Among the Hidden Read online

  For John and Janet

  CHAPTER ONE

  He saw the first tree shudder and fall, far off in the distance. Then he heard his mother call out the kitchen window: “Luke! Inside. Now.”

  He had never disobeyed the order to hide. Even as a toddler, barely able to walk in the backyard’s tall grass, he had somehow understood the fear in his mother’s voice. But on this day, the day they began taking the woods away, he hesitated. He took one extra breath of the fresh air, scented with clover and honeysuckle and—coming from far away—pine smoke. He laid his hoe down gently, and savored one last moment of feeling warm soil beneath his bare feet. He reminded himself, “I will never be allowed outside again. Maybe never again as long as I live.”

  He turned and walked into the house, as silently as a shadow.

  “Why?” he asked at the supper table that night. It wasn’t a common question in the Garner house. There were plenty of “how’s”—How much rain’d the backfield get? How’s the planting going? Even “what’s”—What’d Matthew do with the five-sixteenth wrench? What’s Dad going to do about that busted tire? But “why” wasn’t considered much worth asking. Luke asked again. “Why’d you have to sell the woods?”

  Luke’s dad harrumphed, and paused in the midst of shoveling forkfuls of boiled potatoes into his mouth.

  “Told you before. We didn’t have a choice. Government wanted it. You can’t tell the Government no.”

  Mother came over and gave Luke’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before turning back to the stove. They had defied the Government once, with Luke. That had taken all the defiance they had in them. Maybe more.

  “We wouldn’t have sold the woods if we hadn’t had to,” she said, ladling out thick tomatoey soup. “The Government didn’t ask us if we wanted houses there.”

  She pursed her lips as she slid the bowls of soup onto the table.

  “But the Government’s not going to live in the houses,” Luke protested. At twelve, he knew better, but sometimes still pictured the Government as a very big, mean, fat person, two or three times as tall as an ordinary man, who went around yelling at people, “Not allowed!” and “Stop that!” It was because of the way his parents and older brothers talked: “Government won’t let us plant corn there again.” “Government’s keeping the prices down.” “Government’s not going to like this crop.”

  “Probably some of the people who live in those houses will be Government workers,” Mother said. “It’ll all be city people.”

  If he’d been allowed, Luke would have gone over to the kitchen window and peered out at the woods, trying for the umpteenth time to picture rows and rows of houses where the firs and maples and oaks now stood. Or had stood—Luke knew from a sneaked peek right before supper that half the trees were now toppled. Some already lay on the ground. Some hung at weird angles from their former lofty positions in the sky. Their absence made everything look different, like a fresh haircut exposing a band of untanned skin on a forehead. Even from deep inside the kitchen, Luke could tell the trees were missing because everything was brighter, more open. Scarier.

  “And then, when those people move in, I have to stay away from the windows?” Luke asked, though he knew the answer.

  The question made Dad explode. He slammed his hand down on the table.

  “Then? You gotta stay away now! Everybody and his brother’s going to be tramping around back there, to see what’s going on. They see you—” He waved his fork violently. Luke wasn’t sure what the gesture meant, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  No one had ever told him exactly what would happen if anyone saw him. Death? Death was what happened to the runt pigs who got stepped on by their stronger brothers and sisters. Death was a fly that stopped buzzing when the swatter hit it. He had a hard time thinking about himself in connection with the smashed fly or the dead pig, gone stiff in the sun. It made his stomach feel funny even trying.

  “I don’t think it’s fair we’ve got to do Luke’s chores now,” Luke’s other brother, Mark, grumbled. “Can’t he go outside some? Maybe at night?”

  Luke waited hopefully for the answer. But Dad just said, “No,” without looking up.

  “It’s not fair,” Mark said again. Mark was the second son—the lucky second, Luke thought when he was feeling sorry for himself. Mark was two years older than Luke and barely a year younger than Matthew, the oldest. Matthew and Mark were easily recognizable as brothers, with their dark hair and chiseled faces. Luke was fairer, smaller-boned, softer-looking. He often wondered if he’d ever look tougher, like them. Somehow he didn’t think so.

  “Luke don’t do nothing nohow,” Matthew jeered. “We won’t miss his work at all.”

  “It’s not my fault!” Luke protested. “I’d help more if—”

  Mother laid her hands on his shoulders again. “Hush, all of you,” she said. “Luke will do what he can. He always has.”

  The sound of tires on their gravel driveway came through the open window.

  “Now, who—” Dad started. Luke knew the rest of the sentence. Who could that be? Why were they bothering him now, his first chance all day to sit down? It was a question Luke always heard the end of from the other side of a door. Today, skittish because of the woods coming down, he scrambled up faster than usual, dashing for the door to the back stairs. He knew without watching that Mother would take his plate from the table and hide it in a cupboard, would slide his chair back into the corner so it looked like an unneeded spare. In three seconds she would hide all evidence that Luke existed, just in time to step to the door and offer a weary smile to the fertilizer salesman or the Government inspector or whomever else had come to interrupt their supper.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was a law against Luke.

  Not him personally—everyone like him, kids who were born after their parents had already had two babies.

  Actually, Luke didn’t know if there was anyone else like him. He wasn’t supposed to exist. Maybe he was the only one. They did things to women after they had their second baby, so they wouldn’t have any more. And if there was a mistake, and a woman got pregnant anyway, she was supposed to get rid of it.

  That was how Mother had explained it, years ago, the first and only time Luke had asked why he had to hide.

  He had been six years old.

  Before that, he had thought only very little kids had to stay out of sight. He had thought, as soon as he was as old as Matthew and Mark, he would get to go around like they did, riding to the backfield and even into town with Dad, hanging their heads and arms out the pickup window. He had thought, as soon as he got as old as Matthew and Mark, he could play in the front yard and kick the ball out into the road if he wanted. He had thought, as soon as he got as old as Matthew and Mark, he could go to school. They complained about it, whining, “Jeez, we gotta do homework!” and, “Who cares about spelling?” But they also talked about games at recess, and friends who shared candy at lunchtime or loaned them pocketknives to carve with.

  Somehow, Luke never got as old as Matthew and Mark.

  The day of his sixth birthday, Mother baked a cake, a special one with raspberry jam dripping down the sides. At supper that night she put six candles on the top and placed it in front of Luke and said, “Make a wish.”

  Staring into the ring of candles—proud that the number of his years finally made a ring, all around the cake—Luke suddenly remembered another cake, another ring of six candles. Mark’s. He remembered Mark’s sixth birthday. He remembered it because, even with the cake in front of him, Mark had been whining, “But I wanna have a party. Robert Joe had a party on his birthday. He got to have three friends over.” Mother had said, “Ssh,” and looked from Mark to Luke, saying something with her eyes
that Luke didn’t understand.

  Startled by the memory, Luke let out his breath. Two of his candles flickered, and one went out. Matthew and Mark laughed.

  “You ain’t getting that wish,” Mark said. “Baby. Can’t even blow out candles.”

  Luke wanted to cry. He’d forgotten even to make a wish, and if he hadn’t been surprised he would have been able to blow out all six candles. He knew he could have. And then he would have gotten—oh, he didn’t know. A chance to ride to town in the pickup truck. A chance to play in the front yard. A chance to go to school. Instead, all he had was a strange memory that couldn’t be right. Surely Luke was thinking about Mark’s seventh birthday, or maybe his eighth. Mark couldn’t have known Robert Joe when he was six, because he would have been hiding then, like Luke.

  Luke thought about it for three days. He trailed along behind his mother as she hung wash out on the line, made strawberry preserves, scrubbed the bathroom floor. Several times he started to ask, “How old do I have to be before people can see me?” But something stopped him every time.

  Finally, on the fourth day, after Dad, Matthew, and Mark scraped back their chairs from the breakfast table and headed out to the barn, Luke crouched by the kitchen’s side window—one he wasn’t supposed to look out because people driving by might catch a glimpse of his face. He tilted his head to the side and raised up just enough that his left eye was above the level of the windowsill. He watched Matthew and Mark running in the sunlight, the tops of their hog boots thumping against their knees. They were in full sight of the whole world, it seemed, and they didn’t care. They were racing to the front door of the barn, not the side one off the backyard that Luke always had to use because it was hidden from the road.

  Luke turned around and slid to the floor, out of sight.

  “Matthew and Mark never had to hide, did they?” he asked.

  Mother was scrubbing the remains of scrambled eggs out of the skillet. She turned her head and looked at him carefully.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then why do I?”

  She dried her hands and left the sink, something Luke had almost never seen her do if there were still dirty dishes left to be washed. She crouched beside him and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.

  “Oh, Lukie, do you really need to know? Isn’t it enough to know—things are just different for you?”

  He thought about that. Mother was always saying he was the only one who would ever sit on her lap and cuddle. She still read bedtime stories to him, and he knew Matthew and Mark thought that was sissified. Was that what she meant? But he was just younger. He’d grow up. Wouldn’t he be like them then?

  With unusual stubbornness, Luke insisted, “I want to know why I’m different. I want to know why I have to hide.”

  So Mother told him.

  Later, he wished he’d asked more questions. But at the time it was all he could do to listen to what she told him. He felt like he was drowning in the flow of her words.

  “It just happened,” she said. “You just happened. And we wanted you. I wouldn’t even let your dad talk about . . . getting rid of you.”

  Luke pictured himself as a baby, left in a cardboard box by the side of a road somewhere, the way Dad said people used to do with kittens, back when people were allowed to have pets. But maybe that wasn’t what Mother meant.

  “The Population Law hadn’t been around long, then, and I had always wanted lots of kids. Before, I mean. Getting pregnant with you was like—a miracle. I thought the Government would get over their foolishness, maybe even by the time you were born, and then I’d have a new baby to show everyone.”

  “But you didn’t,” Luke managed to say. “You hid me.”

  His voice sounded strangely hoarse, like it belonged to someone else.

  Mother nodded. “Once I started showing, I didn’t go anywhere. That wasn’t hard to do—where do I go, anyway? I didn’t let Matthew and Mark leave the farm, for fear they’d say something. I didn’t even say anything about you in letters to my mother and sister. I wasn’t really scared then. It was just superstition. I didn’t want to brag. I thought I’d go to the hospital to give birth. I wasn’t going to keep you secret forever. But then . . .”

  “Then what?” Luke asked.

  Mother wouldn’t look at him.

  “Then they started running all that on TV about the Population Police, how the Population Police had ways of finding out everything, how they’d do anything to enforce the law.”

  Luke glanced toward the hulking television in the living room. He wasn’t allowed to watch it. Was that why?

  “And your dad started hearing rumors in town, about other babies . . .”

  Luke shivered. Mother was looking far off into the distance, to where the rows of new corn plants met the horizon.

  “I always wanted a John, too,” she said. “ ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I lie on.’ But then I thank the Lord that I have you, at least. And it’s worked out, the hiding, hasn’t it?”

  The smile she offered him was wobbly. He felt he had to help her.

  “Yes,” he said.

  And somehow, after that, he didn’t mind hiding so much anymore. Who wanted to meet strangers, anyway? Who wanted to go to school, where—if Matthew and Mark were to be believed—the teachers yelled, and the other boys would double-cross you if you didn’t watch out? He was special. He was secret. He belonged at home—home, where his mother always let him have the first piece of apple pie because he was there and the other boys were away. Home, where he could cradle the new baby pigs in the barn, climb the trees at the edge of the woods, throw snowballs at the posts of the clothesline. Home, where the backyard always beckoned, always safe and protected by the house and the barn and the woods.

  Until they took the woods away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Luke lay on his stomach on the floor and idly ran the toy train back and forth on the track. The train had belonged to Dad when he was a little boy, and his own father before him. Luke could remember a time when his greatest longing had been for Mark to outgrow the train so Luke could have it all to himself. But it wasn’t what he wanted to play with today. There was a beautiful day unfolding outside, with fleecy clouds in a blue, blue sky, and a mild breeze rustling the grass in the backyard. He hadn’t left the house in a week now, and he could almost hear the outdoors calling to him. But now he wasn’t even allowed in the same room as an uncovered window.

  “Are you trying to be discovered?” Dad had bellowed at Luke just that morning, when he’d held the shade a few inches back from the kitchen window and peeked out longingly.

  Luke jumped. He’d been so busy thinking about running barefoot through the grass that he’d half-forgotten there was anyone or anything behind him, in the house.

  “No one’s out there,” he said, glancing again to be sure. He’d been trying not to look beyond the ragged edge of the backyard to the bulldozed mess of branches, trunks, leaves, and mud that had once been his beloved woods.

  “Yeah?” Dad said. “Did it ever occur to you that if there is, they might see you before you see them?”

  He grabbed Luke by the arm and jerked him back a good three feet. Freed from Luke’s grasp, the bottom of the shade banged against the windowsill.

  “You can’t look out at all,” Dad said. “I mean it. From now on, just stay away from the windows. And don’t go into a room unless we’ve got the shades or curtains pulled.”

  “But then I can’t see anything,” Luke protested.

  “Better that than to get turned in,” Dad said.

  Dad sounded like he might feel sorry for Luke, but that only made things worse. Luke turned around and left, scared he might cry in front of Dad.

  Now he gave the toy train a shove, and it careened off the track. It landed upside down, wheels spinning.

  “Who cares?” Luke muttered.

  There was a harsh knock on his door.

  “Population Police! Open up!” />
  Luke didn’t move.

  “That’s not funny, Mark!” he shouted.

  Mark opened the door and bounded up the stairs that led to Luke’s room proper. Luke’s room was also the attic, a fact he had never minded. Mother long ago had shoved all the trunks and boxes as far as they could go under the eaves, leaving prime space for Luke’s brass bed and circular rag rug and books and toys. Luke had even heard Matthew and Mark grumble about Luke having the biggest room. But they had windows.

  “Scared you this time, didn’t I?” Mark asked.

  “No,” Luke said. Nothing would force him to admit that his heart had jumped. Mark had been playing the “Population Police” joke for years, always out of their parents’ earshot. Usually Luke just ignored Mark, but now, with Dad acting so skittish . . . What would Luke have done if it really had been the Population Police? What would they do to him?

  “Matt and me, we’ve never told anyone about you,” Mark said, suddenly serious, which was strange for him. “And you know Mother and Dad don’t say anything. You’re good at hiding. So you’re safe, you know?”

  “I know,” Luke muttered.

  Mark kicked the toy train Luke had crashed. “Still playing with baby toys?” he asked, as if to make up for slipping and being nice.

  Luke shrugged. Normally, he wouldn’t have wanted Mark to know he played with the train anymore. But today everything else was so bad that that didn’t matter.

  “Did you come up here just to bug me?” Luke asked.

  Mark put on an offended look.

  “Thought you might want to play checkers,” he said.

  Luke squinted.

  “Mother told you to, right?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re lying,” Luke said, not caring how nasty he sounded.

  “Well, if you’re going to be that way—”

  “Just leave me alone, okay?”

  “Okay, okay.” Mark backed down the stairs. “Jeez!”

  Alone again, Luke felt a little sorry he’d been so mean. Maybe Mark had told the truth. Luke should apologize. But he didn’t really feel like it.