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IT IS SAID—and it is true—that just before we are born, a cavern angel holds his finger to our mouths and whispers, “Hush! Don’t tell what you know.”
This is why we have a cleft on our upper lips and remember nothing of where we came from.
Toward the end of the last century—in 1978, to be precise—a smooth-lipped boy appeared in the world.
He grew up in an ominous time. People had lost the power of belief. Plagues of the spirit swept the world; shapeless anxieties spread like fever, self-hatred was rampant, love was bitterly denounced because it wasn’t perfect. Evidence of madness glittered everywhere. The workshops of great nations forged weapons that would destroy the societies that used them. Acid rained from the skies. Rivers putrified. In some places the air was unbreathable. Hucksters sold God on television, and religions were made out of economic theories that didn’t work. Tyrants brutalized the people in the name of the people. The new prophets of freedom preached doctrines of selfishness. Knowledge raced far ahead of wisdom. Mankind worshipped facts, but facts couldn’t explain the misfortunes that counterweight the blessings of human life. There were machines that could think, and people numbed their minds to keep themselves from thinking. In their deepest dreams men stood within stone circles and saw a darkness darker than dark.
Such epochs of desolation had cursed human history a thousand times before. And, each time, a smooth-lipped mortal was born. These men lived strange, obsessed lives. Some of them lie buried in great mausoleums. Others rotted on the hangman’s tree. Some will be remembered forever. Others disappeared into dust and oblivion.
When the time of dementia and sorrow came to the late twentieth century, Bentley Ellicott was born with a twisted leg in Stonehaven on the northern coast. Why he was created as a cripple, why he appeared in a peaceful place far from the world’s worst torments, will remain mysteries forever. Bentley Ellicott himself was the only person in the world who knew the purpose of his life. It was a secret. He didn’t tell anybody until he was eight years old.
Stonehaven lies on a sheltered curve of the northern coast, between islands dense with pine trees and a distant river spanned by a bridge shaped like a humpbacked monster’s bones. The weather on this coast can be dramatic. Storms burst from turrets of clouds on the uplands and send volleys of thunder rolling across the wind-lashed sea. In winter Stonehaven is entombed in ice, bitter cold, and silence. The fogs of spring and autumn blur the shapes of the village, the forests, the coast.
In the time of Bentley Ellicott’s childhood, Main Street was a potholed, two-lane way that passed the drugstore, the police station, and the bank. The masts of sailboats swayed with the harbor’s lazy swell, and sea gulls wheeled and cried above lobster boats and draggers unloading at the town wharf. There were a freezing plant, a boathouse, and a sardine cannery.
The Stonehaven House Hotel stood at the end of Main Street. Years before, when the village shipped granite in waterline schooners to hot cities down the coast, the Stone-haven House Hotel had been fashionable. But the granite quarries had been closed for years by the time Bentley Ellicott was born. The hotel was a white, peeling ruin with broken windows. Tall grass grew all around it. Nobody lived there except Charlie Feavey. He had inherited the hotel from his father. Charlie was a scrawny man with dirty fingernails who was always desperate for money.
Potato fields lay north of the village. Along a wooded strip of shoreline—which everybody called the point—Victorian summer houses overlooked the sea and the seaward islands. After the middle of the last century, young couples like Richard and Dorothy Ellicott winterized the old houses and lived in them all year round. Richard was a mathematics professor at the university sixteen miles inland. Bentley Ellicott was born on the point.
Odd circumstances surrounded his birth.
His beautiful young mother died that night—for no reason the doctors could discover. A jade-eyed stranger named Willybill appeared in Stonehaven as the cold November light was going down. Toward midnight a choppy wind came up out of nowhere and changed directions four times, as if the power behind it were searching for something. McGraw, the Stonehaven police chief, said later that on the night of Bentley’s birth he felt as if he and the village were under a glass bell and that a terrible pressure was trying to break through.
Bentley’s father retreated into a deep depression after his wife died. Richard Ellicott drove to and from the university every day. But he aged faster than his life proceeded. He slept and read too much. He took long, solitary walks along the shore north of the village. He felt abandoned. He loved Bentley, but, as the boy was growing up, Richard couldn’t emerge from his grief and pay attention to him.
So, Stonehaven’s Congregationalist minister, the Reverend Homer Tally, became Bentley’s substitute father. He was a gentle man of fifty who rarely spoke above a murmur except when he preached. Everybody regarded Mr. Tally as a saint. He had no children of his own, and he adored Bentley. Reverend Tally taught the boy how to ride a bicycle and plant gardens.
Mrs. Tally was not regarded as a saint. Her tart manner, closed mind, and barbed commentaries on the lives of everyone in the village made people tense. As the years progressed she sensed a mystery within Bentley—she was decidedly not stupid—and told everyone the boy was peculiar. He was always wandering off alone in the woods when he was little and search parties had to be organized. That proved his oddity so far as Mrs. Tally was concerned.
In the midmorning of his life, when he was eight, Bentley Ellicott’s wiry body could scarcely contain his spirit, which was iridescent as summer light on the water. He was as busy as the foragings of a million bees and as curious as the eternal demand to know the meaning of God’s wink.
He was short for his age and had large, dark eyes. His brown hair hung over those eyes until a German graduate student named Helga became Richard Ellicott’s housekeeper. Even Helga had a hard time getting Bentley to sit still long enough for an attack on his hair with scissors. Helga was a slender, pretty girl of nineteen. She teased Bentley to make him screech, wrestled his blue jeans and sneakers off of him so she could wash them, and tried to make him stop gobbling his breakfast.
Bentley was irrepressible. He had the energy of a chipmunk, and his face was as changeable as the weather on the northern coast. He bulged out his eyes as he exaggerated his triumphs and failures. He did a terrific imitation of a chimpanzee, bouncing around in circles and scratching his ribs. Other children liked him because he was exuberant and made up interesting games and adventures. In school he fidgeted and shot up his hand and often had the right answers because he loved to learn. He could run in a hopping stumble, but because of his deformed right leg he couldn’t run fast enough to play baseball. Baseball was Bentley’s favorite thing. He practiced throwing until he was better at it than any kid in Stonehaven. He could knock a tin can off a stump from thirty feet away.
Joe Persis, who was Bentley’s best friend, was a year older and a lot bigger. He had a dim mind—which is often the mind that sees the obvious truth everyone else misses. He, too, thought that Bentley was different. Bentley was the leader, but he never made Joe feel dumb.
They were beach and forest prowlers. They dug clams with their bare hands. Joe climbed trees and pulled Bentley up after him. They made a catapult by laying a board across a log, putting rocks on one end, and jumping on the other. They hauled a U.S. Navy ammunition crate out of the water, quarreled about who owned it, and made up.
In his room Bentley had posters depicting birds, fishes, and dinosaurs. He had a toy box half filled with treasures he found along the shore. Sometimes in the evenings he watched television with Helga and her boyfriend. Bentley would pull his sweater up over his eyes when there were scary parts of horror movies. On other evenings he had supper at the Tally’s house and rode home on his bicycle. Reverend Tally took him exploring on the uplands of bare meadows, granite outcroppings, forests, and crater lakes that rise behind Stonehaven and the coast. Bentley became a substitute for the son Reverend Tally never had. Mrs. Tally endured him.
McGraw, the Stonehaven police chief, didn’t like Bentley. He was the one who’d had to lead all the search parties when Bentley had gotten himself lost. He told the other loungers in the Stonehaven drugstore that the kid was a fool. Willybill, the jade-eyed stranger who had appeared in the village on the night Bentley was born, was still there, still a stranger. He watched the boy.
Bentley Ellicott kept his secret. He tore around the village and the countryside on his bicycle, yelled his head off at schoolyard baseball games, and reveled in his child-hood despite the fact that his mother was dead, his father was unreachable, and he himself was handicapped.
Our fortunes and lives seem chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older, wiser time of the world when things were less known but better understood. That ancient wisdom lived secretly within Bentley Ellicott alongside the rackety personality of an eight-year-old boy. He assumed that the great purpose for which he had been born would not summon him for years and years.
* * *
No sound ever disappears. Every wind rush stays, every rattle of wave-washed gravel remains in the world, hovering above the gray boulders and rock ledges, dripping with the mists of spring in the pine forests. All of Stonehaven’s history murmurs and speaks in the second air—the shouts of Vikings sailing down the cold sea, the rigging creaks of the ships that brought the first French settlers, the rifle cracks of hunting and war, the sounds of adze and mallet as neat white houses and the Cutter mansion were built on the slope above the cove. In the second air, people born with the gift of magic can hear the gossip of Stonehaven’s early generations, the grumbles of nineteenth-century fishermen casting off for George’s Bank, the gnash of iron machines cutting granite, the scrape of shovels in the graveyard.
Sounds of eternal conditions are all around us—night cries of ecstasy, the whispers of the dying, promises being made, and soft, disappointed weeping.
The echoes of Stonehaven’s decline are also in the second air—the clink of beer bottles against the pilings of the town wharf, the roaring endeavor of tractors pushing mobile homes into place, hammers nailing sheet metal onto the sides of shacks to protect against the winter wind, the minuscule scuttle and twirl of spiders busy at their webs in the trash-littered hallways of Charlie Feavey’s Stonehaven House Hotel. The world’s noise outlives all the generations that made it. In this vast and imperishable archive of every sound ever made, from the beginning of time until the present moment, the voices of animals are understood by those mortals endowed with the gift of listening.
Bentley Ellicott could hear the second air. That was the reason he started wandering off into the woods when he was three, exasperating McGraw, the police chief. McGraw was a tall, bulky man with a weather-burned face and gray eyes. He spoke with the reserve common to people on the northern coast. He was sensible—whether he and his two deputies were called to rescue a dog in a culvert or to disarm a deranged man with a gun. People in Stonehaven relied on McGraw. He was as predictably steady as the rising of the sun. His wife was a heavy, tired woman who worked at the sardine cannery.
McGraw never talked about the dark disenchantment that had possessed his heart since he was thirteen years old. It wasn’t anybody’s business.
He had had a happy childhood. His parents were religious, and McGraw grew up nestled in their faith. He believed no harm could come to him if he was good, because God loved him. He memorized long passages from the Bible and behaved himself. Then, when he was thirteen, his father abruptly left home and moved into the house trailer of a slatternly woman named Grace Wood-house. They had a child. McGraw’s mother went mad. She prattled incessantly about the enigma of God’s ways and hanged herself in the garage.
McGraw’s world blew apart. He never spoke to his father again. He finished his adolescence knowing that faith was a lie. There was no God. The world was chaos and people’s lives were haphazard. Everything McGraw had experienced as a policeman confirmed his agnostic view of reality. As others saw him, he was a quiet, strong man. As he saw himself, he had been a gullible boy who had had to retrain himself in skepticism in order to survive as an adult.
Bentley Ellicott reminded the police chief of how he had been when he was eight. There was, to McGraw, a childish arrogance in Bentley’s whooping confidence, in his stubborn refusal to be cowed by his handicap, or by the tragedy of his mother’s death and his father’s withdrawal. The kid acted as if he believed that some benevolence were watching over him. McGraw disliked Bentley with all the power of self-contempt. He yearned for a cataclysm that would shock the boy out of his confidence. The police chief wanted to see Bentley get his comeuppance.
Bentley tried to avoid him. He knew that McGraw was not his friend.
Neither McGraw nor anybody else could have possibly known the truth about Bentley. Nobody would have believed it anyway.
If Bentley had lived in that older, wiser time of the world, people in Stonehaven would have assumed that he could ravel up the pain of childbirth if he wanted to, and could tell which heron standing on the mud flats was a transfigured king. He would have been instructed by old, one-eyed men who had survived many battles. They would have blessed him with handfuls of dust and given him an amulet. Wonder-workers would have clearly seen the darkening of the world in smoke and water. Everybody would have understood what was happening. They would have known what Bentley was.
Bentley Ellicott was a child born with the memory of another, perfect childhood. In his daydreams he remembered as an old traveler remembers a land beyond the mists of the sea where he had known untroubled love and perfect happiness. He remembered a perpetual noon that needed no sun for its shining. He had played then with countless children from ages gone, never wearying, never bored, never reproached. He had danced in a grove with the robed masters of all knowledge. He had spoken in poems, and he had a golden apple.
He hadn’t been sad when they had called him away and loaned him the heart that had been borne in the world by a thousand mortals before him. He knew that the heart had returned a thousand times. All souls always came back when their moments of mortal life were done.
Bentley remembered being born. He remembered floating up from the depths of a grotto toward the rose-colored light of future existence. The hovering cavern angel stopped him but laid no finger on Bentley’s lips. Instead, he was told about his great and ominous destiny and given a final instruction: Don’t tell your secret unless you are offered love sealed in silence, or unless someone recognizes what you really are.
The instant he was born, the imperfection of the mortal condition seized him. His life was flawed now; he was afraid of death.
Bentley also was given powers, ones that no ordinary mortal possessed. The horseshoe crabs, who are the armorers of the shallow sea, taught him an incantation. Ospreys could be summoned to fly in protective circles above him. When he was chanting the spell and standing within his circles, no enemy—mortal or from the distant darkness—could harm Bentley or make him do anything he didn’t want to do. He had been endowed with the gift of hearing all the sounds of the past and understanding the speech of animals in the second air. Nobody knew about Bentley’s magic.
The borrowed heart sometimes whispered indistinctly to him. But, most of the time, it surrendered to the unquenchable enthusiasm of the boyhood Bentley was living in the old village above the harbor, on the shores and windy uplands and in the forests of the northern coast. Bentley dreamed of the man he would someday be—and in those fantasies the mortal terror he had been born to endure and the glory of his destiny became a supreme adventure.
But then, late in his ninth autumn, Bentley’s life suddenly darkened. His heart cried warning to him. Now! proclaimed the voice of his unworldly intuition. It is beginning—now!
One November night Bentley and Joe were unchaining their bicycles on Main Street after going to the movies. They heard tires screeching. A four-door sedan tore down Cutter Street, skidded as it swung into Main, and roared past them through the spaced pools of lamplight. As the two boys watched, open-mouthed, the car hit a patch where mist had frozen on the road, spun around twice, and slammed sideways into the wall of the freezing plant. Glass blasted outward from the back windows with the impact.
People came running out of a bar across the street. A figure was climbing from the car. Bentley was astounded as Mr. Tally stumbled into the light. The clergyman was bleeding from a cut on his forehead. He began to shout and curse as people surrounded him. Bentley saw a skirmish, and a woman fell to the ground. Mr. Tally had punched her. Four men were holding him back as he tried to kick her. A police car came down the street from the opposite direction. It stopped, and McGraw and his first deputy, Mike, jumped out. Reverend Tally was shouting drunken obscenities as he was dragged across the street to the police station.
Bentley was numb with bewilderment. He rode home trying to reconcile the wild man on Main Street with the gentle Reverend Tally he had known all of his life. He didn’t tell his father and Helga what he’d seen. He was afraid they would explain how such things happened—and that the explanation would confuse what he already instinctively knew. He put on his pajamas, climbed into bed, and turned off the light.
He listened to his agitated heart. It cried to him that Reverend Tally had been assaulted by sorcery because he was a part of Bentley’s life. You are being attacked. It is beginning! Now!
The next day Bentley rode his bicycle over to the Tallies’ house after school. Mrs. Tally told him to go away.
On Thursday everybody in Stonehaven was talking about Reverend Tally’s dismissal by his congregation. The episode at the freezing plant had been the fourth drunken scene since September.
On Saturday Bentley and Joe were in the drugstore buying candy bars when they heard McGraw telling Polly Woodhouse, the soda fountain girl, how Reverend Tally’s battered car had been found in the parking lot of an airport miles away down the coast. The clergyman had disappeared from Stonehaven, leaving his wife behind.
Bentley told Joe he didn’t feel so hot. He rode home on his bicycle and walked up the dirt road to the end of the point. He climbed a broken stone wall and limped up a steep meadow that ended at a cliff over the sea.
He put his hands in the pockets of his anorak. The wind blew his hair back from his face. Reverend Tally’s disappearance was like a death. Bentley looked out at the horizon and the low, gray sky. Winter was coming. Bentley’s heart whispered to him that something else, remembered in legends and glimpsed in the profoundest depths of dreams, was rising with the chilling of the world.
Bentley was suddenly terrified. It had never occurred to him that he’d have to fulfill his destiny before he grew up.
Two weeks later, Joe Persis abruptly changed. It was as if the first winds of winter had brought the world’s contamination to the northern coast and Bentley’s best friend had become infected.
One December afternoon Bentley and Joe were throwing a baseball on the playground. They did that a lot, and Joe always tried to throw straight so that Bentley wouldn’t have to run. That day he was throwing deliberately wide. Bentley had to make limping dashes for the ball. Joe thought it was funny.
Bentley let the ball roll into the wire mesh along the side of the playground. He stood in the twilight listening to Joe’s forced, phony laughter. Bentley’s heart whispered a warning to him.
“Let’s quit,” Bentley said. “I’m cold.”
Joe was wearing a heavy jacket. His wool hat was pulled down almost over his eyes. “Maybe you ought to go home,” he said. “Maybe your mother’s waiting for you! I’m gonna hit!”
He picked up a baseball bat and smacked the ball in a hard drive at three first-graders who were crossing the other side of the playground. The ball hit one of them, who started to cry.
Another little kid threw the ball over some bushes.
“You go get that!” Joe screamed to the child, his amiable, stupid face getting red. He picked up a rock and batted it across the playground. The first-graders screamed and dodged. Joe had become somebody else.
Bentley knew what was happening. He squelched his fear and jumped on Joe’s back. Joe yelled in rage and tossed him off. Bentley landed hard on his rear end.
“Crippled crud!” Joe shouted.
Bentley blinked. He was stunned. “You’d better quit hitting things at people,” he managed to say.
Joe swung the bat over his shoulder. “Make me! Go on, crippled crud, make me!”
“Chowder head,” Bentley muttered. Swift as a lizard he spun around on his rear end, grabbed Joe’s ankles, and yanked him off his feet. The bat skidded ten feet away. Bentley lunged for it. But Joe jumped up, sprinted, and stomped hard, squashing Bentley’s fingers beneath the hard ash wood. Bentley screeched.
Cries of “Fight! Fight!” rang across the cold schoolyard. Kids came running from every direction to watch.
Bentley was standing up, two fingers in his mouth, glaring at Joe.
“I’ll knock your block off!” Joe yelled.
Bentley took his fingers out of his mouth and grinned. “Your block’s so fat they couldn’t knock it off with a bulldozer.”
Joe spat. “Are you looking for trouble?”
Bentley nodded.
“Crippled crud!” Joe screamed again.
“Lard head!”
“My father says you’re nuts! McGraw told him!”
Bentley put on his solemn, chimpanzee face and pranced about, scratching himself under the arms.
The kids standing in a wide circle around them began to laugh.
What happened next was something that Stonehaven children and parents argued about for weeks.
Joe took a sudden, vicious chop with the baseball bat.
Bentley ducked, but he didn’t step back. A strange look came into his eyes. He began to make a soft, senseless chanting noise, staring into Joe’s face. Joe went berserk and swung the bat again—hard—straight at Bentley’s head. But it didn’t hit Bentley. He kept on chanting and staring into Joe’s eyes. Joe yowled in fury and frustration. He swung the bat again and again. Joe got so mad that he cracked himself on the shin with the bat. He limped off the playground, crying and yelling. He and Bentley weren’t best friends anymore.
That evening the children who had seen the fight told their parents about it at supper tables all over Stonehaven. They thought that Bentley was magic and a hero. They were told to stop being silly and eat their carrots. Joe swore that Bentley was the one who had been swatting rocks at the first-graders. He also said that Bentley had hit him on the leg with the bat.
Bentley was scared again. He sat in the woods listening to the second air. The two beings that lived within him argued as he crouched on his bed at night, watching the stars. Bentley, the frightened eight-year-old, tried to persuade himself that Reverend Tally’s disgrace and disappearance had no significance larger than sadness, that the fight with Joe Persis had just been a dumb thing that happened. The warnings of his heart grew more insistent. Bentley waited for a sign that his worst fears were going to come true.
Willybill was the one who brought the sign.
Strange, inexplicable Willybill. He had lived in Stone-haven for eight years, but nobody knew him. People stayed away from him.
Remembering Willybill, it is impossible to know whether he was thirty or fifty. He was a lean, scruffy man with long, reddish hair and a beard. When he didn’t have a cowboy hat on, he wore a rolled bandanna around his head. He never dressed in anything but blue jeans, cracked leather boots, and faded shirts. He had the sullen expression of a man who has been defeated by the world. The stains of the wanderer were on him. The only things he seemed to own were his clothes, his battered pickup truck, and a guitar.
He lived in a rented room above the hardware store on Main Street and sang songs in a roadhouse on the highway outside town. He had an oddly powerful voice but rarely spoke to anybody. He had no friends.
Will bill's eyes were alarming. They were the color of pale jade and burned in both sunlight and shadow. He watched Bentley Ellicott a lot. McGraw and his two deputies thought the stranger was sinister, but they could never get anything on him.
A few days after the fight, Bentley was riding home across the potato fields at dusk. McGraw’s cruiser came out of the woods along the point and crossed the highway. The siren whirred briefly, and Bentley stopped his bicycle. McGraw pulled off the road and rolled down the windows of his police car. “Joe Persia's father spoke to me this morning,” he said.
Bentley’s nose was cold. His stomach got tight.
“Having a fight with a boy’s one thing,” McGraw said. “Hitting him with a baseball bat’s something else.”
“I didn’t hit him,” Bentley said. “He hit himself.”
“You’re a weird kid, Bentley,” McGraw answered. “What’s wrong with you isn’t any of my business. But I get any more reports of you making trouble, I’m going to take it up with your father.”
“I didn’t do anything!” Bentley said loudly. “You can ask the other kids! They saw it!”
McGraw studied him for a moment. “You just remember what I said.” He rolled up the window and drove away.
Bentley pedaled toward the forest and the dirt road that ran the length of the point. He felt angry, humiliated, and helpless. He desperately wanted to believe that it could have happened to anybody, that a power beyond his imagination wasn’t attacking him, trying to weaken him and fill him with despair. But the other part of him, his heart that had come to the world a thousand times before in a cause as old as the world itself, told him the truth.
Bentley’s mind was still churning around in a muddle between two perspectives as he rode across the highway and into the forest on the dirt road. The dusk was deepening. The air was sharp.
He skidded his bicycle to a stop. A figure was emerging from the shrubbery ten feet in front of him.
Bentley put his foot on the road. He gripped the handlebars tightly and stared at Willybill.
Willybill stared back at him. His jade eyes burned in the gloom.
Then Bentley’s conflict stopped. He knew.
Christmas passed. January and February hardened their grip on the northern coast. Bentley Ellicott was alone.
He and Joe weren’t speaking anymore, and he’d stopped hanging around the playground because he didn’t feel like having fun. Reverend Tally was gone. Bentley became quiet. Helga took him to the doctor, but they didn’t find anything wrong. He couldn’t tell Helga and his father what he was brooding about because it was part of his secret.
Bentley’s heart delivered memories of his other life to him. As he lay awake at night, as he sat on his log in the hushed, gray afternoons, recollection rose in him. He saw, as through a mist, the grotto in which souls about to be born float up toward the glow of mortal existence. Bentley heard again the voice of the cavern angel giving him instructions for his life. Echoing like cherubim song, as clear as the command of God, the angel’s voice described the destiny of the smooth-lipped ones born as mortals. They must oppose an enemy that mankind had willed itself to forget; they must confront terrors calculated to turn hearts to stone; the warriors of god must find such courage that they could perform deeds beyond the exertion of ordinary men.
Bentley lay awake at night, wondering if he was brave enough. Up until his ninth year he had assumed that heroic courage would come to him with manhood. But now that he knew his destiny was going to call him before he was a man, he wasn’t sure of himself.
He rode to and from school on his bicycle, thinking about being afraid. He lay awake at night, making lists of all the things he feared. He began to work out a plan to prepare himself.
March came. In Stonehaven, Mrs. Tally fixed her critical eye on Polly Woodhouse, the soda fountain girl in the drugstore; she did not approve of that overripe child. Chief McGraw drove around the village in his cruiser; he felt an inexplicable anxiety as spring approached. Willybill spoke to no one. But several people noticed that he stood all day at the window of his rented room. He scanned the village, the harbor, and the thawing islands in the sea as if he were waiting for something.
The more Bentley thought about what frightened him, the longer his lists grew. He was afraid of wasps and the dark. He was frightened that he might see a face on the window glass at night. He was squeamish about wading barefoot because some sea creature might pinch his toes. When somebody in a TV movie was about to open a mysterious door, Bentley hid his eyes.
If he had to, Bentley figured, he could face any of these things. He turned on his imagination and tried to think of what he was more scared of than anything else.
He sat in the forest on his favorite log, listening to the drip of melting icicles on the sodden carpet of dead leaves. He saw a bird fluttering from branch to branch.
He heard the distant rumble and whoosh of cars on the wet highway that curved through the potato fields. A large silence enclosed that sound.
Bentley shivered. The car noises reminded him of the night in November when Reverend Tally crashed into the wall of the freezing plant. And that, in turn, reminded him of a day, the year before, that he had seen a boy hit by a delivery truck on Main Street. Bentley’s chest tightened as he remembered the boy flying off his bicycle and smashing onto the street. He was shrieking for his mother when they lifted him into an ambulance. It had been horrible.
After thinking about it for several days, Bentley figured that being hit by a truck scared him more than anything else. The cavern angel had told him that he would need superhuman courage to fulfill the purpose of his life. What he would face at that hour of his destiny was beyond imagination. He decided to test himself. He would practice being brave by confronting the most frightening thing he did know about.
In early April he started getting up before dawn so that nobody could catch him. He put on a heavy sweater and rode his bicycle over to the highway in the flint-gray light.
The first few days he went there he stood among the new potato plants watching big trailer trucks burst from the tree line. Their headlights speared into the murk with the harsh glare of dragon's eyes. Smaller lights flashed and winked on the trucks’ bodies. Their horns brayed across the sleeping landscape. Gears howled as the huge machines hurtled around the curve in the middle of the fields, exhaling bitter smoke. The trucks roared past Bentley and disappeared into the woods.
Every morning Bentley moved a little farther up the shoulder of the highway. He was trying to push down his fear so that he could stand right beside the pavement, with his toes on the edge of the macadam, as the trucks thundered by just a foot away from his nose. If he could bring himself to do that, he’d be equal to anything. As Bentley stood watching in the half-light, his mind would fill with chaos as he imagined those speeding tons of steel smashing into him and mangling his body under the double sets of wheels. He had to do it just right.
Finally, before dawn on a Friday, he was standing with one foot on the highway and another on the roadside grit. It was very cold, and Bentley was wearing his anorak. He tensed as he heard the rumbling of a truck approaching from the north. It got louder and louder. Bentley began trembling. He told himself to hold his ground. He closed his eyes and made two fists. Then he moved his other foot onto the pavement.
He opened his eyes. The truck exploded from the dark wall of forest at the far end of the potato fields. It tore across the flat country and hit the curve, gears shrieking, its headlights sweeping over the ground. Suddenly the glare of the lights was full in his eyes. He realized he was too close. The bellow of the truck’s horn acknowledged him. His brain yelled at him to jump back. He froze.
In the cab, the driver had taken his eyes off the highway for a moment to glance at the speedometer. The needle was rising past 75 as the truck started around the curve. The driver hugged the inside to keep his load from shifting.
He looked up. His mind went white with shock. A small boy was standing in the full beam of headlights.
The driver pounded the horn once and wrenched the wheel to the left. The truck swayed like a drunken elephant and hurtled across the highway. It tore into the field, bucking and heaving. The driver frantically rammed the brakes and yanked the gears down, and brought the truck to a stop in a spray of dirt, rocks, and potato plants.
Bentley watched, horrified. He ran across the highway and into the field as plumes of dust were settling around the damaged truck.
The driver opened the cab door. The song of a lark trilled across the hushed morning. The driver unhooked the microphone of his CB radio and called the police.
He lowered himself to the ground. He didn’t want to look at the highway for fear he’d see a crushed little body. He walked the length of the truck. The rear wheels were buckled inward. The stink of scorched brakes filled the air. Gears and parts of the transmission box littered the oily path gouged through the new growth. The driver walked past the end of the truck. He saw a brown-haired boy standing fifteen feet away, staring at him.
“I’m really sorry,” Bentley said. “I didn’t mean to…”
The driver looked back at him in the widening morning light. Any normal kid who’d caused a bad accident would have run like hell. This kid was weird. “Don’t move,” the driver said.
“Okay,” Bentley answered. He was in shock. “I thought you’d gotten hurt or something.”
Bentley nodded. He knew that he was doomed.
He and the driver were still standing in the morning light, looking at each other, when McGraw arrived. The police chief inspected the damage and radioed for a tow truck. He was elated because the driver’s account of the accident gave substance to what McGraw had been saying for years. The Ellicott kid was crazy.
McGraw put Bentley in the front seat of his cruiser. Bentley didn’t say anything on the way home. He was burning with humiliation.
It has begun!
The sun was plashing hot light on the sea as McGraw rang the doorbell of the Ellicott house. Helga clutched the top of her bathrobe and looked frightened when she saw Bentley standing on the porch beside the tall, heavy police chief. She went to wake Richard.
Bentley ate his breakfast at the kitchen table. He felt small, stupid, and ashamed. He didn’t answer when Helga asked him what had happened. He listened to the low decibels of male conversation coming from the living room.
After a while he heard his father and McGraw walk into the front hall. The police chief said, “I’m taking your word you’ll do something about him, Professor. If you don’t, the county will.”
When McGraw had gone, Richard came to the kitchen door in his bathrobe and pajamas. Bentley saw the expression in his father’s eyes. He looked down at a soggy cornflake floating at the bottom of his cereal bowl. His embarrassment got hotter as his father and Helga waited for him to explain.
He wanted to. But the cavern angel had warned him not to tell his secret unless he was offered love sealed with silence or unless somebody recognized what he really was. Bentley knew that his father and Helga loved him. But he knew they wouldn’t believe him. He tried to think something about the cornflake so that he could stop thinking about how alone he was.
 
Copyright © 1982 by Roderick McLeish