He came back into the kitchen and took the receiver from her. “Wheeler,” he said into it.
“Tom Poulter, Harry,” the postmaster said. “Them letters is in.”
“Be right there,” Wheeler said and hung up.
“The letters?” his wife asked.
Wheeler nodded.
“Oh,” she murmured so that he barely heard her.
When Wheeler entered the post office twenty minutes later, Poulter slid the three letters across the counter. The sheriff picked them up.
“Switzerland,” he read the postmarks, “Sweden, Germany.”
“That’s the lot,” Poulter said, “like always. On the thirtieth of the month.”
“Can’t open them, I suppose,” Wheeler said.
“Y’know I’d say yes if I could, Harry,” Poulter answered. “But law’s law. You know that. I got t’send them back unopened. That’s the law.”
“All right.” Wheeler took out his pen and copied down the return addresses in his pad. He pushed the letters back. “Thanks.”
When he got home at four that afternoon, Cora was in the front room with Paal. There was a look of confused emotion on Paal’s face—a desire to please coupled with a frightened need to flee the disconcertion of sound. He sat beside her on the couch looking as if he were about to cry.
“Oh Paal,” she said as Wheeler entered. She put her arms around the trembling boy. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, darling.”
She saw her husband.
“What did they do to him?” she asked, unhappily.
He shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “He should have been put in school though.”
“We can’t very well put him in school when he’s like this,” she said.
“We can’t put him anywhere till we see what’s what,” Wheeler said. “I’ll write those people tonight.”
In the silence, Paal felt a sudden burst of emotion in the woman and he looked up quickly at her stricken face.
Pain. He felt it pour from her like blood from a mortal wound.
And while they ate supper in an almost silence, Paal kept sensing tragic sadness in the woman. It seemed he heard sobbing in a distant place. As the silence continued he began to get momentary flashes of remembrance in her pain-opened mind. He saw the face of another boy. Only it swirled and faded and there was his face in her thoughts. The two faces, like contesting wraiths, lay and overlay upon each other as if fighting for the dominance of her mind.
All fleeing, locked abruptly behind black doors as she said, “You have to write to them, I suppose.”
“You know I do, Cora,” Wheeler said.
Silence. Pain again. And when she tucked him into bed, he looked at her with such soft, apparent pity on his face that she turned quickly from the bed and he could feel the waves of sorrow break across his mind until her footsteps could no longer be heard. And, even then, like the faint fluttering of bird wings in the night, he felt her pitiable despair moving in the house.
—
“What are you writing?” she asked.
Wheeler looked over from his desk as midnight chimed its seventh stroke in the hall. Cora came walking across the room and set the tray down at his elbow. The steamy fragrance of freshly brewed coffee filled his nostrils as he reached for the pot.
“Just telling them the situation,” he said, “about the fire, the Nielsens dying. Asking them if they’re related to the boy or know any of his relations over there.”
“And what if his relations don’t do any better than his parents?”
“Now, Cora,” he said, pouring cream, “I thought we’d already discussed that. It’s not our business.”
She pressed pale lips together.
“A frightened child is my business,” she said angrily. “Maybe you—”
She broke off as he looked up at her patiently, no argument in his expression.
“Well,” she said, turning from him, “it’s true.”
“It’s not our business, Cora.” He didn’t see the tremor of her lips.
“So he’ll just go on not talking, I suppose! Being afraid of shadows!”
She whirled. “It’s criminal!” she cried, love and anger bursting from her in a twisted mixture.
“It’s got to be done, Cora,” he said quietly. “It’s our duty.”
“Duty.” She echoed it with an empty lifelessness in her voice.
She didn’t sleep. The liquid flutter of Harry’s snoring in her ears, she lay staring at the jump of shadows on the ceiling, a scene enacted in her mind.
A summer’s afternoon; the back doorbell ringing. Men standing on the porch, John Carpenter among them, a blanket-covered stillness weighing down his arms, a blank look on his face. In the silence, a drip of water on the sunbaked boards—slowly, unsteadily, like the beats of a dying heart. He was swimming in the lake, Miz Wheeler and—
She shuddered on the bed as she had shuddered then—numbly, mutely. The hands beside her were a crumpled whiteness, twisted by remembered anguish. All these years waiting, waiting for a child to bring life into her house again.
At breakfast she was hollow-eyed and drawn. She moved about the kitchen with a willful tread, sliding eggs and pancakes on her husband’s plate, pouring coffee, never speaking once.
Then he had kissed her goodbye and she was standing at the living room window watching him trudge down the path to the car. Long after he’d gone, staring at the three envelopes he’d stuck into the side clip of the mailbox.
When Paal came downstairs he smiled at her. She kissed his cheek, then stood behind him, wordless and watching, while he drank his orange juice. The way he sat, the way he held his glass; it was so like—
While Paal ate his cereal she went out to the mailbox and got the three letters, replacing them with three of her own—just in case her husband ever asked the mailman if he’d picked up three letters at their house that morning.
While Paal was eating his eggs, she went down into the cellar and threw the letters into the furnace. The one to Switzerland burned, then the ones to Germany and Sweden. She stirred them with a poker until the pieces broke and disappeared like black confetti in the flames.
Weeks passed: and, with every day, the service of his mind grew weaker.
“Paal, dear, don’t you understand?” The patient, loving voice of the woman he needed but feared. “Won’t you say it once for me? Just for me? Paal?”
He knew there was only love in her but sound would destroy him. It would chain his thoughts—like putting shackles on the wind.
“Would you like to go to school, Paal? Would you? School?”
Her face a mask of worried devotion.
“Try to talk, Paal. Just try.”
He fought it off with mounting fear. Silence would bring him scraps of meaning from her mind. Then sound returned and grossed each meaning with unwieldy flesh. Meanings joined with sounds. The links formed quickly, frighteningly. He struggled against them. Sounds could cover fragile, darting symbols with a hideous, restraining dough, dough that would be baked in ovens of articulation, then chopped into the stunted lengths of words.
Afraid of the woman, yet wanting to be near the warmth of her, protected by her arms. Like a pendulum he swung from dread to need and back to dread again.
And still the sounds kept shearing at his mind.
—
“We can’t wait any longer to hear from them,” Harry said. “He’ll have to go to school, that’s all.”
“No,” she said.
He put down his newspaper and looked across the living room at her. She kept her eyes on the movements of her knitting needles.
“What do you mean, no?” he asked, irritably. “Every time I mention school you say no. Why shouldn’t he go to school?”
The needles stopped and were lowered to her lap. Cora stared at th
em.
“I don’t know,” she said, “it’s just that—” A sigh emptied from her. “I don’t know,” she said.
“He’ll start on Monday,” Harry said.
“But he’s frightened,” she said.
“Sure he’s frightened. You’d be frightened too if you couldn’t talk and everybody around you was talking. He needs education, that’s all.”
“But he’s not ignorant, Harry. I—I swear he understands me sometimes. Without talking.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But—well, the Nielsens weren’t stupid people. They wouldn’t just refuse to teach him.”
“Well, whatever they taught him,” Harry said, picking up his paper, “it sure doesn’t show.”
When they asked Miss Edna Frank over that afternoon to meet the boy she was determined to be impartial.
That Paal Nielsen had been reared in miserable fashion was beyond cavil, but the maiden teacher had decided not to allow the knowledge to affect her attitude. The boy needed understanding. The cruel mistreatment of his parents had to be undone and Miss Frank had elected herself to the office.
Striding with a resolute quickness down German Corners’ main artery, she recalled that scene in the Nielsen house when she and Sheriff Wheeler had tried to persuade them to enter Paal in school.
And such a smugness in their faces, thought Miss Frank, remembering. Such a polite disdain. We do not wish our boy in school, she heard Professor Nielsen’s words again. Just like that, Miss Frank recalled. Arrogant as you please. We do not wish—Disgusting attitude.
Well, at least the boy was out of it now. The fire was probably the blessing of his life, she thought.
“We wrote to them four, five weeks ago,” the sheriff explained, “and we haven’t gotten an answer yet. We can’t just let the boy go on the way he is. He needs schooling.”
“He most certainly does,” agreed Miss Frank, her pale features drawn into their usual sum of unyielding dogmatism. There was a wisp of mustache on her upper lip, her chin came almost to a point. On Halloween the children of German Corners watched the sky above her house.
“He’s very shy,” Cora said, sensing that harshness in the middle-aged teacher. “He’ll be terribly frightened. He’ll need a lot of understanding.”
“He shall receive it,” Miss Frank declared. “But let’s see the boy.”
Cora led Paal down the steps speaking to him softly. “Don’t be afraid, darling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Paal entered the room and looked into the eyes of Miss Edna Frank.
Only Cora felt the stiffening of his body—as though, instead of the gaunt virgin, he had looked into the petrifying gaze of the Medusa. Miss Frank and the sheriff did not catch the flare of iris in his bright, green eyes, the minute twitching at one corner of his mouth. None of them could sense the leap of panic in his mind.
Miss Frank sat smiling, holding out her hand.
“Come here, child,” she said and, for a moment, the gates slammed shut and hid away the writhing shimmer.
“Come on, darling,” Cora said, “Miss Frank is here to help you.” She led him forward, feeling beneath her fingers the shuddering of terror in him.
Silence again. And, in the moment of it, Paal felt as though he were walking into a century-sealed tomb. Dead winds gushed out upon him, creatures of frustration slithered on his heart, strange flying jealousies and hates rushed by—all obscured by clouds of twisted memory. It was the purgatory that his father had pictured to him once in telling him of myth and legend. This was no legend though.
Her touch was cool and dry. Dark wrenching terrors ran down her veins and poured into him. Inaudibly, the fragment of a scream tightened his throat. Their eyes met again and Paal saw that, for a second, the woman seemed to know that he was looking at her brain.
Then she spoke and he was free again, limp and staring.
“I think we’ll get along just fine,” she said.
—
Maelstrom!
He lurched back on his heels and fell against the sheriff’s wife.
All the way across the grounds, it had been growing, growing—as if he were a Geiger counter moving towards some fantastic pulsing strata of atomic force. Closer, yet closer, the delicate controls within him stirring, glowing, trembling, reacting with increasing violence to the nearness of power. Even though his sensitivity had been weakened by over three months of sound he felt this now, strongly. As though he walked into a center of vitality.
It was the young.
Then the door opened, the voices stopped, and all of it rushed through him like a vast, electric current—all wild and unharnessed. He clung to her, fingers rigid in her skirt, eyes widened, quick breaths falling from his parted lips. His gaze moved shakily across the rows of staring children faces and waves of distorted energies kept bounding out from them in a snarled, uncontrolled network.
Miss Frank scraped back her chair, stepped down from her six-inch eminence and started down the aisle towards them.
“Good morning,” she said, crisply. “We’re just about to start our classes for the day.”
“I—do hope everything will be all right,” Cora said. She glanced down. Paal was looking at the class through a welling haze of tears. “Oh, Paal.” She leaned over and ran her fingers through his blond hair, a worried look on her face. “Paal, don’t be afraid, dear,” she whispered.
He looked at her blankly.
“Darling, there’s nothing to be—”
“Now just you leave him here,” Miss Frank broke in, putting her hand on Paal’s shoulder. She ignored the shudder that rippled through him. “He’ll be right at home in no time, Mrs. Wheeler. But you’ve got to leave him by himself.”
“Oh, but—” Cora started.
“No, believe me, it’s the only way,” Miss Frank insisted. “As long as you stay he’ll be upset. Believe me. I’ve seen such things before.”
At first he wouldn’t let go of Cora but clung to her as the one familiar thing in this whirlpool of frightening newness. It was only when Miss Frank’s hard, thin hands held him back that Cora backed off slowly, anxiously, closing the door and cutting off from Paal the sight of her soft pity.
He stood there trembling, incapable of uttering a single word to ask for help. Confused, his mind sent out tenuous shoots of communication but in the undisciplined tangle they were broken off and lost. He drew back quickly and tried, in vain, to cut himself off. All he could manage to do was let the torrent of needling thoughts continue unopposed until they had become a numbing, meaningless surge.
“Now, Paal,” he heard Miss Frank’s voice and looked up gingerly at her. The hand drew him from the door. “Come along.”
He didn’t understand the words but the brittle sound of them was clear enough, the flow of irrational animosity from her was unmistakable. He stumbled along at her side, threading a thin path of consciousness through the living undergrowth of young, untrained minds; the strange admixture of them with their retention of born sensitivity overlaid with the dulling coat of formal inculcation.
She brought him to the front of the room and stood him there, his chest laboring for breath as if the feelings around him were hands pushing and constraining on his body.
“This is Paal Nielsen, class,” Miss Frank announced, and sound drew a momentary blade across the stunted weave of thoughts. “We’re going to have to be very patient with him. You see his mother and father never taught him how to talk.”
She looked down at him as a prosecuting lawyer might gaze upon exhibit A.
“He can’t understand a word of English,” she said.
Silence a moment, writhing. Miss Frank tightened her grip on his shoulder.
“Well, we’ll help him learn, won’t we, class?”
Faint mutterings arose from them; one thin, piping. “Yes, Miss
Frank.”
“Now, Paal,” she said. He didn’t turn. She shook his shoulder. “Paal,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Can you say your name?” she asked. “Paal? Paal Nielsen? Go ahead. Say your name.”
Her fingers drew in like talons.
“Say it. Paal. Pa-al.”
He sobbed. Miss Frank released her hand.
“You’ll learn,” she said calmly.
It was not encouragement.
—
He sat in the middle of it like hooked bait in a current that swirled with devouring mouths, mouths from which endlessly came mind-deadening sounds.
“This is a boat. A boat sails on the water. The men who live on the boat are called sailors.”
And, in the primer, the words about the boat printed under a picture of one.
Paal remembered a picture his father had shown him once. It had been a picture of a boat too; but his father had not spoken futile words about the boat. His father had created about the picture every sight and sound heir to it. Great blue rising swells of tide. Gray-green mountain waves, their white tops lashing. Storm winds whistling through the rigging of a bucking, surging, shuddering vessel. The quiet majesty of an ocean sunset, joining, with a scarlet seal, sea and sky.
“This is a farm. Men grow food on the farm. The men who grow food are called farmers.”
Words. Empty, with no power to convey the moist, warm feel of earth. The sound of grain fields rustling in the wind like golden seas. The sight of sun setting on a red barn wall. The smell of soft lea winds carrying, from afar, the delicate clank of cowbells.
“This is a forest. A forest is made of trees.”
No sense of presence in those black, dogmatic symbols whether sounded or looked upon. No sound of winds rushing like eternal rivers through the high green canopies. No smell of pine and birch, oak and maple and hemlock. No feel of treading on the century-thick carpet of leafy forest floors.
Words. Blunt, sawed-off lengths of hemmed-in meaning; incapable of evocation, of expansion. Black figures on white. This is a cat. This is a dog. Cat, dog. This is a man. This is a woman. Man, woman. Car. Horse. Tree. Desk. Children. Each word a trap, stalking his mind. A snare set to enclose fluid and unbounded comprehension.