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A Novel
by Scott Alexander Howard
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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.
Excerpted from The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard. Copyright © 2024 by Scott Alexander Howard. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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