Aberration of Starlight

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There is a photograph of the boy that shows him at age ten. He is looking directly into the camera, holding up a kitten as if for our inspection, his right hand at her neck, his left underneath her body, supporting the animal’s weight. The sun is intensely bright, and he squints at us, smiling, his white even teeth too large for his small face. Because of this squint we cannot see that his left eye is crossed. Behind him are the edges and planes of farm buildings faded watery red, and the deep shadows that they cast on the ground. In the shade of a haymow a half-grown Holstein calf lies, also looking directly at us: although we cannot see them, because of her distance from the anonymous photographer, flies swarm and settle, rise, swarm and settle around her pacific eyes. The kitten is striped, her eyes slits in the sunlight.

The boy’s hair is black and freshly combed, glistening with a brilli-antine known as rose oil, given to him by Tom Thebus and bought at the five-and-ten in Hackettstown. To the boy, this dark-pink, almost cerise liquid, its odor unlike any rose ever grown on this earth, is a palpable manifestation of a world of beauty and delight. In this world his mother will be happy. In this world the memory of his dead grandmother will fade subtly into lies about her goodness. In this world his grandfather will be, always, the confident and arrogantly serene gentleman that he is when he plays croquet.

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