Emory's Gift

by W. Bruce Cameron

  So it was not the content of the message on the wall but the fact that it was painted there in the first place that got all of my attention. No, I’ve responded patiently to so many people, I did not stop to connect “1862” with “rebels” and I did not try to figure out what “inf.” and “regt.” meant. I was a kid. I just didn’t want to get in trouble. And anyway, my biggest concern had been for Emory, and he was evidently fine.

  I had enough primer to coat the places on the floor where the bear had walked and drizzled a trail of red but not enough for the wall. To mark out his words, I used a roller and flat white wall paint, knowing as I did so that it would take more than one coat. Where the bear had left a smear crawling out the broken window I was forced to resort to sandpaper—I didn’t have any stain that would match. In the yard, I scraped and dug at the red tracks with a hoe and a garden rake.

  All of this I did in such a hurry my hands were shaking. The gray garage paint went on the floor so fast that little flecks of the stuff flew up in the air and got on my pants, but when I was done it looked really nice. The wall I repainted while it was still tacky from the first coat.

  Despite my haste, several hours passed, and every time I checked my watch I was dismayed at how quickly the day was draining away. I was going to be late to my rendezvous with Beth.

  I changed clothes because the outfit I’d had on was stippled with gray and white paint, but that cost me more time. It was already ten after five when I slammed the front door and raced down Hidden Creek Road.

  A sharp wind had come up, cold air turning my sweat to ice and making the trees wave at me as if in warning. At 5:30 I was still running, now on the trail by the river, the uneven ground threatening to trip me up at every step.

  I came to the rendezvous point at 5:34 by my watch. I slowed, panting.

  She wasn’t there.

  So, okay. Though my skin was flushed red from the run, I could feel how cold it had gotten. She had probably waited here, freezing, for as long as she could.

  I wasn’t disappointed; it was worse than that: I felt as if I had let her down, failed her.

  “Charlie.”

  I turned and there she was, hugging herself. “I went downstream a little,” she told me. “I thought maybe I had the place wrong.”

  “No! It was my fault. I was late.”

  “Did you change your clothes?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry; if I had a jacket, you could wear it.” This sounded pretty lame to my ears, but once you’ve said something stupid to a pretty girl there’s no taking it back. It’s a lesson I’d learn many times in my life.

  “It’s okay.”

  Mr. Shelburton was a little less forgiving than his daughter, clearly annoyed we’d been gone all day. “I need to get Charlie down to see his father,” he told Beth.

  “Well, you didn’t say what time we had to be home,” Beth responded reasonably.

  “You had to know that I’d be waiting,” he insisted.

  “No, because you didn’t say anything, Dad. If you’d told me to be home at a specific time, we would have been home when you said.”

  He gave her an exasperated look. “Okay,” he finally said. “You stay and help your mother with dinner.”

  I watched this whole exchange in amazement. Beth didn’t back down from her father’s anger. I tried to picture talking to my own father in this manner—it was easier to conjure up an image of a grizzly bear holding a paintbrush.

  We grabbed a basket of lemon bars from Mrs. Shelburton and headed out the door. Somehow she had managed to make the sour lemon and the sweet, crunchy crust work together in a silky delicious harmony. I ate four in the car and Mr. Shelburton had two and then he and I decided to split another one and not tell anyone. I wondered if my dad would be puzzled why we’d bothered with such a fancy basket when there were only three lemon bars left in it.

  My father was sitting up in bed, glumly watching television, when we got to the hospital. He wore exactly the same type of hospital gown my mother had worn. Just seeing it made me a little sick. A too-fancy basket of flowers on the bedside table seemed out of place in such a grim room. I put the lemon bars down right next to them and gave Dad a look full of encouragement to offer me one.

  “They say I can go home tomorrow, but they want me here another night for observation,” my dad said to Mr. Shelburton. “I don’t like to be observed.”

  I don’t think my dad meant this as a joke, but Mr. Shelburton laughed. They chatted about a few things while I just stood there silently like the Invisible Man. Finally Mr. Shelburton seemed to notice my dad and I hadn’t spoken to each other. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’ll go on down the hall for a minute, give you fellas a chance to chew the fat.”

  My dad nodded without irony, though naturally when Mr. Shelburton left he had nothing to say to me. We sort of stared at each other for a minute.

  “The Shelburtons treating you okay?” he finally asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  He looked around the room and I saw his eyes drifting uncomfortably past the flowers—plain as day you could read the card: I love you, Yvonne. I wondered if Dad told her if he loved her back. God, I hated being in this place.

  “The window in the pole barn got broken out,” I told him almost spitefully.

  “Really? What happened?”

  I was going to have to be very careful here, wasn’t I? “Well, it was obviously an animal. Inside, the floor was all red, and some was on the wall, too.” There, all completely true, as opposed to him telling me he didn’t even like Yvonne.

  “Ah, probably a duck. Didn’t understand it was flying through the glass until it was too late, and then panicked inside. You didn’t find a dead duck?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How high up on the wall?”

  I reached my hand up a little more than head high.

  “Had to be a duck,” my dad grunted.

  “I cleaned it up.”

  “Good, Charlie.”

  “I couldn’t get the red up, so I painted over it.”

  That surprised him. “You painted the wall?”

  “Yes, sir. And the floor.”

  “You painted the floor of the pole barn?”

  “Yes, sir, is that okay?”

  “Why, sure, Charlie, I’m just … that’s fine.”

  “Good. I wasn’t able to do anything about the window, though.”

  “That’s okay; I’ll fix it.”

  “Okay.”

  Mr. Shelburton poked his head in the room. “If it’s okeydoke with you, George, I’m going to take this fine young man home for some supper.”

  I figured “okeydoke” was an expression Mr. Shelburton had gotten from a book titled How Those Hicks Talk in Idaho.

  “Sure, Rod,” my father said. We both relaxed a little, now that the burden of being alone together had been removed from our shoulders.

  As I was headed out the door my dad called out, “Charlie!” and I turned back with a questioning look.

  “I’m proud of how you handled the duck. You took responsibility. It was a good thing to do.”

  It was the most tender thing I could remember him saying to me in a long time. I nodded at him, my throat inexplicably tight, my eyes even a little bleary with unwanted, unshed tears that I wiped away when no one was looking.

  On the drive home I realized I was far more worried about Emory the bear than my father the hospital patient, which was plain silly—why worry how a grizzly bear was getting along in the woods? It would be like worrying that your pet fish might drown. As for the words on the wall, well, that seemed like something to think about when there was less going on.

  Dinner at the Shelburtons’ was the most pleasant meal I could remember ever having. Beth and I sat across from each other at one end of the table, ignoring Craig, carrying on a conversation in quiet tones that the adults only occasionally audited.

  “What did you say about sports?” Mr. Sh
elburton asked.

  I cleared my throat. “I said I haven’t gone out for anything yet,” I explained, my face red.

  The adults exchanged pitying glances and I felt a flash of resentment course through me.

  “Well … you’ll hit a growth spurt soon,” Mrs. Shelburton said soothingly. It was just about the worst comment she could have made, and I looked down at my plate for a full minute before I had recovered enough to meet Beth’s eyes. Her expression was, as usual, confoundingly self-possessed and calm, and if she saw my embarrassment she made no mention of it.

  The air was clear and dry the next morning as Beth and I walked to school together. I thought about what a delicious life she had, able to sleep in for an extra forty-five minutes because she didn’t have a long bus ride to contend with.

  “What lunch hour do you have?” she asked.

  “First period,” I said.

  “I have first lunch, too. Imagine that, Charlie. You’ve gone an entire month of school and never noticed Beth Shelburton across the room having lunch.”

  I hated the idea Beth might have witnessed my daily anguish over trying to find a table where I’d fit in. “You never noticed me,” I finally countered.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  I had no evidence to submit and kicked at some rocks, feeling stupid. How a mere girl could make me feel both wonderful and witless at the same time was completely beyond me.

  “But you’ll notice me now, won’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what,” she asked gravely, “will you do then?”

  I swallowed. It was a good question.

  What would I do then?

  chapter

  SIXTEEN

  MY first class was gym—the school’s way of making sure that I would spend the rest of the day sweating unattractively in front of all the girls. The shower room could have doubled as a Turkish bath and the locker room a sauna; I was perspiring even as I changed into my gym clothes.

  The outfits we wore were designed to make us look scrawny and weak. White shorts, T-shirts, socks, and shoes lent us an escaped-from-the-asylum appearance, especially on a boy like Charlie Hall, who wore a size Small in everything.

  The two best athletes in our grade were in my gym class so that I’d never feel like I could excel at anything. Tim Humphrey and Mike Kappas both had men’s bodies, with actual muscles under their cotton shirts. The resemblance between them ended there: Tim was blond and blue-eyed and Mike had a dark complexion and hair and eyes to match. They respected each other in a breezy, friendly way and were always opposing captains for any game we played.

  I was always just about the last one picked.

  Our gym teacher was Coach Briggs, a big hairy guy with a whistle around his neck. We filtered into the gym, bumping and pushing each other without discipline until the coach blew his whistle.

  “Line up!” he commanded.

  We organized ourselves into a line, looking like a row of little white lambs. He pointed to the chalkboard, where a crude map had been drawn.

  “The new cross-country course starts here, goes to this yellow flag here, then down here, across the stream at the yellow flag here, up to here, then here. Everyone got that?”

  Basically we’d be running the entire perimeter of the school, which felt like it had to be a thousand miles. We all looked at each other.

  “A little more’n two miles,” the coach said.

  “Two miles,” someone repeated in horror.

  I don’t know about the rest of the country, but at that point in history the idea of folks running recreationally hadn’t really taken hold in northern Idaho. We had some people in town we called joggers, but for the most part the local populace couldn’t see any reason to run unless it was being chased by something. I shared the perplexed trepidation of most of the boys in that gym class as we stood around at the starting point, the first yellow flag so far away we could barely see it. Two miles?

  “Line up outside!” the coach barked, like we were already in trouble for something. We shuffled out the door like a chain gang.

  The coach blew the whistle and we all jumped and then settled into a bumpy, unpleasant pace. Tim and Mike, naturally, moved to the front and then accelerated like a pair of motorcycles, while everyone else around me put an expression of pain on their faces in anticipation of what was to come.

  I’ve never been particularly fast or noticeably slow—just average, I guess. But I had no sense of the science of pacing myself and was lured to the front of the crowd by Tim’s and Mike’s sprint. It felt like we should be following our leaders.

  Oddly, the boys who had always been the best at school sports were the first to drop back, their mouths open. Boys like me, gawky, all elbows and knees, kept running at the same determined speed.

  Once my muscles warmed up and shook out their reluctance, I let the steady beat of my shoes lure me into a hypnotic state, and, as had been true of every contemplative moment of the previous twenty-four hours, I thought about Beth and Emory the bear in roughly equal measure.

  Emory Bain. Really? A bear who had a first and last name and could write them down? Beth Shelburton. Seriously? A stunningly beautiful girl who wanted me to say hi to her in the hall and sit with her at lunch?

  At the first turn, a long, steady hill greeted us and more boys fell away. For a time a skinny boy named Kenny hung by my side, blinking at me through thick glasses, and then about halfway up the hill his expression changed and he seemed to lose ambition.

  The next person in front of me was Ned, a knobby, muscle-less kid whose storklike legs hinged and unhinged in graceless, uneven rhythm. He never even looked at me as I passed him—his gaze was turned inward on his own agonies.

  I had a knot in my side. Up ahead, Tim and Mike had stopped talking to each other and were now just determinedly slogging it out on the hill.

  I was gaining on them.

  They both turned in surprise when I was about ten feet away. At that very moment we crested the hill and they put on a quick burst, zooming ahead again.

  At the bottom of the hill was a tiny stream to vault over and then we were on flat ground. I kept my pace the same, listening for the sound of runners behind me. When I didn’t hear any, I turned and looked and was startled to see I was fifty yards ahead of a staggering string of stumblers, none of them looking like they were enjoying their morning.

  I had a solid cramp in my rib cage now, but there was something about the pain that felt liberating, like it was a wall I was punching through.

  As I caught up with them again Mike and Tim didn’t turn, even when the sound of my foot strikes merged with theirs. They did split, though, opening a gap that I moved up into.

  “Hi,” I gasped, which felt like it was going to be the last word I’d ever be able to utter. Neither of them responded. Tim nodded at me, though.

  Now we were facing the hill from the back side of it, climbing up at an angle that felt almost as steep as the road to my house. I kept pounding my feet. When I glanced back at the top of the hill, Mike and Tim were twenty yards behind.

  They beat me by finding some amazing strength at the end of the race and pouring on the speed. I didn’t have anything left. I was, I now understood, a plodder, a person who put my feet down at the same rate whether I was going uphill or down. When they stormed past me, I didn’t increase my pace by a step, pulling in third in the race.

  Mike put his hands on his knees, wheezing, while Tim walked in circles, his face in a taut grimace. I turned and looked back at the rest of the class, who were one by one popping up at the top of the hill holding their sides as if they’d been pierced by spears.

  I felt a slap on my back. Tim was nodding at me, grinning, still not capable of speech.

  “Good job, Hall,” Mike panted.

  I couldn’t have been happier if they’d picked me up and carried me around on their shoulders.

  Coach Briggs was pretty impatient with our performance. He called us gi
rls and asked us if we’d taken a nap somewhere along the line. He said he’d called the police and put in a missing persons report. He said we were supposed to run the course, not play hopscotch the whole way. He asked if we were worried that we’d get mud on our party dresses if we ran too hard or if we’d stopped to put on lipstick somewhere in the whole process.

  Through this whole tirade, the boys in gym class winced and moaned with the pain like they were having dental surgery. “Kappas. Humphrey. You guys can hit the showers. Everyone else, drop and give me twenty.”

  The boys all groaned. I moved over to find a place to do my push-ups.

  “Not you, Hall,” the coach said. “You hit the showers, too.”

  I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as I headed toward the locker room. Coach Briggs’s eyes had regarded me without warmth and his expression was as severe as it always was, but I basked in it.

  It felt like love.

  The class before lunch was science, the only one I shared with Dan Alderton that semester. As I listened to the teacher explain photosynthesis I could feel Dan’s eyes on me and wished he could have been in gym. I had the probably foolish thought that if he had seen me cross the finish line just a few steps behind Mike and Tim it would somehow put an end to the odd dispute between us.

  I would be seeing Beth at lunch. I’m sure that there was something in the lecture that I paid attention to, but for the most part my focus was on the clock, which doled out each minute in such a miserly fashion I wanted to yell at it.

  I think Dan tried to say something to me as the class ended, but I was in a hurry. I dumped my books in my locker, then ducked into the boys’ room to make sure my hair was still combed. There was nothing lodged in my teeth and my face hadn’t grown any zits since breakfast.

  I loaded up my lunch tray and wandered out into the lunchroom. I spotted Beth across the room and my heart sank; she wasn’t alone. Sitting with her were several girls—if I went over there I’d be sitting with a whole group of seventh-grade females. I’d be the only boy and the only eighth grader. Everyone would be watching. It would be awful.