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first day in plastic and kept it in a box forever to take out and look at and play with, I would have been happy.
    Mick moved through the whole town. The grown-ups left after a little time to get back to what they were doing, and I started to follow them as well—Python stayed with Mick again and I had to call him to break him away—but Fred stopped me.
    “The elevator will run fine without you for a while if you want to stay.”
    “It’s all right. He’s just going to draw more pictures and what is that to watch?”
    But he knew, Fred knew that I really wanted to see it, see all of it, and he shook his head. “Things like this come along, you’ve got to see them. ’Specially if you’re young. You stay and I’ll keep up as best I can. Then you can tell me all about it at supper tonight. You be my eyes.”
    So I stayed with Mick almost the rest of the day until Mrs. Langdon found him.
    Until then he just kept moving, working, drawing so that he filled the tablet, and when it was full he turned it over and started to draw on the backs of the papers he’d already drawn on. It didn’t matter to him.
    Once he saw something small, some little thing I couldn’t see. He lowered to his hands and knees and crawled into a shrub by the Walters’s place dragging the tablet behind him.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Come see—come see. Oh, it’s the most lovely thing, the most lovely, lonely thing of all. Come see.”
    I didn’t want to crawl into any old bush. The Walterses had about seven dozen kids from diaper-fillers to older than me, and the older oneshad a way of teasing that made me not want to embarrass myself.
    But Python followed him in. I couldn’t let Python follow where I wouldn’t go so I scrabbled down—it was hard because of my leg—and I looked in. Light came down through the bush and showed on a small place, just a little circle inside the bush, and there was a tiny cross made of popsicle sticks where one of the Walters kids had buried a gerbil or a dead bird.
    It didn’t matter what was buried there. Not to Mick. He pulled the pad in with him, and I watched him make the light and the little circle and the two crossed popsicle sticks. While he worked I saw his face and he was crying.
    Tears moving down through the grime of sleeping in the car and the dust under the bush, crying while he worked until he was done. I could see it then, see the sadness of the little grave and the way the light hit the popsicle sticks. When we were walking down the sidewalk with the cracks where the elm tree roots were pushing up, I asked him about it.
    “How could you see that? Where the Popsicle-stickgrave was? It didn’t show, I couldn’t see it until I got in there—how could you see that walking by on the sidewalk?”
    He stopped and scratched his hair around the bald spot with his fingernails. Bits of dust and dirt came out. “It had to be there, didn’t it?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just that—it had to be there, didn’t it? A child simply had to go in there and bury a wee bird or animal. It was the place it had to be and I knew it was there. Just as I know this woman coming is after me—not you.”
    I turned and there came Mrs. Langdon, walking so fast the band that went around her head to hold her glasses almost flew out in back of her hair.
    “Mr. Strum,” she yelled, half a block away. “Oh, Mr. Strum, I didn’t know you’d arrived.”
    “Who is she?” He scratched his stomach, which was covered with different-colored stripes of chalk where the board had left marks while he worked.
    “Mrs. Langdon,” I said.
    “Ahh, the one who wrote me.” He nodded.“It’s not good,” he said aside to me, his voice lowered, “when they call you
Mr
. that way. Only people who want something call you that—bill collectors. Or rich bankers who want you to make their nose look better than it is. It was either Oscar Wilde or Whistler or Sargent who said an oil portrait is a painting with something