Swing Low (12 page)

I looked at my father. My face was on fire and my hands were numb. I had shamed the family, I had jeopardized our status in the community, and my father’s livelihood. I had ruined my mother’s reputation and undermined my father’s efforts to cope by turning away from it.

I’m sorry, I whispered to my father.

That night I had the first dream of a series that would run all my life. I dreamt that our home was no longer our home and that we had to live elsewhere. These new homes varied in my dreams; sometimes they were bamboo houses on stilts, sometimes apartments in the city, sometimes underground parking lots. Once, it was a foul-smelling greenhouse with hanging ferns and piles of moist earth everywhere. Each time we moved, we ended up wanting to
go back, but for whatever reason — the house had been sold, or we couldn’t afford moving costs — it was impossible to do so.

Sometimes Elvira, sensing that I’d had one of my dreams, would ask me in the morning: So? Where were we living last night?

Over the years, my dream expanded to include the “homelessness” of friends and casual acquaintances. Eventually nobody I knew was allowed to live in their homes. Everybody was living elsewhere, usually unhappily but not always, and wanting to return to their original homes.

I realize that this dream is quite obvious in its meaning: I’m looking for a home, or for a sense of home, or for my self, but I can’t find it. I rather doubt its uniqueness.

What is interesting about my dream is that it has come true. It has stopped being a dream with metaphorical significance and has become reality, as though the dream all those years had been an exercise in preparation for the real event. Perhaps God is trying to give me a sign. Or perhaps it was simply a premonition.

Everything’s in boxes. We’re moving to the city, apparently. I’m a little worried about it. Girls say it’ll be fine, hard at first, but okay later. Somebody’s looking after the yard. That’s good. They say: Mom’s in the city, she’s moving there. It’s the only way they’ll transfer you to a place where you’ll get the right care. If she goes home, they’ll find out
and send you back there. She can’t take care of you on her own anymore, but nobody believes her.

That’s your fault for saying you are fine, they don’t say. They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn’t say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault? I’m sorry for the death of E. And the pilot. I keep saying it, but nobody will listen.

That evening, the evening I was discharged from the hospital, after my chat with Father and before the dream, I hung around a bit outside listening to the wind and the chickens, chewing on my thumbs and wondering what was to become of me. I sat on the back steps and penned a letter to Elvira.

I didn’t know how to work in the fact that I had, by opening my mouth and uttering two words, ruined the lives of my parents and brother and sister, and so I just left the letter as it was and the next morning I mailed it to Omaha. My father had given me a few days off of work to rest up, and I didn’t want to spend all day at home with Mother.

I decided that I would build something out back behind the feed shed and try to think of ways to improve relations with my family. I should have wondered at that time about my father’s own bout of despair and about his three-month stay in bed after leaving the feedmill. But it didn’t occur to me then, or ever, to ask him. If only I’d kept my mouth shut, I repeated to myself as I hauled my tools and wood to the shed.

Who knows why, maybe it was the precariousness of my mind at that time, or because I was so determined to come up with a new life strategy, becoming a teacher, a better person, et cetera, or because I was young, or because I didn’t want to lose Elvira, or because I didn’t want to be crazy, or because I still wanted somehow to fit into my family, or because I still felt there was a slim chance I’d impress my parents with my industriousness and that this might erase the hurt I had caused them by talking to the doctor, but I
came up with an altogether bad plan for the future: to keep my mouth shut. If, in the months and years to follow, I had only taken stock of the situation I would have realized that no undue hardship had fallen on my family. My father didn’t lose his egg business, and my mother’s reputation in the church and community hadn’t changed one bit. We weren’t excommunicated. My brother wasn’t tarred and feathered by local bullies or taken away by child welfare authorities. Nothing had changed. If I had known then what I know now, I would have known that there was no stronger power in this town than the power of denial.

But it seemed so simple and right at the time. I remember leaning against the wall of the feed shed and thinking that, because the sun had moved over to shine directly on me as I made my decision, God had somehow sanctified it, and that the brilliance of the sun was equal to the brilliance of my plan. I decided that I would get busy with my hands and get my mind off myself by making a pair of stilts for my friend and neighbour D.W. Later in the day I would teach him how to walk and then run on the stilts, and the two of us could race each other down Town Line Road!

I worked on the stilts all day, modelling them after my own set, which Father had made for me years before, and in the evening when D.W. came home from school, I told him what I had planned. It won’t take you long to learn, I said, we could be racing later tonight! I had, in my earlier childhood, spent many enjoyable hours running through town on my stilts but, as I told D.W., I’d never had anybody to race with. Surprisingly, he agreed. After supper, he and I went out to the feed shed to retrieve the stilts. We practised
in the field as the sun fell below the horizon and the sky turned purple. I suppose I should have taken the sun’s disappearance as a sign that the brilliance of my plan was also fading. D.W. could walk well enough on the stilts but he couldn’t quite get the hang of running and kept lifting his foot off the block in midstride and falling into the dirt. It’s not like normal running, D.W., I’d tell him, your legs shouldn’t bend at the knees. Think of your legs as straight pieces of wood, as one with the stilts.

But no amount of counselling could rid D.W. of his habit of running “on top” of the stilts, and I could tell he was becoming discouraged. I was about to suggest to him that we try again the next day when, suddenly, I had another idea. The sun, at that very moment, likely dropped entirely out of view if I am to think that its brightness coincided with the brightness of this idea. I would tie his legs to the stilts!

Sure enough, in a matter of moments, with the help of a roll of twine found in the feed shed, D.W. had managed to stay with his stilts. Soon he was running, with only moderate awkwardness, through the dirt, and I knew the time had come. I didn’t want to go to the trouble of untying D.W. from his stilts, so I brought the truck around and dragged him into the back of it, stilts and all, and hopped into the cab. In a matter of minutes we were at Town Line Road, ready to race. By now it was pitch black outside, and except for the sound of crickets in the ditches, deathly quiet. We could smell the fresh spring clover and the dust from the road. I had already made up my mind that I would win by only a very narrow margin, so that D.W. might feel motivated to race me again with the hope of winning. I asked
him if he was having fun, and he said he was. Are you nervous? I asked him, and he said of course he wasn’t. If I could do it, he could do it. Fair enough, I said, then let’s do it!

We had agreed to run from the truck to the beginning of W.F. Harder’s green fence, which was about a quarter of a mile down the gravel road. We left the truck headlights on so we’d be able to see where we were going. We stood on each side of the cab, using it to steady ourselves before we began. On your mark, I said, get ready … I glanced at D.W.… go!

And there we were, flying along Town Line Road in the dark like a couple of giant stick insects. Right off the top I pulled ahead of my friend, just to set the pace and get him going, but after half a minute or so I pulled back and let him take the lead. The heel of his stilt must have caught a small stone as he passed me and it flew up and hit me in the neck. By now most of the light from the highbeams had been swallowed by the dust we’d kicked up, and I slowed down even more, hoping that D.W. would notice and take it easy. I didn’t want him to lose his way in the darkness and stumble into the ditch. He must have noticed that I’d fallen back, because I could hear him laughing, and that’s when the accident occurred.

W.F. (Mennonite men of a certain age are almost exclusively referred to by their first initials), we found out later, had been awakened by his dogs, who were barking up a storm because of the ruckus D.W. and I were causing, and had, in a foul temper, jumped into his truck to investigate. He peeled out of his driveway and, not knowing we were there, drove straight at us. With all the dust in the air and D.W.’s loud laughter drowning out the sound of W.F.’s
truck, it wasn’t until it was immediately in front of us that we noticed it. Jump! I screamed at my friend, meaning off his stilts and into the ditch, but of course that was impossible because I had tied his legs to his stilts with twine. Because he was running, and because he was on stilts, it was impossible for him to change direction quickly and head for the ditch. He tried, of course, but the front bumper of W.F.’s truck clipped the end of one of his stilts. He sailed over the ditch and landed up against the green fence (he won!) on the other side.

I had easily abandoned my own stilts, of course, and was standing by the side of the road screaming for W.F. Harder to stop. I remember thinking that now, after hitting my friend, he would carry on in his rage and have a head-on collision with my father’s truck, which was still parked and idling in the middle of the road. Again, I was wrong. W.F., by swerving to the right and flipping his own truck over onto its back, and breaking his collarbone, managed, heroically, to avoid crashing into my father’s truck.

W.F. Harder was hospitalized in the city and D.W. was spending the night here in this hospital, after being X-rayed for broken bones. Mother reminded me of my vast array of shortcomings and Father went into his room and closed the door.