Mute Witness

The first time I met him I'd never heard of muteness. I knew not that such people existed.

I was crossing the churchyard when this man sprang out from behind a hedge and began accosting me with a series of extraordinary gestures backed by no words.

To this day I couldn't describe what the gestures were, merely that to my young childish mind, lacking the concept of a mute, they seemed aggressive, intrusive, exaggerated to the extent of a threat.

I think he was just telling me to get off the grass.

"What do you want?" I shouted, but his reply was merely more gestures. I turned and ran, never so terrified in my short life.

My parents were worried, momentarily, by my terrified utterings. They thought I'd been assaulted, they feared some dangerous murderer loose in the churchyard. But as I continued my account of events,  their serious talk of 'police' and 'action' changed to laughter, rare pearls of free laughter. I couldn't understand why they no longer cared about my safety. 

"That's Mikey the Mute," my dad said. "He can't talk so he makes gestures. He helps the vicar, mows the churchyard, does the vicarage garden, that sort of thing."

I felt guilty about running away the way I did, so the next day I took him some seedlings from our garden: kale, lettuce and rhubarb. My father grew the vegetables that grew well in our soil, not the vegetables we liked to eat, we were forever forcing rhubarb on complete strangers. Mikey gestured for me to follow him to the vicarage garden, and there he gestured for me to help out, as he planted the seedlings there and then. 

I began visiting Mikey every day after school, helping him with his chores. I became his apprentice. He showed me how to plant and nurture vegetables in the vegetable patch and flowers in the vicarage front garden, and how to pick and arrange them in the church for special events. There were always tasks to do and these shared activies led to a weird kind of friendship. 

Mike had no letters, could neither read nor write a word, but had taught himself his own makeshift sign language through which he communicated with the vicar and which he taught me. 

Then, one day, strangers came and robbed the church. A gang of them, five or more, helping themselves to silver plate and stripping any feature that looked of value. The vicar caught them at it, but he was outnumbered, even with god on his side, and he was struck a fatal blow on the head.

The police were called and when they eventually came the men had long since vamoosed. When the police did eventually arrive, several hours later, there was a veritable mob of them, from another county by all accounts. The first thing they saw when they arrived was a distraught Mikey wandering the grounds in a state of great stress, arms all gestures.

The police, fresh with warnings of a dangers gang, assumed he was one of the same. They tried to converse, but he failed to respond, instead waving his arms in what they perceived as an aggressive act. Fearing for their lives they attacked en masse. He was arrested, eventually, after a severe beating. 

MIkey was eventually identified and released. The gang, it transpired, had left many hours before. Mikey must have discovered the body, or possibly witnessed the assault, but nobody could get a coherent gesture out of him.  

Mikey survived the ordeal, but his faculties were gone. He could no longer sign, he looked at me blankly when I did so. He didn't gesture at all now. Instead, as if warned against being mute, he tried to speak, not that he could speak. He would release a helpless whine, like a cry from a long extinct bird. Nobody could commune with him at all, not even me.

The new vicar wouldn't have him in the vicarage out-building, where he'd lived all these years. A new gardener was hired, one with an education who could give name to the plants, and the blights and pests. One who didn't frighten the children. 

Now genuinely afeard of Micky, my dad encouraged me to become friends with kids my own age, forcing me to join the scouts.  I started arranging play dates, bringing home new-found friends.  I slowly became more normal, more like the other kids, though inside nothing had changed. I would always be alone. 

Mikey lived in the woods for a while, becoming ever more a wild man, but eventually he disappeared, taking his story elsewhere.