Moon Over Manifest (23 page)

“What kid would want to erase fine poetry like that?” Lettie smiled. “You’d be considered the lucky one to have this desk.”

“Let’s see if there’s any more that have writing,” I said, moving to the next desk over. “Here’s one. It’s unsigned.

Ruthanne read another.

Then, suddenly, Lettie screamed from the desk in the far back corner. “Here it is! ‘Ode to the Rattler by Stucky Cybulskis.’ ”

Ruthanne and I hurdled chairs to reach the back. We looked at Lettie in anticipation, but she said, “Ruthanne, I think you should get to read it. After all, it was your idea to look.”

“Okay.” Ruthanne grinned and raised an eyebrow. “But don’t blame me if it’s scary. ‘Ode to the Rattler,’ ” she began, making her voice sound spooky like Count Dracula.

Ruthanne did such a fine rendition that we were pleasantly spooked—until we heard a clattering noise in the hallway. After several seconds of us pointing to each other, determining who should look out the window of the door, it seemed that with Lettie and Ruthanne both pointing to me, I was the chosen one.

Without a word, Lettie got down on her hands and knees next to the door and I stepped up on her back. I saw a man in sweat-stained clothes. A cigar hung from his mouth. He
dunked a large scrub brush into a bucket of water and commenced halfheartedly scrubbing the floor.

Lettie fidgeted a little under my weight. “What do you see?” she grunted.

“It’s the janitor.”

“The janitor?” Ruthanne smacked her hand against her forehead. “Oh, Lord, mean Mr. Foster.”

“He’s scrubbing the hallway. And from the looks of the tin canister next to him, I think he’s fixing to do some waxing.”

“That man barely lifts a finger all year long and he picks now to wax floors?”

Lettie shifted again and I bumped up against the door. The noise startled Mr. Foster and he dropped his cigar right into the soapy water. He let fly with a string of curses that would make a sailor blush, and stomped down the hallway and out of sight.

“He left!” I said, jumping down from Lettie’s back. “I think he’s just going to get another cigar. If we hurry, we can sneak back out the same way we came in.”

The three of us scampered out of the classroom and back to the open closet window. Ruthanne and I gave Lettie a boost up. Then I laced my fingers together to give Ruthanne a foothold. She looked at me. “Wait a minute. He’s got the bucket. If you give me a leg up, how will you get out?”

I confessed I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I’ll find an open door.”

“But—”

“Hurry up, or he’ll come back and I’ll be stuck in here. I’ll be fine,” I assured her.

“Okay. We’ll meet you in the alley behind the schoolyard.”

She wiggled out the window and was gone.

I chanced a look into the hallway. He still wasn’t there. But as soon as I ventured into the open, his swear words announced his return. The closest place to go was back into the senior classroom. I ducked in and leaned my back against the chalkboard with my heart pounding and sweat trickling down my neck.

By then the shadows in the classroom had grown long. My breathing seemed so loud I was sure Mr. Foster could hear me through the classroom wall. It was the same feeling I had when getting ready to jump from a train. Only this train wasn’t slowing down.

I could hear the sound of the janitor’s lackadaisical scrubbing against the wooden floor. It looked like I might be stuck there for a while. As I slowly inched along the wall and away from the door, my hand brushed across the pages of the still open dictionary. It was open to the
H
s.

This was the only dictionary I’d seen since coming to Manifest, and I remembered Sister Redempta’s instructions. “Manifest,” she’d said, “look it up.” I thumbed through the pages.
Hobble, hobby, hobnail. What’s a hobnail?
I wondered. I flipped ahead to the
M
s.
Magi, magpie, manicure … manifest
.

I listened to make sure I could hear scrubbing in the hall. Mr. Foster was still at it.

Manifest—noun. A list of passengers on a ship
.

That was interesting, since most of the people who had lived in Manifest years before were immigrants who had come to this country on ships. So their names would have been listed on a ship’s manifest. But Sister Redempta had said that the word was a verb as well as a noun.

Manifest—verb. To reveal, to make known
.

I admit I was stumped. She had said to start my story with the dictionary and this definition in particular. How was this supposed to help me start a story? What was I supposed to make known? The room was hot and stuffy. I lifted my foot to give my leg a scratch and managed to knock a book off the bottom shelf. It hit the floor with a thump.

Quietly picking it up, all I heard was my own breathing. That was it. No scrubbing noise from the hallway. I scooted quickly back to the door, only to smell the stale odor of old cigar. Then somebody on the other side slowly turned the doorknob. I couldn’t move and there was no place to hide anyway. This was just an empty summertime classroom. I squeezed the book to my chest, waiting to be discovered, when there was a loud
kapow, kapang, kapang, kapow
farther down the hallway. It sounded like Al Capone had arrived in Manifest with tommy guns blazing.

Mr. Foster issued forth with another exuberant round of oaths, yelling his way down the hall. I took my chance, sprinting the opposite way down the hall and bursting out a side door that had been left propped open by a can of nails.

I rushed to the alley, not knowing what I feared more, Mr. Foster or the gun-firing gangsters, then ran headlong into Lettie and Ruthanne.

“Quick! Over here!” Ruthanne shoved me behind a rose trellis that didn’t provide much coverage, as there were no blooms to boast of.

Ruthanne and Lettie giggled.

“What’s so funny? I was nearly caught by Mr. Foster. And then gunshots went off from who knows where. I could have been killed in there!”

They giggled even louder.

“Those weren’t gunshots.”

“They were firecrackers!”

“We busted you out.”

“So happy Independence Day!”

Lettie’s firecrackers. I was relieved and a little embarrassed at getting into such a flurry. I smiled a shaky smile.

“Wait!” I said, realizing I still held the book in my hand. “I have to put this back.”

But they were already pulling me toward the newspaper office for some of Hattie Mae’s lemonade.

“There’s no going back in there now,” Lettie said. “My brother, Teddy, is going to be a senior this year. He can take it back the first day of school, and no one will be the wiser.”

“Are you sure?” I hesitated.

“Sure I’m sure. Just put it somewhere safe until then and Teddy will put it back in its place.”

Back in its place. The first day of school. Where would I be then? What was my place?

Where would Gideon be? I had so many questions that had no answers. I recalled the definition in the dictionary.

Manifest—verb. To reveal, to make known
.

The way I saw it, that was the wrong name for this town.

I
n our hunt for the Rattler, Ruthanne, Lettie, and I must not have been as secret as we thought. One day, I was walking up Main Street, caught up in my own little contest of tossing a hedge apple into the air and catching it, hoping to count to two hundred catches without dropping. I was on one hundred and fifty-eight when Mr. Cooper, the barber, stepped out of his shop, blocking my way.

He flapped his haircutting cape to shake off the clippings and said, “Hey, kid.”

I looked around to make sure he was talking to me.

“You one of them girls that’s been looking for a spy?” he asked, kind of half looking at me.

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “Um.” I shrugged. I admit it wasn’t the best I could come up with, but it kept him talking.

“Yeah, well, my father came here from Germany.
Hermann Keufer. We lived at 224 Easy Street. Can you believe that? A street called Easy and a German living on it during the war? I was fifteen when the war started, and I can tell you, it was far from easy.” Mr. Cooper took out his razor and wiped it clean with his apron.

I wasn’t sure why he was telling me all this, but he kept on. “He worked in the mines and sang baritone in a barbershop quartet. After he died, my mother changed our last name. She thought it would make things easier on us.” The sun glinting off the razor made his eyes water. “Somehow, I always felt like we were turning our backs on the old man.” He folded the razor on itself and put it into his pocket. “So if there was a spy here, good luck finding him, but it wasn’t my dad. All right?”

I nodded, relieved to watch him and his razor go back into the barber shop. My gaze went to the old picture in his store window of the group of men in overalls and miner’s hats. It was easy to spot Hermann Keufer with his handlebar mustache. Slowly, thoughtfully, I took up catching the hedge apple again,
One, two, three …
, but I wasn’t really paying attention to my counting anymore.

A couple of days later it happened again. This time it was the elderly Mrs. Dawkins. She saw me walking by the beauty shop while she was getting her curls done. She rapped on the window and motioned me in. Then she pulled me so close to her that the sharp-smelling concoction for her permanent wave nearly singed my nostrils.

“I know what you girls are up to,” she hissed, then looked over her shoulder at Betty Lou, the beautician, who was rinsing out strips of cloth across the room. “Be careful. You might uncover more than you bargained for.” With the
curlers rolled up tight, her face seemed strangely misshapen, and I wanted to pull away, but she held me with her eyes. “Those were
unusual
times,” she said, lowering her voice and raising her eyebrows.

Betty Lou was coming back and Mrs. Dawkins released me. “Go on, now,” she whispered, “and remember what I told you.”

I hadn’t said a word to the woman, but she talked as if she was revealing some long-buried secret. If there was one thing I was learning about the town of Manifest, it was that Secret was its middle name. And if someone had a secret, I seemed to be the one to tell. One thing was clear. Those
were
unusual times.

At Sunday night’s church service, the crowd at Shady’s place—if eight people could be called a crowd—got settled into their seats. Hattie Mae had been coming regularly, along with Velma T. Harkrader. It was interesting that some people looked just how I imagined them from Miss Sadie’s stories, while others looked different. Velma T. was just what I’d imagined. Tall and skinny, a little on the homely side, but smarter than any woman I’d ever known.

Then there was Mrs. Dawkins, who didn’t look nearly as scary with her hair done up nice instead of pulled back in curlers. Ivan DeVore, Mr. Cooper, Mr. Koski from the diner, Shady, me. Of course, there were many people from Miss Sadie’s stories I hadn’t seen yet and wondered if they just kept to themselves or had moved away.

That Sunday night we had a surprise guest. Mrs. Evans. The stone lady from the porch. I didn’t think Shady knew
she was coming or he’d have mentioned it, but he didn’t act the least surprised. He just welcomed her in and found her a seat next to Hattie Mae. I must have been staring and lost in shock, because Shady had to ask me three times to take my seat. I pulled up a chair.

Finally, Shady started the service with a reading from the Bible. It was about two men walking along a road. Then, all of a sudden Jesus was walking with them, only they didn’t know it was him. After they talked awhile, they “broke bread”—that was what they called eating—and somehow, just by eating with him, they recognized who Jesus was.

It was a good story, and I wouldn’t have minded hearing what Shady had to say about it. After all, he was a preacher, if only a temporary one. But at the First Baptist Church and Bar, as I had come to call it, there never was much of a sermon. Shady figured everyone had been preached to enough in their own churches that morning.

Even though Shady was the interim Baptist minister, I think he was more of a Quaker at heart. One of those people who called themselves Friends. Gideon and I had gone to a Quaker meeting once, because they were having roast beef and sweet potatoes afterward. It was real nice the way they came together in what their preacher called silent, expectant waiting. Of course, eventually, those Friends started talking and sharing about the Lord.

Well, the folks in Manifest weren’t really Friends; they were more like acquaintances. And they didn’t often get past the silent part to the sharing-about-the-Lord part. I supposed some were coming for the food following the service, just like Gideon and I had, and if that was the case, they
were probably glad they hadn’t wasted many words on what food was provided. Sometimes beans, sometimes crackers and canned sardines.

But there seemed to be a different mood in the group this Sunday night. Like they wanted to say something but couldn’t quite get up the nerve.

After an awkward few minutes went by without anyone saying a word, Hattie Mae ended the silence, saying, “Well, I think it’s time to serve up the refreshments.”

I was all ready to help parcel out the smidgeon of food when, lo and behold, Hattie Mae uncovered a huge angel food cake. It must have been twelve inches high. She cut it up into nice big wedges while I poured the coffee.