All night I lay in bed and thought about it.
I tried to pray, but mostly I just kept
imagining my heart, how dry it was
and empty like a shell that long ago
someone had picked up sparkling from the surf.
But now it lies in a cluttered dresser drawer
where no one ever touches it again.
And if you ever held it to your ear,
you wouldn’t hear the crash of ocean waves.
All you would feel is the harshness of bone.
All you would hear is a hush of loneliness
so small that you could hold it in your hand.
That night I knew that I would go to Hell,
and it would be a place just like my room—
dark, suffocating, with its door shut tight,
and even if my mother were there too,
she wouldn’t find me. I’d always be alone.
VI.
The next night I left home. I walked for miles
through fields and farmland without any aim.
It was so dark I couldn’t see my way.
Then pushing though a cornfield, suddenly
I tripped and slid into some kind of hole.
I clutched the muddy walls to break my fall.
They crumbled at my weight. Each time I tried
to right myself I slipped and fell again.
Stuck ankle-deep in mud, I screamed for help,
struggling in darkness, unable to escape.
Finally I lay there panting at the bottom.
It seemed so deep I didn’t try again,
and, absolutely sure that I would die there,
I fell asleep, still glad that I’d left home.
And I remember waking up that morning
in a deep ditch beside a cornfield. I
was hungry, cold. My clothes were caked with mud.
The first thing that I noticed was a crow
perched right above me on the ditch’s edge,
blinking and cawing at the murky sky.
I lay there shaking, stupidly afraid
the bird would swoop and blind me with his claws.
Trying to keep still, holding my breath,
I watched him pacing back and forth while slowly
the cool green daylight filtered through the corn.
I finally summoned courage to stand up,
and — just like that — the startled bird flapped off.
At first I was embarrassed. How had I
become so terrified of that small creature?
But then I had to laugh. I realized
how many of the things I feared in life
were likely just as much afraid of me.
I knew I could climb out then, and I did—
digging myself a sort of runway up.
Gasping for breath, I knelt down in the field
between the tall straight rows of sunlit corn
and swore I’d never be afraid again.
They found me the next day and brought me home.
That’s when I started getting into trouble.
My teachers always wondered why a kid
as smart as me would lie so shamelessly
or pick a fight for no apparent reason.
She wondered, too — as if intelligence
was ever any guarantee of goodness.
V.
I used to read at night back in my room.
I liked adventure stories most of all
and books about the War—To Hell and Back,
The Death March at Bataan. You know the sort.
There weren’t more than a dozen books at home,
mainly the Bible and religious crap,
but back in town there was a library.
The books I liked the best I used to steal.
I filled my room with them—Pellucidar,
The Dunwich Horror, Master of the World,
Robur the Conqueror, Tarzan the Untamed.
I didn’t want them read by anyone but me—
not that the folks I knew were in much danger
of opening a book which had no pictures.
The more I read the more I realized
that power was the only thing that mattered.
The weak made rules to penalize the strong,
but if the strong refused to be afraid,
they always found another way to win.
Sometimes when she dozed off, I’d slip outside
and head off through the trees behind the house.
She said these woods had been a pasture once,
but now a second growth of scruffy pine
covered the fields as far as you could see.
I had a special hiding place back there.
Near the foundations of a ruined farmhouse
there was a boarded-up old well. I’d pried
a couple of planks loose covering it.
If I came there at noon, I could look down
and see the deep black sparkle of the water
framed by the darkness of the earthen walls.
At night it was an emptiness of must
and fading echoes that could swallow up
a falling match before it reached the bottom.
Sometimes I’d stretch along beside it dreaming.
I knew there was a boy who’d fallen there.
His family had boarded up the well
and moved away to let the trees reclaim
the fields they’d spent so many years to clear.
I wondered if they’d ever found the body
or if it floated there beneath the surface,
the features bloated like a sopping sponge,
the skin as black as the surrounding earth.
I didn’t mention it to anyone.
This was my place. I didn’t want it spoiled.
Most people are too weak to keep a secret,
but I knew knowledge gives a person power.
I came there every evening — or at least
whenever I could sneak away from her.
One night I started whispering down the well.
What was it like, I asked him, to be dead?
What was there left without your family,
your home, your friends, even your name forgotten,
the light shut out, the moist earth pressing round?
Of course he didn’t answer me. The dead
never do. Not him. Not even Jesus.
Only a razor’s edge of moonlight gleamed,
silent at the bottom of the well.
I realized that if he could return,
if he could rise again through the dark shaft
and stand there in the sun, breathing the air,
what use would all our morals be to him?
Death leaves an emptiness that words can’t fill.
No, he would seize whatever things he wanted,
and what would guilt or honesty or love
matter to him now? Coming from the dead,
he would be something more or less than human,
something as cruel and hungry as a wolf.
How was I any different from him?
I came to death each day and sat beside it.
I breathed its musty odor in my lungs.
That was the night that I was born again,
not out of death, but into it — with him,
my poor unwitting savior in the well.
If I could only become strong enough,
I could do anything. I simply had
to tear away the comfortable lies,
the soft morality — the way a snake
sloughs skin when it becomes too small, the way
a wolf cub sheds its milkteeth for its fangs.
The next day when I saw a neighbor’s dog
sniffing around the well, I called him over.
I let him nuzzle me, then slit his throat.
I stuffed him full of rocks and threw him in.
I wanted to be sick, but I stayed strong.
Later I killed a cat and then another dog,
and when I heard two neighbors talk about
keeping their kids and pets inside at night
because a wolf had come down from the hills,
I had to smile. My new life had begun.
I started pulling petty robberies,