The Tiger Rising

Rob had a way of not-thinking about things. He imagined himself as a suitcase that was too full, like the one that he had packed when they left Jacksonville after the funeral. He made all his feelings go inside the suitcase; he stuffed them in tight and then sat on the suitcase and locked it shut. That was the way he not-thought about things. Sometimes it was hard to keep the suitcase shut. But now he had something to put on top of it. The tiger.

So as he waited for the bus under the Kentucky Star sign, and as the first drops of rain fell from the sullen sky, Rob imagined the tiger on top of his suitcase, blinking his golden eyes, sitting proud and strong, unaffected by all the not-thoughts inside straining to come out.

He stayed up late working on the carving, and when he finally fell asleep, he dreamed about the tiger, only it wasn’t in a cage. It was free and running through the woods, and there was something on its back, but Rob couldn’t tell what it was. As the tiger got closer and closer, Rob saw that the thing was Sistine in her pink party dress. She was riding the tiger. In his dream, Rob waved to her and she waved back at him. But she didn’t stop. She and the tiger kept going, past Rob, deeper and deeper into the woods.

It was still raining, but not hard. He looked at the falling Kentucky Star. He thought for a minute about one of the not-wishes he had buried deepest: a friend. He stared at the star and felt the hope and need and fear course through him in a hot neon arc. He shook his head.

“Naw,” he said to the Kentucky Star. “Naw.”

“It’s just like the poem says,” Sistine breathed.

“What?” said Rob.

“That poem. The one that goes, ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.’ That poem. It’s just like that. He burns bright.”

“Oh,” said Rob. He nodded. He liked the fierce and beautiful way the words sounded. Just as he was getting ready to ask Sistine to say them again, she whirled around and faced him.

“What’s he doing way out here?” she demanded.

Rob shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s Beauchamp’s, I guess.”

“Beauchamp’s what?” said Sistine. “His pet?”

“I don’t know,” said Rob. “I just like looking at him. Maybe Beauchamp does, too. Maybe he just likes to come out here and look at him.”

“That’s selfish,” said Sistine.

Rob shrugged.

“This isn’t right, for this tiger to be in a cage. It’s not right.”

Then Rob remembered the name of the feeling that was pushing up inside him, filling him full to overflowing. It was happiness. That was what it was called.

“What happened to [Cricket]?” Rob asked.

Willie May bent and took a pillowcase out of the dryer.

“Let him go,” she said.

“You let him go?” Rob repeated, his heart sinking inside him like a stone.

“Couldn’t stand seeing him locked up, so I let him go.” She folded the pillowcase carefully.

“And then what happened?”

“I got beat by my daddy. He said I didn’t do that bird no favor. Said all I did was give some snake its supper.”

“I know something that’s in a cage,” said Rob, pushing the words past the tightness in his throat.

Willie May nodded her head, but she wasn’t listening. She was looking past Rob, past the white sheet, past the laundry room, past the Kentucky Star.

“Who don’t?” she said finally. “Who don’t know something in a cage?”

Willie May lit another cigarette and laughed. “Ain’t that just like God,” she said, “throwing the two of you together?” She shook her head. “This boy full of sorrow, keeping it down low in his legs. And you,”—she pointed her cigarette at Sistine—“you all full of anger, got it snapping out of you like lightning. You some pair, that’s the truth.”

“Look, Rob, I have never in my life seen a prettier color of green. Ain’t it perfect?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, staring at the leaves. “It looks like the original green. The first one God ever thought up.”

His mother squeezed his hand hard. “That’s right,” she said. “The first one God ever thought up. The first-ever green. You and me, we see the world the same.”

And Rob realized then why he liked Sistine so much. He liked her because when she saw something beautiful, the sound of her voice changed. All the words she uttered had an oof sound to them, as if she was getting punched in the stomach. The sound was in her voice when she talked about the Sistine Chapel and when she looked at the things he carved in wood. It was there when she said the poem about the tiger burning bright, and it was there when she talked about Willie May being a prophetess. Her words sounded the way all those things made him feel, as if the world, the real world, had been punched through, so that he could see something wonderful and dazzling on the other side of it.

“You’re not talking like a prophetess.”

“That’s ’cause I ain’t no prophetess,” said Willie May. All I am is somebody speaking the truth. And the truth is: there ain’t nothing you can do for this tiger except to let it be.”

“It’s not right,” said Sistine.

“Right ain’t got nothing to do with it,” muttered Willie May. “Sometimes right don’t count.”

As they walked back to the Kentucky Star, Rob thought about what Willie May had said about the tiger rising on up. It reminded him of what she had said about his sadness needing to rise up. And when he thought about the two things together, the tiger and his sadness, the truth circled over and above him and then came and landed lightly on his shoulder. He knew what he had to do.

“Oh,” said Sistine, in that voice that Rob loved. “See,” she said, “that was the right thing. That was the right thing to do.”

Rob nodded. But in his mind, he saw a flash of green. He remembered what happened to Cricket.

The whole way back to the Kentucky Star, Rob held on to Sistine’s hand. He marveled at what a small hand it was and how much comfort there was in holding on to it.

And he marveled, too, at how different he felt inside, how much lighter, as he had set something heavy down and walked away from it, without bothering to look back.

Rob looked at his father’s hands. They were the hands that had held the gun that shot the tiger. They were the hands that put the medicine on his legs. They were the hands that had held him when he cried. They were complicated hands, Rob thought.