Chapter Six
Elam met me at the door when we drove up to the hospital one day. He was dressed as usual in his grab bag of clothes from the trunk, but now he had added a pair of glasses, black horn rimmed glasses with no lens. He showed them to me, poked his finger through the hole where the lens would be and laughed.
“The appearance is what I need, no prescription necessary. Just the appearance.” He put them on, and struck a pose, like the statue of “The Thinker”, hand on forehead. I laughed and he limped around me, singing.
“Oh, such beauty has two edges, laughter and anguish and the heart is cut asunder. You make the day bright, lady of mercy.” He took out his play, and showed me a new paragraph.
“This is where I’ve put a new character! I finally found him, I’ve searched for him for so long...” he dragged me by the hand over to the corner, where a man sat in a chair, looking up at the pay phone.
The man was one of those young/old people, gray and disheveled, his face was lined with many years but he had no age. He looked blankly at me and when he smiled I saw that half his teeth were missing.
“Is it possible to fornicate with the students?"
There was no lechery in his look, and he looked confused when I asked if that would be therapeutic. Elam shook his head and whispered,
“Poor thing, he doesn’t know how to be polite.” He took the man’s hand and said very clearly, “This is a student, another one like us, trying to learn the lines. Tell her your story.” Elam turned to me and introduced him. “This is Samuel, the Waiter.” He pointed to pages of his play sticking out of his vest pocket.
The man looked around, away from Elam, and eyed one of the male techs, who wore tight pants and a shirt that was unbuttoned down to the middle of his chest. He looked back at me, with a sly and confidential smirk on his face.
“I have an invention," Sam the Waiter looked carefully around to see if anyone was listening, "that the degenerates in the government and the CIA don't want to fall into the wrong hands. So they put me here, figuring that no one would believe me." He nodded, "And no one does. They were right. But I smuggled a letter out with that young man," he pointed to the tech in the tight pants, who gave him a brilliant smile and put his finger across his lips.
"He got a letter out to the Pentagon, and I'm waiting for the call to talk to them directly." Sam pointed to the phone. "That's why I have to stay near a phone at all times, never get out of sight of a phone. Never, that's the trick, to get me away from the phone so that I can't get the call. I mustn't let them do that, to trick me away from a phone, to keep my weapon away from the people who need it..."
He was moving his hands up and down against his legs, and his eyes were staring. Spittle hung from his mouth and I felt like running. But the tech came up behind him, with one of those little paper cups and a glass of water, and said, "Time for meddy-meds, Sammy my pet." He held the little cup out, and the man rubbed his hand on his chin, scraping against the gray stubble of a beard. He looked at the tech, into the big brown eyes of the tech, and took the little cup. He tossed the pills into his mouth and drank the water and threw the cup at the tech, who stooped and picked it up off the floor, and reached out and pinched his cheek.
"Naughty boy, Sammy. You sit with the student nursie and behave." He looked at me and rolled his eyes up, engaging me as the other professional who understood his trials with this difficult patient. I felt like throwing the paper cup at him, too.
Elam was quiet, waiting for the tech to leave, and he shrugged his shoulders at me at this intrusion.
“Samuel waits. He waits for the phone to ring, for the Pentagon to call. So I have found my Waiter.” Elam put his hands up in prayer and stood there touching his forehead with his fingertips. I waited, too. Maybe I was also one of his Waiters? Samuel’s head lolled forward against his chest, and he sat there, quiet. The phone didn’t ring. Elam stopped praying and sat on an overstuffed chair, and began to write. I sat down next to him, and he showed me the script and began to explain. He talked about his play and pointed up and down the room, gesturing broadly.
“This will be Stage Right, and there’s the apron. Up there is Backstage, behind the door. Blind George is back there, behind the stage, watching. He understands everything, so of course, he plays the part of the Blind Man who sees.”
“Where’s the audience, Elam?” I watched his face as he thought.
“Oh, sunshine person, you are right! Where’s the audience?” He put the play in my lap and stood up, rubbing his chin and pursing his lips. He walked to the other corner, and stood watching Auntie Bea, rocking. He looked at Mr. Lastinger and turned and looked toward the back where Blind George sat with Jesse. He waved to Lucas. He moved around and looked at the Nurse’s Station, and a gleam came into his eye.
“There!” he whispered. “There it is. Our audience. And judge, and jury and perhaps the executioner!” He limped his little dance around, his scarf flying. He took a little whistle out of his pocket, and sang his song about “calloo callay.”
I looked at the play that he had left in my lap. I read several paragraphs and realized that all Elam had been writing over and over was, “The waiter waits. The waiter waits,” on the whole page. There were no directions, no paragraphs, no playwriting. Only some disconnected words, written over and over and over. On one line he had written “the horse, the horse, the hurt, the hurt” and another line said “black clouds and black me, all is black.”
I sat there for a minute, watching Elam arrange chairs and walk on his stage. The white shock of hair must have been where the surgery was, back in 1959, when he had the hematoma and brain injury. I watched Elam and smiled when he looked at me with that shy beautiful smile. I swallowed hard and felt a pricking in my eyes, and blinked. I stood up and took the papers to Elam and folded them carefully and put them in his hand, and smiled at him. He took the play and looked at me, his dark eyes full of tears. He stood there with the sheaf of paper in his hand, carefully smoothing the sheets with the loopy scrawled writing. He looked at me, searching in my face for something.
You have read the words,” he whispered. “The nothing words? The words that do not say what Elam means?”
I nodded and gave him a hug. “They’re not nothing words, maybe they come from that unhappy time when you fell off the horse. Maybe the words will come back, Elam. Keep writing them down.”
Elam put his head on my shoulder and sighed. “River run, past even Elam. Lady of mercy, Portia the Merciful. Count the days for learning. For you are learning.”
I took a deep breath and walked away from Elam, walked around the dayroom, trying to work the lump from my throat. It took a walk around the hall and a handful of peanuts and some stern talking to myself. What could I do? How could I help poor head injured Elam? He knew pretty much what was wrong, so what could I do? Was I allowed to put hugs on the Nurse’s Notes?
Elam arranged chairs on his stage, I was at the Nurse’s Station, Leo was walking, Samuel the Waiter sat on the couch near the phone and waited. Mrs. Railiford, the woman we called Auntie Bea, sat in her chair and rocked and cried. She was Nellie’s patient; I had no responsibility for her, but I could not ignore the sadness in her face, the pain in her eyes. Nellie was checking charts and medications with Guard Dog and I wandered away from them into the room, watching. I sat down and opened a notebook on my lap, writing descriptions of what I saw.
“Elderly female, looks to be about 65, heavyset and gray-haired, sits in chair and weeps; holds blanket as if there is a baby on her lap.” I stopped writing, and looked up. Elam and Leo were watching me, and Auntie Bea.
"Here in Bedlam is sadness, Miss Sunshine." Elam gestured at the woman in the rocking chair, and shook his head. "She can get no rest from singing hush a bye, she thinks the stone’s a child. Day after day, year after sad year, rocking her children who were taken from her. All gone, my pretty ones. All her pretty chickens gone in a long night that never found the day."
Auntie Bea turned to me, and with eyes that looked into middle distance, to a place I could not see, she cried out,
"Do you see them, all of them? There are none left, and I have done with breeding. I can bring no more into the fire, no more." She continued to rock, holding the blanket in her arms, looking bleakly into the empty space of the blanket as if into a baby's face.
I was losing it, fast. My Student Nurseperson self was about to weep, so I continued to scribble in the notebook and began to describe the grief and the person, and the look of Auntie Bea's puffy face, how her thick white fingers clutched the blanket in her lap. Writing helped bring the lump in my throat down to a place where I could talk. I looked up at Leo brightly, and asked if anyone knew what had happened to Auntie Bea and her children.
"We don't know for sure; no one does. We can guess, though, from things her visitors have told us." Leo spoke, and Elam took his little penny whistle out of his pocket and began to play a sad little lullaby.
"They told us that she lived in a trailer out in the county with her five children, and another, a cousin or someone. Her man was a pulpwooder, so there was lots of fat wood piled right near the house."
Leo looked at me and saw that I knew what fat wood was; full of resin, it burned very quickly, lighting with only the touch of a match. The other word for it was "lightwood." There were lots of pulpwooders out in those piney woods, but none brought the wood so close to home, except Auntie Bea's lazy man.
Leo continued, and Elam played the whistle slower and slower as she grew more agitated, crying and wailing. "She was across the way, tending to a sick person, heard the fire raging fast with all that piney wood, and ran to get in, to rescue her children, but the neighbors held her back. The fire got too hot too quick, and her man had never fixed the back door so it would open. They stood outside and watched the trailer burn, and they could hear the little ones running, they heard the steps running back and forth, and the screams."
We were quiet, hearing little footsteps on a burning floor. Leo shook his head, and looked at me.
"They said it was a cigarette, thrown into the stack of lightwood. Purely stupid." Leo watched Auntie Bea, a deep fire in his green eyes. "People who hurt kids, who don't take care of them...." the fire smoldered, and Leo closed his eyes. I could see the effort it took him to calm himself in the tight muscles of his face, the way he clenched his hands.
Auntie Bea moaned and rocked, rocked and moaned, her anguish clear and real as if it were happening right before her again and again. Leo looked up and saw Jesse, and said, “Go find George.” Jesse stared at Leo for a minute and then walked quickly away, his short legs taking him rapidly on his errand.
Leo looked at the old woman, at her tear mottled face, and murmured, “George will help; he’ll know what to do.”
We sat frozen, watching Auntie Bea’s heart break and listening to the tuneless melody of Elam’s whistle. Then I heard the creak of the wheelchair, and Jesse and Blind George came into the room. Leo let out a long sigh and I realized that we all were holding our breath. The old man pushed himself with Jesse’s help to Auntie Bea’s side, and Leo reached for his big knobby hand and put it on Auntie Bea’s arm. George held her arm, and stroked it, and began to sing in a low, almost inaudible rumble. As he stroked, the old woman stopped wailing, and put her head down. George kept singing, and I realized he was singing “Rock of Ages” to her, low and soft. Elam’s tune changed and he played the song as George sang. The song came from deep inside him, and hovered over all of us. In a moment, it was silent in the room, and Auntie Bea slept, her chin fallen on her chest. No one moved, and George stroked her arm and murmured, “Sleep, sleep. Sleep and forget.”
He put his hand back on the armrest of the wheelchair, and nodded. Jesse turned the chair around, and they moved off slowly. The little crowd of people that had gathered moved away too, sighing, relieved. No one spoke. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
In the quiet, we sat in the shabby Dayroom, watching Auntie Bea sleep. Leo shook his head and relaxed and told me about some of the residents.
"There's Old Man Lastinger, he says he was at the last coon hanging in the County." Leo watched warily as the old man shuffled past him, a strange light in his eyes. "He might take a notion to lynch me, too, but I can run faster than him." Leo chuckled. "That one is Harris, thinks he's a cop. Tries to run everyone off the porch of the County Jail. And there's Little June, took too many drugs one day on the street and landed up here. We've got 'em all," Leo waved his arms around both sides of the Dayroom. "You name it, it's here. All kinds of lost souls." He grunted. "And Elam says I'm the king. Some kingdom." He had stood in one place for a long time, and his feet started jiggling, and he waved at me.
"Gotta walk, missy. I'll be around again." And off he went, I wondered where. I ran after him with a question, and he turned, ready to move.
“Why do you walk so much, so fast?”
He looked at me with a strange light in his eyes. “Only way I can be alone, that’s why, missy. Nobody can keep up with me, so they leave me be.” And off he went, long legs striding, up the straight dim hall.
I sat in the Dayroom, school forgotten, sitting as still as still, quiet inside. Every once in a while Elam and The Waiter would look up at the telephone, mute upon the wall. Ring, damnit, I thought. Ring and be the Pentagon and let's find out about the weapon and tell the FBI to check out what happened with the children, and then I took a deep breath and told myself not to feed into the fantasies of these people. I was here to observe and learn, and I must maintain my distance. I needed to keep remembering that I must maintain my distance.
I took another deep breath and walked back to the chart rack at the nurse’s station. Nellie was reading Auntie Bea’s chart, so I waited. Nellie had seen me with her patient, she must have, standing right there in the glassed-in cubicle. She looked at me over the chart and said,
“You need something?”
I looked at Nellie and saw a Guard Dog hiding in her eyes, and shook my head. “No, just wondered how old Auntie Bea is.”
Nellie looked at the first admission page and said “Miz Railiford was born in 1934, so she’s about 45. Why?”
Forty-five? Auntie Bea? I turned back and looked at the woman who seemed twenty years older than forty-five. Her gray unkempt hair straggled on her face, pale and blotchy. Her great weight sagged over the chair as she slept, still clutching the old yellow blanket. I heard Nellie ask me again why I was interested, and I just shook my head. Age and memory as well as shadows played tricks upon the souls’ eye in this place. I took Elam and Leo’s charts off the rack and walked back into the lounge and poured a cup of coffee. Guard Dog was there, frowning at the charts in my hand. I watched as Nellie came in and sat down next to her, holding her charts. No frowns there, none for Nellie. There was kinship there; kind understood kind. I drank my coffee and studied the charts for new notes, and listened to Guard Dog tell Nellie about her problems with the Night Shift. Nellie nodded, and seemed to enjoy herself. She dug a Snickers out of her pocket and broke it in half to share with Guard Dog. They sat there, munching and complaining. I left. I needed a big breath of air, cold Chicago winter air with a stinging wind off the Lake. I settled for cool South Georgia air, outside.
Out on the porch, away from the warm, close air of the Dayroom and the stuffy nurses’ lounge, I started walking. Past the canteen, waved at Cracker and Duveen as I went by. Past the plaster shop and the sewing class, around the corner past the cafeteria. Only after about ten minutes of walking fast in the cool damp air did I hear Leo’s voice telling me “no one can keep up with me; they let me be.” And that’s when I started laughing.
Elaine heard me; she had been in one of the crafts room and came out into the hall. We stood there together, looking out the wide empty window at the dark pine trees across the parking lot.
“You know,” Elaine said, cocking her red head like a bird, “one of my patients looks better. She dresses herself better and she remembers to button all her buttons and she wears shoes that match.” In this new world of ours, caring enough to wear matching shoes was an achievement. Depressed people don’t care how they look, and that small gain was a good sign. In the two months we had been coming to Enigma we could see those small changes, some good and some not. Elaine sighed.
“You get better at noticing,” she said.
Noticing was what it was all about. Caring, too, obviously. But you had to notice first. You had to look and remember and make connections. Like Elam said “There are none so blind as will not see.” Of course when he said that, Elam put his hand over his eyes to cover them up and waved his other hand far in front of him, limping and walking into things. He liked to do that when Wallace was standing there, always at the edges of the Dayroom, letting us know it was time for lunch or time to leave.
Elaine nodded to herself and said, “I’ve noticed something else that I’d like to tell Mr. Wallace. You know, they’re just like us, but just a little blurry. Not quite in focus. I can’t think of a better word, I know it sounds funny, but.... You know what I mean?” she stopped, and chewed her lip for a minute, thinking.
I looked at her. “You’re right. That’s exactly what it is. Like a picture a little out of focus. You know what it is but it doesn’t look real, it doesn’t look like the way we see the world.”
I knew exactly what she meant, and I hope she put that in her journal. The lines were blurred, like Elam’s quotes. Some were familiar, others out of context, all mixed up together making an odd kind of sense.
She nodded. “Wallace would think I was crazy, but it’s true.” She shook her head and walked back into the crafts room. I was walking to the Canteen when Nellie and Sweets caught up with me.
"We need to find those two alcoholics on Antabuse you talked to the other day; we need to get them down for our journal. But first, let's find the vending machines."
Nellie had put herself in charge of finding food. She marched around the long hallways of the mental hospital looking for vending machines, canteens, packages of calories. Sweets followed, looking vague. I sometimes wondered what had drawn them to nursing school, but Nellie was smart. She looked like she could be a head nurse, no problem with that, she was a bossy, “my way or the highway” sort of person. She was fine as long as she could find a vending machine or a snack bar. Her locker overflowed with little packages of chips and peanut butter bars, Hershey bars and Doritos. She broke down and bought chocolate covered granola bars when she felt she needed something healthy.
"There's the Canteen, let's sit down." I was tired of wandering these hallways looking for calories. The lunch today at the cafeteria was plenty, lots of rice and some good chicken fried steak, some fried okra, plenty of well cooked vegetables, lots of sugary iced tea. Enough calories for anyone. But Nellie and Sweets were not interested in normal calories. They had a need far beyond normal nutrition. They were into some serious eating and they were feeding hungers that no calories could satisfy. Even skinny little Yankee me could figure that out, in a heartbeat.
It cost a lot of money, and Nellie and Sweets always had money for the vending machines. They complained about the price of books every semester, they argued about every spiral and journal notebook we were required to buy, but they never ran out of quarters to feed the vending machines. I thought of Cracker and Duveen and the cigarettes, and in earlier days, the booze.
Nellie stood at the vending machine with a connoisseur's eye.
"No Fritos. No Payday. This stinks."
"There's another one in the other hallway, I found it." Sweets looked up at Nellie, glad to have found her an alternative supply.
"Do they have Snickers? I really want Snickers."
"Let's look." So we went at a gallop to the other hallway and found a vending machine that looked to me exactly like the other one. But this one had Snickers.
Nellie shoved quarters into the machine, hitting it a couple of times when the quarters didn't go down fast enough.
"Fritos are the best chips." After the big Snickers bar was safely in hand, she went after the chips. "Doritos are OK, but Fritos are better. And Snickers makes my day." Nellie took the Fritos from two bags in her hands and ate them, little pieces of corn chips falling on her sweater. The Snickers wrapper went into the pocket, the nuts and the candy bar disappeared. We went to find Cracker and Duveen, who were sitting in the canteen drinking Co-cola and smoking. Addicted, on Antabuse. Was there an Antabuse for Snickers bars or Fritos?
"So what's the problem, why are you here?" Nellie was bright, and brash, and looked straight at Duveen with a challenging look.
He drew back, astonished at this aggression.
"Well, we used to work in the woods..."
"Pulpwooders, were you? I know about them. Had an uncle was a pulpwooder." Nellie stared at Duveen with narrowed eyes. Duveen was not comfortable with this comparison with Nellie’s uncle. His foot started jiggling and his hands shook on the co-cola can.
"Was he? Where?"
"Willacoochee." Nellie didn't waste words.
Duveen nodded. "Good fat wood there. Good wood." He avoided her question about why he was there, and I wondered if she would remember. She did.
"So, why are you here?" She took a Payday out of her pocket and chewed quietly, watching him.
"Addiction. Alcohol." Duveen decided to match her sentence structure, probably hoping that this Junior Head Nurse would go away.
"Bad?" No one could accuse Nellie of wordiness.
"Yep."
Duveen matched her syllable for syllable, playing the game. He watched her finish the Payday and start on a package of Fritos.
"You on Antabuse?"
"Yep. Are you?" Duveen said quietly. Nellie frowned.
"Me, why? I'm not an addict."
"No?"
"No. No way." Nellie got up, looked at me and said, “See you back at the motel." She looked at Duveen as if he had some kind of social disease. She put the empty Fritos bag on the table and opened a pack of gum, and motioned to Sweets.
"Let's go, past the machines in the hall. I need a soda." They walked out, and Duveen watched them go.
"We're here and they aren't."
"Payday bars and Fritos are socially acceptable, you know that." I felt the anger across the table.
"And booze is legal but not OK?"
I sighed and put my chin in my hands. "You don't get funny with Payday bars, Duveen. You can drive a car after eating six packages of Fritos. That's the difference.”
Cracker and Duveen lit another cigarette and thought about that. So did I. I sat there feeling tired again, and all of a sudden I realized why. I had been journalizing about this, feeling tired. I had been thinking about it and wondering why it was, because it was very unusual. Most of my friends here had felt the same kind of weariness. But now I knew why. I remembered what Elaine had just told me, how everything seemed out of focus. I sat there and looked at Cracker and Duveen and the little canteen, and looked out the window at the long hallway where Leo walked, and realized that I was trying to make these “blurry” people come into focus. We weren’t content to leave them with blurred outlines and no sense of focus. We were trying to bring them back into a sharp focus for our own needs. The effort was exhausting us. They kept sliding back into their blurriness, losing their sharpness. It was like trying to figure Elam out with a conscious effort, it left you confused and in a maze. If you just let Elam’s sayings penetrate your mind and sink in, without trying to analyze them, they began to make sense. If I picked them apart, I lost them. The same with Cracker and Duveen; if I tried to imagine them working, or living, with nice clear outlines, my mind shut off. What I needed to do was let them be, let them blur, and leave them alone. Leave them to be themselves. Give up the effort and relax and listen. Keep my own life in focus, because that’s the only life I had any little control over.
So simple, like most answers to big questions. So very clear and simple. I took a deep breath and felt the tiredness flow away, let reality in and control disappeared. Nothing in the room had changed, Cracker still played Solitaire, cheating at every other hand. Duveen still blew those ragged smoke rings, and I could hear Leo’s footsteps down the quiet hall. The refrigerator hummed and there were voices murmuring from the craft shop. In the stillness my mind stretched and shed its skin like a snake.
Cara Innocenza,
You’ve got to be careful in that place. I heard on the news where some crazy people took hostages in a hospital like yours. Don’t be alone, that’s when they jump at you. And be careful in the hotel; I think it’s disgraceful to have a young lady your age in a motel, with strangers. The roommate sounds nice, someone you can trust.
We went to the mall today, didn’t do much shopping, just looking. Prices today I could die. They had a nice sale at Penny’s, but the bath towels were all the wrong color. We had a vanilla cone and sat on the benches to watch. Your grandma gets tired just walking, but she likes to watch shoppers. I told it was crazy to sit and watch people when we have cooking to do, but she likes it. Like the porch in Syracuse, watching the neighbors. Only here we can watch all year, no snow to drive us in.
We got the cooking done, homemade egg noodles, some nice meatballs, and strawberry shortcake. I made braciole but I left the hard boiled eggs out, Barney’s coming for dinner and he worries about cholesterol.