Sigh. I thought of my worm fences. This was another test, wasn't it? "Okay." I gave in.
I spent most of the afternoon clearing the brush from the base of the peninsula, where I wanted to install the worm fence. It wasn't quite the narrowest part; I would have preferred to work at the very base of the peninsula, but it was too rocky. There was no easy way to get onto the rocks, let alone anchor the fences. No, we'd have to do it higher up, where we had enough good soil to anchor the spikes. If I could get a gas-hammer we could shoot the spikes right into the ground and the job would be a lot easier; otherwise, we'd have to use the screw-in kind and do it by hand.
While I worked, I tried to figure out what kind of a game I would have the children play. I wanted to do something more than just wash dishes or pick up litter; I wanted to give these kids something that they weren't getting anywhere else-hell, even a chance to scream out their frustration might be a welcome break.
It was while I was working on a particularly well-rooted bush that I noticed a little boy watching me. I didn't recognize him immediately; there were a lot of kids around I didn't know; but he shouldn't be out here alone either.
This was a continual problem with some of the kids, they weren't socialized enough to be bonded to any specific person or place. Some of them were near-feral and wandered off a lot. We knew who most of our problem children were and we kept them on tight leashes; but this must have been one of the new ones.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi, back," he said.
He was about eight years old, maybe ten. Hard to tell. Short pants that didn't quite fit him, a bulky sweater. Needed a haircut. Black hair. Missing a tooth.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Clearing the bushes."
"Why? Don't you like the bushes?"
"I like the bushes fine. We just don't need them here."
"Oh. How come?"
"We're putting up a fence. A big strong one. To keep the worms out. That's so we can sleep well at night."
"Oh," said the boy. He watched me silently for a while, then he said, "You're really scared of worms, aren't you?"
"Everybody is," I said, without thinking.
"I'm not," he said.
I gave him my best indulgent smile. Childhood bravado. I wanted to say, "Wait till you see one up close," but Betty-John wasn't particularly fond of scaring the hell out of the children for no reason at all.
For no reason at all. Hm.
An idea occurred to me.
To the boy, I said, "You'd better get back. You don't want to wiss lunch. I think Little Ivy is making Chocolate Disaster for dessert today."
"I don't like chocolate," he said. "What's your name?"
"Jim. What's yours?"
"Jim who?"
"Jim McCarthy. And you're really not supposed to be here now. Somebody is probably looking for you. Come on, I'll take you back." I held out my hand.
"I don't need your help." He backed away.
"Okay." I held up my hands to show I meant no harm. "Have it your own way." I bent back to the task at hand. The kid looked skittish enough already. When I looked up again, he was gone. No matter. He couldn't go far.
Just as well. I wanted to think.
I had an idea for a game we could play.
Maybe one of the reasons we were having so much trouble making contact with these children was that they were so terrified. Dogs, darkness, people, worms, their own bodies-these kids were psychological disaster areas. The ones who knew what they were afraid of were the lucky ones; the rest of them were afraid of things that could only be found in a catalog of Nameless Horrors. (How do you alphabetize a catalog of Nameless Horrors anyway?) Or worse.
It wasn't just that our kids were afraid; it was worse than that: they were afraid to be afraid.
If we could get them to acknowledge how scared they really were, that would be the most honest experience in their lives. It might be the start of real communication.
That was it. We had to get them talking. I knew what I wanted to do.
It was one of Jason's exercises.
Jason always said, "What you resist, persists. Your resistance is the energy it feeds upon."
Right. If you resist your own fear, what you get is the terror of fear compounded. If you resist your feelings of anger, you get rage. If you resist your grief, what you get is unending despair.
"Give in," Jason always said. "Let yourself be angry, afraid, or sad, or whatever else comes up. The experience hurts a lot less than the resistance to it. Once you let it out, it leaves you. Let go of it, it disappears."
I knew the exercise would work.
It had worked for me. Over and over and over. Dammit.
I knew what the real problem was.
I missed the circle. I missed the loving. I missed the good things about the Tribe.
I didn't want Family to be a Tribe-but I did want Family to have some of the family feeling of the Tribe.
When I finally came back, later that afternoon, I must have had a thoughtful expression on my face because B-Jay stopped me and asked, "What's that about?"
"What's what?"
"The look."
"Huh? Nothing. I was thinking about tonight?"
"Did you figure out what you're going to do?"
I realized then that she was testing me-no, pushing me into larger and larger responsibilities-the same way we pushed the children. The same way Jason had pushed me. The same way Duke had pushed me. And everybody else. It annoyed me. I wanted to ask, "Why can't I go through life at my own speed?"
But I didn't. I just nodded. "I'm going to have a screaming contest. We're going to see how much noise we can make."
"Sounds like a perfectly horrible idea," Betty-John grinned. "The kids will love it." I wanted to tell her the rest, but she shrugged me off. "I don't have the time right now, Jim."
"I really want you to hear this, B-Jay. I think there's the possibility of a breakthrough here."
"Jim, I mean it. I don't have time." She shoved me away. "I trust you. Go and teach the kids to scream."
So I did.
After dinner, I walked the kids over to the main hall. We were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts. The heat of the day still lingered and it was a warm, slightly muggy evening.
Inside my head, I was experiencing a bit of stage fright. Second thoughts. Maybe I wasn't qualified to do this; but then, I argued with myself, if I'm not qualified to do this, nobody is.
The hell with it. Let's just do it and find out.
We pushed into the well-lit hall. Alec and Holly and Tommy and me.
There were only two or three of the older kids to assist me, Little Ivy and Trisha and Mike; everybody else would be at the Directors' meeting; but these three were experienced. We shouldn't have any real trouble. I took them aside and explained to them briefly what I was going to do and what they should watch out for. "You're probably going to need some boxes of tissue. Some of the kids will start crying. I'm going to explain to them that it's all right to cry. The way you win this game is by seeing how much screaming and crying you can do. So don't try to help them or comfort them. Let them just all have a good scream and if they cry, they cry. They'll be fine. You'll know if someone's in real trouble."
I stepped to the center of the room. The children quickly formed themselves into a large circle. The games always started with a big circle.
"Okay," I said to them, "tonight's game is about noise. All kinds of noise. Big noise, little noise, happy noise, even unhappy noise. So, let's start by practicing. Let's see how much noise we can make. Let's see who can scream the loudest." And we were off.
The kids began to scream like banshees and wild Indians and air raid sirens.
Little Ivy grinned at me above the uproar. The little monsters loved the idea. Everybody else was always telling them to keep quiet; here was a grown-up telling them to roar like a madhouse. Most of them did.
"You must be talking to my deaf ear!" I shouted. I had to holler
to make myself heard. "I can't hear you!"
That upped the level of noise by at least ten decibels.
"I almost heard something that time-but Alec wasn't shouting." I waited till the noise level began to ebb a bit and went down on one knee in front of him. "You don't have to shout if you don't want," I said. "But Bear can't make any noise without your help, so would you shout for Bear?"
He shook his head. "Not even for Bear?"
Alec looked very uncomfortable. I didn't want to push him too hard, but I did so want him to make a noise, any kind of noise at all.
"Tell you what," I said, deliberately casual. "You ask Bear if he wants you to make a noise. And if he does, then you make a noise. And if he doesn't, you don't have to. Okay?"
Alec nodded.
"Go ahead. Ask Bear."
Alec turned away and bent his face down to Bear's neck hole. I waited, but he didn't turn back. Well, maybe Bear was a slow talker.
"All right," I straightened and spoke again to the rest of the children. "That was a good warm-up. Now, let's do it for real. Now, let's make some real noise. Let's have them hear us in the big house."
This time, they put their hearts into it. Once they realized it was all right to shriek their lungs out, they began to be willing to really let loose. I noticed that the paint had shaken off some of the walls and the bark was starting to blister on some of the trees outside.
I waved my arm in a big circle as if I was winding them up and they kept up the noise as long as they could. Their faces were shiny and red. All of them were very excited now. They were jumping up and down and screaming as hard as they could. Good. I needed them to reach that peak just before exhaustion. One more good scream ought to do it.
"Okay, this is it. This is the last one," I said. "Let's make it count."
When I looked back in Alec's direction, I noticed that he had his mouth open and he was screaming as hard as he could. At first, I thought it was good. I'd finally gotten him to make a sound.
Theen I realized that he had dropped Bear on the floor before him, he was screaming out of sheer panic.
Uh-oh
Instinctively, I grabbed him in a gigantic hug. I pulled him close m me and let him scream into my chest. He was rigid-and he couldn't stop screaming. He just raged and raged and raged. He couldn't hear me and he couldn't stop.
The other children were slowing down now, turning and looking at Alec and me. They were puzzled, uncertain. Was this part of the game or not? I made a signal to Little Ivy, I waggled my fingers in a circle in the air-have them make some more noise-and I walked out of the room, carrying the still screaming Alcc. I strode across the dark lawn to the big swimming pool, kicking off my shoes as I walked, and then stepped right off the edge and into the deep end, Alec and all.
We came up gasping. I was still holding him with my right arm and dog-paddling and treading water like crazy. Alec still wanted to scream, but he had been caught totally off guard and he was coughing and spitting out water.
"That was good, Alec. That was very good. I love you, sweetheart. You did that just right. You just have to remember to stop screaming too."
He glowered at me, but I just hugged him and kissed him close. Anger was real. Anger was good. It was much better than indifference. Anger, at least, was alive. I headed for the shallow end and the stairs.
We came back into the big room, both dripping wet, me Iaughing, Alec trying to retreat into himself and not succeeding. He wanted to be angry at the same time. And he didn't want to let go of me. And he wanted to scream again, but he didn't want to be walked into the pool again.
Little Ivy was already wrapping towels around the both of us. This was not the first time one or another of the kids had gotten the swimming pool treatment. The proximity of the pool was one of the main reasons why we held the games in the main hall.
We stripped Alec's wet clothes off of him and had him sit down, wrapped up in three big warm towels. Somewhere there were terry cloth robes, but Little Ivy couldn't find any of them, and it was more important that we continue with the game.
I had all the children sit on the floor now, still in a large circle and Little Ivy dialed the lights down low for a spooky effect. I pulled Alec into the safety of my lap.
Okay," I said. "Now, for this part of the game, we have to think of the saddest things in the world. I'll start. The saddest thing in the world is good old Wag going without any supper. Isn't that sad?"
Some of the children nodded and looked serious. They thought that was very sad. A lot of them liked old Wag.
"Can anyone think of anything sadder?" I asked.
One of the little girls raised her hand. "What about everybody going without any supper?"
"Oh, that's a good one," I said. "That's much sadder. Is there anything sadder than that?"
One of the older boys, said, "How about everybody going without supper because there isn't any food?"
"And nobody knows where Mommy is," added one of the smaller boys, Toby-Joy Christopher.
I had to be careful with this exercise, I didn't want them accelerating into the next stage before they'd finished with sadness. I said quickly, "Oh my, yes, that's terribly sad. Oh, goodness, that's so sad, I want to cry." And I pretended to weep into my hands. Alec looked up at me oddly.
"Let's think of some more sad things," I prompted. "Who can think of something even sadder?"
"My mommy went away," said Toby-Joy.
"I never had a mommy," said one of the little girls. "My mommy died," said another.
Good. Now, they were comparing sadnesses.
"My mommy said she'd come back to me. I'm just waiting for her here," said one little girl in an almost haughty tone. The way she said it, she was setting herself above the game: I'm not one of you. I'm just visiting.
Several disbelieving looks answered this declaration. These children weren't stupid. Everybody knew that if you were here it was because you didn't have anywhere else to go and nobody was coming back for you. That was even true for most of the adults. Popular rumor had it that Jack Balaban was wanted for murder in Ireland. Not true-it was something more like a hundred and forty-seven parking violations in Chicago-but the rumor was more fun than the truth.
There was abrupt silence in the room. All of the children were abruptly alone with their own griefs.
I said, "Okay, everybody think of something sad. If you can't think of something sad, make something up; but think of the saddest thing you can. Now, let's all think real hard about how sad we feel. Close your eyes if you want." Most of them buried their faces in their hands. We'd played lots of imagining games before: This one wasn't so different, just more intense.
"Gosh," I said. "I feel so sad. I feel so very very sad. I think I'm going to cry. Let's everybody cry because we feel sad. If you can't cry, it's all right to pretend. Just make it up. Just let yourself be sad. See how sad you can feel. It's all right to miss Mommy and Daddy and all your friends from school and your favorite teacher or your dog or your cat or your favorite doll or toy or TV show or Gramma and Grampa-anything. Just think of something you miss. Even your favorite food is fine. Now feel real sad about it. Oh, my goodness. I'm starting to cry. . . ."
I put my own face into my hands and made weeping noises. Around me, some of the children began to weep too, some of them pretend, some for real. One or two giggled while they pretended, some of them peeked out between their fingers; but when they saw that we were serious, they went back behind the safety of their hands. In a minute, most of them were crying softly to themselves.
Alec sat in my lap and looked up at me. I looked down at him. Very gently, I took his hands in mine and kissed them, then I placed them over his eyes and wrapped my arms around him. We made little weepy sounds together. His were almost imperceptible, but I could feel them in the cradle of my embrace and it made me feel warm. I couldn't remember Alec ever crying before.
"Everybody cry," I repeated as gently as I could. "Everybody think of the saddest thing you c
an and just let the tears come out. You're doing fine. Just cry until you're through crying. Just like me. Just like Little Ivy."
One or two of the girls were still giggling. They still thought this was all make-believe; they didn't realize how serious this was about to get.
After a while, the crying ended and Little Ivy began working her way around the room, wiping eyes and noses. We all looked at each other; the children had such solemn expressions on their laces, I had to smile. "Listen. It's all right to be sad," I reassured them. "It's part of missing things. It's all right to miss things and then when you're through missing them, it's all right to smile again. Okay, everybody hug everybody else now," I said. "Don't stop until you've given everybody in the room a big hug."
The children liked hugging games, and in a very few minutes, they were all giggling again. And then they all jumped on me in a big wet cluster-hug and we collapsed in a pile of laughter with me and Alec on the bottom.
After a bit, we continued.
The next part of the game was the scary part.
I had them resume their places on the floor and we began again. "When I was a little boy," I said. "We used to go out in the woods at night and tell the spookiest stories we knew to see how much we could scare ourselves. Who knows a scary story?" I looked around the room. Nobody raised a hand. "Oh, come on-am I going to have to tell the story about the leprechauns and the penguin?"
Little Ivy groaned. "No, no-" she said in mock horror. "Anything but that. Somebody think of a scary story."
"I know one," said a small voice. A little girl we called Crystal because she seemed so delicate and fragile.
"Do you want to tell it to us?" She hesitated.
"Well, when you're ready." I let her off the hook. "Little Ivy, do you know a scary story?"
Little Ivy nodded enthusiastically. "I once saw a great . . . big . . . purple . . . and red . . ." She held up her two fingers about ten inches apart, but her eyes were looking directly into mine. Her expression was impish.
"Ivy!" I started to say
". . . hippopotamus!" she finished, spreading her arms out widely, laughing at me.
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