by R.P. Burnham
Through the late summer and into the fall, Malcolm helped Mr. Kaminski build the final part of his temple, the Mayan superstructure at the top of the staired pyramid. With the Incan walls seven feet high and the pyramid another twelve feet, the top of the entire structure was going to be twenty-six feet from the ground. They had to shift gravel with the backhoe to reach this height, a job that took several days to complete. A real Mayan temple would be much bigger than the twenty-six-foot structure they were building, but in this homage to Mayan genius (that was the word Mr. Kaminski used, which Malcolm took to be an architectural term for a smaller version) only the external appearance was reproduced. It may have been small, but the stones and columns they carefully lofted to the top were still very heavy. Most weighed several hundred pounds. That is why they had to spend as much time planning each move as actually doing it. One day in late September when the structure was half completed, Malcolm began to wonder if the large granite slab at the top of the Incan wall was strong enough to support the weight of the Mayan temple. He had hesitated to ask the question, thinking that Mr. Kaminski might be insulted, but the question pleased him. “Probably not,” he said, “but let me show you something.” They went into the ground-floor chamber. The eight window openings, two on each side of the Incan wall, were only about a foot in height and two feet wide and didn’t let much light in, but the boss shone a flashlight up to the ceiling to show Malcolm four steel girders, which were fitted into the three-foot walls on ledges of a foot and half. Mr. Kaminski grinned nervously and admitted that with time and manpower limited it had been necessary that he cheat. The Incan wall, the girders, and the granite slab as well as all the gravel they used to reach the heights were installed by a crew from Portsmouth, New Hampshire—he had chosen that company so that local tongues wouldn’t wag. He wanted the temple to be completed before its presence became known, and until this summer, he said, he had always kept the temple hidden under a huge tarp. Studying the girders and thinking for a moment, he said that on some rainy day he planned to stucco those girders to hide them. A week later after it had rained for several days, they did that work. Malcolm painted the steel with metal primer, and both of them, using scaffolding made from heavy boards and two metal stepladders, stuccoed them with a premixed batch of cement, sand and lime tinted a brownish shade to match the walls. Malcolm did most of the work since he was more spry, and this was typical of their work together. More and more Mr. Kaminski grew to trust and depend on him. He was a quick learner and a very good worker, a fact that Mr. Kaminski quickly recognized. Trust and mutual respect grew so that more and more his boss came to trust his judgment as much as his competence. He would listen to Malcolm’s suggestion that a stone should be turned when it swung from the backhoe and aligned with a corner, then carefully edged into place, and agree, even though all the stones placed before had been placed directly above their resting place and dropped slowly down. Malcolm’s suggestion allowed the work to go even more quickly.
The more he worked on the temple, the more new things he found out about it. One day he was shown Phoebe’s relief sculpture in the chamber entered through the Greek portico. It looked like the photographs he had seen of her except younger. It was beautiful, and he thought she must have been a wonderful woman to have inspired her husband to built this temple to her memory. Later they worked at mounting a framed poem under Plexiglas that they placed below her face. It was a sonnet by Shakespeare that Mr. Kaminski identified as Number 116.
Another thing he learned as they started constructing the top of the Mayan superstructure was that the stones above and in front of the superstructure had inscriptions. One was in English and read,
LOVE’S NOT TIME’S FOOL
Below it was some strange letters that Mr. Kaminski said was Greek:
gnwqi seauton [Greek for Know Thyself]
Next there was one in German and went like this:
ALLES VERGÄNGLICHE IST NUR EIN GLEICHNIS
The third one was in Latin.
HOMO SUM, HUMANI NIL A
This one was incomplete. Mr. Kaminski showed him a paper where the rest of it was written: ME ALIENUM PUTO. The whole thing meant in English, “I am a man. Nothing human is alien to me.” There was another in French that would be done in place after he finished the Latin one. He also found out that the decorative designs he’d seen on the first level of stones of the Mayan temple were actually hieroglyphics in the Mayan language, but Malcolm didn’t ask him what they meant. Finding out they were words made him feel uneasy, even a bit afraid, as if they were some magic spell that would be sprung on him if he stared at them too long. Actually, even those ones in the other languages didn’t make too much sense to him. Mr. Kaminski made a translation of them and told him what they meant. He said that after his wife died five years ago he had spent a lot of time reading and studying literature and philosophy, two subjects he had neglected as a student, but they still smelled too much of book learning for Malcolm. He liked the stones, the feel of them, their reality. He could do without the words.
He had skipped school a couple times to help Mr. Kaminski. The old man had been doubtful, but Malcolm reminded him that he was going to quit school within a month, and besides, he said, he was learning a lot more here and at the garage than he ever did in school. He was not only learning things. He was also discovering things about himself. One time when he was unsure of the placement of a peculiarly shaped stone (it was a triangular), Mr. Kaminski showed him the engineering plans for the whole building so that he could see for himself. When he looked at them he discovered that unlike reading words, and more like what he saw when looking at an engine not working, he could instantly understand them. He could see the completed temple in his mind. When he told the boss this, he was very pleased. Trust and mutual respect were growing. Self-confidence and pride were growing.
Self-respect too. Because the same thing was happening at the garage. Every time he did a job when Luke was busy and Dave Audet, the boss, didn’t feel like getting covered with grease (which was more and more often), it was done perfectly. He even replaced the brakes and suspension system on a car on his own with only a few questions for Luke. Dave gave him a raise after that and told him he could work full-time by next year when he (the boss) was going to semi-retire and do more hunting and fishing. He said he thought Malcolm was a natural at repairing cars. He got his driver’s permit right before school started and went out with his father a few times. Twice at the garage when they were busy and a call for someone needing a jump-start came in, he drove Luke’s car to the car with a dead battery. Denny Farquhar let him drive his car. He was easily going to pass his driver’s test because at lunchtime on Saturdays Luke kept drilling him on the questions that would be asked. The driving part was going to be no problem.
And he was going to get a car sooner than he thought. He was working so many hours for Mr. Kaminski that he had saved over $900 already. The extra work—three or four hours after school through the fall, several Sundays and then the two times he skipped school—directly led him another step closer to a car. One day Mr. Kaminski started talking about his son Phil. He had been helping his father one week in the summer for the past three years, and until Malcolm came along he expected he’d need his son for three more summers or more to finish the temple. But they had made so much progress this fall and he, Malcolm, was such a good worker (the boss implied without saying so out loud that he was much better than his son) that the project could even be finished by early December if the snow held off. He had been covering the temple with the tarp so that it would be a secret, but now it didn’t matter. He knew hunters and bird watchers had probably already seen it, so that it wouldn’t be a secret much longer anyways. Hearing him say that, Malcolm told him about Chris Andrews seeing the temple in the summer. He had been bothered by having a secret of his own that he kept from Mr. Kaminski and spoke nervously—this was another of those times when he thought his boss might be angry with him, but he merely nodded. His mind was clearly e
lsewhere. Malcolm didn’t have to wonder long, for Mr. Kaminski took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Malcolm. “I know you’ve been saving for a car,” he said. “Here’s an extra contribution to the cause and my thanks for your good work.”
The envelope contained ten fifty-dollar bills!
He went home that night trembling with excitement. He knew that the money was more than money—that it confirmed something he felt growing inside him. Now that what used to be part of his daydreams, owning a car, was soon to be a reality, the confidence he was gaining from the good work he was doing, both at the garage and the temple, was also making him more self-confident personally. He could feel the change. He could see it. It was real. He couldn’t put his finger on what he was doing differently, but at school now nobody teased him anymore. He heard no titters behind his back, and nobody whispered some cutting remark in class when he was called upon. In social science class he actually asked a question one day when the teacher began discussing Athenian democracy. He remembered some things Mr. Kaminski had told him and asked the teacher how Athens could be a democracy when it had slaves. The teacher answered the question (he said it was a limited democracy) and then said that it was a very good, a very intelligent question. Malcolm heard a murmur go through the class. It sounded much different from the old titters, the barks of contempt.
Something else happened that was an even bigger change. A few weeks before Mr. Kaminski gave him the bonus, he had met a girl, not a stranger at all but one he had never thought of as a girl before. She was shy and quiet, plain, with curly brown hair, a long face, big nose, thin lips and small breasts. She lived less than two miles from him, and he had known her since kindergarten. She rode the same school bus he did every school day, but she had never been part of his fantasies. Alison Bentley was her name. One morning in mid-October he happened to sit next to her on the bus. They exchanged greetings but otherwise did not speak. Out the window the low sun brilliantly lit the golden and reddish leaves across a field while the grass was still in shadows in such a way that it was very beautiful. Both stared at the trees intently and only slowly became aware that the other was also enraptured. They started talking about it. Alison had long loved to draw, and this summer an aunt had given her a set of watercolors and paper for her birthday. She was taking an art course this fall. Her next assignment, she said, was going to be a landscape, and she knew she would paint that scene. Malcolm told her about the birds he carved. Two more he had done in the summer of a blue jay and a red-tailed hawk had come out nicely, and he was proud of them. One thing led to another, and that night he had walked the mile and a half to her house to show them to her. She loved them, just as he loved the watercolors she showed him.
He started visiting regularly and having lunch with her in school. They both loved nature and beauty, and so talked easily and felt comfortable together. When she got an assignment to draw a face, she drew his. She captured his homeliness—his big ears, uneven teeth, sunken eyes over a jutting brow—and yet drew it with love. He could see it in her shining eyes as she worked on the picture. He could feel that she accepted him for himself, for that self that was behind the eyes and that he knew existed because when he looked at her he too saw her inner beauty. After a while he began to think she had the most beautiful soul in the whole universe. Within two weeks of meeting her he was asking himself if this was what love felt like. He was sure it was.
It was like seeing a stone by a path day after day and thinking nothing of it until one day your spade happens to hit it when digging a new post and splits the rock in two. Inside that plain dull stone were purple crystals so beautiful they made you gasp. That, he decided, was how he would think of Alison. For she was a jewel. When he compared her to Mary Peckham, the only woman he had known personally (as opposed to the scores of females he’d daydreamed about), he saw the difference instantly. Alison had a gentle, giving nature. Mary looked out for herself and tried to trick him into love. Alison was interested in beauty and the world. Mary thought only of herself.
Without a car, they couldn’t go on a date yet, but he told her his plans for a car and work. She tried to talk him out of quitting school and even used a compelling argument—she said that school would be empty for her without him. But she accepted his argument that he was one of those people not meant for book learning. When he told her about his job prospects at the garage and spoke guardedly about the help he was giving a neighbor on a construction project, again she accepted his decision, and he knew why. She understood him. She knew these things were important to him. She didn’t want to impose her beliefs on him. That was how love was. Love accepted a person for who he was. He told himself that he owed her the same respect. He promised himself that he would always listen to what was important to her. That was what love meant. It meant souls touching. It meant there was never a place for meanness or selfishness in love. He understood love. He was almost sixteen and he understood love.
Sometimes at night before he fell asleep he would think about how lucky he was to have met Alison and Mr. Kaminski and even Dave Audet. Life wasn’t scary anymore. It was exciting. It was filled with unknown challenges and problems, but now he approached them the way he would look forward to going to the woods to hunt or fish. He might not see anything. He might not catch anything. He might fall into the brook and get wet. He might scratch his leg in a bramble patch. But it would be fun and he would feel totally alive. That’s how life was for him now that he loved and had good men respecting him and a good woman loving him.
Only one part of his life wasn’t going well. Home, the place where he used to be able to be himself away from the taunts and contempt of the world, was now a sad, gloomy prison where smiles were rare and joy a stranger.
Mark was no better. He had slowed mentally. He understood words but slowly. “Don’t go near the stove, Mark,” his mother would say, and he’d keep going one, two, three steps before stopping. He searches for words and forgets others. “I wan’ a”—then points to the bananas Mrs. Carnevale provides every week along with orange juice. “Banana,” his mother says and repeats the word. “Ba-nana-nana.” He recognizes everyone in the family but is afraid of strangers. But Olive Berry, who’s come to the house a hundred times, is now listed with the strangers. The doctor says the damage is permanent. He has a tic in his eye and loses his balance easily. Sometimes he cries for no reason. It’s a sad, whimpering kind of a cry, sniveling really. Once or twice he’s had temper tantrums. He never did that before. His mother tries to get him to read. She hands him children’s books that Mrs. Carnevale also gave her. But though he could read before and better than Malcolm when he was seven, he can hardly read at all now. Often he just watches TV. It doesn’t matter what. He likes children’s shows, but he’ll watch the news too—anything. He sits unmoving for a long time, then will start twitching. When that happens he’s scared and calls wildly for his momma. She has a lot of patience with him. She mothers him more than she did the rest of the kids. But Malcolm can see the despair in her eyes. She prays a lot, but her prayers are not answered.
His brother’s strangeness scares Malcolm. He knows he shouldn’t feel this way but he does. Mark’s not his brother anymore. He’s weird and different and scary. He’s lost both of his brothers. In some ways he’s also lost his father, a thought that makes him sad at times, but he also cannot help that. He knows that the ones he looks up to are Mr. Kaminski and Dave Audet. He knows that even while remembering all the times he’s shared with his father that when he sees him now the feeling that swells in his heart is pity. His father blames himself for Mark’s illness, and as a result has withdrawn into himself. He eats supper in silence and then goes out to the shed to find something to do or up to Hoot Berry’s barn to help him sort through his junk. He never goes hunting or fishing now. Woods and fields have a bad taste. He is still working on clearing land for housing developments and comes home late many evenings. His father gives most of the money he makes to his mother, keeping only som
e for tobacco and such for himself. Things are not right between his parents. His father’s silence bothers his mother, and sometimes she snaps at him, but he will not argue with her. He acts like a man who’s already doomed and is just waiting for the final blow to happen.
On the day of his sixteenth birthday he dropped out of school. He didn’t tell anyone at Courtney Academy, he signed no papers or any such thing, he just stopped going. He did tell Mr. Kaminski that he was free any time he was needed except Friday nights and Saturdays. His boss merely nodded. He was chiseling in the last words of the Latin writing while Malcolm was polishing some of the stones. He watched Mr. Kaminski scoring a stone and carefully observed the angle he used to strike with the chisel. He saw that the chisel was kept sharp. With a grinder the boss would sharpen his tools every fifteen blows or so. He had smaller chisels for smaller cuts that he used for detailed, finishing work. All this Malcolm watched because it was the kind of learning he loved.
They were doing this detail work now because all the stones were in place. It was still warm in the afternoon even in mid-November, but there was a certain urgency to their days. Soon it would be too cold to work. But, really, the temple was done as far as how it looked from any distance except close up. Even the stones that Malcolm was polishing with pumice had been polished long before—he was just fixing up scratches and bruises from putting the stones in place. He hoped that the temple was like most buildings and would require maintenance. It was sad to think that this part of his life would be over in a few weeks.
But the next day and the following two days Mr. Kaminski wasn’t there when he reported for work in the afternoon. On the fourth day, a Friday when he didn’t work on the temple, he went over after lunch hoping to see the boss, but the place was still deserted. He left to hitchhike into town. He was taking his driver’s license test in Denny Farquhar’s car at three o’clock. He always thought this would be the most exciting day of his life, but he felt nothing even after he got his license.
On Monday he bought a car for $1,050.00, all the money he had except for insurance money. For that he had enough for the first payment. The car was an eight-year-old Mazda sports model with many things wrong with it—including the suspension and brakes as well as bad valves—but all easily repaired because of the skills he had learned at the garage. The car was twice as good as Denny’s car and was going to be better. He took Alison for a ride that night and told her his secret. Now that the temple was almost done and Mr. Kaminski had gone missing, he felt it was okay to share this knowledge. She was amazed.
“But why do you think he’s not there?”
She crinkled her nose. “You say he’s an old man? Maybe he’s had a heart attack or something.”
It was the “something” that worried Malcolm, but it didn’t seem possible. Mr. Kaminski was strong and healthy except for stiffness in his joints on cold or rainy days.
Alison’s fears made his doubt unbearable. The next morning he walked through the woods past the temple and up the lumber road that led to Mr. Kaminski’s house. He could have driven, but after thinking about it decided to walk. It didn’t seem right to drive into the man’s yard. He walked quickly and as he approached the large colonial house even more quickly so that he wouldn’t chicken out. He knocked on the door (using the doorbell didn’t seem right).
Presently a plump woman with a round, red face opened the door and frowned at him. She didn’t look as old as Mr. Kaminski, but she was older than his parents. She must be Phoebe’s cousin, he thought. She was the housekeeper. It was because she also went to that family wedding that Malcolm had fed the cats last summer. Her name was Mrs. Dewey, but he didn’t dare say it in case he was wrong.
The frown didn’t go away when he said, “I’m Malcolm Kimball,” but did when he added, “the boy who’s been helping Mr. Kaminski.”
“Yes?” she said slowly and turned it into a question. “I’ve heard of you.”
She was still suspicious. “I’m worried about him,” he said hurriedly. “I’ve gone to work and he hasn’t been there. We’re almost finished, it doesn’t seem…”
They both looked behind her to where one of the cats had come up to the door. It was Piddle, the yellow one, the one that was friendly and purred at him. The other two, and especially the black cat with a white belly, had hidden most of the time he came to feed them. He only caught glimpses of that one as he was running away.
“He’s been taken ill. He’s had a stroke.”
Malcolm knew what that was. Olive Berry’s father had one and was paralyzed for two years before he died. It was bad. But he’d heard of other strokes that folks recovered from. “Is it bad?”
She softened, seeing his concern. “He’s paralyzed on one side. He’s in a rehab hospital and making slow progress.”
“Slow progress” didn’t make sense. It seemed bad news, but she said it like good news. “When will he be home?”
“The doctors can’t really say. Perhaps in a few weeks, perhaps a month.”
He didn’t know what to say. He was looking for certainty and there was none. But an idea came into his head, one he didn’t want to share with her.
Her eyes narrowed. “Is there anything else?”
“Tell him I hope he gets better soon.”
She nodded and closed the door.
He wondered why she seemed to turn hostile again, but that was only a passing thought. For the rest of the day he thought about the idea that had popped into his mind. That night he talked to Alison about it. She encouraged him.
The next day was cold and spitting snow as he left the house and walked past the pond and through the woods to the temple. He was going to finish the temple for Mr. Kaminski—that was his idea.
It meant he had to learn how to engrave letters in stone, for except for a bit of polishing and cleaning up, that was all that remained to do. The huge mound of gravel also remained, but that was going to have to be moved by heavy equipment. Everything else, including removal of the tools and brooms and the like, he was going to do. He knew where the plans were for the temple, and he knew that they contained the inscriptions.
One thing he was sure of—it wasn’t going to be easy. He was going to have to practice on some of the spare pieces of granite until he was sure how to use the chisels. He couldn’t make a mistake on the temple. It turned out to be frustrating work. For the first couple days he thought he was going to have to give up on the idea. He would mark lines with a level, use it or a smaller ruler to draw the outlines of the letters, then score them with an awl. Then he’d pick up the chisels. His first blows shattered the surface. On the tenth try he finally found the angle and the feel for the strength of the blow to get it right. Several times he almost finished a letter before one bad blow would ruin it. He didn’t dare fire up the diesel-driven generator, so he had to sharpen the chisels with a whetstone he brought from home. Once he got the feel for the big chisels, he had to go through the whole process for the smaller chisels. Three weeks went by and December came. Now the cold became his enemy. On a couple days he built a fire to keep his hands warm. Once he brought Alison to see the temple. Proudly he showed her what he had done. She was amazed. It was a cold day, and they did not stay long because he could tell she was getting uncomfortable. He showed her the French words he was working on. L’EXISTENCE PRÉCÈDE L’ESSENCE. She said that she could see the words meant “existence precedes essence” but still could not tell what that meant. He told her Mr. Kaminski studied philosophy. As long as it meant something to him, it was okay.
Finally when the cold became permanent and he could only work a few hours in the afternoon when the sun shining through the pines brought a little warmth, he decided that he had to be ready or the work would never get done. He drew the outlines and scored then with the awl, and then waited for his pounding heart to calm. He steeled himself by remembering the first times he worked on a car alone. His heart had also pounded then, but the work itself brought calmness. It was the same this
time. The first blow was good and true and brought confidence. In three days he finished the lettering. Two more days were devoted to cleaning up, and then it was time to drive to the garage to work. Afterwards he was going to pick Alison up and they were going to a movie. He was so excited he could hardly wait to tell her. It was she who suggested that the way to show Mr. Kaminski the temple was done was to take pictures of the work. He had never in his life used a camera, and he did not know that you could buy a cheap camera, take twenty-five photos and bring the whole camera back to the store for processing. But Alison did. On Sunday morning he practiced by taking her picture, and then they went through the woods to the temple and took the photos. He took some of the whole temple from each side, but most of the rest of the roll were detailed shots of the inscriptions—especially the French one he did. They also took one of each of them standing in front of the temple and smiling.
Alison had to do something with her mother that afternoon, so he spent the time working on a carving of a meadowlark he planned to give her for Christmas along with a sweater he had already bought and a portable radio he planned to get for her. Money was not a problem for him now. He had been doing more and more engine work at the garage, and Dave, who loved ice fishing, told him he was going to start cutting back on his own days right after Christmas and give him another day of work. He would be working twenty-one hours a week for ten dollars an hour. Now that his father was out of work for the year, Malcolm was going to give his mother fifty dollars a week.
He was in the bedroom sitting on his bed. On the wall behind him were two landscape watercolors by Alison. Sissy’s lip had curled when she saw them. She had a new boyfriend, a kid from the city, and looked down on country folk. He didn’t talk to her much because of her attitude. He didn’t particularly like her anymore, in fact, so she could curl her lip all she wanted. He was carving and thinking of how much better Alison was than his sister when he heard his grandmother come into the kitchen and say she had just got a phone call from two women in Portland who wanted to call and pay a visit to Mark. He stopped and listened.
“You mean right now?” Momma asked.
“Ayuh. They got some Christmas gifts they want to give him. Other stuff too. I told ’em it was okay.”
Malcolm went into the kitchen to hear more. Sharon was visiting a friend and his father was up at Hoot’s barn. Only Mark and Momma were home with him. Momma looked worried. “When are they coming?”
“Directly.”
Momma frowned. She never liked strangers to come into the house. She accused Daddy of a foolish pride, but she had plenty of it too. Malcolm understood. He would never want anyone like Ray Caron or Brian Olson to see where he lived. The look of pity always stabbed the deepest part of the soul.
Gramma also seemed to understand what was going through Momma’s mind. “They seemed like awful nice people. They said a soup kitchen in Portland got stuff for people at this time of year, and they had long known about Mark and wanted to do something.”
“I bet it’s people who know that young fella who came to take them readings at the pond. He was from Portland.” She turned to him. “Malcolm, what was his name?”
“Chris Andrews.”
“There was a young woman with him too. Did they give their names?”
“Patti and Donna.”
“That don’t sound right,” Momma said. “I recollect her name was Virginia.”
“I can’t answer to that,” Gramma said, “but one of ’em said she’d been here before. She didn’t need directions.”
With Gramma helping, they busied themselves cleaning and tidying the house. Malcolm took the waste out and put it behind the shed, then placed a few boards in front of their door. The last few days had been warm and melted all the snow, and the mud that always made their yard impassable in the spring made an early appearance. Through all this activity Mark watched TV without hardly moving. Malcolm wondered if he could even understand what was happening and if he would be able to appreciate the gifts the women were bringing.
When they came there was a bit of awkwardness on both sides as they introduced themselves, but when they started paying attention to Mark all that awkwardness went away and they were just a bunch of women fussing over a kid. Malcolm was surprised to see that Mark did like one thing, a giant-sized teddy bear that had a thick coat. He rubbed his face against it and started grinning foolishly. “If he’d been a kitty he’d be purrin’,” Gramma said. “He likes it.”
There were many other things—toy trucks, books, some shirts and sweaters, socks too. And they brought a box of canned goods for Momma.
The thing Malcolm noticed was that they were very nice and kept Momma’s feelings in mind. They did their best to not make it look like it was charity they were offering. It was more like they were distant relatives paying a family visit.
The one whose name was Patti said, “We had a lot of stuff come in—more than we usually get. It was me who thought of Mark. I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. Kimball.”
Donna, the other one, said she’d brought some stuff like this to a nephew, a statement Malcolm doubted and rather thought was for Momma’s benefit. But Momma seemed to believe her and regard the two as family friends.
After they’d shown all the gifts to Mark and shown him the clothes, Patti told Momma her father had started work on the civil suit and asked her if they had agreed on the terms.
“We’ve done nothing yet,” she said.
“You should,” Patti said. “The case is very clear. My brother is studying law. He says you can easily win the case. You could get an enormous amount of money too.”
“What I want,” Momma said with a dignity that made Malcolm proud of her (and ashamed of himself for his feelings about Mark), “is for my boy to be healthy.”
“Of course. But he’ll need a lot of medical help to get healthy. Don’t forget there is no risk for you. My father told me he’d do your case pro bono. That’s a lawyer term for free. My brother could help him on the case. It would help train him, see? Shall I tell him you said yes?”
Momma thought for a moment and then nodded.
They talked some more while Malcolm sat on the couch and didn’t listen much. He was thinking. When the women got up to go, he followed them out to the car. “I want to ask you something I really need to know.”
They were opening the doors to their car, but turned to listen.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because we’re all brothers and sisters.”
“And mothers and fathers and sons and daughters,” Donna said. “And besides, Christmas is coming. Christmas is special.”
“So you think my brother is special because it’s Christmas?” he asked Patti.
“He’s special because he’s special. We’re all special.”
On Monday morning he gave Alison a ride to school and then went to the drugstore to get the pictures developed. They wouldn’t be ready for two hours, so he went to the garage and helped Luke do a valve job on a car. He watched closely because that was one of the things he needed to do on his car. At eleven he was back home with the developed pictures in hand. They’d all come out fairly well, especially the important ones that showed the work he’d done to finish the temple. Directly and anxiously he went past the pond and through the woods to Mr. Kaminski’s house.
Mrs. Dewey answered the door without a frown this time, but she did seem impatient. When he explained his mission and its importance, she told him to wait and closed the door. Several minutes passed before she returned and opened the massive door. She told him that the nurse was expected momentarily and that he could only stay a few moments. He took off his muddy boots in the hall. He had expected this and had worn a new pair of socks. He could see into the living room as he fumbled with his shoes. Last summer when he had fed the cats, the house had filled him with awe. It was like the museum in Boston his eighth-grade class had visited on a field trip. A life-sized Egyptian lion with a human head faced the door in th
e center of the large hall, and the living room was filled with Greek and Indian statues. A naked Greek woman and a stone with the same kind of strange Mayan writing that was on the temple were, like the lion-man, full-sized, but the shelves and tables held many small figures of animals, men and women. Books were everywhere. The rug in the living room was thicker than his mattress at home. The walls were painted bright colors—the living room red with white trim, the hall a deep blue and the dining room and kitchen shades of green. The furniture was made of rich woods and plush cushions. Beautiful plants, some the size of small trees, were in every room.
He was too nervous to look at this stuff now. He followed Mrs. Dewey down a long hall to the back of the house to Mr. Kaminski’s study. Through the door he could see an entire wall of shelves holding more books than he remembered seeing in the Courtney Academy library. At the end of the room a large desk had been moved to the side to make room for a hospital bed. It was adjusted to the sitting position for Mr. Kaminski. Instead of the strong and healthy man he had known, he saw a withered old man with sunken cheeks who had lost his deep tan and was deathly pale. Only his eyes moved as Malcolm walked up to him. Just as he got to the bed, one arm came from under the covers. Malcolm, thinking his boss was going to shake his hand, awkwardly started to reach for it, but the hand instead clutched at the blanket and drew it up over his chest. He took a deep breath. Mr. Kaminski’s eyes were different. There was no self-confidence and power in them, only despair and—what was it?—shame? Loss of self-respect? Malcolm remembered the feelings of pity his father made him feel and struggled against that unworthy and disrespectful emotion.
He paused, waiting for Mr. Kaminski to speak, before realizing that he was expected to start the conversation. “Hi, Mr. Kaminski. I hope you’re feeling better. I’ve come because I’ve got some pictures to show you of the temple.”
He waited for a greeting, but the old man just nodded. “You see, I finished it for you, Mr. Kaminski.” Even he could hear the pride in his own voice. Well, he should be proud and he was proud.
Again he waited for the sick man to speak, but he didn’t. Then in a flash Malcolm understood that his pride kept him silent. He didn’t want to show he was tongue-tied. The realization made Malcolm feel better, and he respected this man who had taught him much about life and work even more. He decided he’d talk in a way that all Mr. Kaminski had to do was nod. He became aware of a stale smell in the room, a sour smell, unpleasant, but he ignored it. “Let me show you the pictures I took.” He held up the two he’d taken of the French words to Mr. Kaminski’s eyes. He was glad he had shown Alison the work. She told him that the funny lines above two of the letters were accent marks and important. He was going to leave them out before she said that.
He could see the surprise on Mr. Kaminski’s face and his eyes widening to question him. “I practiced on those spare pieces of granite. It took a long time, but I watched you do the Latin one. And I did it! I also cleaned up everything. Everything but the gravel mound, that is. You’ll have to hire a man with equipment for that.”
He couldn’t read the old man’s eyes now. He saw a trembling in the bad arm as if he was trying to move it. Then there was a frown. Then he looked again at the photos in Malcolm’s hand.
He showed him the next picture. This one he took at the very edge of the top level, trying to get the whole of the superstructure in it, but the top was clipped off. Then he showed him the rest of the photos except for the ones of Alison and him—several distant shots, and more close-ups. When he was through he could see tears in Mr. Kaminski’s eyes. The old man tapped his heart with his good hand.
“You’re welcome.”
Mrs. Dewey poked her head in the door. “Adam, the nurse will be here in a few minutes.”
He frowned and waited for her to leave, then spoke. It took Malcolm awhile to understand. He asked why, but it came out from the corner of his mouth, “Whooo?”
“I got a car, Mr. Kaminski. It’s a good one, thanks to you. I wanted to return the favor and say thank you. I’ve learned so much from you. That’s why. I’ve got a girlfriend now. I’m very happy, but I hate to keep secrets from her. Is it okay if I tell her about the temple now that it’s done?”
He looked at Malcolm for a long time, then said in a way that was very unclear, “Don’t do what I did. Do everything in life. Don’t have regrets, my boy.”
He had to repeat it three times before Malcolm understood him. With tears in his eyes matching the glistening eyes of the old man he said, “I promise.”
He didn’t remember much about saying good-bye and walking out of the house. He felt sad, numb, and anxious for that old man—and just as anxious about something that was swelling up inside of him. Free of the house and in the woods, he stopped and leaned against a tree. Even expecting to see Mr. Kaminski in a bad way had not prepared him for the shocking reality. The stroke had not taken his life but it had taken everything else. He saw it there in the eyes, the same defeat, the same hopelessness, his father showed. What did it mean? How could a man change so quickly? In movies and on TV sick people got better because they would not give up. But had Mr. Kaminski given up? If the despair came from thinking the temple was never to be completed, then maybe he could still be saved. Maybe the photographs would save him. But all he talked about when he spoke was not to have regrets. Do everything in life. He thought of Alison. What if she was suddenly killed and never heard him say he loved her? That would be a regret. He thought that she knew his feelings, but it was true that he had never told her. And then there were the things the two Portland women said—that we were all brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and all of us special, special, special. Was it that bad things happened to good people and it wasn’t their fault? His father and mother struggling and poor and worn-out, and it wasn’t their fault? And poor little Mark sick in the head as well as the body, not his fault?
Mark. He used to take him down this very lumber road. He remembered his shining eyes when he pointed to a bird or a fleeing deer. He remembered how the little boy loved flowers and tried to catch butterflies because they were so “booful.” How he grinned happily when Malcolm came home from school on a warm spring day because he had been promised that they would go fishing together. Sometimes going up hills he would have to take his little hand to help him. He could feel its warmth and the trust his brother had in him as he remembered. “He’s special because he’s special. We’re all special,” Patti said. Now he saw what she meant.
At home there was an old hockey game that his parents got from Hoot and gave to him as a Christmas present. Unlike those modern games that the rich kids had, there was nothing electrical about it. It had two levers, one that moved the hockey players and one that swung their hockey stick. In winters past he had played the game with Mark almost every day. As soon as he got home he went into the bedroom and groped under his bed until he found it. Mark was silently watching TV as his mother cooked in the kitchen. “Markie,” he said, “want to play hockey?”
And there in Mark’s eyes was the light, the joy, of the brother he remembered and who, like him, had not forgotten the fun that brothers shared.
A Great Reckoning in a Little Room
