For thirty-five years they had lived together,
treating each other kindly;
never a word of trouble.

She never said anything to her husband
about going to California
where their married daughter was living.
The neighbors told him
that she was going;
she had said that if she had a choice
of California or Heaven,
she would go to California.
Her husband answered
that he knew nothing about it,
and said nothing to his wife.
She went off while he was away cutting brush;
never bid him good-by
or left a note.

Since then they had not written to each other
and only heard from each other through their daughter.
Everything had been pleasant and nice
and your wife packs up and goes off.
How could I keep her if she wanted to go?
She was not bound to stay.
Do you think your wife would come back
if you wrote her a nice letter
and told her how much you liked her?
I hardly think so.
If you would go there,
do you suppose she would come back with you?
I suppose if I should go for her,
she would come back;
but it would be a good while before I'd go.

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony

The new janitor is a Puerto Rican;
still a young man and he has four small children.
He has been hired because he is cheap—
not because he is the handy man
a good janitor is supposed to be.
I doubt if he ever saw any plumbing
before he came to this country,
to say nothing of a boiler and radiators.
Anyway, he was soon overwhelmed by requests from the tenants
to do this and fix that.
He does his best and spends hours at simple jobs,
and seldom does them well—or can do them at all.
He was in my flat once
to do something or other and, when he was through,
asked me if he might sit down.
"Of course," I said and offered him a drink
but he would not take it.
"It is so quiet here," he explained.
And then he began to talk about a man who lived in the house
and taught Spanish.
"He talks to me in Spanish," the janitor said,
"but I do not understand.
You see, I am not an educated man."
His eye caught the print of a water-color by Winslow Homer
which I have hanging: a palm tree in the Bahamas.
"That is my country," he said,
and kept looking at the print
as one might look at a photograph of one's mother
long dead.
 

Charles Reznikoff, By the Well of Living and Seeing