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Young Truman shifted in his seat, rehearsing bullying and clubbing his way through the family occupying the seats before his own, should the need arise. They were too happy, carrying on carelessly between Truman's seat and the starboard rear emergency door, which, of course, served little good at 35,000 feet.

A blue, three-ringed binder lay open on his lap. Truman bought it obediently at an airport gift shop in Seattle. "July 10, 1980" was entered upon the top left-hand side of the lined paper. Two spaces below, Truman had written: "I guess I'm having trouble with this thing—I feel talked into it—" in ink, in a cursive hand still groping in a hard-held, childish development. Truman was eighteen years old. Forgiving his handwriting, he was also handsome, excepting a scar that haunted the left side of his otherwise boyish good looks.

The fleshy splash, thick and wide, corralled his left, untouched eye, clinging to his cheekbone as a weeping crescent moon, like clown's makeup gone forever wrong.

About him, within the cabin of the wide-bodied 747, passengers carried on to the steady whine of the engines. Some read, others listened to headphones amongst scattered napping between movies and meals. Somewhere trays clattered.

Truman looked fast, something else to think about. This was his second time flying. The first frightened him worse, days before, delivering him to his group's staging in Seattle. Truman, with twenty-two other Americans, having joined the United States Peace Corps, was headed for the tropical heat of Malaysia, with oodles of more fun in the sky to come. This flight for Tokyo, then on to Hong Kong, to rest to rise to fly again, bound for bustling Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's much discussed, sweltering capital city.

The pretty flight attendant smiled above the mishandled trays. A passenger, a man, helped her.

Truman looked back to his notebook. The aircraft's laboring Rolls-Royce engines whined steadily as he wondered why he was even doing what he was doing. He peeked out his small window. Clouds spread out far below. He marveled again at his promised two years of service. He'd be twenty years old, a sentence self-imposed.

By the time he and his party of twenty-two others touched down in the dark heat of a Kuala Lumpur night, Truman's three-ring binder was tucked into his carry-on luggage. Its first entry read:

July 10, 1980

(Huh—I guess this is how you write in a journal!!)

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Young Truman was a bit of a Piney.

This didn't hurt him as he smiled easily, within the hot night air of Kuala Lumpur's surprisingly modern Subang International Airport. He even laughed, swearing quietly, scurrying for his accidentally opened luggage sliding sideways down the stainless steel baggage claim.

Things could have been worse. He could have been in the air.

If asked, Truman could tell something of his parents, who he had little of, yet wondered much over. He could name his grandparents, but without first-person memories. His tier of great grand-parentage remained the dark wall that separated his life from the nameless ghosts that led to his being, a lineage snaking clean back to the American Revolution, an ancestry lost, resting in scattered graveyards deep in the Jersey Pines.

Truman's line, his particular Kramer, hopped in when four hundred Hessians invaded Burlington, New Jersey, in the winter of 1776.

Amongst these mercenaries was a reluctant youth named Hermann Kramer. More unloyal than disloyal, and in debt, Hermann, with no one waiting across the Atlantic, fled east one early morning, alone, into the colony's heavy central forests. By the mid 1780s, he was married to his employer's lone daughter, Estella, and settled into a small cabin outside the village of Kimmon's Mills, a meeting of rough wagon-cut roads, defiantly referred to as New Egypt by its sparse citizenry, after the Genesis tale of the world having to travel to Egypt for its grain.

Hermann and Estella were happy. Their six children lived their lives in and around this secluded village. Four married, two didn't, seeing themselves through the depression of 1817, aging through the next of 1837. Estella's youngest left their wooded, sandy plain, never heard from again, for the Erie Canal, lured by fireside stories of the great route west. Hermann Kramer himself died before seeing grandchildren.

These children of Kramers' children sprinkled themselves about the forests between the pull of the Delaware and the lapping of the sea. Steady farmers and woodsmen, they married neighbors and ran off with passing through risks as their surrounding forests were razed for shipbuilding and charcoal, fueling the scattered forges of a brief pineland iron industry. As their forests fell, pitch pines, hardy forty-foot starlings of photosynthesis, swept their forests like weeds.

By 1850 several of these children of Kramers' children, still about New Egypt, reared children of their own as fallen Quakers from the swelling of westward Philadelphia began sowing themselves into their forest, some with hearts differing from brethren, others from deeds hard to forgive. Truman's own mother would ascend from one of these lines as their young nation trembled into civil war.

Mr. Lincoln lost New Jersey in his re-election bid of 1864, to favored son, General McClellan of Trenton, a day's wooded travel northeast, where the Delaware River shallowed, blurring New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Their distant, sad President, his brutal war over, won the nation in spite of this, then died as he did, a sorrow to all the states. Several seasons later, in quiet New Egypt, brick roads were laid, courtesy of the Oakford Land Company, in exchange for changing the town's name to Oakford, a municipal sleight-of-hand enticing the railroad.

And due track was laid, in the form of the Pemberton-Heightstown spur. But by the spring of 1870 their town leaders honored their own fathers, officially changing their town's name back to New Egypt, as their iron works faded into stilled forges, as long dead mercenary Kramer faded into the folklore of his great-grandchildren who cared to remember. Sustenance farming, blueberries and cranberries settled into their sandy pineland clearings as the population of their plain declined for fifty years. Of those who stayed was mercenary Hermann's one great-grandson, Truman's great-grandfather, born in 1899 in a farmhouse outside of New Egypt, the son of a farmer-tinker.

A year later the town's dam broke, without detriment to the local economy. The pooled cedar water poured like tea from behind the retired mill, long overdue to the curious who watched from on horseback, amongst marveling children and unruly dogs. Seventy years later, the remains of the compromised stone-blocked structure, overgrown with encroaching trees, would be trod upon by a roaming, friendless boy named Truman Kramer.

Two years into Wilson's presidency, the cranberry industry lured Truman's great-grandfather, at fifteen, deeper into the Pines, where a local squire married him to another child laborer of the bogs. His young bride died three months after their child-like wedding, birthing in a warehouse made comfortable.

Still a boy, the young widower moved on, giving his baby to New Egypt, to his grandparents, for far off Europe breathed world war, prompting the construction of nearby Camp Dix, where money was to be made as a stretching of their sandy forest was changing forever.

This baby, Truman's grandfather, grew up snuggled in the ease of rural New Egypt, a boyhood of chores, a bit of schooling and play amongst Jersey's meandering streams. As distant cities roared through the twenties, Truman's grandfather saw occasional motorcars, while hearing the distant guns of Camp Dix as he marveled, with scattered neighbors, over the occasional hum of the floating dirigibles that anchored in Lakehurst, a town he'd never see, east through the Pines. He'd be married when the big one from Germany exploded and burned, cleansing the pineland sky of the slow floating ships.

Then New Egypt rebuilt her dam, becoming a temporary tourist attraction to summer cottage people in those '30s. There was swimming, fishing and boating. Carnival rides even emerged as their town went rough with soldiers and outsiders, bringing alcohol, strangers and fighting. Then something changed. These New Egyptians believed they willed it themselves as their small town relaxed back into its sleepy self. By then Truman's grandparents had produced two children of their own, a daughter, Mabel, and a son, George.

George Kramer, born in the winter of 1932, was given to daydreaming, and often caught at it. He grew up good-willed, handsome and clever, but shiftless and impatient. What he possessed in physical stature, he lacked in virtue. His sister, Mabel, three years older, was industrious and thoughtful, and gangly and plain.

Older sister and kid brother were children when the world convulsed into its second world war. George was a young teen when it justly ended. Mabel was eighteen, working on the base as a civilian employee. She had also fallen in love with a soldier, but told no one, as Camp Dix, rebuilt into Fort Dix, was quartered off for the Army Air Corps. The prosperity wouldn't grace nearby New Egypt. In the 1950s, Route 195, Trenton to Belmar, at the shore, was measured and dug out and poured, slipping miles north of the town. Smaller Route 70, a state highway, from Camden to the shore, showed hope, but arched out east of New Egypt for Point Pleasant Beach, leaving the New Egyptians to their porches, their gardens and fields, pondering losses and blessings.

None of this mattered to young George Kramer. Bustle and growth never sang to him anyway. At nineteen he wandered south for work in Chatsworth, in the blue-skied, deep-green heart of the Pines.

In this hamlet of several hundred, according to the post office, George labored as a mechanic, learning light automotive work at a family-owned Gulf station.

Chatsworth suited him, for he stayed, living in an oddly constructed addition to an older man's home. This older man, Barlow Archer, lived in the original framing of the same house. His own children were grown and gone. His faithless wife ran off so long before that it didn't matter to anyone. At times even Barlow Archer couldn't picture her, which gave him peace, as did the pines and the sand and the distance that made up his property of several acres. His neighbors felt likewise.

Well-behaved dogs weren't tied in this town where George gained several friends but saved no money. He drank often, but never heavily at a local watering hole as he remained quietly loyal to his employer. One girl once, and another a few years later, gained his affection, but neither made him more than he was, until the late spring of 1961, when in a sudden whirlwind of desire, at twenty-nine years old, George met, and married a month later, a seventeen year old who appeared in Chatsworth without notice, claiming in a whisper to be somehow related to the family who owned the crossroads general store.

Her name was April Applegate. No one argued her claim. She was soft of flesh, small breasted before a rounded ribcage, weak in her walk and a bit pimply about her mouth. Her eyes were large and her hair was thin and straight. She wasn't very pretty.

The following February, in a dark and windless cold, young April gave birth to a baby boy in George's rented addition to Barlow Archer's home. She sweated and cried and ached. Old man Archer sat with her at her bedside, tending to her as best he could, for two months before, a week before Christmas, was the last either of them had seen of husband George, hunched over in the cold, walking off to work with gloveless hands in his pockets, never turning back for swelling April who watched him off.

At eighteen, stranded in an old man's home, April named her suckling baby, Truman. Truman Kramer.

Eighteen years later, without blush, Truman gathered scattered underwear, socks, shirts and jeans at Kuala Lumpur's Subang International Airport.

He'd have to write Aunt Mabel. This sort of public stumble would charm her, for she was something of a Piney, too.

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July 16, 1980

I wish Jimmy & the farm help could have seen me. No drinking age!! Well, I have plenty to look at & the people in the back seat have quieted down, so I'll quit here. Besides, I feel like I have to watch the road for this guy.

That night Truman dreamed of rats at their training site outside of Malacca. Friendly ones, wanting to be petted, brushing his ankles like cats. They wouldn't appear in his journal though, nor would Kuala Lumpur's hot heavy air, its modern skyscrapers and so many smells. He didn't write of the opposite lane traffic, rendering the simple crossing of a city street a curious new task, and, of course, he had no idea that several of the others had already discreetly discussed him as a likely failure. Too young. Misplaced.

In Malacca, Truman's group's first task was to be trained across two and one-half months of intensive language instruction, learning Bahasa Malaysia, the national language, while being exposed to and instructed in becoming respectfully mindful and appreciative of the cultures that shared the Malay peninsula, primarily the Malays, the sons of the soil, some with the Chinese, and a sprinkling regarding the Indians, a people oddly divided between rubber plantations and law firms. British colonization, they'd learn, brought these others to this land of tropical contrasts.

Meanwhile they'd also be introduced to their specific assignments, ensuing at the break of training. They were Group 97, twenty-three strong, with several engineers, a small number of English and Special Education teachers, four social workers and a handful of agricultural Youth Extension people, who were to imagine and promote some sort of Future Farmers of Malaysia amongst the rural youth of the kampongs. Truman, having spent his teen years on an American dairy farm, was among this last group, expected to work the sleepy villages.

And Truman worked hard at his Bahasa, priding himself, staying close to Ben, an intelligent and thoughtful civil engineer in his late twenties, whose voice went to a whisper the few times he spoke of his failed marriage.

In their time off, Truman swam in the Straits of Malacca with the others. They also played pickup games of basketball and touch football. Truman seldom complained of the heat which descended heavily, every midmorning, thickening the air until an hour or two after dark.

To the more articulate complaints of the others, Truman claimed that the Islamic call to prayer didn't bother him. The cryptic song, sung out at 5:30 a.m., from unseen PA systems, was repeated five times across every day.

"I think it's kind of pretty, and spooky," Truman said.

"You think so?" asked Dave, a burly farmer from Iowa. "It's a pain in my ass at 5:00 a.m."

"Is it in Bahasa, or Arabic or what?" asked a teacher.

"It's in 'freaks-me-the-hell-out'," said the Iowan, laughing.

Truman listened, for the others were older and better educated. He didn't dare share the public prayer's somehow prompting thoughts of the midnight guns of Fort Dix, the track bed, and once, a pineland cemetery.

For when alone, Truman's thoughts returned easily to New Egypt, the farm, his loving Aunt Mabel, gangling Jimmy McCleary, and Angela, when quietly wishful. His returned laundry, done by a local Chinese woman, provided a sweet deja vu of its own upon its bundled return, as Ben's friendship acquainted him with the nation's daily newspaper, the New Straits Times, with its daily reflection of culture, crime, human interest, and always the creeping, sinister menace of westernization.

After their group toured a Buddhist temple and an Islamic mosque, Truman thought Buddha less demanding of His followers, perhaps willing to listen to troubles and wishes, yet reticent to act. Islam seemed to forbid human folly altogether, to the right of the double yellow line, or nothing at all. However, churches of any kind made Truman uneasy. The last time he prayed hard was as a younger boy, asking Jesus to be of the same mind as Mabel's, regarding the guilt and innocence of his childhood's single, defining act.

Then news came to Truman and his Youth Extension peers. Three Youth Extension volunteers from the field were brought in to share their own ongoing assignments. One was a tall, homely girl, dressed in the colorful splash adorned by Malay women. Their trainers noted this; in spite of Islam, Malays liked colors. The other two were young men. One heavy and happy. The other determined to be informative. All three were candid.

"Only one in ten do anything meaningful," explained the homely girl.

"Easiest job you'll ever love!" said the happy man, mocking the TV ad back home. "Just show up at your office, whenever you're not on your next vacation."

All three stayed the night, and with Truman included, went out drinking with a handful of trainees.

After their departures the next morning, it was emphasized that some volunteers have to create their jobs to be rewarded. The response of the six Youth Extension volunteers varied. One quit within the week, his roommate relieved. Another gritted his teeth with determination, as two more rejoiced. Truman was undecided. He did, though, enjoy Ben's sharing an article Ben found in the New Straits Times, of a man roaming the villages of the northeast, laying for school children, to suck their toes in exchange for trinkets. Local bomohs—"Lay doctors, to be kind," explained Ben—along with the police, converged on the scene. Hysteria was feared.

Mail came, a first letter from Aunt Mabel, in graceful blue ink. Truman opened it, proud of receiving mail, imagining her old-lady knuckles working her pen. She mixed local news and gossip, and passed along several "hellos" from her own friends about New Egypt, sprinkled amongst the things she thought about while eating alone, or while brewing coffee in her home without Truman.

August 8, 1980

In a few days I have to go & stay with a Malay family for a week. We all have to do it. It may be a drag but I'll save some $. I'm nearly broke, & payday's a week away!

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April Kramer, Truman's mother, kept her Kramer name in spite of being abandoned. Applegate didn't bring her much luck either. Besides, along with her baby, it made her someone else, if not better, at least different.

At eighteen, she remained fleshy, covered with a layer of her pale soft self as a stinging of acne resurfaced about her small mouth. The sharp angles of baby Truman's face were George's. So was the wave in his baby hair. Beneath the few blouses and T-shirts she owned, April remained small breasted in spite of her nursing, atop small hips and shapeless legs. She also feared too many things, thus baby Truman spent much of his infancy lovingly guarded from contagions real and otherwise.

Old man Archer asked April to stay on, within the small addition to his tired house in the Pines that she already occupied. Barlow was a quiet, gravelly-voiced man somewhere in his sixties. His potbelly heaved when he laughed, and sweated in concert with his face and neck when he toiled. A single man, he ate when hungry, regardless of the time of day or night. To support himself he worked without schedule, for modest wages in a local cranberry bog, when not serving a part-time arrangement at a local Sunoco station. His home was a mess, and he owed no one a dime. Tools and sawhorses had long since worked their way indoors, into a chaos he didn't know very well, aside from the room where he'd last seen a particular tool or resource, which was where the clamor began.

Across that first spring, Barlow assured April of George's eventual return, which he never believed. To lessen her despair, he shared his own loss of a woman while serving in the army, in Texas, leaving him with both small children, since grown and gone. He guessed his wife somewhere in one of the Dakotas, the last he and the kids had heard from her. April's eyes widened.

Across that summer and into the autumn, their friendship grew into something between foster parentage and respectful, denied affection as their duties and chores crept into the assigned rooms of each other's lives.

Baby Truman, in time, toddled freely between. Blessed with April's love and Barlow's pleasant sensibilities, utensils and tools became his toys amongst their togetherness that would stir in his mind of later years as distant snapshots, elongated, blurred, walkways through occupied messes of hallways and rooms. Carrots laid out for Santa's reindeer, which real ones ate. Barlow, shirtless and sweaty. The anvil kept, for some reason, in Barlow's kitchen. A heavy vice bolted to a table that wasn't a dining room table in old man Archer's dining room. Then haunting ones, products of his mother vanishing for a time, to return to him, and their clutter, without her right leg, forever sadder than she already was. For in the summer of 1967, April was struck by a car while collecting the mail. Truman was five. Barlow, back in the house, heard the bang. Out front, on the shoulder of the road, little boy Truman stood helplessly by, his little mind forever stained with his mother flying and spinning, arms and hair outstretched.

A man was driving the car. And nothing more.

The following autumn, Barlow knocked out the wall between the adjoined sections of his home. He built strong, unhandsome ramps over his few stairs, and he cleared domestic pathways, allowing April's crutches and wheelchair as April gained social security for her handicap, finding her own way back to her duties about their little Pineland family. Their Pineland neighbors never talked.

That fall the Woodland's Township Board of Education added Barlow's sandy driveway to one of its stops.

Little Truman liked first grade, making memories that could now move, events watched in silence, yet far away, as though through the opposite ends of binoculars. There was Chatworth's elementary school playground, and its lunchroom, crowded with children's noises, waxed paper, sandwiches and milk. A water fountain hummed chilled water. Desks were bolted to the floor. Decorated shoeboxes, coarsely slotted by children, wrought sentimental riches on Valentine's Day. Somewhere a substitute teacher, or some kid's mother, explained that if one never sinned they'd live forever. Truman felt cheated, never having been told this divine bargain until sinned beyond repair at six or seven.

Laced into those years was the excitement of men on the moon, Americans, of course. The event made everyone childlike, even quiet Barlow, who thought the event a respite from that summer's distant war heating up in a distant land.

Truman learned of rabies in the lethargic aimlessness of certain wild animals. Barlow, because he cared, explained it as best he could. The possibilities were horrifying as Truman sawed and banged at scraps of wood alongside some project of Barlow's.

Once, while walking somewhere, through trees, Barlow answered little Truman's concern for bedtime, awing him. "Sometimes, Truddy, I don't go to bed at all!"

Another time, as Barlow worked at bathroom plumbing, breathing hard and lying on his side, little Truman, amongst the clutter of tools and living, pulled a box of sanitary napkins from within a curtained closet, extracting two of the soft white pads.

Old man Archer's big belly heaved as he answered from his back upon the floor. "Mouse mattresses, Truddy. Your mother's so kind and decent she even puts out beds for the mice I try to catch. What'd ya think of that?"

Little Truman, with a mallet across his lap, compared two lengths of pads. "I thought people didn't want mice in their houses."

"Whelp, your mother figures they got to sleep somewhere. She's like that." Breathing hard, he added, "Now, Truddy, hand me that white tape. And put them little beds where you found 'em. That's a good boy now."

Several months later April feared a staying pain, something unlike her seasonal concerns. Truman was told nothing. Barlow, in hushed tones, got her off to a doctor. At twenty-seven years old, and already disfigured, April learned she was indeed terribly ill. It started cervical, before it spread.

Midway through third grade, Truman learned that certain kids were bused in from Birch Creek Village. Awed by the word "village," he also soon learned that Birch Creek had neither teepees, nor the perpetual campfires he imagined. Meanwhile, his mother's change was slow as she stayed in her chair more, her crutches leaning against the side of their refrigerator for days that turned into weeks. She hadn't hopped since between Thanksgiving and Christmas, as she hugged at him more, as he and Barlow quietly helped her about.

Late that spring, April had bouts of crying that Truman seldom saw. When he did notice, Barlow was already there. Little Truman also noticed that she began coming down from Barlow's room in the mornings. She answered his single inquiry. "My dreams are bad, honey. Barlow helps me rest, and I need my rest."

"Can I help, too?" Truman asked.

"Yes. Be a good boy. And you're already that."

That summer April told little Truman that she was sick. They sat alone out on their perpetually-shaded Pineland porch. "I hope to get better, honey, but I probably won't."

She cried, then clung to him. Little Truman cried, too, because she cried.

When Barlow got home, he found Truman out in their larger shed, scribbling numbers and lines on a rafter with a stubby pencil. He was playing carpenter. His eyes were swollen, and his little chest heaved as old man Archer hugged him down from the stepladder.

That summer of 1971, Barlow Archer became April's constant companion as dressed-up people began coming around. One time they brought a woman who claimed to be Truman's aunt. April confirmed her as her errant husband's elder sister from the northern Pines of New Egypt. Best of all, Truman got a brand new bicycle, for no reason at all. It was his first, a lime green Roll Fast 20-inch Monkey Bike, with a banana seat and high handlebars. The bike's front sprocket was small, allowing quick acceleration, enabling him to plow, in a standing peddling, through the sandy surroundings of their home.

The treads of his bike's front knobby tire fascinated little Truman, appearing to spin backwards at certain speeds. His new bike's chain guard and fenders were of shiny chrome. Sharp to the eye, sharp to the touch.

The new school year, Truman's fourth, rolled in with the autumn as his mother weakened. Barlow assumed nearly all of the household duties, arranging their parlor into a downstairs bedroom for his fading friend. Truman slept with her at times, as did Barlow. She seldom left her new room. Little Truman feared her bad dreams, for he, too, feared November's winds that swayed the Pines.

Into the winter, the dressed-up people returned. They were from New Jersey's Division of Youth and Family Services. Their interest was Truman. Twice they brought back the woman he was asked to address as Aunt Mabel. Her surname was Ludwig. Truman overheard that her husband, Fritz, was dead, yet left her provided. He had been a soldier.

Little Truman saw her as older, and tall for a woman, much taller than his inclined mother, and even taller than Barlow, whom she nervously leaned toward in conversation. In her midlife, she had a tendency to lean toward whomever she was speaking with, making Truman think of her as a big bird, as he watched her, within the front room of Barlow's cluttered home. It didn't help that she kept her arms up close in front of her, like a praying mantis, as though supporting two of her large purses, one on each elbow, instead of the one that swayed and jerked from her left arm. Years later, pondering a photograph, a friend of Truman's likened her to Margaret Thatcher.

With a nervous shake, Mabel spoke deliberately to little Truman. "Would you like to come visit with me, up in New Egypt, sometime soon?"

Minding his manners, little Truman said, "Yes. For a little bit."

Then much of that winter became lost to Truman. Photographs could have captured the swelling of his little boy pain, but neither Barlow nor April owned a camera. In time, Mabel would try an album.

Truman then saw his frail mother naked, in confusing glimpses, for Barlow began bathing her after Christmas, having to carry her, blanketed, into the bathroom.

Somewhere in there, his teacher, with wet eyes of her own, kissed him hard on both cheeks, right in front of the other children, for no reason at all.

Then came one winter night, remembered by Truman as dark and cold with only a single light on, when, in fact, their house was well lit. Old man Barlow appeared leaning in their kitchen archway, hardly able to speak.

"Your mother's gone, Truddy," Barlow Archer choked.

Truman was at their stove, a good boy, stirring supper. He answered, "I thought this was going to happen."

His young shoulders heaved. It was his tenth birthday.

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