Thirteenth Child fm-1, Page 2

  We younger ones didn’t say much. Well, Jack and Robbie did, but that was mostly about how much fun it would be. Lan was quiet, but he had a gleam in his eye that meant he was of much the same opinion. Nan sat and chewed on her lower lip like she was thinking real hard, until Allie poked her and made her giggle.

  Patiently, Mama and Papa laid out the whole plan. The oldest ones were grown and gone, so moving mainly affected how often we’d see each other. And while it was true that no one could drop in for a chat, it wasn’t as if the North Plains Territory was a three-week trip in a horse-drawn wagon, the way it used to be. The overnight train only took two days and a night, Papa said, so we could still visit, and Mama could certainly come back for a week or two if there was a “special reason.” Sharl blushed when he said that, and looked down at her waistline and told him it was a great comfort to know that.

  Charlie and Diane would stay with Uncle Stephen until Charlie went off to the university in the fall and Diane finished earning her music school money. Papa gave Rennie and Hugh the choice, whether to stay as well or come West with us younger ones.

  “That’s easy!” Hugh declared immediately. “I’m coming. How about you, Rennie?”

  “I don’t know,” Rennie said.

  “What?” Hugh stared at her. “How can you not know? Why would you want to stay here?”

  “I need to think about it,” Rennie told him. She sounded cross.

  “Oh, come on, Rennie!” Hugh said. “It’ll be an adventure! Like the first settlers from the Old Continent.”

  Robbie frowned. “I don’t want to live in a big forest full of monsters,” he objected.

  “There is no forest where we’ll be going,” Papa said. “There won’t be any monsters, either, for it’s on the east side of the Great Barrier. It won’t be as comfortable and easy as Helvan Shores, but Mill City has been settled for some time.”

  “It’s still right out on the frontier, isn’t it?” Hugh said with undiminished enthusiasm. “I bet there’ll be monsters! Bison, and mammoths, and those giant things with the horns on their noses, and—”

  “Unicorns live in forests, dummy; everybody knows that,” Nan said.

  “Unicorns have horns on their foreheads,” Hugh said with equal scorn. “I’m talking about those huge ugly things with the curly fur and the great horn on their nose.”

  “Nan!” Mama said. “You do not call your brother names. And Hugh, if you cannot remember the proper name of a woolly rhinoceros, perhaps you should spend some extra time studying your natural history from now until the day we leave. Rennie may take plenty of time to think, if she wishes. We won’t be leaving Helvan Shores for another month and a half.”

  Hugh groaned, and Jack piped up, asking, “What kind of school will we be going to?”

  “Will it be all in one room with the same teacher, and everybody sharing books, and no pencils or paper?” Allie added anxiously

  “What is the new house like?” Nan asked, right on top of Allie’s question. “Will I get my own room, or do I still have to share with Rennie?”

  “Mill City is a little too large to make do with a one-room schoolhouse,” Papa said. “As for the house, you’ll know what it’s like as soon as I do. It’s being provided by the college, and we’ll have to see what we find when we get there.”

  Mama gave him a disapproving look. “Daniel! What were you thinking? If they give us some little cracker box, we’ll never fit!”

  “I let them know how many of us there are,” Papa reassured her. Mama still looked worried, until he added, “If the college doesn’t have someone in charge with sense enough to provide a dwelling large enough to hold us all, why, it’ll just show how very much they need my help, won’t it?”

  That made Mama laugh, and the talk settled down. The older ones still weren’t totally happy with the notion, but everyone could see that they didn’t have a vote. The middle ones were split between the ones like Hugh, who thought that whatever happened would be fun and an adventure, and the ones like Diane and Rennie, who seemed to feel abandoned or hurt that Mama and Papa would even consider muddling up their lives like this. And the younger ones…we were just confused and excited. None of us had any real notion what it would mean.

  Finally Papa called everyone to order and said, “I think we’ve covered the main points. Does anyone have any other questions?”

  I raised my hand. “What’s a land-grant college?”

  Papa laughed. “Trust Eff to get to the heart of the matter!” he said, as if I’d asked something very clever. And then he explained.

  After the Secession War ended in 1838, the Assembly wanted to do something nice for all the Northern states and territories that had stuck with them in the fight. They couldn’t give out money, because there wasn’t any; they’d spent it all on winning the war. But one really bright Assemblyman had an idea. There were millions of acres of Federal land all over the country that hadn’t yet been homesteaded and that were bringing in no taxes or other money. Why not give some of it to the states and territories, to set up colleges? The states could sell the land, or rent it out, or build on it—whatever they wanted, as long as the money they got from it paid for colleges that taught people useful skills like agriculture and engineering and magic along with things like Latin and law.

  The idea was a big hit, especially in the newest Western territories that didn’t have a lot of money yet for things like colleges. The North Plains Territory was one of the first to get its grant of land, but it had taken the settlers a while to study out exactly what they wanted to do with it. In the end, they sold some and put the money aside to pay for building the college on another part, and the rest they rented out to whoever wanted to pay. They’d had a good bit of luck when the railroad came through right by the land-grant site, so they had more money than anyone expected, and no shortage of students, either, once they got going. What they were short of was professors, especially professors who could teach more than just theoretical magic.

  That was why they wanted Papa. It seems he had a good reputation as a practical magician, plus they’d talked to several people who said there wasn’t a teacher like him for explaining so that you could really understand and remember. They’d been after him for a whole year, and none of us except Mama had known a thing about it.

  I started to get a funny feeling in my middle right about then. Neither Papa nor Mama had said anything about Uncle Earn or the policeman since that dreadful scene in the sitting room, but it wasn’t something you just forgot about. And Papa had never given anyone the smallest hint that he’d ever thought of heading West. I didn’t say anything at the meeting, but later, when Mama tucked me into bed, I asked her straight out.

  “Is Papa making everybody move because of me?”

  “What? Goodness, child, where did you get a notion like that?” Mama said.

  “I thought maybe it was to keep Uncle Earn from putting me in jail,” I explained.

  Mama took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Then she looked at me with a serious expression. “Uncle Earn could not have you put in jail, whether we stay in Helvan Shores or not,” she said.

  “But—”

  Mama held up her hand, and I closed my mouth on my questions and listened real hard. “I can’t deny that moving will get you and Lan away from a type of attention and comment that your father and I think is very bad for you,” she said. “And I must admit that removing you from that poisonous atmosphere was one of the things we thought was a good reason to make the move.”

  “Then—”

  This time, Mama gave me a stern look. “Eff, you should wait until someone is quite finished speaking before you jump in with your comments.” She waited a moment, but I knew well enough not to open my mouth again. Once she was satisfied that I wasn’t going to interrupt, she went on, “But if you and Lan had been the only reasons we had for moving—if your father hadn’t been pleased and excited by the thought of trying out his ideas for teaching practical magic at a
brand-new school that has no traditions to overturn, and if he hadn’t liked the notion of setting his stamp on an institution that will be teaching young magicians for the next hundred years and more—then we wouldn’t be going. Not even for you.” She smiled. “So you should be very glad that your father does feel that way shouldn’t you?”

  Well, when she put it like that, I could see that wild horses couldn’t have kept Papa in Helvan Shores when there was something like this waiting. Only—“If Papa wanted to go West so much, how come it took him a whole year to make up his mind?” I asked.

  “Because it’s a hard thing to leave a place where you’ve lived most of your life, where your brothers and sisters and parents still live, where some of your children will stay behind,” Mama said. “It’s a hard thing to risk what you know and are sure of, just for the possibility of something better. Even when it’s a pretty strong possibility, and something that’s a whole lot better.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Mama bent and kissed my forehead. “You don’t understand now, but if you remember what I said, you’ll understand someday.”

  She was right. I didn’t understand then, but I do now.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT MONTH AND A HALF WAS A BUSY TIME. EVERYTHING IN THE house had to be cleaned and wrapped up and packed in crates and shipped off to the North Plains Territory. It seemed as if no one had a minute to spare for anything but cleaning and packing. Hugh tried to sneak all his schoolbooks into the very first box, so that he wouldn’t have to do lessons for a month, but Papa found them and took them out again.

  Then there were the aunts and uncles and cousins, who all came by at one time or another to marvel at what Papa was doing—or shake their heads over it, depending. All except Aunt Janna and Uncle Earn, that is. They didn’t come next nor near the house the whole time we were getting ready to leave.

  The rest of the aunts and uncles more than made up for the two of them, though. The uncles all wanted to talk with Papa about the West and business opportunities and political questions. The aunts wanted to talk to Mama about living so much nearer to the frontier. Some of the aunts tried to commiserate with Mama, as if she must dislike the idea of moving West. Mama soon straightened that out, but that only set them all to wondering how she could dream of doing such a thing. And the cousins were so interested in telling us what to expect that they even forgot about teasing me.

  “I heard there are great beasts, the size of a house, that can stamp you flat as paper!” Cousin Bernie said.

  “Those are mammoths,” Robbie told him. He’d been doing extra reading on the North Plains ever since he found out we’d be living there, and he enjoyed showing off his new knowledge to the rest of us. “They used to be all over North Columbia, but when the first settlers came from the Old Continent, they killed all the ones in the East. Well, almost all. Peter said he saw a man once who’d caught one and tamed it and rode it like a horse.”

  “You can’t ride a thing as big as a house!” Cousin Bernie said with magnificent scorn.

  “They do it with elephants in India,” Hugh said. “They don’t ride them the way you’d ride a horse; they strap a sort of carriage seat to the elephant’s back, and four or five people can sit in it at once and ride.”

  “I bet a mammoth could carry ten people!” Robbie said with enthusiasm.

  “Maybe twenty!” Bernie said, abandoning his objections in favor of such an interesting alternative. “Maybe you can catch one, Robbie!”

  “It would have to be a small one,” Robbie said thoughtfully. “Young, I mean. So you’d have time to train it up.”

  “Catching even a small one would be hard,” Jack put in. “Since they’re so big.”

  “You could do it if you dug a big pit, and it fell in,” Bernie said.

  “How would you get it out again?” Robbie objected. “They’re awful heavy. You’d have to get someone with lots of magic to do it. Maybe more than one.”

  “Have you got a better idea?” Bernie said.

  I could see the boys were going to spend the rest of Cousin Bernie’s visit arguing about mammoth traps, so I left and went upstairs. Mama and Aunt Tilly were visiting in the parlor, and I didn’t want to have to sit straight and be quiet while they went on about what to take for housekeeping and what to leave behind.

  Things went on like that for the whole month, and then, suddenly, all our belongings were gone and it was time for us to leave as well. Mama helped me pack a trunk all my own, and pasted a silhouette of me on it that she’d cut out of black paper, so that everyone would know it for mine. Then there was an enormous party, with Grandfather and all the aunts and uncles and cousins, even Uncle Earn and Aunt Janna, though they came late and left early.

  We boarded the train the next morning. The trip was the kind of thing you remember forever. There were so many of us, even without Diane and Charlie and Peter and Frank and Sharl and Julie, that we took up almost half a car. The train company had separate boarding areas for men and women, so Papa took Hugh and Jack and Robbie and Lan one way, and Mama took Rennie, Nan, Allie, and me the other.

  The train station was loud and confusing. Mama set Rennie and Hugh to help mind the younger ones, because they were the oldest. Of course Rennie complained that Jack and Nan should be helping, too, and Mama pointed out that Jack and Nan weren’t old enough for childminding, and Jack, especially, was as likely to get into trouble as the childings he’d be watching. Rennie pouted and said she wished she’d stayed with Uncle Stephen after all. Papa told her it was too late for that and to behave. After that, she just sulked quietly.

  I didn’t mind Rennie. I spent most of the trip looking out the window, watching the land change. First, there were plowed fields and small villages, then big rolling mountains that the train had to wind through like a snake because it couldn’t just climb up and down like a mule or a horse. Then there were midland cities, bigger than Helvan Shores, almost as big as the great ports on the East Coast, but bare of trees and full of dust.

  Whenever the train stopped at a station, we would get off and run up and down the platform to stretch our legs. Hugh wanted to explore, but Mama wouldn’t let him. She said there wasn’t enough time, and the train wouldn’t wait for him if he got lost and was slow coming back. Even at the meal stops, when all the long-riding passengers were let off for an hour to eat in the little dining room at the train station, Mama insisted that he stay close.

  In between stops, Papa told us about the North Plains Territory. Mill City was right at the edge of the Great Prairie, on the Mammoth River. To the east were forests of oak and maple and pine, and the farms that men were carving out of them despite the haunts and greatwolves and Columbian boars that lived in them still. To the west were the plains, the wild country where great herds of mammoths and bison trampled everything in their path, woolly rhinoceroses with horns on their noses as long as a grown man’s arm made the earth shake when they charged, and steam dragons and spectral bears hunted anything that moved.

  On the far side of the plains were mountains, sharp and high, that no one had seen but a few explorers. Papa said that at least ten expeditions had tried to find a way through them to the Pacific Ocean, but only three men had ever come back alive, and they were stark out of their heads. There was a monument in the capital to Lewis and Clark, who headed the first group that went missing, back in 1804. It was more than wild country; it was unknown.

  I loved listening to Papa’s stories, but it made me wonder what Mill City would be like, being right at the edge of the wild like that. I could see the country changing around us as the train carried us farther west. The stops were farther apart, and when we got off the train to run, the platforms were shorter. Then the train plunged into the woods, and we watched the trees stream past the windows, ancient and dark and frightening despite the sunlit slash the railroad company had cleared through their midst to run the trains. I stared out the window at it for an hour, and fell asleep still staring.
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  Lan shook me awake when we reached Mill City. I’d begun to worry that it would be another tiny place like the towns we’d passed through, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t like Helvan Shores, either. Everything looked new and raw—the square warehouses near the station, the dusty dirt roads, the station itself. Even the people and wagons looked like they’d only just been finished; neat enough, but without the kind of polish folks had back home. And over to the side, past piles of logs and crates, just visible between the rows of big, flat railroad cars, was the dark, foamy water of the Mammoth River. On the far side, the western side, there was just grass and a few trees.

  Mr. Farley, the dean of the college, had come to meet us with three wagons and several large men to help with our trunks. Mama rounded up all us children and told us in a no-nonsense tone to stay right there until we were ready to leave. Not even Hugh so much as thought about disobeying.

  We stood and watched the wagons and the people passing by. Rennie and Hugh and Jack started arguing about something, but I didn’t pay attention. I was still half-’mazed with sleep and the strangeness of this new place. Then, just as Papa and Mama came back to collect us, I saw a woman walking in our direction, and I felt a jolt go through me. It was as if I recognized her, even though I’d never seen her before.

  She was a tall black woman wearing a high-crowned hat trimmed with cherries. A white lace neck scarf fell across the top of her close-fitting blue jacket. Her lips were full, and her crinkly black hair made an enormous bun at the nape of her neck, but what I remember best were her eyes. They were wide-set and bright with intelligence, and I felt another shock when her gaze locked onto mine.