by Mark Bouman
“Why, what’s wrong—are you talking about all that honey?”
“That ain’t honey. Dynamite’s just sawdust mixed with nitroglycerin and wrapped in paper, and when the dynamite sits too long, the nitroglycerin bleeds through the paper. Very sticky,” he said, letting the tip of one finger graze the dynamite, “and very unstable. Even a sudden change in temperature can set this stuff off. We’ve got to get rid of this before something bad happens.”
Dad stood up and put his hands on his hips, slowly scanning our property. That was how he did his best thinking. Sometimes he’d stay that way for a dozen minutes or more, elbows out, eyes staring into the distance. And when he finally worked out a solution, nothing would stop him—he was like a bulldog with a bone. This time the answer came to him after only a minute or two, but that was plenty long to be standing next to a boxful of bombs, as far as I was concerned.
Dad dropped his arms from his hips and strode down the hill. “Go get your brother,” he called over his shoulder, “and grab some shovels.”
I raced off to find Jerry. “Dad found a box of dynamite, and we’re gonna help him with it!”
“Help him do what?”
“I don’t know—he just said to grab shovels!”
“So it sounds like we’re gonna help him dig.”
Shovels in hand, we caught up with Dad at a huge tree stump. He was looking at it with a smug expression. The stump was waist high and three feet across, and it probably weighed a thousand pounds. It was all that was left of a mighty oak that had been destroyed by the tornado. He kicked it with his black leather shoe. The stump sounded thick and solid. It didn’t move an inch.
“Okay, boys,” he announced. “That dynamite we found is gonna make my life a lot easier. I need you boys to dig a hole—and make sure it goes all the way under the stump. It’s gotta be deep enough so the dynamite will lift it.”
“Got it,” we both said, then set to work digging with a will. We threw shovelful after shovelful of dirt into the air.
Jerry held up his hand for me to stop after a few minutes. “Mark, don’t throw the dirt too close—some of it’s falling back into the hole, and we’ll have to dig it twice.”
“How deep do we have to dig?” I asked.
“Not sure, but Dad said make it deep enough to get underneath the stump.”
I sighed. “Yeah, but this stump is huge. It’ll take us forever.”
“Just keep digging.” Helping Dad with dynamite was looking worse by the minute. Still, I wasn’t keen to have the dynamite blow up on its own above the ground, so I dug with a bit more enthusiasm than normal. Dad watched as our shovels cut through a foot of sand, then another foot. We had to dig a foot or two sideways for every foot we dug down, owing to all the sand that kept sliding down the slope and refilling the hole. From time to time Dad returned, each time carrying something he’d need for the project: blasting cap, a roll of fuse, matches, and last of all, the box of dynamite, which he dragged along the sand at a snail’s pace.
With every trip, he looked at our hole and said the same thing. “Nope, not yet.”
At last—long past the time my arms had begun to feel like spaghetti—Jerry and I stood at the bottom of a six-foot-deep hole that was at least ten feet across—and arching and twisting all around us and above us was the stump and its network of roots. Taproots as thick as my thigh snaked off in all directions, and the body of the stump itself was massive.
“That should be deep enough,” hollered Dad, and we scrambled out of the pit, panting, and knelt at the edge of the hole to watch Dad. He lifted out the sticks of dynamite, one at a time, and set them in a pile directly below the stump. It reminded me of a tiny log cabin.
“That’ll do,” he pronounced, looking at the pile of explosives. But then he looked back at the box, which still had half a dozen more. He gave a small shrug. “You know what? Let’s just use it all on the stump—it’ll be all right.”
Jerry and I were ecstatic. We grinned at each other like maniacs. All the digging had been worth it. Dad was going to blow up the entire box at once! Dad attached the blasting cap and fuse, climbed out, and ran the fuse to a safe distance.
“You boys go hide under the tank,” Dad told us. “You’ll be safe there.” He readied a match to strike as we sprinted off, calling a final warning: “And do not come out early!”
We sprinted to the tank and slid underneath its near edge, then commando-crawled backward until it covered us. Past experience had taught us that safety was never at the top of Dad’s priority list, so if he told us to put twenty tons of steel above our heads, something big was about to happen.
“And make sure you plug your ears!” Dad yelled.
I grinned at Jerry and shoved a finger in each ear. Dad touched the match to the fuse, and then he sprinted away from the stump as fast as he could.
The trail of smoke from the burning fuse took forever to crawl across the sand to the stump. Ears firmly plugged, I could hear only the sound of my heavy breathing and the beat of my heart. At last the smoke trail reached the edge of the pit and disappeared into the hole. Any minute now . . .
The entire world hiccuped. The ground punched me in the stomach just as the loudest sound I’d ever heard hammered my body. Everything became a violent blur of brown that resolved, an instant later, into a towering column, like Old Faithful made of smoke and sand. Fear and wonder flooded my body. I watched the smoke column drifting slowly from right to left, growing taller and more transparent.
I turned toward Jerry. He looked like he’d just been run over by a school bus, but he was grinning at me.
We scrambled out from beneath the tank. “Did you plug your ears?” Jerry yelled at me.
“Yeah, why? Did you pl—?” I began.
“I didn’t!” Jerry yelled proudly.
We saw Dad jogging toward the pit, so we did too, and before we got halfway there, it started to rain wood. Pieces of all sizes were falling around us, the larger chunks hitting the sand with audible thumps while the smaller bits and splinters cartwheeled and drifted down. Dad threw his arms over his head but stayed where he was, and we did the same. As the cloud of sand and dust slowly dissipated, the rain of wood continued for five seconds, ten seconds. Jerry and I stood in awe. It was the most incredible thing either of us had ever witnessed.
When the wood shower finally dried up, we sprinted to where the stump used to be. In its place was a crater filled with pure sand, about twice the size of our bedroom. It was as if the stump had never existed.
“Guess maybe we didn’t need all that dynamite,” Dad said happily.
The three of us were like clones, each grinning at the hole in the ground with our hands on our hips. Mom, with Sheri following, came tearing out of the house. One hand held a sponge, and an apron was tied around her blouse. “What in the world just happened? I heard a boom, the roof went bang, and then the power went out!” She stopped in front of the hole, panting and waiting for my father to answer.
Dad didn’t say anything. He was still staring at the hole. But Jerry, who’d turned his attention to the surrounding landscape, blurted out much too loudly, “Hey—what’s that sticking out of the roof of the house?”
It was part of the stump, of course. The dynamite had launched a huge hunk who knew how high into the air, and it had arced across the fifty yards to the house before punching right through the roof and the ceiling. We discovered, when we all trooped back into the house together, that a small section was still embedded in the roof, but the remainder of the chunk had plowed straight on through, coming to rest on the floor just in front of the couch. It was surrounded by a scattering of insulation, ceiling tiles, and splinters of wood. When I looked up, I could see the sky through a hole the size of a five-gallon bucket.
“Well I’ll be . . .” reflected Dad.
“And what about the power,” chided Mom.
“Mark,” said Dad, “go check the breakers and see if any are tripped.”
I reported ba
ck to Dad that all the breakers looked good, which perplexed him—why was the power out? He stood for a long while in the living room, looking at the stump. We stood in the living room, too, looking at Dad look at the stump. Suddenly Dad ran outside.
“Wow, the stump just barely missed the couch,” Jerry yelled.
“Amazing,” I added.
Sheri stood mute at Mom’s side, unable to take in what had just happened. Mom alternated between staring at the hole in her ceiling and asking, “Are you two all right? Sure?”
“We’re fine,” I reassured her. “We were safe under the tank.”
“One of these days your father is going to kill someone,” Mom said, disgusted.
I kept staring at the hunk of stump, comparing it in my mind to the original. “I wonder what happened to the rest of the stump—this piece isn’t even that big.”
“It had to have been blown up,” Jerry said, his volume returning closer to normal. “I saw, like, a million pieces flying through the air.”
He turned to Mom and Sheri. “They were landing all around us.”
“Yeah!” I added. “And a couple big pieces landed right next to us!”
Mom frowned. “I thought you said you were—”
Dad burst into the house. “Found it!” he said triumphantly. “Knew I’d figure it out! Come on!”
We followed him outside, then down the hill about a hundred yards. Another chunk of the stump had flown along a different trajectory, crashing not into the roof of the house but directly into the transformer atop the power pole at one edge of our property. The transformer wasn’t built to withstand the impact of a dynamite-propelled stump, and it had been knocked right off the power pole. It was lying on the ground, its insulators shattered and a huge stump-shaped dent marking the side of its casing.
“Well, don’t expect me to pay thousands of dollars to fix something that wasn’t my fault!” Dad proclaimed, looking at the ruined transformer.
“Not your fault?” clarified Mom.
“It was an accident,” Dad answered, “and therefore not my fault. Jerry, clear out the chips and splinters near this power pole. I’m gonna drag this big hunk clear with the tank.”
Mom threw up her hands. “Come on, Sheri, we’re going back inside, and hopefully no more trees will land on us!”
It wasn’t fifteen minutes later that Dad was speaking with someone from the utility company.
“Yeah, I need to report a problem,” he began, and there was no way, once he started his story, that the guy on the other end of the line was going to come out ahead. Dad was a great storyteller, and he never thought twice about embellishing the facts—or inventing some out of whole cloth.
By the time Dad hung up the phone a few minutes later, the power company was convinced that a freak lightning storm had knocked our transformer to the ground. Or, if they weren’t quite convinced, there was nothing they could do to prove otherwise—especially when the guy complaining was the Tank Man.
“They said they’d come right out and take care of it,” reported Dad.
When the lineman arrived, he didn’t make even a single comment about the blue skies we’d had for days on end or about the lack of burn marks on the transformer. He did remark that in all his years of repair work, he’d never seen lightning damage a transformer in quite that way. But if he didn’t believe Dad’s story about lightning, so what? It’s not like he would have believed the real story either.
18
THAT SUMMER, Grandma Jean said I was old enough to go to Grace Bible Camp for a week and that she’d pay. She told me there would be archery, a lake to swim in, a camp store, and hundreds of kids my age. Most of that sounded okay, except for the part about the other kids. If the camp kids were anything like church kids or school kids, I’d stick out like a sore thumb.
The week before I left for camp, Mom came into my room holding a pair of blue jeans. “These are for you to take to camp, Mark. I wanted you to have new ones to wear.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
Mom walked over to my dresser and opened the bottom drawer, setting the new pants inside. I’d been worrying about what camp would be like, and I’d planned on spending most of my time swimming. Mom turned to leave, but she stopped in the doorway. It looked like she was about to say something else, but she just tried to smile at me, looked at the floor, and then left.
I couldn’t resist trying out the jeans early. I didn’t want to get them dirty outside, so whenever I was in my room I’d pull them on. After I’d looked at a book for a while, or just relaxed on my bed, I’d take them back off, fold them neatly, and return them to the drawer. After a few days of this, I noticed that the jeans, which had never been washed, had turned my best pair of underwear a light shade of blue. That wasn’t terrible news, in a way, since the hard water from our well had already stained my other underwear dark yellow.
When the time came to leave for camp, it took me about five minutes to pack. My towel, which was barely long enough to wrap around my butt and legs after a shower, didn’t take up much space. Mom got all our towels as free promotional gifts for buying a certain amount of laundry soap—each box had a code on it, and Mom dutifully saved each one inside an old manila envelope, earning us three or four free towels per year. Of course, three or four free towels were equivalent to one proper, store-bought towel, and our free towels were all the color of urine. I decided that at camp, when I opened my suitcase, I’d say something like, “Aw geez, looks like my old lady packed me a yellow hand towel.”
The zipper on my sleeping bag didn’t work, so I used a length of old rope to keep it rolled. I tossed a few other things into my suitcase, pulled on my new jeans, and headed for the door. Halfway there, the suitcase popped open and everything fell out. Dad watched it happen.
“Here you go,” he said, taking off his belt and handing it to me.
I winced as I knelt in front of my suitcase, feeling the leather belt run through my fingers. Eventually I decided to use it—I had to use it—but I considered forgetting the belt at camp on purpose.
Mom drove me, the humid summer air pouring in through four open windows and blowing our hair. The trees grew thicker, houses fewer and farther between, and then we turned onto a dirt road and drove beneath a wooden arch that announced we’d arrived. We parked beside a long, low building made from logs.
“You’ll have a good time at camp,” she said across the front seat, “and I’m sorry I don’t have much money to give you.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out a one-dollar bill. My face must have betrayed my thoughts.
“I’m so sorry, Mark, but I just don’t have any more.”
I knew I shouldn’t, knew it was rude, but I couldn’t help staring at the neatly folded bill.
“I don’t have anything else,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
My heart dropped into my bur-covered shoes. I leaned back so I could jam the money into the pocket of my new jeans. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I wanted to drive straight back home, or better yet, to drive somewhere no one knew me. It was bad enough having stained underwear and a swim towel that was really a dish towel. Now I’d be the only kid at camp with no money.
“You’ll have a good time, honey?” her reassurance came as a question.
“Okay, I will,” I replied, not believing my own words. I climbed out, grabbed my broken suitcase, and stood on the gravel, looking through the open window at Mom.
“Bye, Mark.”
“Bye.”
She pulled away, and my eyes followed her car. I was suddenly aware of a large spot of rust near the bumper.
I watched until the car disappeared, then reached into my pocket, pulling out the one-dollar bill. I didn’t blame Mom, but it took me a long time to refold it and shove it back into my jeans. I kept thinking about all the things I couldn’t buy with it.
The first night, sometime around midnight, I crept out of my bunk and snuck across the room. Then I
slipped the wallet from the pair of pants draped over the end of my cabinmate’s bed. I grabbed the wad of bills—six dollars—returned the wallet to the pants, returned the pants to the bed, and snuck back to my bunk. I shoved the stolen cash into my own jeans, then climbed into my bunk to sleep.
In the morning, I woke to the sound of sobbing and a counselor trying—and failing—to get a word in edgewise. My victim—I didn’t even know his name, but the day before I’d sized him up as a rich kid—was a wreck. His eyes were puffy and red, and he kept shaking his wallet in the air as if he were trying to fling water off it.
“My money was here last night—I know it! Someone stole it, I’m telling you!”
“Sorry to do this to you, boys,” sighed our counselor, “but I need you to turn your pockets out for me. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
All around the cabin, boys climbed out of their bunks and began complying with the counselor’s orders. I put my suitcase up on my bed and opened it, and then I took my jeans off the end of the bed where they were hanging and laid them out flat. When the counselor asked to see what was in my pockets, I reached into the left one and pulled it inside out. Empty. Then I reached into the right one, and my fist came back out with a roll of bills. I looked at the counselor and he raised one eyebrow. I unfolded the bills and laid them down.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
“Wait, is that my six dollars? Did he steal my money?” The crying boy peered past the counselor, bouncing up and down on his feet and beginning to shout again. “Why is that seven dollars? Are my six dollars in that pile of money?”
The counselor calculated my net worth in a single glance. “Well,” he asked, “are they?”
I shook my head. The counselor sighed again, then moved down the line to the next bed. I turned around and pulled my new jeans on. Then I repacked everything and slid the seven dollars back into my pocket. By the time I had everything squared away, the rest of the cabin had been searched. Lots of dollar bills had been discovered, of course. The crying boy was no longer crying. Instead he was sitting on his bed, mumbling to himself and looking through his wallet. He kept closing it and reopening it, as if on the fourth or tenth try his missing money would appear, the happy punch line to a magic trick he hadn’t wanted to volunteer for. I yanked my shoes on and left.
