What did she mean by that? Ferguson wondered. The only other people connected to the store were Uncle Lew and Uncle Arnold, his father’s brothers, and brothers didn’t rob one another, did they? Things like that simply didn’t happen.
Your father had a terrible decision to make, his mother said. Either drop the charges and the insurance claim or send Arnold to prison. What do you think he did?
He dropped the charges and didn’t send Arnold to prison.
Of course not. He never would have dreamed of it. But you understand now why he’s been so upset.
A week after Ferguson had this conversation with his mother, she told him that Uncle Arnold and Aunt Joan were moving to Los Angeles. She would miss Joan, his mother said, but it was probably better this way, since the damage that had been done was beyond repair. Two months after Arnold and Joan left for California, Uncle Lew smashed up his white Cadillac on the Garden State Parkway and died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, and before anyone could comprehend how swiftly the gods accomplished their work when they had nothing better to do, the Ferguson clan had been blown to bits.
1.2
When Ferguson was six, his mother told the story of how she had nearly lost him. Not lost in the sense of not knowing where he was but lost in the sense of being dead, of exiting this world and floating up to heaven as a bodiless spirit. He wasn’t yet a year and a half old, she said, and one night he began running a fever, a low fever that rapidly shot up to a high fever, just over 106, an alarming temperature even for a small child, and so she and his father bundled him up and drove him to the hospital, where he started going into convulsions, which easily could have done him in, for even the doctor who removed his tonsils that night said it was touch-and-go, meaning that he couldn’t be certain whether Ferguson would live or die, that it was all in God’s hands now, and his mother was so scared, she told him, so horribly scared she would lose her little boy that she nearly went out of her mind.
That was the worst moment, she said, the one time when she believed the world could actually come to an end, but there were other rough spots as well, a whole list of unforeseen jolts and mishaps, and then she began enumerating the various accidents that had befallen him as a young child, several of which could have killed him or maimed him, choking on an unchewed sliver of steak, for example, or the piece of broken glass that went through the bottom of his foot and required fourteen stitches, or the time he tripped and fell on a rock, which tore open his left cheek and required eleven stitches, or the bee sting that swelled his eyes shut, or the day last summer when he was learning how to swim and nearly drowned when his cousin Andrew pushed him under the water, and each time his mother recounted one of these events, she would pause for a moment and ask Ferguson if he remembered, and the fact was that he did remember, remembered nearly all of them as if they had happened only yesterday.
It was mid-June when they had this conversation, three days after Ferguson had fallen out of the oak tree in the backyard and broken his left leg, and what his mother was trying to demonstrate by going through this litany of small catastrophes was that whenever he had hurt himself in the past he had always gotten better, that his body had hurt for a while and then had stopped hurting, and that was precisely what was going to happen with his leg. Too bad he had to be in a cast, of course, but eventually the cast would come off and he would be as good as new. Ferguson wanted to know how long it would take before that happened, and his mother said a month or so, which was an extremely vague and unsatisfactory answer, he felt, a month being one cycle of the moon, which might be tolerable if the weather didn’t become too hot, but or so meant even longer than that, an indefinite and therefore unbearable length of time. Before he could get himself fully worked up over the injustice of it all, however, his mother asked him a question, a strange question, perhaps the strangest question anyone had ever asked him.
Are you angry at yourself, Archie, or angry at the tree?
What a perplexing thing to throw at a boy who hadn’t even finished kindergarten. Angry? Why should he be angry at anything? Why couldn’t he just feel sad?
His mother smiled. She was happy he didn’t hold it against the tree, she said, because she loved that tree, she and his father both loved that tree, and they had bought this house in West Orange mostly because of the big backyard, and the best and most beautiful thing about the backyard was the towering oak that stood in the center of it. Three and a half years ago, when she and his father had decided to leave the apartment in Newark and buy a house in the suburbs, they had looked in several towns, Montclair and Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange, but none of those places had the right house for them, they felt weary and discouraged from looking at so many wrong houses, and then they came to this house and knew it was the one for them. She was glad he wasn’t angry at the tree, she said, because if he had been angry she would have been forced to chop it down. Why chop it down? Ferguson asked, beginning to laugh now at the thought of his mother chopping down such a large tree, his beautiful mother dressed in work clothes as she assaulted the oak with an enormous, gleaming axe. Because I’m on your side, Archie, she said, and any enemy of yours is an enemy of mine.
The next day, his father returned from 3 Brothers Home World with an air conditioner for Ferguson’s room. It’s getting hot out there, his father said, meaning he wanted his son to be comfortable as he languished on the bed in his cast, and it would also help with his hay fever, his father continued, preventing pollen from entering the room, for Ferguson’s nose was highly sensitive to the airborne irritants that emanated from grass and dust and flowers, and the less he sneezed during his convalescence, the less his broken bone would hurt, since a sneeze was a powerful force, and a big one could resonate throughout your entire body, from the top of your whiplashed head to the tips of your toes. The six-year-old Ferguson watched his father go about the business of installing the air conditioner in the window to the right of the desk, a far more elaborate operation than he would have imagined, which began with the removal of the screen window and called upon such things as a tape measure, a pencil, a drill, a caulking gun, two strips of unpainted wood, a screwdriver, and several screws, and Ferguson was impressed by how quickly and carefully his father worked, as if his hands understood what to do without any instructions from his mind, autonomous hands, as it were, endowed with their own special knowledge, and then came the moment to hoist the large metallic cube off the ground and mount it in the window, such a heavy object to lift, Ferguson thought, but his father managed it without any apparent strain, and as he completed the job with the screwdriver and the caulking gun, his father hummed the song he always hummed when he fixed things around the house, an old Al Jolson number called Sonny Boy — You’ve no way of knowing / There’s no way of showing / What you mean to me Sonny. His father bent down to pick up an extra screw that had fallen on the floor, and when he stood up straight again he suddenly grabbed the small of his back with his right hand. Och un vai, he said, I think I’ve strained a muscle. The cure for strained muscles was to lie flat on your back for several minutes, his father told him, preferably on a hard surface, and since the hardest surface in the room was the floor, his father promptly lay down on the floor next to Ferguson’s bed. What an unusual vantage that was, to be looking down at his father stretched out on the floor below him, and as Ferguson leaned over the edge of the bed and studied his father’s grimacing face, he decided to ask a question, a question he had thought of several times in the past month but had never found the proper moment to ask: What had his father done before he became the boss of 3 Brothers Home World? He saw his father’s eyes roam across the ceiling, as if searching for an answer to the question, and then Ferguson noticed the muscles around his father’s mouth pulling downward, which was a familiar gesture to him, an indication that his father was struggling to suppress a smile, which in turn meant that something unexpected was about to happen. I was a big-game hunter, his father said, calmly and flatly, betraying no sign that he was about to launch into the most egregious load of nonsense he had ever imparted to his son, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes he reminisced about lions, tigers, and elephants, the sweltering heat of Africa, hacking his way through dense jungles, crossing the Sahara on foot, scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, the time when he was nearly swallowed whole by a giant snake, and the other time when he was captured by cannibals and was about to be thrown into a pot of boiling water, but at the last minute he managed to wriggle out of the vines that were strapped around his wrists and ankles, outran his murderous captors, and disappeared into the thick of the jungle, and the other time when he was on his last safari before coming home to marry Ferguson’s mother and was lost in the darkest heart of Africa, which was known as the dark continent, and wandered onto a broad, endless savanna where he saw a herd of grazing dinosaurs, the last dinosaurs left on earth. Ferguson was old enough to know that dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years, but the other stories seemed plausible to him, not necessarily true, perhaps, but possibly true, and therefore worthy of being believed — perhaps. Then his mother walked into the room, and when she saw Ferguson’s father lying on the floor, she asked him if anything was wrong with his back. No, no, he said, I’m just resting, and then he stood up as if his back were indeed fine, walked over to the window, and turned on the air conditioner.