The Heavenly Table(41)

“It’s my son,” the woman said, a sob catching in her throat as she looked toward the narrow stairs leading to the second floor. “He’s…he’s…” she stuttered.

“Well?” Hamm said, hoping it was something easy, like constipation or a stomachache. With the ink on his medical degree barely dry, he didn’t think he was quite ready to tackle something life-threatening yet. He was sure his lack of confidence would soon go away, but a few more days to settle in before he confronted something complicated or ghastly would be a blessing.

“It’s not something a lady can talk about,” she said, wiping delicately at a tear running down her powdered cheeks. “Just look him over and you’ll see. An adjustment, that’s what he needs.”

“A what?”

“An adjustment,” she repeated. “So he’s normal.”

Shit, this must be bad, Hamm thought, as he looked down at the string of rosary beads she was squeezing in her hand. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“Jasper,” she managed to whisper right before she gave a little swoon and carefully crumpled onto the horsehair sofa.

Hamm climbed the stairway with a sense of dread. Though he really didn’t believe in a divine being anymore, he stopped near the top and crossed himself anyway, hoping for some guidance and preparing for the worst. It was inevitable, he had been told in medical school, that he would lose a patient now and then, but why did the first one have to be a child? “Just do your best,” he told himself, as he walked toward the open door at the end of the hall. However, when he entered the room he found a boy standing rigidly in front of a bed, looking quite healthy except for a frightened look on his rather plain, bony face.

“Well, lad,” Hamm said, after introducing himself, “can you tell me what’s wrong? I can’t make heads or tails out of what your—”

“I don’t want you cuttin’ on it,” Jasper interrupted.

“On what?” Hamm asked, figuring the boy must be suffering from a cyst or tumor of some kind.

After a moment’s hesitation, Jasper unbuckled his pants and let them drop to the floor. He wasn’t wearing any drawers. Hamm stood there speechless for a minute, staring at the long slab of meat hanging between the boy’s skinny legs. “So this is what your mother was talking about?” he finally said. “Your penis?”

Jasper nodded grimly, then reached down and pulled his pants back up over it. “She wants you to whack some of it off, but I’d rather you maybe tried to shrink it like those Africans do with the heads and stuff.”

Only then did the doctor realize what the woman meant by “an adjustment.” Lord, could she be serious? He glanced about the room, bare except for a small dresser and a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall above the neatly made bed and a long rifle leaning in the corner. “But why?” Hamm asked.

“To make me normal,” the boy replied. “Just like she told ye.” Then he began to tremble and a single tear flushed from one of his brown eyes and dripped off his chin onto the floor.

“Now don’t worry, son,” Hamm said. “I’m not going to touch it, let alone operate on it, I promise. How old are you?”

“Be twelve my next birthday.”

“So you’re still in school?”

The boy shook his head. “Mother won’t allow it. She says freaks shouldn’t be seen in public.”

“What about your father?”

“He got killed right after I was born,” Jasper said. “Over at the paper mill.” He turned then and pointed at the rifle. “He bought that buffalo gun just for me. You ever seen one before?”

“No, can’t say that I have.”

“Mother won’t let me shoot it, but one of these days I will.”

Hamm looked out the window into the backyard, saw a couple of chickens pecking in the dirt, a mangy cat stretched out on a low hanging limb in a mulberry tree. Once, as part of his surgical training, he and several classmates had dissected a cadaver. The man on the table had been found frozen to death on a bench in downtown Baltimore in the middle of the day. Just a tramp with no name, no next of kin. Other than that, the only thing Hamm remembered about the poor fellow was that he’d had the biggest cock any of them had ever seen. Pumped up, it would have been the length of a hatchet handle and as big around as a specimen cup. They had all gone out for a beer afterward, and, of course, there had been much joking about it, most of them finding it hard to believe that a man who possessed something so magnificent could have ever ended up alone in the gutter. And by the time Jasper’s quit growing, Hamm estimated, as he watched the cat suddenly drop from the tree and slink off through the grass, his would be even larger than the one they had removed from the bum, the one that had ended up pickled in a jar of alcohol in a dark closet alongside some mutated embryos and a three-headed mouse.

“Your mother,” the doctor told Jasper, “just doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with you. Certainly not anything we can fix anyway. You’re just going to have to live with it. My God, son, probably ninety percent of the men the world over would give anything to have your problem.”

That had been sixteen years ago, and now Jasper was twenty-seven. But what most men would have looked upon as a great gift, he had always considered a curse. Of course, his mother was to blame, with her insane, unrelenting tirades about Devil’s spawn, perverted desires, and hellish retributions. Growing up in such a house, Jasper became half-mad himself. It was a lonely life, filled with shame and guilt. As far as the doctor knew, he had never been with a woman. If he had, she would have probably ended up in the hospital a medical emergency, needing stitches at the very least. Not long after Hamm examined him, Jasper started keeping his penis bound up in a homemade truss constructed from a swatch of coarse canvas and strips of leather cord and a pair of silk bloomers he found lying behind the Blind Owl Saloon on one of those few nights when his mother forgot to lock him in his bedroom. But then, when he was eighteen, Cassandra Cone died from a heart attack while walking home with one of her chickens from a Blessing of the Animals service. Suddenly, Jasper’s world opened up in ways he’d never dreamed of. Within days of her passing, his uncle, the broom maker, got him a job emptying outhouses with a scavenger named Itchy Ingham, and every evening after they shoveled the last load of shit off the honey wagon, they took turns shooting rats out at the city dump with the buffalo gun. For someone whose life had been as joyless and stunted as Jasper’s, every day with the easygoing Itchy was like a holiday. He and the old man worked and ate and murdered rodents together six days a week. Then one blazing hot afternoon in the summer of 1915, Itchy keeled over and died in the middle of scooping out a particularly odious crapper at a boardinghouse over on Chestnut Street that catered to men who worked at the Old Capitol Brewery. Besides Jasper, the only other person who attended the funeral was Ernie Bagshaw, the dump keeper. The next day, Jasper made a place in the shed behind his house for Gyp, the donkey that pulled the honey wagon, and went back to work by himself.