“Because of me?” Dad’s voice was ragged.
Mother look at him with steady loving eyes. “Because of us, Bruce. It was the chance we took. We pushed our luck after Peter.”
So there we were, the two of us-different-but different in our differences. For me it was mostly fun, but not for Bethie.
We had to be careful for Bethie. She tried school at first, but skinned knees and rough rassling and aching teeth and bumped heads and the janitor’s Monday hangover sent her home exhausted and shaking the first day, with hysteria hanging on the flick of an eyelash. So Bethie read for Mother and learned her numbers and leaned wistfully over the gate as the other children went by.
It wasn’t long after Bethie’s first day in school that I found a practical use for my difference. Dad sent me out to the woodshed to stack a cord of mesquite that Delfino dumped into our back yard from his old wood wagon. I had a date to explore an old fluorspar mine with some other guys and bitterly resented being sidetracked. I slouched out to the woodpile and stood, hands in pockets, kicking the heavy rough stove lengths. Finally I carried in one armload, grunting under the weight, and afterward sucking the round of my thumb where the sliding wood had peeled me. I hunkered down on my heels and stared as I sucked. Suddenly something prickled inside my brain. If I could fly why couldn’t I make the wood fly? And I knew I could! I leaned forward and flipped a finger under half a dozen sticks, concentrating as I did so. They lifted into the air and hovered. I pushed them into the shed, guided them to where I wanted them and distributed them like dealing a pack of cards. It didn’t take me long to figure out the maximum load, and I had all the wood stacked in a wonderfully short time.
I whistled into the house for my flashlight. The mine was spooky and dark, and I was the only one of the gang with a flashlight.
“I told you to stack the wood.” Dad looked up from his milk records.
“I did,” I said, grinning.
“Cut the kidding,” Dad grunted. “You couldn’t be done already.”
“I am, though,” I said triumphantly. “I found a new way to do it. You see-” I stopped, frozen by Dad’s look.
“We don’t need any new ways around here,” he said evenly.
“Go back out there until you’ve had time to stack the wood right!”
“It is stacked,” I protested. “And the kids are waiting for me!”
“I’m not arguing, son,” said Dad, white-faced. “Go back out to the shed.”
I went back out to the shed-past Mother, who had come in from the kitchen and whose hand half went out to me. I sat in the shed fuming for a long time, stubbornly set that I wouldn’t leave till Dad told me to.
Then I got to thinking. Dad wasn’t usually unreasonable like this. Maybe I’d done something wrong. Maybe it was bad to stack wood like that. Maybe-my thoughts wavered as I remembered whispers I’d overheard about Bethie. Maybe it-it was a crazy thing to do-an insane thing.
I huddled close upon myself as I considered it. Crazy means not doing like other people. Crazy means doing things ordinary people don’t do. Maybe that’s why Dad made such a fuss. Maybe I’d done an insane thing! I stared at the ground, lost in bewilderment. What was different about our family? And for the first time I was able to isolate and recognize the feeling I must have had for a long time-the feeling of being on the outside looking in-the feeling of apartness. With this recognition came a wariness, a need for concealment. If something was wrong no one else must know-I must not betray…
Then Mother was standing beside me. “Dad says you may go now,-” she said, sitting down on my log.
“Peter-” She looked at me unhappily. “Dad’s doing what is best. All I can say is: remember that whatever you do, wherever you live, different is dead. You have to conform or-or die. But Peter, don’t be ashamed. Don’t ever be ashamed!” Then swiftly her hands were on my shoulders and her lips brushed my ear.
“Be different!” she whispered. “Be as different as you can. But don’t let anyone see-don’t let anyone know!” And she was gone up the back steps, into the kitchen.
As I grew further into adolescence I seemed to grow further and further away from kids my age. I couldn’t seem to get much of a kick out of what they considered fun. So it was that with increasing frequency in the years that followed I took Mother’s whispered advice, never asking for explanations I knew she wouldn’t give. The wood incident had opened up a whole vista of possibilities-no telling what I might be able to do-so I got in the habit of going down to the foot of our pasture lot. There, screened by the brush and greasewood, I tried all sorts of experiments, never knowing whether they would work or not. I sweated plenty over some that didn’t work-and some that did.
I found that I could snap my fingers and bring things to me, or send them short distances from me without bothering to touch them as I had the wood. I roosted regularly in the tops of the tall cottonwoods, swan-diving ecstatically down to the ground, warily, after I got too ecstatic once and crash-landed on my nose and chin. By headaching concentration that left me dizzy, I even set a small campfire ablaze. Then blistered and charred both hands unmercifully by confidently scooping up the crackling fire.
Then I guess I got careless about checking for onlookers because some nasty talk got started. Bub Jacobs whispered around that I was “doing things” all alone down in the brush.
His sly grimace as he whispered made the “doing things” any nasty perversion the listeners’ imaginations could conjure up, and the “alone” damned me on the spot. I learned bitterly then what Mother had told me. Different is dead-and one death is never enough. You die and die and die.
Then one day I caught Bub cutting across the foot of our wood lot. He saw me coming and lit for tall timber, already smarting under what he knew he’d get if I caught him, I started full speed after him, then plowed to a stop. Why waste effort? If I could do it to the wood I could do it to a blockhead like Bub.
He let out a scream of pure terror as the ground dropped out from under him. His scream flatted and strangled into silence as he struggled in midair, convulsed with fear of falling and the terrible thing that was happening to him. And I stood and laughed at him, feeling myself a giant towering above stupid dopes like Bub.
Sharply, before he passed out, I felt his terror, and an echo of his scream rose in my throat. I slumped down in the dirt, sick with sudden realization, knowing with a knowledge that went beyond ordinary experience that I had done something terribly wrong, that I had prostituted whatever powers I possessed by using them to terrorize unjustly.
