John D. MacDonald

Begin Again

One by one and in little groups they all came to see him, the aunts and uncles and cousins and the friends of his mother and father.

Once in a while the kids he had played with came to see him, with a mother along who wouldn’t let them get too close to the bed. Of course, all this was after the bad part was over, the hot part where things were all funny and disconnected and you couldn’t tell whether it was early or late or even Sunday.

It wasn’t hard, really. He had learned to smile politely when they said some of the silly things, and he had learned to thank them for the stuff they brought him. He heard Aunt Harriet in the hall outside his bedroom saying to his mother, “...such a shame for an active boy like Robert to be cooped up so long. I bet he’s dying to get out there and run around with the kids. And I know how hard it is on you...”

She had walked out of earshot, giving him a chance to think of what she had said. Thinking was a different sort of thing when you were in bed. You could take a thought and sort of hold it up and look at the shape of it, slowly and carefully.

He didn’t particularly miss running around. Every day he could hear the yelling when school let out. It didn’t hurt to think about it. Every day was long, but not too long, when you learned how to make little things last. The best part of the day was when his father came home from the office.

When the hands of the clock on the little table pointed to four, he began to think about it. He didn’t let himself think about it before four. When the thought jumped into his head, he pushed it back down out of sight until after four. From four o’clock on, he thought of something to say to his father. It was always something funny. But, somehow, he never got to say it.

It was always the same. His father would tramp into the bedroom, huge and dark.

“How do you feel today, kid?” he would boom.

Robert would say, “Fine, dad,” wishing his voice wasn’t so small.

Then there was the usual joke, when his father said, “Gosh, I sure wish I could spend every day in a nice soft bed. You got it easy, kid.” Then he would laugh and Robert would laugh, and after he had left the room, Robert would hear the distant rustle of the evening paper as his father opened it up in the living room. It was the best part of the day.

At last Dr. Hinkle told his mother that she could prop him up into a sitting position for an hour each day and he should have something to do, with his hands. For a week there were coloring books, clay, and puzzles that had to be fitted together or taken apart. Robert worked on them dutifully, but they weren’t satisfying.

One night his father came home with a big board, wax paper, some glass cement, and two boxes of kitchen matches with the heads removed. He laid them proudly on the foot of the bed and boomed, “Know what that stuff is, kid?”

“No, dad.”

“Once, when I was a sick kid, my old man fixed me up with the same layout. Here’s what you’re to do. You take the matches and the cement and build yourself a big fort on this board. Glue the matches right to the wood. Make buildings inside the fort and when you want windows and stuff, cut them out of the wax paper. Every night I’ll inspect the progress of construction and on Sundays I’ll help you for an hour. Then, when you’re well, we’ll take the whole works out in the back yard and be Indians setting fire to the fort. You ought to see one burn! Just like a real one. How do you like that?”

Robert couldn’t find the words to tell how much he liked it. The next day, when he could sit up for an hour, his hands shook so with excitement that he couldn’t get the matches started properly.

The next day was better. He found that it was best to set in one match, and then shift to another part, giving the first part a chance to dry.

On Sunday he couldn’t do much. Having his father sitting there working with him made his hands tremble again. He was awkward.

At the end of the second week they let him sit up for two hours, one hour on the edge of the bed with a blanket wrapped around his legs. The first time, he felt dizzy and lightheaded. The floor looked miles away and the familiar room looked odd from this new angle. Meanwhile the buildings on the big board took shape. He decided on six of them, three on either side of the main street down through the center of the fort. He begged a sharp knife and used it to cut the matches to the exact size he needed.

When the people came about the brace for his leg, four of the houses were done and he had started on the fifth. He was shy about his leg, it looked so awfully thin, like one of the matches, but they didn’t seem to notice how thin it was. They made measurements and came back two days later and fitted the brace to the thin leg, telling his mother something about “Merely the problem of getting used to it.”

When his father saw the shiny brace of metal and leather and padding, he got a funny tight expression around his nose and mouth, as though he were about to sneeze.

As the buildings in the fort grew, Robert would stop and put his cheek down on the board and shut the higher eye. It was as though he were one of the people who lived inside the fort. The buildings were high above him. In that way he discovered that some of the doors were too big compared with the windows, and he changed them.

One day his mother stood in front of him as he sat on the edge of the bed. He didn’t have the blanket wrapped around his legs. She held out her hands and he took them and she pulled him up to his feet. He swayed and would have fallen if it hadn’t been for her hands. On the next day he stood a bit longer, and on the third day, with Dr. Hinkle there, he learned how to take a step with the brace on his leg. It was really very simple. It was just a case of stepping off first with the leg which didn’t have a brace. Then you lifted your hip so that it pulled the brace off the floor. It would swing by itself, out in front of you, and then you lowered your hip quickly so that the metal ends struck the floor and the brace stayed out in front of you. It hurt to step on it, but not too badly. Not badly at all.

By the first day of spring, the wall around the fort was finished, and with bits of copper wire for hinges Robert was building a gate that would swing. His father had tired of the meticulous work, and while he came in to watch him for a time each Sunday, he didn’t help. Each time he would say, “Kid, that’s going to burn like mad. We’ll have us a time.” Each time he said it, Robert felt a small inside contraction as though a big hand were closing around his stomach. But each time he smiled and agreed that it would make a dandy fire.

The first day of spring was also the first day that he could stay dressed all day and walk to any part of the house. He liked walking in on the rugs but not out on the kitchen linoleum. The brace made too much noise on the linoleum. He could almost stop thinking about it when he walked on the rugs.

He used brown water color on the matches and it wasn’t right. He mixed black with it and it was exactly right. It made the six houses, the wall, the gate, the towers all look as though they were made of logs. He painted the surface of the big board a grass green. With your eyes almost shut, so that everything looked misty, it did look like grass.

His father came home at noon on a warm and sunny Saturday. He smiled down at the fort, rubbed his big hands together, and said, “Kid, it looks like today’s the day. We’ll have us a fire. I got some color film left and I’ll use a portrait lens and we’ll sell the pictures to the movies for a million dollars.”

This time Robert didn’t smile and agree. He opened his mouth and, to his intense surprise, a loud, shrill “No!” came out.

He glanced up at his father and saw that his father’s face had gone all smooth, as it always did when he was annoyed. “What’s the matter, kid?”

“I... I don’t want to burn it. I want to keep it,” he said, dismayed at the sound of tears in his own voice.

His father turned to the door and said quietly, “Certainly, Robert. It’s yours. Do anything you want.” Robert stood alone in the room, looking down at the fort. He brushed slowly at the houses with his hand, hearing the crackling noise as he swept them into jagged piles of discolored matches. He noticed that most of the matches were unbroken, that it was the glue which had parted, and suddenly he knew that he had to build again — not a fort but a great house, tall and strong and beautiful. He knew that when he had completed this house which was growing in his mind, no one in the world could bear to destroy it.

With his teeth clamped down tightly on his lower lip, he began to separate the whole matches from those which had been broken.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Begin Again