“You understand me, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then,” he said, and he got out of the car. He held the door open for a second, looking at the ground as if trying to remember something, then said to the boy, “Leave the trap out here in the barn, but bring the rest of the stuff inside to the shop. You set the trap tonight after supper. New snow’ll make a fox foolish and hungry at the same time.” Then he moved away, clumsily, wobbling slightly, with the door left wide open behind him.
The boy reached across his father’s seat and drew the door closed. He let the brake off and backed the car into the darkness of the barn.
The Child Screams and Looks Back at You
WHEN YOUR CHILD SHOWS the first signs of illness—fever, lassitude, aching joints and muscles—you fear that he or she is dying. You may not admit it to anyone, but the sight of your child lying flushed and feverish in bed becomes for an instant the sight of your child in its coffin. The nature of reality shifts, and it’s suddenly not clear to you whether you are beginning to dream or are waking from a dream, for you watch the child’s breath stutter and stop, and you cry out and then struggle in vain to blow life back into the tiny, inert body lying below you. Or you see the child heave himself into convulsions, thrash wildly in the bed and utter hoarse, incoherent noises, as if he were possessed by a demon, and horrified, helpless, you back to the door, hands to mouth, crying, “Stop, stop, please, oh God, please stop!” Or, suddenly, the bed is sopped with blood pouring from the child’s body, blood seeping into the mattress, over the sheets, through the child’s tangled pajamas, and the child whitens, stares up pitifully and without understanding, for there is no wound to blame, there is only this blood emptying out of his body, and you cannot staunch its flow but must stand there and watch your child’s miraculous, mysterious life disappear before you. For that is the key that unlocks these awful visions—your child’s being simply alive is both miracle and mystery, and therefore it seems both natural and understandable that he should be dead.
Marcelle called her boys from the kitchen to hurry and get dressed for school. One of these mornings she was not going to keep after them like this and they would all be late for school and she would not write a note to the teacher to explain anything, she didn’t give a damn if the teacher kept them after school, because it would teach them a lesson once and for all, and that lesson was when she woke them in the morning they had to hurry and get dressed and make their beds and get the hell out here to the kitchen and eat their breakfasts and brush their teeth and get the hell out the door to school so she could get dressed and eat her breakfast and go to work. There were four of them, the four sons of Marcelle and Richard Chagnon. Joel was the oldest at twelve, and then, separated by little more than nine months, came Raymond, Maurice and Charles. The father had moved out, had been thrown out of the apartment by Marcelle’s younger brother Steve and one of Steve’s friends nearly nine years ago, when the youngest, Charles, was still an infant, and though for several years Richard had tried to convince Marcelle she should let him move back in with them and let him be her husband and the father of his four sons again, she had never allowed it, for his way of being a husband and father was to get drunk and beat her and the older boys and then to wake ashamed and beg their forgiveness. For years she had forgiven him, because to her when you forgive someone you make it possible for that person to change, and the boys also forgave him—they were, after all, her sons too, and she had taught them, in their dealings with each other, to forgive. If you don’t forgive someone who has hurt you, he can’t change into a new person. He is stuck in his life with you at the point where he hurt you. But her husband and their father Richard, after five years of it, had come to seem incapable of using their forgiveness in any way that allowed him to stop hurting them, so finally one night she had sent her oldest boy, Joel, who was then only four and a half years old, out the door and down the dark stairs to the street, down the street to the tenement where her brother Steve lived with his girlfriend, and Joel had found Steve sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer with a friend and had said to him, “Come and keep my daddy from hitting my mommy!” That night for Marcelle marked the end of the period of forgiveness, for she had permitted outsiders, her brother and his friend, to see how badly her husband Richard behaved. By that act she had ceased to protect her husband, and you cannot forgive someone you will not protect. Richard never perceived or understood that shift, just as all those years he had never perceived or understood what it meant to be protected and forgiven. If you don’t know what you’ve got when you’ve got it, you won’t know what you’ve lost when you’ve lost it. Marcelle was Catholic and even though she was not a diligent Catholic she was a loyal one, and she never remarried, which is not to say that over the years she did not now and again fall in love, once even with a married man, only briefly, however, until she became strong enough to reveal her affair to Father Brautigan, after which she had broken off with the man, to the relief of her sons, for they had not liked the way he had come sneaking around at odd hours to see their mother and talk with her in hushed tones in the kitchen until very late, when the lights would go off and an hour or two later he would leave. When in the morning the children got up and came out to the kitchen for breakfast, they would talk in low voices, as if the married man were still in the apartment and asleep in their mother’s bed, and she would have deep circles under her eyes and would stir her coffee slowly and look out the window and now and then quietly remind them to hurry or they’d be late for school. They were more comfortable when she was hollering at them, standing at the door to their bedroom, her hands on her hips, her dressing gown flapping open as she whirled and stomped back to the kitchen, embarrassing her slightly, for beneath her dressing gown she wore men’s long underwear, so that, by the time they got out to the kitchen themselves, her dressing gown would have been pulled back tightly around her and tied at the waist, and all they could see of the long underwear beneath it would be the top button at her throat, which she would try to cover casually with one hand while she set their breakfasts before them with the other. On this morning, however, only three of her sons appeared at the table, dressed for school, slumping grumpily into their chairs, for it was a gray, wintry day in early December, barely light outside. The oldest, Joel, had not come out with them, and she lost her temper, slammed three plates of scrambled eggs and toast down in front of the others and fairly jogged back to the bedroom, stalked to the narrow bed by the wall where the boy slept and yanked the covers away, to expose the boy, curled up on his side, eyes wide open, his face flushed and sweating, his hands clasped together as if in prayer. Horrified, she looked down at the gangly boy, and she saw him dead and quickly lay the covers back over him, gently straightening the blanket and top sheet. Then, slowly, she sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked his hot forehead, brushing his limp blond hair back, feeling beneath his jawbone as if for a pulse, touching his cheeks with the smooth backside of her cool hand. “Tell me how you feel, honey,” she said to the boy. He didn’t answer her. His tongue came out and touched his dry lips and went quickly back inside his mouth. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said, and she got up from the bed. “It’s probably the flu, that’s all. I’ll take your temperature and maybe call Doctor Wickshaw, and he’ll tell me what to do. If you’re too sick, I’ll stay home from the tannery today. All right?” she asked and took a tentative step away from the bed. “Okay,” the boy said weakly. The room was dark and cluttered with clothing and toys, model airplanes and boats, weapons, costumes, tools, hockey equipment, portable radios, photographs of athletes and singers, like the prop room of a small theater group. As she left the room, Marcelle stopped in the doorway and looked back. The boy huddled in his bed looked like one of the props, a ventriloquist’s dummy, perhaps, or a heap of clothes that, in this shadowy half-light, only resembled a human child for a second or two, and then, looked at from a second angle, came clearly to be no more than an impatiently disca
rded costume.
Most people, when they call in a physician, deal with him as they would a priest. They say that what they want is a medical opinion, a professional medical man’s professional opinion, when what they really want is his blessing. Information is useful only insofar as it provides peace of mind, release from the horrifying visions of dead children, an end to this dream. Most physicians, like most priests, recognize the need and attempt to satisfy it. This story takes place almost twenty years ago, in the early 1960s, in a small mill town in central New Hampshire, and it was especially true then and there that the physician responded before all other needs to the patient’s need for peace of mind, and only when that need had been met would he respond to the patient’s need for bodily health. In addition, because he usually knew all the members of the family and frequently treated them for injuries and diseases, he tended to regard an injured or ill person as one part of an injured or ill family. Thus it gradually became the physician’s practice to minimize the danger or seriousness of a particular injury or illness, so that a broken bone was often called a probable sprain, until x rays proved otherwise, and a concussion was called, with a laugh, a bump on the head, until the symptoms—dizziness, nausea, sleepiness—persisted, when the bump on the head became a possible mild concussion, which eventually may have to be upgraded all the way to fractured skull. It was the same with diseases. A virus, the flu that’s going around, a low-grade intestinal infection, and so on, often came to be identified a week or two later as strep throat, bronchial pneumonia, dysentery, without necessarily stopping there. There was an obvious, if limited, use for this practice, because it soothed and calmed both the patient and the family members, which made it easier for the physician to make an accurate diagnosis and to secure the aid of the family members in providing treatment. It was worse than useless, however, when an overoptimistic diagnosis of a disease or injury led to the patient’s sudden, crazed descent into sickness, pain, paralysis, and death.
Doctor Wickshaw, a man in his middle-forties, portly but in good physical condition, with horn-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard, told Marcelle that her son Joel probably had the flu, it was going around, half the school was out with it. “Keep him in bed a few days and give him lots of liquids,” he instructed her after examining the boy. He made housecalls, if the call for help came during morning hours or if it was truly an emergency. Afternoons he was at his office, and evenings he made rounds at the Concord Hospital, twenty-five miles away. Marcelle asked what she should do about the fever, one hundred four degrees, and he told her to give the boy three aspirins now and two more every three or four hours. She saw the man to the door, and as he passed her in the narrow hallway he placed one hand on her rump, and he said to the tall, broad-shouldered woman, “How are things with you, Marcelle? I saw you walking home from the tannery the other day, and I said to myself, ‘Now that’s a woman who shouldn’t be alone in the world.’” He smiled into her bladelike face, the face of a large, powerful bird, and showed her his excellent teeth. His hand was still pressed against her rump and they stood face to face, for she was as tall as he. She was not alone in the world, she reminded him, mentioning her four sons. The doctor’s hand slipped to her thigh. She did not move. “But you get lonely,” he told her. She had gray eyes and her face was filled with fatigue, tiny lines that broke her smooth pale skin like the cracks in a ceramic jar that long ago had broken and had been glued back together again, as good as new, they say, and even stronger than before, but nevertheless fragile-looking now, and brittle perhaps, more likely to break a second time, it seemed, than when it had not been broken at all. “Yes,” she said, “I get lonely,” and with both hands, she reached up to her temples and pushed her dark hair back, and holding on to the sides of her own head she leaned it forward and kissed the man for several seconds, pushing at him with her mouth, until he pulled away, red-faced, his hand at his side now, and moved self-consciously sideways toward the door. “I’ll come by tomorrow,” he said in a low voice. “To see how Joel’s doing.” She smiled slightly and nodded. “If he’s better,” she said, “I’ll be at work. But the door is always open.” From the doorway, he asked if she came home for lunch. “Yes,” she said, “when one of the boys is home sick, I do. Otherwise, no.” He said that he might be here then, and she said, “Fine,” and reached forward and closed the door on him.
Sometimes you dream that you are walking across a meadow under sunshine and a cloudless blue sky, hand in hand with your favorite child, and soon you notice that the meadow is sloping uphill slightly, and so walking becomes somewhat more difficult, although it remains a pleasure, for you are with your favorite child and he is beautiful and happy and confident that you will let nothing terrible happen to him. You cross the crest, a rounded, meandering ridge, and start downhill, walking faster and more easily. The sun is shining and there are wildflowers all around you, and the grass is golden and drifting in long waves in the breeze. Soon you find that the hill is steeper than before, the slope is falling away beneath your feet, as if the earth were curving in on itself, so you dig in your heels and try to slow your descent. Your child looks up at you and there is fear in his eyes, as he realizes he is falling away from you. “My hand!” you cry. “Hold tightly to my hand!” And you grasp the child’s hand, who has started to fly away from you, as if over the edge of a crevice, while you dig your heels deeper into the ground and grab with your free hand at the long grasses behind you. The child screams and looks back at you with a pitiful gaze, and suddenly he grows so heavy that his weight is pulling you free of the ground also. You feel your feet leave the ground, and your body falls forward and down, behind your child’s body, even though with one hand you still cling to the grasses. You weep, and you let go of your child’s hand. The child flies away and you wake up, shuddering.
That night the boy’s fever went higher. To one hundred five degrees, and Marcelle moved the younger boys into her own room, so that she could sleep in the bed next to the sick boy’s. She bathed him in cool water with washcloths, coaxed him into swallowing aspirin with orange juice, and sat there on the edge of the bed next to his and watched him sleep, although she knew he was not truly sleeping, he was merely lying there on his side, his legs out straight now, silent and breathing rapidly, like an injured dog, stunned and silently healing itself. But the boy was not healing himself, he was hourly growing worse. She could tell that. She tried to move him so that she could straighten the sheets, but when she touched him, he cried out in pain, as if his back or neck were broken, and frightened, she drew back from him. She wanted to call Doctor Wickshaw, and several times she got up and walked out to the kitchen where the telephone hung on the wall like a large black insect, and each time she stood for a few seconds before the instrument, remembered the doctor in the hallway and what she had let him promise her with his eyes, remembered then what he had told her about her son’s illness, and turned and walked back to the boy and tried again to cool him with damp cloths. Her three other sons slept peacefully through the night and knew nothing of what happened until morning came.
When your child lives, he carries with him all his earlier selves, so that you cannot separate your individual memories of him from your view of him now, at this moment. When you recall a particular event in your and your child’s shared past—a day at the beach, a Christmas morning, a sad, weary night of flight from the child’s shouting father, a sweet, pathetic supper prepared by the child for your birthday—when you recall these events singly, you cannot see the child as a camera would have photographed him then. You see him simultaneously all the way from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and on, as if he has been moving through your life too rapidly for any camera to catch and still, so that the image is blurred, grayed out, a swatch of your own past pasted across the foreground of a studio photographer’s carefully arranged backdrop.
When her son went into convulsions, Marcelle did not at first know it, for his voice was clear and what he said made sense. Suddenly, he spoke
loudly and in complete sentences. “Ma, I’m not alone. I know that, and it helps me not be scared. For a while I thought I was alone,” he went on, and she sat upright and listened alertly to him in the darkness of the bedroom. “And then I started to see things and think maybe there was someone else in the room here with me, and then I was scared, Ma. Because I didn’t know for sure whether I was alone or not. But now I know I’m not alone, and knowing it helps me not be scared.” She said that she was glad, because she thought he was talking about her presence in the room, and she took his recognition of her presence as a sign that the fever had broken. But when she reached out in the darkness and touched his neck, it was burning, like an empty, black pot left over a fire, and she almost cried out in pain, and might have, had the child not commenced to shout at her, bellowing at her as if she were a large, ugly animal that he wished to send cowering into the far corner of his room.
Most people, when they do what the physician has told them will cure them, expect to be cured. When they are not cured, they at first believe it is because they have not done properly what they have been told to do. Sickness is the mystery, the miracle, and the physician understands such things, you say, whereas you, who are not a physician, all you understand is health. This is not so, of course, for health is the mystery and the miracle, not sickness. Sickness can be penetrated, understood, predicted. Health cannot. No, the analogy between the physician and the priest will not hold, for sickness and injury are not at all like divine protection and forgiveness. Sadly, most people and most physicians and most priests do not know this, or if they do, they do not act as if they know it. It’s only in dealing with their children that people treat life as if it were indeed the miracle, as if life itself were the mystery of divine protection and forgiveness, and in that way, it is only in dealing with their children that most people are like priests serving God, making it possible for poor sinners to obtain grace.
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