by Farris, John
Katharine knew she needed to get a little better grip on herself, because Gillian could go on like this for days. She would insist on a room at the new hospital as close to her daughter as she could get. No more thoughts of the holidays in Acapulco, and Howard Wrightnour would have to struggle along without her. Only Gillian mattered now.
Chapter Five
LAMBETH, VIRGINIA
JUNE 1972
Robin caught the little pop fly a few feet to the right of the first-base line and sat down hard, clutching mitt and ball to his chest; while waving the first baseman away he had taken his eye off the ball for a moment and misjudged it. But he was up immediately, ready to charge the unprotected plate if Shanley, the runner on third, decided to come home. Shanley bluffed but returned to the base. Robin jogged back with the ball as he'd been taught to do at Johnny Bench's clinic; only then, with the plate covered, did he lob the ball back to his pitcher. He held up a finger.
"One more!" he yelled. "Any base!" Feast of the Assumption had the sacks loaded in the bottom of the sixth; two out and the Barksdale Baptist Little Leaguers were clinging to a 10-9 lead. The batter was a lean long-armed kid named Giffin, who had really tagged one in the fifth inning.
Coach was up off the bench waving the shortstop closer to third. Robin adjusted his chest protector and picked up the mask he had discarded to chase the pop fly.
"Let's hear it!" he chided the tired infielders. "Little chatter now! Stay alive, we've got 'em."
The sun was setting behind the third-base bleachers, casting an orange glow over the field. Robin hunkered down and glanced at Shanley, the biggest boy on the Assumption team.
Shanley played first base, and early in the season Robin had had a run-in with him while trying to beat out a soft roller. A bad throw had pulled Shanley a step off the bag and in trying to tag Robin he'd hit him in the mouth with his elbow; result, one shattered eyetooth and three other teeth so loosened they had to be wired. It could have been an accident, but Robin wasn't all that sure. Red Shanley was the sort who enjoyed a cheap shot if he thought he could get away with it. He looked heavy, almost fat, crouched down at third with his left foot nudging the bag, but Robin could vouch for his strength and for a big kid he could really get it into gear.
"Look who's here," Robin sneered as Giffin stepped into the box. "Hey, man, your bat's got holes in it. Wave goodbye, Giffin, wave goodbye."
"Don't you ever shut up?" Giffin muttered, glaring at the pitcher. Robin signaled for Harkaday's best pitch, a change-up, and stuck his mitt out. Giffin let one go by on the outside corner that the umpire called a strike. They were having a fit over there on the Feast of the Assumption bench. Giffin backed off looking disgusted and hit the ground with his bat.
Robin laughed. "That's what happens when you don't go to confession. Okay, Giffin, coming right at you. Show us your beautiful swing."
Ball one, and Robin had to go down to smother it in the dirt. He called time and went out to settle his pitcher down.
"Break one off," he told Harkaday.
"Coach said—"
"Break one off anyway," Robin ordered, hoping he wouldn't end up chasing the ball all the way to the backstop while Shanley sauntered home.
He went back behind the plate, and Harkaday threw his best curve in two weeks. Nevertheless Giffin got a piece of the ball, topping it to the pitcher's mound.
"Home!" Robin yelled, crouching over the plate. The best and safest play was to first and Harkaday, who had been quick to pounce on the ball, knew it. But he was used to obeying Robin, so he hitched around and threw awkwardly as Shanley came barreling down the chalk from third.
The throw was wide but Robin knew it was going to be. He took two quick steps, grabbed the ball with his bare hand and flung himself back toward the plate, kneeling and covering it with his body. Shanley hit him and they went rolling over and over in the dirt. Robin held the ball, jumping up as the umpire called Shanley out. Shanley stayed down, openmouthed, clutching his stomach. Robin glanced nonchalantly at him as he walked away. The knee in Shanley's solar plexus had been purely accidental, of course—but he was pleased with the results.
As the team was getting together for the after-game prayer Coach gave Robin a long look, but Robin ignored it. He was the team leader and it was up to him to make crucial decisions on the field. If either the curve ball or Harkaday's hasty throw to the plate had gone astray Robin would have accepted all the blame, and shrugged it off. Johnny Bench never made excuses, either. When Johnny blew one, which wasn't often—maybe a couple of times a season—he looked you right in the eye and owned up to his mistake. He didn't remind you of all those games he'd won practically singlehanded with his bat, of the shrewdly called games that made his pitchers look like geniuses. And that was Robin's style too.
He shrugged off congratulations, praised his teammates for every good play he could remember, slapped a few palms and rumps and walked home alone, carrying the tools of the catcher's trade, limping just a little from bruises, weary but satisfied.
Robin was ten years old, and from the age of three he had lived with his aunt and a man he called sir but refused to call uncle in a pleasantly shaded frame house that leaned decidedly to one side, like the Tower of Pisa, but somehow never fell into the pond next door, despite much groaning and popping of rafters in a windstorm. The house hadn't been painted since shortly after World War II and very likely never would be painted again; it was the property of the World-Wide Church of the Thirteenth Apostle, a missionary church that legislated against almost everything in life that could be dispensed with, as long as it didn't cause physical hardship. Robin had found it necessary to run away three or four times before he was reluctantly granted permission by the Apostolate Council to play ball with the Baptists. Also his father had threatened to remove him from the Tidrow household and place him in military school, a certain loss of one soul to the devil.
Robin's Aunt Fay was in the kitchen frying chicken when he walked in.
Fried chicken, corn on the cob with crock butter, pickled squash and first-crop tomatoes, biscuits as big as a man's fist—at least the Thirteenth Apostolates believed in eating well, to keep up their strength for prayer meetings, knocking on doors and bracing natives in the bush, and Aunt Fay was the best cook in the Lambeth Sanctuary.
In general their strict religion was kinder to the women, who labored like pioneers but saw the beauty of life reflected in their children; the men, who as wage-earners were more exposed to the wickedness and deceit of the world, often were guarded and humorless, even around each other.
"Did you win?" Fay asked him.
"Uh-huh." He glanced at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which was set for dinner. That was his job, but the game had started late. "I'm sorry it took so long."
"That's all right, Robin. Ellis called from Washington, he won't be home before eight. So you have a half hour to get cleaned up and read Scripture."
"Yes, ma'am." Robin looked at the right-hand top of the refrigerator where the mail would be, if there was any, specifically one of the tissue-weight light blue airmail envelopes from overseas. It had been nearly two months this time.
"No, nothing today," Fay Tidrow said with a sympathetic smile.
"That could mean he's coming home," Robin said, feeling suddenly jittery with anticipation; this time it was more than just a hunch, or wishful thinking. He had become expert at divining the meaning of non-communication on the part of his father.
Sometimes The Commander was so busy he couldn't write, or if he had time to write then he was in a part of the world where it took weeks just to get a letter out. Robin's father had been a naval officer; now he worked as a hydrologist for a government agency, which sent him to places Robin had trouble locating even on the detailed maps of his Rand McNally International Atlas. Water was life, and apparently there was plenty of fresh water to be had in the world. A seven-thousand-year supply less than a mile below the surface of the United States; a prehistoric lake the size
of England and Wales combined trapped underneath the Sahara Desert.
Putting all this water to use was his father's job, and it was important and interesting work. Unfortunately he was able to spend only four or five weeks a year at home. Robin and his father had learned how to make the time count, so that looking forward to The Commander's return relieved the austere months of church meetings and Bible study and no movies or television.
And his father always needed the closeness and the fun as badly as Robin did; sometimes when he returned he was gaunt from poor food or illness.
Last year Robin had suffered through the longest stretch yet, five months without a word. When at last The Commander arrived Robin was shocked to see him. He was only thirty-seven, but his hair was turning silver. There'd been an accident on the job, followed by weeks in a primitive hospital. He bore, across one set of ribs and down to the small of his back, a rippled bad scar, as if from a stuttering blade.
So they didn't do anything really strenuous during the Caribbean vacation that followed. In Tortola they chartered a forty-one-foot sloop. The weather held blue and perfect. They explored St. John's, Virgin Gorda and the Horse Shoe Reefs. Two divers, tank-saddled, awkward as horseless knights before the plunge, performing steeply in the moody blues beneath the maelstrom in the airless eye of heaven. Briny cogitations of brain-coral. Regiments of little checkered flicker-fish. Wrack-ribbed schooner and crusted iron. Dropsical octopus like a leathery leaf blowing across the bottom sand. The Commander made superb conch chowder and cheeseburgers. Robin was active, courteous, good-humored and eager to please. He worked hard to make fatherhood effortless. Even so it was more than a week before all of his father's strength and his low-key sense of humor returned; gradually the night sweats and tormenting dreams ceased. . . .
"Robin," Fay said gently for the third time, finally getting through. Robin gave his head a shake and looked up at her.
"Don't you want to get started on your bath?"
"I was just thinking about—"
"I know. Wouldn't it be wonderful if he decided to stop traveling, take a less demanding job. But we all have our mission in life, Robin. Think of the lives that have been saved. Hunger. Famine. Pestilence. Drought. Those are your father's enemies. We can be proud."
Robin dawdled in the bathroom, soaping and scrubbing only when he heard the door of Ellis Tidrow's junker car slam, and he was late getting to the table; a couple of beads of water slid along the angle of his jaw as he unfolded his napkin and bowed his head. Ellis Tidrow looked at him with glum forbearance, recited Scripture at length and added his own prayers.
Tidrow was a long shy nervous man who talked with downcast eyes, often rubbing his high forehead in distraction if the conversation went on too long. He regarded even the ordinary occurrences of daily life as a series of curses. "We're cursed with a rainy day," he would remark upon arising and looking out. Or, "We're cursed with that dog again," when the neighbors' Collie came around to see what Robin was up to. He handled finances for Thirteenth Apostolate missions, working out of the church's international headquarters, which were located on the edge of a Washington slum. But he yearned to be in the field, preaching to the heathen.
Dinner wasn't over when Fran Marshall appeared at the back screen, fluttering there like a giant moth. Fay invited her in.
Fran was tense and pale; her eyes went to Robin and stayed on him.
"I hate to bother y'all like this, but we're havin' just a awful time with Brian, and maybe if Robin could talk to him like he did those other times—"
"We have Vigil tonight," Ellis Tidrow said firmly.
"It isn't strictly necessary for the children to attend," Fay reminded him. "And if Robin can be of any help to that poor little child—"
"Sure," Robin said eagerly.
"Prayer is the only answer for a child like that," Tidrow explained, reasonably he thought, while Fran stood on one foot and then the other, embarrassed.
She was a tall Blue Ridge Mountain girl with blonde hair so lank it looked runny. Just eighteen, already she had two children, the oldest of whom was the autistic Brian, and she was at least five months pregnant again, showing up big in the homely summer dress she wore. She might at least have taken the trouble to put on some underwear before rushing into his house, Tidrow thought.
He looked at Robin, again trying to evaluate the mysterious quality that attracted people to him. Jehovah had denied Ellis Tidrow children of his own, then further frustrated him by placing in his care a boy who was reckless, troublesome and headstrong. Tidrow had good reason to believe that, if Robin was not totally godless yet, he was a budding heretic. Perhaps it was a blessing that Robin seemed to have some influence over Brian Marshall, but Tidrow was prey to doubts. He was terrified of any kind of mental illness. There were Dark Legions at work in the afflicted; our state hospitals were piled high with the victims of Satan's whims. You who would heal, read your Bible and know the truth! If Robin so easily communicated with the otherwise unreachable Brian, it could be devil's work. And Robin did have red hair, a most mournful sign.
Tidrow sometimes dreamed uneasy dreams about his red-haired charge; once he had awakened with a taut erection and an outpouring, even though he'd never been able to sustain an erection long enough to impregnate his wife. Devil's guile . . . and devil's laughter in the bare orderly rooms of his mind. Prayer was his salvation. Intense, scouring prayer.
He yielded to the silent pleading of the women and gave a quick nod in Robin's direction. Robin, grateful to escape the grinding repetition of Wednesday night Vigil, hopped up and was out the door just behind Franny.
For a woman with her center of gravity distended, Fran was light-footed; Robin caught up to her only after they crossed the road. They walked the rest of the way side by side, Fran breathing hard and trying not to get off on a crying binge.
Robin didn't know what to say, so he took her hand. She held him very tightly.
The Marshalls owned six acres of woodlot and boggy meadow. They lived on a grassless plot under shade trees, the crowns of which looked high as clouds in the night sky. The house, from the outside, was a twin of the house in which the Tidrows lived, but without the Italianate lean. Inside there were treasures. Both Fran and her husband Whit were descendants of mountain people who had sold their heritage for fifty cents an acre to coal and timber interests, but they had passed on a love of craft to their offspring.
Robin heard Brian long before they got to the house; tonight it was the peculiar chanting cry which usually accompanied his "rounds." He would walk a very nearly perfect circle, exactly six and a half feet in diameter (Whit had measured), speeding up the walk at intervals with a kind of jog-step-skip. He was capable of maintaining the ritual for hours, until he fell over gray and soggy from exhaustion, as exhausted as his bewildered parents.
He was on the long back porch which Whit had shored up and glassed in to take advantage of sunny winter days. Whit and Fran kept their workbenches on the porch, along with an assortment of broken-down antiques, odds and ends of junk and barrels of discarded clothing, all of which they turned into dazzling artifacts. Whit made tables and chairs and hourglass dulcimers and open-back banjos. Fran made sweaters from Collie dog hair spun on her ancient flax wheel, Star-of-Bethlehem quilts that brought three hundred dollars apiece in the cities, and such traditional mountain items as artificial flowers from wood shavings and maple-split baskets colored with dyes boiled from walnut or pulcoon root.
Robin was always happy to hang around the porch, and he'd learned to make a few things himself, such as gourd birdhouses and corncob pigs; Whit had promised to show him how to construct a whimmydiddle. But that was a complicated toy, and what with teaching at a college across the border in Maryland and trying to find medical help for Brian, Whit had very little free time any more.
The baby, Bernice, was crying in her cradle in another room. Fran looked despairingly at Brian and went to pick up Bernice. Whit tugged at his vast beard and rocked and stared at
Robin with drowned blue eyes. Whit was having a few beers to help him manage his distress.
"Brian was making good progress," Whit muttered. "He really was."
Robin didn't say anything. He sat cross-legged on the floor near Brian. Obviously Brian had done it in his pants again. For a while there he hadn't been doing it in his pants, and responding to simple verbal commands. Now he was back to a familiar pattern and crying out helplessly.
Robin felt sad because Brian was sane and bright and beautiful, and because he knew what Brian himself knew, that Brian was doomed. And that was the reason for the frantic making of rounds, the slamming of the same door over and over again, or the repetitious clenching and unclenching of hands while he sat with his back to a wall, ignoring all attempts to distract him. These were Brian's methods of trying to solve the enormous riddle of the inside self and the outside self, his attempts to push the right buttons as Whit pushed buttons on his typewriter and produced something coherent from the mental and physical collaboration. But Brian would never never be able to do it.
During his Visits Robin could perform simple tasks for him. When Robin took control Brian dressed and undressed skillfully, bathed or fed himself. But after the Visit ended and Robin withdrew, Brian was as perplexed as ever. He could imitate the Robin-self for a while, but always something went wrong: as the cells of the body eventually lose their ability to duplicate themselves perfectly, Brian's brain soon produced only the most bizarre examples of rote. He could not easily feed himself, or remember to take down his pants at toilet time, but he could go around and around in monotonously exact circles.