From the Corner of His Eye

him.
        "Does he read Father Brown mysteries?"
        Crouching beside the boy as he rubbed a brighter shine onto the granite, Agnes said, "Barty, honey, why are you…
        He stopped polishing the stone and met her stare. "What?"
        Although she would have felt ridiculous phrasing this question in these words to any other three-year-old, no better way existed to ask it of her special son: "Kiddo… do you realize you're speaking of your dad in the present tense?"
        Barty had never been instructed in the rules of grammar, but had absorbed them as the roots of Edom's roses absorbed nutrients. "Sure. Does and is."
        "Why?"
        The boy shrugged.
        The cemetery had been mown for the holiday. The scent of fresh cut grass grew more intense the longer Agnes met her son's radiant green-blue gaze, until the fragrance became exquisitely sweet.
        "Honey, you do understand… of course you do… that your dad is gone."
        "Sure. The day I was born."
        "That's right."
        Thanks to his intelligence and his personality, Barty's presence was so great for his age that Agnes tended to think of him as being physically larger and stronger than he actually was. As the scent of grass grew more complex and even more appealing, she saw her son more clearly than she'd seen him in a while: quite small, fatherless yet brave, burdened with a gift that was a blessing but that also made a normal boyhood impossible, forced to grow up at a up faster pace than any child should be required to endure. Barty was achingly delicate, so vulnerable that when Agnes looked at him, she felt a little of the awful sense of helplessness that burdened Edom and Jacob.
        "I wish your dad could have known you," Agnes said.
        "Somewhere, he does."
        At first, she thought that Barty meant his father watched him from Heaven, and his words touched a tenderness in her, overlaying an arc of pain across the curve of her smile.
        Then the boy put new and puzzling shadings on his meaning when he said, "Daddy died here, but he didn't die every place I am."
        His words echoed back to her from July: My cold's just here, not every place I am.
        "The pepper tree had been whispering in the breeze, the roses nodding their bright heads. Now a stillness came into the cemetery, as if rising from beneath the grass, from out of that city of the lost.
        "It's lonely for me here," said Barty, "but not lonely for me everywhere."
        From a bedtime conversation in September: Somewhere, there's kids next door And somewhere Selma Galloway, their neighbor, was not a spinster but a married woman with grandchildren.
        A sudden strange weakness, a formless dread, dropped Agnes out of her crouch and onto her knees beside the boy.
        "Sometimes it's sad here, Mommy. But it's not sad every place you are. Lots of places, Daddy's with you and me, and we're happier, and everything's okay."
        Here again were these peculiar grammatical constructions, which sometimes she had thought were just the mistakes that even a prodigy could be expected to make, and which sometimes she had interpreted as expressions of fanciful speculations, but which lately she had suspected were of a more complex-and perhaps darker-nature. Now her dread took form, and she wondered if the personality disorders that had shaped her brothers' lives could have roots not just in the abuse they had taken from their father, but also in a twisted genetic legacy that could manifest again in her son. In spite of his great gifts, Barty might be destined for a life limited by a psychological problem of a unique or at least different-nature, first suggested by these occasional conversations that seemed not fully coherent.
        "And in a lot of somewheres," said Barty, "things are worse for us than here. Some somewheres, you died, too, when I was born, so I never met you, either."
        These statements sounded so convoluted and so bizarre to Agnes that they nourished her growing fear for Barty's mental stability.
        "Please, sweetie please don't…"
        She wanted to tell him not to say these queer things, not to talk this way, yet she couldn't speak those words. When Barty asked her why, as inevitably he would, she'd have to say she was worried that something might be terribly wrong with him, but she couldn't express this fear to her boy, not ever. He was the lintel of her heart, the