For no reason at all. Hm.
An idea occurred to me.
To the boy, I said, "You'd better get back. You don't want to wiss lunch. I think Little Ivy is making Chocolate Disaster for dessert today."
"I don't like chocolate," he said. "What's your name?"
"Jim. What's yours?"
"Jim who?"
"Jim McCarthy. And you're really not supposed to be here now. Somebody is probably looking for you. Come on, I'll take you back." I held out my hand.
"I don't need your help." He backed away.
"Okay." I held up my hands to show I meant no harm. "Have it your own way." I bent back to the task at hand. The kid looked skittish enough already. When I looked up again, he was gone. No matter. He couldn't go far.
Just as well. I wanted to think.
I had an idea for a game we could play.
Maybe one of the reasons we were having so much trouble making contact with these children was that they were so terrified. Dogs, darkness, people, worms, their own bodies-these kids were psychological disaster areas. The ones who knew what they were afraid of were the lucky ones; the rest of them were afraid of things that could only be found in a catalog of Nameless Horrors. (How do you alphabetize a catalog of Nameless Horrors anyway?) Or worse.
It wasn't just that our kids were afraid; it was worse than that: they were afraid to be afraid.
If we could get them to acknowledge how scared they really were, that would be the most honest experience in their lives. It might be the start of real communication.
That was it. We had to get them talking. I knew what I wanted to do.
It was one of Jason's exercises.
Jason always said, "What you resist, persists. Your resistance is the energy it feeds upon."
Right. If you resist your own fear, what you get is the terror of fear compounded. If you resist your feelings of anger, you get rage. If you resist your grief, what you get is unending despair.
"Give in," Jason always said. "Let yourself be angry, afraid, or sad, or whatever else comes up. The experience hurts a lot less than the resistance to it. Once you let it out, it leaves you. Let go of it, it disappears."
I knew the exercise would work.
It had worked for me. Over and over and over. Dammit.
I knew what the real problem was.
I missed the circle. I missed the loving. I missed the good things about the Tribe.
I didn't want Family to be a Tribe-but I did want Family to have some of the family feeling of the Tribe.
When I finally came back, later that afternoon, I must have had a thoughtful expression on my face because B-Jay stopped me and asked, "What's that about?"
"What's what?"
"The look."
"Huh? Nothing. I was thinking about tonight?"
"Did you figure out what you're going to do?"
I realized then that she was testing me-no, pushing me into larger and larger responsibilities-the same way we pushed the children. The same way Jason had pushed me. The same way Duke had pushed me. And everybody else. It annoyed me. I wanted to ask, "Why can't I go through life at my own speed?"
But I didn't. I just nodded. "I'm going to have a screaming contest. We're going to see how much noise we can make."
"Sounds like a perfectly horrible idea," Betty-John grinned. "The kids will love it." I wanted to tell her the rest, but she shrugged me off. "I don't have the time right now, Jim."
"I really want you to hear this, B-Jay. I think there's the possibility of a breakthrough here."
"Jim, I mean it. I don't have time." She shoved me away. "I trust you. Go and teach the kids to scream."
So I did.
After dinner, I walked the kids over to the main hall. We were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts. The heat of the day still lingered and it was a warm, slightly muggy evening.
Inside my head, I was experiencing a bit of stage fright. Second thoughts. Maybe I wasn't qualified to do this; but then, I argued with myself, if I'm not qualified to do this, nobody is.
The hell with it. Let's just do it and find out.
We pushed into the well-lit hall. Alec and Holly and Tommy and me.
There were only two or three of the older kids to assist me, Little Ivy and Trisha and Mike; everybody else would be at the Directors' meeting; but these three were experienced. We shouldn't have any real trouble. I took them aside and explained to them briefly what I was going to do and what they should watch out for. "You're probably going to need some boxes of tissue. Some of the kids will start crying. I'm going to explain to them that it's all right to cry. The way you win this game is by seeing how much screaming and crying you can do. So don't try to help them or comfort them. Let them just all have a good scream and if they cry, they cry. They'll be fine. You'll know if someone's in real trouble."
I stepped to the center of the room. The children quickly formed themselves into a large circle. The games always started with a big circle.
"Okay," I said to them, "tonight's game is about noise. All kinds of noise. Big noise, little noise, happy noise, even unhappy noise. So, let's start by practicing. Let's see how much noise we can make. Let's see who can scream the loudest." And we were off.
The kids began to scream like banshees and wild Indians and air raid sirens.
Little Ivy grinned at me above the uproar. The little monsters loved the idea. Everybody else was always telling them to keep quiet; here was a grown-up telling them to roar like a madhouse. Most of them did.
"You must be talking to my deaf ear!" I shouted. I had to holler to make myself heard. "I can't hear you!"
That upped the level of noise by at least ten decibels.
"I almost heard something that time-but Alec wasn't shouting." I waited till the noise level began to ebb a bit and went down on one knee in front of him. "You don't have to shout if you don't want," I said. "But Bear can't make any noise without your help, so would you shout for Bear?"
He shook his head. "Not even for Bear?"
Alec looked very uncomfortable. I didn't want to push him too hard, but I did so want him to make a noise, any kind of noise at all.
"Tell you what," I said, deliberately casual. "You ask Bear if he wants you to make a noise. And if he does, then you make a noise. And if he doesn't, you don't have to. Okay?"
Alec nodded.
"Go ahead. Ask Bear."
Alec turned away and bent his face down to Bear's neck hole. I waited, but he didn't turn back. Well, maybe Bear was a slow talker.
"All right," I straightened and spoke again to the rest of the children. "That was a good warm-up. Now, let's do it for real. Now, let's make some real noise. Let's have them hear us in the big house."
This time, they put their hearts into it. Once they realized it was all right to shriek their lungs out, they began to be willing to really let loose. I noticed that the paint had shaken off some of the walls and the bark was starting to blister on some of the trees outside.
I waved my arm in a big circle as if I was winding them up and they kept up the noise as long as they could. Their faces were shiny and red. All of them were very excited now. They were jumping up and down and screaming as hard as they could. Good. I needed them to reach that peak just before exhaustion. One more good scream ought to do it.
"Okay, this is it. This is the last one," I said. "Let's make it count."
When I looked back in Alec's direction, I noticed that he had his mouth open and he was screaming as hard as he could. At first, I thought it was good. I'd finally gotten him to make a sound.
Theen I realized that he had dropped Bear on the floor before him, he was screaming out of sheer panic.
Uh-oh
Instinctively, I grabbed him in a gigantic hug. I pulled him close m me and let him scream into my chest. He was rigid-and he couldn't stop screaming. He just raged and raged and raged. He couldn't hear me and he couldn't stop.