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Authors: James Sallis
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listening.
He found the 8x12 brown envelope marked Accounts Due sitting on edge behind the library books. One leg of the metal clasp was gone. He thumbed it open, looked briefly, and took the envelope with him.
Back at Hacienda Motel he opened it again, slid the contents onto a table not unlike the one in Baylor’s apartment. Atop sat a composition book, the kind with marbleized covers, containing names and short biographies, close to a hundred of them, he figured, one per page, the thing so dense with entries that it was twice its original thickness.
Dav Goodman, born 1919, gunner in WW II. Worked as a salesman, cattle food initially, then hardware and, finally, furniture. Retired when Parkinson’s hit. One daughter, lives up in Iowa somewhere, not in good health herself. Son died “a few years back.”
That went on for some time before ending “Died April 9, 1998,” a formula that continued throughout.
Shelba Adari, born 1988. A runner on SMU’s team until the day she fell on the track while training and they discovered that her tibia had broken. Cancer, which was soon everywhere. Patrick, the law student she’d been engaged to, came to see her every Friday.
“Died Friday, December 21, 2005,” that one ended. The dates of death were written in a different ink from the other entries, an unusual green color, almost emerald.
Also in the envelope, behind the composition book and clipped together with a well-sprung paper clip, were a sheaf of letters written on a variety of paper. None had address, date, or salutation, though some bore a single letter upper left.
K,
There is so much pain in the world. I don’t know how we stand it. We reach out for the bag of food pushed through the take-out window and somewhere an entire town is being destroyed, bombs are being driven into shopping malls in old Toyotas, children are dying of hunger.
Outside his motel room window, across the street, stood a strip mall. That could be bombed out, he thought, from the way it looks. Of six storefronts, only the end one, a convenience store, remained in business, the rest caving in upon themselves, windows cataracted with dirt, bird droppings, and spray-paint tags. A young woman sat on what remained of the sidewalk outside the convenience store, back against the wall, talking on the pay phone.
D,
When I was eight or nine, on a road trip to visit my grandmother in Pine Grove, we came across an accident that had just happened. An old truck with no fenders had gone off the road and turned over. The driver, who looked ancient to me, like the gimpy old bearded man in cowboy movies, was trapped under the doorframe and when he finally pulled himself loose, about the time we got there, most of his leg stayed behind. While my father was busy improvising the tourniquet that saved his life, I sat by the little girl with my hand on her forehead. She was a year or two younger than me, couldn’t possibly be his daughter, I thought, old as he was. She died, with my hand on her head, just as my father finished his work and looked up.
We do what we can to ease another’s pain, thinking it will ease our own. But it doesn’t. Somehow, instead, it adds to our pain. We don’t erase theirs, we take it to ourselves. Is it possible that, far beyond our understanding, balances are at work? That suffering is like matter in the universe, there is only so much of it, forever the same amount, and all we can do is rearrange it, pick it up here, put it down there?
K,
Everything comes at a cost, even the good we do. Dav, Mr. Dahlhart, Belinda Chorley, Jerry (“Not the President”) Ford, Joe Satcher, they’re all at rest now, where pain, hunger, fury, even their own infirmities, cannot reach them. Angels didn’t lay them away like in the old song, not the angel of death or any other angel, because there are no angels. It’s all on us.
We have to be our own angels.
A man named Mr. Sheldon was the first. His heart, long overburdened by
He found the 8x12 brown envelope marked Accounts Due sitting on edge behind the library books. One leg of the metal clasp was gone. He thumbed it open, looked briefly, and took the envelope with him.
Back at Hacienda Motel he opened it again, slid the contents onto a table not unlike the one in Baylor’s apartment. Atop sat a composition book, the kind with marbleized covers, containing names and short biographies, close to a hundred of them, he figured, one per page, the thing so dense with entries that it was twice its original thickness.
Dav Goodman, born 1919, gunner in WW II. Worked as a salesman, cattle food initially, then hardware and, finally, furniture. Retired when Parkinson’s hit. One daughter, lives up in Iowa somewhere, not in good health herself. Son died “a few years back.”
That went on for some time before ending “Died April 9, 1998,” a formula that continued throughout.
Shelba Adari, born 1988. A runner on SMU’s team until the day she fell on the track while training and they discovered that her tibia had broken. Cancer, which was soon everywhere. Patrick, the law student she’d been engaged to, came to see her every Friday.
“Died Friday, December 21, 2005,” that one ended. The dates of death were written in a different ink from the other entries, an unusual green color, almost emerald.
Also in the envelope, behind the composition book and clipped together with a well-sprung paper clip, were a sheaf of letters written on a variety of paper. None had address, date, or salutation, though some bore a single letter upper left.
K,
There is so much pain in the world. I don’t know how we stand it. We reach out for the bag of food pushed through the take-out window and somewhere an entire town is being destroyed, bombs are being driven into shopping malls in old Toyotas, children are dying of hunger.
Outside his motel room window, across the street, stood a strip mall. That could be bombed out, he thought, from the way it looks. Of six storefronts, only the end one, a convenience store, remained in business, the rest caving in upon themselves, windows cataracted with dirt, bird droppings, and spray-paint tags. A young woman sat on what remained of the sidewalk outside the convenience store, back against the wall, talking on the pay phone.
D,
When I was eight or nine, on a road trip to visit my grandmother in Pine Grove, we came across an accident that had just happened. An old truck with no fenders had gone off the road and turned over. The driver, who looked ancient to me, like the gimpy old bearded man in cowboy movies, was trapped under the doorframe and when he finally pulled himself loose, about the time we got there, most of his leg stayed behind. While my father was busy improvising the tourniquet that saved his life, I sat by the little girl with my hand on her forehead. She was a year or two younger than me, couldn’t possibly be his daughter, I thought, old as he was. She died, with my hand on her head, just as my father finished his work and looked up.
We do what we can to ease another’s pain, thinking it will ease our own. But it doesn’t. Somehow, instead, it adds to our pain. We don’t erase theirs, we take it to ourselves. Is it possible that, far beyond our understanding, balances are at work? That suffering is like matter in the universe, there is only so much of it, forever the same amount, and all we can do is rearrange it, pick it up here, put it down there?
K,
Everything comes at a cost, even the good we do. Dav, Mr. Dahlhart, Belinda Chorley, Jerry (“Not the President”) Ford, Joe Satcher, they’re all at rest now, where pain, hunger, fury, even their own infirmities, cannot reach them. Angels didn’t lay them away like in the old song, not the angel of death or any other angel, because there are no angels. It’s all on us.
We have to be our own angels.
A man named Mr. Sheldon was the first. His heart, long overburdened by
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