“Oh.” Mary Margaret’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Mr. Darby has an aphasia, a loss of speech. Evidently he’s had it from birth. I am certain he cannot be cured, and I don’t believe he can be helped here. We can’t take people we can’t help. There’s too many we can.”
“Then he is coming home,” Mary Margaret said.
“I feel pretty sure,” the doctor said.
“Say, don’t any of these folks you let just walk around free ever just keep going?” Wilroy said. They had rounded the corner, and he saw the snack shop ahead.
“Occasionally. But we find them and bring them back. We have more trouble with families taking them off. They get to feeling guilty or decide the person is well, come to take them for a drive and keep on going. Or if the patient goes home for a visit, the family doesn’t bother to bring him back. All we can do is notify the court nearest them, and if they can’t get the person sent back, then that’s the end of it.” He poked his head inside the shop. “Alice, take care of these folks.”
A pleasant-looking woman behind the counter said, “I sure will, Doc.”
“Alice is a patient,” the doctor whispered to Mary Margaret. “She’s been helping out in here for twenty years.” He shook hands again and went off down the hall.
Mary Margaret sat at the counter as close as she could to Wilroy. She wished she could get over the feeling that at any moment a patient might draw out a knife and stick her in the back. She passed up a dieter’s vegetable plate and joined Wilroy in a hamburger and chocolate milk shake. Just as they finished, a man in a white uniform entered and said to the young man who had been sitting beside her the whole time, drinking a Coke, “Are you finished? Was it good?”
The young man got up and smiled, somewhat sadly Mary Margaret thought, before he left. Her heart went out to him, but her blood ran cold.
When they went to Jake’s ward, she asked the young man at the desk, “Will our friend have to have a warden with him while he’s talking to us?”
“Warden!” The young man almost jumped from his chair. “We’re not wardens. We’re called attendants, or preferably psychiatric aides.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mary Margaret said, and the young man said, “Oh, it’s all right. You’re not the first,” but Mary Margaret felt his eyes on her as she and Wilroy pushed through swinging doors into the television room, as he had directed. They stood close together and looked about. There were men looking at the set, or playing cards at a table in one corner, or just sitting. Over by the window, in the sunshine, Jake sat on a narrow chair, his knees pulled up close, looking at the floor.
They approached him slowly, not wanting to scare him, preparing themselves. They stood right in front of him before he looked up. “Jake, honey,” Mary Margaret said, softly. “It’s us.”
Tears slowly filled his eyes. One hand started toward them involuntarily and then clutched his knee instead. Mary Margaret reached down for it, groping because her own eyes were blinded by tears. Even Wilroy had to blow his nose. “Let’s take him out in the hall, like the doctor said,” he said. He bent over and took Jake’s elbow, and Jake got up. Mary Margaret took his other elbow, and between them they propelled him forward; he went like a sleepwalker, his arms half out before him. From his desk by the door the attendant watched and smiled encouragingly.
In the hallway they found an unoccupied nook, bright with sunshine, and sat down. Mary Margaret clutched her pocketbook until her knuckles whitened and said, “Wilroy, I declare, he looks older.”
“Now, I don’t know,” Wilroy said, gently. “He looks a little fatter.”
“Pshaw!” Mary Margaret said. “It’s in his eyes. That’s where you can tell.” Her voice broke.
“Now, I don’t know,” Wilroy said, but he did not look at Jake’s face.
“Well, I know,” Mary Margaret said. “And when your heart’s broke, it don’t ever heal. That hangdog look’s not ever going to go away. Remember Mattie Perkins when her little girl got run over? She had the same look, and it never went away although she had four more kids afterward. Jake’s look isn’t ever going to go away either. You mark my words.”
Wilroy stood up and said, “I tell you what. I’m going to go get us some ice-cream cones in that snack shop and bring ’em back here.”
Ice cream. He had loved it so much and knew the word. Mary Margaret looked at him, but he showed no response. Her mouth tightened; her belief strengthened. Something that had been alive in Jake, that made him go, had gone out of him. She knew it. He seemed almost a stranger to her. It was as if he knew too much now, things he never was supposed to know. Strange places and strange ways. She looked out onto the patio at the strange world there of patients and attendants, and she felt herself a long way from home. At last she knew the answer to the question she and Wilroy had asked themselves over and over, and she moved her lips and said to herself without sound, He never should have been taken from home. She wondered what he was going to do when he went back. They were all going to have to make the best of things. When Wilroy returned she brightened and was gay and passed around the icecream cones and said they were having a party. But before the end of it, she knew even Wilroy saw the difference in Jake.
“Well, it’s bus time,” she said, eventually. “You better take him and wash him up. He’s covered with ice cream.”
Jake sensed they were leaving, and she saw his face change. When they got up, he did too. She held him to her a moment and said, “Oh, if only he could tell us. If only he could tell his Mary Margaret. Mary Margaret loves you, honey. She’s thinking of you and praying for you.”
She released him and stepped back. She felt tears coming and knew this time she would not be able to check them. She hurried away and turned back once and cried out so terribly that several people passing in the hall turned and looked at her, “Oh, tell him! Tell him he’s coming home, Wilroy!”
Wilroy gripped his arm, not knowing what to do. The attendant, who had been watching from behind the window, came out and said, “I’ll take care of him if you want to go on.”
Wilroy said, in a tentative way, “I was going to wash his hands.” He nodded at them.
The attendant caught Jake’s hands in his and said, “Did you have ice cream? Nice, huh?” He led him away. Jake looked over his shoulder, not understanding.
“You’re coming home, boy!” Wilroy shouted.
He stood in the hall, embarrassed, because people came even out of doors to look at him. But more, he was frightened because he had failed. He wanted to run after Jake, grip him by the shoulders and tell him over and over and over again, if need be, that he was coming home. He had to understand. He, Wilroy, had to absolve himself, partly, of his share of the blame for what had happened to Jake. Surely he and Mary Margaret had not tried hard enough. Surely there was something they could have done.
He thought he would cry too. He turned away, himself feeling like the broken, almost old man that Jake had been as he was led away. It had been in his face, as Mary Margaret said, and in his walk and in the droop of his shoulders. He thought for a moment of the way Jake had been before: free, in his own way, proud. Wilroy’s shoulders drooped even further, his walk was even more shuffling, and he went off down the hall looking for Mary Margaret.
Chapter Eleven
Jake’s month was up early in November, and before sunup on a Sunday morning, Wilroy and Mary Margaret drove back to get him. They expected to return again just after dark. They chose Sunday because all their lives on Sunday nights town had been as deserted as some old Western ghost town. People only passed through on their way to evening service, wherever it was to be held. The two churches, Methodist and Baptist, alternated holding service on Sunday nights; not enough people attended to make it worth while heating two churches or having two sermons written. Then, when church was over about eight o’clock, they passed back through, leaving their dust to fall silently on the deserted road.
But the day played a trick on Wilroy and M
ary Margaret. It was a cold, fine, brilliant day, and the sun seemed to have frozen in the sky. It remained a round, hard, blinding object just at eye level long past the time it should have sunk. Then it seemed only to diminish slowly until it was the size of a pin prick, and you could squint and your eye could contain the sun itself. When all its roundness was gone, and there was only a yellow mellowness in the sky where it had been, it sent back, as an afterthought, a sundown that was mauve and rose. Shading their eyes, people looked at it and speculated that tomorrow it was going to snow.
When Wilroy and Mary Margaret drove into town, with Jake in the back seat, the glow fell on them. Mary Margaret had lowered the sunshade as they drove into the sun. Now she lifted it, and a sound escaped her involuntarily.
“Wilroy, did they come just to stare?” she said. Way in the back of her mind an old fear stirred. She had always wanted to believe that most folks were good Christian people with all good intentions, and now here were the store porches as crowded as midweek to belie it.
“They ought to be horsewhipped,” he said. Glancing about, he saw some of his own friends, and a part of him shut off from them, forever.
Mary Margaret was nervous and did not know whether to turn and look at Jake or not. When she did, he was only sitting straight, staring straight ahead as he had been doing the whole trip. But there was a glisten to his lips that would have been saliva if he had opened his mouth.
His hair had been freshly cut (there was something infinitely touching to Mary Margaret about the closely clipped sides, so neat to his head, the hairs closest to his cheeks stiff and short and lighter, almost like new hair; like a child tidied for his first appearance somewhere, school or Sunday school, he would not look the remainder of the year as altogether presentable as he did now); he was freshly shaved and bathed, and he wore overalls so stiff in their brand-newness that the bib stood away from his shirt as if it were stuffed with something. She looked at his hands and thought how wrong it was that they should be so pale; the good color he kept all year had faded, and his hands had the unfortunate appearance of having accepted the last month’s idleness. They lay cupped, palms up, at the creases where his thighs were attached to his body. His eyes met hers a moment, and she would have sworn that he almost smiled before he looked again at the road, his eyes having taken in once, flickered and turned away from, the people on the store porches. She was positive that he knew where he was, just as she had been positive from his behavior when they first put him into the car that he knew where he was going. She and Wilroy had wanted to reintroduce him to home quietly, without any kind of fuss. They would stay with him the first night, and Jurldeane would come every day for the first week.
No one had objected when they heard Jake was coming home. Time had passed; they had gotten everything off their chests once; everyone felt better: the underdog knew where he stood. They had been assured, through reports of medical reports, that Jake was not dangerous; he was not a criminal and not really insane, else they would have kept him at the state hospital, wouldn’t they? Think of it more that he’s sick and can’t be cured. Oh, sick. Sick, they could grasp. They would probably keep a closer eye on the children than before. Perhaps they would feel in their hearts a little less kindly. But if the boy were only sick … Why, he was one of their own, after all! Come to think of it, Jake’s people had been in these parts near ’bout as long as anybody’s. Many people could remember his grandfather, and some his great-grandfather. Remember the old Darby place? It hadn’t been quite so down-in-the-mouth as what they had come to. Too bad his daddy had died so early, too bad Jud had gone off like that. Now Jake, he never had gone to do any harm.
But they wanted to see him. And some, without knowing it, had arrived expecting to see more than they saw: Wilroy and Mary Margaret driving through town with Jake sitting upright in the back seat. They had come with the same feeling of expectancy with which they drove to Memphis twice a year, in May to the Cotton Carnival parade and again in December to the Christmas parade.
“Is that him!” a little girl cried, and it could have been Santa Claus in the final float of the latter parade, only her mother said, “Hush.”
“Evenin’,” several people said, with sheepish grins, when Wilroy drew alongside them to turn off the main road.
The car windows were closed, and Mary Margaret turned a deaf ear and kept her grim face straight ahead. She peeped sideways at Wilroy and saw his mouth corners turned down; his nose had the blanched, tweaked look it always had when he was angry.
Now the road plunged downward so steeply as to make Mary Margaret gasp; then they were out of sight of town, and only the dark tops of trees with a swath between told the townspeople where the car had gone.
They all turned and looked at one another after the car disappeared. Not knowing exactly what they had expected, they did not know whether they had seen it or not. They did not know whether they were disappointed or not.
“Well, what’d you think?”
“How’d you think he looked?”
They turned to one another, questioning. Some said they hadn’t seen him well enough; others said he looked exactly the same, and those right next to them said, No, he looked different; he was older-looking, or something. Then there seemed no more to say, and they began to disperse. All they could have agreed on, if anyone had mentioned it, was the silence that had prevailed as he was driven through town. In it they had heard only the church bell, which had been tolling for some time in vain. Now, hearing it again, those who had parked their cars along the road to wait started up their motors and drove off to worship, quite late.
When Wilroy stopped the car before Jake’s house, he and Mary Margaret did not have to tell him to get out. He was already trying the door handle when Mary Margaret turned and reached over the back seat and opened the door for him. She would have followed, but Wilroy put out a restraining hand. “Let him go by hisself,” he said. She patted Wilroy’s arm, thinking she should have thought of that.
He went at an unaccustomed fast pace and stopped only once to watch a blackbird fly overhead. Caw caw it cried while he watched, and he almost put out his hand, but then he did not. He hunched his shoulders and lowered them and went on. His house had never been locked; there was no key. Opening the door, he went inside and closed the door behind him. Mary Margaret and Wilroy sat on until full dark came and a candle was lit indoors. Then they went inside, too.
He was sitting at the table, the candle before him, eating. He was in the act of spreading butter on his bread; his mouth was full and chewing; it ceased, his hands, holding the knife and bread before him, stilled, and his eyes opened in total surprise.
Mary Margaret and Wilroy stood with their rolled-up nightclothes, their toothbrushes inside, feeling as foolish as if they had walked into any stranger’s suppertime without knocking. At Mary Margaret’s side her handbag hung heavy, full of little glass jars wrapped in tissue paper to protect them and also because they were irrevocably greasy. They contained her going-to-bed creams. Immediately she saw herself choosing them, wrapping them, drying her toothbrush, and she had to laugh, though she did not think the moment warranted it. Beside her she felt Wilroy let go like a punctured balloon, and he laughed too.
Jake, having begun to chew again, looked as if he knew that whatever the moment had been, it had passed. He grinned too, rocking back and forth in his chair in time to his chewing.
Wilroy drew his hand across his mouth and said, “Well, boy, it looks to me like you weren’t expectin’ no company tonight. What say, Miz Sheaffer?”
“Well, I reckon you’re right,” Mary Margaret said; but she felt sad, like a mother unneeded. She glanced around the room at what he had been doing while they were outside. Yesterday she had brought in food and cleaned and arranged the house, and knew everything’s place. He had sat on every chair and on the bed; the imprint of his bottom was on the cushions and on the bedspread. He had looked into all the cabinets; the doors stood slightly open. He had gone to the
back windows and looked out; she had left the shades half drawn, now they were all the way up. He had put away the few belongings he had; the box in which he had brought them home was empty on the floor beside him.
“Well, I reckon this boy’s going to take care of hisself like he’s always done,” Wilroy said. He was restless and ready to go since they were not going to stay. His fingers drummed on the doorframe.
“All right,” Mary Margaret said. “We’re going.” She crossed the room and put her hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Good night, honey. Good night.”
“You come uptown tomorrow, you hear?” Wilroy said. “Town!” His hand made a vague gesture; he could not think how to describe town with it, and Jake seemed not to understand as once he would have. His eyes remained on Wilroy, steady and expressionless. “Town!” Wilroy said. “Town!”
“Wilroy, hush,” Mary Margaret said. “Maybe he’s forgotten the word, but he won’t forget to come. Bye-bye, now, honey, bye-bye.” She almost bent and kissed the top of his head but did not. She crossed the room and she and Wilroy left, closing the door without looking back. They were glad not to be spending the night, though neither confessed it, even to the other.
“Well, what do you think?” Mary Margaret said when the car was started and they were again on the road. Feeling quite tired, she leaned her head back.
“About what?” Wilroy said.
“Why, about Jake. I mean, do you think he’s going to be lonely?”
“Lonely? He’ll be uptown tomorrow. I’ve never known uptown to be lonely, except on Sundays, and I’m not sure about that any more. He spends the better part of his time up there. He’ll be all right.”
“Well, he’s used to having folks around him all the time now, and there’s nobody here to look in on him but us and Loma and Jurldeane, and Lord knows, we all got other things to do too, especially with Christmastime coming. I declare to my soul, it’s a shame about Ruth Edna. She’d be the one to spend the time with him.”
The Morning and the Evening Page 15