So much had built up in him while they waited that it was almost a relief when the train came sighing into the station. His mother stood and reached for Jude. He smiled up into her soft answering smile.
Then Jude’s father stepped into the lights and scooped him up. His body under Jude’s was taut, and Jude was so surprised that the shout caught in his throat. His mother did not look at her husband or her son. She seemed a statue, thin and pale.
At last, when the conductor said, All aboard! she gave an awful strangled sound and rushed through the train’s door. The train hooted and slowly moved off. Jude could now shout, and did, as loudly as he could, although his father held him too firmly to escape, but the train vanished his mother into the darkness without stopping.
* * *
—
Then they were alone, Jude’s father and he, in the house by the swamp.
Language wilted between them. Jude was the one who took up the sweeping and scrubbing, who made their sandwiches for supper. When his father was gone, he’d open the windows to let out some of the reptile rot. His father ripped up his mother’s lilies and roses and planted mandarins and blueberries, saying that fruit brought birds and birds brought snakes. The boy walked three miles to school, where he told nobody that he already knew numbers better than the teachers did. He was small, but no one messed with him. On his first day, when a big ten-year-old tried to sneer at his clothes, Jude leapt at him with a viciousness he’d learned from watching rattlesnakes, and made the big boy’s head bleed. The others avoided him. He was an in-between creature, motherless but not fatherless, stunted and ratty like a poor boy, but a professor’s son, always correct with answers when the teachers called on him, but never offering a word on his own. The others kept their distance. Jude played by himself or with one of the succession of puppies that his father brought home. Inevitably, the dogs would run down to the edge of the swamp, and one of the fourteen-or fifteen-foot alligators would get them.
Jude’s loneliness grew, became a living creature that shadowed him and wandered off only when he was in the company of his numbers. More than marbles or tin soldiers, they were his playthings. More than sticks of candy or plums, they made his mouth water. As messy as the world was, the numbers, predictable and polite, brought order.
* * *
—
When he was ten, a short, round man stopped him on the street and pushed a brown-paper package into his arms. Jude found him vaguely familiar but couldn’t place him. The man pressed a finger to his lips, minced away. At home in his room at night, Jude unwrapped the books. One was a collection of Frost’s poems. The other was a book of geometry, the world whittled down until it became a series of lines and angles. He looked up and morning was sunshot through the laurel oaks. More than the feeling that the book had taught him geometry was the feeling that it had showed the boy something that had been living inside him, undetected until now.
There was also a letter. It was addressed to him in his mother’s round hand. When he sat in school dividing the hours until he could be free, when he made the supper of tuna sandwiches, when he ate with his father, who conducted to Benny Goodman on the radio, when he brushed his teeth and put on pajamas far too small for him, the four perfect right angles of the letter called to him. He put it under his pillow, unopened. For a week, the letter burned under everything, the way the sun on a hot, overcast day was hidden but always present.
At last, having squeezed everything to know out of the geometry book, he put the still-sealed envelope inside and taped up the covers and hid it between his mattress and box spring. He checked it every night after saying his prayers and was comforted into sleep. When, one night, he saw the book was untaped and the letter gone, he knew his father had found it and nothing could be done.
The next time he saw the little round man on the street, he stopped him. Who are you? he asked, and the man blinked and said, Your uncle. When no comprehension passed over the boy’s face, the man threw his arms up and said, Oh, honey! and made as if to hug him, but Jude had already turned away.
* * *
—
Inexorably, the university grew. It swelled and expanded under a steady supply of conditioned air, swallowing the land between it and the swamp until the university’s roads were built snug against his father’s land. Dinners, now, were full of his father’s invective: Did the university not know that his snakes needed a home, that this expanse of sandy acres was one of the richest reptile havens in North America? He would never sell, never. He would kill to keep it.
While his father spoke, the traitor in Jude dreamed of the sums his father had been offered. So simple, it seemed, to make the money grow. Unlike other kinds of numbers, money was already self-fertilized; it would double and double again until at last it made a roiling mass. If you had enough of it, Jude knew, nobody would ever have to worry again.
* * *
—
When Jude was thirteen, he discovered the university library. One summer day, he looked up from the pile of books he’d been contentedly digging through—trigonometry, statistics, calculus, whatever he could find—to see his father opposite him. Jude didn’t know how long he’d been there. It was a humid morning, and even in the library the air was stifling, but his father looked leathered, cool in his sun-beaten shirt and red neckerchief.
Come on, then, he said. Jude followed, feeling ill. They rode in the pickup for two hours before Jude understood that they were going snaking together. This was his first time. When he was smaller, he’d begged to go, but every time, his father had said no, it was too dangerous, and Jude never argued that letting a boy live for a week alone in a house full of venom and guns and questionable wiring was equally unsafe.
His father pitched the tent and they ate beans from a can in the darkness. They lay side by side in their sleeping bags until his father said, You’re good at math.
Jude said, I am, though with such understatement that it felt like a lie. Something shifted between them, and they fell asleep to a silence that was softer at its edges.
His father woke Jude before dawn and he stumbled out of the tent to grainy coffee with condensed milk and hot hush puppies. His father was after moccasins, and he gave Jude his waders and trudged through the swamp protected only by jeans and boots. He’d been bitten so often, he said, it had become routine. When he handed his son the stick and gestured at a black slash sunning on a rock, the boy had to imagine the snake as a line in space, only connecting point to point, to be able to grasp it. The snake spun from the number one to the number three to a defeated eight, and he deposited it in the sack. They worked in silence, only the noise of exuberant natural Florida filling their ears, the unafraid birds, the seethe of insects.
When Jude climbed back up into the truck at the end of the day, his legs shook from the effort it took him to be brave. So now you know, his father said in a strange, holy voice, and Jude was too tired to take the steps necessary then, and ever afterward until he was his father’s own age, to understand.
* * *
—
His father began storing the fodder mice in Jude’s closet, and to avoid the doomed squeaks, Jude joined the high school track team. He found his talent in the two-hundred-twenty-yard hurdles. When he came home with a trophy from the state games, his father held the trophy for a moment, then put it down.
Different if Negroes were allowed to run, he said.
Jude said nothing, and his father said, Lord knows I’m no lover of the race, but your average Negro could outrun any white boy I know.