I don’t remember much, but I know they called it God’s Country.
I do remember the land, despite myself. I guess land like that can’t be forgotten.
I went to this cafe down the street from my apartment once, where they were having a celebration of a holiday.
The place was full of homosexuals and I ended up at this table of lesbians. An old woman, sitting at the table -- she was from the same place I’m from -- she said, _Oh, you’re from God’s Country .. My old people had called it that, they all did._
I suppose it’s still true, despite the hell that took place there, drowned out by the lush shades of green she claimed to remember. The chaos of blooms in spring and summer. It was true, those unapologetic, live colors, they were louder even than their own stories.
In the classic way, in an attempt to tame, they did come along and name the land, and put up street signs to make it official. When I was a teenager, it stopped being called Route ___ and became B____ Rd. But it didn’t matter. The land, and its inherent unmanageable-ness, still caused the viewer to -- know its name.
Mary -- this older girl, whose eyes and face and body were always moving, like her personality was too big for her frame and it didn’t know how to stay put -- once stopped me on the sidewalk.
At the time, she lived down the street from my apartment. She was walking her new puppy in the middle of the night, and said, in this quick, flirty, wide-eyed, laughing way of hers, _I get now, why you and her, are always going around bare foot._
It was a leftover trait from the House .. In winter, in rain, on hot concrete, on gravel, the same slightly dangerous sentimentality. To walk out and get something from the car, to go a few apartments down and hang out with friends, to step out the back door, in the icy morning, to throw the trash out. God’s country’s grown children .. living in a city.
_I get on her about it all the time,_ she said, _I drove out there with her .._
'There' meaning the house where I grew up. 'Her' meaning my older sister, A___, who was more ghost now than person.
_ .. Oh my god that place is so beautiful. As soon as I stepped out of the car out onto that grass under those trees --- I’d be going around bare foot all the time, too, if that childhood was mine._
To me she was a silly girl, but anyone who didn’t know much about the Bad came across to me as silly. Sweet, maybe, a kind of sweet smelling atrophy, but inevitably ridiculous. Still, it wasn’t her fought.
The worst part of the bad, is never the events, or bad happenings. It is the consequences. The mainstream approach is to put all the bad behind you, but how can you, when you’re standing in it, the consequences, so many years later: the bad complete in its encroach.
The House was a piece of an old plantation still physically intact, though technically broken up now with different owners. The big house was on the corner of our street. My sister claimed she came across an old slave school house as she was walking in the woods surrounding the plantation, but I could never find it.
We all had ghost stories, not just her; the rural South seemed intended for ghosts, rightfully owned by ghosts, as if us live ones were somehow misplaced, to be there only a short while. She said it was rundown, and obviously a school house, obviously for slave children. Little pieces of slate in her little-girl hands, with chalk scratched into them, by other little-child hands.
One night, when we were little, we were playing schoolhouse in the children’s room, because she had just started kindergarten, she suddenly shushed me and we stayed real still. She was looking at the window.
In the House none of the windows had much drapery or blinds, because there were no neighbors. So the window was a plain black rectangle. She said, _He’s back, look,_ as if she was talking about an imaginary friend of hers.
I looked at the window and saw the set of eyes, the whites as white as paper. The eyes looked like the cartoon eyes that would show up whenever Bugs Bunny was in the dark. I had already fought my dad off in the blue Mustang, and knew exactly what the eyes were. I could feel the chill in my spine. I was her younger brother so I was in awe of her: the way she didn’t feel the chill, the way she seemed so excited about having a ghost(?) friend ..
The reason the land was considered so beautiful, so much so that instantly its name is known, was due to the undeniable Love it hinted at, just underneath its physical surface, its history, and its story.
Every human being recognized it when they saw it, recognized it from somewhere deeper than the marrow of the bone. Love enough to remember itself, that freedom .. that wildness .. at the center of its being .. its soul.
Despite the cultivated fields of tobacco and wheat, corn and soy, barley and, every few years, flame, it remained unmanageable. So unmanageable it could not even manage itself; could not self-control, self-reflect, or self-console, except in the context of its own sheer, decisive Love. A Wildness so frightening, simple reflex always places an owner in its name.
That’s what was wrong with the other four inhabitants of the House. And was the only reason I survived the House: left with my limbs and what was between my legs still intact. They had no love for themselves to check their wildness with, not to mention love for anybody else.
I had my own love, the one true thing with which I could check, and interact, something holy deep inside me, something so mine it was me.
This same love of mine, was so good, it committed the worst crime possible.
The same love that was so decisive, its only name was violence: so beautiful, so cruel, so cool.
The same love that insisted I take care of myself, the same love that makes the world go round, and the sun shine, that makes even the moonbeams frightening, because they’re so unapologetic: wild and free and untamed.
The same love that will be here long after this body is back to dust.
The same love that’s so good, it causes lovers to -- say my name.
__________
No comments:
Post a Comment