Franky Furbo

This book is dedicated to our daughter Kate, her husband, Bill, their two beautiful daughters, Dayiel, age two years, and Mia, age eight months.

They are all dead now. They were killed August 3, 1988, at 4:00 p.m. in a terrible automobile crash and fire on Highway I-5 near Albany in the Willlamette Valley in the state of Oregon.

This horrible accident was precipitated by a field fire licensed by public officials of that state. Despite the accident, in which seven were killed, thirty-five injured and twenty-four vehicles destroyed, these field fires are still licensed with the published endorsement of the governor. The overwhelming objection to field burning by most of the residents in that valley is also ignored in the special interest of less than a thousand farmers who bring in $350 million yearly to the state at a profit of $170 million to themselves.

The first Franky Furbo stories were told by me to Kate, over thirty years ago. I told them every morning to each of my children during the next twenty years. I’d looked forward to telling them to Dayiel and Mia.

Now, due to the arrogance, short-sightedness and greed of the grass growers with the backing of Oregon state officials, this can never be.

We hope to forgive but we can never be reconciled.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

1. Going to Ground

2. Denial

3. Fox Hole

4. The Warren

The Story I

5. A Suggestion

6. The Search

The Story II

7. Coming Home

The Story III

8. The Meeting

9. Franky’s Story

10. Going Home

11. Going to Ground

Also by William Wharton

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Going to Ground

In the center of Italy, surrounded by the rolling hills of Umbria, there is a city built on top of a hill. This city is called Perugia, an old fortress city, with tunnels under it designed to withstand sieges during the many battles that, through the centuries, have raged up and down the Italian peninsula.

A few kilometers south of Perugia is a much smaller village called Prepo. It has only twelve houses in it; these are the homes of farmers who work tiny plots of ground around the village. Mostly the farmers grow olives and grapes on their land. They also grow vegetables for themselves, and grain for their animals.

In order to plow the ground, the farmers have huge white oxen called buoi. These beautiful animals are usually hitched by a wooden yoke in twos to pull a plow. The wooden plows dig deep into the dark, brown earth.

Up on the side of a hill, beside Prepo, is a small forest of pine trees. At the edge of these pine trees, and above a small plot of two hectares, is a medium-sized stone house. This house has a tile roof with moss growing on it. There are five windows with wooden shutters, and a chimney. Attached to the house, on the south side so it catches the sun, is a terrace with a grape arbor. In the summer and early autumn the grapes hang over the terrace and the leaves give shade. In all, it is a beautiful place to live.

Inside this house on the side of the hill, near the forest, lives a most interesting family. The father is an American. The mother, although she speaks perfect Italian, is not Italian; she doesn’t look American either. She has golden tan skin and dark red hair. The people in Prepo consider her brutta, or ugly, because red hair to them is a sign of the devil. Actually, almost anyone from anywhere else would call her beautiful.

This American family has lived in their house for more than forty years. The father comes out often and talks with the villagers or rides his bicycle into Perugia to shop. The mother stays home and keeps house and works in the garden. She does not talk to many people. If someone comes to visit, she is very polite, but she never invites anyone to come and never visits anyone herself. Many times she walks alone, or with her husband, through the fields, in the night. There are some in the village who have insisted she is a witch.

This American and his strange wife have four children. Three of them, when they were old enough to leave home, went elsewhere to live, but the youngest still lives with them. None of the children ever attended the Italian schools or any school whatsoever. The parents have taught these children themselves.

The man speaks some Italian but with a quite strong American accent. The children all speak beautiful Italian like their mother. It must be she who teaches them.

In addition to cultivating his grapes and olives, the American father, whose name is William Wiley, is said to write stories for children. Often he can be seen in the neighborhood pedaling around on his bicycle with a folder of paper and a box of paints while he looks for places to paint or draw. No one has ever seen anything he wrote or painted, so there is no way for them to know that the stories he writes and illustrates are published in America and England. The people in Prepo do not travel much. The farthest any of them has ever been is Rome.

It’s the postman who made that journey. He also travels all over this hilly region of small villages, delivering the mail. He is considered by everyone very well traveled. He says the American often receives packages and letters from America or other places. In fact, the mail this American man, William Wiley, receives is probably about half the mail the mailman delivers from the small bag attached to the front of his bicycle.

One of the strange things about this family is they do not make wine from their grapes. They pick the grapes at the proper time, when they are filled with juices, then eat some of them, as does everyone in the village. The rest of the grapes they crush in a large wine press, as everyone knows it must be done, but then they bottle the juice and keep it tightly closed so it can never turn into the lovely light wine for which this part of Italy is famous.

They drink this juice of the grape just that way, raw. It is another thing the people in the village can never understand. But then, they say, what else can one expect from foreigners, especially when one of them is most likely a witch, or worse.

Long ago, the cardinal in Perugia sent a priest to vist the Americans. This was just after they had arrived.

This priest was thirty-five at that time, and it is said he had studied in Rome. He did not think the mother and wife, whose name is Caroline, was ugly at all. He found her quite attractive in a foreign kind of way.

He made this first visit over forty years ago. They invited him to drink with them, and it was true: it wasn’t wine, it was grape juice. He told the villagers he was surprised to find how delicious it tasted, but no one in the village would believe him, even though he was a priest.

This priest discovered the Americans were not Catholic, had no religion, did not go to any church, did not intend to send their children to church or to instruct them in religion. In fact, he suspected they weren’t even Christians, but he didn’t tell anybody in the village this.

Finally, he talked to the family about why he’d come to visit them, how the villagers found them peculiar and thought the wife might be a witch. At this, the two strangers looked at each other and smiled. They’d just had a child born to them, a baby girl; the mother brought her out for the priest to see. He asked if perhaps he might baptize the child. It would help the villagers accept the Americans if he could tell them the baby was baptized. William and Caroline had no objection, and so the priest performed the ceremony. They named the little girl Kathleen.

With that, he left. There was no other discussion.

In the course of years passing by, he came once a year, until, years later, he became a monsignor and was assigned to another church in another part of Italy. During all that time, the American couple allowed him to bless the house and baptize their other children when they were born. This seemed to satisfy most people in the village, although many still maintained the woman was a witch.

The thing that especially bothered everyone, particularly the women in the village, was that as the years passed by, the wife, Caroline, scarcely seemed to age. She became only more mature, more beautiful. At the time when our story starts, after more than forty years, she still looked younger than most forty-year-old women in the village. It wasn’t natural.

Over the years, she continued with her long nocturnal walks, through the dusty fields, up into the forests, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty kilometers in different directions. When she did appear in the daytime, or when children came near her house, she was always kind, and the village children grew to love her. This, perhaps even more than the priest’s acceptance, somewhat commended her to the villagers. In Italy, anyone who loves children and whom children love in turn cannot be thought of as really bad and probably couldn’t be a witch.

So, now it is time for our tale. It will be told mostly by the man in the family, the American named William Wiley. It is a strange, somewhat frightening history, and I must admit I cannot actually remember now how I came to know it. Sometimes it all seems like a weird dream. At the same time, I believe it as strongly as I believe anything in this life.

At the time of our story, the three older children have left and only the young boy remains. The father, William, now has almost pure white hair and is over sixty years old. Caroline continues to look young, not girlish, but like a real woman, a strong woman of great natural beauty. The little boy is dark, thin and tall. All the children, like their mother, seem to mature slowly, seem very young for their years.

Inside the house, on the first floor, is one large room, the room into which one enters. On one side, to the right, is a huge bed, a bed as large as three double beds; it takes up the entire width of the room. In the center of the room is a large round wooden table. It is massively thick and ample enough to seat six people comfortably.

On the other side of the room is a kitchen with a closet for dishes and food. The kitchen has a copper sink, a drainboard in wood, and a large worktable. On the rear wall of the room is a fireplace. On either side are closets for clothing, huge, hand-carved wooden chests reaching to the ceiling. Also on that back wall is a staircase, almost like a ship’s ladder. It leads to the upstairs.

If we go up those stairs, we find two rooms. One is a schoolroom, with chalkboards on the walls, a wide desk and four smaller ones. In that room, the walls, where there are not chalkboards, are lined by bookshelves filled with books. It’s a miniature schoolroom.

The other room is the workroom of the father, William. There is a desk with a typewriter. This desk is large and has many drawers. It also has a section with a slanted top for drawing. There is a light over the typewriter and another over the drawing board. On the board is a half-finished drawing, but we cannot quite see it.

We now go downstairs again. The mother, Caroline, is in the kitchen preparing breakfast. The father, William, and the son, Billy, are still in bed. The little boy is stretched out on his father’s chest.

Let us now begin our story. I only hope I can tell this properly. Oddly enough, being a professional writer of novels can sometimes make it difficult to tell about true things so they’ll be believed. People don’t expect truth in novels. Once, in a book called A Midnight Clear, I wrote about a nineteen-year-old boy who said, ‘I have a penchant for telling true stories no one can believe.’

I feel that way myself, now.

2

Denial

‘Aw, come on, Daddy, that’s not the way it ends. You can’t end the story that way.’

‘What do you mean, Billy? Of course that’s the way it ends. That’s the end of the story.’

‘Please, Dad, make up another ending. Make up an interesting ending with more things happening, exciting things.’

Billy has his head on my chest now. With one ear he can listen to the hollow sound of my voice inside me, and with the other ear hear the sounds coming out of my mouth. All our children figured this out at one time or another, or maybe it was only one and they shared. But, in the past, when for a while there were four of them scattered on top and around me, there was hardly room on my chest for all the heads. I’m missing those wonderful mornings, those full days. I dread when Billy will grow up and leave us.

Kathy, our oldest, once told me how hearing a story that way, with her ear on my chest, made it seem to come from inside herself. Matthew, our first boy, always said he liked to watch my eyes and mouth when I told a story, but that it was even better hearing it with his ear against me. Once in a while, in an exciting part, he’d lift his head and look into my eyes. He’d have such a wonderful glow of excitement and interest in his beautiful yellow-brown eyes. Such wonderful days.

But now I must come back to the present; I can’t avoid it any longer. I know I’m only putting this off. It’s something I don’t want to face; I’m not prepared.

‘But, Billy, you know these aren’t stories I make up myself; these are stories Franky Furbo told me many years ago. I can’t change the ending, you know that.’

Billy lifts his head from my chest and looks me in the eyes the way Matthew used to years ago, only Billy’s eyes are more knowing, more challenging. I think, what a beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, kind boy he is, as have been all our children, each different and each such a tremendous joy to us over the many years. Our lives have truly been like a dream; there’s no other word to describe the way we’ve lived all these years.

I never have had to go off to work anywhere. The combination of my military disability pension and the money I earn from the little stories and books I write, along with the money we make selling olive oil from our trees, has more than provided us with any money we’ve needed. When the children were young, none of us wanted to travel. We only sent the children off from home to the university because it was time for them to know something of the everyday world, the world we’ve abandoned.

Caroline has insisted they have this experience with real life, the hostility, competition, violence, greed from which we’ve sheltered them. Caroline has been an excellent teacher, and they were each well prepared to attend any university they wanted, or do any work that interested them.

The most rewarding, incredible thing is how, during their entire lives, they’ve always played with one another. They’ve been such loving friends. They’ve had Italian friends as well, but mostly they’ve made up their own games here at home. There’s been much laughter and joy in this house over these years.

Billy is still staring into my eyes as my mind wanders.

‘I KNOW you make up these stories, Dad. I don’t really believe in Franky Furbo anymore, either. Come on, Dad, tell me, truly. You do make all these stories up, don’t you? There isn’t any real Franky Furbo; he’s just somebody you made up in your head. You can tell me; I’m old enough now.’

It had to come, sooner or later. But he’s the first one to challenge me, to throw it in my face. Probably the others were too timid or too kind, or maybe they only wanted to believe more than Billy does. Also, they had one another to back up the stories. They’d repeat them over and over; they’d even play Franky Furbo games, taking turns being Franky. They’d often ask me questions about Franky Furbo, questions independent of the stories I told. They were curious; Franky was such an important part of their lives. Believing might be harder for Billy because he’s been alone these past years. In some important way he’s different.

The crazy thing is how hard it hits me when he says he doesn’t believe in Franky Furbo. I don’t know how to respond. I want him to believe with me. I want to respect his opinions, his beliefs, but I still have to be true to myself.

‘But, Billy, there is a Franky Furbo. I’ve seen him. I lived with him. I know him very well. I’m not lying to you.’

‘I know you’re not lying, Dad. You’re only telling stories. That’s not the same as lying. You know how you’ve tried to teach me, all of us, to tell stories. Telling stories is fun. I know that. I know you like to tell stories, and I like to listen to them, too. Come on, Dad. Make up another ending for me. I don’t really have to believe in Franky for it to be fun.’

He puts his head back on my chest and gives me a good love hug. I know how soon it will be before he’s too embarrassed to come into bed with me and cuddle like this in the morning. Boys or girls, it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Even though we all sleep together in this gigantic bed, it still happens. I designed this bed because neither of us, Caroline nor I, believe children should be alone in the night.

Still, there comes a time when they pull back and are less willing to be held closely. It’s interesting how the farthest part of the bed from Caroline and me becomes the special prerogative of the oldest child. As they’ve grown older and each one, in turn, has left our nest, our private warren, the next in line would move toward that end. Little Billy has a lot of bed to himself, and he seems to pick a place according to his mood. Last night I noticed he slept on the far end, as the oldest child at home normally would. That should have told me something.

Most likely, the children sense that the bed space where Caroline and I sleep is our private property, and they feel like invaders in our personal life. There’s a little curtain I insisted on putting up, which can be drawn across when we want to make love alone. Caroline says I’m silly, but she lets me draw it anyway sometimes.

However, whatever the reasons for their pulling apart, I do regret it, as does Caroline; although both of us are resigned to this inevitable pulling away, separation, parting. And we know we’re lucky having them as long as we do.

I turn my mind back to the problem of Billy and Franky Furbo. Billy lifts his head up to me one more time.

‘Don’t feel badly, Dad. I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, or Brufani , or Santa Claus either. It doesn’t mean anything if I don’t believe Franky Furbo really exists.’

How can I ever tell him?

‘OK, then, if that’s what you want. So, instead of the guardians for the ball of fire returning through the crack in time-space and going back to their own world in another galaxy, in another universe, they work their way through again. They force their overwhelming power of blue death through the Climus Channel and with great wickedness and malevolence set fire to everything. They burn down the forest where Franky lives with his friends. All of them are burned, turned to a white ash. Before Franky can even think to make himself big or small, change himself into something else, hide or fly away on Bamba, it’s all over.

‘The denizens of Climus look over their work, their destruction, and even they are sad. This is the end. All their years of trying to stop Franky Furbo’s efforts at doing good, helping people on this planet, have finally been successful. They’ve won! Franky is dead! His tree house and all he’d built, his magic powders – all are gone! These wicked aliens will never have anything to worry about in their conquest of the universe. The end.’

I stop. I know, even as I’m telling this story, that I’m being incredibly cruel. I don’t understand it myself. I’ve been telling this continuous story of Franky Furbo all the years we’ve had children old enough to listen and enjoy. I also know I’ve hurt myself as much as anyone.

In our family, storytelling time is always in the morning. It gives Caroline some free moments to get herself dressed, to clean up and make breakfast. I must’ve told thousands of stories over the years. And all these Franky Furbo stories would just come to me out of nowhere. In a certain way I really didn’t make them up any more than the real things in life are made up.

Another reason I’d always tell these stories in the morning was because the children would go to bed at different times at night, according to their age; also Caroline was concerned they would dream about them. Some of the Franky stories are very scary. But this one I just told, this ending I gave to this story, didn’t come from anywhere but my own wounded vanity. I’d struck back at my much-loved son with an unnecessary, indefensible violence.

I can feel Billy sobbing against my chest. He doesn’t look up at me. I wait. He’s gone limp. When he speaks it’s haltingly, between sobs.

‘Aw, that’s not fair, Dad. You didn’t have to kill off everybody, even Franky. I feel awful. Camilla and Matthew and Kathy will be sad, too, when they find out. Just because I don’t believe in Franky doesn’t mean he isn’t really there. I feel as if I killed him myself.’

I hold on to him tightly. Caroline comes over from the kitchen and looks down at me. Boy, is she ever upset! Usually she doesn’t get angry easily or show much of what she’s feeling unless the feelings are good. And then, somehow, she helps me feel her good feelings. But I know right now she has no good feelings toward me. She doesn’t have to say anything. I don’t think I ever remember her being this deeply disgusted. She’s so angry she doesn’t speak but turns away and goes back to her work in the kitchen.

‘OK, Billy. I was only kidding. That isn’t the way it ends. I was just pretending. The way it ended the first time I told you is the real ending. It’s the way the story ended when Franky told it to me. I can’t change it. If I change that ending, then any ending would be all right, could be true, even the terrible one I just made up. Do you understand? Making up stories is a tricky business. I must be honest with the story even if you don’t like it or don’t believe it, even if I don’t like it, don’t believe it.’

Billy hugs me harder and nods his head that he understands. At least that’s what I think he’s doing. I look over at Caroline. She’s shaking her head, too, but not the same way. She’s shaking her head as if she still doesn’t understand or agree with what I’m up to. It’s a head shake of incomprehension.

The tension is so great I can’t take it anymore, and, besides, it’s time to get up. The eggs and cereal are almost ready, and I need to wash up first. So does Billy. It used to be a madhouse around here when all six of us were trying to wash. Caroline would have hot water in bowls for each and there would be as much splashing around and spluttering as a flock of birds bathing in a birdbath. Caroline would check all of us, even me, to see if we’d washed correctly and were clean. Our toilet is in the back, behind the house, and we’d each take our turns there too. I’m really missing the other children, especially right now, just before Christmas. And Billy will have another birthday, two days before Christmas. It won’t be long before we’re alone. It’s hard to think about.

Kathleen and Matthew are both down in the mountains of Chile now. They seem to be happy together, and each is doing work they think is important. Kathy has become what she calls an anthropologist-archaeologist and is making studies of giant rocks and strange marks on the mountains down there. Matthew works on a computer and makes up programs for solving different problems in ecological procedures, the way I make up children’s stories. He says he can live anywhere he wants, and he likes living near Kathleen. I worry about them living such strange lives, but Caroline doesn’t seem concerned, and, after all, she’s the mother. I’ve been a pretty good father, but there’s no question: the center of our family has always been Caroline. She lives her life around them and they around her. Except for the Franky Furbo part of my life, I’m not very important.