Abe’s beard split, his smile so big Bit feared for his father’s cheeks.
There was a silence, the sound of someone in the Octagonal Barn above dragging something heavy across the floor. The straw bosses all began talking over one another, pacing up and down the tunnel as they dreamed aloud, building their vision detail by detail.
The deeper Bit pushes into Arcadia House, now, the more he is bitten by a wretched clammy cold. The men haven’t touched these rooms yet: they are moldy and dark. He pushes at a latch, and a door swings open with a foul exhalation. Between the darkness of the hall he is in and the light above the stairwell, he takes the light and goes up, though the dust is to his ankles. He finds himself on a catwalk that skirts a deep room, an intact couch, a grand brick fireplace, a sea of filth that moves ten feet below from the air he displaces. From this spot in the house, he can no longer hear the men on the roof, their music, or the women far away in the Children’s Wing as they sing and talk.
There is a black spill beneath the first door, an evil that spreads from the crack. He skips it, creeps on. From behind the second he hears a sound, a sigh, a whisper, and feels a cold in the metal of the knob, so he skips it, too. The third opens when he pushes hard, and he enters.
The room is furred with dust, inches deep. It grows off the walls, over the floor, spreads itself across lumps that are furniture, Bit discovers, when he inserts his hand and feels wood beneath. He touches a filminess under one, cloth, and finds it a bed.
In the middle of the floor, a delicious lump, and Bit plunges in both hands. There are hard things deep down. He brings out his fist and peers at a series of tiny bones, a mouse’s skull and skeleton. Then, a handful of buttons in a strange, dense material, creamy white and shimmering. At last, an object, hard and soft at the same time. He blows on it until the book reveals itself.
On the leather cover, there are embossed flowers, a boy who peers from behind a tree, and letters in gold. Bit traces four — G-R-I-M — then grows impatient and opens the pages.
At first he sees an illustration. It is the most vivid thing in all of Arcadia House; it sucks the daylight into it. A girl with a squinched face seems to be using her cut-off finger for a key. On another page, there is a tiny man who splits himself in two while blood spills in gouts from his wounds. On another, a girl in a long dress walks beside lions, her mouth open, her hair up in a furry acorn hat.
He finds the smallest story. His finger runs under each word as he puzzles it out. It is about a mother with many children in a time of famine, something Bit knows: the terror in the belly, winterberry and soybeans all they have left in the mason jars. The mother wants to eat her children. They are angelic and choose to die for her. But she is so ashamed with their sacrifice that she doesn’t eat them. Instead, she runs away.
Horror is heaped within horror: the mother eating her children, the children dying, the mother disappearing forever into the dark behind the story.
He drops the book back in its heap of dust, clamps his hands over his eyes. The world moves in tight and squeezes him. He holds his face until the terror scuttles off and he can breathe again.
From afar, Hannah’s voice, high, frantic: Bit! Come here, right now! Before he leaves, he snatches the book, shoves it down his pants, and runs down over his own treadmarks in the dust, runs and runs, turns the wrong way, loses Hannah’s voice, bursts into a familiar hall, hears her voice closer now, goes down the stairs, leaping the gaps in the treads, stumbles into the Entryway, goes down a corridor, loses her voice, goes another way and at last finds himself in a glassy room with half-collapsed long tables, where Hannah’s back is turned to him, where she is shouting for him. She is so happy to see Bit she snatches him up under the arms and hugs him to her so tightly he can’t breathe, and puts him down, and wipes her wet face on her shoulder and says, Don’t ever wander off here, Bit. You can get hurt. This place is very, very dangerous.
She holds him away by the arms. God, she says. You’re black with filth.
Then her mouth shifts as she feels the book in his pants. She looks at him, and Bit watches her, and is almost disappointed when she lets the book go. She has been letting everything go, these days.
Midge comes from a back room. Since her father turned to ice during the February Morning Meeting, Midge’s face has gone sour, as if she is constantly sucking a gooseberry. She snaps, This is no place for a kid, Hannah. Take him home.
Midge has no neck, Bit notices. Her head swivels on her shoulders like a ratchet.
Away they go again, rattling down over the hill in the Red Wagon. Bit leaves the book under his shoes and pants when he and his mother go into the cement-block Showerhouse together, though their day to bathe isn’t until Sunday. Most days, they do what Hannah calls a KACA Bath: dip a washcloth in hot water, soap it up, hit the Kisser-Armpit-Crotch-Ass. Today the Showerhouse echoes, empty. Everyone else is working. There’s a dangerous luxury to the steam, the rosy softnesses of his mother under the hot water, the faces of sleeping babies that live in Hannah’s knees, in his own layers of darkness that fall as she rubs at him with her chapped hands until she has scrubbed him raw and red as an infant again.
Clean in the quiet of the middle of day, Hannah makes herself a cup of tea. She sits at the window, Edith Piaf on the record player. Non, the invisible singer warbles, je ne regrette rien. Bit hears: No, Gina rug-wet again. He thinks, Poor Gina, heartstruck for her shame.
Hannah’s so deep in her thoughts that Bit is invisible. He waves his hands before her eyes, but she doesn’t blink. He takes the book he stole from Arcadia House from his pants and sidles down the steps from the main Bread Truck into the chilly lean-to, and puts it into his Stash tin, where it just barely fits if he takes everything else out: the snakeskin and glass eye with a green iris and arrowhead and sparrow with working wings that Abe had once carved for him.
Daring, he goes out into the afternoon and carries his treasures to the Free Store, where he puts them on the shelf where all of the other unused things live. He touches the hemp necklaces that Sylvia braids, the single rollerskate, the musty paperbacks, the neat stacks of patched and folded jeans, the flannel shirts. Cheryl is weighing dried cranberries in the corner and putting them into paper bags for the cook of each homestead to pick up, and when her back is turned, he plunges his hands into the flour barrel and squeezes the powder deliciously through his fingers. Muffin looks up from where she’s funneling cooking oil into mason jars, and the spatters of oil on her glasses refract her eyes into many tiny blinking eyes. But she doesn’t tell on him. He takes a piece of dried apple from the snack bin and runs home through the cold. When he comes in, his mother cocks her head and says, Where’d you go, Little Man? but doesn’t even listen for his answer.
He makes a plan. Tomorrow, he will sneak home from the Kid Herd and spend hours in his new book happily, piecing together the terrible, sharp stories until the world is stuffed full of them and nothing else can get in.
The snow melts under a freezing rain and the sky is the color of lint. Jincy comes over. Her face is red with tears. She is eight and her head is a wild screw of white curls. She is much older, but Bit’s best friend. They zip themselves into his sleeping bag, and in the closeness there, she whispers: My parents are fighting.
There is so much for Bit to say that he doesn’t say anything.
They play Babysitter and Baby, they play Boycott, they play Handy and Lila. They play Nixon, Jincy making her face loose, veeing her fingers, saying I am not a crook. They play Midwife, in which Jincy is Astrid, and Bit pushes a porcelain babydoll out of his pretend yoni, until Hannah sees and blanches and says, Hey, kids! Let’s make cookies! Then they stir and mix and bake, oatmeal cookies with almonds and raisins and molasses, while Hannah gives them directions from the kitchen table.