Electric City: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

City—thanks to the complicated insistence of his father he attended high school with all of the scientists’ kids, the school with an Indian name. It alternately amused and infuriated him that no one there seemed to wonder about the translation, casually using the Iroquois words as if they all assumed the meaning of the language no longer mattered.
    Land of high corn.
    Land beyond the pine trees.
    These were the timeless place-names given by his forebears, the now-invisible ones. There were still plenty of pine trees, but the fields of corn were shrinking, year by year. He wondered often if he was the only one who noticed. It was nearly impossible to sit still in geology class, for instance, and hear the teacher droning about metamorphic terrain and postglaciation. How could they care so much about scratches and chatter marks on shale without knowing the histories of this land and of his tribe?
    Whenever he stayed up late at night listening to his homemade recordings of elders speaking Mohawk, and considered the idea that the Electric City Museum ought to collect such things, he always ended up assuring himself that he was better at safekeeping than anymuseum could ever be. Even the battered trunk with a broken lock served as a treasure chest when it was draped with one of Annie’s handmade quilts.
    He would have had to teach the basics of listening, and he had no idea how to explain the subtleties of telling stories by beginning with “you” instead of “I.” On his high school English papers, that same “you” was repeatedly crossed out with red marks, replaced in the teacher’s handwriting with her strangely detached “one.” It would take more patience than he possessed to explain that in his own tongue, there was a “we” that meant you and I , while another word for “we” meant he/she and I, but not you . The language of including and excluding could be simple, but not easy.
    Why share this legacy with people who owned too much already, and yet seemed oblivious to the value of preserving what they claimed. Not the land, not the river, not even the houses they built or the machines they made. The letters in the sky and the kitchen appliances and the things that came after.
    In the faintest background of certain tapes, Martin recognized the cacophony of mayflies. Their singing so brief and urgent.

    You know how to quiet everything down toward a center point, a place where even your breath is barely a disturbance, like the mirrored surface of a pond. Present to nothingness, you can be present to all, even as you stay off to the side somewhere, watching. The flight of an owl in the darkness, wings against air, silent.
    You keep waiting to hear somebody tell the true story of the massacre at the Stockade. Instead all you ever get is the twisted history beingtold all wrong about who fought and who died. To refer to women and children as “combatants”!
    You feel rage in your fingers; the muscles in your legs tighten with a confusing mix of defiance and helplessness. Who made up these words? And who claimed the right to use the names of your people for their street signs and subdivisions? The wrongs are everywhere.
    Trapped behind your desk, in the angry voice you keep inside, you challenge the teachers to talk about American history in a different way. You dare them to learn the whole of what happened before they claim to know the facts. The inside voice threatens to erupt, especially now that massacres seem to be happening all over again, in jungles on the other side of the world.
    Today, a November morning, you get in trouble for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, sent to the principal for remaining in your seat with your fists clenched. You don’t even bother to explain to the homeroom teacher why you will not say words that aren’t true, won’t even shape your mouth around them.
    In the principal’s office you mumble something about hypocrisy, about the lies of freedom and justice for all