FIRST CONSONANTS, page 1
Praise for John Whittier Treat’s
First Consonants
“A flame of rage burns at the core of Brian Moriarty, ignited by a traumatic birth and fueled by a lifetime of debasement and abuse because Brian stutters. The text of John Whittier Treat’s First Consonants is incendiary, placing the reader in the furious heart of Brian’s world. As we may decry his actions, we cannot help but want a balm for him, a cool soothing of his implacable ire, lest it consume and reduce him to ash.”
—Terry Wolverton, the author of Stealing Angel
“A compelling, at times relentless novel that gives the term antihero a brand-new spin.”
—Felice Picano, author of Like People in History, The Book of Lies, and Onyx
“Brian Moriarty intuits truths about his life he never expresses in words, nor even in thoughts. First Consonants tells the story of his long journey to confront those truths. Brian traverses landscapes, internal and external, and grapples with the reality of violence, the complexity of family, the insidiousness of faith. Thrumming beneath it all, John Whittier Treat’s unrelentingly poignant prose grounds and belies the central theme: the aching unrealized potential of language.”
—Ana Maria Spagna, author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going
“First Consonants touches on the origins of violence, of love, and what it means to find one’s way through the maze that is the world. Here is a story that is engrossing, vulnerable and wise in a way that few books are these days.”
—Jim Krusoe, author of The Sleep Garden
“This remarkable and moving novel of a boy and a man struggling to overcome the violence the world inflicts on him due to his stutter made me rethink so many of my assumptions about language and the body. Written in ludic, kinetic prose, at turns beautiful and harrowing, it has an expansiveness and ethical import that is rare.”
—Alistair McCartney, author of The Disintegrations
FIRST
CONSONANTS
John Whittier Treat
FIRST CONSONANTS. Copyright © 2022 by John Whittier Treat.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, questions, and comments, please contact us at info@jadedibispress.com.
Published by Jaded Ibis Press
A nonprofit, feminist press publishing socially engaged literature
jadedibispress.com
Cover design by Crystal J. Hairston
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-938841-86-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-938841-85-9
First Edition: 2022. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
“Unlike most stuttering, mine began violently.”
—Frederick Pemberton Murray, A Stutterer’s Story
FIRST
CONSONANTS
Chapter One
Brian’s problem became the whole town’s one rainy morning.
He was a little late. His wet rubber boots made squishy sounds as he walked down the wide hallway of the new cinder-block school building. The green paint on the walls still smelled fresh. The too-bright fluorescent lights hummed in unison. His teacher, Mrs. Roland, was standing by the shiny red metal door to assist children as they arrived at her first-grade classroom. She peered down at Brian when he stopped in front of her. He didn’t want to ask for help, but he had to.
“Can you help me take off . . . my. . . buh-buh-boots?”
Later, Brian would overhear Mrs. Roland explain to the principal that she had giggled at Brian half out of embarrassment for him and half because boys his age are so cute when they stutter.
“Your boots, Brian?”
He did not let his eyes meet hers. He focused on the small puddle gathering between his boots.
“I’ll help you with your boots, young man,” she said. “Here, sit down on the bench. Now say boots for me.”
Brian did not sit. Nor did he say anything. Instead, he looked up at Mrs. Roland with a face crossed with hurt. He wailed while stamping his wet rubber boots up and down. Soon he was flailing his arms within his raincoat, warding off his teacher lest she dare bend over to help him. He resolved that the grown-up who had betrayed him with her laughter would not touch him. His wailing grew louder and attracted attention in the school hallway. He knew he had done something wrong by stuttering. Adults always chuckled. He had no choice but to make his slipup worse by shrieking. No one would laugh at that.
Mrs. Roland insisted Brian to stop. He ignored her. She took a step back, as if she foresaw he’d need more room for his performance. Classmates poked their heads into the hallway to see what was going on. Two boys, not his friends, snickered. The girl with the ribbons in her yellow hair started crying. Another teacher, the old, ugly one, popped out of her own classroom and scowled. Not at him, but at Mrs. Roland.
Mrs. Roland, thus cued, insisted he stop again, but she betrayed her own resolve by retreating another step. Brian did not stop. In fact, he was inspired. He was going to use this chance to get back at everyone. He would ruin their morning. He screeched louder. For a long while, he’d been mad at stuttering and madder at others for not stuttering. Now they’d all know it. He did not stammer when he yowled. He’d show them how good he could be at yowling. He kicked the other kids’ rain boots, lined up neatly against the wall under their coats, in every direction. Some bounced against the opposite side of the hallway. A boot here, a pair of galoshes there. He was enjoying this but didn’t let it show. He kicked more footwear, including Mrs. Roland’s fancy ones with the fake red roses on them and her umbrella, too. They ricocheted and landed helter-skelter far from where they belonged. Some kid’s little rainbow-striped umbrella, propelled by his kick, struck a third teacher’s shin and made her cry out. Brian knew he was in trouble. He’d pay for it later. But for the time being, he was in charge of everything in this hallway. He meant to get the most out of the moment.
He wondered what to attack next. The old teacher, the one with her eyeglasses on a chain around her neck, stepped forward. Unfazed by any six-year-old, she grabbed Brian by the collar and yanked him toward her, hurting his shoulder. He stopped yelling but left his mouth open, a signal that he was ready to resume at any second. She clutched his jacket tighter and barked orders to the other teachers in the hallway to get their pupils back in their seats.
Order restored, the teacher left the scene with Brian in her fast grip and led him to the principal’s office. A lady behind the counter made a call to his mother. “Please come and take your son home,” she said. While waiting, Brian heard Mrs. Roland explain to the principal what had happened, an account he had to listen to again once his mother arrived. They instructed Mrs. Moriarty that her son could return to school in the afternoon, after lunch, if he had sufficiently calmed down. He did not calm down. His mother confined him to his room for the rest of the day, a square room with a square window looking out onto a square backyard. He sat up straight on the edge of his bed’s calico spread, legs swinging in defiance, now with no audience to appreciate his performance. His legs soon got tired, but stopping would have been an admission of defeat.
He had all afternoon to think about what he had done. If he had limped down the school hallway, he could have explained to Mrs. Roland that he was out playing ball the day before. If his arm had been in a cast, he could have told her about falling off his bike. If he had a fever, he could have asked to be sent to the school nurse. But when you stutter, Brian thought, you can’t tell anyone anything for sure. You don’t know if you’ll succeed or not. There’s no excuse for it, anyway. You’ve always stuttered and there’s no new accident or cold going around to blame. You might think you know why you stutter. Brian had an idea or two. But explanations don’t help. You’re encouraged to talk, to say what’s on your mind. They laugh when you can’t. All that’s left, Brian realized, are your two arms and legs: Limbs powered by a body’s muscles actually working in coordination. Arms and legs, like swords, sliced through the air and made boots and umbrellas fly against school corridor walls. They came down with a clatter that a mouth, willfully muted, chose not to enlighten with words.
He never told his mother what had set him off, in part because he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t just Mrs. Roland’s titter. There was more to it than that, but just what he didn’t know. Mostly he didn’t talk to his mother because he worried he’d stutter more and get angry all over again. Nor did she ask for his side of the story. It was 1953, and problems went away by not talking about them. Brian was excellent at not talking. For that, he and his mother were grateful.
*
In Brian’s earliest memory, he was sitting in a high chair in his family’s kitchen and banging a teething ring against the tray in front of him. He watched his father, in one of the two identical charcoal gray suits he wore to the plant, rush out of the house through the back door. The house door slammed; the car door followed with another slam a few seconds later. Brian’s attention turned to the now empty kitchen. The walls were pale beige, the cabinets off-white. The floor was checkered with black and gray linoleum tiles. Over the roar of a vacuum cleaner running in another room, he heard a radio on the counter. It was tuned to a radio station on which a deep-voiced man was talking about something. Brian did not understand words yet.
An alternative first memory competed with this one. It came to him in dreams, sometimes waking ones. Inside Brian Horace Moriarty’s mother there was no day or night. He would never learn the words to describe that place. Language had failed him all his life. He recalled bits and pieces of this intrauterine time when feeling exceptionally dumb in a garrulous world.
In this dream, his parents made a wish when they conceived him. They prayed he’d be whole. They didn’t know their son was already more than heart, spine, bones, skin and blood. He had those things, all the accessories he would need for any reasonable task in life: Powerful arms, stout legs, a worthy penis, an upright head. He was a perfect growing swell in a woman’s body, the early start to a man who would wonder about this dream. Ripped out of his mother’s body and dragged into desiccated air, Brian would spend the total of his allotted years trying to recapture its intensity and exchange it for eloquence. He was lifted with forceps into the sterile light of a delivery room. His soft skull would bear the tool’s mark forever. For now, he floated in his mother and grew aware of another with him. He looked a lot like Brian. The same arms, legs, penis and head. But when Brian touched his own face, there was no opening where the other fetus had one. He didn’t have all the things he’d need. Soon he realized this missing part was a mouth, and its absence would leave him bereft of a tongue as well. He and the other fetus exchanged no grunts or groans. Only once, when Brian was pulled out of their mother, did his fraternal fetus make room for him. He shrank as best he could against the wall of the womb before he lunged without warning and struck Brian hard in the face. He made a bloody slit where there was no mouth but should have been; and Brian knew violence, one moment before brutal forceps would teach it to him a second time. He would recall, or think he recalled, that his brother’s blow instructed this: I am the one who gave you this mouth, out of which one day you might speak words that redeem you, or the world.
Chapter Two
The Moriarty family lived twenty miles east of Seattle in Tummus. Their town sat up against the foothills of the Cascades, mountains high enough to halt the clouds drifting in from the Pacific that made it rain in sheets. On the western slope, dense green forests; on the eastern, not much. The Sammamish Plateau ran along the northern edge, and more mountains lay to the south. No matter where you stood in town, mountains seemed close. When he was very young, Brian thought all towns had mountains surrounding them. At night he’d hear bobcats catching raccoons. On Sunday car rides after mass at St. Joseph’s, he saw telephone poles that stood askew and a town dump spilling over into adjacent woods. But streets in Tummus were straight and laid out at right angles. The newer parts of town were small ranch homes built by Boeing employees for their young families. Eisenhower was president, Khrushchev was first party secretary, and the race was on. Boeing was hiring men by the thousands.
The Moriartys lived in one of these ranch homes. Brian’s father had built it with the help of his brothers, borrowing plans from his boss at work. A one-story, one-car garage, one-bathroom ranch, just like everyone else’s. It was boom times in postwar America, and everyone was building something. In time, when television arrived, homeowners mounted the same roof antenna. Every house on his street had the same picture window looking out onto the same lawn looking in at the same furniture. A few, such as the Moriartys, had basketball hoops in their driveways. Some had three bedrooms. The Moriarty family had two. Some men built backyard decks. Some, including Art Moriarty, did not. Instead, the Moriartys had a concrete birdbath with white bird droppings on its rim year-round. Otherwise, the Moriarty home resembled every family’s, distinguished by variations in the pale earth tones of house paint chosen from a palette meant to contrast only slightly with the Northwest’s leaden winter skies.
Inside the house, however, Brian thought his family was special. His mother, Eve, was beautiful and his father, Art, handsome. She had a fair Irish complexion and a good figure. Eve wore dresses that smelled like flowers. Art had broad shoulders, large hands and a firm chin. His father’s scent reminded him of the men’s department at Sears, where he and his mother would go buy the khakis and short-sleeved shirts Art wore on weekends. Brian was special because he was their son.
On the fireplace mantel stood framed black-and-white pictures of Art and Eve’s marriage. They were standing in front of St. Joseph’s church. There were no grandparents in the picture. They had died already. Some people in the photographs were men in uniforms. His father explained to him the war had just ended. Dispatched to places flat and dry, he said, now they were back where everything was green, and tall mountains encircled them.
In this town everyone had to fit in. There was a hole in the Moriarty family to fill, and Brian filled it. His mother’s pregnancy had been long, and he later learned there had been “complications,” but after baby Brian arrived, he was all anyone could have wished for. The mood in the Moriarty household changed as neighborhood children chatted away with new words each day. New words came slowly to Brian. Early on he’d managed the expected ma-ma and dah-dah, and for a time a handful of other pseudo words: Jeez for cheese, guu for good, mee for milk. So gradually that no one noticed right away, he spoke less rather than more. Art and Eve didn’t mind at first. Neither said anything to him. He heard them tell neighbors their child was a quiet one, as his father had been. A sign of manly reserve. He would grow up to be good with his hands, they said, like his uncles in the construction trades. No need to be a chatterbox, other mothers reassured Eve as Brian listened to everything they said from his bedroom. It took time for his parents to understand what he had sensed since infancy: What was lodged inside him, what stuck in his mouth like glue, were words he did not say and no one heard. There were words he wanted to say, but all he could handle were the most minimal and necessary. Wah-wah. Wee-wee. Poo-poo.
*
Dr. Stevens wore a large headband around his head with a mirror attached to it. The rest of his face was dry and pasty. Brian wasn’t sure if the mirror looked funny or threatening. He sat on the edge of the examining table, wondering what was about to happen.
His stutter deteriorated from occasional to constant when he was five, at the same time his parents brought home another child, a younger brother, Bruce Aaron Moriarty, soon nicknamed Bam. They told him his baby brother looked just like he had at that age, minus the small gash the obstetrician’s forceps had left on Brian’s scalp. He did. The same little snout of a nose, the same big ears. The same blue eyes, although one of Bam’s seemed askew. No Moriarty was going to perfect, Brian thought with relief. They could have been twins.
Peering over the top of the crib on tiptoe, Brian would steal glimpses of the new baby and study its gurgling mouth: No words, just like him. Brian’s near-total stammer meant he was trying less to communicate. He heard his parents say it might be the presence, the competition, of a new baby that was making his speech less fluent. A phase, nothing to worry about. Whatever problems Brian might have, the happy cooing of a second Moriarty son trumped them. But a year later, someone, perhaps the school principal, worried enough about the tantrum he’d thrown outside Mrs. Roland’s classroom to suggest professional help. He eavesdropped on his parents talking in the kitchen about this, too. “It’s a process of elimination,” Eve said to Art. “We’ve thought about every reason he might have trouble talking: Shyness, confusion, maybe a little retardation. Now we’re down to this.”
A week later, his mother took him to the family physician after school, leaving baby Bam in the care of a neighbor. Dr. Stevens ran his small practice out of a two-room addition he had added to his home in their neighborhood. On the town’s newly poured sidewalk, Brian and his mother walked to the appointment.
“Hello, Brian,” said Dr. Stevens.
Brian had been to Dr. Stevens many times when he was sick. He didn’t feel sick today, and didn’t know why his mother had brought him. “Huh-huh-hello,” he mumbled. Hs weren’t as hard for him as bs, but they almost were. It was rare for him to try.
