The Children's Crusade (11 page)

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Down the hill, down the winding road. They passed their neighbors’ mailboxes, painted tin boxes attached to wooden posts; they went by the fruit and vegetable stand at Webb Ranch, with its crates of melons and tomatoes shaded by a corrugated roof. Each summer the Blairs marked the passage of time by the berries at Webb: first strawberries, which lasted all season; then raspberries, blackberries, and loganberries; and finally boysenberries, which Bill said were the sweetest of all and which he dipped in sugar and let dry overnight, making them almost as good as candy.

At the ice cream parlor they slid into a booth, Bill on one side between the two younger boys while Robert and Rebecca settled as far apart as they could on the opposite bench, Rebecca unclear why they were fighting and Robert no longer angry at her but upset about his father’s comment at dinner. If Robert thought his new school was boring, it was boring, period. He didn’t appreciate being corrected. His father had no idea what it was like plodding from one strange classroom to another on the hottest first day of school imaginable. And trying to learn each teacher’s name, and looking
around for a familiar face in each class, just one, and discovering on two separate occasions, in science and German, that he didn’t know a single other person in the room.

They had bowls and cones and sundaes, according to appetite and drip tolerance. Outside again, they found the evening even hotter, if that was possible. “We’ll walk around the block, shall we?” Bill said, and the children were too hot to decide if this would make things better or worse. James dropped to his knees after a few steps, and his father carried him piggyback the rest of the way. People they passed on the sidewalk smiled at the sight of them. “The Pied Piper,” said an old man, and Bill whistled a quick tune and kept walking.

“Why didn’t Mom come?” Ryan said as they approached the car.

“I think she was tired,” Bill said.

“I’m tired,” James grumbled.

Bill settled James on the front seat, and the others sat in back, Rebecca in the middle. The sun had disappeared; the sky was the color of a glass of water into which you’d dipped a calligraphy pen.

“Why
didn’t
Mom come?” Ryan said again, but softly, so that only Rebecca heard him. “Because she was mad?”

“Because she didn’t feel like it,” Rebecca whispered, but she knew this was only half the story. She felt guilty that she hadn’t urged her mother to join them, and in that moment she began to hatch a plan.

The next day was much cooler, and after school she gathered her brothers under the oak tree and told them what was on her mind. “We have to think of things to do,” she said, “that Mom will want to do with us.”

“You mean like go out for ice cream?” Ryan said.

“I mean like
not
go out for ice cream. Like something else.”

Robert had had a much better second day, in fact a pretty good second day, with a great lunch period playing kickball with some other seventh-graders who didn’t think that just because you were
in junior high you had to act so big all of a sudden. “I have an idea,” he said.

“What?” Ryan said.

“We’ll go on a crusade.”

Rebecca liked it instantly. It had just the kind of purposeful sound she loved, the real, official sound of a job, instead of the kind of soft, ill-formed half-intention that so often led nowhere.

“We have to brainstorm,” she said. “Hang on.” She ran for the house and returned to the boys with a clipboard and pen.

“We could buy her some colored pencils,” Ryan said.

“No,” Robert said, “that’s the opposite of what we should do.”

“We’re brainstorming,” Rebecca said. “We’re going to write down every idea.” She wrote “Colored pencils” on the notepad and looked up again.

“Miss McKinley showed us the crayons today,” James said. “And the scissors and glue. And they go back where they came from.” He’d had a wonderful morning, three special talks with Miss McKinley by himself, near her desk. “Oh, James,” she had said at the beginning of the third talk, and he had said, “Oh, Miss McKinley,” right back at her, and she had smiled her big white smile, extra wide that time.

“When my school starts,” Ryan said, “I’m going to have Dixon and Julia for my teachers.” At his school, the classes weren’t as separate as they were at the public school, and when he said he was going to have Dixon and Julia, what he meant was that he was especially looking forward to seeing them again, Dixon because he was always ready to sit on the floor with the students and help them do their work, and Julia because she had the softest hair. Sand Hill Day was for creative children, and Ryan felt bad for his siblings that they didn’t get to go there with him. Especially James—he had hoped James would join him there, so it would be two and two.

“We have one thing,” Rebecca said. “We should have five by now.”

“How about a nature walk,” Robert said, and she wrote that down.

“A trip!” she said. It had been four years since the family had gone to Michigan, and though they’d gone somewhere every summer since then—Disneyland and Yosemite and places like that—they hadn’t been on an airplane in all that time.

“We just went on one,” Robert said, referring to the week they’d spent at Sea Ranch.

“Somewhere far away,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, I’m writing it down.”

“Mommy doesn’t like the tree house,” James said.

“No, that’s right, James,” Ryan said. “We’re thinking about what she
does
like.”

“She likes the party again now. Why did we almost not have the party this year?”

“She was tired of it,” Rebecca reminded him.

“But then she found the Chinese caterer,” Ryan added.

“This is boring,” James said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to the tree house.”

“Not by yourself, James,” Robert said, but James took off anyway, and via a quick look Robert and Rebecca decided he could go alone this time. The trail to the tree house was easy to follow and steep in only a couple of places.

“I think New York City,” Rebecca said.

“Too far away for a weekend,” Robert said.

“For Christmas.”

“But that’s Christmas. I want to be home for Christmas.”

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” She was not happy that there were only three items on the list, so she wrote “Trip” and then,
below it, “New York City,” feeling a small pang that she was counting them as two separate things when they really weren’t.

“The Golden Gate Bridge,” Ryan said, and both Robert and Rebecca beamed at him, an occurrence that was rare and special: both of them smiling at him at once. He felt a shiver across his shoulders.

“Brilliant,” Rebecca said, writing it down. Their mother liked going across the Golden Gate Bridge, and since you had to do something once you were on the other side, they sometimes went to Muir Beach, which was small and sheltered in a way the beaches closer to home weren’t.

“Sacramento?” Ryan said.

The older children shook their heads. Sacramento was where their grandparents lived, and they went there a few times a year, their mother always moody on the way home, saying things like “She’s so fussy” or “He can’t see an inch in front of his nose.”

“Not the zoo,” Rebecca said, and the boys didn’t even bother nodding.

“If it weren’t for James,” Robert said, “we could say a restaurant.”

“He might be better now,” Rebecca said, but she didn’t write it down.

Ryan said, “James should come back.” When neither of his older siblings responded, he got to his feet and went over to the top of the trail and called, “James!”

Behind him, Robert and Rebecca exchanged a nervous look.

“James!” Ryan shouted again.

“I think Carmel,” Robert said, and Rebecca wrote that down deliberately, adding “Monterey?” beneath it.

“That’s good enough,” Robert said. “We’re just brainstorming today.”

“I guess.”

Over at the top of the trail, Ryan glanced back at them with a doubtful expression. His straw-colored hair hung in wavy strands almost to his shoulders.

“He can’t climb up to the tree house by himself,” Robert said, “so it’s not a big deal.”

Rebecca headed for Ryan. “Let’s go down.”

She led the way. There were bees everywhere at this time of year, so she slowed each time she crossed a patch of sunlight. She had been stung when she was five years old, and she still remembered the ice her father had held against her ankle, so cold she couldn’t bear it but so necessary just moments after he’d withdrawn it.

“Here I am!”

James was on the trail below her in his shirt and shoes, his pants nowhere to be seen. His legs were tan from the midthigh down and pale pink where he’d been covered all summer by shorts.

“What happened to your pants?”

“I didn’t need them anymore.”

“James, what did you do?” Exasperated, she brushed past him. “James took off his pants,” she called over her shoulder.

Ryan saw James standing in front of him, half-naked.

“I didn’t climb up to the tree house,” James said.

“Good boy.”

“What the hell?” Robert said.

“I didn’t climb up to the tree house,” James said again, but with less certainty this time, recognizing that Robert’s praise was unlikely.

Rebecca returned with James’s discarded clothes. “He wet his pants. And left them there. James, what were you thinking, leaving them? Well, let’s go up. You can’t put these back on.”

He started scratching an hour later. He was in clean shorts, sitting on the floor of his and Ryan’s room playing with a small car. Ryan lay on his bed. Robert would have told James to stop, but
Ryan didn’t think it was all that important. The back was worse than the front, and James was mostly scratching the front.

“Stop scratching,” Ryan said five minutes later, by which point James had been going at it so vigorously that Ryan had started feeling a little strange in his own parts.

“I itch,” James cried.

Ryan found his mother in the mud pantry, knotting string for a wall hanging. The room was a tiny closet-size space off the kitchen, so named because it had begun life in Bill’s mind as a mudroom, done time on their architect’s drafting table as a pantry, and ended up a battleground for the ongoing fight between Penny’s crafts and an assortment of household items, some edible and some not.

“How’s my boy?” she said. Her hair hung in a single thick braid down her back; she almost never wore it loose anymore. “Not so hot today, is it?”

“Not nearly.”

“Want to check?”

The thermometer hung just outside the kitchen. It was green and white and said “Texaco” on it—they’d gotten it for free at a gas station. Eighty-one degrees, he told her.

“Positively bearable,” she said with a smile.

“I’m ready for my school.”

“I’ll bet you are, baby. Next week.”

He wondered what she’d do once he was gone. Today, with James away all morning again, she had taken him to the grocery store and then the two of them had spent an hour doing watercolors. When it was time to go get James, she kissed the top of his head and said, “That was nice.”

There was a wail from the bedroom hallway, and Ryan went to see what was going on. Rebecca and James were outside the children’s bathroom, James with his shorts off and Rebecca squatting in
front of him. When she heard Ryan, she turned and mouthed the words
Oh, no
.

James had a rash; that was all anyone could say until their father got home. Penny applied calamine lotion and gave him cold compresses, and he lay crying and scratching on his bed while she phoned the clinic once to report the problem and once more to tell her husband to hurry. It was on his penis and bottom and thighs: tiny, angry-looking red dots.

Bill got home a little before six and said the words everyone was fearing: poison oak. The older children put together the story. Down at the tree house, having wet himself, James sat down to unbuckle and remove his shoes, stood up to pull off his wet pants, sat again bare-bottomed to put his shoes back on, and finally stood and headed up the hill. For the rest of his life he would associate the terrible days of his poison oak with the letter F, never realizing it was the down, up, down, up—sit, stand, sit, stand; the same motions as on his first day with Miss McKinley—that linked them in his mind. Effing poison oak, he always said when he told the story, avoiding an actual “fucking” as if he were decorous rather than gripped by a buried memory.

Oh, but he was miserable that evening. His father gave him Benadryl, bathed him in cool water, tried to distract him with games and stories. At dusk he was put to bed and whimpered for an hour or longer, falling asleep just long enough to allow Ryan to drop off and then waking with his hand already at work, scratching. This cycle was repeated twice. Bill didn’t prescribe for his children, an ironclad rule he was never so tempted to break as on this occasion. Instead, he put James in the car and drove him to the nearby home of his colleague Marvin Miller, who had a much more relaxed attitude about doctors treating family members and who therefore would have allowed a little irritation to show at being awakened if
he hadn’t been so indebted to Bill. It was nearly midnight, and his wife was sleeping; his children were away at college. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you’ll have to go to the hospital—” At the last minute he left off the word “anyway,” realizing it contained a rebuke for the middle-of-the-night consultation.

Bill rubbed his hand over his face. Of course he would; there was nowhere else to get prednisone at this hour. Back in the car, James wailed and subsided into sobs and wailed again. Bill carried him into the ER and explained the situation, feeling a pang of guilt as he exercised his doctor’s
droit du seigneur
and followed the attending to an exam room while a little boy lay curled on the floor with obvious abdominal pain and a young man held a bloody cloth to his eye. Bill could hear the cries and groans of an adult, and he thought there was no mistaking the sound of a man with a gunshot wound. The first time he saw such a man, on the U.S.S.
Consolation
in Inchon Harbor, he was so flooded by adrenaline he nearly vomited.