My brother Clive trying to kick the arm off the Statue of Liberty is something I’m pretty sure happened but it’s right on the edge of recall. I remember it but I wouldn’t swear to it. I remember all sorts of things but I’m done with swearing these days.
Nowadays if old Clive were to offer to kick the arm off the Statue in a moment of weakness, I’d definitely remember. People do crazy stuff under stress. Gentle old Clive is carrying so many responsibilities with raising three young children and a young wife, which is practically four kids, that he’s pressed down under the weight of his responsibilities and has been drifting south, down through Tennessee, north Texas, south Texas. He’s sunk to the bottom of America now. The bottom of America and the bottom of Texas are the same place, Brownsville. Doesn’t Brownsville sound like a murky name to you? What if moral turpitude sank to the bottom of America and collected there? It wouldn’t be anyone’s fault.
A moment of weakness for him as an adult, I guess, that’s what kicking the arm off nowadays would be. You figure he’s safe in Brownsville, as far from the Statue as you can get, but two days ago Aunt Edith told me she’s planning on meeting Clive at Noah’s Ark. Clive and the whole family, is who she’s going to meet up with, so despite his responsibilities Clive’s more mobile than you think. No one’s going to care if you kick Noah’s Ark. You’re just going to stub a toe. Plus half the country’d probably cheer you on, because the Ark’s out of favor with them. The Ark’s just over the line from Tennessee and like everything down there it’s lifesize, like how in your phone you send stuff Actual Size. It’s just over the line in Kentucky, so I guess it’s technically in the North and sitting on the Mason Dixon line, and would look like it’s floating on the line if you consulted a map of the whole United States. It’s five-hundred feet long. Therefore, for all I know, if you tipped it sideways and put it next to the Statue of Liberty it would be about the same size. It’s a useful thought experiment, anyway. Or you could build another ark around the bottom, like a plinth, and it would look like the Lady was bursting out of the ark and the pigeons could be like doves.
Of course no one thinks their grown brother is going to kick the arm off the Statue of Liberty but the poor guy is an eye doctor working three jobs seven days a week, a real freeway flyer, and his wife does unspeakable things with their credit card, like buying naugahyde sofas on credit and sending money to her Tagalog village an ocean away. The only time he has available to talk on the phone is when he’s driving, zipping along the highway faster than the nearby crop dusters, with their low stall speeds, and sometimes the pilots look over at him as they drift backwards past him and they wave to each other. Adults don’t kick arms off statues. Man from Brownsville assaults beloved historical landmark. But as boys, the kick-off idea was a moment of strength, at least in the mind of Clive’s younger brother. That part’s for sure. There was an incipient engineer in the generally pyro mind of young Clive, who could light fires using matches or science, he was that smart. Clive had powers. The moment inside the Statue was propitious because it was a moment of weakness for the Statue. They wouldn’t get a chance like that again. Her arm was closed by reason of weakness. Repairs were needed to prop it up. Who knows where our parents were—standing right there or maybe still working their way up the torso stuck at the different chakras behind Japanese tourists—but armed with this knowledge of the weak spot in the Statue we scooted around inside the head, peering down at the Hudson through the place above the eyes and then running off, and each time we went past the roped-off arm you could kind of see how if two of you pushed hard on the bottom stair of the arm you might be able to kick the arm off. Wherever two or more are gathered, the Bible said. Our dad was a giant and he would have no trouble kicking the arm off the Statue, which was practically falling off already, but we were protecting him by not asking. It was something we knew we had to do on our own. If I’m remembering the scene correctly, we were pretty excited and sort of half singing the song we just got at the New York World’s Fair: it’s a small world after all.
We were students in elementary school four hours to the north in Marlboro, Massachusetts, where just one generation earlier all students had been required every single morning to perform the Bellamy salute. Just twenty years, that’s how close we got to being Bellamy salutists. The Bellamy salute for the pledge of allegiance in Massachusetts was the stiff-armed one like how you were showing your mother a new and improved sugar product on a higher shelf of the Big Discount on the Boston Post Road across from Hildreth, where Clive might have to go for fourth grade one day and which was basically just a haunted old mansion from the nineteenth century. With a Bellamy your arm was a little lower than the Statue holding the torch. A lady doing a sniff test for B.O was the arm angle of the Statue, so not very Bellamy. Still, the raised arm invited comparisons. Look at me, I’m a pyro lady. The lady had the heart of a pyro—I got a torch and I ain’t afraid to use it—and that must have been inspiring for Clive, who was known personally and by name to the fire chief in Marlboro. Maybe there’s only room for one pyro in town. The right-to-bare-arms joke came from that time but it doesn’t count if you think of a good line when it’s too late.
As for the Bellamy, obviously we practiced the salute repeatedly whenever we could, especially in the black granite fort up behind the Loynd girl’s house where we would sometimes wear loin cloths and throw spears at each other. That’s how Dad would describe the girl next door, “the Loynd girl.” It said Loynd on their mailbox. He said it “loin girl.” We knew loins from the Bible, and it made perfect sense that we’d have our own loin girl right next door. The Bible for us wasn’t just some old dead book. We were living it.
Have you read Cloud street by David Winton? Aussie writer
https://australia-explained.com.au/books/cloudstreet/
He puts me in the thick of it
Like you do
The magic of great writing