A Perfect Friend

By Reynolds Price

A Moving Fable For Readers Of All Ages -- From National Book Critics Circle Award-Winning Author Reynolds Price

Ben Barks loved elephants long before he'd seen one. He sometimes wondered how that love started....

It's been a whole year since Ben's mother died, and nothing has soothed his broken heart -- except thinking about elephants, those magnificent creatures his mother loved too. Imagining their awesome grace always calms him in a way that his sad father and closest friends never can. When a one-ring circus comes to Ben's small town, he discovers Sala, an elephant who survived a wicked trainer's abuses. And soon, their powerful bond becomes a miraculous healer -- and gives Ben renewed hope for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
• Release date: Jun 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781439106273

Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price (1933–2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Book preview

A PERFECT FRIEND

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 2000 by Reynolds Price

Frontispiece © 2000 by Maurice Sendak

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Book design by Michael Nelson

The text of this book is set in Goudy.

Printed in the United States of America

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Price, Reynolds, 1933-

A perfect friend / Reynolds Price.

p. cm.

Summary: Still grieving over the death of his mother, eleven-year-old Ben finds solace in the special relationship he forms with an elephant in a visiting circus.

ISBN 0-689-83029-7

eISBN: 978-1-439-10627-3

[1. Elephants—Fiction. 2. Circus—Fiction. 3. Human-animal communication—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction. 5. Death—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.P93163 Pe 2000

[Fic]—dc21

99-55397

Dedication

FOR MARCIA DRAKE BENNETT and PATRICIA DRAKE MASIUS

FIRST FRIENDS

BOOKS BY REYNOLDS PRICE

A PERFECT FRIEND 2000

FEASTING THE HEART 2000

LETTER TO A MAN IN THE FIRE 1999

LEARNING A TRADE 1998

ROXANNA SLADE 1998

THE COLLECTED POEMS 1997

THREE GOSPELS 1996

THE PROMISE OF REST 1995

A WHOLE NEW LIFE 1994

THE COLLECTED STORIES 1993

FULL MOON 1993

BLUE CALHOUN 1992

THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE 1991

NEW MUSIC 1990

THE USE OF FIRE 1990

THE TONGUES OF ANGELS 1990

CLEAR PICTURES 1989

GOOD HEARTS 1988

A COMMON ROOM 1987

THE LAWS OF ICE 1986

KATE VAIDEN 1986

PRIVATE CONTENTMENT 1984

VITAL PROVISIONS 1982

THE SOURCE OF LIGHT 1981

A PALPABLE GOD 1978

EARLY DARK 1977

THE SURFACE OF EARTH 1975

THINGS THEMSELVES 1972

PERMANENT ERRORS 1970

LOVE AND WORK 1968

A GENEROUS MAN 1966

THE NAMES AND FACES OF HEROES 1963

A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE 1962

A PERFECT FRIEND

BENJAMIN LAUGHINGHOUSE BARKS WAS CALLED BEN. By the time he was nine, he asked his friends to call him Laugh. Laughinghouse had been his mother’s last name before she married his father. But nobody wanted to call Ben Laugh, nobody but a red-haired boy named Duncan Owens, who became his second-best friend. Ben was generally friendly to young and old people, but even that early Laugh didn’t seem right for a serious person. His cousin Robin Drake was one year younger, and she knew Ben as well as anybody. She tried to call him Laugher for a while; but when Ben’s mother died the year he was ten, he finally asked Robin to call him anything except Laugher.

He was the only boy in school who had a girl for his best friend, and he could usually smile at Robin’s joking. After his mother died, though, Ben’s out-look changed; and he went on feeling sad for a long time. Even a whole year later, he still missed his mother at night; and the sadness would keep him awake sometimes. Then he would lie very flat in the dark, with both his arms stretched down by his sides, and think about elephants to help him sleep. Sooner or later they always helped him. Just the thought of their power and the awesome gentleness with which they treated each other most times could ease his mind and send him on into sleep like a boat on a calm dark lake.

Some people love horses or tropical fish. Some are devoted to cranky parrots that can bite off a finger. Ben knew one boy who kept a mighty boa constrictor right by his bed—a snake that could choke him to death as easily as strangling a kitten. Ben Barks loved elephants long before he’d seen one. He sometimes wondered how that love started. Since he lived in a small quiet town and had never even been to a zoo, Ben guessed his mother had been the cause.

By the time he was three years old, his mother would sit with Ben at a kitchen table and draw good pictures of elephants with a pencil. When she was a child, she’d seen an elephant in a traveling circus, and she and Ben’s father had a few books and magazines with photographs of actual elephants who lived far off in Africa and Asia. But Ben’s mother never copied those pictures. For some mysterious reason of her own, since childhood, the idea of elephants was planted in her head; and when she drew her idea on paper, the elephant always looked realer than any photograph—to her and her only child Ben at least.

Good as she was, she always asked Ben to draw along with her. At first Ben’s drawings were funny, but they managed to look more or less like elephants. When Ben and his mother each finished a drawing, she would help him color his picture with crayons. Ben colored them red or blue or yellow—impossible colors.

His mother let him do that for a while. But when he was five and the idea of elephants was safe in his own head, his mother said Ben, in Africa and Asia, all elephants are gray or brownish gray. Let’s respect the way they really look. From then on Ben made his drawings true to life or as true as he could since he still hadn’t seen a live elephant.

Soon after that Ben’s mother mostly let him draw alone. He was his parents’ only child; and since they lived on the edge of town with few close neighbors, he had no playmates except his cousin Robin and occasionally Duncan Owens, when Duncan’s mean father would let him play. Robin lived a mile away. On weekends she and Ben would ride their bicycles to visit each other, and then they’d act out the stories they’d read or seen in movies. Ben went to every movie that starred real elephants, and most times Robin went along with him. In a lot of their games, Ben would ride an imaginary elephant and sometimes let Robin ride behind him through the nearby woods. It could make them happy for a whole afternoon; and once Ben started school and could read, he spent many evenings reading about real elephants in his father’s books.

That way he learned a lot about them. Elephants lived in good-sized families and guarded their babies carefully. They were stronger than anything else alive on land; and they had huge brains that made them at least as smart as the smartest other creatures—whales, dolphins, pigs, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The only thing elephants did that seemed wrong to Ben was butting down whole trees just to eat the top leaves. Now and then they also tramped down the gardens of helpless people who were trying to grow their food and live in elephant country. Even one elephant could ruin a whole cornfield by just walking through it. And when they got angry occasionally, some elephant might badly hurt or kill someone. That would only happen, most times anyhow, when they felt their young were in real danger.

When Ben was seven the year after he began first grade, his parents surprised him by taking him and Robin to an actual circus that was visiting the nearest big town for two days. It was Ringling Brothers, the Greatest Show on Earth—or so it said on its red-and-blue posters. Ben knew the whole thing was his mother’s idea, and he secretly wished that he could have gone with nobody but her. He liked his father and Robin; but he and his mother had spent almost their best times together, drawing elephants and trying to imagine their lives. His mother got tickets for the whole family, though. So Ben concealed his disappointment, and off they all went. The whole way there Ben had told himself silently to concentrate on the great sights to come and not to let Robin or his joking father keep him from seeing and memorizing every good thing and of course every detail of the elephant troop.

But before the show started in the huge main tent, Ben and the others walked through a long but smaller tent where all the circus animals waited. There were lions and tigers and leopards pacing back and forth in cages, looking fierce and lonely at the same time. There was one lone gorilla crouched down in the corner of a cage with the thickest bars of all. His face was as sad as anything Ben had ever seen—and sadder still because there was nothing anybody could do to cheer him up, short of sending him back to the African mountains.

Then the last thing before Ben and his family entered the main tent was two lines of elephants. One was on Ben’s left, one on his right. By the shape of their heads, Ben knew at once they were Indian elephants, who were easier to tame than the ones from Africa, though even the smallest one was twice as tall as Ben’s father. When they came into sight, Ben stopped in his tracks. However many elephants he’d read about or seen in movies, he had never guessed at the high excitement he would feel when he first saw one, alive and nearby.

He felt as if he were flying through space with just the power of his own two arms, and the speed had emptied the air from his lungs. But that didn’t scare him. Ben had always liked a great many things in the world around him. A well-played game or an arrowhead he might find in the woods could make him happy for hours. But the sight of these elephants made him happier than he’d ever been before. Joyful as he was, soon he got his breath back and counted the elephants carefully.

There were fifteen on one side, fourteen on the other—twenty-nine live elephants in all. They looked enough alike to be a single family; but each one of them was moving a little, side to side as if dancing alone with nobody near. None of them were looking at each other but were facing straight forward, chewing mouthfuls of hay. Each one had a small chain around an ankle, and each chain was hooked to an iron post in the ground behind. Of course they all could have pulled those up with no trouble whatever and gone anywhere they wanted to go unless men with powerful elephant guns shot and killed them.

Ben even realized that, with their famous strength, any one of them could take a single step, break free completely, and kill every person in the whole crowded tent. Their family together could tear up every building in town, including the water tank, and crush all the people. But they just continued their gentle dance and seemed not to make any harmful plans. Ben could hardly believe he was in the same space with such peaceful and noble creatures. A few yards ahead of him, a human family with several children were feeding peanuts to one

Reviews for A Perfect Friend

[eliz12_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Awful, just awful.