Excerpts

Chapter 1 I used to stand alone by the cloakroom door. In the morning before school, and again when the lunch bell rang and the others ran out to the field, I walked to the same spot and rested my head on the sharp crags of stucco. An outcrop of shadow protected the wall from the autumn heat. With folded hands I stood in the shade, gazing at the backwoods and waiting out the day. I took up my station at the rear of the school after Clare's parents moved downtown, leaving me friendless in the neighborhood. I sometimes ran into her at the store or on the boulevard, but as our mothers chatted, our scant talk revealed that our common ground had been only literal, the adjoining area between our yards. The new neighbors were old and seemed to wear housecoats all day. And so, at school, I became the girl by the door: Odile who stands by herself. Never spoken to and seldom spoken of. Staring at nothing with eyes like carved wood, as motionless as an effigy. Before the bell called everyone in, I liked to slip inside the classroom a minute early. Six empty rows faced an immaculate blackboard. The dusty odor of chalk blended with a pungent oil. My teacher, M. Pichegru, habitually rubbed his desk with a wet black rag. When I was younger the oily smell had made my nostrils curl. Then the bell would ring, the cloakroom door would open behind me, and the room would rush with noise. In the storm of laughter and gossip, I remained alone. But when Pichegru strode in with his books and his switch, everybody hushed. We stood in our uniforms until he motioned us to sit, and for the next hours of lectures and tests I was glad to have company in my silence. That fall I was sixteen and the course of my life was ready to be determined. My class had reached the apprenticeship level, and most people were excited about the impending transition out of school. At the end of September we were to hand in our applications and wait to see who chose us; later on, once the decisions were made, we would split our time between Pichegru's lessons and training for our vocations around town. Some people knew the work they wanted, and others were scrambling to figure it out. All month there were visits scheduled from clerks and artisans explaining their trades, as well as field trips to the farms, the orchards, the mill, and the border. That, at least, was the regular way of things. My mother, however, thought that I was destined for the Conseil. She had always believed this, or wanted to. The Conseil's process was different from other apprenticeships. I could not simply apply at the end of the month and hope to be picked. Before that, they had a special vetting program, and gaining admittance to that program was difficult in itself. Pichegru would have to nominate me, and he could send just two students, unlike the downtown school, which got to send more. If you managed to get accepted into vetting, you had to get through September without being cut. Those who succeeded were offered apprenticeships in the Hôtel de Ville. Only a few candidates made it each year; some years no one did. My mother worked in the Hôtel de Ville, but in the basement archives. I see the apprentices they get, she told me. They're smart, but you're smarter. She had tried out for the Conseil when she was my age and made it to the end of the second week. When I said I might be too shy for a career in politics, she scoffed. She didn't know how I acted at school. The idea of me on the Conseil was ludicrous. I had no desire to be a conseiller, and no illusions about the likelihood of my becoming one. The prospect of competing against others mortified me, let alone the prospect of prevailing and having such a public job. But my mother's job seemed not so bad, despite her frequent gripes: filing petitions in a tucked-away room, collating reports with blacked-out names and ages. Underneath the Hôtel de Ville was somewhere I could see myself. And the fact that all such positions went to students cut from the Conseil's vetting program had helped prepare me for the shame of asking Pichegru, on the first day of school, whether he would consider nominating me. My mother had dropped me off that morning and confidently wished me luck. School began on the final Friday of August, an encroachment on the summer that never ceased to feel cruel. For the younger children it was a half day, but Pichegru treated it like any other, directing us to open our fresh textbooks without welcoming us back. I saw that some girls in the room had new haircuts, and there were discernible shifts in the social landscape--people who'd traded desks to get closer to each other. Alliances and flirtations I imagined developing during long afternoons at the beach. I took care to look engaged in the lessons, and when class let out I ventured up to the lectern. Pichegru was erasing the blackboard. He was barely taller than me, but he was muscular and rapid, destroying block letters in vigorous swirls. The overhead light gleamed off his bald skull. I stammered that I was interested in a Conseil apprenticeship. He finished cleaning the whole board before responding. Through the window I heard muffled shouts on the playground. Pichegru tossed his cloth on the chalk ledge and turned to me. I'm surprised to hear that, Odile. You know the vetting program requires you to speak. A blush climbed my face, but the next thing he said was matter-of-fact. Write me something over the weekend and give it to me Monday. I nominate next week. He told me that his recommendations were based on a personal essay--the shorter the better, but well considered. The downtown school nominated according to nepotism, but his essay method was based solely on merit. If I could write a paper that demonstrated a suitable intellect and, more importantly, a suitable temperament for the Conseil, he would be willing to give them my name. I asked what I was supposed to write about. Pichegru said that he gave the same question every year: If you had permission to travel outside the valley, which direction would you go? I walked home from school on the neighborhood's one real road, notched into the mountain's edge. On the uphill side of the chemin des Pins, houses peered from the tops of steep driveways. Across the road the slope continued downward, clumped with balsamroot and weeds. You could see the whole valley beyond the faded grey roofs of the lower homes: the calm lake, the arid mountains rising from the opposite shore. Our house was a small one below the chemin des Pins. I walked down the laneway and let myself in. My mother was still at work. She'd been reorganizing the books in the living room, and precarious towers had sprouted around the floor. I sat cross-legged and picked up a vellum-bound collection. It was the only art book she owned. It contained woodcuts done in red ink, compact square landscapes that made the valley look like a fairy tale. Each illustration was protected by a glassine page that had to be turned delicately. I opened to a picture of a hillside apple orchard, a rolling murmuration of trees. On the next page was the downtown park. It was a perspective from out on the lake, maybe from the summer swim dock. Little bathers stood on the beach. The crimson water in the foreground swayed with lines as thin as hair. The most interesting picture was at the end of the book. It assumed a vantage point in the sky, looking at the valley from above. Our small town in the middle was nestled against the lake, which stretched like a finger up and down the page. The mountains surrounding us were tall and empty. To the left of the mountains was an identical small town, on the shore of an identical lake. To the right, it was the same: the mountains, the lake, the town again. After each valley came another. The towns repeated in both directions, east and west. Dark lakes slid up the page in parallel. My fingers paced the mountains as I considered Pichegru's fantasy exercise. In addition to the valleys' natural borders, each town was encircled by a fence--something not shown on this particular woodcut, but something everyone knew. The fence followed the ridge above my school, high in the backwoods and mostly out of view. Where it came down out of the mountains, it tracked across the wide yellow swath of plainsland on the eastern outskirts of town. It curved toward the lakeshore and then continued across the water, reaching the other side to claim the narrow slice of land inhabited by the western guards. I had never seen the border up close. I sat on the floor and imagined how it would feel to cross it. When I described my exchange with Pichegru to my mother, she didn't ask whether I was actually more interested in visiting the east or the west. She said to prioritize what the Conseil wanted to hear. It's a trick question, Odile. Think about what you're applying for. They don't want apprentices who are curious what it's like over there. A conseiller mostly tells people they can't go. We were on the back patio in our mismatched iron chairs, sipping cold soup for dinner. The soup was tangy and red. It was still daylight but there were some early stars. Our backyard was shaded by trees that blocked our view of the lake. I asked what she thought I should say in my paper if Pichegru's prompt was a trap. Be honest and say you don't want to see those places. Say you're content where you are. I worked at my father's old desk in my bedroom. The desk was so tight over my legs that I couldn't picture a grown man using it, but it gave me an idea for making my essay more personal. This helped me feel better about not technically answering the question. After all, I had to write something. I picked up my pencil. Given the chance to visit another valley, I would not take it. I scratched this out: Would respectfully decline. The only legitimate reason for requesting passage, we'd been told, was consolation. To lay eyes on a person you would never otherwise live to meet, or a person you would never see again at home. In fact, for me, there was someone like this whom I could write about. When I was four years old, my father died in the old garage next to my grandparents' orchard. If I were to go west, I could find him, and watch him for a bit. He'd be in his early twenties on the other side of the mountains, and would have met my mother only recently, hanging out by the fountain in the Place du Bâtisseur. I knew the story: she'd wished on a coin and refused to tell him, an inquisitive stranger, what her wish was. He threw a coin of his own and wished to take her out. She said he'd nullified his wish by sharing it, but she went out with him anyway. It would be tempting to go there and look. To feel like I knew him better, or like I knew him at all. But, I wrote to Pichegru, seeing him would not console me. I might not even recognize which man he was. What good would it do, to have him pointed out from afar and be told I was looking at my father? The truth was that he was not so much a vivid loss in my life as an abstract deficit, the explanation for why our house was quieter than Clare's. The real loss belonged to my mother, and she always swore that she'd never petition for a viewing. She said she remembered enough: how he started sleeping all day, how he started seeming asleep even when he wasn't. She said her memories were what helped her not to miss him. I concluded my essay by vowing that, as a future conseiller, I would advise petitioners to seek whatever closure they needed here in their own valley, which is to say, in the safer pastures of ordinary grief. If that was enough for my mother, then it was enough for me, and so it ought to be for anyone. Reading it back under my breath, my answer struck me as reasonably good. Moreover, it seemed like the kind of writing that might impress Pichegru. The only checkmarks he ever scrawled on my homework, regardless of the subject, were next to the toughest-minded statements that crept from my pencil. Perhaps he would see this as another one of my small severities, and approve. It was late when I transcribed my final draft. My mother was reading in bed. She placed my essay on her book and tilted it to the lamp, her shadowy eyes scanning the page. I was nervous and looked away, finding my distorted face in her magnified makeup mirror: my jumble of curls, my too-long jaw. The paper fluttered when she handed it back. Very clever, she said. We hadn't talked about him in a long time. He had worked in the little grocery store on the rue de Laiche. He did everything there, but his specialty was fruit, which made sense given his upbringing. It was a sore spot between him and my grandparents that he didn't want to run the orchard when they retired. They had to sell the land to the neighbors instead, and the two orchards were merged. But the Nancys were always kind to me, and when we visited my grandparents, I was still allowed to wander through the cherry trees that used to be ours. One of the few memories I have of him is from that orchard in the summer. Although the sunshine was splitting hot, under the leaves the air felt lush and languid. My father held my hand as we walked barefoot up the row. I took big steps through the tall grass, squishing overripe cherries between my toes, feeling like a giant in a slow green land. When we reached the orchard's edge, he lifted me onto the stone wall that formed the property line. Before me was a barren vista, a field of wild mustard climbing toward rounded foothills. The sun had gone white in the clouds. What I felt was a kind of thrilling sadness, something I have since experienced when looking out over other open spaces and lonely boundaries: an emotion that lives on the desolate edge of the known. As important as this memory is to me, the next part contains too much hindsight to be genuine. Still holding my father's hand, I glance back into the trees. They are all the very same height, and through their branches I see the white-walled garage, crouching. The moment has the air of a premonition: instead of a parent, you will have this haunted place. Yet apart from avoiding the garage where he'd done it, I really didn't think of him often. When he left us, I had been too young to understand, and so the disavowal in my essay came easily. Excerpted from The Other Valley: A Novel by Scott Alexander Howard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.