by test
The truth is that Héma's mother became an expert in torture, even by the high standards of our slum. There were beatings and hair-pullings and finger-smashings-with-rocks, of course. But there was also the forced eating of excrement, brandings with iron rods and unnecessary poking around in festering sores. Until Héma was five, the cruel mother would tie her to a stake in the shack floor by a rope attached to her ankle. Thus, offering Héma, for the ten hours she was away at work, as a cure for other people's miseries as well. Hollow-eyed, rib-showing urchins showed up for visits. With sharpened bamboo sticks and pet scorpions on strings. Once, two starving dogs got smart ideas. Héma-the-four-year-old's struggle to escape caused rope to rasp on white bone and a scar like a pink anklet to appear.
I have also been told of a deal struck between mother and gold-toothed pimp. As a result of which urchins and senior citizens, men with paunches and rotten teeth, heaved themselves atop a thirteen-year-old and pushed something like knives into a knife slit.
Héma will not talk about any of this. It was Mumbai who told me. When I heard the story for the first time, I was still new to the slum. Unused, as of yet, to its daily realities. I had been aware, of course, of the physical condition of the slum. From my third-story window on the opposite side of Dadar road, I had
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had a bird's-eye view of it. I had seen the excreta-paved paths and the pitted, eroded tin boxes. Because I shared my ten-by-ten abode with two others, and the toilet at the end of the veranda with thirty more, I had even thought that I had some experience of the excessive neighborliness of the slum. So, when I was abruptly relieved of my duties as a reporter and in four months had exhausted my savings and the charity of friends, without finding a new job; when, in other words, the slum became the only option, I thought the change would be manageable. At least for a few months. I even attempted to provoke in myself a certain thrill at my descent into the valley. The thrill of a challenge. I had secretly admired the slum dweller's ability to exist in the conditions that he did. I had envied his capacity to endure harsher realities than I had ever been exposed to. I had always wondered if I, the loyal fan-of-truth-and-reality-no-matter-how-harsh, could equal him.
Alas! I must acknowledge failure in this regard. I was quite ignorant of the sheer magnificence, the sheer brilliance of the realities one is privy to in the slum. Elsewhere, the fan of truth may be asked to forgo a story or even a job. Here, he is asked to remain in the constant presence of a far-too-dazzling vision of his idol. The consequence of which is a gradual blinding of the eyes.
The option of taking refuge in a fortress is, of course, not available to the fan of truth. The night I first learned of Héma's past, I had to take recourse to a full bottle of arrack. By the time Héma got home, I was quite an emotional swamp. A sentimental bog, if you will. I wept all over her. I showered her with promises of eternal devotion. Héma, being more experienced than I in these respects, cautioned against such extravagance.
"Aré, aré, baba, little will do," she warned. "Don't be making all these marriage vows."
Even a little, of course, is proving a lot these days. The day-and-night glare of slum visions gives me a perpetual headache, and makes everything an irritation. The slum offers no middle ground, nothing between the fortress and the desert, between swampy emotionalism and complete dehydration. I am not certain anymore which is the better choice. There are times, I confess, when I envy Héma, envy the peaceful heaving of her forty-two-inch breasts, and the violent weeping that precedes it. At other times, I am driven to fury by her addiction to lurid melodramas and her steadfast faith in illusions. I try to remind myself then of the midwife's tale. But even that charming story is becoming commonplace against the backdrop of the slum. Slowly losing its capacity to move. Just as I am losing the capacity to be moved by it. These days, when Héma approaches me with her "I love you, kiss, kiss, kiss," it's all I can do to keep from screaming at her. These days, when Laxmi-the-neighbor's son starts his nightly wailing, I am quick to rap on the wall, so that Laxmi can beat or threaten the boy into silence.
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Foley's Escape Story
by Tom Chiarella
Dan's father drove the hearse straight by the main house and the barn. As they passed the house, a yellow light went on behind the curtains. It was then that Dan caught a glimpse of Marrissa Tamsley, who was in the sixth grade with him, standing in the window watching them like a silent, bony cat.
"She knows what we're here for," he thought to himself and that was his first real thought of the morning. Less than an hour before, when his father shook him, Dan had said "Hunting?" That was only a word, an instinct really, brought on by his father waking him so early, so abruptly. The half-hour ride since then, slicing the drizzle and mist that blanketed the Sauquoit Valley, had been a blank. Even so, he knew what they were here for. His mother had whispered it to him when she handed him his uncut slice of toast before they left. They were here for one of the Tamsley brothers. They were on removal.
He felt himself waking up a little and guessed that they were headed to one of the Tamsleys' other houses, a new one it seemed, since the road they were on was nothing more than two parallel ruts in the field. "Why didn't they bring him down themselves?" he asked. But his father concentrated on the road, which was slow going, and did not answer They rocked along in the hearse for two or three hundred yards before his father brought it to a stop. "Now we walk," his father said. The road ahead was deep mud that the low-riding hearse could not handle without getting stuck. At the back of the hearse, they pulled out the shovels, the toolbox, and a large piece of canvas his father had stored under the gurney, and then began walking up the road. His father, carrying the canvas under his arm, a shovel over his shoulder, was quiet. Dan trailed, head down, carrying the tools and the other shovel, watching for dry places.
This was Dan's first removal. His father had always used Hank, Dan's older brother. Although he had no real idea why Hank wasn't there, Dan knew that his father was fed up with Hank. Hank was a tense subject in the family. There was a catalogue of things he did wrong. He drank. He disappeared for days on end. He ran his car off the road. He backed out of work at the funeral home.
While it was possible that his father had chosen to break Dan in on this particular morning, it didn't seem right that Hank wasn't there too. Their father was not much of a teacher, and Dan had counted on his brother helping with
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the first few removals, offering pointers, providing warnings. But here Dan was, alone, trudging along behind his father, hoping he didn't make some incredible mistake. He tried to remember Hank's stories then, to call up his words.
"Nothing to it," Hank had once told him about removals. "There's nothing you don't already know." Dan hung on that now.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
After half a mile, the road swung through a patch of young pines. Just beyond, the land rose up meanly in a large swath of wet earth stretching at least a quarter mile, from the forest on their left, down the slope, across what was once pasture, to a distant line of trees. The road ended abruptly at the wall of dirt in front of them. It was five feet high.
"Mudslide," Dan said softly
His father looked up at the sky. "If it keeps raining," he said, "there'll be more of these."
"Have you ever seen a mudslide?" Dan said. "I mean while it's happening."
"Wouldn't want to," his father said, walking down the slope. "Look what it did to the house." He extended his arm straight out, pointing his shovel at the tree line. Dan couldn't see over the mud. He had the sensation that everything had been swallowed up, that he was looking at nothing, at a point where the sky simply butted up against the earth. Yet when he jumped he could see the peak of the house poking out of the mud in the distance. He father walked on ahead, picking up speed.
Dan started after him. The rain, which had fallen for weeks, hung like a sickness in the air. Now he could see the beginnings of a path where the grass h
ad been trampled down by the Tamsleys on their trips out to this disaster.
Dan caught up. "Is it buried all the way?"
His father shook his head. "No, but it's pushed up against the trees pretty good."
They walked. Soon Dan felt the dampness seep into his boots. The world seemed out of scale. Next to him was a ridge of earth born only this morning. A mass of earth as long and high as the ridge that ran behind his father's funeral home, a ridge that Dan assumed had been there for centuries. But this mass was new to the world, fresh and wet. He wondered if it might still be moving, at a pace too slow to detect. "This is just like the glaciers," he said out loud. "Or like a river when you look at it from underground."
His father stopped. "What?"
"From underground," Dan said.
His father turned and looked at the mudslide, then back at Dan. "What is it you're saying?"
"This looks like a river from underground," Dan said, putting a hand out
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and twisting it over. ''If you were standing underground. I mean completely upside down."
"What river? Where's the water?"
"If you were under it, Dad. Say the world were upside down."
His father shook his head and put the shovel back over his shoulder. "This is mud here, Dan," he said, looking straight at him as if to make sure that Dan understood.
They walked a little farther and soon Dan could see the house clearly. It was flipped up on its side, and the wedge he had seen was not the peak of the house at all, but one of the corners tilted and pushed against the trees. The front porch lay splintered and crushed against a stand of young birches. Dan felt almost as if he were looking at a normal house from above. He decided not to mention this to his father.
His father leaned in a window. "In here."
Dan moved alongside his father and looked in. The room was hip-deep in mud that had poured in the window from the top corner of the room. The bed stuck up at an awkward angle. A lamp was pinned against the wall by the dresser. Dan saw no body.
"Where is he?"
His father pointed to a patch of red in the mud just to the side of the bed. Dan squinted and began to see the slope of a human back. The red was a flannel shirt. "Why didn't they dig him out?" Dan said.
His father clumped the bag of tools up and into the window. "Why should they? That's what we do."
"How do they know who it is?" Dan said.
"This is Jimmy," his father said, lifting a leg up into the room. "It happened three days ago. They hadn't seen him in a couple of days, so they came out here and saw what happened. Even then, they didn't notice him at first." He pulled himself into the room and turned to help Dan. "Hand me my shovel," he said. "I wouldn't want them to dig him out. It's hard enough on people. That's what a removal is, Dan. It's my job."
Dan passed the shovel to his father and then climbed in behind him. His father placed one foot on the wall and one foot on the floor and began to gently dig away the mud, which had hardened around the body since the mudslide. Dan started in. "Dig a trench around him," his father said, "and we'll pull him out with the rope."
They dug for an hour. Periodically his father would sigh, raise a hand and stop to smoke a cigarette. He didn't say much to Dan, who watched the rigid shape of Jimmy Tamsley grow out of the hole they dug. As they broke the mud from his face, they found that his mouth was open, his eyes closed. His arms were frozen in front of him, bent inwards as if he were holding on to something
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big, like a tree. They broke as much of the mud away from his hair as they could. What was left formed a corona of blond hair and dark earth around his contorted face.
Dan had seen corpses all his life, so he didn't mind looking at Jimmy for long stretches of time. Jimmy never bothered him while he was alive, either. He had never really struck Dan as much more than an unlucky farmer in a valley of lucky ones; a lanky, dirty man, who paced the floors of Dan's mother's diner with a curious nervous energy, moving from booth to booth, seat to seat, in a clumsy attempt to pick up gossip and tips from the other farmers. Now, in this posture of death, trapped in the motion of escape, he seemed peaceful, and Dan found himself staring.
When they dug down past the waist they found that he was naked below the red flannel shirt. Dan's father ran a rope down under the legs, but the mud at this lower level was still wet and wouldn't give. They pulledhis father heaving, the rope tied over his back like an oxbut the body would not come free.
So they dug. More slowly now, as they were tired and the space got tighter when they dug deeper. Soon they found that his calf was pinned underneath the bed, snapped in half, and it took them another hour to dig down under the bed to free it. Then the body came loose, and they lifted it with the ropes and rolled it to the window, where Dan pushed it out to his father
They laid the body in the wet grass. It was late morning by then, the gray skies spread above them, the clouds higher than before. The mist had pulled up and away His father reached down, stuck a finger in the mouth and pulled out a plug of dirt lodged in it. "Tamsleys might want to see him before we leave," he explained, wiping his hands on the canvas as he bent to wrap the corpse.
Dan threw the last flap over Jimmy Tamsley's broken, crouching body One leg curled beneath the body, one legthe broken onewas splayed out, so that Jimmy looked something like a dancer, arms frozen in embrace, hands clenching the hardened mud like a knife behind an unseen partner's back.
Dan's father pulled the flap back immediately. Dan knew the tenor of the motion. His father had seen something he didn't like. "For the love of Christ," he said, throwing his cigarette to one side. "Will you look at this?" But he wasn't speaking to anyone in particular, Dan knew, only out loud. He reached down and pulled something like a belt that was wrapped around Jimmy Tamsley's waist. He pulled and yanked until the flaps of mud and grass that covered the groin and belly began to fall away. Dan reached in to pull at the dirt, but his father pushed his hands away. Soon Dan, standing at some distance now, could see that Jimmy Tamsley was wearing a leather harness, one that clamped his penis into a muddy hard-on. As his father cleared the last of the mud away, Dan stepped back a little. His father pulled a knife from the tool bag.
"What are you going to do?" Dan said softly.
"Jesus," his father said to himself as he knelt down next to the body. "Jesus,
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Jesus, Jesus." He slid the knife beneath the harness and began to cut it away. When the harness came free he carried it around the house and lobbed it up on top of the mudslide. Dan sat down on a birch tree bent under by the house, while his father resumed working, wrapping the corpse again. As he tied a rope around the bundle he said, with his eyes down, hands busy, as if talking to no one in particular, "No one should have to see that kind of thing." Then he signaled Dan to come around and lift with him. "No one should even have to know about it. Not me. Not you. No one."
He gave Dan a look then, a look that asked for a mutual understanding, a contract between father and son. "No one should know."
"I won't tell anyone," Dan said. "Don't worry."
His father walked back to the house and looked in the window at the ruined bedroom. Dan sat in the wet grass. "You could dig and dig," his father said, shaking his head.
Suddenly Dan knew. His father was looking for someone else, another body buried in the mud. It was as if a voice were whispering in his ear, telling him things, showing him the things he had never seen before. A woman. They were doing it. They were holding each other. Grabbing each other.
Dan came up alongside his father. He scanned the room from side to side. "I don't see anything," he said.
His father nodded. "Maybe there's nothing to see."