Not too long after that, Tommy’s parents went away. His father was tired from all the work at the plant after the explosion in the furnace, and he couldn’t stand the mess in the house. So after the furnaces had been operating normally for some time and when the house was almost finished, he decided to take his mother on a little trip, a second honeymoon, he called it. Mrs. Moran came to stay with him and David. Rose was all right for a night or two, his mother said, but she wasn’t responsible enough for more than that, and she couldn’t cook very well, either. Tommy liked it when Mrs. Moran came to stay. Her powdery smell reminded him of his grandmother.
The most exciting thing that happened while his parents were away was that David got engaged to Margie, and Tommy was the first to know. He thought he had never been so happy in his entire life, and David and Margie took him down to the hamburger stand by the river, and they ate hamburgers with mustard and raw onions, and they had French-fries and Tommy drank a Coke, too. His brother didn’t care, and Margie loved Coke. She was on a diet, but this was a celebration. Tommy didn’t mind at all when they dropped him off at the house after dinner and they went on to Margie’s; he was eager to tell Mrs. Moran all about it.
Mrs. Moran thought it was good news too. “Oh, it’s a very nice thing to be young and in love,” she told Tommy, “a very nice thing.” Tommy hadn’t thought of Mrs. Moran as ever being young, let alone in love. She’d been married once, and she was married a long time until her husband died. But that was long ago. Tommy had a hard time imagining any of the older people as being young or in love. As his mother said, it was a mystery.
After he’d told Mrs. Moran about David’s engagement—how he’d found them sitting on the big couch in the living room when he came home from school, and how David had tricked him into going over to Mrs. Randolph’s for a plant—he suddenly remembered that the plant was for her, and he found it in the kitchen where he’d put it. He handed it to her. “Why would Mrs. Randolph give me a plant?” Mrs. Moran said. “Isn’t that nice of her?”
“She said it would flower in the winter,” Tommy said. “She called it a Christmas cactus. Mrs. Moran, will I be related to Mrs. Slade when Margie and David get married?”
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Moran said.
“Not at all?”
“Oh, maybe you’d be some kind of in-law, but you wouldn’t really be related.”
“That’s too bad,” Tommy said. Then he went to his room. He was thinking about the strange letter that had arrived that day, and he wanted to read about Mexico. He found the book Mr. Wolfe had given him, but that didn’t really tell him what he wanted to know. The story took place in Mexico, but it didn’t tell much about it. It was warm there and the people were very poor, that was all, so poor that the children had to work. Lands and Peoples would tell him more, he thought. So he looked through the volumes until he found the one about Central and South America. There was a map, and Tommy examined it. Mexico was next to the United States, just like Canada, but at the other end. He could see Canada from his window, beyond the glow in the sky from his father’s furnaces. There were jungles in Mexico, and ancient ruins; there were no jungles in Canada, only miles and miles of forests that started just a little ways across the river and went on almost forever, until the ice of the Arctic. Tommy had seen some of the forest when he’d gone on picnics to the Montreal River. That was the end of the road. He took Mrs. Steer’s telescope from his dresser top and pointed it out the window toward Canada. Through the lens the light from his father’s furnaces shot toward him, brighter than ever, the currents of fire flowing in the air like the waters in the canal, but red and glowing. He moved the telescope and tried to focus it on Canada, but he couldn’t see anything, only darkness, and then back to the wildly swirling fire. It looked very hot and fierce through the telescope; the telescope did bring the fire up close. From his bedroom window, with his naked eye, it looked more like heat lightning or the northern lights of late summer, ebbing and flowing in the distant sky. He did like Mrs. Steer’s telescope, and he was learning how to use it. She was right: it took a little practice and you had to have some idea of what you were looking for, where to point it. He put the telescope back in its place on the dresser and returned to his book, to the pictures of Mexico with its beautiful green jungles, its great ruined temples and strange gods. He recognized one of the figures. It was called Quetzalcóatl. Tommy wondered how you’d ever pronounce such a name. It had huge teeth, and a funny kind of feathers on its head, and it was called a plumed serpent. It was a god. The same figure was on one of the stamps on the envelope downstairs. He decided to go look at it again, and he picked it out of the pile and brought it upstairs to his desk. He handled the letter carefully, because he thought it might be valuable. The stamps were large and brilliantly colored, certainly like none he’d ever seen before, and he laid the envelope next to the book he was reading so that he could look from one to the other. A plumed serpent, Tommy thought. Think of that. There were some very strange things in the world, especially in ancient Mexico. There was another animal, a jaguar, that the ancient Mexicans called the beast of darkness because they thought it swallowed the sun every night. He didn’t see the jaguar on the stamps, but there was a picture of a great stone head with blank eyes. The head was gray and the background was orange and green. The third stamp on the envelope showed a smoking volcano against a bright blue-and-yellow sky. Tommy looked for the mountain in the book, and he did find pictures of two volcanoes but he couldn’t tell if either of them was the one on the stamp. The ancient Mexicans knew a lot about astronomy, too, though they didn’t have telescopes; they just studied the sky night after night from the tops of their pyramids. They called them pyramids but they didn’t look like the pyramids in Egypt. The Aztecs were a very cruel people. They sacrificed humans by cutting out their hearts. Tommy could hardly believe it, but it said so, right in Lands and Peoples. They cut out their hearts! Mr. Wolfe’s book certainly didn’t say anything about that. Every year they cut out the heart of the bravest young warrior and placed it in a special vessel and offered it to their gods and the rest of the warrior to the people. It was sickening, the most sickening thing Tommy had ever heard of. Tommy thought none of the warriors would have wanted to be very brave. Why would you want to be brave if they were going to cut out your heart and offer it to the gods? They must have been the cruelest gods in the world, to demand such a terrible sacrifice. Sometimes they wanted more than one, too. But of course they weren’t real gods; they weren’t God. The Aztecs and those other people had just made them up. The real God was good. The stamps on the envelope that had at first looked so strange and beautiful began to look scary to Tommy now, and he decided to move it out of sight. He put the letter in his special drawer and locked it. Because it might be valuable, he didn’t want it to be lost; he didn’t want to have to see it, either.
Tommy remembered the envelope when he got home from school the next day. It was another beautiful day, and on his way home he noticed that Mrs. Steer’s garden seemed to have grown more flowers overnight, soft and beautifully colored flowers, not like the colors on those stamps. Tommy went right to his desk and got the key from its hiding place and unlocked the drawer. The envelope was still there. He didn’t want anyone to find it in his desk; he didn’t want to be caught with it. He didn’t want to see it, or even know that it existed. He wondered what was in the envelope, but of course he couldn’t open it. Mail was private, even if the envelope had already been opened. Even postcards were private. His mother had really punished him when she’d caught him reading David’s letters from Margie. She didn’t like that one bit, and it didn’t make a shred of difference, she had said, that the envelopes were already opened: “You don’t read anyone else’s mail without their permission,” she said. “Ever.” And then she’d spanked him, so she’d really meant it. It was almost worth the spanking, though, the letters were so funny and it made David so mad when he started reciting them that night at dinner. Tommy wondered wh
o this letter was from. There was no return address, and he didn’t know the handwriting. There was only his mother’s name and their address, and then there were the stamps. He looked at them, and began to get scared all over again. He got up from his desk and walked to the far end of the hall. He stood in front of the attic door. He looked at the door for a minute. The door was always bolted, just like the cellar door, to keep out drafts. He unbolted the door and walked quickly up the winding attic stairs and directly to his secret place, the floorboard that nobody knew was loose and could be lifted. He’d sometimes put strange things in it before he’d gotten his desk. He’d dropped three marbles in it and they’d rolled out of sight. Once a long time ago he’d even gone to the bathroom in it, a real bowel movement—a small one, but still. He lifted the floorboard. The movement was still there, but all shriveled and harmless-looking. Tommy shoved it back with a stick. And there he put his mother’s letter with its foreign stamps, replaced the floorboard, and left the attic as fast as he could. When he got to the hall he slammed the door and bolted it. He leaned against it while he caught his breath. No one would find the letter there, and someday, when his mother was home, he’d have to remember to give it to her. After all, he hadn’t opened it; he was just keeping it safe. He’d have to wait for the right time so he could explain to his mother why he’d been protecting it.
Why did his house have so many scary places, he wondered: the cellar with the big old furnace they didn’t use anymore now that they burned oil; the coal bin, black as a piece of coal; the fruit room, with Mr. Bonnaro’s jugs of wine and its unchanging rows of jars on shelves, jars that everyone was afraid to open because the food was probably spoiled but that no one every threw out, either; and the attic, sometimes the scariest attic in the world but on nice days in the spring and in the fall an interesting place to play. On those days the sun came through the windows, warming the air and catching the motes of dust, and the attic smelled dry and warm and old. In the winter it was too cold to play in the attic, and in the summer it was too hot and besides, they were usually on the Island in the summer. There was a broken sewing machine that he sometimes played at, with a wooden box full of bobbins of colored thread. There were old books and toys, the rocker in the shape of a swan that he’d had as a baby, his crib, a playpen, discarded lamps and pieces of furniture and boxes that had belonged to his grandmother—all coated with a thin film of dust. There were his father’s fishing boots, hip boots, stuffed with newspaper and hanging from hooks on the wall, like somebody’s legs. There was the old chest of drawers where his mother had put the shoes that Mrs. Henderson had given her. And at the windows there were usually spiders, and sometimes a wasp, and almost always flies that got caught in the spiders’ webs. The attic was full of strange things, and a long time ago, in exploring these things, Tommy had discovered the floorboard that came up, and the secret place beneath it.
When his parents did get home from their trip, and Tommy had told them all about David’s engagement and how he’d gone out to dinner that night with David and Margie and how he thought it was the most exciting day of his life, he suddenly remembered the letter, up there in its hiding place. What reminded him was when his mother was telling David that Hot Pink was wondering why he never replied to her letters. His mother called her Madge, not Hot Pink, of course; that was just John’s name for her, but Tommy liked it. That didn’t seem like the right time to tell his mother about her letter, though.
Later that month, Paul Malotte made his First Communion. He was only Tommy’s age, just eight, but Catholics made their First Communion then, when they were in second grade and seven or eight years old, old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. Paul was very proud that day. His family had saved a lot of money—it was hard, because they were so poor now that his father was dead, and he’d been dead at least a year, Tommy thought, maybe two—and they bought Paul a white suit and white shoes, and he wore a white shirt and a white tie and white socks and a white belt, too. Except for his face and his hair, which were dark like the French, Paul was white all over the day he went to the Catholic church to make his First Communion. They even got his nose to stop running for a while. Afterwards Paul’s mother had a little party. The cake was white, too. The party was just for Catholics. Tommy and Jimmy and Amy couldn’t go, even though Paul lived right at the end of their street and kitty-corner from Amy’s house. But Paul hadn’t been at Tommy’s birthday party, either. He would have felt he had to take a present, and he couldn’t afford a present and he might have felt bad.
When he got home from church, Paul came out in his yard to show off his new clothes. You have to wear white, he said. It means purity, and you have to be pure to receive Communion, you have to try to be as pure as the Baby Jesus. That was impossible because the Baby Jesus was God and the purest thing that ever lived, but you had to come as close to it as you could. You couldn’t show disrespect to your parents or the nuns—sometimes he called them the sisters—or the priest; you couldn’t be disobedient; you couldn’t use bad language—Paul did, though; Tommy’d heard him—and you couldn’t have bad thoughts.
“What are bad thoughts?” Tommy asked him.
“Bad thoughts,” Paul said. “You know, bad thoughts. What the Ten Commandments tell you you can’t do. You can’t kill anybody. You can’t swear. You can’t covet thy neighbor’s wife, or commit adultery, or steal. You can’t do any of those things or you’ll go to hell.”
“What about if you take something and hide it?” Tommy asked him. “Can you hide something from somebody?”
“That’s the same as stealing,” Paul said. “If you take it and it’s not yours, then you stole it.”
“Well,” Tommy said, “what about when you stole the bubble gum from Mr. Lavelle, from Mr. Lavelle’s store? I saw you.”
“You did not!”
“I did too. I saw you take it.”
“I put it back.”
“You did not. You put it in your mouth, that’s where you put it! I saw.”
“I’ll beat you up,” Paul said. “If you say that again, I’ll beat you up, you dirty bastard, and I can, too. You take it back.”
“You can’t beat me up,” Tommy said. “You’ll get your suit dirty and your mother’ll be mad.”
Paul grabbed him by the shirt and Tommy thought maybe Paul would beat him up, right there in the dust of his yard, white suit or not. “Okay,” Tommy said, “I take it back.”
“Take it back again,” Paul said. He hadn’t let go of his shirt, and now he was twisting it.
“I take it back again,” Tommy said. He was humiliated. Why was he such a coward? His father would be ashamed of him.
“Besides,” Paul said, “I put a penny on Mr. Lavelle’s counter one day when he wasn’t looking. So I paid him back. That was the same as giving it back to him.” Then Paul’s mother stuck her head out the kitchen door and yelled at Paul. “You come in here right this minute! It’s time for the cake.” Paul went in to join his family for the celebration that the rest of them couldn’t go to because they weren’t Catholics. Probably there wasn’t enough cake for anybody else, Tommy thought.
Carmen Bonnaro died that same month, right after he’d made his First Communion with Paul Malotte. He drowned in the pond by the lime dump, the pond where nobody was ever supposed to swim and there were signs that said “NO TRESPASSING,” and if you violated them it was against the law. Carmen thought he could swim, but he couldn’t do it very well, and he got a cramp and drowned. He went under three times, and the third time he stayed there in the murky water and never came up again. His brother Leo saw it happen. They had to drag for his body, and because the water was so cloudy and deep it took a long time to find it. A lot of the older boys went down to watch the dragging. When they finally pulled Carmen’s body from the water, it was covered with weeds and they said it had turned blue and was bloated from being under the water so long. They buried him in his white suit, the one he’d worn to his First Communion.
> “Did he look blue?” Tommy asked Paul Malotte, who’d seen him.
“Sort of,” Paul said. “He didn’t look like Carmen at all. He had lipstick on. He looked terrible.” Paul had gone to the funeral home when Carmen died. He said the undertaker had tried to fix him up, but it was hard to fix up drowned people. Everyone in Paul’s grade went to the funeral home to say a rosary for Carmen, and they were all crying, the nuns too, and Carmen’s mother had to be held up by some of her friends, and she moaned and screamed. Even Carmen’s father was crying. “Everybody was crying,” Paul said. “It was the saddest thing that ever happened,” and when he looked at Carmen in his white suit, lying at the end of the room in his white casket with big candles all around it, and holding a rosary in his hands, Paul cried too. It almost made Tommy cry, just hearing about it. Somebody he knew and had played with, somebody who’d been in his class and even at his house for a minute on Christmas Day and Tommy had shown him the windup truck he’d gotten instead of the Monopoly set—and now he was dead. It seemed like one of those terrible stories, one of those fairy stories that there ought to be a happy ending to but there wasn’t.
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