"I'm none of those things," he said. "I'm just moving backward."
He couldn't. But she taught him—slowly, patiently, letter by letter, as the fireflies came out and the old clock in Union Station ticked backward. By the time her grandmother called her home, Benjamin had spelled Mississippi seven times. Daisy kissed him on his wrinkled cheek and said, "I'll come back tomorrow."
"We have a boy," the social worker said. "About seven years old. He doesn't speak much. But he keeps drawing a picture of a house on Elysian Fields Avenue. And he keeps spelling the word 'Mississippi' over and over."
She did not recognize him.
Benjamin was twenty-six when he returned to New Orleans. He looked thirty. His hair was dark brown now, his face smooth, his body lean from years of hauling lines and fighting river currents. Queenie, now gray and frail, hugged him at the door and wept. "You're beautiful," she said. "My ugly little baby. You're beautiful."
Thomas Button, a wealthy button manufacturer, paced outside the bedroom as his wife Caroline screamed. The doctor emerged, pale as bone. "Mr. Button," he said, "you have a child. But… he is not like other children."
But when she mentioned Queenie's boarding house, and the old man in the rocking chair who had spelled Mississippi, his eyes filled with tears. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...
"Benjamin?" she whispered.
"Cat is easy. Spell 'Mississippi.'"
On the morning of April 15, 2003, Daisy woke to find the baby silent. His eyes were closed. His chest was still. She held him for a long time, rocking back and forth, humming a blues song Mr. Daws had taught him sixty years ago. "I'm none of those things," he said
At seventeen, Benjamin looked forty. He had grown taller—or rather, his spine had straightened—and his hair was now a distinguished salt-and-pepper. He could walk without a cane, though his knees still ached. Queenie, who had raised him as her own, finally allowed him to leave the boarding house for work.
"Excuse me," he said. "Do I know you?"
Caroline, who had glimpsed the child only for a moment, died within the hour—not from birth, but from shock. Thomas, heartbroken and horrified, did what any man of his era might do: he wrapped the ancient infant in a shawl and carried him down the dark stairs of their Garden District mansion. He did not go to the hospital. He went to a boarding house on the fringe of the French Quarter, where a kind, exhausted woman named Queenie ran a home for the unwanted. By the time her grandmother called her home,
Daisy visited the clock on the anniversary of his death every year. She would stand beneath it, close her eyes, and listen. And if she listened closely enough, she could almost hear it ticking backward—a sound like footsteps retreating into the past, into the arms of a blind clockmaker's son, into a place where time was just a story we told ourselves to make the leaving bearable.