I said, “But that’s people. The world’s also rock and water and trees.”
“Rocks keep their promises. They behave like rocks. Water boils at one hundred degrees. The sea rises and falls, that’s the sea and the moon keeping their own kind of promises. To have the world work for you, you’ve got to make your own promises right back.”
“People break promises,” I said bitterly. A boy I liked had asked me to a school dance then at the last minute decided he’d rather take another girl.
“This isn’t about other people, Elli. There’s a satisfaction in keeping your word that no one and nothing can take away from you.”
We were living in the town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It was a steel town and my father worked at the mill. I had no idea about the actual job he did until years later when I was a junior doctor at the local veterans’ hospital. I was talking to a man who’d quit his job at the steel mill. He couldn’t stand the din. “Not noise. Particular noises.” He described explosions of water heewhacking to steam as it hit red metal at two thousand degrees, a crane that sang like a helicopter turbine, a deep-thumping compressor that reminded him of the whup-whup-whup of Hueys coming in low over jungle. “I don’t want those memories in my head every day.” Well, I was a child when the Vietnam war ended, I found it hard to imagine an ordeal so bad that twenty years couldn’t heal it, but this man’s hands were shaking as he spoke. He was my dad’s age, I wondered if they knew each other.
“Harry Barber? Sure I do.”
Which is how I learned what my father’s job was. Forty feet below the main control floor, among furnaces that roared like volcanoes, was a tin shack on whose door someone had chalked HELL HOLE.
“Down there,” said my dad’s friend, “it’s so hot it can burn the hairs right out of your nose. There’s steel plates, glowing red as the devil’s eye, going by on a roller belt. Water’s spraying on them but it bangs off, boom! boom! boom! like a stick of bombs. Your dad’s job is to step outside of the hell hole and check the plate. Is it good and flat or does it need more rolling? He’s got on fireproof gear and a face guard and he’s holding four-foot-long calipers, even so he has only four seconds per sheet. Thirty seconds out there and protection or no, your skin is going to start blistering. One slip, you’re history.”
It was a job for a skilled man with plenty of guts and a steady hand and my father was proud of it. “We built Amrika,” he used to tell me. “We made the steel for the Walt Whitman Bridge and the World Trade Center.”
Elli pauses and looks around as if expecting a question or a comment, but all are silent, waiting for her next words.
“The world is made of promises.” It’s all very well to say such things, but noble ideas don’t dull pain, not when you’re a teenager and people snigger and make jokes behind your back. When my mother, Martha, was found wandering the town in her nightclothes, my dad had to be called away from his work at the steel mill, I got home to find him sitting with his head in his hands, for the first time ever I saw him cry. My mother was ill with a sickness that affected her mind. There’d be times when she wouldn’t know who she was, who we were. One day, on my mother’s arm I found red marks, they could only have been made by a man’s strong fingers. My father’s. The realisation that he’d been momentarily cruel filled me with anger, but not against him. I was angry with my poor mother, whose illness had caused him to lose self-control, also I was angry with myself because I could do nothing to help either of them. In my shame I remembered reading about a doctor who had gone to Africa, he worked among pygmy women who gave birth to the planet’s tiniest babies, two small discs of coconut outlined in milk, for some reason that’s how I thought of them, I decided I would become a doctor. “To be able to help. To have the power to help.” I became a doctor to save not my mother, but my father.
Before Martha became ill we rented a small house with a view across the railroad tracks to the grey steel mill where my father worked. When he realised that my mother’s health would not improve, this was after she’d gone running round town in her underwear, my father decided that she needed a change. He’d take her away to somewhere with trees and fields, where a person could breathe. He could not afford to buy a house, so he built one. I helped him. It was a timber frame house in a small development a few miles out of town. It stood in an acre of land and was constructed in what was locally called “ranch style,” all on one floor, spread out. More prosperous people built “colonial style,” which was two stories, one above the other. My father began the house during the winter, working weekends. When days grew longer he’d return from his job to the little house in C’ville, as we locals called it, and we’d drive in his beat-up old car out to the property. The neighbours came over and helped us raise the frames. My dad climbed a ladder, he sawed and hammered. I climbed nearly to the top and held the nails and handed up tools as needed. He worked late, those summer nights, nine, ten, till the last light was gone from the west. Often he’d carry on by lamplight. When the house was done he landscaped the yard and planted trees. He put in rhododendrons and azaleas, a willow, a mimosa near the house, evergreen trees round the lawn. He was tireless. Whatever the difficulty, he never gave up.
“You’re a hero,” I thought, loving my dad, “you made our house.”
The day it was finished, we took Martha out to see the new house. She clapped her hands at the sight of its neat white boards, blue-painted windows. Her illness seemed to fade away, as if the demons feeding on her brain could not survive out of sight and sound and smell of the steel mill. “How I do love this place,” Martha said.
This house of my childhood stood on land that once had been fields. The backyard was ridged by generations of ploughs. Two homes away was a small farm that raised horses and if the wind was right it brought sweet, rich gusts of manure. Of the old forest there still remained patches of woodland, mainly maples and oaks. Honeysuckle, wild raspberries and blackberries climbed on the fences. At night, the stars were brilliant, you could hear frogs and crickets, and the wind running like a river in the trees.
“Oh my, just look at all the little birds!” What Martha loved best about the new place was the wilderness all round, but one day I found her distraught because one of the songbirds was dead. “A hawk got it. I hate them, they are so cruel.” A pair of red-tailed hawks were soaring overhead. Two days later Martha said, “I love the hawks, they are so beautiful.”
I still recall the dismay I felt that my mother’s illness could not be cured either by prayer, or by my own force of will and sincerity of purpose. After this I fell out with god, we went our separate ways, he to demonstrate his strange way of loving human beings, while for me began the long process of learning how to heal their broken bodies and minds.
After hearing this story many people go up to Elli doctress to say how sorry they are to hear of her mother’s illness, they hope she has recovered, what a truly wonderful thing to be a doctor, etc.
It’s Chunaram, he’s come up and asked about promises, how come they’re so important. Elli says, “I mean that things work when we keep our promises to each other and to ourselves, when we don’t keep our promises, things fall apart.” Some folk, including Zafar, are nodding, as for me, I’m thinking that things couldn’t be better for Chunaram who’s hardly kept a promise in his life.
Last of all’s come Pandit Somraj. Says he, “We come from different worlds. Yours is made of promises, mine of music. I wonder if the two are as far apart as they seem.”
“You know what,” Elli says to me afterwards, “I think this is Pandit Somraj’s way of making peace. Now at last people will come.”