The Pillows Are Crying
Still waters run deep.
Between one and ten years old, I was known as a child who cried all the time, at the drop of a hat, and who had frequent episodes of uncontrollable rage. They called me “tender hearted,” and no one ever knew how much or what they could say or do around me, or to me. My rage was that of a cornered and wounded animal. It frightened those around me. My mama and daddy would tell me when I was almost grown how afraid they had been that I might seriously hurt someone. I was like someone possessed, they said. Like an angry demon inside their angel. Like someone “not right in the head,” not wholly human. And I felt like something different. Something wrong. Sometimes I would try walking with my head tipped to the side, my arm thrown over it, like I had seen parakeets do, when they sleep with their heads under their wings, to see if the world looked more right.
Most of the time, I felt overwhelmed. Overstimulated. Frustrated. Out of control. Things around me moved too fast. People said things and moved on as I waded through the multitude of sounds around me, trying to separate out their words. Until I was around eight years old, the outlines of shapes around me were fuzzy, and things often seemed to melt into each other. When I first rode on a roller coaster, as a young adult, I recognized the nauseous, sick feeling of speed and fear as what I had been feeling “normally” most of my childhood.
Almost everything made me sick. My own emotions made me physically sick. The emotions of others around me made me sick. The thoughts of others made me sick. I could hear their thoughts. I could see them floating through the house like crowds of puppets going back and forth across the stage, wearing countless faces, carrying countless weights. Like bodies on a crowded city street. My thoughts would be lost in the multitude, and I could seldom find them. I came apart like a sack of grain, everything spilling out. I would lie in bed, an empty body searching desperately to be filled.
Touching the wrong spirits made me sick. The cries of objects, like the pillows, hoes, pots, axes, knife blades, doorknobs, glasses, coins, buttons, tables, and lamps made me sick.
The knives were always crying, “Marry me to the bright blood blossoms of your palms, your wrists, your arms, the insides of your thighs.” The high pitch of glasses crying almost made me scream.
The snoring of the plants when they thought no one could hear them often made me sick. Sometimes it healed me. But the way they shrieked when they heard footsteps approaching made me tiptoe. Sometimes it made me stand still and not move at all, just so they wouldn’t be afraid.
The brightness of sunshine was the same way. The loud brightness of the sunshine. Some days, it struck me down like fire burns up a blade of dried grass. Other days it propped me up like the wood beneath a scarecrow.
The buttons cried fake tears to see if they could trick me into weeping for them or holding them or putting a coat or a dry washcloth or a pillow over them to keep them warm. They were always getting cold.
Sometimes someone stepped on a leaf and I burst into tears. Or someone moved a marble I had set on a ledge to keep the world balanced, to keep my heart from sinking. Finding it gone, I would feel like I was plummeting down an abandoned well. I would spend days at the bottom, cold and wet and sucking my thumb. I would spend weeks after that climbing out. Sometimes while I was climbing, someone would start talking to me. My daddy was famous for talking to me at the wrong time. “How’s my little man?” he would say, or “Come here, Red. Sit with your daddy.” Or he would try to play running around or something like that. Or my brothers would jostle me or pull the covers off at night when I was almost to the top of the well. And as soon as I paid attention to them I would forget to hold on. I would lose my grip on the sides of the well and fall back to the bottom. Mama and Granny usually left me alone when I was climbing out. They would hum or sing to help me stay focused.
Some days someone would let the screen door slam, and I would imagine Daddy’s gun had gone off, that Mama had shot him and he lay bleeding on the kitchen floor, while white chickens pecked in the yard. I would think her anger had burst, and he lay torn up inside, like when a bullet entered the belly of a hog or tore up a horse’s head. Like when a dog went mad and Daddy leaned the stock of his .22 against his cheek and the gunpowder singed the air and the dog lay kicking on his side, confused that he couldn’t move. Confused about the sudden ebbing of his spirit out of him. Sometimes when the screen door slammed, I would find a corner and curl up into a ball.
From the earliest age, I lived by ritual, and as I got older the rituals magnified. They held the world together, even though the world was still in a fog. They minimized the pain. Sit every day of summer and listen to the butterflies whisper. Touch the maple tree every spring morning. Bury eight circles of acorns at the edge of the woods every fall, one for each of us, and walk around the circles every Monday after school. Always carry a favorite rock, or piece of bark, or piece of wood in my pocket. Rub the dust off my yellow pencils every night before bed. Pray every night before bed. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Lord bless my family. Lord bless the grass. Lord bless the stars.”
Be careful of what I touch. Because when I touch vinyl, a knife goes through my liver. When I touch concrete, cold hands wrap around my heart. “If you sit on concrete,” the adults would say, “you get piles.” Hogs with “piles” walked around with parts of their intestines, bright pink, hanging out of their rectums. When I touch wood, there is a soft humming. When I touch cold water, I drown. When I touch iron, I am crucified. Aluminum, I am ripped to shreds. Copper is a friendly hand, reaching out of water. When I touch polyester, my skin falls slowly apart, like filo burnt to a crisp. When I touch glass, I get mildly shocked. When I touch hair, I’m inside someone else’s body. When I touch grass, warm water runs over me. When I touch a blossom, I melt, dispelling my hunger. When I touch bark, I have déjà vus. When I touch mud, I am paralyzed, cold worms squirm inside me.
I was obsessed with light. I felt it as palpably as rain on my skin. If a room is too bright, get out of it. If I can’t get out, find the shadow of a wooden object. If a room is too dim, close my eyes. The light has to have rose in it. It has to have indigo, diffused as the scent of earth after a summer shower, or I can’t breathe. Then get out of it.
So much depended on me. Raise my hands to the windows three times each morning to let the slave children know I’m up. Call quietly to the sparrows four times, and then four times again, or the baby sparrows won’t be able to fly. Tilt my head to the left at eleven o’clock so the clouds can drift left down the tilted sky. In the grayed, oak fence boards of the pigpen, there were eyes disguised as knots in the wood. Every day, brush my hands lightly over the eyes so that they will have sight and can look out at the garden and the orchard. Lightly, though, so that the boards won’t be frightened and defend themselves with splinters. Every day, tap the corner of the henhouse so the chickens will keep laying. So the roosters will stay red. So the roosters will not turn entirely the green of one of their tail feathers.
Don’t get up in the morning until I hear the pillows sigh. Touch each pillow five times or the pillows will cry. Whisper to them, because they like whispering. For some reason, I heard the cries of pillows more loudly than I heard those of anything else. They were like the whines of starving kittens, huddled together waiting for a mother that would never come back. And so, I had to mother them.
It took only small things to bring on a convulsion. Smells could trigger them. A wrong texture. A wrong sound. I hated nothing more than my convulsions. It wasn’t so much the going as the coming back. I had seen other children with fits, and so I could imagine what I looked like. It was scary and grotesque, and the shame of wetting on myself, at whatever age I may have been, made me want to die. To just not exist.
Light breaking into the room the wrong way could trigger them. I had to always be in the right light, but never in the light entirely. Never so far away from shade that I couldn’t reach out and hold on to
it, leap back into it.
I was allergic to almost everything. But I wouldn’t understand this until I was in my twenties and had moved away from home. The names of illnesses, such as “allergies,” were not a part of my childhood. I was just “sick.” I had severe reactions to dust, molds, pollens, animal hairs, feathers, water, vegetable and fruit skins. Bark. Metals. Insect bites and stings. I was stung so many times that it seemed like wasps hated me and sought me out. Wherever I was stung swelled quickly to many times its normal size. If I was stung anywhere on my face, my eyes would swell over until I was blind. If I was stung on a foot, I couldn’t put on my shoe. I learned where the wasps hid: in sawdust, in bushes, in the eaves of houses, on the sides of boards, in holes in the ground. But there was no way to avoid all of these.
Sometimes Daddy took us to the CC camp, where the fresh scent of wood and sawdust was like a perfume, a liquor. I loved the feeling of sawdust under my feet, the whirring sound of saw blades singing in the sun, the glistening skin of dark sweaty men, and the bowed and straight long lengths of brown and pink cedar planks, edged with gray bark. But almost always while I was there, I’d step on a nest of wasps, and red, black, and yellow, they’d sting me with a fury.
I was having asthma attacks all the time and almost dying. Each spring, when the wild onions shouted through the ground and the jonquils opened and spewed their pollens to the winds, when the bees hummed like twisters around the dazzling forsythia and the dogwoods splayed open in mock stigmatas, I took a deep breath and felt my chest closing. I could feel the mindful spreading of toxins through my lungs, like bony fingers, like spider web, like deer sinew being pulled tight around a pelt. I could feel the breath leaving me, refusing to return, my chest tightening as if someone was turning a wrench, and the sound of my wheezing and labored breath as abrupt as the caw of crows in early dawn. People say that life is free, but it didn’t feel that way to me. I had to work hard to stay alive.
I was often saying goodbye to the people looking down at me, whose fear I could smell, who seemed to also be saying goodbye to me. Daddy would sit by the bed sometimes and hold my hand. “Dennis, do you feel like you’re dying?” he’d ask, almost reverently. “No, Daddy, no, I’m not dying,” I’d reassure him.
I often had a knot in my stomach, a sinking feeling. Almost nothing was clear. Sometimes people were so nice to me that the knot disappeared. Sometimes I could run and play with my brothers and sisters and cousins from through the woods, and I would know what I was doing. And I could even come out first, or on top, or win. Sometimes my body could do the right things, as good as, or better than, some of the others.
The times when I could run and play would never last long. Something not human would come and get me. Where am I going when I’m not here anymore? I wondered a lot, lying in bed. What will it be like? Who will be my mama there? Will it hurt? “Will it hurt?” I asked the tall shadow in the corner of the room, as filaments of dust floated in the small light from the window. “Is my baby brother there? Will I see him? Will he know me?” Some days the shadow stayed put, silent, present, but not really watching me. Some days he lifted up his head and opened a trembling mouth filled with sharp teeth. Other days, there was a glow, like that from the sun, but not really, because it was strangely made of something unlike light, which I never quite understood. “Can you play with me?” I asked on some days, and he would. He took me places filled with the music of waterfalls, through layers of gauze and fog. He took me to meadows where no sound could be heard, and we played hide-and-seek among stones that were soft when I fell. He took me to places where the moonlight touched and held me and the sobs that wracked my body moved away from me, rippling the very atmosphere, where my breath made the wind that rustled the leaves and my tears flew into the clouds like birds with a single mind.
I never really wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to be what my parents called “retarded.” I heard them sometimes, talking about me. They said maybe I was the sign of their sins, and I didn’t want to be their sins. If I were their sins, I could never go anywhere, or ride in a car or on a bus. Like my cousins across the road, and my other cousin down in the bottom, I would always have to stay at home.
So I tried to try. I opened my mouth and tried to speak but could only grunt. I watched my mama and my granny’s mouths closely, but after a few words, my attention would wander to the shapes of their teeth, the little holes on their tongues, or the sounds of other things, like my baby sister crying, a rooster, a cow, the dogs.
I tried to stop tasting people, and talk, because it bothered people. I tasted them as a natural reflex, the way animals did. At first with my real tongue, slyly, holding on to someone’s arm. And then with some other tongue no one could see. I tasted what was in their cells with a warm curiosity. I smelled them and listened to their footsteps and the way they breathed.
By the time I was four, when the first words spilled out, my parents had almost given up. When I was older, they would laugh about all the pig and cow grunts I made, the new languages I taught them. But back then, they worried. But talking would never come easy. It would never feel natural. I felt as if words were stones attached to threads of my body. As soon as they left my mouth, they sank into invisible waters, slowly unraveling the spools of my belly and heart.
Certain sounds caught my ear, and so I made them over and over. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. Car. “Put that plate on the kitchen counter, Bubba.” Put that plate. Put that plate. Put that plate. Put that plate. Put that plate. Put that plate. Put that plate . . . Sometimes the sounds startled me, because they seemed to be coming from somewhere else, from someone other than me. Sometimes my brothers and sisters would complain. “Mama, can you make Dennis stop!?” “All right, Red,” my mama would say. And I would keep rocking to the sound, back and forth, back and forth, sitting there on the floor, or the bed, but only whispering now. My mama and my daddy called me “Red” because my hair turned fiery in the sun. All right, Red. All right, Red. All right, Red. All right, Red. All right, Red. All right, Red. I couldn’t stop the repeater. And not repeating was like not shivering when it was freezing cold.
And this was the thing about talking. Some of the parts of me that are most me have still never talked. They can’t. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. If I was sitting in a room sorting rocks, or pieces of bark, or lost in splotches of light, or reading a book and someone came in and started talking, a part of me might turn and say something to them. It might say something and then say something else. But a part of me would keep its back turned. It couldn’t help it.
The me I knew best listened. I was the child who lay awake at night, listening. I was the child who stayed behind at the dinner table when all the other children had gone, listening to my mama and daddy and sometimes my granny talk, slowly sorting my food and planning combinations of bites. I was the child in my mama and daddy’s bed. They talked at night, and I listened. In the sounds of their breathing as they slept were cities filled with restless and hungry people. The sounds of their talking were my blankets. The colors their talking made were my pillows. Sometimes their talking was a growing mass of crisscrosses, green like the holly. Other times the threads went through me, like swords, and twisted together, like roots going through earth.
But there were plenty of other people talking all around me, a matrix of talk. So no one missed my voice. And I was listening to spirits. Behind my granny’s house, in the meadow where my birth trailer had been, were locust trees. There were other trees whose names I do not know. And in the meadow the spirits came and went. There was Grandpa Walter, Cousin Molly, Great-great-grandmother, Hattie, Gracie, Ophelia, Nathaniel, Douglass, and many others. Pods fell from one of the trees and burst open, seeds singing with souls from another era. On the borders of the meadow were my granny’s flowerbeds, filled with roots and bulbs. And all of them knew the spirits. Snow on the mountain. Begonias. Pansies. Daffodils. Madonna lilies. I could hear spirits moving across the hy
drangeas, the papery lips of gladiolus, sweet peas, and impatiens.
Alongside the meadow, across a little fence, was a road that went back through the woods. A lot of our cousins lived back through there. I could hear them talking through the thick cluster of woods. Yelling out. Laughing. Our cousins’ mama was named Betty and their daddy’s name was Nat. Our cousins were named Freda, Lynn, Bootsie Lee, Man, and Baby Sis. I could hear them talking sometimes, coming and going, passing by our house. Sometimes we took the rutted path through the woods, going to our cousins’ house. The path went down a hill where, at the bottom, a wooden bridge passed over a small creek, and then gradually climbed and curved around to right. Some days we went to their house, and some days they came to ours. Their house was small, the boards warped and gray, their grain washed rough by decades of weather. They were ashy, like our bony black arms and legs. You would never want to run your bare skin along them, for fear of getting splinters. Sometimes we played in the woods or fields, and other times we played in their yard and ours, where dogs and cats and chickens ran freely about.
Mama and Granny and Daddy talked about our cousins sometimes. They were “good time” people, they said. But our family didn’t understand the idea of a good time. It puzzled us. Good time went with not getting ahead, and so we condemned it. We were “church people.” Good time was devil things. Good time was sin. On Saturday nights our cousins drank and laughed, juked, smoked, danced, and planted sloppy kisses all over each other’s good-time bodies. Or so we were told. And so it was often with a long, stern eye on us that our parents said, “I guess so” when we asked to go through the woods to our cousins’ house and play.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 5