The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  With these routines she believed she’d helped make the otherwise shapeless hours of his life a degree or two more bearable. And she’d played a part in diminishing him, too. He was a less imposing man that he’d been at Kindermann Forest. Part of this had to do with the way he’d aged; he was thirty-eight years old, and his uneven face, especially his forehead, was folded into thick creases. For a decade he’d worn specially fitted glasses to correct his nearsightedness. His hair was longer. (The extra length helped disguise the cranial incongruities of Apert syndrome.) Over the years he’d had a progression of surgeries for recurring infections in his gums and ear canals, and the rigors of these surgeries had left him thirty-five pounds lighter than he’d once been. He was no longer strapping or brawny. What was he then? Larger than average maybe, but not noticeably so. A stranger looking at Wyatt Huddy for the first time might think that he’d made an incomplete recovery from a dire accident: the looming forehead, the wide gap between his offset eyes, the sloping mouth. It would all have its effect. But so, too, would Wyatt’s subdued demeanor, his bowed posture, the tight and wincing expression he wore, the deliberate way he watched the placement of his footsteps—a hesitant and resigned man, a man patiently awaiting the next instruction.

  “Better push the closet and bathroom doors shut, Wyatt. Yes, like that. Thank you.” She turned and called back to her escort in the hallway. “Franklin. Any way for you to do us a favor and lock up the room?”

  “No, ma’am. The room stays unlocked.”

  “Even while he’s away?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Even while he’s away.”

  She leaned in close to help Wyatt zip up the luggage. “How about the dresser drawers, Wyatt? Any money inside?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “How much?”

  “Sixty dollars, maybe.”

  “Well, put it in your wallet and bring it with you.” Once he’d done this, she placed the luggage in his hand and ushered him out of the room. Before she pulled the door closed, she flipped off the light and took a last appraising look around. The dull gleam of the night table and desktop. A bookshelf lined with twenty or more jigsaw puzzle boxes. A very small library of books: a dictionary, a baseball almanac, a beginner’s book of crossword puzzles, a scuffed and mostly unread edition of Lives of the American Presidents.

  A supremely clean and well-ordered room—the kind of room, maybe, a person could return to without falling into despair.

  She couldn’t accompany Wyatt Huddy from Living Cottage No. 8 without first halting at the staff station counter and discussing with Living Cottage Manager Mary Jo Savini a list of Gateway furlough regulations. Each regulation needed to be read aloud, agreed to, and initialed. First, Harriet would take possession of Wyatt’s prescription and nonprescription medications (Prilosec for acid reflux, Altoprev for cholesterol, Advil for the head and body ache). She would dispense these medications at the proper times and in the proper amounts. At eight o’clock each evening she would contact the on-duty living cottage manager and make a brief report of Wyatt Huddy’s basic condition and state of mind. If he was excessively agitated or paranoid, she would immediately seek advice from a Gateway psychiatrist. Should he become violent, Harriet would call the St. Louis Police Department for assistance. She and Wyatt Huddy were not to travel more than fifty miles from the Gateway Psychiatric Rehabilitation campus. He was not to consume alcohol or illegal drugs. As stipulated, she would return Wyatt Huddy to Living Cottage No. 8 at the end of this weekend, Labor Day weekend, on Monday, September 5, 2011, by no later than two in the afternoon.

  She signed and dated the bottom of the page.

  To mark the occasion of Wyatt’s departure, they were summoned to the common room activity table so that the care attendants Franklin and Yvonne could try to provoke the circle of spiritless watercolor artists into a round of applause. (They could not be roused, these gentlemen, though they did look up at Wyatt with their watery and uneven eyes.) B. J. Tompkins stomped over and flashed his mouthful of awful yellow teeth. “Ain’t nothing. No matter. No how,” he hissed. He caught sight of Harriet and bristled in agitation. “Come on now, lady!” he pleaded.

  This was as much of a send-off as Harriet could stand. “Thank you,” she sang out to the Living Cottage staff and corralled Wyatt and his rollaway luggage into the foyer, where they waited a few interminable seconds for the front door of Living Cottage No. 8 to be buzzed open. They stepped out into the glaring light of a warm September morning. Fortunately, Wyatt seemed to share her sense of urgency, and they hurried along the walkway and then passed through the long tunneling hallway of the administration building. The weekend security guards, Maurice and Laquisha, looked up from their station. “Look who we got here,” Laquisha said. “You and your lady friend have a good weekend, Wyatt.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Harriet said, angling toward the doors. The term lady friend always troubled her vaguely. To her parents’ generation, lady friend referred to woman who could be counted on for sex.

  In the parking lot they loaded the luggage into the trunk and squeezed into the front seats. She guided her Honda out past the security station. An oblique nod of farewell from the station guard. “Goodbye,” Harriet whispered and steered her car beyond the limits of the Gateway campus. An auspicious moment: Wyatt Huddy had been successfully furloughed.

  Yet this wasn’t his first excursion out into the world. On several occasions he’d been escorted off-campus to visit the orthodontist or shuttled to the hospital for outpatient surgery. For the past year and a half he’d been allowed to pass through the facility’s front gate and walk with Harriet into the surrounding Hill neighborhood. (They could go to lunch if they pleased, or shop at a nearby market, anything really, as long as Wyatt was back at Living Cottage No. 8 within ninety minutes.) In order to secure this privilege she’d had to petition the Gateway Psychiatric Physicians’ Board. She’d been told to expect her first petitions to be denied. And they were. Denied. Denied. Denied. Granted. Encouraged, she set her sights on a more extravagant permission: a weekend furlough. Denied. Denied. Denied. Denied. Eventually she was asked to attend a committee meeting with the Psychiatric Physicians’ Board. Certain questions were put to her. Did she have a safe and stable home life? Did she understand, did she appreciate, that if her petition was granted she’d be solely responsible for a man with an IQ of 67? A man with a history of violence?

  Yes, absolutely, she said. She understood. She was ready for it. She’d been a nurse for nearly twenty years, she reminded the board. She’d seen some things in that time. She’d dealt with her share of emergencies.

  Perhaps they approved of her answer. They were not an unreasonable group—four men, two women, each with a brand of career fatigue that seemed to have made them inwardly frail.

  But there was one thing Harriet thought worth mentioning. It might not be fair, she said, to call it a history of violence. Wyatt Huddy had only been violent once. On one occasion. That was fifteen years ago.

  The members of the board exchanged a wearied look. Then they offered her this revision: a past incident of violence, they said. An incident that resulted in the death of a camp counselor.

  All right, she said. A past incident. That’s more accurate, I think. Thank you.

  And what would she and Wyatt Huddy do, what activities would they engage in, if the board granted them a weekend furlough?

  They’d stay at her home mostly, she said. He doesn’t like crowds. They’d go for a walk around Harriet’s neighborhood. He’d listen to the baseball game and keep track of the stats on his scorecard. The things he liked doing at Living Cottage No. 8, he’d do in her home.

  There was one other thing the Psychiatric Physicians’ Board wanted to know. Where was all this leading, Harriet? they asked. They’d already granted Wyatt Huddy twice-monthly permission to stroll outside the Gateway campus. Now she was applying for a weekend furlough. What would she ask for next?

  She thought it best not to disguise he
r intentions. The next thing, she said, is to get Wyatt Huddy released into my care. Yes, she said. Yes. That’s what we’ll do next. We’ll prove to you he can be trusted to spend a weekend away. Then I’ll file whatever petitions and statements I need to.

  And just how long do you plan to care for Wyatt Huddy?

  As long as he needs it, she said. As long as he lives.

  Thank you for making that clear, they said. You can, if you like, resubmit your petition for a weekend furlough.

  Thank you, she said. I will.

  And she did. Denied. Denied. Granted.

  She’d learned a few things over the years about bureaucrats, especially those who worked in the fields of criminal justice and mental health. As a species, they believed in incremental progress. They adored well-written documents. The good ones seemed to need from Harriet a delicate signal that proved she recognized their competency. The bad bureaucrats, the ones who operated inside a fog of self-doubt, needed more frequent and obvious encouragement.

  In the months following Wyatt’s arrest, the bureaucrats she’d encountered had all been middle-aged white men from rural Shannon County, Missouri. Perhaps the real revelation, at least for twenty-seven-year-old Harriet Foster, was how eagerly and with what courtliness they had welcomed her into their musty offices. “My goodness, you’re here! Come in. Come in, Miss Foster.” They would haul out a leather armchair for her to sit in and hustle off to the office break room for a chilled can of Pepsi-Cola. Who’d have guessed that a personal visit from an alert and neatly dressed young black woman would be such a rich occasion for these gentlemen?

  She’d been offered some good advice during these office visits. The best guidance had come from the opposing council: Shannon County Prosecuting Attorney Henry Masner. Professionally speaking, Mr. Masner was not persuaded by her version of the events leading to Christopher Waterhouse’s death. But he was vehement about how a court document should be worded and filed. And he held a pitying regard for Wyatt’s court-appointed defense attorney, the rheumy-eyed and often frazzled Mackland Benders. Henry Masner was of the opinion that Mackland Benders’s pretrial efforts were scattered and incomplete. Now is the time, he warned Harriet, to make sure Mackland Benders gets his house in order.

  To that end she’d written an affidavit describing her professional opinion of Wyatt Huddy’s diminished intelligence. She’d also helped solicit similar affidavits from a few inclined individuals—from Linda Rucker and from Wyatt’s former employer, Captain Terry Throckmorton of the Salvation Army. These were delicate negotiations. She’d needed Linda and Terry Throckmorton to recognize a version of events in which Wyatt Huddy had come to Kindermann Forest as a camper. (It wasn’t at all unlikely, she told them. They needed first to understand how Wyatt’s role at Kindermann Forest would affect the charges brought against him. In this light, they could picture him as a camper, couldn’t they? They could see him as indistinguishable among the hundred and four retarded adults from the state hospital.) She’d had to help in the shaping and sometimes in the precise wording of these documents. But her duties didn’t end there. She still had to arrange for the authors to sign the documents in the presence of a notary public.

  Hard to know if these affidavits would have stood up in a court of a law. They were never put to the test, never read by anyone other than the case lawyers and court clerks of Shannon County. Even so, she didn’t regret the meticulous effort she’d put into creating and securing these documents.

  Except maybe in one instance. In the fall of 1996, five months after Wyatt had been arrested and held for trial in the Shannon County jail, Harriet had made a trip to Jefferson City, Missouri. She’d set out in her car on a ringingly clear Friday morning in November, and just two hours later she was threading her way along the neat avenues of the state capital. It was a comely and quaint and serious town, with its pale marbled state buildings and the wide, curving embrace of the Missouri River. By comparison the outskirts of Jefferson City looked a bit scrubby and unexceptional. She found a winding gravel driveway that led off Highway 54 and followed it to the loading dock of the Jefferson City Salvation Army Depot.

  She’d guessed there would be a discrepancy between Captain Throckmorton’s winsome phone voice and the impression he’d make in person. But my what a difference. He emerged from his depot office carrying his round belly like a basket of clutched laundry. His large head was bald and gleaming, and buttressed at the back of the neck with a ladder of plump wrinkles. A funny-looking man maybe, but in his calm face there was a flush of something unexpected: an old-fashioned, discreet handsomeness.

  In their phone conversations it had been clear to Harriet that, of all the people she’d contacted regarding Wyatt’s arrest and trial, only Captain Throckmorton shared her agony over the prospect of a murder conviction and lengthy prison sentence. He’d been quick to grasp the alternative: not guilty by reason of diminished IQ. “Yes,” he’d said. “I see how it might have happened that way with Wyatt. He might not have been capable of understanding.”

  She’d been relieved to hear this. Still, she had to make it clear to Captain Throckmorton that there’d been a mix-up. Some people, she’d explained, were under the impression that Wyatt had come to camp as a counselor. Whereas she and Captain Throckmorton both knew that he’d been sent to Kindermann Forest as a camper.

  There’d been a weighted pause on the telephone. At last Captain Throckmorton had said, “I remember it like you do, Miss Foster. I sent Wyatt Huddy away with the understanding he’d be a camper at Kindermann Forest.”

  In the depot office she sat in an armchair and read the statement Captain Throckmorton had prepared. Carefully worded, expertly typed, it needed only to be signed in the presence of a notary public.

  They had lunch at a sandwich shop several blocks from the state capitol. Waiting for them at a table was Captain Throckmorton’s friend and roommate, Ed McClintock, who stood and greeted Harriet formally and shyly, then lowered himself back into his chair. Ed McClintock had a broomy mustache and a glinting sidelong gaze, which Harriet found difficult to read. “Beware the jalapeño cheese dip,” he declared ominously. But when the waitress came, he ordered the dip along with a poor boy sandwich minus the tomatoes. “Make my poor boy a little poorer, if you please,” he said.

  They were joined a few minutes later by a wiry little woman named Rachel Young. Rachel worked as a part-time clerk for the Department of Motor Vehicles, but she had other interests and proficiencies, including certification as a notary public. She’d brought along her notary stamp in a felt-lined wood box, which she passed around for her lunch partners to inspect. “If called upon,” she said dryly, “I can use either the stamp or the box as a weapon.”

  It dawned on Harriet that they’d convened at the sandwich shop for a greater purpose than lunch. They were here to plan the next stage of her visit to Jefferson City: a trip to the Huddy farm to try to solicit a statement from Wyatt’s sister, Caroline.

  “If it were up to me,” Ed McClintock said, “I’d bring along a policeman’s stick and a pair of handcuffs.” He let his wry, sidelong gaze settle on Captain Throckmorton for a moment. “But I’ve been overruled.”

  “Not entirely,” the captain said. “Show the ladies your weapon of choice, Ed.”

  From a weighty ring of keys attached to his belt loop Ed McClintock unfastened a palm-size canister of pepper spray, bright purple and covered in plump cartoon daisies. It had been found, Captain Throckmorton explained, in one of the depot donation bins.

  As a group they seemed to be cheered by the fact of this bright pepper spray canister—though afterward all their talk regarding a confrontation with Caroline Huddy was practical and sobering. Captain Throckmorton and Ed McClintock had a few provisional schemes that might persuade her to offer a statement. But beyond that, what were they to do? What if Caroline Huddy came after them with a shotgun? Pepper-spray her and run, they decided. What if she called the police? No chance of that. Her phone service had been out for m
any months. She’d long ago stopped paying her utilities.

  Rachel Young had known Caroline Huddy in high school and still saw her in the Jefferson City shops from time to time. In high school they’d called Caroline Huddy Viking Girl because of her size and her rampaging personality.

  “She’s been a miserable person all her life,” Captain Throckmorton said. “I try to keep that in mind. The state she’s in. Her inner pain. Still though, I consider the things she’s done to Wyatt unforgivable.”

  “What things would those be?” Harriet asked.

  It was a strange and grievous experience to be told of the injuries inflicted to Wyatt’s feet and the long hours he’d spent suffering in the family shed before rescue. Worse somehow to hear of it in a Jefferson City sandwich shop, with its peppermint-striped wallpaper and cheery lunchtime crowd. There was no way for Harriet to locate herself in this silly shop, no proper direction to turn her anger and disgust. Instead she listened to Captain Throckmorton’s account and afterward shielded her eyes with her unsteady hand.

  They drove in a procession of three cars out through the quaint neighborhoods of Jefferson City and across the Missouri River. East of the river the land was hilly and open, the farmhouses handsome and sided by long sloping fields of cut hay. None of this tidiness, however, could be found a mile or two off the blacktop highway. To reach this interior land they had to travel slowly along dirt roads whose crumbling edges gave way to sudden ditches and sprawls of litter. The Huddy farm had a rusted swing gate that had fallen back into the bushes. The house was two-storied and weathered and set in the middle of a sun-flooded clearing. Twenty yards away, along a well-trod dirt path, was an immense tin metal tractor shed.