Sister Wolf by Ann Arensberg Page A

which was always the same one. He felt the plucking, but he did not hear her voice. He shook off her fingers as if he were brushing away a horsefly, and then a sound of a higher pitch reached his ears. The girl was crying, and he had made her cry.
    What distinguished any pillar of fire or poet from Attila or Tamburlaine? If he placed himself at the center of the universe, little people would be maimed and overrun. There was no room in his life of service for a poet’s hubris. Gabriel was in anguish. For a time he lived by shorter and shorter shrift. The Caretaker pushed the Poet down a manhole, fed him on scraps, and kept him in the dark.
    Gabriel looked around for tasks that would drain his time and energy. He set up sacrifices like trip wires, in order to thwart his passage back to poetry. Where he saw need, he dove in like a sponge-diver; and there was need and pathos everywhere he looked. Children are poignant in and of themselves. Children in institutions break your heart. Blind children in institutions are sacred trusts. Gabriel’s vision of these young blind was only partial. He willfully did not notice, nor could he recall, that Wyeth threw food, John stole cigarettes, and Preston had hoisted Nannie Phillips into an apple tree and run away while she was screaming to be let down. All that Gabriel saw, or would retain, was their habit of walking around with their faces lifted, as if they were holding sweet conversation with Our Lord. They were denied the world of appearances and its distractions, so they must be in closer touch with the realm of Ideas. If one of these vessels of truth and beauty should bruise its shin, Gabriel ministered to the hurt like the Magdalene anointing the feet of Christ. One day Nannie had sat at the back of his classroom, frowning. Tears flowed in a steady stream from her closed blind eyes. When the class was over, he dropped to his knees by her chair and enfolded her. He rocked her in his arms, and stroked her thick, dark hair. “What makes you cry, my poor Nannie? There is no trouble so big it can’t be talked about.” “For Pete’s sake,” said Nannie, wriggling free of him, “I’ve got hay fever and my eyes are watering awful.”
    After a number of these outbursts, the children began to avoid him. Gabriel’s timing was off, and he sounded false, even to himself. His chest was tight from the press of his humane obligations. He tried to force himself to move and speak legato, but he had developed the reflexes of an intern on call, a flair for emergency which alarmed his shy charges, who were as skittish as rabbits.
    One night he was putting the youngest boys to bed. They lived together in a dormitory room which held five cots. An hour after lights-out, as he made the usual bed check, he heard Michael—he thought it was Michael—whimpering under the covers. Dreading suffocation, meningitis, burst appendix, Gabriel crossed the room in one bound, knocking over a chair, which fell with a crack to the floor. The whimper spread from cot to cot, until five little boys sat rocking back and forth, fists pressed to their eyes, mewing and moaning for a night-lamp. Gabriel’s suddenness reminded them that they had been afraid of the dark before they lost their sight.
    Gabriel stayed in the room until the last boy fell asleep. He left one light burning when he tiptoed out. Stumbling the first few yards down the hall, clumsy from the shame of frightening children, he went up the stairs to his room. He paused for a moment outside his door; then he hurried down three flights of stairs without being seen, and left the house.
    Gabriel knew his way through the Deym woods as well as he knew the floor plan of his room. In the daytime he had used a square of hard white chalk to blaze his route. The chalk marks had stood up well against the rainfall. He counted on the moonlight to pick up the marks and show him the trail, but the blazes dimmed out at night and he could not find them. He was not