Authors: Thomas Cater
“You found it in Vandalia?”
“I was doing a little excavating in my back yard; it’s
still intact.”
“And you don’t know what it is?”
“’Fraid not.”
When we reached the van, Dr. Cavell made a sound of
approval.
“Very nice.” he added.
“I like it,” I said, feeling once more the pride of
ownership, though not so intently.
“What did this set you back, about thirty thousand?”
“Thirty-five," I said, "not including taxes
and interest.”
He rolled his eyes and whistled softly.
“I only paid twenty-seven for my house, but that was 15
years ago,” he said.
“Times change,” I concluded.
“Indeed they do,” he replied, beginning to show some
weariness with the small talk.
Inside the van, I eased the skeletal bones from the
sheet.
“Jesus,” he hissed, and took a long hard look at the skull.
“I thought you said you found it in the ground. This thing has never been in
the ground.”
My face and the back of my neck reddened.
“I lied, but not intentionally. It was in the ground,
but it was also in a coffin, or a wooden box, a box that looks like a coffin,”
I said. “Do you know what it is?”
He looked the bones over, his eyes picking it apart a
section at a time.
“I know it’s a primate.”
I thought as much, but I was hoping for more in the
way of details. “It looks a little strange for your average primate, wouldn’t
you say?”
“There are several species of ape on this planet,” he
said. “Some are big and some are small. Who are you?” he asked.
I repeated my name and he shook my hand again as if I
were a candidate receiving some kind of award, and then he returned to the
skeleton.
“I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but I’d say this is
probably a species of baboon, maybe a mandrill. A very big mandrill, maybe a
mutant, or crossed with something else, though I don’t know what.”
“A mandrill?”
“Yeah,” he said, “It could be a very large one.”
He told me what he knew about mandrills from West
Africa, which wasn’t much.
“Mandrills are not my area of expertise; they’re
different than other baboons, bigger, and a lot more ferocious. Beautiful red
and blue faces, with color coordinated asses to match. I’m sure you’ve seen
pictures,” he said.
I was sure I had too, but couldn’t remember where or when.
“So where did you really get this thing?” he asked.
I mentioned the graveyard in the back of the house. He
shrugged away any ominous implications.
“I find nothing inconsistent in that.”
“I was having a problem with it,” I said.
“The world is full of eccentrics,” he replied. “I know
a doctor who just spent $1,500 dollars for a coffin and a brass marker to bury
his wife’s cat. I attended the animal’s funeral. He’s turned the grave into a
shrine.”
“Yes, but a baboon!” I insisted.
He smiled and turned his attention to the skeleton.
“I’ve heard stories about these things,” he said.
“Their intelligence is grossly underrated. They’ve been known to take over the
care and feeding of human infants, and they know how to ambush prey and predators.
They’re very clever animals.”
He took a skeletal arm in one hand and examined it.
“It’s in good shape; very healthy when it died. It had
excellent care. Look at the shape of these bones, and that skull!”
“You can tell that from its bones?”
“Just like everything else, Mr. Case. If you eat well,
your body shows it. This animal ate well.”
I wasn’t comfortable knowing the baboon had eaten
well, not knowing who or what it may have eaten. Nor was I willing to accept
the idea of it being a pet, especially if it were a wild one.
“Are they carnivores?” I asked.
“Look at those teeth, what do you think?”
I didn’t want to think about it.
“You said they were mean? Could it have been a pet?”
“It’s possible,” he said, “but you can domesticate
anything. They domesticate orangutans in Sumatra. We shouldn’t ignore the
possibility it may have escaped from a road show and died as a result of
climatic changes. In any case, it’s been dead a long time.”
“How long would you say?” I asked.
“Maybe 40 or 50 years; it looks like someone cleaned and
boiled the flesh from the bones.”
I believe its departure was effected -- not for the
glory of science -- but for its hide, talons, flesh and bones, or for charms and
fetishes, or so I thought.
“What’s the problem?” he asked. “You dissatisfied with
my diagnosis?”
I wanted to share the insight I’d gained with someone
unrelated to recent events. If more people were advised, their doubt or
disbelief might serve to weaken the spirits’ hold. To mention that was asking
for trouble, so I equivocated on the facts.
“I’ve been researching the life of a ‘visually
impaired’ girl who once lived in the house. The pet idea doesn’t fit.”
I told him Elinore feared something that wandered
through the house. I explained my suspicions, and what part I believed the
animal may have performed in the frightening drama.
He rubbed his chin. “This may not be important, maybe
a bit of a coincidence, but if that baboon came from West Africa, it could very
well have been a temple baboon. They are revered in Ethiopia and naturally assume
the duties of temple guards. They are also incredibly dangerous to would-be
temple robbers. On the other hand, they are completely docile toward worshipers.
They reportedly have eyesight keen enough to detect a man’s motives, to look
into the souls of men and know if they are good or evil. Some say they can see
through stone walls and their eyes never close when they sleep.”
“See through stone walls?”
Dr. Cavell nodded. “I don’t believe it, either, but
I’ve learned to keep an open mind when it comes to animals. Most of the time,
the wildest claims turn out to be true.”
He smiled again and continued.
“Wouldn’t it be strange if your young lady had managed
to acquire the first ‘seeing-eye baboon in the history of medical science?” He
said laughing.
A seeing-eye baboon? The thought had never occurred to
me. In 1922, it probably made more sense than trying to train a dog for the
job.
I wanted to laugh aloud, a seeing-eye baboon! That is all
it is. Grier was well ahead of his time. He could have outdistanced
Michelangelo given a little more time and effort.
“A seeing-eye baboon!” I shouted. “That sounds like a
real possibility.”
Dr. Cavell agreed with a nod and took pride in his suggestion.
“Now that I think about it, it is a good idea. They
are far more intelligent than dogs, strong maternal instincts, maybe more
willful and less obedient than dogs, but still, it’s possible.”
I liked the idea even though I had forgotten the other
strange manifestations I had encountered in the house.
“Dr. Cavell, I want to thank you; you’ve taken a load
off my shoulders.”
“It was bothering you that much?” he said
,
with a bit of
a Jewish accent.
“Yes, it was, it was giving me nightmares.”
“What are you going to do now?” He asked in a voice
that demanded action.
“The bones are yours if you want them, but only
temporarily. Later I want to put them back where they belong.”
“It would make a fine specimen,” he said. “I would
like to examine it a little more carefully.”
He took the skull in his hand and the skullcap fell
off.
“That’s strange,” he said. “You say this skeleton was
in a coffin?” I nodded. “Was the seal broken?”
I told him the box was intact when I found it, but
shattered when it fell over.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious to know why someone removed the skull
cap. The marks on the inside look like the work of a surgical tool.”
“Brain or eye surgery?” I asked. He squinted into the
skull cavity. “I don’t know.” He looked it over closely, appearing to sniff it
with his nose.
“Someone had to remove this, and there must have been
a good reason for it.”
I thought I knew why, but I didn’t want to think about
it. I didn’t want to destroy the seeing-eye baboon theory. I wrapped the sheet
around the skeleton and turned it over to Cavell.
“It’s all yours,” I said. “Take care of it. Now that I
know what it is, or was, I don’t want anything to happen to it.”
We carried the skeleton to the basement.
“I’ll have the department mail you a receipt,” he
said.
I scribbled my address “general delivery, Vandalia,”
and started to leave.
“Before I forget, have you ever heard of
a
Dr. Grier? He
was the superintendent at the state hospital in Vandalia about 70 years ago.”
“Does that have anything to do with your research?” He
asked.
“Some,” I replied.
He turned the name over in his mind, sensed nothing was
forthcoming and shook his head.
“Not my department. I suggest you contact Joanne
Zimmerly, the head of psychiatry, and not bad looking, either. She might be
able to help.”
C
hapter Thirty-Eight
I gathered up the sheet and left him standing alone by
the side of the skeleton. I felt a little nostalgia leaving those old bones, as
if I were leaving an old friend.
The girl at the library had unearthed three books for
me. She said it was all she could find that contained the information I needed.
I began to wonder what happened to the tons of material she had mentioned.
The books were all reference materials, one from the
West Virginia historical file: Treatment of Mental Disorders, Past and Present,
by Tyrone Massey. It was a very old book, published in the 1880s and reprinted
in the 1920s. The other book was more recent: Eye Surgery, by Leo Bell, published
in 1974, with a brief three-page history of eye surgery. She also delivered a book
on color blindness. The last book was a slim document on the early history of
the Vandalia State Hospital by Michael Snowden. It was 64 pages and contained a
number of reproduced
ancient
black and white pictures taken before and after the
wall.
I found a table where the light was good and began to
read. In the event something memorable surfaced
,
I opened my notebook.
There were several pages devoted to pictures of
superintendents and administrators, but I already had pictures of Ryder and
Grier. Most of the book was devoted to statistical information on the number of
patients committed each year, how many were released, numbers and types of
cases, kinds of treatment and the economic impact the hospital made on the
county and state, which was extensive.
Grier’s qualifications were reiterated in his one-half
page biography. He was born in southern Illinois, which came as a surprise. My
instincts would have led me to suspect some middle European city. I wondered
who Mike Snowden was and how much information he had left ignored or discarded
from that accommodating little brochure.
I was shocked to learn that eye or corneal
transplanting was a comparatively recent phenomenon. The first eye bank, established
in 1945, put Grier in a very special category. He may have impressed his peers
as a modern day Frankenstein, but what he was doing or thinking of doing was
only just technically out of his grasp, but not theoretically.
Lobotomies or trephining, I was also fascinated to
discover, had been going on for centuries. Skulls found in Central and South
American ruins bore the telltale marks of frontal brain surgery, and a branch
of medical research was trying to convince the learned community that
lobotomies were a common medical technique practiced in ancient Egypt 5,000
years ago.
Apparently, the operation outgrew its usefulness 10-15
years after its official application in the United States. The cure turned out
to be worse than the illness. Many lobotomized individuals began to manifest
more disorders after treatment than they had before treatment. Over the long
run, it made little difference in the mental health of the patient. It all came
to an abrupt halt in the 1960s.
I tried to find statistics that revealed mortality rates
or reviewed dangers implicit in the surgical procedure. The mortality rate
nationally, I discovered, was less than 3.0 percent, but at Vandalia in the
early days, it looked more like 30 percent.
Color blindness, I discovered, was still an
irresolvable mystery to the medical community. There were trichromats, who were
slightly colorblind, and dichromats who were fully colorblind and hundreds of
variations in between.
No one really knew what a dichromat saw in place of
color; only that brown was a very popular concept among them. Red often
appeared as black and many colorful things between the red to blue scale often
appeared as white
... or
ghostly
. Words refer
encing
color held little in the way of meaning.