I didn't think she would, but she did.
It was only a couple of days later that I looked up from my book at the creak of the old gate. The heavy old gear that served as a weight to pull it shut thudded dully behind the Francher kid. He walked up the porch steps under my close scrutiny with none of the hesitant embarrassment that most people would feel. He mounted the three steps and wordlessly handed me an envelope. I opened it. It said:
"Dust off your halo! I've reached the !! stage. Wouldn't you like to keep him permanent-like?"
"Won't you sit down?" I gestured to the porch swing, wondering how I was going to handle this deal.
He looked at the swing and sank down on the top porch step.
"What's your name?"
He looked at me incuriously. "Francher." His voice was husky and unused-sounding.
"Is that your first name?"
"That's my name."
"What's your other name?" I asked patiently, falling into a first-grade dialogue in spite of his age.
"They put down Clement."
"Clement Francher. A good-sounding name, but what do they call you?"
His eyebrows slanted subtly upward, and a tiny bitter smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
"With their eyes—juvenile delinquent, lazy trash, no-good off-scouring, potential criminal, burden—"
I winced away from the icy malice of his voice.
"But mostly they call me a whole sentence, like—'Well, what can you expect from a background like that?' "
His knuckles were white against his faded Levi's. Then as I watched them the color crept back and, without visible relaxation, the tension was gone. But his eyes were the eyes of a boy too big to cry and too young for any other comfort.
"What is your background?" I asked quietly, as though I had the right to ask. He answered as simply as though he owed me an answer.
"We were with the carnival. We went to all the fairs around the country. Mother—" his words nearly died, "Mother had a mind-reading act. She was good. She was better than anyone knew—better than she wanted to be. It hurt and scared her sometimes to walk through people's minds. Sometimes she would come back to the trailer and cry and cry and take a long long shower and wash herself until her hands were all water-soaked and her hair hung in dripping strings. They curled at the end. She couldn't get all the fear and hate and—and tired dirt off even that way. Only if she could find a Good to read, or a dark church with tall candles."
"And where is she now?" I asked, holding a small warm picture in my mind of narrow fragile shoulders, thin and defenseless under a flimsy moist robe, with one wet strand of hair dampening one shoulder of it.
"Gone." His eyes were over my head but empty of the vision of the weatherworn siding of the house. "She died. Three years ago. This is a foster home. To try to make a decent citizen of me."
There was no inflection in his words. They lay as flat as paper between us in our silence.
"You like music," I said, curling Anna's note around my forefinger, remembering what I had seen the other night.
"Yes." His eyes were on the note. "'Miss Semper doesn't think so, though. I hate that scratchy wrapped-up music."
"You sing?"
"No. I make music."
"You mean you play an instrument?"
He frowned a little impatiently. "No. I make music with instruments."
"Oh," I said. "There's a difference?"
"Yes." He turned his head away. I had disappointed him or failed him in some way.
"Wait," I said. "'I want to show you something." I struggled to my feet. Oh, deftly and quickly enough under the circumstances, I suppose, but it seemed an endless aching effort in front of the Francher kid's eyes. But finally I was up and swinging in through the front door. When I got back with my key chain the kid was still staring at my empty chair, and I had to struggle back into it under his unwavering eyes.
"Can't you stand alone?" he asked, as though he had a right to.
"Very little, very briefly," I answered, as though I owed him an answer.
"You don't walk without those braces."
"I can't walk without those braces. Here." I held out my key chain. There was a charm on it: a harmonica with four notes, so small that I had never managed to blow one by itself. The four together made a tiny breathy chord, like a small hesitant wind.
He took the chain between his fingers and swung the charm back and forth, his head bent so that the sunlight flickered across its tousledness. The chain stilled. For a long moment there wasn't a sound. Then clearly, sharply, came the musical notes, one after another. There was a slight pause and then four notes poured their separateness together to make a clear sweet chord.
"You make music," I said, barely audible.
"Yes." He gave me back my key chain and stood up. "I guess she's cooled down now. I'll go on back."
"To work?"
"To work." He smiled wryly. "For a while anyway." He started down the walk.
"What if I tell?" I called after him.
"I told once," he called back over his shoulder. "Try it if you want to."
I sat for a long time on the porch after he left. My fingers were closed over the harmonica as I watched the sun creep up my skirts and into my lap. Finally I turned Anna's envelope over. The seal was still secure. The end was jagged where I had torn it. The paper was opaque. I blew a tiny breathy chord on the harmonica. Then I shivered as cold crept across my shoulders. The chill was chased away by a tiny hot wave of excitement. So his mother could walk through the minds of others. So he knew what was in a sealed letter—or had he got his knowledge from Anna before the letter? So he could make music with harmonicas. So the Francher kid was . . . My hurried thoughts caught and came to a full stop. What was the Francher kid?
After school that day Anna toiled up the four front steps and rested against the railing, half sitting and half leaning. "I'm too tired to sit down," she said. "I'm wound up like a clock and I'm going to strike something pretty darned quick." She half laughed and grimaced a little. "Probably my laundry. I'm fresh out of clothes." She caught a long ragged breath. "You must have built a fire under that Francher kid. He came back and piled into his math book and did the whole week's assignments that he hadn't bothered with before. Did them in less than an hour, too. Makes me mad, though—" She grimaced again and pressed her hand to her chest. "Darn that chalk dust anyway. Thanks a million for your assist. I wish I were optimistic enough to believe it would last." She leaned and breathed, her eyes closing with the effort. "Awful shortage of air around here." Her hands fretted with her collar. "Anyway the Francher kid said you'd substitute for me until my pneumonia is over." She laughed, a little soundless laugh. "He doesn't know that it's just chalk dust and that I'm never sick." She buried her face in her two hands and burst into tears. "I'm not sick, am I? It's only that darn Francher kid!"
She was still blaming him when Mrs. Somanson came out and led her into her bedroom and when the doctor arrived to shake his head over her chest.
So that's how it was that the first-floor first grade was hastily moved upstairs and the junior high was hastily moved downstairs and I once more found myself facing the challenge of a class, telling myself that the Francher kid needed no special knowledge to say that I'd substitute. After all I like Anna, I was the only substitute available, and besides, any slight—substitute's pay!—addition to the exchequer was most welcome.
"You can live on those monthly checks, but it's pleasant to have a couple of extra coins to clink together.
By midmorning I knew a little of what Anna was sweating over. The Francher kid's absolutely dead-weight presence in the room was a drag on everything we did. Recitations paused, limped and halted when they came to him. Activities swirled around his inactivity, creating distracting eddies. It wasn't only a negative sort of nonparticipation on his part but an aggressively positive not-doingness. It wasn't just a hindrance but an active opposition, without any overt action for any sort of proof of his attitude
. This, along with my disappointment in not having the same comfortable rapport with him that I'd had before, and the bone-weariness of having to be vertical all day instead of collapsing horizontally at intervals, and the strain of getting back into harness, cold, with a roomful of teeners and subteeners, had me worn down to a nubbin by early afternoon.
So I fell back on the perennial refuge of harried teachers and opened a discussion of "what I want to be when I grow up." We had gone through the usual nurses and airplane hostesses and pilots and bridge builders and the usual unexpected ballet dancer and CPA (and he still can't add six and nine!) until the discussion frothed like a breaking wave against the Francher kid and stilled there.
He was lounging down in his seat, his weight supported by the back of his neck and the remote end of his spine. The class sighed collectively though inaudibly and waited for his contribution.
"And you, Clement?" I prompted, shifting vainly, trying to ease the taut cry of aching muscles.
"An outlaw," he said huskily, not bothering to straighten up.
"I'm going to keep a list and break every law there is—and get away with it, too."
"Whatever for?" I asked, trying to reassure the .sick pang inside me. "An outlaw is no use at all to society."
"Who wants to be of use?" he asked. "I'11 use society-and I can do it."
"Perhaps," I said, knowing full well it was so. "But that's not the way to happiness."
"Who's happy? The bad are unhappy because they are bad. The good are unhappy because they're afraid to be bad—"
"Clement," I said gently, "I think you are—"
"I think he's crazy," said Rigo, his black eyes flashing. "Don't pay him no never mind, Miss Carolle. He's a screwball. He's all the time saying crazy things."
I saw the heavy world globe on the top shelf of the bookcase behind Rigo shift and slide toward the edge. I saw it lift clear of the shelf and I cried out, "Clement!" The whole class started at the loud urgency of my voice, the Francher kid included, and Rigo moved just far enough out of line that the falling globe missed him and cracked itself apart at his feet.
Someone screamed and several gasped and a babble of voices broke out. I caught the Francher kid's eyes, and he flushed hotly and ducked his head. Then he straightened up proudly and defiantly returned my look. He wet his forefinger in his mouth and drew an invisible tally mark in the air before him. I shook my head at him, slowly, regretfully. What could I do with a child like this?
Well, I had to do something, so I told him to stay in after school, though the kids wondered why. He slouched against the door, defiance in every awkward angle of his body and in the hooking of his thumbs into his front pockets. I let the parting noises fade and die, the last hurried clang of lunch pail, the last flurry of feet, the last reverberant slam of the outside door. The Francher kid shifted several times, easing the tension of his shoulders as he waited. Finally I said, "Sit down."
"No." His word was flat and uncompromising. I looked at him, the gaunt young planes of his face, the unhappy mouth thinned to stubbornness, the eyes that blinded themselves with dogged defiance. I leaned across the desk, my hands clasped, and wondered what I could say. Argument would do no good. A kid of that age has an answer for everything.
"We all have violences," I said, tightening my hands, "but we can't always let them out. Think what a mess things would be if we did." I smiled wryly into his unresponsive face. "if we gave in to every violent impulse I'd probably have slapped you with an encyclopedia before now." His eyelids flicked, startled, and he looked straight at me for the first time.
"Sometimes we can just hold our breath until the violence swirls away from us. Other times it's too big and it swells inside us like a balloon until it chokes our lungs and aches our jaw hinges." His lids flickered down over his watching eyes. "But it can be put to use. Then's when we stir up a cake by hand or chop wood or kick cans across the back yard or—" I faltered, "or run until our knees bend both ways from tiredness."
There was a small silence while I held my breath until my violent rebellion against unresponsive knees swirled away from me.
"There are bigger violences, I guess," I went on. "From them come assault and murder, vandalism and war, but even those can be used. If you want to smash things there are worthless things that need to be smashed and things that ought to be destroyed, tipped apart and ruined. But you have no way of knowing what those things are, yet. You must keep your violences small until you learn how to tell the difference."
"I can smash." His voice was thick.
"Yes," I said. "But smash to build. "You have no right to hurt other people with your own hurt."
"People!" The word was profanity.
I drew a long breath. If he were younger... You can melt stiff rebellious arms and legs with warm hugs or a hand across a wind-ruffled head or a long look that flickers into a smile, but what can you do with a creature that's neither adult nor child but puzzlingly both? I leaned forward.
"Francher," I said softly, "if your mother could walk through your mind now—"
He reddened, then paled. His mouth opened. He swallowed tightly. Then he jerked himself upright in the doorway.
"Leave my mother alone." His voice was shaken and muffled. "You leave her alone. She's dead."
I listened to his footsteps and the crashing slam of the outside door. For some sudden reason I felt my heart follow him down the hill to town. I sighed, almost with exasperation. So this was to be a My Child. We teacher-types sometimes find them. They aren't our pets; often they aren't even in our classes. But they are the children who move unasked into our hearts and make claims upon them over and above the call of duty. And this My Child I had to reach. Somehow I had to keep him from sliding on over the borderline to lawlessness as he so surely was doing—this My Child who, even more than the usual My Child, was different.
I put my head down on the desk and let weariness ripple up over me. After a minute I began to straighten up my papers. I made the desk top tidy and took my purse out of the bottom drawer. I struggled to my feet and glared at my crutches. Then I grinned weakly.
"Come, friends," I said. "Leave us help one another depart."
~ * ~
Anna was out for a week. After she returned I was surprised at my reluctance to let go of the class. The sniff of chalk dust was in my nostrils and I ached to be busy again. So I started helping out with the school programs and teen-age dances, which led naturally to the day my committee and I stood in the town recreation hall and looked about us despairingly.
"How long have those decorations been up?" I craned my neck to get a better view of the wilderness of sooty cobwebby crepe paper that clotted the whole of the high ceiling and the upper reaches of the walls of the ramshackle old hall that leaned wearily against the back of the saloon. Twyla stopped chewing the end of one of her heavy braids. "About four years, I guess. At least the newest. Pea-Green put it all up."
"Pea-Green?"
"Yeah. He was a screwball. He used up every piece of crepe paper in town and used nails to put the stuff up—big nails. He's gone now. He got silicosis and went down to Hot Springs."
"Well, nails or no nails we can't have a Hallowe'en dance with that stuff up."
"Going to miss the old junk. How we going to get it down?" Janniset asked.
"Pea-Green used an extension ladder he borrowed from a power crew that was stringing some wires up to the Bluebell Mine," Rigo said. "But we'll have to find some other way to get it down, now."
I felt a flick of something at my elbow. It might have been the Francher kid shifting from one foot to the other, or it might have been just a thought slipping by. I glanced sideways but caught only the lean line of his cheek and the shaggy back of his neck.
"I think I can get a ladder." Rigo snapped his thumbnail loudly with his white front teeth. "It won't reach clear up but it'll help."
"We could take rakes and just drag it down," Twyla suggested.
We all laughed until I sobered u
s all with, "It might come to that yet, bless the buttons of whoever thought up twenty-foot ceilings. Well, tomorrow's Saturday. Everybody be here about nine and we'll get with it."
"Can't." The Francher kid cast anchor unequivocally, snapping all our willingness up short.
"Oh?" I shifted my crutches, and, as usual, his eyes fastened on them, almost hypnotically. "That's too bad."
"How come?" Rigo was belligerent. "If the rest of us can you oughta be able to. Ever'body's s'posed to do this together. Ever'body does the dirty work and ever'body has the fun. You're nobody special. You're on this committee, aren't you?"
I restrained myself from a sudden impulse to clap my hand over Rigo's mouth midway in his protest. I didn't like the quietness of the Francher kid's hands, hut he only looked slantwise up at Rigo and said, "I got volunteered on this committee. I didn't ask to. And to fix this joint up today. I gotta work tomorrow."
The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology] Page 20
