The Inverted Forest (39 page)

She’d been relieved to hear this. Still, she had to make it clear
to Captain Throckmorton that there’d been a mix-up. Some people, she’d explained, were under the impression that Wyatt had come to camp as a counselor. Whereas she and Captain Throckmorton both knew that he’d been sent to Kindermann Forest as a camper.

There’d been a weighted pause on the telephone. At last Captain Throckmorton had said, “I remember it like you do, Miss Foster. I sent Wyatt Huddy away with the understanding he’d be a
camper
at Kindermann Forest.”

In the depot office she sat in an armchair and read the statement Captain Throckmorton had prepared. Carefully worded, expertly typed, it needed only to be signed in the presence of a notary public.

They had lunch at a sandwich shop several blocks from the state capitol. Waiting for them at a table was Captain Throckmorton’s friend and roommate, Ed McClintock, who stood and greeted Harriet formally and shyly, then lowered himself back into his chair. Ed McClintock had a broomy mustache and a glinting sidelong gaze, which Harriet found difficult to read. “Beware the jalapeño cheese dip,” he declared ominously. But when the waitress came, he ordered the dip along with a poor boy sandwich minus the tomatoes. “Make my poor boy a little poorer, if you please,” he said.

They were joined a few minutes later by a wiry little woman named Rachel Young. Rachel worked as a part-time clerk for the Department of Motor Vehicles, but she had other interests and proficiencies, including certification as a notary public. She’d brought along her notary stamp in a felt-lined wood box, which she passed around for her lunch partners to inspect. “If called upon,” she said dryly, “I can use either the stamp or the box as a weapon.”

It dawned on Harriet that they’d convened at the sandwich shop for a greater purpose than lunch. They were here to plan the next stage of her visit to Jefferson City: a trip to the Huddy farm to try to solicit a statement from Wyatt’s sister, Caroline.

“If it were up to me,” Ed McClintock said, “I’d bring along a
policeman’s stick and a pair of handcuffs.” He let his wry, sidelong gaze settle on Captain Throckmorton for a moment. “But I’ve been
overruled.
”

“Not entirely,” the captain said. “Show the ladies your weapon of choice, Ed.”

From a weighty ring of keys attached to his belt loop Ed McClintock unfastened a palm-size canister of pepper spray, bright purple and covered in plump cartoon daisies. It had been found, Captain Throckmorton explained, in one of the depot donation bins.

As a group they seemed to be cheered by the fact of this bright pepper spray canister—though afterward all their talk regarding a confrontation with Caroline Huddy was practical and sobering. Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock had a few provisional schemes that might persuade her to offer a statement. But beyond that, what were they to do? What if Caroline Huddy came after them with a shotgun? Pepper-spray her and run, they decided. What if she called the police? No chance of that. Her phone service had been out for many months. She’d long ago stopped paying her utilities.

Rachel Young had known Caroline Huddy in high school and still saw her in the Jefferson City shops from time to time. In high school they’d called Caroline Huddy Viking Girl because of her size and her rampaging personality.

“She’s been a miserable person all her life,” Captain Throckmorton said. “I try to keep that in mind. The state she’s in. Her inner pain. Still though, I consider the things she’s done to Wyatt unforgivable.”

“What things would those be?” Harriet asked.

It was a strange and grievous experience to be told of the injuries inflicted to Wyatt’s feet and the long hours he’d spent suffering in the family shed before rescue. Worse somehow to hear of it in a Jefferson City sandwich shop, with its peppermint-striped wallpaper and cheery lunchtime crowd. There was no way for Harriet to locate herself in this silly shop, no proper direction to turn her anger and
disgust. Instead she listened to Captain Throckmorton’s account and afterward shielded her eyes with her unsteady hand.

They drove in a procession of three cars out through the quaint neighborhoods of Jefferson City and across the Missouri River. East of the river the land was hilly and open, the farmhouses handsome and sided by long sloping fields of cut hay. None of this tidiness, however, could be found a mile or two off the blacktop highway. To reach this interior land they had to travel slowly along dirt roads whose crumbling edges gave way to sudden ditches and sprawls of litter. The Huddy farm had a rusted swing gate that had fallen back into the bushes. The house was two-storied and weathered and set in the middle of a sun-flooded clearing. Twenty yards away, along a well-trod dirt path, was an immense tin metal tractor shed.

They made no effort to hide the clamor of their arrival: the squawking car doors, the stomp of their footsteps across the cedar-board front porch. Captain Throckmorton knocked on the door and knocked again. “Caroline Huddy!” he called out. No answer. And no sounds or movement from the inner precincts of the house. After several minutes of waiting he shrugged and turned the doorknob.

“Wait a minute now,” Rachel Young said. She’d been wavering on the lip of the porch and had turned to them with a blanched expression. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “When the document’s ready, you holler and I’ll come on in with my stamp.”

They gave her a sympathetic nod. Captain Throckmorton pushed open the door.

Inside they discovered a living room thronged with debris: piles of scuffed secondhand furniture, great mounds of wadded-up plastic bags and bundled clothing. Pathways had been cleared from one room to the next. In the kitchen a large dormant portable generator had been set up on cinder blocks near an open window. A bright orange extension cord ran out from the generator, across the floor, and into the hallway.

They followed the cord up a cluttered staircase to the second-floor landing and finally to a closed bedroom door. “Anyone home?” Captain Throckmorton inquired. “Caroline? Caroline Huddy?” Propped against the doorframe was a twin-barrel shotgun, which Ed McClintock hoisted up with one hand. He snapped open the chambers and removed both shells and set the gun back in its place. Then he eased open the bedroom door.

Caroline Huddy was propped up waiting for them in a bed full of scavenged sofa cushions. There was nothing haphazard about the arrangement of these cushions; they’d been stacked in careful layers at the rear of the bed so that they rose up thronelike and supported her broad back. Each of her plump forearms had its own plaid cushion. Arrayed across the quilt were dozens of essential items in sealed Ziploc bags: candy and nuts and various breakfast cereals, tissues, lip balms, remote controls for the television and VCR.

She looked up at them from the encampment of her bed. The best that could be said of her, physically, was that she had clear hazel eyes edged with vivid black lashes. (No mascara on those lashes; their thickness and length and curled ends appeared to be natural gifts.) Otherwise her features were blunt and heavy, her face hinged with an overlarge jaw—an old-time boxer’s jaw—and her mouth set in one long, thin, inexpressive line. It was hard to see any clear resemblance to Wyatt, except maybe in the general stockiness of her build and in the size and roughness of Caroline Huddy’s resting hands.

“Did I invite
any
of you into my house?” Caroline Huddy asked. “Did I?” she insisted. “
Any
of you?” Each time she uttered the word
any,
in her wispy, unused voice, she stared directly at Harriet.

“We had no choice but to let ourselves in,” Captain Throckmorton said. “I apologize for that. But we’re here to talk over some important matters.”

She sat up straighter against her wall of layered cushions. Again she lifted her gaze and studied each of her three visitors: Captain
Throckmorton, Ed McClintock, Harriet. There was a murky, hard-to-determine quality in Caroline Huddy’s posture and blunt expression, but if Harriet had to guess, she would say she was seeing a woman marginally pleased to have uninvited guests in the doorway of her bedroom, a woman ready to be included in the serious talk.

“There are decisions to be made,” Captain Throckmorton said. “Regarding your brother, Wyatt.”

Caroline huffed air through her broad nose and then, patiently, lowered and raised her thick eyelashes.

“You’re aware of what happened to Wyatt last summer at Kindermann Forest?”

“I know you sent him off to camp,” she said. “And I know he squeezed the stuffing out of some dumb son-of-a-bitch counselor.” All this she recited matter-of-factly; her words might have been barbed, but the delivery was dispassionate.

“Yes,” Captain Throckmorton said. “I did send him off. And there was a tragedy at camp. You probably also know that Wyatt is being prosecuted in Shannon County, Missouri, and the prosecution will go forward one of two ways. That’s what our friend here, Harriet Foster, has come to talk to you about.”

Harriet stepped forward. It would be a mistake, she knew, a grievous insult, to sit on the edge of Caroline Huddy’s bed. Fortunately, there was a seamstress’s stool in the corner of the room. “May I use the stool?” she asked and, having received permission from Caroline Huddy in the form of an indifferent shrug, Harriet took the stool and sat at the bedside.

“I’m a friend of Wyatt,” Harriet began. “I worked as the camp nurse last summer at Kindermann Forest.”

“A friend?”

“That’s right. A good friend, I hope.”

Caroline Huddy gazed at her somberly. “You Negro girls will go with anyone, won’t you?” It was voiced with such mildness, this
remark, as if it, too, were a kind of uninvited guest, poised on the threshold, wondering shyly if it could come in. “I bet you don’t like the word
Negro,
do you?” Caroline Huddy asked. “There’s another name I could use.”

At this Ed McClintock let out a gruff sigh and stepped back out of the room. They could hear his creaking footsteps on the landing, then the stairs.

“People use all sorts of names,” Harriet said. “Here are two names I’m willing to accept from you. You can call me Ms. Foster or Nurse Harriet. Anything else and we’re going to have trouble.”

There was from Caroline Huddy a softening of her blunt expression. “All right then,
Nurse Harriet,
” she said. For the time being she seemed pleased to have made this concession. More so, there was an even stronger sense of what Harriet had first noticed upon entering the bedroom: Caroline Huddy was eager for camaraderie. How very odd and impossible this was. She seemed to want to say the most poisonous things. And she wanted someone—anyone, a black nurse even—to be her dearest friend.

“What I want to tell you,” Harriet explained, “is that your brother, Wyatt, will be tried sometime next summer. The prosecutor wants to seek a second-degree murder conviction, which means—”

“He’ll be put in the electric chair.”

“No, no. They won’t be seeking a death sentence. But they will ask the jury for life in prison. There’s another way to go about it, though. We can make it clear to the judge that instead of prison Wyatt should be put in a state hospital or group home. He shouldn’t stand trial at all because of his diminished intelligence.”

“Diminished intelligence,”
Caroline Huddy repeated. She seemed to think it a marvelous term.

“Because he’s mentally retarded.”

“Wyatt?” she said. “Retarded? He may look that way, Nurse Harriet. But it’s a condition he has.”

“I know about the condition. Some people with Apert syndrome have a normal IQ. And others suffer from mental retardation. It’s much better for Wyatt if we make it clear to the judge that because of his diminished intelligence he didn’t know what he was doing at the time of the murder.”

“Didn’t know?” Caroline Huddy said. She shook her head in dumb wonder. “He squeezed a man to death without knowing?”

“In my car I have a typewriter. It’s electric. I’m guessing that Captain Throckmorton or Ed McClintock can start up the generator in your kitchen. I can sit here by your bedside and type a statement that explains how you saw plenty of signs of Wyatt’s diminished intelligence when he was growing up. When it’s done, we’ll call up a woman we have waiting on your front porch, a notary public named Rachel Young. You’ll sign the statement in her presence and she’ll put her notary stamp on it.”

“Rachel Young? I won’t sign anything in front of that bitch.”

“There’s no time to find anyone else. It’ll have to be Rachel.”

Caroline Huddy sighed wistfully. “Too bad for you then. My answer is no.”

“A statement from you could make the difference for Wyatt,” Harriet said. “The difference between a lifetime in prison, which we both know would be awful, and a life being cared for in a state mental health facility. If he went to a state facility, he’d have a chance of getting out someday. I’d like you to think about that a minute, please, Caroline.”

To this Caroline Huddy tipped back her head and narrowed her features in mock deliberation. While she performed this act, they could hear Ed McClintock climbing the stairs again. A moment later he was in the bedroom doorway holding an object behind his back.

“I’ve thought it all through,” Caroline Huddy announced. “And my answer— Are you ready,
Nurse Harriet
? My answer is still no. No and no again. There’s a reason for it, too. I’m saying no because
there’s a big difference between retarded and stupid. Wyatt’s always been stupid. And if you do a stupid thing, Nurse Harriet, then you pay the price.”

“Have you paid the price? For the stupid things—”

“Shut your face,” Caroline Huddy said. “You don’t know a damn thing about what I’ve done.”

“Excuse me, ladies,” Ed McClintock said. He’d taken a few steps forward into the bedroom. To Caroline Huddy he tipped his head in a tepid nod. “Look here, Caroline,” he said, and from behind his back he produced what looked to be a steering wheel, thin and overlarge and chipped along its outer edges. “When I was passing through your living room, I happened to see this little gem. From an Oliver 70 series farm tractor. A model from the nineteen forties, or maybe fifties. I’m not sure. You know I collect old tractor seats and steering wheels, and so I thought—”