Nails and Other Instruments of Death

Lately, I have been on the watch for nails. The need has been especially keen in recent months, when my little street near New Orleans has been under reconstruction. As crews have finished section after section of fresh, clean concrete and discarded the wooden forms, I have pulled dozens of four-inch nails off of the street and sidewalk. Hammer-bent, rusted, hidden in sand or beneath leaves, almost the same size and shape as many of the knobbled oak twigs strewn about in our late, slow autumn, the nails are everywhere at once. 

But it’s not just on my street. As I drive the few miles to work each day, or take my children to City Park or the botanical gardens, or take the pleasant Sunday ride to Mass, I find myself edging from one side of the lane to the other to avoid nails and screws and bolts left in the road. Walking my children to the snowball stand, I stoop to pluck a tack from the sidewalk. Crossing Palmyra Street on my way to a doctor’s appointment, my foot sends an eight-inch saw blade clattering across the concrete. I pick it up and carry it, like a madman holding his madness at arm’s length, to the nearest trash can. The bowed, ferrous, biting stuff of our building is everywhere in the streets of our city. 

In such sightings, I am tempted to see signs. Signs of what? Of a vast carelessness which, in our American richness and generosity and fecklessness, has at last expanded, like a monstrous debt, beyond the limits of our goodness? Of the cunning creep of acedia ever deeper into our hearts? Of laziness? Of drunkenness? Of the schemes of the tire manufacturers and repair shops? Of the desperate necessity to build and repair as the sea threatens, year by year, to overwhelm us? 

Is it a sign of the love of death, which we above all in the Western world have come to cradle in our hearts, both in the supernatural embrace of the Cross of Christ and in the sickly, decayed delight concealed within that final, blinding scream that whispers, like a lover there beside us in a theater, “this way, this way, and you’re free, free forever from the daylight’s cares”? 

There are other things to be considered, too. Certain sounds have become significant in ways they once were not. I-10, rushing past my house some hundred feet away, keeps up a whispering susurrus like passing time and the girdling ocean. Big V-8 engines snarl and roar up into high gear, and now and then backfire rockets out and ricochets across the neighborhood. Is it backfire? How many in Eastern Europe or Palestine lie hearing such sounds by night?

Distantly, I hear a pair of fighter planes splitting the air as the children and I watch the tiger at the Audubon Zoo, asleep on its side in the sun as a light breeze ticks the bamboo canes. I look up, find the planes on their approach, point them out to the children, who point in turn and smile and are amazed at the sudden thunder breaking on high, and I think again how different it is to be a child here than in other places where that screaming past the sun’s face marks the other side of awe, of terror at the onset of the gods in their riches and their wrath.

It is January 1, 2025. Night has fallen, and the echoes of the revel are again cracking against the washed-out sky as the leftover fireworks shriek and bang into oblivion. Meanwhile, in the French Quarter, a few miles away in the warm maternal curve of the river, teams are sweeping the cobbled streets and wrought iron alleys, redolent with piss and pot and anise and bourbon, for IEDs. This morning, just after 3:00, the shadowland Golgotha where the dark night of the soul inveterately resides, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented F-150 into a crowd on Bourbon Street, killing fifteen and injuring dozens more before dying in a shoot-out with police.

It is always another who faces these things. The mother and father across the sea. The 28-year-old mother who worked in a bakery. The 18-year-old girl who dreamed of being a nurse. The 21-year-old boy whose old high school now mourns him. The Army veteran who drove from Texas knowing the end had come. Tonight, the lingering fireworks explode above the city, and my thoughts need not cross oceans to find the hot musk of fear. It is always another who faces these things. Tweet This

Every night, I lie in my son’s bed with him until he falls asleep. Every night, I am awestruck. One moment, he’s breathing heavily, rolling around, kicking a leg, doing all the things we do as we labor toward sleep. And then he’s there, gone beyond the grainy, swirling borderland of Nod. I can always tell because he goes quiet, so utterly still that I sometimes have to put my ear near his face to be sure he’s still breathing. Every night, this hint and rehearsal of death comes to astound me; and every night, I am shaken, briefly, till time moves on again and I rise and wash the dishes or sweep or do whatever else still needs doing before I, too, can pass beyond all darkness into dreams. Almost always, it will be my son who comes to wake me, at dawn or whenever in the hours before, when something moves him again to the land of the living.

He is sleeping now, and I am thinking of the nails and the backfire and the fireworks and the dead down on Bourbon Street who were all, their friends say, the nicest of people. 

I am thinking of the man who grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and served his country in war, and was, according to his friends and family, the nicest of people, who nonetheless rented a truck and affixed a black flag to it and drove it into a crowd of nice people and died in a rain of gunfire, having known, apparently, that this was no beginning but the end. I am looking for signs and finding none but the sign of Jonah, and a monstrous fish is stirring, stirring, somewhere unseen.

One day, God willing, my son or I will look upon the other as the last sleep settles down around us, as the limbs stop their restlessness and the breath quits its labored bellows and plummets into silence. Somewhere, in the depths of eternity, the nails are poised. The new year has begun, and the end is coming, a sign which is not so much, perhaps, an answer as it is a question. What faces will we have prepared to meet the singing silence when it comes? Will our eyes spy Christ the eagle singing from the end of his descent? Will our ears discern the screaming of his wings? 

The fireworks are dying out. The interstate is slowing, though now and then an engine moans by for the swamps on either end of our city. Many here in the bend of the river are asleep. Many have died. And many lie awake, looking for signs of what’s to come.