The Children's Crusade (4 page)

But he wanted to see the rowboat. They’d never once used it, not in two years. “Someday,” was his father’s insufficient answer to the question of when they might put it in water. Crouching at the door,
Robert felt with his fingers for a gap between the foundation and the wall. Nothing. He slid his fingers sideways. Still nothing. It was a little creepy, not knowing what might be lurking there, what soft bug or moldy leaf, so he changed his mind about the whole thing and headed up to the house.

His brothers and sister had disappeared, and he lay down under the oak tree. There were so many branches it was like being in a room. Robert remembered Mr. Gleason showing the class slides of his trip to France, where he’d been inside a church that didn’t have normal walls or a ceiling but instead a vast network of oak beams like an overturned sailing ship with its framing exposed. Mr. Gleason had brought out a box of balsa wood sticks and some glue, and they’d had a lesson on engineering. He was the only teacher who used science in English lessons and social studies in math lessons and made it so you didn’t even notice you were learning. A great example was the way he took a unit on the human body and ended up teaching the class a history lesson about “the four humors,” which was basically a big mistake doctors had made about how the body worked. In ancient Greece and Rome, doctors thought the body was filled with four substances—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—and that all diseases resulted from having an imbalance of the humors.

Robert told his father about the humors, partly to show him how smart Mr. Gleason was and partly to make sure he knew about them, and his father said that even though the theory was long discredited, it wasn’t as outlandish as most people thought, because when blood was drawn and left to sit in a transparent container such as a glass vial, you ended up with four different layers, from a dark clot at the bottom to a yellow serum at the top. It was easy to understand how, in very early medicine, the observation of those layers might have given rise to all kinds of speculation and theoriz
ing. He asked Robert if Mr. Gleason had shared with the class the idea that each humor was associated with a certain type of personality—black bile with the melancholic type, yellow bile with the choleric type, blood with the sanguine, and phlegm with the phlegmatic, a word that made Robert snort with laughter until he realized his father wasn’t kidding and it was a real word. It meant rational, calm, unemotional. Choleric meant angry or bad-tempered. Sanguine meant courageous and hopeful, and melancholic meant sad. “I guess I’m sanguine,” Robert’s father had said in answer to Robert’s question, “though your mother might say I’m phlegmatic.” Robert found it interesting that there seemed to be two good types and two bad types, and his father was both of the good types while his mother—well, at least sometimes she was both of the bad.

“What is Rebecca?” he said, avoiding the question he really wanted to ask.

“Oh, Rebecca is sanguine,” his father said. “She is definitely sanguine.”

Lying under the tree, Robert squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, and when he opened them bright spots fluttered in his vision. He waited for the world to become normal again. Above the branches of the oak tree, the sky was a harsh, crystalline blue. He thought it was probably about one o’clock, and then he remembered his watch, a gift from his father for his tenth birthday—a special gift for him because he was the oldest. It was a gift his father had received from his own grandfather, and his mother’s reaction had been confusing, almost as if she thought his father should have given the watch to her.

It was in Robert’s desk. He entered the house through the laundry room and slipped into his room unnoticed. He fastened the leather strap around his wrist, though it was too big on even the tightest hole. It was only 12:20. Hours more until his father would
be home.

Through the window he saw Rebecca dragging a wooden bench away from the garage, and his anger at her intensified. He’d forgotten that they always put the wooden bench outside the kitchen so people would have a place to set an empty glass or plate if they happened to step outside for a little air. Now she would get all the credit. It was possible she’d even been assigned the job by their mother, and he couldn’t decide if that would make it better or worse.

Out under the hot sun, Rebecca dragged the bench and rested, dragged it and rested. In fact, she’d had the idea on her own, and it was turning out to be not such a good one. The bench was incredibly heavy. She heard the phone ring in the house, and as she listened to the muffled sound of her mother’s voice she realized it was her father calling. Though she couldn’t hear words, she knew her mother was complaining about being home alone with the children and the party preparations, and Rebecca could almost fill in the gaps in her mother’s speech with the sound of her father’s calm, reassuring voice. “Your dad is like a mom,” one of Rebecca’s friends said once on a Saturday when her father was home with a houseful of kids while her mother was out shopping. Robert had a friend over that day, too, and their father helped them make Popsicles with lemonade and made sure everyone got a turn with Rebecca’s new pogo stick.

Ryan found his mother alone at the kitchen table, thumb and forefinger pinching the handle on a coffee cup. She had her back to the door, and he was very quiet as he approached her. He stopped just behind her chair and waited. Then he moved forward and made his badger approach her for a big surprise kiss.

“Oh, good grief,” she cried, scraping the chair away from the table and waving her hands near her face. “What are you doing?”

He brought the badger back to his chest.

“Ryan, what? What?”

“Hi,” he said.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Hi. Hi!” She leaned toward him and grinned a horrible jack-o’-lantern grin. “My God, this day. Where have you been? Where are the rest of them? Your father has a meningitis case. He’s hours behind schedule.”

She pushed her hair away from her face, and Ryan thought about how sometimes he did that for her: if they were sitting together on the couch he might get on his knees and turn his fingers into a comb and do her hair. She liked a lot of combing when he did that. More combing than tying, though he’d recently learned how to tighten a rubber band on something—twist, wrap, twist, wrap—and he had made her some good ponytails. Her hair was dark brown—the same color as Robert’s, a little darker than Rebecca’s—and wavy.

She took Badger and made him kiss Ryan. “It’s okay, baby,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She held Badger near his eyes. “He’s thirsty. He’ll drink those tears. Are
you
thirsty, baby?” She increased Badger’s pressure on Ryan’s face, and he understood that he should hold Badger steady while she got him some water. She returned to the table, pulled him onto her lap, and held the glass while he drank. Badger listened to Ryan’s heartbeat and said it sounded very good and healthy.

“I’m sorry about before,” she said, “with the cookies. We’ll make some together another time, okay? Chocolate chip—you don’t even like this kind very much.” She was about to ask him not to tell Bill how she’d yelled, but Bill had told her she shouldn’t do that kind of thing. And with four kids, he was bound to find out anyway.

She pushed away from the table. “How’s the children’s bathroom?”

Ryan thought of James peeing into the sink. “Okay,” he said, meaning
I want to protect you,
and not understanding, as he would in a few years, that there were times to postpone bad news and times
to hurry it, and this was a time to hurry it.

“Where is everyone?” she said. “What’s James doing?”

Ryan found James and took him outside. The lawn had been freshly mowed, and Ryan took off his shoes and wiggled his toes in the grass. The blades tickled his feet, and he thought of barefoot time at his school, which started with sitting and ended with dancing. He took hold of James’s hands and swayed back and forth, but James got excited and began running in circles, fast and then faster.

“We all fall
down,
” James shouted, and he pulled Ryan to the grass, where they lay together in a heap, panting. James’s face was pink and sweaty, his hair stuck to his head in damp strands. Suddenly his smile disappeared, and he stared at Ryan with giant, wounded eyes. “We fall down!” he said mournfully. “When is Dada?”

“Dada will come home, James. We didn’t hurt ourselves.”

Tears spilled from James’s eyes.

“You want Mama?”

“Dada takin’ me on my twike,” James said. “Down the hill.”

Their father taught them to ride their bicycles on the driveway, up by the house where it was flat, but to really practice you had to go down to the village, or even to Menlo Park.

“My wed twike,” James added.

“What’s your favorite color?” Ryan said.

“Wed!”

“What color are your shoes?”

James waved a foot in Ryan’s face. “Wed!”

“That’s right,” Ryan said. “You like red the best. And I like blue the best.” But as soon as he said this, he thought of the other colors, the green of the grass today, and the white of his milk, and the dark orange he’d chosen for his new blanket. All the colors together helped each other be the best. He lay back on the grass. He would never say that grayish brown was his favorite color, but that was
Badger’s color and it was the right one for Badger.

High in the sky, the sun shone down on them. It shone on the roof of the house, heating the kitchen even hotter than the oven had. But it didn’t shine on the shed.

Robert had gone down there again. He had decided that the table part of the old patio furniture set might be very helpful and that it would be fun to surprise his father by getting it out of the shed and bringing it up to the house. His father and his mother. She wouldn’t mind—she might even appreciate it—because it was only the cushions of the furniture set that she didn’t like.

He’d looked in the kitchen but couldn’t find the key. And he still couldn’t find it on the foundation. He felt all along the front, crawling on all fours, bits of leaves and dirt embedding themselves in his hands and knees. Nothing. He heard the sound of his father’s car laboring up the steep part of the road and turning in to the driveway, and he ran up the spur waving just as the car, a four-year-old white Plymouth Valiant, roared past him. (“More my style,” his father had said when he bought the car, “than the Barracuda.”)

“Dad!” Robert yelled, and through the back window he saw his father’s head tilt up—a look into the rearview mirror—and the brake lights flashed red.

Robert ran. The car door swung open, and his father stepped out and gave Robert a giant wave. “Welcoming committee,” he called. He brought his palm to the back of his neck, a customary gesture that accentuated how tall and skinny he was, elbow triangling away from his head like the point of a signal flag.

“How’d you get here so early?” Robert said as he reached the car. He was panting lightly. “What time is it?” Asking the question, he realized he was no longer wearing his watch.

“Well, there’s a complicated answer to that,” his father said.

Robert’s heart pounded, his absent watch leading the assault but
followed closely by the uphill run and a fear, materializing by the moment, that his father would be going out again. “You haven’t gone to the clinic yet?”

“I’ve been, but I have to go back. There are four patients left from this morning and six more when we reopen.”

Robert thought he’d left the watch in his room—he must have—but he needed to get back to the house and check. “But why?”

“I had an emergency.”

The word “emergency” was familiar enough—it was an everyday word—but with his own emergency developing Robert let a small whimper escape, and his father squatted so he was looking up into Robert’s eyes.

“It’s okay, son,” he said. “We have an infant with meningitis. It’s serious, but we’re treating him with antibiotics and I’m optimistic.”

“What about us?” Robert cried, and he was so ashamed that he took off down the hill again, knowing he was humiliating himself further but unable to stop.

Bill drove the rest of the way up to the house. The three other children crowded around him as soon as he was out of the car, James hugging his leg, Ryan leaning against his hip, Rebecca resting her head on his stomach. Usually when he came home they were inside, and they tackled him on the entry hall floor and worked him over as if he were a giant slab of clay. Greeting him outside, they settled for extra volume.

“Do you need help with the ice, Dad?” Rebecca said. “I moved the bench, I put it by the kitchen. That’s right, isn’t it, Dad? Isn’t that what we do?”

“Yes, it is, Rebeck,” he said, “but I don’t have the ice yet. I’m going to see if your mother needs any help.”

The children followed him to the bedroom hallway, where Ryan smelled Lysol and remembered the lie he’d told his mother about
the bathroom.

And there she was, hair covered by a shower cap, a giant sponge in one yellow-gloved hand.

“Oh, dear,” their father said.

She scowled. “You can say that again!”

“We’re closed for lunch. Thought I’d see what I could do for half an hour. Chopping? Mopping?”

“Hoppin’!” James shouted, and he marched his feet up and down.

“James,” Bill said, and he reached down and lifted James in his arms.

“Get them some lunch, would you?” Penny said irritably. “Someone peed in here!”

Bill carried James to the kitchen with Rebecca and Ryan following. “I suppose,” he said, “it might be better not to ask who peed in the bathroom.”

It took Rebecca a moment to get it, but then she burst out laughing. How dare someone
pee
in the
bathroom
! Ryan laughed, too, unconvincingly. She wished Robert were there, because he would have been cracking up, and the two of them might have started knocking into each other and ended up on the floor laughing their heads off.

“It was James,” Ryan said.

“James!” their father said. “Lunchtime!”

Mornings when he wasn’t at the hospital, he did assembly-line lunch making, bread in pairs, slap on a slice of meat, slap on a slice of cheese, swipe on the mayo, and the children lined up to receive the sandwiches and wrapped them up themselves, in waxed paper he’d previously torn from the roll, each piece coming off with a satisfying rip against the tiny metal teeth of the box.