The bailiff enters, and I can actually tell he has aged since 2013.
His mustache has more grey, the hairline receding.
Before he did not wear glasses.
Now he has dark-rimmed square frames.
I can gauge the season because his skin is darker here in June, pale in winter hearings.
Always the tan sheriff uniform,
radio pinned under his chin,
badge glistening gold.
He does not smile.
He offers Kleenex.
Constant through the last six years.
Every hearing
He watched me
nervous
angry
questioning
confused
crying.
Four different judges,
but just the bailiff and me.
I wonder if he remembers me
or others.
Does he remember my five year restraining order?
the death threats
the talk of suicide to my two year and five year old children?
Does he recall each woman who has asked the court to sever parental rights from abusive or absent fathers?
Do the details of our trauma stay in his memory when he goes to church or passes one of us while buying apples and milk at Raley's in town?
Maybe though, his job requires amnesia
like that movie where the blonde actress starts each day with no knowledge,
detachment
where his memories of faces and cases
are wiped clean after every day in court.
Maybe he does not even register details here
only watches human behavior
as a zookeeper would:
observe elephants giving themselves a dust bath,
monkeys yelling at each other from opposite trees
He scans for sudden movements,
threatening looks.
He does not remember the stories.
Soothing sunlight falls gracefully from an angled skylight above us,
and it peeps through the slats of closed blinds along a far wall.
Dark wood panels line three walls and converge behind the chair of the judge
where they suddenly stop.
The last panel is instead a bright, white wall.
At its center is a large seal of the state of California
with images of the state where I have lived my whole life,
images I still do not recognize.
It says "Eureka!" at the top
which has something to do with finding gold.
"Eureka! I found it!"
Found the gold, that is.
The all-important historical moment, that began our status
as the beautiful, hopeful promise it is--
riches
freedom
opportunity
But that word--Eureka--never makes me think of miner 49ers
with their gold pans sliding in magical circles of cold, Sierra creek water
and colorful sand...
at least
it is not the first thing I think of.
That word always calls to mind for me my parents first home as a family,
a home, a life I did not experience
but which is as real to me as the gold letters in the courthouse seal.
A white mobile home in Eureka, California
where my mother held my older sister
while the near-constant rain beat down on the metal roof,
making her ache with longing for her home
in the warm, dry Central Valley,
rain that made her long for the Bermuda grass
and cows in a small field
closed in by wooden slat fence built by her father's hands.
My mother loved my father
still loves him nearly sixty years later,
but she was a child-adult
perhaps ill-equipped to know how to navigate the new-found treasure
of husband
of child
like shining gold in her hands.
She held my sister with the golden hair as the Humboldt County rain mixed with already deep puddles outside.
All these decades later
They are still together,
still man and wife,
still in love,
clinging tightly to one another
as the sunlight begins to dim.
Yet here I am
staring blankly at that gold word, Eureka,
in a building that houses a multitude of miseries
more relentless than rain.
The judge slowly enunciates
"DV-120," then lists the violations for a domestic violence restraining order
to a tiny Hispanic woman
with curly hair pulled up off her face.
It is only now that the short, muscular man
with grey hair
realizes his wife has moved out of their apartment,
and that the judge, bailiff, and now all of us in open court
know he has done something bad to her.
He seems shocked, confused
as the judge orders him to sell or surrender his weapons.
He reassures the judge he has no guns,
that he would never have them because he has children in the home.
He does not seem to appreciate the irony
that he has to stay 100 yards away from the wife and mother of his children
while he waxes defensive about the dangers of weapons in the home,
He clenches two fists tightly next to each other in his lap,
As her eyes dart left and right.
She is my sister in this dark, sad, confusing procedure.
I pray for her and beg for mercy upon myself,
As the nameless bailiff
takes the paper from the judge's hands into his own,
closes the distance between the judge and the courtroom tables,
and politely hands the orders to both parties,
just has he has done for me so many times,
He hands her a box of tissues,
the gold of his badge,
and the round seal over the judge's head,
and the track light reflection on the long white tables at the front of the courtroom,
glow, shiny and official,
as we unfold, broken before it all.
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