In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (11 page)

Donald survived the first grade and returned to school for a second year, and then a third. In a way, the routine of the classroom may have suited his need for sameness: he went to the same building every day, at the same hour, for the same length of time. His seat was always where it was supposed to be, and a bell rang automatically, and reliably, to start and stop activities. One afternoon, when he was nine and a half, he walked into his classroom not knowing that classes had been canceled for the rest of the day. His parents were also unaware of the change. Donald spent the next few hours alone at his desk, writing in a notebook, waiting for the dismissal bell. When it rang, he packed away his things and headed home as usual. His ingrained habits had served him well.

Ultimately, however, school became more demanding, and the difference between him and the other children became more pronounced.
Around the time he turned ten, the gap between what the school expected and what Donald was capable of—both academically and socially—grew too wide.

By the spring of 1943, when his original first-grade classmates were making their way through the fourth grade, Donald was back at home, helping his mother with simple chores in return for money for the picture shows he loved. At the same time, his natural skill in arithmetic was strengthened when he made a hobby out of calculating the
publication dates of
Time
magazine. By chance, he had come across a copy of
Time
’s first issue. On the cover it said “Vol. I, No. 1” and the date, “March 3, 1923.” He was fascinated, and became obsessed with figuring out the exact dates on which every subsequent issue was published.

This led to
an obsession with calendars. Once, when visiting his mother’s friends, the Rushings, he pulled up a chair in their kitchen so that he could stand up high enough to study their big wall calendar. By the time he was done frantically rifling back and forth through its pages, it was so much the worse for wear that they took it down after he and Mary left.

Donald was stretching his mind, but the seeming impracticality of his efforts was overwhelming. What he was good at did not fit in the classroom anymore. What he was not good at—making sense of reading and history lessons—increasingly got in the way of everyone else’s learning. His adjustment to life, while progressing, was not progressing quickly enough.

With Donald at home again, Mary experienced the full burden of loneliness, frustration, and exhaustion that crushed other mothers in her situation. For the second time in his life, Donald was sent away.

—

I
T
WAS NOT
an institution this time. And in no way was Donald abandoned. The setting, in fact, was a home—a real family home, and getting there from the Triplett residence took all of eighteen minutes by car. Located in the deep Mississippi countryside, well past the last road sign, and at the end of a network of unmarked dirt roads, it was a house on a hill where no electricity or phone lines ran. The place did not even have running water; the toilet was outdoors. But Donald’s
parents hoped the couple who lived there would be kind to their son, and that the outdoor setting would be good for his development.

Their names were Ernest and Josephine Lewis. They were poor farmers, without much education, but townspeople said they were decent, hardworking, and honest. Josephine was in her early forties, and Ernest was in his mid-fifties. They had no children of their own, and they lived off the land they worked themselves. The amount of money Beamon paid the couple to take in Donald was never disclosed, but their treatment of him was a matter of record, thanks to Leo Kanner.

Donald had already started living with the Lewises when Kanner came to visit the Tripletts in May 1945. He was interested in seeing how it was working out, and, of course, most curious to see how his Case 1 was doing. As it was, Donald came home to Forest many weekends and all holidays, and he was there for Kanner’s visit. But at some point, they all piled into Beamon’s car and hit the dusty road to visit Ernest and Josephine.

By this time, the Lewises had become almost like family to the Tripletts. Mary’s father’s appreciation of the couple and their way of life was apparent in a letter he sent his grandson in 1943: “Now I think
Mr. & Mrs. Lewis are the very best people in the County. They are trying to train you to be a useful man. They are out for you and you must reciprocate by minding them. Bring in the stove wood for Mrs. Lewis, get the hatchet and fix the kindling wood for the kitchen fire.” Granddaddy McCravey had grown up on such a farm himself before setting out at the age of twenty-two and striking it rich in finance. He respected the discipline of chores. “It is by far the best training a boy can get,” he told Donald. “To live in a place like Forest is not comparable to it in any sense. You are near nature, and nature’s God.”

Granddaddy signed off by reminding his grandson, “I have loved lots of folks, but I love you as much as anyone I have ever known.”

Leo Kanner didn’t idealize country living quite as much as Granddaddy McCravey, but after getting to the farm and spending a few hours there, he formed just as high an opinion of the Lewises. Ernest and Josephine walked the psychiatrist all around the place, showed him Donald’s room, and talked him through the chores Donald did regularly. As Kanner took it in, he realized that the couple had stumbled
upon a kind of therapeutic solution to Donald’s deficits. On the one hand, there was a rigid structure to days on the farm—the same pattern every morning, every night, every season. Donald had no choice but to abide by the schedule.

At the same time, they showed creativity and flexibility in how they accommodated his obsessions and strengths and fit them into farm life. As Kanner watched, for example, Donald ran into a cornfield, took up the reins of a heavy plow horse, and successfully put the animal through its paces—plowing one long row, then turning the horse around to begin another. As he looked on, amazed, the Lewises explained that this had all begun when Donald had started walking the cornfields, obsessively counting the rows. Then Ernest had put the reins in his hand and showed him how to control the horse and maneuver the plowshare. In this way, he was able to count the rows while working them. Kanner watched Donald pass back and forth with the horse half a dozen times and cut half a dozen field lengths in the earth; it seemed to give the boy pleasure.

Donald had also become entranced by the process of measurement and had been taking a yardstick to whatever he could find around the farm, keeping track of how long, tall, deep, or wide everything was. Again, Ernest thought about this, and when the farm needed a new well, he recruited Donald to help dig it, presenting it to him as a measuring project: How deep is the well now? How deep should it go?

Josephine and Ernest also made allowances for some of Donald’s less practical preoccupations. For a time, Donald went through a phase when he was obsessed with death and brought every dead bird or bug he found back to the house. The Lewises could be tough with Donald, and they did take a switch to him when he misbehaved. But with the birds and the bugs, they understood that Donald was trying to figure out something important. Instead of punishing him for dirtying the house, they pointed to a little parcel of open ground near the house and told him he could lay all the creatures to rest there. Donald built his little graveyard enthusiastically, not only burying every deceased thing he found, but doing so with an air of formality.

When Kanner strolled into Donald’s little cemetery, he saw that he had given names to all the creatures buried there, erecting small
wooden markers over each grave and making them all members of the Lewis family. The one that stuck in Kanner’s mind was inscribed
“John Snail Lewis. Born, date unknown
.
”
For the date of departure from this life, Donald listed the date on which he’d found the snail’s remains.

Donald flourished under the regimen of farm life. In Kanner’s estimation, living there for a period of time was one of the best things that ever happened to Donald. The farm offered an ideal balance of restrictions and freedoms. Donald became more verbal, more creative, and more accomplished at completing complex tasks. He also basked in a kind of freedom he never had in town: the freedom to explore, to go over to the next field to find birds and bugs, without giving anyone cause to worry that cars might run him down.

After a while, the Lewises began bringing him to a nearby country school every day to resume his education. It was a better fit for Donald than the school in town for one simple reason: it was a one-room schoolhouse. By its very nature, it had to tailor itself to children learning different material on different schedules. As for Donald’s social peculiarities, they were accommodated without too much fuss—another benefit of being in an environment that was less caught up with appearances.

In this setting, Donald began writing letters home, using complete sentences and correct spelling—mostly—and sharing concrete details about his days with the Lewises. A few days before Mother’s Day in 1944, he picked up a pencil and wrote to Mary that he had been to the town of Salem to make a purchase. “Mr. Ernest told me that I have to have a rose for Mother’s Day,” he wrote. “He told me that a red rose was to show that the mother was still living. A white rose is to show that the mother is dead.” He also mentioned that he had been playing ball and that “the score I made was…5/74.” He signed it “Donald G. T. Lewis.” Mary preserved this letter for the rest of her life.

Donald would always remember those years as happy ones, when he belonged to two families. It was an arrangement in which he was doubly loved and doubly protected, and was spared the awful things happening to so many other children like him—children who were stuck in large institutions, often neglected and sometimes abused,
because, unlike the Tripletts, their parents lacked the resources to create something better.

Kanner was thrilled to see Donald growing and learning so much. While the boy’s overall improvement could be labeled “moderate,” moderate in the context of Donald’s development was like a leap across an abyss. Donald was proof that at least some children could leave the most debilitating aspects of autism behind, and that it was worth trying to encourage that process.

6

SOME KIND OF GENIUS

W
hen Donald was fourteen years old, he suddenly became very ill. He was with the Lewises when the symptoms began. It was chills at first. Then fever. Then chills again. It was so bad that the Lewises let him off from his chores and had him stay in bed. Then his joints began acting up too. It hurt to bend his arms and legs. The pain became excruciating. The Lewises, alarmed, packed Donald into their car and drove him back to his parents’ house. For some days, Donald was back in his old bed, where he became extremely agitated and difficult to handle. As the family put it, he was exceedingly “nervous” again, more like his toddler self than the teenager he was. When the fevers ran still higher, he became delirious.

At the Campbell Clinic in Memphis, a doctor diagnosed Still’s disease, also known as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease. For reasons still not well understood, the body’s immune system turns against itself and attacks the tissues in the joints. There are high fevers, which can be fatal. For the children who survive, there can be lasting damage to the joints, which fuse together permanently. Using a compound called gold salts and a steroid known as ACTH, doctors at the clinic pulled him back from the brink. The fevers receded, and the disease slowly loosened its grip on his joints. But it was not until the middle of 1949, a year and a half later, that Donald was up and walking again.

His recovery began in Memphis, and then, after several months, he returned home to Forest, where his convalescence continued under his parents’ roof. This was a turning point for the Triplett family—the
first time in years that Donald was back with them full-time. As the months passed and Donald’s health returned, so did more of the personality he had been showing on the farm, before the illness. His “nervousness” faded. As it did, his improvement in language and learning resumed, and, if anything, picked up pace. With each month, he became less the boy whose extreme behaviors had overwhelmed the Triplett household in the early 1940s. Instead, he was maturing into a young man who could take his place at the table. Sixteen years old, he was home again. The Lewises would always remain close friends, but Donald would not return to the farm to live. Mary had something new in mind for Donald. That September, he would go to high school.

—

I
N THE EARLY
1950s, when Donald was a high school student, a number of local myths swirled around him. Some were more true than others, but all had something to do with numbers. The most famous was the one
about the bricks.

The story goes that Donald was standing outside Forest High School one day, facing a half-circle of his classmates, who wanted him to confirm a rumor. Word was that Donald had a gift for counting things quickly, and these boys wanted him to prove it. “Okay, so how many bricks are in that wall there?” the leader challenged him, nodding toward the side of the building that housed the gymnasium, a long, high edifice of redbrick. According to legend, Donald glanced at the school and immediately announced the correct number of bricks.

Mouths fell open.
That fast?
Staggered, the boys ran off to tell everyone else what they had just seen the Triplett kid do, with their own eyes. The story spread rapidly, even as far as some of the neighboring towns. And it endured. No newcomer to town would ever hear the name Donald Triplett for the first time without also hearing that, sometime back in the early fifties, he had counted every brick on the side of the school gym in an instant.

This account was missing a vital detail or two. For one thing, no one ever seemed to remember the actual number Donald had come up with. Also, no one ever explained how the boys knew that Donald’s calculation was accurate. In one version, a couple of boys ran over
to the wall and spent a tedious hour or so counting the bricks one by one. In another version, one of the math-minded kids did some quick geometry. But most of the time it was simply taken for granted that Donald had it exactly right.