By
Douglas L. Simmons
All Rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published Internationally in electronic format by
Global Publishing Bureau Limited, Scotland.
First Global Publishing Bureau Electronic Edition: January 5, 2000
Copyright © 1997 by Douglas L. Simmons
Library of Congress Number: TXu 831-019
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
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For: The Crazy White Man....
....and the little boy.
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CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
This is a story of love.
It might even be a love story. I'll leave that for you to decide. If you seek truth you will have love, and if you seek love you will find truth.
Shall I speak of little boys? They are timeless. They live in the forever of now. Not yet comprehending. There is tomorrow. Or not. They move of their own accord.
They embrace the power of the wind.
I have lived in Kansas for many years now.
It doesn't seem that way to me most of the time. I wake up in the morning and still find myself surprised by my surroundings.
I walk into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, lean on the edge of the sink and look out the window; expecting to see the rolling tree covered hills of my childhood, and instead gazing out over the fields which appear to recede endlessly. But only make it to the horizon.
This is the Kansas I know. These are the sights I see with my eyes if I chance to look away from the screen of my computer and rest my imagination for a moment. It is easy for me to forget reality while sitting in my study writing. It is not so easy to forget the past and reside here in today.
The eleven year old boy inside me whom I spend much of my time remembering and writing about however does not know these endless plains of wheat and corn. He does not know the peace of this land. He knows only the monster.
I have tried. I truly have.
The endless tales of terror which have poured forth from my pen over the years; in which the children always triumph over the evil their parents cannot see or comprehend--will not allow in their world--have protected me from my own monsters. They can not protect me from that child.
"Why the hell would they put an intersection for two main highways out in the middle of a cornfield, I ask you?" my mother cursed as we headed off down Interstate 55, bound for St. Louis, when we were supposed to be on 57. Aimed at Chicago.
That's how my mother drove. She aimed the car and went; like a bullet fired from a gun. Now she had ricocheted off an unexpected intersection, and was flying toward the wrong target.
"Would some one just tell me why?" she went on. She had to know that none of us were going to answer. We were just hanging on, and praying she would continue to vent her rage upon the road, leaving us out of it.
"Everybody knows you change highways when you come to a city. Shit; when you come to a city it wakes you up and you have to pay attention to the signs. Who the hell is going to be watching for signs out here in the middle of nowhere?"
She was right of course. But the fact was: the state had built the intersection of Intestate's 55, and 57 in the middle of nowhere and my mother, half asleep, had missed her turn, and we were headed the wrong way. Still, I admired my mother. She could cuss like a sailor and, whatever the circumstances, always managed to push on to her destination. One way; or the other.
That was the summer of my eleventh birthday.
The year my brother, my sister, my mother and myself went to Chicago.
Where I met the crazy white man.
It was also the year the monster died.
We lived in Hermanville Mississippi. Actually, we lived south of town, back up off the main road, up among the trees. Which covered any part of the land that somebody hadn't taken a chain saw to and cut back for farming. The monster lived just a couple of miles down that same road at the Juke House. My mother; Vanessa Jean Robinson, said the monster had more control over my fathers life than he had of it his own damn self. That's why my father didn't live with us anymore, she said. He loved the monster more than he loved us.
At eleven years old, I could not figure out why. And I did try (because I loved that big, gentle man who was my father absolutely, without reservation, and wanted him to love me back) but how--if something was a monster--could anybody love it at all? Let alone care for it more than one did for ones own family?
Even though I secretly viewed my older brother Billy as someone to be held in the highest of regards, I always called him Billy; because I knew how much it irked him.
"My name is William," he would announce pointedly, to anyone who happened to call him otherwise. Especially if any of the older boys his own age were about. I was eleven years old. Armed with such knowledge about my older brother, I was helpless to control my actions. I called him Billy, at every opportune moment available to me, and usually got cuffed a good one for it. But it was worth it.
Billy was fourteen, and claimed that three years difference had allotted to him a degree of wisdom I could not possibly posses at the mere age of eleven. He said, there was no monster at all. He said, Mama was talking about some crazy guy who lived down at the Juke House, and stayed drunk on the white mans booze that Daddy liked to drink so much. He was a mean old bastard, but he was just a man.
My older brother could cuss almost as fluently as my mother could. Of course he did have an excellent instructor. He had, however, managed to gather up enough good sense from some hidden reservoir--which the rest of my family did not have access to--that he knew enough to reserve such language for occasions when he and I were well out of earshot of Mama. She would have cut a hickory switch for his behind, if she had ever caught him at it.
My sister Martha--who had out lived the both of us, attaining the ancient age of sixteen--said, neither one of us knew what we were talking about. We would be better off staying out of the way, and minding our own business. She told us that about virtually everything we poked our noses into. I think mainly she was concerned that we didn't become too informed about her activities with her boy friends. My brother and myself had the both of us told on her, on more than one occasion, for being off at the movies with some boy, when she had led Mama to believe she was going with one of her girl friends. Later I learned it was more profitable to keep my mouth shut. I made a quarter; here and there, a candy bar; every now and then. It was easy. I only had to threaten her once or twice a week, and I was good to go.
At the time I could not understand why, but my sister would spend hours talking with the boys who came by the house, to sit on our front porch and drink lemonade with her. It wasn't my sister Martha whom I didn't understand. I knew what she was up to.
She was practicing hypnotism on those boys.
Oh yes. I understood girls completely. They were all a part of the advance forces of some kind of alien life forms. Things made up to look like girls on the outside and then, somehow, spirited into families as babies, and left there to grow up disguised as normal children. Until the moment was ripe for them to strike. Their purpose was to pave the way for the full scale invasion to come.
I knew such practices existed in nature as I had, not too long before, watched a show on the discovery channel about these birds who would lay their eggs in some other birds nest so the other bird would hatch them, thinking they were its own. Then when the intruder fledglings had hatched, and grown big enough, they would push the mama birds babies out of the nest and take over. It was simple logic to apply this observation to girls and, from there, develop my own theory about the origin of my sibling sister.
Their primary purpose was to seek a means whereby the invaders to come could exert some form of hypnotic control over little boys, and program them to assist in taking over the world. It seemed they had, as yet, been unable to perfect the technique, and were only able to use it well enough to exert a marginal control over teenage boys. On adults however the system worked perfectly. How else to explain the ease with which sisters could get away with activities any boy would have paid severely for even attempting?
This power seemed to fail when used on boys who were younger than fifteen, or sixteen, so I surmised my sister was attempting to develop a method which would some day allow them to enslave the entire male population of the world with their power.
It was the boys I couldn't understand. Why would they want to spend so much of their free time with my sister? I could only conclude that they too were aware of the sinister alien plot and were trying to discover the source of her power over my parents. If they had only confided in me: I probably could have been of immense assistance to the counteroffensive. Perhaps as a spy; or an assassin? But they never said a word. They just kept coming by; the boys and Martha would sit on the porch for hours, staring into each others eyes. Trying to hypnotize one another.
On several occasions, I attempted to discuss this belief with my brother, but I could not get him to see the significance of this sinister plot, and about a year and a-half later he too succumbed to their power. Becoming forever lost to the world of total freedom from oppression we younger boys still enjoyed. I was left with no other choice but to write him off as a casualty of war and fight on without him. I had heard someone say "War Is Hell" but, until that moment, had not fully understood just what they had meant. I was only grateful they hadn't got to him before the monster finally died. I don't know if I could have endured those days without Billy at my side.
All claims made by my elders to the contrary, I knew the monster was real. I had seen him twice, with my own eyes. Once in my own living room and, the other time, down by the Juke House. Where I had gone to look for my father. That time I didn't get a really clear look at the thing, just a fleeting glance, as he threw some poor slob through the front window of the place, then dove out himself and ran off into the woods. But later, the time at our house, I saw the beast close up. Not more than five feet away from me.
He was very real.
We all knew when the monster was coming. Mama would be nervous all day long, pacing through the house, and cussing at anybody who got in her way. Then when night came, and she tucked us in bed, she would tell us to stay in our rooms, and not to come out for anything at all, until she told us we could.
The second and (I believed) the last time I would ever saw the monster was on a Saturday night; about a week before we all came up to Chicago. My father had stopped by the house that morning to bring Mama some money. He usually only came by for one of two reasons.
He would come sometimes on a Sunday afternoon and take us kids fishing down at the creek, which ran through the woods a mile or so back up from where we lived. My sister refused to go along with us, complaining there were too many snakes in the woods. Not that Billy, and I cared, we thought of those fishing expeditions as our exclusive territory, and didn't want any girls hindering our treks into the wilderness in any event. So it all worked out just fine as far as we were concerned.
I think I mentioned that my father liked to drink, but us kids had never actually seen him drunk. Mama said she run him off when we were babies; because she could damn well see what the hell was coming from the way he acted back then, and she sure as shit stinks to high heaven wasn't gonna wait around until he had drug his mess into the lives of her innocent children. He might as well just go on and live down there at that flipping (that's not the word she used) Juke House, if he liked it so much. And keep his no good damn friends down there with him!
Us kids didn't remember any of that, but she made sure we heard about it every time my fathers name was mentioned in that house. Most of the time, we did good just to stay out of her way. I didn't know about my sister Martha, but Billy, and I had concluded that Mama was the crazy one in the family. Of course, neither of us ever voiced that opinion out loud.
As it turned out, that weekend we didn't go fishing. I don't think we would have been up to it, if we had. Daddy came by, and brought Mama some money for groceries, and as I sat in the swing made from an old tire which Billy, and I had roped to the limb of this big oak tree in the back of the house, I could hear the two of them having their regular Saturday morning conversation.
"Now Vanessa. You know that this family could make out a lot better if we all lived up under the same roof. There isn't any need for all of this foolishness. You know I barely make enough money to afford one roof over a families head, and here I am all these years, trying to keep my self alive and still be able to take care of you and the children too. Just how much longer are we going to go on living like this? Why, it's downright embarrassing on top of everything else!"
That was my father. His name was William--same as my brother's--but nobody ever called him Billy. Not when I was around to hear it anyway. He was this great big old giant of a man. It might have been because I was a lot smaller in those days, but he seemed to be about seven feet tall to me at the time. You never, even after you knew him, expected that soft gentle voice to come from that massive frame. Don't get me wrong; he could get just as loud as the next man if the situation called for it, as I had found out on the few occasions when Mama had reached her very wits end with me and Billy, and called my father to come and take us in hand. Billy, and I avoided that contingency to the best of our abilities.
My father came every Saturday morning, and said virtually the same thing to my mother, after he handed her the money he had come to give her. He said it all at once, and never paused for breath, until he had got it all out. He knew that, if he did, whatever word he stopped on would be the last one to leave his mouth until the next Saturday, when he would have one more opportunity to express himself for those few brief moments.
He must have paused, for a tenth of a second or so, after that last sentence, for here came Mama right on cue:
"Now you listen here William Robinson. I don't need you to take care of me, and I damn well told you enough times already, that it should have soaked through that thick skull of yours by now! If it weren't for those children of ours, you wouldn't so much as step one sorry foot on this property until the end of time! As long as you got nothing better to do with yourself than hang out down at that Juke House, with all of your drunken buddies, there will, absolutely, be no talking about you moving your sorry black ass back up into this house!"
I didn't have to look to know that by now my father was backing toward his car, already pulling his keys out of his pocket, and steady backing as she talked. This was a feat which never failed to impress me, even though I had witnessed it a hundred times. My father could walk every inch of our property backwards, without running into anything, or tripping over some hidden obstacle, and falling. Not once had I ever seen him have to look back over his shoulder to see where he was going. He just knew. I couldn't figure out how he did that. I tried it more than once, and always ended up on my back, with my feet up in the air. It must have taken him years of practice. I do know that the one time I saw him try to just turn around and walk away her shoe hit him in the back of the head before he could get to his car.
My mother could have entered the Olympic shoe tossing competition, and taken the gold medal hands down, had there been such an event. Billy, and I never failed to impress upon our friends, whenever they came by to see if we had discovered any new form of mischief they were unaware of, that our mother could knock a bird out of the air in mid-flight. Were she of a mind to do so. Nobody else we knew had a mother half as crazy as ours. We sure were proud her.
Mama spent the rest of that day pacing and cussing and going through her "getting ready for battle" routine. That very night the monster showed up on our doorstep, and I got a good look at him in person.
I should have been in the bedroom with my brother, but I had got up to use the bathroom and, on my way back to bed, had slipped under the big old couch--which Mama had found on sale somewhere and drug up into our living room--to lay in wait. I loved that couch, and used to hide under it for hours, spying on my sister.
From the listening post that my bed room became on such occasions, I had heard all the battles raging over the years on those varied Saturday nights the monster had shown up at our door. I had become somewhat of an expert at calling the blows, as if I were a ring announcer at a heavyweight boxing match, or some news reporter hiding in a burned out building, while describing a horrendous battle to unseen listeners thousands of miles away. That night I decided I had based my beliefs long enough on rumor, and innuendo, and set out to see first hand if the monster was indeed a living creature, or just some horrible invention conjured up from the deep dark depths of my own imagination.
Mama came out of her bed room, where she had gone to do something or other--which was why I had been able to secure this choice vantage point from which to view the upcoming battle--normally she never left her post on that couch until the sun came up on Sunday morning. Or the monster showed up to engage her in a match of screaming and yelling and pounding on the door. Whichever came first.
I couldn't discern what it was she had gone in there for as I was squeezing back against the wall trying to avoid being crushed when she landed her considerable mass once again on the couch and returned to sentry duty. Then I heard the breech of my grandfathers old shotgun come open and I knew Armageddon must be approaching our door this night. That old gun hadn't been down off the wall in years. It was an antique; one of those old double barreled jobs farmers used to hunt rabbits with. I hadn't even known it still worked. I guess that was a good thing because Billy, and I would've probably killed each other messing with it had we known.
So there we sat well into the night, Mama defending her home and me backing her play with out her knowing I was there. As much as I didn't want to miss any of the action, I fell asleep and would likely have laid there until morning had I not been awakened by the sound of something massive crashing against the front door.
I tried to sit up and banged my head against the bottom of the couch and fought with some imagined attacker until I came completely awake and remembered where I was. The noise of my struggles must have been drowned out by the cacophony coming from outside our house as Mama didn't discover me hiding there. If she had, she would have made me get back in the bedroom and blistered my tail for it later. She was otherwise occupied at that moment.
She jumped up facing the door, and began to cuss at whatever horrible creature it was out there that was trying to get in, "I'm only going to tell you once you bastard! I've got a gun and if you don't take your ass on back where you came from I'm going to blow a hole through you; and this damn door! So help me! I will!"
I hadn't realized it had begun to storm while I was sleeping until right at that moment. There came a brilliant flash of light out side the windows, followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. Mama must have pulled the trigger on the gun at that same instant. The door splintered under the impact of the double-ought buckshot, and swung open as the rain began to pour into the room. Then the wind grabbed that door and ripped it clean off the hinges like it was made of balsa wood.
I guess Mama had never fired that big old gun before. She hadn't been holding it tight up against her shoulder the way you're supposed to do and the recoil from that old cannon knocked her backwards and she fell over in the floor and lost her grip on the gun. I wasn't too much concerned about Mama; there wasn't much I could have done anyway. She was going to be all right or she wasn't. Either way she was sure to come up cussin' a blue streak. Gravity was in charge of her life for the time it took for her to hit the floor and I was tucked up under the couch; safely out of the way of any secondary impact damage. I think that old couch could have withstood even such a massive blow as Mama could have delivered, had she fallen on it.
Satisfied that Mama was beyond any assistance I could lend, I scooted far enough out from under the couch to keep my eyes on that old gun, which sailed up into the air, turned completely over one revolution then landed butt first and discharged again, blowing out the light fixture in the ceiling as it went off. Then the both of us just lay there in the dark for several heartbeats until their was another flash of lightening from outside and for that brief microsecond of time it takes a strobe light to flash; I saw him silhouetted in the door.
In that terrible moment I knew.
And have never doubted since.
The monster was real.
We did make it to Chicago that summer. We arrived a day later than Mama had planned on, but she was the only one who minded. We got to see the Arch in St. Louis and Mama had to spend more money on cheese burgers than she had allotted for the trip up. She was mad as hell but us kids thought it was just fine.
We weren't actually going to the city of Chicago itself; we were headed for Gary, Indiana where a friend of my mother lived. Somehow they had gone to school together. I was a little confused about that part of it; as far as I knew my mother had been in Mississippi all of her life. I didn't think too hard on the subject as I had concluded long ago that adults seldom tell children the entire truth, and on many occasions outright lie about what's going on in the world.
They think they're protecting them. Instead all they're actually doing is giving them just enough information to invent possibilities which most of the time are far more outrageous than the simple truth turns out to be. Once it's known.
They don't know, and if they ever did seem to have forgotten, that children can accept the truth with far more willingness than adults ever do. They think they already know how the world should be, and when it turns out to not be so they go into these awful fits of depression and denial, and it usually takes them three times as long to just deal with it and go on about their business as it does for a kid.
I never did understand all the fuss. Every day I woke up to an entirely new and different world, and set out with joyous abandon to explore and conquer it as I had the one the day before.
Now we had plenty of television in Mississippi and weren't just the dumb country folk Hollywood likes to make people think anyone who lives more than twenty miles outside of a major city are. With the advent of cable television all across the country about the time I was being born into this world, the age of rural folks being isolated from all the nonsense people in the cities had to tolerate in their lives had come to an end.
At the age of eleven I had probably been exposed to more trivial useless information than any other eleven year old boy in the history of the state of Mississippi.
Hermanville is not all that large of a city, but up until this time in our lives was the biggest metropolis myself and my two siblings had ever ventured into. Still I could not figure out why it should take so long to get through Chicago. From looking at the outside I could tell it was a lot bigger than my home town. But I didn't see any reason why we should not have been able to drive right on in. I had watched shows on television where people were flying and when the plane came to a city like Chicago or New York sometimes the pilot would have to circle until there was a runway clear which he could land on, but until that summer when we went to Chicago it had never occurred to me that the same rules might have applied to cars as well.
I had never seen in my life, in fact had no idea there were so many cars. They were lined up along the highway like dominoes, and we were right there in the middle of them. My mother must have circled that city three times before she found an exit she could use and get us out of that holding pattern and onto a road which would lead us away from Chicago and on into Gary Indiana.
I will not repeat the language which uttered forth from her mouth that day. She used words we had never heard her say before, not even when she was on a roll about my father and the ills he had brought into her life. Some of those words we had never heard at all. Not even when we got a chance to sneak and watch one of the movies on cable we weren't supposed to be watching. I'm inclined to think her vocabulary didn't contain the words necessary for her to express the way she felt at that moment and she was making them up as she went along.
There were days I could have used that talent on the playground at school.
I don't know if God sent it along that night to save us from the monster or if it just happened to come wandering through our front yard of it's own accord, but that tornado surely did change the course of what was to have been otherwise.
I could, to this day, draw you a detailed picture of the vision I saw standing framed in the empty space where moments before had been our front door. I think the fact that it was all done in the stark black and white momentary world of a lightning stroke, striping it of the Technicolor panorama of sunlit vision rather than detracting from the image, enhanced the terror of that surreal scene.
I could hear the roar now as the tornado approached and feel in the floor, more so than hear, the rumble of its immense power as it demolished everything in its path. On its way to meet and do battle with the monster.
The lightning flashed once again and the terror was still standing framed in silhouette before us. He had crouched down now, as if about to leap into the room and devour all within. An incredible span of wings were spread behind and above him like some vampires cloak. Poised, stop-motion by the strobe effect of the lightning flash, ready to complete their downward stroke and lift him into the air like some gigantic predatory bird.
His great arms were spread wide to clutch his prey. Huge hands at their ends, fingers curled in an open curve like talons. His mouth was open in a silent scream of rage exposing the huge shining white fangs within.
And riveting my attention above all else I saw in those moments of absolute, paralyzing fear were his eyes. The only two objects which exhibited their true color in that monochrome world of microsecond vision. They were a deep blood red and seemed to glow from within. The veins standing out in the whites of them, pulsing in hypnotic rhythm to the beat of his evil heart.
In that moment I saw no reason to believe I would ever see another sunrise and, strangely enough, with the coming of that realization the fear left me. With no other options even vaguely apparent I simply continued to lay there under that old couch, completely helpless to move, staring directly into the face of death itself standing right in front of me. Listened to the freight train roar of a tornado rushing at my backside from the other direction, and waited for events to unfold.
Although my own heart was beating with the pace of a machine gun; generating enough pressure to cause the blood to course through my veins at a velocity nothing made of flesh and bone was ever designed to withstand and my thoughts were rushing through my head faster than a computer can think, everything outside of me had slowed down to a crawl. I witnessed the unfolding of those events as if watching a VCR set on slow motion. Viewing one frame at a time as they flashed on the screen of darkness before me.
I don't to this day know if the monster was aware of the tornado roaring toward him or if, in the heat of battle, had become pumped full of some ghoulish monster version of adrenaline and thought himself invincible. Under other circumstances I could not have faulted the beasts logic. Whatever his past exploits of monsterdom it immediately became obvious that this particular monster had never tangled with a real live tornado before.
In the instant that I knew my life was to expire sooner than anticipated nature intervened on my behalf. In a continuous procession of flashes, brilliant bolts of lightening lanced into the ground around our house, lighting up the night, filling the air with thunderous explosions of sound and completing the setting for the battlefield it had become.
Before the monster could continue his leap in through the door, or even change his mind and turn to flee, the tornado was upon him, with a vengeance. It descended into our front yard, ripping the porch away from the house and tossing it upward to oblivion before our eyes. Amazingly, still standing unscathed, the monster turned as if to clutch the invisible whirlwind, and wrestle it to submission. As he did so, a limb that had only moments before been a part of some mighty tree, until the wind had sheared it from its place on the trunk, swept him away as if he were a toy doll being snatched up in a child's hand.
And the monster was gone.
Serenity at last returned to the interior of my mothers car as we rounded the final curve and pulled to a halt at our long sought goal. It had been an epic journey, fraught with many terrors on the unknown highways of places none of us had dared venture through before but as I said; Mama always reached her destination one way or the other.
She pulled her car up into the drive in front of house we had journeyed so far to find, steady cussing at whoever the idiot was who didn't know how to park their car without taking up the whole damn driveway. As if the owners of the place, knowing she were coming, should abdicate their right to park in their own drive for the duration of her visit. As we all piled out of that car and stepped into the July heat--we had been told all our lives it was cold up north but I swear it was hotter that year in Indiana than it had been in Mississippi when we left--I was afforded the very last two sights I anticipated seeing when we finally arrived....
I was as in love as an eleven year old boy can be.
Sitting in a glider on the front porch of that house in Indiana was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen with my own two eyes.
In an earlier age she could have been an Egyptian Princess. Her skin had the natural tone of that deep dark tan lighter skinned women irradiate themselves with sunlight, until they turn into raisins, trying to achieve. She had beautiful long hair that was such a burnished dark brown it looked black. Until the sun touched it and you saw that it was shot through with natural red highlights. It lay in flowing waves across her shoulders in a style that other black women have to spend hours at the beauty salon to achieve. When she turned to face us I saw that she had that faint oriental tilt to her eyes which lends an exotic allure to an already beautiful woman and makes men into slaves at her feet. Until that moment I had thought all the women who looked like that lived in Hollywood and had leading roles in blockbuster movies. But here she was walking toward me across that lawn as pretty as you please. Kind of skipping and dancing and jumping up and down and clapping her hands together like a little girl at her own birthday party.
Then of all things she leaned down and gave me a hug as if she had known me all of her life.
I almost passed out. I thought for a second she was going to kiss me.
I just kind of stood there in shock thinking to myself that, so far, this had been the summer of my life to write a novel about.
Monsters.
Tornado's.
Journeys to Strange Lands--filled with Beautiful Women. It might even turn out to be a good enough story to make a movie from the book. All I needed was a Wizard. Or maybe a Knight in Shining Armor... tilting at windmills or something.
Then as I was teetering backwards, my knees kind of wanting to buckle and sit me down in the grass, on the verge of totally embarrassing myself in front of Billy, I looked up and saw him sitting up there on the roof of the house.
In the middle of a neighborhood filled with black people. They had to think he was crazy. There were no windmills in sight. But I had no doubt which part the crazy white man was to play in my novel.
And the tornado was gone.
A hole opened in the cloud cover and the sun sent its morning rays slanting through the trees whose limbs, now bared of the leaves which lay scattered like a blanket over the devastation left in the wake of the tornado, broke that light into separate spots of brilliance. As if to shield the daylight world from having to view any evidence of the destruction the night had left behind. Shining only upon those scenes which could sanely be illuminated by the light of day.
As suddenly as if someone had stopped the film at the theater right in the middle of one of those special effects filled horror movies; just at the most exciting single point of ultimate terror. After you had sat patiently through more than an hour of listening to the hero speculate as to the meaning of it all. While, at the same time, he was trying to seduce any number of the beautiful women the producers of the flick had seen fit to have walk half naked amidst the towns folk. Who were all--of course--in the middle of summer dressed in overalls and cowboy boots.
Sat and watched while they called each other Jake and accused each other, never using words with more than two syllables, of secretly being the evil entity which had devastated the town and left all its inhabitants dead or maimed.
Except for one half naked woman and the hero.
Just as the villain was about to be unmasked and destroyed or the world was about to end....
Right at that moment you had waited the entire time for--previews and all--they stopped the film, turned up the house lights and ushered you out the door. That is how I felt as I crawled from under that couch and stumbled through what was left of the front of our house and into the wreckage my world had become.
As I walked out that morning into that strange and mournful world of post tornado living, there were no birds singing. No cars were passing by on the road in front of our house. The corpses of trees lay strewn about like matchsticks dropped from the box while trying to light the kitchen stove. Across the road I could see the path the twister had taken as it left our house with the monster in tow.
The Jackson place was gone. It wasn't demolished or knocked down. It simply wasn't there anymore. As if it had never been. I hoped they had made it to their storm cellar.
As I stood there learning how to be alive all over again one simple fact struck me with greater impact than all the destruction laid out before my eyes and marked this as a day singled out from all other days I had enjoyed in my eleven years of life. I could hear Martha and Billy whispering to each other in awe as they crawled from the wreckage and witnessed first hand the aftermath of the events I had sat ringside and viewed up close and personal. But the one thing which had remained a constant through out all my days of living; providing the security my world might otherwise have lacked, was missing from my perceptions. I could not hear the sound of my mothers voice cussing and blaming somebody (anybody) for the night which had gone before.
Between the two; the monster and the tornado, they had accomplished what to that instant had never been achievable before in the history of Mississippi. They had left my mother speechless. That frightened me more than all the other tragedies which had befallen me in those few short hours of darkness.
As strong and passionate a love as it is possible for an eleven year old boy to feel, instantly and without any hesitation, that passion is just as soon forgotten or shelved for later contemplation. Superseded by greater events which come along, portending adventures and heroic deeds which have no place for love written into the little boy logic of their rules.
Without a second thought on the matter I abandoned the just discovered love of my life and headed full speed around to the back of the house in search of a way to join the crazy white man up on the roof. Spurred onward by the fact that he was waving for me to come on up. I rounded the corner of the house, dashed into the back yard and spotted the ladder the man had used to get up on the roof and began to climb up as if it were the most natural thing in the world to drive a thousand miles, jump out of the car and climb up to sit on the roof of a house you had never seen before, in the middle of a strange city. With a grown man you didn't know.
When I reached the top of the ladder he--by now I was already thinking of him as the crazy white man--was waiting with his hand extended to assist me in stepping off the top rung and onto the roof of the house. The man wasn't as tall as my father, nor as heavy set. He was maybe five-eleven or so and had brown hair and blue eyes. As I leaped from the ladder onto the roof my tennis shoes slipped on the aluminum of the ladder rung and the leap turned into a slide. Before I could plummet back to the earth I had so recently ascended from the man had a hold on my arm and lifted me to a safe touch down on the asphalt shingles next to where he was standing.
He laughed and said, "Come on over and sit for a while, but be a little more careful after this, if you fall off I'll just have to kick the ladder over and stay up here from now on. From what Chelsie has told me I'm already afraid of your mother, and I haven't even met her yet!"
I said, "You got that part of it right. But don't worry I won't fall off. Me and my brother Billy have been climbing trees taller than this house for years."
"I'm sure you have," he said. He still held on to my hand until we were seated together on the peak of the roof, next to the chimney.
He took a deep breath of the high altitude air and ask, "What's your name son?"
"James," I replied. "James Robinson, but everybody calls me Jimmy."
"Well all right then James," he acknowledged and stuck his hand out to shake. "My name is David Summers."
I returned his handshake and replied, "It's very nice to meet you Mr. Summers."
Then before I could catch myself I went ahead and ask the one question an eleven year old boy never asks. I mean if one of your buddies says, "Hey! Let's go chuck some rocks into the pond," or, "Let's go down by the creek and look for frogs," you never question why. You either know why he wants to do those things, or if you don't you pretend to know. If it sounds like a really stupid idea you can just say, "Naaa.... I did that before, it's boring!" thus avoiding the activity without making yourself look like a chicken or having to call your buddy stupid, and wind up in a fight with him.
But you never ask why.
It was too late.
"What are you doing up here anyway?" I questioned.
Either he didn't know the rules--most adults don't--or, and in the crazy white mans case I'm inclined to think the latter, he overlooked my breech of protocol and simply replied anyway, "Dancing with the world."
"Do you do it a lot?" I ask.
Mr. Summers smiled and looked around; scanning the roofs of the houses laid out before us like a model city someone has built for a train set, "As often as I can."
At the age of eleven this concept made perfect sense to me.
Billy, myself and any of our friends who happened to be along on those occasions, usually at night when we could sneak out, had climbed the backstop--which was made of chain link fencing--down at the County Parks baseball diamond and spent hours just sitting on the part of the mesh that leans out over home plate to prevent pop-flies from going up into the bleachers. Contemplating the deep dark mysteries of the universe. Kinda.
Most of the time we spent just looking for flying saucers. We figured if we spotted one and could get him to land, he could just answer all of our questions and save us having to work so hard at it.
"But don't you get tired of just sitting up here all the time?"
"Oh, I don't come up here very often," he replied. "You can dance with the world wherever your at. It's a big place you know."
I sat in silence and thought that over for a few minutes.
"I guess I never looked at it that way before," I said.
"Yea," he responded. "Sometimes it takes a while to realize."
Within the silence of a world which lacked the sound of my mothers voice I discovered another form of terror than any I had experienced or conceived in my wildest imaginings. I believe some part of my childhood was lost in that void. That part of me which lived in forever was sucked away as swiftly and suddenly as the tornado had taken the monster. Looking about me I could see the end of things which I had, until that instant, lived with the sublime conviction would endure until the end of time.
Trees which had already been old and ageless when I first attempted to climb them years ago, were now missing from the landscape. The porch, along with the old swing which hung by chains from the porch rafters, that my mother sat out on in the evening and us kids only used when it was raining and we could not venture out into the mud field our yard became when mixed with water, were gone. I had only to cast my vision across the way to see evidence that it was purely by the Grace of God and the mercies of the tornado that our house had not suffered a fate similar to the Jackson's. In that silence I came to understand that I could loose the source of all my world.
I turned and ran back into the house, expecting to find her lifeless form waiting for my grief to descend upon it. When I saw instead that Mama was alive and well, just sitting there in the floor looking about herself and saying not a word, I ran to her and grabbing her about the neck in a choke hold any professional wrestler would have been proud of, burst into tears of relief and gratitude.
Which she mistook for tears of fright and began to comfort me, patting me on the back and saying, "There, there, baby. It's gonna be all right. Everything is OK now."
This only caused me to cry the harder.
We sat there for a while as Mama comforted me, and I comforted her by needing her reassurance, until she decided I had been spoiled enough and it was time to take charge once again.
"All right now. That's enough of that," she said, as she pushed me away from her and attempted to lift her massive form from the floor.
"Help me get up from here. Where is your brother? William Robinson Junior! Drag your sorry butt in here and help your mother up from this floor!"
A little sanity returned to my world as I stood in awe and adoration watching Mama transform herself back into the matronly figure who's anger we all dreaded to have unleashed upon our frail forms, while at the same time I breathed a sigh of relief as she revved up her engine and began to roll her vengeance in Billy's direction. Upon reflection I should have known that someone would have to pay for this calamity. That is the way of the world. Somebody always has to be sacrificed.
"It is a damn shame...," she said; now completely back to her old self once again. "It is a damn shame that a mothers oldest son will just walk right on past her fallen form in the middle of the floor and not even lift a hand to help her up, or even take the time to inquire if she is injured."
I was certainly glad I had taken that time, albeit for selfish reasons, but Mama didn't know that.
Needless to say we spent the remainder of that day in a hapless attempt to restore the wreckage of our yard to a semblance of it's former self.
Mostly Martha and I just walked around picking up sticks and such and stayed as far out of Mamas way as we could, while she rode herd on Billy and made him pay dearly for his momentary lapse. There wasn't a piece of debris in that yard that she didn't make him pick up at least twice and move to another location before she was finished with him and had determined to her satisfaction that never again would he fail to check first things first. I compared mental pictures and decided that everything was back where it had started when we began our clean up program. I couldn't see that we had accomplished anything. Perhaps Billy had detected some progress, I would have to ask him about it later.
It was coming up onto sundown and Mama had sent Martha in to fix some supper. We had seen somebody stirring around over at the Jackson place and she told Billy to walk over there and make sure everyone was all right. Somebody had gone out in the field behind where their house used to stand and fired up the old pickup truck their boys used to drive around in the fields with, and headed off toward town in it. The new truck Old Man Jackson had bought last year was no where in sight.
She told Billy to tell whoever was still there to come on over before it got dark and we would find them something to eat and put them up for the night.
I was trying to hammer some boards together so we could nail them up for a makeshift door until Mama could get Daddy or somebody else to come and hang a new one. I thought I had cobbled something together which might do the job when I heard someone calling from down by the road. Thinking it was Billy or one of the Jackson's I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun and for a second it looked like the monster walking up the middle of the road with his wings half spread out behind him. Then I saw that it was my father, with some old trench coat I had never seen him in before, trailing out behind him in what was left of last nights winds. One of those long things the Navy boys always have on when they come home on leave from Boot Camp. They just have to wear them and show them off even though it seldom gets cold enough in southern Mississippi to need a coat like that.
I had not known with any certainty where my father was the night before, simply assuming he was at the Juke House where he usually spent his Saturday nights, and I was glad to see him alive and well. If the tornado had so much as thought about passing by that old ramshackle building it would have collapsed in fear. Such was the nature of its construction.
While I was preparing to run and meet him, thinking that after we had gone through the necessary gratitude rituals; of hugging and returning hugs; of lifting into the air and swinging about in a circle; of being lifted and swung, that we could swap tornado stories, Mama was making other plans.
My expectations were short lived as Mama stepped out of the opening where her front door used to be, into the space where only hours before her porch had stood, and spotted Daddy coming into the drive. As Daddy neared the house Mama turned in my direction and used the "VOICE OF COMMAND". Not the voice she used when she yelled at us. Not that voice. This was the voice which is never disobeyed. It issued forth at the same volume level as her normal conversation and likely no one but us kids could have detected any difference at all. But when we heard that voice, we knew.
"JAMES," she summoned.
"Yes Mama?" I answered as humbly as possible. I well knew the consequences of failing to respond instantly to that voice.
"I want you to go into the house with your sister, and tell her that neither of you is to come out here unless I call for you or the tornado returns."
"Yes Mama," I replied over my shoulder, already heading in through the remnants of our front door.
As I passed through the kitchen I whispered to Martha, "Don't go out front. Daddy is out there and Mama sure is mad as hell about something."
"She's going to be madder yet when I tell her what you just said little boy!" Martha shot after my receding form as I went on through the house and out the back door.
I circled around the side of the house and took up station next to the old whiskey barrel, one of which sat at each corner of the house and caught the rain water running off of the roof. Just about everyone we knew had them sitting in their yards. Billy contended that they were there for use in putting out fires, but all I ever knew them to be good for was growing mosquitoes and hiding behind. Two purposes for which they were well suited.
Having spent many an hour behind this very barrel, listening in on things I was not meant to hear, I knew I was safe from detection and had a well worn escape route behind me. I could sprint around the house, be through the back door and in the bathroom with the door closed and the water running in the sink to cover the sound of my labored breathing, before my mother could come through the front of the house and reach that same point. The only time this ploy had ever failed was on the occasion when Billy saw me there and locked the back door on me. I barely survived the incident by hastily climbing in through our bed room window. I knew he wasn't around to pull that one on me this time, so I focused all my attention on the estranged couple in my front yard. Leaving my rear unguarded.
Daddy walked on up into the front yard, surveying the rubble as he came. I couldn't pick out much detail from my position behind the rain barrel, but even from that far away I could see that he didn't look well at all. He was covered with mud, and the parts of him which weren't were all skinned up like he'd been dragged through a thorn bush. His clothes, including the trench coat were torn in places. Maybe he had been at the Juke House after all. Mama waited until he was standing a few feet from her and then with her hands firmly planted on her hips and the usual look of disgust she reserved for the disheveled man painted on her face, launched her usual attack.
"William Robinson, you look like hell, I want you to know," she declared truthfully.
Daddy kind of shuffled his feet in the dirt and brushed at the now drying mud on his clothing and replied, "I guess I do at that Vanessa. Truth to tell, I feel as if that's where I just walked out of."
He looked one more time at the destruction in front of his house, shook his head in amazement and ask, "Is everybody all right here?"
"Yes William," she answered, "we're all just fine." She couldn't let it go at that though. Mama always had to get a barb or two in whenever she dealt with Daddy.
"No thanks to your selfish hide mister. You should have been here to protect us instead of running up and down the valley hoot hollerin' drunk. You damn fool!" she yelled at him, and then she did something I had never seen her do before.
My Mama--who would claim in as loud a voice as she could summon at the slightest mention of Daddy coming back home to live with us that she didn't need no one on the face of this earth except God and her children to make it through this life--broke down into tears and grabbed that muddy man in both of her big old arms and hugged him until he could scarcely catch a breath of air while, at the same time, continuing to cuss him out.
"William Robinson I don't know what I would have done if the last mortal sight of you I had in this life was to see you, drunk as a skunk, being sucked off down the road by that tornado!" (Now what could she have meant by that? We hadn't seen Daddy since he left on Saturday morning, until he had come walking up that road, less than an hour before.)
She stepped back from him then, put her hands back in their lecture position on her sizable hips, and continued, "I just don't think I could have endured having to keep that sight as a final memory of my husband." She started to sway a bit and looked as if she were going to fall over right there in the yard.
"I've got to sit down," Mama said, pulling herself out of her swoon and turning to walk toward the house. She stopped and just kind floundered in the middle of the yard, when she realized the porch was gone and there was no swing there to sit on, until Daddy took her hand and led her over to this old stump where he had cut down a dead tree a couple of summers back, and sat her down on it.
"Now Vanessa. Everything is going to be all right again," he reassured her. The house is still standing and all of the children are unhurt...."
We had two goats that Mama let wander around the property wherever they felt like going. They weren't good for anything except eating whatever they could their mouths around. I hadn't seen either one of them since Saturday afternoon and had assumed they either hadn't survived the storm or had run off and hadn't found their way home yet. I never did hear the rest of what Daddy was saying as right at that moment I located one of our lost goats, actually, he located me.
I was bent over peering around the rain barrel trying to see what was going on over by that old stump and like I said had left my rear unprotected. It didn't help any that it was sticking up in the air. That old goat hit me with his best shot and I came out from behind that barrel like Superman; without his cape on. I had my arms straight out in front of me and for the few seconds that I was airborne managed to maintain a pretty straight and level flight path.
It was the landing that got me. Without that cape, I couldn't catch enough air to pull up and get my feet between myself and the ground. I came in belly first with my landing gear still up and bounced a good two or three times before sliding to a stop. And a good thing it was that I took the impact on the front, as I don't think my rear could have withstood another blow right at that moment.
Now under more normal conditions my Mama would have added injury to injury had she caught me spying on her private conversations. I guess there had already been enough pain and misery in her life for one day as she never said a word. Just sat there with her arms folded across her chest and waited until I could find the strength to pick myself up and hobble back in the house, where I was supposed to have been in the first place. Maybe it helped that Daddy fell over laughing when he figured out what had just happened.
I guess I sat up there on the roof with Mr. Summers a good two hours. To this day I'm not exactly certain how he did it but, somehow, in just a few minutes the man had me talking to him as if I had known him all my life and made a regular habit of coming to him to unburden my soul.
We talked about tornados and monsters.
We discussed whether there were really flying saucers or not and pondered what forms they might have chosen to disguise themselves with if they had already landed and were wandering among us. I came close to informing him about the covert activities of my sister Martha, but held myself in check at the last minute.
And we talked about fathers.
He told me he hadn't really known his father very well and said he was glad that I was able to spend so much time fishing with my dad. Then told me I should treasure that time as much as anything else I could find to value.
And of a sudden as if we had never left the subject of tornados, he said that he had lived in a tornado for a long time and whirled around the world wreaking things and making a mess out of the lives of all the people he knew until one day the tornado dropped him off in Kansas. He said he landed in a place where there was this Wizard who knew how to keep the tornado from snatching him up again, who had taught him the secret and he had been free from the tornado ever since.
I laughed at him and told him I had read that book and that he had the story all wrong.
Then the crazy white man laughed back at me and said this wasn't from any book and wasn't the same kind of tornado in any event. That the one I was thinking of had been a Kansas Dust Buster. While the one he was in was a Tennessee Hill Hopper. Not the same kind at all.
We sat up there and danced with the world....
Until Mama and Mr. Summers wife made us come down and wash up for supper.
I didn't get to hear the end of Mama and Daddy's conversation. I know she wasn't too happy after he left and she came back into the house. When Billy returned from his errand he had two of the Jackson brothers in tow. He told Mama that the rest of the family was over at Mrs. Jackson's sisters house and had sent the two youngest boys to stay with us for the night as there wasn't enough room at her sisters place for all of them to sleep. We made pallets for the brothers on the floor in our bedroom. Billy and I didn't mind the company, we had all stayed over the night with each other before so we knew they were house broke.
Benjamin and Matthew were both Billy's age--one boy the same age and the other older--but I was used to hanging out with boys older than me. It seemed I was the only eleven year old boy in that part of Mississippi. The only boys I knew my own age were those I attended school with, and none of us lived close enough to each other that we were able to get together when not in school.
Mama fed us the pork chops, beans, and corn bread Martha had cooked and got us all bedded down before dark came fully upon the world. The power was still off so there wasn't any television to watch, or video games to play. That didn't bother us too much. Four boys in the same room together have never needed more than each other to keep themselves entertained and get into trouble if need be. But we were all worn down and Mama only had to come in the room and threaten us two or three times before the last one had gone to sleep. I guess that was me as I couldn't lay on my back. Or on my front, and ended up having to lay on my side which was not my normal sleeping posture. This kept me awake for a while until I finally succumbed to exhaustion.
I was awakened the next morning by the sun light shining through our bedroom window and lay there for a while listening to the sound of someone in the kitchen making breakfast. Eventually I got up and went into the bathroom to wash up; figuring to beat the rush. Mama was sitting on her old couch in the living room. She was looking through some papers that she had laying in her lap and didn't say anything to me as I wandered through the room.
I said, "Good morning Mama," then kept on through into the kitchen without waiting for a reply. Thinking maybe I should keep a low profile for the time being until she found other matters to dwell on than my having been busted out by that old goat of ours while spying on her.
It wasn't long before the smells of bacon, sausage, ham, fresh laid eggs and orange juice, accompanied by homemade grits and cornbread, had the rest of the household up and seated at the breakfast table. Of all my memories from those childhood days in Mississippi, the banquets laid out at my mothers table stand unequaled by any other recollection.
Still.
After all these years.
If I close my eyes and think of a meal in that house be it breakfast, lunch or supper, I can practically taste the wonderful food which crossed my pallet. No King who ever dined on Caviar and Royal Venison ate a better meal. If Martha never learned another secret during her time as a child in that house, she did well to learn that one from my mother. She is still as good a cook as Mama taught her to be and I look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at my sisters house now with the same anticipation as I did at my mothers house as a child.
When we were done with breakfast Mama drove Matthew and Benjamin to their aunts house and returned them to their mother. As soon as she came back home again she sent Billy up into the attic and had him bring down the suitcases she kept stored up there. She assigned a bag to each one of us kids and told us to pack our summer cloths. Several days later, after having gone through the packing ritual, the getting the car ready ritual, the closing up the house ritual, and finally the last minute what have we forgotten ritual, we left for Chicago.
That was the strangest house I ever stayed at in my life.
There were stuffed animals all over the place that everybody talked to and stopped to pet when they passed by. Most of them looked as real as real could be. There was a life size lion sitting by the back door and when I first entered the house I yelled, ran back outside and slammed the screen door closed, then just stood there pointing with my mouth open. I thought at first they had a real lion in their family room! Mr. Summers stood behind me and enjoyed my terror for a moment before telling me it was only a stuffed animal. Sleeping next to the front door was a lazy old black and white German Shepherd that looked as if he were just lying there and waiting for the door to open so he could jump up and bark at whomever was coming in, and who got kicked and yelled at for laying around in the way by Mrs. Summers every time she passed him.
People walked around singing weird songs all the time.
The first day we were there Mr. Summers traveled throughout the house singing some silly song about how you put the lime in the coconut and then you'll feel better, or something silly like that, until he drove us all insane and we pleaded for silence.
One night around bed time they all started singing Mister Sandman. The one that goes something like this: "Mister Sandman. YES...? Bring me a dream. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM... etc." It wasn't long before the three of us kids picked up on it and were singing that song from sunup until sundown. We drove my mother crazy. I don't know who she hated the most for it her own children or Mr. and Mrs. Summers for starting the whole thing. We finally had to give it up on the ride home when she pulled the car over to the side of the road and threatened to leave all three of us there if we sang one more stanza.
There was a Monopoly game set up on the table in the dining room which Mr. and Mrs. Summers son claimed....
I guess I should back up a bit.
The Summers had two sons; Robert, who was fifteen and still lived in the house with them and an older son, Gordon, who was twenty years old and had already moved out on his own. Their younger son was as loony as his parents, and would join in on their bizarre behavior at the drop of a hat, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The older son, Gordon, seemed to have been cast from another mold and was always quiet and withdrawn, only giving forth an occasional laugh or two and shaking his head in amazement at the antics of his family. He did however join in on the monopoly game which, as I started to mention, Robert claimed had been in progress for months without a winner. Whenever a couple of us felt like playing we would pick a spot at the table--not necessarily the one we had occupied previously--and commence to play. Sometimes someone would come by during the course of play and sit in for a while. Or one of the players already there would simply get up and leave, returning later to sit at a different spot and take up the game.
I didn't get it at first. But later I concluded we were dancing with the world.
At the back of the house, off the door where I had first entered, was a deck which was roofed over and upon which sat a variety of plastic lawn chairs. The Summers spent a lot of their time sitting on that deck and while we were there visiting a variety of strange people came by and sat in the chairs, drinking coffee and talking about most anything. The adults tried to run us off so they could talk about things they didn't think we should know about. But we heard as much as we cared to listen in on. The windows were open and we were right on the other side of the wall. In the dining room. Playing monopoly. Or something like that.
On one such occasion myself, Mr. and Mrs. Summers and my mother were sitting outside. They drank coffee while Mama and I had a cola, she couldn't abide coffee. I was there with them because the older kids had gone off to see a movie and didn't want me tagging along.
We all turned to look when we heard a buzzing sound coming up the street and Mr. Summers exclaimed, "Oh no! Here comes the lawn mower man!" Mrs. Summers began laughing and jumped up to run in the house, beckoning for Mama and my self to follow as she did. Neither of us knew what was going on but went in with her just to be on the safe side. Mrs. Summers, still chuckling to herself, attempted to explain as we peeked around the curtains and watched the confrontation between Mr. Summers and the stranger.
"David let this guy cut our hedges last summer and he hasn't been able to get rid of him since then," she told us, then cautioned as I pulled the curtain back further to get a better view. "Careful! He'll see you."
"Once you start talking to him, the man won't leave," she explained. "He's harmless but he is such a pest and drives David nuts. It doesn't help any that I abandon him every time we see the man coming."
I focused my attention of the events outside as the object of our interest proceeded to drive his riding mower across the lawn, trampling the grass and leaving twin tire tracks in his wake as he pulled in next to the porch and shut off the motor.
"It sure is hot today; isn't it?" he questioned Mr. Summers, breaking the short silence which followed his arrival.
"Yes, it is that," Mr. Summers replied rather sarcastically. Then he ask, "What are you up to today Chief?"
The man on the lawn mower stepped down, clutching the steering wheel in an attempt to remain upright.
I'm pretty dark complexioned myself--there aren't all that many high-yellow black people in Mississippi--but this man was a dark mahogany and with the sweat pouring out of him in that hot July sun, was shining as if his skin were made of plastic. He was one of those wiry men who naturally have muscles standing out on their arms, and look like weight lifters, but aren't.
"Just trying to make a little money," he said. Holding on to the hand railing which ran around the sides of the deck the man made his way to one of the lawn chairs and sat down, then pointed back in the direction he had arrived from.
"That guy right down the street there hired me to paint his gutters and eaves but he hasn't paid me yet," he accused.
"Maybe he doesn't have the money right now," Mr. Summers commented.
"No. That's not the problem. It was more work than I cared to do by myself; so I got two of the boys from the neighborhood to help me out and the old coot says they splashed paint all over his brick, and now he doesn't want to pay me."
"Did the boys get paint on his brick?" Mr. Summers ask.
The lawn mower man scratched at himself, beginning with the right side of his neck and working his way down and around his chest until he was under his left armpit and still going at it.
"Well," he said. "I guess they did hit a few spots that weren't supposed to be painted." Then, defending himself, "But that isn't my fault! I didn't get the paint on the brick. There's no reason the guy shouldn't pay me!"
Mr. Summers laughed and pointed out, "But you are the person who hired the boys to do the work. That makes you responsible."
"Aaa hell. I don't want to talk about it anymore," the other man said. Then he leaned in close to Mr. Summers, and looked around from side to side in that way people do when they are trying to make you think they're letting you in on something but actually are embarrassed and don't want somebody else listening to what they are about to say.
"Look," he said. "I'm kind of short today. It took all the money I had to pay those boys I got to do the painting for me and now... well, you know how it is. I just need enough to get by until I pick up a lawn to mow or something."
"No, I don't know 'how it is', and I'm not going to loan you any money Clarence. I've told you that before."
"Yea, but it was worth a try," Clarence admitted.
"It sure is hot today."
"Yes it is." That over with both men sat for a while trying to think of something to say.
Finally the lawn mower man ask, "Do you have anything cold to drink?"
"There's some Sun Tea in that jar over by the door, and we've got pop in the house if you'd rather have that," Mr. Summers said. "Otherwise, there's always plenty of cold water."
"I was thinking of maybe a cold beer," Clarence pointed out.
"You know we don't drink here Clarence. That's another thing I've told you before."
Clarence stood and made his way to his mower. Reaching under the seat he removed a bottle, held it up to the light, looked inside and said, "Well. If you can just let me have a glass with some ice in it I guess I can finish what's left here. I was planning on saving it for later, but.... What the hell."
"Clarence. You're not drinking that here. I'm not going to tell you again."
"Aaa come on Mr. Summers," he said attempting to placate his unwilling host, "you don't have to drink any. There isn't that much left anyway." It had begun to cloud up just before the stranger had driven his lawn tractor into the yard and now a light drizzle started falling in the yard outside the porch.
"Shit," Clarence said as he stuffed the bottle back under the seat of the tractor. He turned and grabbing the machine by the front axle lifted the wheels off the ground and began pulling it up onto the deck. Struggling to fit it through the entrance.
"What the hell are you doing?" Mr. Summers yelled at him, coming up out of his chair and moving toward the man.
"I've got to get her out of the rain," Clarence explained, grunting as he continued to lift and pull on the mower. "Water's gonna drown out the carburetor."
"Nonsense," Mr. Summers said, taking the man by his arms and pushing him from the deck. "The damn thing is made to be outside. It's a lawn mower!"
Clarence turned to face him and stated, "You don't understand. This is my new mower and I don't...."
At the end of his tolerance, Mr. Summers seized the man, walked him around to the other end and forcibly seated him on his tractor.
"I understand perfectly Clarence," he said, his frustration showing in the tone of his voice. "Now, I have been as nice to you as I'm going to be. Take your drunk ass, and your tractor, and see if you can manage to find your way home before you get in trouble, and don't ever drive that thing across my grass again. You got it?"
As if at last realizing he had crossed some line with Mr. Summers which apparently he had not crossed before Clarence, without a single word of reply, hurriedly started the engine on the mower and maneuvering as best he could drove off down the street. Looking back over his shoulder several times to make sure he wasn't being followed.
Mr. Summers entered the house mumbling to himself about the nerve of some people and shaking his head in bafflement. The three of us, who had witnessed the entire affair through the kitchen window, unable to endure in silence any longer, burst into uncontrolled laughter at the sight of him standing with his hands raised in the air looking heavenward and silently asking, "Why me?"
Mrs. Summers controlled herself long enough to reply aloud to his un-vocalized question with one of her own. "Why not you?" Then as we began laughing once again Mr. Summers, giving in to the inevitable, quite helpless to resist, joined in and laughed louder than the rest of us put together.
Many events of this order transpired there on the deck behind the Summers residence. Often other men would stop over and Mr. Summers would set and talk to them for seemingly hours at a time. Then some lady would drop by and Mrs. Summers would shoo all of us away and counsel with her. Sometimes there were couples and both Mr. and Mrs. Summers would spend the afternoon or evening with them. Other times people would stop in and stay all day and well into the night as if having no other place at all to go. What ever the situation or combination of people who were continually parading past the Summers house to stop in for coffee and conversation, it seemed the one thing that all of them had in common was some problem which they were not equipped to solve unassisted and most of these people were angry when they arrived. On leaving however the majority of the visitors were much calmed compared to their earlier emotional states and their problems seemed diminished and did not appear to weigh so heavily on their minds as before.
I remembered that before my grandfather died, many of the people we knew and a lot of our relatives would come by the house to talk to him and ask his advice, and whenever there was a domestic crises at one of their houses Grandpa would like as not be called in to mediate and bring a return of peace to that home. I had questioned my mother about it and she told me Grandpa was a Deacon and an Elder of the church, so it was his right and duty to give advice and let people know how they should be acting towards their families and neighbors. I started to ask her why he didn't give her and Daddy some advice so they could get along better and he could move back in with us, but she must have anticipated my question as I was swatted on the behind and told to stay out of adult business where I didn't belong. And that was the end of that conversation.
I realized that Mr. and Mrs. Summers were not old enough to be Elders of the church, and could tell from the language most of their visitors used that they probably weren't regulars at whatever church (if any) they belonged to. So I was puzzled why all of these people would come to them for advice.
We had counselors at the school in Mississippi who talked to the kids when they were in trouble and at the beginning of each semester just because it was their job, so I thought maybe the Summers were counselors and watched to see if the people who came by were paying them. When I had determined that no money was exchanging hands I gave up trying to solve the mystery on my own and ask Billy, but he didn't know either.
Several days after the lawn mower man incident the older kids were off somewhere together and the Summers were both gone on some chore or other and Mama had taken me along with her to one of that cities Mall Marts. The clones of which at that time were spreading across the nation like a retail virus. Infecting every town. Killing off any business which didn't have a gigantic Mall Mart logo over the entrance, and then overnight sprouting an identical sister store in place of the one which had served the ungrateful citizens faithfully for generations. Most of whom could not the very next day recall the name of the old market where their parents and grandparents had shopped, as they--hypnotically drawn by the big red M flashing on and off above the building--massed at the doors and shoved their way inside seeking that ever elusive sale or discount. Or that once in a lifetime goal. A bargain!
We were--oh so slowly--walking up and down each aisle, but I did not complain. We weren't allowed to behave like many of the children you might have seen in the stores with their parents. There was no jumping up and down and whining or pleading, "Mama get me this." Or, "Mama can I have that." There definitely was never a temper tantrum thrown in a public place by one of my mothers children. Had that ever happened she would still be serving out a life sentence in prison for murder!
I simply endured the ordeal and plodded along after her feigning interest as we looked at all the captivating pots and pans. Gazed with longing toward the new refrigerators, with the automatic ice makers and the recess in the door which dispensed cold water at a touch. Oh to someday be able to actually own one of these beauties! I could hardly contain myself.
I cringed in anguish as we at last headed in the direction of the dreaded clothing department where, if Mama lost track of time, we could literally spend hours looking and touching and shaking and holding up before the mirror, and (Heaven help me I'll never get out of here.) trying on the thousands of clothes arrayed before us, lined up on row after endless row of shining chrome racks. Hanging there just waiting there to be pulled from the breakaway plastic hangers.
In a futile attempt to distract her from the lure of all that unworn clothing I ask, 'Mama?'
"Yes child. What is it? Can't you see I'm trying to shop?'
(Well of course I could see that! I could see it all too well.)
"Mama; why do all those people come by Mr. and Mrs. Summers house for advice all the time? Are they Elders in the church or something?"
Now I knew this was the best time to get a straight answer out of my mother. If I had ask her that question at any other time she would have come up with some rudimentary explanation which she believed would satisfy me or, failing that, simply have told me to mind my own business. But distracted as she was by the vision of new clothes she answered without realizing who it was she was talking to.
"No. They're not Elders in the church. I think they're drunks."
I believe she meant they were alcoholics but Mama was never one to pay much attention to the subtlety of meaning inherent in different words used to describe similar objects. To her a drunk, an alcoholic, a sot, and a bum were all the same animal. She knew what she meant.
I had a picture of a drunk in my mind and it was not one which fit Mr. Summers and it absolutely did not apply to Mrs. Summers! I had seen drunks in all their various stages of inebriation as we passed by the Juke House on our way to town, or coming home. I had seen them standing, falling, and already fallen down. I had even witnessed them attempting to get back up afterwards. I could not imagine either of our hosts in those circumstances.
"What do you mean Mama? They don't even keep beer in their house. How could they be drunks?"
"I don't mean that they are drunks child!" she answered irritably as she held some sparkly gold thing up to the light, as if that would somehow make it look less like a florescent snake skin.
"I meant they used to be drunks, but they don't drink anymore."
"You mean like when Uncle Adam repented and started coming to church, gave up all his evil ways and stopped chasing after all those Hoochie Mamas and stayed at home with Aunt Betty where he belonged?"
"Yes kind of like-- Now where on earth did you hear such a thing James Robinson? (Well where did she think I heard it?) If I ever hear you repeat that garbage again I'll wash your mouth out with soap!"
"Yes Mama."
"Don't you forget it."
"No Mama."
Deciding it wasn't quite her, Mama tossed the gold thing back on top of the rack--the hanger now being useless--pulled down another outfit, not bothering to lift this hanger from the bar either, just pulling until something gave.
Quickly over her anger: Mama could not stay mad for long when she was looking at clothes, but I knew I would pay for it later, she continued, "It's not exactly like it was with your uncle Adam, although he did used to drink quite a bit more than was good for him. Thank God he's in church now where he belongs."
I had to stop her before she got on a roll. My mother could step up to an imaginary pulpit and preach a sermon anywhere, anytime day or night. No matter what she was doing. Fortunately I had the clothes on my side.
"What do you mean Mama?"
"Well. You're uncle came to the Pastor and ask for his help and they sat down and prayed together and the Deacons all went over to his house and prayed with him until that demon booze was purged from his soul and your uncle has been a free man ever since. You see James God did that for him because he was truly repentant. Not like some people I know...."
I was loosing her. She was about to bring Daddy into the conversation and I knew if she did that there was going to be a revival right there in the middle of the Mall Mart Clothing Department.
In desperation I chose at random and pointed to a burgundy dress hanging on the next rack over and said, "Look Mama! There's a nice dress and it's the color you like too!" I couldn't believe it! She went for it! I was even more mystified, about an hour later, when we got to the check out and that was the one she bought.
She scrutinized the dress I had chosen for her, looking down at me with a twinkle of admiration in her eyes, commenting as she did, "Why James! This is a nice dress. You are paying attention to what I like aren't you? I'm going to have to bring you with me more often. (Oh no! I had cleverly trapped myself. I was doomed. I would live out the rest of my days shopping with my mother. Picking out clothes.)
I desperately had to get her back on track.
"So Mama," (Careful now.) "How are Mr. and Mrs. Summers different from Uncle Adam?"
"Well," she said, having already forgotten the topic of our conversation, lost in ecstasy at discovering her eleven year old son had good taste in women's clothing, "they're not really involved with the church. They're members of some kind of organization--triple A or double A or something like that--where people who used to drink get together and talk each other out of drinking again."
Her distorted explanation was unsatisfactory but I let it go at that, "Well it must work as many people that come over to talk to them!" I observed heartily.
"I guess it does," she replied.
"Well maybe some of these people could come over and talk to Daddy." Mama stopped her examination of the dress for a moment and gave me a quizzical look.
"Perhaps they could James. Perhaps they could," she said.
Before I could explore this avenue any further she turned on me and ordered, "Now stop asking all these foolish questions and help me out here. We have shopping to do!"
"Yes Mama."
I was just a little boy. I know that now. Then I did not know. There was only helplessness and confusion. I could not kill the monster. Nor could I save him. I could only hate what I did not know, and in turn--once I knew--learn the meaning of pity.
Many illusions which I had lived with, accepting as literal truth, were shattered that summer of my eleventh year. I was driven by those events and the realizations which followed into a shell of resentment which required many years of chipping at to break my way out of. As everyone around me recovered from the tragedy of those days, and moved on with their lives into the sunshine of the brighter future which then lay waiting ahead, I became cynical and bitter. A realist, who refused to any longer acknowledge that the world might have ever actually been the magical place I knew as an innocent child. Grew up to become the monster I had so feared before I had witnessed him revealed to me in the light of day.
I only saw the monster. I did not see that the man had at long last acknowledged his own self-betrayal. Had turned and faced the day. Instead of doing the same; I selfishly clung to the realization that he had also betrayed me.
At last I arrived in Kansas, trapped within the eye of my own tornado, entombed within the nothing which is always at the center of such violence. Searching for a reason. Seeking a wizard perhaps, or simply just running away.
No longer able to trust myself or believe in happy endings. I had to trust that little boy could show me a way to rediscover the simple, innocent faith which for a time allowed him to believe that--if only once--circumstance had led you there, you could indeed find the way back over a rainbow.
Caught up in the intense pressures generated when a publishing deadline collides head on with writers block, I have let almost a year slip away from me since last I sat down with that eleven year old boy and once again journeyed with him through the days of that long ago summer. As I read through the part of his telling which finally has been dredged from the dark depths of denial and put on paper, a truth begins to make itself apparent. This truth I have refused to acknowledge for too long and must at last accept without further protest.
Often when in the middle of a book, the story will be flowing from my fingers and appearing on the screen of my computer before me as if I were actually reading a tale which has already been written by another. It seems the story is writing itself and I am only the instrument of that writing. Then with out any warning at all the words cease to appear before me and I am unable to write further. Or what I can write goes in circles and has no bearing on the direction of the tale. Until I accept that I am once again attempting to create an ending to the story that I want it to have, rather than the actual end which is approaching as a natural result of the events that have led up to the point where the writing became stalled.
Once I know this the story can continue to flow, in a straight line, toward its own conclusion.
Truth might possibly play a part in why so many years have passed without my putting to print the tale of this eleven year old boy, and just as likely each time the attempt is made, be the reason why an excuse is found to put the recounting aside for other projects. Truth not about the monster. Truth about myself.
That little boy wanted desperately to live in his imagination. Within that sphere of existence the monster made sense. Could be faced and overcome. I have sheltered him there for years. Written between the lines of all my fiction, in a place where he could safely face the demons which I, as an adult, refused to exorcise from my soul.
Reality is never the easiest location in which to attack ones monsters. But that is where the battle took place. In fiction I have written my own endings. Now I must tell that truth.
Out of the mouths of babes perhaps.
Forgetting that I was attempting to distract my mother from the subject of my father, I had betrayed myself and commented on that very issue.
As I said I had never actually, to my knowledge, saw the man in a state of drunkenness, and while I had stated it as only an all too obvious solution to the apparent problem of my fathers drinking, I did not know at the time, but Mama heard as revelation what I had said to her while fighting to escape the maze of clothing covered aisles, which from her elevated vantage point were laid out in orderly progression but from my lowly position twisted and turned in identical confusion.
I resigned myself to fate, and the whims of my mother.
Mall Mart never closes....
I have viewed the launch of the space shuttle which--driven by an urgent need to immediately be away from the raging force of the exploding furies unleashed inches below its tender belly--screams in terror and flees skyward. I have seen the slow motion antics of deep sea leviathans who move as if assured they have until judgment day to get there. I have sailed with daring men who trusting themselves to the mercies of the wind, set off across vast uncharted oceans for months on end in search of wealth and glory. I have plummeted through white water rapids with nothing but an inflated rubber raft and the skill of the man at her tiller to insure safe passage. I have skied the slopes of Mount Everest....
All on television.
Couch potatoes just do not know.
News programs included. Television does not begin to convey the truth.
I rode upon a roller coaster for the very first time that summer. One can sit down before the screen of our times substitute for using your own imagination and ride a roller coaster. You can hear the wheels clacking and clicking on the rails, as the cars make their way up the steep ascent leading to that first headlong dive into thrilldom. You can hear that part of the chain, which no longer bears the load of the lead car pulling the troop of buggies, once it loops around the drive sprocket, goes slack and slaps the return idlers on its way back to pick up the load once again. You can see the track ahead of you seem to disappear into what might well be nothingness as it crosses the hump at the apex of the climb.
You can see all of this on television.
But you are not there.
You don't feel the whole structure of the ride shake and tremble as if about to collapse from the forces being exerted upon it by the cars which are already screaming their way around the ride. You don't see the entire amusement park spread out below you.
The Viking boat, which only moments before had seemed so formidable as it swung back and forth up into the sky, alternately mashing you into yourself and then slowing to a stop at the top of its swing and attempting to let you float up out of your seat before once more subjecting you to G-forces only astronauts should know. Now far beneath you like a toy.
The smells of carnival, that on the ground overpower your nostrils with the stink of popcorn and cotton candy. The odors of grease and hot dogs and the occasional stench of someone who has taken one ride too many, now waft up to you diluted by high altitude breezes and fill the air with sweet faint scents of pleasure.
The cacophony of sound which surrounds and deafens you on the boardwalk below, now is muted and softened into the susurrus lull of waves on the beach. A peaceful, relaxing, distant rush of white noise, punctuated at intervals by the stray voice, whose single word or two have somehow traveled unimpeded to these heights and now, totally out of context, are heard in the air next to you as if you sported an invisible companion.
The people on the ride (yourself included) subside into silent anticipation, broken only by the occasional giggle of nervous laughter which slips unintended from the lips of some boy or girl luxuriating in the tranquility of an existence they know will all too soon transform itself into violent motion.
With the feel of that last gentle breeze on your face the end of the climb approaches and you tug at the cross bar in front of you one last time, no longer annoyed at its pressing uncomfortably into your midsection, now reassured by the resistance as you jerk upward and are not able to move it. No longer resentful at the ride attendant for insisting upon your buckling the safety belt which you realize you probably should have tightened about your waist just a little bit more. But it's too late.
While riding this ultimate terror machine, on your way to the top, you see and feel all of these things, and until you cross that point of no return, where even if something does go wrong, no one can stop the ride, you encounter a peace of being that nothing other than the actual experience can bring.
And then you are over the top.
In a rush of air the bottom falls from beneath the world and the wheels on the cars, that only moments before had been gently clicking their way along the track, begin to roar below you, filling the car with vibration and a hum which builds into a rumble of freight train proportions. The car feels as if it is lifting from the rails while a slow terror begins to creep its way along your spine, as you picture the roller coaster leaving the track and plummeting uncontrollably through the air with you strapped helplessly in your seat. It dawns on you that maybe--just maybe--you shouldn't have boarded this ride.
The coaster reaches the bottom of the long fall, where the track curves up and to the right and then to the left. You're SLAMMED down into your seat, as your hands without any direction whatsoever from your brain, fly to the crossbar in front of you and clench it with a grip which by all the laws of physics should have bent the thing into a pretzel. Then you're SLAMMED to the left, into the person riding next to you with a force which compresses them into the side of the car, expelling the air from their lungs more effectively than any Hiemlic Maneuver ever could. Then you're SLAMMED to the right and the other person returns the favor.
Just as you know this is it, you can't take anymore, and you are going to die, the car leaps upward once more, rising on the energy of its own momentum toward another fall and still more violent twists and turns, and then coming out of the final three hundred and sixty degree loop coasts, still traveling at breakneck speed, toward the loading platform only to be rescued from disaster at the last second by the braking mechanism which--grabbing the runners under the cars--brings them to a precipitous stop before the anxious eyes of the next load of victims awaiting their turn.
You stumble from the ride, incredulous upon realizing you are still alive. Your knees are weak and want to fold up beneath your body. Your breath comes to you in short quick gasps, only gradually slowing and then lengthening back into a normal breathing pattern. The pounding of your heart begins to subside from its trip-hammer rhythm, eventually settling into a more sedate pace, and without quite knowing how you got there, you find yourself standing in line. Waiting to go around one more time.
Or.
At last you summon the strength to walk away. And you never. Ever.
Never ride a roller coaster again.
We had witnessed so many new sights, met so many different people and done such varied and interesting things. We had traveled so far at such a dizzying velocity in only weeks that--as Einstein had predicted (Or do I have it backwards?)--the universe had compressed into itself and it seemed as if I had lived months in that short span of time while the world stood still around me.
As Mama drove into Hermanville the truth once again became all too apparent and the virtual reality of vacation land which had deluded me for a while vanished.
Little had changed.
The same do nothings still stood on the same corners. Doing nothing.
The same old men who had been sitting there daily since my birth, were still seated in front of the hardware store and the auto-body shop. Instructing a world--that was too busy going about its business to pay them any attention--how to go about its business.
The Mall Mart which, true to form, had devoured yet another of the towns legendary shopping centers and had now become a victim of its own rapaciousness, was still undergoing the process of being torn down in turn, to make room for the new Mega Mall Mart. Which the sign promised would be open in time for the towns mothers to buy all of their children's school cloths before the semester started in September.
There was nothing new in Hermanville, and the only old things missing were the ones taken (Was it only a few weeks ago?) by the tornado. The wreckage of which was still being cleaned up by the municipalities Department of Public Works.
As we left town and headed up the road leading to our house there was one notable difference. The Juke House was gone. That monument to misplaced lives, which had withstood countless brawls, innumerable raids by the county police, and even held out against the best courtroom efforts of DDAMM (Daddy's Drunk And Mamas Madd) had finally succumbed to the one cure-all nature holds in reserve for rampant life-forms which will not adhere to her rules of order and blight the landscape with cancerous growth.
The Juke House having had no true foundation; the fire had taken every part of the structure which had been flammable, leaving behind only a few shards of broken glass, some blackened brass door knobs and the twisted remains of what might have been the metal legs from a bar stool. Already blades of wild grass were poking up through the chard Mississippi clay. In a year or two the land would be covered over by new growth. The memory by time.
The proprietors would not rebuild. It was cheaper to find another empty building and buy or lease it. It was politically less expensive to terrorize a different neighborhood for a while. Location was not important for such a business. No need to advertise the move. Their customers would find them.
We continued on past that much abused plot of ground, no sorrow in our hearts at the passing of Joey's Juke and Jive.
As we rounded the final curve and climbed the short hill leading up to our house I saw that the Jackson's were living in a trailer they had pulled up on their property next to where their house had been. Neighbors and relatives had already cleared away the remnants of the old structure and begun stacking lumber in preparation for the raising of a new house over the site of the old.
Across the road from the Jackson place someone had been busy. When we left for Chicago tree limbs had littered the yard and our house had stood without a front porch. Any paint which had not peeled away beforehand had been blasted into powder and blown off by the storm. As we pulled into the drive I saw little before me to mark as a reminder of that place I had grown up in and with the innocence of childhood never expected to leave. A new front porch stood in place of the old. This one even bigger and sporting a handrail--which the old porch had lacked--along its entire circumference. Leading up to the deck of the structure stood a set of prefabricated concrete stairs complete with cast iron railings. Mama had been forever complaining about the wooden stairs on the old porch, which if painted were too slick to walk on in the rain but if left unprotected would rot away, needing to be replaced every few years.
Sitting smack in the middle of that porch was a brand new redwood glider, complete with cushions. On either side of the armrests sat matching tables where you could put a glass of tea or a sandwich if you were eating out on the porch. Mama had talked about having one of those gliders since I could remember.
As I looked past the porch to the rest of the house I saw that every inch of bare wood had been covered with a fresh coat of paint, and our house, which had been white when we last viewed it, was now a kind of gingerbread brown trimmed with a green color that at first glance glared on your eye but after a while seemed to belong there.
Climbing from the back seat of Mamas car and running to inspect the marvelous changes which had transpired during our absence, I heard pounding and banging from across the way and what I assumed were echoes coming from the direction of the trees behind our own house. As I drew closer the difference in the sounds alerted me to the fact that someone was busy at work in the back of our house so I altered course and headed around for the other side.
Mama was determined that if we were going to drive a thousand miles to take our first ever vacation outside the state of Mississippi that her children would see all of the sights the frigid north had to offer before going back home. Since anyone who has never been there thinks people wear coats year round up north, the plan to provide a little extra vacation money by waiting to repair the air conditioner in the car after the trip made perfect sense. Until we arrived and it was too late.
The whole time we were there it was ninety-six in the shade at night. The daytime was unbearable. So when someone suggested we all go to the beach I was ecstatic. The ladies all rode in Mamas car and us boys rode with Mr. Summers. I thought I was getting over until I found out that his air conditioner wasn't working either. Come on cool water.
When we arrived at the famous Indiana Dunes we were not allowed to drive right up to the water but had to park in a lot and walk for seeming miles across endless sand hills, the surface of which was even hotter than the humid blast furnace air I struggled to force through my lungs. I was approaching the point of giving up and throwing myself down in the sand to sizzle like a piece of bacon until death brought me relief, when a cool moist breeze touched my skin and hope of salvation flickered in my brain. We crossed a final dune and there before me was the lake.
Many years later I saw the actual ocean. But at the age of eleven Lake Michigan was ocean enough. Before that summer never in my life had I laid eyes on so much water. It completely covered the land and no matter how hard you strained your eyes they could find no end to that incredible expanse.
Mr. and Mrs. Summers, behaving as if they were the children instead of the adults who had brought us here and were supposed to be chaperoning us, dashed off across the sand and ran directly into the water. Of course, I kicked in the afterburner and darted behind them plunging into the water with no regard for the fact that I could not swim a stroke and the water just might have been over my head.
Before I made it all the way around to the back of the house I nearly ran head on into my Uncle Adam.
We avoided the fated impact--which would have certainly left me looking like a car that has struck a tree at excessive velocity, my meager form compressed into an unrecognizable accordion shape, smashed against his immovable bulk--as he caught me by the arms, lifted me up swung around and planted me facing back in the direction I had come from. All of this without slowing down appreciably. Apparently he had heard the car doors closing and was coming to investigate the noise.
"Where are you headed in such a hurry Jimmy?" he ask, continuing toward the front of the house.
"Hi Uncle Adam," I replied, as I trotted along next to him in an attempt to match his superior stride. "I thought you were Daddy. Is he around back?"
"No. He was, just before you all got here, but he left for town not long ago." Then, a look of concern on his face, he said, "I'm surprised he didn't pass you on the road."
"We haven't seen anybody," I pointed out, looking around. "I guess they're all busy working on their houses."
Smiling down at me Uncle Adam said, "You're likely right about that young fellow. There is a lot of that to be done around here right now."
Mama tore herself from standing in adoration of her new front porch and as we came up to her grabbed her brother in a smothering hug.
"Did you do this Adam?" she ask, then went on without waiting for him to reply. "It's the most beautiful thing I think I've ever seen in my life!"
"Me and the boys came over and helped William fix the place up. Had plenty of time, as there was no damage over our way. The twister completely missed that side of town," he answered.
Then, laughing, he continued, "Guess that tornado did a lot of people around here a big favor. If their houses hadn't been blown down and they hadn't collected all of that insurance money most of them never would have done all of the repairs that have been getting done for the last few weeks."
"Believe me; I will never be the one to say I was grateful a tornado passed through Hermanville but I certainly am glad to see my house looking so lovely. It's actually prettier than it was the day we moved in."
She turned away to dab at her face and I saw the tears in her eyes. Women cry at the silliest things. "I just wish everything else could have stayed the way they were on that day."
Uncle Adam put his arm around her and said, "Come on now Little Sister, things are gonna be all right. William has sowed a lot of wild oats in his time but he's going to grow out of it. You'll see. I promise."
Just then Billy and Martha came out of the house and grabbed Mama, one on each arm, and began pulling her toward the front door.
"Come inside and look at the house Mama!" Martha said exuberantly. "It's all painted and just wait 'till you see the kitchen... never mind just come on!"
"OK child. I'm coming. I'm coming, don't pull my arm off!"
The currents coming in from the deep water to the north and running along the shallows of Lake Michigan's south shore line move like rivers flowing within the body of the lake. They pick the sand up and carry it around from place to place along the length of the southern shores and carve deep channels in the bottom of the lake-bed near the beach. Where one day there was bottom to stand on only four or five feet deep all the way out to the marker buoys, twenty-four hours later you might find a trough ten or fifteen feet in depth carved in the sand beneath the water. It was one of these trenches which waited for me as I plowed recklessly through the crests of the waves.
I saw Mr. and Mrs. Summers, twenty or thirty feet out, standing to their waists in the water and assumed I could reach them in a straight line. Suddenly the sand beneath my feet, in which I had been digging my toes for traction to propel myself through the water, was gone and the lake closed over my head.
There is that frightening moment of panic, even for someone who can swim, when expecting to put your feet down and stand with your head projecting above the water, you instead find yourself submerged and unable to reach the life giving air inches above you. If you can swim you recover, stroke upward into the light, sounding like a whale and blowing out any water you may have swallowed, and swim for shore. But if you can't swim, the panic does not end and if your feet do not find purchase or someone comes to your rescue; you might well drown. There I was doing a poor imitation of a submarine until a hand came through the water and lifted me up into the gaseous medium my respiratory system was designed to inhabit, where instinct took over and without any conscious help on my part my lungs expelled the water I had inhaled and replenished themselves with the air they had become so desperate for. At this point my days as a deep sea diver came to an end and I gratefully allowed my rescuer to ferry my limp form back to the safety of solid ground.
I didn't see anything funny about the episode but everyone else got a good laugh out of it. I left them to their grizzly humor, went and sat down on the sand, a safe distance back from the water, and watched as hundreds of other "un-traumatized" beach goers frolicked in the waves with carefree abandon.
After a time Mr. Summers took pity on my miserable form, came over, kicked some sand at me and said, "Hey James! Do you know what drift-glass is?"
I sat and pouted for a moment longer and then replied, "No Mr. Summers. I don't."
He held out his hand and, as I put mine out in return pulled me to my feet saying, "Come on then and I'll show you what it is. We have to hunt for it though. It isn't easy to find."
I trailed along as he led the way down the beach. When he began moving toward the waters edge I was reluctant to follow but finally convinced myself I would be safe as long as I did not actually go back into the lake. When we were close enough that the waves began lapping onto the sand and curling around our bare feet Mr. Summers turned so that the sun was shining over our shoulders and slowly began to walk along the waters edge, following behind the waves and looking down to where the sand was still wet from having just been covered by the water.
"You have to look into your shadow," he said, pointing. "If you look in the sunlit part of the sand the drift-glass will disappear, and when it's under the water you can't see it at all. Submerged the glass becomes completely invisible."
I began to walk alongside him; asking as I did, "What does it look like when you can see it Mr. Summers?"
"Did you ever see one of those frosty mugs?" he questioned. "The ones that look as if you just took them out of the freezer even when they're not cold?"
"Yes sir," I answered. "My uncle Adam had some. He used to drink beer in them, but now Aunt Betty uses them to serve us ice tea when we're over at her house in the hot weather."
"Well that's what drift-glass looks like. It's all frosty looking when it's dry, but when it gets wet it's clear as can be, and you can see right through it as if it isn't even there." We walked along for a while kicking at the sand and leaning down from time to time when one of us thought he had found something. Then Mr. Summers finally did find a piece of the glass we were seeking.
"Here's one!" he yelled, holding it up to the light for my inspection. It was nothing more than a piece of broken glass which had become rounded and smoothed by the action of the waves sliding it back and forth through the sand along the beach, but Mr. Summers reacted as if he had discovered gold or diamonds lying about on the ground.
"See the color," he said. "This came from an old bottle that someone broke along the beach before you or I either one was born. No one has made glass for bottles quite that color of green for many, many years."
"How do you know that?" I questioned him.
"Well you see, the glass is green because of the impurities in it. Glass made today is almost perfectly clear, unless the color is deliberately added."
"Yea... but. Why do you care?" I wondered aloud. Thinking that I might suggest to him that if he wanted to know about those people he should just go to the library, get a book and read about it. It seemed to me that would have been a lot easier than standing out here in the sun.
"I don't really," he said; "not about the glass. I care about what it represents. This is all that's left of someone's day at the beach. Probably fifty or sixty years ago--maybe longer--someone came to the beach and spent the day having a picnic and swimming. While they were here one of them broke this bottle."
Mr. Summers stopped talking and looked out over the water. He pointed toward the horizon and ask, "James do you see all of that water out there?"
"Yes," I said, feeling kind of silly.
"That's a lot of water; isn't it?"
"Yes."
"That's only the top of it. There is a whole lot more underneath."
Remembering my recent experience with that same water, I stepped back a pace and said, "I guess you're right. You don't really realize unless you stop and think about it; but what does that have to do with drift-glass?"
"It exactly has to do with the glass," he said, handing me the souvenir he had picked up from the sand.
"At first glance this looks like just a piece of worn glass, until you stop to consider the stories it has to tell."
"The glass tells stories?"
"Sure, it talks to us about people who lived before we were even here. It can tell us part of what they might have been doing on the beach the day they were here. It tells us about the lake itself."
"How can it do that?" I ask.
"By being the way it is today. This used to be a bottle. Today it's a piece of smooth glass. How did it change? It's just a piece of glass after all."
When he looked in my direction, I shrugged my shoulders to let him know I didn't have a clue.
"The lake changed it. It took the broken glass and began to polish it and wear away at it until--if we hadn't come along and picked it up--eventually the glass would have become just more grains of sand. A part of the beach. This piece of glass can help tell me how the beach got here in the first place. The beach was made by the lake."
"The glass lets me see things I would never have seen otherwise," he concluded.
We walked along some more, Mr. Summers finding and picking up pieces of glass, while I carried them for him and thought about who could have left them here and wondered if maybe I should break a bottle and toss it into the water so somebody could come along years from now and know I was here before them, but I didn't have a bottle with me so I left nothing behind that day for posterity except some transient footprints and a few stray thoughts.
I found a dead bird lying on the sand and Mr. Summers came and we stood in silence for a moment just looking at it. Then I took a stick I had picked up while we were walking and poked at the bird with it. When I did that the maggots which had begun to devour the lifeless creature swarmed forth upon the ground.
I said, "I hate flies and mosquitoes, and maggots." Then as I picked up a rock and was about to smash them Mr. Summers caught my arm and stopped me.
"It's part of the circle of life James."
"That's all right," I spat. "I hate them anyway."
"All of Gods creatures have a purpose," he stated, "and we certainly aren't able to know His intentions for all of His creations, but I don't think He intended for us to just indiscriminately smash them because we find them distasteful."
Then he ask, "What do you suppose would happen if we smashed all of the maggots?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"We would interrupt the birds journey," he said, "and we would interfere with the lives of the maggots." Then--as I was learning Mr. Summers had a way of doing--he went on as if we weren't talking about the maggots at all and returned to the subject of glass.
"Take that glass you're holding for instance. As I said: it's just a piece of glass but it lets us see things we might otherwise not be able to see. Just as these glasses I'm wearing do. All they are made of is some wire and two pieces of curved glass, but they let me see a world that would be beyond my vision without them."
"Well sure," I said. "Lots of people wear glasses."
Waving his arm around in an arc to encompass the sunbathers all about us he agreed, "So they do. Even those who don't have poor vision. Look at all of the people here on the beach wearing sun glasses to let them see better in the glare, but it was only recently in human history that eyeglasses were invented. Since that time many people, myself included, who would otherwise have been impaired in life have been able to function much the same as those who have perfect vision. To us this seems to be a vast improvement over the previous state of affairs for humanity. But it might not be that at all! It might be that we are allowing our race as a whole to decline by protecting people with poor vision. This does not imply that I should smash people who can't see without glasses, I don't have enough information to know the outcome of either situation."
As he turned and looked off across the lake for a moment while he continued talking a tone of sadness came in his voice. At the time I could not account for it and, from that and other conversations between the two of us, simply concluded that even though he laughed and joked a lot Mr. Summers was a sad man. Much later as a result of my own experiences I did understand. He laughed because he knew how to love, and he had learned how to love because he knew the sadness.
"I do know that there have been times when people who thought they were wise enough to judge tried to exterminate others they deemed to be inferior. They made a horrible mess of the world until they were stopped from doing that. I have no right to judge."
He pointed at the bird laying on the sand.
"What do you see?" he demanded, as if he had just noticed its presence there.
"A dead bird."
"Which is more beautiful, the memory of a bird in flight or his uneaten corpse forever on the ground?"
"Yuch!"
"Absolutely," he concurred.
"Perhaps this piece of glass lets me see the beauty of the maggots. Without the lake the beach would be littered with all the pieces of broken bottles ever left here in the sand."
I said, "You're right Mr. Summers, but I still hate maggots."
"You know what James," he said, "it's possible that God created the species of maggots a million years ago, and allowed them to exist all this time so we could witness this event and have this conversation. I don't think so; but it's possible.
"Then again, it might be that if there weren't creatures such as maggots and microbes to recycle dead things we would be surrounded by the carcasses of everything from dinosaurs to this very dead bird we are looking at now."
Mr. Summers laughed and continued, "Perhaps we're just the spotters today James. God sees every sparrow that falls, maybe we were born and have lived until now just so we could be His spotters today, and we are not as important as we think we are. I don't believe that is the answer either. I believe we are all a part of the circle. The bird, the maggots. You and I. Perhaps our place today is simply to witness the event, and learn. Not intervene."
Then seeming completely in character--once you got to know him--one moment sounding like a college professor and the next behaving like an eleven year old himself, Mr. Summers turned and pointed at a mountainous sand hill off in the distance, and already running yelled back over his shoulder, "Come on James. Race you to the top!"
Uncle Adam and his sons finished up the work on the house, and Billy and I got the yard all cleaned up until you could hardly tell the tornado had ever passed through our neighborhood. Daddy didn't come back that day or for the several days following our return home. In fact I did not see him again until the next week. When he finally did show up early one morning and woke us all out of bed with the commotion of his arrival I got to meet the man Mama had told us about all of our lives, but whom I had refused to believe was indeed a living entity. I was catapulted into wakefulness by the sound of a crash coming from the front of our house. Jumping out of the bed I ran to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked to see what had taken place.
There was Daddies car wrapped around that old oak tree in our front yard. Crawling from the wreckage was a man who looked like my father but was exhibiting none of the familiar behaviors that I associated with him. This fellow kicked the door of the car open which, as the top hinge gave way under the stress and broke in two, fell over and hanging from the bottom hinge, embedded itself in the soil next to the now completely demolished automobile. Reaching back into the front seat of the car he removed a baseball bat, turned and stumbled towards the house, howling and cursing as he came.
Shocked beyond belief, I closed my eyes and as the man who was indeed my father rushed to the front door of our home and, still howling in rage, began to slam the ball bat against the thick wood of the new oak door my uncle had only recently installed, I knew the truth.
Although outside the sun was up, a clear blue cloudless sky covered the land, and there was not the faintest hint of a breeze, let alone any wind to ruffle the world. Within my soul a storm was raging, and my physical eyes were squeezed shut with painful force, attempting to deny the image, seen once before in darkness, now exposed anew in the clear stark light of day. With the vision of my imagination I watched the replay of memory, and rode out the tempest yet again. This time sucked into the center of quite another kind of tornado, and knew the monster as he truly was.
Knew for certain that I had not imagined him at all. That indeed the fantasy I had created in my desire to escape reality was not some terrible beast. The monster was at last seen to be the reality.
The illusion was the man.
When Mr. Summers and I finally made it to the top of the sand dune we did not shout to the world below and proclaim the victory of our climb. We collapsed in the sand. Spent. The only energy either of us had to spare was what it took to suck air into our lungs and replenish the depleted muscles which had been pushed to their limits by the scaling of this mountain of sand. We sat and waited for the pains in our sides to go away, and deliciously enjoyed each breath of breeze that caressed our overheated bodies with a cooling touch.
We shared with each other that quiet smile of satisfaction that comes with knowing together two people have pushed each other to achieve a goal neither would have tackled on their own. The kind of achievement you only attain during that special competitive/cooperation which sometimes overtakes two athletes during a competition and bonds them into one single engine powering two separate machines toward a mutual goal. Until as the finish line is reached neither cares that the other might win, only that both have finished the race they could not have run alone.
Eventually we were able to raise our exhausted bodies to a sitting position. Still in silence, we gazed off across the vistas stretching away before us. Made visible by the scaling of this temporary mountain. Which someday would fall. Victim to the winds as they patiently, one grain at a time, returned the sand to the lake that had abandoned it here in the heights hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Looking to the east I saw a hawk sitting, much as we were, at the top of another hill cocking his head from side to side as he took in the banquet table of the dunes laid out for his feast of life. And I understood why the bird perched there. High above the world. For the same reason that Mr. Summers and myself sat astride the summit of this hill.
Because he could..., and so could we.
Mr. Summers broke the silence and began to recite a poem which I had never heard before. It seemed to reflect the feelings I was having as I lived that moment of time. I started to ask if he was the author of the poem, but thought better of it. Considering perhaps that what he was expressing might be thoughts of a different time. A shared moment of solitude. Spent at the apex of some other world. Better accepted without question:
- "Crossing high upon a mountain
there I saw upon the peak
sights to other men unseen.
There I saw a searcher seek.
"Gazing out above the valleys,
searching on beyond his view,
looking for what other visions
only he and heaven knew...."
Maybe there was some secret power waiting to be found by one who climbed above the world and looked down from the heavens to see from above all the mysterious complications and mazes of the land laid out in orderly progression like a three dimensional map. To view the landscape of your life from the outside, arranged and simplified. Discovering a sense that you could not find while wrapped up in the middle of it all, able only to see the one small patch of existence within which that part of your living was encapsulated.
Perhaps the Lamas and Monks residing in splendid isolation on their mountain aeries do tap into a wisdom which is unable to filter its way through the atmosphere and reach the foolish mortals who inhabit the lowlands below.
I still lived in my imagination. I still trusted in my dreams.
Having scaled the mountain and looked down to face head on the soul of the world, I dared to dream an answer could be found.
"Mr. Summers?"
"Yes James. What is it?"
"Do you remember when we were talking about tornados and flying saucers and things?"
"Well sure I do James. Why would I forget?"
"I didn't mean I thought you had forgotten our talk. I just wondered if you remembered what you said."
"Now that is an interesting question James...."
I guess I had been around him long enough by then to know what was coming before I spoke. I don't think Mr. Summers could have simply answered the question ask of him without first answering all the un-ask ones. It wasn't in his nature. The surprise to me came with realizing that I was beginning to enjoy the answers. Had I known the questions I would have ask them.
I settled back on my elbows to wait while--having admitted he did remember--Mr. Summers went through his explanation of why he remembered what he had said the day I met him.
"I won't say I have never lied about anything in my life James. Because that statement itself would be a lie. But I try not to do that anymore. You see people who tell lies always have to remember what it was they said. Not only what they said once, but what they said to each and every person they have spoken to. Otherwise they will (and in the end it's inevitable) eventually be caught in some lie or other.' He paused a moment, then laughed aloud.
"If I always tell the truth I don't have to remember what I said. It will still be the truth if someone repeats it back to me, or if I think of it and say it again another time. But in this instance I do remember what I said," he stated.
"We talked about a lot that day James; which part of our conversation do you wish to discuss?"
Billy was at my side, shoving me over in an attempt to see for himself what was going on outside the window. By now the pounding had awakened the rest of the house and my mother was at the door, yelling through at my father, who apparently was unable to hear or simply wasn't listening.
"This is the very last time you will ever set foot on this property William Robinson!"
Outside our door the pounding and cursing continued.
"I mean every word I'm saying! Do you hear me out there?"
BAM! BAM! Then a pause, followed by more of the same. THUMP! BAM! BAM! All combined with a continuous stream of cursing and unintelligible demands.
Hearing Mama run from the front door into the kitchen, Billy and I dashed to the living room to find Martha sitting on the couch shouting hysterically, "Make him stop Mama! I can't stand it! We can't even sleep in this house anymore with out something horrible happening! Why didn't we just stay in Indiana?"
Mama leaned around the kitchen door and said, "Hush now! I'm on the phone. There's going to be no more madness around this house. I'm fed up. Do you hear?"
She put the phone back to her ear and continued talking, "I'll put an... Yes sir I'm still here... No he's not gone! He's out there right now, you ought to be able to hear him over this phone, all that racket he's making... Okay. Okay! But you had better hurry... No I'm not going to open the door; if I do it will be to stick a shotgun through it and pull the trigger... I am calm...! All right, I said I wasn't going to open... They hung up on me!"
She turned and looked at us as if we might know, and could explain to her, why anyone would have the nerve do such a thing and ask, "Do you believe that? They hung up on me. The police hung up on me!"
The pounding at the door continued until a few minutes later a police cruiser from the county pulled into the drive. Two Uniformed Officers stepped from the car, taking their night sticks from their belts as they did, while keeping their free hands on the butts of the revolvers in their holsters. They didn't have to use them. The monster was gone; defeated by the tornado. All they faced that morning was another angry drunk.
For the first time in my memory; Daddy just gave up and left our house without an argument.
Still unsure of myself, and only certain of the moment because of the spiritual atmosphere pervading these lofty heights and the mutual bond engendered between us by the shared struggle we had enjoyed in our quest to reach this elevation. Granted the power to overcome the deliberate silence of my tender years by the force of the adrenaline still coursing through my veins I dared to question fate.
"Mr. Summers, were you just making it up when you told me that you were trapped in a tornado until you met the wizard in Kansas?"
"No James," he replied. "I wasn't making that up." He turned to face me now, all pretense of carelessness gone from his expression, as if he detected a seriousness within the heart of my question that surely was not apparent from the simple structure of the sentence itself.
"No James; I wasn't making that up at all. There is a very profound truth in what I said to you that first day we met. Although the tornado I spoke of was not a physical thing, it was an emotional state, a tempest of unfettered desires and fears which can suck away your life as certainly as any storm, and although there are different kinds of wizards and some would not call them that at all, their power to influence the life of another is concrete." Standing then he waited for me to join him and began to stroll down the side of the dune.
Thinking that Mr. Summers was going to end our conversation, and afraid that I might never have the courage to bring the subject up again I ask, "Where are you going now Mr. Summers?"
"It's much too hot to sit up here in the sun for very long. Let's walk over to the pavilion and get something cold to drink."
As we continued our descent he questioned, "What made you think to ask about tornados and wizards just now James?"
"Well... I really didn't know exactly what you were talking about before, but I ask Mama about the people who come to visit you and Mrs. Summers and she said you used to drink before but that you don't anymore and you were helping people who didn't want to drink. So I just kind of figured the wizard you were talking about was the guy who helped you stop drinking."
"That's a lot to put together on such slim evidence James," Mr. Summers replied.
"There's a whole lot of things that all add up to Mama and us kids being here Mr. Summers. I didn't see it all at first but now I'm wondering if maybe Mama came up here because she wanted to see you and Mrs. Summers for more than just to visit."
He took the palm of his hand and rubbed the top of my head, the way some men have of doing when you've impressed them and that most kids hate having done to them, but I let it pass.
"You're a pretty smart fellow, aren't you James?"
"Sometimes," I confessed.
"As a matter of fact, your mother did ask us if we could tell her how to help your father with his drinking--unless I'm mistaken I guess that's what you're talking about right now--but I've got to tell you the same thing we told her. Someone can only be helped when they are ready to be helped. If you try to give advise that hasn't been ask for or lend a hand where it's not wanted, you'll more than likely be told to mind your own business."
Just then we came to the concession stand under the pavilion and our conversation paused until we had purchased some cold drinks and began to walk back down the beach toward where our families waited.
As we walked I ask, "Are you saying that no one can help my father Mr. Summers?"
"No, that's not what I'm saying at all. The point is James that another person can have all the answers to your problems and be willing to share them with you but if you aren't willing to listen and then put those solutions to use they can't do you any good.
"Just consider all the things we have talked about since we met," he suggested. "If we weren't willing to listen to each other how could either of us ever learn from the other?"
"I guess we couldn't," I admitted. "It's like if I don't pay attention at school I mess up on the test because I don't know what the teacher was talking about that day."
"There you go, and for a long time in my life, that's exactly how I behaved. Even though I didn't have any answers to any questions, I wasn't willing to listen to anyone who did have answers. Until I met this fellow in Kansas who was able to help me and became willing to listen, I was beyond help."
Summoning all of the courage I had held in reserve for this moment I ask, "Mr. Summers, do you think if you called up the Wizard in Kansas he might be willing to talk to my father?"
"I don't know where he is anymore James, but I gave your mother some numbers to call in Mississippi. There are people there who might be able to help, but it's not up to them. All they can do is show the way."
I believe there is a basic purpose to it all. Each of our actions affects the lives of others and sometimes there are events in our own lives for which we can, at the time, find no cause. But I believe there is direction behind everything which occurs. I'm not too big on coincidence and accidents. For a long time I didn't know enough to say.
When I came to Kansas these many years later I did not find any wizards and although the world was engulfed in its own tornado of political turmoil; all I knew inside was the void of existing in a life which had somewhere along the line, lost its meaning. I existed in the despair which came in the wake of loosing that thrill of living which little boys are born with and is the engine powering their every move. Until one day it is gone and those little boys find themselves becoming old men who contemplate more the end rather than the course of the journey. When going on becomes a chore to be endured, instead of an adventure to be embraced.
I wanted to go home and, much like Dorothy, did not understand that home was not a place but a state of mind, that all the magic in the world only surrounds those people who themselves bring that magic into being from within their own hearts and let it flow outward to touch the darkness awaiting us all; with a light that can shine beyond that end and show the way to new beginnings. Not only for ourselves but for others waiting to know.
I came to Kansas seeking not a place, looking for instead that little boy inside who had listened and learned so many years ago. Who had lived through the tornado and had met a wizard. Who had flourished in the imagination the man had later corrupted until it became a vision-less caricature of its former self. Who had journeyed over a rainbow to seek the truth. Had seen magic happen in his world.
And believed.
The Saturday morning after the day my father had arrived at the house drunk and been taken away by the police, I had finished all of my chores and was sitting on the old stump in our front yard, indulging in a dose of undeserved self pity and waiting to see if the wizard was going to show up or not. I was beginning to have my doubts. I sat there thinking and wondering what to do with the knowledge that I could no longer trust my own imagination which, in an attempt to protect myself from the truth I had used to deny the reality of the monster. Creating in my mind a creature I would rather have in my world than the person I could not admit was there. Until the man himself at last shoved my fantasies aside and turned to face me in silent accusation.
A car I didn't recognize pulled up into our drive.
Despite the fact that no black man ever played those roles back then; the man who got out was dressed to look like one of the sleuths from those old black and white detective movies that are on late at night. He was wearing a wide brim hat that he had pulled down over his forehead until all you could see in the shadow beneath was his eyes peeking out at the world. Draped over his shoulders was one of those long gray coats that hang almost to the ground and under which can be hidden any number of things, which the bad guys in those movies used to conceal their weapons as they went in to rob a bank or to shoot up some place where other bad guys were hiding out, and which the private eyes--who dressed just like the bad guys and could not figure out why the cops never trusted them--wore throughout the entire movie so they would have them available to cover the shoulders of any coat less women they encountered who, although not as unclothed as they are in today's movies, never seemed to have a coat when it was cold or raining out.
I didn't detect any bulges indicating a gun hidden beneath the coat but he did have a book in his hand so I presumed the man was one of those people who come around every now and then trying to get you to visit their church.
He walked across the yard to where I was sitting, stopped a short distance away from me and ask, "Is this the Robinson place Son?"
I was about to answer him but before I could the front door opened and Mama came out onto the porch, letting the screen door slam closed behind her and startling the both of us, causing the man to turn from me and face toward the house.
"Pardon me Mam," he said, taking off his hat when he saw Mama standing there. Then without turning to see if I was still on the stump he waved his hat back in my direction repeated his question. "Is this the Robinson residence?"
Looking him up and down as if she could not quite believe he was standing in her front yard Mama replied, "Yes sir. It is."
"Well that's good," the man said. "I wasn't sure I had the right house." He looked around surveying the property. "This sure is a nice place you have here Mam. Anybody'd be proud to call this home." He looked about himself once again as if not sure where he was. "Fred gave me pretty good directions but I guess the storm must have blown down all the signs hereabouts. Took me a good while to find the place, and when I did I still wasn't sure, because this don't match the description he gave of the house at all."
"My brother just painted the house and put on a new porch," Mama said.
"Yes Mam. I see that."
Then as if we couldn't tell by looking he explained, "I'm not from these parts you know. No Mam. I'm from up Kansas way."
Once more looking at the house as if surprised by the condition of the place he laughed to himself and said, "Only been in Mississippi a few weeks or so. I guess you could say I blew in with that tornado that came through here. Yes Mam. Chased me right down the main highway, and didn't turn me loose 'till I was right outside of town. Then she throwed my car down in the ditch and passed me up like it was nothin'. Been stranded here ever since tryin' to get my car fixed. Fella named Fred that I was on my way down here to visit loaned me his so I could come by here today or I would of had to walk."
Mama looked over at me as if it was my fault and I just shrugged my shoulders at her to let her know I didn't have any more idea what the man was talking about than she did. She turned back to the man and said, "Well that is all fine and good, but just exactly what is it you came here for Mister...?"
Shaking his head at himself the man answered, "Well excuse me Mam. That was kinda rude of me I guess; not introducing myself. My name is Osmond. Osmond Davis. But folks just call me Oz. Guess they think that's funny, me bein' from Kansas and all.
"I came to see Mr. Robinson. Fred was supposed to come, but he took sick so I told him I'd come in his place."
You could have knocked me over with a feather....
After Mama had explained where he was and what he was doing there, the man from Kansas and Fred--who turned out to be Fred Johnson a fellow that worked with my father and whom we had known for most of our lives--went and got Daddy out of jail. I never did know if Mama called Fred or if Mr. Summers had called from Indiana. Or if indeed Daddy himself might have been the one.
The mystery remains.... The magic never goes away.
Daddy was gone for over a month, and although this was not unusual his return home was unlike any other time I could recall. We were all sitting down at the dinner table and Mama looked up as she was pouring milk in our glasses and said, "Your father is coming home today."
The monster was truly gone.
The day my mother told us he was coming, my father did come home. He didn't pound on the door or even knock. He just put his key in the lock, opened the door and came in as if that were something he had been doing all along.
Although they never met and in fact I never saw either of them again after that summers visit, my father began to behave much like Mr. and Mrs. Summers.
He danced with the world.
Like David and Chelsie Summers he found a means to remain young in his heart amid the heartbreak of a world filled with tragedy and evil. He learned to laugh. To laugh at himself and not take himself so damn seriously that he thought he was the world. He learned to love without cause or condition....
That was the ending I wanted to write. When, at the age of eleven, I could not understand all that had transpired but I knew the magic was real. When I was still able to believe Dorothy had, in fact, made it over the rainbow.
At a much older age; able to write novels, filled with little boys battling imaginary monsters, but still unable to confront my own monster, not brave enough to face that little boy, I did understand and no longer believed in the magic at all.
With the truth at last all told. I am still that little boy.
And believing once again is an easy thing to do.
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- Thank you for keeping my thoughts alive.
An astute writer once advised all readers: "If you are reading and come upon a word which you do not know the meaning of, immediately, go to the dictionary and find out. Else you might well miss the single most important message in the book!" I believe this advice could indeed apply to every aspect of our lives. Dictionary.com...don't leave your homepage without it!
