Raising Stony Mayhall Read online

  “Talk to me, my son.”

  But of course that was the last thing she should have said. He couldn’t just talk when she told him to. Impossible.

  “No one’s out there,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She crouched beside him and stared out the window with him. “No one can hurt you here, John,” she said. “This farm is mine, and it’s yours. It’s our mighty fortress. No one gets in without our say-so, I guarantee it.”

  “You can’t promise that,” he said. “No one can promise that.”

  “Oh yes I can.” She stood up and walked purposefully into the kitchen. He was curious, but he didn’t get up. Thirty seconds later she was back, holding a five-pound bag of flour. Then she opened the front door and walked outside.

  He thought, Mom’s gone crazy.

  He got to his feet and walked to the door. His mother stood on the lawn in her bare feet, cradling the white bag. “Come on,” she said. She tugged open the top of the bag, reached in, and then sprinkled a bit of the powder in a line at her feet.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “ ‘God sits above the circle of the earth,’ ” she said. “And we’re all safe inside it.” She began to walk in a circle around the house, scooping a handful of flour from the bag and tossing it before her. Stony followed her at a distance. Is this the kind of thing they did in church? They’d never let him go, of course, but if it was like this then maybe it was more interesting than he thought.

  “Everything in this circle belongs to us,” she said. “Come on, say it. Everything in this circle …”

  He laughed. “Belongs to us.”

  By the time they reached the front of the house again the bag was empty. His mother turned it upside down and shook it over the lawn.

  “There,” she said. “The walls are up.” A fuzzy circle of white surrounded the house.

  “What if somebody digs underneath them?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “This is a magic circle. Now come on, my feet are about to freeze off.” She put an arm around his shoulder. “I know you can’t sleep, John, but you can lie down next to me for a while.”

  He didn’t believe in magic circles, of course. He knew that the government wouldn’t be stopped by a border of baking material. No, he’d need his own defenses, his own fortifications. In fact, he could start working on them tonight.

  Or maybe not tonight. His mother snored lightly beside him, and her arms were warm.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1978

  Easterly, Iowa

  very August was a betrayal. Alice drove back to college. Junie came home from Kmart with new binders, plastic zip bags packed with colored pencils, protractors, compasses—shiny weapons for a war in which he was not allowed to enlist. And then one morning Chelsea and Junie and Kwang would be gone, driven away in a crowded yellow bus to their new classes, new teachers.

  New friends.

  The August he and Kwang were fourteen, the year Kwang went to high school, was especially cruel. Out of nowhere Kwang had developed an obsession with football. Two weeks before school began, he started practicing twice a day with the high school team, abandoning Stony to his sisters. Chelsea, though, was hardly ever home. She’d fallen in love with a greasy-haired eighteen-year-old named Alton, and since he wasn’t allowed to come to the farm, Chelsea spent most of the time at the lake with him, or in his Chevy Malibu. That left Junie, who since joining the youth group at the Baptist church only wanted to talk about Jesus.

  His mother tried to make him feel like he was starting a new year, too. As usual, she’d gone to the mall in Des Moines and bought him new gym shoes and a couple of pairs of jeans. The first day of class, Junie said a prayer over breakfast: “Bless us Lord for this oatmeal, and watch over us during the day, and bless our teachers” and on and on until she was almost late for the bus. Chelsea walked out to the end of the lane to be picked up by Alton. His mother kissed him on the cheek and left for work. And then he was alone.

  He thought about going back to his bedroom to read, or heading down to work on the cellar. But if he stayed home, Mrs. Cho would only come looking for him. Finally he trudged across the field.

  Mrs. Cho greeted him with a hug. “First day of the year. A very big day.” She went through the textbooks and study guides he’d brought with him—his mother purchased them each year from a used bookstore in Des Moines—and commented on each of them. “Ooh, calculus, very advanced. And American literature! That’s good for us both.”

  His mother called it homeschooling, but Stony knew what it was: babysitting with books. He would churn through the assignments his mother and Mrs. Cho made up for him, and then start in on any homework Kwang and his sisters left lying around. He corrected math problems, filled in the blank spots in worksheets, proofread essays, finished extra-credit questions. Only Alice’s college textbooks, the ones she’d brought home because she couldn’t sell back, provided any challenge.

  He was forced to create his own electives. He picked up an advanced degree in reruns (unlike his mother, Mrs. Cho considered television an important educational tool), with an emphasis in Dick Van Dyke and Hogan’s Heroes. But he also began to study car and small engine repair—Mr. Cho’s business. In Korea, Kwang had told Stony, his father had been an engineer who worked on turbines for hydroelectric dams. But Mr. Cho had moved his family from Pittsburgh to Iowa because he wanted to become a farmer. This, even though he knew nothing about crops, owned no equipment, and did not have enough capital to seed a garden patch. Also, he did not like working outside. Eventually the side business he started in order to keep food on the table while he killed food in the fields turned into a full-time job.

  “My sister wants to save my soul,” Stony told Mr. Cho one afternoon. Stony had dismantled a Toro engine down to the screws and laid out each part on a white sheet. It looked like a crime scene. Mr. Cho had said the engine was beyond repair, though not in so many words. He communicated primarily in grunts and scowls.

  Stony said, “Do you know that word, soul?”

  Mr. Cho did not answer; he was stretched out under a Chevy Vega that needed new brakes. Stony had never forgotten what Kwang had told him in the hayloft. The fact that Mr. Cho thought they should be careful around him didn’t make him want to avoid the man. The opposite, actually. Stony wanted to prove himself trustworthy, and at the same time, to hang around someone who thought of him as dangerous.

  “The problem is,” Stony said, “I don’t think I have one.”

  “Socket,” Mr. Cho said.

  Stony picked up the socket wrench from the toolbox and squatted to hand it to him. Mr. Cho tilted his head to look at it, then said, “No! Nine-sixteen.”

  Stony walked back to the tray of socket heads and started to fish through them. “The Bible’s not much help. A lot of resurrections, but those people come back to life, you know? Their bodies don’t stay dead.”

  Mr. Cho reached up and impatiently slapped the fender of the Vega. Stony wondered, when Mr. Cho lay there with his legs sticking out like that, did he ever think, That dead boy could bite me?

  Stony snapped the nine-sixteenths head into place and put the wrench in his hands. “It seems to me that if I’m already dead, then my soul went to heaven or hell or wherever it was supposed to go. There’s nothing left to save.”

  Mr. Cho grunted, though probably that was just because he was struggling with the bolt.

  “On the other hand,” Stony said, “maybe what happened is that my soul never left like it was supposed to. It was prevented from going to the afterlife. So, there’s no use trying to save it, because some other rules are in effect. I’m in purgatory.”

  “Shut up now,” Mr. Cho said. “Fix lawn mower.”

  At night, after his family had gone to sleep, he worked on expanding the cellar. His mother had given him permission to dig a new floor to provide some headroom and to double the square footage. He’d already gone well beyond that. A crawl-space extended und
er the entire house, and he’d dug almost to the cinder-block walls in every direction.

  The work was tedious, but he’d learned that he had a talent for manual labor. He could let his mind wander and work for hours without realizing it. He thought about the state of his soul. He thought about the Cubs. He thought about his body, and why he didn’t get tired, and how it was that it could move at all.

  He couldn’t find himself in any of the science books he’d been reading. He knew how bodies were supposed to work: Lungs inhaled, alveoli transferred oxygen to red blood cells, the heart pumped blood to all the cells. But while he could inhale and exhale, his heart didn’t beat, and there wasn’t any blood for it to pump anyway. If the cells didn’t receive any oxygen, they couldn’t do any work. Muscles couldn’t contract, neurons couldn’t fire. He should be as inert as a lump of clay. Yet he moved and talked. He grew. He had feelings and ideas. He thought things such as, How am I thinking this?

  He’d found only one textbook that mentioned the outbreak of 1968. Alice had brought home a book called Government and Society that spent a measly three pages on it. The outbreak struck on October 1, and by the end of the next day, between 35,000 and 72,000 people were dead, depending on whether you counted people who were dead before the outbreak began and had to be killed again. The article was mostly about how the event changed federal disaster preparedness plans. It didn’t even talk about what caused the disease, what the living dead were, and what the government would do if they found more of them. It was as if the whole thing were all over and he didn’t exist.

  Useless.

  He began to think that his mother and sisters were deliberately hiding the truth from him. What he needed was free rein at a library, a few hours in the stacks without his family looking over his shoulder. Since that wasn’t possible, he went to his next-best option.

  “Here are the topics and keywords I’m interested in,” Stony said, and handed Kwang the sheet of notebook paper. He’d waited at the Cho house until Kwang came home, and made sure to pass him the list when Mrs. Cho wasn’t in the room. “Next month is the tenth anniversary of the outbreak, so there should be something. Check out everything you can find in the catalog. Whatever’s not on the shelves, write down the title and Dewey decimal number.”

  “How do you know about Dewey decimal numbers?”

  “I’m not an idiot. How many books will they let you check out?”

  “I don’t know, five? I really don’t have time for this tonight. Me and the guys—”

  “What guys? The team?”

  “Yeah, they’re on the team. What does that have to do with it?”

  “Nothing. I just didn’t know that hanging out with them six hours a day wasn’t enough for you.”

  “All we’re doing is going to Brett’s house for a bonfire.”

  “Bonfire. Are you kidding me? Bonfire?”

  “What’s the matter with you? You’re acting all weird.”

  “Forget it. I’ll find some other way. Have fun with your Nazi friends.”

  “What?” Kwang put up his hands. “Never mind. I’ll get you the books, okay? But it’ll have to be tomorrow after practice.”

  Stony stomped back across the field through the high grass, thinking dark thoughts. He’d just passed the property line where their old fort stood when he noticed a white van stopped on the highway.

  He froze, suddenly sure that he was about to be captured. They’d grab him, shoot him, and burn him.

  He crouched, then ducked behind a sapling, watching, and tried to calm down. Stupid, so stupid. When he was younger and shorter, he couldn’t have seen the highway from any point on the path. The track of dirt ran parallel to the road but was set back several hundred yards; a slight roll in the land provided a bunker that had before this year kept him hidden from sight the entire way. Now that he was taller, he’d have to be more careful.

  He could see just the top of the van and the driver’s-side window. He couldn’t make out a face behind the glass. The vehicle sat there thirty seconds, a minute, and Stony paged through one nightmare scenario after another. Would they shoot first, or try to capture him “alive”? Would they come at him with nets like in Planet of the Apes?

  Finally the van moved. He watched it roll slowly away, and when it was out of sight he sat down. He was shaking. Why was he shaking? He wasn’t some dog in a thunderstorm, some frightened baby. He was the Unstoppable. He stared at his hand and in a few seconds the trembling subsided. There. He didn’t need fear, he needed anger. After several minutes he stood up. Take that, coppers! Then he crouched again and ran toward home.

  He’d reached the back door when heard Chelsea inside the house, screaming “You don’t even try to understand me!”

  Another fight then. It seemed like there was one every couple of days since Chelsea had turned sixteen.

  Against his better judgment, he walked inside. His mother and Chelsea stood face-to-face in the middle of the kitchen, with Junie hunched against the refrigerator, watching them. Mom’s face had gone rigid—never a good sign—and while tears welled in her eyes, she seemed determined to keep them from falling. Chelsea was raw and outraged, awash in tears. Junie was the worst. She wept silently, like a great-grandmother remembering a childhood tragedy.

  Three women, three different ways of crying, Stony thought. He’d lived among them his entire life, and it seemed like he’d spent most of that time in a state of bafflement. “Is this about Alton?” he asked.

  Chelsea screamed at him to shut up. His mother screamed at Chelsea to stop screaming. Stony put up his hands, turned slowly, and walked back outside.

  He went around to the side of the house and pulled open the cellar door. Junie came running out after him and threw her arms around him, sobbing. He didn’t try to move. He’d learned years ago that when Junie seized him like this, there was nothing to do but stand there until she released him. She could go from bawling to screaming at him in seconds flat. He fought with Junie much more than he ever fought with Chelsea or Alice. Partly this was because they were together more often, so fights were bound to happen, in the same way that most car accidents occur within seven miles of home. Partly this was because, as he’d tried to explain to her, Junie was an erratic personality. And partly this was because, as Junie explained to him, he was a jerk who used phrases like “erratic personality” and thought he was smarter than everybody else.

  So he let her hang on him and waited for the tears to subside. She was so much shorter than he was. She took after the women on her father’s side, Mom said: short and curvy, which in Mom Code meant that Junie would get fat if she didn’t watch it. Alice and Chelsea were tall, lithe, and dark; their fair-haired, fireplug sister looked to be more of an adoption case than Stony. Stony had the same dark hair as his older sisters, the same thin frame. His skin tone just happened to be grayer.

  A few minutes later she said into his shoulder, “Chelsea wants to spend the weekend in Chicago with Alton. There’s an Allman Brothers concert or something.”

  “Is she crazy?” Stony said. “Mom’s never going to go for that.”

  “She told me she’s going to run away,” Junie said.

  “Mom or Chelsea?”

  “Stop it. She says she’s going with Alton out west.” She let him go, then patted the damp spot she’d made on his shirt. “She’s changing her name to Amethyst or something, and they’re going to follow the Grateful Dead around.”

  There was a joke there, but he let it pass. “That’s never going to happen, Junie. Besides, nobody gets to run away before I do.”

  Junie yelped. “Don’t even say that!’

  He ducked into the cellar door. He’d laid down reinforced plywood ramps over the cement stairs, then had kept extending the ramps as he dug deeper under the house. Junie followed him down. “I feel like everything’s falling apart,” she said. “Mom’s all alone, you’re angry all the time—”

  “What? I’m not angry.” But what he was thinking was, Mom’s all a
lone? But of course she was. Kids didn’t count. But she couldn’t get married again, not with a dead boy hiding at home. How could she even date—he’d have to hide in the barn while she made him dinner. He was ruining her life.

  “Oh, you’re angry all right,” Junie said. She pulled on the chain to turn on the single lightbulb. “Just look at this place.” The ceiling was eight feet high—or rather, the floor was eight feet low—and the new walls extended far into the dark.

  He said, “What does the basement have to do with anything?”

  “You’re down here by yourself, digging at all hours. You’ve got to be mad at somebody.” She walked over to a stepladder, picked up the hacksaw that was lying on top of it. Sawdust covered the ground. “What are you cutting?”

  “Old barn wood. For the ramps. Don’t tell Mom.”

  She shook her head and put down the saw. She walked around the perimeter of the room. He’d decorated a little, and furnished the place with found furniture: an old couch Kwang had rescued from the side of the road, a couple of rusting lawn chairs. But it still looked like, well, a hole in the ground.

  She stopped at the north wall, where he’d tacked up an unfolded refrigerator box. Taped to the cardboard was the huge Kiss Alive poster that Chelsea had given him for his birthday two years ago. “I’m worried about you, Brother John. It’s like you’re digging your own grave.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s more of a mausoleum.”

  She walked back to him and gripped his hand. Her skin was hot. “I’m serious, Stony. Have you thought about what we talked about?”

  “A little bit.” He’d thought about salvation a lot, actually. Eternal life, his immortal soul, how Jesus had died for his sins. Though why some sacrifice was necessary was never explained. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son. It seemed to Stony that there was no need for God to send his own son off to be tortured and killed, just so God could bring him back to life and prove that he was his son. Why not just forgive their sins himself? He was God. Was he so petty that he needed some kind of payment, or else he’d burn all of humanity in hell? Jehovah, he’d decided, was kind of a dick.