T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

If he’d felt sympathy, if he’d felt kinship and pity, now all the dyer felt was disgust. He was an old man, fifty-four years on this earth, and Marie-Thérèse had been dead nearly half a century. This was none of his affair. None of it. Cautiously, warily, all his senses on alert as if he’d found himself locked in a cage with a ravening beast, he backed toward the door, slipped outside and pulled it shut behind him.

Late that afternoon, as a cold rain pelted the streets of Saint-Sernin and fell hard over the countryside, the wild child was given up to science, and through science, to celebrity. After having rolled one of his big cast-iron dye pots across the yard and up against the door to secure it, Vidal had gone directly to lean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, the government commissioner for Saint-Sernin, to make a report and give over responsibility for the creature immured in his cottage. The Commissioner, a man who traveled widely about the district, had heard the rumors from Lacaune and elsewhere, and he was eager to see this phenomenon with his own eyes. Here was a chance, he reasoned — if this creature wasn’t just some bugbear or an African ape escaped from a private menagerie — to put Rousseau’s notion of the Noble Savage to the test.

What innate ideas did he have? Did he know of God and Creation?

What was his language — the ur-language that gave rise to all the languages of the world, the language all men brought with them from Heaven? Or was it the gabble of the birds and the beasts? He could barely restrain himself. The light was fading from the sky and he’d had no dinner, but dinner was nothing compared to what this opportunity meant. He took Vidal by the arm. “Lead me to him,” he said.

By the time the Commissioner had concluded his audience with Vidal and hurried with him out into the rain to see this prodigy for himself, he was surprised to see people in the street, heading in the same direction as he. “Is it true, Citizen Commissioner?” people asked. “They’ve captured the wild child?”

“I hear,” someone else said, and there was a mob of them now, men, women and children, plodding through the rain to Vidal’s cottage, “that he has six fingers on each hand—”

“And toes,” another chimed in. “And he has claws like a cat to climb straight up a wall.”

“He leaps fifty meters in a bound.”

“Blood, he lives on blood that he sucks from the sheep at midnight.”

“Nonsense, nonsense”—one of the village women, Catherine Thibodeaux, appeared at his shoulder, hooded against the storm—“it’s only an abandoned child. Where’s the cure? Call out the cure.”

When they approached the yard, the Commissioner swung round furiously to hush them—“Stay back,” he hissed, “you’ll frighten him”—but the crowd had worked itself into a frenzy of fear and wonderment and they pressed forward like a flock heading to pasture. Everyone crowded round the door, pressing their faces to the windows, and if it weren’t for the impediment of the dye kettle they would have rushed into the room without thinking. Now they hesitated, their voices dropping to a whisper, while Vidal and the Commissioner shifted the kettle aside and stepped into the room, pulling the door fast behind them. The child was there, crouched before the fire, no different from how Vidal had left him, though he didn’t seem to be masticating anything at the moment. Thankfully.

What was strange, however, was that he didn’t look up, though certainly he must have been aware of the alien presence in the room and even of the credulous faces pressed to the windows.

The Commissioner was dumbstruck. This child — this thing — was scarred, hunched, filthy, and it gave off a stench of the barnyard, as wild and forlorn as the first upright creature created by God in His own image, the man Adam who was given dominion over the animals and named them in turn. But this was an animal, a kind of ape, the sort of degraded thing Linnaeus must have had in mind when he placed men and apes in the same order of being. And if there was any doubt, there was the fresh coil of its dung, gleaming on the rough planks of the floor.

The fire snapped and hissed. There was a murmur from the crowd pressed up against the windows. “Good God,” he exclaimed under his breath, and then, turning to the dyer, he put to him the only question he could manage, “Is it dangerous?”

Vidal, his house a shambles so that he was embarrassed in front of the Commissioner, merely shrugged. “He’s just a child, Citizen Commissioner, a poor abandoned child, flesh and blood, just like anyone else. But he’s unschooled. He doesn’t know porridge, doesn’t know a bowl, a cup, a spoon, doesn’t know what to do with them—”

Constans-Saint-Estève was in his early forties and dressed in the fashion of Paris as it was before the Revolution. He had a fleshy face and the pouting lips of an epicene. His back still pressed to the door, his eyes locked on the child, he whispered, “Does he speak?”

“Only cries and whimpers. He may be — I think he’s a deaf-mute.”

Overcoming his initial shock, the Commissioner crossed the room and stood over the boy a moment, murmuring blandishments.

His scientific curiosity had been re-aroused — this was a rare opportunity. A wonder, really. “Hello,” he said finally, bending at the knees and bringing his bland face into the child’s line of vision, “I am Jean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, Commissioner for Saint-Sernin. And who might you be? What is your name?”

The child stared through him, as if he were insubstantial.

“Do you have a name?”

Nothing.

“Do you understand me? Do you understand French? Or perhaps some other language?” Judging from the coloration of the child’s skin, he might have been Basque, Spanish, Italian. The Commissioner tried out a greeting on him in the languages of these regions, and then, frustrated, clapped his hands together as loudly as he could, right in front of the child’s nose. There was no reaction whatever. The Commissioner looked to Vidal and the pale buds of the faces hung as if on a branch at the near window and pronounced, “Sourd-muet.”

It was then that the villagers could stand it no longer and began to push into the room, one at a time, until the place was crowded to the walls, people trampling the dried leaves and roots scattered across the floor, examining everything — trying, Vidal thought, to discover his secret methods and receipts, which made him uneasy in the extreme, made him suspicious and angry — and it was then that the child came to life and made a bolt for the open door. A cry went up and people leapt back as if a mad dog were amongst them; in a trice the child was out in the yard, in the rain, galloping on all fours for the curtain of trees at the edge of the field. And he would have made it, would have escaped again back into nature, but for two of the strongest men in the village, men in their twenties, great runners, who brought him to ground and wrestled him back to the open door of the dyer’s cottage. The child writhed in their grip, making a repetitive sound that rattled in his windpipe — uh-uh-uh-uh

— and snaking his head round to bite.

It was fully dark now, the light of the fire and a single candle falling through the open door to illuminate the scene. The Commissioner stood there in the doorway, looking down at the child for a long moment, and then he began to stroke the child’s face, pushing the hair back from his brow and out of his eyes so that everyone could see that he was a human child and no dog or ape or demon, and the stroking had the effect it would have on any sentient thing: the child’s breathing slowed and his eyes went distant. “All right,” the Commissioner said, “let him go,” and the men loosened their grip on his limbs and stepped back. For a moment the child just slumped there on the doorstep, glistening with wet and mud, his limbs thin as a cow’s shins, and then he took hold of the hand the Commissioner held out to him and rose quietly to his feet.