The haunted hound; (9 page)

Then, for a long moment, there was absolute silence. There wasn't even the sound of breathing.

It was broken b\- a low moan which swept over the room as they saw the exam. One boy just let the exam paper drop on the floor and put his head down on his arms.

Jonathan looked at it, his eyes misting o\'er a little. It was exactly what he had feared it would be—almost all problems. No simple equations or goes-into or things like that. There were blocks of type, one after the other—problems.

Slowly he wrote his name at the top of the paper and then, on the first line, he put ''i'' and a period.

The first problem was something about acres of land. He read it over twice, but couldn't even figure out a way to begin \\'orking it. He wondered what an acre looked like. How big was an acre?

He decided to skip that one. He'd do the easy ones first.

Jonathan didn't know how long he had been working when he finally raised his head and looked toward the front of the room.

The way Mr. Schreiker was staring at him startled Jonathan. The teacher was sitting behind his desk on the httle platform, his hands holding his chin up and his glittery eyes fixed right on Jonathan. It was the way a hawk sits and watches a field mouse, Jonathan thought.

Jonathan went back to work. He finished about a third of the exam and thought that he had most of it right. All the rest of it, though, was problems.

He went back to the first one about the acres. He read it over and over again, but to him it seemed to be like a baseball. You could take your fingernail and start out on one of the stitched seams of a baseball cover and follow it along, but you would never find the end of it. That's the way the problem was: there was no way to start solving it, it just went around and around.

- He wondered if that bass he had caught Saturday had gone through an acre of water. Or whether the north pasture had an acre of ground in it.

And then, suddenly, Jonathan remembered Judy telling him how she did arithmetic. ''Me and dollars,'' she had said.

He couldn't help smiling a little as he remembered it.

Then he looked at Problem i again. It started off saying, ''A farmer owns six hundred acres of land."

On his tablet Jonathan wrote, ''I have six hundred dollars."

It was a lot of money, and he wished he had that much.

All the way through the problem he changed the acres to

dollars. When he got through it didn't make much sense.

He kept thinking, though, about having six hundred dollars.

And then, just as though something inside had pushed it open, the problem fell apart. It was like these flat pieces of paper which, if you fold on the dotted lines and slip the corners into little slits they will make a house or something.

Jonathan was amazed at how easy it seemed to be to solve the problem about the acres. And when he got the answer he had a sure feeling that it was the right one.

He tackled the next one, changing apples to dollars. It was harder, but he believed that he got it right.

Jonathan didn't even hear Mr. Schreiker say that the first hour was up. He was bent down over his desk, sweat running down his chest and arms, his feet tangled up in the seat supports. He had rumpled his hair and got lead pencil smudges on his face. The two arteries going up his forehead from the outside corner of his eye sockets to his hair stood out like pale blue ridges under his brown skin.

For the first time in his life Jonathan was really thinking.

He didn't hear anything or feel anything. As he finished each of the problems he would print in big letters ANSWER and go on to the next one. A fly lit on his ear, walked down it and across his mouth before it took off and buzzed around his head. Jonathan didn't feel it and didn't hear it. He didn't see Mr. Schreiker walking slowly up and down the aisles between the desks, or see the teacher pause at his desk and peer down at what he was doing.

All Jonathan saw was the problem he was working on.

At last, and for the last time, he wrote ANSWER. He had done them all.

Suddenly he was tireder than he had ever been in his life. As he reached up and dropped the pencil in the groove at the top of his desk, his arm just flopped down. He watched it slide off the desk and dangle, his limp fingers almost touching the floor.

When he untangled his feet, his legs ached. So did his head, a little. And his clothes were soaked with sweat. His neck was stiff and his lips dry and cracked.

When the bell rang, Jonathan looked around, wondering what was the matter.

Slowly everyone stood up.

Mr. Schreiker waited until they were all quiet and then said, 'Well, I hope you enjoyed that little examination. It wasn't hard now, was it?''

There wasn't even a movement.

He tapped the bell. ''Don't touch a pencil," he ordered. "Just arrange your papers neatly and in order and leave them face up on your desks."

On the way out of the building and across the yard all the rest of the boys and girls talked about the exam and the answers they had gotten, but Jonathan walked alone, too tired even to think about arithmetic any more.

There was no place in particular that he wanted to go, so he wandered along the street, his feet dragging and his head down.

When at last he looked up, he saw the city park. The trees were all green, making deep shadows on the clipped grass, and there was a fountain with water squirting up out of the middle of it.

Paying no attention to the signs, Jonathan walked a little way out on the grass and sat down.

He hadn't been there ten minutes before a policeman came and told him to get off the grass.

Jonathan drifted on. When he was hungry, he called up and told Mamie he wasn't coming home for lunch and then ate a foot-long hot dog. After that he went to a double feature.

It was past suppertime when he got home. As soon as he opened the apartment door he knew that his father was there by the smell of his pipe.

Jonathan hesitated a moment, a sudden feeling of helplessness dragging him down.

The door of the den was closed, so Jonathan decided not to bother his father right now. But as he started up the stairs to his own room, Mrs. Johnson darted out of the kitchen. ''Not so fast, young man,'' she said. 'Tour father wants to

see you right away. And " She made a lot of looking at

her watch.

Now it's coming, Jonathan thought, as he turned and went toward the den. He knew almost exactly what his father was going to do, and he dreaded it. He would just look at Jonathan with that faraway expression he sometimes had and then he wouldn't say a thing. It would be a lot

better, Jonathan thought, if his father would just get mad or something.

He knocked on the door and went in, closing the door behind him.

His father looked tired. On the desk in front of him were a lot of those long sheets of paper lawyers use.

''Hello, Dad,'' Jonathan said, standing with his back almost touching the door.

''Hello, son. Hungry?''

"Well, sort of."

His father stood up. "Let's go see if Mamie left you anything."

As they went out the door, his father put his hand on Jonathan's shoulder for a moment. "What kind of day have you had?"

Jonathan thought about it but could remember only the exam. "School's over," he said.

In the kitchen he ate his supper while his father heated some coffee and drank a cup of it.

They didn't talk much. His father told him about the trip and that he was going to buy a new car. Jonathan was interested in that and, together, they decided that the best kind would be a convertible.

Jonathan knew that his father was waiting, just as he was. When they got back to the den, it would come. It would be rough then.

Jonathan finished and stacked the dishes. On the way through the living room his father stopped to talk to Mrs.

Johnson, so Jonathan went on alone and was waiting, his back against the wall, when his father came in.

His father closed the door, sat down, and then took a long time to put the tobacco in his pipe.

Jonathan noticed that the report was still propped up against the pens.

After his father got the pipe going, he lifted the report card and tapped it with the pipestem. "You've had a rough summer, haven't you, son?''

Jonathan nodded. ''Guess I flunked," he said, not wanting to drag the thing out.

''Have you got your exam mark yet? That's got to be counted, too."

Jonathan tried to smile, but his lips were stiff. "I'd have to make about a hundred on the exam to pass the whole grade, I guess."

"How did you do on the exam? Was it hard?"

"I don't know," Jonathan admitted. "I had a kind of a feeling that I got some of the answers right, but it was just a feeling, maybe."

His father dropped the report card in the wastebasket and smoked his pipe. "I called up Mr. Schreiker and asked him to let me know how you did as soon as he could."

Jonathan again tried to smile.

His father thought for a long time. "Jonathan, how would }0u like to go off to school? A prep school somewhere?"

"A boarding school?"

His father nodded.

Jonathan thought about it for a while. "I don't think it would make any difference—in my low marks, I mean. It just wouldn't make any difference at all, I guess.''

His father looked up at him suddenly and then looked away. ''Nothing makes very much difference to you, does it, son?" he asked, his voice quiet and slow.

''Well ..." Jonathan said, not knowing what to say. "Some things do, I think."

"What, for instance?"

"Well, the Farm. Things seem different out there. I mean, I feel different, I guess."

"But that was a long time ago, son."

"Day before yesterday," Jonathan said. "I spent almost all day out there."

His father straightened up. "You did? Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. Dad. I Just went out there, that's all."

His father started to say something, but the phone rang.

Jonathan could hear a flat voice talking, and as his father listened his face began to change. At first it was the way it usually was around the apartment—friendly, a little sad, and, somehow, far away. But now, as he listened, his face changed to what Jonathan called the "lawyer look." You couldn't tell how he felt, or what he was thinking, or anything else. His face wasn't exactly a blank—you knew he was thinking something—but you'd never find out what it was until he chose to tell you.

"Thank you. Good-by," his father said, in the polite, cold lawyer's voice he sometimes used.

His father swung slowly around in the chair and looked at Jonathan, the ''lawyer look" fading away. Then he got up and held out his hand. ''Congratulations, son. You made a hundred on that examination this morning."

Jonathan \\ent over to a chair and sat down. "A hundred?" he asked.

His father was smiling. "Yep. Perfect, Jonny. You passed for the year."

"I wonder w^hat happened?" Jonathan asked, almost talking to himself as he thought about Judy and the dollars.

"Schreiker tried very hard to hint that perhaps you had cheated a little."

Jonathan looked up, surprised. "No," he said. "I didn't cheat. There wasn't any way to."

His father came over and gave him a little push on the shoulder. "Nice going," he said. "It must have given Schreiker a big surprise."

"Me, too."

His father walked around a little, grinning all the time. "That's really fine!" he said. "I'm proud of you, son."

"Judy Shelley taught me how," Jonathan said.

"Who's she?"

"She's Mr. \\^orth's niece. Her mother bought the old Forbes place, next to the Farm, you remember?"

"I remember," his father said. Then he went back to the desk and sat down.

"Dad," Jonathan said, his mouth suddenly dry, ''are you still going to sell the Farm?"

''Well '' Then he stopped to work on his pipe. ''Well,

yes/' he said. "The taxes are going up on it all the time. It's expensive to keep and, if we don't sell it soon, we'll have to spend a lot of money to keep the house from falling apart."

"It's not going to fall apart," Jonathan said. "It's gray and the paint's kind of peeling off now, but it's a strong house, Dad."

"But if we don't live in it or use the place at all, why not sell it, son?"

"Because," Jonathan said. "Because it's where we used to live. It's where Mother lived. It's where all the dogs used to be and the horses. Just because it's our Farm, Dad." Suddenly he was afraid he was going to cry.

His father thought for a long time. "Son, maybe it's all wrong, but there isn't any way to live your life backwards. You have to keep going into the future. And sometimes you have to forget the past entirely."

Jonathan wondered what kind of future he would have living all his life in a city. "All right," he said.

His father looked happier. "After all, son, it's only a piece of land and a house."

Jonathan nodded. "Just a piece of land and a house," he said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kings were different for Jonathan in the morning. He \\oke up at exactly seven o'clock and started to get right out of bed. Then he remembered that he had passed and that school was over. It made him feel so good, he got up any-wa\'.