Habeas Corpus, Installment 8
Posted on January 16, 2008
Filed Under marriage, writings, fiction, Habeas corpus |
It took the papers a full day to get the story. Lacy was found in the middle of Rte. 100 some time just before 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning. The Green Mountain Ledger led with the story on Wednesday. By that time, Lacy had died of her wounds at Rutland Regional Hospital. A woman driving home along the dark and empty road had found her, face up, arms by her side, almost peaceful, like she had laid down to rest and forgotten to get up. The paper recorded what she was wearing, a striped cotton polo shirt, green and pink with a white collar, scuffed up sneakers, a denim mini. I had wondered why this level of detail mattered, but, with no one to blame, I guess the reporters had to find something to talk about.
****
Now I stop to use the bathroom, to refuel, to eat luke warm burgers from damp foil wrappers. I arrive in Northfield, tired and nostalgic, a persistent drizzle obscuring the familiar pitch and roll of a landscape that is childhood.
Northfield is now a town in flux. For a hundred years before now, it’s been a town not trying too hard.- no steepled church on a pretty town green surrounded by antique homes with black shutters, no boutiques or coffee shops, not even a proper grocery store; only a post office, a cemetery long neglected that sits beside a squat, beige brick building that was the Congregational Church, built there in the fifties as some modern manifestation of form following function and ornament as crime - all that has changed since commuting an hour to and from the city had become normal, expected even.
The residents of Northfield have begun parceling off their land and selling to developers. There are now cul-de-sacs and by laws and cable services with high speed internet access. There is a Super Stop and Shop, Dunkin Donuts and no shortage of foreign cars with halogen head lights and satellite radio.
But the Northfield I grew up in was a town populated by the descendants of farmers, people who had long since given up tending to live stock or working the fields, with empty barns and pastures gone to weeds and thistle, holding space between small neighborhoods of working folks and people looking for lonely. As children, we expended great effort to find fun in the quiet sameness of the place.
There was always Jim Dings frequently found in the bushes along Union Street, a spreading wetness at the crotch, muttering profanities. His wife would hide his car keys when he was on a real bender. The only way he could continue his drunk was to ride his bike or walk five miles when the liquor ran out. And with the single minded devotion of a true addict he would keep at it until he had fallen off that bike on the way to the packie.
I remember the singular thrill that was Dings coming, weaving his way towards town, as we rode the bus home from school. No matter if there was a biting North wind or rain or sleet, as I remember it, that man would be short sleeved and hatless. We’d all dig into our backpacks for leftover lunch items, empty soda cans, apple cores, whatever we could lob from the windows of the bus as they hurtled by. It hadn’t been all that cruel considering that Dings was blackout drunk and operating outside of himself. Not one of us would have had the courage to ridicule a grown man like that if he had not already made himself such a laughing stock.
There were a few guys like that in Northfield to make my father’s trespasses seem minor. What’s a raised fist every now and again, some chronic unemployment, when you have people like Dings to compare yourself to?
The truth about my familial situation didn’t begin to crystallize until one optimistic spring day, warm enough for playing outdoors and spreading a picnic blanket in the patch of sun near the Calleaux’s pool, still covered in the blue plastic liner of Winter. Jessie Calleaux and I ate row after row of sugar wafers straight from the package as we watched the ants march towards the crumbs they had scattered. Mrs. Calleaux, the kind of woman who defined herself in terms of in-ground swimming pools and trips to the Caribbean in February, went on about removing the pool cover and bringing down the table and umbrella from storage up in the garage.
“I hope Jerry laid enough bait up there this winter to discourage their eating holes in the lounge cushions,” she said to her bored audience, more concerned with cookies crumbs and squashing ants with the bottom of our juice cups. “We had to buy all new pool furniture last spring. Destroyed by rats.” She offered this fact as warning, what could happen to even the best families if diligence about rodent control was disregarded.
Jessie’s Dad was one of the few men in town then working somewhere far from Northfield, making the commute in somber gray suits with a plastic clip hanging from his breast pocket that said Jerry Calleaux, Management Services. He spent weekends in colorful polo shirts and did Dad-like things about the house and yard like lay rat poison, clean the pool and prepare square patches of soil in the sunny part of the yard for Mrs. Calleaux to grow zinnias and tomatoes and rosemary.
“My Mom uses Ex-Lax,” I offered, brightly. “For the rats I mean. She swears it makes them shit their guts out.”
Mrs. Calleaux sucked in her breath sharply. Her sudden intake said, Such words from a little girl, without actually uttering it aloud. And it was then, right then, on the first warm day of my ninth year, that I realized we were somehow strange and hopeless for my Mom’s being in charge of things like Ex-Lax for rats and my knowing how to use curse words in a way that could make a grown woman uncomfortable.
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4 Responses to “Habeas Corpus, Installment 8”
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Argh. Don’t just leave it there! Argh.
9 - is that the age when we figure out we’re from Mars, a discovery that we spend the rest of our life recovering from? “Your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins at that moment when you discover that you are in the wrong family.”
- Philip Pullman
Nothing like an untimely death to give the narrator an opportunity to unveil people. Anyway, you’re a fabulous writer but by now I’m sure you’re tired of me saying that. About the only thing that might be worth considering? Your smooth prose is spilling over to dialogue - people generally talk less smoothly than you narrate.
Now the tricky part. Just keep working. Don’t let the apathy, praise, or criticism distract you from that.
Ron, dialogue is tricky, very, very tricky for me. It’s one of those damn reasons that grad school stint just might be worthwhile. Sighhh.
more good stuff from you, cce. thanks for sharing it.