by Thomas Tryon
Now, grinning his crooked, saw-toothed grin, Tiger said, “So tell me. How come you were trying to fly?”
Leo’s response was simple. “It’s the thing I want most in the world - except for two other things.”
“Like what?”
“First, to own a dog.”
“Yeah? What kind?”
“Name it.”
“Didn’t you ever have one?”
“Sure. Once.” Leo blew out his cheeks; his eyelids fluttered and closed.
“What happened to him?”
“Got killed.”
“How?”
“Curiosity.”
Tiger thought that was the cat, but before he could comment Leo went on.
“Actually he got run over by a truck.”
“Gee, that’s tough. Hit and run?”
“No. It was my f-father’s truck.”
“Gee, I bet he felt bad.”
“Not so’s you’d notice. If you asked me, I’d say he enjoyed it.”
“What?”
“You had to know him. He never liked Butch. He didn’t like him in the house. Butch knew ...”
“Knew what?”
“Butch knew Rudy. That was his name, Rudy. His black heart. Rudy was the only person Butch didn’t like. Rudy knew it. He was just looking for a chance to do him a bad turn.”
“So he deliberately ... ?”
Leo nodded somberly. “Butch was lying in the driveway. He liked the warm concrete. Rudy backed the truck out and just ran over him as nice as you please.”
“But - maybe he didn’t see him.”
“He saw him all right. Butch was asleep. Rudy gunned his motor and hit him before he could get out of the way.”
Tiger’s eyelids lowered, his lips stretched in a grim line. He remained that way, wondering why Leo had made so personal a confession on such short acquaintance. It was, he decided, one way to cement a friendship.
Leo spoke again. “That night I brushed all the dog hair off of Albert—”
Tiger’s lids lifted again. “You mean - Albert was Butch’s pillow?”
Leo nodded. “I cut the hairs up real fine and whenever I carried the plates in from the kitchen I sprinkled some of them on Rudy’s food.”
“Did it make him sick?”
“Not so’s you’d notice; but it made me feel better.”
Tiger smiled, then grew thoughtful. “How’d he die?” he asked.
“I just told you - oh, you mean Rudy. He had a bad accident. In that same truck he ran Butch over with. The funny thing was,” Leo went on, “I always thought for sure I’d die before Butch did. Then, when I was dead, he would come and lie by me on my funeral pyre. You know - like a Viking’s funeral.”
Tiger nodded; he had read Beau Geste. A Viking always took his farewell of life with a dog at his feet.
“And your mother? How’d she die?”
“She-she—” Leo gulped, and his jaws worked as he tried to articulate the words, but no sound materialized. His face flushed.
“That’s okay,” Tiger said, “let’s skip it.” Raising his wrist, he checked his Ingersoll. “Jeez, I better be getting to the store so I’m back in time for Swim.” He reflected for a moment, then framed a tactful question: “Aren’t you scheduled for ball practice with Coach this morning?” “Mmmm ...” Leo nodded, closed his eyes, and lay back. The last thing he wanted to do right now was practice baseball, especially with Hap Holliday. Among the montage of images jumping about under his eyelids was a picture of the coach - “the all-American jockstrap,” as Leo had dubbed him in his journal - glove in hand, waiting for Wacko Wackeem to field a few flies. But Wacko was not Coach’s “kind of guy.” Nor, for that matter, was Coach Leo’s. That red, jolly face seemed to corrugate with consternation and dismay the moment Leo came upon the scene, and what point was there in trying to “measure up” when, where Hap was concerned, the percentages were so low?
All in all, Leo decided, he preferred staying where and as he was. Presently, he heard Tiger steal off, and through slitted lids watched him and Harpo cross the meadow and head for the Old Lake Road, a hundred or so yards away. Leo closed his eyes again, basking in the warm sun. How glorious to lie in a sweet-smelling meadow with nothing to do but make notes on a spider replenishing its pantry. He told himself he should collect the specimen and get back to camp (he was due at baseball practice before Morning Swim), but it was hard giving up such a spot as this; it was so quiet here; that’s what he noticed more than anything. At Pitt the stone hallways forever echoed with the frantic clamor of discontent, dissatisfaction, and despair, 150 boys in their leather-soles clattering up and down, the incessant racket of scores of voices, admonishing, correcting, quarreling, wheedling, whining, complaining, crying, cursing. Seventy-five double-decker wire-spring cots, each with a boy top and bottom, lined up in a brick-walled dormitory with barred windows and a coal stove at the far end, a long low-ceilinged room once used for the drying of hops for beer, a place where the nights resounded with coughing and moans, with whispers and mutterings and outcries, and dreams that flew about on dark wings, like bats.
This was a sweet corner of the world all right, the valley that cradled Moonbow Lake, with its red-siloed barns tucked like so many play-farms amid the softly rolling countryside that unfolded among the Jurassic outcroppings of schist and shale, and its thickly shaded forest glades, the tall, dark fir trees whose tips pointed like village church steeples toward the heavens. Until now, for Leo “the country” had meant only the hot, insect-teeming tobacco fields of upper Connecticut, arid, dusty acreage enclosed by endless miles of suffocating mosquito netting that was worse than a winding sheet for those unlucky fellows destined to spend their years sweating breathlessly beneath it, while so-called fresh air was the stuff you got in the cement-floored, rusty-fenced playground at the Institute, with its jail-like steel-pipe jungle gym and oil barrels to play on.
But this - this was Longfellow land, the forest primeval and its murmuring pines and the hemlocks, and the sweet green meadow where Leo lay was as close to utopia as he was likely to get - his own private domain, as he’d begun to think of it. It was almost as if he had been drawn to it, he decided, because getting here wasn’t easy. This is how you did it: You left Jeremiah and walked up the line-path to the cow-crossing, where the sagging rack of mailboxes defied the force of gravity, then turned left down the Old Lake Road, passing along the northern flank of Indian Woods, laced with a confusing network of paths, a maze that - if you knew its secrets - eventually brought you out at the Wolf’s Cave, where the Senecas held their sacred campfires (and where the uninitiated didn’t dare venture). But if instead of entering the woods you walked on a little farther up the road, past Pissing Rock, you came upon a pair of decrepit posts and, bisecting them, the beginnings of an old trace, a grassy track that ran between two rows of tall pines to form a wide, shaded lane covered with fallen needles, a soft, luxurious carpet under your feet. At the other end of the lane lay the meadow, contained on one side by the pond, and on the others by a palisade of dark fir trees, their apexes piercing the bright-blue sky, seeming now to impale the fleecy clouds, shepherded east to west by a light breeze. The blue-green grass, dotted with buttercups and daisies, grew tall, so that, on his first foray to the meadow, he had almost missed the pond altogether - a body of water no more than five hundred feet in length, half that across, still as glass at the near end, at the far stirring itself and falling into rapid motion where its outlet crossed a weir to fret its way in a noisy babble some fifty yards to the ruins of Kelsoe’s icehouse and the small cove called the China Garden, filled with lotus-like water lilies.
There was another feature of this place that made it special, however, that in an odd way made it seem to belong to him, to be his personal property. Off to his right, on the far side of the meadow, partly hidden by the stand of sentinel pines, he could make out the bay window in the “tower” of the old Steelyard place, the Haunted House. The house had struck a profound
chord in him that first evening when Hank Ives had driven him past it in the jitney. And afterward - there had been something to do with the house in his dream, something connected with Pa Starbuck’s story of the Moonbow Princess, only Leo hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.
What he did know was that there had been just such a turret window in the house over Rudy Matuchek’s butcher shop on Gallop Street. Leo had hated that house - his house - but the window was different. The window had belonged to her, to Emily, his mother - and as he looked over to the Steelyard property now, it was almost as if he' expected to see her sitting up there, just as she used to when he was a child, waiting for him to come home from school, with Butch beside her, waiting too.
Now Butch was buried under a tree behind the garage, and Emily, she was buried - well, Leo didn’t know where, because he’d never seen her grave, or Rudy’s, for that matter; though he knew they were buried somewhere together, somewhere at Saggetts Notch - Mrs Kranze had told him so - hadn’t she? Funny about Mrs Kranze, whose face he’d known so well, but could no longer remember -along with all the other things he had trouble recalling.
He turned from the house and his eye fell on his violin case. The sight of it prodded him: he had promised Miss Meekum that he would practice every day. Carefully he opened the case and lifted out the violin; then, seated there beside the pond, he began to play, softly, for no other ears, his bow moving and angling as it coaxed sweet notes from the hollow heart of the instrument.
He had played for half an hour or so when, suddenly, he stopped, his concentration broken by the rapturous trilling of a bird somewhere above his head. Was it a mockingbird? Certainly it possessed an extraordinary repertoire. Leo craned to find it: yes, there it was, feathered gray and white, perched above him, its throat throbbing with song. How was it that such a plain, un-likely-looking creature could produce such a glorious melody?
“No rhapsodies in this house!”
He heard the detestable voice saying the hated words.
“Shut up!” he shouted, sitting up and addressing the air. “Go away! Leave me alone!”
The cry sprang from his lips before he realized it; he glanced around in embarrassment. Then he threw himself back on the ground and covered his head with his arms, lids squeezed tight, while the same voice rang inside his head.
It grew momentarily chilly and, opening his eyes, Leo shivered as an errant cloud swept across the face of the sun, casting an unwelcome shadow. He peered upward, half-expecting to see a large-winged roc, Sinbad’s roc; but there was no such creature, and he forced himself to relax as the curtain of shadow was raised and he was laved again with gratifying warmth. Easy, pal, he told himself impatiently. There’s no one to hear, no one to make fun of you. But they’d heard him that first night in camp all right, when he’d had the bad dream and waked up hollering his head off. Even now he still hadn’t erased the memory of Pa’s gory tale, of the knife of Misswiss glinting in the moonlight and the scream of the dying maiden, which had become his own scream as he fell . . . fell, down into darkness.
He had come to blinking in the yellow beam of Reece’s flashlight. While the other Jeremians stirred groggily, trying to dope out what was going on, Reece had accompanied him out to the fountain, where he urged him to drink, then he’d walked him around the baseball diamond, talking quietly, the sound of his voice both soothing Leo and distracting him from his disturbing anxiety.
When he was yawning widely, they had returned to the cabin, where, shamed to silence, Leo wriggled in over the sill and flattened himself under his blankets, while several of his rudely awakened cabin-mates gathered out at Old Faithful. Lying in his bunk, Leo heard his name . on Phil’s lips.
“What was Wacko making such a ruckus for, anyways? Only sissies and twerps have nightmares. Cripes.”
“Cripes yourself,” came Tiger’s retort. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody has dreams.”
In the morning Leo had faced queer looks, especially from Phil and his shadow Wally, as well as from some of the Ezekielites and the Hoseans on either side of Jeremiah, whose rest had likewise been disturbed. But Reece behaved as if nothing had happened and evidently he cautioned the boys to do likewise, for by the time they formed for the march to Sunday chapel the incident seemed to have been forgotten. And by the time services were over even Phil had quit grumbling.
Was it the magic of Pa’s oratory that did the trick? Leo had heard from Hank Ives that when it came to preaching a sermon the Reverend Garland Starbuck was possessed of the golden throat and silver tongue of a William Jennings Bryan, that his words, of honey or of fire, “could turn a Moonbow camper to stone” at the first hearing. And Leo had been impressed by Pa, decked out in his Sunday best (a full-sleeved, blousy shirt of snowiest broadcloth, touched up with a small black clip-on bow tie, a pair of gallused black trousers, seat shiny as a dime, and still shinier high-laced boots whose knob-like toes curled right off the ground), greeting his campers and staffers from his place beside Tabernacle Rock, thereafter speaking out boldly in the name of the Lord God Jehovah, entreating, cajoling, coaxing, and commanding these, his sons (and a single daughter) to bow down and make obeisance to the Maker of us all. (The camp schedule, as Leo had discovered in a few short days, left no doubt that Friend-Indeed was a “Bible camp”: morning chapel worship in the council ring was commonly followed by more prayers in the dining hall, more hymn singing, more Scripture reading, more ecclesiastical homilies bandied about, the saying of Grace at noon, too, vespers observed thrice weekly, as well as impromptu sing-alongs, with eager voices raised in praise of both “The Old Rugged Cross” and “The Old Oaken Bucket.”)
Though the memory of the morning’s embarrassments still caused him to blush, that night Leo had taken heart from the friendly bull session before Lights Out, conducted by Reece himself. The counselor had stretched out on his cot and led the discussion, about what it meant to be a Jeremian — a true-blue member of the team, as he put it - and how they were all looking forward to seeing the Hartsig Trophy emblazoned with their names under the heading “Best Campers of 1938.” And Leo, who had envied his cabin-mates their camaraderie and lighthearted give-and-take, the way Reece kidded around with them (especially Phil and Tiger), and the bonds they had formed through years of close association and shared experience, had felt - actually, physically felt, he thought - those bonds now being extended to include him.
Luckily there had been no bad dreams that night, no disturbances whatever, and next morning he had got up before reveille, ready to attack his first real camping day. He was off to a flying start - well, no, not quite. As a greenhorn at Moonbow he was bound to make a few mistakes, that would have been okay; unfortunately for him he had come a cropper three times in a row, which hadn’t upped his stock with either the Jeremians or their counselor.
First, the camp inspection committee, made up of a revolving panel culled from the Sachems’ Council, showed up in Jeremiah on its twice-weekly rounds, to find that Leo’s cap had been left on his pillow - one demerit - and the contents of his suitcase were not up to standard neatness - a second demerit, making Leo the only Jeremian to receive blackies that day.
Next came his introduction to the traditional soap bath. Monday was “wash day,” when first thing in the morning everyone fell out for the weekly soap bath in the lake, and Leo was tugging on his swim suit when he noticed he was getting funny looks from his cabin-mates.
“What are you doing, kiddo?” Phil demanded, wrapping his husky waist in a towel.
Leo gave him a look back; he was putting on his trunks, what else?
“Nobody wears a bathing suit to soap bath.”
“They don’t?”
"No. They go buck-assed naked.”
“Oh.” Leo crimsoned, and, pulling off his trunks, wrapped a towel around his waist. Though he was used to the casualness of dormitory life, the idea of standing around naked in the open air offended his sense of propriety, and when, within minutes, he
found himself dockside amid a sea of robust male forms, legs, arms, and pale behinds, a forest of limp penises, of corrugated scrotums drawn up tight as walnut shells in the nippy morning air - all of Pa’s campers gathered to worship Hygeia, goddess of “cleanliness,” with their pious offerings of pink Lifebuoy or green Palmolive soap cakes - he clung desperately to his towel. The result had been a spate of scornful taunts.
“Come on, lily-white, dive in!” “Hey, Wacko, drop the laundry!” “Yeah, screwball, let the world see your dong!” This last from an older, thick-necked camper with a round, pimply, pug-ugly face and a nasty swagger, who wore a tattoo on his forearm, like Popeye. His name, Leo had already learned, was Claude Moriarity - more often known as “Bullnuts,” Leo now perceived, for obvious reasons. The sight of the new boy, covered with goose pimples, knees knocking from the morning chill, seemed to goad him, and he advanced menacingly.
“Okay, you guys!” he boomed. “Let’s get ’im!” And five or six campers had sprung on Leo and stripped away his towel, leaving him trying to cover his nakedness with both hands. This show of modesty further provoked Bullnuts and his pals, who, before Leo realized their full intent, had picked him up and chucked him off the dock into the swim crib, where he landed on his back and got water up his nose. Not knowing what else to do, he paddled helplessly around until the Bomber came to the rescue and loaned him his block of Ivory soap (“It floats”), then dived for Leo’s cake of Lifebuoy (which didn’t).
The third incident of note occurred after dinner that evening, and marked the beginning of Leo’s troubles with Hap Holliday. He had been heading for the Dewdrop Inn, giving a wide berth to the playing field, where late baseball practice was in progress, hoping to go unnoticed by the coach, who Leo was afraid might try to trap him into playing. Swinging madly, Junior Leffingwell had hit a pop fly that sailed across the field and (having been missed by Oggie Ogden, in the outfield) bounced within ten feet of Leo and continued rolling toward him. Leo had stood transfixed, unable to do anything but stare at it, as if to touch it would do him injury.