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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He began to tremble. His whole body arched away from me slightly. ‘You have to do it.’
I watched him.
His voice was only a whisper. ‘You have to. Because I’ve told you to, do you hear?’
I shifted positions. I’d been sitting on my feet and the circulation was going, so I moved them.
‘Awk!’ Kevin screamed when I did. His marker flew out of his hand. Abruptly, he dived for the safety of the table.
‘Kev?’
‘I didn’t mean it!’ he shrieked and covered his head, as he rolled into a ball. ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it. You don’t have to!’
Stunned, I only gaped at him.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it!’ He was in tears already, rocking and sobbing. ‘Please, please, please, I didn’t mean it. Honest I didn’t. Please. I’m sorry.’
‘Kevin, I don’t mind. It’s not that big a deal. Don’t be frightened. I’m not angry You want me to do the sky? I don’t mind. I’ll do the sky. Okay?’
‘Please, please, please, please, please,’ he begged. ‘Oh please don’t think I meant it. I didn’t. Please, I’m sorry.’
‘Kevin?’
He was beside himself, rocking and weeping, crying for me to forget and absolve him. I was too astonished at having caused such a furor to really think about what was going on. On my hands and knees I crawled across the carpet to try and talk him down from his hysteria.
WHAM!
Leaping to his feet when I approached, he threw the table off over his back. ‘Get away from me!’ he shouted. His face grew red, terror glazed his eyes. ‘Get away! Get away!’
Before I could gather my senses, he had picked up one of the chairs. He hurled it at me with keen precision and it didn’t really miss. Painfully, I staggered to my feet.
The room was too small for Kevin to be able to elude me to his satisfaction, and clearly it was I who terrified him. He reacted to me as if I were the Devil Incarnate.
Because the room was so small and he could not get away from me, Kevin felt obliged to keep me at bay by throwing things at me. He needn’t have. I was quite sufficiently panic-stricken myself and was perfectly willing to stay out of his way. This frightened, I knew he was dangerous. And looming up to his nearly six-foot height, he made an awesome sight when he held a chair aloft.
There wasn’t much for me to do. I ducked. A lot. Kevin threw anything and everything he could get his hands on. Chairs, pens, the poster, my box, its contents, even the table. His terror gave him improbable strength. And I, like a circus performer, jumped and ducked and dodged. The most painful things turned out to be the numerous small wooden blocks I had had in my box. They were two-inch square colored counting cubes with surprisingly sharp edges, and Kevin fired them like missiles.
Frantically I looked around for a call button or some other method of summoning help. There was none. I did have a key to the door, which the stupid aide persisted in locking. Still, with Kevin in this state, I did not want to chance turning my back on him for long, especially in front of an exit. But what else to do? Through my mind whirred all the alternatives I could think of. Would I be able to talk him down from this? Would he wear himself out before he splattered me? Should I just keep dodging and hope my strength held out longer than his? I don’t think he was dead serious on really hurting me. All he wanted was to keep me away from him. But that made him plenty dangerous. Every move I made was interpreted as an attack and provoked another frenzy of panic and missiles. But it was a vicious cycle. When I moved, he threw things. When he threw things, I had to move again to avoid being hit.
Around and around and around we went. He was screaming now, ripping at his clothes and throwing himself against the walls in an attempt to escape me. When he came to the door, he jerked at it violently, but of course it was locked.
In the end, I confined myself to the two bare walls and stayed away from the windows and the door so that he would not think I was blocking any exits from him. I held a wooden chair in one hand and fended off what he threw the best I could. He began to scream when I kept the chair in hand because I think he thought I was planning to attack him with it. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
That did the trick. They heard us. Within moments a crowd of faces pressed against the small door window, frightening Kevin even further. Next came the frantic rattling of a key in the lock. Kevin tried to run from the door and fell face forward over the table. His hysteria mounted as he scrambled to his feet and threw himself against the windows.
The door burst open. People spilled in. Relieved to be rescued, I slumped back against the far wall and slid down to the floor. They swarmed over Kevin and tried to pull him from the window. He shrieked louder and fought like a wounded tiger. The Marines were there and they had his legs and his pants. They pulled his shoes off as they tugged him down from the sill. I heard the sound of cloth tearing as they struggled to lift him. There were six of them this time, six big burly men with tattooed arms and Charles Atlas muscles rippling under their shirts. Still they could not maneuver Kevin. They got him down from the windows but now he was on the floor, wiggling and squirming. Kevin escaped their grasp and, like a caged bird, battered himself against the window again. Two more men came and then a nurse. Dana was there too. So was the psychologist and two people in business suits whom I did not recognize. I stayed away from them all, clear over to the far side because I was still afraid I would only add fuel to Kevin’s delirium, if I approached. In the end, it took nine men to defeat that one cornstalk of a boy and bear him out. All the way down the corridor I could hear him screaming, the pitch of it high and hysterical.
Dana came over to me, righting chairs and the table as she came. Of all the people in the room, she was the only one to come to me in the aftermath of the commotion. I was rolling up the sleeve of my shirt to look at my arm.
All of me hurt. There was no point in denying that. Now that Kevin had been borne away, I was feeling sorely in need of a little comfort myself.
The chair had hit my arm, and already a red-and-purple bruise stretched out along the upper half. Dana touched it gently.
‘They’ll have a doctor in for Kevin,’ she said. ‘You ought to have him look at that before he goes. Does it hurt?’
I nodded.
‘You’ve got a scratch on your nose too.’ She fingered it and then refocused her gaze on me. ‘What happened?’
‘I wish I knew for sure. I don’t.’
‘He just went off?’
I shrugged.
I intended to stay until Kevin quieted down and then go talk to him. However, when I went up to the ward, he was still in the seclusion room, still screaming and throwing himself against the walls. So I went down to see the doctor. There normally was not a physician at the residence, but to increase psychotropic tranquilizers in emergencies and to put an individual in seclusion with the door locked, the affiliated psychiatrist had to come over and sign orders. Thus, when I was unable to go in and see Kevin, I went down to where the psychiatrist was sitting in the back of the reception office, drinking coffee. He was a big, heavyset fellow in his late fifties, white haired and very jolly. He set me awash with antiseptic and plastered Band-Aids all over me while telling me about the king-sized sunflowers he had grown in his garden for a competition. Afterward, I treated myself to a can of Dr Pepper and went into Dana’s office to begin the nasty job of recording all this in Kevin’s chart. Most of the staff I encountered had a wry smile for me, a manifestation of the sort of gallows humor one develops working in such places. At least, they said, they had all heard Kevin now.
When I went back up to the ward an hour later, Kevin had been given a second tranquilizing injection. He was still banging around in the seclusion room, however. Briefly I gazed through