Evergreen (43 page)

“Would you like a jelly doughnut?” Mrs. Thorgerson asked.

“Yes, please, I mean thank you, I would.”

“They’re still warm.… Does your grandmother allow you to?”

“Oh, yes! Sometimes I go to Tom’s Bakery in town after school. But Gran says they’re greasy. She doesn’t like me to have them, only if they’re homemade.”

“Well, these are certainly homemade,” Mrs. Thorgerson said. “Here, sit down and have a glass of milk while Mr. Thorgerson goes outside and talks to your grandfather.”

The kitchen smelled pleasantly of sugar and hot baking. There were plants on the windowsill next to the table where he was given his milk and two doughnuts on a white plate. It was nice to eat in the kitchen, handy to the icebox and the stove, more comfortable than their dining room at home, where you had to be careful not to spill anything on the carpet or on the shiny wood table. You had to keep everything on the place mat with its lace border and the mat was so small. But at home only Mrs. Mather, the housekeeper, ate in the kitchen.

Mrs. Thorgerson stood looking down at him. “Was that good?”

“Very good, thank you.” It was good, but still he liked the ones at Tom’s Bakery better, to tell the truth. Only he didn’t tell the truth, of course.

“It’s a long time since my boys were home to eat at this table,” Mrs. Thorgerson said, sighing a little.

They went out to the car. Mr. Thorgerson was leaning against the fence talking to Gramp. “He’ll ruin the country. Something for nothing, these loafers want. Mark my words, this young fellow here will pay for it. All the generations that come after us will be left with the bills.”

“Roosevelt again!” his wife said. “You raise your blood pressure, harping on that man. I swear you do, every time.”

“Me too, then, Mrs. Thorgerson,” Gramp said. “Any man who’s worked hard and knows the value of a dollar can’t help but feel disgusted with things. Time he got out anyway, war or no war, before he ruins the country. We’ve had ten years of him and that’s ten years too many. Let me see, is that jelly on your face? Here’s a handkerchief.” He took a white handkerchief from his breast pocket. He was so clean, Gramp was, even a little jelly brothered him.

“He had jelly doughnuts,” Mrs. Thorgerson said.

“Well, that was nice, wasn’t it, Eric? Doughnuts and a new puppy. What a day!”

“Gramp,” Eric asked, when they were out on the road, “what did you mean when you said Roosevelt was going to sroon the country?”

“Sroon?” Gramp looked puzzled. “You mean ruin! That means to spoil.”

“Oh. Why is he going to?”

“Well, that’s a bit hard for you to understand. It’s just that we don’t agree with the way he manages things. We think another man would do a better job.”

“What other man?”

“Almost any other man, I should say.”

“Do you hate him? I think Mr. Thorgerson hates him. He was awfully angry.”

“Not hate. We have to respect him because he is the President. But we think he desecrates the office. Do you understand? Desecrating is like—well, it’s like having no respect, wearing your hat or laughing out loud in church. Something like that. Do you see what I mean?”

Eric nodded, and thought of the familiar face in the newspaper, with the cigarette tilted upward out of the side of the mouth.

Gramp said seriously, “It’s a wonderful thing to be an American, Eric. It’s a kind of sacred trust, do you know what I am trying to say? It’s having something you love very much that was given to you by your family and you must take the best care of it so that you can hand it over to your children unspoiled.

“Ours is a very old family, Eric. Our people came here when the English king still owned this land, when Indians camped here. This road that were on was one of their trails to what now is called Canada. They came here when it was all forest, hundreds and hundreds of miles of trees.” He swept an arm out. “All you could see here was dark trees. And they cut the trees and cleared fields, built cabins, planted crops. It was hard, hard work, much harder and more dangerous than anything you can think of that anybody does today.”

“Did the Indians kill any of them? With tomahawks?”

“I’m sure they did. There’s plenty in the history books about that. There were forts all through this state. Fort Stanwyx, Fort Niagara. Forts are where the people went for safety when the Indians attacked.”

“But there aren’t any Indians now.”

“No, that was a long time ago. After a while everything was calm here and people made beautiful big farms like Mr. Thorgerson’s. Our own family were all farming people, except here and there a son went into some profession. I had an ancestor, let me see now, he would be your great-great—no, your great-great-granduncle, he was one of the
engineers who worked on the Erie Canal. I remember hearing from my grandfather about that uncle. He was present on the day, November 4, 1825, when Governor De Witt Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic Ocean. The canal joined the waters of the lake with the ocean, you see. A great piece of work, that was. And we had soldiers, of course; we’ve had men in all the country’s wars. And schoolteachers and lawyers.”

“That’s what you are! A lawyer!” Eric cried triumphantly.

“Yes, I’m a lawyer and I’ve always been proud of my profession. But I never forget that my origins were in the soil, on the land, the basis of everything. My origins and your grandmother’s too. Her family is as old as mine.”

Eric remembered something. “Is that her father in the picture? The one over the mantel in her room?”

“No, no, child, that’s her grandfather. Your great-great-grandfather. He fought in the Civil War.” Abruptly, Gramp swung the car around. “We’re only a couple of miles from Cyprus. I want to show you something there.”

The car rode lightly along a level stretch of road between apple orchards, faintly white. “Cyprus is the county seat. That’s where the courthouse is and the Cvil War monument. They’ve a statue there put up to honor the men from this area who fought in the Civil War. And they’ve written on it the names of the ones who were killed in the war. You’ll see that man’s name there.”

“Whose name?”

“The man in the picture in your grandmother’s room,” Gramp said patiently.

The courthouse stood back on a stretch of lawn. A walk with rows of stiff red flowers, tulips, Eric knew, ran to the front where a kind of porch was held up by plump white wooden columns. On one side of the lawn stood a tall flagpole. The flag made a snapping noise in the wind. On the other side, in the center of a concrete circle, was a statue of a crouching soldier wearing a kind of square cap; he was
pointing a gun, and the pedestal on which he was placed had names cut in the stone on all four sides.

“Walk over there,” Gramp said. “The names go by the alphabet. You can find the ‘Bs,’ can’t you? Then look for a long name, it’s almost at the top of the ‘Bs.’ Bellingham. Go look. It’s too hard for me to get out of the car.”

Eric walked over, found the “Bs” without any trouble and was proud that he could read the names. The first one was Banks. Then came Bean. That was funny, because you could also spell it without the “A.” Some of the kids in his class got mixed up by things like that, but letters never brothered him. They were easy. Here it was: Bellingham. He stood there a minute looking at it, and at the way the shadow of the soldier’s stone arm fell right in the middle of the Belling—. Then came a comma, and another name: Luke. He knew that it was like his prayer that Gran said: “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.”

He ran back to the car. “I found it! I found it! It says Luke Bellingham, right near the top.”

“Good. I knew you could. Be sure to put the lock down, that’s it. Yes, that was your Gran’s grandfather,” he said, as they turned around the square back to the road they had come on. “He was at the second Battle of Bull Run, Antietam and many more. That’s when Abraham Lincoln was the President.”

“Did he deserate like Roosevelt? Lincoln, I mean?”

Gramp laughed. “Desecrate? I should say not! He was one of the greatest men in the world, Eric. When you are a little older I shall tell you about him, and give you some books about him. Anyway, now you’ve seen the name of your ancestor cut in stone. Gran’s name was Bellingham, you know, before she married me.”

“And your name is Martin.”

“That’s right.”

Eric considered a minute. There was a question he had on his tongue. Then he asked it. “Why isn’t my name Martin, too? Why is my name Freeman?”

“Because. Because people take their father’s names.”

“Why do they?”

“Because that’s the law. That’s the way it is.”

“Who makes the laws?”

“A lot of men are chosen to think up the laws for us. They sit and talk about things and then vote to decide. They’re called the legislature.”

But he didn’t really want to know about that. “Did the legislature decide what my name had to be?” he persisted. Something nagged at him. He didn’t know exactly why he felt that something was a secret.

“Not just your name. Everybody’s.”

Eric thought there was a change in Gramp’s voice. Was he cross about anything? But no, he looked at Eric and smiled and said with his teeth locked around the stem of his pipe, “I’m going to put some music on the radio. There’s a program that goes on at four.”

Piano music was plucked out of the air. They were riding along on the smooth road and above their heads the leaves were starting to come out, unraveling small sheaves of yellowish-green. Piano music tinkled through the leaves.

Freeman
. His father’s name was Maurice Freeman. He had asked Gran once, “Was my father French, Gran?”

“No, he wasn’t French.” And her mouth closed in the straight line it made whenever he asked for something he knew he wasn’t going to get, like permission to sleep overnight in the woods, or a third piece of pie.
No, you may not
. Her mouth would shut in a straight line like a dresser drawer closing tightly into its frame.
Snap. Click
.

“I thought the name sounded French. Because of Gramp’s friend in France that he always tells about. His name was Maurice, too.”

“He wasn’t French.”

“What was he, then?”

“Why, American, of course. American.”

“Oh. Can I see a picture of him?”

“You could if I had one.”

“Why haven’t you got one?”

“I don’t know why I haven’t. I just haven’t, that’s all.
Oh, Eric, now I have to go back and count my stitches again, you’ve got me so mixed up.” She was always knitting sweaters for him like the navy blue one he was wearing today. He didn’t like her sweaters. They itched. The back of his neck itched now, thinking of it.

He had been very stubborn that day. “If you haven’t got a picture, tell me what he looked like.”

“I don’t remember what he looked like. I only saw him once.”

He had been about to ask, “Why?” But he opened his mouth and closed it again. In some way he knew that she would not have an answer for him. There was a blankness there, an end, like being closed in someplace and trying to get out, or being shut out and trying to get in. You might try and try but there was no way. He felt that with no particular emotion, only a kind of puzzlement.

Now his mother was different. Pictures of her were everywhere, photographs in silver frames on desks and dressers, and a painting over the piano, wearing a short white dress and a ribbon bow on her head. She was in leather albums, snapped on the deck of an ocean liner with a life preserver in back:
S. S. Leviathan
, it said. “That was the year we went to live in France,” his grandparents told him, bending over into the lamp light on the library table, turning the pages, going too slowly and boring him with things he didn’t care about. “That’s the place we took in Provence one summer. See, those are olive trees, and there in the background, see those terraces? That’s how they grow grapes. Your mother acquired a Provençal accent that summer; she already spoke French like a native, anyway.”

He liked the picture of her as a baby, maybe two years old, sitting on the front step with a big white collie. There above her head was the brass knocker with the head of a lion. He went outside and, when nobody was looking, sat down in the same spot under the knocker and rubbed his palms over the stone step, this very step where she had sat, his mother; and felt that maybe some of her was still there
on the stone; and felt not sad, not regretful, but only curious.

He could barely remember when he had first known that his position and his life were not like the other children’s whom he knew. Somebody, Gran? Gramp? Mrs. Mather, the housekeeper? Somebody had told him his parents were dead. He was an Orphan. That was wrong, though. In fairy tales like
The Little Match Girl
and
Cinderella
an Orphan was a sad person. An Orphan was hungry and had to sleep in doorways. How did you sleep in doorways? Where did you stretch your legs and wouldn’t people trip over you, going in and out?

But he, Eric, had a house and a big room in it with a fireplace and a bed with a quilt that had animals printed on it, and a shelf of books, and a cupboard where he kept his Erector set and Lincoln Logs and his big dump truck and hook-and-ladder. And he had plenty to eat. They were always making him eat when he wasn’t hungry.
You must finish that good hot cereal before you go to school
. So how could he be an Orphan?

Because of the Accident, that was why. Something had happened in a car far away, in New York City. The car got smashed and after that he didn’t have any father and mother. He had come here to live with Gran and Gramp. After the Accident. He saw it like that, in big letters. Like the letters on the monument: Luke Bellingham.

“Well, here we are,” Gramp said, switching off the radio. “Hand me my crutches from the back seat, will you please, Eric?”

His grandmother came out of the house to help Gramp in. “Why, I was worried about you, it’s almost five o’clock and Teddy’s here waiting for you.”

“Oh, we had a fine time. Eric saw his new puppy that got born this morning, and we had a beautiful drive. I see you’re all dressed up.”