IT TOOK LUTHER AND HIS LONG-LIPPED COUSIN TO show me the price of what had flown out of the window I’d meditated from. Our bus picked up the cousin from the side of the road and waited while the males pushed his car into a field. When they got back on, the topic moved from what had just blown up under his hood to how his clubs, the Future Farmers of America and the Junior National Rifle Association, were teaming up to kill enough hogs to finance an overnight excursion to the Outer Banks for the Future Homemakers of America club his sisters were in. Stuart was talking into my ear, but I told him I needed to listen to how these girls were going to see the play The Lost Colony, an outdoor drama about the settlers who became lost trying to establish a colony under grim circumstances, with the spotlight on Virginia Dare, the first little white girl born in the New World.
Laura and I had been planning to go for a while, and when I leaned up and asked Luther and his cousin whether it’d be possible for me to pay and swing a ride, Luther said, She’s the girl I told you about. Tell her what English you have due Monday.
I hadn’t noticed his facial features because his back had been to me, but when he turned around with his assignment, I told him I’d look at it and barely held back asking why he’d hacked off his bangs to where they couldn’t lay flat but had to dart outward from his head. It was the haircut you most associate with backwoods individuals, no one very bright, but he was organizing the charity donation for the club, so maybe his mother grabbed him with the scissors, very mad, and probably disgusted with his habit of pulling his bottom lip too far out and speaking with the inner-tissue moistness exposed.
Stuart whispered in my hair, Good God, I wish he’d stop. Huh, I’d charge double to have to look at that and write.
He could’ve been training his lip to have a tribal plate installed, and when he offered to pick up his work, I gave back the assignment, not wanting to spend Saturday dreading Sunday. Luther spoke low and extreme, I told him you keep a stock with you usually, Ellen. You couldn’t allowance him out one and do me a favor for him?
He has rhyming couplets due Monday, I told him, on nature, and I don’t have any, and the weekend’s already pushed, but anybody who can put together a way to get future housewives to a drama should be able to knock it out.
The cousin looked over his shoulder, saying, Never mind. I can draw one off the English book.
I said, Do what?
Draw, he said, out of the book.
When I asked if he’d ever turned in work he’d copied from his own book, he said, Not yet, hadn’t had to turn in.
He had the driver let him off at the bottom of his path, and the summary of what Luther said was his cousin didn’t understand that the poems in his English book or anywhere else belonged to the people who wrote them, and if they could be recited, he didn’t see why he couldn’t claim one. Luther couldn’t say how he’d gotten to high school, never having turned in a piece of creative work, but he seemed unlikely to stay, and his mother had asked Luther to lend a hand after his improved attitude and attendance had become the talk of their family.
Luther and I got off the bus together, and standing by the ditch, looking at the large cat sleeping in his yard, he said, I tried to tell him what you said to me about this time of year being when you can pick up the beat, but his speed goes from slow to freezing if he has to write something. When he crossed the road though, the teacher said he had to start turning writing in or they’d expel him, which put his mother in a swivet, crying, calling for people to throw in and help him.
I had Luther come in the house and eat a snack or two while he waited on the arm of the chair to tell me if it favored his cousin to say,
Nature
Nature is an old wise owl,
Nature is a bobcat howl.
Nature is the only way,
Birds know where to fly and stay.
Nature’s here now when it’s cool,
And when you heat to death in school.
Not in but outside a bus.
Nature will be on my farm of the future,
If Nature gets a grade I’m not used to.
When Luther said the poem was the image of his cousin and asked how much I wanted for it, I told him I was glad, but nothing. He said, I thought you were going to the fair tomorrow, but since you’re dying, I’ll tell my mother you need some soup run toward this way over the pasture.
No, I told him, not dying, not drawing poems out of a book or seized frozen either.
If I charge his cousin or anybody else for the one thing I know how to do fairly easily, I’d remind myself too much of the greedy-minded individuals from the classes, but I told Luther only, The people in Baltimore were at another extreme, and I don’t see myself going there.
While you were gone, he said, Stuart told everybody you should come home on account of they had a reputation for taking legs.
His great-uncle, I said, lost his leg to diabetes in the hospital up there is all, an amputation, not body snatching.
If it was me, he said, I’d charge Stuart to take him places and be around generally. The way he’s been, you wouldn’t miss the profit off the poems.
I said, Tell it, and followed him to the door, watching him leave, going along through gold hay pasture. Without someone stepping in to put a frame around the view and heighten what I saw into scenery, it couldn’t rise past a boy walking through a field on the side of a narrow road and be called a background. I needed to run behind him, shouting the one good, real and true thing I’d brought home from Baltimore. It felt urgent to announce how there was an individual who once loved humanity so creatively he’d called the place he’d found the Isle of Man. I also had to be struck by how the long-lengthed range of him was so giant-sized compared to the picture of him knocking his heels against a metal grammar grade desk. This tall, this rapid, the world must’ve been able to see us growing, moving physical upward.
When the school year started, the school nurse measured us together in her room, and there’d been the sensation of old sameness when I saw my percentile marks high on the height chart and in the low-middle on weight. Numbers didn’t help me recognize myself as much as the people there with me always had. When Martha, Luther, Stuart, and the rest went through a phase of their heads outgrowing their bodies, things were so jangled that the memory of what I saw in a mirror left when I blinked, but they reminded me that I was a girl, alive and well enough to report to school and stay available to pass through stages with other individuals.
If they smelled like the red, indented kickballs or like crayons, I knew I carried the odor of school on my hands and in my hair and liked to think it was pleasant to people, though now you’ll smell Windsong on us, or Aqua Velva and our legs reach out across wide aisles and fields. They’ve stayed simple to be around, except for Stuart, who turned an interfering, constant longing on me about a year ago, but you behave with some honor around what can seem like foolishness, because he’s a mistake waiting to happen with a heart of gold. The night before my mother’s funeral, my Aunt Nadine had come and taken all my mother’s things from the house, the gold compact mirror, scarves, her brush and comb, pearls, dresses, everything except a pair of stockings, which I wore rolled over and rubber-banded to school and elsewhere beyond that day until the holes were larger than my legs. The morning I returned to school after my mother’s funeral, Stuart knew what I needed and gave it to me in a way I could manage. When I reached under my desk, I found a sack of gobbed candy corn, some pocket change, and seven dilapidated dollar bills he’d put in a brown lunch sack with a note to say,
I diding lik the candy but I hope you will. Dont eat it all at one time. If you dislik it you can go to the stor for sum you do lik and thow this korn in the trach.
I cooding go to the stor becaws I am in trobel for mizbeehaven on the way home from your mamas funrel yes terday.
I wisseld wen you need to stay quiat after some body is ded. I pollogize. My daddy sed it was dizrespetfull of me and punnsht me and went to the stor by hisself widdout me but he came bak unmad and sed I culd help him shav tonite. He tole me your mama was a nise womn. Yuse the chang to git som nise foods.
This is the longess ledder in the werld for me. I muss stop.
Your frend,
Stuart.