Heading Out to Wonderful

  But, lying in his narrow bed at night, fresh from making love to her, or, worse, on the nights he had not seen her and knew he would not for days, he knew it wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough land in the world to say what he felt, to make her believe, so he drew her picture, again and again, and none of the drawings looked like her. There was no crayon in the box for the lichen color of her eyes, the amber glint of her hair as she fell into him in the pines at sunset, no color for the rush of it, the breathlessness, the haste of her love, his need, knowing what they knew, that it ended at sunset’s peak, and that she would be home and unattainable by dark.

  In the margins of his diary, he would write scraps of poetry he remembered from school. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” Take my heart, he would think. It is your Xanadu. Build it here.

  And even Scripture: ”Set me as a seal upon thine arm, as a seal upon thy heart; for love is strong as death,” snatches of memory that had nothing to do with her, except that everything, every word, had everything to do with her. She was everywhere in his life.

  He drew a picture of himself, frozen in midair, the edge of the cliff behind him, like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon strip, one step away from solid ground, just before the plunge, the instant fall that left plumes of disaster in the air where his body once had been. That was Charlie, in those times, everything the same, everything changed, everything lost, the world gained, because she was not, for him, a woman but the world.

  He thought of her, as he drew her picture and wrote her name, thought of the panic and peace that came in the second, the split hair, before the plunge. The peace and the panic.

  I want you. I love you. He couldn’t even say these things. They weren’t allowed. Words like that belonged to other people. Those words belonged to ordinary people who led ordinary lives.

  It amazed him every moment that he, too, led an ordinary life. He was amazed he could get up in the morning and make a pot of coffee and put his pants on, the way he’d always done. When he got out of his bath in the morning, and shaved the night stubble from his face, he could see his body, and he saw it the way she saw it, and he liked what he saw, flat edges and smooth skin, still and calm and firm, his body as not just the box he carried his soul around in, but as something made of flesh and muscle and blood that somebody else wanted, his body as wholly owned by her as the rest of the things that used to belong to him.

  He would die for her, just as he lived, now, for Sylvan and Sylvan alone. He would be a better person on her behalf, and he would be patient as Job, saying nothing, applying no pressure, wanting everything and expecting nothing. But it was hard for him, it was hard to pay attention to anything else, to focus on anything that didn’t have to do with her.

  Everybody in town began to notice the change in him, the distance. What he did with his body began to show in his face. They could sense, dimly at first and then more clearly, that his enthusiasms had become particular, and they knew they had become particular for a particular woman.

  Charlie Carter saw it first. He saw, in the late light of a Wednesday evening, Charlie Beale driving his truck down the drive and out of Boaty Glass’s gate, a beagle dog and Will Haislett’s boy on the seat beside him. He saw Charlie get out and close and latch the gate with a practiced assurance, then turn again to wave to Sylvan, who stood on the porch in her slip, and all that care and all that planning went up the chimney. Carter told his wife, who was a talker, and by the next afternoon, the whole town knew that the glow in Charlie Beale’s face was there because he was the lover of Mrs. Harrison Boatwright Glass, and the people of the town just shook their heads, amazed it had taken them so long to figure it out.

  And they were, if you had asked them, they were glad for Charlie.

  Towns like that, nothing is secret, and so Charlie became the subject of everyday gossip. Even Will and Alma heard about it, as they were bound to. They knew Charlie would do nothing to hurt the boy, but they also knew that love makes people careless and reckless, and they began to question, in their conversations in bed at night, whether Sam should still go out with Charlie so much. They talked about it, and they worried, but they waited. They didn’t know what they were waiting for. Sam was starting school in the fall. Maybe they were waiting for that, just to avoid any kind of confrontation.

  There wasn’t any evidence. The boy had said nothing. Maybe the talk was just talk.

  The Misses Allie knew. They knew something, anyway, even if they weren’t quite sure what it was. His name was up, as people used to say. They stopped him on the street one day as he was walking home at noon to eat his dinner.

  “It’s baseball season, Mister Beale,” said Miss Allie, one or the other. They were both wearing red suits, thin women in expensive clothes, each wearing a heavy gold charm bracelet, one on the right arm, the other on the left, dozens of charms on each, heavy, jangling things. They always wore them so that everybody knew they were coming before they even saw them, as he did now. “You have to teach the boys.”

  “And some of the girls, if they want to, Mister Beale,” said the other Miss Allie.

  “Yes. Some of the girls. Maybe even some of the old spinster girls.” They laughed identical laughs, blue-white teeth thin as milk in their ancient mouths. When they smiled, they looked to be either a hundred or eighteen, their faces breaking into a thousand lines that spoke of delight, decades of pleasure in each other’s company.

  “We’d need a field. There’s no place to play, Miss Allie, Miss Allie,” he said, glancing back and forth between the two eager faces, not knowing where to land his gaze, both faces being the same.

  “Well, we have it figured out. There’s a field . . .”

  “. . . behind our house. Flat as a board.”

  “And Cousin Little Walton Mercer is all set to come and grade it down and put in baselines and even some bleacher seats, if you’ll just agree to take it on.”

  “Say yes, Mister Beale. The boys . . .”

  “. . . and girls need it, something to do, somewhere to go.”

  “Something to do, Mister Beale, and Cousin Little Walton can have it done in three days. Say yes, Mister Beale.”

  “Please do, Mister Beale.”

  “Of course, ladies. That would be a pleasure.”

  “That’s the ticket!” Miss Allie shook his hand firmly, a symphony of gold charms erupting around him. “We’ll put an announcement in the paper, and you’ll see, it’ll be the new thing.”

  “Be good to do something fun with the boys . . . and girls.”

  “Well, we’ve thought about this all winter. Something has to be done. This town is as sleepy as a tick mattress. Needs some life.”

  “And it’s going to be right in our backyard. Thank you, Mister Beale, thank you again. I’ll be the Happy Chandler of Brownsburg, Virginia, Elinor.” She glanced at her sister, then turned to Charlie, explaining, “He’s a Kentucky cousin of ours, you know.”

  “And I’ll be the Casey Stengel, Ansolette.”

  “Well, we’ll see, ladies. We’ll see. Now, I have to get on home and have my dinner. Nice day, ladies.”

  As he walked away, one of them—Ansolette? Elinor?—stopped him with a gentle call. “Mister Beale?”

  He turned. “Yes?”

  “Is everything all right? All right with you?”

  He felt his cheeks flush with shame. He felt as he always felt, as though he had just been stopped for committing a crime he couldn’t remember. Except, in this case, he remembered every detail. Everything in him wanted to tell the old ladies the truth, at least as he understood it. It is, and it isn’t, he wanted to say. It is now, and it never will be. Some things you don’t say. Some things you just carry.

  The wonder of her body, he wanted to say, the way she looks at me, sometimes, only sometimes, but then, that way. Between the twins and where he stood, stood Sylvan; he could see her, a full young woman in a yellow dress from the movies, smiling in that way that made his heart explode in his chest,
every single time. Explode.

  “Fine,” he said. “Right as rain”—and, in his smile and his shrug, there was all of the rightness and none of the wrongness in the world.

  “Well, we think of you, Mister Beale.”

  “We think of you often, and sometimes talk about you.”

  “Nothing bad, I hope.”

  Taken seriously. Answered fully. “No, Mister Beale. Not at all.”

  “In fact, the opposite.”

  “We have the kindest feelings for you.”

  “Everybody does.”

  “Everybody in town.”

  So he went on slaughtering cows, not caring any more to wait until they were calm and accepting of their fate, knowing that his haste made them panic, made their fear creep into the taste of the meat; he slaughtered cows in haste and cut meat and coached baseball and made what he hoped was love to Sylvan Glass, and that was his life, his whole life. And the boy. The boy he loved and he needed, because none of it worked without him, his fantasy son.

  He was the cigarette hitting the blacktop at fifty miles an hour, reckless, except for the one thing about which he had to be more than careful, and he was, silent and perfectly careful. He never said her name in public one time, not ever. He never meant harm. He had meant never to hurt another living thing. And perhaps the boy was not hurt, he thought, perhaps, but he knew better.

  The boy who now kicked and screamed when he had to go to bed, the boy who fought everything that moved. The boy who wouldn’t eat or say much, who did not say ma’am and sir, who smacked Jackie Robinson when he did not come when called, so that the dog now alternately snarled at and doted on the boy, looked at the boy with a mixture of fear and adoration. This was the boy he had made, had raised, they, he and Sylvan, in the world they had made for no one but themselves. Their little family. This was Sam, the apple of his father’s eye, the first, last, and only fruit of his tree, who was five and was now about to be six, and Charlie loved him and did not know what to do, lost in the way he was lost, trying to be ordinary, finding any conversation with the boy impossible now, but needing him, needing him because he was part of the secret, and to lose him now, he felt, might be chancing everything.

  He tried to be kind to him. He tried to pay attention to Sam as he had once done, to listen to the endless questions and invent answers when he did not know the answer. Why was the moon big sometimes and small at others? He was confounded by this, and by the many things a boy’s mind can invent to ask about. A deer can die of fright, a hummingbird in his sleep, for no reason? Is forever a long time? He wanted to hold him, but the boy was not his child, was not even really his responsibility, although he felt contained within the bounds of his care of and for the boy.

  Once it had occurred to him to make a will and to leave everything to the boy, but that was when he still owned things, enough to give a boy a life, a place in the world. That was what he had wanted to do, also in secret, to be found out only when he died, but now he could not do that, that one thing he had wanted to do out of simple kindness.

  Again and again Alma and Will had discussed how the boy should not go with him any more, on the afternoons to the slaughterhouse, the days by the river, the house in the woods, because they knew, as everybody knew now, that the boy languished alone while Charlie spent his hours with Boaty Glass’s wife, not fishing at all, slaughtering in haste, laying waste, laying waste around him without meaning to and ultimately without being able to care, to stop himself. They had discussed it and done nothing to stop it.

  So when Charlie came to them and asked what he asked, how could they not say yes? How could they not go along, thinking, as Charlie thought, that it might do the boy some good, might bring the boy around again, home to himself, to his childhood, home to them, his mother and father?

  “It’s his birthday soon,” Charlie had said. “I want to give a party for him. I want to show him, maybe it’ll do some good. Maybe it’ll stop the fighting.”

  And how could they say no, knowing what they knew, wanting what they wanted, some kind of salvation, some kind of return of their boy back to them, and Charlie whole again, his old self, laughing in the crowd, generous, kind, a man whose arms were wide open even when his hands were in his pockets.

  A party. A carnival for Sam, in the meadow out by the river, just for him, because he was six, because he had lived that long and had much longer still to live and some peace had to be made with that, some equanimity created with the whole life that lay waiting, man and boy.

  “It’ll be just the thing,” said Charlie. “Good for the boy.

  “I want to do it,” he said. “Leave everything to me.”

  And of course they did. Of course they already had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AUGUST 4, 1949. Sam Haislett’s sixth birthday. August in the Valley of Virginia, hot as holy hell, hotter than you would think for a place where people used to flock after the Civil War to escape the heat of the cities, everything dry now, gold gray, second cutting come and gone, the willows hanging limply into the still rippling water, lower now than in the spring, but still lively, still heading for the sea and freedom. The sun white-hot against a hot white sky. The river water, the sweet Maury, so fresh and clear, still leaping greenly, the water that flows from the eye of Jesus into the heart of God.

  In Pittsburgh, at Forbes Field that afternoon, the man Jackie Robinson went 0 for 4, even though his team got fourteen hits and beat the Pirates 11–3. They went on to win the pennant, and then to lose the Series to the Yankees. On that day, the people of Brownsburg worried about the fact that the Russians were about to explode an atomic bomb, and, in fact, they did it three weeks later. Happy Chandler, the commissioner of baseball and a cousin to the twins, even if it was so distant, so convoluted he wasn’t aware of it, spent the day at home in Versailles, Kentucky, quietly reviewing some legal papers in the Danny Gardella case, a case that ultimately changed baseball forever.

  It was a Thursday. A fire started in the Mann Gulch near Helena, Montana, and by the next day it had killed thirteen people. Montgomery Clift and Olivia de Havilland were on the cover of Movie Story. Big things happened. Little things happened. It was a busy day on the planet and in the county. But people around here still talk about that day for one simple reason. August 4, 1949 was also the day on which six-year-old Sam Haislett died and was brought back to life again by a single kiss from Charlie Beale.

  It was after that day that everybody who knew him, and everybody who didn’t, called Charlie Beale by the name Beebo. They called him that because that was the first thing the child said when he opened his eyes, saved by a single kiss from Charlie Beale, alive again, after the doctor had failed.

  To save one life is to save the whole entire world. That’s what the Jews say. Just one single life, among the billions being lived. It changes everything. And not just for the one who got saved.

  The day before the day, the day that changed everything, Charlie took Sam out to the field by the river where he had first lived when he came to town, to make sure it had been mowed and raked, that the tables had been set up, long planks on sawhorses that could seat fourteen. He had planned a feast, and had slaughtered two baby pigs on Tuesday, and spent the afternoon digging a giant pit to roast them over a wood fire. He split logs, and Sam stacked the wood for him. As they were getting ready to leave, he showed Sam a magic trick, or the first part of it.

  He asked Sam to pick out his favorite tree, and when Sam had found it at the edge of the water, a young willow with branches trailing among the minnows, Charlie had pulled from his pocket a piece of Bazooka gum, and carefully and soberly planted it in the soft dirt at the tree’s roots. Then, when it was covered over and the dirt stomped down with their boots, he promised Sam a surprise on his birthday.

  Sam didn’t sleep much that night, he spent his time lying in the dark, pressing his fingers against his closed eyes to watch the fireworks in the dark, but at some point he fell, flying in the iridescent dark with
Captain America, and then he woke into joy, so when he headed out the door that morning, his sixth birthday, over two thousand days on the planet, all spent in the streets of the same small town, he was heading out to wonderful. He was heading out to Charlie Beale.

  Everything is different on a boy’s birthday. Every moment is blessed with a kind of luminosity of self, an awareness that every gesture, every word, is a birthday word or gesture. People know who you are, on your birthday.

  At breakfast, his mother recited: “ ‘But now I am six and I’m clever as clever, so I think I’ll be six forever and ever.’ ” And then she kissed him, and said, “Happy birthday Darling,” as Will led him, eyes closed, to the back porch where a brand new bike waited for him. His birthday, his poem, his bike.

  As soon as he could, he got over to Charlie’s. He couldn’t wait to find out what the next surprise was. “Morning, Sam,” said Charlie. “You ready to dig?”

  When they got out to Charlie’s field, it wasn’t any later than eight o’clock, hot already, and there was his birthday surprise. The willow tree had sprouted hundreds of pieces of Bazooka overnight, from the tendrils that trailed in the water to the highest branches. A bubblegum tree, just out of nowhere, overnight. And Sam knew that Bazooka cost a penny apiece, so he was awed by the fortune his one piece of gum, planted the day before, had yielded in a single night. He picked and picked from the branches, and filled his pockets, but there was still more, higher up, hundreds of pieces he couldn’t reach, each one with bubblegum inside, and a joke, and maybe an offer for a free whistle.

  “Sam,” said Charlie, slowing him down. “Sam. You’ve got a lifetime. This bubblegum is forever. It’s your birthday present. One piece at a time. Just one. It’ll last you forever. Later, we’ll harvest them all and put them in a secret place. Okay? This is your birthday, Sam, and you’ve got a whole life of Bazooka ahead of you. Imagine that.”