Tigerheart Read Free Page B

mother and I think it would be best if I left for a time.”
    “All right,” said Paul, unfazed, for he was accustomed to his mother and father doing what they thought best, and did not expect them to change their behavior at this late date. “When will you come back?”
    “I wish I knew,” said his father.
    Paul stared at his father for a long moment, the slightest glimmer of what was being said beginning to illuminate his brain. “I thought grown-ups knew everything,” he said.
    “I wish we did.” He ruffled Paul’s hair, which was something Paul had never been too fond of, but he offered no protest now. “Take care of your mother.”
    “I think she’s supposed to take care of me.”
    “Yes,” said his father, “but for the time being—perhaps a very long time to come—you are to be the grown-up man of the house.”
    “But I do not wish to grow up.”
    “All children, except one, grow up.”
    “Am I that child?” Paul watched his father’s face carefully for a reaction. “Am I The Boy?”
    Patrick did not answer him. Instead he hugged him once more, then stole out of the room, noiseless as a shadow.
    Paul sat there in the darkness for a long, long moment, and then there was a tapping at the windowpane. He slid out of bed, padded across the floor, and opened the window wide. A small, brown swallow fluttered in and nestled on his outstretched finger. It cocked its head slightly and said, “You told them, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” Paul said with a sigh.
    It fluffed its feathers and said, “I warned you not to. I knew this would happen. I told you so. Why didn’t you listen to me?”
    “I did,” he insisted. “Listening and doing don’t always have to be the same thing.”
    “Fair enough,” said the swallow.
    “Can you stay with me always?” Paul said.
    “No, because I’m already forgetting about my time as a baby. I’m thinking more and more about nests and winter habitat and such. Soon I will simply be another bird, and no matter how much you remind me, I won’t recall.”
    “I will always remember you,” Paul assured his sister.
    “We’ll see,” said the swallow, and then turned on his finger, hopped off, and flew away into the night sky.

Chapter 2
    The Irishman with the Curious Profession
    T hings don’t happen all at once.
    Even those things that do seem to happen all at once, such as automobile accidents, don’t really. They are the last act in a lengthy series of actions that have led, slowly but inevitably, to the supposedly “sudden outcome.” You may be standing on a street corner and your head snaps around and, two drivers—one in a blue car, one in a white car—are sitting there, looking quite stunned, having collided with each other, because this was not remotely what they had planned for the day. Be aware that the first step along the long and treacherous path resulting in this “sudden” happenstance occurred twenty-three years earlier when the driver of the blue car was told by his mother, “Today is the day! You’re getting your first haircut!” Off they went to the barber, who had a rather superb tonsorial facility; and there he had a haircut that was most revelatory because suddenly this mass of stuff hanging from the top of his head was no longer obscuring his vision. So splendid an experience was it that he resolved, right then and there, to come to this very barber once a month, on that same Monday, so the hair would not hang in front of his face again.
    Had the haircut been any less superb, had the day been anything other than Monday, he would never have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and run afoul of a speeding motorist who had his entire own story with which we will not bore you. The point is that he brought himself to this pass, and it may have seemed accidental; but looking back at the course of his life, it was unavoidable. This is what is referred to as foresight aftersight. You may as well perfect it, because there are some walks