More Than Human

Lone nodded. Janie looked again. ‘Nastiest one I ever saw.’

Lone said, ‘Well never mind that. Give him something to eat.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lone. ‘You’re a baby, almost. You should know.’

‘Where’d you get him?’

‘A farm yonder.’

‘You’re a kidnapper,’ said Janie. ‘Know that?’

‘What’s a kidnapper?’

‘Man that steals babies, that’s what. When they find out about it the policeman will come and shoot you dead and put you in the electric chair.’

‘Well,’ said Lone, relieved, ‘ain’t nobody going to find out. Only man knows about it, I fixed it so he’s forgotten. That’s the daddy. The ma, she’s dead, but he don’t know that either. He thinks she’s back East. He’ll hang on waiting for her. Anyway, feed him.’

He pulled off his jacket. The kids kept it too hot in here. The baby lay still with its dull button eyes open, breathing too loudly. Janie stood before the fire, staring thoughtfully at the stewpot. Finally she dipped into it with a ladle and dribbled the juice into a tin can. ‘Milk,’ she said while she worked. ‘You got to start swiping milk for him, Lone. Babies, they eat more milk’n a cat.’

‘All right,’ said Lone.

The twins watched, wall-eyed, as Janie slopped the broth on the baby’s disinterested mouth.

‘He’s getting some,’ said Janie optimistically.

Without humour and only from visible evidence, Lone said, ‘Maybe through his ears.’

Janie pulled at the baby’s shirt and half sat him up. This favoured the neck rather than the ears but still left the mouth intake in doubt.

‘Oh, maybe I can!’ said Janie suddenly, as if answering a comment. The twins giggled and jumped up and down. Janie drew the tin can a few inches away from the baby’s face and narrowed her eyes. The baby immediately started to choke and spewed up what was unequivocally broth.

‘That’s not right yet but I’ll get it,’ said Janie. She spent half an hour trying. At last the baby went to sleep.

One afternoon Lone watched for a while and then prodded Janie with his toe. ‘What’s going on there?’

She looked. ‘He’s talking to them.’

Lone pondered. ‘I used to could do that. Hear babies.’

‘Bo

‘What I mean,’ said Lone laboriously, ‘When I was growed I could hear babies.’

‘You must’ve been an idiot, then,’ said Janie positively. ‘Idiots can’t understand people but can understand babies. Mr Widdecombe, he’s the man the twins lived with, he had a girl friend once who was an idiot and Bo

‘Baby’s s’posed to be some kind of a idiot,’ Lone said.

‘Yes, Beanie, she says he’s sort of different. He’s like a adding machine.’

‘What’s a adding machine?’

Janie exaggerated the supreme patience that her nursery school teacher had affected. ‘It’s a thing you push buttons and it gives you the right answer.’

Lone shook his head.

Janie essayed, ‘Well, if you have three cents and four cents and five cents and seven cents and eight cents – how many you got altogether?’

Lone shrugged hopelessly.

‘Well if you have a adding machine, you push a button for two and a button for three and a button for all the other ones and then you pull a handle, the machine tells you how many you got altogether. And it’s always right.’

Lone sorted all this out slowly and finally nodded. Then he waved towards the orange crate that was now Baby’s bassinet, and the twins hanging spellbound over him. ‘He got no buttons you push.’

‘That was just a finger of speech,’ Janie said loftily. ‘Look, you tell Baby something, and then you tell him something else. He will put the somethings together and tell you what they come out to, just like the adding machine does with one and two and – ‘

‘All right, but what kind of somethings?’

‘Anything.’ She eyed him. ‘You’re sort of stoopid, you know that, Lone. I got to tell you every little thing four times. Now listen, if you want to know something you tell me and I’ll tell Baby and he’ll get the answer and tell the twins and they’ll tell me and I’ll tell you, now what do you want to know?’

Lone stared at the fire. ‘I don’t know anything I want to know.’

‘Well, you sure think up a lot of silly things to ask me.’

Lone, not offended, sat and thought. Janie went to work on a scab on her knee, picking it gently round and round with fingernails the colour and shape of parentheses.

‘Suppose I got a truck,’ Lone said a half-hour later, ‘it gets stuck in a field all the time, the ground’s too tore up. Suppose I want to fix it so it won’t stick no more. Baby tell me a thing like that?’

‘Anything, I told you,’ said Janie sharply. She turned and looked at Baby. Baby lay as always, staring dully upward. In a moment she looked at the twins.

‘He don’t know what is a truck. If you’re going to ask him anything you have to explain all the pieces before he can put ‘em together.’

‘Well you know what a truck is,’ said Lone, ‘and soft ground and what stickin’ is. You tell him.’

‘Oh all right,’ said Janie.

She went through the routine again, sending to Baby, receiving from the twins. Then she laughed. ‘He says stop driving on the field and you won’t get stuck. You could of thought of that yourself, you dumbhead.’

Lone said, ‘Well suppose you got to use it there, then what?’

‘You ‘spect me to go on askin’ him silly questions all night?’

‘All right, he can’t answer like you said.’

‘He can too!’ Her facts impugned, Janie went to the task with a will. The next answer was, ‘Put great big wide wheels on it.’

‘Suppose you ain’t got money nor time nor tools for that?’

This time it was, ‘ Make it real heavy where the ground is hard and real light where the ground is soft and anything in between.’

Janie very nearly went on strike when Lone demanded to know how this could be accomplished and reached something of a peak of impatience when Lone rejected the suggestion of loading and unloading rocks. She complained that not only was this silly, but that Baby was matching every fact she fed him with every other fact he had been fed previously and was giving correct but unsolicited answers to situational sums of tyres plus weight plus soup plus bird’s nests, and babies plus soft dirt plus wheel diameters plus straw. Lone doggedly clung to his basic question and the day’s impasse was reached when it was determined that there was such a way but it could not be expressed except by facts not in Lone’s or Janie’s possession. Janie said it sounded to her like radio tubes and with only that to go on, Lone proceeded by entering the next night a radio service shop and stealing a heavy armload of literature. He bulled along unswerving, unstoppable, until at last Janie relinquished her opposition because she had not energy for it and for the research as well. For days she sca

And at last the specifications were met: something which Lone could make himself, which would involve only a small knob you pushed to make the truck heavier and pulled to make it lighter, as well as an equally simple attachment to add power to the front wheels – according to Baby a sine qua non.

In the half-cave, half-cabin, with the fire smoking in the centre of the room and the meat turning slowly in the up-draft, with the help of two tongue-tied infants, a mongoloid baby and a sharp-tongued child who seemed to despise him but never failed him, Lone built the device. He did it, not because he was particularly interested in the thing for itself, nor because he wished to understand its principles (which were and would always be beyond him), but only because an old man who had taught him something he could not name was mad with bereavement and needed to work and could not afford a horse.