Good Night, Mr. Tom

Mum said she was kinder to him than most mothers. She only gave him soft beatings. He shuddered. He was dreading the moment when Mr. Oakley would discover how wicked he was. He was stronger-looking than Mum.

“While you’re in my house,” he said in a choked voice, “you’ll live by my rules. I ent ever hit a child and if I ever do it’ll be with the skin of me hand. You got that?”

Willie nodded.

“So we can forget the ole belt.”

Willie continued to gaze at the materials. He loved the reds, but Mum said red was a sinful color.

“We must all help one another now.”

“As soon as I see someone I like, I talk to them.”

Willie almost dropped the clod of earth he was holding. No one had ever said that they liked him. He’d always accepted that no one did. Even his mum said she only liked him when he was quiet and still.

“Mister Tom?” said Willie. “Does that mean that I won’t go to hell if I copy?”

“Hell!” said Tom in amazement as he strode out of the room. “Don’t be daft, boy. Whatever put such a thought in yer head?”

Willie felt enormously relieved and returned to his writing.

When Willie woke the next day, there was something altogether unusual about the morning. He lay in bed for some time and stared up at the ceiling trying to puzzle it out. Finally he gave up and clambered out of bed. It was only when he started automatically to strip it that he realized what it was that was so different. There was no need for the sheets to be washed that day. They were dry.

“Everythin’ has its own time,” he whispered, and he blushed. “That’s what Mister Tom ses.”

He adored being near Mrs. Hartridge, and he watched her stomach gently expand with each passing week. He loved the way she moved and smiled and the soft cadence of her voice.

He felt as though he was a different person lying there in the dark. He was no longer Willie. It was as if he had said good-bye to an old part of himself. Neither was he two separate people. He was Will inside and out.

For an instant he wished he had never gone to Little Weirwold. Then he would have thought his mum was kind and loving. He wouldn’t have known any different.

“I never met anyone who cared that much for them. I hear such stories about you country folk, not nice uns neither. No offense,” he added, “but I can see some of you are a kind’earted lot.”

“Oh, Rachel,” he said half aloud to the sky. “What would you do?” and he saw her, in his mind, swing round in her long dress and flash her dark eyes at him.

“Kidnap him,” she said laughingly.

Tom gave a start. Rachel wouldn’t have said that. On second thoughts, Rachel would.

After they had died, he had bought the pot of blue paint and placed it in the black wooden box that he had made for her one Christmas, when he was eighteen. As he closed the lid, so he shut out not only the memory of her but also the company of anyone else who reminded him of her.

Although it wasn’t his Sabbath, he gripped his little round cap into his feathery hair and swayed gently to and fro saying the few Hebrew prayers that he remembered. It comforted him to sing the strange guttural sounds. It was like uttering a magical language that would make everything all right. His parents had taught him that whoever or whatever God was, he, she or it could probably understand silent thoughts; but it made Zach feel better to voice his feelings aloud.

“When you kidnap someone you usually want a ransom. There ent no one in the world who’d pay a ransom for me”—and here he glanced at Tom—“except Mister Tom perhaps, and he’s the one that’s supposed to have kidnapped me. Well, I reckon I weren’t kidnapped. I reckon I was rescued.”