The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(39)

“Samuel!” my mother said as she came around the corner from the kitchen. “You sound like a herd of buffalo.”

“Ernie’s here.”

“I heard.”

A second later the doorbell chimed. When I pulled open the door, Mrs. Cantwell stood alone, a balled-up Kleenex in her hand.

“Sam, go back upstairs,” my mother said.

“Is Ernie here?” I asked.

“No, hon,” Mrs. Cantwell said, wiping her nose.

“Sam,” my mother said, this time giving me the look. “Go upstairs.”

I rushed upstairs, hurled myself to the floor, and shimmied my way to the grate. My mother made tea. I knew this from the familiar sounds in the kitchen—the ping of the blue kettle when my mother removed the top, the sound of the tap water filling the kettle, and another ping when she replaced the top and placed the kettle on the stove. She and Mrs. Cantwell sat at the kitchen table—a deduction from the sound the chairs made scraping the linoleum. Mrs. Cantwell kept her voice so soft I had trouble picking up all the words, but it had something to do with coming from a doctor’s office. Something about Ernie.

We’d had a girl in our class leave school because she got sick, and when she came back she was bald and thin with dark circles under her eyes. My mother said she had something wrong with her blood. So when I heard Mrs. Cantwell say, “The doctor says Ernie has trouble reading, that his brain causes letters to switch places and he gets mixed up,” I felt a huge relief. But then Mrs. Cantwell said, “He suggested we take Ernie out of OLM and send him to the public school. They have specialists who can give Ernie more personal attention.”

This was bad. Ernie remained my only friend. I would be lost without Ernie. Then another thought came to me. To send Ernie to the public school was to send him to where the monster now lurked—David Bateman.

“Samuel has been such a good friend to Ernie,” Mrs. Cantwell said. “Being the only black child in school has been very difficult for Ernie. Sam was the only child to welcome him. You’ve all always made us feel so welcome.”

This was news to me. I’d always thought of Ernie as the kid who had saved me. I was, after all, the devil boy. Next to that, having black skin never seemed like such a big deal to me, but then I’d never thought of Ernie as black. He was just my best friend. Now his mother was in my kitchen saying Ernie needed me.

The blue kettle whistled.

I crawled out from under my bed and lay atop the covers, staring at the assortment of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling by fishing wire.

I considered the problem all afternoon. When my father came home, I didn’t rush downstairs to greet him. He stopped at my bedroom door to check in with me. “Hey, son, everything okay?”

“Just reading.”

My dad picked up the copy of Tom Sawyer from my nightstand. “Mark Twain,” he said. “My favorite American author. Did you know his real name was Samuel? Samuel Clemens.”

Under other circumstances I might have been interested, but I was preoccupied. “Dad, can I ask you something?”

He set the book down on my bed. “You know you can.”

I couldn’t very well tell my dad I had been spying on my mom and Mrs. Cantwell, so I decided to keep things anonymous. “What if you had this friend and he wasn’t doing so good . . . like in school. And you wanted to help him, but you didn’t want him to know you were helping him.”

“Would this friend be anyone I know?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just supposing it.”

“Well, just supposing, why wouldn’t this friend want help?”

I recalled how Ernie had always stuffed his tests in his desk when our teachers returned them and never told me his scores. “Maybe because he’s embarrassed about it, you know, maybe because he doesn’t want people to think he’s stupid or something.”

My dad put his hands to his chin as if in prayer, rubbing the palms together. “I can see why you wouldn’t want him to feel stupid.” He pondered the question a bit longer, then smiled and picked up Tom Sawyer, flipping the pages. “You’ve read the part in the story where Tom has to whitewash the fence?”

“You mean the part where he tricks Ben Rogers into doing it for him?”

“Exactly. You see, what Tom did was take advantage of Ben Rogers’s disposition.”

“His what?”

“Tom knew what type of boy Ben was. He knew Ben would tease him because he had to work while Ben was going swimming. Before Ben could tease him, Tom made his work look like more fun than swimming. And that made Ben want to paint the fence. Do you follow?”

“Not really.”

“What you need to do is find out this friend’s disposition. Do you know him pretty well?”

“Pretty well,” I said.

“Then you need to figure out how to get this friend to accept your help without him knowing you’re doing it.”

“You mean trick him like Tom Sawyer tricked Ben Rogers.”

“As long as this trick isn’t mean-spirited, yes.”

I thought about that a bit longer. “Thanks, Dad.” My father started for the door. “And Dad, can we not tell Mom about this friend?”

My father looked at me. “You know your mother and I don’t keep secrets from each other, Sam. But maybe I just won’t bring it up.” He winked and left.