“The fact they let us have him so easy should have told us something was up, but it didn’t,” said Emmett.
Edith shrugged. “We got a little brown cowboy shirt for him to wear out, some cowboy pants, too. I remember walkin’ with him between us out to the Buick, feeling like I finally had my family. I think that walk from the agency door to the Buick was the first and last time in my life I was happy. It was exactly twenty-four steps. I still remember that, for some reason.”
“Don’t get sloppy, Edith,” said her husband.
“I count steps sometimes, too,” said Jim.
Emboldened, Edith sipped again and continued. “Funny the things you remember when you’re happy. So we got Horton home and he was silent. He didn’t look at us or say a thing for five days. He ate a lot. We were told about the ‘adjustment period,’ how the child had to grow into your life and feel secure before he could be happy. The agency told us to try a pet. We got him two hamsters, but they disappeared, and Horton didn’t know where. Later, we got him a dog, and he liked the dog a bunch. Dog ran off after a couple of weeks, though. Month later, some of the farm dogs dug up Horton’s dog and the hamsters outta the swamp down by bridge, came parading around the yard with them. Horton didn’t seem too surprised.”
A long silence followed. Emmett stared at the TV. “I talked to the agency about him. They said it was normal and that Horton didn’t have any history of bad behavior, so we had to be patient. The thing that got us the most was he’d never say nothing. One day, Horton stood up on his chair in the middle of dinner and pissed on the ham. I used a belt on him good, but he bit my leg so deep, it took eighteen stitches and a tetanus shot. It healed black for some reason.”
“That’s when we put Horton in the car and drove him back to the agency.” said Edith. “They couldn’t figure out why Horton was being so naughty, and they told us his record before was good. They tried to make it sound like we were doing something wrong and maybe we weren’t fit to have him. We said we’d try more lovin’ and understanding, on accounta that’s what a child needs, they said. We felt bad.”
“I didn’t,” said Emmett. “I knew right then from the look on that lady’s face, she was lying about him. I remember on the way back from the agency, Horton was sitting in the backseat of the Buick, burning a firefly in one of them cigarette lighters the old ’sixty-fours had in the rear.”
The silence got long again. “Pretty bad kid,” said Jim to fill it.
Edith nodded. “So we had a private investigator get the records from the agency. It was just like we thought. He’d burnt down his own house when he was four. He was really six when we got him, like I said, they tried to fool us. That’s why they let him go so fast. He was a lemon. So we tried to take him back, but they wouldn’t take him. Finally, he stuck a dead water moccasin down Pammy Fritzie’s underwear, and we turned him over to the Juvenile Authority. He was seven by then. They kept him two years. They did a lot of tests and told us they thought it might be a chemical problem. Maybe that was the second happiest time of my life, when we got rid of Horton then.”
Emmett held out his coffee cup and his wife poured in some bourbon. “A few months after Horton was at the Juvenile Authority, he started sending us letters. They were done in real nice writing, and the spelling was good. He had a real good vocabulary for a seven-year-old. He was smart. He wrote us about how sorry he was for what he’d done, and how much he missed the farm. I’D tell you, we sat there at the kitchen table and cried because he sounded so full of sorrow and because we’d held a lot of love inside us just waitin’ for a reason to let it out, but we never had no reason. It was like Horton in the letter was the son we always wanted.”
“So,” said Edith, “we made the petition and got him back.”
Emmett sighed and looked at Jim. His face went blue again in the TV screen’s light. “As I look back on my life, Mr. Weird, I can honestly say that was the dumbest fuckin’ thing I ever did.”
“Me, too,” Edith added solemnly. “Horton was fine for a few years after that. That was, say from nine years old to twelve. He spent a lot of time out in the fields and the swamps, catching snakes and critters and bringing them home. He did his chores, earned some money, and bought books on animals. At school, well, Horton didn’t make many friends. He got beat up a lot because he wasn’t big and he was one of those kids — you know how they pick out one to badger all the time? They singled out Horton and made him kind of miserable. But, gosh, his grades! When Horton went into seventh level — that’s age thirteen about — he got all A’s and only one D. The D was in speech. He just couldn’t get up in front of everyone and talk.”
Weir was quiet as an invisible ripple of memory issued through the room. He understood that what he’d just heard represented the apex of happiness in the Goins family unit. “So I guess the Juvenile Authority did him some good.”
Edith nodded and drank again. “When Horton came back to us, he had learned self-control. He was very polite. He was quiet. He liked to move things into his room so he wouldn’t have to come out much. He wanted to eat in there, but we never allowed that. But you know, Horton never once told us he loved us. He never once remembered a birthday or made us anything for Christmas. He lived in some kind of other place. There was the Horton that nodded politely and did the dishes. Then there was the Horton that lived in his room for hours at a time, or spent whole days out in the fields or in the swamp. There was two Hortons. I’m convinced of that.”
The Goinses went quiet again, each lost to a separate remembrance. Edith’s head turned toward Jim. “You have kids?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you probably think we’re a couple of dumb farmers, but we’re not. We’ve got love in our hearts — or at least we did a long time back — and we tried our best to find something to attach it to. There was nothing in the world we wanted more than to get through to that boy. After the first year, we started thinking it was us, and the more bad he did, the more we thought it was our fault. By the time we put him in the Juvenile Authority, we were just about crazy ourselves. We offered Horton our love. Nobody can say we didn’t. We stood by him. We still do.”
Emmett held out his cup for more. He looked at Jim, and in the TV light his eyes took on a cathode glow of surprising tenderness. “From age twelve to age fifteen, Horton was kind of distant. Still polite to us, never argued. For a brief time, he had a girlfriend, a girl his age who lived two farms over. Her name was Lucy Galen and we saw them together a few times, walking home from school. You could tell from the angle of Horton’s head, the way he looked at her, how... fascinated he was with this girl. He’d go to the fountain where she worked. We never knew exactly what happened, but Lucy’s parents called us one night and told us to keep Horton away from her or they’d call the police. Something about him and their daughter behind the smoke shed. So we forbid him to see her, and so far as we know, he didn’t. Horton spent more time in his room after that, quiet.”
Emmett turned off the TV with a remote. The apartment got suddenly darker and smaller, as if crouched in anticipation. “In May of that year, when Horton was fifteen, they found Lucy out in the swamp, stabbed bad and raped. They put Horton in jail but decided he was too crazy to help defend himself. They committed him. Lucy didn’t die, but she never got well, either, from what we heard. Nine years of hospital came after that, for Horton. They finally took a picture of what was making him crazy, and gave him a bunch of good drugs. He was getting better before that, but the new drugs cured him. January last, they let him out to us. Cured.”
Jim observed a moment of silence, for Lucy and Horton, but mostly for Emmett and Edith Goins. The apartment seemed to vibrate with their pain. “And you moved here to California?”