Dreamer (11 page)

Now we were in the kitchen. Smith glowered darkly out the window, cracking his knuckles. I tried to ignore him. I said to Amy, “Your people lived like that?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I'd known your great-grandfather.” In the depths
of me I did. Partly I was envious, knowing so little of my own family's past before they migrated from the South to the city; and partly I hungered for the sense of history she had, the confidence and connectedness that came from a clear lineage stretching back a century. “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

“He was.” Amy laughed. “Mama Pearl told me he used to say over and over, ‘Life is God's gift to you; what you do with it is your gift to Him'”

“Excuse
me,”
growled Smith. “I need to shit.”

Amy flinched, as though he'd pinched her. She pointed through the window to an outhouse about fifty feet from the back door. Smith seemed anxious to flee the farmhouse and had one foot out the door when she said, “Wait,” reached into one of the boxes of SCLC materials we'd placed on the table, and brought out one of the Commitment Blanks distributed among volunteers. “I brought this along for you to sign.”

I knew that form well, having signed one earlier in the year. On it were ten essential promises—like the tablets Moses hauled down from smoky Mount Sinai—the Movement asked of its followers. Seeing the form made me feel a little weak, insofar as I remembered the hundreds of times I'd failed to uphold these vows:

COMMANDMENTS FOR VOLUNTEERS

I HEREBY PLEDGE MYSELF—MY PERSON AND BODY—TO THE NONVIOLENT MOVEMENT THEREFORE I WILL KEEP THE FOLLOWING COMMANDMENTS:

1. Meditate
   daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
   
2. Remember
   always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.
   
3. Walk and Talk
   in the manner of love, for God is love.
   
4. Pray
   daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
   
5. Sacrifice
   personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
   
6. Observe
   with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
   
7. Seek
   to perform regular service for others and for the world.
   
8. Refrain
   from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
   
9. Strive
   to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
   
10. Follow
    the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.
    

I sign this pledge, having seriously considered what I do and with the determination and will to persevere.

NAME_____________________________ (
Please print neatly
)

He tore it from her hand and tramped outside, his action so rude—so brusque—that it startled Amy and angered me. I followed him into the backyard, clamped my fingers on the crook of his arm, and spun him round to face me.

“You want to tell me what's wrong?”

“That story she told,” said Smith, “it's a fucking lie. Front to back, it was
kitsch
. All narratives are lies, man, an illusion. Don't you know that? As soon as you squeeze experience into a sentence—or a story—it's suspect. A lot sweeter, or uglier, than things actually were. Words are just webs. Memory is mostly imagination. If you want to be free, you best go beyond all that.”

“To
what?
”

“That's what I'm trying to figure out. By the way”—he held up the Commitment Blank and grinned—“tell her thanks for this. I need something to wipe with.”

I stood and watched him squeeze into the outhouse and shut the door. I picked up a handful of rocks and pegged them against the wall. Inside, Smith laughed. He reminded me I owed him for saving my skin in Chicago, and kept on talking through the door, railing against conformity and convention, all the while emptying his bowels loudly, with trumpeting flatulence and gurgling sounds and a stink so mephitic it made me choke, then fleeing back into the farmhouse, I found Amy looking through his bags.

Winged open in her hands was one of Smith's sketch-books. She turned each page slowly, puzzling over verses he'd scrawled beneath a series of eight charcoal illustrations of a herdsman searching for his lost ox. Finding it. And leading it home, where—in the final panel—both hunter and hunted vanished in an empty circle. “Chaym is talented,” she said as I stepped closer, looking over her shoulder, “but I can't see him helping the Movement. Look at these.” She flipped through more pages, turning them carefully at the bottom edge, as if she were afraid the images might soil her fingers. But I was not seeing Smith's drawings. No. I saw only the softness of her skin, and before I knew full well what I was doing I encircled my arms round her waist and lowered my head to her shoulder in a kiss. Amy stiffened for an instant. Then I felt her relax, offering no resistance whatsoever to my embrace. She squeezed my arm gently, then stepped to one side and placed the sketchbook back on the kitchen table.

“That was sweet, Matthew, but please don't do it again.”

“Why not?”

“I know you're attracted to me,” she said. “I
know
that. And I'm flattered. I really am. It's just that I'm not right for
you. Or you for me. Your sign is water—didn't you say that once? Mine is earth. Together, all we'd make is
mud
.” She tried to laugh, to get me to laugh, as one might a child who has knocked over his water glass at the table and needs to be chastised but not crushed for his blindness. His blunder. She was not angry, only disappointed, I thought, and was doing her best to be gracious—to salvage the situation for me and herself—after the minor mess I'd created. And it was strange, I realized, how at that moment my emotions were a pastiche of pain and wonder at her civilized composure, her ability to absorb the discomfort and disorientation my desire caused her—as if she were stepping over a puddle—and at the same time transform it into something like sympathy for me, for how confused and aching I felt right then—like someone who'd fallen off a ladder, say, or stepped on a rake. Yes, that was how I felt. Gently she placed her hand on my arm, and in a voice as full of candor as it was of Galilean compassion, said, “I'm fond of you, really I am, but I'm not the right person for you.” Once again she smiled, as one might when a child is being unreasonable. “Someday, if you do well, you'll find someone right for you. I need somebody a little more like the men I knew when I was growing up. Or like Dr. King. Oh, God, I hope I haven't hurt you.”

Actually I couldn't say; I'd never been shot down with such finesse before. Nor had I ever felt so impoverished by desire. Just then, her words were more than I could bear.

“We can still be friends?”

I couldn't look at her, but I said, “Sure.” My eyes began to burn and steam, blurring the buckled, floral-print linoleum floor as she pushed up on her toes, pressing her lips against my cheek in a chaste kiss. “I suppose we should get back to unpacking, eh?”

“You go ahead, I'll get Chaym.”

More than anything else, I needed to be away from the
farmhouse. And her. It was dark now. My feet carried me east, from the kitchen to an open field. Looking back at the lighted rear window of the old, warm house with its family heirlooms and positivist history as it grew smaller, I felt better being outside, stepping through humus, round moss-covered stones green as kelp, past the well where the water tasted faintly of minerals, skinks, and salamanders. The brisk walk left me panting a little, perspiring as if a spigot somewhere in my pores had switched on, pouring out toxins in a tamasic flush of sweat that soaked my shirt. Yes, it still hurt. I'd always known I was hardly the model for Paul's Epistle in Corinthians 13, but to be rebuffed because I fell so short of the minister's example was confounding. Who could measure up to
that
? Yet—and yet—in her refusal I also felt relief, as if the weight of want had lifted. I sat down in weeds high as my waist, the night closing round me like two cupped hands. Wondering less about the woman I'd desired than the mystery of my desire itself, how it had made me experience myself as
lack
and her as fulfillment, all of which were false, mere fictions of my imagination. Just beyond there were woods that looked vaporous and incorporeal in the moonlight; and I felt just as vaporous and incorporeal, as if maybe I might vanish in the enveloping, prehuman world around me. Leaves on the nearest trees trembled with tiny globes of moisture clear as glass. And then, as my eyes began to adjust, I saw numinal light haloing the head of a figure—it was Smith—kneeling amidst the trees.

His eyes were seeled, his breath flowed easily, lifting his chest at half-minute intervals and flaring the flanges of his nostrils faintly with each inhalation. His exterior was still as a figure frozen in ice. Yet inside, I knew from his notebooks, he was in motion, traversing 350 passages he'd memorized from numerous spiritual traditions, allowing the words to slip through his mind like pearls on a necklace. The passages—called
gatha
in Buddhist monasteries—ranged from Avaita Vedanta to Thomas à Kempis, from Seng Ts'an to the devotional poetry of Saint Teresa of Avila, from the Qur'an to Egyptian hymns, from a phrase in John 14:10 to the Dhammapada; they were tools—according to jottings he'd made—selected to free him from contingency and the conditioning of others. When he focused on a
gatha,
the
gatha
was his mind for that moment, identical with it, knower and known inseparable as water and wave. He was utterly unaware of me, and his practicing the Presence, reviewing these passages like a Muslim
hafiz,
was so private and intimate an exercise that I felt like a voyeur and was about to pull myself away, back toward the farmhouse, when I saw tears sliding down his cheekbones to his chin.

Then his eyes were open, and he asked softly, “You like what you see, Bishop?” He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Yeah, I cry sometimes. Can't help myself. When I sit, it just comes out. I can't keep it down. At the
zendo,
I wasn't the only one who cried when doing
zazen.”

I stepped closer and sat down as he stretched out his legs from the kneeling position, massaging them vigorously to get blood moving again. “Where was that?”

“Kyoto,” he said. “Two years after my discharge I was there, tossing down sake, and the fellah I was drinking with told me 'bout a Zen temple way out in the forest that accepted foreigners. 'Bout that time I was a mess, man. Drank like a fish. Hurt inside every damned day. I wanted to kill myself. Kept my service revolver right beside my pillow, just in case I worked up the courage to stick the barrel in my mouth and paint the wall behind me with brains. I went to the temple 'cause I was sick and tired of the world. I wanted a refuge, someplace where I could heal myself. I figured it was either the
zendo
or I was dead.” Smith kept on massaging
his right leg as he talked, working his way methodically from his hip downward.

“When I got there, I kneeled in front of the entrance, on the steps, and kept my head bowed until I heard the straw sandals of one of the priests coming toward me. I begged him to let me train. Naturally, he refused my request, like he was supposed to do, and then he went away. That's the script. So I sat there all day—like I was supposed to do—on my knees, my head bowed, keeping that posture and waiting. Night came, but I still didn't move. On the second day it rained. I was soaked to the skin. I damned near caught pneumonia on the second evening. But sometime during the third day the priest came back and gave me permission to enter the temple temporarily. See, he was playing a role thousands of years old—same as I was playing mine. He had me wash my feet, gave me a pair of tatami sandals, put me in a special little room called
tankaryo,
shut the sliding paper door, and went away again, this time for five days. For five days, I didn't see nobody. They didn't bring me food. Or water. I waited, kneeling just like you seen me doing, my eyes shut, hands on my lap, palms up with my thumbs kissing my forefingers, meditating for a hundred twenty hours nonstop to prove to the priest that I could do it. I say five days, but when you're in
zazen
that long, there is no time. That's another illusion, Bishop. In God, or the Void—or whatever you wanna call it—past, present, and future are all rolled up in
now
. And the hardest thing a man can do, especially a colored man whose ass has been kicked in every corner of the world, is live completely in
now
. But I did. And the priest came back. He led me down a hallway with wooden floors polished so brightly by hand that they almost gleamed, then he stopped in front of a bulletin board listing the names of the monks and laymen presently training at
the temple. Mine was the last, the newest one there. I tell you, buddy, when I seen that I broke down and cried like a goddamn baby. I was home. You get it? After centuries of slavery and segregation and being shat on by everybody on earth, I was
home.”

I did get it, and in his voice I saw the beautiful vision of a tile-roofed, forest temple encircled by trees, the grounds spotless, the gardens well tended, and here and there were statues of guardian kings. Smith began slowly massaging his left leg as he'd done his right, working from hip to heel.

“I was a good novice, I want you to know that. Every day I was up at three-thirty
A.M.
when the priest struck the sounding board. When I washed up I didn't waste a drop of water. I brushed my teeth using only one finger and a li'l bit of salt, and I was the first in the Hondo—the Buddha hall—for the morning recitation of sutras. After that, when we ate, I didn't drop nary a grain of rice from my eating bowl. I shaved my head every five days. Kept my robes mended. With the others, I walked single file from the temple into town, reciting sutras and collecting donations in a cloth bag suspended from a strap around my neck. Always I blessed those who gave, singing a brief sutra that all sentient beings may achieve enlightenment and liberation. But for that year I trained, I never touched money. Or thought 'bout women. Or drink. The world that hurt me so bad didn't exist no more, and I was happy. Hell, I wasn't even aware of an I. After our rounds we came back and did
samu
—monastic labor. Chopping firewood. Maintaining the gardens. And all this we did in silence, Bishop. Each daily task was
zazen
. Was holy. No matter how humble the work, it was all spiritual practice.”