Sam had supposed that one thing he was providing for Pierce under his roof was a sort of older brother, someone who might counteract any bent that being his father’s son might have left him with—no, that was too strongly put, Sam knew, but still he thought that Joe Boyd could be mentor, guide, friend for Pierce, all that Sam’s own older brothers had been for him. Sam was sure enough of this that he paid less careful attention to Pierce than he might have. To Pierce, though, Joe Boyd with his sad, minatory eyes and jailbird haircut remained just what he had always seemed, the viceroy or dark archangel of Sam, the one who brought him Sam’s wishes and instructions moral or practical, lessons Pierce could never learn.
That spring Joe Boyd had organized his sisters and his brother into a club, with passwords and offices and swearingsin. Joe Boyd’s club was called the Retrievers, in imitation of the animal lodges he had known of back North, Elks, Moose, Lions; his was named in honor of the breed of dog he most admired and would never own. The Retrievers had their headquarters in a long-disused chicken house up the steep hillside from the big house; its chief activity was the impossible job of cleaning this place of its accumulation of guano and pinfeathers and crushed eggshell: the job being done by the younger members at Joe Boyd’s direction.
Pierce, hands in his jacket pockets, stood at the door watching the distasteful work go on, never having seen or smelled such a place before. He hadn’t been invited to be a Retriever by the only Retriever able to issue the invitation, Joe Boyd, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask for admission either. He had come to realize, though, that he wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of his childhood in his room, as he had opined to his mother he might; he’d have to come to accommodation.
“Whatcha doing?”
“What’s it look like?”
Shrug. He asked what anyway the place was, with its boxes of whitened screening and strawdusty air. Joe Boyd took exception to his superior tone, which Pierce hadn’t intended.
“Not good enough for you?”
“Well we don’t exactly have chicken houses in Brooklyn.”
“Yeah? Well.”
Without knowing where he was headed, Pierce allowed himself to be drawn into a debate with Joe Boyd about the relative merits of New York and Kentucky. It was never in doubt who would win this debate; Joe Boyd, though loyal to his mother’s state, the state where he had been conceived, could not himself name enough virtues in it to keep up.
“Name a hero who came from Kentucky.”
“Daniel Boone.”
“Name another.” Joe Boyd didn’t name Abraham Lincoln, though Pierce had counterclaims if he had.
“Well name one from New York,” Joe Boyd said.
“Peter Minuit. He had a peg leg. Peter Stuyvesant. Alexander Hamilton. Joe DiMaggio. Thomas E. Dewey.”
“Who?”
At length Joe Boyd chose another way to settle the matter. It wasn’t so unfair a match as it seemed, as it seemed to Hildy who pointed out that Joe Boyd was two years older: for Pierce had already begun the weedlike, apelike (so he would one day think of it) burgeoning that would take him to a thick six feet, and Joe Boyd took after his light-boned and delicate mother. Joe Boyd still won handily, being less afraid of giving and getting pain than his cousin, and more willing to fight to conclusive victory. Pierce face down in the odorous dust of the floor was made to admit that Kentucky, the state where he now lived, was a better state of the United States than New York, the state where he had lived with his father and mother, but where he lived no more.
“Wanna go again? Two out of three.”
“No.”
“Say uncle.”
“What?”
“Say uncle.”
Pierce, not ever having been forced to this formula of surrender, made his own sense of it. “Uncle,” he said.
For a long time after he let Pierce rise, Joe Boyd sat with his arm around Pierce’s shoulders, Pierce shy to shake him off; and after this meeting of the lodge was over, and supper eaten, Joe Boyd took Pierce up to his room to show him his treasures.
Unnerved by the sudden intensity of his comradeship, Pierce looked in silence at Joe Boyd’s beautifully preserved comic books and his Long Island seashells. A branch on which real stuffed birds perched with real bird feet, jay, cardinal, robin. Snake’s skin and deer’s skull. His plated six-guns, which hung in their holsters over the bedposts, little worn these days. An engraving of Robert E. Lee, which Joe Boyd had begged as a souvenir from Arlington when the Oliphants had visited there on their way South: something in the sad-eyed noble-dog figure, gloved and sashed, had touched him.
Lastly he drew out from its box and opened to Pierce his latest project.
“It’s a battle,” he said.
It was a tall roll of smooth white paper such as Pierce had never seen before, which Joe Boyd called “shelf paper.” He unrolled a foot of it, revealing pencil-drawn figures, tiny ones, many of them. They were in fact engaged in a struggle; each little stick man had a stick-gun which he fired, or aimed, or lay dead gripping. Dotted lines showed the trajectories of these guns’ bullets toward a facing crowd of armed figures, which Joe Boyd now revealed farther along the scroll.
“I can draw better people,” he said. “But this is the quick way to draw lots.”
He’d said it was a battle, but it wasn’t really; there were no massed formations maneuvering, no regiments or officers. The dozens on each side fought independently over the crudely-drawn landscape, aimed from behind rocks and stumps, fired and died alone in dozens of carefully-conceived attitudes. Some bled tiny penciled puddles.
“But look at this,” Joe Boyd said. He unrolled the shelf paper further, revealing that the opponents of the first bunch were themselves being attacked in the rear by a third group; some had already turned to face them. It was evident that this new band would be vulnerable too, though Joe Boyd hadn’t got that far yet. There was no reason for it ever to stop.
“I’m going to do more,” Joe Boyd said, rolling it up. “Lots more.”
No, Joe Boyd would never be his mentor, nor ever entirely his friend, whatever Sam hoped. And though Pierce would anyway show no trace of Axel’s inclinations, would soon begin accumulating evidence that his nature contained none, still one among his secret heroes would always be Georgie Porgie, puddn and pie, who kissed the girls and made them cry:
But when the Boys came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away.
Still Pierce wasn’t offered membership in the Retrievers; perhaps Joe Boyd sensed in him some remaining reluctance about fellowship, or the work it entailed, that might be a source of disaffection. “I don’t care anyway,” Pierce said to Bird and Hildy in their bungalow at night. “I already have a club. Sort of.”
The three of them were gathered at the brown gas heater, big as a chest of drawers, that stood in Pierce’s room and heated the whole of the little house. It took all three of them to light it: Hildy to direct operations, and turn on the gas; Pierce to light the match; Bird, afraid of lighting matches but not afraid of the heater as Pierce was, to thrust the lit match into the hole in the heater’s side.
“What’s your club?”
“Well, it’s secret.” He readied himself with match and box next to Bird at the touch-hole. Hildy crouched at the gas cock. “It’s a secret club of my father’s.”
“They let little kids in?”
“Some.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s secret.” He saw his father’s face, binding him in an imaginary but suddenly vivid past to secrecy.
“Ready?” said Hildy impatiently, whose skinny legs trembled with cold.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Pierce, after a few misfires, got the match to flame, turning it in his fingers. Hildy had opened the cock already, too soon; Bird fumbled for the match in Pierce’s fingers, each of them trying to keep farthest from the flame. She half-thrust half-threw the match within the hole an
d turned away. Gas built up within the chamber ignited with an impatient whump, not as loud as on some nights when the process took even longer.
“Who all are members?” Hildy asked. “Can we be?”
“Maybe,” Pierce said.
“Can Warren be?”
Pierce shrugged.
“Can Joe Boyd be?”
There was no reason to exclude him. There was also no reason, and Pierce felt no compulsion, to inform him that he was eligible for membership; or that his membership had been considered. And accepted. The taste of triumph, like the taste of the burned gas, was in the back of Pierce’s throat. “Sure,” he said. “Sure he can.”
Later, in bed, his two cousins tried to guess the name of Pierce’s secret lodge, or wheedle it from him. They guessed birds and beasts noble and ridiculous (“The Lizards Club! The Bugs Club!”) until they got the giggles; they asked Pierce for the initials, the number of letters, the sounds-like. Pierce wasn’t telling, though; he didn’t yet know himself. He only knew that he was a member, inducted long ago (he with so little long-ago, that had recently come to seem so much to him), the brothers robed and smiling to welcome him, rank on rank. His heart was full of a wicked glee, that he wasn’t alone here as they had all thought him to be, but one of a company, invisible for now but coming clearer to him all the time.
The Retrievers soon passed out of existence, its clubhouse still uncleaned, as Joe Boyd turned his hungry heart elsewhere. Pierce couldn’t later remember if he was ever formally sworn in, but Bird said sure he had been, didn’t he remember, there were outings and official business that included him, and dues exacted. It would later surprise Pierce how much more his younger cousin could remember, of things they had both experienced, than he could himself. That first year he came to Bondieu must, he thought, have been so full of shifting challenges and things hard to understand that like the successive crises of a long dream they couldn’t be retained in memory afterwards: only the umber coloration, and the sense of a struggle.
“I can’t even really tell you how we got there,” Winnie in Florida said to him, “with all our things, our trunks and clothes and the beds and things.”
“The marble-topped dresser,” Pierce said—locating it suddenly, vividly, just as it was on the point of departing, got you at least. “The spool bed.”
“Did Axel send them on?” Winnie wondered. “I guess he must have, because they were all there later on, weren’t they? Sure they were. Well, I was in a state, I know it.”
Pierce never blamed Winnie for his exile. Of Axel his father he had been deeply, inarticulately ashamed; on those nights when Axel called to talk to him, he would listen almost without speaking to Axel’s anyway unbreakable stream of sentiments (always a sound in the background of these calls, a tinkle and sea-murmur of voices and music) which inevitably grew maudlin, sorry, filled with moist pauses, while the Oliphants watched and Pierce’s cheeks grew hot. But he didn’t blame Axel for what had become of him either, because Winnie didn’t or didn’t seem to. She never complained of Axel; she seemed to bear him no grudge; she rarely spoke of him at all. Maybe it was because Winnie was able not to notice things, because she sought so diligently for a space of rest for herself untouched by the consequences of things, maybe because she loved Pierce so much and never questioned him either, that Pierce had always found in her room not the reasons for his exile but a respite from it.
Take care of your mother, Axel had commissioned him, his words drowned in tears, that last morning in Brooklyn before Pierce set out with Winnie, in a cab filled with their swollen suitcases, toward the bus station. Be a good knight, he had said.
Be a good knight. Axel, quixotic lover of romances, chivalry, and vows of service, had also suffered a quixotic harm to the brain from them. Pierce in Kentucky remembered his injunction, but he didn’t feel burdened by it, not then anyway. Axel grew dim to Pierce in Kentucky, insubstantial, which judging from Winnie’s behavior he was supposed to do, evaporate, melt into nothing like a snowman in the advancing of Pierce’s seasons. But Pierce was his mother’s knight, and would remain; she had rescued him from the dark wood of the Brooklyn apartment where his father was lost (Why dark? Why lost?) and now she was his alone, installed over in the upper story of the main house, in the bedroom next to Sam’s. There he served her, there he waited on her, laughed with her, capered before her; he poured himself endlessly into the vacancy that was her, teasing her with questions that would last forever because they had no answers: What if everything suddenly got twice as big as it is? Could you tell? What if the stars are really small and close overhead, just a little ways, a thousand miles, and only seem to be far away? What if seeming-to-be-far-away is just the way they are, and you could really reach them easily in a jet? Why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead? Why is there space? Why is there anything, anything at all, and not just nothing?
THREE
Autumn rains slaked the ash of the hillside and the holler; for a long time the smell of things burned and then wetted reached the nose on every wind, but more cold rain washed the air. In spring the burnt-over land would only be the more fertile because of the rich ash the children had laid on it; burning and then planting, after all, was how Cumberland crops had long been grown. Pierce turned a leaf of Collier’s magazine and saw an ad for the Plywood Association: an emerald sprout of fir, sheltered like a flame by rough caring hands, first growth of a new forest in the colorless blasted land all around.
The school year hadn’t yet started for the Oliphants. Every autumn since they had come school had started late, and this year Father Midnight’s sister, who had been the children’s tutor, went away to a distant hospital just as the process of setting up school in the kitchen and sitting room of the little bungalow was to begin. What sort of hospital she went away to, and for what reason, wasn’t described to the children, which left them free to imagine reasons and outcomes more drastic than any the real case warranted. They hadn’t loved Miss Martha, Father Midnight’s sister, but she was vague and easily fooled, and they hadn’t feared her.
(It was Hildy who had first seen that their parish priest was a replica of the unheroic hero on TV, who, whatever deeds he might once have done in some other medium somewhere else, on their Saturdays now merely introduced ancient cowboy movies from behind a desk, and in the intervals sold a hot drink the children had never drunk and could not imagine. The priest was he exactly, but in phony eyeglasses and liturgical gear: Father Midnight. Warren had to be strictly schooled never to call him that.)
It wasn’t conceivable that the children should attend the local grammar school. There was one, a square brick building not in the town of Bondieu but in the town of Good Luck, a mile or so distant. Like the square brick hospital, like the rows of gritty cabins along the railroad track, the school was a beneficence of the Good Luck Coal and Coke Company in the early years of the century. Now it was the property of the state, and all the children of Bondieu who went to school went there, just as almost all the fathers who worked had once worked for Good Luck Coal and Coke. Dr. Hazelton himself had dispensed pills to miners and miners’ wives at the Good Luck hospital, which had just closed its doors for good. “Good luck for the patients,” Sam said.
Sam’s arrangement with his hospital had from the beginning included provision of a tutor for his children; Opal Boyd had seen too many schools like the Good Luck school, and had known their teachers. So Miss Martha, who had trained as a teacher though she had only briefly been one, had been hired, and Opal had done the rest, until her headaches got too bad; and now Miss Martha too was gone. September ran into October. The children lived within an unwonted freedom that could end any day; they got used to it. Summer’s games continued. They were like the mountain children they knew of but rarely encountered, shoeless wraiths invisible to teacher or to principal.
They did read, though. There wasn’t one of them, not even Joe Boyd, who didn’t. They read through meals and chores and car-trips; they ho
gged the bathroom, unwilling to leave the pot where they sat reading. Hildy could read and listen to the radio at the same time, and miss nothing either of Nancy Drew or of Sky King. Sam read the novels that Winnie finished, as he had read Opal’s.
They got their books by writing to the State Library in Lexington and asking for them; there was no public library for mountain miles in any direction from Bondieu. Once a month a big box of them arrived in a sort of laundry case with canvas belts that could be done up when the books had been read (or not read) and were to be sent back. What books were received depended on what was asked for, who received the order, and what the library had, which wasn’t Everything though it seemed bottomless from Bondieu. If Bird asked for a book about horses, she was as likely to get dense volumes on equine anatomy or ranch management as she was to get another book like Black Beauty, which was what she wanted. Joe Boyd knew what he wanted, but not how to describe it: he wanted books full of facts, strange but true, things which he could ask others if they knew and be certain they would not: the number of peepers that could sit side by side on a single pencil, the number of pencils that could be made from a single cedar tree. If the facts were disgusting as well as obscure, that was all the better.
It was Joe Boyd’s description of this category, however he had phrased it, that had once brought him a big book whose end-papers showed a mass of ruins, and whose double-columned pages were filled with tenebrous illustration. Or maybe it had been put in just to fill up the box, as the best and worst books the family got often were. Anyway Joe Boyd claimed it, and looked through it for a while, enjoying the images of monstrous gods, witches at their sabbats, and heretics aflame. Then Pierce took it up: A Dictionary of Deities, Devils and Dæmons of Mankind, by Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, a name that Sam would have had fun with if Pierce had ever shown him the book, which he never did. Whenever it arrived (and Pierce ordered it again and again after the first time) it would immediately be removed to Pierce’s room, to the shelf where he kept things important to him: the missal his father had given him, his photo album, his crystal of quartz and his souvenir sheath-knife from Bear Mountain, his bookends in the form of two hemispheres of the world, beneath which on either side little sculpted boys and girls read books of unimaginable facts.