Bird In The Hand It's still there just at the crest of the small lake where the long grass swags in a gentle breeze and the silver mist hesitates with a question to everything beneath it. The sharp contrast of daybreak slowly winking letting light back on the earth, a reddish orange light like that of a match's flame prone across the half emptied starry sky. All of life begins in the dawn pealing away the charade of death night brings like the gown of a virgin; she runs naked in the light through the misty fields and wait mischievous in the branches of the willows. Some of us have the momentary thoughts of naked blonde virgins just shy of battlefield where staining of blood and soil meet. I think of the chill in the water and the smell of gunpowder and can see the bleeding sky through the swirling smoke. There is blood in my mouth but I don't mind it so as I stare at the sky thinking that it is the same sky my mother looks at. There is something else beside me and I dare not look. I could hear the songs of birds if not for the dissonance of crying men an agonizing cacophony playing softly now. From the corner of my eye I can see birettas and chasubles draping priests swinging their crosses like a chicken eats. Strange I think staring at the carpel of flowers like ants on the wind. I decide it is not a good day to die for country and mother and all of that jingoistic crap. My epaulets would agree floating strings in the reddish water and the squeaking caissons at a mourners pace somewhere off in the distance perhaps seeking exculpation or gloating at the canard? I fell with nearly a hundred others after the first salvo seeing the earth tear a part right in front of my eyes and feeling the breath of death against my face. In those brief moments life was epexegesis like having sunlight poured into one's recently concealed eyes. My muttonchops are tangled with dried blood and one finger is missing down to mount Jupiter and I'm sure that will distort the reading of my palm in the future. I am in that place between pain and splendor and for the moment at peace. He pushes up against me as if to remind me he is still there in all of his ephemeral essence like melting ice. I gave up trying to move, too much pain titling the delicate balance. If that is to happen I fear death not long to follow so I stay semi afloat in the small lake near the crest of long grass dripping with blood. So I ask myself how did I ever arrive to such a place? Uppity of me assuming I had a choice in the matter. I rather have the bird in the hand and that is why I am here in such a place. Not far off the occasional rifle shot disturbs the serenity and holiness causing the priests to duck. It is humorous because priests should desire to embrace death only so to be in the arms of God, silly for them to value life such. Their business is that of the soul which of course continues on after the death. For any holy person to be so linked to carnality would be lukewarm in the mouth of God. But I recall many on the airwaves glittering like the stars overhead adorn in gold, silver and expensive stones preaching of wealth and health and God knows what else! God's designed plan…stuff your pockets with as much as you can! The clouds are visible, so thick and tinted with the dawn forming a herd of charging wapitis with their antlers low. The palace of God rests in the sky outlined by orders of angel and Corinthian columns. The world and humanity was fashioned by the mind of God using a stonecutter's chisel. It is at these times I wonder if God isn't remorseful? I am not a bit remorseful anymore over what I have done. I can tell myself that I was right in taking what she owned. In the eyes of God I was nearly her husband. She possessed my heart and I hers. In the eyes of God I say reassuringly. "Religion," he says from beside me. "The opium of the masses, powerful enough to dupe you and the others to make that charge. It was a glorious charge at that." He is a dark figure adoring a uniform. His face is marred and dirty and dry blood caked at the corners of both his eyes. I first saw him seconds before the cannon fire. "You read my mind, sir," I politely answer. "Not your mind but your face, lieutenant." He manages to sit upright and splash the murky water against his face. "A lake to drink and yet still thirsty. This is the madness of war." "Why aren't you back at supply?" I ask. "I longed for adventure too. Is this wrong?" Orange maples lined the country road from my father's house to the white church nestled in the breasts of the wood. The air was always crisp and chilled and the sky a powdered blue. The wheels of the carriage made the sounds of a concertina. As in heaven, there on earth was order from the day to the blade of grass. "It isn't done," I say. "You have no weapon and your duty is not to fight but to supply. This is the order of things." "I sing and dance, you lord over the land is that what you mean, lieutenant?" I offend him but I am not sure why. What I said is what is taught even to his kind as to my own. It is what has made our nation strong. Why would he be offended so? I wonder briefly if the new day will bring unmerciful heat. The corpses will melt into the very soil like ice cream in the front yard of my father's house. "Lieutenant, are you still with us?" "I hurt deep to my soul," I tell the black man. "I question why I'm even here." "It must be nice to have a choice," the black man says as he splashes more water to his face. The pattern water makes on the face of a human is reminiscent to crystal spider webs. It is the oil produced in the face I ascertain that makes the patterns. The water is that much more define on such a dark face. "All men have a choice," I tell him. His face seems to light up with the illumination of sheer intellect. A smile works it's way through his harden face. "And here lies the essence of the problem." He moves closer to me and I allow the uneasiness to disperse like a butterfly from cupped hands. "What is a man?" "Who is a man?" I correct him. "No, what! The essence of a man or better yet the essence of a human being! It is a question of what and not who." The smoke grows thicker sliding over the perennial morning sky. I close my eyes only for a second to ape what is happening to the sky above me. Why should I care about the two in the bush especially with one in my hand? I cough spitting up some blood but the black man continues to speak about things done to him in the past. Things of manipulation and exploitation as if they were as common as pine cones on the forest ground. I can understand manipulation and think of it as a strength. The forest that concealed most of the sunlight and allowed moss to grow, wet and rich sponges between my toes making me feel that much more alive. I think for a moment that perhaps those times are gone forever. "Ride on the bus anywhere you please. I wouldn't mind it because I don't ride buses," I say. "That's my point exactly." If he had been a condor I would have been his meal. One of the priests reached us looking through red sockets. His face trembling and voice dry like a desert. He might have been a young man before the war but now the lines of prediction linger in his face. His stare went through me as if I wasn't there and he never stopped swinging that insipid gold ball in a near perfect parabola. His voice straining Latin, "Ad majorem Dei gloriam! (To the greater glory of God)" Over and over again more a chant than anything else he spoke that phrase. His face changed twisted in disgust. The priest hurried away looking back only once as he merged into the sunlight appearing to be the filament inside an incandescent lamp. "Strange," I mumble but the black man can read minds I think because he asked me why? I noticed for the first time that the black man's uniform is different from mine. It isn't the uniform of the enemy. The board shoulders and tassels speak of extravaganza and not military. "I can only inarticulate because it's more a feeling than anything else. I am not a poet and unable to express my emotions in words or prose." "My people can in music." He manages a large smile. His smiles reminds me of the long rides with my father a time past in the new black surrey. It's yellow wheels spinning the opposite direction. It was brought over from England my father said. I never lost my fascination with that surrey and the joy it brought my father. My father used to say that life held surreptitious angles and malevolent pitfalls all ingenuous and eternal. "Can you sing, Lieutenant?" "Not very well I'm afraid." I was a part of the flying column sent to seize the enemy's supply depot housed in a building with flying buttresses standing like marble soldiers. We all were cut down here near the lake the way a lawnmower cut down grass. The projectiles burned through our flesh scarring our minds. We tossed ourselves up into the lake and on the shore; pieces of us displaced like gravel. "I know a song my mother would sing to me time and time again. A Scottish melody filled with limerick it is about a princess bound by duty to marry her brother whom she loved as a brother. The years went by and soon she became of age to marry but discovered she didn't love her brother as a wife would a husband. She refused to marry so was imprisoned and sentenced to be beheaded. Over the year of her imprisonment she fell in love with a prison guard and both conducted a romance that lasted a year. Her brother discovered the romance and blamed it the reason his sister refused to marry him. His rage burned like hot embers the song revealed. "His sister?" ask the black man. "That is just plain sick!" "True but I think they did that sort of thing back then," I say. "That's taking racism a bit too far in my book." I'm not quite sure what he means. The clouds are orange nimbuses dangling on strings of air like a child's mobile over us. I think I can touch them but to lift my arm ignites a phosphor of pain. "The prince was willing to marry his own sister than make love to a black woman." "No, no, no! That isn't the point of the limerick." "Sure it is, lieutenant! It is the point to all that white people do or say. Race is a unique thing to be guarded and never polluted to you white folks. That has been your centralized belief since you stop painting yourselves blue and dancing around Stonehenge!" "Not with this limerick!" "Admit it, lieutenant?" "Admit what?" "What you have in your hand!" I stare at my empty hand minus a finger. It is charred and muddy. My blood dry and beginning to flake. There is nothing in my hand but in a passing moment I understand what he means. His eyes are filled with jaundice dripping yellow and reeking from too much sickness probably from the cancer of our land. Maybe is all I can manage but it brings satisfaction to his black face. I think how easy it is to hate such a black face. It isn't like my white face and those lips are larger and his skull smaller than mine. They can jump, and run and make babies but we are much smarter. It is a genetic truth. Of course we wish to guard our race from the inferiority of your race like guarding a healthy body from sickness. "May I continue with the limerick?" "By all means, lieutenant." It is difficult to recall each line but I know it ends with the prince having the guard executed. He blamed their love for the lack of love his sister had for him. I guess people see what they wish to see. "What happened to his sister?" the black man inquires. "He let the other guards rape her and she killed herself." "That's the way it always is when it come to you people. She isn't good enough so let the dogs have her!" "It's just a song and nothing more. Why must your people think ulterior motive in everything we do?" His race is a paranoid ignorant race of bones in their noses and nappy hair. They let their women run naked through the jungles, such majestic women of strong developed bodies. My race discovered electricity and put a man on the moon. Everything good in the world comes from my race. We have the right to determine what is corrupted and tainted. "Strange you lying here half submerged in a lake in a country not your own. Have you asked yourself why?" The black man stares intensely at me with incriminating eyes. "Humanitarian reasons!" I say. It is about this time that a lamprey swims close to my neck and than darts away leaving ripples in the blood-tinted waters. I notice the face of a soldier I met at the officer's club two days past or what is left of his face. He caught a round of one of the bigger caliber weapons. His face cracked as if it was made of limpets. He walked with me beneath white groins in the garden as stars hemstitched the dark canopy. Now he is broken and used up, discarded to the elements and to the soil from where we all originate. I wish I could take back my words as I stare at him. Humanitarian reasons are not why we are here. It is more of a sense of nature theology. We are the gods of the world science proves this and we decide what is worthy of our intervention. Elisa stood in the foyer of her family's mansion. The shirtwaist dress held the rays of the sun each brass button shiny as flesh-minted pennies. She waved me goodbye standing beside her father, a round man, wearing a homburg and smoking a Cuban cigar. He was shouting, "It is for homogeny!" "Why then did you not come to the aid of the African countries?" "We give them financial aid to fight the sicknesses homogenous to their natures! No amount of aid can fight ignorance!" "A million died in various wars the last few years. They cried for your help but nothing was done." I think of one thing over and over. It is in my nightmares and present in my daydreams. I think of Elisa having her shirtwaist dress torn from her milky skin by a pack of black men. Black lives are not worth the spilling of white blood. It is a simple equation. One must pull the rickshaw and one must ride it. "Without our help these people have no freedom. They are gassed and executed at the whim of an insane dictator. He is developing weapons of massive obliteration. We had to act in the name of justice!" "Siphoning is why you are here. Your race is a leech, a parasite capable of one thing and one thing only…sucking the life from other races!" the black man is subliminal I think. "You lust after hegemony as if God bestow it upon your race alone." He points just beyond an assortment of trees. "There rest the world's largest oil reserves and your race has its hose out ready to suck it dry. This is why you are here." No, I tell myself. I am here to fight for democracy and freedom. If we do not what will become of the quaternary period and humankind? The genius of the genome demands the superior to assist! "You never answered my question what is a man?" "Homo Sapiens!" "Am I a man," he asks. "Yes," I hesitate. "Or one-third of a man?" "That's silly. You are a homo Sapiens." "Just like you correct?" Here is another attempt by one of them to weasel in on something they never worked for. He has his damn hand out wanting more welfare or reparations. He wants to come to our neighborhoods and shower in our clubs. He wants to marry our sisters…but we want give up any of it not our clubs, money or sisters! "What do you have in your hand, lieutenant? Do you even know?" Again I stare at my mangled hand out of reflex finding nothing there. I think Elisa was once in the center of my hand but the insanity deep within me pushed her away. I wanted more instead of being happy with what I had. Obsession leads to despair and destruction lies between the two. She wore her virginity like a priest his robe. She used her sexuality to deplete me and that faithless night I struck her across her milky face swelling red welts. I stole that virginity like a black man might. "I have nothing in my hand," I say. The water is getting much colder and I can feel it in my lips. "Nothing at all!" In the hovering clouds for a minute I see her face the way it was that night. Her eyes glass balls and lips trembling. It was as if she stared at a monster. Thinking of her face hurts me more than my wounds of battle. "There's something sweet concerning a red headed woman," the black man says. His head tipped back as if he wishes to catch drops of rain if it were raining. "The kind of woman with green eyes and a shape chiseled by God himself!" "Shut up!" I scream. Elisa's hair is red and her eyes green. "Why, lieutenant?" he lowers his head and his eyes are lasers. "You aren't exactly in the position to stop me from thinking!" He reminds me of Punchinello but I am not sure why. "Let's say I take this red headed green eyed beauty on a riverboat down the Mississippi and we dine beneath a starry sky while Dixie Jazz soothes the elements. You know I'm going to take her to bed but good!" "Shut up, you black bastard!" I would have struck him if I could. "Purgatory is a bitch!" "You should know you place," I tell him but he only smiles. "My people have done so much for your kind. If it wasn't for us you would be swinging in the trees." "My people would be free! We wouldn't have to endure slavery, Jim Crow! We would be unfettered spirits like the wind! Your people broke us…pulled our wings from our backs!" He appears to fight tears. "Article four of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that no one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. What about the slavery that still exists in our beloved country, lieutenant?" "What slavery? That ended more years past than I can count. Your people aren't slaves!" "Is that so?" He laughs and shakes his head. "So you are here fighting for democracy and freedom? These people are fighting you back though." "Misguided and afraid of their dictator." Before the charge the twilight was still. I saw the winking of the stars just at horizon and the wind shoved against me playful in my epaulets. I thought of God and mother then sitting upon my white horse with my silver saber in hand. Behind me stood my men, people of an assortment of heritages. Their banners flapping ever so spoke of pride. So many of them were young and idealistic. Many were there due to an act of congress. I volunteered for the war having an opportunity to miss such events due to my position in life. There was a hint of romance in the words our leaders spoke over the airwaves and off satellites amounting to nothing more than sortilege and soteriology. I sought salvation and they behind me held the shorter lots. Perhaps we would find soubrettes to make love to in what turned out to be a comedy of massive proportions. We thought blondes danced at the crest of the forest. My black ally said only oil bubbled there. In a moment of violence we fell to the wave of lead and fire that tore us too pieces. The soil red with blood and yellow with urine our innocence lost forever. "We will show them a different and better way!" " So that is why are you here? The white man has discovered compassion instead of exploitation? Your God has changed his mind?" I know his face but I can't place it and that worms into my mind like a splinter. I dare not ask him unsure of how he will react. They are a volatile group of people and perhaps rightly so they have such limited opportunities due to their own inhibitions. Those are my father's words I think rolling around inside my head. "I believe in protecting human life," I say. The pain works it's way up my spine and radiates into every part of my body. I am fighting tears and the urge to regurgitate the fine meal I dined just last night. I believe in protecting humanity if it maintains the order of things. I must keep what I have no matter the cost. Hegemony is a thing that maintains order. It keeps the peace in a otherwise volatile world. I am a peacekeeper in the sense of the word. My race keeps the world from exploding. "Shoe shine boys, cheap labor in the apple orchards, porters, maids, janitors, experiment victims in concentration camps or medical labs this is the humanity you fight for? You only wish to gerrymander the world to favor your own race that is why you are here!" There are flashes of hate in his eyes like sparkles off of tin as the sunlight strikes it. He is wrecked in hatred picking it like quince from Asiatic trees. "You are wrong!" The shout aggravates the pain. "I am no racist! I will never be a racist!" "Than what are you?" It is midday and the heat settles on the battlefield like the foundation of a house. The gravediggers are out stacking bodies on wagons. I can see them from my vantage point but the black man seems uninterested. I refuse to be called a racist. I have never hated any race of people in my life. The words of my father resound in my head though. Children are always affected their parents deep to their very core. It is difficult to remove their influence. How can you reach so far down a person? It would be like reaching to the depths of the earth! "I am no racist," I say softly. I can hear the sounds shovels made striking soil. My father was buried in a cemetery beneath a myriad of maple trees during a chilly October. Not many people attended probably because of the cold? I like to think that anyway. I stayed after the ceremony watching to two black men lower his bronze casket and cover it with soil. Their shovels making the same sound as sweat dropped from their faces. They treated him as if his was some expensive art offered to the earth. They never knew how he felt about their race. One of them patted me on the shoulder in such a compassionate way it brought tears to my eyes. They understood death and the respect of it and it's affects. I was a virgin to death. I'm not quite positive but I think that was when the confusion arrived. How could my father but a good person and hate such compassionate people? Could all I believed in but a lie? My world, my education and my religion, be a giant lie? "I came here to find salvation." "Salvation from what?" "I don't rightly know." "So you are a liberal," he says. "I am lost plain and simple." He reads something in my voice and it eases his hatred. He lowers his head and then raises it but his eyes are filled with indulgence. I think he believes me for the first time. "Perhaps a short stay in purgatory for you at all, lieutenant?" What does he mean by that? Does he hold some divine power or right? I recall the priest's reaction of that of a man who saw something horrific. I wonder if I am in worst shape than I think? "Redemption is a painful thing, lieutenant. It takes everything a man is and gives back everything a man should be! It reaches down to the pit of a man's psyche and yanks it from him!" "You can read mind," I say. "I only read your need for salvation." Salvation if it can be achieved but I think it too difficult a task because over the years of my life I have seen that salvation isn't easily obtainable. It is something that can drain the color from your skin and burn hot pokers in your eyes. It can make you question your very upbringing. It is like going cold turkey to break a heroin addiction. Is it so obvious in my visage what I seek? It is so easy to just be satisfied with what one already holds. The world doesn't change and order is not disrupted if no one tries for salvation. But not trying to obtain salvation kills all critical and independent thinking. I wonder if I have ever held an independent thought? When you are being suppressed you can think independently because what else can happen to you? What do you have to lose? I envy the black man's ability to think outside the confinements of his world and to see, yes, to dream of something better. "I never used the word nigger," I say. "Nor have you ever used the word man when speaking about a black male! What do you think is worst?" He is my teacher now I can feel it. I cough again this time so violently I scare myself. The black man seems concerned but not just with my condition but with time in general. Maybe I am running out of time? "I loved Elisa," I tell him. "But am I convinced that we spend the lengths of our lives trying to get into each pants. We are nothing more than animals driven to survive. It is why we place so emphasis on race…it is like animals living in packs. She knew I wanted her and refused to oblige me." "So you took. It is after all in your nature." "I simply demanded payment that was due." The sky looms over me as if it is the face of God staring down in judgment. The cold is gone from my bones and I can't hear the cries of dying men nor the shovels in the soil. It is as if my head is in a translucent box. I can no longer smell the scent of gunpowder or feel the sun on my face. I am scared of what it all means. "Payment due," the black man questions. "Must your kind always sanitize your actions? You are removing a evil dictator in the name of democracy and freedom…you are removing him in order to rape, deplete and demand payment due of the people and the resources of this land!" "She refused what was I suppose to do?" "Respect her humanity," the black man answers. "What about my needs?" My father was always concerned with his needs. He was after all a very needy person. He never saw me that day he went to the other side of the tracks. I followed him because he was my father. It was a hot afternoon and my mother was ill most the time back then. I rode my bike with all the strength my legs could muster into the black neighborhood and down a narrow street shielded on both sides my thick junipers with their prostrated limbs reaching out to grab me. I could hear the earth through the trees as they cracked and heaved. In the distant a swallow bellowed and falling acorn mingled with the rich green of the forest around me. It never dawned to me that I was in danger but that was what my father told me that day. I saw him enter the shack where the tar road met with a gravel road. The shack was hidden well in the trees. I made my way to the window at the rear of the shack and there I saw my naked father with a naked black woman in the act of sex. "The extent of our lives is nothing more then the promulgating of our seed! The need to be fulfilled and it doesn't matter what color when it comes right down to that need!" How dare he belittle them but empty himself so precociously in one? The uniqueness of our essence poured into someone he wouldn't spit on if she were on fire! "I can't answer that question, lieutenant." My mother used to walk with me to school when she was younger and in good health. I used to think she was the most beautiful woman in the world until I met Elisa. I had to preserve the seed after my father so wastefully gave it away. He would never touch my mother again after the illness beset her. I saw her at times weeping because of his lost touch like she dropped it in the desert sands and a mighty wind covered where it lay. It was then that insanity slowly worked it's way into her mind like worms in decaying flesh. "Have you ever seen what despair can do to the human will?" "Yes," the black man says. "It turns it into garbage." "Or hardens it…makes it like a bomb ready to explode." His face comes to me as if emerging from water. "Are you an angel?" "You know who I am, lieutenant. You always knew." I recognize him now and dread works it way through my body. The sky turns dark for recompense is due and I have delayed long enough. It was a rainy night just outside an exclusive club on the Upper East Side where my father had a membership. It was in that club he and his friends berated blacks, Jews, Hispanics. The outside walls were brick and the gate black iron. My father was in a hurry and held me by my hand. He was shouting at the black doorman to hail us a taxi. "You niggers aren't good for nothing!" My father screamed. The man was in a near panic because others shouted at him. He raced into the street to hail a taxi but didn't see the carriage that pulled him beneath its wheels chewing him up and twisting him. He was mangled humanity when finished. The sight horrified many that witnessed it. But my father only said as he stepped into the taxi, "Now he's a good nigger…a dead nigger!" I look at the black man sitting a few feet from me and for the first time notice his legs twisted and mangled exactly like they were that night one pointing east and the other northwest. He gives me a hint in his eyes he knows what I know. He isn't a solider and that is why his uniform is different, it is the uniform of a doorman. "I ever felt pain before until that night," the black man says. "I recall staring up at the buildings as blood oozed from me as if I was poked by a thousand swords. I could hear laughter and the continuous sounds of wheels to pavement. I thought, damn life is going on without me and that made me cry. I knew I had been nothing in a world of limited choices. I was a doorman yet I held such thoughts and ideas that could have helped the world. I was just human garbage in the street. I wanted someone to at least comfort me until the time." The black man that touched me on the shoulder at my father's burial brought tears to my eyes and gave me comfort. It suddenly came to me what I thought after my father said what he did. I thought how callous. The black man vanished from my thoughts like chalk erased off a chalkboard. I thought so but even chalk leaves a portion of residue. I knew who the beast was. Perhaps this memory drove me to volunteer? This memory made me beat and rape Elisa? I knew the beast and I carried it with me until now, the beast wasn't mangled on the street but riding beside me lighting a Cuban cigar. A good nigger is a dead nigger ringing in my ears.
Copyright © 2003 E Rocco Caldwell |