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  I Can Hear the Mourning Dove

  James W. Bennett

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Terrence Lore Smith, my best friend,

  without whose help and encouragement

  I never would have been a writer at all.

  One

  On the days when it’s not terribly hot, Mrs. Higgins turns off the air-conditioning in the lounge and opens some of the windows. I like the breeze at the open window and I sit on the blue couch. That’s when it’s so peaceful, and if I listen very carefully, I can hear the mourning dove. The dove says:

  Oooooo ooo ooo

  Cooooo ooo ooo

  The cooing is peaceful and reassuring. I am sitting in the sunken garden at Allerton under the warmest sun that ever was. An old science teacher bursts into my brain, very smug in his opinion that birds never make any noise whatsoever unless they are threatened or stressed. It would be hard to make a statement more false; but to learn the truth he would have to sit in the Allerton sun in a state of inner peace and listen to the mourning dove. I choose not to remember the teacher’s name, and I would prefer him to keep his self-righteous ideas out of my brain altogether.

  Oooooo ooo ooo

  Cooooo ooo ooo

  This is a different day. I’m quite sure about that. Of course, I could simply look at the logic of it: this is a day, and every day is different, so this has to be a different day. It is not the same day.

  I don’t always know what place this is. Mostly, I’m quite sure it’s a hospital. There are colored lines of tape on the wall, down near the baseboard. There is a blue line, a red line, a green line, and a yellow line. Too many lines at once is too much data. It’s not necessary for the tape to be fluorescent because they always leave the hall lights on, but I’m very fond of fluorescent tape. The lines are there in case you get scrambled, so you can find your destination.

  There is no tape at Allerton, but there are always gravel paths to lead the way. The formal gardens have hedges that make diagonal rows and rectangular rows; there is so much geometry. It is blissful there, in the warm sun, and my father is a nourishment.

  The hospital has lots of new wings, which are actually quite ugly. It has wings but it can’t fly. This thought makes me giggle.

  Mrs. Higgins says to me, “What’s funny, dear?”

  “It takes wings to fly, but they have to be the right wings.”

  “Grace, you need to get dressed. You’re still in your nightgown.”

  If I know her name is Mrs. Higgins, then I must know what place this is. I say to her, “What place this is, I know not.”

  Mrs. Higgins has blurry edges because she’s standing in the mist. People in the mist float a few inches off the ground since there’s less gravity. There’s some gravity, otherwise they would float high in the sky right on through the stratosphere and the atmosphere and the biosphere.

  I ask Mrs. Higgins what day it is.

  “It’s Tuesday, dear.”

  “You’re quite sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. If you go and take a shower and get dressed, you’ll feel much better.” After that, I don’t know what she says. Her voice is quite electrical.

  Some days I go flat out and the days crawl by and the nights go on forever. About all I do is sit and cry like a baby, and I wonder what’s the use. Some nights the nightmares come.

  My mother visits me and I’m so flat out I don’t feel like talking.

  “How’s your appetite?” she wants to know. “Are you eating well?”

  I shrug. “Who cares?”

  “I care, and you’d better care.”

  I just shrug again.

  She bores in. “What did you have for dinner last night?” She’s very persistent.

  I say to her, “We had breaded pork tenderloin, mashed potatoes with gravy, roll with butter, and strawberry Jell-O.”

  “I know you didn’t eat the tenderloin; did you eat the potatoes?”

  “Pork gravy on them. I ate some of the Jell-O.”

  “Have you told them you’re vegetarian?”

  “I’ve told them I’m a vegetable.”

  “I don’t see the humor, Grace. If you don’t tell them, I will.”

  “Please stop boring in. I get sick, sick, sick of telling them things.” It grieves me the way I talk to my mother. She’s so patient and I am such a cross for her to bear.

  I wake up in the middle of the night and the freight train is roaring through my bedroom. I sit straight up in bed and hug my knees. The roar is so deafening it vibrates the room. I am trembling all over and drenched with sweat; my teeth are chattering.

  In the other bed, Mrs. O’Rourke is sleeping soundly. The whole building is shaking and she sleeps. I dare not move a single inch to the right or left, or else I will be pulverized beneath the steel wheels of the locomotive. I see myself dismembered, and severed into scraps of flesh and bone.

  Then there is screaming. I can hear it clearly. It even wakes Mrs. O’Rourke up. She slept through the train, but not the screaming. The screams are louder and louder and closer and closer and then I realize that they are my own. I am the one who is screaming.

  Mrs. Grant comes in a hurry from the hallway. The two of us are sitting on the edge of the bed; she has her arm around my shoulders. It’s hard for me to talk because I still have the shakes.

  “Mrs. Grant, do you not hear the train?”

  “There’s no train, dear, it’s just the nightmare.”

  “Be sure to sit still, Mrs. Grant, or the wheels of the train will crush us to bits.”

  This is how it started. Nightmares. Nightmares with bed-wetting—it’s so humiliating.

  “Not the train again? It’s only a nightmare; everything is okay.” She dabs the sweat from my forehead. My complexion is bad; my mom urges me to take better care of it, but I am neglectful. Thinking this wretched thought, I start to cry, and Mrs. Grant holds me again.

  Dr. Phyllis Rowe asks me lots of questions about my father. She must think it’s an important thread in the fabric of my make-up.

  I am walking with my father in the field across the pond from the elegant Georgian mansion at Allerton. At the far end of the field there are woods. We always pick wildflowers as we go: violets, daisies, clover, and trillium. There are fuchsia bushes growing among the rocks at the edge of the woods; the bees are so thick the bushes seem to hum with a voice all their own. The sun is warm in the bluest blue sky.

  “Tell me about picking wildflowers with your father.”

  “Sometimes we would find the wild roses that grow in the woods, the little tiny ones in bunches. He would cut me some with his pocket knife. They are tiny and white. He used to carry balls of yarn in the back pocket of his blue jeans; we used the yarn to make an Ojo de Dios.”

  “What is Ojo de Dios?”

  “It means God’s Eye.”

  “Yes, but what is it?”

  “It’s a craft. You tie two sticks in the shape of a cross, then you cover the spaces with different colored yarn. You wrap the yarn in the shape of a diamond.” The eye belongs to the voice, and the voice to the eye. But I’d better not tell her that.

  “Your father was good at crafts.”

  “He was an artist. He was very good with his hands and very good with his heart. His hands were rough and brown, but they were tender and gentle. Sometimes I think Jesus Christ had hands like my father.”

  “That’s a nice thought. You were very close to your father.”

  She insists o
n using the past tense. “We were very close.”

  Maybe there’s an eye in the sky that rotates and pivots and searches into every secret, private corner in the universe. Maybe it’s a merciless eye that knows your thoughts and can influence your thoughts. Maybe the eye uses the voice. But I don’t think the eye could be an Ojo.

  “Besides picking wildflowers and making God’s Eyes, what did the two of you do together?”

  “We did everything together. We walked the grounds of Allerton from one end to the other. We made things together. We read together, especially poetry. I went with him on a peace march once—it was a protest of military force in Nicaragua. Sometimes after supper, he took me to the art room at the high school. He made a lovely sculpture of Beauty and the Beast out of junk and scraps. He could do things like that.”

  “Grace, you’ve never mentioned your friends to me.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “If that’s true, why is it true?”

  I just know I’m going to get scrambled; she’s going to cause it. I don’t want it to happen, so I talk as fast as I can: “Our house was in the country, I rode the bus to school and I rode the bus home. Our neighbors didn’t have children. Everything I just said is probably irrelevant; I wouldn’t have had friends anyway. People scare me and I’m too weird. I am crazy wild this very moment.”

  “Sometimes it seems maybe your father was your best friend.”

  I stop talking because the tears are running down my face. How did I get this way? It’s so lonely and miserable and degrading.

  Dr. Phyllis Rowe has her hand on my hand and she’s asking more questions. If she wants to know so much about my dad, why doesn’t she let him answer for himself? Her voice is a storm of static.

  She is receding down this incredibly long tunnel, like Alice floating through space. She is just a speck.

  The razor blade I use for slitting my wrist is a single-edge blade with a rounded metal shield on one side. It belongs to my father. He has lots of them. Artists use them to scrape paint from glass and other hard, slick surfaces.

  My plan is to cut both wrists, but when the blade slices the flesh it hurts a lot more than I expected. I am sitting in the bathtub, squeezing the bleeding left wrist under the water, and for a moment I think only of the pain. The blood billows into the water like red cumulus clouds. The clouds toss and tumble in the water, shifting colors from deep rose to a shade so pale it is nearly pink.

  I stretch out in the tub so that only my head and shoulders are above the water. I only know that a sense of purpose is very purifying. The hot water is still running from the tap; there is rising steam and crimson water. I feel pleasantly faint in a peaceful sort of twilight zone. They will find me naked, but it won’t be embarrassing because I will be dead.

  I wake up in the middle of the night with the shakes again. A siren is inside my head, trying to split my skull in two. The train is roaring. My nightgown is soaked with cold sweat; I lie in the fetal position and quiver. The train is shaking the whole earth. I am dizzy because I’m about to be tossed off the planet and into the abyss.

  I make it to the bathroom, where I wipe my face and dab the towel at my stringy hair. It must have been a nightmare. I take off the soaked nightgown and I am standing naked in the harsh bathroom light. I have the shakes so bad I have to lean on the lavatory to keep my balance. I try some deep breathing. I look at myself in the mirror, my red watery eyes and my pasty white skin. I never shave under my arms. My mother says it’s a tacky, sloppy thing, and if I shaved my armpits, and took care of my complexion, and did something with my hair, I would look better and feel better. I always shave my legs but it’s absurd, really. I wear blue jeans every day so no one ever sees my legs but me.

  I put on my robe and go to the lounge. When I pass the nurses’ station, I don’t look to the right or the left. The lounge is nearly empty because it’s not yet dawn. I can only see two or three people, and they are mostly floating in the mist. I sit on the blue couch beside the open window and hug my knees. The wind blows peace and quiet from the far-off university farm, cattle lowing and the rich smell of manure in a barn.

  Even at this early hour, I can hear traffic noise from the interstate. The drivers are probably going to work. I’m sure they are very competent; they will drive their cars skillfully and arrive at their destinations on time. They will work in stressful offices all day without getting scrambled, and their personal relationships will be effective. Their lives are so good and so sound.

  Dr. Phyllis Rowe is firmly convinced that my father is dead, but I don’t have the energy to dispute with her. There’s so much she doesn’t understand. The Surly People run rampant in our new neighborhood. They trample underfoot whatsoever is good, whatsoever is kind, whatsoever is merciful, but how could I ever explain it to her? I’ve tried to tell her about the Surly People and I’ve tried to tell her about my dreams, but there’s so much interpretation.

  I know exactly what place this is. If my father comes today, he will be proud that I don’t shave my armpits, that I haven’t become a pawn in the empty game called the Amerikan Way. If he does come, I think I’ll ask him if we can read some poetry.

  “Grace, did you hear what I said?”

  It’s Mrs. Higgins. “Mrs. Higgins, I’ve meant to ask you. Why are there so many mirrors in the lounge?”

  “It’s used sometimes for aerobic and dance classes. Are you ready to get dressed?”

  Mrs. Higgins is floating and misty. “Too many mirrors may not be a good thing, you know. They make so many facets. It can make a fractured person feel all the more fractured.”

  “I’ll think that over.”

  Mrs. Higgins always means well, but her teeth are so long. I’ve noticed it quite often in group therapy. Especially when she smiles: she’s very long in the tooth. It seems to be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, to be long in the tooth, and I start to giggle. I try to stop because I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but that only makes it worse. Of course she doesn’t know that I’m thinking about long in the tooth. I am laughing hysterically until the tears are running down my face.

  “Momma is momma and poppa is poppa.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Momma does what momma does and poppa does what poppa does.”

  “Your father died in June of last year. You’re not forgetting that, are you?” Her voice is popping and crackling with electrical charge.

  She goes on. “Your mother and father had different values? Different goals and priorities? Is that what you mean?”

  “That’s it. Dr. Rowe, have I told you about the nightmares?”

  “You’ve tried to from time to time. Are you still having the nightmares?”

  “I always have them. I’m sure they must be important.”

  “If you want to be specific, I’ll be happy to hear about them. If not, I’d rather not change the subject.”

  I’m starting to go flat out, but I say, “My dad was vegetarian. He thought it was barbaric to kill and devour a sentient being. I thought he was right. My mom didn’t really go along with it. We ate different things at the dinner table. Sometimes my dad would fix some vegetarian thing for the two of us and Mom would have something else.”

  “Did they quarrel much about it?”

  My mother is patient and kind; she has so much goodness. I say to Dr. Rowe, “They didn’t quarrel much about anything. At least not in front of me. That’s what I remember most: they weren’t really together on things, but their antagonism was always below the surface. It wasn’t out in the open.” I’m flat out now, and I don’t feel like talking.

  “I’m listening,” says Dr. Rowe.

  I just shrug. At Allerton, the sun is warm, and the dove brings peace and harmony.

  “Don’t stonewall me,” she says. “Please go on.”

  I shrug again. “Not worth the effort.”

  “I think it’s worth the effort. You can give up on your own time if you want, but not on
my time.”

  She ties my stomach in knots. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “So keep trying. Your affect is completely flat.” There is electrical interference in her voice. I don’t know if it’s charge or discharge. She tells me I have no affect. I have no effect either. If I died in the bathtub, no one would ever notice my absence.

  “Dr. Rowe, I have no affect and no effect. Hospital language is crazy, it’s crazy language for crazy people. Have you ever noticed that?”

  “We were talking about your parents, Grace.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you!” I snap. “My father felt things very deeply, and he was always full of energy. There was always a wrong to be righted.”

  “Such as?”

  “Peace march, vegetarianism, animal rights. When my dad and I were together, we were always doing something or going somewhere.”

  “And your mother?”

  “The opposite.” She ties me up in knots the way she bores in. She’s boring and she’s boring. She’s asking me more questions but the only thing coming out of her mouth is electrical static.

  This is the night that crawls by. Seconds are minutes and minutes are hours and hours are days. I can’t go to sleep no matter how hard I try. I should ask for more medicine but I know they won’t let me have it. Every scary thing that ever was makes a fiery chain in my brain. A nuclear war is incinerating the whole planet. I see burning streets and melting people, their flesh dripping from their bones like candle wax. In slaughterhouses poor beasts are getting butchered. They bleat out their panic and squeal out their terror and the blood gets washed away with a hose. I cover my ears with such pressure that my head begins to ache.

  I get out of my bed and sit on the floor in the corner of the room and hug my knees. I pray for daylight. Why should my life be like this? If I shut out the frightening things in my own life, then the calamities of the whole earth take their place. I begin to sob, but at first I try not to make a lot of noise and wake Mrs. O’Rourke.

  Now I’m crying so loud I wonder why she doesn’t wake up. No nurse comes, so it must be that they can’t hear me at the nurses’ station. Mrs. O’Rourke is in for acute depression due to menopause; she will get better, everybody says so. I will never get better. The meaningful part of my life is over, if I ever had one. I’m sixteen now, if I live to be 80, that means 64 years of fear and getting scrambled. It’s so obvious that the answer is death. Maybe my father will bring me one of his razor blades, but if he does I can’t botch it this time.