• • •
On the second day of junior high school, Mark was crossing the street in front of the building when a kid came up behind him, hooked a finger into the notebooks under his arm, yanked them to the asphalt, and kicked them. The bookstrap snapped and the binders disintegrated, fanning pocket folders across two lanes of traffic. “I’m in serious school now,” Mark thought.
He was in the Advanced Program, and on Thursday in the first week, his seventh-grade English teacher assigned The Yearling, which they were supposed to read in its entirety by Monday. Mark accepted the challenge. It rained all weekend, and he spent both days lying in bed with the book. This was the first novel he had read that didn’t involve a mystery (when he’d outgrown Enid Blyton, his mother gave him Dick Francis and Andrew Garve) and for a while he didn’t see the point. Where was the puzzle you were supposed to figure out if you were smart enough? Jody’s life was just a boy’s life, and Mark had his own life, so why read about Jody’s?
But as the hours wore on, he started to get interested. He started to like Jody’s small, kindhearted father, Penny. The rough, big Forresters were scary. The hunt for Ol’ Slewfoot was exciting. By Sunday afternoon, Mark was 90 percent done, cruising along with all these people he knew pretty well, and thinking, “This is literature; this is serious reading,” and suddenly Penny got badly hurt hauling on a tree stump, and he didn’t recover in the next chapter. In fact, he seemed to be kind of permanently damaged. Which was a little shocking. And then there was Flag, the motherless fawn Jody had found 200 pages back and had been taking care of. Ma hadn’t liked him, but she was grumpy in general, and Penny had always supported Jody—but now, with only forty pages to go, Mark started to feel unease. Flag trampled the tobacco crop, then ate the corn seedlings, and the family couldn’t afford to lose the food. Jody emphatically proved he deserved to keep Flag by working hard for a week planting a new corn crop and building a higher fence, winning the respect of stern Ma, but Flag—and this was really shocking—jumped over the higher fence as though it were nothing, as though all Jody’s work and all Jody’s deserving counted for nothing, and ate the second corn crop.
Flag had no idea what a huge problem this was.
When Penny told Jody to shoot Flag, Mark couldn’t believe what he was reading. Jody walked into the woods with Flag and Penny’s shotgun, but he wasn’t able do it, of course, some other solution would appear, and he snuck back home after dark. Mark turned the page to find the solution to the puzzle, but Ma discovered Flag alive, eating the peas, and she shot and wounded him, and Penny handed Jody the shotgun again, and he had to follow Flag, who ran from him in terror, not understanding, bleeding and floundering, to where he collapsed by a pool and looked up at Jody with “great liquid eyes glazed with wonder” and Jody had to put the gun against his neck and kill him, and Mark put the book down and stared at the bedroom ceiling for a long time.
Why? Why would Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings want to do this to him, to anyone? Some old lady he’d never met who’d lured him into this place by himself, who made it inviting, then blew out the lights and locked the door.
He struggled on toward the end, trying to get over it. Characters offered hard-earned wisdom. He half bought it, only because not buying it made him feel terrible. Jody ran away, and almost starved, and had to come home, where Penny was still bedridden and showed no sign of ever getting better, not “scarcely wuth shootin’,” as he said, which if you thought about it, was a tactless thing to say to Jody. “Boy, life goes back on you,” he said.
So was that the comfort?
“You’ve seed how things goes in the world o’ men.”
So growing up was the consolation?
Mark reached the last page: “He did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling. He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on. In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, ‘Flag!’ It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy’s voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”
Mark burst into tears. She’d tricked him again! She’d held out a little scrap, and in the last line she’d stabbed him in the heart. Gone forever. In the dank gray September light, Mark lay in bed, outraged at Rawlings and the irreversibility of time.
• • •
Serious school: now there were psychopaths to contend with. There was one enormous kid in particular who was coming down the stairs one day just as Mark was opening the fire door in the first-floor hallway. “Hey!” he barked, his voice low and gravelly. Mark whirled, alarmed. “You don’t—ehv-ver—go through a door before me.” He tossed Mark sideways and proceeded. Mark was happy to oblige him, and to hang far enough back that their paths might diverge forever.
No such luck. In the following weeks, the mere sight of Mark seemed to frenzy the kid. He would fight upstream through a dense hallway crowd, pummeling innocent bystanders, in order to reach Mark and punch him. When he was in too much of an apeshit hurry to divert his course, he would turn as he flashed past, his face contorted,
