Spooner (10 page)

“For the sake of argument,” Calmer said one night, indicating the pasture beyond the fence, “let us say that yon cow is in
need of shoes, a pair of saddle shoes perhaps.” They’d all driven to Macon that week for shoes; Margaret was beginning first
grade on Monday. They were sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, an hour after he’d finished the dishes. Spooner, Margaret,
Calmer. The air was hot and wet and full of insects, and no fresher to breathe, even though the sun had dropped into the cloud
of awful, sweet smoke that hung over the sawmill, completely out of sight.

Spooner turned to look and saw the last few stragglers ambling downhill to the pond, where they spent the night together in
a pile. A pile of cows. Calmer reached under the table and took Margaret’s bare foot in his hand. “Now, the problem, my dear,”
he said, “as you may already know, cows have quite dainty feet—like yourself.”

Spooner squinted, trying to make out the cows’ dainty feet, and Calmer turned to him. “But the real problem is that yon cow
will not ride in the family car. It’s undignified, it thinks, and they push and pull and beg and cajole, but the animal will
not budge, and in the end it has its own way and it walks. Thirty-two miles.”

At the edge of his vision, Spooner saw Margaret write down the number thirty-two. These days she carried a notepad and a pencil
everywhere she went, getting ready for school. Calmer had gotten him a notepad too—like his new shoes, so he wouldn’t feel
left out—but Spooner had used it only once, balling up a few pieces of paper, trying to set fire to the patch of briars at
the edge of the woods. He had very little use for a notepad otherwise—he couldn’t write yet, not numbers or letters, and wasn’t
even much at drawing.

“And so beginneth the journey,” Calmer said. “But miles pass, and time, and eventually, exactly halfway to Macon the cow stops.”

“Why?” Spooner said.

Calmer shrugged. “Well, his feet hurt,” he said. “He
is
barefoot.” Which bent Margaret over until her nose touched the notepad, and as she giggled, a line of drool dropped from
her mouth onto the paper and pooled. She’d lost one of her front teeth the week before and another one was looser every day.

“And after the cow has rested its feet,” Calmer said, “it starts out and walks half the distance to Macon again, and again
stops and rests its feet.”

“When does it sleep?” Spooner said.

“It sleeps while it rests its feet, and then eats breakfast, and then walks half the distance left to Macon again. And the
cow proceeds in this way, walking and resting, each time covering half the distance left. And one day it comes to a post office
and drops a card to its friends back in the pasture, saying the weather is fine and the grass is sweet and it should be in
Macon by…”

Calmer paused, looking from Spooner to Margaret. “But it doesn’t know when it will be in Macon, and that,” he said, “is the
question. How long should yon bovine say it will take, each day walking half the distance left, to arrive in Macon?”

Margaret thought a moment and began her calculations, writing careful, perfect numbers down the page, writing and erasing,
subtracting and adding and dividing. Numbers all over. Spooner watched her work a little while and then looked away, back
to the pasture, and presently, feeling Calmer’s eyes on him, he picked up his pencil and drew a cow. This was a distraction
of course, as most of everything he did and said around Calmer was, hoping this time around that Calmer wouldn’t notice that
he didn’t know how to do problems, or even write numbers, hoping somehow not to disappoint him. And the last thing he would
do, or even think of doing, in the face of this convolution of time and miles and cows and saddle shoes, not to mention his
sister’s furious calculations as she closed in on the answer, was admit that, as far as he could tell, the cow was never going
to make it to Macon at all.

To Spooner’s knowledge Margaret didn’t lie or make mistakes, but he still had his doubts when she told him Calmer was going
to marry their mother.

From what Spooner had seen—from what he’d heard through the heating vent—there was something his mother wanted from Calmer
that he couldn’t give her, no matter how many walls he painted or how many times he climbed up onto the roof to fix a leak,
or how hard he tried to cheer her up. Lately, there were times when he came over and she didn’t even come out of her bedroom
to see him. Asthma, she said, and stayed in bed all day.

It was sometimes Spooner’s job to take his mother lunch or a glass of water when she was sick, and she would be under a sheet
in her nightgown, the room warm and thick with the smell of her sickness, and the skin on her throat pulling tight against
the cords beneath it when she pumped in the medicine.

His mother had been sick in this way, off and on, for as long as Spooner remembered, and he worried that Calmer would notice
the smell and not want to come back.

I
n the fall, Margaret started second grade, and Spooner was shipped out to kindergarten. That was what Calmer called it,
shipping out
, which it was called back in the navy.

His grandmother drove them to school that morning—his mother had an early class to teach at the college—and wouldn’t let Spooner
roll down his window; she didn’t want the wind messing up Margaret’s hair on her first day. Spooner’s grandmother was a
no nonsense, young man
kind of grandmother, not the kind that gave presents, and he sat alone in the breezeless backseat of her old Kaiser, an automobile
she could not shift without a noise that reminded him of the drill the dentist had used that spring to smooth out what was
left of the front tooth he broke off falling into the curb in front of the bakery. Six stitches in his eyebrow and then the
dentist. And now kindergarten.

Spooner’s kindergarten and Peabody Elementary sat on the same street, a block apart. They stopped at the kindergarten first,
and Margaret was too excited to wait and walked the rest of the way by herself. Spooner watched her go—skipping—thinking he
might like school too if he could already read better than the teacher.

His grandmother put an Indian-burn grip on his wrist and walked him through a gate in a chain-link fence, then through a swarm
of children’s faces, some of them sticking out their tongues to be ugly. The place had a dirt yard and a small slide and a
sandbox and a set of swings, things that were of no interest to Spooner at all. Beyond the playground was the school house
itself, and she tightened her grip and pulled him straight ahead.

The teacher was named Miss Julie Tuttle and stopped him dead in his tracks. Miss Tuttle had black hair that shone like Calmer’s
shoes and smelled like flowers, and Spooner wanted to roll in that smell the way the Shakers’ coonhound rolled in cow shit
after he’d been in the pond. And something more than that, something he felt crawling all over him, like impetigo.

A shampoo. He wanted Miss Tuttle to give him a shampoo, and thus emerged Spooner’s pecker into the untidiness of the universe.

Miss Tuttle was twenty-one years old, fresh out of college, and had chosen kindergarten because children of that age were
cuter than seven- or eight-year-olds—cuter, smaller, easier to handle, more innocent—and was pretty much innocent herself,
or at least unaware that a child still three months shy of his fifth birthday could already be connected in that dark, reptilian
way to his pecker.

She took Spooner’s hand from his grandmother, smiling down at him, and said something about meeting the other children. Spooner
had no interest in meeting other children and wanted only to stay right there where he was with Miss Tuttle, or possibly closer.
His hand was tingling now that his grandmother was no longer cutting off the circulation. She was behind him—his grandmother—and
straightening him up, pushing her thumbs into his shoulder blades and reminding him to keep his fingers out of his mouth.
She smiled at Miss Tuttle, talking about him like he wasn’t there, and reported that his finger sucking started that summer
when he fell and broke his tooth, which was a lie, and then patted him on the shoulder and headed back to the gate.

Miss Tuttle watched her go and then winked at him, as if they were in it together now, and said, “What a sweet little guy.”
She laid her hand on his hair a moment and tousled it, then led him back in the direction of the playground to introduce him
to his new classmates.

And with his fingers in his mouth and his pecker doing the thinking, Spooner allowed himself to be led into the yard.

Two weeks later Margaret was sent home with a letter saying she was being skipped ahead into third grade, and on that same
day Spooner was also sent home with a letter, the contents of which were never discussed in his presence, but after which
Spooner was a kindergartener no more.

The complaint was only superficially that Spooner had been dipping his head in glue and finger paint so that Miss Tuttle would
have to wash out his hair. The real complaint was that Miss Tuttle had noticed that while she was washing out his hair, his
head rose up into her hand like a cat raising its rump as you stroked it, and it was not long before she noticed the little
rise in his britches, and after that even the sight of his arrival at the schoolyard in the morning frightened and repelled
her, and she went finally, in tears, to the principal. Who had been having thoughts of his own about Miss Tuttle, and expelled
Spooner on the spot.

Spooner listened to his mother and Calmer talking it over in the kitchen that night. He and Margaret and his grandmother were
all in bed. A school day tomorrow, but not for Spooner.

“Could you at least talk to him about it?” she said.

Spooner could not figure out what she had on Calmer, why he always gave in and did what she wanted. Even so, this time it
was quiet a pretty long time before he answered. “You know, it’s probably just a phase…”

She said, “Please, Calmer. Children aren’t expelled from kindergarten because they’re going through a phase.”

She was in her other voice now, the one she used for arguing politics with her sisters and her mother, all of whom were Republicans
and had no idea what it was like to barely scrape by, to have to watch every penny.