by Mark Richard
Here is something you can play with, the grandmother tells the special child. She sets an old Royal typewriter on the dining room table. Write me a letter, write me a story. The child tries to type the story of Misty of Chincoteague in several sentences. It takes most of the afternoon.
When it is time to go back to Virginia, they spend one last night at the mother’s old house, and she cries and begs to stay. Here, take some food I am making for you for the trip, the mother’s mother says, ignoring her crying. The mother’s mother cooks spicy food and fries up some bread, and this makes the father angry because he hates when his clothes smell like fried bread. The child is afraid he will have to return to Virginia with his father by himself.
They have a big going-away barbeque for the mother, and her brothers tie her up in the backyard and wash her hair for her with the hose until she says uncle. Everybody laughs except the father, who watches from the garage where the stock car and tools are, sipping beer. When the child tries to save his mother, one of his uncles sets him on top of the garage roof and later makes him ride a pony.
Sometimes on the drive back to Virginia, because the company grey sedan with the two-way radio looks like an unmarked police car, the father drives up behind people he thinks are driving too fast and flashes his lights and makes them pull over, then he speeds off. He stops doing this when in Georgia he accidentally pulls over an unmarked police car and the state trooper is very angry at the father. Later on in North Carolina, the father seethes and speeds faster.
It has been so hot while they have been away in Louisiana that the candles the mother had stuck in the Chianti bottles are drooped over on the mantel.
There is a lot of mail. There is a letter from the invention company where the father has sent them an invention. It is for a device that hooks onto a kite string that sends paper airplanes up to the kite and then releases the airplanes so they can float to the ground. The father had gotten the idea watching the special child trying to slingshot his Japanese parachutists as high as he can in the backyard. The father tried to explain the idea to his brothers-in-law in Louisiana, and they were polite about it, but you could tell they didn’t understand why anyone would want an invention like that. Right on the spot, the brothers-in-law took some pipes and welded together a cannon that shot old golf balls about a hundred yards. You can take it back to Virginia with you, they told the child when they were leaving, giving him the cannon, and they said good luck to the father about his invention, even if they didn’t understand it. When the family got home from Louisiana, the invention company didn’t understand the invention and they didn’t want it, either.
In the mail are test results. One test result says the mother is most likely pregnant again. The other test result says the special child is eligible for a special school if the father can afford it.
The father goes down to check on his underwater property. While he and his family have been away in Louisiana, the idiots at the dam finally adjusted the water levels on the lake just right. The shoreline is exactly where he and the German had predicted it would be. In the lowering fluctuations of the lake all the German’s beautiful sand has washed along the father’s shoreline and blanketed his property with long, broad beaches. Where the German’s beautiful beaches had been are ugly slick stretches of slippery red clay corrupted through and through by the black roots of drowned trees. Zat iss in der past, you must let it go, the father tells the angry German. The German and his family move away.
In the fall the special child starts second grade. His second-grade teacher is Miss Caroon. Miss Caroon has seen his test results, so she lets him spend as much time as he wants reading The Boxcar Children and Mark Twain in the cloakroom while the other children struggle with Dick and Jane and Baby Sally and Spot. Miss Caroon lets him wear his father’s Army helmet in the classroom if he wants to, and she lets him try to pass off the wad of Confederate money he always carries. At Thanksgiving, when he draws the Pilgrims coming to the New World in a Chinese junk greeted by Indians selling Live Bait and Cold Beer, she hangs his picture on the wall with all the rest without extraordinary comment.
Miss Caroon gives the children in her class a list of words from which to make a story. In the stories the class turns in, dogs get up on the furniture when they aren’t supposed to or someone finds a coin. From the special child she receives “The Ancient Castle,” in which a Good King goes away to conquer an enemy and while he is gone an Evil King comes and lays siege to the Good King’s castle. The Evil King’s men scale the walls, and some of the Good King’s favorite men are shot full of arrows and beheaded. Just when all seems to be lost, everyone looks up and sees a brilliant flash of light on a distant hill. It is the sun shining off the Good King’s shield. The Good King and his men come and slaughter the Evil King and all the Evil King’s men. The people in the Good King’s castle are so happy, they have a huge banquet and feast on roast duck and turkey. After they have eaten all they can eat, they begin singing the Good King’s favorite songs. Miss Caroon reads the child’s story out loud to the class. She especially likes the last sentence in the story and takes her time sounding it out—And the singing went on for days.
Miss Caroon hands back the stories, and the child receives an A-minus because he misspells “Ancient” in the title. This is a very good story, she tells the child. When his mother comes to visit on Parents’ Day, Miss Caroon tells her that her son is a special child, that he could be a writer someday if he wanted to be one. The mother shakes her head sadly and tells Miss Caroon the truth. She has to tell Miss Caroon that all the child wants to be when he grows up is the man who walks around the monkey house all day with a nail on the end of a stick.
SAY YOU ARE THE SPECIAL CHILD. Say one reason you are special is because there is something wrong with your legs. You cannot run. Your legs will not move fast enough. When you try to run, your hips click and pop. When you have to run a race, like at the going-away party at a doctor’s house in the old town, when everyone was running toward the doctor’s house that would burn completely to the ground the next year, you pretend to trip and fall and not finish the race. You avoid footraces; you avoid running at all. When something bad happens and everyone else runs away, rocks thrown through greenhouse glass, loose spikes thrown at passing caboose windows, fishing boats untethered along a riverbank, you know you will have to face whoever is coming at you in their anger. You learn you must never get caught.
In the new town the teachers don’t say you are special as the teachers did in the old town. They use the word “slow.” And you are slow. But they also say you are slow when you are sitting at your desk unable to color the state bird. You can’t get the red crayon to work on the cardinal in a way that makes the teacher happy. Your father has said to be careful about signing your name to anything, so you don’t put your name on your homework. A suspicious teacher has said that if your parents are really from Louisiana, you must be able to speak French. Oui, you say. You try to speak with a French accent, you still try to spend your Confederate money, you still wear your father’s Army helmet to school. No one can understand what you are saying, and big boys from out in the county want to fight you in line to the cafeteria. They come up behind you and flip off your helmet and you have to fight them almost every day. The fighting finally stops when you break a boy’s hand. When your mother finds out, she cries because she is afraid the boy is the son of a new friend of hers. You get the feeling it was selfish of you to break the boy’s hand.
A good afternoon in the new town is when the school is struck twice by lightning. Everyone else starts crying when the lightning strikes the swing set first. You stand at the window. It’s raining and thundering and the lightning strikes the roof, but the sun is also shining, and you heard from your father’s mother that when it rains and the sun is shining, it means the Devil is beating his wife. As the big boys from the county and all the little girls cry for their mommies and the teacher is shouting for everyone to get into the cloakroom, you clap and lau
gh and shout, The Devil is beating his wife! The Devil is beating his wife! The children and teacher are afraid of your loud laughter, you can tell by their looks as they crowd into the cloakroom as you stand by the open window getting soaked by the windblown rain, the special child.
One morning you do not have to go to school. Your father does not put on his forest clothes—khaki shirt, denim jeans, snake pistol, long-sheath knife, the boots with wire laces that won’t burn in case he gets caught in a forest fire and has to make a run for it. He puts on a coat and a tie, and you get in the car with him. He drives you to Richmond, through swamps, low woodlands, fields turned over for peanuts and corn. Neither of you speaks, there’s just the tires on the corduroy road and his flying-tiger class ring clicking the window when he lifts his cigarette ash to the rolled-down crack at the top. You always keep an eye out for the tiger, you never know when it may fly across your face.
Your father turns the grey sedan in to a long driveway between green lawns to a place that looks like a museum. Your father signs you in, and you take an elevator upstairs. The place smells like linoleum wax and medicine and shitty diapers.
You and your father sit on folding chairs in a long dark hallway with other fathers and mothers and what an odd boy who lives in the place later calls sin spawn: children with withered legs, legs of different lengths, bent-up legs, legs in steel and leather braces, hobbling kids crying and carrying the smell of places where people live who tote water in buckets from a well and go to the bathroom in sheds out back. A lot of the people waiting have long greasy hair that needs cutting. You can tell some are missing teeth when they talk and smoke and spit in the metal trash can by the exam room door.
A woman in a white uniform comes out with a clipboard and hands it to your father. You can read the top of the paper, and you understand why you are special when you read crippled CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL.
The doctor has seen your X-rays. He twists your legs and makes your hips crack and pop on the white-papered table. The doctor doesn’t answer your father’s questions. The doctor says he will try nails in your hips. Your father wants to know if the doctor will put the nails in your hips himself. The doctor doesn’t answer your father. He says nails are the best remedy. Your father asks if there is any other remedy, and he says it in a way that makes him sound like a smart-ass. The doctor stares at your father and says loudly, With or without the nails, your son will probably be in a wheelchair by the time he’s thirty anyway.
To cheer you up, your father takes you to the Hollywood Cemetery, where some of your heroes are buried, President Jefferson Davis, Major Generals J. E. B. Stuart and George Pickett. You and your friends have spent many afternoons playing Pickett’s Charge in the park across from the Episcopal church, running into withering cannon and musket fire, and because of your legs you are always the first casualty as the minié balls rip into your arms and throat, falling dying in the grass, sometimes crawling beneath the azalea bushes where Robert E. Lee sits astride his iron-grey horse Traveller, him saying down to you sadly, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it was all my fault.
After you visit the grave of the doctor who amputated Stonewall Jackson’s arm and tended to Lee’s heart attack on the eve of Gettysburg, you go see the big black iron dog that guards a little girl’s grave. By the time you get to the grave of Jefferson Davis’s five-year-old son, Joe Davis, you are ready to go home.
AT THE HOSPITAL THEY strip you naked and scrub you with tar-smelling delousing soap in a deep sink in an old tiled room full of drains even though you had a bath that morning before leaving home with your family. A nurse takes the green cardboard suitcase your mother had packed for you that morning and says she’ll deliver it to your father in the reception office. It’s the green cardboard suitcase you used to carry your cat in. Here are your new clothes, nice and clean, with somebody else’s name in the worn waistband of the donated shorts and in the collars of the two old summer camp shirts. One of the shirts is a good one, yellow, red, and white madras, and in the coming months you will trade for it back when it goes through the laundry and is given to someone else.
Here is the T-shirt to sleep in, here is a fresh sheet for your bed, once a week put the top sheet on the bottom, the fresh sheet on top, and here is your bed on the sunporch. The boys’ ward is crowded in summer. Your bed looks out over the rigging and masts, the bars and chains of the playground swing sets. That night it will all look like shipwrecks in the grey streetlight when you turn away from the crying around you and stare out through the metal safety rails of your bed.
Your mother sat in your father’s car in the parking lot earlier that afternoon nursing your baby sister because your mother’s luck has changed. She’s had a baby and she’s going to hell. She and another lady went into the little Catholic church to put fresh flowers on the altar one Saturday afternoon, and the priest came out of the sacristy with a rope belt and Scotch on his breath. Women in culottes defiling the altar. Whores! The priest swung the rope belt, and in her weekly call to her own mother later in Louisiana, your mother says she has left the Church for good.
Then you are going to hell, her mother tells her. Goodbye. On the extension, you hear someone take a breath quickly after your grandmother says this, and don’t know if it’s your mother or the long-distance operator who sometimes listens in and lives down your street in a sorrow-filled house with her three children who used to be four children until one drowned in the frozen pond behind the cemetery like a lot of people seem to do, including Mrs. Richardson one street over.
From your sunporch bed that afternoon you saw your father return to the car with your green suitcase and tell your mother something, and it seemed she didn’t understand, but later you could tell she was crying as she nursed your little sister.
Your father walks over to the empty playground where no one is allowed because it is not playtime and he sits in one of the swings and you watch him chain-smoke for a while until he sees your mother burping your sister and he looks at his watch. A nervous boy comes up to you and says some kid died that morning. You figure out you got the dead kid’s bed. When you look out next, your father is gone, there’s an empty swing swinging in the swing set. In the morning you go out on the playground with all the other crippled children and you find the swing where your father sat, the smoked tobacco and cigarette butts ground into the ashy dust.
IN THE NEXT DAYS they draw your blood and take your temperature. They X-ray you some more and forget you in a hallway until suppertime. They make you walk naked in front of an auditorium of young student doctors and nurses from a college. Walk. Run. Stop. Stand on one leg. Hop. Run some more. Also in the audience are boys your age and girls your age. They see how you can’t run naked, how you can’t hop naked, how you can barely walk naked. They laugh at first until they realize in a few minutes a nurse will remove their gowns and make them jump, run, walk, and hobble naked, too.
One day after lunch, instead of a nap, a nurse takes you and her purse out in front of the hospital to wait for a taxicab. The taxicab takes the two of you to a laboratory downtown. By the way the nurse pets your head, you know this is going to be bad. They give you a shot that makes you drowsy and begin to dream, but you don’t fall all the way asleep. While you are drowsy and beginning to dream, they lay you on your side and push long needles into your spine. Somebody in your dream is screaming.
It’s you.
Later in the taxicab back to the hospital the nurse holds you in her arms like a backseat pietà, the sunlight burns your eyes, and the telephone wires hang and loop, hang and loop. In the hospital auditorium you had noticed these words painted in large letters over the stage: SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME.
Who said that? you ask the nurse who took you to the laboratory, the nurse who sometimes sneaks Coke in your metal spout cup when everybody else gets tap water. Nurse Wilfong.
Jesus. Jesus Christ, she says.
What kind of jerk would want little children to suffer? you wonder.
&
nbsp; Nurse Wilfong says you’re constipated. They keep track of everyone’s bowel movements in a ledger. You didn’t know you had to report a bowel movement while you were still walking around, if they hadn’t sent you upstairs yet to let the young student doctors practice taking you apart and nailing you back together.
Nurse Wilfong wants you to drink chalky stool softener while you want to talk about what a jerk Jesus must be if that’s what He said about children and suffering. It’s creepy, like the older boys going around saying a kid down in North Carolina went into a department store bathroom and some man cut his penis off with a pocketknife. The older boys say it was in the newspaper.
The hospital is crowded with children from Appalachia with knees that have to be cut up and legs that have to be sawed off. They’re a pretty happy bunch. They love the food so much you give them yours, you don’t eat it anyway. The first night you went into the lunch-table room there was a black kid sneezing snot into his plate of food right before the blessing. The woman who ran the lunch table made everyone slide down one plate so you could squeeze in, and you got the plate with the droplets of snot on the rim, the rest of the snot having disappeared into the stewed tomatoes and cabbage and boiled meat. The Appalachian kids start eating off your plate as soon as it’s set down in front of you. One of the Appalachian kids had been sent home with a long cast on his leg, and when he comes back and they cut off the cast, they find bugs have nested in there.
The black kid who blew snot all over your food is on a respirator now. You lie awake and watch the stoplight change out on Brook Road and wonder if there was enough of something in that one spoonful of stewed tomatoes you choked down so that you’ll start coughing up bloody snot yourself. The ward overflows with deformity and crying kids at night. It’s been two weeks, maybe they’ve forgotten about you again.