Among the Hidden Read online

  Luke got up and started pacing his room. The squeak of the third board in from the stairs annoyed him. He hated having to duck under the rafters on the far side of his bed. Even his favorite model cars, lined up on the shelves in the corner, bothered him today. Why should he have model cars? He’d never even sat in a real one. He never would. He’d never get to do anything or go anywhere. He might as well just rot up here in the attic. He’d thought about that before, on the rare occasions when Mother, Dad, Matthew, and Mark all went somewhere and left him behind—what if something happened to them and they never came back? Would someone find him years from now, abandoned and dead? He’d read a story in one of the old books in the attic about a bunch of kids finding a deserted pirate ship, and then a skeleton in one of the rooms. He’d be like that skeleton. And now that he wasn’t allowed in rooms with uncovered windows, he’d be a skeleton in the dark.

  Luke looked up automatically, as if to remind himself that nothing lit the rafters but the single bulb over his head. Except—there was light at either end of the ceiling, leaking in under the peak of the roof.

  Luke stood up and went to investigate. Of course. He should have remembered. There were vents at each end of the roof. Dad grumbled occasionally about heating the attic for Luke—“It’s just like throwing money out those vents”—but Mother always fixed him with one of her stares, and nothing changed.

  Now Luke climbed on top of one of the largest trunks and looked down through the vent. He could see out! He could see a strip of the road and the cornfield beyond, its leaves waving in the breeze. The vent slanted down and limited his view, but at least he was sure nobody would ever be able to see him.

  For a moment, Luke was excited, but that quickly faded. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life watching the corn grow. Without much hope, he stepped down from the trunk and went to the other end of the attic, the portion that faced the backyard. He had to slide boxes around and drag an old step stool from the opposite end of the attic, but finally his eyes were level with the back vent.

  The view was not of the backyard—it was too close—but of the former woods. He’d never realized it before, but the land there sloped away from his family’s house, so he had a clear view of acres and acres that once had been covered with trees. The land was abuzz with activity now. Huge yellow bulldozers shoved brush back from a rough road that had been traced out with gravel. Other vehicles Luke couldn’t identify were digging holes for huge concrete pipes. Luke watched in fascination. He knew tractors and combines, of course, and had seen his dad’s bush hog and manure spreader and gravity wagons up close, in the barn. But these machines were different, designed for different jobs. And they were all operated by different people.

  Once, when Luke was younger, a tramp had walked up to the house and Luke had only had time to hide under the sink in the mudroom before the man was in the house, begging for food. The door of the cabinet was cracked, so Luke had been able to peek out and see the man’s patched trousers and holey shoes. He’d heard his whiny voice: “I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t et in three days . . . . No, no, I can’t do no farmwork for my food. What do you think I am? I’m sick. I’m starving . . . .”

  Other than that tramp and pictures in books, Luke had never seen another human being besides his parents and Matthew and Mark. He’d never dreamed there was such variety.

  Many of the people running the bulldozers and shovel contraptions were stripped of their shirts, while others standing nearby even wore ties and coats. Some were fat and some were thin; some were browned by the sun and some were paler than Luke himself, who would never be tan again. They were all moving—shifting gears and lowering pipe, waving others into position or, at the very least, talking at full speed. All that activity made Luke dizzy. The pictures in books always showed people still. Overwhelmed, Luke closed his eyes, then opened them again for fear of missing something.

  “Luke?”

  Reluctantly, Luke slid down from his step stool perch and scrambled over to recline innocently on his bed.

  “Come in,” he called to his mother.

  She climbed the stairs heavily.

  “You okay?”

  Luke dangled his feet over the side of the bed.

  “Sure. I’m fine.”

  Mother sat on the bed beside him and patted his leg.

  “It’s—” she swallowed hard. “It’s not easy, the life you’ve got to live. I know you’d like to look outside. You’d like to go outside—”

  “That’s okay, Mother,” Luke said. He could have told her then about the vents—he didn’t see how anyone could object to him looking out there—but something stopped him. What if they took that away from him, too? What if Mother told Dad, and Dad said, “No, no, that’s too much of a risk. I forbid it”? Luke wouldn’t be able to stand it. He kept silent.

  Mother ruffled his hair.

  “You’re a trooper,” she said. “I knew you’d hold up all right.”

  Luke leaned against his mother’s arm, and she moved her arm around his shoulders and hugged him tight to her side. He felt a little guilty for keeping a secret, but mostly reassured—loved and reassured.

  Then, more to herself than to him, Mother added, “And things could be worse.”

  Somehow, that wasn’t comforting. Luke didn’t know why, but he had a feeling what she really meant was that things were going to get worse. He snuggled tighter against Mother, hoping he was wrong.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Luke found out what Mother meant a few days later when he came down for breakfast. As usual, he opened the door from the back stairs to the kitchen only a crack. He could remember barely a handful of times in his entire life when someone had dropped by before breakfast, and each time Mother had managed to send Matthew or Mark up to warn Luke to stay out of sight. But he always checked. Today he could see Dad and Matthew and Mark at the table, and knew from the sound of frying bacon that Mother must be at the stove.

  “Are the shades closed?” he called softly.

  Mother opened the door to the stairs. Luke started to step into the kitchen, but she put out her arm to keep him back. She handed him a plate full of scrambled eggs and bacon.

  “Luke, honey? Can you eat sitting on the bottom step there?”

  “What?” Luke asked.

  Mother looked beseechingly over her shoulder.

  “Dad thinks—I mean, it’s not safe anymore to have you in the kitchen. You can still eat with us, and talk to us and all, but you’ll be . . . over here.”

  She waved her hand toward the stairs behind Luke.

  “But with the shades pulled—” Luke started.

  “One of those workers asked me yesterday, ‘Hey, farmer, you got air-conditioning in that house of yours?’ ” Dad said from the table. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t seem to want to look at Luke. “We keep the shades pulled, hot day like today, people get suspicious. This way is safer. I’m sorry.”

  And then Dad did turn around and glance at Luke, once. Luke tried to keep from looking upset.

  “So what’d you tell him?” Matthew asked, as if the worker’s question was only a matter of curiosity.

  “Told him of course we don’t have air-conditioning. Farming don’t make nobody a millionaire.”

  Dad took a long sip of coffee.

  “Okay, Luke?” Mother asked.

  “Yes,” he mumbled. He took the plate of eggs and bacon, but it didn’t look good to him now. He knew every bite he ate would stick in his throat. He sat down on the step, out of sight of both kitchen windows.

  “We’ll leave the door open,” Mother said. She hovered over him, as if unwilling to return to the stove. “This isn’t too much different, is it?”

  “Mother—” Dad said warningly.

  Through the open windows, Luke could hear the rumble of several trucks and cars. The workers had arrived for the day. He knew from watching through the vent the past few days that the caravan of vehicles came up the road like a parade. The cars would
peel off to the side and unload the nicer dressed men. The more rugged vehicles pulled on in to the muddiest sections, and the people inside would scatter to the bulldozers and backhoes that had been left outside overnight. But the vehicles barely had time to get cold, because the workers were there now from sunup to sundown. Someone was in a hurry for them to finish.

  “Luke—I’m sorry,” Mother said, and scurried back to the stove. She loaded a plate for herself, then sat down at the table, beside Luke’s usual spot. His chair wasn’t even in the kitchen anymore.

  For a while, Luke watched Dad, Mother, Matthew, and Mark eating in silence, a complete family of four. Once, he cleared his throat, ready to protest again. You can’t do this—it’s not fair— Then he choked back the words, unspoken. They were only trying to protect him. What could he do?

  Resolutely, Luke stuck his fork in the pile of scrambled eggs on his plate and took a bite. He ate the whole plateful of food without tasting any of it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Luke ate every meal after that on the bottom step. It became a habit, but a hated one. He had never noticed before, but Mother often spoke too softly to be heard from any distance, and Matthew and Mark always made their nasty comments under their breath. So they would start laughing, often at Luke’s expense, and he couldn’t defend himself because he didn’t know what they had said. He couldn’t even hear Mother saying, “Now, be nice, boys.” After a week or two, a lot of the time, he didn’t even try to listen to the rest of the family’s conversation.

  But even he was curious the hot July day when the letter arrived about the pigs.

  Matthew brought the mail in that day from the mailbox at the crossroads a mile away. (Luke had never seen them, of course, but Matthew and Mark had told him there were three mailboxes there, one for each of the families that lived on their road.) Usually the Garners’ mail was just bills or thin envelopes carrying curt orders from the Government about how much corn to plant, which fertilizer to use, and where to take their crop when it was harvested. A letter from a relative was a cause to celebrate, and Mother always dropped whatever she was doing and sat down to open it with trembling hands, calling out at intervals, “Oh, Aunt Effie’s in the hospital again . . . .” or, “Tsk, Lisabeth’s going to marry that fellow after all . . . .” Luke almost felt he knew his relatives, though they lived hundreds of miles away. And, of course, they didn’t even know he existed. The letters Mother wrote back, painstakingly, late at night, when she’d saved up enough money for a stamp, contained plenty of news of Matthew and Mark, but never once had mentioned Luke’s name.

  This letter was as thick as some from Luke’s grandmother, but it bore an official seal, and the return address was an embossed DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN HABITATION, ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS DIVISION. Matthew held the letter at arm’s length, the way Luke had seen him hold dead baby pigs when they had to be carried out of the barn.

  Dad looked worried the minute he saw the letter in Matthew’s hand. Matthew put the letter down beside Dad’s silverware. Dad sighed.

  “Can’t be anything but bad news,” Dad said. “No use ruining a good meal. It can wait.”

  He went back to eating chicken and dumplings. Only after his last belch did he turn the envelope over and run a dirt-rimmed fingernail under the flap. He unfolded the letter.

  “ ‘It has come to our attention . . . ,’ ” he read aloud. “Well, so far I understand it.” Then he read silently for a while, calling out at intervals, “Mother, what’s ‘offal’?” and, “Where’s that dictionary? Matthew, look up ‘reciprocity.’ ” Finally, he threw down the whole thick packet and proclaimed, “They’re going to make us get rid of our hogs.”

  “What?” Matthew asked. More serious than Mark, he had talked for as long as anyone could remember about, “When I get my own farm, it’s going to be all hogs. I’ll make the Government let me do that, somehow . . . .” Now he looked over Dad’s shoulder. “You mean they’re just going to make us sell a lot at one time, right? But we can build the herd back up—”

  “Nope,” Dad said. “Those people in them fancy new houses won’t be able to stand pig smell. So we can’t raise hogs no more.” He threw the letter out into the center of the table for all to see. “What’d they expect, building next to a farm?”

  From his seat on the stairs, Luke had to hold himself back from going to fish the edge of the letter out of the chicken gravy and looking at it himself.

  “They can’t do that, can they?” he asked.

  Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. Luke felt like a fool for asking as soon as the words were out of his mouth. For once, he was glad of his hiding place.

  Mother twisted a dishrag in her hand.

  “Those hogs are our bread and butter,” she said. “With grain prices the way they are . . . what are we going to live on?”

  Dad just looked at her. After a moment, so did Matthew and Mark. Luke didn’t know why.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The tax bill arrived two weeks later, the day that Dad, Matthew, and Mark loaded the hogs onto the livestock trailer and took them all away. Most were going to the slaughterhouse. The ones too young and too small to bring a decent price were going to an auction for feeder pigs. Luke watched through the vent at the front of the house as Dad drove by in the battered pickup with each load. Matthew and Mark sat in the back of the pickup, making sure the trailer stayed hitched right. Even three stories up, Luke could see Matthew’s hangdog expression.

  Then when the three of them came into the house for dinner, after washing the last of the hog smell off their hands in the mudroom, Dad handed Mother the tax bill without comment. She put down the wooden spoon she’d been using to stir the stew and unfolded the letter. Then she dropped it.

  “Why, that’s—” she seemed to be doing the math in her head as she bent to retrieve it. “That’s three times what it usually is. There must be a mistake.”

  Dad shook his head grimly. “No mistake. I talked to Williker at the auction.”

  The Willikers were their nearest neighbors, with a house three miles down the road. Luke always pictured them with monster scales and fierce claws because of the number of times he’d been cautioned, “You don’t want the Willikers to see you.”

  Dad went on. “Williker says they raised everyone’s taxes because of them fancy houses. Makes our land worth more.”

  “Isn’t that good?” Luke asked eagerly. It was strange—he should hate the new houses for replacing his woods and forcing him to stay indoors. But he’d half-fallen in love with them, having watched every foundation poured, every wooden skeleton of walls and roofs raised to the sky. They were his main entertainment, aside from talking to Mother when she came upstairs for what she called “my Luke breaks.” Sometimes she pretended his room needed cleaning as badly as the bread needed baking or the garden needed weeding. Sometimes she just sat and talked.

  Dad was shaking his head in disgust over Luke’s question.

  “No. It’s only good if we’re selling. And we ain’t. All it means for us is that the Government thinks they can get more money out of us.”

  Matthew was slumped in his chair at the table. “How are we going to pay?” he asked. “That’s more than we got for all the hogs, and that was supposed to carry us through for a long time—”

  Dad didn’t answer. Even Mark, who normally had a smart-alecky comeback for everything, was stupefied.

  Mother had turned back to her stew.

  “I got my work permit today,” she said softly. “The factory’s hiring. If I get on there, I can maybe get an advance on my paycheck.”

  Luke’s jaw dropped.

  “You can’t go to work,” he said. “Who will—” He wanted to say, Who will stay with me? Who will I talk to all day when everyone else is outside? But that seemed too selfish. Luke looked around. No one else looked surprised by Mother’s news. He shut his mouth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By mid-September, Luke’s days had fallen into a familiar pattern. He got up
at dawn just for the chance to sit on the stairs and watch the rest of his family eat breakfast. They all rushed now. Mother had to be at the factory by seven. Dad was trying to get all the machinery in working order before harvest. And Matthew and Mark were back in school. Only Luke had time to linger over his undercooked bacon and dry toast. He didn’t bother asking for butter because that meant someone would have to stand up and bring it over to him, all the while pretending for the sake of the open window that they’d just forgotten something upstairs.

  As soon as the rest of his family had stomped out the door, Luke went back to his room and watched out the vents—first out the front, to see Matthew and Mark climb onto the school bus, then out the back, where the new houses were practically finished. They were mansions, as large as the Garners’ house and barn put together. They gleamed in the morning sunlight as though their walls were studded with precious jewels. For all Luke knew, maybe they were.

  Hordes of workmen still arrived every morning, but almost all of them worked indoors now. They headed into the houses first thing, carrying rolls of carpet, stacks of drywall, cans of paint. Luke couldn’t see much of them after that. He spent more time now watching a new kind of traffic: expensive-looking cars driving slowly down the newly paved streets. Sometimes they pulled into a driveway and went into one of the houses, usually trailing a woman who appeared to be talking nonstop. It had taken Luke a while to figure it out—he certainly hadn’t dared ask anyone else in his family—but he thought maybe the people were thinking about buying the houses. Once he realized that, he studied each potential neighbor carefully. He’d overheard Mother and Dad marveling that the people moving into the new houses were not just going to be city people, but Barons. Barons were unbelievably rich, Luke knew. They had things ordinary people hadn’t had in years. Luke wasn’t sure how the Barons had gotten rich, when everybody else was poor. But Dad never said the word “Baron” without a curse word or two in front of it.