Did you know? Because it wasn’t that long ago that I saw your eyes and you said the same thing to me. You said there was a moment in time that you remembered, a moment you felt some joy and that, even though it was just a memory, you knew it would come back to you some day, not just as something from the past, but here with you. And you touched your finger to your heart.
Deep hot Texas August in 2006, The dust and smoke curled around a smoldering pile of trees that had been cleared from the land. We stood in a circle around the fire ready to extinguish any finger of flame threatening to spread to the dried up pastures. Dust rose in tindrels, pulled into the heat, mingling with the smoke, taking on the form of skulls, faces, ghosts. It rose up, pale and thin, disappearing into the blue sky.
Some barricades had been built and people gathered behind them making molotov cocktails with looted liquor bottles. A rumor rippled through the crowd that someone had become trapped in the burning store on the corner, they had gone into the basement as the building blazed and the stairs collapsed in flames before they could come back up. Months later I would come across a newspaper saying they had found remains in the building.
The basement of the church, made of stone and brick, had survived the burning and, in the years after the massacre, the century in fact, the new church had been built on its foundation. I was led to a small room with twelve wooden chairs. One hundred years before these chairs had been pulled from the smoldering basement as Oklahoma rose from the smoke in June and, five days after the killings, these chairs were sat in the street and Vernon held Sunday services, there, among the ruins of Greenwood.
I found him alone in the park across the street from the federal courthouse, no mask, eyes closed so tight in a cloud of teargas that seemed to envelope the entire city. When I said I would help him out of the cloud he said, unable to open his eyes and barely able to speak, “its just tear gas, you get used it, im used to it, it doesn’t matter.” Walking alone through the park, separated from the protestors, so much gas in the air and things were astoundingly quiet and still. It could have been any foggy Portland night, but I cam upon another lost soul, a fed walking alone, looking everywhere for his friends, we pass each other and keep moving in a quiet, teary eyed nightmare.
In the depths of the tunnel he told me that the Arkansas River was misnamed, that it was actually, the River Jordan. “Have you noticed there are so many more people living on the streets these days?” he asked, “They’re all angels, they’re being dropped off on boats, I’ll show you.” He stopped, turned to me, only his eyes and mine in the dark, “The devil has boats here too, though.”
A child walks up to me, turns his head up; “Do you know what they do in that building?” the child asked me. He said, “They murder babies.”
He sat on his bed in a house without heat and told us he was dying and didn’t want to take this guilt with him. He said he had seen a picture of a mass grave, bodies wrapped in clothe lay on the ground surrounding it, white men with guns pointed at Black men with shovels, it was an old picture he said and the police captain, his boss, had an entire box of them, bodies, brutality and, according to this dying old man, Bob Patty, pictures of the graves, so long hidden from view, so long rumoured. He took us there, he took us to the place in the photos, pointed to the ground, a place in the dirt, and said, “The gates of hell was wide open that day. The Devil was dancin’ in the fuckin’ streets.”
It was the middle of the night and I sat with Tasawi at the fire at Oka Lawa, a pipeline resistance camp in Southeast Oklahoma. “Every year you are in addiction,” he told me, “your soul walks away from your body and however many years you lived in addiction it takes that many years for your soul to find you again.” The local sheriff would drive by and flash his floodlights into the camp and the oilfield workers would blast their horns in the dark while we listened to the night birds in the trees.
Outside the prison waiting for noon, the moment that execution would or would not come, waiting for word from a government official so lost in his own demons that it was some kind of an absurdity that allowed this cruelty. Then, in the sun, a deer came leaping out from behind a small house. It ran a cross the road, bounded over a wall into the field. The drummers hit their drums harder and their song turned to yells and the deer ran so fast and jumped so high. Someone next to me said, “There, see it. Pure freedom.”
CS lewis says, “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.”
In the small trailer home the tornado hit and ripped it apart. The father had woken up when he heard the roar. He pulled his son close as the tornado laid upon them. He held as tight as he could and the wind tore the walls from around them. How he had refused, even as he was ripped and snagged, to let his son out of his grasp and when he finally came to the rain was falling on his face and his child was saying, “daddy you’re holding me too tight”. Only then did he let his grip ease. At the moment the father and son were finding themselves alive she was racing through the pitch black night to get home, hoping to beat the storm and get her family to the shelter. But, the tornado found her and lifted her car from the pavement and she prayed “lord, not like this.” The tornado or the lord sat her car back down right side up. She found her husband and son crawling up the hill in pajamas over shredded trees.
“Dont you remember that the devil was banished to earth?” She asked me. “Yes,” I said, “I remember,” She said to me then, in the kitchen, with care and with love in a whisper, “There is the thinnest veil between heaven and earth and I think its about to be ripped open.”
The Arkansas River had run dry and a man stood out there in the middle of the stones. “They’ve disturbed it,” he said, “I think thats why I’ve been feeling so bad. They unleashed a lot of things they should have left alone. I don’t know if you believe in good and evil, but it’s out here.” We walked together to the bridge and back. “I’m Apache,” he told me, “from the Southwest. Its always dry out there, but I’ve never seen anything this.”
Tex holds a snake on the banks of the river. “The family runs deep in east Texas where I was raised and that’s what I’m gettin away from. My kid is eighteen and out of the house now so I come here to escape, just be alive.”
“Not a bad place to escape.” I told him.
Somehow we got talking about Grapes of Wrath and he said. “My great grandfathers a writer, James Joyce. But I don’t have nothin to do with that family no more.”
Jerry told me this story last summer. He said. “I didn’t approve of it when he did it, but now I’m glad he did, “ he said to me, ‘Someone is gonna call you in the morning so you gotta be up early.’ and at five o clock in the morning my phone rings and its my daughter, I was so mad at him for doin that, he gave her my number and I picked up the phone and she said, ‘how you doin old man,’ and we talked and before I hung up I told her ‘I love you,’ and I didn’t talk to her again and she died six months later. I love Pedro here like he’s my son and I always will because of what he did and I don’t mean any disrespect and I hate to say it, but one day Pedros gonna wake up and I won’t be here anymore, sometimes I think I’m dying and I just have to start moving, I have to move and if I don’t, if I don’t head north or south or someplace then ill be dead within this year and I don’t mean any disrespect, but one day im just gonna be gone and I won’t tell nobody, I would tell Pedro, but I know what he’ll say, so one day im just gonna go, and, well, im sorry to say it.”
.
She lived in her car north of downtown and we would sit in the winter sun in the early afternoons. “Theres a battle coming to this place,” she said, “I don’t know why the Devil chose Tulsa, I guess, Maybe because God chose it first.”
I moved through the crowd to the front steps of the Capitol building, my mouth was so dry. As I ran forward I saw a robed man in a grim reapers mask. He stood on the stairs with his back to the capitol and looked down the hill at the mass of humanity roiling below him. He held his arms open to the sky, welcoming. I looked through the viewfinder. I pressed the shutter button once. From behind me someones hand reached forward clutching a King James Bible, handing it to the man in the robe, Death grasped it, pulled it close to his body and held it tight. I pressed the shutter again. At the time I had no idea how much this moment would haunt me. An instant possessed forever. Vampire on the steps. An Omen. Do you know what the killer means when he speaks?
It was a dark mood and it was a roar. A melee would break out on one part of the line then a hole would open in that spot as the police and rioters broke apart from each other, litter from the fight would be left on the ground, a tiny battlefield and a broken engagement, then the gap would close and others moved forward to take the place of the injured or overwhelmed. But the police had no one to take their place on the line. They were alone and the crowd wanted death. The mob had been taken over. The Reaper, Death himself, had control of the pitch and the lust ran deep. There was a love of brutality in the crowd that had been stoked for months or years and now it was time to take it upon them. The man in the mask was here, the liar, the betrayer.
“It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage,” She said about her role in storming the capitol, “We were just there to overthrow the government.”
At the Christian Extremist gathering on the border I talked to a preacher. He traveled around with a worship team and talked maga Christianity. “Joe, do you believe in Jesus?” He asked.
I told him, “No.”
“Do you believe in a creator?”
“Sure, somehow, I think.”
“Joe, can I pray over you, that Jesus may enter your heart?”
I’m always around these preachers and they always want to pray over me, they want to put their hands on my head, my shoulders, my chest and they want to ask god to live within me and guide me and give me wisdom. I always let them pray for me like this, It never takes though. There is no preacher that can describe the fires of hell or the true dimensions of eternity in some way that would move me. Preachers just don’t have it. They don’t have the words for me. He had only prayers for me and my soul, selfish prayers, selfish thoughts, his prayer was not for the mother caught in the razor wire at the rio grande just down the road. Did he have a moment for her? Or was it just me that needed his saving?
Later the worship band called for people to repent their sins and be baptized in the cattle trough beside the stage. A young woman in an American flag sundress and a trump hat stood in ecstatic worship, people gathered around her and laid their hands all upon her shoulders, face and head. She fell into them, she cried and prayed and murmured.
All these prayers, dozens of them just in this moment, all for this helpless child of god who has become so full of surrender that they will drop to their knees and beg salvation. But, no salvation will be found, no escape from their pain. Because they are begging for the wrong things, because they do not beg forgiveness for their fantasies of bodies trapped in the razor wire. They do not beg forgiveness for their laughter at people caught between the river and the soldiers. They do not beg forgiveness for their wishes of gunning down people in the desert. It’s never quite articulated what they beg for as they crawl on their knees, please god please. But What God do you wish to listen to you when blood fills your prayers.
A quote form the book of revelation:
“One woe is past; and, behold, there comes two more.”
We can’t give everything in the world a title and definition. It is beyond us what the stars speak to our neighbors or what the dust whispers in the ears of children.
Surely, I cry, a soul cannot be tarnished by actions and thoughts on this earth once it passes to the next world. Because, if god gives these things freely to us how can he then give us the gun and the unyielding weight of it. knowing, that we know, the pull of the trigger is so easy. I pray for a soul untouched by this earth. Isn’t hell enough? Isn’t suffering worthy of redemption and if a soul cannot be redeemed what good is a God that grants it. Pull your finger from the trigger and put down the gun, find not that way that way out, but search until the end, because it will end, because if not, then what else could it be? More of this?