The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  Before Harriet could answer, she had to first suffer a sharp pang of discomfort. After all, what awkwardness: both of them registered nurses, both black, both in the employ of whites. All this shared experience—and still they had nothing in common. It was Harriet’s fault mostly. She wasn’t a dependable black person. For whatever reasons, complicated or simple, she spoke differently, thought differently, formed different allegiances. Black women like Nurse B. Colette Dunbar sensed this attitude a mile away. Black boys steered clear of Harriet. Some white boys took a step closer.

  “Excuse me?” Harriet said. “Get what done?”

  “I’m referring to Miss Mary Ann Hornicker. The lady on your bed here. She had her insulin yet?”

  “No,” Harriet said. “I wasn’t sure—”

  “Then maybe you should get to it. Five units. Humalog. She’s been waiting since lunchtime.”

  Inwardly Harriet bristled. But outwardly she did as she was told. She measured five units, drove the syringe into Miss Hornicker’s freckled hip (not a stir or even a blink from her patient). Nurse Dunbar stood close by and supervised the injection—it seemed only to bore her—and then began rooting through the box she’d carried in. She pulled out a prescription bottle and summoned into the infirmary the first of her charges: a wiry little man who swiveled forward. His left side appeared withered and useless, his right side incongruently strong. He let out a raw-sounding grunt.

  “This would be Mr. Talbot. M for Marcus. Takes Dilantin in the morning. Suffers from asthma—mild compared to some of the others. You’ll need to keep his inhaler or else he’ll lose it or treat it like a toy. Won’t you, Mr. Talbot?”

  Mr. Talbot froze, as if a spotlight had found him in a moment of great indiscretion.

  “Won’t you?” she repeated, her tone part teasing, mostly scornful.

  He shifted from his left to right side, then gave a quick jerk of his head, which might or might not have been a guilty nod.

  Satisfied, Nurse Dunbar dismissed him with a wave. Another man, this one tall and rail-thin, stepped forward in his place. “Now Mr. Jarman here can’t have products with sugar and sometimes, most of the time, uses Senokot for help with his BMs. He used to take lithium, but not anymore . . .”

  Harriet reached for her clipboard of forms.

  “Leave the forms go and listen to what I’m tellin’ you.”

  It was probably best for Harriet not to reply. At least not yet. Besides, she’d endured this sort of bullying from other nurses. It sometimes happened that those who knew their patients the best liked them the least, and were the most tyrannical when it came to passing on their knowledge to others.

  More campers were called forward and their ailments listed aloud. Mrs. Tamerack’s swollen feet. Mrs. Petterson’s inflamed hemorrhoids. Mr. Henley’s memory loss and seizures, the severe, age-yellowed binder he wore to keep his hernia pressed against his abdomen. Some twenty campers paused for Harriet’s inspection. She’d seen some extreme variations of the human body while working in a nursing home. And yet, there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth.

  But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.

  Last in line was a stiff-postured little man with thick black glasses and enormous woolly sideburns. He tottered rather than walked, as if the bones of each leg and been locked into place and fused shut. “And this is Leonard Peirpont,” Nurse Dunbar said. “Seizures. Some bad. Most of them light. You tell whoever . . .”

  Thus far Leonard Peirpont was one of the few campers to seek out and hold Harriet’s attention, the first to address her directly. He had a prim, wide-eyed face and a shrill voice. “Up in Kingdom City they won’t allow it,” he announced. “They’ve got rules you ain’t heard of . . . rules for driving and for . . . and rules for hunting quail.”

  “Quiet down now,” Nurse Dunbar chided him, mildly. “You tell whoever takes care of Leonard to hold him here at the elbow and take it easy because—”

  “—They won’t wash windows, either, without you give ’em an extra fifty cents an hour.”

  “He’s liable to pitch forward at any minute.”

  “—Or mop the floors. They won’t allow it.”

  “And he won’t stop once he gets started,” Nurse Dunbar said. “Will you, Leonard?”

  At the sound of his name, his broad expression tightened and a look of something like clarity passed across his features, passed and faded. “I suppose I’ll do . . . what I have to do,” he said.

  A short while later attendants carried in a duffel bag containing, improbably enough, fifty cartons of cigarettes. It would be Harriet’s duty to supply the counselors, who would ration out cigarettes to the campers. Last, from the deep pouch of her leather purse, Nurse Dunbar produced a medium-size brown paper bag. The top of the bag had been rolled down and stapled shut. Schuller Kindermann’s name was written in thick black marker on both sides. “For Mr. Kindermann,” Nurse Dunbar said and let the bag plop down onto the countertop. “He told me to leave it in the infirmary and that he’d be by soon to pick it up.”

  “I’ll see that he gets it.”

  Nurse Dunbar leaned against the medicine cabinet and set her face in a tight-lipped pout. Everything she glared at with her hooded eyes seemed to either weary or annoy her. “He’s a peculiar man, Mr. Kindermann. A peculiar type, isn’t he?”

  Harriet shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Guess so? He a friend of yours? You owe him favors?”

  “No,” Harriet said. “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I hope not,” Nurse Dunbar said. “Mr. Kindermann’s got some old-fashioned ideas. Old-time Catholic Church ideas. This paper bag I brought in? Mr. Kindermann wants what’s inside the bag kept separate from the other medications. He wants things his way. But that don’t mean you can’t make your own arrangements.”

  “Arrangements?” Harriet asked.

  “There’s a lot Mr. Kindermann don’t understand about retarded people—about the way they are. So each summer when we come on the buses, I meet with the camp nurse. I say, ‘Pay attention.’ I say, ‘Make your own arrangements if you have to.’”

  All Harriet could do was nod slowly, as if she understood the implications of this conversation, as if she were well acquainted with the ways of retarded people.

  “I do what I can,” Nurse B. Colette Dunbar said. “But each summer it’s a new nurse here at camp. Never the same face. It’s not the kind of job you want to come back and do again,” she said. “And it’s these two weeks with the state hospital patients that does it. Pushes you to your limits.” With her thick eyelids half lowered, she seemed to be conjuring a picture of Harriet pushed to her limits. “Two weeks,” Nurse Dunbar said. “How you going to manage?” She didn’t wait for a reply. Instead she reached for Leonard Peirpont’s elbow and directed him toward the infirmary door. By now the rest of her charges had deserted her. The moment they were beyond her jurisdiction, they let out sharp squawks of happiness and resumed their odd mumblings, their bodily tics and contortions, and staggered off toward the chaos of the meadow. Yet Nurse Dunbar was obliging, even tender, with Leonard Peirpont, coaxing him down the infirmary step, talking to him in a soft voice. “Easy, Leonard. Easy.”

  Inside the infirmary Harriet was left holding her clipboard of health forms. She stood dumb
founded flipping through the forms: a myriad of diseases and disorders and medications. There were brief personal histories, too. Leonard Peirpont, she read, was not born retarded. He’d been brain-injured ten years earlier, at age twenty-seven, in a farming accident.

  When she glanced up from her papers moments later, she noticed that the side door leading from the infirmary to her living quarters was cracked open an inch or two. Into this gap a face was pressed, or a portion of a face, a boy’s round cheek, a boy’s focused and wary eye.

  Her son, James.

  Other people tended to remark on her son’s demeanor, his terse way of speaking, or not speaking at all, his habit of slipping unnoticed into the room and listening in on adult conversations, his brow furrowed, the corners of his mouth pursed, as if in judgment. Her white friends called him bashful, her black friends, sly or secretive. Inevitably, both groups asked the same question: Was he always this quiet?

  Not exactly. In private James could be a bully for her attention. He sometimes screamed if, while they were speaking, her attention strayed to the TV or radio. Or he might sulk openly if she showed the slightest interest in other boys his age. (Such jealousy didn’t extend to the attention she paid little girls.) He was five years old. Five. It amazed her, this number. He was small for his size. At five he’d retained a few passionate interests that might be said to belong to younger children. Staring contest, for instance, with her, with his mother. He still liked to set his boy-face a centimeter before hers, to fix her with a deep and unblinking gaze. It was either a phase—and she’d seen many distinct phases in his five years—or the solidifying of his true personality.

  She believed he’d enjoyed his time at summer camp thus far. During training week several of the male counselors had made a point of including James in a hike to Barker Lake, in a lazy game of catch before dinner. What a special brand of happiness for Harriet to see her son at play with these young men, professional camp counselors no less. Had these moments been meaningful for James? Hard to say. A few days later he’d shown little reaction when she told him these same counselors had been fired. Though he did want to know why they’d been let go.

  “For swimming at night,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “It’s dangerous, swimming at night. You could hit your head and drown.”

  She’d been equally tactful when preparing James for the sight of a hundred and four retarded adult campers. A few weeks before they’d left their St. Louis apartment for Kindermann Forest, she’d brought home a book on Down syndrome, and together they had looked through the pages. “Not so different, really,” she’d said. She told him he should not be afraid. “True,” she said. “On the outside they would look . . . unusual, their faces and bodies and their behaviors.”

  To this James blinked in agreement. “But they’re normal inside, right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re good people. They have good, normal hearts.”

  Of course she’d said these things to lessen the strangeness and dread of the moment—this moment, in fact—when James looked upon retarded men and women for the first time. He appeared awed by what he’d just seen. It was a daunting task, maybe, to try to match their misshapen bodies to their supposed good and normal hearts.

  “James,” she said. “Next time, you don’t have to stand in the doorway and stare. You can come in and meet them. You can say hello.”

  He gave her a quick nod and blink.

  “You don’t have to be afraid.” She waited. “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” he said. “Why do they swing back and forth like that when they walk?”

  “They were born with a disease. Or a defect. Or they had an accident. The man who just left, Mr. Peirpont, fell off his tractor and hit his head.”

  She wasn’t beyond inventing a cautionary tale, at least the part about the tractor. She’d seen James turn his eager boy-gaze toward the maintenance staff’s tractor and brush hog, a roaring and violent contraption. If her falsehoods were casual enough and attached to something James knew to be true, then she could make him reflect. She could guide his thoughts a bit. No doubt he was presently thinking about the sharp blades of the brush hog or Leonard Peirpont’s tottering walk or the hazards of swimming at night.

  He was a handsome and determined thinker, the way he raised his chin and half-squinted. His hair was dark brown and would have fallen into loose waves if she didn’t cut it short. His complexion shone a few shades lighter than Harriet’s—not just lighter but composed of different tones. People looked at her son and wondered.

  “I’ve got medicines to organize,” she said. “If only you could help me. But I bet you’re busy, aren’t you? What are you doing in there?”

  “Building bridges.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought that’s what you might be doing.”

  She returned to her charts and medicines and he settled back down onto the floor of their living quarters and resumed work on his bridges. Bridges to islands. Bridges across chasms and rivers. Bridges to other bridges.

  Twenty minutes later Maureen Boyd from the kitchen came by with two very large oven pans, or muffin trays to be exact, industrial-size, sixty-four muffin holes in each tray. Harriet looked up from her desk, puzzled.

  “For your medications,” Maureen said.

  She still didn’t understand. But once Maureen explained, Harriet realized that muffin pans were perfect. A camper’s name could be taped into each muffin well. She could sort and arrange breakfast, lunch, and dinner meds. At mealtimes she could go from one mess hall table to the next with her muffin tray balanced in one hand.

  After Maureen left, Harriet practiced walking waitress-style around the infirmary beds. She stopped at the window, pulled back the curtain. The crowd of campers had thinned. Across the meadow Schuller Kindermann had just stepped out of the camp office and was making his way toward the infirmary. She wasn’t at all panicked. Given his methodical pace, there was plenty of time for Harriet to turn her attention to the folded paper bag and conduct whatever investigations she thought necessary.

  She weighed the bag in her hand. The sides of the bag had been expertly folded down and stapled shut, meticulously so—a neat row of three tight staples.

  The first of these Harriet removed with a hemostat. But this method proved too painstaking. The remaining staples she simply cut in half with a nail clipper.

  Inside the bag were stacked sheets of birth control pills, dozens of sheets, one for each female state hospital camper of childbearing age. Their names were taped to the edges of the sheets. MRS. RAMONA KAISER, MISS BLANCHE NAGEL, MISS MARY ANN HORNICKER.

  Because these names had been neatly handwritten on adhesive labels, you might think that each woman had pondered her circumstance and then made a practical choice. But of course that wasn’t it. Someone at the state hospital had decided—wisely—on their behalf.

  Could it be that Mr. Kindermann had misunderstood these intentions, or misunderstood the workings of birth control pills?

  Or did he plan to hold back these pills for the duration of the state hospital session—the act of an old-fashioned Catholic, a principled man?

  It was hard, if not impossible, to know his intentions. At that moment all Harriet could do was dump the birth control pills into the bottom drawer of her work desk and searched for a reasonable replacement. Seltzer tablets? Gauze bandages? Stool softeners?

  In the end she chose throat lozenges, twenty or more sheets’ worth. A ridiculous substitute. She placed the lozenges in the bag, folded down and restapled its sides.

  Maybe the real difficulty of reading Schuller Kindermann’s intentions had to do with his age and appearance. At first glance he looked properly, reassuringly paternal. Grandfatherly. His face was pale and kind, his hair vibrantly white. He had the fussy manners people seemed to approve of in the elderly. (Easy to imagine a man like Schuller Kindermann fixing clocks or cobbling shoes in some quaint Bavarian village.) If you looked close, you could
see an age-softened version of the child he’d once been: a tidy, well-mannered boy of ten or eleven, a boy not so very interested in other children or in pleasing adults, but not at all troublesome, either, just wholly devoted to his own interests and pursuits—self-sufficient, determined, a bit aloof. You looked at seventy-eight-year-old Schuller Kindermann and expected a grown boy’s sly humor, or at least a willingness to be playful.

  What you got was altogether different.

  The infirmary door creaked open, and Schuller hoisted himself inside. A carefully placed step. A slow turn. He carried with him the expectation that each of his slow and deliberate movements was somehow interesting for others to watch. “Well,” he said. “Linda Rucker tells me we have one hundred and four campers. Eight more than last year.” He glared at the infirmary floor, waiting, it seemed, for Harriet to take his simple statement—a hundred and four campers—and turn it into a lively and inclusive conversation. Several tepid moments slipped by and he lifted his face and took a squinting glance out the window at the buses and the bright afternoon. “These attendants from the state hospital,” he said. “They really ought to do a better job unloading the buses.”

  Again Harriet was struck by the oddness of it. The incongruity. To be so primly lectured to by such a seemingly mild and kindly old man.

  “But it always looks like pandemonium at first,” Schuller added. “There was a summer four years ago when a dozen of the state hospital campers arrived with the stomach flu. By the next day we had an epidemic. All the infirmary beds were full. We lined up cots in the mess hall. But I probably told you about that, didn’t I?”