Every Hidden Thing Read Free Page B

being in a telegraph office. News and chatter flashing between tables. It was a museum upended, everything dragged out of its cases and cupboards. It was a zoo. It was a morgue. More dead things here than the local slaughterhouse. More pickling alcohol than the tavern down the street.
    I loved it. But I was also glad that, upstairs, I had a bedroom with a door I could close. And there were times I needed to shut it tight and keep it shut. Against the dust and the roving salamanders. Against my father’s cries of fury or joy.
    Two weeks ago I’d been sent home from school. For the rest of the year. I’d been suspended, mainly because of the incident with Harold Thom. He’d asked me what my father had done during the war. It was a sneaky question, since most Quakers hadn’t fought as a matter of conscience. But some had, including Thom’s own father. When I told Thom my father had worked in field hospitals since he was a pacifist, Thom had snorted, said that was a joke since everyone knew my father was quick enough to use his fists when it suited him. And it was only for the war he decided to be a coward.
    I kept hitting him until his nose and teeth bled. Which was not a good thing to do in a Quaker school. I got yanked off by several of his friends and marched to the headmaster’s office. He lambasted me for my “deplorable violence.” Also, I’d played billiards in the town, gambled, and scandalized several girls at the school with my “saucy poetry.” “Moreover,” the headmaster added, “your penmanship is atrocious.” I think he found this the most despicable thing of all. I would not graduate this year, he said, and would need to reapply to return in the fall, if there was any hope of me being accepted into college. I didn’t care about returning, and I didn’t care about college. But I knew my father did. My first few days home had been explosive with his angry talk.
    But that was past now. I think he was secretly glad to have me home. Since he wasn’t an organized man, he quickly enlisted me to help sort and identify his specimens.
    So all this morning I’d been dutifully opening boxes and letters and taking notes. Trying to stay focused.
    But I kept seeing those eyes of hers. Rachel. I’d only learned her name from my father on our way home from the academy. She’d filled my head as I slept. In my dreams I was trying to schedule a train trip to see her. The Pennsylvanian from Philadelphia to New York, arriving at Penn Station, and then a quick change to the New England line that would bring me to New Haven in another two hours. She would see me, wouldn’t she, if I showed up at her doorstep? But the train schedules didn’t make any sense. Columns of jumbled numbers and letters, and anyway I was always running late and never getting to where I was supposed to be, and I woke up with my heart pounding.
    I wanted to talk to her, tell her I wasn’t a rash, cocky fool. Wanted to tell her I wasn’t a mad brawler like my father. Quite a speech I had planned. I kept hearing her voice, catching her scent, seeing her looking up at me gravely. Just one meeting. No beauty, and an ass of a father. But she’d snagged at something in my heart.
    I dropped a fossil shell to the floor and went scrabbling for it—and that’s when I found the Kickapoo Medicine Company crate under my father’s desk.
    On the worktable I used a chisel to prize up the lid. Inside was a nest of prairie grass for padding and three separate burlap bundles. I’d only just started to unwrap the largest when I heardthe front door burst open and slam shut. Father exploded into the room with a mighty sigh.
    â€œIt’s too late, they say.”
    All through the night, holding a handkerchief bulging with ice chips against his bruised cheekbone, he’d furiously rewritten his elasmosaurus paper. It had already been slated for publication in