Free Your Eyes in Stars by M. E. Kerr Page A

WEEDSPORT, NEW YORK
    REWARD!
----
    I threw my arms around his neck. “Thank you!”
    “You’re welcome, sweetie pie.”
    “He looks younger than twenty. Look at that baby face!”
    “I look at it every day, and I think what a waste it is to have him locked up. Here’s a young man who neverfinished high school, never went on dates, never went on a picnic, owned a bike, a boat, a dog. No family anyone knows about.”
    “Who taught him how to play the bugle?”
    “He’s self-taught, I suspect.”
    “Doesn’t he ever tell you about himself?”
    “Very little. I don’t encourage it. He has to live in the here and now.”
    “You never told me his nickname was Goldilocks.”
    “I don’t call my inmates by their nicknames. I want them to think of themselves as men. Men who keep their nicknames into adulthood aren’t taken seriously, in my opinion. Who would follow my orders up on The Hill if I still called myself Blocker?”
    The poster made up for the fact I wasn’t allowed to meet Elisa that night.
    On the phone I told her I had a huge surprise for her. No, I would not tell her about it. Elisa had to see it.
    At nine thirty sharp I went to the window. Most Cayutians had gotten used to his bugle by then. I had the feeling some, like me, stopped what they were doing and listened with the feeling of tears behind their eyes. When that happened to me, I was surprised. It had nothing to do with Slater Carr, but what was it making me sad?
    Elisa said that when Slater played, she thought ofwhat her favorite American poet, Sara Teasdale, said about beauty.
    For beauty more than bitterness
    Makes the heart break.
    I felt that I was on the verge of understanding poetry, on the verge of having more feelings than I’d ever had too.
    But I was still only on the verge. I’d even tried reading T. S. Eliot ever since the librarian said Mrs. Stadler read him. At first I believed I had found a poet who could speak in plain, understandable language, but within a few lines I would find myself lost. I would stumble on
    Twit twit twit
    Jug jug jug jug jug
    So rudely forc’d…
    and worse.
    “Tell me something beautiful that could make your heart break,” I asked Elisa.
    “Richard. When he gave his coat to the tramp last winter. That was beautiful. It made me cry to know about it.”
    “Richard’s not very beautiful with those rubber bands popping out of his mouth and hickies all over his face.”
    “It’s what’s inside him. He cares.”
    “ Caritas . I remember.”
    “And it takes courage to care, I think. I don’t have it. I talk about it, but what do I do? Maybe I will grow up to be like Mutter . Inside, a stone.”
    “My mother too.”
    “No. She is different with her tramps and her animal love. My mother loves only my father, me, and Omi, my grandmother. But we are part of her. It’s when you care about something beyond you.”
    “What will become of us, Elisa?”
    “I know. I will be at the top of the Eiffel Tower sometime in the future, waiting for you to overcome your fear of things at a slant. You have to get over it, you know. All of life is at a slant.”

20
SLATER CARR
    M ISS P URRINGTON ALWAYS told Slater Carr she knew him like the back of her hand.
    The trouble was that no part of Purr’s anatomy could help her understand Slater Carr once Daisy Raleigh hit Peachy.
    “Hit” would be the best way to put it, too, because she came roaring into town in a bright-red Pierce-Arrow, slamming smack into the Caribbean cabbage palm tree in front of Peachy School.
    Sixteen years old, daughter of a judge from Auburn, New York, Daisy was driving from Savannah to Atlanta to meet her father. Judge Raleigh was there attending his sister’s funeral.
    Nellie Purrington had made the mistake of saying, “Help her, Slater. I think that young lady is off her rocker speeding that way.”
    For the one and only time in his life, Slater fell in love. She was wild and beautiful, and she could get him to do anything.
    He would