Cage's Bend

by Carter Coleman

  He stops laughing and makes a peace sign. “Thanks for that cigarette.”

  “Up shit creek without a paddle, as they used to say,” a voice whispers. I come awake with a start, then keep perfectly still. The room is dark, save a faint glow through the bars. The hallway beyond is quiet. Pringle is snoring on the bunk below. My spine tingles. The voice is familiar, one I haven’t heard in a long time. I wonder if I’m dreaming.

  “Events sort of got out of your control, swept you along like a flash flood, and dumped you in this place.” The voice is coming from the end of the bed. I’m too scared to move. I know that voice almost as well as I know my own. “Well, it’s a better place than where I am.”

  “Nick?” I whisper. “Is it really you?”

  “It ain’t the bogeyman.”

  I raise up on my elbows and see a figure sitting on the end of the bunk, dangling its legs over the edge. “Am I dreaming?”

  “That’s not the right question. There’s a fine line between waking and dreaming, life and death, sanity and madness. Who’s to say what’s real?”

  “I must be dreaming.”

  “You must be . . . or maybe not.”

  “I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t mean to kill you.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t really your fault. It’s kind of too late in the game but I forgive you. Okay? Feel better?”

  “Is that why I’m here?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it. Sort of simplistic, though.”

  “What’s it like being dead?”

  “Beyond the mirror of your imagination.”

  “I miss you, Nick. Every damn day. No one knows me like you did.”

  “I’m with you, brother. Wherever you go. Following you like a fart.”

  “That’s nice to know. Have you seen Poppy?”

  “Went fishing with him the other day.”

  “Fishing? Where?”

  “Where else? Old Hickory Lake. You can only go places that you’ve been.”

  “Jugs or poles?”

  “Poles. Caught a whole mess of bass. But he likes to throw them back now.”

  “Will you tell him that I love him?”

  “He knows that, Cage.”

  “Can you help me get out of here?” I sit up, lean my back against the cold wall. Nick is transparent, the hallway light filtering through him. I can’t make out his features.

  “Like what, help you escape? You shouldn’t try to escape.” His jaw doesn’t move when he talks.

  “Maybe you could write an order for my release and put it in the right tray.”

  Nick laughs. “I wish I could help you, Cage. I would if I could. But it’s beyond my parameters.”

  “Nick, is there life after death?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it life.”

  “Are you in purgatory?”

  “No such thing.”

  “Have you seen the face of God?”

  “We’re not allowed to talk about that.”

  “Can you give me a hint?”

  “No. Listen, I’ve got to go. Take hold, Cage, you’ll be all right. You won’t be here forever. Take my advice and don’t tell anyone I was here. They’ll think you’re crazy.”

  Then he’s gone.

  “Nick, come back.” I crawl to the end of the bed to see if he had left an imprint on the blanket, and it’s flat. “Nick, come back.” I wipe tears from my eyes. “Nick!”

  “Shut up, you crazy cracker,” Pringle says groggily from the bed below. He kicks the mattress. “Don’t make me get out of this bed and bust up your face.”

  “I must have had a nightmare,” I say, lying back down.

  “Save it for group.” Pringle kicks the bed again. “I don’t care if you dreamed you were locked in a nuthouse.”

  Franklin

  “If this is the way God treats his friends, no wonder he has so few.” St. Theresa of Avila’s words resound in my head like the refrain of a hymn, over and over, as I sit down in the kitchen to put on my fortieth, maybe fiftieth, new pair of New Balance, which became my brand in the seventies when Cage swore by them in high school. I wear out a pair every three months, mail-order them quarterly from Runner’s Warehouse. The kettle whistles and I rush across the kitchen in one shoe to take it from the burner before it wakes Margaret, who’s emotionally exhausted from her trip to Massachusetts. The clock on the stove shows five-thirty. I pour the water over a tea bag and pick up the steaming mug with a picture of a grizzled cowboy and a quotation: There’s a lot of things they didn’t tell me when I signed on with this outfit.

  First Nick’s death. Now Cage’s crack-up. After nearly thirty years of consoling grieving families, after countless accidents, sudden heart attacks, long, slow deaths, hundreds of thousands of hours in hospital rooms sitting with families while the doctors trooped in to recommend further futile treatments whose only tangible results would be protracting the pain and bankrupting the families, I don’t know where to look for solace. The trials of Job.

  I carry the tea out the back door into the garden. The sky is lightening the palest pink. Warblers, jays, and cardinals are singing as if all is right with the world. I single out my favorite—the ethereal flutelike ee-o-lay of the wood thrush. A foreign song, without human meaning, without human feeling, Harper, my youngest, the atheist, would say. After stretching, fifty sit-ups, and twenty-five push-ups, I leave the garden through the gate by the carport and jog up the street toward the country club parking lot. God has blessed me with good knees. Even after thirty-five years of daily running, after most of my peers have given up jogging for swimming or golf, my knobby old fellows are going strong. Hitting the golf course, I commence my morning prayers. “Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against Thy holy laws,” but I break off, remembering Nick as a long-haired, gap-toothed teenager. He came home once from a matinee, a movie set in the future where the world was so polluted all the trees had died, so affected that he spent the rest of the afternoon picking up trash for a mile along the street outside the rectory where we lived in Virginia. Why did You take him so young, so idealistic? Or was it You who took him?

  The trees cast long shadows over the fairways beneath the bluing sky as the sun simmers the humidity into a sticky broth. My sweat has soaked through my shirt. I stop trying to pray and follow the high ivy-covered brick wall that encircles the club. Was it something we did, some failure as parents? Through grammar school and junior high, Cage had been the bright one, always one of the top students in his class, a leader, the captain of the football team, while Nick was the shy underperformer. In the first grade Nick had refused to learn to read. He simply didn’t want to. In fourth grade, after refusing to do his homework for a week, his teacher whipped him in front of the whole class. That would never happen nowadays, but it worked. He started turning his homework in on time.

  Then a clear reversal occurred in high school when we moved from Virginia to Louisiana. Cage became a B student, while Nick logged straight As, was elected president of his class. Cage grew into a mercurial young man, often storming away from the dinner table or the Christmas tree, dissatisfied with his presents, with his lot in life as the son of a clergyman, while his friends got new cars, stereo players, ski trips. Nick was quiet, the peacemaker. The pattern continued on through college. Nick’s grades never slipped, while Cage’s continued to drop. Cage graduated without a clue as to what he wanted to do, without a sense of purpose. I think the professors at Sewanee these days are as morally confused as Cage is. I suppose Cage was doing drugs.

  Marijuana. Cocaine. LSD. They are just names to me. Or even reliable ol’ alcohol. What else would set loose Cage’s illness? Manic depression. It seems to me the culture of rock and roll music has accounted more than anything else for the moral decline of American society, distracted our children from the serious business of life. When I was growing up,
kids didn’t blow their minds on drugs and stay out all night listening to music that impairs their eardrums. In the Great Depression everyone was working hard to get by, better themselves, make something out of their lives. Nowadays kids have it too easy. All they’re interested in is excitement.

  Harper came along nine years after Nick. He was the only one we planned. Margaret badly wanted one more child. He would be perfect, the one with whom she would apply everything that she had learned from raising the first two. She wouldn’t make the same mistakes. But Harper turned out to be an angry child.

  Across the link Malachi, who looks as old as Methuselah, comes out of a barn on a riding mower, which calls up the image of an old Negro on a mule in Arkansas in the thirties. Every Tuesday, Malachi’s and my paths intersect on the eighteenth fairway. Malachi waves and turns along in the same direction, yelling above the engine noise, “Mo’nin’, Bishop.”

  “Morning, Mal. Another scorcher.”

  “It gets any hotter than yesaday, they gonna have get me some special inshunce for sunstroke, yes suh. Don’t sees how you stan’ to run.”

  “Got to suffer a little to stay healthy.”

  “I know Jesus promised eternal life. Looks to me like you’s aiming to have it right here on earth.”

  “Hell, I ain’t that old, Malachi.”

  “Nah suh, but you ain’t that young neitherway be out here at the crack o’ dawn every mo’nin’.”

  Reaching the iron fence, I say, “Good morning to you, sir.”

  “Always a pleasure talking to you, suh.” Malachi grins and turns the mower in the opposite direction.

  I remember that today is a diocesan executive committee meeting with the Integrity chapter. Those fellows. They are growing so adversarial one day they’ll split the entire Episcopal church. The Great Gay Schism. They are never satisified with our attempts to accommodate them pastorally. That’s what I find so frustrating. I empathize with the plea of the homosexually oriented person that they have been excluded from the life of the church and I have tried to make them a part of the Body of Christ, to incorporate them into the community. Regardless of what I do, it’s not enough. They want to make everything a legal issue. This year it’s blessing same-sex unions, which diametrically opposes the teachings of the church on holy matrimony. I don’t know what to do except to liturgically recognize fidelity practiced between same sexes. But you cannot call it marriage. Hell, it ain’t marriage. And what will they want next year?

  I wish I was hiking alone along a high, cool ridgetop, deep in the Appalachians.

  Harper

  In late August the Magic Hour comes earlier and doesn’t last as long. Late in the day, up high on a ladder on the side of an old shingled two-story, I watch gulls wheel and shriek over the shore. I look across the water at the gray horizon as if I can see Cage locked up in the asylum. The more I think about it, the more Cage’s crack-up scares me. Can I suddenly go crazy? Can I change into a conniving, charming con man? For all I know I’m carrying the bipolar time bomb.

  I still feel terrible about telling the police where they could find Cage. When Dad was up here in July, he told me that I did the right thing, that there was no way to know that the judge would throw him into that hellhole. Mama has been up three or four times over the summer. She is a stoic. Each time, she’s come back from Bridgewater shaken up by the scary place and more determined that we will get him out soon. She despises the lawyer in Bridgewater. “He is a coarse man, well acquainted with the system and clever. But, my land, is he coarse. He is not a gentleman. Never forget you are a gentleman, Harper. Manners are morals.” I scrape peeling paint under the eaves and think about that. It seems erroneous to me; a perfectly mannered man could be a crook. Manners are exterior forms, habits of good behavior, at best an awareness and consideration of others. But are they morals? Yes, if fine manners means thinking of others before yourself, then it is a moral imperative. Like love thy neighbor. Mama expects me to be a Christian gentleman.

  It would have been good manners for me to have gone to Bridgewater with her but I used work as an excuse because I was ashamed to see Cage, since I felt like I had put him there. I keep making up my mind to go to the mainland on the next visiting day, then wussing out.

  Bipolar. Manic-depressive. I thought Cage was simply being selfish and partying too much, that he’d gone over the deep end. Dr. Lamb told Mom and me that he was self-medicating. After her first visit to Bridgewater, Mom insisted on seeing him again, scheduled an appointment. He wasn’t apologetic about his recommendation to send Cage for an evaluation. He said, Cage had shown a capacity for violence; the legal system required his evaluation. I felt like punching him in the nose. Mom responded, I hope you have the capacity to appreciate the damage that you’ve inflicted on my son and experience some feeling of regret, though you have the look of a psychiatrist who has exorcised guilt from his vocabulary of emotion. I was impressed. Lamb was silent at that one.

  Looking back at Cage’s life, you wonder if the illness was there all along. The fits of anger. The wild escapades. The depressions in college and grad school. Was what had appeared to be normal adolescent turmoil really the slow arrival of his madness? “When they figure out the right drug to control manic depression, to allow them the manic energy without the psychosis, the bipolars will rule the world. They are often very bright,” an orthopedic surgeon from Charleston told me one day while I was painting his house. It’s easier to talk to southerners. I told him I was thinking of staying through December, maybe longer, and he said I could look after his huge place right on the bluff, looking out at the ocean, until next June.

  Sylvia’s Saab comes down the street. She slows down and waves. She’s started running with some guy from Rhode Island, another hard-partying trustafarian. I don’t run into her much. I raise a paintbrush and start to come down the ladder. She rolls on by.

  I’m thinking of staying because I’m not sure what I want to major in, what I want to be. Hanging out in a fraternity house with a bunch of drunks getting fucked up and chasing trim has lost its appeal. I’ve been seeing a therapist, a guy named Jack, since a couple of weeks after Cage went into Bridgewater. Jack says my not wanting to go back to college stems from an adjustment disorder. He’s trying to adjust me. I think the long silences of painting houses are more valuable than the fifty minutes a week with him at a dollar a minute. He did introduce me to the tool of stepping out of myself and drawing back from my family, watching all of us interact as if I was watching a play. But he doesn’t have much else to teach. I’m getting more out of a book on Gestalt therapy. I need to take some time off and think about what I want to do.

  Mom and Dad are against it. The unspoken subtext is: Look what happened to Cage when he took time off from college. With their oldest son in the loony bin, their middle son dead, their youngest son appearing to drop out of college, they’re fairly freaked out. So I tell them that I’ll pay my own way, including the sixty percent of the therapy not covered by the church medical insurance. Mom guessed right away that there’s a girl involved.

  I’m falling in love. Savanna heard about Cage long before she met me. He was famous across the island. Even now in late August they’re still talking about the sermon at St. Paul’s and the yard of boat wrecks and his arrest. The boatbuilder who bought Cage’s sloop for three grand, twice what Cage had paid for it, said the work Cage had done was first-class. I used the money to pay off the Slades’ account at Coffin’s Marine. There’s a consensus across the island that Cage got shafted by the doctor, the judge, and the prosecutor. Cage is remembered fondly, especially after Mom rode all over the island apologizing to everyone and covering the rubber checks—enough to send me to Tulane for a semester.

  Mom hasn’t met Savanna. She was in Boston or the Vineyard when Mom was around. Mom doesn’t know that she moved into my attic. She goes to Wellesley, just a ferry ride away, studies political science, wants to be a lawyer, like half the people I know. I started therapy because of her.
She’s very pragmatic. “You’ve got to do it, Harper,” she told me about dawn the night I met her. We stayed up talking all night, not even drinking much, just talking. “Your family is obviously dysfunctional. Everyone’s is. It’s too bad there’s not a Jungian analyst on the island. I had a great one in Atlanta.”

  She taught me how to sail a Laser. Sometimes at sunset we cast into the surf on an isolated beach. One week we read The Moviegoer and the next The Last Gentleman. I like Walker Percy. He’s funny and captures the upper-class South in the sixties but I don’t buy his theism. Savanna believes in God. We lie on the sand under blankets, half naked. We didn’t make the two-back beast, as Cage would say, until after a month of hanging together constantly. She’s slender, like a ballerina. She has dark skin and short dark hair and barely comes to my shoulder. The first time we made love I thought I was going to hurt her. She just seemed so small. She had slept with two other boys. But once she decides, she’s into it all the way. After the long gentle warm-up of soft kisses, half-clothed bodies entwined, tender caresses, tentative wandering hands, we fucked like alley cats. She leaves marks. It’s the first great sex of my life, the first without awkwardness. I get a double bed that takes up most of the attic. We live on that bed.

  So I’m going to weather the family storm on Nantucket, ponder the future and the past, try to find a path.

  The End of the South

  1969

  “Nick. Wake up.” Cage nudged his shoulder. “Sompin’s in the corner.”

  “Huh?” Nick yawned and squinted in the darkness at the bedroom ceiling. He rolled over and hid his head under the pillow.

  “Nick,” Cage whispered. “It’s floating.”

  Nick kicked his legs under the sheets but they were not long enough to hit his brother on the other side of the big four-post bed.

  “Nick.” Cage’s voice was trembling more now. “It . . . it’s . . . it’s an old wo-woman. She’s floating.”