Nothing

There were rules, and Theo wrote them at six in the morning on the back of the feed-store bag.

It was Castellanos’s bag, from the night of the midway, with the fairgrounds still drawn on the other side of it in pencil with a ruler, and the red crosses; and Theo turned it over on the oilcloth and smoothed it flat and wrote on the blank side with the short pencil, in his big slanting hand, while the box fan roared and the light came up grey in the window over the sink, and the others sat round the table in their sheets from the porch, and the goldfish went round in the mixing bowl.

NUMBER TEN. RULES.

“There have to be rules,” said Theo. “Otherwise you’ll cheat. You’ll say I’m doing nothing and then you’ll read a book, and reading a book is something. Or you’ll do the boxes and say the boxes are nothing because they’re the Crown.” He looked at Frederick. “I know you.”

“I wasn’t going to do the boxes.”

“You were. You were going to do them at seven, before it got hot, and say it didn’t count because it was before the day started.” Theo wrote. 1. No boxes. He looked at it. Then he crossed it out. “No. You have to do the boxes. The boxes are the Crown. The Private Secretary said.” He wrote, under it: 1. The boxes don’t count, but you have to do them as fast as possible and not enjoy it.

“I never enjoy it.”

“You do. You read every word. You read the names.” Theo wrote. 2. No reading. He looked at it. 3. No swimming. Swimming is something. He thought. 4. No talking about anything that’s something. He thought harder. 5. No lists.

“You’re making a list,” said Felix.

“This is a list about not making lists. It’s allowed.” Theo wrote. 6. Lying down is allowed. Sitting is allowed. Looking at things is allowed if you don’t do anything about them. He stopped. 7. Eating is allowed if somebody else makes it. He looked at it. 8. Sleeping is

He stopped.

“Is sleeping nothing?” he said.

Nobody knew.

“Sleeping’s not nothing,” said Marcus. “Sleeping’s sleeping. It’s a thing you do.”

“It’s the most nothing thing there is,” said Felix. “You’re not even there.”

“You’re there. You’re just asleep.”

“Then it’s nothing. You’re there and you’re not doing anything. That’s the definition.”

Theo looked at the feed-store bag for a long time with the pencil over number eight.

8. Sleeping is to be decided later, he wrote. By me.

He put the pencil down.

“Right,” he said. “From now. Six fifteen. Till midnight.” He looked at Frederick across the table. “Nothing.”

---

The plane came at seven, and Castellanos brought the box.

There was only one. It came up the gravel road in the grey car at a quarter past seven, from the airstrip, with Mr Lowther in the passenger seat, which he never was, because Mr Lowther waited at the airstrip with the plane; and Mr Lowther got out of the car in his suit, in the cool of the early morning, which was not cool, and came up the porch steps with one red box, and stood at the screen door, and did not open it.

“Sir,” he said, through the mesh. “From the Private Secretary. With his compliments.” A pause. “He asked me to bring it to the house myself, sir, and to wait while you opened it, and to take it back.”

Frederick came to the screen door. He opened it. He took the box.

It was light. It was so light that he thought for a moment that it was empty, and nearly dropped it, the way you nearly drop a thing you have braced yourself to lift; and he took it to the kitchen table, and put it down on the oilcloth beside the feed-store bag with the rules on it, and took out the two small keys on the ring that went everywhere he went, and unlocked it, and opened the lid.

It was empty.

Not quite. There was a cream envelope in the bottom of it, with the crest on the flap, and nothing else at all. No Acts. No letters. No lists. No notes from the Crown Office. The red leather inside of the box, worn pale at the corners, and the cream envelope lying in the middle of it, by itself, like a leaf on the bottom of a pool.

He opened it.

Sir. There is nothing in the box today. I have made sure of it. There is nothing pressing and there is nothing that is not pressing. The Prime Minister has nothing for you. Hanover has nothing. Dame Margaret has been asked not to telephone, and has agreed, and has made a note. Your mother sends her love, and will ring tomorrow, as usual. I have been told by Sergeant Kimura what today is. I hope you will forgive the presumption.

It was signed with the Private Secretary’s initials, small, in the corner, the way he always signed.

And under the initials, in the same hand, smaller still:

Number ten, I believe, sir.

Frederick stood at the kitchen table and looked at it.

At the empty red box, open on the oilcloth, with its worn leather inside and its brass lock and the cipher on the lid rubbed nearly away; which had come to him every day of his life since the second of May, and before that for years, every day there were boxes, which was every day; which had come in an aeroplane at night through two white pillars of insects, and in a car from Tulsa, and to a kitchen table in Ketchum with the moths on the screen; and which had come to him this morning, on the first of September, on the morning plane, with a Messenger of the Household in the passenger seat of the car, with nothing in it.

He thought it was the most beautiful thing anybody had ever sent him.

He closed the lid. He locked it. He took it to the screen door and gave it back to Mr Lowther through the mesh.

“Thank you,” he said. “Will you tell him…”

He stopped. He did not know what he wanted Mr Lowther to tell the Private Secretary. He could not think of anything that was the right size.

“Sir,” said Mr Lowther, through the mesh, with the empty box in his hands. “I think he knows.” He paused. “I’ve carried the boxes for six years, sir. To your father, and to the Regent, and to you.” He looked at the box. “I’ve never carried one with nothing in it.”

“Is there a precedent?”

Mr Lowther thought about it, very seriously, standing on the porch with the light box held out in front of him.

“No, sir,” he said. “There isn’t.” He turned to go down the steps. Then he turned back. “There is now,” he said; and went down the steps, one at a time, to the car.

---

The others tried to do nothing beside him, and failed.

Felix failed first. He failed at a quarter to eight. He lay down on the porch boards beside Frederick at seven, in the row, in his sheet, and did nothing, with his eyes open, looking at the underside of the eave, for forty minutes; and at a quarter to eight he sat up, suddenly, as if somebody had called him, and said I have to make a pie, in a voice of desperate conviction.

“You don’t have to,” said Theo, from the swing.

“I have to. It’s the last day. It’s the last day at the blue door. She said six o’clock. I said I’d come. She’s got the lard out.” Felix stood up. He looked down at Frederick, on the boards. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I tried. I can’t do nothing. I’ve never been able to. My mother says I came out of the womb doing something.” He went down the steps. At the bottom, he stopped, and looked back. “I’ll bring it back,” he said. “The pie. For later. Rule seven. Somebody else makes it.” And he went away down the gravel road, two miles, walking fast, to the blue door.

Marcus failed at half past nine.

He lasted longer than Felix. He lay on the boards with his hands behind his head and his eyes shut, and did nothing, and Frederick could hear him doing it, breathing, slowly, steadily; and then not so steadily; and at half past nine Frederick heard something else, very faint, from Marcus’s end of the row, and turned his head, and Marcus was lying on his back with his eyes shut and his hands behind his head, doing nothing, and moving his lips. Silently. In a pattern. Over and over.

“You’re practising,” said Frederick.

Marcus opened his eyes.

“I’m not.”

“You are. In your head. With your lips. I can see you. It’s the hymn. The one from the van.”

Marcus looked at the eave for a long time.

“It’s the last day at the dock,” he said, at last. “They’ll be there. The boats. At seven. They asked me last night if I’d come and I said I’d think about it.” He sat up. “I can’t not practise if I might play. My lip’ll go.” He looked at Frederick, apologetically. “I’m sorry. I’ll go down to the lake. Behind the trees. You won’t hear me.”

He went down to the lake behind the trees. Frederick heard him, faintly, a quarter of an hour later, through the trees, across the field: a long low note, round and warm, held until it shook, and then the hymn, the slow one, the one about the sweet by and by, over and over, practising, across the water.

Theo failed at eleven.

He did not mean to. He was on the swing, with his camera on his chest, doing nothing, rocking, very slightly, with one foot on the boards; and he had been doing nothing for five hours, the longest of any of them, and Frederick could see that it was costing him enormously and that he would not give in; and then at eleven o’clock a bird came and sat on the porch rail.

It was the bluebird.

Or a bluebird; Frederick did not know if it was the same one that had been on the fence post by Earl’s van, or on the stamp, or any of them. It was small, blue on the back and the wings and the head, a deep clear blue like the pool, and rust on the breast, and white underneath; and it sat on the rail of Mrs Sixkiller’s porch three feet from the swing, in the sun, and looked sideways at Theo with one black eye.

Theo did not move.

Then, very slowly, the way he had knelt at the screen door with Mrs Sixkiller’s camera, the way he had moved his hand on the bench in the cellar to Frederick’s wrist, he lifted the camera on his chest, an inch at a time, to his eye.

“Theo,” said Frederick, from the boards. “Rule six. Looking at things is allowed if you don’t do anything about them.”

“I know,” said Theo, through his teeth, with the camera at his eye, not moving. “I’m breaking it.”

The camera clicked.

The bluebird looked at him a moment longer, and flew away.

Theo lowered the camera. He sat on the swing and looked at the porch rail where the bird had been, and then at Frederick, on the boards, with an expression of the most profound and peaceful defeat.

“Twelve,” he said.

He did not go anywhere. He did not get up. He sat on the swing with the camera on his chest and rocked, very slightly, with one foot on the boards, and went on doing nothing, the way you go on with a fast after you have broken it, because you have broken it and there is nothing else to do; and he did not say anything else for an hour.

---

He did nothing.

He lay on the porch boards at the end of the row by the post, on his back, with his hands at his sides, in his shorts and a T-shirt, and his bare feet towards the yard, and his head against the wall of the house beside the screen door, and the warm wood under him; and he did nothing.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

He had not known it would be. Theo had told him, in the King’s sitting room, five weeks ago, you’ve never done it, not once, not one day in your life, and he had said it’s the easiest one, and he had believed it; and he lay on the boards at half past eleven on Saturday morning in Ketchum, five hours into it, and understood that Theo had been right, and that it was not easy at all, and that he did not know how to do it.

Because nothing was not nothing. That was the trouble. When you did nothing, things came.

They came into his head. They came in one after another, the way the moths came to the lamp, out of the whole dark country round him, and hung there, on the mesh, waiting. The boxes, first, which were not there, and which he thought about anyway, the empty one, and what would be in Monday’s, and Tuesday’s. School, on Tuesday. The homeroom at the end of the east corridor on the first floor, and the radiators that had never worked, and Mr Abernathy at the front in the brown jacket. The coronation. November. The seventeenth. The Abbey. He let that one come and looked at it and let it go, because it was too big for a porch. The Programme, in a drawer in Charter House. Ms Fenner, who had been told she was a genius. The Prime Minister on a bus, and in the queue, and on the edge of the shallow end with Tucker, saying not today. The bridge, with its crane. Earl, ten minutes, each way. His mother, on Öland, who would ring tomorrow.

He lay on the boards and let them come, and look at him, and go.

He found that there was a way to do it. He found it at about noon. It was the way you put a frog back in the lake: you did not throw it, and you did not hold on to it. You carried it to the edge, and tipped the net, and let it sit on the mud for a moment, looking at you, and then it went in, by itself, and was gone, into the brown warm water, and the surface closed over it. He did that with the boxes. He did it with school. He did it with the Abbey. One after another, each thing that came, he carried it to the edge, and tipped the net, and let it go in.

And between them, after a while, more and more, there was nothing.

---

He looked at the yard.

That was allowed. Rule six. He looked at it, from the boards, with his head turned on the warm wood; and it was the same yard he had looked at every day for six weeks, and he had never looked at it.

The light went across it.

He watched it go. At noon it was straight down, white, flat, so that the oak had no shadow at all, only a dark ring round its foot; and then, very slowly, so slowly that he could not see it move, only see that it had moved, the shadow of the oak came out from its foot and began to go across the yard towards the barn. Across the gravel. Across the patch of different-coloured grass by the fence where the henhouse had stood for seventy-one years. Across the grassy mound of the cellar, and the slanted wooden door set into the end of it like the cover of a book. He watched it go. It took an hour to cross the cellar.

There was an ant.

It was on the porch board beside his hand, a small red one, going somewhere, with something white in its jaws, a crumb, from Felix’s pie, perhaps, from some other day; and it went along the board to the crack between this board and the next, and stopped, and considered the crack, and went along the crack, and found a place where the crack was narrower, and crossed, and went on, with its crumb, along the next board, to the edge of the porch, and over the edge, and was gone.

He watched it the whole way. It took four minutes. He did not do anything about it.

The windmill turned.

He watched that too. It turned when there was wind, and there was wind today, a little, a hot breath coming across the fields from the west, from where the green had been on Thursday; and the windmill turned, slowly, with its long creak, its blades straight again because two men in Mrs Sixkiller’s fourth grade had bent them back by hand, and stopped, and turned again. It pumped nothing. It had pumped nothing since the well was put in, in 1923. It told you the wind. That was all it did. It stood by the barn and turned when the wind came and stopped when it went, and told you, and did not do anything about it.

He thought that the windmill had been doing nothing for a hundred and six years, and was very good at it.

---

Mrs Sixkiller came at two.

He heard the car on the gravel road, at the speed limit, and the dust, and the door; and did not move. He lay on the boards with his head turned towards the yard, and watched her get out of the blue car by the oak in her straw hat and her gardening gloves, and stand in the yard, and look at the porch.

At him, on the boards, at the end of the row by the post, on his back, doing nothing.

At Theo, on the swing, with the camera on his chest, rocking, doing nothing.

She did not come up the steps. She did not go to the well. She did not say anything for a long time. She stood in the yard in the heat with her hands in their gardening gloves folded in front of her and looked at the two of them on the porch, the way she had looked at the four of them in a row in front of her by the well on the first afternoon, from the left, one after another, the way Mr Abernathy looked along a row before he took the roll.

“Good,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

She got back into the blue car. She turned it round in three movements by the oak. She drove away down the gravel road at exactly the speed limit, in her dust, which hung in the still air behind her for a long time after the car had gone.

---

He slept at three.

He did not mean to. He did not decide anything. He was lying on the boards looking at the shadow of the oak, which had reached the barn, and the windmill, turning; and the heat lay on him like a hand; and the insects in the trees were breathing, rising and falling, rising and falling, in waves, across the whole dark country, which was not dark, it was three in the afternoon, which he knew; and then he did not know anything at all.

He woke at half past five.

He woke all at once, the way Theo slept, and did not know where he was. Then he knew. The boards. The eave. The light, which had gone gold, and long, and come round so that it was in under the eave of the porch and lying across his legs. The shadow of the oak gone right across the yard and up the side of the barn to the roof. The windmill, still. And the smell, coming through the screen door from the kitchen, of something sweet, and hot, and baked.

Theo was sitting on the top step, with his back against the post, beside him, looking down at him.

“You slept,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“Two and a half hours.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He sat up. “Does it count?”

Theo looked at him for a long time. He looked at him the way he had looked at the feed-store bag at six in the morning with the pencil over number eight; the way he had looked at the brick at the bottom of the deep end, and the photograph of the screen door, and the eleven pounds in their envelope with the crest.

“I’ve decided,” said Theo.

“And?”

“It counts,” said Theo. “Rule eight. Sleeping is to be decided later, by me.” He looked at the yard. “I’ve decided. It counts. It’s the most nothing thing there is.” He paused. “Felix was right.”

“Felix will be unbearable.”

“Felix,” said Theo, “is in the kitchen with a pie.”

---

The pie was peach. Golden. The slits in the top in the shape of a leaf, and the edge pinched like the edge of a coin. Felix had made it at the blue door at six, and carried it back two miles, and put it on the kitchen table at four, and had sat at the table beside it for an hour and a half, he said, doing nothing, properly, because it was the only way he could stop himself from eating it; and when Frederick came in through the screen door at twenty to six with his hair flat on one side from the boards, Felix looked up from the pie with the face of a man who has been to war.

“Rule seven,” he said. “Somebody else made it.”

They ate it on the porch. All of it. With their fingers. And it was not tough at all; and Marcus came back up through the field from the lake at half past six with the trombone in its case, and his lip, he said, intact; and he sat down on the top step, and did not go to the dock. And at seven, from the porch, very faintly, across the fields and through the trees and over the water, they heard the hymn anyway. Not a trombone. A radio, on somebody’s boat, Marcus said, listening, with his head on one side: somebody who had come to the dock for the trombone and found nobody there, and had turned on the gospel station out of Tulsa instead, which was playing it, as it played it every evening, at seven.

In the sweet by and by.

They sat on the porch and listened to it come across the water, very faint, from somebody else’s boat; and did not say anything.

---

At eleven o’clock Theo got up off the swing and went in through the screen door, and let it bang.

Frederick heard the drawer. He heard Theo’s feet on the kitchen floor, to the refrigerator. He heard nothing, for a long time.

He got up off the boards and went to the screen door and looked through the mesh.

Theo was standing in front of the refrigerator with the short pencil, under the lamp, with the moths on the screen behind Frederick’s head, and the goldfish going round in the mixing bowl on the table. He was looking at the list. At the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme, cream, with the crest showing faintly through from the other side, held up at its corner by the magnet shaped like the State; with ten lines on it in four hands, and nine ticks, and beside the fourth tick a second, very small, for keeping it; and Bonnie Tackett’s letter beside it, I would employ him again; and the pink ticket, 412, hanging over the top.

And at the bottom, in Frederick’s own small hand, the last thing written.

10. Do nothing all day.

“It’s not midnight,” said Frederick, through the mesh.

“I know,” said Theo. He did not turn round. “I’m not ticking it.” He looked at the list. “I’m just looking.”

They looked at it together, through the mesh, for a long time.

Then Theo turned round. He held out the pencil, through the screen door, without opening it, so that it lay against the mesh between them.

“You do it,” he said. “At midnight. It’s yours. You wrote it.”

---

At midnight Frederick made the tick.

He did it alone, in the kitchen, under the lamp, with the box fan off and the moths on the screen and the others on the porch in the row under the eave, asleep, or not asleep and pretending, which in Felix’s case was the same thing and in Theo’s was not possible. He stood in front of the refrigerator with the short pencil and looked at the list for the last time with a line on it without a tick.

Then he made the tick. Beside number ten. Small, and neat, and pressed rather hard into the paper, the way you press when you have been waiting a long time to make a mark; exactly like the tick in the margin of page thirty-four of the Highways (Rural Bridges) Act 2029, beside Big Cabin Creek, in a Prime Minister’s pencil.

Ten.

He stood back.

Ten ticks, down the side of the back of page fourteen. In four hands. Held up by a magnet shaped like the State, with a little gold star where Guthrie was, that had been Mrs Sixkiller’s mother’s, for holding things up.

He stood in the kitchen at midnight and looked at it for a long time, and did not do anything about it.

Then he turned off the lamp, and went out through the screen door, holding it so that it did not bang, and lay down on the porch boards at the end of the row by the post, beside Theo, whose hand was flung out across the boards towards him, a few inches from his head; and looked up past the eave at the edge of the stars, and the galaxy going across them, faint, edge on, the whole of it.

Tomorrow they were going home.

He let that come, and looked at it, and carried it to the edge, and tipped the net.

The whip-poor-will in the oak said its name.