One thing I knew: I was going to quit that house, that town, that night. Hit the road. Hop a freight and head for California. Make my living shining shoes in Hollywood. Fred Astaire’s shoes. Clark Gable’s. Or—maybe I just might become a movie star myself. Look at Jackie Cooper. Oh, they’d be sorry then. When I was rich and famous and refused to answer their letters and even telegrams, probably.
Suddenly I thought of something that would make them even sorrier. The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.
The only hitch was, I wouldn’t actually be able to see or hear any of this: how could I, being dead? And unless one can observe the guilt and regret of the mourners, surely there is nothing satisfactory about being dead?
Uncle B. must have forbidden Miss Sook to go look for me until the last guest had left the table. It was late afternoon before I heard her voice floating across the pasture; she called my name softly, forlornly as a mourning dove. I stayed where I was and did not answer.
It was Queenie who found me; she came sniffing around the smokehouse and yapped when she caught my scent, then entered and crawled toward me and licked my hand, an ear and a cheek; she knew she had treated me badly.
Presently, the door swung open and the light widened. My friend said, “Come here, Buddy.” And I wanted to go to her. When she saw me, she laughed. “Goodness, boy. You look dipped in tar and all ready for feathering.” But there were no recriminations or references to my ruined suit.
Queenie trotted off to pester some cows; and trailing after her into the pasture, we sat down on a tree stump. “I saved you a drumstick,” she said, handing me a parcel wrapped in waxed paper. “And your favorite piece of turkey. The pulley.”
The hunger that direr sensations had numbed now hit me like a belly-punch. I gnawed the drumstick clean, then stripped the pulley, the sweet part of the turkey around the wishbone.
While I was eating, Miss Sook put her arm around my shoulders. “There’s just this I want to say, Buddy. Two wrongs never made a right. It was wrong of him to take the cameo. But we don’t know why he took it. Maybe he never meant to keep it. Whatever his reason, it can’t have been calculated. Which is why what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It was deliberate. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. Do you understand me, Buddy?”
I did, dimly, and time has taught me that she was right. But at that moment I mainly comprehended that because my revenge had failed, my method must have been wrong. Odd Henderson had emerged—how? why?—as someone superior to me, even more honest.
“Do you, Buddy? Understand?”
“Sort of. Pull,” I said, offering her one prong of the wishbone.
We split it; my half was the larger, which entitled me to a wish. She wanted to know what I’d wished.
“That you’re still my friend.”
“Dumbhead,” she said, and hugged me.
“Forever?”
“I won’t be here forever, Buddy. Nor will you.” Her voice sank like the sun on the pasture’s horizon, was silent a second and then climbed with the strength of a new sun. “But yes, forever. The Lord willing, you’ll be here long after I’ve gone. And as long as you remember me, then we’ll always be together.” …
Afterward, Odd Henderson let me alone. He started tussling with a boy his own age, Squirrel McMillan. And the next year, because of Odd’s poor grades and general bad conduct, our school principal wouldn’t allow him to attend classes, so he spent the winter working as a hand on a dairy farm. The last time I saw him was shortly before he hitchhiked to Mobile, joined the Merchant Marine and disappeared. It must have been the year before I was packed off to a miserable fate in a military academy, and two years prior to my friend’s death. That would make it the autumn of 1934.
Miss Sook had summoned me to the garden; she had transplanted a blossoming chrysanthemum bush into a tin washtub and needed help to haul it up the steps onto the front porch, where it would make a fine display. It was heavier than forty fat pirates, and while we were struggling with it ineffectually, Odd Henderson passed along the road. He paused at the garden gate and then opened it, saying, “Let me do that for you, ma’am.” Life on a dairy farm had done him a lot of good; he’d thickened, his arms were sinewy and his red coloring had deepened to a ruddy brown. Airily he lifted the big tub and placed it on the porch.
My friend said, “I’m obliged to you, sir. That was neighborly.”
“Nothing,” he said, still ignoring me.
Miss Sook snapped the stems of her showiest blooms. “Take these to your mother,” she told him, handing him the bouquet. “And give her my love.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I will.”
“Oh, Odd,” she called, after he’d regained the road, “be careful! They’re lions, you know.” But he was already out of hearing. We watched until he turned a bend at the corner, innocent of the menace he carried, the chrysanthemums that burned, that growled and roared against a greenly lowering dusk.
1967
The End
