Digging the Basement
Nancy Bourne
“I’ve decided not to go to school anymore,” my seven-year-old daughter, Louise, says as we drive to her mom’s house.
I smile. “Why not?”
“I get stomach aches when I go.”
“You know, there’s a law here in Virginia says you have to go to school.”
“Not if you’re sick,” she tells me.
“What does your mother say?”
“She says I have to go.”
Louise holds up thin translucent arms as we say goodbye. I pick her up, savoring the warmth of her weightless body against me, breathing in baby shampoo. You don’t know about love until you have a daughter.
Later I telephone Linda, my ex. “How come she doesn’t like school?”
“She’s pretty tight-lipped about it. But I think the problem is she’s not reading.”
“We need to talk to that teacher.”
“I did. She says we should read to her.”
“Jesus,” I say. “I read to her all the time. She loves it.”
“Yeah. Me too. Maybe she’s just not as smart as you think she is.”
“What are you talking about? She’s plenty smart,” I say.
“Just don’t push her, Ronnie.”
“I don’t push her.”
“You know what I’m talking about. The toilet training, walking her around the block when she could barely toddle, and then, of course, the bicycle.”
“She loves the bicycle.”
“Just don’t push her.”
I hang up.
~ ~ ~
Not reading? I’m on it. I do a little research-- I’m a lawyer-- and find out there’s this new law, enacted just last year, 1975. It mandates something called “special education” for public school kids who are having problems reading. How lucky is that!
I tell the teacher, let’s stop wasting time. Get her tested.
As a result of the test, she’s labeled “reading disabled” and placed, for an hour a day, in a special class with other kids who can’t read. The teacher tells me she’ll be at grade level in no time. She better be right.
In the meantime, I take the initiative and hire a tutor. Mr. Hawkins. He’s a skinny man with yellow-brown eyes, a handlebar mustache, and an office on Spring Street. The sign outside says, “Reading Clinic.” Inside, there’s one room with a table in the middle, a desk, and a few folding chairs. Blinds cover the only window.
“He looks like his name, doesn’t he?” I say to Louise, after we meet him for the first time.
“You mean like the bird?”
“It’s the eyes,” I say. “They’re watching you.”
She giggles.
~ ~ ~
The next time I telephone my ex, she tells me Louise hates that reading guy.
“She doesn’t tell me that,” I say.
“Maybe it’s because you don’t always pay attention.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How many times have I told you? You have to listen to what people don’t say.”
I hang up.
~ ~ ~
I usually drop her off and run errands while she’s being tutored. But today I ask the Hawk if I can stick around to observe. He doesn’t like it, but I’m paying him. Louise spends the first half-hour, sitting at the table, sounding out words in a book from school. I can tell she’s making progress. For the last half of the session, she looks at drawings of various objects. Chair. Bed. Chicken. The idea is to circle the correct name of the object from a list of words the Hawk gives her. She gets half of them right. I give her a hug. Good job, sweetie. Next week you’ll get ‘em all.
We’re just wrapping it up when the door opens. A tall man with slicked-back dark hair, about my age, is standing there. He takes one look at the three of us and turns to leave.
“Come on in,” the Hawk says.
“I was in the neighborhood, Mr. Hawkins,” the man says. “Thought I’d say hi.”
“We’re done,” I say.
As Louise and I walk past, I try not to stare. But the man looks familiar. Suddenly I’ve got it. Buddy Harrell. It’s the sports coat he’s wearing that confused me.
“Buddy?” I say.
He faces me, eyebrows raised. “That’s me.” His voice is deep, husky, like I remember.
“Ron Croxton. Ronnie. Remember?”
“Yeah. Been a long time,” he says, brushing past us.
“It’s been forever.” I want to stop him, ask what happened, why he disappeared.
But the Hawk calls out, “See you next week, Louise.”
We have no choice. We have to leave.
~ ~ ~
Every afternoon in the spring of my fifth-grade year, I’d hang around after school, hoping Buddy Harrell would catch my eye and jerk his thumb in the direction of the school bus. Whenever it happened, I’d grab my book bag and race after him, my eyes fixed on his wide shoulders under his tee shirt, his knotty biceps, his shiny black hair. We’d climb up on the school bus with the rest of the kids from out in the county. They’d be hollering and laughing and bouncing up and down, while Buddy sat still and silent, towering over me on the worn leather seat. I don’t think I’d ever felt so important.
His house was set in the middle of a field of dandelions. It was a wood frame one story, built by his dad, he told me, with a tar and gravel roof, like all the other houses on that unpaved road. Mrs. Harrell would greet us at the front door with a thermos of lemonade, and Buddy would head directly for the toolshed, with me scurrying after him. He’d hang his clean overalls on a nail, pull on a muddy pair and cram his feet into rubber boots caked with red earth. I had to roll up the bottoms of the overalls he handed me; they were way too long. We’d choose a pick and a couple of shovels from the dozen or so hanging up on nails and head out. At the back of the house, we’d pull back a tarp, lift off the two-by-fours underneath it, then climb down a wooden ladder into a deep hole of iron-hard red mud. And start digging.
The first time I saw the hole, I asked, “What’s that for?”
“A basement,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Our house don’t have a basement. I’m digging one underneath.”
I didn’t understand. Where I lived, on Hawthorne Lane, two blocks from Forest Knolls School, everybody had a basement. The one under our house had been turned into a family room with pine paneling, wall-to-wall carpet, a pool table and a cabinet full of board games.
“You’re digging a basement all by yourself?” I asked.
“Papa helps when he’s not too tired. And Chester lends a hand on the weekends, but it’s mostly my job.”
Chester was Buddy’s older brother who worked with Mr. Harrell in the mill, which was the only industry in our town in those days.
After that, every time I came home with Buddy, we set to digging. Or rather Buddy would strike the earth with the pick, loosening it, and I would follow behind, shoveling the clumps of red earth into a wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was half full, I would push it over to a pulley-like contraption with a basket, which Chester had rigged up, and shovel the mounds of earth into the basket. Buddy would climb back up the ladder, haul the basket up to ground level and dump the contents onto a large pile.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.
“Man down the road wants his ditch filled.”
I still see him, sweat dripping off his chin, holding that pickax high above his head, then plunging it into the hard earth, over and over. I pretended he was Paul Bunyan from my book on American heroes. I couldn’t believe he had chosen me, with my spindly arms and legs, as his helper. And I still don’t know why. Buddy was almost as tall as my dad, and built up. All of us boys in fifth grade looked up to him. We figured he must have failed a grade or two, but we didn’t care. He was our big guy, and we imitated his rolling gait and fought over him in choosing teams for ballgames.
Back then, in the 1950s, when the town was pretty small, our parents didn’t worry when their children didn’t show up after school. They assumed we were with friends, playing ball, shooting marbles, running the safe streets of my childhood. They didn’t ask questions as long as we turned up for dinner. But after my first stint at digging Buddy’s basement, Mama gave me a look.
“Where on earth did you pick up all that red mud?” she scolded.
“I went to Buddy Harrell’s after school.”
“Do I know him?”
“He’s the tall one in our class,” I said.
She looked sharp at me. “Where does he live?”
“Out in the county.”
“I see.”
“We were digging out his basement,” I bragged. “It’s hard work.”
“Well, I’ll be,” she said. “So how did you get home?”
“His mama drove me in their truck.”
That night after supper I heard her talking it over with my dad, and I worried they might stop me. But for whatever reason, they never did.
~ ~ ~
“What’s that you’re reading?” Buddy asked me on one of our bus rides to the county.
“Stuart Little,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
“You know. A mouse,” I said.
“What about a mouse?”
Now that surprised me. Miss Robinson had handed out the books at least a month before. We were supposed to read it at home and write a report.
“Haven’t you started it?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “Tell me about the mouse.”
“He’s like a human. The Little family had him instead of a child. And he has all kinds of adventures.”
Buddy sat silent for a few minutes.
“Sounds dumb to me,” he finally said.
“I think you’d like it,” I said, “but you better get started on it. The book report’s due pretty soon.”
He didn’t say anything for the rest of the bus ride, but when we were deep in the hole, digging and shoveling, he said, “Why don’t you tell me some more about that mouse?”
So I told him about Stuart getting caught in a window blind and him sailing a model boat in a race and almost getting eaten by a cat.
Buddy never said a word, but whenever I stopped talking, he’d say, “Go on. It’s dumb, but I like to hear you telling it.”
And I loved it too. It felt so comfortable, the two of us down in that hole, working side by side, me talking about Stuart Little and him hacking at the earth.
~ ~ ~
“Okay, your turn.” I’ve been reading James and the Giant Peach for an hour at least, with Louise curled up beside me, dressed for bed in a faded nylon nightgown of her mom’s.
“I don’t feel like it,” she says.
“Too bad,” I say. “That was our deal. I read James and the Giant Peach to you and you read Green Eggs and Ham to me.”
I open the book.
“I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I am,” she reads. Or does she?
“Good girl,” I say and point to the word green. “What’s that word?”
She looks up at me. “Eggs?”
“Try again, Louise. What does it start with?”
“G,” she tells me.
I ask her to sound out ‘g-r-e.”
“G-r . . . g-r-e . . .green Daddy?” she whispers.
I hug her, then turn the page and point to green again. “What’s that word, sweetie?”
She looks at the word and back at me. “Green?”
“Bingo!” I’m feeling on top of the world.
“Can we just read the book?” she asks.
“Of course.”
She smiles and begins. “I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them in a house.”
We laugh, as we always do.
~ ~ ~
A couple of weeks after our talk about Stuart Little, I saw Buddy coming out of school, his cheeks a dull red and his mouth set in a line. I had asked him at recess if I could come help him with the basement and he’d nodded.
“She’s a bitch,” he said under his breath, as we sat side by side on the bus.
I figured from the look of him I better keep quiet. But I couldn’t help myself. “Who?” I asked.
“That teacher bitch.”
“What’d she do?”
“Accused me of cheating.”
“Why?”
“My report.”
“On Stuart Little?”
He nodded.
“Why’d she think you cheated?”
“Because it was written so good she said I couldn’t a done it.”
“You told her you wrote it, didn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“And she didn’t take your word?”
For answer, he jerked some paper out of his book bag and tore it into strips. “I’d like to shove this right up her ass,” he hissed.
We sat in silence for the rest of the bus ride.
But once in the basement, pickax in hand, he let it out.
“I never done so much schoolwork” Thunk. “in my life.” Thunk. “And I ain’t gonna do it again.” Thunk. “It’s a dumb book.” Thunk. “I want to burn down the whole fucking school.”
I kept quiet.
Later, when we were drinking lemonade and cooling off, Chester showed up from work. I never knew what to say to Buddy’s brother; he was so big and muscular, just like Buddy, only older.
“Got your report back?” Chester asked.
Buddy didn’t say anything.
“How’d we do?”
“Bitch failed me,” Buddy mumbled.
“No! That was first class A+,” Chester said.
“She accused me of cheating, the bitch.”
“Well that’s a damned lie.” Chester turned to me. “I gotta say that mouse story was sort of cute. Buddy here says you told him the whole story.”
I nodded.
“And I showed him how to spell the words he wanted to say in his report. That ain’t cheating. That’s taking the initiative.”
I looked over at Buddy. He was sitting there, in his overalls and muddy rubber boots, with his back up against the toolshed wall, his face buried in his arms. He didn’t get up when Mrs. Harrell came by in the truck to take me home. He didn’t even say goodbye.
And that was the last I saw of him for twenty-five years.
~ ~ ~
At the reading clinic, Louise is choosing most of the words for the pictures now.
“She’s making great strides,” the Hawk tells me. “She’s a sharp little thing.”
At night, she’s actually sounding out the words in Green Eggs and Ham.
“Let’s read this one,” I say, showing her another Dr. Seuss book. “We’re on a roll.”
“I’m too tired.”
“Fair enough.” I pick her up and whirl her around the room.
“What a champion!” I say.
“Put me down, Daddy,” she says. She’s not smiling.
~ ~ ~
On my walk from the parking lot to my law office, I pass a large truck with J. J. Harrell Construction painted in red letters on the side. It’s parked next to a construction site. A young guy climbs down from the cab of the truck and starts pulling ladders out the back.
“Excuse me,” I say, “I’m just wondering if you could tell me who J. J. Harrell is.”
“The boss.”
“I might know him,” I say. “What’s he look like?”
“Tall. Black hair. Nice guy.”
“Is he ever called Buddy?”
“Never heard that. If you want to see him, he usually stops by around lunchtime to check up on us.”
When I get to the office, I look in the yellow pages under “Construction” for J. J. Harrell. I find the ad, with a picture of J. J., all business, in suit and tie. It’s him. How come I haven’t seen him around? Town’s gotten too big, I guess.
Around noon I see a black Buick pulling up next to the truck. And there’s Buddy. Climbing out of the car, wearing an orange hardhat and lace-up boots, holding a clipboard.
I race down the stairs and out to the street.
“Buddy,” I call out.
As he turns toward me, I catch a glimpse of a smile. But it instantly freezes.
“Hi Buddy. It’s me. Ronnie.”
“Oh, hi,” he says, avoiding my gaze. “Sorry, but I’m really busy right now.”
I’m not letting him by this time. “Come on. It’s lunchtime. There’s a Denny’s on the corner. They get you out in a flash, and you have to eat.”
“I brought a sandwich,” he says. But he’s made a mistake. He’s actually looked at me. His scowl softens. “Oh, okay. But let’s make it fast.”
We choose a booth and order cheeseburgers and fries.
“What happened to you?” I ask. “You just disappeared.”
He looks away. “I had to work.”
“Work? We were in the fifth grade.”
“I was thirteen.” He spits it out.
That stops me for a minute. Thirteen in the fifth grade? How old was . . . ten, I was ten. I search my mind for the right words.
“All I know is you were my hero.” It sounds so lame.
He laughs. “I was a stupid kid digging out a basement.”
“I thought we had fun.”
He takes a bite of cheeseburger, washes it down with coke. “You had fun,” he says. “For me it was work.”
I realize memories of the past won’t keep him sitting here, and I need to find out something.
“I looked you up,” I say. “That’s a serious business you’re running.”
“You’re surprised?”
“I’m surprised to see you. Twice now.”
He shrugs and pops a couple of fries in his mouth.
I try again. “So how did you get in the construction business?”
“Long story.” He starts to get up. “Another time.”
“You haven’t even finished your cheeseburger,” I say. “Give me fifteen minutes. We were friends. What happened?”
He sighs, looks down at his half-eaten burger, then up at me. “Okay. Somebody saw me digging that basement way back then, offered me a job digging ditches. I was wasting my time in that fucking school and I needed the money. So I dug ditches until I got hired on in construction. One thing led to another.”
“But it’s a business,” I say. “With machinery and employees. How’d that happen?”
He pushes his plate away and looks square at me. “You mean, how’d a dumb shit like me set up a business?” He doesn’t even sound angry, just weary.
“That’s not what I mean.”
He laughs. “What do you mean?”
He’s right, of course. They called it “holding them back” in those days. And we didn’t question it. We just assumed . . .
I change the subject. “What school did you go to after you left Forest Knolls?”
“Nowhere. Look, I gotta go.”
“Wait!” I say.
He stands up, turns to leave. Then stops.
“Look, Ronnie. I don’t want to sound mean, but I need you to lay off. You understand? I can’t go back there. You want to know how I got this far. And I know you mean well. Okay. The answer is hard work. And a lot of help from my brother and that reading guy. Not from that fucking teacher. And certainly not from sitting every day like a big lummox in a bunch of little kids.”
“But we adored you,” I protest.
“You have no idea,” he says, looking straight at me.
I want to ask more questions. I want to tell him about Louise, how things are better now for kids like him.
But he’s out the door.
~ ~ ~
“How was school?” It’s my turn to pick up Louise.
She sits beside me, her face red.
“Hey, sunshine girl, what’s up?”
No answer.
“No pouting, remember?”
No answer.
When we get to my house, she rushes to her room.
“Chocolate chip cookies,” I whisper to the closed bedroom door. “If you don’t eat them, I will.”
She cracks open the door and stares at me with wet eyes.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
I pick her up and carry her to the kitchen.
“I want to blow up the school!” She’s suddenly so fierce it scares me.
I see Buddy in the red mud, pickax in hand. Thunk!
“Why do you want to do that?” I ask in as calm a voice as I can manage.
“I hate it.”
I start talking nonsense about how everybody hates school sooner or later.
“I’m dumb,” she cries. “Dumb bunny, dumb, dumb, dumb.” She’s sobbing.
“Of course you’re not,” I say, holding her, rocking her. “Who says such a thing?”
“They all do. I’m in the dumb bunny class with all the other dumb bunnies.”
“It’s not a class for dumb bunnies, silly,” I say. “It’s a class for smart people like you to get better at reading. And it’s working. I’m so proud of you.”
She looks up at me, tears dripping off her cheeks.
“You’re smarter than all those mean kids,” I say. “I’m going to talk to that teacher.”
“No,” Louise wails. “That’ll only make it worse.”
She’s right. Nasty little fuckers.
“How ‘bout I talk to the Hawk?”
“I hate him.”
I kiss the top of her head. “But sweetheart, you’re almost reading now. And you’ll get better and better.”
She reaches across the table for Green Eggs and Ham and throws it across the room.
Buddy’s looking straight at me.
You have no idea.
Nancy Bourne
“I’ve decided not to go to school anymore,” my seven-year-old daughter, Louise, says as we drive to her mom’s house.
I smile. “Why not?”
“I get stomach aches when I go.”
“You know, there’s a law here in Virginia says you have to go to school.”
“Not if you’re sick,” she tells me.
“What does your mother say?”
“She says I have to go.”
Louise holds up thin translucent arms as we say goodbye. I pick her up, savoring the warmth of her weightless body against me, breathing in baby shampoo. You don’t know about love until you have a daughter.
Later I telephone Linda, my ex. “How come she doesn’t like school?”
“She’s pretty tight-lipped about it. But I think the problem is she’s not reading.”
“We need to talk to that teacher.”
“I did. She says we should read to her.”
“Jesus,” I say. “I read to her all the time. She loves it.”
“Yeah. Me too. Maybe she’s just not as smart as you think she is.”
“What are you talking about? She’s plenty smart,” I say.
“Just don’t push her, Ronnie.”
“I don’t push her.”
“You know what I’m talking about. The toilet training, walking her around the block when she could barely toddle, and then, of course, the bicycle.”
“She loves the bicycle.”
“Just don’t push her.”
I hang up.
~ ~ ~
Not reading? I’m on it. I do a little research-- I’m a lawyer-- and find out there’s this new law, enacted just last year, 1975. It mandates something called “special education” for public school kids who are having problems reading. How lucky is that!
I tell the teacher, let’s stop wasting time. Get her tested.
As a result of the test, she’s labeled “reading disabled” and placed, for an hour a day, in a special class with other kids who can’t read. The teacher tells me she’ll be at grade level in no time. She better be right.
In the meantime, I take the initiative and hire a tutor. Mr. Hawkins. He’s a skinny man with yellow-brown eyes, a handlebar mustache, and an office on Spring Street. The sign outside says, “Reading Clinic.” Inside, there’s one room with a table in the middle, a desk, and a few folding chairs. Blinds cover the only window.
“He looks like his name, doesn’t he?” I say to Louise, after we meet him for the first time.
“You mean like the bird?”
“It’s the eyes,” I say. “They’re watching you.”
She giggles.
~ ~ ~
The next time I telephone my ex, she tells me Louise hates that reading guy.
“She doesn’t tell me that,” I say.
“Maybe it’s because you don’t always pay attention.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How many times have I told you? You have to listen to what people don’t say.”
I hang up.
~ ~ ~
I usually drop her off and run errands while she’s being tutored. But today I ask the Hawk if I can stick around to observe. He doesn’t like it, but I’m paying him. Louise spends the first half-hour, sitting at the table, sounding out words in a book from school. I can tell she’s making progress. For the last half of the session, she looks at drawings of various objects. Chair. Bed. Chicken. The idea is to circle the correct name of the object from a list of words the Hawk gives her. She gets half of them right. I give her a hug. Good job, sweetie. Next week you’ll get ‘em all.
We’re just wrapping it up when the door opens. A tall man with slicked-back dark hair, about my age, is standing there. He takes one look at the three of us and turns to leave.
“Come on in,” the Hawk says.
“I was in the neighborhood, Mr. Hawkins,” the man says. “Thought I’d say hi.”
“We’re done,” I say.
As Louise and I walk past, I try not to stare. But the man looks familiar. Suddenly I’ve got it. Buddy Harrell. It’s the sports coat he’s wearing that confused me.
“Buddy?” I say.
He faces me, eyebrows raised. “That’s me.” His voice is deep, husky, like I remember.
“Ron Croxton. Ronnie. Remember?”
“Yeah. Been a long time,” he says, brushing past us.
“It’s been forever.” I want to stop him, ask what happened, why he disappeared.
But the Hawk calls out, “See you next week, Louise.”
We have no choice. We have to leave.
~ ~ ~
Every afternoon in the spring of my fifth-grade year, I’d hang around after school, hoping Buddy Harrell would catch my eye and jerk his thumb in the direction of the school bus. Whenever it happened, I’d grab my book bag and race after him, my eyes fixed on his wide shoulders under his tee shirt, his knotty biceps, his shiny black hair. We’d climb up on the school bus with the rest of the kids from out in the county. They’d be hollering and laughing and bouncing up and down, while Buddy sat still and silent, towering over me on the worn leather seat. I don’t think I’d ever felt so important.
His house was set in the middle of a field of dandelions. It was a wood frame one story, built by his dad, he told me, with a tar and gravel roof, like all the other houses on that unpaved road. Mrs. Harrell would greet us at the front door with a thermos of lemonade, and Buddy would head directly for the toolshed, with me scurrying after him. He’d hang his clean overalls on a nail, pull on a muddy pair and cram his feet into rubber boots caked with red earth. I had to roll up the bottoms of the overalls he handed me; they were way too long. We’d choose a pick and a couple of shovels from the dozen or so hanging up on nails and head out. At the back of the house, we’d pull back a tarp, lift off the two-by-fours underneath it, then climb down a wooden ladder into a deep hole of iron-hard red mud. And start digging.
The first time I saw the hole, I asked, “What’s that for?”
“A basement,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Our house don’t have a basement. I’m digging one underneath.”
I didn’t understand. Where I lived, on Hawthorne Lane, two blocks from Forest Knolls School, everybody had a basement. The one under our house had been turned into a family room with pine paneling, wall-to-wall carpet, a pool table and a cabinet full of board games.
“You’re digging a basement all by yourself?” I asked.
“Papa helps when he’s not too tired. And Chester lends a hand on the weekends, but it’s mostly my job.”
Chester was Buddy’s older brother who worked with Mr. Harrell in the mill, which was the only industry in our town in those days.
After that, every time I came home with Buddy, we set to digging. Or rather Buddy would strike the earth with the pick, loosening it, and I would follow behind, shoveling the clumps of red earth into a wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was half full, I would push it over to a pulley-like contraption with a basket, which Chester had rigged up, and shovel the mounds of earth into the basket. Buddy would climb back up the ladder, haul the basket up to ground level and dump the contents onto a large pile.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.
“Man down the road wants his ditch filled.”
I still see him, sweat dripping off his chin, holding that pickax high above his head, then plunging it into the hard earth, over and over. I pretended he was Paul Bunyan from my book on American heroes. I couldn’t believe he had chosen me, with my spindly arms and legs, as his helper. And I still don’t know why. Buddy was almost as tall as my dad, and built up. All of us boys in fifth grade looked up to him. We figured he must have failed a grade or two, but we didn’t care. He was our big guy, and we imitated his rolling gait and fought over him in choosing teams for ballgames.
Back then, in the 1950s, when the town was pretty small, our parents didn’t worry when their children didn’t show up after school. They assumed we were with friends, playing ball, shooting marbles, running the safe streets of my childhood. They didn’t ask questions as long as we turned up for dinner. But after my first stint at digging Buddy’s basement, Mama gave me a look.
“Where on earth did you pick up all that red mud?” she scolded.
“I went to Buddy Harrell’s after school.”
“Do I know him?”
“He’s the tall one in our class,” I said.
She looked sharp at me. “Where does he live?”
“Out in the county.”
“I see.”
“We were digging out his basement,” I bragged. “It’s hard work.”
“Well, I’ll be,” she said. “So how did you get home?”
“His mama drove me in their truck.”
That night after supper I heard her talking it over with my dad, and I worried they might stop me. But for whatever reason, they never did.
~ ~ ~
“What’s that you’re reading?” Buddy asked me on one of our bus rides to the county.
“Stuart Little,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
“You know. A mouse,” I said.
“What about a mouse?”
Now that surprised me. Miss Robinson had handed out the books at least a month before. We were supposed to read it at home and write a report.
“Haven’t you started it?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “Tell me about the mouse.”
“He’s like a human. The Little family had him instead of a child. And he has all kinds of adventures.”
Buddy sat silent for a few minutes.
“Sounds dumb to me,” he finally said.
“I think you’d like it,” I said, “but you better get started on it. The book report’s due pretty soon.”
He didn’t say anything for the rest of the bus ride, but when we were deep in the hole, digging and shoveling, he said, “Why don’t you tell me some more about that mouse?”
So I told him about Stuart getting caught in a window blind and him sailing a model boat in a race and almost getting eaten by a cat.
Buddy never said a word, but whenever I stopped talking, he’d say, “Go on. It’s dumb, but I like to hear you telling it.”
And I loved it too. It felt so comfortable, the two of us down in that hole, working side by side, me talking about Stuart Little and him hacking at the earth.
~ ~ ~
“Okay, your turn.” I’ve been reading James and the Giant Peach for an hour at least, with Louise curled up beside me, dressed for bed in a faded nylon nightgown of her mom’s.
“I don’t feel like it,” she says.
“Too bad,” I say. “That was our deal. I read James and the Giant Peach to you and you read Green Eggs and Ham to me.”
I open the book.
“I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I am,” she reads. Or does she?
“Good girl,” I say and point to the word green. “What’s that word?”
She looks up at me. “Eggs?”
“Try again, Louise. What does it start with?”
“G,” she tells me.
I ask her to sound out ‘g-r-e.”
“G-r . . . g-r-e . . .green Daddy?” she whispers.
I hug her, then turn the page and point to green again. “What’s that word, sweetie?”
She looks at the word and back at me. “Green?”
“Bingo!” I’m feeling on top of the world.
“Can we just read the book?” she asks.
“Of course.”
She smiles and begins. “I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them in a house.”
We laugh, as we always do.
~ ~ ~
A couple of weeks after our talk about Stuart Little, I saw Buddy coming out of school, his cheeks a dull red and his mouth set in a line. I had asked him at recess if I could come help him with the basement and he’d nodded.
“She’s a bitch,” he said under his breath, as we sat side by side on the bus.
I figured from the look of him I better keep quiet. But I couldn’t help myself. “Who?” I asked.
“That teacher bitch.”
“What’d she do?”
“Accused me of cheating.”
“Why?”
“My report.”
“On Stuart Little?”
He nodded.
“Why’d she think you cheated?”
“Because it was written so good she said I couldn’t a done it.”
“You told her you wrote it, didn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“And she didn’t take your word?”
For answer, he jerked some paper out of his book bag and tore it into strips. “I’d like to shove this right up her ass,” he hissed.
We sat in silence for the rest of the bus ride.
But once in the basement, pickax in hand, he let it out.
“I never done so much schoolwork” Thunk. “in my life.” Thunk. “And I ain’t gonna do it again.” Thunk. “It’s a dumb book.” Thunk. “I want to burn down the whole fucking school.”
I kept quiet.
Later, when we were drinking lemonade and cooling off, Chester showed up from work. I never knew what to say to Buddy’s brother; he was so big and muscular, just like Buddy, only older.
“Got your report back?” Chester asked.
Buddy didn’t say anything.
“How’d we do?”
“Bitch failed me,” Buddy mumbled.
“No! That was first class A+,” Chester said.
“She accused me of cheating, the bitch.”
“Well that’s a damned lie.” Chester turned to me. “I gotta say that mouse story was sort of cute. Buddy here says you told him the whole story.”
I nodded.
“And I showed him how to spell the words he wanted to say in his report. That ain’t cheating. That’s taking the initiative.”
I looked over at Buddy. He was sitting there, in his overalls and muddy rubber boots, with his back up against the toolshed wall, his face buried in his arms. He didn’t get up when Mrs. Harrell came by in the truck to take me home. He didn’t even say goodbye.
And that was the last I saw of him for twenty-five years.
~ ~ ~
At the reading clinic, Louise is choosing most of the words for the pictures now.
“She’s making great strides,” the Hawk tells me. “She’s a sharp little thing.”
At night, she’s actually sounding out the words in Green Eggs and Ham.
“Let’s read this one,” I say, showing her another Dr. Seuss book. “We’re on a roll.”
“I’m too tired.”
“Fair enough.” I pick her up and whirl her around the room.
“What a champion!” I say.
“Put me down, Daddy,” she says. She’s not smiling.
~ ~ ~
On my walk from the parking lot to my law office, I pass a large truck with J. J. Harrell Construction painted in red letters on the side. It’s parked next to a construction site. A young guy climbs down from the cab of the truck and starts pulling ladders out the back.
“Excuse me,” I say, “I’m just wondering if you could tell me who J. J. Harrell is.”
“The boss.”
“I might know him,” I say. “What’s he look like?”
“Tall. Black hair. Nice guy.”
“Is he ever called Buddy?”
“Never heard that. If you want to see him, he usually stops by around lunchtime to check up on us.”
When I get to the office, I look in the yellow pages under “Construction” for J. J. Harrell. I find the ad, with a picture of J. J., all business, in suit and tie. It’s him. How come I haven’t seen him around? Town’s gotten too big, I guess.
Around noon I see a black Buick pulling up next to the truck. And there’s Buddy. Climbing out of the car, wearing an orange hardhat and lace-up boots, holding a clipboard.
I race down the stairs and out to the street.
“Buddy,” I call out.
As he turns toward me, I catch a glimpse of a smile. But it instantly freezes.
“Hi Buddy. It’s me. Ronnie.”
“Oh, hi,” he says, avoiding my gaze. “Sorry, but I’m really busy right now.”
I’m not letting him by this time. “Come on. It’s lunchtime. There’s a Denny’s on the corner. They get you out in a flash, and you have to eat.”
“I brought a sandwich,” he says. But he’s made a mistake. He’s actually looked at me. His scowl softens. “Oh, okay. But let’s make it fast.”
We choose a booth and order cheeseburgers and fries.
“What happened to you?” I ask. “You just disappeared.”
He looks away. “I had to work.”
“Work? We were in the fifth grade.”
“I was thirteen.” He spits it out.
That stops me for a minute. Thirteen in the fifth grade? How old was . . . ten, I was ten. I search my mind for the right words.
“All I know is you were my hero.” It sounds so lame.
He laughs. “I was a stupid kid digging out a basement.”
“I thought we had fun.”
He takes a bite of cheeseburger, washes it down with coke. “You had fun,” he says. “For me it was work.”
I realize memories of the past won’t keep him sitting here, and I need to find out something.
“I looked you up,” I say. “That’s a serious business you’re running.”
“You’re surprised?”
“I’m surprised to see you. Twice now.”
He shrugs and pops a couple of fries in his mouth.
I try again. “So how did you get in the construction business?”
“Long story.” He starts to get up. “Another time.”
“You haven’t even finished your cheeseburger,” I say. “Give me fifteen minutes. We were friends. What happened?”
He sighs, looks down at his half-eaten burger, then up at me. “Okay. Somebody saw me digging that basement way back then, offered me a job digging ditches. I was wasting my time in that fucking school and I needed the money. So I dug ditches until I got hired on in construction. One thing led to another.”
“But it’s a business,” I say. “With machinery and employees. How’d that happen?”
He pushes his plate away and looks square at me. “You mean, how’d a dumb shit like me set up a business?” He doesn’t even sound angry, just weary.
“That’s not what I mean.”
He laughs. “What do you mean?”
He’s right, of course. They called it “holding them back” in those days. And we didn’t question it. We just assumed . . .
I change the subject. “What school did you go to after you left Forest Knolls?”
“Nowhere. Look, I gotta go.”
“Wait!” I say.
He stands up, turns to leave. Then stops.
“Look, Ronnie. I don’t want to sound mean, but I need you to lay off. You understand? I can’t go back there. You want to know how I got this far. And I know you mean well. Okay. The answer is hard work. And a lot of help from my brother and that reading guy. Not from that fucking teacher. And certainly not from sitting every day like a big lummox in a bunch of little kids.”
“But we adored you,” I protest.
“You have no idea,” he says, looking straight at me.
I want to ask more questions. I want to tell him about Louise, how things are better now for kids like him.
But he’s out the door.
~ ~ ~
“How was school?” It’s my turn to pick up Louise.
She sits beside me, her face red.
“Hey, sunshine girl, what’s up?”
No answer.
“No pouting, remember?”
No answer.
When we get to my house, she rushes to her room.
“Chocolate chip cookies,” I whisper to the closed bedroom door. “If you don’t eat them, I will.”
She cracks open the door and stares at me with wet eyes.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
I pick her up and carry her to the kitchen.
“I want to blow up the school!” She’s suddenly so fierce it scares me.
I see Buddy in the red mud, pickax in hand. Thunk!
“Why do you want to do that?” I ask in as calm a voice as I can manage.
“I hate it.”
I start talking nonsense about how everybody hates school sooner or later.
“I’m dumb,” she cries. “Dumb bunny, dumb, dumb, dumb.” She’s sobbing.
“Of course you’re not,” I say, holding her, rocking her. “Who says such a thing?”
“They all do. I’m in the dumb bunny class with all the other dumb bunnies.”
“It’s not a class for dumb bunnies, silly,” I say. “It’s a class for smart people like you to get better at reading. And it’s working. I’m so proud of you.”
She looks up at me, tears dripping off her cheeks.
“You’re smarter than all those mean kids,” I say. “I’m going to talk to that teacher.”
“No,” Louise wails. “That’ll only make it worse.”
She’s right. Nasty little fuckers.
“How ‘bout I talk to the Hawk?”
“I hate him.”
I kiss the top of her head. “But sweetheart, you’re almost reading now. And you’ll get better and better.”
She reaches across the table for Green Eggs and Ham and throws it across the room.
Buddy’s looking straight at me.
You have no idea.
