The corn isn’t mine, by the way. I rent the field out to a local farmer, Dale Cromwell, who started farming it for my grandfather almost fifty years ago. He pays me enough to cover the land tax, and every spring, like clockwork, he tries to convince me to sell the land to him. I could probably get a lot of money for it, but I don’t want to take the chance of him deciding to build a house on the property and blocking my view.
Anyway, I called Cheri again and she’s coming back in the morning after my class at the high school. She’s bringing what she insists on calling “the evidence” with her, and she thinks it will persuade me to let her dig around out there with a “small team of archaeologists” from my alma mater, the University of Connecticut. I told her I didn’t imagine Dale would appreciate her messing up his corn, but she said she thought she could reach some kind of agreement with him if only I’d say yes.
I didn’t flat out tell her no, but I’m going to. I’m sure someone in my family in the last hundred years would have known of something like this village she’s talking about, and I’ve never heard a word about it. And even if there is something to her story, she says she doesn’t think there will be any “significant ruins,” because she says it’s just a place this mysterious tribe lived for a few short years and then disappeared from without leaving much behind except vague rumors. So what the hell does she think she’s going to find? Chewing gum wrappers?
Whatever, I don’t want people traipsing around in my field all summer with pickaxes and shovels and making noise when I’m trying to work. Cheri Tipton can kiss my ass if she doesn’t like it.
I get up at sunrise and stumble downstairs to the shower, then I make breakfast and go back upstairs with a cup of tea to sit at the desk and grade papers. While I’m circling misspellings and comma splices, I sip at my tea and stare out the window and play with the loose brass handles on the bottom desk drawer with my toes.
When I was in junior high and high school, mornings used to be when I wrote in my journal. From the time I was thirteen until I left home for college, I got up every day and scribbled down whatever I was thinking. For reasons that are utterly obscure to me now, I used to think I’d eventually want a written record of my teenage years.
I was in junior high at the time and my English teacher was having us read The Diary of Anne Frank, which gave me the idea (along with every other overimaginative kid in the class) to start keeping a journal. After all, I did have my very own Nazi living in the same house with me, and our bedroom door was hidden behind a bookshelf, just like Anne’s. I bought a fountain pen and one of those cool black leather notebooks with unlined pages, and I used to sprawl out on my bed and write for half an hour or so right after I woke up.
It was all there: daily life with Tommy, first loves, fights with Dad, first sex, jobs, dreams, nightmares, masturbation fantasies, grievances, and an embarrassing amount of self-important, pseudointellectual rambling. There’s a place in the downstairs bedroom where Tommy and I (who shared that room our entire childhood) kept things we didn’t want Dad to find. It’s a cubbyhole in the closet under a loose board, and until I moved out of the house after high school I always kept my journal there. In the five years between when I first started writing and when I moved out, I had seven full notebooks in the cubbyhole.
It’s odd but I never once worried about Tommy reading my journals when we were kids. A lot of the stuff in them was about him, of course, but having a common enemy in the same house with us made us considerably closer than most siblings, so I never cared if he read them or not. Besides, he was usually in the room with me while I was writing. I still remember the first paragraph, word for word:
Tommy’s fucked-up. He put an empty bottle of ketchup back in the refrigerator and I asked him why and he blushed and wouldn’t tell me until I pinned him on the floor and threatened to fart on him. Then he told me he didn’t want to throw away the ketchup bottle because the jar of mayonnaise would get lonely.
What a spaz.
Okay, so Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about me usurping her rightful place on library bookshelves. But stuff like this made Tommy laugh, and there were hundreds of similar entries. He used to dig my notebooks out at night before bed to read whatever I’d written earlier that day; he said he wanted to “keep an eye on the weird-ass things” going on in my head.
And he was furious when I told him I’d burned all seven of the notebooks. He said those memories were a part of his life, too, and I should have thought to ask him before I did such a thing. I suppose he’s right, but I’m not sorry. He wasn’t the one who had to sit in the same house with those fucking things day after day, wondering who would find them after I was dead and imagining what they’d think and say about us when they read them. So I got drunk one winter night and carted the notebooks out to the bare ground of the cornfield, poured gasoline over them and struck a match. The burning leather smelled horrible but I didn’t budge until all the paper had turned to ash and the covers were only charred, unrecognizable scraps. I was crying while I did it, but the heat from the fire felt good on my face and hands.
Tommy likes to pretend that our childhood was one lighthearted episode after another, but Tommy has yak shit for brains. He never read the journals after he left high school, and he’s managed to convince himself that Dad was Andy Griffith and Walcott was Mayberry, and he and I were typical teenage boys. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t burned the journals; then I could shove them in his face and make him read the stuff he doesn’t want to remember.
But that would mean I’d have to read it, too, and that’s the last thing I want to do.
The kids file in one after another, all hormones and pimples and self-conscious posturing. There are twelve of them, freshmen and sophomores, and since there’s no air-conditioning in this furnace of a classroom, the girls wear only short skirts and sleeveless blouses (quite a few of them without bras) and most of the boys are decked out in lightweight shorts and tank tops. Simon comes in right before class, still wearing what looks like the same pair of cutoffs he had on yesterday and a T-shirt with big holes in it, one of them gaping open enough to reveal a few inches of his stomach. He smiles at me and sits in an open desk at the front of the room. His blond hair is uncombed and curly and covers half of his ears.
It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and for the next hour and fifteen minutes these poor, grammatically challenged dimwits are my prisoners. They don’t want to be here and neither do I, but I push back from the desk with fake enthusiasm.
“Okay, did everybody read the chapter about verbs last night?”
In the front row, Vernette Shute rolls her eyes and Peter Russo swats at a fly. Simon shifts lower in his seat and opens his legs wide; his shorts are loose enough to reveal green and black plaid boxers underneath. The rest of the kids stare out the open windows and either scratch themselves or yawn and put their heads on their desks. One boy picks at an inflamed mosquito bite on his left bicep.
I try again. “Who can tell me what a verb is?”
I lead a lethargic discussion for fifteen minutes and then give up and hand out worksheets and a reading assignment to complete by the end of class. I collect their homework assignments from yesterday and sit at my desk to grade them. By nine thirty the heat and the boredom have me fighting to keep my eyes open. I unscrew the lid on my thermos and pour myself a cup of strong, bitter coffee, but what I really need is a hypo full of adrenaline pumped directly into my heart. Sometime around ten they start finishing up their work and stirring, looking at me expectantly, wanting to be dismissed early.
Vernette has fallen asleep with her head on her book, but when I start shuffling papers on my desk she jerks awake and blinks like an iguana on a rock. Peter, a sweet, dumb kid with a sweet, dumb wrestler’s body, puts both arms over his head and stretches. His tank top is too big for him and a small brown nipple exposes