First Light by Charles Baxter
“Where will they hit me?”
“In the nose. That’s where they always hit kids.”
“Hugh?”
“What?”
“I don’t want them to hit me.”
“Well, don’t sing.”
“Hugh?”
“What?”
“Are we rich?”
“I don’t think so.”
He turns the wagon around and starts to pull Dorsey back, passing the Lesley house again, and when he stops to catch his breath, he checks on his sister and sees that she is crying: no sobs, but wet eyes and large tears sliding down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I want to sing.”
“I guess you can’t.”
“It’s not fair.”
“What?”
“That rich people can hit.”
“It’s a fact.”
“Who told you?”
“This kid at school.”
“How did he know?”
“Some rich person hit him.”
“What was he doing?”
“I don’t know. Singing, I guess.”
“Where did they hit him?”
“In the nose, like I told you.”
“Did it hurt?”
“He said it was the worst thing ever.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
All the way back to the house the wagon saws and creaks and rattles, and when Hugh pulls his sister into the driveway, she lowers herself out of the Radio Flyer and runs unsteadily toward the side door that leads to the back hallway and the kitchen. Hugh wants to hide. He parks the wagon in its proper place in the garage, then runs out to the backyard and climbs up the apple tree. Here, obscured by apple blossoms, no one can see him. It isn’t until he’s most of the way up that he realized that, for almost every blossom, there is a bee. He’s surrounded by bees: honey bees, bumble bees, and bees with bright yellow stripes.
“Hugh?” It’s his mother.
“What?”
“Where are you?”
“Back here.”
Terrified by the bees, Hugh keeps himself still, like one of those wax boys he saw last summer in the wax museum in Spooner, Wisconsin. From his perch he sees his mother striding out onto the lawn, her arm on her hip, looking around for him.
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
A bee is flying around his face, an inch or so from his eyes. If the bee stings him in the eye, he’ll go blind, but only after his eye has swelled up to the size of a baseball and he has to go to work at the freak show in the State Fair. He squints his eyes shut.
“Hugh Bardwell Welch, come down from that tree this instant.”
“I can t.”
“Why not?”
“This tree is full of bees. If I come down I’ll get stung.”
“You should have thought of that when you climbed up. Young man, what have you been telling your sister?”
“I told her to stop singing, that’s all. It sounded awful. We were at the end of the block and I thought she was going to get everybody mad at us.”
“You said they were going to hit her.”
“I said they might.”
“Well, you know they wouldn’t.”
“I wasn’t sure. Have you ever heard Dorsey sing?”
“Yes. And another thing. You were lying.”
“I was not.”
“You said rich people can hit anyone they want to. You know they can’t. You know what you said was wrong.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you’re being silly. You’ve never seen a rich person hit anyone.”
“So? It could happen.”
His mother, exasperated, tugs at her right elbow with her left hand. She has the air of a woman who hates to argue with children. “I don’t want you to lie ever again to your sister. You mustn’t ever do that. She’s not like all your other friends.”
“Yes, she is. She’s just like them.”
“No, she isn’t. She doesn’t forget.”
“What?”
“Your sister doesn’t forget. She doesn’t forget anything. Haven’t you noticed? If you tell her something, it sticks to her. It always will. So when you talk to her, tell her the truth. Promise me.”
He mutters something, and his mother turns and walks away. It seems that she will not punish him after all. At once the air is filled with the smell of apple blossoms. He got away with it. The pounding of his heart subsides. He lowers himself toward the ground, and as he is placing his foot on the grass he feels an icepick’s point thrust into his hand. Scared and horrified by the pain, he yanks his hand away from the branch and sees a bee slowly but urgently detaching itself from its stinger and then flying unsteadily away. Yelling, Hugh runs into the house, screaming now, shouting. Between shouts he tells his mother and father that he’s been stung, and he holds out his pinked hand for evidence. His father rushes out to the backyard and returns to the kitchen with a handful of mud. Meanwhile, Hugh’s mother has rolled up some ice cubes into a dishcloth and is trying to apply it to Hugh’s hand, but it’s difficult to help him because he’s screaming so much and clutching his hand as it swells. He runs around the kitchen in a frantic circle. In the center of his pain, in the middle of this unjust punishment for something he never meant to do while he was trying to give her a ride as a simple favor after showing her his steam machine, he sees his sister, Dorsey, standing in the kitchen doorway, scared too by all his human noise, all his yelling. His eyes wet with his tears, Hugh sees something unbelievable, his sister sticking her tongue out. She turns her back on him and walks into the living room, and the pain is a lens for a split second and focuses a thought: I won’t forget this either; I will remember, too.
29
She toddles into his room and turns his Wood River gas station upside down, breaking off one of the crowns on top of the pumps. She puts his soldiers into her mouth and then dumps them back on the floor, covered with girl slime. While he’s watching “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on their new Bendix TV set, she appears out of nowhere, reaches up to the channel changer, and, before he can stop her, switches the set to “The Stu Erwin Show”; then she toddles out of the room, a deep smile on her face. She steps on his flashlight and opens it up and throws the batteries out of the window.
But so far they haven’t bought her a bed, because she can’t figure out how to climb out of her crib, and this is why, when she’s supposed to be taking a nap, Hugh comes into her room with a thick tablet of his mother’s typing paper. He sits himself down on the floor, heavy with purpose, and rips off the first sheet, crumpling it up. He tosses it like a basketball into her crib. The projectile startles her. She looks up at the ceiling, as if it had started to rain paper balls, and when Hugh’s second one comes sailing into the crib and hits her on the arm, she sees her brother and laughs.
She loves games. She picks up one of the balls and shoves it out through the slats in the side. This is not what Hugh had in mind. What he had in mind was to turn his sister’s crib, with his sister in it, into a wastebasket. So he crumples up paper again, more paper, more balls, and throws them in faster and faster, and as fast as he throws them in, Dorsey shoves them out again, so that they form a small waterfall of paper dropping over the side of the crib onto the floor.
With the persistence of desperation, Hugh continues crumpling the paper and throwing it into the crib, until the result he has been hoping for is partly achieved. There is now a one-inch layer of paper, like the first snow of winter, covering the blankets and pillows and stuffed animals in Dorsey’s crib. Her music bear is completely out of sight. Having thrown in all this paper, Hugh expects Dorsey to yell at him, to be unhappy, but she won’t be unhappy. She laughs and smiles and throws the paper balls up into the air over her head. Looking at him through the bars, she has the grateful expression of a prisoner or an animal at the zoo who is being entertained. She makes a happy gurgle deep in her throat and lets herself fall over sideways i
nto the snow sea of paper.
But Hugh won’t quit, despite the failure of his plan, his creation of joy in his sister instead of pain. He runs into his mother’s upstairs room, takes another tablet of typing paper, and returns to Dorsey’s floor, crumpling up more, trying to raise the level of trash higher, so that, maybe, Dorsey herself will disappear in all the paper, and they’ll take it out, and she won’t be there, and they’ll throw it all away …
“Hugh.”
He turns. It’s his mother, standing, arms crossed, in the suddenly very large doorway.
“I would like to know what you are doing.”
“Nothing.”
Her voice is calm. It’s always calm. “It doesn’t look like nothing. It looks like something. It looks like you are filling up your sister’s crib with paper.”
“I guess so.”
“And why are you doing that?”
The months of resentment blow out of him like a door opened suddenly into his heart. “She gets everything,” he says, “and you and Daddy are always looking at her and playing with her, and she breaks my stuff and puts it into her mouth, and she smells funny, and you’re always fussing over her, and she cries a lot, and you don’t care about me anymore, and when you do, it’s only to tell me off about stuff.”
“Hugh, first we’re going to empty Dorsey’s crib. Then we’ll talk. Bring in the wastebaskets from your room and from our bedroom, and we’ll clean this up.”
As soon as they have emptied all the papers, she takes him by the hand and leads him into his room. She shuts the door. Hugh stares at the lock. His mother kneels down and puts her hands on his shoulders. She looks directly into his eyes. After so many weeks of inattentiveness, this intensity from his mother makes Hugh’s knees quake. She’s going to tell him something terrible, he knows. He’s going to be sent away. They’re going to sell him for fifty dollars to his Aunt Marjorie.
“Now listen to me,” she says. “This is important. Are you listening to me?” He nods, able at least to move his head. “Your sister is younger than you are. She is always going to be younger than you are. She will never be older. That means something. What it means is that you may have to take care of her. Your father and I may not always be around. You are Dorsey’s older brother. That is a responsibility. Are you listening to me?”
Hugh nods, hopelessly.
“I want you to make me a promise,” she says. “I want you to promise that you will be a brother to Dorsey, and look after her, and watch out for her, always and forever.”
She stares at him, pounding her gaze into his heart.
“Do you promise? Raise your right hand and promise.”
The hand goes up. He nods, says “I promise,” and begins to cry.
“Good,” she says, rising. “Very good. I’m so glad that you promised. It’s very important.” Hugh’s mother is standing now, gazing down at him with a warm smile. It’s so clear: there’s nothing he can do except what she wants. Whatever he thinks, she already knows it, all the big and little thoughts that he’s had and is going to have. Quickly turning, she disappears from the room, leaving Hugh alone with himself, surrounded by his picture books, his stuffed animals, the toys broken by his sister. He clenches his hands into fists, then closes his eyes. He begins to jump. For as long as he can manage to do it, he throws his weight into the air and then with both heels against the floor, rising and falling.
30
Because the grandmother—the one who gives away doughnuts—had asked for a baptism, Hugh’s father and mother bring Dorsey down to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church eight weeks after the child is born. They also take Hugh along, to watch. He sits in the back of his father’s gray Nash with his grandmother, who tests him on trees all the way to the church. Her long curved finger smelling of Florida Water points past him, beyond the car, out through the window to where some tree stands, and Hugh says, “Oak,” and the doughnut grandmother says, “No, dear, that one is an elm.” So on the next guess Hugh says, “Elm,” and his grandmother says, “That was a very good guess, Hugh, darling, but, no, that tree is an ash.” Each time he makes a wrong guess—and they are all wrong, every one of them—his grandmother raises her right eyebrow and smiles, and Hugh thinks that it must be that she really likes him to be wrong. It’s why she’s there and is so old: so she can test him, and he can be wrong.
She has a voice crackly with age like someone on short-wave radio, and when she walks, her joints creak. She wears museum clothes. She takes Hugh’s hand and walks him into the church. His mother and father disappear with Dorsey into the back, and then they reappear with Mrs. Lesley and Mrs. Forster, who will be Dorsey’s godmothers, and Mr. Lesley, who will be the godfather. Hugh looks up at the ceiling throughout much of the service, at the thick crossbeams holding the church’s slant roof in place, so it doesn’t fall down and crash on everybody’s head and leave them crushed and screaming in a human heap. He squints to look at the stained-glass windows through his eyelashes. The colored pictures lose their outlines, but the colors, especially the reds and blues, come to life. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen any red as red as this glass, not even his own blood from his finger on the glass slide at the doctor’s office.
There is much standing up and sitting down and kneeling. Hugh starts to twiddle his thumbs. His grandmother brings down her hand, now wearing a white glove, over his two hands. “Watch,” she says quietly to him in her short-wave radio voice. Hugh wants a stick of gum, but his grandmother doesn’t have any. It’s hot in the church. It smells of everybody’s hot clothes. He can feel the collar of his white shirt squeezing against his neck, trying to choke him, he’s going to die and fall over and be buried in Five Oaks Cemetery, but all he does is cough.
The church has so many people that his cough is lost in a whole forest of coughs. Almost exactly behind him is mean Miss Hagburg, who doesn’t wave, sitting next to Mr. and Mrs. Polechuck. From where he’s sitting, he can also see Mr. and Mrs. Castlehoff—it’s easy to see Mrs. Castlehoff with her red hair, and Mr. Castlehoff’s bald head—and near Mrs. Castlehoff is Mrs. LaMonte, who sells antiques and firecrackers, and he can also see his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Melkie, and the McConnells and the Blairs. Most of Five Oaks is here, watching, and now Hugh tries to listen to what the minister, Mr. Valentine, is saying, but the words are the biggest ones he’s ever heard come out of a human being’s mouth.
“ ‘Regard,’ ” he says, “ ‘we beseech thee, the supplications of thy congregation; sanctify this Water to the mystical washing away of sin; and grant that this child, now to be baptized therein, may receive the fulness of thy grace …’ ” Hugh doesn’t understand any of it, not one word. The minister says, “Name this child.”
Hugh’s parents say, “Dorsey Evans Welch.”
The minister repeats the name, then grabs a little pitcher of water and pours it over his sister’s head. Hugh waits for her to screech, but she doesn’t. He’s noticed that already about his sister: she won’t cry unless she has to. The minister says more prayers, makes the sign of the cross over his sister’s head, and just when it seems to be over and he’s going to be able to make an escape to Bacon Drug, where he’s been promised an ice cream cone of any size he wants as long as he can eat it, the minister takes Dorsey back into his arms and tells the congregation that they may welcome her into the world. He walks slowly down the aisle, and the people on the aisle lean over and smile, and touch Dorsey lightly with their fingers on her forehead. Miss Hagburg bends down and kisses her. Mrs. Blair makes the sign of the cross over her. Hugh doesn’t know what any of this is for. Mrs. LaMonte touches Dorsey quickly on the cheek. There she goes, Dorsey, his sister, being carried toward the doors of the church, people from all over town bending down and kissing her and touching her and waving at her, and as she goes, Hugh squints at the whole thing, and it’s as though his sister is a magnet pulling at these people, so that they bend down over her and then straighten up again, bowing toward her, this baby. They’re kissing her into t
he world. Why do they love her? Hugh wants to know. They don’t even know her. He turns to his doughnut grandmother and yanks twice at her sleeve. She bends down, so that he can whisper into her ear. “Did they ever do this for me?” Hugh asks, and the old woman, smelling of doughnuts and Florida Water, says, “Yes.”
31
“Hugh. Son, wake up.” His father bends over him in the bed, his father unshaven, still in his blue pajamas, the morning light behind the shades in two thin strips. This is the morning, the first morning. Hugh tugs at his pillow and at the stuffed dragon he sleeps with. His father tells him to shake a leg, to shake both of his legs. His father’s breath smells of the night. It smells of cigarettes and his father. He pulls the bedspread aside and places his feet on the cold wood floor. With his father’s whispered help he lowers his pajamas down and raises his T-shirt up, and even in the warmth of morning, Hugh feels cold and hugs himself. After finding his son’s clothes in the dresser and laying them out where Hugh can pull and tug himself into them, Hugh’s father yanks at the window shade, and there, beyond the front lawn of the house, and the street outside, and even beyond Five Oaks itself, down the hill next to the lake, beyond all this of course is the sun, streaming into Hugh’s east-facing window, cutting in a rectangular strip across his bed and the floor. Rubbing his eyes, the boy walks into the bathroom to pee. He holds his penis down and the water spurts into the toilet in a sort of greenish-yellow stream. When he is finished, he remembers to flush and then to wash his hands. He is careful; his mother is gone, and he wants to please his father.
Downstairs, this one morning, his father has made him scrambled eggs and bacon and toast, bacon exactly the way he likes it, fried hard so that it’s stiff, so that you can hold it up, all the fat gone. Deep within the eggs is garlic powder, which his father pours over everything he cooks. Hugh smears strawberry jam on the toast, and, though he has remembered to put the napkin in his lap, he still spills a gob of jam over his shirt. His father sees it and says, “That’s all right. But we’ll have to find you a clean shirt. We can’t have you going in, looking like that.”
“In the nose. That’s where they always hit kids.”
“Hugh?”
“What?”
“I don’t want them to hit me.”
“Well, don’t sing.”
“Hugh?”
“What?”
“Are we rich?”
“I don’t think so.”
He turns the wagon around and starts to pull Dorsey back, passing the Lesley house again, and when he stops to catch his breath, he checks on his sister and sees that she is crying: no sobs, but wet eyes and large tears sliding down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I want to sing.”
“I guess you can’t.”
“It’s not fair.”
“What?”
“That rich people can hit.”
“It’s a fact.”
“Who told you?”
“This kid at school.”
“How did he know?”
“Some rich person hit him.”
“What was he doing?”
“I don’t know. Singing, I guess.”
“Where did they hit him?”
“In the nose, like I told you.”
“Did it hurt?”
“He said it was the worst thing ever.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
All the way back to the house the wagon saws and creaks and rattles, and when Hugh pulls his sister into the driveway, she lowers herself out of the Radio Flyer and runs unsteadily toward the side door that leads to the back hallway and the kitchen. Hugh wants to hide. He parks the wagon in its proper place in the garage, then runs out to the backyard and climbs up the apple tree. Here, obscured by apple blossoms, no one can see him. It isn’t until he’s most of the way up that he realized that, for almost every blossom, there is a bee. He’s surrounded by bees: honey bees, bumble bees, and bees with bright yellow stripes.
“Hugh?” It’s his mother.
“What?”
“Where are you?”
“Back here.”
Terrified by the bees, Hugh keeps himself still, like one of those wax boys he saw last summer in the wax museum in Spooner, Wisconsin. From his perch he sees his mother striding out onto the lawn, her arm on her hip, looking around for him.
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
A bee is flying around his face, an inch or so from his eyes. If the bee stings him in the eye, he’ll go blind, but only after his eye has swelled up to the size of a baseball and he has to go to work at the freak show in the State Fair. He squints his eyes shut.
“Hugh Bardwell Welch, come down from that tree this instant.”
“I can t.”
“Why not?”
“This tree is full of bees. If I come down I’ll get stung.”
“You should have thought of that when you climbed up. Young man, what have you been telling your sister?”
“I told her to stop singing, that’s all. It sounded awful. We were at the end of the block and I thought she was going to get everybody mad at us.”
“You said they were going to hit her.”
“I said they might.”
“Well, you know they wouldn’t.”
“I wasn’t sure. Have you ever heard Dorsey sing?”
“Yes. And another thing. You were lying.”
“I was not.”
“You said rich people can hit anyone they want to. You know they can’t. You know what you said was wrong.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you’re being silly. You’ve never seen a rich person hit anyone.”
“So? It could happen.”
His mother, exasperated, tugs at her right elbow with her left hand. She has the air of a woman who hates to argue with children. “I don’t want you to lie ever again to your sister. You mustn’t ever do that. She’s not like all your other friends.”
“Yes, she is. She’s just like them.”
“No, she isn’t. She doesn’t forget.”
“What?”
“Your sister doesn’t forget. She doesn’t forget anything. Haven’t you noticed? If you tell her something, it sticks to her. It always will. So when you talk to her, tell her the truth. Promise me.”
He mutters something, and his mother turns and walks away. It seems that she will not punish him after all. At once the air is filled with the smell of apple blossoms. He got away with it. The pounding of his heart subsides. He lowers himself toward the ground, and as he is placing his foot on the grass he feels an icepick’s point thrust into his hand. Scared and horrified by the pain, he yanks his hand away from the branch and sees a bee slowly but urgently detaching itself from its stinger and then flying unsteadily away. Yelling, Hugh runs into the house, screaming now, shouting. Between shouts he tells his mother and father that he’s been stung, and he holds out his pinked hand for evidence. His father rushes out to the backyard and returns to the kitchen with a handful of mud. Meanwhile, Hugh’s mother has rolled up some ice cubes into a dishcloth and is trying to apply it to Hugh’s hand, but it’s difficult to help him because he’s screaming so much and clutching his hand as it swells. He runs around the kitchen in a frantic circle. In the center of his pain, in the middle of this unjust punishment for something he never meant to do while he was trying to give her a ride as a simple favor after showing her his steam machine, he sees his sister, Dorsey, standing in the kitchen doorway, scared too by all his human noise, all his yelling. His eyes wet with his tears, Hugh sees something unbelievable, his sister sticking her tongue out. She turns her back on him and walks into the living room, and the pain is a lens for a split second and focuses a thought: I won’t forget this either; I will remember, too.
29
She toddles into his room and turns his Wood River gas station upside down, breaking off one of the crowns on top of the pumps. She puts his soldiers into her mouth and then dumps them back on the floor, covered with girl slime. While he’s watching “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on their new Bendix TV set, she appears out of nowhere, reaches up to the channel changer, and, before he can stop her, switches the set to “The Stu Erwin Show”; then she toddles out of the room, a deep smile on her face. She steps on his flashlight and opens it up and throws the batteries out of the window.
But so far they haven’t bought her a bed, because she can’t figure out how to climb out of her crib, and this is why, when she’s supposed to be taking a nap, Hugh comes into her room with a thick tablet of his mother’s typing paper. He sits himself down on the floor, heavy with purpose, and rips off the first sheet, crumpling it up. He tosses it like a basketball into her crib. The projectile startles her. She looks up at the ceiling, as if it had started to rain paper balls, and when Hugh’s second one comes sailing into the crib and hits her on the arm, she sees her brother and laughs.
She loves games. She picks up one of the balls and shoves it out through the slats in the side. This is not what Hugh had in mind. What he had in mind was to turn his sister’s crib, with his sister in it, into a wastebasket. So he crumples up paper again, more paper, more balls, and throws them in faster and faster, and as fast as he throws them in, Dorsey shoves them out again, so that they form a small waterfall of paper dropping over the side of the crib onto the floor.
With the persistence of desperation, Hugh continues crumpling the paper and throwing it into the crib, until the result he has been hoping for is partly achieved. There is now a one-inch layer of paper, like the first snow of winter, covering the blankets and pillows and stuffed animals in Dorsey’s crib. Her music bear is completely out of sight. Having thrown in all this paper, Hugh expects Dorsey to yell at him, to be unhappy, but she won’t be unhappy. She laughs and smiles and throws the paper balls up into the air over her head. Looking at him through the bars, she has the grateful expression of a prisoner or an animal at the zoo who is being entertained. She makes a happy gurgle deep in her throat and lets herself fall over sideways i
But Hugh won’t quit, despite the failure of his plan, his creation of joy in his sister instead of pain. He runs into his mother’s upstairs room, takes another tablet of typing paper, and returns to Dorsey’s floor, crumpling up more, trying to raise the level of trash higher, so that, maybe, Dorsey herself will disappear in all the paper, and they’ll take it out, and she won’t be there, and they’ll throw it all away …
“Hugh.”
He turns. It’s his mother, standing, arms crossed, in the suddenly very large doorway.
“I would like to know what you are doing.”
“Nothing.”
Her voice is calm. It’s always calm. “It doesn’t look like nothing. It looks like something. It looks like you are filling up your sister’s crib with paper.”
“I guess so.”
“And why are you doing that?”
The months of resentment blow out of him like a door opened suddenly into his heart. “She gets everything,” he says, “and you and Daddy are always looking at her and playing with her, and she breaks my stuff and puts it into her mouth, and she smells funny, and you’re always fussing over her, and she cries a lot, and you don’t care about me anymore, and when you do, it’s only to tell me off about stuff.”
“Hugh, first we’re going to empty Dorsey’s crib. Then we’ll talk. Bring in the wastebaskets from your room and from our bedroom, and we’ll clean this up.”
As soon as they have emptied all the papers, she takes him by the hand and leads him into his room. She shuts the door. Hugh stares at the lock. His mother kneels down and puts her hands on his shoulders. She looks directly into his eyes. After so many weeks of inattentiveness, this intensity from his mother makes Hugh’s knees quake. She’s going to tell him something terrible, he knows. He’s going to be sent away. They’re going to sell him for fifty dollars to his Aunt Marjorie.
“Now listen to me,” she says. “This is important. Are you listening to me?” He nods, able at least to move his head. “Your sister is younger than you are. She is always going to be younger than you are. She will never be older. That means something. What it means is that you may have to take care of her. Your father and I may not always be around. You are Dorsey’s older brother. That is a responsibility. Are you listening to me?”
Hugh nods, hopelessly.
“I want you to make me a promise,” she says. “I want you to promise that you will be a brother to Dorsey, and look after her, and watch out for her, always and forever.”
She stares at him, pounding her gaze into his heart.
“Do you promise? Raise your right hand and promise.”
The hand goes up. He nods, says “I promise,” and begins to cry.
“Good,” she says, rising. “Very good. I’m so glad that you promised. It’s very important.” Hugh’s mother is standing now, gazing down at him with a warm smile. It’s so clear: there’s nothing he can do except what she wants. Whatever he thinks, she already knows it, all the big and little thoughts that he’s had and is going to have. Quickly turning, she disappears from the room, leaving Hugh alone with himself, surrounded by his picture books, his stuffed animals, the toys broken by his sister. He clenches his hands into fists, then closes his eyes. He begins to jump. For as long as he can manage to do it, he throws his weight into the air and then with both heels against the floor, rising and falling.
30
Because the grandmother—the one who gives away doughnuts—had asked for a baptism, Hugh’s father and mother bring Dorsey down to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church eight weeks after the child is born. They also take Hugh along, to watch. He sits in the back of his father’s gray Nash with his grandmother, who tests him on trees all the way to the church. Her long curved finger smelling of Florida Water points past him, beyond the car, out through the window to where some tree stands, and Hugh says, “Oak,” and the doughnut grandmother says, “No, dear, that one is an elm.” So on the next guess Hugh says, “Elm,” and his grandmother says, “That was a very good guess, Hugh, darling, but, no, that tree is an ash.” Each time he makes a wrong guess—and they are all wrong, every one of them—his grandmother raises her right eyebrow and smiles, and Hugh thinks that it must be that she really likes him to be wrong. It’s why she’s there and is so old: so she can test him, and he can be wrong.
She has a voice crackly with age like someone on short-wave radio, and when she walks, her joints creak. She wears museum clothes. She takes Hugh’s hand and walks him into the church. His mother and father disappear with Dorsey into the back, and then they reappear with Mrs. Lesley and Mrs. Forster, who will be Dorsey’s godmothers, and Mr. Lesley, who will be the godfather. Hugh looks up at the ceiling throughout much of the service, at the thick crossbeams holding the church’s slant roof in place, so it doesn’t fall down and crash on everybody’s head and leave them crushed and screaming in a human heap. He squints to look at the stained-glass windows through his eyelashes. The colored pictures lose their outlines, but the colors, especially the reds and blues, come to life. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen any red as red as this glass, not even his own blood from his finger on the glass slide at the doctor’s office.
There is much standing up and sitting down and kneeling. Hugh starts to twiddle his thumbs. His grandmother brings down her hand, now wearing a white glove, over his two hands. “Watch,” she says quietly to him in her short-wave radio voice. Hugh wants a stick of gum, but his grandmother doesn’t have any. It’s hot in the church. It smells of everybody’s hot clothes. He can feel the collar of his white shirt squeezing against his neck, trying to choke him, he’s going to die and fall over and be buried in Five Oaks Cemetery, but all he does is cough.
The church has so many people that his cough is lost in a whole forest of coughs. Almost exactly behind him is mean Miss Hagburg, who doesn’t wave, sitting next to Mr. and Mrs. Polechuck. From where he’s sitting, he can also see Mr. and Mrs. Castlehoff—it’s easy to see Mrs. Castlehoff with her red hair, and Mr. Castlehoff’s bald head—and near Mrs. Castlehoff is Mrs. LaMonte, who sells antiques and firecrackers, and he can also see his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Melkie, and the McConnells and the Blairs. Most of Five Oaks is here, watching, and now Hugh tries to listen to what the minister, Mr. Valentine, is saying, but the words are the biggest ones he’s ever heard come out of a human being’s mouth.
“ ‘Regard,’ ” he says, “ ‘we beseech thee, the supplications of thy congregation; sanctify this Water to the mystical washing away of sin; and grant that this child, now to be baptized therein, may receive the fulness of thy grace …’ ” Hugh doesn’t understand any of it, not one word. The minister says, “Name this child.”
Hugh’s parents say, “Dorsey Evans Welch.”
The minister repeats the name, then grabs a little pitcher of water and pours it over his sister’s head. Hugh waits for her to screech, but she doesn’t. He’s noticed that already about his sister: she won’t cry unless she has to. The minister says more prayers, makes the sign of the cross over his sister’s head, and just when it seems to be over and he’s going to be able to make an escape to Bacon Drug, where he’s been promised an ice cream cone of any size he wants as long as he can eat it, the minister takes Dorsey back into his arms and tells the congregation that they may welcome her into the world. He walks slowly down the aisle, and the people on the aisle lean over and smile, and touch Dorsey lightly with their fingers on her forehead. Miss Hagburg bends down and kisses her. Mrs. Blair makes the sign of the cross over her. Hugh doesn’t know what any of this is for. Mrs. LaMonte touches Dorsey quickly on the cheek. There she goes, Dorsey, his sister, being carried toward the doors of the church, people from all over town bending down and kissing her and touching her and waving at her, and as she goes, Hugh squints at the whole thing, and it’s as though his sister is a magnet pulling at these people, so that they bend down over her and then straighten up again, bowing toward her, this baby. They’re kissing her into t
31
“Hugh. Son, wake up.” His father bends over him in the bed, his father unshaven, still in his blue pajamas, the morning light behind the shades in two thin strips. This is the morning, the first morning. Hugh tugs at his pillow and at the stuffed dragon he sleeps with. His father tells him to shake a leg, to shake both of his legs. His father’s breath smells of the night. It smells of cigarettes and his father. He pulls the bedspread aside and places his feet on the cold wood floor. With his father’s whispered help he lowers his pajamas down and raises his T-shirt up, and even in the warmth of morning, Hugh feels cold and hugs himself. After finding his son’s clothes in the dresser and laying them out where Hugh can pull and tug himself into them, Hugh’s father yanks at the window shade, and there, beyond the front lawn of the house, and the street outside, and even beyond Five Oaks itself, down the hill next to the lake, beyond all this of course is the sun, streaming into Hugh’s east-facing window, cutting in a rectangular strip across his bed and the floor. Rubbing his eyes, the boy walks into the bathroom to pee. He holds his penis down and the water spurts into the toilet in a sort of greenish-yellow stream. When he is finished, he remembers to flush and then to wash his hands. He is careful; his mother is gone, and he wants to please his father.
Downstairs, this one morning, his father has made him scrambled eggs and bacon and toast, bacon exactly the way he likes it, fried hard so that it’s stiff, so that you can hold it up, all the fat gone. Deep within the eggs is garlic powder, which his father pours over everything he cooks. Hugh smears strawberry jam on the toast, and, though he has remembered to put the napkin in his lap, he still spills a gob of jam over his shirt. His father sees it and says, “That’s all right. But we’ll have to find you a clean shirt. We can’t have you going in, looking like that.”