Glory could feel her body winding down, her life energy draining out of her. It was not the same feeling as plain exhaustion. Her employer got her on a group insurance plan and she went to see a Doctor for the first time in her life, just in time to discover that it was cancer draining her life away and too late to save her. She didn’t need to hear the “if only…we could have….you should have…” It did her no good to know they could have done something had they caught it earlier, that she should and could have been getting annual mammograms. Now she needed to consider how best to use the time she had remaining to her and how best to prepare her son for his impending loss. He was a forty year old man with the innocence of a six-year-old child.
About this time a new tenant came to live at Corrine’s, a man with an interesting demeanor and a wonderful job. The man’s name was Alexander Graham named for the inventor of the telephone and he liked to say his father who had the last name of Graham decided to name him Alexander because he could tell even then that his son would have the gift of gab. Some people called him AG or even Alexander Graham, nobody ever called him Alex. Alexander loved horses and took tourists on horse and buggy rides through the French Quarter and the Garden District. He was a busy man most of the time but when business was slow he would invite Glory and Corrine and Noah for a ride around the neighborhood. Lulled by the steady clip clop of the horses’ hooves, Glory would doze hearing only bits and pieces of Alexander’s stories but Noah would hang on every word. Sometimes Noah practiced repeating Alexander’s stories; sometimes he practiced telling a few of his own. After all, he had seen a bit of the world himself.
Alexander Graham knew lots of stories about the rich and famous people of New Orleans, whether they lived there in the present or the past or had just passed through although Alexander once said nobody “just passed through” because each person who spent time in the city of New Orleans had its mark on them just as if they had lived there and then he’d said that really everyone was just passing through this life anyway and Corrine had given him a quick shushing look but Glory said “that’s OK, we all know that I’m dying, do we all know that we are all dying?” and Noah wanting to change the subject asked Alexander if knew any stories about “ordinary” people:
“You know what I mean? poor people.” To which Alexander said that poor people were not ordinary but be that as it may, yes he did know stories about poor people but most tourists who paid him for a buggy ride did not want to hear about poor people unless they had once been rich people. Alexander said tourists were always curious about rich people, rich and famous was better and the rich and famous who had lost all their wealth and died in poverty were the most interesting: “yes,” he said, “death trumps them all for pure fascination,” and Corrine gave him another look, but Glory was really not bothered by such references to the inevitable and she even became quite animated and contributed her own story about a woman in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia who was the young and beautiful second wife of a much older wealthy man who built her a castle. Then he lost all his money and died soon thereafter leaving her to live out the rest of her very long life in the chicken house where the new owners kindly let her stay. Glory said she wasn’t sure if the story was true but when visitors paid to see the castle, their tour always ended out in the back where they could see the contrast in accommodations and be properly awed by the vicissitudes of time and fate.
Passing a beautiful mansion painted bright yellow and trimmed in gleaming white, Alexander said the home was given to an order of nuns who cared for grown children, people who could not care for themselves, one of them, the daughter of the family who had owned the mansion. Alexander tactfully said the young woman was “slow” and her parents had cared for her quite lovingly but after the mother died and then the housekeeper and the gardener, her father knew that before long his daughter would be alone and helpless so he deeded the house to the nuns to turn into a home for developmentally disabled adults and thus assured that his daughter would be well cared for. Then he died a peaceful death in the upstairs bedroom he had reserved for his remaining days and had a beautiful funeral procession up the street to the famous cemetery where all the movies scenes were filmed.
Noah asked what “developmentally disabled” meant and before Corrine or Glory could interject, Alexander told them something they would each cherish. He said they were people who were too innocent for a guilty world.
“Even the best intentioned among us have to learn a few tricks to make it in this world but some folks are too honest, too gentle and just can’t so they need some help getting by.”
Noah thought about this a lot. He knew he was considered “slow” but was wondering if he would be considered innocent.
One afternoon when Glory was feeling very low and even Alexander could not cheer her up Noah decided to share a story of his own.
“Did I tell you the story about the college professor and the one eyed calf?” Noah asked Glory.
“No,” she smiled, happy to see him look so cheerful, for his anxiety over her was palpable.
“Well this was on one of them organic farms in West Virginia, maybe near where I was born but I didn’t know it then of course”
“Of course,” his mother echoed still smiling.
“I’d stopped there for a few months, helping out; I liked working on farms you know.”
“Oh I know,” she said, responding just enough to keep him going and not taxing her waning strength.
“Well, they had a lot of visitors from the city who wanted to see what this whole back to the land thing was all about and sometimes they would write articles about the farmers and one woman was writing a paper about the way they taught their children at home, stuff like that. So, this one professor came from some college in Virginia and he hung around kind of longer than anyone really wanted. He said he wanted to help but whenever anyone really needed him to do anything it was too early in the morning or he was out exploring. The only time anyone could rely on this guy to be around was at mealtimes and then he didn’t even help clean up afterwards, said to one of the guys that cleaning up was women’s work even though the women did all the men’s jobs too.”
“I hear that,” said Corrine.
“Well, one day the professor told the farmer that he would go out and check the cattle, probably thinking that would be a good excuse for a walk in the woods. The cows were grazing all over the place. The farmer asked him if he would know what to look for and the professor said sure, how hard could it be, checking cattle. So the farmer invited him into the corral where he had this one calf and the farmer asked the professor what was wrong with the little guy. That professor he walked all around the calf, looked him over from one end to the other and up and down and found all kinds of things wrong with it that were, actually, just fine. After a while the farmer got tired of waiting on the right answer and pointed out that the calf had lost an eye. Well you can imagine there were a lot of jokes about the professor’s own eyes after that. Folks said he was blinder than a one eyed calf and the women told him not to be afraid he’d be asked to do women’s work because you needed eyes in the back of your head to do women’s work which included keeping an eye out for the kids. Just when it looked like maybe he was tolerating all that teasing pretty well and might finally be accepted, someone got the idea to give him a nickname. I guess he did not know that being given a nickname was a good thing because when they started calling him Cyclops, he said he’d had enough and went back to the university and he never wrote nothing about the farm.”
At first Glory laughed to please her sweet son and then she laughed harder because it just felt so good to be laughing and then she just could not stop laughing at all. All that laughing was contagious and Alexander began to laugh too and when Corrine joined in they were all laughing so hard they could barely draw breath for laughing. Then Noah told a lot of jokes he had heard from fellow travelers, some he was not even sure he understood, most of them he’d learned from
an old guy who was hitchhiking back to New Mexico after having been gone most of his life. Glory wondered why anyone would leave such a beautiful place. She’d seen pictures in magazines of New Mexico and told Noah she had always wanted to go there and how she’d been trying to save some money to take Corrine and Noah both on a vacation to New Mexico. “Promise me,” she asked him, “promise me, that someday you will go to New Mexico,” so Noah, having no idea where New Mexico even was, said he would do that, he would surely do that.
Once, in the privacy of their room, Noah asked his mother if Corrine knew he was her son and Glory said yes that after telling Noah himself she told her story to Corrine and was glad because she learned then that her experience was not as unusual as she always thought it was and that comforted her somehow even though she felt bad for all the other young girls who had gone through the same betrayal.
Thinking about it made Noah remember a story he heard when he was traveling down through Alabama but he decided not to tell his mother for it seemed too horrible to repeat and when he remembered the story he did his best to forget it: listened to music or began singing to himself to drown out the image of it. It had been more than a decade since he’d heard about the terrible things but he still remembered it like it was just days ago. Noah had hidden the ark among some trees along a back road, a shortcut someone had recommended to him although to where he was not sure. The woods were softly beautiful in the dusk and enticing and wandering too far into them, he’d lost his sense of direction. He was not really bothered by this and began to look for a good place to make his bed for the night when he was startled by an old woman who appeared out of nowhere. She told him to be careful, that there were people hanging from the trees. Then she disappeared so quickly Noah wondered if he had imagined her. He never actually saw any people hanging from the trees but he dreamed of them, a multitude of bodies swinging from a multitude of branches, some by their broken necks, some upside down. All night long he heard the screech owls in the woods.
The next morning he headed back to the road to find the ark and resume the long walk toward New Orleans. But he walked in circles in the woods, unable to find the road and came instead to a large stone house on the side of a hill, a grand house really, with pillars out front. A family of women lived there, all beautiful, a mother and her five daughters. Noah knocked on the door to ask directions and discovered that he did not know the name of the road he was looking for and he stood there speechless and truly afraid for the first time because he did not want to lose the ark he had so carefully crafted and which contained his few possessions. The oldest daughter who answered the door assumed he was hungry and invited him inside to the kitchen. The mother fixed him some breakfast and asked him his business, realizing he was lost and afraid. They put him to work chopping firewood for the cook stove and he stayed several days with them, his harmlessness being apparent. At night he heard the screech owls. They sounded like women screaming in the night. He covered his head with a blanket even though the night was hot but still he heard the screaming.
It was the youngest daughter who told him about the people hanging from the trees and about the women screaming in the night in the woods behind the house. She told him that yes indeed there had been many hangings in the woods not that many years earlier and people would be afraid when they saw the victims and not report it.
“Lynchings” she called it, mostly men, mostly black men, but some white men who loved other men, sometimes a woman was hung after other tortures for transgressions that Noah could not understand. And, carried away with the horrors of the history of these woods in her own backyard, she then told him about the screaming in the woods behind the house, how every time she heard a screech owl she thought it was a woman screaming, how some years before, abortions were done in the backseats of cars in the woods with nothing to kill the pain and now it was just screech owls back there but sometimes, sometimes she thought maybe it was the ghosts of those women.
“I just know some of those girls went home and died, bled to death or died of infections, I just know it,” she said and Noah sat quietly while she shook her head.
“If a woman wants to have one, she is going to have one so they may as well make it legal and safe and clean,” she told Noah without batting an eyelash. When Noah asked what an abortion was, she became embarrassed trying to explain. She changed the subject, began talking about something else but Noah wasn’t really listening, thinking hard about the women, about the screech owls, about the people hanging in the trees.
When a week had gone by, a man came to the door to deliver some groceries and he told the women about the strange thing parked up among some trees alongside the road, a beautiful canoe, utterly abandoned on a nifty set of big rubber wheels, with the name Noah’s Ark painted on it. Noah cried out with joy and said it was his ark and that he had been trying to get to New Orleans. The man, Henry his name was, might have thought Noah was crazy but he believed him and certainly he’d seen crazier in his day. Henry drove Noah back in his pickup truck to the place where the ark was parked and they pitched it up into the bed of his truck, wheels and all. Henry drove Noah to the highway that would take him into New Orleans, where Noah forgot the nightmares of the Alabama woods until his sister-mother’s sad story reminded him and then it would haunt him sometimes at night just as he’d been haunted in those woods.
Thinking about those poor women having babies cut out of them in the backseats of cars, afraid and bleeding, perhaps to death, Noah did not want to disturb his mother, herself dying, and so once again he buried the image in his mind by suddenly singing one of their choir songs. This delighted her and they sang together a while as if they were the two happiest people on earth. It was in that moment that Noah learned that happiness was not always a gift but the result of hard work and effort and that indeed he had been innocent.
Glory lived long enough to see the Christmas Eve fires on the levee. She had come to enjoy the haunting sight of it and it comforted her now that she knew her own material existence was coming to an end. Noah watched her face lit up by the flames in the night then lost again in shadow and he tried to comprehend it. Glory watched Noah watching her, trying to decide if he was ready yet then realizing it was not her decision. Glory let go then and trusted to something, maybe god, maybe nature, maybe something else she had no name for, that Noah would figure out a way to live with this loss. That is, after all what everyone must do sooner or later and usually often. Glory got ready to die that night in the wavering illuminations and shadows cast by celebratory fire.
The next day Corinne prepared a special breakfast but Glory only pretended to eat. Preparing herself to die, she wanted no food and very little water. She asked Noah questions about his travels, for it seemed his memories about his journey down from Maryland through West Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, were endless and he rarely repeated a story. Sometimes he just talked about sights and birdsongs and smells. Sometimes he got quiet as he remembered. That morning, he remembered sleeping on a beach in Biloxi and opening his eyes to see the shrimping boats in the distance. On each boat a huddled figure steered while a slender graceful boy stood at the prow, poised to cast the nets and when they cast them, the nets billowed out gossamer white, a dreamlike tracery against the sky that was gone in the space of a breath, and, remembering this, Noah caught his own breath and tried to find the words to make her see it, but Glory was gone.
Corrine took care of the cremation and the service and she tried to comfort Noah but she could not comfort Noah. He found that just looking at Corrine made him sad for she was a remnant of something torn asunder, a piece of something broken and useless: the family that had been himself and his mother and Corrine and was now just two lonely people who had lost what had connected them. That was how it felt to Noah though he did not have the words to tell her this and he could not bear to look at her much less attempt a conversation with her. At first Noah walked to Claiborne Ave. to find comf
ort among his old friends there. But they greeted him with the news that one among them had died and they had missed Noah at the funeral. He did not even have time to explain where he’d been and that his own mother had died. He listened to them talk about the fine funeral and he thought about his mother’s quiet little service at that church that was his first home in the city, just the priest and Noah and Corrine, Alexander and a few ladies from the hair salon. Quiet it was, sad. He was still sad. He would always be sad. He could not imagine being anything but sad. Finally, when the others finished telling him all they could remember about the funeral he had missed, he tried to tell them his own story but he cried instead and ran off.
Noah started walking to the water, watching its oily darkness, the soft sound of it lapping up against the sides of boats. The moon glimmered on the water, a mother watching him, and he stared at it for hours mesmerized and soothed. Eventually he had to leave, go back home, he couldn’t stay here forever watching the moon’s reflection on the water…unless…he did nothing that first night by the water. He returned every night and stared at the moon until it had grown from a silver crescent to a large full round moon and it was simply too lovely to leave so he looked for a way into the water and finally jumped, shocked by the coldness of it, the breath knocked out of him and he let himself sink, stopped breathing even before he was completely under and passed out. He never heard the commotion of the old woman who had first seen him or saw Alexander who had been looking everywhere for him.
Noah awoke to the strong smell of ammonia and a large hospital building where he was wheeled around on a hospital bed for what seemed like hours and when he told one nurse after another that he had to get up and pee they ignored him or told him to hold on, no one seemed to know what to do with him until he got up and tried to find the bathroom on his own and about four of them came running. Noah actually laughed before he got dizzy and was glad to sink back down into a wheelchair. The hospital was a blur of days and nights and bright white lights until Corrine and Alexander came for him and took him home and he was embarrassed and ashamed and refused to speak.
For several weeks, Noah hardly spoke, barely ate, did not go outside at all and Corrine and Alexander were quite beside themselves with worry and frustration. No one knew how old Corrine was and to the little family of tenants who had gathered at her house she seemed ageless, eternal, but she was in fact quite an old woman by the time Glory died her own untimely death and feeling helpless to care properly for Glory’s son and after due deliberation with Alexander, she decided that Noah himself might be better off living at the yellow house. Noah went meekly enough, followed the nuns to his own room which was actually quite nice with a lovely view of the neighbor’s garden, learned where to find the bathroom and the dining room and turned off his light when told. Corrine and Alexander came often to visit and Noah tried to be polite and respond to their conversation but in truth he wished he could just fade away. After a while Corrine stopped coming to see him and Noah felt guilty that he had disappointed her. Alexander came a few times alone and for the first time in his life seemed to be at a total loss for words. The priest, who had befriended Noah when he first came to town, came a few times and then at last to say goodbye as he was leaving for Guatemala. He told Noah that he would be sure to tell the new priest to take care of Noah’s ark for him in case he ever needed it. Then years passed when no one came to see him and Noah did not care.
1995 - 2005