Chapter 5 - Pictures in All the Scribble...
Mrs. Jordan’s students marked the passage of days on their classroom’s calendar until summer delivered them extended recess. Those boys and girls returned from break and then marked the passing days as fourth graders on the calendar posted on Mrs. Wheelan’s wall; and with the arrival of winter, the students smiled to see how the calendar squares vanished that separated them from the return of another tent festival of story and song.
“Just try and make something out of that mess, Hudson. There’s no way you’ll find a picture in all that scribble.”
Amy Zerlinger tossed the page of notebook paper atop the large canvas upon which Hudson had been focussing his attention. Hudson sighed as he looked up from his efforts. He couldn’t understand why his classmates would not simply leave him alone during recess as he sat on the first row bleacher and worked on his artwork through recess.
“Will you leave me alone if I turn all that ink into something?
Amy smirked. “Believe me, I’ll be more than happy to leave you alone if you find a picture in that gibberish. There’s no way you’ll make a scene out of all of that.”
Hudson set down the green piece of chalk with which he had been working and replaced it with an inexpensive, black pen. Hudson clicked the pen as he picked up Amy’s page and squinted to find that first line or curve that would first inspire him. Since the start of that school year, the students of Hudson’s class had challenged him to turn whatever they might scribble on notebook pages and cafeteria napkins into finer art. Hudson had transformed their chaotic pen strokes into dragons, ink drops into butterflies. His classmates had marveled as Hudson’s imagination reshaped doodle into herds of stampeding horses or pods of leaping dolphins. None of Hudson’s classmates had yet stumped him. Hudson had not received one page from which he could not pull out figure and form.
At the start, his classmates had cheered Hudson’s efforts, and for a time, Hudson had believed he might’ve found friendship hidden within so many garbled pages.
But then Hudson noticed a change ripple through the demeanor of his classmates who had at first clapped when their scribbled pages were returned as fourth-grade masterpieces. Hudson recognized when his classmates rewarded his efforts with frowns instead of smiles. Hudson sensed in his classmates that a hunger to see him fail replaced the satisfaction they had first felt when a lion grew from an ink tangle. They crowded each notebook page with more and more scribble. They attacked a new page’s white a ferocity that tore holes into many of the papers handed to Hudson. Hudson heard them growl over his shoulder as his black pen inked meaning into their disorder. Hudson could not understand what motivated his classmates to so turn against him.
“You’re taking a long time to start on that page, Hudson.” Amy chuckled. “I’ve finally stumped you.”
Hudson’s tongue slipped out of his mouth as he set his black pen upon the edge of the giant whirl of ink that nearly covered Amy’s page. Hudson learned that to pull order out of pages made so black with garble he needed to imagine landscapes were darkness was prevalent. Hudson worked at the edges of that ink whirl. Hudson’s pen danced, and curves sprouted upon the page. His fingers darted, and shadow accentuated light. Hudson’s black pen rose and fell as texture rippled dimension onto the page’s thin surface. They may have no longer cheered him, but Hudson’s classmates still crowded around him as he worked. The pen eventually stilled, and Hudson cracked his timid smile as he returned the page to Amy.
“I knew I left too much empty space on that page,” Amy growled, “but my pen ran out of ink. The next one won’t be so easy, Hudson.”
“I thought you said you were going to leave me alone.”
“Not until I win, Hudson. Not until I win.”
Amy’s frown continued to sour as she regarded what Hudson had summoned upon her page. Eight curling tentacles brimming with suction cups cradled the mass of ink Amy had colored upon the scene. A pair of large, octopus eyes nearly blinked at Amy, crafted so masterfully by Hudson’s touch as to almost glisten mockery back upon her as they rose towards some invisible surface beyond the page’s boundaries. Amy could not deny the magic no matter how hard she attempted to smother her imagination. Hudson had found that octopus beneath so much ink, and the creature looked all the more magnificent for it.
Disgust twisted on Amy’s face. “Where did you put it this time?”
Hudson pointed to one of the octopus’s arching tentacles. “There in that large suction cup near the side of the page. You just have to look closer.”
Hudson never signed his name at the bottom of his artwork, instead adopting a different mark. Each of his efforts contained the shape of that wonderful tent the performers brought each year to their school. Hudson’s classmates had first raced to learn who could first find the tent hidden in the work. But by the time Amy looked upon her octopus, most in the fourth grade classroom thought the search felt too much like a chore.
“It’s ugly,” Amy sneered.
Hudson shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I don’t want it,” and before anyone might protest, Amy closed a fist and crumpled that octopus into a paper ball before tossing the page beneath the bleachers.
“That’s a waste,” sighed Hudson.
Hudson judged his work was not a total loss when Amy and the crowd moved across the gymnasium and gifted him the peace to concentrate on his larger canvas. The year since Hudson had lost his pocketknife had not passed easily. Classmates smirked at him in the hallways, walking behind Hudson with stiff, zombie-like gaits, with their arms raised in front of them like Frankenstein golems. Hudson was forced to meet every other week in the afternoon with the school counselor, who badgered Hudson over and again with questions digging for signs and sources of Hudson’s anxiety. Hudson’s teachers were prohibited from asking him to read aloud with his peers during book hour. Every work of fiction to which Hudson was exposed - be it short story, poem or play - needed to be approved by Hudson’s mother, who did her best keep her son grounded by limiting his exposure to fantasy goblins and berserk robots.
Hardest to Hudson was accepting the loss of his uncle. He dreaded visiting his cousins Mallory and Mandy, who shunned Hudson further for the bond he had shared with their father. His cousins had laughed at him when Hudson had cried upon learning how Mallory and Mandy had set the tea house Uncle Mark had built on fire. Hudson occasionally asked his mother if anyone had heard where Uncle Mark might be, but his mother always answered that no news at all was the best news they could hope for. When left to the quiet of his bedroom, Hudson wondered where Uncle Mark may have gone, if he ever found shelter to protect himself from the monsters that must have lurked in his dreams.
Hudson drifted further into his pencils and markers. Though he struggled to concentrate on his school work, Hudson’s attention focussed intently upon his artwork. He mastered all of the techniques in his book on action hero illustration. He practiced and studied light and shadow. Left to alone to his colored charcoals and pencils, Hudson thrived.
Hudson’s mother worried early in her son’s efforts if such time spent in drawing was healthy for her boy who drifted with such a strong imagination. Yet her trepidation dissipated when the school counselor suggested an avenue for Hudson’s dreaming might be a very helpful thing. She could not resist supplying Hudson with supplies after he presented her with a series of wonderful, watercolor sailboats.
“I don’t know how, Hudson, but your landscapes grow more and more incredible.” The voice startled Hudson, and Hudson’s finger slipped a smeared stroke. He had not noticed Principal Maddox stride across the gymnasium to him. “That’s incredible.”
A landscape teeming in shades of green charcoal rested at Hudson’s feet. Giant trees and ferns stretched beyond the background’s dimensions. A massive, fiery bronze comet scorched across the sky, its luminescence penetrating the thick canopy of leaves that nearly covered the horizon. Fauna blanketed the ground, swaying in an invisible wind captured in
Hudson’s medium. Insects born from their creator’s imagination hovered in the foreground, with paper-thin wings aglow in an internal, golden light that twirled shadows throughout the foliage. Eyes that rested upon smaller spaces of green soon discerned the flat shells of ancient, many-legged bugs slithering through the shade.
The tent rose slightly off center in that alien and green landscape, bathed in the overhead comet’s bronze light breaking through a clearing above the tent. No pathways were trimmed through the thick fauna to encourage approach. No signs announced that performers waited within with story and song. A single, crimson banner waved at the tent’s peak, decoration enough for the tent that stood out so strangely amid such exotic scenery.
“Why do you always put that tent into all of your landscapes, Hudson?”
Hudson took a breath. The way he saw the world was so hard to explain. “It’s not a reason I can write in a simple, neat sentence like the ones we copy from Mrs. Wheelan’s chalkboard.”
“Mrs. Wheelan tells me you’re falling behind again on your classwork. We both know you’re more than smart enough for all those exercises. So I’m guessing something’s bothering you again, Hudson.”
Principal Maddox took a seat upon the bleachers next to Hudson when the student remained silent. The principal sometimes feared he spent too much time in the office tending to paperwork and budget columns, that he lost a connection with the students who each morning filed into his hallways. But he remained intelligent enough to understand what troubled Hudson. It did not take much of a sleuth to recognize the source of that boy’s discontent.
“It’s the returning tent that’s taking your attention,” the principal winked before Hudson’s nerves twitched. “You don’t have to say anything. You know, you’re not the only student so excited about it.”
“But I’m the only one not allowed to enter the tent,” and Hudson again grabbed the green charcoal and returned to his canvas. He did not want to listen to Principal Maddox remind him of what was lost.
“I have good news for you about that,” replied Principal Maddox. “You’re going to be able to enter that tent after all.”
Hudson’s hand froze above his canvas. He dared not touch his work while his fingers trembled.
“I better first say that I already have your mother’s approval. She’s agreed to let you visit that tent as long as I go with you, as long as none of your classmates are there to bother you.”
Hudson stammered. “I’m going to go all by myself?”
“The tent performers want to make an exception for you,” the principal answered. “Don’t look at me like that. If you’re going to thank anyone, it better be Mrs. Ramsey. She was the one who posted your landscapes up on the main office bulletin board. Your pictures made a powerful impression on the tent performers. I tell you, Hudson, they just stood and stared at your work. They giggled to see there tent in all those pictures. I was really proud to call you my student. Those performers asked me if they might give you a performance without any of the other students tagging along.”
The charcoal cracked in Hudson’s clenching hand. “I don’t want the tent performers to feel sorry for me. I don’t want them to remember that I was the boy who ran away one year, who brought a knife the time after that. I’ve had enough of everyone feeling sorry for me.”
“That’s my man,” Principal Maddox grinned. “I doubt they remember you. They visit too many other places, see too many other faces. And you don’t actually think you’re the only student who ever had second-thoughts about visiting their tent, do you? Hudson, they only want to repay you for your artwork. Your efforts have earned it. No one’s giving you anything out of pity.”
“Promise?”
“I promise, and none of your classmates know anything about it.” Principal Maddox held up a hand before Hudson jumped out of his sneakers. “But, Hudson, I need another promise in return. I need you to promise to focus on the tasks Mrs. Wheelan gives you in the classroom. I want you to promise me that you’ll concentrate. I know it’s not easy for you, but I know you can do it. Do you promise me that?”
Hudson didn’t hesitate. “I promise.”
At night, after Hudson diligently finished the homework Mrs. Wheelan assigned him, Hudson illustrated, painted and sketched as never before. The tent was about to return to his school’s gymnasium, and its performers offered a show catered only to him. And so Hudson created one landscape after another, determined to find the shadows in which his monsters lurked before those creatures could find him.
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