, and then the shape of a box.

“But how does it work?” said someone.

“Water springs up in it,” said Ms. Buloware. “The water carries away the waste.” Her hand swept sideways.

“And then where does it go?”

Ms. Buloware looked momentarily confused. Kenny could tell that she didn’t know the answer to this question. She could have admitted this and no one would have blamed her. But she didn’t like to appear ignorant. So she said, “It goes far, far away.”

“But how?” Kenny asked.

Ms. Buloware frowned. “It has to do with pipes,” she said. “And pressures. And electricity. In any case, it is too complex for me to explain to you.”

It seemed to Kenny that everything in the Ancient World had to do with electricity. Whenever he asked how something had worked—cars, lamps, refrigerators, telescopes—the answer was always electricity. But then when he asked what electricity was, and where it came from, and why they couldn’t get it now, Ms. Buloware never knew the answer. None of his other teachers had ever known it, either. Kenny figured that everything that seemed impossible had to do with electricity. He asked the teacher once if birds could fly because of electricity. “Of course not,” she said. “Birds can fly because they have wings. And because they’re alive. It isn’t electricity that powers them.”

“What does, then?” Kenny had asked, but the teacher just shook her head impatiently.

Another teacher, who’d read one of the books from the library Edward Pocket was making at the back of the Ark, said electricity came from lightning. But how you could take a great dagger of lightning that lasted for only a few seconds and use it to make a lamp light up Kenny could not understand. He liked things to make sense, and electricity didn’t.

The only part of school he liked was Nature. In Nature, each student got one assignment for the year. You were supposed to observe a certain thing and write down everything you could about it. For instance, last year Kenny’s assignment was Ants. He spent hours watching ants marching along in long wavery lines; he watched ants carrying bits of grass; he found the ant nest and figured out that the little white grainy things were ant eggs. He wrote it all down, added a few sketches, and his report was put with the collection in the schoolroom. The year before, his assignment was Blue Bird with Pointed Cap. That was harder, because birds were harder to follow around than ants. And another year, he did Strawberry Plant, and wrote about when to plant these plants, how they grew, and how hard it was to keep Blue Bird with Pointed Cap from stealing them.

The amazing thing was that Doon had done sort of the same thing back in his underground city. This was one reason Kenny felt so close to Doon—they were alike, at least in some ways. Doon had had a collection of insects that he observed and wrote about—but he’d had to leave it behind when he left. Kenny wished he could have seen it. He thought probably it was a masterpiece.

Other than Nature, school seemed confusing or boring to Kenny. He’d learned to read a long time ago, but he didn’t much like doing it. There wasn’t anything very interesting to read. And he’d learned his numbers well enough, up to the part where you have one number on top of another one, with a line between them. He got a little lost after that.

He was restless in school. The outside called to him, even in winter. On days when it wasn’t raining, and when his mother didn’t need him to help with some household task, he went down to the rain-swollen river and watched the water pour over the rocks, or he went up into the woods on the other side and poked around, happy if he could spot an owl having its daytime sleep or a rabbit disappearing into the grass.

One cold afternoon, he put on two sweaters and a jacket and went looking for Doon. Doon was a kind of cross between big brother and hero to Kenny. He hadn’t seen him since the day after the roamer came, when he’d taught him how to make a whistle. It would be good to talk to him, Kenny thought, so he took off down the river road toward the Pioneer Hotel.

The air was icy, but the sun was out, and Kenny moved along at an easy lope. He passed the Ark, where people were working to patch the broken roof, and farther on, he passed some people combing through a thicket of withered brown blackberry bushes, looking for the tiny dried-up berries that the birds sometimes missed. He thought he would like to have some of those berries right now—just thinking about them made him feel the empty spot in his stomach—but when he asked if they’d found any, the searchers said they hadn’t.

When he arrived at the Pioneer, Kenny went around to the back to see what was going on. People were at work destroying old buildings out in the churned-up field. Stacks of boards stood everywhere, and windows in their frames leaned against each other, and chunks of concrete and stones were heaped in mounds like small hills. When spring came and the weather was more reliable, these materials would be used, along with mud-and-straw bricks, to build the houses so badly needed by the people still living in the decrepit hotel.

Kenny trotted around, looking for Doon. He didn’t see him. Sadge Merrill was out there, lugging a big heavy beam across the sodden ground, his breath puffing clouds into the air. The boy named Chet Noam was there carrying buckets of nails, and even the fragile little Miss Thorn, who had been a teacher in Ember, was out there wearing overalls and a big quilted coat, helping to lay string along the ground to mark the outlines of the future houses. Kenny wandered around, watching all this, and finally he saw Doon’s father over by the hotel’s back door. A big tub of nails and bolts and washers and things was beside him, and he was sorting those things into piles with his left hand. His right hand was all bandaged up.

Kenny went up to him. “Hi, Doon’s father,” he said.

“Hi, Kenny.” Loris Harrow looked up from his work and smiled.

“What happened to your hand?” Kenny asked.

Doon’s father explained.

“Is it better?” Kenny asked.

“I think so,” said Doon’s father. “It feels a little . . . well, a little sore and swollen, but I guess that’s to be expected.”

“I’m looking for Doon,” Kenny said. “I can’t find him.”

“That’s because he isn’t here,” said Doon’s father. “He’s staying up at Doctor Hester’s house this week, helping out. He left yesterday.”

So Kenny turned around and started up the river road again, heading for the other end of the village. He moved along idly, stopping to observe a beetle lying on its back with its legs waving (he turned it over with a twig), and to pick up a blue feather that wasn’t too muddy, and to pitch a rock as far as he could throw it out into the field. He saw a few people down by the river. They had poles with them; they’d be hoping to catch fish.

By the time Kenny got to the doctor’s house, it was late afternoon. In the courtyard, Torren was sitting on a bench in a patch of sunlight. He was playing with one of his treasures, a toy airplane, making it climb and dive in the air. Poppy stood by his knee, breaking a twig into pieces. She was so bundled up that she looked like a small puffy package with feet.

“Hi, Torren,” Kenny said. “Is Doon here?”

“No. Why would he be? He’s probably down working at the Pioneer the way he always is.”

“Nope,” said Kenny. “I looked for him there. Where’s Lina?”

“She’s down there, too,” Torren said. “They needed some extra help, so she went. For three or four days. I think she was tired of being here and wanted a big change. Maddy came up to stay with us. She’s in the kitchen making soup.”

“Oh,” said Kenny. He thought about this. He could tell that someone had the facts wrong, but he wasn’t sure who.

Poppy pulled on his sleeve. “I breaked the stick,” she said.

“You did,” said Kenny. “Good girl.” He patted Poppy’s head. “How long has Lina been gone?”

“I don’t know.” Torren sent his airplane into a steep dive. “Just a couple of days, I think. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I just wondered why . . . I just think it’s kind of strange that . . . Oh, well. Never mind. I have to get going now.”

“Going where?” said Torren, putting his airplane down. “And what’s strange?”

The door of the house opened just then, and Mrs. Murdo came out. There were stains on her shirt, and her hair straggled. Kenny could tell she was tired. “Hello, Kenny,” she said. “Poppy, it’s much too cold for you to be outside. Time for you to come in. You, too, Torren.”

“I’m not cold,” Torren said.

Mrs. Murdo shrugged. It was clear she was not up to arguing with him. “Come in when you are, then,” she said. She took Poppy’s hand, and they went back into the house.

“So I’m going,” said Kenny. “Bye.”

“But where are you going?”

“Nowhere. Just back into town.”

“Can I come with you? You can tell me what’s strange.”

“No,” Kenny said. He wished he hadn’t said a thing about it. “I’m just going home. I can’t be late for dinner.”

“No one ever tells me anything,” said Torren. He glowered at Kenny, but Kenny ignored him and went back out to the road.

He puzzled over what he’d heard as he walked toward town. Doon’s father thought Doon was at the doctor’s house, but he wasn’t. Torren thought Lina was at the Pioneer, but as far as Kenny could tell, she wasn’t. What did this mean? He concentrated hard on figuring it out and did not hear the steps behind him.