Winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People
Recommended by USA Today for Black History Month as "a blend of history and suspense."
In this novel for young adults, Josh knows there is something about the tall Victorian House on the Harpers Ferry Hill, the one his father grew up in, that he can’t quite put his finger on. And his impossible father won’t give him any clues. He’s hiding something.
And then there’s the famous John Brown. The one who all the tourists come to hear about. The one whose statue looms over Josh’s house. Why does he seem to haunt Josh and his whole family? When the fancy Richmonds come to town and move right next door, their presence forces Josh to find the answers and stand up to the secrets of the House, to his father—and to John Brown, too.
The historic village of Harpers Ferry comes alive in this young boy’s brave search for answers and a place of his own in this brilliant first novel by John Michael Cummings.
Winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People
Recommended by USA Today for Black History Month as "a blend of history and suspense."
In this novel for young adults, Josh knows there is something about the tall Victorian House on the Harpers Ferry Hill, the one his father grew up in, that he can’t quite put his finger on. And his impossible father won’t give him any clues. He’s hiding something.
And then there’s the famous John Brown. The one who all the tourists come to hear about. The one whose statue looms over Josh’s house. Why does he seem to haunt Josh and his whole family? When the fancy Richmonds come to town and move right next door, their presence forces Josh to find the answers and stand up to the secrets of the House, to his father—and to John Brown, too.
The historic village of Harpers Ferry comes alive in this young boy’s brave search for answers and a place of his own in this brilliant first novel by John Michael Cummings.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People
Recommended by USA Today for Black History Month as "a blend of history and suspense."
In this novel for young adults, Josh knows there is something about the tall Victorian House on the Harpers Ferry Hill, the one his father grew up in, that he can’t quite put his finger on. And his impossible father won’t give him any clues. He’s hiding something.
And then there’s the famous John Brown. The one who all the tourists come to hear about. The one whose statue looms over Josh’s house. Why does he seem to haunt Josh and his whole family? When the fancy Richmonds come to town and move right next door, their presence forces Josh to find the answers and stand up to the secrets of the House, to his father—and to John Brown, too.
The historic village of Harpers Ferry comes alive in this young boy’s brave search for answers and a place of his own in this brilliant first novel by John Michael Cummings.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940425979 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 906 KB |
About the Author
John Michael Cummings's short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including The Iowa Review, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. Twice he has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. His short story "The Scratchboard Project" received an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007. He is the author of Ugly to Start With and Don't Forget Me, Bro.
Read an Excerpt
The Night I Freed John Brown
By John Michael Cummings
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2016 John Michael CummingsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-940425-97-9
CHAPTER 1
GO AWAY, GHOST!
My new friend Luke hopped the rusted chain hanging low and heavy across the overgrown lane and caught up with me where the weeds became thick and dead trees lay everywhere. We had just entered a secret junglelike world. Vines curled down like snakes, and dark trees stood around like villains and thieves. Blanketing the ground were purple wildflowers and gooey webs of silver leaves. Dead ahead were the ghostly white ruins of a chapel, its jagged walls biting up through the black earth like bad teeth. Nearby, in speckles of sunlight, stood a vine-wrapped statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms missing. You could almost see her waving hello to us.
From here we crossed a meadow high with dandelions, then stepped through skinny, ragged trees that stood like scarecrows below a tall white house on the hill. Luke was looking up and stumbling. Though the house had been empty for years, it was still snow-white and gleaming, as if just painted.
"Wow, it does look just like my house!" he said, running ahead, his voice husky and excited. "You weren't kidding."
You bet I wasn't kidding. Luke was my new next-door neighbor in town. A month ago, he, his father, and two brothers moved into a house that was a spitting image of this one.
He stepped closer. It was creepy how impossible it was to tell the houses apart, and he knew it. There was no other word for it. Creepy. Here, in these woods full of broken-up dormitories and armless statues, stood this perfect copy of his house in town, sealed in time for some reason.
"Wait, was it just painted?" he asked, turning around.
"No, it always looks that way," I said, grinning.
He did a double take.
"No way," he said.
As if alive, the house stood tall and shimmering bright-white. My mother said it was like the tall evergreens beyond it — everlasting. I thought it looked like cake icing.
When I stepped up onto the porch, Luke took a step back.
"You sure nobody lives here?" he said. "'Cause there are blinds on the windows."
More than that, in one of the windows, a single venetian blind was lifted up, making a sliverlike black eye peeking out at us! Luke came off the ground like a scared cat.
"Jesus, there's somebody in there!"
"No, there's not," I said, laughing.
I had already explained it all to him. This was the old caretaker's house for the Catholic retreat, the ruins of which we had just walked through. My grandparents had once been the caretakers, and my father had grown up in this house, working the dairy farm by the river.
But Luke was convinced someone was still living here. Backing up more, he pointed to a broom leaning against the house, and a welcome mat in place. Grinning and shaking my head, I swung the front door open for him to see — inside was an empty kitchen, with bare, dull-white walls and an outline where the refrigerator and sink had been removed long ago.
"See?" I said.
Luke inched his way inside behind me.
"What's that?" he hissed, pointing his skinny arm so hard it looked like a knobby branch.
On the musty counter where the sink had been removed, leaving a gaping hole in the wall, sat a brand-new salt shaker with a shiny metal top and bright-white salt inside. I stopped and looked at it, puzzled.
"See," he said, turning to leave.
"Come on," I said, grabbing his arm.
Down a dark hall we went, the narrow ceiling looming over us like a long spaceship.
"And it's just unlocked?" he whispered, looking up.
"Yeah, the church left it this way."
When we came to stairs with fancy banisters, we stopped dead. Luke turned in a complete circle, and I turned with him, slowly, as if we were tiny figures in a music box, the strange house turning around us, without the music. Overhead was a maze of stairs, where, in the rows of handrails curving up and around, were hundreds of hiding spots for eyes.
"Weird," he said, breathing the word out.
No cracks in the plaster, no missing handrails, no broken glass, everything just sitting and waiting.
"Josh, this is exactly like our house!"
The sharp hiss of his voice set loose a thousand spiders up the dim walls around us, their scampering little legs rattling like dried leaves.
"Told you," I said.
I stood following the walls with my eyes, seeing the distance each door was from the next, where the windows were cut in, and how it all folded together. It reminded me of art class. It was as if somebody had traced Luke's house in town and stuck the copy out here in the woods along the river to keep from getting caught at cheating.
Luke bent down and ran his hand over the floor, then sat crouched, looking at his clean palm.
"It's like somebody just moved out," he said. "... does anybody else know about this place?"
"Just my family."
"Just your family?"
I took a step toward the banister.
"Wait," he said, popping up. "What happened?"
"I'm not supposed to talk about it, okay?"
I stood there for a moment, my hand on the smooth railing. Anybody could hear it in my voice — I was dying to talk about it.
"... there were some things stolen out of here," I said, starting up the stairs.
"What things?"
He was so close I could feel his warm breath on my back through my shirt.
"Church things," I said.
I made a little show of sitting down on the stairs. Luke was quick to sit on the step below me.
It happened many years ago, when I was around seven. The chapel, the dorms, this house — all were picked clean. Silver statues. A gold leaf altar filled with ivory figures. Even candles. Everything taken.
"'Robbed blind, goddammit!'" I cried out, in a hushed roar of my father's voice that scared away all the devil eyes in the stairs above us.
Doors were found busted open, I told Luke. Windows broken. Supposedly the railroad police were called in, as the tracks near here were also damaged.
"They even took fingerprints and everything," I said, leaning back against the wall.
Luke sat riveted on me, his eyes angled up with the handrail.
"Was anybody caught?" he asked.
I shook my head. Everybody was sure suspected, from the neighbors upriver to the neighbors downriver. Even the Brothers were accused at one point.
"After that, the church just totally forgot about this place."
What was left fell into decay. The barn, the pump house, the orchard — all gone.
"Except this house," I said, looking up again at the countless eyes peering down. "It's like it's alive."
We sat for a moment longer, looking up into the deep stairs. Then I pulled myself up by the handrail.
"Come on," I said.
Up and around we went, past empty room after empty room, our whispery voices scampering ahead, filling the house with spiders. In the second-floor hallway, sunlight was angling in, elongating our shadows into twenty-foot monster men, the dark doorways on either side like jail cells we were being led to.
"It's like a clone! Only unfinished," Luke said.
It was true. Where in his house in town were bright rooms full of antiques and things that made a home, here in this house along the river were empty rooms, squares of space, with one door and one window in each. Nothing else.
Without warning, Luke cried out, pointing and backing up, "What the hell's that!"
Dancing on the ceiling were a dozen soft spots of light, as if from weak flashlights moving in a jerky circle.
"Reflections off the river," I said, laughing. "Look." I pointed to the bright window down the hall.
His nerves shot, Luke shouted at the top of his lungs — "Hello!"
"Hel-lo!" the house shouted back.
We cringed as if plaster and beams were coming down. Luke burst out laughing at my terrified face.
"Josh," he said, a moment later, "this place is really weird. It should just be used for something."
"Tell me about it," I said, walking ahead of him.
"No, I mean it. Somebody should live here again."
He caught up with me and looked over, his eyes shining through his wire-frame glasses.
"Wait, why doesn't your family live here?"
"'Cause it's not for sale. That's why. The church owns it."
He stopped. I stopped. He stood looking at me. I wasn't lying. The church did own it, and they would never sell it. For years, the railroad had tried to buy it. So had big, rich families in town.
Still, I knew what Luke was thinking. Why was I showing him this house as if my family already owned it? Why had I just taken him back into these woods, making this old, empty house into a big question mark I wanted him to solve?
Drifting away from me, he poked his head into another room.
"Man, it must bother your father like crazy. I mean, he used to live here."
It killed him, was how Mom always put it.
"And he never comes back here?"
"Not since my grandparents died," I said.
"Never?"
"Never," I said.
Luke turned and looked at me. His glasses, whenever he scrunched up his nose, slid up and down like a toy.
"Is that why he's so mean?" he asked.
Spiders on the walls stood still, listening for my answer. Outside, in the weeds, the armless statue suddenly frowned, and the trees around her slouched, and the wild-flowers drooped. The great mysterious feeling of being in this house — the gleam in my eyes, the thump in my chest — funneled down and disappeared into one small word: mean. For eighth graders like Luke and me, it was just the right-size word. Whoever you were, you were either mean or you weren't.
I looked down at the floor.
"Guess so," I said.
Luke, shaking his head, peered into another room. The same — just empty.
"But why's the church not using it for something?" he asked.
I was taking the stairs ahead of him, getting ahead of my own tour.
"I don't know, okay?" I said.
We soon stood on the fourth floor.
"Hey, my room," Luke said in a hushed voice, peering into the room that, in his identical house in town, was his room.
It was like a before-and-after photo. In this room, there were nothing but bare, sad walls and a lonely little window. In Luke's room in town stood a big bed with four posts that rose up toward the ceiling like giant screws.
"Hey," said Luke, looking all around as he walked through this shadow room, "does Ricky know about this house?"
I felt an ache in the pit of my stomach. Ricky was Ricky Hardaway, my no-account cousin. He did odd jobs around town, including some painting in Luke's house, which was how Luke knew him. Most of the time, Ricky was in jail for drugs. He was nobody I wanted Luke to think I was related to, or even talk about.
"Nah," I said, looking away and leaving it at that.
On the fifth floor, the top floor, we came to the room facing the river. This had been my father's bedroom when he was a boy. Now it was like every other — totally empty.
"Whoa, whose is that?" Luke asked, pointing at the grungy mattress that lay in the corner.
It was small, like a boy's mattress, long ago stripped of its sheet, with prison-gray stripes running down it and branded crossways by lines of rust from the bedspring that once held it.
"Some bum's," I said.
He looked over at me. "Bum? You've seen him?"
I nodded, lying about it before I knew it.
"You mean, you come here by yourself?"
"Sometimes," I said.
"Your brothers?"
I walked over and kicked the mattress.
"Sometimes."
He stepped up beside me and kicked it, too.
"Both of them?"
He didn't have to ask about both. If one did, the other did.
I never saw Jerry or Robbie out here, but I knew they came. I could see it in their eyes at home — that look of having wandered through a cemetery all day.
Luke stepped past me and up to the window, where he looked down at the overgrown field. He saw a herd of slow-moving, vine-covered elephants, rhinos, and zebras, inside of which were a tractor, a wagon, a plow, a few old cars, and even a flatbed truck — junked farm vehicles that, over the years, the underbrush had crawled right over, weaving a topiary garden out of. I saw a grassy pasture filled with cows, and my father and Uncle Dave shooting clay pigeons out over the river. Mom and Grandma were on the porch below, sipping lemonade and watching the speedboats zoom on the river, leaving white waves in the water as they pulled in and out of the landing on the far side.
"Hey, I wonder if you can see my house," Luke said, squinting through the dusty glass, then shielding the sun with his hand to try to see downriver toward town.
When I said nothing, he glanced back at me.
"Can you?" he asked.
I shrugged and acted nonchalant about it, but I had wondered. I knew you could see the church steeple in town, way in the distance, as a glitter of gold in the sky. On clear days, you could also see the red roof of the armory. So you ought to be able to see Luke's house, too, since it was so tall, like this one. But for some reason, you couldn't.
"Bet I can," he said, peering out the window again.
I watched him squint as far as he could into the distance. It was strange watching him do something I had done before.
Luke was from Boston. He was thirteen like me. He was short and skinny like me. But he was nothing like me on the inside. He didn't have a mother to baby him, because his father was divorced. He wasn't shy. He spoke right up to adults and didn't hang his head. He acted as if he could go anywhere, do anything. He knew Paris, he knew London. He had even been on that bullet train in Japan that went 175 mph! But as different as he was from me, this house talked to us the same, made us wonder and think the same.
I stepped up to the window beside him, and together we looked as hard as we could toward town. In this direction, I could stare forever, trying to figure out why I lived down there, why this house was here, and why my life was going back and forth between these two places.
After a moment, Luke held his arm up to the window.
"Hey, look," he said.
In the light I could see goose bumps on his forearm.
"You were serious, weren't you?" he said, his voice quavering.
I looked at him.
"About what?"
"About this house being alive."
I stood frozen.
"'Cause I have news for you," he said, his eyes going wider and wider.
"What?" I said, grinning and leaning away from him.
"It's waking up!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.
He bolted from the window, hopped the mattress, and dashed out the door, only to hit the brakes and come back. As I stood grinning, he reached in, grabbed the doorknob, and slammed the door shut behind him. Bang! The sound clapped up around me, freezing me. For a second, I just stood there. I was alone in my father's childhood bedroom, sealed in. Around me walls rose up and drew across the ceiling into a perfect cube, trapping me inside, like a mosquito inside a gob of sap.
Running from the shiver of it, I sailed over the mattress, flung open the door, and took off after Luke. Down the long hallway we ran, screaming one long scream, pretending we were falling out of an airplane. We took the stairs in a flurry of feet, pushing and bumping each other, me on Luke's heels, him on mine. In our mad dash down the hallway to get to the next flight, the dark doorways on both sides moved and blurred like coffins filled with mummies and zombies that were stepping out after us.
"Go! Go! Go!" Luke was shouting, waving his arm like a marine sergeant.
Down and around, down and around, and down and around we raced. Coming after us, along with the mummies and zombies, were the thousands upon thousands of spiders, an army of creepy-crawlies now scampering down the long, high walls, just seconds behind us.
We galloped halfway down one flight, then leaped — falling through the air down to the landing, our sneaks thumping down one-two. One banister, I hopped and rode down like a slide, knocking into Luke and sending both of us headlong onto the landing below. Laughing, trampling over each other, we scrambled on.
On a floor near the bottom, Luke stopped to slam a door. Boom!
"Go away, ghost!" he barked, pointing his finger at the closed door.
He dashed to the next door and did the same. Boom! "Go away, ghost!"
I joined in on the other side of the hall. Boom! "Go away, ghost!"
Down the long hall we went, slamming doors, barking orders at ghosts. But some of the doors bounced back open, and the mummies and zombies spilled out of their coffins again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Night I Freed John Brown by John Michael Cummings. Copyright © 2016 John Michael Cummings. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.