Silent Boy (21 page)

Over the Fourth of July weekend I took Charity camping with me and some of my friends and their children. We went clear up into the Rockies, driving as far through the trees on the mountainside as the Jeep would take us and then packing in almost three miles farther beyond the end of the road.

Charity complained the entire three miles. She wasn’t used to walking that far, and even though I had found a pair of decent hiking boots for her, she said her feet hurt and her back hurt and she was tired. It was a bit of a bother as my friends’ twin sons who were five and their little girl who was three all carried their own sleeping bags and rucksacks and even the dog carried his food. But Charity didn’t care if she was almost nine and carrying only a pack full of clothes. She was tired and hot and thought the things were too heavy. But since we weren’t in any hurry, when Charity complained of being tired, we stopped. When her back hurt, I took her pack. And in the end, we made it.

It was a lovely weekend. Charity came alive in the mountains. I taught her to swim in the small, icy pools under the waterfalls. Charity adored that. We had neglected to pack bathing suits, so she started out swimming in her holey, grimy underpants. However, in a short time she had both pairs wet and none dry and so she dropped her inhibitions altogether and cavorted through the water bare. It was the way it should have been, I thought, as I sat on the rocks by the side of the stream and watched her. I had unbraided Charity’s long thick hair and it flowed about her like a black cloak. The pudginess which made her fat in polyester was robustness against the wraithlike lodgepole pines that came right down to the pool’s edge. She was beautiful there, a native to the forest and the water, at once one with the world about her.

She learned to fish too and loved that best of all. She had a hunter’s instinct. Searching out the best ‘holes,’ watching silently on the banks to see fish moving in the depths below became an hours-long occupation for her.

And there were also the normal chores of camping. Fuel had to be found, fires started. Tents had to be straightened each morning. Suppers of roast potatoes and hot dogs cooked, smoke wafting up through the pines. Afterward we sat around the campfire in the growing dusk telling stories. A far-off forest fire deepened the air around us and made it pungent with a smell which simultaneously evoked warmth and death.

We made strange conglomerations out of bananas, marshmallows and chocolate bars and wrapped them up in foil to bake in the embers. We told such stories. We all did. Even Maggie, the three-year-old, had a story. So did I. And so did Charity. I suppose because she was so good at creating her own tales, I ought to have known she’d be a storyteller, but I hadn’t. No one among us was more captivated than I when she started in. She was sitting on the far side of the campfire, almost apart from the rest of us. The flames did not illuminate her face as they did ours. It gave mystery to the small, almost disembodied voice that told us of The Unknown One, who was Son of Two Men. We heard of camps and lodges long dead, even in memory, of gods who had no more worshipers, of a people now faded as mist into darkness.

There were long pauses in Charity’s story. Not thinking pauses so much as listening pauses. She would cock her head and listen to the night sounds and then continue her tale. At one point, with her voice quiet as the wind through the pines, she lapsed into her native tongue. It didn’t matter really. The soft, strange words carried the meaning of the story just as well.

Then we were alone, Charity and I, snuggled warm in our sleeping bags. The air was summer warm, a breezy, breath-soft sort of night, and the stars were veiled behind distant smoke. I left the flap of the tent open so that we could see the night.

We had camped up on a ridge between two mountains. The taller was to our left, an old extinct volcano named Hollowtop. From where we lay in the tent, the huge massif of the mountain was silhouetted against the hazy tapestry of stars.

Long after all was quiet in the camp and I had drifted asleep, I heard Charity call out cautiously. ‘Torey?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Where are we?’

I rolled over sleepily. ‘In the tent. We’re camping, remember?’

‘Oh yeah,’ she replied, a little troubled.

‘Are you frightened, Charity?’

‘Oh no. Not me.’

Silence.

Are there any bears up here, Torey?’ she inquired politely.

‘No,’ I answered.’ I shouldn’t think there are. They’d be other places.’

‘Do you know that for sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘There might be bears.’

‘No.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I know bears, Charity. And none would be here.’

‘What if there were?’

‘I’d keep them all away from you, Char. I’d keep you very safe. Now go back to sleep.’

‘Torey? How’d you keep me safe? Would you fight ’em?’

‘I’d fight ’em, Char. And I’d win. Now go to sleep.’

Silence.

‘Torey?’

‘Ye-es.’

Are there any lions, Torey?’

‘No. There are absolutely, positively no lions. None at all here. Now go back to sleep and don’t worry about it.’

‘What about mountain lions? There might be mountain lions.’

‘No. No mountain lions. I’d hear them, if there were. And I don’t. So we’re quite safe. Now go to sleep.’ I closed my eyes. Charity moved her sleeping bag closer to mine and I made a little hollow where she could cuddle.

The night-time stillness came down again and I thought she had fallen back asleep.

‘Torey?’ in the tiniest voice.

‘Yes, Charity.’

‘Well, my mom said I wasn’t to sleep with you unless you asked me to. But if you did ask me, well, she said I could, you know.’

‘I see.’

‘I thought you’d want to know that. Just in case you did want me to sleep with you.’

‘Are you scared?’

‘No. No. I just thought you might be cold or something and didn’t like to ask. But if you did want me to, I wouldn’t mind.’

Sleepily I sat up. I smiled at her. ‘Yes, I wanted you to sleep with me all along.’

She broke into a most glorious smile. ‘I thought you did!’

Then I took a month off and went to Wales.

The cool, misty mountains in the north of that small country had become a home to my heart. I never knew quite why; I only knew the yearning, the
hiraeth
, as the Welsh called it in their own language. So in late July I packed my mountain boots and my rucksack and left the clinic and the city and the hot Western summer behind. I spent weeks walking through the wet, wild places, across the windy moors and over the Pass of the Arrows, where King Arthur met defeat. Nights were spent in small stone cottages of friends or around the coal fire in the pub while mists rolled up from the Irish Sea. They are called simply The High Places by their own people. And one local poet said that the Welsh left their mountains only once because they could never bear the pain of leaving them again.

M
y head was still somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when the phone rang. I lifted my head from the pillow and was totally disoriented. It was daylight. Morning? Afternoon? Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow? I still had not managed to answer that question satisfactorily by the time I had stumbled to the telephone.

It was Jeff. I was in no mood for his company.

‘My God, Jeff, I just got back. What are you calling at this time of day for anyway? What time is it?’

‘8:30.’

‘Oh. In the evening? The morning?’

‘In the morning. I’m at the office.’

I was squinting at the kitchen clock. Yes, it was 8:30. ‘I’m not due in today, Jeff. It’s still my vacation. I’m not coming in until Monday.’

‘I know it.’

‘Then what on earth do you want?’

‘Well,’ he said, and there was a sigh. ‘Do you remember Kevin Richter? From Garson Gayer?’

‘Of course I remember him.’

‘He’s in the psychiatric unit at Mortenson Hospital.’

I came fully awake. In a way I wish I hadn’t. I wished I were still in Wales and this was all just a dream.

On a hot August night Kevin had apparently become involved in a fracas out in Bellefountaine with a couple of other boys and with a woman counselor. It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened, according to Jeff, but Kevin seemed to have attacked the woman in the course of an argument. He broke her arm and dislocated her shoulder. The police were called. Kevin was summarily removed from the home and taken down to the juvenile center at the courthouse.

Geez, I said. Just wait, Jeff replied, that’s only the first of it.

Kevin was retained at juvenile hall for three or four days while they tried to decide what to do with him. Then he broke out. Loose for two days in the city, he had broken into the clinic the previous night.

The clinic? I echoed. Yeah, Jeff said. Our office. What the hell did he want to break into our office for? I asked.

Easy. He was looking for his knife, for the blue metal bedstead knife he had given me to keep for him so many months before. Did I remember that? Jeff asked. How could I forget it. Apparently, Kevin had only one goal in mind when he escaped from juvenile hall. To kill his stepfather. He knew I had the knife, although he didn’t know I had been on vacation. A boy matching his description had been around the clinic during the day, pestering Shirley, the receptionist, to see me. When she had told him I wasn’t due back yet, from Wales, he had left. Then after dark, he had broken in.

They caught him, the police did, him and his knife, which he had found in my desk drawer. Now he was in the high-security unit at Mortenson.

Understandably, Jeff and a whole lot of other people were quite keen for me to come in to work. You ought to see what our office looks like, Jeff said. You just wait. And wait until the people from Mortenson get hold of you. They’re dying to talk to you.

I just bet they were.

I went into the bathroom, ran a basin full of water and had a good scrub. As I pulled the washcloth down over my face, I saw myself in the mirror. I literally had not been back Twenty–four hours and was exhausted. It showed in my face and no amount of soap and water could wash it away.

I arrived to find our office a declared disaster area. All the drawers had been pulled out of both our desks and the contents strewn about the floor. The bookshelves had been emptied. Paper was everywhere.

Jeff sat in his office chair in the middle of it all. He looked like I felt, devastated.

‘I suppose it’s what we should have expected,’ he said forlornly as I picked my way across the room and sat down in my chair. ‘There had to be more to that kid, didn’t there? It couldn’t have been as easy as it was, could it? Not after all those years.’

‘I had been kind of hoping it had been,’ I replied.

‘Yes, So had I. But …’ Jeff swiveled his chair back and forth aimlessly. ‘I guess I have to face the fact that the kid never really ever told me much. Not really. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think he ever told me anything.’

‘What do you mean?’ I looked over at him.

Jeff shrugged. ‘You know. You know as well as I do. He just never
said
anything. It was all surface stuff. It’s just that…’Jeff paused. ‘It’s just that I got so sick of you. You always sitting there, saying “My gut says this.” “My gut says that.”’ He smiled drily. ‘I knew you were right all along. I knew the stupid kid wasn’t telling me a damned thing, that it was all just some sort of class act of his. But I got so blooming sick of hearing about you and your gut …’

I grimaced.

Jeff shrugged again. ‘But I got nothing from him. And after a while you begin to believe in nothing.’

‘I’d believed,’ I said softly. ‘I think I really did believe that he was getting better. I thought we’d fixed him.’

I felt like crying. I hadn’t wanted Jeff to say something like that to me. I hadn’t wanted to know the actual problem had been the communication between him and me. Most of all, I hadn’t wanted to be right.

‘Well, yes,’ said Jeff gently, ‘I guess maybe I believed him too.’ He smiled at me. ‘Don’t blame yourself for it.’

‘But he
was
getting better. He did improve, didn’t he? What more was there? I guess I thought maybe that was enough.’

‘I guess we both did,’ Jeff replied.

‘But he
was
improving, Jeff. He
did
get better. Even this, Jeff, is better than what he was under his table. At least I think maybe it is. I don’t know. What more is there? I have no answers. I was good at the questions but I never had any answers.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We never had any answers. In a way we never even had all the questions. We really don’t have anything.’

The hospital wanted me up there. They recognized, I suspect, the strange, twisted part I was playing in this. Moreover, Kevin had ceased talking. He hadn’t said a single word to anyone other than the police. So after an hour with Jeff in the office, picking up the ruins of our desk drawers, I got back into the car and drove across the city to Mortenson Hospital.