The Orphanage

If one were to leave Stuttersville on foot, walking in a Northwesterly direction past the hills of white pine stumps, across the fields of prairie grass and rusted hay balers, one would see an odd sight just there, hulking on the skyline before a backdrop of oaks; the Orpheus....no, no. That’s not right; the Orphanage. This orphanage was a sprawling, isolated estate of a once great lumber baron, but now a neglected and seemingly abandoned homestead.

The orphanage had long been stripped of its accreditations, and yet children still lived there. Eager couples no longer knocked on the front door — tentative, embarrassed, hopeful and doubtful all at the same time — to adopt a child and become a family. Only one caretaker remained, Miss Crustacienne. She was more of a figurehead to provide the semblance of adult supervision; the children were, in fact, self-governed. Between Miss Crustacienne and the more resourceful of the children, the place continued to run much as it had when it was a state-sanctioned institution. But sanctioned, it was no more. The state had withdrawn its license some time ago due to rumors of nefarious goings-on that were never substantiated; plus, the nation as a whole was undergoing a transition toward fostering children in private homes rather than in state funded facilities. The state was able to find foster homes for most of the children, while the remaining few stayed behind in Miss Crustacienne’s care.

At the time, everyone believed that the remaining children would eventually be adopted and then the orphanage would close its doors forever, but in actuality, these stragglers remained at the orphanage in perpetuity, or until such a time that they moved to the town proper if they so wished, typically taking up residence in one of the abandoned homes in town, which were plentiful in this era of Stuttersville.

Aside from these attritions, the number of children in the home did not dwindle as expected. Unwilling parents still dropped off their children so that they could become childless once again. Parents still died in farm accidents, burning homes, and car crashes, and sometimes no fosters could be found. Finally, there were those kids that, for one reason or another, never lasted long in foster care and were dispatched unceremoniously on the front steps by their wards.

While the orphanage of Stuttersville was no longer meant to be an orphanage at all, it nonetheless provided much needed refuge to those children cast rudderless on an ocean, vulnerable to unsavory elements of town, in need of nurturing, of schooling, of a tenuous sense of safety. And it was this environment that bred the Stuttersville Three: the Butcher, the Starlet and the Genius.

Postscript

Drawing on walls, Miss Crustacienne asks? Why yes, we let all of our children express themselves with crayons on the walls: sometimes finger paints or mud (or even stencils for those born without an ounce of creativity); whatever their urges demand. Does this teach them improper behavior, will they become graffiti artists? Any kind of art would be an improvement in this town. Who am I to tell a child that they need to stifle their creative instincts, that they need to stunt their expression to fit our expectations? Children are pure souls, before this world has a chance to tamper with their spirits; it is we as adults who are here to serve their needs, to feed and clothe them so that they can enjoy life unhampered by the necessities that bind us. We need to learn from them. We need to emulate them, not them us.

When I say children are pure souls, unadulterated, do not get the false impression that I mean they are angelic, good and loving. A pure soul is a tempest of extremes, of great cruelty and mischief, of joy and hugs, of pinching and kicking and spitting, of wonder, both questioning and knowing at the same time. A pure soul is angelic, good, and loving, until a cloud covers their brow and the little monsters come out to play.

Honey Bee

   Back Yard Beehive 

Bees bees everywhere,

  Scattered in my ears and hair.

  Boxes out back filled with buzzing,

 Children running; 

 Mother, mother I got shtung!  I got shtung!

  Too bad for William, who’s allergic and done.

Twas a good life, little billy boy.

Curiosity killed this bundle of joy.

All for honey, and the honey’s comb;

Beehive's a buzzin' too close to home.

Bixby Had to Go

 

Bixby had to go. I couldn’t tolerate his presence any more.  An annoying boy to begin with, he was growing into a self-indulged, conceited, deeply flawed young man.  As his father, I supposed I owed him some desultory level of love, perhaps even unconditional, but this is not a world without conditions.  I never understood this allusion to a basic, natural instinct to love our offspring.  I watched the nature channel enough to know that lions, prairie dogs and honey bees weed out the weakest, or even the strongest, of their brood.  Jettisoned from the arc.  If not outright killed by the parent, they are neglected and, in so doing, offered up to our not-so-friendly neighbors in the food chain.  It wasn’t my fault that nature’s mutation created a species with no other predators to take us out, besides ourselves.  I was his father; I was his only predator.  

Problem was, Bixby held in a safe deposit box the will that bequeathed him the family estate, bestowed upon him not by his father but by his father before him, by good ol’ granddad.  Maybe my father was trying to take me out of the lineup.  Perhaps this was his final fuck-you in face of these past ten or so years, when I finally gained the upper hand during his infirmity.  Or had gained the upper hand, until now.  It irks me that my destiny can be thwarted by a  simple piece of paper, the weakest element in nature, subject to conflagration by the smallest spark, able to be rendered in half by the hands of a child, even crumpled up and popped in my mouth like a truffle, chewed up, swallowed, digested, and shitted out into the bowl of my toilet.  

But I didn’t have the will. Bixby had it.  Bixby had to go.

Bixby came over at 6:15.  He was supposed to be over at 5:30, but whatever.  His mother fawned over him in the foyer, took has coat and shoved all others aside in my closet to hang it on the good hanger, then flittered off to the kitchen.  By this time I was retired to my office with a gin martini, straight up, two olives.  It was fall and I could smell the dry rot of autumn.  The leaves in my yard were not my leaves, as I cut down my trees years ago.  These came from Mrs. Sutterby next door.  She’s too old and too broke to get her leaves raked up; just lets them rot where they lie from season to season.  I might have arrived at a charitable idea of raking them for her, but Bixby came in and interrupted.

“Hi Dad, how’re you doing?”

“Great son, great!  Been sitting hear listening to the birds, smelling the leaves.  Can you believe how quickly Summer passed this year?”

What?  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, there’s the inside you and the outside you, and never the twain shall meet.  Appearances are everything, and if performed artfully, give you the upper hand until the right moment, and oh how satisfying it can be when you pull the trigger.  But today, this mockery of a Sunday roast with family, was merely a positioning of pawns.

Trail of Broken Wine Glasses

She left a trail of broken wineglasses through the house.  I followed them to the attic, up to the children’s playroom and chest full of costumes that hadn’t been worn in years.  She left me a trail of her own blood to follow, all the way across the floor to the dumbwaiter.  Did she go up or down?  Was she hiding in the low hanging clouds or was she crumpled up in a heap in the cellar.  She always liked her wine, Ms Millie, ever since her first beau succumbed to the allure of the pond’s murky depths while the two of them skinny dipped with a bottle of Jack.  She remembered the stillness of the water, the quiet of the trees crowded around the shore to gawk.  

She learned she was pregnant shortly after that, carrying her brood even before she climbed out of the water.  The boy’s last plunge.   After that she was secluded away in a cabin on the Gunflint Trail with an aunt for nine months, and after they were out, perhaps even before, she drank and partied like a girl ready to throw it all away, and she did.  The Gateway District offered her unsafe haven, where I rescued her, if that is how you look at it.  She wasn’t looking for kindness or saving though, and maybe that’s where I failed her.  I hid the bottles, schooled her children, paid for home visits by the doctor because they wouldn’t let her back into town.  

Wine glasses crushed to diamonds beneath my pacing steps.  Where does a lost woman go when she doesn’t want to be found.  I see her in the moon, I see her in the water, I see her swaying in slow dance with the limbs of trees.

Penance by Sea - The Freighter

I’m on this tanker out in the middle of the ocean.  I’ve gone from living in a Midwestern rambler to this iron maiden floating on the sea.  The ocean tries to drown us every day.  We slice through swells forty to fifty feet high, and when the calm comes, it feels like a momentary reprieve from the wrath of an angry mother.

I know nothing that is required of a ship mate.  I got this gig from the captain, who I went to school with a hundred years ago.  We fought on the playground, we played tricks on each other, I egged his house, and then we became best friends.  We would ride our bikes to the edge of town and hunt for a giant snake rumored to be living in the gulch.  We traumatized a possum we found living in an oak tree.  We built tree houses, started fires in fields of dried grass, and then his sister died and his parents moved them out to the West Coast to forget.

Twenty years can change a guy.  Harris is thick and hairy; best way I have to describe him.  His arms are like stumps, his neck sunburned and gnarled like an old log.  Beneath his cap he is bald as a cannon ball, but  he is almost never without his cap.  Teeth aren’t so great, and he squints because he doesn’t want to buy glasses or wear contacts.

I am his polar opposite.  I wear reading glasses.  My arms are skinny and my skin sallow for lack of hard work and sun, but I’m hoping all of that changes after three months out at sea.  So far I’m spared much of the heavy lifting because the first week I broke my arm and spent days laid up in the infirmary.  Then as the sea swelled my stomach turned inside out.  Yes, I am infirm.  I brought along several novels and have started a ship library for the rest of the crew, though I think they would prefer I replace Joseph Conrad and John Steinbeck with Playboy and Penthouse.  Little do they know the joys of Lawrence and Nin.    

Why am I out here?  Unlike Harris’s parents, who ran away to forget, I have followed to remember.  You see, I killed Harris’s sister.  It was an accident, but something for which I never took responsibility.  But the mind does not absolve one who knows the truth.  The soul grows sick from a wrong never made right.

The Meaning of IV

No, IV does not represent the 4^th cantos of my poem, nor the 4^th chapter of my manifesto.  Neither does IV represent the century of Constantine.  It is why I am home today from work, why I sit around uselessly in this quiet, empty house.  Intestinal Virus.  My stomach rumbles and gurgles like the errant plumbing of section IV housing.  I am an upended decanter of ditch water.  Fever and dehydration created the perfect conditions, a lapse of mental discipline, a crack in a years-forged wall of self deception, so I remembered.

I left by way of the back door.  I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in that house a moment longer.  It harbored all the years of my confinement, all of my fears and hate in the shadow of a cruel father and wraith mother.  Why must I become them?  Why shrink in cold, airless rooms?  Maybe I couldn’t believe in myself, couldn’t trust that I could make it on my own, but there wasn’t much else to choose from.  “What the hell, why not?” A rally cry for freedom as good as any other.

I drifted down The Great River road to Beale Street and Bourbon.  I slept in unlocked cars, ate what food was left unguarded, wrote in a notepad while I smoked along the levee.  I drew out a picture of my father, crinkled Kodak paper with spores of mold, but there it was again; his flashing smile coming out of the dark, his white teeth approaching like a line of ghosts.  It made me warm, happy, proud, protected.  What of this father in the picture, who was not my father in the confines of the house, who was not the man he projected for the lens, but who ran deeper than the polluted waters held back by this levee?  Perhaps Bukowski could help reconcile me with my forebear, my template, my mould, the piss pot emptied and waiting to be filled.

Were they really that bad?  They left me with board games but nobody to play with; Sorry and Life and Surgery.  I dressed in costumes of their old 70’s clothes, wide ties and polyester purple trousers and wigs and white boat shoes. 

I had left with a regrettable lack of drama.  No fury towards dad, no accusations or commiseration for Mom.  I patted the dog on the head and began walking.  As I accumulated miles at my back, I began to believe in myself, in an utter lack of infirmity, an immunity to cold and virus, flu and bugs that get lodged beneath the finger nails.  Antibodies.  Parasites.  Latent.  Blooming.

IV represents my fallibility.  IV represents the number of years I’ve been gone.  IV is the number of miles left in a nearly complete circuitous route back home.