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 into his suspenders. His face was the dusty, ruddy color of any farmer’s face. His pale, peculiar eyes might have been tipped just the slightest bit at the corners with amusement. Or not. When he was sure she was finished, had said her say, he spoke calmly and flatly. “I ain’t never peeked, Beatrice, but it sure as hell ain’t rape.”

And with that the matter was “tabled for further discussion.” Which, in northern New England, is the polite term for purgatory.

 

John Cheltzman and the other boys from Hetton House were enthusiastic about the trip from the first, but Blaze had his doubts. When it came to “working out,” he remembered the Bowies too well.

Toe-Jam couldn’t stop talking about finding a girl “to jazz around with.” Blaze didn’t believe he himself had to spend much time worrying about that. He still thought about Marjorie Thurlow, but what was the sense in thinking about the rest of them? Girls liked tough guys, fellows who could kid them along like the guys in the movies did.

Besides, girls scared him. Going into a toilet stall at HH with Toe-Jam’s treasured copy of Girl Digest and beating off did him fine. Did him right when he was wrong. So far as he’d been able to tell from listening to the other boys, the feeling you got from beating off and the feeling you got from sticking it in stacked up about the same, and there was this to be said for beating off: you could do it four or five times a day.

At fifteen, Blaze was finally reaching full growth. He was six and a half feet tall, and the string John stretched from shoulder to shoulder one day measured out twenty-eight inches. His hair was brown, coarse, thick, and oily. His hands were blocks measuring a foot from thumb to pinky when spread. His eyes were bottle green, brilliant and arresting — not a dummy’s eyes at all. He made the other boys look like pygmies, yet they teased him with easy, impudent openness. They had accepted John Cheltzman — now commonly known as JC or Jeepers Cripe — as Blaze’s personal totem, and because of their Boston adventure, the two boys had become folk heroes in the closed society of Hetton House. Blaze had achieved an even more special place. Anyone who has ever seen toddlers flocking around a St. Bernard will know what it was.

 

When they arrived at the Bluenote place, Dougie Bluenote was waiting to take them to their cabins. He told them they would be sharing Riffle Cabins that summer with half a dozen boys from South Portland Correctional. Mouths tightened at this news. South Portland boys were known as ball-busters of the first water.

Blaze was in Cabin 3 with John and Toe-Jam. John had grown thinner since the trip to Beantown. His rheumatic fever had been diagnosed by the Hetton House doctor (a Camel-smoking old quack named Donald Hough) as nothing but a bad case of the flu. This diagnosis would kill John, but not for another year.

“Here’s your cabin,” Doug Bluenote said. He had his father’s farmer’s face, but not his father’s strange pale eyes. “There’s a lot of boys used it before you. If you like it, take care of it so a lot of boys can use it after you. There’s a woodstove if it gets chilly at night, but it probably won’t. There’s four beds, so you get to choose. If we pick up another fella, he gets the one left over. There’s a hot plate for snacks and coffee. Unplug it last thing you do before you leave in the mornings. Unplug it last thing before turning in at night. There’s ashtrays. Your butts go there. Not on the floor. Not in the dooryard. There isn’t to be any drinking or playing poker. If me or my dad catches you drinking or playing poker, you’re done. No second chances. Breakfast at six, in the big house. You’ll get lunch at noon, and you’ll eat it in the yonder.” He waved his arm in the general direction of the blueberry fields. “Supper at six, in the big house. You start in raking tomorrow at seven. Good day to you, gentlemen.”

When he was gone, they poked around. It wasn’t a bad place. The stove was an old Invincible with a Dutch oven. The beds were all on the floor — for the first time in years they would not be stacked up like coins in a slot. There was a fairly large common room in addition to the kitchen and the two bedrooms. Here was a bookcase made out of a Pomona orange crate. It contained the Bible, a sex manual for young people, Ten Nights in a Barroom, and Gone with the Wind. There was a faded hooked rug on the floor. The floor itself was of loose boards, very different from the tile and varnished wood of HH. These boards rumbled underfoot when you walked on them.

While the others were making their beds, Blaze went out on the porch to look for the river. The river was there. It ran through a gentle depression at this point in its course, but not too far upstream he could hear the lulling thunder of a rapids. Gnarled trees, oak and willow, leaned over the water as if to see their reflections. Dragonflies and sewing needles and skeeters flew just above the surface, sometimes stitching it. Far away, in the distance, came the rough buzz of a cicada.

Blaze felt something in him loosen.

He sat down on the top step of the porch. After awhile John came out and sat beside him.

“Where’s Toe?” Blaze asked.

“Readin that sexbook. He’s lookin for pictures.”

“He find any?”

“Not yet.”

They sat quiet for awhile. “Blaze?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not so bad, is it?”

“No.”

But he still remembered the Bowies.

 

They walked down to the big house at five-thirty. The path followed the river’s course and soon brought them to the Bend Cabins, where half a dozen girls were clustered.

The boys from HH and the ball-busters from South Portland kept walking, as if they were around girls — girls with breasts — every damn day. The girls joined them, some putting on lipstick as they chatted with each other, like being around boys — boys with beard-shadows — was as common as swatting flies. One or two were wearing nylons; the rest were in bobby-sox. The bobby-sox were all folded at exactly the same position on the shin. Make-up had been laid over blemishes — in some cases to the thickness of cupcake frosting. One girl, much envied by the others, was sporting green eye-shadow. All of them had perfected the sort of hip-rolling walk John Cheltzman later called the Streetwalker Strut.

One of the South Portland ball-busters hawked and spat. Then he picked a piece of alfalfa grass to stick between his teeth. The other boys regarded this closely and tried to think of something — anything — they themselves could do in order to demonstrate their nonchalance around the fairer sex. Most settled for hawking and spitting. Some originalists stuck their hands in their back pockets. Some did both.

The South Portland boys probably had the advantage of the Hetton boys; when it came to girls, the supply was greater in the city. The mothers of the South Portland boys might have been juicers, hypes, and ten-dollar lovers, their sisters two-buck handjob honeys, but the ball-busters in most cases at least grasped the essential idea of girls.

The HH boys lived in an almost exclusively male society. Their sex education consisted of guest lectures from local clergy. Most of these country preachers informed the boys that masturbation made you foolish and the risks of intercourse included a penis that turned black from disease and began to stink. They also had Toe-Jam’s occasional dirty mags (Girl Digest the latest and best). Their ideas on how to converse with girls came from the movies. About actual intercourse they had no idea, because — as Toe once sadly observed — they only showed fucking in French movies. The only French movie they had ever seen was The French Connection.

And so the walk from Bend Cabins to the big house was accomplished mostly in tense (but not antagonistic) silence. Had they not been quite so involved in trying to cope with their new situation, they might have spared a glance for Dougie Bluenote, who was doing his mighty best to keep a straight face.

 

Harry Bluenote was leaning against the dining room door when they came in. Boys and girls alike gawked at the pictures on the walls (Currier & Ives, N.C. Wyeth), the old and mellow furniture, the long dining table with SET A SPELL carved on one bench and COME HUNGRY, LEAVE FULL carved on the other. Most of all they looked at the large oil portrait on the east wall. This was Marian Bluenote, Harry’s late wife.

They might have considered themselves tough — in some ways they were — but they were still only children sporting their first sex characteristics. They instinctively formed themselves into the lines that had been their entire lives. Bluenote let them. Then he shook hands with each one as he or she filed into the room. He nodded in courtly fashion to the girls, in no way betraying that they were got up like kewpie dolls.

Blaze was last. He towered over Bluenote by half a foot, but he was shuffling his feet and looking at the floor and wishing he were back at HH. This was too hard. This was awful. His tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. He thrust his hand out blindly.

Bluenote shook it. “Christ, ain’t you a big one. Not built for raking berries, though.”

Blaze looked at him dumbly.

“You want to drive truck?”

Blaze gulped. There seemed to be something caught in his throat that wouldn’t go down. “I don’t know how to drive, sir.”

“I’ll teach you,” Bluenote said. “It ain’t hard. Go on in and get y’self y’dinner.”

Blaze went in. The table was mahogany. It glittered like a pool. Places were set up and down both sides. Overhead glittered a chandelier, just like in a movie. Blaze sat down, feeling hot and cold. There was a girl on his left and that made his confusion worse. Every time he glanced that way, his eye fell on the jut of her breasts. He tried to do something about this and couldn’t. They were just…there. Taking up space in the world.

Bluenote and the camp mom served out. There was beef stew and a whole turkey. There was a huge wooden bowl heaped with salad and three kinds of dressing. There was a plate of wax beans, one of peas, one of sliced carrots. There was a ceramic pot filled with mashed potatoes.

When all the food was on the table and everyone was seated before their shining plates, silence dropped like a rock. The boys and girls stared at this feast as if at a hallucination. Somewhere a belly rumbled. It sounded like a truck crossing a plank bridge.

“All right,” Bluenote said. He was sitting at the head of the table with the camp mom on his left. His son sat at the foot. “Let’s have some grace.”

They bowed their heads and awaited the sermon.

“Lord,” Bluenote said, “bless these boys and girls. And bless this food to their use. Amen.”

They blinked at each other surreptitiously, trying to decide if it was a joke. Or a trick. Amen meant you could eat, but if that was the case now, they had just heard the shortest goddam grace in the history of the world.

“Pass me that stew,” Bluenote said.

That summer’s raking crew fell to with a will.

 

Bluenote and his son showed up at the big house the next morning after breakfast driving two Ford two-tons. The boys and girls climbed into the backs and were driven to the first blueberry field. The girls were dressed in slacks this morning. Their faces were puffy with sleep and mostly free of make-up. They looked younger, softer.

Conversations began. They were awkward at first, but became more natural. When the trucks hit field-bumps, everyone laughed. There were no formal introductions. Sally Ann Robichaux had Winstons and shared out the pack; even Blaze, sitting on the end, got one. One of the ball-busters from South Portland began discussing girly books with Toe-Jam. It turned out that this fellow, Brian Wick, just happened to have come to the Bluenote farm equipped with a pocket-sized digest called Fizzy. Toe allowed that he had heard good things about Fizzy, and the two of them worked out a trade. The girls managed to ignore this and look indulgent at the same time.

They arrived. The low blueberry bushes were in full fruit. Harry and Douglas Bluenote dropped the truck tailgates and everyone jumped down. The field had been divided into strips with white cloth pennants fluttering from low stakes. Another truck — older, bigger — pulled up. This one had high canvas sides. It was driven by a small black man named Sonny. Blaze never heard Sonny say a single word.

The Bluenotes gave their crew short, close-tined blueberry rakes. Only Blaze did not get one. “The rake is designed to take nothin but ripe berries,” Bluenote said. Behind him, Sonny got a fishing pole and creel out of the big truck. He clapped a straw hat on his head and started across the field toward a line of trees. He didn’t look back.

“But,” Bluenote said, raising a finger, “bein an invention of human hand, it ain’t perfect. It’ll get some leaves and greenies as well. Don’t let that worry you, or slow you down. We pick em over back at the barn. And you’ll be there, so don’t worry we’re shorting your wages. Got that?”

Brian and Toe-Jam, who would be inseparable pals by the end of the day, stood side by side, arms folded. They both nodded.

“Now, just so’s you know,” Bluenote went on. His strange pale eyes glittered. “I get twenty-six cents the quart. You get seven cents. Makes it sound like I’m makin nineteen cents a quart on the sweat of your brow, but it ain’t so. After all expenses, I make ten cents the quart. Three more’n you. That three cents is called capitalism. My field, my profit, you take a share.” He repeated: “Just so’s you know. Any objections?”

There were no objections. They seemed hypnotized in the hot morning sunshine.

“Okay. I got me a driver; that be you, Hoss. I need a counter. You, kid. What’s your name?”

“Uh, John. John Cheltzman.”

“Come over here.”

He helped Johnny up into the back of the truck with the canvas sides and explained what had to be done. There were stacks of galvanized steel pails. He was to run and hand one to anyone who called for a bucket. Each empty bucket had a blank strip of white adhesive tape on the side. Johnny had to print the picker’s name on each full bucket. Full buckets were tucked into a slotted frame that kept them from falling over and spilling while the truck was moving. There was also an ancient, dusty chalkboard to keep running totals on.

“Okay, son,” Bluenote said. “Get em to line up and give em their buckets.”

John went red, cleared his throat, and whispered for them to line up. Please. He looked as though he expected to be ganged-up on. Instead, they lined up. Some of the girls were putting on headscarves or tucking gum into their mouths. John handed them buckets, printing their names on the ID tapes in big black capital letters. The boys and girls chose their rows, and the day’s work began.

Blaze stood beside the truck and waited. There was a great, formless excitement in his chest. To drive had been an ambition of his for years. It was as if Bluenote had read the secret language of his heart. If he meant it.

Bluenote walked over. “What do they call you, son? Besides Hoss?”

“Blaze, sometimes. Sometimes Clay.”

“Okay, Blaze, c’mere.” Bluenote led him to the cab of the truck and got behind the wheel. “This is a three-speed International Harvester. That means it’s got three gears ahead and one for reverse. This here stickin up from the floor’s the gearshift. See it?”

Blaze nodded.

“This I got my left foot on is the clutch. See that?”

Blaze nodded.

“Push it in when you want to shift. When you got the gearshift where you want it, let the clutch out again. Let it out too slow and she’ll stall. Let it out too fast — pop it — and you’re apt to spill all the berries and knock your friend on his fanny into the bargain. Because she’ll jerk. You understand?”

Blaze nodded. The boys and girls had already worked a little distance up their first rows. Douglas Bluenote walked from one to the next, showing them the best way to handle the rake and avoid blisters. He also showed them the little wrist-twist at the end of each pull; that spilled out most of the leaves and little twigs.

The elder Bluenote hawked and spat. “Don’t worry about y’gears. To start with, all you need to worry about is reverse and low range. Now watch here and I’ll show you where those two are.”

Blaze watched. It had taken him years to get the hang of addition and subtraction (and carrying numbers had been a mystery to him until John told him to think of it like carrying water). He picked up all the basic driving skills in the course of one morning. He stalled the truck only twice. Bluenote later told his son that he had never seen anyone learn the delicate balance between clutch and accelerator so quickly. What he said to Blaze was, “You’re doin good. Keep the tires off the bushes.”

Blaze did more than drive. He also picked up everyone’s pails, trotted them back to the truck, handed them to John, and brought back empties to the pickers. He spent the whole day with an unvarying grin on his face. His happiness was a germ that infected everyone.

A thundersquall came up around three o’clock. The kids piled into the back of the big truck, obeying Bluenote’s admonition to be damn careful where they sat.

“I’ll drive back,” Bluenote said, getting up on the running-board. He saw Blaze’s face fall and grinned. “Give it time, Hoss — Blaze, I mean.”

“Okay. Where’s that man Sonny?”

“Cookin,” Bluenote said briefly, punching the clutch and engaging first gear. “Fresh fish if we’re lucky; more stew if we ain’t. You want to run into town with me after dinner?”

Blaze nodded, too overcome to speak.

That evening he looked on silently with Douglas as Harry Bluenote haggled with the buyer from Federal Foods, Inc., and got his price. Douglas drove home behind the wheel of one of the farm’s Ford pick-ups. No one talked. Watching the road unroll before the headlights, Blaze thought: I’m going somewhere. Then he thought: I am somewhere. The first thought made him happy. The second was so big it made him feel like crying.

 

Days passed, then weeks, and there was a rhythm to it all. Up early. Huge breakfast. Work until noon; huge lunch in the field (Blaze had been known to consume as many as four sandwiches, and nobody told him no). Work until the afternoon thundersqualls put an end to it or Sonny rang the big brass dinner-bell, strokes that came across the hot, fleeting day like sounds heard in a vivid dream.

Bluenote began letting Blaze drive to and from the fields along the back roads. He drove with increasing skill, until it was something like genius. He never spilled a single container from the low wooden slat-holders. After dinner he often went to Portland with Harry and Douglas and watched Harry do his dickers with the various food companies.

July disappeared wherever used months go. Then half of August. Soon summer would be over. Thinking of that made Blaze sad. Soon, Hetton House again. Then winter. Blaze could barely stand to think of another winter at Hetton.

He had no idea how powerful Harry Bluenote’s liking for him had become. The big boy was a natural peacemaker and the picking had never gone more sweetly. Only one fistfight had broken out. Usually there were half a dozen. A boy named Henry Gillette accused one of the other South Portland boys of cheating at blackjack (technically not poker). Blaze simply picked Gillette up by the scruff of the neck and hauled him off. Then he made the other boy give Gillette his money back.

Then, in the third week of August, the icing on the cake. Blaze lost his virginity.

 

The girl’s name was Anne Bradstay. She was in Pittsfield for arson. She and her boyfriend had burned down six potato warehouses between Presque Isle and Mars Hill before getting caught. They said they did it because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was fun to watch them burn. Anne said Curtis would call her up and say “Let’s go French-fryin,” and off they’d go. The judge — who had lost a son Curtis Prebble’s age in Korea — had no understanding of such boredom, nor sympathy for it. He sentenced the boy to six years in Shawshank State Prison.

Anne got a year in what the girls called The Pittsfield Kotex Factory. She didn’t really mind. Her stepfather had busted her cherry for her when she was thirteen and her older brother beat her when he was drunk, which was often. After that shit, Pittsfield was a vacation.

She was not a bruised girl with a heart of gold, only a bruised girl. She was not mean, but she was acquisitive, with a crow’s eye for shiny things. Toe, Brian Wick, and two other boys from South Portland pooled their resources and offered Anne four dollars to lay Blaze. They had no motive save curiosity. Nobody told John Cheltzman — they were afraid he might tell Blaze, or even Doug Bluenote — but everyone else in camp knew.

Once a night, someone from the boys’ cabins went down to the well on the road to the big house with two pails — one for drinking, one for washing. That particular night was Toe-Jam’s turn, but he said he had the belly-gripe and offered Blaze a quarter to go in his stead.

“Naw, that’s okay, I’ll go for free,” Blaze said, and got the buckets.

Toe smirked at the quarter saved and went to tell his friend Brian.

 

The night was dark and fragrant. The moon was orange, just risen. Blaze walked stolidly, thinking of nothing. The buckets clashed together. When a light hand fell on his shoulder, he didn’t jump.

“Can I walk with you?” Anne asked. She held up her own buckets.

“Sure,” Blaze said. Then his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he began to blush.

They walked side by side to the well. Anne whistled softly through her rotting teeth.

When they got there, Blaze shifted the boards aside. The well was only twenty feet deep, but a pebble dropped into its rock-lined barrel made a mysterious, hollow splash. Timothy grass and wild roses grew luxuriously all around the concrete pad. Half a dozen old oaks stood around, as if on guard. The moon peered through one of them now, casting pale gleams.

“Can I get your water?” Blaze asked. His ears were burning.

“Yeah? Tha’d be nice.”

“Sure,” he said, grinning thoughtlessly. “Sure it would.” He thought of Margie Thurlow, although this girl looked nothing like her.

There was a length of sunbleached rope tied to a ringbolt set in one corner of the cement. Blaze tied the free end of this rope to one of the buckets. He dropped it into the hole. There was a splash. Then they waited for it to fill up.

Anne Bradstay was no expert in the art of seduction. She put her hand on the crotch of Blaze’s jeans and grasped his penis.

“Hey!” he said, surprised.

“I like you,” she said. “Why don’t you screw me? Want to?”

Blaze looked at her, struck dumb with amazement…although, within her hand, part of him was now beginning to speak its piece in the old language. The girl was wearing a long dress, but she had pulled it up to show her thighs. She was scrawny, but the moonlight was kind to her face. The shadows were even kinder.

He kissed her clumsily, wrapping his arms around her.

“Jeez, you got a real woodie, don’tcha?” she asked, gasping for breath (and grasping his cock even harder). “Now take it easy, okay?”

“Sure,” Blaze said, and lifted her in his arms. He set her down in the timothy. He unbuckled his belt. “I don’t know nothin bout this.”

Anne smiled, not without bitterness. “It’s easy,” she said. She pulled her dress over her hips. She wasn’t wearing underpants. He saw a thin triangle of dark hair in the moonlight and thought if he looked at it too long, it would kill him.

She pointed matter-of-factly. “Stick your pecker in here.”

Blaze dropped his pants and climbed on. At a distance of about twenty feet, hunkered in some high pucky, Brian Wick looked at Toe-Jam with wide eyes. He whispered, “Get a load of that tool!”

Toe tapped the side of his head and whispered, “I guess what God took away here he put back down there. Now shut up.”

They turned to watch.

 

The next day, Toe mentioned that he’d heard Blaze got more than water at the well. Blaze turned almost purple and showed his teeth before walking away. Toe never dared mention it again.

Blaze became Anne’s cavalier. He followed her everywhere, and gave her his second blanket in case she got cold during the night. Anne enjoyed this. In her own way, she fell in love with him. She and he carried water for the girls’ and boys’ cabins for the rest of the picking and no one ever said anything about it. They would not have dared.

 

On the night before they were to go back to Hetton, Harry Bluenote asked Blaze if he would stay a bit after supper. Blaze said sure, but he began to feel uneasy. His first thought was that Mr. Bluenote had found out what he and Anne were doing down by the well and was mad. This made him feel bad, because he liked Mr. Bluenote.

When everyone else was gone, Bluenote lit a cigar and walked twice around the cleared supper-table. He coughed. He rumpled his already rumpled hair. Then he nearly barked: “Look here, you want to stay on?”

Blaze gaped, unable at first to get across the chasm between what he had believed Mr. Bluenote was going to say and what he had said.

“Well? Would you?”

“Yes,” Blaze managed. “Yes, sure. I…sure.”

“Good,” Bluenote said, looking relieved. “Because Hetton House isn’t for a boy like you. You’re a good boy, but you need taking in hand. You try goddam hard, but —” He pointed at Blaze’s head. “How’d that happen?”

Blaze’s hand went immediately to the bashed-in dent. He blushed. “It’s awful, ain’t it? To look at, I mean. Lordy.”

“Well, it ain’t pretty, but I seen worse.” Bluenote dropped into a chair. “How’d it happen?”

“My dad go an pitch me downstair. He ’us hungover or somethin. I don’t remember very well. Anyway…” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh? Well, I guess it was enough.” He got up again, went to the cooler in the corner, drew himself a Dixie cup of water. “I went to the doctor’s today — I been puttin it off because sometimes I get these little flutters — and he gave me a clean bill. I was some relieved.” He drank his water, crumpled the cup, and tossed it into the wastebasket. “A man gets older, that’s the thing. You don’t know nothin about that, but you will. He gets older and his whole life starts to seem like a dream he had durin an afternoon nap. You know?”

“Sure,” Blaze said. He hadn’t heard a word of it. Live here with Mr. Bluenote! He was just beginning to grasp what that might mean.

“I just wanted to make sure I could do right by you if I went and took you on,” Bluenote said. He cocked a thumb at the picture of the woman on the wall. “She liked boys. She give me three and died havin the last. Dougie’s the middle boy. Eldest is in Washington state, buildin planes for Boeing. Youngest died in a car accident four year ago. That was a sad thing, but I like to think he’s with his ma now. Could be that’s a stupid idea, but we take our comfort where we can. Don’t we, Blaze?”

“Yessir,” Blaze said. He was thinking about Anne at the well. Anne in the moonlight. Then he saw there were tears in Mr. Bluenote’s eyes. They shocked him and frightened him a little.

“Go on,” Mr. Bluenote said. “And don’t linger too long at the well, you hear me?”

 

But he did stop at the well. He told Anne what had happened, and she nodded. Then she began to cry, too.

“What’s wrong, Annie?” he asked her. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“Nothin,” she said. “Draw my water, will you? I brought the buckets.”

He drew the water. She watched him raptly.

 

The last day’s picking was over by one o’clock, and even Blaze could see the final haul didn’t amount to much. Berries was over.

He always drove now. He was in the cab of the truck, idling along in low, when Harry Bluenote called: “Okay, youse! Up in the truck! Blaze’ll drive back! Change y’duds and come on down to the big house! Cake n ice cream.”

They scrambled over the tailgate, yelling like a bunch of kiddies, and John had to yell back at them to watch out for the berries. Blaze was grinning. It felt like the kind of grin that might stay on all day.

Bluenote walked around to the passenger side. His face looked pale under his tan, and there was sweat on his forehead.

“Mr. Bluenote? Are you okay?”

“Sure,” Harry Bluenote said. He smiled his last smile. “Just ate too much lunch, I guess. Take her in, Bla —”

He grabbed his chest. Cords popped out on both sides of his neck. He stared full at Blaze, but not as if he was seeing him.

“What’s wrong?” Blaze asked.

“Ticker,” Bluenote remarked, then fell forward. His forehead smacked the metal dashboard. For a moment he clutched at the old torn seatcover with both hands, as if the world had turned upside-down. Then he tilted sideways and fell out the open door onto the ground.

Dougie Bluenote had been ambling around the hood of the truck. Now he broke into a run. “Poppa!” he screamed.

 

Bluenote died in his son’s arms on the wild, jouncing ride back to the big house. Blaze hardly noticed. He was hunched over the big, cracked wheel of the I-H truck, glaring at the unrolling dirt road like a madman.

Bluenote shivered once, twice, like a dog caught out in the rain, and that was it.

 

Mrs. Bricker — the camp mom — dropped a pitcher of lemonade on the floor when they carried him in. Icecubes sprayed every whichway on the plank pine. They took Bluenote into the parlor and put him on the couch. One arm dangled on the floor. Blaze picked it up and put it on Bluenote’s chest. It fell off again. After that, Blaze just held it.

Dougie Bluenote was in the dining room, standing beside the long table, which was set for the end-of-picking ice cream party (a small going-away present had been set beside each kid’s plate), talking frantically on the phone. The other pickers clustered on the porch, looking in. All of them looked horrified except for Johnny Cheltzman, who looked relieved.

Blaze had told him everything the night before.

 

The doctor came and made a brief examination. When he was done, he pulled a blanket over Bluenote’s face.

Mrs. Bricker, who had stopped crying, started again. “The ice cream,” she said. “What will we do with all that ice cream? Oh, lands!” She put her apron over her face, then all the way over her head, like a hood.

“Have em come in and eat it,” Doug Bluenote said. “You too, Blaze. Pitch in.”

Blaze shook his head. He felt like he might never be hungry again.

“Never mind, then,” Doug said. He ran his hands through his hair. “I’ll have to call Hetton…and South Portland…Pittsfield…Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” He put his face to the wall and began to cry himself. Blaze just sat and looked at the covered shape on the couch.

 

The station wagon from HH came first. Blaze sat in the back, looking out the dusty rear window. The big house dwindled and dwindled until it was finally lost to view.

The others began to talk a little, but Blaze kept his silence. It was beginning to sink in. He tried to work it out in his mind and couldn’t. It made no sense, but it was sinking in anyway.

His face began to work. First his mouth twitched, then his eyes. His cheeks began to tremble. He couldn’t control these things. They were beyond him. Finally he began to cry. He put his forehead against the rear window of the station wagon and wept great monotonous sobs that sounded like a horse neighing.

The man driving was Martin Coslaw’s brother-in-law. He said, “Somebody shut the moose up, how about it?”

But nobody dared touch him.

 

Anne Bradstay’s baby was born eight and a half months later. It was a whopping boy — ten pounds, nine ounces. He was put up for adoption and taken almost immediately by a childless couple from Saco named Wyatt. Boy Bradstay became Rufus Wyatt. He was named All-State Tackle from his high school team when he was seventeen; All-New England a year later. He went to Boston University with the intention of majoring in literature. He particularly enjoyed Shelley, Keats, and the American poet James Dickey.