The Inverted Forest (36 page)

For Wayne this meant rushing to St. Matthew’s Catholic Hospital for the start of his 7:30
A.M.
shift. His department was housekeeping, his assignment was wielding the large and powerful Tour Master 5200 electric floor polisher. He had plenty of time while buffing the long hospital corridors to reflect on the jail conversations he’d had
over the weekend. The boasting. The bullshit. He could review it all in his mind and scoff. Nearly every man in the holding cell had elaborate plans to start a business, to enroll in college, to run for public office. At least Wayne wasn’t trying to make himself look better in the eyes of other weekend prisoners. He was a floor polisher, for Christ’s sake. He wasn’t going to get an advanced degree or rise to the station of hospital director. It was achievement enough to hold down a steady job for a while.

Or, as it turned out, more than a while. A few years. It wasn’t so bad, really. A floor polisher’s salary was nearly twice that of a burger flipper or grocery store cashier. The benefits were good. In five years he’d saved enough for a down payment on a mobile home. He rented a grassy little lot in a trailer park. At work there was always a flood of young nurses strolling across his floors. He knew most of them by name. Over the years he dated more than a few of these nurses. Several became steady girlfriends. And even after the relationships ran their course he was on friendly enough terms with these nurses to go out for a drink or sell them a little pot now and then. It was only mildly surprising to realize he’d worked at St. Matthew’s for a decade. By then he had a strong hunch he wasn’t going to be a husband or father. That was probably for the best. He didn’t have any strong inclinations to be someone’s spouse or someone’s daddy. He liked to come home and smoke and see what was on TV. Every once in a while he’d do something stupid: get a DWI and, rather than hire a lawyer, give up his driver’s license. Stupid maybe. And a little embarrassing. What else could he do but learn to live with it? He was thirty-three years old, then thirty-five, then thirty-seven. He was the only long-term employee of St. Matthew’s who came to work each morning on the public bus. But once he arrived people seemed glad to see him.
Morning, Wayne,
they liked to say. He was a fixture at St. Matthew’s. So what if his life’s work was floor polishing? He wasn’t going to walk around feeling ashamed for doing a competent job. And the work itself wasn’t so bad. He could
grip the weighty handlebars of the Tour Master 5200 and slip away comfortably inside himself. An hour later he’d surface to find the long hospital corridor behind him gleaming in the light.

One afternoon in the chilly late winter of 2011, Wayne, on the bus ride home from work, lifted his gaze from a scavenged newspaper and studied one of his fellow passengers—an old man—sitting across the aisle. It was an odd sensation. Just to sit and look at this old man made Wayne fretful—a sharp, insinuating fretfulness. When he got home, he’d have to smoke and drink a stiff Coke and bourbon.

And then it dawned on him: the old man across the bus aisle was Mr. Stottlemeir. Terrence J. Stottlemeir. Years ago—could it be fifteen years?—at a summer camp called Kindermann Forest, Wayne had cared for Mr. Stottlemeir. He’d been Mr. Stottlemeir’s counselor, though this was a misleading term because, really, the duties he’d performed for Mr. Stottlemeir—the showering and dressing and cleaning up after a bowel movement—had been the duties of a nurse’s aide. For two mostly awful weeks Wayne had suffered in these duties: he’d been screamed at and ridiculed, slapped and cursed.

But this couldn’t be the same Mr. Stottlemeir. That Mr. Stottlemeir had, in the summer of 1996, been old and impossibly cranky. By now he’d be more than ancient. He’d be dead. Also the Terrence J. Stottlemeir whom Wayne had cared for had been completely out of his mind. He’d had an unnerving habit of ratcheting his head back and forth and opening his crooked mouth. He’d raved. He’d slapped and clawed. Just to feed Mr. Stottlemeir his meals each day they’d had to dress him in a heavily buttoned garment that resembled a straitjacket. The old man sitting now across the bus aisle from Wayne looked to be in full command of his arms and of the taut bearing of his neck and shoulders. He raised two fingers. With a delicate, pinching grip, he adjusted the bridge of his glasses. He was maybe seventy years of age, perhaps seventy-five. Now and then a potent thought seemed to break the surface of his calm expression, and he furrowed
his brow and scribbled a few letters or marks onto a writing tablet balanced on one knee. Then he lifted his pale face to the window and looked out again, thoughtfully, at the passing city blocks.

A short while later the bus stopped along Olive Road, at the Friendly Village Retirement Home, and the old man rose from his bus seat and along with a half dozen other elderly passengers filed to the front of the bus. Down the steps they went, donning mittens and scarves and treading carefully across the frozen pavement to the gated entranceway of the Friendly Village.

It was, for Wayne, an unsettling encounter, deeply so. For several days he couldn’t think of anything else. It couldn’t possibly have been Mr. Stottlemeir. And yet there was a quality to the old man’s face, a refinement, a princeliness, that couldn’t belong to anyone else. It was god damn unnerving. And the usual remedies—the smoking and watching of his favorite TV shows—did little to settle Wayne down. In the middle of the night it dawned on him: Mr. Stottlemeir hadn’t been elderly in 1996. He’d been late middle-aged—fifty-five or sixty years old.

At work Wayne talked about the encounter to anyone who’d listen: his fellow floor polishers, the kitchen staff. He talked about the man who might have been Mr. Stottlemeir to the nurses of St. Matthew’s. This turned out to be a wise tactic. Nurses knew things. They knew other nurses. For example, the nurses at St. Matthew’s knew several nurses at the Friendly Village Retirement Home. The St. Matthew’s nurses, stirred by Wayne’s distress, called the Friendly Village Retirement Home and made an inquiry.

The old man on the bus
was
Terrence J. Stottlemeir. He was seventy-two years old. He’d been a long-term resident of the state hospital in Farmington. Six years ago an eager doctor at the state hospital had tried a series of new prescription medications on Mr. Stottlemeir. The first two medicines did nothing. The third one changed everything. In a matter of days Mr. Stottlemeir went from cursing and flailing
his arms to padding along the state hospital corridors and studying, patiently, the framed prints of horse pastures and forest cottages. At the nurses’ station he made a polite request for butterscotch pudding. More impressive, he could use the toilet on his own. He could feed himself. The things he said were mostly lucid and reasonable. It was clear to his attendants that Mr. Stottlemeir no longer required the services of a locked-down institution. Still though, he had to suffer confinement in the state hospital for two more years, until a diligent caseworker was able to secure for Mr. Stottlemeir a change of status: from ward of the state to Medicaid patient. He ended up at the Friendly Village Retirement Home, a stroke of real luck, since the home was new and staffed with well-paid and conscientious nurses. The food at the Friendly Village was said to be varied and delicious. He took advantage of the home’s flower arranging and Jazzercise classes. On Fridays he went by bus with a group of other Friendly Village residents to the botanical garden to make pencil sketches of the acclaimed orchid collection.

Wayne Kesterson, of course, was amazed and grateful to receive this news. “Un-
fucking
-believable,” he kept telling the St. Matthew’s nurses. Not that he doubted the story. But he had to keep explaining it to himself in order for the truth to sink in: Mr. Stottlemeir had been idiotic and crazy for many years. Now, with the right medication, he’d come to his senses.

It was agonizing to wait for the bus after work on Friday. How awful it would be to see Mr. Stottlemeir again. But how disappointing it would be—crushing really—for Mr. Stottlemeir to be absent from the rows of passengers.

Fortunately or unfortunately, he was there, same row, same window-side bench. The seat beside him was open. Wayne took it. For a few wintry miles he could do nothing but rack his mind for an innocent observation to share. “Four more weeks of winter,” he said at last. “I’ll be glad to be done with it. How ’bout you?”

Mr. Stottlemeir tightened his regal expression. He seemed willing to acknowledge that someone had spoken to him, but for the time being he wasn’t ready to reply.

“I work at St. Matthew’s,” Wayne said, more forcefully. “I’m in with the housekeeping crew. What I do is polish the floors.”

Mr. Stottlemeir sat back a few inches in his seat. He turned his head and braved a quick glance at Wayne.

“In a hospital,” Wayne said. “The floors have to be kept clean and shiny. It reassures people. So I polish. I clean up the messes. And I show up on time each morning.”

“Yes,” Mr. Stottlemeir said. “Yes, you do.” His voice sounded raspy, unused.

“I do my work.”

Outside there were knots of people shivering within a mud-splattered bus shelter. Every time they opened their mouths plumes of foggy breath escaped them.

“I pay my taxes, too,” Wayne said. “Federal and state.”

“Good for you,” Mr. Stottlemeir said, weakly.

“But some people, they think that if you’re not a brain surgeon then you’re not worth talking to. You’re a nobody. Or worse than that. A loser. A screwup.” He waited. His hands were trembling. “They think you’re a stinking puddle of piss.”

From Mr. Stottlemeir came a slow and rather dreamy fluttering of the eyelids. He cocked his head to the side and concentrated on Wayne’s remark. “No, no,” Mr. Stottlemeir said. “They’d be wrong, if they said that. They’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?”

Something about the politeness of this attention undid Wayne. One moment he was all right, the next he was pitched forward with his mouth hanging open, his face pressed against the forward seat, long, heaving breaths—all the way to the Friendly Village and beyond.

The tract of land formerly known as Kindermann Forest Summer Camp appeared on the commercial real estate market in February 1997. It made for an altogether impressive listing: one hundred and sixteen acres (some wooded, some cleared), an access throughway to Barker Lake, a fifty-meter swimming pool and shower house, four large sleeping cabins, an expansive kitchen and dining hall, an infirmary and camp office, two single-unit sleeping cottages, a stable and wrangler’s quarters, two pavilions, five enclosed utility sheds. The price had been set at two and a half million dollars. According to the real estate agent, Schuller Kindermann preferred that the property be sold to individuals interested in operating an arts and crafts, nature, and Christian faith summer camp. He most definitely did not want the grounds and facilities turned into a commercial sports camp, of which there were already several in the Missouri Ozarks region. If necessary, he was willing to turn down offers.

For a long while there were no offers to turn down. During the summer of 1997 the camp was rented out for family reunions and company retreats. This turned out to be a wasted effort. The money collected didn’t cover the liability insurance premiums. That fall the herd of sixteen trail horses was sold off, and Reggie Boyd, who lived in the director’s cottage and watched over the property, was released from his duties. The metal gate at the entrance to Kindermann Forest was closed, wound with chain, and locked shut.

Seven years later a retired heart surgeon from Kansas City bought the grounds for five hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars. He and his wife planned to refurbish the buildings and open a Bible study camp. It never came to pass.

By the summer of 2011 the buildings had begun to rupture. Wild shrubs sprang from every clear patch of lawn or yard. The open meadow of Kindermann Forest was lost to a drove of rangy young cedar trees. Inside the woods all four cabins were now banked beneath a crushing wave of tree limbs and bushes. Thick cords of ivy
pried through the window screens into the dark inner chambers of the sleeping barracks.

At the swimming pool a lone sycamore tree had pushed its way up from one of a hundred cracks in the pool floor. It wasn’t as impossible a place for a tree as one might think: all that dampness and uncontested sunlight.

Still though, what a remarkable sight: a twelve-foot sapling rising up from the shallow end of an abandoned pool. It grew fast and wild and strange.

O
n Saturday morning she loaded into the passenger seat of her Honda Accord a handsome new piece of rollaway luggage and drove it out past the elegant brick houses of her neighborhood and onto the wide and uncrowded lanes of Kingshighway Avenue. The traffic lights shone mostly in her favor. In five minutes’ time she was rolling through a precinct of St. Louis know as The Hill, glancing now and then at the luggage belted into the seat beside her, and trailing behind a bread truck and a sprightly weekend bicyclist, past corner bars and shuttered restaurants, the bread truck and bicyclist turning right, and Harriet pushing ahead one more block and pulling up, at last, to the front security station of the Gateway Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center.