Year of the ox

New moon, old stories. Courts thrown up in gyms and churches, courts carved and marbled in the hearts of cities, one law lugged in texts and testaments between them all. This practice, awesome and absurd, consumes the most of me. But this daily, endless work is not enough. Truth must roost somewhere, and for me, for now it must be here, in the flock and flutter of mere words, in stories stripped of names, of places, of everything that might specifically identify the places and players. True though, as true as possible. I need to tell them because they matter, and I fear they can’t be adequately told or heard in courtrooms, at least not in the machinery we’ve made. So I try, tiptoeing through the dangers of a job that can, with a violent orthodoxy that spines most every authority, quell the tellings, order them unimportant.

What is it that I want to have your inner narrator orate? Sounds even the first person, or the court reporter, won’t often notice, or neglect as meaningless until, perhaps, much later. Listen: A young man is sobbing over the phone to the struck embarrassment of his lawyer. Sick, hiccupping the distance between rooming house and office, each of us the distant thirds of a three-hundred mile triangle whose crucial angle is the small community far north of the cities where we sit. The boy-man’s a broken voice on the far side of the line: “I can’t come back here. Ain’t comin’ back here. Fuck, you don’t know, you gotta change my conditions. This is bullshit.” Angry words, but not spoken with violence or arrogance. The voice is thin, pleading. Laugh or yell at it, if you like, emphasise its futility, say man, boy, you’re not going home, not yet. Spit out the bald truth – this one’s had his chances, lump him in with the other lost ones who have to wait out the months in Kenora, until the court gets done with ‘em, or they trip up in desperation and land back in the DJ, just down the road. Or worse. The options fall like dominos – first chance, second chance, last chance, jail. Logic plain for the able to obey. But I know my young man is taking little notice of such official plans, however much I try to stress their importance upon his trembling life. He doesn’t understand – a job has opened up at home, and a teenage girl is struggling with the little one they’ve made, and his mother, who in the police report was last seen cradling her head against his blows, his mother has forgiven him, or agreed it never happened, whatever works, she’ll send a letter. The patience – hardly abundant amongst those of us whose great daily challenge might be a slow server or checkout line – has long since drained from the voice I impotently listen to, miles and worlds away. And I pray the worst won’t happen, not jail, not crumpled knuckles against some importunate wall, not even the sick oblivion of homebrew or hairspray. I pray this boy won’t, by poisoned choice, cease living.

This prayer – so basic to anyone who’s loved or seen the frightened eyes of one of their own in danger – this prayer is projected upon the walls of my profession, against the mandate our state has given an army of strangers, a quiver of rules; all to attain that incomplete scripture, to seek justice. Ordained and manifest, it regulates his binding, justifies his exile. Far, far from finished with the boy, I only hope to shepherd him through to its end. And I know it is of essence noble, acknowledge it won’t be abandoned by this or any people. Offences will have their process, their consequence. But our way and this boy are so distant, alien, nearly invisible to each other. And the gulf in between is where chances and lives are lost. Where, I ask, do we fit that scripture’s next phrases?