Chapter 3
I came to understand the value of reading as easily as a duckling learns to navigate water. Before I got that book, the only way I knew of to distract myself from my domestic life was to daydream, which I did every minute that I was not in school; in my head I invented a world in which I had an alive father, a mother who loved me and whom I loved back, and in which I attended a school whose faculty and student body adored me. Daydreams can take you only so far; the longer I occupied myself with them, the weaker the happiness it brought me grew, before this happiness was eventually supplanted by grief that the life I imagined was far beyond my possession. Though the first dozen or so books I borrowed concerned history, I first perused the bookcase corresponding to literary fiction when I was eight, whereupon my eyes found a clothbound titled “Oliver Twist”, with a name Charles Dickens next to the title.
I had overheard once, from a conversation between him and Mr. Rees, that the school librarian’s name was Mr. Blackwell; this, to my disappointment, refuted my theory that he and Mr. Rees were related. When I checked the novel out to him, he remarked that my interests were mature for a boy of my age. Taking this as a compliment, I said, “Thank you, Mr. Blackwell”.
“How did you learn my name, John?” he asked, with nothing but curiosity in his tone.
“I heard Mr. Rees say your name when he was talking to you.”
“That makes perfect sense. And you are very welcome.”
I left the library with a smile that stretched from one of my ears to the other, for this exchange with him increased his likeability, in my view, tenfold; he was the only person to have treated me with a demeanor more positive than indifference. My mother, when the rare chance struck that she was in the foyer to greet me, no longer questioned me whenever I returned carrying a book (which occurred every time I returned home from school). When I entered she gave me neither glance nor greeting.
I used to believe that I was alone, amongst all children, in being unloved, for all of my peers appeared to have someone, be it their parents or one another, who loved them. Every afternoon, several boys’ fathers would swing by, conducting horse-drawn buggies, to take them home, and I would watch them depart with envy filling my heart. It gladdened me to read of poor Oliver’s wretched life in a workhouse, in which he got hit for politely requesting more gruel, because it proved that there existed someone who had it not only as bad but even worse than I.
I thought again about Mr. Blackwell. Though I was not certain whether he loved me, nor whether I loved him, the geniality of his countenance and the gentleness of his intonation drew my attention toward him for reasons I lacked the words to elucidate. Whenever I saw him I felt a tingling throughout my body, as if a million angels had come down to tickle me, and whenever he addressed me by name (which I never heard him do with my peers) a peculiar sense of excitement surged through my every nerve. Every time I got my eyes onto him I had great difficulty getting them off. He objectively was an ordinary-looking man, but every feature, solely on account of belonging to him, registered to me as beautiful; and though Mr Rees looked like him, I felt none of the same affection toward Mr. Rees.
Slightly later, I lay in bed in that odd state between wakefulness and hypnagogia, in which you are free to forget that there is a world outside of whatever your mind’s eye throws at you, and imagined myself putting my clothes and books into a bindle and slipping out of the house when it was night and my mother asleep. In my slumber that night, I dreamt the same, and I awoke unusually early, so early that the sky outside the window was pitch-black. My youthful naivety led me to think that there would be no interference if I were to leave and attempt to find shelter elsewhere—probably, I decided, at Mr. Blackwell’s domicile.
Come the end of tomorrow’s school session, I went into the library, approached Mr. Blackwell at his desk, and asked him, “This is a weird question, but where do you live?”
“That is far from the strangest question someone’s ever asked me, and since a young child can do no harm, I live in Salem, but the one here in Oregon and thankfully not Massachusetts. Where do you live, John?”
“I live in Tillamook. Is that far from Salem?”
“Salem is to the east of Tillamook and a day away on foot.”
A day of walking was perfectly attainable, thought I, because a day at home passed like nothing. The difference in your perception of time when you are idle, versus when you are doing something, did not enter my consideration.
He added, “What brings you to ask, dear?” My head grew fuzzy at that term of endearment, for he had never before called me such, and neither had anyone else. I said, “I don’t like being at home because my mother doesn’t like me, and I think that being with you will make me happy.”
He lifted his eyebrows in astonishment. “Well, if you do leave, I will have food and a spare bed ready.”
“Thank you, and I do plan to leave,” said I, thinking the world twice as agreeable for me to live in on account of his generosity.
He bent over his desk and kissed my forehead; a wonder that this touch to a fraction of my skin caused the whole of my flesh to tingle, and he got a grin out of me in that moment. In spite of his genial manner, he had not hitherto made such a display of physical affection, and he did not seem like the class of man strongly inclined to do so. Yet I had always wondered how wonderful it would feel to be touched by him.
“Goodbye, Mr. Blackwell,” said I, and he wished me well in the same manner.
After I returned home I went to my room, pulled my blanket off the bed and spread it out onto the floor, placed my books and clothing onto the blanket’s center, and hoisted the four corners upward, and in this position I tied them together. A makeshift sack resulted from this improvisation. I sat staring at the clock on the table against the wall, in wait for it to strike midnight, since by that time it was always certain my mother would be asleep. It was nine, and the second hand moved too slowly, the minute hand vegetatively, and the hour hand not at all. I would be a frail old man, with my knees cracking and my teeth rattling like windchimes in my mouth, by the time it was midnight. As my eyes were growing heavy, I closed them for what I thought would be a few seconds.
When I opened them again the hour hand was on one, and I was lying against the frame of my bed. I rose, slung the sack over my shoulder, and tiptoed downstairs. By increments of a millimeter I pulled the front door ajar, and I slipped out as soon as the gap became wide enough to fit myself through. During the day, farmers from nearby acres would set their goats and cattle free to roam the area, and then they would reclaim them come evening, and consequently those animals frequently happened upon my father’s property; I cannot recall not seeing them in the morning or afternoon. At this time, however, they were absent, which granted to the scene a lonesome air. The emptiness of the night gave me no other stimuli to divert my attention from this air, and it thus seemed apocalyptic.
After I stepped down from the porch, I apprehended my surroundings, in which I discerned a barrenness that contradicted my knowledge of object permanence; the vast scalp of tall grass and dandelion that I could see clearly when the Sun shone bright eluded my view now, and the ponderosa pine in front of the house did not rustle in the wind as it did each morning. The white stars that dotted the sky were the only sign that the Earth had not ceased to spin.
During one science session concerning the interactions between animals in an ecosystem, Mr. Rees recounted that he had once been chased by coyotes off a hiking trail, and I found his anecdote more memorable than any of his others. Believing that a stick would prove a hardy weapon against these beasts, I approached the ponderosa, broke a thick branch off of it, and stuck the branch into the area between my belt and my waistband.
I began to traverse the plains in a bid to orient myself eastward, because I lacked a compass (it was not as if I knew how to use one, anyway), and ascended a short hill, one among many; the foreseeable expanse past the house comprised one shallow mound after another. On the top of that hill a wooden pole with wooden arrow-shaped signs nailed to it told me exactly what I needed to know: the facade of the house faced south, ergo the house’s right side (when the viewer is looking at the front door) must have faced east. I turned back toward the house, turned right, and walked straight ahead. There ran a wide dirt road next to me.
Fearing that if I lingered too long my mother would come out and catch me, I quickened my pace so that I was bounding down the road, and the hard books in the blanket started to smack me over and over in the back. I stopped at the hoarse sound of a man’s shout of, “Young boy!”. A buggy had pulled up beside me. I came up to its driver, who was a small, weaselly man in a bowler hat and pinstripe suit, and he asked, “What on Earth is a boy your age doing alone at night?”
“I got lost and I need to find my way home,” I fabulated.
“Well, get in and tell me where to go.”
I went around to the other side of the buggy, stepped up, and said, “I need to go to Salem.” Upon sitting down I set the sack on my lap, bringing immediate relief to the shoulder on which I had carried it. The horses resumed their gallop, and when the driver pulled their reins to make them turn right I was perplexed; I thought that if your destination was a cardinal direction from your starting point, you had to go exclusively in that direction if you wanted to reach it. The sky turned from black to navy blue, and, when I kept yawning, I closed my eyes. No fantasies came to entertain me.