This Is the Child

This Is the Child

By Terry Pringle

Copyright 1981, 1983 by Terry Pringle

First published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1983

Reissued by SMU Press 1992

Ebook version 2010

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. It remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

For Brenda and Michael

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. --VIKTOR FRANKL

Chapter 1

As we move from Austin to Abilene, Texas, in January 1978, I wonder along the way about the wisdom of this change. The two-hundred-mile trip north and west takes us to what I consider the edge of habitable country. God’s waning interest is obvious. He often forgets to send rain, and the trees thin to wispy mesquites. The hills are more often scabbed with rock than obscured by vegetation, and the landscape seems useful for little more than capping deposits of oil and gas held deep within the earth. Beyond Abilene, God abandoned beautification altogether; the country falls from a few gasping hills to barren flatness, where long horizons are broken only by occasional dust devils swirling across the countryside. Abilene, a city of almost 100,000, is set on a platter in the dwindling hills; its dominant feature is the sky.

We left a three-bedroom, two-bath tract home in Austin, and I am nervous about the reaction of my wife, Brenda, when she sees the house I have rented. It is five miles outside town in a cotton field, a gray shingled farm house with ugly green and brown and orange carpet, equipped with space heaters that I bought at a junk store—and no air conditioning. The boys, Michael and Eric, seem game for anything, but Brenda, my small, brown-haired wife of nine years, a schoolteacher who retired in 1974 to rear children, likes neighbors and security. A house is important to her. And I know she is going to hate this one.

She does. We clean as she cries. The windows rattle in the winter wind as it sweeps out of the long gray sky, and the chill in the house remains except for a five-foot radius around each space heater. Because we were unable to find a house we liked, and don’t know whether the house we will eventually buy will have a stove, I buy a used one and never get it correctly adjusted from natural gas to butane, which runs to the house from a big silver tank in the back yard. We eat meals with headaches from the fumes. The drain line to the washing machine freezes and we can’t wash clothes. We stand in the kitchen and watch mice dart across the room.

We are here because my employer, an insurance company for which I handle claims, mostly involving worker’s compensation, has moved us, and before long I find the advantage to living in Abilene. People here are much easier to deal with than those in Austin, home of cosmic cowboys, consumer groups, the University of Texas, and too many underworked lawyers. Here people like handling their own claims and dealing face to face. I call on claimants and am invited to drink coffee or a beer, to eat lunch, and I settle claims sitting on pickups, standing beside drilling rigs, or once walking with a man hunting coyotes.

Although at first I dislike the city for its narrow-minded churchiness and conservatism, I discover that west Texans are as tough and self-reliant as the ever-present mesquites, and form one of the last bastions of individualism.

But Brenda sits in the middle of the cotton field with Michael and Eric, ages three and two, trying not to cry. She misses her friends and hates the wind, the grubby carpet, the ironing board that keeps falling out of its little closet in the wall. At night we look for a house in town. We finally find one, sign the contract, and, one afternoon a week later, walk into our farm house to discover a rattlesnake resting beneath our kitchen table.

Our lives smooth out with the move into town. The house is located two blocks from the school the boys will attend and three blocks from my office. It is white frame, small, but full of promise. We spend our time cleaning the yard of unraked leaves, fallen branches, and untended fruit trees, and correcting the previous owner’s abuses inside by sanding and painting and patching and wallpapering. In the evening we walk along quiet streets lined with huge pecan trees and wizened mesquites, meeting other strolling families.

The boys grow, start playing together, and learn to perform necessary functions alone, freeing Brenda to again teach piano, cross-stitch, and visit with a growing circle of friends she meets at church. It is a life that suits her, defined and planned. Her lists of things to do make sense again.

I watch the boys, as different as two boys can be, a pattern that seems prevalent in most families with two boys: the older bouncing and ever present, bursting with needs and often at odds with the truth, the younger quieter and more independent, usually lost in his thoughts and in other rooms.

Michael was born talking, using words to get out of trouble. He pulled up the newly planted marigolds because one had made a face at him. He couldn’t take a nap because the holly bushes were calling him for a drink of acid. And although he intuitively understands the necessity of communication in social intercourse, his pronunciation is sloppy. One night when he was three and I couldn’t get him to practice saying drink, which he pronounced link, I asked him what he would do if he found himself dying of thirst with only one house in sight, and the only person home didn’t know what a link was. He shrugged. "Then I’d ask for some agua." He and I awoke one morning at my mother’s house when he was two, across the room from each other in single beds, and he tried explaining in his rapid, slurred speech that . . . well, I didn’t know what he wanted, only that he kept repeating himself. Finally I asked if he could explain in a different way. He tried sign language, a remarkable attempt considering neither of us knew it.

He is easily bribed, recognizing that if his first request is to be refused, an alternative is better than nothing. He explains his attitude simply: I make deals. One Christmas when I keep suggesting that he buy his mother a present with his own money, he finally agrees—on the condition that I take him either bowling or to play miniature golf.

Unlike Michael, Eric usually talks only when he has something to say, but then is often repetitive to the point of insanity. He refuses compromises and isn’t put off with promises of later. On a trip home from the grandparents’ when he was almost two, he asked for a piece of candy. We refused. He continued to ask, so I volunteered to count his requests. I stopped at a hundred. Several years later he tests his mother’s intention to ignore the use of tittie by repeating it for twenty minutes, until we all beg him to quit.

If we walk down the mall and someone says hello, he is always surprised to find that I don’t know the person and that those who aren’t acquainted often speak anyway. If I come in the house and ask what he and Michael are watching on television, Eric, if he answers, says he doesn’t know, and Michael is off and running with the opportunity to talk. Once apparently tired of Michael’s radiating intelligence, Eric interrupts and gives me a quick outline of the show’s plot and a sketch of each character. But most of the time, his thoughts are his own. A photographer trying to get him to smile wondered aloud once if he were in a coma.

From the ages of two through five, he has the same girlfriend, a little girl at church, and comes home pleased if she has spoken. The day she says, Oh, Eric, you’re funny, he is rapturous. Does he ever speak to her? I ask. No, never. Then how is she to know she is his girlfriend? He doesn’t know, but he certainly isn’t going to talk to her. They exchange pictures through the mail.

I enjoy watching our boys play, but am occasionally frustrated by Eric’s lack of assertiveness. Michael is a great director, not only telling Eric what to play, but what to say and when, such as, Okay, E, I’m going to ask you if you want to go on a picnic, and you say yes and put your hand on the basket and then . . . If Eric refuses, Michael whips out his ultimate weapon. If you don’t play, I’m going to call all your toys mine. The first time I hear the threat, I think I have misunderstood, but I hear it used several times in one day. It invariably works. Eric, ignorant of the points of property transfer or else nervous about Michael’s powers, always gives in.

Other times it is outright trickery. If Eric sits too long on the top rung of the ladder to the slide, a popular perch in the back yard, Michael hops on the merry-go-round and invites Eric to join him. Eric yells, Wait for me, and scrambles down. As soon as Eric passes the point of no return, Michael leaps from the merry-go-round and scurries up the ladder. I watch the same process repeated three times in an hour. Each time Eric howls in protest when he sees that he has been tricked, as naïve as Charlie Brown running to kick the football that Lucy always moves.

Eric simply cannot outmaneuver Michael, who will use force when he considers it necessary. One day Eric sits happily coloring in a book. Michael’s desires are often sparked simply by the sight of an object in Eric’s hands, which makes him recognize that this object is something he intensely wants. To be proper, Michael politely asks for the coloring book. Eric, amazed that his brother would even ask, loudly refuses. Overcome with indignation, Michael jerks the book from his brother’s lap, an action that sends Eric seeking correction from his mother. Rather than suffer the punishment he has only now thought about, Michael starts crying loudly and exhibits the exact point of attack where Eric hit him because Michael wouldn’t give Eric the book. Eric goes into an apoplectic state of despair and confusion.

Eric believes, but we are never sure if his belief extends into the religious realm. He will as soon end his short blessing of the food (Thank you for this food) with a burp as an amen, and his nighttime prayer is as short as Michael’s is long. While Michael thanks God for everyone he knows, and a few he doesn’t, such as Moses, Eric’s is always the same—Dear God, thank you for this nice day you give me, thank you for my friends. When I once suggest that he pray for himself, he refuses. When I ask why, he says, Because I don’t want to.

Occasionally he is hit with a streak of negativism that is as funny as it is irritating. As we drive to a state park for a picnic, Eric leans on the front seat and repeats for fifteen miles, I know we’re not really going to the park. Once there and no longer able to make such predictions, he takes four steps down a nature trail and says, Oh, no, now we’re lost and we’ll never get out. He makes a great show of enjoying food we discourage him from eating—onions, dill pickles, peppers.

He often has trouble deciding whether he wants to leave the house for a five-minute trip to the store, changing his mind several times and then finally deciding to go, only to request a block from the house that he be returned home.

Easy to please with toys, he usually prefers a cheap one to anything elaborate, but he is as quick to denounce something he doesn’t want as he is to dole out loving gratitude for a gift he likes. At Christmas when he is three, he requests only one gift—a supergun. We have no inkling of what a supergun is. Whenever we walk into a store, we always ask him to point one out. Eric looks for a long time at the guns and then shrugs; Kinda like that, is as close as we get. On Christmas Eve, when he gets to open one present in preparation for Christmas morning’s events, he locates a long present and rips off the wrapping. A stick horse with a stuffed head. I didn’t want that, he yells as he throws it across the room. On Christmas morning we nervously watch him open the nearest thing to a supergun we have found, a sawed-off rifle that shoots yellow plastic BBs. Although it isn’t a supergun, he tells us, he likes it anyway.

He masquerades, intrigued with the cartoon superheroes, and has Brenda make him muscles out of old diapers that he can stuff under his shirt so he can be the Incredible Hulk. He flexes his cotton muscles before the mirror and growls. Other times he dashes around dressed like Batman or Spiderman. But when he tires of superheroes, he always returns to his favorite—the cowboy. He wears hat, bandana, guns, badge, vest, and boots with his pants legs stuffed into them. If he isn’t wearing boots, he tucks his cuffs into his socks until he ruins every pair.

Unlike a good cowboy, he overlooks staples for junk and for several years lives only for a snock, an in-between-meals meal. One night he sits down to a table covered with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, and rolls and announces that he is hungry and wants a snock. He never turns his nose up at pizza, Vienna sausage, potted meat, or a corndog. If we would allow it, he would subsist entirely on any-m’s, his term for M&Ms.

His favorite activity, next to playing cowboy, is drawing and writing. In diapers, he usually found a pen with which to draw on his legs. Now he finds other surfaces. Once when I am predicting harsh punishment if I find him writing on anything but paper, his brother comes to his rescue and points out that Eric has been writing on paper—wallpaper. At the age of four, he draws endless cowboys and seals them in envelopes before Christmas, presenting gift after gift. He experiments with combinations of letters until he comes upon one that has an attractive sound. Grop is one. He writes it and laughs, writes it and laughs. He lists our names. If mine is on the bottom in small letters, I am to get mad and complain, or be deliriously happy if it is on top.

When he is four and I am researching the occult, I decide to find out if either child is psychic. I instruct them in relaxing and making their minds receptive to images I will send. Once Eric or Michael is properly relaxed on a bed, I get a grocery store magazine from a stack and take it to the living room. Then I find an appropriate picture and attempt to transmit it mentally to the child in the other room. Once he thinks he has received the image, he is to come to the living room and describe it.

Michael misses badly, describing in great detail a beach scene when I had been looking at a rabbit, or a magnificent bird in flight when the picture is that of a snowplow. But Eric scores. He walks in once and tells me he has seen a child playing with a toy when the Fisher-Price ad is exactly that. Another time he says all he saw was a swimming pool when I had been staring at a cigarette ad, the entire page swimming-pool blue.

The last time we try, in the fall of 1980, as Eric settles down, I walk out of the bedroom, get a magazine, and begin looking for a picture. Before I find one, he starts crying. I hurry to his bedroom, thinking he must have hit his head or fallen from the bed, but he lies curled into a ball and all he will say is