Cartoonist (10 page)

Whenever his mother visited the monkey house, she talked about what kind of outfits they’d look good in. “I’d get the gorilla a sailor suit, Alfie, pale blue with a straw hat to match.”

But even in the monkey house, with his mother happily clothing the monkeys, he had remembered the silent, despairing polar bear.

“Alfie, are you coming down?” Alma asked from below.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know. All his life it had seemed to him that things would go on as they were. If he was happy, he would always be happy. When he hurt, he could never see relief. The way things were, that was the way they would always be. He could not see beyond this chair, this attic, this flat misery.

“Because you didn’t
win,
Alfie. Mom was wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with you really. Bubba and Maureen decided on their own to live with her parents. They didn’t even know about you.

“
I
didn’t win when I threw a fit and smashed my bank and almost had to be driven to the hospital. It was just something I did because I couldn’t stand what had happened to me. But even if I had gotten my money back by doing what I did, I still wouldn’t have won. And you didn’t win either.”

Alfie waited. He shut his eyes. He felt as if he were getting a cold. His eyes burned with tears.

“So don’t feel like you’ve won,” she said. “Did you hear me, Alfie? Don’t feel like you’ve won!”

I don’t, Alfie said, so softly the words didn’t actually leave his mouth. He cleared his throat. He spoke for the first time in twenty-four hours. “I don’t,” he said.

“W
ELL, COME ON DOWN
then,” Alma called. “Supper’s ready.”

He kept sitting at his table in the attic. He felt swept away by emotion—like those people caught in the
Wizard of Oz
tornado, whirling past Dorothy’s window, sitting normally in rocking chairs or pedaling bicycles, all the while being carried away. Alfie felt himself circling closer to something.

Suddenly a fly buzzed around his head. It lit on his ear. Alfie brushed it away. He felt irritated at the intrusion.

The fly must have been here all along, he thought, resting on a beam and had chosen this moment to fly down and irritate him. It was like the fly in a television studio that waits until an actor is on camera, in his most moving scene, and then comes down and buzzes around his made-up lips. He swatted the fly away again.

“Is Alfie coming down for supper?” his mother called from the kitchen. “Tell him it’s Sloppy Joes.”

“He’s coming,” Alma said.

“Well, if it’s Sloppy Joes,” Pap groaned, “I’m
going.
Them things is not fit for human consumption.”

“Then they should be just right for
you,”
his mother said.

Alfie leaned back in his chair. The fly had left as quickly as it had come. It had been strange, like a touch from a wand. He thought of those old stories where the fairy godmother waves her wand and in a shower of sparkles changes evil to good and ugliness to beauty. Only
his
fairy godmother, he thought, was old; her wand, weak. She had noticed him in trouble here in the attic and had waved her wand over him with all her strength, really wanting to change the whole world for him. But instead of magic sparkles, her wand had given off one tired fly. It had buzzed down, touched his ear, and been whisked back.

His fairy godmother was waiting above him now, holding her wand anxiously. To the fly she’d be saying, “Well, it’s up to him now. We did our best.”

Alfie let the air go out of his lungs in one long sigh. He remembered what was really waiting over his head. Slowly he turned his face to the ceiling. He lifted one hand as if he were going to shield his eyes. Through his tears he saw his cartoons

They hung pale and still in the warm, dusty air. “Super Caterpillar.” “Super Bird.” The boy with the turned-in feet. The chicken. The children. The old man and woman with their car.

He rose from the table the way Pap got up from a chair, as if he weren’t sure he would make it, as if he feared his bones were going to give way. He stood. He stepped back from the table, stumbling a little on the uneven boards.

Then slowly, as if he were picking fruit, he began to take down the cartoons. Scotch tape pulled off with a sigh. Thumbtacks gave. Paper tore. One by one the cartoons came off. The pile grew in his hand.

He pulled the last one, “Super Caterpillar,” from the rafters and put it with the others. For some reason he felt a little easier, as if the clothespin had been taken from his ear without his knowing it. He rolled the cartoons up like an awkward diploma.

Holding them under one arm, he slid the board from the trap door. He opened it. He looked down into the room below. For a moment it looked wrong, like a negative. Black was white; white was black. Then everything got normal.

He started down the ladder. He could hear the family in the kitchen. Pap was saying, “Don’t nobody care what I want to eat anyway. You get old—it’s like in the jungle—the old elephant can’t reach the good leaves no more, and nobody’ll pull them down for him.”

“Pap, if you start in on the old-elephant routine now, I really will scream.”

“All right, Pap,” Alma said, “what do you want to eat? Tell me and I’ll fix it for you.”

“Anything I want?” he bargained.

“Yes.”

“I want a souse meat pie.”

“A souse meat pie?” his mother said. “Are you loony? Where’s Alma going to get a hog’s head?”

“I’ll get one, Mom.”

Alfie paused on the ladder. Suddenly he thought that maybe it was possible to make a cartoon even of this. The idea surprised him. He leaned his cheek against the wood. Not a cartoon of himself—he wasn’t ready for that yet. He could do a comic strip about a
man
who had taken himself away from the world. He was better at drawing men anyway. In a balloon, he thought. Balloons were better than attics in a comic strip. He warmed to the idea.

In the first square a man would be suspended over the world in a balloon. He’d be saying, “Nobody can make me come down!”

In the second square he’d be saying,
“Nobody
can make me come down!”

In the third square he’d be saying,
“Nobody can make me come down!”

In the last square he’d be saying, “But somebody could try.”

Alfie smiled. He was glad there would still be cartoons. He climbed down the remaining rungs of the ladder. He stepped on the living room floor. He felt jarred for a moment, as if he had stepped on something unexpectedly hard. He put one hand on the ladder to steady himself.

He set his cartoons on the television. They unrolled, and he put Alma’s books on top to hold them. He walked into the kitchen. “I’m down,” he said.

Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including
The Summer of the Swans
(1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for
The Night Swimmers
(1980) and an Edgar Award for
Wanted . . . Mud Blossom
(1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.

Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.

After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.

Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Look
. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections,
Clementine
(1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.

Following
Clementine
, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including
The Summer of the Swans
, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as
The Eighteenth Emergency
(1973),
The Night Swimmers
, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as
My Dog, My Hero
(2000).

Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.

Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.

A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named
NanaBet
for Betsy and Nancy.

Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.

Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.