‘Well, Ma, you don’t have to treat him like a two-year-old,’ said Prodd. Perhaps it was the eyes, but he was troubled again.
She pressed his hand warningly; he understood and said no more about it just then. But later in the night when he thought she was asleep, she said suddenly, ‘I do so have to treat him like a two-year-old, Prodd. Maybe even younger.’
‘How’s that?’
‘With Grace,’ she said, ‘it was like that. Not so bad, though. She was like six, when she started to get better. Dolls. When she didn’t get apple pie with the rest of us one time, she cried her heart out. It was like growing up all over again. Faster, I mean, but like travelling the same road again.’
‘You think he’s going to belike that?’
‘Isn’t he like a two-year-old?’
‘First I ever saw six foot tall.’
She snorted in half-pretended annoyance. ‘We’ll raise him up just like a child.’
He was quiet for a time. Then. ‘What’ll we call him?’
‘Not Jack,’ she said before she could stop herself.
He grunted an agreement. He didn’t know quite what to say then.
She said, ‘We’ll bide our time about that. He’s got his own name. It wouldn’t be right to put another to him. You just wait. He’ll get back to where he remembers it.’
He thought about it for a long time. He said, ‘Ma, I hope we’re doing the right thing.’ But by then she was asleep.
There were miracles.
The Prodds thought of them as achievements, as successes, but they were miracles. There was the time when Prodd found two strong hands at the other end of a piece of 12 x 12 he was snaking out of the barn. There was the time Mrs Prodd found her patient holding a ball of yarn, holding it and looking at it only because it was red. There was the time he found a full bucket by the pump and brought it inside. It was a long while, however, before he learned to work the handle.
When he had been there a year Mrs Prodd remembered and baked him a cake. Impulsively she put four candles on it. The Prodds beamed at him as he stared at the little flames, fascinated. His strange eyes caught and held hers, then Prodd’s. ‘Blow it out, son.’
Perhaps he visualized the act. Perhaps it was the result of the warmth outflowing from the couple, the wishing for him, the warmth of caring. He bent his head and blew. They laughed together and rose and came to him, and Prodd thumped his shoulder and Mrs Prodd kissed his cheek.
Something twisted inside him. His eyes rolled up until, for a moment, only the whites showed. The frozen grief he carried slumped and flooded him. This wasn’t the call, the contact, the exchange he had experienced with Evelyn. It was not even like it, except in degree. But because he could now feel to such a degree, he was aware of his loss, and he did just what he had done when first he lost it. He cried.
It was the same shrill tortured weeping that had led Prodd to him in the darkening wood a year ago. This room was too small to contain it. Mrs Prodd had never heard him make a sound before. Prodd had, that first night. It would be hard to say whether it was worse to listen to such a sound or to listen to it again.
Mrs Prodd put her arms around his head and cooed small syllables to him. Prodd balanced himself awkwardly near by, put out a hand, changed his mind, and finally retreated into a futile reiteration: ‘Aw. Aw… Aw, now.’
In its own time, the weeping stopped. Sniffling, he looked at them each in turn. Something new was in his face; it was as if the bronze mask over which his facial skin was stretched had disappeared. ‘I’m sorry,’ Prodd said. ‘Reckon we did something wrong.’
‘It wasn’t wrong,’ said his wife. ‘You’ll see.’
He got a name.
The night he cried, he discovered consciously that if he wished, he could absorb a message, a meaning, from those about him. It had happened before, but it happened as the wind happened to blow on him, as reflexively as a sneeze or a shiver. He began to hold and turn this ability, as once he had held and turned the ball of yarn. The sounds called speech still meant little to him, but he began to detect the difference between speech directed to him and that which did not concern him. He never really learned to hear speech; instead, ideas were transmitted to him directly. Ideas in themselves are formless, and it is hardly surprising that he learned very slowly to give ideas the form of speech.
‘What’s your name?’ Prodd asked him suddenly one day. They were filling the horse trough from the cistern and there was that about water running and running in the sun which tugged deeply at the idiot. Utterly absorbed, he was jolted by the question. He looked up and found his gaze locked with Prodd’s.