cows, for God’s sake! She felt lighthearted and proud. Phrygian, hell! Cao was English, no matter how broadly inflected. A good Anglo-Saxon English word. By uttering this single word he had vindicated her faith in his potential. Even though many children did not speak until well after their second birthday, that “feral child” business of Major so-and-so in Colonel Unger’s office had bugged her for better than a year. She had secretly begun to suspect that John-John’s unmonitored infancy in Seville had taken an insidious toll on his capacity to pick up language. This suspicion, in turn, had riddled her with guilt, because otherwise he was an alert and vivacious child.
“Cow,” she said, laughing. “Cao, cao, cao.”
* * *
“I don’t believe it, mujer.”
“It’s true—he spoke.”
“To a herd of cows?”
“Not to them, Hugo. He just saw them and he—”
“He said cow, Daddy!”
They were sitting in the kitchen at a table with a Formica top, part of the dinette set that Hugo had bought last Christmas through the McConnell Base Exchange. John-John was in an aluminum high chair with a yellow plastic tray. With a spoon in his right hand and the greasy fingers of his left, he was eating overdone hamburger granules. His mouth was smeared with mustard.
Hugo addressed Anna with mock stateliness: “ ‘Four score and seven years ago,’ John-John told the cows, ‘our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nación, conceived in libertad and dedicated to—’ How does the rest of it go, niña?”
“Daddy!”
“He really did speak,” Jeannette insisted. “Not Phrygian, either.”
“Then I think we should be havin’ steak instead of hamburger.” Hugo lifted a piece of hamburger patty on his fork tines. “John-John, this is cao, too. You see this? You’re eatin’ cao, Juanito, all the time eatin’ those big sleepy creatures with those big brown eyes. Say cao for me, pretty please.”
The boy, scattering bits of hamburger on the linoleum, pointed in the direction that Jeannette had taken him on his walk that morning. Toward the elementary school. Toward Udall.
“And at the playground a little boy named Donnie told me I ought to read to John-John—not just alphabet and picture books. Real books, difficult things. I’m going to start doing that, too.”
“When?” Hugo asked warily.
“Right after his bath. Why don’t you and Anna get the dishes?”
“Why don’ I wear high heels and lipstick?” Hugo retorted. But he and Anna did what Jeannette had asked.
Jeannette, meanwhile, supervised John-John’s bath, diapered him, shoehorned him into his terrycloth pajamas, and stood him up in his crib. He folded his arms over the crib’s top railing and watched his mother jockey a rocking chair into place beside him. Although he was old enough to climb out of the crib, Jeannette had taught him that doing so at bedtime would cost him. Two or three evenings a week he made a break for it, anyway.
Tonight, however, Jeannette’s continued presence in his and Anna’s room kept this impulse in check. As his mother removed a garish paperback from the pocket of her sunflower-print apron, he looked on with mounting curiosity. Then Jeannette sat down in the rocking chair and opened the book and began to read: “ ‘When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton . . .’ ”
Chapter Ten
Fruit of the Looms
OUR CONTINGENCY PLAN DEMANDED THAT I BE PRESENT at lakeside every sunrise and sunset for the possible extrusion of the Backstep Scaffold, a stipulation that cut down my range and frustrated my efforts to observe Helen’s people. This demand was doubly difficult to observe because the scaffold did not appear. Nevertheless, after missing my first sunrise assignation, for the entire week afterward I honored my end of the bargain and showed up at lakeside even when irritably certain that my colleagues in the twentieth century would fail me again. Still, I did not believe I was permanently stranded. Kaprow and his assistants were experiencing Technological Difficulties, bugs that they would undoubtedly overcome in time, and time was Kaprow’s private bailiwick.
In fact, I began to believe that maybe my apprehension of time differed in some significant way from that of my White Sphinx colleagues. Maybe, because of the sheer temporal distance of my dropback, my sunrises and sunsets no longer corresponded to theirs. Eventually, I decided, Kaprow would figure that out, and the scaffold would appear—seemingly out of thin air—exactly when it was supposed to. In the