Page 19 of Freak
Bogie huffed a half-bark, backing her up, and Mitch trotted over to the tree stump he considered his post.
With the goats managed, the dogs at work, and the cats off doing cat things—they were decent mousers, but she fed them kibble as well, so they did their rodent-murdering recreationally—Abigail headed to the chicken coop. The ladies were pressed up against the reinforced-chicken-wire wall of the tiny yard off the coop. They had access to this little strip of fresh air around the clock, through a small chute that Mel had called a ‘Habitrail for chickens.’ Since Buster’s tragic and untimely death, she had no rooster and wouldn’t until the spring, when she could trade with a neighbor for a cockerel chick, or buy one at the feed store in town. Though Buster had been killed weeks ago, in the youth of a summer that was now marching to its end, the hens were still out of sorts and confused. They were followers in need of a leader.
When she opened the gate and let them loose in the yard, they spilled out eagerly. But then they milled about in a clump, clucking irritably, trying to figure out what to do with their day.
Abigail pulled the lid off the repurposed plastic tub that had long ago contained store-bought lard but for years had held the choicest leavings from the previous day’s food preparation. She pulled a large steel disc off the coop wall, and a chorus of much happier clucks rose up around her as the chickens hurried her way. The disc was the lid from the old steel drum she used to burn trash. She’d claimed the lid as a serving tray for the chickens and spray-painted it a vivid pink and hand-painted with flowers, insects, and fruits. She dropped the ‘tray’ on the ground near the gate and dumped the kitchen leavings on it. The hens descended on their breakfast with relish.
As she watched the chickens happily pecking, she smiled. There was something truly charming about the uncomplicated life of well-tended farm animals. Beyond the raising of young and, for a few, the protection of the flock or the herd, they had no responsibilities. They slept, they ate, they enjoyed the sun. There were dangers, to be sure, but those dangers were always sudden. No looming worries, no persistent anxiety.
At the corner of her eye she saw Bogie leave his post and amble toward the driveway, his stride relaxed but purposeful. Someone was coming.
Mitch saw him andwoofedsoftly. Bogiewoofedback. Abigail wasn’t fluent in her dogs’ shared language, but she knew enough: Bogie wasn’t worried about the visitor. Abigail wasn’t, either. Several people were due for a quick visit today; she had batches of jams ready, as well as a new run of soaps and lotions. Though she delivered large orders to the shops that carried her products, most people who made individual orders came to pick them up themselves. She had two appointments for readings as well today, with Junie Frey and Brittany Bello, but those were later.
When she heard the grind of tires on gravel, she, too, headed toward the front to greet her guest. She’d have to collect the eggs later.
A white SUV, one of the fancier electric models, cleared the rise just as Abigail reached the massive hydrangea bush at the corner of her house. She recognized it at once, and a second later, the driver—Lilli Lunden—tootled her horn twice. Abigail lifted her hand to return the greeting. Then she saw the passenger and smiled brightly. Lilli had brought her son, Bo, with her.
Bo was a truly special young man. He was autistic, and proclaimed as much whenever he met anyone new. Abigail didn’t know much about autism, or, for that matter, any other psychological or cognitive diagnosis. She’d never studied such things, she’d never been diagnosed herself with any such thing, and she did not pretend to be knowledgeable when she was not.
However, she was not the type of traditional-healing provider who sneered at conventional medicine and therapeutics. She never claimed that any diagnosis or its treatment wasn’t ‘real’ or that conventional medicines were ‘poisons.’ The right kind of medicine for anyone was the kind of medicine that worked for them.
She found autism and other states of being considered ‘neurodivergence’ fascinating for the simple reason that the label assumed there was a particular way of being that was ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ or ‘right.’Thatidea, Abigail found both ridiculous and frustrating. It insisted on conformity, and conformity was the real poison.
She hadn’t gone to college, but Granny Kate had taught her to study deeply to answer life’s questions and to read widely to encounter as many ideas as her mind could hold. She thought she was considerably more widely and deeply read than the average Signal Bend resident. She was a particular fan of the Transcendentalists and had read everything Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau and others had published, from letters to essays to poems. In his essay ‘Self-Reliance,’ Mr. Emerson wrote a passage from which a fairly famous line had been lifted:a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Abigail thought it applied keenly well to this question of neurodivergence and neurotypical-ness, especially when the famous line was returned to its full context, a passage Abigail had committed to memory long ago:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. – ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ –Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
That last line had also been immortalized on plaques, posters, and senior-photo captions—two sentences created in support of a complex idea torn asunder to fit on t-shirts, and thereby stripped of most of their meaning. The meaty middle was what made those pithy sentences important. Society—at least the dominant version of it—demanded conformity, but no genius, no visionary, no one who’d ever made the world better in any lasting way had ever thought like everybody else. Most who dared to, or who could not help but, think differently had been excoriated, persecuted, even killed for daring to walk a new path, but without them, humans would still be living in caves and dying before they were thirty.
Bo Lunden was a man who thought differently. For it, he lived a fairly isolated life, and he likely would struggle to live without the support of his family—not because he wasn’t smart or capable but because the world had not been made with people like Bo in mind, and society didn’t make room for the kinds of things he needed, or value many of the things he could offer.
Yet he was magnificently capable of many things most could never become even proficient at. He was a true artist of a woodworker, for instance. Abigail had seen designs Bo had made of wood so intricate and beautiful that it seemed as if he must have reduced the wood to a putty and molded it to his will. He was intimidatingly smart and could, and would, when allowed, hold forth at length about the things he was particularly interested in. And above all other gifts, Bo was a profoundly kind, compassionate, gentle soul.
He did not act like most people. He did not think like most people. And he was better for it. The person who was not off-put by his reticence around strangers or his direct and literal way of speaking, the person who took Bo as he came and got to know him, was better for it as well.
Abigail had no children and would not, but she was a nurturer all the way to her marrow. She felt protective of Bo and of the other ‘neurodivergent’ people she knew. Bo didn’t need her nurturing, he had the mama bear of all mama bears in Lilli, but if Lilli ever needed backup in defense or support of her son, Abigail would be among the first to volunteer.
Lilli and Bo opened their doors in tandem and climbed down from the SUV. The dogs trotted over to Bo, got some pats and scritches, took the same entrance fee from Lilli, and then turned and headed back to their posts, tails wagging in unison.
“Hi, you!” Abigail called out as she took a few steps toward her guests.
“Hey, Abigail! How you doin’?” Lilli called back.
“Hello, Miss Abigail,” Bo said. “I like your pink boots. They match the roses on your dress. I like your dress, too.”
“Well, thank you, Bo! I like your shirt. That’s a really nice shade of blue.”
He grinned and brushed a hand down his chest. “Thank you. It’s cornflower blue. My mother bought it for me in Springfield.”
As usual, Bo’s aura was a swirl of purples. Today the hues were muted; Abigail took that to mean he was between projects. Sometimes, when he was in the middle of creating something he was excited about, the colors became quite vibrant.
People who scoffed at the idea of auras, like any other facet of such practice, were thinking typically, and that made them blind to the wonderful mysteries and magicks of the natural world. Abigail didn’t consider her ability to see auras as supernatural—it was decidedly natural. She was simply open to that way of perceiving and had been trained to use her physical senses to see what was always there:energy.
No one who’d gotten through eighth-grade life-sciences class would dispute that the human body worked on energy. That was what calories were. Energy always had a signature; everything that used energy emitted it. And one’s ways of thinking, acting, doing, being, affected the ways energy was used. When a person was stressed, their use of energy was considerably different from when they were at rest. When they were chronically stressed, or chronically angry, or habitually peaceful, all that changed the way their bodies and minds used energy.
Abigail’s grandmother had taught her what to look for—it wasn’t a bold, bright field around a person like a neon sign on the Vegas Strip. It was subtle and mutable. It was hard to see, it took patience and training to discern it, so ‘typical’ thinkers decided it wasn’t there.
