On the Blue Comet

by Rosemary Wells

  I looked up. A man stood at the edge of the porch, looking in on my spread-out papers. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a snap-brim cap. He did not appear to be in filthy clothes or in danger of arrest. He had a pleasant smile, and he smelled of Barbasol shaving cream, like my dad. The grand­father clock had dinged four o’clock. There was still an hour and a half of afternoon before Aunt Carmen and Willa Sue alighted from the bus.

  “My name’s Henry Applegate,” the man said, taking off his cap politely. “I was a math teacher once.” He replaced the cap and removed his glasses. “Raised three boys of my own! All grown,” he added as he polished the lenses on a tattered but clean handkerchief. He was well spoken. That was a good sign. He was carrying a fat book. Another good sign. I didn’t think tramps and hobos went around with heavy books under their arms.

  He continued to introduce himself. “I taught algebra and geometry in the town high school of Searchlight, Texas. A year ago, Mr. Hoover’s recession hit Texas badly. Everybody upped and went away. They closed the school. I lost my job, so I came up here to see if there was any work.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Got a room at the Y for twenty-five cents a day,” was his answer.

  “My dad lost his job, too,” I said. “He went to Cal­i­fornia. He’s going to work for John Deere out there. Soon as he gets his job, he’s going to send me a ticket to go. He’s going to meet me at the station in Los Angeles.”

  Mr. Applegate pointed to my paper with his pinky finger. He said, “The answer to the first question is five hundred sixty-eight thousand, six hundred sixty point oh five five, three times an hour. The answer to the second question is twenty million, four hundred ninety-six thousand, forty-one point oh nine, and the answer to the third question is six hundred million, nine hundred fifty thousand, four hundred seventy-eight point ten.”

  “Come again?” I said, pencil stub furiously writing.

  Without effort he reeled off the answers a second time. “Once upon a time, I was even a math­ematics tutor at the University of Texas,” Mr. Applegate added by way of further explanation. I noticed him breathing in deeply and grinning. “Is that pancakes I smell?” he asked.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “I haven’t eaten but a box of raisins in two days,” said Mr. Applegate.

  I retreated from the porch to the kitchen and made him a plate of pancakes all his own and covered them with molasses. I added to his lunch an apple, which was all I dared do for fear Aunt Carmen would notice something missing. I passed the plate out the window to him. When I turned away for a second, everything on Mr. Applegate’s plate was gone, and he thanked me. In another five minutes, my homework was completely done.

  “I am going to explain how to do it,” said Mr. Applegate. “It’s no good you just having the right answers. You have to know how to get them. Then we’ll read a poem together.”

  A little comprehension flickered in my mind as Mr. Applegate showed me how to do the work. He was certainly a better teacher than Mrs. Olderby. It had never occurred to me that one teacher might be better than another. Teachers just were. You got them, one after another, the way you got shoes.

  After math, Mr. Applegate opened The Fireside Book of Poetry. We read, “The boy stood on the burning deck . . .” Tears sprang into my eyes when the father and then the noble son die on a fiery ship in the midst of battle. Mr. Applegate passed me his handkerchief.

  Mr. Applegate stayed outside the kitchen window for the first week. He did all the problems from afar. But when it rained, I could not bear to see him all wet and dripping. I asked him to come under the eaves and sit in the glider on the porch. I showed him my postcards from Dad. He showed me how he did math in his head.

  “You can train yourself, Oscar,” he assured me. “Just use the palm of your hand instead of paper. That way you feel the numbers as you write them with your fingernail, but you can’t see them. Makes you concentrate. You do that for a few weeks, and you’ll start doing math in your head just like me!”

  Each afternoon we lightened Arithmetic for the Modern Child with The Fireside Book of Poetry. One afternoon Mr. Applegate recited a poem called “O Captain! My Captain!”

  “It has another dead father in it!” I complained, my lip trembling. “This time he’s lying cold and dead on the deck!”

  “Next time we will do a more uplifting poem,” said Mr. Applegate.

  “I don’t want an uplifting poem!” I pleaded, serving him his plate of pancakes. “I want to turn myself into an arrow and fly to when I see my dad again.”

  Mr. Applegate’s jaw dropped. “Now that is very interesting, Oscar,” he said, actually suspending his forkful of pancakes, midair over his plate, on the way to his mouth.

  “What is interesting?” I asked.

  “Well most people would say I want to fly to where, not I want to fly to when. Flying to when is a very complicated mathematical concept. Perhaps only a handful of people on earth really understand it. It is the theory that time and place are one thing, not different things, discovered by Professor Einstein. He believes that time is like a river. All times are present at once along its banks. Everything future and every­thing past is happening right now at some point in that river. If we were strong enough and fast enough to get across the current, we could reverse course and go back around the last bend in the stream. We might see the Battle of Gettysburg and find Mr. Lincoln in the White House.”

  “We could?” I asked. “Then we could warn President Lincoln not to go out to the theater ever again!”

  “Yes, we could, but if we did, every event ever after that would change, too. Who knows, Oscar? A new chain of history would fall into place like cogs turning on a billion sprockets. Herbert Hoover might not be our president today if Lincoln had not been assassinated. On the other hand, you and I might never have been born. It would be a foolish thing to go back in time and make changes. Not to mention, Oscar, that it would take a very fast rocket ship to go into the past. It would have to go so fast that it would disintegrate, and all its passengers would disintegrate with it.”

  “But how about forward? Could somebody like me go forward from now, just a little bit?” I asked. “Maybe just enough to find my dad?”

  “Oh, forward is part of the concept, too, according to Professor Einstein,” answered Mr. Applegate.

  I answered Mr. Applegate with a puzzled look.

  He explained more, if explain is the right word — I couldn’t make sense of a single p­article of his thinking. “Oscar, if you wanted to go into the future, you would have to travel more slowly than time itself. You would have to use the principle of negative velocity. Time would simply pass you by.”

  “Did Professor Einstein invent a way of doing it?” I asked.

  “Alas, Oscar,” answered Mr. Applegate, eating his pancakes now, “Professor Einstein is just a mathematician, not an inventor.”

  “There’s always a catch,” I said, and looked down at my first problem of the day.

  A train leaves Station A at two p.m. It arrives in Station B three hours, four minutes, and thirty seconds later. Station B is 75.6 miles away from Station A. How fast is the train going?

  “Who cares?” I moaned. “Who cares about the stupid train, the butchers, or liver prices?”

  Every day Mr. Applegate ate with the speed of a hungry German shepherd. Every day he told me of his job-hunting progress. One week he raked leaves for the city park for twenty-five cents an hour. Another day he changed oil, lying on the floor under the cars in the Mobilgas garage. There was no regular work to be had.

  The no-work stories frightened me. I was afraid the same thing was happening to my dad way out in Cal­i­fornia. Were Dad’s cheerful postcards from this town and that just a mask over hopelessness? Were my dad’s handkerchiefs tattered? Were there worry pouches sunk below his eyes, like Mr. Applegate’s?

  “Poetry gets you through the hardest times, Oscar. It’s like a tonic,” Mr. Applega
te told me. “The world has forgotten poetry and how it heals the soul and body, too.”

  Mr. Applegate finished his pancakes, sat back in his chair, and out of his mouth came a stream of verses. It was a righteous theme, a moral Sunday-school kind of poem, but it had a kick to it and it made little goose bumps go down my back and lift the tiny hairs along my spine.

  “I liked that one, Mr. Applegate!” I told him.

  “It’s a very famous one called ‘If,’ Oscar, and it was written by Rudyard Kipling. Come June, some unlucky kid in every school in America has to recite that chestnut on graduation day. Preachers love it; teachers love it! Weepy old army officers love it! But, darn it, when the blues come over me, I set myself right by reciting ‘If.’”

  “How can you remember so many lines of it?” I asked.

  “There’s a trick to learning things by heart. A secret code.”

  “Wow!” I said. “Could you teach me how to do it?”

  “Nothing easier,” said Mr. Applegate. He flipped open The Fireside Book of Poetry to K for Kipling. I scanned the poem “If.” With a pencil, Mr. Applegate made tiny red underlines on certain words in the first verse.

  If you can keep your head while all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too;

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise . . .

  “Now try to remember those key words in order,” said Mr. Applegate.

  “I can’t possibly,” I answered.

  “The code works just the way ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ lets you remember the notes E, G, B, D, F in music,” Mr. Applegate explained. “Keep blaming yourself. Your allowance can wait. Lies and hating don’t look too good! Repeat it a couple of times, Oscar. Now can you recall your anchor words?”

  The first verse of “If” flowed into my mind as easily as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Each afternoon Mr. Applegate and I got more of the poem down to memory.

  One day we had run out of milk and eggs. I did not dare open a can of substitute turkey hash or even tinned cod cheeks in case Aunt Carmen found it missing. Then the idea came to me.

  “You know what!” I said to Mr. Applegate. “There’s a whole carton of Ham Stix hidden in the basement. My dad brought ’em from our house. I reckon those Ham Stix are legally mine.” I made Mr. Applegate a nice hot Ham Stix sandwich on toast. He loved it. He said it gave him energy.

  “Let me see your last test paper from Mrs. Olderby,” he said. “Let’s go over those answers.”

  We worked from three-thirty to five o’clock each day as the days grew short and cold. Aunt Carmen never questioned the missing pieces of bread. She never discovered about Dad’s carton of Ham Stix behind the water tank.

  Aunt Carmen did not exactly smile, nor did she offer any praise, but, lips pursed, she did say, “Oscar, your grades in arithmetic are more respectable than they were.”

  I beamed, but then Aunt Carmen soured it by tacking on, “It seems as if you have a better sense of numbers than your father. Your father is terrible with numbers and money. That’s why he invested in those foolish trains and put himself in the poorhouse.”

  “I hope to get a B soon, ma’am,” I allowed casually.

  “Hard work will achieve it, Oscar,” she said. “I hope your father is able to find some hard work for himself.”

  There had been nine postcards from my dad. Each one featured a picture of a new city in a new state. He had gone from Topeka to Little Rock, and from there to New Mexico, Arizona, then Fresno, Cal­i­fornia. There were no jobs, and I guessed his cash was beginning to run out. I had no address to write him at. I felt frozen in my half of our correspondence because I could not answer his cards.

  My eyes prickled and nearly burst into embarrassing tears when I thought of him at dinner or in school. So instead I tried to imagine Los Angeles, City of Angels. In my mind’s eye it was a city of temples and oranges, grander than any of the seven wonders of the ancient world. In the middle was the train station. In its fabulous halls my dad ran down a gold speckled marble platform to meet my train and melt the ice that cramped my heart.

  On November 18, it sleeted all afternoon. I was afraid Mr. Applegate would not come in the bad weather, but he showed up all the same. It was too cold to sit outside on the glider. Nervously I looked at the clock. Still two hours before Aunt Carmen and Willa Sue would trundle up the street from the number 17 bus that pulled in at 5:51.

  “We can sit inside for a while,” I said. “I don’t reckon they’ll ever be the wiser.”

  I made Mr. Applegate a cup of cocoa to go with his Ham Stix sandwich. He was grateful. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Oscar,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “The food gives me strength. I’ve got a job tonight. Pays a dollar an hour. Shoveling slush and ice at some rich fellow’s party up in River Heights. His driveway’ll be full of fancy cars, and those folks don’t like to slip and slide. One of the gardeners said the boss might even have a regular indoor job for me downtown. We’ll see.”

  “What kind of job?” I asked.

  But Mr. Applegate didn’t know. His nose was running, and he blew it stuffily into his hand­kerchief. “My shoes have holes,” he explained nasally. “I caught a chill.”

  I wished I had even a dry pair of socks for Mr. Applegate. I had nothing to give him. Aunt Carmen had darned my socks five times, heel and toe, but they were too small for a grown man.

  “I don’t understand,” I told him. “One day every­thing in the world was fine. Dad and I had lamb chops and ice cream. The farmers farmed and bought tractors and the teachers like you had jobs teaching, then suddenly, bingo! It was over. My dad is gone, and now we’re lucky to have cold turnips for supper. How could it happen?”

  “Greed,” said Mr. Applegate. “Greedy Wall Street profiteers pushing their luck like high rollers betting right over the top. They stacked the stock market like a house of playing cards. They bet way over their heads, couldn’t back up their spending, and it all came tumbling down.”

  I knew well enough from Our Lady of Sorrows Sunday School about greed. I wasn’t sure if the money changers greased people’s palms in the Temple, or the Tower of Babel, but it didn’t matter. Sure as shooting, there were greaseballs and gamblers in the Bible, and their descendants had clearly been at work on Wall Street in October 1929.

  Mr. Applegate and I solved the day’s arithmetic prob­lems, going through the hoops of show-your-work on each one. “You’re not dreamin’ about your train set, now, Oscar,” Mr. Applegate prodded me gently whenever my eyes glazed over.

  I looked up at the kitchen clock for a moment. It was exactly 4:15. I glanced out the window. “Holy mackerel!” I said. “There they are! Getting off the bus. They’re early! You’ll have to go out the back door!”

  Mr. Applegate grabbed his tattered overcoat and vanished out of our kitchen like a rabbit in the night.

  They noticed nothing amiss. Luckily the pot and cocoa cup were clean; the Wonder bread was tucked neatly in its wrapper in the bread box. The frying pan was hanging from its hook, brightly polished, all traces of Ham Stix gone, and the empty Ham Stix tin lay sunken beneath Aunt Carmen’s coffee grounds in the very bottom of the trash barrel. The kitchen smelled of my lima bean casserole.

  I looked up from my arithmetic. “You’re early!” I said as calmly as I possibly could.

  Aunt Carmen removed her hat. “The Merri­weathers have chicken pox,” she announced as if chicken pox were a personal shortcoming. “They had a big yellow quarantine sign up, right next to the front door. Not a living soul is allowed in or out on account of the chicken pox. So that took care of Mary-Louise’s ‘Yankee Doodle’ practice and the Patrick Henry speech that her b
rother was rehearsing. We went all the way out to East Cairo for nothing, and of course, I can’t bill them for today.”

  “And no key lime pie, either,” grumped Willa Sue. “I was all looking forward, and then here come the dumb yellow quarantine signs and no pie!”

  There had been many a time that my dad had encouraged Aunt Carmen to get a telephone. “I’ll call you up, Carmen, and pass the time of day with you!” Dad always said. “Then you can talk to me and not have to put up with the cigars!”

  Aunt Carmen always pointed out that telephones, like electric trains, were expensive gadgets. They were a luxury for those who could afford them, not ordinary folks like us.

  This did not stop me from saying to Aunt Carmen, “If we had a telephone in the house, Mrs. Merriweather could have called —”

  “What’s this?” interrupted Willa Sue. She hefted The Fireside Book of Poetry over the table to Aunt Carmen. “This book’s soaking wet!” Her voice began the singsong teasing of the playground. “Oscar’s left the ho-use! Oscar’s been to the library in the ra-in and ruined the bo-ok, and he’s in big tro-uble!”

  Aunt Carmen opened the clammy covers of The Fireside Book of Poetry. The book fell open where it had been bookmarked to Kipling’s “If.”

  “Whose book might this be, Oscar?” asked Aunt Carmen.

  “I don’t know!” came tumbling out of my mouth. Willa Sue snorted from across the room.

  Aunt Carmen flipped to the inside back cover, where the library glued its card envelope and stamped the return dates for each book as it was checked out. She tapped the column of stamped dates with her fingernail.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “It seems this book was checked out today, November eighteenth, Oscar!”

  My mind was flying in circles of explanations, but none were needed.

  Aunt Carmen squinted again at the stack of date stamps. “Interesting!” she said. “This book, The Fireside Book of Poetry, has been checked out of the Cairo Public Library every week since early fall this year. Hmm! Not one checkout before that for ten years. Early fall is when I began leaving you alone in this house. This must be your favorite book, Oscar. ‘If’ must be your favorite poem!”