The Flock

by Joan Frances Casey

  But then, in January 1983, Rusty popped out during a session, defiant and suspicious, and looking for his dad. He hadn’t returned since Lynn said he was a girl. He didn’t know much, but he had no doubt that he was a boy. He wouldn’t be a girl in a million years.

  But Rusty languished in the recesses of the Flock’s mind, longing for male companionship, and once Gordon started attending the sessions, it was only natural that Rusty would eagerly come forward. He ignored “that lady Lynn,” but responded to Gordon, who seemed to him both safe and smart.

  Maybe Gordon could tell him how things were. Rusty knew he forgot a lot of stuff.

  Rusty visualized his mind as being like a fishing net. The only things he could remember were the little drops that clung to his mental netting.

  When Gordon said, “Tell me about yourself,” Rusty remarked glumly, “I can tell you that in five seconds!”

  Rusty said that he came from Saint Michaels, a small fishing village on the Chesapeake Bay. He remembered having spent a lot of time with his dad; he had also served as an unidentified helper to Keith and Steve. “I didn’t tell those other men my name,” Rusty said, “ ’cause my dad said I shouldn’t say nothin’ to nobody.”

  Rusty wished his dad would hurry up and come get him. As far as Rusty knew, his dad had simply disappeared a long time ago. “Maybe he’s gone back to sea. When that lady Nancy bugged him, that’s what he said he was gonna do. I seen them freighters in the lake here sometimes,” Rusty said, “and I wave in case my dad’s there lookin’ for me.

  “I can read animal tracks,” Rusty concluded, “but I can’t read no words.”

  Rusty didn’t tell Gordon that when he stared at printed words long and hard, waiting for them to speak to him as they seemed to do to other people, he got real scared. He feared that the lines would notice him watching, sharpen into daggers, and kill him. He didn’t tell Gordon how he looked away quick when he saw words glaring up at him.

  “Do you have any friends?” Gordon asked. “Yup, one,” Rusty said, and told him about Gary, a mongoloid boy who cleaned out the nets on a dock in Norfolk. Gary couldn’t read none and he forgot things too.

  “I’m a retard. I ain’t like other boys,” Gary confided, and showed Rusty his bright-green rabbit’s foot, which helped him remember the little he could. Rusty showed Gary his own special columbine shell, which he stroked when he realized he had forgotten something important.

  Rusty was aware that he was unlike other boys; there was some difference that he couldn’t quite name. He figured that he must be retarded too.

  Like Gary, Rusty knew the sea and its creatures intimately. Gordon admitted to Rusty that he knew nothing about the seasonal changes of the bay or about the stages in the life of the Chesapeake blue crab, and professed an interest in learning. So Rusty told Gordon, in a pronounced Eastern Shore accent, about “arstering” and how the oyster boats were forced by law to work under sail during certain months of the year.

  “It’s hard for them arsters to have a fighting chance when they’re stuck in those shells and can’t move none,” Rusty said.

  Gordon knew lots of things that Rusty’s dad had never known, and shared that in return. Gordon said he didn’t know about commercial shellfishing like Rusty, but he also loved the water. Gordon sailed boats and he spent his days teaching young boys how to build things in carpentry class.

  Time after time, Rusty was delighted to find Gordon in Lynn’s office. When Gordon didn’t come for the Flock’s appointment, Rusty demanded that Lynn tell him what she had done to “get rid of that man Gordon.” “He’ll be back, Rusty,” Lynn said, and he was delighted to discover that she wasn’t lying.

  But after weeks of conversations, Rusty stopped talking. Though he still liked Gordon, he was tired of words. Rusty liked doing things. He got fidgety if he sat and listened for very long.

  The solution seemed simple to Gordon. He had none of Lynn’s professional conventions to overcome. If Rusty wanted to spend time with him working with his hands, they’d do it. Gordon had provided this sort of work therapy in the past, and decided that a healthy male relationship might help Rusty tell his story.

  By this point, the Flock had developed our unique relationship with Lynn and Gordon to the extent that, when things were calm, they could often call for any personality they wished. So, when plans were made for Lynn and Gordon to come to the house so that Rusty could work with Gordon, it was Rusty who eagerly met them at the door one mild April Sunday afternoon.

  Gordon had a radio and an antenna to install in his car and wanted Rusty to help. Lynn sat off to the side, out of earshot, reading a book and enjoying the sunshine. “That lady knows how to keep her mouth shut,” Rusty observed. “That’s sometimes so,” Gordon said with a chuckle.

  While Rusty and Gordon worked on the car, and later, while they built bookshelves at Gordon and Lynn’s home, Rusty shared his memories with Gordon and with others in the Flock, who listened intently.

  Rusty had the vivid but spotty recall that Gordon and Lynn had come to expect from past-keeper personalities. Rusty had watched while his dad spliced and knotted ropes with fisherman friends. Never allowed to touch the ropes himself, Rusty nevertheless committed all the intricate steps to memory. Now, many years later, Rusty demonstrated for Gordon all of the knots he had seen Ray create. Gordon was appropriately impressed and taught Rusty how to tie a few more.

  Rusty also remembered drives to the shore with Ray. He talked with his dad about the things they both loved most—animals, the woods, the sea. When they neared other people, Ray cautioned, “You can come with me, but keep your mouth shut. If you say one word, I’ll send you back to the car.”

  Silent but content, not wanting to embarrass his dad, Rusty watched while Ray shared a beer with the fishermen.

  When Rusty could sit still no longer, he wandered out to the docks. During the spring and summer, Rusty watched floaters—molting crabs in their netted pens. He admired their willingness to work hard enough to cast off old shells, and he felt glad that they didn’t know they were about to be eaten. Rusty listened while the boats, snug in their slips, talked to him in their special language of creaks and groans and told tales of their travels with decaying fish and seaweed.

  As Rusty worked alongside Gordon, he was able to push through to his earliest memory of how he came to be. “I was in the woods, I saw my dad, and there I was,” he said.

  But with memories supplied by Missy, Josie, and some of the other personalities, Gordon and Lynn learned over time that this boy personality was created not in response to a single event, but in response to many years of provocation.

  —

  RAY BEGAN TAKING HIS daughter with him on weekend jaunts to Norfolk and other parts of the Virginia shore where he visited with commercial fishermen or explored pine-forest properties for real-estate speculation. The Missy personality loved being with Daddy. He taught her about different kinds of boats and knots. He helped her recognize birds by their songs. She learned to sit quietly on fallen logs so as to watch deer and fox moving through the foliage.

  She was often entranced by the magic world of the forest, until Ray broke the spell by announcing that he “had to take a pee.” He stayed just close enough to be in sight of his young daughter. She didn’t look his way very often, but she noticed that he sometimes took a very long time.

  On one trip, when the Flock was seven, Ray indulged a growing desire to involve his daughter actively. It was early spring, just after the violets began sparking the pine carpet. Missy leaned against a tree deep in the forest, smelled fresh pine sap, and tried not to watch her father. She saw his penis swell and quickly glanced away. “I wish he’d hurry up,” she muttered to herself.

  Missy glanced over again and her father caught her eye. “Betcha wish you had one of these,” he said.

  Missy was made uncomfortable by her father’s throaty tone of voice, and she felt so very sad. Yes, she did wish she had one of those, because then her dad wou
ld like her better. Every night, before Missy fell asleep, she prayed to God to please make her a boy. She thought that, if she remembered to repeat the prayer for a long time, maybe a whole month, God would know she was serious and grant her wish.

  “Hey,” Ray said sharply, and Missy looked over. He was several feet away from her, but still exposed. “Come on over here,” he said. Missy looked away, and Ray said again, more forcefully, “Come on over and see what I’ve written in the dirt here. Don’tcha love your old man?”

  Missy suddenly felt cold. Conversation and coming close were something new in the “woods game.” The rules were that he moved away from her and took his penis out. She’d look but pretend not to notice. After a while, he’d come back and they’d continue their hike.

  But this time there was something new in her father’s voice. He sounded almost angry. When his temper flared, someone always got hurt. She better move back.

  “No, sir,” she said, standing up and edging back behind a tree, “I’ll stay here and wait for you to finish.” Ray did not like to be disobeyed. Rage building, he zipped his pants back up and walked slowly toward her. Terrified and trapped, afraid to run and afraid to stay, Missy disappeared into herself.

  None of the already existing personalities surfaced. They also felt terror at their father’s infrequent but devastating rage.

  Rusty was born. Brand-new, but ready to handle the situation, he stepped boldly from behind the tree to face his father. All Rusty knew was that he was fourteen years old and that this was the father who cherished him.

  “Hey, Dad!” Rusty said, his voice and face reflecting all of the love the Flock had for Daddy with none of the complicating fear.

  Noting the sudden change in his daughter’s voice, gait, and manner, Ray stopped and said nothing. Rusty smiled disarmingly at his dad and looked pointedly at Ray’s crotch. “I got one too, Dad,” Rusty said proudly.

  “Come over here,” Ray said. “Let me see.”

  “Nope, Dad, I ain’t gonna come over there,” Rusty said with an assuredness that none of the girl personalities possessed. “I ain’t gonna let you cut it off,” he added in a cheery voice.

  “Well, come over here and see what I’ve written in the dirt,” Ray said, trying his ploy again.

  “Nope, Dad,” Rusty said again, smiling and confident.

  “Why not?” asked Ray. “You scared of your old man?”

  “Heck, no, Dad, I ain’t scared of you,” Rusty said.

  “Well, why not?” Ray asked again.

  Rusty stopped and searched his virtually blank mind for a moment, knowing that there must be an answer in there somewhere. When he found it, he smiled broadly again. “I ain’t comin’ over there to see ’cause I can’t read.”

  Ray was apparently so perplexed by this turn of events that he forgot his sexual urge. His daughter had been able to read for years. What did she mean, she couldn’t read? And if she didn’t stop acting funny, there would be hell to pay when they got home to Nancy.

  “Why are you talking like that?” Ray asked as they left the woods together, Rusty staying at least an arm’s length away. Rusty didn’t rightly know.

  “Jist ’cause it’s the way I talk, I guess,” he finally answered.

  “Well, don’t talk like that around your mother,” Ray cautioned.

  “Oh, I don’t got no mother,” Rusty replied, “jist you, Dad.” Ray let the matter drop.

  From then until Ray’s death, Rusty occasionally surfaced when the Flock was alone with him. Ray learned that his daughter liked to be called Rusty sometimes, and he himself rather liked it when they could both pretend that Joan was his son. He taught this “son” many things, including the inadequacies of women, of Nancy in particular.

  Ray said that women were the most worthless creatures God had ever put on earth—“Jesus’s one mistake.” Rusty guessed that Gordon’s woman, Lynn, was no exception.

  Rusty was puzzled by Gordon’s attitude toward women. No matter how many times Rusty gave Gordon the chance to vent his hatred of women, Gordon never did. Once Rusty overheard Lynn say something to Gordon about her sailing lessons. Later, as they worked on the car, he questioned Gordon in private.

  “Do you really let that lady sail your boats?”

  “Yes,” Gordon said.

  “Does she sail as good as you?”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Gordon responded calmly.

  Rusty looked smug and satisfied.

  But Gordon wasn’t through. He finished tightening a bolt and surveyed Rusty’s expression. “Lynn hasn’t had as much practice sailing as I have. That’s why she’s not as good. But Lynn is much better than many of the male racers I know.”

  As he helped Rusty work through his hatred of women, Gordon stubbornly resisted supplanting one stereotype with another. He didn’t tell Rusty that men and women were just alike. As usual, Gordon didn’t see the world in line with the social convention and rejected my urgings to offer Rusty the expected “healthy” alternative.

  “I don’t see the world that way, Renee,” Gordon said. “I just don’t believe that everyone is the same. There are gender differences. All persons have important male and female aspects. They differ to the extent of how male or female their mixtures are.

  “People who are homophobic or who, like Rusty, refuse to see worth in the other sex are really denying some intrinsic part of self,” he said. That acceptance, Gordon explained, would come not from argument but from appreciation. Time and a noncommittal stance would take care of Rusty’s problem with women.

  “I won’t force him to deny his male parts in an effort to accept his female parts. The more Rusty is around Lynn,” Gordon decided, “and the more he is with me, the more he will come to see that who he is is his own delightful mix of male and female attributes.”

  Rusty flourished under Gordon’s attention throughout the spring. Time and again, however, he became frustrated with his own limitations. “I know I’m really stupid,” Rusty said. “I guess I’m just like that boy Gary.”

  “No, you are definitely not stupid or retarded,” Gordon responded. “You learn quicker than most people I know. You see me do something one time and then you know how to do it. Most people can’t learn that quick.”

  Rusty shrugged off the evidence. “But I can’t read nothin’, and I always forget, and I can’t pound nails good.”

  Gordon didn’t respond to the first two complaints. He hadn’t yet determined the extent of Rusty’s reading problem, and he knew that suggesting to Rusty that the “forgetting” was because he lived in a female frame with a lot of girl personalities would cause that personality to dive deep inside.

  Gordon did address Rusty’s third concern. “You’re not really good at pounding nails with a hammer because that takes lots of practice.”

  Rusty listened quietly.

  “Do you want to know how I help my boys at school learn how to hammer?”

  Rusty nodded eagerly. He was sure that he wouldn’t have forgotten so much if he had ever had a teacher like Gordon.

  “I give them a board and a hammer and a hundred nails,” Gordon said. “They learn how to hammer by pounding those hundred nails into that piece of board.”

  Rusty resolved that that was exactly what he would do, but he’d do it in a special way, to make Gordon proud. He found a piece of oak stump with beautiful swirling grain and bark around the edges. He bought some brass nails at the hardware store. For several nights, Rusty worked alone in the basement workshop at Steve’s house.

  “A flying horse,” Rusty decided. That’s what Gordon reminded him of. Rusty remembered having seen a picture of Pegasus many years before, and he was so entranced by the idea of a horse that could fly that he remembered the picture in vivid detail.

  A few weeks later, Rusty had grown competent with a hammer. And Gordon had a brass-nail Pegasus that shimmered against an oiled wood background, the flow of the grain used to simulate coat and movement.

  DIARY    May 1, 1
983

  Gordon has bonded with the personalities so easily that I can’t help being a little envious. I can rationalize how and why it happened: the personalities were ready to relate to another person whom I trusted; they craved a male model and parent as much as they craved a female; the various personalities in the Flock were eager to love him because of their identification with me.

  I can trace their readiness for involvement with him back to the progress I had made with the Flock, but it’s still sometimes frustrating. The relationships that it took me two long years of hard work to develop, Gordon established with ease in two months.

  And it’s even more frustrating that I can’t talk to my favorite confidant about this. Even now, even with the clear bonding and love he has with Jo, Rusty, Josie, and Renee, he seems ready to back out at the slightest criticism.

  For example, Gordon is dealing with the Flock and their gender issues much differently from the way I deal with them. Jo and I, and Renee and I as well, have had long talks about maleness and femaleness. For Jo I try, from time to time, to describe the feelings that go along with being a woman. Renee and I talk about sex, but from a different perspective. Renee has trouble reconciling the fact that Ray sexually abused his daughter with his derision of women in his conversations with Rusty. I’ve pointed out that Ray’s sexual behavior is more rightly labeled “pathology” than “expression of gender.” Through our talks, Renee is beginning to understand that “female” is not synonymous with “victim,” although she’s still not sure that men are governed by anything other than sexual impulse.

  But Gordon honestly believes it doesn’t matter much that he was born male. When he thinks of who he knows himself to be, physical gender is just not significant.

  He responds to Rusty’s refusal to accept any femaleness by saying, “Who cares if you’re a boy or a girl?” He responds to Jo’s lack of gender identity by saying, “Why don’t you work on feeling you rather than worrying about feeling female?” When I commented that his approach, so unlike mine, might muddy the waters a bit, he said, “I don’t want to do anything wrong. I’ll stop anytime you want me to.”