Estranged on a Train

Estranged on a Train

John E. Keats

        I found a haunting, blank postcard from a Chicago hotel in a bureau drawer full of old greeting cards. So much white space, sent without any identifying word in warm cursive or determined print, seemed sinister. Whatever usual degree of certainty I maintain about who I am was disturbed by ripples of eerie instability perpetuated through formulaic movie scripts: a taunting demon had me in his sights. Being sought out, though, even as prey, at least confirms existence. “Everybody,” a divorced John Prine groans in a song, “wants to be wanted.” But I soon realized the card was never sent. I had purchased it on the one lengthy trip I’ve taken, from Boston to Houston in 1980 with my mom when I was thirteen. It was about sixty round-trip travel hours on an Amtrak train. We slept in uncomfortable seats. Microwaves were a recent convenience, marketed as a progressive triumph, so the disgusting hamburgers on soggy rolls that we could barely stomach made us feel wrong about our own judgments, almost unpatriotic. The views were mostly pitiful. Instead of the beautiful scenery we expected, characterless fields, vacant lots, and intimate laundry fluttering on lines rushed by, along with glimpses so distant of Three Mile Island, which had had a meltdown in one of its reactors less than a year before, that they seemed like children’s tops waiting to be spun. Comiskey Park’s shrunken white façade was ghostly, even without nuclear catastrophe in mind.
        When the train broke down in Chicago, it seemed an answer to a prayer we felt too insignificant and humble to make. All passengers were granted a complimentary overnight stay at the Holiday Inn. Having real beds, being able to lie down in privacy, felt like heaven, as did being served palatable food in a spacious dining room that didn’t rock and vibrate. We both were watching out for somebody, a man who had been forced to sit with us the first and last time we chose to eat in the train’s dining car. I hope we were curious. I don’t think we were afraid. He wasn’t as old as my mom, but didn’t seem young either. He wore a brown suit and a dark tie, and never smiled. He hadn’t looked mean. Burdened is the most accurate adjective I can find.
        We had exchanged greetings robotically when the porter led him to our table. My mom tried to make conversation, volunteered that we were heading to see her brother Wallace, my Uncle Johnny. “Our mother,” she said, “loved her maiden name too much to give it up.” She joked about a reprieve from rubberized hamburgers. He remained silent. We always put outspokenness on a pedestal, at least when we thought of it as an Irish trait, so we should have admired his blunt distaste for conversing with us. I don’t recall how long we all sat there, or who left first, but I would still say we were more confused and uncomfortable than afraid. I wouldn’t say we didn’t at all wonder if we could have been at fault, somehow, but because we knew our own motives, I guess we did blame him more. We were incapable of making competent guesses at his thoughts or of accurately reading his expression. My mom scanned every setting for danger, from her recognition of the risks involved in taking a child halfway across the country. And when I played Space Invaders in the arcade back at the crowded station as we waited to board again, I imagine we saw lots of black men. It wasn’t skin color that disturbed us. It was the deep, incomprehensible distance between us that made us feel a little ashamed, until we’d come home from our Texas trip. My mom’s struggle to earn enough to raise a boy alone, and my own efforts to discover or construct my character, crowded that awkward dinner out of our conscious thoughts.
 
        Becoming and Creation
        In James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, he defines the devil as a condition “in you and in me,” not as a supernatural being: “It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself.” He’s critiquing my own simplistic characterization of Satan found in The Exorcist, which is about a wispy kind of bad conscience, where you feel bad about everything without taking action that could crack your conventional, relatively comfortable capitalist cocoon. Baldwin calls such a life “unanchored.” Into the market, into films or art or abstract notions of family we fly, but we never feel good enough about where we end up or bad enough to question the direction we chose. A Hollywood devil doesn’t make you confront anything real. It doesn’t require engagement of flesh and blood, or carry the potential weight of interiority that religious texts do, or the urge to political or social action that secular thought can. It lets you squirm and scream in the dark eating popcorn, and go back home.
        I could never get through The Exorcist, which came out in 1973, the year my father died, even though I came to agree with Baldwin about its insincerity. The idea of a child getting erased by evil, losing the solace of character and a chance at God—I wasn’t ever brave enough to confront that possibility. I felt that like my own youth gave my mother hope when her husband died; many burdens, yes, but hope. But I didn’t feel innocent. As grateful as I was for my mother’s loyal love, I wasn’t ever sure I deserved it. Children in general seemed like a legitimate source of salvation. That I quickly became spoiled enough to disregard the external world’s injustice and barbarity that Baldwin experienced as a black child and man was an individual failing. I wasted years on private, flimsy visions of damnation. To cut myself a break, I’d blame my dad for introducing into my dreams the reality that a quiet old man could become someone who’d douse himself with gasoline, light a match, and leave too little of what he was to keep his coffin open. Those alterations seemed pretty close to demonic possession to me.
 
        Psalm 29
        If you can put pride, reason, or romanticized faith on hold and cleanse yourself, however briefly, of a few civilized comforts, nature should feel divine. The voice of the LORD is over the water; the God of glory thunders. In tides and winds and sunrises, in miraculous hearts, in this verse; maybe even in the white mystery of an empty old post card; certainly in death’s promise: there’s so much that’s more substantial than individual subjects. My mom is dying a natural death. She’s ninety-two. I’ve been thinking that thought—my mom is dying—since my father killed himself. Plus, she had me at forty-three, and life expectancies then were shorter, so I just always felt the clock running out on her, and on us. Against that pressure of mortality—against the voice of the LORD—was the permanence one woman embodied. Her devotion and constancy convinced me I was safe, and wanted. Dementia has immersed her in a kind of fear I’d only noticed—as if through a fissure in her courage carved out by the lightning—during thunderstorms. She would shake, and cry, and drive us to malls or movie theaters for greater security, even though our basement apartment was probably the safest place for us. People she’d converse with in those shelters would laugh at her. I thought her honest fear made her beautiful. God was in the thunder. He’s in the dementia. I never thought He’d be anywhere near the Pez dispensers and old cameras I was searching for in drawers to sell on eBay to keep my mom in our home.
 
        Oblivious to Beauty
        When we finally got to Houston, my uncle, Wallace John Riley, drove us across a long causeway to a seafood place in Galveston for a stunning view of the Gulf of Mexico. His wife had an Eastern Star meeting she couldn’t cancel. He complained all the way about the Mexicans and crime that were taking over his neighborhood, but his complaints were always in the form of jokes. It was a new version of the old routine he’d performed on Jewish tailors and German merchants back home in Everett, where he’d apprenticed with an Italian sign painter and letterer before starting his own business. The role of jolly, harmless bigot seemed a natural, tolerated fit. I doubt his Mexican neighbors found it funny, since that neighborhood was never his to control.
        His jokes and my secret nausea distracted me from observing anything. When we got to the restaurant I broke into a sprint toward a restroom sign and vomited a path across a maroon carpet. After I cleaned myself up, I shamefully passed a waiter directing a small man in stained white clothes to mop up the mess I’d made. I sat down next to my mom, across from my uncle, and we ordered from the waiter. She delicately touched my shoulder as she left to get down on her hands and knees with a rag she grabbed off the boy’s mop bucket. He said some Spanish words to her, and shook his head a few times, but she kept scrubbing.
        “Hope you still feel good about that deed,” my uncle said when she returned, “when his cousin or brother-in-law steals the hubcaps off my van. They all live in one house, you know. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t on my street.”
 
        Proof of Contemptible Inadequacy
        A few years after my dad died, my mom bought a house, as a smart investment, right across the street from the apartment that had been oppressive and claustrophobic to my father. Our new place got broken into twice. Thunderstorms felt louder and more malicious. Mice invaded the fireplaces. Our Texas trip might have been a way to escape the realization that we’d made a mistake. We both felt weaker there. I wanted to be the Man of it, at ten years old, and couldn’t. I was a boy who followed a frog hopping around our yard for days before I coaxed it into a jar with a stick. I wasn’t even man enough to touch the shining belly or to feel the pulsing of its bloated throat in my hands. With the lid screwed on tight, I showed the reduced creature to my mother. She grimaced and told me to make breathing holes. I did, with a screwdriver—jabbing into the oppressive sky I’d imposed—and sat on the front stairs, staring joyfully at a thing I wasn’t really willing to see. At dinner time I put the jar behind a bush. The next afternoon was bright and beautiful and I eagerly sought the frog out, as if it would enjoy the honor of my playing with it. I found a brown, leathery carcass, emptied of life. I couldn’t bear to find its eyes. My mother gasped. Shame shot across her face. We threw the jar into a trash can, and tried to forget what I’d done.
 
        Becoming and Destruction
        On our way to Houston, those hard Amtrak seats, disappointing scenery, bad food, and getting annoying, uncomfortable erections at night, stole my concentration. The erections linked themselves to visions of Loni Anderson or any of Charlie’s Angels, which was pleasant, but I didn’t like feeling out of control. My mom noticed my restlessness, asked if I was okay. I wanted to say yes and to believe that this sign of manhood was good, or scream no, my dreams are driving me crazy, or I don’t know; the voice of the LORD is inside me! I was afraid to be weak, and tired of feeling ashamed, on this journey into the American South, the setting for most of Bullwhip Days, a collection of Depression-era interviews with survivors of slavery like Elbert Hunter, who describes the Union soldiers he witnessed during the Civil War cutting meat from living pigs or oxen only to “go off leavin’ de animal groanin’.” Fur traders shamelessly did the same thing after the war, blasphemously leaving buffalo carcasses stripped of their hides strewn across the Great Plains that train tracks would soon traverse, wasting the meat, bones, sinews, and claws that the Native Americans would have cherished and respected, through grateful prayer, as sustenance and tools and shelter. Moving on and enduring hard fate could be heroic for any gender, any age—these consumptive white hunters were certainly considered real men—but my mother’s compassionate resilience was much more appealing to emulate.
        My uncle loved art, and the day after Galveston, before seeing a rodeo being setup in the airless Astrodome, or touring the NASA Johnson Space Center, where imagining blasting off this planet almost made me nauseous again, he took me to his Morgue. It was just a file cabinet in his congested garage, full of drawings torn from magazines that he’d copy or alter to design signs or logos for companies. On top of the cabinet was a book on Norman Rockwell so big that we supported it on our laps as we sat beside each other on the living room couch. “There’s nothing Rockwell doesn’t see,” my uncle said. I didn’t know then that Rockwell’s detractors, in defense of integrity and accuracy in art, accuse him of blindness. They say sentimentality elevates white America and conventional norms and reductively simplifies young love, race relations, war, and progress. If sentimentality is unearned emotion, Rockwell does refrain from ambiguity, does hit you over the head with explicit feelings, but his technical ability sure did make people look distinctive, emotive, and very alive. Respect for the craft, the lines, the fidelity to faces and wrinkled skin on old hands or the creased uniform of a soldier in a war my uncle bled in, that’s what enthralled Uncle Johnny. The realistic portraits made me think about the black man on the train, all I’d missed. I had his brown suit, made of a material rough rather than smooth. I had his searing eyes. That’s it. But even if my eyes had captured more, I still didn’t know nearly enough about his personal history, or about applicable historical forces, to contextualize his experience and rescue him from the isolating scrutiny of objectification.
        My Aunt Edyth never wanted children, so my uncle promised he’d get that book to me someday. And he did, about seventeen years later, along with his Army jacket and some medals, when the paint he used to decorate commercial vehicles, or the fumes from motors left running in some of the garages he had to work in, generated cancer throughout his lungs and bones. The postman delivered the package about a week before he died in hospice.
        “He never really liked it down here,” his lawyer told my mother on the phone. “He was funny about it.”
        “Yes,” she answered. “For thirty years, he said he wanted to come home.”
 
        Privilege: Inclusion
        A beautiful girl invaded my elementary school in 1979. She looked like Olivia Newton-John. Something flared up inside me that felt higher and more pervasive than what happened to me on the train later. It was as tempestuous a feeling as puberty, I guess, but calming, too, and more about me as a complicated human dreamer; not as an animal or a potential breeder awakened to nature’s call. The smell of clean laundry and the smudged, burning ocher of dusk; something childish and sweet but sturdy enough to extend into maturation: it doesn’t feel sentimental to say she was about those things to me. I spent a lot of time watching the popular kids orbit around her in the schoolyard. A skinny, buck-toothed, freckled only child with cowlicks wasn’t included in many groups. But once, on a field trip to George’s Island, she and I found ourselves running and laughing through the sun together, sliding on our heels down a gray boulder with a deep, black fissure crackling across its face. We rested on a solid rock above lapping water and absorbed Boston Harbor’s light. I was afraid to touch her, to diminish her, to disrespect her in any way, but I wasn’t afraid of her company. Maybe the environment, being on an island, helped two young hearts feel more available to each other than the prison of civilized individualism usually allows. Possession wasn’t a desire; to be possessed wasn’t a threat. She told me she’d come to my town to live with a foster family. She’d even spent time in an orphanage at the age I was when my father died. Nothing out there, all that water and space, the black crack on the stone, the towering sky of soft blue, looked scary by her side; neither did anything inside feel wrong. Our shared shore didn’t seem like the edge of a cliff an escaping parent could abandon you from. She’d been through harder things and was stronger, in her quiet grace, than I could ever be, but maybe both our childhoods fractured enough to give us a unique potential for connection we couldn’t articulate. But we left for Junior High the next year, and I never believed someone so glorious could sustain interest in me. I also got absorbed again in my insular life, taking all the lies of love for granted that my mother told me—that I was special and deserved protection—instead of trying to make others feel that way. I asked what foster care was, and orphanages. My mom looked heartbroken and said she didn’t know much about them. We had the same kind of brief conversation about slavery after Texas.
 
        Deepening Separation
        For a few summer weeks when I was fifteen, after we’d moved back across the street to our old apartment complex, I thought a man was trying to kill me. He had to be devilishly patient. I had become unpredictable. I would linger at the park shooting baskets until night obscured the rim, or I’d try to make people laugh at keg parties in the woods until I stomped away early when I couldn’t get a greedy whiff of a girl’s hair. Home was usually half a mile away. I’d glance up at Elephant Rock on the walk, a ridge of gray stone in the woods that seemed to have shrugged off a tomb of trees. On trail maps its name was Black Rock. But from a distance it did suggest the forehead and spine of a profiled elephant, just like everyone said. When a curve in the street blocked my view, that’s when I would hear the footsteps crunching through leaves behind the dentist’s house, with its fake Greek columns out front. The rhythm was crazy and bold—crunch and crackle, crackle and crunch—followed by jarring silence. I had grand fears at first. The voice of the LORD divides the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness. Then I almost settled for the stalker theory. I never imagined a face, though, or a skin color. Last year’s leaves for lunatics to crunch through weren’t tolerated on landscaped lawns. I might have maintained the fantasy as an exciting, private game—after I kept surviving. I knew I didn’t want to suffer, but felt even less innocent than I used to, in the ineffectual way that Baldwin condemned. Guilt did fend off a sense of abandonment my father might have endured, by suggesting that at least something eternal was interested in me, even if only to collect a debt.
 
        Character Consistency
        Uncle Johnny called us a lot. One night I picked up the phone, said hello, and he bellowed: “Where’s your mother? Out throwing snowballs at your crazy aunt?” I laughed joyously, from shared knowledge about my combative Aunt Grace (who lived at the foot of Elephant Rock) and my mother’s masochistic loyalty to her. As the only boy in his family, he always wanted a brother, and my mom was his last chance. Instead of resenting her, he cherished her, forever. Wallace was never for my mother a man that his laughing or offended audience would ever understand. They got to be the closest in feeling, the oldest child caring for their crippled mom at the start of her long illness; the youngest at the end, holding their mother in her arms in bed as she died. We never saw him again after that 1980 trip. But my mom persuaded Edyth to send her his cremated remains north in 1997. My mom told her sisters that Wallace was finally coming home to be buried with their parents. Years of space had been conquered. They looked at her with blank, confused expressions, uncomfortable with him being reduced to ashes. I secretly imagined being able to run my hands through him, as a child would sift sand at the beach.
 
        Privilege: Acts of Mercy
        While drinking and driving not long after I’d gotten my license, I was pulled over by a local cop, the same man who purchased our disastrous house. It wasn’t the first time. He ordered me out of the car and led me across the lawn of a Protestant church. I looked up at a modest spire, a gray spike in the night sky. He stopped short, spun around, and struck me in the chest with his flashlight. “Smarten up, fast,” he roared. “This is the last break you get.” It hurt, a little, the light. The words hurt worse, but that’s because there was never any real possibility that he would inflict major pain. He knew my mother, my context. He could sketch my face and create a narrative that said I was worth forgiving. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine processes a mother’s story of her young boy denied that gift. He’s knocked over in a crowded subway: “Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.” To diagnose deep separation and societal fracture as errors of etiquette or courtesy or imagined decency—that is devil’s work. My disrespect and paltry compassion toward a stranger’s defensive but justified composure, no matter my age, aboard our roaring train, were similar signs of critical system failure.
 
        Recognition and Respect
        We are a nation of laws. Confident capitalists often boast about that. I return to children, this time a little girl in California, a Sinkyone Indian, who witnessed white men legally clear land—create space—for the glorious Gold Rush. They weren’t weeding or deforesting. They were exterminating humans. This child’s parents were murdered and her young sister, just beyond the high grass concealing her as she watched. She tracked down the bloody heart white men cut out and discarded, and held it in her hands, her only comfort in hiding. Native American culture, before Europeans infected it with progress, was intimate with and immersed in conditions of life and death that the civilized dismiss and degrade. The Huron relocated entire villages when land could no longer yield what they needed to survive and exhumed their dead. The corpses were placed in a pit of earth called a Kettle, and women “lovingly removed any remaining flesh from the bones.” White immigrants, fueled by abstractions like Manifest Destiny, determined that those tributes were as barbaric and bestial as the heathen rituals of the Africans they enslaved. Laws multiplied. Railroad tracks, monstrous stitches of steel and wood, spread over lacerations in the earth that only apocalypse can heal. We take flight from too much, even our dead, to the point now of dreading the humbling sight of them in open caskets.
 
        Anticlimax as Relief
        The psychotic hunter in my boring suburban neighborhood turned out to be a bug zapper, not the Lord. Like rubbery microwaved hamburgers and Hollywood devils, the sound of footsteps was an effect of human progress. I came at the dentist’s home one night from a side street. I heard the crackling. I saw a vertical lure glowing within a cage dangling from a tree branch beside a Mercedes in the driveway. The electrified grid indiscriminately fried everything in its orbit: pollinating moths, aphid-eating beetles, pretty fireflies, even bees and wasps at dusk. Female mosquitoes and biting gnats, the primary targets of the device, were spared, since they don’t really give a damn about light; they go for the scent of carbon dioxide exuded by juicy blood sources.
 
        Privilege: Obstacles
        Jesse James evokes a conception of American heroics I have little interest in anymore, a hearty dose of criminality with a pinch of rugged individualism. He was a bushwhacker. Many accounts of the Civil War describe bushwhackers as guerilla soldiers. A former slave, John Crawford, recalls them as “deserters from the army,” known for stealing and “having no mercy on the womens.” Although Mr. Crawford was an eyewitness to their actions, what he really gives us in Bullwhip Days is a blank gap of silent revelation: “’Bout twenty-five or thirty bushwhackers come in, and they is the worserest looking mens I ever seen. They tell Mammy get them something to eat. She starts slicing ham, and they say, ‘Where is the white womens?’ She tells them they all gone fur away, and they ain’t nobody ‘bout. Then a baby cries up in the loft. Mammy puts her apron over her head and say, ‘I pray to God to die.’ The bushwhackers stay up there two or three hours, and then they come down and grab something to eat and ride away. They is swinging old muzzleloaders ‘bout all the time.”
        There are lots of things I am not—black, female, Southern—that could interfere with my ability to imagine what happened in those “two or three hours” of hell. But I am human. I should recognize my very existence as a dynamic privilege. It’s a privilege to be spared having that violation belong to my family history. It’s a privilege to have been granted one loving parent capable of keeping me safe in safer times. It’s a privilege not to be haunted by what made my father flee his family and the world. And yet the more we attempt to fill in, by engaged imagining, the closer we get to another privilege: a respectful appreciation of different levels of pain and struggle that grows into deeper compassion for the ones who have suffered. Is that suit wool, sir? Maybe such a small question to a traveling man could have stirred his soul and his voice. Are birthdays hard, forever, after so many spent away from the people you loved? Maybe compassionate interest could inspire a neglected girl toward healing answers within herself.
 
        Edges of Worlds
        Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita: “Among hidden things, I am silence.” Krishna is God, and if God is everywhere, emptiness is illusion. Maternal love has made me believe in that possibility. The white space on that Chicago postcard might be a silent warning about doubting the value of personal purpose, placing peaceful space and a comfortable bed above the timeless work of relationships. In Alice Munro’s short story, “Leaving Maverley,” a devoted husband visits his comatose wife’s hospital room, as he has been doing for four years, and when he learns that Isabel has died, the narrator tells us: “The emptiness in place of her was astounding.” That indecipherable, unhinging emptiness is slowly consuming my mom: identity first; body soon. Her siblings all died in the order they were born, within three years of each other. They still exist for her. I remember straining to see the Gulf of Mexico with my uncle, while my mother lingered in the seafood place apologizing for my vomiting. The sky was blotted out with soft gray clouds that melted into drab water divested of blue but sparkling with white, splashing stars. Absence blurred into presence. I filled the awesome blankness with that beautiful, sunlit girl on an island closer to home, while my stomach gently churned. My childless uncle might have been plotting a seascape in pencil or trying to accept that he’d have to leave his cherished Rockwell book to a stranger that shared his blood.