Crossing the Water by Daniel Robb

Author:Daniel Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

15

FRIDAY, January 27. I had Jerome and Reggie in school two days ago. The stove was inhaling quietly in the background, the day outside was gray, and both guys sat at the heavy oak table with their chins propped on their hands, looking up at me balefully. As a primer for some short essay writing, we discussed violence versus nonviolence, and whether we as a country should excuse the actions of criminals. They both said no.

“No way, man. You do the crime, you pay the time,” was Jerome’s answer.

So I asked if a person should ever be excused from violence.

“If you was being threatened, it would be okay to take it in your own hands,” was Jerome’s reply, and Reggie came in with, “I don’t think violence is ever right, but if somebody gonna mess with you, expose you to harm, then you got to be able to defend yourself. Simple as that.”

“When should a person be killed?” I asked.

Reggie said, “If he be threatening your life, then you got to use force, maybe deadly force.”

Jerome said, “If he threaten you or rob you.”

“Of how much would this robbery have to be?” I asked Jerome.

“A lot,” he said.

We whittled down his conception. Nine hundred and ninety dollars stolen would call for only a beating, but one thousand dollars stolen would call for the thief to be killed, according to his code, which might have been invented just for the day. Perhaps the capital amount has gone up by now. I let him know that I had a different code. We’ll discuss it again tomorrow.

“J ESUS, I’m lonely,” I wrote in my journal not long ago. This life is too damned long to go through without a woman, and I’m doing it. Part of the problem is that I spend half of my time on an island inhabited by criminal boys. Which I enjoy, in a sense, but it is hard to find a woman who understands the drive to teach in such a place. I think. Or is it hard to find anyone when I am either teaching or exhausted?

In either case I feel at the frail edge of isolation, an explorer marooned in the Arctic, locked in ice. I don’t know if I need this, if my personal discovery here is so intense that I couldn’t be with anyone, or if I am isolating myself out here, as if I were in a lab. I lie in bed in the night, listening to the quiet of the house, or to its creaking in the wind, and to the soft hiss of lamp flame next to my head. I lie in that narrow bed, feel the sea stretching out on every side of the island, feel the work of the day in my body, feel the lifting of stones or the swinging of the axe in my back and forearms, feel the long walk with firewood in my legs, and I feel a body that is growing older alone, untouched.

Perhaps this must be.

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