Blaze said nothing.
“Was it Cheltzman? I think it was Cheltzman.”
Blaze said nothing. His fists were clenched, trembling. Tears spilled out of his eyes, but he didn’t think they were feeling-small tears now.
Coslaw swung The Paddle and struck Blaze high up on one arm. It made a crack like a small gun. It was the first time Blaze had ever been struck by a teacher anywhere except on the ass, although sometimes, when he was littler, his ear had been twisted (and once or twice, his nose). “
“Fuck you!” Blaze cried, the nameless thing finally leaping all the way free. “Fuck you, fuck you!”
“Come here,” The Law said. His eyes were huge, bugging out. The hand holding The Paddle had gone white. “Come here, you bag of God’s trash.”
And with the nameless thing that was rage now out of him, and because he was after all a child, Blaze went.
When he walked out of The Law’s study twenty minutes later, his breath whistling raggedly in his throat and his nose bleeding — but still dry-eyed and close-mouthed — he became a Hetton House legend.
He was done with Arithmetic. During October and most of November, instead of going to Room 7, he went to Room 19 study hall. That was fine by Blaze. It was two weeks before he could lie on his back comfortably, and then that was fine, too.
One day in late November, he was once more summoned to Headmaster Coslaw’s office. Sitting there in front of the blackboard were a man and a woman of middle age. To Blaze, they looked dry. Like they might have been blown in on the late autumn wind like leaves.
The Law was seated behind his desk. His bowling shirt was nowhere to be seen. The room was cold because the window had been opened to let in the bright, thin November sun. Besides being a bowling nut, The Law was a fresh air fiend. The visiting couple did not seem to mind. The dry man was wearing a gray suit-jacket with padded shoulders and a string tie. The dry woman was wearing a plaid coat and a white blouse under it. Both had blocky, vein-ridged hands. His were callused. Hers were cracked and red.
“Mr. and Mrs. Bowie, this is the boy of whom I spoke. Take off your hat, young Blaisdell.”
Blaze took off his Red Sox cap.
Mr. Bowie looked at him critically. “He’s a big ‘un. Only eleven, you say?”
“Twelve next month. He’ll be a good help around your place.”
“He ain’t got nothin, does he?” Mrs. Bowie asked. Her voice was high and reedy. It sounded strange coming from that mammoth breast, which rose under her plaid coat like a comber at Higgins Beach. “No TB nor nothin?”
“He’s been tested,” said Coslaw. “All our boys are tested regularly. State requirement.”
“Can he chop wood, that’s what I need to know,” Mr. Bowie said. His face was thin and haggard, the face of an unsuccessful TV preacher.
“I’m sure he can,” said Coslaw. “I’m sure he’s capable of hard work. Hard
Mrs. Bowie smiled. It was all lip and no teeth. “I do the cipherin.” She turned to her husband. “Hubert?”
Bowie considered, then nodded. “Ayuh.”
“Step out, please, young Blaisdell,” The Law said. “I’ll speak to you later.”
And so, without a word spoken by him, Blaze became a ward of the Bowies.
“I don’t want you to go,” John said. He was sitting on the cot next to Blaze’s, watching as Blaze loaded a zipper bag with his few personal possessions. Most, like the zipper bag itself, had been provided by Hetton House.
“I’m sorry,” Blaze said, but he wasn’t, or not entirely — he only wished Johnny could come along.
“They’ll start pounding on me as soon as you’re down the road. Everybody will.” John’s eyes moved rapidly back and forth in their sockets, and he picked at a fresh pimple on the side of his nose.
“No they won’t.”
“They will, and you know it.”
Blaze did know it. He also knew there was nothing he could do about it. “I got to go. I’m a minor.” He smiled at John. “Miner, forty-niner, dreadful sorry, Clementine.”
For Blaze, this was nearly Juvenalian wit, but John didn’t even smile. He reached out and grasped Blaze’s arm hard, as if to store its texture in his memory forever. “You won’t ever come back.”
But Blaze did.
The Bowies came for him in an old Ford pick-up that had been painted a grotesque and lap-marked white some years before. There was room for three in the cab, but Blaze rode in back. He didn’t mind. The sight of HH shrinking in the distance, then disappearing, filled him with joy.
They lived in a huge, ramshackle farmhouse in Cumberland, which borders Falmouth on one side and Yarmouth on the other. The house was on an unpaved road and bore a thousand coats of road dust. It was unpainted. In front was a sign reading BOWIE’S COLLIES. To the left of the house was a huge dogpen in which twenty-eight Collies ran and barked and yapped constantly. Some had the mange. The hair fell out of them in big patches, revealing the tender pink hide beneath for the season’s few remaining bugs to eat. To the right of the house was weedy pastureland. Behind it was a gigantic old barn where the Bowies kept cows. The house stood on forty acres. Most was given over to hay, but there was also seven acres of mixed soft and hardwoods.
When they arrived, Blaze jumped down from the truck with his zipper bag in his hand. Bowie took it. “I’ll put that away for you. You want to get choppin.”
Blaze blinked at him.
Bowie pointed to the barn. A series of sheds connected it to the house, zigzagging, forming something that was almost a dooryard. A pile of logs stood against one shed wall. Some were maple, some were plain pine, with the sap coagulating in blisters on the bark. In front of the pile stood an old scarred chopping block with an ax buried in it.
“You want to get choppin,” Hubert Bowie said again.
“Oh,” Blaze said. It was the first word he had said to either of them.
The Bowies watched him go over to the chopping block and free the ax. He looked at it, then stood it in the dust beside the block. Dogs ran and yapped ceaselessly. The smallest Collies were the shrillest.
“Well?” Bowie asked.
“Sir, I ain’t never chopped wood.”
Bowie dropped the zipper bag in the dust. He walked over and sat a maple chunk on the chopping block. He spat in one palm, clapped his hands together, and picked up the ax. Blaze watched closely. Bowie brought the blade down. The chunk fell in two pieces.
“There,” he said. “Now they’re stovelengths.” He held out the ax. “You.”
Blaze rested it between his legs, then spat in one palm and clapped his hands together. He went to pick up the ax, then remembered he hadn’t put no chunk of wood on the block. He put one on, raised the ax, and brought it down. His piece fell in a pair of stovelengths almost identical to Bowie’s. Blaze was delighted. The next moment he was sprawling in the dirt, his right ear ringing from the backhand blow Bowie had fetched him with one of his dry, work-hardened hands.
“What was that for?” Blaze asked, looking up.
“Not knowin how to chop wood,” Bowie said. “And before you say it ain’t your fault — boy, it ain’t mine, neither. Now you want to get choppin.”
His room was a tiny afterthought on the third floor of the rambling farmhouse. There was a bed and a bureau, nothing else. There was one window. Everything you saw through it looked wavy and distorted. It was cold in the room at night, colder in the morning. Blaze didn’t mind the cold, but he minded the Bowies. Them he minded more and more. Minding became dislike and dislike finally became hate. The hate grew slowly. For him it was the only
