A life without corners

Corners behind, none ahead, March 2010

Wilbur was checked in to the rehab hospital this week. His home was a trailer on the Johnson's land. Working as a farm hand, he passed most of his days out from under a roof. Mr. Johnson said Wilbur was semi-retarded and that we weren't likely to get much out of him.

"Yer a little retarded, ain't you Wilbur?" Mr. Johnson chuckles in a friendly enough way.

"Yeah, I guess."

"Maybe a lot!" Mr. Johnson slaps his dirty jeans and laughs at his old joke. Wilbur looks at his paralyzed right arm. The hand is like an empty baseball mitt with fresh dog shit fingers.

"My hand is like mush," he says to no one in particular.

The nurse, uncomfortable with the r-word, moves ahead to her last question. "What church do you go to Wilbur?" Her voice is kind, but still has a tinge of fear because Wilbur is a scary man to look at. He's well over 6 feet tall and must weigh a good 300 lbs. That mushy hand must have helped the other one wrestle yearling steers before his brain stroked and stopped sending signals to the muscles. His head is like a caveman boulder. Its base is a red and poorly shaved tree-trunk topped with a silver-stubbled jawbone is as thick as a Clydesdale horse shoe and probably as strong. His eyes are small and lost behind murky, greased-up glasses. They're the old-fashioned kind of glasses that people wear when someone else buys them and doesn't want to spend a lot of money. It's hard to tell what Wilbur is looking at. He never looks up. Above his eyes are wild caterpillar eyebrows and oddly, a tiny dome of bald head, pale and white from living under a cap. His head is a distorted dinosaur egg with a distinct point on the top. It leads one to speculate on a traumatic birth that starved his brain of oxygen, killed his mother, and left him an orphan in the care of the Johnson's.

"I belong to a round church," Wilbur finally says after an uncomfortable delay. "That way the devil can't catch me in a corner."

I can picture pre-stroke Wilbur walking through a dusky pasture with bottomless shadows and a blazing purple sunset sky. He takes long, steady strides and knows instinctively where to step to avoid gopher holes and cowpies. The pasture is his. He's like a lonely bull fenced off from his herd. Even though he's alone, he feels at home here, completely free at the center of a landscape that curves around him in a perfect circle and tells him that he belongs. He stays here until the sun is gone and then he returns to the distant light of his trailer to sleep until the sun rises again.

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