Silas Dillon of Cary County

by Clifford Schrage

  Mommy’s two friends Jasmine and Carl arrived, but they didn’t pay any attention to me. Jasmine was a very dark-skinned lady, about thirty. She spoke with a Haitian accent, and she didn’t smile—not once—and she seemed angry, and seemed to stay that way most of the time they were there. Carl was thin, not as dark as Jasmine, with a shaved head, silver jewelry bulging from pierced flesh on his face—ears, brows, nose, lip, tongue—a dark goatee, a quiet, ominous stare from black irises and pupils that seemed to peer through thin, crevice-like fissures.

  Another older man named Jack entered with them. He seemed about fifty, only he was white, slovenly fat, partially intoxicated, and even though he dressed in a dark blue business suit and tie, he appeared bedraggled as his tie hung from his neck, and his white shirt draped untucked.

  They then opened little plastic packages of heroin, syringes, spoons, straws, and matches. They lit flames, strapped their arms, squeezed their fists, craving, famished. Mommy and Jasmine injected this into their veins as I watched, and Carl inhaled it through a thin straw, vacuuming it directly into his wide nostrils.

  Jack wanted nothing to do with this heroin. He was here for something else. He waited patiently and just sipped brown alcohol from a small flask he kept in his pocket. I could feel something diabolic in the atmosphere of the apartment, and it made me nervous, even frightened. All three of these heroin users felt their rushes of euphoria, the transient soaring painlessness, and they groaned with sighs of pleasure and sick laughs, followed by lapses into apathy. There was energy—a fallacious energy. Numbing painlessness, a rest which wearied and a beguiling painlessness which dug its ulcerous wound paradoxically deeper, held them. This was my birth mother’s perpetual appetite, to find freedom from her pain—pain from whatever it was that weighed heavily in her from her past, pain from her broken relationships, from all the self-inflicted wounds and those from other inflicted humans, pain from regret of mistakes made in her own selfishness.

  After a while Mommy Maureen went into her bedroom with this enormous man and his bottle of booze. She remained in there for an hour while Jasmine and Carl watched the television, and while I sat, observing, pulling my fingers, gouging my slight finger nails into my own skin, distressed, wanting to sleep, wanting someone to hold me, rock me, observing their cadaverous deadness, excitableness, and feverishness, walking to the chair to look out at the night, seeing lights outside in the darkness, seeing my own frightened reflection. I cried for about one minute—very hard—with violent screams, and then I simply stopped. Jasmine kept looking at me with dead, mean eyes: “Shush! Shush boy! Now shush!” She shouted with her Haitian, demanding manner.

  That big man finally came out, without his tie on, carrying his jacket, with his giant shirt tucked in now, and his pants pulled and belted a little higher. His thick flesh shook and jiggled as he walked. He didn’t even look at me. It was as though I didn’t exist, as though I were nothing, like a cat. There was this indulgent aura, this permissive indulgence with carelessness that amounts to hatred that came out of this man. None of those present knew of what people were involved in this big man’s life, but whoever they were, they were not better because of him.

  Mommy came out after him wearing nothing but a very long tee-shirt over her underwear. She came right to me, with a nervous energy, with talking, with confusion, with hurry. She lifted me as I reached for her. “You’re going to bed!” she said, and that was all.

  She dropped me into my crib without changing me. I didn’t go to bed that night with my pajamas on. She didn’t even take off my sneakers. I cried for a minute, but was so tired I just drifted off into sleep. I woke up twenty minutes later in the darkness, and cried again, but this time I kept crying, screaming until my mother returned for me. She brought me back out into the living room.

  It was finally time for giant Jack to leave, and as Jack and Carl walked toward the door, there was no conversation. Carl said, “Good, good,” as he quickly counted a fist full of bills Jack passed onto him. Jack tipped his heavy head back, swilled a long gulp from his flask, scuffed his lumpy mass out the door and closed it behind him. I could hear his stout steps in the hallway as his rhinoceros-like massiveness moved toward the stairway. Then, suddenly they could hear a shout, a descending clamor, a crash, more pained collapsing shouts that seemed to jerk vociferously out of his wide mouth, with more clamorous crashes, shouts and uproars of Jack’s plenteous flesh as he fell for maybe fifteen steps down the rickety stairway. I imagined the whole building shook. Inside, Carl stopped his motion, listening. Silence. A giggle burst out of Maureen’s mouth, while Jasmine palmed her mouth as she watched Carl and Mommy.

  Carl stepped out to see what had happened. “Ya all right? Ya all right?” I could hear Carl saying in the hallway.

  Big Jack’s moans returned: “Yeah. I think so,” he said with a dilatory, growling,

  Time lapsed, and Carl came in with his goatee and gold adorned face, laughing.

  “What happened?” said Jasmine.

  Carl could barely get it out, trying to speak through his over-whelming laughter. “He fell–” laughter. “He fell. He fell down the stairs!” Crass, stoned laughter followed.

  “He fell?” Mommy said. Then she burst out in laughter, and kept laughing.

  They all laughed for a long time. Huge Jack limped and staggered to his car.

  This little deviant group laughed like demons. They scarcely spoke to one another, yet they adhered together like ill parasites bleeding energy from each other. This sick laughter was the only semblance of joy they expressed, and that quickly withered.

  After everyone left, Mommy fell asleep on the couch. So when I became tired, I curled up on the other end and slept as well. I was so tired, and I needed a bath too. I felt a little bit safer with these strangers gone. Mommy was familiar. Sleep was my favorite place. It was the taken for granted, soothing dressing of an exhaustively lonely day. I had no thought of tomorrow. God, or tomorrow itself, or both would care about all those things there; but of course I didn’t know or believe that then. I just slept, breathed, and dreamed of sights I’d seen from that high window, and dreamed of Carl, Jasmine, Jack, Mommy, and other monsters.

  FOUR

  APPLE BOUGHS

  Molly’s third surprise visit from the agency was the one that caught me alone in the apartment. It was an April day, like the day Mommy Sophia left me in the car a year earlier—a sunny, breezy, kite flying late afternoon—more than a month after the day I was placed here.

  Molly climbed the long stairway, knocked, and spoke at the other side of the door: “Maureen! Maureen!”

  When I recognized Molly’s safe, amiable voice, I ran to the door.

  “Silas honey, how are you? Are you okay honey? Is Mommy there Silas?”

  I replied with one-word answers: “Mommy. Door,” and with some two-year-old, unintelligible words too.

  She knocked on the door harder, calling, “Maureen! Maureen!” thinking maybe she was asleep, or in the bathroom. She waited patiently. Finally, “I’m going to get the man to open the door Silas, okay?”

  I was silent, turning the door knob, playing, jiggling it, curious.

  “I’ll be right back, honey.”

  Molly went for the building superintendent to open the door. I played contentedly with the knob. Other times when there were knocks on the door I stood silently, in stationary fear, until the unknown visitor left.

  Maureen was somewhere on the street for two hours, a risk she’d taken—maybe ten or twelve times. There were times she’d take me with her, but usually I was too much of a bother, especially when she’d get high. She really was proud of me, but none of her friends in the street or in their flats found me adorable. Once she left me alone all night, but fortunately I’d slept through most of that one. Many of those hours were lonely, tear-filled, terror-filled hours; some were quiet, imagination filled, play filled hours. I manufactured imaginary friends to play with.

  On at least a dozen nights that month
Mommy Maureen had different men visit her. She’d take them into her dark bedroom for about an hour, and then they’d just leave. One man visited three times like this. None of them ever talked much. Most of them were apparently ordinary men, well-thought-of in their business spheres, men with families and jobs and responsibilities, but also obviously with sordid secrets.

  Maureen frequently got high that month. I sometimes watched her inject her vein with the syringe, and usually curiously inquired, “Dat?” asking what it was she was doing.

  “Medicine. Mommy’s medicine,” she’d say.

  “What dat, Mommy?”

  “I said medicine!” she said louder.

  She never sat me down to read me a story or tell me a story or just talk to me. Her thoughts were always somewhere else, planning, worrying, racing, struggling.

  Finally Molly came back with the superintendent and a police-man, just in case Mommy had returned and would cause some trouble. Molly had full authority from the court to move me. As she gathered my few things together, the men waited. I stood by the couch watching when the policeman looked at me and saw the fear and alarm in my inquisitive eyes. He smiled at me, but all I saw in his smile was his mouth. There were no words, no eyes. He was tightly packed with dark blue and squeaking leather, with sternness, writing things down in reports, with sunglasses on, ignoring the radio that kept speaking in static from his waist. The old superintendent of the building curiously walked around the messy apartment, murmuring low. These alarmed me, I started to cry.

  Molly came from my room with my stuff jammed in my trunk. She knelt and hugged me saying, “It’s okay. Ah, it’s okay, Silas honey. Everything’s going to be all right. It’s okay, baby.” She continued to hug me and pat my small back until I stopped. Then they left the apartment, making their slow descent down the feeble stairway. Molly kept talking to me, filling me with soothing words, occupying my thoughts with hopes, saying things I wanted to hear, promising me candy and juice, making me laugh, teasing me, making funny noises, tickling, distracting, aiming to make me feel secure. I laughed nervously with tears on my face all the way to her car.

  We drove a few blocks down this street—Bay Street—which I’d observed so often from the high window standing on that chair, through this urban din; and we stopped at a convenience store for that juice and candy. It was one of those old general stores with those creaky wooden floors and a peculiar sense of crookedness. Four stories of apartments piled above it. Molly used her own money to buy me lollypops, chocolate covered raisins, juice, and a toy—a little monkey that danced in a circle when I pressed a hidden button.

  When they stepped back outside into the sunlight, what was unusual was that in the lot beside the old building there lived the remnants of an old apple orchard—five tremendous trees with limbs intermeshed in their white blossoms—like lacework—grown closely locked together through the years like intimate human lives. They stood there in noticeable ambivalence, out of place, unobtrusive, surrounded by the municipal congestion, looking aged, mature, and graceful, full of fluffy whiteness, wisdom, and with stories to tell from Cary County’s rural past. If these beautiful, full-blossomed trees could have seen and spoken, they’d reveal with lament the passage of change that had taken place. They stood poised among all the other commotion of structure and alteration like the resilient, buoyant, nineteenth century “tall” ships by the piers at South Street—seemingly lost beside, but at the same time shining bright sites beneath the newer colossal structures in the financial district on Manhattan Island. They stood poised like white haired aged patriarchs and matriarchs, aside and unassuming as ones might at a family reunions, quietly observant, brimming with secret sagacity and sage secrets, heavy with a sorrow over the change, brokenness, pace, and departure from the old ways, quietly moved by the plight of their grandchildren and great grand-children who lived fragmented by divorce, separation, remarriage, in blended, jumbled, and mixed up homes.

  Molly and I sat beneath these exquisite white apple boughs on a worn wooden picnic table. On one side breathed the busy street; on the three other sides stood graffiti-ridden walls. In the sheltering white shade it seemed our skin was made bluer.

  “Molly loves you.”

  I fixed my little eyes on Molly’s.

  “Molly loves Silas,” she said, looking at me, handing me chocolate covered raisins. Her eyes kept watering up as she gazed at me, broken over my being neglected and left alone in that apartment. I devoured the candy, enjoying eating in hunger.

  “Mommy loves Silas,” I repeated. I couldn’t say Molly. I couldn’t pronounce my l’s yet. This was an antilogy. She poured more of a mother’s love on to me than anyone had, and I clumsily called her Mommy.

  “Molly. Mollllly,” she said, teaching me the l sound, stretching the l’s.

  I watched her, chomping on my chocolate covered raisins, drooling.

  “Mollllly!”

  “Molmy,” I replied, partially attentive to the little monkey’s dance as I repetitively pressed the button.

  “Molly.”

  “Molmys.”

  She laughed. Her youthful, blonde radiance and simple manner found me adorable. I found her so pleasant to be with, a magnetic adult I’d not experienced except for when I first entered, born in the hospital with that nurse.

  I laughed, copying her, still chewing and drooling chocolate. I kept saying “Molmy” because of the reaction from Molly, because it brought me an unconsciously sought for approval.

  She rubbed my golden frizzy hair and touched my brown smiling face. “You’re so bronze,” she said. “Oh you’re so beautiful. Do you know that?” She leaned her pretty face close to mine, adoring.

  This made me feel so good inside. “Bonze,” I said, nodding. I simply agreed to anything her tone led me to agree with. I didn’t know what bronze meant. I knew she thought I was handsome, maybe unique looking. I knew she loved me. I felt and welcomed such an authentic acceptance from her, and I wanted more. I loved her, or at least I loved her love.

  “Oh Silas, if I were married and didn’t have to work, I’d take you home with me and make you my boy.”

  I nodded again, eating my candy, happy in ignorance.

  I could have remained there under those apple tree canopies forever, eating chocolate, securing attention from Molly; but that wouldn’t be. She sipped soda from a straw and we sat quietly awhile listening to the sounds of the street—cars, voices, clatter, clangs, bells, and clacks; we sat quietly absorbing what would one day become just a memory, a dream that faded or blurred, and then it was time to get back into the car and go.

  Once again I was fastened into a car seat willing to go wherever I was taken, only this time I was handed a big lollypop to hold with my free hand, while my other hand clutched my toy possessively. Molly gave me a big kiss on my cheek, and playfully said—“Will you marry me, Silas? Will you be my husband? I need a husband,” she said to me.

  I nodded again. My puerile, uninstructed, faultless expression in agreement was what she was after.

  “You’re so funny!” she said laughing. She moved into the front seat, started the engine, and drove into the sunny glistening traffic. While she drove, she began to sing, and this arrested my fascination and focus. She sang half to me and half to teach me, that comfortable old song:

  Jesus loves me, this I know

  For the Bible tells me so.

  Little ones to Him belong

  They are weak, but He is strong.

  Yes Jesus loves me. Yes Jesus loves me.

  Yes Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.

  “Sing with me, Silas!” She looked at me through her mirror, and she sang again. She sang with a strong, sweet, purposeful voice—admiring God, teaching me. She kept singing through it—three times, four times. Soon I joined in in my baby way. It stayed in my head for the rest of that day and night, and would emerge again from time to time, and I would just sing it in my clumsy way. At that hour I felt happy to have this person who loved me
in my nearness, this person who made me feel well.

  FIVE

  FLIES

  For two weeks I stayed in the Cary County Children’s Center, which was formerly an orphanage administratively adjoined to the agency in Brooklyn, but which was physically in the center of this island. It was a tremendous house that really wasn’t a permanent orphanage anymore: it was just called that because once, years ago and for a century, it had been an orphanage. Now it was just a holding coop, sort of a place where kids like me were kept when we were initially removed from abusive, dangerous situations, during transitions—changeovers between homes—until “fitting” foster homes could be found for placement. Ideally, guardians who treated foster kids as their own—with love and rightful intention—were the sort the agency appealed to.

  Molly worked very hard for me—as she did for all of her assignments—to place me in good foster care, with preferably both a foster mother and father. Of course I didn’t know this, but for the time being I just thought that this was where I lived—in the Cary County Children’s Center, and the way every kid lived—in this big, seascape mural papered room amid rows of cribs and beds; and the other big, cityscape mural papered room amid three long tables and a dozen highchairs where all the kids ate and were fed beside the big, sizzling, clanging kitchen; and the other big, farm mural papered room, the playroom filled with toys and noise and kids and sofas and chairs and a big-screened television, with cows and pigs and chickens plastered on the plaster walls.

  I didn’t get to see Molly a lot here. She was busy working—visiting foster homes, on the telephone, in the Brooklyn office where she was making good impressions on her superiors and talking with lawyers and judges about kids’ cases. But when she came here, she visited me and other kids she knew. She always made contact, physical contact, with touches, with hugging and kissing. God she made me feel good.