T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Then it was quiet. Then it was dark. Traumatized, numb, the child lay there in a state between waking and sleeping. He was trembling, not from the cold because he was hardened to the weather, even to winter and the bitterest of days, but because of fear. He couldn’t feel his limbs, the cords so tightly wound they were like ligatures, cutting off circulation, and he was terrified of the strangeness of the place where he was confined, a place that was enclosed on six planes and gave no sign of the stars overhead and no scent of pine or juniper or water in its flight. Animals, bigger and more powerful than he, had taken him for their pleasure, for their prey, and he had no expectation but fear because he had no word for death and no way to conceptualize it. He caught things, quick frightened things, and he killed them and ate them, but that was in a different place and a different time. Perhaps he made the connection, perhaps not. But at some point, when the moon rose and the thinnest sliver of light cut between the jointure of two stones in the near wall, he began to stir.

He had no awareness of time. Flexing, rocking, pushing off with his flexible toes and scrabbling with his nails, he shifted in space and shifted again and again till the cords began to give up their grip. When they were loose, he tore them off as if they were strips of vegetation, the vines and tendrils and entangling branches that snatched at his wrists and ankles as he perambulated through the forest, and a moment later he was stalking the room. There were two doors, but he didn’t know what a door was and the rigidity of his terror had kept him from discovering its function when he was brought into this place and laid on the compacted floor in a scattering of straw. Nonetheless, he felt them, felt the wood as a texture to itself and a contrast to the stone, and thrust his weight into them. Nothing happened. The doors — the one leading back into the tavern, the other to the yard — were latched, and even if they weren’t he wouldn’t have been able to uncover the secret of their hinges or their method either. But above him was the roof, thatch over a frame of stripped poles laid close as fingers and toes. A single leap took him there, where he clung upside down like an oversized insect, and then it was a small thing to separate two poles and begin to dig upward toward the scent of the night.

3

For two years and more he eluded capture, hovering like a cauchemar at the margins of people’s thoughts, and when the mistral raked the roofs and shrieked down the chimneys, they said he was stirring up the spirits of the forest. If a hen went missing, they blamed the enfant, though he’d never been seen to consume flesh or even to know what it was; if it rained too much or too little or if rust afflicted the grain or aphids the vines, people crossed themselves and cursed his name. He wasn’t a child. He was a spirit, a demon outcast like the rebel angels, mute and staring and mad. Peasants reported seeing him capering in moonlit meadows, swimming like a rat in the rivers, basking in the sun in summer and darting through the scabs of snow that lay on the winter hills, oblivious to the cold. They called him the Naked One. L’Animal. Or, simply, the Savage.

For his part, he scraped and dug and followed his nose. On the primal level, he had only to feed himself, and if he raided the fields like any other creature of the forest, he took the same risks as they, to be trapped or shot or startled to immobility by the sudden flapping of a scarecrow’s rags. Still, his diet was barely adequate, as might be imagined, consisting almost entirely of vegetable matter, and in winter he suffered just as the birds did. But he survived. And he grew. Haunting the barnyards, the middens and granaries, he became bolder, quicker, stronger, and farmers took to setting the dogs on him, but he was cannier than any dog and too smart to go to tree. Did he somehow come to understand that people were his tribe in the way that a bear instinctually consorts with other bears rather than foxes or wolves or goats? Did he know he was human? He must have. He had no words to form the proposition, no way of thinking beyond the present moment, but as he grew he became less a creature of the forest and more of the pasture, the garden, the dim margin where the trees and the maquis give way to cultivation.

Then came the winter of 1799, which was especially bitter. By this time, wary of the forest of La Bassine and wandering in search of the next trove of mushrooms or wild grapes or berries and the grubs he extracted from the pulp of decaying trees, he’d worked his way up over the mountains, across the plain between Lacaune and Roquecézière, and then down again along the bed of the Lavergne until he arrived in the environs of the village of Saint-Sernin. It was early January, just after the New Year, and the cold held a grip on everything. When night fell, he made himself a nest of pine branches, but slept fitfully because of his shivering and the hunger that clawed at his insides. At first light he was up and pawing through the scattered clods of a dormant field, looking for anything to feed into his mouth, tubers, onions, the chaff and scraps of crops long since harvested, when a ghostly drifting movement caught his eye: smoke, rising above the trees at the far end of the field. He was crouched on all fours, digging. The ground was wet. A crow mocked him from the trees. Without thinking, without knowing what he was doing or why, he rose and trotted toward the smoke and the cottage that gave rise to it.

Inside was the village dyer, François 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.