Here Lies Linc (2 page)

“Hearts can be tricky,” they told my mom.

The only thing that made me feel better back then was writing in my epitaph journal, scribbling down all the epitaphs
I might have put on a real headstone for Dad if Lottie had bothered to ask me. I liked my rhyming ones the best:

Here lies Lincoln Crenshaw
Geologist, Husband, Pa
He liked climbing and black-bottom pie.
We were going to build a tree house three stories high
.

LINCOLN RAINTREE CRENSHAW
We had the same name
Father and Son
First there were two, now there’s one

I wrote lots more over the next year or so, all about how he liked to make us blueberry pancakes and never skipped the funnies in the newspaper, and how he wore long johns to bed and won the gold plaque on our mantel that said
GEOLOGY RESEARCH PRIZE, 1999
. But I never showed Lottie. Talking about him only made her sadder. Actually, it seemed like she didn’t even want to think about him anymore. One day while I was at school, she took his clothes to Goodwill and packed everything else—his books and his favorite coffee mug and the gold plaque and their wedding picture—into boxes and hid them away in the attic. At least she saved one picture out for me. I still have it by my bed—a photo of me with Dad when I was two. We’ve got our tongues out, sharing a drippy chocolate ice cream cone.

But the truth is the last few years haven’t been nearly as dismal as they sound. My mother and I have gotten on with
things. After Dad died, we adopted one of the world’s funniest-looking dogs from the animal shelter. Lottie went straight back to her cemetery research and teaching classes at the university. I’ve kept busy going to school down the street and helping around the house—basically trying to be a normal kid.

Once I turned twelve this past June, I decided it wasn’t normal for someone my age to be spending so much time in graveyards anymore. So lately I’ve been making up excuses to stay behind on Lottie’s research trips. All summer I pretended to be too busy to hang out with Jeeter at the cemetery. And while I can’t quite bring myself to toss out my epitaph journal yet, I haven’t added a single new listing in weeks.

But then along comes September and my first taste of junior high, and suddenly I’ve found myself right back where I started.

M
Y
F
IRST
F
IELD
T
RIP OF THE
S
EVENTH
G
RADE:
Not to the state capital or to a show at the performing arts center or to the science museum in Cedar Rapids. My American Studies teacher just announced that our entire class is going to Oakland Cemetery to study graves.

P
LAINVIEW
J
UNIOR
H
IGH WAS
supposed to be a fresh start for me. But it’s hard to start fresh when kids keep asking you questions about your past. During the first week of school at least ten kids had tried to strike up conversations.

They always started the same way.

“You’re new, right? Where’re you from?”

“I’m from around here.”

“Then how come I’ve never seen you before? Which elementary school did you go to?”

“Uh … you’ve probably never heard of it,” I’d say. “It’s really small.”

“Oh, you mean Washington Elementary? Or Kennedy?”

“No.…”

“Well, which one?”

“Uh—”

“Which one?”

“Well, it’s called the Home-Away-from-Homeschool. A retired professor runs it out of her basement. It’s sort of like a homeschool … but, you know, away from home. There were only a few of us.…”

That’s about the time their ten pairs of eyes would cloud over and their ten pairs of feet would find an excuse to shuffle away.

And that’s about the time I started to think that maybe I had made a big mistake switching to public school. Part of me wished I was back in Dr. Lindstrom’s stuffy basement with the other oddball university professors’ kids who made up the Ho-Hos. That’s what Dr. Lindstrom had called us—the Ho-Hos, short for Home-Away-from-Homeschoolers.

Next to the typical Ho-Ho—like Sebastian, who could list every ancient Egyptian ruler back to King Khufu and wrote his name in hieroglyphics on the top of all his papers, or Vladka, who came from Russia and hardly ever spoke above a whisper and could multiply five-digit numbers in her head—I felt downright ordinary. I had transferred to Plainview hoping to find more regular kids like me. Lottie had always said if I
really
wanted, I could switch schools once junior high rolled around. But after just a few days at Plainview, I began to realize that I must be a full-fledged Ho-Ho after all, with extra cream filling on the side.

Still, I kept trying to fit in, and I was doing a pretty good job of it until the end of September, when Mr. Oliver made his surprise announcement in American Studies class.

That afternoon’s lecture on the settlement of the Midwest territories hadn’t exactly been riveting. So to entertain
myself, I had grabbed a Kleenex from the box on the window-sill beside my desk and, like a surgeon, gotten busy dissecting the tissue into two see-through layers. Once the dissection was complete, I tuned back in, just in time to hear Mr. Oliver say, “And listen up, people! I’ve got some good news. Next week you’ll actually have a chance to see where some of our city’s most famous settlers are buried, because we’re all going on a field trip to Oakland Cemetery.”

While the rest of the kids whooped and high-fived over the prospect of missing class for a day, I froze in my seat, trying to make sense of the weird coincidence.

But Mr. Oliver wasn’t finished.

“And, people …,” he said, pausing for effect while We the People waited, “here’s the best part. I’ve managed to convince one of the nation’s premier cemetery experts to come over from the university and lead our tour. Her name is Professor Charlotte Landers.”

Lottie.

Why didn’t she tell me?

If the sport of blushing could be an Olympic event, I’d win the gold medal. I’ve always turned beet red without a second’s notice, even over dumb stuff like having to answer “Here” during attendance or if a halfway-decent girl happens to look in my direction or if Lottie sends me to the grocery store for something embarrassing like diarrhea medicine or dandruff shampoo.

So obviously, as soon as Mr. Oliver called out my mother’s name, I felt my cheeks start to turn the color of raw hamburger. I grabbed a dissected tissue from my desk and pretended
to blow my nose, bracing myself for the next part of the announcement, the part when Mr. Oliver would tell everyone that the graveyard expert’s son was, in fact, a member of our very own fifth-period class. I waited with my face buried in the wad of Kleenex, praying for the blood to hurry up and drain back to where it belonged, into my overactive arteries and capillaries and veins.

A few more long seconds passed, and when I didn’t hear my name called, I lifted my face out of the tissues, inch by inch, and looked around the room. But Mr. Oliver had already turned back to the blackboard, and the kids in the next row were busy copying down details of a new assignment. I slumped back in my desk with relief.… Nobody knew. For some reason Lottie must not have told Mr. Oliver that she was my mother. And since we had different last names, no one had any idea that we were even related.

Still, by the time school ended that day, the upcoming field trip had lodged itself like a splinter in my brain. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Right when the Ho-Ho questions were starting to die down, now this—Lottie leading my class on a tour of the graveyard. It’s not that I didn’t love my mother. I loved her more than anything. It’s just that she was kind of … kind of unusual. The way she thought and talked and dressed, everything about her was different from other moms. I knew the kids in my class weren’t prepared for the likes of Lottie Landers.

She called home that night to check on me—from some tiny town on the coast of Rhode Island where she was spending a week of research in an old slave cemetery. This would
be the longest Lottie had ever been gone, and she had insisted on hiring one of her graduate students to “take care of” me while she was away, even though I had become pretty good at running things around the house over the past few years. Luckily I had barely seen the guy since he’d shown up on our doorstep with his four bags of laundry the day before.

I wanted to interrogate Lottie about the field trip the minute I picked up the phone, but I forced myself to hold back until she had finished telling me about how her research was going. I couldn’t remember the last time she had sounded so excited.

“Oh, Linc,” she said. “I wish you could see this place. They call it God’s Little Acre, and the stones are amazing. So artful and
poignant
. A lot of them list just a slave name and then who the slave belonged to. ‘In memory of Cato. Servant to Mr. Brinley.’ ‘Peter. Servant of Captain John Browning.’ Can you imagine? Linc? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well, you’re so quiet. Are you all right? Is Rick helping to fix dinner like he promised?”

“Uh-huh,” I lied, looking down at the dregs of Rice Krispies floating in my bowl on the kitchen table. I couldn’t complain. I was the one who had convinced her that I’d be fine staying home while she went to Rhode Island. I clamped the phone under my chin and started flipping through the stack of mail that had been piling up next to Lottie’s spot at the table for the past month. “There’s an overdue notice here, Lottie.” I said. My mother had a habit of avoiding bill paying until the envelopes arrived with bright red alert messages
and exclamation points stamped across the front. “It’s from that plumber who came to fix our toilet back in July.”

“Oh, shoot,” Lottie muttered. “I meant to pay that one before I left. Can you take care of it for me, Linc? I signed a couple checks for you in case something came up. They’re on the desk in my office … I think.” She hurried to change the subject. “How’s C.B.?”

“Fine,” I said, trying not to sound too testy as I turned in my chair to look at C.B. He was sprawled on his hairy dog bed by the back door. As usual there was mud caked on the top of his big nose and dirt clods trapped in his mustache. “He’s been busy,” I told Lottie, “working on a new hole by the front porch.”

She groaned. “Not the front yard too? Pretty soon we’re going to look like we’re living on top of an archaeological dig.”

I plunked my bowl of soggy cereal on the floor for C.B. Even with the cranky mood I was in, I couldn’t help smiling as I watched him roust himself from his bed and wander over to investigate. C.B. caused the same reaction in most people. I could never get very far in the park without someone stopping to ask me, “What kind of breed
is
that?” C.B. looked like some sort of canine mutant with his sheepdog head, basset-hound body, and long rat tail. And just to make his pedigree even more of a mystery, he was the color of a chocolate lab, all except for the blond eyebrows that sprang from his head like furry antennae.

I slid down to the floor so I could sit next to C.B. while he licked out my cereal bowl. He smelled like a swamp, but I hugged him anyway.

“Well, how was school today?”

I sat up, dodging C.B.’s tongue.
Finally
. Time to let the logjam loose. “Pretty good until fifth period,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me that Mr. Oliver asked you to give our class a tour of the cemetery?”

“Mr. Oliver?” Lottie repeated in bewilderment. Then she gasped. “Oh, shoot! I almost forgot. Did I miss it? Wait a minute, that’s
your
class going to Oakland?”

“Mom!” I barked into the phone. We both knew I only called her Mom when I was mad. And we both knew that she had a habit of forgetting things, but this was bordering on amnesia territory. “No, you didn’t miss it. The field trip’s not till
next
Tuesday … and yes, it’s
my
American Studies class that you’re supposed to lead on the tour.” C.B. scooted out of the way as I grabbed the bowl he had licked clean and clambered to my feet in frustration.

“I’m sorry, Linc,” Lottie said helplessly. “Before, there was just Dr. Lindstrom to keep track of, but now you have … is it six? Seven different teachers? And you know I get called to do lots of tours and special lectures. It’s hard to keep everything straight.”

I had started toward the sink with the bowl, but the phone cord was too short and tangled for me to get very far. I gave it a hard yank. Maybe if I broke it, Lottie would join the rest of the modern world and buy us a portable phone.

“Well, you can’t do it anyway, can you?” I asked, standing motionless for a hopeful second at the end of my phone-cord tether. “You’re not even getting home till the day of the field trip.”

“What time does your class go to Oakland?”

“Around one o’clock.”

“Piece of cake,” she said. “I think my plane gets in around noon. See there? Everything’s going to work out fine.”

I didn’t answer. It was so quiet in the house, I could hear C.B.’s long toenails clicking on the linoleum as he headed back to his bed.

“Linc?”