“Yes,” he said earnestly with his high voice. “In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face. When it does, I’m going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers I’ve ever had.”
They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant to say the last words. Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. “How many other folks’ve you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?”
Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. “I guess it’s about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by since I started my tour.”
“Well, we can’t holler,” said Steve. “Better to’ve had a son thirty-six months than none whatever.”
“Well,” said Willie, and kissed Anna quickly, seized at his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon light, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running steadily.
The boys were playing on the green park diamond when he came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shadows, watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open in mouths to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially important to hold onto. The boys’ voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near Willie.
Carrying the ball forward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five years before that, and so on down the line to the year when he was really eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices saying: “What’s wrong with Willie, missus?” “Mrs. B., is Willie late agrowin’?” “Willie, you smokin’ cigars lately?” The echoes died in summer light and color. His mother’s voice: “Willie’s twenty-one today!” And a thousand voices saying: “Come back, son, when you’re fifteen; then maybe we’ll give you a job.”
He stared at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard the kids walking toward him; he felt them blot out the sun, and they were older, standing around him.
“Willie! Where you goin’?” They kicked his suitcase.
How tall they stood to the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, beckoned, and they were warm metal drawn melting upwards; they were golden taffy pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago:
“Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?”
“Aw, Willie’s too little; we don’t play with ‘kids.’”
And they raced ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and wind, and he was twelve years old and not of them any more. And the other voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain: “Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve.” “Anna, does shortness run in your family?” And the cold fist kneading at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the “folks.”
“Willie, where are you goin’?”
He jerked his head. He was back among the towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking fountain bending down.
“Goin’ a few days visitin’ a cousin of mine.”
“Oh.” There was a day, a year ago, when they would have cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their enchantment with trains and trips and far places.
“How about a coupla fast ones?” said Willie.
They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. He dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing, life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanlon, Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there! Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935! The baseball flying. The Smiths, the Eatons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children, no children! A knock on this door, a knock on that.
“Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder if—”
“A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you from, son?”
The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the smiling, the nodding, the comfortable, leisurely talking.
“Son, you look like you been traveling. You run off from somewhere?”
“No.”
“Boy, are you an orphan?”
Another glass of milk.
“We always wanted kids. It never worked out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. It’s getting late, son. Don’t you think you better hit for home?”
“Got no home.”
“A boy like you? Not dry behind the ears? Your mother’ll be worried.”
“Got no home and no folks anywhere in the world. I wonder if—I wonder—could I sleep here tonight?”
“Well, now, son, I don’t just know. We never considered taking in—” said the husband.
“We got chicken for supper tonight,” said the wife, “enough for extras, enough for company....”
And the years turning and flying away, the voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations. The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summer-night darkness, the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her voice saying:
“I look at all the little children’s faces going by. And I sometimes think, What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I can’t believe they’ll ever go the road I’m going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworth’s poem: ‘When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.’ That’s how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They’re so eager for everything! I guess that’s what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. It’s like someone threw a bunch of flowers out the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as fine as you seem?”
The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he heard his memory say:
“I worked with what I had. After my folks died, after I found I couldn’t get man’s work anywhere, I tried carnivals, but they only laughed. ‘Son,’ they said, ‘you’re not a midget, and even if you are, you look like a boy! We want midgets with midgets’ faces! Sorry, son, sorry.’ So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well go on being a boy. No use fighting it. No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I saw this man in a restaurant looking at another man’s pictures of his children. ‘Sure wish I had kids,’ he said. ‘Sure wish I had kids.’ He kept shaking his head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat there, frozen! At that very instant I knew what my job would be for most of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I had to do was be a mother’s son and a father’s pride: I turned to the man down the counter from me. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. I smiled at him....”
“But, Willie,” said Mrs. Emily long ago, “didn’t you ever get lonely? Didn’t you ever want??
?things—that grown-ups wanted?”
“I fought that out alone,” said Willie. “I’m a boy, I told myself, I’ll have to live in a boy’s world, read boys’ books, play boys’ games, cut myself off from everything else. I can’t be both. I got to be only one thing—young. And so I played that way. Oh, it wasn’t easy. There were times—” He lapsed into silence.
“And the family you lived with, they never knew?”
“No. Telling them would have spoiled everything. I told them I was a runaway; I let them check through official channels, police. Then, when there was no record, let them put in to adopt me. That was best of all; as long as they never guessed. But then, after three years, or five years, they guessed, or a traveling man came through, or a carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end.”
“And you’re very happy and it’s nice being a child for over forty years?”
“It’s a living, as they say. And when you make other people happy, then you’re almost happy too. I got my job to do and I do it. And anyway, in a few years now I’ll be in my second childhood. All the fevers will be out of me and all the unfulfilled things and most of the dreams. Then I can relax, maybe, and play the role all the way.”
He threw the baseball one last time and broke the reverie. Then he was running to seize his luggage. Tom, Bill, Jamie, Bob, Sam—their names moved on his lips. They were embarrassed at his shaking hands.
“After all, Willie, it ain’t as if you’re going to China or Timbuktu.”
“That’s right, isn’t it?” Willie did not move.
“So long, Willie. See you next week!”
“So long, so long!”
And he was walking off with his suitcase again looking at the trees, going away from the boys and the street where he had lived, and as he turned the corner a train whistle screamed, and he began to run.
The last thing he saw and heard was a white ball tossed at a high roof, back and forth, back and forth, and two voices crying out as the ball pitched now up, down, and back through the sky, “Annie, annie, over! Annie, annie, over!” like the crying of birds flying off to the far south.
In the early morning, with the smell of the mist and the cold metal, with the iron smell of the train around him and a full night of traveling shaking his bones and his body, and a smell of the sun beyond the horizon, he awoke and looked out upon a small town just arising from sleep. Lights were coming on, soft voices muttered, a red signal bobbed back and forth, back and forth in the cold air. There was that sleeping hush in which echoes are dignified by clarity, in which echoes stand nakedly alone and sharp. A porter moved by, a shadow in shadows.
“Sir,” said Willie.
The porter stopped.
“What town’s this?” whispered the boy in the dark.
“Valleyville.”
“How many people?”
“Ten thousand. Why? This your stop?”
“It looks green.” Willie gazed out at the cold morning town for a long time. “It looks nice and quiet,” said Willie.
“Son,” said the porter, “you know where you going?”
“Here,” said Willie, and got up quietly in the still, cool, iron-smelling morning, in the train dark, with a rustling and stir.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, boy,” said the porter.
“Yes, sir,” said Willie. “I know what I’m doing.” And he was down the dark aisle, luggage lifted after him by the porter, and out in the smoking, steaming-cold, beginning-to-lighten morning. He stood looking up at the porter and the black metal train against the few remaining stars. The train gave a great wailing blast of whistle, the porters cried out all along the line, the cars jolted, and his special porter waved and smiled down at the boy there, the small boy there with the big luggage who shouted up to him, even as the whistle screamed again.
“What?” shouted the porter, hand cupped to ear.
“Wish me luck!” cried Willie.
“Best of luck, son,” called the porter, waving, smiling. “Best of luck, boy!”
“Thanks!” said Willie, in the great sound of the train, in the steam and roar.
He watched the black train until it was completely gone away and out of sight. He did not move all the time it was going. He stood quietly, a small boy twelve years old, on the worn wooden platform, and only after three entire minutes did he turn at last to face the empty streets below.
Then, as the sun was rising, he began to walk very fast, so as to keep warm, down into the new town.
Invisible Boy
She took the great iron spoon and the mummified frog and gave it a bash and made dust of it, and talked to the dust while she ground it in her stony fists quickly. Her beady gray bird-eyes flickered at the cabin. Each time she looked, a head in the small thin window ducked as if she’d fired off a shotgun.
“Charlie!” cried Old Lady. “You come outa there! I’m fixing a lizard magic to unlock that rusty door! You come out now and I won’t make the earth shake or the trees go up in fire or the sun set at high noon!”
The only sound was the warm mountain light on the high turpentine trees, a tufted squirrel chittering around and around on a green-furred log, the ants moving in a fine brown line at Old Lady’s bare, blue-veined feet.
“You been starving in there two days, darn you!” she panted, chiming the spoon against a flat rock, causing the plump gray miracle bag to swing at her waist. Sweating sour, she rose and marched at the cabin, bearing the pulverized flesh. “Come out, now!” She flicked a pinch of powder inside the lock. “All right, I’ll come get you!” she wheezed.
She spun the knob with one walnut-colored hand, first one way, then the other. “O Lord,” she intoned “fling this door wide!”
When nothing flung, she added yet another philter and held her breath. Her long blue untidy skirt rustled as she peered into her bag of darkness to see if she had any scaly monsters there, any charm finer than the frog she’d killed months ago for such a crisis as this.
She heard Charlie breathing against the door. His folks had pranced off into some Ozark town early this week, leaving him, and he’d run almost six miles to Old Lady for company—she was by way of being an aunt or cousin or some such, and he didn’t mind her fashions.
But then, two days ago, Old Lady, having gotten used to the boy around, decided to keep him for convenient company. She pricked her thin shoulder bone, drew out three blood pearls, spat wet over her right elbow, tromped on a crunch-cricket, and at the same instant clawed her left hand at Charlie, crying, “My son you are, you are my son, for all eternity!”
Charlie, bounding like a startled hare, had crashed off into the bush, heading for home.
But Old Lady, skittering quick as a gingham lizard, cornered him in a dead end, and Charlie holed up in this old hermit’s cabin and wouldn’t come out, no matter how she whammed door, window, or knothole with amber-colored fist or trounced her ritual fires, explaining to him that he was certainly her son now, all right.
“Charlie, you there?” she asked, cutting holes in the door planks with her bright little slippery eyes.
“I’m all of me here,” he replied finally, very tired.
Maybe he would fall out on the ground any moment. She wrestled the knob hopefully. Perhaps a pinch too much frog powder had grated the lock wrong. She always overdid or underdid her miracles, she mused angrily, never doing them just exact, Devil take it!
“Charlie, I only wants someone to night-prattle to, someone to warm hands with at the fire. Someone to fetch kindling for me mornings, and fight off the spunks that come creeping of early fogs! I ain’t got no fetchings on you for myself, son, just for your company.” She smacked her lips. “Tell you what, Charles, you come out and I teach you things!”
“What things?” he suspicioned.
“Teach you how to buy cheap, sell high. Catch a snow weasel, cut off its head, carry it warm in your hind pocket. There!”
“Aw,” said Charlie.
She made haste. “Teach
you to make yourself shot-proof. So if anyone bangs at you with a gun, nothing happens.”
When Charlie stayed silent, she gave him the secret in a high, fluttering whisper. “Dig and stitch mouse-ear roots on Friday during full moon, and wear ’em around your neck in a white silk.”
“You’re crazy,” Charlie said.
“Teach you how to stop blood or make animals stand frozen or make blind horses see, all them things I’ll teach you! Teach you to cure a swelled-up cow and unbewitch a goat. Show you how to make yourself invisible!”
“Oh,” said Charlie.
Old Lady’s heart beat like a Salvation tambourine.
The knob turned from the other side.
“You,” said Charlie, “are funning me.”
“No, I’m not,” exclaimed Old Lady. “Oh, Charlie, why, I’ll make you like a window, see right through you. Why, child, you’ll be surprised!”
“Real invisible?”
“Real invisible!”
“You won’t fetch onto me if I walk out?”
“Won’t touch a bristle of you, son.”
“Well,” he drawled reluctantly, “all right.”
The door opened. Charlie stood in his bare feet, head down, chin against chest. “Make me invisible,” he said.
“First we got to catch us a bat,” said Old Lady. “Start lookin’!”
She gave him some jerky beef for his hunger and watched him climb a tree. He went high up and high up and it was nice seeing him there and it was nice having him here and all about after so many years alone with nothing to say good morning to but bird-droppings and silvery snail tracks.
Pretty soon a bat with a broken wing fluttered down out of the tree. Old Lady snatched it up, beating warm and shrieking between its porcelain white teeth, and Charlie dropped down after it, hand upon clenched hand, yelling.
That night, with the moon nibbling at the spiced pine cones, Old Lady extracted a long silver needle from under her wide blue dress. Gumming her excitement and secret anticipation, she sighted up the dead bat and held the cold needle steady-steady.