Gene's parents were nearly the same height, but his father was squarely built, dark and muscular, whereas his mother was small-boned and had thick auburn hair, now turning gray. Her skin was very pale and fine, and she had bright blue eyes. Gene was their only child. She told him, weeping, about her two stillborn daughters, and he used to imagine that he would meet them in heaven. His birth had been so difficult, she told him, that she could never have another baby. He felt guilty about this, and resolved to make it up to her by being a good son, but he forgot this whenever he was angry with her.
Gene's father was a carpenter; he had a shop in the garage where Gene often sat and watched him work. Gene loved the aromatic smells of cut pine, glue and shellac, and he liked to watch the clean white shavings curl out under the plane. When he was still very young his father began letting him help with small tasks, carrying boards from the stack, measuring, clamping pieces together to be glued. He let Gene use the hand-saw and play at nailing boards together. One day when he was busy, he said, "Cut this piece eighteen and seven-eighths inches for me, Gene, can you do that?" Feeling proud and honored, the boy measured the board and sawed it, but when he brought it to his father, it was too short; he had made a mistake in the measurement. "Well, that's ruined," his father said, and threw the piece down.
Gene's eyes filled with tears. "I can fix it," he said.
"No, you can't." His father went to the other side of the room for another board.
Gene picked up the rejected piece and laid it on the worktable beside the frame his father was making. He reached into the shadows to a place where he had cut it correctly; it jumped a little and was longer. "Look, Dad," he said, "it's all right."
At first Gene's father would not come; when Gene insisted, he looked at the board impatiently, then stared at it, picked it up, and finally measured it with his steel rule. He knew it was the same board because of the two knots near one end. There was something in his mind that he would not let himself think.
"It's all right, isn't it?" Gene asked. He was afraid, and didn't know why.
"Yes, it is," Gene's father said slowly. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. "I must be getting tired. Gene, you go on out and play."
From these things he learned that his power was somehow dangerous and shameful, and he kept it a secret. For a long time he did not even use it when he was alone, unless he had lost some toy and wanted to bring it back. Once or twice it happened by itself, and that disturbed him.
He often daydreamed that he was a magical changeling, a prince given away in infancy, and that someday his real father would come to take him away to his kingdom, or perhaps would touch Gene on the forehead while he was asleep, conferring on him some power greater than he could imagine.
In the first grade he was a foot taller than any of the other children. The desks were too small for him; he had to sit sideways with his legs in the aisle. On the first day, the teacher gave all the children strips of purple and yellow paper and showed them how to make paper chains, first a purple link, then a yellow one. Gene liked the yellow ones best, and made his chain all of yellow. A girl across the aisle showed it to the teacher and said, "He's doing it wrong."
Later they were coloring in their books; there was a picture of a rabbit; Gene colored its fur blue, as the teacher had told them, but he made the insides of its ears yellow instead of pink. When the teacher came by to look at their work, the same girl said, "Look, he's doing it wrong again. He can't do anything right, can he?"
The teacher said, "That's all right, Dolores; he can do it that way if he wants to," but when she was gone the girl stuck out her tongue. Gene was angry, and turned all her crayons to yellow ones. When she saw them, she called to the teacher that he had taken her crayons. Gene denied it, and the teacher brought her other crayons, but as soon as her back was turned Gene changed them to yellow too. She began to scream, and the teacher moved Gene all the way across the room. From that day on, the other children understood that he was a troublemaker. They began calling him "Big Feet," then just "Feet." They were not brave enough to attack him, because he was so much bigger, but they threw stones at him from behind, and when he chased them they scattered, shouting, "Fee-eet, Fee-eet, can't sit in his sea-eat."
After a few weeks of this he discovered an overgrown corner of the playground where he could lie hidden, and then he spent every recess there, pulling sweet grass stems and sucking the nectar. He daydreamed often of sending himself into another world, but his power was not strong enough for that: the largest thing he had ever turned from one world into another was the piece of wood for his father, and afterward he had had a headache. Even with smaller things, if he used his power too often, he became weak and dizzy.
After school and on weekends life was better; there was a group of neighborhood children of mixed ages, none of whom were Gene's classmates, and they did not mind his being tall. In the winter they went sledding and had snowball fights, and made snowmen that melted little by little until they were only slumped mounds in their circles of grass. In the long summer evenings they played King of the Hill, Red Light and hide-and-seek. He never forgot the scent of the tall lilacs in the dusk, and the lonesome sound of "All-ee-all-ee-out's in free."
Long after the other children had left it behind, he was still engrossed by the world of small things. There were different sorts of grasses that were good to suck: one kind slipped with a sliding sweetness out of its sheath, and another would only break. There was a weed growing close to the ground that bore tiny grayish-green buttons, and these buttons were also good to eat. He learned to stretch a grass-blade tight between his thumbs pressed together as if in prayer, and then by blowing into the hollow between the first and second joints of his thumbs, to make a shattering squawk. Noises could be made with the bitter milky stems of dandelions, too, and with the stalks of green onions.
He never had a tricycle, because by the time he was old enough he was too big. When he was seven his parents gave him a bicycle, and all that summer he explored the country roads across the river and into the hills.
Often he left his bicycle beside the road and walked up a little way into the woods. When he sat down with the trees all around him, he had a curious feeling that they were aware of him as he was of them, or at least that there was some intelligence watching him. This feeling disturbed him, and he never stayed long in the woods, but he kept on going there because he needed solitude.
Even in town, however, there were quiet places where he could be alone. One of them was the long tree-shaded lawn below the library, where he sat for hours reading books of fairy tales. The library had a set of Grimm, with old-fashioned engraved illustrations that were all the more mysterious because they were so dark and badly printed. He avoided stories about giants -- they were always monsters, to be outwitted or killed by the hero -- but he liked stories about the Little People, their trickiness and magical powers, and he liked the "Brownie" books of Palmer Cox. The verses were labored and dull, but he never tired of the illustrations; each one was full of hundreds of tiny figures, all doing different things, but all together. His daydreams were of secret caverns under the earth, hidden treasures, and a mysterious fellowship.
Because he was growing so fast, his clothes seldom fitted; either his wrists and ankles stuck out and his shirts bound him across the chest, or, if he had new clothes, the sleeves hung over his hands and his pants-legs had to be rolled up. He used this as an excuse not to go to church with his parents, but there were other reasons. The first time he went to Sunday school, the lesson was about David and Goliath, and after that, for a while, he had a new nickname. The hard pews in church made his bottom ache, and he did not understand the purpose of all that varnished wood, the tall organ-pipes, the minister in his pulpit talking on and on, the bad singing.