Navigating Early

by Clare Vanderpool

  But sitting there on the way home, miserable and stewing in the back of the jostling pickup truck, I had no idea how lost I was soon to be. If I had known about my mom—what would happen to her—what could I have done differently? I don’t know that anything would have changed what happened.

  Suddenly, I realized the water dripping from my swimsuit was making a small puddle around me. I opened my eyes and ventured past the doorway. The room was warm and hummed with a soft, crackling, airy sound. It seemed like a typical custodian’s room, cluttered with all kinds of tools; hammers, pliers, wrenches. Anything you would expect to find in the custodian’s quarters, only it was much neater. My dad would have felt right at home. A place for everything and everything in its place.

  But as I let my eyes roam around, I noticed things you wouldn’t expect. Like a cot, bookshelves, chalkboards filled with numbers, equations, and drawings. Not just any drawings, but kind of connect-the-dot pictures. A hunter, a scorpion, a crab. And a great bear. I recognized them. They were constellations. The bear was Ursa Major.

  There was also a bulletin board with several newspaper clippings tacked up. The headlines read:

  BLACK BEAR STALKS THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL

  LARGEST BLACK BEAR TRACKS ON RECORD

  REWARD FOR KILL OR CAPTURE

  OF GREAT APPALACHIAN BEAR

  There was still the sound—airy, like a long breath, only not that. I followed it until I came to an old phonograph with a record spinning on the turntable, but the needle was at the end, making only that rhythmic whispering sound. There was a collection of record albums, all neatly placed on a shelf. I was about to see which record had been playing when I heard a voice from a back corner of the room.

  “They don’t know where he’s buried.”

  I spun around, gripping the towel about my shoulders. It was Early Auden.

  4

  “Where who’s buried?” I asked.

  “Mozart.” He gestured toward the record. “He’s somewhere in Vienna, but there’s no gravestone with his name to mark where he’s actually buried. Do you think he wanted it that way? To let his music live on, with him unencumbered by praise and accolades?”

  I wasn’t sure what unencumbered meant, and I thought an accolade might be a drink, so I just said what had to be obvious. “I don’t know.”

  “I think he wanted it that way. He wanted to be buried in the white space. Do you hear it?” The boy talked funny. A little too loud. A little flat.

  I listened, but all I heard was the sound of the record spinning at its end. “Nothing’s playing. You’ll have to move the needle.”

  “No. Mozart is only for Sundays. You were upset when you ran down here. So I put on the white space for you. To calm you down. That’s what I do when I’m upset. I listen to the white space. Do you feel better?”

  “Yes, thanks.” I knew this kid was strange. I was just trying to gauge how strange. So far, I knew he stacked sandbags against the ocean, skipped every class but math, and apparently lived in the basement of his own school. The way he dressed was normal enough, if a bit overly careful, his plaid shirt neatly tucked into his khaki pants and his hair spit-combed down, with a tuft that had sprung free in the back.

  Still, the question remained. Was he straitjacket strange or just go-off-by-yourself-at-recess-and-put-bugs-in-your-nose strange? I knew a kid who used to do that in second grade.

  I was still making up my mind when he handed me a pair of neatly folded khaki pants and an oxford shirt, along with some deck shoes.

  “There’s underwear in the left shoe, and socks in the right shoe. Is that the way you do it?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Thanks.” I didn’t make a habit of putting socks or underwear in either shoe, but it was a nice gesture, so I went ahead and crossed straitjacket strange off the list of possibilities. Pulling on the dry clothes, I was surprised that they were too big on me, because Early was kind of scrawny. Slipping on the shoes and socks, I looked around at the unusual array of hammers, chalkboards, and record albums. “What is this place?”

  “It’s my workshop. My father wouldn’t let me have a workshop at home. He said I would be the death of him. But I wasn’t. It was his heart. He had a heart attack.”

  “I see,” I said. Even though I didn’t. “But doesn’t the custodian work here?”

  “No. Mr. Wallace is the custodian, and he didn’t like me hanging around down here, so he set up a new shop in the basement of the middle school. Plus, he likes to tipple. That means he likes to sneak a drink of alcohol once in a while. He also calls it taking a wee half. My favorite is when he says he’s going for a swalley. But he prefers to go for a swalley without anybody around.”

  “Right,” I said slowly, thinking Early knew a lot more than I’d given him credit for. “So are these your dad’s records and chalkboards?”

  “No. He doesn’t own anything anymore, because he’s dead.” Early picked up a piece of chalk, and with what could only be called delicate hands, he began adding numbers to a series of numbers already on one of the chalkboards. There was a deep, croaking sound coming from near the record player.

  “That’s Bucky. He’s a northern leopard frog. I’ve had him for two years.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She never had a frog.”

  “No, I mean, where is she?”

  “She died when I was born early.”

  Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  “So you live down here? In the custodian’s room?”

  “Yes. I lived in the dorm until last year, but it was loud. I like it here. It’s warm and quiet.”

  “And if Mozart is for Sundays, who do you listen to the rest of the week?”

  “Louis Armstrong on Mondays. Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays. And Glenn Miller on Fridays, unless it’s raining. If it’s raining, it’s always Billie Holiday.”

  “What about Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday?” I asked.

  “Those days are quiet. Unless it’s raining.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. What’s all this?” I gestured to the numbers on the chalkboard.

  He picked up where he’d left off, writing numbers on the board, one after another: 806613001927 …

  “This is the part where Pi gets lost in a hurricane and saved by a whale, and he washes up on the shores of a tropical island right before the volcano blows.”

  I was leaning back toward the straitjacket. Then I asked Early Auden, that strangest of boys, the most important of questions.

  “Who is Pi?”

  Suddenly Early looked up from his numbers and locked me in his gaze, as if I were the one who should be wearing a straitjacket. No, I think it was more a look of him trying to decide if he could trust me.

  His eyebrows drew together and he paused, chalk in hand. Finally, he took the eraser from its ledge and, standing on tiptoes, erased the hundreds of numbers that were written in neat lines all across the board.

  “It’s better if you start from the beginning.” He took up a piece of chalk in his slender fingers and wrote three numbers and a decimal point on the board.

  3.14

  I recognized the number pi. Or the beginning of it, anyway. Kind of a coincidence that he had a whole chalkboard full of the number when we were just discussing it in class. But then, my mom always said, “There are no coincidences. Just miracles by the boatload.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Blane was just talking about that in math class, about it ending. But maybe that was after you left.”

  “I heard what he said.” Early’s voice got a little louder. “That’s crazy talk.”

  “How do you know? People thought it was crazy talk to say that the Earth wasn’t flat or that it moved around the sun and not the other way around.” I couldn’t resist. “People probably think it’s crazy talk to say that there are no timber rattlesnakes in Maine.”

  “NO.” Early clenched his hands at his side. “It’s not like that, because the Earth isn’t flat and it does move around the sun.
And”—he huffed—“there are timber rattlesnakes in Maine!”

  “And pi is just a number.” At least, that was what I thought.

  Early circled the number one. “This is Pi. And the rest of the numbers are his story. The story of Pi begins with a family. Three is his mother. She is beautiful and kind and she carried him in her heart always. Four is his father. He is strong and good. And here”—Early pointed to the number one, in the middle—“this is Pi. His mother named him Polaris, but she said he would have to earn his name.”

  The Stargazer

  BEFORE THE STARS HAD NAMES, before men knew how to use them to plot their courses, before anyone had ventured beyond his own horizon, there was a boy who wondered what lay beyond. He gazed up at the stars with praise and wonder, but his wonder was not only born of awe. It was also born of a question: Why?

  This question began as a spark in his breast and grew with the kindling only a boy’s curiosity can provide. Why is the sky so big? he would ask his mother. Why am I so small? Why does the water creep up on the shore, only to retreat again? Why does the moon change its shape? Why do shells hold the sound of the sea? Why? Why? Why?

  The mother didn’t know the answers to his questions, but she did know that one day he would leave. And that day was not as distant as it had once been. She had named him Polaris, a big name for her little boy, and for now she still called him Pi. But the days passed. The moon changed its shape, and the ocean licked the shore and retreated over and over again.

  Someday, when I am big, he thought, I will put my boat in the water and follow it when it retreats. Then I will know why.

  And the boy grew big.

  One day he went to his mother, and she knew. They both cried their tears, though they were not the same. His were youthful and exhilarating. Hers were old and earned. She had made a necklace of shells for him, so he could always hear the sea lapping on his home shore.

  “How will I find my way?” he asked as he prepared to leave.

  “Look to the stars,” she said, ruffling his hair. “They will guide you.”

  The boy and his mother gazed at the stars as they had when he was small. “Remember those?” He pointed to a cluster that looked like a crab. And another that resembled a hunter. “Which should be my guide?”

  His mother looked to the night sky. “What do you see?” she asked.

  “That one.” He pointed to a shining star. “That one—in the little bear. It’s always there.”

  His mother said, “We will name that star, and it will guide you. And for me, I will know that it is within both our sights.” She pointed to the little bear’s bright light. “That star will be my Polaris. But”—his mother pointed to a larger group of stars—“the little bear has a mother. The Great Bear.” Pi’s mother gazed out into the rolling sea. “And a mother’s love is fierce. The Great Bear will watch over you.”

  Finally, Pi cast off, waving as the distance grew between them. Then she called after him. He had forgotten the necklace of shells.

  “Too late,” he called from a ways offshore. “I’ll get them when I return.”

  She watched as her son became the first to take the questions burning in his chest and set off by the light of the stars. Her Polaris would be the first navigator. But Pi had not yet earned his name.

  5

  Early continued writing numbers on the chalkboard as he told his story of Pi, but the talk of stars had taken me back to the one place I didn’t want to be: The creek near our house, with the late-afternoon sun dancing on the water. After the survival outing.

  “Come on, Jackie,” Mom had said, trying to perk me up. “Let’s skip some rocks. See if you can get four skips with one.”

  “I might get lost,” I grumbled.

  “Oh, you’re just a bit out of sorts. You’ll find your way next time.”

  “Fat chance,” I said. “I can name every constellation in the sky, but put a few clouds in the way, and I get lost. A lot of good stargazing does.”

  Mom tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. “Sounds to me like you’re getting ahead of yourself, Jackie. That’s like expecting a young lady to do your laundry before you gaze into her pretty eyes.”

  I looked at her, confused.

  “You’re jumping into the navigating part too soon. Maybe you should focus on the beauty of those stars up there apart from their function. Just take them in, admire them, stand in awe of them, before you expect them to lead the way. Besides, who’s to say that one group of stars belongs together and only together? Those stars up there are drawn to each other in lots of different ways. They’re connected in unexpected ways, just like people. Who’d have thought your father and I would make a pair? Me, a farm girl from Kansas, and him, a navy man from the East Coast.” She smiled at the retelling, even though I’d heard the story from both of them over the years.

  My mom had met my dad in a chance encounter. He’d spent some time in California and was heading back east to finish his last two years at the Naval Academy when his train got held up for some repairs in my mom’s hometown. He got off the train to stretch his legs just as my mother was delivering a cake to the Granby house to celebrate their new baby.

  My dad had said, “What’s a fella got to do to get a cake like that?”

  “I guess you’d have to have a baby,” my mother answered, grinning to beat the band, my dad would say.

  My dad smiled a smile that went into tomorrow, my mother would say. And that was the end of that, they both would say. He walked her down to the Granby farm, offering to carry the cake, missed his train, and they were married the next month.

  My dad put aside a military career, which didn’t sit too well with his father, John Baker the First, and lived the life of a farmer for the first nine years of my life. Then Hitler started bombing England and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and all H-E-double-hockey-sticks broke loose. He joined the navy and shipped out before Christmas that year. He left me in charge, giving me the navigator ring and saying, Take good care of your mother. I didn’t see him again until my mother died.

  “We’re part of the same constellation, your father and I,” Mom said that day. “It’s just not one you find in any textbook.”

  “That’s a nice story, Mom, but it’s not exactly going to help me find my way out of the woods,” I told her.

  “Sometimes it’s best not to see your whole path laid out before you. Let life surprise you, Jackie. There are more stars out there than just the ones with names. And they’re all beautiful.” Listening to my mother was a lot like reading poetry. I had to stretch my mind to make sense of what she was trying to get across. And even when I did understand, sometimes I tried not to let on.

  Gradually, I realized that the click-clack of chalk had stopped and been filled with the white noise of the record player. Sitting on the floor with my back against a file cabinet, I must have nodded off. Looking up, I saw the chalkboard full of numbers streaming out from the original 3.14. The numbers, Early had said, were a mother, a father, and their son, Pi.

  Had I really heard this story or just dreamed it? Either way, it was a silly notion that these numbers told a story. And Early, that strangest of boys, was now sitting on his cot beside the record player, but instead of watching it spin, he was busy tying a rope in an elaborate knot, so engrossed in his work, it was as if that rope and its knots also had a mesmerizing story to tell.

  “Um, sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “I must have dozed off.”

  “That’s okay,” said Early without looking up. “The next numbers aren’t as good as the beginning. Pi just sails on the open seas awhile before anything happens again. I don’t think you’d like that part.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, thanks for the clothes. I’d better get back to the dorm.”

  Early was too engrossed in his rope and knot making to notice me leave.

  I didn’t see Early for a week, not that I went looking for him. My mother would not be happy about that. She had a knack f
or pairing me up with every misfit and newcomer. Jack would love to have you come over to play, she’d say without having heard any such thing from me. For my tenth birthday party, she said I could invite six boys to the bowling alley. But there ended up being seven, because Melvin Trumboldt had just moved to town and supposedly didn’t know a soul. I fought her on that point, as Melvin got in trouble the first day of school for flushing all the toilets in the boys’ bathroom one after another, and I knew he was well acquainted with the principal.

  But she made me invite him anyway, and he turned out not to be so bad. Especially when he gave up the name Melvin and started going by Flush. I got sucked into his antics a couple of times, but Mom could never get too mad, as she was the one who’d forced us into being friends.

  The point is, she wouldn’t be too happy with me not inviting Early to join a table at lunch or play ball after school. But my mom wasn’t here to watch over me. Besides, I was the new kid this time, and people weren’t exactly banging on my door. Until about five o’clock one morning when someone was doing just that. Banging loud and insistent.

  I was still coming out of a hard sleep when the pounding continued on the next door over, and the next one.

  “Let’s go, gentlemen. Crew call,” an adult voice boomed.

  I poked my head out the door. It was Mr. Blane, the math teacher. It was a school day, but no one had said anything about five-a.m. math class. He was dressed in gray sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt with the Morton Hill crest on the front and the word Crew underneath. Was he getting us all out of bed to be the kitchen crew? Or the latrine crew?

  Just then, Sam Feeney poked his bleary-eyed face out of his room. “Hey, what’s all the racket about, Mr. Blane?”

  “It’s about rising to the challenge, Mr. Feeney. It’s about discipline and strength. It’s about working as a team.”