T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

Inside was the village dyer, Francois Vidal, who’d just gotten out of bed and started up the fire to warm the place and make himself a bit of porridge for breakfast. He was childless, a widower, and he lived alone. From the rafters of his one-room cottage hung the drying herbs, flowers and marsh weeds he used in his receipts — he was the only man in the region who could produce a bon teint of royal purple in lamb’s wool, employing his own mixture and mordant, and he was of necessity extremely secretive. Did his competitors want his receipts? Yes, they did. Did they spy on him?

He couldn’t have said for certain, but he wouldn’t have put it past them. At any rate, he went out to the yard, to the crude shed in which he kept his cow, so that he could feed and milk her, thinking to skim off the cream to complement his porridge. That was when he saw something — the dark streak of an animal — moving upright against the dun earth and the stripped backdrop of the trees.

He had no prejudices. He hadn’t heard the rumors from Lacaune or even from the next village over. And when his eyes adjusted and registered the image in his brain, he saw that this was no animal, but a human child, a boy, filthy, naked to the elements and in need. He held out his hand.

What ensued was a test of wills. When the boy didn’t respond, Vidal extended both his hands, palms up, to show he was unarmed, and he spoke to him in soft, coaxing tones, but the boy didn’t seem to understand or even to hear. As a child, Vidal had a half-sister who was deaf, and the family had evolved its own home signs to communicate with her, though the rest of the village shunned her as a freak; it was these signs that began to come back to him as he stood there in the cold, contemplating the naked child. If the boy was a deaf-mute, as it appeared, then perhaps he would respond to the signs. The dyer’s hands, stained with the residue of his trade, spoke in quick elegant patterns, but to no avail. The boy stood rooted, his eyes flitting past the dyer’s face to the house, the shed, the smoke that flattened and billowed against the sky. Finally, fearful of driving him off, Vidal backed slowly to the house, made a welcoming gesture at the door, and then stepped inside, leaving the door open wide in invitation.

Eventually, with the dyer bent over the hearth and the cow — Rousa — unmilked and lowing with a sound that was like the distant intermittent report of a meteorological event in the hills, the boy came to the open door and Vidal was able to get a good look at him. Whose child was this, he wondered, to be allowed to run wild like an animal, the filth of the woods ingrained in the very pores of his skin, his hair matted with twigs and burrs and leaf mold and his knees callused like the soles of his feet? Who was he? Had he been abandoned? And then he saw the scar at the child’s throat and knew the answer. When he gestured toward the fire, toward the blackened pot and the wheat porridge congealing within it, he was thinking of his dead sister.

Cautiously, one tentative step at a time, the boy was drawn to the fire. And just as cautiously, because he was afraid that any sudden movement would chase him through the door and back out into the fields, Vidal laid sticks on the hearth till the fire leapt up and he had to remove the pot, which he set on the fender to cool. The door stood open. The cow lowed. Using his hands to speak, the dyer offered the boy a bowl of porridge, fragrant with the steam rising from it, and he meant to fetch milk and pull the door shut, once he had his trust. But the boy showed no interest whatever in the food.

He was in constant motion, rocking back and forth on his feet, his eyes fixed on the fire. It came to Vidal that he didn’t know what porridge was, didn’t know a bowl or a spoon or their function either.

And so he made gestures, pantomiming the act of eating in the way of a parent with an infant, bringing the spoon to his lips and tasting the porridge, making a show of masticating and swallowing and even going so far as to rub his abdomen in a circular fashion and smiling in satisfaction.

The boy was unmoved. He simply stood there, rocking, fascinated by the fire, and the two of them might have stayed in position all day long if it weren’t for an inspiration that suddenly came to the old man. Perhaps there were simpler, ruder foods, he reasoned, foods of the forest and fields, that the child would take without prejudice, nuts and the like. He looked round him — he had no nuts. Nuts were out of season. But in a basket against the far wall there was a small quantity of potatoes he’d brought up from the root cellar to fry in lard with his evening meal. Very slowly, communicating with his body and his hands so as not to alarm the child, he got to his feet, and slowly — so slowly he might have been a child himself playing a game of statues — crossed the room to the basket.

He lifted the straw lid, and still pantomiming, held up the basket to display its contents.

That was all it took. In an instant the child was there, inches away, the wild odor rising from him like musk, his hands scrabbling in the basket till he was clutching every last potato in his arms — a dozen or more — and then he was at the fire, throwing them into the flames in a single motion. His face was animated, his eyes leaping.

Short, blunted, inarticulate cries escaped his lips. Within seconds, in the space of time it took Vidal to move to the door and pull it closed, the boy had reached into the coals to extract one of the uncooked potatoes, burning his fingers in the process. Immediately, as if he had no concept of what cookery involved, he began gnawing at it.

When it was gone, he reached for another and then another and the same sequence of events played out, only now the potatoes were blackened on the outside and hard within and his fingers visibly scarred.

Appalled, Vidal tried to instruct him, showing him the use of the fire irons, but the boy ignored him — or worse, stared right through him as if he didn’t exist. The dyer offered him cheese, bread, wine, but the child showed no interest, and it was only when he thought to pour him a cup of water from the pitcher on the table that the child responded. He tried at first to lap the water from the cup, but then he understood and held it to his lips until it was drained and he wanted more, which Vidal, as fascinated as if a fox had got up on two legs and come to join him at table, kept pouring until he was sated. After which, naked and filthy, the child pulled his limbs to his chest and fell into a deep sleep on the stones of the hearth.

For a long while, the dyer merely sat there, contemplating this apparition that had blundered into his life. He got up from time to time to feed the fire or light his pipe, but he didn’t attempt to do any work, not that day. All he could think of was his half-sister, Marie-Thérèse, an undersized child with a powerfully expressive face — she could say more with her face alone than most people with their tongues. She was the product of his father’s first marriage to a woman who had died of puerperal fever after bearing only this one damaged child, and his mother never accepted her. She was always last to be fed and first to receive the slap to the face or the back of the head when things went wrong, and she took to wandering off by herself, away from the other siblings, until one night she didn’t come back. He was eight or nine at the time, and so she must have been twelve or so. They found her body at the bottom of a ravine. People said she must have lost her way in the dark and fallen, but even then, even as a child, he knew better.

Just then Rousa bellowed and he started. What was he thinking, leaving her to burst like that? He got up quickly, slipped into his coat and went out to her. When he returned, the child was pinned against the far wall, huddled and afraid, staring at him as if they’d never encountered one another before. Things were out of place, the table overturned, candlesticks on the floor, all his painstakingly gathered and hoarded plants torn down from the rafters and scattered like drift. He tried to calm the boy, speaking with his hands, but it did no good — every movement he made was matched by a corresponding movement, the child keeping his back to the wall and maintaining the distance between them, rocking on his feet, ready to leap for the door if only he knew what the door was. And his jaws, his jaws seemed to be working. What was it? What was he eating, another potato? It was then that the dyer saw the naked tail of the thing dangling like a string of saliva from the corner of the boy’s mouth, and the boy’s yellowed teeth, chewing round the dun wad of fur.