“Call me Tommy,” the boy said.
They didn’t. They called him “Earl” or “Earl the Pearl” or “Earrrl” or Earl the Girl.”
“Don’t pay your brothers any mind,” his mother said peeling carrots into the sink. “Earl is a good name. It was your grandfather’s name. Wear it proudly.”
“It’s the name of an English Lord, said his father with dismissive impatience. That was how he said most things, and only his mother found it charming, and then not always and later not at all. Not even his father called him Earl or Earl Thomas or Tommy. He called him The Boy to distinguish him from his brothers who were nearly men by then, and what started as a description became a name, or nearly a name.
When the teasing or the indifference or the impatience got too bad, Earl left his place and went up the canyon to the Hitchcock’s old ramshackle house. He didn’t advertise the fact because he sensed even as a small boy that his family considered the Hitchcocks strange. And they were strange.
Wonderfully strange. Three brothers spaced a year apart the youngest of whom was a year older than Earl. Three brothers who talked fast, who walked fast often in lockstep with arms held at their sides, who usually had a purpose or a mission when no one else around him seemed to have either.
They would spread maps out on the dining room table and study them half standing, half leaning, one knee on a chair, pointing, talking all at once, tapping with their index fingers. They discovered or perhaps invented old Indian trails. They found an ancient wagon in the woods encased in vines which they were quite sure was a “caisson.” Earl had no idea what a caisson was, and when he repeated the story to his parents, his father laughed derisively. “A caisson!” he said. That’s when Earl stopped talking about what he did at the Hitchcocks’ place.
What he did mostly was watch. What the Hitchcocks did was let him watch and, he was to realize looking back on that time, also perform for him. He became their audience, and as such they accepted him. That didn’t happen at home. He watched the Hitchcocks build model airplanes using tiny tubes of glue and tweezers. Then they hung the planes from the rafters in their common room, something Earl knew that his parents would never allow. “Now this is Spitfire AB910 that flew 143 operations between 1941 and 1945,” one of the Hitchcocks would say holding a tiny decal with the tweezers and studying it through a magnifying glass as he placed it on the plane’s fuselage “just so. A steady hand is required.” That’s how the Hitchcocks talked. Earl was quite sure that they were all geniuses. He “arrived at this conclusion” (also how they talked) after a heated debate on the nature of genius, and who was (Einstein, Fermi, Madame Curie) and who wasn’t (Henry Ford, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucile Ball included for consideration because someone in Parade magazine had called her a “comic genius”). Earl loved their debates. He watched them as if they were sporting events. The Hitchcocks paced, gestured, jumped up suddenly and sat down emphatically. They argued over the uses of nuclear power, who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, space travel, the existence of God, UFOs, socialism, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of The New Deal. Their favorite topic, however, was the “future.” They were forever speculating about what the future world would look like.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
