She’d tell me, “These things I’m going to explain to you later will be a great help for you.” Then Momma’d look hard in my face, grab a holt of my arms real tight and say, “And Bud, I want you always to remember, no matter how bad things look to you, no matter how dark the night, when one door closes, don’t worry, because another door opens.”
I’d say, “What, it opens all by itself?”
She’d say, “Yes, it seems so.”
That was it: “Another door opens.” That was the thing that was supposed to have helped me. I should’ve known then that I was in for a lot of trouble.
It’s funny how now that I’m ten years old and just about a man I can see how Momma was so wrong. She was wrong because she probably should’ve told me the things she thought I was too young to hear, because now that she’s gone I’ll never know what they were. Even if I was too young back then I could’ve rememorized them and used them when I did need help, like right now.
She was also wrong when she thought I’d understand that nonsense about doors closing and opening all by themselves. Back then it really scared me because I couldn’t see what one door closing had to do with another one opening unless there was a ghost involved. All her talk made me start jamming a chair up against my closet door at night.
But now that I’m almost grown I see Momma wasn’t talking about doors opening to let ghosts into your bedroom, she meant doors like the door at the Home closing leading to the door at the Amoses’ opening and the door in the shed opening leading to me sleeping under a tree getting ready to open the next door.
I checked out the other things in my suitcase and they seemed OK. I felt a lot better.
Right now I was too tired to think anymore so I closed my suitcase, put the proper knots back in the twine, crawled under the Christmas tree and wrapped myself in the blanket.
I’d have to wake up real early if I wanted to get to the mission in time for breakfast, if you were one minute late they wouldn’t let you in for food.
UH-OH. My eyes opened and I could see the sun behind the branch of a Christmas tree.
I jumped up, folded my blanket inside my suitcase, hid it and started running the six or seven blocks down to the mission.
I turned the corner and said, “Whew!” There were still people lined up waiting. I started walking along the line. The end was a lot farther away than I thought. The line turned all the way around two corners, then crossed over one street before I saw the last person. Shucks. I walked up to get behind him.
He said, “Line’s closed. These here folks are the last ones.” He pointed at a man standing next to a woman who was carrying a baby.
I said, “But sir . . .”
He said, “But nothing. Line’s closed. These here folks are the last ones.”
It was time to start lying. If I didn’t get any food now I’d have to steal something out of someone’s garbage or I wouldn’t be able to eat until the mission opened for supper.
I said, “Sir, I—”
The man raised his hand and said, “Look, kid, everybody’s got a story and everybody knows the rules. The line closes at seven o’clock. How’s it fair to these people who been here since five o’clock that you can sleep until”—he looked at his wristwatch—“until seven-fifteen, then come busting down here expecting to eat? You think you got some kind of special privilege just ’cause you’re skinny and raggedy? Look in the line, there’s lots of folks look just like you, you ain’t the worst.
“Supper starts at six P.M., but you see how things is, if you plan on getting fed you better be in line by four. Now get out of here before I get rough with you.”
Shucks, being hungry for a whole day is about as bad as it can get. I said, “But . . .”
He reached in his pocket and pulled something out that looked like a heavy black strap and slapped it across his hand. Uh-oh, here we go again.
He said, “That’s it, no more talk, you opened your mouth one time too many. You rotten kids today don’t listen to no one, but I’ma show you something that’ll improve your hearing.” He slapped the strap on his hand and started walking toward me.
I was wrong when I said being hungry for a day is about as bad as it can get, being hungry plus having a big knot on your head from a black leather strap would be even worse.
I backed away but only got two steps before I felt a giant warm hand wrap around my neck from behind. I looked up to see whose doggone hand was so doggone big and why they’d put it around my neck.
A very tall, square-shaped man in old blue overalls looked down at me and said, “Clarence, what took you so long?”
I got ready to say, “My name’s not Clarence and please don’t choke me, sir, I’ll leave,” but as soon as I opened my mouth he gave my head a shake and said, “I told you to hurry back, now where you been?” He gave me a shove and said, “Get back in line with your momma.”
I looked up and down the line to see who was supposed to be my momma when a woman pointed her finger at her feet and said, “Clarence, you get over here right now.” There were two little kids hanging on to her skirt.
I walked over to where she was and she gave me a good hard smack on the head. Shucks, for someone who was just pretending to be my momma she sure did slap me a good one.
I said, “Ow!”
The big square man who’d grabbed my neck looked at the man with the strap and said, “Boy had to go use the crapper, told him not to waste time, but like you said, these kids today don’t listen to nobody.”
The strap man looked at the size of the man who called me Clarence and walked back to the end of the line.
When the overall man got back in line I said, “Thank you, sir, I really tried to get—” But he popped me in the back of the head, hard, and said, “Next time don’t be gone so long.”
The two little kids busted out laughing and said, “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah, Clarence got a lickin’, Clarence got a lickin’.”
I told them, “Shut up, and don’t call me—” Then both my pretend poppa and my pretend momma smacked my head.
She looked at the people direct behind us and said, “Mercy, when they get to be this age . . .”
The people weren’t too happy about me taking cuts in the line, but when they looked at how big my pretend daddy was and they saw how hard him and my pretend momma were going upside my head they decided they wouldn’t say anything.
I was grateful to these people, but I wished they’d quit popping me in the head, and it seems like with all the names in the world they could’ve come up with a better one for me than Clarence.
I stood in line with my pretend family for a long, long time. Everybody was very quiet about standing in line, even my pretend brother and sister and all the other kids. When we finally got around the last corner and could see the door and folks going in it seemed like a bubble busted and people started laughing and talking. The main thing people were talking about was the great big sign that was hanging over the building.
It showed a gigantic picture of a family of four rich white people sitting in a car driving somewhere. You could tell it was a family ’cause they all looked exactly alike. The only difference amongst them was that the daddy had a big head and a hat and the momma had the same head with a woman’s hat and the girl had two big yellow pigtails coming out from above her ears. They all had big shiny teeth and big shiny eyes and big shiny cheeks and big shiny smiles. Shucks, you’d need to squint your eyes if that shiny family drove anywhere near you.
You could tell they were rich ’cause the car looked like it had room for eight or nine more people in it and ’cause they had movie star clothes on. The woman was wearing a coat with a hunk of fur around the neck and the man was wearing a suit and a tie and the kids looked like they were wearing ten-dollar-apiece jackets.
Writ about their car in fancy letters it said, THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE AMERICA TODAY!
My pretend daddy read it and said, “Uh-uh-uh, well, you got to give them credit, you wouldn??
?t expect that they’d have the nerve to come down here and tell the truth.”
When we finally got into the building it was worth the wait. The first thing you noticed when you got inside was how big the place was, and how many people were in it and how quiet it was. The only sound you could hear was when someone scraped a spoon across the bottom of their bowl or pulled a chair in or put one back or when the people in front of you dragged their feet on the floor moving up to where they were spooning out the food.
After we’d picked up our spoons and bowls a lady dug a big mess of oatmeal out of a giant pot and swopped it down into our bowls. She smiled and said, “I hope you enjoy.”
Me and my pretend family all said, “Thank you, ma’am.” Then a man put two pieces of bread and a apple and a big glass of milk on your tray and said, “Please read the signs to your children. Thank you.”
We all said, “Thank you, sir.” Then we walked past some signs someone’d stuck up on the wall.
One said, PLEASE DO NOT SMOKE, another said, PLEASE EAT AS QUICKLY AND QUIETLY AS POSSIBLE, another one said, PLEASE BE CONSIDERATE AND PATIENT—CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF—YOUR NEIGHBORS WILL BE EATING AFTER YOU, and the last one said, WE ARE TERRIBLY SORRY BUT WE HAVE NO WORK AVAILABLE.
My pretend daddy read the signs to my pretend brother and sister and we all sat at a long table with strangers on both sides of us.
The oatmeal was delicious! I poured some of my milk into it so it wouldn’t be so lumpy and mixed it all together.
My pretend mother opened her pocketbook and took out a little brown envelope. She reached inside of it and sprinkled something on my pretend brother’s and sister’s oatmeal, then said to them, “I know that’s not as much as you normally get, but I wanted to ask you if you minded sharing some with Clarence.”
They pouted and gave me a couple of dirty looks. My pretend mother said, “Good,” and emptied the rest of the envelope over my oatmeal. Brown sugar!
Shucks, I didn’t even mind them calling me Clarence anymore. I said “Thank you, Momma, ma’am.”
She and my pretend daddy laughed and he said, “It took you long enough to catch on, Clarence.” He acted like he was going to smack me again but he didn’t.
After we’d finished all our food we put our bowls up and I thanked my pretend family again, I asked them, “Are you going to be coming back for supper?”
My pretend momma said, “No, dear, we only come here mornings. But you make sure you get here plenty early, you hear?”
I said, “Yes, Momma, I mean, ma’am.”
I watched them walking away. My pretend brother looked back at me and stuck out his tongue, then reached up and took my pretend mother’s hand. I couldn’t really blame him, I don’t think I’d be real happy about sharing my brown sugar and my folks with any strange kids either.
I PUSHED the heavy door open and walked into the library. The air in the library isn’t like the air anywhere else, first it’s always cooler than the air outside, it feels like you’re walking into a cellar on a hot July day, even if you have to walk up a bunch of stairs to get into it.
The next thing about the air in the library is that no other place smells anything like it. If you close your eyes and try to pick out what it is that you’re sniffing you’re only going to get confused, because all the smells have blended together and turned themselves into a different one.
As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, the books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the pages in little puffs when you’re reading something or looking at some pictures, a kind of hypnotizing smell.
I think it’s that smell that makes so many folks fall asleep in the library. You’ll see someone turn a page and you can imagine a puff of page powder coming up really slow and easy until it starts piling on the person’s eyelashes, weighing their eyes down so much that they stay down a little longer after each blink and finally making them so heavy that they just don’t come back up at all. Then their mouths come open and their heads start bouncing up and down like they’re bobbing in a big tub of water for apples and before you know it, . . . woop, zoop, sloop . . . they’re out cold and their face thunks down smack-dab on the book.
That’s the part that gets the librarians the maddest, they get real upset if folks start drooling in the books and, page powder or not, they don’t want to hear no excuses, you gotta get out. Drooling in the books is even worse than laughing out loud in the library, and even though it might seem kind of mean, you can’t really blame the librarians for tossing drooly folks out ’cause there’s nothing worse than opening a book and having the pages all stuck together from somebody’s dried-up slobber.
I opened my eyes to start looking for Miss Hill. She wasn’t at the lending desk so I left my suitcase with the white lady there. I knew it would be safe.
I walked between the stacks to see if Miss Hill was putting books up. Three doggone times I walked through the library, upstairs and down, and couldn’t find her.
I went back up to the librarian at the lending desk. I waited until she looked up at me. She smiled and said, “Yes? Would you like to retrieve your suitcase?” She reached under the desk.
I said, “Not yet, ma’am, could I ask you a question?” She said, “Of course, young man, how may I help you?”
“I’m looking for Miss Hill.”
The librarian looked surprised. “Miss Hill? My goodness, hadn’t you heard?”
Uh-oh! That’s Number 16 of Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself, that’s one of the worst ones.
RULES AND THINGS NUMBER 16
If a Grown-up Ever Starts a Sentence by Saying
“Haven’t You Heard,” Get Ready, ’Cause
What’s About to Come Out of Their Mouth Is Gonna
Drop You Headfirst into a Boiling Tragedy.
It seems like the answer to “Haven’t you heard” always has something to do with someone kicking the bucket. And not kicking the bucket in a calm, peaceful way like a heart attack at home in bed either, it usually is some kind of dying that will make your eyes buck out of your head when you hear about it, it’s usually the kind of thing that will run you out of a room with your hands over your ears and your mouth wide open.
Something like hearing that your grandmother got her whole body pulled through the wringer on a washing machine, or something like hearing about a horse slipping on the ice and landing on some kid you went to school with.
I answered, “No, ma’am,” and got my stomach ready to hear about Miss Hill biting the dust in some way that was going to give me nightmares.
The librarian said, “There’s no need for you to look so stricken. It’s not bad news, young man.”
She laughed a quiet, librarian-type laugh and said, “Really, it’s not bad news. Unless you had matrimonial plans concerning Miss Hill.”
I pretended I knew what she was talking about, most times if you listen to how grown folks ask a question they let you know what it is they want to hear.
I said, “No, ma’am, I didn’t plan that at all.”
She laughed again and said, “Good, because I don’t think her new husband would appreciate the competition. Charlemae . . . Miss Hill is currently living in Chicago, Illinois.”
I said, “Husband? You mean she got married, ma’am?”
The librarian said, “Oh, yes, and I must tell you, she was radiating happiness.”
I said, “And she moved all the way to Chicago?”
“That’s right, but Chicago isn’t that far. Here, I’ll show you.”
She reached under her desk and pulled out a thick leather book called Atlas of the United States of Am
erica.
She thumbed through a couple of pages and said, “Here we are.” She turned the book to me, it was a big map of Michigan and a couple of the states that were next to it.
“We’re here.” She pointed to the spot that said Flint. “And Chicago is here in Illinois.”
They looked pretty close, but I know how tricky maps can be, shucks, they can put the whole world on one page on a map, so I said, “How long would it take someone to walk that far?”
She said, “Oh, dear, quite a while, I’m afraid. Let’s check the distance.”
She reached under the desk and pulled out another thick book called Standard Highway Mileage Guide and turned to a page that had a million numbers and city names on it. She showed me how to find Chicago on the line that was running across the page and Flint on the line that was running down the page and then to look at the number that was writ where the two of them joined up. It said 270.
She pulled a pencil out and said, “OK, this is how one figures the amount of time required to walk to Chicago. Now—” She pulled a third book out.
Shucks, this is one of the bad things about talking to librarians, I asked one question and already she had us digging through three different books.
She thumbed through the book until she said, “Aha, it says here that the average male human gait is five miles an hour. OK, assuming that you could cover five miles an hour, all we have to do is divide two hundred seventy by five.”
She did it and said, “Fifty-four hours! Much too long to be practical. No, I’m afraid you’ll simply have to wait until Mrs. Rollins comes back to Flint for a visit.”
Shucks. Chicago might as well be a million miles away from Flint and Miss Hill might as well be a squashed, crunched-up mess in a washing machine when it came down to helping me now.
I thanked the librarian for the bad news and went to sit at one of the big heavy tables so I could think what to do next.
Going back to the Home was out, it used to be that we’d get a new kid every once in a while, but lately it seems like there’s a couple of new kids every day, mostly babies, and they’re most always sick. It’s not like it was when I first got there, shucks, half the folks that run it don’t even tell you their name and don’t remember yours unless you’re in trouble all the time or getting ready to move out.