No Book but the World: A Novel (15 page)

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked again when I could speak. My voice rasped; I could feel the fierceness of my own gaze as I looked at her, imploring.

She was quiet. “Let’s sit,” she said.

We sat in chairs by the stove. She was baking squash and the kitchen smelled like nutmeg. My face was wet, my lips and eyes swollen. June rubbed my back in slow circles while I regained the normal rhythm of my breath.

“He is difficult to love,” June said after a while. Softly, softly she said this, as if it was a secret she had always meant to keep. A pause. Then: “That’s not the same as unlovable.”

That was the last time I ever cried for Fred.

•   •   •

N
OW IN THE DINER
I open my own composition book, Kitty’s gift to me, and read over the few notes I compiled this morning in response to Bayard Charles’s request for any helpful documentation of Fred’s past. I tried to list all the different places he’s traveled, the various jobs he’s held along the way. But what good might this do, other than provide proof of his geographic instability? I tried to think of other doctors he might have seen, anyone who might have taken note of his apparent disability, but couldn’t come up with any names other than our old neighbor.

GINNY GANN. HOMEOPATH? SEATTLE, VANCOUVER?

I cross this out. Wherever she is, whether still in practice or not, I think it doubtful she would have kept any medical records pertaining to Fred, let alone records of a sort that might help Mr. Charles defend him. But there is another, more troubling, reason I am hesitant to look her up. If it turns out she has saved records from that time, it seems likely some of them would document injury Fred inflicted on others.

My thoughts curve again toward the summer after Neel died, when Fred went with that family to the Magdalens. I have a dim recollection of meeting them at Neel’s memorial service. The father remains an indistinct blur, but I have a definite image of the boy, twelvish, with pale, almost lunar hair, and of his tall, tawny mother, stiff-limbed and austere. It was my impression June never liked her, although possibly that’s wrong, possibly it’s borrowed from a later memory, once the trip was over, once Fred had been deposited ahead of schedule back at Batter Hollow. Amid some residue of blame, shame.

Had he been in some way responsible for the boy’s injury?

He’s the gentlest person I know
, I have a memory of June insisting. To whom? And in response to what charge?

I try to picture Fred and the boy James Ferebee, but instead of the dark and ruddy boy they have been showing on the news, I see the milk-white boy of the Magdalens instead. I picture them deep in the forest, in motion. I picture them covering the seven miles the news reports say they traveled from the pickup truck they abandoned at the trailhead, walking along paths at first and then veering off, weaving among the trees, crunching through vast tracts of dry yellow and brown leaves, the forest like a giant’s bowl of cornflakes—like we used to pretend back at Batter Hollow, Kitty and Fred and me, picking our way through the giants’ breakfast in our soft sneakers on cold mornings, whispering so as not to wake the slumbering creatures, half believing we might one day really see them rise up through the earth. I picture Fred and the boy walking and weaving through the flakes of snow the papers say fell on Thursday night last, sifting through the sieve of branches, a dusting of sugar over the cereal of dead leaves. An inch of snow accumulated through the night: slow, slow confectioners’ sugar coming down through the thick limbs of fir and maple and oak. I picture them walking all night long, staying in motion the way light and breezes and water keep moving, constantly, without tiring and without regard, much as the cold mountain air would have passed in and out of their lungs endlessly, steadily, ad infinitum. Until finitum.

I take a mouthful of soup. It has cooled to pastiness.

The waitress comes. “Anything else, hon?”

The unexpected sweetness of her address startles a lump into my throat. I look up at her and shake my head, unable to choke out words.

“Just the check, then,” she answers for me.

I try to smile quickly before she turns away, then drop my eyes back to the composition book, where below Ginny Gann I have written:

FREYBURG PRIMARY. SEPT. 1984–DEC. 1984

The dates of Fred’s brief, unwise enrollment in public school. “Unwise” being Neel’s term for it from the beginning, and June’s concession by the time the end of the year rolled around. Freddy made it through four months in the one-story sprawling brick building, where he’d been a large-boned, mop-haired, eight-year-old second-grader. I never saw him as miserable as during his short sojourn in public school—and I saw him there on pretty much a daily basis as long as he attended, since Kitty and I were fifth-graders at the same school, albeit housed down in the portables where the oldest students’ classes were held. Freddy’s own classroom, by a stroke of bad luck, was near the main entrance and catty-corner to the principal’s office.

Kitty started going to public school in third grade, after a single year of “woods school,” a term her parents used—not disparagingly, quite, but with a kind of detached amusement, as though they couldn’t imagine what their thought process had been in deciding to let her spend her first year at Batter Hollow running wild with Freddy and me. As though the relationship they now bore with the people who had made that decision was one of fond bewilderment, a sort of
what-were-we-thinking?
mixed with
aren’t-we-corkers-for-having-thought-it!

If Neel took their change of heart, and subsequent decision to send Kitty to conventional school, as an insult, at least it might have bolstered his sense of exceptionalism. A sense I must have eroded a year later, however, by following Kitty into public school—the result of a protracted battle between me and my parents, and eventually between Neel on one side and June and me on the other, for my mother came around much more quickly. Neel’s stance boiled down to: It’s Our Duty to Keep Her From the Poisonous and Petty-Minded Influence of So-Called Civilized Society. June countered with: At Her Age Friends Are Becoming More Important and After All Kitty Seems Perfectly Happy There.

For a while Neel prevailed by claiming his position was the more philosophical and objective, but in the end he weakened under the dual assault of June’s serene refusal to be converted and my own anything-but-serene insistence that he was ruining my life. He threw in the towel just in time for me to be registered for the start of school in September, and I’m afraid I was not very gracious in victory.

“You always say people should be allowed to do whatever they please so long as they’re not hurting anyone else or themselves,” I reminded him in cocky singsong. It was the eve of my first day of fourth grade.

“Ava, my girl”—he spoke with effortful jocosity—“in public school you won’t be allowed to do whatever you please. You’ll have a tidy little list of things you
are
allowed—forced, actually—to do, and a great long list of things you’re not allowed to do or think or say or ask or—”

“But
that’s
what I please, Neel. That’s exactly what I please!”

“Bosh.”

We were sitting out back at the picnic table, Neel on one of the benches, me kneeling up on top. Generations of Batter Hollow students had carved their initials into the warped and silvered wood, and as we talked I followed the irregular grooves with my fingernail, like the needle on our record player, as if by so doing I could make audible a record of Batter Hollow’s past. The sky was still aglow, barely, with a soft periwinkle light, but across the field the woods was sunk in darkness, and fireflies were beginning to test their lanterns over by the mock orange bush. Freddy and June were inside the house, dancing to the stereo. Jazz, heavy with horns, floated out the open windows.

“Just remember,” said Neel, “everything will be on a schedule. Your every action ruled not by nature but by the clock. You’ll sit at a desk according to the clock, you’ll be herded off to kick a ball according to the clock, you’ll eat lunch according to the clock, you’ll even—”

“I’ll even pee and shit according to the clock, I know, I know! You’ve told me all this stuff!” (I did not believe he could be right about this last—Kitty had only laughed uproariously when I repeated his words to her—but even if he was, I had determined that my enthusiasm would remain undimmed.) I reached over and gave his cottony curls a consolatory pat.

Neel harrumphed into his cup, a massive lavender teacup, more like a bowl, that had been made by a former student and from which he always drank his evening Postum. Just now it served also as a kind of a face shield; I couldn’t read his expression, only the corrugations of his forehead. Was he laughing? Was he upset?

Over his head, inside the house, I could see June waving her arms in a jazzy hula, her long hair swaying from side to side, and Freddy in pajamas bouncing up and down on the couch. I could not imagine Freddy doing anything according to the clock. For a moment I stung with remorse; in the morning I would be leaving him behind.

As I was determined to do.

“Dance, Neel,” I commanded, standing on the picnic table and snapping my fingers. “C’mon!” Shaking my shoulders and hips like I’d seen Jim and Katinka do at our Batter Hollow bonfires, when everybody came and toasted marshmallows and danced under the stars. Neel laughed, as I had meant him to. I hopped down and helped him to his feet and he danced with me, wagging his broad bottom like a parody of dancing; this was his only move on the dance floor, and it never failed to make Freddy and me dissolve with laughter. Only this night I found his awkwardness poignant as well as funny. It seemed unfair and even pitiable that Neel, despite believing so fervently, so faithfully, in “nature,” should possess so little natural grace.

That was a mostly happy night. Or I see it so, gazing back at it now from this little diner booth. I look back once more at the few notes I have jotted down: a sparse mess of garbled shorthand. How could anyone who wasn’t there hope to understand?

Who could ever tell a story complete?

T
HE PARKING LOT
outside Buck Wallace Community Center is packed. By the time I arrive, cars have improvised spots along both sides of the tree-lined street, and I find myself pulling over in what is really no more than a shallow ditch. As I head back down the road, the nearer I get to the white clapboard building, the more I find myself not alone but part of a convergence. Men and women and boys and girls—we are all walking slowly, singly or in pairs or in clusters, gathering more thickly as we near the high arched double doors. And although I am here of my own volition, I am struck by the discomfiting impression, as we all keep approaching from various directions, funneling toward a single point, that I am caught up by some force drawing us inexorably, nearing a destination toward which we have no choice but to proceed.

Once when Freddy and I were about nine and eleven, we had a music festival at Batter Hollow, an all-day out-of-doors event with a soundstage and colored tarps and picnic blankets crowding the meadow. It was huge. Alumni from every decade of the school’s existence had come. There were bluegrass bands and Afro-pop, reggae and rock. It was hot and dusty and by late afternoon all the kids were practically drunk on lemonade and watermelon and brownies and sun. One of the last acts was a funk band, and as soon as they started to play, that was it for Freddy. He began dancing in his wild, transported way, and then pushing through the crowd until he reached the very edge of the stage. I threaded after him, apologizing to the people he’d stepped on, worried he’d try to climb right up with the musicians. Once he’d reached the edge of the stage he stopped, although he did hold onto the vibrating platform with both hands, as though he needed to feel the music inside his body.

This funk group seemed to be playing one endless song; it went on and on with no clear sense of shape, at least not to my ear, no sense of approaching a climax or circling around to a resolution. I began to lose myself in the tapestry of sound, letting it ripple over and through me, jabbing here, twisting into smoky coils there, then undulating apart. It occurred to me the musicians were making it up as they went along, and the freedom and difficulty of this amazed me. Standing so close, I could see the way they communicated with one another, laughing as though the melody had made a joke, then shaking their heads from side to side as though the music testified to some unspeakable profundity. During a long solo, the drummer craned his face skyward, eyes closed, sweat streaming, lips parted in a grimace or wince. When the music stopped, I clapped almost as enthusiastically as Freddy, whose elbows pumped and whose face had given itself over to a loopy, beatific grin.

As the musicians started putting away their instruments, someone in the audience yelled, “More!” and someone else, “Do another!” and quickly the whole crowd took up the chant, “Encore! Encore!” and began to clap rhythmically. Although I wasn’t trying to match the crowd’s rhythm, my own clapping got somehow conscripted into the mass beat. I tried clapping off the beat and couldn’t. I found this weirdly displeasing, even debasing. It reminded me for some reason of the mechanical rides, the hippo and race car, in front of the Grand Union. I stopped clapping and wiped my hands on my pants. Around me the tidal throb continued along with the shouts of the smitten, insistent crowd. I looked over to see what Freddy was doing, and he wasn’t there. Then I saw he was there, but no longer standing: he lay writhing on the ground in a kind of a fetal ball, eyes squeezed shut, hands clamped over his ears, mouth open in an inaudible squall.

I felt closer to him in that moment than ever before or since. I had the sense that I understood, implicitly and absolutely, the cause of his anguish: the loss of the band’s free and boundless improvisations, replaced by the tyranny of this rhythmic clapping. It was as if in this one instant I’d been given the power to realize the crucial thing about my brother: that his odd and persistent compulsion to drum, to beat and tap and kick at things, was not pointless and arbitrary, not simply an annoying tic. He needed to disrupt order and pattern, to search out and produce irregularity, randomness. He had a horror of anything lockstep. I loved him searingly in that moment.

In a way, it is the complement of that moment in Midgetropolis when Kitty pricked my thumb and Freddy cried. Funny that my own revelation came years after Freddy’s, when he was supposed to be the one deficient in empathy.

•   •   •

B
UCK
W
ALLACE
C
OMMUNITY
C
ENTER
must once have been a church, with its high, intricately arched windows of leaded glass and its floor plan like a cross, but instead of pews there are metal folding chairs, and instead of an altar there’s a stage with an American flag and an upright piano and a podium. Next to the podium stands an easel displaying a poster-sized likeness of James Ferebee—the same school portrait, as if no other photograph of the boy exists. On the floor beside it, a metal pitcher holds white lilies. Other, smaller bouquets in plastic and paper sheaths have been laid along the edge of the stage.

The building is not large; the downstairs is already filled. Newcomers are being directed to a balcony, and I let myself be carried along. At the top of the narrow stairway I see that it, too, is filling. I should go. Who am I to take a seat from one of the good citizens of Perdu? I turn, but my path is blocked by the people coming up behind me. Then an elderly woman in a coat the color of a daffodil slides over on the bench where she is sitting. When I hesitate, she looks up at me and nods.

I sit. The woman holds a program in her blue-veined hands, a simple photocopied sheet. I hadn’t noticed these downstairs. When she feels me looking over her shoulder, she angles the paper discreetly, almost inadvertently, allowing us both to read. The hospitality of this gesture seems to reside not simply in its generosity, but also—more so—in its tact.

First the waitress’s “hon” and now this. No—first the man who pulled over in the rain yesterday to help me free my tire from the ditch. No, first Mrs. Tremblay’s small talk this morning, allowing me to be her ally in the grievance over moldy bread. And before that Bayard Charles with his plastic cup of water, his promise to get me on the list. And Kitty coming over with the composition book. And Dennis, my husband, my love (all at once I wish he were here, wish I’d asked him to come, wish I trusted him not to love me less if he knew Fred more!), topping off the fluids, leaving the chocolate bar on the dash.

So much kindness.

The service begins with a song I do not know, a hymn, I think it must be, played on the piano by a classmate of James Ferebee’s (as the program tells us) and sung, it would seem, by everyone. From either side of me, from behind me and down below, voices rise in unison. Every last one of Neel’s diatribes against conformity, against civilized society rains down upon me now. Every last one of the scores of people packed into this building seems to know the song except for me. I am revealed. I half expect to be asked to leave. I do not belong here. We do not belong, Freddy and me; not belonging was our bread and butter.

And in fact my silence does not go unnoticed. My daffodil-coated neighbor, without interrupting her singing, turns her program over. The back is printed with lyrics. She extends the paper toward me in her blue-veined hand. In embarrassment and under duress I take it and add my voice to the rest, faltering and small. But the melody proves easy to learn, and by the end of the song I find I am singing not simply out of politeness. Our voices in this vaulted place are rough-hewn and sterling, and I, who am accustomed to singing with others only as the Singalong Lady, find surprisingly exultant the way our voices flock together to hold the song’s last note.

Now begin the speakers: the middle school principal, the boy’s homeroom teacher, his gym teacher, his school bus driver. Each in turn mounts the stage and we hear a parable, a poem, a testament to his ball handling, a description of how he always liked to sit in the back of the bus going fast over the potholes, so he’d get bounced out of his seat. We hear how Jimmy—they are all calling him Jimmy, and he is becoming Jimmy in my mind, the pieces of a real boy converging, constructing someone solid and singular—was crazy about motorcycles and monster trucks, how he loved being allowed to drive some of the junkers around his grandpa’s lot, how he’d looked forward to getting his permit in a few years and then his license and one day having wheels of his own.

The last speaker, a squarely built, older woman, has a wide face and a chin that flows pigeon-like into her neck. She has to catch her breath before introducing herself as Jimmy’s first babysitter, back when he was a “little nipper.” She says how Jimmy liked her to sing to him, that there was one song in particular he’d always ask for. Says how he’d sit on the floor, thumb in his mouth, take out the thumb to say, “Do Joe again,” then stick it back in. She acts it out for us. She is a wonderful storyteller, this wheezy old woman, because while she talks I am seeing it, seeing just what Jimmy must have looked like, the way his fat little legs would have stuck out before him, dimpled at the knees; the way his hair would’ve curled long over his ears and down his pipe cleaner neck; the way his lashes would’ve cast fringed shadows.

Then she begins to sing the song she says was his favorite, and it’s one I know, “Old Joe Clark.” It’s one I actually do when I’m being the Singalong Lady. A rollicking tune, the children love it. I pass out all my clappers and shakers and tambourines and they get up and dance. But this woman doesn’t do it that way. She slows it down, turns it into a kind of ballad or spiritual, almost a dirge.

Ole Joe Clark he had a mule

Think her name was Sal.

Her singing voice is fine, full-timbred and with a husky warmth, yet bell-like on the high notes. It reaches effortlessly up to the balcony, curving lush and full across the rafters.

Heard he loved that dirt’ ole mule

More’n any gal.

Perhaps it has to do with her vivid portrait of him as a baby—seated on the floor, gazing up, riveted by her melody—but one feels she is singing specifically and exclusively to him. One feels he must be here, unseen, listening, drinking in her voice that is for him and him alone. I get the queerest feeling that we are the ghosts, shadowy, insubstantial, congregated here only to witness the living communion that is occurring between this old woman, this newly dead child.

The song has many verses, and as she continues, never varying her tempo or the tenderness with which she delivers each note, another sound becomes intermittently audible, gradually increasing in volume and frequency: sniffles. Little moans. Here and there a sob blossoms and is suppressed. Some of the weeping emanates from people who sound as if they lack practice crying; men, their sobs have a raw, amateur quality, the more heartrending for it.

The woman comes to the final refrain:

Fare thee well Ole Joe Clark

The sweetness of the notes compounds their loneliness. They soar and fade like the burnt, spent ends of fireworks, their ashy tendrils scribbling slowly toward the ground.

The light outside has lessened. The diamantine windowpanes glitter and a rusty pink has bled into the lower rim of sky.

Soon it will be time to call the jail.

Fare thee well now I say

It comes to me why I am able to visualize Jimmy in such vivid detail: it isn’t Jimmy, but Freddy I am seeing. Freddy’s long lashes casting shadows; Freddy’s sweet plump toddler legs; Freddy’s thumb, glistening and pruney in the corner of his mouth. My own story obscuring the view. And it is Freddy I am mourning here, at Jimmy Ferebee’s memorial service, Freddy in his crinkly plastic diaper with his uncut curling hair soft against my chin as he leaned back against me on the gray flowered couch to see the illustrations as I read.

I am mourning Freddy who is gone, and aching for Fred who resides at this moment a few miles from here in a long yellow building set back from the road, and both feelings, I fear, are discreditable and blameworthy here, in the Buck Wallace Community Center on the occasion of James Ferebee’s memorial service.

But perhaps not. Perhaps it is through my feeling for Freddy, the boy I have known, that I am able to feel for the boy who is a stranger to me, and for all the strangers here. How many of them, my neighbors on this bench, and on all the seats above and below, knew him? I consider the daffodil-coated woman sitting on my right, her blue-veined hands now folded in her lap. Is she here because of some connection with the family, or simply because she is a member of this community? And in that way, connected.

Behind me someone sniffles. How many in this room are thinking of someone else right now? Are we not all guided in our grief by the constellation of associations sorrow brings?

Fare thee well Ole Joe Clark

The babysitter’s voice sends the line once more with a kind of ascetic radiance throughout the room, until it gives way to a fragmentary pause, a controlled particle of silence, itself expanding from floorboards to rafters, filling the space with a great and ruthless nothingness. Then she brings the tune home, lays it to rest—

Haven’t got time to stay.