I am also excited that my fourth collection of lyrical essays (as I prefer to call them, rather than using the hideous contemporary term "creative nonfiction") will be published by a new and exciting Vermont Publisher, Green Writers Press, directed by the very able Dede Cummings. It will be called WHAT'S THE STORY? SHORT TAKES ON A LIFE GROWN LONG. The following is an excerpt.
County Home: An Iraqui Suite, 2004
–in
mem. Robert Bagley, and for the Reverend Ms. Susan Tarantino
I.
Hex on the Vampire
Months
back, the preacher told me I should
go and see him, because our left-wing Christian sect requires “the ministry of the
people.” So here I am to pick up Robert at the county home, to speed with him
in near absolute quiet to the truck stop. We arrive, and he shuffles beside me,
feeble, a brad-thin arm hooked under mine, as we make our slow way through the
idling 18-wheelers in the lot, then into the unsmiling company of their
drivers, rough-hewn Québecois. This is the first truck stop south of the lately
terror-stricken, closely guarded border.
Please God, I think, don’t let me be a vampire, whatever in my art
may prompt me to be. I will force myself to be silent, letting the old guy
order for himself, attending his articulations, the dark den of his mouth
twisted by– no, I won’t tell you. I won’t tell anyone, at least for now, what
happened to make him this way some years ago.
We eat, still unspeaking, and I don’t wipe the egg from his one
and only necktie. No. The writer won’t comment on how Robert’s doing as his
trousers ride up his milk-blue shins and he keeps on smiling. I’ll tell you
only that he may just be doing better than you or I: he’ll take the world as it
is. He’s alone, he's dirt poor, he's ancient and lame, and is nonetheless a man
who, unlike me too often, seems to understand the difference between acceptance
and resignation.
I’m hungry. I order the “Big Rig Platter,” steak and eggs, with
bulky bread and the bottomless cup of good strong coffee. I mean to leave
things at filling my healthy gut like a truck, forgetting about subject matter.
He’s taught me a thing or two, this shambles, this shell, though it’s often a
struggle to remember them. You see, I’m not doing good here. In the
good-for-good department, Robert outpaces me, fueled by a meal of
soft-scrambled eggs, crustless toast, and –it being a big day, in fact his
birthday– tomato soup.
Robert’s shirt is cross-buttoned, his trousers climb those shanks,
his dank and slow-grown hair is harum-scarum.
Awkwardly, I pray, Please God, don’t let some literary effort of
mine reflect on those crumpled shoulders, the head that lolls and allows the
white, bowed neck to present its length, as if for my teeth.
II. Dated story
On
my way in, I see the two women whom I think of –without irony, I hope– as the
Sleeping Beauties, small in their nineties to the cusp almost of infinity, and
always resting, always utterly quiet, thus apparently peaceful. And peace is,
after all, a rare thing of beauty.
A
war’s still on, and Rumsfeld’s “Saddened” By Criticism of Iraq Policy. So says this morning’s
headline above the syndicated article in our small local newspaper.
When I get to Frenchy’s room, I notice his daughter has woven a
handsome Boston Red Sox blanket with "For Daddy" stitched at the top.
A small, crocheted stocking shows on every door in the hall. It’s just before
Christmas.
Frenchy was born in 1918, which was until now the last year the
Sox were World Series champions. It’ll be a good holiday, then. Fact is, he’s
not saddened. Not at all. Fact is, he tells me, he’s happy as a bull with a
heifer. Despite my poor ears and his spectral voice, I hear and I laugh.
One of my older neighbors recalls Frenchy’s gas station in the
1950s, which he’d bought and run for a long spell because even then Vermont’s
family hill farms were in trouble. She tells me Frenchy was a very nice man.
Frenchy is a very nice man, and not all that ill; he’s just
old, is all. He jokes that when he was a boy, “That Big Dipper wa’n’t nothin’
but a little cup.” He laughs again, a sound like gentle wind among reeds on the
river, as I used to hear it from blinds when the duck hunting was a lot better.
I laugh again myself, even if I’m a touch wistful. I was a fitter, younger man
when I hunted those ducks, so I get to thinking of time’s velocity.
As for Mr. Secretary, he claims that time is precisely the issue,
not will, and in another context I’d agree, because true enough, time is a
killer. But Rummy isn't talking of philosophy but of making armor plating for
our soldiers’ Humvees, which his department could not, apparently, manage to provide
before the U.S. invasion.
He has advised our troops that “you go to war with the army you
have and not with the one you may wish you had,” no matter it seems clear as
death to an ignorant man like me that he and his cronies had all the time in
the world in which to plan their precious assault. Frenchy doesn’t have that
kind of time; but then, as far as I know, he bears no responsibility for a
single death, either.
“By God we did it!” Frenchy calls out loud, or as loud as he can,
while I’m leaving. You might think he had driven in runs himself, or pitched
scoreless innings, or turned double plays, and so had helped to whip the hated
foes. But it’s just the ironist in me that notes such a thing, and I’ve become
ironic only because so many people’s claims are –excuse me– bullshit, whereas
Frenchy’s joy is real, I think, and I know I am right, and his joy is not
petty, because there’s no such thing as a petty joy in the world.
III.
Unspent
There’s
been more snow in March alone than there was all the rest of the winter, so I’m
guarding against the ice that forms beneath its cover after rain or thaw swells
brooks and then a freeze drops in to sheet the surface over. In time, the brooks
subside, the water drops, the drum-ice turns into a trap.
Not
me, goddamn you! I shout into still
air. I probe with a ski-pole. That ice is thin as a dollar, I suddenly think,
and having thought it, I go on to think of old Reed at the home.
Reed said last week he had unspent cash in his wallet. He showed
me a bill so worn you could scarcely make out the figures on the bills. “Older’n God,” he
sighed. So I took him down to the general store, because he’d been in no store
for ages and had forgotten what it was like to visit one. A store! A
store was all, for the love of God. And I’ve got nothing to do this Saturday
afterwards but poke around with a pole and swear.
Today, the president told the public he was on a mission to change
Social Security. Reform. That’s the
word he used. His plan would put all retirement accounts into the hands of Wall
Street’s brokers. The brokers love it. Now it’s true enough, Reed’s benefits
can’t pay for any care but what he gets in his tiny room at the county home,
which not that long ago was known as The Residence for the Poor, but will Wall
Street help that? I have my doubts. By now the home’s name has been softened,
and its staff’s damned good, as good anyhow as it can be under the
circumstances. A decent staff is not the point, however.
The only stock Reed’s ever gotten over the counter is his stock of
drugs, whose manufacturers are likewise fond of so-called reform. Most of the
time, the pharmaceuticals keep Reed from hitting bottom with seizures. I mutter
and keep right at my probing. I don’t want to sink into some neck-deep pit with
a crash. Whenever I find a patch of drum-ice I just bash the living hell out of
it, then hop across the brook or ditch as I still can do, praise God.
In that general store I figured I should let Reed spend his money,
because, just for a change, he wanted to buy whatever he could himself. He
fished up two of those pale bucks for doughnuts and tea.
I’m out here by myself for now. Not for good. For now. A person needs some dignity, I think,
but I'm standing alone in woods, where that issue isn’t an issue, where only
ravens and rodents hear me curse and flail, and wish out loud I could see the
reformers spend one year at making bread, loaf after loaf, as Reed kept doing
for forty years and more, so that his hands are forever locked in a curl, as if
he were still kneading dough.
Then those who rhapsodize on an ownership society would
spend one week in the home, good staff or none, where Reed sits quietly waiting
for somebody to join him in front of the lone TV, on whose screen the owners
keep prosing away, their discourse full of high-sounding bromides. Dignity. Responsibility. Freedom. So on.
Each day for Reed is like treading that dollar-thin ice. Each day is a day is a
day is a day in the home. I crash my crude weapon against the goddamned ice
until the croaking and chattering wild things scatter, as if I possessed not a
pole but a gun.
IV. 6-9-9-1
6 is for the number of strokes that left Joe what he is: one big stroke, then five of those
little ones called by letters. I forget which letters, but one is I, for
incident, as I
recall.
You wouldn’t think Joe’s mouth could be so black, so hollow. I
like to see him smile, and at the same time don’t. You wouldn’t think a back
could be so bent, either. And yet, whenever I arrive, he straightens as best he
can to present himself to me.
I’ve been with him this morning for a few minutes, which, I scold
myself, aren’t enough. Yet I keep on punching the code.
9 now. What else can I do, after all? He can’t walk, he can’t talk, it will
have to be enough, –won’t it?– that I come to visit once a week and after only
a while I return to this great metal door and punch the numbers, whose order
he’s not allowed to know, though he couldn’t escape if he tried.
These short visits are all I offer Joe. He has no one else on
earth. So am I a hero? You bet I’m
not. Not at all, but he does notice me there, I believe. He’s aware that I
stand by him now and then to hear the Bingo numbers, say, and to help him put
down his chips, gently slapping him on his back when he wins. Today he didn’t
win.
So I have walked down this Pine-Sol-and-urine-reeking hall and I’m
punching these other numbers on the big, cold door. Oh, here I am again at my
blessed 6-9-9-1, I think, and although it can’t be right, I feel I’m
free at last.
I’m still only at the second 9. I’m much younger than Joe but I’m
slow with the code because my eyes don’t do well in such low light. He was a
roofer down in Concord and probably known by his full name there, not just Joe.
I don’t know the other name myself.
Joe and I are friends by now, to call it friendship, and you
always want, of course, to help a friend or any fellow human as much as you
can– except you can’t. Or maybe you can but you don’t know how. For instance, I
have only held Joe’s shriveled claw and shouted at him to nod if he needed
anything and pointed to his shirt, shoe, toothbrush, and so on. He didn’t nod.
I didn’t ask about the T.V. or radio because he can’t quite hear them anyway,
and his roommate is asleep. All he does is sleep. He won’t be watching or
listening to anything. At least Joe sits there waiting.
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