As heroes go, Scott is not an obvious choice. He’s a little on the ordinary side, smart enough and funny enough, not exactly teen heart-throb material, a good baseball player, and that’s about it. He made it this far without having to think too deeply or experience much out of his comfort zone.
Maybe this is his strength: he tends to take things at face value initially and then he ponders them. People, events, and ideas all play on his mind.
“Holly stood in Scott’s doorway at the top of the stairs. “There are three boys waiting for you on the front porch, a nerdy one, a chubby one, and a jock. They need a dorky one to complete the set and heard about you.”
Mom entered right behind her. “These must be the boys Beatrice told me about. They’re going to show you around Dalriada, introduce you to the other kids, tell you about the programs—”
“What programs?” asked Scott.
“There’s an astronomy club, a rocketry club, ham radio, book club, baseball—
“Baseball?” questioned Scott.
“Yes, baseball, and music lessons, a dance school, lots of fun stuff,” continued Mom, drawing on her years as a junior high school teacher to make it all sound as appealing as possible.
“Just baseball.”
“To start, sure, but be open to new people, new experiences—I know you will.” Mom turned to go downstairs. “I’m sure they’re nice boys. You won’t have to wait for school to start to make friends.”
“I don’t need any friends. I just want to blend in.”
Mom concluded the conversation on her way down to the second floor. “You won’t blend in if you don’t make friends.”
“Blending in” is one goal Scott’s not going to reach.
He’s the new kid, and he’s not even from Cedar Mills, or Massachusetts, or even New England. He’s from a far-off, exotic place called the Midwest, where things are different, kind of boring and predictable, but the people are nice, so there’s that. And he’s completely clueless when it comes to Dalriada.
It’s a lot to take in all at once, the mansion, the grounds, the woods, the people, the programs, the history. In truth, he’s overwhelmed by it. Dalriada just keeps coming at him. It’s a lot to deal with.
In the background is the dull throb of anxiety in anticipation of the Millennium, the death of the old order and rise of the new age. This is not a folkloric bit of New Age fluff. The Y2K bug is a real and present threat. Xander, an outsider seeking revenge, plays on Scott’s uncertainty. Should he be worried? Should he be prepared for disaster? And what exactly does Xander intend to do to “even the score” with the Argylls?
“Time to turn the snow globe over and give it a good shake.” Xander dragged Scott to the front porch where they sat on castoff furniture. “At one second past midnight, January 1, 2000, earth goes back to the 1700s. This is reality. The military will occupy all major cities around the world. People will kill for food and shelter.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a student of history, Scooter. During a crisis people want strong leaders, decisive action. If you have food and a gun, you’ll be a god.”
“And you have those things?”
“Now are you interested?”
“You have guns? And bullets?”
“When the shit hits the fan it’s every man for himself. You’d better have a plan. And I have a special interest in surfing the chaos.”
“What happened between your family and the Argylls?”
“Honestly, Scooter, if it’s not Y2K, it’ll be something else. Time to even the score.”
“Let’s say it happens. How are you going to survive?”
“If I tell you then my plans are compromised. You’re either with me or I’ll have to kill you on New Year’s Eve.”
“So, this…,” Indicating Mr. Cropper’s house, “is your fortress against the fall of civilization?”
“Staging area. A gathering point. Looks like a dump, but it’s a military supply depot. Genius, huh?”
“Then what?”
“Here’s a hypothetical scenario: What if I had a group of people who depended on me for food and shelter.”
“Like Derrick and Donny, and those guys from town?”
“It’ll start small but when people hear about us, they’ll be begging to join, so we’ll need a big shelter. It should be easily defended with a high lookout for snipers, lots of defensive positions for sentries, maybe surrounded by woods, maybe have a stone wall and steel gates, have a source of fresh water, enough food and supplies on hand to feed a town. I don’t know, Scooter, does that sound to you like a good plan for surviving the end of the world?”
Scott became increasingly uncomfortable as Xander described a place very much like Dalriada. “There’s no way you have enough guns for an army in this place.”
“Do you know how cheap Soviet military surplus is? You just have to clean them up a little. And you can buy the ammo by the crate. Hey, if nothing else I’ll burn Dalriada to the ground and have my justice.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Watch what happens the next few months, follow the news, listen for the hysteria to build. It will all make sense.”
Scott begins making progress blending into the group until one night he does something stupid, senseless, involving Mrs. Bannister, the elderly woman he’s delivering meals to. While struggling with responsibility for vandalizing her property, something quite unexpected happens. Mrs. Bannister dies.
Did she know before she died what he had done? He struggles to wiggle out from under his conscience. He finds the most unlikely confessor in Tony, a gruff survivor of the streets of Boston, and a soft-hearted “Uncle” to all the Dalriada kids. On impulse, Scott confesses to Tony and together they undertake Scott’s absolution.
“So, I went to hang out with the guys and Xander Cropper the other night.”
“Aw, geesh.”
“I went on this bike ride with them. No reason, I don’t like the guy, I just wanted to see why Troll and T-Bone hung out with him.”
“A bombing raid?”
“You know about that?”
“Go on.”
“So, we were going down Old Post Road—”
“Got it. And they kept making fun of you and you had enough of it, and you whacked Mrs. Bannister’s mailbox.”
“How’d you know?”
“This is about Mrs. Bannister, right? And a bombing raid? And you? Cowboy math.”
“Yeah. It’s just so stupid.”
“So, you did that. Regret it?”
“I’d give anything to not have done that.”
“Well, good. You’re not hopeless. So now she’s dead. Not simple. What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know what to do about it. “
“Well, what would Mrs. Bannister do? If she backed her car down the driveway and took out her own mailbox, what would she do?”
“Well, she’d replace it. Or have someone else replace it. A neighbor or somebody. That’s what I would do if it were me.”
“How much is a mailbox?” Scott shrugged. He had no idea. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Tony headed back to the golf cart and Scott hustled to join him.
An hour later, Tony and Scott had bought a new mailbox and post at the hardware store and set the new post in the ground. The old, smashed mailbox was already stowed in the Dalriada pickup truck parked nearby.
We rarely consider a tortured conscience to be a gift. To many teenagers a silly act of vandalism doesn’t get a serious second thought. To Scott, it becomes a turning point.
Scott begins to build relationships with the other adults at Dalriada as his place in the Dalriada clan solidifies, and we can see a character foundation beginning to form.
But he’s not there yet. Sweeny provokes Scott to come to grips with simple questions about life, questions straight out of a catechism and without preachy emotional appeal. Sweeney uses Scott’s his own words to show how shallow and self-absorbed his thoughts are about things of enduring value.
“That’s not what I said,” [protested Scott].
“Here’s what I heard.” Sweeney affects a comedic Scott voice, “I’m in a great state of begrudgery, Mr. Sweeney.” He replies in his own voice, “Sweeney, just Sweeney.” With his Scott voice again, “Yes, ahem, Sweeney, imagine my chagrin, having enrolled myself in the rodeo clown school called ‘life,’ that all I’ve learned is how to be a rodeo clown.”
Scott laughs, and Sweeney quickly shushes him.
“You’re still wandering around in your own head like it’s an abandoned building,” Sweeney said, gruffly. “Love, trust, and fear were warmup questions and you’ve yet to lace up your boots.”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” replied Scott, reluctantly.
“Shocker.”
Scott follows his instinct to defend Dalriada from Xander’s planned destruction and puts himself in harm’s way. The final showdown with Xander puts Scott in a dangerous trap which he escapes, thanks to the vigilant protection of Sweeney. Tony, finally, is the one to stop Xander, but not without personal cost. He ends up in the hospital stabbed by Xander.
At the end of a long night, Scott seeks out Sweeney to update him on Tony’s condition.
[Scott] found his way to Sweeney’s cairn and made a small campfire using the candle and matches he still had in his messenger bag. Before long, he could hear Sweeney moving through the underbrush and felt him sitting back-to-back with him. The two sat together in the still night and Scott could feel Sweeney breathing.
“It could’ve been much worse but he’s going to be okay,” said Scott. “He apologized for the fuss. He was joking with us and the hospital staff, ‘I forgot to ask you to take out my appendix while you were in there.’ He told me to stop crying and reminded me that I owed him some money.”
“Brilliant,” said Sweeney, chuckling. “He’s a quality man.”
“I want to know something,” said Scott.
“Need I remind you this is the Questions Department. The Answers Department is—”
“I don’t know why, but I was praying for Tony while he was in surgery.”
“And yet he survived,” observed Sweeney, drily.
Scott sighed, exhausted emotionally and physically. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“How is that a problem?”
“I don’t know how to be…religious.”
“Do you want to be religious, or do you want to fear, trust, and love God?”
“I’m not very spiritual, I don’t have any wisdom about God, and I’m not a very good person.”
“You don’t know how very fortunate you are to think that.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s simple, but not easy. We can’t climb up to God. No one ever has, no one ever will.”
Scott was quiet, sorting this out.
“So, your question for tonight, and the rest of your life, for that matter, is what difference does it make?”
Sweeney stood and walked into the woods. Turning back, he said, “God came down to us, now what?”
Scott, the unlikely hero, is not tasked with solving deep riddles or vanquishing dragons. His challenge is more difficult, confronting his true nature and grappling with the truth revealed in three simple questions, “What do I love? What do I trust? And what do I fear? Above all things.”
What Then? 