Son
It was an early morning at the peak of spring, steeped in blue sky and yellow sun and life, in all its earnestness. Everywhere gardens were in bloom and their good keepers tending them. Throughout the countryside farmers were busy with irrigation and their prayers for collaboration from above. In towns and villages community elders were planning the festivals of flowers and county fairs and judging candidates for the May queen. And in the city a mime, late for his sidewalk performance at the superior courts, was just then knocking over a young man in handcuffs.
He was twenty-five, maybe, already well tanned, thin as a rail yet sturdy, with a shrub of yellow hair, and, perhaps most noticeably, was oddly dressed in filthy dungarees and suspenders and a tattered flannel shirt, half-tucked. “Hey scarecrow!” called a courier trotting by with a bicycle up the courthouse steps. The young man smiled, he loved these days, for always with the first lilies and crocuses his own life bloomed a little again.
As he ambled back to his feet, a bit dazed and squinting at the sun, he shook his flaxen locks and flicked off what grit and pigeon feces he could, and before he’d finished, gestured forgivingly to the courier and the stoic man. Then the officer tapped him and they started again up the thirty-three steps to the great oak door.
Upon its opening a gust sucked them into a tepid darkness, where at first their sun-swelled eyes could decipher nothing more than a pulsating whiteness around which stars flitted frantically like netted butterflies. A great noise, as of barkers on a trading floor, plugged their ears and they were swept into a stampede of lawyers, attachés, and judges of the court and their accused. Into this thicket the officer pushed ahead of the young man to accept their beating.
For this precinct sergeant, the ensuing passage entailed nothing more or less than duty, ‘processing’ lawbreakers being as basic to his job as money-handling to a banker, and as a thirty-year veteran of the force he proceeded indifferently. Yet for the young man the going felt like a death march. For he was certain that before this day’s end the old, prevailing accusation — that he was a dreamer (compared to which the present charge seemed a trifle) — would finally be proved, the punishment summary condemnation as a veritable good-for-nothing. And so for him this passage was all-the-more agonizing for the bearing his arrest would have not so much here but at home, where the eyes of judgment were ever upon him.
Back at the precinct they were still assembling his file. The young man had no prior arrests, had recently graduated from the city university, was among the legions of currently unemployed, and, as already noted, still lived at home: a high-rise called The Parkview. This, so far, was what the officer knew. Considering the young man’s disheveled appearance, especially the tattered shirt and mud-pie knees, what the officer imagined was that this lad must also be clumsy, or else particularly fond of other than the city’s concrete earth, or both. Yet this did not matter now, in good time he’d understand, so he kept to himself.
Soon in the immense domed lobby just enough of the sun’s faint light and dial converged at nine o’clock and they saw the long row of judge’s portraits, in the midst of which was the arresting cop, his starched sleeves flagging them like a Navy man’s. The officer immediately noticed his subordinate (one would have been blind to miss such histrionics) and presently acknowledged him, as with the other hand he tapped the young man to pass ahead, the rest of the way to lead.
A minute later they all arrived at a door marked COURT 3.
“A fine spring day, isn’t it, McKeever,” said the officer.
“Indeed, sir, indeed,” crowed the cop, “that is, if by ‘fine,’ sir, ye mean this day’s fine light shall expose the truth here, sir,” and without taking a breath, “he give ye any trouble, sir?”
“No,” answered the officer. “None at all.”
The cop unlocked the door and they entered the room. It was small, about the size of a common shed. Except for its yellow institutional tile floor and lazy fluorescent lights it was entirely brown, its wood walls, baseboards, crowning, even its painted ceiling, as well its sole amenities, a wood table, two matching chairs, and a water fountain (which someone, seriously or satirically, had wrapped with packing tape) all being of an earthen hue. Not as musty as the rotunda, the room nevertheless was just as hot, and its heavy air seemed to carry the cop to the fountain, his arms flapping like the wings of a startled bird. He was a bourbon barrel of a man, ripe as a mulch heap, with a square Henry the Eighth head that seemed propped without the stem, and profuse red curls like rolled-up shades that made the big ears seem bigger. When he’d arrived back at the table he stopped and straightened, as if he’d just come upon something significant, and clapped the accused to his side.
“No, McKeever,” said the officer, “first the door. And then you may remove them,” he continued.
“Ye mean the handcuffs, sir. Oh, no, sir, I wouldn’t, sir, I—”
“Thank you, McKeever,” said the officer.
The cop did as he was told. But the cuffs, rather than clipping them beside his gun, where they belonged, he stuffed in a pocket. As the officer made a welcoming gesture to the young man to take a seat and then took the other, opposite, the cop took to mumbling, uttering something to the effect: “...good-for-nothin’ punk loser waste of my you’ll get yours and wait till ye find out who this is ol’ Sargy Boy ha ha you good-for-nothin’ piece o’—!”
The officer hadn’t even tried to listen, he’d already thrown himself in the report, which he tended to not earnestly but evenly, as if in his den rather than the interrogation room, his knowing eyes and prominent hands managing the pages and accompanying photographs serenely. Across, the young man, whose eyes, ever since taking his seat, had been pinned on the officer, now turned them slowly to the floor, where, beginning at his feet, they began tracing circles around and around till he found himself in a yellow glade of sapling birch and thistle grass, the sky so blue his eyes opened radiantly, the woods just beyond. Oh. And what’s this? A carpenter ant! Whereupon leaning over he clasps it with two fingers lightly, and mounting the fine black steed dashes then into the forest, deep, deep... O glory God! In their flight the furrowed ground erupts behind in every kind of fauna, the wind embraces him, he shakes his long locks like a dog out of water, cherishes again the mud-pies at his knees, as well those which now also spatter his back. Certain then to be far from the world of men he dismounts, sending the good steed on its way, and breathes in deeply the clean familiar air as he lays his body down on a bed of wild parsley. Behold the tranquil stars and their twinkling: cast of angels winking of their care; the moon swimming in his eyes which close before its fullness. Closing the report the officer looked up. The yellow shrub was all to be seen.
“Now ain’t that somethin’, Sergeant?” snapped the cop. “A judge’s kid! A goddamned judge’s kid!”
And just as he was about to box the young man’s ear:
“Yes, I trespassed.”
***
Having just reawakened the young man was suddenly perched forward, straight and square, as if on a job interview, his bloomed face red as a rose and wanting for the sun, his eyes fixed on the cop like black lights.
“And lookee this,” continued the other, “the goddamned judge’s kid talks!”
“Enough, McKeever,” said the officer.
The young man looked away.
“Both eyes here!” commanded the cop.
“I said enough, McKeever!”
To calm the air the officer rose. Tapping the report he said:
“I see that The Fenimore is next door to The Parkview.”
“How else ye think he spied the garden,” said the cop sarcastically, “—the rooftop garden?”
The door opened and a clerk scurried in with a small open cardboard box, which he placed at the center of the table. From it the officer retrieved a child’s plastic pail, shovel, and two clay molds. Holding the pail and shovel like mice by the tails he said:
“This is the evidence? Toys?”
The cop puffed out his chest. “Don’t forget the footprints, sir!”
“McKeever, surely this is nonsense!”
“No,” countered the cop, “this is The Honorable Stuart K. Chamberlain, sir!”
“What, pray tell, could the good Judge have to do with this, McKeever?”
“Have you forgotten? He is the young man’s father!”
“—A father who need not be in this conversation, McKeever. Have you forgotten that the lad hasn’t even been charged?” he proffered a hand toward the accused. “McKeever, Judge Chamberlain’s sole purpose in this case, if it can even be called a ‘purpose,’ is procedural—.”
“Yes, procedural!” interrupted the cop. “I ask you to recall that this is no mere relation, sir, no ordinary Papa Dear come bail out Sonny Boy! This is Chief Justice Stuart K. Chamberlain, sir! Pillar of our great city! After the mayor, our most important city father! And the absolute last person this punk, this punk son—!”
“Easy, McKeever, I detect a strain of zealousness.”
“Bravo, bravo!” continued the cop. “Once again, good old Sergeant ‘Keenly Observant’ Chambers! Never misses a thing! Oh, but alas, for this time in the strain he misses the stain! Or, should I say, in his own zealousness he overlooks honor!’”
The officer took a step toward the cop. “What are you intimating, McKeever?”
A squirrelly smile propped the cop’s face. He did not answer.
“Whose honor?” pursued the officer.
Again, no answer.
“You did not!”
“How could I not!”
“You had no good cause to pull him in—!”
“On the contrary, Sergeant, I had every good cause! And you, you, sir, have completely failed to grasp the critical implications here!” He was howling now, a king on parade: “There, a great city’s chief justice!” he conducted the air. “Here, a derelict son!” he shook a finger at the young man. “Of course I’ve told the Judge! He is this case, sir! And justice will be done...sir!”
The officer dropped to his chair. “There is no justice done here, McKeever.”
“Consider the law, Sergeant!”
“Consider propriety, McKeever!” the officer slapped the table.
The room fell silent. A hand flew up. It did not move, the arm stiff as a staff: a Roman general’s whose act of dominion was carved in stone for eternity.
“You’re dismissed, McKeever,” said the officer.
“Eh?” said the cop.
“Leave.”
“But I’m the arrestin—!”
“Leave, sir.”
The hand dropped. Nothing more was said....
***
With the cop’s departure the room exhaled.
In the stunning stillness left behind the officer leaned back in his chair, transfixed. At the same time, with both hands pressed to his ears the young man tried to purge the city’s great noise.
In his discomfort he found again the window, from which the morning light now traced toward the table a gold path. As if entranced he rose and stepped upon it, gazing back. The officer smiled and nodded.
When he’d reached the window the young man perched on the sill.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The officer immediately waved away the contrition.
The young man lay his head on the frame. He was sweating, the shrub wilted over his brow in soaked strands. The officer offered the fountain. The young man smiled, but remained.
“My father used to take me there...,” he said.
He looked down. He was struggling, not for words but composure. He looked back again. With his prominent hands the elder bade continue.
“My father used to take me there,” repeated the young man, his voice cracking nervously. “We’d approach the woods, he with his wheelbarrow, I two steps behind, with his shovel—.”
“You take your time,” said the officer.
The youth pressed his forehead to the pane. Suddenly the whole world was a garden.
“We’d enter the darkest part, where sapling birches were thick like porcupine needles, just as the morning sun was turning orange.... Soon he’d be twenty paces ahead, checking the ground with his heels. And I, I’d already be loitering at the creek — but always listening: ‘Thaddeus, the shovel....’
He stood up.
“Like a scout now I’d be hop-scotching the creek’s rocks in search of the mother lode. One of those rocks I’d discovered on our first trip together years before. How splendid it was! A giant sea turtle: its mammoth shell a perfect chair. And a perfect marker, too. For the best earth, I’d learned — thanks to my good scouting — was just beyond, where the creek turns.” A bright light seemed cast from his eyes. “Oh that creek!” he exclaimed. “Its water there was more than six feet deep, its width twice the length of my father. What a mighty river it was...
“Now, as he’d be in the last stages testing the rich dirt for roots and other ‘imperfections,’ I’d be running along the bank with his wheelbarrow, and sometimes his shovel would fall out and make a loud clang on one of the rocks, and he’d rebuff me, saying: ‘Thaddeus, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand—!’”
The youth paused and ruffled his locks.
“These were the moments that defined me,” he continued. “When they ended, it was as if a part of me...”
“Go on, son,” said the officer.
Again the young man sat.
“As I grew, my father and I made fewer trips. When I was twelve, my mother left him. He continued to keep his garden. This was the one thing, it had become clear to me, that mattered most to him: his only friend, the only thing with which he seemed interested in, or capable of, cultivating a relationship. But after my mother left, he no longer tended it with the same vigor. Over time the garden became smaller and smaller, until weeds had overrun it. We stopped going to the woods altogether. In its last years, a truck would bring the garden’s dirt, in fifty-pound bags. I continued to go to the woods. But it was not the same....
“I’d kept a butterfly collection then, and every now and then would still wander to the woods for a new prize; and it was also during this time that I’d decided, despite my father’s disapproval, that I was an artist — and the woods had the right ambience for an adolescent of feeling and ideas. Yet, in a much greater sense, the woods had lost its soul. —Or, maybe I...”
He dropped to his knees.
“If you’ve never noticed, sir,” he said, his voice suddenly wavering, “the Judge isn’t the easiest person. The woods, our mutual friend once, had been the only source of a true bond between us: the only thing, really, aside from our common blood, that had made us ‘father and son.’ Yet finally all that remained was the son. And the woods: they’d become a refuge—”
“Stop!” said the officer.
The young man bowed.
The other took up the pail and shovel as before. But this time he ripped off their tags.
“Go get the cop,” he said.
“Where, sir?” asked the young man.
“He hasn’t tarried far, I can assure you. Check the sundial. If he resists, tell him there’ll be consequences!”
The young man nodded and left the room. Not a minute later, the cop was leading him back.
“Well, I see we’re finally ready to—!”
“McKeever, you’re to fill in for me the rest of the day,” said the officer.
“Eh?”
“I will be with the young man.”
“But I’m the arrestin—!”
“There will be no more arresting here, McKeever,” said the officer, “Mr. Chamberlain and I have an outing to attend.”
The cop stiffened.
The young man had already left, pail and shovel in hand.
As for the officer, his only reason for tarrying was to impart one final instruction to the cop.
“Anyone asks about us,” he said, “say, ‘They’ve gone on a mission.’ Say, ‘They’ve gone to sow a garden, at The Parkview.’”
The End