Excerpt: The Boyhood of Jonathan Force

I

HERO

I was born into Christmas. It’s true, and I can tell you everything about it. I must have been about one. I was lying there, curled into the damp, sweet, lovely warmth of my own sleep when I opened my eyes to it. There was that milky winter light that lets you see the air, and the gray and pink swirls of the wallpaper were moving a little in the light, and through the dark wooden archway of the open door I could see the spangles and flashing jewels on the evergreen boughs in the living room. The plastic kitchen radio was playing Joy to the World, which I did not know as words then, but I knew it, and it grew in me, swelled up in me until, just as I knew she would, my mother’s beautiful dark figure filled the doorway arch, and for a moment all I knew was the shape of her red mouth, which said, “Merry Christmas, Jonathan Force.”

Then there was laughter, mother’s and mine, fused together, and I was lifted wonderfully, still wet and warm, up into her arms, and over her shoulder the tree with its sparkles and pine sweet smell was no longer striped by the slats of my crib, and I was carried from a happiness to a still greater happiness so fine and so full I did not believe I could bear it.

And that is the way Christmas has always been in my life—being picked up and carried into an aching beauty, a beauty that opens and opens. Christmas was the first thing I really knew, and since that time the other necessary and important things have gathered themselves to that first knowing. Of course the family gathered, in the morning my mother and father and sister, later in the day my grandparents Nana and Papa and their sons, my uncles. There were presents, mounds of brightly wrapped and bowed presents under the tree, then as guests arrived, box loads and bag loads of more presents. There were presents stacked on the lamp tables, heaped on the piano, and so many of them opened and unopened on the floor that we waded through wrappings and tissue and swizzles of ribbon in order to cross the room. From the midday arrival of guests until their departure late that night there would be a fire in the fireplace, a strong crackling blaze when first lit, then quieting to a radiant mound of lavender, blue and buttery gold. The scent of the burning hardwood met the blood-rich cooking smells of the slowly roasting turkey, the sage dressing, creamed onions, apple pies and pumpkin pies. As the dinner was readied, drinks were prepared, amber cocktails in martini glasses with delicate stems. Secure in the vee of each glass was the beckoning scarlet orb of a candied cherry. In time it was understood that these were to be saved for me, The ritual of handing them over became to me a kind of sacrament, token after token of pulpy cherry sweetness, of Christmas itself, held between tongue and palate for as long as I could stand it.

In the course of what must have been many years, Christmas came to include the out doors. I always felt that the secret of the day, the secret of winter itself, was the lively tension between outdoors and in, between shallow breathed ventures out into the cold and blessed relief inside. From my first winter swaddling at the hands of others, I was always taken with the elaborate and rather formal ritual of girding for the cold: knitted caps, long heavy coats the arms of which grew stiff in the freezing air, woolen scarves sealing the neck, mittens which within minutes of true cold reduced the fingered hand to a numbed club, high black rubber boots fastened tight with complicated metal clasps. To be outdoors in winter cold was stolen time. I was out where seemingly no one was supposed to be. The cold clarified everything. It seemed to want silence. The easiest thing became effortful in the cold, but marvelous for that. Then snow came into the picture, the whirl and blur of it in the air, thrilling the first time, thrilling always. Snow was specks and clumps of lively light against the gray of winter afternoons. Snow at night, silent snow, whitening the void, is nothing less than holy.

I cannot tell you where I got this picture, although it is a fixture in my Christmas memory. The impression is so cold and fresh that I could be there now. It is deep winter, and I am stopped still in a sloping field of cedar trees. It is late afternoon, and the sun is about to set. The sky is clear, and as I look out toward the horizon, the cold glass blue overhead passes into vivid rose and peach and shimmering gold as it meets the sinking sun on the horizon line. I am fascinated by the look of the snow resting on the branches of the cedars, how the snow holds rose and smoky blue afternoon light, and all of it is saying “afterward,” as if beauty itself was explaining the end of beauty.

Somehow the snow on the cedar bows in the declining afternoon and the cedar boughs sparkling with lights and ornaments beyond my crib on that first Christmas morning form a single picture, and it is all Christmas, and it is forever about to begin and yet has always been over.

A few years after my mother gathered me up and walked me under the archway into Christmas, I was taken to church one winter night and beheld Jesus in the manger. I recall that it was a Lutheran church, not that we were Lutherans or that the idea of Lutheran would have meant anything to me at the time. But my mother had said it was the Lutheran church, and that became important to me. The sanctuary was darkened for a Christmas service of some kind, and it smelled of the musty hymnals and of the slightly sweet, slightly sour smell of flowers standing out too long. A bright light from high up in the apse beamed down on the manger where colorfully robed shepherds knelt and little goats and lambs looked on. The light shone directly on the baby’s face in his crib.

This was the holy child. I don’t know if mother told me or I heard it in the carols or if I just knew it. But everything that evening was about the holy child, how long the world had waited and now here he was. The world had been waiting for a baby. I had only to hear that to realize I had always known it. Of course it was a holy child. Wasn’t I?

Everything about that Lutheran service for the holy child was serious, gentle, and strangely sad. The baby Jesus had always been coming.

And it came to pass in those days,
that there went out a decree
from Caesar Augustus that all
the world should be taxed…

It was important to kings, it was important to wise men. Angels and shepherds were waiting for it. The waiting was unbearable and very beautiful. It was like waiting for Christmas to come. Silent night, holy night. Then the announcement, the arrival—even more beautiful, but cheerful and loud. Hark the herald, joy to the world. It came upon a midnight clear in the sanctuary of the Lutheran church.

Chapter 2

So that was the first of the Three Great Things, the coming of the holy child, and just as it was in my case, the coming involved Christmas. But there was the other story about my coming. In the course of my growing up I heard it again and again, and when I knew enough to ask, I would check on the facts and details. The other story is not a very good one, far, far from beautiful and even farther from Christmas.

I was born during the war, World War II, near the end. Later I was confused in school about the war because I felt I had long known the enemies. I had lived with them, and they were good, kind people—my family. That is, my mother’s parents, Nana and Papa, were English and German. They had fallen in love and gotten married after the previous war, World War I, in which my German grandfather who had become an American and was fighting for the Americans got shot in the leg and was shipped to England where my English grandmother met him, nursed him and fell in love with him. She followed him back to Chicago where they married and had my mother and my uncles. They were such kind, beautiful people, and they made such a beautiful house.

England was married to Germany in that house, and when my father got drafted into the Navy, he had to leave his job as a trumpet player in the dance band and board a battleship in the Pacific. My mother worked as a secretary in an office, but when she got pregnant with me and then very sick she had to quit work and move in with her parents. There wasn’t much money then, she told me. The Navy pay wasn’t very much, and so she could no longer afford her own place which, she told me when I was much older, made her feel like a girl again and not a woman, and this made her feel worthless and small. Then she got sick and almost died. The good doctors, people told her later, were all in the service, and she had a bad one who didn’t understand what was wrong with her. We know what was wrong now, a condition called edema. Edema made my mother swell up to almost twice her size. Her legs and arms filled with fluid, and her joints—elbows, knees, ankles—felt as if they were about to burst open. My mother told me about sitting in a chair and watching in helpless tears as her legs filled with fluid and her ankles swelled enormously so that the flesh of her legs spilled out over the sides of her shoes. I cannot bear picturing my mother picturing this. She had been such a beautiful woman. The edema, doctors told her later, could have killed her. Moreover, there were simple medicines that could have helped, but mother’s doctor didn’t know about them, and she suffered. Possibly, I had edema too, although no one has ever told me that. It cannot have been good, my mother so unhappy, feeling no longer a grown woman but a little girl back in her childhood room in her parents’ house, her husband far away on a battle ship in the Pacific where, he wrote, the Japanese suicide planes dive-bombed the ship, the U.S.S. West Virginia, as often as they could. What could she do but sit there waiting for the swelling to subside, wondering if my father would ever come home, wondering if she would ever have her exquisite woman’s body again?

Whether or not the edema was to blame, I was cut out of my mother by a Caesarean section, which further weakened her, and I came into the world early, undersized, and quite ill. I had pneumonia, of which I have no recollection, except in a kind of bodily awareness that has inclined me to bronchial troubles all my life.

I had to stay in the hospital two weeks after my mother was able to go home. I wish I could remember what that was like, or maybe I don’t. I’m sure my mother came to see me, or somebody, probably Nana, did. They had to have started feeding me, formula in a bottle, not my mother’s breast. It feels funny to have only a voided impression of all of that, to have no feeling or recollection of any kind until the Christmas story. By then my father was back from the war. I can’t remember anything about that either. Sometimes I think I do, but it’s just the memory of a photograph we have of my father, still in his navy uniform, the old fashioned dark blue wool kind with the white stripes around the open neck on the jersey and the square flap at the back. My father is standing in our back yard in that uniform, looking pleased and kind of jaunty. With one arm he is holding me to his chest in a blanket, and his other hand is gripping his trumpet under the valves, as if he has just played a riff. He doesn’t look quite related to me in the picture. He looks like a boy.

As hard as my mother’s life was while my father was away in the Pacific, she said it didn’t get much better after he returned. My father had to get work and save some money before they could move out of my grandparents’ house and live on their own again. My mother didn’t like this at all, and one day my father made a big mistake that made him feel uncomfortable for years. It happened one morning when he came back into the house after doing an errand. He went upstairs to the bedroom to look for mother. He said he had a sense of her in the room as he entered. She was leaning over the bed, making it up, and my father reached out and, he said, gave her bottom a good squeeze. But it wasn’t my mother; it was Nana. She was startled and then quite angry. My father was so surprised and embarrassed he couldn’t say anything. He tried to explain and to apologize, but Nana was too flustered to hear him, and she bolted from the room. Once, not too many years before he died, my father tried to tell the story as a funny story, but even then I could feel the misery in it. But I think that goosing of Nana accelerated my mother and father’s departure plans and their eventual independence.

There are plenty of stories like that from that period in my waking up to the world—stories that I will never forget, stories that trouble me or that for some reason won’t subside into oblivion, but they are not good, not holy and alive like the Christmas story. For a long stretch there I felt not only far from a holy child, I felt that the child I was and the things that kept happening to me were a teasing mockery of what I sensed should have been a much, much better world. There was only one miracle that I remember from that time. It involved the biggest turtle I have ever seen.

One cool gray spring morning my mother let me out into our small fenced in back yard to play. There was not much to do in the yard. There was no swing or sand box, just a narrow concrete walkway to a back gate that opened up onto a narrow alley of cinders. I was shuffling along this walk toward the alley, where it was possible to get a glimpse sometimes of the trash man’s blinkered horse or of a stray cat out on a rove or possibly rats, which were known to slither about the trash cans set out in the alley. About half way down the walk I saw something amazing, the large, oily looking black shell of a turtle. It was enormous, half as big as I was, its girth wider than the walkway. I didn’t think turtle at first, because all I could see was the great heavy looking shell, but then its black scaly head came out a little and looked around, and I knew. I could not have seen a real turtle before, but I knew this was one, and I my heart flew up, and I jumped back a little because I was afraid it might bite me. I wanted it to move, so I stamped my feet on the concrete, but all it did was draw in its head. I just stood there, bent at the waist, looking hard at the shell, I think for quite a while. I was certain this was an agent from the other world. Then it moved a little, and I was startled again. It occurred to me that mother must see this. I felt it would amaze her to see it, amaze her that I had found it. Inside, mother was doing dishes, and it took her a long time to make sense of what I was telling her and even longer before she would come outside into the yard to look. When we got to the spot, the turtle was gone. I ran to the back fence hoping to catch sight of it, but it was gone. I assured my mother it had been there, indicating its size with my arms. My mother smiled in an odd way, which let me know she didn’t believe me. Where would a turtle live around here, she asked. We lived in a densely packed neighborhood of wooden shingled houses, close to the elevated train, far from any open land or rivers or streams. A huge black turtle was as likely to show up in our yard as a puma or an ostrich. Mother went back into the house, and I remember standing for some time in the empty yard, thinking. The turtle, for some reason, had appeared, and I understood that I must bear the burden of this kind of knowledge alone.

Blackie, our duck, was not quite a miracle, but I will never forget him. I was four by then, my sister Annabel was six, and we had moved to a fresh, raw housing development on the prairie edge of Chicago’s northwest side. My father worked for a big bank now in the city, and the bank staff was invited to a summer outing in a state park. There was a picnic, boat rides, and races and games and contests for the kids. There were contests for the grownups, too, and one of them, which fascinated me, was to ring a duck. The rings were wooden hoops about the circumference of a small pie. For a quarter you got three hoops and tried to toss them around the neck of one of the ducks huddled in a little pen about ten yards behind the throwing counter. I stood a long time watching, and nobody succeeded in landing a hoop around a duck’s neck. The exercise was actually kind of upsetting. The tossed hoops grazed the ducks’ heads and flanks and sent them scuttling and quacking into each other. My father appeared and bought three hoops. I was barely paying attention, and then there was a tremendous shriek of surprise and laughter, because my father’s toss had fallen around the neck of a black duck. That meant we had won him; he was ours. Annabel was so surprised and happy she started to cry. She loved animals of all kinds. She cut out pictures of especially cute ones and taped them to the top of her dresser. The man selling the rings said the ducks’ wings were “clipped” so that they couldn’t fly away. My dad held the duck in the crook of his elbow and exchanged jokes and cracks with the people standing around, and then he handed the duck down to Annabel, who was so transported with pleasure she could not speak.

As we drove home in the car afterward, Annabel still clutching and petting the duck, my mother and father talked about what we would do with it. There was the terrifying suggestion in the air that we would have to “get rid” of it. I felt Annabel tense up at the words, her eyes welling with tears. From the back seat I shouted out, “We’re keeping it! We’re keeping it!” to make Annabel feel better. When we got home, my father went down into the basement and reworked a big cardboard box our washing machine had come in, and put the duck inside. Mother and Annabel brought down a little bowl of water and some cut up vegetables for the duck then left us alone with it. For a long time we just watched it, and Annabel decided to name it Blackie, as it was a black duck. I was now as mesmerized and in love with Blackie as Annabel was. This was partly because the force of her feeling was so overwhelming I felt drawn up into it. But there was something about the duck itself that was impossible to resist. It was just so beautiful, if that is the word, or cute. Something about it was more vivid and wonderful than we were. I could not stop looking at it. The perfectly rounded top of its shiny black head somehow matched the beautiful curve of its breast, and its bright black eyes flashed a fiery fleck of gold in the basement light.

It was not easy to pick Blackie up and hold him, because he would get excited and push away with surprising force with his little legs and duck feet. But every few minutes we could not bear not to pick him up again and hold him close, so we took turns grabbing him up out of the box until in one clumsy attempt he got away from us and disappeared between the furnace and the basement wall. Even my father with the aid of a broom handle could not dislodge Blackie from behind the furnace, so Annabel and I had to bathe and go to bed in agonizing uncertainty.

In the bright morning, my father was able to retrieve Blackie, and all was well again. Annabel decided to take Blackie’s box outside, so that he could breathe the air and get some sun. We also were eager to show him to the Weisblatts, our neighbors. Not wanting to lose him again, Annabel took special care lifting Blackie out of the box, but as she held him quietly in her arms, something—a shout or a car door slamming—startled him and he erupted out my sister’s grasp and onto the sidewalk down which he scooted with phenomenal speed, trailed by me, my sister, and the shrieking Weisblatts. I remember a warm, smiling feeling in my heart because this was an adventure and Blackie’s wings were “clipped,” which meant he could not really escape us—but then he did. After a run of perhaps a quarter of a block, Blackie arose. Powerful and sure in flight he ascended up over the power lines, then the treetops and in a minute or two disappeared into the sunny blue sky. Blackie’s escape was so sudden and so sure that it seemed to me, and I suspect Annabel too, natural and right. The loss was stunning, but something about Blackie had seemed from the outset too good to be true. Blackie, I decided, was a clue, but far from the whole story.

Chapter 3

Of course I had no idea then how far away I was from anything like the whole story. It took a long time for me to realize that something in the world doesn’t want us to see the whole story. Something wants to overwhelm us with the ordinary, usually bad stories that carry us away from, not into, the better world. Some kind of force—including plenty of people—won’t let us see or even talk about the golden side of things, as if they cannot bear so much unspoiled possibility, such gladness. Sometimes for days and weeks on end I felt as if the holy child were being slapped out of me. These were the times when seemingly everybody, but especially my father, was telling me I couldn’t do anything right. My father liked to joke about me, “Jonathan, you get dumber every day,” but it was no joke to me. Some days I knew I was dumber, and I remember feeling that there was no end to how dumb I could get, and I began to think up ways to conceal from others how dumb I was, a dumbness at my very core of which I was so ashamed I could barely breathe.

When I say I thought the holy child was being slapped out of me, I don’t mean slaps or punches right in the face. My slaps were what my father called “cracks in the head.” Every now and then my father would look at me or at something I had done or just hear about something I had done and then give me a crack in the head. These cracks in the head were jarring, upward clouts against the back of my skull. If the annoyance was minor, if I just said something that irritated him, he might just crack me with the first two fingers of his right hand. But if he was really mad, I’d get the full force of his open palm against the back of my head. I hated getting cracks in the head. I never got used to them, and the worst were the ones that I did not see coming, which, because they came up from behind me, was a lot of the time. My father wasn’t always angry with me, and when he was in a good mood, he liked to make jokes about cracking me in the head, so that I’d see the funny side of it, but I could not see it. When I got a sudden, full handed crack in the head, I’d see a terrible white light and feel as if my existence had stopped altogether for a second. A crack in the head, even the two finger, always surprised me and scared me. Cracks in the head also made me cry, which made me feel babyish and ashamed, not ashamed of whatever I had done, which sometimes I didn’t really know, but that I had been cracked in the head and that I was crying. Once, after several years of being cracked in the head, I looked up at my father after a really rotten crack and even though I was crying and afraid, said to him, “What am I, a dog?” A jolt, white light—another terrific crack in the head.

I don’t think my skull or my brain was ever in any danger from all the cracks in the head, but they had a terrible effect on me in another way. I started to lose confidence. I started to lose my connection to the bright world, the Christmas world, and to the clues and signs that had once made me so excited and happy. Even worse, I could not seem to forget being cracked in the head. I felt as if I were carrying them around with me. After the first one, I wondered if I might die.

Just before I got that crack, I thought I was doing a good thing. I had figured out how to move my chair around the kitchen to get up to things I was interested in, like the crackers and the cookies on the counter. I could pull the chair across the kitchen floor to the table and get up there too, to see what was going on. I was actually quite excited about this new range of operations. Between meals my chair was placed in a little nook between the side of the ice box and a counter near the back door of the kitchen. It wasn’t a baby’s high chair with a tray, but it was higher than a regular chair and it had a kind of step in front that enabled me to climb up onto it by myself. I liked the feeling of moving the chair around the floor. I think mother liked it that at mealtimes I would drag it out of its nook across the linoleum to the table without even having to be asked.

One winter evening I was in the bright kitchen with my mother while she prepared dinner. She had just finished stirring up a huge white bowl of cake frosting and had let me lick the spoon. She took off her apron and left the kitchen to change clothes before my father got home. I spotted the bowl of frosting up on the counter and realized I could get to it by moving my chair over there. But when I gave the chair legs the usual yank to get it out of its spot, something terrible happened. The cord that plugged in the radio must have gotten in front of one of the chair legs, because the purple plastic Zenith slid off the counter and smashed onto the linoleum. It made a loud, terrible crash, and it was all broken. There were sharp shards of purple plastic, and the metal chassis and broken glass tubes were exposed. Still plugged in, the radio made an angry, urgent hum. Mother appeared in the kitchen tying the sash of her dress behind her. “Jonathan, what did you do?” I didn’t know what I did. I said, “ The radio fell down.” I was still holding onto the legs of my chair. My father had entered the front of the house and was calling out a greeting. Then he was in the kitchen, standing next to my mother, staring at the shattered mess of the radio and at me. “Jonathan,” mother said in a voice I had not heard from her before, “look what you’ve done.” She looked as though she were about to cry. “Now we don’t have a radio.” The kitchen seemed to grow brighter and brighter. Then my father sprang toward me like an animal. He tore the chair out of my hands. He gripped the back of my neck and turned my head painfully in the direction of the mess on the floor. “Look what the hell you’ve done!” Jolt, white light—the crack. Then I was up under one his arms, feet off the ground, as he hauled me through the dark house to my bedroom where he dropped me onto the bed and shut the door. I was left in complete blackness, and the blackness was inside me too. I had broken something of enormous importance from the world of my mother and father, something that could not, I believed, ever be restored. I had been cracked in the head and was now banished to the dark, and the only thing I could think to do was to complete the process, find an even greater darkness and stay in it forever. The darkest abyss I could devise was my closet, and I made my way to it in the dark, pulled the shoes and boxes away from the back wall, shut the closet door and curled into a ball. The misery I felt was like a sickening electric current. It soured what was in my stomach and made me retch. I held myself in the ball and tried to darken the darkness by shutting my eyes tight. I don’t know if I slept, but I remember suddenly blinking into the light of the closet, staring up into the enormous standing figures of my mother and father. Mother reached down to pull me up. My father said, “Half wit.”

After a few more cracks in the head, I began to wake up in the morning with a different feeling. I did not feel the glad surge that had made me tear the covers away and race out of my room to mother, breakfast, and bright day. Now I needed to lie there in the warmth. I remember feeling that as long as I could stay there under the covers I was safe, not just safe from cracks in the head, but from doing the things that brought them on. I would not have found the words for it then, but until my loss of confidence, I believed I had a knack for making myself happy. I didn’t have to make an effort for interesting things to happen, they just happened, like the appearance of the turtle or of Blackie or Papa walking me down into the basement of my grandparents’ house and opening up the old wooden chest and taking out the velvet lined case where he kept his pearl handled pistols, real pistols, pistols that, if they were loaded, would shoot. The stubby silver barrels and the embossed trigger housings were a little dull with oil and were surprisingly heavy in my hands. I could not get those pistols out of my mind, or their velvet case or the trunk. There were many other treasures in that trunk, treasures from Germany and England, and I was sure that in time Papa would show them to me.

That was just one kind of sign. Nearly any encounter with an animal excited me, but there was no greater happiness than the parties in our living room or at Nana’s and Papa’s, parties where my mother would wear her sparkly green dress and there would be amber cocktails with sweet cherries for me and delicious cream-filled desserts and always music, music from the R.C.A. Victor or music around the piano. My uncles would remove the shiny black Gilbert and Sullivan recordings from their brown paper sleeves, and I could not stop watching the gorgeously scripted green record labels as they circled the Victorola spindle. Papa could play some of the airs from “The Merry Widow” on the piano, and my father would fill in harmonies on his trumpet. My mother’s brother, Uncle Desmond, could sing all the words to “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” Mother was shy, but she could sometimes be coaxed to sing “You Made Me Love You,” and when she finished, Annabel and I would always beg her to sing it again. I remember the buttery lamplight of those parties, the excited talk and shrieks of women’s laughter. I can see slivers of light on the cocktail glasses and wine glasses, the amber and reds like jewels in the faceted glassware. I remember my father and his jokes and how his handsome face seemed to shine and that he was always at the center of the music and the laughter.

But after I started getting cracked in the head, all of this seemed spoiled and out of reach. For months and even years, for what seems now like a separate lifetime, there was no gladness at all. I got dumber every day. I had only to take something delicate into my hands, and I would drop it and break it. I spilled my milk, and it slopped down onto my lap, into my socks, down onto the floor. Flash—crack. I could not manage my knife and fork. Big bits of meat would slide over the side of my plate onto the clean tablecloth or onto the floor. Annabel could cut up her food— my father would ask: what the hell was wrong with me? Crack. Sometimes, especially at supper, I could not eat, even though I was told I could not leave the table until I cleaned my plate. Gray mounds of meat pooled in dark juice, hard potatoes yellowed with butter and parsley, cooked carrots and sour florets of steamed broccoli loomed horribly before me. “What’s the matter,” my father would say, “you fill up on a lot of candy and crap?” Crap. I could see steaming messes of dog excrement on the pavement. Filling up on crap. My stomach clenched like a fist. I repeated the word: crap. Flash—crack. I could taste the sour acidy spit that arose before I threw up. I could not look at my plate. I could not look up at my father’s awful face. Annabel was crying. My mother said, “Frank, don’t.” I wanted dark, I wanted night.

It seemed, especially around adults, I could only say the wrong thing. Uncle Dennis, my father’s brother, and Aunt Betty were visiting from St. Louis. I loved Uncle Dennis because he liked to talk to me and play with me. He would get right down on the floor with me and do what I was doing. His voice was soft, and he made a lot of jokes, and I remember wanting him to keep talking to me and never to go home. One morning he taught me how to thumb wrestle, a game in which we would lace our fingers together and each of us would try to pin the other’s thumb down with our own. It was an awkward, silly game, and for some reason it made me laugh uncontrollably, which made Uncle Dennis laugh so hard tears came down out of the corners of his eyes, and then when he wasn’t paying attention I would clamp my thumb down over his huge bony thumb and win. Uncle Dennis seemed to have all the time in the world to sit on the floor with me, thumb wrestling or just fooling around. Once in that very position I looked into Uncle Dennis’s open smile and said, “Why are your teeth like that?” He gave me a funny, questioning look and said, “Like what? They’re just teeth,” and I said, “They’re all yellow and brown.” White flash—crack. I didn’t even know my father was in the room.

Teddy Weisblatt and I were playing outside in his yard one late cold autumn afternoon. Mother and father had some kind of engagement in the city and would not be home until after supper, so the Weisblatts were watching me until they came home. Annabel had gone to Nana and Papa’s. Teddy and I were digging in an untended patch of dirt behind his garage, but the clay was cold and hard to penetrate, and our hands were getting raw and stiff as we took turns with Mr. Weisblatt’s big spade. Then I realized I really had to go the bathroom. Number two. I told Teddy and we left the spade and went to his back door, but it was locked. Mrs. Weisblatt had run out to the store to get something she needed for dinner. She told us she would be right back, but we didn’t know the door would be locked. I really had to go, so we ran around to the front of the house, but those doors were locked too. Teddy told me I’d better hold it, but I knew I couldn’t. Something was already happening in my butt. I made my way back to our house, trying as hard as I could not to poop, but the doors were locked there too. I needed to go. I wished Teddy would disappear and leave me alone, but he was right there at my side. “Go away for awhile,” I told him, as I waddled back toward his garage. I decided I would go there, someplace behind the garage where no one could see. I barely got around the corner of the garage before I had to unbuckle my belt and unzip my pants and pull them down around my ankles. I pulled my jacket up above my waist so I wouldn’t poop on it, squatted down and started to go. It was a big, difficult poop, and it took a long time, because there would be a big plop and then those intervals when nothing more would come out, but I could tell I wasn’t done at all. It took forever, and I was cold, and my legs ached from squatting. Teddy had followed me around to the back of the garage, even though I shouted at him not to. “You shouldn’t do that here,” I heard him saying, “My dad is going to be really mad.” But I was already pooping hard. I thought Teddy might have wandered off. I had forgotten about him when, a few minutes later, I heard his voice behind me saying, “Oh boy, this is really terrible. When are you going to be finished?” I was in a not-done-yet interval, and I didn’t know when I would be finished. It seemed like I would never be finished. I wasn’t really finished when I finally stood up and pulled up my pants. Teddy saw his mother’s car pulling into the drive, and said, “Here’s my mom!” and that was enough for me.

Before I could ask him not to, he ran to the car and told his mother, “Jonathan just made a B.M. in the yard.” After that, everything seemed as if it were happening very far away from me, as if I were under dark soupy water. I can’t even tell if I remember what happened or whether I have just filled in with pictures from the way my mother and father told the story for years afterward. I do know that Mrs. Weisblatt used the key my mother had left her and unlocked our house. She turned on the lights and told me I had better go into the bathroom and take a bath. She didn’t run the water or help me. She went home to make supper, and I sat in the bathroom by myself for a long time, until mother and father came home. I may have told them, or tried to tell them, what happened, but I cannot remember succeeding. Mrs. Weisblatt came over later and told my parents what I had done. I remember my mother saying the words, “sick with embarrassment.” Sick with. My father never got tired of telling the story, which included his cracking me in the head. He always concluded with an account of shoveling up and burying the mess with the Weisblatts’ spade. “It must have taken me a half hour,” he would say. “It was like something you’d expect from a hippopotamus.” Much later, when I was grown up, he would add, “and this is from a man with two college degrees!”

Chapter Four

That was a dark terrible time. It was like being suspended in the feeling of crying, as if midway through a heaving sob, I got stuck there, in that sickening clench, and there was no way forward, no way out, just the helpless, no-end-to-it crying feeling every minute of the day, no matter what was happening on the surface.

It didn’t really end, either. I suppose it just got absorbed up into bigger things. That crying darkness is, I suppose, still part of the mix, something that, like whatever disease finally does kill me, I could fall into again. One thing I’ve learned is to be respectful of everything really terrible.

I think what saved me after being cracked in the head and losing my confidence was the Second Great Thing, which was adventure. Adventure carried me right out of this world and just in time. I felt the first tiny clues to adventure by discovering things. There were indoor discoveries, and there were outdoor discoveries. Each kind was thrilling. My first indoor adventures were in attics and cellars. I can still feel it today. There is something about entering the forgotten, underdeveloped parts of a building that breaks your connection to the ordinary and the expected. True basements carry the dark and damp of the building before it was a building. A true basement can feel as much outdoors and indoors, especially if there is only stone and earth. But even concrete, provided it is not covered over with upstairs finishes and furnishings, can create an earthy effect. People leave their oldest stuff in basements, hardware and machines and tools and gadgets from another time. I loved basements with surprising bins and recesses and dark crawl spaces. In some old houses I played in as a boy there were coal rooms with coal chutes and cold storage cellars timbered like mine shafts right into the earth. A really great basement captures the feeling of a cave. Attics, although they have a different kind of light and an airless, almost unbreathable atmosphere, can carry the same wonderful sense of a house beyond what anyone living in the house is thinking about. I like attics best that have multiple partitions and tight, complicated crawlways under the eaves. I like attics that are loaded with boxes and chests filled with pictures and treasure somebody wanted to save but forgot about. I like attics and cellars that have trunks in them like Papa’s basement trunk that had beautiful cloths wrapped around polished wooden boxes lined with green velvet holding old, real pistols. Going down into Nana and Papa’s cellar with Papa to look at his heavy, dully gleaming pistols and to handle them was one of the holiest times of my life.

Those first discoveries create a tremendous longing for adventures, and some of my very best were in the basement of Cyrus Best’s house. I met Cyrus when he entered mid year into the second grade of my primary school, Palatine South, in Palatine, Illinois where we lived after we moved out of Chicago. Cyrus, everyone could tell right away, was a different kind of boy. He had a massive block of a head, and his hair was cut very short. There was a dark thatch on top, but the sides and back were shaved nearly bald. He told me, when I got to know him later, that his brother Len cut his hair. His brother Len and two other older brothers, Cal and Jessie, were teenagers. Len was a big boy at Palatine High School and Cal and Jessie had dropped out and were working. They looked like men to me, bigger and rougher and older than my Uncle Desmond who was out of college and out of the army and worked for a magazine. Cyrus’s brothers had haircuts like Cyrus’s.

Cyrus stood out in school. Seated midway down his row of boys and girls, he gave off a kind of vibration. With his huge head and his washed out flannel shirt buttoned up tight around his throat, he seemed to be beaming out a desperate message from his little blond desk. Part of it, I suppose, was discomfort, as he was always tense and miserable at school. It didn’t take long for it to become clear that Cyrus could not read yet. He could not read at all, even “the” or “of.” He told me he had been to a different kind of school, a school kept by his church where he used to live which, he told me, was “down state.” I actually made a picture of Illinois’s arrowhead shape and imagined Cyrus and his people down by the pointed end. He told me he and his people—he didn’t say “family”—lived “by the river.” That helped explain Cyrus’s difference and his special force. He came from another kind of people, downstate river people with small dark eyes set deep behind their big bony foreheads. Cyrus could not read, and I think he was unbearably ashamed that he couldn’t. I would ask him about it sometimes, in a nice way. I would say, “Can you really not read?” I thought maybe he could but he was just afraid to do it out loud in class. He just looked at me hard and hunched his neck down into his shoulders and said, “I cain’t.” He—and his people, when I met them—said “cain’t” and “ain’t.”

I was fascinated that Cyrus could not, or at least would not, read. He didn’t even try or stumble when Mrs. Packworth asked him to read a passage in class. He would just hunch his neck into his shoulders and freeze. His small gray eyes seemed to recede even further behind his brow. “Cyrus,” Mrs. Packworth would say, “Try sounding it out: wuh-wuh, wih-wih, with-with—“ Cyrus could have been in another town. He did not look up at Mrs. Packworth or respond to her words. He waited, frozen, until she moved on. Once I took Cyrus aside when a group of us were standing around a big table molding bits of clay for what was supposed to be a colonial fort. “See this,” I said to him and drew a large ‘A’ on a piece of construction paper. I asked him what it was. A look of suspicion flashed across his big face. “You know what it is,” I told him. “It’s ‘A’.” He looked hard into my eyes. “A,” he said. I was excited. I asked him, “OK, what does that spell?” Cyrus froze. His eyes retreated into his head. He would not read, not even read “A.” His refusal was total, and in it there was a force I had not encountered before, a force that I fell under like a spell.

It took me a while to realize that Cyrus, while a special presence in school, was not really himself there. Seated in his assigned row, silent, inert, neck hunched into his shoulders, he was like a photographic negative of his real self. Outside or in his room or in his basement he had a lot to say. He knew about Jesus and hell and sinning. When he and his people lived downstate, he had been baptized in the river with all his clothes on. He told me his preacher had held him down under the brown water for a long time. He said, “I almost drown’t.” Now he was saved. I never asked him what saved meant, but I kind of knew. Cyrus carried that saved quality with him into our classroom from the first day. He carried it with him everywhere he went. I don’t remember him ever laughing or thinking anything was funny. He was always pretty serious, even worried. Once when we turned the corner of his street he pointed up in the direction of the Miller’s big stone house and told me the Millers were going to hell. His mother worked for the Millers, and he told me they went around naked there, that it was a “sex house.” I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but his words carried an electric charge. After that I could never pass the Millers’ house or see Freddy Miller at school or see Mrs. Miller at the A&P without picturing them naked, walking around their house naked, walking around in the unbearably charged atmosphere of a sex house.

Cyrus told me about other sins his people knew about. Playing cards and dancing were sins, but knowing this made me feel uneasy because my mother and father went out dancing. On our piano we had a framed picture of them dressed up and dancing. My mother was smiling beautifully in the picture, and it scared me to think of this as being part of a sin that could send her to hell. I could not even imagine my mother in hell. I was sure she was saved. Sometimes in bed at night I would think about playing cards and how that could be a sin. Playing cards seemed to carry none of the tension of being naked in a sex house. Nana and Papa and Uncle Desmond played cards. They played pinochle and cribbage and kept a running score in a leather notebook. Annabel and I played cards sometimes. We played war and crazy eights. Even when I tried to feel bad about the sin of cards, I couldn’t. There was no special feeling in it.

It was more fun to talk to Cyrus about hunting and about guns, especially after we started hunting, with real guns, in his basement. Cyrus had a true basement with a dirt floor and walls of piled stone. A few bulbs on looping wires were suspended from the floor joists overhead, creating a complex impression of islands of light and dark shadowy caverns. The full basement didn’t go under all the rooms of the house, but there were crawl spaces of two or three feet under the other rooms, and Cyrus and I were able to wriggle into these through manhole-sized openings in the foundation walls. It was not really like a basement of a house at all. It was a subterranean world. In the winter we could hear the whoosh of the furnace kicking in and water glugging through the overhead pipes, and these sudden, purposeful sounds seemed proof of the secret separateness of the place. The basement, Cyrus warned me, was full of spiders, and we saw quite a few, but even when our faces and hair were filmy with webs, the spiders seemed less dreadful down in this realm where spiders rightly belonged than they did when a frenzied brown centipede would appear in the tub as mother ran my bath water or when a black spider of any size stood out in stark relief against the white paint of the ceiling above my bed. What was a little frightening, but also alluring, was the prospect of animals in the cellar. Like what, I remember asking Cyrus, when he told me “we got critters.” Mice and rats, he said, maybe sometimes a chuck or a possum.

Cyrus’s older brothers all hunted and had guns—shotguns, twenty-twos, and pellet rifles—and they had taught Cyrus how to load them and how to shoot. You loaded the twenty-two by pulling back a metal cylinder, slipping in a brass shell, then sliding the cylinder back in place. The pellet rifle had a kind of pump running beneath the length of the barrel. After you loaded a pellet into the chamber, you had to slide back the pump to build up enough compressed air to shoot the pellet. The pump was hard for me to operate. Holding the rifle stock against my shoulder, I wasn’t strong enough to pump the rifle with my left arm. Cyrus could do it, but I couldn’t. This was a problem because his brother Len would only allow him to shoot his twenty-two. That meant I got the pellet rifle, which Cyrus’s brothers thought of as a kid’s toy, but I wasn’t strong enough to work it. Feeling too weak started to spoil the whole basement adventure. I felt as if I had at last been granted access to a place of limitless adventure, a place Cyrus and I could feel that electric feeling of being armed and on the loose-- but I was too weak to do it. What was wrong with my skinny arms? I could see they were only sticks compared to Cyrus’s. I couldn’t stand asking Cyrus to help me pump my rifle every time I wanted to shoot. That would mean that he belonged in the adventure, but I did not. I could feel myself starting to lose confidence, the feeling dangerously close to the can’t-do-anything feeling that led to cracks in the head. Not being able to pump the rifle was like not being able to hammer a nail straight into the board after my father had shown me how so many times that he started to get mad. It was like the time he asked me to help him wash the windows on the storm doors. He was outside with his ammonia and rags, and I was on the inside with mine. He would wash a square from the outside, and then tap the glass so that I would do my side. When we were both finished, there would still be filmy swirls and streaks. He would swipe at them from his side, but they wouldn’t disappear, because they were on my side, and the more I sprayed and wiped, the cloudier it got. It was a curse. I would apply the spray, then pull my rag as evenly and as hard as I could over the glass, and then, just for an instant it would look clear, and then the cloudy swirls would reform. “For Christ sake,” my father finally said. He came inside and tore the rag out of my hand and gave me a little shove away from the door. “Get lost. Find something to do. I’ll do this myself.”

That’s what it felt like as I loaded the pellet into the chamber and stood there on the damp floor of the basement unable to slide back the pump of the rifle. Then in a rage that made a bright flash behind my eyes, I knew what to do. I set the heel of the rifle stock against the basement floor, bent down over the barrel and grabbed the pump with both hands. I pressed down with all my strength and all my weight. Then the pump gave way, and I heard a gassy poof and then a metallic ping. The light bulb over our heads shattered and went dark. “Dang it,” Cyrus said. “You shot the light out.” It took me a minute to figure out what he meant. Then I realized the rifle had fired. It had gone straight up and broken the light bulb. “Come here,” Cyrus said, pulling me by the wrist until we were standing under another light bulb. “Know what else,” he said, “You shot yourself in the ear.” The tip of my ear was cold. It started to sting. I reached up to touch it, and there was new red blood on my grimy fingers. “Let’s go and get you cleaned up,” Cyrus said. I didn’t know if he was mad or disappointed. We were just getting ready to hunt in one of the crawl spaces. We had shells and pellets in our pockets and a flashlight with new batteries. Upstairs at Cyrus’s kitchen sink I washed off my ear with a dishcloth, and Cyrus brought me a bandage. At the door as I was leaving, he said, “You coulda shot yourself in the head and killed yourself.”