Thief of Dreams (10 page)

On the day he'd answered the question, he was crossing the ballfield at lunchtime when Earl stepped in front of him. “You're just what we need, ain'tcha?” he'd said, “a pissant bookworm,” and he'd put his hand over James's face and pushed him back.

But James had only walked around him toward where Lester was sitting under the huge sycamore by the creek; they always ate their lunches there as though on the most remote edge of the civilized world. “What are you anyway?” Earl had shouted at his back, “a pissant or a bookworm?”

Halfway across the ballfield Tim Lanich had come running up behind him and flung himself sideways at the backs of James's knees, spilling him hard and straining both his back and his knees and then leaping up and running back to where Earl and Tom Lanich stood laughing.

“Lester?” Mrs. Arents said, ignoring the three or four girls who had raised their hands, “why do you suppose the speaker in the poem wants him moved into the sun, and who do you suppose
him
might be?”

Through the fingers shading his brow, James watched Lester, who didn't speak or even seem to breathe but merely stared down at his desk while a ferocious blush rose out of his ragged shirt collar into his tall, shy neck. Why did she have to pick on him? He wouldn't say a word, and she must know it by this time, since he hadn't answered anything but the roll call all week. But Lester knew about death, James was certain of that, knew about it way down in his bones, even if he didn't care to talk about it or understand the poem.

“Timothy?” Mrs. Arents said.

“What?” Tim Lanich said.

“Why does the poet want him moved into the sun?”

“Cause he won't get up.”

“And why won't he get up, kind sir?” Mrs. Arents asked.

Tim pulled the corners of his mouth down and raised his shoulders.

“Probably drunk too much the night before,” Earl offered and got a few scattered snickers.

“Probably
drank
too much,” Mrs. Arents corrected. “And who do you think this
him
might be, Earl?”

“It don't say,” Earl said. “Maybe his dick,” he added in a lower voice.

“Yes, Earl?” Mrs. Arents said.

“Nuthin,” Earl said.

All at once James liked the poem and regretted his earlier attitude. It was the poet's sentiment that counted after all, his care and sadness about the death of his friend, his unwillingness to believe that nothing could be done to change it.

“James?” Mrs. Arents said, “will you enlighten us, please?”

“Please, pissant, enlighten us,” Earl said from across the room.

Was she stone deaf? Couldn't she hear at all? Why wouldn't she call on one of the girls who had their hands up and waving? James had heard his cousins say she was very partial to boys and, in spite of her age, was a terrible flirt and had been ever since her husband had died about a hundred years ago.

“James?”

“Well,” James said, “the poem doesn't say who has died; maybe a friend or a father or a brother?” He scratched his head and frowned at the page. “But he was probably a farmer once, since he used to get up and sow his fields, and maybe later, he was a soldier in France, but it says the sun always woke him, and so the speaker wants him put gently out where the sun can touch him in hopes that the sun will bring him back to life.” He didn't want to look up, not at her or anyone, so he kept staring down at the poem, hoping she would go on to someone else.

“Why did you say the dead person was a soldier, James?” Mrs. Arents asked.

“I don't know,” he answered. “That was stupid. Maybe it was because of France, or the snow? I don't know why I said it.”

“Oh but it wasn't stupid,” Mrs. Arents said. “Wilfred Owen is very famous for his poems about soldiers and the horrors of the battlefield.”

“I didn't know,” James said. “It was just a stupid guess.”

“Go on to the second stanza, if you please, James.”

He did not please. It made his stomach hurt. “Well,” he said, holding his head miserably between his hands, “the poet says the sun can wake the seeds and once gave life to, you know, the cold earth, so he wants to know why, when there's already a person there who is still warm, why it wouldn't be a lot easier to make him alive again. I mean, if the sun started with nothing but clay and made it finally into something as tall and complicated as a man, the poet wants to know why it would bother, if the man was only going to die; I mean, the poet doesn't understand why the sunbeams went to all the trouble in the first place.” His head between his hands, as though between the jaws of a vice, James waited for her to go on to someone else, waited for the bell to ring, or something, anything, to come along and release him.

“Would you tell the class what ‘fatuous' means, please?” she asked.

“I can't,” he said. “I don't know what it means. I just left it out when I read that line.”

“And ‘futility'?”

“I think it means hopeless,” he said.

“That's very close. It really means useless, and ‘fatuous' means unconscious or silly. But you did beautifully with the poem, kind sir, and I'm sure we're all impressed and grateful.”

“I sure-the-fuck-am,” Earl said under his breath just as the bell began ringing as long and loud as a fire alarm.

While the class shuffled noisily into the hall, James sat at his desk with his head down, and when at last he took a deep breath and looked up, the room was empty except for Mrs. Arents, who in her shaky, ineffectual way was trying to tidy her desk; and Lester, who was waiting patiently by the door. James gathered his books. She told them to be sure and have a lovely weekend. And he and Lester left by the rear of the building, since both of them knew without having to discuss it, that Earl and the twins rode the first bus and would be waiting out front.

Without speaking, they crossed the ballfield and the trestle over the creek, following an abandoned, narrow-gauge railroad track toward Lester's house. After a quarter of a mile they left the faded cinders and rotten ties to go cross-country, Lester spreading the strands of a barbed-wire fence for James to climb through and James returning the courtesy.

Lester was worn down by his own brand of misery, and James knew it. In the eighth grade or no, Lester could scarcely read or write, and he would accept no help from James. He meant only to endure this last year until he was sixteen and could quit school forever, just as he had endured every year since he'd given up jumping out of windows. He'd simply made up his mind, long ago, that school and books were not for him, that he could not and would not learn those things that were taught in a classroom, and neither James nor anyone else could convince him otherwise. He was determined to wait it out like some exquisite torture.

Sometimes James nearly envied him, if only because he'd taught himself to be almost invisible. Anyway his classmates didn't seem to see him. He never spoke to them, or acknowledged them, or asked anything from them; and somehow, over the years, he'd taught them to look beyond him or around him just as they might have looked past a fence post or a tree. Never mind that she'd called on him that day, even Mrs. Arents wasn't immune to his magic. Already she seldom asked him a question, and when she did forget and call his name, something peculiar seemed to happen to her, as though she realized she'd called on an empty seat, and she never pressed it. The trick was all the more remarkable because Lester looked even sillier than Virginia and Clara had claimed. On his own ground or out fishing or doing chores, he looked okay, but at school his clothes were suddenly so ill-fitting and ragged, he resembled a clown. Roy had made the whole thing worse by buying a huge pair of reddish-yellow, high-top work shoes for Lester to grow into that seemed almost to glow and emitted an outrageous odor of leather James could smell all the way across the classroom. But Effie's haircut was the cruelest joke of all. Lester had been woolly-headed all summer, and James hadn't been prepared to find him looking like a bottle brush, cropped on top and shaved from the tops of his ears down, straight around his head. It took talent, mystifying talent, James thought, to be inconspicuous, almost invisible, when you looked like Lester.

When they came to the fence around Roy's land, James spread the strands of barbed wire first so Lester could slip through. On the other side they climbed up on a granite outcropping and sat down as they had done every day that week, looking silently out across the valley, each of them locked in his own particular brand of trouble. They would part here, Lester going off to the right athwart the grade of the mountain and James going straight up the valley toward his grandmother's table and the trailer. Still, they sat together for a long time, not saying anything but merely thinking and smelling the sweet scent of ragweed and ripening apples and all that went into the faint but real perfume of the approaching fall.

It had been unseasonably and steadily cool, and on the mountaintops there was already a little color, which would spread and get richer and deeper until, by the first week of October, it would have come creeping down into the valleys. Almost every night had been in the thirties, and on the second of September there had been enough frost to singe the leaves of his grandfather's squash, even if it had left almost everything else in the garden untouched. When he had time to notice this sweet, sad change of season, it was almost enough to break James's heart, although he couldn't have said why.

“Want to do something tomorrow?” he asked at last and without looking at Lester.

“Tomorrow afternoon, I expect,” Lester said, gazing off in the distance himself, “got to help Poppa grade tobacco in the mornin.”

“Well,” James said after another long pause, “I'd better get going I guess,” and he slid off the face of the outcropping to the ground.

“See you, buddy,” Lester said.

“See you,” James said.

It was just that his summer had been stolen from him, he thought after he'd walked a while. That was why the fall seemed unusually sad. He had borne the unhappiness between his mother and father and therefore merely existed through the summer, and so it had slipped away. It seemed to him he'd spent most of his time sitting up in a huge, grimy catalpa tree on the edge of the trailer park in Knoxville, watching traffic slip under the blue haze of its exhaust, either west into the city or east toward the country. After supper he nearly always climbed into the ancient, half-dead catalpa and stayed until it was time to go in and try not to notice the deadly silence his parents maintained between them like the aftermath of a gunshot. Oh, he'd gotten to go to a movie now and then, and sometimes his troubles seemed kind enough to wait for him outside while he went in where magic could happen, his spirit could still rejoice and even note the earmarks and mannerisms of the hero's courage, as though for future use. And once his father and his mother and he, all three, spent a grand spectacle of an evening at the Barnum
&
Bailey Circus. But if there had been more to June, July, and part of August than that, then he couldn't remember it. Somehow both the beginning and the end of summer had come when he'd gotten to his grandparents' house, and he'd had only a small taste before his mother was buying him school clothes at Green's Department Store, he was getting a haircut in the barber shop down the street, and a heartbeat later, he was in Mrs. Arents's eighth-grade classroom. So. No wonder the cool air and smell of fall saddened him, he thought. No wonder his stomach seemed to hurt.

But as he climbed over a fence and came up out of the ditch into the road, some chamber of his heart seemed to insist that the grief was deeper than that, deeper than the loss of summer or even being trapped in eighth grade with the likes of Earl Carpenter and the Lanich twins.

He came in sight of his grandparents' house just as Virginia and Clara climbed down from the school bus. It was the one he was supposed to ride, since the grammar school and high school were separated only by a small dirt parking lot and used the same buses; but he'd never once ridden it. His cousins didn't seem to see him. Waving to someone on the bus and looking wonderfully normal and happy, they climbed the flagstone walk and flounced into the house. He wondered if he'd ever know, or could even learn, what they seemed born knowing. Somehow, he doubted it.

When he had let himself into the small, stale trailer and changed out of his school clothes, as his mother insisted he do the moment he got home, he went out to the huge pile of wood by the barn and loaded his arms. It was his great pleasure to carry wood, and he liked even better to split kindling—at least once his grandfather had grown to trust him not to ruin the blades of the double-bitted ax—and he always had to take care not to split too much of it. Beside his grandmother's cook stove, there was a small box for kindling and a larger one for stove-wood. He filled the large one first, which took him three trips. “Lordy, chile, that's a gracious plenty,” his grandmother said, which pleased him. Then, since it had grown so cool and his grandfather built a fire in the living room fireplace each evening, he filled the huge wood cradle by the hearth, which took him five trips and got him sweaty. But then it was that time of day he loved best, when the smell of wood seemed strongest, and the shadows had grown long, and the air had grown sharp and crisp. While the sweat at his temples dried, he chose pieces of maple with the straightest grain and split them neatly into kindling, his left hand, which held the wood, daring the right, which held the ax. And his spirits began to lift, as they always did, as though by his labor he could earn a place in his grandparents' household and be real family and not someone they merely tolerated. Lately he had even begun to enjoy dinnertime. He'd always thought his grandmother was the world's best cook, but the main thing was that his cousins were back in school and so interested in telling stories about their teachers and friends, they barely noticed him.