... Wayne Noone
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Swallow a Crocodile I remember Mom in the Oncology Unit, how one day I came visiting same as usual to find her room empty, bed remade and waiting like a maw for the next one. Well, she wasn't dead yet, just moved to Cardiology with a mild attack to top off the cancer, but I was standing in that vacant room as if it were the only room on the ward or in the universe, then running, pushing aside the ambulators trailing their IVs, frantic to the nurse's station to find her, not giving two shits for the other cancer patients filling the rooms around me when all that mattered was one I loved was lost. It's the same for me now with him over there in this dumbest of all wars. I've never had much truck with others, their concerns are nothing to me, but the boy's room is empty and I need to find him on another floor and goddamn all the other mothers and fathers and to hell with the grief around me I have only heart enough for one. Hi Kral Dear Kral, sorry to hear about Owl being ill, how'd he ever end up with diabetes and a heart condition anyway, you know I was wondering if you had an email address for him, I'm sure he must have a computer, heck I can remember when he was just a curate how he developed that silly tickler file to track the names of all the people in his parish so he could greet them Sundays after mass so he of all people must be high tech now and using a PC, you know, I just wanted to drop him a line to let him know I was thinking of him, and Kral, I'll just have to ask him if he still keeps that little pad in his shirt pocket surrounded by those two Cross Pens, remember us laughing at him the time Stoken pulled those out and threw them across the floor, we were always in his room eating those chips of his, Charlton Chips or something, that he had in a big can he kept in his closet, man I was always hungry then, you too remember, and how about that time that fella from Kentucky, Brad Wostle, came up against you in touch football and knocked you like a ping pong ball across Echo Field, he was a big son of a gun and mean too till we got to know him, those southern boys all seemed mean, like that Charlie with the French last name, the one who used to spend most of his time playing darts down in the rec room and would always be bending over and showing the plumber's crack of his fat ass, remember how they told us don't mess with him he's a Cajun, and we weren't really sure what a Cajun was or why we should be afraid of one, and that other kid from Owl's Diocese, the one who tried to hang himself in his room and I got pulled in by the Rector to help carry the stretcher and was late for Quinn's class so he zapped me soon as I walked in by asking me when was the Council of Nicea which of course all those St. Thomas boys like Owl knew, Quinn was always giving us grief, remember how ticked he was when we cut his class the day Lennon died and just sat in your room listening to Beatles tunes on that little cassette player of yours, how bout that time in the summer when Greb got us all up to Kane Hospital to give out water to the elderly and Rice wrote that article in the Catholic about Mustachioed Seminarians crossing picket lines, and remember how Saladna always said Basta! when he finished a class, I'll bet he's dead now, and Satter, how he'd always end a lecture at exactly 10 o'clock even if he was in mid-sentence, he's gone now too, remember Kral how when it was time to go how Byrd cried, holding his fat belly and draping his face with his beautiful long-fingered hand, hey, you know I saw Tom Bitner about a year ago, guess he works for some child care agency now, I was chairing a meeting and there must have been about fifty people in the room but I knew him right away and he never looked and me and I never looked at him and we never spoke but I knew we both knew the other was in the room, you know its weird Kral, we all know each other, the ones who leave, its like we're vampires or aliens or something, I swear if you turned off the lights in that room, Bitner and I, our hands would glow where old Bishop Leonard smeared the oil on our palms, and you probably still believe it was the speragis, the seal, but I think it has something to do with those times together and how they made us who we are, and sometime I'd like to write it all down, just get it out of my system in one big gulp, and maybe its like any other time for any other person, when you're young and unformed and life just starts to roll out for you and the world is greener than it'll ever be again, still I just want to yell one time from a mountain I was a young man once and I believed in things and I lived in a world of magic but it's all too much to say in a little message in an email. Bower Hill If the dead are left to bury the dead then maybe its for us the living to dig them up again. Let me tell you a story: In the old times, back in the days of knights and dinosaurs, men who worked in the mills, at least those of skilled labor, wore crisp white shirts. There was a locker room where at shift's end they would shower and change. My grandfather always wore a three piece suit, dark blue. As a little boy I remember him, retired and senile, sitting on the couch in the parlor watching Lawrence Welk, talking and waving to the TV. He no longer wore his suitcoat, but I can still see his long white sleeves and blue vest with a thin gold watch-chain. Once he called me and sat me next to him, wrapping his arm around me, and I could hear what he whispered to the television in a voice like a hum, insistent and repetitive, like the sound of yellowjackets under the sickle pear tree behind the house in August: "Love lost, victories lost, cruelty inflicted and cruelty incurred, I have as many children as Abraham but I do not know their names, one of your brothers buried in a shoebox, the other dying drunk on a couch, you stretched out like a filament between them. You are but one in a constellation of loss." I was just a boy then and didn't understand. Not too long ago I asked a dead man to tell me how it was, being dead. He said he could only speak to me by analogy. But he was just a gravedigger, his shirt was dirty, stained with soup and tobacco, don't pay him any mind. Main Page
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