At first Herschel had been unhappy when Leeson joined him in the woods, had watched with dismay as he came briskly through a clearing and flailed a hand overhead. The two men were friends because of the nature of their circumstances and the proximity of their ward beds, but, Herschel felt, Leeson did not understand him. By the time the girl joined them, he had reconciled himself to the fact of company, though it was the poet he would have preferred to be with.
As Charles and the girl walked ahead, Herschel busied himself tracking the patter of the birds as they took to their shrubs and branches, their own poems arcing out of the flutes of their throats. Theirs was a language he could speak, their twittering complaints and warbled praise braided with his own twiney thinking. Herschel understood that he did not see the world as others saw it. He saw himself as being like the poet in this regard, although the poet had a means to speak of his purgatorial travels whereas Herschel did not. In the weeks before the walk his problem had been getting worse. He would recover his voice in therapy only to lose it again, and because of this he had started to pluck grievances from grounds where there were none, to revel in bitterness. He could savour the weight of his silence only when he was amongst the others, and so he started to take the most prominent seat in the games room or in the ward in order to perch there, his face slack and his mouth gaping open like a purse.
We know that when Jane read Herschel’s casebook she was able to see how his progress varied. One week there would be talk of his release, and the next there would be a threat of removal to one of the stricter asylums. He oscillated from improving to having fits to privileges returned within three hastily written lines. What Jane doesn’t understand is that this is only part of the story, gleaned as the hospital staff tracked patients over the course of a day or two and jotted down exaggerated acts or volatile aspects. The hours of selfhood between fits in the bath or dining hall rebellions went mostly unrecorded, and no one but Dr. Thorpe was tasked with asking “How do you feel?” or “What are you thinking?” No one but Thorpe was willing to read Herschel’s body language, watch him flit his hands and arms as if they could speak for him on the days his voice failed.
The lack of a proper voice, the silence, wasn’t Herschel’s choice. A trap door had closed in his throat one morning and refused to open again. He’d been walking the cornfields of his farm, watching the crows settle between the stalks. He had opened his mouth, intending to disperse them, but instead of a human word a serrated sound came out. He squawked at himself with surprise. That night under the rough blankets of his bed he could feel a tingling in one arm; then, days later, he felt a prickliness in the other. The soles of his feet became itchy and his clothes nettled his skin. His body grew strange and worked against him — his arms so heavy that although he became fascinated with the contours of his own limp sex he stopped being able to touch it. He walked purposefully into town but when the chemist asked him to describe what salve he sought, a guttural sound emerged. When he tried to modify it, it assumed the whoot of an owl. At first he recoiled from his disability, hid in out-of-the-way places when his woman came around — on the sloped roof of his barn, on the guttered lip of his neighbour’s house. But then he realized what was happening: it wasn’t that he couldn’t speak; rather, he was acquiring a new language, and his physical discomfort was part of the required change. Some days, if he concentrated, he believed he could feel his metamorphosis — his vocal fold closing and his esophagus opening into a swelling crop, the crop opening onto a blooming gizzard.
It suited Herschel that the physician called to the farm to assess him believed he was an imbecile.
When asked by the young doctor if he was a danger to others, the woman who claimed she was Herschel’s wife — but who did not, in reality, live with him — gazed at Herschel with hooded lids and said, “Yes.” She sat primly in the front room when the second doctor came and testified that she lived in constant fear of her husband’s self-harm, pointing to the grey space of the adjacent kitchen where she said duty had required her to lock up the knives. Herschel cawed in reply. He knew there would be some other man in his bed before he exited the carriage at the hospital. Still, even in his fledgling state, Herschel knew that, no matter the cost, he wanted other than what he had. He was tired of meagreness and petty ways of thinking; he wanted a larger view of the world, wanted to get out of the poverty of his own life, out of the insularity of the village he had been brought up in. The second doctor, at least, had studied him with a certain degree of open-minded patience, as if he discerned a mind at work under Herschel’s feathered thinking.
If Thorpe had asked Herschel what he remembered about that day in the woods, and if Herschel could have voiced it, he might have said the cast light of the forest, the sun broken by branches as if by the struts of a window, the dew palpable and settling. The poet’s words covered everything he saw like a gauzy web: recitations netted over the spindling trees, crawling over the thick veins of the leaves like a caterpillar. Caught in gusted exaltation! / Tooth-tipped we slip / under the grazed skin of the mottling ground. The green noise of the poems and the woods surrounded Herscheclass="underline" leaf-mouths and nattering grasses, the low hum of the pan of moss he put his ear against. The throstle in the forest understorey saying hello in its tweep and burble; the poet singing, Come under, come under and know you are not alone.
In the latter part of the day, Leeson and the girl started to trail Herschel at a distance. From time to time, Herschel would turn and glance around for them, sure that they’d become separated. His own face was slick with sweat from the exertion of the walk and he resented his companions when they caught up to him because they did not appear to be suffering as he was. Leeson had been distant earlier, in the hour when they’d walked three abreast, absent-mindedly gravitating toward even the faintest tread of a path as if he needed to course a route others had forged before him. Herschel had been mulling over a stanza the poet had composed weeks ago in the potting shed while observing turnip roots dangling over the edge of the work surface like little phalluses: All our ghosted pities/all our sorrowed births/bursting like seeds/in the blackened womb of earth. Herschel had never seen before that the earth was like a womb and he did not like to think of it. It changed the entryway of a woman’s sex into a door to an incomprehensible chamber, and it turned the place where the horizon met his farm’s fields into a fertile slit. And so the Whitmore girl’s sex was a fact he was aware of as they entered a stand of oak. Leeson walked between him and the girl as if he were a partition. As if he thought Herschel were some kind of animal, catching whiff of his prey.