Tinkers (10 page)

As mother and son came abreast of the front corner of the house, they saw that it was being drawn by eight yoke of titanic oxen. The oxen were yoked in a train and harnessed to the house by chains as thick as Kathleen's wrists. A man marched up and down the length of the team with a bullwhip, cursing and whipping the beasts on their rumps. The oxen heaved and steamed in the cold. Each time the man yelled and cracked his whip, there was a rippling of wood and leather and iron as the chains fastened to the house snapped tight and each successive pair of oxen strained into the weight of the house and the building ground forward an inch or two, its windows rattling, its frame vibrating, and then the man with the whip yelled, Take yeere rest dogs, and the sixteen animals stopped pulling all at once, as if they were a circus act. The man was Ezra Morrell, George's best friend Ray Morrell's father.

Standing off to the side of the road, keeping slightly ahead of the progress of his home and business, was Dr. Box. He was dressed like the other men, except that his hat and his eyeglasses were of better quality. The eyeglasses were justified because of his profession; the town physician simply needed the best eyes he could get. The hat was his one public indulgence, the one symbol of his status in West Cove which he permitted himself. It came from a shop in London, where Dr. Box liked to say that there was an exact replica of his head in wood, around which each year a new hat was fitted for the real head thousands of miles away. (When he could not find his stethoscope or a tongue depressor, he'd say that the heads were mixed up-that the real head was in London and the wooden one in West Cove.) Otherwise, he wore the same wool coat of red plaid, the same dark wool pants, the same heavy boots, which laced up nearly to his knees. He munched on the stem of a pipe, now and then taking it from his mouth to say, That's it, boys! Or, Careful, fellas. Mother Box'll skin me if anything happens to the castle! When he saw Kathleen and George coming along, he made a show of stepping back, bowing slightly, and sweeping a hand across the space in front of himself for Kathleen to pass, and then snapped to attention and saluted George.

Come along, ma'am. Come along, sergeant. Just moving HQ closer to the line!

I'm sorry to interrupt, Doctor, Kathleen said, standing behind George with her hands resting on his shoulders. It's just that yesterday-

Dr. Box yanked his pipe from his mouth and set his large, slightly stained teeth together in a way to show that he was listening as a professional. Before Kathleen could continue, however, he saw George's bandaged hand.

Well, soldier, hurt in the line of duty, I see. Let's take a look.

Kathleen urged George forward a step and he shyly allowed the doctor to take his hand.

Don't worry, sergeant, I'll be careful. Dr. Box squatted and unwound the bandages. When he saw the puncture marks, he turned George's hand over and back twice, whistled, and said, A dog got you, huh, soldier? George looked at his mother.

Kathleen said, Well, it was an accident. We didn't-

I'm afraid you're going to need a stitch or two on the deepest cuts, the doctor said. Nothing broken, but you'll be sore for a good while. You'll probably feel it for longer, maybe even when you're an old man. Who's the dog? We need to see about rabies.

Kathleen said, That's the thing, Doctor. Can ICould we- The doctor looked up from George's hand.

Yes, yes, of course, ma'am. Of course. He wound the bandages back around George's hand. Listen, sergeant, he said to George, your mother and I need to talk for a minute, so let's get you someplace warm. Dan! Danny! The doctor put his hand against George's back and steered him toward the idling truck. The driver's window was down and a man sat at the wheel, his head tilted outside the cab, smoking a cigarette. He looked up when the doctor called his name.

Danny, roll that window up and let this soldier warm up in there; he's been injured in the line of duty!

The man, Dan Cooper, cinched his lips around the cigarette and pulled his head back into the truck cab. He rolled up the window, opened the truck door, and stepped down off the truck.

All yours, Doc, he said.

There you go. That's it, sergeant, the doctor said, helping George up into the passenger seat. You just mark time here and your mother and I'll be done in a jiff.

The cab of the truck warmed up quickly. The seat bench was covered in cracked brown leather. George felt broken seat springs through the bottom of his coat. Old manuals and newspapers and a coffee mug lined with the silt of long-since-evaporated coffee cluttered the space between him and the driver's seat. The glass steamed over and George watched the men and oxen and the moving house turn to phantoms in a silver mist. He remembered stories that his father had told him about ghost ships that had foundered on the rocks off the coast a hundred years ago but whose mournful, doomed crews and splintering keels could still be heard on foggy nights.

Kathleen and the doctor talked for ten minutes, toward the end of which George saw his mother bow her head and cover her face in her hands. He had never seen his mother cry and he knew it was about his father and that it was serious. Dr. Box hugged Kathleen to himself with one arm, patted her on the back twice, and then let go. He marched towards the truck. George looked past him to the blurry vision of his mother through the glass. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her coat and shook herself as if to slough off her weeping with the snow. She turned her face up toward the sky for a moment. Dr. Box grabbed the truck door open and saluted George.

Okay, sergeant, we're headed on ahead into town, where I can get you back into fighting shape.

George climbed down from the truck and went to his mother. Her face was flushed and her eyes red. She smiled at George and took his hand.

It's okay, Georgie, she said. George noticed for the first time that his mother was still a young woman. Dr. Box conferred with Dan Cooper, who had taken up his seat in the truck again, and two other men and then went back to Kathleen and George.

Ready, troops?

Kathleen said, It seems so sad your house out in the middle of the road. She began to weep again.

Oh, poor Mrs. Crosby. There, there. We have to do something. It's time for us to do something. We're going to take care of everything.

Kathleen chopped wood, shaken. Howard was still on his rounds. The girls were in the parlor, doing needlepoint and keeping an eye on Joe, who was having a conversation with Ursula, a bearskin rug that he treated like one of the family pets. George slept upstairs, on top of Kathleen and Howard's bed. The wind was still up. But it will soften and die down when it gets dark, she thought. Wisps of snow were still on the wind, too, sweet and sharp. The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light. The trees lolled under the weight of those luminescent organs growing at the tops of their slender trunks. The brains murmured among themselves. They kept counsel and possessed a wintery wisdom-cold scarlet and opaline minds, brief and burnished, flaring in the metallic blue of dusk. And then they were gone. The light drained from the sky and the trees and funneled to a point on the western horizon, where it seemed to be swallowed by the earth. The branches of the trees were darknesses over the lesser dark of dusk. Kathleen thought, That is like Howard's brain-lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly. How much light does the mind need? Have use for? Like a room full of lamps. Like a brain full of light. She patted her coat pocket to feel the folded prospectus for the Eastern Maine State Hospital in Bangor, located on top of Hepatica Hill overlooking the beautiful Penobscot River. When Dr. Box had given her the brochure, her first thought had been to remember that the hospital had originally been called the Eastern Maine Insane Hospital. But the pictures in the brochure showed clean rooms and a broad, sunny campus and a huge brick building with four wings that looked to her like a grand hotel. The idea of a hotel seemed benevolent rather than cruel, seemed, in the suddenly alien backyard, full of glowing, leaky, vanishing brains, a warm, safe shelter that she envisioned as if she were a famished and half-frozen traveler on a planet made of ice, breaching a hill and catching sight of a lodge with lights in every window and smoke pouring from the chimneys and people gathered together, luxuriating in the dreamlike delight that comes from grateful strangers sharing sanctuary. The brochure was not in either of her coat pockets, and Kathleen realized that she must have placed it somewhere in her room when she helped George onto her bed.

George slept on top of his parents' bed. He lay curled up around his bitten hand. The bandages on the hand were tight, and in his shallow sleep a black dog held his hand in its mouth. The dog looked up into George's eyes and George knew that the dog would bite his hand if he tried to remove it. The dog would never move. It would never tire nor need to eat or sleep, and the thought that he would never be able to move again, but could only sit still, with his hand in the dog's mouth, for the rest of his life terrified George. He panicked and, by reflex, yanked his hand back. The dog's jaws sprang like a trap and the first pressure from the bite startled him awake. He whimpered for his mother. The room was cold and the blue in the windows so dim that it did not seem to be light, but the cold itself, which seemed to pry between the bed and his body, where the only warmth was. George shuddered and whimpered again and tried to burrow deeper into the bed, but he lay on top of the covers and could not get warm. Oh, Mummy, he groaned, and rose up onto an elbow. He looked at his bitten hand. The bandages seemed luminescent, as if the last light in the room might be coming from them. George felt his blood pulsing against them in his palm. The hand ached. He wanted to call for his mother again, but he heard the tock-tock of the hatchet in the yard. In the dark and the cold, it sounded as if his mother was chopping at rock, not wood, and a trace of his dream about the dog made him suddenly feel as if he would have to spend the rest of his life freezing and stranded on the bed with a crushed hand, listening to his mother uselessly chopping at stone out beyond the window fitted with panes of black ice, when what he most needed was to be curled up in her warm lap, with her warm hands on his face and her soft, quiet voice cooing to him that everything was all right. Instead, George sat upright and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up and slid a foot forward in the total darkness of the floor, testing for the edge of the cable rug or a stray shoe that might trip him. He shuffled toward where the door was. He held his bitten hand limply above his head, as if he were crossing a river, and patted at the dark with his good hand until he felt the corner of his mother's bureau, which stood to the left of the door. He opened the door onto deeper darkness still. Rather than risking the hallway and the stairs, George tapped his fingers along the top of the bureau until he felt the lamp. He lifted the glass and set it down and felt for the box of matches. He held the matchbox against his stomach with the heel of his bitten hand and struck a match. The top of the bureau appeared and the image of him holding the match appeared in the lamp glass. There was a pamphlet next to the lamp, with a photograph of a building that looked to him like a school, called the Eastern Maine State Hospital. George realized that this was what Dr. Box had given to his mother after he had finished with the stitches in George's hand (there had only been four, and they had not hurt at first). Underneath the picture of the building, a caption read Northern and Eastern Maine's care facility for the insane and feebleminded. George touched the match to the lamp wick and light swelled up and out into the room. The light resolved the furniture and the walls and the floor and ceiling and George's eyes as if it were liquid. He opened the pamphlet and began to read. Patients at the hospital experience relief from the frantic modern world, which aggravates so many cases of insanity. They enjoy sessions of hydrotherapy, extended periods of bedrest, harvesting crops, and tending the piggery. They also make and repair furniture and do the laundry....

Never you mind that, George. It's time to come down and get dinner. Kathleen had come upstairs without George noticing. George started when she spoke, and suddenly his head and his neck and his legs and his arms all ached and he felt feverish. Kathleen saw that he felt a kind of humiliation at being caught reading the pamphlet and at knowing just what it meant, even though it was something he should not even know about. She, too, suddenly suffered the weight of the day and felt cold and hungry and impatient.

My bureau is not yours to dig around, she said. She snatched the brochure from George's hands and shooed him out of her room and toward the stairs. Go get your brother ready to eat and tell your sisters to pour everyone a glass of milk. Go.

Yes, Mum. George stifled an urge to burst into tears. He went downstairs. Kathleen folded the brochure in half and stuffed it into a wool sock, which she tucked under a sweater at the back of her bottom bureau drawer.

That night, Kathleen and the children ate dinner without Howard, who was still not back from his rounds by seven o'clock. Afterward, she took up mending a pair of Joe's overalls in her rocking chair next to the woodstove. Darla and Margie played with two dolls, which they pretended were Susan B. Anthony and Betsy Ross preparing tea for George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Darla hopped Susan B. Anthony over to Betsy Ross, who was already sitting at the table, double-checking the tea service.

Darla made Susan B. Anthony bow to Betsy Ross and say, Happy New Year, Betsy!

Margie stood Besty Ross up and made her curtsy. And happy 192 7 to you, Ms. Anthony!

Darla said, No, Margie, it's 1776.

George sat on the couch, holding a book called Mark the Match Boy open on his lap with his injured hand and an apple in the other. He stared at the print but did not read. He thought about his father, who had bitten him and who was a madman about to be taken to the madhouse. It suddenly occurred to him that his brother, Joe, would be sent to the madhouse, too, sooner or later.