Sons from Afar (23 page)

James had never thought of himself as the kind of person who could do things and make other people better. What, he wondered, had he been thinking of not to realize that if you were as smart as he was you could really choose what to do? What had he thought all this smartness was good for?

He guessed maybe he didn't mind being James Tillerman, didn't mind being himself. No matter what other people, kids, thought of him. He'd grow up, and being grown up would be easier; one thing about adults—he thought of the adults he knew—they seemed easier just being themselves. He'd be okay, if he didn't get lost from himself along the way. Francis Verricker, he thought, had gotten lost. How, or why, James didn't know, and he never would know, he guessed. But that didn't matter for James. It was up to James to see that he didn't get lost. James pedaled along, just feeling good.

Until he remembered that he was virtually cheating on that French report—more than virtually cheating, he told himself. Actually cheating. Even if Andy Walker had instigated it, and would do the actual act of cheating, James had gone along. Had helped out. Had done it. He tried to push the thought away and forget about it. But this time it wouldn't go away. James slowed down, no longer eager to get home, or get anywhere. Because if he did that, that was the kind of person he was.

All right, he said to himself. That's done. What's done is done. But never again, he promised himself. I can't do anything about that now, but I won't ever again let myself do anything like that, not in any way.

The promise helped . . . some.

S
ammy leaned back in his seat and stretched his legs out. Ernie was up there babbling away about baseball. Sammy kept his face turned toward Ernie, so it would look like he was paying attention. He had the evaluation sheet in front of him.

Ernie's was the second report of the day, following Shirley's report on how the Chesapeake Bay was getting polluted. What Shirley said made Sammy uneasy, uncomfortable: How could people be so dumb? The dumbest thing of all was to keep on doing it, even after they could see the bad effects it had, cutting down the trees, and using fertilizers that ran off into the bay. He was glad when Shirley finished and sat down, even though he gave her high marks on every category of the evaluation sheet. You'd think, Sammy thought, that somebody, the governor or the president or someone, would just stop the destruction. You'd think that somebody who had the power, and was in charge, would do something.

It was almost a relief to have Ernie standing up there, looking like a potato, a couple of notecards in his hand. Ernie wasn't nervous at all. It sounded to Sammy as if Ernie had spent maybe ten minutes, tops, looking up baseball in a little kid's encyclopedia. It was a terrible report. Ernie would tell some fact, then look up and say something—usually something stupid—about that fact. After people stopped laughing he'd read off his next fact.
“Baseball was invented in 1839,” Ernie said. He looked at the class. “Which was a pretty long time ago.” People giggled, because if there was anything stupider than Ernie acting like Ernie, nobody knew what it was. It was a joke, Ernie giving a report. Ernie was a joke. “In 1939 the Baseball Hall of Fame was opened, in Cooperstown, New York. That's New York State, not New York City, in case any of you are wondering. Nineteen thirty-nine is a hundred years after 1839,” he added.

Sammy was giving Ernie pretty high marks for engaging interest, because most people were enjoying themselves; the low marks came on content and organization, preparation and delivery.

When Miss Karin stood up from her desk and said, “Thank you, Ernie. Are there any questions?” Custer muttered into Sammy's ear, “Yeah, I'd like to know how he got into seventh grade.” Sammy snickered, as did others who'd heard.

There were thirty-six kids in the class, and about half of the reports had been given. Reports made an easy week of English, because all you had to do was come to class and listen, checking off the evaluation sheet. After class, people told one another what their evaluations had been. An awful lot of the evaluations had to do with how popular someone was. Robin had given a pretty good report on jet fighters. Sammy had liked it and Miss Karin had said it was good. Even Custer, who'd been asking Sammy why he was friends with a wimp like Robin, thought it was interesting. But most of Robin's evaluations had been bad ones, just because Robin wasn't well liked; everybody agreed with Custer about Robin, so they gave him low marks. Sammy didn't see why Custer was so down on Robin. “I bet he cries, too,” Custer had said. So what? Sammy wanted to say, but he didn't. Instead he got sarcastic: “Real men don't cry?”

“C'mon, Sammy, you know what I mean,” was all Custer answered. Sammy guessed he did know, but “No, I don't. Tell me,” was
what he'd said. “Why are we fighting about that baby face?” Custer had asked.

Sammy didn't know. He didn't like someone telling him who to be friends with, for one thing, even if that someone was a friend of his. He didn't exactly know how he felt about Robin either, because the thing he liked best about Robin was his mother. Maybe. “I'm not fighting,” he'd said to Custer.

Miss Karin called Sammy's attention back to class. “You're on, Sammy,” she said, smiling at him.

Sammy got up from his desk. He was never nervous. People liked him, and they liked listening to him. Mostly, he got off some good jokes, and he kept things short; he tried to give the kind of report he liked listening to. He didn't have any note-cards, because he never had any trouble remembering what he planned to say. He stood at the front of the class and looked around at everyone. Making eye contact was what they called it on the evaluation sheet.

They sat in straight rows, in their desks, all of them looking at him. The girls were looking at him and the boys were looking at him. They each had a fresh evaluation sheet, waiting. They each had a pencil, ready to write things down. They were mostly his friends—Chris and Jason, Billy and Pete and Tom Childress, and everyone except the ones he didn't like. He looked at them.

Sammy couldn't remember a word of what he was going to say. He couldn't even remember his topic, practically. If he opened his mouth, he knew no words would come out. He just stood there, staring stupidly back.

He had no idea what was going on with him. If this was nervousness, he could sympathize with people who got nervous. But why should he be nervous?

Sammy jammed his hands into his back pockets and kind of spread his legs apart. He did this because he could feel his whole
left leg just shaking, vibrating away, and with his legs apart he could lock his kneecaps. It felt like his stomach was jiggling and he didn't know how to get himself going. He opened his mouth. “Um,” he said. But nothing came into his mind. Nothing else came out of his mouth.

He looked out the windows: The sky was smoky gray with low clouds and a misty rain filled the air, not falling, but sort of floating down.

“Um,” Sammy said again. Mythology, that was it. Greek mythology. James's idea.

But what was wrong with him that he was suddenly nervous?

“My report is on Greek mythology,” he said. A lot of people didn't like to hear that; he could see it on their faces. He looked at Miss Karin and she smiled at him, to encourage him. She smiled at him with her red mouth. She always kept her lipstick fresh and bright. Something about her red smile drove any other thoughts out of his head.

“Um,” Sammy said. “My report is on Greek mythology,” he said.

“I guess we know that by now,” Ernie said. Some people laughed so he asked, “Is the report over?”

Shut up your fat face, Sammy wanted to say. Ernie made him mad, trying to submarine his report. “But what I'm going to talk about,” he said, remembering now, “is just one story. Because I thought it was interesting. But first, I want to say a couple of general things about Greek mythology.” He was saying it all wrong. He should have said “What we call Greek mythology was their religion.” That was the important thing and he'd omitted it.

Robin was watching Sammy, looking interested. Custer had a little smile on his face, probably waiting for the jokes. Sammy was okay now, he hoped.

“The important thing is, that this was a religion. We treat it
the same way we treat fairy tales, but it was a religion. People believed in it. The kind of religion it was, is a nature religion.” He heard how he was repeating that word, religion, and how wrong that sounded, repeating it like that. “The Greeks believed that different parts of nature had gods who controlled them.” What a little kid sentence; it didn't even say what it meant. Shut
up,
Sammy said to himself. He took a breath and tried again. “Like, there was a god who controlled the ocean, and a goddess of war, and every river or field had its own little god or goddess. So that everything had a reason for it. If lightning struck, for example, that was Zeus—or Jupiter, to the Romans—he was the king of the gods, he would send lightning bolts to destroy something. Or, if you fell in love, that was Eros—or Cupid—who had shot you with a golden arrow and you couldn't help it. So that, in a way, the people were helpless, and everything that happened was the gods' idea. So you can see it's different from what we think.” Now he was really off the track. But he'd never thought of that before, the way believing that the gods had all the power kept you helpless.

Not too interested, most of the faces. A few were, Sammy saw: Custer was, and Shirley he thought, although she was doing that trick of pulling her hair down over her face and chewing on it. Robin, too. But most of them weren't too interested at all. He hurried along. In a way, he just wanted it over, because it didn't look like his report was as good as he'd thought.

“My report was actually about the god of the sun, Apollo. The Greeks thought that the sun and moon were chariots, driven across the day sky and night sky by twins, Apollo and his sister Artemis, or Diana. Do you know what a chariot is?” Sammy asked. He hadn't planned to ask that, but it struck him that some people might not know, and for the story they needed to know. So he explained what a chariot was, and how it was
pulled by horses. He got back on the subject. “Apollo was mostly the sun god, but he was also god of prophecies. When you wanted to find out what was going to happen you'd go to his temple at Delphi and the priestess would go into a trance and tell you his answer. He was also the god of music. He was always pictured as a very handsome young man.” There were a couple of giggles at that. Sammy ignored them.

“Anyway, I thought I'd tell you one of the myths about Apollo,” he said. That sounded so bad—he almost wished he did have notecards, and had written down how to say things right. “The Greek gods,” he began the story, “often fell in love with mortal women, and they'd have children. I guess these children were half-god, half-mortal. Apollo once fell in love, and the woman had a son named Phaëton. Apollo didn't live with his family, because he was a god and he had to drive his chariot across the sky every day. Besides, the gods would fall in love and then just forget about the woman and never see her again. So this Phaëton lived with his mother, down on earth. She told him who his father was, but it was supposed to be a secret. Well, Phaëton was just a kid, and the other kids started teasing him, telling him he didn't have a father, and all. He got angry one day, and told them who his father was.” Sammy wondered if they needed a reminder. “That his father was Apollo, the sun god.” No, he'd been wrong, they hadn't needed a reminder.

“The kids didn't believe him, of course. I mean, would you?” Nobody would, they agreed; at least they were listening now, interested. They liked being told a story.

“So Phaëton got really upset, and he went to his mother. I don't know what she said to him, the story doesn't say, but he made up his mind to prove to the other kids that he really was Apollo's son. So what he did was, he went up to Mount Olympus, where the gods all lived, and he went up to Apollo. Apollo knew
who he was. Phaëton asked his father if he could have one wish granted. Apollo wasn't thinking, I guess—he just said yes. Phaëton made him promise first, he made Apollo swear by the river Styx—which is one of the rivers that surround the underworld in Greek mythology. That was the most sacred vow a god could make, to swear by the Styx. When a god swore by the Styx that he'd do something, he had to do it. Then, once Apollo had promised, Phaëton told him what he wanted.”

Sammy waited there, just for a minute, letting their curiosity build. He had them, he could see. Waiting was the way to tell the story—that at least was right and he was sure of it. He waited just the right time and then told them.

“He wanted Apollo to let him drive the chariot of the sun.”

“I wouldn't have asked for that. I'd have asked for money,” Jason said.

“I'd have asked for immortality,” Custer said.

“What happened?” Tom Childress asked.

“Apollo tried to talk him out of it, but the more his father tried to convince him the more Phaëton wanted to do it. Apollo had to give in, because he'd sworn the sacred vow. So, the next morning, Phaëton—who was just a kid, like us—climbed up into the chariot of the sun. I guess, Apollo was probably still trying to get him to ask for something else, even when he was handing over the reins. But Phaëton only wanted the one thing, because that would show the other kids he'd been telling the truth.”

“Anyway, what was so bad about that, driving the chariot?” Shirley wondered.

“Because it was dangerous,” Sammy said. “Because the horses—nobody knows how many there were, maybe two of them, maybe four—they were huge. Strong and fast. I mean, they pulled the
sun.
They were pretty wild and strong. And Phaëton wasn't a god or anything, he was just a kid. Would you
be able to do that? Be the one who controls horses strong and fearless enough to pull the whole burning sun across the sky? Anyway, when Apollo unbolted the stable doors, the horses knew they were supposed to go out and follow dawn across the sky. So they went tearing out of there, like every day. I guess, Phaëton probably felt pretty good right then. There he was, about to drive the chariot of the sun across the whole sky where everyone would see him.