by Rhonda Riley
“Rest until I get the water and breakfast ready.”
I dressed, stoked up the stove, and fed the animals while he seemed to be sleeping again. I pulled the tub as close to the stove as I dared. After I filled it with warm water, I touched him on the shoulder to wake him. “Does this hurt?” I massaged his shoulder lightly.
“No.”
“You can take a bath now.”
He held my hands and pulled himself up into a sitting position. His grip was strong.
“You okay sitting up?”
“Okay.” He nodded back at me.
He didn’t seem to understand what to do next. Helping him stand was like pulling a very large, drunk child out of a low bed. He kept his eyes on me and I kept my eyes on his face so I wouldn’t have to see his naked body.
As soon as I got him standing, I let go and grabbed a towel. He swayed a little, but caught himself and planted his feet firmly apart while I reached behind him and wrapped the towel around his waist. I pulled his arm over my shoulder. We were the same height. He teetered awkwardly.
“You must have been on a real bender before you got here.” His hapless nakedness made me giddy.
He turned his head, so close now I could smell the clean, sweet odor of his breath, and gave me a blank, patient look.
“Just joking,” I said. The second step, which got him to the edge of the tub, was smoother.
“Get in,” I told him. “It’s warm, it’ll feel good.” But he only turned his head and regarded me with that pale-eyed gaze again. I reached down and lifted one of his legs, easing it slowly into the warm water. He let out a sharp “ahhh” of surprise as soon as his foot touched the water. I startled, afraid it might be too warm. But then he beamed a sweet, wide smile as if I’d just given him a whole tub of blackberry jam.
Once he got both feet in, he just stood there. I had to help him sit. In what I took for modesty, he left the towel on when he went down into the water. He sat in the tub smiling, waving his hands in the water, but not making any effort to bathe himself or take the cloth I held out. So I began to bathe his arms and shoulders very gently. He watched my face and hands, all the while smiling at me. A sweet odor rose from the water. He smelled like a newly mowed summer lawn. He sighed and shut his eyes. I sensed that odd sound again, the soothing resonant chime. I touched his chest. He opened his eyes wide, and the sound changed timbre and pitch. I could feel its vibration through my hand.
I took my hand away from his chest and forced myself to move around behind him to wash his back. The scarring was there, too. My throat clenched. I needed words to counter what I saw, to soften the horrors I imagined had caused such damage. “Are you from around here? Where are you from?”
He said nothing. I couldn’t see his face, but imagined his blank then confused expression. After a moment, he spoke. “I don’t know where I am from.” Each word stood carefully by itself, his first full sentence.
The bath water began to cool. I held his hands again and he stood with more confidence. But the towel stayed in the water. He did not seem to notice and just held the dry towel when I handed it to him.
“Dry yourself. Here. Like this.” I rubbed his shoulder with the towel, careful not to look down. “You can get dressed. Hurry before you get cold.” I dried him off and he helped in his awkward way.
He just stood there when he was dry. Clearly, he needed my help getting dressed. I knelt in front of him holding his underwear open and, averting my eyes, I motioned that he should lift his leg. He got the idea and, steadying himself by holding on to my shoulders, stepped with his other leg into the shorts. I bent forward, holding them open. As I rose to pull them up around his hips, I had to see what was right in front of my face. There was an awful protruding mangle of flesh, neither man nor woman, and a fuzz of red pubic hair.
“Who did this to you? Who hurt you like this?” I held his rough face in my hands. “What happened to you?”
His face contorted, alarmed and puzzled. He put his hand up and touched a tear on my face. “Hurt?” he said. “Who did this?”
“Were you in Japan?”
“Japan?”
I was upsetting him. He didn’t seem to know how to answer. He stared at me, waiting to find out about Japan.
“Let’s finish putting your clothes on and then I’ll show you something,” I said. I helped him put on the rest of his clothes. They were too big, even the shoes. He was not as tall as Uncle Lester. I slipped Uncle Lester’s socks on over his scarred foot. Like the bath, socks seemed new and unexpected to him, but after the struggle of the first one, he held his foot firm so the second one slipped on easily.
“Wait,” I said when he was dressed. I brought the picture of the Japanese woman back to him and held it out. He took it carefully, holding it by the corner, and studied the woman. A ragged sigh rose from him.
“This is hurt?” He held the photograph out for me to take.
I touched his hand, feeling the strangeness of his skin, and turned it over next to my hand, comparing. “I know who did this to her, but who did this to you?”
He seemed to struggle for words and then announced, “I am not like her. I am not hurt. I do not hurt.” I took the photograph back.
“You don’t hurt anywhere?” I rubbed his shoulder. He leaned into my touch like a purring cat.
He shook his head, then turned his attention back to our hands. Taking my hand in both of his, he held it, touching me lightly at first, then searching the bones and tendons of my wrist as if memorizing them.
I did not bathe after him, as I normally would have, to take advantage of the labor of getting up a hot bath. I let the water go cold. When I went to throw it out, it was not muddy as I had expected it to be, but almost clear, with just a bit of grit in the bottom. There was not much dirt on the quilts, either, not nearly what there should have been given the conditions I’d found him in.
The rain continued that day, the waterfall of it crashed off the roof, keeping me housebound with my odd stranger. I had begun to think of him as mine. Mine to protect and teach. Mine to bring back to what he had been before. I tried not to think of the unnatural speed of his recovery, or the faint vibrating drone that sometimes emanated from him. I still thought of him as a damaged soldier.
Except for my brief trips to the barn, I spent that day holding him by the hand, guiding his clumsy steps around the house, and talking to him.
Again and again, I asked him about his family and where he was from. Did he remember anyone or anything? The answer remained the same, “I don’t know.” The only thing he seemed to be certain of was his lack of pain.
In the hope of triggering some memories, I told him stories of my family. Stories about my momma’s family, poor Appalachian hill farmers coming down to work in the cotton mills. About her crazy cousin who robbed post offices and the federal agents who came looking for him. I told the story of my father’s half-sister, the only relation I had never met, who ran off with a boy from Chicago named Hardin.
Of all things, I thought my talk of the war would make him remember something, but even that seemed news to him. He could not remember anything from his past. Reluctantly, I concluded that he must be brain-damaged. But he was so lucid. He filled the room.
Something in his manner and bearing seemed so familiar. I was certain that he was a local boy. I covered the local geography, naming towns, counties, hills, rivers, and creeks nearby, hoping to jog some uninjured part of his brain. None of what I said helped him remember his people, but he turned that deaf-man gaze on me, and I felt like I was reciting Holy Scripture to a drowning sinner.
I saw no judgment, no appraisal in his eyes. He wasn’t like the boys in the mill-village. He reminded me of Cole. I was not too tall, red-haired, or freckled when I talked to him. I was unaccustomed to the intensity of his attention, and at times it made me shy, but I wanted to meet his gaze. I wanted to tell this man everything, to give him the world he seemed to have lost.
By the end of the day, h
is gait was almost normal and the questions were coming from him. He followed me, watching everything I did. He wanted to know the name of everything—a knife, the stove, the buckle on his overalls.
That afternoon, I discovered that he had even forgotten what a chamber pot was for. The outhouse was not close, so I had taken to using a chamber pot sometimes even during the day, and I certainly wasn’t going out in the continuing downpour just to pee. Since I had been living alone so much, I’d taken to leaving the pot on the back porch. In bad weather, I used it in a corner, behind the tool shelves. He found me there just before sunset that day. I was squatting over the pot, doing my business, when he appeared. I startled, but there wasn’t much to be done except finish peeing. He watched me with the same intense interest he had in everything. Beside him, Hobo peered at me, sniffing the air. Then the cat stuck her head around the corner.
“I guess this means we’re pretty good friends, but even my family doesn’t find this so interesting they have to watch.”
My comment seemed to please him.
“Oh!” he said when I finished and he saw the pot behind me. He stood very close to me. I smelled his faint green odor. He sniffed, too. I offered him the pot and walked away until I heard the metallic clink of the fasteners on his overalls. I couldn’t help myself, I peered back over my shoulder. When I didn’t see him standing over the pot, I took a couple of quiet steps backward and peeked over the shelves. He squatted like a woman, staring down between his legs like a child. I blushed, remembering what I had seen there when I helped him dress. After he finished, he beamed up at me, happy, completely unself-conscious.
Later, when we ate dinner, I noticed his skin was much better. Not quite normal, but in the lamplight, I could see that it had lost its odd yellow hue. Only traces of the burn-like scarring remained. His skin was smoother. The roughness now seemed just below the surface, like the dimpling and slight lumpiness of fat. His hair formed a short copper halo. He reminded me of the children in my family when they were younger. His emerging familiarity kept my mind off of how he had looked when I found him. I no longer felt the urgent need to call Momma and Daddy for help. This strange man had begun to feel like a gift instead of an emergency. A curious gift.
It wouldn’t have been right to have him sleep on the floor again for his second night. At bedtime, I put him in the room closest to mine, not the one Frank had slept in. Getting him into long johns was easier than dressing him after his bath. He did most of the work himself, but I had to remind him to keep his socks on for warmth. His bed squeaked when he sat on it. He echoed with his own squeak of surprise and leapt up. I laughed. He grinned before gazing warily at the bed.
“It’s just the springs.” I lifted the mattress to show him and then I sat down bouncing and patting the bed beside me. I left him squeaking and grinning.
In my room, the sound of the rain drowned any noise he might have made on the squeaking bed, but I was aware of the wall between us as I changed into sleeping clothes and got into bed. I had been in bed only a few minutes when I heard him at my bedroom door. Then he was a darker lump in the darkness beside my bed.
“I want to be in here with you,” he announced with such simplicity that I opened the covers. Given what I had seen bathing him, he was in no shape to take advantage of me.
We slept that night spooning together for warmth as we had the afternoon I found him. All night, I dreamed of hands and eyes and tongues, of an indistinct jumble of flesh and skin sliding by and around and then into me. Boundaries disappearing and reappearing. My own hands cupping a kneecap or a shoulder blade, or tracing the rippled expanse of ribs. They were liquid dreams, familiar and unfamiliar. Disturbing.
Waking in the morning, I was conscious first of something good and new. Then I remembered. Yes, him. That was how I thought of him—just Him. He needed a name. I wanted to find out what his name was rather than give him one. His lack of knowledge about himself was, otherwise, becoming peculiarly undisturbing to me.
He turned in the bed beside me, a column of warmth. I lay there a moment, not moving as I listened to his breathing and the rain. Beyond the rain there was silence. Even the trains were flooded out now. It would be days before the road would be clear again. I would have my stranger to myself. We were alone in a house of present tense; for now, he did not need a name or history. The extreme weather fit him. Something equally extraordinary and extreme had happened to him.
When I got out of bed, he moaned sweetly. Before I got the stove warm, he walked into the kitchen looking even better than the day before. His hair, about an inch long, was red—bright red like mine and my mother’s. A carrot top like me. His skin was more natural, all the yellow gone out of it, though it did not appear quite normal in its smoothness. He moved well, too, lowering himself gracefully to sit cross-legged on the floor where he watched me make our breakfast. His eyes never left me, going from my face to my hands and back again. I did not ask myself how he could heal so quickly. My mind went around that question like creek water around a stone. I thought, instead, of a cicada I’d once watched emerge from its chrysalis. The short, nubby wings, clearly not large enough for its bulk, had expanded as if converting the air itself into more wingspan, the delicate veins growing as I watched.
All day, he shadowed me, watching and listening while I did my chores. We went to the coop first. The chickens murmured as I unlocked the door. They fluffed themselves and strutted to the feeding pans. He laughed when he saw them, a bubbly, metallic laugh. I measured their feed at the first pan and he copied me with precision at the second feeding pan.
We were a parade of three, me doing my routine chores, jabbering away. Him big-eyed, one step behind me. And Hobo was at the man’s side at every opportunity. While we were in the barn, the cat joined us. I explained everything—chickens, the sow, bridles, the pump, the water coming up from underground. Everything seemed new to him.
Becky nickered softly and one of the cows lowed deep and long when I opened the barn door. Behind me, he exclaimed, “Ooooh!” and stopped on the threshold. I pulled him out of the rain into the barn. I lit the lantern. He stood beside one of the cows. Becky turned in her stall to face him.
For the first time, he seemed oblivious to my presence. Solemnly, he studied the cow, running his hands along her back and shoulders. Then he went to her ears and face. The cows, particularly, were not patient when waiting to be fed, but they were quiet as he went to them one by one. Without complaint, they let him touch them—hooves, tail, ears, and muzzle. I moved closer with the lantern. The planes of his face reminded me of my mother’s family.
An expression of complete absorption and concentration filled his face. The sound of rain pelting the roof dominated, but I felt a steady, barely audible drone beneath it. Becky snorted softly, straining toward him, and he went to her. He lifted his face and shut his eyes. She rubbed her head against his, sniffing him loudly.
He moved into shadows as he circled Becky. Then he reappeared and gently combed his hands through her mane. He sighed deeply, then stepped back, smiled at me, and opened his hands. The barn fell completely still and I realized that the humming drone had ceased. “Show me how,” he said.
I did. We fed, watered, shoveled, and combed. His study of the cows and Becky seemed to have sobered him, but when we got to the milking, he grew more excited. He squatted beside me, so close he could have suckled the cow. When the first squirt of milk hit the bucket, he squawked and rolled back onto his heels.
“It’s just milk,” I said.
“Milk!” His mouth hung open in surprise. He leaned back and eyed the cow respectfully. Just then one of the other cows farted loudly. Still open-mouthed, he swirled toward the second cow, then glanced quizzically at me. I started laughing and could not stop. I giggled and guffawed in waves until I cried. All the strangeness of the last days uncoiled from my diaphragm.
He just watched me, a patient smile on his face. Clearly, I was a benign, interesting idiot.
When I
finally stopped laughing and wiped my eyes, he sat up straight, cocked his head, and said, “You okay?” He touched a tear on my cheek.
“Great,” I said.
He held his hands out as if ready to take over the milking. I showed him how to hold the udders. I wrapped my hands around his so he could feel the pressure as I pulled and squeezed. His hands were warm and the same size as mine. When I let go, he continued the milking. He was a quick study.
On the way back from the barn, the downpour soaked us. Lester’s old clothes hung bedraggled on him. I offered him a shirt of mine. As he changed, I saw that he had a heaviness in his hairless chest, his nipples were puffy, the way some boys are as they change into men. Maybe I had overestimated his age. He did not need any help with the shirt. I scooted out the door when he started taking his pants off, which he did without bothering to turn from me.
In the evening, the rain continued washing over the house. I taught him how to make corn bread. While it baked, I prepared the beans and ham. He stood at the big kitchen window, peering out one side and then the other, taking in as much of the view as he could and giving me a rare chance to watch him unobserved. Beyond him, the horizon was dark and cloud-banked. The way he lifted his chin and swiveled his head—I’d seen my mother do that, her hand on the sill like that as she surveyed her backyard.
He looked healthy and good. He could have been one of the boys from town, his facial features still a little fuzzy in some way I couldn’t put my finger on, but very normal. A little feminine. His skin was now as smooth as mine. No sign of a beard. No sign at all that he had ever looked so strange.
He was like the cicada expanding into itself—a normal face and skin emerging from his muddy, ugly surface. My anxiety about his unnatural transformation still rested under my diaphragm. But I felt the same sense of privilege studying him as I had when I watched the cicada.
At the dinner table, he saw me observing him and put his fork down to look back at me. I had no doubt anymore: he was not foreign at all. He smiled. Lord, he had a smile.