Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  Anytime a grown-up said something like “where you want to go in life,” I tuned out, but this time, Michael wouldn’t let me. He had that look on his face again, the one he only wore when big things went wrong. But all he said was, “You’re going to go someplace.”

  I felt warm and sleepy, and I didn’t really feel like going anywhere. “Where we going?” I asked.

  “Just somewhere.” His sigh was short and didn’t sound quite like him. “People grow up here and they . . . they get stuck, Sash. They get tired and they get in a rut, and then before they know it, they’re thirty and nothing’s ever gonna change. There’s a whole world out there, and most people here, they don’t ever see it.”

  I looked up the road at the sun splashing patterns on the pavement. Yellow flowers sprouted out of cracks in the sidewalk. “Ain’t this part of the world?”

  “Ain’t ain’t a word, squirt. And yeah, this is part. Only it’s just one part. You’ve got to promise me you’re going to see at least a few of the other parts. The better ones.” His voice went low, almost like he wasn’t even talking to me anymore. “I can’t stand the thought of you staying in this damn town your whole life.”

  I thought of our mother, who ran away, and I linked my arm through Michael’s, suddenly scared he might disappear, too. It wasn’t till a long time later, thinking back, that I realized that was around the time Michael stopped talking about getting himself out of here. The only escape he talked about anymore was mine.

  • • •

  I sit alone on the bus every day. It’s funny how people leave room around you once they know you as “that kid who punched that other kid for no reason.” But once I’m in my seat the morning after the vigil, the girl I punched changes seats to slide in next to me.

  This is such a shock that it takes me a moment to process. By the time I have, she’s already making herself at home on the far end of the bench seat, slipping out of her backpack straps and balancing the pack on her skinny knees.

  “Hi,” she says. Her voice, like her hair and the tip of her nose, defies gravity, lilting upward. I try to think of an appropriate response. One that convinces her how sorry I am to have punched her. One that explains it was an accident. One that buys me a fresh start.

  I come up with, “Hi.”

  “I wasn’t”—except she pronounces it like wadn’t—“sure you wanted any friends, but I never noticed you having any and I thought”—except she pronounces it like thowt—“you might be looking for one.”

  “Well, that’s . . .” I search for something I can say that will match her manner of speaking and make her feel comfortable. I end up saying, “. . . hmm.”

  We sit while the trees hop by. I say hop because the bus is bouncing. Road crews never make it this far out the holler.

  “We got nine goats and five cats, but I ain’t allowed to get a dog,” she tells me.

  “You moved here with nine goats and five cats? How’d that work?”

  “We didn’t move. I just never came to school before.”

  This doesn’t sound possible. “How’d you manage that?”

  “I was homeschooled. But now my dad thinks I need more social skills.”

  She seems plenty social to me, but then my standards in that area are low.

  “I’m Jaina,” she offers.

  Even though I already know this—everybody knows the new kid’s name—I pounce on the new topic. “I’m Sasha.”

  “I know,” she says. Then she looks embarrassed. I shouldn’t be surprised she knows my name. Everybody knows the weird kid, too.

  • • •

  In social studies, we do coal mining as a current event. It’s not one of the lessons they made us write down in our planners, and I remind myself that I shouldn’t complain to Mr. Powell about it later. I hate when the teachers don’t stay on topic. It’s easier to talk about classwork than real stuff. But Mr. Powell has told me more than once that my constant critique of my classes has more to do with me needing to feel in control than it does with my education. He says it’s because so many things have been out of my control lately.

  It’s not that I don’t see his point. It’s just that it’s really not what we’d had planned for today, and for once, I had my homework done.

  Also, I really don’t like to talk about coal mining.

  Talking about coal mining in Caboose never ends well. It’s been brought up more and more lately because of a few big accidents in our own state as well as in Kentucky, Tennessee, and other places that share our livelihood. When people run for office, they talk about it, and then everybody at home talks about it. How accident rates really are on the decline, and the news just makes it seem otherwise. How so-and-so’s daddy and his daddy and his daddy were coal miners and it was good enough for them. How it’s the best living around and how politicians care more about the environment than jobs.

  Today’s class discussion goes a little bit different. It seems like everybody in class knows somebody who knows somebody who knew the miners who died last week.

  “But it was a freak accident,” one kid says. “It’s a dangerous job; that’s one reason they get paid so much. They know it’s dangerous. That’s what they sign up for.”

  “I think what they sign up for is having a job, period,” a boy in the front row offers. “The other stuff they just have to put up with.”

  “Your dad owns a laundry mat!” the first kid points out, distracted, pulling her hair up into a ponytail while she argues. “My dad and uncle are miners, and they love what they do! They’re not ‘just putting up with’ anything!”

  “There’s a lot of jobs that’s dangerous!” another boy pipes up. “Police, paramedics, firemen . . .” His voice trails off, and I sense the second when half the people in the class glance at me.

  I raise my hand.

  “Sasha?” Mr. Pope asks. “You can speak up. You don’t have to raise your hand during current events.”

  I slowly withdraw my hand, keeping my head down. “May I be excused? I’d like to talk to Mr. Powell, if that’s all right.”

  • • •

  But I don’t. I sit in his office, drawing treetops on the inside cover of my social studies books. Treetops are easy. They’re all leaves and smudgy texture. It’s the trunks that give me trouble. I can’t ever get the angle right.

  Mr. Powell finishes with the student before me, a burly kid with a wallet chain hanging out of his pocket, legs the width of the tree trunks I’ve been drawing, disappearing sockless into untied kicks. My eyes trail from his retreating figure to Mr. Powell standing in the doorway of his office.

  “Ms. Harless,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Social studies,” I answer.

  He sighs shortly. “Come in.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Sasha, you came to see me.” He’s moving quickly through the stages of Mr. Powell anxiety. He started out with his hands at his sides, but now they’ve moved to his pockets. He bounces up onto the balls of his feet and back down.

  “Yeah, but you were busy. Now the bell’s about to ring.”

  He walks out to sit next to me in the yellow fabric-covered chairs that line the rose-pink wall. His hands go from pockets to running through his thick hair right on schedule. “Sasha. Is everything all right?”

  I glance up from my drawing. “I mean, I don’t want to be late for English.”

  Right on time, his arms crisscross his chest. I’ve gotten pretty good at reading Mr. Powell’s frustration with me. “Why didn’t you want to stay in social studies?”

  I glance back down at my book and start erasing the treetops before he can get mad about them. I don’t know what to say.

  “Were they discussing something that was upsetting to you?”

  Bingo! But I don’t tell him that. The more times Mr. Powell is right, the more t
imes I think there might actually be something wrong with me.

  “Were they discussing yesterday’s candlelight vigil?”

  I think of the flowers on the news. The stories that couldn’t begin to sum up what the stories left behind had lost. I smack the cover of my book shut, hard.

  “We weren’t supposed to talk about it!” I blurt out, and then the bell rings.

  • • •

  In English we do haiku. Five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the last. They’re supposed to have something to do with nature, like running streams or hazy mountains. They’re supposed to capture a single moment in time.

  We’re supposed to do three. The kids around me moan and groan. Something about the shortness of haiku feels good to my pencil. I write and write.

  I do:

  Walking from the store

  where the GUI-tar waits for me—

  when will it be ours?

  I do:

  Mom picked up and left.

  The rest of us waited, but

  she didn’t come back.

  I do:

  Mom sang about birds.

  No, that isn’t quite true. She

  sang about cages.

  I do:

  Dad walked down and down.

  Me and Michael waited, but

  he didn’t come back.

  I do:

  Phyllis likes to sing,

  but guitars will break when they

  hit the windowpane.

  I do:

  On the bus today,

  Jaina sat and talked to me.

  Could we become friends?

  I do:

  Coal mines can collapse.

  I watch miners come and go—

  except when they die.

  I do:

  So many people

  are down under the ground here.

  Some in mines. Some not.

  • • •

  We read our haiku to the class, each student choosing one to share. We hear poems about report cards and poems about cardinals on tree branches and poems about how much the writer doesn’t like writing poetry. I can’t imagine how I’m going to choose just one. I finally do:

  In history class,

  we do a lot of talking

  about scary things.

  • • •

  Miss Jacks calls me to her desk after class. “Sasha,” she says. “I wanted to talk to you about your poems.” She’s holding my paper in her hand.

  “I know they’re supposed to be about nature,” I blurt, afraid she’s going to give me a bad grade. Michael always said I have to get good grades if I want someone else to pay for college. And believe me, sister, you want somebody else to pay for college.

  Miss Jacks wears T-shirts and jeans instead of the khakis and polos most of the other teachers wear. Today’s T-shirt is sky blue and says GRIZZLIES on it, showing our school mascot. She’s got long brown hair that she wears loose on her shoulders so that it tangles around the stems of her glasses; she’s always having to take them off and sort them out.

  She’s looking at me with this long, strange look that I’ve never seen on a teacher’s face before. Like she’s afraid of me or something. “They are about nature, Sasha,” she says. “They’re about the nature of where you’re growing up.”

  Or maybe not afraid of me so much as for me. I don’t know what to say, so I look at the clock and then the door.

  “You’re an excellent student,” she says. “Just like your brother.”

  No one’s ever called me an excellent student before, but I’m more interested in the second thing she said. “You had Michael?”

  “Twice. Honors and yearbook. He was a brilliant student, your brother. A beautiful writer.”

  This is news to me. I never read a word Michael wrote. He put out fires. He encouraged me to go to college, but he never went himself. The idea of Michael sitting in Miss Jacks’s class, writing haiku, makes something well up in me, and for a minute it’s difficult to catch my breath. Even now, after three months have passed, I still have moments where all the air leaves the room for a minute.

  “What did . . . did he write?” I have to work to make the words come out.

  “Science fiction,” she says with a smile. “A couple of westerns. Your brother liked adventure.” She makes a small sound, halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

  I don’t know what to say. I look back and forth between Miss Jacks and the door. Her eyes are misty. “Go on,” she says. “Go get the bus.”

  I don’t know her well, haven’t done much to draw her attention besides turning in papers and refusing to raise my hand. This is the first time I’ve really noticed how tired she looks up close.

  “Is my—are my poems okay? Do you want me to do them again?”

  “They’re just fine,” she says. “But if you do write more, I’d sure like to read them.”

  • • •

  I want to write haiku all the way home, but I can’t. Jaina is next to me again and leaves no downtime for thought. She doesn’t give me any clues as to why she’s trusting me even though I hurt her. She talks about her favorite TV show and her new video game and her upcoming weekend trip to Tennessee. She tells me about the boy she has a crush on and the funny part in the book she’s reading and her bad math grade. She tells me she’s mad that she has to go straight home today because of makeup work and she can’t stay for after-school activities. She barely ever stops for a breath.

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” I blurt in the middle of her sermon about how unfair Mr. Samples is when he grades his social studies tests.

  Jaina laughs this weird little laugh, like a dog barking. “You’re a weird kid. You know that, right?”

  “Then why’d you sit down next to me?”

  “’Cause I’m a weird kid, too. I’m new. All new kids are weird, didn’t you know? Least that’s what Anthony says.” She grins. “I know you was aiming for Anthony, and who can blame you for that?”

  • • •

  “I would like to walk to Town Center.”

  Phyllis smiles. “A walk sounds nice.”

  “I would like to walk alone.”

  Her smile disappears. “I see.”

  Now I think maybe I hurt her feelings. So I say, “Never mind. Let’s stay home.”

  • • •

  After Phyllis goes to sleep, I walk to Town Center. It’s spooky in the dark. There are ribbons on the trees.

  I mean to write. The rules and rhythms of haiku have been bouncing around in my brain since I left Miss Jacks alone at her desk. I have my notebook and my pen and a flashlight I took from the junk drawer in Phyllis’s kitchen, and I have all these ideas floating around that are just the right length for haiku. I feel like if I’m going to do them right, I need to be somewhere in nature so I can write about it. I’m not brave enough for the woods at night, so I choose the park.

  But in the center of the park, on the steps of the caboose, somebody has placed three hard hats with lamps. One of the hats is red. The ground in front of the caboose is piled with flowers, mostly daisies and baby’s breath, along with one carnation—not the evaporated milk but the flower—and a few red roses.

  Now there are even more words, too many words for me to write down, bubbling up in my head and through my heart, and I can’t make them stop. I hear patterns of syllables in my head, 5–7–5, and they are all about loss and death and sadness and men with grimy faces who leave for work and don’t come home. It’s like haiku has opened a door inside me that I’m trying with all my might to shove closed again. I feel an itch in my fingers, in my bones. I pull the weeds out of the spaces between the steps of the caboose. I sweep loose twigs off the park bench. I gather the garbage the druggies have left and cram it into the trash can. I try to find the “off�
�� valve for the floodgate of words the sad memorial and my English assignment have opened up.

  My fingers twitch toward flowers at the edge of the park. I pick a purple clover and place it on the pile. I do one more haiku in my head:

  If this town were a

  bird, it would not be able

  to fly anymore.

  Then I swear off poetry.

  11

  “I thought you might want to stay for poetry club on Thursdays.”

  This was not what I expected when Miss Jacks asked me to stay after again. I was thinking maybe she’d had a second look at my poetry and decided it wasn’t right after all. My nervousness must show on my face, because she starts trying to talk me into it. “It’s Friday now, so you’ve got almost a week to think about it. Just mull it over, will you? We experiment with new poetry forms. We freewrite. We critique each other’s work. A lot of the kids enter contests. There’s one every quarter, and they give scholarships.”

  Scholarships. It’s one of those escape words Michael was always pushing me toward, and I latch onto it like a sign from him. Maybe I was too quick to swear off poetry.

  “What kinds of scholarships?”

  “Well, for talented writers. Some are for specific programs of study, like journalism or English, but a lot of them are just general scholarships.”

  “How late do you stay?” I ask, wondering how they could squeeze poetry club in before the buses run.

  “We meet from three fifteen to four fifteen.”

  “Oh.”

  “You would need to arrange a ride home.”

  “Oh.” I leave.

  • • •

  Before the sun rises Saturday morning, I have already worked up a sweat pacing the porch. I’ve been pacing since Hubert raised one hand in a wave and then walked out to his truck on his first day back at work.

  The accident at Dogwood wasn’t big enough to close the mine. It was only a little thing, only a fluke. Human error on the part of one of the men who died. It could happen in any job. It’s not going to happen again. Everyone is safe; that’s what they’ve said. The mine’s open again, barely over a week after the accident.