Waiting for Solomon

Holly Hunt

The Veterans Hospital, Vancouver, Washington: a bright, modern sprawl—a big, confusing building not far away from the river, on the higher bluffs above the Columbia.  The hallways go around and around forever. Whenever I entered, I had to be careful, because every hallway appeared the same. The circular design tripped up my ability to recognize the correct pathway. The nurses joked that newbie volunteers like me were all directionally challenged.
The first floor, my training area, was the hospice and Community Living Center where the resident patients lived. Some of the short-term patients improved week to week. One of my favorites could barely utter a syllable after his stroke. But after three weeks, he was laughing, talking in phrases. It is unbelievable how fast he recovered. He was glad to go home so soon. Nobody wanted to stay in the hospital a minute longer than necessary.
Another of my favorites would not be going home soon. He was a former pilot, Vietnam era. Butch, his nickname forever, was a paraplegic whose speech was minimal, but his thoughts were clear. He was cognizant but unlikely to form a string of complex compound sentences. He wore a black knit stocking cap to cover up the gap in his skull from a violent auto accident, when they had to remove part of his upper forehead. Butch was waiting, usually, to be pushed to another area of the building, or to therapy, or back to his room when he’d had enough social stimulus in the community center. The atmosphere there could get frenzied and noisy from time to time.
On one occasion, I found him alone in the media lounge, staring at the floor, with the TV flashing in front of him. I knew he had been this way for a while. He couldn’t move his legs, torso, arms, and could only move his hands with great difficulty, all results of the auto wreck that had happened years before.
He had once been a sportsman, a skier, a climber, an adventurer. Now he had reached a level of acceptance about that loss, and allowed us to mingle near him, even abiding with our stupider, sillier moments. He played games and joined our group rec activities. Butch had even been known to utter words that were pretty sparky. He flickered with spicy ideas and sometimes got a kick out of offering shocking statements. Nothing crude, nothing profane. But he liked to cause a pause.
That morning, he was not so sparky. He said he felt pretty good, but I doubted it. When I saw him, I would often start chattering like a monkey, and my energy did not offend him, but he responded slowly. He formed words very carefully. He also figured out how gullible I was, and delighted in telling me fibs. I noticed a bandage over the top of his hand:
I ask, “What’s that?”
“I scratched myself,” he says, with his driest croutons-on-wilted-lettuce attitude.
I feel bad for him, but then I realize he can hardly move his fingers. “You did not scratch yourself! That’s a windy.”
He gives me a little sideways smile. For some reason, that always gives me hope, because I am hopelessly corny, and Butch knows it. He was raised somewhere in Alabama or Georgia, and I was raised in the cow pastures of Hot Spring County, Arkansas. We share an allegiance to sincerity and the hokey-pokey, and we put up with endless Hee-Haw jokes without always responding with a catty retort.
The nurse had given him medicine through a needle in his hand, and it did not go smoothly.
On TV, a mining problem has surfaced into mainstream news. We take notice. I immediately think of a story I want to share with him, but Butch keeps nodding downward. I get down on the floor. I kneel in front of him. Suddenly his blue eyes are staring into mine. If I am going to reach him with my story, I also have to focus.
I tell him, “You know they find out some pretty weird things digging down in those mines.”
He looks at me with a question in his eyes. I tell him how a grown man can wonder for years, never really knowing what something sacred means, only to find the answer in the strangest place years later. That man lives in a holding pattern, turning a question over in his head, never able to crack the code or find an answer.
Uncle Will was silver-haired when I was born. He worked in the Bisbee copper mines so long he could hardly breathe. Finally, the ore of southern Arizona, and the copper dust-born emphysema, took him out when he was in his mid-eighties. He never married; there were always loose women he could have minus the drama. Will was happy to pay for services and then pay them again to get lost. I told Butch so, because Butch had told me his favorite magazine was Playboy. I knew that wasn’t the truth, either. But it was easier to say that than Ecclesiastes or the Song of Solomon, which would be closer to the truth.
Butch nods affirmatively. He definitely recognizes the type that was my Uncle Will, my daddy’s oldest brother, the bossiest one, a lead critic in a clan of seven dirt farm children.
Butch understands about the voice of authority. In his life, before his accident, he had usually been the flyer, the fighter pilot, the director.
About my uncle: such a gambler and hard drinker as my Uncle Will never appeared to be especially religious. Certainly, never a church cat! But something happened one day on the deeper levels of the famous Copper Queen Mine, the Phelps Dodge stronghold where he was a foreman. His crew was digging way down under when they came across something. Right then, a spiritual bell, lost for many years and silent within him, finally rang out with clarity. Scientists and geologists might roll their eyes and say what really happened is that some old miner cooked up a wild tale while getting stewed at the Elks Lodge, but if Uncle Will said he saw it, you could damn well carve it in stone.
Will was anti-nonsense. He took me to see “The Pink Panther” when I was a little kid. I adored it, but he thought it was annoyingly silly and unintelligent.
Will and his crew were digging at a deeper level when some guy’s pick axe hit something that sounded funny. It vibrated like metal but was not a copper vein. Copper in its purest form is pliable. So the crew began to dig around a weird obstruction of sorts. As they dug deeper, revealing more, they were soon treating the area with deference and curiosity.
When Butch asks what it was, I am sure that I am not losing him. His eyes have not left mine, but that does not always mean he’s hanging on. This time, though, he is underground with me.
Something rather odd had set the miners back. The object revealed itself. A huge block of steel with perfectly straight edges emerged. Will said it was about the size of a coffee table, rectangular. He actually pointed to our own coffee table in the living room where he sat and told us about this thing.
Where did it come from? And how did it get down there? No one at the site could get his head around it. Some laughed, some just shook their heads, staring at it. It had to be man-made, right? Or wrong? Well, who did this? When was it done? None of them wished it would disappear, this most unexpected uncovering.
The supervisors got wind of it. They certainly did make it disappear. They hauled it out pronto, that very afternoon. Wherever it went, nobody could say. It raised bizarre questions among the workers, and miners with questions were always a frightening prospect for upper management. The miners in the ground were hard-core Union. Once they started asking questions of any kind, they might eventually get around to asking themselves why they risked their necks every day and contracted countless cases of lung disease for puny hourly wages. They were always about an arms-length away from striking at Bisbee, which had been the case throughout the region ever since 1907, when Mother Jones came into Tombstone and lectured on socialism and workers’ rights. Mining upper management, therefore, aimed to keep critical thinking at a minimum.
But for Uncle Will, this block of steel answered a question that had plagued him since he was a little boy, when he heard his grandfather preach in Point Cedar, Arkansas. His question was not socio-political, but more about the nature of all creation.
The message was from Ecclesiastes, one of the less hopeful books of The Old Testament. The preacher who wrote that book was not one to set folks up for big dreams that never come true. A few of those verses had puzzled Uncle Will until the day he witnessed the steel block dug out of the low layer.
Will said, speaking of the slab of steel: “I always wondered what those words meant. But when I saw that thing, I knew.” He had memorized the verses as a child, turning them over in his mind, unable to shake his fixation on the mystery. It was Solomon speaking in chapter one, verses nine and ten:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is
done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath
been already of old time, which was before us.”

Such was that block of steel, its sharp edge cut by something, some time, somehow. There still might be a written record of its discovery somewhere. Someone’s Cochise County great-grandchildren may have heard about it being dug up. Uncle Will would have never believed such a thing if he had not seen it. He was always the least dreamy of my relatives with a canny, math-driven head. There were no fairy tales worth repeating, in his opinion. But now this crazy piece of steel, so out of sync with known history, appeared. Its revelation would remain with him until he died.
For most of the miners, it cracked open a hole in theory that remained unfilled. An unsolved dilemma. Only Will’s question to Solomon was answered: How could it be that there was no new thing under the sun? And the answer was, there was no new thing.
My listener, Butch, said not a word. He looked straight at me with those clear blue eyes, two shades darker than aquamarines, slightly smiling with a calm that always amazed me. Smooth as a glacier lake before sunrise when not the slightest breeze stirs.
Butch knew that I would always be easily astounded, much more than my sardonic Uncle Will. He understood, also, how that mining crew was caught off guard as they dug out an exact, three-dimensional rectangle of steel, steel or something resembling it, from the great whatever. But in his smile, I saw that while Butch was amused, he had some rock-solid Solomon in him. He was not among the greatly surprised, even with an anomaly from the deep underground which proved there was nothing new under the sun.

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