The yard

I've got Lenore's shades on, driving down I-64. If they were any bigger, darker, or uglier, they'd be a shipyard welding shield. You can only get these masks from eye doctors, I think, and I don't mean optometrists. I'm talking about the other two with the even longer titles that start with "o."

Lenore got the shades when her eyes were sensitive after the cataract operation. But she wore them whenever she was outside until her dying day. I inherited them. To be honest, I was the first one in her apartment after we heard she had died, but no one had a problem with that. Or at least no one has said anything to my face.

Using Lenore's sunglasses is like peering back into my college years, in a way. Lenore would always complain about the light when I was home from school and driving her around. "It's the water, Honey. We're surrounded by water here. It reflects the sunlight back into the sky. It's the brightest place in the world."

I had never heard that last claim before, but now, after finally living where rivers pass through cities, instead of the other way around, I'm ready to accept any extreme claim about my home. The Virginia Peninsula is a jumping-off point. Driving down 64, I feel like I should punch it, race down to the tip of the Peninsula, jump out of the car and run down one of docks, strip off my clothes and throw myself into the water. The traffic, which they've imported from your area maybe to look suave, holds me back.

A lot of stuff ends here. Amtrak's Boston-New York-Washington service ends in Newport News. There's a lot of West Virginia piled up at the piers at Newport News Point, never to return. The deciduous trees are pretty much gone by the time you pass Williamsburg, and longleaf pines, most at least fifty feet tall, dominate the landscape on 64 from there eastward. The black soil is gone, and the pine roots shoot down into mostly sand. The sun also vanishes, too close to be seen. It teams with the sky and the rivers, and you can't tell any of them apart.

The longleaf pines, dark as my shades, have jettisoned their middle branches in favor of a canopy strategy at the top, where they may have taken a final stand against the crushing haze. They are inert, caught mid-stride like statues of brave and overmatched warriors, not hewn in honor but frozen by a quicker and more resourceful alien foe. The light has appropriated the needles and the dark scaly bark and advances now from around them, reconnoitering on side view mirrors and passing chrome, charging from windows and from my car keys, and making for my eyes as if it were a bayonet. I can see how sea power bottled up Cornwallis down here, just by squinting at the sky.

Lenore's welding shield gives the steel sky a dull green tint, and it makes me feel bottled up, too, as if I'm driving through glass, maybe through one of the old Coke bottles I'd drain when I'd visit Lenore's apartment. With my shield off, the Peninsula sky varies from a blue-gray-white to a darker-shade-of-gray-white, but it's always some kind of gray-white, like the sky over the shoulders of squinting family members in overexposed photographs.

Lenore's father and her brother stared out of silver frames on her end tables. Her pictures, along with her modest library of art, philosophy, history, and literature books occupying separate sections, were reference materials for the stories that kept us together summer afternoons. Her green patio awning softened the light pouring in through her sliding glass doors. She was like a nun, carefully maintaining a convent of culture. She never acknowledged the shipyard.

Her mind was quicker than mine. She was Mercury's nun, if Mercury needed one, and she moved fast to keep her world from being pulled in by the nearby shipyard. Her father was a vice-president of the C&O Railway at the turn of the century before the shipyard eclipsed Newport News Point as the city's chief employer. Stopping in after work and dressed in my steel-toed shoes and long-sleeve button-downs, I felt responsible for the shift somehow.

Some afternoons she would end her stories with reflections on one or more of my deficiencies. The stories didn't have to end that way because I heard the same stories end benignly lots of times with both of us laughing. She would always laugh first, one eye filled with tears and the other eye trained on me, in training.

I never saw a surprise ending coming. I wasn't even sure it was there after it had settled uncomfortably between us in some wing chair. The only thing I knew for sure was the burning I felt in my cheeks.

After I left for college, I began to feel off-balance at home, and not just in Lenore's apartment. I found no horizon to steady me. The sky told me nothing about what I'd find beneath it. Sunshine may be hitting the pines or rain may be glancing off the asphalt, but who could tell from looking at the sky? The weather was hidden in the steel reflected from the rivers. Each summer, I knew my job and little else.

I remember looking across the James River summer mornings from the Pentran bus curling around Kettle Pond on its way to the shipyard. The river reflected the sky and the sky reflected the river. Nothing was captured between these two mirrors, not even the sunrise, since the view across the river is southwestward. Only the pines on the Isle of Wight County shoreline four miles away stood out - dull green arrows pointing both ways, adding only their ambivalence to the sky's tug on the river. The rest was light steel and lighter steel, but at least you didn't need shades that early in the day.

Prospective employers always found my five summers at Newport News's shipyard to be the most impressive thing on my resume. During one interview, an older gentleman looked out of his fourth-story window and called the yard a "magnificent enterprise." But I wasn't applying for work at shipyards then. Not after those five summers. I wasn't even on the Peninsula by then. By then I was calling home and hearing Lenore speak with an accent for the first time.

I remember stuffing a dollar bill down the chute my first day on the bus. The driver looked at me, wearing what must have been my own expression. I felt the men lined up on the asphalt behind me, so I decided not to ask for change. The next morning I felt the rapid clinks my coins made against the glass and steel as they rattled through their designated paths in the collection box. The sounds jarred me but the fog stayed with me. I took my seat and looked out the tinted window at the sky, dreaming of four-story air-conditioned office buildings with aircraft carrier desks. I thought of my father spreading his large hands towards the opposite edges of one of them a year or two before he died.

I helped run pipe through a carrier for two of my summers. The X19s were supposed to keep the compartments between the steel bulkheads ventilated, but we started each day with nothing but steam from the river and smoke from the graveyard shift welders below decks. The day's first job was to tape up scavenged pieces of ventilation and to connect them to a blower from maybe two decks above. The air came out at us just about as hard as you can breathe out with your mouth wide open, and about as cool, but if you were very still, you could feel it. Other mates would siphon off of our line, so we had to go back and check it a lot. It was work.

"It's hot in here and I ain't lyin'." Baylor repeated his line on the dry dock bottom underneath a black submarine every morning until the heat and his alternation between goldbricking and work had settled him. As the day wore on, his voice became hard to hear over the grinders and tack welders and riggers anyway. One time - I don't know why - Baylor glanced at me and something connected through the haze, through the safety goggles, just for a moment. Concern, maybe. Maybe I was going through something. I was too young to know, and it was too long ago to reflect on now. Then Baylor turned his head towards the river hovering 40 feet above us and outside the dry dock gates. "It's hot in here and I ain't lyin'," he said.

The second whistle's air-raid wail smothered downtown Newport News every weekday morning at seven. The siren's workups were like blizzards and its long wind-downs were like snowdrifts, throwing us together in ways we couldn't have foreseen. Hauling copper pipe one morning I uncovered Manny Herbert who had sat behind me with a full beard his second time through seventh grade. Steam was puffing up through some asphalt next to a rail line where Manny and some others were loading up cars with scrap metal. I walked away after we had reconnected. "Stay in school or you'll end up here," he called after me, holding his gloves in one hand.

We had our helmets on at seven. They put out enough information to deflect most things. Mine said "X42" and "Finley." I was summer help and everyone knew it, but I didn't know they knew it. I was pretty sure nothing was discovered at the shipyard. I spent my second shipyard summer at the copper shop helping two mates clean pipe. They had burn marks on their faces and hands from the hydrochloric acid they dipped the pipes in and out of all day, one of them lowering the chain and the other guiding the pipes. Towards the end of the summer, I had a sandwich with one of them while the other took a nap under the shop's loading dock overhang.

"How long you worked with Lewes, Smitty?"

"I don't know." He munched, put a hand to his hip and looked to the river, wide here by Hampton Roads. "Twenty-five years, maybe?" He glanced at me, as if to hear my side of it.

I chewed for a while. "What's Lewes's first name?"

He paused. "You know, Finney," he said, "I don't know." He stuffed the sub in his mouth again and watched the river as if it were daytime television.

Most times, though, the noon whistle took me outside the gate. I'd walk to the West Avenue Library on 30th Street or to Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church on 25th Street and eat my bag lunch there. Both places were almost blue with air-conditioning. The library had books piled to its old ceilings and I could see the gilded stars painted on the church's dark blue firmament. The white sky waited outside like a leashed dog tied to a streetlamp. I would pull my words out of my back pocket and rest, or dream. One day at the church I read:

And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

Not quite as hopeful as the gold words running in a circle around the firmament above me, I thought. Was it even worse outside my Bible, though? The yard reserved the brass for the final outfitting - for the compass and the binnacle and other instruments. The only brass in my world was the Navy officers' buckles and epaulets. But the siren wailed and I stuffed my words out of sight. I walked back, trying to make sense of the carrier's monumental flight deck against the steel humidity that had already mothballed it, three years before sea trials.

The bus ride home wasn't as jarring as the ride in, but the bus's air conditioning wouldn't work much better than our carrier's taped-up ventilation lines. Enoch's laugh would cut through the bus benches and would make for the tinted bus windows on either side of me. It was the only thing I could hear above the bus's roar and the murmuring workers. Enoch worked somewhere around me on the carrier, and his laugh, warm and mechanical, would pulse through the ship's compartments more frequently as quitting time got closer. On the bus, his laugh would become an intermittent alarm I had the privilege of sleeping through, and the bus driver would wake me at my street, which was the last stop. Enoch's conversation would become clearer in my sleep as he would pass my bench three stops earlier.

"You wide open!"

"I saw you rollin' up by the canteen. Forman said you were rollin'!"

"You the one!"

The laugh would trail Enoch off of the bus, along with pieces of men's jokes, funny in their own right once but now serving as reminders of genuine laughter, as ways of passing by friends and years and hopes, without excuse or even contact, on the way off the bus. Words struggling out of shells on the sand after the tides had worn the conjunctions and subordinate clauses into Hampton Roads. Enoch's laugh again. The bus brakes at each stop releasing the pieces and the laughs into the afternoon's bright haze with a valve's mechanical desperation, adding to yesterday's pieces and laughs now floating under and beside every Pentran bus passing through the haze, now tarnished and threatening through the tinted bus windows.

It did not rain that summer.

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Posted August 2005

When silence tucks even the wind when even the whispers stop and we fall from the foretop skyward with sudden slack and loss of song, and the clouds reel in our umbilical until they stand above us, just below us, and the shouts inside us my son's laugh inside us, the dearest, the dearest memory of an afternoon we, we really shared, when

     - from "Foretopmen"

Photo by Daniele Florio. Used by permission.