A shooter is a ball from the bowler that, after it bounces, comes in much lower than the batsman had anticipated. The surprising placement can lead to many a fallen bail.
waiting for me—almost as if he knew I’d be on the late bus. He stood outside the house, Ned beside him on his leash.
“Really?” I said. “I just got home.”
“Something Ned is most keenly aware of, as you may conclude by the manner in which his back legs are crossed.”
“His back legs aren’t crossed.”
“Only because they are too short.” He handed me the leash. “Shall I accompany you?” he said.
I shrugged.
“Literacy skills are in short supply in your nation, young Master Carter. You would do well not to contribute to the problem.”
“I should say hi to my mother first.”
“Your mother has an appointment at St. Michael’s.”
I looked at him.
“She never goes to St. Michael’s,” I said.
“Then today would represent an exception to the rule. Come along.” So we set off around the block, Ned pulling out in front because he was pretty eager. Obviously.
The day had gotten even colder during the bus ride home, and the wind was taking off more of the early yellow leaves and blowing Ned’s ears back. He half closed his eyes against it and trotted on.
“You had an extra practice, then?” said the Butler.
“Carson Krebs and me.”
“An estimable young man. Living in India for any time at all will make a gentleman of you.”
“I suppose,” I said. We passed the Ketchums’ azaleas, the flowers almost all gone now. The Briggses’ rhododendrons, the Rockcastles’ holly hedge, the Koertges’ petunias—their flowers almost all gone too. When we got to the end of Billy Colt’s driveway, we stopped for Ned. “Hey, how did you know about the extra practice?” I said.
“I come from the land of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” the Butler said. “I deduced.”
“No you didn’t,” I said. “You knew about it.”
The Butler, for once, didn’t say anything.
“You talked to Krebs.”
Still nothing.
“You told him to meet me after school. You told him to set up a practice so . . . what? So he could talk to me? About my father? You told him about my father? How did you even know?”
“Are you accusing, young Master Carter?”
“Deducing. And accusing.”
“Is it your intention to allow Ned to relieve himself against the last of these day lilies?”
“It’s where he always does it. Stop stalling.”
The Butler waited for a moment. Then he said, slowly, “You will remember, young Master Carter, that I have taken rooms with Mr. Krebs, and—”
“Geez, so you blabbed everything.”
The Butler turned to me. “I do not blab, young Master Carter. I inquire, I learn, and I inform.”
“You blabbed.”
“And the British lament the lack of subtlety and nuance in the American exploitation of our language. How could we have possibly come to that conclusion?”
“You blabbed.”
“I hoped to encourage camaraderie during a time when you might feel a tad lost.”
“You still blabbed.”
“And I hoped to encourage it with a young man who has been in a similar situation. I believed there might be a kind of understanding that would be healthy for you both.”
And I don’t know why, but as Ned stood there, trying to figure out which day lily he was going to finish off with, I thought I was going to bawl. Or maybe throw up. Or maybe both.
In the Blue Mountains of Australia, you can walk and walk and never have to think about anything except the trail.
In the Blue Mountains, all you hear is the sound of water dripping and rushing and falling.
Sometimes white birds screeching. Hunting calls, slithering, scrambling.
In the Blue Mountains, I walked with my father for miles, and we never had to talk. When we stopped for lunch, we each knew what to do. When we stopped to make camp, we each knew what to do. Once I almost showed him Currier’s green marble, but I didn’t. “I wish it could always be like this,” he said one dark night while I was trying to see stars between the high leaves of the eucalyptus trees. I went to sleep with him humming Beethoven.
The Butler took Ned’s leash. “It’s all right, young Master Carter. Things will sort out.”
“How?”
He looked at me. “You will learn to sort them.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I couldn’t say that since I was about to bawl.
“Shall we go on home, then?” said the Butler. “Your mother will be back from her appointment.”
We did, but when we went up the steps, just before we went in the back door, I turned to the Butler and said, “You still blabbed.”
And the Butler said, “So I did.”
It rained on Saturday—more sleet than rain—so there was no cricket practice. It rained on Sunday, too, so according to the Butler, there was nothing for it but to do homework, which Annie, Charlie, and Emily finished in about ten seconds. This, said the Butler, gave Annie the splendid opportunity to spend a trifle more time on her piano scales, to be followed by her rhythmic exercises with the metronome, and he exiled her to the living room for an hour.
For enjoying Annie’s exile too much, Charlie and Emily, the Butler said, were to spend that same hour in their room practicing archeology, hoping, he said, to discover the color of the carpet that lay beneath their layers of debris.
“It’s blue,” said Emily.
The Butler bent down to her. “I challenge you to prove it to me,” he said.
And now, I want it to be clear that I didn’t say a thing about enjoying Annie’s exile.
But it didn’t matter.
The Butler stood up. “And so to you, young Master Carter,” he said.
“To me?”
He opened my social studies book and turned a few pages. “You are studying the rebellion of the American colonies?”
“The American Revolution,” I said. “I have to do a report on the Declaration of Independence.”
The Butler sighed. “That does seem a tad dreary.”
“No kidding.”
“On the other hand—”
You know how writers sometimes say that someone’s ears perked up? It was almost like that really happened with the Butler. He smiled and his eyes sort of gleamed, and he said, “Your report might become of interest if you were to articulate the British perspective on that document and its rash call for independence.”
I looked at him. “Why would I do that? The British didn’t think there was any reason for the Declaration of Independence.”
“And how discerning they were,” said the Butler.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that there was no justification for such a declaration,” said the Butler.
“How about taxation without representation?”
“An irksome thing, no doubt—and one faced annually by the inhabitants of your District of Columbia, which is currently the seat of your American government. And yet you do not see those citizens setting up barricades and seceding.”
“So? How many people actually live there? Like, fourteen?”
“Certainly, young Master Carter, you are not seriously arguing that matters of truth and justice should be decided numerically?”
“Okay, how about the Boston Massacre? You think it’s okay for a bunch of soldiers to shoot down innocent civilians?”
“Hurting innocent civilians is the purview of terrorists. However, as your own John Adams proved at trial, soldiers defending themselves from a mob in the process of attacking them is hardly shooting down innocent civilians. And John Adams, I hasten to remind you, became your second president, proving that some Americans, at least, may be wise and good men and still rise to power.”
“And all the threats by the British government?”
“Did the British government detain American officials and subsequently tar and feather them? Did the British government board British merchantmen and ransack them, throwing their cargo into the harbor? Did the British government attack the home of the governor of Massachusetts, scattering much of the work that was meant to be published as the history of that colony? Did the British government—”
“All right, all right. But I remember who I am, which is an American, and I can’t write stuff like that.”
“Of course not, young Master Carter, because trying to think objectively in order to discern and express truth is so much less worthy than parroting centuries-old propaganda.”
I stared at the Butler. He was winning, and he knew it.
“How about Benedict Arnold?” I said. “Huh? How about him?”
“I am not quite sure how Benedict Arnold represents a justification of your Declaration of Independence, unless you mean that document to express a rationale for boorish and illegal behavior—which of course it does. However, in the cause of objectivity, I note that the patriot Benedict Arnold, having been scorned for extraordinary acts of valor by your Congress, chose for a representative pittance to turn over an American stronghold to rightful hands for the noble purpose of ending a war ruinous to two countries, though he understood the calamitous consequences to his personal safety and estate. Is this the gentleman to whom you refer?”
I looked at the Butler. “Remember how you blabbed the other day?”
The Butler looked at me. “Young Master Carter, might I suggest that you work to overcome the bias of your position and begin with words to this effect: ‘Due to the madness of the times’ or ‘The revolutionaries, in their arrogance’ or ‘Ignoring the many kindnesses of their mother country in their headlong ambition.’ I suspect any of those will do.”
“And those aren’t biased at all,” I said.
“Let me brew some tea to inspire you,” the Butler said. “That is, unless you wish to emulate your ancestors and throw all the Earl Grey into the swimming pool next door.”
“Blabber,” I said.
The Butler went into the kitchen to brew the tea. He walked through the living room first, though, and asked Annie if she might pause in her scales and play “Rule Britannia!” please. Fortissimo.