by Jack Hodgins
“Just look at that,” she said. “You’ve never seen anything so pretty, I bet.”
But the child was still curled up, face hidden. She laid hands on him for the first time, grabbed both arms and dragged him closer to the hole in the wall. “Look!” she said. “Just look at that! Don’t you want to go out there and be free?” She put fingers in his hair and yanked the face up so he couldn’t avoid the view. “There. That’s the world you’re missing. A beautiful place, and the middle of summer too!”
The boy opened his eyes, jerked back, and screamed. The pastry face split, fell apart, became one huge gaping mouth that screamed so loud she had to cover her ears.
And fled, ran down ladder and staircase, ran out of the house, ran with that scream still loud behind her down the lane to the barn (past Mrs. Starbuck at the gate, holding it open, mouth ready to say “What’s the matter with you, Charlene?”) and didn’t stop until she was in her own house, under the heavy comforter that lay on the top of her bed.
“Look,” her father said, “you could be mistaken, see. It could all be just a mistake. The world hasn’t fallen apart.” He smiled, to show her he meant it. Creases ran out from his eyes all the way to his ears.
But, “It has!” she said. “I tried to set him free.”
Her father ran a hand around his jaw, squinted his eyes even harder than before, sucked a hole in his teeth. “You took too much on yourself. You didn’t stop to think or wait to find out what it was all about. It’s thought that solves problems, not just action.”
Charlene pulled the blanket even tighter around her neck. She wished she could slip right down inside and disappear altogether. “All I wanted was to show him how pretty the world is.”
“And scared him,” he told her. “Maybe to you it’s a pretty day but to him it’s blinding and horrible. You ought to known that, how our senses are only beliefs we’re educated to.”
She nodded. Her father sat on the edge of the bed and put one finger into the curls by her ear. In another room a radio droned on, a bored male voice reading news. “We’ll work on it,” her father said. “Mrs. Starbuck will be needing our help so we’d better start giving it some thought.”
But she didn’t care about his words. She knew only that there was no disappointment in his eyes and she was grateful for that.
III
That evening Mrs. Starbuck lay on her sagging bed, flat on her back, and cursed her luck. There was no use in doing anything else, as far as she could see, because no matter what she tried it was bound to turn out wrong. She kept her eyes closed against the dying light, waiting for dark. Her fingers counted off the keys in her hand, one at a time, slipping them around the key ring to drop, clinking, against the others: ignition key, trunk key, house key, ignition key, trunk key, house key.
Once, she had known how to hope, too, like everybody else, how to dream and plan and scheme. Now, though, she could plan all she wanted, work all she could, hope all she dared, but she knew that it took only one nosy girl to wreck everything. What was the use? Mrs. Starbuck’s face on the white pillow looked as if it had gathered in all the day’s burning sun and reflected it now, red as a fiery peony, deep almost as blood.
And up in the attic, two floors above her in the crotch of the roof, the child was whimpering. Her child. Her son.
Mrs. Starbuck groaned. Now, now she was in trouble. Up to her bloody eyeballs in it. This time that girl had really poked her big nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Why hadn’t she just taken her father’s axe and walked up to Mrs. Starbuck and bashed in her brains? That would have been a lot easier, and maybe even what she deserved after this morning. Or why didn’t she just push her down the well or burn her to death in this old house? It would have been more merciful. Because Mrs. Starbuck was sure that if she had been given just a few more days she might have got around at last to doing something about getting herself out of this mess.
Still, right after supper she had got into her big old paint-peeling sedan and driven over to Mrs. Wright’s to try saving what was left. And the first thing she had to do was apologize to the little scrunch for the way she had acted back there at the well. She knew Mrs. Wright wouldn’t do a thing for anyone who didn’t have good manners.
“Really, Edna,” Mrs. Wright said. “No amount of apologizing can erase the way you talked to me.” She kept her face turned slightly to the side, to let Mrs. Starbuck know how hurt she was. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are friends,” Mrs. Starbuck said. She sat in one of Mrs. Wright’s living-room chairs and felt, as she always did in this house, that she might be getting grease from her clothes on the green embossed upholstery. “I was under strain. Stress and strain. A person might say anything.”
“Not anything. Not anything you didn’t mean.” Mrs. Wright brought a mug of coffee, and put it on a cork mat on the stereo set beside Mrs. Starbuck. “And besides, it was your actions not your speech that need explaining. That poor calf.” When Mrs. Wright sat on the chesterfield with her own mug of coffee her feet didn’t quite reach the floor.
Mrs. Starbuck picked up her coffee but it was too hot to drink. “Emotions,” she said. “I just got carried away under all that stress and strain.”
Mrs. Wright sneered. “Emotions,” she echoed. “You better just learn to control them. I like to have all mine right here where I want them, so I can turn them on or off whenever I please.”
“I guess I just have more than others,” Mrs. Starbuck said, and took a gulp of coffee that scalded the whole inside of her mouth.
“If I was you I’d be seeing a doctor, not sitting around apologizing. That kind of behaviour is irrational.”
Mrs. Starbuck knew that Mrs. Wright used that word because she thought she wouldn’t understand it. Mrs. Wright sometimes liked to use the English language as if it were something foreign that only she had learned. Maybe she had got a late start in school and was constantly being surprised at what knowledge she’d picked up. Mrs. Starbuck didn’t mind. If someone wanted to put on airs in front of her she didn’t care, as long as she wasn’t expected to do the same.
The second thing she had driven over for was to talk to Mr. Wright. She’d never spoken to any other lawyer in her life and was afraid even of him. She didn’t know what she was going to say but it was obvious that if she was going to do something about bringing that child back down out of the attic she would need to know some answers to a few questions about the law. It was her own child and what she did about him was her own business, she felt, but she also knew that the rest of the world wouldn’t feel the same way. People would start asking questions. Judges, doctors, police. Officials would start nosing around. Before she knew it the child welfare people would be laying charges and making all sorts of ugly noises about what she’d done.
But Mr. Wright wasn’t home. “Golfing,” Mrs. Wright said.
“What time does he get home?” Mrs. Starbuck asked.
“Oh late. It’s business, really, you know. They’re playing a game but at the same time they’re talking business.”
Mrs. Starbuck got up to leave. “I would’ve thought he’d want to stay home once in a while and help you around the place, pull a few weeds.”
“Oh Mr. Wright isn’t interested in farming,” Mrs. Wright said. “If he was, I’d still be over there where you’re living and you’d be somewhere else.”
And now, back in the house Mrs. Wright had lived in for so many years and would still like to live in if it weren’t for her husband (Mrs. Starbuck hadn’t missed those looks that said “This place is going downhill without me.”) Mrs. Starbuck lay on her bed, eyes closed, slipping keys around and around on the aluminum ring. Outside, she knew, the sun was ready to drop, like a child’s hot penny, into its slot behind the blue scarred mountain. When it was darker, when the shadows had blended into one another, then she would open her eyes.
Mrs. Starbuck was scared. She could hear, faintly, the child’s whimpering two floors above her. She could hear the
sharp clinking of the keys as they fell against each other in her hand. She could hear her own breathing, shallow and quick, like the breathing of an old old man. She had been a widow for a year now, and she didn’t see how she could go on living alone for very much longer. Not with them all starting to gang up on her: police, doctors, lawyers, neighbours.
Not that Mr. Starbuck had ever been much help or comfort. He was a mean little bastard who would just as soon hit her as put his arm around her, but just the same he was another adult around the place to share some of the responsibility. That was something.
She hadn’t realized until he was dead that she had been sharing the responsibility for this child with him for years. She thought up until then that just because she pleaded with him to let the child down and because she was as kind as she could be to the boy, that it was all his fault and none of her own. But when he died and she went upstairs to say it’s all right now, you can come down, the child had snarled at her and refused and would have bitten if she’d forced him. Then she knew whose fault it was.
The boy’s name was Searle Starbuck. She’d hated the name but her husband insisted on calling him after a grandfather or something Back East.
“You mean Cyril,” she said.
“No. Searle. S-e-a-r-l-e.”
“That’s no kind of name.”
“That’s his name. Searle Starbuck, named after Searle Starbuck, potato farmer and politician.”
So they put Searle Starbuck on the birth certificate and for fourteen years she called him Richard, though never aloud. Richard Starbuck sounded like a famous movie star or an inventor. It was a strong masculine name and she could see him as a handsome middle-aged man making a speech somewhere, accepting an award, tilting his head to applause.
But he had never made a speech, and never would. Nor would he ever hear the sound of applause. Searle Edwin Starbuck had been born partly deaf and had never learned to speak. When he was three years old and still hadn’t said anything beyond gurgling baby sounds and animal grunts, Mr. Starbuck decided he was retarded. “Just keep him out of my sight,” he said. “I don’t want no mental case in my family.”
“Being slow is not the same as being mental,” she said.
“Just the same, I have no son until he can say my name. When he can stand up and say ‘Roydon Tindall Starbuck, you are my father,’ then I’ll call him son.”
She tried. She tried every way she knew to teach him that sentence but all she got was tears. Even when she discovered it was his hearing and not something in his mouth that was wrong, she still couldn’t find a way of getting him to say those words. There were days when he didn’t even want to walk, but crawled on the floor like a dog.
She discovered he liked candy. His eyes brightened and he started to slobber whenever he saw the dish so she tried to withhold candies as a bribe.
“No,” she said. “Not until you say it.”
He groaned and snarled, stamped his foot.
“No sir, not a single candy until you at least try.”
He growled louder and kicked the cupboard door, looking at her as if he could cheerfully kill her.
“No. No candy until you say Daddy. Say Daddy.”
The child threw back his head and screamed. He screamed one long steady sound that could have come from a grown man’s throat; and didn’t stop, though his face was turning blue, until she put a candy into his hand.
“Here, you stupid little bastard. I hope you choke on it.”
She was so upset by the way she’d spoken to the boy that she took him to a doctor in town while Mr. Starbuck thought she was having a tooth filled at the dentist. The doctor, an old man with runny eyes, asked if he’d ever had a bad fall.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Because it’s more than his ears. There might be damage.”
“Damage? What kind of damage?”
He put one of his old wrinkled hands on her shoulder and she pulled away. “We won’t know for sure until we’ve given some tests, of course, but there could be brain damage.”
She never went back. The doctor was a fool and too old to know anything. And besides, if the boy was retarded or damaged what good did it do to know about it? Mrs. Starbuck was his mother and could do more for him than any tests of old men could do. She would teach him to say “Roydon Tindall Starbuck you are my father” and look after him all her life.
But Mr. Starbuck’s relatives arrived from Back East to stay with them for a few days. A phone call from town asking for directions to their place gave them fifteen minutes to do something with the boy.
“Lock him in the tool shed while they’re here,” Mr. Starbuck said. “You can take food out to him and they won’t ever know.”
She looked at him as if he’d gone mad. “This is your son you’re talking about, not a goat or a sheep.”
“Just do it,” he said. He had put on his best clothes for the company and was starting to shave. “They don’t even know we got a goddam kid. And he won’t know the difference. I don’t want them seeing what we got stuck with. Give him a snort of whiskey to make him sleep. You can slip food out to him when no one’s looking. I don’t want to be ashamed.”
“I won’t do it,” she said. “If it’s so important to you we’ll both move out, stay somewheres else until they’re gone. I won’t lock my baby up.”
He swung on her and raised the hand that held the razor. “Do it,” he said, and his little red eyes flashed. “Do it.”
And when the company had left, thanking her for all she had done to make their holiday enjoyable and congratulating him for choosing such a thoughtful pleasant wife, he announced that the arrangements suited him just fine and the child could stay there for ever as far as he was concerned. When fall came and the nights started getting colder he let her bring him into the house and put him in a back room. Whenever she protested, he just raised his hand and looked as if he could strangle her without batting an eye.
They had to move, because there were neighbours who remembered seeing the boy. Mrs. Starbuck wept when she walked out of that house, a small cedar-shaked farmhouse surrounded by apple trees, and wondered why she didn’t leave her husband, just take the child and find some place of her own to live. Some day she would. But first she would teach him to speak. She would bring him out into the kitchen where he was hunched over his supper at the table like someone driving a motorcycle and she would tell the boy to say it. “Roydon Starbuck is my father,” he would say, and she would say—just as her husband was grinning from ear to ear with pleasure—“But not any more” and pick the child up and take him away from there. It was a day worth waiting for.
And while she waited, they moved seven times. Mr. Starbuck would get it into his head that a neighbour or the paper boy or a travelling salesman had heard the boy or seen his face at the window, and they would pack up all their furniture and rent another place. Always they moved in at night, drove in with the headlights of the old car turned off so that no one could see there were three of them. When they found Mrs. Wright’s farm two years ago, though, they had liked it so much that Mr. Starbuck bought it. “We’re here to stay,” he said, because it seemed ideal. Porter’s farm, the nearest place, was a quarter-mile away. Mrs. Wright’s new house was way out on the highway. And best of all, it had an attic with only one small window they could cover up and a ladder they could take down and hide somewhere on the second floor.
Mrs. Starbuck, now, saw her whole life as nightmare. That was the problem, she thought. She had lived in a nightmare and didn’t even have enough damn sense to see what it was. She believed it was real and accepted it as normal. No one else would have put up with a man like Mr. Starbuck. No one else would have got used to having her own child a prisoner in the attic.
She imagined Mrs. Wright married to Mr. Starbuck. That little terrier would have chewed him to pieces. In a ladylike way, of course, Mrs. Wright did everything in a proper way. But she wouldn’t have let him boss her around that way, threaten her,
and lock the child up. She imagined Mr. Starbuck telling little Mrs. Wright “Lock him in the tool shed” and nearly laughed out loud. She didn’t laugh though, because she realized it was Mrs. Wright and not her husband that looked silly and unnatural in her mental picture. Mrs. Wright would say “Roydon, you’re being irrational.” She would say, “I can tolerate a lot, Roydon dear, you know I’m very broad-minded, but one thing I will not tolerate is irrationality. It just doesn’t make sense to lock a child up. I believe you are insane.”
Maybe I’m stupid, Mrs. Starbuck thought. Perhaps all her life she had been a stupid woman and never known it. She knew she wasn’t as smart as Mrs. Wright; no lawyer could stand to be married to her for long; but she had got as far as grade nine in school with fairly good marks before her parents sent her out to work. The teacher had written on one of her report cards Edna earns good enough grades but she lacks initiative.
That sounded like a Mrs. Wright word. Initiative. It was true too. Would a person with one bloody ounce of initiative have taken a whole year before doing something about that boy? A whole year, logging and burning and planting fifteen new acres just to keep out of the house, before getting around to facing what had to be done?
A sudden image of herself, this morning, standing over that trapped calf with Mr. Porter’s axe raised to smash in its brains, scared up the fear again that lay waiting in her chest. What had happened to her? What kind of person was she turning into? She loved her cattle; they surrounded her like a living wall and she loved them singly and together. What had she let herself become when her feelings could go so badly out of control that she was capable of a thing like that?
Lying on that bed, she wished her husband were here just long enough to help her out. Come back, she thought. You were a miserable rotten little man. I was glad when they phoned and told me you had died in that hospital but you could act. You could make decisions and act on them. No one would ever find Roydon Starbuck lying on a bed waiting for something to happen, just waiting.