Defiant Heart (11 page)

“You’re sewing.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“May I see it?” she asked, reaching out a hand, and, again, for a brief moment, he hesitated. Then he reached down, picked up the needle with the fingers of one hand, lifted the shirt with the other, and handed everything to her.

With a practiced gesture, she slipped the needle through the fabric so as to keep it from falling, held the shirt up and shook it out. It was torn in two places. The seam in the right shoulder had separated and the fabric itself was ripped at a spot in the middle of the back. She could understand a seam coming loose, but it would have taken a lot of effort to tear the fabric. She turned the garment around, noticed the initials on the front, then noticed something else.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is much too big for you. Where did you get it?”

“At Molly’s Thrift Shop.”

“And you need this for school?”

He nodded.

“Tomorrow?”

Again, he nodded.

She was about to ask him how it became torn, but there was something in his expression that made her stop. Instead, she studied the stitches her grandson had already made and shook her head.

As handy as Ernest had been, he couldn’t sew worth a lick. Apparently, her grandson suffered the same shortcoming. She folded the shirt loosely, and, holding it in one hand, reached out and plucked the spool of thread off the workbench. “This won’t take me but a few minutes.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she gave him a look, and he stopped. “Thank you,” he said, simply.

#

Things were slow at the hardware store on Thursday afternoon, so Jon took a seat on one of the stools and opened a book he’d checked out of the library. It was the same trigonometry text that the twelfth graders were using in Mr. Hanson’s class. The school, he’d discovered, kept a few extra copies of the textbooks in the library.

He was trying to figure out the problem Mr. Hanson had assigned to Mary. He’d been noodling it all day, whenever he had a spare moment.

“Whatcha reading?” asked Walt, as he stepped through the back door. Walt had taken advantage of the lull to use the toilet in the storeroom.

Jon held up the book so Walt could see the cover.

“Trigonometry,” Walt grimaced. “That hurts my head just saying it.” He stepped up to the counter and leaned against it with one elbow. “Is that your toughest class?”

“Not really. I won’t be taking this class until next year.”

“You’re not even in the class, and you’re reading the book?” Walt asked incredulously.

Jon laughed. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“You like to read a lot, huh?”

“I love to read. Don’t you?”

Walt shook his head solemnly. “Let me put it this way: Ol’ Walt has never met a book he couldn’t ignore.”

“Don’t you like stories?”

“I love stories.”

“You’re missing out on so many good stories by not reading. Here,” Jon said, pulling one of the books from the stack on the counter and holding it out. “I just read this for the second time. It’s a great story.”

Walt took the book from Jon and turned it over in his hands. “
The Mayor of Casterbridge
,” he read. “Hey, sort of like the boss.”

“Well, the main character
is
a mayor. But it’s about a lot more than that.”

“Got a lot of action, huh?”

“It depends on what you mean by action. But, sure, there’s a lot that happens.”

Walt looked again at the book with a dubious expression. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Ok. What the heck.”

He came around the counter and placed the novel on the shelf. Glancing over Jon’s shoulder, he pointed to the sheet of paper on which Jon had transcribed Mr. Hanson’s problem. “What is that, a code?”

“Well, sort of. Each one of these symbols has a meaning”

Walt picked up the sheet and held it closer to the light. He turned it upside down. Then, apparently deciding it didn’t make any more sense that way, turned it back again. Finally, he returned it to the counter.

“So, what does it say?”

“That’s kind of what I’m trying to figure out. What I don’t understand is why or how this part,” and Jon pointed to the last line of the equation, “equals zero.”

“Well, it’s a cinch I don’t know,” Walt said, sliding his stool over to the counter. “So what good is any of this stuff anyway?”

“Oh, believe me, you can do a lot of things with this.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

Jon thought for a moment. “Ok, you know that big elm tree by the funeral parlor?”

“Sure.”

“Would you be able to figure out how tall it is?”

“Oh yeah, piece o’ cake.”

Bemused, Jon asked, “How?”

“I’d climb it,” Walt said, as he struggled to pull himself up on his stool, “with a measuring stick.” Settling onto the seat, he gave Jon a self-satisfied look.

“You would climb the tree,” Jon deadpanned.

“I’ve climbed lots of trees.”

Jon looked at Walt skeptically. “Have you climbed any lately?”

“No.”

John chuckled. “Well, ok. Let’s say you climbed the tree. While you were climbing the tree, I could sit at the bottom and eat my lunch.”

“Why would you be eating your lunch?”

“I’m just making a point. While you’re doing all that work climbing, I’m not working at all,” he said, then added, “I don’t have to be eating lunch.”

“You could be eating lunch if you wanted to.”

“Right. The point is this. Long after you started climbing the tree, but before you got to the top, I could stand up, pace out fifty feet from the trunk, take a reading from my protractor here,” he held up the small plastic device, “and, with a couple of calculations, I could tell you exactly how tall the tree is. It would take me all of one minute, and I would never need to leave the ground.”

“Why fifty feet?”

“It doesn’t have to be fifty feet. It could be sixty feet.”

“Well, which would it be? Fifty or sixty?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Walt. It doesn’t matter.”

“I know. I’m just havin’ fun with you,” Walt said, laughing. “Here’s the thing though,” he said, affecting a serious look and speaking with an exaggerated solemnity. “I am never, ever, in a million years, gonna wanna know how tall that tree is.” He arched his bushy eyebrows and grinned. “So, I guess I don’t need to know trigonometry now, do I?”

Jon was about to respond when the bell above the front door tinkled, and Mary Dahlgren stepped into the store.

#

Mary had spent the previous half hour across the street at the diner. She’d seen no customers enter the store, so it didn’t surprise her to see Jon and Walt sitting alone at the counter.

“Hey, Mary,” Walt called out, “haven’t seen you here in, gosh, I don’t know how long.”

She paused, just inside the door. For the hundredth time, she asked herself just what in the world she was doing. For the hundredth time, she had no ready answer. She took a deep breath, smiled brightly, and said, “Hi. I, um, just stopped by to surprise my dad.”

“Oh,” Walt said, “he’s not here right now.”

She knew that. In fact, she knew exactly where he was. It was Thursday afternoon, so he would be at the city hall, going over paperwork and getting ready for the city council meeting that evening.

“He’s not? Gee, that’s too bad.”

She was still standing just inside the door, not having taken a step since entering. She could see that Jon was looking at her in that intense, curious way he had, with his head slightly tilted. She realized she had to do something. She stepped over to the counter and set down the books she’d been holding across her chest.

“Hey,” Walt exclaimed immediately, “look at that. You’ve got the same trigonometry book as Jon.”

Jon seemed to flinch at Walt’s words. The comment also struck her as odd, but she didn’t immediately focus on it. Then she cocked her head and said, “Trigonometry?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Walt, “the secret code.” He snatched the sheet of paper off the counter a fraction of a second before Jon could reach it. “See,” he said, laying it down in front of Mary. “We’re having trouble figuring out why this part equals zero,” and he punched the last line of the equation with a stubby finger.

She looked down at the page and the familiar equation. When she looked up, Jon’s cheeks had reddened.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m having trouble with that as well.”

There was an awkward pause. Then Jon said, slowly, looking intently at the page and avoiding eye contact, “I think it has something to do with the cosine having an even function.”

She was about to ask him why he had the same equation that Mr. Hanson had assigned to her when what he had said caused her to stop. “Of course,” she said, “that would mean the coefficients for all of the odd powers have to equal zero.” She slipped a pencil out of her notebook. “What if you assume this,” and she made a notation on the sheet.

Jon looked at what Mary had written and furrowed his brow in concentration. “Then,” he said thoughtfully, reaching out and rotating the page, “multiplication of the denominator and substitution of the series would yield this,” and he scribbled out a new line on the page. He turned the sheet back around and showed it to Mary, looking up at her, his hazel eyes now bright with enthusiasm.

She felt an intense excitement. Glancing back and forth between the page and his eyes, she concluded, “And, the only possible result is zero. Oh my God, that’s it.”

She stood there, looking at him, her heart racing. This time, he did not look away.

Walt beamed. “Isn’t this great? Anyone want to go measure some trees?”

The bell above the front door tinkled again, and all three of them turned to look. This time, it was Jim Dahlgren who walked through the entrance. Obviously in a hurry, he made immediately for the stairway, then he suddenly pulled up short with a classic double take.

“Mary, what are you doing here?”

For the hundredth and first time, she had no answer to that question. “Well,” she said, after a moment, “I actually came to surprise you.”

“But,” he said, a confused expression on his face, “today is Thursday. You know I have city council on Thursday. I only came back because I left a file in my office.”

“Oh, today is
Thursday
,” she said, as though it had just dawned on her. “Of course. What am I thinking? I don’t know where my head is at,” she continued. She was speaking too rapidly, she knew, but she was unable to stop herself. She quickly gathered her books from the counter and hugged them to her chest. “It must be everything going on at school.”

She turned toward Jon and Walt and, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, said cheerfully. “Well, it was good seeing all of you. Bye now.”

She hurried to the door. “I’ll see you later Dad,” she trilled, and she was gone.

#

On Friday morning, Jon arrived at school a few minutes early. He hurriedly parked his bike and took the front steps two at a time. For reasons he couldn’t explain even to himself, he wanted to be in Miss Tremaine’s classroom before Mary arrived.

In the entryway at the top of the stairs, he turned left and walked quickly down the main corridor. It was lined on both sides with metal lockers bolted to the walls. As he approached his locker, he slowed. Something was out of place.

All of the lockers were painted a gunmetal grey. This morning, though, Jon could see red at the end of the row on the right. The color stood out starkly against the drab uniformity of the lockers. It wasn’t until he was within a few feet of the end of the hall, however, that he realized what he was seeing. With a sudden intake of breath, his stomach constricted, and bile rose in the back of his throat, bitter, almost metallic tasting.

Across the face of his locker in large block letters, someone had painted the word “JEW.” The paint had run, and there were long scarlet trails extending from the bottom of the word almost to the floor in a macabre suggestion of blood.

“What the hell?” said a loud voice behind him, and he turned to see Mr. Mabry, the school janitor. The man was wearing a pair of overalls, and he had a broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other. Jon had seen him around the school a couple of times.

“You do that?” Mr. Mabry asked. Then, without waiting for a reply, he said, “No, ‘course not. Wouldn’t be standin’ here if you did.”

With the handle of the broom, he pointed. “That your locker?”

Jon nodded.

The janitor studied the messy graffiti, mouthing the word. He then looked at Jon. “Just what I don’t need,” he said, finally. “That’s gonna take me some time to clean off.” He shook his head. “Just what I don’t need,” he repeated. Then, as if to hammer the point home, he said, loudly, “Damn,” and he turned and stalked off.

Jon watched him leave. Returning his attention to the locker, he reached out, tentatively, gripped the handle and opened the door. A foul odor assaulted him.

Someone had urinated in his locker.

He stood there a moment longer, gathering his wits. Then, wrinkling his nose against the smell, he leaned forward and peered at the shelf that ran across the width of the locker. His books were still sitting where he had left them the afternoon before. He had nothing hanging on the two hooks below the shelf, and, because it was Friday, his gym shoes that might otherwise have been sitting at the bottom of the locker were back at his grandmother’s house.

He took a breath, held it, and reached into the locker, putting his hands around the books and pulling them out. Awkwardly, he arranged them, large to small, bottom to top, and he placed them under one arm. He took one last look at the locker. Then, leaving the door open, he turned and trudged heavily down the corridor in the direction of his first class.

At the door to Miss Tremaine’s class, he paused. He could see there were just a few students in the room. Mary was not one of them. All of the students who had arrived before him were sitting at their desks with the exception of one of the eleventh grade girls, who was standing beside the teacher’s desk, hunched over, her finger on the page of an open book. She and Miss Tremaine were studying the book intently.

Vernon King was sitting at his desk, his back to the entrance. He was talking to Jeff Fletcher, who occupied the desk behind him. Vernon was usually the last person through the door in the morning, so his presence in the classroom now was unusual.