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 colourless 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 belike 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 x 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