Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

The man ignored her. “I’m Harry Jones,” he said. “This is Sylvia Smith.” He kept smiling at Mother in a way that made me afraid he was going to cause trouble, like the villain, Flip, in the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Mother said, “Nice to meet you,” but didn’t tell him our names.

“Come on.” Miss Smith gave Mr. Jones a little shove with the cushion. “Let these people eat in peace.”

“Enjoy the pecan pie,” he said, still smiling at Mother in that peculiar way. “We’ll get acquainted later.”

Mother nodded. Miss Smith gave Harry another gentle shove, and the two of them left the dining room.

Mother said, “‘Mr. Jones’ and ‘Miss Smith.’ Do we look that stupid?”

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but from then on I thought of them as Harry and Sylvia.

“Let these people eat in peace.” I imitated Sylvia's rasping voice.

“Why does he have to sit on a cushion?” Mother said.

I choked on my ham, and she spewed iced tea into her napkin. We couldn’t quit laughing. Finally we had to abandon our dinners. Still snickering, Mother pushed my wheelchair out of the dining room while everyone stared at us.

Mother and I shared a room, which embarrassed me, but I was also grateful for her company. We took turns undressing behind a Chinese screen in the corner, and later, as I lay on the hard mattress in my four-poster bed, I listened to Mother's even breathing in the next bed and held my aching knee. I stayed awake for a long time, imagining Harry's eyes watching Mother from the corner of the room.

The next morning I had my first mud treatment. Someone rapped on our door at seven to wake us, and Mother and I had a quiet breakfast of eggs and bacon in the dining room. Only a few other guests were there, and they all seemed to be the sick ones-in wheelchairs or bent over their plates in a twisted way. I looked around for the woman on the stretcher who’d been on our bus, and the fat man, but they were nowhere to be seen. They’d get breakfast in bed, I decided. Being among sick people again brought my condition home, and I felt my heart thump dully in my chest.

“There's our friend Harry Smith,” Mother said. “Or is it Jones?” She cut her eyes over to a table next to the wall. Harry was eating alone. He looked even smaller and skinnier than he had the previous evening. He wore an ordinary white shirt, brown trousers, and a linen jacket, but somehow he did not look ordinary. He was again sitting on his rubber cushion.

“Wonder how he managed to get that cushion in here all by himself,” Mother said.

I was feeling so nervous that all I could do was shrug. Her efforts to distract me seemed frivolous and coldhearted.

“No need to worry,” Mother said. “The treatment is painless.”

“How do you know?”

“They assured me.”

Harry turned, as if drawn by the sound of my mother's voice. He nodded once and then turned back to his toast and coffee and the Chicago Tribune.

“Who assured you?”

But she was watching Harry, studying him, so I went back to my breakfast. I tried to imagine what Dottie B. was doing at that very minute- probably reading L. Frank Baum in bed. If she’d been at Mudlavia, eating breakfast with us, I told myself, she would’ve ignored Harry and tried to comfort me. But I couldn’t imagine Dottie there, couldn’t imagine anyone I knew there. That's when I realized how far from home we were.

After breakfast my attendant, who turned out to be the tall man with the squarish head who’d boarded our bus and welcomed us to Mudlavia, wheeled me into a long narrow ward at the end of the first floor. The room was lined with rows of small metal-framed cots. Men lay on the cots, but I could see only their faces and hair-their bodies were covered with mud. Eyes watched me pass. Attendants were bustling up and down the aisles between the cots, pushing carts of steaming mud.

Buster, as he told me to call him, stopped beside an empty cot lined with a few inches of mud and asked me to remove my clothes and give them to him.

I couldn’t think how to tell him that I couldn’t possibly do either thing.

Buster squeezed my shoulder. “We’re used to naked bodies round here. People with clothes on look strange to me!”

His words only made me more self-conscious, but I untied my shoes and took them off, and then slowly took off my socks, pants, shirt, and undershirt, and finally my undershorts. I held the bundle of clothes in front of me, burning with humiliation.

“Lie down there,” Buster said. He snatched up my bundle and stuffed it into a wire basket. “Be back directly.”

I rolled onto the cot, twisting my knee as I did so. The canvas sagged down inside the frame, so lying there was like being in a shallow tub full of warm mud. I stared up at the beams in the ceiling. Despite the heat in the room, I began to shiver. I listened to flies buzzing and someone breathing beside me.

Finally a voice said, “Hello there, young man.” Harry Jones was lying in the next cot.

I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t been looking left or right, but now I fixed my eyes on his cadaverous face. I couldn’t look at the rest of him. “I’m Matthew,” I said. For some reason I didn’t tell him my last name.

Harry pointed to a big room adjoining ours. “They dig up the mud out back and heat it up in that room there, over the wood fires. Then they dip it up into buckets and put those buckets on the carts. Here comes my man now.” Harry pointed to an attendant and a cart coming toward us up the aisle. “Watch and see how it's done.” He winked at me.

“Yes, sir,” I said, grateful for his unpatronizing manner. I watched as his attendant, a wiry little man with a narrow red face, pushed the cart up next to Harry. He took a small bucket from the side of the cart and dipped it down into the big bucket of mud, bringing up a steaming heap. He tipped the bucket and, starting at the toes, poured the mud over Harry in a slow, leisurely way, as if he were watering a garden. He refilled the bucket and repeated the process until Harry was covered with a thick layer of mud up to his chin. Then he leveled the mud off with a strip of metal and scraped the extra mud back into an empty bucket. “Relax and get healthy,” the attendant said. He wheeled his cart down the aisle toward the mud room.

“Is it hot?” I asked Harry.

“Like a nice warm bath.”

I saw Buster starting up the aisle with a cart. I asked Harry, “How long?”

“Not long enough. Hour every day. You’ll look forward to it.”

I had a squeeze of panic when the first bucket tipped over me and mud began sliding over my feet. I held my breath, waiting to be scorched, but as Harry had said, it was like a warm bath. When Buster had finished, he said, “Relax and get well.” I was plastered to the cot. I couldn’t move, and didn’t want to. The oddly pleasant smell filled my nose, and I realized that I’d always wanted to play in mud, to pick it up and squeeze it, smear it on my body, lie down and roll in it. I remembered the day that Dottie B. and I had come back from playing in the creek behind her house, and how horrified my mother had been. She had sent me straight to the bath. She made me promise never to go near the creek again, and I kept my word. But mud was good. Dirt was good. It was healthful!

My body relaxed under the mud blanket. I was an Indian, hiding from white men. Or a leech, waiting for my next victim. Or a log, buried in a creek bank. This forced passivity was a peculiar feeling. Freeing, somehow.

“You’re right, Mr. Jones,” I said, turning my head toward him. But his eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep.

The time passed too quickly. Buster brought me cool water to drink and wiped my sweaty face. When he pulled me off my cot, breaking me out of my cocoon of drying mud, I had the sensation of landing again on earth after being away for years and years. I felt both younger and older at the same time, and I was no longer self-conscious. Buster escorted me, naked, out of the room and into another room lined with showers. Old men and their attendants were busy scrubbing. I looked for Harry, but didn’t see him. I stood on the green-tile floor, and Buster scrubbed my back and legs with a big rag; then he left me to wash the mud off my front as best I could. My knee still ached, but I told myself it felt a little bit better. In a bathrobe Buster gave me, I rested awhile in the cooling room. Later, after I’d dressed, Buster wheeled me along a dirt path toward the front porch. “What will you be when you grow up?” he asked me.