2003-08-26 - 7:45 p.m.
The scene might come through more clearly for you were you to imagine it as
a movie. The first shot, the camera peering sharply up into the trees,
sunlight filtering in through the branches cruelly, bugs,
swimming through the shafts of light. Slowly, with concentration, the
camera pans down, following closely the path one particular tree makes, it's
curves and risings, the moss a metallic green contrasting sharply with the
nearly black bark of the tree, (technicolor, midnight and the rising) until
finally, almost with a sigh, you see the bent head of a child, with the
blonde hair of a child. The camera levels out
for a moment, focusing on this side view of the child, a look of religious
concentration on his face and then, almost not noticible, the camera pans
down, you see this child is kneeling, and at his knees lies a cat, a kitten,
it's head bent under it's body. Just the knees of this child and this dead
cat, that is all you see while slowly from the silence of the scene voices
rise up, sstaccato in anger but no discernible words, and the child reaches
out a hand, you see emerge from the right frame of the scene steady
children's fingers with dirt under the nails and a scab on the knuckle of
the thumb and as the hand nears the kitten feet appear, feet sheathed in
black shoes, women's shoes, the shoes of a cafeteria worker, white socks
coming up out of the shoes banded tightly around fat ankles (and you find
yourself holding your breath for the scene has gone silent again) and
sunlight shines on the brown of this child's hand as it reaches out too
slowly too slowly you are thinking, but the slowness is like to gentleness
as he softly lifts the kitten's head and places it into a more natural
position and as its head is restored and placed careful careful into the dust
and the weeds the sound snaps forcefully back into the scene as if from out
of a vacuum, leaving you startled, the wails of a child and a huge voice
screaming on top of you
"Richard! Richard!"
and cicadas are singing and the tires of cars thump down an unseen
blacktop and the woman's indelicate, brown-knuckled and heavy hand slaps onto
the wrist of the child, Richard, and seizing him up, his knees disappearing,
leaving only the cat as if it had only been sleeping and the woman had simply not
wished it woken. Her footsteps recede away from as you hear Richard,
speaking calmly and in the accent of a young southern boy
"it wasn’t me"
and then it’s only bugs and the cat and the whine of moving cars. After a
beat the camera begins its ascent back into the trees, sheathed once again
in silence, following the same line it had followed on its descent, the bark
and the moss and ants scurrying circular until finally, at rest, the camera
shows us the sun, strong and unchanged, burning our eyes.
*
He was 4 years old when he first recognized death, in the form of a gravely
twisted and broken kitten, sacrificed by clay, the son of the woman who
watched him after preschool let out.
Clay had apparently planned it as a game: to see if the kitten could dodge
rocks dropped from a distance into a box housing the kitten. It did not
manage to dodge. Clay's mother did not love this kitten, but, she did not
like Richard and his sullen-seeming silence, nor did she like his mother,
who worked in a bar and drank in one too, so when clay told her of Richard's
evil deeds, she cried and cursed and refused to let him back in the trailer,
insisting instead that he remain in the back yard with the dead kitten,
whose body had been thrown in something fright by clay when he
discovered what a dead cat felt like in his hand.
*
his face, as he came out of the building, looked to her awkward, aged, drawn
in as though he had seen something he'd never been meant to see, but, unable
to undo what had already been done, what could not be erased, dealt with
it in the only way he knew how-accepting it.
"do you believe in heaven momma?"
he frightened her. The kitten had sent his mind away somewhere and his eyes
looked bruised and for weeks she tried to deal with him on her own but it got
to be too much for her and she knew that he needed someone to talk to, her
own conversations until now having been relegated to sexual innuendo (and sometimes even flat-out propositions and unappealing ones at that) while
at the bar or arguments about teeth brushing habits and bedtime, so how was
she to talk of death with her 4 year old son, whom she still remembered
sitting on the kitchen floor at 3 in the morning, covered in egg yoke, the
result of late night boredom, crawling into the kitchen to break a carton of
eggs on the floor and on his head with her so exhausted not even waking
until the carton was gone? Why would a 4 year old have such thoughts? She
couldn't remember her own thoughts at that age but felt certain that they were nearly
exclusively reserved for the pondering of...dolls? not make-up, she would have been too young. does she believe in heaven?
Well, sure, now she does, now that he needs her to.
"I sure do sugar."
"why?"
fuck. Why? Because she fucking well was supposed to, that's why. There's
no such thing as why (?) with heaven. –what do I say?- she wondered.
"well, don't you believe in heaven?"
"yes. I guess so. I just wanted to hear why you believe in it."
"what did the preacher say?"
"he said it was a matter of faith. That it was there, and so was hell, and
I was just supposed to believe because it's the truth."
"I think that's a good reason to believe in it" yep. No such thing as why
with heaven. She wasn't so sure about hell.
"yeah."
That night, Richard started praying.
*
she couldn't understand where it came from, this religious fervor, and she
wanted to believe it was a phase, something most little boys went through
after the first time they saw a dead kitten, but it was his eyes that told her
what she already knew. The deep focus when they were open, the way he
concentrated so intently on everything, no running commentary like before,
everything ingested, digested, who knew what came out in his prayers.
The way he rocks back and forth on his heels at the foot of his bed, she
half expected him to break into tears in the midst of his prayers-and when
she asks him what he prays about, he says it's a secret. That's what it is,
she supposes. A secret between him and god.
