Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  Robert came. It made me smile. "How's Sooner?" I said. But I didn't want to know, not really. I wanted to picture her happy and really…I didn't want to know.

  He told me how the puppies were doing, their latest stories all happy. I listened a little, but it wasn't just sadness that made me tired…happiness did too. Then he told me about working at the match company doing a welding job Lonnie hadn't finished. He'd called Allie and she said to tell me to get well so we could get started. He'd ordered parts from her and she'd delivered and checked his work and she thought he did fine, but she said to make it clear she was ready to do business with me. Corning was wide open, she said.

  Then he tried to hand me a little bunch of pink flowers.

  "They said they're Zinnias…I don't know," he said.

  I didn't lift my hand because I'd grown so weary. "I don't have a vase," I said.

  He held them there for another second or two then he just let his arm drop and they laid on his thigh and I thought about how pretty they were, then his leg, then Danny's leg and I was crying.

  To him it looked like I just cried, like a crazy person, but to me I knew. It made sense. Really everything did. I didn't need their endless questions and their advice that fit me like Saul's armor must have fit David when he was fixing to fight Goliath.

  He didn't need it…someone else's answer. He had to find his own.

  I got up while he was talking about those pups again and went to my room. I didn't fall on the bed lest he follow me in and do what Sukey did. I had a new rule about that. Before I went to bed I checked and checked the hall and checked again. Sometimes I didn't go to bed at all, but I hid under it. Pretty smart I know, but burn me twice… shame on me.

  It hurt Naomi that they wouldn't let her come to see me those times. I always knew she'd been around anyway cause she brought those packages of care. But since she upset me that last time, they said it would be best she let me work through it. I didn't know what work I was supposed to do beyond breathing. Breathing was the hardest work I could do.

  She wanted to fix me. If she could just let me be here…but she wanted me to rise.

  The 'get up.' She wanted to pray me out of it. She wanted me to be her miracle and I wasn't going to move on her time…or no time…not my time…not their time…not the devil's time.

  "Leave me alone," I had screamed. But I'd called her since and I knew she was crying.

  But now just her silence. Well baskets and cards. And I'd left that note at the desk for her. I love you, it said, because I did, somewhere in me, that love I couldn't feel but had to recognize even while I was locked in this mist. I loved her.

  And him, Danny. I had left this place in my mind to go to him, where he was. I waited for myself to come back, but I feared I wouldn't. I was with him, wherever he was. Not a whole self, or a healthy self he would ever want, but a part of me, my eyes, my seeing eyes, on him, over his bed, watching.

  Here's what I knew. He was not forgiving himself for being alive. I knew it. I knew it. He gave up the leg to punish himself. He thought he deserved it and more. He was nearly glad to bear such a loss, because he had not saved them, not been the hero, not been the champion, but had lived. He had lived and had not earned the right. He had only been in-country for five weeks. He had been stripped down to powerless and he was lost in that swamp of horror.

  He had to come back…he had to know he was loved…I was telling him for himself, not for me, I was this now, this inhuman incubator of the inhumane. I was this soiled receptacle of hate. And I had only started to know that, to define myself, what was left of it, in terms. Before I had been mist and fog just scattered and nothing. Now I was gathering into this mass…this thing I did not want to be a part of…this self… this hideous, defiled, judged, pisspot, shitpot. This me. This it.

  I knew Naomi hurt. They had killed Dr. King. I knew she was a woman of sorrows, pierced through, a crown of thorns under the blue hat. I grieved for her. I grieved for us. This family of man that raped and murdered and amputated and spawned itself again and again.

  We were hurting each other. Love meant you drew close enough to feel the knife go in.

  In here, in this hospital, I couldn't hurt anyone, anymore. I belonged here. I was home.

  April eleventh The Civil Rights Act was signed by President Johnson. Naomi could no longer be discriminated against for owning property on Willard Street. May second Naomi and several of the sisters and Debra and her husband Tad now home from Vietnam traveled by freedom bus to the Poor People's March in Washington D.C.

  Then in June someone shot Robert F. Kennedy. By the end of the month the news media dubbed the war in Vietnam the longest war in U. S. history.

  I was starting to show. Just the slightest bump because I'd lost weight. I was sick a lot, morning sick they said. I was just starting to believe it though I could not imagine that a child grew in me, but truth to tell, I had learned that that which I could not imagine could and probably would come true and then some.

  By August we had rioting in Cleveland and rioting in Miami. And a list of presidential candidates long as your arm.

  By November we had Richard M. Nixon for president and Danny's mother came to see me.

  "Your grandmother has visited me," she said.

  I tried to sit up straighter. I had not cared that I sat straight before now. But I smelled a sour smell that was me. And for once, I was ashamed. I thought, I can change this.

  Danny favored his mother. He had her hair. She went through her purse and pulled out some pictures. On top was that one Danny had told me about before, him sitting on the porch stairs, his father with him. His father…brown he'd called him. I called it splitting hairs. That man was black as Eugene.

  Then Danny as I'd known him, a boy who lived on a bicycle, on the street. Then Danny and Sukey. I handed her the pictures. I drew back in my soul. She wasn't here to create sympathy…surely she wasn't.

  "I'm sorry," she said, her eyes filled. "I…I've lost them both. I'm the only one who cares…who's ever cared."

  "You haven't lost Danny," I said, and it was sane…it was me. I was in there and I knew things.

  "They can't find him. They think he's left the country." She meant Sukey. We'd gone to the police…Naomi had…when she came home in time to be shoved by Sukey as he bolted out the front door. Bixby had stood by while they spread me and gathered the evidence while my grandmother held my hand and whispered Jesus.

  But they had not gathered the spawning spawn that spawned. Like Sukey, it got away. Like Sukey it rooted in me…Mama's tumor all over again…in me.

  I stared at her, his birth mother. There was nothing to say.

  "Paul…he's an angry man."

  "We're all angry," I said. What I meant was…we all could be…if we so chose. It meant nothing. It excused nothing.

  "Danny?" He's all I wanted to hear about.

  "He's healing. He'll walk again. Did you know?"

  How could I? "He doesn't write," I said bluntly. "He doesn't know where I am."

  Then, "Does he?"

  "No. I haven't wanted to add to what he's going through. He doesn't write, but he's called. It's brief, but he sends his love…to us."

  He did not call Naomi. She would tell me. She would bring me water from afar to quench my thirst so I would rise. "Does he…mention me?"

  She leans forward, her hand on my knee. A mother's touch. I remember that…those times…those long ago times. The way Mama would touch me when she knows her child is not loved.

  "Tell him…it's God's will that he's alive." Then I looked at her. "Will you tell him?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Tell him he has to live…for all of us…for all of those who didn't…for all of those around him who need his encouragement. Tell Danny…he has to live for himself. Because he's beautiful…and he's a light. He's a light in this world." It felt so right to say this. I heard myself. I was proud of what I'd said. It was true.

  "I will, Hilly. No wonder he loves you
so much."

  "Does he?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "Then why…nothing…for so long."

  She smiled, sad. "My guess is he's protecting you. Giving you an out."

  "He knows," I said, a fire catching in me. "He can't do that! He knows I'll never stop loving him…never."

  "Shhh," she says because I'm crying. God says he wants us hot or cold. Either one. But not lukewarm. He won't tolerate tepid. And I'd been tepid. I'd been tepid since Danny got shot. Since Sukey raped me. I'd been stuck in lukewarm and almost gone. But right now, hot was coming. Hot was coming.

  "You tell him I said this…I said it…he promised nothing could separate me from his love. He told me no matter what I wasn't to think for a minute he'd stopped loving me. This world wasn't big enough to stop his love. He told me that!" I yelled, grabbing onto her, clutching her arm.

  I knew security was behind me, saw her eyes dart to them over my head, but she held them off, not that they would listen for long. I sat down, and breathed like they'd showed me. I calmed myself. "I'm alright," I said, not turning around, but arms around my middle and rocking some I said, "I'm alright."

  Once they backed off I said to Mrs. Boyd, "You'll tell him for me?"

  "I will," she said.

  Later that week they let me listen to the heart beat. I couldn't believe it, so quick and strong. The doctor said it was supposed to be fast like that. "It's alive in me," I said to him.

  "That's right. You're going to be a mother."

  Well, that brought me back to King Nebuchadnezzar. Being crazy like an animal wasn't the end of his story. One day he was in the field, in the rain, eating grass, and he looked up. That was it. He looked up and he thought, "I'm not God." And seeing as he knew he wasn't God, he praised God and he became a man. So he wasn't God, and he wasn't an animal. He was just a man.

  And sanity returned.

  Two weeks later I went home.

  Finding My Thunder 51

  I knew a boy, who was a man, who was my man. He was my lover with the coal black hair. I had held him to me and learned his flesh and soul and in our spirits we were one and that transcended countries and oceans and time.

  Naomi had rearranged the house. She had uprooted herself, putting me in her bedroom and she had taken mine. I did not agree, but her old room was the big one, big enough for two, for a crib need be.

  But fragile as I felt, it was an awareness of the house down the block, connected to me by a ribbon of brick alley, but so much more, by love, by hate…and now by blood.

  Dickens came first, upon learning I was home. I sat on the porch because it was not as close as the house got sometimes with Naomi keeping it so warm. I sat there and here he came on his bike, and it not stopped when he got off, letting it crash itself as he threw open the gate and ran to me and dropped on the step beside me, his head on my lap and his arms around.

  He cried for a while, and I was over him crying some, feeling what he did, it so raw and pure. "It's alright," I told him as I patted his back.

  He lifted his head, his streaming face, freckles wet and some dirt, too, "I told him. He called. We don't have the money but Mom called the hospital and they promised to make him call and Dad said we couldn't take it…the call…and he tried to grab it from Mom and they fought and I got it and I yelled in the phone, 'Sukey hurt Hilly.'"

  And I remembered so well Danny at the table in Naomi's kitchen, clear-eyed. He would kill Sukey, he said.

  "I told him I would tell," he said, more tears. "I promised him I'd watch and tell."

  "It's okay," I kept saying though my face must have showed something different.

  He gripped me harder, almost too hard, but his body was shaking.

  "He chased me into the bathroom and I got the door shut," he said.

  "Who chased you?"

  "Dad," he said. "But…I got the door closed and Mom was there…so I opened it…and he hit her…so many times…so I got him off, and he shook me off and he left. I wanted to call Bixby…but Mom said no."

  I felt the quaking deep in me. I couldn't tolerate it anymore. I couldn't sit by and pretend not to notice another predator's den. Naomi didn't. She gave her life…to rescue. Look at me…here. Rescue. I stroked his hair from his face and he lay there until it was just a hiccup in him. "It gets bad down there, you come stay with me…me and Naomi. He comes around here…we'll call Bixby."

  He lifted his head. "I've got to help Mom. I promised Danny."

  "If we get Bixby in on it…you have helped her," I said. I knew how it went, that they wouldn't do a thing between a man and his wife other than calm the man down some. But I knew what it was like to sit on those kinds of secrets. To feel there was nowhere to go. I even protected Naomi from it. But sometimes, after Lonnie passed out, I came to this little house. And if it hadn't been here…somebody…I don't know what.

  "I don't have much family…but I'll be your big sister. How about that?"

  Well he had another round of crying then. He was just a little boy, just that and I kept stroking through his hair. The sins of the fathers, it's all I could think. The sins of the fathers. "Someday you'll be a father," I said. "And you'll be better. You'll have a chance to get it right."

  He lifted his head and wiped his nose on his arm. "Use your shirt," I said, and he did, wiping his nose on his shirt's tail. Then we both laughed a little. Just a bit.

  "I ain't gonna be like them. I hate them…Dad and Sukey. He put a baby in you. You need to leave it at the hospital. I hope it dies."

  I nodded, but his sincere well-meaning words were like a knife twisted. What he said…what he felt…that came from Sukey…and Paul. That wasn't about my baby.

  That was the father's hate. It had to stop.

  I had to keep coming to terms. It was a baby. It was a person. The unimaginable had happened. But this young hurt boy confronting me about it…that's always when the words got formed…when someone brought the challenge…and then I got to thinking how to speak back…and that made me face what I felt. And this one, this boy, he spoke out of love and real and dear. For all the fury in his words, he was innocent, but the thing being formed…in him…that was the violation. They had my body, they took it, but they had his soul and his spirit in their hands. They were forming him, forging him.

  Words were swirling and forming in me. Truth was defining itself, rising up.

  "But…no. No. I ain't gonna let this poor…child…I ain't gonna let you hate this child…I ain't gonna let anyone…I ain't gonna let anyone hate this child." I said it looking out, down the alley. Well…I would never do that. I would never…do that. That had been done with me. The sins of the fathers. That is what it was with Sukey…hate…for what Danny had in him, and me…hate…Paul's hate…Paul's father's hate…and all the hate in all the Pauls and all the Lonnies and all the Sukey’s…and now they were passing the baton…and I stroked over this hair and this skull and brain…who was being taught…to hate.

  It's like a door opened up…a hatch and some light showed, not weak light…but piercing light.

  "Dickens," I made him sit up and look at me, "you ever think…this baby is a part of me…a part of you…a part of Annie…a part of Danny…a part of everyone in your family?"

  He shook his head.

  "You ever think? If you hate something…you hate yourself?"

  He shook his head.

  "Hey Dickens…don't you dare hate this child…my child…your…brother. Don't you dare ever let yourself think that way."

  "But…if it wasn't there…."

  "It is there. And it's the great…gift…the surprise that rises out of the darkest, cruelty. Out of hate, out of hate…this child will come and he or she will be this chance…for all of us…hitting…fighting with fists and words…trying to kill each other…this child will be a place…to come to our senses. A place to give love."

  He stared at me.

  "Love can't be stopped. It's stronger than hate. You think Sukey stopped me? Stopped love? You just w
ait 'til this baby is born. You just watch how much I love him."

  That's what she said. That's what she taught me…the blue hat…the crown. I had seen her spine straight in its presence. I had never seen hate grow straighter or taller than her or even close. When Dr. King got shot…her Dr. King…she went to the poor people's march with Dr. Abernathy. She did not go to the mental home. She did not lick her wounds. She carried on. In love.

  I felt something so big in my heart, something trying to spark, trying to breathe and get some legs…and it was love and it was this child and they were the same.

  And I thought of Cain…killing his brother…and the mark it put on him…and the mark on this world…but Adam had another son…and his name was Seth…and he brought healing…and something new, from the same line, the same two flawed human beings, the father and mother of us all.

  "This is a boy," I said to Dickens.

  "Do you know?" he asked.

  "I do," I said. I just did.

  It was so strange, it was so real. I said to Dickens, "I just want you to know, I love you. I'm here if you need to come…need to get out…any of you all…I'll be here for you. We're a family now. We're one another's future."

  "Do you know?" he said again, like he was trying to believe something good.

  "I do. I'm tired. I'm weak. But I ain't gonna stay this way. So you need us…you don't feel safe…just come. I got a lot in this world to step up to. I'll get better. Don't you worry. And Danny…." Danny. I wished I could tell him all that I felt, all that I knew. But his heart was good and I prayed like never before. I prayed to the one who could reach where I could not go. Because I wasn't God. And I wasn't an animal either, and nothing done to me could make me an animal, a beast, except hate.

  And I shared that at Temple. I had never shared before, never stood where Naomi stood to deliver her "Get up" sermons. But I had something to say, not because I'd suffered, but because I was healing. I had love.

  And now I had more love. I entered a new place with the sisters at Temple. They told me things, they shared. And I was less alone in what I'd suffered than I realized.