maple out of what can only be called love. It comes down to ironwood versus maple. Campaigning is ruthless. Jean helps Adam make pamphlets. Leigh takes over as Emmett’s manager. For a slogan, Leigh and Emmett doctor a poem they find scribbled in their father’s old high school yearbook:
Don’t worry if your job is small
and your rewards are few.
Even the mighty Ironwood
was once a nut, like you.
To counter, Adam has Jean make a poster reading:
Come on, Sugar, Vote for Maple.
Up in Canada it’s a staple.
“I don’t know, Dammie.” Jean, three years older, has her finger more squarely on the pulse of the electorate. “They might not get it.”
“It’s funny. People like funny.”
They lose the election, three to two. Adam sulks for the next two months.
BY TEN, Adam travels mostly alone. Kids have it out for him. His brother takes him on a hike, then gives him a canteen full of urine on ice to drink. In the park, his friends tell him his scalp is turning green from eating too many potato chips. He rushes home to a mother who chides him for being so gullible. He can’t figure out why people do what they do. His cluelessness only makes others keener to dupe him.
He keeps to himself, but even the subdivision’s barest lot is home to millions of creatures. The Golden Guide to Insects and a jar with a punched lid turns the loneliest Sunday afternoon into a collector’s dream. Armed with The Golden Guide to Fossils, he concludes that the bumps and nubs in the front flagstones are the teeth of ichthyosaurs who went extinct long before mammals were anything but a sideshow on the forest floor. The Golden Guide to Pond Life, The Golden Guide to Stars, to Rocks and Minerals, to Reptiles and Amphibians: humans are almost beside the point.
Months pass in amassing specimens. Owl pellets and oriole nests. The shed skin of a corn snake, complete with tail tip and eye caps. Fool’s gold, smoky quartz, silver-gray mica that flakes like sheets of paper, and a shard of flint he’s sure is a Paleolithic arrowhead. He dates each find and tags it with a location. The collection takes over the boys’ room and spills down the hallway into the den. Even the sacred living room breaks out in exhibits.
He comes home from school late one winter afternoon to find the entire museum in the incinerator. He flies through the rooms, wailing.
“Honey,” his mother explains, “it was all junk. Moldy, bug-infested junk.”
He slaps her. She stumbles back from the sting, hands to her face, staring at the boy. She can’t believe the evidence of her pain. She doesn’t understand what has happened to her son, the one who, at age six, once took a damp dish towel from her hands and told her he’d take over from here.
Adam’s father learns of the slap that evening. He teaches the boy a lesson that involves twisting his wrist until it fractures. No one realizes the wrist is broken until late that night, when it swells up weird and blue like something out of The Golden Guide to Crustaceans.
The Saturday in late spring when the cast comes off, Adam climbs up into his maple as high as he can and doesn’t come down until dinner. Sun passes through the foliage, turning the air the color of a not-quite-ripe lime. It gives him bitter comfort to gaze over the neighborhood’s roofs and know how much better life is above ground level. The palmate leaves wave in the gentle breeze, a crowd of five-fingered hands. There’s a sound like light rain, the shower of thousands of tiny bud scales. High above his head squirrels gnaw at the massed flowers, sucking out their liquid sap, then scattering the spent reddish yellow bouquets across the ground below. Adam counts fifteen different crawling things, from mealy worms to flattened flecks with legs almost too small to see, circling his dimpled limb in search of sweet wellsprings. Brown- and black-hooded birds dart through, feeding on the rafts of eggs that bugs and butterflies leave all over the branchlets. A woodpecker ducks in and out of a hole it made while grub-fishing the year before. It’s a stunning secret that no one in his family will ever know: there are more lives up here, in his one single maple, than there are people in all of Belleville.
Adam will remember the vigil many years later, from two hundred feet up in a redwood, when he’ll look down