by Lynn Hall
“Hey, I’m glad you did. Tonight we’re celebrating.” Ward threw one arm across Tom’s shoulders, and his face glowed as they walked across the clearing together. “Guess where I’ve just been.”
“To town.”
Ward laughed and held the door open for Tom. “You could tell because I’m wearing my best Jesus shoes.” He wagged one sandaled foot in front of him. “I have just been to the Post Office, my friend, to send off my manuscript on its merry round of rejections. That is what we are celebrating tonight.”
Tom stopped and looked at Ward, delight shining from his face. “It’s really done? I didn’t realize you were so near finished with it.”
“I finished writing it months ago. I’ve just been doing revisions, messing around with words, retyping parts of it. Actually, I think I’ve been putting off telling myself it’s done because I know what that first rejection is going to do to me. But suddenly this morning I had the feeling that if I made one more change the whole thing was going to start going downhill. So I wrapped it up and sent it off, and tonight we celebrate. What did you bring?’’
As Tom began emptying the grocery sack onto the counter, he said, “I sure hope you know how to cook this stuff, because I don’t.”
“Ah. Steaks. And mushrooms, you genius. Never fear, Tom Thumb, you’re looking at one of the world’s all-time great gourmet chefs.”
Ward did not exaggerate by much. When the steaks were charred and smothered with mushrooms and the salad arranged to artistic perfection, it was the best meal Tom had ever eaten.
“My dad took us to the Pump Room once in Chicago,” Tom said, “and I know this steak is at least as good as what I had there. Give my compliments to the chef.”
Ward raised his fork in salute and bowed low over his plate.
They ate on the doorstep, which had emerged from Ward’s scrubbing as a weather-pitted but still handsome slab of marble in which thousands of feet had worn a swaybacked hollow. They sat with their backs against the sun-warmed stones of the doorway, hairy legs stretched out in front of them, plates balanced on their laps.
When the food was gone, Ward went to the Jeep and brought back a bottle of wine. “I got this after I mailed the manuscript,” he said. “It’s just an inexpensive Catawba and we’ll have to drink it out of jelly glasses, but I felt the occasion called for something more than a can of beer.”
While the twilight deepened into dark and the wine bottle on the marble between them went from red to clear, Tom and Ward sat. The night air raised gooseflesh on Tom’s arms and legs so that the hair stood straight out from his skin, and his rear went numb, but he didn’t want to move.
Once he said, “Do you feel like going somewhere, to a show or something like that?”
“Not really. I’m so high on this book thing I couldn’t concentrate on a movie. Unless you want to.”
“No.” A little later Tom said, “Should we be doing something? We could paint the kitchen cupboards.”
“Hah. Kerosene lanterns aren’t the ideal light for painting. Besides, we’ve worked hard all week, so tonight we’re just going to sit here on our big fat doorstep and loaf. Seriously, Tom, I hope you know how much I appreciate all the work you’ve done out here. I’m getting a home out of it, but you’re not getting anything but a lot of blisters.”
“And a bruised shin,” Tom added, rolling his left leg from side to side. “And a lot of fun. I wouldn’t keep volunteering if I wasn’t enjoying myself, so don’t worry about me.”
“Okay. Good. I just didn’t want you to feel as though I was taking advantage of your good nature. Here, you can have the last little drip of wine.”
Tom savored the last taste of the sweet red stuff. He was inexperienced with wine so he wasn’t sure how much of his good mood came from the bottle, but he did know he was going to remember the glow of this evening for a long, long time. He had a sudden vision of himself as a middle-aged man caught in the sinkhole of an everyday existence, but remembering one night of his youth when he sat with a friend, in a clearing in a woods, and felt both supreme exhilaration and supreme peace.
After a long quiet time he said, “Now that the book is done, can you tell me about it?”
“Yes, if you really want me to.”
At first Ward just sketched the plot briefly, but as Tom drew him on with questions about the characters and the setting, Ward went on until he had dissected the entire book. Sometimes he talked quickly, with passion, and at other times there were long musing silences. For Ward, it was the first exposure of something precious and fragile and very much entwined with his own identity.
For Tom, listening to Ward’s book was moving and revealing. He knew, without having read a word, that Ward must be a sensitive and talented writer who was surely going to be known before very many years. And he realized something else as he listened, as he watched the controlled but intense gestures of Ward’s hands, outlined now by moonlight. In spite of his limited experience with different kinds of people, Tom knew instinctively that Ward Alexander possessed a rare degree of sensitivity that enabled him to imagine accurately another person’s thoughts and feelings.
In his present floating mood Tom found this power of Ward’s oddly comforting. He felt that he could start a sentence, leave it half-spoken, and Ward would finish it for him; or that he could confess the worst sin he had committed so far in life—he couldn’t think of any real shockers offhand—and Ward would understand the forgivable human weakness that had caused the sin.
“Do you realize it’s after midnight?” Ward said suddenly. “Will your mother be afraid you’ve had an accident or something?”
“Probably.” Tom stretched and tried to make himself get up, but contentment and inertia held him in place. “Is your sleeping bag still down here? How about if I stay here tonight, would you care? I’ll take the sleeping bag. I really don’t feel as though I’ve got the strength to drive home. To tell you the truth, I think my rear end has gone to sleep.”
Ward hesitated, but not quite long enough to seem inhospitable. “Sure. Glad to have you. We can go up to my folks’ and call so your mom won’t worry. Think you can make it up the hill?”
“I think so. ‘Lead on, Macduff.’ “
They climbed a deer path behind the schoolhouse, up the steep wooded slope of the bluff. Now that he was on his feet and moving, Tom found that his balance wasn’t quite what it should be, but he was so contented that he didn’t consider a slight tilting of the earth worth worrying about. At the upper rim of the bluff they cut across a newly mowed oat field and came out at the Alexander house. They went inside, made the phone call without waking anyone, and paused in the kitchen long enough to find two frozen pizzas and half a lemon pie, which they took with them.
In the moonlight and the freedom of the oat field they ran, laughing like children who had just gotten away with something.
“Watch the pie,” Tom called. “Don’t fall in our pie.” His legs moved according to their own will, and he had an odd sensation that his feet had either died or disappeared; he felt no contact with the ground through them.
When they came laughing and panting into the darkened schoolhouse, Tom stopped suddenly and looked down at the two boxes of Mama Roma’s Frozen Pizza, Sausage and Pepperoni, and said, “I know you’re one of the all-time great cooks of the world, but how are you going to cook these pizzas without an oven?”
Ward, lighting the kerosene lantern, said, “I’ll think of something.”
“Something” turned out to be an improvised oven of aluminum foil between layers of charcoal. It took an incredibly long time for the pizzas to cook, and even then they were cold in the middle of the meat chunks, but by that time Tom and Ward had eaten the pie and weren’t very hungry anyway. They ate sitting cross-legged in their respective beds, Ward on his junkyard iron bed on the raised teacher’s platform and Tom in Ward’s sleeping bag on the couch.
“I hate to say this and hurt your feelings,” Tom said, “but this is the wor
st pizza I ever ate.”
“Yes, but I make good steak.”
“You do, for a fact. You’ll make someone a good wife.”
Ward got up abruptly. “I’d better pour some water on those briquettes,” he muttered. Coming back to bed, he misjudged the step up and stubbed his toe. “Summer ditch!” he said, sucking in his breath with pain.
“What did you say?”
“Summer ditch. I’m trying to break myself of the habit of swearing so much, but sometimes nothing short of ‘summer ditch’ expresses the way I feel. I think I broke my toe.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Why are you trying to quit swearing? There’s nobody around to object to your language.”
Ward let go of his foot and stretched out on the bed. The lantern was out, and the schoolhouse pleasantly dark and quiet. “I just decided that if I’m going to be a writer I should try to be more precise and imaginative with my vocabulary. Swearing is all right in its place, but did you ever stop to think how stupid it is when people say ‘It’s a hell of a nice day’ or ‘That’s a damned pretty picture’?”
“I never thought about it that way.” Tom sat up, and as he did, a flash of movement at the window caught his eye. He whispered, “Something’s out there. It looked like somebody looking in at us.”
“No more wine for you,” Ward said, but he got up and moved with Tom toward the window. They looked out into the shifting patterns of moonlight and blackness, but they saw nothing.
“Probably a deer,” Ward said.
“Yeah. Or an owl.”
“Nothing to worry about at any rate.” They went back to bed.
“As I was saying,” Ward went on, “what this country needs is a whole new set of profane words. The ones we’ve got really don’t have much meaning when you stop to think about them. For instance, what’s the point of saying ‘Son of a bitch’ when you stub your toe in the dark? Now if you’d stubbed your toe on a male dog, it might be appropriate. Let’s put our minds together and see what we can come up with.”
For nearly an hour their two voices, disembodied by the dark, hurled up new and strange-sounding words to be laughed at, discarded or remembered for future use. Gradually the words became fewer and the pauses longer, until finally the schoolhouse held only the sounds of heavy sleep-breathing.
10
“You have your choice this morning; you can either take the VW or ride the school bus. I’m going to need the car,” Charlotte said as she handed Tom half a cantaloupe cut in a sawtooth pattern.
“I’ll take the Volkswagen. After school I’ve got to get together with the music teacher and decide what I’m going to play for state music locals, so I can’t ride the school bus. Where do you have to go?”
“Dentist.” She made a face. “I’m kind of curious, though. I was looking under ‘Dentists’ in the Yellow Pages, and I saw this name, H. R. Werle. I went to high school with a Harv Werle—I just wonder if it could be the same one.”
“Aha! A childhood sweetheart. You probably don’t need to go to the dentist at all.” Tom pointed accusingly with a forkful of cantaloupe.
Charlotte waved him away, but her face reddened. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a checkup. You, too, come to think of it, young man.”
To change the subject, Tom said, “All kidding aside, I think it would be great if you did find someone to go out with. You need a little night life.”
She snorted. “If I’d wanted night life, I wouldn’t have come back here. I don’t imagine there’s an unmarried man between twenty-one and eighty in the whole county.”
“You are glad we moved here, though, aren’t you,” Tom said. It was an affirming statement, not a question. “I’ve never seen you look so good. You’re so much more relaxed than you used to be.”
She had begun to clear the table, but now she sat down again and looked at Tom. “I was out of my element in Chicago,” she said quietly, “and even after we moved out to Wheaton. I honestly believe I was out of my element with your father. It’s funny, but when I look back on it now, the things that attracted us to each other in college were the very same things that eventually separated us. I was the earth-mother country girl, rosy cheeks and freckles and the whole thing, so naturally I wanted to be sophisticated. To me, Grant Naylor had all the qualities I longed for. He’d been around, you know? He knew about liqueurs and hors d’oeuvres and things like that.
“I suppose I must have represented some values that he felt were lacking in him. Midwestern stability”—she chuckled rather wistfully—“or whatever. The trouble was, we both grew into exactly the kinds of people we started out to be, only more so, rather than learning from each other and combining the better qualities of both of us.”
Tom thought about it, then said quietly, “That’s sad. There must be an awful lot of marriages like that.”
Briskly Charlotte stood up. “Well, don’t let it worry you. You’ll probably make a much wiser choice than I did, when your times comes. And speaking of time—”
“I’m going, I’m going. Have a wonderful time in the dentist’s chair.” He banged out through the back door into a golden warm September morning.
As he shifted and chugged and roared up the hill, he waved an unseen greeting to Buck Creek. He felt buoyant this morning, for no particular reason except that everything was right in his world. Buck Creek in the yellow haze of a September morning somehow gave him a feeling of belonging he’d never gotten before from anyplace he had lived. The summer people were all gone now, and Buck Creek was tightening in for the winter, an intimate neighborhood where every member was known, understood, accepted, and given a clearly defined role. Although Tom had never known a wide family circle of aunts and uncles and cousins, he imagined it felt something like this Buck Creek community. It was a comfortable feeling. He understood now why his mother had wanted to come back here, where she had grown up, even though her family had moved away from the area years ago.
Another facet of this morning’s good mood was school, now in its third week. As Tom parked in the student parking lot and walked toward the low, pleasantly landscaped new school, he felt an eagerness for the day’s classes. He had always enjoyed school, but the informality of Great River High especially pleased him. Classes were small enough so that strict discipline was unnecessary, and because the town was small also, students and teachers usually knew each other’s families and backgrounds. They saw each other as human beings. There was less respect than would have been demanded in Tom’s former school, but there was also a more open communication between students and teachers that made forced respect unnecessary in keeping order.
Tom’s first morning class was journalism. He had signed up for it this fall at the last minute because his grades were high enough to allow him an extra course, and because he felt an unconscious wish to make this small bond with Ward’s life. He’d been disappointed to find out how little creative writing was taught in the class and how much time was taken up with the mechanics of producing the school paper, but after a couple weeks of paste ups and proofreading he was beginning to enjoy it.
One of the reasons he enjoyed it was that Karen was in the class. She was in the journalism room when he came in now, but she was busy with Meredith and another girl in the far corner and didn’t notice him.
He stood around for a few minutes, wanting to say something to her but not knowing how to get her away from the other girls. He had decided to ask her for a date the first time they happened to be talking alone, but so far the opportunity hadn’t come along. It might have been just his imagination, but since school had started, he thought he was getting cooler messages from Karen than last year—fewer meetings of eyes, fewer times when she was going out of a door at the same moment as he, or standing in the cafeteria line near him.
“I should just call her up some night and ask her for a date,” he told himself as he fiddled with the papers in his notebook. But he knew he wouldn’t do that, not unless sh
e gave him more encouragement than she had lately. The possibilities of such a phone call chilled the pit of his stomach: she had met someone over the summer and was no longer interested in Tom Naylor; or she never had been interested in the first place; or by some feminine telepathy she knew that he had never dated a girl and was dreading the thought of making conversation.
Miss Hershaw came into the room, and the activity of the dozen young people took on a definite direction. They pulled chairs around into a circle, and on each chair they put a stack of mimeographed sheets to be collated and stapled together.
“Okay, gang,” Miss Hershaw called. “Knock off the noise and let’s take a little march around the room. This is collating day, you lucky people.” She was young and rather mod, at least by Great River standards.
One of the boys grabbed Meredith’s wrist and said with a leer, “Come on, baby, you and I are gonna collate, right here in front of everybody.”
With a great deal of clowning the class formed a line and moved from chair to chair, gathering the mimeographed sheets for Karen to staple together. Someone called, “Let’s sing. All together now, ‘The Vulgar Boatman.’ ’’
“That’s the ‘Volga Boatman,’ ” Miss Hershaw said, “and keep it down so they can’t hear you next door.”
They sang a few “Yo-oh, heave ho’s”; then the song died for lack of lyrics. Tom, enjoying the spirit in the room, started another song before the mood could drift away.
“Reuben, Reuben, I been thinking, What a queer world this would be, If the girls were all transported…”
No one else joined in, and suddenly self-conscious, he stopped singing. The room was tense. The line jostled to a halt for an instant, then started moving again. In the charged silence, a suppressed giggle broke loose. Tom looked toward Karen just as she averted her reddened face. Her mouth was hardened in a battle against a smile, and her eyes were ashamed of the smile.
Behind Tom another giggle exploded, and suddenly the whole room was filled with echoing, bouncing laughter. It came from everyone but Tom, the teacher, and Karen, but even Karen was making small choking noises that she tried to hide. Tom tried to laugh along, but his face stiffened. He tried to understand what they were laughing at, and couldn’t.