Heading Out to Wonderful (22 page)

“Fine,” he said. “Right as rain”—and, in his smile and his shrug, there was all of the rightness and none of the wrongness in the world.

“Well, we think of you, Mister Beale.”

“We think of you often, and sometimes talk about you.”

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

Taken seriously. Answered fully. “No, Mister Beale. Not at all.”

“In fact, the opposite.”

“We have the kindest feelings for you.”

“Everybody does.”

“Everybody in town.”

So he went on slaughtering cows, not caring any more to wait until they were calm and accepting of their fate, knowing that his haste made them panic, made their fear creep into the taste of the meat; he slaughtered cows in haste and cut meat and coached baseball and made what he hoped was love to Sylvan Glass, and that was his life, his whole life. And the boy. The boy he loved and he needed, because none of it worked without him, his fantasy son.

He was the cigarette hitting the blacktop at fifty miles an hour, reckless, except for the one thing about which he had to be more than careful, and he was, silent and perfectly careful. He never said her name in public one time, not ever. He never meant harm. He had meant never to hurt another living thing. And perhaps the boy was not hurt, he thought, perhaps, but he knew better.

The boy who now kicked and screamed when he had to go to bed, the boy who fought everything that moved. The boy who wouldn’t eat or say much, who did not say ma’am and sir, who smacked Jackie Robinson when he did not come when called, so that the dog now alternately snarled at and doted on the boy, looked at the boy with a mixture of fear and adoration. This was the boy he had made, had raised, they, he and Sylvan, in the world they had made for no one but themselves. Their little family. This was Sam, the apple of his father’s eye, the first, last, and only fruit of his tree, who was five and was now about to be six, and Charlie loved him and did not know what to do, lost in the way he was lost, trying to be ordinary, finding any conversation with the boy impossible now, but needing him, needing him because he was part of the secret, and to lose him now, he felt, might be chancing everything.

He tried to be kind to him. He tried to pay attention to Sam as he had once done, to listen to the endless questions and invent answers when he did not know the answer. Why was the moon big sometimes and small at others? He was confounded by this, and by the many things a boy’s mind can invent to ask about. A deer can die of fright, a hummingbird in his sleep, for no reason? Is forever a long time? He wanted to hold him, but the boy was not his child, was not even really his responsibility, although he felt contained within the bounds of his care of and for the boy.

Once it had occurred to him to make a will and to leave everything to the boy, but that was when he still owned things, enough to give a boy a life, a place in the world. That was what he had wanted to do, also in secret, to be found out only when he died, but now he could not do that, that one thing he had wanted to do out of simple kindness.

Again and again Alma and Will had discussed how the boy should not go with him any more, on the afternoons to the slaughterhouse, the days by the river, the house in the woods, because they knew, as everybody knew now, that the boy languished alone while Charlie spent his hours with Boaty Glass’s wife, not fishing at all, slaughtering in haste, laying waste, laying waste around him without meaning to and ultimately without being able to care, to stop himself. They had discussed it and done nothing to stop it.

So when Charlie came to them and asked what he asked, how could they not say yes? How could they not go along, thinking, as Charlie thought, that it might do the boy some good, might bring the boy around again, home to himself, to his childhood, home to them, his mother and father?

“It’s his birthday soon,” Charlie had said. “I want to give a party for him. I want to show him, maybe it’ll do some good. Maybe it’ll stop the fighting.”

And how could they say no, knowing what they knew, wanting what they wanted, some kind of salvation, some kind of return of their boy back to them, and Charlie whole again, his old self, laughing in the crowd, generous, kind, a man whose arms were wide open even when his hands were in his pockets.

A party. A carnival for Sam, in the meadow out by the river, just for him, because he was six, because he had lived that long and had much longer still to live and some peace had to be made with that, some equanimity created with the whole life that lay waiting, man and boy.

“It’ll be just the thing,” said Charlie. “Good for the boy.

“I want to do it,” he said. “Leave everything to me.”

And of course they did. Of course they already had.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A
UGUST 4, 1949.
Sam Haislett’s sixth birthday. August in the Valley of Virginia, hot as holy hell, hotter than you would think for a place where people used to flock after the Civil War to escape the heat of the cities, everything dry now, gold gray, second cutting come and gone, the willows hanging limply into the still rippling water, lower now than in the spring, but still lively, still heading for the sea and freedom. The sun white-hot against a hot white sky. The river water, the sweet Maury, so fresh and clear, still leaping greenly, the water that flows from the eye of Jesus into the heart of God.

In Pittsburgh, at Forbes Field that afternoon, the man Jackie Robinson went 0 for 4, even though his team got fourteen hits and beat the Pirates 11–3. They went on to win the pennant, and then to lose the Series to the Yankees. On that day, the people of Brownsburg worried about the fact that the Russians were about to explode an atomic bomb, and, in fact, they did it three weeks later. Happy Chandler, the commissioner of baseball and a cousin to the twins, even if it was so distant, so convoluted he wasn’t aware of it, spent the day at home in Versailles, Kentucky, quietly reviewing some legal papers in the Danny Gardella case, a case that ultimately changed baseball forever.

It was a Thursday. A fire started in the Mann Gulch near Helena, Montana, and by the next day it had killed thirteen people. Montgomery Clift and Olivia de Havilland were on the cover of Movie Story. Big things happened. Little things happened. It was a busy day on the planet and in the county. But people around here still talk about that day for one simple reason. August 4, 1949 was also the day on which six-year-old Sam Haislett died and was brought back to life again by a single kiss from Charlie Beale.

It was after that day that everybody who knew him, and everybody who didn’t, called Charlie Beale by the name Beebo. They called him that because that was the first thing the child said when he opened his eyes, saved by a single kiss from Charlie Beale, alive again, after the doctor had failed.

To save one life is to save the whole entire world. That’s what the Jews say. Just one single life, among the billions being lived. It changes everything. And not just for the one who got saved.

The day before the day, the day that changed everything, Charlie took Sam out to the field by the river where he had first lived when he came to town, to make sure it had been mowed and raked, that the tables had been set up, long planks on sawhorses that could seat fourteen. He had planned a feast, and had slaughtered two baby pigs on Tuesday, and spent the afternoon digging a giant pit to roast them over a wood fire. He split logs, and Sam stacked the wood for him. As they were getting ready to leave, he showed Sam a magic trick, or the first part of it.

He asked Sam to pick out his favorite tree, and when Sam had found it at the edge of the water, a young willow with branches trailing among the minnows, Charlie had pulled from his pocket a piece of Bazooka gum, and carefully and soberly planted it in the soft dirt at the tree’s roots. Then, when it was covered over and the dirt stomped down with their boots, he promised Sam a surprise on his birthday.

Sam didn’t sleep much that night, he spent his time lying in the dark, pressing his fingers against his closed eyes to watch the fireworks in the dark, but at some point he fell, flying in the iridescent dark with Captain America, and then he woke into joy, so when he headed out the door that morning, his sixth birthday, over two thousand days on the planet, all spent in the streets of the same small town, he was heading out to wonderful. He was heading out to Charlie Beale.

Everything is different on a boy’s birthday. Every moment is blessed with a kind of luminosity of self, an awareness that every gesture, every word, is a birthday word or gesture. People know who you are, on your birthday.

At breakfast, his mother recited: “ ‘But now I am six and I’m clever as clever, so I think I’ll be six forever and ever.’ ” And then she kissed him, and said, “Happy birthday Darling,” as Will led him, eyes closed, to the back porch where a brand new bike waited for him. His birthday, his poem, his bike.

As soon as he could, he got over to Charlie’s. He couldn’t wait to find out what the next surprise was. “Morning, Sam,” said Charlie. “You ready to dig?”

When they got out to Charlie’s field, it wasn’t any later than eight o’clock, hot already, and there was his birthday surprise. The willow tree had sprouted hundreds of pieces of Bazooka overnight, from the tendrils that trailed in the water to the highest branches. A bubblegum tree, just out of nowhere, overnight. And Sam knew that Bazooka cost a penny apiece, so he was awed by the fortune his one piece of gum, planted the day before, had yielded in a single night. He picked and picked from the branches, and filled his pockets, but there was still more, higher up, hundreds of pieces he couldn’t reach, each one with bubblegum inside, and a joke, and maybe an offer for a free whistle.

“Sam,” said Charlie, slowing him down. “Sam. You’ve got a lifetime. This bubblegum is forever. It’s your birthday present. One piece at a time. Just one. It’ll last you forever. Later, we’ll harvest them all and put them in a secret place. Okay? This is your birthday, Sam, and you’ve got a whole life of Bazooka ahead of you. Imagine that.”

Sam threw his arms around Charlie’s neck, his cheeks puffed with gum, and just held him like that, smelling the morning, Charlie’s soap, the river, his birthday.

Then Charlie led him to the truck and gave him one more present, his first baseball glove, a Wilson, stiff and taut, a boy’s glove, too big now, something to grow into. Charlie told him they’d put Wesson oil in the glove that night, oil it down, and in time it would grow supple, and grow to fit exactly as his hand grew, smooth and supple as a second skin. Sam was in heaven. He had died and gone to heaven.

“Now we dig, son,” said Charlie, gently taking the boy’s arms from around his neck. “Get you a shovel out of the truck.” He’d started to talk like a country man, by then.

Sam helped for half an hour, then wandered by the river with his new glove, tossing a ball and letting it bounce off the tight new surface of the glove that smelled so sweet to him, while Charlie dug the pit for another three hours, until the hole was three feet wide and five feet deep, like a child’s grave.

Once the pit was dug, they filled it with kindling and logs and set it on fire, the blaze so hot you couldn’t get within five feet of it, so hot that any log thrown on it hissed like a snake, popped like summer fireworks, and then burst into flames immediately. The fire started, fresh wood stacked over Charlie’s head, they went back to the butcher shop to get the pigs, which had been soaking in brine in the meat locker. Charlie knew nothing about what he was doing, not really, but old man Tolley, who had sold him the three week-old piglets, who had been fattening them up for Charlie from the day they were born, had taught him carefully, step by step, about the brining, the pit, the basting with melted butter and cider, how long, how hot, how high. The old man had been doing it since he was a boy, and his father before him, so being taught how to roast a pig by old man Tolley was like being taught how to paint by da Vinci.

“Are they babies?” asked Sam, staring down at the two grayish pink carcasses floating in tubs.

“Well, they’re not getting any older, not any more,” said Will, “but that is some of the finest pig you will ever eat in your life.”

“I wish they weren’t babies.”

“If you’re going to eat it, son, you ought to know where it comes from. You’re six now. You have to pay attention. It shows respect. Always remember that. You don’t get a full belly out of nowhere.

“Can’t live on air,” said Charlie.

“I don’t need food,” said Sam.

“Everybody needs food.”

“I don’t. I’ve got Bazooka!” shouted Sam, spilling the pieces out of his pocket onto the floor.

“Where’d you get that, boy?” asked Will, gathering them up and holding out his hands.

“The tree. The magic tree.”

“I did it, Will. I gave them to the boy.”

“Wish you hadn’t done that, Charlie. Alma won’t like it, you know.”

“Sam?” Charlie knelt on the floor in front of the boy. “Whenever we pick a piece off the tree, you’ll ask your mother first, right?”

“Well. Okay.”

“Just think. That way, it’ll last longer. It’ll last forever, your whole life.”

“And how long will that be?”

“At least a hundred years. One hundred and ninety-seven years.”

“That’s a long time.”

“It’s a very very long time.”