We look at picture books together, though.”
“Throw us the ball, Donnie! Throw the stupid ball!”
Donnie gently removed the ball from John-John’s hands, whirled about and threw it wildly into the infield. Then, turning back to Jeannette, he said, “You ought to read to him out of real books. He’ll listen to you. That’s what my mother used to do with me, even before I could talk. The whole first year after I was born she used to read me ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ every night. I could say the whole poem—every line—before I even went to school,” he bragged.
“You like poetry, huh?”
“Come on, Donnie! Hurry up!”
“Not so much. I don’t know what it means, a lot. I can say it, but I still don’t know what it means. I like softball better.” Through the fence he gave John-John an amiable poke in the gut. “ ’Bye. Nice to meetcha, John-John.”
He sauntered off. John-John remained at the fence, hypnotized by the activity. Jeannette, her hands in her coat pockets, searched the playground for Anna, but could not find her before the bell signaling the end of recess sent the school’s entire student population scrambling up the slope toward the building.
* * *
On impulse she led John-John up the leaf-strewn sidewalk, past the school, and eventually into a low-income housing development with a single unpaved road dead-ending on the edge of an open field. Eight miles away, over a rolling stretch of prairie dotted with cottonwoods, lay Udall, Kansas. The blacktop from Wichita, Highway 15, cut a clean diagonal toward that almost mythical little town. During Jeannette’s senior year in high school, nine years ago, a tornado had completely flattened Udall, killing more than sixty people and distributing kaboodles of outlandish debris all over the countryside.
As they walked into the open field, Jeannette told John-John the story. She embellished the account with colorful details. The farmer who had described the twister as sounding like a thousand jets and looking like a big oil slush. The telephone operator who had died at her switchboard. The man who had been thrown up a tree alive. John-John, his mother noted, appeared to be hanging on every word, as if she were promulgating some obvious but deliciously entertaining lie. Too, the rhythms of her voice had seduced him.
“Today that town looks one-hundred-percent, brand-spanking new,” she concluded. “You’d never know it had once been wiped off the map as surely as Neanderthals and woolly mammoths.”
They stood in the autumn turkey grass together, silent again. A meadowlark flew up from the ground cover, inscribed a parabola on the pale October sky. Jeannette began to feel vulnerable, exposed, as if their uprightness in this place invited either ridicule from the conventional folks in the houses behind them or attack from the cavemen and pachyderms hidden in the bushes beyond the arroyo dividing this small expanse of cow pasture. Crazy thoughts, but the wind was blowing and the world seemed big and hostile.
Now that her tornado story was over, John-John’s interest shifted elsewhere. He took off downhill, toward the gully. He was fast, too. To keep her dress out of the snagging thistles and shrub branches, she grabbed it up by the hem, then plunged down the meadow after him. By seizing his wrist, she halted his single-minded assault on the dry flood bed. The boy strained against her grip. He pointed and made unintelligible noises in his throat.
Phrygian, Hugo facetiously called these vocalizations. We’ve got a kid who speaks Phrygian. That, according to a friend of his in the library at McConnell, had once been thought the first language ever spoken by human beings.
Beyond the arroyo were five or six white-faced heifers placidly chewing their cuds. Despite their bulk, Jeannette had not seen them until just now. Like rhinoceroses or giraffes, they were browsing on the shrubbery that had partly concealed them, stripping the year’s last leaves from their branches. It was weird, this sudden apparition of cattle. Even weirder that they were browsing rather than cropping grass. It almost seemed that John-John had summoned them into existence by pointing at them.
“Cows,” Jeannette said distractedly. “Cows.”
“Cao,” John-John said, still pointing.
Startled, Jeannette knelt in front of the boy and gripped his shoulders so that she was blocking his view. “That’s right,” she said eagerly. “That’s right—cow! The word is cow!”
He pulled to the right, not interested in his mother’s efforts to reinforce his accomplishment.
Brushing a strand of wayward hair from her face, Jeannette stood up. Let him see the goddamn