by John Dalton
“All right.”
“Bolivar County,” Leonard said. He seemed startled to have come up with the name. “I wouldn’t go there. Not even if you paid me in a pile of silver dollar coins.”
“What about a pile of gold coins?”
Leonard sat and brooded over the question, and then, unexpectedly, he grinned. It was odd, truly. Some part of Leonard seemed to know he was being teased. And yet, another part of him remained oblivious. “I wouldn’t go there,” he said. “Considering the way they’ll treat you.”
“And how do they treat you?”
“You know full well,” he said, scowling through his glasses. “I don’t have to tell you, do I?” His narrow professor’s face turned an indignant red.
“All right. Take it easy, Leonard. Your move. Look here. Your move. Go ahead now,” Wyatt said.
On the picnic table between them was a loaded checkerboard. Of all the activities at camp, this was Leonard’s favorite, especially the jumping, one checker over another, his own or Wyatt’s, regardless of direction or rules. He managed to clasp a red checker in his unsteady right hand. What happiness this brought him. At once he began jumping the checker forward and back and sideways.
It was Tuesday an hour after lunch, a ripely warm but by no means insufferable June afternoon. They’d chosen a shaded picnic table a dozen yards from The Sanctuary. Nearby Jerry Johnston and Thomas Anwar Toomey had found patches of earth to sit upon. Both men were occupied. Jerry had a bounty of paper scraps, which he pulled from the pockets of his overalls and sorted into various piles. But the piles, once completed, didn’t appear to please him, and he’d shake his head and scramble all the scraps together and start over. Thomas Anwar had his cigarettes. At the moment he was squatting with his back against an elm tree, smoking and staring out at the afternoon with a look that was, for Thomas Anwar, close to satisfaction.
“Well, all right then,” Wyatt said. He reset the checkerboard for Leonard. Then he called out to Jerry and Thomas Anwar. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “You two sit right here, you understand.”
Neither of them bothered to look up at him.
“I’ll be right back,” he repeated, and then he rose from the table and took off at a brisk pace for The Sanctuary, turning around once, twice, three times and finding Leonard and Jerry and Thomas Anwar unchanged. Oblivious. He hurried through the swinging screen door of The Sanctuary. Inside, several camp dogs had crawled onto the couches and were stretched out sleeping, their dusty snouts buried in the crevices of the cushions. Otherwise The Sanctuary was vacant, the pay phone unattended. He slipped five quarters into the slot and dialed. While he waited he pulled back the window curtain for a view of the meadow and the picnic table where he’d been sitting.
The phone line clicked and hummed, and eventually Captain Throckmorton answered. “Wyatt,” he said. “My goodness. Wy-att.” There was a swell of relief in the captain’s voice and, as always, a brand of good humor meant exclusively for Wyatt. “I’ve been wondering about you, Wyatt,” the captain said. “I’ve been . . . How is it there? How are the children?”
So much to explain. Too much, really. He had to start at the beginning. He said he’d arrived at camp last Monday. Barbara McCauley had driven him down. But there were no children. Not yet. The children wouldn’t arrive until next week. For now all the counselors here at Kindermann Forest had to take care of adults from the state hospital. Adults with problems.
“What kinds of problems, Wyatt?”
He looked out through the window at Leonard Peirpont, who sat hunched at the picnic table trying with his unsteady hands to fit his checkers into a neat stack. Leonard couldn’t quite manage this simple task. What an idiot, Wyatt thought, tenderly. “All kinds of problems,” he said. “Most of the people here are, you know, retarded.”
There was from Captain Throckmorton a long, near-whistling sigh. After a while he said, “Oh my.”
“The first two weeks here are for retarded people. Then the children come. That’s the way it works.”
“I didn’t know that, Wyatt. If I had known, I’d have . . . I would have told you. You understand that, right?”
“Yes. I do.”
“What have you . . . How have you been getting along?”
“It’s hard work. Well, it’s hard for all the counselors. Taking care of people who are like this.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“There’s four more days until the state hospital buses come back and the campers leave. Then we get a day off. Then the children come.”
“I see.”
Wyatt stood holding the receiver to his ear, waiting. “So, yes, it’s a lot of work,” he said. There was a graceful way, surely, to steer the conversation in the direction it needed to go. He wished he knew how to do the steering. “I’ve been thinking about the horses here. About working with the horses.”
“The horses?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said. But he knew he’d been too vague. He concentrated. “There’s some talk around here,” he said. “People are saying that when the State Hospital Session ends, I’ll be asked to stop being a counselor and become a wrangler instead. I wouldn’t work with the children. I’d work with horses. I’d spend all day at the stables. I’d sleep there, too.”
“At the stables?”
“Yes. That’s what you do if you’re a wrangler.”
“Whose idea is this?” the captain asked. “Who is it that said you should become a wrangler?”
“The people in charge here. Mr. Kindermann maybe. I don’t know.”
“And do you want to be a wrangler? I mean, if it was up to you, would that be your choice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, let me ask you this, Wyatt. Have you done a good job this week, taking care of the people at camp? The retarded people?”
This seemed to Wyatt an unlikely, if not unfair, question. It wasn’t an evaluation he should be asked to make. He leaned forward and pushed back the dusty and threadbare window curtains. Outside, in the brilliant light of the afternoon, Jerry Johnston was trying to rise to his feet. For a man of his roundness and size, this meant crawling to the picnic table and pulling himself up, one foot planted, then the other rising up in increments. “It’s hard to say,” Wyatt said. “It’s hard to say one way or the other.”
“And when you worked here at the depot. Did you do a good job then?”
“I’m not sure about that, either.”
“Then let me make it clear. You did a very good job for us, Wyatt. Of all the people who work at the depot, you were the most thorough, the most dependable. And I’m willing to bet it’s the same at Kindermann Forest. You’ve worked hard. I’m sure of it. You did what you were supposed to. Am I right about that?”
“Yes, maybe.”
“So you did a good job, and that means you get to decide what your assignment should be. If it’s working with the horses, if that’s what you really want, then tell Mr. Kindermann. But if it’s the children you want to work with—and I think it is, Wyatt, I think you’d like to spend your summer working with children rather than horses—then you need to go to Mr. Kindermann and tell him so.”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t think that’s the way people do it here.”
“You can stand up for yourself and tell other people what it is you want.”
“Yes, all right. But I’d have to say it a different way, wouldn’t I? So that they wouldn’t think . . . Because they might think I was making trouble.” He turned his attention back out the window to the bright afternoon and the stretch of green meadow. Jerry Johnston had begun doing something odd. He was tottering about, drunkenly, throwing his head back one moment, as if to howl at the sky, and then hunching over suddenly, dangling his arms out as if he were an exhausted runner.
“It’s okay to be direct with people. You can say, ‘Look here, I did a good job and now I want to work with the children.’”
“Maybe so.”
“Yo
u’re allowed to make some trouble, Wyatt. It’s perfectly all right to stand up for yourself and get angry sometimes. When people are being unfair to you, you can speak your mind.”
Outside Jerry Johnston was standing up bolt straight and clutching at the buttons of his overalls. Then, as if a string had been suddenly cut, he collapsed heavily onto the ground.
Wyatt weighed the phone receiver in his hand. Far away, in Jefferson City, Captain Throckmorton was talking to him. . . . Better to speak your mind than to . . . The receiver was gray and chipped. It was rising in Wyatt’s hand. After a moment of dumbstruck consideration, he placed it gently in the cradle.
He was a lurching and clumsy runner. He stumbled over furniture, bolted through the swinging screen door of The Sanctuary. It was still a lovely afternoon, sun-dappled and warm, a few distant strolling figures on the open meadow and a wave of happy voices rising from the pool in the woods—except now, near the picnic tables, there was Jerry Johnston’s slumped form in the grass. Not motionless, not a still body, just a pear-shaped man in overalls lying on his side and rocking back and forth.
Wyatt hurried to him and bent down. “Jerry,” he said. “What’d you do? What happened?”
From Jerry a low gurgle. He’d gone red in the face. His fists were squeezed into tight paws.
Other people had begun to take notice: several counselors crossing the meadow turned toward the Sanctuary yard. Nearby, Leonard Peirpont looked up blinking from his stacks of checkers. Thomas Anwar Toomey crawled over from where he’d been smoking and gazed down upon his stricken friend. “No, no, no,” Thomas Anwar said. “Not good! Not good!”
One of the kitchen girls appeared suddenly over Wyatt’s shoulder. She stared down at Jerry Johnston. “Oh shit!” she said and took off running for the infirmary.
“It hurts. It hurts. It hurts,” Jerry moaned.
“Where?” Wyatt asked.
Jerry put a plump hand on the bib of his overalls. “Here,” he said and patted his fingers atop his chest.
A simple gesture, but it made Wyatt cringe in dread. He could picture Jerry Johnston’s heart, a swelled and probably misshapen vessel. It had deflated somehow or frozen midbeat. Jerry had dropped to the ground. While this had happened, Wyatt had been away on the phone claiming to be a responsible counselor.
Someone shouted, “Here she comes. She’s coming now,” meaning, of course, the camp nurse, Harriet Foster. There were several minutes, as long and as intimate as any Wyatt had known, in which he gripped Jerry Johnston’s hand and listened to his anxious breathing.
The crowd had begun shouting for her, “Hurry, please. Hurry up, Harriet,” until at last the throng of onlookers parted. How odd. They’d all wanted her here so badly—they’d longed for her—that once she’d arrived and knelt in the meadow grass beside Jerry, she seemed entirely too ordinary for this emergency. They wanted someone else. “All right, Jerry. All right,” she said and, rather than brandish any tools from a canvas bag of instruments slung over her shoulder, she rested her hand on Jerry Johnston’s forehead, then his cheek, and finally in the crook of his fat neck, as if he were a feverish child. “Don’t breathe so fast,” she said. “Slow it down, please.”
“I can’t,” Jerry panted.
“Can’t because it hurts? Or can’t because you’re scared?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
From her canvas bag she extracted a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff, which she wrapped around Jerry Johnston’s arm. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.
He patted his chest.
“Does it feel heavy? Does it feel like weight on top of you?”
He closed his eyes and shuddered.
“Does it burn?”
“Yes.”
She pumped the blood pressure cuff and listened through her stethoscope, and then she looked up sharply and insisted that the crowd of onlookers back away and be quiet. Again she put her hands on Jerry Johnston’s face and neck and listened through her stethoscope. She counted out loud to herself and bent down close to her patient, studying the features of his face—his eyes and nose and bulging tongue—and then leaned back on her heels and scrutinized him from a wary distance. At last she said, “I’d like you to sit up, Jerry. Would you do that?”
“No, no, I can’t,” he whimpered.
She turned her gaze from Jerry to Wyatt.
“What’d he have for lunch, Wyatt?” she asked.
“Hot dogs,” Wyatt said. “Beans.”
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Four hot dogs. Two plates of beans. Then some marshmallows he was saving.”
“My goodness,” she said. “Four hot dogs.” She bowed her head, gratefully, and searched through the pockets of her jeans until she found a roll of antacid tablets. Into Jerry Johnston’s wet mouth she placed two tablets and ordered him to chew.
“I can’t,” he grunted. “It hurts too much.”
“Oh, but you can. Wyatt and I will sit beside you until the hurt goes away.”
“But it won’t go away,” Jerry cried. Thick tears poured down his face. “I’m having a heart attack.”
“No, no. You’re having indigestion.”
He turned his face away from them and cried harder.
“You ate too much for lunch, Jerry. If you sit up and swallow the tablets, I promise you’ll feel better.”
But he didn’t appear any less anguished or afraid. He gazed up at Harriet and wept. “No heart attack,” she promised. The crowd of onlookers pressed in around them. “No heart attack, Jerry,” they said. “Sit up. Please. You can do it, Jerry.” He lingered awhile under the warm light of their attention, and then, still weeping, he sat up, chewed and swallowed the antacid tablets. Wyatt and Harriet helped hoist him onto his feet for the journey to the infirmary—a plodding and laborious journey given that he required their constant support. He was still grief-stricken. “My heart,” Jerry moaned as they marched him forward. “My heart.” He could be distracted for a minute or two—What’s the best car to have, Jerry? What’s on TV tonight?—so that he’d walk ten or twenty paces reciting the virtues of Ford Mustangs and The Dukes of Hazzard before recalling the anguish of his heart attack. Then he’d slump backward and cry out, “No, no, no,” and Wyatt and Harriet would catch him beneath the arms and bear the considerable weight of Jerry Johnston for a dozen yards or more until, at last, they’d crossed the meadow and climbed the infirmary step.
Inside, they guided Jerry, the infirmary’s only patient, onto an empty bunk. A tremendous relief to drop the bulk of Jerry Johnston onto a mattress, to be unburdened. Afterward, they leaned against the bunk frame and tried to catch their breath.
“Sit up, Jerry,” Harriet pleaded. She shuffled to the sink and filled a cup of water. “Sit up and drink some water.” But he did the opposite: lay down and turned his face to the wall.
“Please,” she said, wearily. When he didn’t respond, she drank the water herself and lay down on a nearby bunk. Eyes closed, she draped a slender arm across her forehead, as if she were settling in for a long nap. “For goodness’ sake,” she said. “Sit down and rest a minute, Wyatt.”
He wavered a moment and eased into a chair.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.” Which was mostly true. His difficulties, at the moment, were all minor. His back ached. He seemed to be sweating too much. And he wasn’t used to young women, particularly attractive women, treating him with such familiarity. Such kindness. He wasn’t at all sure that he liked it.
“I’ll keep Jerry here till dinnertime,” Harriet said, her eyes still closed. “He’s just acting this way because he’s scared. But he doesn’t have anything to be scared of. Do you, Jerry?”
No answer from their patient except for a huffy, indignant snort.
Otherwise the infirmary was still and quiet and nicely cool. There were stripes of soft light bleeding though the win
dow blinds.
“Wyatt,” she said. “Every time I see you around camp, I always want to ask you . . . not ask . . . tell you. I always want to tell you.” She propped her head up on her outstretched arm and peered at him. “I don’t know if this will be worth anything to you, if it’s even worth saying. But when I was in high school, back in North Carolina, there was a boy I knew. Only four years old. A boy with Apert syndrome. I took care of him sometimes. He had a twin brother. And what I know about that boy, Taylor, the one with Apert syndrome, was that he was as smart and normal as any other four-year-old. Smarter and more normal than his twin brother.”
Wyatt sat perfectly still in his chair. For the time being he was too embarrassed, too aware of himself, to offer her a sensible reply.
“I thought I’d let you know about that,” she said.
He nodded.
“Should I have let you know?” she asked. “Is it all right that I said something?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s all right.” He readied himself to stand and leave. “Thank you,” he said.
Chapter Eleven
She stirred awake very early in the morning and found James standing at her bedside, flexing up and down on his tiptoes. He had one hand clenched on the crotch of his pajamas.
“Hold on now,” she said. “Just a second. I need to find . . . Can you hold it?”
He nodded and tightened his grip. This was, for James, a typical morning dilemma: he needed badly to pee, and yet the infirmary bathroom was almost always occupied, usually by a very fat, half-dressed, retarded woman who’d failed to close the door and who could be seen propped atop the toilet like a roosting ostrich.
Harriet located her sandals. Then she led the boy out the door to the edge of the yard, to a dirt gulley that ran alongside the infirmary. A gauzy, break-of-day light was seeping through the dew-weighted cedar branches and clarifying, inch by inch, the yard and pathways and open meadow. No chirping birds or barking dogs yet. No lumbering campers, either. Without them the grounds of Kindermann Forest looked soft-edged and vulnerable.