by John Dalton
James, poised at the edge of the gully, stood rocking to and fro and peeing with great accuracy, and when he was done he craned his face up to her, Harriet, his mother, and said, “I don’t care if I ever see any of them again.”
She didn’t bother correcting him. Today was Thursday, day eleven of the State Hospital Session. It felt like a great accomplishment to have made it this far. Eleven days. Last night she’d heard the exhausted counselors of Kindermann Forest boast that they were in the homestretch now. There were Thursday and Friday yet to conquer. It would all officially end Saturday morning, when three white state hospital buses rumbled into camp and reclaimed their one hundred and four patients. What a moment of relief that would be! To see the loaded buses pass from the gates of Kindermann Forest bound for the hospitals and group homes from which they’d come. The staff had already set their sights on such a moment. They were looking ahead and calculating each small milestone. Three more rise-and-shines. Two more working days in which, at nearly every moment, they’d be duty-bound to their campers. Two more evening activities. Two more clamorous bedtime routines. Two more dreadful showers.
For Harriet seven more rounds of medication to anxiously sort and distribute. Two more sleep-wrecked night shifts in the infirmary.
How nice it would be to stumble back to her bed for another hour’s sleep. But there was no chance of that. From inside the infirmary came the sound of last night’s patients stomping across the wood floor. James had found his digging spoons and was hunched down in the yard excavating tiny roads for his Matchbox cars.
A half hour before breakfast one of the counselors, Daniel Hartpence, brought Harriet her first patient of the day: Frederick Torbert. What could be said of Frederick that his appearance didn’t already make clear? He had a broad chest and muscle-bloated arms and neck. (How could this be when Frederick, like several other brawny male campers, never seemed to exercise?) With his hard, jutting forehead and tiny black-marble eyes, he looked Neanderthal, which was precisely the way he behaved—ferocious and grunting and single-minded. One day last week, in the middle of mess hall lunch, he’d stood up, put his hands beneath the edge of his table, and flipped it over in one easy motion. Fortunately, no one had ended up beneath the overturned table, which was made of oak and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. Just to move a mess hall table for sweeping required the wholesale exertions of four kitchen girls.
What brought Frederick to the infirmary was a thick splinter, several days old, lodged in the palm of his hand. As a source of pain and infection, it didn’t seem to bother him. He sat beside Harriet on the picnic table in the infirmary yard, wiggling the beefy fingers of his injured hand. His unswerving gaze, softened from twice-daily doses of lithium, was focused on the crotch of Harriet’s blue jean shorts.
Daniel Hartpence hovered over them, his legs half-cocked and ready to spring to Harriet’s rescue. Or make a hasty retreat. “Did you know it’s our turn to go see the ponies this afternoon?” Daniel announced brightly. “That’ll sure be nice. Won’t it, Frederick?”
From Frederick a bored grunt as Harriet tweezed the splinter from his palm.
“I know you’ve been looking forward to seeing the ponies,” Daniel said.
“I bet he has,” Harriet agreed. She smiled wanly. How halfhearted their banter sounded. But what else could they do? Around Frederick there was always the compulsion to make the sunniest of comments in order to displace whatever primitive thoughts might be gaining a perch inside his head.
She swabbed his wound with disinfectant and sealed it with a Band-Aid. “Is that better?” she asked. In answer he rose from the bench, opened his mouth in what might have been a loose grin. He held his enormous arms out to her. Apparently, he wanted a hug from Nurse Harriet.
A bad idea to accept this offer. But what horrible arrogance to refuse it. Harriet took a step toward his open arms, and at once he brought his hand down and rubbed the bandaged palm over the crotch of her shorts.
She stepped back right away. She’d learned to suffer these indignities with a minimal degree of fuss. No stomp of protest. No outward shudder of disgust. “All right,” she said, as if his determined groping had been a mindless act. “I’ll let you gentlemen get on with your day.” She stood in the yard and watched Frederick Torbert being led away by a hushed and red-faced Daniel Hartpence.
Harriet went back to her post at the infirmary picnic table. A few moments later she shivered and crossed her legs. It unsettled her, the deliberateness of what Frederick Torbert had done. He’d wanted to reach out and touch her. He’d brooded over it while she worked on his hand. Then he’d done it. Not just a lack of boundaries. Or a lack of inhibitions. It wasn’t Frederick Torbert’s low IQ that gave him these longings or the boldness to act on them. If he weren’t retarded, if by some medical procedure or godly miracle his IQ were made forty points higher, she’d still do all she could to avoid being left alone with him.
Then there was the matter of the phone call she’d promised Linda Rucker. It irked Harriet. What had seemed at the time like a kindly gesture had evolved somehow into the demands of an actual friendship. She brooded over her obligation much of the morning, and twenty minutes before lunch she roused herself and picked up the infirmary telephone and dialed the number of Linda Rucker’s sister.
The line was answered by a wheezy voice: not that of Linda Rucker but that of Linda Rucker’s sister, who grunted heavily and shrieked out Linda’s name, “Lin-duhhhhhhh! Lin-duhhhhhhhhh!” A long, low, crooning wail. Layered inside this wail, waiting to be excavated, were decades of grievance and compacted insult. “Lin-duhhhhhhhhh!” the sister wailed one last time, and then, either bored or clumsy, she seemed to let the receiver drop from her hand and clatter down onto a table or countertop.
A steady plod, plod, plod of footsteps could be heard. The receiver was hoisted up. “Harriet?” Linda Rucker said, her voice clear and alert, lively compared to her sister’s, but lacking a genuine spark of interest. She took in a long, near-whistling draw of breath. “Well,” she sighed. “I guess you tracked me down, didn’t you?”
“I did, yes.”
“I thought you might call. One of these days.”
“How are you, Linda?”
“I’m all right, I suppose. Considering.”
“And have you . . . What have you been doing?”
“This and that,” she said. “Settling in.”
“And have you had time to look for a job?” Harriet asked. She’d not wanted to pose this question, but already it seemed they’d exhausted the safe topics.
“Oh, I’ve looked,” Linda said. “I’ve found one, too.”
Found one? That was good news, surely. A pleasant surprise. “Well, for goodness’ sake. You’re not wasting any time, are you?” Harriet said. It was a relief, really. Linda had found a job. And she was willing to talk about it, too, solitary and reticent Linda Rucker. She said she hadn’t needed to look very hard. In fact on Sunday, as soon as she’d arrived at her sister’s house, she had unloaded her car and gone straight out to look for work. In Branson, Missouri, an Ozark tourist town, there were scores of hotels and restaurants, hundreds of service jobs. She’d been hired right away at an enormous country buffet. Kitchen work. From 3:00 P.M. to 10:00 each evening Linda Rucker stood at a counter chopping vegetables and cheese for the buffet’s famous mile-long food bar.
“It’s fascinating work,” Linda said dryly.
“But at least you have a start at something, don’t you?”
“A start at what, though? It’s just chopping and slicing.”
“At least you’re not lying around feeling sorry for yourself.”
No answer to this. No offering to the contrary.
“Well,” Harriet said. “You can always move on to something—”
“All right,” Linda said. “Here’s a question I don’t really want to ask. Is Christopher Waterhouse the new program director?”
“Mmmm,” Harriet said, as if this were an entirely ne
w possibility to consider. “Well, that’s the thing. No one’s made an announcement, one way or the other.”
“Is he acting like he is?”
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes he does.”
“Can I tell you something?” Linda asked. “I’m not proud of admitting this, Harriet. I hate him.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I’d like to find a way to make him miserable.”
“Well . . . ,” Harriet said, vaguely.
“I’d like him to suffer.”
“That’s, you know . . .”
“I’m usually not like this. I’m a fair-minded person, mostly. But someone like Christopher Waterhouse, he doesn’t feel awful about the things he does. He isn’t disgusted with himself. So the only thing you could do with a person like that is tie him down and make him suffer, physically, I mean.”
“Well . . . ,” she said again.
“I’m not talking seriously here, Harriet. It’s not like I’m making plans. I’m just saying that if someone or something were ready to make Christopher suffer, and all I had to do was give my approval to get it started, I’d do it. I’d think it over a little while and nod and say go ahead. There’s nobody else in the whole world I feel that way about.”
“All right,” Harriet said. “All right.”
“It’s god damn awful knowing what’s happening there at camp. It would’ve been better if you hadn’t called.”
“But you asked me to,” Harriet said, incredulous.
“Did I?” There was a small wavering in Linda’s voice that was both obliging and unconvinced. “I don’t know about that . . . if it’s true or not. But even if it is, I shouldn’t have asked. It does me no good to hear these things right now. To know about camp. So I’m making a firm rule about this, Harriet. No more, please. No more news about camp.”
“Fine, yes. No more news.”
“Thank you,” Linda Rucker said. This seemed to mark the end of their conversation, but at the last moment, she let out an indignant huff and said, “Even if things are starting to fall apart without me, I still don’t want to know. It does me no good, you understand?”
“All right. I won’t call again,” Harriet said and hung up the phone.
No time, really, to reflect on this fraught conversation. She had medications to distribute, and a dirt-smeared five-year-old boy to wash and hurry across the yard and into the mess hall for a lunch of pizza squares and salad. For James this was a happy occasion. He took his place beside Schuller Kindermann at the director’s table, and Harriet, balancing her muffin tray in one hand, roamed from table to table dispensing her potent medications. It was a task that required all of her concentration.
But afterward she was tired, a blanketing, unshakable tiredness that only a weekend of bed rest could cure. All morning she’d sipped Coca-Cola to remedy her fatigue. Just after lunch she did something she hadn’t done in years: begged a cigarette and then stepped out the back door of the kitchen and smoked it among the stacks of milk crates and collapsed boxes. What a strange, woozy buzz it created in her head. Her breathing slowed. Her heartbeat raced. All the particulars of the kitchen’s scrubby backyard seemed magnified by a degree or two. But her tiredness did not lift.
A few hours later, while sorting dinner medications in the infirmary yard, she put a hand to her forehead and fell asleep, probably for no more than ten minutes. She woke with her arms stretched across the enormous muffin tray. In the wells of the tray lolled dozens of bright capsules and tablets. Lithium, phenobarbital, Nembutal. Kneeling beside her on the bench, as if he’d materialized out of nothing, was James, calm and alert, his chin propped in his hands while he chewed, patiently, on something tiny and dark.
Raisins it turned out. But in those first moments of waking, she’d been given a terrible start.
The day wasn’t conquered yet. There were duties—some of them usual, some unusual—for Harriet to perform. Nursing duties. She was a nurse, after all. (In her most hectic moments this sometimes struck her as the oddest of facts. I am a nurse? How strange. How could this have happened to me?) There were stacks of file charts into which she added her notations and initials. She changed urine-stained bedsheets. To anything that looked remotely like an insect bite or ivy rash she applied calamine lotion. The usual and the unusual. She rewrapped the Ace bandage on Mrs. Gilder’s swollen ankle and then a few minutes later used a pair of hemostats to remove three pearl-white pajama buttons that Ms. Pauline Kopine had squirreled away in her right nostril. What a peculiar occupation, nursing, the way it veered back and forth between the honorable and the ridiculous.
But they were in the homestretch now, she reminded herself. And who knew? She might just have the necessary stamina to make it the rest of this day and another. But nothing more than that. Nothing left over.
At dinner she dealt out her medications and then sat for two plates of Maureen Boyd’s benign but compulsively edible five-layer lasagna. She drank coffee and blinked away her weariness, and when she looked around, she noticed that many of the counselors were doing the same: gulping down long sips of coffee and then heaving their shoulders and stretching open their eyes as if to wake themselves from a dream. At the end of the meal Christopher Waterhouse bounded up to the long mess hall serving counter and raised his hand for quiet. He looked to be in a jubilant mood. He had an announcement to make. In thirty minutes everyone was to meet in the open meadow for the evening’s activity: the Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival. “There will be thrilling games,” he said in an unpracticed barker’s voice. “Extravagant prizes. Spectacular feats of competition.”
It was a camp tradition that the evening activity be hawked like miracle-cure medicine. The counselors grinned knowingly. It seemed they’d come to enjoy these exaggerations, the teasing discrepancy between what the Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival was promised to be and the homely reality of how it would turn out.
Thirty minutes later, when Harriet arrived with James at the meadow, she and the counselors found seven milk crates containing the barest ingredients of carnival games: spoons and a carton of eggs; strips of cloth for a three-legged race; a clutch of water balloons. From this, apparently, they were meant to construct an evening of entertainment. No one could, of course. The state hospital campers were, by this late juncture of the day, tired, moody, easily distracted. The counselors lacked both the energy and the necessary will. They rolled their eyes and checked their watches and prayed for it to end. But they seemed to agree: you couldn’t blame Christopher Waterhouse. He’d had too many responsibilities dumped in his lap; his daytime obligations as a lifeguard, and now the fresh demands of being the undeclared program director.
This was the attitude Harriet found so baffling: the tremendous leeway afforded to Christopher Waterhouse. Maybe Linda Rucker had some notion of it. In her phone call she’d pleaded not to know the ways camp had deteriorated. What could Harriet reasonably tell her anyway? Kindermann Forest, without you, is shabby and disorganized. The evening activities are a tiresome joke. The blame for this seems to be Christopher Waterhouse’s. By the way, no one misses you. No one seems to mind.
For the rest of the evening the campers were set loose to sift through the crates of carnival games and roam the meadow as they pleased. As evening activities went, this one was shapeless and lazy. No games, thrilling or otherwise, were played. No feats of competition, either. The campers were free to scatter debris across the meadow or, in a few cases, to form chatty little cliques that looked, from a distance, as cheery and ordinary as any summer-party gathering. Others stood rooted in the grass, flailing their limbs about, rocking to and fro and turning their heads sharply to consider the darkening bowl of the sky or the overhead whir of insects. Rarely did a camper try to push beyond the grass boundaries and into the woods; they were more compliant now, or more exhausted, than they’d been the first day of camp.
A half hour before twilight Christopher Waterhouse came bouncing across the meadow in the camp van. Until that moment he�
��d barely been present at the carnival, though he’d been seen nearby, hurrying along the gravel paths or hefting boxes in and out of the mess hall; a young man with pressing duties and the authority to wander wherever he chose.
The van lumbered to a halt. He stepped out and hurried to the back of the vehicle, where he flung open the rear doors and set out several folding tables. Onto these tables he placed the evening snack: bug juice and vanilla wafers.
“Gather round!” he shouted. “Gather round! Our snack is served,” he announced, and the campers, many of them dispersed across the meadow or sitting cross-legged in the grass, turned or rose and began to totter in his direction. Some of them were much more difficult to summon and needed to be goaded along by the counselors, directed with a firm hand—pushed, shoved, pulled by a shirtsleeve until they joined the thickening crowd at the rear of the van.
By then Christopher Waterhouse had stationed himself before the snack tables. He held up his hand for quiet. “Before we snack,” he declared, “I’d like to know one thing. Who are the winners here?”
The campers stared back at him blankly.
“All right,” he said with a patient nod. His expression was open and obliging. He looked ready to coax an honest answer from each of them. “Now listen up, please,” he said while lifting a box from the bed of the van. “Our Kindermann Forest Camp Carnival is over. Or almost over. It’s time now, don’t you think, to reward the competition winners?” He plucked a brown paper lunch bag, one of many, from the box and held it up. “Will the winners of our camp carnival please raise their hands?”
At least half of the campers hoisted their hands aloft, and Christopher Waterhouse, who seemed charmed by their response, began flinging bags into the crowd, easy, looping tosses that landed upon or near their intended targets. For a few particular members of the crowd—camp favorites like Leonard Peirpont—he waded deep into the throng of bodies and placed the bags in their grasping hands. He pressed all the way to the outer edge of the gathering and handed a bag to Harriet’s son, James.
