Silas Dillon of Cary County

by Clifford Schrage

  One day in December when we got on the bus to go home, Tyrone got an idea: “Hey, let’s get off the bus at Joey’s stop today.” His white teeth and white eyes beamed.

  I was confused. I looked at him.

  “Ya mean at the bridge?” Kyle said. Kyle’s white skin, thin lips, red freckles and hair were so counter to Tyrone’s jet blackness and ample lips. My complexion remained somewhere in between.

  “Yeah, let’s go across the bridge to Jersey!”

  I pondered: it wasn’t very cold; afternoons at the residence were especially ho-hum since the sun set so early this time of the year. This was a great idea! We were learning about the states and where they were on the map, and this seemed like a bright and shiny idea for us to brag about to other kids. “Yeah, then we can just run home along the channel!”

  Kyle seemed reluctant, but the pressure of our outnumbering thrill made him fold. “Aright, just a minute though.”

  We got off the bus at Joey’s stop, about a mile—four or five stops before ours, with the several other kids that got off there. Usually Mommy, Tyrone’s mom, or Kyle’s mom met us at our stop in front of the residence. I wondered, as we furtively deboarded, who’d be there today, and what the backlash would be. The bus driver was inattentive. When the door unfolded, closing, and the bus thundered away, adrenaline filled me like amphetamine. This thrill had all of us beaming.

  “What a you guys doin’?” Joey said.

  “Goin’ across,” said Tyrone, pointing at the bridge. Eighty yards across drooped that other state, New Jersey, with all its motley, industrious clamor summoning us. In my memory, that fragment of New Jersey seemed dark, squalid, even evil from my eight-year-old perspective. This side, Cary Island, was secure, familiar, safe, sunny. In retrospect, there was this curious light and dark separation.

  “Ya crossin’ the Rock Channel Bridge?” Joey was awed. It was named this because of all the bedrock that had to be blasted out to build the bridge and all the bulkheading along the channel.

  “Wanna come?” I said.

  He wanted to. I could tell. His eyes were filled with amazement, watching, lured, hesitant.

  Kyle was quiet, scared. At eight, our insane daring even made us skeptical that this was actually happening. It was all so accelerated, swift as the channel’s current when the locks were opened.

  “I can’t.” Joey said. “I’m not allowed to. I’ll get in trouble.” He squinted, looking westward where the bright sun had begun to set.

  We climbed up the steep embankment to the highway. At the top we looked down at Joey, who still stood at the stop, watching us. He seemed so far, so safe, so removed from us, I thought. Joey had a mom and a dad, and he lived in a nice house, and he did his homework, and his hair was combed and clothes nice every morning.

  Trucks passed, cars sped, exhaust emanated. We walked. Tyrone led the way, I followed, then Kyle. We didn’t speak. There was so much noise from the whirring of passing vehicles, honking horns, and clamor from the factories across the channel that we wouldn’t have been able to hear one another anyway. We just kept pacing, careful on the narrow curb that separated us from the four-foot railing and the channel on one side, and the hazardous highway on the other.

  One man shouted out from his car as he passed in the deafening traffic: “What are you kids doing?”

  Another shouted, “You kids wanna get killed?”

  What a question! I didn’t know if I was supposed to answer.

  Another in the hurried velocity: “Get home!”

  And yet another, a woman’s screech: “No pedestrians on the bridge!” Her voice was awful. It could have made one’s ears bleed. I didn’t know what a pedestrian was then. I now imagine she read a sign to us!”

  Each of these passing cries frightened us, not in fear of punishment, but because in our caution we were startled, jumpy. We didn’t look back. We moved faster.

  Finally we got to the other side, climbed over the four-foot railing—assisting one another, and running down the embankment.

  The homes, marts, stores, and buildings on Cary Island looked so different from this side. Adrenaline drove through us. We kept walking, not looking back. We came to the sidewalk of the street that paralleled the channel like the route we lived on on the other side. We walked fleetly—a half mile—because we wanted to see the residence from this side. We could see it in the distance.

  “Let’s go back now,” Kyle said with an urge.

  We squinted, focusing, looking west. It was hard to notice if the bus was there at the residence still, or if there was any activity surrounding our absence. Twenty minutes must have lapsed since we got off.

  “Let’s go this way awhile.” Tyrone’s proposal was a calm demand.

  I followed, and then Kyle—down a narrow lane for about a block. And then there was another lane we took, until we came to a lot, and some greenhouses.

  “Look!” Tyrone pointed. We paced to where a shed and dumpster could conceal us. We sat there in the dirt, excited, feeling incongruously free in our little insurgency, catching our breath. The sun kept lowering, the air beginning to stab with cold. We zipped our coats. Then Tyrone picked up a rock; and with a delirious, wild grin he just threw it at the greenhouse. A pane broke. Then we could hear the glass break on the floor on the other side.

  We giggled, listened. No retort from anywhere. We could faintly hear Christmas music playing somewhere in the distance. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

  “Watch this!” Tyrone picked up another larger rock. He threw it higher. It dropped onto the angling roof of glass, crashing again.

  The lowest part of the opaque, filmy structure was green; the higher part was a lighter reflector of the orange of December sunlight and shapes of small buildings opposite the lot.

  I looked at the rocks on the lot, noticing they were no different from those on rocky Cary Island on the other side. I watched Tyrone in his sinister ecstasy lift another, and throw. I listened as it crashed, and as the falling glass inside crashed again.

  “Come on, it’s fun!” he whispered loudly.

  I reached for a rock, and threw, thoughtlessly. I reached for another. The mystery of this destructive pleasure, this aimless, effortless indulgence in the forbidden electrified me, actually mystified me as I kept searching, lifting, throwing, listening. Kyle followed, and the three of us continued in this aimless and randomly wasteful vandalism for a minute or so, until a light from within that end of that long greenhouse lit.

  Suddenly panic struck, and the late afternoon seemed suddenly colder, so closer to dusk. We froze. Then suddenly—a voice—a loud, irate, old man’s voice: “Hey you_____ kids! What the ____ do you think ya _____ doin’!” His amplification slapped us with a terror of judgment. His cursing struck us like three blows. None of us could see him, but we knew that wherever he was, he was wild with anger. My heart pounded.

  We bolted, at first speechlessly running, riveting our direction toward the bridge, the same way we came. Then I could hear Kyle crying as he ran.

  “Don’t worry!” I shouted between breaths.

  It wasn’t until we reached and began to climb the embankment on the New Jersey side that I started to wheeze; so I walked. I was out in front. Tyrone and Kyle followed, and walked as well. Tyrone was giggling; Kyle still cried.

  We walked along that narrow curb again; and amid the danger on both sides I thought of Mommy Sparks, Daddy Sparks, and Justin; and I felt a trace of shame. I felt lost. For some reason, I recalled a certain Summer Sunday at that Pentecostal church where Daddy was Pastor Sparks. I’d been seated in the usual front pew with Mommy Lucinda and Justin. Sunday School just ended. Daddy’s text that Sunday was Matthew 3:7-9: “But when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance; and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, “We have Abraham for our father”; for I say to you, that God i
s able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.’”

  Daddy preached on practical Christianity, denouncing the gospel of ease. I remember his elevating a certain family’s expression of love for people as a model for evidence of loving God, connecting it with his point. “Brother and sister Lewis crossed paths with a young pregnant lady over in Brooklyn, unmarried, and already a single parent. Well this woman made up her mind to abort this child, convinced she couldn’t afford another. Well the Lewis’s committed themselves, offering this young woman that if she’d choose to give this child life, they’d make sure that for the first year they’d provide enough for his care. We have needy, helpless people all about us saints, None of ’em are inclined to come inside our nice churches or hear our empty words if words is all we got! But they might hear us if we reach out instead of just preach out—if you know what I mean. To reach people for God we have to extend ourselves, to give up our comfort. The Lewis’s are showing God’s love to this woman and her children!”

  I remember Daddy’s long, staring, breathing pauses. His flock would wait in silence. “We can’t just love in word or tongue, but in deed and truth! We can’t like John’s crowd who called themselves Abraham’s children call ourselves Christians and then sit idly by! Nonsense! We’re frauds! Faith without works is dead!” He shouted, continuing, “We can’t pretend, wishing, ‘If I had a lot of money I’d open a home for kids!’ Phooey! We start with one! We open our hearts and doors. We lay down our golf clubs and pick up our crosses! We sacrifice the nail salon and invest on a human being.”

  That’s a sermon I recall. It has stayed with me. Daddy and Mommy Lucinda devoted their lives into human beings, and for some reason I thought about it now deeply as I wheezed and walked and shivered as the deadly cars whizzed by us on that dreary bridge, as the miry channel waters swirled below.

  Mommy and Daddy Sparks and Justin visited me every couple of weeks. The people in the program said it was okay, but they weren’t allowed to take me out, or visit for long durations. That was supposed to be for my benefit. They thought it might interfere with the “bonding” that was reputed to be forming between me and Mommy Maureen. The big problem was that every time they’d leave from a short visit at the residence, I felt that old ache again. I wanted to be with them badly. I could tell it hurt them too, and that made me feel both bad and good.

  After we crossed the bridge, we descended the embankment on the Cary Island side, and the area seemed dull and quieter now than when the bus stopped before. Joey was gone, probably at home doing his homework, aiming carefully at something constructive with his mom or dad helping him. By now the sun was set and the purple-gray filled the east, bleaching the trees, darkening buildings, making them square two-dimensional structures. We kept walking. My feet, ears, and fingers grew frigid; but as I walked my wheezing subsided. To the west the sky glowed with bright scarlet, and every shape that stood before it was black.

  When we arrived at the residence we discovered a police car in the front. We entered the rear entrance of the house, still speechlessly novice as wrongdoers to fabricate a unified story, and we found a nervous hubbub, a tense panic mixed with relief. “Where have you been? Why weren’t you on the bus? You boys had us scared.” Our moms were there. A nurse was there, with two of the workers. The policeman was writing.

  “We were at Joey’s” Tyrone said.

  I and Kyle kept quiet, looking at each other.

  “Well how?”

  “We just got off at his stop.”

  Tyrone lied so masterfully naturally.

  “Don’t ever do that again! You hear me Tyrone Wilson?” His mother’s thick black index finger was raised above his white eyes.

  “Yes Ma.”

  We were fearful that the police were there because of all those windows we’d broken. We were relieved, but we were also unsettled. I had this inexplicable feeling that I had crossed something other than a bridge, traversed into something metaphysically secret, into something darker and dirtier than that part of New Jersey. I’d crossed over a line into the forbidden, a prohibited clime that was more ruinous than the West Channel Bridge we’d walked, one that would be ruefully easier to cross from that time forward.

  Well I liked being in school mostly because I didn’t like being stuck in Crossings House with Mommy. I looked for opportunities to get away from Mommy, like the one I just described. The psychology people at the residence wanted Mommy and me to be together often. That was program policy, because they were supposed to watch us interacting together to see if Mommy was capable. The funny thing was that they didn’t “study” us much. They had a lot of meetings behind closed doors where they talked, drank coffee, wrote and read reports, making Mommy’s and other people’s files thicker. I now can’t imagine how much money taxpayers paid for all this.

  Back to school again, I’m not sure people like Miss Karessi embraced my being present. Miss Karessi was a petite, loquacious, ambitious young lady who wore little, round glasses. She loved kids; no doubt. She hugged them, touched them on their backs when she leaned over them looking at their work; and some hugged her. Once she hugged me, but usually she didn’t, and that was probably because I was habitually dirty, tousled, sometimes reeking. Like many “serious” teachers, I recall her as one who wouldn’t go out of her way, especially for one like me. I was a lost cause. She redirected attention to kids with hope, to kids with influential parents in the district.

  A lot of the kids brought gifts in for her—little things like mugs with praises like “World’s Best Teacher” printed on them, or packages of homemade things to eat, fruit baskets, or cards, nice pencils, and sometimes even gift certificates to restaurants. My guess, looking back, was that most of that was initiated by parents, or kids who’d probed their parents because other kids brought gifts in.

  Once I slipped one of Mommy Maureen’s nicer ashtrays—a heavy, glass, semitransparent blue one with a lighthouse, a bluff, a soaring gull, and Maine embossed in white, wiping away ash stains—into my backpack to offer as a gift for Miss Karessi. “Oh, how nice, Silas, but I don’t smoke,” she said so all would hear.

  Some kids giggled, some laughed aloud. Picturing pretty little Miss Karessi puffing cigarettes at that moment did seem absurd.

  “That’s enough,” Miss Karessi said to the laughers, forcing a change on her expression and tone.

  I didn’t know what to do in my angry awkwardness, so I walked quickly, carrying the burdensome thing, looking down into its deep florescent blueness back to my desk. When I looked back at her I could tell by the way she kept an eye on me that she probably regretted her reaction—her making that vociferous point so that the other kids wouldn’t suppose she smoked. Finally, having thought hard enough, she said: “Silas I love Maine, and I could use that to put my paperclips in. Can I still have it and use it for that? Those trays don’t have to be for ashes only! I really like it.”

  I quietly stepped forward as quickly as I’d retreated, and I thudded it onto her desk, returning again, staring at the floor tiles, less angry.

  I did spend a lot of time—three or four visits that year—in Mr. McMaster the principal’s office. After the second visit in December I could foretell his predictable, rehearsed speech which regressively lost its threatening intimidation. I guess he’d forgotten that kids have memories. It went something like this: “Mr. Dillon, your teacher works very hard, and your mother has great hopes for you. You are in this school to learn. Antics, fighting, fun and games…” His voice heaved with threat here: “It will not be tolerated!” He paused, looked at me through spectacles with grave, preoccupation and fake hostility. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I understood?”

  I nodded.

  “So you’re telling me there will be no more problems with Miss Karessi!”

  “Uh huh.” I fidgeted, eager to get out.

  “Now return to your classroom.”

  I’d bob my way out of his back office
, through a little maze of women working at desks, around a high counter, and out into the hallway, mostly unaffected.

  In classes I liked I didn’t get into trouble. I was pretty good in art class back then, probably because of Mommy Sparks’ influence. Mr. Tinge, an older, soft-spoken man with long gray hair tied in a ponytail and thick glasses magnifying blue eyes, often drew the class’s attention to the things I drew, painted, or made, praising my work. He called me the Gauguin of West Channel Elementary School, probably because I made my human figures dark complexioned like Gauguin’s primitive looking Tahitians. I don’t know.

  Music class usually included singing along with old, corpulent Mrs. Sonato and her piano. I never sang, and she never bothered me too much about it. She didn’t stand up and walk around ever. Maybe she didn’t notice. I’m still not too sure why—why I didn’t sing or why she didn’t press me. I’d always loved to sing in church with Justin and Mommy Sparks; but those church hymns and choruses somehow made singing feel good. But singing patriotic songs, or about ten little Indians and a dog named Bingo, even in third grade, seemed a lot less sensible. For a couple of weeks we played recorders and learned about instruments we’d be able to explore in fourth grade. Otherwise, our voices—what we could do with our voices with inane songs—was the seat of passion with old Mrs. Sonato.

  My best subject was gym. I liked it because I excelled. I’d always been coordinated, lithe, fast, aggressive, competitive, strong. A lot of that came from Justin’s influence, and hanging around those older kids in the old neighborhood. Thick-chested, short-haired Mr. Kemp the gym teacher often employed me to demonstrate before the twenty other boys things like pull-ups or swinging a bat, and he usually called on me so he could demonstrate things like wrestling moves or wheelbarrow racing or defending a basketball player. I always outwrestled my opponents, and I was often the last one out in the dodge ball contests. I won the Best Athlete award that year.