The Inverted Forest (6 page)

They stopped at a drive-in for lunch, and Barbara McCauley bought him, over his objection, two king-size hamburgers. She sipped a coffee and told him that several years back, when her son and his friends had played high school football, they would practice at a nearby park and then tramp right into her kitchen looking for food. She made them remove their jerseys and pads before serving them hamburgers. But what a mess and commotion they made, these sweaty, shirtless
teenage boys gathered around her kitchen table. She said she wanted to spank their butts and send them straight to the shower.

It seemed to cheer her, this story, and once they’d climbed back into the Galaxie, she had lively opinions to share on other topics: for instance, the Lawrence Welk singers and dancers, who could teach young people a lot about how to behave, and a hooded sweater she’d mail-ordered and was waiting to receive, and finally and at great length she talked about a Shetland pony she owned that was more perceptive about her moods than her husband or children or, for that matter, any person she’d ever known. By then the landscape had changed from cropland to gentle, shrub-covered hills. A half hour later Barbara was urging the car up one steep and winding incline after another, only to let it swoop down the opposite side. It was for Wyatt an unfamiliar terrain—not just steep hills but small mountains eroded and ancient-looking and separated by craggy valleys, nearly all of which contained deep hollows or clear, gurgling creeks.

Kindermann Forest was set back three miles from the highway along a well-tended gravel road, the camp’s entrance gate fronted by a bench made of split logs. Beyond the gate stood a weathered office and cottage—nothing particularly welcoming about either of these buildings. The same was true of the camp grounds, which, like the countryside in general, looked ancient and weedy. In Wyatt’s view, it was not how a summer camp should be. And yet, beyond question, it was more beautiful than anything he’d anticipated, more striking and vast and real, with stone fences and a giant meadow that shone lushly green beneath the bright midday sun. The trees were either knotted hickories or tall, bristling pines. Through a curtain of such trees he could see several large cedar cabins gray with age and weather.

When he turned to thank Barbara McCauley and climb from the car, he found her ruddy face squeezed with emotion.

“Don’t you dare thank me,” she insisted. “This drive, this time we’ve spent together, Wyatt, has been a great opportunity for me.
It’s
really
made me think.” She looked, for the time being, too overwhelmed to report on whatever conclusions she might have reached. She dropped him off with his duffel bag at the mess hall steps and sped away.

Inside the mess hall a meeting was under way. To attend he must pass through screen doors and take his place among a gathering of what could only be other newly arrived counselors. This, more than swimming, was the dread he had tried to describe to Captain Throckmorton. But perhaps it couldn’t be described. Perhaps it was Wyatt’s burden to own each second of what happened next: the slow creak of the screen door opening, the clap of it swinging shut, more than a dozen strangers turning their bright faces toward him, their gaze expectant, then startled, then troubled. And then, of course, the moment of recognition—the sizing up and the swift classification. Maybe too swift. Had Captain Throckmorton called? Had they been told in advance? Because they seemed to recognize him or at least expect his arrival.

A sturdy, middle-aged woman led the meeting. She gave Wyatt her name without any indication as to what her position might be. Linda Rucker. She flipped through a three-ring binder and, with a satisfied nod, seemed to find the proper notation. “Wyatt Huddy?” she asked.

To this Wyatt nodded. He felt keenly the purposeful way each person in the room turned their attention elsewhere.

“We’ve put you in Cabin Two.”

“Yes. All right.”

“And in a moment you’ll have a list of your campers.” She regarded him frankly. “Are we all set then?”

“Yes,” he said. “All set.” He found a bench at the rear of the hall. A paper was making its way toward him. When it arrived he found his own name and beneath it a list of campers three names long.

“I was explaining to the group, Wyatt, that at the end of the day,
after the evening activity, you’ll escort your campers back to the cabins. You’ll make sure they wash up. You’ll see that they brush their teeth and get to bed. After that you’ll be off duty and can gather in The Sanctuary with the other counselors. We expect you to be back in your cabins and asleep by midnight. Am I clear about that?”

The new counselors gave her a mild nod, which seemed enough for Linda Rucker. She then explained meal procedures and nightly cabin watch duty. While she spoke, she flipped through her clipboard of papers. “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind. It’s too much to tell you all at once. I’m afraid you’ll have to learn as you go along. The scheduling, for example, it’s always—” She stopped herself. From outside came the bray of a diesel engine. A large white bus, the first of three, appeared at the far end of the meadow and rumbled toward the mess hall. Linda Rucker squeezed shut her eyes a moment, concentrated. “For now I’m only going to insist that you remember one thing. At each meal the camp nurse, Harriet Foster, will come to your mess hall table. You will identify each camper for Harriet. If they require medications, you will make sure they take them. You will do this for every meal. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.”

The buses had drawn close, veered from the gravel lane and rolled to a halt a few yards deep in the meadow. One by one they shut down their squalling engines. In each vehicle a mob of passengers rose from their seats and thronged the aisle. The first bus threw open its door, and down climbed a truly odd-looking teacher or chaperone—a blatantly pear-shaped woman, a great ridge of fat around her waist, but a thin chest and arms and a wide, flapping, probably toothless mouth. Wyatt, who never failed to notice such irregularities, stared. What scorn she must receive from the children. Behind her was another curiosity, a very tall, lanky gentleman with a sloping forehead who limped down the bus’s landing and took a few unsteady steps across the meadow. And after him came a squat little man who wore impossibly thick glasses and whose wide eyes and
myopic gaze and thick lips were all clear markings of mental retardation, of an affliction, Down syndrome, which Wyatt happened to know by name.

Within the mess hall the new counselors began to stir and shift, and all at once, amid their anxious muttering (“They’re here already. They’re
here
!”), they rose from the benches clutching their bags.

“The first step!” Linda Rucker shouted. “Listen to me,
please.
The first step is to hurry to your assigned cabins—and, yes, I do mean
hurry.
You’ll need to choose a bed. And stow your bags away. Be quick about it. Then you’ll run back here to the meadow and
find
the campers on your list. Do you understand? Get going then. Go. Go. Go.”

At once they threw open the mess hall doors and hurried down the gravel pathway toward the cabins. Wyatt stayed behind, and when the opportunity presented itself, he approached Linda Rucker and broached his question.

“Excuse me?” he said. “Will there be children? Is it a camp for children?”

There was a clear wrinkling of concern in her otherwise patient regard. All the while she held his gaze. “It is a camp for children, Wyatt. But not the first two weeks,” Linda explained. “For the first two weeks all the campers will be handicapped adults from the state hospital.”

He could not, for the time being, sort out exactly what this meant. No children. Instead the campers would be disabled adults. Retarded adults. This, of course, was exactly what he deserved—for making a decision on a whim, for being who he was. No one would appreciate this more than the depot register clerks, Mindy and Janet. What a reaction they’d have if they were here, if they could see the retarded campers spilling off the buses.
The state hospital campers and Wyatt. Wyatt and the state hospital campers.
Across Mindy’s and Janet’s faces would bloom the richest expressions. They’d turn to one another wide-eyed, joyful.

“I didn’t know.” Wyatt said. “Adults from the state hospital. We’ll be taking care of them?” A deep crimson blush colored his face.

“That’s right. You will. Night and day. Are you all right?” Linda Rucker asked.

“I am, yes. I’m fine.” He hoisted his bag. “Thank you, Captain Rucker,” he said and pushed through the mess hall doors and out onto the open meadow, with its enormous white buses and strewn luggage and unbearable crowd.

A
retarded woman—plump, middle-aged, dressed in a gray cotton sweat suit—came to the infirmary door. She didn’t knock. Perhaps she was too timid. Instead she began twisting the doorknob back and forth, a steady and soundless turning.

Luckily, Harriet was inside and happened to look up from her work desk and notice a glimmer of light rolling along the edge of the knob. She crossed the room and pulled open the door.

A lot to take in all at once: the retarded woman, the glaring and humid afternoon and, across the gravel roadway atop a usually bare corner of the Kindermann Forest meadow, a commotion and thickening crowd and several enormous vehicles. School buses. (So it hadn’t been the Waverly Foods supply truck she’d heard minutes earlier.) Huge bundles of bed linens were being rolled out of the ends of the buses. The men and women doing the work, a dozen sweating and uniformed state hospital attendants, were, without exception, black.

Just then the woman at the door did something curious. She pulled the loose waistband of her sweatpants down to reveal a white,
fleshy patch of hip and buttock. With the other hand she held up a brown paper lunch bag for Harriet’s inspection. Inside were two bottles of insulin and a cluster of disposable syringes.

“What’s your name, honey?” Harriet asked.

No answer. The woman might have been mute as well as retarded. Most likely she’d missed her lunchtime injection and had been sent to the infirmary by one of the attendants.

Certainly, you could make such an assumption, but then again, you could be wrong. At Meadowmont Gardens Nursing Home, where Harriet had worked before coming to Kindermann Forest, a registered nurse had been passing through the dining room and chanced upon an elderly woman choking on her evening meds—three pills taken together, one the size of a small grape. The nurse helped the woman disgorge the pills into a napkin, then watched as she reswallowed them separately with a generous gulp of water. Of course later, when the woman was discovered frothing and unconscious, they realized she’d swiped the pills from her heavily sedated partner at the table. Such things happened. The trick was to never make assumptions—unless the patient was yours, in which case, it seemed, you did nothing but make assumptions.

As for the woman at the infirmary door, there wasn’t even a glint of expectation in her eyes, just the supreme patience of the institutionalized. No trouble at all for Harriet to take her by the hand and guide her to an infirmary bed, where the woman lay on her side, her sweatpants wedged down, her bare hip exposed.

“I’m just waiting to hear from your attendant,” Harriet said. “Your attendant or your nurse.”

The woman stared back without blinking. She had the least imposing gaze Harriet had ever seen.

“At least we have a cool place to wait, don’t we?” Harriet said and nodded toward the infirmary’s air conditioner, a mammoth window unit capable of sudden gasps and long manly sighs of pleasure.

The woman ran a thick tongue across her chapped lips. She let loose a sudden gusty breath.

“Only cool place in camp. I’m surprised I haven’t . . .” Harriet made herself stop. She had a hunch she was boring her patient.

On the infirmary desk was a clipboard containing one hundred and four camper health forms. For the past week Harriet had been flipping compulsively through the forms compiling lists of allergies (penicillin, nine; sulfa, eight; iodine, four; beestings, three; aspirin, one), medical conditions (cerebral palsy, thirty-nine; Down syndrome, nineteen; autism, seventeen; factor X, eight; head trauma, seven), secondary diseases (seizures, thirty-six; cardiac abnormalities, eighteen; diabetes, nine; asthma, seven; arthritis, seven; blindness, six; deafness, five; gout, four). It wearied the mind. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to concentrate.

An absurd worry, maybe, but she didn’t want to be a bore. And from this small anxiety, this trifle, she felt a much deeper wavering. Perhaps what would be demanded of her in the coming days was simply too much. Too much for Harriet. It happened of course. People overestimated their own abilities all the time.