The old man watched Osgood laugh his gaspy hee-hawing laugh. The boy laughed so hard he finally had to lean over and put his hands on his knees, so hard the others came out of their hiding places to see what it was, and when they saw, they laughed, too. They all stood around in the morning sun and laughed at his grandson and the old man forgot how much he wanted a smoke. What he wanted now was to see if Clivey would cry. He found he was more curious on this subject than on any other which had engaged his attention over the last several months, including the subject of his own fast-approaching death.
‘Caught im out!’ the others chanted, laughing. ‘Caught im, caught im, caught im out!’
Clivey only stood there, stolid as a chunk of rock in a farmer’s field, waiting for the razzing to be over so the game could go on with him as It and the embarrassment beginning to be behind him. After a while the game did. Then it was noontime and the other boys went home. The old man watched to see how much lunch Clivey would eat. It turned out to be not much. Clivey just poked at his potatoes, made his corn and his peas change places, and fed little scraps of meat to the dog under the table. The old man watched it all, interested, answering when the others talked to him, but not much listening to their mouths or his own. His mind was on the boy.
When the pie was done he wanted what he couldn’t have and so excused himself to take a nap and paused halfway up the stairs because now his heart felt like a fan with a playing card caught in it, and he stood there with his head down, waiting to see if this was the final one (there had been two before), and when it wasn’t he went on up and took off all but his underdrawers and lay down on the crisp white coverlet. A rectangular label of sun lay across his scrawny chest; it was cut into three sections by dark strokes of shadow that were the window laths. He put his hands behind his head, drowsing and listening. After awhile he thought he heard the boy crying in his own room down the hall and he thought, I ought to take care of that.
He slept an hour, and when he got up the woman was asleep beside him in her slip, and so he took his clothes out into the hallway to dress before going down.
Clivey was outside, sitting on the steps and throwing a stick for the dog, who fetched with more will than the boy tossed. The dog (he had no name, he was just the dog) seemed puzzled.
The old man hailed the boy and told him to take a walk up to the orchard with him and so the boy did.
The old man’s name was George Banning. He was the boy’s grandfather, and it was from him that Clive Banning learned the importance of having a pretty pony in your life. You had to have
one of those even if you were allergic to horses, because without a pretty pony you could have six clocks in every room and so many watches on each wrist you couldn’t raise your arms and still you’d never know what time it was.
The instruction (George Banning didn’t give advice, only instruction) had taken place on the day Clive got caught out by that idiot Alden Osgood while playing hide and seek. By that time Clive’s Grandpa seemed older than God, which probably meant about seventy-two. The Banning homestead was in the town of Troy, New York, which in 1961 was just starting to learn how not to be the country.
The instruction took place in the West Orchard.
His grandfather was standing coatless in a blizzard that was not late snow but early apple blossoms in a high warm wind; Grandpa was wearing his biballs with a collared shirt beneath, a shirt that looked as if it had once been green but was now faded to a no-account olive by dozens or hundreds of washings, and beneath the collared shirt was the round top of a cotton undershirt (the kind with the straps, of course; in those days they made the other kind, but a man like Grandpa would be a strap-undershirt man to the end), and this shirt was clean but the color of old ivory instead of its original white because Gramma’s motto, often spoken and stitched into a living-room sampler as well (presumably for those rare times when the woman herself was not there to dispense what wisdom needed dispensing), was this: Use it, use it, never lose it! Break it in! Wear it out! Keep it safe or do without! There were apple blossoms caught in Grandpa’s long hair, still only half white, and the boy thought the old man was beautiful in the trees.
He had seen Grandpa watching them as they went about their game earlier that day. Watching him. Grandpa had been sitting in his rocker at the entrance to the barn. One of the boards squeaked every time Grandpa rocked, and there he sat, a book face down in his lap, his hands folded atop it, there he sat rocking amid the dim sweet smells of hay and apples and cider. It was this game that caused his Grandpa to offer Clive Banning instruction on the subject of time, and how it was slippery, and how a man had to fight to hold it in his hands almost all the while; the pony was pretty but it had a wicked heart. If you didn’t keep a close eye on that pretty pony, it would jump the fence and be out of sight and you’d have to take your rope bridle and go after it, a trip that was apt to tire you all the way to your bones even if it was short.
Grandpa began his instruction by saying that Alden Osgood had cheated. He was supposed to hide his eyes against the dead elm by the chopping block for a full minute, which he would time by counting to sixty. This would give Clivey (so Grandpa had always called him, and he hadn’t minded, although he was thinking he would have to fight any boy or man who called him that once he was past the age of twelve) and the others a fair chance to hide. Clivey had still been looking for a place when Alden Osgood got to sixty, turned around, and ‘caught him out’ as he was trying to squirm — as a last resort — behind a pile of apple crates stacked haphazardly beside the press-shed, where the machine that squeezed the blems into cider bulked in the dimness like an engine of torture.
‘It wasn’t fair,’ Grandpa said. ‘You didn’t do no bitching about it and that was right, because a natural man never does no bitching — they call it bitching because it ain’t for men or even boys smart enough to know better and brave enough to do better. Just the same, it wasn’t fair. I can say that now because you didn’t say it then.’
Apple blossom blowing in the old man’s hair. One caught in the dent below his Adam’s apple, caught there like a jewel that was pretty simply because some things were and couldn’t help it,
but was gorgeous because it lacked duration: in a few seconds it would be brushed impatiently away and left on the ground where it would become perfectly anonymous among its fellows.
He told Grandpa that Alden had counted to sixty, just as the rules said he must, not knowing why he wanted to argue the side of the boy who had, after all, shamed him by not even having to find him but had simply ‘caught him out’. Alden — who sometimes slapped like a girl when he was mad -had needed only to turn, see him, then casually put his hand on the dead tree and chant the mystic and unquestioned formula of elimination: ‘I-see-Clive, my gool-one-two-three!’
Maybe he only argued Alden’s case so he and Grandpa wouldn’t have to go back yet, so he could watch Grandpa’s steel hair blow back in the blizzard of blossoms, so he could admire that transient jewel caught in the hollow at the base of the old man’s throat.
‘Sure he did,’ Grandpa said. ‘Sure he counted to sixty. Now looka this, Clivey! And let it mark your mind!’
There were real pockets in Grandpa’s overalls — five of them, counting the kangaroo-like pouch in the bib — but beside the hip pockets there were things that only looked like pockets.
They were really slits, made so you could reach through to the pants you were wearing underneath (in those days the idea of not wearing pants underneath would not have seemed scandalous, only laughable — the behavior of someone who was A Little Soft in the Attic).