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Dancing for My
   Mother

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Thomas E. Kennedy
Walter Cummins
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          Spring day, summery feeling, trees bursting with leaves and the songs of birds. You walk to a field two blocks away carrying your BB gun hoping to find something to shoot. There are railroad tracks for you to balance on. Walking a rail you come upon a sickly looking kitten toddling down the center of the tracks. It is dark gray and frizzy. Seems to be lost. It’s making a squeaky noise as it walks along. Calling for its mama? You could shoot it, but you don’t want to. You pick it up, cradle it, pet it while it rests gratefully against your chest. On the way home a car stops and a man inside says, Hey, kid, you want to sell that fox. Fox? Doesn’t look like a fox to you. The man says he’ll give you five dollars. You tell him nope. He says he’ll give you fifteen dollars. You run for home. When your mother sees you she says, What’s that thing you’ve got there? A fox, you tell her. A man wanted to give me fifteen bucks for it. She wants to know what you’re going to do with it. Keep him, you say. Hmm, we’ll see, she tells you.

          You name the fox Squeaky because that’s the noise he makes, his bark a kind of squeaking. He lives under your bed for a while. Sleeps with you. Eats dog food. No trouble. When you let him outside he goes under the front porch. It’s like a dark den in there. When he’s in the house he jumps in the crib with Michele Renee and chews on her pacifiers. He steals them and piles them up under Carol Marie’s bed. One day when your mother is making the bed, she accidently kicks one of the pacifiers underneath and Squeaky bites her big toe. All right, she says, that’s enough of that, Squeaky has to go. By this time he is turning red and actually looks like a real fox, big bushy tail and pointy ears. He’s beautiful. He sits on the lawn and watches traffic. People will stop and stare at him, point and smile. A man comes to the door one day and says, Do you know you have a fox on your lawn? He tells your mother about a nature conservatory not far away. She convinces you that the conservatory is the best place for Squeaky. It’s off-limits to hunters. The animals run free and live according to the laws of nature. By mid-summer Squeaky is gone. You weep about losing your fox but convince yourself he’s better off living according to the laws of nature. The phrase pacifies you. You see him running wild and free, doing what God made him to do.

          There is a chubby girl who lives down the street. Her name is Karen Fielding. Next door to her lives a boy named Bart Moore and his little sister Bonnie. Karen and Bart are eleven and one grade in front of you. Bonnie is nine and a grade behind you. That summer you play baseball with other kids in the park. Karen is better than everyone. She’s a natural, the Babe Ruth of girls with the bat, and, living up to her last name, she can field. She’s not as fast a runner as Bart, but she can beat you, unless the race is for distance, then you can beat her and Bonnie and Bart. Philip of the green buckteeth is pretty good at baseball too. Bucky and Raymond and Karen’s fat cousin Shirley sometimes come over to play or meet you at the CINEMA to watch Saturday matinees. It’s there that you get to see King Kong for the first time and fall in love with Fay Wray and dream about her spanking you.

          The team occasionally meets at the municipal pool, which is where you learn to swim and learn to love water. It’s a fun summer you’re having, mostly left on your own during the day and only the evenings to worry about when your parents are home. You negotiate the evenings by eating your dinner quietly and helping your sister do the dishes and then going up to your room to read books you get at the school library. The books you check out are mostly children picture books about Greek mythology. About Hercules, the strongest man in the world and how he went crazy and killed his wife and children and did twelve labors for penance and died because he put on a poisoned shirt. After he was dead the gods lifted him to heaven. It reminds you of what happened to Jesus. You read about Perseus and Medusa, how he killed her and cut her head off. About Zeus, Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, Athena, Aphrodite—a summer of obsession. This is a trait you will carry all of your life: obsessing on books, obsessing on Greeks or Romans or Vikings, the Icelandic and Irish Sagas, Indians of North America, the Mountain Men, the Pioneers, the biographies of famous authors and the works they’ve written. At ten you’re still reading comic books as well, reading them over and over, until they are dog-eared and tattered and your mother throws them away.

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