Wonderland (11 page)

Every morning he woke before dawn. Sometimes he woke as if jerked out of sleep by a hand, his mother’s hand. Then he would sit up and not know where he was. Sometimes he woke because of his grandfather’s noises in the other room. The old man snored raspily and moaned in
his sleep. Jesse would lie in the warmth of his bed for a while, dreading the freezing air of the room, hearing the birds, the wind, a constant flow of sound that was inhuman and soothing. Then he got dressed, stepped into his overalls, into his boots, and went out to the kitchen. The floor creaked. Gusts of cold air rose from it. Duke, sleeping behind the stove, shook himself awake and whimpered around Jesse’s legs as if questioning him—why were they here? What was this place?

Outside, the birds sang in a maniac chattering as the sun rose. Faster and noisier. A frenzy of callings. Jesse listened to them, as if transfixed by their bright, staccato notes. The birds were almost screaming a human language; if he listened closely, very closely, he could almost hear words. He worked the hand pump and splashed water onto his face, sucking in his breath with the cold. He made himself coffee. In a while he would hear his grandfather getting up—the creaking of the old bedsprings, the creaking of the floor. In the country people moved, silently, unspeaking, against a background of noises—the chattering of small birds, the cries of crows, of owls, the sound of the wind, a dog’s distant barking. A car, passing along the road, was a surprise.

One day a car had turned up the lane and a man and a woman came to see Jesse. They were from the Niagara County Welfare Board, the Department of Child Welfare. They asked Jesse questions about his life here; they looked around, prudently, with smiles. They asked Jesse about school. Why wasn’t he going to school? Was he still in pain? He was alone in the kitchen because his grandfather had walked out when the man and woman came in, not excusing himself, just walking out to show his disapproval of visitors. Jesse had been very nervous, left on his own. He had never spoken to adults like this, people who wanted him, who had something to say to
him
, plans for
him
. He said that his shoulder still hurt and that he wanted to stay home for a while. He would go to school in the fall, he promised. In the fall. Wasn’t that soon enough?

They left and his grandfather came back in the house. He never asked Jesse what they had wanted.

Most of the time they did not speak.

But Jesse felt that they were together in their silence, flowing the same way with the passage of each day, time itself a tangible element that carried them forward, always forward, away from the past. He helped the old man with everything. His arms and shoulders and chest
ached from the heavy farm work, but he thought that this kind of pain was good for him; it made him sleep, it pitched him at once into a deep, dreamless sleep, which was healing. Time itself was healing. He woke every morning at four-thirty or five, and then the day would begin for him and there was no staying in bed, no going back to sleep. It began by jerking him awake so that his heart hammered as if sensing danger—had someone awakened him? taken hold of his shoulder to shake it? But it was good to sleep so heavily and good to wake up, good to work so hard.

There were two things on the farm that Jesse hated, though: the chicken coop and one of the barns. The chicken coop was a long, low structure, kept in fairly good condition, but Jesse hated the chickens and their clucking and their stink, the awful crusts of their droppings everywhere—on the ground, thick on their roosts and the dirt floor of their coop, everywhere. They were nervous, filthy things. They moved like women, tiny, feathered, dumpy women. He hated their bleary red eyes, which were sometimes diseased or surrounded by tiny grublike worms, he hated their quick, stealthy walk, their dirty feathers, their perpetual hunger. When he went out to feed them they rushed upon him, wings fluttering, their eyes darting, darting, their scrawny little feet rushing them inward, to him, as if he were the center of the world for them, existing only to toss out feed. Brown hens. White hens. Jesse stared at them in disgust. When he walked out anywhere, on any task, the chickens converged upon him, clucking and excited. A few of the bolder ones would peck at his boots. It didn’t matter that he had fed them only half an hour before, or that their feeding time was hours away. “Get out! Scat! You dirty things!” Jesse would whisper. He had begun to talk to himself, usually in whispers. “Dirty. Dirty. Dirty things,” he said, hating them. He especially hated to collect their eggs. Still warm from the hens’ bodies, some of them damp, with feathers or excrement on them … he so hated collecting these eggs that he had no appetite to eat them, he felt like gagging over a plateful of eggs, though he had liked them well enough in the past. His mother had made them scrambled eggs on Sunday. Chickens … fluidy droppings freezing to stones … their eggs half-hidden in straw … their perky heads, their little beaks, their scaly legs and feet—His scalp crawled when he had to feed them.

The animals he liked best were the horses, his grandfather’s two
aged horses that had no interest in him, big, gentle, stupid animals with great eyes, eyes nearly as big as Jesse’s fist, black and bulging. These eyes fascinated Jesse: they were so huge, and yet they were used to see very little. As if there were little to see. As if the world contained nothing more than hay, feed, a water trough. Jesse liked to feed the horses, and he lingered in the horse barn, sometimes pressing himself against the horses’ sides, his warm face against their cool sleek sides, his eyes starkly open and unthinking, unseeing. The horses were so still you did not have to think of anything. They munched hay, their heads were lowered almost permanently, they were still, silent, occasionally shifting their weight on their eroded hoofs, but there was nothing to think about or to remember, nothing. So heavy, the horses were like life that had run down into pure flesh, enormous muscular mounds of flesh, perfectly obedient and indifferent. Unlike the chickens, they were still, as if sleeping on their feet. There was no change in them.

Yet he felt their separation from him, their isolation. He could not cross over into it. What was massive in them, the powerful neutrality of their legs and shoulders and backs, was separate from him and baffled him.… It did no good for him to embrace their necks, to rub his face against their rippling necks, their dry, fine, stinging manes, even to talk to them, because they did not notice him, not really. There was nothing in
him
, nothing in Jesse himself, that could touch them.

He would walk quickly through the yard, his face turned away from the scurrying chickens. He spent less time with Duke now—the dog was a nuisance. He seemed to be always dragging Jesse back to Jesse’s own childhood, a time in his life when he had been wriggling and stupid with energy, like the dog—a scrawny black Labrador retriever who had never been much good at hunting. Jesse’s father had kicked the dog once in disgust.…

Since the day he discovered what was kept inside it, Jesse walked by one of the small barns quickly. The door was padlocked. Furniture from his parents’ house was in the barn, piled up. Jesse had peered through the cracks to see the old sofa, the chairs, the floor-model radio, the kitchen table, some beds. On the floor, wrapped carelessly in newspaper, were plates and silverware and what looked like Christmas tree ornaments, though Jesse couldn’t be sure. He had felt nothing, seeing these things for the first time. He had simply walked away. But after that, crossing the yard, he had been unable to even look at the
barn. His mouth twisted upward into a grin just to think of it, of himself peering through the cracks and seeing what he had seen.

On Sundays he and his grandfather went to services at the Benton Center Methodist Church, about ten miles away. Jesse sat in the drafty old church and did not look at the people around him, who might have been curious about him,
Jesse Harte … you know what happened to him
.… He could almost hear their crackling thoughts, their curious poking questions. He kept a hymn book opened on his lap, though he never took part in the singing; his face went slack and dead in church. He tried to think of God, but his mind had no skill—it wobbled and shivered, confronted with such an idea. God.
God
. He needed something he could touch, turn over in his hands, get hold of. He needed to use his hands. He could believe only in things that had weight and toughness, that resisted him. When he tried to think of Christ, who had been a real man for a while, his mind leaped immediately to Christmas, to the tinsel and candy, the Santa Claus cutouts, the manger scenes with the Infant Jesus, the crepe-paper bells and candles; and then he thought of nothing at all, his mind going blank like a light that has been turned off.

In the midst of the church’s small congregation, the country men and women and their children, some of them grown-up children, Jesse felt his strangeness. He and his grandfather were both strange. People glanced at them wondering. Curious.
That there is the boy whose father … But old man Vogel was always pretty strange himself. Must run in the family
. Jesse was grateful that his grandfather never lingered to talk with anyone except the minister, that he had no friends and had broken off ties with most of his own kin over the years, one squabble after another, the old man certain that he was right and everyone else wrong, out to cheat him. So there was a space about them, a dry, holy space that no one else entered. Jesse had little to say to the minister, Reverend Wilkinson, who always asked him and his grandfather how they were. Wilkinson was a man born for pitying, with mousy eyes that ran pink at the very sight of Jesse, a victim, someone who might be like Christ—“Christ, too, was a victim,” Wilkinson had said once to Jesse, out of nowhere, as if he had planned saying it for a long time. Jesse had not replied. He held himself apart, quiet, content. Everyone else sang—the old women off-key but loud—and the organ, pumped by foot, was played by a girl Jesse’s own age who labored with the hymns slowly
and shrilly, her shoulders bent over the cold keyboard the way Jesse’s grandfather bent over his plate at meals. Thumping—the organ’s shrieking high notes—the slow rising voices of the people around him—the dusty maroon hymn books with their faded gold letters: Jesse took these things in but did not allow himself to be touched by them. He felt nothing, not the presence of God or of other people; he sensed nothing, no closeness, no intimacy. Confessing for Christ, some members of the congregation burst into tears and came forward to kneel before the Reverend Wilkinson, but Jesse only stared at them through half-closed eyes, fearful of their ecstasy, their coming loose. He was terrified of people, strangers, coming loose in front of him. Better the horses. Yes, the horses and their heavy, massive indifference, their brainless slumber.

But the rest of Sunday belonged to him. He and his grandfather did not work on that day and so Jesse was free to go out, tramping the fields in the misty suspension of Sunday, taking in the silence of the land. In late March the thaw began. Jesse walked for miles, his dog running with him, looking eagerly, alertly about into the fields where rivulets were draining into ditches, feeling a sense of excitement, almost dismay, in the bright sunlight. Everything was coming back to life! If he listened, he could hear the breathing of the damp earth, a soft oozing sound like a human sigh, a sucking. Jesse’s eyes began to water because he could not look closely enough at everything. He had to look closely, severely. It was important. The odor of late winter was hypnotic to him: the smell of timber, of the earth, of sunlight. He came upon the thawing carcasses of small animals that had died in the winter. Their shabby, inert bodies were like cast-off articles of clothing. They were so final, so still; he found himself staring at them while the dog sniffed eagerly.
Closer to those dead animals than to the living dog
. Irritated, he chased Duke away. “Leave them alone!” he said.

He would come to a stop suddenly, not breathing. What was all that noise? The constant chatter of birds, the belligerent cries of crows. The wind. Branches came wildly to life in a sudden gust of wind, crushing against one another, tapping together. Was it a warning? What did it mean?

His body was tired from the heavy farmwork. Yet he was pleased with it—the persistent, inhuman work. He was not the same boy he had been a few months before. He had become transformed entirely.
When he went to bed not long after dark he fell asleep at once, exhausted, urgent, his body tightened until the moment at which he actually slept and was lost to himself. And so, he thought, the rest of his life would pass. Sleep, waking, work; sleep, waking, work. Jesse sleeping. Jesse waking. Jesse at work, hard at work. He would not have to think about his life because it would pass like this, one day after another, carrying him forward. When he walked he could feel the muscles hardening in his legs and thighs; it excited him to think of the inhuman growth of the muscles in him, the strange, neutral strengthening of his body, which would push him forward into his own future.

The soft, sucking noises of the earth—what did they have to tell him except that he could walk quietly through the mud, in his boots, and be free of it and of anything that tried to hold him down?

One Sunday in early April he went with the dog along the bank of the creek—the “crick”—that ran about a mile behind his grandfather’s house. The underbrush was thick on the banks and he had to force his way through. Birds flew up about him, as if to startle him. Partridges, pheasants, trying to terrify him with the noise of their flight. Across the creek he saw some boys, five or six boys. Were they his own age? He could not see how old they were. He hid, not wanting them to see him. They were hunting, probably for rabbits. Jesse hid and watched them. The day was filmy and glaring; he had to shade his eyes in order to see them. It crossed his mind that they might fire idly into the bushes and hit him.… Their voices came, indistinct and light as girls’ voices, across the distance. He wondered what they were talking about. Two dogs ran along with them. Jesse had to comfort Duke, who had begun to whimper. “Quiet. It’s all right. Nobody is going to hurt you,” Jesse murmured. He watched as the boys climbed the long high hill of the creek bank and he could almost feel the strain of their climb, the tug of their leg muscles. They were about to disappear. Jesse had an impulse to call out to them—But he said nothing. Displeased with himself, he grinned angrily, mockingly, and stood with the heels of his boots firmly in the sucking mud. He did not move.