Love and Fury (20 page)

About a year after my AVP experience, I was given the chance to lead a men's group at “The Farm,” Concord's prerelease facility. It was not an AA meeting or really anything like it. But it was called Tools of Recovery and based on a curriculum a local pastor and clinician had devised. The term “recovery” was understood broadly. When I first agreed to lead this group, the program was designed as an eight-week course. It usually took five or six weeks for the men to finish giving voice to their resentment at being incarcerated. During that time my role was to listen. I recall one man doing time for possession of a handgun:

“In my neighborhood? Where I live? Know what we call a nigger with no gun?

“Dead.”

The second time I ran the course, I lengthened it to ten weeks. Finally, it found its real length—twelve weeks. I remember one guy in an early class who really helped me to shape subsequent discussions. Many of the men had children, and we were talking about what it takes to be a good father. Some were angry that their children's mothers never brought them for a visit. Others were remorseful about missing years of their kids' growing up. But this guy was thinking of his own father. “My father?” he said, “my father? I fuckin' hate that guy! I fuckin' hate him! But I fuckin' love him, too. Y'know what I mean?” Or maybe it was the other way around. I honestly don't remember. What I recall is the ferocity of his emotion and how utterly deflated he was a moment later. The oscillation between a hateful bitterness and an angry love is exhausting.

As Damion comes close and smiles, I see my grandson in his face. I rise and hug him, both of us mumbling, “How are you? Good to see you. Good to see you, too. I'm good. I'm good.” I believe I can see the boy he was, a child still so present it's heartbreaking, the boy who deserved so much more than he was given, and I can watch his face, first puzzled and then closing, as he comes to know, in some wordless, unacknowledged way, that I have been looking
into
him, that I am trying to bring what he's told me of his life here, now, to this encounter, that I want to know him. I have embarrassed him, I think, even frightened him a little.

Over the course of several visits, we have talked about prison life, legal matters, Jamaica, Veronica, Robert, Kathi, our conversation punctuated by stories about D, who is now four and offering hypotheses for everything he doesn't understand. I bring him the latest funny thing he said, or something I have observed, or else Damion recounts D's last visit to him there at the prison. We have talked about our fathers, about being beaten by our fathers, about our disappointment in them and our attachment to them, about our confusion, about our love and fury.

The man next to us, two chairs away, is seated across from a woman I take to be his mother. She is feeding him, that is, she's bought him a sandwich from the vending machine and microwaved it. Steam escapes as he opens the plastic bag. The smell is not appetizing, but he takes a big bite, thanks her with his mouth full, chewing.

I tell Damion what D said to me a few days before. The two of us lay on the living room rug while I taught him the coins: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. Sometimes he called nickels “nipples” and dimes “diamonds.” I tell him how just that morning he drew a picture of a playground. And that I said that when someone is going to build a playground, they always draw a picture first.

“Like a map!” D said, and I saw his pride and pleasure at another concept clicking into place. I thought I might offer the word blueprint, but thought better of it. Map was just fine. Damion is smiling, slowly shaking his head from side to side. “That kid's a trip,” he says. “The other night I called Veronica and he answered the phone.”

“Yeah, he's doing that now. He races to the phone to be the one to answer it.”

“But get this. He says to me, ‘Daddy, can you come over tonight?'”

“‘D!' I said, ‘you know I can't come over there. I have to stay here.'”

“‘Daddy?' he says.”

“I said, ‘What?'”

“He says, ‘Why are you in jail?'”

“I'm thinking, What the . . .”

Damion admits he wasn't ready for this question. Until very recently, D was content to tell everyone his daddy lived in a castle, a big castle. Now, telling this, Damion's blinking back tears.

“I told him we could talk about that when I get out of here. ‘I'll tell you when I come home,' I said. ‘I promise.'”

“‘Why won't you tell me now?' he says to me. I'm not sure what to say. I mean, can you believe this kid? At four years old? So I say, ‘I will. I will tell you. When it's time. Let me talk to your mommy now.' Then the line was silent. I can hear somebody breathing, so I'm like, ‘Veronica?'”

“‘No. It's still me, Daddy. Tell me why you are in jail. Tell me now.'” Telling me this, he smiles and shakes his head with pride in this exasperating little boy, but he's sniffing and swallowing hard.

“‘Because I had a gun,' I said to him.”

“‘Did you shoot somebody?' he asks me. He wants to know if I'm a bad guy.”

“I'm like, ‘No, no. I never shot nobody. I would never want to shoot nobody. Never.'”

“Then he says, ‘But guns are bad?'”

“‘Yes, guns are bad!' I tell him. ‘That's why I'm in jail.'”

“‘Daddy?' he says.”

“I mean, the kid won't let up. So I say, ‘What? Are you going to let me speak to your mother?'”

“He's like, ‘Daddy?'”

“And I'm all messed up by this whole conversation and I say, ‘What?'”

“‘Thank you for telling me why you're in jail,' he says. ‘I love you.' Can you believe it?”

“So I say, ‘I love you too, D. Now let me talk to Mommy.' Man!” Damion's leaning forward now, elbows on his knees; he sniffs and collects himself, looks up and smiles. “That kid's a trip.”

And I don't swap him the next story, the one I brought with me that I thought he'd like, the way I used to bring my brother Bobby stories of things I'd seen living in New York. I feel like an idiot for not seeing how cruel it would have been. Kathi and I had taken D to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to see some Native American dancing as part of an exhibit. D was rightly impressed by the hoop dance. “How does he do the magic with the hoops?” And it was, certainly, magical: hoops, in several combinations, became wings of birds, butterflies, a ball, a cage, a horse. I didn't get to see D's face since he was on my shoulders; Kathi says he was enthralled. He also enjoyed an exhibit about water. On the way home we talked about the hoop dance. Kathi said the dancer mentioned during the Q&A that his father had taught him the dance.

“When I was a little, little boy,” D said from the back seat, “my father taught me things. I have a father, too.”

“Yes. Yes you do!” said Kathi.

“And when I was a little boy, a little, little boy, he taught me lots and lots of things.”

Silence.

Instead I tell Damion how just that morning we went to the playground in our neighborhood, where there are always tricycles and wagons left by neighbors whose kids have outgrown them. I tell him about D wrapping his arms and ankles around the thin and supple branch of a young maple gone to orange, and hanging there just a few feet from the ground. “Look at me, Grandpa!”

But I don't know how to convey my experience of the morning. A wind came up and blew leaves from the tree-tops. “Look at me, Grandpa!” And I looked at him knowing, deeply, that we are all here for only some brief season of seasons we have no name for. “Life” is too commonplace, and carries no feeling. “Lifespan” has a span in it, a bridge, a concept I can't always muster the faith for. Call it our portion, a single share of the plenitude of time, with little or nothing to do with anything but love, partaking of everything that ever was or will be.

Damion and I just grin at each other until he says, again, “That kid's a trip.”

All my life I've carried a sense that the world is beyond our knowing, beyond our capacity to understand. Since the age of eight or nine I have awakened every morning to the questions, “Why Bobby and not me? Why Bob and Mike, but not me, or Joe?” What cosmic lottery decides that? What God decrees it? I cannot refuse this roaring chord of fear, awe, gratitude, and sadness, it has been the roar in my ears ever since. It is, I believe, the elemental form of the religious impulse.

It seems to me now that my ninth year was a turning point. My brother Bobby, eight, was no longer able to walk. I remember little about this colossal change in our lives. My parents told me nothing. I remember being punished for my impatience with Bobby, “Come on!” I'd say, and he would whine, “I can't. I can't!” I couldn't parse the fury I felt then, couldn't tell the difference between rage at what was happening to him and anger at my brother himself. He was moved out of our bedroom, into the fold-out sofa downstairs and—When did it arrive? How is it suddenly one day there, as if it belonged in the spot—next to the sofa, foot rest up, its scissored chassis folded closed, the wheelchair, chrome and green vinyl. What could my parents have said? How could they have explained what must have only then been sinking in?

Yes, everything changed that year. Of course I was not a self-conscious observer, so to say that everything changed is a judgment I make now, sifting through memories. And the lack of memories, the paucity of physical impressions, is surprising to me. I have such vivid sensual recall of so much of my childhood that I must take this poverty as a sign of just how confused and abstracted I had become. What was happening to my brother had a name but no meaning, a terrible reality but no explanation.

Could my parents have taken me aside, a nine-year-old, and said, “We know you and your brother have been playmates all your lives, but that's over”? Could they have explained that Bobby was never going to walk again? That he would grow weaker and weaker now until he died? As I said, I have few specific memories of this change, so maybe they did try to tell me what was happening. Or maybe they did explain it to me but I didn't understand, or couldn't, or wouldn't. Or maybe they were trying to spare me the worst of it.

Or maybe—here I am ashamed at the narcissism of my inquiry—maybe I was not their first concern, not the first of their sons who needed an explanation.

Kathi's oncologist called to report that the second surgery had gone well. Radiation would suffice; there was no need for further surgery or chemo. She scheduled her treatments for early in the morning five days a week, and continued to teach her classes. As the weeks went on, fatigue became a fact of life, along with radiation burns, patches of tender purple skin, blisters. Salves, ointments, naps, and her ferocious commitment to her students kept her going.

I didn't know this at the time, but after that second surgery, Kathi had asked a friend if she could stay with her for a while if she felt the need. Our house was too chaotic and stressful. D, a year old, loved his grandmother intensely and always wanted her to pick him up; Veronica was working hard as a floor nurse in a rehab hospital; I was working two jobs and revising the book of stories I'd been writing; the kitchen sink was always piled with pots and pans and dishes, toys and books were strewn everywhere—there was nowhere restful or even very private where Kathi could heal.