“It is. She also held your current position as my apprentice, many years ago.”
“Many years ago? Um, Teacher, I’ve been meaning to ask. If you don’t mind. May I ask your age?”
“You may, later. Now, focus on this.”
She tapped the book.
“It is full of useful information and the insights deepen as she becomes more experienced. She isn’t a bad role model to meet early in your studies. Many in our field would likely tell you it would have been better to encounter her before me.”
Green opened the book. It was a three-ring binder full of typed pages and handwritten notes. He flipped through the pages. Some were dog-eared. Some were coffee stained. Some were covered with whited-out corrections and a few were redacted with black marker.
It was an intimate thing. It was someone else’s life. He turned to the first page. It had been typed on an old-fashioned typewriter.
Valentina walked away without another word.
Green read.
[Transcribed from original document by L. R. Rodriguez]
September 12, 1948
Where to begin?
Everything changed two weeks ago when young Jonathan Herkimer turned his afternoon math lesson into a game of hide and seek. He darted from the room with a giggle as I rummaged for my lesson plan.
I wasn’t cross. A good tutor knows to build in time for a bit of mischief and, honestly, I wasn’t terribly interested in the lesson myself.
I heard him dash into the study and found him beneath his grandfather’s prodigious desk. Atop the blotter was a sight that took my breath. There were half a dozen detailed, annotated drawings and diagrams of tractor-sized lizards roaming the prairie.
I nearly fainted.
It wasn’t the shock of seeing such outlandish creatures. It was the shock of familiarity, the shock of a secret stolen from my mind and displayed on the desk of a man I hardly knew.
Jonathan looked up at me from his hiding place with uncommon concern on his young face. No doubt I looked as if someone had just walked over my grave. He marched himself back to his desk without another word. I hardly remember the rest of our tutoring session, only a specter of tension pacing the room like a tiger and Jonathan stealing surreptitious glances at me while completing his assignments.
How can I describe my relationship with the lizards in those drawings?
As a child, when I told my uncles about great, thornylizards bigger than horses grazing the fields near Stoneburner’s Feedstore, they laughed. So I laughed. I was seven and I knew already that their laughter wasn’t to be trusted. In our house, mirth and anger were always scheming together.
I knew those lizards could look just like tumbled stone or slip beneath the turf like a diving frog as fast as you could say “button,” but how could you miss seeing them?
You couldn’t.
So, I was mad or damned and in practical terms I wasn’t sure which was worse. There were always cautionary tales about wayward women in other families. The sanitarium. The nunnery. Places you were put to be forgotten. Oubliettes the menfolk could pretend were a kindness.
I know there are households who smile at whimsy and think kindly on their children’s imaginary playmates. I know it in the way I know the north pole exists or the dark side of the moon. The knowledge is academic. In my family, we didn’t talk of whimsy. We talked of lingering scars from the dust bowl. We talked of the abandoned homestead. Uncle Juan told grim stories about shoveling grit from the kitchen with a wheat scoop and the way the air would be haunted with static sparks. My family cursed the adage “rain will follow the plow” and doubly cursed themselves for ever thinking it trustworthy.
My choice was obvious. Deception. Avoidance. So, I didn’t mention the giant lizards. Nor the zebra ants. Nor the golden dragonflies with eyes like silver coins.
If you were a child, you could speak of such things. Once. Perhaps twice. No more than that.
If you drew pictures of them, you had better draw them a bit different every time. Add a horn here. Add some wings there.
And now I had found the sorts of drawings I would never dare to make sitting out in the open on Robert Herkimer’s desk. I had stumbled into an ambush, my forbidden subject lying in wait where I would least expect it.
What did I know of Mr. Herkimer? He was the patriarch of his family. He paid me to tutor his grandson. According to local lore, Robert Herkimer had made his fortune “away” doing “God knows what.” He didn’t seem to participate in any industry and it was the height of mystery why the Herkimers had settled in Eastern Kansas at all.
My afternoon lessons with Jonathan ended as the grandfather clock in the hall chimed thrice. I dismissed him and remained, stone-still, studying the fringe on the rug and feeling as if my body was mineralizing into stone. I heard Jonathan stamp down the stairs, racing to join his mother in the garden.
