Navigating Early (4 page)

“W
here 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
 

B
EFORE 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
 

E
arly 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.