Joe-No-Can-Do

by Merle Drown

The first thing we learned was not to be afraid of Joe-No-Can-Do. We grew up on the prairie at the edge of the city, wasteland with a creek, a dump behind the paper company, and Joe's shack, where he lived with his goats.

Bearded, shaggy-haired, dressed in tattered layers, Joe lumbered across the prairie, talking to his goats and grunting to us a reversal of language that baffled us. We didn't see how we were like him, picking at the dump for bolts of cloth to bring to our grandmothers, running through the tall grass, hiding in the bulrushes, riding along the creek in an old boat someone had stolen and ditched, the way they always ditched junk in the prairie. Not for us, the city park on the other side of the tracks, not for us the stores on Lake Street, Little League.

A smell enveloped Joe, sour, rank, goat, wood smoke, cold ash, bitter weeds. We said it kept the bugs off him, while mosquitoes and gnats feasted on us in the wet swamp. At first he'd surprise you because you wouldn't identify the smell or the grunts, and there he'd be, with his goats and a smile that didn't look right.

Our grandmothers talked with him, if talk it was because we couldn't understand them when they gave him the plate of meat or bowl of soup, only "eat" and "Joe." Those we understood. And understood he sometimes milked a nanny into a clean pail by the house or chopped some wood or gave them a twisted grass figure. Our grandmothers kept them over their kitchen stoves. Some years he'd replace everyone's figure two or three times. Other years the dried grass piece set on the wall opposite the crucifix from one September to the next.

My older brother said one brave boy asked Joe to make a figure for him, but clear as a bell, Joe said, "No can do." Many things Joe couldn't do, read, drive, work a job, but he wasn't retarded. We figured that for him what he couldn't do and what he wouldn't do were the same, and we wished that could be true for us too.

But our grandmothers relied on Joe for news of the future, when to plant their gardens, how much firewood to stack for the winter, where the sweet grass for their cows would grow. Like us, they called him Joe-No-Can-Do, but they didn't think him lazy or contrary because they never would have fed him if they did.

When we entered adolescence, the bulldozers dug up the prairie. Excavators changed the course of the creek. Churning cement trucks poured foundation pads on a gridwork of new streets. In the middle of dust and roar, Joe stayed in his shack with his goats.

Men in hard hats, men in suits, and finally the police told him he had to move. To each Joe said, "No can do." And to some he gave a twisted figure, but he ran out of grass. He went to our grandmothers and told them he couldn't bring them new figures because the prairie had been laid bare. "No can do," he said.

He said it over and over when they cuffed him and put him in the patrol car, and our grandmothers cried. They cried harder when they learned Joe-No-Can-Do died in a jail cell overnight. "What an awful end," they said. We knew it was the end for us too, and then we were afraid.

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