Travels with George, in Search of Ben Hur and Other Meanderings

The Boy who Spoke in Hymns

The Boy Who Spoke in Hymns Not far from where I grew up, there lived a family named Simmons—a father, mother, and son. The boy, Buddy, was some three years behind me in school for a while, then five, then seven. He lost ground in the educational process as time rolled on. Thaddyus (spelled wrong, yes, but applied in good faith by his parents long before he could do anything about it) and Rose Simmons knew almost from the get-go that something was a little wrong in the head with their son, Buddy. (This was not a nickname—Thaddyus knew how to spell Buddy, and it was the first name that came to him the minute the midwife had the red, puckered little thing slid out on a clean sheet and he saw the proper appendage. Bertha was poised on his tongue if said appendage had been missing.) Buddy did not talk until he was almost four, and then he just made little bulldozer and airplane propeller sounds, which wasn’t exactly talk, but was closer to it than what he’d done before, which was mostly wailing. “Bbbbbbbbbbbppppppppppppp,” he’d go. Then came bird sounds, really good ones, maybe better than the ones made by real birds, only it was hard to tell. He could turn a flock of blackbirds hell-bent to the south in October or have cardinals clawing at the screens. Somehow he never managed to woo mockingbirds or crows, which might in some ways be smarter than other birds, but Thaddyus and Rose didn’t know about that for sure. They just saw that crows and mockingbirds wouldn’t even look at Buddy, even when he cawed and chirped till he was red in the face and breathless, and in fact they flew the other way, but then who knew what he might be saying in bird talk? “Hey, you ugly, noisy black bastard , how’d you like me to kick your ass?” or “How come you can’t you make up your own songs, you goofy bitch?” Words finally came to him when he started picking up lines from hymns in church. They’d be driving back from prayer meeting or Sunday morning The Boy Who Spoke in Hymns 49 or evening service, and he’d break out with “Hill far way stud a old rug cross” or “Mazing Grace, how sweet they soun and save a witch like me.” Thaddyus and Rose would correct him, the best they could and gently, lest they discourage a boy just stumbling across real words, which, when he did use them, might well sound like the flutter of hummingbird wings: bbbbbbbbbbbbbb ppppppppppppp, and finally, if they were lucky, bbbbbbbbbuuutttttterrrrrrr, pppppepppppppperrrrrrrrrr. They didn’t have the money to take him to any kind of doctor that might be of help, and friends and family just said he was slow and would doubtless catch on as he aged. And this he did, but barely. His first years of school were ones of deep travail for the two of them, though Buddy seemed not to be bothered by the fact that other kids called him dumb and a mute. One of his teachers reported that when they started in on him, he’d just grin and sing something such as: “When we been there ten thousand years, bright shinin’ as the sun . . .” and end with an emphatic “be-gun!” And they’d shut up and back off, not knowing quite what to make of him. You know, like whether maybe he had some kind of religious powers and all, or perhaps that stress on gun might have some extra heft to it for a reason. “It is real eerie,” she told Thaddyus and Rose one day during a conference . “He seems to read OK, maybe a few months behind the other kids, but all goes in, and nothing much comes out. He just won’t talk right. I know he’s understanding what he’s reading, because he can shake his head yes or no to my questions as good as any other child. And even when we get a regular sentence out of him, he will use the hymn beat or just use lines from hymns, whether they make any sense or not. Better that than stuttering, I say.” So it was that Thaddyus and Rose shrugged and accepted their fate. What else was there to do? Buddy would forever be locked into the hymn beat, even...