What Hearts (4 page)

This
is what he was good at, he realized. This is what he
did
. He placed himself in the world, and the world drew his thoughts outside himself, where they multiplied and spiraled and led him in silent, thrilling flights. And as he expanded into the world, he expanded inside. At these moments an endlessness beyond thought opened inside him. Outside, his mind was whizzing through things, but inside, he was silent, still; sometimes, he knew he was not even breathing.

How do you put on a show of
that
? Asa felt that these abilities and experiences must appear, somehow, in everything he did, in what he
was
; but how could anyone be expected to know what he was? He was alone. That was it, really. Even when he was scurrying around figuring the angles and openings of other people, he was operating alone. He was a singleton, not a showman.

He got up from the window and found Joel's book. He thought of taking it back to the window and reading it by the moonlight, but he could not do it—not a poem called “Little Boy Blue.” The ghost of Eugene Field was probably hovering somewhere
begging
him to read it in the moonlight, then cry silver tears. He switched on his overhead light.

He found the poem and read it. When he finished, he stared at the wall. It was difficult to believe that someone had written this. He read it again, and this time, he found it difficult to believe that someone else, even a kid, had chosen it to recite, on a stage, in front of other people. A sweet little boy pats his stuffed animals and drops dead in the night, and oh
what a sad, sad world it is. Asa tried to laugh, but found that despite his scorn, he could not easily shake the heavy sadness the poem labored so shamelessly to create. This made him furious.

A few months ago, he and his mother and stepfather had been at a restaurant. While they were waiting for their food, Dave had gotten up and gone to the jukebox. He studied the selections for a moment, dropped in a coin, and pressed two buttons. A song bloomed from the small speaker over their booth, a song his mother apparently recognized, for as Dave sat down again next to Asa, she looked across at him and said, “Oh, honey, thanks.”

The song was sung by a man with a high, rather nasal voice. It was a personal narrative about his darling young wife. She had come to him one spring, they had been in love for a year, then for some reason—something woeful that happened between the second chorus and the third verse, during the violin solo—she died. In the last verse, he was looking at a tree in the yard and noticing that it had grown.
She, of course, being dead, had not, which (Asa thought) must be what made his mother so sad. For she was crying by the time the violins—hundreds of them by now—faded back into the speaker.

They sat in silence, except for his mother's snufflings. Asa said nothing. The air at the table was suddenly very tense; there was danger popping like ions. Asa would not have spoken for a hundred dollars. He held his breath and hoped the food would come. He saw the waitress emerge from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three plates. He let his breath out as she approached. He had made it.

But then, just before she arrived, Dave held up a hand to stop her. He turned his head slightly and looked sideways at Asa with a thin, amused smile. “Well?” he said.

Asa stared at the waitress. She stood, holding the heavy tray. “Well what?” the boy said, innocently.

Dave lifted his chin in a little nod at him. The smile held. “Well, what did you think of the song?”

Asa looked at his stepfather. Across the table, his mother had sniffed to a halt, and was wiping her eyes with a napkin. “I'm hungry,” the boy said. “Please let's just eat.”

The waitress made a move to put the tray down, but Dave held his hand out again and stopped her. “Now, I think it's a fair question to ask a boy, don't you? Just a simple question. And a boy ought to answer when he's spoken to.” He lifted his chin again, and the smile tightened. “So answer me, unless you want to be reminded of your manners when we get home.”

Asa took a deep breath and tried to hold it. He couldn't hold it forever. “All right,” he burst out, louder than he wanted to be. “Okay. It's a stupid song designed to suck the easy stupid sad feelings out of people who have plenty of other things to feel sad about, and it's about as real as the sunshine in cigarette commercials, and I hate
every stinking word
.”

He sat, breathing hard and quaking, his eyes bulging hard against the insides of his eyelids with every pounding heartbeat, making the restaurant disappear in flashes of white,
white, white. His mother exploded into sobs once more, but worse this time: real. Dave apparently gave the waitress a signal, for she now began to place the food in front of them. Asa stared down at his plate of spaghetti and said, “I have to get up. I'm going to be sick.” Dave did not move to let him out of the booth, but leisurely stuck his fork into his own spaghetti, and twirled until a large mass hung on the end. This he raised until it was just in front of his face. He studied it. Asa's mother wailed across the table.

Dave said, “Well, yes. I guess—I guess you have to have a
heart
to like that song. Not just a brain.”

Now, it seemed, Asa would once again have to make public his heartlessness: he hated every word of “Little Boy Blue,” which, probably, all other human beings on the planet adored, and unless he wanted to recite “And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue/Kissed them and put them there” about a toy dog and a tin soldier, he would have to say so.

Before he knew it, he was standing on his
bed. He bounced up and came down, hard. This was forbidden; Dave and his mother could hear in their bedroom below. It was sure to bring Dave up, scowling and storming. “ ‘Now don't you go till I come,'” Asa recited loudly, bouncing again, “ ‘And don't you make any
noise
!'” He bounced one, two, three times, found a comfortable rhythm,
bowm, bowm, bowm, bowm
.

“ ‘And toddling off to his trundle bed,'” Asa shouted, “ ‘He dreamt of the pretty toys.' Hoo boy! Are those poor little toys in for a big
surprise
!” He cackled and lifted his knees, dropping even deeper into the mattress,
whong!
, springing even higher. Again he laughed, louder and wilder, and as long as his mouth was open and his voice sounded good, why not go ahead and holler this stupid poem that seemed to have stuck in his memory after only two readings? So he launched into a full-blown recitation, emphasizing the special moments of pathos with hoots or moans; except for a line or two (which he filled in by singing “Blue-d'dee blue-d'dee”
bowm, bowm, bowm
) he had the whole thing by heart. He built up to a big
finish by bouncing higher, shouting louder, higher, louder, higher…until he arrived at the end and sprang spread-eagled off his bed out into the air of his room, singing “What has become of our Little Boy Blue?” in falsetto as he soared. Then his heels hit the floor with a stunning jolt, and he sprawled. He lay there, panting, waiting.

From below there was no sound. That was odd. He sat up, still panting. What was the matter down there? Perhaps they were weeping with the sadness of it all. Poor Little Boy Blue! Maybe they'd like to hear it again. He got up and found the book, intending to brush up on the couple of lines he'd blown. He snatched it open and scratched roughly through the pages, looking for the poem, intending to read it aloud with volume and sarcasm. He held the text up close to his face.

It was not “Little Boy Blue” he was on the wrong page. But before he could flip it, he had read a line or two, and he stopped. The lines were “And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable wicket creaked/Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked.”

Asa read the lines again. He didn't know what an ostler was. He didn't even know what a stable wicket was. But he knew they were better than toy dogs and tin soldiers, and he knew above all that when an ostler with a white, peaked face listened by a creaking wicket dark in a dark old inn-yard, something was afoot. He read the next lines: “His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like moldy hay/But he loved the landlord's daughter/The landlord's red-lipped daughter,/Dumb as a dog he listened,/And he heard the robber say…”

Now, thought Asa, springing up with the book in his hand and shaking a fist,
now
by God we are
onto
something. Just ahead of his thoughts he saw a solution to his problem, he saw poor Little Boy Blue dying alone and unsung in the darkness far from voice and stage, but at the moment he did not want to think it through. To heck with Little Boy Blue. He wanted to
read
. So, quietly, he turned out his overhead light, and quietly pulled a chair into the moonlight coming through his window.

TWO

“‘A coat of the claret velvet,'” came Joel's voice over his shoulder, “‘and boots of the brown doe-skin.'”

“No,” said Asa, stopping on the leafy path. “No. Not boots, and not ‘
the
brown doe-skin.' It's his
breeches
that are made of that: ‘breeches of brown doe-skin.'” As an afterthought he added, “You had the right sense of the rhythm, though. You added that ‘the' to make up for the difference in syllables between ‘boots' and ‘breeches.'”

Joel had stopped now too, and he came walking back, snapping a withering leaf shaped like a mitten from a sassafras bush. “I forget what breeches are again,” he said. He stuck the leafs stem in his mouth.

“Pants,” said Asa. Every time they went over this, he was tempted to mention the obvious clue; but he was afraid that if he called Joel's attention to the similarity between the familiar word “britches” and the unknown word, Joel would just start saying “britches.”
He supposed that would be better than “boots,” but he hated the way it sounded.

Joel twirled the leaf in front of his face by rolling the stem between his pink lips. The leaf fell. “You know why I can never remember that? Because it doesn't make any sense. I mean, doeskin is like leather, right? Well, whoever heard of leather
pants
?”

Asa sighed, and sat on a fallen tree trunk. “It's very soft,” he said. “Doeskin I mean. It's as soft as cashmere.”

“How do you know?” Joel asked, taking a seat up the trunk from Asa. There was no challenge in his voice, Asa knew; Joel didn't doubt, he just wondered.

“My mother has some doeskin gloves.”

“Ah.” Joel looked around, sighed contentedly, and began to whistle. Asa said nothing. He felt bad for an instant; his mother had never had doeskin gloves, at least as far as he knew. He had lied.

“Shall we try it again?” he asked.

“You know,” said Joel, “you are the only kid I ever knew who actually says things like ‘shall.' Is it because you're a Yankee?”

“I'm not a Yankee,” Asa said patiently. “Washington is below the Mason-Dixon line.”

“May be,” said Joel, “but it's a big city. Seems like all big cities are Yankee, really.”

“What about Atlanta?”

“Well, I guess you got me there.” Joel stood up and stretched slowly, smiling at the woods all around. “You got to admit,” he said, “that this is better than a stuffy room.”

“Yes, it is,” said Asa. “But the reason we stopped working in my room was that you said you couldn't learn anything in there but you could learn
anything
outside.” He paused, then added: “It's only a week away, Joel.”

“I know,” Joel said, with a heavy sigh Asa hoped was faked for his benefit. “I'm not doing too very good.”

“You're doing fine,” Asa said, “but you just need to speed up.”

“And you gave me all the hot verses.”

“Stanzas,” said Asa. It was true: in an effort to engage Joel's enthusiasm, and thereby his concentration, Asa had abandoned their initial scheme of simple alternation, coming up instead with an arrangement that favored Joel with the
exciting parts. Joel was now responsible for telling the audience about the moon being a ghostly galleon, about Tim the ostler's white peaked face, about the brave robber with the twinkling pistol butts rising in the saddle to kiss his bonny sweetheart while his face burnt and her perfumed hair tumbled all over him, and, best of all, about the gallant, galloping fellow turning back on the murderous red-coats, shrieking a curse to the sky with the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high. But instead of rising to the thrill of this amazing privilege, Joel scattered his attention at every strange, marvelous old word, unable to keep his ostlers and rapiers and breeches straight. He still couldn't really grasp why they called a robber a “highwayman.” He said it sounded like a highwayman ought to be a guy doing road work.

The switch hadn't worked, but Asa wasn't willing after two weeks of effort to undo whatever odd bits of memorization Joel had accomplished by reclaiming the choice stanzas for himself. Besides, he was still deeply grateful for the easygoing way Joel had agreed to drop
“Little Boy Blue” and take on the much longer poem. Sometimes, though, he was tempted to wish for a way he could recite the whole thing himself.

Joel had started walking back in the direction of the house; it appeared that today's rehearsal was about to end. Asa shook his head, and fell into step behind the larger boy.

After a few minutes, Joel asked, “Do you think I'll make it?”

Without thinking, Asa said, “Yes.”

“I don't. I'm sorry I'm so dumb.”

“You're not dumb.”

“I had ‘Little Boy Blue' down
cold
.”

Asa doubted this; he doubted Joel had his own telephone number down cold; but he only said, “I know. It was tough on you to switch.”

“It's worth it,” said Joel brightly. “We're better friends because we have to work so hard on this one.”