I
don’t remember his name. That’s the most terrible thing:
that I have even excised from my famously selective memory what his
name was. He was a little boy whose family had the fair cabin two
doors down from ours at the Neshoba County Fair. The Fair was the
major event of the summer for me as a child, next to Christmas the
major event of the year. It was the last gasp of summer before school
started back again. It was spending a week in a rustic cabin in the
vicinity of midway rides and games and food stalls with corndogs and
snowcones alongside the exotic presence of livestock and horse-racing
and other interesting things, and best of all spending time with
friends. I would spend the whole week with my friends Scott Barham
and Tracy Smitherman. It was rare for me to see them outside of
school. They lived in the same close-knit neighborhood called
Woodland Hills back home in Philadelphia, but I lived on what seemed
to be a distant, semi-rural road. But at the Fair we would see each
other every day, spending the night at each other’s cabins,
playing tag in the rafters of the livestock barn, exploring every
inch of the Fairgrounds. There were a few other kids who came and
went with our group: Scott’s younger brother Kyle and a few
older boys who were mainly friends of Tracy’s (I’ve
forgotten their names too).
With
white-blonde hair and silver-rimmed glasses, Tracy was perhaps the
unlikely-looking alpha male of our group, but he had a certain
confidence that whatever he liked, whatever he chose was the right
choice, and we tended to agree with him. I had met him in first
grade, and I had immediately wanted his approval. I had it for a
while, enjoying his “bad boy” humor when he would make
fun of our very nice (but very old) teacher, Mrs. Durrett. I lost his
favor in second grade when Tracy inexplicably turned against me and
seemed to go out of his way to ignore or antagonize me. I would cry
about it at home, and Daddy said sympathetically, “That is what
is called a bully.” But for four or so years in the
mid-Seventies Tracy and I enjoyed what I felt to be a very strong
friendship. I was pleased to have earned a spot in his entourage,
even though I suspected at times that I may have been most valued for
my ability to supply us with free passes to rides on the midway
because Daddy was an official Fair employee.
But
there were other worlds at the Fair, of course. It was and is a place
where multiple worlds and spheres of experience are continually
colliding, because the Fair is always full of people: family and
friends and neighbors you don’t really know and strangers and
their friends and guests from out of town; and everyone is constantly
dropping by the cabin to see my brothers or my parents, to join the
party, to watch the horse races. We were all jam-packed in those
wooden sardine cans lined around the racetrack, but we never really
knew our neighbors very well. I never knew the people in the cabin on
the right, but my brother David did (he knows everyone); and on the
left was the Therrell cabin, a huge double-cabin with their name on a
sign on the front. Mr. Therrell was a Fair employee as well, who
oversaw the horse races, and there were lots of kids and relatives
over there, none of whom I ever knew except Stacy Therrell, who was a
year younger than me in school, and her little cousin Todd with the
curly blonde hair, whom I had watched grow up at the Fair. Tracy and
Scott and I made a running joke out of an expression that Todd had
said, when he described a horse racer who had died from an accident
on the track as “a whole lot dead.” I don’t know if
it’s true that the racer died; I just know we never tired of
saying things were “a whole lot dead” and then laughing.
Tragedy into comedy. I had learned from David and his friends and
from mine that there was nothing in the world (and to be honest there
still isn’t) that is better than making your friends laugh:
coming up with the right turn of phrase, the right joke that catches
them off guard with delight and saying it before anyone else can
think of it. And when you hear their laughter, then you have–at
least for that moment– their full attention and admiration.
That is the most delicious form of approval.
The
cabin just beyond the Therrells’ was a small one, and I never
knew the name of the family there. But one year I know they had a
little boy staying there, and I would see him out in the little
communal strip of yard or pathway that ran between our cabin porches
and the wide dirty creek separating us from the red dirt track for
the horse races. I was even more shy then than now and very unlikely
to meet new people without being prompted. But I saw him playing out
in the yard, and he saw me and became curious to play with me. And at
some point we got together. He may have come over to my cabin, and
maybe I let him play with some of my toys (at that time it would have
been mainly Planet of the Apes toys). And I do remember once going
into his little cabin. There was something cozy and quaint about it,
and I remember his having a little toy chest and inviting me to play
with him. And we had a nice time, but he was younger, and I didn’t
consider him a serious playmate. But I did know his name at the time.
My other friends never knew him, never played with him, only passed
by a few times and saw him digging in the dirt or playing by himself
and derisively referred to him out of earshot (or maybe not) as “that
boy.”
I liked him perfectly well, but I knew they found him silly, so I
would defer to their opinion that this little kid was beneath us.
In
retelling this, I’m really having to fill in some gaps, maybe
even fabricate a little because I just can’t recall many
details. All I really recall is the shame. But I think this probably
happened on my birthday. I usually celebrated my birthday at the
Fair, and at that age it was an especially great place to do this.
Later I would come to despise birthday parties at the Fair just as I
came to despise the Fair itself for the most part. But I’m sure
all my friends had come over for my party: Tracy and Scott and
probably Kyle, and we were playing out front with something with
which we could torment each other. Perhaps they were water pistols or
some kind of noise-makers. I really have no idea, but there was
something that we were firing back and forth at each other. And I was
standing on the little bridge across the creek, and I caught sight of
the little neighbor boy. He had wandered over closer to us, maybe
intrigued by our game, happy enough to watch, but maybe waiting to be
asked to join. Why not?
But
my instinct was to seek my peers’ approbation at the expense of
someone else. I wanted to alert them immediately to the presence of
the interloper. I was hungry already for more birthday approval.
Because the fact is that as much as I enjoyed my friends’
approval, I was never certain of keeping it. It wouldn’t be
long before I might be relegated again to the bottom of the pack, not
all that bright when it came to the practical world, certainly not as
confident nor as savage as was necessary, a second string player in
the end, at least until the moment that I managed to present
something that merited their approval. Already I was fearing that I
might be ignored on my own birthday if I didn’t come up with
some new way to amuse them.
So
this is all I did. I simply said, “Hey! Let’s do it to
that boy.”
I meant to serve up two treats for my friends: first to alert them to
the boy’s unwelcome presence and then to suggest the punishment
for his unwelcome-ness. We would do it
to him, whatever it
was. It might have been tossing water balloons or firing plastic
missiles–I’ll never remember, because that isn’t
what matters. Tracy and Scott didn’t hear me, so I had to
repeat this more than once, getting louder each time. “Hey!
Let’s do it that
boy!”
I
don’t think they ever heard me. The only thing I remember is
the thing That
Boy said
to me. As I stood halfway across the bridge, he stood at the foot of
the bridge and looked at me with hurt, sincere eyes and said, “You
know my name, John .”
That
rebuke froze me in my tracks and froze me in time. I don’t
remember anything else that happened. I don’t remember ever
seeing the boy again. And I don’t remember his name, only my
shame. The
dissonance of ideas of my own self-image resounded with hypocrisy. I
always thought of myself as the good guy. So did everyone else.
Everyone will tell you how nice, how patient, how kind, how courteous
I am. It’s the others around me who may be bold enough to be
caustic, to scold, to wound, to skirt the rules. Sometimes I chide
them, not openly, but perhaps only by my presence. Such was the story
I had told myself. I wanted the laugh, I wanted the approval, but I
would always be the good guy in the end. But of course that wasn’t
true. I was capable of being not nice at all. I could be a bully too.
He
was right. I had known his name. He had brought me into his home and
allowed me to play with his toys, to meld our make-believe for a bit,
which is an intimate thing to do. And I was willing to dismiss him
utterly as nothing but a punch line, no one of importance. I
pretended I didn’t know him, that I didn’t care for him,
that I didn’t even see him as human. I pretended so well that I
convinced myself. But he reminded me: I am human, and you do know me,
and you chose to reject me. What a heartless thing to do. Why, in
retrospect, why didn’t I invite him to my birthday? That’s
what a really good guy would have done. But we were only kids. And
kids are cruel. And in my mind I remain stuck on that bridge, halfway
between good and evil, strong and weak, human and monster, always
remembering the look in his eyes.
My
name is John Howell. I grew up in a family of artists and musicians
in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and started writing around the age of
seven. It was my early ambition to be a science fiction writer, but I
never published anything. When I married and moved to the
Mississippi capital of Jackson, I worked at New Stage Theatre,
Mississippi’s only professional theatre, as both an actor and
Education Director; and my wife Diana and I co-founded the Fondren
Theatre Workshop in 2003, I have performed in over 50 plays and
directed many others for college, community, and professional groups.
I wrote and produced a full-length musical adaptation of Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass as well as
several short plays. In 2019, I received first prize in the
Mississippi Theatre Association Playwriting Competition for my
one-act play The Mice.
I worked for Jackson Public
Schools for 25 years as the Arts Coordinator and Drama Teacher at
Casey Elementary School, where I enjoyed introducing young
people to the arts and helping them to discover their own creative
passions. I retired from the school in May of 2023.
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