Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “Let me show you something, Tommy,” Emil said. He had finished showing the putter to the two women, and they had left. He put a golf ball into the stamper, pressed the handle, took it out, and handed it to Tommy. “See?”

  Tommy looked. There on a fresh new ball was his name, “THOMAS MACALLISTER,” black against the whiteness of the ball. “Gee,” Tommy said. “Gee, Emil, thanks. Thanks a lot.” He smiled. He held the ball in his hand, looking at it. He rubbed it against his shirt. He looked again. The name hadn’t rubbed off. “Hey, my own golf ball,” he said. “I love it.” He admired it again. “Thanks, Emil. Thanks,” and he slipped the ball into his pocket.

  “Not in your pocket, Tommy. You’re going to use it. Let’s head for the tee.”

  “Can I use it?”

  “You have to use it. Now let’s take a few practice swings,” Emil said when they got to the tee. “Remember, keep your head down and your left arm straight. Don’t bend it at all. Keep your left arm straight, and your right leg. Only the right arm and the left leg bend.” Tommy tried it. “That’s better,” Emil said. “Do it again, and remember to follow through.” So Tommy practiced several times, holding the mashie, trying to keep his eye on the imaginary ball, trying to remember which arm and which leg to keep straight, which to bend. He knew, but it was harder to do than to know. “That’s a lot better,” Emil said, “a lot better. It’s all in the form. Now take that ball back out of your pocket and slam it.”

  “Do I have to use my new ball?” Tommy asked.

  “Use the new one,” Emil said. “You’ve got to use it sometime and you might as well start now.” Emil set it up on a yellow tee. That would make it easier, he said.

  Tommy bent his head, staring at the ball without blinking. He was afraid it might disappear if he blinked. And he swung the club back and smacked the ball—right up into the air! Up, up it went, in a smooth arc through the air, and then it began to drop to the fairway. Tommy was astonished. So was Emil. He whooped. “That was great! That was just great! Tommy, you keep that up and you’ll be a golfer in no time. You’ll be as good as your brothers someday. Now let’s try it again.” Tommy did it a few more times, but none of his shots were as good as the first. Some of them were pretty bad, just like always. But at least he was learning, he thought. He’d done it once. For the first time he thought he might actually learn to hit the ball where it was supposed to go, and he was very pleased.

  When his lesson was over he told Emil, “That was fun.” It had never been fun before. Emil was fun, but not the lesson. This time the lesson was fun, too, and when it was over he went into the clubhouse and rang the bell and asked Ophelia if he could have a Coke.

  “You look at me, Tommy,” Ophelia said. “You supposed to have Cokes?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tommy said, “it’s all right.”

  “Don’t seem all right to me,” Ophelia said. “You know how your mamma feels about Cokes. You can’t fool old Ophelia. But maybe we can find a root beer. Maybe we can even find some ice cream,” and Ophelia made him a root beer float. That was fine; really he liked that better than a Coke. After he drank it he went out to the side porch—he wanted to avoid Mrs. Appleton—and in a few minutes Buck came ambling around the corner from the back of the clubhouse. They had their own porch back there, off the kitchen, but Tommy had never been on it. It was just for the help and their friends.

  “When you going to show me that telescope?” Buck asked him.

  “Shit,” Tommy said, “I keep forgetting it.” He’d said it again. He could hardly believe his ears, but he liked what he heard. “Shit. I’ll get it the next time I go uptown and then I’ll bring it over. I’m sorry.” Tommy wanted to tell Buck about his golf lesson, but since Buck wasn’t allowed to play he decided not to. He told him about Mr. Wolfe’s masks from Mexico instead, and about the two stone snakes. He made a good story out of it.

  “They poisonous?” Buck asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Tommy said. “One bite and you’re dead.”

  “Deader than if a moccasin bit you?”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “A lot deader.” Tommy had never seen a water moccasin, but there were moccasins in Kentucky and Buck had seen lots of them. He’d even picked one up, but it didn’t bite him. He knew how to do it. You had to grab them quick behind the ears.

  “Well, you take care around them snakes,” Buck said. “Snakes is bad.”

  “Buck,” Tommy asked him, “have you ever done anything bad?”

  “Ain’t never done nothin’ good,” Buck said.

  “I mean really bad.”

  “Don’t know that I’d tell you if I did. Why? You done something bad?”

  “I think so,” Tommy said. He felt funny in his stomach.

  “What?”

  “Well, one night I hid under the dining-room table,” Tommy said, “when my parents were having a party. I hid under the table.” Tommy felt terrible. He felt as if something might happen, he didn’t know what. Buck was looking at him as if he were crazy.

  “You white as a ghost,” he said. “That all?”

  “And one day I took a letter and hid it.”

  “Shit,” Buck said. “That don’t sound so bad to me. That ain’t bad like bad be bad.”

  “It was though,” Tommy said. “It was. I have to go now,” and Tommy ran across the golf course and down the slope through the tall grass and across the River Road and down the hill to the river, where he sat on the dock and waited. He knew that eventually someone would come over in a boat, one of the Indians or one of the Islanders, and row him back to the Island. He hoped it wouldn’t be anyone he didn’t want to see, and there was hardly anyone he did want to see right then.

  After a while Mr. Sedgwick came out of his channel in his launch, and he gave Tommy a ride back. Tommy liked riding in Mr. Sedgwick’s launch. It went fast and made a lot of noise, so you couldn’t talk. Tommy sat in the back and watched the waves Mr. Sedgwick made with his boat. When he got to the Island he sat on the Farnsworth porch for a while, leaning against the shuttered door and watching the river flowing.

  Tommy’s father went to work most days, rowing himself across the river and driving to the plant. David spent a lot of time uptown. He slept there most nights, and if his father had to work late, as he often did, he would sleep there, too. John spent as much time as he could with Emily, at the Sedgwicks’ or playing golf. Sometimes they went into town to the movies or dancing at the country club. His mother spent a lot of time doing the things she did, and some of them involved going uptown, too. There were a lot of things to be done for her party, and most of them had to be done uptown. “Sometimes I hate living in two houses,” she told Tommy. “It’s difficult. Whatever you want is always in the other house. Always.”

  Tommy went up with her the day after his first good golf lesson. He wanted to get the telescope, and she let him stay there alone in the house while she ran her errands and did the many things she had to do. The house was different in the summer, cool and silent. It hardly ever happened that Tommy was there all by himself, and he liked it. He got the telescope first thing from his dresser top and put it on the table near the door so he wouldn’t forget it. He sat in the brown silk chair in the living room for a while, the chair that felt so cool to his touch and that his mother kept intending to move, and looked at a magazine. Then he went back upstairs to his desk. He rolled back the top and looked at his things. He took the key from its hiding place and opened his locked drawer. Nothing had changed. There was the big box of crayons; there was the case with the fountain pen his father had given him. He opened the case. The pen lay there, held in its place by the two tiny elastics. Tommy touched it. He took it from his drawer and slipped it out of its case. He held the pen in his hand, looking at it, examining it. He took off the cap and touched the point and looked through the window that showed if there was ink in it. The pen still looked as new as it did the day his father had given it to him. Tommy had never filled it. He’d never actually tried to use it; he�
�d just held it in his hand sometimes and pretended. There was ink downstairs. He went to find it. There were several bottles. One said royal blue, one said blue-black, and one was simply black. Tommy looked at the bottles of ink, trying to decide. The blue was pretty. It was a very bright blue. He opened the blue-black, but he didn’t like that so much. He looked at the bottle of black ink. His pen was black. That would be right for his pen. It was a serious pen. He took the bottle upstairs, set it on his desk, and filled his pen. It was messy, filling a pen, and harder than it looked. He got ink on the barrel, and he went into the bathroom to find some paper to wipe it off. He thought he’d better put the top back on the bottle of ink before he knocked it over and spilled it. He was always spilling things. It said permanent. Maybe you could never get it out. He looked through the little window. You couldn’t see through it now; all you saw was the black ink. He liked the way it smelled. He took a piece of paper from his desk and tested the pen. He made a stroke, and there was the stroke, black on the paper. He made another stroke, and another black line appeared. It worked. He was making marks with his pen. He decided to practice writing. They hadn’t had script yet in school, but he’d watched the older people doing it often enough and he began to try. He would write his name in ink. It took him a long time, and he dropped some blobs of ink on the paper. He got it on his fingers, too, but he wrote out “Tommy MacAllister.” It didn’t look very good. It didn’t look like grown-ups’ handwriting. He tried it again. This time he decided to write out his whole name, and finally he got it all down on the page: “Andrew Thomas MacAllister.” There it was. His name. It still didn’t look like much, but he’d practice, and he’d get better at it. He’d learn. Writing with a pen couldn’t be harder than golf. Tommy was excited. It was the first time he’d ever written out his full name in grown-up script in ink. It didn’t look very grown-up, actually. He looked at it, studying it for a while, and then he put his pen and the paper with his name written on it back into his locked drawer. He would look at it the next time he was in town. He didn’t want to take the pen to the Island because he was afraid that he’d lose it, and he did not want to lose it. The telescope was too big to lose.

  When his mother came home she had a lot of packages, and she asked Tommy to help her carry them in from the car. “I want to show you my new shoes,” she said. Then she looked at him. “What have you got all over your hands? Tommy, what have you been into?”

  “It’s ink,” Tommy said. “I filled my pen.”

  “Well, let’s wash that off right this minute. Don’t touch anything.” She took him to the sink in the kitchen and scrubbed at his fingers with a brush. The ink was hard to get off, and even after she’d scrubbed a long time you could see the dark smudges on his fingers. “Why did your father ever give you a fountain pen?” she asked. “You’re much too young for it.” After she’d gotten off as much of the ink as she could, enough so that it wouldn’t stain anything, she and Tommy went to the car to carry in the packages. His brother John showed up then, and his mother remembered this time to ask John to carry the brown silk chair up to the big guest room. Then the three of them went into his mother’s bedroom to see her new shoes.

  She opened one of the boxes and pulled a pair of shoes from the tissue paper. She held them up. “What do you think of them?” she asked. They were red, and they had high heels and a lot of little straps and no backs.

  John laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “What color are they?” John asked her.

  “They’re fuchsia,” his mother said. “Fuchsia. I think it’s a beautiful color.”

  “I think it looks like Madge McGhee,” John said. “They look like something Madge McGhee would wear.” Yes, Tommy thought, they did look like Miss Pink—shoes for Hot Pink. They were the color of her ink.

  “Let me try them on,” his mother said. “You can’t really tell until I get them on.” She took a while getting into the shoes. She had to slip her foot just so into the straps, otherwise they got tangled, and the buckles were tiny and hard to fasten. When she had gotten them on, she stood up, walked in a little circle in front of her dressing table, and said, “Well now, what do you think of them now?”

  “Really?” John asked.

  “Of course, really,” his mother replied.

  “I think they’re lousy.”

  “Lousy!” His mother didn’t like that at all. “ ‘Lousy’ is not a word you use to your mother. I’m ashamed of you, John.”

  “Well, you asked,” John said.

  “You don’t have to like them,” his mother said. “I don’t demand that you like them. But they are not lousy and I won’t have you speaking to me like that. I don’t care if you are twenty-two years old. Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that.” She was really mad, and she was more than mad; she was disappointed. She liked her new shoes.

  “I don’t think they’re so bad, Mommy,” Tommy said. “I think they’re pretty. But they sure have high heels.”

  “They’ll make me taller,” his mother said. She always wanted to be taller. It was hard to find the right clothes when you were short.

  Tommy walked over to his mother and put his arm around her waist. She really was taller with the shoes on. “I like your shoes, Mommy,” he said.

  “Well, I’ll think about them,” his mother said. “If I decide they’re too much, I’ll return them.”

  “What’s that?” Tommy pointed to a long package that had been sent from Saks Fifth Avenue in Chicago.

  “It’s a dress. I’m not showing it to either of you.”

  “I’ll bet it matches your shoes,” Tommy said, but his mother still refused to show them the dress or what was in the other packages, either.

  While she was putting away her things in her room, Tommy asked John, “What’s the matter with ‘lousy’? What’s it mean?”

  “Mother’s just being sensitive,” John said. “She has been lately. You know how the kids in school sometimes have lice? Not you. The dirty kids. If they have lice, they’re lousy.”

  “Well,” Tommy said, “Mother certainly doesn’t have lice. It’s not as if you said ‘shit.’”

  “Boy,” John said, “you’re getting a filthy mouth. If Mother heard you say that, she’d drop dead.”

  “You’re the one with the filthy mouth,” Tommy said. “You told her her shoes were lousy, I didn’t. And I’ve heard you say ‘shit,’ too.”

  “Scram,” John said. “Just scram before I wash your mouth out with soap. I did it before and I can do it again.”

  “I’m learning,” Tommy said. “I’m learning real fast,” and he ran downstairs and got his telescope and waited for his mother to drive him back down to the shore.

  John was usually so nice. Why was everyone so cross, he wondered. Why was everyone getting so mean? His mother hardly said a word in the car, and when they got to the dock there was no one there to row them over. His mother didn’t like to row herself. “You’d think one of the Indians would be around,” she said, growing more annoyed. Finally she said, “You wait here. I’m going up to the country club to phone for a boat. I’ll be right back.” She drove off to the club, but she was back in just a few minutes. As she was driving down the hill to the dock, Tommy could see a figure by the boathouse on the Island. He put the telescope to his eye and looked. Mr. Wolfe was coming to get them.

  “We’ve had a little excitement here,” he said to Tommy’s mother while he held the boat against the dock so they could step into it. “In fact, we’ve had a lot of excitement. I’ll tell you about it later.” He gave Tommy’s mother a look. That meant Tommy wasn’t old enough to hear it.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Oh, just a little trouble among the Indians,” Mr. Wolfe said. “They got in a fight. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing they haven’t fought about before.”

  When they got to the Island, Tommy’s mother told him to run along home, she had to talk to Mr. Wolfe, and the two of them walked sl
owly along the path in the dappled light toward Mr. Wolfe’s cottage. Tommy could hear his mother’s exclaiming, and her gay laughter. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he’d find out. And he did, too. It didn’t take long at all. He found out about it that very night when everyone was having a drink before dinner at Mr. Treverton’s to discuss what ought to be done and, as usual, they thought the children weren’t listening. Besides, there weren’t any Indians around.