Page 35 of Together We Rot

I run a careful finger along the title and he reads it over my shoulder: Pine Point—Past and Present. Our history stains the pages and I have always dreamed of the day I would pick up the pen next. Yet here I am, prying apart the cover before my time, my finger wisping along the worn spine years too early.

I carry the book with me to the other table in the room. It’s nearly as old as the ledger itself and blackened from time and splattered pots of ink. I recognize the fountain pen immediately; Dad’s got a nearly identical one back in his office. It’s a tarnished gold engraved with twisted foliage and the same Latin words that are recited in the church. My father sat here last and now I’m here, viciously disobeying him.

I try not to think about it.

“It looks like it could fall apart if you blow on it,” Veronica comments. “It’s got to be a hundred years old. Probably older.”

Past the title, the first handful of pages are yellowed, the script a thin, slanted cursive, tight and hard to distinguish. Kevin looms over my shoulder and recites each line below his breath as he reads.

“Mrs.Beasley acted like this book didn’t exist. I can’t believe we’ve had it down in the basement this whole time. I also can’t believe this place has a basement.” A gulp. “Do you mind if I...?” His sentence lingers, the rest of his question unspoken.

I nod, but I can’t shake the guilt as he lifts the book. It feels too intimate for someone without the Clarke name.

He brushes a careful finger across the page. “You’re right, Wil. I’m not an expert, of course, but this book is definitely old. You can tell by the paper alone.” He eyes the deckled edges and hums to himself. “It’s missing pages. Hard to say if they were ripped out or if the book’s that delicate and the binding came loose. Regardless, we should be careful with it.”

“Okay, so it’s a history book?” Lucas asks. “A really old history book. That’s what you’re getting at, yeah?”

Kevin nods, and his response might be good enough for Lucas, but Wil’s hardly sated. “What do you mean, Mrs.Beasley acted like this book didn’t exist?”

He returns it gently to my hands and buries his own in his pockets. “Your mom never told you?”

“Told me what?”

“I had my suspicions when you brought up the library, but I wasn’t sure about it until now. Your mom was in here a ton. Drove Beasley crazy. Kept asking for town records and stuff. She gave her a file of old newspapers, but your mom was never satisfied. Kept insisting there had to be something else. Let’s just say Beasley wasn’t exactly a fan. But here she was, right all along.”

I return my attention to the page, and Veronica flashes her phone light overhead to help.

It opens with a grim prognosis for the Upper Peninsula. The federal government deemed our part of Michigan “forever a wilderness.” Never mind the Native populations that had called this land home for ages, the country thought it uninhabitable and harsh, no place to create a settlement.

But then copper changed that. It tells of the greed and desperation that sent men here to strip whatever they could from this land. I trace the image on the page, a black-and-white illustration of early Pine Point. It was somehow even more remote than it is now, a sparse assortment of timber-framed houses hidden among the trees.

Winter stole almost everything. Food rations slashed to a critical level, lives lost to disease and starvation. The season had been abnormally cold, no doubt slipping well into the negatives. Winter was greedy, too. It stretched its fingers into May, the snow only beginning to melt after one last brutal storm. “Led by religious leader James Alderwood, the villagers did what they had to in order to survive.”

“Wow, what a totally normal, not-creepy-at-all way to end things,” Wil grumbles under her breath. “Nice touch with the ripped-out pages, too.”

She’s right. Just beyond that unsettling last line, the following passages are torn right out of the book.

Veronica’s attention trains elsewhere. “Alderwood, huh?” She fidgets with her tongue piercing as she speaks. I remember back when she walked into class every day with a golden cross strung around her neck. “It sounds a lot like your name, doesn’t it?”

I clear my throat. “It’s my legal name, Alderwood. I go by Elwood, though.” I gnaw on my cheek. I got bullied hard enough for having an old man’s name. I can only imagine what sort of hell my classmates would have put me through if they knew I was named after a man from our town’s founding. “My uncle had the same name.”

I don’t think that makes it any less embarrassing.

“And what happened to him?” Kevin questions. From the tone alone, I know it’s more than an innocent question.

I answer it delicately. “He’s no longer with us. He died young.” The earth hums and murmurs below my feet, the world waiting for me to uncover the truth it already knows. My stomach burns as I flip through the pages. My uncle’s name is printed alongside my father’s in the birth records, yet only one brother is still breathing. “Right before I was born.”

Prudence’s due date is soon.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Lucas insists, but there’s an edge to his voice that wasn’t there before. It’s hard to be the voice of reason when doubt slithers from your core. “He could’ve died from anything. Was he sick?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

I flip through the ledger some more until I make it to the death records. So many lives are reduced to lines on a page. There’s relatives and old churchgoers, neighbors and people I never had the chance to meet.

Everyone and anyone, but nothing for my uncle.

“He’s not here. I don’t see a burial plot or death certificate or anything.”

---