by Betsy Byars
After a moment, even weaker, he let himself lie on the porch. He sagged. All his strength was gone. His leg felt like a sausage in a frying pan.
He looked up at the porch ceiling. Rain had seeped through the tar and shingles of the roof and stained the boards. Lennie saw it all in a kind of blur because he had started crying again.
All of a sudden Lennie found himself remembering a poem. Lennie knew only one poem. He had had to learn it for a school assignment.
“If everyone else can memorize a poem, you can too, Lennie,” his teacher had said.
“But why can’t I substitute a TV jingle? They’re poems. They rhyme.”
“No, Lennie.”
“But listen to this. Why isn’t this a poem?
“Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce,
Special orders don’t upset us,
All we ask is that you let us
Serve you—”
“No, Lennie, that’s not poetry.”
“Well, here’s another one. What’s wrong with this?
“Hotdogs, Armour hotdogs.
What kind of kids like Armour hotdogs?
Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who—“
“Lennie for the last time, you are to learn a poem. Advertisingjingles are not poetry.”
Lennie could no longer remember the teacher’s name—he had had twenty-three different teachers in all that year—but he could still remember his poem and how bright the sun had been, slanting into the room, as he said it. It was as if the audience were lit up for the occasion instead of the stage.
“The July sun is gone,
The August moon.
September’s stars are dim,
October’s bright noon.”
“I am curious,” the teacher had said when he had finished. “Why did you select that particular poem, Lennie?”
He had selected it because all the months of the year were in it, and that would make it easier to memorize. He already knew the months. “It just appealed to me,” he had said.
“Why, Lennie?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think the poet had in mind when he wrote the poem?” The teacher, interested in Lennie for the first time, crossed in front of her desk.
“Let me think.” Lennie put his hand to his chin at this point to give the impression of deep thought. Lennie had always had a hard time arranging his face in the right expression. Looking interested or studious was especially hard for him. He sometimes thought he needed acting lessons on being a person.
“Do you think he was just talking about one year passing?” the teacher went on. “Or do you think, Lennie, that the poet was seeing his whole life as a year, that he was seeing his whole life slipping past?”
“I’m not sure.” Lennie’s hand was still on his chin as if ready to stroke a long gray beard.
“Class?”
“His whole life slipping past, ” the class chorused together. They had had this teacher so long that they could tell, just from the way she asked a question, what they were supposed to answer.
“I was just getting ready to say that,” Lennie mumbled into his hand.
And now, two years too late, Lennie knew what they were talking about. The poet had meant his whole life. Lennie knew because he saw his whole life slipping away too. In exactly the same way. July’s sun. August’s moon. September’s stars. October’s noon.
He closed his eyes and the tears came again, hot and fast. He couldn’t remember the rest of the poem. What was it he would miss about November and December? He squeezed his eyes shut tighter in determination. He stuck out his jaw.
Then his body went slack. He sighed. He realized that he would miss everything about the world. He would miss all the reruns of Bonanza and Star Trek. He would miss shows that hadn’t even come on the air, midwinter replacements he didn’t even know about. He would miss shows that hadn’t even been thought up yet. He would miss his mother.
Lennie sighed again. And his mother would miss him. That was the worst thought. To get his mind off it, he tried to think of something he had seen on TV. All the programs were a blur. He couldn’t even remember what dangers Mannix had faced last week, or Columbo. And Kojak had been in real trouble. What was it?
He groaned, feeling again the pain of separation from his mother.
All Lennie’s life his own feelings had been as hard to get to as the meat in a walnut. His feelings were there—Lennie was sure of that—somewhere inside the hull, probably just as perfectly formed as the rest of the things nature put in a shell.
Lennie remembered that one March morning he and his mom had been burning trash behind the motel. His mom had said, “Why, Lennie, look at this.”
Lennie had come over to where his mom was standing by some bushes. “What is it?”
“It’s an old cocoon. We’ll take it in and cut it open, and you can see where a butterfly grew.”
His mom had broken off the twig and, forgetting the trash fire, had gone into the motel. She had taken her onion knife and sawed through the cocoon. “There,” she had said.
For a moment Lennie and his mom had stared at the cut-open cocoon in silence. Then his mom had said in a sad voice, “Oh, dear. It wasn’t empty. I cut through a butterfly.”
Lennie had stared silently at the two halves, the pale wet center.
“It was the first cocoon I ever saw. I’m sorry, Lennie.”
He could see that it really bothered her, and he’d said, “That’s all right.”
“I just didn’t know.”
Lennie felt that his own feelings had suddenly been laid bare in the same way. Now that it was too late, he found that—He broke off. He had just remembered the last part of the poem.
And November’s morn
White with frost
And December’s snows
Are melted and lost.
Anyway, it was something like that.
Chapter Thirteen
Trying to remember the lines of the poem had helped Lennie forget his pain for a moment. It seemed to him then that if you knew enough poems to say to yourself, you could get through anything. He tried to think of something else to divert him. He went back to TV. TV jingles maybe.
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to hold it in my hands
And keep it company.
It’s the reeeeeeal thing, Coke is—
Lennie moaned. They weren’t as good as poetry.
Quaker State your caaaaaaaar,
To keep it running young,
Maybe they were too easy to remember.
Oh, Log Cabin makes good syrups,
’Bout the best as anyone can.
Whether regular or buttered—
Abruptly his leg jerked and he couldn’t think of anything but the pain. He raised up and looked at his leg. Grimacing with the pain, he looked down the slope to the willow trees. He could see the edge of his boat through the trees. He took a deep breath.
Double your pleasure, double your fun,
With double—
It wouldn’t work. He looked again at his boat. He thought, maybe if I can reach the boat I can float across the lake. Then maybe I can crawl real slowly through the field. Then maybe I can ... He saw it as if it were happening on television. It seemed possible.
He leaned up on one elbow. He hesitated, struggling with himself. Lassie would make it, he told himself. A rattlesnake bite wouldn’t stop Lassie. A shark bite wouldn’t stop Flipper. Gentle Ben would drag a bear trap a hundred miles to save himself.
Lennie took a deep breath and tried to push himself into a sitting position. He fell back on his elbow. He tried again. He couldn’t make it.
He was very weak now, but he wanted desperately to be in his boat floating toward home. He could almost feel himself moving over the gentle waves. He tried to push himself up again. He failed. He lay back on the porch.
The silence around him was awful now. It wasn’t only the
silence that bothered Lennie. It was the terrible feeling that everything had stopped moving. The sun wasn’t dropping in the sky. It was still hanging in the sky in exactly the same place. The wind wasn’t blowing. The clouds weren’t moving. The trees were as still as plastic arrangements.
He closed his eyes. He had lost track of time. He didn’t know how long he had been lying here. It seemed like days. Years. Centuries.
He felt as if he had been lying here long enough to have been frozen in a glacier or petrified by burning lava. He had been lying here long enough to be preserved and sent to some museum as the main display.
He would be more popular in the museum than the mummy or the fossilized whale. “Hey, did you guys see the preserved kid?”
“No, where’s any preserved kid?”
“Around yonder. He’s ten million years old—the card says so, and he’s got a snake bite on his ankle. You can even see the holes.”
“Where? Show me.”
“Come on if you don’t believe me.”
He would be so popular that they would make a whole educational TV program about him, Lennie thought. They would reconstruct his life, his last day. The show would be called “This Is the Way We Think It Was,” and as the young actor lay stretched out, imitating Lennie’s , pain, imitating Lennie’s dying, the announcer’s voice would say, “Yes, this is the way we think it was, ten million years ago today.”
Lennie raised his head. The only bit of movement left in the world was his pounding heart. And now even that seemed to be slowly winding down.
Lennie stretched out flat on the porch. His mind drifted back in time. He thought of a friend he had had in Nashville. Nashville was the only place he and his mom had stayed long enough for Lennie to get a good friend. The other places they had lived, by the time people got used to Lennie and stopped picking on him, right then he and his mom had moved.
This friend in Nashville was Carl Lee Norton, and he and Lennie used to walk home from school together through an old cow field. They both lived in side-by-side trailers in Pineview Trailer Court. And sometimes when they got tired, they would lie down in the field and just look up at the sky.
One day as they were lying there in silence, an airplane flew overhead, a small plane, white and red, single engine. Lennie, watching the plane, began to will it to fall from the sky. “Fall! Fall! Fall!” he was saying to himself, not really wanting the plane to fall, just testing his ability to make things happen.
At that very moment, as Lennie lay there with his brain powers trained on the airplane, Carl Lee sat up and said, “Hey, I bet that’s my uncle.”
“Where?”
“Up there in that airplane. You know, Uncle David. It looks like his Cessna.”
“Oh.”
Lennie lay back and closed his eyes. He felt weak. He realized he had been willing one of his most admired people, Carl Lee’s Uncle David, the man who had let Lennie sit in the cockpit of his glider and promised to take him up in an airplane—this was the man he had been willing to fall from the sky.
“I got to go home,” he said after a moment. He got up slowly. The plane was out of sight, hopefully still flying.
“Me too,” Carl Lee said.
And the two of them walked toward their trailers with the matching plastic sofas and the plastic sliding doors and the carpets of miracle fibers. As he entered his trailer, Carl Lee called, “I’ll ask Uncle David if we can go up in his Cessna this Sunday.”
Lennie nodded, but he wasn’t so eager to go up any more. Going up in the airplane was ruined now. Because maybe, just maybe, there would be some other person, in some other field, looking up at the sky, saying, “Fall! Fall! Fall!” to Lennie’s plane. Sure, he, Lennie, didn’t have any power, but maybe somebody else did.
But now, lying on the porch, dying, he sent out a mental signal to the world. Come! Come! Come! Silently he willed the invisible people with all his might. Anyone within range of my mind, come! Help me! Help!
His leg jerked again, and he cried out. He put his fists up to his eyes.
“You have to keep hold of yourself,” his mother had told him once. It was just after her boyfriend Sam had died. Lennie had been sad too. Sam was his favorite of his mother’s boyfriends. Sam had owned a diner and was so big and strong he flattened hamburgers like he was swatting flies. He was always saying, “Hit me, kid, go ahead and hit me hard as you can.”
Lennie would hit and hit until his arms got tired, but it was like trying to hurt a mattress. Lennie liked it when he couldn’t hurt Sam. It was nice to know that there was one person in the world who could not be hurt no matter what you did.
And then Sam had died. He died right at the diner while he was shoveling snow off the parking lot. His heart, it turned out, was not as strong as his body.
Lennie had sat in the last booth with his mom while she warmed her hands around a cup of coffee.
“You always have to keep hold of yourself,” she said.
Lennie had a young-looking mother. People were always mistaking her for his sister. Now for the first time she looked old enough to really be his mother.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “Never let go, Lennie.”
“I try not to.”
“No matter what happens.”
“Will we have to leave the diner?”
She nodded.
“But where will we go?”
“I don’t know, but if we just keep hold of ourselves we’ll be all right.”
“I’ll try to.”
Now, as if to keep his word, Lennie hugged himself. One hand was on each shoulder, but his fingers were like icy claws. There was no comfort. He wished for dream arms that would grow long on command and wrap him like soft fleshy hoses.
Holding himself tighter, he sent out the message again. Somebody, anybody, come.
Chapter Fourteen
A sound broke through the stillness of the front porch. Lennie couldn’t place the noise at first, but he waited. He held his breath and listened.
Maybe the sound hadn’t been real, he thought. It was puzzling. It was like the time his mother had taken him to the wax museum in New Orleans. The wax museum had been a substitute treat because they hadn’t been able to find Midget City. “All right,” his mother had said finally, “we’ll just go to the wax museum. You want to see wax people, don’t you?”
They had gone in, and Lennie had really been surprised at how real the people looked. Lennie could see the pores in their hands. Their eyes looked right at him.
Still and all, there had been something wrong, something so wrong that Lennie couldn’t really be scared, no matter how hard he tried, not even in the Chamber of Horrors. It just wasn’t real somehow.
That was the same feeling Lennie had now as he lay on the porch, thinking back on the sound he had heard. He listened. Now he couldn’t hear anything at all.
It seemed to him that maybe the sound had been a car door slamming, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just because that was what he wanted it to be. He tried to pull himself up on his elbow.
“Help me,” he called out. “Is anybody there?” He waited. “I’m here on the porch. I’m dying.”
His hopes went up and down like a pop fly. He sank back to the porch. He didn’t have the strength to hold his head up any more. He called again, but his voice seemed to be no more than a sigh.
“Somebody help me,” he begged. For a moment his hopes were all mixed up with the wax figures in New Orleans, and he imagined that Napoleon and Huey Long and Flip Wilson were drawing around him.
Abruptly he turned his head from side to side as if to clear it of a bad dream. He wet his lips. He murmured, “No,” to the wax figures. “No!”
Then he grew still. He had heard another sound. It was real. Someone had spoken to him.
“Son?”
Lennie’s eyes snapped open. He tried to rise again. The big sagging cop was standing at the bottom of the steps, tall as a tree.
Lennie blinked. He saw the
policeman clearly now. Lennie drew in a breath of air. His heart rested a moment. He said, “Help me.”
“Sure, son, what happened to your leg?”
“Snake bite.”
“What kind of snake, son—do you know?”
“Rattler.” Saying the word made him shiver. His leg jerked again and he cried out.
The big cop straightened. “Hey, Bert,” he called, “get the hospital on the double.”
“My leg’s on fire,” Lennie moaned.
“Tell them a kid’s been bit by a rattlesnake,” he yelled. “We’re bringing him in. Then get over here and help me.”
“My mom—” Lennie began.
“Yeah, son, who is your mom?”
“She runs the Fairy Land Motel.”
“We’ll get your mom—now you just lie quiet. When did it happen, son—can you tell me?”
“It was right after you drove off the second time.”
“We knew you were there. We saw your wet footprints on the front porch.”
Lennie nodded. The boat leaked, his sneakers were wet, he had left his footprints.
His leg twitched again, and the hot pain shot through his whole body. He began to cry.
“Don’t cry, son. We’re going to get you to the hospital. Won’t take us five minutes.”
“I can’t help crying.”
“I know. A buddy of mine got snake-bit—we were on a picnic down at Wandover Falls, and my buddy was reaching in the grass for a baseball, and the snake caught him on his little finger, right there, by the nail. My buddy cried too, and he was a grown man, forty years old.”
Lennie groaned.
“Give me a hand here, Bert,” the big cop said. “I’ll steady his leg.” They got Lennie into lifting position. “Here we go.”
Lennie cried out as they picked him up—his leg couldn’t stand the slightest touch now—and then he felt himself being rushed to the car.
“Can you get the door?” the big cop asked.
