A Singular Accomplishment
Laz Hart used to be able to put his toe in his mouth when he was standing up, could still do that when he was a man, and used to make everybody laugh thataway. He’s eighty-or-so now, he preached Daddy’s funeral sermon, thirty or forty years ago—didn’t you know that?
And when we were near the Old House one late afternoon with Jim in his pickup poking along we drove by a place where a skinny white-haired man was out front puttering at the aluminum rowboat he’d somehow put up on the roof of his big beat-up station wagon, although it didn’t seem like much of a day for fishing, with the weather blowing in dark and fast. It was Laz, and Jim stopped and called out to him, and he came to the driver-side window. He nodded and said hello and kidded Jim about being back in the neighborhood, where long-ago cutthroats and renegades remain a favorite local legend, especially among those whose lives have been lawful and mostly mild, albeit sinful, too, for as many as eighty years or more.
The matter of Laz’s old antics came up—his putting his toe in his mouth. Abruptly he stepped back a few paces, his baggy overalls flapping around his bony age in the green gusty wind before rain, and he reached down to his huge laced boots and as he straightened up he pulled his right foot all the way to his face and put the toe of his boot to his teeth, grimacing with a big smile, and when we stared at him in great surprise and couldn’t think of what to say, he let go of the foot and stood on it again and backed away with bashful pride. As if he, the retired preacher, had just invented the very wheel of human civilization but wished not to take too much credit for it.
Three Persons on a Crow
It’s flying behind a gull that is flying behind an osprey that has a heavy fish in its talons. Below is a silvery blue river. Somewhere above, there might be a thieving eagle that none of them has yet seen, on its way down in a swooping dive to startle the osprey into dropping the fish and escaping, and then the eagle will catch the fish before it falls back into the river from which the osprey took it.
On the crow’s tail sits a very tiny boy, last in order of authority but happy with the wildest ride, holding stiff feathers planing this way and that as the crow steadies itself in the gusts behind the gull and behind the osprey ahead of the gull. The boy whoops and yells in his very small high voice.
The boy’s father is riding as if on a horse, sitting on the crow’s shoulders with his legs dangling down in front of the beating wings. He’s clutching black feathers tightly with both hands, trying to look brave.
The mother, vulnerable and endangered yet somehow with an air of worthiness and sufficient will, is standing straight up on the crow’s head! She doesn’t need anything at all to hang onto, she’s looking ahead at the erratic gull and beyond the gull at the strong great-winged osprey clutching the fish, this is a procession the great consequence of which only she knows, and if the crow would fly ahead much faster why she’d leap onto the back of the osprey, eagle be damned, and ride it into a genuine myth.
Hide and Seek
And the youngest child, out of an unnoticed sadness, would sometimes go into the utility room when no one was looking and crawl behind the green curtain over the wooden cupboard without a door, she would put herself with the dirty shoes and odd tools and other things that were only used once in a while. She would wait for someone to notice her absence, to notice that she was gone, to notice—and then to come looking for her, full of need and worry for her. She was waiting for someone to want to find her: Where’d she go? Where is she? Let’s find her! Because: we can’t go on without her. Because: we love her. Because: we need her here, with us, now. Because: We love her more than anyone!
But the other children did not come. They kept on playing, they weren’t going to come, so after a long while she would have to crawl out again; she always did, from this place she had chosen near Daddy’s old shoes—now his work shoes for around the yard. Mother hadn’t liked looking at them; she was the one who, from the shelf above, had hung the heavy green curtain. Daddy’s ugly shoes.
Now these many years later I’m looking into every room of the house of our lives, looking for you this year and last and always, and just now I have thought of the green curtain which time has hung over all that, to hide work’s hard long days. I’m going to creep quietly toward the utility room and step down the little half step from the kitchen onto the cold linoleum floor and find you! I’ll call out, Here she is! I found her! I’ll carry you on my shoulders to the living room where everyone is waiting . . . Daddy’s gone. Mother’s gone. You’re not behind her curtain. You’re not his old shoes! You’re the heart of what we have always wanted, and wanted to live for—and we stop everything to find our missing one—without whom we can’t go on: you.
Arms
In Chicago, on the dusty floor of the single shop window of a neighborhood used-vinyl-and-CD store where teenagers not so far beyond childhood hang out, the owner has put a discarded department-store mannequin, or rather the upper two thirds of one. He’s put a summer nightgown on her that’s thin and lacy, the length of which lies rumpled around her cut-off hips as though the hem has risen on water that she has stepped into—thinking of doing what? On the surface of the same pool some old album covers are floating around her.
Appropriately, her head is bowed, her eyes cast downward, you can’t see her face because draped over her head is a large piece of delicate white fabric like an oversize bridal veil—a parody of a veil? I don’t know how to tell—and it hangs down as far as her breasts and a little lower. And also she has no arms.
A sort of half-clothed, unintended allusion to the statue called the Venus de Milo—to the idea of a woman with no arms or legs? But that connection, rather than investing the mannequin with some added ironic significance . . . that connection between this mannequin and the ancient salvaged figure throws some light in another direction. The mute dummy shows what it is that the Venus de Milo herself represents for us in her broken state, disfigured in a way that has for so long, and even cozily, fit the psyches of acquirers and connoisseurs and maybe all of us.
I hope there’s some use in my saying the rest of this.
There’s the attraction of the beautiful powerless body. Powerless when represented without arms; powerless when it is the small body of one who, without having lost arms or legs, is small.
I only want to say what seems to me to be there, in the intuitions we share. A day doesn’t pass when the experts aren’t writing books and pamphlets and explaining yet again to juries about little crayon drawings of children, drawn by children, in the aftermath of the things I mean, which you can figure out—and so often the children draw themselves without arms.
The Oldest Man in North America
It came back to me the other day as I was walking up the Lakeview Road again—very slow for me nowadays, but it’s paved now—and wishing I could still talk with you. You and I were up there, almost exactly a hundred years ago, that day we realized we were beginning to feel something for each other. The same time of year as now—late summer. We walked up all the way to the intersection with the Highview Road, talking. Looked around from up there and then came back. We stopped under all those big trees at the front of Carson’s property—only two of them left now—and were talking. We noticed there was some new sound—a steady noise of a kind we couldn’t even be sure we heard, couldn’t be sure we didn’t hear.
Over in Albert’s woods, a quarter mile from us, he was shooting his shotgun again and again—we couldn’t imagine why or at what, but knew who it was. There were a lot of things we were used to hearing. Orioles and wrens and warblers in the orchards. Men calling to each other, yelling sometimes, and horses, and the horse-drawn machinery, during harvest. In spring I had to help Dad in those years by plowing the narrow side field with the mule. It was hard if a young man hardly even weighed enough to keep the plow deep in the soil—it makes a quiet noise, you know, slicing, hissing, through the dirt and clinking or scraping on stones. In the weeds there was all tha
t clicking, rustling, buzzing in summer. I’m thinking of those numberless flying grasshoppers that take to the air just in front of you with every step, in late summer. Trilling, whistling, braying, mooing, snorting. In spring and fall, there would be sandhill cranes in V’s so low their honking would echo off a big barn. There was sometimes the sound of crying or a scream, of course. Fussing and weeping, as well as laughing and giggling. Our feet crunching the gravel all the way up there and back. It was a beautiful long walk, wasn’t it. Whispering of poplars and cottonwoods when there was a breeze, as there was, I’m pretty sure, on that day that I’m remembering now, one of the early times when you and I did that. Remember hearing that raven fly right overhead, the soft whipping of those wingtips. At a perfect moment when the autumn air and sunlight could make the world, or at least our little part of it, stand still, do you remember what it was like to hear the sound of one single falling leaf as it hit the ground? It was noisy when the wind was up, the trees swaying, and nearer the water, the sound of the lake waves, the moored fishing boats making the hawsers groan. Don’t all these sounds put you in mind of others you have heard? But as you know, what we heard that day was none of these.
To say nothing of all those sounds you can’t hear, but you know that something or other sure can hear—the fluttering of those little yellow butterflies that will congregate over a patch of mud in late summer. (They were there again, the other day; not nearly as many, but for now they’re still in this world.) By the side of the road, the sound of the growing of the wild carrot. The sound of the beating of the heart of a kingbird perched at the top of an apple tree, when it’s just about to leap up and take a tiny bug from midair. Sound of stone stories lying in the ditches and heaped up in crude fences, that almost no one ever hears when they crack in winter. The sound of the black trunks of the orchard holding up the wet branches. That deepest sound of all—of the wide blue horizon when you’ve climbed up high enough to see a lot of it, as you can from the crest of the Highview Road. It’s a complex quietness I’m talking about, that’s filled with all kinds of different silences.
I was thinking of you again, today. How I do think of you. There was a noise we heard, first time ever on that day, that got louder over the years, and later we were sure we did hear it that day, and after a while we couldn’t not hear it, and then we couldn’t hear much of anything else. I wonder if you’d have remembered it the way I do. We saw the new century come sputtering and grinding to the top of the rise, carrying some visitors, to get a nice view of what had just become the past.
The Living
A typical hearing or trial in juvenile court, on the delinquency not the abuse-and-neglect side, is like a routine brief dance. The public defenders work from a table to one side of the small plain courtroom, facing the raised bench, the state’s attorneys from a table at the other side, also facing the bench. The clerk calls the next case. An official leaves the closed courtroom by the doors at the back to the waiting area and, holding them open, calls out the minor respondent’s name. Through another door to one side of the bench, the minor respondent himself—a handcuffed boy—is brought in by a uniformed officer, and the boy and guard stand just inside that door, waiting. The boy is wearing street clothes. A long moment later—“Someone is approaching, Judge,” says a public defender, to placate the impatient man behind the bench—into the courtroom from the waiting area come three women. The judge says, “Is mother here?” “Yes, Judge,” says the public defender, and he indicates one of the women. “And who is with mother?” the judge asks. “Grandmother and aunt,” says the public defender. The judge says, “Aunt, please sit at the back of the courtroom,” and the woman retreats without speaking. The other two wait where they stand, also silent.
Like the women who are here for him, this child is black. Except for him and his kin, everyone else in the courtroom is white. The boy’s handcuffs have been removed by the officer, and, as instructed by this man, who accompanies him and stands behind him, the boy comes into the courtroom and faces the judge, keeping his hands behind him as if they were still cuffed, and holding in his hands a light jacket, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush.
This legal episode lasts three minutes. Approaching the judge from her table with a manila folder in her hand, the state’s attorney speaks; the judge speaks; the public defender, standing beside the boy, speaks; the person of whom they all speak is not asked to speak and does not speak. Although they have had time, in their service, to learn a little of the language that the boy speaks, they do not speak a language that is in turn intelligible to him.
Some interim step having been taken, to be concluded later, the boy is led out of the courtroom through that door at the back, the three women who have witnessed the hearing but have not been allowed to touch the boy or speak with him, leave together, talking about a Christmas present for him, and the clerk calls the next case. There are a lot of cases to be heard before the day is over, and the judge wants to deal with each one as quickly as possible.
The boy’s public defender gathers his papers, whispers for a minute to one of his colleagues about another matter, while the next very short hearing or trial begins—whether to be delayed again for one reason or another, or concluded—and then the boy’s public defender goes out the same door through which the officer took the boy.
That door leads to a corridor. Along it are the chambers of seven or eight judges. At the end of the corridor is a raised police desk. To one side of this, where five or six officers stand on duty, talking loudly among themselves, is the “holding tank,” a single large room with a glass wall facing the police desk. In it, about fifty boys aged sixteen or younger are waiting—standing, talking, yelling, sitting, remaining silent, looking out through the smudged glass wall and glass door, and being watched by one or two of the officers.
Nearby, the public defender meets with his client in a small bare windowless interview room. The client is fourteen years old and has been held for two weeks, so far, on a very serious charge. His hearing, which will take place in two more weeks, will determine whether he will be tried as a juvenile in this building and have the chance to go free again, after seven years of detention, or will be sent to the court at 26th Street to be tried as an adult.
This boy is short, thin; he does not look directly at the public defender—his attorney. This man is explaining to him what happened in the courtroom in those three minutes of the judge’s time. It was decided that something will be decided. But this explanation, too, is in the language of the courts. So in response to the explanation, which is that he is going to be given psychological tests, and that he needs to be completely honest with the doctor, and then there will be another few minutes before the judge, to determine where he will be tried, he says, “How long am I going to be in here?” For his crime, if he is convicted as an adult, he would be likely to remain in prison for most of the rest of his life, or all of it if his life is not long.
His attorney says, “That depends. But it’s gonna be a while. We have to convince the judge not to send you to 26th Street, right?”
“Right.”
“You know how we do that?”
“Oh man.” His knees are jiggling.
“You know how we do that? You have to do two things—you have to not get written up for anything while you’re here, and you have to do well in school, upstairs. Are you doing well in school here?”
The child is not doing well. And he has already been written up once. People get in his face, he says. He says he has a temper. All he really wants to know is how long he will be in here.
“It could be a long time,” his attorney says.
“How long? Am I going to get out for Christmas?”
“No.”
“No?!” He doesn’t believe this man is his attorney. He says he wants a good lawyer, he wants to pay five hundred dollars and have a good lawyer.
He shifts in his chair, again and again. The small brick-walled room doesn’t fit him any better than h
is clothes. His jacket, toothbrush, and toothpaste lie on the table.
Even in here, coming faintly from beyond some corner or from behind one of these bricks, there are voices which—whether they’re endangered or dangerous—are still free, on the street, still loud out there. That’s the world he knows. He doesn’t know any of all the other worlds. He and his friends are wary of those other worlds.
“Is it more important to you,” the attorney says, “to react when someone is on you, so they know you won’t tolerate that, or to spend the rest of your life in jail?”
The boy says nothing.
“If the judge hears that you got written up, he’s gonna think that you’re not taking this seriously, and if that’s what he thinks, then he’ll decide that you need to go to 26th Street. Right?”
The attorney has never studied the development of children, but he has talked with hundreds of them in their hard moments; he is only—out of his own good intentions and his legal training and seven years of work in the institution of justice that is reserved for juveniles—their defender; he despairs of succeeding in more than a small number of cases in defending them adequately and as they deserve; he persists, however. The child fidgets violently in his chair and flings his arms to one side and then the other. He looks at every corner of the very small room and not at his attorney.
His attorney says, “Someone gets in your face, you have to walk away from it, right? And in school, you need A’s and B’s. OK? That’s so we can ask one of your teachers to come down to the courtroom and tell the judge that you should not be tried at 26th Street. Right?”
From the meeting rooms, the judicial chambers, the police desk, the holding tank, the unconcluded child is returned to a part of the building that is behind additional locks. After he is gone, the attorney, standing in the hallway, sees the mildly questioning look on the face of another public defender nearby. “He isn’t going to make it,” the child’s attorney says. “What he has to do in there is more than any adult could be reasonably expected to be able to do. And he’s only fourteen. I couldn’t have done it at fourteen.”
An Orchard in the Street Page 8
