Silas Dillon of Cary County
Page 24
He focused his ears, tilting his head slightly, looking at me as he strained to hear.
“It’s like a choir, lots a voices—high voices, deep voices. Hear it?”
“No.”
I adjusted my Yankee cap, thought for a moment, of their house, their hurts, this day. Once again tears filled the shallow pools of my lower eyelids. I felt this bursting rapture of exultation like an overflowing pool. I briefly glanced at Molly, and could see the glistening in her eyes. Neither Molly nor I could say a word further. There remained this strange suspension of time, this peerless sense of wordless understanding as I leaned forward the way Bob leaned forward, and I covered my face with my hands. He placed his hand on my shoulder, compressing, comforting. I wept for a long time. Molly knelt beside me, hugging me, pressing the side of her face and temple against my arm, patting my back with her hand. I could hear her crying. I then knew what it meant to be absolutely speechless.
With my face in my hands I envisioned the three of us in our little huddle, the two of them surrounding me, touching me. I envisioned us in a gradually fading, slowly diminishing film-like image, our little cluster as it shrank, as it grew diminutive in the extending vista from an exalted lens above, moving into heights beyond the clouds, us huddled like the rest of the human race, huddled against the elements of the globe that for now breathed upon me fabulously favorably, upon us huddled like the rest of the human race, growing forward into this envisioned future where time grew evenly diminutive. I continued, in my mind’s ear I suppose, to hear this beautiful choir of voices.
We three remained speechless, yet from the recesses of my being, in the silence of my center I kept saying beneath my sobs, “Thank you. Oh, thank you!” I felt so incredibly relieved.
EPILOGUE
THE LOOKOUT TOWER
I’m going to have to tell the rest of my story on some other rainy afternoon.
The sun just burst in the west, and its brilliant July beams reach from tens of millions of miles away across this wet island, beaming the way they had beamed that day twenty-one years ago on the orphanage grounds. They throw their feet through my screens and panes, onto my den’s floor; and I can now hear the screen door in the kitchen slamming repeatedly as my ten kids—two offspring, two adopted, and six foster children—burst like those sunbeams one by one from their indoor imprisonment, out into the sodden yard.
Weak knocks on my door set foot in my ear.
“Come in,” I say.
The doorknob turns; the door swings open. My three-year-old Gabriel takes three steps in, sneakers on, slightly pigeon-toed like me, scratching the back of his head, one blond curly lock hanging on his forehead, his eyes agape and shaped as lovely as my beautiful wife Abby’s, and gazing aflame with thrill. “Daddy, the raining stopped!”
“Yes, I know!”
“And the sun come out!”
“I see. I see.”
“Wanna come play band mittens?”
“You’re playing badminton?”
He’s nodding his head. “And… and Mommy said… um…” His thoughts drift with his gaze, recalling as I patiently wait.
“What did Mommy say?”
“Um, Mommy said to say to you there’s a big… a big… um… there’s a big rain bone in the sky!”
“There’s a rainbow?!”
“Yep!”
“Okay! I’d like that, Gabe! I’ll come see, and I’ll play badminton. I’ll be out in a minute, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy!”
Smiling, he reaches with two hands for the doorknob, closing my door, excited, hurried, stepping backwards, slamming. I hear him running, and then seconds later I hear the last slam of the screen door in the kitchen. The sundry voices of my family can be heard from the other side of the house. The resonance of a basketball’s doused thumping on the wet asphalt driveway, against the backboard, and on the rim, beats its rhythm as I envision my older ones shooting.
I glance upon my desk. Paper. Much paper. Many things going on.
Sadly, things in the foster care system and in the family courts are little changed since I was stuck there. Twenty years have lapsed. Agencies continue to seek and receive state funds for each foster child placed within their charge, creating a discriminating reluctance to encourage adoption, as unremitting money is welcomed. And the bureaucracy is as monstrous as it was then, crammed with cases in court, with lifeless little laws that are loud enough to drown out the inexpressible cries of the lingering children waiting for a simple place of belonging. The facade of good intentions and the camouflage of nice words continue, while cases adjourn and adjourn, while countless foundling-castaways flounder.
Abby and I have been in court these days battling to adopt two more kids whose natural parents have been making no effort to reconstruct their own lives, and the child welfare system, like a crippled old man with a broken cane, carrying a hundred-pound package, drags its feet, pampers these broken adults who twenty years earlier should have themselves been adopted, who now, for the sake of their offspring’s futures, ought to have their parental rights terminated by these feeble courts. It’s simply sick, and sickly satanic.
The obesity and incompetence of this system suffocates, frustrates, exasperates the man who tries to budge it! More so, American church, each member amply fit to reach out and welcome a child into his home, in sleepy smugness and fat apathy lounges in lassitude like five oil-empty virgins waiting for a groom that will ultimately shun them.
Twenty years later Abby and I live and savor life with our quiver overfilled, in an epoch of unprecedented nationwide prosperity. We observe so many others—the do-nothings and do-littles and criticizers and stumbling blocks—driving to church in comfortable cars, with their 2.3 well-dressed children, from commodious homes, wearing fair, indifferent smiles and genteel clothes, holding their selectively read Bibles, quoting those verses interpreted exclusively as promises for their own self-indulgence, saying, “We’re not called to that,” or “You people are doing a wonderful thing,” or “Taking in children isn’t for everyone,” or “I always wanted to do something like that,” or “We tithe 10 percent,” or “You know, you really have to use wisdom before you take someone else’s child into your home,” or “Gays and lesbians shouldn’t be having rights to adopt children,” or something even as ignorantly vapid and egocentric as “You know, by adopting a child, you might be inviting some other family’s generational curse into your family.”
The clarion shout from James’ voice, to his pen, to ears that hear and hearts that sense, continues to cry through the ages: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
I make my way out of the house, onto the back porch. Immediately I notice the lucid quarter-circle of a resplendent rainbow situated toward a dark east, while the sun blazes in the west wet and glistening. I have a notion that both the bow and the sun will remain forever. I stare at the glory of color that treats my eyes with dazzling splendor after such a rainy-gray day. The cries of soaring gulls, the stroke of a summer breeze, and the scent of the briny ocean all lace themselves into this moment. In a new and unfamiliar way, I feel so grateful to be having life, so grateful to have been born, so grateful that my natural mother, Maureen, in an age when murderers keep crying for a right to choose to murder their unborn, chose to give me life.
I’m strangely grateful for my heritage, for the Rosenbergs, who’d made their way from Germany, and for the Dillons, who’d made their way from Ireland, so many decades into the past. I’m grateful for whatever derivation my African-American father might have had. I’m grateful for all the goodness that came my way from foster parents of goodwill. I’m especially thankful for Molly and Bob, who saw in me something redeemable, and saw that I myself was irreplaceable. I’m entirely grateful for the great God of the ages who chose me, who plucked me from the fire, who lifted me, who made me His son, who clothed me
with clean clothes, who gave me a seat in a heavenly place with Jesus Christ, giving me such “a place to walk,” in His courts, in His house, among those who stand there. Despite my childhood, I’m so grateful.