Jamari

He was smiling, and that’s all I needed. I saw him sprinting down the street, passing the neighborhood blocks and yards with local neighbors mowing the mid-summer grass, and I admired his energy. It was far too early that Saturday morning; I had just woken up an hour before, and I’d gone to sleep only four hours before that. I was clearing the sleep from my eyes and the sweat from my brow when I saw him coming up, and we’d be starting the meeting soon.

It was definitely his smile that made Jamari special. His face acted like a barometer for everything being right in the world, and when you couldn’t find a smile, then something was terribly wrong. I hadn’t known Jamari for that long; he was just a neighborhood kid at the church. He was eleven years old when he joined up with the Scout troop that was assigned to me. He could stretch himself to eye-level with my navel on the tips of his toes, and at times I could imagine him wearing the chain around my neck as a belt. When he joined, I knew his mother wouldn’t be able to afford a uniform for him, but the church deacons made sure he had one. When he tried the clothes on, he told me they were perfect, and I believed him. That next Saturday morning, he showed up with a uniform two sizes too big, but he sowed the badges on himself and would absolutely refuse for me to take them back. Wearing that uniform that day, he looked like a little boy trying on his father’s suit, and he looked like he’d never been prouder in his life. That’s how I’ve always seen Jamari.

He was energetic and fast, and he never seemed to have both feet on the ground at the same time. He was never afraid to wrestle with the biggest kid in the troop, and he would even take me on if I let him. He was never afraid to attempt the most daunting of tasks, just as long as he thought he could be of some help. He was kind, and funny, and wise far beyond his years. He was the youngest kid to join my troop and the hardest worker I had, so it was no big surprise that he soon became a project of mine. I focused on many of the kids in my Scout troop in the same way, but most of those kids were older, between fourteen and sixteen years old. With Jamari, I took extra care; he was the least experienced and the least educated, but he was more than willing to put his everything into learning all that I had to teach him. Jamari was my favorite (I don’t think anybody would be surprised to hear that), because if nothing else, he represented everything I missed about being a kid in my own time.

Four months prior to that Saturday morning, I was with a different group of kids, those who were actually my own age. They had been my best friends for years: J.T., Pat, Ryan, Josh. We had spent the entire summer day that Saturday doing everything we had so openly ached for, swimming and boating at the lake, just we few. Since breaking our chains and going our separate ways to colleges hours apart, we had talked time and time again about how wonderful it would be to just have one of those summer days again, like we always had in high school. We’d get together at the lake, hop in a boat, and just drift. We’d swim, and we’d fish. We’d flirt with whatever girls we could find, and we would joke at their expense when they shot us down. That summer day was about remembering all those stories, and reliving them, and reminding ourselves that college hasn’t changed who we really were.

The day was coming to a close and the boat was finally tied to the dock. The colors in the cloudless sky burned from blue to orange, towards a darker blue at the top, and the water shone from yellow to red across the horizon. We flattened ourselves on the wooden dock, unable to gather strength enough to actually get up and move to dry land. Beside our five, practically inanimate bodies sat towels, soaked and tossed aside, and numerous bottles of brown and green glass, all empty, strewn about beside a cooler that was once filled with ice, but by then was merely water. We were all content, and all exhausted, and as the daylight hours burned away we stared at the stars that became more visible as the orange continued to melt downward.

“You know, I really do miss high school,” Pat broke the silence. “I mean, I’ve done so much since I’ve gone to college, but I really never stopped missing this kinda stuff we’re doing.”

“Is that just weird?” he finished.

I knew the answer. I laid there in the silent calm that passed over us, and I knew exactly what to say. I had spent often too much time considering it before, and it had been the subject of many of the things I was writing about at the time. “Things were easier then. Easier than they are now, at least,” I managed to spit out. “Now we're grown. The stakes are just higher, and we don’t have the family now; not like we were family then.”

The passing calm had already passed; what passed over us now was a deep, nostalgic melancholia. There were no words for the next few moments as the alcohol mixed with the emotion and we all knew what each of us were feeling.

“I miss being a kid. Being a kid was great,” J.T. pitched in.

“I miss knowing that everything was gonna be taken care of, no matter what,” Josh added.

They were both right. That was the last we talked of the subject that night. We found more bottles and we found more ice, and we went back to being the closest group of friends in the world, at least for that night, and the rest of that summer until life started back again. But that nostalgic melancholia had never been far from my mind, for months before that night and each night since.

I stared at Jamari that Saturday morning four months later, bent over and catching his breath, still smiling that ear-to-ear beam of his. We went inside into the air-conditioned room the church had set aside for us to have our meetings. We opened the meeting with a prayer, where we gathered into a circle, crossed arms in front of our bodies and grabbed one another’s hands to form the bond, and the troop’s chaplain aide started to pray aloud. Jamari refused to be in the circle unless he was next to an adult leader, and he usually ran to me first. His little hand had very little strength in it, and at best, he would only grab two of my fingers to hold on. After the prayer, they would line up in single line, and the senior patrol leader would bark orders in a military fashion. They all lined up and followed the orders, repeating aloud the oath, the law, the pledge of allegiance, and little Jamari stayed on the far right at the end of the line. He was a foot and a half shorter than the next one in line, but he stood taller and straighter than any kid there, back rigid with the three-fingered Scout sign up. While every kid there barked the oath and the law and the pledge back to the SPL like a young soldier would, Jamari never let that smile go.

The line broke and they all sat down in their seats, ready for me to give the instructions for the day. They stared at me, wondering what I had cooked up for them this time. Would they learn how to save somebody’s life? Would they learn how to cook a three course meal using charcoal and aluminum foil? Would they learn how to navigate in the day-time without a compass? No, they wouldn’t; they wouldn’t learn any of those things today, because in Scouting, for every life-changing, paradigm-shifting lesson they would learn, they would have to sit through four or five lessons of tedium. I remember wondering whether Jamari would smile about this one, too.

“Alright, fellas, today, we’re gonna be learning ‘bout knots!” I tried to sound as excited as I could. I dropped a bag on the table and pulled out a bundle of thin, plastic-threaded ropes; each scout looked at the bundle as if I had pulled out the shovel that would eventually bury them alive. “Now, I’ve got seven knots that we have to have down for the camping trip next month, so that we can do some cooler stuff with them. We’re gonna build monkey bridges and flagpoles and all kinds of stuff, but first we have to learn the knots we’re gonna use to build them with.” I pulled out a stack of index cards, each showing the knot name and procedure, and I caught their eyes; Sam was looking all around the room, in his own head. Josh fought against gravity to keep his eyes from going under. Caleb looked at me as if I had just damned him to the first circle of Hell. Jamari stared at me, attentively, still smiling. I remember wondering why I’d doubted it.

I stared back at them and I froze. I hadn’t a clue what to say. This was certainly not my first speech to them; I’d been having these meetings every week for over three months at the time. It wasn’t so long ago that I was standing in their shoes, a scout ready to take things in. I remember having so much fun, learning everything and applying it to the activities I had to do. I remember looking up to the leaders because they were leaders, and because they were adults, because that’s what my mother always told me to do. I never remembered looking back and thinking, “Wow, those guys really did put in a lot of time and effort for all this,” or, “You know, these guys could be home with their wives and families right now.” I stood in front of these wide-eyed children and I knew there were twenty things I could be doing right then and there, but I wasn’t. I was with my boys. And as Jamari prepared himself to hang on my every word, I remembered being thankful to those who came before me.

It was only eight months back when I sat down with the old man, my grandfather. He had been the Scoutmaster to my troop, back when he was in his prime. He had called me up that night and coaxed me to his dinner table with the thought of my grandmother’s soy-marinated London Broil and rice. For that reason alone, I knew it was a trap.

“Well, Bryan,” he passed the rice bowl and crouched into his pouncing position, “next week is your birthday, right?”

“Yessir,” I sensed his muscles tensing.

“Twenty-one, right?” he crept forward from the brush.

“Yessir,” I tensed.

“Well I’ve been talking to the pastor, and he agrees that there’s one thing our church desperately needs,” he sprang toward me, “and that’s a Scout troop.”

I hesitated. Any positive word from me would be tacit consent. But this man has been my life; he’s the one who raised me. I could not tell him “no.” I had no choice: “Sounds good.”

Finally, the pounce: “And we agreed that when you turn twenty-one, you’d be the perfect choice to head it up.”

“Crushed” was the only way to describe how I felt at the moment. I knew exactly where the conversation was heading the moment he brought up the pastor. The pastor was always talking about the kids, and how the kids were uncontrollable, and how the kids needed a positive influence in their lives, and how if there was only some way he could get them to sit down and learn something, he would jump on it. These two had been plotting this scheme since the moment I came to their church. I argued: “Don’t you think I’m a little too young for that?”

“Twenty-one’s the cut-off point. You qualify,” he’d done his homework.

“It’s twenty-one to be a leader, sure, but to be lead scoutmaster?” I begged.

“You qualify,” he said. He wasn’t going to budge, and I knew he wouldn’t. He had all the ends taken care of. I stared at him, intently, like he had just sentenced me to life; he sighed, and he said: “Bryan, I raised you. I stood by your side this whole time, not because your mother needed me, and not just because I love you, but because I saw what you had to offer. I’m seventy-seven years old, Bryan, and I’m too old to lead these kids. But I wake up every day proud because I’ve done everything I could to help as many people as I could, and even better: I knew that I raised you well enough that you would do the same. Those kids love you. They respect you. I see you playing horseshoes with them every Sunday, and I see you throwing the football with them every Wednesday, and I know you love it too. You’re a wonderful kid, and I’ve watched you grow into a great man, with a heart ’bout too big for your chest. I was with you all seven years in scouts, and I was with you when they gave you that Eagle badge, so I know: As an Eagle scout, and as a man of God, you know duty when you see it, and I know you know what to do with it.”

I knew he had an agenda behind the words, but that didn’t make them any less impactful. It was probably a speech he’d practiced for a while, because he knew I’d have my doubts. I could have thrown college into his face, or my job, or my bills; I’m sure he had something put aside to knock every one of those down, but he didn’t need them. He was right. I come from a legacy of scouts, Eagle Scouts, no less. I knew I had a duty.

Eight months later, I’m staring into the eyes of nine boys, each begging me with everything in them to give them something they would take home with them, and tell their family and friends about. I had nothing. I was ready to show them how to tie a bowline knot one-handed around their bodies, but what good would that do if they couldn’t say they enjoyed learning how to do it?

“Yeah, and if you guys learn all the knots now,” J.T. broke my trance, swinging in with the save, “you can practice using the knots by tying me and Bryan up and seeing if we can get out.” I had drafted J.T. to do this with me, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own. He didn’t much like being called my “assistant,” but he was always there to pull me out of the fire. In that case, on the other hand, I didn’t know if I much cared for the suggestion; I remember picturing two adult leaders, tied together in fifty taut-line hitches and square knots, squirming to get out while nine boys burned down the church. By the time I woke from my daydream, they were hard at work absorbing the index cards, developing dastardly designs of torture for their scoutmasters. I looked at J.T. and he simply shrugged.

“Mr. Bryan,” Jamari pulled down on my jacket sleeve, “look!” It seemed fitting he was the first to show me what his perfect square knot looked like.

It was only four weeks ago, J.T. had devised the first way for them to learn something that would put me in danger. They had to learn how to pull an unconscious body out of a smoke-filled room and transport it twenty-five yards, a feat he thought they would only appreciate if I was the victim in question. It took three of them to drag me out of the smoke-filled room we had set up, and all nine to carry me the twenty-five yards. The kids’ parents watched and laughed as eight kids hefted me, banging my knee against the ground, dropping me once, and shredding a perfectly good t-shirt in the process. The ninth kid, little Jamari, chased behind them with one of my boots in his tiny arms.

I wiped a little blood from my knee and we closed the meeting down as they caught their breath and quit giggling. They all split their different ways, to each set of parents; little Jamari handed me my boot and asked, “Mr. Bryan, will I see you next week?” I smiled, and rubbed down on the top of his head until he laughed and swiped my hand away, and he sprinted over towards his mother. She hugged him and kissed his head, and though I couldn’t hear the words coming from her mouth, I could imagine all the motherly questions she was asking. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see the pastor there, watching the same thing I was.

“Certainly is a shame…” he whispered.

“What’s that?” I asked, confused.

“That woman, Jamari’s mother. She has to be one of the strongest women I’ve ever met. Loves that boy with everything she’s got. I think he may be the only thing she’s got,” he said.

“Jamari’s a good kid. It had to come from somewhere,” the words came from my mouth, but I hadn’t ever considered them.

“She sacrificed everything for him. She used to be a teacher ‘til she got attacked by one of her students. Now she draws disability and home-schools Jamari,” he added. I remember it striking me how much more than the Bible the pastor had to know to do his job.

“So what’s so shameful about that?” I asked. At the time, I thought the question mattered.

“Now his father’s tryin’ to take him back from her. And she ain’t got nothin’ but him,” he finished. I couldn’t reply. I just turned to Jamari and his mother; he said something that made her laugh, and she picked him up in a great big hug. When his feet touched the ground again, he grabbed her hand and turned to me, and with the smile he’s never lost, he waved goodbye.

Four weeks to the day, and though my knee had healed, I was in the same trouble now as I was then: J.T. and I were tied, head-to-foot, in knot after knot. I was proud that they had learned all seven knots with such mastery, and prouder still that they had learned to tie them so very tight. When they were done tying, they gave me the signal and dared me to try to get out. My hands tied behind my back worked fast, untying knot after knot, faster than they had tied them. J.T. struggled slightly, but the haste in which the knots came flying off my hands and arms drew the attention of the room to me. At first, they worried: “He’s getting out too fast,” Sam blurted out. As I began to pull my left arm loose, Josh let out, “Start tying those back on!” Caleb and Joseph started hurrying to tie knots around my hand again, but I was too quick, moving my arms around and loosening the knots’ hold on me. It was Jamari who took the first step I knew would come eventually: he climbed on the table, jumped on my back, and brought the giant down. I fell lightly to the carpet and grunted; in fact, I might’ve barked at them and ordered them off had it not been for the laughter. With all the attention on bringing Goliath down, J.T. was able to get his arms loose, and the remainder was just sliding the rest of the ropes off. J.T. again came to my rescue, picking Jamari up and off, and grabbing Caleb in a loose headlock. A few moments later I was free, and picking Jamari up over my head, with him too busy laughing to tell me to let him down.

Once the onslaught let down, I was slowly able to draw them back in and calm them down. Occasionally there were the mumbles that they “brought the big man down” or that they would’ve had me if J.T. hadn’t jumped in, but they were quickly hushed. I knelt down in front of them with a rope in my hand and went over the knots they had learned; I showed them an easier way to tie the square knot, and how two half-hitches will slide tight like a lasso, and even that elusive one-handed bowline. The whole time they were still smiling because they had a story to tell their parents when they got home, and they learned something along the way. Jamari still smiled, even while gasping to catch his breath.

Two weeks ago from that day was their first camping trip, and somehow I believed that me and J.T. were more excited to be going than they were. It had been a long while since it was my first camping trip, and as I watched all the boys say goodbye to their parents, I remember thinking how surprised they’ll be years from now when they’d see the peak of a mountain and so much more. I watched little Jamari hug his mom tightly, and I saw her slip a cell phone in his pocket in case he got home sick. I reassured her that Jamari would be fine with us, but I’m sure nothing really got through. There’s nothing like letting your child go for the first time.

That weekend was filled to the brim with new experiences for the kids. Josh and Joseph got a whale of a catfish, and my grandfather showed them how to gut and skin it. Caleb learned how to wrestle when he picked on J.T. one-to-many times. Sam learned how to swim, and better yet, he learned how to save someone’s life in the water, as I played his drowning victim three times too many. J.T. learned how to sleep on grass and I learned how pond water will stay in your hair for more times than you’d care to wash it. And for Jamari, everything was an eye-opening experience. He caught three frogs and six tadpoles, and he had this uncanny ability to find worms in the strangest places. He had a habit of disappearing for lengths of time, and I remember thinking that I had to be the only twenty-one year old with paternal instinct as I had to go searching for him. He learned how to cook for the first time as everyone could attest by the amount of garlic salt in the spaghetti sauce.

He advanced a full rank that first full day of camping, and in scouts, rank advancement ends with something called a scoutmaster conference; here, the scout sits down and just talks with the leaders, about anything he has on his mind. After dinner, J.T. and I sat on the other side of the campfire, away from the boys, and sat Jamari down in front of us. He seemed nervous, his little feet swinging from the chair back and forth, trying to calm himself. I smiled, simply because this was always my favorite part of scouts, just sitting down with my grandfather and talking with him.

“Jamari, you know you don’t have to worry, buddy,” I tried to calm him. “We’re just here to talk with you.”

“About anything you wanna talk about,” J.T. added.

“Okay,” Jamari nodded.

“Anytime you’re ready,” I encouraged.

“I don’t know what to talk about,” Jamari shrugged, smiling nervously.

“Anything,” J.T. tried.

“What about school? How do you like home-schooling?” I asked.

“I’m not home-schooling anymore. I’m in middle school now.”

I grew confused. “I thought your mom was teaching you.”

“No. No. Not anymore,” Jamari’s little face started to stare at the ground.

“Why not? Mom say you graduated from her?” J.T. joked.

“No. No. Daddy says he doesn’t want me to go to school at home anymore.”

I hadn’t expected that. I felt almost pressured to change the subject, and Jamari’s smile was fading to a dim, contemplative grin. It was a pain I hadn’t ever felt before, yet I felt compelled to draw it out: “Why does your Dad not want you home-schooled? Your mom was a teacher, right?”

“He says that I need to be around other kids, and that mommy’s just babying me.”

“Did you tell him you were with a bunch of kids in scouts now?” J.T. asked.

“Daddy doesn’t like scouts. He says… well, that don’t matter. Mommy likes scouts, so I’m gonna stay here.”

“Do you like scouts?” J.T. asked, grasping at the chance to change the subject.

“Yeah! Yeah! I mean, yes, I do. I love scouts. It’s the best part of the week! I can’t wait ‘til we start doing the big camping stuff!”

To this day, I can’t remember why I felt so needed to press the subject. I knew it was painful for him, but somehow I felt like I had something, perhaps a duty, to bring this out of him and comfort him. I pressed, “Jamari, what has your mother told you about your daddy?”

He paused. My guts wrenched; I felt like I had just stabbed the poor child and I immediately regretted the question. The smile was gone. After a moment, he responded, “My mom tells me everything. She’s my best friend. She don’t hide things from me. She said he was trying to make me come live with him.”

“Is that why you’re in public school now?” I asked. J.T. began to stare at me, as if I was the enemy.

“I think so. I think she’s trying to make him happy so he doesn’t take me away.”

“What is it like at your school?” I continued.

“I’m scared a lot,” he shook, “I don’t know anybody there, and they’re all way bigger than me. And they swear, a lot! Mommy would pop me cross my mouth if she heard me say what they say.”

“Do they pick on you there?” I badgered.

“No. They don’t really notice me much.”

My eyes caught J.T.’s and for a moment, he saw the pain in my eyes. Seeing that, he knew I wasn’t the enemy here; I simply cared more than I thought I had. To Jamari, I asked, “Do you ever talk about this with anybody? Anybody other than your mother?”

He replied, “No. I don’t really like to bother her with it, really. She’s always dealing with something.”

“You know that’s what we’re here for, right?” My eyes opened wide into his. He just nodded, and he smiled at me.

“How do you keep that smile going all the time, Jamari?” J.T. asked.

“I just know that I’m gonna be alright. Mommy’s gonna take care of me, and I know if I’m with her, she won’t take me out of scouts either. I really like it here.”

“Well we like having you, buddy,” J.T. finished. He looked over at me, stoically silent, somewhere else. He added, “We’re done here, buddy. You can head back to the guys, if you wanna.”

He jumped up and bustled back to the guys, jumping on the first kid’s back he could find, and they wrestled for a bit. I sat forward in the chair, staring at the fire as it slowly burned me, and my face rested calmly in my hands. J.T. put a hand on my shoulder for a moment, and walked back to the campsite for taps.

Two weeks later, we stand in a circle again, arms across our bodies, grabbing hands. Jamari grabbed two of my fingers and held on. “Jamari,” I asked, “would you close us in prayer, buddy?”

Everyone closed their eyes, and little Jamari cleared his throat. “Dear God, thank you for bringing us here today, Lord. Thank you for another bright day outside, and be with us as we go out into it. Thank you for letting Mr. Bryan and Mr. J.T. come here to teach us, and thank you for giving us the strength to listen. Please, God, watch us through the week, and help us get through everything we need to get through. And make sure we can all make it here next week. In your name we pray.”

“Amen.”

And just as we close every meeting, with our hands clutched and our eyes closed, we all say in unison, “And may the great Scoutmasters of all great Scouts, be with us ‘til we meet again.”

“Be prepared.”

The doors opened from our air-conditioned sanctuary and the boys made their way to their parents' car, each rambling about how they almost had us. With a tug on my jacket sleeve, little Jamari grabbed me.

“Here you go, Mr. Bryan,” he smiled, and he handed me a small piece of the rope with his perfect little square knot tied in it. “Mr. Bryan, will I see you next week?” I smiled, and rubbed down on the top of his head until he laughed and swiped my hand away, and he sprinted over towards his mother.