Leaving

Mrs Sixkiller took the list down herself.

She came at six, before any of them were up, in the blue car, at the speed limit, and he heard the car from the porch, where they were all four still lying in the row under the eave in their sheets; and he heard the door, and her shoes on the steps, and the screen door, opened and shut so that it did not bang; and then nothing, for a long time. He got up and went to the mesh.

She was standing in front of the refrigerator in the grey light from the window over the sink, in her navy dress and her hat with the small brim, the funeral hat, the one she had worn on the first day by the well; and she was looking at the door of it. At the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme, cream, with the crest showing faintly through from the other side; and the ten lines on it in four hands; and the ten ticks down the side, and the second, very small one beside number four; and Bonnie Tackett’s letter beside it, I would employ him again; and the pink ticket, 412. All of it held up at the corner by the magnet that was the exact shape of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, the long body and the panhandle, brown, with a little gold star where Guthrie was.

She did not turn round.

“You’ll want this,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

She took the magnet off the door. Slowly. With two fingers, by the panhandle. The list and the letter and the ticket came down off the refrigerator into her other hand, all together, and she held them for a moment, the three things, in her hand; and looked at the list, at the ten lines in four hands, the way Mr Abernathy looked along a row before he took the roll.

Then she put the magnet back on the refrigerator door, by itself, in the middle, holding nothing.

She turned round and held the three things out to him, through the screen door; and he opened it, and took them.

“It was your mother’s,” he said. “The magnet. You said.”

“It was my mother’s,” agreed Mrs Sixkiller. She looked at it, on the white door of the refrigerator, holding nothing. “It stays. It’s for holding things up. It’ll hold something else up.” She looked at him. “Next year.”

---

They put the blue bicycle in the barn.

It could not go on the aeroplane. Castellanos had said so on Friday night, and Frederick had known it before he said it; it was a bicycle, and it was fourteen miles to Vinita and a hundred more to Tulsa and a thousand to New Westminster, and it belonged here, he thought, the way the windmill did and the well. So at seven he wheeled it across the yard, for the last time, with the bell going ting by itself on the gravel, past the oak with its torn limb and the trailer, level again, and Castellanos and Kimura loading the car beside it; and into the barn by the small door at the side of the big ones, where the old red tractor was, under its sheet, and the cart with no wheels, and the bales, and the bench with the tools on the board above it in the shapes of themselves.

He leaned it against the bench. Beside the vice. Under the tools.

He stood and looked at it in the grey light that came through the cracks between the boards. Blue, with the paint gone pale on the crossbar where the sun had come through Royce Pettit’s window; three gears; the rack; the mudguards; the black tape on the handlebars that Royce Pettit had wound himself. And on the bench beside it, in the dust, the flat carpenter’s pencil, sharpened with a knife, which he had put back where he had found it, at three in the morning, five weeks ago, when the birdhouse was done.

Mrs Sixkiller was in the doorway behind him.

“It’ll be here,” she said.

He did not say anything. He looked at the bicycle a moment longer. Then he put his hand on the bell, and pressed it, once. Ting.

Then he went out, and she put the wooden bar back across the small door.

---

Theo carried the goldfish to the café in the mixing bowl.

He would not let it go in the car. He said that Earl had never been in a car and did not know about cars and that it would frighten him and he would go round and round faster and faster and come out of the top of the bowl, and that he, Theo, was not having that, not on the last day; and so at half past seven the four of them walked the two miles into town for the last time, on the gravel and then the paved road, in the early heat, with Theo in the middle carrying Mrs Sixkiller’s glass mixing bowl in both hands in front of him at the height of his chest, very slowly, like Felix with the pie, with the water slopping a little at every step and Earl going round in it; and Kimura a hundred yards behind with her binoculars; and the car a quarter of a mile behind her.

A pickup came past them on the paved road going into town and slowed, and the man driving it looked at four boys walking along the verge in the heat, one of them carrying a goldfish in a mixing bowl, with an expression of the deepest concern; and leaned out of the window.

“You boys broke down?”

“No, sir,” said Theo, without stopping. “We’re walking a fish.”

The man looked at them for a long time.

“Well, God bless you,” he said, and drove on.

---

The bell over the door of the Cove Café rang.

It was half full. Sunday. The family from the booth by the window were in it, in their church clothes; and the girl in the church dress with the ribbon in her hair was standing up on the seat looking over the back of it at the door; and she saw him, and her mouth opened, and her mother, without looking round, said Kaylynn, sit down, and Kaylynn sat down, and stared at him over the back of the booth with enormous eyes the whole time, exactly the way she had on the first Sunday, and said nothing.

Darlene was at the till.

She looked at the four of them in the door. At Frederick, and Marcus, and Felix. And at Theo, in the middle, holding a mixing bowl in both hands, with a goldfish in it.

She did not say anything for a moment.

“Sit anywhere, hons,” she said. “Four on the end.” She looked at the bowl. “What’s that?”

“It’s Earl,” said Theo.

Darlene looked at the goldfish.

“Earl,” she said.

“I won him at the fair. On the last night. With a ping-pong ball. He can’t go on the aeroplane.” Theo held out the bowl, across the counter, at the end, by the till. “He needs somewhere. Somewhere with people. He likes people. He goes round more when there’s people.” He swallowed. “Mrs Sixkiller says he can’t stay at the farmhouse on his own, there’s nobody to feed him and the chickens would have him, and she’s got enough to do with the chickens. And Mr Rowe says a goldfish in a cove’d last about four minutes.” He held the bowl out. “Please.”

Darlene looked at Theo for a long time. Then she looked at the goldfish, going round in the mixing bowl, in the light from the window.

Then she took the bowl.

She took it in both hands, across the counter, and turned, and looked at the wall behind the till, at the shelf there below the slate, which had a jar of pens on it and the telephone and a box of matches and a photograph of a man with a fish that was not the same man as Bonnie Tackett’s but might have been, and a bell; and she moved the jar of pens, and the matches, and put the bowl down on the shelf, in the middle, under the slate, where the light from the window fell on it.

Earl went round.

“There,” said Darlene. “By the till. Where everybody can see him.” She looked at the bowl. “Earl’ll be thrilled.”

“The van Earl?”

“Hon,” said Darlene, “Earl’s going to sit on that stool every Monday and Tuesday for the rest of his life and look at that fish and say now there’s a fella with the right idea.” She turned back to the counter. “Coffee?”

---

He had biscuits and gravy. They all did. They sat on the four stools on the end, the chrome ones with the round red seats that went round if you pushed them, in a row, Frederick, Theo, Felix, Marcus, with their hands on the pale green counter with its little gold stars worn white in front of every stool; and Darlene turned the cups over in front of them with a flick and filled them without asking, and brought the thick white plates; and they ate, slowly, and turned round on the stools a little, now and then, because the stools went round; and nobody looked at them.

Three stools down, the man in the tractor cap was eating pancakes.

He had his newspaper open on the counter beside his plate, and Frederick could see the front page of it, sideways, along the counter; and there was a photograph on it, below the fold, small, of a bridge, grey, concrete, with a crane beside it, yellow, with its arm over a creek, and twelve men in hard hats standing in a row in front of it in the heat, and in the middle of them, in jeans, with his hands in his pockets, the commissioner, not smiling. BIG CABIN WORKS AHEAD OF SCHEDULE, it said above it.

Cecil Rowe saw him see it.

He did not fold the newspaper. He left it open, face up, on the counter, beside his pancakes, with the photograph of the bridge on it, where anybody could see; and picked up his fork; and went on eating.

---

The bill came on a slip of green paper, face down, in front of Marcus, because Marcus was at the end.

Frederick reached across Theo and Felix and took it.

He turned it over. 27.40. He took out the brown wallet, and unzipped it, and took out two twenties, and put them on the counter; and Darlene took them, and opened the till, and came back, and counted the change into his hand, slowly, the way you count change into somebody’s hand.

“Twenty-seven forty,” said Darlene. “Twenty-eight. Thirty. Forty.” She closed his hand over the coins with hers. “There.”

Then she turned round, and reached up to the small blackboard hanging on its nail on the wall behind the till, above the shelf where the goldfish was going round; at the column of names in chalk, BEAVERS 4.50. ROWE 12.10. THE PASTOR 3.00. DUANE (BOAT) 31.75, and under DUANE (BOAT) the pale grey smudge the shape of a word where his name had been, which she had never quite rubbed off; and she took a piece of chalk out of her apron pocket, and wrote, on the smudge, in large clear capitals:

HANOVER +3 - NEXT SUMMER

She put the chalk back in her pocket.

“That’s not money,” said Frederick.

“No, hon,” said Darlene. “That’s not money.” She picked up the coffee pot and filled his cup, which was full. “That’s what you owe me.”

---

Cecil Rowe finished his pancakes.

He put his fork down on the plate, and put his cap straight, and folded his newspaper, in half and in half again, with the photograph of the bridge on the outside, and put it under his arm; and got down off his stool, and went to the till, and put a note down in front of Darlene, and did not wait for the change.

At the door, with his hand on it, and the bell above it waiting, he stopped. He looked back along the counter at the four of them on the four stools on the end, one after another, the same length of time for each, with his pale blue eyes in his walnut face.

“Next August,” said Cecil Rowe.

He pushed the door. The bell rang. He went out into the heat.

---

He gave Kimura the book at the farmhouse at ten, by the car, while Castellanos was putting the last of the bags in the boot.

He had wrapped it in the Vinita paper, the inside pages, the ones with the fair results in them, the ribbons, in small type, in columns, Section D, woodwork and handicraft, Class 6, birdhouse or feeder, any material: 1. J. Coker, Langley. 2. M. Doyle, Afton. 3. F. Hanover, Ketchum; and tied it with orange baler twine from the barn, because there was nothing else; and he held it out to her, by the car, in the yard, under the oak.

Kimura looked at it.

She looked at it for a long time without taking it, the way she looked at a bird before she lifted the binoculars, as if deciding whether it would stay. Then she took it.

She untied the baler twine, and folded it, and put it in her pocket. She took off the paper, and looked at the fair results, and at the third line, for a moment. And then she looked at the book.

Birds of Oklahoma-Sequoyah. A Field Guide. With a heron on the cover, standing in the shallows on one leg, very still.

She opened it. Not at the beginning. She opened it somewhere in the middle, as if she knew where she was going, and turned the pages, slowly, with one finger, past the hawks and the woodpeckers and the flycatchers, until she found it, and stopped.

Eastern Bluebird. Blue on the back and the wings and the head, rust on the breast, white underneath. On a fence post. Looking sideways out of the page with one black eye.

Kimura looked at it for a long time.

“Sir,” she said.

“For the birds,” said Frederick. “You’ve been looking at them all summer. In Vinita, and on the van, and at the fair, and at the pool, and in the yard.” He looked at the book in her hands. “I thought you should know what they were.”

Kimura did not say anything. She closed the book, with her finger still in it at the bluebird, and held it against her chest; and looked at him, in the yard, under the oak, small and quiet, with her binoculars round her neck and her face doing nothing at all, the way it did when she was looking at a bird.

“Ten,” she said.

“Ten what?”

“Out of ten.” She looked at the yard, at the farmhouse, at the porch with its swing, and its screen door with a hole in it the size of a fist that Mrs Sixkiller was going to mend. “The summer.” She looked at the book. “Ten.”

She got into the car.

---

Mrs Sixkiller did not say goodbye.

She stood in the yard by the well, under the oak, in her funeral hat, with her hands folded in front of her, the way she had stood on the first afternoon when the car came up the gravel road at five to one; and she did not come to the car. She waited for them to come to her.

They came to her. The four of them, in a row in front of her, in the heat, by the well. And she looked at them, one after another, from the left, the way Mr Abernathy looked along a row before he took the roll.

“The well’s at thirty,” she said. “It rained on Thursday. That’ll do it.” She looked at Felix. “No buckets.”

“No, ma’am.”

“The screen door’s got a hole in it. I’ll mend it.” She looked at the screen door. “Everything in Craig County’ll be in that kitchen by tonight, and I’ll have to get it out.” She looked back at them. “And the magnet’s on the refrigerator. Holding nothing up.” She looked at Frederick. “Find something.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at the four of them for a moment longer.

“I taught school in this county for forty-one years,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Fourth grade and then eighth. I said goodbye to every child I ever taught, every June, at the door of the classroom, one at a time, and I meant it every time.” She looked at the oak. “And then I retired, and I stopped. Because I found out that they come back. All of them. Earl, and Della, and Lonnie, and Shawna, and Daniel Swimmer with his camera. Every one. Sooner or later.” She looked at them. “So I don’t say it any more. It’s a waste of a good word.”

She turned round, and went to the well, and lifted the steel lid of the concrete box, and looked at the dial with the needle, with her back to them.

“Go on,” said Mrs Sixkiller, to the well. “You’ll miss your aeroplane.”

---

At the edge of the town, on the paved road, going out, the sign.

KETCHUM POP. 471. White letters on green. And under it, smaller, the same again, in the syllabary.

Castellanos slowed the car. Nobody had asked him to. He slowed it, the way Kimura had slowed it on the first afternoon, and stopped, on the verge, beside the sign, and sat with both hands on the wheel, and did not say anything.

Frederick looked at the sign.

He looked at the line of characters under the English, which he could not read. He had looked at them on the first afternoon, coming in, and had not been able to read them, and could not now. He looked at the back of his right hand, beside the bandage, where Mrs Sixkiller had written the word at the well, in blue, five weeks ago, and where there was nothing now, because he had washed it off in the lake in the end, the night of the creek, without meaning to.

He did not know the word on the sign. He knew one word. It was not on the sign.

ᏩᏙ, he thought.

Beside him, Theo lifted the camera on his chest, and put it to his eye, and pointed it out of the window at the sign; and turned the lens, slowly; and waited.

The camera clicked.

“Thirteen,” said Theo.

Castellanos took his hands off the wheel, and put them back on, and drove out of Ketchum.

---

The boarding pass said HANOVER/FREDERICK MR, and the seat was 23C, and nobody looked at it twice.

He stood at the gate at Tulsa at a quarter to three in the afternoon with three hundred people going to New Westminster on a Sunday, holiday people going home, families with children in their school shoes already, a man asleep across four seats with his hat over his face; and he held the pass in his hand and looked at it.

He had his own money in his pocket. In the brown wallet. With the library card in the little window, HANOVER, F., and behind it the pink ticket and the yellow card from Earl’s van; and in the long pocket for notes, what was left of five brown envelopes, which was most of them, and a receipt from Royce Pettit for one bicycle, blue, and a slip of green paper from the Cove Café with 27.40 on it in pencil, which he had asked Darlene for, and which she had given him, without saying anything, and with her face doing the thing it had done when she rubbed his name off the slate.

He walked down the jet bridge with the pass in his hand.

At the door of the aeroplane he stopped and turned round.

“She didn’t look,” he said.

“Nobody looks at a quarter to three,” said Theo, behind him, with the camera round his neck and Kaylee’s whistle round it too, and the trombone case, because Marcus was carrying both their bags again. “Nobody looks at anything at a quarter to three on a Sunday. Everybody’s going home.” He looked at the pass in Frederick’s hand. “Mister Hanover.”

“Mister Hanover,” said Frederick.

---

New Westminster came up out of the evening at a quarter to eight, under the wing.

He saw it from 23C, across Theo, who had the window this time because Marcus had said he had had the middle seat on the way out and that was enough ordinariness for one summer: the river, wide and grey and gold in the low sun, and the bridges over it, and the Axis going away from the river in a long straight line between its trees towards the dome on Charter Hill, and the white of the Palace at the end of it, small, and the whole of the capital round it, roofs and streets and spires and towers, going away to the edge of the evening in every direction, with the lights coming on in it already, one by one, and then a hundred at a time.

He looked at it.

He had seen it from the air a great many times. He had come back to it from Stockholm, and from London, and from Solliden, and from a great many places with names that went in a Court Circular. He had never come back to it from a farmhouse with a screen door. He looked at it, under the wing, in the evening, with his forehead nearly against the back of Theo’s seat, and it looked like a very large town, which it was; and like a place where he lived, which it was; and he could not tell, looking at it, whether it was home.

“Is it home?” said Theo, beside him, at the window, without turning round.

Frederick did not answer at once.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“My mum says,” said Theo, looking down at it, “we live in New Westminster and we’re from Wisconsin, and she doesn’t expect them to swap.” He watched the river come up under the wing. “I always thought that was sad. When I was eleven.” He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think it’s sad any more.”

The wheels came down, with a thump, under the floor.

---

Felix’s little sisters were at the gate.

They were at the gate of Felix’s house, a small house in a row of small houses on a street of trees in the north-east of the capital, at half past eight, in the dusk, both of them, in their pyjamas, with their faces pressed to the bars of the gate; and when the car stopped they screamed, both at once, a single high scream that went down the whole street, FELIX, and Felix got out of the car, and they came through the gate at him like a wave and hit him at the knees, one on each side, and held on.

Felix stood on the pavement with a little sister on each leg and looked back at the car.

He did not say anything. He lifted one hand, the way Cecil Rowe did, a little, from his side. Then he picked up the little sisters, one under each arm, the way Castellanos had said he would carry Theo to the show barn, and carried them in through the gate, screaming, delighted, and his mother in the doorway with the light behind her put her hand over her mouth.

---

Marcus’s mother had the camera.

She was on the front step of the block where they lived, small and round, in a yellow dress, the same yellow dress, Frederick was nearly sure, that she had been wearing in the King’s sitting room five weeks ago, with the same camera, the large one, with the strap round her neck; and she had been on the step, Frederick thought, looking at her, for a long time, because she had not known when they would come.

She did not say anything when Marcus got out of the car. She put the camera up.

“All of you,” she said, from behind it. “All four. On the pavement. In a row.” She looked over the top of it. “The before was in July. This is the after.”

They got out. All four. They stood on the pavement outside Marcus’s block in a row in the dusk, under the street light, which had come on, in their T-shirts and their shorts, Frederick and Theo and Marcus and Felix, who had come back down the street from his own house without his sisters to be in it; with the bandages on Frederick’s arm and Theo’s, and Theo’s camera on his chest and Kaylee’s whistle on top of it, orange, and Marcus with his trombone case, and Felix with flour, still, faintly, in one eyebrow, which would not come out; and Frederick with his hair cut short at the back and the sides and a little longer on top, neat, with a parting, the regular, the way Earl did it on Saturdays.

Marcus’s mother looked at them through the camera for a long time.

“Don’t smile,” she said. “You don’t have to smile.”

They did not smile. They stood in a row on the pavement under the street light and looked at the camera.

Then Theo started. He could not help it. He started at the end of the row, beside Frederick, his shoulders going, all down his left side, the way they had at the counter on the first Sunday; and it went along the row like a fire along a fence, Frederick, and Marcus, and Felix; and by the time it reached Felix all four of them were laughing so much that Felix had to hold on to the back of Marcus’s shirt to stay upright, on the pavement, under the street light, in New Westminster, at nine o’clock on a Sunday night.

The camera clicked.

“There,” said Marcus’s mother. She lowered it. She looked at them, the four of them, laughing, on her pavement, for a long moment; and then she looked at her son, and her small round face did something it could not stop. “That’s the after.”

---

Theo was last.

The car went across the north-east of the capital in the dark, through streets that Frederick knew, now, from four years of Tuesdays, past the bus depot, past the corner where the detail always waited, to the block; and stopped at the door, under the light, and Theo sat for a moment in the back seat beside him with his camera on his chest and did not get out.

“Tuesday,” said Theo.

“Tuesday.”

“Abernathy.” Theo looked at the door of the block. “The radiators. Seventh grade all over again.” He was quiet. “I’ll be on the wall. By the bike racks. Ten to eight.”

“I know.”

Theo opened the door of the car. He got out, with his bag, and stood on the pavement, under the light, and looked up at the block, at the fourth floor, where the window of the flat was, dark; and then back into the car.

“Freddie.”

“What?”

Theo looked at him for a long time, in the light from the door of the block, with the camera on his chest and the whistle on top of it, and the ride card from Earl in his shirt pocket, and his bandaged arm.

“Thanks for the summer,” said Theo.

He shut the car door before Frederick could say anything, and went in through the door of the block, and it swung shut behind him; and through the glass Frederick saw him cross the hall to the lift, and press the button, and stand there, waiting, with his bag, under the light. The lift came. It worked. It always worked. Theo got into it, and the doors closed.

The car did not move. Castellanos did not start it. He sat at the wheel with his hands on it, and looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the street, and waited.

On the fourth floor, after a while, a light came on in a window.

Then Castellanos started the car.