“Help! Mom!” It came as a raw cry. “I don’t know where I am.” All sounds and movement in the kitchen stopped instantly. Terror in Hap’s voice funneled through the hallway. “I don’t know where the kitchen is. It’s dark.” He stumbled down the hall, scraping his shoulder along the wall, his hands groping out in front of him.
Faith gasped. Forrie’s fork clattered on his plate. Forrest’s hand shot out and grabbed Jean’s forearm, as if to forestall her reaction. Time stopped for a moment of utter blackness, shared.
A moment only, then Jean mobilized. She called Franny to be with the other children while she, Forrest and Mother Holly took Hap to San Diego. Most of the day, Hap was stunned. He answered questions, cried, then answered more questions, and constantly held onto Jean’s hand. When she drew it away once to get a handkerchief from her purse, he grabbed for her. Even when they came home, Hap still didn’t seem to understand. “It’s still dark,” he cried.
The truth hit Forrie first. He fled the house and ran across the gravel breezeway to his separate room. Jean heard the headboard bang against the wall when he flung himself on his bed. His bawling triggered others and one by one their shock turned to wails. Forrest would have to comfort them. She had Hap to attend to.
She told everyone to go to bed early that night. She had no energy for tucking-in. Except for Hap, they’d have to do it themselves. After he fell asleep under her touch, she wandered from room to room, her mind a kaleidoscope of sharp, painful images. Hap tomorrow. Hap next week. Hap as a young man. Her life again. She picked her way out to the Chinese elm, walking in a daze, her throat choked tight, her eyes burning. She plopped herself in one of the swing seats and wept, trying to be quiet, her fingers cramped around the swing chain.
She had already paid, she told herself. It wasn’t fair.
What made her think that they could do it all? Why, after all, was she so special that the manager of the universe would grant her not one or two or even three normal, perfect children, but four? They had gambled too much. Like a tightrope walker overconfident, she had set her line too high.
How would she tell Mother? How could she? She remembered Mother’s calm acceptance the day Dr. Wheeler told Mother and Father by her bedside that nothing more could be done. “Well, we’ll just go on,” Mother had said. If Mother had felt any outrage at the cruelty of Jean’s own loss, she kept it to herself. She didn’t remember Mother being a blubbering fountain of emotionalism.
Then she mustn’t be either.
But it was too much, too much to ask of her. She knew. Better than Mother had known, she knew what this would mean for Hap—isolation, confusion, frustration, an anger which always had to be held in check, and always the question, What can I do? Mother hadn’t known that, still didn’t know it. No wonder Mother could be calm. She didn’t want to know.
Growing up, she had always submitted so easily—to teachers, to Father, even to blindness. Only recently had she felt strong enough to stand up to things, but how could she stand up to the universe? How could she do anything but submit to this? She sank into a hump on the swing.
Crickets, always there were crickets by the swings. Their urgent chirp penetrated her thoughts, and for a moment she listened absently to their syncopated melody. Occasionally, they left an unusually long pause, their note suspended. Each time she thought they had forgotten to chirp, they resumed their uneven rhythm. Usually she loved cricket sounds, but now their irregularity irritated her. It was jangling. Why couldn’t it just stop? The continuity hurt.
So that was to be the way. Another person in the world who must walk by faith, not by sight. Another person whose vision must develop alternatively. Another person for whom just living is an achievement.
Suppose that all this time—through her years with Miss Weaver and her inexorable “of course you can,” through finding her voice at The Seeing Eye, and through each battle to stuff food down a child’s mouth—suppose she was being led to this, to Hap. Yes, that was it. All that for the real test, the life out of hers. Hap’s.
Hap would have to enter their own queer shapeless world. He’d have to learn as they had. She gripped the swing chain fiercely and held tight to Miss Weaver’s principle that life wouldn’t give people what they couldn’t handle. Maybe as our capacity for endurance grows, she thought, it is no longer endurance, but just plain life. She wiped her eyes on her skirt and stretched her shoulders back. Her mouth tasted sour. Forrest was somewhere, maybe out with the horses, working through his despair in his own way. Tonight, she thought, he’s got to hold me until I fall asleep.
She took a long, slow breath. Hesitant footsteps came from the direction of the barn. “Jeanie, are you out here?” He nearly choked when he spoke.
“Yes.”
He came closer. “Are you okay?” His voice was hollow, hardly sounding like him.
“Yes,” she said, but it wasn’t true. She couldn’t say anything else when she knew Forrest felt things, even small things, so intensely. Forrest’s highs were always higher than hers, and his lows lower. Despite her own black pain, she felt a need to soften his. She felt older. Stronger. Older than this tree she smelled, this town, older even than words was some impulse that makes woman want to shelter her man.
“We’ll work it out together,” she said. “With God and with Hap.”
“Yes.” Uncertainty quavered in his voice thin as a thread. She felt him reaching for her, and she stood up and put her hands on both sides of his head.
“We know what it’s like. So we know what he has to do,” she said. “He has us. And he has God. And we can teach and trust.”
“You’re right.” The words barely came. “We can. We can.”
She brought his head down onto her shoulder. She wanted to articulate what he couldn’t, what needed to be said. “God is still good. We’ve got to know it.”
After a moment he nodded, his face buried. They stood by the elm for a long time holding each other, exchanging need for strength by their touch until Jean took him by the hand and they walked back slowly into the house.
Chapter Thirty-six
“Mommy, Mommy!” The panic in Hap’s voice knifed through her. “I don’t know how to get in.” He had gotten outside the three-foot adobe wall surrounding the patio. Though Jean tried to stay right with him for the first few days, he had wandered away when she answered the phone. “I can’t find the way in,” he called, his voice tremulous.
Inside, Jean came to the doorway. “Yes, you can.” She tried to sound calm. “Your father and I found the way in. You can, too.” She kept talking to him, knowing her voice would be his only anchor in a swimming world.
His first days passed in the confusion she expected. “I don’t know where I am,” he whined continually. It was because he tried to do things the same way he always had. He forgot where he set down his toys and lost them, then became angry.
Jean understood. She tried to give him what she knew he needed, moment-by-moment instruction so the frustrations wouldn’t swallow him. “Creep up on your milk glass like you’re creeping up on a bug,” she said. It was a skill he needed immediately. Wiping up his spilled milk was, at best, guesswork. Jean fought against inadequacy all over again.
There were some things she knew she couldn’t do. She couldn’t teach him how to cut his meat. Mother Holly or Faith or cousin Lancey would have to do that. At every meal he needed a sighted person to guide his hand to the food, to get him sensitive to the weight of food on his fork, to tell him when his fork was level and when it wasn’t. Soup was one of those things no one can teach. He’d have to learn how to eat it himself, eventually. She just wouldn’t make soup for a long time. She couldn’t tell him his mashed potatoes were at six o’clock on his plate and his peas at nine because he couldn’t tell time. Before he learned that in first grade, he had probably lost sight of the clock on the schoolroom wall.
Jean drew a clock on his hand with her fingers. “Twelve is at the top. To the right we start at one and then two.” She traced the hours around the circle of his palm. Then she did it again. It was tedious and he became fidgety. She touched his hand to a plate. “Pretend this plate is a clock. There’s nothing on it. Point with a finger.” She guided his chubby index finger in a circle, stopping at each hour. Then she put his hand in the middle of the plate. “Point to twelve o’clock,” she said. After a moment she felt for his hand. The method wasn’t very accurate, but they had to start somewhere.
Then there was the problem of keeping track of his things. Once she heard him wailing in his bedroom. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I can’t find my shoes.”
“Where did you take them off?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Look in the closet first. Feel around on the floor.”
“I did already.”
“Did you look by the bed?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you kicked them under the bed. Look there.”
He did. They both did, padding around on hands and knees, bumping into each other.
“Did you have them on when you went to the bathroom before you went to bed?”
“Can’t remember.”
She understood. So many times she’d forgotten, too, before she had developed a system. “Well, honey, you have to learn to remember where you take them off. And always put your socks in them, too. It’s more important now to wear shoes all the time.” She reached for him, bent down and kissed his tousled hair.
Yes, she could tell him these things, but it was only talk until he learned for himself. The lessons all came in a rush of immediacy. He needed his clothes now. He needed to eat now. He needed to walk now. And, like any seven year old boy, he needed to play.
“There’s nothing to do,” he grumbled one day.
So many of the things he used to do were impossible now—riding freely all around the ranch, drawing, flying his airplanes. Instead, he spent time in Billy’s room playing his drum set until one day his too-enthusiastic lead foot sent the plunger right through the bass drum. That had been her suggestion, and was good while it lasted, but every day she had to think of a new one.
“What can I do?” He was insistent.
She thought of Forrie’s electric train set. It made great engine sounds. “You could probably play with Forrie’s train. I think he’d let you if you were careful.” It was in Forrie’s room, attached to the garage and separated from the house by the breezeway, nearly fifteen feet across the gravel. That would mean another challenge. She heard the screen door close.
“Forrie, where are you?” Hap called.
“Inside. Just come,” Forrie said. Echoing the attitude he’d heard, he added, “Mom and Dad can find the way here. You can find it, too.”
Good for him, Jean thought. A flood of love welled up for this son whose childhood was tempered by premature responsibility. She heard the train going around the track, but she didn’t hear shoes crunching on the gravel. Maybe Hap hadn’t started yet. It seemed a long time. Then she heard him bump into the wood pile too far to the left. Pieces slid down. “Ow,” he wailed. “Dumb logs.” She forgot to ask him if he had shoes on. He’d just have to learn.
“You made it!” Forrie said seconds later, the pride in his voice swelling Jean’s heart.
“Yeah.”
During the first weeks, Mother Holly did a lot of the cooking to give Jean time to instruct Hap. But Betty was a savior. Life had always been good like that, providing someone just when she needed help. Lucy. Lorraine. Celerina. Even in the hard times, life had a continuity of good to sustain her. She couldn’t forget that.
Betty took slow walks with Hap, first along the roads on the Holly property, then more broadly, and reported back to Jean how Hap was doing. Once Jean went with them to Heddy and Karl’s, the three walking hand in hand with Hap in the middle.
“The road’s a little wet right here,” Betty said. “Can you hear it?”
“Nope.”
“Walk backwards a few steps. Can you hear the difference?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and learned something new.
“Can you feel the road go uphill?” Jean asked.
“Yeah.” They passed into a cooler area. “Where are we now? What trees are making the shade?” he asked.
“No trees. It’s the water tower,” Betty explained. “But there are some trees up ahead. Tell me when you think we’re there.” Betty made it a game in a way Jean couldn’t always do, not just because she couldn’t see to do some things, but because she was weary with it. She had lived with it herself long enough. They walked into the sun again and, after a while, they entered shade.
“Here they are,” he said. “What kind are they?”
“Hmm, I’m not sure, Hap. Some kind of piney tree with needles nearly as long as your fingers.”
“Can’t you smell them?” Jean asked. “It reminds me of New England.”
Betty walked him over to the tree trunks and had him feel the bark. She was so good with him. She taught him poems and songs, and described what particular birds looked like when they heard them. It occurred to Jean that she leaned on Betty to make the world beautiful for Hap in the same way she’d leaned on Icy. Her grief about Icy’s death had dulled now. The sharp wince whenever she thought of her had been replaced by a wistful recollection of carefree days. She wondered if she could ever reach that point with Hap.
She knew he must be full of feelings for which he didn’t have words. His questions were usually “What’s happening?” or “Where am I?” And still, he seemed basically happy. Was it that a very young child can adjust more easily, she wondered, because he doesn’t know the future? Every day when she heard the killdeer and meadowlark whose songs penetrated right to her bones, she tried to convince herself that the same birds she heard sang for Hap as well. A person with perfect vision may not see life at all. She knew this to be true, but that didn’t take the pain away.
After the shock lessened, the children became almost too casual around Hap. They went on with their play, because, what else was there to do? The final weeks of summer brought a pressure to squeeze in whatever play they could. Billy drifted in the shadows, probably watching one more, now, who couldn’t reach him. Faith listened to Rickie Nelson and covered her bedroom walls with posters. She and Jean still tussled over her messy room and her clothes and laundry excesses until Jean decided that it was time Faith did her own laundry. It resolved some of the tension. Forrie discarded his homemade toy banjo for a real guitar, expanded his train operation and raised three bantam chickens. When one hatched a baby chick, Forrie kept it in a carton in his bathroom.