Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  “What is it? What is it, Si?”

  The sudden flare from the window lit the room, and Silas snapped up the shade to reveal a lop-sided cross, burning with the quick, violent flare of kerosene-soaked waste, standing in the center of the lawn, thrust into the soft dirt of Myra’s tulip bed. He felt Myra pressing behind him, her gasping breath in his ear, and then there were more shouts, and three men ran across the lawn.

  Silas ran to the head of the stairs and called Brady. “It’s all right, Silas!” Brady shouted back. “They’re running. Just the cross, and they’re running—”

  There was a sudden crash against the wall of the house, and then another, and then the crash of glass being shattered, and then the screaming of children, and Myra calling, in a voice wild with agony.

  “Silas! Silas!”

  He ran through his bedroom and into the girls’ room. Susan stood at the doorway, half-hysterical and sobbing, “No—no, no, no!”

  “Are you all right?”

  The terrible screams came from Brian’s room. He ran in there. The lights were on, and Geraldine was standing at one side, stiff, like a piece of stone, her face contorted with horror. Brian lay in Myfa’s arms, screaming with pain, screaming through the pain, “I can’t see—I can’t see!” his face covered with blood and blood all over his pajamas and Myra’s nightgown, and Myra trying to comfort him and wipe the blood from his face, but gently, because the face was so cut and broken.

  “My God, my God! What happened?”

  Through her own tears, Myra tried to tell him that Brian must have had his face pressed against the window pane, which was shattered, when the rock hit it. Silas ran to the bathroom and wet a towel with hot water. When he came back, Geraldine was sobbing, “Daddy, daddy, he’s dead.” Myra’s face was white with horror, and Brian lay limp and quiet in her arms. His hand shaking, Silas found the child’s pulse—and said almost angrily, “He’s not dead! Stop that damned nonsense! We’ve got to get him to a doctor! He must have fainted from the shock.” Then Spencer pushed past Silas into the little room and said.

  “On the bed, here, Myra. I’ll help you.”

  They laid the child on the bed, and Spencer wrapped him in blankets while Silas wiped the blood from his face and stanched the flow with towels. He was badly cut, especially around the eyes and forehead.

  “Cotton on his face,” Spencer said gently. “Have you got absorbent cotton? We must leave him space to breathe.”

  Silas returned with the cotton, and pulled off wads to hand to Spencer, who packed it gently on Brian’s face. It served to stop the flow of blood, and then he bound it loosely on with bandage.

  “Fit to drive?” he asked Silas, and when Silas nodded, “Good. We’ll take him to the hospital in town immediately. Myra, call Doc Burnside and tell him to meet us there. I’ll carry the boy.”

  They did as he said without questioning him. Out in the corridor Silas saw Brady and Leslie standing silently, Brady’s arms around the two girls.

  “You’ll stay here?” Silas whispered.

  Brady nodded. Spencer bore the blanket-wrapped child gently and tenderly. He was in his shirtsleeves, and Silas threw a coat over Spencer’s shoulders and then led him to the car and helped him to lay Brian on the seat.

  “Get a coat for yourself,” Spencer said.

  Silas threw on a coat, his own or not, he didn’t know, and when he got into the car, Myra was already there.

  “You reached Burnside?”

  Myra nodded. Then he drove into Clemington to the hospital, pressing all thoughts from his mind in the concentration of driving quickly and carefully and smoothly.

  * * *

  The dawn was breaking, gray milk flowing into the dark corners of the dimly-lit vestibule that served as waiting room for Clemington’s little hospital, when Dr. Burnside finished his work and came to where Myra, Silas and Hartman Spencer were waiting. Myra and Silas sat on a bench, her head resting against his shoulder, her silence for the past hour no measure of what went on inside of her. Spencer idly turned the pages of a medical manual for the fourth time, staring blindly at the advertisements for stretchers, bedpans and iron lungs. They all looked up when Burnside entered; they sat and waited for him to speak, like a traditional tableau, and he observed the scene with the tired recognition of used-up middle age. He toyed nervously with his glasses, which hung from his neck by a black ribbon, and the two white spots left alongside his nose gave him a forlorn, unreal elegance.

  “The boy will be all right,” he said immediately. “Yes, the boy will be all right—that’s the first thing you want to know. He lost a good deal of blood and he went through a profound shock, but he’ll be all right. I don’t think there’s any fracture, certainly no brain injury, and that’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

  Myra began to cry, and Silas spoke slowly and hoarsely, so that he would not burst into tears himself and that way make it worse for Myra and everyone else concerned.

  “Can we see him?”

  “Yes—yes, of course. Why not? But there isn’t much to see, you know—his face is pretty well bandaged up.” Burnside smiled, uncertain as to whether it was a witticism or not. “Bandages can be pretty frightening, remember, but they don’t mean scars. He’ll have scars—you couldn’t expect anything else with all those cuts—but they’ll be thin ones mostly, and in time they’ll fade away. Young flesh has a tremendous vitality for healing, verve, you might say—you and me, we’d be bad, worse. But he won’t be disfigured. I got all the glass out, I think—yes, I think I could say so, all the glass, nasty stuff—dreadful thing, glass—” He was rambling in his own agony, unable to say what they were equally unable to ask. They couldn’t ask, and it was Spencer who said.

  “What about his eyes, Dr. Burnside?”

  “His eyes were hurt,” the doctor answered miserably.

  “Badly?”

  “The trouble is, I don’t know. I did all I could do and I saw what I could see. I don’t want to hold anything back from you, but I also don’t want to give you any fears that aren’t based on facts, I told you that his eyes were hurt—that’s so. The cornea is damaged, but I don’t know how badly. This is something for a very skilled ophthalmologist to decide, a surgeon, and that’s not the kind of surgery I can do or would dare to do. I thought of calling Cohen in, but he’s an oculist, and he wouldn’t be able to say much more than I could. He’s the only one in Clemington. I think we have to get someone to look at him quickly—maybe Sapperman, from Indianapolis.”

  “But,” Silas said, measuring each word, “will he be blind?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know. I wish I could say that his eyesight won’t be affected, but I can’t say that. All I can say is that he will recover from the effect of the cuts and the concussion and the shock.”

  “But you must have some opinion?” Silas pleaded.

  “What good is an opinion if it isn’t based on knowledge? Just a few hours, and someone will be here who can tell you. Please don’t press me, Silas.”

  “We understand, doctor,” Myra whispered.

  “Now, why don’t you go in and see the child, and then get home and get some rest?”

  “Can’t I stay with him?”

  “You have to rest a little, Mrs. Timberman, or we’ll have two sick people. And you have to get some fresh clothes on—” Myra looked down, and realized that she was wearing a flannel nightgown, already caked with dry blood. “Yes, now go look at him, and in a few hours you can come back and stay with him. I’ve got a nurse with him. He’ll be all right. Now come with me.” He led them down the corridor, Myra whispering to Silas, “I don’t need sleep, Silas. I’ll put on a dress and come back. Please.”

  “All right. Sure. Sure,” he told her.

  He kept an arm around her as they looked down at the pathetically tiny figure, the face swathed in bandages; and for the first time, the first time in all his life, Silas knew the full meaning of horror. Into his mind’s eye, awful and agonizing, came the pi
cture of the rock striking the glass window-pane, against which the little face was pressed to see the cross burning—and then he saw the faceless, mindless thing that had thrown the stone, and then hate came, like a flood of fire that would never burn itself out.

  Somehow, horror, love and hatred used him up, calmed him and altered him. His voice was even and natural as he said, “You can’t go, can you, Myra dear?”

  “No—please.”

  “All right. You stay here. I’ll bring you some clothes. I’ll just shave and get dressed, and then I’ll be back.”

  “The girls?”

  “They’ll be all right. Alec is with them. Alec won’t leave them.”

  “Yes—yes, Si.”

  He left her sitting next to the bed, and when Spencer saw him, Spencer wondered, strangely, what was so deeply different in him?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tuesday: December 18, 1951

  THE ARREST

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE ARREST

  The day they took the bandages off Brian’s eyes was the day before Silas was arrested—a connection Silas always made afterwards, just as he always remembered that this was a week before Christmas. It was computation by a different calendar than most people around him used, but not a new way; and he could recall that it was by such a calendar that his mother and father had lived, not the dry stuff of days and weeks, but when this child was born and when that sister died, when the season was good or lean, when there was work or no work, when the winter was terribly cold or not too cold, when his own brother had died of diphtheria—when lightning struck or a storm raged or the sun warmed the earth for a little while; and now his own life too had taken that form.

  It was a reckoning of people who knew trouble, who walked side by side with trouble. He had noticed Mike Leslie doing it a few days ago, when he drove in from Indianapolis to see how Brian was, and in the course of things remarked about a time fifteen years ago—“The year of the big strike,” as he put it. “Was it ’35 or ’36?”

  Anyway, it was decent of him and thoughtful of him to come. He brought with him a miniature farm, with more than fifty figures of livestock and people—Silas could guess what it had cost—and set them up on the counterpane of Brian’s bed, and guided the little boy’s fingers over each figure with patience and understanding.

  “Do I know you?” Brian kept asking.

  “Now you do. I’m Mike Leslie.”

  “But I never saw you?”

  “You’ll see me. I’m a funny-looking man with a long nose.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m a good friend of yours, too. We’re going to be buddies after you get back on your feet. I got a little boy who’s seven years old. His name is Mike too.”

  “Big Mike and Little Mike,” Brian said, greatly amused. “You get mixed up?”

  “Sometimes—yes, we get mixed up.”

  Afterwards, Leslie asked Silas, “How will he be?”

  “We’re hoping for the best. We’ll know in a few days—when the bandages come off—”

  “I hope so, I hope so,” Leslie said.

  But as the time approached, it became harder and worse, harder for both of them but much harder for Myra. She didn’t sleep. She lay in bed, still, silent, her eyes open, staring and staring. Sometimes Silas would wake up in the middle of the night and find her like that and beg her to try to relax, try to sleep.

  “I’m all right, Si. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You’re eating yourself up, eating your heart out. Darling, you’re squeezing your soul dry.”

  “Funny for you to say that—it makes me think, you know that old saying, the eyes are the windows of the soul—”

  His relief when the day came was in good measure for Myra. Now there would be a decision, and whatever it was, they would have to face it and Brian would have to face it; and he had no doubt but that they would be able to. They had all changed, he and Myra and the girls, and Brian too; they had all come of somber age together, and they were able to face things, many things. Sometimes, when he sat next to Brian’s bed and talked to him, or read to him, or played one of the many games he had invented for a little boy who had no eyes, he was astounded by the child’s grave understanding. Brian almost never complained, and his acceptance tore at Silas’ heart more than anything else in the situation—to an extent where Silas was thankful that they had never discovered who threw the stone, for had he been able to personalize the act in terms of a known individual, he could have killed that person without hesitation or qualm, and possibly would not have rested until he had.

  In any case, they could not go on that way; they had to know—and he was glad when the day came. They had asked Dr. Sapperman to come before noon, while the girls were still at school; if it was to be good news, it could hold, and if the news was bad, they would want time to think it through.

  “You both get hold of yourselves,” Sapperman said, after he had greeted them, evidently aware of what such situations entailed. He was a very small, fat man, with long-fingered, womanish hands, and a petulant, nervous manner, yet he said several times, “Don’t be nervous. No need at all to be nervous. It’s only fair to the little boy, after all the pain he’s suffered. You have no idea how painful these eye injuries can be. We’ve hardly begun to understand the complex around the optic nerve. As far as the boy is concerned, the pain is gone. That’s something to be thankful for, isn’t it? Don’t ask for miracles. People keep asking me for miracles. Moses Sapperman. I can’t strike a rock and bring forth water. I do whatever I can do.”

  “Why doesn’t he stop?” Myra thought. “Why doesn’t he stop that senseless chatter and get on with it?”

  He went into the kitchen, asked Myra for pots, and fussily prepared his instruments himself, rattling on with his disjointed comments as he waited for the water to boil. He told Silas to go up to Brian’s room and darken it as much as possible. “Shades drawn, curtains drawn. We don’t like too much light, enough to see by, but not too much. Light is a force in itself, and if the nerves are all right, it will hurt him like all get out. We want it to hurt, as a matter of fact. Beneficial pain—life is pain—”

  “Stop it,” Myra was pleading silently. “Stop it, please.”

  Silas went upstairs into Brian’s room, and said, “Hello, monkey. The doctor’s here. Be nice to him.”

  “Again?”

  “Yup.” Brian heard him, and wanted to know what he was doing. “Drawing the shades. We’re going to take those bandages off your eyes.” He had his back to Brian, and the silence disconcerted him, and he turned around, but waited because he didn’t know what to say.

  “Will I see?” Brian asked finally.

  “Think you can wait a few minutes, son?”

  “I can wait.” His vast patience was more disconcerting than tears or pleading would have been, and made Silas wonder again what had happened inside of him—what had happened inside of any of them and all of them? Then the doctor came, Myra with him, and they began to remove the bandages. He closed his eyes and stood rigidly, until he heard Brian crying with pain. He turned then and looked at the twisted face, Myra holding his hands away from his eyes, the scars red welts against the white skin, laced and interlaced all over with the suture marks.

  “What do you see?” the doctor asked him. “Tell me, Brian—what do you see?”

  “The light hurts.”

  The doctor grinned at Silas, the petulance gone, the womanish hands caressing each other delightedly. “You see, the light hurts him—the nerve is there. We make a beginning.” Standing still though he was, the fat little man gave the impression of dancing wildly, celebrating his own triumph. Silas turned away to hide his tears.

  * * *

  It took none of the edge off their pleasure to hear from Sapperman that Brian would probably never recover normal vision and that the fact of how normal his vision would be could not yet be determined. Their fear was of blindness, and they knew now that he would not be blind. As Silas said, i
t was like opening his own eyes for the first time in weeks, and for Myra, it was more than that—it was being reborn; and for the moment, nothing else mattered or could matter. Even the fact of Silas’ arrest the following day seemed of less import than it would have been, for they had accepted the possibility of an indictment ever since the hearing, accepted it without fully believing that it could be or fully hoping that it could not be, and then stored it away among the many uncertainties of the future. But since the stone was thrown, the future had ceased to be, and there was only the sightless present.

  Susan and Geraldine caught the infection of their parents’ delight. To them, blindness was as unknowable as death, and it became a game to discover how much Brian could see in those intervals when the protective coverings were removed from his eyes. If it seemed to Silas that there was an element of heartlessness there, Myra pointed out,

  “What else can they do? They have their own scars to cover up.”

  The future returned. Silas had taken to himself that curious phrase, “Without visible means of support—” Edna Crawford had returned to Massachusetts, and Leon Federman had embarked upon the writing of a vast book with the same furious outburst of energy that marked all of his activities. It was to be a collation of all scientific data, written for popular taste—something Silas could only conceive of in connection with Federman. The others marked time, and made plans to appeal their case through the courts, a forlorn hope. Ike Amsterdam was gradually accepting the fact that somehow or other, he would live the remainder of his years on the little money he had saved. Since Brian was hurt, he had come at least once a day, to sit by the child’s bed and read to him or tell him fantastic stories of rocket ships and outer space, the fairyland of this generation of children; and there had been, with Ike Amsterdam and the rest of the suspended group, a cautious trickle of careful faculty members, to express their sympathy and their indignation at the attack on the house. But Silas couldn’t help having the impression that their indignation was as carefully qualified as their sympathy had been—indignation for a stone thrown against a child, but qualified for whatever symbolic stones had been thrown at him.