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.”

Underneath the attic, Tom sat in his armchair with Sammy collapsed across his feet. He held a large black wooden paint box on his lap. He raised the lid, gazed for an instant at the contents and quietly blew away the dust from the tops of the brightly colored pots.

He raised the lid and stared at the brightly colored pots. “Paints?” he inquired.

Tom grunted in the affirmative. “Bit old, but the pots’ll do. You paint?” Willie’s face fell. He longed to paint. “Nah, ‘cos I can’t read.”

“The ones that can read and write gits the paint, that it?”

“Yeh.” Willie touched one of the pots gently with his hand and then hastily took it away.

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.

Since Rachel’s death he hadn’t joined in any of the social activities in Little Weirwold. In his grief he had cut himself off from people, and when he had recovered he had lost the habit of socializing.

He couldn’t read or write. He couldn’t swim or ride a bicycle. He had never made anything and he couldn’t tell the difference between one flower and another. He couldn’t play cricket or any other game for that matter and he had never been fishing. He began to panic. The others would get bored with waiting and go off on their own without him. He swallowed hard and looked up at their faces. They didn’t look bored. He relaxed a little and then he remembered something.

“I likes drawin’.”

“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.

Since her death he had never wanted to touch anything that might remind him of her. Trust a strange boy to soften him up. The odd thing was that, after he had entered the paint shop, he had felt as if a heavy wave of sadness had suddenly been lifted from out of him. Memories of her didn’t seem as painful as he had imagined.

The jersey had a polo-neck collar in red. The cuffs and the waistband were ribbed in the same color. Willie thought that next to Zach’s deep complexion and black hair the red looked pleasing.

“I think it’s fine,” he said quietly, and Zach knew he was speaking truthfully.

“And here’s me dying to act and I can’t be in it because I’m Jewish.”

“Now you know how I feel about the high school,” said Carrie.

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.

“I’m afraid I’ve had some rather bad news. Robert and Christine’s mother came early this morning and took them back to London. It seems she felt they were being used as unpaid labor. This means we have no Scrooge.”

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

Tom grunted. “I ent ‘ere to listen to meself. One more time.”

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.”

“Better to accept than to pretend he never existed.”

As he rode, his coat flapping behind him, the crisp wind cooling his face, he suddenly felt that Zach was no longer beside him, he was inside him and very much alive. The numbness in his body had dissolved into exhilaration.