Weeds in Bloom (10 page)

“Yes, sir, the whole bit. If it’s no good, you can blame your son, on account it was his idea I’m here, not mine.”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“My knees hurt.”

“Football?”

I nodded.

Dr. Cranberry made a sour face. “I don’t cotton to football. And I never much liked anyone who played it.” He smiled up at me like a pixie. “Until now. What else have you written?”

“Poems. A few songs. Most of my regular stuff is about the outdoors because that’s all I know.”

He grinned. “A professional usually writes about what he knows. Nothing else. So you’re off to a roaring good start.” He stood. “What courses are you into?”

I told him, and again he frowned, yet his eyes narrowed as though in deep professorial cogitation. “Would you please do
us
a favor?” he asked.

“Sure. Glad to, sir.”

“There are tests I want you to take. An entire battery they give up in DeLand, at Stetson University. Do you have means of getting there? Any transportation?”

With a grin, I hoisted my thumb. “I’ll hitch.”

“No you won’t. I’ll carry you in my car. We’ll first arrange a time. These exams will tell me what I want to know about you. Not academic. More for mental agility and capacity. One can’t really
study
for them.”

“Tough?”

“Not for those with brains.” He cracked his cagey little birdlike smile. “I’d bet the farm on you.”

After the tests at Stetson, I waited for weeks, didn’t hear a word, and presumed I’d flunked. But then I spotted Dr. Cranberry waving at me and hollering my name. Excited about something. Yanking me into his tiny paper-littered office, he could hardly speak.

“Robert,” he said at last, “what I suspected is now proven. My boy, you’re a moth destined to be a butterfly.” He held up a manila folder. “I swiped your file from administration. Your schedule.” As if in some rapturous rage, he tore my records into pieces. “Goodbye to these mush courses. You’re going to take philosophy, psychology, science, logic, math, world history, languages … and every single literature and theater course available. Plus a ton of outside reading.” He paused for a breather. “Sit down!”

I sat. My knees screamed.

“Robert Newton Peck,” he said in a more contained tone, “tell me what you’ve done in your young life. Right now. But make it brief.”

I told him: Farm work, helped Papa kill hogs. Then a machine gunner overseas. Came home to a sawmill, paper mill, freight gang, and lumber camp. Now a defensive middle guard. Unknown. An unheralded substitute.

Tiny hands reached to cradle my ears and hold my head as though he feared to drop it. “Rob,” he
said softly, “all your life, people made you into nothing except a beast of burden. They looked at your oxlike frame and thought
ox
. Well, they’re all mistaken. You’re no mule. From this point on, we’re going to employ your
mind
, big fellow, not just your muscles.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“No. This is your first icy plunge into reality. Give us four years, my boy, and you won’t believe how you’ve grown by graduation.” He squinted. “Must you wear all that black hair so long? If you plan to do much hitchhiking, you’ll frighten a motorist right off the road. You look like Geronimo.”

For four bits, I bought myself a brush cut.

A number of us had to quit football because of injury. For some reason, my weight dropped by over forty pounds. Coach warned me that if I didn’t finish the season, I wouldn’t be in the team photograph, or attend the banquet.

I told him that I’d already heard them eat.

Our college discontinued football. Too expensive. Between snake hunting (for profit) and the G.I. Bill, my tuition got paid. I didn’t ask the college for a dime. But four years later I wore neither cap nor gown because I had a chance to ride north, for free, a day before commencement. Dean Stone understood after I explained that no one
in my family could afford to come and see me graduate.

College senior, on a bench that Papa built.

He mailed me my diploma in a tube. And it’s still inside, rolled up. I never had it framed for an ego wall. Because, for a number of years, I couldn’t even afford a wall.

A year at Cornell Law School exhausted every penny of my G.I. Bill, so I escaped to New York City to become a songwriter. Or a comic. I had twenty-four songs published (none famous), plus a few
radio jingles, and then stumbled into advertising in 1954.

Except for corporate success, nothing much happened until 1973 and
A Day No Pigs Would Die
, my first novel. Eventually over sixty more, and I’m still writing.

Returning to my alma mater to be honored, I was so pleased that a kind and dedicated Dr. Cranberry, who taught me how to write, was there. As he sat beaming in the front row, I couldn’t look at him for fear of tears. Needless to say, I mentioned his name, reminding the audience that I’d dedicated a book to him in gratitude. Also one to Dr. Wilbur Dorset. And to Miss Kelly.

Afterward, Dr. Cranberry gave me a very special volume from his collection,
The White Goat’s Kid
, a short story of gritty determination that bore meaning to us both, and personally signed it:

As I bear-hugged the frail little gentleman, we both did.

I
T WAS LATE
.

A few minutes after eight o’clock. Outside my Manhattan corner-office window loomed an inky December night, speckled by thousands of other little windows. Our business day was done. Except for me, all of our employees had hustled home; I was alone at my desk, grooming an advertising proposal for tomorrow morning’s client meeting.

Even though my office door was open, I heard a timid knock. Three apologetic taps. Looking up, I saw her.

There was Mary.

That was all I knew concerning her name. Mary, a cleaning lady, hired by the giant office building to police up the dirt, litter, butts, and ashes of slick executives and svelte secretaries.

“Not right now, Mary. Perhaps in about an hour. Please do the other offices and leave mine for last. Okay?”

She never moved.

Looking at her, I saw a tired face and a slumped body, aged beyond her years, no education, dressed in clothes that were close to cleaning cloths. Rags. One stocking had fallen and was collapsed above her shoe. Her entire appearance said
charwoman
.

“Well?” I asked.

There was an object in her hands. Neither a sponge nor a scrub brush. No mop. A second later I recognized an item oddly out of place. A book.

“Mr. Peck, I … I gotta ask your help.”

“What’s up?” I asked, more out of get-it-over-with speed than concern.

“I got a problem.”

“Yes?”

Mary took a few steps toward me. “It’s about Anthony.”

“Who’s he?”

“Anthony is my son,” she said. “He’s going to become an engineer. If he can make it through college. My boy’s got a chance.”

“Good,” I said, without much sincerity.

“Anthony, he’s my youngest. I got five. But the older ones won’t never amount to nothing. No future. They’ll be lucky to end up like me.”

She advanced another cautious step.

“What’s the book?”

“Algebra. My son calls it math. But I guess it’s his weak spot. Comes hard for him. So for years now, I learned to do math too. We learn it together. Me and Anthony.”

“Oh?”

“This ain’t no beginner algebra. This is the hard stuff. Advanced, he says. I can’t understand it no more. My eyesight can’t keep up. So maybe my son’s going to fail.”

Dropping my pencil, I stared at her in a sudden rush of respectful disbelief. Although shocked, I found the strength to speak.

“Mary … you are studying
advanced algebra?”

She nodded, then slowly lifted the algebra textbook as though making a final offering to an altar. To make the bells ring in the chapel of a Christmas fable.

“It’s … number 74.”

I sighed. “Mary, it’s late, and I’m very—”

“Please,” she begged. “I don’t got nobody else to ask. I’m stuck. Went as far as I can go. But unless I understand quadratics, I can’t explain it to my boy so he’ll graduate and be a
somebody.”
Her spine straightened. “An engineer.”

I was silent. Mary continued.

“Anthony … he’s sort of all the hope I got.”

“What about your husband? They claim that men are more into mathematics. Could
he
help?”

“Louie died. Took a cough, about ten years back. Doctor bills? You can’t believe what it cost me. So all I got to help me is
you.”

There it lay on my big walnut desk, a marketing plan for a new deodorant, one that society needed about as much as I longed for a second navel. At this speed, I wouldn’t catch a train to Connecticut and report home at ten o’clock. On a night when I’d promised my wife I’d help put up the Christmas tree. Family was coming tomorrow. But a spruce would have to wait.

“May I look at the problem?”

“Sure. You have a lot of brains. It’ll be a cinch for somebody like you, Mr. Peck. You got education. I don’t.”

Mary’s assessment of my mathematical talents was far beyond coping, I feared. Because I was another Anthony. Math was murder, and I had been a perpetual victim. Gary Blake, one of my competent assistants, served as my numbers guy. Details. Stats. Figures on a sheet of paper danced for Gary. Why wasn’t he here when I needed him? Home, I mused, putting up
his
tree. The rat.

“Let me take a squint, Mary.”

She gave me the open book.
Advanced Algebra
. The equations seemed to be written in Japanese
italics. Flipping back a few pages, I reinforced what little I knew with regard to solving quadratic equations. I mumbled the formula as I read:
“X
equals
A
minus
B
, plus or minus the square root of
B
squared minus 4
AC
over 2
A.
”

It seemed to be a guideline to finding the value of an unknown
X
when given the three other values as constants. Armed with my brief refresher, I jumped ahead to problem 74. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Or, to be more appropriate, the Lone Ranger.

Glancing at my desk phone, I had the urge to call Gary Blake and order him to haul his freight over to Mary’s house to tutor Anthony. Gary would have to drop his tinsel and hustle out into a wintry night and perform his math magic for the fifth child of a scrubwoman.

Call it Christmas. Label it anything you please. Like lunacy. There’s no logical explanation why I, the math moron, boned over an algebra problem. It was Greek. Yet desperation has a talent for knighting a serf into a scholar. It was amazing how much Mary (I didn’t even know her family name) had mastered of the finer points of factoring, even when so many values were parenthetical and, if you’ll allow, problematic.

Perhaps, right around Christmastime, an algebraic angel beams down to tap a confused shoulder,
to enlighten, to inspire with a competence beyond deserving.

Mary and I did it!

A merry miracle.

Christmas, so it goes, is a time for gift giving. The gift I received that night, sweating over numerical values far beyond me (and cursing the ghost of John Napier), was later valued above any price I paid. Sometimes the most I can give is the least I have, yet everything that a Christmas spirit could inspire. I made a bell ring. Not a cathedral carillon. Merely a tiny tinkle from the curled-up toe of Santa’s elf.

Never did I know whether or not Anthony graduated from college. Let’s fervently hope so. Perhaps because his mother’s name is Mary, as was the name of the woman who lived two thousand years ago, a Mary birthing a son who didn’t become an engineer.

Only a carpenter.

I
N
V
ERMONT THERE WERE
P
ECKS APLENTY
. U
NCLE
C
HARLES
sired fourteen children, Uncle Edward begot ten, and my father, Haven, added seven more. As seventh, I was the runt among thirty-one.

Townsfolk called us “uproaders,” an unflattering label for those have-nots who resided in gray unpainted shacks, along dirt roads instead of pavement. We called
them
“downhillers.” Perhaps in envy of their rich bottom land (compared to our rocks and stumps), indoor plumbing, electricity, and store-bought clothes.

Although poor, my parents convinced me that we were comfortable off. More important, hearty harvests had blessed us with a bounty for which anyone ought to bow thankful. “Gratefulness,” my mother fervently insisted, “is our highest note in the hymn of prayer.”

Miss Lucy, as Papa so often called my mother, was a model of compromise. Merchandise we couldn’t afford she branded as “a frill,” a luxury no God-fearing Shaker would covet. Once a week I was informed that Divine Benevolence had again beamed down upon us and our table.

We ate chicken every Sunday.

Our daily trio of meals was referred to as breakfast, dinner, and supper. Lunch was whatever a kid toted to school for a noon repast … in a
dinner
pail. I doubt that today’s students, seated in their million-dollar cafeterias, have the fun we enjoyed. How? Trading sandwiches! My sandwich was often a thick layer of pork-flavored baked beans between two slabs of homemade brown bread. Ah, but a noontime Sunday dinner was an event, due to the fact, I presumed, that fowl provided more sanctity than jowl.