Issue 3:2 | Non-Fiction | Bill King

Images of Relief

Bill King

Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through

some foreign virtue . . . . [S]ee prayer in all action.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

The Chapel

“Welcome to tsunami disaster relief” sings out the chaplain, standing below in the sunken nave of the circular chapel. Three concentric pews, each within and below the other, ring the nave, in the center of which sits a short round alter, one fat white candle in the middle. The handful of volunteers mill about, ready to stuff one-gallon storage bags with health-related items spaced out along the bottom pew. The chaplain begins to explain the process—we will pick up the bag, rotate from item to item, and sign a “packaged with love” slip before beginning again—but I am drawn to the continuous stained glass, only interrupted by four doors—north, east, south, and west—that serves as the chapel’s outer and inner wall. Chipped brick of light blue to ultramarine and yellow to burnt orange to carmine red, all mortared together in a crazy quilt design of mountains and valleys, mirror the color, shape, and movement of my world: the Tygart Valley watershed, in the central Appalachian region, in Elkins, West Virginia. From where we stand receiving instructions, the single pane doors are filled with sky; if they had not hinges, it would not surprise me to see them detach and swirl skyward like bits of gray sycamore bark that, come spring, fall in sheets into our rivers, that catch in uncurling eddies along the bank before spinning out and slipping away. My son calls them boats and I’m standing in Shaver’s Fork now, watching him play. He’s hunkered into a low squat, his feet submerged and his bottom swinging just above the water. He’s placing a crawdad on bark for a ride. I want to be here, standing in this circle, but the chaplain’s words swim beneath the doors turned to bark, turned to boats, bobbing downstream now beneath a clear blue spring sky. The crawdad makes his backward dive—a great escape my son applauds with glee—when the single-pane doors slide back on their hinges and fill up again with winter sky the color of turbid water.

I find myself in the circle of again, but as I slide a “Dr. Dumore’s Toothbrush” to the bottom of my bag, I feel than I can not say for sure why I am here.

The Tugboat

You would think it would be obvious. We are making health kits for survivors of the December 26, 2004 earthquake and tsunami—8,000 confirmed dead on day one and now, January 6, the day of Epiphany, 186,000, with thousands more unaccounted for. I had worried for my niece, a college student studying Urdu and Hindi, traveling over the holidays and in Thailand December 24. Word came that she is safe. I also still worry for my daughter who worries for her 14-year-old pen pal, a girl who loves to collect stickers and lives in the foothills of Sri Lanka, a few miles from the coast, where those sunbathing on the golden beaches ran into the sea as it drained, as it was sucked out by the yawning trough of the first 30 foot wall of water, awed by the phenomenon that exposed the mysterious floor of the ocean—suddenly alive now with grounded fish flashing in the eyes of vacationers and natives alike—on the south coast an entire coral reef, even, stood straight up, beckoning, making them pause in wonder and delight, before the sudden shift that picked them up, that threw them onto balconies a mile away or dragged them a mile out to sea.

Maybe I came here because I was thinking of them.

But I’m not.

While my legs walk the circle and my hands stuff, mechanically, hand towel washcloth comb clippers soap, my head is gone again. I am not thinking of them. I am in the tub with my older brother, skin to skin. I sit between his legs as you do doubling up on a sled. His are wrapped around my waist and we are happy. He’s pulling water from the back of the tub past our bodies to the front of the tub where the wave gathers, swells and rushes back around us. We laugh as it slaps the wall behind us and our belly buttons, briefly revealed, submerge again. In front of me, a wooden rubber-band paddle boat bobs upside down and the lost, drowned, washcloth lifted by the force of water he has made now wraps around my left shin. The tub is our tugboat and we are shoving off to patrol the stormy harbor.

The Furnace

The candle in the middle does not hold this orbit of ours, has not the gravitational pull of the sun nor force of a whirlpool, yet we 7 planets, each one of us a world of our own making, spin: 3, 4, 6, 10 times along the pew, to make 100 health kits, which will join 100 school kits, 100 baby kits, 100 clean-up buckets and hope-in-a-box kits, all of which make one relief box that supplies a village of 1,000 for a month, one box that joins 99 other boxes, all of which fit into one long 40 foot container that all told serves 1,000,000 people, for whom a bar of Safeguard soap wards off diarrhea, scabies, and pneumonia: 11, 12, how many times we circle, until the names of health products begin to unpeel and swirl about in my head like spent leaves escaping a burning barrel: Common Sense, Goody, Trim, Dr. Du-More, Curad, Aim, Equate. They swirl and writhe above this furnace, dancing to shake the weight of meaning, to escape the flame and escape into a darkness I want to trim down and trim out, as the rain lets loose just now on the needle point of this odd chapel—to which I have never gone, am not drawn to, and never really have been.

What safeguard? What Common Sense? Do more?

I do not aim to waste my life.

“Fully lit,” a good friend said, admiring my Christmas tree of 2000 lights last week. “A good metaphor for you.”

“Greatest compliment of my life,” I say.

But for what purpose?

The Rollercoaster

The rain soothes. The fog that rises out of this valley, out of these rivers and streams and brooks and runs that roar beneath the veil, soothes. Before the noon-day sun, you can stand anywhere and hear invisible trees breathe. And come early afternoon, long lines of crows will sew invisible threads along the ridge tops. They lift and fall and lift and fall again before climbing, churning circles, and then breaking into a hundred single choreographed dives that pilot slow into the great oaks and hollow maples that line our streets. I am as comfortable in this dark shroud as the day that, age three, my mother took me to 6 Flags over Georgia and we rode a roller coaster that banked and weaved and shot toward the sky before plummeting into a tunnel of total darkness. As we rattled through metal that twisted like a snake—too fast, too fast—I screamed with pure terror beside my mother, purse clenched to lap with one hand, the other to my shoulder—until the long, slow straight-railed glide and the merciful, merciful blackness of the tunnel swallowed us whole. Memory and time ceased then. And only then, in that moment of nothingness, did I first come to know my mother’s love of me, born of pain and of suffering.

If she spoke a word I do not know it.

We all ride on that coaster forever, in and out of the light, until memory ceases. Welcome the darkness. People you do not know need you there. So enter it, screaming, and against your will.