The Inverted Forest (24 page)

James wrinkled his slender nose. This wasn’t, Harriet knew, a sign of the boy’s skepticism; it was a wince of satisfaction at having a grown man, an important man, speak to him.

“Well, did you know this?” Schuller continued. “There’s a giant tomato tree in China that produces tens of thousands of tomatoes each year?”

James nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I know about that.” And then he looked to his mother for confirmation. But what did Harriet know about giant tomato trees in China? And how to explain something almost as remarkable: Schuller’s popularity with James and—according to Linda Rucker and Maureen Boyd—with all the youngest boys who came to camp, the seven- to ten-year-olds. They revered Schuller Kindermann, supposedly. But once they’d aged a few years, once they were beyond twelve or thirteen, they found him ridiculous.

At the end of the meal Schuller wished everyone gathered at the director’s table a good evening and strolled across the meadow to his cottage. He had not mentioned, one way or the other, who would oversee the evening’s activity: a campfire to be held in the southwest
corner of the meadow, a campfire that would feature marshmallows and chocolate bars and a visit from an Indian brave and his loyal squaw, both on horseback.

The counselors were unsure how to proceed. Linda Rucker had always given them clear instructions for each evening event. Were
they
now responsible? Was it their job to prepare the campfire?

They needn’t have worried. When they arrived at the meadow, they found a waist-high tepee of cedar logs erected and stuffed with newspaper. Ten minutes later Christopher Waterhouse drove up in the camp van and from its rear hatch produced two foldout tables, which he stocked with chocolate bars and marshmallows and thermoses of bug juice. From the edge of the crowd Harriet and James stood and watched the fire set ablaze. Everyone hunted for sticks upon which to spear their marshmallows. Counselor Michael Lauderback uncased his guitar and led the state hospital campers in a raucous and uneven version of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Such awful crooning. Yet they were wildly happy to sing this song. Several campers who, until now, had spent their week dazed and flat-eyed and stumbling managed somehow to surface from beneath the heavy mantle of their medications and bark out a few words to the song.
Live . . . long . . . day,
they warbled, as if they were answering a chorus of voices that had traveled a very great distance to reach them.

At twilight two riders appeared on the horizon of the meadow and trotted their horses to within twenty yards of the fire. The Indian brave, a shirtless Wayne Kesterson in cutoff jeans and war paint across his chest and cheeks, folded his arms Indian-style and nodded sagely at their gathering. Beside him, Marcy Bittman, dressed in a buckskin-fringe skirt and blouse, beneath which they could see the outline of her black one-piece swimsuit, glared at them with a fervent gaze, thrusting her chin and breasts forward, an attempt, largely successful, to appear wild and fetching. Together Wayne and Marcy raised their hands as if swearing an oath and said: “We command all who have
gathered here at the sacred fire to love the earth and lead honorable lives.” Then they turned their trail horses and galloped off. The campers watched them go. All day long they’d been promised a visit from an Indian brave and squaw, and now those campers aware enough to understand what they’d just seen, the fulfillment of a promise, called after the horses.
Come back, come back, come back!

I
wouldn’t buy an inch of cropland . . . 
there,
” Leonard Peirpont said.

“Where?” Wyatt asked

“At the . . . Over at the . . .” But by then he’d lost the thread of his thoughts. With Leonard, you could see the gears slipping, the rift in concentration, the soft pursing and unpursing of his lips. “I wouldn’t . . . ,” he muttered.

“All right.”

“Bolivar County,”
Leonard said. He seemed startled to have come up with the name. “I wouldn’t go there. Not even if you paid me in a pile of silver dollar coins.”

“What about a pile of gold coins?”

Leonard sat and brooded over the question, and then, unexpectedly, he grinned. It was odd, truly. Some part of Leonard seemed to know he was being teased. And yet, another part of him remained oblivious. “I wouldn’t go there,” he said. “Considering the way they’ll treat you.”

“And how do they treat you?”

“You know
full well,
” he said, scowling through his glasses. “I don’t have to tell you, do I?” His narrow professor’s face turned an indignant red.

“All right. Take it easy, Leonard. Your move. Look here. Your move. Go ahead now,” Wyatt said.

On the picnic table between them was a loaded checkerboard. Of all the activities at camp, this was Leonard’s favorite, especially the jumping, one checker over another, his own or Wyatt’s, regardless of direction or rules. He managed to clasp a red checker in his unsteady right hand. What happiness this brought him. At once he began jumping the checker forward and back and sideways.

It was Tuesday an hour after lunch, a ripely warm but by no means insufferable June afternoon. They’d chosen a shaded picnic table a dozen yards from The Sanctuary. Nearby Jerry Johnston and Thomas Anwar Toomey had found patches of earth to sit upon. Both men were occupied. Jerry had a bounty of paper scraps, which he pulled from the pockets of his overalls and sorted into various piles. But the piles, once completed, didn’t appear to please him, and he’d shake his head and scramble all the scraps together and start over. Thomas Anwar had his cigarettes. At the moment he was squatting with his back against an elm tree, smoking and staring out at the afternoon with a look that was, for Thomas Anwar, close to satisfaction.

“Well, all right then,” Wyatt said. He reset the checkerboard for Leonard. Then he called out to Jerry and Thomas Anwar. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “You two sit right here, you understand.”

Neither of them bothered to look up at him.

“I’ll be right back,” he repeated, and then he rose from the table and took off at a brisk pace for The Sanctuary, turning around once, twice, three times and finding Leonard and Jerry and Thomas Anwar unchanged. Oblivious. He hurried through the swinging screen door
of The Sanctuary. Inside, several camp dogs had crawled onto the couches and were stretched out sleeping, their dusty snouts buried in the crevices of the cushions. Otherwise The Sanctuary was vacant, the pay phone unattended. He slipped five quarters into the slot and dialed. While he waited he pulled back the window curtain for a view of the meadow and the picnic table where he’d been sitting.

The phone line clicked and hummed, and eventually Captain Throckmorton answered. “Wyatt,” he said. “My goodness.
Wy-att
.” There was a swell of relief in the captain’s voice and, as always, a brand of good humor meant exclusively for Wyatt. “I’ve been wondering about you, Wyatt,” the captain said. “I’ve been . . . How is it there? How are the children?”

So much to explain. Too much, really. He had to start at the beginning. He said he’d arrived at camp last Monday. Barbara McCauley had driven him down. But there were no children. Not yet. The children wouldn’t arrive until next week. For now all the counselors here at Kindermann Forest had to take care of adults from the state hospital. Adults with problems.

“What kinds of problems, Wyatt?”

He looked out through the window at Leonard Peirpont, who sat hunched at the picnic table trying with his unsteady hands to fit his checkers into a neat stack. Leonard couldn’t quite manage this simple task.
What an idiot,
Wyatt thought, tenderly. “All kinds of problems,” he said. “Most of the people here are, you know, retarded.”

There was from Captain Throckmorton a long, near-whistling sigh. After a while he said, “Oh my.”

“The first two weeks here are for retarded people. Then the children come. That’s the way it works.”

“I didn’t know that, Wyatt. If I had known, I’d have . . . I would have told you. You understand that, right?”

“Yes. I do.”

“What have you . . . How have you been getting along?”

“It’s hard work. Well, it’s hard for all the counselors. Taking care of people who are like this.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“There’s four more days until the state hospital buses come back and the campers leave. Then we get a day off. Then the children come.”

“I see.”

Wyatt stood holding the receiver to his ear, waiting. “So, yes, it’s a lot of work,” he said. There was a graceful way, surely, to steer the conversation in the direction it needed to go. He wished he knew how to do the steering. “I’ve been thinking about the horses here. About working with the horses.”

“The horses?”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said. But he knew he’d been too vague. He concentrated. “There’s some talk around here,” he said. “People are saying that when the State Hospital Session ends, I’ll be asked to stop being a counselor and become a wrangler instead. I wouldn’t work with the children. I’d work with horses. I’d spend all day at the stables. I’d sleep there, too.”

“At the stables?”

“Yes. That’s what you do if you’re a wrangler.”

“Whose idea is this?” the captain asked. “Who is it that said you should become a wrangler?”

“The people in charge here. Mr. Kindermann maybe. I don’t know.”

“And do you want to be a wrangler? I mean, if it was up to you, would that be your choice?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let me ask you this, Wyatt. Have you done a good job this week, taking care of the people at camp? The retarded people?”

This seemed to Wyatt an unlikely, if not unfair, question. It wasn’t an evaluation he should be asked to make. He leaned forward and pushed back the dusty and threadbare window curtains. Outside, in the brilliant light of the afternoon, Jerry Johnston was trying to rise
to his feet. For a man of his roundness and size, this meant crawling to the picnic table and pulling himself up, one foot planted, then the other rising up in increments. “It’s hard to say,” Wyatt said. “It’s hard to say one way or the other.”

“And when you worked here at the depot. Did you do a good job then?”

“I’m not sure about that, either.”

“Then let me make it clear. You did a very good job for us, Wyatt. Of all the people who work at the depot, you were the most thorough, the most dependable. And I’m willing to bet it’s the same at Kindermann Forest. You’ve worked hard. I’m sure of it. You did what you were supposed to. Am I right about that?”

“Yes, maybe.”

“So you did a good job, and that means you get to decide what your assignment should be. If it’s working with the horses, if that’s what you really want, then tell Mr. Kindermann. But if it’s the children you want to work with—and I think it is, Wyatt, I think you’d like to spend your summer working with children rather than horses—then you need to go to Mr. Kindermann and tell him so.”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t think that’s the way people do it here.”

“You can stand up for yourself and tell other people what it is you want.”

“Yes, all right. But I’d have to say it a different way, wouldn’t I? So that they wouldn’t think . . . Because they might think I was making trouble.” He turned his attention back out the window to the bright afternoon and the stretch of green meadow. Jerry Johnston had begun doing something odd. He was tottering about, drunkenly, throwing his head back one moment, as if to howl at the sky, and then hunching over suddenly, dangling his arms out as if he were an exhausted runner.

“It’s okay to be direct with people. You can say, ‘Look here, I did a good job and now I want to work with the children.’”

“Maybe so.”

“You’re allowed to make some trouble, Wyatt. It’s perfectly all right to stand up for yourself and get angry sometimes. When people are being unfair to you, you can speak your mind.”

Outside Jerry Johnston was standing up bolt straight and clutching at the buttons of his overalls. Then, as if a string had been suddenly cut, he collapsed heavily onto the ground.

Wyatt weighed the phone receiver in his hand. Far away, in Jefferson City, Captain Throckmorton was talking to him.
. . . Better to speak your mind than to . . .
The receiver was gray and chipped. It was rising in Wyatt’s hand. After a moment of dumbstruck consideration, he placed it gently in the cradle.

He was a lurching and clumsy runner. He stumbled over furniture, bolted through the swinging screen door of The Sanctuary. It was still a lovely afternoon, sun-dappled and warm, a few distant strolling figures on the open meadow and a wave of happy voices rising from the pool in the woods—except now, near the picnic tables, there was Jerry Johnston’s slumped form in the grass. Not motionless, not a still body, just a pear-shaped man in overalls lying on his side and rocking back and forth.

Wyatt hurried to him and bent down.
“Jerry,”
he said. “What’d you do? What happened?”

From Jerry a low gurgle. He’d gone red in the face. His fists were squeezed into tight paws.