"Hawkins Is Coming"

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Where does this come from, and what date is it?

_Jack_ Hawkins? Like the pirate, Captain Jack Hawkins? Or like Jack Frost?



http://smith2.sewanee.edu/texts/Other/Hawkins.html

_Hawkins_

And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima, saying:

'O fair Yima, son of Vivanghat! Upon the material world the evil winters are about to fall, that shall bring the fierce, deadly frost; upon the material world the evil winters are about to fall, that shall make the snowflakes fall thick, even in Aredvi deep on the highest tops of the mountains.'

Videvdat, Fargard II

Around 1912 Junie Sullivan, my grandfather, left his father's farm in Stafford County, Virginia and came five miles across the Rapppahannock River to Fredericksburg. On two lots that cost $10.00 each, he and his brother Burley built a two-storey, four room house. Like the common Irishmen that they were they were also common workers: farmers, railroad hands, carpenters, distillers, roofers, painters. The house was solid and in its original form well-proportioned. By the time I was born in 1942, the house had been expanded along its left or west side.

(...)

Sometimes when the fresh wood cracked or popped sharply in the stove, Junie would say as flatly as if he were noticing that it was raining, "Hawkins 's coming." It is the only thing I ever remember hearing him say in the evenings around the stove. He did not direct it to anyone. He did not look up to meet their eyes when he said it. He said it, firmly enough to seize the conversation of the room just for the half second it took to say it, firmly enough to seize the center from the edge of the room, but he never moved his eyes from the angling sabre blade of his knife as it worked a groove around the prong of the gravel shooter. "Hawkins 's coming." He might say it once in an evening, a few times in a winter. When he said it, it was always as a slab cracked and the fire began to roar with the released gases. Sometimes when he said it he would grin. Sometimes he winked. He didn't wink often though, because that would make us laugh. Junie's wink was really a blink done with both eyes, but he meant it for a wink and almost everytime he did it, the children would laugh and ask him to do it again.

Hawkins was also known as "Jack Hawkins" and for a while, I thought that he was a cousin or other relative of ours who would come to visit. Junie though was the only one who mentioned him, and after a while it began to dawn on me that he was like Jack Frost, the harbinger of cold. Jack Frost seemed a warmer, hearth-friendly kind of being; Hawkins was not so warm. Hawkins was evoked by the fire but was not fire nor associated with fire. The fire was only a reminder to us. Hawkins was always associated with the cold. Hawkins was the essence of cold, of terminal, destructive cold. Hawkins was the cold. The cold always at our backs as we sat facing the fire, the cold that hovered in the dark rooms of the house and reached out as the fire died and we turned out the lights for the day. The cold old men feel when they sit summer evenings in wool sweaters, rubbing fingers that always hurt, the kind of cold Junie felt sawing ice blocks on the river in winter of 1912. Junie pronounced his coming with a flat certainty that never once let enter a shred of doubt about his reality. I knew that Hawkins was real and I knew that when he got here, it meant a closure and a sorting out of things. Hawkins combined the idea of retribution and resolution, of bringing things to an end and of putting things in their right places, a last leveling reduction of effort and posture and vanity under the weight of ice and snow and frost. There was neither dread nor doubt in Junie's voice. He said, "Hawkins 's coming," and as the wind rose and the ashes of the fire sank, I knew he was right.

Hawkins had a name, but I knew he was not a man although when I tried to picture him, I thought of the faces of men, particularly the mean ones my aunts had known. One of them had been sent to prison and I sometimes thought Hawkins would look like Ray Pitts, with dark eyes that never smiled. I also thought of Hawkins as very powerful, not strong like a muscular man, but strong like the wind or the cold, a warlock of all winters frozen in a single relentless intent. Hawkins was more than a man, not a monster or terror though, more like God, I suppose, but Junie did not talk much about God. God talk was like house talk; it was the work of women, and Hattie only talked of God when she got scared during thunderstorms. Then she hurried us all into the parlor, pulled down the shades, turned out the light, and repeated, "Be still and know that I am God," each time it thundered. We could not talk or move or play while the storm was going on. Sometimes I would peek, glancing quickly between the curtain and the shade to see if I could see God in the lightning and rain out in the street, but peeking only brought the wrath inside. "Get your eyes away from that window! You hear me child," snapped Hattie. "That lightning come in here and kill us all." I learned the tokens of a kind of theological discourse in that house, and the storm god and Hawkins, the gods of summer and winter, were more real and vivid than all the tales of Sunday School and Church.

The finality of Junie's pronouncement of Hawkins' coming gave Hawkins a cosmic, apocalyptic, character. Hawkins was not just the end of the summer, the end of the green leaves and the tomatoes on the vine. Hawkins was the end. The end of everything. Coming like a blanketing, freezing blizzard, covering and annihilating everything in his path in a grip of cold that would still the earth and men upon it. For all that, Hawkins' coming was certain, but in a way not fearsome. Junie did not say it to frighten us. He did not tell us Hawkins would cut our ears off and sell us to Gypsies or stuff us in grass sacks and throw us in the river. Hawkins was coming. Junie knew it. He announced it. It was not commented upon or debated. When the fire popped and Junie said, "Hawkins 's coming," the response was somatic, not verbal. Women shifted on their cushions, pulling their sweaters tighter, or if the women around the fire were my great aunts, they curled their snuff wads to the other side of their lips and released their breath in the long slow sigh that was their way of consenting and commenting at the same time on any final thing. For a moment, the tidal, chthonic flow of talk in the room was reversed. Matriarchy fell silent, and patriarchy claimed its place. Junie squinted at the groove in the hickory, testing its depth with his thumbnail. He set his knife to the other prong and a tiny tress-like spiral, like a curled lock of girl's hair, peeled under the edge. Directly, a child would knock over a stool or toy or one of my aunts would reach for the fire poker to jiggle the wood. Bill got up and walked out to the kitchen. "Anybody want anything while I'm back here," he asked, not waiting for a reply.

We were not an intellectual family. No one asked who Hawkins was or what Junie meant by saying he was coming. No one protested that since he hadn't already come he wasn't likely to. Hawkins was real and the reality of Hawkins overwhelmed our sense of self and place and permanence, but no one said these things. No one said, as if to soften the truth, "Yeah, it sure is getting cold outside," or tried to exchange the truth into another more understandable currency. The truth was known by being felt, and I could see it in the complex ritual of soma and gesture that followed in the wake of the pronouncement. When the women shifted in their chairs or the children fussed, when Bill moved from the central parlor to the kitchen and then to the cold, darkened porch at the end of the house, it was not that they were uncomfortable so much as that they were shifting their bodies to bear the weight of a burden they already carried. No one quoted scripture, no one said, "That's right, Junie, death is coming for us all." The truth and weight of Junie's knowledge of Hawkins anteceded all explanations. The long sighs of the women and the wind met in a harmonic of affirmation, a convergence of their being and with the body of the world. Sometimes now, when I hear the wind at night and I am half asleep, I think of old women, and sometimes, not so often, when I hear old women sigh, I feel a chill I do not name. Then, by habit of memory sealed before my childhood was over, like a hand on my shoulder turning me on the path beyond the creek, I hear an old man's voice, Junie, grandfather, "Hawkins 's coming."

Hawkins 's coming. All my life I have known Hawkins is coming. Coming and already come and coming still. He has come for Junie and Hattie, Bill and Shine, for Mack Mann, and Lafayette and Smitty and all that tribe of my relatives, Sullivans and Smiths, Withers and Greens, Truslows and Mullens. Men, and women, who wore no particular labels, nameless people almost, but famous to those of us who remember them. Hawkins has come for them and the world they knew and made in the sheds and fields, around the stoves and on the porch. Like a killing frost on the last tomato vines, Hawkins has come for their world and their ways. The old wood houses, the Irish neighborhood, the lawns and sheds, the chicken coops and garages, and cellars and gardens are gone now. The lanes and trees and the rolling earth of the land itself has been leveled. And now when I walk the streets where I played I cannot remember where I am because nothing is left of their world. Hawkins came for them and for a whole way of life and devoured it without a trace save in memory.

As a child, I thought everything my father and grandfathers told me was directly and unambiguously true. Living as we did in a practical world of working and making, there was an immediate empirical confirmation of each instruction, "See, Man, set the peg this way, then when the rabbit bites the apple, the trap will fall." "Look here, now. Always be sure to pack salt along the bone in the ham because there is this little pocket where air can get in and spoil it." It was an education of show and tell in woods and fields, sheds and gardens, with tools and animals. I had an implicit trust in their words. When Junie said Hawkins was coming, the only wonder I might have was when or how soon, but never if. They also told me that Santa Claus was coming. I have believed in Hawkins a lot longer than I did in Santa Claus. Now, when I sit by a fire watching orange through amber, the cracking or popping of a log brings a recollected yet adumbrated chill the fire cannot touch, and in the ashening heat of these bones I know Hawkins is coming for me and all my tribe too.


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Copyright 1992 Gerald L. Smith, Sewanee, Tennessee