The Year They Burned the Books

“There’s a vacancy on the school committee,” Jamie’s mother said at breakfast when Jamie mentioned the signs. “Remember my talking about Mrs. Cochran? Her husband got a new job in August and they moved to New Jersey. Lisa Buel is—how can I put it? She moved to Wilson about five years ago and went to school committee meetings all last year. She’s very conservative, and she argued against the new health ed curriculum, specifically the parts that have to do with sex; she claims sex education encourages immorality. In fact, she’s spent a lot of time trying to convince people to object to the curriculum on moral grounds. I think she’s been pretty successful.” Mrs. Crawford took a swallow of coffee, then got up from the table. “Thank goodness Anna Pembar’s running for school committee, too.”

“Nomi’s mom?” Jamie asked, surprised. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Why not?” Mrs. Crawford opened the door to the back stairs and yelled, “Ronnie! Rise and shine!” Then she returned to the table. Sunlight played over her features, small and even like Jamie’s, but with tiny smile wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. “Anna Pembar’s conservative, too, but she’s also reasonable, a lot more reasonable than Lisa Buel. If Lisa gets in, I’ll think seriously about early retirement.” Mrs. Crawford took another swallow of coffee. “A lot of people would say Lisa’s a pillar of the community, but—well, remember Mr. Bergemot, who used to teach sixth grade?”

“The guy who left last year?”

“The very one. He left because Lisa Buel saw him a couple of times with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and she started a move to get him fired as ‘an unfit role model.’ I think that’s what she called it.”

Jamie put down her own coffee mug. “But he was divorced, wasn’t he?”

“No, separated. Lisa thought it was immoral for him to see another woman while he was still technically married. The school committee refused to fire him, but she and a few others made his life so miserable he resigned.” Mrs. Crawford looked at her watch. “We’ve got some lazy men in this family,” she said, getting up. “There are already people on this year’s school committee who oppose nearly everything that’s halfway innovative. Lisa Buel just might give them the courage to force things to go their way.” She went to the stairs again. “Ronnie! Dick, you too!” She sighed. “Your dad’s as bad as your brother. Slugabeds, both of them. More coffee? More cereal?”

“Nope. You wouldn’t really take early retirement, would you? You’d go crazy if you stopped teaching, and then we’d go crazy watching you go crazy, and the entire family would fall apart.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t retire.” Jamie’s mother poured herself more coffee. “But it’d be hard not to. Last summer Lisa kept telling us—the health ed curriculum committee—that it wasn’t any of our business as teachers to even broach the subject of sex education. When we explained that lots of parents don’t talk about sex at all with their kids, she got angry and said that should show us even more that it isn’t any of our business, that we’re interfering with parents’ rights.”

Jamie gave a short laugh. “She’ll love my editorial this week, then. And speaking of that, I’ve got to get going.” She pushed her chair back.

“Oh? What editorial?”

There was a clatter on the stairs, and Jamie’s nine-year-old brother Ronnie burst into the room, toothpaste smeared on his mouth and a Red Sox T-shirt on backwards. He was followed closely by their father, buttoning his old blue flannel shirt and rubbing his eyes. One reason, Dad had always said, why he owned and managed the town’s only hardware store was that there was no way he could keep fisherman’s hours. Ronnie took after him.

Jamie crammed the last spoonful of corn flakes into her mouth and gulped down the rest of her coffee. “Tell you later. Morning, Dad. Ron, is it cool to wear backwards shirts these days? ’Bye, Mom.”

And she was out the door.

Later, after school, Jamie worked on her editorial again, closeted in the newspaper office with Terry, who at her request was polishing a story a new reporter had written about the prospects of the school’s football team, the Wilson Wolves. The sounds of departing students made a distant hum punctuated by shouts and clanging locker doors; a fly, buzzing loudly at the window, occasionally masked the muffled tapping of Terry’s electronic typewriter and Jamie’s computer keyboard.

In an hour or so, Jamie heard the rasp of paper being ripped out of the typewriter, and Terry thrust the football story at her. “Here you are, Madame Editor. Great head, right?”

Jamie glanced at the yellow copy paper:

WILSON WILL WIN, WISH WOLVES

She groaned. “Wish? That’s a pretty weak verb, Terry.”

“Yeah, but what else is there that begins with W? Besides whine?”

“I don’t know, but you’ll come up with something.” She handed the paper back to him.

“By deadline? I’m not so sure.”

“You’ve got till Thursday, for Pete’s sake.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got two practices to cover, plus a track meet, and not enough reporters.”

“You’ll manage.” Jamie returned to her editorial.

“You’re hard, Jamie, you’re hard.”

“Darn right.”

“How about ‘Wilson Will Win, Say Wolves’?” Terry asked.

“Sure. Still catchy, and it’s a lot stronger.” Jamie held out her hand for the paper again, penciled in the change, and scanned the rest of the story, nodding. “Good, Terry. A tad long …”

“No,” said Terry. “No, no, no, no, and no! This is the first issue of the year, and the first football story of the year, and the time when the jocks, bless ’em, are trying to stir up that elusive quality known as, er, school spirit—remember? There is no way you’re going to bury it on page forty-seven below the fold in three-point type. No way! Besides, you asked me to get this story, remember? And the guy who wrote it is really proud of it.”

“Okay, okay. We don’t even,” Jamie added as the office door opened, “have a page forty-seven.”

“Page four, then. Whatever. Hi, Ernie.” Terry smiled at the slender blond boy who’d just come in, and Jamie looked up quickly. Ernie Rivers had always had the reputation of being a shy, quiet, academic loner, but he’d gained the other students’ notice and respect when he’d started swimming and diving. As far as Jamie knew, he’d always been friendly to everyone but close to no one.

“Hi, Terry,” Ernie said with a shy smile that Jamie could see was just for him. But despite the smile, he seemed ill at ease. “And hi, Jamie.” He glanced around the small, narrow office. “Nice,” he said. “Crowded, but nice.”

“Hi, Ernie,” Jamie said. “Welcome to chaos.” Trying to see the office through Ernie’s eyes, she scanned the two battered green file cabinets with old issues piled on top of them; the scratched layout table strewn with scissors, X-ACTO knives, and rubber cement jars; her desk and Matt’s, with scraps of paper, pens, a dictionary or two, and photos waiting for captions scattered around their computers; the long table where the reporters occasionally worked, lined with old typewriters and edged with uncomfortable stools. “It’s crowded, but it’s home.” She stood up. “Hey, I hear maybe I’m going to the movies with you guys this weekend. Or didn’t …”

Ernie’s smile tensed a little. “Terry told me. Sounds good.”

“Of course,” said Terry, sitting on one of the stools, “there aren’t any good movies except all the way down in George-port …”

“That’s only an hour away,” Jamie pointed out.

“Right,” said Terry. “I’ll drive. Okay, Ernie?”

“Sure. Um, listen, Terry, why I really came in was to tell you when that meet’s scheduled for. It’ll be October ninth.”

“Thanks.” Terry flipped a page on the huge calendar that was tacked to the office wall and wrote SWIM MEET in large letters in the square for October 9. It was, Jamie saw, a Saturday.

“That’s a four-schools meet,” Terry explained to Jamie. “We’ve got to cover it.”

“You’re the sports editor. Go for it.” She turned to Ernie. “You guys going to win?”

“We’re sure going to try. Terry …?”

“Yes. Story’s okay, right?” Terry said to Jamie.

She glanced at it again, changed a couple of commas, and nodded.

Terry gathered up books and pens, switched off his typewriter, gave Jamie a perfunctory wave, and left with Ernie. Their shoulders touched, then moved quickly apart.

Jamie stayed in the office for a while after finishing her editorial, hoping Nomi would drop in with the op-ed piece she’d more or less indicated she’d do. Cindy came with a few more ads, followed by one or two reporters, and then Jack arrived with his storm interview. But by 4:30, when there was no sign of Nomi, Jamie gave up. She closed the office and walked through town, past more LISA BUEL FOR SCHOOL COMMITTEE signs, about four of them to every homemade-looking one for Anna Pembar. It had been an unseasonably warm afternoon, and the slowly descending sun glowed lazily on the white clapboards of the general store, the pharmacy, the souvenir shop, the bookstore. Jamie walked through town and along the narrow causeway road leading to the working harbor. Gold-green marsh grass waved gently on one side, and herring gulls dipped and mewed around one or two returning boats on the other.

Jamie slipped off her sweater, tied it around her waist, and went out on Cal Pembar’s dock, where Nomi’s dad was stacking lobster traps.

“Jamie, my girl!” Mr. Pembar said cheerfully, his bronzed, weather-beaten face crinkling with his smile. “Haven’t seen much of you lately. And Nomi was a real thundercloud last night. You and she have a tiff?”

“Sort of,” Jamie admitted. “But it’ll heal, I think.”

Mr. Pembar laughed. “Lordy,” he said, “I remember when you two were no bigger’n a couple of minutes and you had a fight over a teddy bear. Took you two days to make up, and Nomi’s mother and I thought she’d never stop crying.”

“I remember,” said Jamie, hoping their present quarrel would turn out to be that simple.

Mr. Pembar tossed an undersize lobster over the side. “Missed this fella,” he said as if to himself. “Well,” he went on to Jamie, “just so the two of you don’t cry for days over whatever this fight’s about.”

“We won’t.” Jamie turned to go, then stopped. “Good luck to Mrs. Pembar. I hope she gets on the school committee. So does Mom.”

“And so do I. At least I think I do. I don’t much hold with some of that Buel woman’s ideas. But it’s a hard job, and it’ll only get harder this year, what with that new program to worry about. And then come March and the regular school committee election, Anna’ll have to campaign all over again if she still wants the job. There’ll probably be another big fuss then about the new program.”

“Yes, I guess there might be.” Jamie suddenly found herself wondering just what Mr. Pembar thought about “the new program,” but before she could sound him out, he’d already returned to his traps—and then Jamie spotted a tall figure, camera bag and fancy Nikon slung over her shoulder, walking along the causeway road.

“See you later, Mr. Pembar,” Jamie said quickly, and ran along the dock. “Tess!” she called.

Tessa turned, her star-chain earrings and the star in her nose sparkling against her dark skin. Then she stopped, a quizzical half smile on her lips.

“Hi,” Jamie said breathlessly when she reached her.

“Hi.”

Suddenly Jamie had no idea what to say. “Um,” she finally managed, “looking for pictures for the paper?”

Tessa nodded.

“How’s it going?”

“Okay,” Tessa said noncommittally, shifting her camera bag. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many boats.”

“Yeah, we’ve got a lot. I mean, half the town’s population fishes for a living, so we’ve kind of got to. Lots of little kids learn to row before they learn to ride bikes.” She stopped, afraid she was chattering mindlessly.

“Did you?”

“Huh?”

Tessa looked down at her; Jamie realized Tessa was at least an inch taller. “Did you learn to row before you learned to ride a bike?”

“I—well, no. My dad’s in hardware, not fishing, so I learned to ride a bike first.”

Tessa’s smile broadened a little. “Good. So did I, actually. That means we’ve got something in common.”

Jamie laughed self-consciously. “Yeah.” She fell into step beside Tessa as the taller girl strode toward town along the narrow road. “Yeah, I guess maybe it does. We’ve got the newspaper in common, too, or we probably will. You don’t have much competition for the photo editor’s job. Only two other sets of photos came in, and …”

“Any good?”

“What? Oh, I don’t know. Matt won’t let us look at them till they’re all in. But I know who submitted them, and I know what the photos you showed us look like.”

There was an awkward pause, during which Jamie struggled to think of something—anything—to say.

“What’s that church?” Tessa asked finally, pointing to a small white steeple just visible above the trees ahead.

“Lord’s Assembly. My friend Nomi, you know, the art editor, goes there.” She pointed to the right. “There’s also a Congregational church, but you can’t see it from here.”

Tessa nodded. “I shot both of them. I think a town’s churches kind of symbolize the town. You know, the people in it. We don’t go anywhere here yet. But my mother’s looking into it.”

“There’s a Catholic church, too,” Jamie told her. “Saint Joseph’s. It’s up on the hill, sort of between the interstate and the town center. And there’s a Methodist church in the next town, and a synagogue down in Georgeport, and …” She realized she was chattering again, but Tessa spoke before Jamie’s voice trailed off in embarrassed silence.

“I’d rather go to church in the woods. Or”—Tessa swept her hand around the way she had in the newspaper office—“or by the water, with the seagulls and those little skittery birds …”

“Sandpipers, probably.”

“Sandpipers. And the fishes and the bugs and the waves. I’m a pagan, I guess. A pagan-Catholic-Quaker-Unitarian-witch. I think God likes the outdoors best, don’t you? I mean, that’s what God created; it was people made the buildings, even the churches.”

Jamie felt her tension ease. “You’re right. I never quite thought of it that way, but—yeah, you’re right. Sometimes when I’ve got a problem or something, I just go down to Sloan’s Beach. That’s on the other side of where we are now, beyond where the yachts are. You saw that harbor, right?”

“And took pictures there.”

“Great! I go down there and walk, or I sit on the rocks and watch the ocean. It makes me feel”—she hesitated—“makes me feel little, sort of, and that nothing that bothers me can be all that bad. It makes me know the world’s going to go on forever, with me or without me.” Shut up, Jamie, she ordered herself. Why would Tessa care?

But Tessa didn’t seem to mind. “It’ll go on forever if we don’t blow it up first, or choke it to death.” She pointed at a huge house just visible among trees and bushes at the point where the causeway road widened. “I tried to shoot that place, too, but I don’t think the house’ll show through the shrubbery. Who lives there, anyway?”

Jamie smiled; everyone who was new in town asked that question sooner or later. “Mom calls him ‘the laird of Wilson,’ you know, like some Scottish nobleman. His name is Philbert Davenport …”

“His name is WHAT?”

Jamie’s smile became a grin. “Philbert Davenport.”

Tessa looked as if she was about to burst out laughing. “Like the nut and the sofa, right?”

Jamie did laugh. “Right. And he’s richer than anyone in the world, practically, has a couple of yachts, one of which has a helicopter and a Volkswagen Beetle on its afterdeck, and his grandfather used to own half the town. The family still owns five or six huge fish-packing plants.”

“Ugh. Smelly.” Tessa wrinkled her nose, which made the tiny star more noticeable. Jamie found herself staring at it, fascinated, then looked away self-consciously.

“Right. Very smelly. And there’ve been rumors that Philbert’s got a drug-running operation. Every time I hear a boat at night, I wonder, and so does everyone else in town, including the coast guard. But no one’s been able to prove anything.”

“What does Philbert look like?”

“No one’s seen him for years. He’s a recluse.”

“So who uses the yacht and the helicopter and the Volkswagen?” Tessa had unslung her Nikon and was fishing in her camera bag, from which she produced a long telephoto lens. “Here.” She unscrewed the Nikon’s short lens and handed it to Jamie; purple, Jamie decided, studying Tessa’s nail polish. But underneath the odd trappings, Tessa seemed—well, not quite like everyone else, but not as different from them as she looked.

“I don’t know who uses them,” Jamie said, answering Tessa’s question. “Maybe they’re just for show.”

“Or,” said Tessa, deftly attaching the long lens, “maybe they’re fake. Just stage props, to impress everyone.” Balancing the lens with one hand, she lifted the camera to her eye. “Hey,” she said, after twisting the lens back and forth a few times. “There’s someone outside the house in a wheelchair. Maybe it’s Philbert.” She handed the camera to Jamie.

Jamie took it, surprised at how clumsy it was with the long lens weighing it down in front, and squinted through the eyepiece. She could just make out a wheelchair, or what could have been a wheelchair, and a splash of white—a blanket, perhaps—with a triangular patch of brighter white above it.

“I think it’s his beard,” said Tessa.

After a moment, Jamie realized that Tessa meant the triangular patch. “I bet you’re right.” She handed the camera back.

“So that’s what Philbert looks like,” said Tessa. “Two white blobs, a blanket blob and a triangle-beard blob. So much for money.”

Jamie laughed again. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”

There was another silence, less awkward this time, and they walked on.

Not long after they reached the main road, but before the houses thickened as the road approached the town center, Tessa stopped, pointing to a side street. “I go left here.”

“Robert Road.”

Tessa nodded. “Thanks for the tour.”

“It really wasn’t one.”

“No, it wasn’t, but that seemed the right thing to say. I mean, like it’s your town.”

“Wrong,” Jamie said emphatically. “It’s everyone’s town who lives here.”

Then, as Tessa waved and walked away, she thought of what her mother had said about Lisa Buel, and wondered.