Too Much Happiness

“I have to go,” says Kent.

“Go where?”

“I have to go pee.”

“Oh for God’s sake, go.”

“Me too,” says Peter.

Sally clamps her mouth down on the automatic injunction to be careful. Alex looks at her and approves of the clamping down. They smile faintly at each other.

Sava

As she buttons herself up there comes a cry, not sharp but lost, diminishing, and Alex is on his feet before she is, ru

“ Kent falled in. Kent falled in.”

His father yells, “I’m coming.”

Sally will always believe that she knew at once, even before she heard Peter’s voice she knew what had happened. If any accident happened it would not be to her six-year-old who was brave but not inventive, not a show-off. It would be to Kent. She could see exactly how. Peeing into the hole, balancing on the rim, teasing Peter, teasing himself.

He was alive. He was lying far down in the rubble at the bottom of the crevasse, but he was moving his arms, struggling to push himself up. Struggling so feebly. One leg caught under him, the other oddly bent.

“Can you carry the baby?” she said to Peter. “Go back to the picnic and put her down and watch her. That’s my good boy. My good strong boy.”

Alex was getting down into the hole, scrambling down, telling Kent to stay still. Getting down in one piece was just possible. It would be getting Kent out that was hard.

Should she run to the car and see if there was a rope? Tie the rope around a tree trunk. Maybe tie it around Kent ’s body so she could lift him when Alex raised him up to her.

There wouldn’t be a rope. Why should there be a rope?

Alex had reached him. He bent and lifted him. Kent gave a beseeching scream of pain. Alex draped him around his shoulders, head hanging down on one side and useless legs-one so oddly protruding-on the other. He rose, stumbled a couple of steps, and while still hanging on to Kent dropped onto his knees. He had decided to crawl, and was making his way-Sally could understand this now-to the rubble which partly filled the far end of the crevasse. He shouted some order to her without raising his head, and though she could not make out a single word she understood. She got up off her knees-why was she on her knees?-and pushed through some saplings to the rim where the rubble came to within perhaps three feet of the surface. Alex was crawling along with Kent dangling from him like a shot deer.

She called, “I’m here. I’m here.”

Kent would have to be raised up by his father, pulled to the solid shelf of rock by his mother. He was a ski

When Alex had clawed and heaved his way out they collected the other children and drove to the Collingwood Hospital. There seemed to be no internal injury. Both legs were broken. One break was clean, as the doctor put it; the other leg was shattered.

“Kids have to be watched every minute in there,” he said to Sally, who had gone in with Kent while Alex managed the other children. “Haven’t they got any warning signs up?”

With Alex, she thought, he would have spoken differently. That’s the way boys are. Turn your back and they’re tearing around where they shouldn’t be. “Boys will be boys.”

Her gratitude-to God, whom she did not believe in, and Alex, whom she did-was so immense that she resented nothing.

It was necessary for Kent to spend the next half year out of school, strung up for the first while in a rented hospital bed. Sally picked up and took back his school assignments, which he completed in no time. Then he was encouraged to go ahead with Extra Projects. One of these was Travels and Explorations-Choose Your Country.

“I want to pick what nobody else would pick,” he said.

Now Sally told him something she had not told to another soul. She told him how she was attracted to remote islands. Not to the Hawaiian Islands or the Canaries or the Hebrides or the Isles of Greece, where everybody wanted to go, but to small or obscure islands nobody talked about and which were seldom if ever visited. Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Chatham Islands, and Christmas Island and Desolation Island and the Faeroes. She and Kent began to collect every scrap of information they could find about these places, not allowing themselves to make anything up. And never telling Alex what they were doing.

“He would think we were off our heads,” said Sally.

Desolation Island ’s main boast was of a vegetable of great antiquity, a unique cabbage. They imagined worship ceremonies for it, costumes, cabbage parades in its honor.

And before he was born, Sally told her son, she had seen on television the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha disembarking at Heathrow Airport, having all been evacuated due to a great earthquake on their island. How strange they looked, docile and dignified, like human creatures from another century. They must have adjusted to London, more or less, but when the volcano quieted down they wanted to go home.

When Kent could go back to school things changed, of course, but he still seemed old for his age, patient with Sava

“Honor to the man who saved my life,” he might say, or, “Home is the hero.”

He said this rather dramatically though not at all sarcastically. Yet it got on Alex’s nerves. Kent got on his nerves, had done so even before the deep-hole drama happened.

“Cut that out,” he said, and complained privately to Sally.

“He’s saying you must have loved him, because you rescued him.”

“Christ, I’d have rescued anybody.”

“Don’t say that in front of him. Please.”

When Kent got to high school things improved with his father. He chose to study science. He picked the hard sciences, not the soft earth sciences, and even this roused no opposition in Alex. The harder the better.

But after six months at college Kent disappeared. People who knew him a little-there did not seem to be anyone claiming to be a friend-said that he had talked of going to the West Coast. And a letter came, just as his parents were deciding to go to the police. He was working in a Canadian Tire store in a suburb just north of Toronto. Alex went to see him there, to order him back to his education. But Kent refused, said he was very happy with the job he had now, and was making good money, or soon would be, as he got promoted. Then Sally went to see him, without telling Alex, and found him jolly and ten pounds heavier. He said it was the beer. He had friends now.

“It’s a phase,” she said to Alex when she confessed the visit. “He wants to get a taste of independence.”

“He can get a bellyful of it as far as I’m concerned.”

Kent had not told her where he was living, but it did not matter, because when she made her next visit she was told that he had quit. She was embarrassed-she thought she caught a smirk on the face of the employee who told her that-and she did not ask where Kent had gone. She thought he would get in touch, anyway, as soon as he had settled again.