Fraternity of the Stone

by David Morrell

  "Those pants cost good money, you know."

  The day after that, Drew's aunt made an urgent phone call to her husband at his real estate office.

  She could hardly speak. But through her sobs, her husband understood enough. Shocked, he agreed to meet her at Drew's grade school after classes let out.

  14

  "Now I don't deny that your nephew had provocation." The principal had a wobbly double chin. "The Whet-man boy is known to be a bully. I assume you're familiar with his parents? His father runs the Cadillac dealership over on Palmer Road."

  Drew's aunt and uncle didn't recognize "Whetman," but they certainly recognized "Cadillac."

  "So the situation's this." The principal mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. "The Whetman kid is twelve. He's big for his age, and he likes to throw his weight around. The fact is... I'll tell you this in confidence. I assume you won't repeat it. The kid takes after his father - pushy. But the father donates a lot of cash to our athletic fund. Anyway, the kid lets everybody know who's boss. So your nephew... Well, he didn't buckle under, is what it amounts to. I've got to give him credit. Tough little monkey. Everybody else buckles under. I don't know why your nephew didn't. When school got started, I guess the Whetman kid checked around to see who's new on the block and decided to pick on Andrew as an example. The way I hear it, the Whetman kid put bubble gum in Andrew's hair. And then he stuck pencils into him. And shoved him in the gravel at recess, ripping his pants."

  Drew's uncle asked, "Why wasn't anything done to stop this?"

  "It's only rumors, things I heard from the children. If I believed everything that the students told me... "

  "Go on."

  "Well, basically..." The principal sighed. "Today, the Whetman kid took a whack at Andrew. A pretty good one. He split Andrew's lip."

  Drew's uncle squinted angrily. "And?"

  "Andrew didn't cry. I'll give him credit for that as well. He sure is a tough little monkey. But the thing is, he should have complained to a teacher in the playground."

  "Would it have mattered?"

  The principal scowled. "I'm sorry. I don't understand."

  "Never mind. Go on."

  "Instead, Andrew lost his temper."

  "I can't imagine why."

  "He hit the Whetman kid in the mouth with a baseball bat."

  Drew's uncle turned pale. "Oh, shit."

  "Loosened the Whetman kid's front teeth is what he did. Now the kid had some discipline coming, sure. I won't argue that point. But a baseball bat? Overreaction, wouldn't you think? And Mr. Whetman was in here earlier. He's upset, I don't need to tell you. He wants to know what kind of school I'm running. He's threatened to go to the education board and the police. Thank God, I managed to talk him out of it, but the point is, until this problem is settled... Well, what I asked you here to talk about is your nephew's suspended. I want him to stay home from school."

  15

  "It's a damned good thing for you," Mr. Whetman told Drew's uncle and aunt in their living room that night. "If my son had lost his teeth, I'd be suing you so fast... "

  "Mr. Whetman, please. I know you've got every reason to be angry." Drew's uncle held up his hands. "Believe me, we're disturbed about this ourselves. I'll be glad to pay for any doctor or dentist bills. Your boy isn't disfigured, I hope."

  Whetman fumed. "No thanks to your nephew. The doctor says that the stitches won't leave scars, but right now my son's got lips the size of sausages. I'll be direct. The principal told me about your nephew's background, about what happened to his parents. Terrible. It's the only excuse I can think of for his behavior. Obviously your nephew's disturbed. I've decided not to go to the police. On one condition. That the boy get professional help."

  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "A psychiatrist, Mr. MacLane. The sooner, the better. Oh, yes, and something else."

  Drew's uncle waited.

  "I don't want that boy near my son. Have him transferred to another school."

  Drew listened behind the partly open door of his room. His eyes stung bitterly. But he'd made a promise to himself, and he kept it. He didn't cry.

  16

  On the third day after his transfer, Drew's aunt heard the phone ring as she carried groceries into the kitchen.

  She hurried to set down the bags and answer it.

  "Mrs. MacLane?"

  The officious voice distressed her. "Speaking."

  "I'm sorry to bother you. This is the principal over at Emerson grade school."

  She tensed.

  "I'm sure this is nothing. You probably, well, just forgot."

  She gripped the cupboard.

  "But since we didn't receive any word this morning, I thought I'd better call to find out if your nephew's sick."

  She herself felt sick. "No." She swallowed something sour. "Not that I know of. He seemed perfectly well when he got on the bus this morning. Why? Has he been complaining about a stomach ache?"

  "That's just it, Mrs. MacLane. No one here has seen him to ask him."

  Inwardly, she groaned.

  "I assumed you'd kept him home from school and simply forgot to let the attendance office know. It happens all the time. But because I'm aware of your nephew's situation, I thought there wouldn't be any harm in my asking. Just in case, you understand."

  "In case?"

  "Well, I don't think anything's happened to him, though you never can tell. But he wasn't here yesterday, either."

  17

  Standing next to the policeman, Drew stared down at the sidewalk in front of his aunt and uncle's house.

  The screen door banged open. He peered up as his uncle stormed out. "It's after supper, Andrew, you had us worried. Where on earth have you been?"

  "The cemetery," the policeman said.

  "What?"

  "Pleasant View. That's ten miles north of here."

  "Yes, officer, I'm familiar with it."

  "They've had some vandalism recently. Teenagers sneaking in, toppling tombstones, that sort of thing. I can't imagine why anybody would think that's funny. Anyway, the cemetery director asked us to keep a watch, so I've been driving through there on my rounds. Yesterday morning, I saw this youngster staring down at some graves. I didn't think much about it, mostly because I had a radio call about a burglary in progress, and I had to hot-tail it over to a liquor store. But this morning, I was driving through that cemetery again, and there was this youngster again, and I thought, 'Now wait a minute,' and stopped. He sure doesn't talk much, does he?"

  "That's a fact," Drew's aunt said.

  "Even when I walked up to him, he didn't pay me any attention. He just kept staring down at the graves. So I went around behind him and saw that the last names on the tombstones were both the same."

  "MacLane," Drew's uncle said.

  "That's right. A man and a woman."

  "Robert and Susan."

  "Right. So I asked him what he was doing, and the first and last thing he said to me was, 'I'm talking to my mom and dad.' "

  "Dear God."

  "Then he wiped at his eyes, but the funny thing was, I couldn't see any tears. I figured he must have someone with him, but when I looked, there wasn't anyone in sight. And most children, you know, this uniform makes them pay attention. Not him, though. He just kept staring down at those graves. He wouldn't tell me his name or where he lived. All by himself. Why wasn't he in school? So what could I do? I took him down to the station."

  "You did right," Drew's uncle said.

  "I even bought him a chocolate bar, but he still wouldn't talk to me, and his wallet had no I.D., so that's when I started calling all the MacLanes in the book. You say you're his guardians?"

  "He was telling the truth," Drew's uncle said. "His parents are buried there."

  "I sure feel sorry for him."

  "Yeah," Drew's uncle said, "it's a long, sad story. Here, let me pay you for the chocolate bar you bought him."

  "That's okay. My treat. Besides, he's a tough litt
le kid. He never ate it."

  "Right," Drew's uncle said. "A tough little kid."

  18

  Mrs. Cavendish set down the pointer she'd been aiming at multiplication lists on the blackboard.

  "Andrew, I asked you a question."

  The children giggled.

  "Andrew?" Mrs. Cavendish stalked between rows of desks until she reached a seat near the back. Drew was slumped across the desktop, his head on his arms, asleep. She towered over him, glaring, her voice loud. "Andrew?"

  He murmured in his sleep.

  She nudged his shoulder. Nudged it again. "Andrew?" she barked.

  He sat up bolt-straight, blinking.

  "I asked you a question."

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Cavendish." Drew shook his head to clear it. "I guess I wasn't listening."

  "Of course not. How could you? When you were asleep."

  The children had turned around in their desks to watch the excitement. Now as Mrs. Cavendish shot an angry glance their way, they swiveled to peer ahead, their flushed necks the only sign of the laughter they struggled to contain.

  "This isn't the first time. Do I bore you so much that I put you to sleep?"

  "No, Mrs. Cavendish."

  "Then it must be mathematics that makes you sleepy."

  "No, Mrs. Cavendish."

  "What is it then?"

  Drew didn't answer.

  "Well, young man, you can sleep on somebody else's time. From now on, you sit in the desk right in front of me. Stand up."

  She marched him to the front and made him switch places with another student.

  "And now, young man, the next time you're tempted to show me how boring I am by falling asleep, I won't have to reach far" - she picked up her pointer and whacked it hard against the front of the desk - "to wake you up." Of all the children, only Drew didn't flinch.

  19

  Four a.m. A chilly October wind nipped Drew's cheeks as he stood with the policeman in front of the house.

  "I hate to wake you up this late," the policeman said, but I figured you must be frantic with worry."

  Light spilled from the open front door. Drew's aunt clutched the front of her housecoat. Beside her, silhouetted in the doorway, Drew's uncle glanced nervously at the darkened houses along the street as if he hoped that the neighbors wouldn't notice the police car parked in front. "You'd better come in."

  "I understand." The policeman guided Drew in and shut the door. "I'm sure you weren't expecting company. I'll just stand here in the hall."

  "But where did you find him?"

  The policeman hesitated. "The cemetery."

  Drew's uncle blinked. "We didn't even know he was gone."

  Drew's aunt raised a trembling hand to her hairnet. "I put him to bed right after supper. I checked him before we went to sleep."

  "It seems he snuck out after. I've got his bicycle in the trunk of the car," the policeman said.

  "He biked ten miles?" Drew's uncle slumped against the wall. "In the night, in this cold? He must be - "

  "Exhausted," Drew's aunt said. She looked at her husband. "Dear Lord, do you suppose?" She shivered and stared at Drew. "Is that what you've been doing? Is that why you're so tired at school?"

  "This time around, I managed to get him to talk to me," the policeman said. "Not a lot, but enough to get the idea. I gather that he's been biking over there at night and... maybe it's better if he tells you himself. Go on, Drew. Why have you been biking over there? I don't mean just to visit your parents. You can do that in daylight. Why at night?"

  Drew glanced from the policeman to his aunt and uncle. He peered at the door.

  "Go on, Drew." The policeman crouched. "Tell them what you told rne."

  Drew's aunt and uncle waited sternly.

  "Vandals," Drew said.

  His aunt and uncle looked shocked. "Vandals?"

  Drew nodded.

  "The cat has his tongue again," the policeman said, "so let me fill in the blanks. When I brought him home before, he heard me talk about the teenagers who've been vandalizing the cemetery."

  "I remember," Drew's uncle said.

  "Well, apparently that got him thinking. For starters, he didn't know what 'vandals' meant, so he says he looked it up in the dictionary. I don't know what he read, but it sure upset him."

  "That still doesn't explain why he's been sneaking out at night to go to the cemetery," Drew's aunt said.

  "It does if you think about it. What he's been doing is - " Drew fidgeted, self-conscious; they stared at him "-protecting his parents' graves."

  20

  Saturday morning, bright and cold. As a group of neighborhood children played football in the distance, Drew sat alone on a swing at the far end of the lot.

  A shadow loomed across him. From in back.

  Drew turned. At first, with the sun angled toward his eyes, he couldn't make out the face of the tall man in the overcoat.

  But as his vision got used to the glare of the sun, he suddenly grinned excitedly and rushed to the man.

  "Uncle Ray!"

  In truth, the man was not related to Drew, but from years of habit, that was what Drew had always called him.

  "Uncle Ray!"

  Drew threw his arms around the man's waist, feeling the soft brown cloth of the overcoat.

  The man laughed, picked Drew up, and swung him around. "It's good to see you, sport. How's the world been treating you?"

  Drew was too delighted to pay attention to the question. As the man continued laughing, Drew laughed as well, enjoying the wonderful dizziness of being swung around.

  The man set him down and, smiling, crouched to face him. "Surprised?"

  "Boy, I'll say!"

  "I happened to be in Boston on business, and I thought, 'What the heck, as long as I'm here, I might as well visit my old friend Drew.' " Uncle Ray mussed Drew's hair. "A good thing I did, huh? When I saw you on that swing, you looked pretty glum."

  Drew shrugged, remembering how he'd felt, returning to his somber mood.

  "Got troubles, sport?"

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  "Any you'd like to tell me about?"

  Drew scuffed his running shoes in the dead brown grass. "Just stuff."

  "Well, it might be I know a few of them already. I stopped at the house. Your aunt told me where you'd gone." Ray paused. "She also told me what's been happening. Your problems at school." He bit his lip. "The other things. And I hear you've been getting in fights with your cousin."

  "He doesn't like me."

  "Oh? You're sure of that?"

  "He's mad because I live there. He's always playing practical jokes on me or hiding my homework or blaming me for things I didn't do."

  "I can see how that might happen. So you decked him, huh?"

  Drew grinned, holding up his right hand. "Bruised my knuckles."

  "It could be an even trade. At the house, I saw his black eye."

  The man was as old as Drew's father had been. For some reason, "thirty-five" stuck in Drew's mind. He had neatly trimmed sandy hair, expressive blue eyes, and a narrow, handsome face, his jaw strongly outlined. Drew loved the sweet smell of his aftershave.

  "Yeah, a lot of commotion," Ray said. "The question is, what are we going to do about it? You feel like taking a walk, sport?"

  21

  Puzzled, his heart thumping, Drew listened out of sight in the hall as the grown-ups talked about him in the living room.

  "As you're aware, Drew's father and I were very close," Ray said. His smooth voice carried down the hall. "I knew him for years. We went to Yale together. We received our State Department training together. We were both stationed in Japan."

  Drew's uncle said, "Then you were at the embassy when his parents were killed?"

  "No, by the time the demonstrations started, I'd already been transferred to Hong Kong. When I heard what had happened, well, I couldn't believe that anybody would do such a horrible thing. I was involved in a diplomatic emergency at the time, and I couldn't lea
ve Hong Kong even to go to the funeral. In fact, my assignment was serious enough that I wasn't free to get away till just last week. I'm sure you'll understand that I can't be specific about what I was doing. But as soon as