the doctor closed the door carefully after them, leaning against it until he heard it click shut. The room was small and crowded, because of the examining table there was hardly space left over for a couple of chairs. The two men were forced to sit face to face, their knees almost touching. The doctor breathed peppermint into Alec’s face. Alec didn’t wait for him to begin. “What’s wrong? Is Earl hurt bad somehow?” he demanded.
The doctor was relieved to find he could begin on a note of reassurance. “No, from what I can gather your son was very lucky,” he said. “Most of his injuries are pretty superficial, a few first- and second-degree burns. He’ll be all right on that score.”
“What about this shock business? That doesn’t look too hot to me.”
“In pathological terms he’s not suffering from shock at all – not shock as a result of physical trauma at any rate. I’ve checked his blood pressure for instance and it’s not depressed, all other vital signs are normal.” The young doctor realized he had lost his listener. He hadn’t been long out of medical school and medical school clung to him still. He tried again. “We don’t have to worry about shock – not that kind at any rate,” he said.
“Why don’t he talk then?” Alec asked. “Why does he look so Jesus awful then?”
“He talked to me,” said Dr. Evans.
“Earl never said a word to me or Stutz on the way in – you can ask Stutz.”
“I don’t doubt he didn’t,” said the doctor. He paused before taking the next step. “Mr. Monkman,” he asked, “has your son ever mentioned anything to you about hearing voices?”
Monkman gave the doctor an uncomprehending stare. It was clear he didn’t grasp the question. “How do you mean – voices?”
“Voices which aren’t there. Voices with nobody speaking them. Voices that urge him to do things. Things like happened tonight.”
“Christ.” There was no place for Alec to turn his eyes. The doctor was too close to him to avoid looking at.
“No signs of anything like this before? No auditory hallucinations?” He rephrased the question. “I mean to say, he’s never heard things that weren’t there, or seen things that didn’t exist?”
“No.” No sooner had he said that than Alec recollected Earl’s complaining of his mother banging cupboard doors and walking through the house after she was buried. Still, he was just a child at the time. It was nothing more than imagination and shouldn’t count. Yet the memory made him compromise. Guiltily he retreated, but only so far. “I’m not sure. Maybe. I haven’t seen much of him this summer.”
“Let me ask you something else then. Has Earl ever tried to harm himself before tonight?”
“Who says he tried to harm himself tonight?”
Dr. Evans disregarded the challenge. “I know this isn’t a pleasant discussion – but I want you to tell me if he’s ever tried to hurt himself. He’s never burned himself with matches, or stuck himself with pins, has he? Nothing like that? Any exhibition of self-destructive behaviour before?”
“On purpose, you mean?” asked Alec, astounded.
“Yes, on purpose.”
“If I had, I’d have self-destructed him. I’d have kicked his arse until he barked like a bloody fox,” asserted Monkman, shaken by outrage at the very idea. Imagine Earl, his gentle boy, ever doing such a thing!
Dr. Evans tapped his jaw with the barrel of a fountain-pen. “It’s not, as you say, a question of ‘kicking him in the arse,’ ” he said severely. “That’s not how sick people are made better.” He paused to let his statement sink in. “And after what your boy has told me, I have no doubt he’s sick.”
“He’s worn out with all the work he done this summer. He needs building up.”
“He needs more than building up to get better.”
“Whatever he needs, give it to him.”
“It’s beyond me what he needs. I’m not equipped to give it to him. Neither is Dr. Dowler. No G.P. is. But there is a place he can go for treatment.”
“What you’re talking about is the Mental, isn’t it?” said Monkman.
“If you mean the Provincial Mental Hospital – yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Fuck that noise. My Earl’s not going anywhere near that place.”
Young Dr. Evans had expected as much. They had been warned at medical school to expect such reactions from families. “Listen,” he said, choosing his words carefully so that the man sitting across from him could comprehend, “there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Mental illness is an illness like any other, like pneumonia or appendicitis, say. If your boy had appendicitis you wouldn’t deny him treatment, would you? No, you’d say, ‘Do whatever needs to be done to make him well.’ That’s what you’d say, wouldn’t you? And another thing. It’s not the way it used to be there. Forget the old stories you may have heard. Most of them weren’t true anyway. There are new treatments now. Patients get well. They come back to their families and homes. You must understand. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Alec wasn’t ashamed. How to explain to the doctor? He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I couldn’t do it to him,” he said. “I couldn’t put him in a place like that, full of strangers, without a face he knows. He’s too shy. He isn’t capable. Ever since he was a little one, all he wanted was to be with his own, his family. Know what his sister called him? ‘Home-sticker.’ Because he wouldn’t play any place but his own yard. He was that timid, you see? All he wanted was home.”
Alec hoped that what he said would make the doctor understand. He searched for some change in his manner, for some sign that he was no longer so sure. Monkman knew that otherwise he would have to give way. A simple, uneducated man like him could not, in the end, resist medical arguments, medical authority.
The doctor’s face was implacable.
It was Stutz and Alec who delivered Earl with the necessary papers. A long, exhausting drive with stretches of indescribably bad road. The men commented on the progress of the harvest to distract their minds from what they were doing.
At one point in the trip Alec said to Stutz, “If anybody asks where Earl’s at – he went east to visit his sister and maybe to look for work. When he comes back better, he won’t need this as common knowledge.” Earl’s complete and unbroken silence had already caused his father to fall into the habit of talking about him as if he wasn’t present.
Stutz pursed his lips disapprovingly. “That’s a lie.”
Alec lost his temper, something he seldom did with Stutz. “If you’re too goddamn pure to tell a lie – then refer them to me. I can tell enough lies for the both of us if I need to. Just promise me to keep quiet. Can you do that much?”
Quiet they both kept.
17
Although Vera had come to a decision, for nearly two weeks she held her cards close to her vest and gave no hint of what she was thinking, even when Stutz went fishing by reminding her that his offer still stood. She was behaving exactly as she had done years before when she joined the Army without taking anyone into her confidence. There’s many a slip betwixt cup and lip, Vera was fond of telling herself.
That was part of it, but not all. She didn’t want to leave the impression of being desperate by grabbing at the money too quickly. It was undignified. A respectable delay between offer and cautious acceptance gave the whole transaction more of a business-like air and made it feel less like charity. There were reasons of pleasure, too. Vera liked the tease of anticipation, the slow boil of excitement that came with knowing she was going to shake and throw the dice. Last of all, she was not inclined to rush headlong into this because she half-expected to one day soon find her father on her doorstep, prepared to apologize. The great man himself, not Stutz.
Sitting in the bare, rented shack without so much as a radio to distract her, pictures would form in her mind. There she stood with her father having a real conversation, all the pieces of the puzzle that was their lives falling into place and locking solid in exactly the way they never had before.
And then suddenly she would be furious with herself for making the same stupid mistake she had been making since the first day she had set foot back in Connaught. Hoping for the miracle to occur, hoping that honesty, if
