The Inverted Forest (40 page)

“Put your twenty dollars on my dresser and get out of my room.”

“I will,” he said. “But I think it’s only fair to mention that this steering wheel is a real gem to me. To another collector it might only be worth twenty dollars. To me, though, it’s worth more.” He freed his wallet from his back pocket and held it open so that Caroline Huddy could see the layered bills in its fold. “The fairest price I can think of, for me personally, is all the money I’ve got here in my wallet. That would be two hundred dollars even.”

She was, for the time being, frozen in a state of surprise that looked entirely genuine.

“I’ll go ahead and put this two hundred dollars on the dresser for you, Caroline,” Ed McClintock said. “I’ll do it once you and Ms. Foster have sorted through your
difficulties
 . . . once the statement’s been typed up and Rachel’s had a chance to put her stamp on it.”

It was hard to imagine what a smile from Caroline Huddy might look like, but here it was: a sudden creasing of her long, thin mouth, and a blossoming in her cheeks that was almost girlish. “You’re as
worse as the rest of them,” she said. “You come into my house thinking you’re better, but you’re worse. Truly you are. Someone should report you,” she said gamely.

“Nothing to report,” Ed McClintock said. “All I’m doing is paying fair money for an item that’s important to me.”

“Hell you are,” she said. “God damn hell you are.” She appeared to be on the verge of a strange, eruptive laughter. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Ed,” she said. “Know what I should do? I should call out the authorities on you.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Should I fetch you the telephone?”

“I should throw that money right back in your fat face.”

“Maybe you should,” he said. There was an acute, mocking humor in his sidelong gaze. “Then you can sit up here and wait for the next collector to come by and offer you two hundred dollars. That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”

“Well it might . . . It would. God
damn
it.”

“It sure would. Because I looked through your kitchen cupboards downstairs, Caroline. Ain’t a damn thing in them. Everything you have to get by on is right here on your bed.” He stood back and surveyed her Ziploc bags of cereals and nuts—her various luxuries.

“You go straight to god damn hell, you bastard. You don’t know a thing. You don’t know
anything,
you fucker.” Caroline Huddy was beyond herself then, rocking back and forth against her cushions, crying out half-strangled phrases that were crude and bitter one moment and loaded with self-pity the next. She said she’d been treated badly all her life. Everyone in Jeff City knew it, too. She’d had a sick mother, a worthless father. And Wyatt. She’d done the best she could with Wyatt, spoiled him, loved him too much.

“The god damn shame of it is this,” she said. “I’ve taken care of people all my life and now there’s no one round to take care of me.” She wagged her head back and forth, amazed that she’d spoken this truth aloud. Her face was covered with a film of tears and mucus, which she wiped at with the underside of her forearm. “God damn it.
God damn it.
God damn it,
” she cursed. Then she gave a slow nod of acceptance and a long, deep steadying breath. “Run and get your god damn typewriter,” she said to Harriet. “I’ll tell the judge about Wyatt being
dim-witted.
”

“About his diminished intelligence,” Harriet corrected her.

“Yes, God damn it. About his diminished intelligence. His mental retardation. But I’ll do it in my own words, you understand? You’ll type it out just like I say it.”

It took time for Harriet to retrieve the typewriter from her car, more time for Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock to find a canister of gasoline and prime the generator in the kitchen. There were long minutes when Harriet waited at the bedside for a steady current of electricity to power the typewriter on her lap. It wasn’t a matter of feeling awkward. She’d grown accustomed to that. It was the prospect of being the lone witness to Caroline Huddy’s life in this bedroom: the way she sat propped up in her bed, blinking her long eyelashes, looking out the window and reaching into a bag, now and then, for a handful of cornflakes. A gaze out the window. A handful of cornflakes. A blinking consideration of the stacked boxes and bags on her dresser and bookshelves. The sum and substance of her life. Horrible to imagine it going on like this day after day.

Yet Caroline Huddy seemed to have developed a supreme patience for it. She chewed her cornflakes and let her gaze drift across the room and settle on Harriet. “Hey, Nurse Harriet,” she said. “Let me ask you something. The times you’ve gone to see Wyatt locked up in jail, does he look sorry? Sorry for what he’s done?”

“Yes, he does. Very sorry.”

She parted her thin lips. Her unlikely smile presented itself. “All right then. Let me ask you this. The counselor boy that Wyatt squeezed to death. Did you know him?”

“I did.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Well enough to know what kind of person he was.”

“And what kind of person was he?”

“The very worst kind.”

“Really?” Caroline Huddy said. Clearly, she’d not expected this reply. The surprise of it, the novelty, made her overlarge jaw hang open. “The very worst kind?” she repeated. She needed some private time, apparently, to sort through this riddle, and so she turned again and surveyed the view outside her window. Her hand burrowed into the bag of cornflakes. After a while she grew absolutely still. Then she turned back to Harriet with a face purged of its anger and gruff confidence. Caroline Huddy’s voice wavered. “Worse than me?” she asked.

It might have been the most sincere and pleading inquiry Harriet had ever heard. She sat and considered her answer. “Yes,” Harriet said. “He was worse.” After all, she still needed an affidavit from the one remaining member of Wyatt’s family.

But her private, unspoken answer would not have been so different. Yes, Christopher Waterhouse was worse, she might say. Worse because he seemed to Harriet to be entirely self-satisfied, an untroubled young man with a terrible selfishness and a sharp eye for the next opportunity. Caroline Huddy, on the other hand, was full of misery. Not regret. She wasn’t sorry. Neither of them was. But at least Caroline Huddy was miserable.

Moments later the typewriter thrummed to life. Harriet rolled in a fresh piece of paper and recorded, as faithfully as possible, Caroline Huddy’s terse remembrances and opinions. Rachel Young was called up to witness the signing of the statement. And once this was accomplished, the only reason for being at the Huddy farm dissolved and they were all—Harriet and Rachel and Ed McClintock and Captain Throckmorton—eager to be gone. The generator was shut down, the typewriter packed away. A stack of twenty-dollar bills was left on the bedroom dresser.

All the while Caroline Huddy, who’d crawled out from beneath
the quilts of her bed—she could walk well enough it seemed, or at least shamble along the cleared pathways of her house—was calling out curses and insults and other provocations meant to snare them in an argument and delay their departure, if only by a minute or two.

No one bothered to answer her. They would not be delayed. Hurriedly, they climbed into their cars and away they went, out along the crumbling dirt roads to the prettier blacktop lanes and finally a convenience store parking lot where Harriet climbed from her car to say goodbye. But how exactly to thank Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock for their help? “Thank you,” she said and patted their hefty shoulders, though this gesture seemed only to embarrass them. She would have to find a better way, she told herself, when they met up again for the trial next summer. But the trial didn’t happen. She never saw or spoke to either man again.

Halfway to St. Louis she stopped at a rest area and couldn’t resist pulling Caroline Huddy’s affidavit from its manila folder.

I raised Wyatt up after the death of our beloved mother, Florence Huddy. He was not a smart or reliable child. His attention wandered. He had to be told again and again and again what work to do and what was right and what was wrong. I always knew Wyatt to be slow and stubborn, and some people say this falls in line with having a diminished intelligence. I’m not trained in this area. I can’t say. But maybe so. In my opinion he was fine and could be controlled here in the relaxing environment of our farm. But once he left and was under the supervision of others, he ran into a lot of trouble. As for the tragedy, who knows how much he understood or didn’t understand? I always taught him to behave better. It’s also my opinion that queers and Negro nurses should keep with their own kind and quit putting their noses in other people’s business.

Sincerely, Caroline Huddy

S
he owned a nicer home than might be expected of an unmarried black nurse: a two-story redbrick, built for the upper middle class in the nineteen forties, rigorously constructed, Bavarian in its details, and now, almost seven decades later, made elegant by time and the upward spiraling of Boston ivy. Three gorgeous elm trees shaded the backyard. There were stained-glass windows in the kitchen and master bedroom, two richly manteled fireplaces, a dumbwaiter, a roomy and mostly dry basement. She’d been fortunate on two accounts. The previous owners—an elderly black married couple, proprietors of a nearby hardware store—had been meticulous caretakers of the property. But when she’d bought the home, eleven years earlier, the neighborhood was skirting toward a neglected state. A few windows in nearby houses had been sealed with plastic. There was windblown litter in the streets. Worrying signs, to be sure. She’d acquired the house for just sixty-four thousand and braced herself for further decline. Almost at once the opposite happened. Other bargain hunters—black, white, Asian, gay—began buying up properties
along her street. In a short while the neighborhood had stabilized, and each year since then it had incrementally improved. If she had to, she could sell the house now for more than twice what she’d paid for it.

Her guest for the weekend, Wyatt Huddy, seemed impressed without knowing a shred of this history. “Harriet?” he said while towing his luggage along the neat little sidewalk to the front steps. He lifted his head in order to follow the sprawl of ivy all the way up to the eaves of the second floor. “This is your house,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. “Harriet, are you . . . ?”

Most likely he’d wanted to know if she was rich. It wasn’t politeness that kept him from asking. He’d been hushed by the arched church door entranceway, with its cast-iron knocker, hushed again by the warm burnished woodwork of the interior hallway, the tiled kitchen, the living room with its plump oak mantel. She escorted him from room to room and watched him absorb each detail: a sharp, craning glance from his tilted head, a huff of surprise or quick grimace of satisfaction. How nice to feel that the home she’d perfected over the years was so
appreciated.
Then again, what did Wyatt Huddy have as points of comparison? When measured against the Huddy farm or Living Cottage No. 8, it must seem like she lived in a cut-from-a-storybook palace.

She took him to the guest room and placed his rollaway luggage on a sea chest, showed him the bathroom and the portable radio, which he could use to listen to the Cardinals game that evening. Then, though she’d meant to save the surprise for later, she led him to a narrow door off the kitchen and down a flight of steps to a basement that was lit by dusty bare bulbs. The surprise was in the far corner: a long and wide tarp-covered platform. She pulled back the tarp.

Not just a model railroad layout; that would be neither accurate nor fair. On the platform was an expansive reproduction of a bygone midwestern town, a settlement of some twenty faux-wood
buildings—from the nineteen thirties maybe, but also timeless—set among rolling hills and mossy green pastureland and circled by three interweaving track lines. A very energetic town, by the look of it. A throng of customers, tiny but ecstatic, crowded around a produce truck. Little men heaved pickaxes on the gravel shoulders of the tracks. At the baseball park an Irish setter had raced out onto center field, where it took a joyful, frozen leap. All of it, of course—the figures, the buildings, the lush landscape—was too painstaking and pure to have ever existed in real life.

The layout had been a gift for James and had arrived four years after the closing of Kindermann Forest, when the boy was nine years old. It had come from Schuller Kindermann, who’d telephoned one morning to announce to Harriet that he’d sold his St. Louis town house and was moving to a retirement community in nearby Webster Groves. He was then eighty-two years old. His brother, Sandie, had recently passed away. Most of their town house possessions had been let go in an estate sale. But Schuller had a very special model railroad layout he’d like to pass on to James. “Would that be all right with you, Nurse Harriet?” he’d asked, a steady tremor of apprehension in his voice. They’d not seen or spoken to one another in several years. Perhaps he was worried she’d refuse his offer. Or resurrect a past grievance. But why on earth would she do either of those things? “Yes,” she’d said. “Thank you. That would be very nice, Mr. Kindermann.” He’d let forth a sigh of relief and said he’d send some boys over on Saturday morning. She had better, he suggested, make a little room in her basement.

She couldn’t remember now what exactly she’d expected—a delivery boy maybe, hauling a large box of wire train track down into her basement? Instead there’d been a rented U-Haul truck and a team of three very earnest boy-men hired from a local hobby shop. Her basement doorway hadn’t been wide enough. The boy-men needed to dismantle one of the basement window wells and pass the platform
through in eight separate sections. Then, over the course of the day, they reassembled the layout, glued and painted the seams, reconnected the wiring, tested the lights inside the little buildings, the track, the locomotives, and set out the tiny human and animal figurines. The finished platform occupied a third of Harriet’s basement. She might have been outraged if the layout hadn’t been so absurdly beautiful. James was overwhelmed: a miniaturized world all to himself. For years he regarded the layout with quiet adoration. No single item Harriet had given the boy had produced such awe and lasting pleasure.