The One-in-a-Million Boy
Page 30
The cold clouds of his quickened breaths flit into the brightening air, just like birds. Sixty birds, seventy birds, ninety birds, too fast now, uncountable. Their voices join and swell, and he swells with them. This is the morning chorus, this is the morning chorus, and a rollicking delight takes hold of his body.
He hears a creaking in the trees and remembers: a sound like a rusty gate. Then he sees them, gusting out of a single tree, a heckling flock of grackles teasing the brightness out of the dawn. Then he spots robins, six of them, standing on separate, exposed branches, singing their part, the color in their breasts spreading as the light spreads.
He yips his yippy laugh, and the feeling in his own breast spreads, a mysterious intensifying pressure, as if color is rising in him as well, as if he himself were a bird capable of making music. The feeling fills him until it resembles something like pain, as if he might explode with happiness.
You hear that? his father once said about Eric Chapman’s ghost notes. It’s like something rising out of the goddamn sea. It should take your breath away.
His breath is being taken away, his arm weakening, but he holds the recorder high, determined to outstay the tape’s last sputtering revolution. This is the big finale, the morning chorus, which he will take to his father, who owns a magical machine with knobs and lights. God can’t make birds sing lower, but his father can.
He will ask this of his father, who will say to himself: You can’t make a simple D chord, how do you know about changing keys?
I listened, he’ll answer, and his father will realize how ardently he’d paid attention all along, how carefully he observed, how hard he tried. He will tell his father that the morning chorus sounded like something rising out of the breath it took away.
To which his father will respond, All right, then, my friend; let’s make some music.
The ten parts of Miss Vitkus’s story will end with bird music in a key she can hear, a big surprise that he will present to her next Saturday, exactly nine months and twenty-six days before her actual birthday. Miss Vitkus will want to meet his father, who lowered the key of birds, and they will all become friends.
He cannot know that the thing he thinks of as his friend’s amazing life, ninety minutes on tape, will momentarily break from his hand and slide down the street to be crushed beyond seeing by the first squad car at the scene. The unwinding tape will twist and flutter, catching the rising light. Over time, the tatters will work their way underground, save for a single, glinting ribbon picked up at day’s end by a passing crow, which will carry its own voice to a nest high above the place where the boy, thankful for his father, waits with his whirring machine, certain that his friend shall hear once again the whole of the wakening world.
Chapter 26
From Guinness World Records 2006:
RECORD: Oldest matron of honor
RECORD HOLDER: Ona Vitkus, age 104, USA (wedding of Belle and Ted Ledbetter, USA)
From Guinness World Records 2009:
RECORD: Oldest licensed driver
RECORD HOLDER: Ona Vitkus, age 108, Portland, Maine, USA
From Guinness World Records 2010:
RECORD: Oldest Lithuanian émigrée to revisit homeland
RECORD HOLDER: Ona Vitkus, age 109, USA (escort: Quinn Porter, USA)
From Guinness World Records 2011:
RECORD: Oldest multiple record holder
RECORD HOLDER: Ona Vitkus, age 110, USA
Acknowledgments
Thanks first to my editor, Deanne Urmy, whose advice and friendship I cherish; this is our second book together, and I remain in awe of her grace and wisdom. The Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team—especially Michelle Bonanno Triant and Nicole Angeloro—has been a delight to work with. The production team of Martha Kennedy, Beth Burleigh Fuller, and Barbara Wood hit another homer for me.
My agent, Gail Hochman, and her crew—especially Marianne Merola and Jody Kahn—have been the mainstays of my professional life. Thank you, oh fair and noble ladies.
Special thanks to my friend Mary Berry (in memory), whose youthful spirit offered me a way to write about extreme old age; to Amy MacDonald, who so often provided both a literal and metaphorical refuge for this writer; to Patty Hopkins, who loaned me her family lore and Lithuanian tapes; and to Susan and Bill, and Jess and Bill, who loaned me space and time to write. For musical models and inspiration, I thank my brother, Barry, still a working musician after all these years; and Bob Thompson, my old friend and erstwhile music partner.
This book took so much longer to write than I first imagined and therefore required more than the usual amount of encouragement. Polly Bennell, life coach to writers in despair, offered inestimable guidance. And I’m especially grateful to Anne Wood, Patrick Clary, and Bill Lundgren for their pestering affection and refusal to take no for an answer; to Catherine WoodBrooks on general principles; and to Dan Abbott, my husband and teammate, who lives it all with me. I owe you guys big-time.
Finally, a long-overdue shout-out to my friends at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, who over the years have offered me books, cats, free stuff, undeserved adulation, Phyllis’s cookies, ridiculously high sales, enormous moral support, and true friendship. I write this in loving memory of Stuart Gersen.
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About the Author
MONICA WOOD is the author of When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine, and of the novel Any Bitter Thing, a national bestseller and Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes Ernie’s Ark and My Only Story, a finalist for the Kate Chopin Award. Her writing has appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Parade, and many other publications. Wood lives in Portland, Maine.