“Willie! Where you goin’?” They kicked his suitcase.
How tall they stood to the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, beckoned, and they were warm metal drawn melting upwards; they were golden taffy pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago:
“Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?”
“Aw, Willie’s too little; we don’t play with ‘kids.’”
And they raced ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and wind, and he was twelve years old and not of them any more. And the other voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain: “Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve.” “Anna, does shortness run in your family?” And the cold fist kneading at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the “folks.”
“Willie, where are you goin’?”
He jerked his head. He was back among the towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking fountain bending down.
“Goin’ a few days visitin’ a cousin of mine.”
“Oh.” There was a day, a year ago, when they would have cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their enchantment with trains and trips and far places.
“How about a coupla fast ones?” said Willie.
They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. He dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing, life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanlon, Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there! Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935! The baseball flying. The Smiths, the Eatons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children, no children! A knock on this door, a knock on that.
“Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder if—”
“A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you from, son?”
The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the smiling, the nodding, the comfortable, leisurely talking.
“Son, you look like you been traveling. You run off from somewhere?”
“No.”
“Boy, are you an orphan?”
Another glass of milk.
“We always wanted kids. It never worked out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. It’s getting late, son. Don’t you think you better hit for home?”
“Got no home.”
“A boy like you? Not dry behind the ears? Your mother’ll be worried.”
“Got no home and no folks anywhere in the world. I wonder if—I wonder—could I sleep here tonight?”
“Well, now, son, I don’t just know. We never considered taking in—” said the husband.
“We got chicken for supper tonight,” said the wife, “enough for extras, enough for company....”
And the years turning and flying away, the voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations. The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summer-night darkness, the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her voice saying:
“I look at all the little children’s faces going by. And I sometimes think, What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I can’t believe they’ll ever go the road I’m going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworth’s poem: ‘When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.’ That’s how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They’re so eager for everything! I guess that’s what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. It’s like someone threw a bunch of flowers out the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as fine as you seem?”
The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he heard his memory say:
“I worked with what I had. After my folks died, after I found I couldn’t get man’s work anywhere, I tried carnivals, but they only laughed. ‘Son,’ they said, ‘you’re not a midget, and even if you are, you look like a boy! We want midgets with midgets’ faces! Sorry, son, sorry.’ So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well go on being a boy. No use fighting it. No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I saw this man in a restaurant looking at another man’s pictures of his children. ‘Sure wish I had kids,’ he said. ‘Sure wish I had kids.’ He kept shaking his head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat there, frozen! At that very instant I knew what m
y job would be for most of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I had to do was be a mother’s son and a father’s pride: I turned to the man down the counter from me. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. I smiled at him....”
“But, Willie,” said Mrs. Emily long ago, “didn’t you ever get lonely? Didn’t you ever want—things—that grown-ups wanted?”