CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was the last weekend in February when Lucy Moon arrived at the old gas station for her Youth Action assignment to find Mrs. Mudd ticked off at her.

  "Ms. Kortum at the Turtle Rock Historical Society says she needs you to help her," said Mrs. Mudd. She tap-tap-tapped her pencil against her clipboard. "She won't have anyone else—and I offered everyone—but she said you're the best student in her social studies class. So today, you're to report to the Grundhoffer House. Do you know where that is?"

  Lucy nodded. It was one of Turtle Rock's claims to fame—an eight-sided house built in the 1800s. The Historical Society gave tours of the house every weekend.

  "It's on Third Street. Four blocks that way," said Mrs. Mudd, pointing. "Don't get lost. If you don't show up, it'll be worse for you next week."

  Mrs. Mudd paused and then said, "I hope you're not up to your sly ways, Lucy Moon. This was all very suspicious. You'd be just the type to weasel out of Youth Action."

  Lucy felt confused. She could barely weasel her way out of bed these days. But who cared? For once, Mrs. Mudd was headed one way and Lucy in another!

  "Go on," said Mrs. Mudd. "And you'd better pray I don't hear one bad report about your behavior."

  Lucy opened the door to the three-season porch of the Grundhoffer House and saw a sign on a desk: RING FOR TOURS. Lucy rang the bell.

  Lucy half thought this was all a strange mistake. How could Ms. Kortum work at the Grundhoffer House? She had a full-time job at the junior high already! More likely, someone about two hundred years old, wearing knickers and a puffy shirt, would show up, hand Lucy a pickax and steel wool, and gesture toward the water closet. Lucy would give the toilet its first cleaning ever, probably in honor of some freaky event like the sesquicentennial. (And didn't the word "sesquicentennial" sound like chunky peanut butter being squished from a tube? How could anyone celebrate that?)

  Still, a decrepit toilet away from Mrs. Mudd was a toilet of pure pleasure.

  Lucy glanced at her watch. She rang the bell a second time.

  "Coming . . . Coming! Just a minute."

  And there she was: Ms. Kortum, wearing sparkly aqua eye shadow and smiling widely.

  "Finally, Lucy Moon!" Ms Kortum said. She put her hands on her hips. "Boy, do I need your help."

  Lucy's eyes widened at the sight of her teacher, but she got right to the point—no use pretending this was a social call. "It's the toilet, isn't it? You want me to clean it, right?"

  Ms. Kortum's face screwed up. "When have I ever asked you to clean a toilet, Lucy Moon? I need your brain, not your brawn! Let me show you."

  Ms. Kortum beckoned Lucy to follow, talking all the way through the Grundhoffer House and down the dark steps into the basement. "I knew as soon as I heard from your father that you were exactly the kind of help I needed. But Mrs. Mudd wasn't willing to give you up. She made me fill out all sorts of ridiculous paperwork. But here you are!"

  Her dad did this? Lucy hadn't seen him working to improve her situation since January. Then Lucy got it—he hadn't wanted to get her hopes up. He'd been secretly steadfast for weeks. Lucy's eyes started to water. Now was not the time! Lucy blinked back the tears and pinched the back of her hand.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Ms. Kortum turned on the lights, and Lucy saw chairs around a banquet table, and on the table, a huge box. amos zebulon, papers 1 OF 14 read the words on the side of the box.

  Ms. Kortum handed Lucy a pair of white gloves.

  "Okay, I want you to put these letters and papers into acid-free sleeves." Ms. Kortum held up a plastic sleeve. "Then I want you to put them in order by date as best you can. And be careful, because this is the oldest history of Turtle Rock we have. Then we'll have lunch at twelve, and then you've got homework to do—and I've got my grading. If you don't have homework, I'm a crack cribbage player, and I'd like to have a game."

  Lucy nodded her head.

  "Oh, and here's the best part," said Ms. Kortum, smiling. "Anything interesting you find, you must read aloud. I'm sure we'll find all sorts of things in these boxes!"

  Ms. Kortum seemed to want Lucy to smile, so Lucy smiled.

  She shouldn't get used to this! If she got used to it, next week with Mrs. Mudd would be a million times worse. Lucy could work with Mrs. Mudd and not take it personally—just do the work in a zombie trance. It had taken several weekends to develop the zombie trance, and Lucy didn't want to lose it now!

  Lucy swallowed hard. "How long do you think you'll need help?" Lucy hated that she lacked the gumption to ask this in a casual way—in a way that didn't sound like begging, pleading. But right now, she was a lobster without a shell, all soft and raw.

  Ms. Kortum showed no signs of noticing. She looked at the box. Her brow furrowed. "For sure until spring break," she said. "This is only one of fourteen boxes, Lucy. I can't imagine us going through them quickly, can you?"

  Lucy bit her lip and smiled unsteadily, wave after wave of relief crashing through her.

  Ms. Kortum glanced at Lucy. "You know," said Ms. Kortum, "I could really use some tea. Would you like some tea, Lucy?"

  Lucy shook her head.

  "Well, I'll go get a cup for myself, then. Be right back."

  At the sound of Ms. Kortum climbing the stairs, Lucy glanced at all her good fortune, then sat on a chair and started to cry. It didn't last long, and when she was done, Lucy felt ready to work.

  That first weekend at the Grundhoffer House was the first weekend Lucy hadn't felt like sleeping during the day. And though it was painful, Lucy let the first green stalks of spring poke up through her frozen heart. Maybe she'd make it until spring break. Yeah, she could make it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At the junior high, opinions about Lucy Moon grew more generous as daylight lengthened, stretching toward spring. The kids had finished their punishments. The police left them alone. And as a result, the kids' anger at Lucy Moon began to subside incrementally each day.

  Most kids' lives got on in a normal fashion. They got their allowance (and tried to figure out how to ask for a raise).They saw their friends after school (and wished they were old enough to drive a car).Teachers gave homework freely (without any concern about students having a life). Principal Adams stood in the hall between classes, pulling boys into headlocks. "Come on, come on—I've seen you move faster than that," he said every day. The Big Six— Kendra, Brenda, Didi, Gillian, Chantel, and the Genie— crowded on the third floor in the southeast corner, as they'd always done. And boys lined up in the back hallway to dump wrappers in the southeast corner trash can, or slurp a drink from the southeast corner water fountain. It was normal. All was normal.

  Except for one thing: Lucy Moon. Lucy Moon's new behavior caused the school equilibrium to shift subtly, and it felt like a pebble in a shoe—sometimes not even evident, sometimes slightly irritating, and sometimes downright painful. Normally, Lucy beamed with the intensity of a searchlight. Sitting next to her, people sometimes felt the heat of her concentration. When Lucy listened, the person suspected that she took in more than what they'd actually said. Lucy Moon giving a book report meant calling the room to action. And Lucy didn't talk in class, she challenged. She believed in big issues, stood up for them, and took on everybody in her path: students, teachers, Principal Adams—even Miss Wiggins. There was something . . . well, admirable about it. What did they believe in? Their television shows? Lucy reminded them all (sometimes like a brick to the head) that there was another way. Maybe they'd never do things the way Lucy did, but in the end, no one wanted to be without her. Lucy's extremism was a standard, a bookend to judge their own behavior. So when Lucy dimmed during the winter—when she dragged, and barely paid attention—it felt wrong.

  Kids started talking. The "lobotomized Lucy" they called her. They found out that Lucy still had detention for the "Free Wiggins Hill!" postcards, even when they'd heard that Sam Shipman came up with the idea in the first place! In addition, Lucy had been forced to join Youth Action. That was way too harsh.

  It had something to do with the adults. Why were they paying all this extra attention to Lucy Moon? Was she that special? Yeah, she was weird. But she'd been weird forever! Suddenly, adults wanted to hear the Lucy Moon stories: How Lucy bit Brian Gellman when she saw him bite his little brother, in order to teach the kid not to bite; how Lucy lined the edge of a mining pit with red sand and put up signs that said THE land BLEEDS; how Lucy took water samples from elementary-school drinking fountains to test for lead. Kids heard parents repeating Lucy Moon stories on the phone, or an aisle away in the grocery store, or at the gas pump. What was the deal?

  And so the kids at the junior high had begun to feel the invoking of that ancient line in the sand that separates kids from adults: the us and them, the out-of-the-know and the in-the-know, the powerless and the powerful. At first it had felt like a faint background noise, but when Lucy Moon came back to school without her green-and-yellow hat . . . well, that was downright wrong. No green-and-yellow hat? This was not okay. Lucy Moon may have been a weirdo, but she was their weirdo.

  Even the Genie, of The Big Six, noticed. Several kids overheard the Genie say, "Lucy Moon may be a freak but you know she doesn't deserve this."

  That was when Gillian put her arm around the Genie. "You're not feeling well," she said.

  "Do we need an emergency online shopping intervention?" Kendra asked.

  "Yes!" Didi and Brenda squealed together.

  In the end, all the kids agreed: what was so wrong with Lucy Moon trying to get the truth out about Wiggins Hill? As kids thought about the chain-link fence around Wiggins Hill, they began to agree that fencing a good sledding hill and arresting sledders were things that simply defied rational behavior. In fact, what kind of "enlightenment" (a period of scientific thought they had studied in school) had society reached if this was the end result? Pitiful. It was pitiful.

  In addition, there was the irritating fact that Lucy Moon's homework had become so detailed—with additional sources and outside reading—that she made the rest of them look about as intelligent as slobbering bulldogs. Something needed to be done. Lucy Moon had way too much time to do homework.

  With the Grundhoffer House Youth Action assignment, Lucy Moon began to shake off the haze of cleaning, school, books, homework, more cleaning, school, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. And as she began to feel more like herself, she found—surprisingly—that she was angry.

  Lucy thought she should be happy. Don't get her wrong—she felt much better at the Grundhoffer House than during the three weeks she'd cleaned with Mrs. Myra Mudd. It's just that she wasn't that happy. Relieved? Yes. Not so tired? Yes. Having a better time? Things were a hundred percent better. But Lucy felt angry.

  See, when Lucy thought about all the things that happened because of Wiggins Hill—stacked them up, shuffled them, looked at them front to back, back to front, and upside down—she couldn't find one thing she did wrong. All she had done was ask questions, raise an issue. And this is what she got: a double-length detention at school for her part in the postcard campaign, a Youth Action assignment that involved solitary confinement with a toilet and a toothbrush, and finally, she seemed to be shouldering the blame for the Wiggins Hill vandalism. In addition, her green-and-yellow hat now lived at the bottom of Principal Adams's closet as feed for the neighborhood silverfish!

  On top of this, her mom had gone from stalking Lucy with phone calls to stalking Lucy with thick letters. They came in the mail more and more frequently now, and Lucy had finally succumbed. She read a couple. Dear Lucy, they started. But Lucy thought they should begin Dear Diary or Dear Confessor, since her mom used the letters to chronicle the minutia of cloud-photography life, and confessed things like feeling guilty about feeling so free, or finally I can breathe. Then she'd gush on and on about how sorry she was about Christmas. Right. The postmarks clearly indicated that Lucy's mom steered her car as far away from the northern Midwest United States as possible, driving along the tattered edges of the southern states. Any farther away and she'd need a submarine! Lucy decided that collecting them, unopened, on top of her dresser, was a good idea.

  Finally, Lucy felt angry because she no longer had any friends. And this, she thought, was her fault. No friends except Ms. Kortum and her dad, and did they even count? Ms. Kortum was paid by the school to be nice to her, and her dad was her dad. Yes, she'd say he was a friend now, and a good one. It's just that he was clearly a dad first.

  Lucy desperately wanted to talk to Zoë, but how could she? Scenes panned through Lucy's mind: putting the yellow walkie-talkie in the mailbox, trying to get Zoë to hand out postcards in the school hallways when she didn't want to do it, and pretending to be asleep in the Rossignol Bakery when she could hear every word Zoë said. Lucy even admitted that all this time she'd kind of wished she had a body like Zoë, with all its new bells and whistles. (She was so sick of having to shop in the little boys' department for jeans!) Also, Lucy had a vague recollection of not even giving Zoë credit for The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes. That one hurt.

  But Lucy felt so angry, she wasn't sure now was a good time to talk to anyone. Someone might say the wrong thing, some little ping of a thought, and Lucy would respond, ka-boom! Not good, no, not good—especially if there was any chance of winning Zoë's friendship back.

  Lucy decided to concentrate on the Amos Zebulon papers at the Grundhoffer House until she felt less angry. This was despite that fact that old papers held no excitement for Lucy, except for their recycling potential. (True, Ms. Kortum made Minnesota History an okay topic in class, and Lucy had written a couple of A+ reports, but it was time to move on.) So Lucy surprised herself when, during the second weekend, she became intrigued.

  On that Sunday, Lucy picked a leather-bound journal out of the box. Lucy thought she would figure out the beginning and ending dates and file it somehow, but Ms. Kortum insisted that Lucy read it. "It's part of the fun," she said.

  Lucy sighed and opened it up, and began searching for something entertaining. It wasn't the kind of journal that recorded lots of thoughts—more like a simple record of the day's activities. A typical entry recorded the date and said something like this:

  Fine weather. 8 beaver, 3 mink. Set out traps. Spent most of the day working on fort with other men.

  Not the most exciting read, but Lucy soldiered through it.

  After being bored cross-eyed over lists and lists of animals trapped, it occurred to Lucy that Amos had killed a lot of beaver, tons, it seemed. Lucy had never heard of that many beaver. She mentioned this thought to Ms. Kortum, who sat across from her sorting correspondences. Ms. Kortum smiled at Lucy and said, "Imagine what the bird-song must have sounded like in the middle of the nineteenth century."

  And that started an avalanche of thought: Yeah, what were the woods like then? If there were more birds, the woods must have been noisy! How many beaver lived then? Bear? Fox? And what about animals that were extinct now? Did passenger pigeons fly over Minnesota?

  Lucy read on, beginning to piece together Amos Zebulon's story. As Lucy had learned in class, Amos Zebulon had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company, an English fur-trading company. He was only fifteen or sixteen when he joined, and in his mid-twenties, he came to Turtle Rock to help with the new fort the Hudson's Bay Company built. He wasn't in charge, but he'd had a lot of responsibility. He was good with a canoe, an excellent trapper, and could carry a tune.

  Then came this entry:

  March 22, 1836: The Chippewa invited the men from Turtle Rock Fort to the sugar bush today. They are harvesting the sugar and it is a festival of sorts. We came bearing gifts for the Chippewa — bells, ribbons, and tin cups. (We were in dire need of festivities for during the long winter we have been among ourselves.) The Chippewa spike the tree, collect the sap, and boil it. Most they save for later, but some goes into ducks’ beaks and birch bark cones. When it is cool, the children suck the hardened sap and laugh.

  I must confess fascination with Rippling Water, the daughter of the head of the Chippewa clan. She has been married once (and abandoned) and cannot bear children. The Hudson’s Bay Company will not recognize unions between their men and the Indians. Men of other companies find an Indian wife useful in this wilderness. I find I cannot forget her.

  Lucy read the section to Ms. Kortum.

  Ms. Kortum clapped her hands. "Oh, that's exactly what I thought," she said excitedly. "You must tell me if they get married. I've suspected for years that Amos Zebulon married a Chippewa Native American!"

  "But what is this 'sugar bush'?" Lucy put down the journal. "I keep telling Amos that there's no bush growing sugar in Minnesota, but he keeps saying it!"

  Ms. Kortum started laughing. She pulled off her reading glasses. "A 'sugar bush' is a grove of sugar maple trees. You make maple sugar out of sugar maple trees."

  "Well, why don't they call it a bunch of sugar trees or something? A tree is not a bush."

  "I don't know, Lucy," said Ms. Kortum. "Maybe you should look it up. It might make an interesting paper for class. . . ."

  "I'm not that interested," said Lucy, hurriedly picking up the journal.

  Amos returned to detailing daily life. The men worked hard on building the fort and solidifying their relationship with the Chippewa.

  Then this:

  May 20, 1836: Fine weather. Established Rippling Water’s bride price with her father: 3 moose, 10 blankets, 1 hatchet, 5 kettles. Two of the other men in the fort think it’s a mortal sin marrying an Indian, and the others (including the Chief Agent) say nothing. I suspect the Chief Agent knows that we all will benefit from my family bond with the Chippewa, especially with the Sioux warring.