After the Ashes Read online

  Sara K Joiner

  After the Ashes

  Holiday House

  New York

  Text copyright © 2015 by Sara K Joiner

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3529-6 (ebook)w

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3530-2 (ebook)r

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Joiner, Sara, author.

  After the ashes / by Sara Joiner. —First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: In 1883 thirteen-year-old Katrien Courtlandt is more interested in science and exploring the Javanese jungle for beetles with her native friend than in becoming a young lady like her despised cousin Brigitta—but when Krakatoa erupts, the tsunami hits, and their families are swept away, the two cousins must struggle to survive together.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3441-1 (hardcover)

  1. Survival—Juvenile fiction. 2. Volcanoes—Indonesia—19th century—Juvenile fiction. 3. Tsunamis—Indonesia—19th century—Juvenile fiction. 4. Cousins—Juvenile fiction. 5. Families—Indonesia—19th century—Juvenile fiction. 6. Dutch—Indonesia—19th century—Juvenile fiction. 7. Krakatoa (Indonesia)—Eruption, 1883—Juvenile fiction. 8. Java (Indonesia)—History—19th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Volcanoes—Fiction. 3. Tsunamis—Fiction. 4. Cousins—Fiction. 5. Families—Fiction. 6. Dutch—Indonesia—Fiction. 7. Krakatoa (Indonesia)—Eruption, 1883—Fiction. 8. Java (Indonesia)—History—19th century—Fiction. 9. Indonesia—History—19th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.J65Af 2015

  813.6—dc23

  [Fic]

  2014044158

  To Daddy and Papaw because I promised myself the first one would be dedicated to you.

  To Nana because she said I could do anything I set my mind to.

  To #1 Mom because she is #1.

  Anjer, Java, Dutch East Indies

  3 NOVEMBER 1880

  Dear Mr. Charles Darwin,

  I recently finished reading On the Origin of Species, and it has opened my eyes to the world. Vader—that’s my father—let me read it when I asked why the Asian paradise- flycatcher and the racket-tailed treepie both had long tails but didn’t look alike.

  Now I know they both evolved differently.

  I see lots of beautiful birds and animals here. We live on the west coast of Java with the ocean near our front door and the jungle almost in our backyard.

  I love the jungle. I explore it almost every day because I plan to prove your theory of natural selection. Did you know there are people who don’t believe it’s true? I’m going to do what you did and collect specimens—hundreds of them, maybe even thousands—to show how one species changes over time into a new species.

  Lots of times my friend Slamet explores with me. He tells me about the plants and flowers in the jungle because I’m not very good with vegetation. I prefer animals. Slamet is native and knows all about plants. His mother is our housekeeper, but we’ve been friends forever. Do you think that’s strange? Some of the girls in my school think it’s funny that my closest friend is a native boy, but I don’t think so.

  Those girls usually call us names when we go to the beach together. Slamet and I ignore them. On the beach we can see all the way to Sumatra and even the volcano on Krakatau.

  Have you ever been to Krakatau? It’s an island. No one lives there, but I’m sure some animals do. Birds could fly there without any trouble; it’s only forty kilometers from Anjer. I long to visit, but neither Vader nor my aunt will let me. My aunt says it’s too dangerous since it’s a volcano. Vader said it’s extinct, but he still won’t let me go. It can’t be that dangerous if it’s extinct, can it?

  Perhaps you could visit Java someday, and we could explore Krakatau together. I could be your assistant. No one could object then because you are an important scientist.

  Thank you for writing On the Origin of Species. I loved it, and I hope one day to meet you.

  Yours in admiration,

  Katrien Courtlandt

  Part One

  JUNE 1883

  Anjer, Java, Dutch East Indies

  Chapter 1

  I knelt down beside the giant strangler fig and reached within its latticelike trunk. There, hiding on the dying tree that was being suffocated by the surrounding fig, was a stag beetle—Hexarthrius rhinoceros rhinoceros.

  “Careful,” Slamet said. “Do not scare it.”

  “I won’t. I’ve done this before,” I reminded him. With gentle fingers, I plucked the insect off the trunk. It filled the palm of my hand. The enormous mandibles stretched out from its head. Some people thought they were horns. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Slamet shook his head. “I do not know why you like this.”

  “I’m proving a theory.” I pushed up my spectacles. “ ‘We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects.’ ”

  His face went blank, and I knew he didn’t understand what I said. Dutch was not his first language, and Javanese wasn’t mine. How could I explain about Mr. Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection? I had read his book On the Origin of Species four times, but Slamet couldn’t read at all.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  He held out the funnel net, and I dropped the beetle in it with the other two I had already found, tying off the top of the net with string.

  “Dank u,” I said, standing up. As I did, my heel caught on my skirt and I plopped down in the mud.

  “Aah!” I yelled.

  With Slamet’s help, I managed to get on my feet, though the brown muck stained the fabric. “My aunt won’t be pleased.” I tried to wipe off the filth, but it didn’t do any good.

  “She will punish?” Slamet asked.

  “She won’t be happy, but I doubt she’ll do anything to me.” I took the net from him.

  We walked beside each other out of the jungle and toward Anjer. “You know what, Slamet?” I asked. “The capital is nothing like here.” My aunt Greet, Vader and I had just returned from a three-week trip to Batavia visiting my uncle Maarten, and I was still in awe at all there was to see and do in the Dutch East Indies’ capital city.

  “It is far,” Slamet said.

  “Ja, but it’s an easy trip by boat.” Slamet had never been farther than Merak, twenty kilometers north of here.

  “What do you do?”

  “In Batavia?”

  He nodded.

  I pushed my spectacles up. “We did lots of things. We went to the zoo. I think Oom Maarten enjoyed that even more than I did. Lots of the animals there are ones I’ve seen here in the jungle. Though they did have some animals from Africa—a lion and a zebra.”

  “Zee-bruh?” He furrowed his brow.

  “It’s like a horse, and it has black and white stripes. Quite beautiful.”

  “You like Batavia?”

  I thought about that for a minute. Like Anjer, Batavia was on the ocean, but the capital was much larger than my town. I couldn’t hear the waves from Oom Maarten’s little house. He lived miles away from the docks, which pleased Tante Greet. “There are undesirables at the docks, Katrien,” she said to me. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. I only knew that not being able to hear the waves meant I didn’t sleep very well.

  “No,” I said in answer to Slamet’s question. “I don’t really like Batavia. It’s too . . . organized. Too contained.”

  He gave me that blank look again, and I tried to make myself more clear.

  “The jungle has been beaten back. It’s nowhere to be seen.” We passed by some of the kampongs—the tiny thatched cottages of the
natives—on the outskirts of town. “My favorite parts of the trip were walking Oom Maarten’s dog. Torben gets so excited when he goes for a walk, and he barks and barks at anything—people, other dogs, the crocodiles in the canals.”

  We shuffled along in silence. The sounds of horses clopping through town and barking dogs intermingled with the croaking frogs and buzzing insects of the jungle. I took a deep breath in anticipation of telling Slamet the most interesting part of my trip.

  “There’s something else, Slamet. The strangest earthquake hit while we were there!”

  Slamet was not impressed. “Earthquake is not strange.”

  He was right. Earthquakes hit Java all the time. “I know, but this one was. It lasted for about an hour.”

  His head whipped around to face me. “Hour?”

  I nodded. “It was terrifying. Tante Greet and I took cover in a doorway, but the ground just kept shaking. Poor Torben sank to his belly and whimpered. Everything went quiet. Even the air seemed to vibrate. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

  We paused while a young native boy ran across our path, followed by a white girl. They hurried to one of the kampongs, reminding me of Slamet and myself when we were that little.

  “Strange thing also happens here,” Slamet said, his brow creased. “While you are not here.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ash rains down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ash falls from sky.” He moved his fingers like falling rain. “Strange.”

  “When exactly did this happen while I was away?” I pushed my spectacles up.

  He thought before saying, “Two weeks.”

  I gasped. “That’s the same time we had that strange earthquake in Batavia!”

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” It was certainly intriguing. Was it possible the two events were connected?

  Chapter 2

  Slamet and I hadn’t gone much farther when more little children—native and white—ran past us. They were all heading to the same crowded kampong. I shook myself out of my reverie about earthquakes and ash and we followed them. Inside the kampong, a storyteller was beginning to spin a wondrous tale in the same deep, gravelly voice he’d been using since the days when Slamet and I would sneak here to escape our chores. The storyteller didn’t speak Dutch, but he was so gifted that I could understand the tales anyway.

  As the storyteller spoke, Slamet cocked his head and smiled at me. “It is Butho Ijo.”

  I smiled back. “I know.”

  Butho Ijo was one of my favorite Javanese stories. It was about a green giant who tells a woman how to have a child, then tricks her into giving up her daughter for him to eat. Fortunately, the daughter manages to destroy him with help from a hermit and a bag of magical objects.

  The storyteller warmed to his tale. He made me jump as he raised his arms high above his head and deepened his voice for the giant. He hunched over when he played the hermit and fluttered his eyelashes when he acted out the daughter. I clapped along with the children when he finished the story and bowed.

  At that point, Slamet poked my shoulder. “I go. Ibu needs me.”

  I nodded as he left to help his mother, and slowly I rose to leave, too. I wished I could stay all day and listen to the stories with the other children. I missed being that young, when my mother was still alive and I could run around and play with anyone. But I was thirteen now, and Tante Greet lived with us, trying to turn me into a lady. Girls I used to play with now thought I was odd because of my friendship with Slamet and my insect collection.

  My aunt wanted me to be friends with those girls, but I found I had less and less in common with them. They talked about boys and bustles and babies. I wanted to talk about animals and science and natural selection. They giggled a lot, and always seemed to be looking at me when they did. I felt like a zoo animal on display in their presence.

  Still, my aunt kept singing their praises. “Brigitta Burkart is a wonderful girl,” she often said pointedly. “She’s polite and kind and respectful.”

  But Brigitta Burkart was the worst of them all, and I hated her. Truly hated her. My aunt knew this perfectly well, and it infuriated me that she ignored my feelings and spoke so admiringly of someone I despised.

  There was a time, not so very long ago, when I would have agreed with my aunt’s opinion. Brigitta and I had been friendly once, thanks in part to our fathers. We were introduced years ago, as small girls, when Vader began working as the controller for Anjer and Brigitta’s father assumed the higher-ranking government position of assistant resident. Vader explained all this very carefully to me one day when I asked him about his job. He sat me down at a table and sketched a simple, but accurate, map.

  “You see, Katrien, the Dutch East Indies are divided into provinces, like so, then divisions, and then departments,” he said, making each section smaller and smaller. “Assistant residents, like Mr. Burkart, are in charge of divisions.” He pointed to an area that included Anjer and a few other towns. “Part of the job of an assistant resident is to oversee the regions’ controllers. My responsibility as Anjer’s controller is to carry out the administration of the department, which includes overseeing the police and collecting taxes.”

  I understood this to mean that Mr. Burkart was Vader’s supervisor, and I was glad of it. Now that our families had begun visiting with each other, I had found Brigitta to be a fun playmate. For several years, the two of us passed those visits playing happily while the adults talked about grown-up things like the fighting in Aceh or other news they read about in the Java Messenger. Once we started attending school, Brigitta and I spent even more time together.

  But all that changed on the day of Brigitta’s tenth birthday party. Every girl in our class had been invited to celebrate at the Burkart family’s fine brick mansion on the water. I knew already from my playdates with Brigitta that a small army of native workers was responsible for keeping the home immaculate and the grounds well manicured, but as I stepped onto the Burkart property that day, everything seemed to look even more spectacular than usual. Even the Dutch flag that always flew tall and proud from the pole on the luxurious lawn seemed to be flapping extra hard for Brigitta, and the assistant resident’s boat that Mr. Burkart kept tied to his private dock bobbed merrily in the waves. I hoped he would take us all for a ride. What a birthday treat that would make!

  I began to feel shy as I approached the house and a housekeeper ushered me inside, but in no time at all, I was on top of the world. Brigitta greeted me with a warm smile and soon made it clear that she was singling me out as special. She insisted I sit beside her at the table. She seemed to prefer the gift I brought her over all the others. And when we went outside to play windmills, Brigitta honored me again. She was the berger, the head of the game, and she picked Rika and me to be team leaders. All went well as we selected teams, but when the time came to begin, I happened to spot a stag beetle climbing on the side of the house. I could not believe my good fortune. In a way, the discovery felt like a present for me on Brigitta’s special day. I plucked it off the wall and ran to show my friend.

  “This is the fourth one for my collection,” I said breathlessly, waving my prize under her nose. Brigitta’s eyes grew wide in shock. She screamed and rushed into the house. Everyone else came over to see what the commotion was about, and when I held out the insect for them to see, they all backed away in horror. Rika even started to cry, and I started to get angry. I tried to make them understand there was nothing to fear, but their shouting drowned out my words.

  Brigitta’s father came onto the porch with Brigitta trembling beside him. She pointed at me and cried, “Katrien has ruined my party with that disgusting creature! She’s disgusting, too! I never want her here again!” The other girls gathered around her in support.

  Moments later Mr. Burkart was escorting me home. I cradled the precious beetle in my hands the entire way, all the while wondering how everythi
ng had gone so very wrong.

  To this day I didn’t know why my beetle collecting disturbed Brigitta so, but one thing was certain: our friendship ended the day she turned ten. And from that moment on, I would have given anything—maybe even my now-sizable beetle collection—to never see Brigitta again.

  But of course, I couldn’t possibly avoid her. I still had to face her in school every day, and worse, our families continued to see each other socially. Brigitta’s and my relationship may have turned frosty, but the adults’ was as warm as ever—which is why I was still subjected to monthly Courtlandt-Burkart dinners at the Hotel Anjer. How I dreaded those gatherings! I would rather spend an hour in a pit full of poisonous blue kraits than dine with the Burkarts. But, like so much else in my life, I had no say in the matter.

  All these thoughts of Brigitta Burkart were making my head ache. Rubbing my eyes, I forced myself to think about more pleasant things. Today was a lovely day, after all. I had three stag beetles in my net, which increased my collection size to three hundred five, and I needed to prepare them for mounting. With a little hop, I hurried toward home.

  But my eagerness vanished when I heard familiar laughter in the air. Within moments, whom should I see up ahead but Brigitta, Rika and two of their friends, Maud and Inge, sitting on Inge’s porch eating ginger buns. Rika was tearing bits of the bread and tossing them to the ground several meters away. A long-tailed macaque sat nearby and scurried over to grab the food.

  Inge pointed. “Look how long his tail is.”

  “It is, however, possible that the long tail of this monkey may be of more service to it as a balancing organ in making its prodigious leaps, than as a prehensile organ,” I thought.

  “It’s a good thing you’re tossing those scraps so far,” Brigitta said, patting her perfectly styled blond hair. “I wouldn’t want him coming any closer to us.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt us, would he?” Rika asked, her eyes wide.