Osler's Razor

Chapter Nine: Summer

In Summer, Lincoln Park becomes a green ribbon laid next to the lake, the tall buildings to the west massed together, brown and red, and the Lake to the east a deep blue-green. There is an easy gentleness to the park on warm evenings, as people walk back from the beach, the softball fields and the zoo. On a perfect evening it seemed almost eternal, the scenes and the mood and the scent of summer, made of equal parts suntan lotion, foliage, hamburgers, and sweat.

Lisa and I would often walk down the ribbon on those gentle evenings. On a mild August day, we headed deep into the park, crossing Sheridan against the light. We were both being difficult. My jaw was set, and my eyes were cast down. Lisa walked slightly ahead of me, her hands jammed firmly into her pockets. She did not like my plan, and had told me so, and now felt the frustration of knowing that in the end I would go.

As she spoke to me her hands moved in quick chopping motions, her fingertips extended fully away from her body. Her voice became slightly staccato, and her fingers curled inward into her palms, almost but not quite in a fist.

We walked down a long asphalt path which sloped away from the center of the city. On either side of us were softball games, played with sixteen-inch balls and no mitts, by players fueled by aluminum cans of beer. In a few games, the cans themselves took the field and sat passively next to their owners, sunk slightly into the sand or grass and slowly warming in the afternoon sunlight.

After our encounter with the old woman, both of us ceased fearing our fights and almost revelled in them. More than once, passion closely followed such walks.

"If what you're talking about is what you're talking about," I explained, "then what you just said isn't even relevant. I mean, it's not even in the ballpark of relevant." I knew that I wasn't making sense.

Lisa looked exasperated. "Relevant? Is that what you said, Buddy? When did you start talking like a lawyer? My God, I feel like I'm back in law school again, where everybody used words like that all the time in any situation. Please. I'm the lawyer, anyways."

"What's the matter with my saying something isn't relevant? I can't use the word unless I take the bar?"

Lisa shook her head rapidly. "No, it's just that..., well, you just make me feel like I'm back at school, the way you always ask those questions. It's like the Socratic method of love."

I could maintain the combatative role no longer; her biting humor always got to me. I sat down on a bench and pulled her over on top of me, onto my lap. "That's us, huh? The Socratic method of love. I kind of like that."

She looked at me, not making the transition to joviality that I had. Her eyes were sad more than anything else, like the girl who holds a kitten and realizes the fragility of its precious life in a world filled with speeding cars and warm roadways.

Looking straight ahead but clutching at my shirt with her right hand, Lisa said, "God, Buddy, it's so strong, you know? It's so strong it can make me hate you and want you more than ever all at once. I mean, it's not just passion. I don't know how to say it. I'm not saying it."

"Saying what?"

"What it is that's there. What it is that makes me feel like you will come back to me, somehow. I know that."

I just looked ahead and nodded, my head down. I felt her hand on my shoulder, and the fire-red light of the evening was on her fingertips.

"I don't believe in fate, but I know I always wanted this. I had a prophet once, Buddy. I guess this is hard to say, because I don't really know where it comes from. Don't laugh, okay?"

"I wouldn't laugh," I said, leaning back and putting my fingers lightly on her neck.

"There was a boy in high school that no one knew. He talked in class sometimes. He came from somewhere else, just moved into town for the last semester of his senior year. Everyone was pretty much into their second set of friends by then, and he didn't push it. He wasn't quiet really; it's more like he was polite, so he didn't barge in on anyone, so no one met him.

"Anyways, he was in my science lab. Physics. I liked that class, because you got to actually do things all day-- burn things and wave pools and that sort of stuff. One day we both missed something in class, and the teacher asked us to come in on Saturday and make up the experiment we had missed. I had plans for the night, but I told him I could do it that afternoon. This boy said that he could do it then, too.

"The Saturday came and I went into the lab and the boy was there already. It was one of those wave pool experiments, where you measure the oscillations and are supposed to think about sound. We set the wave pool up, and it was like he started to look different. You know how that is, how some people you never notice, but once you know them you wonder why you never did? What I remember best are his eyes, these steel-blue eyes. They could look so understanding. Blue-gray, I guess, but they always looked like steel to me, like some new machine. But human."

"I don't remember anything about the experiment, or anything that he said, either. I just remember this sort of transformation. I wanted him very much, in a truly sexual way. It was the first time I had felt like that. I was a virgin, too, but I just knew that I wanted to have him. I wasn't much help with the experiment.

"After the class, I walked out the door with him, and he said 'what do you want to do?', like it was just assumed that we would go do something else after the lab experiment. And he was right. I don't even remember the exchange, really, or feeling awkward. We went down to the Lake; it was spring. We went to one of the town parks, and just walked. I wasn't confused at all. I just knew that I wanted to wrap him up and keep him. I held his arm as we walked, I remember that. I held onto him close."

"After the sun went down, we walked over to his house. His parents were gone to Europe. Meanwhile, my date has shown up over at my house, and is sitting there on the couch with my Mom and Dad. He was there for about two hours before he finally gave up. They said they liked him, and that he was very patient, and that maybe I needed someone like that. Typical. They always liked my dates better than I did.

"So this boy and I are back at his house. His father had the first compact disk player I ever saw, and about six disks. We still had quadraphonic and eight-track. He put on one of these disks I'd never seen before, and sat down on the floor. He was so gentle, just the way he sat was comforting.

"We talked for about six hours. He knew the answers before I told him what the questions were. It was like magic that way. It wasn't just like he understood what it was that I was feeling, it was that he knew before I told him, it seemed, and that I didn't even have to do the explaining part. It was more like two people talking over a play which they had both seen. It got later and later, then midnight, then later and later until it was about four. I couldn't take it anymore. I don't remember if I lunged at him or what, but I took off my shirt. I remember feeling his chest. It was incredible, just that part.

"I wasn't ashamed or anything. It's not that I wanted him to take me; I wanted to take him, to seduce him. But he piled up some cushions next to the sofa and laid me down there, with my feet away from the couch. Then he sort of rolled me over and lay behind me, lying on the floor. I could feel him behind me, and his right arm was under my neck, and his left arm sort of draped down between my breasts. It was an incredible feeling. Our bodies were touching, but not pressed together, and the warmth was incredible. At first, I just wanted to flip over and attack him, but after awhile I just sort of revelled in being the way that we were. I was being patient, for once.

"After a while, he started to kiss my left ear. Not really kissing hard, but little kisses, and a soft voice, and his breathing. It was incredible."

"After that, I turned around and kissed him. I just wrapped my arms around him and tried to rake it all in. He held me close again, which sort of put a freeze on things. I told him what was going on, that I wanted him so much that I ached, that I wanted to just keep him, to be his lover and have him be mine.

"I thought that he was going to say something about how we had just met and how we were sort of rushing things, the kinds of

things that I told guys when they put me in that situation. But he didn't. I remember exactly what he said. 'Sex is a symbol of something that we already have. I know that I have a role in your life, but I don't think that my role is lover. Your lover still awaits you.' Something like that. He actually talked that way. I think that was one thing that put other people off. It was like a bad sitcom, almost, but with one really good writer.

"We graduated two weeks later, and I gave him a big kiss after the ceremony and everyone seemed shocked. Then we were all gone, and so was my prophet. I never felt like that again, passion, longing, until I met you. Not that I didn't try to find it, or create it.

"I always knew that you would come after that, Buddy, that you would come to me and be what he said."

We sat there in silence, the warm air bathing us as the sun disappeared, aglow, into the netherworld on the far side of the curtain of buildings. It was warm in the dark.

With just the fire off the braziers and the lingering scent of softball around us now, I leaned back in the bench and looked for stars, and talked. "I had my prophet, too."

"In college, I signed up for black literature because we had to take a world literature course, and I was very into Zora Neal Hurston. They had a visiting professor from Maryland up teaching the class, because Williams had a problem recruiting a permanent black lit professor. They kept leaving. Most of the black students, and there weren't that many, were in the class. It was a seminar, really, with about twenty black kids and maybe eight of us whites. All guys, the white people, which I thought was a little strange. I guess the odds just get beat sometimes.

"This professor was really something. She was tall and dark and wore funky clothes and was pretty androgynous before that was in. She was a poet, and she talked a lot about herself. She went to Harvard for grad school, and did her dissertation on Haiti. She spent a lot of time there. I had the vague impression that she was into the entire culture and magic and everything of the island. She was a good teacher, too, and a lot different from what we were used to. I read all the books on the list the first week, even Phyllis Wheatley. I always did that for my favorite class, just because I couldn't wait and I knew that for the first week I could let the other things slide.

"Every class, though, I felt like she was picking on me. Whenever there was a slaveowner part or something like that, she would have me read it. I felt a little put upon, but I did it. I spent hours, days, on my papers for her, and she gave me B's. The only B's I got that year, and I worked much harder there than I did in the classes where I got A's. Towards the end of the class, she had me read one slaveowner part too many. I sort of cracked, but not in class. I waited until after everyone was gone, and I went up to ask her why she was picking on me. She looked up at me, and I started to talk, and she just put up her hand, without looking up at me. 'Come over to my house,' she told me. I was just burning up, I was so mad, and that caught me off guard. So I followed her to the her place, which was this small house not far from school by a creek that was starting to freeze over. God, things like that; New England can be so beautiful.

"She didn't say anything the whole walk, until she caught me looking at the creek as we went in the door. 'This is nothingcompared to the Eastern Shore,' she said. Whatever that meant. Anyways, I sat down in this beautiful wood chair. It was cherrywood, I think. She made hot chocolate, handed me a cup, and talked to me. 'I pick on you because you're the strongest. You can take it, and you have the most to learn from me. I know you,' she said.

"That seemed a little weird, and then she showed me what she meant. She had done my genealogy. She had it all down on a chart, all the white ones, anyways. I guess that even she didn't follow all of the twists and turns of the whitlock. She even had a picture of one guy. It was pretty amazing. She didn't know everything about the South Carolina people that I know now, but back then I knew nothing, and it was all news to me. She said that she wouldn't let a black student off without knowing her people, and she wouldn't let me off without knowing mine.

"After about an hour of this, though, I had a pretty crushing headache. It's funny, because I very rarely get headaches, maybe one a year. This one was about the worst that I ever had.

"She could tell. She told me to lie down on the couch; it was more like a long cot, really. Then she knelt down next to me and snatched my headache. I know that sounds stupid, but that's exactly what she did. She just put her hand on my forehead and snatched it. The things was, it was gone, but I could tell that she had it then-- she had the headache.

"I know the whole thing sounds stupid, probably, but it was an incredibly powerful moment. To know that someone is capable of just reaching down and pulling out a headache like that-- I don't know. So I got up to leave, a little bit scared. I knew there was a reason for all of it, though; that there was a reason that she was doing it and that it would come back later and be important for some reason. I knew that there was some reason that she was telling me this.

"As I left the house she said 'Everybody can snatch somebody's pain.' I remember just the way she said it. I can see her saying it. And that was the prophesy."

A siren went past by on Lake Shore Drive, and then we were returned to the quiet murmur of the evening.

"When Mark died," Lisa said, out of the darkness.

"Yeah, when Mark died."

"I did. And it was true, I snatched it out and had to take it all on, Buddy. It hurt so much, and it was yours. But it was the most incredible thing to feel that I could do that, that there was that in me and you."

I sat up straight and nodded. "So that's when I knew. It all just came to me, what she meant and what you did. I'll come back. But I still have to go."

"I wish I could snatch that from you, Buddy."

"I do too, but it's already gone."

Again we were quiet on the bench, and looked out over the park, and the few small groups and couples still on the ribbon. The moon came up over the water, orange, pregnant, and we both took in our breath for a half second when we first saw it, the sign of our prophets.

* * *

The next day, I went to the church I had been to nearly every Sunday morning of my life in Kenilworth. It was a stone building not so much larger than the large homes around it, but the wood of the interior was warm and comforting in a way no house was, and gave a sense of airiness to the inside space. I had always thought that it was somewhat ironic that the outside of the church seemed cold and the inside warm; it struck me that the Methodists must not have much of an evangelical mission, at least not in Kenilworth. On the hot Sunday morning, I was to meet my father in front of the church, as I had every morning since moving back to Chicago after Lisa retrieved me from South Carolina.

That morning, I had woken up at dawn, which was not like me. I put on my clothes and walked down to the lake, overwhelmed with grief and regret and longing for peace. So many of the people I had chosen to draw close were now gone—Mark, my Uncle, even the father I thought I had known. There was such turmoil in my heart, so much of it born of guilt at the sin I had committed. I didn’t have a plan, really, but knew that I had to go to the lake, and once I was there I did know what to do, that I had to drop to my knees and pray, really pray, in total humility, and seek a God who did not seem to know I was there. And then there was calm. I went to church that day with dirt and grass stains ground into the knees of my pants, badges of faith no matter what the wealthy women in hats might think.

The drive down Sheridan Road towards the church was well-memorized; the familiar blending into the familiar, bridging two worlds each of which welcomed me, and both of which I would soon have to leave. The trees of Evanston gave way to the even larger trees to the North, with the presence of the Lake to the right an ever-present stillness. On Sunday mornings, most of the others on the road were engaged in the same task as I, going to church, and then to someone's large home under the leaves. My neighbors, people like me; they would be my audience today.

The two of us, my father and I, walked into the church together and nodded at those people we knew. The ritual was a culturally coded message of belonging which the members shared; the subtle nod, the gentle smile. Each nod, our secret password.

We sat in the pew where I had once sat between both of my parents. I did not so often allow myself to think of my Mother, but sitting down on that pew I always did, as it was a place that seemed curiously marked by her. I clutched the paper program, which was quickly graying in my sweaty hands.

The sanctuary filled with familiar faces. In my head I went over the words that I would say; to my father, to all those people who, unsuspecting, sat around me.

The minister, Reverend Franklin, swept down the aisle with the choir. Though he had not the best voice in the room, the veteran minister had the loudest. In high school, I had envision the dynamics of the Doppler Effect entirely in terms of my experiences of sitting in place as the loudly-singing Reverend Franklin passed, like a train in the night, whistle blowing, quietly, then more loudly as it went past, and quietly again.

My time came closer as the hymns and announcements tripped by. The mundane nature of the service strengthened my resolve, and I felt the dull throb in my temple ease. Finally, the time was near, and a strange calm came over me.

The peak of the formal religious script to me had always been the moment of silence following the collective reading of the Lord's Prayer. The silence lasted only a few moments, but there was something delicious about the sudden shift from a group activity to being utterly alone in prayer, a shift which in itself was moving.

After the hymns, the announcements, the scripture reading and children's message, the minister lead the congregation in prayer in preparation for the sermon, which was on the subject, "Fully God/Fully Man?". The minister, spreading his arms over the pulpit, began to speak in a low, loud voice, saying, "Lord, today we sit here, each of us fallible humans under the dominion of a God we cannot fully understand. Help us to live with and meet the challenge of not always knowing what action is virtuous, or which action is truly sin. Help us to know what is right, even when that is hard to see, and to remember you, our Father, as we make these hard decisions."

I could feel the beads of creeping moisture forming under my clothes and in the palms of my hands, as my fingers clutched at the front of the pew before me. My father put his own hand on top of mine, sensing something, as before us the white-robed minister continued. "Let us now join together in praying as Jesus taught us to, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever."

During the conclusion of the prayer, I listened to the gathered voices, balled together in the familiar room. The light was cast across and along the white ceiling which was rounded off by the soft brown of the wood. The yellow light fell down along the walls, gently away from the center of the room, which was in shadow. When it rained outside, as it did this day, the tall, narrow windows streaked with water and let through their panes only a skewed but familiar scene of the outside, twisted by the refraction of the light through the drops of water. There had been a day, long ago, that the rain had moved me almost uncontrollably, such that I could feel my own spirit rising up in sadness and felt myself cry. Today I could not cry.

There was the tolling of a bell, and the brief, spare moment of silence had begun. I felt the first part of the moment pass, and looked up over the bowed heads of the congregation. The people in front of me were my neighbors, many of whom had known me literally since I was born. Three rows down was Denice Edison, who had been my nursery school teacher when she was a young woman of thirty. She wore a small black hat, with the fringes of her graying hair sticking out from the edges. I looked at her, at her hat and her hair, and then I stood. Standing in church, during the moment of silence. Today would be different.

With my first word, an audible rustle went through the congregation as the startled parishioners turned nearly as one to see the source of the sound. The faces reflected surprise more than anger, turned towards me like the faces of old friends who have just been awoken from a nap. The eyes looked at me directly, and I was surprised to see a patience in those eyes that I had not expected. Perhaps, they seemed to be saying, I was simply performing something which was an unknown part of the unspoken Methodist canon, a brief test of their pledge of tolerance.

My voice unsteady, I looked up towards the front of the roof, above the altar. I drew in a breath, and out again, trying to remember what it was I had planned to say, that I had memorized, but which had now escaped me into the yellow light or the rain on the windows. Finally, the words came to me again, or at least some words did, which seemed to be more through me than of me, and I felt my fear and shaking calm and stop.

I realized that my father's hand was still on top of mine, that he had not moved it when I stood up, and he did not remove it when I began my confession.

As I spoke, I looked directly into the eyes of Denice Edison, and saw calm there at this unlikely moment. It was her that I told it all to; even my description of the shotgun and the realization of what I had done did not change the expression in her eyes, which was neither judging nor empathetic. I did not describe my motives; why I had killed him was a question I had not fully addressed myself. I could not describe it as anything other than anger, the same anger that had caused me to cut my own skin with the glass from the window after I had served the family on the South Side. It was wrong, though, and that's why I was telling them. When I was done, Denice Edison returned my gaze, and again I saw neither judgment nor acceptance.

I looked up towards the pulpit, where the old minister stood with his hands folded and his head bowed, looking as if he was still in prayer through the interruption. Still standing, silently as the congregation looked at me, for an instant I looked out the window at the rain on the glass, and felt the small frantic voice screaming inside of me quiet; the ghost of the little girl being stilled.

My father squeezed my hand, but I did not look down at him as I turned to leave the pew. Only when I was in the aisle, my hand on the rail, did I look back into the eyes of my father, and saw my own, and those of the Uncle I had killed. I had looked in his eyes as I held the gun, and saw the level acceptance of a man who had long expected that fate.

As I walked out, I heard no sounds, not even the characteristic shuffling of feet and coats which marked the intermezzos of the service. I walked out the door and into the narthex, careful to hold the door so that it shut quietly behind me.

There was a slight slipping noise as the big door closed, putting its barrier between me and those to whom I had confessed. I walked outside, around the side of the church, and opened the door to my old car. I did not cry.

As I drove away and down towards the expressway, I saw the trees. They were the most beautiful trees I had ever seen, even more striking than those around the Hopgood Pond to which I had escaped in college.

I did not, could not, allow my mind to wander far from my task, however, as I turned onto the Eisenhower expressway and headed South. "Down the river," I thought to myself, "I'm selling myself down South, down the big river." In an instant, that thought was gone, as I forced myself to think about the route, the expressways, the numbers of the interstates, like a spider choosing his path along the web, selecting those strands which would accommodate his mission. My path took me away from my home, my father, and Lisa, and back into the South.

* * *

Even on a Sunday morning, the Dan Ryan was a construction-ridden mess, the drivers alternating between near-motionlessness and rapid acceleration without apparent reason. I was guided by a sense of direction that worked within my subconscious, as I had shut down my active means of thought. Indianapolis was a blur to the left, the Hoosierdome a giant pillow unnoticed as I drove past at exactly the legal limit, and the landscape slowly returned to a pastiche of red barns and fields on either side of the expressway. Cincinatti went by, and the fields of Kentucky in the evening as I plunged into West Virginia. Near Shalimar, Virginia, finally lost, I stopped at a tiny motel, a motel where the owner happened to be awake because a baseball game on the West Coast had gone into extra innings.

The proprietor emerged only long enough to give me the key and take my twenty dollars. I found the room at the end of the flat bland building, and fell asleep without taking off my clothes. Overhead a television flickered soundlessly, a small color set bolted to the wall.

In the morning, I rolled out of bed and stepped out the door, and found that this particular somewhere else was breathtaking; the Blue Ridge faced me proudly, a green blanket pushed so as to create luxurious folds. The road nearby, I was surprised to discover, was certainly not an interstate; only two paved lanes pushed through the woods.

Showered and changed, I walked back to the office of the motel, where the manager sat in front of the door wearing only boxer shorts. "There you go, I paid you last night," I explained, handing the old man the key.

"So you did," the manager said, "so you did." I started to walk away when I heard the manager's voice behind me. "You ever throw snowballs? You ever throw snowballs at cars on a day like today, save 'em up from the winter?"

I looked back at the old man incredulously. "Pardon?"

"Snowballs. Don't a hot day like today make you think of snowballs?"

I returned to the office step and shrugged my shoulders. "Snowball would be OK about now. But I think I'd want to just hold it in my hand in the car, you know, feel it melt."

"No way. No way, kid. That's the problem with you kids, you won't share," the old man nearly yelled, waving the key at me. "See, we would go out in the winter and throw the snowballs at cars, hiding in the bushes. Used to, but only a few times, really. See, I grew up in Harrisonburg, college town. One day we was throwing snowballs at some cars, hitting some of them, when one of them, we saw the damn brake lights come on. Then the car stopped. Two college kids, a boy and a girl, in some expensive car. They get out, and we take off for the bushes. Then they come after us, and we, me and my brother, we figure that we're goners, and we're hiding in those bushes. Just then, the girl, she spots us, and I figure that we're dead. I musta been about eight, about that. So they find us, but we're surprised to find out that all they do is throw some snowballs of their own at us. They just want to get in a snow fight! So we do it, we get in the snowball fight, and it lasts for about an hour, and we're all laying in the snow, all laughing and exhausted. Now, see, that's a snowball fight! That's a snowball!"

I backed away and opened the car door. I didn't know what to say, how to follow up on his story. It made me think back to college, to looking at the Western Massachussets farms and wondering what went on there, under the snow.

On the drive out of the tiny town I passed a small circle of black children in the dirt next to the road. They were playing a circle game, with one of the children popping up as the circle changed. As I drove by, they stopped and looked at me. My windows were rolled up and I could not hear their voices as they called out to me, but their eyes revealed removal from me; a knowledge that I would continue my drive and leave their town to find my own. Which is what I did.

On the search for the interstate, and the subsequent drive to Columbia, I was able to block out almost completely the purpose of my trip, or the certainty that by the end of it I would lose my freedom. The closer I got, the less prison seemed an abstraction. I wondered what it was that people ate in prison.

First it was the smell that hit me, just after I left the interstate and turned onto U.S. 17 towards Beaufort. The low country had a certain smell that seemed close to something disgusting, yet was tantalizingly pleasant. That smell brought with it a gnawing at the edges of my mental wall, and fear overtook me by the time that I pulled up in front of the Beaufort police station.

I sat in the car, frozen in place, for a full ten minutes. I wondered if, in fact, this was the right place at which to turn oneself in for a major crime; I wondered whom I should ask for once I was inside. Then, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I opened the door of the elderly car and walked up the brick path to the door of the brick building. The door itself seemed unusually heavy, and I had to put my full weight against it in order to budge it open. Inside, there was only a small white room, with benches along the wall and a lone woman sitting behind plate glass.

Looking at the woman behind the glass, I sat down on one of the benches and bowed my head. I sat there for a few minutes before I heard the voice, heavily accented, of the woman behind the glass, who had slid the shield out of the way in order to call out to me.

"Honey, can I help you? Are you here to see someone?"

Standing up, I walked closer to the glass shield and thrust my hands into my pockets. "Yes, Ma'am, I need to talk to somebody about something."

The woman behind the counter made a slightly impatient face. "Well, it would help me if you could tell me what sort of a somebody you want to talk to and what kind of a something you want to talk about."

"I guess I need to talk to somebody about a crime." I was struggling to overcome my inability to choke out the words. "I should probably talk to a detective, I guess."

Squinting slightly, the woman looked at me more carefully. "You look familiar, honey. You from around here?"

"Well, sort of. I mean, my family was, and I lived here for about, I don't know, four months this year. Well, last year."

Not satisfied, the woman continued to look at me questioningly. "What did you say your name was, honey?"

"I'm Buddy, or, David Trigg, Ma'am."

"Oh, all right," the woman said, nodding and smiling slightly. "Hold on a minute. Stay right here and I'll go get the person you need to see. Is this about your Uncle?"

I nodded. Once again, the Low Country knew me better than I knew myself.

"That's in the County, not the City. You need to see the D.A."

The woman disappeared through a door at the back of her cubicle. I sat on the bench again, but in only a few seconds the woman returned and smiled at me. "What you need to do, David, is go through that door," she said, pointing at a door I had not noticed next to her cubicle, "and go all the way to the end of the hall. The sign says 'D.A. Robertson.' That's the door. I told him that you were coming down." With a wan smile, the woman held the door as I walked through and peered down the clean white hallway towards the wooden door at the far end.

As I walked over the worn white linoleum, I saw the door at the far end inch open, pulled by an unseen hand. Standing at the threshold, I knocked quietly, and a strong male voice told me to enter.

He was a tall man, with dark hair cut short to his head, balding in the middle. The confusing element was that in this place where the difference between black and white is made to be critical in determining almost all elements of social construction, the man evidenced no traits which allowed me to assess his ethnicity with assurance. His skin tone was that of a light-skinned black or a dark Italian or Sephardic Jew, his nose distinctive but not pronounced, and his voice vaguely familiar, moderate yet unplaceable, lacking even the gentle low country accent to which I had become accustomed.

"Sit down, please," the man said. I sat in a tall-backed wooden chair which carried an indecipherable crest at the top of its back. The rest of the room was filled with photos of the land around us, mostly of the rivers of the sea islands, reeds poking through the meandering waters.

I looked in vain for diplomas or degrees on the wall, but could not locate any. I was searching for connection as the scenario became stranger, but was offered no respite by the surroundings. The DA gave me a long look over the desk, a look that was both knowing and questioning.

"Welcome back, Buddy," the man behind the desk said in an unmistakably authoritative voice. "I know you may not remember me, but I saw you when you very small, and your father brought you here. The Trigg family goes back a long way."

"I know that sir," I said, weakly.

"There's really something interesting about that family, your family. There's definitely a certain self-destructive streak, but you know that. Your Daddy got out, never came back. They say the sea island pluff mud gets in between your toes, but it didn't hold him. Can't say I knew him when we were young, Buddy, and he has never given me the chance. But down here I can know a lot of the things about people you don't know."

Looking across the desk warily, I nodded. "There's a lot of things unusual down here, sir. Everybody knows you before they know you, or something."

"Tell me about you, Buddy," the man said, leaning over the desk, his hands folded in front of him, "tell me about your people."

"My people, sir?"

"Your people. Tell me about your people."

I leaned back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling, squinting. I crossed my hands over my chest, and felt calmer. The D.A. seemed to already know about my people. "I guess," I began, "that the only person I knew who ever talked about things down here was my Aunt Sam, and she was crazy. She was really crazy, or at least she seemed like it in Chicago. She always wore too many clothes, like some sort of bag lady, and she used to talk about the stupidest things. Political things. But we got used to her."

I didn't know whether or not this constituted an answer to his question, but he seemed content so I continued. "Aunt Sam talked a lot about what it was like down here. Mostly she talked about what it looked like or how people knew their place or about how there were decent people in the South. No one really took her seriously, but it seemed funny that she always talked about it but never came back, not once. She never really told stories about what happened to her down here. She just talked about it."

"My dad, I knew that he was from down here, too, but he never said anything about it. We always thought that it was because he left when he was young, but he wasn't really all that young. I think that something bad happened to him and that he didn't want to talk about it, so I didn't say anything about it."

"I guess you know that I came down here looking for my Uncle. Actually, I didn't know that was who I was looking for, but that was who I found. I loved that man. He showed me an awful lot. He ripped every last fatalistic bone I had in my body right out. He said if you want something, you go get it. And he did. He just created his own world down here, until, it happened. I guess I didn't like what he wanted to do. Actually, I hated what he wanted to do, what he was doing."

He remained silent so I continued. "He had books, too, from the family. I went through a good part of the library while I was down here. The best part wasn't the books themselves, but what people had written to one another in the inside covers, dedications and notes and things like that. I learned a lot from those notes."

"Not that I really ended up knowing an awful lot of biographical information. They came down here in the 1820's, and they built Old Sedalia right before the war. I learned that, and about the whitlock, and the people leaving. So I guess that's mostly what I know: the plantation, losing it, people leaving, guns. That's my people."

"That’s people. Not just yours. But there is more to all of us, too…"

I didn't understand this. "I guess they heal in the end. Maybe. Well, I came back, right?"

"You came here for the first time-- you had nothing to forgive this place for, David. People forgive, they come back. They have to forgive themselves, forgive the town, let the anger go. Your Daddy never left that island behind. There's mercy out there, though, if you let yourself grab it."

He walked out from behind the desk and stood next to the window. He looked out for a long moment, then drew in his breath sharply. I had seen a news story once about a Humane Society which fed the dogs and kittens gourmet food before putting them to sleep. This moment, sitting in the big chair talking about my family, I felt like one of those kittens.

Sitting in the chair, I felt an arrow of fear shoot through me. "What does this have to do with me? You know I did it, right?"

"I know why you're here. We looked pretty hard around the scene of your Uncle's death, you know. Two shotgun blasts will mess a guy up pretty bad, Buddy, and that's what happened, two blasts at close range. Most of us had never seen the inside of that house. Beautiful place, Buddy. Yours now, I hear."

"I got it from my Uncle... I mean, I didn't know that I would when he died... that is, he never told me that. I didn't..."

"It was wrong," the DA said, somewhat sharply, standing up behind his desk. "Though, I won’t open a file. That means that we're not seeking anybody for anything, and that you will walk out of this door in a few minutes to live with the rest of the sinners." He punctuated his last remark with a sharp look.

"Let me tell you a story, Buddy, that you might not understand. But maybe you will. There was a young man in this town who was a quiet boy, lived out on one of the islands. White boy, and that was important then, even more important than it is now, if you can believe that. This boy, his family was a little odd, like some of them are down here. Anyways, one of his friends, one of the Trayns, has this little ritual we didn't see much on the island. Every year, this Trayn would take a woman as his own, one of the black women from the lands out on the plantation, and then she'd be gone. No one ever asked where she went, at least nobody in town did. They just didn't talk about it at all. The men out on the plantation, they knew that this couldn't go on much longer, and there would be a war. The blacks, they got guns, no one knew where from."

"But then the man was gone, with no war, no nothing. The man died in a hunting accident, it was decided. Shotgun. Nobody asked who did it. And now the man who did it comes down here, and doesn't show his face, just goes out to Sedalia. Now, killing a man is wrong, even the man that needs killing. "

I stared at the floor intently. Another thing that ran in my family.

“You know it is wrong to kill, don’t you? That it is against the Law, His Law?”

I nodded, crying.

"Who are you, Buddy Trigg?" the DA asked.

I breathed in deeply. "I am David Baxten Trigg, the son of Red Trigg, the nephew of Ennis Trigg and Doctor Micah."

"That's the truth, Buddy," said the DA, nodding slowly. "You can't get away from them, from here, no matter where you run to. Do with it what you will. But you're a free man, under the law of Beaufort County. You came, now you can go."

"Yes.” I looked up. “Even for something that bad?" I knew the answer, though. Standing, I nodded and turned toward the door, unsteady. As I opened the door, I was stopped by the sound of the DA's voice.

"Buddy, let me give you another answer. Next time somebody asks you who you are, you remember this day, Buddy. You tell them, Buddy, that who you are is Forgiven."

* * *

A pale yellow light came from a restaurant on Bay Street, and I walked towards it. The restaurant was long and thin, and somewhat formal. Through the middle of it, I could see that there was a small bar in the back of it, with several people sitting watching something on the television. I got the feeling that something had happened that day, some apocalypse, that drew people to the news; something in the nature of the beginning of a war or the sudden death of someone very, very important. It was the stillness of the town that gave me that feeling, and the intensity of the people staring up at the screen.

I did not hear the news; my mind was still on Forgiven.

Amidst the people at the bar was an empty stool, and I took it. I ordered a beer, and looked around at the crowd. Everyone in the small room was watching the television except me and a father and his two children who were at a table just below me. They had ordered hamburgers, and the children were badgering one another. From the television, I heard words being spoken, but did not listen to them, did not process them into a string of meaning. I was watching the children who were also ignoring the television.

As I watched them, I felt my awareness coming back. Still, I did not look at the television, but at the two children, each of whom was making a face at the other, eyes contorted, tongues aloft, cheeks sucked in. There was a rush of warmth that passed through me, oxygen, life. The children were moving slowly, as if the film had been slowed, and stopped their game. They looked up not at their father or at the television which had so transfixed the crowd, but at me. Their faces were expectant, without judgment, as they looked into my eyes. Again, a child looked up at me.

It seemed like a long time that I watched them, the only eyes other than my own which were not looking, aghast and silent, at the television. It felt as if a wind had come into me, and released something inside which I had been unable to touch or grab. Slowly, I raised my glass in front of me, the pale beer visible above my hand. The two children smiled, and lifted up their glasses, waiting.

Returning their smile, I nodded slightly. "Here's to Old Sedalia," I said. They laughed, and drank with me, as the others sat like stones, not seeing the cup of redemption or the light, or the water behind us, filled with reeds.