When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

Iowa Basic Test of Skills in the eighth grade.
    He made slightly above-average trouble as a teenager, before he was shipped off to a military academy, but on the whole it was trouble for its own sake. He wasn't angry or sullen, didn't hold a grudge against any particular person. His intentions, that is, were pure. Why not set a cornfield on fire at the lake--not just a corner flaring up, but the windy night sweeping the flames, one end to the other, five acres ravaged? That the barn and farmhouse hadn't been lost was a testament to the volunteer fire department. Even Buddy admitted it ha d g otten out of hand. There were other pyrotechnics no less exhilarating, tying M-8 0 s to bricks and throwing them in the water to blow up the overgrown greasy carp. The fatsos of the fish world, he maintained, deserved to be obliterated. His need to rid the lake of aquatic ugliness seemed connected to our grandfather's wish to preserve the loveliness of the butterflies, and my father's trapping birds to immortalize their plumage. Buddy always managed to get hold of illegal fireworks, and up in the west pasture we were at least once a summer in the paradise of explosives. It probably goes without saying that there was nothing funnier in all the world than Buddy igniting his farts with a Bic lighter.
    He went to jail only once, for taking an ambulance on a joy ride. That was something we only heard about. I was glad also to miss the shaving of the cat down to its whiskers, the animal staggering around the yard as if it had been blinded. Perhaps his most whimsical stunt took place after they moved to Washington, D . C ., when he sneaked backstage in a high-school auditorium and inserted himself into the second act of Bngadoon, hamming it up in the dance line to amaze the leading lady. He'd had the foresight, the genius, to rent a kilt. Figgy had never been more embarrassed by her son, but only because the ingenue was the daughter of a member of President Kennedy's Cabinet, either Transportation or Agriculture. Shortly after that episode, Buddy was sent to the academy in West Virginia.
    There was no end of Buddy stories, including the one about the girl who got pregnant, who had to go all the way to Tokyo to have her abortion and get over him. There were the stories, and there were the snapshots of his feats, water-skiing with theatricality and daring, playing tennis with panache, grace notes in his serve before the slam. His lips had that turned-inside-out puffiness, and yet the pillow of the upper lip was finely sculpted, the refinements people pay great sums of money for nowadays. The big joker mugged for the camera, that mouth puckered up, ready to kiss. Although I'd learned to expect it, he always managed to tackle me when I wasn't ready, even if I thought I was on guard. I'd find myself suddenly on the floor of the forest, Buddy yelling at me to fight him. "Stop being puny, Brains! Take me down, take me down!" I don't think he really meant me to, because he usually jumped me when the others were watching, to prove, I guess, that he was the stronger and also that there were limits to his ability to force my or anyone else's success. "How're you going to get out of this hold, huh? Huh? Stick your ass up, your wimpy little ass, come on, use your legs, use your legs, what are you made of?" And so forth.
    At night, as I said, he gave us indispensable advice. His verbal skills were not exceptional, but he was a good mimic, and he was also an exhibitionist--and why not, since he was lean and muscular and immoderately well hung? We took it for granted that he was right to show off. Without his clothes on, and bouncing as best he could on the thin cot, he made sexual intercourse seem like an activity that was best performed on a trampoline, something that added to my anxiety about girls. Even in the guttering light his prowess was plain to see, and so we understood that any slight he received in school or on the playing field was an error, an