Over the years - and although autism wasn’t fully identified and classified until the 1940s, the condition most likely pre-dated recorded history - there had been no shortage of “miracle cures.” Psychotherapy, diet, vitamin and mineral regimens, and various sorts of behavior modification had all been tried, and all had failed. Most recently, advocates of “facilitated communication” had boasted that profoundly autistic children could “type” intelligent and coherent thoughts when assisted by a “facilitator” holding the child’s hand over a keyboard. But controlled studies had cast serious doubt on the claims, suggesting that they reflected no more than suggestiveness (whether deliberate or unconscious) on the part of the facilitator.
In terms of intelligence, it had long been assumed that the majority of autistic children were retarded, with the debate centering on the question of degree. But recent thinking had begun to cast new light on the issue. One complicating factor was that autism was often accompanied by other abnormalities, and clinicians tended to be guilty of attributing deficits to the autism, when in fact some other condition might be responsible. Additionally, it was likely that much of what presents itself as retardation could be explained by the close connection that existed between language facility and intelligence testing. As more sophisticated testing methods were employed, relying less on the subject’s verbal ability, IQ levels tended to rise rather significantly.
Occasionally - and only occasionally - autistic children displayed enormously prodigious aptitudes, and when they did, the phrase “idiot savant” was sometimes used to describe them. Examples of such behavior included the ability to perform complex mathematical calculations with computer-like speed, or to unerringly predict what day of the week a particular date will fall on centuries into the future. Kim Peek, the man upon whom the movie Rain Man was based, had such talents. Other autistics were musically gifted. In Civil War times, a blind negro boy (for those were the terms in favor back then, “sightless” and “African-American” still more than a century away from coming into vogue), described as an “idiot” in all other ways, mastered the piano without any training, to the point where he could perfectly re-create any piece he heard. Blind Tom, as he became known, astounded audiences by playing one song with his left hand and another with his right, all the while singing a third. He was also known to play with his back to the piano and his hands held upside down. Leslie Lemke, at age fourteen, having heard Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 once, sat down and played the piano part flawlessly. Tony DeBlois, a blind, autistic, jazz improvisationist, quickly learned to play fourteen musical instruments, twelve of them proficiently.
But as impressive as these accounts of autistics with mathematical or musical skills were to Jorgensen, of even more interest were the artistic savants. Nadia, a girl of three and a half, began drawing animals and other objects in a manner described by developmental psychologists as “not possible.” Unlike children three and four times her age, she displayed a sense of proportion, perspective, and light that was not only technically accomplished, but appeared to be entirely intuitive. A man named Alonzo Clemons could glimpse a fleeting image of a horse on a television screen and, given twenty minutes, could sculpt a perfect three-dimensional replica of it out of clay or wax. Richard Wawro was an autistic who was also a world-renowned landscape painter. Many autistic artists (many, of course, being a relative term) concentrated on a single subject matter to the point of fixation. An autistic boy known as Jonny specialized in drawings of electric lamps; the autistic Japanese artist Shyoichiro Yamamura focused on insects; while the American Jessy Park was first obsessed with radio dials and heaters, then weather anomalies and constellations in the night sky, before moving on to renditions of houses and churches. And Oliver Sacks (perhaps best known as the psychologist who worked with post-encephalitic patients and became the model for Robin Williams’s portrayal in the movie Awakenings) had described in detail the case of Stephen Wiltshire, a black, autistic English boy whose drawings from memory of London architecture were said to be nothing less than breathtaking.
Jorgensen came away from the session $10 poorer. It was all Pop Crawford would permit him to pay Zachary for three full hours of research assistance.
“Give him any more’n that, and he’s liable to go out and find himself a woman, blow it all on her. Right, Zack?”
Zack yawned. He seemed pretty noncommittal on the subject and was anxious to get back to the more important stuff he’d been doing on the computer, before he’d been sidetracked by the old man who pretended he was a hacker, but barely knew how to click a mouse.
The other thing Jorgensen came away with was a hunger to learn more about the paradox presented by the autistic savants, particularly the artistic ones. How could young children - some of them so profoundly impaired that they couldn’t respond to their own names, or carry on a conversation or be taught to read a single rudimentary sentence - nevertheless create stunning visual depictions of things they’d only glanced at? And that they could do so without the least bit of training, practice or (at least it seemed) concentration, made it all the more stupefying.
“It truly boggles the mind,” Jorgensen said aloud.
Jake, sitting beside him in the pickup truck, his nose stuck out the far window, contributed no more than a wag of the tail. Small boys and dogs, apparently, were not so easily impressed.
That night, Jorgensen sat in front of his stove, reviewing the notes he’d made and the pages young Zachary had printed out for him. Boyd Davies’s lawyers were probably right in acknowledging that their client wasn’t retarded, at least not in the sense that the courts might be interested. And in focusing on Boyd’s failure to comprehend the logical link between his act (murder) and the resulting sentence (death), they’d somehow managed to stumble upon what seemed to Jorgensen to be the very essence of his disorder: the utter inability of the autistic brain to put things together and form a concept out of them.
But where did that leave them? Boyd had murdered an eleven-year-old child, and likely raped her, as well. At the time, he’d been on parole for an earlier sexual assault of a child. Was William Rehnquist really going to concern himself with whether or not Boyd could make the connection between his crime and his punishment? Was Antonin Scalia looking to broaden the reach of the Eighth Amendment, so that every defendant who stood up and said, “Look, I don’t understand why you’re killing me,” would get his sentence commuted? Did Clarence Thomas give a hoot about damaged cerebella and hippocampi, or abnormal serotonin levels?
The answers seemed painfully obvious, just as they had to have seemed obvious to those who’d reached out to Jorgensen and drawn him into their circle so that he could lead them into a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds.
As his thoughts wandered, so did his concentration, and at one point, he had to yank the steering wheel sharply to the right, in order to keep the old truck from drifting off the road and into the marsh.
Why was it he’d wanted to know more about autism? He tried to remember. It had been only this morning, but it seemed so long ago. Ah, yes - it had been because he wanted to understand more about Boyd Davies, to get to know him better, so he could humanize him for the Court.
But Zachary’s computer hadn’t humanized Boyd at all. It had spat out long lists of statistics and Latin words and case histories and unproved theories; but in the end, all of the autistic savants he’d read about seemed less human, if anything. They were freaks, is what they were, sideshow performers. Somewhere along the line, some genetic accident or mutant virus or playful god had reached into their brains, lifted out the essence of whatever it was that made people human, and replaced it with some weird and extravagant talent. They belonged right between the fire-breather and the sword-swallower. “Step right up, folks! See the amazing picture-drawer! Snatched from his parents at birth and raised by rats in the basement of the Smithsonian! Only one dollar!”
It was starting to get dark as Jorgensen crossed over the narrow bridge to the bar
rier island, and already the fog was beginning to settle into the low spots. He thought of Boyd Davies, sitting alone in his cell in Brushy Mountain. Poor Boyd. Except for a handful of drawings, his whole life was probably nothing but fog.
Jorgensen spent a couple of days getting ready for winter. That meant mending the shrimp nets, folding them up, and putting them into barrels; carrying in a week’s worth of firewood, in order to keep it dry; shutting off the water to the outside hose, draining the pipe to it, and pouring in a little antifreeze to keep anything he might have missed from bursting the fittings; and doing some caulking around the portholes - at least those he could reach from the ground, or with a stepladder.
That left the biggest job of all, dragging the catboat out of the water. But he wasn’t quite ready to do that yet - not only because it was backbreaking work that would take him half a day, but because, even though it was already November, he was determined to get in one last sail before mothballing her.
His chance came one morning at the end of the week when, even before he’d stepped outside, he knew from the spray on the windward portholes that there was a crisp offshore breeze blowing. With the wind coming directly out of the east, it would be something of a struggle to get out past the breakers. But there’d be a payoff: Once he was beyond them, he’d be able to pick his course at will, without having to worry about getting back in; the same breeze he’d have to fight going out would carry him home safely.
He found Jake nosing around at a crab hole in the sand. “You up for a sail, mate?”
If the old dog didn’t really understand, he sure did a good job of pretending. Tail wagging, entire body wagging (if, indeed, a body can wag), he all but knocked the old man over, rushing past him on the narrow pathway that led through the spartina grass and down to the dinghy.
It took them a series of tacks to get out. The one-sail design of the catboat made for poor pointing upwind, and they were forced to zigzag - first to port, then to starboard, then back to port - over and over again. Each time they came about, they’d lose a little headway: The sail would luff for a moment, and the waves would slap against the hull, stopping their momentum and occasionally even pushing them back toward shore. But the cat had a fixed keel, with a leaded core for ballast. It was shallow enough to let them glide over the shoals and sandbars without running aground, but long and heavy enough to minimize drifting. Bit by bit, tack by tack, they made headway, and gradually Jorgensen was able to see that the shoreline was receding behind them, and the lighthouse was getting smaller.
Once safely over the breakers, Jorgensen swung the tiller one last time and set a north-northwesterly course, or at least a pretty good approximation of one. He carried no compass, other than the internal one he’d inherited from his Scandinavian ancestors, and that had always proved pretty accurate. In fact, he had nothing on board more sophisticated than a folding knife, a screwdriver, and a bailing can. Marge had been after him for years to buy a little outboard motor, but doing so would have meant registering the boat, and registering it in turn would have meant insuring it. So instead he paid attention to the wind and the weather and the tides, and they hadn’t let him down yet. And if they ever did, if some monster squall suddenly appeared from out of nowhere and knocked them over, or some rogue wave decided to crash over their bow and swamp them? Well, to August Jorgensen’s way of thinking, there were worse ways to die.
But today there would be no monster squalls to knock them over, no rogue waves to swamp them. Only a long starboard reach in the morning sun, followed by a good run back to shore - a satisfying end to the season.
And that afternoon, while there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, he rigged a bowline to the winch he’d welded to the front of his truck, and let Thomas Edison do the work dragging the old catboat out of the water and up onto her winter cradle.
He spent the following morning chocking the hull so she wouldn’t slip. He removed, cleaned, folded, and stored the sail. He scraped a season’s worth of barnacles and algae from the keel and the underside. He thought about putting on a coat of anti-fouling paint, but decided he’d be better off waiting until spring, when the surface would be good and dry and take the paint better. Finally, he draped her with plastic tarps and secured them with nylon cord, leaving only the mast uncovered. With the boat no longer swinging free at her mooring to show him the direction and strength of the wind, her landlocked mast would serve as his winter flagpole, its red pennant the only telltale he’d need.
His work done, he whistled for Jake and took a drive to the post office. His electric bill was a month or so past due, and even though the folks over at Santee Cooper had learned to put up with his irregular payments, he didn’t like to abuse their kindness.
Edna Coombs, the postmistress who’d been retiring for at least eleven years, kept lollipops for the kids and treats for the dogs behind her window, so Jake was always the first one through the door. Jorgensen waited while he and Edna got reacquainted, then handed over his envelope.
“Thirty-four cents,” said Edna.
“Thirty-four? What happened to thirty-three?”
Edna reminded him that it had gone up a penny, way back in January. Jorgensen nodded absently. It seemed only yesterday that stamps were purple, and it cost three cents to mail a letter. Or you use a one-cent green one and stick it on a postcard. Penny postcards, they used to call them. A nickel would get you a whole Coke, one that came in a bottle made out of real glass, not that plastic stuff they used today. And a dime? A dime would get you into the picture show, where you could hunker down and spend half a day watching a newsreel, a couple of Tom and Jerry cartoons, a Bill and Coo short, and a double-feature.
“Thirty-four cents,” Edna was saying again.
He fished around in his pockets until he came up with two quarters. “Put the change in my account for next time,” he told her, “and make sure you keep track of the interest. Got anything for me?” They both understood that his anything meant any mail worth opening. Edna had long ago taken it upon herself to weed out the catalogs, credit card offerings, sweepstakes announcements, and other junk mail Jorgensen had no patience for.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Edna. She pretended to search around for it, but Jorgensen knew that was just for show, to impress him with how busy she was, and how much stuff she had back there. “Ahh,” she said after a minute, “here it is.” And handed him a package.
But this was no ordinary package, Jorgensen could see; this was how packages used to be. The size of a shoebox, wrapped in well-used brown paper, and all tied up in white cotton string with lots of knots. Instead of bearing one of those postage meter stickers, it had real stamps, a whole row of them. And his name and address hadn’t been typed or printed on a label by one of those machines. No, it had been written by hand, and - if he was any judge - slowly and meticulously, the work of someone to whom writing was definitely not second nature.
“You been expectin’ it?” Edna asked him. She was a bit of a busybody, as they used to say, who liked to know whatever there was to know about her customers.
“No,” said Jorgensen, “can’t say that I have been.” He tucked it under his arm.
“Well, don’tcha want to see what’s in it?”
“I probably will,” allowed Jorgensen, “I probably will.” And opened the door for Jake.
Back home, he placed the package on his kitchen table and studied it. There was no return address, and the postmarks (there were several, to cover all the stamps) were all too smudged to read.
Back when he’d been on the bench, a federal agent had come around, from Postal Inspection or Secret Service, or maybe ATF, warning Jorgensen and his colleagues to be on the lookout for suspicious-looking packages. It seemed some district judge over in the Fifth Circuit had had three fingers blown off when he’d opened up a box mailed by a defendant who hadn’t been too pleased with his sentence.
Well, if ever anything looked suspicious, thought Jorgensen, this certainly
fit the bill. But then again, who on earth would want to blow him up? Just about everyone he’d ever sentenced had finished doing their time long ago, or died trying to. He found a pair of scissors, snipped the string, and slit open the paper.
Inside, just as he’d guessed, was a shoebox, an old beat-up one with the name THOM MCCAN printed on the lid. He remembered Thom McCans well. No-nonsense shoes, folks used to call them. He tried to remember if they were the same as Buster Browns, or different.
Hi, my name’s Buster Brown,
And I live in a shoe.
This is my dog, Ty-
He lives here, too.
Or something like that.
He lifted the lid off the box. No flash of light blinded him; no deafening explosion shattered his eardrums. Instead, he found himself looking down at a letter, a single-paged letter written in the same hand that had addressed the package. Using the tips of his fingers (all ten of which had somehow managed to survive the opening of the package), he lifted it up, noticing as he did that underneath it lay a stack of more letters, older ones from the look of them, tied together with faded blue ribbon.
Dear Mr Judge,
They tell me you are the new lawer for Boy. I am his sister. My name is Nell. First of all I want to thank you for help my brother. Even if he did what they say and I gues he must of he is not a bad person. He never lern to read or rite. He try but his brane is no good at lest it is not the same as other fokes.
Ever since our mama got sick and cant travel no more I am the onliest one to visit Boy at Brushy Mt. I use to go ever month so I can rite a letter and tell Mama how her one sun is. After mama pass I dont go ever month but I still go when I cans.
When Mama pass and my sisters and I clean out her things from her closit we find all the letters I ever rite her about Boy in a shoe box all tie up just like this. I dont no if they help you but may be so. I hope so.
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