Gregory Orr

Hunkered down, nerve-numb, in the carnal hut, the cave of self, while outside a storm rages. Huddled there, rubbing together white sticks of your own ribs, praying for sparks in that dark where tinder is heart, where tender is not.

I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.

I felt both pleasure and a shiver as we undressed on the slippery bank and then plunged into the wild river. I waded in; she entered as a diver. Watching her pale flanks slice the dark I felt both pleasure and a shiver. Was this a source of the lake we sought, giver of itself to that vast, blue expanse? We’d learn by plunging into the wild river and letting the current take us wherever it willed. I had that yielding to thank for how I felt both pleasure and a shiver. But what she felt and saw I’ll never know: separate bodies taking the same risk by plunging together into the wild river. Later, past the rapids, we paused to consider if chance or destiny had brought us here; whether it was more than pleasure and a shiver we’d found by plunging into the wild river.

Snapping turtles in the pond eat bass, sunfish, and frogs. They do us no harm when we swim. But early this spring two Canada geese lingered, then built a nest. What I’d heard of, our neighbor feared: goslings, as they paddle about, grabbed from below by a snapper, pulled down to drown. So he stuck hunks of fat on huge, wire-leadered hooks attached to plastic milk-bottle buoys. The first week he caught three turtles and still there are more: sometimes he finds the bottles dragged ashore, the wire wrapped several times around a pine trunk and the steel hook wrenched straight as a pin.

July 1965 As the sheriff remarked: I had no business being there. He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Among that odd crew of volunteers from the North, I was by far the most inept and least effective. I couldn’t have inspired or assisted a woodchuck to vote. In fact, when the sheriff’s buddies nabbed me on the highway east of Selma, I’d just been released from ten days of jail in Mississippi. I was fed up and terrified; I was actually fleeing north and glad to go. - In Jackson, they’d been ready for the demonstration. After the peaceful arrests, after the news cameras recorded us being quietly ushered onto trucks, the doors were closed and we headed for the county fairgrounds. Once we passed its gates, it was a different story: the truck doors opened on a crowd of state troopers waiting to greet us with their nightsticks out. Smiles beneath mirrored sunglasses and blue riot helmets; smiles above badges taped so numbers didn’t show. For the next twenty minutes, they clubbed us, and it kept up at intervals, more or less at random, all that afternoon and into the evening. Next morning we woke to new guards who did not need to conceal their names or faces. A little later, the fbi arrived to ask if anyone had specific complaints about how they’d been treated and by whom. But late that first night, as we sat bolt upright in rows on the concrete floor of the cattle barn waiting for mattresses to arrive, one last precise event: A guard stopped in front of the ten-year-old black kid next to me. He pulled a freedom now pin from the kid’s shirt, made him put it in his mouth, then ordered him to swallow. - That stakeout at dusk on Route 80 east of Selma was intended for someone else, some imaginary organizer rumored to be headed toward their dismal, godforsaken town. Why did they stop me? The New York plates, perhaps, and that little bit of stupidity: the straw hat I wore, a souvenir of Mississippi. Siren-wail from an unmarked car behind me—why should I think they were cops? I hesitated, then pulled to the shoulder. The two who jumped out waved pistols, but wore no uniforms or badges. By then, my doors were locked, my windows rolled. Absurd sound of a pistol barrel rapping the glass three inches from my face: “Get out, you son of a bitch, or we’ll blow your head off.” When they found pamphlets on the backseat they were sure they’d got the right guy. The fat one started poking my stomach with his gun, saying, “Boy, we’re gonna dump you in the swamp.” - It was a long ride through the dark, a ride full of believable threats, before they arrived at that hamlet with its cinderblock jail. He was very glad to see it, that adolescent I was twenty years ago. For eight days he cowered in his solitary cell, stinking of dirt and fear. He’s cowering there still, waiting for me to come back and release him by turning his terror into art. But consciously or not, he made his choice and he’s caught in history. And if I reach back now, it’s only to hug him and tell him to be brave, to remember that black kid who sat beside him in the Mississippi darkness. And to remember that silence shared by guards and prisoners alike as they watched in disbelief the darkness deepening around the small shape in his mouth, the taste of metal, the feel of the pin against his tongue. It’s too dark for it to matter what’s printed on the pin; it’s too dark for anything but the brute fact that someone wants him to choke to death on its hard shape. And still he refuses to swallow.

1 After our march from the Hudson to the top of Cemetery Hill, we Boy Scouts proudly endured the sermons and hot sun while Girl Scouts lolled among graves in the maple shade. When members of the veterans’ honor guard aimed their bone-white rifles skyward and fired, I glimpsed beneath one metal helmet the salmon-pink flesh of Mr. Webber’s nose, restored after shrapnel tore it. 2 Friends who sat near me in school died in Asia, now lie here under new stones that small flags flap beside. It’s fifth-grade recess: war stories. Mr. Webber stands before us and plucks his glass eye from its socket, holds it high between finger and thumb. The girls giggle and scream; the awed boys gape. The fancy pocket watch he looted from a shop in Germany ticks on its chain.

for Peter Orr When all the rooms of the house fill with smoke, it’s not enough to say an angel is sleeping on the chimney. 1. a night in the barn The deer carcass hangs from a rafter. Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps and dreams about a death that is coming: Inside him, there are small bones scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass. He will spend his life walking there, gathering the bones together. Pigeons rustle in the eaves. At his feet, the German shepherd snaps its jaws in its sleep. 2 A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. The father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming. 3 I crouch in the corner of my room, staring into the glass well of my hands; far down I see him drowning in air. Outside, leaves shaped like mouths make a black pool under a tree. Snails glide there, little death-swans. 4. smoke Something has covered the chimney and the whole house fills with smoke. I go outside and look up at the roof, but I can’t see anything. I go back inside. Everyone weeps, walking from room to room. Their eyes ache. This smoke turns people into shadows. Even after it is gone and the tears are gone, we will smell it in pillows when we lie down to sleep. 5 He lives in a house of black glass. Sometimes I visit him, and we talk. My father says he is dead, but what does that mean? Last night I found a child sleeping on a nest of bones. He had a red, leaf-shaped scar on his cheek. I lifted him up and carried him with me, though I didn’t know where I was going. 6. the journey Each night, I knelt on a marble slab and scrubbed at the blood. I scrubbed for years and still it was there. But tonight the bones in my feet begin to burn. I stand up and start walking, and the slab appears under my feet with each step, a white road only as long as your body. 7. the distance The winter I was eight, a horse slipped on the ice, breaking its leg. Father took a rifle, a can of gasoline. I stood by the road at dusk and watched the carcass burning in the far pasture. I was twelve when I killed him; I felt my own bones wrench from my body. Now I am twenty-seven and walk beside this river, looking for them. They have become a bridge that arches toward the other shore.

Here’s a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me. Small then, and smaller. My desire’s to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart. And if the heart’s a rock I’ll whack it with this tin cup and eat the sparks, always screaming, always screaming for more.