Fence Evil Out, part one

As a Christian, you admit that evil is.  As a Christian, you throw a barrier before that ring-tailed, horn-swogglin’, sidewinder of a devil before he gets the upper hand.   

 

Fences are necessary; always have been, always will be.   

 

                                                            *****

                                               

When I was a boy, my sister and I drove with our parents each summer through coastal Maine to our summer cottage.  Penobscot was one of the small hamlets through which we drove.  Penobscot was, and is, modest enough—small houses strung along the street, a store, and, for many years, a blueberry cannery, now turned into a craft shop. 

 

The houses are set close together.  As we observed Penobscot during our yearly drives, nothing much changed, until one particular year.  That year, we were stunned to see between two houses a tall wooden slat fence, as high as the second levels of the houses, stretching from the street back to what must have been the rear property line. 

 

What had happened? 

 

That raw wooden barrier was like a scream between the two houses…what could possibly have caused this palisade to be flung up?  The remainder of our ride was enlivened by speculative answers, each answer more excitingly lurid than the last. 

 

Many readers will recall that Robert Frost wrote a poem about re-building stone walls each spring with his neighbor, in which is found that famous line—“good fences make good neighbors.”  The poem tells of the two neighbors meeting to restore the wall between their properties, the neighbor being pine, and Frost apple orchard.  Time—and an imp—knocks down the wall each year, Frost says, and each spring it must be restored.   

 

In Penobscot, though, the installation of that wooden rampart seemed not to have been the result of a neighborly afternoon work.  It seemed as though it must have been thrown up in a sudden rage, and savagely nailed into place, by one side or the other. 

 

Thud, thud, thud: the hammer!   

 

My father took the opportunity of this shrill wall to write a poem he called “Spite Fence.” It’s not one of his best, but it concludes with a pun on the Frost line, and one which his pal Robert enjoyed.  Dad’s line always got a big laugh when he included the poem in public readings.  The last line of Dad’s poem is, “Bad neighbors make good fencers.”

 

Someone in Penobscot was safer, when fenced. 

 

                                                            *****

                                               

            Whenever I was young and broke, in Boston I would drive a cab. 

 

            One summer, in answer to a rash of cab driver muggings, and a murder, the company for which I drove agreed to install thick Plexiglas barriers, like fences, between the passenger area and the driver.  Despite that new fence, among my fellow cabbies, there were those who drove armed, though it was against the policy of the company to do so.  However, there were times—late on a Saturday night, for example, with a certain sort of fare in the car—when I longed to have a gun on the seat beside me. 

 

            But we unarmed drivers did have another sort of fence upon which we could depend.  There was radio communication between us and dispatch, and dispatch had access to all the Town Taxis in the city.  And Town Taxis were everywhere. 

 

One night I slapped up a quick fence. 

 

I had responded to a radio call in the Tenderloin—lower Washington Street—at 2 am on a Sunday.  Two young men got into the cab and directed me to a location in Roxbury.  They struck me as menacing.  Their manner was pumped, loud, aggressive.  As we approached what they said was their destination, they changed their minds and, without giving me an actual address, they directed me into a smaller street, and then, after that, into an even smaller and a more narrow and more badly lit street. 

 

I did not like this. They radiated nervous energy and were alternately silent and then loudly jiving. 

 

            Well, there was the radio code. 

 

I thumbed the button on my microphone, spoke a certain number, and recited my location.  That’s all I needed to do.  Instantly, all other radio traffic was cleared from the air, and I was live in realtime through the network.  Dispatch repeated the code number and my location.  That’s all it took.  Within two minutes, other Town Taxis cruised beside me.  I had five cabs inside of 120 seconds.

 

            I pulled to the curb and told my fare this was as far as I went.  All five cabs surrounded me.  A platoon of headlights bathed my fare.  Large men stepped from their cabs.  Baseball bats and tire irons were in evidence. 

 

Very quietly, my fare paid up, and, very, very quietly tiptoed away.

 

            That was some code, that was. 

 

            It was a battlement against which I could lean.  That’s what fences are for.  They let us know where we stop and where the Bad One starts.  And they keep it that way, with him on the other side.  

 

                                                                        ******

 

            As a young college man, I visited Ireland, and I made it my business to sojourn to Yeats’ Tower, to climb up into and to inspect its interior, and to observe the view from its windows.  I was at the time much enamored of William Butler Yeats, a poet who built no fences between the commonplace world and his inspirational world of spirits and the imagination.  Like him, I too longed for the lost woods of Arcady.  I was open to comers from all sides—spiritual comers—because I was still young and unhurt. 

 

Yeats built the tower for the wife he married late in life.  My father’s telling of Yeats’ Tower had given the place a prominence in my mind—Dad had been a diner with Yeats and his circle in the 1920s, and he had looked on the older Nobel laureate as a god-like being.  When I arrived at the tower, from Dad’s tales, I had expected it to be more imposing than it is.  Truly, it’s a modest construction.  But you may sit in its upper story and gaze out at the green hills and dream of your own escape from the pavements grey…to the shores of some Innisfree of your own devising. 

 

            A tower.  Yeats may have built the place just to afford his wife a high view, and himself a high one, too.  He may have been pummeled politically and wounded in love, but he was not a man who feared, I think, the stranger.  Nevertheless, the ancestors of Yeats’ Tower were designed to keep fearsome strangers away.  Towers are fences that one pulls up around oneself against the danger of those men from that mountain over there. 

 

Indeed, elsewhere along Ireland’s western coast are the ruins of towers more ancient than Yeats’, which have succumbed over the years either to Frostian imps or to war.  They nobble the sheep-grazed hills, and they fascinated me.  I explored those that I could reach in a few days’ walking. 

 

Who had stood within these walls, now cast down, and what had he feared from away?

 

            Still farther out than they are the stone huts of early medieval Christians, set on the rock islets strung along Ireland’s Atlantic shore. In those years, those hutments were home to monks who fell back as far as possible from the encroaching re-assertion of paganism, and then they set themselves a final bulwark, a fence.  Saint Patrick may have cleared the Ireland’s green of snakes in the fourth century, but, at least figuratively, the serpent was making a vigorous return by the sixth. 

 

The Irish monks were justly afraid of the spiritual danger they faced; it would be more than three centuries before the Auld Sod once again was free of the hissing of snakes.    

 

 

Copyright, 2013 – Dikkon Eberhart