The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  The headstones and tombs are carved with family names and long gone dates and the oxidized faces of people now forgotten.

  Along the road near the cemetery, I see the woman, running, and in front of her is her boy, running too.

  The boy runs along the low, iron fence bordering the church grounds. I walk toward it and when I’m closer I see that he runs with his hands over his ears, pressing hard, his eyes half closed, and it seems that he is screaming. But it’s a sound I can’t hear in the wailing of the sirens.

  The boy sees me and falls down, onto the dirt along the fence, and already he is curling into a ball.

  The woman reaches him, drops to her knees, then lies down, curling up around him, legs tucked up against him, arms wrapped around his chest and around his arms and with one hand she tries to hold his forehead.

  I stand watching them, just a few feet away.

  The air-raid sirens cycle one last time.

  And now it’s quiet.

  The mother and her boy still lie in the dirt.

  It is many minutes later that she speaks. The boy still covers his ears. But I’m sure that he can hear her on the ground, her voice right next to his ear.

  “The sound of sirens terrifies him,” she says. “I think it’s the volume, not the sirens themselves. This is one more reason we came here. The quiet. The absence of sudden noises.”

  She runs one hand along the boy’s forehead, lightly. Gentle.

  “He was not always like this,” she says. “He used to talk. He used to sing.”

  The boy still covers his ears.

  “They wanted us to leave our home,” she says. “Our dying neighborhood in the South End. They shut off the power and they shut off the water and still we would not leave. Fifty people. Thirty homes. We still lived there. But they kept at us. Cutting the streetlights and the bus service and making clear that the fire and police would no longer respond. But still we all stayed. We had jobs near our neighborhood and most of us owned those homes and even those that didn’t, they felt like they owned their homes too.”

  She stops. I hear my hand touch the rail on top of the fence. I hear her breathing. I hear the boy breathing too.

  “So they condemned our homes. And when they’d condemned our homes they could declare us, me, everyone, they could declare us all unfit. Unfit to stay. Unfit to live there. And unfit to be a parent. And I came home and they’d taken him. Away. To a foster parent. A protector. Because I was unfit. That’s what they said. ‘You are unfit. Look at where you live. Now the boy will be safe.’” She looks at me from the ground. “The abuse started within days. Abuse of every kind.” She speaks without moving. Only stares. “What happened to that man, it was entirely deserved.” She leans down, kissing her boy’s head where he still presses it into the ground. “That man deserved to die. And all of them, every one of them who took my boy and my home from me, all of them deserve the same.”

  • • •

  In the morning, the woman and her boy are gone.

  She has left me a handwritten note, sealed in an envelope she’s slid underneath my office door.

  The woman killed that man. On that hill near my playground. She hit him once in the head. She did not think that he would die. But she left him there to bleed.

  I will leave now, she writes. With my boy.

  Thank you, she writes. For how you’ve helped us both.

  And for me, in the morning, there is always a reason to cry.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 5

  The lack of crime in the North End has not completely erased a sense of wariness. A lifetime’s expectation, even teaching, that, left on their own, some people will turn to violence. That some people will inevitably, maybe necessarily, manifest the worst that humans are capable of doing.

  It has not happened here. It’s as if there is no motivation for such a descent into darkness. No items worth stealing that aren’t easily available to possess. No places of importance to defend or protect. No market for drugs or sex or some activity over which people would be willing to fight.

  We live the uneasy peace of the tired and resigned.

  I write this up for the paper.

  Yet the next day, while walking back downtown from a commission meeting, a red car playing loud music passes me, slows half a block ahead, then reverses. The kids, white and brown, look out at me, the music still thumping in the car.

  Of course I am wary. These people aren’t from here.

  “What have you got?” one of the kids asks.

  It’s clear they’ve wandered across the overpass. It happens a few times a year. Wannabe gang members or rich kids killing their boredom. I’m not sure which these ones are.

  “What have you got?” someone asks again.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Where can we find something going on here?” another asks. “Where’s the party here?”

  I shake my head. “There isn’t one.”

  They are laughing. I’m an unshaven older man in a heavy, black blazer, carrying a camera and a notebook.

  “What about that camera?” one of them asks.

  I can’t say that I am nervous. I know that I’m not scared. I am just very aware of what might happen.

  “Let me see that camera,” one says.

  I say to him, “No.”

  “I said, ‘Let me see that camera.’”

  “No.”

  We’re in a dark area, a few square blocks where all light has been shut off. The only streetlights are a few blocks away.

  “One more time,” says the kid in the passenger seat. “Let me see the camera.”

  I turn and run. I cut between two houses, through a back gate, into the alley, and I can hear their voices somewhere behind me. Not close yet, but moving.

  I turn right, down the dark alley, staying close to the fences and garages, running fast. Faster than I’d thought I could run. Wind blowing past me with force. My legs and arms and chest pushing forward.

  A block and a half away, I hop a fence, then slip into a garage. It’s hard to see because it’s so dark, but my eyes are adjusting to the limited light.

  I hear their voices in the alley, right outside the garage. I can see the outlines of their bodies through the dirty, cracked windows.

  Once they pass, I find what I am looking for, gasoline in a metal can high up on an old shelf. I also find a screwdriver on the floor and put it in my jacket pocket.

  I hear the kids still walking down the alley. They are talking to one another, bouncing their hands along fences and garage doors. Not trying to be quiet as they look for me. But also there’s the reality that there is no other noise. In the North End, at night, there is a nearly total lack of sound. These four kids, they have no idea how loud they are. And so I hear it all, every step they take, every fence they touch, every breath they inhale then exhale as they walk.

  “Where’d he go?” one asks.

  I listen for a minute and make sure I hear four voices. All four of them left the car.

  I slide out of the garage door, then head into the dark, abandoned house in front of the garage. It’s a small house that only takes a few minutes to get started. I leave through the front door. I’m two blocks from their car. I cross the street in darkness, standing behind a low shed, watching the house begin to burn. In another few minutes, the kids all show up, staring at the burning house, standing near it at first, but then having to step back as the fire grows. They are laughing as they watch it, one jumping in place, another beginning to do some bad Native American dance, a bad impersonation of a warrior around a campfire.

  Boys always like fire.

  I turn away from them, moving behind a house, then finding the alley and running again. A few blocks away, I go back into the street.

  I can see the glow from the fire. The boys still stand there, the four of them now still, watching the flames, staring up, mouths slightly open, rooted in place in the street before the blaze.

  They have forgotten
all about me.

  And the sound of the fire is loud. Consuming every other noise the kids might otherwise hear.

  I’m standing next to their car. I take the screwdriver and break the valves on both front tires, the air now escaping with a high and steady hiss. Through the open window on the passenger side, I pour the last of the gasoline on the seat and light it, the fabric catching quickly, already spreading up the insides of the car’s upholstery.

  I look back to where the kids are, but they don’t even turn. They are staring at the house on fire. I’m sure they’ll watch it for some time.

  I lift my camera. Take a picture.

  Then I walk toward the nearest fence and slip through the gate. The car burning brightly now. But I only cross the black backyard, then enter the alley.

  It’s another twenty minutes till I reach my hotel.

  There was a time when those kids would have scared me. A time when I would have quickly handed the camera to them. But I’m past that time. I’m not that person.

  And although it’s unclear to me who I have become, I know I’m not a person that I would have ever known.

  • • •

  It’s months since the woman and boy left here.

  Moments that fade. Conversations I can’t quite remember.

  Because much of my memory is, of course, taken up with the things that happened.

  So much of my memory. My thoughts.

  My time.

  • • •

  At night, even covered by the many blankets on my couch, I hear a crash, thick and deep and distant, as another levee collapses to the north, the hiss of water rushing southward, the sound in the air echoing heavily, the water from the bay moving another few blocks toward me.

  • • •

  I have been walking for a few hours along a very old section of downtown when I notice something out of place in the rows of old, two-story brick buildings. I see the difference only because I’m across the street, where I can see past the top edge of the rooflines.

  There is ivy. Bright green ivy, growing along the top edge of three of the buildings.

  And there is a tree. A tall, leafy tree, only its top visible as it grows inside one of the buildings.

  It’s the first green tree, the ivy the first living plant, that I’ve seen in many years.

  I cross the empty street, wind blowing hard against my right side. There are windows on the fronts of the three buildings, but heavy shutters have been pulled tightly closed. The doors are all locked. Two doors have metal gates on them but the wooden door to the left does not. There is a burned-out car half a block away and I sort through the mess in the car before finding a tire iron.

  After a minute of prying on the building’s door, I get it to open.

  On the other side of the door, there is green. A courtyard, or small park. The three buildings have no roofs, no interior walls or floors. The front brick walls are braced with large timbers leaning at angles against them, the timbers also green, with ivy and flowering vines twisted all around them.

  I am not far from my hotel. But I had no idea such a place existed. There is no green in the North End, no trees or flowers or shrubs of any kind.

  Here, though, are shrubs and flowers and a tall tree in the middle of the space. It’s a young tree even as tall as it has grown, the branches covering a narrow space, the trunk itself not much thicker than my hand.

  There’s something astonishing in this. An awe that renders me not quite able to speak or think or move.

  The entire area is a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet deep, bordered on the front by the facades of the buildings, bordered on the sides and back by the tall brick walls of the neighboring structures. The ground floors of the three buildings have mostly been removed. But in some places concrete and brick remain, creating pathways between the plants, leading to a small stone fountain attached to a wall, to a table and chairs near another wall.

  The only sounds are the running water from the fountain and the wind blowing across the open door I came through.

  “The tree took quite a bit of effort,” a voice says and I flinch, startled by the sound. I turn to see a man sitting in a low chair near a table. “I’d prefer if you did not cut it down for firewood.”

  “Of course not,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  He stands up slowly. He is middle-aged, semi-bearded, a black man wearing old corduroys and a heavy sweater under his thick blazer.

  “You don’t need to,” he says. “But close the door if you would.”

  I close the door, then turn back to him. With the door closed, it’s nearly silent here, no sound of wind. Just water running. I see that the water flows from the fountain to a stone pond on one side of the courtyard.

  The man has a book sitting on the low table next to him. There are blankets on his chair. It is not too cold in here, though, as the wind doesn’t blow.

  The stillness, the quiet, are deeper than anything I can remember.

  “I’m sorry I broke your door,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Don’t worry. It’s fine for it to be unlocked. I don’t come or go that way. But maybe now I will.”

  I look around to see how else he might get in and out of here. On the far back wall, there is a doorway, open, that leads into one of the buildings.

  “This is what I do here,” he says. “I garden.” He looks around. “I guess everyone here has some kind of purpose. This is mine.”

  I put my hands in my jacket pockets. An affirmation, I think, a sign that I am listening.

  “For years I worked with the scavengers,” he says. “But eventually I focused just on this.”

  I have a question but can’t figure out how to ask it. We’re quiet for a while.

  “Nothing grows here,” I finally say. “Nothing grows at all.”

  He looks around. “It’s not that nothing can grow,” the man says, pausing. “The old plants, the vegetation that existed, obviously that’s all been wiped out. It will no longer grow. But that doesn’t mean other plants can’t survive.”

  He begins to walk along one of the brick paths, slowly, and in a moment I follow him.

  “You brought the plants in from the South End?” I ask.

  “I trade with the scavengers. They then trade with the brokers, who can find me every type of plant I want. It comes with their mentality. Traders and barterers. There seems to be no plant too exotic that they cannot eventually find.”

  We’re silent again.

  “I was a professor,” he says. He moves very slowly and his arms and hands and even his fingers seem very long, his brown skin in this light made flat and colorless. “I grew up here. I left a long time ago.” He pauses. “Then I came back a few years ago.”

  He sits down at the table with the two chairs. In a moment, I sit in the other chair.

  My wariness is sourceless but ingrained. A way of life for so many years. Wary of people and what they might say. Wary of strangers and what they might ask. Wary of my ability to interact, to talk, to even for a moment connect.

  I ask him, “Why come back?”

  “I came back to try to help,” he says. He leans an elbow on the table, but is sitting facing slightly away from me.

  “Quite obviously,” he says, “I got here much too late to help.”

  The garden he’s created, it brings about some kind of calm. The place feels warmer, not just in the absence of the sharp wind, but in the aura of the branches and the vines along the walls and the long grasses planted in curving rows along the ground. I find myself touching a small flower that grows up the side of the wall. I hadn’t meant to touch it. I only realize what I am doing as I notice he is watching me.

  I take my hand away from the flower.

  “Why are you here?” he asks.

  I think of him as being much older than me, but as I look at him I eventually realize that we are about the same age.

  In another moment, I shake my head. I can’t answer his question.
>
  He leans back in his chair, again turned slightly away from me. Staring up at the tree in the center of the courtyard. He moves very slowly, as if some part of him is very much asleep. “That’s fine,” he says.

  I find myself staring at the tree again, following the trunk where it meets the ground up to the branches spread out above us. Growing, right now.

  “I should ask,” he says, “what is your capacity for violence?”

  I shake my head. Confused.

  “The scavengers ask that of the new people,” he says, smiling some. “‘What is your capacity for violence?’ People are honest among the scavengers. You work from dawn to dusk next to a group of strangers, doing work that is terrible, hard, involved. You want to know something about a person’s nature. At what point do they become impatient, what makes them angry, are they frustrated by difficulty.”

  I run my fingers along the waxy leaves of ivy. The leaves are smooth and soft and spring back in place after I disturb them. I have a moment where I want to press my face against the leaves, but I blink then, and pull my hand away.

  I say to him, “I don’t think of this as a place where there is violence. Or danger. Not from one another.”

  He leans back farther in his chair, balancing on the rear legs of the chair, the back of his head touching the ivy. “It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? No roaming bands of violent men. No lawless acts of depravity.”

  “Maybe we’re just too tired,” I say to him.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But it’s also a place of an unexpected abundance. There are no luxuries. But, at the same time, there are few basic needs that are not readily met.”

  I can’t understand how he’s gotten so much to grow here.

  “And yet, none of that,” he says, “speaks to a person’s capacity for violence.”

  I don’t understand how all this can be alive.

  “I’m one of the people who believes,” he says, turning to me, “that whatever poisons are in the air and dirt and water, I don’t believe they’re insurmountable. Don’t believe that what is happening here can’t eventually be stopped.”