Hankki Pondered These Things and Kept Them in His Heart

Hankki Pondered These Things

and Kept Them in His Heart

D. R. Hamm, Ph.D

pigs are funny are they not

the way they feast on slop

and cause no end of silliness

about who’s out and who is in

they can’t be trusted to be good

do not behave the way they should

eat whatever’s in the pen

fallen man or next of kin

Heave Ho! Ho did as he was told. “Yo!” he shouted, and pulled at the yardarms a little. His heart wasn’t in it. He hated jibs, masts, yardarms, hawsers, cleats, bows, sterns, albatrosses, captains, pilots, steamers, tugs, Tahiti, reefs, dug-out canoes, coral islands, lagoons, bare-breasted savages, Mosquito Coasts, wild surfs, surfboards, hatches, holds, cargo, topknots, chiefs, colorful fishes, becalming, wind, sea creatures, rope and boatswains. He preferred female students working archeological digs on the Aegean, or around the Horn. At one, sun almost tore off their clothes, and at the other, wind did the same. That he liked. Wind and sun tearing clothes. The actual baring  and exposing he cared for only mildly.

       Hankki Ho had grown up in rural Tanzania. His father loved farming and hogs. Not other livestock so much, but grunters. Kine lugging their milk-laden bags, pullets filling puffy croups, and horses with their endless whinnying for love and feed, he tolerated. Swine, grunting, sweating, nuzzling into the dirt and dross, he adored. And Hank had come grudgingly himself to admire porkers. They would, the two of them, father and son, stand there watching over the wooden rail at the trough while the slop, with its smells of bananas, onions, yam peels, human waste, dead chickens and such, mixed up in a bit of oats, lots of water, and a handful of cheap salt, bobbed about Billy’s, Nan’s, and Chiffy’s snouts. Tschlop, tschlopp, tschloppff. It made the men hungry.

       Hank’s father, a priest of the Translutchswa cast, serving the lower, lower, middle levels of Swazialinga County, and taking his pay in corn, bread, piglets, strong employables for the week, help about the farm, and rides into town on tractors, often left home for days on end and then it fell on Hankki to be the man of the house. He hated this. His mothers and sisters did, too. His younger brothers simply smiled and disappeared for the entire period of the elder’s absence. When Aronimo, his father, returned again from Swil, his eyes would seem to see little. He would ask Hankki how it had gone, but the answers mattered not. Did you service Bottle? Was the bull available? Have the chickens had their fill and are they happy? Could you see a difference in the attitude of Groaner towards Truckswi? Hankki answered as he wished—yes to this, no to that, maybe to something else—but his father paid no heed and in a few days he would be back to his perspicuous self.

       Once, when his mother got up out of bed on one of those occasions when Aron left, it was the middle of the night. Hankki called for her not to leave him cold. The nights had grown chilly early that year and one thought of snow on the mountains causing these dips. She did not listen to him but went outside and returned hours later when the dawn’s light almost showed her outline coming down the path. Hankki determined that he would tell Aron about this but he kept it to himself for now. One day, maybe. When his sisters looked at him mornings they had blank and thoughtless faces. They said little. He could hardly wait for father to come home again. He left all this to go to sea. When he was at sea, life became happier for him, not because he loved the sea but because he hated home. Not because he hated home, but because he so fervently wished to leave it behind and start a new life absolutely and unalterably other than the one that had sprung him up.

       “Go now to Canaan,” rung in his ears one morning in May, 1987. What the hell did that mean, he wondered. Go to Canaan. Go to Canaan. He was not going anywhere near a place with a name like that and one that insisted on calling him to itself with such persistence. He looked up “Canaan,” found its location on a map, and spent the last of his savings on a ticket to the Cretan island of Samoa. Here, among the Dingbat and dancing ladies, he felt happy, unaccountable for, without purpose and daring. Left alone by fate, family and friends, he got along marvelously in the world. When things called him, tapped him on the shoulder, made him out to be special, required this or that of him, trained him to march, speak well, work so and so, learn skills, and in other ways prepared him, he had to go and go fast to some new hideout. Hankki had his life to himself in the city. He rented a crouder up above a grocery on Swine Street. This way he felt close to food. He noticed, before he agreed to sign, that across the street a billiard sign hung, and so he'd have access to fights and fun, a regular theatre always there for him, money or not. The street, narrow and smelly, reminded him of life’s pleasures. You got sweaty negotiating both, and knew by your sweat where you were. Over the ally behind his nest, an old woman sang mornings hanging up wash and, on inquiry, Hankki found that she laundered for others, so cleanliness of dress, too, had its burnish and application now. Blocks to the left, the city’s financial district gave him hope and news of the flows of large amounts of cash. He liked that. Some streets to the right, the dockage gave him work when he needed it. Load lumber on Tuesdays into a ship bound for Haiti. Offload coal on Fridays and leave it in piles on the warf for untouchables to pick up in their shoulder baskets and set off for homes far away, uphill from the sea. Maybe dresses and skirts next Thursday for the bazars up on Kensingsi Square. Always some money to be made if need be.

       First he had been to sea, and then he had resided in Samoa. He grew old there. He refused to marry. He lived without fuss or fanfare. He had sex seldom, and when he did it was often with chickens. He preferred chickens. Their feathers and everything. Now and then he smoked cigars and drank hot rum bankros, but mostly he stayed sober and stayed away from drugs. He slept only in his own bed and never, under any conditions, allowed anyone to crawl under his sheets or stretch out on his mattress, no matter how tired, no matter how convincing. Goats bothered him. He had a special relationship with them. They winked when he approached. Total stranger goats gloated over him. Complete foreigner goatlings pranced when he neared and acted as if he would immediately fondle and make much of them. Goats had a certain swa riveri about them in his presence, which he resented and ultimately came to feel rage and disgust over. Nevertheless, he treated them with respect and they did not exploit him. He died under the hooves of goats and that rankles anyone who saw how much love he gave them in the end despite his lifelong antipathy for these same.

       Nevertheless, for other animals he had whole sets of complex feelings and behaviors. For goslings, for instance, he felt repugnance. For chickadees he sweated and abased himself. For ducks and their offspring he rose to states of cheerfulness that no other animals could achieve in him. For rabbits he experienced some rather embarrassing emotions, which their softness and big, trusting eyes immediately suggest to the reader. And for crawdads he eventually mastered his fear and learned to care as if he had never found them difficult.

       When he died, no one attended his funeral. For the ladies of Crete, digging as is their wont in the gravel beds of the old Roman Empirium, where the paths are straight and Alithea remains unknown, life went on as before. Hankki’s funeral mass was presided over by a chicken with the odd name of Chanticleermeter Singh.