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Ernie Patiently Waiting

Lying behind the foldaway bed, with his five senses shut down and his heart as still as a stone, Ernie was periodically soothed by the kindly male and female voices that came not through his ears but arose within him. He could not understand how it was possible to “hear” them without actually hearing them, but he didn’t waste time worrying about that, even though in his current circumstances he had plenty of time to waste. He continued to compose country songs. The exercise of his musical genius was from time to time interrupted by memories on which he dwelled with interest. At the moment, he was thinking about Thanksgiving in the year of Wayne Louis Hornfly. He knew intuitively and beyond doubt that, elsewhere in Maple Grove, his amigos were obsessed with the same long-ago holiday. That, too, was something he could not possibly know, but he didn’t worry about how he knew it. After all, if he wasn’t worried about being a disembodied consciousness adrift in what seemed to be a lightless vacuum, there wasn’t much point in being worried about anything.

Whether on Thanksgiving and other holidays or on ordinary evenings, Britta Hernishen rarely dined with her son. She’d never done so regularly, and she had entirely disengaged from the practice on the night of Ernie’s fifth birthday.

Sitting directly across the dining room table from his mother, he had been talking about a battery-powered dump truck that could tilt its bed back to spill its contents. It was red, and it was big for a toy, bigger than the four-slice toaster in the kitchen.

He thought she was riveted by his description of the truck, but she interrupted him to say, “Stop playing with your peas.”

“I’m not playing with them.”

“Am I to understand that you would have me believe you are not playing with your peas when I can plainly see that you are? Is that your position?”

“I’m just moving them.”

“Is it your habit to reposition your vegetables at every meal? Do you reposition them when Ms. Merkwurdig feeds you?”

Ms. Merkwurdig was the nanny who looked after him in Britta’s absence, which was most of the time.

“What does ‘reposition’ mean?” he asked.

Britta put her fork down and patted her lips with her napkin and returned the napkin to her lap, staring at Ernie in disbelief throughout the procedure. “How could it be possible that you have reached the age of five without being able to define ‘reposition’? Are you able to explain that to me, Ernest?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I thought not. Do you not see that you are still playing with your peas? I expressly asked you to stop.”

“I’m just moving them.”

“And to where are you moving them?”

“To the other side of my mashed potatoes.”

“It is important that we do the things we do in life for clear and rational reasons. Can you explain why you must move your peas to the other side of your mashed potatoes? Can you do that, Ernest?”

“They taste better when they’re on that side.”

She had begun to pick up her fork. She put it down again. “Are you seriously contending that peas taste better when consumed from the left side of your mashed potatoes than they do when they have been served on the right side?”

“Yeah.”

“As I have asked you before, I ask you yet again to refrain from using the word ‘yeah.’ It is an informal derivative of the proper word ‘yes.’”

“Other kids say it.”

“Yes, they do. You must understand, however, that children who speak imprecisely—or, worse, descend to the use of slang—will grow up to be ill-spoken adults who are condemned to such menial careers as plumbers and car mechanics.”

“Plumbers and car mechanics are cool jobs.”

“In the interest of maintaining a cheerful mood on this special occasion, we will not further discuss suitable careers. Are we in agreement that this restriction will apply throughout the remainder of this celebratory dinner?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

After a prolonged silence, Britta observed, “You have eaten only half of your filet medallions. Should I not have placed them directly opposite your mashed potatoes?”

“I wanted hamburgers for my birthday.”

“What we want and what we should have are not always the same thing. An individual might want to drink vast quantities of sugary cola every day of his life, but as he lies dying of diabetes at the age of thirty-four, he will recognize the folly of having failed to appreciate the consequences of always choosing what he wanted rather than what he should have had. Do you understand, Ernest?”

“I guess so. But most people call me Ernie.”

“Those are people I would severely censor if I could. I am the one who named you after Mr. Hemingway. He was a properly proud man. He would never have allowed anyone to call him Ernie. An Earnest is a person of importance. An Ernie is the kind of person who works twelve hours a day, belowdecks in a commercial fishing trawler, gutting the day’s catch. Am I to assume that is the life you yearn for, Ernest, a life standing knee-deep in fish guts?”

“No, ma’am.”

After a long silence followed by a longer one, his mother brought him a slice of cake and a small scoop of ice cream.

“It’s not a whole cake,” Ernest said.

“If I provided an entire cake, you would eat a second slice later, another tomorrow, on and on, until eventually you had eaten the whole thing. One slice is all that is required for an adequate celebration. I am determined you will not become diabetic—or grow into an enormous fat person who would be an embarrassment to me.”

“I’m five. There’s only one candle.”

“One is sufficient, Ernest. Burning candles produce carbon dioxide. We were not born for the purpose of imperiling the planet by contributing to climate change.”

She produced a silver snifter with which he was required to extinguish the candle, because blowing it out would be uncouth.

A year later, shortly after Ernie’s sixth birthday, Hilda Merkwurdig was fired from her position as his nanny when Britta discovered from whom her son had learned the phrase crazy bitch .

Hilda’s replacement, Bertha Fettleibig, lasted eight months before she was fired when Britta discovered from whom Ernie had learned the phrase shit for brains .

By the time the boy turned seven, his mother decided that he could be left home alone and that it was time for him to make his way through the world unaccompanied. She wanted to ensure that he would not go astray and would grow up to be a manly man like his famous namesake. She also wanted to spare herself from the daily annoyance of conversing with a child of somewhat high but not exceptional intelligence. Therefore, Britta provided a hundred-page notebook filled with rules and expectations. Ernie was required to memorize all entries whether he understood them or not. Over the years that followed, he was regularly quizzed as to his compliance.

When he was fourteen and warmed by the company of his amigos, in the year of Hornfly, there came a four-day Thanksgiving weekend of terror and revelation that had subsequently been expunged from his memory. Now, cosseted in the space behind the foldaway bed but unaware that his body had been stashed in Spencer’s empty house in the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane, in the neighborhood of the Nelsoneers, who were even at that moment preparing for a community barbecue with lawn bowling and badminton, Ernie was on the brink of remembering the fateful events of that long-ago turkey day and what followed, but not quite yet.

At this juncture, you might be marveling at how neatly all the disparate elements of this book seem to be knitting together toward a satisfying and convincing ending. Others of you, though perhaps entertained, might find the tale too fantastic to be true, although I have assured you it is as true as anything you will read in the papers or see on the evening news. I take no offense at your doubt. However, I commend to you the quotation from the great novelist Thomas Hardy, which serves as the epigraph at the front of this volume and which, for your convenience, I repeat herewith: Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.