More Than Human Read online

  “Get a rag, hot water,” he grunted. She went out and he gently lifted off the blanket. “Oh my God.”

  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 colorless 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 traveling the same road again.”

  “You think he’s going to be like 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 12x12 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 nearby, 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 o
ver 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 him and that which did not concern him. He never really learned to hear speech; instead, ideas were transmitted to him directly. Ideas in themselves are formless and it is hardly surprising that he learned very slowly to give ideas the form of speech.

  “What’s your name?” Prodd asked him suddenly one day. They were filling the horse trough from the cistern and there was that about water running and running in the sun which tugged deeply at the idiot. Utterly absorbed, he was jolted by the question. He looked up and found his gaze locked with Prodd’s.

  Name. He made a reaching, a flash of demand, and it returned to him carrying what might be called a definition. It came, though, as pure concept. “Name” is the single thing which is me and what I have done and been and learned.

  It was all there, waiting for that single symbol, a name. All the wandering, the hunger, the loss, the thing which is worse than loss, called back. There was a dim and subtle awareness that even here, with the Prodds, he was not a something, but a substitute for something.

  All alone.

  He tried to say it. Directly from Prodd he took the concept and its verbal coding and the way it ought to sound. But understanding and expressing were one thing; the physical act of enunciation was something else again. His tongue might have been a shoe sole and his larynx a rusty whistle. His lips writhed. He said, “Ul … ul …”

  “What is it, son?”

  All alone. It was transmitted clear and clean, complete, but as a thought only and he sensed instantly that a thought sent this way had no impact whatever on Prodd, though the farmer strained to receive what he was trying to convey. “Ul-ul … lone,” he gasped.

  “Lone?” said Prodd.

  It could be seen that the syllable meant something to Prodd, something like the codification he offered, though far less.

  But it would do.

  He tried to repeat the sound, but his unaccustomed tongue became spastic. Saliva spurted annoyingly and ran from his lips. He sent a desperate demand for help, for some other way to express it, found it, used it. He nodded.

  “Lone,” repeated Prodd.

  And again he nodded; and this was his first word and his first conversation; another miracle.

  It took him five years to learn to talk and always he preferred not to. He never did learn to read. He was simply not equipped.

  There were two boys for whom the smell of disinfectant on tile was the smell of hate.

  For Gerry Thompson it was the smell of hunger, too, and of loneliness. All food was spiced with it, all sleep permeated with disinfectant, hunger, cold, fear … all components of hatred. Hatred was the only warmth in the world, the only certainty. A man clings to certainties, especially when he has only one; most especially when he is six years old. And at six Gerry was very largely a man—at least, he had a grown man’s appreciation of that gray pleasure which comes merely with the absence of pain; he had an implacable patience, found usually only in men of purpose who must appear broken until their time of decision arrives. One does not realize that for a six-year-old the path of memory stretches back for just as long a lifetime as it does for anyone, and is as full of detail and incident. Gerry had had trouble enough, loss enough, illness enough, to make a man of anyone. At six he looked it, too; it was then that he began to accept, to be obedient, and to wait. His small, seamed face became just another face, and his voice no longer protested. He lived like this for two years, until his day of decision.

  Then he ran away from the state orphanage, to live by himself, to be the color of gutters and garbage so he would not be picked up; to kill if cornered; to hate.

  For Hip there was no hunger, no cold, and no precocious maturity. There was the smell of hate, though. It surrounded his father the doctor, the deft and merciless hands, the somber clothes. Even Hip’s memory of Doctor Barrows’ voice was the memory of chlorine and carbolic.

  Little Hip Barrows was a brilliant and beautiful child, to whom the world refused to be a straight, hard path of disinfected tile. Everything came easily to him, except control of his curiosity—and “everything” included the cold injections of rectitude administered by his father the doctor, who was a successful man, a moral man, a man who had made a career of being sure and of being right.

  Hip rose through childhood like a rocket, burnished, swift, afire. His gifts brought him anything a young man might want, and his conditioning constantly chanted to him that he was a kind of thief, not entitled to that which he had not earned; for such was the philosophy of his father the doctor, who had worked hard for everything. So Hip’s talents brought him friends and honors, and friendships and honors brought him uneasiness and a sick humility of which he was quite unaware.

  He was eight when he built his first radio, a crystal set for which he even wound the coils. He suspended it from the bedsprings so it could not be seen except by lifting the bed itself and buried an earphone inside the mattress so he could lie awake at night and hear it. His father the doctor discovered it and forbade his ever touching so much as a piece of wire in the house again. He was nine when his father the doctor located his cache of radio and electronics texts and magazines and piled them all up in front of the fireplace and made him burn them, one by one; they were up all night. He was twelve when he won a Science Search engineering scholarship for his secretly designed tubeless oscilloscope, and his father the doctor dictated his letter of refusal. He was a brilliant fifteen when he was expelled from premedical school for playfully cross-wiring the relays in the staff elevators and adding some sequence switches, so that every touch of a control button was an unappreciated adventure. At sixteen, happily disowned, he was making his own living in a research laboratory and attending engineering school.

  He was big and bright and very popular. He needed to be very popular and this, like all his other needs, he accomplished with ease. He played the piano with a surprisingly delicate touch and played swift and subtle chess. He learned to lose skilfully and never too often at chess and at tennis and once at the harassing game of being “first in the Class, first in the School.” He always had time—time to talk and to read, time to wonder quietly, time to listen to those who valued his listening, time to rephrase pedantries for those who found them arduous in the original. He even had time for ROTC and it was through this that he got his commission.

  He found the Air Force a rather different institution from any school he had ever attended and it took him a while to learn that the Colonel could not be softened by humility or won by a witticism like the Dean of Men. It took him even longer to learn that in Service it is the majority, not the minority, who tend to regard physical perfection, conversational brilliance and easy achievement as defects rather than assets. He found himself alone more than he liked and avoided more than he could bear.

  It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster….

  Alicia Kew stood in the deepest shade by the edge of the meadow. “Father, Father, forgive me!” she cried. She sank down on the grass, blind with grief and terror, torn, shaken with conflict.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered with passion. “Forgive me,” she whispered with scorn.

  She thought, Devil, why won’t you be dead? Five years ago you killed yourself, you killed my sister, and still it’s “Father, forgive me.” Sadist, pervert, murderer, devil … man, dirty poisonous man!

  I’ve come
a long way, she thought, I’ve come no way at all. How I ran from Jacobs, gentle Lawyer Jacobs, when he came to help with the bodies; oh, how I ran, to keep from being alone with him, so that he might not go mad and poison me. And when he brought his wife, how I fled from her too, thinking women were evil and must not touch me. They had a time with me, indeed they did; it was so long before I could understand that I was mad, not they … it was so long before I knew how very good, how very patient, Mother Jacobs was with me; how much she had to do with me, for me. “But child, no one’s worn clothes like those for forty years!” And in the cab, when I screamed and couldn’t stop, for the people, the hurry, the bodies, so many bodies, all touching and so achingly visible; bodies on the streets, the stairs, great pictures of bodies in the magazines, men holding women who laughed and were brazenly unfrightened … Dr. Rothstein who explained and explained and went back and explained again; there is no poison sweat, and there must be men and women else there would be no people at all…. I had to learn this, Father, dear devil Father, because of you; because of you I had never seen an automobile or a breast or a newspaper or a railroad train or a sanitary napkin or a kiss or a restaurant or an elevator or a bathing suit or the hair on—oh forgive me, Father.

  I’m not afraid of a whip, I’m afraid of hands and eyes, thank you Father. One day, one day, you’ll see, Father, I shall live with people all around me, I shall ride on their trains and drive my own motorcar; I shall go among thousands on a beach at the edge of a sea which goes out and out without walls, I shall step in and out among them with a tiny strip of cloth here and there and let them see my navel, I shall meet a man with white teeth, Father, and round strong arms, Father, and I shall oh what will become of me, what have I become now, Father forgive me.

  I live in a house you never saw, one with windows overlooking a road, where the bright gentle cars whisper past and children play outside the hedge. The hedge is not a wall and, twice for the drive and once for the walk, it is open to anyone. I look through the curtains whenever I choose, and see strangers. There is no way to make the bathroom black dark and in the bathroom is a mirror as tall as I am; and one day, Father, I shall leave the towel off.