More Than Human (3 page)

When Alicia saw her father returning she put the heel of her hand in her mouth and bit down until her teeth met. It was not his clothes, wet and torn, nor even his ruined eye. It was something else, something which—“Father!”
       He did not answer, but strode up to her. At the last possible instant before being walked down like a wheat stalk, she numbly stepped aside. He stamped past her and through the library doors, leaving them open. “Father!”
       No answer. She ran to the library. He was across the room, at the cabinets which she had never seen open. One was open now. From it he took a long-barrelled target revolver and a small box of cartridges. This he opened, spilling the cartridges across his desk. Methodically he began to load.
       Alicia ran to him. “What is it? What is it? You’re hurt, let me help you, what are you...”
       His one good eye was fixed and glassy. He breathed slowly, too deeply, the air rushing in for too long, being held for too long, whistling out and out. He snapped the cylinder into place, clicked off the safety, looked at her, and raised the gun.
       She was never to forget that look. Terrible things happened then and later, but time softened the focus, elided the details. But that look was to be with her for ever.
       He fixed the one eye on her, caught and held her with it; she squirmed on it like an impaled insect. She knew with a horrifying certainty that he did not see her at all, but looked at some unknowable horror of his own. Still looking through her, he put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
       There was not much noise. His hair fluffed upward on top. The eye still stared, she was still pierced by it. She screamed his name. He was no less reachable dead than he had been a moment before. He bent forward as if to show her the ruin which had replaced his hair and the thing that held her broke, and she ran.
       Two hours, two whole hours passed before she found Evelyn. One of the hours was simply lost; it was a blackness and a pain. The other was too quiet, a time of wandering about the house followed by a soft little whimpering that she made herself: “What?” she whimpered, “what’s that you say?” trying to understand, asking and asking the quiet house for the second hour.
       She found Evelyn by the pool, lying on her back with her eyes wide open. On the side of Evelyn’s head was a puffiness, and in the centre of the puffiness was a hollow into which she could have laid three fingers.
       “Don’t,” said Evelyn softly when Alicia tried to lift her head. Alicia set it back gently and knelt and took her hands and squeezed them together. “Evelyn, oh, what happened?”
       “Father hit me,” Evelyn said calmly. “I’m going to go to sleep.”
       Alicia whimpered.
       Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a... person... when you want to be touched and the... two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?”
       Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length. She swallowed. “It’s a madness. It’s bad.”
       Evelyn’s quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. “It isn’t bad,” she said. “I had it.”
       “You have to get back to the house.”
       “I’ll sleep here,” said Evelyn. She looked up at her sister and smiled. “It’s all right... Alicia?”
       “Yes.”
       “I won’t ever wake up,” she said with that strange wisdom. “I wanted to do something and now I can’t. Will you do it for me?”
       “I’ll do it,” Alicia whispered.
       “For me,” Evelyn insisted. “You won’t want to.”
       “I’ll do it.”
       “When the sun is bright,” Evelyn said, “take a bath in it. There’s more, wait.” She closed her eyes. A little furrow came and went on her brow. “Be in the sun like that. Move, run. Run and... jump high. Make a wind with running and moving. I so wanted that. I didn’t know until now that I wanted it and now I... oh,
Alicia
!”
       “What is it, what is it?”
       “There it is, there it is, can’t you see? The love, with the sun on its body!”
       The soft wise eyes were wide, looking at the darkling sky. Alicia looked up and saw nothing. When she looked down again, she knew that Evelyn was also seeing nothing. Not any more.
       Far off, in the woods beyond the fence, there was a rush of weeping.
       Alicia stayed there listening to it and at last put out her hand and closed Evelyn’s eyes. She rose and went towards the house and the weeping followed her and followed her, almost until she reached the door. And even then it seemed to go on inside her.

When Mrs Prodd heard the hoof thuds in the yard, she muttered under her breath and peered out between the dimity kitchen curtains. By a combination of starlight and deep familiarity with the yard itself, she discerned the horse and stoneboat, with her husband plodding beside it, coming through the gate. He’ll get what for, she mumbled, off to the woods so long and letting her burn dinner.
       He didn’t get what for, though. One look at his broad face precluded it. “What is it, Prodd?” she asked, alarmed.
       “Gimme a blanket.”
       “Why on earth—”
       “Hurry now. Feller bad hurt. Picked him up in the woods. Looks like a bear chewed him. Got the clo’es ripped off him.”
       She brought the blanket, running, and he snatched it and went out. In a moment he was back, carrying a man. “Here,” said Mrs Prodd. She flung open the door to Jack’s room. When Prodd hesitated, the long limp body dangling in his arms, she said, “Go on, go on, never mind the spread. It’ll wash.”
       “Get a rag, hot water,” he grunted. She went out and he gently lifted off the blanket. “Oh my God.”
       He stopped her at the door. “He won’t last the night. Maybe we shouldn’t plague him with that.” He indicated the steaming basin she carried.
       “We got to try.” She went in. She stopped and he deftly took the basin from her as she stood, white-faced, her eyes closed. “Ma—”
       “Come,” she said softly. She went to the bed and began to clean the tattered body.
       He lasted the night. He lasted the week too, and it was only then that the Prodds began to have hope for him. He lay motionless in the room called Jack’s room, interested in nothing, aware of nothing except perhaps the light as it came and went at the window. He would stare out as he lay, perhaps seeing, perhaps watching, perhaps not. There was little to be seen out there. A distant mountain, a few of Prodd’s sparse acres; occasionally Prodd himself, a doll in the distance, scratching the stubborn soil with a broken harrow, stooping for weed-shoots. His inner self was encysted and silent in sorrow. His outer self seemed shrunken, unreachable also. When Mrs Prodd brought food—eggs and warm sweet milk, home-cured ham and johnny-cake—he would eat if she urged him, ignore both her and the food if she did not.
       In the evenings, “He say anything yet?” Prodd would ask, and his wife would shake her head. After ten days he had a thought; after two weeks he voiced it. “You don’t suppose he’s tetched, do you, Ma?”
       She was unaccountably angry. “How do you mean tetched?”
       He gestured. “You know. Like feeble-minded. I mean, maybe he don’t talk because he can’t.”
       “No!” she said positively. She looked up to see the question in Prodd’s face. She said, “You ever look in his eyes? He’s no idiot.”
       He had noticed the eyes. They disturbed him; that was all he could say of them. “Well, I wish he’d say something.”
       She touched a thick coffee cup. “You know Grace.”
       “Well, you told me. Your cousin that lost her little ones.”
       “Yes. Well, after the fire, Grace was almost like that, lying quiet all day. Talk to her, it was like she didn’t hear. Show her something, she might’ve been blind. Had to spoon-feed her, wash her face.”
       “Maybe it’s that then,” he allowed. “That feller, he sure walked into something worth forgetting, up there... Grace, she got better, didn’t she?”
       “Well, she was never the same,” said his wife. “But she got over it. I guess sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.”
       The weeks went by and broken tissues knit and the wide flat body soaked up nourishment like a cactus absorbing moisture. Never in his life had he had rest and food and...
       She sat with him, talked to him. She sang songs, “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” and “Home on the Range”. She was a little brown woman with colorless hair and bleached eyes, and there was about her a hunger very like one he had felt. She told the moveless, silent face all about the folks back East and second grade and the time Prodd had come courting in his boss’s Model T and him not even knowing how to drive it yet. She told him all the little things that would never be altogether in the past for her: the dress she wore to her confirmation, with a bow here and little gores here and here, and the time Grace’s husband came home drunk with his Sunday pants all tore and a live pig under his arm, squealing to wake the dead. She read to him from the prayer book and told him Bible stories. She chattered out everything that was in her mind, except about Jack.
       He never smiled nor answered, and the only difference it made in him was that he kept his eyes on her face when she was in the room and patiently on the door when she was not. What a profound difference this was, she could not know; but the flat starved body tissues were not all that were slowly filling out.
       A day came at last when the Prodds were at lunch—”dinner”, they called it—and there was a fumbling at the inside of the door of Jack’s room. Prodd exchanged a glance with his wife, then rose and opened it.
       “Here, now, you can’t come out like that.” He called, “Ma, throw in my other overalls.”
       He was weak and very uncertain, but he was on his feet. They helped him to the table and he slumped there, his eyes cloaked and stupid, ignoring the food until Mrs Prodd tantalized his nostrils with a spoonful. Then he took the spoon in his broad fist and got his mouth on it and looked past his hand at her. She patted his shoulder and told him it was just wonderful, how well he did.
       “Well, Ma, you don’t have to treat him like a two-year-old,” said Prodd. Perhaps it was the eyes, but he was troubled again.
       She pressed his hand warningly; he understood and said no more about it just then. But later in the night when he thought she was asleep, she said suddenly, “I do so have to treat him like a two-year-old, Prodd. Maybe even younger.”
       “How’s that?”
       “With Grace,” she said, “it was like that. Not so bad, though. She was like six, when she started to get better. Dolls. When she didn’t get apple pie with the rest of us one time, she cried her heart out. It was like growing up all over again. Faster, I mean, but like travelling the same road again.”
       “You think he’s going to be like that?”
       “Isn’t he like a two-year-old?”
       “First I ever saw six foot tall.”
       She snorted in half-pretended annoyance. “We’ll raise him up just like a child.”
       He was quiet for a time. Then. “What’ll we call him?”
       “Not Jack,” she said before she could stop herself.
       He grunted an agreement. He didn’t know quite what to say then.
       She said, “We’ll bide our time about that. He’s got his own name. It wouldn’t be right to put another to him. You just wait. He’ll get back to where he remembers it.”
       He thought about it for a long time. He said, “Ma, I hope we’re doing the right thing.” But by then she was asleep.

There were miracles.
       The Prodds thought of them, as achievements, as successes, but they were miracles. There was the time when Prodd found two strong hands at the other end of a piece of 12´12 he was snaking out of the barn. There was the time Mrs Prodd found her patient holding a ball of yarn, holding it and looking at it only because it was red. There was the time he found a full bucket by the pump and brought it inside. It was a long while, however, before he learned to work the handle.
       When he had been there a year Mrs Prodd remembered and baked him a cake. Impulsively she put four candles on it. The Prodds beamed at him as he stared at the little flames, fascinated. His strange eyes caught and held hers, then Prodd’s. “Blow it out, son.”
       Perhaps he visualized the act. Perhaps it was the result of the warmth outflowing from the couple, the wishing for him, the warmth of caring. He bent his head and blew. They laughed together and rose and came to him, and Prodd thumped his shoulder and Mrs Prodd kissed his cheek.
       Something twisted inside him. His eyes rolled up until, for a moment, only the whites showed. The frozen grief he carried slumped and flooded him. This wasn’t the call, the contact, the exchange he had experienced with Evelyn. It was not even like it, except in degree. But because he could now feel to such a degree, he was aware of his loss, and he did just what he had done when first he lost it. He cried.
       It was the same shrill tortured weeping that had led Prodd to him in the darkening wood a year ago. This room was too small to contain it. Mrs Prodd had never heard him make a sound before. Prodd had, that first night. It would be hard to say whether it was worse to listen to such a sound or to listen to it again.
       Mrs Prodd put her arms around his head and cooed small syllables to him. Prodd balanced himself awkwardly near by, put out a hand, changed his mind, and finally retreated into a futile reiteration: “Aw. Aw... Aw, now.”
       In its own time, the weeping stopped. Sniffling, he looked at them each in turn. Something new was in his face; it was as if the bronze mask over which his facial skin was stretched had disappeared. “I’m sorry,” Prodd said. “Reckon we did something wrong.”
       “It wasn’t wrong,” said his wife. “You’ll see.”

He got a name.
       The night he cried, he discovered consciously that if he wished, he could absorb a message, a meaning, from those about him. It had happened before, but it happened as the wind happened to blow on him, as reflexively as a sneeze or a shiver. He began to hold and turn this ability, as once he had held and turned the ball of yarn. The sounds called speech still meant little to him, but he began to detect the difference between speech directed to him and that which did not concern him. He never really learned to hear speech; instead, ideas were transmitted to him directly. Ideas in themselves are formless, and it is hardly surprising that he learned very slowly to give ideas the form of speech.
       “What’s your name?” Prodd asked him suddenly one day. They were filling the horse trough from the cistern and there was that about water running and running in the sun which tugged deeply at the idiot. Utterly absorbed, he was jolted by the question. He looked up and found his gaze locked with Prodd’s.
      
Name
. He made a reaching, a flash of demand, and it returned to him carrying what might be called a definition. It came, though, as pure concept. “
Name” is the single thing which is me and what I have done and been and learned
.
       It was all there, waiting for that single symbol, a name. All the wandering, the hunger, the loss, the thing which is worse than loss, called lack. There was a dim and subtle awareness that even here, with the Prodds, he was not a something, but a substitute for something.
      
All alone
.
       He tried to say it. Directly from Prodd he took the concept and its verbal coding and the way it ought to sound. But understanding and expressing were one thing; the physical act of enunciation was something else again. His tongue might have been a shoe sole and his larynx a rusty whistle. His lips writhed. He said, “Ul... ul...”
       “What is it, son?”
      
All alone
. It was transmitted clear and clean, complete, but as a thought only, and he sensed instantly that a thought sent this way had no impact whatever on Prodd, though the farmer strained to receive what he was trying to convey. “Ul-ul... lone,” he gasped.
       “Lone?” said Prodd.
       It could be seen that the syllable meant something to Prodd, something like the codification he offered, though far less.
       But it would do.
       He tried to repeat the sound, but his unaccustomed tongue became spastic. Saliva spurted annoyingly and ran from his lips. He sent a desperate demand for help, for some other way to express it, found it, used it. He nodded.
       “Lone,” repeated Prodd.
       And again he nodded; and this was his first word and his first conversation; another miracle.
       It took him five years to learn to talk, and always he preferred not to. He never did learn to read. He was simply not equipped.