Through my early years of grade school, my mother kept us afloat by working in a Dairy Queen, farming me out to even needier families on weekends and summer days. One of those families had an old fishing boat propped up in their front yard. What was it doing there? This was in rural Florida. The husband worked at a nearby farm, and we were many miles from the ocean. If they’d ever meant to use it, or sell it, that possibility was long past. The planking of the hull had separated, paint hung in curls off the gray wood, and the deck was slick with mold and spongy underfoot. Wasps and raccoons nested in the small cabin.
The family had two children: Ginger, a girl my age, eight or nine, always cuddling a doll, and a boy, Lonny, several years older and twice my size. Lonny suffered from what I now suspect was autism. He did not go to school. His speech was limited to a few words and repetitive sounds. But he liked me and so did Ginger, and they let me read books to them and lead them in play, though Lonny would soon grow distracted and wander off. My favorite game was to get into the boat and pretend that I was a pirate captain and Lonny and Ginger my crew. We weren’t supposed to be there. The boat, I’d been firmly told, was off limits. But when the man of the house was away and the mother busy indoors, I couldn’t resist the joy of standing at the wheel, barking orders as we pursued rich merchantmen through roiling seas.
Then Lonny pushed Ginger off the boat. She’d been sitting on the gunwale with her doll, minding her own business, when without cause or warning he came at her with both arms outstretched and sent her flying. It was a good six feet to the ground and she landed flat on her back. Lonny and I both stood at the rail looking down at her as she gasped for air. I didn’t know what to do. She finally caught her breath and gave a terrible cry. She cried out again and her mother came running from the house. She knelt by Ginger and looked up at me. “What did you do?”
“Lonny pushed me,” Ginger said.
Eyes still fixed on me, her mother said, “You told him to.”
“No,” I said. “No. I did not.”
“I heard you. You told him to.”
I was stricken mute by the sheer extravagance of this untruth. I’d told Lonny nothing, and in the house she couldn’t have heard me if I had. I was ordered inside and made to wait alone in the kitchen until my mother picked me up some hours later. When the woman repeated the lie to her I denied it, tearfully, theatrically, but I could see the doubt in my mother’s face. I continued insisting on my innocence during the drive home, and though she said she believed me I could see that she didn’t, not really—that she thought it might be true. For why would the woman make up such a story? At this remove of years, I would say: because she had to. But I had no answer then.
Something broke between us that day, or at least in me.
We speak of losing our innocence as a consequence of something willful we have done, less often as a consequence of something done, or revealed, to us. But that is the deepest loss. Children can amend their own conduct, even their ways of thinking; they can restore their own trustworthiness, but trust in the adult world, in its rightness, in the rightness of its power over them, once broken is beyond repair. And then begins the project of accommodating oneself to that unjust, unreliable world. Of fooling it, manipulating it, of evading, deflecting, and, finally, seizing its power. Of becoming an adult.
Tobias Wolff’s books of fiction and nonfiction include Old School, The Night in Question, In Pharaoh’s Army, and This Boy’s Life.
