The king’s music has four slow beats per measure. It’s more largo than andante. His coat of arms has a lion, rampant, the right foreleg above the left, “Honi soit” in purple letters along the top and “qui mal y pense” along the bottom.
I was right to come here first. A better place to get his due than the grocery store—and going to school really is his due. I look in at the classes through the little windows in the doors. At the third window I find him. He’s in the back row, ducking down behind the other kids. He doesn’t look right. That haircut I gave him doesn’t look like the other boys’. I see now how bad it is. No wonder Mother was angry. He’s dirty and has dark circles under his eyes. His jeans are more raggedy than any of the other kids’ and are so small for him they show his ankles.
I’m sure the teacher knows he’s there, but she’s not letting on. The kids know too. They keep turning around to look at him. Good thing he’s small for his age—nobody’s afraid of his being there. I suppose a child sneaking into a class and paying attention is a nice change.
I see why he sneaked into this classroom. All along the walls there are pictures of insects. Near a window at the back there’s an ant farm. The window is a little bit open so the ants can come and go. Bill is right next to the farm. Behind him there’s a cage with gerbils and next to that a fish tank. I remember things like that back when I went to school. I feel such yearning I think I’m going to cry. Good I don’t, because I don’t look right in here either. There’s a hall monitor. I managed to avoid her when I first snuck in with other people, but she’s right behind me now, before I realize it. She’s wondering why I’m standing here looking in the window. I say I just wanted to see if my brother was there. Which is the truth.
“Is he?”
I don’t know what to answer. I don’t want him hauled out when he looks like he’s having such a good time. I say, “No.”
She asks me to come to the office. She leads the way. I follow, but when I see a hallway, I duck into it and run out a side door.
Maybe I should have stayed, because they might have let Bill and me go to school, but I got scared. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have any answers figured out. What I do is wait until school is over. That’s not till three thirty. I sit on the front steps all the rest of the day. I get hungry. I wonder if Bill will find a way to get something to eat in school.
When he comes out, he’s with a teacher. They’re talking so much they don’t notice me. I’m standing right there beside them on the steps. I hope Bill has figured out some good answers. They say good-bye, so I guess he said the right things. He turns in the opposite direction from the teacher and goes off as if he had a place to go. I follow. Pretty soon he slows down. Now it’s as if he doesn’t know what to do or where to go next.
I yell, “Bill,” but he doesn’t turn around. He’s not used to his name yet. “Bill, Bill. Guillaume!”
Finally he realizes it’s me calling him and that Bill meant him. He’s so glad to see me he actually hugs me before he realizes he’s doing it. Then he collapses down on the edge of the sidewalk, and I sit beside him.
“I saw you in there. Did you eat?”
“They had lunch at school, but I was afraid they’d find out about me. I hid.”
He is a beautiful boy. Mother’s right. Even at his age he has an aristocratic face and a kind of natural dignity. I don’t think it’s because Mother keeps saying, Sit up, don’t slouch, and such. It’s too bad about that scar on his cheek.
“I’m hungry, too. Let’s go scrounge.”
I want Mother to get good and worried before I take him back.
That is, if he’ll come back. Maybe he won’t.
Sometimes at the back of grocery stores they’ll give you old vegetables and fruit. In this town there’s only one grocery store, and it’s not a very big one. The man back there gives us perfectly good apples and carrots and a loaf of day-old bread. Also moldy cheese. He cuts the mold off for us, though Bill says he has a good pocketknife. Then he gives us each a quarter.
We sit not far from the store and eat.
I was right to worry. He won’t come back. “You were having a good time there, in the school. What did the teacher say? ”
“She said I could come back whenever I want. She said she’d give me paper.”
“Where will you spend the night?”
“I found a place.”
But he won’t tell me where.
“Okay. How about I meet you after school tomorrow then? ”
I give him his raincoat and my quarter, he takes some of our food, then I go back to Mother.
I left her at the back of the park, hidden behind bushes and under a tree, and now she’s right at the front where she can see up and down the street. She’s awake and hunched over, elbows on knees, head on hands. When she sees me she jumps up, as delighted as Bill was. It’s clear she thought I’d gone off and left her, too.
Good. I hope she’s been thinking about our life.
I think she’s been crying. She takes a big shaky breath and asks, “Guillaume?”
I give her the food I scrounged. She eats as if she’s hungry. There’s not much left after she gets through. I don’t know how she stays so thin.
“So, Guillaume?”
“I want to go to school.”
“You! What good would that do? Besides, I’m a better teacher than any teacher you could ever have.”
She always says she taught tenth-grade French until she got married, but I wonder if there wasn’t another reason why she . . . She says she quit.
“But Guillaume?”
“I mean it. I need to go.”
I know better than to say that this is a nice town. I already know she would think it’s a terrible place for Bill. I can just hear her: This town? This little nowhere town? I suppose you want a cottage with a picket fence in the front and a peach tree in the backyard and Guillaume fraternizing with ordinary small-town people.
That’s exactly what I want. But I’d settle for less—a lot less, in fact—just as long as it was different from this life we have.
“Isn’t there a law that we have to go to school?”
“But did you find him?”
She’s counting too much on me. She always does. I say, “No.”
She’s about to get upset again. I can see her eyes go wild. Would she attack me?
I say, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I can find him. I have an idea.”
“What? ”
But I won’t tell her. “Why should he come back? When I find him I have to give him a good reason.”
“All right, tell him I’ll spend tomorrow looking for a place to live.”
Can it really be this easy?
We camp at the edge of town just beyond a regular camping spot that charges fifty cents. We sneak in and use the bathrooms. In the morning we have coffee at a little café where they have a couple of local newspapers lying around for the patrons. We steal one and take it back to the park. I tell her to look up not only the ads for places to live but the ads for jobs, too—for both of us. I say I’ll be back by four.
I wander around the town again. I check out one of those little houses that looks vacant. I look in the windows and there’s no furniture in there. Maybe we won’t have to pay for a place, until we all get jobs, that is. I memorize the address: 45 Overridge Lane.
At three o’clock I go sit on the school steps and wait.
Sometimes Guillaume . . . I mean Bill, seems so old—old and a little kid at the same time. It’s that quiet questioning stare. I can see in his eyes all that yearning for a different life.
Mother always tells him he’s better than everybody else, but he’s a democratic kind of kid. He wants to be like the other boys. No better and no worse.
I sit with one of our apples.
Finally he comes out, again with the teacher. This time he has a book and a tablet. I’ve never, ever seen him this happy. As soon as the teacher turns away, he can’t help skipping. He’s tur
ning off in the direction of “my” little house. I follow. I shout, “Bill, Bill,” and this time he remembers that’s him.
But Mother has followed me. (All day long? all around town? to the library? to the little art gallery? and maybe to 45 Overridge Lane?) Just when Bill turns, grins up at me (“I’m in!” he says, and gives a little jump for joy), she steps out from behind the bushes next to the school and grabs him.
She’s all packed up and ready for the trail. She throws his book and the tablet into the gutter and off we go again, heading south. He doesn’t protest. He turns into a kind of floppy rag and lets himself be dragged along.
I rescue the book and tablet. I lag behind. I never want Bill to see me crying.
Most of the time Mother holds Bill’s arm, though now and then, in narrow spots, she has to let go. Once when he’s free he punches a tree trunk and bloodies his knuckles. Mother wants to put Band-Aids on his scrapes, but he won’t let her. He won’t look at her either. I’ve never seen him like this.
It starts to rain. Right away we find one of those lean-tos, but Mother won’t stop there. She wants to get farther from that town. She says she doesn’t ever want to see it again or hear about it.
I’m not going to let this just lie there. The look on Bill’s face there on the school steps!
We go on much later than we usually would. We have to pitch the tent by flashlight.
First thing we’re settled in, Bill takes his bug book, tears out the pages and throws them out into the rain. We huddle down, cold and wet and miserable . . . except for Mother.
I wake up in the middle of the night. The rain has stopped and the moon is out. There’s light coming through the mosquito net doorway. I see something glinting. I sit up fast. I’m not sure. I guess. I turn on the flashlight and there’s Bill with his jackknife open. Right away I think, Not the prince! I can’t believe I think “the prince” when neither of us wants him to be a prince.
We stare at each other.
I whisper, “I’ll find a way. I’ll figure it out. Let me.”
But he snatches the flashlight from my hand and crawls out of the tent.
I’m not sorry. In fact, I feel a lot better that he’s out of here. I don’t fall back to sleep right away. I’m worried but reassured. He won’t be punching any more trees if he’s heading back toward what he loves.
I wake to wails.
Of course I do.
I knew I would.
The king’s horse is the color of sweet cream, while his saddle is as if of butter.
A king must have a shield, but, and more important, he must have a sword.
So back we go.
Mother can’t stop talking. That often happens. It doesn’t help to say something because she can’t hear anybody but herself. We’re out of food by now. I don’t know what she thought we’d do along the trail, but it wouldn’t be the first time we’d have to trap quail and catch fish. But now she doesn’t stop to eat. I wonder how we’ll get food, because there’s only that one grocery store. You can’t keep going back to the same place every day without getting noticed. And probably Bill will have already gone there a second time.
We don’t get back to town till evening.
Bill won’t dare head for the school. I wonder what he’ll do.
Was he going to kill her? If he was, I need to do it instead, but I don’t want to. I wonder if I could. She’s very strong. If she has to, she can carry all our stuff by herself.
Or maybe he was going to turn the knife on himself—to show her how desperate he is. Where would a desperate almost-ten-year-old go?
Will people help him because he’s so beautiful and sits so straight?
I wonder if somebody will ever think that I’m royalty, too.
“Beauty without vanity. Strength without insolence,” as every king should be.
I set Mother up in the very back of the park beyond the duck pond—back where the town starts being pasture. There the houses are little more than tool sheds. Some really are tool sheds. At first I thought they all were, but some look lived in. I wonder if one of those would do for us.
I make it clear . . . I hope I do . . . that I’m the one who has to find him, that I’m her only chance to get him back. “He’ll go off into the woods and be a hermit. He knows how. Or he’ll end up in some other town you’ll never find. You’ll lose him for good. Why not let him at least go to school? You can teach him, too—all the royal things he needs to know. We’ll settle down . . . just for a while, get jobs, save our money, and go to France when he’s a little older.”
“Even over there nobody will know.”
“They’ll know. Maybe just one look is all they need.
They’ll guess right away.”
Hard to believe, but she actually believes me.
The king’s forehead is pale as oysters. The dew of his tears is fresh and cool.
Embroidered fleurs-de-lys in tiny stitches are on his handkerchiefs. Of which he has dozens.
All his pomp, all his circumstance, follows him wherever he goes.
I find him in an unexpected place. The senior center.
It’s all by itself in a grove of trees. I see the grocery-store truck pull up. I see the man—the very same man who gave us food before—carry out bags of bread and still-good vegetables.
I go in behind him, thinking maybe I can get us some more food. There are a lot of old people in there working hard. They’re setting up the tables for the people who are going to have lunch there. The volunteers look to be just as old as the people they’re going to serve. (In fact, that grocery-store man looks to be one of the oldest.)
And who should be helping set the tables but Bill. Somebody has bandaged his hand for him, but he can manage.
He sees me, but he doesn’t stop working till the tables are all ready.
I sit and wait.
He comes and sits beside me, says, “I’m getting paid in lunch.”
A couple of old ladies invite me to eat, too. As we eat, I notice my fingernails are black and nobody else’s are.
We have a very nice lunch. In fact, it’s better than any meal I can remember in a long time. There’s a salad and a baked potato with cheese on top and slices of beef and rolls with butter and gelatin with fruit in it. I can’t believe all this food.
And there’s nobody who isn’t nice. Even the addled ones who don’t make much sense are nice. They seem to like having kids around. They give us their desserts until we can’t eat anymore. I let Bill do all the talking. He’s good at avoiding hard questions. “We’re on the trail just passing through. We’re on the way back to my school. I’m in the fourth grade. I got held back a year.” (How does he think up all this stuff?) “We got delayed but we’ll be there soon. My school starts late, anyway. We’re with our father.”
Father!
After, we help clean up and then we go outside and sit on a bench not far from old people on other benches. We whisper.
“If I can get Mother to stop in this town, will you come back to her?”
“She won’t.”
“Were you going to hurt her or were you going to cut yourself? ”
“I don’t have to tell you.”
“Mother will go crazy.”
“She’s already not like any other mother.”
When has he ever known about any other mothers?
“I’ve got a house you can hide in.”
I think I do. Just because Mother saw me—or probably did—looking in the windows at 45 Overridge Lane, doesn’t mean she’ll find him at some other empty house. There was another one not so far away.
The king’s portrait hangs in the grand hall. The eyes follow you as you walk from one place in the room to another.
This time, as we go, we keep looking around to make sure Mother isn’t following. We double back. We hide behind bushes and wait. It takes half an hour. Then I take him to the last house on Farm House Road. We don’t have any trouble breaking in a back window. Not much more than a “p
’tit coup de pouce” as Mother would say. He already has our best flashlight. I don’t have to tell him not to use it much and to keep it away from the windows. We’re used to hiding. He sneaked a couple of buns from lunch so he won’t get hungry. And there is a fruit tree in the backyard (though not a peach). There are apples on it and apples lying under it, rotting. A sure sign that even the neighbors or the neighbor kids don’t bother to come around. We gather a few of the best ones. I take a couple to bring back to Mother. Of course, they’re wormy, but that’s another thing we’re used to. We always love abandoned orchards.
It’s a little house with a kitchen/living room all in one and two small bedrooms. Perfect for us, though Mother won’t think so. She’ll say, “Better no place at all than this.” There is a little furniture: a surprisingly clean mattress, a stool, some old newspapers. Somebody else has been camping in here. I hope not recently. I warn Bill to escape out the window if somebody comes.
Nothing works—no water, no electricity. Somebody has made a fire on top of the stove. There’s a lot of ashes there. It’s a mess.
Last thing I tell him: “Remember, petit à petit . . .”
Last thing he tells me: “I don’t want to hear any more French.”
So then I go back to Mother.
If there’s a line of people waiting, the king goes first.
You say, “Après vous” to the king.
A king has a good chance at becoming a constellation not unlike Orion.
He must never blow his nose in public.
She’s not there. I get worried again. I don’t know what to do. I sit and watch the ducks. I imagine Mother following us even though we tried so hard to lose her. I imagine her, right this very minute, grabbing Bill in her iron grip and dragging him away—on purpose without me.
I get up. I’m about to go back and see if Bill is all right when here she comes—out from one of the little tool-shed houses.
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