In this Sam Cooper was an ordinary child, doing what God had given him to do. First he completed the little circle, and as the bar was swept from his hand, he finished the rest of the figure, arms flung eternally to the heavens, feet inked one infinite inch into the fathomless eclipse of space, the body forever flying from the faraway arc of the world.
EPILOGUE
It is a place called Boggs, and it is here that the boy goes to school now—second grade, Mrs. Alma Tweety's class. They say she's the meanest woman in the state, the old-timers who had her long ago. Well, the truth is, she is very, very strict. All you have to do is sass her or do anything the least bit out of line, and there's Mrs. Tweety hollering, "Go straight to the principal's office! This minute!''
But the kids all secretly love her, even though they like to make fun of her name. It's a mystery why, year after year, they're all so fond of Mrs. Tweety, despite what the old-timers say. On the other hand, sometimes children see things grownups never imagine; the same child who sees so much is no better than blind by the time he's grown to a man.
At any rate, the boy is just nuts about old Mrs. Tweety, just the way the rest of the kids are. She lets him draw whenever he wants to, so long as it doesn't get in the way of his work.
And as for the boy, he never misses his chance. He takes his special pen and his All-Purpose Jumbo pad, his left hand nimbly delivering to the paper the vision that's come into his head. But somehow he can never quite catch it, not all of it, at least. A line, a curve, a little squiggle—there's never any telling. It's just that some crucial part of the thing simply isn't there.
It makes the boy a tiny bit sad, this absence that's there on the page. Deep down, he knows it's something big. Deep down, he knows that it's everything, the difference between what's true and what's real.
But everyone flatters him anyhow. They all tell him how good he is, no more than a second-grader, and look—he can draw what he sees in the world!
Yet the boy knows better. He knows that he has lost something very special. And sometimes, when he's all by himself, he knows a truth even crazier than that. He knows the thing he lost was lost the instant he tried to know what it was.
The boy likes to think about it sometimes, times when he and his mother are just sitting around being quiet, her knitting or sewing or doing something sort of very gentle like that.
He watches her from where he sits on the floor, his eyes swimming in her light brown hair, and he thinks how it's really a backward miracle how a thing vanishes the second it appears. Oh, not real things—like people and dogs and stuff. And not even fuzzy things—like wanting and hurting and love. But another kind of thing, a thing deeper and truer than anything else.
It's just that there's no word that says exactly what it is. But that doesn't mean it's not there. Or, anyhow, that it really once was.
The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow Page 14