Patrick O’Reilly and Tommy Leftkowitz steered clear of me in school after that. My guess is that Father Brogan put the fear of Jesus in them and in their parents. Sister Beatrice also, for the most part, let me be, though I would catch her watching me on the playground, and I took those glances as a subtle warning never to reveal the little secret of the silver flask she kept in the front pouch of her habit.
I never did.
6
Ernie’s mother worked while his father continued doing what he was doing in the garage, so on weekends and in the summer, my mother took Ernie and me to San Francisco’s museums, to watch the children’s theater, or to listen to concerts in Stern Grove. She also frequently took us to the Easton library to pick out books. It seemed my mother handed me a new book every week: Huckleberry Finn, The Black Stallion, Old Yeller, The Mousewife, The Jungle Book. Saturday afternoons before dinner, she would send me upstairs for quiet reading time. It was on one of those Saturdays after we’d started school, as I lay on my bed reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that I heard a car pull into our driveway. I put the book down to look out my shuttered bedroom window and saw the Cantwells’ Volkswagen Beetle. I thundered down the stairs shouting, “Ernie’s here! Ernie’s here!”
“Samuel!” my mother said as she came around the corner from the kitchen. “You sound like a herd of buffalo.”
“Ernie’s here.”
“I heard.”
A second later the doorbell chimed. When I pulled open the door, Mrs. Cantwell stood alone, a balled-up Kleenex in her hand.
“Sam, go back upstairs,” my mother said.
“Is Ernie here?” I asked.
“No, hon,” Mrs. Cantwell said, wiping her nose.
“Sam,” my mother said, this time giving me the look. “Go upstairs.”
I rushed upstairs, hurled myself to the floor, and shimmied my way to the grate. My mother made tea. I knew this from the familiar sounds in the kitchen—the ping of the blue kettle when my mother removed the top, the sound of the tap water filling the kettle, and another ping when she replaced the top and placed the kettle on the stove. She and Mrs. Cantwell sat at the kitchen table—a deduction from the sound the chairs made scraping the linoleum. Mrs. Cantwell kept her voice so soft I had trouble picking up all the words, but it had something to do with coming from a doctor’s office. Something about Ernie.
We’d had a girl in our class leave school because she got sick, and when she came back she was bald and thin with dark circles under her eyes. My mother said she had something wrong with her blood. So when I heard Mrs. Cantwell say, “The doctor says Ernie has trouble reading, that his brain causes letters to switch places and he gets mixed up,” I felt a huge relief. But then Mrs. Cantwell said, “He suggested we take Ernie out of OLM and send him to the public school. They have specialists who can give Ernie more personal attention.”
This was bad. Ernie remained my only friend. I would be lost without Ernie. Then another thought came to me. To send Ernie to the public school was to send him to where the monster now lurked—David Bateman.
“Samuel has been such a good friend to Ernie,” Mrs. Cantwell said. “Being the only black child in school has been very difficult for Ernie. Sam was the only child to welcome him. You’ve all always made us feel so welcome.”
This was news to me. I’d always thought of Ernie as the kid who had saved me. I was, after all, the devil boy. Next to that, having black skin never seemed like such a big deal to me, but then I’d never thought of Ernie as black. He was just my best friend. Now his mother was in my kitchen saying Ernie needed me.
The blue kettle whistled.
I crawled out from under my bed and lay atop the covers, staring at the assortment of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling by fishing wire.