Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  “Bill,” I say, “what happened to you after you were taken away from Canwood?”

  “That was a long time ago,” says Bill. “I don’t like to think on it.”

  “But do you remember?”

  “Some of it.” Bill sighs. It’s a sound like the horses make. “Most of it,” he says.

  “What happened first? What happened when they took you out of the courtroom after the verdict?”

  “They put me in a truck,” Bill says. “With no windows. The truck went fast. All fast and bumpy. I didn’t know where I was. It was just a box with no windows in the back of the truck.”

  “They took you to the prison?”

  “They put me down a hole,” says Bill, “and fed me through a slot in the door.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “Not right away.”

  “Did they work you?”

  “I wouldn’t have minded that,” says Bill. “But mostly I was kept in the hole. I could put my arms out and touch the walls. It were like a grave.”

  I remember an article from medical school that described the rationale behind the building of the early prisons. The cells were meant to resemble graves. It psychologically unhinges a man if he can touch the walls of his cell with arms outstretched. This was meant to be part of the punishment, this psychological unhinging. They wanted the prisoners to become insane from their isolation and confinement.

  “What did you think about?” I ask. “When you were in your cell?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Bill sighs. “There was no point,” he says, “in thinking of anything, because I couldn’t change where I was. Even in my thoughts. I couldn’t get out of that hole in the ground.”

  There seems like no worse hell to me. I hate to think of Bill’s suffering during those years.

  “You must have been glad when they moved you,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a very different place here.”

  “I like it,” says Bill. “I like the horses, and the people leave me alone.” He pauses. “Except for you,” he says.

  “Do you mind? Do you mind that I come to see you?”

  Bill is quiet for a moment. “No,” he says softly, and I can tell from the nearness of his voice that he’s turned his head towards me, that he’s watching me. “I might even like it, Dr. Lenny.”

  We lie on our backs under the rattle of stars. We push our breath out in unison, haul it in again, until our breathing makes engines of our bodies in the dark.

  THE MOTHS KNOCK against the porch light and the moon is climbing the sky above the river when I get back to my cottage. My body is stiff from lying so long in the grass outside the stables with Bill. I realize too that I left my white lab coat in the stables, folded over the door of one of the stalls. It’s too late to go back for it now. I’ll have to remember to get it first thing in the morning. I feel a twinge of guilt for shirking my responsibilities at the Weyburn. I had wanted to do so well at this job, but now I can’t seem to concentrate on it at all.

  But really, I’m not that bothered by forgetting the coat, or by the stiffness in my limbs, or by my dereliction of duty. I feel happy at having spent the evening hours with Bill. While he still might not remember exactly who I am, he is at least opening up to me, and it feels like we are finally connecting.

  I lie on my bed, fully clothed, with the lights out, and I think of lying on the grass beside Bill. It is the first time since I got to the Weyburn that I haven’t felt slightly out of control, that I haven’t been rushing. It is the first time that I’ve felt completely in my own skin. Why would I feel like that if something bad had happened to me as a child at Sugar Hill? The memories that I had while I was witnessing Gus Polder’s LSD journey make no sense to me when I lie them alongside that moment at the stables with Bill, when I felt so peaceful and happy.

  The next morning I rush into the stables on my way to breakfast. Bill and the horses are gone, out working in the fields presumably, but my coat is right where I left it the night before, neatly folded over the stall door. I take it down and put it on and walk back outside again. I am disappointed not to have seen Bill. I had been thinking about nothing else on my walk over to the stables. Our conversation of the night before has made me hungry for further contact.

  I head towards the hospital, and then I change my mind and turn around, walk back down the path towards the farm fields. I don’t need to speak to him. I just want sight of him. Seeing him will be enough to assuage my disappointment in not finding him in the stables when I went to get my coat. Seeing him will be enough of a fix for me to get through this day.

  The horses are pulling a thresher. I can spot them in the distance, can see the hay falling beneath the blades of the machine. And if I get up on the fence, stand on the lower rung and balance myself against the upper rung, I can see the small figure of Bill out in front of the horses, leading them forward through the August morning.

  DR. CHRISTIANSEN STOPS me in the corridor on my way to the ward kitchen.

  “How are you managing, Flint?” he asks.

  “Fine, sir.”

  He puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “You’ve recovered from the incident the other morning?”

  “Yes, sir.” I have completely forgotten about my reaction to Gus Polder’s LSD experiment. “It must have been something I ate, sir.”

  Dr. Christiansen keeps his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it gently.

  “I’ve let you have your head,” he says. “But I think it’s been long enough for that. You’ve had enough time to get settled in properly by now. I need to have a look at what you are doing.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ll trail you during your rounds. Say, next Thursday morning. We can start out here, Flint.” He takes his hand away from my shoulder. “Nine o’clock. Sharp.”

  For Dr. Christiansen to accompany me on my rounds, I need to have rounds. I have less than a week to invent a routine that seems like it’s been in place from the day I arrived at the mental hospital.

  After breakfast I walk over to the mattress factory. When Henry Tudor sees me coming, he scuttles to the back of the room. But I know better this time. I approach the supervisor first. He’s in a small office by the bolts of ticking, typing clumsily on a portable typewriter.

  “Hiya, Doc,” he says. “You’re back.” He pulls the sheet of paper from the typewriter and lays it on the desk. “Order forms,” he says. “They’ll be the death of me. We seem to run out of something every second day.” He puts both hands behind his head and leans back in his chair. “What can I do for you, Doc?” he says. “Are you here to have another dance with Two Step?”

  “No, I think I’ll sit this one out.” I move a few feet farther into the room. “I want to know who’s ready for a job outside of this hospital. Who are your best workers?”

  “Well,” says the supervisor, “my best workers aren’t necessarily the ones who are fit for the outside world. Two Step is actually quite a good worker, but it wouldn’t do to set him loose in town.”

  “One man,” I say. “Just tell me the name of one man who is ready for outside employment.”

  “Rusty Kirk,” says the supervisor. “You’ll find him third sewing machine from the wall on the left-hand side.”

  Rusty Kirk is a man in his late thirties with an impressive mop of curly red hair. I can see the shine of his hair from across the room.

  “Mr. Kirk?”

  He looks up from his sewing machine. His mouth is a little twisted and there’s a long scar running down his cheek. “I’m Rusty Kirk,” he says.

  “I’m Leonard Flint. Dr. Leonard Flint. You’re on my ward.”

  “Did I do something, Doc?”

  I feel like I’m incompetent in my job, but my patients always assume they’re guilty of something, that they’ve transgressed. The power lies with me, even though it often feels otherwise. I would do well to remember this.

  �
��No, of course not. It just seems time to help you make the transition from this hospital job to a job in town.”

  The procedure for work placement is for the patient to take an outside job and continue to sleep at the hospital until he’s adjusted well enough to his new circumstances to live away from the hospital environment. It’s acclimatization by degrees.

  “What sort of a job would you like to have?” I ask.

  Rusty Kirk looks around the room. “I’d probably be all right at cutting cloth,” he says.

  “No, not here. If you could have any job, a job not in the hospital, what would that be?”

  Rusty knits his brow together in a thoughtful scowl. “I wouldn’t mind being a race car driver,” he says.

  “You like cars then?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about working as a mechanic’s helper?”

  Rusty looks up at me as though I’m an idiot. “That’s not being a race car driver,” he says. “That’s not driving a race car.”

  “You have to start somewhere,” I say. “You can’t start by being a race car driver.”

  “But you asked me what job I wanted?”

  “Well, I said it the wrong way round. The question now is would you like to work with cars?”

  “I suppose so,” says Rusty grudgingly. “But that wasn’t the question a moment ago.”

  My exchange with Rusty Kirk is turning out like all my other exchanges with the patients at the Weyburn, but I refuse to be defeated this time. There’s too much at stake for me to back down.

  “All right then,” I say. “I’ll make some inquiries and I’ll be by later to let you know what I’ve found out.” I turn and walk away from Rusty before he is able to protest again about it not being possible for him to be a race car driver.

  I spend the morning making phone calls, and after lunch I go back into the mattress factory to collect Rusty Kirk.

  “I’ve lined up an interview for you,” I say. “At Scully’s Garage. We’ll go over there now and I’ll bring you back in time for supper.”

  Rusty Kirk rather reluctantly gets up from his sewing machine and follows me out of the shop. I can feel someone watching us, and when I turn at the door, I see Henry Tudor staring after me.

  We take a taxi to Scully’s Garage. Tom Scully meets us outside and we all shake hands by the pyramid of oil cans stacked between the gas pumps.

  “I’ve had the mentals before,” Scully says to me. “They’re good workers.”

  “Boy,” he says to Rusty, even though they’re about the same age, “do you think you could pump gas and check oil?”

  “Sure.”

  “And sweep the garage floor, and put the tools back where they came from at the end of the day?” Tom Scully leads us into the mechanics’ bays and shows us a pegboard wall where the tools are hung. In the spaces where the tools are missing, there are drawn outlines of wrenches or saws or hammers that used to occupy those spots.

  “That’s clever,” says Rusty.

  “You could do that?” asks Tom Scully.

  “Sure.” Rusty seems more childlike, more defenceless and obedient, out of the hospital setting.

  “Job’s yours then,” says Tom Scully to Rusty. To me he says, “I’ll have to pay him a little less for the favour I’m doing you.”

  Before I call for the taxi to drive us back to the hospital, I take Rusty Kirk for a coffee and a piece of pie at the restaurant across the road from Scully’s Garage.

  “Do you think you’ll be all right there?” I ask Rusty as we’re standing at the pastry case, choosing our pies.

  “Mr. Scully seems like a nice man.”

  “Nice enough, I suppose.” He doesn’t seem nice to me at all. He seems a man who’s on to a good scheme and knows it. “But if he gives you any trouble, any trouble at all, you’re to tell me about it. Understand?”

  “Do you think I could have the lemon meringue?” says Rusty. “I like how high it is.”

  We sit at the counter on the red vinyl stools that turn right around, and eat our pie and drink our coffee.

  “Why are you in the Weyburn?” I ask.

  “There were too many of us. Someone had to go.” Rusty takes an enormous forkful of pie. “Daddy said I wasn’t right in the head and I should go into the bughouse. Be one of the bugs in the bughouse.” He shovels the pie into his mouth and tries to say something else with his mouth full of meringue.

  “What?”

  “Boys eat too much. That’s what Daddy said.”

  “How long have you been inside?”

  “Since I was eight.”

  Probably there was not much wrong with Rusty Kirk before he was put into the mental hospital. Thirty-odd years of living as a mental defective have transformed him into one. Now he’ll pump gas and sweep out the greasy floors of the mechanics’ bays for the rest of his life. Now he’ll be cheap labour for a man like Tom Scully. The injustice of this rises in me like bile, leaving a sour taste at the back of my throat.

  “Would you like another piece of pie?” I ask.

  Rusty, with his mouth full of the first piece, nods, and I wave the waitress over to get him another slice.

  BILL IS WAITING supper for me. When I burst into the stables at the end of the day, having lost half my food on the rush over, he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, his untouched tray balanced on his lap.

  “You don’t have to wait for me,” I say, dropping down beside him. “I might not always be able to come. I might get stuck on the ward.”

  But as I say this, I think, I will always try to be here. I will always try to find you.

  Bill doesn’t say anything in reply. He just waits until I pick up my fork, and then he picks up his and we begin eating. Supper is meatloaf and gravy, potatoes, carrots, peas. The dessert is a rather lardy peach pie, not nearly as good as the piece of pie I had earlier at the restaurant in town with Rusty Kirk.

  When we’re finished eating, Bill takes my tray and puts it on the floor next to his. Then he reaches over and slides the white coat from my shoulders, removing it and folding it neatly and placing it on the upturned wooden box that functions as a small table by his bed.

  “Do you want me to help you muck out the horses?” I ask.

  Bill shakes his head.

  “Do you not like the white coat?”

  “No. It makes you look like a doctor.”

  “But I am a doctor.”

  Perhaps, to relate to me, Bill has to separate me from my profession, from the bad associations with doctors that he might have experienced at the Weyburn before I got here.

  “All right,” I say. “I don’t have to be a doctor here.” I certainly don’t feel like one when I’m out with Bill in the stables.

  He sits back down beside me on the cot. “That’s better,” he says.

  “Bill,” I say, “what were you like when you were a boy?”

  I remember people in the little town where we both used to live saying that Bill had come from farther north, that he’d worked his way down the rail line and had ended up in Canwood only a few years before my family moved there.

  Bill is quiet for a moment and I think he hasn’t heard me.

  “What was your childhood like?” I ask. “Where did you live? What did your father do?”

  Bill shrugs.

  “You don’t remember?” I ask.

  “I don’t care,” he says.

  From my training, I know that a closed door means a walk around the house to find the open window.

  “When I was a boy,” I say, “I had you. Who did you have?”

  “No one.”

  “There must have been someone?”

  Bill is quiet for a moment. “I had a dog,” he says.

  “What was his name?”

  “Didn’t have one.” Bill looks square at me. “He was a dog,” he says. “What good would a name do?”

  I remember the trial, and my blind rush out to Sugar Hill. I remember the open door to Bill’s house, and the tramp
led garden, how I ran up to the top of the hill, but the dogs were nowhere in sight.

  “I went to look for your dogs, just like you asked me to at the trial. But I couldn’t find them. They’d been eating the rabbits for a while, but then they must have left.”

  “A dog will go,” says Bill, “when the food goes. Then there’s no point in staying.”

  “Is that what happened to your dog? When you were a boy? Did it just go?”

  Bill rubs his face with his hands. “I don’t remember,” he says.

  “Did it die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t remember,” I say.

  Bill leans over and pats me on the knee. “It’s all right,” he says. “You looked for them.”

  He thinks I’m still talking about his dogs on Sugar Hill. I don’t correct him.

  The stable murmurs with animal noise and the creak and shift of the wooden boards of the building. It is like a skin that holds us all within it, that covers the whisper of our blood, the snap of our bones.

  “I’m not doing well here,” I say to Bill.

  “I know,” he says, and this surprises me.

  “How do you know?”

  “You don’t settle. When something’s frightened, it doesn’t settle. I see you rushing about, afraid to land.”

  I suddenly feel exhausted.

  “Am I frightened?” I ask. “I’m tired, and I don’t know why. There’s no good reason for it.”

  Perhaps if I had tried harder to do my job and learn the place, instead of each day still seeming like it’s my first day. I feel I’m losing competence rather than gaining it.

  Bill stands up, and I move to follow him.

  “No,” he says, and he pushes me back down on the bed, firmly but gently. “You rest here. I’ll watch out for you.”

  I lie back down on the scratchy blanket, on the lumpy mattress probably stuffed by Henry Tudor, and I promptly fall asleep.

  When I wake, all the lights in the stable are out. I can see the glint of the moon through the boards high up near the rafters, can hear the heavy shuffle of the horses, and something else, something closer. There’s a snoring noise nearby. I raise myself up on an elbow and look over the edge of the bed and see Bill, curled up on the hard floor like a dog, beside my cot.