I caught a glimpse at dawn of someone (I thought inmate) walking under my window between banks of snow. There was a stiffness in his walk, like what you get on Thorazine. He wore a dark suit with no overcoat. Along the road wild geese pushed their bills into the snow to graze. They didn’t notice him. A mist made everything look warm and quiet, but the drainage pond beside the old incinerator house was frozen, where the Jews come for atonement, to throw bread into the moving waters. After a while, the switchboard operator rang me: there’s a guest. He’s waiting for me in the lobby. Yes, (she called me dear) she did try telling him the way, but he was deaf, or spoke some other language … Greek, who knows. He had a scrap of cardboard with my name in crayon scrawled, she said, by must-a-been a kid, a mental case. I didn’t tell her where I thought he came from, much less whose handwriting it was. I thanked her. He and I climbed into the stationwagon, him dead quiet. I was quiet too, but he didn’t breathe. At home I parked. I said, “You must have tried the door. I work upstairs. The doorbell doesn’t reach those rooms.” We stepped out into the snow and mist, and stood there looking at the trees, big spruces in the yard, white pines, cedar branches stooped with snow. I thought, why not. I fetched a bag of stale bread, took him to the pond, and showed him how to throw crumbs onto the ice. He didn’t care. He fed his to the geese and walked off, which left me to work out the atonement. I tried again with running water at the spillway, but no luck. I tried the scrap of cardboard from my pocket, dropped it in. Drips melted from the willows into the ditchwater, hitting the cardboard as it spun away. I must have scrawled my name like that, in red crayon, a long long time ago.
-Brooks Haxton
