Try a Little Shutting-Up
I’ve
read a couple of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels; and I’ve heard one, Last Car to Elysian Fields. It helped
pass the time – delightfully – one long, otherwise lonely, road trip. But it’s
not Elysian Fields I find myself
thinking about today. It’s Crusader’s
Cross.
Particularly the section where Robicheaux
has been called to the deathbed of a man he despises. and there’s no reason for
him to go he can think of, except the man, a life-long bully named Troy
Bordelon is dying, and his “estranged
wife” Zerelda has called Dave, asking if he can come see Troy. That’s all she
says, so Dave, who never wants to see Troy,
asks, “He doesn’t have a telephone?” Then, Zerelda tells him Troy’s “at Baptist
Hospital,” and for some reason wants to see Dave. “As far as I’m concerned, you
can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of
dying. So what’s a Christian girl to do?”
“Leave the dead to bury the dead,” someone
once said. But Dave will follow neither his own resentment nor what the wise
man advised; he goes to visit that poor fuck, Troy Bordelon.
I’ve
got notes on practically everything; it’s a flurry of notes around here; so don’t
think I’m quoting from memory (like the huge heads that write for The New York Review of Books). So this –
what follows – is in my notes, but they don’t say if Dave is thinking about
Troy Bordelon, which seems unlikely, doesn’t it? or someone else. It doesn’t
matter really. He is defining for himself what he means by slide: “He doesn’t defend or attack. He treat[s] an insult like a
compliment and an adversary like a misguided friend.”
Dave is just enough of an optimist,
for all he’s seen and heard, not to think, as I do, who have heard and seen a
lot less, that (foe or friend) everyone is
misguided. And there’s nothing we can do about it, except maybe on days when we’re
not so wound up because some other poor, misguided
fuck is winding us, we can live lightly and gently inside ourselves – and outside
in the world, if we don’t venture too far.
If I
sit still, lightly, in my chair – not
venturing far at all, just looking out the open window – maybe I become aware
of the color of the sky, or of the chokeberries ripening from green to
red-grape to black on the tree outside my window, of a cardinal’s whistling and
swallowing or the occasional truck grinding up old US-11 less than a block
away. Maybe I hear voices next door (but not words), a far-off crow; maybe I
see how the ivy has climbed two-thirds up the hundred-foot oak tree in the back
yard of the large, beautiful, old brick house behind us that still looks lived
in four years after its owners left to move out into the country.
The voices I hear: I think they may be
on television. The birds fall silent.
More
Robicheaux –
Question:
What can dumb and
fearful people always be counted on to do?
Answer:
To try to control and manipulate everyone in their environment.
Question:
What is the tactic used by these same dumb people as they try to control others?
Answer:
They lie.
But, if they’re clever, they “[wrap] a piece of truth inside [the] lie,” and challenge you to distinguish fact from falsehood.
Don’t try to do that, Robicheaux seems
to think. But you can’t not. Open your mouth and see. Maybe, though, if you can
sit still a minute longer, one cloud will change the color of the whole sky and
the ivy and the oak and the brick of the house, the cardinal will start
whistling, the crow will caw again, you’ll catch a word or four of the conversation
(“yellow” and “you know her”). And maybe you’ll see how things move along as
they do, not in the straight lines history teachers draw on their blackboards,
but in a misguided clutter of clutter.
Any
attempt to control, manipulate, or even guide is misguided; and on every attempt to draw the truth (the whole truth
and nothing but the truth) the chalk will crack or go crooked. Listen the next
time you think you’re telling it like it is;
really listen . . . to the crap that’s coming out of your mouth. Now, close it.
Shutting up is more than half the
battle. Hell, it’s more than half the war.
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