by Devon, Gary;
Somehow Toddy realized what had happened. When they were getting ready for bed, he gave her a present. “It’s for your birthday,” he said, and he handed her the old cuff-link box, unwrapped. “Go ahead. Open it.” Inside was his skull ring, like the Phantom’s. A summer ago, he’d sold garden seeds and saved box tops and sent away for it; it had one red eye and one green eye. The ring was just like the Phantom’s ring in the funny papers; it could dent your jaw and leave its mark forever. “But, Toddy,” Mamie said, “I can’t take this! This’s your ring you sent off for.”
“You have to,” he said. “I don’t have nothing else you’d want.” The back of the ring was adjustable and he bent it to fit tighter on her finger. He told her it would probably turn her finger green, but in that moment it became her most favorite of all her favorite things. She wore it to bed.
At Christmastime, their parents had a disagreement that lasted several days. Their father wanted to have Christmas as always, with a tree and presents underneath; their mother said that since Sherman couldn’t participate, she wanted to put it off until they could all be together again. The two younger children heard them arguing in the night after the lights had been turned out. In the end, their father decided it. He took Toddy and Mamie through the bright glittering stores, where they bought armloads of presents, but on Christmas Day the three large presents wrapped for their mother and the four wrapped for Sherman remained untouched under the tree all that day and the next.
In the evenings of those months, they listened to the radio: “Junior Miss” and “Lux Radio Theatre,” “Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,” “The Shadow,” and then “Boston Blackie.” For New Year’s Eve, they stayed up to listen to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians.
The condition of the house fell steadily into decline. Balls of dust rolled underfoot. Their mother went through the motions of keeping herself going; that was all. She moved through the house like a hollow-eyed ghost. For a long time, Mamie and her father kept the kitchen halfway clean, tidying up each night after supper while Toddy did his homework. None of it seemed to matter. Their upside-down lives drifted on without any reversal in sight. Sherman lay unconscious on the wicker lounger. He was now thirteen.
A few nights into February, as Toddy set the supper table and Mamie laid out plates, their mother came from the living room. She stood in the doorway with her back to them, to Mamie and Toddy and their father. When she turned, her face was contorted and alive. She tried to speak, but her mouth just worked, her eyes opened wide. Toddy said, “Mama, what’s wrong?”
“He talked to me,” she stammered. “Just now he talked to me. Our prayers are answered. Just now he said, ‘I’m in the light.’ That’s what he said. Of course, he sounded weak, but I heard him. ‘I’m in the light, the red light.’ That’s it—it exactly.”
They filed into the room and stood around the lounger, but Sherman looked no different from the way he had yesterday, and no sound came from him except his ragged breathing. It was like a terrible joke. Her mother studied their sad faces. “You don’t believe me. I didn’t believe it myself at first.” Tears stood in her eyes. “You think I made it up—it’s all over your faces. But I didn’t.… Just wait, you’ll see.” She had begun to tap her foot. “You’ll see.”
The following afternoon, she had the children stand with her beside the makeshift bed. “I want you to feel how much heavier his arm is. He’s getting stronger. Really he is. So much stronger. I can see it.” The arm placed first in the upturned hands of Toddy, then in Mamie’s, seemed heavy, but they didn’t know how to gauge it.
It was another three weeks, toward the end of February, before Sherman opened his eyes. According to their mother, this time he said, “Oh, Mama, I’m so tired.” The doctor was called, and again the children were kept from the room overnight. To dampen their impatience, their father said that evening, “You can see him tomorrow. That’s plenty soon enough. The doctor said we have to take it slow. And Mama wants to give him a bath first and cut his hair.” He headed back downstairs, but they trailed after him in their pajamas.
“Will he know who we are?” Toddy asked.
“Sometimes he will,” their father said with his hand on the bannister, and it seemed an odd and baffling reply.
It was noon the following day before they were called into the living room. The window shades had been lifted. The purity of the winter light magnified the room, making it appear vast and sparsely furnished. The couch had been pushed back against the wall; a plain spindle-back chair replaced it at the bedside. “Toddy, come on,” their mother said. “And, Mamie, close the door as you come in, sweetie. It’s too drafty. We don’t want him to catch cold.”
Mamie did as she was told. Charged with anticipation, but not knowing what to expect, she lagged behind Toddy. She kept her eyes fastened on the lounger as they went to join their father on its far side. She leaned forward as she walked, trying to peer around her mother’s shoulder; after a few more steps she could see Sherman propped up on pillows, his head pitched slightly downward. She moistened her lips and bit them and swallowed hard.
All this time, her mother was speaking to Sherman in a soft voice. “He’s doing just fine. Yes, he is. Just fine, but look how tired he is. He’s slept so long he wore himself out. So tired …”
Vaguely nodding and swaying, his head lifted by slow degrees.
It was as if everything else disappeared. Only his incredibly blue eyes looked up from below his eyelashes, and the room began to slide around Mamie. The smart-alecky, devil-may-care glint that had been so much a part of him was gone; in its place was something hard, and cruel, and blunt. She wanted to scream, No! He’s not all right. He’s not just fine. His eyes’re wrong. Can’t you see? It’s all wrong!
And for as long as that moment lasted, it was like a horrible dream that wouldn’t go away.
Then, as if moving it through heavy air, Sherman lifted his hand toward her and her mother’s voice broke through that first stricken impression. “Mamie, don’t be bashful,” she said. “Take hold of his hand and tell him who you are, because he remembers you, really he does, but he’s kind of confused. Everything seems so brand new to him. You’ll have to help me watch out for him. Will you do that? Help me take care of him?”
Deliberately, Mamie nodded. She wanted to take his hand and help him, and then she did take it and she knew she must never tell them that he wasn’t just fine, because he was her brother who had watched over her and taken her out into the night. Only he knew how to undo the trouble they were in; only he could help her return the things they had taken and not get caught. So for now he couldn’t be anything but fine, because now that he was coming back, he was really all she had.
They knew from that day that he would never be the same as before the shooting, and yet it was like an unspoken secret they kept to themselves. Their mother acknowledged nothing but the glory of his improvement, and the others, the children and their father, realized instinctively what had to be done. With subtle, innocent glances, they communicated what they couldn’t say out loud, what they couldn’t have put into words if they’d wanted to, except to admit that he was different; changed. The glint was gone. They missed his smirky smile, his cockiness, and the gleam of mischief in his eyes, but with their silence they wove a cocoon around the truth—around the pain and sorrow and disappointment.
Within the week, their mother was more like her old self than she had been in eight months. Humming, she tied an apron around her waist and put her hair up in a scarf triangle She went to work downstairs, mopping and cleaning, and she cooked expansive suppers, complete with dessert. As soon as Sherman could sit up for any reasonable length of time, she tied pillows to the back and the seat of her granddaddy’s rocker, and when their father came home from work, he carried Sherman to the dining room and placed him in the padded rocking chair. In that way, he was with them each evening.
With his blank blue eyes, Sherman appeared more confused than docile, and when he did no
t looked confused, Mamie saw the hardness in his glance that chilled her to the heart.
Seldom was he cross, even more seldom did he complain, but he had frightening spells where he blacked out. In the beginning, only the simplest acts made sense to him. Did the sandwich taste good? “It’s good,” he’d say, staring into the distance. When he slumped back on the pillows and their mother asked if he was tired, “I’m tired,” he’d say, “… sleepy,” as if the connection between the two words were abstract and difficult. And when it was nine o’clock and he wasn’t sleepy, she gave him medicine to put him to sleep. In time, he did remember who they were and called them by name—their mother initially, then Toddy, then Mamie and their father. It took a long time; he seemed to have to dredge their likenesses from the depths of his memory. But every day he grew a little stronger and a little more aware.
And their mother’s praise of him never faltered. Her cheerful patter embraced him completely. Even in the early morning, as their father shaved to go to work, they sometimes heard her. “There goes Jimmy Porterfield to deliver his newspapers. See him? There he goes. One day you’ll ride a bicycle just like his.” She spent most of her time coaxing him to walk another step, to take one more bite; she urged him to speak without slurring. “How strong you’ll be,” she would say. “As good as new. That’s my good boy.” As if she could leave the past behind. But Mamie thought, Not for long will he be good. Not for very much longer.
During those months, those slow, rainy months when winter telescoped into spring, Mamie gently shared her things with him, even when he had no patience and tore her paper dolls or sent the toy lead soldiers she’d chosen for his Christmas present flying under the swipe of his hand. When their mother was out of earshot, she told him about the Chinaman. “I took him one of your old socks,” she said, “so he’ll remember you.” In the chair too high for her, she sat beside his bed, talking quietly as their mother hovered nearby, or when he was finally able to walk from the chair to the couch to the doorway, she stood with him. She wanted to talk to him, really talk to him, but the chance didn’t come and he was very reticent about talking to her. In all those early months, he didn’t think to ask what had happened to him. “I’m hurt,” he would say. “Yes,” their mother would say, “you hurt yourself. But we’re going to fix it. You’ll be good as new.” And the room would start to slide behind his gaze and Mamie would want to cry out, No, no, he’s not! He’s changed! He’s not good … not good.
At the supper table early that summer, their mother said, “He’s getting too strong for me. It wears me out just to have him lean on me. He’s almost as tall as I am, and solid as a rock.”
“Five foot two and eyes of blue,” Toddy said.
One day weeks later, when the doctor had been to examine him, the doctor said to their father, “Walk with me out to the car. I have one of the prescriptions in my other case.” But they didn’t reach the car; they stood on the sidewalk with their backs to the house and seemed to stay out there endlessly. A little over a year had passed since that awful night in the blackberry patch. It was the middle of August; school would start soon. The doctor carried his coat, blotted his face with a handkerchief. And Mamie watched them through the blur of the ticking window fan. Finally, the black sedan drove away and their father came in empty-handed. “What did the doctor say, Daddy?” Mamie asked. With his fingers, he smoothed the sweat from his eyebrow. “Oh,” he said, preoccupied, “nothing’s very clear-cut right now. We have to decide what to do about Sherman.”
Then, for several weeks, every night, it seemed, after she and Toddy had gone to bed Mamie heard them talking downstairs, their faint voices rising sporadically through the joists and plaster and lath like buried hearts. On the nights she couldn’t sleep, she went quietly down to the landing to listen. Their voices sometimes buzzed and hummed inside the walls; only pieces of what they said came to her undistorted. One night, her father said, “I’m going to do what the doctor said to do, Ellie. Or else, before we know it, it might be too late.” And her mother replied, “Not yet, please, not yet. Haven’t you seen how well he walks? He’s doing so well. Just today I was thinking we should move him upstairs. He needs more time. Give him a little more time, Ray … another few weeks.” A shadow came to the lighted doorway below, and Mamie slipped up the stairs.
Another night, she had to go all the way down the stairs to hear. Light glowed beneath the closed kitchen door; she inched toward it. “Doc Lasher said he needs tests and he needs specialists. Even then we can’t be sure. Maybe he’ll never be—”
Her mother was adamant. “I won’t put him away. You might as well tear the heart right out of me. I can’t … I won’t.”
A long silence followed. One of them stirred something; a spoon tinkled against china. Her father said, “He’s been out of the house again. I checked his shoes this morning when I got up. And they were wet. You know all this and still you persist.”
Without any detectable increase in the pitch of his voice, suddenly he was near; inches from Mamie’s eyes, the brass doorknob turned clockwise. As if hypnotized by it, she stood locked in her tracks. She couldn’t move, the fear pounding through her. The door cracked open a slit and a thin blade of light scored her in half. But before she could think what to do, the knob jiggled and the door closed. “What if he is depressed,” her mother said. “He’ll come out of it.” Mamie was already on the stairs, her fingers swinging round the pillar post. “Depressive,” her father said, and the walls muffled his voice.
On the landing, Mamie hastened up the remaining stairs and back to her room.
But she dozed and tossed and dozed again. The house settled into a deep plinking silence, like a well. She couldn’t think what it would be like to be put away, except that it would be a room with bars in it. Every few minutes, she woke up slick with sweat. She had to tell him, warn him.
In the deepest ebb of the night, she made her way down the dark stairs, crossed in front of the window fan that ruffled her hair and made her suck in breath, and entered the living room through the double doors, now left open. Her mother slept sprawled on the couch. Mamie paused long enough to watch the slow, even fall of her breath. Then she hurried toward the white island of the lounger.
To hide, she knelt on the back, shadowed side of it, checked the dark peripheries, and nudged Sherman’s shoulder. As smooth and controlled as ball bearings, his eyes flipped open and they were like the lightless eyes of an animal stirred suddenly from an alert sleep. Placing her finger straight against her lips, she whispered, “Sh-h-h.” He started to raise himself on his elbow, but she motioned him down. “Sherman,” she said, uttering his name so low it was hardly more than the shape of her lips. “We have to go away. Go far away like we used to want to. Okay? Go far, far away. I put all your things in the doghouse. The things we took.” She couldn’t tell if he was listening. Like cobalt disks, his eyes were fixed on her, unblinking and expressionless. “We have to go, Sherman, just as soon as we can. I’ll let you know when. Maybe Saturday when they go upstairs to sleep. If we don’t go, they’ll put you away in a place with bars in it. They’re going to. I heard ’em.”
Though quiet, his voice was gruff like a man’s. “They did this, didn’t they?” he said.
“What?” she murmured. “Did what?”
“Hurt me. To make me stop.”
“No, but they’re going to if we don’t leave. So we have to. Or they’ll put electricity things on us and make us talk like they did on the radio. On ‘Boston Blackie.’”
“I know what they did,” he said, shifting his head on the pillow. “I’m tryin’ to remember … all day.” The words oozed from him, his eyes beginning to squint. “I looked in the mirror. I had to do somethin’. And I had to do it.”
“But they’re going—”
“I know what they’re tryin’ to do. I heard them.” Then he said, “Look.” He slipped his hand under his pillow and pulled out a crumbling white pill. “I fooled her.” His mouth worked and a str
ange broken smile widened his face. He started to giggle. Amazing bright tears clung in his eyes. “I fooled her.” And he laughed. For the spark of that moment, he was the old Sherman again, having a good time, and nothing else mattered. She couldn’t help it; she was laughing, too. And as she laughed she whispered to him, “Don’t be mad at Toddy any more. He’s been so worried about you.” Sherman put his hands over his mouth and she put her hands on top of his, because if he stopped laughing, maybe she would, too, but it was too late. Their mother stumbled toward them. “What d’you two think you’re doing? It’s the middle of the night.”
They looked up at her, no longer laughing.
“Well, come on. Somebody tell me.”
“We’re just telling jokes,” Mamie said.
“Oh, Mamie, you don’t know any jokes. Now run back to bed.”
That was on Monday.
On Thursday evening, as they sat around the dining-room table passing the serving dishes back and forth, a knock came at the back screen door. It had been a sultry day for September, and it seemed an odd time for someone to call. Their father pushed his chair away from the table and went to answer the door.