Guests on Earth (17 page)

And then Dwane got out of the army and came back a hero, with a wooden foot, a lot of medals, constant pain, and a chip on his shoulder. Soon there was a terrible accident up on Crabtree Mountain, and Dwane’s brother Roman got killed some way or other, bringing the high sheriff and his deputies up the long rutted road. Charges were never placed against Dwane, but the county went back two days later and took the twins. Another baby gripping her skirt, Lorena stood weeping at the door to watch them go down the mountainside. After that, folks left them alone. Dwane made regular trips into town for the checks and the drugs he required from the pharmacy, sometimes accompanied by Lorena, who spoke to no one, shopping with her head down at the grocery store.

Time passed, and more time.

Then came the blizzard of 1928, which brought two feet of snow followed by an ice storm that left a solid sheet of ice on top of it. When that finally melted, making a river out of the road, Lorena put her coat on and wrapped little Millie up as best she could and they walked all the way down the mountain and just sat down in the snow, the two of them huddled together holding hands by the side of the road until somebody came along and found them.

This turned out to be a Church of Christ minister named Rudy Swink and two of his deacons, on their way to a prayer breakfast. Crazed, emaciated, and babbling, Lorena pulled at them until they parked the car and walked back up the mountain. She led them first to Dwane’s body, face down in the snow at the side of the house, where he had fallen coming back from the woodshed. He had been dead for several days.

But that was not all. Tugging insistently at the Reverend Swink’s sleeve, she took them into the house, which was “filthy something awful” as the Reverend described it later in the newspaper articles that Mrs. Hodges had saved all these years. The stove had gone out; you could see your breath in the air. Lorene kept on pulling at Reverend Swink’s sleeve, taking him into a makeshift pantry off the kitchen, which had ladder steps at the back of it leading down into a kind of a root cellar that contained the boy, Billy Ray Moss, in a slatted cage fashioned with chicken wire. At first, in the dim light, they didn’t even see him. Then “Lord God have mercy!” the Reverend had hollered, flinging out his hand in the old gospel style to pray before stumbling forward to open the latch, but the boy drew back into his rags and blankets and would not look at the preacher, or at anyone.

He was taken to Broughton Mental Hospital in Morganton, where he was the subject of great interest and much attention by the entire medical establishment, who came from far and wide to view him. Although about eight years old at the time of his discovery, he weighed only forty-eight pounds, walked on all fours or maintained a crouching posture, ate with his hands, and did not speak or make eye contact, flinching when anyone approached him.

“How do you all know all this?” I demanded of Mrs. Hodges one afternoon. “These details, I mean?”

“Why, my goodness, it was in all the papers, you had better believe it. Worldwide! Everybody knew about it. The Boy in the Cage, they called him. It was terrible, terrible. But he improved, with time. They made him their special pet over there at Broughton, they showered him with attention, and affection, don’t you know, as much as possible, and he improved, he did, quite a bit, to where he could stand up, and walk and run and speak, too—though he has never liked to, mind you—and eat with a spoon and a fork and all that, and even throw a football, and play a harmonica. Oh, he took to the harmonica! But he was still different from other children, of course, and the time came when he reached a plateau, they called it.”

“What did that mean?” I asked.

“They came to a point where the boy did not need to be in hospital any longer, and certainly not the state hospital, where all beds are nec-ess-ary. Yet he got booted out of the Oxford orphanage, and then no other orphanage would have him, nor any foster home either, he was just too . . . too different, too un-u-su-al, or so they said. He was removed from placement after placement, which had a damaging effect, don’t you know.”

“Like what?”

“Regression,” she said darkly, clicking her needles. “My, yes. Finally they sent him back to Broughton, and this is when Himself got involved.”

“How?” I asked.

“The head of child psychiatry at Broughton, a Dr. Spiegelman, had heard Dr. Carroll speak at Duke, and so he came to call upon us, and of course the Carrolls were fascinated to learn what had happened to the boy in the cage, and went immediately to see him, and the upshot of it was that he was brought here, where he has lived ever since, as you see. He has not progressed as far as Dr. C had hoped, I daresay—it soon became clear that he’d never go to university! He’s not got the intellect for schooling, nor the temperament either. Too odd! But he has got a job and a home here now, at least.”

“All thanks to the Carrolls,” I murmured almost to myself, wondering how Billy Ray felt about that, for I harbored conflicting emotions of my own when I contemplated the overwhelming debt of gratitude I owed them.

But Mrs. Hodges glared at me. “Indeed not!” She snipped off the yarn with a huge pair of scissors. “All thanks to Gerhardt Otto, to be sure.”

This part had never been in the papers. But as soon as the “caged boy” Billy Ray was introduced to the greenhouse and let loose upon the grounds, he abandoned the studies the Carrolls had set out for him. (“You might say he was stubborn, as a student,” Claudia Overholser told me, smiling. “Intractable!” pronounced her husband.) Billy Ray loved the out-of-doors and took to the work, following old Gerhard Otto everywhere. No task was too long or too hard. Dr. Carroll took to calling the boy “Pan” ironically, in jest, and the name stuck. Old Gerhardt built him a little partitioned room off the greenhouse itself, and gave him his first puppy, a stray they found in the woods. The boy became more expressive, evidencing pleasure and sometimes mirth. He began to work in groups with the others upon occasion.

When old Gerhardt was diagnosed with lung cancer, he officially adopted the boy, whose last name was then changed to Otto. Upon the old man’s death, a small inheritance was settled upon him, in a trust he himself would control upon reaching the age of twenty-one.

“And that, I’d say, has been the making of him,” Mrs. Hodges concluded.

When Highland Hospital changed hands and Mrs. Morris arrived to head up the Hortitherapy program, she kept him on. “I have never known anyone so tuned to plants and animals—and sometimes people,” she said, surprising me.

“People?” I repeated.

“Oh yes, our most psychotic patients respond to him in a way that they do not respond to the rest of us, a way that we cannot understand. He knows more than you think. In fact, sometimes I feel that he may know more than we know. Just watch—you’ll see.”

•••

M
RS.
M
ORRIS’S PREDICTION
t
urned out to be true, I learned, as I found myself spending more and more time down at the greenhouse or out on the grounds with Pan Otto and his crews whenever possible, despite the encroaching cold weather. I enjoyed the work, quite simply. I liked the cold on my cheeks and the ache in my muscles at the end of a task. I felt that I was getting my body back, my strength, after whatever had happened to me. Apparently Dr. Schwartz agreed, for the rest of my insulin shock treatments were abruptly cancelled. I began to play the piano for several of Phoebe Dean’s groups and programs, too, but it was Hortitherapy I took to.

I don’t recall that I was ever actually introduced to Pan Otto, not formally. I just seemed to know him after a while, spending as much time in his presence as I could, for he made me comfortable in the world in a way I cannot explain. I felt at home with Pan Otto—I, Evalina—who had never had a home of my own on earth.

But here, let me try to describe him for you exactly as he was that autumn afternoon when we met.

He is not particularly tall, due perhaps to all those years in the root cellar, though they say he grew rapidly, once released—eighteen inches, Mrs. Hodges claimed, in the first year alone. We can stand shoulder to shoulder, and our eyes meet instantly when we face one another. Pan’s eyes are a light, light blue—almost the color of his dog’s eyes. This dog is named Roy Rogers, for Pan delights in Westerns, sitting in the front row whenever they are shown at Movie Night in the Assembly Hall. Roy Rogers follows Pan everywhere, always watchful and polite, though he does not play. I have never seen him fetch a stick, for instance, or jump up on anybody. He just watches, patiently. He is not waiting for anything. Nor is Pan. Pan has no plans, beyond the demands of the season. Instead he is simply living in the present time, all the time, rather like an animal himself.

When he is in the woods, you cannot see him—you really can’t, for he is camouflage itself, wearing old, nondescript clothes that blend right in with the forest and look like they came straight out of a Salvation Army box someplace—perhaps they did! His skin is more brown than white, whether from natural pigmentation or the effects of the sun, I do not know. His hair is dark and thick. Mrs. Morris cuts it with shears as he sits in a straight-back chair, I have seen her do this many times, putting a towel around his shoulders and letting the hair fall around him onto the cement floor, to be swept up later. I have swept it up myself, saving several locks of it, thick and wiry. Pan must shower and shave in the greenhouse bathroom, after hours—I find his razor there, in the medicine cabinet, and hold it up against my own face as I look in the mirror hanging above the sink. I cannot say why I do these things. But in any case I deduce that there is no running water in his own living facility, the hut which he is reputed to have built for himself in a “laurel hell” of the deepest woods, moving there after Gerhardt Otto’s death. Oh, how I would love to see it! To go there, where he lives, myself . . .

A
S OFTEN AS
p
ossible, I joined expeditions of one sort or another where Pan would be present, such as the memorable occasion when I went along on one of the teenagers’ “nature hikes,” obviously designed to wear them out as well as show them the various flora and fauna. Old Mr. Pugh identified the plants and trees and animal droppings and pontificated upon the ecosystem, but it was Pan we followed single file on a trail across a high sere meadow with its rustling weeds and dried wildflowers rattling in the wind that swept unceasingly across the long curve of the earth. Perhaps that unceasing wind is what made the boy so nervous; wind has that effect upon me, too. In any case, one of the teenagers toward the back of the line—Randall Cunningham, a big boy, a troublemaker—suddenly spat out a curse and grabbed one of his fellow hikers from behind, throwing him down upon the ground and slamming his head again and again upon a rock outcropping while the boy screamed. Now everyone else was screaming or yelling, too, as they closed in—but the attacker jumped up and zigzagged across the meadow toward the cliff beyond.

Instantly Pan was after him, not seeming to run so much as flow through the waist-high weeds, effortlessly and silently, like the wind itself. He caught the boy a good way before the mountain’s edge, tackling him, and then both were lost to us for a time, down on the ground in the weeds but finally emerging—wonder of wonders!—with their arms around each others’ shoulders. Pan kept his arms around the boy’s waist from behind as Randall stumbled, sobbing, back to the rest of us, then sat with his head in his hands next to the injured one, who was still unconscious though moaning.

Mr. Pugh directed the making of a kind of litter from several long saplings crisscrossed by brush tied with twine from his pack. They lifted the hurt boy onto it; I looked away from the pool of blood on the rock where his head had been. Then Pan touched Randall Cunningham on the shoulder just once, lightly, jerking his head toward the stretcher; without a word, Randall stood up and grasped a limb and helped to carry the stretcher all the way down, though the rest of us took turns. I shall not forget our slow progress back across the mountain as the sun began its colorful descent behind us. I remember having the sensation, which I had had before at Highland, of being in a painting.

This incident, interestingly enough, was the making of Randall Cunningham, who became a model patient on the spot. He was released at Christmastime, and returned to his own school in January. Maybe he had just needed to hit somebody . . . or maybe he had finally scared himself, gotten his own attention.

When I asked Dr. Schwartz later what she thought about all this, she threw up her hands and laughed. “Who knows? Pills are not everything,” she said. “Spontaneous remission can certainly happen, especially with young people. Sometimes their symptoms are situational, a reaction to certain stress, but not internalized, not real illness. It’s impossible to predict.”

It was impossible to predict anything; I was realizing this more and more.

CHAPTER 8

I
HAD TROUBLE BELIEVING
t
hat Dixie had never been to college, for she seemed to know everything about everything, not only painting but books, too. She and Richard Overholser fell into long literary conversations whenever we went over to their house for dinner. I especially remember one Saturday night when I was helping Claudia clear the dishes while he and Dixie discussed existentialism, “a philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of each individual in a universe that doesn’t give a damn,” as Richard explained it to me. I had never heard of it. “So each person is solely responsible for giving his own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely,” he finished up.

“But what about God?” asked I, the product of all those nuns.

“He doesn’t exist,” Richard proclaimed. “It’s all up to you girls.”

“That’s sort of what Hemingway is saying, isn’t he?” Dixie said.

“Well, yes. An even better reading choice would be Albert Camus.”

“Albert who?” Dixie had her pencil out.

“C-A-M-U-S. And look here, Dixie,” he added in his emphatic Northern way, “why not enroll in some college courses when you get back to Georgia? You’d enjoy them. Be damn good for you, too, I’ll wager.”

“Now Richard, you know that’s not allowed, we’re not supposed to get involved here—” Claudia tossed over her shoulder as she headed back to the kitchen.

“Well, why not?” He pounded on the table. “This is a brilliant woman, why shouldn’t she go to college? For God’s sake!”

“Oh no,” Dixie said quickly. “Frank wouldn’t like it.” I perked up; she never, ever mentioned her husband’s name. “A, there’s no college back home, for miles and miles around. I’d have to drive all the way down to Tallahassee, a day’s trip. Assuming he’d let me drive at all. Assuming he’d let me spend the night. And B, you do know that’s not the purpose of therapy at Highland, don’t you? That’s not why he sent me up here. I am being ‘reeducated, retrained’ . . .” Though she used the mimicking voice, her smile was sweet and resigned.

“Retrained for what?” Richard pushed back his chair.

“For marriage, I guess,” she said. “I wasn’t very good at it before.”

Richard picked up the serving plates and abruptly left the table. “You know what I think of all that,” he called back over his shoulder.

“Well . . .” Dixie said calmly, vacantly, playing with her hair as she looked away, into some distance we couldn’t see.

I sank down at the table beside her.

Claudia came back in to join us. “Why not sign up for a correspondence course, then, honey? I know they have them at Goddard College, where I went to school—I can find out for you. You would enjoy it, and then perhaps you wouldn’t be so bored by the routine at home. I am sure that your husband wants you to be happy, doesn’t he?”

“Lord! He’s such a busy man, that’s the furtherest thing from his mind!” Dixie laughed and shook her head no, vehemently. Again, the flash of skin, the bald patch at the temple. “He just wants me to shut up and quit being sick and do what I’m supposed to and quit bothering everybody. I don’t know what we would have done if it hadn’t been for his mother, that’s Big Mama, to take over for me. Now don’t get me wrong. Frank loves me, he really does, or he sure wouldn’t have put up with me all this time. He just wants me to calm down and be satisfied. That’s what I want, too. I’m sick of myself!” The rueful smile.

Back in the kitchen Richard Overholser was washing the dishes, singing “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” at the top of his lungs.

“But changes can be made in a marriage, you know,” Claudia suggested carefully, leaning across the table to take Dixie’s hand. “Old roles can change. Even little things can help a lot. How old are your children now?” she asked, completely jolting me, for Dixie had never once, in our month-long friendship, even mentioned their existence.

“Margaret Ann is seven and Lissa is six.” Tears stood in the violet eyes. “I miss them so much,” she said.

O
VER THE FOLLOWING
w
eeks, Dixie’s story came out in bursts and whispers, which I shall attempt to piece together here. I was very surprised to learn that she had not grown up in circumstances such as she clearly enjoyed today. In fact her mother, Daisy Belle, came from a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, and her own tragic past had determined the whole family’s life—in my opinion.

“Oh, she never stopped telling it!” Dixie cried, stamping her foot. “She used to go on and on—it was like she just couldn’t stop.”

“Well, what was it?” Of course I asked.

“It really was awful,” Dixie said. “Mama was real good in school, and just beautiful, the most beautiful girl in the county”—this part was no surprise to me—“so she got picked to be Homecoming Queen, and then Miss Magnolia at a contest over in Waycross, and that’s when she started running around with a banker’s son named Lynwood Small, staying out all night drinking and whatnot. He even gave her his grandmother’s ring, right before he drove his car through the guardrail of a bridge over the Tar River. The car hit some kind of a big concrete post before it sank.

“Somehow he only broke his arm, but Mama’s beautiful face was completely destroyed. She ended up with one eye a whole lot lower than the other one, so she was always staring off to the side, and she got this big, jagged white scar which ran from her hairline down to her chin. She broke her back, too, so she always had a limp. Lynwood Small took back his grandmother’s ring, and then Mama’s reputation was completely ruined in that town, according to her. When she finally got out of the hospital, she was real different, real serious. She took a room in a boardinghouse in town and became a seamstress. She joined the Methodist Church, where she met my sweet daddy, Dudley Stovall, who was a lot older, and he married her. He worked for the power company.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“And then all they did was work, I reckon, with a little time out to have me and my little sister, Estelle. That’s when we moved into a bigger brick house with a patio and a garage. Mama used to say it was perfect in every way. She made all the draperies and the upholstery herself. She turned the front parlor into a sewing room, with her big Singer right there on its own table and swatches of material to choose from and this raised platform where her ladies turned around and around real slow, like ladies in a music box, while Mama knelt at their feet to pin up their skirts for hemming. She used to keep the straight pins in her mouth. I had to do the cooking while she worked. Daddy used to try to get her to stop working so hard, but she wouldn’t, because she said we had to have all the advantages. We had to take piano lessons and dance lessons, we had to have braces—I even had to take elocution! I think Mama got all these ideas from her ladies.

“ ‘Look at them! My little dolls!’ she used to say when we ran out the door in our matching clothes, which she made, which were always perfect. I guess she was living vicariously through all this, but she never would go out to any kind of public meetings or events at our schools.”

“But how did you and your sister feel about all this?” I asked her.

Dixie grinned at me. “Estelle rebelled the minute she was old enough, but I kept on going. Maybe this is awful, but I was glad to get out of there! So I kept on going to everything. When they offered me a scholarship to Dover Academy in Atlanta, I took it and went, even though Daddy had a lot of misgivings about it. Then I won the scholarship to Agnes Scott, and that’s when I got invited —after a lot of interviews, I’ll tell you—to make my debut at the Gone With the Wind Ball. It was because of my girlfriends at Dover. Mama was tickled to death. She stayed up night after night sewing those ruffles onto the skirt of my ball gown. Finally Daddy just exploded. I remember him saying, ‘My God, Daisy, this thing has gone far enough. It will break us!’ ”

But nothing could stop it by then, the great rolling ball of Mary Margaret’s social success, which left her jealous sister and her awestruck family behind. With her new nickname, “Dixie,” she traveled from debut to debut of her girlfriends, house party to house party, taken up by the girls and their families, courted by their brothers and their friends. Now part of a vast network that seemed to cover the whole South, Dixie was way too busy for college.

Nothing could stop it except for Dixie herself, who got unaccountably pregnant by somebody’s older brother in a boathouse while attending a wedding in Sea Island, Georgia. “I’m not sorry, either!” she insisted. “I’ve never been sorry. I swear, that was the most important night of my life. And it was the most magical, too. I was wearing this long baby-blue satin sheath dress with spaghetti straps and a little bolero jacket, made by Mama, of course, and a camellia in my hair. That camellia used to be my trademark. Two boys at this dance claimed to be in love with me, so I was dancing with first one, then the other. I remember they had this hot Negro band from Macon, it was all so much fun . . .”

Finally Dixie had to slip outside and catch her breath. She walked down the crushed shell path into the garden, away from the white-columned mansion, and sat down on a wrought-iron bench looking back at it, the whole mansion fairly pulsing with music, each window lit, with the flitting forms of the dancers inside. Suddenly it seemed like a stage set to her, like the way they had decorated the outside of Loew’s Grand Theatre to make it look like a plantation for the Gone With the Wind Ball. It seemed fake, all of it, and suddenly Dixie felt fake, too, and very separate from the house and the party and everything else in the world, sitting on her curlicue bench in the moonlight. She had a headache from drinking Champagne, and her face hurt from smiling so much.

“Smoke?” A thin boy with long black hair emerged from the shrubbery, not dressed for the occasion.

“Sure,” Dixie said.

In the flare of the match, Dixie saw his big beaky nose, his twitchy mouth, and the dark, serious eyes behind his gold-framed glasses, glasses like an old man would wear. “Thanks,” she said. Then she said, “I know who you are.” It was Genevieve’s older brother Duncan, the brilliant one, now attending graduate school at Harvard.

“I know who you are, too.” He smiled a long slow smile at her. “You’re the lucky one, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” She thought about this.

“Want to walk down and see the water?”

“Sure,” Dixie said, suddenly wanting to do this more than anything, leaving the path to follow Duncan down to the glittery, slapping water filled with stars. She ran forward to stand at the edge of it and he stood just behind her.

“ ‘The sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits; on the French coast the light gleams and is gone,’ ” he recited.

“ ‘The cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air!’ ” Dixie finished the verse, and then he put his arms around her and squeezed her tight, and then he turned her around and kissed her full on the lips, not a groping, sloppy kiss such as she allowed her beaux, but a solid, real kiss. She opened her mouth to him.

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand and walking her along the edge of the beach to the old boathouse, where a beautiful wooden motorboat named Miss Dolly’s Folly rocked in its slip and the upstairs loft contained only a mattress pulled right up to the huge triangular window propped wide open, looking out over the harbor. Duncan drew her down upon it.

“You like English poetry, then,” he said to her, and Dixie said, “Oh yes,” telling him her favorites, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” She went on and on, she just couldn’t believe herself. He nodded gravely, fiddling with the spaghetti straps on her shoulders. He had majored in English literature himself; in fact he would be leaving for England in a few days, headed for the Lake District and then for Oxford, where he would study for the next two years, soon to be joined by a woman from Boston, his lover. His family didn’t know this part. “And you’re going where, to school?” he asked.

“Agnes Scott,” she said, “but not right now. I’ve put it off a year.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t put it off.” He turned her around to face him. “You’re not like these others.” He took the camellia out of her hair, carefully, then laid her back against the mattress where she forgot in an instant everything her mother had always told her about leading them on, then making them stop—always making them stop—and hanging on to your most precious possession. Suddenly she didn’t care about that anymore, and she was not sorry then, or later when they watched the moon set, dropping down like a glowing opal into the water, the most beautiful thing Dixie had ever seen, or at least noticed.

At one point he drew back a bit, to look into her face. “You are protected, of course,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, not having a clue what he meant.

I
T WAS HER
s
ister Estelle who broke the news, coming into the bathroom to stand silently while Dixie, on her knees, retched into the toilet, not even caring that her long dark hair trailed down into the horrible water.

“Oh my God,” Estelle said flatly. “Oh my God.” Then, “You’re pregnant, Mary Margaret, I’m going to tell Mama!” almost crowing as she ran off, her bare feet slapping down the hall.

“Mary Margaret Stovall, I just can’t believe you would do this to me!” Dixie’s mother dragged her head up out of the toilet and slapped her face, laying her flat out on the bathroom floor, sobbing.

“What?” Dixie remembers asking. “Do what to you?”

“This baby!” her mother shrieked. “You cannot have this baby!”

A Lysol douche followed, right there on the bathroom floor, with Estelle holding her down. When that didn’t seem to work, Daisy Belle pushed her into the car for a trip out into the county to visit an old black woman who poked and prodded and then patted Dixie on the head and said, “Yes, girl. You go on home and have this child and love it to pieces. That’s all you can do, that’s what I’m telling you. This child gone be a blessing in the world.” Whereupon Daisy Belle started to shriek again. The scar stood out white in her red face. “Drunk!” she screamed. “Whore!” Dixie had to drive back home, with Estelle giggling in the backseat.