Flying Crows (5 page)

IV

JOSH AND
BIRDIE

SOMERSET

1933

Josh heard the duty doctor tell the bushwhackers that there was something
insincere
about Birdie. “I'm not sure he's a maximum lunatic,” said the doctor. But he told them to be prepared for Birdie to make some noise and commotion and possibly even do something violent. The doctor, as always, then left the asylum and its patients to the care of the bushwhackers. He would do the rest of his Sunday night on-call duty from his home in town.

The doctor was a young man named Jameson who, from Josh's observation, was not competent to trim a toenail, much less deal with lunacy— sincere or otherwise. Josh had come across only one fine doctor in all his years at Somerset. He was Dr. Will Mitchell, a good man, a helpful, caring soul, who tried as best as he could to guide Somerset patients back to sanity and a regular life. Dr. Mitchell had been extremely helpful to Josh. He had, in fact, saved Josh's life—and soul. Dr. Mitchell had left Somerset in anger thirteen years ago to become a private doctor in Kansas City.

Among the practices at Somerset that enraged Dr. Mitchell was the use of Somerset Sluggers. Nor did he like the kind of restraining they were doing to Birdie this night.

Just before lights-out at nine, the bushwhackers held Birdie down on his back while they tied his hands and arms to the metal frame of his bed. It was a common practice. Five other patients considered to be violent or potential wanderers were routinely strapped down on this ward.

“That way, no matter what, and just in case he decides to play games,” said Amos the ass, the night bushwhacker in charge, “this Birdie can't fly away and damage anybody, including his ownself, can he?”

Amos said that to Josh, whose bed was directly across from Birdie's. The long narrow dormitory room had two rows of twenty single beds each, lined up barracks-style on both sides of a center aisle with the heads of the beds against a wall. All but two of the forty beds were occupied now, Birdie having just become the thirty-eighth patient on the ward.

“Help us keep an eye on your young friend over there,” said Amos, knowing Josh would do that without having to be asked. From head to head, counting the twelve-foot aisle, Josh was barely twenty-five feet away from Birdie.

Josh didn't really know what to make of what the doctor and the bushwhackers were saying about Birdie. He had heard rumors that sometimes sane people were sent here for personal, family, or political reasons, but he had never come across one. Josh did think the new boy, this Birdie from Kansas City, seemed pretty normal until he saw what happened when the kid closed his eyes during that first rocking time. Only lunatics screamed when they closed their eyes.

Josh kept his own eyes wide open now while he braced for the worst from Birdie. But after a few minutes of silence from across the way, Josh's own lids began to droop and he launched the nightly ritual that he and Dr. Mitchell had invented years ago. Moving his lips but with no sound, Josh said, “I have to say now, dear listener, as I approach a description of the final horrors of the massacre, my voice grows weak, my sight is dimmed, and my heart sickens with the recollection. . . .”

Now his eyes were closed, and the threat of his own screaming eruption had passed. He moved his mind to thinking about his annoyance about where they had put Birdie. He was in a bed that, for Josh, was still warm with the body heat and juices as well as the soul of Jesus of Chillicothe, who had died in his sleep just nine days ago. There were two other vacant beds down at the other end of the room. Too bad they couldn't put Birdie in one of them. But that would have made it impossible for Josh to keep watch on him.

Josh thought about Jesus of Chillicothe. They never said why he died. He just didn't wake up one morning, after complaining for two days about feeling as if a wagon of dirt were being pulled back and forth over his chest by twelve horses and experiencing wild tingling in both of his arms. Josh was one of four patients who were allowed to attend a brief burial service down at the Unknowns Cemetery under the trees alongside the Kansas City Southern tracks. The Methodist minister from town who presided spoke only of “the deceased”; he never mentioned a name, either a real one or Jesus of Chillicothe, as the dead man had called himself for the twenty-four years he had been a Somerset patient. Josh once asked Jesus, a gaunt figure in his late fifties when he died, where he was from and why he was sent to Somerset. Jesus said he was working for the Livingston County agricultural agent in Chillicothe, counting the number of acres growing wheat, when God ordered him, his son Jesus of Chillicothe, to quit counting the acres and set them all on fire. “Unfortunately, God the Father chose to take the lives of two farm families along with the wheat,” he said. That led to Jesus of Chillicothe being ajudged a lunatic and committed here in lieu of being hanged for murder. The headstone they put over the grave had only a number on it:
371.
The administration office usually didn't pay attention to names after a patient had been in the asylum for twenty years or more without a visitor or an inquiry. Jesus of Chillicothe, who could recite most every word of the New Testament from memory, never had either. Neither had Josh.

For the first half hour now, the only noise in the ward came from the usual farts, belches, giggles, and whispered conversations and the continual barely audible orders from Streamliner for everyone to have their tickets ready before he went off into his go-to-sleep ritual of reciting the opening lines of Josh's Centralia massacre story. Then, like the beginning rolls of a coming storm, the other noises, including Streamliner's, ended and the snoring began as, one by one, the men fell asleep.

Josh wanted to read, to move his mind far away from this place and even the question of Birdie's bed and the death of Jesus of Chillicothe. He had the asylum library's copy of Stephen Vincent Benét's
John Brown's
Body
in the top drawer of his bedside table, one of the two-foot-square white metal cabinets put between the beds for each patient. If anybody had more stuff than would fit in the cabinet, it went under the bed. Josh had nothing under his bed; as far he knew, neither did anybody else. Patients came to Somerset with nothing but a few clothes and toilet articles, and it stayed that way because there was no way—or need—to acquire anything else.

But it was impossible for Josh to read in this darkness. There had been a time when he could see the print of a book pretty well at night, having been taught by a bushwhacker war veteran how to train his eyes for night vision. But it was getting increasingly difficult for Josh to read even in the broadest daylight. Sister Hilda, his favorite Somerset Sister, had brought him a large magnifying glass and had promised to get the local optician to make him a pair of reading glasses someday. . . .

Josh heard a metallic rattling sound, one of the tied-down patients jerking on his ropes. It had to be Birdie. The others seldom did it anymore; they knew it was useless. They had learned that if they had a real emergency, or even if they just had to go to the bathroom, the only way they could get loose was to yell out loudly and long enough to bring a bushwhacker into the ward. Pulling on the ropes got you nowhere.

The rattle stopped. Birdie must have also figured out those ropes weren't going to break or come loose. Would he close his eyes and try to go to sleep? Josh held his breath. The only sound was that of snoring, some occasional dialogue from a dream, the scream from a nightmare. Somebody—it sounded like Gardner from Lee's Summit, ten beds away from Josh—was being chased by a white mouse. Another guy was denying to a woman, probably his wife, that he had touched her baby sister while she slept on a sunporch. Somebody else, Josh couldn't tell for sure who, was reciting a recipe for corn-bread stuffing over and over.

Then it began.

“No! No! Don't shoot no more! The blood! Look at the blood!” Birdie's voice was a piercing screech. “Nooooooooooo!”

Josh sat up in bed.

“Don't shoot no more! The blood! Noooooo!”

One of the other patients yelled halfheartedly, “Knock it off, new boy. Us lunatics need our beauty sleep too.” Josh, even in the dark, knew that was Richard of Harrisonville.

“The blood! Don't shoot no more!”

Figuring it wouldn't be long before a bushwhacker would be in here, Josh decided to do something. The bushwhackers, as Amos had done tonight, encouraged him to act in situations like this. He slipped his blue cotton pants over his underwear, stuck on his shoes, and went over to Birdie's bed.

“Hey, Birdie, it's me, Josh,” he whispered. He leaned down into Birdie's face, which was twisted like a dirty rag. “Forget about what happened to you. Tell me a story of something else, Birdie. Tell me a story, any story. . . .”

At that moment, the lights came on, the hallway door sprang open, and in rushed Amos and two other bushwhackers carrying Somerset Sluggers.

They untied Birdie and yanked him to the floor. Then they ordered him to strip naked and led him away. As they left the ward, they invited Josh to join them.

The bushwhackers didn't slug Birdie in the head because he went quietly. He was through screaming. Josh figured that was because he was wide awake and his eyes were no longer closed.

“Please let me put some clothes on,” Birdie said to the bushwhackers. He said it quietly, like a normal person would.

“Forget it,” Amos said, and he pushed Birdie on in front of him.

Josh saw how truly upset Birdie was about being naked in front of him and the bushwhackers—all men. He was walking pigeon-toed, with his hands covering his genitals. That reaction, in his pre-Somerset life many years ago, would have seemed completely normal to Josh. But forcing patients to be naked was an accepted way of life here at Somerset. It was another of those routine tools of control and discipline that so upset Dr. Will Mitchell.

They took Birdie to the hydrotherapy room, which was a steamy, soapy, all-white room with a tile floor that was only big enough for two large bathtubs and an open stall of four shower nozzles. As Josh saw it, hydrotherapy was a fancy word for a long bath or shower. Sometimes the water was hot, sometimes cold. Sometimes it calmed down agitated or energized patients, sometimes it didn't. Mostly, it seemed to Josh, it just made them wet.

Within minutes, Birdie was lying in a tub of hot water. Birdie didn't seem to mind. He was still holding his privates underwater but his face was not twisted and contorted as it had been when he was screaming.

“Talk to him, Josh, do your thing on this guy—if you can,” said Amos, ignoring the fact that Birdie was as quiet as a mouse now. “I've got to check on some guy who's crapped in his bed over in Five Ward.”

Josh would indeed try his thing on Birdie. To be helpful, to work with new patients, was part of the deal he had made with Dr. Mitchell, who said—and convinced the superintendents and the bushwhackers—it might be good treatment for Josh as well as the other patients. Josh took seriously his mission to try to provide help to some of his fellow lunatics. He could not claim any cures, but that didn't seem to matter because that was not what this asylum was in business to do. Will Mitchell was probably right when he had said over and over that care and feeding was really the main purpose of the Sunset at Somerset. But Josh had had some triumphs, his most notable being Streamliner. And it was the story of Streamliner that Josh always used on newly arrived patients.

Josh pulled a wooden stool up to the side of Birdie's bathtub.

“You know the man we all call Streamliner, Birdie? I have no idea what his real name is. Bob? Bill? Jack? Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John—who knows? He's Streamliner.”

Birdie moved one hand off his genitals. That was a good sign. He was relaxing, he was listening.

“I want to tell you about him, Birdie. Maybe you could learn from what happened to him. I think it could be an inspiration to you. OK?”