The Yearbook Read Free Page A

here. When can you have the prints?”
    Rosie shrugged. “This afternoon, I guess.”
    “I’ll come by on my way back from the library.”
    “The library ! It’s Saturday!”
    “Hey, I have a date, okay?”
    “Fine. Don’t get testy. I just thought you lost your mind. I’m not the first.”
    “Nor the last. See you.”
    My date was with Edna Klatsch. She was the town librarian.
    We had our rendezvous in the lobby of Lyte Memorial Library — but I had to share her with another man.
    He was an artist, repairing a mural that had been damaged in the February quake when a tree fell through the glass entrance.
    The painting was faded and awful. It showed a bearded white man, dressed in formal clothes, shaking hands with an African slave in front of an open trapdoor in the ground. The slave looked bewildered, and a dozen or so equally dazed-looking slave families stood behind him.
    The mural was labeled JONAS LYTE, WETHERBY RESIDENT, HERO OFTHE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.
    Jonas Lyte’s self-satisfied smile had been turned into a white plaster gash by the fallen tree. The artist was trying to recreate it.
    “You’re making him into a clown!” Mrs. Klatsch scolded. Then she turned to me and said, “Hello, David. I’m very busy today. Follow me.”
    She led me inside, into the locked area that contained the library’s rare and most-likely-to-be-stolen books.
    Mrs. Klatsch raised an eyebrow. “You’re looking for — ?”
    “Pictures of the 1950 quake, for a ‘then-and-now’ feature for the yearbook,” I replied.
    She pointed. “Try the big maroon book. I’ll be back to help you. If you steal anything, I’ll have your head.”
    The book was called Our Town: A Wetherby History from 1634 to the Present. I flipped to a section on the ’50 quake. The school actually had caught fire, so I could use some incredibly dramatic shots. But I loved the “candids” the most — stiff, sober-looking kids pointing to fallen trees and broken windows. High school students from 1950 all look about forty years old, I don’t know why.
    I kept paging through, stopping to read whatever interested me. Near the beginning, I saw something else I wanted to use. It was a drawing, labeled Witch Hunt, Spuyten Duyvil (Wetherby), 1686. In it, a young and innocent-looking “witch” was being burned at the stake. Next to her the devil was rising out of a crack in the ground, shrouded in mist.
    “The burning of Annabelle Spicer,” came a voice from behind me. “Spuyten Duyvil means ‘spitting devil’ in Dutch. That was the name of an area of Wetherby. Shameful … but rather a hilarious engraving, don’t you think?”
    I’d known Mrs. Klatsch was approaching before she had said those words. It was the smell of Ben-Gay, mixed with some perfume that only elderly women seem to wear. Eau de Old Lady. Mrs. Klatsch was probably not around at the founding of Wetherby, but she didn’t miss it by much.
    I couldn’t help laughing at her comment. The picture was pretty ridiculous. “Which area was it?”
    “No one knows for sure.” She took the book and leafed through. “You’ll find a lot of other important things here, you know. Like Wetherby’s role in the Underground Railroad during the Civil War — which will never be looked at the same way after the artist in the lobby is done.…” She sighed and shook her head. “We were a spy post during the Revolution, too. Lord, the Pilgrims set up the first college in the country here — but try telling that to the snobs down at Harvard. You know, we also have some wonderful microfilmed material.…”
    Obviously Mrs. Klatsch was proud of her collection. I was impressed, too. I never expected Wetherby to have such a glamorous history.
    Mr. DeWaart described my hometown best: “It’s a small town, but ugly.” Wetherby looked like Last Place in a town-design contest of nearsighted architects. Houses were old and drab, office buildings and stores were rundown, and the hottest nighttime