Blaze

“I’m sorry,” Blaze said, but he wasn’t, or not entirely — he only wished Johnny could come along.

“They’ll start pounding on me as soon as you’re down the road. Everybody will.” John’s eyes moved rapidly back and forth in their sockets, and he picked at a fresh pimple on the side of his nose.

“No they won’t.”

“They will, and you know it.”

Blaze did know it. He also knew there was nothing he could do about it. “I got to go. I’m a minor.” He smiled at John. “Miner, forty-niner, dreadful sorry, Clementine.”

For Blaze, this was nearly Juvenalian wit, but John didn’t even smile. He reached out and grasped Blaze’s arm hard, as if to store its texture in his memory forever. “You won’t ever come back.”

But Blaze did.

The Bowies came for him in an old Ford pick-up that had been painted a grotesque and lap-marked white some years before. There was room for three in the cab, but Blaze rode in back. He didn’t mind. The sight of HH shrinking in the distance, then disappearing, filled him with joy.

They lived in a huge, ramshackle farmhouse in Cumberland, which borders Falmouth on one side and Yarmouth on the other. The house was on an unpaved road and bore a thousand coats of road dust. It was unpainted. In front was a sign reading BOWIE’S COLLIES. To the left of the house was a huge dogpen in which twenty-eight Collies ran and barked and yapped constantly. Some had the mange. The hair fell out of them in big patches, revealing the tender pink hide beneath for the season’s few remaining bugs to eat. To the right of the house was weedy pastureland. Behind it was a gigantic old barn where the Bowies kept cows. The house stood on forty acres. Most was given over to hay, but there was also seven acres of mixed soft and hardwoods.

When they arrived, Blaze jumped down from the truck with his zipper bag in his hand. Bowie took it. “I’ll put that away for you. You want to get choppin.”

Blaze blinked at him.

Bowie pointed to the barn. A series of sheds connected it to the house, zigzagging, forming something that was almost a dooryard. A pile of logs stood against one shed wall. Some were maple, some were plain pine, with the sap coagulating in blisters on the bark. In front of the pile stood an old scarred chopping block with an ax buried in it.

“You want to get choppin,” Hubert Bowie said again.

“Oh,” Blaze said. It was the first word he had said to either of them.

The Bowies watched him go over to the chopping block and free the ax. He looked at it, then stood it in the dust beside the block. Dogs ran and yapped ceaselessly. The smallest Collies were the shrillest.

“Well?” Bowie asked.

“Sir, I ain’t never chopped wood.”

Bowie dropped the zipper bag in the dust. He walked over and sat a maple chunk on the chopping block. He spat in one palm, clapped his hands together, and picked up the ax. Blaze watched closely. Bowie brought the blade down. The chunk fell in two pieces.

“There,” he said. “Now they’re stovelengths.” He held out the ax. “You.”

Blaze rested it between his legs, then spat in one palm and clapped his hands together. He went to pick up the ax, then remembered he hadn’t put no chunk of wood on the block. He put one on, raised the ax, and brought it down. His piece fell in a pair of stovelengths almost identical to Bowie’s. Blaze was delighted. The next moment he was sprawling in the dirt, his right ear ringing from the backhand blow Bowie had fetched him with one of his dry, work-hardened hands.

“What was that for?” Blaze asked, looking up.

“Not knowin how to chop wood,” Bowie said. “And before you say it ain’t your fault — boy, it ain’t mine, neither. Now you want to get choppin.”

His room was a tiny afterthought on the third floor of the rambling farmhouse. There was a bed and a bureau, nothing else. There was one window. Everything you saw through it looked wavy and distorted. It was cold in the room at night, colder in the morning. Blaze didn’t mind the cold, but he minded the Bowies. Them he minded more and more. Minding became dislike and dislike finally became hate. The hate grew slowly. For him it was the only way. It grew at its own pace, and it grew completely, and it put forth red flowers. It was the sort of hate no intelligent person ever knows. It was its own thing. It was not adulterated by reflection.