Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

'Hey, Simon,' he said, 'why don't you come in?'

Simon raised his head and looked at him. 'What for?' he asked.

'Well, you look kind of lonely out there.'

'Aw, no.'

'Well, anyway,' said James, 'I want to take a picture of you.’

That made Simon think twice. He stood still for a moment to consider it, with his chin stuck out and his eyes gazing away from James and across the field. Then he said, 'What kind of picture?'

'The kind you like. A portrait.'

'Well, then, I reckon I might. I'll come in and think about it.'

‘That's the way,' said James.

He let Simon come in his own good time, stopping to kick at a bootscraper and wasting several minutes examining some blistered paint on the door. When Simon was troubled about something, this was the way he acted. He circled all around the kitchen without once looking at James or speaking to him, and he picked up several things from counters and turned them over and over in his hands before setting them down again. Then he jammed his hands into his back pockets and went to the window. 'Mama's hemming a dress,' he said.

"That's good.'

'She talks a little, too, but not about any concern of mine.'

'Well, you got to give her time,' said James. 'First thing people talk about is weather and things.'

'I know,' Simon said. 'Daddy is at the fields, and Joan too. It's her tobacco day. Everybody's busy.'

'So're you,' said James. 'You're having your picture taken.'

'Yeah, well.'

But when James headed toward the darkroom Simon followed him. 'Where are we going to take it?' he asked.

'Outdoors, if you like.'

'I'd rather the living room.'

'All right,' James said. He opened the door of the darkroom and led the way to where his cameras stood. 'You got to be quiet, though, because that's where Ansel's sleeping.'

‘ Now? '

'It's one of his dizzy days.'

'Oh, cripes,' said Simon, and he started walking in circles again. He put the heel of one boot exactly in front of the toe of the other, and keeping his balance that way made him fling both arms out and tilt sideways slightly. 'It's a bad day for everyone.’ he said. 'I declare.' He seemed to be walking on an imaginary hoop, suspended high above the ground.

James had seen the kind of portraits that Simon and Janie Rose liked best – the ones taken against a dead white screen, with the faces retouched afterwards. He favoured a homier picture, himself. He left the screen behind and brought only a couple of lamps, not the glaring ones, and his favourite old box camera. 'We'll put you in the easy chair,' he told Simon. He had given the camera to Simon to carry, and Simon was squinting through the view-finder as he walked. 'Do you want to be doing anything special?'

'Yes,' Simon said. 'I want to be smoking a cigar.'

'Be serious, now.'

'I am serious. You asked me what I wanted to be doing. Well, all my life I've been waiting to get my picture took with a cigar. I been counting on it.'

'Oh, what the hell,' said James. He set his lamps down and went over to the living-room mantelpiece. From the old wooden cigar box that had belonged to his grandfather he took a cigar, the fat black kind that he smoked on special evenings when no one was around to complain. 'Here you go,' he said. 'But don't you light it, now. Just get your picture took with it.'

'Well, thank you,' said Simon. He crossed to the easy chair, giving Ansel a sideways glance as he passed, but Ansel only stirred and didn't wake up. 'He don't know what he's missing,' Simon whispered. 'Me with a cigar, boy.'

'It'll all be recorded for posterity,' said James.

While James was setting up the lights, Simon practised with the cigar. He opened it and slid the paper ring off, and then he sat with his elbow resting on the chair arm and his face in a furious frown every time he took a suck from the unlit cigar. 'I'm getting the hang of it,' he said, and looked around for an ashtray to practise tapping ashes into. 'When do you reckon they'll let me smoke these for real?'

'Never, probably,' said James. 'Always someone around that objects to the smell.'

'Ah, I wouldn't care. I'm going to start as soon as I'm out on my own, boy. Soon as I turn sixteen or so.'

James smiled and tilted a lamp closer to Simon. He had been listening to Simon for some years how, and he had a mental list of what he was planning to do at age sixteen. Smoke cigars, take tap-dance lessons, buy his own Wool-worth's, and grow sideburns. Janie Rose hadn't even been going to wait that long. She asked her mother weekly, 'Do you think it's time I should be thinking of getting married?' And then she would smile hopefully, showing two front teeth so new that they still had scalloped edges, and everyone would laugh at her. James could see their point, though – Janie's and Simon's. He couldn't remember that being a child was so much fun. So he nodded at Simon and said, 'When you turn sixteen, I'll buy you a box,' and Simon smiled and settled back in the chair.

'Might not wait till then even,' he said. 'You never can tell.'

'Well, I would,' said James. 'Tobacco stunts your growth.'

'No, I mean to go out on my own. I might go earlier.' He stuck out his tongue and flicked an imaginary piece of tobacco off the tip of it. 'I been thinking where I could go.'

'It's kind of early for that,' James said.

'I don't know. You know Caraway, N.C.?'

James stopped fiddling with his camera and looked up. 'What about it?' he asked.

'I just thought you could tell me about it. If that's where you are from.'

'Nothing to tell,' said James.

'Well, there's hats with feathers on them, and them gold earrings the boys all wear. Do you think I might like that town?'

In the view-finder his face was small and pointed, with a worried line between his eyes. He was leaning toward James with the cigar poised forgotten between his thumb and forefinger, and in the second of stillness that followed his question James snapped the picture. 'That'll be a good one,' he said.

'Will I like Caraway?'

'I don't see how. Do you ever see me going to Caraway?'

'Well, the boys wear gold earrings,' Simon said again, and he sighed and rubbed the top of his head and James snapped that picture too.

'Sure, the boys,' he told Simon. They're the worst in the state, Caraway boys. Got tight little Church of God parents. All they want to do when they grow up is come somewhere like Larksville. What you want to do in Caraway?'

'I could board with your family,' Simon said.

James looked up from his camera with his mouth open and then threw back his head and laughed. 'Hoo!' he said, and Ansel stirred in his sleep at the noise. ‘I’d like to see that,' he went on more quietly. 'Would you turn sideways in your chair now, please?'

Simon turned, but he kept his eyes on James. 'Ansel says-' he began.

'Ansel don't know.'

'Ain't he from there?'

'He don't know.'

'Well, anyway,' said Simon. 'I could go and look it over.'

'Your mother would love that. Now, quit watching out of the corner of your eye, Simon. Look at the fireplace.'

'Do you think she'd miss me?' Simon asked.

James clicked the picture and stood up, squinting at him sideways to see which way to turn him next.

'I think my mother'd say, "Who you say's gone? Oh, Simon!" she'd say. "Him. My goodness. Did you remember to bring the eggs?" ' He sat forward again then and frowned at James, twining the cigar over and under the fingers of his left hand. 'You see how it'd be,' he said.

'You know that ain't so,' said James.

He stepped a little to one side and got Simon focussed in the camera again, all the while waiting for the argument to continue. But it didn't. In the square of the viewfinder Simon suddenly sighed and slumped down like a little old man, staring abstractedly at the wet end of his cigar. 'Ah, hell,' he said. 'It don't matter.'