Common Sons

by Ronald Donaghe

  In the end, he had failed to infuse in Joel the drive to pull away from Common. Most teens were ready to get on with their lives, to go out into the big wide world and see other things. Joel had quit, suddenly, without warning, not because he was a quitter, but because his loyalties lay in a few hundred acres of desert in the middle of nowhere. Not at all the kind of place for a kid to live from birth to adulthood, without ever going out into the world, Bill thought. But try as he might, he couldn’t shake Joel’s decision.

  For Bill Hoffins, the choice to live in Common was made because the coaching job offered a substantial income and latitude in his coaching program. He had studied as many sports as he could, and this position offered him the chance to open a wide range of options for the boys and girls. He did not believe in fun-neling all boys through football or basketball. Why make an excellent swimmer into a lousy left end? Or strive to produce aggressive basketball players out of graceful, streamlined runners? JoAnna had been hired, too, in a less-rewarding position, maybe, but the school paid for further education, so she could continue school at the university. She had often told him that her boss, David Wier, had the tightest sphincter at the school and characterized him from then on as anal retentive. She also didn’t like her boss’s attitudes when it came to closing opportunities for girls so that boys could advance. She walked on eggshells at work and was often frustrated in her attempts to work around him without endangering her job.

  The desert wind scraped his face raw. In his briefcase were the few meager pages of notes. He hadn’t decided yet to let Joel read them. Gnawing at his conscience was the school board policy of staying out of sexual discussions with students. And especially this sexual discussion, he told himself. But he wanted to do something for Joel, because aside from his disappointment in him, Joel was still a wonderful kid; he would have loved to have had a son exactly like him.

  JoAnna met him at the door wearing a light, breezy, summer shift with narrow straps tied into bows on either shoulder. She had combed down her hair and brushed out the kinks that always formed under the tight, pinned-up style she wore at her job within the high school counselor’s office.

  “That was a quick trip,” she said, as he climbed out of the MG. “I thought you were going to research that stuff for the Reece kid.”

  “At least I made it back in time to go to the hospital with you. It was a lost cause, Jo. You can read my notes on the way. I don’t know what to do about Joel.”

  “I told you, you wouldn’t find much. We had that Johnson case, remember? The kid came in crying and nervous, said all the guys in shop were pushing him around, calling him queer. He wanted help. But David wouldn’t touch it, of course. I did all the research I could find and even talked to a psychiatrist. But then David told me to file it. He called in the kid’s parents, but I don’t think anything was ever settled.”

  Some enterprising fundraiser had managed to get a special wing built onto the county hospital, complete with its own special staff. It was the newest wing of the small hospital that served the southern county residents. But the special wing received patients from all over the state. Children. Townspeople referred to it as the children’s nut ward, completely misunderstanding the difference between emotional and physical disturbances of the mind.

  The interior of the hospital was one of the few cool places in Common. It was equipped with refrigerated air conditioners, rather than the evaporative coolers that sat atop most houses and businesses in town. Bill had not changed from the clothes he wore to the university and, as they walked down the long, shiny waxed corridor to the west wing, he began to feel cool and comfortable. He put his arm around JoAnna’s waist and they walked in like that to their son’s bedside.

  Linton William Hoffins was severely autistic, and Bill and JoAnna were glad that they were able to live so close. The few hours a week they visited did nothing to benefit Linton; he was too withdrawn to even focus on their faces or to react to their hugs, except to screech and pull away. He could barely stand to be touched or held, and they eventually came only to sit and watch him smile to himself with that strange inner calm he had developed in his third year of life. They sat beside each other now on two metal-backed chairs next to his bed, holding each other’s hands, silent and contemplative as always. For a time, both were lost in their own thoughts. Occasionally, JoAnna softly brushed Linton’s hair from his eyes or gently extracted his tangled limbs from the bed clothes.

  Linton was four, now, and had lived in his hospital room for almost two years. At first, the Hoffinses didn’t realize that their son was autistic. Realization that something was terribly wrong with him came painfully over a year’s time, when his development fell off drastically; after learning to crawl, he stopped. Physiologically, Linton was a perfect, beautiful child. But when he was two, one could get lost looking into his blank inward stare. He fluctuated between unaccountable bouts of screaming and absolute serenity when he would stare blankly at them, then lie back and smile or laugh. They had been prepared to take care of him at home. But his temper tantrums were always directed at himself. He could become agitated without warning, and with the little strength he had developed in two years he could inflict bloody wounds to his body. Bill and JoAnna had realized his need for constant supervision.

  Having Linton at home had been a strain on them both. As married people in a family-oriented town, it was a natural activity to visit with other teachers and their families, with other couples from their church. But because they both worked, it was hard for them to keep a clean house, or to keep a constant babysitter, especially because of Linton’s strange behavior. It was impossible to keep a maid because of Linton. Bill also wanted to make it a practice to invite his athletes over, wanting to round out his training in sports with a little of the human side. He felt he could be a positive model for many of the teens, and the school board smiled on teachers who took an active interest in the community. As the principal, Robert Whitman, was fond of saying during staff meetings, “The town needs its schools to provide Common with family activities.” And the Hoffinses agreed. Except for the emptiness of a childless house, they were happier now that Linton was receiving good care.

  As he sat at Linton’s bedside, Bill squeezed his wife’s hand. “I’m going to help Joel if I can, Jo. I miss having a kid to talk to.”

  JoAnna stood up and leaned over Linton, who was lying flat on his back and smiling. It was hard to tell he was conscious, except for the little shrieks that gurgled in his throat, and the quick snatches his fists made at his clothes. She sighed. “It isn’t fair, is it? We’d make good parents, and we can’t even talk to him.”

  She turned around and pulled Bill up. She was taller than him by an inch. She kissed his forehead and tasted the salt of the dry sweat. It bothered her that Bill might get caught helping with Joel’s problem. But at the same time, she agreed that kids needed help sometimes when even their parents were not aware of their problems. She had looked forward to the summer, with a real chance to get their house in order, cleaned from top to bottom, and to begin inviting people over for small dinners and bridge. But Joel was the first one to show up, bearing more problems. Not that she resented it. Like her husband, she missed having a kid to talk to, but Joel Reece’s problem was as difficult in its own way as Linton’s autism. It was considered an illness too and, like autism, as confusing and vague. “But at least you can talk to him.”

  Bill followed her out of Linton’s room and into the quiet corridor. He wasn’t sure that he was doing the right thing. “What do you think, Jo? Should I?”

  She looked at him strangely. “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “But even against policy?”

  “When did that stop you before? Yes, honey, talk to him. We both will if he comes back. If I can’t do real counseling at work, I can do it on the side.”

  * * *

  Wednesday was another church night. Joel hadn’t heard from Tom all week so, after church was surely over, he called Tom’s house
, breaking his promise to wait. Tom’s father answered this time, and he also said that Tom was sick. “But what kind of sick—” Joel managed to get out before the buzz of a dead line came back. Fucker! Okay, so it was nine o’clock at night. Who would be in bed? Surely Tom wasn’t bedridden. Maybe he wasn’t being allowed to talk, Joel thought, with a pang of fear.

  Maybe he told his father what we did. That idea made him look at the black telephone with apprehension, and he turned away, as confused as ever.

  * * *

  On the other end, when the telephone rang once, it was snatched up instantly, its ring choked off by Tom’s father. On a chance that it might be Joel, Tom slipped out of his room and passed by his father on the way to the kitchen for a glass of water. From his father’s abrupt monologue into the receiver, Tom knew it was Joel. “Still sick. Goodnight.”

  That’s a lie! Tom whispered under his breath. Then he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the kitchen window over the sink. His fragmented frown and wild eyes met. He was surprised at the anger on his face, and a little frightened that it showed. His anger made him restless, but there was no place to go to get away. He gulped down the cool tap water and set his glass on the counter. It was the only dirty dish in the house.

  His mother was in her bedroom reading probably, but he didn’t know for sure what she did in her room all the time, either. For both of them, shutting themselves away most of the time was habitual. This realization was new, but he could see it was true: practically every evening at some point, he would go to his room and would only come out if his father called him out for some duty around the house or if Joel came to pick him up and take him somewhere. His mother would go to her room like that, as well. And his father would work at the desk. Like other things tonight, that realization added to his anger. He turned away from the window and marched right passed his father and into his room without a word.

  He lay on his bed feeling angry, discovering that his anger was many-headed. He was angry at himself for playing the fool at the dance, for initiating the sex with Joel in such a drunken way. He was angry at himself for getting into trouble with his father most of all and angry that his father’s response was to make the snap judgment to ground him. Father would be surprised, wouldn’t he, to know that this time, his rule-making was irrelevant, that he failed to “first define the problem,” as he’s so fond of saying? That thought made Tom angrier still. His father’s decision to ground him was like many of his overreactions. Now it hung on like the odor in an alley. It’s this power, Tom thought suddenly, “this power to make rules,” he said aloud, “that Father enjoys!” He was stunned at the clarity, the simplicity of this realization. It was true. His father pounced on a crisis, and generally had it quickly under control. But like a pit bull, once his mind had locked onto a problem, once his jaws were clamped at the throat of the argument, there was no pulling him off of it.

  He looked at the black rectangle of window and felt a jolt of temper at the passing of another summer evening. He had geared himself for the long wait until he could call Joel, until his father lifted his stupid rule, but seeing how abruptly, disrespectfully, his father had treated Joel, Tom felt as if he was going to explode with anger, or stamp his foot through the floor in frustration.

  You’re a crybaby, Tom. If you were as angry as you think, you’d call Joel, sneak out of the house, maybe, something anyway, to let Joel know what’s going on! But the fact of his cowardice hit him. Even the thought of defying his father made him nauseous. Breaking one of his father’s rules…if he did that, things would get out of hand. A small infraction would be open rebellion.

  He clicked off the desk lamp and the room turned a shiny gray. The darkness of the night outside was obliterated by the blackness of his room. He sighed.

  Pete said you do. You decide. Joel said you loved it, Tom. “And I started it,” he said aloud. There was something he had missed. Pete had touched on his private conflict so quickly the other day that he began to wonder what blind spot there was. It was something Pete had said about who decides what a sin is that had gotten Tom to thinking less hysterically about having sex. And now, he realized that he wasn’t ashamed any more. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all.

  Joel never said if it was wrong or right. But I didn’t give him a chance.Joel wasn’t concerned with the idea of sin anyway. He seemed not at all concerned with spiritual comfort. Joel never asked God for anything—even his cussing never called on God to damn anybody. And when Tom had asked him once, a long time ago, “Don’t you worry about your soul?” Joel had said, “My soul? If you bust my lip, my soul will bleed down my chin.” And that had settled the religion subject forever.

  Tom wanted to be more like Joel, sometimes wished Douglas and Eva Reece were his parents. Even Pete was closer to Joel’s thinking, not quite so caught up with religion.

  He sighed as he lay down for bed. He had analyzed his anger to death. His father, as usual, had been central. Soon, Joel, he thought, I’ll figure out how to get past Father, past the rule-maker, past my own cowardice. He hoped Joel would be waiting for him when he did.

  Friday, June 4

  Wilting. That was her word for it. “He’s wilting, Douglas. That’s the only way I can describe it.” Eva Reece was resting against Douglas on the couch in the living room. The same old news was playing. Johnson had just announced more troop deployment in South Vietnam. Douglas patted her shoulder and squeezed her to him a little. She was warm and comfortable. Over the years, her slim figure had disappeared and she had become plump like many of the other farmers’ wives. But Douglas preferred her now to the frail thing he had married the year before he was drafted into the army.

  “There’s something bothering him all right, hon. I thought a girl might be giving him fits, you know?” He laughed softly, thinking about the underwear he’d found, but he didn’t share that with her. “But he’s not one to talk about a problem, ‘less it’s more’n he can handle.”

  Eva sighed. “You know how bad that would be, don’t you?”

  Douglas detected her old amazement. Joel had always been so independent, he’d caused them several years of fright, practically from the time they’d brought him home from the hospital. Eva was a little overprotective at first, he recalled, after the two miscarriages before him, but Joel soon proved that she wasn’t wrong in keeping an eye on him. “Do you remember that year—guess he was five or six—when he dug up that plum tree?”

  “It was the summer he turned seven, honey. I think it was anyway, because you said you wished you’d never told him he had to get rid of it. I still don’t know how he kept from chopping a foot off, as mangled as the tree was! Remember, he worked on it for days? You said at least he would be good in school. You said if the teachers just gave him something to do, he’d do it.”

  Douglas nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I remember.” He watched the weatherman drawing on a map of the United States.

  Joel was looking at him from the hole he’d dug. The hole was at least a yard deep. Joel’s face was streaked with mud. His blond hair was wet and glistened from the top of the hole like something metallic. Douglas chuckled. “He said he wanted to see how many roots it had! Can you imagine that, Eva? He goes and digs for days just to find out?”

  For Joel’s size, the tree was enormous, but something Douglas could have worked loose in a couple of hours. Luckily, too, the tree was one he’d been thinking of cutting down anyway to build a garage. And the loss of the scrubby thing wasn’t serious, but to punish him, he’d told Joel he had to straighten out the yard, fill the hole, and get rid of the tree. He didn’t care how—but he fully intended to hook it to the tractor, when Joel saw he couldn’t handle it, and drag if off. A little frustration, Douglas hoped, would teach him to ask before he did something like that again.

  But Joel worked steadily on it for several days. Douglas would see him from the dining room. When he glanced up from his work at the shop where he parked the tractor, Joel would be busy. Dirt would be fly
ing, and he would wonder what kind of further mess he was making. But he had given Joel a job, and he decided to wait and see how it turned out. At night, Joel came in for supper tired and happy, his sleeves rolled up like his father’s, his hands blistered, so that Eva would have to put iodine on them. He washed at the sink, standing on a chair that he dragged from the breakfast table. At supper, he shoveled food down hungrily, quietly, completely content with himself. Then one day, he met Douglas as he came in from the field. “I’m done,” he said simply.

  “With what? The tree?”

  Joel had beamed proudly. “Yeah! Wanna see?”

  Douglas followed his son to the site where the tree had met its end. The ground was clear, the hole filled in and level with the rest of the yard. “But where’d you put it? He expected to see a small stack of mangled branches lying nearby. Joel had carted the entire tree, branch by branch, twig by twig, to the north side of his mother’s garden, away from the house. Although the branches were cut badly, Joel had managed a fairly respectable stack.

  Douglas laughed softly as he related the story. “Yessiree. I thought he could handle anything.”

  Eva sighed again. “But he’s too quiet, Douglas. He’s been moping around here all week. He says his friend, Tom, is sick, but I think it’s something else.”

  “I’ve tried talking to him, hon, but I guess it’s not bad enough, or he would say something, surely.”