The Giant-Slayer

W
hen Laurie Valentine was six years old she got out her crayons and drew the future.

She started with an island in the shape of a potato, and in the middle she put a range of mountains in a zigzag line. She drew a crooked river crawling down toward the coast, green forests and a scarlet lake, a smear of yellow for a meadow. Here she put a white cross, there a lion with wings on its back.

It was a Thursday morning in 1950. Laurie was kneeling on a kitchen chair, her elbows on the table, while her nanna—Mrs. Strawberry—did the dusting in the living room. The house smelled of furniture polish.

“I need that table now,” said Mrs. Strawberry. She came into the kitchen with her rags and feather duster, and stopped behind the girl. “My, what a pretty picture.”

“It’s not a picture, Nanna,” said Laurie, looking up. “It’s a map of my life. It shows all the things I’m going to find when I go exploring.”

“So what’s the squiggle?” asked Mrs. Strawberry. “That red thing by the castle?”

“I don’t know,” said Laurie. “But I think I’ll have to fight it when I get there.”

Mrs. Strawberry laughed. “What an imagination you’ve got.” She rubbed Laurie’s hair and turned away. “Now clear the table, honey. It’s nearly time for lunch.”

Laurie picked crumbs of blue crayon from the river. “Do you want to know anything else about my map?” she asked.

“It’s probably best if you put it away,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “After all, we should keep it safe for your father. He’ll certainly want to see
that
when he comes home.”

“Can I put it in the atlas?” said Laurie. “It’s a map, and—”

“Yes, that’s a good idea.”

“Because it should be with all the other maps.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “I know what an atlas is for.”

Laurie had been smiling. But without another word she returned her crayons to the box, standing them as neatly as pickets in a fence. She climbed down from her chair, carried her map in both hands to the living room, and stuck it among the pages of the big blue atlas, between Antarctica and the index.

“You’ve never seen a child so lonely,” said Mrs. Strawberry that night. She was sitting with her husband on the front porch of their small white house. He was on the glider, she on the wooden chair with her knitting on her lap.

“It’s tragic, don’t you think,” she said, “for a girl to grow up without a mother?”

“I suppose it is,” he said with a sigh. They had had the same conversation many times before.

“So tragic, the mother dying in childbirth,” added Mrs. Strawberry.

Her husband nodded. “Yes, indeed.”

“I don’t know why he never remarried. I feel sorry for the both of them.” Mrs. Strawberry took up her needles and tugged on the wool. “That poor Mr. Valentine, he’s so darned busy. It’s good work, of course; why, it’s the work of saints he does, raising all that money for polio. But I wish he had more time for Laurie.” She began to work the needles, and they ticked as steadily as a clock. “It’s like he’s trying to save every child in the country, and forgetting his own.”

“That
does
sound sad,” said Mr. Strawberry, as though following a script.

“She’s so much like him. Smart as a whip,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “Shy and quiet too. You should see how she plays. She takes every book from the shelf and stacks them into walls, talking away to herself a mile a minute. She always arranges the books in the same way—in a square—but
one day it’s a castle, and the next a sailing ship, or a fort or a covered wagon. It’s all imaginary, you see.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Strawberry.

As always, Mrs. Strawberry finished with a clack of her knitting needles and some final words. “That child lives in a land of make-believe.”

There were pictures everywhere of Mrs. Valentine—black-framed photos that stood like little cardboard tents on the mantelpiece and radio, on the sideboard in the hall, on every windowsill and table. But to Laurie these were images of strangers, of twenty different women all fading into brown and yellow.

Sometimes, in the night, she could hear her father talking to the pictures.

He was her hero: the second smartest man in the world. Only Santa Claus knew more than Laurie’s father. He raised money for the March of Dimes, but she thought of him as some sort of soldier. He was always talking about fighting.

“We’re waging a war against polio,” he would say. Or, “We’ve won the battle, but the fight goes on.”

His uniform was a brown suit, his helmet a gray fedora. Every morning, as soon as Mrs. Strawberry arrived, he put on that hat, gave Laurie a kiss, and hurried away to catch the bus. And Mrs. Strawberry, still holding her handbag, still wearing her gloves, would make sure that the knot on his tie was perfectly straight, that he hadn’t forgotten his briefcase.

“People think your father’s scatterbrained,” she told Laurie. “But he’s so busy with big ideas that he doesn’t have time to think of little things.”

Laurie thought of herself as one of those “little things.” Mr. Valentine never had time to play with her. He spent his evenings in the armchair, smoking his pipe, reading the papers he brought home from work. He didn’t like noise, and he didn’t like music, so the house was very quiet, the only sounds the rustle of his paper.

But for a few minutes before her bedtime, Laurie was allowed to sit on his lap, and the smoke from his pipe coiled round the two of them like a gray rope. She liked to fiddle with his tie clasp, watching reflections twist on the gold.

On the day she drew the map, Laurie brought the atlas to his chair. She put it on his knees and climbed up beside him. It was such a big book that it hit his pipe when she opened it. Then she nestled against him and started telling him all the things about the map of her life.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” he said. But he wasn’t really listening.