William Again
by David S. Warren
Trying to hang on to our family home after my parents died, I decided to turn the house into a Bed and Breakfast. There were a lot of delays and obstacles on the way to eventual failure of the enterprise, and my imaginary brother William was one of them.
While we were redoing the bathrooms, the old claw-foot tub stood in the middle of the living room for several weeks. One morning I came downstairs and discovered my sometime brother William in the tub..... just waking up, squinting his face and rubbing his head with his knuckles.
When we were kids, William and I shared a bedroom at Edgewood Place, but he had spent more nights in that tub than in his own bed. Full of water too. A normal child would have drowned.
I didn't know how long it had been since I last saw him, where he had been, or what he was doing back at Edgewood Place again, but I was not all that happy to see my mystery brother just then, and I did know he wouldn't be capable of speech for five or ten minutes yet; so I went to the kitchen and made coffee.
William isn't my real brother. We never even knew where he came from: he just appeared in the garden with our dog Binker one day.
I was five years old. It was Spring of 1949 and we were getting ready to move from Lewis County to Ithaca so dad could teach at Cornell.
I went to the bay window just as my father came in the driveway and my mother went out to meet him. I think we must have all seen the strange boy in the garden at once.
His big dirty face was only high as Binker's head, and he held on to her collar, as if he were using her to climb out of the ground.
My mother and father walked slowly toward the boy, as if he might sink back into the ground if they were too abrupt.
They stopped few yards from him for what seemed like a long time, talking at him I suppose, and finally Dad took Binker by the collar and led her toward the back door, the boy twaddling along side .
I tried to hold the door shut when they came up the steps, but Dad growled "BOY" through the door, and I stepped aside.
The boy was barefooted; His hair and skin and clothing seemed to be all about the same uncolor, except for around his mouth which me must have put in the creek to drink. Mom and Dad led Binker, boy attached, right up to the bath room. I followed, well behind, and watched from the upstairs hall.
He had freakishly short, slightly curved legs like the jaws of pliers. His his toenails brown and curled.
I didn't like anything about the situation. I called Binker to me, and we went downstairs.
William came fairly clean, but he never stayed that way long, and he didn't talk for many months. His first words, or at least the first we heard, were song lyrics he picked up from the radio. Goodnight Irene, which he sang, not to well, with some attempted yodeling, which he must have picked up from the Hank Williams, but never mastered.
Whether his underdeveloped legs were result of a Thalidomide poisoning, inbreeding , or just a chance mutation, we will never know. I suppose he wasn't too well liked at home anyway, and imagine he must have lived in somebody's attic or cellar, or in a brush pile behind the outhouse for most of his life before he came to us.
Well, we were the Warrens, and we were going to treat him justly, so the move down to Ithaca was delayed while Dad tried to discover who the boy was, and where he belonged.
In the meantime Mom , us kids, and the boy went up to Lake Bonaparte.
He and I didn't always play well together.
It started with us earnestly stalking one another around the island, and developed into scrambles, chases, climbs, swimming, and wrestling, all of which and William was better at that me.
Very quickly I grew to admire
and resent him equally.
William would sometimes stay out in the water into the evening. Mom would call him in and ring the camp bell, but there was no controlling William. Thinking of him out there on the water as I lay safe in bed, I felt deep aloneness.
In a few weeks of poking around, Dad could not establish William's identity, so he took on guardianship for the mean time, and it was a long mean time. Mom and Dad named him William, for no reason I know of except that there were no other Williams around, and the name Bonaparte, they pulled from the lake because it was handy, but it was appropriate enough
William was totally at home on Loon Island but never so in Ithaca . During the first years there, mostly speechless he didn't go to school and mostly went out only at night, like a cat.
Sometimes I locked the doors when he was out, but he would just go up a tree and in at the third floor.
At Lake Bonaparte William would sometimes be gone for days at a time. He was obviously able to take care of himself and Mom and Dad couldn't keep William in, so they grew to tolerate his wanderings. And they couldn't adopt a child who didn't official exist, but they did everything they could for William. One of those things was to pay for a hormone therapy which our doctor suggested might help restart the development of William's attenuated legs.
What the primitive hormone therapy of that time actually did, was it grew only his Privates. This has complicated his life in ways you can imagine for your self.
I took the coffee to William ; still in the tub, in which he immediately spilled half the coffee, then he slurped down the remaining half as fast as he could, so he could finish it before he spilled it again.
I poured him some more.
William told me that he had been up North since last I saw him, and he only planned to stay in Ithaca for a season. He wanted to dip into the money economy briefly, to save up for a bus ticket to Wyoming where he knows some horses. Horses and William are a Minotaur, if you have ever seen them. Not many horses around Ithaca, where he mostly wears his sheet rock stilts to be normal, and used to borrow my bike to ride out of town. The spring loaded sheet rock stilts work very very well for him on the bike. I wished he had his own bike, but every time he gets one, usually free one way another, it gets stolen from him.
William has no locks, has nothing to lock anything to, and manages to get past locks when he encounters them.. He had slept the night before in my new garden shed, and washed up in the watergarden.
It was a nice little shed, he let me know.
from
William Again
Dog's Plot The
Book of William
Metaphysical Times
Volume VII number 4
Fall 2012