Becky snorted a welcome and one of the cows belched a soft moo. They shifted in their stalls when I lit a lantern. I spread fresh hay and felt a surge of tenderness for the animals’ familiar bodily warmth. They needed only dry, secure shelter and food.
What would the near-mute, ugly man inside my house need? As I lifted the full, covered buckets of milk, I felt the fatigue in my shoulders from carrying him.
Back in the kitchen, I dried myself again and got things ready for when he woke. I pulled out some of Uncle Lester’s old clothes—overalls, wool socks, underwear, and a flannel shirt. They smelled musty, so I laid them over the dining chairs to air. I got out the tub, towels, and a washcloth, then checked the temperature of the water in the stove tank. I tried to read while I waited for him to wake up, but my eyes kept leaving the page for the long bundle of quilts on the floor.
He did not wake. It was late and I began to feel sleepy. I didn’t want to wake him to move him again, certainly not to a cold bedroom. I couldn’t bear the thought that he might wake in the middle of the night alone in a strange place. All that scarring; he’d already been through so much. What if he needed something?
So I brought out the rest of the pillows and quilts. I lined his cold side with the down pillows, then made myself a bed on the floor so we could sleep head to head, forming a semicircle near the stove.
For a long time, I did not sleep. An alertness filled me, but I also felt a peculiar calm. I thought again of the awful picture of the Japanese woman, how the skin on my strange-looking guest was so similar to hers. I was pleased that he was alive, however he had come to be half-buried on my land. There must be a secret military hospital nearby, I reasoned, a place for specially damaged soldiers. I tried to imagine such a place, and how he might have managed to leave naked. Lightning snapped, brightening the room. Rain on the tin roof drowned the sounds of his breathing. Then, despite my nap earlier that day, exhaustion overcame me and I drifted into sleep.
B
efore dawn, I woke with a start. In the dimness of the clouded moonlight coming through the window, I could sense more than see him looking at me.
I rose, stumbled blindly against the table, and then lit a lantern. He had turned in his sleep, his back to the stove. He stared up at me from his bed on the floor, that bright gaze drinking me in. He seemed familiar in a way I could not place. His skin appeared much better. The swirling and roughness remained, but less severe, like very old burn scars.
He pulled himself awkwardly up on his elbows, as if about to speak, and I knelt beside him. Reaching up, he touched my face and ran his fingertips lightly over my cheeks, lips, and eyelids. His hand had become smoother. His color was better, too, sallow rather than rusty, his head not nearly so spherical. His nose and eyes were more normal. Short, barely visible reddish hairs sprouted from his scalp. His ears were normal in size. The room fell away. Fascinated, I touched his cheek and forehead. He was not healing. This was too fast for healing. He was changing. Small sparks of alarm caught my breath. His hand on my jaw stopped, a question on his face.
“Who are you?” I whispered. “Where are you from?”
“From?” He pulled his hand slowly away, and his face went blank and still. I could almost hear him thinking. His gaze left my face and lost its focus. I leaned closer to him, touched his bare shoulder. I wanted his focus back. Fear surrendered to tenderness, a shift deep in my chest. “Are you feeling better?”
“Better.” A statement, not a question. Even his voice, far less coarse than the day before, sounded familiar. Maybe he was a local boy, his war scars making him unrecognizable.
The blanket slid farther off his shoulder. I remembered the clothes. “You should have a bath first, to get the dirt off, but these are for you.” I laid them on the blankets next to him.
He rubbed his hand along the pant leg of the overalls.
“Rest until I get the water and breakfast ready.”
I dressed, stoked up the stove, and fed the animals while he seemed to be sleeping again. I pulled the tub as close to the stove as I dared. After I filled it with warm water, I touched him on the shoulder to wake him. “Does this hurt?” I massaged his shoulder lightly.
“No.”
“You can take a bath now.”
He held my hands and pulled himself up into a sitting position. His grip was strong.
“You okay sitting up?”
“Okay.” He nodded back at me.
He didn’t seem to understand what to do next. Helping him stand was like pulling a very large, drunk child out of a low bed. He kept his eyes on me and I kept my eyes on his face so I wouldn’t have to see his naked body.
As soon as I got him standing, I let go and grabbed a towel. He swayed a little, but caught himself and planted his feet firmly apart while I reached behind him and wrapped the towel around his waist. I pulled his arm over my shoulder. We were the same height. He teetered awkwardly.
“You must have been on a real bender before you got here.” His hapless nakedness made me giddy.
He turned his head, so close now I could smell the clean, sweet odor of his breath, and gave me a blank, patient look.
“Just joking,” I said. The second step, which got him to the edge of the tub, was smoother.
“Get in,” I told him. “It’s warm, it’ll feel good.” But he only turned his head and regarded me with that pale-eyed gaze again. I reached down and lifted one of his legs, easing it slowly into the warm water. He let out a sharp “ahhh” of surprise as soon as his foot touched the water. I startled, afraid it might be too warm. But then he beamed a sweet, wide smile as if I’d just given him a whole tub of blackberry jam.
Once he got both feet in, he just stood there. I had to help him sit. In what I took for modesty, he left the towel on when he went down into the water. He sat in the tub smiling, waving his hands in the water, but not making any effort to bathe himself or take the cloth I held out. So I began to bathe his arms and shoulders very gently. He watched my face and hands, all the while smiling at me. A sweet odor rose from the water. He smelled like a newly mowed summer lawn. He sighed and shut his eyes. I sensed that odd sound again, the soothing resonant chime. I touched his chest. He opened his eyes wide, and the sound changed timbre and pitch. I could feel its vibration through my hand.
I took my hand away from his chest and forced myself to move around behind him to wash his back. The scarring was there, too. My throat clenched. I needed words to counter what I saw, to soften the horrors I imagined had caused such damage. “Are you from around here? Where are you from?”
He said nothing. I couldn’t see his face, but imagined his blank then confused expression. After a moment, he spoke. “I don’t know where I am from.” Each word stood carefully by itself, his first full sentence.
The bath water began to cool. I held his hands again and he stood with more confidence. But the towel stayed in the water. He did not seem to notice and just held the dry towel when I handed it to him.
“Dry yourself. Here. Like this.” I rubbed his shoulder with the towel, careful not to look down. “You can get dressed. Hurry before you get cold.” I dried him off and he helped in his awkward way.
He just stood there when he was dry. Clearly, he needed my help getting dressed. I knelt in front of him holding his underwear open and, averting my eyes, I motioned that he should lift his leg. He got the idea and, steadying himself by holding on to my shoulders, stepped with his other leg into the shorts. I bent forward, holding them open. As I rose to pull them up around his hips, I had to see what was right in front of my face. There was an awful protruding mangle of flesh, neither man nor woman, and a fuzz of red pubic hair.
“Who did this to you? Who hurt you like this?” I held his rough face in my hands. “What happened to you?”
His face contorted, alarmed and puzzled. He put his hand up and touched a tear on my face. “Hurt?” he said. “Who did this?”
“Were you in Japan?”
“Japan?”
I was upsetting him. He didn’t seem to know how to answer. He stared at me, waiting to find out about Japan.
“Let’s finish putting your clothes on and then I’ll show you something,” I said. I helped him put on the rest of his clothes. They were too big, even the shoes. He was not as tall as Uncle Lester. I slipped Uncle Lester’s socks on over his scarred foot. Like the bath, socks seemed new and unexpected to him, but after the struggle of the first one, he held his foot firm so the second one slipped on easily.
“Wait,” I said when he was dressed. I brought the picture of the Japanese woman back to him and held it out. He took it carefully, holding it by the corner, and studied the woman. A ragged sigh rose from him.
“This is hurt?” He held the photograph out for me to take.
I touched his hand, feeling the strangeness of his skin, and turned it over next to my hand, comparing. “I know who did this to her, but who did this to you?”
He seemed to struggle for words and then announced, “I am not like her. I am not hurt. I do not hurt.” I took the photograph back.
“You don’t hurt anywhere?” I rubbed his shoulder. He leaned into my touch like a purring cat.
He shook his head, then turned his attention back to our hands. Taking my hand in both of his, he held it, touching me lightly at first, then searching the bones and tendons of my wrist as if memorizing them.
I did not bathe after him, as I normally would have, to take advantage of the labor of getting up a hot bath. I let the water go cold. When I went to throw it out, it was not muddy as I had expected it to be, but almost clear, with just a bit of grit in the bottom. There was not much dirt on the quilts, either, not nearly what there should have been given the conditions I’d found him in.
The rain continued that day, the waterfall of it crashed off the roof, keeping me housebound with my odd stranger. I had begun to think of him as mine. Mine to protect and teach. Mine to bring back to what he had been before. I tried not to think of the unnatural speed of his recovery, or the faint vibrating drone that sometimes emanated from him. I still thought of him as a damaged soldier.
Except for my brief trips to the barn, I spent that day holding him by the hand, guiding his clumsy steps around the house, and talking to him.
Again and again, I asked him about his family and where he was from. Did he remember anyone or anything? The answer remained the same, “I don’t know.” The only thing he seemed to be certain of was his lack of pain.
In the hope of triggering some memories, I told him stories of my family. Stories about my momma’s family, poor Appalachian hill farmers coming down to work in the cotton mills. About her crazy cousin who robbed post offices and the federal agents who came looking for him. I told the story of my father’s half-sister, the only relation I had never met, who ran off with a boy from Chicago named Hardin.
Of all things, I thought my talk of the war would make him remember something, but even that seemed news to him. He could not remember anything from his past. Reluctantly, I concluded that he must be brain-damaged. But he was so lucid. He filled the room.
Something in his manner and bearing seemed so familiar. I was certain that he was a local boy. I covered the local geography, naming towns, counties, hills, rivers, and creeks nearby, hoping to jog some uninjured part of his brain. None of what I said helped him remember his people, but he turned that deaf-man gaze on me, and I felt like I was reciting Holy Scripture to a drowning sinner.
I saw no judgment, no appraisal in his eyes. He wasn’t like the boys in the mill-village. He reminded me of Cole. I was not too tall, red-haired, or freckled when I talked to him. I was unaccustomed to the intensity of his attention, and at times it made me shy, but I wanted to meet his gaze. I wanted to tell this man everything, to give him the world he seemed to have lost.
By the end of the day, his gait was almost normal and the questions were coming from him. He followed me, watching everything I did. He wanted to know the name of everything—a knife, the stove, the buckle on his overalls.
That afternoon, I discovered that he had even forgotten what a chamber pot was for. The outhouse was not close, so I had taken to using a chamber pot sometimes even during the day, and I certainly wasn’t going out in the continuing downpour just to pee. Since I had been living alone so much, I’d taken to leaving the pot on the back porch. In bad weather, I used it in a corner, behind the tool shelves. He found me there just before sunset that day. I was squatting over the pot, doing my business, when he appeared. I startled, but there wasn’t much to be done except finish peeing. He watched me with the same intense interest he had in everything. Beside him, Hobo peered at me, sniffing the air. Then the cat stuck her head around the corner.
“I guess this means we’re pretty good friends, but even my family doesn’t find this so interesting they have to watch.”
My comment seemed to please him.
“Oh!” he said when I finished and he saw the pot behind me. He stood very close to me. I smelled his faint green odor. He sniffed, too. I offered him the pot and walked away until I heard the metallic clink of the fasteners on his overalls. I couldn’t help myself, I peered back over my shoulder. When I didn’t see him standing over the pot, I took a couple of quiet steps backward and peeked over the shelves. He squatted like a woman, staring down between his legs like a child. I blushed, remembering what I had seen there when I helped him dress. After he finished, he beamed up at me, happy, completely unself-conscious.
Later, when we ate dinner, I noticed his skin was much better. Not quite normal, but in the lamplight, I could see that it had lost its odd yellow hue. Only traces of the burn-like scarring remained. His skin was smoother. The roughness now seemed just below the surface, like the dimpling and slight lumpiness of fat. His hair formed a short copper halo. He reminded me of the children in my family when they were younger. His emerging familiarity kept my mind off of how he had looked when I found him. I no longer felt the urgent need to call Momma and Daddy for help. This strange man had begun to feel like a gift instead of an emergency. A curious gift.