Search Party by Valerie Trueblood

Author:Valerie Trueblood [Trueblood, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781619022232
Publisher: Counterpoint

The Stabbed Boy

THE summer of the stabbing, he attended Vacation Bible School. Who took him there, along with his sister, who did not survive? His teacher, Mrs. Rao, from the Methodist church where the Bible school was held. How did she know them? Had anyone in his family ever been to a service there? That was for his biographers to answer.

His sister was in a class down the hall, with the kids who were already in school and reading. She was seven years old; he was five.

Because there was polio then, on the first day the teacher handed out a note for them to take home and after that each kid came with a thermos or a jar of his or her own juice. For him, Mrs. Rao brought a clean glass and poured out juice from her own thermos. She did it for his sister too, because he and his sister were her helpers and the three of them got there early. Sometimes she used the time to play the piano, always telling the two of them that it was out of tune. He came to think he could hear what she meant.

One day Mrs. Rao took him upstairs into the ladies restroom, past the open doors of the still room of wooden rows for which he did not have the word sanctuary, and she combed his hair with a little water. Another day she washed his hands. In their workbooks they were doing Put On the Full Armor of God, which he would find later to be words of the Apostle Paul, about whom he would write a poem when he was in his fifties. They were pasting silver and gold breastplates and helmets on an outline of a man with bulges in his arms and legs. “A giant,” he said. Then and afterward, he spoke in bursts of one or two words. “No face.” “It’s a silhouette,” said Mrs. Rao. Silhouette. It sounded like a bird, not a giant. He had been careful not to get paste on his hands, but she washed them anyway, leaving him with a clear memory of gray water with bubbles in it going down the drain of the church sink.

Now that he is famous he sometimes brings up Mrs. Rao in interviews. His story is not known; it is not in his poems. He’s in L.A. now, and in his adult life and travels, he has never even met anyone familiar with the small once-industrial city in the Midwest where he was born. So it is not unusual for him to be asked about his youth, urged to recall something that might have set him on his path as a poet. One of these interviews in which he gave credit to Mrs. Rao’s attention, her eyes, piano, black hair in a sort of coil—for this hairdo he had yet to find a word—resulted in the phone call that led to his third marriage.

“Oh my goodness, it is you! It’s Lisa! I was Lisa Rao.

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