Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen

Author:Christie Hodgen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Elegy for

James Butler

(1952–1996)

Northern Arkansas, 1952. Oh that you had been born somewhere, anywhere else. A swamp of a town, as you told it, its inhabitants like the creatures of a swamp, primitive and slow-moving, with the stupid smiles and heavy-lidded stares of frogs. No place for you. A person with a bit of taste, as you called yourself. A person with a bit of class. Throughout your childhood you waited like a customer in line at a complaint window. Somber, patient, holding a numbered ticket in your hand, you believed there would come a day, one day your turn would come at the head of the line and you would be given the chance to explain to someone, a surly employee in blue coveralls, your predicament. I believe some mistake has been made. I do not belong here. And there would be no doubt. One look at you would tell the story. You were a short, slender boy with an oversized head; you were pale, with hair so thin it was colorless; you had a soft, sibilant voice, a lilting cadence; you were nearsighted, with thick glasses in tortoiseshell frames, your eyes strangely magnified behind them; you were weak, pigeon-toed, with a funny, shuffling walk, and no, no, you did not belong here, you were not the right kind of boy for this place, anyone could see.

To be a boy in your town, a proper boy, was to be outdoors, running barefoot and shirtless through the woods, to shoot down squirrels and birds with slingshots, to wrestle and fight with other boys—those writhing, muscular, brainless organisms—to flick open and closed, open and closed, the blade of one’s pocketknife, to move through the world mudcovered, dirt thick under one’s nails, to spit on the ground, to piss against trees. Meanwhile there you sat on your grandparents’ front porch, in a cane rocking chair, reading from your encyclopedia set, listening to classical records on the Victrola. Every afternoon you sat there in your linen shirts and trousers—preened and polished, your nails clipped, your hair oiled and parted to the side—you sat sipping tea from your grandmother’s rose-trimmed china cups, and when the other boys passed you by on their way to and from the woods, they called out to you the worst name they knew—Fairy!—and the word and its name became one, the word floated in the air, glimmering and alive, the word settled like dust around you. Though it would be many years before the troubles of sex introduced themselves to boys your age, they knew already the difference between you—Fairy, Fairy, Quite Contrary—they knew already, you were not a proper boy.

There was nothing for you to do but wait. Wait and perform those duties necessary to your survival and eventual escape. Through one decade and into the next, through grade school and junior high, through the long, yawning stretch of high school you waited, practicing your piano in the mornings and evenings, the metronome knocking out time as you ran

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