He gave me a pair of gardening gloves and sent me up-stairs with a hammer and a chisel, and instructions to get underneath the wall panels any way I could and just start ripping.
I got good at hammering the chisel in and working it around until I could pry an edge out. That’s when I’d get to smash away with the hammer for a while, weakening the plaster’s hold until I could pull the board out whole. Underneath, the bricks of the exterior wall were motley and old, but they felt solid. I finished as high as my shoulders on one of the short walls, and started on the more difficult long back wall.
Then the prickling started under my T-shirt.
I remember that shirt. It featured Speedy Gonzales, my favorite cartoon a few years before, and was now old enough to be on my mom’s “tear-it-up-for-dusters” list.
Suddenly, it felt like I had bugs crawling on my chest, or like I had put my hands on those electricity balls at the science center. I gasped and started scratching and feeling around, then began coughing on the plaster dust I had sucked in.
“What’s wrong?” my dad called up. I waved him away, and held my breath until the coughing fit stopped.
The prickling stopped as well. I sat up and inched back toward the wall.
Prickling again.
I turned to my dad, who was still frowning in puzzlement from below. “Lung full of dust? I’ll get masks this afternoon. Your mother would kill me if she saw these conditions.”
I shook my head. “Not that. There’s something weird. When I get close to the wall here, I get this electricity shooting through me—like when you rub a balloon on your hair, but stronger.”
His frown deepened. “Can’t be. Place doesn’t even have power. Everything’s dead.”
He came up the stairs cautiously and moved me back with a gentle hand. The farther I got from that point in the wall, the more the prickling subsided.
“I don’t feel it,” said my dad. He reached for the strip of lath I had been working on and tugged the board smoothly away, twisting at just the right points so it came off in one easy piece, which he tossed over the side. He did the same for two more pieces; then, “What’s that? Did somebody—?” He reached into the space behind the lath, where something black and smaller than a loaf of bread nestled. “Did somebody throw their garbage in here? Their lunch or something?”
He pulled it out, a blackened bundle, crusty flakes drifting from it as it came out of the hole. A folded square of ancient paper fell away. I picked it up, eyes still on the parcel in my father’s hands.
“Is that newspaper covering it?” I said. I could almost make out words, blacker ink set in folds and crevices. The piece in my hand was different, though, a page torn from a book.
He picked at it. “Yeah. Somebody’s old fish dinner?” He held it to his nose. “Doesn’t even smell. Imagine how long it’s been there.” He shook his head and grinned. “That’s why I love doing this stuff, you know? You find bits of people’s stories in the dust. History class, but way better. Who was the guy, Kenny? What was he doing here? Was he a worker? The owner?”
As he talked, he kept picking at the bundle, and finally found an edge that he could pull. More black flakes drifted away. “There. I’ve got it. Oh, Christ,” he said. “Oh, Christ.” Suddenly cradling the thing with more care, he sat down heavily. “Oh, Christ, Kenny, get your mother. Tell her to call—the police or something. Just tell her to come. Tell her to come and see.” His voice had a heaviness I had never heard before, something deep and shuddering. “Oh, Jesus, Kenny, look at the little thing.”
“What is it?” I said, though I had by this time looked and seen exactly what it was. The little blackened, mummified foot sticking out of the crystallized newspapers couldn’t be anything else. I wanted my dad to tell me it was a doll.
He bounced it just slightly in his hands, judging. “Oh, Jesus, Kenny. It’s so tiny. Couldn’t have been a day old. Get your mother.”
As I stumbled down the stairs and out into the tiny yard, I unfolded the piece of paper that had fallen into my hand. Blinded by daylight, and desperate to reach my mother, I couldn’t read the words at first, but when I did, I felt a tingling less physical than the electricity under my T-shirt a few minutes before, but no less real. It was a list of names and dates printed in a neat old-fashioned style.
1917
Rose Hollerith
January 29, 1901
1927
Curtis Hollerith
September 2, 1917
1937
Lillian Huff
February 3, 1920
1947
Margaret
January 2, 1930
1957
Anthony Currah
March 27, 1940
1967
Jimmy Hayes
January 22, 1951
1977
Kenny Maxwell
June 19, 1962
1987
Lucy Branson
October 12, 1970
1997
Melissa Peat
January 15, 1982
2007
Keisha Blaine
March 2, 1992
2017
C.M.?
2000?
My name. My birthday. On a browned and crinkly piece of paper put in the wall—how many years before I was born?
I stuffed the paper into a pocket, and amid the excitement of my mother’s moans, my dad’s stricken face, and the three calls to the police that it took to bring a squad car, I didn’t think about it again until late that night. On my bed at the center of the wide, low attic, I took it out and read the list again. Only then did I notice, scrawled at the bottom, the faint and urgent message that had waited for me all those years in that wall.
Part One
