life, and Elaine never came back again. Nothing was said to Prosper. A
week later, school started.
The bus that made its rounds through his part of town picking up the
students of the special health class arrived at the school building a little
after all the other students were beginning their classes—Prosper and
the others walking or rolling in could hear them reciting in unison
somewhere—and it returned for them just before three o’clock, was
awaiting them just beyond the ramp, engine running, when they were
dismissed: they’d begun climbing or being lifted aboard by the driver
and his husky helper even as the bell of the school exploded like a giant
alarm clock and the kids inside poured shrieking out. Some of those
aboard the bus looked out longingly at the games forming up on the
playground, one perhaps naming a child out there among the capture-
the-flag or pitch-penny gangs who had once said something pleasant to
him or to her; Prosper wouldn’t do that. He was he, they were they.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 149
Back home again he went to his room and took up his work where
the day before he had left off.
He’d learned a lot from his book of Commercial Art and Studio
Skills, and what of it he couldn’t understand he made his own sense
of. He used all the tools and the inks and the papers, the French
Curve, the Mat Knife, but what he loved best were the Ruling Pens,
which made the perfect even lines he saw in columns of type and
bordering newspaper ads, squared at each end as though trimmed by
scissors. He’d later learn that his method of using them was all his
own—like a man who learns to play a guitar the wrong way around—
but he got good at it. You turned a little dial atop the nib to narrow
or broaden the stripe it scribed. He still never tried to make pictures,
or copy nature, or draw faces. He created the letterheads of imagi-
nary companies (ACME with beautiful winged A). But most of his
time was spent producing, with great care and increasing realism, the
documents—tax stamps, stock certificates, bank checks (he’d studied
forms for these in sample books that May in puzzlement brought
home for him)—of a nonexistent country. Once it had been a real
place, he’d found its name in a ragged set of books on the shelf called
the People’s Cyclopedia: the Sabine Free State. At some past time it
had been part of the territory of Louisiana. The Sabine Free State had
been the home of the Redbone people, though no more, and no one
knew where the Redbones who had once lived there had come from,
or where they had gone. As he drew and lettered and crosshatched
with precision he could see in his imagination the places and people
of the Sabine Free State, the streets of the capital, the white-hatted
men and white-dressed women like those in magazine pictures of hot
places; the brown rivers and the cone of an extinct volcano, Bea’s
postcards of Mexico showed him those; the files of dark Redbone
women bearing baskets of fruit on their heads. He saw all that, but
what he drew were only the visas, permits, railroad shares, docu-
ments headed with the crest of the state: wings, and a badge, and a
curling banner with the unintelligible motto that all such things
seemed to have, Ars Gratia Artis, E Pluribus Unum. The motto of
the Sabine Free State he took from what May and Bea had first spelled
out on the Ouija board that guided their meditations: Fenix
Vigaron.
150 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Prosper went to the special class in the school for two years. Bea and
May gave him valuable advice on how to pay attention and please
those in authority without yielding up your Inner Self to them. He
was among the most able in that class, as he was among the least in
his old school, which somehow didn’t seem to add up to an advan-
tage, but it gave him a certain standing with the girls. In the boys’
toilet he learned what he would learn of the vocabulary employed in
what Bea called the gutter, trying to work out the meaning of each
new term without admitting he didn’t have it down already, and fall-
ing for some common jokes ( ’D you suck my dick if I washed it? No?
Dirty cocksucker! ). Then in the next year there was no city or state
money for it any longer, no money for anything, and certainly not for
a special health bus and a special class; tax revenues had evaporated
just as the welfare services were overwhelmed with desperate need,
more every day, husbands deserting families to go try to find work
somewhere and just disappearing, children living on coffee and crack-
ers and pickles, pitiable older men in nice suits with upright bearing
and faces of suppressed dismay as though unable to believe they’d
come to ask the city for food and shelter. May saw her pay cut; there
was not a big call to furnish new offices. Bea’s commission on per-
fumes and oils went down.
What would the two aunts do with him now? Miss Mack had
shaken her head wordlessly when Bea brought up the State School as a
possibility. But she did tell them (with some reluctance, it was easy to
see) about a Home in another part of town, and May one hot day,
without telling Bea, took a trolley out. Just to look at it. She’d never
been inside such a place, had only seen them in the movies or read
about them in novels, where orphans and crippled children were helped
by warmhearted baseball-playing priests, tough hurt boys who learned
and grew. The place itself when she reached it was smaller than she’d
expected, just a plain brick building amid old streets in a featureless
neighborhood. The first thing she noticed was that the windows were
barred: even the wide balconies that might have been nice places to sit
were fenced with wire barriers. Alarm made her tongue-tied, and she
asked the wrong questions of the torpid caretaker, and was refused a
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 151
look around, though she could hear a faint uproar. She’d have to make
an application, she was told. Couldn’t she just meet some of the chil-
dren? Perhaps if she came on visiting day. Bea was feeling faint with
sorrow, as though the walls were soaked with it. She seemed to smell
cat piss, though there were no cats here.
She wandered, trying to peer down bleak corridors and into rooms.
She got a glimpse of a line of girls being taken from a classroom, she
thought, to somewhere else. The girls were dressed alike in gray jump-
ers washed a thousand times, their hair cut short, for lice maybe.
Coldly strict as their teacher was she couldn’t get them to march
straight. So many different things were wrong with them May couldn’t
distinguish. One looked back at May, dull drawn face, wide-set eyes: a
mongoloid, perhaps, but surely a soul, what would become of her.
May went home in the awful heat and never spoke of her trip. She
convinced Bea it’d be all right, that Prosper was old enough to stay
home alone; they’d get lessons from the school if they could, and do the
best they could when they could.
By then Prosper was almost fourteen, and should have been going
into high school, even if the actual grades he’d passed through didn’t
add up to that. The high school had never had provision for special
cases like his; if he reached the eighth grade he was considered to have