Blaze

When he got back, Joe was awake and screaming lustily. This no longer terrified Blaze as it had at first. He dressed the kid in his little jacket (green — and cute), then set him on the floor to paddle around. While Joe tried to crawl, Blaze opened a beef dinner. He couldn’t find the damn spoon — it would probably show up eventually, most things did — and so he fed the kid off the end of his finger. He was delighted to find Joe had gotten another tooth through in the night. That made a total of three.

“Sorry it’s cold,” Blaze said. “We’ll work somethin out, okay?”

Joe didn’t care that his dinner was cold. He ate greedily. Then, after he was finished, he began to cry with the bellyache. Blaze knew that for what it was; he now knew the difference between bellyache crying, teething crying, and I’m tired crying. He put Joe on his shoulder and walked around the room with him, rubbing his back and crooning. Then, when he kept crying, Blaze walked up and down the cold corridor with him, still crooning. Joe began to shiver as well as to cry, so Blaze wrapped him in a blanket and flipped the corner of it over Joe’s head like a hood.

He climbed to the third floor and went into Room 7, where he and Martin Coslaw had originally met in Arithmetic. There were three desks left, piled in the corner. On top of one, nearly hidden by entwinings of later graffiti (hearts, male and female sexual equipment, adjurations to suck and bend over), he saw the initials CB, done in his own careful block letters.

Wonderingly, he took off a glove and let his fingers trail over the ancient cuts. A boy he barely remembered had been here before him. It was incredible. And, in a strange way that made him think of birds sitting alone on telephone wires, sad. The cuts were old, the damage to the wood rubbed smooth by time. The wood had accepted them, made them part of itself.

He seemed to hear a chuckle behind him and whirled.

“George?”

No answer. The word echoed away, then bounced back. It seemed to mock him. It seemed to say there was no million, there was just this room. This room where he had been embarrassed and frightened. This room where he had failed to learn.

Joe stirred on his shoulder and sneezed. His nose was red. He began to cry. The noise was frail in the cold and empty building. The damp brick seemed to suck it up.

“There,” Blaze crooned. “It’s all right, don’t cry. I’m here. It’s all right. You’re fine. I’m fine.”

The baby was shivering again and Blaze decided to take him back down to The Law’s office. He would put him in his cradle by the fireplace. With an extra blanket.

“It’s all right, honey. It’s good. It’s fine.”

But Joe cried until he was exhausted, and not too long after that, it began to spit snow.

Chapter 18

THE SUMMER AFTER their Boston adventure, Blaze and Johnny Cheltzman went out blueberry raking with some other boys from Hetton House. The man who hired them, Harry Bluenote, was a straight. Not in the contemptuous sense in which Blaze would later hear George use the word, but in the best Lord Baden-Powell tradition. He owned fifty acres of prime blueberry land in West Harlow, and burned it over every other spring. Each July he hired a crew of two dozen or so young misfits to rake it. There was nothing in it for him other than the thin money any small farmer gets from a cash crop. He might have hired boys from HH and girls from the Wiscassett Home for Troubled Girls and given them three cents a quart; they would have taken it and counted themselves lucky to be out in the fresh air. Instead he gave them the straight seven that local kids asked for and got. The money for bus transportation to and from the fields came out of his own pocket.

He was a tall, scrawny old Yankee with a deeply seamed face and pale eyes. If you looked into those eyes too long, you came away with the conviction that he was crazy. He was not a member of the Grange or any other farmers’ association. They would not have had him, anyway. Not a man who hired criminals to pick his berries. And they were criminals, dammit, whether they were sixteen or sixty-one. They came into a decent little town and decent folks felt like they had to lock their doors. They had to watch out for strange teenagers walking the roads. Boys and girls. Put them together — criminal boys and criminal girls — and what you got was no better than Sodom and Gomorrah. Everyone said so. It was wrong. Especially when you were trying to raise your own young ones up right.

The season lasted from the second week of July into the third or fourth week of August. Bluenote had constructed ten cabins down by the Royal River, which ran smack through the middle of his property. There were six boys’ cabins and four girls’ cabins in another cluster at a little distance. Because of their relative positions on the river, the boys’ quarters were called Riffle Cabins and the girls’ Bend Cabins. One of Bluenote’s sons — Douglas — stayed with the boys. Bluenote advertised each June for a woman to stay at Bend Cabins, someone who could double as a “camp mom” and a cook. He paid her well, and this came out of his own pocket too.

The whole scandalous affair came up at town meeting one year, when a Southwest Bend coalition tried to force a reassessment of the taxes on Bluenote’s property. The idea seemed to be to cut his profit margin enough to make his pinko social welfare programs impossible.

Bluenote said nothing until the discussion’s close. His boy Dougie and two or three friends from his end of town had more than held up his side. Then, just before Mr. Moderator gaveled the discussion to a close, he rose and asked to be recognized. Which he was. Reluctantly.

He said, “There’s not a single one of you lost a single thing during raking-time. There’s never been a single car-theft or home break-in or act of barn-arson. Not so much as a stolen soup-spoon. All I want to do is show these kids what a good life gets you. What they do about it after they’ve seen it is up to them. Ain’t none of you ever been stuck in the mud and needed a push? I won’t ask you how you can be for this and still call yourselves Christians, because one of you would have some kind of answer out of what I call the Holy-Joe-Do-It-My-Way Bible. But, Jeezly-Crow! How can you read the parable of the Good Samaritan on Sunday and then say you’re for a thing like this on Monday night?”

At that, Beatrice McCafferty exploded. Heaving herself up from her folding chair (which might have given a creak of thanks) and without waiting for so much as a nod of recognition from Mr. Moderator, she trumpeted: “All right, let’s get to it! Hanky-panky! You want to stand there, Harry Bluenote, and say there’s never been none between the boys in that one bunch of cabins and the girls in t’other?” She looked around, grim as a shovel. “I wonder if Mr. Bluenote was born yesterday? I wonder what he thinks goes on in the dead of night, if it ain’t robbery or barn-burning?”

Harry Bluenote did not sit during this. He stood on the other side of the meeting hall with his thumbs hooked