Idiocy of Mary Cartright
by Julie Ann Shapiro © 2007
I wiggle my straightjacket. The buckles are on so tight it hurts to breath deep. I'm no more crazy than Aunt Mary. We hear voices…ghosts.
Mary says, “Society locks up what they can't quantify; the case for the shackles.”
Only she got out of hers. She dug a hole in the center of her cell back in 1869 and struck an underground stream. It bubbled and hissed. The settlers said the place was haunted, which is why they built the nuthouse on land no one wanted.
“Why,” I question her, "when they preferred to send the nuts back east.”
She says, “Too expensive to transport bodies.” (Back in Wyoming in Mary's day, they had a state decree, “Idiots, lunatics, insane guaranteed safe passage to the Eastern Asylum.” Mary heard about it and said two words only, “bull shit,” of course now in my ear she's a chatterbox as they close the door to my padded room.
I squirm and try to loosen a buckle on my straightjacket and ask her, “Why didn't they kill them?”
“Oh, they tried with their supposed humane treatments. Me, I didn't take to warm water poured down my nose and ears to stop the voices. Many an inmate died of fluid toxicity. Not me, I learned I could withhold a large amount of water. It's what saved me, you know, that and the little boy ghost. He talked to me, said he wouldn't hurt me, that he controlled the water, not the warden.
The warden at the nuthouse retrieved the water from the well, the very same one a little boy fell in years before they built the nuthouse. He had called for his Daddy and said he lost a sailboat. It fell down the well.
The boy climbed in after it and raced the boat. An underground swell tipped it over…a warning for the boy to leave and climb back up the rope. He tried and it frayed in his hands. Moments later the boat stood upright and the boy pushed it along. Fine lines appeared on the base of the well. A ripple sent to the sprit world, “Someone's in trouble.”
The boy's father emerged from the house, as if sensing the danger. He pulled the rope up from the well and ran his hands over the ends of it, “Those frayed edges; they weren't there yesterday. I know they weren't there.”
The little boy screamed, “Daddy, I'm down here.” The man dumped a bucket of water down the well and listened to it splash, not hearing the echo of his child's flesh.
Lines cracked on both sides of the well. The man shuttered, “It's granite, it can't be this porous.” Workers came in from his mine and said it was a useless well. With cracks, it couldn't hold the ground water. They suggested foraging for gold at its base. They dumped water laced with dynamite down its opening. The lines grew wider and smoke seeped from the well.
The boy gasped.
“Impossible, for it to make such sounds,” they all said, as they deserted the place. The boy scratched with a nail he'd saved in his pocket for good luck, it had a buffalo face on the top of it.
The screaming the nail made on the walls grew unbearable and the Father fled. Weeks later he wept for his son when word got round to him by stagecoach out in California .
As for the boy he stayed in the well long past his life and the nail and the sailboat that drifted away in the underground stream. He remained silent for years, ‘til Mary Carthright's warden retrieved water and forced it down her nose and ears.
The little boy helped her swim in her mind, even though she'd never so much as waded in water her whole life. He taught her one arm over the other making big Ms and to nestle her head in her shoulders and to take small breaths, very small breaths. Water dripped down her shirt, not enough for the warden to get suspicious, but just enough to save her from drowning her insides.
The warden left her for dead, so did the other workers in the nuthouse. By the time they checked on her she'd swam out past the nuthouse and onto the tributary where the stream surfaced.
On the spot where she came ashore there's a pepper tree that bears her initials and a drawing of a dragonfly. It's on my family's land. Aunt Mary died there in the swing set probably watching the dragonflies circle in the air.
She's been talking to me since I was a kid. I don't know much about her life between the time the little boy spoke to her and her big escape or of my Mom and her, just that she's here and insisting I find a way out of my room in the nuthouse.
The floor's concrete I tell her.
She says, “It's why the dynamite is here.”
“Huh?”
“The little boy's, Father's…after his son's death he abandoned the mine and stacks of dynamite have been sitting there for decades and we've enlisted half of the spirit world on your behalf.”
“Half?”
“Yes. It's going to take a lot to blow up this place. It's not just you that needs a rescue. You know every nut in here has been hearing a relative or other and they can't keep locking up those in direct communication. It's time for a revolt. Our country did it once before. Why can't it now?”
“OK, hold on, Aunt Mary. It's not like a tea party and arguments over taxation. Various doctors have sworn up and down I'm crazy. And each inmate in here is more certifiably nuts than the next. Aren't they? Just what have those doctors been doctoring? Doping us up so we can't hear our thoughts; telling us our own truths and medicating us so we sleep so much that we don't care about leaving or anything else in this world called a life. And…and…wait…the truth I saw it. And you know it too. I painted and made ceramic bowls and saw your face. You had a dimple on both cheeks, didn't you?”
“Yes, but there's no time for sentimentality.”
“And Mom, she called me a loon too, even when I showed her your face outlined in the steam in the bathroom and…and why didn't you talk to her and show yourself?”
“Cause you needed the help, not her.”
“But it was ‘cause of you…”
“No, you needed me. And it's time for revolution; the time of the century. Some will say.”
I laugh and laugh, “And now you sound crazy too, my dear Aunt.” Crazies can laugh up quite a storm, not caring for the world how they sound. Hysteria has a whole new meaning.
Mary says, “Enough talk. Now, it's revolt time.”
“No, Mary.”
“Oh yes, Bloody Mary, we're blowing this joint. And that's what you'll serve me if it works.”
“But you're dead. You can't drink.”
“Yes, and the dead can't move a whole lot of things, right?” Just then I felt the buckles on my straightjacket loosen and I stretched and wiggled myself out of the constraints as a whiff of smoke billowed all around my room.
I panicked, “No, Mary, no,” and the little boy said, “Crouch down and make K's with your body as many as you can through the broken down doors.”
I k'd my way out of the nuthouse and made it to the nearest bar for a pitcher of Blood Marys. I needed to get good and drunk before half the spirit world showed up on my bar tab.
Julie Ann Shapiro is a freelance writer, short story author, Pushcart Nominee and novelist. She lives in the coastal community of Encinitas , California . Her first novel, Jen-Zen & The One Shoe Diaries will be published this fall by Synergebooks.com . Published stories and essays have appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune, North County Times, Los Angeles Journal, Pindeldyboz, Sacred Waters/Fire: (Adams Media 2005), Story South, Word Riot, Opium Magazine, Insolent Rudder, Cezzane's Carrots, Mad Hatters Review, Ghoti Magazine, Spoiled Ink, Void, Elimae, Footsteps to Oxford, Salome, Skive, The 2nd Hand, Millennium Shift, Mega Era Magazine, Science Fiction and Fantasy World, Green Tricycle, Long Story Short, All Things Girl, Ultimate Hallucination, The Glut, Somewhat, Uber, Moon Dance, The Quarterly Staple, Journal of Modern Post, Rumble, Long Story Short, Cellar Door Magazine (Spring and Summer Issues 2005), Edifice Wrecked, Espresso Fiction, Red, ISM Quarterly and other magazines.