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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Camping out, we was. Just like on TV. Mom let me do it ’cause Sandy was with me. Sandy’s twelve. So my mom said it was okay.’
‘Wasn’t it a little chilly?’
‘Gosh no. We had lots of blankets.’ Charity lay all the way back on the couch and kicked her feet up. For a few moments she bicycled in the air. ‘And the next morning we got up and baked pancakes, me and Sandy. Sandy’s twelve. She can touch the stove.’
‘I see.’ Actually I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine when Charity was finding time to do all these things, since she seemed to have moved in with me over the past few weeks. When I would come home from work, there was Charity, hunched up on my doorstep, still dressed in her school clothes. She would stay until supper and eat with me, if I’d let her. Then down in front of the television she’d go. Or if I was writing, she would stand in back of my chair, feet on the rung, and read over my shoulder, all the while making my desk chair sway. She couldn’t read worth a hill of beans, so mostly she just shouted out letters she recognized. B! R! H! would come the constant chant behind me while I tried to concentrate on wording a technical paper about bilingualism and psychogenic language problems. Charity would stay until I chucked her out every night. On weekends I was even luckier. One Saturday she arrived at 6:15 in the morning.
Charity’s family seemed quite pleased with the arrangement. I must admit, if I’d had Charity I probably would have too. In the beginning I demanded that she have permission and could prove it before she could stay. But that was hopeless. The family had no phone and the couple of times I had bothered to pile her in the car and drive her home for consent, no one there had even missed her. I suspect they’d realized she’d found a place to go and someone to feed her and were satisfied to let her milk the situation for all it was worth. I was irked by the imposition; it was like having acquired a stray cat. But as with cats, I was too soft to ignore her and send her home hungry.
Truth was, of course, that Charity’s family was full of problems of their own, not the least of them, Charity herself. They lived well below the poverty level in a small dingy place down by the river. I had met Charity’s mother only once when I had brought Charity home. She was a young woman but she looked ancient. Her body was riddled with the stigmata of a rough life, and I suspected they went clear through to her heart. The house was constantly jammed with relatives, and they all seemed to live there on a more or less permanent basis. While Charity had no father, there was no lack of males in her home, but their exact position in the household was something I never knew for sure.
Charity herself continued to be a personal challenge to me. A master of the unintentional put-down, Charity had done more to devastate my ego in three months than most kids had in a lifetime. I have no doubt that if I had encountered Charity earlier in my career, I would have become a medical technologist like my mother wanted.
Still she had an innate charm about her. She would be standing there on my doorstep complaining loudly or would be struggling with some mishap, like the time she had polished her fingernails and then couldn’t get her mittens off, and I’d think to myself, what’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be an authority! Sixty pounds of sheer challenge was Charity.
It was a Wednesday evening, when she lounged across my furniture and gave me more excruciating details of life with Sandy.
‘Can I eat supper with you? What we having?’ she asked when I rose with what must have been a suppertime look on my face. She was off the couch in a second and skipping out into the kitchen ahead of me, her body dancing side to side like an excited puppy.
‘Stew,’ I said. ‘Stew and salad and bread.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Why don’t you ever keep any good stuff around?’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Like ice cream or Cokes or something?’
‘Because that’s not what I make my suppers out of.’
‘Oh well,’ she said good-naturedly. ‘If that’s what we gotta have, then that’s what we gotta have, huh?’
I nodded.
I gave her the lettuce to wash and the carrots to slice. Touché she shouted to herself and stabbed the knife into the air at unseen dangers. I took it and the carrots and let her shake the dressing instead.
And then as I was putting the stew into bowls, Charity came bounding over and leaned across my arm to see what was happening.
‘Tor?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I spend the night with you?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a school night.’
‘So? What difference does that make? I’ll still go to school.’
‘You need to go home and get a bath and –’
‘Why?’ she interrupted, looking down at herself. ‘Am I dirty? Don’t you got a bathtub here?’
‘That’s not the point. It’s a school night. You ought to be home in bed and then be able to get up and put on school clothes and get there before the bell rings. It would be too hard from clear over here. We’re practically across town. And I have to leave for work a lot earlier than you have to go to school.’
‘It wouldn’t be so hard. I could do it. I could wear these here clothes. They ain’t dirty. I could get up real, real early. Okay? Can I? Please?’
I shook my head and handed her a bowl of stew. ‘No, not on a school night, Charity. Maybe some weekend. But not on a school night. End of conversation.’
Carefully she carried her bowl over to the table. Setting it down, she climbed up onto the chair. ‘You gonna have a man over here tonight, is that how come I can’t?’
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