The Inverted Forest (14 page)

“But you don’t know anything about him for certain?” Harriet said.

“I don’t, no. It’s just a feeling I have. And I had this feeling the instant I met him, even before he opened his mouth and we had our first conversation. I don’t know what it is about him, but I have an intuition that he’s not a good person. And so I’m wondering, Harriet, if you have the same intuition.”

This wasn’t coercion, not exactly. Still, if Harriet wasn’t careful, she could wilt under this delicate pressure. She said, “The few times I’ve been around Christopher he’s been fine. Helpful. So he seems all right to me.”

“Does he?”

“Yes.”

From Linda a complicated response: she bowed her head and weighed the answer given to her, and then she pretended—Harriet was sure it was pretense—to reach some private understanding, a revised opinion of Christopher Waterhouse. Her expression brightened. “Well, this is good for me to hear,” she said. “It’s really just a feeling I had. Thank you, Harriet,” she said, her voice cheery but unemphatic, as if they’d just met and were bringing to a close their very first conversation “I’ll see you around,” Linda Rucker said and headed off, in her heavy-footed way, toward the Kindermann Forest camp office.

But what did Harriet know about other people’s private natures? Their deepest intentions? Her family had once considered her a sound judge of character. (They’d changed this opinion once she’d become pregnant.) But perhaps it was true. It also had to be said—though she would never say such a thing to Linda Rucker—that she was less confident in her appraisal of white people. Easier somehow to recognize a black schemer or narcissist or Good Samaritan than it was to distinguish their white counterparts. With white people the motives were more deeply buried, the disguises less familiar.

She knew certain things, however. As camp nurse, she sometimes opened the infirmary file cabinet and read the staff health forms for no better reason than the itch of curiosity. And she dispensed medication to the staff. It was a strictly held camp rule that employees of Kindermann Forest turn over all their medications to the nurse. (Far too dangerous to have bottles of pills lying about the cabins for children or state hospital campers to discover.) So the counselors came to Harriet each day for their aspirin and Benadryl and laxatives. Pretty Veronica Yordy used prescription ointment for an odd, yellowing toenail fungus. Marcy Bittman and Carrie Reinkenmeyer and Emily Boehler and Ellen Swinderman arrived each morning for their birth control pills, but so, too, did a member of the Lonesome Three, a deeply shy, spindly, and mournful-faced young woman. Was it a matter of controlling her menstruation, or was this homely young woman hoping for love?

Wyatt Huddy came to see her after dinner each evening for his stomach medication—a stool softener. He preferred to wait on the steps rather than enter the infirmary. He was invariably shy in her presence, more so, Harriet felt, than with any other staff member at camp. Why should this be? Perhaps it was the fact of her race. But it might also be that he sensed her deep interest in him and backed away as a result.

As it happened, she knew the name and terms of his disorder without the need to consult his health form. Apert syndrome, a genetic
disease in which the bones of the skull fused shut and gave the head and face a distorted appearance. There were other effects as well, though one of them wasn’t, as people expected, a diminished IQ. She knew this not because of nursing school or any research she’d done on genetic disorders, of which there were thousands. She knew because a family in her North Carolina hometown had twin boys—one with Apert syndrome, one without. She’d see them about town and, from a distance, she’d dreamed up a sad life for the Apert syndrome boy.

Then she came to know both boys. As a high school junior, she was asked to babysit for Taylor and Eddie. Taylor, the afflicted one, had a pointy crown to his head and a sunken, uneven quality to his eyes and nose. But at age three, what did it really matter? His appearance might be striking at first, yet soon enough you saw the beauty and ordinariness of a young boy. Taylor, it turned out, was bright and eager and more outgoing than his twin, Eddie, who tended to stand back and learn from his brother’s successes and failures. The first day Harriet had arrived at their home the boys were out in the backyard trying to shape the scattered remains of a March snow into a convincing snowman. After an hour of play she’d brought them inside, removed their jackets and mittens. Taylor’s hands took her by surprise. The index, middle, and ring fingers were fused together like the three-digit hands of a stuffed animal or cartoon character. She was sentimental about those hands. She liked to cup them in her own hands and feel the contours of those fused fingers. A few months later, when he turned four, a surgeon separated his fused fingers into five better-functioning but decidedly less beautiful digits.

Now, each evening when she placed pills in Wyatt Huddy’s hands, she saw that he had undergone the same procedure.

Among the counselors of Kindermann Forest, Harriet noticed a shift in morale, a lightening of attitude. They were not so moody. Not
so ready to throw up their hands in disgust or defeat. They’d been on duty seventy-two hours and were showing signs of a wry humor and toughened nonchalance, as if in the course of three days they’d witnessed in their state hospital campers the full range of unruly behavior.

In The Sanctuary, where Harriet went each afternoon to buy a cold bottle of Coca-Cola, she came upon off-duty counselors doing boisterous imitations of the campers they cared for. Perhaps the most celebrated and oft-impersonated state hospital camper was Mr. Terrence J. Stottlemeir. Mr. Stottlemeir was an odd case. Just fifty-seven years old and he seemed to have lost his mind. His arms and hands were in a wild and constant state of agitation, darting up out of his lap, flailing about. For this reason the counselors had begun calling him “the mad drummer.” He looked, with his thin, regal face and balding pate, like a straight and narrow tax accountant who’d let himself go to seed. His cheeks were thick with stubble. (It was hard to shave a man so intent on slapping anyone who tried to assist him.) He cursed loudly and with an eccentric vocabulary. Everyone at Kindermann Forest considered him the camp’s crotchety old man.

Any decent impersonation began by mimicking Mr. Stottlemeir’s single rich expression—part outrage, part horror at the ruined world. Then the cursing:
God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say. God damn you. I’ll kick you, you jizzy bastard. I’ll kick you shitless.

From there the counselors spun out improvised skits: a rock band named Stottlemeir and the Jizzy Bastards. Or an incensed Stottlemeir sharing a White House dinner with President Clinton.
God damn you, Billy Boy. God damn you to hell eternal
. Or Grampa Stottlemeir reading storybooks to five-year-olds at the local library.
God damn you, spoon. God damn you, room. God damn you, cow jumping over the moon . . .

Was it cruel? An observer who stumbled into camp might think
so. Harriet was less sure. Maybe after a long day of close proximity to the retarded, the counselors needed this release. They brought themselves to tears with these skits. They collapsed onto The Sanctuary’s dusty couches, clutching their sides and howling. The best lines they repeated in every corner of camp, especially in the presence of Wayne Kesterson, Mr. Stottlemeir’s counselor. Poor Wayne. By now it was public knowledge that he’d be sentenced in the fall for marijuana possession. His days were numbered. Hard to picture Wayne behind bars. He was such a gangly, forgetful, good-natured young man. Mr. Stottlemeir treated him with particular scorn. If Wayne got too near, Mr. Stottlemeir would shout,
Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss!
Of course the counselors found this richly hilarious:
stinking puddle of piss,
an insult Mr. Stottlemeir seemed to reserve exclusively for Wayne. Naturally, it caught on.

Hands off that last pancake, Wayne, you stinking puddle of piss.

Wayne, your mother called. She wants you to remember to wear your clean jammies and to never forget—you’re a stinking puddle of piss.

He laughed along with them, gamely, merrily. It was pleasure, maybe, for Wayne to see those around him roused into such high spirits. He wasn’t the true brunt of the joke after all. Mr. Stottlemeir was. They were laughing at his crotchety demeanor, at the clever mimicry.

But one afternoon in the infirmary Harriet was audience to the real thing. She’d had to give Mr. Stottlemeir a dose of Benadryl for an outbreak of hives. To do that she and Wayne had needed to pin Mr. Stotttlemeir in a chair and hold down his flailing arms. The scalding look he gave: all the features of his face, once elegant and now mangy, were pinched into an expression of intense hate—a hatred that felt long-held and personal and aimed solely at Wayne Kesterson.

“You stupid knob,” Mr. Stottlemeir said, wet-lipped and sputtering. “Get your filthy hands off me, you stinking puddle of piss!”

To this, mild-mannered, hapless Wayne Kesterson lowered his head and shuddered.

Certainly Harriet had seen her fair share of startling behavior. She’d had campers shriek out strange songs during examinations. One gentleman had crumpled to the floor and played dead while she bandaged his scraped knee. Another woman, in the middle of an oral exam, had leaned forward and wetly licked Harriet’s cheek.

The most remarkable thing said to her had come from Leonard Peirpont. His counselor, Wyatt Huddy, had noticed Leonard walking slower and with a more pronounced limp than usual and had brought him to the infirmary yard. She’d taken Leonard inside and removed his shoes and socks. An easy enough problem to diagnose; his toenails had grown long and sharp. She trimmed them and then washed and dried his feet. She put his socks and shoes on and helped him stand.

“Better?” she asked.

He stood gripping her forearm, swaying atop his stiff legs. There was always a look of wide-eyed surprise about him. At the moment his amazement seemed especially acute. He studied her intently, leaned close. “How ’bout I take you back to Higbee with me,” he said.

Higbee? This may or may not have been Leonard’s hometown. The funniness of the name and the intensity with which he said it made her laugh. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go to Higbee.”

“You can come stay in my house and be my little blackie.”

She was too stunned to do anything but blink in surprise. If only there was another black employee at camp. She’d seek them out and tell them of this offer. To be Leonard Peirpont’s little blackie. With the right black person, she could pass an entire evening repeating this remark and laughing until she cried. (No good sharing it with Linda Rucker or any of the white counselors, since they’d first have
to register their shock and disapproval. To them it would be a jolting surprise. Imagine that. Leonard Peirpont had been racist before he injured his brain.) What was more amazing, at least to Harriet, was that he’d been looking at her rapturously when he said it.
You can come stay in my house and be my little blackie.
She doubted she’d hear another offer this tender all summer long.