There were only a few significant incidents in Maxon’s mind in the time between when he was born and the time he married Sunny and became Sunny’s husband. They ranged in his mind from the excruciatingly significant to largely significant. In his life, they were like beads on a chain. They were the only things he could truly remember that involved talking.
THE FIRST BEGAN AT 3:45 in the afternoon on July 4, 1987. The temperature in the cow barn was 68. Fog lay over the mountains, coagulating over this valley. The boy was eighty miles north of Pittsburgh, eighty miles south of Erie, between one Appalachian foothill and another. A weak summer sun broke through the clouds but did not warm him. A light rain had come down at 1:35. The boy put one hard foot on the lower layer of the barbed-wire fence and pushed down, pinched the upper layer with his hand. Pulling them apart, he slid through expertly and left his father’s property. As soon as he was through he went off running. Down through the valley he ran, fifty steps down, hands out to steady himself down a short descent, fifty more steps running, feet slipping shoeless through the leaf mold and pine needles. The ferns whipped his bare legs.
At the creek in the bottom of the valley he paused, bones in his chest expanding and contracting around his panting lungs and racing heart. Ankle-deep in the stream, he put his hand down to drink, lifted the water up to his face like a hunter, his eyes on the sandy bank. Raccoon tracks, deer tracks, and then he saw human tracks. Adult human feet in boots, all over the place, and one delicate footprint, pressed into the edge of the creek where the sand gave way to mud. It was small, the footprint of a child. The boy let the water fall from between his fingers. He climbed up the bank from whence he’d come, and approached a nearby stump. He reached in and lifted out a flat rock that covered up an opening inside. Up to his armpit now in the stump, he pushed aside a chipmunk skeleton, fully formed, a few rocks and odd-shaped gnarls of wood, a wad of cash, and pulled out a wax paper bag. Inside it was candy, very old. He took out a piece of the sticky peppermint and put it in the pocket of his shorts.
The boy went back to the footprint, puzzled over it, studied it closely, his sharp nose barely a breath away from the pea-shaped indentations of the toes. He put his own filthy foot over it, as if to match the shapes, but he did not disturb one grain of sand on this precious impression. Instead, he pressed his hands down over his long hair, flattening it, ordering it. He rubbed the back of his hand over his face, then applied some water to the effort, and used the hem of his torn white T-shirt to scrub at his cheeks. He gave himself a winning smile in his reflection in the creek. Then suddenly he looked fierce, angry, wild, growling at the water. His face went blank. Then he lifted his eyebrows, widened his eyes, showed all his teeth. His face went blank again. Finally he frowned, stood up, and began to climb the opposite hill.
Across the road from the old farm, the boy stopped in the high weeds. Among the milkweed clumps, he waited and watched, crouched over, hunched down. The old farm was no longer empty. He knew, looking at the place, that he would no longer be able to climb through a window and sleep there when he needed to. There was new gravel on the driveway. There were new windows with bright white frames. He had heard the sound of a car, the sound of a hammer yesterday. He had envisioned a thief, tearing apart the decrepit porch, seeing the wormy chestnut paneling, using a crowbar. He knew that paneling was worth some money, because he had heard his father and brothers discussing it.
He felt angry at the interlopers. He had deciphered every book inside the old farmhouse, saying each word out loud, one after the other. He deciphered by the light of a store of yellowed candles from under the kitchen counter. There was a book entirely composed of letters, arrows, and numbers. There was a set of leather volumes that had the word “Dickens” on the spine, fifteen volumes, ranging between two inches and three and a half inches thick, wide as his mother’s butcher block. He could recall the length of each paragraph, and the width. How dare some other vagrant dismantle this house? There was a station wagon in the driveway, and in the front yard, a human hung from a rope, swinging back and forth, back and forth, sixty degrees across the yard and back.
He parted the weeds to get a clearer look. His face framed in weeds, his hands pulling them apart on each side of his face, he looked across the dirt road and saw the human that had made the footprint in the creek. It was a child. The child sat in a tire all cut apart. The cut-up tire hung from the tree and was swinging back and forth, back and forth. As it swung across the arc it also was revolving, so that it turned and swung, both, the child’s face coming around to face him, seeing him, and then turning away, around, across the whole sweep of the yard, the farmhouse, and then back around to see him again. By the time the child had rotated back around, the boy had sprinted across the road and was standing on the mounting block at the bottom of the driveway. The child in the swing put out its foot and stopped the swing from rotating and swinging. It regarded the boy with large eyes. It stared at him.
“Who are you, a boy?” said this child.
“Maxon,” said the boy. He stood fully erect, one knee touching the other, heels planted firmly together on that mossy and rectangular stone block.
“I’m Sunny,” said the child. “I’m a girl. Do you want a turn on this?”
The farmhouse had been empty ever since Maxon could remember. He had found it very early in his life, when he was exploring the woods. Now he had been all over the county. It was one of the places where he slept. There were others, an A-frame cabin 168 trees down the electric line past the old farm, a hunting blind in a tree next to the railroad. There were people who fed him, including his family, but also others. There was one woman in a trailer who thought he was a mute. He never talked to her. The houses with white paint and ninety-degree angles he stayed away from. During the school year, he went to school as much as he could, on the bus. He was seven years, four months, and eighteen days old. Or, he was 2,693 rotations of the Earth old.
At this time, Maxon climbed into the tire swing and Sunny pushed him on it, and he played with her. When they were laughing, another person came out of the front door. Maxon had never seen any of the doors of the house open; he thought of the old farmhouse as impenetrable except by squirrels and him. The woman was tall, wearing a long skirt. She had long blond hair in pigtails as if she were a child.
“Sunny, what’s this?” said the woman.
“It’s Maxon,” said Sunny. She talked around the piece of peppermint that was in her mouth. “He’s staying for dinner. Maxon, this is my mother.”
Another woman came out behind the mother, and this one was brown. Maxon had never seen a person this brown color. She was short, and she had a hammer in her hand. Her arms were covered in dust.
“Nu, please set another place at the table,” said the mother. “Sunny has a friend.”
At the dinner table, Maxon sat diagonal to the mother and the brown woman, and across from Sunny. Sunny ordered him to eat a lot of vegetables that she didn’t appear to want. Maxon ate zucchini in handfuls, and said, “I like zucchini. We have it wild. It grows in the yard. The seeds in the zucchini I grow in the yard are from four generations of zucchini in the same yard. I can also eat it raw. I eat it just like a banana, but without peeling it.” When he said this, Sunny put her hands over her ears like cups facing backward. The brown women squinted at him and the mother nodded.
He refused to take a bath when the mother put the question out there, but he allowed her to brush his hair and wrap him in a blanket. She kept leaving the room and coming back, pressing her hands onto her long skirt. Her eyebrows wrinkled down. They had put yard furniture in the living room; Maxon saw that it was rainproof. Before, in the living room, there had been a chair with mice living in it, and a lounge covered in red corduroy. The two children sat on a swinging sofa, curled metal rods holding the sofa to the frame. It would swing back and forth or side to side. Maxon’s feet touched the floor, but Sunny had her feet folded under her.
“He starving!” the brown woman called in from the kitchen, where she was knocking dishes around in the sink. “Look at him! Like a damn toothpick!”
“Where do you live?” said Sunny’s mother.
Maxon pointed out the window.
“Come on,” said Sunny. “Let’s go play.”
Maxon took her hand when she offered it. They went out under the apple tree and began to pick up apples. Only halfway through the summer and already some were starting to fall, crabbed and hopeless little fruit, gnawed by deer, pink only on one scant face. Maxon had the understanding that Sunny would never eat these apples, like Maxon sometimes did.
Sometimes as they were playing with the apples, Sunny’s hand would fall onto Maxon’s hand or arm, as if she was trying to feel if he was hot.
“Where do you live?” Sunny asked. “Will you take me there?”
Maxon shook his head. He chucked an apple through a window in the old barn with perfect aim. The pane broke and shattered inward. He put another apple through the exact same hole. Sunny watched him. When she threw an apple, she threw it short.
At the sound of breaking glass, the mother came out the screen door again and it shut with a crack you could hear hit the mountain on the other side of the valley, under the fog.
“Maxon, I am going to take you home,” she said. “Can you show me where that is?”
Maxon thought about running away, but the tall woman with the braided hair compelled him inside. She had all the books, and all the candles. There was a tight smoothness to her face, and her teeth, so white in rows, made him stare. They got into the station wagon. Sunny stood beside the car door, sadly waving. Maxon looked down at her feet, not bare, not pressing toe prints into the ground, but wearing leather shoes held tightly on her feet with a wide strap. The station wagon pulled down the drive, and the new gravel crunched under the tires.
WHAT HAPPENED THEN DID not have any significance. Maxon did not remember it, because it was not in his memory.
THEN THE STATION WAGON came back up the driveway, crunching on the gravel. The mother led him by the hand, back into the kitchen, and gave him a banana. She told him to sit on the bench behind a table, built into the wall. It was red and the mice had chewed it open, showing its foam stuffing. He peeled the banana and began to eat it.
The mother said to the brown woman, “Well, there was no one there. But I can tell you. There were sheep living in rusty cars. I mean living. And pigs.”
“You lie,” said the brown woman.
“Nu, the place is falling down and no one is at home. I called, I yelled, I rang the bell, and do you want to know what this child said to me? That seven-, eight-year-old child?”
“What he say,” said Nu, working on putting dinner away.
“He said, ‘They went to town.’ Can you believe it? He’s barely bigger than Sunny. They left him out in the rain in those—” Here she began to cough. “—shorts. And went to town. Nu, if you had seen the place. I think there was a mule in the parlor.”
An hour later they had all gone to see the fireworks. Maxon wore a blanket, and was running in tight, concentric circles around Sunny and her mother, as they sat in a pasture on an old crocheted afghan, waiting for the explosions. The field they sat in had been newly mowed and the hay harvested. It was prickly, as a father’s beard might be, even through the blanket. Sunny sat on her mother and wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist.
“There’s a bat,” Sunny said. “And there’s Maxon.”
The mother laughed, hugged her child, and Maxon watched them. He could hear their talking. Sunny said she didn’t want to see the fireworks, kept letting her eye be distracted by the boy, and the bats flying around. “That’s Maxon, and that’s a bat,” she repeated.
When the fireworks started, Maxon was startled by the noise. The show was all around them, but he didn’t look up. It was dark, and then there would be a flash, and all the cars illuminated, and the mother’s face showing, and then black again, and a sharp whine. The smell of the hay clung around him, and he could smell that there were cows nearby.
“We have to take him home, after this,” said Emma.
“No, I want to keep him,” said Sunny. And Maxon continued to trot around.
The booms of the fireworks echoed down the valley, amplified by the river, ricocheting off the mountains on both sides.
“No,” said Emma. “He has to go home.”
“But I like him. I want him,” said Sunny.
When the fireworks were over, the two children sat in the backseat while Emma drove, muttering to herself and shaking her head. Maybe she was practicing what she would say. Maxon felt pretty good sitting there in the dark with the girl, the hiss of a sudden rain in the wheel wells, the flashing, weird mosaic of lights on the ceiling in the car, the back of the mother’s head. The girl reached out for his hand and he took it. He was taller. She was fatter. His toes were turned inward from being shoved into shoes that were too small. When they stopped at a stop sign and he knew they were close to home, he slipped out the car door and into the rain. No one gave chase. It was too dark and he was already gone, sliding over wet fallen wood, under the clutch of dripping leaves.
“Come back tomorrow,” she had said, squeezing his hand. “Don’t forget.”
Probably, if he was being ruthlessly straight with himself, that was when he had fallen in love.
That was when it had happened.