“When is Shavuos?” I asked my father one evening.
On Shabbos and the holidays, my father served as cantor at a Reform synagogue in Baltimore. He sat on the bimah with the rabbi and led the congregation in song. I was approaching the age of thirteen, when Jewish children are admitted as adult members to the religious community, but my parents never mentioned my studying Torah or having a bas mitzvah.
“Shavuos?” my father said. “It’s next week. Why? You want to come to services?”
“No,” I said.
I couldn’t go to services. I had to be home and awake when the sky opened at midnight, to wish for my mother and father, to wish for the children next door, to wish for myself.
The night of Shavuos I sat in the living room alone, watching television. My father left for services early; my mother had already shut herself in her bedroom for the night.
I climbed the stairs to my room around ten, washed, and changed into my pajamas. I listened for sounds from next door. The closet was quiet.
Closing my bedroom door, I turned out the light and stood at the dressing table in front of my window. Less than two hours ’til midnight, I thought, gazing into the sky. Surely I could stay awake for two hours.
My father came home a little after eleven.
As soon as their bedroom door shut, my parents started fighting. The air in the house prickled with their anger. The fight was a short one though. Within a few minutes the house grew quiet again; I heard only the occasional pop of a floorboard and the drip of the kitchen sink.
I thought everyone in the world had gone to sleep. It was just me and God now, on either side of the sky, waiting for midnight.
Still quiet next door. Maybe tonight, maybe just for tonight, it would stay quiet. I looked over my shoulder at my closet. My mother used to hang a calendar on the door and put gold stars on it for the days I didn’t cry. I rarely earned more than a handful of gold stars in any particular year. She eventually gave up on the gold stars. I eventually stopped crying.
On that night of Shavuos, my feet grew cold as I stood waiting. My legs ached. I decided to climb into bed.
But I feared falling asleep and missing my appointment with heaven. To stay awake, I put my day clothes back on. I pulled my shirt back over my head, slipped into my pants, and sat upright in bed, leaning my cheek against the cool white wall. The time crept slowly forward. Once, I nodded off and started back awake. Rubbing my eyelids with the knuckles of my thumbs, I made myself stand and walk to the dressing table under the window.
I didn’t need a flashlight. I could read my watch by the moon. The time was 11:39.
I wanted it to happen. I wanted the sky to open. I wanted to see inside heaven.
As I stared up into the night, a dog came down the alley and turned over a garbage can across the way. I shifted my eyes from the sky for a moment, down to the dog pawing trash, then quickly back up again. I didn’t dare risk looking away any longer.
At five minutes to midnight, I tucked my chair in under my dressing table and leaned toward the window.
That’s when, next door, the voices started.
“Please,” the girl whispered. “Please. Let us out. We’ll be good. I promise. We’ll be good. Please let us out, Mommy. Pleeeease.”
She sounded like a ghost, her voice coming softly through the closet wall. I turned toward the sound.
And that’s when it happened. I sensed the change.
Quickly turning back toward the window, I saw it.
The filmy black of the night split open, and streaming out through the opening were the most exquisite colors. They swirled around and around, a dazzling display of radiance.
Out of that shimmering brightness, ladders unfurled. I could not see them clearly, and yet I knew they were ladders. And down those ladders, beings descended. Brilliant beings of light. They were angels. I was seeing angels.
I don’t think I breathed. I don’t think I blinked. My eyes wide, I took in every detail.
And then, just like that, the ladders disappeared, the colors vanished, and the night returned to its filmy blackness.
The entire scene had taken place in a heartbeat.
And I had not made any wish at all.
I had not wished for my parents to stop fighting, I had not wished for my mother to be well, I had not wished for the end of the children’s suffering next door, I had not wished for the end of my own torment. I had stood before the face of God and wished for nothing.
K’Tonton, at least, had made a wish.
I wanted to cry, and yet my eyes stayed dry and round with wonder. I stood watching the black sky for a long time.
Next door, the pleading of the children grew quieter and quieter.
And finally, during a stretch of silence, I curled up on my bed and dozed off.
Suddenly I awoke. A different kind of light ricocheted off my bedroom walls. The light from heaven had filled me with awe, but this light filled me with terror. It paced around and around my room, like a caged animal.
Still dressed, I crept to my window, my heart thrumming in my neck. I saw two police cars in the alley below, lights rotating on their roofs, the low squawk of their radios crackling into the night. And then I saw the shadowy figure of a child, wrapped in a blanket, being brought out of the house next door and placed into one of the cruisers. A second child already sat huddled in the same cruiser’s back seat. Alone, in a cruiser in front of theirs, rigid, unflinching, sat their mother.
Bubi Hannah stood inside her gate, her arms wrapped around herself. She wore a coat over her nightgown. Her hair, in a long white braid, hung down her back.
The police cars pulled away at last, and as their lights vanished, I realized my closet was silent. Completely silent.
I felt almost weightless.
The rest of that night I slept sweetly, peacefully, for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long. I slept deeper than the voice of Howard Bruce’s father, a sleep that might have come all the way from Heaven.
“This was a hard story to share. But I chose to relate this moment in my life because it marked a turning point for me. On that night, the night that I’ve transformed into the climax for this story, a flame of faith was kindled in my soul. During that night, for the first time, I saw that no matter how desperate and unrelenting things seemed, in a moment the situation could change and there could be respite, comfort, hope. I have modified the story a bit; left pieces out, put pieces in; but the core of this story is true.
I learned at a very early age the reward of retreating into fictional worlds. Not only did reading give me an escape from a difficult childhood, but the characters shared their survival skills with me, skills that I could then mold, shape, and apply to my own life.
My roots as a writer extend all the way back to those long Baltimore nights. I never imagined that the stories I told myself in that little room on West Garrison Avenue would blossom into a life’s work. I simply wove those tales to console myself.
I am still awed by the things people survive, how people can turn their most crippling trials into soaring triumphs. Telling their stories is what compels me to write.”
My grandmother was working in the flower garden near the road that morning when I came out with my fishing pole. She was separating out the roots of iris. As far as flowers go, she and I were agreed that iris had the sweetest scent. Iris would grow about anywhere, shooting up green sword-shaped leaves like the mythical soldiers that sprang from the planted teeth of a dragon. But iris needed some amount of care. Their roots would multiply so thick and fast that they could crowd themselves right up out of the soil. Spring separating and replanting were, as my grandmother put it, just the ticket.
Later that day, I knew, she would climb into our blue 1951 Plymouth to drive around the back roads of Greenfield, a box of iris in the back seat. She would stop at farms where she had noticed a certain color of iris that she didn’t have yet. Up to the door she would go to ask for a root so that she could add
another splash of color to our garden. And, in exchange, she would give that person, most often a flowered-aproned and somewhat elderly woman like herself, some of her own iris.
It wasn’t just that she wanted more flowers herself. She had a philosophy. If only one person keeps a plant, something might happen to it. Early frost, insects, animals, Lord knows what. But if many have that kind of plant, then it may survive. Sharing meant a kind of immortality. I didn’t quite understand it then, but I enjoyed taking those rides with her, carrying boxes and cans and flowerpots with new kinds of iris back to the car.
“Going fishing, Sonny?” she said now.
Of course, she knew where I was going. Not only the evidence of the pole in my hand, but also the simple facts that it was a Saturday morning in late May and I was a boy of ten, would have led her to that natural conclusion. But she had to ask. It was part of our routine.
“Un-hun,” I answered, as I always did. “Unless you and Grampa need some help.” Then I held my breath, for though my offer of aid had been sincere enough, I really wanted to go fishing.
Grama thrust her foot down on the spading fork, carefully levering out a heavy clump of iris marked last fall with a purple ribbon to indicate the color. She did such things with half my effort and twice the skill, despite the fact I was growing, as she put it, like a weed. “No, you go on along. This afternoon Grampa and I could use some help, though.”
“I’ll be back by then,” I said, but I didn’t turn and walk away. I waited for the next thing I knew she would say.
“You stay off of the state road, now.”
In my grandmother’s mind, Route 9N, which came down the hill past my grandparents’ little gas station and general store on the corner, was nothing less than a Road of Death. If I ever set foot on it, I would surely be as doomed as our four cats and two dogs that met their fates there.
“Runned over and kilt,” as Grampa Jesse put it.
Grampa Jesse, who had been the hired man for my grandmother’s parents before he and Grama eloped, was not a person with book learning like my college-educated grandmother. His family was Abenaki Indian, poor but honest hill people who could read the signs in the forest, but who had never traipsed far along the trails of schoolhouse ways. Between Grama’s books and Grampa’s practical knowledge, some of which I was about to apply to bring home a mess of trout, I figured I was getting about the best education a ten-year-old boy could have. I was lucky that my grandparents were raising me.
“I’ll stay off the state road,” I promised. “I’ll just follow Bell Brook.”
Truth be told, the state road made me a little nervous, too. It was all too easy to imagine myself in the place of one of my defunct pets, stunned by the elephant bellow of a tractor-trailer’s horn, looking wild-eyed up to the shiny metal grill; the thud, the lightning-bolt flash of light, and then the eternal dark. I imagined my grandfather shoveling the dirt over me in a backyard grave next to that of Lady, the collie, and Kitty-kitty, the gray cat, while my grandmother dried her eyes with her apron and said, “I told him to stay off that road!”
I was big on knowledge but very short on courage in those years. I mostly played by myself because the other kids my age from the houses and farms scattered around our rural township regarded me as a Grama’s boy who would tell if they were to tie me up and threaten to burn my toes with matches, a ritual required to join the local society of pre-teenage boys. A squealer. And they were right.
I didn’t much miss the company of other kids. I had discovered that most of them had little interest in the living things around them. They were noisier than Grampa and I were, scaring away the rabbits that we could creep right up on. Instead of watching the frogs catching flies with their long, gummy tongues, those boys wanted to shoot them with their BB guns. I couldn’t imagine any of them having the patience or inclination to hold out a hand filled with sunflower seeds, as Grampa had showed me I could, long enough for a chickadee to come and light on an index finger.
Even fishing was done differently when I did it Grampa’s way. I knew for a fact that most of those boys would go out and come home with an empty creel. They hadn’t been watching for fish from the banks as I had in the weeks before the trout season began, so they didn’t know where the fish lived. They didn’t know how to keep low, float your line in, wait for that first tap, and then, after the strike that bent your pole, set the hook. And they never said thank-you to every fish they caught, the way I remembered to do.
Walking the creek edge, I set off downstream. By mid-morning, my bait can of moss and red earthworms that Grampa and I had dug from the edge of our manure pile was near empty. I’d gone half a mile and had already caught seven trout. All of them were squaretails, native brook trout whose sides were patterned with a speckled rainbow of bright circles — red, green, gold. I’d only kept the ones more than seven inches long, and I’d remembered to wet my hand before taking the little ones off the hook. Grasping a trout with a dry hand would abrade the slick coat of natural oil from the skin and leave it open for infection and disease.
As always, I’d had to keep the eyes in the back of my head open just as Grampa had told me to do whenever I was in the woods.
“Things is always hunting one another,” he’d said.
And he was right. Twice, at places where Bell Brook swung near Mill Road I’d had to leave the stream banks to take shelter when I heard the ominous crunch of bicycle tires on the gravel. Back then, when I was ten, I was smaller than the other boys my age. I made up for it by being harder to catch. Equal parts of craftiness and plain old panic at being collared by bullies I viewed as close kin to Attila the Hun kept me slipperier than an eel.
From grapevine tangles up the bank, I’d watched as Pauly Roffmeier, Ricky Holstead, and Will Backus rolled up to the creek, making more noise than a herd of hippos, to plunk their own lines in. Both times, they caught nothing. It wasn’t surprising, since they were talking like jaybirds, scaring away whatever fish might have been within half a mile. And Will kept lighting matches and throwing them down to watch them hiss out when they struck the water. Not to mention the fact that I had pulled a ten-inch brook trout out of the first hole and an eleven incher out of the second before they even reached the stream.
I looked up at the sky. I didn’t wear a watch then. No watch made by man seemed able to work more than a few days when strapped to my wrist. It was a common thing on my Grampa’s side of the family. “We jest got too much ’lectricity in us,” he explained.
Without a watch, I could measure time by the sun. I could see it was about ten. I had reached the place where Bell Brook crossed under the state road. Usually I went no further than this. It had been my boundary for years. But somewhere along the way I had decided that today would be different. I think perhaps a part of me was ashamed of hiding from the other boys, ashamed of always being afraid. I wanted to do something that I’d always been afraid to do. I wanted to be brave.
I had no need to fish further. I had plenty of trout for our supper. I’d cleaned them all out with my Swiss Army knife, leaving the entrails where the crows and jays could get them. If you did that, the crows and jays would know you for a friend and not sound the alarm when they saw you walking in the woods. I sank the creel under water, wedged it beneath a stone. The water of the brook was deep and cold and I knew it would keep the flesh of the trout fresh and firm. Then I cached my pole and bait can under the spice bushes. As I looked up at the highway, Grama’s words came back to me:
“Stay off the state road, Sonny.”
“Under,” I said aloud, “is not on.”
Then, taking a deep breath, bent over at the waist, I waded into the culvert that dove under the Road of Death. I had gone no more than half a dozen steps before I walked into a spider web so strong that it actually bounced me back. I splashed a little water from the creek up onto it and watched the beads shape a pattern of concentric circles. The orb-weaver sat unmoving in a corner, one leg resting on a strand of the web. She
’d been waiting for the vibration of some flying creature caught in the sticky strands of her net. Clearly, I was much more than she had hoped for. She sat there without moving. Her wide back was patterned with a shape like that of a red and gold hourglass. Her compound eyes, jet black on her head, took in my giant shape. Spiders gave some people the willies. I knew their bite would hurt like blue blazes, but I still thought them graced with great beauty.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Didn’t mean to bother you.”
The spider raised one front leg. A nervous reaction, most likely, but I raised one hand back. Then I ducked carefully beneath the web, entering an area where the light was different. It was like passing from one world into another. I sloshed through the dark culvert, my fingertips brushing the rushing surface of the stream, the current pushing at my calves. My sneakered feet barely held their purchase on the ridged metal, slick with moss.
When I came out the other side, the sunlight was blinding. Just ahead of me the creek was overarched with willows. They were so thick and low that there was no way I could pass without either going underwater or breaking a way through the brush. I wasn’t ready to do either. So I made my way up the bank, thinking to circle back and pick up the creek farther down. For what purpose, I wasn’t sure, aside from just wanting to do it. I was nervous as a hen yard when a chicken hawk is circling overhead. But I was excited, too. This was new ground to me, almost a mile from home. I’d gone farther from home in the familiar directions of north and west, into the safety of the woods, but this was different: Across the state road, in the direction of town; someone else’s hunting territory. I stayed low to the ground and hugged the edges of the brush as I moved. Then I saw something that drew me away from the creek: The glint of a wider expanse of water. The Rez, the old Greenfield Reservoir.
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two Page 10