The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  How does one person hum to another such narrative as “You aint nothing but a vegetable”? It sounds inconceivable, but if one tries, one can almost hear the harsh humming of those words as quoted by the man’s daughter and victim. One can also easily imagine how that girl would come to believe that she no longer existed, that her life had ended long before she was confined to this place.

  For her part, Latha was able to reproduce for Jessica the feelings, the moods, the real meanings, without any verbal interference, of her rape and maternity and the theft of her baby by her evil sister and brother-in-law. Because they had nothing better to do, they would often hum back to each other whatever extemporaneous tunes they had hummed to narrate their stories. It is far better to acknowledge one’s receptivity of another’s import by repeating it exactly—not verbatim, because it wasn’t word for word, but hum for hum.

  And in their quest for expressiveness they were inspired to imitate other instruments: Jessica could do a fine cello, Latha a flute, Jessica a dulcimer, Latha an English horn, Jessica a clarinet, Latha a harpsichord. They had long since discovered that sometimes the nose is more important than the gums for giving a special timbre to their humming. The landscape of their conversation was colored by harmonics; they did not know the meaning of but readily demonstrated ritornello, cadenza, glissando, pizzicato, rubato, staccato, fermata. If only somebody with access to a recording machine had made an attempt to preserve their creations!

  Their music became their world, and they knew no other. If that is insanity, then both were totally beyond help and should have been moved on to F Ward.

  Of course they were not able to keep humming night and day around the clock (although there was no clock anywhere), possibly because their lips and tongues and throats and gums and nasal passages inevitably became too dry to lubricate the sounds they made. Thus they spent many hours of each day simply lying on their cots. Sometimes one or the other of them would move to the window and look out at the world, which never changed.

  Thus it came to pass that one afternoon when Jessica was at the window and Latha was lying on her cot, there came a voice from outside: “Do you know Latha Bourne?” It was a man’s voice, and of course Jessica did not answer it. After a while, the voice called, “Is Latha Bourne up there?” Jessica stuck out her tongue at whoever was asking.

  Latha lay for a while, wondering if she had begun to hear voices, as most of the inmates did. But it was clearly her name, spoken twice. She began to rise up from her cot. She lifted a foot; she lifted an arm; she lifted another foot, another arm; she raised up her head, her shoulders; she sat up; she put her feet on the floor; she pushed down on the edge of the cot with her hands and rose up; she stood; she turned; she began to walk toward the window but realized it was too slow; she began to run; she ran and ran and ran and finally reached the window and stood beside Jessica, looking out.

  There was nobody there. Jessica began to hum the story of a German girl named Rapunzel, and Latha especially liked the part about the witch cutting off Rapunzel’s hair, as Latha’s and Jessica’s hair was cut short, but she liked most of all the part about the king’s son, blinded, after years of miserable wandering, finding Rapunzel and her twin children in a deserted place, and how her tears of joy touched his eyes and healed his blindness.

  Was it the night of that same day? Or a night later? Latha no longer had any sense of time at all, but late one night after she and Jessica had fallen asleep, she woke to the sound of something scratching at the door, as if many keys were being tried in search of one that fit. Then the door opened and a strange man came in. It was the first man she had seen in months, maybe years, and she knew he was a man, dressed in a suit, but he didn’t look like a doctor. He knelt beside her cot and gently gave her shoulder a shake, then whispered to her, “Latha, honey, it’s me. I’ve come to take you home. Wake up, sweetheart, and let’s get on back home.”

  Latha knew that she was awake, but she had no reason to believe that she was not dreaming, or fantasizing, or gone to some kind of heaven where one’s Prince Charming becomes one’s hero. She asked herself if she truly knew who this man was, because there was distinctly something familiar about him, as if she had seen him in many, many dreams that had filled her nights before. But she could not speak his name to save her soul; she could not even speak it to herself. Still she was thrilled that she did indeed know him. He was the first non-stranger she had seen in a long, long time.

  Without even trying, she smiled. He would have smiled back at her but his eyes were so close to hers that he couldn’t even see the smile down below.

  “Howdy, Latha, honey,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. Now, don’t you make a sound, sweetheart, because nobody knows I’m here. Now you just get your dress on and we will get out of this place and I will take you home, away from all these crazy people.”

  Slowly she rose up out of her cot, not at all modest about the fact that she was naked. But he turned his face away as if the sight of her nakedness had shocked him. She could only stand there like a statue of Venus while she waited for him to turn his face back to her, and when he did he turned it abruptly away once more and began searching around for some garment to put on her. She had none. They were not even permitted the ugly gray gowns that were worn in the other wards. While he was searching the room for something in which to clothe her, Jessica woke and began to watch him. Jessica hummed to Latha a question asking who he was, but Latha was not able to hum his name in reply. He put his finger to his lips and said to Jessica, “Shhh.” Then he took the wool blanket off Latha’s cot and wrapped it around her, then said to her, “Come on.”

  Jessica spoke, the first actual words Latha had ever heard her say. “Take me.”

  These words were addressed to the man in such a way that Latha wondered if Jessica was asking to have sex with him. But maybe she just wanted to be rescued too.

  The man said, “I caint. No time. Sorry.”

  Jessica said, loudly, “Take me!”

  “I’m sure sorry,” the man said, then he began pushing Latha out through the door.

  Chapter twenty-three

  The man closed the door and re-locked it, but even the door closed would not muffle the sounds of Jessica, who was sobbing, and then started loudly humming a message to Latha begging her to persuade the man to let her go along with them. There was nothing Latha could say, to her or to him. There was nothing Latha could hum to her.

  “Wait right here,” the man said, then moved quickly down to the corridor to a desk where Nurse Pritchard was sitting, sound asleep. The man gently laid a ring of keys on her desk. Then he returned to Latha quickly and said “Come on” for a second time and led her up the corridor stairway, past the fourth floor to the fifth. Down the corridor on the fifth floor he led her to a spot where there was a hatch leading to the attic, but he looked up at the hatch and smote himself on the brow. “Of all the boneheaded stunts!” he said. “How’m I gonna get back up there?” He looked around for a ladder or even a box to stand on, but could find nothing. There were storerooms all over the fifth floor, but they were locked. His face was creased with worry, even panic.

  He came back to Latha and put his hands on her shoulders and spoke very slowly and gently, “Now listen careful, Latha, here’s what we’ve got to do. I’m going to boost you up there and you climb up out through that hatch and then you’ll find a triangular vent-hole and right outside that vent-hole is my rope. A whole coil of rope. You get that rope and bring it back to the hatch and drop it down to me. Okay?”

  It was so difficult to figure out. She stared at him, as if she could read in his eyes some confirmation of the request. If he had been able to hum it to her, she would have grasped it better.

  “Kin you understand me?” he pled. “It’s our only chance. The rope, we got to have that rope. I’ll boost you up to the attic, and you’ll see that vent-hole that I opened up, and right outside it on the roof is a coil of rope. Bring me that rope.”

 
All she could do was crane her neck and stare in the direction he was pointing, up at the hatch.

  He clenched his hands together and opened his palms to make a stirrup for her foot. She stared at the stirrup. “Come on, honey, you kin do it!” he urged. She put her foot in the stirrup, then raised her arms and put her palms against the wall. He began to lift. Up, up she went. When her feet were level with his chest, he unclenched the stirrup and got each of his palms under the soles of her feet and pushed upward until his hands were as high above his head as he could reach, and him on tiptoe. The blanket in which she was wrapped fell off of her and covered his head. Her fingers strove upward and felt the rim of the hatch. She caught hold. She tried to pull herself up. She strained. They had never given her any exercise at the asylum, and she was weak.

  She fell. He caught her, breaking her fall and falling with her to the floor, where they lay tangled together for a while getting their breath back. She could feel the tools he had in his pockets jabbing against her. He got up, sighing, and helped her to her feet. He covered her nakedness with the blanket again, knotting two corners of it around her neck.

  “Let’s try it once more,” he said. “See if you caint get your hands on the sides of the hatch, that way you’d have more leverage.”

  Again he made the stirrup with his hands. Again she rose slowly up the wall until her hands reached the hatch, one hand on one side, the other hand on the other. Again her feet left the palms of his hands. Again she began to strain, every muscle in her arms and shoulders exerting itself.

  She began to rise, but reached a point where she could strain no longer and was on the verge of falling again. Suddenly he leapt. He leapt upward mightily, shoving his hands upward against her feet and propelling her upward beyond the crucial point. She got her chest up onto the attic floor and clambered up and out of sight.

  But then she forgot what she was supposed to do next, if she had ever known in the first place. She wandered around the attic, which was hot and stuffy and filled with cobwebs which clutched at her. There was nothing up there. It was very dark. The only light was a glimmer of moonlight coming in through a three-cornered hole in the roof. She meditated upon that hole, struggling for a word she had learned in tenth grade geometry. Eventually it came back to her, giving its name: triangle. She heard a man calling her name down below the hatch. She pondered this enigma, trying to decide whether to move back to the hatch to the man, or to the triangle. She chose the latter after much thought, and peered out through the triangle. She could see the lights of the town in the distance and stars up in the sky along with the moon. She could also see, on the roof right outside the triangle, a coil of rope. And she remembered then what she was supposed to do. She clutched the coil of rope and crawled across the attic floor to the hatch. The man was very glad to see her, as if he hadn’t seen her for a long time. “Just drop it down,” he said, and she dumped the rope onto him.

  He fashioned one end of the rope into a lariat, with which, after two or three misses, he lassoed the dangling hatch-cover, pulled the rope tight, grabbed hold and climbed hand over hand up the rope with his feet braced against the wall until he could reach the hatch. He pulled himself up and through it, untied the lariat, and replaced the hatch cover, screwing the hinges back on it. “You had me worried there for a minute or two there,” he said. Then he led her out through the triangle. “Keerful you don’t fall off the roof,” he cautioned her. “Best keep one hand on my belt.” She gripped his belt. He replaced the louver in the vent opening, and bolted it back on. Then he fashioned a small loop on one end of his rope and dropped it over an iron finial atop a drainpipe on the corner of the roof’s edge. “Now here comes the tricky part,” he said. “There aint no way you could climb down that rope by yourself, so here’s what I want ye to do. “Just wrap your arms tight around my neck, okay?” She was uncertain and hesitated, so he reached back and took her hands and raised them and wrapped her arms around his neck and clenched her fingers together and said, “Hold on as tight as you can.”

  Then he threw the coil of rope down off the roof and it uncoiled down and down toward the earth. He knelt with her straddling him at the edge of the roof and grabbed hold of the rope and edged himself over.

  Then he began to lower himself, with the weight of her on his back, hand under hand down the rope. He dared not release one of his hands from the rope but had to slide them down the rope and she could smell the rope burning his hands. This made her panic at the thought of falling and she tightened her grip around his neck until she feared she was choking him. The thought of her choking him panicked her even more and she wished she could do something to stop choking him or to help him slide his burning hands down the rope. It was becoming so dreadful that she considered letting go of him and falling on her own. Were they still a long way from the ground? If she let go and fell, would it kill her or break all her bones?

  He was moaning with the pain of his burning hands and her choking him, but kept on making slow progress down the rope. There came a point where he just couldn’t stand it any longer, and he let go of the rope. But he discovered that he was standing on the ground.

  He collapsed. She collapsed with him and let go of her choke-hold on his neck, and finally he got his wind back and stood up. He lifted her to her feet. He looked up at the rope he had managed to climb down, still attached to the finial at the top of the drainpipe. He grasped the rope and gave it a whip, the whip waving upward almost but not quite to the top. He tried it again, and then a third time before the whip rose to the top, snapped, cracked, and the loop popped off the finial and fluttered to the ground. He coiled the rope and said to her, “Okay, we’ve covered all our tracks. Let’s go.”

  The grounds of the asylum were deserted and they crossed them to the place where the man had left his automobile. He opened the door for her and got her into it, then threw the rope and his tools into the backseat, and got in. He started the motor and drove away.

  “You’re free, gal!” he cried. “Call me a monkey’s uncle if you aint free, by granny!” And as he drove he began whistling loudly and happily the tune of “She’ll Be Comin Round the Mountain When She Comes!” Latha hummed it quietly along with him, thinking of the possibility that she might never see Jessica again.

  She quietly uttered the first word she’d spoken since the time, months or years before, when she had tried to explain bluebirds and redbirds to Nurse Bertram: “Free.”

  She could not help feeling that her joy in freedom was all mixed up and confounded with her loss of Jessica. The tears which began to run down her cheeks could have been caused by either, or both.

  But the man had his eyes on the road and did not see her tears. He did not drive into Little Rock to cross the Arkansas River. He emerged from the park of the asylum into a dirt country road, and he kept to the backroads for a long time. He talked a blue streak the whole time, trying to be amusing, and she tried her level best to put a name to the voice she heard, which was so familiar and reassuring in contrast to the voices she’d heard in the asylum. She could not understand why, if unkind voices had driven her mute, she was not able to say anything in response to his kind voice.

  He told tales and jokes by the dozens that were meant to remind her of home. “You remember back when the big craze was riddles,” he would say, “and folks would stop strangers right on the road to try out some new riddle they’d heard? Well, I was riding up to Jasper one day with old Till Cluley when the wagon got stuck bad in the mud, clear up to the hubs. Ole Till was whipping all four horses and hollerin cuss words at the top a his voice. Just then this preacher from Parthenon come along and says to Till, “My friend, do you know the name of Him who died for sinners?” And ole Till says, “I aint got no time for no goddamn riddles. Caint you see I’m stuck in this son-a-bitchin mud?”

  And he would slap his leg and laugh, and then turn to see how she would be taking it, and she could only wonder if she had lost the power to laugh also. Try as she might, she would not b
e able to manage even a giggle at his jokes.

  Speaking of being stuck in the mud, those old backroads were in pretty soggy condition, what with the spring rains. Most of the time he would put the car in low gear and bull his way through, slipping and sliding wildly with the engine roaring. But a few times he got mired.

  The first time the car got stuck, he told Latha to get behind the steering wheel while he got out and pushed. But when he pushed her free she drove on for nearly a quarter of a mile before finding the brake, and that must have given him a bad scare, because the next time the car got stuck he made her get out and push, and pretty soon that blanket she was wrapped in was considerably splattered with mud.

  Then before long the car lurched into a mud hole that seemed more like quicksand than mud, so both of them had to get out and push together. It was very laborious, and by the time they got the car back onto a semblance of dry land, they were both covered with mud from head to toe.

  She stood there panting and staring at him in that fine pin-striped suit all covered with mud. The dawn was coming up. Something about his muddy appearance, and an awareness of her own weird appearance in a mud-soaked blanket, suddenly got through to her, and she discovered that she had not forgotten how to laugh, after all.

  And when she laughed, he began laughing too, and the two of them just stood there and pointed at each other and howled with laughter. Maybe that was the moment when she began to get well. Suddenly they were not howling with laughter but standing in each other’s muddy arms. And either he was kissing her or she was kissing him, but their muddy mouths were pressed tight together for a long little spell.