Letters to My Son. Kent Nerburn

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СКАЧАТЬ hands in her lap. She was probably eighty, almost completely blind, and had heavy orthopedic shoes with straps and four-inch soles and laces up the side.

      “This young man has tickets to a concert tonight, Florence,” the nurse began. “He wants to know if you’d like to go.”

      I laughed at the nurse’s phrasing. “A nursing home is the only place left where I’m likely to be called a young man,” I said.

      Florence turned her heavy glasses toward me. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go. I haven’t had a date for a while.”

      We talked a bit about the concert and the difficulty she might have getting in and out of my car. We set a time when I would pick her up, and I went off about my daily business.

      At seven-thirty I arrived back at the nursing home. Florence was dressed and sitting in her wheelchair in the dark. She had on green cotton gloves and was clutching a purse. I said hello to the nurses and off we went.

      Everything went smoothly. Florence was able to get into my car. The wheelchair fit into the trunk, if just barely. The people in charge of the concert helped me get Florence into the auditorium and stayed with her while I found a place to park.

      Florence decided to stay in her wheelchair during the concert; I had an aisle seat and could stay next to her. Until the lights went down, we talked about people and places we both had in common. While the orchestra was tuning up I read her the concert program — Vivaldi, Bach, Dvorák, and Beethoven.

      Then the music began. For an hour and a half Florence sat silently, staring with empty eyes toward a stage she couldn’t see and listening to music that she had not heard in years. There was a tiny smile on her lips. She never took off her gloves or let go of her purse.

      At the end of the concert, after the applause had died down, she asked if I would get her a copy of the program. “I can’t read it,” she said. “But I’d like to have one anyway.”

      There’s not much more to the story. I took her home. She thanked me. The nurses joked with her and wheeled her down the darkened hall. Her green gloves were resting on her purse, and under her purse, flat on her lap, was the program.

      That’s all. Nothing more.

      Now, the second story.

      One summer when I was just out of high school I worked at a country club with a man named Haines and his son, Calbert. Haines was about sixty and always had a gentle smile on his face. Calbert was in his midtwenties and wore a slicked-up pompadour and tinted glasses. Because they were black they were required to eat downstairs near the boiler room rather than in the employee lunch area upstairs near the kitchen. I used to bring my food down to eat with them.

      “You don’t have to do this,” Haines would say. “You’re not proving nothing.”

      “I’ve got to do it because I don’t think what they are doing is right,” I responded.

      “Suit yourself,” Haines would say. “Can’t do you no harm.”

      Calbert would just smile and shake his head. “You’re just messing yourself up over nothing,” he would say as he pulled out the cribbage board. “Nothing you can do about it.”

      Day by day I would watch Haines and Calbert. I complained to the manager and complained to the other staff. Nothing was changed. Yet, never did I see Haines or Calbert show even the slightest hint of rancor or anger. They just ate their lunch, played cribbage, and went back to work cleaning the men’s locker room and shining shoes.

      At the end of each day they were given a list of shoes that were to be shined and ready to go the next morning. Sometimes when I would go home Haines and Calbert would still be there shining shoes while the laughter of golfers and their families filtered down from the dining room and lounge upstairs.

      At the end of the summer I went off to college, but I continued to visit Haines and Calbert when my travels took me past the country club.

      One day I came across an article in our local newspaper. There had been an attempted burglary at a nearby country club — not the one where Haines and Calbert worked, but another one where I had caddied when I was younger. A black man had been shot and killed after breaking into the locker room with the help of a friend who worked there.

      The black man was Calbert.

      The policeman who had shot him was a man who had been several years ahead of me in high school. He had been a thug even then; everyone had feared him because he beat up people with chains and tire irons. According to the article, he had claimed that he shot in self-defense, though the bullet had entered through Calbert’s back and Calbert had not been carrying a gun. Because there were no witnesses, no case was being filed against the officer.

      I was wild-eyed with anger and grief. I went over to see Haines. I found him at his bench shining shoes. “Calbert wouldn’t try to kill anybody,” I said.

      “I know that,” Haines answered, putting new laces in a white leather oxford.

      “I went to school with that cop,” I continued. “He was a thug then and he’s a thug now. He just shot Calbert in the back.”

      “I know that,” Haines responded.

      “Well, aren’t you going to do anything?” I yelled.

      Haines looked directly at me. His eyes were clear and sad. “Calbert shouldn’t have been there,” he said. That was all.

      With all the pain he had known in his life, with all the injustice and unfairness that had surrounded Calbert right up to the moment of his last breath, Haines refused to place blame elsewhere. Calbert shouldn’t have been there.

      I raged and fumed and choked back tears. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A man had lost his son in an unjustified shooting by a thug in a uniform, and the justice system was turning a blind eye. How could a person be so passive in the face of such unfairness?

      Haines just smiled at me and shook his head. “You’re angry. I know. I’m angry, too,” he said. “That man killed my son. I want to see him behind bars and I’m going to try to put him there. But that don’t change nothing Calbert did. Calbert got shot because he was somewhere he didn’t belong. Nothing I do is going to make what he did right. He shouldn’t have been there.”

      I stood dumbstruck before this man who had just lost his son. He was obviously filled with pain, but his sense of calm was profound. He did not mount arguments to justify his anger or a hope of revenge. He did not take rash action that would increase the cycle of suffering. He stood in his strength, contained in his grief, secure in the sense of honor with which he lived his life.

      In some men this would have seemed like passivity. But one look into the wisdom in Haines’s eyes was enough to tell me that this was not a man refusing to act out of fatalism or cowardice. He knew where the moral center of his being was, and he was as strong as a mountain.

      I could not have been that strong. I would have flown into a rage and set out to exact some horrible vengeance on Calbert’s killer. To outsiders I might have looked like a torrent of righteousness and a tower of strength. But I would not have been as strong as Haines.

      Haines, on the other hand, would never have been strong enough to go to that nursing home to ask a stranger to a concert. He accepted the harshness СКАЧАТЬ