Pilgrimage

" 'And disbelieve enough'?" His words followed me. "Don't you mean 'believe enough'?"
"Don't strain your pattern," I called back. "It's 'disbelieve.'"
Of course I felt silly the next morning at the breakfast table, but Dr. Curtis didn't refer to the conversation so I didn't either. He was discussing renting a jeep for his hunting trip and leaving his car to be fixed.
"Tell Bill you'll be back a week before you plan to," said O1' Hank. "Then your car will be ready when you do get back."
The Francher kid was in the group of people who gathered to watch Bill transfer Dr. Curtis' gear from the car to the jeep. As usual he was a little removed from the rest, lounging against a tree. Dr. Curtis finally came out, his .30-06 under one arm and his heavy hunting jacket under the other. Anna and I leaned over our side fence watching the whole procedure. I saw the Francher kid straighten slowly, his hands leaving his pockets as he stared at Dr. Curtis. One hand went out tentatively and then faltered. Dr. Curtis inserted himself in the seat of the jeep and fumbled at the knobs on the dashboard. "Which one's the radio?" he asked Bill
"Radio? In this jeep?" Bill laughed.
"But the music-" Dr. Curtis paused for a split second, then turned on the ignition. "Have to make my own, I guess," he laughed.
The jeep roared into life, and the small group scattered as he wheeled it in reverse across the yard. In the pause as he shifted gears, he glanced sideways at me and our eyes met. It was a very brief encounter, but he asked questions and I answered with my unknowing and he exploded in a kind of wonderment-all in the moment between reverse and low.
We watched the dust boil up behind the jeep as it growled its way down to the highway. "Well," Anna said, "a-hunting we do go indeed!" "Who's he?" The Francher kid's hands were tight on the top of the fence, a blind sort of look on his face. "I don't know," I said. "His name is Dr. Curtis." "He's heard music before." "I should hope so," Anna said. "That music?" I asked the Francher kid. "Yes," he nearly sobbed. "Yes!" "He'll he back," I said. "He has to get his car." "Well," Anna sighed. "The words are the words of English but the sense is the sense of confusion.
Coffee, anybody?" That afternoon the Francher kid joined me, wordlessly, as I struggled up the rise above the boardinghouse for a little wideness of horizon to counteract the day's shut-in-ness.
I would rather have walked alone, partly because of a need for silence and partly because he just couldn't ever keep his-accusing?-eyes off my crutches. But he didn't trespass upon my attention as so many people would have, so I didn't mind too much. I leaned, panting, against a gray granite boulder and let the fresh-from-distant-snow breeze lift my hair as I caught my breath. Then I huddled down into my coat, warming my ears. The Francher kid had a handful of pebbles and was lobbing them at the scattered rusty tin cans that dotted the hillside. After one pebble turned a square corner to hit a can he spoke.
"If he knows the name of the instrument, then-" He lost his words. "What is the name?" I asked, rubbing my nose where my coat collar had tickled it. "It really isn't a word. It's just two sounds it makes." "Well, then, make me a word. 'Musical instrument' is mighty unmusical and unhandy." The Francher kid listened, his head tilted, his lips moving. "I suppose you could call it a 'rappoor,' " he said, softening the a. "But it isn't that." " 'Rappoor,' " I said. "Of course you know by now we don't have any such instrument." I was intrigued
at having been drawn into another Francher-type conversation. I was developing quite a taste for them.
"It's probably just something your mother dreamed up for you." "And for that doctor?" "Ummm." My mental wheels spun, tractionless. "What do you think?" "I almost know that there are some more like Mother. Some who know 'the madness and the dream,'
too." "'Dr. Curtis??' I asked. "No," he said slowly, rubbing his hand along the boulder. "No, I could feel a faraway, strange-to-me feeling with him. He's like you. He-he knows someone who
knows, but he doesn't know." "Well, thanks. He's a nice bird to be a feather of. Then it's all very simple. When he comes back you ask
him who he knows." "Yes-" The Francher kid drew a tremulous breath. '"Yes!" We eased down the hillside, talking money and music. The Francher kid had enough saved up to buy a
good instrument of some kind-but what kind? He was immersed in tones and timbres and ranges and
keys and the possibility of sometime finding a something that would sound like a rappoor. We paused at the foot of the hill. Impulsively I spoke. "Francher, why do you talk with me?" I wished the words back before I finished them. Words have a
ghastly way of shattering delicate situations and snapping tenuous bonds. He lobbed a couple more stones against the bank and turned away, hands in his pockets. His words
came back to me after I had given them up. "You don't hate me-yet."
I was jarred. I suppose I had imagined all the people around the Francher kid were getting acquainted with him as I was, but his words made me realize differently. After that I caught at every conversation that included the Francher kid, and alerted at every mention of his name. It shook me to find that to practically everyone he was still juvenile delinquent, lazy trash, no-good off-scouring, potential criminal, burden. By some devious means it had been decided that he was responsible for all the odd happenings in town. I asked a number of people how the kid could possibly have done it. The only answer I got was, "The Francher kid can do anything-bad."
Even Anna still found him an unwelcome burden in her classroom despite the fact that he was finally functioning on a fairly acceptable level academically.
Here I'd been thinking-heaven knows why!-that he was establishing himself in the community. Instead he was doing well to hold his own. I reviewed to myself all that had happened since first I met him, and found hardly a thing that would be positive in the eyes of the general public.
"Why," I thought to myself, "I'm darned lucky he's kept out of the hands of the law!" And my stomach knotted coldly at what might happen if the Francher kid ever did step over into out-and-out lawlessness. There's something insidiously sweet to the adolescent in flouting authority, and I wanted no such appetite for any My Child of mine.
Well, the next few days after Dr. Curtis left were typical hunting-weather days. Minutes of sunshine and shouting autumn colors-hours of cloud and rain and near snow and raw aching winds. Reports came of heavy snow across Mingus Mountain, and Dogietown was snowed in for the winter, a trifle earlier than usual. We watched our own first flakes idle down, then whip themselves to tears against the huddled houses. It looked as though all excitement and activity were about to be squeezed out of Willow Springs by the drab grayness of winter.
Then the unexpected, which sometimes splashes our grayness with scarlet, happened. The big dude-ranch school, the Half Circle Star, that occupied the choicest of the range land in our area, invited all the school kids out to a musical splurge. They had imported an orchestra that played concerts as well as being a very good dance band, and they planned a gala weekend with a concert Friday evening followed by a dance for the teeners Saturday night. The ranch students were usually kept aloof from the town kids, poor little tikes. They were mostly unwanted or maladjusted children whose parents could afford to get rid of them with a flourish under the guise of giving them the advantage of growing up in healthful surroundings.