Clare Vanderpool - Moon Over Manifest

Sorry, buddy. You’ve got better things to do than read my rambling. Been fishing lately? Try Echo Cove down at Triple Toe Creek. The waters run a little deeper, so it’s not as hot for the fish. You can even use my green and yellow sparkle lure. Gets one every time .

Ned

P.S. Catch one for me, will you?

Ode to the Rattler

JULY 4, 1936

It was cloudy as Ruthanne reread Ned’s July Fourth letter out loud. We didn’t hold our breath for rain, but a hot breeze blew through the tree house.

“Did you bring ’em?” Ruthanne asked.

“Yeah, I brought ’em.” Lettie showed her stash of four scraggly firecrackers she’d found in her brother’s tackle box. We’d decided to set them off in honor of Ned’s Fourth of July letter on our own Fourth of July. Sort of a tribute by doing the normal things Ned mentioned.

“But this letter always makes me sad,” said Lettie.

It was interesting how Ned’s letters struck us differently from one reading to the next. Lettie might get teary one time at the thought of all those unopened letters, and another she might smile at his fishing advice for Jinx. We had read them so often they almost started to feel the way I’d heard folks talk about scripture, like the words were alive and speaking straight to us.

That day my thoughts lingered on the ending and Ned’s mention of the green and yellow sparkle lure. I still hadn’t told Lettie and Ruthanne about the mementos I’d found under the floorboard in my room. Never having had much to call my own I guess I liked having those few treasures all to myself.

Ruthanne’s thoughts were somewhere else altogether. “I wonder if it’s still there.”

“If what’s still where?” Lettie and I asked together.

Ruthanne sat up as if she’d been jerked out of a dream. “What Stucky Cybulskis wrote in their classroom. His ‘Ode to the Rattler.’ Ned said he didn’t get caught, so he must have written it somewhere he wasn’t supposed to. I wonder if it’s still there.”

Lettie brushed a strand of sweaty hair off her face. “After all these years? Surely it would’ve been washed off, painted over, or just thrown away by now. Why don’t we just set off our firecrackers and go see Hattie Mae about some lemonade?”

“Maybe he wrote it in an out-of-the-way place,” Ruthanne continued, “or stashed a note somewhere … someplace where his classmates might see it but the teacher wouldn’t.”

“What if it is still there?” I asked. “Do you think it might tell us something about who the Rattler was … or is?”

“Only one way to find out,” Ruthanne answered, already shinnying down the rope ladder. Lettie and I shrugged at each other and followed.

Another of life’s universals is there’s always those things in a town that “everybody knows,” except for the person who’s new. So when we got to the high school and I asked Ruthanne how she planned to get in, I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Everybody knows the storage room window doesn’t shut all the way.”

We skirted around the back of the building and Ruthanne laced her fingers together to give me a leg up. Casting a last nervous glance around the school yard, I hoisted myself through the window. With an unexpected shove from below, I ended up tumbling into the storage room, overturning a galvanized bucket with a god-awful clamor.

Lettie was next to make her way through the window. She was much more graceful in her landing. Lettie and I used the upturned bucket to stand on so we could reach out the window and grab hold of Ruthanne.

“I’m surprised they don’t fix that window,” I said now that we were all safe inside.

Ruthanne rubbed her stomach where she’d scratched herself on the windowsill. “ ‘They’ would be Mr. Foster, the janitor. And he’d probably be delighted to spin a little web to catch some kids sneaking in.”

Lettie nodded. “My brothers say he can sniff out mischief and shenanigans before they even happen. And when he’s not chewing his tobacco, he loves to grab a kid by the scruff of the neck and march him into the principal’s office, and before you know it, he’s turned a little mischief into cause for big trouble.”

“Besides,” Ruthanne added, “kids spend nine months of the year trying to get out of school. I guess they don’t figure anyone’s going to sneak back in.”

That made sense. And yet here we were.

“Come on.” Lettie led the way out of the storage closet. “The senior classroom is down the main floor.” I didn’t doubt that Lettie, who had six older siblings, knew her way around this school.

We tiptoed down the hall to the second classroom on the right. The heavy wooden door opened easily and we stepped in. There is an eerie, expectant feeling to a schoolroom in the summer. The normal classroom items were there: desks, chalkboards, a set of encyclopedias. The American flag with accompanying pictures of Presidents Washington and Lincoln. But without students occupying those desks and their homework tacked on the wall, that empty summer classroom seemed laden with the memory of past students and past learning that took place within those walls. I strained to listen, as if I might hear the whisperings and stirrings of the past. Maybe Ruthanne was right. Maybe there was more here than met the eye.

“We’re not going to find anything just standing here,” she said.

We spied around, in the cloakroom, behind the teacher’s desk, on all the walls.

Ruthanne checked by the pencil sharpener and flipped through the dusty pages of a large dictionary atop a bookshelf. “Too bad we can’t just look it up. That would make things simple.”

“It would have to be somewhere that wouldn’t get painted over,” Lettie said, for some reason looking in the trash can.

The room was still and the desks looked familiar and inviting. Ned’s letter was fresh in my mind, so sitting in one of the desks and running my hands over the grainy wooden top, I could imagine this room full of past students: Ned Gillen, Stucky Cybulskis, Danny McIntyre. Tracing my fingers along the ornate cast iron legs, I could picture Heck and Holler Carlson, Pearl Ann Larkin, even Hattie Mae Harper.

“So where would Stucky have written his ‘Ode to the Rattler’?” Lettie interrupted my thoughts. “Where would a teacher not look?”

I tapped my fingers on the desktop, preferring to fall back into my daydream of an earlier time filled with raised hands, muffled giggles, lessons yet to be learned, and lives yet to be lived.

And then came the questions I could never seem to keep at bay. Did Gideon ever sit in this classroom? Did he ever raise his hand to answer a question? Or write a hidden message that had not been erased?

That was when it dawned on me. “Where would a student write a secret message?” I was thinking the words, but I must have said them out loud, because Lettie and Ruthanne abandoned their own search and stood beside me as my drumming fingers suddenly went still.

I lifted the desktop and laid it back on its hinges to reveal the space where each student would store his or her books and slate or tablet of paper. Where one might keep a secret note or a drawing passed from a friend or an admirer.

The desk was empty except for an old pencil whittled down to a nub. There were no messages from admirers, no hidden notes that had been passed behind the teacher’s back. My shoulders slumped like I’d just flunked a final exam.

Then Lettie saw it. “Look.” She pointed at the underside of the desktop. There, in a handwritten scrawl, were the words

Here I sit, my eyelids sagging ,

While teacher’s tongue just won’t quit wagging .