The High Places: Stories

Buttony

The children wanted to play Buttony.

‘All right,’ said Miss Lewis, and she clapped her hands five times in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet and copied her.

‘All right,’ she said with that smile she reserved for the sleepy, silly midafternoon. ‘We’ll play. Joseph, get the Button.’

The children approved the justice of this appointment; that was apparent from the small, satisfied sigh they made together. They watched Joseph walk to Miss Lewis’s desk. Joseph was a compact, deliberate boy, and his straight black hair fell to his shoulders. He wore his uniform in a way that seemed gentlemanly, but at the same time casual. He was both kind and beautiful, and they loved him.

The Button lay in a special tin in the right-hand corner of Miss Lewis’s top drawer. The children listened for the sound this drawer made as Joseph opened it. They knew the shifting sound of that opening drawer meant largesse — gold stars or stamps or, in exceptional cases, jelly frogs — and that Miss Lewis’s bounty was capable of falling upon them all, but perhaps more often on Joseph. Alternatively, the opening drawer meant Buttony.

All the children handled the Button with reverence, but none more so than Joseph. He was gifted in solemnity. He had a processional walk and moved his head slowly when his name was called — and it was regularly called. His attention was made more valuable by its purposeful quality. He never leaned in confidentially to hear a secret; the other children came to his ear and whispered there. Miss Lewis liked to call on him in class just to see his measured face rise up out of that extraordinary hair. His beauty startled her, until she met both parents — Vietnamese mother, Polish father. Then he made lovely sense. When he held the yellow Button out before him in the dish of his hands, Miss Lewis was capable of forgetting the mustard-coloured cardigan it had fallen off one winter’s day. The Button was no longer limited by its cheap yellow plastic; it seemed to pulse with life. The children looked at it, and at Joseph, without appearing to breathe. Miss Lewis wanted her children to live in a heightened way, and she encouraged this sort of ceremony.

‘Close the drawer, Joseph,’ she said, because she found she liked nothing better, after admiring him, after giving him the opportunity to be admired, than to gently suggest a mundane task. Miss Lewis could close that drawer with her hip. Joseph used a shoulder. The sound of the closing drawer released the children. Now they hurried to line up at the door.

They always played Buttony outside.

‘Quietly, quietly!’ Miss Lewis scolded, brushing the tops of their heads as they filed past her into the corridor, led by Joseph and the Button. She followed them out. In the next-door classroom, 3A recited times tables under the priestly monotone of Mr Graham. One side of the corridor shone with 5B’s scaled depiction of the solar system. The children claimed to like blue Saturn best, with its luminous rings, but Miss Lewis was fond of Neptune. She always put out a finger to touch its smooth crayon as she passed.

They gathered under the jacaranda tree. The day was sweet and green. Miss Lewis leaned against the tree and crossed one ankle over the other. Her ankles were still slim; she wasn’t so very old. The children formed a circle around Joseph, and there was something very natural about this, about Joseph being in the middle of a circle. Grave Joseph. He stood with the Button as if at some kind of memorial service. Then he raised it to his lips and kissed it. No one had ever kissed the Button before, and some of the children raised their own fingers to their lips. Miss Lewis pursed her mouth. One boy — she didn’t see who — let out a brief scoff, but was ignored.

‘Put out your hands,’ said Miss Lewis, and the children lifted their cupped hands.

‘Close your eyes,’ said Miss Lewis, closing her own eyes. She was often so tired, in the midafternoon, that this handful of seconds in which to close her eyes seemed the true blessing of Buttony. To stand under the jacaranda tree in the bright day and make darkness fall, and then to hear Joseph’s voice. His eyes were open, of course. He made his way around the circle, and as he touched each set of hands, he said, ‘Buttony.’

Buttony, Buttony, twenty-one times. Miss Lewis counted them out, and when he was finished — all twenty-one pairs of hands, because none of her children were absent that day, no one was sick or pretending to be — she opened her eyes. The children stood motionless in the circle, and now their hands were closed, each set folded over themselves, possibly holding the Button. Joseph returned to the middle of the circle. He looked up at Miss Lewis and she looked at him and it was as if, from inside that hair, he were acknowledging sorrow and solitude and fatigue; also routine and expectation and quietness. And, because he was only a boy, trust. Miss Lewis nodded her head, and Joseph nodded back.

‘Open your eyes,’ said Miss Lewis. She loved to see her children open their eyes all at once. They always smiled, as if relieved to see the sun on the other side of their eyelids. They giggled and pressed their hands together, and looked at each other’s hands, and looked at Joseph, and wondered who now had the Button. Oh, that beautiful Button: mustard-coloured, Joseph-kissed. Round as a planet on one side, sharp as a kiss on the other. Joseph stood with his hands behind his back. His hair hung over his eyes. It was hard to puzzle Joseph out in Buttony. The children delayed for a fond moment, as if wanting to leave him alone with his secret a little longer. Miss Lewis surveyed the circle to see who was blushing, who was still smiling, whose head was raised higher than usual, just because Joseph had favoured them with the Button. And she also looked for the disconsolate signs of a child who was clearly buttonless.

‘You start, Miranda,’ said Miss Lewis.

Miranda rubbed her right ear against her right shoulder. She swayed on one leg.

‘Xin,’ she said. Xin produced a goofy smile. Then she opened out her hands: there was no Button there.

‘Blake,’ said Xin. Blake grinned and threw his empty hands over his head.

Blake said Miranda. Miranda said Josie. Josie said Osea. Osea said Ramon. Miss Lewis closed her eyes. She opened them again and thought, Jyoti. It took eleven more children to guess Jyoti. She was one of those girls you didn’t suspect. Her socks slipped. She had a mole on her left cheek. It was like Joseph to have picked Jyoti. It was like Jyoti to stand burning invisibly in the circle, hardly able to believe her luck. Her hands unfolded and there was the Button. The other children craned to look. For a moment they loved her. For a moment she held Joseph’s kiss in her hands. She stepped into the middle of the circle and Joseph took her place. She raised the Button to her lips, but didn’t kiss it.

‘Hands out, eyes closed,’ said Miss Lewis, and darkness fell. ‘Don’t forget, Jyoti, no giving the Button to the person who was just It. Don’t give the Button to Joseph.’

It was necessary to remind the children of this rule at the beginning of every game; otherwise they were capable of handing the Button over to Joseph at any opportunity. As it was, Jyoti picked Archie and Archie picked Joseph. Joseph picked Mimi who picked Miranda who picked Joseph. The afternoon grew brighter. Planes flew overhead in all directions. The jacaranda dropped its spring flowers. Every now and then Miss Lewis saw faces at the windows of classrooms as other children looked out to see them playing Buttony. How long had they been playing now? These children could spend the whole afternoon hoping to be chosen by Joseph. They would never tire of it.

Joseph picked Ruby picked Ramon picked Joseph picked Liam S picked Liam M picked Joseph. Joseph said, Buttony, Buttony, Buttony, twenty-one times. Miss Lewis closed her eyes and kept them closed when she said, ‘Open your eyes.’ The children, in turn, said, Buttony, Buttony, Buttony. She uncrossed her ankles and crossed them again and thought, Every day could pass like this, quite easily. Every day could be sweet and green with the jacaranda and the children and the sun and the planes. And then at the end of them all, the sweet days and the children, Would you open your eyes? Would your hands fall open? Would they be empty?

Miss Lewis looked. Joseph stood in the circle.

‘Hands out, close your eyes,’ she said, and the children obeyed. They bent their heads as if praying. She was moved by the tenderness she saw fall on each of them. They were like children in a fairy tale, under a spell. She looked at Joseph and he was watching her, so she nodded at him. His face was impassive. He made her think of a Swiss Guard at the Vatican. He received her nod by beginning to walk around the circle, and each hand he touched trembled, and every child lowered their head still further as he passed them. Their hands closed like sea anemones. Joseph hadn’t yet given away the Button. Fifteen, nineteen, twenty-one times he said Buttony. Then he raised his neutral face and looked at Miss Lewis and opened his mouth and placed the Button inside it. The Button made no indentation in his cheek. Miss Lewis crossed her arms. You will solve this, she thought, and suffer for it. Joseph blinked inside his hair.

‘Open your eyes,’ said Miss Lewis. The children lifted their heads into the burden of their love for Joseph. They smiled and squirmed and began to guess: Phoebe, Ruby, Usha, Archie, Blake. Joseph turned toward every name as it was called, as if waiting to see who might produce the Button. Liam S, Bella, Jackson, Xin. Twenty names, and twenty hands falling open. Only Jyoti remained. She stood with her rigid hands, with her desperate smile, with her socks slipping. No one wanted to say her name. They wanted her to give herself up. Miss Lewis, too, wanted Jyoti to give herself up. Eventually Ramon said, ‘Jyoti.’

Jyoti opened her empty hands.

The circle laughed. Miss Lewis had found that children, as a rule, didn’t like practical jokes. There was a certain kind of laughter that, in children, was a howl. Ramon took Jyoti’s wrists and inspected her hands. No one looked at Joseph, but they all saw Jyoti: the mole on her cheek, the dusty mark where she’d rubbed her shin with the heel of her shoe, the crookedness of her teeth. Jyoti might have been crying. Ramon threw her wrists down as if discarding them. Then every child save Joseph and Jyoti began to cry out, just as they’d done when they wanted to play Buttony. They stamped their feet and kicked at the grass. They shook their uniforms and looked up into the branches of the jacaranda tree, as if they might find the Button in these places. Their circle broke open as they shook and kicked and shouted, and faces appeared again in classroom windows.

Miss Lewis watched Joseph stand there with his mouth closed and his hands behind his back. Although the circle had broken, he still seemed to be in the middle of it. He was only a boy and he was alone and proud and terrible. Miss Lewis stepped away from the tree. She would order him to open his mouth and spit out the Button. She would make him say what he had done, how he had stood and watched the children guess; she would shame him, and the faces in the windows would see it.

But first she should settle the children. She clapped her hands five times in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet, but they didn’t copy her. She saw the way they looked at her; she saw their fury. Ramon came first, to pull at her pockets. Then Josie, who had lost a tooth that morning; her mouth was open as she searched the grass at Miss Lewis’s feet. Osea and Mimi scratched at the scabbed bark of the tree. Miss Lewis swatted and slapped, but the children still came. They opened her hands and dug in her elbows. Liam S squatted to peer up her skirt, and when she crouched to stop him, it was Jyoti who pulled the pins from her hair, as if the Button might be hidden in its roots. Now Miss Lewis cried out. She lifted her head and saw Mr Graham running from the 3A classroom. And Joseph was behind him, not quite running, not altogether, but like a shadow, long and blank and beautiful.