The movie happened to be about a cemetery caretaker. We thought it was pretty funny at first. This guy found out that if he put black pins in his cemetery map, the people who owned those plots ended up dying in freak accidents. He’s got all the power in the world: a black pin means death. I didn’t think much of it, it was just some stupid little movie. But afterward Val was quiet, like it really shook her up. She said, ‘Didn’t you see the white pins?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said, ‘There were white pins. He had white pins, too. If the black pins killed them, what do you think the white pins did?’
“She wanted me out of digging. It took some dumb movie for me to see it. If she could, she would give me a million white pins and I would just go scattering them like Johnny Appleseed. After we got away from the Gatlins and got her ear fixed, things were different. She started to not hear things. That included confessions and apologies. There are things I tried to tell her, I swear, only now she couldn’t hear. Or wouldn’t. The injury seemed rather convenient.
“You were too perfect when you came out. It was like you had nothing to do with me. Like you were something molded from the stuff I brought home on the bottom of my boots that somehow got mixed up in our bedsheets and that’s what impregnated her—a million dead men, not me. I know I’m not making any sense. But when I saw you it was like you were a white pin from that movie. You were life.
“She knew it, too. She packed her bags and wrapped you up. She just had that one demand. ‘You give me Chicago as a gift.’ That’s exactly what she said. What else had I ever given her? Or given you? I had to be happy I could give anything at all.”
Boggs had confirmed I can get anyone as my father’s slogan, but this, as much as anything, was proof of its falsehood. I could see her so clearly now, alone in an unfamiliar city, clutching a bawling infant and hobbled with a disfigured ear. Why had it taken me this long to recognize the tragedy of her solitude? She had been young and pretty and brilliant, yet to protect me she had gone into hiding. And not just from Antiochus Boggs and the Gatlins; she couldn’t risk landing another Ken Harnett, either.
As we sailed from one interstate to another, the words of the biology text imprinting themselves into my brain like grit into eyeballs, I began to think that my mother’s final act had been something inspired. North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa: by giving me to Harnett, she had released me from our shared reclusion, and now each state I passed through became my home, because home was anywhere with grass and dirt and stone, and my compatriots, my family, were those who waited beneath to greet me.
9.
BACK IN BLOUGHTON, I felt physical whiplash. Here, once more, was the cruel reality of a shabby two-room cabin off Hewn Oak Road, even smaller and quieter now beneath three inches of unblemished snow. It was Monday morning; we had made it back in time. Harnett collapsed into bed. While I changed clothes for school, I stared in disbelief at the calendar on the side of the sink. I had imagined millions of hatch marks and thousands of slashes, but it had only been three days since the incident in the shower room, not several lifetimes.
There was no point in bothering with first and second periods. I sat and washed down an onion with two cups of coffee before finally making that long walk through the snow. I waited until I heard the third-period bell ring and then entered the Congress of Freaks, keeping my head low to avoid the sight of anyone who had ever hurt or been hurt by me, and slipped into the classroom, where the celebratory mood of the rest of the building gave way to last-minute cramming and general disgruntlement. There was only one villain to grapple with today. I took my usual seat near the back.
Gottschalk, the new acting principal of Bloughton High School, bent his rubbery features into a smug leer as he passed out the tests. I set the paper in front of me and watched the characters rattle