34

Ellie turned six. She came home from kindergarten on her birthday with a paper hat askew on her head, several pictures friends had drawn of her (in the best of them Ellie looked like a friendly scarecrow), and baleful stories about spankings in the schoolyard during recess. The flu epidemic passed. They had to send two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefully sick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton, who went into convulsions shortly after being admitted. Rachel developed a mild infatuation with the blond bag boy at the A amp; P in Brewer and rhapsodized to Louis at night about how packed his jeans looked. “It’s probably just toilet paper,” she added. “Squeeze it sometime,” Louis suggested. “If he screams, it’s probably not.” Rachel had laughed until she cried. The blue, still, subzero miniseason of February passed and brought on the alternating rains and freezes of March, potholes, and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the Great God BUMP. The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief which the psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four to six weeks in most cases-like that period of time New Englanders sometimes call “deep winter.” But time passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like a rainbow. Strong grief becomes a softer, more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourning at last becomes remembrance-a process that may take from six months to three years and still be considered normal. The day of Gage’s first haircut came and passed, and when Louis saw his son’s hair growing in darker, he joked about it and did his own mourning-but only in his heart.

Spring came, and it stayed awhile.

35

Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. The things that were to come, poised above them like a killing sashweight, were still over seven weeks in the future, but looking over those seven weeks he found nothing which stood out with the same color. He supposed that even if none of those terrible things had happened, he would have remembered the day forever. Days which seem genuinely good-good all the way through-are rare enough anyway, he thought. It might be that there was less than a month of really good ones in any natural man’s life in the best of circumstances. It came to seem to Louis that God, in His infinite wisdom, seemed much more generous when it came to doling out pain.

That day was a Saturday, and he was home minding Gage in the afternoon while Rachel and Ellie went after groceries. They had gone with Jud in his old and rattling ‘59 IH pickup not because the station wagon wasn’t running but because the old man genuinely liked their company. Rachel asked Louis if he would be okay with Gage, and he told her that of course he would. He was glad to see her get out; after a winter in Maine, most of it in Ludlow, he thought that she needed all the getting out she could lay her hands on. She had been an unremittingly good sport about it, but she did seem to him to be getting a little stir crazy.

Gage got up from his nap around two o’clock, scratchy and out of sorts. He had discovered the Terrible Twos and made them his own. Louis tried several ineffectual gambits to amuse the kid, and Gage turned them all down. To make matters worse, the rotten kid had an enormous bowel movement, the artistic quality of which was not improved for Louis when he saw a blue marble sitting in the middle of it. It was one of Ellie’s marbles. The kid could have choked. He decided the marbles were going to go-everything Gage got hold of went right to his mouth-but that decision, while undoubtedly laudable, didn’t do a thing about keeping the kid amused until his mother got back.

Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs. Vinton’s field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university. Had he bought twine as well? He had, by God!

“Gage!” he said. Gage had found a green Crayola under the couch and was currently scribbling in one of Ellie’s favorite books-something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry, Louis thought and grinned. If Ellie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in Where the Wild Things Are before Louis could get it away from him, Louis would simply mention the unique treasure he had uncovered in Gage’s Pampers.

“What!” Gage responded smartly. He was talking pretty well now; Louis had decided the kid might actually be half-bright.

“You wanna go out?”

“Wanna go out!” Gage agreed excitedly. “Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?”

This sentence, if reproduced phonetically, would have looked something like this: Weh ma neeks, Dah-dee? The translation was Where are my sneakers, Father?

Louis was often struck by Gage’s speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice box is capable of… the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning.

Gage’s neeks were finally found… they were also under the couch. One of Louis’s other beliefs was that in families with small children, the area under living room couches begins after a while to develop a strong and mysterious electromagnetic force that eventually sucks in all sorts of litter-everything from bottles and diaper pins to green Crayolas and old issues of Sesame Street magazine with food mouldering between the pages.

Gage’s jacket, however, wasn’t under the couch-it was halfway down the stairs.

His Red Sox cap, without which Gage refused to leave the house, was the most difficult of all to find because it was where it belonged-in the closet. That was, naturally, the last place they looked.

“Where goin, Daddy?” Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.

“Going over in Mrs. Vinton’s field,” he said. “Gonna go fly a kite, my man.”

“Kiiiyte?” Gage asked doubtfully.

“You’ll like it,” Louis said. “Wait a minute, kiddo.”

They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet, and turned on the light. He rummaged through the closet and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some hope.

“Lat?” Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for “Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?”

“It’s the kite,” Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.

“Birt!” Gage yelled. “Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!”

“Yeah, it’s a bird,” Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: “You’re gonna like it, big guy.”

Gage liked it.

They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton’s field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was.