Yes, the air conditioner cooled off the room and cut down on sneezes, and because it was cooler his leg didn’t itch as much under the plaster cast, but there were drawbacks to living in a refrigerated chamber as well, the noise first of all, which was a queer and confusing noise, since there were times when he heard it and times when he didn’t, but when he did hear it he found it monotonous and unpleasant, but worse than that there was the matter of the windows, which had to remain shut in order to keep the cool air in, and because they were permanently closed and the motor was perpetually running, he couldn’t hear the birds singing outside, and the only good thing about being cooped up in his room with a cast on his leg was listening to the birds in the trees just beyond his window, the twittering, chanting, warbling birds who made what Ferguson felt were the most beautiful sounds in the world. The air-conditioning had its pluses and minuses, then, its benefits and hardships, and as with so many other things the world doled out to him in the course of his life, it was, as his mother often put it, a mixed blessing.
What bothered him most about falling out of the tree was that it needn’t have happened. Ferguson could accept pain and suffering when he felt they were necessary, such as throwing up when he was sick or letting Dr. Guston jab a needle into his arm for a shot of penicillin, but unnecessary pain violated the principles of good sense, which made it both stupid and intolerable. A part of him was tempted to blame Chuckie Brower for the accident, but in the end Ferguson realized that was no more than a feeble excuse, for what difference did it make that Chuckie had dared him to climb the tree? Ferguson had accepted the dare, which meant he had wanted to climb the tree, had chosen to climb the tree, and therefore he himself was responsible for what had happened. Never mind that Chuckie had promised to follow Ferguson up if Ferguson went first and then had backed down from his promise, claiming he was scared, that the branches were too far apart and he wasn’t tall enough to reach them, but the fact that Chuckie hadn’t followed him up was immaterial, for even if he had been there, how could he have prevented Ferguson from falling? So Ferguson fell, he lost his grip while reaching for a branch that was at most one quarter of an inch beyond the point where he would have been able to grasp it securely, lost his grip and fell, and now he was lying in bed with his left leg imprisoned by a plaster cast that would remain a part of his body for a month or so, meaning more than a month, and there was no one to blame for this misfortune but himself.
He accepted the blame, understood that his present condition was entirely his own fault, but that was a far cry from saying the accident couldn’t have been avoided. Stupid, that’s what it was, just plain stupid to have forged on with his climbing when he couldn’t fully reach the next branch, but if the branch had been one particle of an inch closer to him, it wouldn’t have been stupid. If Chuckie hadn’t rung his doorbell that morning and asked him to come outside and play, it wouldn’t have been stupid. If his parents had moved to one of the other towns where they had been looking for the right house, he wouldn’t even know Chuckie Brower, wouldn’t even know that Chuckie Brower existed, and it wouldn’t have been stupid, for the tree he had climbed wouldn’t have been in his backyard. Such an interesting thought, Ferguson said to himself: to imagine how things could be different for him even though he was the same. The same boy in a different house with a different tree. The same boy with different parents. The same boy with the same parents who didn’t do the same things they did now. What if his father was still a big-game hunter, for example, and they all lived in Africa? What if his mother was a famous movie actress and they all lived in Hollywood? What if he had a brother or a sister? What if his Great-uncle Archie hadn’t died and his own name wasn’t Archie? What if he had fallen out of the same tree and had broken two legs instead of one? What if he had broken both arms and both legs? What if he had been killed? Yes, anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn’t mean they couldn’t happen in another. Everything could be different. The world could be the same world, and yet if he hadn’t fallen out of the tree, it would be a different world for him, and if he had fallen out of the tree and hadn’t just broken his leg but had wound up killing himself, not only would the world be different for him, there would be no world for him to live in anymore, and how sad his mother and father would be when they carried him to the graveyard and buried his body in the ground, so sad that they would go on weeping for forty days and forty nights, for forty months, for four hundred and forty years.
There was a week and a half to go before the end of school and the beginning of summer vacation, which meant he wouldn’t miss enough time to flunk kindergarten because of too many absences. That was something to be thankful for, his mother said, and surely she was right, but Ferguson wasn’t in a thankful mood during those first days after the accident, with no friends to talk to except in the late afternoon when Chuckie Brower would stop by with his little brother to look at the cast, with his father gone from morning to night because he was at work, with his mother driving off for several hours a day in search of a vacant shop to house the photography studio she was planning to open in the fall, with the housekeeper Wanda mostly busy with her washing and cleaning except when she brought lunch up to Ferguson at noon and helped him empty his bladder by holding the milk bottle he was supposed to pee into instead of doing his business in the bathroom, such indignities he had to bear, all for the stupid mistake of having fallen out of a tree, and to add to his frustration there was the fact that he hadn’t yet learned to read, which would have been a good way to pass the time, and with the television downstairs in the living room, inaccessible, temporarily out of bounds, Ferguson spent his days musing on the imponderable questions of the universe, drawing pictures of airplanes and cowboys, and practicing how to write by copying the sheet of letters his mother had made for him.