he made up some stories about who they were and what they’d done.
It took four months for Prosper to be broken out of his plaster shell,
his skin flaking and gray and the cast itself loathsome as the grave, but
himself alive. Two further months to regain the strength in his hips
and the long muscles of his thighs that still functioned, and to find out
which those were, and make them move. More months to cast his legs
and have the steel braces made that from then on he would need to
stand and to walk; to learn to put them on and take them off by him-
self, and lift himself up like a stiff flagpole erected, himself the flagpole
sitter, wobbling high atop them, swept by vertigo—awful to know that
if he fell, his locked knees would stay locked and he’d go down straight
and headlong. To learn to walk with them, first in the parallel bars of
the exercise rooms (the very rooms that he had peeked into on his first
visit to this place, rooms that he now seemed to have been born and
raised in) and after that with wooden crutches under his arms. The
Swing Gait: put both crutches out in front of you and then fling your
body forward on them, advance the crutches quick enough so you don’t
fall forward. The more approved Four Point Gait: left crutch tip, right
foot, right crutch tip, left foot, like a parody of a man free-walking.
When he got good at it he was allowed to compete in the unofficial
crutch-racing meets on the ward. On the lower floor he joined the
marching again, singing and walking at the same time, a good trick.
132 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He was walking with Prudence (who still rarely spoke but seemed glad,
even proud, to have him by her, all he’d wanted) when far off Miss
Mary Mack came onto the floor—several of the children were her
responsibility, and they sang out in greeting:
“Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack
All dressed in Black Black Black
With the silver Buttons Buttons Buttons
All down her Back Back Back.”
Which more than one of the children really did have, under their
skin, including Prosper and Prudence, they’d have known it if anyone
had explained to them what the doctors had done. When the elephant
jumped the fence in the song and didn’t come down till the Fourth of
July Prudence suddenly sang out all by herself in a high piercing chal-
lenging voice Prosper would not have thought she had, that stilled the
tall-shoe clumpers and spastics and cripples:
“July can’t Walk Walk Walk
July can’t Talk Talk Talk
July can’t Eat Eat Eat
With a knife and Fawk Fawk Fawk.”
In all that time Prosper turned ten and then eleven. He passed from
fifth grade into sixth, or would have if he’d gone to school; the teachers
who volunteered on the ward never tried too hard to find out who
needed to learn what and who already knew it well enough—Amerigo
Vespucci, i before e except after c, 160 square rods to the acre. He grew two inches taller, though from now on he would grow taller more
slowly. The stock market crash took all of the family money Nurse
Muscle Eenie’d put into the Blue Ridge Corporation. Some of the sick-
est boys vanished from the ward, usually at night, and no notice was
taken of their absence, not by the nurses, not by the patients; they
weren’t spoken of again. Charlie went home, a little less knotted up
than before. Let’s go, son, his father said, grappling him and lifting
him down from the bed. Prudence went home, in the same white dress
and bow she’d worn to have her picture taken long ago; straighter now
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 133
but not all straighter, seeming to handle herself delicately, a tall stack
of wobbly saucers that might slump and fall. She smiled for him,
though, and showed him that she was taking all the versions of her
name he had made home with her. She seemed happier, he thought. He
never saw her again.
At the end of the year, his uncles appeared again, without the
chocolates this time, but with something to impart that they seemed
to have been ordered to tell him but couldn’t. Each in turn glanced
now and then behind himself, as though the unspoken thing were
right behind them, nudging. In the end they only asked several times
how he was doing, made a joke or two, and hurried away, saying
they’d be back. It was Aunt Bea and Aunt May who, a day after and
in the wake of his uncles’ failure, had to come to tell him that while
he had been in the hospital all this time, his mother had lost ground;
had worsened; weakened—they took turns supplying words—and
failed. She had died just about the time (Prosper later figured out)
he’d first put on his braces.
Whatever else Prosper would remember of that day, the thing that
would cause his own heart to fill with some kind of fearsome rain
when it occurred to him, the thing that for him would always stand for
human grief unbearable and rich, were the tears that stood in his aunts’
eyes as they talked to him then, the tremble in their voices. He had
never seen grown-ups in the grip of sorrow, and though they came
close and put each a hand on him he couldn’t conceive of it as being on
his behalf; it was their own, and he would have given anything to have
been able to say to them It’s all right, don’t cry.
“My God,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in Henryville, or to the world and
the air around.
“What,” said Prosper.
“You went in with the bent back and came out and you couldn’t
walk?”
“I can walk,” Prosper said.
“You know what I mean. And then just while you were getting
better they told you your mother died?”
“They didn’t want to tell me till I was getting out. So I’d have some
134 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
relatives, you know, around. They thought it would be tough if I had to
learn it and then be in the hospital alone.”
“What did she die of?”
“I don’t know. No one said.”
“My God.” Vi’s own mother had passed with her sons and daughter
around her, her last labored breath; they’d seen her put into her box
and into the earth and the dirt covering her. She knew. “And by this
time your father was gone who knew where?”
“Yes.”
“My God. You were alone. I can’t imagine.”
“No I wasn’t actually. There was Bea and May. My aunts. Two
uncles too.”
“Aunts and uncles aren’t parents. I mean they can try to do their
best, but.”
“Well. I don’t know. It was different.”
“Well it can’t have been better.”
“You didn’t know my mother and father,” Prosper said. “You didn’t
know Bea and May.”
4
It will be different when you come out, they all said—Mert and Fred,
Bea and May, with different faces at the different times when they
said it—and he had pondered that as best he could, but it wasn’t easy
to think through what that meant, different; when he looked for-
ward he saw a world that was all changed but actually all the same,
because he couldn’t imagine it changed. Once he dreamed of it, all dif-
ferent, but what was different about it was what was gone: his city, the
streets, his house and the vacant lots around it and the buildings that
had looked down on it. What was in their place he couldn’t see.