The Middlest Boy of All

The Middlest Boy of All

By CAROLE BARNES

The boy is not very far from us.  You can see him clearly through those trees if you are quiet and look carefully.  Yes, there he is, just beyond the tallest pine.  He holds a blade of grass in his hand and his lips move as he talks to the grass.  He lifts his head now and looks out across the canyon at the mountain on the other side.  Watch him as he rises to his feet.  He is 15 years old and stands straight and tall.  In a moment he will turn and see us, and his face will be lighted by a smile so radiant you’ll warm all the way through.  This is David, and there is no boy in the entire world quite like him.

David does not always dream serenely as you see him now.  Sometimes he plays tetherball, throwing hard to wrap the rope all the way around the pole by our basement door.  Or he plays tag with his black-and-white dog, Pepper, who sits up and begs him for treats, sleeps on his bed, and licks his ears.  Every evening David sits at the table in his bedroom with an open book before him, reading in a low maumar.  His favorite stories are about King Arthur and his noble knights, about Jason searching for the Golden Fleece, about the brave dog Buck in Jack London’s Call of the Wild.  David stares intently at the pictures, frowiningslightly with the effort to remember.  The small hairs on the back of his brown hand glow yellow in the light of the desk lamp, as his fingers slowly trace the printed line across the page.

In our den there is a high-back brown sofa.  David has staked a claim to its left end.  There are times when he needs to withdraw here and close the door on the world.  Alone, he bounces rhythmically on the sofa, his back thumping a spot where the upholstery has worn thin.  At such times, David enjoys the dark and silence.  He has his own light within him, and he hears his own music.  We learned long ago that the rest of us can’t hear David’s music, nor can we keep time to his beat, for he walks through life in a special cadence, listening to a different drum.

There are five of us in the family; his father and I and three sons.  In this circle David lives in his own particular place.  Sometime asked him once about his brothers, and he proudly explained; “Jon is the biggest boy of our house, Ben is the littlest one, and I…. I’m the middlest boy of all.”

We five roast wieners and marshmallows over hot coals at the beach.  We climb mountains and sleep in sleeping bags under big trees.  We sail our boat and hunt for sheltered covers to swim in.  And we stay at home to work and study, sweep floots, and carry trash, rake leaves and water the garden.  A perfect, happy life, you say?  Well, not all the time.  For we have an enemy that hovers menacingly right at the edge of our family circle.

Our enemy has many faces ad many weapons in its arsenal.  It appears as doctors and physiologists, teachers and well-meaning friends.  It speaks patronizingly in schools offices, talks in pitying tones in the living rooms of friends, stype balky reports that stare up from the shiny desktops of scholarly men.  The enemy’s purpose is to get David our of his home into a sort of cage called a “facility for the barely educable.”

The enemy says David is incapable of comprehending ideas, of solving problems, of learning to swim and to make friends.  But the enemy has miscalculated our strength, underestimated the patience of David’s father, the perseverance of his mother, the resourcefulness of his brothers.  Above all, it has overlooked the endurance of the boy himself, his zeal to grow, his fervent longing to reach for stars.

But now the enemy is closing in and its ugly secret weapon has begun of find the mark.  Have we won battles for 15 years only at to lose the war?  Must we pack up our son and deliver him, struggling, to faceless strangers carrying keys behind a locked gate?

The secret weapon is a Trojan horse.  Our defense is crumbling from within. The enemy has got through to David and filled him with fear.  His brothers, too, are beginning to wonder. “David can’t play ball forever.  Who will take care of him when he’s grown up?” they asked.

And the enemy pushes me against a wall, a hard, impassable wall that doesn’t yield to my pounding omelet in my tears.

“What are you?  I cry.  “What power has you that you can overcome love?”

“I am Reality,” says the wall.  “You never have seen me, but I have been here all among.”

“You want David. But you’ll not take my son from me.”

“I come for you, not for David.”

After a while my weeping stopped and I raised my face from my hands.  There was a heavy stillness in the office where I sat, and the man behind the desk simply stared quietly at the papers before him.

“Doctor,” I began.

The man looked up.

“Your report has words in it, Dr.Nale, that I can’t accept.  You say that David has severe motor and perceptual disturbance, because of brain damage.  You make him sound hopeless, incomplete.”

“Those are words of professionals, Mrs. Barnes, not for parents.  Of course, you don’t see the same child I see.  You never should.  I see a patient—a pleasant, inadequate youngster who needs special help.  You see your son.”

“But, an institution?  Holed up in some dreary dormitory with hundreds of slobbering, defective people?”

“Mrs. Barenes, why did you bring this boy here for testing?”  Is he happy in his present circumstances?  Are you satisfied with his school situation?”

I studied the figured pattern on the beige rug.  My eyes followed its design from the chair to the door, then back to the walnut desk.

‘No,” I whispered.  “He’s lonely now at home, and miserable with that educationally handicapped class in school.”

The doctor took off his glasses and polished them slowly, attentively, and then he put them on and looked at me hard.

‘The gulf will widen between your son and everyone else.  You’ve given him a good and loving home for as long as he could cope.  You’ve taught him all you can.  Now he needs special training.  And he needs first to become independent of you.”

“To send him away would him so, as though we didn’t want him anymore.  He’d never understand.”

“To send him away will be harder for you than it will be for David.  Do you really believe that he needs you now as much as you need him?”

I left the office, that terrible question ringing in my ears.

One evening, several weeks later, I sat with David in his room for our regular reading time.  Suddenly the book slipped from his hands to the floor.

“I don’t want to read, Mom.  I hate to read.”

“But these are your books, dear, and the better you get at reading the more you’ll find you like it.”

“They’re not my books.  You got them.  They’re your books.”

We both just sat there for a while without moving or speaking.  Nothing ever changed in his room, for David wanted everything jus as it had always been.  A tan bedspread with cowboys and covered wagons.  A blue rug.  A round hole in the window screen through which David pushes bits of cheese and lettuce for the mice.  A big basket full of blue stones, gray stones, orange stones, and lucky stones with black stripes.  And over all there hangs a boy smell of damp grass, bubble gum, sweaty socks and rubbery tennis shoes.

My eyes returned to David.  He stared emptily at the floor, his arms hanging limp, his mouth stack.  I felt myself go cold all over as I saw a person I had never seen before, the bewildered child seen by Dr. Nale.  For how long had I put my vision of his boy before his own deep need of things I did not even have?

Throughout that night I lay in the purple limbo between sleeping and walking.  Over me towered that implacable, unforgiving wall.

“You call yourself Reality.  Do you stand like this over my son, covering him with a shadow of fear?”

“Must he go away?  Doesn’t he need me anymore?”

“He needs you in a new way, to find for him the people who can give him what you cannot give.”

“He will be hurt.”

“That’s true.  But you’ll face his hurt so that he will be able to face his whole life.  This will be your gift to the boy.”

A gray and tired morning dragged itself at last through the window.  That was the day we made a long-distance phone call to the Children’s Village, a private center for the care and training of brain-injured youngsters.  We were told that in six months there would be a place with them for David.  Since his aptitude test scores were rather than lower than what generally indicates ability to become self-sufficient, they accepted him on a trial basis.  Whether he could stay the course would depend on his effort and response.  One week before departure, I told David about the new plans.  “Dad and I have decided you’ll go to another school next week.”

‘What school?”

“It’s called the Village.  It’s up in the Rocky Mountains.

“But I don’t want to go there.  I want to stay here.”

“Of course you do.  We’d rather you stay here.  But going to the Village will be better for you.”

‘No, it won’t.  I won’t go.”

Throughout that week David never let go the subject of the new school.

“Why are you making me go to the Village, Mom?”

“You’ll like it better than the school here.  And you’ll learn more.”

‘I’d hate it.  I’d rather dead than go there.”

“You’ll get used to it and them you’ll be happier.”

“I want to drown myself.”

My anxiety grew by the hour.  In this despondent mood, resisting with all his might, how could David get anything at all from the Village?  Could they possibly reach him?  Or would he withdraw into silent despair, terrified, frozen?

The day came.  Bags were packed.  David said nothing on the way to the airport.  At the boarding gate we all stood and stared at each other.  David’s father and brothers said good-bye, and then David walked with me up the ramp and into the plane.  Through the window we saw the three of them waving until we took off.  When we were airborne, David turned his face to me and spoke.

“I feel like there’s a dam behind my eyes.”

“A dam?”

“A big wall that’s holding the water back.  There’s one behind my eyes.  And if I move blink, the dam will break and make me cry.”

I took his hand and we watched the hills and towns flow past below.

There’s a winding dirt road that leads into the Children’s Village.  I drove slowly along in our rented car, past cows and horses, and occasionally a little house, watching for the turnoff.  Finally we pulled up at a low brick building around which were scattered some cottages that looked like farms.  A stream meandered gently through a clump of trees.  In the distance, snow-covered mountains peaks encircled the valley.

Entering the brick building, we found ourselves in a dining room where several children were eating supper.  A tall, lanky young man, wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt, come over to David and put out his hand.

“You must be David.  My name is Bob.  I’m glad to see you.”  They shook hands.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry.  Come on with me while your mother goes down to the office.  There’s pie, and ice cream….”  And off they went.

In the office, I signed papers.  Then the young man named Bob showed me around the Village.  We looked at the greenhouse where youngsters arrange bulbs in flats, the shop where they mend and refinish furniture, a kitchen where cooking is practiced, the schoolrooms and residence cottages.

“Tell me about David,” Bob said.  I’m not interested in his I.Q.  I want to know the important things.  Does he ride a bike?  Does he like to play kickball?  Has he ever fished a stream for trout?”

Our tour of the premises ended at the teen-age boys’ house.  David was waiting for me by the door.  He spoke in a very low voice.

“Mom.  I want to go back home now.”

“I’m sorry, David.  You’ll have to stay here.  I have to go now.”  I kissed him.  ‘Good-bye, dear.  Be a good boy.”

He stood looking after me, Bob’s arm around his shoulder, as I turned away and walked quickly toward the car.  There was a dam behind my eyes.

Back home it seemed strange to be a family of four instead of five.  I found myself making an extra hamburger my mistake, and setting our five cereal bowls at breakfast.  Sometimes I wondered where David’s socks were when I loaded the washing machine.  And the house sounded oddly silent without the muffled thump of the brown sofa in the den.

Sometime after my return from the Village, we received a letter from the social worker.  “After a few difficult days, David began to smile.  Now he is grinning all the time.  This boy surely knows the meaning of work, takes on diligently every task he is given.  We expect a good deal may be developed in a youngster who shows such cheerfulness and fortitude, and whose personality is so full of charm and warmth.”

And then came a letter from David himself, written laboriously in pencil on lined paper:  “Dear Mom and Dad.  It is very hard work here and it is some times fun to.  I fix a chair and it is good.  I do math and plant flowers.  Bob took us camping were we sleep out in the hills far up.  Bob says how I am a fine camper and also the best laundry worker in this entire place.  Sincerely your son David.”

We are proud, my husband and I, of all our sons.  The biggest boy of our house is a fine athlete, the leading trackman in his school.  The littlest boy is a good student, standing at the top of his class.  And the middlest boy of our house—David—is the very best laundry worker in the village where he lives.

As I look out into our garden, it seems that any moment now we will see David standing in the grass among those pine trees.  No, we can’t see him right now, but he’s not, after all, so very far away.  Listen hard, David, listen to your drum.  Climb, climb to the very top of your own mountain—and my soul will rejoice and be glad.