Hilcias’ Clicks and Whistles

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

Hilcias studied the yellowing eye chart on the back of the closed door of the room at the Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic and practiced saying the letters in his mind, from Spanish to English, from English back to Spanish, until he could think them into a seamless line.

His mamí flipped through the pages of an old Life Magazine with an immigrant mother and child on the cover.

His abuelo stared at a watercolor painting on the wall of a heavy laden peach tree, the colors of the ripe peaches glowing brightly against the white walls of the room, and then clasped his hands in his lap and looked thoughtfully into them as if he were looking into the deepest parts of the earth.

There was a tap on the door.

A young doctor walked into the room.

“Buenos Dias, amigos,” she said. “Me llamo Maria. Como estas ustedes?”

She had eyes like his abuelo, deep and earthy brown.

She wore a white doctor’s coat, faded blue jeans and an old pair of red Chuck Taylor tennis shoes.

“Well,” she began, “Let’s talk about Hilcias.”

“We looked over his brain scans and studied them very carefully.”

“We didn’t find any organic reason why he doesn’t speak.”

“The other tests on his ears, nose and throat came back normal, too.”

“So all of the parts that help him speak are well and good inside of him.”

His mamí put her arm around his shoulder, held him close to her, and breathed out a long, slow, quiet sigh of relief.

“But we still haven’t answered the question,” continued Dr. Maria. 

“Why doesn’t Hilcias talk?”

She pulled up a chair in front of him, sat down in it, and leaned her face close to his face until her nose gently brushed against his nose.

“So now we’ve got to walk together down a path into places we don’t know,” she smiled. 

“The only person who can tell us why he’s not talking…is not talking.”

He smiled back at her and looked away from her eyes and down at her feet.

Suddenly, he whistled the most beautiful notes Dr. Maria had ever heard in her life.

They reminded her of the joy she felt as a little girl standing in the fields with her family on their farm in El Salvador.

At the same time, they reminded her of the sadness she felt as she worked day after day to help person after person who was just trying to make a better life in a place where it was hard for them to live.

The music brought a stillness and a quietness to the room.

After a moment, his abuelo spoke.

“He says he does talk, but not many people understand him, I think.”

And it was true.

Hilcias and Dr. Maria

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

Dr. Maria came to Charleston from El Salvador. 

She practiced medicine at the Barrier Islands Free Medical Clinic on Johns Island. 

She was short and brown skinned, with black bobbed hair and earthy brown eyes. 

She was a great soccer player.

She wore her white lab coat and red Chuck Taylors with humility and pride.

She was a person of the land for the people of the land.

There is a belief that there are 36 righteous people in each generation who hold the world together.

If true, then she was one of those 36.

She was brilliant and kind.

She was gifted at LOOKING CLOSELY and SEEING.

At LISTENING CAREFULLY and HEARING.

This made her the best doctor for many, many miles around the clinic. 

Of the many patients she saw every day throughout the planting, growing and harvesting season, Hilcias was her favorite.

Hilcias, in return, loved Dr. Maria. 

He loved that her skin was the same color as his.

He loved her brown eyes and the way they looked inside of him when she was examining him and trying to help him.

He loved her holey Chuck Taylors because they were like the ones he wore.

Johns Island, along with Wadmalaw Island and James Island, make up the barrier islands around Charleston. 

There are two main roads on that island, Maybank Highway and Bohicket Road. 

The island itself is between the Charleston Harbor and the Stono and Folly Rivers. 

It used to be covered in farmland, but now there are a few residential communities around the old farms. 

It has a small-town feel.

Migrant workers make their way there in the spring and summer to work in the tomato fields and peach orchards.

They are so small, quiet and hidden, the vacationers who come to enjoy the beach life rarely know they’re there.

But they are.

The Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic is an old cottage painted pea green.

The two lane Maybank Highway runs past the Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic, just a stones throw from its front door. 

At the back of the clinic, there is a thicket of trees and 120 acres the Smith family uses to grow tomatoes and peaches.

From the clinic’s back door you can look out across the land at the tomato plants and peach trees. 

It’s very beautiful in the spring and summer.

The soil is brown and rich.

The land glows red and yellow with the tomatoes and peaches growing on it. 

Looking out over the land, Dr. Maria could see the migrant workers moving across the plants and trees, picking tomatoes and peaches, putting them in large sacks tied around their bodies held close to their sides.

Dr. Maria thought a lot about Hilcias’ condition. 

He worked beside his mamí and abuelo during the day and played with the other migrant children in the evening, never speaking a single word. 

At night, he read by the light of an old bulb hanging from a cord running into the dilapidated bus that served as his family’s home behind the Smith’s house. 

In the fall, he and his family packed all of their belongings and boarded a migrant bus and headed down to Florida for winter work. 

Dr. Maria was studying Hilcias’ condition for the whole spring and summer before he left. 

She wanted to help him, to give him the gift of his voice, but she was afraid to borrow too many books and journals from her colleagues or ask too many questions about him to them. 

“Why are you spending so much time and effort on one migrant kid?” they would ask. 

“There are too many other patients to see.”

But, as we noted, she could HEAR Hilcias.

And she knew he needed her.

She could SEE into the ways of the mystery that the world needed him.

The world needed to hear his lost voice.

Hilcias and the Whale

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

Hilcias walked beside his abuelo down rows and rows of tomato plants and peach trees, shielded from the sun by his trusty cap with a whale stitched on the front of it.

“A blue whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle,” he  clicked and whistled, for he hadn’t spoken one word in all of his ten years.

He spoke only in clicks and whistles, much to the dumbfoundedness of the people around him.

“A beluga whale is called the canary of the sea because it sings so much.”

“A fin whale can make a sound on one side of the ocean and be heard by another fin whale on the other side of the ocean 2,000 miles away.”

“Boy,” his abuelo smiled, “You must be talking about whales. You’re a whale genius.”

Now, before sunrise, as he sat beside the Atlantic Ocean at Beachwalker State Park on Kiawah Island in Charleston, South Carolina, as he did each morning of his migrant working life, something astonishing happened.

A gigantic tooth washed up with the waves onto the shore.

The tooth was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was sure.

The sperm whale was his favorite whale.

The first picture he’d ever drawn of a whale, before he visited the Charleston public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, was a picture of a sperm whale.

This was before he learned that the brightness of a light bulb is measured by a lumen, which is simply the light one cup of spermaceti oil from a sperm whale’s head gives off.

This was before he memorized every fact about sperm whales in his field guide to cetaceans of the world, the only book he owned.

He picked up the tooth with both of his hands.

It was a foot long.

It was shaped like a cone.

It was ivory.

"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "because they don't have teeth in their upper jaws, only slots that the teeth from the lower jaws fit into.”

“If I sliced the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale like the rings of a trunk show the age of the tree,” he thought to himself.

He gently laid the tooth beside him on the sand.

Then a conch shell washed up onto the shore with the waves, too.

"What an amazing shell.”

“Look at its shape and color.”

The shape was a common shape in nature, formed by graphing the numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on, the Fibonacci numbers, a special shape that appears many times in geometry, architecture, art, music and literature.

“Some people call the shape ‘God’s blueprint,’” he thought, “Because it seems to be the plan from which God created the whole, wide world.”

Its color was a common color in nature.

There were three shades of yellow.

Its spine was the brilliant yellow of the sun that would rise out of the ocean that very morning.

Its siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the corn he and his abuelo shucked in early August.

Its aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.

He picked up the shell with both of his hands.

He raised it to his tiny ear.

Someone once told him that if you hold a conch shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean inside of it.

"I wonder if it's true," he thought.

"If it is, I can take it home to our bus and bring the ocean and the great whales with me.”

He expected to hear only the ocean.

Boy, was he surprised.

The sound he heard inside the shell wasn’t only of breaking waves and rolling tides.

There was also a song.

It was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard in his life.

He closed his eyes and saw the notes dancing before him.

“I...understand.”

“I understand!”

A whale sang to him in his own language, with his own clicks and whistles!

They were the notes that made up his life, the notes he clicked and whistled to the world but that the world couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand.

A tear rolled down his cheek and dropped onto the sand.

He wept and all the tears inside him poured into the surf and washed away into the vast reaches of the deep sea.

“I hear you!”

I understand you!” he whistled into the shell.

“I hear you!” he heard to his great surprise.

“I understand you, too!”

“There’s a story we hear along our migratory routes,” sang the sperm whale, “About a boy on land, a boy who can sing our language, a boy who can understand our songs.”

“You are that boy, Hilcias.”

“You are that boy.”