What Hearts Read online

  From below there was no sound. That was odd. He sat up, still panting. What was the matter down there? Perhaps they were weeping with the sadness of it all. Poor Little Boy Blue! Maybe they’d like to hear it again. He got up and found the book, intending to brush up on the couple of lines he’d blown. He snatched it open and scratched roughly through the pages, looking for the poem, intending to read it aloud with volume and sarcasm. He held the text up close to his face.

  It was not “Little Boy Blue” he was on the wrong page. But before he could flip it, he had read a line or two, and he stopped. The lines were “And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable wicket creaked/Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked.”

  Asa read the lines again. He didn’t know what an ostler was. He didn’t even know what a stable wicket was. But he knew they were better than toy dogs and tin soldiers, and he knew above all that when an ostler with a white, peaked face listened by a creaking wicket dark in a dark old inn-yard, something was afoot. He read the next lines: “His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like moldy hay/But he loved the landlord’s daughter/The landlord’s red-lipped daughter,/Dumb as a dog he listened,/And he heard the robber say…”

  Now, thought Asa, springing up with the book in his hand and shaking a fist, now by God we are onto something. Just ahead of his thoughts he saw a solution to his problem, he saw poor Little Boy Blue dying alone and unsung in the darkness far from voice and stage, but at the moment he did not want to think it through. To heck with Little Boy Blue. He wanted to read. So, quietly, he turned out his overhead light, and quietly pulled a chair into the moonlight coming through his window.

  TWO

  “‘A coat of the claret velvet,’” came Joel’s voice over his shoulder, “‘and boots of the brown doe-skin.’”

  “No,” said Asa, stopping on the leafy path. “No. Not boots, and not ‘the brown doe-skin.’ It’s his breeches that are made of that: ‘breeches of brown doe-skin.’” As an afterthought he added, “You had the right sense of the rhythm, though. You added that ‘the’ to make up for the difference in syllables between ‘boots’ and ‘breeches.’”

  Joel had stopped now too, and he came walking back, snapping a withering leaf shaped like a mitten from a sassafras bush. “I forget what breeches are again,” he said. He stuck the leafs stem in his mouth.

  “Pants,” said Asa. Every time they went over this, he was tempted to mention the obvious clue; but he was afraid that if he called Joel’s attention to the similarity between the familiar word “britches” and the unknown word, Joel would just start saying “britches.” He supposed that would be better than “boots,” but he hated the way it sounded.

  Joel twirled the leaf in front of his face by rolling the stem between his pink lips. The leaf fell. “You know why I can never remember that? Because it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, doeskin is like leather, right? Well, whoever heard of leather pants?”

  Asa sighed, and sat on a fallen tree trunk. “It’s very soft,” he said. “Doeskin I mean. It’s as soft as cashmere.”

  “How do you know?” Joel asked, taking a seat up the trunk from Asa. There was no challenge in his voice, Asa knew; Joel didn’t doubt, he just wondered.

  “My mother has some doeskin gloves.”

  “Ah.” Joel looked around, sighed contentedly, and began to whistle. Asa said nothing. He felt bad for an instant; his mother had never had doeskin gloves, at least as far as he knew. He had lied.

  “Shall we try it again?” he asked.

  “You know,” said Joel, “you are the only kid I ever knew who actually says things like ‘shall.’ Is it because you’re a Yankee?”

  “I’m not a Yankee,” Asa said patiently. “Washington is below the Mason-Dixon line.”

  “May be,” said Joel, “but it’s a big city. Seems like all big cities are Yankee, really.”

  “What about Atlanta?”

  “Well, I guess you got me there.” Joel stood up and stretched slowly, smiling at the woods all around. “You got to admit,” he said, “that this is better than a stuffy room.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Asa. “But the reason we stopped working in my room was that you said you couldn’t learn anything in there but you could learn anything outside.” He paused, then added: “It’s only a week away, Joel.”

  “I know,” Joel said, with a heavy sigh Asa hoped was faked for his benefit. “I’m not doing too very good.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Asa said, “but you just need to speed up.”

  “And you gave me all the hot verses.”

  “Stanzas,” said Asa. It was true: in an effort to engage Joel’s enthusiasm, and thereby his concentration, Asa had abandoned their initial scheme of simple alternation, coming up instead with an arrangement that favored Joel with the exciting parts. Joel was now responsible for telling the audience about the moon being a ghostly galleon, about Tim the ostler’s white peaked face, about the brave robber with the twinkling pistol butts rising in the saddle to kiss his bonny sweetheart while his face burnt and her perfumed hair tumbled all over him, and, best of all, about the gallant, galloping fellow turning back on the murderous red-coats, shrieking a curse to the sky with the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high. But instead of rising to the thrill of this amazing privilege, Joel scattered his attention at every strange, marvelous old word, unable to keep his ostlers and rapiers and breeches straight. He still couldn’t really grasp why they called a robber a “highwayman.” He said it sounded like a highwayman ought to be a guy doing road work.

  The switch hadn’t worked, but Asa wasn’t willing after two weeks of effort to undo whatever odd bits of memorization Joel had accomplished by reclaiming the choice stanzas for himself. Besides, he was still deeply grateful for the easygoing way Joel had agreed to drop “Little Boy Blue” and take on the much longer poem. Sometimes, though, he was tempted to wish for a way he could recite the whole thing himself.

  Joel had started walking back in the direction of the house; it appeared that today’s rehearsal was about to end. Asa shook his head, and fell into step behind the larger boy.

  After a few minutes, Joel asked, “Do you think I’ll make it?”

  Without thinking, Asa said, “Yes.”

  “I don’t. I’m sorry I’m so dumb.”

  “You’re not dumb.”

  “I had ‘Little Boy Blue’ down cold.”

  Asa doubted this; he doubted Joel had his own telephone number down cold; but he only said, “I know. It was tough on you to switch.”

  “It’s worth it,” said Joel brightly. “We’re better friends because we have to work so hard on this one.”

  Asa doubted this, too. He hated to doubt it, but he did. While it was true that he had changed his mind about Joel—coming to appreciate the boy’s open-minded readiness to like anyone or try anything with a foil heart and reckless energy, at the slightest encouraging sign—he had been unable to slip into the relaxed carelessness of friendship. Joel needed too much handling for that. The responsibilities Asa had to adopt toward him simply prevented spontaneity, trust—equality. The role was set. He was Joel’s manager.

  The week zipped away. Joel missed two of their daily practice sessions, once so that he could work on a tree house his younger brother was building in their backyard. Asa called him on the phone and complained. Joel said, “But I promised him I’d help. It was a deal.”

  “What about your deal with me?”

  Joel thought about it. “It’s different. See, I’m not helping you. The guy who’s doing the helping, it’s, it’s like—”

  “I know,” said Asa drily.

  “Sure,” said Joel, “I guess you do. And, boy, do I know what a good helper you are. You’re my idol when it comes to helping, believe me.” He laughed. “Anyway,” he added casually, “he’s my brother, see.”

  “That,” said Asa, despising himself, even as he spoke, for the obvious self-pity, “is of course something I know nothi
ng about,” and he hung up softly.

  Later that night, Joel called him back and recited twelve new lines, making no mistakes. Asa praised him gratefully. He also suspected that perhaps Joel had been reading to him—not in the spirit of cheating, for Joel was not deceitful, but to make Asa happy. He wished the idea of Joel fudging had not been so automatic, but there it was.

  The next day at school Joel was as bright and breezy as ever, and Asa was contrite. He suggested that they make up for the missed time by pounding through two tremendous sessions over the weekend. Joel agreed happily. So, on Saturday morning, Asa made lemonade and baked a whole sheet of chocolate-chip cookies, while his mother assembled two huge submarine sandwiches, her specialty. Everything was cooling in the refrigerator when the telephone rang. Asa answered.

  “Tlot-tlot,” said a dramatic voice.

  “Hi man,” Asa said, looking at the clock, Joel was due in ten minutes. Obviously, he would be late. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, what’s up is just the question to ask. What’s up, what’s way up, is the tree house. We finished it. Right now it’s swarming with second graders, but guess who reserved it for a solid hour this afternoon, so we can practice our robbers and red-coats?”

  “You’re supposed to come here. You’re—you’re supposed to be here. Now! For three hours. What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?”

  “An hour in a tree house is worth three in a stuffy old room any day. Come on. Get your mom to bring you. We can scare the little guys and stuff. It’ll be fun.”

  So Asa packed his knapsack with the subs and cookies and a thermos of the lemonade. Dave was off with the car, playing golf, so he had to ride his bicycle. Joel lived five or six miles across town, in an area of fine old houses that seemed as big as ships to Asa. It took him almost an hour to get there, and the only thing that kept him from pumping with anger was the chance to pretend that he was himself the highwayman, narrating his own harsh and noble deeds with the wind in his teeth.

  After arriving at Joel’s house and parking his bike, he headed toward the sounds of wild hooting and howling far behind the house. From fifty feet away he saw the tree house, about twelve feet up in a big beech. Around the trunk were eight or ten younger kids, looking up and yelling, jumping and shaking knotty little fists. Most of them were quite wet. As he watched, Joel’s head and shoulders suddenly shot up over one wall made of an old tin sign bearing a peeling portrait of the Sinclair gasoline brontosaurus. Joel’s face was a beaming, bursting cartoon expression of devilish delight at finding the young kids beneath him; he wagged his eyebrows and shook his hair and roared, and the kids howled back and started laughing in fright and pleasure. At just the right moment, when it seemed they would all incinerate with happy dread, he stood up tall and began lofting water balloons at them. Wobbling in their arcs like live things, the balloons—shiny green, blue, red, yellow—caught sunlight in their watery interiors and held it in a glow. Then each of them exploded on the head or shoulders of a shrieking second grader.

  Asa found he was crying. He left unseen.

  THREE

  His mother called him to the telephone. The caller was an adult woman with a rich Carolina accent who identified herself with her entire name, then added that she was Joel’s mother.

  “Ah,” said Asa. “Hello.”

  “Asa,” said the woman rather musically, “I’m sure you know why I’m calling.”

  “Well, not exactly.” He hesitated, then said innocently, “Perhaps it’s something to do with the presentation Joel and I are making tomorrow night?”

  “You’re sweet to be so optimistic, son.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Now, Asa, bright as you must be, I’m sure I don’t have to spell it out for you. I’m well aware of what you’ve been trying to do for my Joel, so I know you’re aware of—well, let’s see—shall we say, the peculiar nature of the dear boy’s intellectual gifts.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “My, you are going to make me pull the flag all the way up the pole, aren’t you? Look, my dear. Joel is full of sweetness and light, he was born full of sweetness and light, he’ll live to be a hundred and the angels will be waiting for him with robes of gold, but—as his father and I and his teachers and I suspect you too know—while he’s on this earth Joel could not find his own fanny with both hands. He is as close to helpless as you can get without being put on a leash. I love him more than any human since Clark Gable, but honey, let’s be frank: when it come to little things like time and space and words and numbers, Joel is missing something between the I. and the Q.”

  “You’re telling me he hasn’t memorized his part of ‘The Highwayman.’”

  “See? I told you you were bright. Indeed, Joel has not memorized his part of that dreadful endless poem you two lit on reciting.” She sighed dramatically. “We had him all set up with something simpler, which was hard enough, mind you—and it took him a week to remember what color ‘Little Boy Blue’ was, but we got almost all of it memorized somehow. Then you come along, all good intentions I’m sure, and of course it is a much finer piece of writing, but my God! it’s long as a catfish’s old age. He was all excited and eager to try it, and, of course, he looks on you as something between Mickey Mantle and Jesus. I couldn’t tell him no—it’s hard to keep saying no when he wants to try something, and the child is eat up with gumption—so I held my breath and prayed you were the kind of young man you’ve turned out to be. He’s told me. You’ve been a saint. You understand him. But I can’t help noticing you’ve given up your practices, and I wonder what you’re thinking now about tomorrow.”

  Well, Asa had been wondering that himself. She was right: since his visit that Saturday, he had not tried to schedule any practice sessions with Joel. They had talked in class, Joel always eager to speak a couple of lines to show his readiness—tlot-tlot!—and Asa always complimentary and encouraging. But he had given up. Joel was on his own. Asa figured their part of the show would be a disaster.

  On the surface, in the daylight of his public self, he had accepted this. On the surface, he was calm, resigned, cool. But just out of view, in the shadows where the real thinking was done, his scheming mind spent every hour trying to figure out a way to dump Joel and do it all himself. This was awful of him, but he could not stop wishing: maybe Joel will get chicken pox, maybe Joel will get stage fright, maybe Joel will move to Nebraska. Asa told himself he wasn’t wishing like this for his own sake. Somehow, he felt, it was just for the sake of the poem itself, and the act of reciting it. There simply was a right way to do it, and when there was a right way, it should be done. It was as if there were a perfect movie of this event floating in the air somewhere in advance, and it was up to him to match it, word for word, motion for motion.

  Now, on the phone with this odd woman, he sensed something like opportunity opening up before him. It was coming, if he could play this right. He said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I was just kind of going to show up and see what happened.”

  “Ha.” She was silent for a moment. “Am I correct, Asa, in assuming that you know this entire poem, all by yourself?”

  Carefully, as innocent as possible, he said, “Well—yes, I guess I do.”

  “You guess you do, do you. I get the feeling maybe you’re about three curves ahead of me here, but you’d just as soon I did the suggesting, so I will. Here’s what I think. I think Joel ought to kind of miss the big show and leave you to struggle bravely on. What do you think about that?”

  “I think he’d feel terrible.”

  “Well, that’s nice, but if I took care of things just right, it would probably be a week before he even remembered, and then it would be so far gone, he’d tend to regard it as a pleasant memory of what might have been. Even if he faced it straight up, he wouldn’t get too low about missing out; he snaps back faster than a fat man’s suspenders, Joel does.”

  “Well…” said Asa. And he let her talk him into it. She had it all worked out: she would give Joel t
he day off from school, and they would go out and buy a football he wanted, then eat lunch at his favorite restaurant, then take in a submarine movie that was playing downtown—“Just a good old day of a boy and his momma being sweet on each other.” She’d make sure his father and brother didn’t mention anything about the show at dinner, after which they’d have a checkers tournament. That was Joel’s favorite family activity, she said; he played the three of them at once on three boards, and murdered them.

  He let her talk. And as she talked, he tested every seam of her plan, first figuring whether or not it would fool Joel, and then whether or not it would hurt him. In his head, the plan worked. Joel would be fooled; and as far as pain went—well, she knew Joel better than he, didn’t she? Okay: Joel would not know. Okay: Joel would not be hurt. Okay. Okay.

  He would do it alone.

  FOUR

  Onstage, two girls were dancing in taffeta costumes. One of them had been allowed to wear makeup, and she was dancing much better than her friend, whose pale face was streaked with the trail of dried tears; she had been forbidden to “doll up,” and her misery threw her steps off. In the wings, boys were laughing as the pale girl stumbled. Asa watched, sympathetic.