I told how in 1852 a tailor from New York and his friends formed the Wicapi Pioneer Association and started building houses all over Dakota land. I told how he wrote that Wicapi was filled with “the most beautiful growth of timber that the eye could wish to look upon, consisting of sugar maple, black walnut, butternut, white and red oak.” And how those same trees became Minnesota’s first cash crop. The class actually gasped then. Not because we really understand what a cash crop is, but because it’s so weird to talk about how beautiful something is and then cut it down for money.
I told how the government rushed the Dakota into signing treaties and broke them anyway. I told about the six hundred burial mounds around Lake Minnetonka, and Spirit Knob, and how the Dakota tried to hold on to the lake, through all the treaties, but couldn’t. Then I told how thirty-eight Dakota were hanged in Minnesota and two hundred sixty were sent to prison and seventeen hundred were forced into a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Fort Snelling! The place we all went to on the fourth-grade field trip! Where people dressed like pioneers made tools and tapped trees for maple sugar and did not say one word about the Dakota.
I told the whole story. Exactly how it was. How it is. I told them all the things we never see. Even Mr. Sorenson is smiling.
Then Tyler squints even though he already wears glasses and sits in the front row and says, “Wait. What’s that last line on your reference list? Is that Benny H., like, the homeless guy in Wicapi?”
I look at Mr. Sorenson. He blinks at me. “He’s not really homeless,” I say, like it matters.
“Okay. But is he considered a reliable source?” Tyler asks. “I mean, Mr. Sorenson said books and encyclopedias, so I’m just wondering.”
I want to beat Tyler up for implying that Benny H. is unreliable. “He knows a lot of history,” I say to the floor.
“He also talks to invisible beings,” Tyler points out.
I shrug. I set my poster on the stack and go back to my desk.
“No worries, Cease-Fire,” Brandon says as I sink down in my chair. “I thought you did great. I mean, maybe Benny H. is secretly a medicine man.”
“I highly doubt that,” Tyler says.
“Shut up, Owly. We don’t know anything for sure.”
Mrs. Peterson is back from her Power of Poetry in the Classroom conference, and she has a million bad ideas. Today’s is called Word Pairings. We all have to write two random words on two scraps of paper and drop them into a jar that used to hold animal crackers. Poor jar. We’re not allowed to write swear words or body words or insult words or gross words or bathroom words. So now that’s all we’re thinking about. And “by the way” Mrs. Peterson is going to check them all. “Take your time,” she says. “Be creative. Be complex. Be evocative.”
“What’s ‘evocative’?” Sarah asks.
“It’s a word that pulls something out of you,” Mrs. Peterson says. Then she glares at us like daring us to make the very obvious bathroom joke.
“Why are we doing this again?” Mike asks.
Mrs. Peterson smiles and takes a deep breath, like she’s trying to hold on to the Power of Poetry in the Classroom as long as she can before we crush it. “Because interesting things happen when two disparate things meet.”
“What’s ‘disparate’?” Mike asks.
“Different.”
“Then why not just say ‘different’?”
“Okay!” Mrs. Peterson says, picking up the jar. So I guess we’re not taking our time after all. I write “button” and “walleye,” which are not evocative but are the first things that popped into my head, and drop them in the jar when it gets to me. Then, after Mrs. Peterson checks all the words and replaces three, the jar comes back around and I pull out “wilderness” and “tangerine.”
* * *
“You look miserable, butter bean,” Mom says. She’s at the stove making dinner, and I’m watching tiny drops of rice water escape from the pot and roll down the sides. The lid is bumping around like a kid who has to pee. It’s making me crazy, watching that pot, but I can’t look away.
“I have to write a poem about a tangerine wilderness,” I tell Mom. “Or a wilderness tangerine. My choice!” I give her a sarcastic thumbs-up.
She dumps a can of cream of mushroom soup onto a pan full of hamburger meat. It looks like gray death. There’s a word pairing for you.
“Says who?” Mom asks.
“Mrs. Peterson. We’re doing word pairings. Evocative ones.”
“Ah. Well, can’t help you there. Dad was the word expert.”
I glare at her back. “Dad. A word expert.”
She turns around and stares at me, but I can’t tell what kind it is. “Come stir this for me.”
“I’m doing my homework!”
“Justin!”
I get up and take the spoon and she leaves the kitchen. Mushroom gore, I think, stirring. Cow cluster. Bubbling gloom.
“Here.” Mom hands me a faded blue notebook, the color of sky in April, when it’s trying to power up. “Dad’s poems,” she says, like it’s obvious. I stare at her. Mushroom gore drips onto the floor, and Mom takes the spoon back.
“What?” I whisper.
“I almost gave it to you the other night, when you said no one knew Dad, but it’s all I have. I mean, of his words. To give you. And words are so important to you. And I didn’t know how old you should be, or whatever, but it just seems like the right time, so…There you go.”
A charge is running through my body like someone poured staples into my bloodstream. The top of the notebook has a bunch of paper clips in it that are holding little sections together. “What…are these?” It’s hard to form actual sentences.
“Each section is a poem,” Mom says. She turns the knob on the stove down, and I think, Simmering slush. “He’d write a bunch of drafts, you know, then copy out the final one on the last page. Then clip it all together.” She lifts the lid of the pot and peeks at the rice. It gurgles at her. She shuts it. My mind is racing but also stuck. How is Mom still doing regular things like peeking at rice when Dad. Wrote. Poems? And I’m Holding Them.
“So like Dad, right?” Mom says, and I look up from the notebook, to her face, for some kind of clue. “So organized,” she says slowly, like that explains everything.
* * *
I sit on my bed and open the notebook, carefully, like it might crumble into powder in my hands and blow away under my breath and I’ll never know what Dad was trying to say.
Swivel
Nice to meet you, hand extended. The words
Come from this man but I hear them from
The boy. Slim chest and straight,
Straight hair, he reached out his hand too
But not to me. To a grandmother, maybe,
A cousin gone before. There were so many
Possibilities, so many already dead.
Then his hand dropped and his head
Swiveled before he crumbled
Into the mud. I didn’t have time for words,
Like for Annie’s goldfish. I said words for a fish
But not for a boy. I didn’t have time.
His head swiveled just like this man’s chair
As he turns to greet me. To offer a job
If I can only stop sweating. If I can only
Shake his hand, the real one
And not the other, turning, already, to dust.
Courage
If any one of us had not been afraid
To be called chicken, just think
What could have happened.
A domino effect, a string of paper
Soldiers, linking arms all the way back
To the chopper that let us down here,
Back to Grayson’s wheat field and Whitt’s
Overcrowded apartment and
Bagley’s
Cast net off a splintered pier. There would be no
Lemon sun soaking everything
So our memories are lit from all sides.
There would be no memories.
Only our clean, separate pasts
And our yellow bellies.
War Machine
I see it like a great big adding machine,
The kind they had at the hardware store
Downtown. You put in everything:
1. Youth, patriotism, economics.
2. Half a face in the muck, eyeball dangling in the socket.
3. Pride of country, but more than that—pride of town.
4. Laughing in pitch-black because things are still funny.
5. 27 civilians in a grass house. Lighting it.
6. Boredom, hours not in seconds but in pounds.
7. An old, barefoot man leading the way. His only English words are fish and heaven. It makes no sense.
So you take it all back out and start again.
Accountable
There is nothing special about this moment
And there is also everything special.
You are on your belly, on your blanket,
Rolling into a patch of sunshine
And out. You are drooling on a toy rabbit.
I say your name. Justin. Which means:
Just, upright, righteous. You look up
And smile at me. And I see everything:
All the pain and joy and heartbeats
Of your life. The one I brought you to.
Dear God in Heaven, have mercy.
* * *
“Hey,” Rodney says when I get on the bus after school. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just tired.” He nods like he doesn’t believe me. I know because it’s the same nod the social worker gives me every other Tuesday when I tell her I’m okay. Luckily, Rodney doesn’t try to get me to join Grief Group. (Grief Group! I can’t think of anything worse. Not even the actual Grief!) But today it’s true. I stayed up past midnight reading Dad’s poems over and over. I read them over and over and over. Except the last one. I didn’t read it at all. Because like Mom said, that’s all there is.
All day, walking through school was like walking through one of those paintings with all the bright colors and pictures that don’t quite make sense. A bride with a goat playing the violin. “Saturated,” the art teacher called it. “Figurative.” Chagall, I think it was. Dad’s poems are swimming all around me. All the images, overlapping, washing in at strange times and places. It’s like living inside the moment when The Wizard of Oz switches from black-and-white to color.
I crash into an empty seat on the bus, shove up against the window and press my cheek against the cold glass. I close my eyes but the pictures keep playing on the inside of my eyelids.
Phuc sits down next to me and I open my eyes again. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“You look like crap.”
“Thanks.”
“So what’s up?”
“Didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Me neither,” Phuc says. He yanks a baseball hat out of his backpack and pulls it down low on his head, like he might just catch a few z’s on the ride home to make up for it. “I stayed up too late watching a NOVA marathon.”
I shake my head. “Of course you did.”
“Did you know that a blue whale’s heart is so big that you and me could swim through the arteries? Single file, obviously.”
“Right. Obviously.”
“So what were you doing all night?” Phuc asks.
“Having weird dreams, mostly.”
“About what? Zombies?”
I laugh. “No zombies.”
Phuc shrugs. “All my nightmares are about zombies. Human minds don’t like the in-between, you know. That’s why zombies scare us so bad. They’re both dead and alive, and our poor tiny brains can’t take it. Like Schrödinger’s cat.”
“Phuc. English. I beg you.”
“It’s a thought experiment, in quantum mechanics. You never heard of it?”
I stare at him. “I’ve never heard of half the things you say. You know this. Go on.”
Phuc nods once, accepting this fact. “So a cat is in a box, right? With some poison. And the cat is either dead or alive. But you don’t know which until you look into the box, so at one point, the cat is both dead and alive—like, in your mind, but also in the realm of possibility. But when you actually look in the box, the cat is either dead or alive. So the question is, At what point does reality become one thing or the other?”
I blink. Twice. “My mom gave me a notebook of my dad’s poems,” I tell him. “There’s only five and I read four last night.”
“So, you don’t want to read the last one?” Phuc asks. The bus pulls away from the curb, chugging between the other buses, toward the street.
I look out the window. “I do want to.”
“Are you afraid of what it will say?”
“No.” The bus pulls onto the main road and picks up a little speed. We bump past all the houses we always bump past. Slush on the streets. Brown trees full of sticks, still far from spring. I look back at Phuc. “But I’m afraid of knowing what it says. Like, once I read it, that’s it. I won’t know any more about him ever. This is the last piece of…evidence.”
Phuc nods fast, the way he does in math when something clicks. (I never nod in math because almost nothing clicks, and if it did, I wouldn’t be excited enough to nod rapidly.) “Exactly! That’s what I mean, about Schrödinger. Once you look in the box, the cat is either dead or alive. There’s no going back. That’s reality.”
* * *
“So what did you think?” Mom asks. She woke up early to fold the laundry before her double shift, which she and Murphy have been doing lots of lately. Murphy, who used to run after the garbage truck in his socks in the snow, laughing and holding up the white plastic bags, almost every Thursday morning. The truck would stop, of course. And the guys would roll down their windows and cheer and pump their fists in the air when Murphy tossed the bags perfectly into the back. Then Murphy would flex his muscles and bow to the empty street.
“About what?” I ask.
“Dad’s poems.” She tucks two socks together with this daydreamy smile, like maybe the socks are soul mates, and lays them on my pile. It’s like she just asked a fairy-tale question and is waiting for an answer with the words “fate” or “true love” in it.
I think a lot of things. I think, I was raised by a stranger. I think, Dad was an amazing writer. I think, Dad didn’t trust me. I think, How did Dad make the inside of his head so beautiful? I think, Dad sucks for dying (possibly on purpose) so he can never answer any of my questions. And now I have a billion more. I think, I wish I never knew those poems existed. I think, Thank God I have those poems.
I fold a towel, for something to do. Also because I don’t really know how to fold anything else. Mom watches me for a minute, then asks, “Did you like them?”
“I guess, but…” I shrug.
Mom smiles, but barely. “I know a few of them are…tough.” The coffeepot gurgles like it’s about to throw up, and I can relate. Mom goes to pour her coffee. “But those poems are like a window into Dad’s soul.”
“A broken window.”
She stops pouring, so her cup is half-full and the pot hangs in the air and the coffee sloshes backwards and she looks at me and her eyes have tears in them. I pick up my laundry and take it to my room and throw it on the floor.
* * *
I’m almost to my faraway point: the bottle Mr. Bauer painted on the wall in the science wing, with a lime-green chemical bubbling out the top. To be specific, my faraway point is the very top bubble, off on its own, like the
wind might be blowing it. Or maybe the bubble is just happy to be out of the bottle, away from the crowd. But then I hear Jenni’s voice say, “Justin will know!”
She’s standing with two friends. I can’t remember their names because she has so many and I’ve spent a lot of seventh grade avoiding them by staring at things like bubbles on walls. But Jenni is the opposite of me. Around her, everything fits. Her friends, the books in her arms, the lockers behind her, and Mr. Bauer’s other drawings over her head (lightbulb, magnet, DNA, nuclear energy). And all the noise. Shoes walking, lockers banging, laughing. I think, I will never fit into this scene.
“He’s so smart,” Jenni says. She’s waving me over with one hand. Her fingernails are painted pink. I step toward them, and the other two girls stare at me. “What comes first?” Jenni asks. “Order or family?” My head is full of dry sand, and so is my mouth. I know she’s asking about science, but pulling those two words out confuses me. Order and Family. How can they be so plain and so important?
“Sorry. I…” I can’t finish the sentence. Jenni’s friends look at each other. Then one looks at the floor and the other one runs off to catch up with someone else.
Mom made up a little song before that test last fall, to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” “K for ‘kingdom,’ P for ‘phylum’!” I can see her dancing around the kitchen, shaking imaginary maracas. And at the same time, I see her holding the stopped coffeepot with tears in her eyes. Both Moms are in the kitchen, crossing over each other like ghosts. And now there are tears in my own eyes. Jenni’s other friend drifts away and joins the stream of kids walking to the next class, like Mr. Bauer’s top bubble.
So now it’s just Jenni and me. The happy Mom, the one with the maracas, is fading from the kitchen. “Then comes class, order, family, genus, species!” I let the tears fall down my cheeks. I don’t care. Or at least that’s what I tell myself because I couldn’t stop them if I tried.
Like Nothing Amazing Ever Happened Page 10