Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence. Torey Hayden
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of my work. That I wasn’t doing so with Kevin seemed to only strengthen the likelihood that I was fabricating the entire thing. But I couldn’t record. There was no way to disguise a recorder in the bare little room and even if I could have, I don’t think I would. It would have been a kind of betrayal to Kevin, who feared the world beyond the door so much. Winning the power struggle with him or asserting my position with the staff shouldn’t be worth that much. So I just held my tongue, stayed out of earshot when I could and pretended not to hear the insinuations or feel them.
So, as the hazy days of October passed, it remained just the two of us alone under the table.
One of the most remarkable things about Kevin was his almost nonexistent personal history. Previously, I had always considered files a nuisance. They prejudiced people against kids before they even met. They were filled mostly with bureaucratic nonsense and the self-important mutterings of little gods. But nonetheless, all my kids had come with them in one form or another and I had always read them. Usually, the worse the kid, the thicker the file. One time I had a fourteen-inch-thick file in my cabinet for one ten-year-old. For Kevin, however, this was not the case, a very remarkable fact in light of his long history with the state.
His folder was a small one, squashed amidst the fatter ones of other children. There was an intake sheet. His mother’s name was given and his stepfather’s. No mention was made of a natural father. A tick mark indicated that he had siblings, but they weren’t enumerated. Most of the rest of the sheet was blank, owing to the fact that he had been in state care rather than at home. There were a number of data sheets and anecdotal records of things that had occurred since Kevin had been living at Garson Gayer. They made interesting reading: accounts of his various fears, of his refusal to go outside, of his ‘tantrums,’ which had required seclusion and medication. But by and large, they were unremarkable. There were some medical reports of bouts with flu and ingrown toenails. Nothing special.
The only detailed report in the whole folder was his school report. Kevin had attended kindergarten at the far south end of the city. After the first year, he was retained because he didn’t talk. Since he still did not talk at the end of the second year but appeared to be progressing adequately, he was passed to the first grade. That whole next year was disastrous. First grade is designed for children who speak. Kevin didn’t. Subjected to behavior controls, tests, inquiries, Kevin failed to respond. He just sat and watched.
In this first-grade section of the report there were a few notes about Kevin’s home life. In a questionable state, the report said. Kevin had bruises and other evidence of physical abuse. I flipped to the front of the report. It was dated prior to the time when reporting child abuse to the authorities became mandatory. And apparently this abuse had never been noted. Scars. Burns. A bruise on the face. The teacher got salve to put on his broken skin and washed his sores, but she told no one. Only people like me, ten years on, found out. Kevin had a sister, a five-year-old at the time, in kindergarten. They were close, Kevin and this sister, and the teacher thought she had overheard him talk to the sister out on the playground. He was very protective of the child. The only time the teacher had seen him react was when someone threatened the little girl. A good sign, this teacher felt.
Unfortunately, by the end of that first year in first grade Kevin had given no evidence of learning. If he could read, he didn’t show it. The school psychologist was called in and Kevin was tested.
The report broke down then, the entries becoming sporadic. Kevin went on to a special-education class the next year. He was eight. At the end of that year he was reported to have a testable IQ of 40, which put him in a very low, uneducable stratum. He was institutionalized for the first time during this period, and from then on, it seemed to be nothing but a string of group homes and juvenile centers and residences. He was even in the children’s unit at the state hospital for a short time before being deemed too retarded and moved into a state-run program for the mentally handicapped. It was not clear when he was where or for how long or why he was switched from one place to another so frequently. But whatever the reason, it did nothing to liberate his power of speech.
There was nothing current in Kevin’s file except updated Garson Gayer reports of height and weight and that sort of thing. There was nothing more to tell why he had been institutionalized in the first place or where his fears had developed or why he had come to Garson Gayer, a residential treatment center not given to taking in severely retarded or welfare kids. And perhaps most sinister of all, there was no explanation anywhere for the single line penciled across the top of the intake sheet: Voluntary termination of parental rights. Made ward of the state.
When I inquired, I found no one knew much more about Kevin. Almost none of the staff had been there as long as he had because Garson Gayer, like most institutions, was a victim of high staff turnover. Dana, who was my usual source of information about everything, had been at the home less than half the time Kevin had. She’d never thought much about his lack of history. With ninety – five other children to worry about and with a cast-iron belief in dealing with only the here and now, she was unbothered by it. Stay in the present, she’d repeat over and over to me. You’re living today, deal with today. And in my heart I knew she was probably right. The staff psychologist only shrugged when I asked him. What do you want? A leather-bound biography? There’s as much in his as in anybody else’s file.
What did I want? That was a stupid question. I wanted answers. I wanted to know why this kid behaved like this. I wanted to know how to fix him. I knew a file wouldn’t tell me those things, even if it had been thick as an encyclopedia. But I still wanted it, for me perhaps more than for Kevin. After all these years of casting my lot with the liberals and the freethinkers, saying how damaging such files were, how they fueled self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess I should have willingly taken a dose of my own medicine. But it felt awful. It left me feeling adrift in a wide sea with no chart. As the days passed, I thought how much nicer it would have been to be adrift with even a bad chart than with no chart at all.
We were reading a cookbook. It was a children’s paperback featuring different dishes of the world. I had used it with my kids in the classroom when I was teaching, and after I’d told Kevin about how we used to cook sometimes, he’d asked if I would bring the book in. So we were sitting on the floor, browsing through the pages together.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to an artist’s illustration.
‘Spaghetti with tomato sauce on it, I think.’
He was thoughtful a moment. ‘It looks kinda like brains.’
I hadn’t noticed that particular quality about spaghetti before and examined the picture more carefully.
‘Have you ever seen brains before?’ Kevin asked.
‘Yes. The grocery store up on 12th Street sells them sometimes. I guess you scramble them up with eggs or something.’
‘No, I mean real brains.’
‘Those are. From cattle, I think. Some people eat them. I guess they’re supposed to be very good but I haven’t been that brave myself yet.’
‘No,’ said Kevin. ‘I mean real brains. Like you got in here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘People’s brains.’
I paused. I had seen human brains before. When I was a biology student in college there were some pickled in formaldehyde up on a shelf in the science building. There’d been pickled babies up there too.
‘I have,’ Kevin said before I could comment. ‘They’re all red and sort of yellowish and bumpy. Like that spaghetti.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Does that make you sick?’ he asked, studying my face carefully.
‘Is it supposed to?’
‘Does it?’
‘It’s not one of my favorite things to think about, if that’s what you mean,’ I replied.
He was still regarding me very closely. It was a penetrating expression and I could not tell what he was trying to glean from me. Then he looked back at the book. ‘I couldn’t eat spaghetti,’ he said.