School finally reopened in the fall of 1935. Rusty was seven. I walked him to the one-room schoolhouse as he held my hand. I had suggested that he shouldn’t take Bear, but he insisted and I finally agreed.
When we arrived at the school, I introduced Rusty to Miss Herbst, the teacher, and she showed him where to sit near two other seven-year-olds. She had, of course, heard about him at church and through the town grapevine.
Returning to me she asked, “What should I expect?”
“Well, I said, “he seems to be able to read nearly everything and to understand it. Because of that, he has a much larger vocabulary than you might expect at his age. He knows addition and subtraction and he’s begun on multiplication and fractions. Other than that, all I can say is be prepared for frequent surprises.”
She thanked me and returned to the front of the classroom, where she called the children to order.
In the afternoon, I returned to the school to pick up Rusty. When he came out after the other children, he didn’t look happy.
We sat on a bench and I asked him what was wrong.
“All the older kids were picking on me and laughing at me,” he said tearfully.
“Do you know why?”
“They think I’m a showoff. I hate being different!”
Miss Herbst came out and sat with us, gently rubbing Rusty’s back. “Rusty, they’re just embarrassed,” she said, “because you know more than they do. They think that since they’re the oldest in the school they should know the most. It’s not your fault.”
“Should I just pretend I don’t know anything?”
“No,” she said. “They’re fine for their age. It’s just that you’re ahead of them.”
“I don’t want to be,” he said. “I want people to like me.”
“I think they will if we give them some time. Let’s try to get through this week, and at the end of the week we can talk, just you, me, Bear, and Abe.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, but I could see he remained unhappy. He was still upset for the next few days, and I had to nearly drag him back to school. I reminded him of our agreement, and he said, “I’ll go this week because I said I would, but after that, I’m not going.”
On Friday, when he came out of the school, he looked a little happier.
“What happened?” I asked.
“At the beginning of school, Miss Herbst asked me to wait outside. Then I heard her talking. I don’t know what she said, but when she called me back into the school, the kids didn’t tease me anymore. Oh, they do on the playground because I’m not very good at games, but the oldest boys tease everyone else about that, so I don’t feel alone.”
Miss Herbst came out of the building and sat with us. “Were things any better today, Rusty?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Good. I want you to tell me if the teasing happens again. I think the older children are a little ashamed about what happened, so we can hope it’s stopped.”
On Monday, Rusty went off to school happily. When he came out in the afternoon he was smiling.
“Did something good happen?” I asked him.
He nodded and said, “I have a friend.”
I asked him to tell me what happened.
“Well, in the middle of the morning, one of the older boys, David Miller, asked me to help him with some math, so I did. Now we’re friends.”
“Wonderful,” I said as we walked home. Well, I walked while he skipped, almost dancing with Bear.
I did know who David Miller was although I’d never met him. His father owned the pharmacy in town. He’d always been welcoming and professional. David was two years older than Rusty.
As Rusty had grown older, the frequency of his bad dreams had diminished. He had them occasionally, and he still needed comforting when they happened, but he was slowly getting better.
One time I asked him if he always had the same dream and he nodded. “I always see my father shooting himself,” he said, “and I see the back of his head disappear and his brains come out.”
I was sad that he kept experiencing that dreadful night, but I knew of no way to help him except to listen and hold him when the dream returned.
Now that Rusty was in school, he couldn’t visit Muriel during the mornings, so they met two days a week after school.
Muriel reported to me that Rusty was now making up his own music. He didn’t write it down; he simply knew it and played it. She had asked him if he’d play some of his music for the church prelude, and he agreed.
The next Sunday, he played his own composition as Bear again sat on the console. I’m sure the members of the congregation thought he was simply playing a piece someone else had written until Pastor John announced that it had been Rusty’s own composition. There were murmurs throughout the congregation.
At the end of the service, a boy came up to him and clapped him on the back. Rusty introduced the boy to me as David Miller.
David asked about the organ, why there was more than one keyboard and what the tabs were for.
“There’s more than one keyboard so you can play a melody on one keyboard and accompany it on the other,” Rusty said and then demonstrated on the instrument. “By the way, on organs the keyboards are called manuals.
“As for the tabs, each one makes a different sound, and that sound can be heard all up and down the manual.” Again he demonstrated. “The tabs are called stops. Each stop controls a whole row of pipes, one for each key on the manual. Some organs have knobs instead of tabs.”
David thanked him and couldn’t stop praising Rusty as they walked out of the church together.
The next Sunday, Muriel gave Rusty some music manuscript paper and asked him to begin writing down some of his compositions.
“Why?” he asked. “I know them without writing them down.”
“But someday, somebody else might want to play your music and they can’t do that until it’s written down. You like to play other composers’ music and you couldn’t do that if they hadn’t taken the time to write it.”
From then on, Rusty sat at our dining table each evening and wrote and wrote. It was clear that he was writing from memory and not composing as he went along.
“When do you make up your music?” I asked him one day.
“Oh, any time I’m by myself. I can’t do it during school, but I can do it when I walk to school and back, and sometimes I do it when I’m waiting to go to sleep.”
Muriel pointed out that as he wrote, his music began to become more complex.
“You know,” she said to us one day, “Mozart didn’t really like to write down his music, either.”
“You’re comparing him to Mozart?” I asked.
“Well, like Mozart, Rusty began making music at a very young age. By the time he was ten Mozart had been writing symphonies for two years.”
Rusty told her he had never heard a symphony. In fact, he’d never heard music played on anything except an organ or a piano.
Muriel invited us to her house the next afternoon. When we arrived, she showed us something she called a gramophone. Then she showed him a disc which she called a record, put it on the gramophone, flicked a switch, and the record began turning. She put a needle on the record and suddenly we were hearing a symphony orchestra. Rusty and I were both astonished. Muriel had to change the record a few times and rewind the gramophone as we listened to the entire piece, which she told us was a Mozart symphony.
On the way home, Rusty couldn’t stop talking about what he’d heard. He’d gained a whole new understanding of music and wanted to be able to write such music. He knew nothing about writing for instruments, so for the moment he was stuck, except that he began writing music that was divided into movements like a symphony. Muriel told him that when a composition with movements was for a single instrument it was called a sonata.
In the spring, Rusty turned eight and announced to me that he was going to give a concert in the church. He invited not only the congregation but also his schoolmates and their parents.
He began by playing a sonata for piano. His second sonata was for organ. He was somewhat restricted as he couldn’t yet reach the pedals. His third and final sonata was again for piano.
There was a little reception in the church rectory after the concert, and Rusty received praise from everyone there.
At one point Muriel brought over a man whom neither Rusty nor I knew. He introduced himself as Mr. Morgan and said he was the music teacher in the Springfield high school. “How old are you, Russell?” he asked.
“Eight, sir,” Rusty replied.
“Well, I want to encourage you to keep writing and to come to the high school when you’re ready.”
“Thank you, sir,” Rusty said and shook Mr. Morgan’s hand.
In those days, most boys who finished school through grade eight in our town went to work on the farms. Only a few went on to high school.
As Rusty walked home that night, he seemed to be floating above the ground.
“So how do you feel now about being different?” I asked.
He stopped walking and thought a bit before saying, “Sometimes, like tonight, I enjoy it, but there are other times when I really wish I was more like the other kids.”
“Why?” I asked.
Again he thought. “Because very often it’s just not fun to be different. Sometimes I get treated as though I’m some kind of rare animal.”
You are, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud.
Rusty had continued to sleep in my bed, but he now decided that he was ready to move back into the other bedroom for sleeping. I imagined that he wanted more privacy, and since I did too, it was a welcome change. Of course, both our bedroom doors occasionally popped open, but we both just laughed about that. I had put a hook and eye on the bathroom door so we could have privacy there.
Once again Rusty and I planted our garden in the spring. Occasionally, David Miller joined us. His home was on the street behind the Main Street shops and was near our end of town. With his help we were even able to expand the garden some, and I promised David some of the vegetables when we harvested them.