My dog's snarls woke me just after 3 in the morning. A Lab mix, Dinah is generally the most passive of creatures, but when she's aroused, the German Shepherd in her takes over. She stood at the window, hackles up, lips pulled back as deep growls rolled out of her chest. It is a sound I respond to instinctively, and I was up before I'd fully awakened.
Across the street, in front of the elementary school, a man was screaming obscenities at the woman with him. "Bitch! Get back here, bitch!" Whenever she got close enough he would slap her, hard, so her hair flew across her face. She kept both hands at her sides, not attempting to protect herself.
Dinah raised her front paws onto the sill, her growls broadening into staccato barks. The man smashed his fist into the woman's face. Slowly, she fell back off the curb, collapsing silently in the street.
Surely she cannot have fallen as slowly as I remember; in my mind, the scene is a slow-motion replay of every act of violence I've ever witnessed.
The man stood over her, screaming, "Get up, goddammit!"
This spring, one of the neighborhood guardians was telling me her plans to restore the area. The idea amused me. This is hardly a historic neighborhood in the sense of stately old homes fallen into disrepair, then gentrified back to their former glory. This part of South Bend, Indiana, has always been a working class neighborhood, built up around Muessel Brewery. My house stands across from a school, the one where the man beat his companion into the gutter. Many of the people who first lived here were Germans who came to work in the brewery. In 1930, one of the owners was murdered during a robbery at his brewery, a few blocks away.
Our neighborhood guardian worries that the wrong kind of people are moving in. She means "coloreds," "poor white trash," "spics."
I plead guilty to two counts of being the wrong kind of person. On my father's side I am poor, white, rural-Kansas trash; on my mother's I am poor, brown, big-city Colombian trash. My parents were raised in violence, poverty and chaos. This was the inheritance they brought to their marriage. This is the legacy they have bequeathed their children.
When my brother was 5, I saw my father straddle him on the ground, beating him with his fists the way he would have fought another man, if he'd dared. My mother pulled him away and he fell back, screaming at his child, "Get up, goddammit."
My sister married a man who has at least once injured her severely enough to put her in the hospital. He has abused all their children. She won't speak against him because he's her children's father. He has rights.
Our brother is a drug addict. When his wife flees with their daughter to a battered women's shelter, he complains that he doesn't understand her. He, after all, is the victim.
My parents sympathize with him. His wife, they say, must have driven him to it.
Once, when a man stole my wallet, I was so incoherent with rage that the police dispatcher had to ask me several times to calm down. But now, calling 911, my voice is steady. I describe the man, what he's done, where he is, where the victim is. Very calm, very controlled. I urge the police to hurry before he gets away. When I hang up, my hands are shaking so hard the headpiece clatters back into its holder. I doubt they're going to hurry.
Recently a friend described an incident in his home in which a guest seemed to suffer a heart attack. He could not believe, he says, how quickly the police and paramedics responded. Seconds, it seemed like.
"Sure," I said, "in your neighborhood."
Without the slightest acknowledgment that he'd heard me, he changed the subject. Among those who espouse democratic and egalitarian values at a safe distance from those who have little access to those values, pointing out their privileged position is like making a rude noise at the dinner table. Officially, it never happened.
Yet the fact remains that in my neighborhood, the police do not rush to the scene and, once there, seem somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. The time some drunken teens kicked in my front door for example, the officer taking the statement asked in a bored tone, "What do you expect me to do?"
I have come to have a certain contempt for the police, and it amuses as much as it disturbs me to have this in common with those who break the law.
My housemate worries that the young woman is dead or, if she isn't, that she may be hit by a car; while I am still on the phone, she is heading for the door with a blanket in one hand and a hammer in the other, in case the man, who has begun to move down the street, should return. Her courage and compassion, her willingness to act, strike me as one of those gestures of grace which soften the brutality of life.
Apparently this is the only part of town where crimes occur. Some time back a woman stood up in church to ask for our prayers because her car had been vandalized. She was outraged that such a thing should happen to her in her neighborhood. Later she remarked to me, "It's not like I live down the street from you, for heaven's sake."
After this latest incident, several people asked me if now I will finally move.
"Hardscrabble," a term often used to describe the holdings of poor white trash, also applied to my back yard 10 years ago. The ground was so packed that a tiller barely broke it the first year, and the only thing that managed to grow was one limp-leafed pepper plant which produced one pepper. Now it is a garden of heirloom tomatoes and corn and beans, a wilderness of wild garlic, borage and mint. Nestled in the vinca are memorial stones for the three cats and one dog who've lived out their lives in my house. A patch of vetch provides a hiding place for the current cats, while the dogs explore the perimeter of the yard along a path that runs under the lilacs, around the compost heap, behind the sunflowers, finally coming to rest near the apple trees. There are two, a common Red Delicious and an antique variety, an Arkblack, whose skin is a deep, bruised red.
The yard is part of my home and an extension of my life. It is here I have worked out my story ideas, my life, my relationships; here that everything can be put into perspective with a shovel, a hoe, or a few trips across the yard with a wheelbarrow full of compost.
It was here that my nephew, visiting me for the summer from his home in Kansas, told me about his mother's boyfriend molesting him. That summer, the violence and chaos of my sister's life slopped over into mine. Confronted with her son's accusation, she merely shrugged. She has been abused, her children are abused. This is how things are. People who try to change things by helping are meddlers trying to control others.
The ineffectiveness of Kansas Child Protection Services policies made it doubtful that my claims would be investigated; I spent the summer trying to help my nephew develop a core of self confidence that a drug-addicted child molester could not violate. Mornings were spent at a neighborhood track program where my nephew's fierce desire to compete -- and to win -- emerged. Twice a week we saw a therapist, a gentle, concerned man who urged me to trust the boy's resiliency. "You've known him longer than the perpetrator has, you've had a bigger influence. He just needs to know you're there for him."
Hunting through thrift shops, we start a collection: "Trophies We Never Got for Things We Never Did." Best is a blob of metal, which may have been a golfer bent over to take a swing, but which resembled nothing so much as a large fish doubled over in pain. Carp Man, our totem.
Before the police arrive, the man has time to walk slowly the length of a block and back again. He is uneasy with the idea of simply leaving the woman in the street. He hovers over her and then, seeing us on the porch, carries out a clumsy, embarrassing pantomime of concern. Splashing water from the gutter on her face, he croons for our benefit, "What's the matter, honey? You sick?" Finally he slings her over his shoulder and is almost to the end of the block when the first patrol car arrives.
Night after night he woke, screaming hysterically, sweat pouring down his face, soaking his pajamas. When I would reach for him, my nephew would shrink away, incoherent with fear. The only way to bring him out of it was to dampen his face with cold water. Then he would cling to me, sobbing, and I would hold him, "I'm here, I'm here, you're safe, I've got you," and sing quietly until long after he'd gone to sleep. In the morning he remembered none of it.
That summer we drove back to Kansas together. We camped out (i.e., slept in the car and ate hamburgers at roadside rest stops). We made side trips, one to see the world's largest hand-dug well (not far from the world's largest ball of twine), and another to scale Mount Sunflower, a boulder in a farmer's field, the highest point in Kansas.
The day before we left, the boy was twirling around in the front room, one of those 9-year-old spontaneous dances. Suddenly he announced, "Everybody in this house loves me."
Amazing. I could not have said as much at his age.
"But I know who loves me the most," he said, coming over to lean against me.
"Yeah? Who?"
"You, 'cause you sing to me even when you think I'm asleep and can't hear you."
These are memories in the mortar joints of my home.
"I expect to pass through life but once. . . ," wrote the Quaker William Penn. "If therefore there be any kindness I can show, or any good that I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again."
I do not choose to live in my neighborhood in order to make any statements, or with the idea that I will make any profound difference. This is my home, that's all. Circumstances chose it and circumstances keep me here. Until circumstances change, it is my home.
The police handcuff the man and put him in a squad car. The woman is placed in an ambulance. If she does not press charges, he will be released. She lives only a block away, I have seen her pass my house on her way back from the grocery store. I wonder what she will think, knowing her neighbors saw her being attacked and tried to help her. I wonder how this might affect her, what she will remember when she passes my house again.
Here is what I do know about these things: You cannot act with the expectation of performing miracles, but only with the hope of somehow coming close to doing that which needs to be done. Those bumper stickers that urge us to perform random acts of kindness -- what other kind are there? Our intrusions into another's life may prove to be the snowflake finally triggering the avalanche. Or, if we are lucky, a gesture of grace for the benefit of those who will not pass this way again, and a benediction upon ourselves for the circumstances that placed us in their path in the first place.