Two directly successive events changed the life of Bill Johnson forever, though their effect was more dramatic than even his greatest friends (of whom there were few) and sincerest enemies (very many) could ever have anticipated.
The first was that the novel on which had laboured eleven long years had not only been published but had shot to the top of the bestsellers list, and was even being spoken of as a serious candidate for several top awards. His agent, a man by the name of Norris who only picked up the story when it became clear this was destined for huge success, called Bill and told him the good news on a Tuesday afternoon, informed him a cheque would be in the post, and told him to expect newspapers to be calling him requesting interviews.
The second was that Bill (“Wild Bill” to those who knew him) celebrated his unexpected achievement by getting very drunk on Wild Turkey bourbon and falling downstairs on Tuesday evening, snapping his spinal column and becoming instantly quadriplegic. He would later claim this fall to have been caused by a sudden hiccup, which uncontrollable body spasm at exactly the wrong moment resulted in his missing the step and descending head first into his food cellar, landing on his neck with a fearsome crack.
Bill was found rather more quickly than a man who lives alone in the hills could expect to be found, by virtue of an unexpected house call requesting help to fix her car by his nearest neighbour, a widow by the name of Mrs Crabapple, though even then Mrs Crabapple lived a good two miles from Bill’s log cabin. Had she left it much longer, Bill would have died and his story would not have been worth telling.
Several hours later, Bill the hermit was in hospital some fifty miles from home, his life saved but his walking days permanently at an end. He was surrounded by people, all concerned for his well-being, a situation he had never once encountered in his 62 years on this earth.
Gradually the few friends Bill had heard the news and came to visit him, though it was less the appalling fate that would require 24-hour care than caught their attention, but that Bill’s personality had been radically transformed in the process.
Bill had been renowned as the grumpiest man in the county, one who had systematically offended everyone in a ten-mile radius, but for his rather soft-hearted neighbour, and she had only escaped his wrath by virtue of cooking him the occasional apple pie and bestowing sexual favours on some cold nights. They do say that comfort makes strange bedfellows, and this was a prime example.
It was therefore the cruellest of ironies that a broken spine and total body paralysis turned Bill Johnson from being the nastiest and most vindictive human being the good people of Clover Country had ever encountered, into one of the sweetest natured men the hospital had known.
All of the nurses sent to tend him had heard of Bill’s daunting reputation and went to work stressed at the prospect of tending his injuries, for fear of his mighty wrath, but came out with smiles on their faces and warmth radiating from their hearts.
The friends, chief among them an equally tough Westerner known as Brick Houseman, a logger whose nickname was inspired by his surname, not by the character in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, gathered at their favourite ale house in the nearby town to consider how they could best help Bill, though the conversation was dominated by the unexpected turn of events that caused Bill’s legendary distemper to change with such dramatic intensity.
“I don’t like it,” said Brick with a note in his voice as sour as the sour mash bourbon he drank. “They must have filled him full of happy drugs. This is not the Bill we know.”
“No, but it’s kinda nice not to get your head bitten off when you ask him how he is,” piped up Steele, a thin and weedy fellow who was the town’s only barber.
“But we know he’s paralysed and can’t do anything for himself, so we don’t need to ask how he is,” yelled Murph, a man renowned for yelling.
“He’s gonna need people to help him live now, round the clock. Of course he’s gotta be nice to folk or they’ll let him die alone up on that mountain,” Steele said with the common sense and trepidation for which he was known.
“Hell, I’d put a gun in my mouth if I was in that situation,” Brick spat out. “He can’t even do that without someone doing it for him, the poor fuck.”
“He might ask you to do it for him, Brick,” laughed Cody, ever the joker, though the prospect of losing their drinking buddy in such a tragic fashion made each drain his glass in quiet contemplation rather than laughter.
“Now wait a minute. They say he’s going to be making lots of money now though,” added Olson, a man who once won a fortune at the casino and spent much of it on whores and liquor. “He can afford nursing care, but he can’t get it up in the hills. He’s going to have to come down and live in town.”
“That’s gonna kill Bill,” Brick shook his head sadly. “His life has been up there on his own, needing nobody to get by. All he ever needed was his dog and a truck. He might be happy now but when he realises his life is all but over he’s gonna go into a depressive tailspin, you mark my words.”
“Who knows about this book he’s published?” Murph yelled. “He ain’t the sort of guy who writes books. He’s a huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ guy, always was.”
“Yes, but so was Hemingway,” chimed in Steele, though it was doubtful any of the guys had read any Hemingway. He let it pass.
“Brick, why don’t you go see him and tell him we will do anything we can to help him?” asked Cody, whose role as a butcher would probably restrict his input to the provision of steaks and chops that Bill could no longer ingest. In fact, a liquid diet was probably his fate, which Cody considered hell on earth.
“I did that already,” Brick retorted. “Told me he was grateful for all I had done for him and how he always thought me a fine, upstanding man and the greatest friend a man could ever hope to find. Nobody ever said that about me before.”
For one moment it looked like Brick’s powerful frame might be wracked with tears, but he held off what in his culture would pass for an abject humiliation.
So in the end the friends decided to go see Bill and ask him about how to help him make the transition from hills to town, and to find what might comfort him in this most difficult of times.
Paradoxically, Bill beamed back at them from behind his big, bushy beard, which he told them a nurse had promised to shave for him, all the better to show off his handsome face. This was a joke, though even Cody took a few seconds to catch on. Bill had not told jokes at any time in living memory.
“Bill, I know you’ve been writing and you’ve written this here novel that is selling well. You’ll need help if you’re gonna write any more, you know that?”
“I know,” he said from his hospital bed, surrounded by machines monitoring Bill’s every vital sign, “but my agent will find me a secretary, and as long as I’m blessed with the gift of speech then I can get all the words in my head written down. It’s going to be fine and dandy, I know it. You know they are already asking me to write another book, and I want to do my best for them. They are good people, like you fellas. I can’t tell you how you happy you make me.”
The friends look at one another and shake their heads. Time was, Bill would have been telling them they were all worthless sons of bitches and should go fuck themselves. There was something almost comforting about such vile insults, and equally something disturbing about the kind words that now emanated from each sentence Bill uttered.
Not for him a rage against nature and the appalling ill-fortune that should see a hiccup land a force of nature like Wild Bill Johnson in a state of permanent physical impairment, merely kind words that sent a flutter of happiness into every heart.
“I am so happy here,” Bill said, impervious to the mangled wreck his body had become. “And the good nurses and doctors here, they are special people. We really don’t value them enough. They should be heroes to the public, heroes I tell you!”
“But you can’t stay here forever,” Brick said quietly. “You will come out of hospital in due course, Bill. We need to set up a new home for you with a bed and nurses at home, you know that?”
“Ah yes. That will be great. But I tell you this, when I move from here I am making a big cash donation to this hospital, that they might carry on doing good in the community,” Bill replied with a blissful sigh. “I want to put the money to good use, so everyone might gain.”
The longer they spoke to Bill, the more bewildered the friends felt that this was strange psychiatric condition should be treated and Bill be returned to his cantankerous old self, as much for their own satisfaction as his.
His doctor was mystified by this too, though with different conclusions. “He seems to be more cheerful than any other patient I’ve ever known with this condition. I’d say that’s a testament to the fine medical care we provide, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but doctor, this is not our friend. It’s like a different person,” warbled Steele.
“I know, isn’t it marvellous?” breathed the doctor contentedly.
The friends were not happy to let things stand there, so they hired a psychiatrist to assess Bill’s state of mind. Then they sacked the first psychiatrist and hired a second, then a third; in fact, they reached the fifth option before they found a shrink prepared to recognise that an irascible ill-natured man becoming irredeemably chirpy and good-natured was a bad thing and evidence of serious brain malfunction that should be treated.
Bill received these visits and assessments with the same beneficent charm that made Murph fondly remember James Stewart playing Elwood P Dowd in Harvey, such that he sighed loudly and serenely.
“Dang, it’s worse than I thought,” said Brick to the group in a stage whisper, “It’s spreading!”
The psychiatrist conducted a number of tests, then began treatment with talking therapy, perforce by the patient’s bedside, but even then he came away scratching his head and mumbling about parts of the brain impacted. He even talked about surgery, which alarmed Brick and the boys, they having no desire to risk turning their friend to a vegetable in addition to his other handicaps.
“There must be some other solution,” said Olson with some feeling, “surely we don’t need to do anything that drastic?”
Olson had a lifelong fear of doctors of any description, and would sooner have died in terrible pain than submit himself to the surgeon’s scalpel.
“It’s too radical,” Steele adds grandly. “We might think about it if he was violent, say, but how can you perform brain surgery on a man because he is being pleasant? After all, a doctor’s mission is, first of all, to do no harm.”
So it was that this proposal was turned down, much to the relief of the physicians responsible for Bill’s physical well-being.
“After all,” said the doctor, “good morale is critical to a good prognosis, and this patient’s morale is second to none, against all the odds.”
The friends puzzled over what to do next for several days. In fact, it could be said that their own morale, separate and collective, took a turn for the worse as Bill dominated their thoughts and feelings. Each noticed themselves becoming snappier with their families, and when they got together a gloom seemed to have set in that had never existed at any time since they were youngsters at high school.
“We need to look for clues,” said Steele. “I mean, whatever happened to his brain in the accident, there must have been good feeling there all the time, just well-hidden.”
“I don’t know about that, but there’s only one place we can look to find what’s in Bill’s mind, and that’s the book he’s written,” Brick said with a frown.
“Hell, yeah!” yelled Murph, “The book might tell what caused him to be a crochety old recluse in the first place? He wasn’t always like that.”
“That’s a great idea, he’ll be so pleased,” Cody added enthusiastically.
“Don’t be naïve, Cody,” growled Brick, who considered pessimism to be man’s natural state.
Nevertheless, they asked Bill if he would be so kind as to let them read his novel.
“Ah, I beat you to it,” beamed Bill, “I’ve already asked Mr Norris to send each of you good people your own personal copy. I would sign them for you, if I could move my arm. I hope you enjoy.”
“Why, thank you, Bill,” Olson smiled, taking off his white straw hat respectfully. “We will read every word, that’s the least we can do for you.”
“It’s my pleasure, I just wish there was more I could do to show you beautiful people how greatly you are valued. In fact, I will lay on an evening at the saloon with bottles of finest whisky, all on me. Just mind your step though, boys.”
The group went directly to the bar, had a perfect evening drinking toasts to their friend, then finally went their separate ways, each with joy in his heart.
Identical substantial tomes turned up on doorsteps around town the following morning, each wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with string. It was a beautiful hardback volume with a brightly-coloured dust jacket, proclaiming the contents to be Wildness of the Heart by Bill Johnson.
The thick leaves and fine matt black printing made Steele feel unaccountably fulfilled. The smell and texture, the crisp feel and sharp sound as he turned the pages offered heightened sensual pleasures far exceeding those in his own, rather modest life, but for the luxuriously soft feel of a badger-hair shaving brush.
Each man began reading at his own pace, which in Murph’s case was very slow indeed. They read with a sense of wonder, appreciating for the first time in their lives how their friend had created a miraculous and three-dimensional world from mere words. It was a magic none of them could possibly have known he possessed, yet here it was.
As for clues about the mental state of the author, the stirring tale told of survival, a man’s adventures in a bleak terrain, struggling against the elements to reclaim his life against the odds. It touched the hearts of each of the men as they read about the heroism as man conquered, but then learned to appreciate the whiles of nature.
The difficulties came as the hero rejected what he saw as the superficial excesses of human life, by comparison with the might and majesty of the natural world. As the friends read about the other characters in the hero’s life, they began to feel the beginning of some strange feelings they found difficult to describe. In each case the author evaluated the since of these characters and made quite clear was in his eyes a monstrous sin.
Indeed, it was the characters that induced these uncomfortable emotions in the men. Each of these caricatured buffoons sounded vaguely familiar yet also strangely absurd lampoons. Each was portrayed as pathetic and feeble, not worthy of the hero.
There was a character called Irons, who thought himself superior his friends, but had a blind spot when it came to his own pretentious and wheedling nature. Steele furrowed his brow and wondered who Bill could possibly mean?
Olson read blandly about a fat, drunken womaniser called Jensen, a man who affected suits with grandiose vests that made him look like a plantation owner in the Deep South, but who was, in the final analysis, pompous and self-serving. He blinked twice and wondered why this sounded familiar, but then shook his head and carried on reading.
Even Murph could not mistake the origins of a dumb fool of Irish extraction by the name of Fitz, who shouted a lot but could hardly read a word, let alone figure out what was going on around him, though it took a while for the cogs to turn.
A fishmonger by the name of Casey made a joke of everything and could not take life seriously, even when his own life was at risk. It was easier to pretend it was all funny than to take positive action. Cody just laughed at the sheer wanton stupidity of such a simpleton.
Most of all, there was a sour-faced character called Brock, who always looked on the worst side of life and could not experience joy or happiness to any degree.
Brick saw through the thinly-veiled character assassination in an instant, but then he was always the realist of the group. The remainder took time, their vanity or lack of brain-power leaving them either in denial or incapable.
But Brick put them right, each and every one of them. He gathered them in the bar and bought a bottle of the finest whisky, the brand they had previously drunk to celebrate the life of Bill Johnson.
“This is an outrage!” he bellowed after sinking two fingers and refilling his glass. “This asshole has mocked us and sold this, this…. charade… to the whole world. We are a laughing stock and Bill is to blame. Gentlemen, we have been fools! We have allowed our good nature to be defiled by a scurrilous villain of a man. We need to revenge ourselves on this unconscionable slur on our good nature and warm friendship.”
“I grant you they are terrible things to say,” said Steele, a man whose sense of logic made him the philosopher of the group, “But surely Bill wrote those things before his accident, and he is a different person now. We can’t blame the man who is lying in hospital for the gross slanders we have read in the book. In fact, he sent us copies of the book, which suggests he has forgotten all about the terrible things he said about us.”
“I think he told the truth,” said a chastised Cody without a hint of a cheeky grin. “It’s only slander if it’s not true.”
“Nevertheless,” said Brick decisively, “I want to take revenge. Who’s with me?”
Olson raised a tentative hand; Steele followed with a shrug; Murph did not want to be left out, so raised his hand. Cody thought long and hard, but finally joined the group.
“You’re good loyal men, one and all. Now here’s what we will do….” Brick began, and then unfolded his scheme.
A week later, a brain surgeon appeared at the hospital to see Bill, who smiled trustingly.
“I’ve come to make you better,” said the surgeon.
“Oh good!” said Bill. “I always believed it was possible. I have great faith in the medical profession, you know.”
“Splendid,” said the surgeon, rubbing his hands with glee. “Now sign here… Oh, of course. You can’t. Well I’ll take that as verbal assent.”
Bill continued to smile happily as nurses shaved his head and transferred him to a trolley, to be wheeled into the anteroom of an operating theatre, where he was invited to breath into a mask and count backwards from ten to one.
Some hours later, Bill woke in a strange room. His eyes narrowed as he tried to focus on his surroundings. Several nurses hovered around his bed, reading the output from the many machines around him.
“Where am I?” he growled, “I want to go home.”
“You can’t go home, Bill, you can’t move.”
“Fuck off, asshole,” Bill leered at an affronted nurse, who turned away in tears.
The surgeon approached the bedside and said sternly, “I’m sorry but that is not acceptable. You cannot talk to member of my team like that.”
“Shut it, tosspot!” yelled Bill harshly, “And what have you done with my arms and legs? I’ll sue the fucking lot of you quacks!”
So it was that Bill was signed off from hospital and placed in a temporary rehabilitation centre with nurses funded from his royalty cheques.
It was there that Brick and the friends came en masse to see Bill. If you looked carefully, you might have spotted Olson paying off the nurse, who departed for an extended lunch break.
“What are you fucking losers doing here?” said Bill nervously as his nursing support departed and five men stood around his bed. It was as if he felt vulnerable for the first time, realising that insults could not protect him against physical harm.
“You made me sound stupid,” said Murph loudly.
“You made me out to be a drunken oaf,” said Olson, clearly hurt.
“You said horrible things about me too,” said Steele.
“And me,” said Cody, though he could not resist a grin.
“You stitched us up, you fucker,” said Brick, “so we are going to make you suffer unless you apologise to each of us in turn.”
“Well, well,” said Bill, “So that’s it. I always did think you were jerks, and now you’ve proved it to me. You really expect me to apologise for telling you what a bunch of morons you truly are?”
“I said that!” said Cody half-heartedly.
“And if I don’t, you’re going to attack a defenceless man, would you? What sort of douche bag would do that, eh? Fuck you! I’m apologising to nobody.”
Brick could see his fellows wavering as these words hit home. Time for a new tack.
“I’ll tell you what we did. Your accident turned you into a drooling vegetable. We paid for an operation to change you back to how you were. And you’re ungrateful? Fuck you, bastard!”
“So, you don’t like the old me after all? Want to change me back, do you? You better put a pillow over my face then, cos that’s the only way you’re going to shut me up.”
Brick thought for a good while after Bill issued this ultimatum. After a while a sly grin came over his heavy-set features.
“No, I’m not going to kill you. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with you. We’re going to take you back up to the mountains, and let your neighbour find you again. That way, you won’t bother us and we won’t bother you.”
And that’s exactly what happened, though of course the friends really did miss curmudgeonly Wild Bill. They went on living their lives in town and in the mountains, but somehow it wasn’t the same without Bill.
And as for Bill, Mrs Crabapple moved in to care for him, and they lived happily ever after.