Flying Crows (9 page)

Josh stood up and ran into the stacks.

Birdie, his pants down around his ankles, was sitting against a bookshelf, his head being hammered from side to side by Roger's bat.

Sister Hilda, her stockings and underclothes also down around her shoes, was pulling at Roger from behind, sobbing, yelling, begging for the whacking of Birdie to stop.

Josh stepped forward to help her and immediately caught a blow alongside his own head that knocked him out cold.

“I had heard that before, but when he pointed his gun at me I had
forgotten it. And it remained mostly forgotten. I figured I had no
choice but to do what he wanted. It probably wouldn't be long
before Grandmama saw what was happening through a window and came
running out with a stick or a rock and some hot words.

“I peed my pants. I couldn't help it. It went down my leg and all over the
front of my pants, which were brown cotton and tight and had been my
cousin's before they were mine.”

Lawrence of Sedalia let out a screaming, whooping, hysterical laugh. Another patient yelled, “The pee was scared right out of ya, little boy Josh, is
that it?” It was the first break in the quiet that had held for the last few minutes. And after a couple of the bushwhackers gave the room some stern
looks, quiet quickly returned.

Josh continued.

“I was humiliated and ashamed, but nobody but the bushwhacker could
have seen what I did and I wasn't even sure he had. If he saw, he didn't say
anything or seem to mind. How could he? I reached forward and let the
bushwhacker grab my right hand. He jerked his right foot out of the stirrup,
I replaced it with mine, and with a quick pull and a jump I was sitting up on
the saddle behind him.

“I didn't want to touch him but I had to grab on to something to keep
from falling off, so I took a handful of his coat in each of my hands and hung
on. I could feel his back, his body, or least his black coat, through my wet
pants, and I didn't mind that I might be getting him wet with my pee.”

“Hooray for Josh's wet pants!” a patient yelled. “Three cheers for Josh's
wet pants!” And, not unlike a school cheerleading squad, just about everyone in the auditorium, including even a couple of the bushwhackers, stood
and screamed, “Hip, hip, hooray!” three times. Like Lawrence of Sedalia's
outbursts of fear and laughter, that was part of the regular ritual of the performance.

When the cheering stopped, Josh went on.

“I tried to hold my breath to keep from smelling the bushwhacker but I
couldn't do it for long. The first odor that hit me was the whiskey he'd been
talking about having just drunk at the El Dorado Hotel. It was something I
was most familiar with because of being a lot with my Uncle Luther, a big
drinker. But the bushwhacker's stench was more mixed than that. Whiffs of
spit and rotten food and gunpowder and people's dried sweat and what I
imagined to be people's blood and guts also lodged in my nose and eased
up into my brain and down into my throat. I figured if he didn't shoot me I
was going to die anyhow of smell poisoning, that was for sure. So I was actually happy to have added some odor of pee to the occasion.”

Again led by Lawrence of Sedalia, a few of the patients broke into loud,
piercing laughter; others stomped their feet and rattled their chairs. When
they didn't stop after a couple of minutes, Amos the Ass stood with the Somerset Slugger up over his head. That got the auditorium quiet again.

Josh moved right up to the edge of the stage.

You could actually hear the sucking sound as the roomful of patients and
bushwhackers took a deep breath—all at once, as if on command. Most
everyone knew what was coming next.

“My right hand slipped from the bushwhacker's coat. I grabbed for something else. I had hold of a thing that felt human, hairy. I peered around the
back of the bushwhacker. I had a scalp in my hand! It was the top of the
head of a human being, tied to the saddle horn. The hair was blond, matted
in places with mud and blood. The skin underneath was shriveled. There
were two, maybe three other scalps; one, maybe two ears; and four noses—
all dried like prunes, tied by heavy black string.”

Josh paused. He looked out into the audience, scanning from left to right,
back to front. His eyes were met with those of his fellow lunatics, most of
them opened wide and fixed on his.

Josh took two steps backward. “I wanted to vomit. My stomach and my
throat and my spirit wanted to regurgitate. But I knew if I vomited on the
back of the man's black coat he would kill me for sure. I closed my eyes,
grabbed the coat again, and prayed silently to God in heaven to keep me
from regurgitating myself to certain death.”

Somebody down front broke the silence by gagging—loudly, horrendously—making the sound of someone on the verge of emptying his entire
insides in front of everyone in Flynn Auditorium. This had never happened
before. Vomiting by one of the patients—even Lawrence—was not part of
the performance. Josh saw in a flash that it was a new boy. Welcome to life
as a lunatic at Somerset.

Josh moved on with his story—quickly. “God answered my prayer. I was
suddenly fine and no longer felt the impending need to regurgitate.”

The gagging sound stopped. The new patient was quiet again. Maybe he
too had successfully prayed to God to spare him a regurgitation.

“We were off toward town, the bushwhacker whomping his legs and
boots hard against the belly of his horse. ‘Grub time, Midnight!' he yelled. I
assumed this was the name of the horse, a tall stallion with a coat that was
blacker than any midnight I had ever known.

“We had barely gone a block—the whole town was no more than five or
six blocks north and south, east and west—when two other fierce-looking
men on horseback came riding up. Both of them had large tin cups of
whiskey in one hand, their horses' reins in the other. ‘Captain Bill, there's a
train coming in from the east,' one of them shouted at my bushwhacker.

“ ‘It's all ours!' my bushwhacker yelled back.

“Captain Bill, they called him. I was sure from the way the others talked
to him and his return shout that I was on a horse with the man in charge—
some kind of chief bushwhacker, the head evildoer. His name was Bill, was
all I knew, except that he reeked of meanness.

“What I also knew at the moment was that the approaching train had to
be the Northern Missouri Railroad passenger run that came in every morning from St. Louis by way of St. Charles, Wentzville, Wright City, Warrenton,
Wellsville, Jefftown, and Mexico.

“ ‘Jump off, boy,' said the bushwhacker to me. ‘I got more serious things to
do now than find some breakfast.'

“He slowed his horse down long enough for me slip down off the rear of
the mount to the ground. He rode away without another word, and I started
to turn and run back to Grandmama's house as fast as I could. But I couldn't
move. There was too much to see, too much happening in and around me. I
walked, not ran, downtown to a place alongside a house that was next to the
El Dorado Hotel. I had no plan, other than to stand there, to hide there, to be
invisible while I watched what neither God in heaven nor the Devil in hell
could have imagined was about to unfold before my tortured eyes.

“What I saw first was more bushwhackers racing around on horseback in
all directions, shooting their pistols up in the air and yelling insults at the citizens of Centralia, some of whom I recognized. I wondered why these good
folks didn't get away and seek safety or protection. I heard some claiming to
the bushwhackers that they were southern sympathizers and shouldn't have
their property or person damaged. That struck me as pointless and stupid.

“Most of the bushwhackers were wearing blue Union soldiers' coats,
which they had probably stolen off dead Union soldiers. They rode in twos
or more. And then I heard one shout, ‘We are Bill Anderson's men!'

“So! My bushwhacker was none other than Bill Anderson, ‘Bloody Bill,'
they called him, because he was known to be the most ruthless and notorious and inhuman of all the bushwhacker leaders. And I had just met him,
rode on his horse with him. I couldn't believe it, fathom it, or digest it.”

VIII

WILL

SOMERSET

1918

Josh regained consciousness. His eyes were open.

“Don't you think it's about time you started talking, Josh?” Dr. Mitchell asked.

Josh did not respond and showed no reaction in his face. It was as if he didn't hear the question.

“When was the last time you spoke a word to somebody—anybody?”

Again, no response.

They had been in the treatment room for less than ten minutes. Josh was still lying face-up on the gurney. Dr. Mitchell, assisted by two attendants, had washed the blood from Josh's chest wounds and was now covering the five gaping holes with large white cotton bandages.

“I take it you have a problem with living, is that right?” Mitchell said, in a friendly, casual manner.

Before anybody could stop him, Josh thrust his two hands down to his chest and ripped at the bandages.

The attendants gripped Josh's arms and after a few seconds of struggle held them down long enough for Dr. Mitchell to bind each to a side of the gurney with leather straps.

“So you really want to die, do you?” Mitchell said, once things had calmed down. The attendants also tied down Josh's legs. “Well, that's too damned bad, because I'm not going to let you.”

The doctor waved his hand back and forth in front of Josh's face. There was no reaction. Josh stared straight ahead as if nothing were happening.

“Close your eyes, Josh. Let's see what happens when you close your eyes.”

Josh not only did not shut his eyes, he opened them wider. From Mitchell's point of view, that was progress. Josh had finally reacted.

“I don't think you can keep them open like that for much longer, can you, Josh? You must be getting sleepy. You've had quite a day. Trying to kill yourself can be exhausting. What did you do, beat on yourself with a tool of some kind? That must have taken some doing and hurt like hell. Were you singing or reciting some poetry while you did it? Was it something by William Shakespeare? As I remember, he wrote a lot of plays with great dying scenes in them. . . . Your lids are really getting heavy, aren't they? I'll bet they feel like they've got pieces of lead on them. It won't be long now before they'll be closed. Did your mother sing that go-to-sleep song to you? ‘Go to sleep, little baby. Go to sleep, little baby. When you wake, your pretty pretty face . . .' ”

The lids fell down across Josh's eyes.

One second passed. Two. Three.

His eyes popped wide open. So did his mouth.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Please forgive me!”

Josh screamed so loudly, Dr. Mayfield and several nurses and attendants came running into the treatment room to see what was going on.

In a matter of a few minutes, it happened three more times. Josh's eyes fell shut, then sprang open to the accompaniment of screeches that were loud enough for God in heaven to hear.

Finally, at Mayfield's direction, one of the attendants put Josh to sleep with a whack to the head with a small piece of lead pipe and wheeled him away to an isolation room for the night.

“That's quite a life you saved him for, isn't it, Dr. Mitchell?” Mayfield said, once they were alone.

Will Mitchell, confused and upset, kept his mouth shut.

But Mayfield was not finished. “I would ask only that you consider one thing, Dr. Mitchell. How do you believe that man, had he been able, would have made the choice between continuing to live the way he is here now or making a contribution, through his death, that might speed up the desperately needed work on how to repair such severely damaged brains as his?”

Will Mitchell left the treatment room, the response in his head unspoken. He was more determined than ever to save the life of Joshua Alan Lancaster.

Will had no problem with the punctures in Josh's chest. He was confident they would heal quickly and completely, leaving only large scars where the holes had been. But handling Josh's mental illness was another matter. Like every other staff doctor to serve at Somerset Asylum, Will had had no formal training or education in how to treat lunacy, much less cure it. It wasn't even in his curriculum at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia. He was only at Somerset because a doctor from the state health department happened to come by the St. Louis hospital where Will was finishing a routine general-medicine residency. The doctor was soliciting volunteers to come and “serve your community” for meager pay in one of the state hospitals. There was a particularly critical need in the state's five insane asylums, he said. Will had been headed since childhood for a comfortable slot in the well-established and prosperous downtown Kansas City practice of his father and three other partners. But Will, still unmarried and without other obligations, signed up to go to Somerset for two years. He figured, What the hell, why not? It might be an interesting experience, if nothing else.

He decided to treat Josh's sick mind during rocking time. It was a decision based solely on hunch and instinct rather than on any professional theory or research.

“Here's what we're going to do, Josh,” said Will, the first afternoon. He had moved Josh and his rocking chair into a corner of the common room, as far away from the others as possible. “I'm not going to put on the straps and things. You can move, see, and talk. Got it?”

Josh smiled. He got it.

He was usually tied to the chair while he rocked back and forth, back and forth:
bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta.
He was also often gagged and blindfolded, with strips of tied or wadded-up white cotton cloth. The restraints on his movements, mouth, and eyes were a treatment designed by one of Will's predecessors a couple of years before. The idea was to force Josh to deal with the darkness and the fits that ensued without doing harm to himself or disrupting the peace and quiet of the other rockers, his fellow patients. The hope, based on nothing as far as Will could tell, was that eventually something would click in his diseased mind to end the fits.

Will's approach was also based on nothing but hope.

He said to Josh, “I want you to rock and rock while you tell me what you remember. I want you to begin at the beginning and go through every detail of what happened to you that caused you such pain and suffering then and continues to now. Got it?”

Josh began rocking. His shoulders shook slightly. He got it.

“Stay calm, Josh. Start with something small. The weather, maybe. Was the sun shining? Was it raining? Or was it dark—at night. Was there a wind blowing? From what direction? That kind of thing.”

Nothing.

“Give me one tiny detail, only one. That's all you have to do. What were you wearing? Tell me that.”

Josh kept his eyes open, staring straight ahead, and his mouth shut. The shaking spread to his hands, which were clutching the arms of the chair.

“The time of day. Just tell me what time it all started. Close your eyes and tell me if it was six o'clock or ten o'clock or whatever. Give me the time of day, Josh. Close your eyes.”

Josh closed his eyes.

Will held his breath, his hope. He wondered if maybe he was the crazier of the two. He had no idea if this approach held out even a remote possibility of helping this man. Was it unethical or even illegal for a regular doctor to practice lunacy doctoring without a license or certificate of some kind? If it wasn't, it probably should be.

“Please, please forgive me! I'm so sorry!”

The piercing screech of Josh's scream brought two bushwhackers running into the common room and set off, like dominoes, talking and sobbing by several of the other patients.

Josh was quickly tied to his chair with leather straps, and cotton strips were put over his eyes and into his mouth.

Will told Josh he would be back to try again tomorrow.

Josh just kept on crying.