A Hundred and Four

On Monday it was a hundred and four, and they moved onto the porch.

They did it at eleven at night, all four of them, without discussing it, the way a herd moves; they came down the stairs from the two hot rooms under the tin roof, one after another, with their sheets and their pillows, the fourth stair and the seventh and the ninth, and through the kitchen, past the goldfish going round in its bowl, and out through the screen door, held, so that it did not bang; and they lay down on the porch boards in a row, under the eave, with their heads against the wall of the house and their feet towards the yard, and did not say anything, and did not go back.

The boards were cooler than the beds. Not cool. Cooler. And there was air on the porch, sometimes, a breath of it coming across the yard from the direction of the lake in the small hours, that never reached the rooms upstairs; and when it came, all four of them felt it at once, and nobody said anything, and somebody sighed.

Frederick lay at the end of the row by the post, with Theo beside him and Felix beyond Theo and Marcus at the far end by the swing, and looked up at the underside of the eave, and past it, at the edge of the stars.

“A hundred and four,” said Marcus, into the dark, at about midnight.

“Don’t,” said Felix.

“I’m just saying it.”

“Don’t say it. If you say it, it’s true.”

“It’s true anyway,” said Marcus. “Bonnie’s thermometer said. By the pass hut. In the shade.” A pause. “Kaylee said the water in the pool was ninety-four. She said it’s the hottest it’s been since she started. She said the chlorine’s going off faster than she can put it in and she’s had to shock it twice.”

“You’re not even working there,” said Felix. “How do you know what the chlorine’s doing?”

“I listen,” said Marcus, with dignity. “When I’m waiting for him. At the gate.” Another pause. “Somebody has to.”

Theo, beside Frederick, had already gone. All at once, the way he always did. Frederick could hear him breathing, slow, on his back, with one arm flung out across the boards towards the post, so that his hand was a few inches from Frederick’s head.

Down by the barn the trailer hummed, with its blind down, and its light off.

---

Castellanos had new shoes on Monday morning.

They were black, and plain, and the same as the old ones, as far as Frederick could see, except that they were new, and shone, and creaked very slightly when he came across the yard in them at twenty past nine to the car; and he had his trousers with the creases on again, and the blue T-shirt, washed, the tear at the shoulder mended, in small neat stitches, in blue thread, by somebody. Frederick looked at the stitches and thought it had been Kimura, and then thought that it had not, and that Castellanos had sat in the trailer on Sunday night with a needle and thread from somewhere and done it himself, under the light, very carefully, the way he did everything.

He did not say anything about the shoes. He had tried, on Sunday afternoon. He had gone to the trailer with the brown wallet and knocked, and Castellanos had opened the door an inch and looked at the wallet and said no, sir, and shut it.

Kimura told him about the report, on the way to the car, in four sentences, walking beside him across the yard, without looking at him.

“Sergeant Castellanos made the report at eight on Sunday,” she said. “The Commissioner rang him back at eleven. There is a note on his file.” A pause. “He’s still here, sir.”

“What kind of note?”

Kimura thought about it.

“A short one,” she said.

---

There was no ice in the county.

He found that out at a quarter to eleven on Monday, at the snack hut, when he opened the chest freezer under the counter to get the bags of ice for the snow-cone machine and there was nothing in the bottom of it but a puddle and a single cube, sliding about in the puddle by itself like a small boat; and he looked at it, and then at Bonnie Tackett at the griddle, and Bonnie Tackett did not turn round.

“I know,” she said.

“Where’s the ice?”

“Grove.” She turned a hot dog. “The ice comes from the plant at Grove on a truck at seven every morning. This morning the truck came at seven and the man got out and said, Bonnie, I’ve got half what you ordered and I’ve got to do the marina and the café and the gas station and three churches and the nursing home at Afton, and the nursing home comes first.” She turned another hot dog. “And I said, Darrell, the nursing home comes first. And he gave me two bags.” She nodded at the snow-cone machine. “They’re in there. They’ll last till noon.”

“And then?”

“And then there’s no snow cones,” said Bonnie Tackett, “in a hundred and four, with a hundred kids in the pool, on a Monday in August.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “And you’re going to stand at that hatch and tell every one of them.”

He stood at the hatch and told every one of them.

At noon the two bags were gone. At five past twelve the first child came up to the hatch with a five-pound note and said blue, and he said I’m sorry, there’s no ice, and the child looked at him as if he had said there was no sky. By two o’clock he had said it a hundred and eleven times. He counted. Tucker came at a quarter past two, and said blue, and he said Tucker, I’m sorry, there’s no ice, and Tucker looked at him for a long time across the counter with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and an expression of the deepest betrayal.

“Is there ice tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

Tucker thought about it.

“Then I’ll have a can,” he said, at last, with great dignity, and held out his money; and Frederick counted the change into his hand, one, two, five, and Tucker said good, without any enthusiasm at all, and went away to sit on the edge of the pool with his can of orange held against his forehead.

---

He went to the library on Monday after his shift, and it wanted proof of an address.

He had known it would. He had seen the sign on the desk on the first Monday, from the door, when he had stood in the door of the library in Vinita in the cool and the smell of floor polish, and thought about number seven, and gone out again: LIBRARY CARDS: PROOF OF ADDRESS IN CRAIG COUNTY REQUIRED. He went back. Castellanos drove him, at a quarter past six, in the air conditioning, because Earl did not run on Monday evenings and the library shut at seven; and he stood at the desk in his red T-shirt with FREDERICK on the badge going over both edges and the snack hut on his hands, and the librarian looked up at him.

She was a woman of sixty, thin, with grey hair in a bun with a pencil through it and half-moon glasses on a chain, and a cardigan, in a hundred and four, and she looked at him over the glasses, and her face did the four seconds, all the way through to the end, and decided; and what it decided, he saw, was that he was a person who wanted a library card.

“Proof of address,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t got any.”

“Anything with your name on it at a Craig County address. A utility bill. A bank statement. A letter. Anything that’s come through the post.” She looked at him over the half-moon glasses. “Through the post. It has to have been posted. So I know it’s real.”

He thought.

He thought about the post. The boxes came by aeroplane, and by car, and by Mr Lowther, and did not come through the post. His mother rang. Dame Margaret rang. The Private Secretary did not write to him at the farmhouse, because there was no need; everything came in the boxes. The letter from the Nation had come by hand, from a police officer. Nobody in the world had sent him a letter through the post at Mrs Sixkiller’s farmhouse in Ketchum, because nobody in the world who wrote to him wrote through the post. They wrote through the Household.

“I haven’t got anything,” he said. “Nobody’s posted me anything. Nobody’s ever…” He stopped. “Nobody posts me things.”

The librarian looked at him over her glasses for a long moment.

“Then somebody will have to,” she said, and went back to her stamping.

---

He posted it himself.

He wrote it at the kitchen table on Monday night, at eleven, before the porch, with the bait-shop pen warmed in his fist, on a sheet of Mrs Sixkiller’s plain white notepaper; and he did not know what to write, because he had never written a letter to himself, and could not think of anything he had to tell himself that he did not already know.

Dear Frederick, he wrote. Then he stopped, for a long time.

This is so that you can get a library card.

He looked at it.

It is a hundred and four. There is no ice in the county. The nursing home at Afton comes first. You have said there is no ice a hundred and eleven times. Tucker had a can.

You mended a gate on Saturday. Sergeant Castellanos has new shoes. Earl the goldfish is going round.

Number seven.

He thought about how to sign it. He thought about George R., which he had written a hundred and fifteen times at this table, and about F. Hanover, which he had written on a form, and about Frederick, which he had written at the bottom of a hundred and twelve letters to children, because it was Frederick they had written to.

Yours sincerely, he wrote, Frederick.

He folded it, and put it in an envelope from the drawer, and wrote on the front, in capitals, the way Earl wrote on his clipboard:

F. HANOVER C/O MRS L. SIXKILLER THE FARMHOUSE ON THE GRAVEL ROAD KETCHUM

He looked at it. He had never addressed an envelope to himself. He had never addressed an envelope to anybody, he realised, holding it, under the lamp, with the moths on the screen; he had signed a great many letters, and somebody else had always put them in the envelopes, and written on the envelopes, and stamped them, and sent them. He did not know whether you put the county. He put the county.

CRAIG COUNTY OKLAHOMA-SEQUOYAH

Then he did not know what to do about the stamp.

---

He bought it on Tuesday morning at the Ketchum post office, on the way to work, on the blue bicycle, with the car behind him at twenty yards.

The post office was in a small brick building on the main street between the Methodist church and the volunteer fire station, with a flag outside it on a pole, the Realm’s, hanging straight down in the still air, and a counter inside it behind a grille, and a row of brass boxes with little glass windows in the wall, and a woman behind the grille. She was perhaps forty, round and brown and quick, with her hair cut short and a pair of glasses pushed up on her head, and a telephone at her ear, which she put down when he came in.

She looked at him.

He watched her face do the four seconds. It did them fast. It got to the end in about two, and decided, and then did something else, which he had not seen a face do before at the end of the four seconds: it looked at the envelope in his hand.

“Stamp?” she said.

“Please. One. For this.” He held it up. “It’s going to Ketchum.”

“It’s going to Ketchum from Ketchum,” said the postmistress. She read the envelope through the grille, upside down, quickly, the way Bonnie Tackett did. “F. Hanover. Care of Mrs L. Sixkiller.” She looked up at him. “You’re posting a letter to yourself.”

“For the library,” said Frederick. “In Vinita. They want proof of an address.”

The postmistress looked at him for a moment longer. Then she opened a drawer under the counter and took out a sheet of stamps, and tore one off along the perforations, very neatly, and put it on the counter, and pushed it through the gap under the grille.

“Eighty-five,” she said.

He paid her. Out of the brown wallet. A pound coin. She counted his change into his hand through the gap under the grille, eighty-five, ninety, a pound. Then he looked at the stamp.

It was a bluebird.

It was small and square, with a perforated edge, and on it, very finely drawn, in blue and rust and white, was a bird on a fence post: a small bird, blue on the back and the wings and the head, a deep clear blue like the pool, and rust-red on the breast, and white underneath, looking sideways out of the stamp with one black eye. Under it, in small capitals, EASTERN BLUEBIRD, and across the top of the stamp, in larger ones, the name of the Realm.

He stood at the counter and looked at it.

He had thought it would be him. He did not know why he had thought so. He knew the rule. He had been taught the rule, at twelve, by the Private Secretary, along with the rule about the boxes and the rule about the Speech from the Throne: that the Realm’s post had been built by Franklin and carried the Realm’s name, and that no living person could be put on a stamp but the sovereign, and that the sovereign never had been, not once, in all the years the rule had existed, by nobody’s order and nobody’s request, because the post was not the Crown’s. He had been taught it as one of the things that was more eloquent unused. He had thought, all the same, standing at the counter with his envelope, that when the postmistress tore off the stamp it would be his own face, and that he would have to stick it on a letter to himself, and that it would be the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened.

It was a bluebird.

“Eastern bluebird,” said the postmistress, through the grille. “The wildlife series. They came out in June.” She looked at him. “Loretta says you made a house for one.”

He looked up.

“She was in on Saturday,” said the postmistress, “for her stamps. She said you made a bluebird house out of the old henhouse, without knowing it was a bluebird house, and it came third at the fair.” She pushed her glasses further up onto her head. “She said the hole was right.”

He did not know what to say.

He licked the stamp and stuck it on the envelope, in the top right-hand corner, very straight, and gave the envelope to the postmistress through the gap under the grille, and she took it and looked at it, and at the bluebird, and at the address, and put it in a canvas sack behind her.

“Wednesday,” she said. “It goes to Vinita tonight and comes back tomorrow. Everything does. The sorting’s in Vinita.” She looked at him. “It’ll be at Loretta’s in the morning. In the box at the bottom of the drive.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, hon,” said the postmistress. “Thank the bluebird.” She picked up her telephone again. Then she put it down, and looked at him once more, through the grille, with her round quick face. “We never put the King on a stamp,” she said. “Did you know that? Never once. Not ever. They’re allowed. Nobody’s ever done it.” She shrugged. “I always thought that was a shame.”

“I don’t,” said Frederick.

The postmistress looked at him.

“No,” she said slowly. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

---

It took two days for his own handwriting to come back to him from fourteen miles away.

He thought about it, on and off, all of Tuesday, at the pool, where it was a hundred and three and there was a little ice, four bags, which lasted until a quarter to one; and all of Tuesday night, on the porch, in the row, with Theo’s hand flung out across the boards a few inches from his head. He thought about the envelope in the canvas sack behind the grille, going to Vinita on a van, in the evening, with all the other letters from Ketchum; and being sorted, by somebody he did not know, in a room he could not see, under a light, at a table, with a machine, or by hand; and put in another sack, the Ketchum sack; and coming back. He thought that it was the first time in his life anything he had done had gone into a system with everybody else’s things and been handled exactly the same as all of them, by people who did not know, and did not need to know, and would not have stopped if they had; and that the system had been built by Franklin, two hundred years ago, so that the Realm’s letters would carry the Realm’s name, and a bluebird.

He thought that this was what Earl meant about the train.

---

Marcus played the trombone at the end of the dock on Tuesday evening.

He had brought it. He had brought it from New Westminster in its black case, on the plane, as hand luggage, and carried it into the farmhouse, and put it under his bed in the hot room, and not taken it out, not once, for seventeen days; and on Tuesday evening at half past seven, when Frederick came home from the pool, Marcus was not at the kitchen table, and the case was not under the bed, and Felix was sitting on the porch steps looking towards the lake with an odd expression.

“He’s at the marina,” said Felix. “The public dock. The one past the café.” He looked at the lake. “He said he couldn’t stand it any more. He said seventeen days. He said his lip would go.”

They went down. All three of them, Frederick and Theo and Felix, walking, two miles, in the evening, with the heat lying on the road in a shimmer; and Kimura a hundred yards behind with her binoculars; and the car a quarter of a mile behind her. And they heard him before they saw him. They heard him from the bend above the café, across the water: a long note, low, held, round and warm and full, coming across the flat still surface of the cove in the evening light, and then another, higher, and then a run of notes going up, like somebody climbing a staircase two at a time, and then the long low note again.

He was at the end of the public dock, on the last plank, sitting on an upturned bucket, facing the water. The sun was going down behind him, over the trees, enormous, orange, and the cove in front of him was gold, flat gold from one side to the other, with the boats on it like black cut-outs; and he had the trombone up, and his eyes closed, and he was playing a hymn. Frederick knew it after a moment. It was the one on Earl’s van, on the radio, every day, the slow one, about the sweet by and by.

They stopped at the land end of the dock and did not go out.

He played it all the way through, slowly, the whole hymn, every verse, with the long notes held until they shook; and the sound went out across the gold water to the far shore and came back, very faintly, off the trees; and when he had finished he lowered the trombone onto his knee and sat on the bucket with his eyes still closed and did not move.

Out on the cove, a boat had stopped.

It was a small one, aluminium, with an outboard, and a man in it fishing, in a cap; and the man had stopped fishing, and turned off his motor, and was sitting in his boat in the middle of the gold water, with his rod across his knees, looking at the dock. And beyond him another boat had stopped. And another, by the marina, a pontoon with a family on it, the children sitting on the edge with their legs over. And another. Five boats. Six. Sitting on the gold water in the last of the sun, with their motors off, turned towards the dock, waiting.

Marcus opened his eyes. He looked at the boats. He went red, all the way down his neck.

Then the man in the first boat, the one in the cap, lifted one hand off his rod, very slightly, and held it up, palm out, the way the man in the tractor cap had lifted his at the café on the evening Frederick rode the blue bicycle home; and in the pontoon one of the children clapped, and then all of them; and somebody on another boat whistled; and Marcus sat on his bucket at the end of the dock and looked at them all, very red, and put the trombone up again, and played Amazing Grace.

---

The letter was in the box at the bottom of the drive on Wednesday morning.

He went down for it at a quarter past nine, before the car, in his red T-shirt, and opened the mailbox, which he had never opened, because nothing had ever come; and it was there. On its own. An envelope, white, with his own capitals on the front, F. HANOVER, C/O MRS L. SIXKILLER, and the county, and the State, and a bluebird in the corner with a black wavy line across it, the postmark, VINITA O-S, and the date.

He stood at the mailbox in the heat and held it.

It was the first letter he had ever received through the post. It was from himself. He knew everything in it. It had gone fourteen miles to Vinita and fourteen miles back, in two sacks, through somebody’s hands at a table under a light, and come back with a black wavy line on it to say that it had, and it was in his hand, and it was real; and he stood at the bottom of Mrs Sixkiller’s drive at a quarter past nine on Wednesday morning in a hundred and one degrees and found that his eyes had gone hot, and that he was smiling, and that he did not know which.

Behind him, on the porch, Theo was standing at the top of the steps in the sheet he had slept in, wrapped round him like a toga, watching.

“Well?” said Theo.

Frederick held it up.

“Proof of address,” he said.

---

The librarian in Vinita looked at it on Wednesday at a quarter past six, over her half-moon glasses, for a long time.

She looked at the address. She looked at the postmark. She looked at the bluebird. She turned it over and looked at the back, and at the flap, which he had opened, carefully, with a knife from Mrs Sixkiller’s drawer, so as not to tear it; and she did not take the letter out. She did not look inside. She held the envelope in her thin hands for a moment longer, and then gave it back to him across the desk.

“That’ll do,” she said.

She pulled a typewriter towards her. A real one. Grey, heavy, on a stand beside the desk, the kind of thing that was in the Private Secretary’s office in New Westminster and nowhere else in the world that he knew of; and she took a card from a drawer, a small stiff card, buff, the size of the brown wallet’s little window, and rolled it into the typewriter, and lined it up, and typed, with two fingers, very fast, so that the keys came up and hit the card with a sound like a very small machine gun.

She rolled it out and looked at it. She signed it at the bottom with the pencil from her bun. She held it out.

CRAIG COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY, VINITA. BORROWER: HANOVER, F. ADDRESS: C/O SIXKILLER, KETCHUM. CARD NO. 4471.

“Three books at a time,” said the librarian. “Two weeks. Five pence a day if they’re late, and they’d better not be.” She looked at him over the glasses. “And I’ll want them back before you go.”

“How do you know I’m going?”

The librarian looked at him for a long moment, over the half-moon glasses, with the pencil back in her bun.

“Everybody’s going, hon,” she said. “That’s what summer is.”

He took the card.

He unzipped the brown wallet. In the little window for the photograph there was the pink ticket, 412, and behind it the yellow card from Earl’s van, RURAL TRANSIT - ONE RIDE; and he took them both out, and put the library card in the window instead, in front, so that HANOVER, F. showed through the plastic, and put the pink ticket and the yellow card behind it, all three together, a stack, in the little window that was meant for a photograph of somebody you loved.

Then he went to the shelves.

He did not know what to borrow. He stood in the aisles in the cool and the smell of floor polish, with the fans going round in the ceiling, and looked at the spines of the books, thousands of them, the whole of the county’s reading, worn, with their plastic covers and their little paper pockets inside the front covers with the dates stamped in; and he took down a book on birds, because of Kimura, and a book on the history of the county, because of the town under the lake, and a novel, because he had not read a novel that nobody had chosen for him since he was nine, and he wanted to see what it was like.

The librarian stamped them. Three times. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The date, in purple, on the little paper slips inside the front covers: 22 AUG 2029.

“Two weeks,” she said.

---

That night, on the porch, in the row, by the light of Theo’s telephone, which Theo held up over him without being asked, because Theo always knew, Frederick lay on his back on the boards and read the first page of the novel; and then the second; and then he stopped, and turned off nothing, and lay with the book open on his chest and his eyes closed.

Inside, on the refrigerator door, under the magnet shaped like the State, there were seven ticks. Theo had made the seventh at ten o’clock, with the short pencil, while Frederick held the library card up beside the list so that he could see the number.

4471.

“A hundred and three tomorrow,” said Marcus, from the far end of the row, into the dark.

“Don’t,” said Felix.