“Do you think you could fix her?” Catalina asked.
“You still have your tools?” Gran asked.
The Duke laughed, and pointed to the overflowing contents of the storage room. “You think I get rid of anything in a place like this?”
Lunch at the Duke’s was different now. Gran and Catalina both arrived on the dot of noon, ate their lunch in five minutes, and then had the rest of the period to watch and help as the Duke restored Gussie.
There was a lot to do.
But the Duke worked with an energy that belied his age. He sanded the horse down and the dirt and grime disappeared, revealing a fresh new skin of blond wood. Gran was briefly worried that he’d have to give up his Lift to Gussie, but the Duke assured him it was more important to have the Lift on hand, not on hoof. They could make more horseshoes for Gussie, he said.
Occasionally the Duke would stop to explain how he’d originally carved a certain aspect of Gussie—her eyes, her hooves—and always the Duke was teaching them. How to use a gouge, a chisel, a carving knife. And how to refashion the lower leg of a Stargazer who had been underground for forty years. Gran knew a bit about shaping material into animals, and the Duke was impressed by his way of making something inanimate look real and look alive.
It took two weeks of lunches, but then Gussie was ready. She looked strong again.
“Nice work, Catalina. Good job, Grant,” the Duke said.
“Thanks,” Gran said. “But, um…”
“What is it?” the Duke asked.
“You can just call me Gran from now on,” Gran said. “That’s actually my name.”
“It’s not Grant?” the Duke said, smiling. It was obvious he’d known all along. “I just liked having my own name for you. But I want to call you what you want to be called.”
“Thanks,” Gran said.
They all looked back at Gussie.
“She almost looks new,” Catalina said.
“All that’s left is the paint,” the Duke said. “But that’s far beyond my capabilities. Making a wooden horse into something alive and in glorious color—that’s a job for someone else. You know anyone with skills like that?”
Gran did know someone with skills like that.
This had been part of his plan all along.
“I didn’t know your mom was an artist,” Catalina said.
They were pushing Gussie through town on the wheelchair, eliciting surprised looks all the way. The large man on the dirtbike, who Gran had seen just about every day for months, stopped, stared, and then fell off his bike entirely.
“You don’t know anything about my mom,” Gran said. “Or my dad. And I don’t know anything about your family, either. I didn’t even realize your great-great-grandfather started the Catalan Carousel Company.”
“Who did what?” Catalina said.
“Your great-great-grandfather—”
She interrupted him. “I heard you,” she said. “But that’s not true. I don’t have any great-anything who started any carousel company.”
Gran didn’t know what to say. He would have assumed she was kidding, but her face was deadly serious. And he knew that no one he’d ever met knew anything about their ancestry.
“But your last name is Catalan,” Gran said. “And the factory that made carousels here was named the Catalan Carousel Company. Don’t you think there’s some connection?”
Now Catalina stopped pushing. She stood on the sidewalk and her brow furrowed, as if she were doing complicated calculations in her head.
Gran continued pushing Gussie up the hill.
After a few blocks, Catalina caught up.
“You could be right,” she said, and continued to think—thinking so hard her eyes were almost crossed. Then, as if embarrassed to let Gran be so right about something so big (because he was right), she forced her face into an expression of calm and confidence.
“I doubt it, though,” she said.
Gran’s mother’s reaction to Gussie’s arrival was different from the Duke’s. She did not look happy. Maybe she simply wasn’t excited to see her old wheelchair carrying an enormous wooden horse. More scuffing, Gran assumed she was thinking.
“Mom, this is Gussie,” Gran said. Then he turned around, revealing Catalina, who had been shyly standing behind him. “And this is Catalina, my best friend.”
Together, Gran and Catalina explained their idea to Gran’s mother—that she could restore the horse by using her painting prowess and animal-display skills.
“But this is so different! I couldn’t possibly!” Gran’s mother said, running her fingers over the head of Gussie. The words she said pointed to reluctance, but the tone with which she said them, and the way she touched Gussie’s head—she touched her wooden mane the way she ran her hand over Maisie’s sleeping head—all this said she was intrigued.
“I wouldn’t even know what kind of paint to use,” she said, and now her eyes were running over the horse, making calculations, plans, color schemes. Gran knew she would do it, that she couldn’t possibly resist now. From the corner of his eye, he caught a smile creeping over Catalina’s face. She knew too.
“I’d have to prime it,” his mother said. “Then sand it down again. Then put on a base coat. Probably with a heavy paint. Something that would cover well. But what color should she be? Not white. Not gray. I’d think calico. A silver saddle. Maybe a blond mane…”
Gran couldn’t remember his mother being so busy. So inspired. She’d set up Gussie on the front porch so the paint fumes wouldn’t overtake the house. By now Gran’s father had fixed the porch so it no longer tilted, and had silenced the front door’s squeaking. Even these small repairs had brought a new contentment to Gran’s mother, and this new project, the resurrection of Gussie, sent her high onto a new plateau of constant happiness and industry.
Every day when Gran and Maisie left for school, she followed them outside, with her smock on and her box of brushes and solvents and color, and she got to work. When they returned in the afternoon, she was still there, touching up, glazing, sanding, glazing again.
In a few days, the horse looked new again, blazing with incandescent color. A few days more and Gran’s mother had somehow doubled the impact—making Gussie even brighter, the details more extraordinary.
And all along, neighbors walking by stopped to see what was happening. What was a carousel horse doing on the porch of the old Flowerpetal house? And who was this woman in a wheelchair painting that horse?
As the days went by, Gran’s mother met dozens of neighbors and connected more deeply with those she’d known from the Propositions P&S phone tree. Everyone in town came to know what she was up to, and she learned the many connections all these neighbors had to the town’s colorful history.
“My father used to work at the factory,” said one woman, pushing a stroller with two children in it. “He did the mirrors. Such elaborate mirrors! Framed in gold, carved to look like ivy! We still have one in the garage.”
“I have pictures in my house of horses like that!” an elderly man said one day. He said he’d once been the mayor of Carousel, thirty years ago. “You would have fit in with the Catalan Carousel folks like peas in a pod!”
Eventually Gran’s father realized that his great-grandfather was indeed the blacksmith in charge of shoeing the horses at the Catalan Carousel Company, and he decided he would teach himself how to make horseshoes too—even if just for fun.
Gran’s mother liked to work outside, and loved the frequent visits from neighbors she’d never known. Some days neighbors stayed for hours, talking of the old times, of the carousel days and of what had happened in between. Gran’s mother loved to listen as she worked, as she resurrected the horse with color.
Meanwhile, Gran’s dad had found a way to get more involved in all of this, too. He was working down at the garage most days, and came home tired and with greasy hands, but he was never too tired to work an hour or so, before and after dinner, on his own Gussie-related project.
>
“Gussie needs a platform,” he said one day while watching Gran’s mother work.
And so, the next day, he’d come home from the shop with a round metal platform in the truck bed. The day after that, he brought gears, and a crank, and a motor, and soon he had his own project, and that project—to build a mini–carousel platform for Gussie—had taken over the driveway.
The days were busy for Gran and Catalina, too. During lunch and after school, and some evenings, and all weekend, they kept busy. They knew the work that needed to be done. Gussie was just the beginning.
They brought up the golden poles (after substituting other supports).
They brought up half of a zebra.
They brought up most of a cheetah.
They brought up the other half of the zebra.
And eight more horses.
And an elephant in six pieces.
And all the while, the Hollows were nowhere to be found.
“You’re kidding me!” the Duke said each time Gran and Catalina brought him another animal. With sixteen creatures in his storage room, all of them needing repair but none of them beyond it, he finally threw up his hands.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, and then, shaking his head, he said, as if giving himself a compliment was a tough thing to admit, “Then again, they were built to last.” Then he shook himself from his reverie. “But I can’t restore them all. And why would we do all that anyway?”
Gran smiled. Catalina smiled.
Because that was the next part of the plan.
And finally, one visitor in particular changed everything. Gran and Catalina were sitting with Gran’s mother on the porch, and Maisie was playing in the yard, when they noticed a woman standing on the sidewalk in front of the house. The woman was very familiar-looking, but at first Gran couldn’t place exactly why.
“Propositions P&S,” Catalina whispered to him.
It was Phyllis Feeley. She was standing in front of Gran’s house. And soon she was talking. And soon she was saying:
“That is beautiful!”
and
“I never thought Gussie could be restored to her former glory, but you did it!”
and
“What are your names?”
and
“Could you all be part of the old Flowerpetal clan?”
and
“I used to play here as a child. I grew up a block away, and knew your great-grandparents!”
and finally,
“You know how we won the battle for Propositions P&S? Well, I was thinking we could use some of the funds to restore the carousel in front of City Hall. You all wouldn’t be interested in helping with such a project, would you?”
This had been Gran and Catalina’s idea all along. They couldn’t believe she had the same idea, too. And they couldn’t believe it when, a year later, it came to be.
Or they could believe it.
They had to believe it.
Because it did. It did come to be.
The new carousel rose from the green grass in front of City Hall, and it was much like the one that had sunk forty years earlier.
It featured the work of dozens of old Catalan Carousel Factory masters like the Duke, and featured, too, the work of Gran’s mother and father, and Gran, and Catalina, and a hundred more residents of Carousel who could carve and paint and build.
It had two stories.
That had been Gran’s father’s idea.
And it had seven speeds.
It was easily the fastest carousel ever made.
It had horses, and zebras, and a cheetah, and an elephant.
And it had Gussie, the Stargazer.
But it had new things, too. It had a capybara. It had a Komodo dragon. A narwhal.
It was beloved in the town.
It was beloved by small children, for whom a carousel was like a roller coaster.
It was appreciated by older children, who knew a carousel wasn’t a roller coaster, but felt that was probably okay.
It was treasured by parents, and grandparents, and by people in other towns, and other states. People drove miles. Hundreds of miles. They walked and rode and flew and sailed to see it.
And soon someone said, “Can you guys make another?” And soon many someones said, “Can you make another and another?”
And when the people of Carousel hesitated, the someones said, “Um, isn’t that why the town is called Carousel?”
So the people of Carousel made another. Gran’s father stopped fixing cars and started building carousels. And Gran’s mother painted the animals, and the rest of the town got back to work, and they built another.
And another.
And another.
And the Hollows?
The Hollows didn’t have much to do in Carousel anymore.
“Haven’t heard much from them,” the Duke said. He’d just hung up the receiver from a black wall phone. “Haven’t heard a peep, actually. It’s as if they’re in full retreat.”
Gran and Catalina were in the Duke’s office—his new office. He no longer ran the storage room at Carousel Middle School. Now his office was in the corner of the first floor at the Catalan Carousel Factory. That’s where the president’s office usually is. It wasn’t far from Gran’s mother’s animal-painting studio, which was next to the workshop where Gran’s father worked out the machinery of each carousel.
The Duke’s office looked, impossibly, the same. Just like the storage room and the office of the Hemispheric Commissioner. There was the same wall of mismatched filing cabinets, and from one of the filing cabinets, the Duke retrieved three oversized sandwiches, distributed two of them to Gran and Catalina, and sat down.
“Wait!” he said, and got up, hustled to another filing cabinet, opened the middle drawer, and set the turntable spinning. He dropped the needle and the tinkle of Cuban music filtered through the room.
“I think I know what you guys did,” the Duke said with his mouth full. As always, it sounded like he was talking through a pillow. “I should have figured out what you two figured out, but I didn’t. So I want to thank you. Happiness above can solve the sadness below. You figured that out. And that the best way to fight the Hollows is not with hockey sticks and two-by-fours, but with…”
The Duke couldn’t finish. He was swallowing a stubborn part of his turkey sub. He raised his finger, asking for a moment.
But there was no need to wait. Gran and Catalina knew the missing word. It was hope.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank you for reading this book. Or skimming it till the end. Or skipping everything except these crucial last pages. Any way you got here, gratitude eternal. He’d also like to thank Katherine Harrison and everyone at Penguin Random House who worked on the book and put it out into the world. Some other people who helped bring this book to fruition include Amanda Uhle and Trixie and Frank Uhle, Andrew Wylie, Luke Ingram, Terry and Eric Fan (who did the beautiful cover), Em-J Staples, Flip Kimball and the Kimball family, Lucie Putnam, Ajani DeFreece, Maeyana Vogt, VV, BV and AV, and especially:
AARON RENIER!
Who, as you know from the dust jacket and elsewhere in the book, did all the illustrations in this book. Would you like to hear a great story—I think it’s great; you decide—about how the author and Aaron met? Well, one day Aaron was drawing pictures for kids at a place called 826CHI. This was in Chicago, and 826CHI was (and is) a place where Chicago kids can go to write stories and create their own books. And this particular day, Aaron was illustrating the work that these Chicago schoolkids had written. The author got to know Aaron that way, and they stayed in touch. About a year later, the legendary Maurice Sendak created a program where young illustrators could come to his house in Connecticut, stay in his barn (it was a barn but was very nice and not barn-like in smell) and spend a few weeks learning from the master—Sendak himself! The author recommended this program to Aaron, and Aaron was accepted and went! And he learned much. Then he returned to C
hicago, and continued to draw illustrations to accompany the work written by public school students in Chicago. It was many years later that the author wrote this book, The Lifters, and thought Aaron would be the perfect person to illustrate it. He said yes, and worked very hard, and many late hours, and used many pencils and charcoal sticks, and got many blisters and one or two headaches. Thank you, Aaron!
ABOUT 826 NATIONAL
We just mentioned something called 826CHI, which is a nonprofit writing and tutoring center in Chicago. But there are also similar and related centers in many other cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., London, Stockholm, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Florence, Milan, and Oakland—among so many other places. In all of these places, kids can write creatively, make books, write plays and poems, and perform their work in front of audiences. These spaces offer all programs free of charge, and all with great joy and aplomb. Please find more information at www.826national.org and www.daveeggers.net. And if you don’t happen to live in or near one of these big cities, you can experience many of the lessons and writing prompts 826 National teaches by visiting this website: www.826Digital.com. See you there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVE EGGERS is an award-winning author whose bestselling novels for adults include The Circle, Heroes of the Frontier, and What Is the What. His books for children include This Bridge Will Not Be Gray and Her Right Foot. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco, and of ScholarMatch, a college-access organization, as well as cofounder of 826 National, a network of educational centers around the country, offering free tutoring and publishing opportunities to youth. He lives in Northern California with his family.