Eternal Tears

 

The crackle of a classroom speaker.

Dozens of small voices, stilled

by the sudden intrusion,

stop at once.

 

A silence.

 

No movement in the room but

the rhythmic metronome of the teacher's ruler

swinging back and forth in her craggy hands.

 

The crackle sounds once more,

and our faces turn in unison,

in anticipation,

toward its source.

 

A small, broken voice--

recognizable but not normal,

not the rich, strong voice usually carried into the room that way,

but a fragment of it,

a shell, without depth,

cracking like the speaker itself--

interrupted the silence.

 

"Bow your heads in prayer," it said.

 

Confused eyes stared at the oval grill

awkwardly jutting out of an ancient beige wall.

The voice, more broken now, continued.

 

"We have just received word that the President has been shot."

 

Vaguely we tried to recall just what a President was--

visions of white-haired men in blue coats leaped out of history

books into our brains, blurred, rolled into each other.

Names, mostly from holidays, flashed through our minds.

And one more...

 

Again the electronic crackling,

as if the speaker itself did not wish to hear the news:

"President Kennedy was shot this afternoon in Dallas."

 

A pause. A sound like sobbing. "Pray for him."

 

Dozens of eyes,

glassy,

confused,

watched the teacher sit in stunned silence at her desk,

tears welling in her gray eyes,

the ruler grasped still tightly in her palm,

some connection to the world

which had ended so abruptly.

Her face quivered, the gray in her hair seemed even duller,

and her head fell to her desk.

We looked at each other, recognizing

that something was terribly, unalterably wrong,

and bowed our own heads.

 

Eternity went by.

 

No sound in the room but the humming of the clock

and the almost imperceptible click of its hand

every minute.

An airplane in the distance rattled the blinds on the window.

Somewhere a woman was calling someone,

her pained voice reaching out into the bright autumn sky.

Somewhere a baby was crying.

And we sat, heads on our desk, unsure exactly

what it all meant,

still as we had ever been, waiting.

Waiting.

 

And the history book images flooded back in:

Abraham Lincoln was a President who had been shot, but that was

long ago, very long ago.

And the quaking voice from the speaker had said, "this afternoon."

 

Voices from the mind: fathers' voices, mothers' voices,

in dinner conversation,

working around the edge of a roast,

red and dripping,

saying something about a new age, a new life for the country,

a new hope.

 

The speaker came to life again, startling us out of our thoughts.

The voice was choking back tears.

 

"President John F. Kennedy died this afternoon in a Dallas hospital."

 

Wailing from somewhere down the hall.

Silence in the classroom.

Our faces blank, our minds blank.

All silent.

 

"We will be sending you home shortly to be with your parents.

There will be no school tomorrow, and a memorial service

will be held in the afternoon."

 

The speaker faded.

 

In the halls, there was silence.

 

Something horrible had happened, something

which would shape and define our lives.

So young, but we knew that.

And we filed quietly to our buses,

no tears in our eyes.

On this day, the tears were left to the grownups.

On this day, it helped to be a child.

 

And the buses rolled through empty streets,

early afternoon traffic

stilled by the flickering blue light

of the television screens all were staring at,

and we went home to the arms of our mothers,

and the blue lights transfixed us too.

 

Perhaps some of us cried then.

 

Perhaps some of us waited

for the scratchy images

of a frigid November morning

with a horse-drawn carriage

rolling along the street lined

with men in black and

women in dark veils and

the young boy raising his hand

in a silent salute,

 

or perhaps we waited until the small flame

began its eternal vigil,

solitary on the hillside.

 

Or perhaps we never cried at all,

and returned to our desks

on Monday,

bursting with children's vigor,

forgetting what we had seen

and heard,

not fearing the next crackle of the tiny speaker.

 

But there are some memories,

stark or vivid,

that haunt and cling and will not let go.

And there are some tears--shed or withheld--that never go away.

 

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