The Wind in its Circuits, a novel: sample pages

1. Shelby

            Shelby had been but once to that Chicago of sirens and sidewalks where his father had gone after the death of his mother. His mother, whose gray, soft-haired portrait had been taken in a Portsmouth studio, stood watch in a frame by his bed. She died when he was three, and he remembered her mainly as a silent pair of hands, brushing back his hair or straightening his clothes. When he tried to put her together in his mind, his fleshly memory of her hands -- slender hands with bitten-down nails, hands tinged red at the knuckles -- merged with the gray studio image of her face, so that for her human hands there was no human voice. Her mind and heart were forever a mystery to him and she appeared to him in a silent re-run movie out of which her hands reached to button his shirt or brush his eyes.

            Only once to that snow-laden roaring Chicago where his father worked taking tickets for the big airplanes that roared in and out of the airport. His father took him out to see the airport, with its great halls of steel and glass, the snow-banked landing strips, the planes, the scurrying tractors that loaded them and fueled them, and the crowds of people (from all over the world, his father said), the men all in suits like lawyers and teachers, the women all dressed like women for church. He and his father stood in a lobby, sheltered by the wide glass, to watch the people board a waiting plane. He could feel the cold air that rushed in at the lobby door. At a signal, a man ducked his head into his collar, jammed his hat down, braced his shoulders, then dove out into the wind. A line of people followed and Shelby remembered how they staggered against the cold, how their clothes (as if they were wet) pressed against them as they waded to the ramp. The hard silver plane stood throbbing and roaring like a beast with no name. Shelby pressed his face against the window and felt the throbbing in the cold pane.

            In the neighborhood where his father stayed, no one walked the streets but the people who walked their dogs. It took four keys to get in the house. And there were trains that ran up on trestles, roaring and shooting off blue sparks right behind people's houses. They could ride the trains right past uncurtained windows and see a man shaving, or a darkened living room, or a kitchen lit up by the blue lightning under the wheels.

            The stations of the train were cold, wooden places where people waited with their hands deep in their pockets, huddling into their clothes against the wind. After they paid their money and climbed the stairs to the platform, the train would skate toward them from a point way up the tracks, around a curve in the snow-crazy distance. They would know the train was coming by the sound of skating and clicking that shimmered through the tracks and into the wood floor of the platform. Once the train came around that bend from where the tracks bowed out of sight, the lead car would grow up toward them, sudden as thunder, its green head massing and blunting at them brakelessly, the sound swelling from the thin noise of skating into a long, desperate gasp full of oil and electricity and the sucked-down souls of lost people.

            The people on the platform, if they recognized it as their train, moved closer to the tracks and Shelby moved closer to his father and cringed as the headcar and its threat roared past them like a wounded bull. The blurring metal and glass flashed at him, harmless inches from his face as he stood at his father's leg. (No one else, he saw, feared it; no one else winced his eyes shut.) The train roared indifferently to a sudden stop. And a door, with no person behind to push it, opened for them to step on.

*

            He remembered two Black men on the El station. In spite of the cold, they wore short, trim jackets and no hats. They talked loudly; he could hear them even as they trotted up the stairs. But they talked so rapidly and with such odd words and mingled laughing and a strange sliding music that he felt as if they spoke some other language. His father turned away so as not to face them and seemed to close himself against them, but Shelby could tell that his father was alive to the men, in the way a hunter is alive to sounds or to a trick of wind.

            A woman, mute and solitary, stood near. She watched. Her face was shrouded for the cold: she wore a long coat with a hood and she wore a scarf across her mouth and nose. But Shelby could see (for her mute eyes were gold; they lit up the darkness of her face) that she watched his father shrink away from the men. He could see that she watched for his own reaction. She was judging him, he thought, or judging his father. Shelby stood taller, and tried to act braver. But he stayed close by his father's side until the train arrived.

*

            And there was a whole lake of winter where great rafts of ice heaped themselves against the concrete banks like so much wrecked furniture. They could stand on the shoreline and see how the ice ran in swelled and broken sheets out into the distance, past the lone black ship out in the miles-out waters, and into a place where he could not tell ice from sky. When the wind was bad, people called it the-Wind-Off-the-Lake. Isn't it terrible, they would say, the Wind Off the Lake, for it came in a rush from combing the forests of the north. It had sharpened itself on the cold waters. It slashed at the city and pushed the wounded people over the streets.

*

            That visit was only once and for only four days. The grim kinsman who had driven him up to Chicago in a long night's driving (just as the winter storm was hitting) took him back in a long day's driving (after the city had unlocked and they could move again) across the flat snowdrift fields of Indiana. The road was blocked down to one snow-choked lane. In that slow, silent drive, Shelby's breath steamed the window over and over. He wiped it clear and watched the stranded cars and the buckled-up, snow-buried semis and the black-and-white drifted rows of cornstubble and treelines and wondered (with a wordless ache of his own far down in his belly) what it was that made his father's silence and his father's pain.

            For all during that four-day snow-bound visit, his father had walked him silent through the streets (which had themselves a forested silence as if something had for those four days been suspended). And even when his father joked with the man at the newsstand or a waitress or his friends out at the airport, he lapsed right away back into his silence. Even when his father asked Shelby simple questions -- What would you like for breakfast? or Do you want to go to a movie? -- he talked as if he were biting down on tough meat or as if he were chewing stones.

            Because of all the snow, he and his uncle had to stay over in Columbus with some other kin. The next morning, when they drove up the road to his grandparents' house, Shelby saw how the creek had piled up great shards and tables of shattered ice, all heaped up bright and broken, like a ditch full of diamonds. The burdened hillside cedars were bent over double with their weight of snow. When they pulled up into the yard and got out of the car, the sound of two slamming doors cracked the white valley silence and the sounds flew up the valley like a pair of wild geese. When the sounds were lost in the distance, Shelby looked around him. The wind made a low ridge-top moan. His uncle in his gray coat was tracking up the hillside to the house. The horses of the neighbor man waited at the fence line, stolid as old trees. Behind him, the shattered furniture of ice shifted in the creek with a crushing sound.

            He had an eerie, locked-in feeling. It was as if, in moving through the snow-heaps of a great cross-country storm, he had been moving, for days, within the limits of a single eye.

2. Ursus

            Next was Chicago. They came in on the edge of a knife-like winter storm, on a wind full of bone-dust and freezing chips of flint. They walked the streets like china dolls, iced to the brittle marrow and afraid a hard knock would shatter them and that their broken limbs would chime like bottles on the sidewalks.

            RoadMan had a brother laid off from the mines in West Virginia, living with his family somewhere in the vast concrete catacombs of Uptown. To find him, they had an old address written on the torn flap of an envelope. It had wrinkled in RoadMan's billfold for over a year. Once they figured out what the paper said and found the place, they found only an old man who scratched his head and told them to try tomorrow when the landlord came in.

            Ursus watched the silent curse RoadMan formed in his lips and brow.

            The brother was lost for now, so they spent three more nights on mission cots after each day-long search, drinking the mission soup, listening to the sermons, and playing cards among the red-faced Kentuckians, somber Lakota, and old men speaking in argumentative foreign tongues. A pair of black-headed boys with narrow jaws sang "In the Pines" each night, face to face, softly, like a secret, studying each other's faces for the painful harmony.

            Each night, as a form of rent, they had to listen to a deadly meditation led by a narrow young man in a white shirt gone yellow at the cuffs. Standing at a podium nicked on the corners by many years of being shoved in and out of a closet, he besought them to make changes (what more changes?) in their lives, to let the Lord in (through which tear in their clothing?), to humble themselves (how much more humble?), and to receive the Savior, who was, the boy said, to be found in the Book he pointed to each time he said the name, as if a full-sized Galilean carpenter could fit inside it. In return, the assembled residents mumbled back a few amens and responses and accepted their cot and their stew.

            On the third night, Ursus sat listening until that moment when the young man, out of habit he supposed, asked the assembly if any of them had a thought they would like to share. And without will or plan, and with the words already on his tongue, Ursus stood to say, "Yes, brother." (Yes brother? he thought. That wimp? Yes: brother. Yes.) "Yes, brothers, I have a notion." (What notion? He had no idea what notion.) "You know I've read and heard the words, 'the spirit of the Lord is on me,' probably hundreds of times but never once felt it until now, at least not the way I feel it right at this moment."

            He knew that he had turned the attention of the twenty or so men in the room toward him, but he was too taken with what was happening to worry about what they might be thinking. "You know,"(he heard his voice take on a ringing tone), "I know the passage that line comes from just as well as I know my own name." He caught himself with his hand cupped to his ear, in the habit of the Old Regular preachers, as if a voice were speaking to him from a distance. "The words come from the first preaching Jesus ever did. 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me', he says, 'because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and to set at liberty them that are bruised.' And brothers." He was beginning to pace, just a few steps to the right and to the left. "Brothers." (Yes, brother and brothers) "I feel the spirit of the Lord upon me tonight. He has been upon me these last several days filling me up with something I can't really describe . . ."

            He stopped for a breath and wondered, What's happening to me now? The boy preacher up front had folded his arms across his Bible and put his hand under his chin to ponder this new thing. Ursus felt a strong current run through him: of contempt and the relenting of contempt. Yes, he thought, even this pale turkey is a brother.     

            "I know," he said, "I know that you are all gathered here for various reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to be here. You've been blown here by hard winds, just like the winds that are blowing outside these walls right now. Hard winds of necessity, poverty, cold, and hangover. But listen a moment again to the words of this passage. It says, first of all, 'the spirit of the Lord is upon me.' Now what is this spirit? It's like a wind that moves you and fills you just as I have been filled and moved to say this thing. It says, 'the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath sent me to preach the gospel to the poor.' And who are we if not the poor?"

                                                                                                            (You say it.)

            "Who here among us drove up here in a Mercedes?" 

                                                (Aint none of us did.)                                                                          (You got it.)

            "Aint none of us here in a three piece suit."

                        (Not me.)

            "And moreover, that Book says, 'he has sent me to heal the broken-hearted.' To heal . . ." His voice slowed to let the word drop on the ears of the listeners. He saw the boy begin to open his mouth to take the session back, so he hurried on to speak. "Yes, he said to heal. Not to just console or to pat on the head, but to heal the broken-hearted. And I don't know about you, brothers, I don't know about your life, but I have had my heart broken, trampled, and shattered, yes shattered. And it helps me to know, to recall to memory and to attention, that the Lord came to heal the broken-hearted poor." 

                                    (That's right.)

            The boy made a sign with his hand as if to thank Ursus for the message and to say it was time to move on. "That's all right, brother," Ursus said. "I'm not quite done yet. I still have a thing to say. And I need to say it. For that's not all the passage tells us. He said he came to 'preach deliverance to the captive, and recovering of sight (the words are as clear to me as if I had the page right now before me), 'recovering of sight to the blind'. And this is curious. He does not mention the deaf, the crippled, or the diseased. Just the recovering of sight to the blind. Not recovering of hearing to the deaf, not recovering of wholeness to the maimed, not health for the diseased, even though in his work he did all these things and more. It makes me wonder, could that blinding that he speaks of here be more than a physical blinding? Could it not be a blindness we all share, the blindness to what goes on around us, the blindness to what is really ours in life, the blindness to our true selves and our true salvation? In other words, a spiritual blindness? Isn't that the kind of blindness that keeps us where we are? A physically blind man is still free to live a life of dignity. But the spiritually blind man, the man (or woman, either one) the man who is blind to the reality of his life, that man is trapped. And I swear, I've been trapped in the thinking that the world was out to destroy me, when it was my own sorriness and shabbiness that was doing it."                             (Amen)                                                                        (You tell it)

            "That's right, brother," he waved to the preacher. "I'm nearly finished. Just bear with me a moment more. For the passage goes on. He goes on to say that he has come to 'set at liberty them that are bruised.'

            "And that line, brothers, is a puzzlement. What could possibly be the bruising that he speaks of? It's clearly not a bruising of the flesh. Why else would he speak of setting the bruised at liberty? Why doesn't he say 'healing' of the bruised?

            "Well, we know that he is talking here of liberty and he spoke earlier of deliverance to the captives. What other bruising can he mean but the bruising of imprisonment? The bruising of the Cook County Jail? of the state pen? of the mental hospital? of the drunk tank? The bruising of the mental prison that we're all in, brothers, and sisters too if any were here among us. And I don't know about you, but I've set in many a jail

                                    (That's right)   

                                                             and I could have lain there much longer than I did. I could have been framed up and sent off on long jail sentences just as it has happened to so many others.

                                    (You tell it)

                                                 And I was in many a danger, before me and behind me.  (You got it)

             But I was always released. God was always with me.

                                                (Right on)                                                                                            And my friends were with me. And the local bail bondsman. But brothers (No, I aint done just yet, brother. Bear with me just a little while.) Brothers, these lines are deep. They are curious. They lead me to wonder, what would the Lord really have us do? And we can ask, now if the Lord came for all these things, and he's really all-powerful, why are we still here? Why are we still bumming for a meal? Why do we get stuck in jail every time we turn around? Why are we still so blind we don't see how it is we hurt ourselves? Why are we still getting bruised up and battered in warehouses and factories and muck heaps? Why aren't we yet free? Why can't we see a way out? Why are we still too broke to pay attention? This is something that has no answer in all the Bible, not in Job or any other books of wisdom, nor the Gospels or Epistles. It is one of the great puzzles of all history.

                        ("It's all right, brother, I'm just winding to a close here.) But you notice, brothers, He did not say He would do all these things. He merely said he would 'preach' them.

            "And brothers, what he preaches is healing and liberation. And just how he intends to go about healing and freeing us, the busted, broken-hearted, blinded, and bruised-up poor, how he intends to go about this task is a mystery to me. (I'm almost done, brother, I'm almost done.) But since he's preaching it, he must mean for us somehow to take this task on ourselves. And just how he intends for us to do this is yet another . . . "

            But by then the boy preacher had caught the attention of the man who played the organ so that Ursus found the last of his words wrapped up in organsounds and "Onward Christian Soldiers."

*

            On the fourth day, as the blizzard was trailing off and the city was moving its great arthritic limbs again, in an accident of recognition, they found RoadMan's brother pumping gas at a service station near an El stop. The brothers greeted each other like Esau and Jacob. Gulls from the Lake wheeled above them. Snow, like stacks of ledger books, was caked on the rooftops and gas pumps. Ursus stood smiling and useless in the cold.

3. Jeannie

            In Chicago, Jeannie learned the meaning of warmth and of survival. She learned that warmth was not firewood or chunks of coal or even piped-in gas. Warmth was dollars. Friendliness was dollars. To eat, to be recognized, to have shelter from the stare of the police needed dollars. Without dollars, Chicago was a city of turned shoulders, of locked doors, metal gates drawn against shop doorways, bone-cold worrisome nights shivering in someone's kitchen with your hands in the oven door, sandwiches on the doorstep of a place where a nun spoke to you from behind a screen.

            Warmth and survival were tied up with the child within her. Alone, on the streets, the small wordless, worldless, tumbling knot inside her was the only warmth that did not call for dollars. It asked for nothing. It merely nestled in the widening bowl of her hips in a hibernation from the winter that raged in each other bone. When her shoulders ached from hunching against the cold and her feet and her hands turned brittle and her legs cramped from walking or from too much standing in the lines at the Welfare or the hospital, she stroked that round warmth, she spoke to it or sung to it. At times, when she ached so much from the cold and the hunger, when an ache was in her marrow and in her glands and when she was down to one flickering wordless thought (made up of a hunger and a rage and a desperation to either die or to live some desperately other way), she sat on a bench or against the wall of a building and curled herself around that warmth: to protect it from all that ache: to be protected from all that cold. She decided then (in no decision she ever put into words but in each day's decision to get out on the street, to take a day's work washing dishes, to argue at the Welfare, to live) that she could not allow that warm spot (anonymous, boy-fathered, faceless, without definition or even a future) to die. There was something in the notion of such a death that was so massively empty that even her own death would be unable to silence it. In the cold of those early days, that decision and that notion were her survival.

            Years later, survival would become a reflex, a habit, something autonomic, simple and desperate and inevitable as breathing or heartbeat or the quiet work of her glands. No matter what happened, no matter what disease, supervisor, bad luck, cop, or landlord said to her, did to her, or put over on her, she did what she needed to survive it, outlive it, outwit it, outeat it, or if all else failed, out-pride it. She became so good at surviving (and thereby keeping the child alive) against cold, hunger, accident, sickness, operations, financial disaster, insult, and hard work that she began, at times, to get the fearsome thought that nothing might be able to kill her and she would be living forever with the rattle and roar of the El tracks and in the gas-range deeps of the Chicago winters.

            But when they killed her child (grown by the time they killed him into a near-man with broad muscles and broad wants and a scowl all his own, who still said yes ma'am like he was six years old), when they killed him, she thought, at first, she ought to die: she expected to either die or to want to die (or at least no longer to want to live). But she wanted then, in spite of her expectation, in that moment and in all the months after, all the more to live.

            She could not explain it, any more than she could have explained in simple words how it was she survived the years of danger and hunger, how she survived her years in the wilderness.

            It was a wilderness of wrong turns, lost chances, big money and fast music that turned over quick to the brick desolation of cold-water flats and the comfort of street corner blues. She wandered in and out of jobs and situations, good times with stacks of money to grim barebones times of empty shelves, with no notion that there was even a way out, no homeland, no settling place where she could belong. Wherever she was---she moved by the month when things got really bad -- it was merely the place where she was making it today, the place she was surviving today. She became a nomad, a Bedouin of the concrete, a wanderer in the vastness of the city.

            She could no longer remember how she survived that first Chicago night, or those first few weeks. She only knew that, if she had to it again, to be homeless, young, pregnant and ignorant, that something would happen. Something would reach across from wherever safety was to take her and lead her to where she would be, even for a short time, safe enough to make it to morning, warm enough at least not to freeze, with food enough at least not to starve.

            She could call up, when she let herself, vague memories of the kitchens of complaining women, the home for pregnant girls (where she was kicked out for getting into a fight), her amazement at the snows and the sheetmetal rattling wind. At times, she even caught herself telling stories from that time, as if the telling part of her could touch parts that the remembering part of her wanted only to ignore, push back, or eliminate.

            But one clear image stayed with her, clear as on the day she saw it: in a waiting room at the Cook County Hospital, she saw a line of pregnant women, far-gone, close to term. She had been told to join the line, though she had no idea what they had lined up for. They were lined up in the middle of a vast waiting room crowded with others: men on crutches, children with bruises and chocolate on their faces, a woman who held her angry arms crossed over her purse: a crowd of illness and injury: Black, white, Oriental and various unidentifiable others with a standing line of pregnant women running through it. The women waiting in the line might have been smiling or talking with each other as they stood, but the way her memory kept them was in their unsmiling silence: their patient/impatient fretful stance: hands crossed over bellies, hands on hips or wrapped around a book or lost in knitting. A tall, Black, broad-armed woman hunkered bigly over her belly like a boss or a bear. A small woman, white, pale as paper, with a sunken place in her jaw where a tooth was gone: she stood behind the enormity of her belly as if it were something else, a desk, a machine, a judge's bench. Jeannie herself, her brows hatchmarked with anger.

            They could have let us sit down, she would say when she told that story. There wasn't no reason for it. When I got to the end, I told them: this aint right, to stand up in front of everybody like that with your belly hanging out and all those men in there looking on. It ain’t enough we're waiting nine months already, they got us waiting in line, so that's double waiting. Back home, they didn't have but the one doctor, and they wasn't much doctor to him, but you didn't wait in line for him, he come to you. He come to you with his hand out, but he did come. He didn't leave you standing in line like cattle at a market. But they just act like: it aint none of our affair, and: we got enough to do without putting up with your sassy mouth. So they didn't do nothing about it then, or ever, I reckon, when all they had to do was put up a line of folding chairs or give everybody a number. But I remember just looking at the line and thinking: this is something terrible, this is something wrong; this can't be right.

            And I knew right then, this has got to go, baby, this has got to go.