CYRIL SAVOURY WAS born with one weak eye. It was the left one and it wandered out the same way, to the left, drifting.
“What a fine baby,” they all said. “But what about that eye, Rosetta, what’s that about?”
In answer to that particular question, Rosetta said, “Well, I guess that’s just Cyril’s eye, that’s the way it is.”
No one could comment with any certainty on the genetic contribution—to the wandering eye—made by Cyril’s father, because he’d only been in town once, for two weeks, and then he was mysteriously gone.
“I remember,” said somebody, “he had brown hair, didn’t he?”
“I don’t remember,” said somebody else, “but this baby of Rosetta’s, he’s either got dark hair or he’s bald.”
Rosetta was out of the room when they were talking.
“Rub your hand on there,” one of them said, “on top of his little head, you’ll feel frizz—watch out for the soft spot—but look, there’s some dark hair down there, on the nape of his neck. Five fingers, five toes, everything else you need.”
Then Rosetta came back into the room and they said, “Too bad about the eye, Rosetta, but it doesn’t matter because otherwise, but for the one eye, that’s some cute baby.”
When she put on the knitted baby hat, the thrum cap—the one she got from her aunt—when she put it on Cyril, it made his eye look worse. How could that be?
She took the cap off and she held him up by the armpits like all her relatives did, like they did with all babies, and she turned him this way and that, and spun him around, and he really looked fine— especially if she turned him just far enough that she could see only one of his eyes at a time. Then he was perfect. But when she tied Cyril’s new hat back on, using the strings provided, the weak eye jumped out at her like an arrow to the heart. His eyes, the hat, they were the same blue colour. Maybe that was it, they reflected back upon each other, magnifying the problem. Forget wearing hats at all, she figured. So she let him go through the early months bare-headed, unless they went outside in the bitter cold.
Tell the truth, she was a bit torn up by the eye. There was a tight feeling in her throat that came and went of its own accord. Everybody wants everything perfect all the time, and I guess I’m like that, she thought. Then, when he was ten weeks old and he started to smile with pleasure, and gurgle and laugh, she almost forgot about the eye. She didn’t look at it, or it became such an accustomed part of what she saw, day in and day out, that she hardly noticed it anymore, when they were alone. But everybody else noticed it.
“Kootchee-kootchee-koo,” they said to Cyril, chuckling him under the chin, but as they chuckled, they looked at his eye and wondered how Cyril would do in life, how he’d get along with an eye like that, one that wandered out into left field with a mind of its own.
They took him to St. John’s to see the specialist. To do that, they had to take the coastal boat and then the taxi from Terrenceville. Her mother and father came along for the ride to help her out, the three of them together with the little bundle that was Cyril. They took turns holding him, and, for a baby, he seemed to like the trip. He looked around in his own fashion. He was easy-going all the time, and, naturally, they wondered what he saw.
“Maybe he sees as much as we do,” Rosetta said, “maybe even twice as much.”
“Maybe he sees less,” said her father, “or the same amount as we do, but blurred. You know, if you leave the eye like that, it goes blind.”
“Don’t say that,” said Rosetta’s mother, “that’s why we’re here in this taxi. Rosetta, let me hold the baby now.”
They stayed overnight in a rooming-house downtown, and early the next morning they went to the doctor’s office. All three of them got to go in with the baby.
“Hi there, Cyril Savoury,” said the doctor, but then he introduced himself to Rosetta and her parents and shook their hands, one by one, looking at each one of them directly in the eye. As though that was part of his examination. To Rosetta, he looked to be as old as her grandfather. That’s good, she thought, here’s a doctor who in his lifetime has seen a lot, so he’ll know what to do.
“Put the baby down there, on the examining table,” he said.
Then the doctor left the room and a nurse put drops in Cyril’s eyes and Cyril cried for five or ten seconds and the nurse said, “Let’s wait fifteen minutes now, so those eyedrops, they have time to work, okay?”
“Okay,” they all said at once, all three of them.
They waited and finally the doctor came back and loomed over the baby with his light. Cyril squirmed away but didn’t say anything, or cry anymore, even though the old doctor was bent over close enough that their cheeks touched. Then the doctor wiggled his fingers in front of Cyril’s face. He picked the baby up and rotated him back and forth, just like Rosetta had done when he was wearing the blue thrum cap. Then he gave him back to Rosetta.
“That’s a well-behaved little boy you got there, you’re doing something right, with this boy.”
“Well,” said Rosetta’s mother, “thank you, he is a good boy, but what about the eye?”
“There should be no surgery for an eye like this,” the doctor said, “not at this age. You could do a lot more harm than good. The best thing for him, for this boy, is the patch, the pirate’s patch.”
“The pirate’s patch?” Rosetta asked, “what’s that?”
“It’s a shaped piece of dark cloth, that’s all. We cover up the right eye, the good one, with it. It’s black, it blocks out the light. You leave the patch on, Miss Savoury, over the good eye, half the day every day, and during that time the left eye, the lazy eye, it’s on its own, it’s forced to do all the work. It tracks you round the room, it sees the trees, the birds, the spoon, the bottle. That way, it learns to see on its own and it does not go blind.”
“Oh Doctor,” Rosetta’s mother said, “that’s such good news.”
Rosetta’s mother had tears rolling down her cheeks, as though she were alone in the room, as though she had no shame at all, to be displaying such emotion in front of strangers.
“Where do we get the patches from?” Rosetta asked the nurse, after the doctor shook their hands again, formally, and bowed and left the room.
“Why, we’ll give you some, we got lots and lots.”
She went over to a drawer and opened it and inside were hundreds of little black patches stacked into each other, like Dixie cups.
“Here’s one that should fit Cyril,” she said.
She put the patch, shaped like an oval, over Cyril’s right eye. There was a black elastic band connected to it that she looped over his forehead and then over the back of his head.
“It’s easier to do,” she said, “once he’s got more hair, because the elastic kind of sticks better then, you’ll see.”
“How long do we keep this up?” Rosetta asked.
“Till his eye goes straight, or till he’s six.”
“Six months?”
“No, six years my dear, six years. That’s how it works, it’s a long haul.”
Well, they figured, that left lots of time for the eye to get better on its own, six years ticking by. It would seem like forever but it wouldn’t be that long, in the grand scheme of things.
After they left the office, Rosetta said, “Did you see all those patches? There must be hundreds of kids like Cyril.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Rosetta’s mother, “you and I know there’s nobody quite like Cyril.”
“I’ll say,” said her father, laughing to himself, waving down a taxi for them.
On the way home, they kept the patch on more than half the time. Everybody who bent over him, in the taxi, on the wharf, and on the boat, looked at him and smiled and said, well, there’s a cute little boy. Must be some kind of pirate, your baby, look at him, how about that! They went on and on about Cyril, and Rosetta was happy now because he was well on the way to being the perfect boy she always knew he was.
Despite the patch though—which every morning she applied and left on until the middle of the afternoon—Cyril’s eye never seemed to focus like it should. Months went by and it still lay askew, and Rosetta was disappointed. She phoned up the nurse in St. John’s for advice, as she’d been told to do.
“Keep putting on the corrective patch, dear. You have to have the necessary patience, and persistence, Miss Savoury. The brain and the lazy eye need to recalibrate, and it takes a long long time.”
That’s what she heard every time she phoned.
“Stay the course, Miss Savoury.”
She began to have dreams in which it was nighttime and she went to pick the sleeping baby up from the crib, and there he was with both eyes now covered up in black. Oh my God. She reached for him and touched him and he opened his mouth to cry, like babies do at night, and out flew a string of those patches. They were like bats coming right at her. She woke up, startled, jumped up out of bed and ran over to the crib by the window. Now she was wide-awake, her heart was thumping, and moonlight came through the lace curtains and washed down over Cyril and carried on through the slats in the crib, leaving a pattern on the floor. Of course there were no patches on his eyes. No bats. It was just another dream, yet so real. Cyril was fine. He always had his right arm up and out, with a fist, when he slept. He never woke up. She was blessed with that, how he slept so peacefully.
She got out all the old photographs of the family and sat down with her mother. “Let’s look for the lazy eye, where it came from,” she said.
One by one they went through a box half-full of dog-eared snapshots, the old black-and-whites they’d put away upstairs, all taken by the same Brownie camera. Actually, there were some older ones too, larger sized, but where they came from, they were uncertain. There were a lot of group shots, mostly from weddings, but all that Rosetta and her mother looked at were the eyes.
“There,” they said, “that girl looks as if her right eye’s gone adrift. Check her out in the other pictures. Who is she anyway?”
“I can’t remember, I’m trying to place her.”
“Give me some of them, Mother, let me help.”
They sifted through all the pictures to find another one of the same girl. There she was, there she was this time standing on the shore with a boat pulled up behind her. She was older then, and her eyes this time were as straight as a ruler.
“Look, she got better. Maybe that first picture, maybe it was just the angle?”
“Hard to tell, hard to tell.”
They wondered once again what Cyril actually saw when his eye rolled out in the way it did. He sure seemed smart enough. When Rosetta brought him the baby bottle, he reached for it with both hands, babbling away, and at the same time, with his left eye, he could watch a gull swing by the window. They could see him follow it with a quick flick, like a pulse.
Finally, on day three of their investigation, they found a picture of someone, way back in olden times, sitting in a parlour, posed. He had on a suit and a tie and there was a picture on the wall, over his shoulder, of a ship under sail. His left eye was just like Cyril’s, turned out and away. There was no doubt about it, this time.
“Who’s that, Mother?”
“Again, I have no idea. I’m sorry. Look, there’s our family clock though, so he must be a relation.”
“These days,” said Rosetta, “they’d retouch this photograph and fix that eye.”
Her mother said that sure, they could retouch things now, like blemishes, but it was impossible back then, because in those days you had to hold still for pictures, it took such a long time for daylight to fix on old-fashioned film, if you moved even one iota during the exposure, it would blur. So maybe this man, their relative, moved his eyes.
“Then both eyes would look crooked, the same,” pointed out Rosetta.
“You had to stand as motionless as an Egyptian Sphinx,” her mother said, “but you’re right, if that was the case, both his eyes would be off.”
No one they consulted had the slightest idea who the man was, but they went and pinned up his photo in the kitchen anyway. That way, they figured, Cyril had someone to relate to, if his eye stayed that way despite the patch, despite all the prayers they made at night, despite the hopes that never deserted them, despite the way he learned to walk with a little stagger, half the time looking, through no fault of his own, like a bandit. Or like a shirt salesman, they soon found out. There was a man who posed with shirts in the magazines, always dressed up to the nines. He wore a black patch too. They put his picture, once they found it, in Cyril’s bedroom. They scotch-taped it onto the mirror on the dresser, and it was still there twenty-five years later, yellowed and crumpled and torn at the edges, in that room that had been empty for such a long time.
The best the eye ever got was when he was about three or four. At that time, he was always in the company of his mother or his grandmother, or more likely both.
“The patch, Cyril,” they always said, “be a good boy, put on the patch, train that eye.”
There was no way they’d let him slack off and leave the patch at home. So that was the time—if ever a time ever was—for the lazy eye to straighten out and do the right thing. But after that, after four years old, no matter how hard they tried, it seemed that Cyril’s eye developed a mind of its own. It stayed where it wanted to be. On top of that, the few times that Cyril wandered down the road by himself, when he was a toddler, he pulled the patch off. He’d drop it on the side of the road, on purpose, or in the long grass, as if by accident. But it seemed that each and every one of those patches had nine lives.
“Hey, look what I found, here’s Cyril’s black eye patch,” some boy or girl would say, standing excitedly by the door, holding it up.
“We found it up the road,” they’d say.
Or, several times, the dog came home with it in his mouth.
“Cyril,” Rosetta would say, “please don’t do that, your patch is the best chance we got.”
When he was six, back they went to the same eye specialist. They got on the boat and then into the taxi and all the way to town. The doctor looked even older and he had a shake in his right hand when he bent over Cyril with the light.
“Don’t mind the little shake,” the doctor said, “I can still see fine. You know, I’m sorry to say, but this boy’s eye has not improved a whit, it’s time for surgery.”
Rosetta said, “But what can go wrong with surgery, Doctor? We kind of like Cyril the way he is, really, he seems to get around okay.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “that’s a good question, the main trouble with the surgery is that if we over-correct the weak eye, then Cyril’s eye will point inwards and sit by the nose. It’s like shortening the leg on a kitchen table, you can overdo it.”
“That’s bad,” said Rosetta.
“That would be worse than now,” said Rosetta’s mother.
“He’d look goofy then,” said her father.
They all imagined the crossed eye, sitting by the nose.
“Why sure, Cyril then, he’d look foolish,” said Rosetta.
“Well yes,” said the doctor, “that’s sort of true, but then there can be further surgery to correct the surgery. We usually get it right at some point.”
“You mean,” asked Rosetta’s mother, “there’d be surgery to correct the surgery that corrected the old surgery?”
“That has happened, yes, but more in the old days,” said the doctor, “when it was more an inexact science than it is now.”
“That won’t do for Cyril,” said Rosetta.
She and her parents didn’t sign up for the operation after all. They took Cyril home and took off his eye patch.
“Cyril,” they said, “just go out and play.”
After that, they gave up on any treatment. They all just accepted the eye for what it was. Cyril went off to school like everyone else, but it turned out that the eye was not the only thing gone wrong. No matter what Cyril did, he couldn’t seem to learn to read at all. It was like there was a space missing in his brain, or as if part of his brain was following that wayward eye, wandering off on its own and not paying attention. This caused problems for Cyril. Everybody knew he was smart. He could remember anything, and draw things with a pencil and a pen that came out looking like life, even when he was just eight years old.
The trouble was, because he couldn’t read, the school failed him year after year, no matter what Albert May, the teacher, thought and wanted to do. Albert May had no choice. The rules for the school district were rigid and could not, apparently, be bent. He wrote the District Superintendent annually for four years, begging him to come out and see Cyril, to talk to him. You’ll see, he wrote, he’s way too smart to hold back because of some generalization, some standard rule.
After a long while that spoke of indifference, the District Supervisor relented and came out and talked directly to Cyril. He agreed with Albert May.
“This boy is very intelligent, that’s for sure, you’re right, but, Mr. May, he’s handicapped not only by his appearance, he’s not reading and the rules are plain: we have to hold him back.”
The teacher protested, saying the rules would destroy the boy, that there was an exception for every rule.
“Not in my district,” the man said, closing the door to his car, “it’s a shitkicker but if he can’t read books, he can’t move on, end of story.”
“Wait,” said Albert May, “I’ll quit if you make me fail that boy again.”
He was bending down into the car, holding onto the mirror and the half-closed window.
“So be it,” said the District Supervisor, “go ahead and quit, all the reports I got on you aren’t the best anyway, there’s others that would come out here, believe it or not, there’s unemployment in our noble profession.”
He drove away and went back to Grand Falls.
Albert May added up the pros and cons and figured out that both he and Cyril Savoury would be better off if he didn’t quit, if he stayed. He actually liked the job, and what else could he do? Also, there was his mother to support.
So he took matters into his own hands and he wrote down FAILED, in black capital letters, like he was supposed to, on Cyril’s report card. He sent that one, the official report, to the district. But when he wrote down the word FAILED he inserted a thin piece of cardboard under the top page of the form, so the word did not pass through onto the carbon paper, to the copies beneath. On those copies, which stayed in town, he wrote PASSED, and that was the copy that went home that year, with Cyril, to his mother. And the next year, and the next year the same. He told no one what he had done.
On the reports, he also wrote things like: Cyril is a smart boy who participates well in class. Though he cannot read at this time, he is learning to script his name. His spoken work and his contribution to class is exemplary. If every boy in this class were as accomplished as Cyril, my job as a teacher would be even more wonderful than it is now.
Rosetta and her mother and Cyril rejoiced over his progress and his advancement and they danced around the kitchen. And their dance was not in vain, for when the time came for Cyril to graduate from primary school, three years later, the old District Superintendant was gone, promoted to Cornerbrook. He was replaced by a young woman and the young woman came uninvited down the gravel road in a small car with dust flying out behind her. She had a sheaf of FAILEDs in her hand, to see for herself this hopeless boy who broke all the records for ineptitude.
“Where is he?” she asked Albert May.
“He’s in there, but first here’s the real reports, the ones he really got, the ones I gave him and his mother.”
Albert May handed over the evidence of his years of deceit.
She read them all, looked at Albert May, and then she walked into the classroom where Cyril sat all by himself. After ten minutes, the new District Superintendent came back out.
“Mr. May, in my opinion, you showed real good judgment when you broke the rules. Move this boy on. You know, he looks good too, once you get used to the eye.”
“We don’t even see that eye anymore,” said Mr. May, “it doesn’t register upon us.”
She drove back up the road, and must have fixed up the old reports in the District Office because Cyril had no further troubles in school again, even though he never really learned to read letters at all. He did all his learning within his head, and he had just the one teacher all the way along, Albert May.
The night she got pregnant with Cyril, Rosetta had on a little dress that wasn’t much more than a shift. It was the hottest time of summer. She went walking with the boy with wavy hair, up the road, and then down the hill to Back Cove. They could swim there if the blackflies weren’t too bad. Rosetta didn’t even realize what had happened to her till it was over. She didn’t have a clue. The only way she could hide was to press in closer to him, to squeeze up to him so he couldn’t see her. It was the only place she could go. Thinking back, she didn’t think he had a lazy eye, that boy, but she couldn’t remember with certainty. What did she know about him? Nothing. She never saw him when he was tired, when the sun shone down enough to make him squint, or when he was sick with a fever of 101 degrees. Maybe, at times like those, maybe his eye wandered off like Cyril’s did. Yes, after Back Cove, it was hard for Rosetta, the worst of times. She grew bigger and all the eyes in the world stared straight at her, watching her. Then Cyril came along and she was left alone with that lovely little patched-up baby, by herself, only her own mother and father there to help.
“You little pirate,” she said to him before they gave up the patch for good, “you little pirate, whatever are we going to do with you?”