For my ninth birthday I was given a heavy, metal-plated wristwatch that belonged to my grandfather before he died. I know now it was not an expensive thing, but at the time I thought it must be very old and made of something precious. The very weight of it hanging around my hand seemed proof I had become responsible and trustworthy. My father showed me how to care for the watch, how to set the time and how to wind it. He told me that inside were a thousand tiny mysterious parts which had been moving nonstop for twenty years.

All that afternoon I went around consulting my new watch, using it to measure the span of events all around me. How long my brother Keith stayed in the bathroom: three minutes, thirty-five seconds. The time it took four crows to eat a crust of bread from our front yard: forty-two seconds.

My mother told me I had been born at one minute after eight p.m. and so that evening I stripped to my underwear and stood peering at my own reflection in a full-length mirror, waiting for the exact moment I turned from eight to nine years old. I hoped for a transformation, some change in my face as I jumped ahead a year. I liked the number nine, balanced and upright, so close to double digits. It meant I was growing up. But when I had counted down the seconds and the moment had passed I felt weak, deflated. One thought rang like a bell inside my little head: I wanted to be eight again.

It is true I was a boy prone to moments of panic. The year before, I discovered I could make myself yawn and after a few tries went around holding my mouth wide open, afraid that I had broken something inside my throat.

Now, I realized that turning nine meant I'd have to leave third grade, and that meant leaving Ms. Webber, my teacher, the clean smelling, pretty woman who had recently replaced my mother as the model of all that was good and pure in the world. Ms. Webber was young and well-liked by all the students in my class. Next year we would be thrown into Mrs. Crenshaw’s fourth grade class, and after that prison sentence would come high school and then the tragedy of adulthood, its life of work and worry, and beyond that what seemed to me the absurd and improbable injustice of old age.

During recess, the other children played make-believe games of duty and responsibility, keeping house or fighting wars. My own picture of adulthood was one of uninterrupted industry in a job that somehow involved the arcane task of long division. I did not yet know what long division meant, but I had heard nobody graduated fourth grade without learning it. I wondered what mystery lay behind those two words, what added responsibilities that knowledge would confer.


Another change that came with my ninth birthday was my parents now allowed me to walk to school with my older brother, Keith. The walk seemed a great adventure to me: two blocks through our neighborhood, then onto a half-mile stretch of railroad tracks through a woods and past our school. I followed Keith each day, balancing on the rails or collecting loose spikes, lingering on the way home to toss rocks at stray dogs and explore the shadowy pools of water beneath the trestles. Now and then a short train would sound in the distance and after placing change on the tracks and Keith and I watched it roar and rattle past, our fingers plugging our ears.

All that year, Keith had been telling me about hobos. He said they lived on the tracks, and now, as the weather warmed that spring I became annoyed that we had yet to see one in person. I imagined them as lonely and noble travelers who kept to themselves and had no need of civilized life, no friends, no family. In my head I had a clear picture of a hobo, straight out of the cartoons: patched slacks, unlaced leather boots, checkered bag on a stick, tattered stovepipe hat.

I found solace in the thought that I could become a hobo myself rather than go on to Mrs. Crenshaw’s fourth grade class. Mrs. Crenshaw had burn scars down one arm and arching false eyebrows and she had haunted the summer dreams of the fourth-graders in my school for nearly twenty years. I listed in my notebook all the objects I would need for survival once I was ready to become a hobo: a canteen, a sleeping bag, a flashlight and fishing rod, a Swiss army knife and bags and bags of powdered donuts. I reminded himself to be careful snagging trains as they passed, remembering stories my brother had told me of boys losing legs and arms and lives to the grinding wheels.


Some days, when Ms. Webber spoke to the class, I worried over my watch, checking the time and counting seconds. Keeping the watch wound became such a nervous habit I broke its internal mechanism walking home from school one day. The knob simply tightened and caught as I turned it. Finally it spun freely and came loose in my hand. The second hand stopped ticking for the first time in twenty years. I had broken my grandfather’s watch, the symbol of my new maturity.

At home we had an old television that now and then made a piercing whine until someone smacked it hard on the side. Perhaps because I had seen my father and brother hit the television so often to fix it, I slapped the watch against my palm and then knelt down, tapping it against the rail until all at once the crystal face shattered. There was no doubt, now; the watch was ruined. I slipped it into my pocket and ran to catch up with my brother.

The last time I saw my Grandfather alive he lay in his bed at the nursing home, an oxygen mask over his face, I.V.'s coiled around his long bony arms. My parents brought us to say goodbye to him but he did not seem to know we were there and so we stood there in silence while outside the room two nurses joked about another patient who was biting orderlies who tried to bathe him.

I did not cry at the funeral. From my seat in the church I could just see the tip of my Grandfather's nose poking up from the edge of the open casket and all through the service I wanted to climb up to look inside. My mother kept telling my father that Grandad wouldn't have to stay in a nursing home anymore and the preacher said he had gone to a better place, and because of this I formed an image of him off with the hobos, cut loose from my family, kicking along rootless and free. But everyone else seemed so distraught and I worried I must not have loved my Grandfather, so I spent the service rubbing my eyes to make them water.


On the last day of the school year, Ms. Webber gave our class a party. We had sodas and chocolate cupcakes and played board games and painted with watercolors. One girl brought her father’s portable record player and a few scratched 45’s, and the girls danced to a few songs before turning shy. After recess the boys drew pictures of sharks and dragsters and showed them to Ms. Webber and the girls took turns giving impromptu reports on the personality quirks or their stuffed animals.

For most of the afternoon I lingered near Ms. Webber's desk, mute and anxious. The other children played and chatted, ignorant and blind to the fact that something terrible was happening. I hated God for arranging things so that I had to leave third grade, for taking my grandfather, for allowing the watch to break.

Twice that day Ms. Webber asked if I felt well, and both times I looked away and said nothing. Finally she came to the front and announced there were only thirty minutes left in the school year. The boys whistled and beamed at each other, and some of the girls ran to their desks for cards they had made for Ms. Webber.

I sat with my arms crossed. Ms. Webber frowned and asked if there was anything special I’d like to do for the last half-hour. My mind went blank, and I wondered dully if I might cry and finally shame himself to death in front of them all. But then an idea came to me, what seemed maybe the best idea I’d ever had. I told Ms. Webber I wanted to learn long division.

She raised her eyebrows. “It’s almost summer! Little eager for fourth grade, aren’t you?”

“No,” I sputtered. “I just want to learn it from you.”

The other children nearby looked up from their play and behind me a girl said she thought it was a good idea. Then others scrambled to their desks, getting their pens and pencils. Yes! they shouted. Teach us long division! We want to learn it from you!

Ms. Webber blushed in pleasure. She thought for a moment, then moved to the board and wrote several division problems to work through, and as she spoke I watched the sharp striking motion of her arm, that familiar stance she took with one knee slightly bent and her free hand thrown back for balance, her writing hand pecking in soft rhythm at the board. Above her was the clock, and now and then I glanced at it sadly, only nine years old, already aching with impermanence and the sweetness of loss.

“What we’re doing is dividing the number,” Ms. Webber said as she worked. “Splitting it into smaller and smaller numbers until we have nothing left. Understand?”

I most certainly did not understand. I knew only that she had put several numbers on the board inside little house-like structures she had drawn. Later she had added numbers on top of the houses. I could not fathom the purpose of those houses, nor why other numbers were stacked beneath.

Ms. Webber dug through her file cabinet. “Who wants to try?” she said, rising with a stack of mimeographed pages to pass around. On mine I saw many numbers tucked inside little houses.

Until now, schoolwork had always been easy for me; I had often been told I was a bright child. But now, a dawning awareness broke over me and in one sickening moment I saw I had reached the upper limits of my intelligence. It occurred to me that I might in fact be retarded. Ms. Webber told us to hurry; there were only five minutes left. My vision blurring, I scribbled random numbers about the page and stuffed it into my backpack.

And then, the bell. Ms. Webber moved to the classroom door to hug each child as we left the room. After my own quick embrace I was pushed along by the momentum of other children all laughing and calling out to one another as they tumbled from the school, jostling me with their arms and book bags. Carried along this way, stunned by the arrival of this moment I had never convinced himself would truly come, I left the school building. The school year was over. This happy time would not return.

This was how it would always be. Next year I would be ten and then eleven, and then twelve. Time would roll along, cruel and constant, and everything would always be new and strange.

I moved down the school steps, the sky a cloudless, fragile blue, the day warm and humid and pregnant with summer. I felt old and wounded and deeply wise with sorrow. To hell with Ms. Webber, I swore suddenly. Breaking into a run, I made for the train tracks beyond the recess field. To hell with school and the whole world, and especially long division. I would not need division, long or short, where I was going now, far down the tracks and beneath a trestle, to a bed of leaves, to cold mornings cooking beans over a fire and eating with fingerless gloves, to a life of hugging my knees in the bushes until another roaring engine passed and I could leap into a boxcar, never heard from, never seen again.