Why the Tree Loves the Axe

Sugartown? she replied. Sure. She nodded, I love it here, I wish I’d grown up here. It’s where nice buildings go when they die. You’ll love it here, too, I can tell. She said this not because she was trying to convince me, but because it was gospel, just a song she knew and believed. Have you found a job? she asked.

I’m just about to start, I told her. I’m going to be changing bedsheets at an old-age home.

Is it good? she said.

I don’t know yet, I said.

I’d like to do something like that, she said. Help out. Now I’m tending bar, but I’m not going to do it for the rest of my life. It’s O.K., but I’m going to get out.

She was playing with a ring of keys, twisting them in and out of her fingers, humming very softly, not a song but sheer want of better work; she was quietly levitating just an inch or so above her seat. Do you want to conquer distant lands? Do you want to bring back spices, silk cloth, and silver? Do you want to be carried in through the gates of the city on an ivory chair? Someone dropped a glass in the kitchen and swore as it shattered. She took a sip from her soda and smiled. Soon as I pay my doctor, she said.

We rose to leave and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill; when I started to open my bag, she said, I’ve got this, let me, and she touched my wrist. No, come on, I said.—Just let me, she replied. So I put my money away; but as we were walking out the door I turned back for a moment and watched as the waitress put her hand over the banknote and transferred it into the pocket of her apron without looking at it.

Out in the street, Bonnie seemed to burn a little bit, like an ember in the sun. A black dog lay sleeping on the sidewalk across the street. On a passing car radio a singer was crooning, Have you seen my baby? It was a consummate moment, everything seemed to fit into one faultless composition: calm, proportionate, meaningful. Bonnie was standing beside me; and I knew at once that I wanted her there all the time. Call it love at first sight, or sudden beatitude, or just one of those things, I don’t care. She drove me home and we traded phone numbers; we stood on the sidewalk and said a thousand last things quickly, as if a whole new conversation was trying to fit itself into the time we had left. Twice she took one step toward her car; twice she gave up and took the distance back. At last she laughed and said, Good-bye. Call me. So it was that she became the first best friend I’d had since I was in high school. I watched her taillights glowing madly as she braked at the corner, like some strange little spaceship trying to force its way into the traffic on the main road.

At nine the following Monday morning I arrived at Eden View; by nine-thirty the administrator had started me on a tour, and for the next few hours she led me up and down the hallways. In all that time I never heard a sound louder than our heels on the floor: the residents roamed noiselessly through the place, shuffling in their bare feet, creeping along behind shiny steel walkers, wheeling inch by inch, drifting in and out of the rooms, through the foyers and down the halls, while the staff moved among them, more quickly but just as quietly. The atmosphere was at once exact and inane: each thing had its place, was named and counted and put away in a closet, each resident had a file in the office and a chart in the nurses’ station, and every event and activity was scheduled to the quarter hour. But none of it made any difference. I could see right away that the years had driven the old folks deeper and deeper into disorder; their lives were shaped like hourglasses, and as they neared the far end all the natural laws that had held them together were coming undone; right before my eyes, they were returning to the original chaos from which they’d fallen.

Here we have the Nutritional Counseling Office, said the administrator. In a wheelchair outside the door sat a woman so aged that she looked like a wormwood tree. Hello, Mrs. Chapman. The woman raised her eyes and opened her mouth, but she said nothing, and we walked on.

Cafeteria. Nurses’ station. Supply room. Staff lounge. In the residents’ recreation room we came upon a group of old men sitting around a round table playing cards, while a thin black man dressed all in yellow played aimlessly on an upright piano that sat a few feet away from the rear wall. Andre, snapped the administrator. Can you come here? He hit three more notes and left the rest of the song hanging. For a moment he stared at the air before his eyes, as if he were watching the music disappear; then he produced a final, silent flourish of his hands, quit his bench, and came across the room.

Yes, ma’am? he said.

This is Caroline Harrison, said the administrator.

He reached out and shook my hand; his fingers were so long that they extended to my wrist. Welcome, he said.

Caroline is our newest orderly. I’m giving her to you. Will you show her where to change and get her started?

He nodded seriously and watched her back as she passed out the door. For a full thirty seconds he waited, one hand held up to quiet me, while I wondered if he was going to be good to me. At last he smiled. Come on, then, he said, and led me from the room.

The sunlight on the windows was ancient and brittle, the hallway was dark, the air smelled of ammonia. This way, this way, said André, and he set off down the hall in the opposite direction from the administrator. Shhh, he said.—But as soon as we’d rounded the first corner, he began to prate. I’ve been here three years, he said. Almost four years. Every two weeks I get my paycheck and send half of it home, go down to Western Union. I’m still here, the big lady can yell at me, but I’m still here. She doesn’t like anyone but the doctors—ha!—but the doctors don’t like her. They have her for blood trouble, they yell at her and she goes in her room. I put my ear to the door and booo … booo, she’s crying. So I know. I know.—And he went on, and he never let up: for the next two hours I trailed him through the place and listened to his pitch: he gossiped, he joked and flirted, he ran down the nurses and mimicked the doctors. I caught no more than half of what he had to say—somewhere along the line it came out that he was from Kingston, and his accent was so strong that every other sentence was lost to me. He didn’t notice, he laughed and talked, he sang little verses of songs, he said, Right? Yes? Right? I nodded and laughed along with him, and followed him to the next station.

The end of the day came earlier than I expected. So this was twenty-seven, I thought. These are my people, so soon; a sleep of snow and ashes. I was exhausted, I had too much to remember, and I wanted so badly for my masquerade to be successful. I wondered. In the women’s bathroom I changed back into my street clothes, and the face I saw in the mirror wore a determined expression. An orderly—yes—in an old-age home—yes—in Sugartown, Texas. It was a new life: I didn’t know what to expect, I really didn’t know. I had no idea.

As I walked out the door, I found André waiting for me. A pair of men in dirty white uniforms passed between us with furtive looks on their faces. As soon as they were out of sight, André scowled. Custodians, he said, and clicked his tongue. Don’t bother with them. They have no names: they come to here, they sit around like stones, and as soon as they steal enough drugs, they leave.

I nodded. O.K., I said. Well, O.K. Good night, and thank you so much. I’ll see you tomorrow. Last words, I started to leave, but he suddenly grabbed my hand, tugging it slightly to bring me closer. He bent his head, and for a second I saw the smell of his skin. Yes, but now you listen, he said. Everyone here is very nice. Except for Billy, you keep your eyes out for him.

Who’s that? I asked. Billy?

This old man, a bad man, you take my advice and watch out for him.

I started to ask him more, but he shook his head; he had already warned me, and that was all he would say.

I came home and found a message from Bonnie. Caroline? she said. Hi, it’s Bonnie, we met last Friday? Hi, I just wanted to say hello. I know you started work today and so, good luck and all that. I have to work tonight too—nights all this week. But look, if you have time, why don’t you come and visit me? It’s this place called Uncle Carl’s, on Route 36. You go out past the zoo about a mile, and it’s on the right. O.K.? So come out some night. O.K. Bye.

As soon as I heard her voice I wanted to see her, but I didn’t have the time right away, I didn’t have the energy. We left messages for each other every few days: that was all I could manage, at the start. But I grew used to hearing her recorded voice on the phone, tentative and near, telling me, yes, she’d heard the last thing I’d said. She was waiting for me, she was thinking of me.

I went to work whenever I was scheduled to go, five days a week, eight hours a shift, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night. As soon as I got home again, no matter what time it was, I’d take a shower and fall asleep right away; there was nothing else I could do, and soon my days were divided so irregularly that I could hardly tell dawn from dusk, and the only forms of consciousness I could recognize were other people’s fear and my own sleep.

There was no place on earth so filled with terrified people as Eden View. It was a death row populated by the innocent, they had long since exhausted every appeal, all they had left was waiting. So they waited, some for judgment, some for extinction, some just to know what they were waiting for. The idleness made them feel as if the waiting itself was all they were ever going to experience; it was punishment by eternal apprehension, which grew until they couldn’t stand it any longer, and then grew some more. Some of them screamed and some of them shook until I thought their bones would come apart; some complained to children who had long since left them and some cried without shedding any tears. It didn’t help them at all. Death was coming for them in pieces, taking their hair, their teeth, their organs, their memories, leaving them dazed, fatless, and compliant. And they were wrinkled, they were filthy, they smelled strange, and they frightened me. I tried very hard to love them all, each for what each was losing, but I’d be lying if I said I always succeeded.

There was Judith, with ninety years out of her mother and a meantime spent God knows where, she crooned to gone ghosts in a language no one could understand; she had long ago stopped eating, she lived on cups of air and the mysterious syllables of her singular vernacular. Bart, a retired businessman, who had lost his entire family in a burning house and was always trying to explain how tired he was. A colonel named Farley, a quiet man in a black shirt and a bolo tie, who would go for days without doing much more than coughing and saying, Ah! now and again, releasing a little puff of being that drifted lazily up to the ceiling. Colonel, it’s time to go to sleep, please. For God’s sake.—Cough. Ah! Cough. All right. Please.

I was putting the Colonel to bed one night when an old man I hadn’t seen before came striding down the hall. He had enormous pale pink ears, from which tufts of reddish white hair grew, and that was all the hair he had; his nose was fleshy and hooked and his eyes were nearly black. He was wearing a dapper dark blue suit and a white shirt that was yellow with age, and he was strutting along without shoes or socks. When he was close by me, he stopped and held up his foot so that I could see the dust that had blackened its thick underside. See this? he said. See this, all this dirt? This is a slovenly place. Aren’t any of you working? Look at this.—I looked. I want my money back, he said. Give me my fucking money, or I’ll set the dogs on you.

I stared at him. What?

Who the fuck are you, anyway? he demanded.

I froze.

Come on, he said.

… Caroline, I said. I’m new … Where did you come from? Where is your room?

Ah! he said, and dismissed me with a wave of his long ivory fingers. Get out of my way. And before I could react he disappeared down around the corner, muttering something vicious, and that was how I met Billy.

The doctors believed that he was dying, and when he waved away their recommendations they told him so, softly but insistently. Still, they never said what was killing him, and in fact he was never at all weakened. He would spend hours in the rec room, banging a basketball against the wall and catching it again with one hand. The noise drove the doctors crazy and they would send orderlies to make him stop; instead, he would pick fistfights with them, and they would have to restrain him by pinning his arms behind his back while he struggled to free himself and called them all cocksuckers and cunts.

Billy had been at Eden View longer than anyone else; in fact, he’d outlasted all of the staff, and there was no one there who remembered when he’d arrived. Once I checked his file in the main office and found that he’d been admitted about twelve years earlier, but he used to insist, sometimes that he’d just arrived, and other times that he’d been there forever. In any case, he’d managed to get himself moved into the best of the residents’ rooms, a large single in a corner of the third floor, with a tiny balcony from which he could look out on the whole of Sugartown, the hills behind it and the sky above. On clear evenings he would sit outside with a penknife and carve pieces of wood into fantastic shapes, a guitar, a woman, a rosebush complete with delicate buds, which he would pass off on the staff, always warning them in a low voice that the things were hexed and might kill them if they weren’t careful. Later still, he would lock himself in his room, turn his desk light on, and take out a canvas bag. Inside of it there was a rolled-up piece of cloth, and inside of that there were dozens of delicate implements—they looked liked dentist’s tools—which he would use to meticulously engrave on something about the size of an envelope. No one ever saw what he was working on; if someone came to his door, he would hide it in his lap and hold it there until he was left alone again.

The orderlies said that he was the Devil’s servant and he was never going to die. André told me that flowers withered and turned brown when he breathed on them, that he could light a match just by looking at it, that he had wings on his back and wore his suits to cover them, that he hid bottles of codeine in his room and had pornographic magazines delivered by mail, that he kept five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills rolled up in a sock in his dresser drawer. I’m telling you, Eden View ran with gossip like blood runs with sugar. But I began to watch old Billy, just out of curiosity; I couldn’t help myself, the rumors were an itch. I hung by his room, playing temptation and waiting to see what he would do. I made excuses to be there: I had his pills, I needed to change his sheets, I wanted to be sure his room was not too warm.

I tried to get him into one of the games that the other orderlies played with their favorites, brief rituals that meant nothing, fair questions and simple tests. Do you know what day today is?

Do I know what day today is? Of course I do. Today is the twenty-seventy-seventh of Pestember. I don’t care for a second what day it is.

What day of the week.

If it isn’t Sunday, I don’t know. I know it isn’t Sunday.

Is it Thursday?

I don’t know.

It’s Thursday, yeah.

Well, shit, he said in a tone of utter disgust at my dumbness. What difference does that make?

Never mind, I said brusquely, and tried to dismiss him with a blank expression. But my cheeks were hot; I was betrayed by my face and Billy noticed it right away. Caroline is angry, he said in a schoolyard singsong voice. I don’t give a shit. Caroline doesn’t think it’s fair that I should be so mean to her, when she’s trying to make nice with an old man. She wants to be all over me, like a mood. She wants to go through my pockets, she wants what I’ve got. And who knows? She may be right, maybe I can help her, maybe I can use her. But—he wagged a finger at me—is she smart enough? Brave enough? Confident enough? Oh, I know I’m not supposed to ask anything like that. Because you people … Take a look at these, he said, holding out a pair of small pale green pills in his palm. They give me these to sleep, so I’ll dream, so I won’t remember what they’ve said to me, so every day we can start all over again at the beginning. Take them, go on, try them, you’ll see.

Billy, these are yours.

I don’t want them, he said. I’m giving them to you. You take them.

I put them in the breast pocket of my uniform, where I found them again a few days later, dissolved into dust and crumbs that clung to my fingertips, and as I hurried to the bathroom to wash my hands I spoke under my breath to an imaginary inquiry. I don’t know what they are, I said. I don’t know where they came from.