Pity People
Pity People
Pity People

Notes on grace under duress.

By Andre Dubus

The quadriplegic’s arms and hands cannot push a wheelchair; his confinement and his mobility will be a chair with a motor. They weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. Who will carry him up even one step to a restaurant? And why would he want to be carried? When you are carried, your helplessness, and the very meatness of you, slap your soul. And it is a frightening surrender to other arms and legs. Chairs with motors cost around eight thousand dollars, and if you plan to leave your home you need a van with a lift, and someone to drive it; though once I met a quadriplegic who somehow drove. The quadriplegic will not walk. A few years after my crippling, after I lost my legs, I saw a film called The Men, starring Marlon Brando as a paraplegic. At his wedding he stood from his chair, holding on to the pew beside him. Alone on my couch, watching him stand, sweating, on paralyzed legs, I laughed aloud this dangerous mockery of those of us who cannot; who spirits are willing, whose flesh will not.

*

When I was a graduate student, I had a friend in a wheelchair. I first met him in late afternoon on a cold winter day; there was snow on the ground and sidewalks, and he was pushing his chair up a long steep hill. I was walking perpendicular to him at the bottom of the hill when I heard his voice. I stopped and saw a black man looking over his shoulder at me, calling: “Can you give me a push?”
     He could not push farther up the hill. I felt the embarrassment of being whole while he was not, and went up to him and pushed. In this way we introduced ourselves; I spoke to the back of his head, and he spoke into the cold air in front of him. He told me of learning to use a wheelchair, of the instructors taking the men on wheels out of the hospital, racing to a bar. You had to keep up and get yourself over the curbs, he said. If you fell on your back, tough shit. He laughed and I laughed with him, and that is how I thought of people in wheelchairs until I became one: stout-hearted folk wheeling fast on sidewalks, climbing curbs, and of course sometimes falling backward, but that seemed to me like slipping and falling on the outfield grass while chasing a fly ball, until over twenty years later, when I fell backward in my chair, and the quick arc of the fall slammed my head against the floor, and I lay helpless and hurt. It was summer and the windows were open and my neighbor, in his house thirty yards away, heard my head striking wood.

*

In my freshman year of college in Louisiana, I studied journalism. If I had become a reporter, and if one day I had walked into a hospital and interviewed a quadriplegic, I would have written the same kind of story I read in the newspaper that November morning. It is a good story. The human spirit is strong, and its strength goes out of a person, and into others. And the heart is capable of such hope that, even when we know the truth and it is not the truth we want, we still hope. Probably I have read William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness ten times, yet each time Peyton climbs the stairs to leap, I hope she will not.
     We should celebrate this.

*

I watch the televised games of the Boston Red Sox. Between innings are commercials, and usually I change channels and watch a movie till the pitcher walks to the mound. But one Saturday afternoon I saw a commercial: a series of war monuments, and stirring music and a man’s voice talking about valor. I saw the Iwo Jima monument, the Marines raising the flag. I was a Marine, between wars. On my couch, watching sculpted brave men in uniforms of different wars, I felt honor and pride. Tears were in my eyes. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was not in the commercial. I still did not know what the commercial was for; it could be for recruitment. It could simply be about America. Then the monuments were gone and what filled the screen was a bottle of Budweiser. Drops of condensation were on the bottle.
     I wanted a Budweiser bottle then, to throw at my television screen. But it is my television set, and it gives me pleasure and peace, with baseball games and movies, rarely anything else. I had watched some bombings during the 1991 Gulf War, had felt the thrill of killing and winning. So I stopped watching.
     Now I watched a baseball game and wanted to yell with rage at every human being involved with that commercial, and I thought of Jeannie, a young woman who was an Army lieutenant in the Gulf War. She was born while her father was a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. Her younger sister, Lynda, worked for me, cleaning my house and helping me with my young daughters, and she was with us on the night the war started. When we heard that it had begun, my girls and Lynda cried, and all through the war we worried about Jeannie.
     The day after the war ended, I drove my youngest girl from playschool to my house. She is Madeleine, and was four then. I looked back at her in the car seat and said: “The war is over.”
“ Jeannie will come home,” she said. “When I see her face she will look different.”
     On a warm day in spring my girls and I saw Jeannie. We went on a picnic with her and Lynda. While Lynda and the girls were playing on the grass in the park, Jeannie said to me: “I’m older. I asked my father when it would go away, and he said: ‘It doesn’t. This is it.’”
     It was the dead, she told me; seeing and smelling the Iraqi soldiers of a bombed convoy. I remembered her father telling me of burying the North Vietnamese dead at Hue, and how sad he was.

*

I did not like writing news stories, and in my second year of college I changed my major to English. In my freshman year, a sportswriter in his forties came to a journalism class and talked to us about his life as a newspaperman. I liked him. He was friendly and good-humored, and cheer was in his eyes. A few years earlier he had written about the professional baseball games in Louisiana’s Class C Evangeline League. One night, because of successive nights of rain and then double-headers, a team had no one who could pitch. The league president allowed the sportswriter to pitch; as a young man he had been a pitcher, a lefthander.That night he gave up a lot of runs, and the fans and ballplayers were merry. He pitched for nine innings.
     In the classroom he told us that, like all old newspapermen, he had a novel in a trunk. I imagined the life ahead of me, as a reporter, a columnist, an adventurous life that would not live in a trunk. I wanted to be out of college, in the midst of the challenge. He spoke with encouragement, with acceptance, with passion. His last line, just before the bell, was: “Remember: the last four letters of American spell I can.”
     My heart filled; tears were in my eyes.

*

Someone sent me a clipping from The Wall Street Journal: a story about a wheelchair that climbs stairs. Computers are involved. The chair has wheels, but you press something, if you are able to press something, and the chair has tracks, and up the stairs you go. There was a picture of the president of the company that made this chair, and the story quoted him: “This is the American way: independence.”
     The chair costs twenty-eight thousand dollars.

*

I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march in parade off to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadraplegic needs for his body. What we need is not the sound of horns rising to the sky but the steady beat of the bass drum. When you march to the bass drum, your left foot touches the earth with each beat, and you can feel the drum in your body: boom and boom and boom and pity people pity people pity people.

This essay is excerpted from a longer piece that the late great Andre Dubus sent us just before he died in 1999. Andre was the author of many books of short stories and two extraordinary books of essays, Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Movable Chair. One of his essays for this magazine graces God Is Love, an anthology of the best spiritual essays from these pages (Augsburg Books). Proceeds from the book go to scholarships for writers on The Bluff.