Jack was born in 1941. His parents were already in their mid-forties then. They had been married for more than twenty years. So I assume they had long ago stopped expecting ever to have children and had settled into that fractious kind of truce that childless couples often accept in place of real marriage. Then Jack was born. And he was quite unexpected, of course. Consequently his parents tried to patch it up for a while. His father is said to have stopped drinking in the bars for an entire year and people say his mother looked almost pretty for a time, that she appeared to have a kind of glow. But it didn’t last. She never became pregnant again. And soon the old man was drinking regularly in the bars once more while Jack’s mother went back to playing the organ at the Catholic church on Sunday mornings, where in that weekly hour of temporary peace she could watch Father O’Brien from behind those clean little wire glasses of hers. It was all as if nothing had changed—except that there was a new source of tension now, and consequently more arguments.
Well, he was a tough kid. He had a shock of black hair and he was always big for his age. Then when he was six they sent him to school. With his hair combed flat on his head and dressed in new shirt and pants, he entered for the first time that old red three-story brick building on the west edge of town, with its wide foot-hollowed stairs and its tall windows and that familiar smell of swept dust, and he didn’t like it. At school they expected him to sit still, to raise his hand and be quiet. So at recess he walked off the playground and went home. He did this about once a week. And when he arrived at home Mrs. Burdette, that serious little pious woman, would take him by the back hair, lean him across the kitchen table and hit him with the spatula. Then she would send him back. Except that he didn’t always go back; instead he often wandered about town, through the back alleys behind the Main Street businesses and out along the railroad tracks into the country. So in April they decided that another full year of the first grade and another complete term with Mrs. Peach would do him good. I don’t think they believed that Jack had been fully socialized yet.
Still I can’t imagine that Mrs. Peach had any part in this decision or that she was excited by it personally. But, in any case, it was because of that routine first-grade truancy of his that Jack was there again the next year when I entered school in 1948. And since his name came after mine in the class rolls he was assigned the desk behind me. He was already there that first morning. He had arrived early; his wet-combed hair was stiff on his head and he was sitting at his desk with his hands folded as if he were bored with it all already and was merely waiting for a chance to escape. We didn’t interest him at all. He was a veteran of the first grade and beyond us. Besides he was at least twenty pounds heavier and a good head taller than we were. We didn’t even exist for him yet.
But later, on the second or third day of school—in the middle of the afternoon when it was hot and still in the room and when the old high windows were open to the air and there wasn’t any air, and while we were sweating over the alphabet, copying out the letters onto lined sheets of paper—Jack popped me on the head. I turned around. I don’t know what I expected. But on his desk there was a dead gopher. He had it stretched out over his attempts at some As and Bs. He had squeezed out a drop of gopher blood onto the paper below his name. “You want him?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want him.”
“Well I’m done with him.”
“I don’t want him.”
Then Mrs. Peach was standing over us. She was standing back a little too. She ordered Jack to deposit the dead gopher in the trash immediately.
Jack stood up and walked to the front of the room. In the far corner, beside the pencil sharpener where the wastebasket was, he turned and faced us. We were all watching him. He raised the gopher by the hind leg and held it there at eye level for a moment, suspended, as if he were about to make a little magic or as if the gopher itself still knew a trick or two. Then he let it go. It seemed to dive into the wastebasket. When it hit bottom it made a satisfactory bang.
“Jack,” Mrs. Peach said. “You sit down.”
Jack walked back slowly to his desk. At his desk he faced straight ahead and grinned. So we were not just watching him now. We were staring at him—in wonder and awe, and shocked admiration too.
Meanwhile Mrs. Peach had begun to shout at us: “Children.