Bird-Self Accumulated. Don Judson
don’t know, sir,” I said. “You depending on me . . . it would seem to make you the one got a problem.”
How many times has one voice come toward conception—moaning under the weight of light, and the voice itself no more than a moment’s absence of that light?
Once, when I was nine years old, there was a fire at a horse stable. It was March and patches of snow were still on the ground. Several horses had escaped the barns by kicking down their stall and then stable doors, and when these—some three or four only—rose suddenly from the frozen woods they themselves had become the fire, their manes and steaming flanks, and most especially the rising cold of all their eyes.
Blood sweated and splayed out onto the snow. I was only nine years old and wanted this to stop and began praying, but from the barns all that could be heard were whistle-pitch screams of terror—and I remember seeing myself then as both the horses which remained trapped, and the uncontrollable wall waiting before them.
Now, here, swallowed within this prison if I could only make for myself a geography of fire distinct somehow from fire—
“Don’t bitch up,” we call to one another.
“Don’t break weak.”
Boo-Boo stabs Morris Boyle and I believe there is no difference, but the day burns thin as parchment to display an engine of living spread between ribs—and me, who sits alone and shakes to death here in my cell.
He stabs Morris Boyle and I can taste and see through to the sweat of weakness, waiting—but not for me. . . . Because daily I kill myself, scouring clean intestines, kidney, liver—and lay them singly across my bed, one after the other. And all I wonder is this: how is it that one of us becomes bone-white with want, and the other not?
This is what I mean: prison, to me, has become the first clean mirror. And can only be what it is. In the mirror this is the heart of midnight. With a sheet propped under my head as a pillow, all night I stare at the bars. I stare the bars, which are green, into nothingness. Then stare them into the world’s last hard bands of light. Then I step beyond the light: I’m standing in a clearing at a wood’s edge. Behind me is the prison. The moon sits bunched above it like some great catbird. It’s a high summer moon, yellow and finely veined. A cloud passes across its face. And for one moment I’m no longer a man standing outside a prison but am again a young boy rowing his skiff. It is a July night smelling of salt marsh, and from our front porch my parent’s voices drift, threadlike and disembodied, across the water as if they were issuing from the darkness itself which leaves imperceptible not only the porch where I know my mother and father sit but our house as well and even the shore, only a line of lanterns strung from posts running the pier’s length to anchor my imagination as I move along the vast black lip of an open sea, yet all the while believing not in any terrors, but instead in the finality of those lights and that shore, and of the voices behind them. On that night also, lying against the gunwale, shivering slightly, my shirt damp with oil and water, I watched high flathead clouds cross in silence before the moon, and was in that moment as sure of the equable passage of the world as I’ve ever been. So now, standing just beyond the barbed wire fence I try to find again, waiting in this memory, belief, and hold it to myself a long minute. Then I draw a deep breath of air sweet with orange blossoms and walk away from the prison compound.
All night I walk, twice skirting marshy areas. Close to dawn I think I hear the dogs and crawl into a thicket which opens slightly around the trunk of a tree. All day I wait and sleep in there. Once, when I wake, my eyes will barely open. They are swollen and oozing. My skin feels warm. Asleep again, I dream of insects large as bats. What stops this dream? Is it the dogs, can I hear them? Later, I sit up and become sick. My legs are swollen from bites and the poison of nettles. But it’s dark again. I start out. By midnight I’ve gone at least ten miles. Now my hands begin to turn blue. It seems I can picture myself drinking some time earlier from a dirty pool. I try to reconstruct events in my mind, yet can’t. Just before sunrise I stumble from a steep bank onto a small dirt road wound like a ribbon down through the darkness. At the end of the road is a tiny cottage. I stand up once more, carefully, and begin to walk. While my legs seem to move, I get nowhere. Finally I sit down in the middle of the road and begin to cry. A door swings open at the front of the cottage. An old man comes out. He walks down the road and lifts me in his ruined arms.
Is this how light death is, I wonder.
He speaks gently and tells me that fever has burnt the very being, and its weight, from my bones. Mr. Ghede is his name.
In his room lingers a dry sweet taste. I’m sitting at a table, Mr. Ghede at its other end. Before Mr. Ghede waits a pencil and a piece of paper with which I’ve asked him to draw a map of the woods. He wears the cokethick glasses of the nearly blind and if my limbs weren’t swollen to inhuman proportion I would hit Mr. Ghede and rob him. The old man places a steaming mug of broth in my hands. He will help me.
Mr. Ghede puts his face up close to the pencil and paper, peering at them. Drink the rest, he tells me, it will make you feel better.
I notice there’s a pond behind the cottage. And gardens. The old man has built a doll-house half again larger than his own quarters. After that, time must pass because the room becomes different. It is lit by candles placed in each of the four corners. I can see into the light. The roof and walls rush down to the floor.
Mr. Ghede stands outside a window. I see him watching. First there is this: the heavy smell of flowers. They are in my mouth and on my tongue like nettles. I gag and fill the air with petals thick as wings. The old man has put something in my drink to do this. As I look he turns into terrible Mr. Bones and then becomes an old woman without teeth.
He chuckles. Goat’s blood, he says. Now he seems to be watching my face. Goat’s blood, and wine and something special to give you vision.
I hallucinate a graveyard. The old man comes screaming about his life’s sleeping mind, talking like one hundred mouths and calling his name to be Baron Cimetiere. I can’t let go. Electricity has crucified my head to this picture. Of the staring angels and the stars which bow down. And Mr. Ghede. He’s smiling. The old man is different than the other dead. He has sharp little teeth with which to bite and the pain of cancer is on his inside. Then I know him to have done something terrible. And he begins to speak. Come in, he says. Come in, come in, he sings. Come in.
Mr. Bones is waiting, he shouts, wanting to read
each one, the story of their doom
and cuff their little ears and ring
their little ears.
Everything falls away from me.
When I open my eyes I’ve been tied to a chair. Mr. Ghede sits directly in front of me. A doll is on his lap. He explains it to be our soul which he’s carried in his angel heart like a broken stump chamber of salvation. Then he touches its waiting eyes to mine, my hair and my mouth.
As Mr. Bones, he explains, he had no face at the shopping mall.
“They’ll find the head sunk in a bag of stones.”
And Mr. Ghede has indeed become beautiful. A blue light surrounds him. It trembles. I can see words fall out of his mouth as he speaks them.
“A young man’s head in a bag of stones.”
There are one hundred, maybe one twenty—it’s difficult because of changes, how some cells they double up, some not, but there are about that many of us in security lockdown. Mostly on rule infractions or investigation, the rest, one reason or another, have asked for protective custody. So, maybe one twenty. It is a corridor of two wings, back to back, thirty-five yards long. Each cell two and a half paces across. Three lengthwise. In stacks at the head of my bunk I have matched three pair of underwear, two shirts, two pants—the shirts and pants, blue—three towels and one facecloth. This is how my day goes: at four o’clock someone throws shit on a med-tech and gets banged up in a strip cell. I listen. Then lie on my bunk, exhausted with hate.
My father would want blood and the pain of redemption.
He, however,