A Doubter's Almanac (4 page)

“Made it.”

Mr. Farragut chuckled, then caught Milo’s expression and quieted. He bent forward to examine one of the links.

Milo knew what he was looking for. “There isn’t any,” he said.

“Any what?”

“Glue.”

After several more minutes of inspection, Mr. Farragut finally said, “I see that, son. What’s your name again?”

“Milo Andret.”

“Well, Milo, I don’t see offhand how this was done. And I hate to say it, but I certainly don’t believe you made it yourself.” He pushed the coiled loops back across the table. Then he added, not unkindly, “And I have to say, I doubt your friends will, either.”

—

T
HIS WASN’T A
problem. Milo didn’t have friends.

It wasn’t that people didn’t like him. In fact, plenty of them
did
. On a fairly regular basis they would approach. But there was something about him that dependably turned them away—as a young boy he’d become aware of this unchangeable fact—some glancing force that never failed to deflect their attempts at friendship. And it wasn’t that he didn’t like other people himself. He did, generally speaking.

He just couldn’t figure out what to say to anyone.

The wooden chain came back home with him. He coiled it into its waxed burlap sack and stowed it again inside the trunk of the maple.

—

H
E DID HAVE
one friend, actually. Perhaps not a friend, but there was something different about a certain kid at school. Vene Wheelwright was the son of the lighthouse keeper at Cheboygan Point. He was an unusual boy. Self-reliant, like Milo. Quick to leave school at the end of the day, also like Milo. Slight of build—again like Milo—and adept in the woods, like just about every other boy around Cheboygan. But unlike Milo, Vene had a fire inside him. He was an ordinary-looking young man, sharp boned and rabbitish, but wherever he went, people gathered. Though he didn’t talk much, he always knew what to say. Vene was a great climber and would in a moment break free from a ring of classmates to scale the high schoolyard fence and sit gleefully at the top. Once, Milo watched him pull himself up the courtyard flagpole by its wire halyard until he was hanging by the crook of one elbow from the small globe at its peak. With the other arm, he was waving.

Vene and Milo sometimes spoke, though usually not more than a few words. They didn’t have any classes together, but whenever they passed in the hall, Vene would say something like “How’s it moving, Milo,” and offer his hand, which Milo would shake, saying something in return like “It’s moving along, Vene. How’s it moving on your side?”

What amazed Milo, though, was that Vene always seemed happy to see him.

Once, on a bike ride that Vene took one Sunday morning after church, he pedaled all the way out to Milo’s house. Mrs. Andret called Milo in from the woods, then baked cookies for the two of them. She hovered over the visitor, the way everyone hovered over him, and encouraged him to stay. After the cookies, Vene and Milo went back out to the woods, where over the course of the afternoon they walked together comfortably, almost without speaking. They whittled lances from hickory saplings. They treed a raccoon. They climbed a beech tree by crossing to its crutch from the limbs of a maple. It was a frightening traverse for Milo—although not apparently for Vene—and when the two of them were on the ground again, walking home, Milo felt a kind of calm that he’d never felt in the presence of another person. When he was with Vene, there was no pressure for either of them to say anything. This solved Milo’s great problem.

“A strange name” was all Mrs. Andret said later that afternoon as they watched Vene pedal away down the slope. She sat down again at the table and stirred her drink, but Milo could see that she maintained her gaze out the window until the bike had disappeared at the bend.

To be fair, Vene was happy to see
everyone
. But still, the fact that he was pleased to see Milo generally astonished him. Milo expected Vene’s affection to fade. It was another mystery to him, in fact, that it never did. Vene was reliably welcoming to him for all the time they knew each other.

Still, he wasn’t exactly a friend. They saw each other in school, and they spoke whenever they passed, and they shook hands in the halls the way they did and once in a while even ate together in the cafeteria. But Vene didn’t ever come to the house again.

It always seemed that he would have, though, if Milo had asked.

—

M
ILO HIMSELF WAS
never truly pleased to see anyone, not even Vene.

This was just the world as he knew it.

His childhood was neither happy nor unhappy, and the thought of either would hardly have occurred to him. He lived in his woods like an animal, aware only of the hierarchy of necessary information—the nearness of evening or dawn, the overwarm humidity that meant a thunderstorm, the wintertime reversal of the prevailing breeze and the descent of a padded quiet from the southwest that meant, between October and May, the onset of snow. He kept a handful of books in an old metal tackle box in the crook of a stump and had built several shelters where he could read them even in a downpour. He liked Jack London and Willa Cather and Mark Twain, along with the occasional biography of a ballplayer or crime boss. He was unaware of the distinction between a young man’s books and an adult’s books, and in those days would read either one with equal pleasure.

The remainder of his world was as solitary as the woods. Now and then, his mother gave dinner parties, but he didn’t take much notice of them, eating his own portion silently and keeping his eyes averted, much as his father did. At school there were the ordinary problems with bullies, and he was knocked around a bit—not badly—once or twice a year, always in the fall. Then left alone. It was a ritual that seemed to establish whatever needed to be established at Near Isle High School. It happened to plenty of other kids, too. His father expected him to fight back, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he would go into the forest afterward by himself, the way a maimed animal might seek familiar shelter. Here is where his humiliation would transform itself. He’d pick up a fallen limb, then stride along, swinging it against the rows of trunks until it shattered. Then he would do the same thing with the fragment that remained, and with the one that remained after that, until finally he was swinging nothing but his own stinging hand, clamped around a shard. When he left the woods he felt absolved.

His mother, if she’d known of his solitary ritual, would have preferred it to fighting. But his father believed in the primacy of reputation. He would have been disgraced.

With the exception of these minor, fall-semester humiliations, however—which rarely resulted in anything worse than torn pants or a few welts on his cheeks, or sometimes a trail of blood drops across his shirt—the tough kids at school left him alone. They perhaps respected the fact that his father was a teacher there. For this, Milo felt a note of gratitude.

Welcome to the World

T
HEN ONE YEAR
something different occurred.

This was December 1958. The sunless winter had painted the coast an unshadowed gray. On the news, integration was being delivered by bus to the public schools and another Pioneer rocket had failed to circle the moon. Not long before Thanksgiving, a local Great Lakes freighter, the SS
Carl D. Bradley,
had gone down in a gale off Gull Island, drowning most of the men aboard. A dozen kids from Near Isle High School had lost their fathers.

At school, services were held in the classrooms, sometimes instead of classes, and in the weeks that followed, a quiet descended on the building. It was like something Milo might have sensed in the woods, the approach of weather. Walking in the hallway one afternoon after the last bell, he was stopped by an upperclassman, one of the innumerable Polish kids whose fathers manned the freighters or worked in the quarries where their tumblehome hulls were loaded with calcite. Milo wasn’t unaccustomed to being approached by schoolmates he didn’t know. This one tapped him on the shoulder and said in a soft voice, “You carved some kind of chain?”

Milo leaned forward to hear. “I guess so.”

“What you do that for?”

Milo thought about it. “I don’t know. Wanted to see if I could, I guess.”

The boy’s face was blank. At the periphery now, a group of other boys had appeared, milling in the background.

“It take you a long time?”

“Couple of months,” said Milo. “How’d you hear about it?”

“Mr. F told me you wanted to hand it over.”

“How’s that?”

The boy, who was so skinny his shirt bagged over his belt, whispered something.

Milo leaned in closer. “What?” he said.

“I said, what you think I got here?” The boy reached above his head to pull the light cord. Milo looked up at where he was reaching.

When the hall turned over, he remembered noticing that there was no light cord at all, only the rows of pine boards on the ceiling, punctuated by rusting nail heads. After that, there were only the blows.

—

T
HE SCHOOL NURSE
shaved his temple. When she pulled away the pad of gauze, it dripped blood onto the tray. “That’s
mine
?” Milo said.

He hadn’t seen a mirror.

“Nasty little punks,” she answered. “What’d you do to deserve this?”

“I really don’t know. I made something.”

“Like what?”

Milo shrugged. “A chain.”

“You hit one of them with it?”

He eked out a laugh.

She looked at him, her manner easing. “Well,” she said, taking his elbow, “they did a number on you, anyway.”

She wiped his wounds with iodine. He tried not to show her how much it burned. Then she lifted his shirt and examined his ribs. The boy who’d done it had lifted Milo’s shirt, too, had yanked the tails up over his head, then tripped him backward, so that when the punching started he was on the floor inside a sack, his arms pinned in beside him. He winced as the nurse eased the collar up over his head. Before moving to his back, she brought him a mirror. Up and down his spine were clumps of bright red rectangles.

“Steel-toed,” she said.

—

“W
HY WAS HE
asking about a chain?” said his mother, turning from the sink of dishes.

“I guess they wanted it.” He shrugged. “It was something I made.”

At this point, they asked him to show it to them. He went out to the woods, and when he returned, they both admired it in their reserved way, which meant that his mother regarded it for a long moment with a smile on her lips, and his father picked it up and inspected several of the links. His father had had a drink that night, too, which he rarely did.

The chain lay on the table now. Milo gazed at it as his mother went back to her washing. He could resurrect every link in his mind, the change in color at each turn of grain.

With a clank, his father set down his glass. He went to the closet, and when he came back to the table he was putting on his hunting coat. “People punch
up,
” he said. “They punch the ones who are better than them. Nobody likes a kid who does something well. That’s what happened.”

This was a compliment. Milo was aware of it.

In the mirror above the mantel now, he regarded his own face. From the work of the nurse, his hair was ragged across the brow, and on one temple was a gauze bandage that was weeping a dark stain. His neck was crisscrossed with scabs that in the low light looked like caterpillars crawling on his skin. He couldn’t keep his eyes off them.

He was a different person. He could sense it. When the kicks had started, he’d thrashed away from them and tried to kick back, but then, when they’d moved from his spine to his skull, he’d just curled up and let himself surrender. That’s when he’d felt himself rising. The thing was, there had been pleasure in it.

This was something he could never tell anyone.

“Next time,” his father was saying, “you hit ’em. Before they get the jump. That’s how you do it. You hit ’em with whatever you have in your hand.”

“You do no such thing, Milo.” His mother held a soapy plate in her hands. “He has a better way of dealing with his problems.”

“The bridge of the nose is good. Butt ’em with your forehead right there, between the eyes.”

“He has—”

“You hit ’em with a bat, Milo. You kick ’em in the nuts. You smash a book into their face—you do whatever the hell you have to. You move
fast.
Do you hear? You show ’em what you’re made of, or they follow you around the rest of your life. That’s the deal. Do you understand?”

“Henry,” said his mother, “what you’re telling him—”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Milo.

His father stood, nearly toppling his chair. Then, coming around the table, he leaned down to whisper in Milo’s ear.

“What was that?” said his mother.

“I was talking to my son.”

“Well, what did you say to him?”

At the threshold, he said, “If I’d wanted you to hear, I would have said it loud enough.”

The door rattled on its hinges.

When the sound of his footsteps was gone, his mother sat down beside him. She finished the drink that was on the table, then reached over and laid her hand on his arm. After a moment, she withdrew it and returned to the sink. The faucet sprayed noisily, and the pots and pans rattled against the basin.

“Well,” she said after a time, “what did he say?”

“I don’t know,” Milo answered. “I didn’t hear.”

—

S
OONER THAN HE
would have imagined, though, his wounds had healed. He was different now, he knew, but he also knew that he probably didn’t appear any different to the other kids at school. People paid no more or less attention to him than they had before. Not long after the incident, Vene had stopped him in the cafeteria with a couple of friends and offered to help him find the attackers; but Milo had put him off, saying he didn’t remember what they looked like and that all the Polish kids were pretty much the same, anyway. There were hundreds of them at Near Isle.