Free A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans Page A

It’s a terrible high summer where I am, George, my father said, and I could picture it. Like a southern mill town, choking on an August heat. As still as noon. My memories never leave me alone. There, in my mind, followed snapshots of situations: the chronology of how he died ( from his sickbed he stared at the opening in the tent, a mere patch of white daylight, where he hoped good news would appear, a medevac helicopter, or the supply truck that would take him away on rough, rutted roads, which it did, the visions told me, but it was weeks ). Through a flurry of dim pictures I saw some of my parents’
    friends, with names attached, Clarissa, Freddie; I felt the sad love he had a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d
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    for my mother, and I saw her face through his eyes on the day he left home for the camp—unreachable and unhappy, her sympathy for him so withered that even had he decided to stay, it would have made little difference.
    Then he stopped, squeezed my shoulder, and said, The worst of these memories, is this.
    What? I was desperate to know.
    Someone hoped I would be killed down there. Tom Harris, whom you already seem prepared to adopt as a foster-father . . . I protested. I don’t! I hate him!
    . . . he was the one who goaded me along, pushed me into going. I knew it! I triumphed. How?
    He played to my principles, convinced me I was unfulfilled, and dressed up this idea, this Catholic idea, of a calling. My father pronounced the word calling with the contempt he once reserved for novels he called bogus and cheap-deep. Instantly I shared his hatred. It was an idea that he whipped up into a passion. He drove me to think I could accomplish some- thing, by helping people endure a disaster that was far beyond me. Stupid and vain, do you understand, George? He manipulated me. I understand, I said.
    Tom Harris, my father said, is in love with your mother. He would come by afternoons when I wasn’t home and talk to her, sometimes for hours. Made her resentful over my plans to go to Honduras—the same trip he goaded me to take! Sometimes he would still be there when I came home and would barely look at me as I came into my own house, as if I were a monster and he were ashamed to be my friend. Do you see what he did, George?
    I see! I said. I remember that. How could you let him do it?
    I could not force him to stop. Your mother said she needed sympathy, and not from her own friends. She said it was better to have someone who understood me as well. She understood no better than I did that Tom Harris was as good as murdering me. I was outsmarted. Another wince of pain shot across my father’s face. Can you understand how this is agony to me?
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    J u s t i n E v a n s
    I felt a burning humiliation so deep it seemed to reach back thousands of years, to the epoch of tribes and chieftans—as if my father had lost in single combat with Tom Harris. He had believed Tom Harris’s jaunty charms and had been duped by his intelligence, and now we both were shamed.
    What can I do? I pleaded with him.
    First, listen, he said. Your godfather, Freddie Turnbull, was part of this scheme. Freddie has letters of mine. He keeps them for Tom Harris, letters they rescued from the house when I died. These letters prove everything I say. Prove? I asked.
    But I felt the reality shift under me. That calm, cool room was jarred; distorted, like someone disturbing a reflection in a birdbath. What do I do with them? I shouted desperately into the vanishing remnants of the waiting room.
    Just find the letters. You’ll see how Tom Harris twists the knife. A howling rose around me as if tigers and dogs were held at bay behind the curtain of the warm night. I saw the gray mass, I felt chaos and motion. I heard my Friend whisper close in my ear: They’ll never tell you where they are. You will have to lie to them. Who are they? I asked desperately.
    And then: a pounding and scraping.
    “George,” came a voice.
    I rose in bed. The door: the chair