The Course of Silence

The Course of Silence

Whenever he arrived, Hack found the outlying fairgrounds where he would be working and located the tents where the help stayed. Most times, though, he would pick out a little clearing in the woods nearby, where he could be by himself in the way he wanted to be, no braggarts abounding or drunk dutchmen acrobats or fights over women or with women. Then he’d look for a local structure (a barn was usually best, though he’d settle for an airy chicken coop, if need be, or even a low limbed elder, or willow) where he could fill his burlap with dirt and hang it to a rafter or a branch with the rope he always carried with him. Then, as quickly as he could, he would get himself into town to look for the library. And once there and settled, he’d set to his mission.

Of course, it would have been easier to keep the past at bay had he chose to surround himself with people at a local church or tent revival or in one of many saloons or liquor houses dotting the fringes of every fairground town he knew. But the revival preachers would tell him to beg forgiveness and he didn’t want to be forgiven and the barkeeps would keep ‘em coming to help him forget and he didn’t want to forget. He didn’t want to forget not being able to feed his young wife and baby son. He didn’t want to forget stealing the fryer and being chased by the man with his squirrel rifle, nor deciding to turn, instinctively knowing the man wouldn’t shoot, and then pummeling him with his fists to the ground ‘til he couldn’t walk and a half mile away, tossing the man’s rifle to the woods. He never wanted to forget as they escaped town in a boxcar and less than forty-eight hours out, going over the Coolamee trestle works some time past midnight with a half moon and swaths of feathery cirrus clouds passing in the course of silence under it, his wife tumbling out with his baby boy in her arms, down, so very far down to the Yadkin River below. Her body washed up the next day, but he never saw his son again. He did not want to sit in a saloon amid the clamor of raucous voices, smoke and ugly frivolity, and try to forget it all in the slushy rambles of memory. And he did not want to wave his hands in the collective spirit of frenzied shouting, pretending all was well again with a God he knew, but not ever like that. He just wanted to be alone, the only sound, his internal voice reciting lines of poetry that tugged at his heart and bathed his mind. And so, the library. In every single town, the library.

Tomorrow he could be in the booth as much as four or five bouts, so he would have to squeeze in his time in the small clay brick Georgian structure next to the armory. The bouts weren’t so bad in that he had entered the booths with his father when he was a teenager and made the old man enough money to keep him in the rot gut bought from vile men the back of mercantile and feed and tack stores. Hack had become more defensive over time to protect his body but, these days, when the fury was unleashed, he was hard to beat. Because the fair booths were the last vestige of bareknuckle, he had learned not to go to the head, so as not to break a hand. He had learned well the various ways to sneak in body blows and wear his opponent down. In each bout there was a time of two-step footwork and jabbing in the slow dance of prey. There was also a time however, different in different bouts, where his feet stopped and planted firmly, where his wide shoulders squared and the passion of his punches reached back to release his buried venom and aversion of the world. It was during this time that all went silent. It was the silence Hack longed for. And the only other place he could find it, including even his dreams, was in the stuffed chair of a lone corner of a town or county library, like the lone corner of the ring where he waited to do violence, where he waited for the silence. And the poor creature who paid fifty cents at the chance of winning twelve dollars, was rendered bruised, abrased and radically short of breath, at times with a cracked rib, puzzled at the force unleashed in a sudden transformation. Hack’s handler, Paddy Corcoran, the booth owner and barker as well, had to start supplying pony carts for the fighter and his family to be carried home in. And the sooner the combatant went down, the sooner Hack was back on mission in the treasured stacks.

Before his father had absconded with him, the Sisters of Mercy had taught him in their academy in Cincinnati. Sister Mary Magdalene saw in Hack a lover of words, a little one with the soul of a poet. She took to tutoring him and found a voracious appetite for poetry, and even as a child, one able to sit in the silence and hear the flood of the language of the heart from a variety of men and women, most of whom long dead. Not long after he lost his family, he began extracting single lines of poetry that he could take out of the context of the opus, put in the small, leather, blank paged book he carried with him, and then live with, in the quiet, lines that said something of the power of love and something of desire and hope and faith. Something of survival. It had to do with looking underneath great suffering, to see what might be there.

The Carter County fair would be five days right outside Elizabethton and so he wanted five lines to put in his book and take with him by the end of the week. Paddy had decided that keeping the booth opened into the night just attracted the volatile drunk miners from over Bristol way, who were going to be fighting somebody before the night was over anyhow, but who were not good for the gate, as opposed to the curious, sober farmers, coming round with their families in the daylight hours, who’d wrestled enough to wonder how they’d do against somebody other than cousins at the church picnic. They were good for the gate.

Since he’d been reading his bible inside and outside the library, Hack’s first line was his favorite out of Psalms. It came from fifty-one: Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Hack had long liked that verse, though he hardly thought it possible to hear anything but his wife’s last fading scream in the night air.  But in the bout of the first morning, he had broken a big old famer’s rib, so it seemed just for all considered, to wish for something good to come of the pounding. Hack studied the words, said them to himself, sometimes even whispered them aloud to give them some slight bit of human resonance. And every set of words he chose, he chose to combat a broken heart, to hush the cacophony of despair, to land a right hook to his agony. And because of the good Sisters of Mercy, his understanding had a sophistication to it, a literary bent that brought him something, not peace, but a kind of engagement with the transcendent.

Hamlet was his favorite play, and he read it in an evening’s sitting at the Carter County Library, by a back-of-the-building window that looked out at a stand of loblolly pine, a sweet librarian checking in on him every half hour or so. What he liked about the play and Hamlet himself was that the prince knew, youngster though he was, that he had to put things right in the kingdom and that to do that, he was going to have to kill the man in his mother’s bed. But here’s the kicker: he not only had to do the right thing, he had to do it for the right reason. He had to kill the usurping king, a man he hated. But he couldn’t kill him because he hated him, he had to kill him because it was the right thing to do. In the third act, Hack hears the villain king, Claudius, who murdered Hamlet’s father, say,

                  My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.                                                                        Words without thoughts, never to heaven go.

Once Hack knew he hated no opponent, his fists were like words that flew, and he could pound a man ‘til he dropped with a grunt and a thud and not even hear it. But his thoughts walked in a darkness and the sounds of words and laughter, of argument and proclamation, of prayer brought little relief. To Hack, Paradise had become a figment. He searched the flying words, however, and tried to flush away in the quiet, the murky gloom that soaked his thoughts. And when all is said and done, Hamlet himself, a martyr for the kingdom, a young man who did the right thing to the very end, says, And the rest is silence.

Next day, Paddy upped the reward if anyone could just knock Hack down. Of course, he upped the fee as well. Hack had become Paddy’s most valuable commodity in his growing stall of booth bare knucklers. It meant that Hack wouldn’t be in the ring ‘til close to dusk. He got up early, made coffee on the campfire, stopped off at the workers’ concession tent to see if Janie Reid, the toothless, light-hearted cook with always a kind word had made up any hoe cakes yet. She had not, but she gave him a few pieces of fried up streaked meat to see him through the day. And then Hack walked on into town, passing over the covered bridge photographers came to take pictures of, the jailhouse, Veteran’s ballfield and finally, the library. There were times in the stacks Hack felt something personal and warm, hearing a woman’s voice from the page. The pitch he heard was not his wife’s but rather some female soul of the world, some anima who could console him like no man could. And once again, this day he found her, in a matron who prized her solitude, in another who sat in the silence. Of all he read during the course of an almost free day, he wrote in his book these lines of Emily Dickinson:

                  Hope is the thing with feathers-

                  That perches in your soul-

                  And sings the tune without the words-

                  And never stops-at all-

Something more began to flow through Hack, something he could actually hear. He was beginning to understand something he had no words for. The tune was memory. The tune was his son in his arms and laying with his wife. The tune was the ram of another human at the mercy of his fist, power where there had been none. Something was beginning to move around inside of Hack, something with feathers. That evening he struggled a bit. It was as if he saw the fighter before him for the first time. His long reach took aim and jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and bam! the right hook! As the man in the ring with Hack was dazed, instinctively came his uppercut. As the man, a rather large fellow who was certainly no boxer, looked like he was about to fall, instead of finishing the job, Hack stepped back, and suddenly heard the crowd yelling, and Paddy adding, “Finish him off, kid! Go finish him!” Hack just stood there. He looked into the big man’s eyes and saw the wounds of many. The man looked back as if to ask, “What happened?” And he dropped all on his own, stunned and silent.

Next day Paddy set him up with three fights early. And though he took them all, two of them were actually fights. Hack had to dance and finesse and hold his opponent’s arms down a couple of times. One lad was a pressman over in Kingsport and knew his job so well that boredom had set in with a rumble of energy. And when he happened to land a punch, Hack felt something he had rarely felt in the booths. Something came back to him in the end, however, in the wake of his own soreness and when the flurry finally came, even with a tinge of dizziness, the powerful young pressman went down. Another was an old miner who looked like he hadn’t felt a human emotion in years. He meant business. He needed the money. It didn’t help at all that Hack’s mind wondered. He tried to feel that thing with feathers and it almost cost him the bout. But suddenly silence floated in, and his experience and skill took over where will and ire had gone away. The next fight was a half drunk, life-of-the-party husband out with his weekend buddies without their wives, a braggart and a joke teller with a mean streak. Hack knew it wouldn’t take all that powerful a punch and he was anxious to get to town, so he took a head shot and knocked the fellow out in a minute. It was so pitiful, the crowd laughed like in a vaudeville show.

Hack would be leaving town the next day, so he needed something for the night. He remembered Mary Magdalene speaking of an old monastery near where she grew up and how she would love to go back and visit it. And then he recalled her reciting to him aloud the poem commonly referred to as Tintern Abbey, and the near magical turns of phrase Mr. Wordsworth had strung together. He found in the stacks an old leather edition published in 1854, ornate and worn. On the title page it said in large type, THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. And then an inch below that in small type, POET LAUREATE, ETC., ETC. It didn’t take Hack long to sift from the bittersweet memories this line, the line for his book:

                  While with an eye made quiet by the power

                  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

                  We see into the life of things.

Hack walked back to his camp in the moonlight and saw the snaky shadows roam the road. He didn’t build a fire. He laid back in the moonlight and with a quiet eye he saw his wife and son as part of him, never to leave him, and there was a strange harmony about it. He saw into his life, and he knew the next day would be his last fight.

Toward day’s end, with fights not much more than momentary scuffles, which weren’t good for the gate, Hack entered the ring and saw a young, bright-eyed boy, whom he imagined didn’t want to be there, but as was the case so often with young bare knucklers, they were taking blows for their families, to put meat on a table.

The two-step began and Paddy was yelling, “Stretch it out, Boyo!”  Though reticent, the boy was powerful and moved with grace. They traded body blows but there wasn’t much to Hack’s punch. His movements were no longer purposeful. Fury was nowhere to be found in the booth. They went two rounds dancing and jabbing and dodging blows with a few landing, here and there. And then in the third, while Hack went through the rote movements of the waltz of the ring, the youngster squared up, stood like a city building, and got in touch with some inner force, a place where all his troubles rose up to. With a controlled rage the likes of which Hack had never seen or felt, the boy unleashed a barrage of punches, so quick Hack had no chance to counter. He made it through the round but could barely get back to his stool in the corner. Paddy doused him in water and had him take a shot of whiskey, slapped his face quick and hard, then gently, like a father putting a son to bed.

“Do it, Hackie, you got this kid.”

“Don’t worry, Pat. you can have my last twelve dollars.”

Paddy didn’t know what he meant, but when he took the mallet to the milk container that made for a bell, Hack sat. He heard the jeers of the crowd, the anger of Paddy Corcoran. He saw the stunned face of the young boxer across the ring. The kid walked over to him. Hack put his hands out, palms up and the boy reached out to him and pulled him up. Hack marched him to center ring and lifted his opponent’s hand in the air, to a now appreciative crowd. And Hack heard the whoops and hollers, and he heard the young man say, “Thank you, boss.”

Next morning, Hack made his way through town before hopping a freight alone. He was there when the library opened. He felt called to a writer he had explored before. Because he never knew his mother, Hack remembered feeling something when reading William Blake’s The Little Black Boy, whose mother is consoling him, helping him to know that his blackness is not as society sees it, that darkness turns to light in the realm of the soul. And very soon Hack took out his book, for the words of that mother were swinging at him from the page:

                  And we are put on earth a little space,

                  That we may learn to bear the beams of love