Some of Your Blood (14 page)

Q. It did…. Oh, I have a note here I wanted to ask you about, George. Something rubbed me a little as I slid past the first reading, and stubbed me the second time around. A little thing but when you describe something, I always know where everything and everybody is. But in this one place where your father came home drunk and you had the knife.

A. Oh yes.

Q. Let me read this out loud. It’s where you threw the knife. Right across the room, correct? Yes. Well, listen: “… he looked down at the cut and the blood coming from it. And the mother was bleeding through her hands and her eyes bulging out over them, looking at the father. And the father pushed George away and got the dishrag …” and so on.

A. Yes, well what about it?

Q. If you threw the knife from across the room, how was it your father pushed you away? I got the feeling the father just stood there, apparently near the sink, so he didn’t move toward you.

A. Oh, it was me moved. (Suddenly quiet and intense.) It was like nothing that ever happened to me before or since. The knife stuck in his chest muscles, I don’t think it passed a rib. It just stuck there. And then when he pulled it out I walked across there like I was pulled by a wire, like a sleepwalker in the movies. I could no more help myself…. I walked across there and I put my mouth on that cut and sucked on it, I was … trying to pull it together or make it go away or make it like it never happened or … or something, I don’t know. Usually I have something to do with what I do even when I’m crazy mad, but I didn’t that time, I just couldn’t help myself.

Q. (After a pause) Well, I … guess that answers my question. How he could just reach out and push you away.

A. I scared him. I scared myself too. I guess that was why he walked out like that, and never after hit my mother or anybody. That … that sleepwalking thing, that scared me a hell of a whole lot more than throwing the knife, do you know that?

Q. I can well imagine … had enough for today, George?

(Conventional routine to return patient to present time, and close.)

Comments:
A formal and complete evaluation will have to wait; not only is it necessary to get this information in the hands of Miss Quigley before she leaves for the South, there is too the matter of generating enough objectivity to do a fair job. Perhaps I am simply overtired, but at the moment I would disqualify myself from any necessarily clinical, impersonal analysis of these developments. Let it suffice for the moment to skim over some of the major peaks.

It would seem that the key log in the jam was the revelation to George that his secret was out. I have remarked before on the marvellous way the sick psyche shouts for help; it is a pity we can’t invent a detecting device which would show which language or which instrument or which vocabulary that shout was cast in. The burden of his secrecy must have been unbearably heavy, and must have become more so of recent weeks. I am very impressed by the way in which release came to him; at the very time when I was laboriously picking my way down into the shellhole to gather him up, he was standing on the edge already working hard at the answer to my question about when he started drinking blood.

Summing up his reasons for the practice, we find that he turns to it for relief only when he is hurt, disoriented—“lost,” as he puts it. This is its distinction from a usual hunger. Or to put it in another way, and using George’s distinction between “satisfaction” and “relief,” his blood-drinking is not like the bottled-up, raging pressures which drive the true sexual psychopath; it is much more like the demanding vacuum inside a suckling babe.

The analogy, once made, bears on the question in so many ways that it stops looking like an analogy and becomes, very nearly, an analysis. A hungry baby wants what it wants with an insensate, unreasoning demand which brooks of no delay, argument, postponement or reason. In these terms it is quite fair to describe a baby’s emotional nexus as insane … maniacal … obsessive. And a baby seeks this assuagement for anything else besides hunger which troubles him. When Baby bumps his head, even when his stomach is full, he can be consoled by the nipple. If he bumps his head, even when his stomach is full, and he cannot find the nipple, his outrage is enormous and his demand increases.

For anyone maltreated and denied as much as George, the transference from breast milk to blood would be understandable. In George’s case it can hardly even be called a transference—not in the light of what occurred, and what, further, he was repeatedly told, about his mother’s preoccupation with her own bleeding breasts.

I am beginning to feel that George’s problem is a sexual problem only in the most remote, though parallel, way. “Arrested development” is a useful phrase but in his case too wildly understated. It would seem that his emotional development absolutely ceased, not at adolescence or in pre-puberty, like so many of these cases, but in the most primitive levels of the infantile. The fact that his physical and mental development in all other areas is relatively unimpaired may be unlikely, may be statistically impossible, but remains a fact.

Hotel Venetian

Charlotte, North Carolina       May 5

Dear Dr Outerbridge:

“Socked in,” as the airlines people call it, by fog, I have to stay here overnight and get tomorrow’s plane instead. I mailed my report to Col. Williams this evening, but I don’t imagine airmail will move tonight any more than I will. So with an evening on my hands and a typewriter in my luggage, I thought I’d write you, if only because I know you must be on tenterhooks awaiting the news.

Col. Williams may have told you that I was a psychiatric nurse before I was a Red Cross worker. I tell you that to add substance to my congratulations. Please do not be angry at Col. Williams for having shown me your “O-R” correspondence—he is an old friend, and he is sure, as I want you to be, that I am not the kind of “record” which that correspondence is “off.”

To keep you no longer in suspense, let me tell you right at the outset that you were right all down the line. The two murders did occur, they happened at the times Col. Williams calculated from the patient’s history and accounts—his enlistment, for example, and the best guess he could make for the Episode of the Skunky Uncle (whom, as you will see, I met and talked with).

The death of the watchman was reported in the newspaper and on the police blotter—and attributed to heart attack. I won’t go into detail as to how I proceeded from there, except to say that the resistance I encountered was not trivial, the welcome I received was not warm, the assistance I got was not helpful, the threats I made were not small, and the feelings I left behind me were ones of great relief. In bald outline, I went to the chief of police, the local bartender who operates the chief of police, and the bartender’s wife, who owns the bar and operates the bartender; and having gotten clearance from her, was able then to approach the coroner sufficiently armed to raid his files. They do indeed differ from newspaper and police reports, which did not mention the knife wound. The coroner, a perfectly unbelievable example of typecasting, even to the gold watchchain and the spitoon, offered what seemed to be a weaseling excuse for letting the fact of the knife-wound get lost; yet I do believe it to be the truth. What he said was that the watchman, a chronic alcoholic of long standing with virtually terminal kidney disease, atherosclerosis, stenosis of the mitral valve, and a forty-foot tapeworm, may well have died for a number of reasons with or without having been stabbed, and only coincidentally with having been assaulted. The main point to him (and the other local officials) was that where a victim was of no importance, the murderer unknown, clues few or absent, and suspects non-existent, there just was no good reason for putting an unsolved killing on the books. I gave him every assurance that the books would, for all of me, remain the way they were. Col. Williams can, if you want him to, give you chapter and verse on the legal position of this matter as far as you are concerned, but I think you may rest assured that if it ever comes to investigation and indictment, the mental condition of your patient will make any further action useless to anyone. This as a moral issue, might, as the saying goes, cause fights in bars, but it places itself outside the immediate province of the patient’s diagnosis and treatment.

My next to move was to Cravensville. It is situated just as your George described it, on a mountain lake which bends around a point, obscuring the far end from the town. I acquired a boat and crossed to what certainly looked like the geography George mentioned—a little cove and a small swamp where a brook seeps into the lake—and entering the cove I horrified a half-dozen naked boys swimming there; they drifted away into the woods like little ghosts. I cannot be sure I saw the actual flat rocks from which George made his deadfall, but if anyone wanted to make one there he certainly could. I did not see any beaver or lodge, but beaver have been there, as anyone can see who recognizes a pointed sapling-stump.

As for the death of the little boy, I had no luck at all with the newspapers. The town has no newspaper, and the nearest regional gazette, a weekly, must have gone to press shortly before the death of the child and found it not worth reporting in the next issue. Your George was chillingly right in one respect—life is a lot cheaper in certain areas of those mountains than one would like to believe. Poverty, illiteracy, and too many children are three great forces against overwhelming grief at the loss of a small life and a hungry mouth.

In addition, circumstances militated against anything sensational appearing in the death of the boy. For one thing, there is a highway bridge across the opposite end of the lake, and twice in the past three years people have died there (one a suicide, the other a traffic casualty) and their bodies have been found floating in the cove—a matter, I suppose, of prevailing wind or some sluggish circulation of the lake water. This, and the battered condition of the boy’s body, made it easy for the local authorities to accept the conclusion that the boy had died elsewhere than at the cove. He was wearing bathing trunks, in which he had left home the afternoon before he died (poor little thing, I’d guess he lay in the deadfall all that night) so there was not even the evidence of his clothes near the death scene.

Specifically, his left leg and his right foot and ankle were crushed, although no bones were broken, and he had a good many bruises and contusions about the head and face. The incision on the navel was there, and though no one ventured a guess as to how exactly it came to be there, the hypothesis of a hit-run driver on or near the highway bridge seemed to cover everything quite neatly. I think you may chalk up one more credit to George’s honesty, no matter what your convictions may be of truth being beauty and beauty truth.

I visited Mr and Mrs Grallus, the aunt and uncle, and I would not attempt to improve upon your George’s talent for portraiture. If it should happen that George is ever freed, there is a niche for him there. The Gralluses are no longer young, and they are childless. I think the aunt has a genuine, though not overwhelming, affection for George, and would do a great deal for him if she could. I think Mr Grallus would do even more, for he feels very guilty about the way he treated George, and would like to make it up to him. There isn’t the slightest tinge of unselfishness in this; he just wishes he didn’t feel guilty and would work hard to get rid of it. They both believe that George is a “dummy”—retarded, that is; and if you and I had a nickel for everyone in this country who fails to make a distinction between the mentally ill and the mentally retarded, we could build a clinic large enough to treat them all.

Finally, I went to see Anna. Oh, poor Anna! Numb, mute, unlovely, unloved, and loving. She reminds one of a draft animal, especially a donkey, one covered with saddle-galls and surrounded by biting flies, which stands patiently waiting, with sad and beautiful eyes, for someone to water it or kick it or kill it or tell it what to do…. I embarrass myself a little, Sergeant Outerbridge; I’m really not given to flights of prosody, but I declare she touched me.

She (too) is just what your George described—a stocky woman with a widow’s hump, heavy shoulders and rump, and surprisingly delicate hands, feet and ankles. Her face is broad and pink with a small pug nose, close-set eyes, and a sad soft mouth. Her jaw is massive and she has a double chin, though she isn’t what anyone would call a fat girl. I met her weeding in a corn-patch, where they sent me from the house. I was glad to be able to talk to her out there and away from that drab, noisy ruin they refer to as a house. The word “mean” has several shades; everything about that house and inhabitants and all its surroundings defines every one of them.

I won’t attempt a verbatim transcript of our conversation, and I have not, by the way, given one in my report to the Colonel. Anna’s vocabulary and experience are so limited that the words express almost nothing. Yet she has had so little sympathy, tenderness, respect or understanding that a little of it went a long, long way.

That she loves George (she calls him Belly—didn’t you report somewhere that his name is Bela?) there can be no question; she loves him through and through and in all dimensions. She accepted his apparent desertion of her, and his unbroken silence, in precisely the way the above-mentioned draft animal accepts a kick in the head. She has never broken stride, nor thought of it. She has gone right on with her succession of days, numbly remembering the two and a half years of George, and using them as her only diversion. She is not exactly waiting for him; to say that would be to imply hope, and she has never entertained hope about anything. But about one thing there is absolutely no doubt: should he ever come back, she will be here and she will be his if he will have her.

I was able to get a fairly complete picture of their relationship—conversationally she has no skill and no defenses—and through a not-too-murky screen of euphemisms one could see that he made his capture so total because he was gentle. Sexually she was not innocent when he came along—there had been some drunken tumbles with some of the threshing crew that came by when the buckwheat was in, and one of the hired hands had used her with some regularity for a period. She also mentioned one Sammy, under whose ministrations she had, for the first and only time enlisted help: she told her father who, she said, beat him half to death. I did not inquire as to what Sammy was to her but gather he is her elder brother. From what your George reports, he never forced himself on Anna, and convinced as she certainly is that all males are violently driven by sex and therefore violently drive, it really never occurred to her that George’s diffidence was anything but enormous self-control and consideration. Seducing George required a good deal more than suggestions and availability. She had literally to perform the entire act with him. He apparently neither cooperated nor resisted, and for his disinterested complaisance, which she took to be a species of chivalry, she worships him. Evidently their coition was infrequent, occurring only when her desire became uncontrollable, but then always; he never resisted her. This alone would make it infrequent; you may add to it that she tried her best to emulate what she felt was his honorable self-denial, which cut down the frequency even more.