The Inverted Forest (25 page)

Other people had begun to take notice: several counselors crossing the meadow turned toward the Sanctuary yard. Nearby, Leonard Peirpont looked up blinking from his stacks of checkers. Thomas Anwar Toomey crawled over from where he’d been smoking and gazed down upon his stricken friend. “No, no, no,” Thomas Anwar said. “Not good! Not good!”

One of the kitchen girls appeared suddenly over Wyatt’s shoulder.
She stared down at Jerry Johnston. “Oh shit!” she said and took off running for the infirmary.

“It hurts. It hurts. It hurts,” Jerry moaned.

“Where?” Wyatt asked.

Jerry put a plump hand on the bib of his overalls. “Here,” he said and patted his fingers atop his chest.

A simple gesture, but it made Wyatt cringe in dread. He could picture Jerry Johnston’s heart, a swelled and probably misshapen vessel. It had deflated somehow or frozen midbeat. Jerry had dropped to the ground. While this had happened, Wyatt had been away on the phone claiming to be a responsible counselor.

Someone shouted, “Here she comes. She’s coming now,” meaning, of course, the camp nurse, Harriet Foster. There were several minutes, as long and as intimate as any Wyatt had known, in which he gripped Jerry Johnston’s hand and listened to his anxious breathing.

The crowd had begun shouting for her, “Hurry, please. Hurry up, Harriet,” until at last the throng of onlookers parted. How odd. They’d all wanted her here so badly—they’d longed for her—that once she’d arrived and knelt in the meadow grass beside Jerry, she seemed entirely too ordinary for this emergency. They wanted someone else. “All right, Jerry. All right,” she said and, rather than brandish any tools from a canvas bag of instruments slung over her shoulder, she rested her hand on Jerry Johnston’s forehead, then his cheek, and finally in the crook of his fat neck, as if he were a feverish child. “Don’t breathe so fast,” she said. “Slow it down, please.”

“I can’t,” Jerry panted.

“Can’t because it hurts? Or can’t because you’re scared?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

From her canvas bag she extracted a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff, which she wrapped around Jerry Johnston’s arm. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

He patted his chest.

“Does it feel heavy? Does it feel like weight on top of you?”

He closed his eyes and shuddered.

“Does it burn?”

“Yes.”

She pumped the blood pressure cuff and listened through her stethoscope, and then she looked up sharply and insisted that the crowd of onlookers back away and be quiet. Again she put her hands on Jerry Johnston’s face and neck and listened through her stethoscope. She counted out loud to herself and bent down close to her patient, studying the features of his face—his eyes and nose and bulging tongue—and then leaned back on her heels and scrutinized him from a wary distance. At last she said, “I’d like you to sit up, Jerry. Would you do that?”

“No, no, I can’t,” he whimpered.

She turned her gaze from Jerry to Wyatt.

“What’d he have for lunch, Wyatt?” she asked.

“Hot dogs,” Wyatt said. “Beans.”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

“How much is a lot?”

“Four hot dogs. Two plates of beans. Then some marshmallows he was saving.”

“My goodness,” she said. “Four hot dogs.” She bowed her head, gratefully, and searched through the pockets of her jeans until she found a roll of antacid tablets. Into Jerry Johnston’s wet mouth she placed two tablets and ordered him to chew.

“I can’t,” he grunted. “It hurts too much.”

“Oh, but you can. Wyatt and I will sit beside you until the hurt goes away.”

“But it won’t go away,” Jerry cried. Thick tears poured down his face. “I’m having a heart attack.”

“No, no. You’re having indigestion.”

He turned his face away from them and cried harder.

“You ate too much for lunch, Jerry. If you sit up and swallow the tablets, I promise you’ll feel better.”

But he didn’t appear any less anguished or afraid. He gazed up at Harriet and wept. “No heart attack,” she promised. The crowd of onlookers pressed in around them. “No heart attack, Jerry,” they said. “Sit up. Please. You can do it, Jerry.” He lingered awhile under the warm light of their attention, and then, still weeping, he sat up, chewed and swallowed the antacid tablets. Wyatt and Harriet helped hoist him onto his feet for the journey to the infirmary—a plodding and laborious journey given that he required their constant support. He was still grief-stricken. “My heart,” Jerry moaned as they marched him forward. “My heart.” He could be distracted for a minute or two—
What’s the best car to have, Jerry? What’s on TV tonight?
—so that he’d walk ten or twenty paces reciting the virtues of Ford Mustangs and
The Dukes of Hazzard
before recalling the anguish of his heart attack. Then he’d slump backward and cry out, “No, no, no,” and Wyatt and Harriet would catch him beneath the arms and bear the considerable weight of Jerry Johnston for a dozen yards or more until, at last, they’d crossed the meadow and climbed the infirmary step.

Inside, they guided Jerry, the infirmary’s only patient, onto an empty bunk. A tremendous relief to drop the bulk of Jerry Johnston onto a mattress, to be unburdened. Afterward, they leaned against the bunk frame and tried to catch their breath.

“Sit up, Jerry,” Harriet pleaded. She shuffled to the sink and filled a cup of water. “Sit up and drink some water.” But he did the opposite: lay down and turned his face to the wall.

“Please,” she said, wearily. When he didn’t respond, she drank the water herself and lay down on a nearby bunk. Eyes closed, she draped a slender arm across her forehead, as if she were settling in for a long nap. “For goodness’ sake,” she said. “Sit down and rest a minute, Wyatt.”

He wavered a moment and eased into a chair.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.” Which was mostly true. His difficulties, at the moment, were all minor. His back ached. He seemed to be sweating too much. And he wasn’t used to young women, particularly attractive women, treating him with such familiarity. Such kindness. He wasn’t at all sure that he liked it.

“I’ll keep Jerry here till dinnertime,” Harriet said, her eyes still closed. “He’s just acting this way because he’s scared. But he doesn’t have anything to be scared of. Do you, Jerry?”

No answer from their patient except for a huffy, indignant snort.

Otherwise the infirmary was still and quiet and nicely cool. There were stripes of soft light bleeding though the window blinds.

“Wyatt,” she said. “Every time I see you around camp, I always want to ask you . . . not ask . . . tell you. I always want to tell you.” She propped her head up on her outstretched arm and peered at him. “I don’t know if this will be worth anything to you, if it’s even worth saying. But when I was in high school, back in North Carolina, there was a boy I knew. Only four years old. A boy with Apert syndrome. I took care of him sometimes. He had a twin brother. And what I know about that boy, Taylor, the one with Apert syndrome, was that he was as smart and normal as any other four-year-old. Smarter and more normal than his twin brother.”

Wyatt sat perfectly still in his chair. For the time being he was too embarrassed, too aware of himself, to offer her a sensible reply.

“I thought I’d let you know about that,” she said.

He nodded.

“Should I have let you know?” she asked. “Is it all right that I said something?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s all right.” He readied himself to stand and leave. “Thank you,” he said.

S
he stirred awake very early in the morning and found James standing at her bedside, flexing up and down on his tiptoes. He had one hand clenched on the crotch of his pajamas.

“Hold on now,” she said. “Just a second. I need to find . . . Can you hold it?”

He nodded and tightened his grip. This was, for James, a typical morning dilemma: he needed badly to pee, and yet the infirmary bathroom was almost always occupied, usually by a very fat, half-dressed, retarded woman who’d failed to close the door and who could be seen propped atop the toilet like a roosting ostrich.

Harriet located her sandals. Then she led the boy out the door to the edge of the yard, to a dirt gulley that ran alongside the infirmary. A gauzy, break-of-day light was seeping through the dew-weighted cedar branches and clarifying, inch by inch, the yard and pathways and open meadow. No chirping birds or barking dogs yet. No lumbering campers, either. Without them the grounds of Kindermann Forest looked soft-edged and vulnerable.

James, poised at the edge of the gully, stood rocking to and fro and peeing with great accuracy, and when he was done he craned his face up to her, Harriet, his mother, and said, “I don’t care if I ever see any of them again.”

She didn’t bother correcting him. Today was Thursday, day eleven of the State Hospital Session. It felt like a great accomplishment to have made it this far. Eleven days. Last night she’d heard the exhausted counselors of Kindermann Forest boast that they were in the homestretch now. There were Thursday and Friday yet to conquer. It would all officially end Saturday morning, when three white state hospital buses rumbled into camp and reclaimed their one hundred and four patients. What a moment of relief that would be! To see the loaded buses pass from the gates of Kindermann Forest bound for the hospitals and group homes from which they’d come. The staff had already set their sights on such a moment. They were looking ahead and calculating each small milestone. Three more rise-and-shines. Two more working days in which, at nearly every moment, they’d be duty-bound to their campers. Two more evening activities. Two more clamorous bedtime routines. Two more dreadful showers.

For Harriet seven more rounds of medication to anxiously sort and distribute. Two more sleep-wrecked night shifts in the infirmary.

How nice it would be to stumble back to her bed for another hour’s sleep. But there was no chance of that. From inside the infirmary came the sound of last night’s patients stomping across the wood floor. James had found his digging spoons and was hunched down in the yard excavating tiny roads for his Matchbox cars.

A half hour before breakfast one of the counselors, Daniel Hartpence, brought Harriet her first patient of the day: Frederick Torbert. What could be said of Frederick that his appearance didn’t already make clear? He had a broad chest and muscle-bloated arms and neck. (How
could this be when Frederick, like several other brawny male campers, never seemed to exercise?) With his hard, jutting forehead and tiny black-marble eyes, he looked Neanderthal, which was precisely the way he behaved—ferocious and grunting and single-minded. One day last week, in the middle of mess hall lunch, he’d stood up, put his hands beneath the edge of his table, and flipped it over in one easy motion. Fortunately, no one had ended up beneath the overturned table, which was made of oak and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. Just to move a mess hall table for sweeping required the wholesale exertions of four kitchen girls.

What brought Frederick to the infirmary was a thick splinter, several days old, lodged in the palm of his hand. As a source of pain and infection, it didn’t seem to bother him. He sat beside Harriet on the picnic table in the infirmary yard, wiggling the beefy fingers of his injured hand. His unswerving gaze, softened from twice-daily doses of lithium, was focused on the crotch of Harriet’s blue jean shorts.

Daniel Hartpence hovered over them, his legs half-cocked and ready to spring to Harriet’s rescue. Or make a hasty retreat. “Did you know it’s our turn to go see the ponies this afternoon?” Daniel announced brightly. “That’ll sure be nice. Won’t it, Frederick?”

From Frederick a bored grunt as Harriet tweezed the splinter from his palm.

“I know you’ve been looking forward to seeing the ponies,” Daniel said.

“I bet he has,” Harriet agreed. She smiled wanly. How halfhearted their banter sounded. But what else could they do? Around Frederick there was always the compulsion to make the sunniest of comments in order to displace whatever primitive thoughts might be gaining a perch inside his head.

She swabbed his wound with disinfectant and sealed it with a Band-Aid. “Is that better?” she asked. In answer he rose from the
bench, opened his mouth in what might have been a loose grin. He held his enormous arms out to her. Apparently, he wanted a hug from Nurse Harriet.

A bad idea to accept this offer. But what horrible arrogance to refuse it. Harriet took a step toward his open arms, and at once he brought his hand down and rubbed the bandaged palm over the crotch of her shorts.

She stepped back right away. She’d learned to suffer these indignities with a minimal degree of fuss. No stomp of protest. No outward shudder of disgust. “All right,” she said, as if his determined groping had been a mindless act. “I’ll let you gentlemen get on with your day.” She stood in the yard and watched Frederick Torbert being led away by a hushed and red-faced Daniel Hartpence.

Harriet went back to her post at the infirmary picnic table. A few moments later she shivered and crossed her legs. It unsettled her, the deliberateness of what Frederick Torbert had done. He’d wanted to reach out and touch her. He’d brooded over it while she worked on his hand. Then he’d done it. Not just a lack of boundaries. Or a lack of inhibitions. It wasn’t Frederick Torbert’s low IQ that gave him these longings or the boldness to act on them. If he weren’t retarded, if by some medical procedure or godly miracle his IQ were made forty points higher, she’d still do all she could to avoid being left alone with him.