Silas Timberman (29 page)

“All right. Sure. Sure,” he told her.

He kept an arm around her as they looked down at the pathetically tiny figure, the face swathed in bandages; and for the first time, the first time in all his life, Silas knew the full meaning of horror. Into his mind's eye, awful and agonizing, came the picture of the rock striking the glass window-pane, against which the little face was pressed to see the cross burning—and then he saw the faceless, mindless thing that had thrown the stone, and then hate came, like a flood of fire that would never burn itself out.

Somehow, horror, love and hatred used him up, calmed him and altered him. His voice was even and natural as he said, “You can't go, can you, Myra dear?”

“No—please.”

“All right. You stay here. I'll bring you some clothes. I'll just shave and get dressed, and then I'll be back.”

“The girls?”

“They'll be all right. Alec is with them. Alec won't leave them.”

“Yes—yes, Si.”

He left her sitting next to the bed, and when Spencer saw him, Spencer wondered, strangely, what was so deeply different in him?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tuesday: December 18, 1951

THE ARREST

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ARREST

The day they took the bandages off Brian's eyes was the day before Silas was arrested—a connection Silas always made afterwards, just as he always remembered that this was a week before Christmas. It was computation by a different calendar than most people around him used, but not a new way; and he could recall that it was by such a calendar that his mother and father had lived, not the dry stuff of days and weeks, but when this child was born and when that sister died, when the season was good or lean, when there was work or no work, when the winter was terribly cold or not too cold, when his own brother had died of diphtheria—when lightning struck or a storm raged or the sun warmed the earth for a little while; and now his own life too had taken that form.

It was a reckoning of people who knew trouble, who walked side by side with trouble. He had noticed Mike Leslie doing it a few days ago, when he drove in from Indianapolis to see how Brian was, and in the course of things remarked about a time fifteen years ago—“The year of the big strike,” as he put it. “Was it '35 or '36?”

Anyway, it was decent of him and thoughtful of him to come. He brought with him a miniature farm, with more than fifty figures of livestock and people—Silas could guess what it had cost—and set them up on the counterpane of Brian's bed, and guided the little boy's fingers over each figure with patience and understanding.

“Do I know you?” Brian kept asking.

“Now you do. I'm Mike Leslie.”

“But I never saw you?”

“You'll see me. I'm a funny-looking man with a long nose.”

“Oh?”

“I'm a good friend of yours, too. We're going to be buddies after you get back on your feet. I got a little boy who's seven years old. His name is Mike too.”

“Big Mike and Little Mike,” Brian said, greatly amused. “You get mixed up?”

“Sometimes—yes, we get mixed up.”

Afterwards, Leslie asked Silas, “How will he be?”

“We're hoping for the best. We'll know in a few days—when the bandages come off—”

“I hope so, I hope so,” Leslie said.

But as the time approached, it became harder and worse, harder for both of them but much harder for Myra. She didn't sleep. She lay in bed, still, silent, her eyes open, staring and staring. Sometimes Silas would wake up in the middle of the night and find her like that and beg her to try to relax, try to sleep.

“I'm all right, Si. Don't worry about me.”

“You're eating yourself up, eating your heart out. Darling, you're squeezing your soul dry.”

“Funny for you to say that—it makes me think, you know that old saying, the eyes are the windows of the soul—”

His relief when the day came was in good measure for Myra. Now there would be a decision, and whatever it was, they would have to face it and Brian would have to face it; and he had no doubt but that they would be able to. They had all changed, he and Myra and the girls, and Brian too; they had all come of somber age together, and they were able to face things, many things. Sometimes, when he sat next to Brian's bed and talked to him, or read to him, or played one of the many games he had invented for a little boy who had no eyes, he was astounded by the child's grave understanding. Brian almost never complained, and his acceptance tore at Silas' heart more than anything else in the situation—to an extent where Silas was thankful that they had never discovered who threw the stone, for had he been able to personalize the act in terms of a known individual, he could have killed that person without hesitation or qualm, and possibly would not have rested until he had.

In any case, they could not go on that way; they had to know—and he was glad when the day came. They had asked Dr. Sapperman to come before noon, while the girls were still at school; if it was to be good news, it could hold, and if the news was bad, they would want time to think it through.

“You both get hold of yourselves,” Sapperman said, after he had greeted them, evidently aware of what such situations entailed. He was a very small, fat man, with long-fingered, womanish hands, and a petulant, nervous manner, yet he said several times, “Don't be nervous. No need at all to be nervous. It's only fair to the little boy, after all the pain he's suffered. You have no idea how painful these eye injuries can be. We've hardly begun to understand the complex around the optic nerve. As far as the boy is concerned, the pain is gone. That's something to be thankful for, isn't it? Don't ask for miracles. People keep asking me for miracles. Moses Sapperman. I can't strike a rock and bring forth water. I do whatever I can do.”

“Why doesn't he stop?” Myra thought. “Why doesn't he stop that senseless chatter and get on with it?”

He went into the kitchen, asked Myra for pots, and fussily prepared his instruments himself, rattling on with his disjointed comments as he waited for the water to boil. He told Silas to go up to Brian's room and darken it as much as possible. “Shades drawn, curtains drawn. We don't like too much light, enough to see by, but not too much. Light is a force in itself, and if the nerves are all right, it will hurt him like all get out. We want it to hurt, as a matter of fact. Beneficial pain—life is pain—”

“Stop it,” Myra was pleading silently. “Stop it, please.”

Silas went upstairs into Brian's room, and said, “Hello, monkey. The doctor's here. Be nice to him.”

“Again?”

“Yup.” Brian heard him, and wanted to know what he was doing. “Drawing the shades. We're going to take those bandages off your eyes.” He had his back to Brian, and the silence disconcerted him, and he turned around, but waited because he didn't know what to say.

“Will I see?” Brian asked finally.

“Think you can wait a few minutes, son?”

“I can wait.” His vast patience was more disconcerting than tears or pleading would have been, and made Silas wonder again what had happened inside of him—what had happened inside of any of them and all of them? Then the doctor came, Myra with him, and they began to remove the bandages. He closed his eyes and stood rigidly, until he heard Brian crying with pain. He turned then and looked at the twisted face, Myra holding his hands away from his eyes, the scars red welts against the white skin, laced and interlaced all over with the suture marks.

“What do you see?” the doctor asked him. “Tell me, Brian—what do you see?”

“The light hurts.”

The doctor grinned at Silas, the petulance gone, the womanish hands caressing each other delightedly. “You see, the light hurts him—the nerve is there. We make a beginning.” Standing still though he was, the fat little man gave the impression of dancing wildly, celebrating his own triumph. Silas turned away to hide his tears.

* * *

It took none of the edge off their pleasure to hear from Sapperman that Brian would probably never recover normal vision and that the fact of how normal his vision would be could not yet be determined. Their fear was of blindness, and they knew now that he would not be blind. As Silas said, it was like opening his own eyes for the first time in weeks, and for Myra, it was more than that—it was being reborn; and for the moment, nothing else mattered or could matter. Even the fact of Silas' arrest the following day seemed of less import than it would have been, for they had accepted the possibility of an indictment ever since the hearing, accepted it without fully believing that it could be or fully hoping that it could not be, and then stored it away among the many uncertainties of the future. But since the stone was thrown, the future had ceased to be, and there was only the sightless present.

Susan and Geraldine caught the infection of their parents' delight. To them, blindness was as unknowable as death, and it became a game to discover how much Brian could see in those intervals when the protective coverings were removed from his eyes. If it seemed to Silas that there was an element of heartlessness there, Myra pointed out,

“What else can they do? They have their own scars to cover up.”

The future returned. Silas had taken to himself that curious phrase, “Without visible means of support—” Edna Crawford had returned to Massachusetts, and Leon Federman had embarked upon the writing of a vast book with the same furious outburst of energy that marked all of his activities. It was to be a collation of all scientific data, written for popular taste—something Silas could only conceive of in connection with Federman. The others marked time, and made plans to appeal their case through the courts, a forlorn hope. Ike Amsterdam was gradually accepting the fact that somehow or other, he would live the remainder of his years on the little money he had saved. Since Brian was hurt, he had come at least once a day, to sit by the child's bed and read to him or tell him fantastic stories of rocket ships and outer space, the fairyland of this generation of children; and there had been, with Ike Amsterdam and the rest of the suspended group, a cautious trickle of careful faculty members, to express their sympathy and their indignation at the attack on the house. But Silas couldn't help having the impression that their indignation was as carefully qualified as their sympathy had been—indignation for a stone thrown against a child, but qualified for whatever symbolic stones had been thrown at him.

Fulcrum
expressed the horror of the campus, saying, “Such acts of violence are not only to be deplored as the maniacal frothing of a lunatic fringe, but to be doubly condemned as serving the very cause of communism which we so bitterly oppose.” Silas pondered that sentence, which Mark Twain would have called a “daisy,” and put it in his file of memories, along with a note from Anthony C. Cabot's secretary, informing him that President Cabot also deplored this “savage and brutal attack” against a little child. His catalog of contempt was broadening. He no longer felt any necessity to know the singular identity of the sick hoodlum who had cast the stone; for he had come to realize that this was only the arm of the thrower; the nature of the body and the complexion of the mind were things he was beginning to understand—and he also understood that at some time in the future, his contempt would turn into something else. On that score, he was content to wait; for he had already learned too many things at a not inconsiderable price. All in good time, he would tell himself.…

It was Brady who said to him during those two weeks of waiting, “Did you know that my wife was a Methodist, Silas?”

Silas couldn't think of why it should matter, although he knew that Brady had been born a Roman Catholic.

“She belongs to Masterson's church, and last Sunday the old man preached his sermon on what happened to Brian. Fire and brimstone, she says. He pulled no punches, and laid the blame for the whole incident squarely where it belongs, at the doorstep of Mr. Cabot and the Brannigan gang. He also busted the book censorship wide open. My word, that's a man!”

“How did the congregation react?” Silas wondered.

“Mixed. Sarah liked it, others didn't. She had the impression that most of them didn't believe any of it—which is what you could expect. Also, a movement's under way to force Masterson's retirement. There's already been a meeting of vestrymen, and I expect they'll take it up to the top of the Church. Also, Cabot won't take it lying down. Our elder statesman here at Clemington is a vindictive bastard, I'm afraid.”

Brady was also different; subtly, he had stopped being a pedagog and was becoming something else. When Silas asked him where and when it would end, he shrugged and said.

“Partly, that's up to us, Silas. Where we end it and when we end it is a matter for our decision.”

“You and me?”

“You and me and a million like us. You see, this is only the beginning. Nothing begins and ends simultaneously. We can examine the beginning and draw our inferences—but the end is still unformed. It may surprise some people.…”

But men like Lawrence Kaplin saw no end that was different from the beginning; and the beginning was savagely permanent. His manner, when he came to see Silas, made Silas realize what agony he had suffered at the thought of Brian's hurt, and his wife, Selma, could not do enough to help Myra. She took the whole thing better than he did—causing Silas to wonder what strange sources of strength women had that men lacked? Kaplin had become an old man over the past few weeks; when they talked about the future, he told Silas that he and Selma were reading proof at home. It was not the best kind of work in the world and rather hard on his eyes, but if they could only maintain their contacts, they could average forty or fifty dollars a week working at home. It made Silas physically sick to hear this man, one of the very great English scholars of the English-speaking world, talk so hopefully and eagerly of earning, with his wife, wages paid to an apprentice in a mill.