Chapter Three: The Assembly Room
Carla awoke Saturday morning to the smell of bacon and the sound of
rain. Frances still slept and no noises came from behind Julia’s
alcove curtain. Rain plunked on the house’s metal roof and coursed
down the eighteen panes of the tall window near Carla’s side of the
bed. Through it she caught sight of the boxwoods, but then a splatter
of rain washed it away. She thought about the night before and
wondered if Shamrock slept in Julia’s bed. Carla slipped her feet
from under the sheet and tiptoed across the scratchy carpet. She
hated to spy on Julia, but she had to know if the dark shadow that
had invaded her night’s dreams was really just a cocker spaniel.
She lifted the curtain. Shamrock was not there. Neither was Julia.
The covers were undisturbed. It hardly looked like girl or dog had
slept there that night.
The books from the windowsill were moved onto the bed in neat stacks.
Julia’s wooden box of secrets was on her pillow and the twinkle
lights had been unplugged and laid in a clump by the books. A few
9-volt batteries littered the comforter, plus some bird feathers, a
stick that looked vaguely like a magic wand, several pencils, and a
brown leather journal. Carla looked at the piles. She scooted the
books down a bit and slid behind the curtain to sit on the bed. She
touched the ornate box but felt guilty thinking about invading the
secrets Julia had gathered. Then she lifted the journal, which also
pricked her conscience. Carla tucked a finger into the pages and
parted them gently. She would flip through, not really reading
anything, she told herself. So she opened it carelessly in the
middle. But it wasn’t a journal; it was a sketch book.
Julia drew everything – dogs, cats, birds, the boxwood garden, the
horses on the property, her grandmother. Most of the drawings were
incomplete, and some were poorly done, but a few of the animals were
beautiful and full of movement. Carla slowly flipped the pages,
forgetting that she shouldn’t. She was captivated to see the world
through her cousin’s eyes. Then she turned a page and found a more
detailed sketch of a long tunnel. Poorly lit and lined with bricks
and moss, it stretched endlessly into a tiny speck of black.”What
a strange thing for her to draw,” Carla thought. She turned
another page. A drawing of a child’s face, dirty and sad, looked
back at her. Carla caught her breath – the boy’s eyes held hers.
Afraid now of what she would find, Carla turned one more page. But it
was only a drawing of the house, of Federal Hill. Except it wasn’t
Federal Hill as she knew it, as it was. It was dark, broken,
deserted, a creepy house of gaping windows and boarded doors. Carla
shut the book. She looked out the pretty window over Julia’s bed at
the morning, at the grass and trees, and she wondered why her cousin
drew the things she did.
Aunt Velma fried two pounds of bacon first thing to wake up the
house. Feeding twelve people is no small task. In addition to bacon
she made pancakes, a batch of biscuits, scrambled eggs, stewed
apples, and homemade grape jelly. She made a huge pot of brewed
coffee for her husband, mother-in-law, and the college boys, but for
herself she always made sassafras tea from roots she’d dug on the
property. Mountains of dishes overflowed the big stone sink. Bundles
of dried herbs, garlic, and onions hung near the fireplace, and the
aroma of rosemary filled the room. Everybody knew that if you wanted
fresh coffee, hot eggs, warm biscuits, and pancakes not flipped with
your own hand, you came to breakfast at 7:30. After that, you were on
your own. Carla found Cecil eating pancakes with Sam and Abe. They
were eating bacon nearly as fast as Aunt Velma could cook it.
Carla sat beside her brother and fingered a biscuit.
“Pancakes, Carla?” Aunt Velma asked. Carla put the biscuit back.
“Yes ma’am. Just one.” Her aunt turned back toward the stove.
“Thank you,” Carla remembered.
“You never have,” Sam was saying quietly. “You’re lying.”
“Am not,” Cecil replied under his breath. “I rode at camp two
years ago.”
“Ha! Did not,” Sam repeated.
“Did too!”
“Did what?” Carla asked.
The three boys were huddled in conspiracy and didn’t hear her.
“Did what?” she asked again.
Abe turned. “Rode a horse. Cecil says he’s done it.”
Carla glopped currant jelly from the spoon back into the bowl.
“I didn’t know Julia could draw,” she said to nobody in
particular.
“Chocolate chips, Carla?” Velma asked.
“You did not,” Sam hissed.
Grandmother’s rocker creaked a little. Carla glanced over to see if
Shamrock were there. The dog was not by the old woman’s feet, which
rested on a small oval rag rug.
“She’s been drawing things since she was tiny,” Grandmother
replied.
“Have too!” Cecil argued forcefully. “I’ll prove it.
I’ll ride today.”
“Yes ma’am,” Carla directed to her aunt. Then she said to her
grandmother, “She’s kind of good, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
Aunt Velma walked toward Carla with a large pancake expertly balanced
on a spatula. She slid it onto a plate. “She’s been doodling on
any piece of paper she could find since she was two years old. Ruined
a perfectly good atlas when she was five.”
Carla cut into her breakfast. Both women were watching her.
“She can’t eat that much,” Grandmother said.
Aunt Velma studied her briefly. “Did Julia show you her drawing
book?” The room was silent. Even the boys stopped talking, and
everyone looked at Carla. She chewed her pancake and wondered what to
say. Then Ben and Teddy threw open the back door and filled the room
with loud laughter.
“Anybody wanna go riding this morning? We’re getting the horses
out.”
Carla escaped interrogation. All five boys began arguing about how to
share two horses, while their mother warned them about imminent
danger to property, horses, and themselves. Spatula in mid-air, she
followed them outside.
“And don’t fall off!” she yelled. “And don’t hurt your
cousin!”
Carla found herself alone in the kitchen with her grandmother and was
about to ask about Shamrock and Julia. The old lady was smiling at
her. Carla opened her mouth to speak but at precisely that moment,
Frances flounced down the stairs from the dining room, yawning. She
collapsed on a chair, laid her head on the table, and groaned.
“I have to go to a party today!” she complained. “I need
coffee!”
So quietly Carla almost didn’t notice, Julia slipped into the room
behind her sister, and Shamrock sneaked in on her heels. Julia sat
down on the steps and draped her nightgown over her feet, but Carla
saw them first. They were filthy dirty and wet. Shamrock’s paws
were the same.
“Those boys!” Velma Christopher exclaimed as she reentered
the kitchen. “They’re gonna be the death of me!”
“Mom!” whined Frances. “Is there coffee?”
“No coffee for you, child. Milk or orange juice. And don’t forget
you’re going to Tammy’s today for that birthday party. Iron your
dress.”
After breakfast, Carla didn’t know what to do. The boys had
disappeared. Frances camped out in the downstairs bathroom applying
make-up and doing her hair. Shamrock groaned wearily and curled up at
Grandmother’s feet. Julia snatched a biscuit from the table when
her mother was distracted and ran from the kitchen. When Carla
drifted back to the bedroom later, Julia had changed into play
clothes and was holding her wand. The bed curtain was pulled back,
and all the contents of the windowsill were returned to their
rightful places. Julia smiled at Carla in a friendly way.
“Wanna play Merlin?”
“What’s that?”
“You run and hide. I try to touch you with the magic wand. If I
touch you with it, you have to pretend to be whatever animal I tell
you to be.”
“Okay ….” Carla hesitated. “And what then?”
“I have ten minutes to find you. If I don’t, then we meet at the
garden statue and it’s your turn with the wand.”
“I can hide outside?”
“Sure, but not in the woods.”
While Julia counted to one hundred, Carla flew out the front door to
avoid the ladies in the kitchen. She hid behind a huge cedar tree
outside Julia’s bedroom window. She hid under a row of boxwood
bushes. She hid inside an old chicken shed. Julia found her quickly
each time, but Carla hunted long and hard to discover Julia under the
kitchen steps and in the rafters of the garage. Finally Abe showed
up, sweaty from chasing horses.
“Hey, Carla.”
“Hey. Did you ride?”
“Nope. They wouldn’t give me a turn,” he said. “Where’s
Julia?” he asked, and then saw the wand in her hand. “Oh …
Merlin. Can’t find her?”
“Yeah.”
“Up in the garage? Under the steps?”
“Already found her in those spots.”
“Hmm,” he replied. He squared his shoulders. “Come with me.”
He marched into the boxwood garden with Carla behind him, straight to
the statue of the lady. She was nearly as tall as Carla on her
pedestal. One marbled hand barely touched her filmy dress which hung
to her knees and the other arched gracefully skyward where she gazed.
Abe rested his hand on her head.
“Watch this,” he instructed.
He grabbed the statue around the waist as if he were going to dance
with her. He pulled up and pushed sideways, and the lady fell into
his arms. He rested her on the grass.
“C’mon out, Julia. You’re found.” He grabbed the wand from
Carla’s hand and extended it into a dark cavity inside the statue’s
pedestal. Carla smelled fresh earth. Abe said to her, “She always
hides here last. The first time she did it we only found her because
she started screaming about some mice crawling up her leg.”
Carla peered into the darkness. It was deep, going into the earth
many feet below ground level. A small child could easily stand there,
she thought.
“Julia!” Abe called into it. “Julia?”
“Yes?” his sister answered as she strolled across the grass and
wound her way through the bushes. She’d come from the direction of
the house.
“But …!” Carla objected. “I looked everywhere around the
house!”
Before they could argue further, Teddy, Sam, Ben, and Cecil ran up in
a group. Teddy and Sam carried Ben between them, his arms draped
around their shoulders.
“Where’s mom?” Teddy gasped.
The children shrugged. The boys lumbered up the kitchen steps and a
furor of voices and activity ensued. A horse had reared, Ben had
fallen, the horse had fallen, and the boy’s foot had been trapped
for a few moments under the animal’s weight. Carla, Abe, and Julia
wandered into the kitchen as Velma inspected her son’s foot. He sat
on the table, his leg propped on a pillow.
“What do you think, Granny?” she asked her mother-in-law.
Grandmother Julia walked to the table with a cane. She didn’t look
at the foot; she slowly ran her hand over it several times. Carla was
puzzled and gave Julia a quizzical look.
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s nearly blind,” Julia whispered. “Didn’t you know?”
“But she knits,” Carla whispered back. “She knits
sweaters.”
“I know,” Julia answered.
“It’s a sprain,” the old woman determined. “But a bad one,
and deep bruising. No horse-riding for you in the near future, young
man.” She patted Ben on the shoulder.
“On the couch you go,” Velma said.
 |
| James Madison and the Virginia Plan |
And so the children – all the children except Frances – spent the
rest of the day and all of the evening inside playing games, watching
a movie, reading, and finally, after the adults had all gone to bed,
telling stories in the darkness. Sam was the one who suggested moving
to the Assembly Room, the off-limits room, the ghostly room. Ben
hobbled with help and the others carefully opened the double doors
into the chamber. In spite of the August heat that day the space was
cool, and moonlight shone brightly through the bare windows. Carla
saw faint particles of dust floating in the air in the middle of the
room where it was lightest. The children went to the round rug in
front of the fireplace. They sat in a circle there. Last to sit was
Teddy. But before he did, he grinned and reached above the mantle. He
grasped three things: a small, tattered book, short sword in its
battered sheath, and a small, yellow powder horn. He sat with his
back to the fireplace.
“What do you want to hear?”
The children began whispering among themselves. Carla heard Harvey
and tunnel and old clerk’s office and statue
and poison and cedar tree and well. At last
Teddy silenced them with his hand in the air and announced, “Tonight
we will have the story of the lost child.”
Several voices said, “Oooo!” and one said, “Yeah!”
But Julia said, “No. I don’t want to hear that one. It’s
scary.”
“Of course it’s scary, Julia. It’s a ghost story, remember?”
Ben reprimanded.
“No,” she continued. “It … it feels real. I think it’s
real.”
“Oh, good grief,” Sam grumbled. “Teddy, tell something else
before she starts to cry.”
Carla was relieved. She didn’t like stories of lost children. She’d
known too many lost children already in her life, and it was not
entertaining to think about.
“Alright,” Teddy continued. “The story of the bloody sword!”
Here, he slid the dull blade from its sheath and held it overhead.
The moonlight shone on its dented edge. Carla listened to an account
of a fugitive from the law hiding at Federal Hill, the officers who
searched for him, his narrow escape, the servant girl who helped him,
and his tragic death when he was finally caught near Richmond.
“Where did he hide?” Carla asked. She was fascinated with a house
full of hiding places.
“He hid in the box garden, right under their noses,” Abe said
excitedly. “I showed it to you today – the hole under the lady
statue!”
“A grown man? In there?” Carla was incredulous. “It’s not big
enough!”
Teddy explained. “You need to get down in there, Carla. We’ll
lower you down tomorrow. It’s quite deep and has a board on the
bottom. You couldn’t stay in there for days, but you could hide for
hours.”
Cecil chimed in. “Why was it made? I mean, who wanted a hiding
place like that, in the garden?”
“We’re not sure,” Sam answered. “Could’ve been for hiding
money, silver, ammunition, liquor, lots of things.”
“Cool!” Cecil said. Then he added, “Did you say there’s
stories about a tunnel? Is there a tunnel on the property?”
Suddenly Julia jumped up and said, “I don’t want to hear anymore
ghost stories.” And she turned to go. “And mom wouldn’t want us
in here!” She strutted from the room.
“What’s got into her?” Teddy asked. “She’s usually the one
who doesn’t want to quit.”
“I think I’ll go with her,” Carla said, and stood up. As she
walked away the boys continued to whisper and laugh. She went
noiselessly to the bedroom and found Julia in her alcove.
“Why’d you leave? You like stories, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” Julia mumbled. “Not tonight. I’m sleepy.”
“Oh, alright.” Carla went to Frances’s bed. “Goodnight,”
she whispered.
But Julia didn’t answer.
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