Authors: Peter Straub
When his mother arrived, Tom followed Bud Copeland down the stairs to the front door. Tim and Valerie Hillman were standing with drinks in their hands in the box-filled living room, but they did not even turn their heads to watch him leave. Bud Copeland opened the door and leaned out after him. 'Be a good friend to our Del, now,' he said softly. Tom nodded, then by reflex held out his hand. Bud Copeland shook it warmly, smiling down. An odd look of recognition, disturbing to Tom, momentarily passed over the butler's face. 'I see the Arizona Flanagans are gentlemen,' he said, gripping the boy's hand. 'Take care, Red.'
In the car, his mother said, 'I didn't know that the house had been sold to a Negro family.'
Take care, Red.
9
Tom by Night
In his dream, which was somehow connected to Bud Copeland, he was being looked at by a vulture, not looking himself, but averting his eyes to the scrubby sandyground — he had seen vultures from time to time, grotesque birds, on the roofs of desert towns on trips with his parents. The vulture was gazing at him with a horrid patient acceptance, knowing all about him. Nothing surprised the vulture, neither heat nor cold, not life or death. The vulture accepted all as it accepted him. It waited for the world to roll its way, and the world always did.
This was a vulture in vulture middle age. Its feathers were greasy, its bill darkened.
First it had eaten his father, and now it would devour him. Nothing could stop it. The world rolled its way, and then it ate what it was given. The vulture was a lesson in economics.
So was his father, for his father was dead — that was real economics. His father was a skeleton hanging from a tree, having been converted into vulture fuel. The loathsome bird hopped forward on its claws and scrutinized him. Yes, it accepted what it saw.
And accepting, spoke to him: as would a snake or a weasel or a bat, in tones too fast and subtle for his understanding. It was crucial that he know what the vulture was saying, but he would have to hear the fast voiceless voice many times before he could begin to decipher its message. He hoped he would never hear it again.
Uncaring, as if Tom were now no more significant than sagebrush or a yucca tree, the vulture craned its neck and turned around and began to walk away into the desert.
Heat shimmered around him.
Then, with the suddenness of dreams, he was no longer in the desert but in a lush green valley. The air was gray and full of moisture, the valley crowded with ferns and rocks and fallen trees. Far below him a man in a long coat continued the vulture's measured indifferent walk. He went away from the boy, indifferent to him. He became vague in the gray air. The man disappeared behind a boulder, emerged again, and vanished.
Where he had been, a large colorless bird flapped noiselessly away into the dark air.
Tom woke up, sure that his father was dead. His father was lying beside his mother in their bedroom, dead.
Tom's heart urged him forward, beat in pain and desolation against his ribs, his throat, made him throw off the sheet and walk across his dark room to the door. He groaned, felt that he was doomed to cry or scream. The darkness was hostile, enveloping. He slipped out of his room and went down the hall to his parents' room.
Trembling, he touched the knob. The scream lodged behind his tongue and tried to escape. Tom closed his eyes and gently pushed the door open. Then he opened his eyes and stepped into his parents' room.
He gasped, loudly enough to wake his mother. She was alone in the big double bed. On his father's side, the sheet lay as smoothly on the bed as upon an amputation.
'Tom?' she said.
'Dad.'
'Oh, Tommy, he's in the hospital. For tests. Don't you remember? He'll be back tomorrow. Don't worry, Tommy. It'll be all right.'
'Had a nightmare,' he said thickly, excused himself, and stumbled back to his own bed.
10
Poetry
Before lunch the next day, while Rachel Flanagan drove to St? Mary's to pick up Hartley, Tom sat at his desk and wrote the first and last poem of his life. He did not know why he suddenly wanted to write poetry — he never read it, barely knew what it looked like, thought of it as the sententious verse he had been made to learn in the Junior School. 'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said,/This is mine own, my native land!' His own little terrace of lines seemed so unlike real poetry to him that he did not bother to title it. This is what he wrote:
Man in the air, do you fly by your own wings?
Animals and birds speak to you
and you in the air understand them,
Football, magic, dreams trouble
my mind, cards tackle other cards
and scatter in a valley.
Man in the air, were you that bird?
Who magicked himself away in dark?
Man in the air, father me back. Now,
while you and I and he have time.
Two years later, when he struggled to produce an assigned poem for Mr. Fitz-Hallan's junior English class, he found that he was unable, even if he tried to follow Fitz-Hallan's advice. ('You could begin every line with the same word. Or name a color in every line. Or end every line with the name of a different country.') He pulled the old poem from his desk and in despair handed it in. The poem came back with an A and the comment in Fitz-Hallan's cursive hand that
This poem is sensitive and mature, and must have been difficult for you to write. Don't you have a title? I'd like to put it in the school magazine, with your permission.
Under the title 'When We All Lived in the Forest,' it appeared in the winter issue of the school magazine for that year.
11
Frosty the Snowman
In the big auditorium down the hall from our homeroom, we filed into the first two rows of seats for our first chapel. Mr. Broome, Mrs. Olinger, and a tall gray-haired man with a long severe face who looked like a bank president were seated on fan-back wooden chairs before us. To the right of them stood a lectern made of champagne-colored wood.
When I looked around I saw Mr. Weatherbee join the rank of teachers leaning against the rear wall. Between the lounging teachers and ourselves the rest of the school was taking its seats: sophomores directly behind us, then the juniors, and the seniors in the last rows. Nearly everyboy, I noticed, wore a blue button-down shirt and neatly striped tie under his jacket; many of the boys were wearing suits. Collectively, the juniors and seniors had a raffish look. Privilege encased them, surrounded them like armor. In the cast of their faces was the assumption that they would never have to take anything very seriously. For the first time in my life I saw the truth in the old proposition that the rich were better-looking.
Mr. Broome stood up and went to the lectern. He raked us in the first rows with his eyes, and then his face adjusted to a brisk, dry administrative mask. 'Boys. Let us begin with a prayer.'
A noise of shuffling, of activity, as a hundred boys bent over their knees.
'Give us the wisdom to know what is right, and the understanding to know what is good. Let us partake of knowledge, and use it to become better men. Let us all spend this new school year with hope, with diligence and discipline, and with ever-renewed application. Amen.'
He looked up. 'Now. We begin a new year. What does this mean? It means that you boys will be asked to do some demanding things. You will be asked to work as hard as you ever have, and to stretch your minds. College is a bit closer for all of you, and college is not for loafers. Therefore, we do not permit slackers and loafers here. Pay attention to this especially, seniors — you have many hurdles to get over this year. But our school does not attempt to educate the intellect at the expense of the spirit. And I am certain that spirit is shown first and foremost in school spirit. Some of you will not last out the year, and that will not always be due to stupidity. You can, indeed you must, demonstrate your school spirit in your bearing, in your classroom and athletic work, in your relations with one another. In honesty. In dedication. We will test all of these. I assure you, freshmen and seniors and all in between, that we do not hesitate to weed out our failures. Other schools have plenty of room for them. But we will not tolerate them. For it is the boy who fails, not the school. We give you the world, gentlemen, but you must show yourselves worthy of it. That is all. Seniors first, please, on the way out.'
'Frosty the Snowman,' Sherman muttered to me as we stood. 'Wait till you hear the one about the dogs.'
12
The tall gray-haired bankerlike man beside Mr. Broome was Mr. Thorpe, and he was already at his desk when we entered his room. This was one of the tiny paneled rooms in the old part of the school, so laden with atmospherics that it seemed to crowd in all around us. A boy with very thick blond hair and black glasses stood beside the teacher. They had obviously been talking, and fell silent as we took our seats.
Mr. Thorpe said, 'This is Miles Teagarden, a senior. He will take a few minutes of our time to explain freshman initiation. Listen to him. He is a prefect, one of the leaders of this school. Begin, Mr. Teagarden.' Thorpe leaned back in his chair and gazed benignly out at us.