A Small Jolt

A Small Jolt Some dried out drunks are like raisins. After enduring so much bitter they develop an unexpected sweetness. His features carried the accumulated weight of penance and its Siamese twin humility. The high life almost always demands the low.The blackout nights and broken promises, the lost friends and lies to others and himself had been cured from him. He wore rags, the remains of weather on his features and the unmistakable air of great suffering. He slept on park benches in the summer and apartment stairwells in the winter, paralyzed by the cruelest kind of unforgiveness. The kind you can never grant yourself. He adopted a small park in front of the local church, like he was sure God might stop someday on the way past and hear his confession. The local discount liquor store was on Damascus Street. And eventually, it took years of stumbling in the dark, this blind drunk was granted vision on that road. Years before he had been a captain on the Staten Island ferry A substantial and steady man. The kind of guy that knows his place in the world. Wife and kids, house in the suburbs. The respect of those around him. “How did it come to this?” I asked him once. His face fell and his voice grew quiet like he was afraid the words might call up all the sharp that memory still held. “One day in the winter, “ he said. “The day run, there was a chop on the water. Nothing I aint seen a thousand times. The wind was galing as I approached." He dragged his hand across his face. "Maybe I was preoccupied," he whispered. "I don’t know." “I come in a little too hard and bounced on one of the pylons. Nothing serious. Just a small jolt. That’s all it takes sometimes, a small jolt and suddenly nothing is plumb ever again." I waited for him to continue. “A woman began to scream, " he said. ‘My little girl…my little girl.’ He stopped and swallowed hard then looked up into my face. "She was too near the back, trying to see the water, like kids do. That jolt was enough. Lost her balance." The silence seemed to freeze between us. "They fished her out an hour later. Her face was blue. I carried her to the bridge. Trying to warm some breathe back into her. No use to it.” “An accident Tommy,” I said to him. But sometimes words are just ghosts. They change nothing much. They can't reach to the bottom. Where the wound and chains of memory rattle. He shook his head. “It was me." He looked down. “I’ll carry her forever.” The el train roared over head beating out a rhythm against each rail in its way. “I tried to drink my way around it, but it was too wide. I'm no good anymore. Not for nothing. Not steering or husbanding or fathering.” I looked at this good man, now in rags, battered by circumstance then sweetened by the weather of hard living. Wine trying to become the kind of water that might wash away his sinless offense. A man dragged into the gutter and imprisoned by his own conscience. Unable to forgive himself for the small steady jolts of the world. A little girl losing her balance demanded he lose his. For decades. WLM