Essays
Play's Work (2004) Jerome W. Berryman
Spring
"I want to know everything."
"I know. I did too," Grandfather said.
"I must go find out."
"Yes. I must go soon, too."
"I will miss you."
"Yes." A tear ran down Grandfather's cheek into his beard. "Say good-bye to your Mother and Father before you go."
"Will they understand?"
"No."
"Where should I go to know what I need to know?"
"You are already there."
"Grandfather, don't make jokes."
"What will you do after you know," he asked and looked away.
"I will play."
"Why don't you play now?"
"I must find my own home and work."
Grandfather jerked up suddenly. His dark beard bristled. "Homes are given, not found! They can be taken away, to be sure, but they are gifts." He then gave me his thick, leather, sewing kit. "Here. You may need this."
"But Grandfather, I must search for what is best for me!" Grandfather's eyes closed. He fell completely asleep in his chair and began to snore. His fierce, stiff beard became soft and white.
In the morning Grandfather was dead. He was buried beside his wife. I watched awkwardly as my parents buried him. They did not speak, so I had no one to tell how much Grandfather meant to me. Then the hole was filled in.
One evening I asked my parents, "Couldn't we all go to a new place together?"
"We do not wish to travel," they said with tired words. "Go if you must."
I stayed, then they died. This time I did the burying. The Elders of the Village watched.
When we turned away from the mound, the Elders walked home with me. They sat down in my parents' chairs with stone faces. The leader said, "This place is no longer your home. It belongs to the Village."
"How can that be?"
"Take what you can and be gone before sunrise." When the sun rose I was on the road.
Summer
As I traveled, I made a living as a tailor, like Grandfather. It was a life of thread, scissors, cloth and wit. People did not always know what fit best for them, so I had to know that as well. I felt Grandfather was there when I opened his kit and held his scissors to make things right.
One day I stopped at a village to rest. Sitting still on a stone bench, I listened intently to the water tumbling out of the fountain. It sparkled as it splashed into the deep pool to make expanding rings.
It was market day and people were setting up their stalls. The square filled with families. Gaiety and color danced everywhere. People were buying and selling, visiting and laughing, playing and working.
What was that? My eyes moved towards two towers on the other side of the square. Some children were climbing effortlessly up the taller one. They pulled themselves up by the vines and found finger holds and places to step in the rough stones. When they came to a doorway framed with wood they began to play on a wire fastened between the threshold of the shut door and the other tower. With light feet they ventured out onto the taut strand. They appeared to dance in the air, calling to each other with joy.
Suddenly, the thick door of the taller tower banged open. A jester poked out his head, his cap screaming with many colors. The jangling bells at its tips were fearsome.
"What are you doing? Get down! You can't play on the high wire."
The children were startled. They began to sway, back and forth, uncertainly, far above the stones below.
"Get down! You cannot learn how to walk on the high wire until you are older."
One child, now white with fright, slipped. She grabbed the wire, swinging, and made her way, hand over hand, to the other side. Another lost his balance but regained it and then hovered motionless. A third child knelt down and grasped the wire with both hands and inched away from the jester, bent over. Another fell all the way down, silently, to his wondering death.
The jester was screeching now. He placed his heavy foot on the wire and moved toward the children, making violent gestures with his balancing pole and contorted face.
Now all the children crept toward the far side of the wire, shaking. They hung on to the vines and inched their way down, but a menacing clown banged his way up the stairs within that tower and jerked its door open. He leaned out above them, shaking his fist and yelling, as the children reached the ground.
People quietly carried away the dead child's body. The other children became invisible. The festive market day ended, as anger continued to heat the wire between the two towers like an incandescent filament.
The town council met at once and voted to punish all the children of the village. They also took down the high wire. Children, they thought, would never be tempted to dance and play there again.
I grew bone weary as this swirled around me. Finally, I heaved my body up. It was impossibly heavy, but I managed to get to my feet and move on, disappearing into the dark wood.
A few days later I made myself a tent to protect me from the rain and cold, the snow and wind. People admired it, so I began to make tents to shelter them and later even made colorful, wispy, dream tents for children's play.
I tried to go everywhere but began to despair of learning any more or finding my own home. I got lost with ease, even when there were roads and signs and maps and much advice about how to go and where.
Autumn
As I traveled, my feet hurt, so I made my own shoes. It seemed everyone needed shoes that made walking and standing a pleasure, so I began to make shoes for others as well. People gratefully paid for them. They even began to search for me as I went along my way. They trusted me to find what could be done to make their lives more livable.
I had grown gray by the time I entered the village again. I hadn't meant to come back, but I sat to rest by the fountain and watched the red and yellow leaves blow across the square at play with the wind.
The two towers drew my attention again, but no children played there and no market hummed with conversation and fun. Even the stones seemed repressed and unwilling to have people walk on them. Faded lettering and tattered signs on the walls showed the towers were no longer cared for. The air smelled of rot.
A lock turned. A door creaked. I heard a step and turned in time to see someone appear from a narrow place between two houses. He looked to see if anyone was watching and hurried across the square to the towers. I was almost invisible, gray like one of the stones on which I sat, and watched him begin to climb.
A few other people scurried across the square, but they did not notice the young man, who by now had climbed up to the door's threshold and sat on it. He then stood up and stepped confidently out into the air, striding straight across to the other tower.
"Look! Look! That man is walking on air." I stood up and pointed. The solitary people in the square stopped. They turned and stared at me.
"Can you believe that? It's amazing." I was excited. I wanted to talk. They did not.
Some shrugged and turned away. Others hurriedly left the square. One or two started toward me with clenched fists. They then stopped and disappeared too, doors slamming out of sight.
What was going on? I had no time to think, because a gentleman in a red velvet hat and green coat trimmed with white fur walked solemnly toward me with great purpose and gravity. I was fascinated. He was very erect and stiff, then he stopped right in front of me and spoke to me with command, and yet as if we shared a secret.
"We do not talk about insane things in this village. Beware."
"But there is someone up there! Look. He is walking back and forth in midair."
The tall man lifted his right hand slowly above his shoulder and with his first finger extended, slowly pointed it towards me. Three soldiers appeared from a faded but stately building to my right. I watched them in a trance as they came towards me. I could clearly hear the leather and metal of their armor creaking and clanging. The edge of the unsheathed swords teased my nose. They had just been sharpened. I remember being colder than ever before and began to shake.
"You are causing a public disturbance. You must go with these gentlemen."
I went with them.
Later, sitting in a small cell with an iron door, I counted the eight large stones along the sides and the four stones at both ends. I counted them over and over again. In one corner was a pile of old hay for sleeping and in another corner a pot that was stinking. I had never felt old before, despite my grayness, but now I did.
In the village things went on as usual and after two years I was set "free," free to leave without speaking.
Winter
It was not a good time to be on the road. Snow fell quietly at first in the forest and I could just make out the dark line of a path through the trees. It grew colder. The snow came more thickly. The wind began to blow and ice began to hit my face like needles. The wind gusted and then roared continuously.
I lost the path, then found some footprints in the snow. My feet broke the frozen crust as I crunched along, beginning to shiver. It grew dark, but I saw a light ahead, then it was gone. For some reason I stopped and looked down in the luminous snow.
A dove had fallen from a frozen bush beside the path and lay like ivory on the hard surface of the snow. I knelt, scooped it up with two hands, like a prayer, and moved on, leaving a cold, empty hole where my fingers had cracked into the snow's surface. I turned my back against the wind and opened my coat, putting the chilled lump inside for what warmth remained. As I limped backwards into the dark the mark made by my hands disappeared.
I went on, leaning against the wind, until I backed into a stone wall. It was a hut. I moved around the outside searching with one hand for a door. I touched the wood, then found a drawstring. I pulled it. Inside a wooden bar could be heard lifting. I pushed. The heavy door slowly gave way, scraping over the stone floor, and I stepped inside.
Inside was a sullen fire. The dull, greasy glow barely lit the space. It was warmer than outside but lacked safety.
It was then that I saw them. They sat like sacks, wrapped against the storm and stone room. I sat across a heavy, wooden table from them. There were two. They were steaming as they warmed.
I reached into my coat and pulled out the marbled bird and put it, loaf-like, on the table. The two shadows stirred. Eyes appeared. They looked at the dove, now becoming limp as life returned.
The shadows moved without a word toward the table. The fire cracked and flared, but they did not look away. They were stalking the bird. Like steel traps their hands grasped at the prey and then at each other. The dove fell between them on the table. They clawed, gurgling and gasping, as they strangled each other and fell to the floor.
As they went down, the dove burst up into the air, fluttering for life. It turned toward the tarnished reflection from the fire in the window's glass. Thinking it to be outside light, the dove crashed through the reflection into the storm. Tiny drops of blood were left on the jagged pieces of glass as the wind ceased to be held at bay and whipped its way into the stone hut to stir the troubled air.
Hate hung suspended in the angry room like a broken bell. I rose and pushed my way through it, passing by the table to gather a few feathers. I then touched the blood with awe and left.
Outside the cold pressed against me like an iron bar as I tried to find the darker line of the path again. Then, I no longer cared. My tears turned to ice and scratched my face, but fluttering hints of doves filled the strangely warm wood with lovely white. I thought I was dreaming as I froze to death, but I did not.
Spring Again
The snow was melting. When I looked in pools to drink I thought I saw Grandfather. Every window glowed with a home that was not mine, as I walked slowly by, but there was also something home-like everywhere I went.
One crystal day I came to a vast cliff and walked carefully along its sharp edge, peering into the depths. The nothingness did not make me dizzy, as such places had when I was young. I felt a vibration in the air and looked up.
A black line was coming toward me from far beyond. It stopped when it touched the edge where I was standing. Suddenly, it began to pulsate. My eyes strained to see why. Then, a distinct figure came into view. As it grew larger I could see it was an odd, old man. He pushed a gaily-painted cart with one wheel that was balanced on the line. I had never known any acrobats and yet he looked familiar.
He stopped in front of me. Our eyes met.
"Do you think I can do it again?"
"Yes," I said, certainty slowly forming in my mind.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. You have great skill."
"Good. Get in. I will take you across."
"No. I will make you fall."
"May I teach you how to walk the wire by yourself, then?"
"No. I will cause myself to fall."
"How will you cross, then?"
"I will stay here."
"How?"
I looked to my right and left. The edge had disappeared in both directions. I turned around. There was nothing.
I accepted the invitation with a nod and climbed in.
The old man winked.
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Play's Work (2004) Jerome W. Berryman
Spring
"I want to know everything."
"I know. I did too," Grandfather said.
"I must go find out."
"Yes. I must go soon, too."
"I will miss you."
"Yes." A tear ran down Grandfather's cheek into his beard. "Say good-bye to your Mother and Father before you go."
"Will they understand?"
"No."
"Where should I go to know what I need to know?"
"You are already there."
"Grandfather, don't make jokes."
"What will you do after you know," he asked and looked away.
"I will play."
"Why don't you play now?"
"I must find my own home and work."
Grandfather jerked up suddenly. His dark beard bristled. "Homes are given, not found! They can be taken away, to be sure, but they are gifts." He then gave me his thick, leather, sewing kit. "Here. You may need this."
"But Grandfather, I must search for what is best for me!" Grandfather's eyes closed. He fell completely asleep in his chair and began to snore. His fierce, stiff beard became soft and white.
In the morning Grandfather was dead. He was buried beside his wife. I watched awkwardly as my parents buried him. They did not speak, so I had no one to tell how much Grandfather meant to me. Then the hole was filled in.
One evening I asked my parents, "Couldn't we all go to a new place together?"
"We do not wish to travel," they said with tired words. "Go if you must."
I stayed, then they died. This time I did the burying. The Elders of the Village watched.
When we turned away from the mound, the Elders walked home with me. They sat down in my parents' chairs with stone faces. The leader said, "This place is no longer your home. It belongs to the Village."
"How can that be?"
"Take what you can and be gone before sunrise." When the sun rose I was on the road.
Summer
As I traveled, I made a living as a tailor, like Grandfather. It was a life of thread, scissors, cloth and wit. People did not always know what fit best for them, so I had to know that as well. I felt Grandfather was there when I opened his kit and held his scissors to make things right.
One day I stopped at a village to rest. Sitting still on a stone bench, I listened intently to the water tumbling out of the fountain. It sparkled as it splashed into the deep pool to make expanding rings.
It was market day and people were setting up their stalls. The square filled with families. Gaiety and color danced everywhere. People were buying and selling, visiting and laughing, playing and working.
What was that? My eyes moved towards two towers on the other side of the square. Some children were climbing effortlessly up the taller one. They pulled themselves up by the vines and found finger holds and places to step in the rough stones. When they came to a doorway framed with wood they began to play on a wire fastened between the threshold of the shut door and the other tower. With light feet they ventured out onto the taut strand. They appeared to dance in the air, calling to each other with joy.
Suddenly, the thick door of the taller tower banged open. A jester poked out his head, his cap screaming with many colors. The jangling bells at its tips were fearsome.
"What are you doing? Get down! You can't play on the high wire."
The children were startled. They began to sway, back and forth, uncertainly, far above the stones below.
"Get down! You cannot learn how to walk on the high wire until you are older."
One child, now white with fright, slipped. She grabbed the wire, swinging, and made her way, hand over hand, to the other side. Another lost his balance but regained it and then hovered motionless. A third child knelt down and grasped the wire with both hands and inched away from the jester, bent over. Another fell all the way down, silently, to his wondering death.
The jester was screeching now. He placed his heavy foot on the wire and moved toward the children, making violent gestures with his balancing pole and contorted face.
Now all the children crept toward the far side of the wire, shaking. They hung on to the vines and inched their way down, but a menacing clown banged his way up the stairs within that tower and jerked its door open. He leaned out above them, shaking his fist and yelling, as the children reached the ground.
People quietly carried away the dead child's body. The other children became invisible. The festive market day ended, as anger continued to heat the wire between the two towers like an incandescent filament.
The town council met at once and voted to punish all the children of the village. They also took down the high wire. Children, they thought, would never be tempted to dance and play there again.
I grew bone weary as this swirled around me. Finally, I heaved my body up. It was impossibly heavy, but I managed to get to my feet and move on, disappearing into the dark wood.
A few days later I made myself a tent to protect me from the rain and cold, the snow and wind. People admired it, so I began to make tents to shelter them and later even made colorful, wispy, dream tents for children's play.
I tried to go everywhere but began to despair of learning any more or finding my own home. I got lost with ease, even when there were roads and signs and maps and much advice about how to go and where.
Autumn
As I traveled, my feet hurt, so I made my own shoes. It seemed everyone needed shoes that made walking and standing a pleasure, so I began to make shoes for others as well. People gratefully paid for them. They even began to search for me as I went along my way. They trusted me to find what could be done to make their lives more livable.
I had grown gray by the time I entered the village again. I hadn't meant to come back, but I sat to rest by the fountain and watched the red and yellow leaves blow across the square at play with the wind.
The two towers drew my attention again, but no children played there and no market hummed with conversation and fun. Even the stones seemed repressed and unwilling to have people walk on them. Faded lettering and tattered signs on the walls showed the towers were no longer cared for. The air smelled of rot.
A lock turned. A door creaked. I heard a step and turned in time to see someone appear from a narrow place between two houses. He looked to see if anyone was watching and hurried across the square to the towers. I was almost invisible, gray like one of the stones on which I sat, and watched him begin to climb.
A few other people scurried across the square, but they did not notice the young man, who by now had climbed up to the door's threshold and sat on it. He then stood up and stepped confidently out into the air, striding straight across to the other tower.
"Look! Look! That man is walking on air." I stood up and pointed. The solitary people in the square stopped. They turned and stared at me.
"Can you believe that? It's amazing." I was excited. I wanted to talk. They did not.
Some shrugged and turned away. Others hurriedly left the square. One or two started toward me with clenched fists. They then stopped and disappeared too, doors slamming out of sight.
What was going on? I had no time to think, because a gentleman in a red velvet hat and green coat trimmed with white fur walked solemnly toward me with great purpose and gravity. I was fascinated. He was very erect and stiff, then he stopped right in front of me and spoke to me with command, and yet as if we shared a secret.
"We do not talk about insane things in this village. Beware."
"But there is someone up there! Look. He is walking back and forth in midair."
The tall man lifted his right hand slowly above his shoulder and with his first finger extended, slowly pointed it towards me. Three soldiers appeared from a faded but stately building to my right. I watched them in a trance as they came towards me. I could clearly hear the leather and metal of their armor creaking and clanging. The edge of the unsheathed swords teased my nose. They had just been sharpened. I remember being colder than ever before and began to shake.
"You are causing a public disturbance. You must go with these gentlemen."
I went with them.
Later, sitting in a small cell with an iron door, I counted the eight large stones along the sides and the four stones at both ends. I counted them over and over again. In one corner was a pile of old hay for sleeping and in another corner a pot that was stinking. I had never felt old before, despite my grayness, but now I did.
In the village things went on as usual and after two years I was set "free," free to leave without speaking.
Winter
It was not a good time to be on the road. Snow fell quietly at first in the forest and I could just make out the dark line of a path through the trees. It grew colder. The snow came more thickly. The wind began to blow and ice began to hit my face like needles. The wind gusted and then roared continuously.
I lost the path, then found some footprints in the snow. My feet broke the frozen crust as I crunched along, beginning to shiver. It grew dark, but I saw a light ahead, then it was gone. For some reason I stopped and looked down in the luminous snow.
A dove had fallen from a frozen bush beside the path and lay like ivory on the hard surface of the snow. I knelt, scooped it up with two hands, like a prayer, and moved on, leaving a cold, empty hole where my fingers had cracked into the snow's surface. I turned my back against the wind and opened my coat, putting the chilled lump inside for what warmth remained. As I limped backwards into the dark the mark made by my hands disappeared.
I went on, leaning against the wind, until I backed into a stone wall. It was a hut. I moved around the outside searching with one hand for a door. I touched the wood, then found a drawstring. I pulled it. Inside a wooden bar could be heard lifting. I pushed. The heavy door slowly gave way, scraping over the stone floor, and I stepped inside.
Inside was a sullen fire. The dull, greasy glow barely lit the space. It was warmer than outside but lacked safety.
It was then that I saw them. They sat like sacks, wrapped against the storm and stone room. I sat across a heavy, wooden table from them. There were two. They were steaming as they warmed.
I reached into my coat and pulled out the marbled bird and put it, loaf-like, on the table. The two shadows stirred. Eyes appeared. They looked at the dove, now becoming limp as life returned.
The shadows moved without a word toward the table. The fire cracked and flared, but they did not look away. They were stalking the bird. Like steel traps their hands grasped at the prey and then at each other. The dove fell between them on the table. They clawed, gurgling and gasping, as they strangled each other and fell to the floor.
As they went down, the dove burst up into the air, fluttering for life. It turned toward the tarnished reflection from the fire in the window's glass. Thinking it to be outside light, the dove crashed through the reflection into the storm. Tiny drops of blood were left on the jagged pieces of glass as the wind ceased to be held at bay and whipped its way into the stone hut to stir the troubled air.
Hate hung suspended in the angry room like a broken bell. I rose and pushed my way through it, passing by the table to gather a few feathers. I then touched the blood with awe and left.
Outside the cold pressed against me like an iron bar as I tried to find the darker line of the path again. Then, I no longer cared. My tears turned to ice and scratched my face, but fluttering hints of doves filled the strangely warm wood with lovely white. I thought I was dreaming as I froze to death, but I did not.
Spring Again
The snow was melting. When I looked in pools to drink I thought I saw Grandfather. Every window glowed with a home that was not mine, as I walked slowly by, but there was also something home-like everywhere I went.
One crystal day I came to a vast cliff and walked carefully along its sharp edge, peering into the depths. The nothingness did not make me dizzy, as such places had when I was young. I felt a vibration in the air and looked up.
A black line was coming toward me from far beyond. It stopped when it touched the edge where I was standing. Suddenly, it began to pulsate. My eyes strained to see why. Then, a distinct figure came into view. As it grew larger I could see it was an odd, old man. He pushed a gaily-painted cart with one wheel that was balanced on the line. I had never known any acrobats and yet he looked familiar.
He stopped in front of me. Our eyes met.
"Do you think I can do it again?"
"Yes," I said, certainty slowly forming in my mind.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. You have great skill."
"Good. Get in. I will take you across."
"No. I will make you fall."
"May I teach you how to walk the wire by yourself, then?"
"No. I will cause myself to fall."
"How will you cross, then?"
"I will stay here."
"How?"
I looked to my right and left. The edge had disappeared in both directions. I turned around. There was nothing.
I accepted the invitation with a nod and climbed in.
The old man winked.
