The Children's Crusade Read Online Free PDF Page B

was no longer visible. For something to do, he opened the mailbox, but of course it was empty; it was far too early for the mail. He felt faintly ridiculous even though no one could see him. Toward the end of the school year, when Mr. Gleason ignored the breaking of small rules, Robert had left the room while everyone was supposed to stay seated and work on math problems, and he’d gone into the cloakroom (his cover story being that he’d left his eraser in his jacket pocket) and quickly transferred the contents of his lunch box into Valerie Pinckney’s lunch box and vice versa. Then, at lunch, he had watched with increasing dismay as she proceeded to eat his ham sandwich and savor his brownie without so much as a tiny wrinkle of confusion disturbing her pretty face. He felt the same kind of silly now as hehad then.
    He started the climb back to the house, but instead of continuing up the driveway he veered to the left, down what his father called the spur. A narrower branch of the driveway, the spur sloped through a dense cover of trees and stopped at a storage shed that was several years older than the house and had been built by Robert’s father on a month of Sundays when Robert was a baby. “A month of Sundays” was just an expression, but as a very young child Robert had imagined a special month that was all Sundays, an anomaly of the calendar not unlike the one every fourth year that gave February twenty-nine days. Robert had imagined that he and his mother had come, too, on the special Sundays of that special month, perhaps sitting on a blanket while his father worked, and he’d been very disappointed to learn, from a passing remark of his mother’s, that they’d been left at home in San Francisco.
    The shed was small, about eight by ten feet, a rough wooden structure with a door held closed by a padlock. Inside was a set of patio furniture his mother no longer liked and a rowboat not quite old enough to have lost all its blue paint. The boat was an impulse purchase of his father’s, bought in a junk shop because it reminded him of a boat he’d used as a boy, on a pond in Michigan.
    The key to the padlock was kept in a drawer in the kitchen, but all at once Robert remembered there was a spare key hidden in a gap between the foundation and the base of one of the walls. He knew this with the strange conviction one has about things learned in dreams: it was absolute fact shrouded in mystery. How did he know it? Why would there be a key hidden in such an unlikely place? He had no idea.
    But he wanted to see the rowboat. They’d never once used it, not in two years. “Someday,” was his father’s insufficient answer to the question of when they might put it in water. Crouching at the door,Robert felt with his fingers for a gap between the foundation and the wall. Nothing. He slid his fingers sideways. Still nothing. It was a little creepy, not knowing what might be lurking there, what soft bug or moldy leaf, so he changed his mind about the whole thing and headed up to the house.
    His brothers and sister had disappeared, and he lay down under the oak tree. There were so many branches it was like being in a room. Robert remembered Mr. Gleason showing the class slides of his trip to France, where he’d been inside a church that didn’t have normal walls or a ceiling but instead a vast network of oak beams like an overturned sailing ship with its framing exposed. Mr. Gleason had brought out a box of balsa wood sticks and some glue, and they’d had a lesson on engineering. He was the only teacher who used science in English lessons and social studies in math lessons and made it so you didn’t even notice you were learning. A great example was the way he took a unit on the human body and ended up teaching the class a history lesson about “the four humors,” which was basically a big mistake doctors had made about how the body worked. In ancient Greece and Rome, doctors thought the body was filled with four