St Eubrie: The Wild Child (635 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 14 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by <interloper> (View user info) at 2006-08-20 23:49:44 EDT
They said it was Momma who civilized him, but that's not true. Momma taught him how to talk, momma taught him how to eat with a fork and say 'thank you', but ain't nobody ever civilized that boy, and ain't nobody ever will.
I was sixteen years old when we found him. It was late August and the days of summer had started their quiet retreat, Momma was washing dishes while me and Bobby fought imaginary indians and ran around the little house while trying not to wake up Grandma. I remembered that Momma's hands suddenly stopped moving, and then she put a soapy dish down on the counter and started squinting through the dirty window in the backyard. "Randy, come here!" she ordered, and Pa came grumbling off the couch.
"There's a boy in the backyard."
Pa muttered something about the great horned owl that's been living in the Redcrown woods for as long as anyone could remember, but Momma dismissed it with a wave of her calloused hand.
"'Ain't no owl," she harrumphed, "look."
And then I remember Pa leaned over and wiped the grimy pane with his sleeve, squinting into the evening shadows. Then he stood up real straight and was quiet for a few seconds.
"Cal, come with me," he said, and I followed him out to the backyard.
Now we lived right on the edge of St. Eubrie's municipal limits, right where the Redcrown woods start getting dark and deep. We had the last house on the street, with the Wallaces, the Taylors, and the rest of the block all to the north. To the south, where Momma's soapy finger beckoned, was nothing but the ominous darkness of Redcrown's open maw. We walked out towards the woods, and as we passed the halfway distance to the trees, I saw him.
He was sitting on his haunches, hands on the ground between his legs like a wolf. Black, dirty hair fell to his shoulders, where a tattered shirt did its best to cover his chest. Somewhere near his waist the shirt turned into something resembling pants, equally shredded and torn.
But the strange thing was his face, completely impassive as his head turned to follow our trek across the yard. He stared at us blankly with two glassy black eyes, like a dog, as we walked right up to him.
We stopped about ten feet away, and Pa turned around to look at Momma, who stood silhouetted in the doorway, hands impatiently on her hips. I heard him sigh, and then he turned back to the boy.
The boy remained both silent and motionless as Pa tried to talk to him. Eventually he gave up and we tried to motion him back towards the house, but that produced similar results. Only when Pa threw up his hands in desperation and sent me back to fetch some bread did the boy move to follow me, and we were able to get him back to the house.
It took a few minutes to get him through the door, and when we finally closed it behind him we saw a nervous light in his eyes, and looking back I now know how dangerous it must have been for us, but he looked barely fourteen and we never considered the possibilities.
Once he was inside he was in Momma's domain, and she towered over him immediately. He had the high cheekbones, dark eyes, and smooth skin of a Chinaman, and Momma said he was probably from the migrant workers who've wandered the area ever since they built the railroads long ago.
Pa returned tiredly to the couch, and Bobby and I watched cautiously as Momma mothered over the boy. By the end of the night she'd managed to feed him, give him a bath, and accept that he couldn't understand a word we said.
Strangely, though, it was Grandma who gave him a name. We'd long known she was dying, and often she woke up to hallucinations and fever dreams, shouting at things nobody else could see. She woke up during the ruckus of the evening and took one look at the boy, then called out to him. "Michael," she said, of all things. Michael the archangel. Then she muttered something about casting down Satan. We nervously laughed it off, but the name stuck.
* * *
That first night was strange. Momma made Bobby sleep in her room while Pa and I slept in the other room with the boy. She'd dressed him in Bobby's clothes, which were at least double his size and hung off him like robes on a priest. She'd coaxed him onto the bed, which startled him when his feet sunk into it, and tried to leave him there. He'd tried to follow her out when she left, but after three tries she got him to stay.
Now I wasn't raised to talk like this, but if there was ever a man I had hoped would die a horrible death it was our neighbor, Earl Wallace. The bastard came home from the Dirty Habit drunk every night, which is why his wife left him, and threw things around his house until he passed out at some ungodly hour. If his fifteen year old daughter was around, which she always was, we'd hear sobbing and shrieking and see some new bruises on her the next morning at school. This was years ago, before the schools and the police mostly put a stop to that sort of thing. Besides, Earl Wallace was a hulking brute of a man, and nobody would stand up to him, not even my Pa before the cancer left him weak as a kitten. The rumor was that he sexually molested her, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was true.
But that's not the point. The point is that right after we put out the lights, Earl Wallace came home next door. The barely audible shrieking and sobbing began, and instantly the wild boy jumps up and his eyes go clear like it's happening right in the hallway.
Then he makes the first sound we ever hear from him, a low vicious snarl, and Pa sits up so fast the blanket falls off his bed. In the dark I see his eyes shoot to me, then back to the boy, and we watch as the boy snarls at the window. This goes on for three hours, until Earl Wallace presumably passes out and the snarling stops.
When we woke up the next morning the boy was still sitting on his haunches, staring out the window.
* * *
It took Momma two months to get him to sit in a chair. She made us start calling him 'Mikey' from the second day, so that he'd get used to it and realize it was his name. She started teaching him words almost immediately, and even though he was a fast learner, it was awkward and slow.
At the dinner table he would watch us intently. Hell, no matter what we did he would watch us, with those quiet eyes and that blank face, usually sitting on his haunches in the corner. And when he thought we weren't watching he would try and act like us, whether it was rising on two shaky legs or cautiously poking at a fork. Occationally he would try to mimic the sounds we made, and 'may-kee' was the first word he ever said.
Bobby and I taught him hide-and-go seek, but gave up because he would always find us. We realized early on that he always knew where everyone was in the house, and probably the whole street. He always seemed to know when a deer went into the backyard or when one of the neigbors' cars was coming down the street. I remember a bird flew into the house once and he came running out of the bedroom on all fours, then leapt up and snatched it out of the air and killed it. Momma yelled at him 'till he cowered in the corner.
Even as Momma got him to stop putting his face in the plate at dinner and walk upright like a person, some things didn't change. Every night he'd sit up and growl at the window while Earl Wallace beat his daughter next door. And every morning we'd find him still awake, staring at the window until Wallace left for work.
* * *
One year after we found him, Mikey could talk (although he often chose not to), and act like any normal boy his age. Grandma had died in the spring and Mikey started living on the couch in her place, so we didn't know if he was still sitting up at night. Momma decided it was time for him to start going to school, and made Pa and me take him to the doctor beforehand. So as Pa and I were leading him to the worn Chevy sitting in the driveway, Mikey saw Mae Wallace for the very first time... I think it was the first time he'd ever seen a girl his age, but whatever the case, he stopped and stared. Mae was a delicate little blond thing with pale white skin spotted with purple bruises, and for her entire trip down the driveway to the curb and back again, Mikey dropped to his haunches and watched.
Pa immediately pulled him back to his feet by the collar, lest Momma see him and whup the both of them, and we ushered him the rest of the way to the car.
Mikey started school that year with the rest of us, and the other kids were surprised to see a new face. For the most part they treated him with cautious indifference, keeping their distance. A few of them singled him out at first, but it stopped almost immediately after one of them appeard with a broken jaw and some nasty lacerations. Nobody was certain what happened because neither he nor Mikey said anything to anyone, but nobody saw the kid fall off the swing and the rumor was that he'd taken a swing at Mikey.
* * *
The last time anyone saw Mikey was on Independance Day the following year, right before I turned eighteen.
The street had thrown a block party for the Fourth, and as the adults all sat around drinking beer and eating burgers everyone started to watch big Earl Wallace with trepidation. Each beer brought him closer to the drunken rage usually reserved for eight hours closer to midnight, and the grown ups started looking at each other as if to ask who's idiodic idea the beer had been in the first place.
Finally it happened. When, at his crude request, Mae Wallace brought her father another beer only to find that it wasn't of the proper temperature, Earl Wallace wound up and slapped her across the face. After Mae's feet had left the ground, but well before her body had returned to it, Mikey was flying over the picnic table that separated him from the six-foot-four, two hundred and sixty pound Wallace.
Now I'm not making this up, and you can ask anyone who was there, because the truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. Mikey, the hundred-and-twenty pound wild child, leapt off the table to where the giant Wallace was sitting in a lawn chair by the street, and just about flew over his head.
I say "just about" because as he went by the man's face he somehow put his fingers in big Earl's mouth and grabbed his cheek. There was a sound I won't describe as the meat was pulled away from Wallace's jaw and the man's head snapped back and to the side as the whole chair topped over.
And as if being pulled to the ground by his cheek wasn't enough, Mikey refused to let go. Instead, he dragged the stunned Wallace an extra three feet to the asphalt, lifted his head (still by the cheek), and slammed it into the street. Then again, and then once more.
By this time the adults were gathered around, but nobody was moving to stop him. I remember pushing through them to see Mikey sitting on his haunches, right next to the head of the limply moving Earl Wallace. And I remember seeing Mikey lift his little hand, already covered with the thick, viscous blood that comes from head trauma, and hold it above his head for just a second before driving it down into Earl Wallace's right eye. There was another sound I won't describe, and then the only sound was the sobbing of Mae Wallace over the broken hulk of her father.
With that Mikey left our lives pretty much the same way he came into it. He walked straight into the Redcrown woods, under the shocked eyes of the whole street, and we watched him until he melted into the shadows.
Earl Wallace eventually recovered... in some ways. A surgeon had to pull the remnants of the shattered eye out of his sinus, and they had to put a plate in his head to fix what Mikey had done to his skull. He's blind in his right eye and mostly deaf in both ears, and he lost a lot of weight cause they had to wire his jaw shut while it healed. Nowadays he sits at home with the blinds pulled shut and the lights on, and people say he won't get within a hundred paces of the treeline.
Mae still stays at home and takes care of her father. Where once the abuse was physical, now it's verbal, but I guess that's better. Ain't nobody ever gotten a split lip or a black eye from words. Despite it, she won't leave him, cause the Good Lord knows he couldn't make her stay anymore. Nah, that's her jungle, her Redcrown woods, and its the only place she's ever known.
Pa says there's a wilderness in each man's heart, a tragic inner nature shaped of our individual pasts that can't be escaped, ineffable and inevitable, an albatross around the necks of men. Momma always stops him when he starts talking, she says the cancer meds make him delerious and he don't know what he says anymore.
To this day when you mention Mikey's name Momma won't answer, she'll pretend she didn't hear you and go right on about something else. Whatever she still thinks of the wild child is a secret she'll take to her grave.
User Reviews
Submitted by Alter (user info) at 2007-09-26 22:00:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No, Comment.
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-05-15 02:47:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
You're good.
Submitted by Benny (user info) at 2007-05-14 23:04:12 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
You have a wonderful way with words.
Submitted by creep_firebombing (user info) at 2006-11-20 18:28:53 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Skillz
Submitted by shandythedog (user info) at 2006-11-14 17:32:54 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
this reminds me of bickerstaff a bit
Submitted by Lee (user info) at 2006-11-14 01:32:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Brilliant.
Submitted by Crystle (user info) at 2006-11-02 17:33:50 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by munkeypants (user info) at 2006-08-21 21:43:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by fried-green-potatoes (user info) at 2006-08-21 12:32:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Wonderful work. Flows like a "t'ee inna way-y-y."
Submitted by Saffron (user info) at 2006-08-21 12:11:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
excellent.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2006-08-21 08:36:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent work.
Submitted by Bundaberg (user info) at 2006-08-21 01:57:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I like it.
Submitted by KungFu (user info) at 2006-08-20 23:59:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Damn that was good.
Submitted by goferforhire (user info) at 2006-08-20 23:51:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
rub-a-dub-dub mothafucka!!