His room was a tiny afterthought on the third floor of the rambling farmhouse. There was a bed and a bureau, nothing else. There was one window. Everything you saw through it looked wavy and distorted. It was cold in the room at night, colder in the morning. Blaze didn’t mind the cold, but he minded the Bowies. Them he minded more and more. Minding became dislike and dislike finally became hate. The hate grew slowly. For him it was the only way. It grew at its own pace, and it grew completely, and it put forth red flowers. It was the sort of hate no intelligent person ever knows. It was its own thing. It was not adulterated by reflection.
He chopped a great deal of wood that fall and winter. Bowie tried to teach him how to hand-milk, but Blaze couldn’t do it. He had what Bowie called hard hands. The cows grew skittish no matter how gently he tried to wrap his fingers around their teats. Then their nervousness came back to him, closing the circuit. The flow of milk slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Bowie never boxed his ears or slapped the back of his head for this. He would not have milking machines, he did not believe in milking machines, said those DeLavals used cows up in their prime, but would allow that hand-milking was a talent. And because it was, you could no more punish someone for not having it than you could punish someone for not being able to write what he called poitry.
“You can chop wood, though,” he said, not smiling. “You got the talent for that.”
Blaze chopped it and carried it, filling the kitchen woodbox four and five times a day. There was an oil furnace, but Hubert Bowie refused to run it until February, because the price of Number Two was so dear. Blaze also shoveled out the ninety-foot driveway once the snow got going, forked hay, cleaned the barn, and scrubbed Mrs. Bowie’s floors.
On weekdays he was up at five to feed the cows (four on mornings when snow had fallen) and to get breakfast before the yellow SAD 106 bus came to take him to school. The Bowies might have done away with school if they had been able, but they were not.
At Hetton House, Blaze had heard both good stories and bad stories about “school out.” Mostly bad ones from the big boys, who went to Freeport High. Blaze was still too young for that, however. He went to Cumberland District A during his time with the Bowies, and he liked it. He liked his teacher. He liked to memorize poems, to stand up in class and recite: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood—” He declaimed these poems in his red- and black-checked hunting jacket (which he never took off, because he forgot it during fire drills), his green flannel pants, and his green gumrubber boots. He stood five-eleven, dwarfing every other sixth-grader in his class, and his height was overtopped by his grinning face and dented forehead. No one ever laughed at Blaze when he recited poems.
He had a great many friends even though he was a state kid, because he wasn’t contentious or bullying. Nor was he sullen. In the schoolyard he was everyone’s bear. He sometimes rode as many as three first-graders on his shoulders at once. He never took advantage of his size at keepaway. He would be tackled by five, six, seven players at once, swaying, swaying, usually grinning, his dented face turned up to the sky, finally toppling like a building, to the inevitable cheers of all. Mrs. Waslewski, who was a Catholic, saw him toting first-graders around on his shoulders one day when she had playground duty and started calling him St. Francis of the Little People.
Mrs. Cheney brought him along in reading, writing, and history. She understood early on that for Blaze, math (which he always called Arithmetic) was a lost cause. The one time she tried him on flash cards, he turned pale and she was convinced the boy actually came close to fainting.
He was slow but not retarded. By December he had moved from the first-grade adventures of Dick and Jane to the stories in Roads to Everywhere, the third-grade reader. She gave him a pile of Classics comic-books she kept bound in hard-covers to take back to the Bowies’ with a note saying they were homework. His favorite, of course, was Oliver Twist, which he read over and over until he knew every word.
All this continued until January and might have continued until spring, except for two unfortunate events. He killed a dog and he fell in love.
He hated the Collies, but one of his chores was to feed them. They were purebreds, but poor diets and lives lived exclusively in the kennel and the pen made them ugly and neurotic. Most were cowardly and shied from the touch. They would lunge at you, yapping and snarling, only to sheer away and approach from a different angle. Sometimes they snuck in from behind. Then they might nip at your calves or buttocks before dashing off. The clamor at feeding time was hellish. They were out of Hubert Bowie’s province. Mrs. Bowie was also the only one they would come to. She fawned over them in her buzzing voice. She always wore a red jacket when she was with the dogs, and it was covered with tawny hair.
The Bowies sold very few grown animals, but the pups fetched two hundred dollars each in the spring. Mrs. Bowie exhorted Blaze on the importance of feeding the dogs well — of feeding them what she called “a good mix.” Yet she never fed them, and what Blaze put in their troughs was discount chow from a feed-store in Falmouth. This feed was called Dog’s Worth. Hubert Bowie sometimes called it Cheap-Chow and sometimes Dog Farts. But never when his wife was around.
The dogs knew Blaze didn’t like them, that he was afraid of them, and every day they grew more aggressive toward him. By the time the weather really began to turn cold, their dashes sometimes brought them close enough to nip him from the front. At night he sometimes woke from dreams in which they packed together, brought him down, and began to eat him alive. He would lie in his bed after these dreams, puffing cold vapor into the dark air and feeling himself over to make sure he was still whole. He knew he was, he knew the difference between what was dreams and what was real, but in the dark that difference seemed thinner.
Several times their bumping and dashing caused him to spill the food. Then he had to scrape it up as best he could from the packed, urine-spotted snow while they snarled and fought over it around him.
Gradually, one became the leader in their undeclared war against him. His name was Randy. He was eleven. He had one milky eye. He scared the shit out of Blaze. His teeth were like old yellow tusks. There was a white stripe down the center of his skull. He would approach Blaze from dead-on, from twelve o’clock high, haunches pumping under his ragged pelt. Randy’s good eye seemed to burn while the bad one remained indifferent to it all, a dead lamp. His claws dug small clods of yellow-white impacted snow from the floor of the dogpen. He would accelerate until it seemed impossible he could do anything but launch himself into flight at Blaze’s throat. The other dogs would be whipped into a frenzy by this, leaping and turning and snarling in the air. At the last instant, Randy’s paws would come down stiff, spraying snow all over Blaze’s green pants, and he would race away in a big loop, only to repeat the maneuver. But he was sheering off later and later, until he was close enough for Blaze to smell his heat and even his breath.
Then one evening toward the end of January, he knew the dog wasn’t going to sheer off. He didn’t know how this charge was different, or why, but it was. This time Randy meant it. He was going to leap. And when he did, the other dogs would come in quickly. Then it would be like in his dreams.
The dog came, speeding faster and faster, silent. This time there were no paws out. No skidding or turning. Its haunches tensed, then pushed down. A moment later Randy was in the air.
Blaze was carrying two steel buckets filled with Dog’s Worth. When he saw Randy meant it this time, all his fear left him. He dropped his buckets at the same time Randy leaped. He was wearing rawhide gloves with holes in the fingers. He met the dog in midair with his right fist, under the long shovel-shelf of the jaw. The jolt ran all the way up to his shoulder. His hand went instantly and completely numb. There was a brief, bitter crack. Randy did a perfect one-eighty in the cold air and landed on his back with a thud.
Blaze realized all the other dogs had fallen silent only when they began to bark again. He picked up the buckets, went to the trough, and poured in the
chow. Always before, the dogs had crowded in at once to begin snarking it up, growling and snapping for the best places, before he could even add water. He could do nothing about it; he was ineffectual. Now, when one of the smaller Collies rushed for the trough with its stupid eyes gleaming and its stupid tongue hanging from the side of its stupid mouth, Blaze jerked at it with his gloved hands and it cut sidewards so fast its feet went out from under it and it landed on its side. The others shrank back.
Blaze added two buckets of water from the bib-faucet. “There,” he said. “It’s wet down. Go on and eat it.”
He walked back to look at Randy while the other dogs ran to the feeding trough.
The fleas were already leaving Randy’s cooling body to die in the piss-stained snow. The good eye was now almost as glazed-looking as the bad one. This awoke a feeling of pity and sadness in Blaze. Perhaps the dog had only been playing, after all. Just trying to scare him.
And he was scared. That, too. He would catch dickens for this.
He walked to the house with the empty buckets, head lowered. Mrs. Bowie was in the kitchen. She had a rubbing-board propped in the sink and was washing curtains on it. She was singing a hymn in her reedy voice as she worked.
“Aw, don’t you track in on my floor, now!” she cried, seeing him. It was her floor, but he washed it. On his knees. Sullenness awoke in his breast.
“Randy’s dead. He jumped me. I hit him. Killed him.”
Her hands flew out of the soapy water and she screamed. “Randy? Randy! Randy!”
She ran around in a circle, grabbed her sweater from the peg near the woodstove, then ran for the door.
“Hubert!” she called to her husband. “Hubert, oh Hubert! Such a bad boy!” And then, as if still singing: “OooooooOOOOOO—”
She thrust Blaze out of her way and ran outside. Mr. Bowie appeared in one of the many shed doors, his scrawny face long with surprise. He strode to Blaze and grabbed him by one shoulder. “What happened?”
“Randy’s dead,” Blaze said stolidly. “He jumped me and I did him down.”
“You wait,” Hubert Bowie said, and went after his wife.
Blaze took off his red and black jacket and sat down on the stool in the corner. Snow melted off his boots and made a puddle. He didn’t care. The heat from the woodstove made his face throb. He chopped the wood. He didn’t care.
Bowie had to lead his wife back inside, because she had her apron over her face. She was sobbing loudly. The high pitch of her voice made her sound like a sewing machine.
“Go out into the shed,” Bowie told him.
Blaze opened the door. Bowie helped him through it with the toe of his boot. Blaze fell down the two steps into the dooryard, got up, and went into the shed. There were tools in there — axes, hammers, a lathe, an emery wheel, a planer, a sander, other things he didn’t know the names of. There were auto parts and boxes of old magazines. And a snow shovel with a wide aluminum scoop. His shovel. Blaze looked at it, and something about the shovel brought his hate of the Bowies to completion, finished it off. They received a hundred and sixty dollars a month for keeping him and he did their chores. He ate badly. He had eaten better at HH. It wasn’t fair.
Hubert Bowie opened the door to the shed and stepped in. “I’m going to whip you now,” he said.
“That dog jumped me. He was going for my throat.”
“Don’t say no more. You’re only making it worse for yourself.”
Every spring, Bowie bred one of his cows with Franklin Marstellar’s bull, Freddy. On the wall of the shed was a walking-halter he called a “love-halter” and a nosepiece. Bowie took it from its peg and held it by the nosepiece, fingers curled through the lattices. The heavy leather straps held down.
“Bend over that work bench.”
“Randy went for my throat. I’m telling you it was him or me.”
“Bend over that work bench.”
Blaze hesitated, but he did not think. Thinking was a long process for him. Instead he consulted the tickings of instinct.
It wasn’t time yet.
He bent over the work bench. It was a long hard whipping, but he didn’t cry. He did that later, in his room.
The girl he’d fallen in love with was a seventh-grader at Cumberland A School named Marjorie Thurlow. She had yellow hair and blue eyes and no breasts. She had a sweet smile that made the corners of her eyes turn up. On the playground, Blaze followed her with his own eyes. She made him feel empty in the pit of his stomach, but in a way that was good. He imagined himself carrying her books and protecting her from outlaws. These thoughts always made his face burn.
One day not long after the incident of Randy and the whipping, the District Nurse came to school to give immunization boosters. The children had been given release forms the week before; those parents who wanted their children to have the shots had signed them. Now, the children with signed forms queued up in a nervous line leading into the cloakroom. Blaze was one of these. Bowie had called up George Henderson, who was on the schoolboard, and asked if the shots cost money. They didn’t, so Bowie signed.
Margie Thurlow was also in line. She looked very pale. Blaze felt bad for her. He wished he could go back and hold her hand. The thought made his face burn. He bent his head and shuffled his feet.
Blaze was first in line. When the nurse beckoned him into the cloakroom, he took off his red- and black-checked jacket and unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt. The nurse took the needle out of a kind of cooker, looked at his slip, then said: “Better unbutton the other sleeve too, big boy. You’re down for both.”
“Will it hurt?” Blaze said, unbuttoning the other sleeve.
“Only for a second.”
“Okay,” Blaze said, and let her shoot the needle from the cooker into his left arm.
“Right. Now the other arm and you’re done.”
Blaze turned the other way. She shot some more stuff from another needle into his right arm. Then he left the cloakroom, went back to his desk, and began to puzzle out a story in his Scholastic.
When Margie came out, there were tears in her eyes and more on her face, but she wasn’t sobbing. Blaze felt proud of her. When she passed his desk on her way to the door (seventh-graders were in another room), he gave her a smile. And she smiled back. Blaze folded that smile, put it away, and kept it for years.
At recess, just as Blaze was coming out the door to the playground, Margie ran inside past him, sobbing. He turned to look after her, then walked slowly into the playground, brow creased, face unhappy. He came to Peter Lavoie, batting the tetherball on its post with one mittened hand, and asked if Peter knew what had happened to Margie.
“Glen hit her in the shot,” Peter Lavoie said. He demonstrated on a passing boy, balling his fist and hitting the kid three times fast, whap-whap-whap. Blaze watched this, frowning. The nurse had lied. Both of his arms now hurt badly from the shots. The large muscles felt stiff and bruised. It was hard to even bend them without wincing. And Margie was a girl. He looked around for Glen.
Glen Hardy was a huge eighth-grader, the kind that will play football, then run to fat. He had red hair that he combed back from his forehead in big waves. His father was a farmer on the west end of town, and Glen’s arms were slabs of muscle.
Somebody threw Blaze the keepaway ball. He dropped it on the ground without looking at it and started for Glen Hardy.
“Oh boy,” Peter Lavoie said. “Blaze is goin after Glen!”
This news traveled quickly. Groups of boys began to move with studied casualness toward where Glen and some of the older boys were playing a clumsy, troll-like version of kickball. Glen was pitching. He rolled the ball quick and hard, making it bounce and skitter on the frozen ground.
Mrs. Foster, who had playground duty that day, was on the other side of the building, monitoring the little ones on the swings. She would not be a factor, at least not at first.
Glen looked up and saw Blaze coming. He dropped the kickball. He put his hands on his hips. Both te
ams collapsed to form a semicircle around him and behind him. They were all seventh- and eighth-graders. None were as big as Blaze. Only Glen was bigger.
The fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders were grouped loosely behind Blaze. They shuffled, adjusted their belts, pulled self-consciously at their mittens, and mumbled to each other. The boys on both sides wore expressions of absurd casualness. The fight had not been called yet.
“What do you want, fucknuts?” Glen Hardy asked. His voice was phlegmy. It was the voice of a young god with a winter cold.
“Why did you hit Margie Thurlow in the shot?” Blaze asked.
“I felt like it.”
“Okay,” Blaze said, and waded in.
Glen hit him twice in the face — whap-whap — before he even got close, and blood began to pour out of Blaze’s nose. Then Glen backed away, wanting to keep the advantage of his reach. People were yelling.
Blaze shook his head. Drops of blood flew, splattering the snow on either side and in front of him.
Glen was grinning. “State kid,” he said. “State kid, shit-for-brains state kid.” He hit Blaze in the middle of Blaze’s dented forehead and his grin faltered as pain exploded up his arm. Blaze’s forehead was very hard, dented or not.
For a moment he forgot to back up and Blaze shot his fist out. He didn’t use his body; he just used his arm like a piston. His knuckles connected with Glen’s mouth. Glen screamed as his lips burst against his teeth and began to bleed. The yelling intensified.
Glen tasted his own blood and forgot about backing up. He forgot about taunting the ugly kid with the busted forehead. He just waded in, swinging roundhouse punches from port and starboard.
Blaze set his feet and met him. Faintly, from far away, he heard the shouts and exhortations of his classmates. They reminded him of the yapping Collies in the dogpen on the day he realized that Randy wasn’t going to sheer off.
Glen got in at least three good blows, and Blaze’s head rocked with them. He gasped, inhaling blood. He heard ringing in his ears. His own fist shot out again, and he felt the jolt all the way up to his shoulder. All at once the blood on Glen’s mouth was spread on his chin and cheeks, too. Glen spat out a tooth. Blaze struck again, in the same place. Glen howled. He sounded like a little kid with his fingers caught in a door. He stopped swinging. His mouth was a ruin. Mrs. Foster was running toward them. Her skirt was flying, her knees were pumping, and she was blowing her little silver whistle.
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