In nearly every review Sara and I have written for Gary D. Schmidt’s books, we have used the word hard to describe the situations his characters encounter. Orbiting Jupiter takes hard to a new level.
In this interview with Schmidt after Okay for Now was published, he talks about an experience at a book club for reluctant readers in a medium security prison. The boys in the book club were between the ages of twelve and fourteen – six from the medium security prison, six brought in from a maximum security prison. Schmidt says, “This book began in a prison, quite literally.” Doug, the main character in Okay for Now, was inspired by a twelve-year-old boy who was from the maximum security prison.
Schmidt says this boy wanted to be a writer someday and write about the planets. A boy living in a building with no windows was telling Schmidt that Jupiter was his favorite planet. The story of Joseph, in Orbiting Jupiter seems to have been built around this comment. The two main characters are based on the boy who loved Jupiter and another boy who was there that day.
The narrator of Orbiting Jupiter is a sixth grade boy named Jackson (Jack) Hurd. He lives on a dairy farm in Maine with his parents. The story opens with Jack’s parents in a discussion with Mrs. Stroud from the State of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services about taking on a foster boy, an eighth grader named Joseph. Mrs. Stroud tells them what she knows about Joseph’s story, wanting to make sure they know what they are getting into.
I am going to SPOIL this story because parents will want to know the themes dealt with in this book before handing it to a child of the age of Schmidt’s typical audience.
Joseph arrives two days later, and it seems that by the time Jack and Joseph catch the school bus the following Monday, everyone in town knows the two most disturbing things (to them) about Joseph. He tried to kill a teacher while high on drugs, and he has a daughter.
Joseph talks very little, and he smiles so seldom that, for a while, Jack counts them. He is up to number eight when, near the end of the book, Joseph begins to find hope and Jack loses count.
One night, while sitting around the fire after an evening of ice skating, Joseph pours out the story of how he came to be a father at the age of thirteen. He was helping his father, a plumber, at the home of a wealthy couple, both lawyers, who had a thirteen-year-old daughter. Joseph began walking seven miles to her house every chance he got. The girl, Madeleine, was left alone, or in the care of a nanny, quite often, so his chances were frequent.
On the last day before Madeleine had to go back to her prep school after Christmas break, Joseph walked to her house in the rain and sleet. He was soaked when he got there, she brought him a blanket and told him to take his clothes off so they could dry. That day, she kissed him for the first time. “Then they went back inside, under the red woolen blanket.” The nanny discovered them, she was fired, and Madeleine’s parents took out an injunction against Joseph. Three months later, Joseph was told that Madeleine was pregnant. From that time on, he considered himself a father.
Things go from bad to worse, however, when Madeleine dies in childbirth. The baby is named Jupiter Joyce. Joseph had already been removed from his home to a juvenile facility for boys at the same time that he learned Madeleine was pregnant. After he escapes to try to get to Madeleine, he is moved to another place that has a fence around it. When he finds out Madeleine is dead, he is distraught, so a fellow inmate gives him some pills, and he tries to kill a teacher while he is high. He is then moved to a facility with higher security, and he slices himself open on the razor wire at the top of the fence while trying to escape. It is after this that Mrs. Stroud places him with Jack’s family.
We learn indirectly about the abuse Joseph has suffered, the way Schmidt usually relates incidents that could otherwise be too graphic and disturbing. While Joseph was visiting Madeleine, “She never asked him why his face looked so beat up. He didn’t tell her what his father was doing to him because he wasn’t around anymore to carry the tools.”
“He lived at Stone Mountain for a month. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. Not even when he got beat up. Not the first time, not the second time, not the third time. Not even when they held him down and . . .”
While Joseph is learning to fit into Jack’s family, there is still Joseph’s father to be reckoned with. He is busy hatching a scheme to get money out of Madeleine’s parents, and he wants Joseph back. In the end, his dad, drunk, comes to the Hurd’s house and holds a gun on Jack in order to get his parents to give up Joseph. Joseph goes with him willingly in order to save Jack. His dad takes off, driving too fast, he hits another car, then turns the wrong way and drives across a bridge, past the “Bridge Out” sign.
“They didn’t even make it halfway. The rotted timbers collapsed and the pickup fell between the girders and then it went through the ice and was gone. By the time Mr. Canton got out of his car and ran to the bridge, he couldn’t see a thing in the black water. Neither could the police later. No one could see a thing.”
Though ugly things happen in this book, it is not an ugly story. This is a story about friendship, and the power of love. Jack is only twelve when Joseph comes to share his home, but instead of judging Joseph by what he has been told about him, he watches Joseph. He hears what Joseph cries out in his sleep. He sees the way Joseph responds to the animals on the farm, and the way they respond to him. He says, “You can tell a whole lot about someone from the way cows are around him.”
Jack believes Joseph should have a chance. He resents the adults who judge Joseph by the way he looks and by the stories. Though Jack’s friends and some of the adults in his life advise him to distance himself from Joseph, Jack becomes the guy who has Joseph’s back. Joseph tells him that no one has ever had his back before.
The bus driver and some of the boys’ teachers refuse to believe there can be any good in Joseph, but a few of them see his gifts and his heart and go out of their way to help him. One of them is Coach Swieteck!
Jack’s parents have Joseph buried in their family cemetery. “Mr. Canton and Mr. D’Ulney, and my father and I, we held the ropes that lowered Joseph into our family, beside the high white pines. Then Reverend Ballou prayed again, and he said that Joseph had put himself in danger to save others, and then he said, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
A year later, Jack’s parents adopt Jupiter.