Spit Delaney's Island (9 page)

Still, right after supper she had got into her big old paint-peeling sedan
and driven over to Mrs. Wright's to try saving what was left. And the first
thing she had to do was apologize to the little scrunch for the way she had
acted back there at the well. She knew Mrs. Wright wouldn't do a thing
for anyone who didn't have good manners.

“Really, Edna,” Mrs. Wright said. “No amount of apologizing can erase
the way you talked to me.” She kept her face turned slightly to the side, to
let Mrs. Starbuck know how hurt she was. “I thought we were friends.”

“We
are
friends,” Mrs. Starbuck said. She sat in one of Mrs. Wright's
living-room chairs and felt, as she always did in this house, that she might
be getting grease from her clothes on the green embossed upholstery. “I
was under strain. Stress and strain. A person might say anything.”

“Not anything. Not anything you didn't mean.” Mrs. Wright brought a
mug of coffee, and put it on a cork mat on the stereo set beside Mrs. Star
buck. “And besides, it was your actions not your speech that need explaining. That poor calf.” When Mrs. Wright sat on the chesterfield with her
own mug of coffee her feet didn't quite reach the floor.

Mrs. Starbuck picked up her coffee but it was too hot to drink. “Emotions,” she said. “I just got carried away under all that stress and strain.”

Mrs. Wright sneered. “Emotions,” she echoed. “You better just learn to
control them. I like to have all mine right here where I want them, so I can
turn them on or off whenever I please.”

“I guess I just have more than others,” Mrs. Starbuck said, and took a
gulp of coffee that scalded the whole inside of her mouth.

“If I was you I'd be seeing a doctor, not sitting around apologizing.
That kind of behaviour is irrational.”

Mrs. Starbuck knew that Mrs. Wright used that word because she
thought she wouldn't understand it. Mrs. Wright sometimes liked to use
the English language as if it were something foreign that only she had
learned. Maybe she had got a late start in school and was constantly being
surprised at what knowledge she'd picked up. Mrs. Starbuck didn't mind.
If someone wanted to put on airs in front of her she didn't care, as long as
she wasn't expected to do the same.

The second thing she had driven over for was to talk to Mr. Wright.
She'd never spoken to any other lawyer in her life and was afraid even of
him. She didn't know what she was going to say but it was obvious that if
she was going to do something about bringing that child back down out
of the attic she would need to know some answers to a few questions about
the law. It was her own child and what she did about him was her own
business, she felt, but she also knew that the rest of the world wouldn't feel
the same way. People would start asking questions. Judges, doctors, police.
Officials would start nosing around. Before she knew it the child welfare
people would be laying charges and making all sorts of ugly noises about
what she'd done.

But Mr. Wright wasn't home. “Golfing,” Mrs. Wright said.

“What time does he get home?” Mrs. Starbuck asked.

“Oh late. It's business, really, you know. They're playing a game but at
the same time they're talking business.”

Mrs. Starbuck got up to leave. “I would've thought he'd want to stay
home once in a while and help you around the place, pull a few weeds.”

“Oh Mr. Wright isn't interested in farming,” Mrs. Wright said. “If he
was, I'd still be over there where you're living and you'd be somewhere
else.”

And now, back in the house Mrs. Wright had lived in for so many years
and would still like to live in if it weren't for her husband (Mrs. Starbuck
hadn't missed those looks that said “This place is going downhill without
me.”) Mrs. Starbuck lay on her bed, eyes closed, slipping keys around and
around on the aluminum ring. Outside, she knew, the sun was ready to
drop, like a child's hot penny, into its slot behind the blue scarred mountain. When it was darker, when the shadows had blended into one another,
then she would open her eyes.

Mrs. Starbuck was scared. She could hear, faintly, the child's whimpering two floors above her. She could hear the sharp clinking of the keys as
they fell against each other in her hand. She could hear her own breathing, shallow and quick, like the breathing of an old old man. She had been
a widow for a year now, and she didn't see how she could go on living
alone for very much longer. Not with
them
all starting to gang up on her:
police, doctors, lawyers, neighbours.

Not that Mr. Starbuck had ever been much help or comfort. He was a
mean little bastard who would just as soon hit her as put his arm around
her, but just the same he was another adult around the place to share some
of the responsibility. That was something.

She hadn't realized until he was dead that she had been sharing the
responsibility for this child with him for years. She thought up until then
that just because she pleaded with him to let the child down and because
she was as kind as she could be to the boy, that it was all his fault and none
of her own. But when he died and she went upstairs to say it's all right
now, you can come down, the child had snarled at her and refused and
would have bitten if she'd forced him. Then she knew whose fault it was.

The boy's name was Searle Starbuck. She'd hated the name but her husband insisted on calling him after a grandfather or something Back East.

“You mean Cyril,” she said.

“No. Searle. S-e-a-r-l-e.”

“That's no kind of name.”

“That's
his
name. Searle Starbuck, named after Searle Starbuck, potato
farmer and politician.”

So they put Searle Starbuck on the birth certificate and for fourteen
years she called him Richard, though never aloud. Richard Starbuck
sounded like a famous movie star or an inventor. It was a strong masculine
name and she could see him as a handsome middle-aged man making a
speech somewhere, accepting an award, tilting his head to applause.

But he had never made a speech, and never would. Nor would he ever
hear the sound of applause. Searle Edwin Starbuck had been born partly
deaf and had never learned to speak. When he was three years old and still
hadn't said anything beyond gurgling baby sounds and animal grunts, Mr.
Starbuck decided he was retarded. “Just keep him out of my sight,” he
said. “I don't want no mental case in my family.”

“Being slow is not the same as being mental,” she said.

“Just the same, I have no son until he can say my name. When he can
stand up and say ‘Roydon Tindall Starbuck, you are my father,' then I'll
call him son.”

She tried. She tried every way she knew to teach him that sentence but
all she got was tears. Even when she discovered it was his hearing and not
something in his mouth that was wrong, she still couldn't find a way of
getting him to say those words. There were days when he didn't even
want to walk, but crawled on the floor like a dog.

She discovered he liked candy. His eyes brightened and he started to
slobber whenever he saw the dish so she tried to withhold candies as a
bribe.

“No,” she said. “Not until you say it.”

He groaned and snarled, stamped his foot.

“No sir, not a single candy until you at least try.”

He growled louder and kicked the cupboard door, looking at her as if
he could cheerfully kill her.

“No. No candy until you say Daddy. Say Daddy.”

The child threw back his head and screamed. He screamed one long
steady sound that could have come from a grown man's throat; and didn't
stop, though his face was turning blue, until she put a candy into his hand.

“Here, you stupid little bastard. I hope you choke on it.”

She was so upset by the way she'd spoken to the boy that she took him
to a doctor in town while Mr. Starbuck thought she was having a tooth
filled at the dentist. The doctor, an old man with runny eyes, asked if he'd
ever had a bad fall.

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Because it's more than his ears. There might be damage.”

“Damage? What kind of damage?”

He put one of his old wrinkled hands on her shoulder and she pulled
away. “We won't know for sure until we've given some tests, of course, but
there could be brain damage.”

She never went back. The doctor was a fool and too old to know anything. And besides, if the boy was retarded or damaged what good did it
do to know about it? Mrs. Starbuck was his mother and could do more for
him than any tests of old men could do. She would teach him to say “Roydon Tindall Starbuck you are my father” and look after him all her life.

But Mr. Starbuck's relatives arrived from Back East to stay with them
for a few days. A phone call from town asking for directions to their place
gave them fifteen minutes to do something with the boy.

“Lock him in the tool shed while they're here,” Mr. Starbuck said. “You
can take food out to him and they won't ever know.”

She looked at him as if he'd gone mad. “This is your son you're talking
about, not a goat or a sheep.”

“Just do it,” he said. He had put on his best clothes for the company and
was starting to shave. “They don't even know we got a goddam kid. And
he
won't know the difference. I don't want them seeing what we got stuck
with. Give him a snort of whiskey to make him sleep. You can slip food
out to him when no one's looking. I don't want to be ashamed.”

“I won't do it,” she said. “If it's so important to you we'll both move out,
stay somewheres else until they're gone. I won't lock my baby up.”

He swung on her and raised the hand that held the razor. “Do it,” he
said, and his little red eyes flashed. “Do it.”

And when the company had left, thanking her for all she had done to
make their holiday enjoyable and congratulating him for choosing such a
thoughtful pleasant wife, he announced that the arrangements suited him
just fine and the child could stay there for ever as far as he was concerned.
When fall came and the nights started getting colder he let her bring him
into the house and put him in a back room. Whenever she protested, he
just raised his hand and looked as if he could strangle her without batting
an eye.

They had to move, because there were neighbours who remembered
seeing the boy. Mrs. Starbuck wept when she walked out of that house, a
small cedar-shaked farmhouse surrounded by apple trees, and wondered
why she didn't leave her husband, just take the child and find some place
of her own to live. Some day she would. But first she would teach him to
speak. She would bring him out into the kitchen where he was hunched
over his supper at the table like someone driving a motorcycle and she
would tell the boy to say it. “Roydon Starbuck is my father,” he would say,
and she would say—just as her husband was grinning from ear to ear with
pleasure—“But not any more” and pick the child up and take him away
from there. It was a day worth waiting for.

And while she waited, they moved seven times. Mr. Starbuck would
get it into his head that a neighbour or the paper boy or a travelling salesman had heard the boy or seen his face at the window, and they would
pack up all their furniture and rent another place. Always they moved in
at night, drove in with the headlights of the old car turned off so that no
one could see there were three of them. When they found Mrs. Wright's
farm two years ago, though, they had liked it so much that Mr. Starbuck
bought it. “We're here to stay,” he said, because it seemed ideal. Porter's
farm, the nearest place, was a quarter-mile away. Mrs. Wright's new house
was way out on the highway. And best of all, it had an attic with only one
small window they could cover up and a ladder they could take down and
hide somewhere on the second floor.

Mrs. Starbuck, now, saw her whole life as nightmare. That was the
problem, she thought. She had lived in a nightmare and didn't even have
enough damn sense to see what it was. She believed it was real and accepted it as normal. No one else would have put up with a man like Mr.
Starbuck. No one else would have got used to having her own child a prisoner in the attic.

She imagined Mrs. Wright married to Mr. Starbuck. That little terrier
would have chewed him to pieces. In a ladylike way, of course, Mrs. Wright
did everything in a proper way. But she wouldn't have let him boss her
around that way, threaten her, and lock the child up. She imagined Mr.
Starbuck telling little Mrs. Wright “Lock him in the tool shed” and nearly
laughed out loud. She didn't laugh though, because she realized it was
Mrs. Wright and not her husband that looked silly and unnatural in her
mental picture. Mrs. Wright would say “Roydon, you're being irrational.”
She would say, “I can tolerate a lot, Roydon dear, you know I'm very
broad-minded, but one thing I will not tolerate is irrationality. It just
doesn't make sense to lock a child up. I believe you are insane.”

Maybe I'm stupid, Mrs. Starbuck thought. Perhaps all her life she had
been a stupid woman and never known it. She knew she wasn't as smart
as Mrs. Wright; no lawyer could stand to be married to her for long; but
she had got as far as grade nine in school with fairly good marks before
her parents sent her out to work. The teacher had written on one of her
report cards
Edna earns good enough grades but she lacks initiative
.

That sounded like a Mrs. Wright word. Initiative. It was true too. Would
a person with one bloody ounce of initiative have taken a whole year before doing something about that boy? A whole year, logging and burning
and planting fifteen new acres just to keep out of the house, before getting
around to facing what had to be done?