The Language of Stars

by Louise Hawes

  Now whenever I jumped in to sing-talk the end of Baylor’s poem, my adrenaline rushed, as if any second someone was going to walk into the classroom and make us all stop bamming and whamming. In fact, right up until the very last minute, when Rufus Baylor looked at his watch and said he’d kept us too long and we could leave, I kept wondering when our punishment was going to start. Was being bad supposed to make you feel this good?

  Safe Deposit

  I thought that I could keep it—

  the light on the running tide,

  how your eyes give you away

  no matter what you hide.

  I thought that I could hold it—

  the forest along the sand,

  your neck bones like pearls

  underneath my hand.

  But time’s school has taught me

  how petals brown and die.

  There’s no saving pleasure.

  Don’t try. Don’t try.

  Star Pupils

  If you’d been in that first class with Baylor, you’d understand the high we felt afterward. I don’t mean it was like some syrupy teacher-knows-best movie, where we sat around talking about how much we’d learned. Or that we walked out of that oven-temperature classroom spouting poetry and determined never to throw another party as long as we lived. But the truth is we’d each expected a sermon, or worse. Our families, the town, everyone, had hammered and hammered and hammered, till most of us were feeling bad to the core. Sure, there were some kids who still laughed about it, but they were the ones who laughed at everything, the ones so dense or so drugged you’d have to drill their skulls to get a thought out.

  But here the rest of us were feeling more alive after class than we had before. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The one person who had a right to hate us apparently didn’t. In fact, he’d shared something with us that the finger pointers would have given anything to be in on.

  A new poem by Rufus Baylor! My old friends, the ones I’d let slip away after Fry filled up my life, would never have believed it. Wanda and George, in particular, were Baylor groupies. They’d memorized most of his poems, and were always quoting pieces of them, fitting them into conversations even where they didn’t belong.

  And Fry? He was excited about the poem, too, though probably not for the same reasons Wanda or George would have been. “We have to be the first people on the planet to hear that poem,” he told H and me now. He was in scheme mode, walking and talking double time. “Wait till we tell Kinney, she’ll go into orbit.” He headed toward the parking lot, but kept turning back to us. “I bet she’ll give us extra credit.” Walking. “She’ll put our names on a plaque and give us all As.” Turning. “Hell, she may just decide to graduate us right now. No pain, all gain!”

  Graduation was a sensitive subject for H. The school had decided that he and the three other WPH seniors who’d been at the bash could graduate. I mean, they’d get their diplomas. But they couldn’t attend the ceremony. Which meant that H’s mother and father, who held down three jobs to keep him in books and gas, would never get to see him walk across the football field in a cap and gown.

  Fry must have realized why his friend had gone suddenly silent. He waited for us to catch up to him, then put his arm around H. “I think you should give the news to Kinney, little buddy,” he said. “You’re about to move to the head of the class.”

  “Chingón.” You could see two impulses at war in H—his massive crush on our English teacher and the whole Hispanic gangsta thing. The crush won; his smile was as wide and open as a little kid’s. “I’ll tell her that me and my compadre, Rufus?” Two skinny fingers high and tight. “We’re like this!”

  The three of us stood in the lot now, while H hunted for his car key. (The rust-covered wreck he insisted on calling “vintage” had once had two keys, but Shore Salvage didn’t include luxury extras like duplicate keys.) It wasn’t long before the gangsta and the grin both disappeared, and the Three Stooges routine started. After Fry and I each assured him that he hadn’t given the key to us, H emptied both pockets, squatted on the asphalt to turn his backpack inside out, then stood up again and finally spotted the key right where he’d left it—in the ignition of his once-proud ’93 Taurus.

  A light rain had started up, a summer sprinkle that actually felt good after the heat in the classroom. (Dr. Fenshaw, English Literature, had tried to budge the thermostat and start up the AC, but apparently the whole system shut down at 5 p.m.) So the fact that, for once in his life, H had locked the car didn’t really upset anyone but him. He slapped his forehead about a thousand times and ran through his whole repertoire of Spanish swearwords. None of us, H included, understood what they meant. Still, they sounded authentic and passionate, and added to the romantic nature of the whole experience.

  We were feeling slightly less romantic ten minutes later. All the other kids were gone, even the ones who’d been waiting for rides. Because it was so hot that he’d left the window open a crack, and because he had his mother’s dry cleaning in the trunk (in true vintage fashion, chronically unlocked), H was convinced he could snag the door lock with a clothes hanger. It was like watching him try to pick the lock the night we’d broken into the Baylor cottage. And he wasn’t having any better luck now than he had then.

  “Why do I have the feeling we’ve been here before, man?” Fry’s patience was wearing thin. The rain was coming down harder now. “Let’s just call Triple A.”

  Watching H manhandle that hanger brought it all back. The fumbling at the cottage door, the crowd and the cold, the way things had curled and turned brown in the flames. I lost my poetry high and began to feel the way I did at the hearing. (“Don’t call it a trial,” my mother had insisted. “It’s not going on your record, thank God.”) The district attorney had rubbed our noses in all the details, so we wouldn’t forget. And so the judge wouldn’t, either, I guess. He made a point of reading the entire police report out loud, including the long list of what we couldn’t make right.

  “Item,” he’d recited in a voice that carried the whole room. “Six porcelain dogs, heads and/or tails broken off. Estimated value, $3,500. If those dogs had been thrown into the fireplace, they would have been totally smashed, wouldn’t they? Did someone sit on that crowded couch, instead, and snap their tiny heads off, one by one?

  “Item: thirty-six family photographs, twenty 8" × 10" or larger; sixteen 4" × 6" or smaller. All frames broken and/or pictures torn. Estimated value, TBD.” To be determined? How? Those photos were all taken before digital cameras, and none of the people in them would ever be young again. Didn’t that make the pictures, like the credit card ads say, priceless?

  I thought about the cleanup that would start the following week. Even though Fry and H had talked, in the same conspiratorial way they shared the names of their favorite NASCAR drivers, about gutters and flashing and struts, I couldn’t understand the point. How would fixing up the shell of that little house bring any of those things back? What difference would plaster and a new roof make when it was empty inside? The rain was coming down in buckets now. (Okay, summer rain doesn’t actually fall in buckets in North Carolina. It’s more like a high-pressure hose that some poor, heat-crazed homeowner turns away from the parched grass and blasts into his own face. Full bore.)

  Still, H wouldn’t give up. “Have faith, ése,” he told Fry. “I’m close, I know it.” He crouched beside the window, fishing with his clumsy hook and resorting to some of the same mysterious curses he’d already used. At least, they sounded the same.

  “Having trouble?”

  All three of us turned to find Rufus Baylor himself walking toward the stranded Taurus. He’d left his green beater—what was a famous poet doing driving a wreck as old as H’s?—at the back of the lot. His was the only other car there, and whether he understood Spanish or not, it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out we needed help. Swearing probably sounds the same in any language.

  H paused in mid-tirade. His mouth stayed open, but the strea
m of musical obscenities stopped pouring out. Deserted by every last bit of macho he’d mustered a few minutes before, he stared at his famous “compadre.” “I—uh . . . ,” he said. “I . . .”

  “We’ve locked the key in the car, sir.” Fry took charge; Fry always took charge. He dug into his pocket for his cell. “We’ll just call Triple A, no problem.” He nodded at the old man, whose white hair had been flattened against his head by the rain. “Thanks for stopping, but we’ve got it licked.” Behind him, H smiled and nodded, too, as if that had been his plan all along.

  “Before you call,” the poet asked, “why not let me take a look?”

  H hesitated, glanced at Fry, then stepped back so Baylor could stare through the Taurus’s window. A second later, he tapped the poet on the back and offered him the clothes hanger, like an OR nurse passing a surgeon his scalpel.

  “Won’t need that,” Baylor said, without looking at the tear-shaped hook H had made at the end of the hanger. Instead he took a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and turned his cane upside down. He opened the knife and sank the blade deep into the business end of the stick. Next, he opened the corkscrew on the knife, and left it sticking out like a broken wing. Finally, he worked the whole thing through the top of the window.

  It was so fast I missed it, but I saw the results. Baylor managed to snag H’s key ring with the corkscrew and slip the key out of the ignition. In less than a minute, he had pulled the stick, knife, and key ring back through the window. “You could have been fooling with that lock all night, young man,” he told H. “Myself? I prefer the direct route.” He unhooked the keyring from the corkscrew and handed it to H.

  Who was, once again, speechless.

  “You want the key, go after the key.” Baylor pulled his knife from the cane and pocketed it, then turned to Fry and me. “See y’all next week?”

  The rainy curls pressed against his forehead made him look younger. Or maybe it was just that between his smile and that wet-baby-duck look, you didn’t even think about his age.

  “Yes, sir,” H said for all of us. “We’ll be here.” He unlocked the Taurus, and Fry took my arm, tried to lead us to the car.

  But I stood there in the rain, needing to tell Baylor. How we’ d never meant to set fire to his dollhouse. My dollhouse. Our dollhouse. How a trillion “sorrys” could never make up for what we’ d done.

  What came out, though, was a lot shorter, a lot easier to say. “Thank you,” I said.

  Fry gave up, ran for the car, and got in. Baylor lifted his cane to eye level, smiled again. “Sometimes it pays to have three legs,” he told me.

  “No, I don’t mean the key.” I felt my own hair streaming down my face, sticking to my cheeks. “I mean for coming today. For writing the poem.” Didn’t he know? “For everything.”

  Now his grin ate up the space between us, and he took my hand. “Thank you,” he said, “for ringing my poem like a bell. It made all the difference, didn’t it, Miss . . . ?”

  “Sarah,” I told him. “My name’s Sarah Wheeler.”

  “You shall not call her name Sarai,” Baylor quoted the Bible passage I knew, “but Sarah shall her name be.”

  I saw H roll down his window, and heard Fry calling me.

  “God wanted to make sure Abraham got it right,” Baylor explained.

  H rolled the window back up, and all I heard now was the rain’s tinny drumming on the roof of the Taurus. “I read that part,” I said. In fact, because it was all about me, I’d read that section of Genesis over and over, ever since I was little. “But I don’t really get it.” (My mom didn’t, either. “Biblical splitting of hairs, that’s all,” she always said.)

  “ ‘Sarai’ means ‘my princess,’ ” the Great One explained. “But ‘Sarah’ means just plain ‘princess.’ No one owns her, she belongs to herself.”

  I gasped. It felt like something important, something secret, had suddenly come clear. Maybe I gasped out loud, because now Baylor’s smile opened like a happy seam, ragged and wide. “Makes all the difference, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  Then he knocked on the car’s back door, Fry opened it, and I got in. I shook the drops from my hair, then slipped my soggy book bag under the front seat. I felt content, full of a secret I couldn’t even name.

  “So what was that all about, teacher’s pet?” Fry was grinning. But not in a good way.

  “What?”

  “First, the old man looks at you like you’re the only one in class. And now?” He nodded out the window at Baylor, who waved as we pulled away. “An after-school special.”

  I sat up, looked out the back window, saw the Great One growing smaller and smaller behind us. “That?” I said it light as air, as if it were nothing, as if it didn’t matter at all. “He just wanted to make sure he knew how to spell my name.”

  * * * *

  Even though it rained all night, next morning the sun felt the way it does on the best summer days at the shore: warm, but not blazing. Toasty, but open to what the wind has to say. In short, it was not the sort of day anyone wanted to waste on school. So it was only because vacation started in one more week, and because we’d get to report the new poem to Miss Kinney, that any of us settled for watching a perfect beach day through the window.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t H, or me or Fry, who delivered the glad tidings. It was the shy girl who’d talked with Baylor about the language of eyes. She must have left her seventh-period class early to beat us all into the room. By the time we got there, the deed was done. And yes, Miss Kinney’s eyes were doing that melting, sparkly thing they did whenever anyone mentioned Rufus Baylor.

  But no, we didn’t get As. Or a plaque. What the four of us, who were taking both Baylor’s class and English 3C, got from our very happy teacher was an invitation to stay after school. Miss Kinney wanted to hear all about the new poem; in fact, she wanted us to reconstruct the whole thing. Not something we were eager to do while everyone else headed for the waves.

  “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it!” Julie Kinney was a tiny woman, and her enthusiasm looked way too big for her. “I honestly thought there’d be no more after ‘Sparrow.’ I thought that was the last poem we’d ever have.”

  Earlier in the year, she’d told us about the poem she called Baylor’s “epitaph.” How she was sure that “The Sparrow” was what he wanted to leave us with, the way he wanted us to remember him and his work. It was about a father’s love, and maybe about something bigger, something you can’t see when you’re caught up in every day. It ended with the words she wrote on the board in pink chalk: “I’ve been mostly wrong, / and God was mostly right.” (She didn’t erase those words for three days straight, not until someone crossed out “God” and wrote in “Kinney.”)

  Today, she was wearing one of her peasant/hippie skirts and sandals. “Do you suppose,” she asked us, once the rest of the class had left and the four of us had moved to desks in the front row, “I mean, do you think you could get a copy of the poem?”

  Fry, who was already looking at his watch, calculating lost surfing time, wasn’t going to make things easy for her. He turned to the rest of us, then sighed. “I don’t know,” he told her. “Rufus Baylor is a very busy man, and we only see him once a week, and—”

  The shy girl who wasn’t actually, and whose name turned out to be Margaret, interrupted him with the truth: “I’m sure we can, Julie,” she said. (Miss Kinney was a Yankee, and she’d asked the class to call her by her first name, but most of us didn’t. In the South, manners die hard, and my mother would have had a shame stroke if I’d slipped up, even at home, and called my teacher Julie.)

  “Mr. Baylor is just about the sweetest person in the entire world.” Margaret had obviously contracted a serious case of Miss Kinney’s Baylor worship. “And if you wrote us a note to take with us . . .”

  “Really?” Our teacher’s gypsy bracelets jangled as she brought both hands to her chest.

  “If you explained how you love his wor
k,” Margaret told her. “If you told him you want to use the poem in class . . .”

  “And won’t publish it somewhere,” H added. “Rufus is pretty touchy about things like that.”

  “He is?” Margaret turned, stared at H. So did I. This was a total Mad Lib, and yet he seemed convinced it was true.

  Margaret’s worldview was being crushed. You could see it in the way she stopped talking, pulled into herself. “I didn’t think he was like that at all.”

  “Well, see, I kinda talked to him after class.” H sounded casual, humble. “You know, he helped me get my car started.”

  “Maybe if you took him my note.” Unfortunately, the look Miss Kinney gave H now, the way she touched his wrist, was probably enough to keep him lying for the rest of his life, even if he lived to be as old as Baylor.

  H’s powers of speech were temporarily short-circuited, and he wore an expression that made him look afraid of how happy he was. “I—I mean . . .”

  “Of course he can take Mr. Baylor your note, Miss Kinney.” Fry knew just the words to put in his friend’s mouth. “As close as they are, I’ll bet Hector could make sure you get copies of any other new stuff he writes, too.”

  Between H’s paralysis and Julie Kinney’s rapture, there wasn’t much sense coming out of either of them. “New poetry?” More bracelets jangling, more chest hugging. “Other poems?”

  Every time our teacher spoke, H turned toward her, as if she were his own private sun. Even though the whole thing was ridiculous, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to have someone that crazy in love with you. Someone who wanted to hear you talk, someone who thought you were too good to be true. Too good to touch . . .

  It must have been because she had taken her hand off his wrist. H suddenly regained his ability to talk. “Sure,” he promised. “Why not? You see, Rufus is full of poetry, full of feelings about what happened.” He went on to assure our teacher that the Great One had essentially sworn an oath to come up with a new book of poems, based on his life-changing encounter with the amazing students of Whale Point High. Or at least, with the outstanding sample that had nearly burned down his former home.