Part One
FIRST GRADE, AUSTIN, 1958
We learned to stand straight as the posts
of empty mail boxes. We sang,
"The Eyes of Texas are Upon You,"
never, "The Star Spangled Banner."
My best friend, Charlie, had been held back
two years, with this same teacher.
When my whispers rose above my breaths,
Mrs. Cooper put the newspaper dunce cap
on my head. I slouched in a corner
looking like Merlin without his magic.
In December, the janitor wired
a speaker into a corner of the classroom.
Mrs. Cooper said Cheryl Anne couldn't walk
to school because of polio, but we would hear
her voice. The teacher explained how sound travels
the air in waves.
Once, during recess, I threw a rubber ball
at Susan's head. While the others played,
I sat in the corner wondering why
my arm did these things without me
telling it to,
when, "Are you alone?"
squeaked from the speaker box.
Cheryl Anne's voice startled me
like the voice of the priest
during a first confessional. I asked,
What do you look like?"
She said, "My head sticks out
of an iron lung. My hair is dark
brown. Below the neck,
my arms and legs don't hear
anything I tell them."
Cheryl Anne lived two houses away
from me. After school, I sat near a wheel
of her iron lung, listening, as I had
begun to do in class, to the noise of waves,
the tide of air being breathed,
sucked in and out of lungs.
I described the voices she heard
through the intercom on her bedroom wall.
I wondered how long she would live
without electricity. Her mother said
the portable lung had its own battery.
It looked like the shell of the snapping
turtle that returned to the azalea bush
each spring. He didn't snap at me,
unless I cornered him.
During Easter vacation, Cheryl Anne's parents
laid her in the back of the station
wagon, the portable breathing
the stretch to San Antonio
for her, not far from the Alamo.
In the hospital, specialists broke her legs.
Her mother explained how nerves are shocked
into feeling, when they heal a break.
With Cheryl Anne gone,
I did chores Saturday morning, dragging
the vacuum into Saturday afternoon.
My mother couldn't understand what took me
so long. I dragged the Hoover,
shaped like a small iron lung,
over half the house, breathing
with each sweep of the vacuum brush.
FATHER