Burning Boy, page 71
That day, one of Martha’s acolytes rushes in to share the latest news with her. “Henry Johnson got away from where they was keeping him,” Carrie Dungen says, “and came to town last night, and scared everybody almost to death.” Martha lets out an emphatic “Well!”—which carries the force of a triumphant “I told you so!”—and then says: “This, my prophecy, has come to pass.” Carrie Dungen rattles on about little Sadie Winter and how sick she is and how her father is trying to get Dr. Trescott arrested and how there is a crowd around the jail “all the time.” At that point, Martha’s sister, “a shivery little woman” named Kate, abandons the novel she has been reading upstairs and enters the kitchen to put in her own two cents.
“Serves him right if he was to lose all his patients,” she said suddenly, in blood-thirsty tones. She snipped her words out as if her lips were scissors.
“Well, he’s likely to,” shouted Carrie Dungen. “Don’t a lot of people say that they won’t have him anymore? If you’re sick and nervous, Doctor Trescott would scare the life out of you, wouldn’t he? He would me. I’d keep thinking.”
Martha, stalking to and fro … surveyed the two other women with a contemplative frown.
Each shift of setting is accompanied by a shift in tone, but through it all Crane continues to advance his story and provide new information, for now we have learned (if Carrie Dungen’s information is correct) that Winter isn’t the only patient who has abandoned Dr. Trescott. And even if what she has said isn’t true, this is the gossip spreading through the town, and as long as there are enough people willing to believe it, gossip is always true.
Jimmie and his mother have returned from Connecticut. Nothing is said about his physical condition, and in this novella of large temporal gaps and immense authorial silences, one can only assume that the boy’s skin has healed and he will carry no permanent scars. After the lushly detailed prose in the first half of The Monster, the prose in the rapidly moving second half is pared down to skeletal thinness to enhance the speed of the storytelling. There are a few pauses for breath (the passage about Martha Goodwin, for example), but for the most part Crane is rushing forward to create an effect of simultaneity (Carrie Dungen is talking to Martha Goodwin at the same time the police chief is talking to Trescott), and rather than put in the things that have always captured his attention (light passing through the branches of a tree, a thought passing through a character’s head), he leaves out as much as he possibly can. The scope of his material has widened—taking in a greater number of characters than ever before, people from all classes and all parts of town, a microcosm of all society—but his method has narrowed to the most stringent form of minimalism: to say the most he can in the fewest words he can. It is a method he applied only to the second half of The Monster. To do what he was hoping to do, he felt that the nature of these chapters demanded it, but in other stories still to come he would use other methods to fit the demands of those works. Crane never stopped experimenting. For now, he had become a minimalist, but in the end it was just one more instrument to be used when necessary, another monkey wrench added to his writer’s bag of tools.
After his return from Connecticut, little Jimmie was at first much afraid of the monster who lived in the room over the carriage-house. He could not identify it in any way. Gradually, however, his fear dwindled under the influence of a weird fascination. He sidled into closer and closer relations with it.
One time the monster was seated on a box behind the stable basking in the rays of the afternoon sun. A heavy crêpe veil was swathed about its head.
Johnson is back in his old room, then, and his protector has followed the police chief’s advice and covered the monster’s head with a veil. And there is Jimmie with a large gang of his friends in the yard, showing off the freak of the Trescott household to the assembly of gaping, frightened boys. A chilling scene unfolds in which young Jim presides as master of ceremonies over a game of dare and bravado that will turn him into “the hero of the mob.” When challenged to touch the thing sitting on the box, “he went to the monster and laid his hand delicately on its shoulder. ‘Hello, Henry,’ he said, in a voice that trembled a trifle. The monster was crooning a weird line of negro melody that was scarcely more than a thread of sound, and it paid no heed to the boy.” Turning in triumph, Jimmie then dares the boy who dared him to perform the same exploit, and on it goes until Mrs. Hannigan in the next yard notices that her son Eddie is standing with the others and screeches at him, “as if she was being murdered,” to come home “this minute!” Dr. Trescott returns a bit later and promptly sends the whole lot of them packing. The next morning, he sits down to have a talk with his boy. When Jimmie explains what he and the others had been doing,
Trescott groaned deeply. His countenance was so clouded in sorrow that the lad, bewildered by the mystery of it, burst suddenly forth in dismal lamentations. “There, there. Don’t cry, Jim,” said Trescott, going round the desk. “Only—” He sat in a great leather reading-chair, and took the boy on his knee. “Only I want to explain to you—”
What he says, of course, is not given, but the reader has no trouble filling in the blanks.
A fellow doctor in town has been called away to care for his dying sister and asks Trescott to fill in for him while he is gone. Trescott is glad to accommodate him, and the next morning, armed with a file of medical histories from Dr. Moser, he goes to the first name on the list. It happens to be Winter, but somehow—strangely—this does not strike Trescott as “an important fact.” One asks why. The Winters have dismissed him as their doctor, and Trescott has been told that Jake Winter has gone so far as to demand his arrest. Are those not important facts, and shouldn’t Trescott feel somewhat wary about going to their house? Too naïve for his own good, he has failed to understand how thoroughly Winter and others in town have turned against him. He rings the bell, and when Mrs. Winter opens the door, he says good morning to her—cheerfully. He explains that he is filling in for Dr. Moser, and the flummoxed woman looks at him “in stony surprise.” As she rushes off to find her husband, Trescott enters the house and goes into the sitting room. Winter appears at the doorway and bluntly asks, “What do you want?” “What do I want?” Trescott replies. “What do I want?”—and suddenly he understands, at long last, what kind of situation he is in. Pushing home the point in the most dramatic terms, Crane adds: “He had heard an utterly new challenge in the night of the jungle.”
“‘Yes, that’s what I want to know,’ snapped Winter. ‘What do you want?’”
Trying to stay calm, Trescott looks over the notes he has been given and says that the little girl’s case looks “a trifle serious.” He advises Winter to consult another doctor and then transcribes Moser’s remarks into his notebook. As he starts to leave, he tears out the page and hands it to Winter, but Winter shrinks back and the page flutters to the floor.
“Good morning,” said Trescott from the hall. This placid retreat seemed to suddenly arouse Winter to ferocity. It was as if he had then recalled all the truths which he had formulated to hurl at Trescott. So he followed him into the hall, and down the hall to the door, and through the door to the porch, barking in fiery rage from a respectful distance. As Trescott imperturbably turned the mare’s head down the road, Winter stood on the porch, still yelping. He was like a little dog.
Back in Martha Goodwin’s kitchen, Carrie Dungen is bursting with news. Everyone knows about the “awful scene” that took place this morning and how Jake Winter told Dr. Trescott “just what he thought of him.” Mrs. Howarth (a wink to Cora) “heard it through her front blinds” and “it’s all over town now,” the it being that Winter told the doctor that Sadie hasn’t been well since the night Henry Johnson scared her at the party and that he holds the doctor responsible and how dare he “cross his threshold—and—and—and—” But no, Martha says, interrupting the conversation between Carrie and her sister, Sadie isn’t the least bit sick and has been going to school “almost the whole time.” When the others refuse to accept this, “Martha wheeled from the sink. She held an iron spoon, and it seemed as if she was about to attack them. ‘Sadie Winter has passed here many a morning since then carrying her school-bag. Where was she going? To a wedding?’” Furthermore—delivered in a loud voice: “If I had been Doctor Trescott, I’d have knocked that miserable Jake Winter’s head off.”
Carrie regroups, and “gaining support and sympathy from Kate’s smile,” boldly comes back at Martha:
“I don’t see how anybody can be blamed for getting angry when their little girl gets almost scared to death and gets sick from it, and all that. Besides, everybody says—”
“Oh, I don’t care what everybody says,” said Martha.
“Well, you can’t go against the whole town,” answered Carrie, in sudden sharp defiance.
“No, Martha, you can’t go against the whole town,” piped Kate, following her leader rapidly.
“‘The whole town,’” cried Martha. I’d like to know what you call ‘the whole town.’ Do you call these silly people who are scared of Henry Johnson ‘the whole town’?”
But … but, Carrie replies, Henry Johnson is scary, and “Everybody’s afraid of him.” Martha contemptuously asks her how she can know that when she hasn’t even seen him herself, and Carrie’s only defense is to fall back on her familiar line of reasoning: “Everybody says so.”
And then, suddenly switching to another topic, she adds—just in case Martha hasn’t heard—that the Hannigans are selling their house and moving to another part of town.
“‘On account of him?’ demanded Martha.”
Yes, on account of him.
Autumn. The maple trees of Whilomville have turned crimson and yellow, and as the little boys watch the leaves fall to the ground, they “dream of the near time when they could heap bushels in the streets and burn them during the abrupt evenings.” Judge Hagenthorpe and three of the town’s most “active and influential citizens” are walking down Niagara Avenue together to pay a call on Dr. Trescott. The delegation is led by a man with the peculiar name of John Twelve, the wholesale grocer, who is worth four hundred thousand dollars “and reported to be worth over a million.” Chapter 12 of the Book of John begins with several pointed references to the resurrection of Lazarus, the most astounding of the miracles performed by Jesus. Dr. Trescott has pulled off a similar miracle in bringing Henry Johnson back from the dead, and while Crane is not comparing the doctor to Jesus, both have defied the laws of nature and are cast under suspicion because of it. (Hagenthorpe at the dinner: “Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. You are restoring him to life.”) In John, the miracle draws an army of new followers to Jesus, but it is also the act that inspires the Pharisees and numerous others to turn against him, and when Jesus enters Jerusalem on what is now called Palm Sunday, the story everyone knows inches toward its climax. In his role as doctor, Trescott has followed his Christian duty by healing a wounded man through the rigorous protocols of medical science, but in doing so he has also created a monster, a thing that has infected Whilomville with a new strain of disease—an epidemic of fear—and unless that thing is removed from their midst, the town will spin further and further out of control. The four distinguished men who call on Trescott are representatives of the status quo, and they have taken it upon themselves to solve the problem. They are exceedingly gracious and sympathetic toward the doctor, but while they pretend to admire what he is doing and claim to have his best interests at heart, they are practical men, hypocritical men, and won’t think twice about abandoning any ethical principles they might possess or think they possess to restore order to the town.
As John Twelve begins to speak, Trescott turns his eyes toward the judge, hoping for a small sign of support, but the old man is resting his chin on his cane and refuses to look in his direction. They all like him, Twelve says to the doctor, but they’re afraid he will ruin himself if he carries on like this much longer. He isn’t ruining himself, Trescott says. All right, Twelve concedes, but he is doing himself a great deal of harm. “You have changed from the leading doctor of the town to about the last one. It is mainly because there are always a large number of people who are very thoughtless fools, of course, but then that doesn’t change the condition.” Another man, nameless, blurts out: “It’s the women.” They all ignore him, and Twelve continues: “Even if there are a lot of fools in the world, we can’t see any reason why you should ruin yourself opposing them. You can’t teach them anything, you know.” With a weary smile, Trescott says he’s not trying to teach them anything, but when he starts to explain himself, the words come out as an incoherent stammer: “I—it is a matter of—well—” Again the nameless man blurts out, “It’s the women,” and again the others ignore him. Twelve proposes that they “get Johnson a place somewhere … up in the valley,” but Trescott cuts him off and says that no one can care for him as well as he does. Thrown by this, Twelve begins to talk about the “little no-good farm” he was planning to give Henry, and after a few moments, he, too, begins to stammer. “And if you—and if you—if you—through your house burning down, or anything—why, all the boys were prepared to take him right off your hands, and—and—” The penultimate chapter ends in a standoff. Trescott won’t budge, and the others have run out of ideas.
Trescott arose and went to the window. He turned his back upon them. They sat waiting in silence. When he returned he kept his face in the shadow. “No, John Twelve,” he said, “it can’t be done.”
There was another stillness. Suddenly a man stirred on his chair.
“Well, then, a public institution—” he began.
“No,” said Trescott; “public institutions are all very good, but he is not going to one.”
In the background of the group old Judge Hagenthorpe was thoughtfully smoothing the polished ivory head of his cane.
Another jump forward in time. It is winter, and as Trescott returns home one evening, he “stamped the snow from his feet and shook the flakes from his shoulders.” He enters the house, and when he walks into the sitting room, he finds Jimmie alone there, “reading painfully in a large book concerning giraffes and tigers and crocodiles.” The doctor asks the boy where his mother is, but Jimmie isn’t sure. Probably upstairs, he says.
Trescott goes to the foot of the stairs and calls out to her, but no one answers. He goes up, enters a small, dimly lit drawing room, and sees his wife “curled in an armchair.” He asks if she heard him calling to her, but again she doesn’t answer, and as he bends down over the chair to see what’s wrong, he hears her “trying to smother a sob in the cushion.” Alarmed, he asks her why she is crying, but the response she gives is not a response so much as an evasion: “I’ve got a headache, a dreadful headache, Ned.”
He pulled a chair close to hers. Later, as he cast his eye over the zone of light shed by the dull red panes, he saw that a low table had been drawn close to the stove, and that it was burdened with many small cups and plates of uncut tea-cake. He remembered that the day was Wednesday, and that his wife received on Wednesdays.
“Who was here to-day, Gracie?” he asked.
From his shoulder there came a mumble, “Mrs. Twelve.”
“Was she—um,” he said. “Why—didn’t Anna Hagenthorpe come over?”
The mumble from his shoulder continued. “She wasn’t well enough.”
Glancing down at the cups, Trescott mechanically counted them. There were fifteen of them. “There, there,” he said. “Don’t cry, Grace. Don’t cry.”
The wind was whining around the house and the snow beat aslant upon the windows. Sometimes the coal in the stove settled with a crumbling sound and the four panes of mica flushed a sudden new crimson. As he sat holding her head on his shoulder, Trescott found himself occasionally trying to count the cups. There were fifteen of them.
It is a supremely quiet and restrained ending, a subdued whimper that nevertheless carries the full, annihilating force of the bang the reader might have been expecting, for this is the way the world ends, and with this small scene in the dimly lit second-floor room, it has most definitely come to an end. The Trescotts have been pushed out. They no longer have a place in the town where they have lived and thrived for years, secure in their assumptions about what their community represents, and now that those assumptions have proven to be false, where are they? They are here and yet not here, trapped in a singular form of exile that has condemned them to live as internal émigrés in their own corner of the world, in the very rooms of their own house, and the hidden, implied tragedy of the story is that they will be stuck in this in-between no-place forever. Where could they possibly go? The doctor has pledged himself to watch over the monster for as long as he lives, and nothing will ever sway him from that commitment. Henry Johnson has become a part of who he is now, and wherever he goes, Johnson will go, too. If they tried to start again in another place, it would only turn out to be another Whilomville.
