People often recognize Father on the street. They stop to say hello and Father always says hello back, so at first Edwin thought his father knew them all. But Father soon put him straight. Everyone knows Tom Fool, Father had said.
Two more boys appear. They land on the ground, dropping from the branches of a tree like rotten apples. They’re not large like the first boy; clearly brothers as they have the same blond hair, the same blunt nose. “Here’s Ned Booth,” the freckled boy tells them, “strolling down the street like he’s the biggest toad in the puddle.”
“I don’t think that. I’m just going home,” Edwin says.
“This won’t take long.” The boy indicates the foils he’s carrying. “Let me see those.”
“They’re not mine.”
“Maybe they’re mine,” the boy tells him. He takes Father’s foils from Edwin’s unresisting hands, looks them over. “What are they? Toy swords? Toy swords for toy soldiers? I don’t want them, after all.” He drops them into the mud. He steps on them a few times, snapping them sharply. “Now you have twice as many. You should thank me.”
Edwin didn’t ask Mother’s permission to take his father’s foils, because she would have said no.
“You should thank him,” the boy on his right says. He has a fading bruise along his flat cheekbone, a peeling scab on his chin. This is not his first fight.
Nor is it Edwin’s. He knows what comes next. He hasn’t yet found a role he can play that carries him through this. If he runs, they’ll catch him and beat him. If he stands his ground, they’ll take it as provocation and beat him. If he surrenders, they’ll see it as weakness and beat him. The large boy takes hold of the back of his jacket and twists the collar so that it tightens around Edwin’s neck.
“I don’t hear you,” the boy on his right says.
“Thank you.” To Edwin’s horror, it comes out a sob though he’s fairly certain he’s not crying. He puts his hands over his face just in time to block the first punch. The second hits his shoulder. He takes a kick in the shin that buckles his leg out from under him. He falls onto the pile of broken foils and remains there, curled up like a dead leaf, his hands over his eyes, his shin a sheet of pain. Someone kicks him in the back.
A sharp, loud whistle. It’s George Stout of the Bully Boys, arriving on the scene, whistling for reinforcements. George doesn’t wait. “Leave him be,” George shouts, wading in, landing punches right and left. The big boy with the freckles hits the ground hard.
More Bully Boys arrive—Theodore Hamilton, Stuart Robson, William O’Laughlen, trailed by his little brother, Michael. Even Michael has more fight in him than Edwin. The battle moves down the street and into an alleyway. The noise of it fades. Edwin doesn’t follow to see how it ends.
He stands. He tests his leg and finds it working. He leaves, scooping up the broken foils, walking the way anyone escaping from a thrashing and on his way to a scolding would walk. He doesn’t look to see if Johnny is about.
He’d hoped to delay Mother’s knowledge of the foils, but by the time he arrives, Johnny has already raced home and told the whole story. It seems that George triumphed. Johnny is quite elated by the whole thing. Victory to the Bully Boys!
But also embarrassed. “He just stands there and lets people hit him,” Edwin overhears him telling Rosalie. “The only fight he’ll ever win is a pretend one. And even then, he’ll only pretend to win it.
“When someone hits him, he cries!”
How amazed Edwin would be to know that as an old man, he will look back on these days with longing. My wonderful childhood, he’ll think. My short and wonderful childhood.
iii
Father arrives at last and in such an excellent mood that the decision not to tell him about the foils is mutually made without a word being spoken. He kisses the girls, returns to kiss them again. Little Joe is tossed into the air. He even helps carry the food to the table for dinner, doing an impression of a Negro servant that gives Asia the hiccoughs, she laughs so hard. The children stand behind their chairs until Father has taken his place.
Dinner with Father is a one-man show. His abhorrence of the theatrical life is much less persuasive than the glamour he casts with every word, every gesture. Tonight he tells tales of Sam Houston, the wild man of the frontiers, intimate of the Cherokee, hero of the battle of San Jacinto, governor, orator, and senator. Edwin looks across the table, hoping to catch Johnny’s eye. They’ve heard these tales so often—if there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before—but Johnny doesn’t notice him and Edwin actually loves these old stories.
Sam Houston dressed like an Indian. Sam Houston’s near mortal wounds. Sam Houston’s broken heart. There are few men Father admires as much and once, long ago, Houston was his closest friend. Like himself, Father says, Houston has mind. He points to his own forehead.
He tells them how, in a fit of despair, Houston determined one day to do himself in. How his hand was stayed by the sudden appearance of an eagle. ‘‘‘A spirit messenger,’ is how the Cherokee tell it. Old Sam’s a great friend to the Indian—speaks the language fluently, which few white men can do. He even has a tribal name—Col-lon-neh. That means the Raven.” Father is wiping his plate clean with a piece of bread.
Around the time Father knew Houston best, around the time they were riding the steamboats on the Mississippi, tearing up the saloons together, regaling the audience on the stools with inebriated extemporaneous speeches on liberty inspired by Homer and Shakespeare, the Cherokee changed Houston’s name from the Raven to Big Drunk. Father doesn’t tell them that part. Nor how comical the Cherokee found them, tiny Father in his flowered waistcoat and brass buttons, hulking Houston in his blanket and sombrero, stumbling drunkenly along the streets, roaring their politics and their poetry.
Without these details, it all sounds grand. Edwin thinks that he would also like a Cherokee name. Obviously, the Cherokee won’t give him one. He’ll have to do that himself. Obviously, it won’t be in Cherokee since Col-lon-neh is the only Cherokee word he knows. But it can’t be in English. Maybe Hebrew? How would you say “the Raven” in Hebrew? Father will know.
Father has moved on to Andrew Jackson, another one-time friend, dead now almost two years. This leads to a brief Byronic melancholy:
Let my pure flame of Honour shine in story,
When I am cold in death—and the slow fire,
That wears my vitals now, will no more move me
Than ’twould a corpse within a monument.