The important thing, though—it was still here. Still his. Once again he found himself smiling. Then he stood up and retraced his steps, back along the tree line to the road.
He was just wheeling his bike up out of the ditch when a car came around the curve ahead of him, and he stood there waiting till it passed.
There were two people in the front seat, and as it sped by, Buck saw that it was Ethan Holt and his dad. Ethan’s face had a look of surprise as they passed, and then the car was gone.
•••
Here it was: last day of seventh grade. And the worst.
In civics, Miss Gordon had a game. She was a young teacher in her second year, and near the end of class, she smiled as she handed a sheet of paper to each person in the front seats. Few teachers expected any serious learning to take place the day before summer vacation began, and often had something fun to do.
“There are six quotations on each sheet, and each sheet is different,” she explained. “These are famous quotations on all sorts of subjects. Each person in the front seats will read their first quotation aloud and see who in the class can guess who said it. Then you’ll pass the papers to the person behind you, and they’ll do the same. We’ll see how many we can guess before class is over.”
Buck, in the third seat from the front, wished with all his heart that he had taken the back row when he came in. Instead, he had followed Nat, taking a seat just behind him, and now he mentally calculated how long it would take before the sheet in their row got back to him. Each class was forty minutes long. Five rows, with four people per row…
He and Nat had eaten lunch together again today, and if Nat remembered his recent weirdness, he didn’t show it. Now, Buck thought, if he could just get through this class without a major blockage…
“ ‘Four score and seven years ago…’ ” came the first quotation, and almost everyone got it right: Lincoln.
“ ‘One small step for man, one giant step for mankind,’ ” read the first person in the next row. Most of the class seemed to know it was said by the first astronaut who stepped on the moon, but only a few remembered that it was Neil Armstrong.
The quotes continued until the last person in the first row of seats had read his, and then all the sheets were passed to those behind them. Buck looked at the clock. This was going faster than he’d thought. He could feel perspiration trickling down his back.
For a long time the class was stumped on “ ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’ ” A debate broke out, and Buck watched the minute hand moving around and around.
“Well, let’s move on, class,” Miss Gordon said. “But I’m surprised you didn’t know that was President John F. Kennedy.”
“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ ” read the next girl, and several voices answered at once: “Patrick Henry!”
Buck’s heart began to pound. There was a quote by Julius Caesar that no one guessed, and it was six minutes before the bell. Two more students, and the papers would be passed along to the third row. Four minutes…Three minutes…Two…
Then the sheet of paper came gliding over Nat’s shoulder and sailed onto the floor. Buck swallowed as he leaned down to pick it up in slow motion.
When he righted himself, his eyes traveled down the paper and settled on the next quote in the line. He felt his throat going tight: To be or not to be; that is the question.
Almost every single word began with a problem letter for Buck, a letter demanding explosive kinds of sounds: Ts and Bs were the worst—sharp sounds that even hurt his tongue to look at them, that stuck in his throat where they wouldn’t come out. Choose another quote, he told himself, and he scanned the page. No, the next one began with a D….
“Buck?” the teacher said.
He looked at the clock and down again. One minute left. One minute of absolute torture and humiliation. People were beginning to look his way.
“T…t…t…t…,” Buck began. The T was trying to get through, but his jaws were so rigid they even held his tongue prisoner.
He was running out of breath. He stopped, his shoulders sagging, took a monstrous breath, and tried again: “T…t…t…”
Someone giggled.
“Take your time,” Miss Gordon said.
“He is!” someone said, and a few of the kids laughed.
“T…to b…b…be…be,” Buck said, gasping, and when he finally got to the last part of the quote, the part he could probably say, the bell rang.
Nobody stayed around to hear how perfectly he read the rest. And before Miss Gordon, with her sympathetic eyes, could make her way back to him, before even Nat could say anything, Buck scooped up his books with one hand, backpack with the other, and half walked, half galloped out the door.
•••
On the bus, he sat four rows up from Pete Ketterman and his gang at the back. He positioned himself so that his body took up the whole seat, and neither Katie nor anyone else made a move to sit with him. He was glad, in fact, that Nat rode a different bus because he wouldn’t have wanted to share the seat, even with him.
Buck wished more than ever that he was in the Hole right now, surrounded on all sides with rock and roots and earth, neither seen nor heard by anyone.
“Hey, Buck-o!” came Ethan Holt’s voice over the rattle and chatter. “What were you doing out on old Bluestone Road?”
Buck almost stopped breathing. He refused to turn around.
“He was clear out there?” Rob asked.
“Yeah. Pushing his bike up out of the ditch. You ride off the road, Buck-o?”
“What do you think he was doing?” said Pete. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
The four boys laughed, and a few girls ducked their heads and giggled too.
Except for the embarrassment, Buck was almost glad that this was what they thought. Just a brief pit stop down in the weeds.
“Hey, Buck-o, it’s the last day of school,” Pete called out. “Come September, Ethan and Isaac and me won’t be on the bus anymore. Aren’t you gonna miss us?”
That was one thing to be grateful for, Buck thought, except that Rob would still be here.
They tired of their heckling after a while, however, and talked about which bus they’d be catching in September, how early they’d have to get up to catch it. But it made Buck think about all the tricks they’d played on him the last two years—the embarrassment of knowing his face was Christmas red, that everyone was looking at him, whispering about him, and Pete Ketterman didn’t care. Pukeman Ketterman just loved to watch him squirm. Boy, was Pukeman ever going to get it when Buck got home.
It was Isaac’s stop, but Pete and Rob and Ethan usually got off with him. They always had something going, the four of them—they were just like Buck and David used to be—close.
As they passed Buck’s seat, one of them whomped him on the head, and Pete said, “What were you doing down in the weeds, Buck-o? Wet your pants?”
“Shut up, Puke Face,” Buck muttered, and felt his jaw freeze. Had he said that?
Pete came to a dead stop, Ethan bumping into him from behind.
“What’s that? What’s that?” Pete asked, leaning down, his face only inches from Buck’s.
Buck didn’t answer.
“You hear what he called me?” Pete said, turning to the others in mock horror. “The weirdo called me Puke Face. What d’you think we ought to do with him?”
“C’mon, fellas. Out! Out!” the driver yelled. “The rest of these kids want to get home too!”
Issac sent Buck’s cap sailing toward the back window, and the four boys tumbled off the bus, laughing. Outside, however, Pete thumped hard on the window next to Buck, and he was only half grinning.
“Oh, Buck-o!” Isaac shouted. “You’re in for it now!”
•••
Now there was another thing to be careful about: not letting any of Pete’s gang see him out on Bluestone Road again. Surely they’d be more tha
n curious. If they found the Hole before he could explore it…That was the worst nightmare of all.
Buck was waiting for the day his dad and Joel would be out cutting down trees again, Gramps in charge of the sawmill; when Uncle Mel would be on another run, and Mom at work, Katie wherever…Maybe in the next week or two, if he was lucky.
On Saturday, his first day of vacation, he took the hoe to both the bean patch and the carrots, then lay on his bed, propped up on one elbow, and began a new Pukeman comic strip. “Pukeman Makes Spaghetti,” he titled it in heavy black pencil.
In the first square, Pukeman was wearing a chef’s apron and mixing the dough.
In the second square, he dropped the dough in the funnel of a big machine.
In the third square, with nothing coming out the other end, Pukeman stuck his head in the funnel to see what was wrong.
In the fourth square, his two feet were waving in the air as he was sucked down into the funnel, and in the final square, he was coming out the trough at the other end in ribbons, his body divided into noodles.
It was satisfying to draw, and now and then Buck found himself chuckling out loud. But in the end, it really didn’t change anything, did it? Pete Ketterman was Pete Ketterman, no matter what happened to him on paper.
•••
Mom had the day off. She came in Buck’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, one hand resting on the green quilt, the other on her knee. Buck pretended to keep on drawing even though he’d finished the cartoon. He was glad she couldn’t see it. He didn’t want any questions.
“Buck,” she said, “we need to talk about your stuttering.”
He let a deep sigh serve as his answer.
“No, we really do,” she continued, and Buck could see one finger nervously scratching at the quilt as she talked. “I want to know I’ve done everything I possibly could to help you. You understand that, don’t you?” She waited.
“I g…guess so.”
“It…really hurts me to see you hurting, Buck.”
“I’m n…not hurting so b…ba…bad.”
“Buck…” She touched his hand and kept it there. “You would make me very happy if you’d go to a healing service with me over in Hillsdale on Sunday afternoon.”
“Mom!” He jerked his head around and glared at her, then returned to his notebook.
“I read about a faith healer, Sister Pearson, coming all the way from Richmond to hold some healings in the area. The article said she’s worked some real miracle cures for all kinds of problems. All I’m asking is for you to go with me.”
“I’m n…not hurting that bad,” Buck said again, without looking up from his paper.
“Well, I’m hurting for you.” There was a catch in his mother’s voice that Buck felt all the way down to the soles of his feet. “Please, Buck. If Jesus could cure the lepers and raise the dead, couldn’t we show just a little faith in his power and see if it might help? It’s just this one time.”
“It’s c…clear over in Hillsdale, Mom!”
“I know. But Sunday’s the last day she’ll be here, and then she’s going on down to the Carolinas. We might never get another chance like this one.”
Buck was trying to remember if Hillsdale sent their students to his school. No, they didn’t, because they had their own basketball team.
Mom squeezed his hand and Buck swallowed.
“Please, Buck.”
For thirty seconds or so, Buck didn’t answer. As though if he didn’t, she’d just get up and leave the room.
“Please…,” she said again.
He took a deep breath. “Just this one t…time.”
Now that he had said yes, Buck wished he hadn’t. He didn’t mind going to church on Sunday mornings sometimes with Mom and Katie—even Dad, when he went along. He liked that he could sing every word of the hymns without stuttering once. He could even do the responsive readings, where everyone was reciting the same thing at the same time.
And Pastor Otis was okay. He’d taught Buck’s Sunday school class once when Buck was nine, and one Sunday he told the kids that they could ask him any question at all about God or Jesus or sin. In fact, he had them write their questions down on slips of paper, fold them up, and put them in a box. Then he tossed them around a few times to mix them up, and read each one aloud, answering it in front of the class.
David had been here then, and his question was, “Who made God?” Four of the kids—and Buck suspected they were girls—had questions about sin: “Is it a sin to go to a movie with bad words in it?” Buck’s question, though, was “Is heaven boring?”
“These are all good questions,” Pastor Otis had said. “They show that you are thinking about your religious lives and what God has in store for you. Who made God? God simply was and is and always will be. How do we know he didn’t make himself?”
And when David had given Buck the eye-rolling look, Pastor Otis had said, “If God is all-powerful, then why is that not possible?”
Finally, when he picked up Buck’s question and read it aloud, he had smiled and said, “Is heaven boring? I want to ask you, is chocolate boring? Are roller coasters boring? I don’t know what they’ve got in heaven, but think of all the pleasures of this earth and perhaps you can imagine what heaven is like. Everything you love multiplied by millions.”
He made heaven sound like an amusement park, Buck had thought. And even those things could get boring if you did them long enough. Eternity was pretty long.
Out in the parking lot later, waiting for their parents, David had said, “I don’t think he really knows any of it, do you? Did you notice how he always answered the question with a question?”
But the question Buck had thought a lot about but never asked was this: if God could do anything, even make himself, why hadn’t he cured Buck of his stuttering? Buck had certainly asked him enough. In every prayer he’d ever prayed, that had been part of it.
Maybe Sister Pearson had the answer.
Still. He’d never been to a healing service, and life, to Buck Anderson, was something you always had to look out for, be ready for, and anticipate what was coming at you next. He pressed his head hard against the back of the seat as he watched the clear path the wiper blades made on the windshield, the way the rain simply drizzled back on it again. He’d rather be on the bus going to school, even with Pete Ketterman sitting behind him, than being here. His mother slowed the car as they entered the town of Hillsdale. This, he felt, was going to be a big mistake.
•••
The first surprise was that the event took place in a tent, not a church. It was on a big grassy lot at the outskirts of town, beyond a Goodwill store. The words on the white banner stretched between two poles at the front of the lot were slightly blurred from the rain: FAITH HEALING, 4 P.M. ALL WELCOME. Still, the area was nearly filled with cars. Some people opened umbrellas as they got out; others simply made a dash for the tent, holding on to each other so as not to slip on the wet grass. A man in a wheelchair was covered top to bottom in a plastic raincoat.
It certainly wasn’t a circus tent, but it could hold a fair number of people. There was sawdust on the ground to keep the feet dry, and maybe sixty or so folding chairs. Two wide aisles led to the platform in front, where only a chair and a table with a glass of water on it waited. And two middle-aged men were handing out song sheets, shaking folks’ hands, asking where they were from, and helping them find seats.
Buck wanted to sit near the back, but his mom found two empty seats in the third row at the far left side, and Buck reluctantly sat down beside her, ducking his head and staring at the words of the hymns: O, for a faith that will not shrink, tho’ pressed by every foe, that will not tremble on the brink of any earthly woe!
The first row was roped off, and the tent was filled with soft chatter and the squeak of folding chairs. Occasionally there would be a hearty hello of neighbor greeting neighbor, and finally Buck felt inconspicuous enough to look around. No one he recognized. Not even anyone his
age. There were more walkers and wheelchairs than he’d ever seen in a service before. Seemed like every other person was sick or broken, and it frightened him.
Was that how other people saw him? Not just weird—he was used to that—but broken? Was that what his friends thought, all but David? Or Nat Waleski, maybe? What his family thought about him? Did Katie?
He stared down at the song sheet again: There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus….None else could heal all our soul’s diseases….Was that what stuttering was—a disease? Something connected to sin? Something he had done? Or was it just that it rhymed with Jesus?
A sudden hush told Buck that the service was about to begin, and a gray-haired woman in a dark blue dress stepped up on the platform and sat down in the chair. She remained very still with her eyes closed, hands in her lap, her feet crossed at the ankles, and her face lifted toward the roof of the tent as though she were receiving telepathic messages from beyond, Buck thought.
At the same time, a gaunt-looking man took his place at the portable keyboard to one side, and the notes of “Take Time to Be Holy” came softly from the two speakers at each corner of the platform. Only his hands moved, his arms frozen above the elbows, and he sat bent over like a question mark, his shoulders were so stooped. In his black suit, he reminded Buck of a turkey buzzard that hung out near a yard full of chickens a few miles up the road back home. He would see it high in a tree looking down, or just making slow circles in the sky. These were not the kind of thoughts he should be having, he told himself. If he didn’t believe that Jesus could heal him, he should have stayed home.
The music went on, one hymn running into another as late arrivals were seated, until finally, on some prearranged signal, it seemed, the music got so soft that it stopped, and Sister Pearson stood up. Her right hand moved to the little black microphone clipped to the collar of her dress, and she walked to the front of the platform.