“I am always greeted with the feeling of a too tight bow string,” I told him, “like something stretched that will snap.”
“There’s that, all right,” he said.
Smells worked their way to my senses: of old food and pots of stew; of cabbage cooking that brought ancient memories to mind; of wastes; of bodies seeping worry and despair despite my husband’s permitting the unheard-of practice of patients bathing more than once each week. Smells of cloths not cleaned, carbolic spray and calomel, of candle wax and lye, kerosene, and sometimes, as though totally unbelonging, the freshest scent of cedar from boughs hung on the walls.
That latter scent gave me the greatest sense of rest in this foreign place. It brought in the land, made this cave of bricks and pink a broader place so I did not feel closed in.
“The nurses do their best,” Thomas Crickett said to the wrinkle of my nose I did not realize had formed. “We have way too many patients for the building and not nearly enough tubs or staff. Wish we’d elect a Grahamite as governor. We’d have to put up with a platform of more vegetables, whole wheat crackers, and less meat, but regular bathing would be considered a necessity instead of the luxury our elected officials seem to think it is today. It’s an old story,” he said and sighed.
“I think less heavy food might be better, Thomas Crickett,” I told him. “The patients seem to be more active when they eat potatoes without gravy or have light vegetables or nuts instead of stew. I could show them how to make piñon stew. Maybe toast and tea for breakfast instead of always eggs and oatmeal.”
“Could be, could be. But we have budgets. And potatoes go much farther than peas for filling up grown adults, m’dear.” He patted my hand with affection and dismissal of the subject.
At Thomas Crickett’s office, we left my cloak, his hat. He tapped tobacco in his clay-lined ivory pipe and lit it, filling the room with a pungent scent, covering for the moment the less appealing smells. He ruffled through some papers on his desk, picked up one or two, and we headed down the long ward that was really just a wide hallway opening to a room flooded with sunshine, filled with patients of all shapes and sizes, all manner of missing mercies.
“Sometimes this room makes me think of a pink sunrise over the lake, full of all different kinds of birds, talking and primping and floating about.”
“It is a sobering place,” Thomas Crickett said. “So far our using this day room by both sexes has worked well, even if it’s a bit unusual. I think it helps to have some semblance of the real world, not isolate everyone into seeing only men or only women all day long.” He nodded with his head, steered me with his hand to my back in the direction. “There she is, by the window.”
My eyes found a small woman dwarfed by the ladder-back chair that held her like a duck’s egg on the edge of a ledge. She wore a calico dress that floated over her frail body like the linen I used to cover herbs to keep them from a freeze. It bunched up on the floor, burying her feet. Her hair hung in thin strings down her back like frizzed corn silk stained by ash. Small ears poked through; long fingers twitched on her lap. And while her face rained wrinkles as of an older woman, her hands were without the brown spots of age.
She appeared to be gazing out the window toward some ducks pecking on the lawn, but as we approached, I saw that the eye not covered by a patch did not seem focused.
Gratefully, the player piano just beyond her stayed silent and several patients seated with nurses doing needlework or playing checkers or looking at pictures in a magazine called Life spoke quietly. No one shouted, yet. Only a young woman dressed in a nightdress and holding a baby doll cried on the sofa between two well-dressed guests who hovered over her like the parents they probably were.
“Just sits and stares mostly, though her record indicates she had some words at one time. Supposedly connected with Bannocks. No family to speak of,” Thomas Crickett told me.
Something about the woman seemed vaguely familiar until I realized she brought back memories of Lukwsh and Wren. But more, the familiar despair of her posture, the sense of not belonging, that was what I recognized, remembered in the pit of my stomach.
Thomas Crickett talked while biting his pipe. “Records say they call her Wuzzie.”
I looked at him to see if he made some kind of joke without knowing, but his eyes spoke sincerity.
“What?” he said, removing his pipe. “Did I say something wrong?”
“It is uncommon. The name. Perhaps more familiar where she came from.”
“It’s what’s listed,” he said, pawing through his sheaf of papers, pipe returned between his teeth.
He motioned to one of the nurses who seemed to be waiting for his signal. She came to stand beside him, her blue-and-white-striped dress swishing behind her, hands folded gently in front of her white apron until she took Thomas Crickett’s papers and pipe and stepped back as crisply as the pleats pressed in the bodice of her dress.
He pulled a chair up in front of the woman called Wuzzie.
“How are we today, then?” he asked. “Interesting ducks out there, aren’t they? Do you like ducks, Mrs. Wuzzie? Busy little fellows, aren’t they? I’d like you to see her little dance,” he said to me as though she were not present. “Maybe you can make some sense of it. She seems to look right through me.”
Then to her he said, “Perhaps you’d like to walk outdoors, get a little closer to those ducks?” His voice sounded deep and gentle, his words sincere. And yet I thought of ferrets, how they pushed and probed and meddled.
“Let’s try that, shall we?” he said and stood, gently cupped his hand beneath the woman’s arm as if to lift her up.
The noise level in the room rose slightly. Words from people at the checkers table were clipped short where seconds before they had been calm. I noticed a man shuffling across the floor bump into a chair, disrupt the person seemingly asleep there, create a shout of protest. Suddenly, two women, painting, disagreed, and their voices increased in pitch until a nurse stepped forward attempting calm.
In that same instant, Wuzzie’s fingers stopped twitching, her chin lifted up so slightly yet set like stone in the profile view I had. I saw the cloth at her feet move almost like a breath exhaled and felt her tension more than saw it as Thomas Crickett closed his hand beneath her arm to gently force her to rise.
I felt her shivering inside, invaded, set to bolt and run or die from fright like a sleeping fawn stumbled upon by a hunter. I wondered if everyone in that same room could feel it, feel the tingling as if a lightning storm had entered each of us.
“Thomas Crickett,” I said to him in calmness. “It would please me to sit beside this woman for a moment before you step outside.”
“Oh? Would it? Well, certainly.” He released the woman’s arm, looked about, motioned me to the chair he had in front of her.
The room calmed. The woman settled like a sunset. I saw her fingers start to twitch again, and something in the high cheekbones, the gentle arc of her eyebrows, the clench of her lips, softened, reminded me of the life I left.
“I choose to sit beside her, not in front,” I told him, sliding the chair so I sat on her right, near the eye not patched. “Sometimes looking closely in a person’s eyes creates more challenge than intended, as with frightened animals.” I spoke to her then in Chinookan since I did not know her language, her story, or her song.
Thomas listened restless, looked around, smiled at the nurse. I focused on Wuzzie’s hands. They continued to twitch, but I saw her blink her unpatched eye, a hazy brown. I caught it shift to glance at me as she heard the jargon words. She dropped her gaze as quickly as an otter slips into the water.
“What did you tell her?” Thomas asked, his voice a whisper.
“That we can sit until she is ready to move on.”
“That could take some time,” he said, irritation allowed to simmer in his voice. “I’m not sure that’s a promise we can keep here.” Then in a lower voice, “There is a law now against speaking any of the native lan
guages.”
“A person must know you are willing to be with them where they are before they will trust you to lead them somewhere else,” I told him. “And they must hear it in words that have some meaning.” My bustle settled into the chair. “I am willing to spend the day.”
“If you start this, you’ll need to be willing to spend more than just this day,” he said in warning. Suddenly he grinned, as though some good thought had just settled in his head.
I nodded agreement, rose and moved my chair to what I believed a respectful distance from the woman.
“Could take months,” Thomas Crickett said and turned. From his nurse, he took sheaves of papers and read rapidly through them. “Don’t suppose it can hurt any, but be careful who hears you speaking her tongue.”
“Nothing else has worked,” his nurse said, speaking for the first time. “I can get her to come with me for meals and into her bed without trouble by just using a single English word or two, but that’s it. I think she hears fine.”
“All right then,” Thomas Crickett said to me. “I’ll come by later, take you away for something to eat, if you like. If you need anything, let Arlita here know. She’s new but knows her way about asylums. This is my wife,” he said by way of introduction. “A specialist in healing in her own right. I certainly don’t think she’s dangerous,” he said, looking at Wuzzie though he kissed my forehead.
He picked up his pipe and walked out. I was hopeful Arlita knew his spoken worries about being dangerous were over Wuzzie, not his wife.
“I’m just over there,” Arlita said, pointing, “playing checkers.” She stood a moment, looked at Wuzzie’s stringy hair broken by the leather strap to hold her eye patch. “That probably should be cut sometime today,” she said, and I remembered my first tubbing by Mother Sherar, the terror of the scissors.
“Hair is very … special, something private,” I said quietly.
“It’d be easier to keep clean, shorter,” Arlita said.
“Perhaps cutting could wait until she knows you better.”
Arlita considered this suggestion. “I’ve enough other things to do anyway,” she answered indirectly and swirled toward the checkers group, hands clasped again, her long skirts swishing behind her day-bustle like a bulldog following its master.
We sat in silence for a very long time, Wuzzie and I, watching ducks waddle past the windows that extended from ceiling to floor. We could feel the room cooling off as the sun eased across the sky, leaving the room in afternoon shade.
Sounds changed as patients moved about or left for a meal. Chairs scraped against the floor, feet shuffled to offices with doctors on staff. I overheard smatterings of conversations that might be heard anywhere people gathered: a steam ship, a feast, in the Umatilla House for dining, at a basket social—the voices of a kind of family chattering about the day.
“Wasn’t it ’62 that Grant replaced General Halleck?” This from a checker player with a mop of red hair.
“Nope. Had to been ’64,” answered a white-haired man whose hand shook as he reached for his checker move.
“You sure?”
“Was the year Rachel and I got married, and I said I’d got my own general, didn’t need Grant. Almost lost the wedding night war after that comment.” He chuckled.
“You sure it wasn’t ’62?” insisted the red mop man.
“Hey, I’m foolish, not forgetful.”
I wondered if perhaps I had entered some wrong place, considered why these people should be staying here at all, they behaved so reasonably, so much like travelers or guests at Sherar’s Bridge. Like Spike had been.
And then I heard a wild shout and discovered that the argument was not contained, that somehow being right about the date had created some fearfulness, some tension that took the two men talking past a conversation into argument, then outrage.
“It had to a been eighteen and sixty-two!” Red Mop shouted. “You’re always trying to trick me. Whole place trying to trick me. I won’t be used like that.” He picked up the checker table and threw it, blue and white chips scattering across the linoleum like cockroaches surprised by light.
Arlita jumped between the men and spoke in calming words to Red Mop. She put her hand behind her, palm down, to quiet Shaky Hand now agitated, shifting from foot to foot, shoulders hunched, chewing his nails then wringing his hands as he stood behind her. Other nurses ushered patients into calmer areas of the room, took away the tension that an audience could bring. A youngish doctor strode in, talked gently now to Red Mop, who lifted his hands and scowled, then charged from the solarium followed by the doctor, gone until another day.
“I’m not senile,” Shaky Hand repeated when things were quieter. “I know when Grant replaced him. I’m foolish, but I’m not forgetful. I’m foolish, but I’m not old.”
Through it all, Wuzzie never moved from her position on the chair. Her fingers never stopped their twitching.
I returned the following day to simply sit, and for several days, then weeks thereafter. She sat always in the solarium, already there when I arrived, but Arlita told me she had washed her hair, had moved twice to different chairs once the nurse had left the ward.
“I think that’s progress, Mrs. Crickett,” she announced, “don’t you?”
“Perhaps I should come earlier, see if she will walk with me from the ward. I never saw her dance.”
“Let’s try for eight, shall we? Just after breakfast?”
And so I did, and for the first time noticed how very frail, how small she was. The leather shoes they placed on her limp feet looked out of place, made Wuzzie unsteady as she moved beside me down the waxed floors of the hall.
“I have an extra pair of moccasins with me,” I told Thomas Crickett that evening. “I believe they might just fit her, though she is so small.”
My time in the large room beside this woman took me back to sitting in a winter’s wickiup listening to stories, watching, listening. I could almost hear the songs and chants, know how Coyote’s foolish ways would teach the children, wonder again how Skunk would get his scent sac back, admire the way the storytellers created the pictures in our heads, kept the parents listening, until the children laid their cheeks down and sank into restful sleep.
“Wrong season,” I told myself. “Must not think of skunks and porcupine stories when no snow is on the ground or we’ll have ourselves a blizzard.”
I wondered what fences kept her in this quiet prison, remembered what kept me in mine: fear, shame, dishonor, a sense of being neither loved nor needed, having little value. Whatever they were, we were weaving something together, she and I as we sat. We forged tools as Shard once did, tools I hoped would take these fences between us down.
In a strange and indescribable way, being there was something I was sure of, something I believed I should be doing. And so I stayed.
I sent word to the Sherar’s Bridge post office that I had been detained. I asked for Carrie, the Sherar’s niece arrived from Nicholsville, New York, to send me the folded buckskin dress from my bureau drawer. Carrie worked now at the inn and wrote with the package sent that all was well, though she reminded me that she would marry in the fall in Nicholsville and not to wait too long before returning to Sherar’s Bridge to see her off.
“I have to say, Alice,” Thomas Crickett said, “that I am a little grieved that after all the years of asking I never convinced you to stay more than a week at a time. But this one, Wuzzie, keeps you here for months. Not that I’m complaining. I should lift the woman up and spin her around for giving me time with you. Almost like a honeymoon it’s been. I’d say this Wuzzie has some power even if she isn’t choosing to use it.”
“Power over me,” I told him, smiling, “but it is my choice to stay. I am interested in her healing, in how God will take her from this statue she is, give her motion and life.”
“God is it you think will do that? I suppose you’re right, in the technical sense. But it’s you who’ve put your energy into her, your effor
ts that’ll complete the circle I think a healthy person needs, the communion of mind, body, and soul.”
“God breaks our hamartolos, then gives the healing. So we will know peace.”
“You’re becoming quite the little theologian,” he said and smiled. “Think I’ll take you to a few less lectures by Dr. Condon and a few more about fishing and food.”
“Oh, Thomas Crickett! You say the kindest things.”
He laughed then, raised his glass of wine to my tea cup in recognition, belched, a grimace like a warning taking the smile from his face.
“She has created her own world, I suspect,” said my husband over dinner one evening in 1890.
“Like she is under a spell,” I said.
“Good description. By the way, Kaiser is back after another attempt at life in Salem. Did you know that ‘Salem’ is an anglicized version of the Hebrew word for peace? Shalom. Did you know that, Alice? No? Just found that out myself. It’s a blessing word, said at the beginning and end instead of good-bye or hello. Look at all this food!” he said, delighted, the subject changed to his favorite.
Kaiser had set out platters enough to feed a family of eight, but it was just for two of us that night.
“The Wadadukas have no word for either,” I told him. “They believe life is a circle. We can always hope to meet each other again so no need to say good-bye. It is a pleasant thought.”
“Interesting,” Thomas Crickett said. “That farm has certainly paid off in good food.”
His words brought the picture of the fields and barns and gardens, sheep, pigs, and cattle that provided the asylum’s food as well as a place for hands to make a difference.
“Hard to know what will penetrate it,” he said, and I realized he returned to the subject of Wuzzie. His face looked flushed. He belched and apologized. “Same with all the catatonics, which I’d say she is. Or locked herself away from some traumatic event, most likely. I still think the prognosis is good since she hasn’t always been like this, supposedly. Good to see her walking with you outside, taking care of her personal needs. Seems like the posturing, the way she holds her fingers sometimes, it’s like her hands were dancing now that her feet don’t. The longer she remains silent, Alice, the less hopeful I am. You should know that.” He shook his head as if shaking out the subject.