Blaze (6 page)

“Fuck you!” Blaze cried, the nameless thing finally leaping all the way free. “Fuck you, fuck you!”

“Come here,” The Law said. His eyes were huge, bugging out. The hand holding The Paddle had gone white. “Come here, you bag of God's trash.”

And with the nameless thing that was rage now out of him, and because he was after all a child, Blaze went.

When he walked out of The Law's study twenty minutes later, his breath whistling raggedly in his throat and his nose bleeding—but still dry-eyed and close-mouthed—he became a Hetton House legend.

He was done with Arithmetic. During October and most of November, instead of going to Room 7, he went to Room 19 study hall. That was fine by Blaze. It was two weeks before he could lie on his back comfortably, and then that was fine, too.

One day in late November, he was once more summoned to Headmaster Coslaw's office. Sitting there in front of the blackboard were a man and a woman of middle age. To Blaze, they looked dry. Like they might have been blown in on the late autumn wind like leaves.

The Law was seated behind his desk. His bowling shirt was nowhere to be seen. The room was cold because the window had been opened to let in the bright, thin November sun. Besides being a bowling nut, The Law was a fresh air fiend. The visiting couple did not seem to mind. The dry man was wearing a gray suit-jacket with padded shoulders and a string tie. The dry woman was wearing a plaid coat and a white blouse under it. Both had blocky, vein-ridged hands. His were callused. Hers were cracked and red.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bowie, this is the boy of whom I spoke. Take off your hat, young Blaisdell.”

Blaze took off his Red Sox cap.

Mr. Bowie looked at him critically. “He's a big 'un. Only eleven, you say?”

“Twelve next month. He'll be a good help around your place.”

“He ain't got nothin, does he?” Mrs. Bowie asked. Her voice was high and reedy. It sounded strange coming from that mammoth breast, which rose under her plaid coat like a comber at Higgins Beach. “No TB nor nothin?”

“He's been tested,” said Coslaw. “All our boys are tested regularly. State requirement.”

“Can he chop wood, that's what I need to know,” Mr. Bowie said. His face was thin and haggard, the face of an unsuccessful TV preacher.

“I'm sure he can,” said Coslaw. “I'm sure he's capable of hard work. Hard
physical
work, I mean. He is poor at Arithmetic.”

Mrs. Bowie smiled. It was all lip and no teeth. “I do the cipherin.” She turned to her husband. “Hubert?”

Bowie considered, then nodded. “Ayuh.”

“Step out, please, young Blaisdell,” The Law said. “I'll speak to you later.”

And so, without a word spoken by him, Blaze became a ward of the Bowies.

“I don't want you to go,” John said. He was sitting on the cot next to Blaze's, watching as Blaze loaded a zipper bag with his few personal possessions. Most, like the zipper bag itself, had been provided by Hetton House.

“I'm sorry,” Blaze said, but he wasn't, or not entirely—he only wished Johnny could come along.

“They'll start pounding on me as soon as you're down the road. Everybody will.” John's eyes moved rapidly back and forth in their sockets, and he picked at a fresh pimple on the side of his nose.

“No they won't.”

“They will, and you know it.”

Blaze did know it. He also knew there was nothing he could do about it. “I got to go. I'm a minor.” He smiled at John. “Miner, forty-niner, dreadful sorry, Clementine.”

For Blaze, this was nearly Juvenalian wit, but John didn't even smile. He reached out and grasped Blaze's arm hard, as if to store its texture in his memory forever. “You won't ever come back.”

But Blaze did.

The Bowies came for him in an old Ford pick-up that had been painted a grotesque and lap-marked white some years before. There was room for three in the cab, but Blaze rode in back. He didn't mind. The sight of HH shrinking in the distance, then disappearing, filled him with joy.

They lived in a huge, ramshackle farmhouse in Cumberland, which borders Falmouth on one side and Yarmouth on the other. The house was on an unpaved road and bore a thousand coats of road dust. It was unpainted. In front was a sign reading BOWIE'S COLLIES. To the left of the house was a huge dogpen in which twenty-eight Collies ran and barked and yapped constantly. Some had the mange. The hair fell out of them in big patches, revealing the tender pink hide beneath for the season's few remaining bugs to eat. To the right of the house was weedy pastureland. Behind it was a gigantic old barn where the Bowies kept cows. The house stood on forty acres. Most was given over to hay, but there was also seven acres of mixed soft and hardwoods.

When they arrived, Blaze jumped down from the truck with his zipper bag in his hand. Bowie took it. “I'll put that away for you. You want to get choppin.”

Blaze blinked at him.

Bowie pointed to the barn. A series of sheds connected it to the house, zigzagging, forming something that was almost a dooryard. A pile of logs stood against one shed wall. Some were maple, some were plain pine, with the sap coagulating in blisters on the bark. In front of the pile stood an old scarred chopping block with an ax buried in it.

“You want to get choppin,” Hubert Bowie said again.

“Oh,” Blaze said. It was the first word he had said to either of them.

The Bowies watched him go over to the chopping block and free the ax. He looked at it, then stood it in the dust beside the block. Dogs ran and yapped ceaselessly. The smallest Collies were the shrillest.

“Well?” Bowie asked.

“Sir, I ain't never chopped wood.”

Bowie dropped the zipper bag in the dust. He walked over and sat a maple chunk on the chopping block. He spat in one palm, clapped his hands together, and picked up the ax. Blaze watched closely. Bowie brought the blade down. The chunk fell in two pieces.

“There,” he said. “Now they're stovelengths.” He held out the ax. “You.”

Blaze rested it between his legs, then spat in one palm and clapped his hands together. He went to pick up the ax, then remembered he hadn't put no chunk of wood on the block. He put one on, raised the ax, and brought it down. His piece fell in a pair of stovelengths almost identical to Bowie's. Blaze was delighted. The next moment he was sprawling in the dirt, his right ear ringing from the backhand blow Bowie had fetched him with one of his dry, work-hardened hands.

“What was that for?” Blaze asked, looking up.

“Not knowin how to chop wood,” Bowie said. “And before you say it ain't your fault—boy, it ain't mine, neither. Now you want to get choppin.”

His room was a tiny afterthought on the third floor of the rambling farmhouse. There was a bed and a bureau, nothing else. There was one window. Everything you saw through it looked wavy and distorted. It was cold in the room at night, colder in the morning. Blaze didn't mind the cold, but he minded the Bowies. Them he minded more and more. Minding became dislike and dislike finally became hate. The hate grew slowly. For him it was the only way. It grew at its own pace, and it grew completely, and it put forth red flowers. It was the sort of hate no intelligent person ever knows. It was its own thing. It was not adulterated by reflection.

He chopped a great deal of wood that fall and winter. Bowie tried to teach him how to hand-milk, but Blaze couldn't do it. He had what Bowie called hard hands. The cows grew skittish no matter how gently he tried to wrap his fingers around their teats. Then their nervousness came back to him, closing the circuit. The flow of milk slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Bowie never boxed his ears or slapped the back of his head for this. He would not have milking machines, he did not believe in milking machines, said those DeLavals used cows up in their prime, but would allow that hand-milking was a talent. And because it was, you could no more punish someone for not having it than you could punish someone for not being able to write what he called poitry.

“You can chop wood, though,” he said, not smiling. “You got the talent for that.”

Blaze chopped it and carried it, filling the kitchen woodbox four and five times a day. There was an oil furnace, but Hubert Bowie refused to run it until February, because the price of Number Two was so dear. Blaze also shoveled out the ninety-foot driveway once the snow got going, forked hay, cleaned the barn, and scrubbed Mrs. Bowie's floors.

On weekdays he was up at five to feed the cows (four on mornings when snow had fallen) and to get breakfast before the yellow SAD 106 bus came to take him to school. The Bowies might have done away with school if they had been able, but they were not.

At Hetton House, Blaze had heard both good stories and bad stories about “school out.” Mostly bad ones from the big boys, who went to Freeport High. Blaze was still too young for that, however. He went to Cumberland District A during his time with the Bowies, and he liked it. He liked his teacher. He liked to memorize poems, to stand up in class and recite: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood…” He declaimed these poems in his red- and black-checked hunting jacket (which he never took off, because he forgot it during fire drills), his green flannel pants, and his green gumrubber boots. He stood five-eleven, dwarfing every other sixth-grader in his class, and his height was overtopped by his grinning face and dented forehead. No one ever laughed at Blaze when he recited poems.

He had a great many friends even though he was a state kid, because he wasn't contentious or bullying. Nor was he sullen. In the schoolyard he was everyone's bear. He sometimes rode as many as three first-graders on his shoulders at once. He never took advantage of his size at keepaway. He would be tackled by five, six, seven players at once, swaying, swaying, usually grinning, his dented face turned up to the sky, finally toppling like a building, to the inevitable cheers of all. Mrs. Waslewski, who was a Catholic, saw him toting first-graders around on his shoulders one day when she had playground duty and started calling him St. Francis of the Little People.

Mrs. Cheney brought him along in reading, writing, and history. She understood early on that for Blaze, math (which he always called Arithmetic) was a lost cause. The one time she tried him on flash cards, he turned pale and she was convinced the boy actually came close to fainting.

He was slow but not retarded. By December he had moved from the first-grade adventures of Dick and Jane to the stories in
Roads to Everywhere,
the third-grade reader. She gave him a pile of Classics comic-books she kept bound in hard-covers to take back to the Bowies' with a note saying they were homework. His favorite, of course, was
Oliver Twist,
which he read over and over until he knew every word.

All this continued until January and might have continued until spring, except for two unfortunate events. He killed a dog and he fell in love.

He hated the Collies, but one of his chores was to feed them. They were purebreds, but poor diets and lives lived exclusively in the kennel and the pen made them ugly and neurotic. Most were cowardly and shied from the touch. They would lunge at you, yapping and snarling, only to sheer away and approach from a different angle. Sometimes they snuck in from behind. Then they might nip at your calves or buttocks before dashing off. The clamor at feeding time was hellish. They were out of Hubert Bowie's province. Mrs. Bowie was also the only one they would come to. She fawned over them in her buzzing voice. She always wore a red jacket when she was with the dogs, and it was covered with tawny hair.

The Bowies sold very few grown animals, but the pups fetched two hundred dollars each in the spring. Mrs. Bowie exhorted Blaze on the importance of feeding the dogs well—of feeding them what she called “a good mix.” Yet
she
never fed them, and what Blaze put in their troughs was discount chow from a feed-store in Falmouth. This feed was called Dog's Worth. Hubert Bowie sometimes called it Cheap-Chow and sometimes Dog Farts. But never when his wife was around.

The dogs knew Blaze didn't like them, that he was afraid of them, and every day they grew more aggressive toward him. By the time the weather really began to turn cold, their dashes sometimes brought them close enough to nip him from the front. At night he sometimes woke from dreams in which they packed together, brought him down, and began to eat him alive. He would lie in his bed after these dreams, puffing cold vapor into the dark air and feeling himself over to make sure he was still whole. He knew he was, he knew the difference between what was dreams and what was real, but in the dark that difference seemed thinner.