The Five Boys

The five boys did, in their way, claim every room but Mother’s as a space of exquisite exploration and robust horseplay. It was not in their nature to be docile, satisfied with rules, or succumb to any notions of negative rights, those defining political assignations against rather than for freedom. No, these boys were of a higher order of humanity than civilized men, unconstrained by propriety, property, or proprietary constructs. Had they been any more adventurous they may have dug a hole all the way to China and proceeded to redact sensibility for the sake of the senses.

The boys, though, exciting in the discovery of the small as well as the large, spent the vast majority of their waking hours of their first winter in their new home examining every nook and even dismantling crannies to make sure nothing of potential import was hiding from them. On occasion the boys took their activities of rambling creativity and inadvertent destruction from the house to the snows in the land surrounding, but as the temperatures dropped they mostly remained indoors, an acceptable alternative as the old Victorian was comprised of thirty-six known rooms on the first three floors, an as-of-yet indeterminate number of rooms and crawl spaces in the primitive rock-floored basement, and a labyrinthine attic that seemed, on the whole, to somehow contain more square footage than the first three floors combined. As far as they knew there were an infinite number of secret passageways, tunnels, and hidden compartments under the floors, in the walls, and possibly the ceilings.

Mother, a widowed woman begrudgingly bequeathed a sum of money from a railroad company after her husband met an untimely death while working on the tracks at a depot when a train failed to stop at its fixed location due to a malfunction caused by a faulty design of braking parts, was a stern woman in many respects, but as a single parent utterly incapable of managing her boys in the ways that more genteel families broke the wills of their children, forcing by harsh means their acquiescence to arbitrary rules designed, more than anything, to internally incarcerate their rambunctious natures into a form suitable for the social mores of the day and, furthermore, preparing them for a life of conformity followed even by those of the highest levels of management and a degree of moderation in private life that even ownership obeyed—or so it was believed.

Truth be told the five boys of the new Victorian manor on the edge of civilization, as it was known in this railroad town in the provinces of what would be incorporated, over time, by the United States of America, held more in common with railroad barons and bank owners in the sense that if they knew such things as rules or laws they certainly didn’t believe they applied to them. For the boys, the spirit was more benign, a brand of adventurousness that cared not at all about claiming spaces or processes or materials as possessions exclusively their own. No, these boys were freer in thought and deed than even the barons and owners of industry. Their perception of abundance was so great and their rugged practices of camaraderie so well developed that limiting concepts of “mine” and “yours” never invaded their minds.

The boys, in their way, helped Mother, but never by being told to do so. Instead, their senses told them what needed to be done. Mornings started with the younger boys up before everyone else, down in the kitchen clinking and clattering not out of a sense of duty, but out of a powerful desire to sate the grumblings in their bellies. It never dawned on them to make enough for everyone because it was a generous thing to do, but because it was far more fun to make more of something than less. They learned, in short order, how to make toast, pancakes, omelets, hash browns, bacon, sausage, coffee, and other breakfast staples, the older boys doing the shopping not at their mother’s behest, but to set out to explore the city, roaming through the grocery to find items of interest and use for food, cleaning, and hygiene, asking the shopkeeper about this or that not out of any respect or deference; no, they consulted with him much the same way they asked the Fabrey kid down the street when and where to find foxes and owls because he knew all the best spots and the right times of day to look. The boys never saw themselves as limited, but acknowledged that certain folks held useful information that they had not yet discovered or learned and that asking questions was a form of exploration in its own right

This accidental ingenuity of the boys helped Mother considerably—another reason she felt no need to manage them; they seemed to do quite well on their own. Even seven-year-old Jimmy seemed more industrious than the hardest working men in the town. She delighted in walking down the stairs after even the oldest boys were up, smelling the aroma of a finely cooked breakfast—though it wasn’t all that fine the first month after Father’s death—and sitting down with her five boys to eat a hearty meal as the day began. The boys scarcely knew what Mother did between meals as they were still in the process of exploring the house, relatively unfurnished as it was after coming from a six-room home in the hinterlands of the forest up north. It may have been there where the boys learned self-sufficiency and the spirit of exploration and ingenuity, but it could have been their nature, their heritage, or magical properties unknown to civilized society.

The boys were not unschooled, though, as they took to reading and writing as easily as they did spatial exploration. The fantastic stories of Robinson Crusoe or those written by Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll enlivened their imaginations and propelled them to compete against one another to create ever grander stories of their own. These stories were often read after dinner, to the never-ending delight of Mother, each boy trying to outdo the last with panache, their oratories often as charismatic as snake oil salesman and carnival barkers, as mesmerizing as circus ringleaders and the most outrageous preachers, and as profoundly stirring as the speeches that had been delivered earlier in the century by Abraham Lincoln. Mother and the boys were often so exhausted by evenings of storytelling that there was no need at all to persuade even the youngest to hurry along to bed for a good night’s sleep.

Math and science were equally as fascinating to the boys, but their means of learning came not from textbooks, but from real world attempts to build various contraptions or gauge the distance, velocity, speed, inertia, degree, angle, slope, curve, arc, weight, height, size, shape, and all manner of physics and geometrical considerations when trying to build a ramp for one of their contraptions, figure out how to jump from the rooftop to a particular branch on the backyard oak tree, or build a tree house in a way that could hold all five of them at once. The ways in which they learned about math and science could not be enumerated, so constant and diverse was their use of concepts they learned through necessity in order to figure out how to do this, where to build that, why something worked when nothing else did, when to try one thing and not another because of cloud or sun or time of day, and who could fit into a tiny hole versus who could lift a heavy pole.

They repainted rooms, fixed creaky floorboards, removed dry rot, built and installed crown moldings, chopped wood for the fireplace and the wood-burning stove, made furniture, picture frames, and ornaments from wood, bought fabrics and metals for similar purposes, and installed indoor plumbing using as guides books they found at the local library or from traveling book salesmen. Not one of these things did the boys call work. No, they considered each activity just another game to play, a contest to see who could make something the others couldn’t, or figure out something that seemed unfathomable.

The oldest boy was Randy but by no means was he the ringleader. Even at twelve he still had all the markings of a boy and felt, as much as anything, that he was one of the group rather than a leader. Not a single boy was a leader in any traditional sense. If there were leaders at all they emerged through the process of a new game or activity. Jimmy, the youngest, was undoubtedly the leader of breakfast and cooking of all kinds as he had a knack for knowing how many ingredients to mix to make just the right amount with the best possible flavor. He never considered himself the leader, though, and if any of his brothers ever surpassed him in ability he would have handed over his apron to whomever proved himself to be better. In fact, he and the others would have reveled in such a change as it would mean even better tasting food would be made.

In that first month, though, before all the changes were made to the house and it was discovered who was better than everyone else at such-and-such an activity, the boys spent most their time examining the house while Mother knitted sweaters, scarves, hats, and mittens or sat quietly with one or two of the boys who needed a rest from playing or simply didn’t enjoy a particular project. They boys did not do everything together all the time. Once while four of the boys reinforced a buttress in the basement, Steve, the second youngest at eight years old, ran up four flights of stairs to the attic, looking through trunks left behind by the previous tenants, discovering postcards and letters, fancy handkerchiefs (which he cleaned and took to Mother as gifts), binoculars, viewfinders, and other items of interest to an eight-year-old boy.

These discoveries, naturally, led all the boys to the attic after they had finished their buttressing project. Steve was patted on the back and celebrated as a brilliant discoverer of the unfound and as the winter passed he proved to be adept at looking where no one else ever thought to look. Each of the boys, in this manner, discovered they possessed unique abilities. Robert, the middle child at nine years old, had the keenest of senses. He could tell the particular sounds of creaking wood and the smell of rot on one of the rails of a fence whether it would hold his oldest brother without breaking. He had a keen sense of temperature and humidity and thus knew which rooms could be wallpapered or would need to be painted. He also could identify whether Jimmy had used coriander, thyme, or fennel in a given dish served for supper. Over time, these abilities became ever more useful in unforeseen ways.

David, the second oldest boy at eleven, was gifted with great athletic ability. He had the ability to leap and climb like no one else. He was fast as a gazelle, could turn on a dime at full speed, and crawl almost as fast as he could run. He walked on his hands almost as often as his feet, taught himself how to scale the outside of the Victorian from the ground to the top of the roof, and generally exceled in any creative athletic activity. Randy, the oldest, possessed a quiet wisdom and lively but practical imagination the others came to respect. He had an uncanny sense of when to start doing something and when to stop. It was he who came up with the ideas to paint the house, build furniture, fix the dry rot, install plumbing, and more. His ideas about what to do were usually so spot on that he rarely ever met with opposition. If something he suggested wasn’t appealing then one or two of the boys might go off and do something else, as Steve had done when discovering the attic treasures. As often as not, though, the five boys played cooperatively and competitively together, but no one gave a thought to anyone who chose to do something else at any given time. The behavior was not just accepted but appreciated because whoever went off on their own almost always discovered something new or something new to do.

When Mother first moved the boys from the hinterlands to the edge of civilization she worried that they would feel displaced. She also concerned herself about how the boys handled Father’s death. The boys cried when Father passed and wept at his funeral, but in the days afterward became enlivened once again. This was not a matter of forgetfulness or repression of emotion on their part. Rather, the boys had truly grieved and, each in his own way, found ways to honor Father in their everyday activities. The boys never became solemn; rather, they embraced life all the more as a way to keep Father alive. Still, each boy did this in his own way as each boy had a particular relationship with Father.

Jimmy made breakfasts with zeal, recounting how Father had loved to cook pancakes on Sunday mornings. The idea of communing never entered Jimmy’s mind; instead he would say to himself, “Okay, Father, watch how high I can toss this pancake in the air while flipping it.” Jimmy did this simply because he had been, from the youngest age, fascinated by Father’s ability to flip pancakes nearly to the ceiling without ever dropping one.

Steve, whenever he found a new nook or cranny in the house, imagined he might find Father peeking through at him. Much of what drove him to search out new places was to excitedly see if he could find something Father would have found interesting. Steve often accompanied Father on treks around the property and whenever he found a strangely colored rock, an oddly shaped pine cone, or an eagle’s feather Father gave the items the utmost attention, complimenting Steve on his eye for the unusual. This common connection kept Father alive not just in his heart, but in his hunger for finding what no one else could.

Robert’s acute senses were first appreciated by Father when Robert woke everyone in their old house by smelling the faintest of smoke before anyone else. He had saved the house from burning to the ground and, by discovering the smell early, prevented the damage from becoming more than cosmetic. Father had always been a keen observer and Robert, more than the other boys, became thrilled when, while on walks through the woods, Father pointed out a buck so well hidden only he among the boys could see what Father saw.

David was the only boy who could keep up with Father when he raced across a meadow, climbed up a cliff, or swam across the lake. They often competed against each other to see who could do the most backflips in a row, who could hop on one leg the longest, and who could grab the most fish out of the stream with their bare hands. David’s abilities fascinated Father and he told David on occasion that in a matter of years there wouldn’t be a person in the world who could run, jump, or swim as fast or as far as he could. David excitedly kept pushing his athletic boundaries day after day while imagining Father matching him stride for stride, jump for jump, and handstand for handstand.

Randy most resembled Father in deliberation, contemplation, and practicality. Father noticed these qualities in Randy when he was young and the two of them often sat silently together while playing chess, thinking not just about the game, but all manner of strategic thinking. Randy might say, while moving a rook, “Robert said he could feel a storm coming in the next few days and Steve noticed there was a tile out of place on the roof. Maybe David should climb up and take a look tomorrow while Jimmy helps you with the pancakes. I’ll look in the basement to see if we have any tiles laying around in case we need to make repairs.” Father would nod his head in agreement and say, “You know, if you keep going like this, I’ll be able to sit with Mother and relax while you figure out everything that needs to be done.” Randy never felt closer to Father than when he was scheming about what to do next.

To be continued ... if there's enough interest.