I kept him under graduated sedation for the better part of a week. That long was needed to quiet him down. He was a listless invalid until well into May.
This was absolutely no normal reaction. Other boys whose fathers were off to war gloried, or claimed they did. Well, I thought, Jack wasn’t any of them.
He recovered and buckled down to his schoolwork. He was in Tom’s company at every imaginable opportunity, and some that nobody would have imagined beforehand. This included furloughs, spent at home. Between times, he wrote almost daily letters to his father -
— who was killed in Italy, August 6, 1943.
2
A DOCTOR cannot endure having made his inevitable grisly blunders unless he recalls enough rescues to offset them. I count Jack Havig among those who redeemed me. Yet I helped less as a physician than as a man.
My special knowledge did let me see that, beneath a tight-held face, the boy was seriously disturbed. Outside the eastern states, gasoline was not rationed in 1942. I arranged for a colleague to take over my practice, and when school closed, Bill and I went on a trip… and we took Jack along.
In Minnesota’s Arrowhead we rented a canoe and entered that wilderness of lakes, bogs, and splendid timber which reaches on into Canada. For an entire month we were myself, my thirteen-year-old son, and my all but adopted son whom I believed to be nine years of age.
It’s rain and mosquito country; paddling against a headwind is stiff work; so is portaging; to make camp required more effort than if we’d had today’s ingenious gear and freeze-dried rations. Jack needed those obstacles, that nightly exhaustion. After fewer days than might have been awaited, the land could begin to heal him.
Hushed sunrises, light gold in the uppermost leaves and ashiver across broad waters; birdsong, rustle of wind, scent of evergreen; a squirrel coaxed to take food from a hand; the soaring departure of deer; blueberries in a bright warm opening of forest, till a bear arrived and we most respectfully turned the place over to him; moose, gigantic and unafraid, watching us glide by; sunsets which shone through the translucent wings of bats; dusk, fire and stories and Bill’s young wonderings about things, which showed Jack better than I could have told him how big a world lies beyond our sorrows; a sleeping bag, and stars uncountable.
It was the foundation of a cure.
Back home again, I made a mistake. “I hope you’re over this notion about your father, Jack. There’s no such thing as foreknowing the future.” He whitened, whirled, and ran from me. I needed weeks to regain his confidence.
His trust, at any rate. He confided nothing to me except the thoughts, hopes, problems of an ordinary boy. I spoke no further of his obsession, nor did he. But as much as time and circumstance allowed, I tried to be a little of what he so desperately lacked, his father.
We could take no more long excursions while the war lasted. However, we had country roads to tramp, Morgan Woods to roam and picnic in, the river for fishing and swimming, Lake Winnego and my small sailboat not far off. He could come around to my garage workshop and make a bird feeder for himself or a broom rack for his mother. We could talk.
I do believe he won to a measure of calm about Tom’s death by the time it happened. Everybody assumed his premonition was coincidental.
Eleanor had already taken a job in the library, plus giving quite a few hours per week to the hospital. Widowhood struck her hard. She rallied gamely, but for a long while was subdued and unsocial. Kate and I tried to get her out, but she declined invitations more often than not.
When at last she began to leave her shell, it was mostly in the company of others than her old circle. I couldn’t keep from remarking: “You know, Ellie, I’m damn glad to see you back in circulation. Still — forgive me — your new friends are kind of a surprise.”
She reddened and looked away. “True,” she said low.
“Perfectly good people, of course. But, uh, not what you’d call intellectual types, are they?”
“N-no… All right.” She straightened in her chair. “Bob, let’s be frank. I don’t want to leave here, if only because of what you are to Jack. Nor do I want to be buried alive, the way I was that first couple of years. Tom influenced me; I don’t really have an academic turn of mind like his. And… you who we went with… you’re all married.”
I abandoned as useless my intention in raising the matter — to tell her how alien her son was to those practical-minded, loud-laughing men who squired her around, how deeply he was coming to detest them.
He was twelve when the nuclear thunderbolts slew two cities and man’s last innocence. Though the astonishing growth rate I had noted in him earlier had slowed down to average since 1942, its effects remained to make him precocious. That reinforced the extreme solitariness which had set in. No longer was Pete Dunbar, or any schoolmate, more than a casual associate. Politely but unshakably, Jack refused everything extracurricular. He did his lessons, and did them well, but his free time was his and nobody else’s: his to read enormously, with emphasis on history books; to take miles-long hikes by himself; to draw pictures or to shape things with the tools I’d helped him collect.
I don’t mean he was morbid. Lonely boys are not uncommon, and generally become reasonably sociable adults. Jack was fond of the Amos ’n’ Andy program, for instance, though he preferred Fred Allen; and he had a dry wit of his own. I remember various of his cartoons he showed me, one in particular suggested by a copy of The Outsider and Others which I lent him. In a dark, dank forest were two human figures. The first, cowering and pointing, was unmistakably H. P. Lovecraft. His companion was a tweedy woman who snapped: “Of course they’re pallid and mushroomlike, Howard. They are mushrooms.”
While he no longer depended on me, we saw a good bit of each other; and the age difference between him and Bill was less important now, so that they two sometimes went together for a walk or a swim or a boat ride-even, in 1948, a return to northern Minnesota with Jim and Stuart.
Soon after he came back from this, my second son asked me: “Dad, what’s a good book on, uh, philosophy?”
“Eh?” I laid down my newspaper. “Philosophy, at thirteen?”
“Why not?” Kate said across her embroidery. “In Athens he’d have started younger.”
“Well, m-m, philosophy’s a mighty wide field, Jim,” I stalled. “What’s your immediate question?”
“Oh,” he mumbled, “free will and time and all that jazz. Jack Havig and Bill talked a lot about it on our trip.”
I learned that Bill, being in college, had begun by posing as an authority, but soon found himself entangled in problems — was the history of the universe written before its beginning? if so, why do we know we make free choices? if not, how can we affect the course of the future… or the past? — which it didn’t seem a high school kid could have pondered as thoroughly as Jack had done.
When I asked my protégé what he wanted for Christmas, he answered: “Something I can understand that explains relativity.”
In 1949, Eleanor remarried. Her choice was catastrophic.
Sven Birkelund meant well. His parents had brought him from Norway when he was three; he was now forty, a successful farmer in possession of a large estate and fine house ten miles outside town, a combat veteran, and a recent widower who had two boys to raise: Sven, Jr., sixteen, and Harold, nine. Huge, red-haired, gusty, he blazed forth maleness — admitted Kate to me, though she couldn’t stand him — and he was not unlettered either; he subscribed to magazines (Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Country Gentleman), read an occasional book, like travel, and was a shrewd businessman.