June
Mrs. Baker hated camping.
You could tell this because her eyes rolled whenever the subject came up—which was plenty lately, since that's what her class was going to do to celebrate the end of the school year. Two nights of camping up in the Catskill Mountains. Beside a waterfall. In deep woods.
"On soggy ground," said Mrs. Baker.
"It'll be great," said Danny.
"With mosquitoes," said Mrs. Baker.
"Mosquitoes?" said Meryl Lee.
"Sleeping on rocks," said Mrs. Baker.
"Terrific," I said.
"Dew all over us," said Mrs. Baker.
"Great," said Doug Swieteck.
"Let's get back to sentence diagramming," said Mrs. Baker.
You might wonder why Mrs. Baker was going to take us camping when she thought that camping meant soggy ground, mosquitoes, sleeping on rocks, and dew. But every year since she had first begun to teach at Camillo Junior High, Mrs. Baker had taken her class camping in June. Lieutenant Baker had come along—probably because he loved camping, and Mrs. Baker was willing to put up with soggy ground, mosquitoes, sleeping on rocks, and dew for his sake. Maybe she wanted to go this year because he would have wanted to go. Maybe she thought that if she kept every routine the same, then he really would be home in time for strawberries.
So Mrs. Baker was taking us camping, even though she hated camping.
But let me tell you, Mrs. Baker would have had to hate camping a whole lot more to keep herself from smiling through all of her classes—even when she was rolling her eyes or crossing her arms or fussing that Mr. Vendleri had still not gotten all the spilled cider mopped up, so that it was sticky on the feet when you walked into the Coat Room.
She was still smiling anyway, because Lieutenant Baker was coming home.
It was in all the papers. Even Walter Cronkite talked about it on the 6:30 news. How Lieutenant Baker's helicopter was shot down. How he jumped out before the helicopter hit the ground and shattered. How his leg was caught by one of the broken blades. How he hid in the jungle near Khesanh trying to keep his wound clean and eating chocolate bars from his pack. How he followed a river until he couldn't go any further. How he was found by a woman who already had two sons killed and didn't want anyone else to die, so she took him back to her house. How he hid there for three months until an American helicopter came over and he signaled. And how the crew pulled him out.
It was, said Walter Cronkite, a miraculous rescue.
I guess it's like Prospero pulling back the curtain for the king and there's Prince Ferdinand, who the king thought was dead, playing chess with Miranda like he was on vacation. Or maybe, a little like a phone call late at night from your sister, who isn't all that interested in finding herself anymore. She just wants to find you.
So Mrs. Baker was smiling because no one can help smiling at miracles.
The camping trip was going to be on Thursday and Friday of the second week of June. Everything before that, said Mrs. Baker, would be work. Work like we had never known work. Work that would make us drop. Work that would make us beg for mercy.
It was hard to worry too much about this since she was smiling the whole time she said it. But she really did work us like we had never been worked before. Sentence diagramming, short stories by John Steinbeck, the spelling and construction of adverbs and adjectives with Latinate endings, declining strong verbs, more short stories by John Steinbeck—who wrote a whole lot of short stories—and an essay report on any three poems written before 1900 —because Mrs. Baker thought that no one had written any poems worth writing about since then.
All this in two weeks. And that doesn't count Mr. Petrelli's "Westward Expansion and You" report. Or Mr. Samowitz's pre-algebra final examination.
And it didn't count Much Ado About Nothing, which should have counted for the whole shebang, since it advertised itself as a comedy—but let me tell you, it wasn't.
"Of course it's not always funny," said Mrs. Baker. "Why would you ever imagine that a comedy has to be funny?"
"Mrs. Baker, if it's a comedy, it's supposed to be funny. That's what comedies are."
"No, Holling," said Mrs. Baker. "Comedies are much more than funny." And she smiled again.
Whatever it was supposed to be much more than, Much Ado About Nothing wasn't funny. Maybe a line or two here and there, but other than that, pretty much not funny. I mean, talk about jerks. Claudio and Hero—Shakespeare wasn't all that good about his names—Claudio and Hero would have a whole lot to do just to get up to where Romeo and Juliet were. First they're in love, then they're not in love, and Hero has to pretend to die (Does this sound familiar? Don't you think Shakespeare needed some new material?), and Claudio has to pine away at her tomb, and then Hero has to come back to life, and then they fall in love again just like that. Really.
Can you believe this stuff?
Because you don't have to be Shakespeare to know that's not the way it happens in the real world. In the real world, people fall out of love little by little, not all at once. They stop looking at each other. They stop talking. They stop serving lima beans. After Walter Cronkite is finished, one of them goes for a ride in a Ford Mustang, and the other goes upstairs to the bedroom. And there is a lot of quiet in the house. And late at night, the sounds of sadness creep underneath the bedroom doors and along the dark halls.
That's the way it is in the real world.
It's not always smiles. Sometimes the real world is like Hamlet. A little scared. Unsure. A little angry. Wishing that you could fix something that you can't fix. Hoping that maybe the something would fix itself, but thinking that hoping that way is stupid.
And sometimes the real world is more like Bobby Kennedy, who was a sure bet for the Democratic nomination and probably would have been president of the United States and stopped the war, but who got shot at point-blank range.
After she heard the news, my sister locked herself in her bedroom. She put on the Beatles singing "Eleanor Rigby" and played it over and over and over again, low, so that I could just barely hear it through her door.
I knocked after something like the fiftieth repetition. "Heather?"
No answer. The song started over.
I knocked again, but she turned up the volume, and the Beatles sang about all the lonely people and wondered where they all came from. As if we didn't know.
But I kept knocking, until finally the music stopped, and the door jerked open, and it looked for a moment like my sister was going to take my head off. But she didn't. Behind her, the Beatles sang of Father McKenzie, walking away with the dirt of a grave on his hands.
I took Heather's hand, and we left the house together.
We walked to Saint Adelbert's. We waited on a long line to light two candles, and though we both were crying—everyone was crying—we kept holding each other's hands, and we said the same prayer.
But it's not always miracles—as if we didn't know that, too.
Bobby Kennedy died the next morning.
We heard it together on the transistor radio, Heather and me. She cried, and I held her, gut-crying, not knowing what at all to do except to be together. And if I hadn't heard that Lieutenant Baker was going to come home and that some miracles stand a chance of being real, I think I might have given up on the whole Presbyterian thing right then, sort of like Julius Caesar giving up on Brutus and going ahead and dying.
Early the next Thursday morning, a bus pulled up to take Mrs. Baker's class to the Catskill Mountains. We taunted the other seventh graders going on into their classrooms. Then there was running onto the bus to pick out our seats, and a lot of running back out to help load the hot dogs and buns and chili and water bottles and juice-powder mix and marshmallows and more marshmallows and loaves of bread and wool blankets for everyone and extra wool blankets for just in case, and then running onto the bus again to make sure that no one had stolen our seats, and then running out again to go to the bathroom one more time, since the only bathrooms where we were going had branches on them. It took Mrs. Baker and Mr. Vendleri and even Mrs. Sidman—who was coming along with us to lend Mrs. Baker moral support, she said—to get us finally herded onto the bus. Then it bumped into gear, and we were out onto Lee Avenue.
We sang as we drove to the Long Island Expressway. We got to Old Miss O'Leary taking a lantern to her shed, and the flea on the fly on the hair on the wart on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea, and the bullfrog stubbing his toe and falling in the water. When we reached the Throgs Neck Bridge, Doug Swieteck started "One Thousand Bottles of Beer on the Wall," until Mrs. Baker came down the bus aisle and didn't need to say anything. She had her arms crossed.
A very ominous beginning.
After an hour, the bus went from the highway to the Thruway, then—an hour later—off a sharp exit to a two-lane road, then to a gravel road, and then to a dirt road. Finally, we ended up on a two-track path that the bus could never have gotten out of if the path didn't double back on itself. When we reached the end of that—and let me tell you, this took a while—we climbed out and Mrs. Sidman tried to keep us corralled together as Mrs. Baker issued a pack to each of us.
The pack Mrs. Baker gave Danny was full of cans of chili—which weighed enough to make Danny stop smiling pretty quickly.
The pack she gave me held four cans of chili—big cans of chili—and all the utensils. "If something happens to this pack," she said when she hefted it onto my shoulders, "we're all going to eat with our fingers."
"What could happen?" I said.
"That is probably what Hero's father was thinking after the wedding date was set," she said.
Which, if you haven't read Much Ado About Nothing lately, was Mrs. Baker's way of saying that a whole lot could happen.
In small groups we followed Mrs. Baker onto a path that went mostly uphill while jutting up as many tree roots as it could to trip us. It wasn't too long before we were all stretched out, a long and straggling line that got longer and stragglier the farther we went.
Still, it was a June day to be blithe and bonny in. The leaves up in the hills still had that fresh color they have when they're just a couple of weeks old, and they give off that green smell that mixes so well with sunshine in June. A few big billows of clouds floated ahead of us. We could see them piled up when the maples thinned out to birches, carried on winds that were way too high to reach us below the trees. Top branches rubbed together now and then, their creaking and cracking the only sound we heard except for the group up ahead that was singing about Napoleon's army of fifty thousand men climbing up a hillside. They probably weren't carrying hefty cans of chili.
I was the very last person on the path. And let me tell you, after a while that bugged me. It wasn't that I was alone. Mrs. Sidman walked in front of me, picking up sweatshirts and canteens that hadn't been tied to the packs very well, and handing them to Danny and Meryl Lee when her arms got too full. But you put all the utensils for an entire class in one pack, and four big cans of chili, and you're carrying quite a bit, and that's going to slow you down. And it was an old pack, and it smelled old. I had to keep hefting it back up around my shoulders because the straps wouldn't hold tight, and every time I did that, another fork or knife found a way to poke into my spine. And when you have to do that while you're climbing mostly uphill, and the straps of your backpack are cutting grooves into your shoulders, and Doug Swieteck is carrying a pack filled with bags of marshmallows, you don't get in the best of moods—even if it is a June day off from school.
The path heaved in short, quick spurts up through some stands of old birches, and then out into more sunlit spaces. We crossed some open rock, and since it had become much warmer, I was glad when the clouds hid the sun and dropped the temperature. Then we climbed into some scrub pines, where the wind came on and cooled our backs. Even my pack began to feel a whole lot lighter, and the forks and knives had stopped jabbing into me whenever I hefted it up again.
It was past noon by the time our group got into camp, and I have to say, Mrs. Baker had picked a great spot—though probably Lieutenant Baker had picked it out years before. An egg-shaped clearing beneath high pines rounded out a bend in a running stream. A waterfall on one side threw its water over mossy stones and into a small, deep pool; on the other side we set our camp. The ground was not soggy, and there were no mosquitoes and not too many rocks, which I pointed out to Mrs. Baker.
"Just wait," she said.
Mrs. Baker organized the whole site. She gave Doug Swieteck a camp shovel and had him dig out a fire pit. I lined it with stones from the streambed. Mai Thi and Danny built a teepee fire, and Mrs. Baker put two large pots for chili beside it. Mrs. Sidman took everyone else to search for wood, and she organized what was brought back into a pile that slouched from the biggest logs to the smallest twigs. Then Mrs. Baker marked out the sleeping places with long branches—the girls on one side of the fire, the boys on the other—and she and Mrs. Sidman set up a big tent in between while everyone picked spots to lay out their sleeping bags.
After the tent was up, Mrs. Baker waved at Danny and me. "The chili," she called, and we brought our packs and dropped them beside her. Meryl Lee filled a fry pan with hot dogs and slid it on a grill over the fire. They began to sizzle right away.
You had to hand it to Mrs. Baker. For someone who hated camping, she knew exactly what to do. She even had latrines built in the woods, and she posted signs shaped like little hands with GENTLEMEN and GENTLEWOMEN written on them pointing to two thin paths that led away from each other. While the hot dogs cooked, I followed the path from the GENTLEMEN sign down a sharp ridge, over a dry streambed, up another ridge, and behind a boulder the size of Camillo Junior High. It was peaceful and comfortable. Doug Swieteck had used his camp shovel to dig a hole in the middle of some bright green vines, and he had set three rolls of toilet paper on three dead branches of a tree beside the hole. The vines that ran up the trees almost covered them. He left a shovel in the pile of dirt—to use as needed.
It was the kind of place where you could sit for a while within the vines and watch the green world be green.
Then Mrs. Sidman hollered, "Holling Hoodhood!"
You already know what had happened, don't you?
Let me tell you, it wasn't my fault that Mrs. Baker had given me an old pack. And it wasn't my fault that its seams were starting to split. And when you're hiking up a path that's pretty steep and hefting an old pack onto your shoulders, you don't feel stuff falling out.
"You didn't notice it was getting lighter?" said Mrs. Sidman.
"Well," I said, "I did notice it wasn't getting any heavier."
She held up a spoon. "This is our entire set of utensils," she said.
"We can stir the chili," I said.
"The can opener was in your pack, too," said Mrs. Sidman.
Mrs. Baker picked up four cans and handed two to me. "Come with me, Holling." We went down to the streambed. "Look for some large stones that are sharp at one end," she said.
And that's how we got the cans of chili opened. We smashed into them with rocks, which is what I think people did during the Westward Expansion. At first, the cans just bent over and started to collapse into themselves, but after a few blows they split open, and chili spattered out. By the time Mrs. Baker and I were done, we looked liked someone had thrown a whole can over us both.
But from the way Mrs. Baker was laughing, you couldn't tell that anything was wrong.
Or that she hated camping.
Mrs. Sidman was grumbling more than a little by the time we got back, and it didn't help much that she cut up the ends of three of her fingers trying to get all the chili out of the battered cans, which were pretty jagged. Every time she cut one, she would glare at me, and I don't think she was thinking thoughts about nurturing one of her students in wisdom and learning.
Any lunch after a long hike tastes good. Especially if it's on a day off from school. And if you take two hot dogs and hold them together, one in each hand, you can scoop up the chili between them, and shovel it all up to your mouth. If you lean way over while you do this, most of it won't even drip onto you—which is something that Mrs. Sidman didn't seem to understand.
And again, it wasn't my fault that she was wearing her favorite sweater, and that streaks of chili don't exactly go with mango, which is a color that you shouldn't wear on a camping trip anyway.
I think this is why I was the one who ended up carrying all the pots and pans down to the stream to wash them.
Meryl Lee helped. She didn't have to, but she did. So it wasn't bad at all, scrubbing at the pots together and her splashing me a little and me splashing her a little until we finally gave up and splashed each other all over so that it looked like we had jumped in—which washed all of the chili off me. Which is more than I can say for Mrs. Sidman's mango sweater.
But by the time we were done, there was a breeze skimming over the top of the stream, and it wasn't warm. We stacked the pots near the rest of the food, and then stood by the fire—Mrs. Sidman did not seem to mind me adding a few sticks to make it blaze up. Still, we were pretty wet, and the problem with getting warm by a fire is that one side of you is always cold, and the other side is always roasting. So you have to keep turning around and around.
We were supposed to go swimming in the afternoon, but the breeze that sent me and Meryl to the fire got stronger when a few of the clouds stacked themselves up between us and the sun, and so we played Capture the Flag instead, which our side won because Danny cheated and hid our flag about three stories up in a pine tree. And after that we climbed down past the waterfall and followed a deer track that led out from it and then climbed back above the waterfall and explored an abandoned stone house in a field beyond it. There were supposed to be rattlesnakes in the basement, but none showed.
It was a whole lot colder when we got back, and so Mrs. Sidman sent us to bring in more wood, and while we did, Mrs. Baker heated up pots of hot chocolate—which tastes better in the woods by an open fire than it does anywhere else—and Mrs. Sidman started unpacking the hamburger patties and glaring at me again, since she wasn't sure whether she could cook them with only one spoon to turn them over.
Anyone would know that she couldn't, and I think that even Mrs. Baker knew it wasn't right to blame me entirely when four of Mrs. Sidman's remaining seven healthy fingers got burns on the ends.
Let me tell you, she made a big deal of it.
After supper, Meryl Lee and I did the pots again.
It was hard to tell when night came on. We got the fire going pretty high—almost as high as where Danny hid the flag—and the crackling and snapping and small explosions of pine resin sent out sparks that looked like rising stars. The clouds had gotten so thick now that there was no sunset to see, and the breeze had picked up to a kind of steady rhythm, steady enough that not even a single mosquito was brave enough to fly out into it.
"Just wait," said Mrs. Baker.
But all through the singing that we did that night, no mosquito showed its face. Which just goes to show that even Mrs. Baker isn't right all the time.
Mrs. Sidman tried some ghost stories after the singing, but there's something about principals that makes it impossible for them to tell ghost stories. I mean, you can't spend your days in the Main Administrative Office and then hope to scare someone with a story about a headless ghost. You don't have a chance. She tried to make her voice all low and quavery, but she just got to sound like old Pastor McClellan at Saint Andrew's grumbling out a hymn. When she finally got to the end and shouted out the climax—which was supposed to make us all scream in fascinated terror—not much happened. So she sat back down and looked at us like she was going to make us all repeat seventh grade next year. There's a special kind of principal look for that, and even though she had only been a principal for two months, she had it down.
So when Mrs. Sidman got up to give her what-you-should-be-careful-about-in-the-woods speech, we didn't pay much attention, either. After all, that's what happens when you have teachers and principals along on a camping trip: You hear about all sorts of disasters, like mosquito bites, bee stings, what to do if you trip over a stone and get blood on your knee. You're told not to wander so far from camp at night that you can't see the firelight—as if that's going to be a real issue. And you're reminded where the latrines are, and how you shouldn't use too much toilet paper since there wasn't a whole lot, and what the shovel is for—stuff like that.
But when she came to the snake part, she got our attention.
"There are poisonous snakes all around here," she said. "If they bite you, your leg will swell up until you have ankles like cantaloupes and shins like watermelons. If you get bitten, you have to swallow this very quickly"—she held up a small glass vial—"so that you can make it to the hospital. You have to swallow it within thirty seconds for it to work. And even if you get it swallowed in thirty seconds, there is no guarantee. So in addition to this vial, I'll have to cut between the fang marks"—she held up a knife that Long John Silver would have been proud of—"and hope that some of the venom will ooze out along with your pus and blood."
I felt my throat start to close up. Meryl Lee took my hand.
Doug Swieteck moaned.
"This is what she should have used for her ghost story," said Danny.
"So be careful to check your sleeping bags before you get into them," said Mrs. Sidman. "It might be a good idea to turn them inside out once, just in case. And be sure not to sleep directly under a low branch. Snakes can climb trees, and sometimes they crawl out onto branches and fall, and you don't want a snake to fall across your face while you're sleeping."
By the time she was done, no one was talking. No one was moving. And Doug Swieteck was close to passing out.
"I'm going to stay up all night," said Danny.
"We can keep the fire going," said Mai Thi.
"I'll help," I said.
Meryl Lee squeezed my hand. Hard.
And that's why long after midnight, after everyone else had turned their sleeping bags inside out, shaken them, then turned them back and crawled in and zipped them up over their heads, Danny and Mai Thi and Meryl Lee and Doug and I and Mrs. Baker—I guess the part about the snakes got to her, too—were sitting around the fire as the flames faded and the blue and gold embers glowed like jewels. We sat in close, with blankets over our backs.
None of us said anything. We sat beside each other by the fire, silent, watching the jewels change and glow first into white diamonds, then into sapphires, then into rubies. Sometimes Mrs. Baker got up and threw another piece of wood on the fire, and the sparks shattered up into the night darkness and we watched them ascend until they disappeared like the stuff of dreams. The breeze clicked the branches above us together, and the water farther away tumbled and dropped into the pool below.
It was about as far away from the Perfect House that you can get and still be in the same universe.
We probably would have stayed there all night—if it hadn't started to rain.
Actually, "started" isn't really the right word. It didn't come on like rain usually does, a little at a time until first you realize that you're feeling a drop or two, and then you realize it's more than a drop or two, and then you know you need to get someplace because it's going to really come down in a minute. Here, one second it was all ascending sparks, and the next it was all rain. It must have been something like the moment the doors closed on Noah's Ark.
We threw our wool blankets over our heads, but it was already too late. We held the blankets tight around us as a cold wind dropped down with the rain, and while every single seventh grader from Mrs. Baker's class was hollering and trying to keep already soggy sleeping bags from getting a whole lot soggier and asking if snakes came out in the rain, Danny and I loaded more wood onto the fire to keep it from going out.
And that's pretty much what we all did for the rest of the night—hollered and wrung out sleeping bags and kept throwing wood onto the fire. Except for Mrs. Baker, who went inside the tent with Mrs. Sidman.
When dawn finally came—which we were all ready for, let me tell you—every bit of ground around the campsite was wet. Every bit. Puddles everywhere. It squelched while we walked, though sometimes it was hard to tell. Sometimes it might have been our sneakers squelching.
Mrs. Baker came out of the tent and looked at us with half-closed eyes. "Awfully soggy, isn't it," she said.
Why is it that when teachers go on campouts, they have tents?
Mrs. Sidman came out with a dark green poncho that covered her head and reached down to her ankles. She looked around the miserable campsite. We all had mud up to our knees, and most of us had draped our sleeping bags on pine branches above us; water dripped from their corners.
"You look like refugees," she said.
"Perhaps we should move toward breakfast," said Mrs. Baker.
Mrs. Sidman nodded. "You used a lot of wood last night," she told us.
"I'll find the eggs," said Mrs. Baker.
That morning, we had scrambled eggs spiced with pine bark, which came from the sticks we used to stir them. The orange Kool-Aid we drank was muddy, because the rain had stirred up the river before we filled our jugs. The bread was soggy, so we dripped honey onto the slices and rolled them and they didn't taste too bad.
Mrs. Sidman warmed the rest of the chili over the fire again, in case anyone wanted it. Only Doug Swieteck did—which was a mistake, as it turned out.
I think if it had kept on raining, we would all have gotten in under Mrs. Sidman's poncho and walked back home. But after Meryl Lee and I had carried all the pots to the stream—we waded right on in with them, since we were wet through already—the clouds started to shred, and sunbeams slit through. Each beam stabbed at the cold winds, until one by one they whimpered and died. The whole sky grew yellow, and we threw off the wet blankets—nothing smells worse than a wet woolen blanket—and then squelched around the campsite gathering more wood for the day, until suddenly it was so warm that someone said, "Let's go swimming," and we all ran a little way down the paths to the latrines and put on shorts and came back to the water and stepped carefully in—it was still cold—until Danny finally let himself slide down with the high current and over the waterfall ledge and into the pool. When he surfaced, he was laughing and snorting with water up his nose.
"It's great!" he said. And so we all went over the waterfall and got water up our noses.
Even Meryl Lee.
Even Mai Thi—holding Meryl Lee's hand.
That's what we did most of the morning, while Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Sidman stood above us and watched.
I could tell that Mrs. Baker was wanting to try it. It was probably getting hot on the open rocks above the falls, with the sun coming straight down now. Everything in the woods around us was steaming and glistening. The ferns, the pines, the leaves, the moss—everything. Even the teachers.
It's got to be hard to be a teacher all the time and not jump into a pool of clear water and come up laughing and snorting with water up your nose.
We ate lunch—chicken salad sandwiches and cucumber spears, which didn't need utensils—and then we headed back to the water, where Danny was throwing dives that the rest of us tried to match but couldn't. He could flip one and a half times and land headfirst right where the falls hit the pool, disappearing in white spray. Once he got around two full turns, which no human being should be able to do, and came up laughing and snorting so hard he could barely breathe.
That's all we did most of the afternoon. Not a diagrammed sentence in sight. Swimming and diving in a waterfall through the heated hours. Until finally we came back up to the campsite and Mrs. Baker started to assign our chores.
Now, you have to understand that we'd been here for a day and a half, and in all that time Doug Swieteck hadn't followed the gentlemen sign and used what was over the two ridges. It was pretty clear he wanted to. Actually, it was very clear he wanted to. But he wasn't going to use a hole in the middle of the woods, he said, even if he had dug it himself.
Still, when you've eaten chili the night before, and chili for breakfast, you can't hold it off forever. Even Doug Swieteck knew that, and that's why he finally gave in. He didn't have any choice.
He was gone for a long time. No one said anything, but everyone watched down the path.
And no one was surprised when he came back smiling—which you can understand.
He probably had no idea what had found him, and what was now following him.
Even we couldn't tell.
"It looks like smoke," said Mai Thi.
"But it's following him," said Danny.
Mrs. Baker sighed. "It's not smoke," she said.
"It's mosquitoes," I said.
Mrs. Baker rolled her eyes.
We all ran. Doug Swieteck couldn't quite figure out why, until the first ones landed on him. He looked down and saw his arms covered. That was until they flew into his eyes. Then he ran, too, and probably hit a whole lot more trees than he would have if the world was a fairer place.
The mosquitoes followed us like little airplanes. You could hear them buzzing.
We ran down to the water and splashed at them.
They hovered above us and laughed.
We ran toward the woods and swatted at them with pine branches.
They laughed some more.
Then we ran toward the fire, since Mrs. Baker said they hated smoke.
They don't. Hiding in the smoke helps about as much as scrunching under a desk during an atomic bomb attack.
"Keep moving and stay in groups," said Mrs. Baker, which is the same strategy to use if you're floating in the ocean and surrounded by sharks. It means that anyone on the outside of the group gets picked off. So we took turns getting in close to the center—except I gave Meryl Lee my turn since she had helped me with the pots. She said that I saved her about a pint of blood—which was worth it the way she smiled at me when she said this.
And that's how Mrs. Bigio found us when she hiked in at dusk—all huddled into small groups, swatting hopelessly at hordes of mosquitoes, nothing cooking on the fire. (Mrs. Sidman was in the tent, with the entrance zipped up.)
Mrs. Bigio unslung her backpack, whipped out a can of insect repellant, and went to work on us. Then she loaded wood onto the fire and sent half of us out for more. "The rest of you, bring me three large flat stones from the river. And scrub them clean! And bring back two pots of water, too. Who's been cleaning these?"
When we came back with the stones and pots of water, she unloaded garlic and carrots and potatoes and turnips and chuck beef and tomatoes.
Mai Thi stared at it all. "Thit bo kho?" she asked.
"It will be by the time we're done," said Mrs. Bigio. "The curry and gingerroot are in the front pocket there. I couldn't find any lemongrass, so we'll have to make do."
She and Mai Thi made do. In a little while, the water was boiling, and they had chopped up the potatoes and turnips into one pot, and the chuck beef into another. And then they combined them and added everything else that Mrs. Bigio had brought. And even if there wasn't any lemongrass, it all smelled as wonderful as any food cooked over an open fire can smell—which is pretty wonderful, let me tell you.
Just as we saw the first star, Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi ladled the stew out into bowls—that Mrs. Bigio had packed—and gave us spoons—that Mrs. Bigio had picked up all along the trail. "You can never be too careful about your supplies," she said to Mrs. Sidman, who, because she was eating hot thit bo kho, was happy enough not to blame anything on me. Even though I still was the one who carried the pots down to the stream to clean them out.
With Meryl Lee.
And neither of us minded at all.
We were still there when Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi came down to wash Mrs. Bigio's cutting knives—which she wouldn't let anyone but Mai Thi touch—and when Mrs. Bigio said to Mai Thi that she had meant to be up to the campsite earlier but that she had taken the morning to speak with the Catholic Relief Agency that had sponsored Mai Thi when she came from Vietnam. She wanted Mai Thi to know that the house where she was living with the relief sisters was very nice, but if she wanted, that is, if Mai Thi would like to, Mrs. Bigio had a small house and she was living all alone now and she thought that maybe, if Mai Thi would ever, could ever imagine that—until Mai Thi put her arms around Mrs. Bigio, and Mrs. Bigio put her arms around Mai Thi, and the ripples of the water replaced all words.
Good Lord, for alliance!
***
That night, I lay awake. It seemed that the soggy ground had sunk down and left a whole lot of rocks to poke up into me. I watched the bazillion stars amaze the sky above. I watched until they fell asleep themselves. Half my mind on sea, half on shore. Thinking about Mai Thi and Mrs. Bigio. And Lieutenant Baker coming home to Mrs. Baker. And Danny Hupfer getting ready for his bar mitzvah. And Bobby Kennedy. And Martin Luther King, Jr. And how in five years I'd have to register for the Vietnam draft.
And how the dew was starting to soak my sleeping bag.
So I was still awake when the dawn started to think about showing herself. The air was coloring everything gray, and the fog was coming up from the ground in white shreds and billows, as if the whole campsite had lifted itself up into the clouds overnight. I slipped out of my dewy sleeping bag and walked through the white and the gray to the water. When I reached it, the stream rippled happily, as if it had been waiting just for me all this time. I knelt down and lowered my palm into it. Cold. Frigidly cold. But I rolled up my pants and waded in. Beneath me, the rocks of the streambed felt smooth and slick, even soft, as the water rushed past, carrying itself away.
Then I looked upstream.
The disk of the sun had just come up, and the billows of fog had bowed to it and backed away. The river was a sudden ribbon of silvery light, flickering and sparkling and flashing, carrying the new light on its back all the way down from the high mountains. It was so bright that you couldn't see below the surface until the water was right up to you, and then it was suddenly clear, and buoying me up in its rush. And it never stopped, this rush of bright water from the mountains, these flashes and chunks of light from the sun. There was so much of it to come.
***
I didn't tell anyone about the river that morning. Not even Meryl Lee. I think that if I had told Pastor McClellan, he would have said it was a vision. I think if I had told Mrs. Baker, she would have said that it was a miracle, that all dawns were miracles—miracles being much on her mind lately, as you can understand. I think that if I had told Shakespeare about the river, he would have said, "All this amazement can I qualify"—but he would have been wrong, since what I saw was something more beautiful than has ever been written.
But I didn't tell anyone.
Not even Danny, who was hoping for a miracle, right up to the day of his bar mitzvah.
You could see him waiting for the worst to happen when he stood up in the synagogue a week later—a synagogue that was full, mostly with Hupfers. Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Bigio and Mrs. Sidman sat near the front. Mai Thi and Meryl Lee and Heather and I sat behind a group of ancient Hupfers—I was trying to keep my borrowed yarmulka on the back of my head, because it felt like it was slipping down all the time. And our parents were there, too—even my father, who, I guess, figured that Mr. Hupfer might someday need an architect, and so he had better show up. It was sort of like an investment. He sat as far away from Mr. Kowalski as he could.
We all watched as Danny pulled the prayer shawl his great-uncle had given him around his shoulders. The tassels reached below his waist. Then he wound the tefillin around his arm and across his forehead. You could see him still waiting for the worst, hoping for a miracle. Then the prayers. Still waiting. Then he walked with the rabbi and cantor back to the altar and took out the Torah. We all stood—I reached up to press down my yarmulka—and he carried the Torah back to the reading desk. The rabbi drew it from its mantle, untied the scroll, and rolled it open.
A huge breath from Danny. Still waiting.
And then—can you believe it?—the miracle came after all.
He lifted one of the tassels, touched it to the scroll, kissed it. He took the handles of the Torah in his own hands. And he began to sing.
Baruch et Adonai ha'mevorach.
And everyone around us sang back.
Baruch Adonai ha'mevorach I'olam va'ed.
And Danny sang again, deep and steady, until he got to "Baruch ata Adonai, noteyn ha'torah," when everyone sang back, just as deep and just as steady, "Amen."
Then Danny took a deep breath and began to read from the Torah.
Okay, so maybe sometimes the real world is smiles and miracles. Right there in front of us, Danny Hupfer was no longer Danny who stuck wads of gum under his desk. Or Danny who screamed out of his skull at soccer games. Or Danny who ran cross-country on bloody knees and waved sweaty T-shirts.
He was more than all of those things. He sang the words, and he was everyone who had sung them before him, like he was taking up his place in this huge choir and it wasn't Miss Violet of the Very Spiky Heels but God Himself leading the music. You saw Danny covered with weight.
Then the cantor and Danny's father stood over him and blessed him. More weight.
And Danny chanted again, this time from the Prophets. More weight.
And then he reached into his back pocket and took out his speech, his Dvar Torah. "Today," he said, "I am become a man."
And he had.
You could see it afterward, when he recited the blessings over the challah, and over the wine, and everyone shouted "L'chayim!" "To life!"
Danny had become a man. You could see him take up his place. And he was smiling. And crying, too.
After the service, my parents and Heather decided not to stay for the party already starting in the reception hall. When they asked if I wanted a ride, I told them I would walk home instead. But I went to the parking lot with them anyway.
As he unlocked the car, my father said, "I bet you're glad you don't have to go through something like that."
"I guess I am," I said.
"What do you mean, 'I guess I am'?" he said. "Would you want to stand up there with all that stuff all over you and chant at everyone?"
"It was a whole lot more than chanting at everyone," I said.
"Let's get in the car," said my mother.
"No," said my father. He put his arms up on top of the station wagon's roof. "I'd like to know what Holling thought was a whole lot more."
My stomach got tight. "He became a man," I said.
"You think that's how you become a man, by chanting a few prayers?"
"You think you become a man by getting a job as an architect?"
My father straightened. "That's exactly how you become a man," he said. "You get a good job and you provide for your family. You hang on, and you play for keeps. That's how it works."
"I really do think we should get in the car," said my mother.
"I don't think so," I said to my father. "It's not just about a job. It's more. It has to do with choosing for yourself."
"And you didn't even have to go to California to figure all that out," said my father. "So who are you, Holling?"
I felt Heather looking at me. And somehow—I don't know how—I thought of Bobby Kennedy, who could have made all the difference.
"I don't know yet," I said finally. "I'll let you know."
"What a barrel of mumbo-jumbo," said my father. He got into the station wagon and slammed the door. My mother blew me a kiss—really—and then she got in, too.
And my sister got in last of all.
She was smiling.
I could hardly breathe.
When they drove away, I went back inside Temple Beth-El, where the sounds of the miracle were still loud. Danny was still smiling—and it wasn't just because Mr. Goldman had brought huge trays of brown, light, perfect cream puffs. He couldn't stop smiling. And after a while, I couldn't, either—especially once the dancing started and Meryl Lee took my hand. And even more especially after Meryl Lee said, "You look different," and I said, "Maybe it's the yarmulka," and she said, "No, something else."
Meryl Lee. Can the world buy such a jewel?
It was when I had gone to find her a Coke that I saw Mrs. Baker, standing alone beside a pile of sugared strawberries. She was holding one in her hand, smiling, too.
Now, I know that you're not supposed to talk to a teacher outside of school activities. It's a rule that probably no one has ever broken. But I decided to break it anyway.
"Do you think Lieutenant Baker will really be home in time for strawberries?" I said.
Mrs. Baker, smiling Mrs. Baker, did not look away from the strawberry. "I'm sure of it," she said.
Now I smiled. "Do teachers always know the future?"
"Always," she said. "Shall I tell you yours?"
Standing there in the music of the bar mitzvah party, feeling the weight of what had happened in the synagogue, I saw again the glittering stream, with its light rushing toward me. "Don't tell me," I said. "But how do you know?"
She looked away from the strawberry and at me. "Do you remember Don Pedro, standing alone at the end of the play?"
I nodded. "Claudio has Hero, and they'll be fine. Benedict has Beatrice, and they'll be fine. Everyone else has everyone else, and they'll all be fine. The only one who's left alone is Don Pedro. And they all go off to dance and leave him behind. And they don't even remember that he's the one who has to deal with a traitor tomorrow, or that he hasn't got anyone."
"That's right," said Mrs. Baker. "And maybe his whole country will split into pieces. He doesn't have any idea what's going to happen to him."
"Great comedy," I said.
"A comedy isn't about being funny," said Mrs. Baker.
"We've talked about this before."
"A comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all. That's how I know."
"Suppose you can't see it?"
"That's the daring part," said Mrs. Baker.
"So you think Don Pedro ended up all right," I said.
"I think he became a man who brought peace and wisdom to his world, because he knew about war and folly. I think that he loved greatly, because he had seen what lost love is. And I think he came to know, too, that he was loved greatly." She looked at the strawberry in her hands. "But I thought you didn't want me to tell you your future."
The music started again. A quick ring dance. Danny Hupfer was going to dance with Mrs. Bigio, and Mai Thi was doubled over, laughing. Mrs. Sidman had stepped into the ring beside Doug Swieteck—who didn't look all that happy. The Kowalskis and the Hupfers had come in together, Mrs. Hupfer and Mrs. Kowalski giggling and in their stocking feet, since you can't dance in high heels. And Meryl Lee...
Everyone was laughing and jostling to their places. I needed to go find mine.
"L'chayim!" I said to Mrs. Baker.
And she smiled—not a teacher smile. "Chrysanthemum," she said.
Eleven days later, on Wednesday, Lieutenant Tybalt Baker came home.
It was the day that President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that the marines were abandoning Khesanh.
I was at the airport. Me and Danny and Mai Thi and Meryl Lee and Doug and the whole class. Standing on the tarmac when the military plane landed.
We all held boxes of sweet strawberries.
I guess you want to know what Mrs. Baker did when Lieutenant Baker came out of the plane. And I guess you want to know what Lieutenant Baker did when he saw Mrs. Baker on the tarmac.
But toads, beetles, bats. If you can't figure that out for yourself, then a southwest blow on ye and blister you all o'er.
Because let me tell you, it was a happy ending.