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I’d been at it for about an hour, when Mrs. Vernon came out the back door. “Someone sent you a letter,” she called out, waving an envelope. “The mailman just brought it.”
The soiled and crinkled envelope looked as if it had spent time in someone’s pocket. I recognized the handwriting immediately—stiff, blocky printing that broke occasionally into script. Tom had never had the patience to write properly. He talked that way, too—in bursts of words that sometimes came out so fast you didn’t have any idea what he was saying.
“Who do you suppose it’s from?” asked Mrs. Vernon, pushing the envelope toward me. The return address was only a long number and the name of a town, Sherwood. Everyone in Illinois, even Mrs. Vernon, knows what’s in that town. It’s as if the place has no other purpose, as if no ordinary person would possibly live there. I snatched the letter and took it over to a shady spot at the side of the house, sitting down with my back to the wall. I ripped open the envelope with my finger. The letter was written with a soft pencil on grayish paper that was thin and pulpy.
Dear Weakheart,
I heard the news! Some guy got here from Edmonton Monday morning (a car thief!!!) and he knew all about it. Now everyone wants to meet you! I guess us Calhouns are all college material after all. From what I hear, Horner will probably give you a full scholarship. You’ll learn a lot of important stuff. Like I’m learning how to paint numbers on lisence plates and fold socks into pairs (you have to be able to count to two to do that). Plus, you’ll meet a lot of interesting people, like Doug Thacker, who shot his gym teacher in the leg with a BB gun. I asked him why and he said because he was aiming at his ---- and missed! Well, that’s about all I had to say. I just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you. How’s Bunny? Sorry this writing is so hard to read, but they won’t let us have any sharp pencils so we won’t stab each other.
As Always,
Tom
P.S. If you take my advise, you’ll run away. You can’t imagine how bad it is here. I know I’m going to die before I ever get home again.
I read the letter over twice quickly, then a third time more slowly. When I looked up, Mrs. Vernon was settled in on a folding chair near the back door, pealing and coring apples for a pie. She was pretending to be occupied by the work, but every now and then her head tilted, and her gaze sneaked over toward me. When I saw that, I wanted to do everything in my power to hurt her. So I folded the letter into a tight wad, and when I was certain she was watching, I reached down the front of my T-shirt and stuffed the wad into my bra.
I went back to the garden and took my place between a second planting of carrots and a row of young beans. The beans were sending out tendrils that curled along a suspended line of string. To try to get comfortable, I stretched my legs down the narrow path between the rows and rested on my side. My jeans were getting filthy.
I tried to imagine Tom, scrunched up at some worn and dirty reform-school desk, composing a letter to me. We’d been great friends once, when we were very little. Bunny’s got snapshots from those days, grainy photographs in which I’m either looking up adoringly at him or clinging to the tail of his shirt. In a couple of the pictures, Tom and I are hunkered down, squatting on our haunches the way Indians do, inspecting something small on the ground. Sitting that way seems impossible now, it seems to defy balance. The memory of doing it has disappeared, just like the memory of when Tom and I were close. Once he got into school, he spent most of his time with his own friends—when he wasn’t in the principal’s office, answering for some sort of mischief. He was always up to something. On a dare, he ate a crayon. He dropped his arithmetic book down a storm sewer. He slipped out of class and hid all afternoon in the boiler room and only emerged to show off a mouse he’d caught with his baseball glove. The school was always calling Bunny, and it was probably during that time that I started to think of Bunny and me as somehow separate in the family from Tom. “What are we going to do with your brother?” Bunny would ask. And though she loves Tom very much, there was a way in which she almost seemed to enjoy the situation—the two of us plotting a way to save him.
He grew angry with Bunny as he got older. He sulked around the house, hardly talking to either of us. He was defiant of all authority, but his problem with Bunny was something different, because she was never strict. She tried to talk to him and take an interest in his friends, even though some of them were dreadful boys, the worst Katydid has to offer. When he got in trouble, she would run down to the police station to try to work things out. After a while, I thought she was too forgiving. She certainly loved him hard. But Tom held a grudge against her anyway, almost as if he blamed her for all the rules and restrictions that other people were placing on him. It was a terrible thing when they sent him away, but Bunny’s house was much calmer after he left.
A sharp corner of Tom’s wadded-up letter pushed painfully into my left breast. My heart was pounding hard, and with each beat the paper stabbed. I didn’t try to move it, though. Something about the pain was almost comforting.
What would happen to me at a place like Sherwood? How would I ever get by? We’d always heard stories—they’d beat you with straps, lock you in closets. You’d have to go weeks without talking to anybody. Vicious kids from the city were there with razor blades hidden in their shoes. You never knew how true the stories were. Even the thought of the Home terrified me. Once, Mrs. Rothermel, my fourth-grade teacher, found two runaways from the Home hiding in her barn. They told her they couldn’t stand it there anymore, but all the same she turned them over to the police. It had pained her, she said, but what else could she do? Everyone in class was left wondering what had happened to those kids.
Tom had never said much about Sherwood before, at least not that Bunny had ever told me. She used to go down to visit once a week. I went with her a few times, though she never wanted me to come; she thought the place was too gruesome for me. The visiting room was a big, airless space with cinder-block walls and little tables and chairs, like a kindergarten. Guards were wandering all around, staring at the families as if to ask, Well, how’d you go wrong? How’d you let that boy turn out that bad? Most of the time when I was there, Tom just slouched in his chair and made jokes across the room with some of the other boys. Bunny used to brin
g him books, and he’d always refuse to keep them. Once, though, he kept a book on Eskimos. Something about it interested him.
He never said anything about dying there, but he wouldn’t say it now if it weren’t true, I thought. He’s a kidder, but not about something like that. And if he can’t take it, what about me? I’m not tough the way he is. I shrivel up when someone yells at me. I get depressed if I can’t talk to Bunny. I know I have my limits, so I’ve always tried to avoid situations that could get me in trouble. There was just that one, stupid, stupid time. It’s almost crazy, I thought. I’m usually so careful, so much more careful than other people. And then there comes a single moment when I’m not thinking about what will happen or whether what I’m doing is bad, and I get caught. It’s unfair, it’s so unfair it’s even meaner than that—it’s something off the scale of fairness, as if the whole situation had been designed to break me down.
The screen door on the back of the house slammed suddenly and snapped me back to attention. Mrs. Vernon had gone inside. I looked down at the section of garden that I’d been weeding, and it was all black. The earth was cleaned out. I’d pulled up everything, even the baby carrots. They were now lying in the weed pile, the carrot parts looking like tiny, helpless teeth among the leafy weeds. For several minutes, I tried to stuff the carrots back in the ground, but it was no use. The green stalks were already turning limp.
Back in the house, I telephoned Bunny, but there was no answer at her house or at Eddie Boggs’s place. At the country club, Mr. Higgins said he hadn’t seen her yet. I waited a few minutes, standing in the hall and staring at the phone. I had to do something. Finally, I called Simon Beach, the lawyer. It took several rings for his secretary to answer.
“Is Mr. Beach there?” I asked.
“Who is this?” She sounded suspicious. I remembered the smile that had made me uncomfortable.
“This is Martha Calhoun.”
“Martha? Is that Bunny’s daughter?”
“Yes. Can I speak to him?”
“Well, what on earth for?” Her voice had a laugh in it.
“About my case.”
“Your case?” More of that hateful laugh. “Oh, your case. Is that why you and your mother were here the other day?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid Mr. Beach isn’t in today. He’s down in southern Illinois on another matter, and he won’t be back in the office until next week.”
I couldn’t say anything. After a few seconds, the secretary asked, “Would you like to leave a message?”
