“you are enough / as you are”
By Phillip Dacey - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1969
Philip Dacey (1939–2016) was raised in St. Louis. He received his bachelor’s from St. Louis University, and later his master’s from Stanford University. During his lifetime, he published thirteen collections of poetry.
“I’m pictured bent over him, our smiles as / stiff as the iron spokes of his wheelchair.”
BY LAURIE KUNTZ - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1995
You called lost and broken down,
one December night--
On a road amidst scarecrows and corn,
your car dropped a fan belt,
and I was tasked an endeavor into darkness
to find you.
The night choked me with weather and empty country roads--
no street names, nor landmarks,
just fields, leftover snow and taunting black ice.
A stranger brought you to safety that night,
as darkness goaded me away from you.
Every winter storm since recalls your rage.
Once, in vengeance, I revealed
that Anna Karenina jumps in front of a train,
ruining the ending you were just about to read.
It was an ending you saw that night,
waiting for me to rescue you
from fan belts and wind.
Like Anna, I'm not good at saving others, or myself.
I fail at heroics--I’m better at baking a cake,
basting a turkey, or planting pansies--
If only I could steal myself
out from your anger,
rise to an occasion,
save you from a precipitous fall off a cliff,
or venture to find your voice lost
in the Siberian wind.
Anna Karenina had infinite tenderness,
but no one to save her,
unlike all the kindness that remains to rescue us.
The time we’ve had together leaves me breathless,
as if running for a train that will stop in places I never want to be again,
but I board it anyway and take a window seat.
For SD
Every poem is a journey; every journey is a poem. Passion fuels the journey, but passion changes, deepens and lessens. The early work is about the journey of a father's and a daughter's love for each other in all its stages-- not excluding anger or frustration, yet it ends in a celebration of beginnings. The current work is also about a journey fueled by passion. The poem, about a marriage, speaks to the desire to continue the journey by going back to the beginning of the story. Somewhere in the telling is healing and acceptance. We save our stories, and our stories save us
Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her working with Southeast Asian refugees for over a decade after the Vietnam War years. She has published one poetry collection (Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press) and two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press), as well as an ESL reader (The New Arrival, Books 1 & 2, Prentice Hall Publishers). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her chapbook, Simple Gestures, won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest. She was editor in chief of Blue Muse Magazine and a guest editor of Hunger Mountain Magazine. She has produced documentaries on the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Law, and currently is producing a documentary on the peace process and reintegration of guerrilla soldiers in Colombia. She is the executive producer of an Emmy winning short narrative film, Posthumous. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. Her website is:
https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1
“Each morning they line the narrow walk, / They listen south to the mermaids.”
BY Albert Goldbarth - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1970
what I mean is: hell,
they took them away. A knife,
the chemo, the radiation;
whatever. To save her. A little
like the way the animal leaves its paw,
its gnawed-off paw, in the trap.
The emperor orders a hundred men and women
into the valley where enemy soldiers wait
behind trees…so the rest
of his troops can make a safe retreat.
A man withdraws his love
from his daughter, to keep what he thinks
is the love of the woman he met last month.
A day is a line we walk, continually
giving up things to the gods, so they
might make the line we walk longer.
Albert Goldbarth was born in Chicago in 1948 and currently lives in Wichita, Kansas. In addition to one novel and collections of books of essays, he has been publishing books of poetry for forty-five years, two of which have received the National Book Critics Circle Award; the most recent is The Now (University of Pittsburgh Press). His hands have never touched a computer keyboard.
photograph of albert goldbarth by michael pointer
“A poet is coming; / they are told to behave.”
BY MARY BALAZS - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1980
Mary Balazs (1931-2001) received her PhD from Pennsylvania State University, and went on to teach English at Virginia Military Institute, Washington and Lee University, and Dabney S. Lancaster Community College. She was a long-time and frequent contributor to Roanoke Review.
“Insomniac in June, / Under the summer-magnified moon,”
BY ERNEST KROLL - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1976
Ernest Kroll (1913-1995), a Washington DC resident, was the author of five collections of poetry, one of which was the runner up for the National Book Award. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before returning to DC to work for the State Department. His poetry was published in many respected journals, including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.
“The way Mother talked, everything was connected so that if one thing went wrong a whole life could unravel like a sweater with a loose thread.”
BY KIM BRIDGFORD - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1991
Sometimes it is what is missing that you want, regardless
Of its value. It just means, really, you can’t remember
What it was, and so it takes on the tint of nostalgia,
Something with a sepia fragrance and wayfarer tone.
Sometimes you are just saying that you are alone.
Not that being alone is bad. It is just that being alone
Makes you more like a number, or entity, regardless
Of your purpose or intention. It adjusts your tone.
You want the most that you can really remember,
And, if not, you’ll make it up: that is nostalgia.
When you were little, you didn’t understand nostalgia:
You thought it was a version of now, being alone
With yourself. You didn’t understand that, to remember,
You have to erase, you have to rewrite, regardless
Of the truth. Each person has an individual tone.
For example, when I think of childhood, its soft tone,
It doesn’t have anything to do with me, that nostalgia,
And it informs everything I do. So it is, regardless.
The past is like the pronoun “it”: sitting there alone,
Inviting others to interpret it. You try to remember
What you were trying to say. Who can remember?
In any event, it has a glow, it has a shape and tone.
When you are older, by yourself, living there alone,
You understand the viewpoint is purely nostalgia:
All of it, from your kitchen chair, thinking, regardless
Of any other tactic, regardless of your coffee or tone,
Regardless of what you remember, other than being alone.
About “Nicknames”: We tend to trust adults, and it doesn't occur to us that they may—or may not—be telling the truth. When we find out the real story, we may be aghast, or made stronger.
About “Pentina for Erasure”: I have been preoccupied with issues of erasure for many years. What we take as truth may only be perception. That is much clearer to me as I've gotten older.
photo of Kim Bridgford by Marion Ettlinger
Kim Bridgford is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including A Crown for Ted and Sylvia, recently released from Wipf and Stock. Her fiction has appeared in Redbook, The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Bridgford and her collaborator/colleague Jo Yarrington are launching three new books in November on Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan, commemorating their trips to those countries. With Russell Goings, Bridgford rang the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of his book The Children of Children Keep Coming, for which she wrote the introduction.
“I am a TinkerToy set / Put together of cylinders and pegs,”
BY Chad walsh - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1975
Chad Walsh (1914-1991) was an Episcopal priest and nationally acclaimed poet. He was also a long time professor at Beloit College, where he founded The Beloit Poetry Journal. During the spring semester in 1979, he served as the poet in residence at Roanoke College. His most famous works include Stop Looking and Listen: An Invitation to the Christian Life and Campus Gods on Trial. In between writing and teaching, he reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review. Chad Walsh passed away in Vermont on January 17, 1991.
“Since the wires have been cut between Kenyon and his family, we have to depend on other sources of information, the weekly newspaper for instance.”
BY CAROLYN OSBORN - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, SPRING 1970
“Ranching on Dry Ground” first appeared in The Missouri Review, Winter 2014.
On top of one of the mesas at the ranch at sunset while looking out above a valley toward other distant blue mesas, the view is a grandiose background for a western movie or a chorus singing, “Oh beautiful for spacious skies.” The chorus would be standing on dry ground.
This ranch I eventually inherited is, by Southwestern measures, a small one spreading over parts of Lampasas and Coryell counties in central Texas. Roughly arrow-shaped, it’s located in the northern-most hill country. From horseback in the spring the land resembles a large English park until you get down from the saddle and something bites or scratches you.
There is no running water, not a single creek, on the place. The nearest river is about three miles distant. In order to water livestock, we use rain-fed “tanks,” as ponds are called here, windmills, and springs when we can find them. We need all these sources, as the average annual rainfall, supposedly 31 inches, is just a number we refer to ironically.
When I first came to the state, I was 12, a city child who knew nothing about ranches. My stepmother began putting hers together in 1940 at the end of the Depression by buying a number of small places near Evant, her hometown, when land, which had been selling for $26 to $28 an acre, fell to $8 to $6 dollars an acre. Actually in 1942 she paid the smallest amount she would ever have to pay, only $5.76 an acre. Though prices slowly went up, she kept piecing small parcels together until she had enough to lease to her brother to run cattle on. After she married my father, he added 160 more acres Mother called “the G.I. pasture” since he bought it via the Texas Veterans’ Land Loan Program in 1957. With this addition, and 33 cares my husband, Joe, added using the same program, we thought the ranch was about 1400 acres.
Then in 1992 the Texas Land Office made the most maddening discovery: we had, in legal terminology, a vacancy. Our ranch surrounded 33.22 acres belonging to the state. Exactly how this happened—careless surveyors, bad copyists, faulty corner marks—couldn’t possibly be traced. (One 1879 survey designated a corner using “a rock mound and a Spanish oak marked E.”) If land belongs to the state, the state can sell it to anyone. When Texas joined the union, it held title to all the land originally belonging to the Spanish king, then to Mexico. To us the Texas Land Office was acting like royalty about those acres in the midst of our west pasture, the one everybody used to enter the ranch. It was as though an ancient quarrel between landlord and peasant surfaced: Mother had to purchase the state’s last hold on our land. After putting together so much cheap acreage earlier, she paid $300 an acre to buy the vacancy. It was about half of what my husband had to spend, but it wasn’t as dear since it was land locked.
Our family never actually lived on the ranch. My parents’ house in Gatesville, thirty miles east, was our headquarters. The first Christmas in Texas, four months after moving there from Tennessee, my brother, Billy, 10, and I received matching boots, factory made with red leather longhorn heads outlined in front, and reminded we were to wear them at the ranch.
We quickly learned the rules for avoiding rattlesnakes, native dwellers in our dry country; watch where you put your boots, and if you see a snake, run as fast as you can to the nearest grown-up. We spent a lot of time studying the ground. Billy threw rocks to kill rattlers. Fortunately I didn’t have to confront one until I was grown. The horse I rode, startled by a rattle, shied and without my reining him, found another path. Although the same rules applied to copperhead and coral snakes, I saw copperheads asleep on top of an old piece of metal only once. I never saw a live coral snake, the deadliest of all, though we learned the doggerel warning about its circular markings: “Red and yellow, kill a fellow. Red and black, venom lack.” Water moccasins lived in old tanks; we went swimming only in one new tank the first spring it was built, one of the few years we had ample rainfall. After Joe and I started running the ranch, we encouraged snake hunters to clear the rattlesnake dens in the mesas’ limestone rim rock. They misted the sleepy hibernating snakes with gasoline until they crawled out to escape the fumes. After collecting the snakes in tow sacks, hunters took them to rattlesnake round-ups, usually held in the spring in nearby counties. Mercifully I never had to attend one, but I’ve seen enough newspaper pictures to know men test their bravado by surrounding themselves with rattlesnakes, pushing them away with sticks, and doing other foolish things such as the recent story of someone getting in a sleeping bag with one. The young snake, full of unused venom, bit the intruder’s foot, which had to be amputated to save the man’s life. Hunters sell their largest snakes to people who concoct anti-venom, the only useful thing except men’s hatbands resulting from rattlesnakes, as far as I’m concerned, although I do know they help reduce the rodent population. And I’m also aware ecologists believe the loss of rattlesnakes upsets nature’s balance. We find their dens are repopulated, if not every year, at least every other, rattlesnakes crawl back from our pastures to hibernate in the mesas’ caves.
Scorpions, we learned as children, usually travel in pairs, “like highway patrol men,” our mother said. She was a skillful driver but prone to speeding. The name “redbug” replaced our familiar “chigger” although the bite’s formidable itch was the same and they were just as unavoidable, or so we thought. Anti-bug sprays weren’t readily available in the forties and fifties. Sometime later we learned you could swallow or bathe in a medicinal looking concoction called “flowers of sulfur” that kept redbugs away. When you sweated it made you smell so sulfurous people kept away too.
Depending on spring rains, more vigorous in the forties before our approximately seven-year drought in the fifties—from 1950 till 1957 though creeping toward us as early as 1947—wildflowers filled the pastures. In over-lapping weeks we’d see bluebonnets, orange paintbrush, yellow and red Indian blankets, yellow Mexican hats with conical-shaped green or brown centers, lavender horsemint, dark purple and lavender bluebells, tight little bouquets of mountain pinks, a field of coreopsis among the profusion of yellow flowers—so many at once that most people forget their common names and say when asked, “Oh, those are yellow flowers.” Many other varieties of flowers bloomed, of course, enough to help fill two volumes of Wildflowers of Texas. Faced with this multitude, we half forgot the short, drab winters and the cruel sun we knew would soon dominate. By 2011 our temperatures varied from 100 to 106 degrees. Around here no one goes to the country to cool off.
We can still pick Mexican plums in the early summer and gather native pecans in the fall. The tank we used for swimming the first year it was scooped out of the earth, and another for fishing, stocked with bass in the good years, dried to mud holes, then simply dried out last year. Clumps of gnarled live oak trees, post oaks, Spanish oaks, elms, walnuts, pecans, hackberries, and a dozen other varieties shade parts of pastures and despite sparse rainfall, fill ravines. For picnics in the forties, Mother favored a slope overlooking the new tank, where in the early spring or late fall she would build a small fire to heat the food, something too dangerous, and forbidden in these drought years when whole counties and those adjacent are under burn bans. On Sunday afternoons our father taught Billy how to shoot, a twenty-two, and later, a shotgun. I had no interest in shooting, or in my uncle’s steers. I’d walk in the opposite direction to find the bones of a herd of Angora goats that had died right after shearing on top of a mesa when a sudden northern blast killed them all, or to poke around the ruins of the one remaining house site and its defunct windmill in the same pasture, a perfect place for the curious to investigate. My searches yielded only old brown snuff bottles or clear sun-glazed bottles and I would wonder about the people who took the snuff, or used “Horlick’s Malted Milk Lunch Tablets,” or drank from a bottle impressed with the words, “YOU CAN’T BEAT IT,” some kind of whiskey I guessed. Did the crumbling ruin of an elevated stone cistern ever hold enough water for people to shower? Who used up all the ink in the empty inkbottle? Did anyone my age ever live there?
As much as I might want a house of our own at the ranch, we had none. Neither had Thomas H. Williams, “an indigent Texas Revolutionary war veteran” living in 1881 in Matagorda County near the Texas Gulf Coast. He was one of four veterans to acquire some of our land. Williams had to give the names of the captains he’d served under “in the year 1836 after the invasion” and prove he owned property worth $500 or less. On oath he swore he was “physically unable to support myself” and all he had was “1/2 of a 320 acre tract of land, 1 yoke of oxen, and 1 gun.” This, written in a beautiful flowing hand, just as everyone who was literate seemed to write then, on aging light brown paper, is all we know of Thomas H. Williams, for he apparently never lived on his land grant from the state; instead it was assigned to agents in Austin who sold the patent to Hyman Blum of Paris, France for an unknown price 45 years after the war with Mexico was over. Blum was evidently one of the many middle-men collecting veterans’ land certificates; he sold William’s reward for helping Texas win its revolution to local settlers for $1.00 an acre in 1901.
Slightly earlier, in 1876, another veteran, a Confederate army survivor named George W. H. McMorris, came to stay on another part of the ranch: he homesteaded 160 acres near today’s ranch’s entrance. On a site overlooking a valley beside a live oak tree he built a 14 by 14 foot log cabin with a wild mixture of logs—oak, gum, cedar, whatever was long enough—which contained a loft, and a fireplace, where he and his his wife raised three children. How five people lived in such a small space, I don’t know, but I’ve always thought the children must have been told to play outside most of the day when they were small. We’ve located the spot near the cabin where McMorris dug a well, the only available water source for his family. Since homesteads required cultivation, when the children grew older they probably worked with their father within sight of the cabin in a flat rock-strewn field made richer by soil eroding off the nearby mesa. Before barbed wire, invented in 1873, arrived in our part of the country in the 1890s perhaps they helped gather the rocks for a now toppled stone fence, but what was grown there? I’m not sure though I know cotton was the main cash crop then. If McMorris raised cotton, he must have had better rainfall in the 1870s and 1880s than we have now. Partially tumbled down with a half caved-in roof by 1946, what was left of his cabin was used to store hay for winter cattle feeding.
On a slight rise to the south of the log cabin stood the Binfords’ house, a little white wooden board and batten place probably built later by McMorris, where a family of cedar choppers, a tiny old woman and her three sons, lived. The sons were tall rangy men with weathered faces, men who seldom spoke, hired by Mother to hand chop cedar on the ranch with double-bladed axes. I didn’t fully understand their importance until my husband and I began running the ranch. In our area Ashe junipers, commonly called cedars, grow to tree size quickly and have practically no commercial value. Cattle won’t eat them and goats will nibble them away only while the trees are young. Impossible to eradicate—the seeds are continually spread by birds and animals—cedars are a water-depleting scourge as well. A 1997 A&M report shows 33.1 gallons of water per tree per day used by Ashe junipers in our area. That’s before our latest drought cycle. Many years after the Binfords’ time, Joe learned to cut down the small junipers with loppers or a chain saw, a recurrent necessity. He also continually fights mesquite, the thorny, invasive brush that thrives even more in drier south Texas. Though not as numerous as cedar here, mesquite are killed when young by spraying with a diesel-herbicide mixture in the hottest part of the summer, an extremely smelly, disagreeable task.
For the Binfords hard work with low pay was simply the cedar choppers’ lot even in earlier years when the wood was used for fence posts. Steel generally replaces cedar now, except for a few corner posts, and Anglo cedar choppers, a tribe of their own, are difficult to find; today Mexican-American crews with chain saws usually take their place.
In the forties and early fifties, I don’t know how the four Binfords all managed to live in a three-room plus screened-in back porch house with an outhouse, without electricity or plumbing except one pipe laid from the nearby windmill. The pipe bent at the house’s south wall and curled up over a windowsill to a sink. They must have had some sort of stove for heat and for Mrs. Binford to cook on. On our trips to the ranch while we were young, neither I, nor my brother were allowed to go near the house. It was off limits out of respect for the Binfords’ privacy according to our mother. I wasn’t even tempted to investigate; tall, silent red-faced men with axes were so unspeakably dangerous, they were best left alone.
Finally the Binfords drifted off, perhaps to better accommodations, or perhaps the men joined the army. My father, a World War II veteran who’d served in the Field Artillery, doubted the latter as he thought no matter how dangerous the Binford boys might have looked, they were not bright enough for service.
Billy, by the time he decided to take up ranching about 1963, moved into the Binfords’ house while retreating to Gatesville on some weekends, particularly when he needed his washing done. He was a young man at odds with formal education, an ex- paratrooper, ex-vet’s assistant, ex-livestock auction worker, ex-rodeo bull-rider. Our parents let him use the ranch lease free, but there wasn’t enough land or water to carry enough cattle and goats to make much of a profit. Gradually he would lease other places.
His years at Mother’s ranch, before he died at 36 in a one pickup wreck in 1973, were full of what seemed to me grubby necessities, but to him, they were, I think now, like the recurrent years of drought, simply part of a rancher’s life. When he hired illegal Mexican workers, as many other ranchers did in order to get by, he generally ate whatever they cooked, mostly pinto beans and rice with chilies added for flavor; some days meat from rabbits or armadillos was added. He showered by attaching a piece of hose to a spigot on the windmill, mended barbed wire fences broken by deer that hadn’t jumped quite high enough, learned to build new fences on rocky ground—another continual necessity—rode pastures checking on and doctoring cattle, designed and helped build a new corral, shored up the pole barn once again, drove to auctions to buy or sell livestock. Windmills, one of our main defenses against drought, habitually need repair. One on top of a mesa was knocked over and totally dismantled by a tornado that left the tower still standing with its fan’s blades, partially overgrown with weeds on the ground, a reason Billy often searched for springs. He discovered the best spring on the ranch at the far north end underneath a big hackberry and two large cedar elms where he found a trickle of water and piped it to run steadily to a trough connected to a another trough, connected to a third trough, all of them sitting at odd angles to each other. The trees’ trunks and limbs, metal troughs, concrete blocks, pipes and supporting wires all jumbled together, look like a working model of a contemporary art installation. It is an art to somehow manage to weave three awkward six-foot long straight troughs through three trees to make a useful watering place. Just moving those empty troughs to the site was a problem.
The spring is not easily visible from the mesa above. It’s hidden within shear rock walls and was found either by prying open a seldom-used wire gate at the northernmost corner of the ranch and hiking up to the site, or by clambering down over rocks and weeds on one side of the wall. To move the troughs in, Billy had to pry open the gate, another difficulty since it hadn’t been used for years and was so rusted he probably cut it apart and rebuilt it later.
I’m not sure exactly how he found the spring. I imagine him tying his horse to a tree on top then half-sliding, half-climbing down, as we do now, to reach the mossy wet rocks below. He could have heard tales about the spring from people in Evant, the nearest town, population 550 at its height, withered to 379 in 2010. Supposedly during the Depression, an old man lived in a tent on the mesa and used the spring below as his only water source. In our dry country, springs are to most people such a mysterious gift they incite stories. I can’t help but wonder how the old man made it through a hard winter in his tent when the wind blew down from the north so fast the temperature could drop to freezing in an hour.
After the loss of my father in 1968 and my brother in 1973, my husband and I decided to venture into a cattle partnership with my mother. For me it was a real venture since I’d never really learned much about ranching. As we grew older, the ranch definitely became my brother’s territory and I didn’t interfere. I knew, however, it was important to keep Mother occupied: she was spending too much time driving from Gatesville to visit my father’s and brother’s graves in a little country cemetery near Evant. And I slowly became more curious about how something so remote from my experience might be done. I was already involved in teaching English part time at the University of Texas in Austin, looking after three children, and writing when I could while my husband was practicing law in downtown Austin. We lived ninety miles south of the ranch. To him, an hour and a half’s drive wasn’t too far; to me the more we discussed the possibility, the more it appealed.
Joe, because he grew up on a stock farm in the Texas Panhandle, was familiar with cattle. I had it all to learn, even the basic language like cow-calf operation, which had no medical connotation: it just meant we would own cows nursing their calves approximately eight months before they were weaned and sold. The next part of the cycle was stockers, those weaned calves that were matured on wheat or grass pastures at other people’s ranches. They could be slaughtered after six or eight months producing grass-fed beef, but the majority generally moved to the feeder stage to be fattened usually in a feedlot for their last six months. My uncle and brother ran stockers, buying each fall and selling each spring. My mother, Joe, and I chose the cow-calf stage since there was less risk. The volatile beef market could leave a stocker broke if it was low at the time one had to sell. If this happened to us, we might have to take a loss on calves, but we’d still own the cows to produce more offspring another year, an optimistic view of motherhood, I decided. First we had to find the cows, but there were no herds readily available in the country nearby, and once we’d made the decision, we were in a hurry to restock.
Despite Joe’s background and familiarity with cattle, together we made one of the worst mistakes we could have; we went to south Texas to buy cows. I thought earlier it might have been a pleasure simply to leave the ranch empty of everything except wildlife, but I knew Mother wouldn’t hear of it. Unused acres are too great a luxury to those who’ve struggled to buy them and the idea of putting land to work was deeply ingrained in her generation. Joe reminded me, owners need the tax break given to agriculture use, and vacant land has its own set of problems including being a continual fire hazard. We knew how frightening a fire on dry land could be. Late one hot summer afternoon just as we drove from the ranch to the highway we saw smoke curling on the horizon. Mother, apparently intuitively aware her place was burning, led the way to the threatening gray signal, set we supposed, by the magnifying effects of sun on broken glass. With the help of the Evant Fire Department, it was quickly contained before it reached gullies covered with cedar. Because of the explosive effect of fire on the oily cedar, a disastrous spread via sparks would have been inevitable. Indians, Comanches probably, purposefully set dry grass on fire in order to attract more buffalo who preferred to eat the new green shoots; Indians obviously had neither fences to burn nor neighbors to consider. And did the cycles of drought we’ve known exist in Indian days?
We drove down to Uvalde on the border to meet a cattle owner and his agent, two men called Shirley and Carol. We already knew men called June and Francis, so in our experience the custom of giving boys girls’ names wasn’t novel, we’d just never met two of them together. Our foreman, we’d noticed, customarily named bulls after the men who sold them to us. This time we somehow forgot the sellers’ names.
After inspecting cattle from the front seat of Shirley’s pickup, we bought two bulls, a hundred mother cows, and their calves for $525 a pair, Herefords with Charolais-Hereford calves, some showing a bit of Brahma mix in the pointed tips of their ears. All of them looked good in their part of the country. We didn’t object to the mixture since, in theory, hybrid vigor results from crossing. They arrived at our place in three double-decker trucks, were unloaded, and driven to the nearest tank. It had been a good spring and all the tanks were full. I thought the windmill was working; its fan’s blades were creaking in the wind, but I soon realized no water was being pumped; the fan was simply running free while the water remained underground, my first lesson in the obduracy of windmills. First you have to know what a sucker rod is; then check closely to see if it’s moving. It’s as if windmills are made to fool anyone watching. Halfway up the tower a scissortail flycatcher, her salmon pink sides barely showing, sat on her nest, her long tail shooting west and her head turned east. Another bird’s nest was built beneath the point where the fan joined the tower. It blew to the ground as I watched, and inside I found one mottled green egg. The same day I saw two pair of quail strutting in the yard of the Binfords’ old house; soon after we jumped three jackrabbits and two cottontails; an armadillo, in its half-blind way, ambled across a corner of the pasture. Mother pointed to a horned toad sunning itself near the road, and a neighbor told us a flock of wild turkeys roosted on the east side of one of the mesas. I remembered my father hunted dove and quail on the place every fall. Since the last of Billy’s stock was removed, it seemed we’d been running a wildlife refuge. We’d spent a previous morning riding the perimeter fences of the ranch horseback and found a fawn, its spots showing in the sunlight while the doe ran off, supposedly tempting us to follow her and a female quail used the same tactic, dragging one wing on the ground to lead us away from her nest, both obeying the instinctive urge to protect their young. I leaned down by my borrowed horse’s sweaty neck to watch the almost invisible quail moving noiselessly through the grasses. On a later early morning ride we saw two bobcats bounding across a pasture. We didn’t see coyotes although we could hear them howling at night.
I would have liked to spend days riding around the ranch exploring, but we had to find a windmill man, a fast fading livelihood since submersible electric pumps are now more widely used. Floyd and Frances Parr, our new foreman and his wife, the two most indispensible people we’d found, directed us to Mr. Perkins who lived near them in Evant. Without contact with people in the area who’d lived there for years, we knew it would be impossible to run a ranch from Austin. Floyd and Frances had been raised on ranches, owned a small ranch themselves, and were willing guides.
Mr. Perkins lived in a house with a porch facing U.S. 281, the highway running from north to south through the state. First we needed to speak through the screen door to Mrs. Perkins who didn’t understand what place we were talking about.
We’d always called it “the ranch,” a futile description I soon realized, so I stated the whole connection, “I’m Mabel Winters Culbert’s daughter, Billy Culbert’s sister.”
“Oh it’s the Billy Culbert place.”
Country people have their own place designations. They forgot, or perhaps never knew, it was Mother’s ranch. Legal definitions of ownership aren’t important; who runs it is. Once this was established, Mrs. Perkins became helpful; she called around to locate Mr. Perkins while we admired her enormous vegetable garden from the front porch. The only seat was a claw-footed bathtub painted yellow, one side cut away revealing a lank cushion about six inches above the floor. In drought-ridden country, it seemed a perfect statement of décor.
Mr. Perkins, himself, looked a bit like an elf; he was a small wiry man dressed in dark green work clothes. He sat on a step, I sat next to him, and Joe hunkered on the ground. No one tried to sit in the bathtub. We soon discovered Mr. Perkins had been my mother’s student when she taught at a country school near Evant in the twenties. We often ran into someone who’d known Mother, had built a corral for my brother, worked for my uncle.
To Mr. Perkins we spoke of various windmills on the ranch and springs.
“I’d rather have a good spring than a windmill any day,” he said.
Since then I’ve heard the exact opposite said by other windmill men. Depending on their experience, they thought either a windmill or a spring tended to dry up when most needed. Now I think both do.
Mr. Perkins got our windmill running again. Just as the rest of his dwindling tribe would do in the future, he attempted to explain its inner workings including brass valves, leathers made of cowhide about the size of tablespoons to scoop up the water, and a series of long, long pipes going down to the water’s surface a hundred and ten feet below. I understood about half of what he was saying, but I did find, in the years to come, that leathers constantly wear out in our gritty limestone suffused water and require replacement, but only the windmill man seems to know exactly when. Other parts need oiling once a year at least, and the odd looking metal box covering the gears near the top is called a bonnet because of its resemblance to a woman’s old-fashioned sunbonnet, the kind my Texas grandmother had worn.
Mr. Perkins gave me two used brass valves, “to make a candlestick with,” he said.
I wondered silently how many candlesticks Mrs. Perkins had.
Shortly after the windmill was repaired and the cattle began to fill out a little, we discovered, unfortunately, some of the cows had developed a taste for prickly pear, the cactus, which grows in great numbers in south Texas and, though not quite so numerous on the ranch, is also a large problem in central Texas. Once cows eat pear with thorns burned off by flame-throwers during droughts, as south Texas ranchers often did, they can become seriously addicted to eating un-prickly pear, so will continue eating them even with thorns on. I’d been told sheep were so dumb they could smother each other to death by huddling too close together in freezing weather, but the “pear-eaters,” as Floyd called them, were I was sure, the dumb half of the dumb cow insult.
Reading information published by Texas A&M, we found prickly pear defies destruction except by the use of gallons of chemical spray or a controlled burn, illegal in a drought. The spray required a license, so we got a license and did a bit of spraying before we found we lacked enough hours to do as much as needed. And even if the burn were legal, we don’t trust the concept especially since it kills the plant only for a limited time. Now, as it threatens to overtake some pastures, we pay someone to spray prickly pear with the newest A&M recommended poison. As much as we dislike using poison, we’ll use it to save a pasture.
The pear-eaters we first bought naturally went on eating it and damaged their stomachs. Soon after we discovered some of them had a peculiar tick borne disease called anaplasmosis, which caused them to abort their calves. Trying to understand it, I read a ranchers’ magazine listing 21 ways a cow could abort; the 21st item was simply called “more.” Even when vaccinated against the disease, cows remained carriers. We eventually sold all of ours to packers, a business that “slaughtered, processed, and packed livestock into meat, meat products and by-products.” This is one of those dictionary definitions telling you less than you need to know. In the case of our cows, I suppose packers also sterilized the anaplasmosis diseased carcasses before turning them into dog food, one of the “by-products.”
We learned from Floyd and our vet that anaplasmosis existed in herds nearby, exactly whose we didn’t know, so we discovered also that ranchers can be secretive about causes of their cows’ deaths.
We began again after requesting help from the nearest U.S. Department of Agriculture office, the bank that loaned us enough money to buy more cows, and my mother who grew up helping her father ranch and was familiar with the multiple risks of raising cows and calves. This time we waited until we could buy stock from reliable local ranchers.
Touring the ranch later with one of the USDA agents, we realized our pastures were over-grazed. In this part of the country a cow and calf together require approximately 23 acres to thrive through dry and wet years. We had a horror of over-grazing. Too often we’d heard of cattlemen over-stocking a place thereby reducing the native grasses. The ranch has numerous species of grass, however our cattle principally graze buffalograss, rescuegrass, and blue grama. Unfortunately we knew we were seeing a lot of inedible broom weed, those dainty yellow flowers coloring pastures in the fall, a sure sign of over-grazed land. Because the main product of ranch land is grass, we had to save it.
We’d already finished a brush-clearing program on the G.I. land; the Binfords’ cedar chopping years didn’t include it. Our son’s three hundred Angora goats and my own multi-colored Spanish goats—at least a hundred of them—were turned loose there to eat the cedar down. Both types of goats were dual purpose; the Spanish goats’ kids were sold for meat, mainly to Chinese, Arab, and other immigrant markets while the Angora goats produced enough mohair—augmented by a generous government support price— to pay for our son’s college tuition. Unfortunately we discovered when the goats moved to other pastures in the winter they chose to eat grasses needed for cattle since the green shoots of brush they preferred were dormant. We sold all the goats. And we reduced the cow numbers from a hundred to sixty. The pastures began recovering.
In the meantime, Joe became interested in the original tall grasses grazed almost to extinction. With whatever help available, and most times alone, in McMorris’ old field he sowed Indian grass, big and little bluestem, and switch grass. We were rewarded when in the fall bluestem and Indian grass stood more than seven feet tall. Because we cut down our stock numbers, the long suppressed tall grasses, especially the little bluestem, also emerged in other parts of the ranch. My mother, who died in 1994, did not live to see the tall grasses. I’m sure she would have approved just as she approved of the log cabin restoration, the well we had drilled—run by a dependable submersible pump—and the ranch house we built with her in 1974 on the site McMorris once homesteaded.
“The 12 months from October 2010 through September 2011 were the driest for that 12 month period in Texas since 1895, when the state began keeping rainfall records.” … Austin American Statesman
This was the worst drought we’d had since Joe and I began ranching in 1973. Without spring and summer rains, grasses in our pastures weren’t growing sufficient forage, and we were running low on stock water. By 2013 we’d culled the cattle down to 52. Cows need approximately ten gallons of water a day, more or less depending on the day’s and size of the animal; bulls and cows nursing calves need more. In drought years the tanks generally dry out first, then the weak springs quit running. To compound the problem, that year our one working windmill broke, and the people we relied on for repairs proved unreliable. We’d drive up from Austin, stop in Lampasas on the way to the ranch, and confront the placid looking woman who tried to soothe us.
First: “We’ve had to order a part.”
Second: “The man who usually does this kind of work is sick.”
Third: “We’re overcome with people needing help.”
At last, after much discussion, especially since the Lampasas workers had dismantled and hauled the mill to their shop, we hired someone else to truck the broken windmill to another repair place in another county.
In 2011 our son William decided to improve a spring, one Billy had already tried to extend. Where water first seeped, as usual below a mesa’s rocks, Billy had set a pipe leading to a large concrete trough, which was generally over-flowing. To capture the over-flow, William’s workers designed an addition, a long curving native limestone wall to contain the water. From the south side the wall looked like stonework on a medieval castle. In some seasons it contained enough water to form a pond reaching to the west and spilling over in a small waterfall to the ravine below. In the driest part of the drought, all that water retreated to the old concrete trough.
To find out the volume of water in the other spring Billy discovered in the GI pasture, I held an empty quart measure under the first pipe while Joe kept his eyes on his watch. The per quart average was 32 seconds, which is 128 seconds per gallon. There are 86,400 seconds in a 24 hour day, so 86,400 divided by 128 equals 675 gallons of water per day from that spring, enough to water 67 cows a year during the worst drought we’d ever experienced.
Our only problem: There wasn’t enough grass in that small pasture to support even ten cows. Leaving the gate open wouldn’t work either because the spring was too remote from the other pastures. Salt and other minerals are easily delivered as is additional feed, but the necessity of a nearby water supply is primary.
Floyd’s spring, one he discovered in a larger pasture, and yet another spring above a pecan grove—each measuring about 474 gallons per day— have carried us through the drought so far. But for the first time since we began ranching, we are worrying about having enough water for the cattle. Drought has ruled so long we must drill another well and raise another windmill. Obviously we have spring water, however, exactly how plentiful water collected in various springs is we don’t know. All of our springs are on or near tops of mesas; according to our son’s knowledge of geology, we have typical “perched aquifers” which are trapped between a thin layer of limestone and dolomite, but these have little stored reserves unless replenished by rain. Nor do we know exactly how many others depend on the Trinity aquifer, the underground water formation in our area.
We do know more houses are being built; consequently more wells are drilled and reports from the Texas Water Development Board state the fact that pumping from the aquifer “far exceeds recharge.” So on this small ranch in Central Texas, our need for stock water from tanks, windmills, and springs continues, and our concern about climate change grows. Inflation and recreational value have driven up the price since my mother’s first purchase. What my father used to call “goat acres” in a faintly derisive tone, and where he used to hunt dove and quail, is now also valuable for deer hunting. We see few of these birds now, and like most other ranchers, are worrying about what is happening to them. Drought, disease, and the invasion of fire ants, since quail nest on the ground are the prevalent answers. On the other hand, after being hunted to extinction by original settlers by the 1890s, whitetail deer began to drift back to our country from the south. In 1967 my father happened on a deer bed, wild gasses and small plants pressed in an oval shape under one of the native pecan trees. Forty-five years later a seasonal lease can bring as much as $1500 per hunter. We never lease. Even in the midst of a record drought, we still have too many deer, hunted only by our family and friends and Frances and Floyd’s two sons. Perhaps this is a landowner’s unique form of selfishness, but it’s also a way of preventing wild shots from strangers’ guns hitting our cows and calves.
Like everyone else who owns land, we know we are only caretakers, but our ancient right to choose who will set foot on the ground remains. The old furious forms of admonition still hold: “Get out of our house! Get out of our yard! Get off our land!” We may forgive those who trespass against us, yet we state, “No trespassing.” Though the ranch is often dry, difficult to profit from, and expensive to maintain properly, it remains ours to look after until we pass the privilege to the next generation. And, unless there is a formidable climate change including far more rainfall, they will also inherit all the land’s limitations.
In 1970, “My Brother is a Cowboy” was my 7th published short story. My first one came out in a local magazine in 1962. I established working hours, from 9:00 a.m. till 12:00 or 1:00 p.m. when working on my M.A. degree in creative writing and tend to use those same hours now. I don’t find it any easier to get a story published now than I did then. Competition is fierce. There are many excellent story writers in the U.S. Persistence is a major virtue in this field.
I wrote on a typewriter before computers arrived, so had to learn how to use one, but I still write all first drafts by hand. There is some sort of magic happening between the hand and eye and the story. I don’t question this; it simply works best for me.
When I wrote “My Brother is a Cowboy” I was teaching part-time in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. The course I taught most often was called “The Modern Short Story” and began with Chekhov’s work, followed by Kafka's, Joyce's, Hemingway's, and Faulkner's plus various admirable women writers such as Porter, Welty, O’Conner, and a great many others. It was a course in comprehension, not creative writing. I learned a lot from all of them as well as from my students. I was also, with the help of my husband, raising three children, and learning how to be a rancher although we lived in Austin. In 1978, after ten years, I quit teaching in order to give more time to my own work.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve turned to writing essays, another form though kin to the short story. After all the short story evolved from the essay. I began writing at a homemade table in our bedroom, but I told myself I should be able to write anywhere including the quiet local library, rented rooms, the children’s dentist’s waiting room. Now I have an office above our garage.
Carolyn Osborn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.J. degree in 1955, and an M.A. in l959. She has won awards from P.E.N., the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Distinguished Prose Award from The Antioch Review (2003). In 2009, she received the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her stories have been included in The O. Henry Awards (Doubleday 1990) and Lone Star Literature (Norton, 2003), among numerous other anthologies. She is the author of two novels, Contrary People (Wings Press, 2012) and Uncertain Ground (Wings Press, 2009), and four collections of short stories, including A Horse of Another Color (University of Illinois Press, 1977), The Fields of Memory (Shearer Publishing, 1984), Warriors and Maidens (Texas Christian University Press, 1991) and Where We Are Now (Wings Press, 2014). The Book Club of Texas published an illustrated, specially bound edition of her story, “The Grands” (l990). Her most recent book is Durations, A Memoir and Personal Essays (Wings Press, 2017).
“Orange juice always scrapes / Night from the tongue, clears and loosens the throat. ”
BY GIANFRANCO PAGNUCCI - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1971
for William & his daughter, Lee Ann
That year’s offspring hung around,
sitting on her favorite branch
four feet above the nest,
calling out—
So sad a cry,
Kathy our young neighbor said.
Makes you feel sad. And every day
that sad cry!
It was just October
in the north lake country.
Sunny. Cool that day.
The rains for a while were gone.
Full fall colors falling fast.
Then, in early October
the immature hadn’t come back.
All night. In the morning one of the adults
sat silent above the nest. No calls out.
Even as I came up from the house
and started piling brush to haul away.
This was a fall ending. We had waited,
since early July,
but everything that year was late.
When Obama dropped off his daughter, Malia,
for college, he said how later, only later,
in the car on the way home did he sniffle.
Time goes so fast, he said.
The little things are what we remember.
Quiet talks after school, pushes on the tire swing …
My longtime friend Bill, a professional psychologist,
when he told me about his daughter’s
approaching marriage, choked.
Couldn’t say where she was moving,
touched me on the shoulder so I’d understand.
Leaving home is a fall ending.
That early October day, the bald eagle
sitting, all morning sitting so silent,
made me miss my daughter
building their place fifteen-hundred miles away
along the salt marshes of North Carolina.
I wrote the poem, “Signs,” many years ago, and when I recently read it so I could say something about it, I found that it felt unfamiliar to me as it might to a new reader. However, I recognized the style—the natural world woven around a human experience.
That’s my style of poem, I thought, a familiar process where the human experience is given in a short, tense anecdote, the natural world around it (here spring) doing its thing. “Signs” also uses vivid images, and the emotional tension is typically shown rather than told. Still, I found “Signs,” on the whole, a little obscure.
“Daughters,” a recent poem, I picked as the companion piece for its similar style and presentation to “Signs.” However, even on a first reading one feels much more comfortable with the poem, “Daughters.” The pace is quicker, smoother. The language is tighter, the images and short anecdotes are clearer and more packed with recognizable nuances. As a whole, “Daughters” is easier to understand. Not surprising, looking at both poems, I find that my concerns remain focused on trying to grasp how we fit in a real place and how our place fits into the larger natural world around us. Also, I’m glad to notice that I still use strong images to give an emotional awareness rather than an intellectual one. My dentist’s comment after reading “Daughters” is a typical response: It’s a beautiful poem. It made me tear-up, he e-mailed. Thanks for sharing.
photograph of gianfranco pagnucci by susan m. pagnucci
Gianfranco Pagnucci, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin – Platteville, has published storytelling books for teachers and students as well as seven volumes of poetry: Firstborn (2016), Breath of the Onion: Italian-American Anecdotes (2015), Tracks on Damp Sand (2014), a chapbook Imprints of Your Tires on Damp Sand (2012), Ancient Moves (1998), I Never Had a Pet (1992), and Out Harmsen’s Way (1991). He has also been the editor for two anthologies: New Roads Old Towns (1988) and Face the Poem (1979). His essays have appeared in such publications as The Christian Science Monitor and Commonweal. His poems have been published in many periodicals and anthologies, including News of the Universe, American Voices, and Best American Poetry 1999. He and Susan Pagnucci, a paper artist, live in the lake country of northern Wisconsin, where they work on handmade poetry books. Firstborn was selected “Outstanding Work of Poetry, 2017” by the Wisconsin Library Association.
“as I open my arms to pray. Dear Jesus, / Dear God: you meant me to fly.”
BY E. KRISTIN ANDERSON - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 2008
Life gave me lemons,
an even sparkle all over.
My secret trick?
Don't let the sun set.
An even sparkle all over,
no one can see it in the dark.
Don't let the sun set,
make a pretty impact.
No one can see it
in the dark.
In the night,
make a pretty impact.
I die.
In the night,
my secret trick?
I die.
Life gave me lemons.
This is a found poem. Source materials: Articles from Seventeen, August 2014. “Fashion Nails! by Jillian Ruffio, page 84; “Feeling Sombré?” by Amanda Elser, page 86; “Five Star Beauty,” page 88; “Easy Fall Updates! For You!” pages 91-94.
It seems I wrote "Amelia at Gardner Island"several versions of myself ago, and it's one of a few poems from my early days that I still feel close to. I wrote it after reading an article in Bust Magazine about Amelia Earhart and the theory that she ended up marooned on Gardner Island. I guess in a way it was my first response poem. I write in conversation with pop culture and current events a lot now, but in 2008 I was still very much finding my feet as a poet. Over the last ten or so years I've surprised myself by embracing both constraint and experimental methods and I know my voice keeps evolving but the work I'm creating now is both more focused and more exciting. I always have a few projects going and while it makes me an incredibly busy poet I love how this expands possibilities. If anything, in the time since I wrote "Amelia at Gardner Island" I've learned that there are more places to start poems than I ever imagined and most of them are worth checking out.
E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. A Connecticut College alumna with a B.A. in classical studies, Kristin’s work has appeared in many magazines including The Texas Review, The Pinch, Barrelhouse Online, TriQuarterly, and FreezeRay Poetry. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press) and is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked the night shift at The New Yorker. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on twitter at @ek_anderson.
“they’re guided / by the light of that beautiful thing,”
BY lEE UPTON - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 2010
“Night Walkers” first appeared in Visitations: Stories, Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, LSU Press, 2017.
The first thing I noticed about my much-married mother-in-law: she wore jewelry the way generals wear medals—as evidence of successful campaigns where her own blood wasn’t shed. And she smoked. More than once I got into coughing fits because of the trapped fumes coming off her sweater, whereupon she told me—absurdly, without irony—that my problem was undiagnosed chronic lung disease.
My mother-in-law possessed an enviable certainty, even though the lights in her eyes were often changing in a way that in anyone else would reveal vulnerability. The thing was, I liked her pretty much instantly, and was grateful for the way she came to believe in me. Upon hearing about my projected divorce from her son, her words proved to be a clear indication of our mutual incomprehension: “Be grateful you don’t have children.”
My husband used to want a child—at least he claimed to. And then he changed his mind. But the woman he left me for was pregnant with his child, and my husband didn’t disguise his excitement about that.
I’d seen pictures of the woman my husband was going to marry. Online. In the only full- length photograph I could find she looked elegant and thin and was wearing a dark fashionable sheath that would make any other woman look like a funeral director. It was impossible to imagine her pregnant. At first. Then I began picturing her as one of those women whose baby hardly makes a ripple.
After I found out the truth I lost my ability to read.
How did it happen? How could reading anything that stirred emotions at more than one level become something I avoided? Suddenly I couldn’t stomach fiction or poetry.
And who understood?
Not Beverly. She was the daughter of one of my mother-in-law’s friends and must have been recruited to help me. Perversely enough, she wanted me to join a book club.
We were the only two customers in a deli known for its shortbread, and I had the impression that she had followed me. “We’ve gone from novels to short stories,” Beverly said. “No one has the time.” She drew her jacket tight, the sleeve ends tucked into her fists. “We’re trying, you know, classical works.” She pressed her shoulders back, all the better to launch into a prepared speech. “Classic short stories. ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ Stuff like that. You’re probably thinking: why should people join book clubs? Can’t they read alone? Does everything require a group—a committee, a forced conversion? What is it about these book clubs? They died out, turned unfashionable, blah blah blah—and then you waited a few years and they were back.” She exhaled loudly before going on. “What do you have against book clubs? You wouldn’t be forced to read anything you don’t want to.”
“I just—I like the quiet moments I have with a book. I like my own misunderstandings of the book.”
“And we’re really together just to, you know—I don’t know. And sometimes in the deep past we used to work on puzzles.”
“Oh God no.”
“Then let’s not read.” Beverly broke her shortbread in half. “Really. Some of us don’t actually read the stories anyway. We could drink? The club’s really just social.”
“You only read short stories lately? And most of you don’t even read them? How could people not at least read a story?” I wanted to ask her: Why can’t I just be friends with you, Beverly? Why does a group have to be involved? It would be exhausting enough simply to be your friend, Beverly.
“I know,” she said, nodding her head violently. “It’s disappointing. But we wouldn’t entirely ruin reading for you given that some of us only pretend to read the stories. My stepfather—wait till you meet him. When we used to read novels he pretended to get upset about the death of Madame Bovary. Like he didn’t know it was coming. He taught high school French for twenty-five years. And the Champlain twins, they’re shameless. Well, actually, my stepfather’s shameless. He had them believing that the novel contains a chapter about the slow death of a horse. But like I said, we’re down to short stories. We’re maybe the world’s laziest book club.”
“You want me to join a book club whose members hate reading?”
Beverly was smiling with what appeared to be genuine affection. “So that’s why you won’t join! You’re afraid it will make you feel awkward. It won’t. You’ll feel superior. It gives us a lot of pleasure to pretend we know what we’re talking about when we obviously don’t. And we walk at night. We’re mentally lazy but not physically lazy—not much. It’s a mobile book club. We don’t just sit around in somebody’s living room and chat anymore. We walk. At night. And talk. Walking. At night. In the woods.”
This took some explaining. As I understood it, one member, Enid, who was in her seventies, turned the book club into a walking club. After her husband died she began roaming at night, obsessively. When Beverly couldn’t convince Enid to stay home, or at least to walk during the day, Beverly recruited escorts.
I said I would have to think about it—and then, without actually thinking, I said, “All right. Okay. I’ll join.”
I guess I capitulated because of a burst of hope and a memory. When I was in middle school a group of us girls sneaked out of a pajama party in our long nightgowns and wandered at night by a stream across from the golf course. We were like the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights—and ready to jump out of our skin, practically peeping with excitement over the romantic sight we thought we made. We never got caught, and that memory has always warmed me. I still like to imagine us girls sometimes and feel the thrill of it, how powerful we thought we were going to become, given time and the right circumstances and, for me, the right books. Then too, I thought of the story about Beverly’s friend Enid—how walking at night served some deep need of hers. And how she had found a way, eccentric as it was, to ease her sorrow. My other hope: I’d start reading again. Eventually. After all, I was joining a book club, even if the members were non-readers (which meant I didn’t have to be embarrassed about not reading). At least joining the club was a step toward reclaiming reading, which had been, after all, one of my great pleasures. And a sort of magnifying mirror, or maybe even a mirrorball running around the rim of my life.
The truth about my actual situation was simpler than I’ve been admitting. I couldn’t read anything that was remotely like literature because I couldn’t read without thinking of the woman my husband was going to marry—and her relationship to books. She was a writer. Of well- respected erotic literature. That is, of erotica considered innovative and revisionist and transgressive by academics. Academics: often the least discerning and most conventional of readers. Yes, her books were taught in English classes. To students. Out of self-disgust I tried reading one of her slim, deckle-edged, beautifully produced books. The foreword was by somebody whose name I recognized; his essays were in an anthology in one of my literary theory classes in college—a guy who looked like a pimply great-nephew of Harold Bloom. Though the book was written in English it sounded translated from some stiff archaic language spoken only by far-flung Greenlanders isolated on an icy spit of volcanic ash. Anyway, I suffered my way into the book until I couldn’t read any more of it, or anything else called literature. To top it off, this woman my husband was intent on marrying after the divorce was finalized, this woman was a librarian. Not just any sort. She worked, if you call it that, at a private library that was slowly being opened to the public through the graces of a foundation supposedly dedicated to preservation. Preservation of its own endowment through manipulation of the tax code. So this woman, this author of erotic literature—“literature” which had as much in common with real literature as “flight literature”—spent her days in a warren of beautiful books. She not only had my husband, she had my preferred life. Except I wouldn’t be writing erotic literature. Or at any rate, what I wrote wouldn’t be both delicate and raw in that bewildering way, with footnotes.
So books repelled me. Which was horrible. Once an English major, always an English major: that is, a person consumed by optimism who holds out hope that a solitary pursuit might someday accrue a public function—and so this person could be left alone to read. And now I couldn’t. I wanted to be comforted by books again. Or absorbed by them again. Or challenged by them again. I did not want to feel rage every time I looked at a book. And so the fact that members of Beverly’s club didn’t actually read filled me with contradictory emotions, including relief. Plus, I could hardly stand being alone anymore.
So began my membership.
There were seven of us: Beverly; her stepfather Simon; Jorge, recently divorced and wildly good-looking and attractively unaware of how attractive he was; the Champlain twins—brutal little women who seemed angry I was joining them; and Enid, the widow whose grief compelled her to walk at night.
We met behind Enid’s house, which was located in the development where I was temporarily living, and on that first night I kept turning back to search for my apartment. I’d left on two overhead lights to make the place seem less bleak when I returned.
The Champlain twins, in yoga pants and thick sneakers, clung to Enid, one on each side. It looked like tall, thin Enid was being kidnapped by a pair of elementary school cheerleaders. Before long the twins were panting as Enid, more energetic than I had expected, dragged them onward. Within minutes, Simon relieved the twins, took Enid’s arm, and managed to get her to slow her pace.
Before a half-hour was up I decided it was my turn to help Enid. I guided her on a trail lined by birches, our flashlights trained on the ground. I could smell the creek—a brisk scent of unripe grapes mixed with a faint fishiness.
That first night and almost every meeting afterwards no one talked about books except for Beverly’s stepfather and the twins. I could see why the twins resented me. Simon was their sole focus, and at first they must have imagined that I might feel the way they did about him. If Enid was walking off her grief, I suppose I was walking off other emotions, and the twins’ chatter with Simon was almost comforting but nothing I wanted in on.
“I thought we were doing ‘The Lottery,’” Simon was saying in a pedantic tone I knew instantly not to trust. “It seems to be about small town mores and the weight of the individual conscience.”
“So they killed a woman.”
“It’s kind of like a murder mystery, isn’t it?” The twins sounded exactly alike. Only the direction of their voices indicated that two people spoke.
“Many cultures engage in ritual sacrifice,” Simon said. “I believe that we do it now—to celebrities. We watch them age and destroy them. Elizabeth Taylor was hunted down like a prize boar.”
I turned to look back at the twins. In the moonlight their flesh was undershot with a blue-green wash. They couldn’t have been older than twenty-six or so, but something about them made me think of bile-filled elderly aunts in a play Tennessee Williams wouldn’t have had the heart to impose on an audience.
“We loved her, didn’t we?” one twin said to the other.
“God, yes. We watched Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf it must have been twenty times. She looked like hell. Absolute hell. Double-chinned, ratty-haired. Like an old hobo. Why don’t we read Virginia Woolf?”
“There’s an idea,” Simon said. “But I thought we were reading short stories, although maybe we could read The Turn of the Screw pretty soon. It’s practically a short story. A novella, anyway.”
“What about The Old Man and the Sea, Simon—wouldn’t you enjoy that? The fish dies. The sharks strip the fish. It’s all coming back. From ninth grade.”
“It’s about the courage to face reality,” Simon said. “And about performing to the best of your ability.”
“Shoot me now. Weren’t we talking about The Turn of the Screw? It’s shorter, maybe?”
Soon, a pattern was established. Although formerly Jorge had spent part of each night walking beside Enid, I volunteered to replace him. My instincts told me that Beverly thought I would be good company for Enid, although Enid didn’t talk, and so I couldn’t imagine how I could be good company for her. Gradually I figured out why Beverly wanted me to join. She was being kind to me, yes. But she was attracted to Jorge, and Simon was preoccupied with the twins, and if Beverly was going to have more time with Jorge someone else had to help Enid. By the third meeting I was Enid’s designated companion—which I liked. I also liked how each night offered pockets of warm air blown apart by cool gusts. I even liked the flare up of smells—skunk, principally, the closest cousin of gasoline fumes. There were always intriguing sounds around us—cracklings and rustlings made by what I assumed to be shy, invisible woodland creatures. And as for Beverly and Jorge—they were the young lovers who lit our way, for they started heading out ahead of us with their flashlights, farther ahead each night. And Simon began to make me laugh with his mock-pedantic tone, no more self-aware of his effect on the twins than if he’d been Bottom the Weaver.
On the fifth night of walking, Simon asked the twins, “Have you two read Wuthering Heights? It’s the story of a woman in love with a horse.”
I had hoped Wuthering Heights wouldn’t be brought up by Simon or the twins. Given that virtually every other classic novel came up—including Adam Bede—I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Unfortunately, one twin responded. “That’s Emily Brontë, right? Wuthering Heights? You know, you could make a fortune from an exercise program for people who are getting flabby, you know? Withering Heinies.”
Simon didn’t laugh, but I did—and felt kind of cheap for laughing. I first discovered Wuthering Heights at twelve, and my fate was set. Reading didn’t become an obsession for me until then. The passions, the sinister attachments, the sheer weirdness of that novel made actual life look small and predictable. I feared that nothing much would ever happen to me and that no one would love me with the sort of love that could ever be called wild. A love so fierce that it practically blasted your skin off, a love that was wuthering. For a while I actually wanted to call myself Catherine. If I couldn’t share Catherine’s temperament I could share her name.
The next meeting, even before the walk started, something must have happened between the twins. They were fuming. Simon, however, was oblivious and chattering on about James Joyce’s first horse.
Within a half hour one of the twins disappeared. The other twin beamed her flashlight into the trees as if expecting to see her sister perched on the branches. We called and waited. No answering voice, no signaling beam. The twin with us (the twins had names, but I hadn’t learned to tell them apart) ran back in the direction we had come. The rest of us followed, sweeping our flashlights through the shrubs. I was cynical and wondered if the disappearance of the twin was a ploy to capture Simon’s attention.
When the path split I walked alone toward the creek. The ground sank under my feet and my shoes began filling with water. Ahead of me something glimmered. I stopped, squinting.
Moonlight reflected off the water onto a crouched figure.
I couldn’t see anything clearly for long moments, as if I was stupefied, and then I made out what was ahead of me in the creek: a frog.
An immense frog.
The giant black eyes blinked and filmed over. The skin glimmered as if polished.
I might as well have been slapped across the face. The impact was that strong, that physical. The frog was a woman. And also a frog. A frog that was more of a frog than a woman. Or more of a woman than a frog. A frog woman/woman frog. With powerful haunches and immense eyes. Or was it two frogs? I closed my eyes and then looked again and saw one frog body—with long forelegs. I couldn’t get away fast enough and ran to find the others.
When I rejoined the group the lost twin was with her sister again, their arms around one another. Everything around me was strangely unreal—calm, normal, and I was speechless.
Everyone needs, at least once in life, a vision, and this was mine.
In trying to describe my reactions I find myself almost speechless again. I was stunned and overwhelmed. I was proud of the vision and terrified at the same time, for I’d broken through some membrane into another world. I was gratified by the vision and undone by it. My fingers tingled as if I’d touched an electric current.
It was Enid who sensed something was wrong. She broke her silence to tell me, “It just takes time.” She knew about my situation. Nevertheless, my first thought was that she was talking about her own grief.
We were nearly at Enid’s house when I heard the whispers. Behind me. Whispers and half-laughs. More whispers.
The twin who was speaking to her sister and Simon kept saying, “I couldn’t look away. It was the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed. I just couldn’t stop staring.”
“Was there a horse?”
I began to understand, in bits and pieces. Right there off the trail. In the woods. In the middle of the creek. For an art class probably.
Pornography. The private school over the ridge. Kids making a film.
I could hardly contain my disappointment.
Was that all I saw? Pornography? A configuration of bodies that my imagination made into a giant wide-eyed frog or one frog dividing into two?
To say I was deflated minimizes how I felt. I had been so anxious to enlarge my life that I turned the sight of a couple of bodies into a monster. With a burst of familiar rage I thought about the so-called erotic literature my husband’s girlfriend wrote and how it was watered down, spineless, less nimble pornography. Her novels were an expense of shame and a waste of experience. And then I thought a new thought. I thought about how my rival made pornography out of her life, whereas out of pornography I made frogs. Which seemed like a higher art.
Something happened later that night: I could read. I knew I could read because I wanted to read. In fact, I downloaded Wuthering Heights on my neglected Kindle as soon as I got back inside my apartment. Once again I longed to encounter the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw beating at the window, beating her cold frantic hands against the glass.
But when Catherine says “I am Heathcliff!” I didn’t respond the way I had whenever I reread the book in the past. No, this time I thought, “No. No, you’re not. And never will you be. You are being ridiculous, Cathy.” It occurred to me that I had never been remotely like Catherine Earnshaw. No, it was my husband, my romantic, obsessive soon-to-be former husband, who was Catherine Earnshaw.
The part of the novel that wasn’t ruined for me was the ending, when the lovers’ spirits are reunited to wander through the dark. I too knew the appeal of night walking and thought—and still think—that of all visions of eternity it’s one of the better ones.
Not long afterwards, our night walking ended. It was too cold to continue. Let’s not give Enid pneumonia, everyone said.
Simon took on contracting work that kept him busy and pretty much exhausted, especially given that the twins turned up at his place on too many nights. Beverly and Jorge began seeing one another without needing the club as an excuse. And Enid moved in with her oldest niece and turned to shopping obsessively online. The club would start up again, everyone promised, once spring returned and we could walk in the woods without freezing.
In mid-October a greeting card arrived from my mother-in-law: a turkey caught inside a pumpkin, doing double duty for two holidays.
I was tempted to tell my mother-in-law everything, except about my vision of the frog. Nor was I going to tell her about how I had stopped reading literature for a while. She might humor me about the frog, but she would never understand why I’d let the woman her son was going to marry get in the way of anything that gave me pleasure. I imagined, with some satisfaction, that if she read her future daughter-in-law’s erotica she’d be tempted to correct it.
When I got around to calling my soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law I didn’t know if I was ready to explain how anything was going for me. Then I didn’t have to.
As soon as she heard my voice she said, “You sound elated. Getting divorced, I tell you, especially when all the loose ends are taken care of, is the best thing ever. Those were the happiest times of my life.”
After we talked I wondered what it would be like if, when reconvened, the club became more like a genuine book club. Where people agreed to read at least one book. Some of us would read the book. And some of us would pretend to read the book. And some of us would only read our way through the first half of the book. And some of us would skip right to the ending.
The thing is: At least I made friends. Plus, I’d had a vision.
And, after all, as I have to admit, books are wonderful, but probably books aren’t what any book club is about.
“The Beautiful Thing” has lived other lives since it first appeared in The Roanoke Review and reappeared under another title (“Even If”) in my collection Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles. A truncated version of the poem, retitled as “The Beautiful,” is lettered on the door of the Easton Public Market in the town where I live in Pennsylvania. Recorded in English and in Spanish and French translations, the poem was used for a dance created by my colleague, the choreographer and writer Carrie Rohman, in the Rivers Merge Dance Festival. Most recently, the poem became part of a song cycle on the recording Autumn Winds by the gifted composer Kirk O’Riordan. I feel more gratitude than I can express to those who’ve read the poem and cared for it, and to the editors of The Roanoke Review who first chose the poem for publication.
The poem was written quickly, unlike so much of my work, and at a time when I felt I needed self-forgiveness. I felt, too, that I couldn’t be alone in that need.
“Night Walkers,” in spirit, is much different from “The Beautiful Thing,” although aspects of forgiveness and redemption appear in the story. In some ways, “Night Walkers” is a love song to books, book clubs, and friendship. Like a number of other stories in the collection in which it appears, Visitations, the story centers around the act of reading or, in this case, a character’s temporary withdrawal from reading. It was gratifying to pull several characters together and to give an about-to-be-ex-mother-in-law a few words of unlikely wisdom. Initially, I was considering another title for the story—"The World’s Laziest Book Club”—until I realized that the members weren’t lazy at all. They were all working hard to get their needs met. Plus, it was such undeniable fun to visualize giant frogs.
Lee Upton is the author of eleven books, including the new novella The Guide to the Flying Island. She has written five books of poetry, most recently Undid in the Land of Undone, and four books of literary criticism. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, and awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her poetry and short stories appear widely. She is a professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.
“The room is full of interruptions. They hold / each others’ hands, admire each others’ pearls.”
BY Patrick Ryan Frank - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 2001
There will be questions—what were the precautions
against collapse and noxious gasses; where
were the walkie-talkies and the spare headlamps;
why were we there, why did we go so deep?
And there’ll be vigils and widows, a man who’ll swear
he’s seen their ghosts or else an angel near
the access road. There will be services planned
and lawsuits settled, but none of that matters yet.
It’s only an hour into the second shift
and they’ve just started in the deepest shaft
when there’s a far-off murmur, then silence, then
a roar everywhere and the overhead lights
go black and someone shouts, “go back, go back,”
but back is gone somewhere behind the rock,
and the miners scream the way they might have said
that women scream. But far away, their women—
their wives and girlfriends, ex-wives—are quiet still,
working at the carpet store or daycare
or waking up from a nap, having dreamt
of nothing, not knowing the men below are throwing
themselves against the rubble, the rough loose rock,
and when the ventilators clog and cough
and the air is going and panic consumes itself
and there is just the dust and somehow time,
each of the miners hears a small bird sing,
even the ones who’d never recognize
a real canary, or know the English word
for “yellow” or what is happening to them now—
capillaries dilating, cascading cell death—
and though it’s dark and nothing is possible and none
of the men could say the word “canary” now,
they hear it singing somewhere near, there,
sharp and unlovely but it sings, it sings
because it cannot sleep, because it doesn’t see the cage,
it knows no better and there’s a weight in the throat,
because it has no choice, because, because.
I sometimes wish I were a nature poet. A landscape belongs to anybody who looks at it: it’ll say what the writer wants it to say; it’ll reflect what’s put in front of it. I write about people, and no person belongs to anyone. I can’t make my subjects mean anything but what they mean, and I don’t always know what that is.
When I wrote “A Roomful of Widows,” I was thinking about my own recently widowed mother. I’m never very comfortable writing about specific people; it can feel presumptuous, like answering a question meant for someone else. But I wanted to understand a version of that experience, how it might change the way the world looks, the way the world looks back. So I stepped away from the individual and into the abstracted archetype.
“Under, Beneath, Below” is a much more recent poem. I’m still interested in imagining an experience that I will almost definitely never have, hopefully with respect and empathy. Recently, though, I’ve been trying to trust the subject more, letting it go where it must, without trying to shape it into something clever or witty or “meaningful.” In many ways, this poem seems to share some of the materials of “A Roomful of Widows,” but it goes in a different direction, one that I didn’t quite expect.
Patrick Ryan Frank is the author of How the Losers Love What's Lost, which won the 2010 Intro Prize from Four Way Books; and The Opposite of People, to be published by Four Way Books in the fall of 2015. He was recently a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland. For more information, go to patrickryanfrank.com.
“Stern military boy / Watching a century begin”
BY STEPHANIE S. TOLAN - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, SPRING 1972
(Copyright 2001)
Part One, Militia
DAY ONE
Amber Landis pushed her blond hair behind her ears and wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was hot and muggy in the basement computer room. It was also dark. The only light was a crack of sunlight at one side of the narrow window up near the ceiling where the blind had curled at its edge. She hadn’t turned on the light because she wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Wait,” her father had said when he left the compound. “Look after your brother, do what Cassie says, and just wait. When news of the mission gets onto the nets, it’ll be full of lies. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”
“But what is the mission?” she had asked. He hadn’t answered. He’d only gone to join the group of camouflage-clad men milling around the truck that was revving its engine in front of the old barn.
There are things you’re better off not knowing, she’d heard all her life. She hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it! How would she ever be part of her father’s mission, how would she ever make a difference in the world, if she wasn’t even allowed to know what they were doing till after it was done?
Cassie, her stepmother, knew, and she was worried. She was doing her best not to show it, giving Amber and Kenny their stupid homeschool assignments as if everything was perfectly normal. But she had taken the radio into her room as soon as the men left, and Amber knew she listened to it early every morning and late every night. Amber couldn’t understand why nobody wanted her and Kenny to know what was going on even now, when it surely had to be over, or nearly over. It wasn’t as if they’d tell anybody. It wasn’t as if there was anybody to tell. Since the men had left, she had not seen one single person except Kenny and Cassie.
She’d thought about the possibility that this mission was so much more dangerous than usual that something bad—really bad—might happen. If that was true, Cassie might be trying to protect them from finding out. Amber couldn’t see what difference it would make when or how they found out about it if the news was that bad.
The mission was different from anything the Free Mountain Militia had ever done before. Different and very, very big. That she knew. For weeks the air had been charged with a new energy as the men had prepared for it. There had never been so much coming and going from the compound, lots of it at night.
It was the fifth day since the men had driven away in the truck, her father following in his black Honda. Five long, hot days. No mission had every taken that long. Amber was tired of wondering, tired of waiting, and even more tired of trying to look after Kenny. Her ten-year-old brother insisted he was a soldier, a soldier who didn’t need looking after. Especially not by a sister only two years older than he was. “You’re just a girl,” he’s sneered that very morning when she reminded him he wasn’t allowed to go out in the canoe without a life jacket. “You can’t tell me what to do.” So he’d gone without the life jacket. If he drowned, it wouldn’t be her fault.
She listened at the door for a moment, then clicked the lock on the doorknob and switched on the computer. When it had run through its wake-up pattern, she sat down and took herself out onto the nets. And found immediately the lies her father had warned her about:
>Path:
>Laurel.grt.com!news.amherst.edu!news.mtholyoke.
>edu!111-winkenllnl.gov!agate!bass!clarinews
>From: clarinews@clarinet.com (AP)
>Message-ID: militiaUR237_eb6@clarinet.com
>
>PLATTSURGH, NY (AP) No leads have been
>reported in the most devastating terrorist attack ever
>launched against American citizens in their own
>country, bigger even than the bombing of the federal
>building in Oklahoma City. The death toll from the
>bombing of two overpasses on Interstate 87, the
>highway known locally as the Northway, has risen to
>183 with the confirmation that two buses carrying
>Canadian tourists home from a visit to DisneyWorld
>were among the vehicles lost in the bomb blasts and
>the ensuing explosion of a gasoline tanker truck.
>According to sources, identification of bodies will not
>be completed for some time, but both buses were
>carrying 45 passengers.
> The Free Mountain Militia, an anarchist fringe
>group never before suspected of terrorism, has taken
>credit for the bombing. Local police have been joined
>by the FBI, the National Guard, and large numbers
>of citizen volunteers in an all-out search of the area
>surrounding the highway south to Lake George and
>north to the Canadian border, where the RCMP is
>conducting its own search.
> United States President Daniel Harris and
>Canadian Prime Minister Jacques Martier both arrived
>this morning to survey the scene of the devastation and
>are assuring their citizens that the perpetrators of
>this atrocity will be found and dealt with to the
>fullest extent of the law.
> In an unrelated story, an eight-year-old African-
>American boy suffering from autism has disappeared
>from Laurel Mountain, a private mental institution
>near the site of the bomb blast, and is lost in the
>extensive Adirondack wilderness where the search
>for the terrorists is being conducted. A separate
>search has not been initiated for the boy; searchers
>have been asked to keep an eye out for him as they
>go. “We’re determined to cover every square inch of
>forest,” National Guard Officer Lester Cunningham
>has said. “There’s no way we’ll miss that little boy in
>the process.”
Amber read the piece again. Lies, her father had said. Of course. The government always lied, and the media were controlled by the government. She knew that. She’d always known it. But which were the lies?
The line of five men in camouflage fatigues was moving quickly through the forest, guided upward on the mountain not by a trail but by compass reckoning. In spite of the dense shade under the trees, the heat was oppressive, and they were soaked with sweat. No one spoke as they moved, one or another taking a quick drink from a canteen now and again. It was well past noon, and they’d been on the move since dawn, stopping only for small rest breaks and to listen briefly to a battery operated radio.
Suddenly the man in the lead, dark hair curling out from beneath his camouflage cap, stopped, and the man behind him nearly ran up his back. Behind them, the others came to a ragged stop, looking at one another questioningly. “What’s up?” the second man whispered.
The other didn’t answer. He merely pointed. A huge moss-covered tree was lying at an angle, its upper branches caught among other trees, a tangle of roots nearly head high reaching into the air from a mound of moss and ferns. Next to the roots, spaced next to each other as neatly as if they’d been placed beside a bed before retiring, stood a small pair of ragged navy blue sneakers. The dark-haired man, a finger to his lips, motioned to the others to fan out around the tree. They did so, indicating with no more than raised eyebrows and shrugs their question about what they were doing.
The leader bent to peer under the trunk, where a mass of fir branches stuck out, their tips at odd angles almost as if they’d been woven together. He took hold of one branch, moved it slightly so that the others moved as well, and then waited. After a moment he gave a gentle tug, again moving the tangle of branches and pulling the one he was holding a few inches toward him so that a small opening appeared behind it. He looked through the opening and then stood up, nodding.
“What?” the man next to him mouthed.
“What are the odds?” the dark-haired man said, his voice at normal volume now. “A few yards either way, and we’d have missed him.”
“Missed who?”
“That black kid who ran away from the mental hospital. The one they’ve been talking about on the news. Not that it does him or us any good. He’s dead. Must’ve fixed himself a bed here last night. Can’t imagine what killed him; it wasn’t cold.” The man began pulling branches out from under the tree trunk and gestured for help. After a few moments they could all see what he had seen. A small barefoot boy, a metal bracelet around one ankle, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, lay curled in a fetal position, one dark fist clutched tightly beneath his chin, the other over his head as if to protect himself from a possible blow.
“Leave him,” a blond man with a flat, smooth face said, kicking at the pile of branches they had pulled free. “Dump those shoes in there with him, and put the branches back. We don’t need nobody else finding him and seeing that somebody besides the kid was here. This whole place’ll be crawling with feds and soldiers soon enough.”
The dark-haired man stood for a moment, looking down at the tiny figure, frowning. “Too bad,” he said. “We could’ve taken him along. Kept him as a hostage. A trade. You never know what sort of bargaining chip you might need.” He took his cap off and ran a hand through the hair that was stuck to his neck with sweat. “I have an idea. Get a picture of him, Ham. Nobody would know he isn’t just sleeping. He looked peaceful enough.”
The man he’d spoken to, heavyset and crew-cut, nodded and pulled open a side pocket on his pack to take out a 35-mm camera. He stepped closer and bent to get a good shot in the shadows. When the flash went off, the boy stirred. The movement wasn’t large, and the child didn’t open his eyes. But he’d moved. They’d all seen it.
The leader leaned in and laid a finger against the boy’s throat. “He’s got a pulse. Very slow, but steady.”
“So?” the flat-faced man said. “We can’t drag some little kid back with us; we got too far to go.”
“Of course we can, Virgil,” the dark-haired man said. He put his cap back on and reached down to pull the boy from his nest. The child made no sound, but his body uncurled as he was dragged free of his hiding place. The arm he’d had over his head moved to join the other, its fist still clutched tightly under his chin. “Wake up, kid!” the man said, and tried to stand the boy on his legs. He might as well have tried to stand a rag doll. “Well, give me a hand with him somebody!”
The man named Ham reached to help, taking the boy under the arms and slinging him against his shoulder as the other man stood, brushing the leaves and dirt from his knees.
“I’m tellin’ you, Mack, we should leave him,” the blond man said. “There’s something wrong with him. He was in a loony bin, after all. You don’t know what kind of trouble he could be. Besides, he’s a black kid!”
The leader turned on him. “You better not let Landis hear you sounding like a racist. He’d have you outa the Cadre, out of the Militia for that matter, before you could blink.”
The blond man kicked at a rock, his face flushing pink. “Ah, who said anything racist, for cripe sake? I just said he was black. He is black!”
“Yeah, well the operative word here is kid. People want lost kids back. As long as he’s alive and tradable, he could come in handy. We’re taking him.” He looked from one to the other of the rest of the men. “Anybody else have objections?”
The others shook their heads.
“Okay, then. Let’s get going. Somebody get his shoes.”
When they’d rearranged their packs, they went on, moving as steadily and swiftly as before. There was no sound from the child and no movement. He had not opened his eyes. As he was carried roughly, slung over ham’s shoulder, he kept one hand, fist tightly closed, tucked under his chin.
From the top of a white pine next to the fallen tree, a raven lifted itself silently into the air and flew over the men as they moved.
When Elijah felt himself pulled from his nest beneath the tree, rough hands dragging him into a world of sunlight and the roar that was and was not sound, the roar of violence he had been running from when he left Laurel Mountain, filled his head again, louder than he’d ever heard it. He kept his eyes tightly shut, let himself go limp. Mountain, he thought, trying to retreat into the consciousness of the great stone presence. Men’s voices intruded, but he blocked them out. Mountain! Silence!
He felt himself lifted and flung across the hard shoulder of a man whose huge hand clasped his legs as they began moving. Elijah’s head jolted with every step the man took. Tree branches brushed at his back. Clutching his marble tightly, Elijah reached with his mind, sending it out into the mountain until he could hear nothing, feel nothing. Concentrating with fierce intensity Elijah Raymond turned himself to stone.
Amber heard the truck engine laboring up the long hill and the wheels scattering gravel. “It’s them!” she yelled. “They’re back!” She leaped off the porch steps and ran to stand in front of the barn, where she could see the truck the moment it made the last turn out from under the trees. She put a hand up to shade her eyes against the sun, still hot and bright, which was resting on the edge of Bald Hill. It sounded like only the truck coming, no car behind, but her father would be in it, surely. He had to be.
The screen door behind her banged, and Kenny came out onto the porch, followed by Cassie, wiping her hands on a dish towel, her dark face impassive, her eyes fixed intently on the gravel road. Kenny, a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, was stuffing another into his mouth. Amber hadn’t been able to eat the beans and tomatoes and hamburgers they’d had for dinner, and the cookies hadn’t tempted her. Her mind had been too full of the story she had read on the nets, the story she wasn’t supposed to know about. Cassie had asked her to string the beans for dinner, and she’d watched Cassie shape the hamburgers, slapping the meat with a kind of tense ferocity. Her stepmother had been even more silent than usual, distant and preoccupied as if her mind too was on a story that was part truth, part media lies.
At the table, while Kenny groused about not having caught any fish, Amber had sat, pushing her food around her plate and worrying. Everybody knew Charles Landis headed the Free Mountain Militia. Were the cops and the feds looking for him now? Had they found him already? And if not, would they come here? And if they did come, what would happen then?
The truck appeared at last, its gray and green and brown camouflage tinged with gold as the sun began to slip behind the hill. Ham LaFontaine was driving, she saw, his beefy, sunburned arm resting on the open window frame, his cap pulled low on his forehead. Behind him, on the passenger side, she could just make out her father’s upright figure. Amber felt the air rush out of her as if she’d been holding her breath since she first heard the truck. Her father was back. Not hurt and not caught. The truck stopped with a grinding of brakes only a foot or so from where Amber stood, its back wheels skidding slightly sideways.
“Scared ya!” Ham said and spit tobacco juice out the window near her feet.
“Didn’t see me flinch!” she said.
He shook his head and grinned, his teeth stained with dark juice. “Nah, you’re pretty good.”
Charles Landis opened the truck’s other door and stepped out. When he left he’d been wearing a business suit, but now he was dressed like the other men in camouflage. Amber did her best to keep her expression as impassive as Cassie’s, as if this was just an ordinary homecoming. Her father didn’t know she knew what they’d been doing or how serious it was.
Her father nodded at the three of them and then turned back to the truck, to get something out of the cab.
The other men were climbing down from the back of the truck now. Mack Sturdivant and Virgil Conway, followed by Duane Bruder and the O’Donnell brothers. She didn’t know how many men had been involved in the mission altogether, but these were the Cadre, the men her father trusted. Most of all, he trusted Mack, his second-in-command, who’d had guerrilla training in Central America and the Middle East. Mack, strategist and explosive expert, would have led the mission.
“Cassie!” her father called. “Is that old mattress still down in the basement?”
“Sure. What do you want it for?”
“Duane and Virgil, you boys go down and bring it up to the toolshed. Cassie, dig up a sleeping bag and bring it out here.” The three people who’d been given their orders moved hurriedly to carry them out. Charles Landis backed around the open door of the truck, and Amber saw what he’d been retrieving. It was a kid, a black kid, asleep or unconscious, as far as she could tell. His head hung down, and his legs and one arm dangled limply in her father’ arms. Was it somebody hurt in the bombing? Or was it maybe the kid the news story had talked about? The kid who’d escaped from the mental institution?
Her father turned to her, then, blue eyes vibrant in his tanned, lined face. “Amber, you go inside and fix this kid a sandwich or something. He hasn’t eaten in who knows how long.”
She couldn’t ask if it was the crazy kid, of course. She wasn’t supposed to know about him.
Charles Landis took the boy to the toolshed that leaned at an odd angle against the barn, and kicked open the door. “Kenny, go find me a padlock.”
“Yes, sir!” Kenny said, and pushed the other cookie into his mouth as he headed into the house.
“Amber, what’re you waiting for? Get this kid some food!”
As Amber turned to go, a huge bird drifted down and landed on the roof of the barn. It seemed to come out of nowhere, like a shadow appearing as the sun sank lower in the sky. Inky black, it looked like a crow, but was bigger. Much bigger. It ruffled its wings a couple of times and then stood, looking down, its attention fixed on her father as he stepped into the shed with the boy in his arms. It opened and shut its heavy black beak but made no sound. Amber rubbed at the back of her neck, where she’d felt a sudden chill. And then went inside to get something for the kid to eat.
Amber sat cross-legged on the floor of the shed next to the stained mattress that took up most of the available floor space. The plate she had brought out with its peanut butter and jelly sandwich tilted slightly where one side rested on the edge of the tattered sleeping bag and the other on the mattress itself. Droplets of water had run down the can of cold soda and made a little puddle on the floor. The boy had not moved since she set the can and plate down for him and told him she’d brought him supper.
She wanted to be in the house right now. Her father might be telling Cassie about the mission, explaining what had really happened, what they had done, what they were going to do now. Kenny was in there. He hadn’t been sent out on some stupid errand to make this kid eat. Maybe she could just leave the food. It wasn’t her fault if he didn’t have the sense to wake up and eat it. Her father couldn’t very well blame her for what some crazy kid did or didn’t do. But as much as she wanted to go back to the house, she didn’t get up. For a reason she couldn’t explain to herself, she just sat there, looking at the kid.
He was lying on his side on top of the open sleeping bag, his eyes closed, both clenched fists beneath his chin and his knees pulled up almost far enough to meet those tight fists. His chest moved only slightly as he breathed. The light from the fluorescent camping lantern shone on his dark skin and hair, on his striped shirt and the jeans with the frayed hems, and glinted off the metal bracelet lying on the floor next to the mattress. It had been around the boy’s ankle before her father had cut it off with tin snips. The thing, her father said, that was meant to keep kids at the hospital from running away. This one hadn’t worked.
It was still warm in the shed, warmer than it was outside, now that the sun had gone down and the twilight mountain chill had begun, “If you don’t eat, you’ll starve, you know,” she said to the unmoving figure.
As she said it, a memory suddenly rose in her mind. Baby rabbits. She’d found them, two of them, in a shallow, fur-lined hole in the ground in the backyard of one of the apartments they’d had in Plattsburgh. It was an old, old memory, but so clear now that Amber felt almost as if she’d slipped back in time, as if she was six years old again, picking the rabbits up from their nest. They had been tiny, smaller than her fist, their eyes not open yet. She could almost feel again their hearts beating fast under her fingers, their tiny ears like velvet against her cheek when she held them close.
She had put them in a shoe box lined with one of Kenny’s old frayed diapers, taken it inside, and hidden it under her bed. She had wanted the rabbits to be hers. Only hers. She didn’t want Kenny even to know about them. She wouldn’t have trusted Kenny with them. Not since the bad time. That was when he’d started being mean. Little as he was, his meanness had begun to scare her sometimes.
She’d gone to the refrigerator and gotten some lettuce to feed them. She wanted to give them a carrot—she knew rabbits ate carrots—but there weren’t any in the vegetable drawer. So she made do with lettuce, which she put into the shoe box along with a saucerful of water for them to drink.
But they hadn’t eaten the lettuce. The next morning she couldn’t even tell if they had drunk any of the water, because it was all spilled. The rabbits were curled up in one corner of the box, their fur dark and wet.
All that day, whenever she could get away from Kenny and the baby-sitter, she had tried to get the rabbits to eat the lettuce. She tore it into little pieces that didn’t look too big for their tiny mouths. But they wouldn’t open their mouths any more than they would open their eyes. Finally, she tried forcing their mouths open, forcing the lettuce in, all the time telling them, “Chew, bunnies, chew it up. You got to eat!” She had felt like crying about their not eating.
She hadn’t though. It was the first summer after the bad time, the summer her father had started being away all the time, leaving them with people they didn’t know. She had cried about it the first time, and her father had told her about the war he was fighting. He’d made her and Kenny promise to be his very best soldiers. Soldiers, he told them, didn’t cry. Not ever.
The next morning she’d waited till Kenny had gotten up to go to the bathroom before she pulled the shoe box out from under the bed. The baby rabbits were dead. They were cold and stiff, their still-wet fur all matted and clumped. She didn’t cry then either. She had wanted to bury them in the backyard, but she couldn’t remember now what had happened to them. The memory seemed to end there: pulling the box out, finding them dead. There were lots of things she didn’t remember from that summer.
Amber shook herself a little, bringing herself back to the present, to the warm shed and the crazy little boy. She reached out one finger and gingerly poked him. Elijah, her father had said his name was. It was just about all he had said about him. Nothing about a search for him. But then he hadn’t talked about the other search yet either or about the bombing.
“Elijah,” she said now, and shook the boy a little. There was no response. “Elijah. Wake up. You have to eat something!”
Amber couldn’t remember the word the news bulletin had used, the kind of crazy he was. She wondered if he was dangerous in some way. But he didn’t look dangerous. No more dangerous than the rabbits. “Elijah!” she said again, louder. She thought she saw his eyelids flutter a little at the sound of his name. “You gotta eat!”
Elijah lay very still, his eyes closed. A pain in his stomach reminded him that he was hungry, more than hungry. It was hunger that had melted his intention to keep himself stone. He did not know where he was. But wherever he was, it was quiet. The roar of violence had faded. The air here was hot and still. He smelled the musty smell of the sleeping bag beneath his cheek and felt a trickle of sweat sliding down his neck.
A tiny sound, like a breath, told him he was not alone. Unmoving, he sensed outward. Whoever was here did not seem to be a threat. But that didn’t make him safe, he knew. Whoever was here was related in some way to the others, the men with big hands and hard shoulders who brought the roar of violence and the white-haired man with the wolf tattoo and the icy cold eyes.
“Elijah.” The voice was a girl’s voice, like honey on burned toast. Soft and sweet over something crisped with fire. “You gotta eat!”
He did his best to ignore the voice, but his stomach responded on its own, rumbling again so that he knew the person who had spoken must have heard. He could smell the unmistakable scent of peanut butter now and longed to respond. Instead he squeezed his eyes more tightly.
He felt the marble in his hand, imagined the look of it, the blue and white swirl in its center like the earth, as his great-grandmother had said when she gave it to him. “We’re all in that little ball together,” she had told him, “looking up and out at the hand of God.” He wanted to take himself into that blue and white center. But he couldn’t keep the image of the marble clear in his mind. It blinked out, and in its place came another. It was a cardboard box, with a wet, frayed white cloth folded inside. Huddled in the corner were a pair of baby rabbits. Dead.
With that image came an overpowering sense of loss he knew all too well. It was like his own. Like the loss of everyone who had ever mattered in his life. No!
“You gotta eat!” The voice came again. He opened his eyes and found himself looking into the face of a girl with long, straight blond hair. He closed his eyes again, gripping the marble in his right hand more tightly, trying to think his way into it, or into the mountain, anywhere away from this girl.
“I brought you some supper.”
It was too late. The rabbits had been her rabbits, he knew. But the loss was deeper than any rabbit babies, as deep in her as in himself. A connection had been made between them. Whether he wanted it or not made no difference.
“You gotta eat!” she said.
After writing poetry throughout my college years and my twenties, while I was pregnant with my son and therefore not acting in the theatre company where we lived, I decided to try writing a novel for kids (or more specifically for the kid-reader I’d been—since kids read books with such passion).
That first novel was dubbed “too old-fashioned” by the editor I sent it to, so I began reading recently published kids’ books. This was in what I call the “golden age” of books for young readers—e.g. Harriet the Spy, Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting. Aware now that one could be a serious writer and write for young readers, I wrote Grandpa—and Me, which found an editor, a publisher and an agent for me. I’d always written plays as well as poetry, but when novels seriously entered my life I quit writing poetry altogether. The necessary long term focus on storyline--character, setting, plot—changed the way I encountered the world.
I went on writing plays, collaborating with Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia. At this point I’ve published 30 books, most for young or intermediate readers (only one picture book) and young adults, and a few nonfiction books for adults. One of my intermediate books, Surviving the Applewhites, won the Newbery Honor in 2003. The novel excerpt here is from Flight of the Raven, the second book in what will be a trilogy, that began with Welcome to the Ark. I'm currently at work on Within the Dark, the third one.
Stephanie S. Tolan has published poetry, plays, nonfiction, and thirty books, most of them fiction for children and young adults. Her novels have won various honors and awards, including the Newbery Honor for her 2003 New York Times best-selling novel Surviving the Applewhites, and the Christopher Award for her 2006 novel, Listen! The Applewhite family appears again in Applewhites at Wits End (2013) and Applewhites Coast to Coast written in collaboration with her son, R.J. Tolan, in 2017.. After co-authoring Guiding the Gifted Child in 1982, Tolan became a consultant on the needs of unusually bright children. Her novel Welcome to the Ark (first book of a trilogy, the second of which is Flight of the Raven and the third in progress) concerns four profoundly gifted young people finding a mission for themselves in a violent and troubling world. 2016 saw the publication of a collection of her essays about the needs of the gifted, Out of Sync, Essays on Giftedness, and her blog about the subject is www.welcometothedeepend.com.
“that was my gift to her, my beauty / blossoming through hers.”
BY MICHELE RUBY - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, SPRING 2006
The evening of the audition found Cindy with hair like shredded wheat and a stray pimple. She knew she could handle the juicy role of the manipulative step-sister, but she entered the theatre with a sense of futility. She never expected ingénue roles, but she was always disappointed not to get cast in roles where appearance shouldn’t have been important. No one could reach the age of nineteen looking as she did without lugging self-awareness with her every step of the way. Directors didn’t cast ugly girls in anything but ugly girl roles—the old lady, the comic best friend. Cindy wanted to stretch. She could certainly act—for about a decade, she’d been acting as if her appearance were just another fact. It had given her depth if nothing else. She was a subtle and moving actor, losing herself readily in a role, growing into it more deeply as she worked and played with the possibilities. Her theatre teachers had told her this, or some version of it. None of them had cast her, however, as anything but wallpaper. Third girl from the left. What she needed was a really nearsighted director. Or one with vision.
She had hoped college would offer her a more varied theatre experience than high school had. Her best friend had offered, “You’re unique, memorable. Be glad you’re not a carbon copy of everyone else.” But so far, college had been a revival of high school, with better production values.
It had taken Cindy more than a semester to summon the nerve to audition. She wasn’t familiar with this director, Carter Lessing, a visiting professor from somewhere else, perhaps somewhere the asymmetry of Cindy’s face would be seen as an interesting bearer of character, her gawky height a contribution to the dynamics of a stage picture. Hope might not spring eternal but it could certainly tap dance when called upon to do so. It was about time something went right. The week so far had offered the phone call from home—Did you go to any socials? Cindy, at least try—and a C on the Western Civ exam she’d practiced her audition piece instead of studying for. And her boss at the dining hall had shifted her from the cafeteria line to clean-up duty. A juicy role would be some compensation.
The usual assortment of actors with good bones waited in the lobby of Cassell Hall, filling out audition cards or warming up with a series of vocal or facial calisthenics. Cindy was momentarily comforted—nobody looked lovely doing facial exercises. The lobby resembled a scene in an asylum.
Soon the doors to the theatre creaked open theatrically, and the hopeful actors entered and settled themselves in the plush maroon seats, sprinkling themselves in twos and threes throughout the house. Cindy sat alone and concentrated on breathing. Each inhaled breath straightened her nose as it traveled up; each exhalation flushed the imperfections from her skin. Auditions were especially difficult because there was so little time to build a character, so first impressions tended to override subtlety. An audition was like a blind date with the director; Cindy could sense in a director the initial unease, the quick and incorrect assessment, the reluctance to finish out the evening.
A licorice whip of a man, very dark and impossibly thin, started making announcements: Call him Carter. Take direction without comment. Do not under any circumstances bore him. First there would be some improvisation so he could see how they moved, how they interacted with each other. Then cold readings from the script. He would not be seeing any prepared monologues; he had his own agenda for them.
He peered over his angular red glasses at the supplicants, and began grouping the actors into trios. The third group contained a bouncy brunette from Cindy’s psychology class, a boy with hair so yellow and spiky, it seemed to have been colored in by a Crayola in the grip of a three-year old, and Cindy. They stared longingly at their prepared monologues before folding them up and stuffing them in backpack or pocket. Then they exchanged heys and waited for instructions. The brunette had a nervous habit of tilting, then righting, her head, and the light slid along her shiny hair every time. The spiked blond had a pointedly cool swagger to match his pointedly cool hair. Both were clad in actor’s armor – black tee shirts and jeans. Black made Cindy’s pale, distressed complexion look post-mortem, so she was wearing an aqua sweater. Also, she didn’t want to look like scene-change crew; it’d be too easy to offer her a position backstage if she were already costumed for it.
“Anybody nervous?” The director raised his eyebrows. “You should be. Embrace that tension. Use it. Show me something with some energy. Here’s what I want. Improv this scene: two of you compete for the attention of the third. Make the third person choose you. Seduce him or her. No dialog in this exercise—I want you to communicate with your face and body. Don’t discuss it beforehand; just do it.” Cindy could feel her face lose its pallor and go red. Did everything always have to be about attraction? The role she coveted had nothing to do with seduction. This was going to be more humiliating than usual. Cindy struggled with the urge to bolt.
The first group climbed the stairs at the far side of the ancient stage, the boys both taking the steps two at a time while the girl tested each step with a platform shoe. The group found its footing in a stereotypical beach scene from a 50s movie, the boys flexing their muscles and jostling each other for position. The girl kicked off her shoes and amused herself by reading a magazine and ignoring the boys until one of them stumbled over her outstretched legs. The other one hastened to help her and in that way, claimed her. Ken and Barbie and Ken at the beach.
In the next group, a pretty woman with corn-rows and dimples pulled a tall boy into a cha-cha, then suddenly walked stage right, crooking her finger at him to follow. Seizing the opportunity, the other group member, a muscular guy with a short beard, winked at the tall boy, who clasped him around the shoulder and walked off stage left with him. More interesting than Barbie and Ken. Not interesting enough to distract Cindy from her panic.
Cindy was not embracing her tension. It was embracing her. Right now it had her in a headlock and was squeezing. Her throat was closing up; only a wisp of air slid through, and the room began to get blotchy. Who would swoon? Someone in a corset at a ball: Why, Harley Fuller, Ah’d adore a sip of lemonade; Ah’m feelin so faint. Someone who hadn’t eaten … someone escaping German soldiers: Go on without me, Rachel; I’d just slow you down. Someone trying to hide an illness: Please don’t tell Richard until after the wedding. Her detour into the possibilities suggested by fainting returned Cindy to a sort of numb calm.
Then her group was called: “Lucinda Rice, Amber Strauss, Jake Underhill.” The journey up the steps to the stage offered Cindy a panoply of scenarios, of which walking the plank was the most persistent, although sleepwalking into oncoming traffic also presented narrative possibilities. At long last, her relentless steps carried her to center stage, where the other two group members waited. Amber began a shtick borrowed from a B-movie, finger-walking up Jake’s chest, touching her finger to his lips and then her own. Jake smiled down at her and threaded his fingers through her shiny hair. Cindy stared at them, paralyzed. This was easy for them. Jake and Amber had done this before, if not with each other, then with facsimiles. Other sweet brunettes had plied Jake with promises; other beefcake men had scooped Amber up like so much ice cream. Cindy’s life had never been, would never be like this, not even on stage.
No words, just action. Carter Lessing’s command.
Cindy strode over to the pair and slapped Jake’s cheek. The flat smack echoed in the cavernous room. The sting felt so good to her hand that she slapped Amber as well. Then she stalked off into the shocked silence, her gait slow and elegant. In the bathroom, she threw up.
As she assessed her blotchy face in the bathroom mirror, someone knocked on the door. “Lucinda? It’s Carlos. I’m the assistant director. Come on out.”
No answer.
“Then may I come in?”
Cindy splashed some water on her face and pushed the door open a half inch. Then a full inch. Then she swung it open just wide enough for Carlos to slip through.
“I thought you had guts. Lots of energy. Wonderful to watch. And Carter liked what little he saw.”
“That wasn’t guts. That wasn’t acting. That was me losing it in front of all those people. Amber and What’s-his-name are probably going to have me arrested for assault.” She started laughing. “I’ll get a reputation for slap-shtick.”
“You should do that more often. Smile, I mean. Great smile. Anyway, you made the scene interesting, and it was a hell of an exit. Come back, finish the audition.”
“How can I face them now?”
“That’s why they call it acting, honey. That’s why they call it acting.”
Cindy took a deep breath, hit a regal pose, and swept back into the auditorium.
When I wrote “Rapunzel, Rapunzel” I was teaching a class in fairy tales for Bellarmine University’s interdisciplinary program, and I was fascinated by the way fairy tales explore maternal archetypes—the good mother, the evil stepmother, and the fairy godmother or other supernatural protector—and the way these roles can overlap or intertwine. In some versions of the Rapunzel tale, the witch is more like a frustrated mother than an evil being, and I wanted to explore that notion in the poem.
The course I taught spent a lot of time on Cinderella, and I became interested in modern retellings in the realm of realism, in which the supernatural element—the agent of transformation for the Cinderella character—was replaced, often by art, especially painting. (Look at the importance of painting in Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and at the role of Leonardo Da Vinci as a sort of fairy godmother figure in the Drew Barrymore movie Ever After.) At about that same time, I switched from poetry to fiction in my MFA program at Spalding University, and I began writing short stories, many of them inspired by fairy tales. “Third Girl from the Left” is based loosely on the Cinderella arc, and, because I have some experience as an actress, it uses theatre rather than painting as the transformative agent. My exploration of this theme led to the creation of a novel, Curtain Rising, in which a version of this story is a chapter. The novel is currently seeking a champion. “Third Girl from the Left” is also part of a collection of stories about theatre and theatre people.
Michele Ruby is a writer of novels, short stories, poems and short plays. Her work has been featured in print and online, in local, regional and national publications. Michele is a retired instructor of fiction writing at Bellarmine University, and a founding member of the Grasmere Writers in Louisville, Kentucky. She also serves as a fiction editor for Best New Writing. When she's not writing, Michele is tap dancing, making jewelry, or—as a proud Kentuckian—making bourbon candy. She has theatre experience as a dancer, actor, and director, as well. She has taught various manifestations of college English classes over the years, including not only the dreaded freshman comp and intro to lit but also juicy courses in fairy tales, mythology, linguistics, and fiction writing. Michele lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband, daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren.
“Calley wished that her mother were still alive so that they could get dressed up together and get on the train and ride away somewhere. Maybe St. Louis.”
BY KURT RHEINHEIMER - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 1981
ROANOKE, VA—Bimini Padgett, 28, was arrested Tuesday morning at 9:20 just inside the silver metal gating protecting the GAP store at the Honeymilk Mall, located at the northeastern edge of the city. The suspect was awakened as she slept on the store floor and offered no resistance as a security guard, under repeated direction from a city police officer, unlocked the gate. There was no immediate explanation why the GAP store was apparently still closed when the mall has a strict 9 a.m. opening time for all its stores.
Honeymilk Mall was built in the early 1980s on 150 acres of a former family farm, by a major East Coast shopping center developer.
Padgett told the detaining officer she’d overslept, and that she had been spending her nights just inside the GAP for “I’d say four to seven weeks now, depending on how you look at it.”
Padgett was not handcuffed. The security guard was heard to mumble something under his breath to her, to which she replied, “It’s cool, it’s all totally cool. I still have plenty of time to get the shop open before there’s any chance the owner gets here.”
The officer was sipping coffee, writing in his little notebook and shifting from foot to foot in plain black shoes. “I mean half the time he doesn’t show up for days on end, except of course to close the register every night,” Padgett shrugged.
“The shop,” it turned out, was a seasonal kiosks set up between two anchors where traffic increases during the holidays. Some kiosks operate all year, some empty out right after Christmas at Honeymilk.
Padgett stretched languorously once she got to the kiosk, revealing a set of navel rings that could possibly show up on radar at the nearby regional airport. Two tiny nose diamonds and a fairly subtle tongue ring seemed innocuous in comparison to the suddenly visible tummy hardware catching the full fluorescence of the mall at about 9:35 a.m.
The officer, still appearing not quite sure what to do, followed Padgett as she reached in under her shirt to reattach her bra in the front, and walked slowly to the main restrooms in the mall, where she disappeared into the ladies’ long enough for him to wonder aloud about calling in a female backup to check on things, and for this reporter to tell him to calm down and let a girl undertake the necessities of the morning the same as the rest of us.
Padgett reappeared in under ten minutes, looking far more presentable than someone who had just slept on the floor of a major, high-markup clothing retailer has any right to look. She had on a different pair of jeans—the same low-rider-cut type she’d had on and that they all wear now—and a loose blue and white scarf around her neck, to set off the lighter blue of her shirt. Her hair looked like she just stepped out of the shower, and she shook it in this little-pony sort of way as she came out the door, looking a little surprised to again see the officer and this reporter. This reporter, by the way, had a girlfriend who used to work at the GAP before she dumped him, so he knows a little about the markup.
“There’s really good discounts right now,” Padgett said, leading the officer back toward the area of the kiosks, one of which is those lotion salespersons that you may have come across, where they walk up to you like muggers and make you feel like you’re parking-lot litter or worse if you don’t walk away with a tube of their velvet magic.
Padgett, born in Florida but a resident of this area since she was twelve, then went to work on unpacking and spreading open the big gray box that opens to be the Daysy Days Calendar Co. display which, according to Padgett, “features calendars for every interest from astrology to the zodiac, and everything in between.”
The box, unlike many of the standard kiosks, opens up into four separate display areas, each with four of its own surfaces, all packed with nothing but calendars. Wall, box, datebook, those little tiny ones, you name it. She opened it all up with pretty much the same smoothness as a magician rolling that big black box around getting ready to do the cut-the-chick-in-half trick.
Padgett presented no drivers license because, she said, she has never needed one. She said she lives in the mall during the colder months—“which really isn’t that much anyway these days”—and in various places around it during the warmer months, though she declined to give any specifics on locations either inside or outside the mall, despite several hard looks from the officer and one instance of him writing stuff down really hard while pursing his lips at her.
“It’s all good,” she said. Her hair was pretty much dry by now, and had a nice curl to it. This reporter noticed just a little makeup around the eyes that must have been applied in the restroom too, giving her an overall appearance of any salesperson who could have had her mother yell at her to get up, take a shower, eat something, get ready for work and make sure to put some damn gas in the car for a change, say, and had then driven out to the mall, bitching at the traffic and at having to park so far away from the cheap-ass store that barely pays enough for gas and lunch, and then had gone on in to start smiling at customers.
“Well, I take that back,” Padgett said next. “It’s nearly all good, but it seems like every year once the holidays are over and we go totally fifty percent off, you get the kooks in here.”
“’Kooks’?” the officer immediately probed, poising his pencil.
They do get purse-snatchers out here, and panty-display sniffers and people who call 911 because their car has been stolen when in reality it is one row over, so you have to give Johnny Law a break to some extent on being pretty idiotic on some things.
“Yesterday?” Padgett said, as if to make sure the officer could remember it. “It’s the mid-morning lull and all? And I’m standing here”—she walked around and positioned herself on the little Welcome To Daysy Days Calendars mat that may well give her at least a little relief, what with the flip flops she had on, even with the sequins in every color on the little straps—“and I’m just peacefully leaning on the counter to read some stuff about this Paul Newman guy who I had no idea was an actor too, and all of a sudden . . .”
She stopped talking for a second to reach back at the small of her back there where the jeans barely come up to and where on most women under thirty these days there is a little tattoo that generally points down. “ . . .and all of a sudden I feel this little coldness or something, and I spin around and a fairly cool older guy says to me, ‘Well, it looked like the coin slot right there, so I dropped in a couple pennies to see what comes out.’”
She went a little incredulous in the face for a second, as if for emphasis. “Can you believe it? Not even a dirty old man, I don’t think, just some guy maybe forty . . . you ever had cold pennies on the edge like rolling down your crack, and into the crotch of your panties without any expectation at all?”
The officer didn’t write anything down for a moment and then got back to his line of questioning, which had to do with how she could live in and/or around a major mall without drawing attention, getting reported or put in jail.
“It’s not really all that major when you get down to it,” Padgett said. “A Disney store, yes, and a Macy’s, but we really need a Nordstrom’s out here.”
The officer told her not to avoid the question. She asked him what the question was again and he said it again.
“You do what you need to,” Padgett said with a smile. “It varies from situation to situation a little, but the spirit of help and humanity is definitely alive in some places.”
“What about the security guards?” the officer said, in maybe the strongest voice he would use the whole time.
Padgett smiled again. “You make the arrangements you need to make at certain times, and everybody comes out warm and smiling.”
“’Warm and smiling’?” this reporter heard himself say, while poising his own pencil.
“Larry Caudill is one of the nicest of the guys working out here,” Padgett said as she straightened out a shelf that had some biker and Maxim calendars mixed in with what seemed otherwise to be an all-canine display. The officer wrote down the name but didn’t ask her if that was the guy who had acted kind of funny when he unlocked the GAP store.
Padgett said she had no permanent address beyond “the greater Honeymilk area and all my friends in it.” That “greater Honeymilk area” includes several outparcels that have been built out just the way the developer drew it up back in the ‘80s, with restaurants, furniture stores, a couple of doc-in-a-boxes, motels, big-boxers and a twelve-plex. The area is now the retail and lodging hub of this part of the state, though you can ask anyone and he or she—mostly he—will tell you they never even go close to Honeymilk at Christmas. Which of course makes it hard to figure why the hell it’s so crowded every year and how one particular former GAP employee could use “the unf[rea]kingbelievable Honeymilk traffic” as an excuse to cover screwing a buyer in the stockroom every day for two and a half weeks and have this reporter not suspect anything.
The officer didn’t seem to think to ask Padgett about that big scope of the mall property aspect even though it had come up. Still, you could think in a way that that overall size did tend to suggest she could very well be telling the truth about her life.
In hardworking fashion that very afternoon, this reporter asked more than forty-some people all around the mall about Padgett—without mentioning the calendar stand—and most said yes, wasn’t she the one who had run the calendar kiosk, or stand, or shop—however they phrased it—almost since the mall opened?
What seemed to be revealed by the investigation was a broad, interwoven pattern—a tapestry?—of this young woman, who may well have been employed within Honeymilk Mall for as long continuously if only seasonally as anyone, having connections and friendships of one kind or another with perhaps more than two hundred individuals in connection with their businesses, as security personnel or even just as individual salespersons or daily mall shoppers or users.
Once her first few customers came along—two Nissan Titan-built women in their thirties in neon sweatsuits who each bought a diet calendar, and a guy in his fifties who got a little upset that all the calendars were sealed up, even after Padgett very clearly pointed out to him that each month of the stupid Pinups Of The Forties calendar was represented on the back with a smaller image—the officer seemed to be losing momentum with his questioning and his inclination to detain Padgett any further, such as he was anyway. He left the calendar scene briefly and walked over to the GAP store to see if anything was missing or perhaps to ask them how in the world they can charge what they do for that stuff when you can get better ladies wear at Stein Mart, say, which has morally upright employees as well, for like a third the price. The officer came back shrugging, reporting that no one over there seemed to know anything about anybody sleeping inside their night fence, and that the only charges they wanted to press at this particular time were either VISA or Mastercard.
“Did they really say that?” this reporter asked.
“Sure as shit,” said the officer, who then folded up his notebook, stuck his pencil in his shirt pocket and shrugged his shoulders. He had been on one single case now for nearly two hours and was very likely in dire need of a few doughnuts before he got in his big fat Ford and drove away.
This reporter also spent some time around the outparcels, taking time to hate Dick’s for putting the local sporting goods store out of business, and to wonder how Olive Garden always wins for best Italian restaurant in the local magazine restaurant poll.
And it seemed clear, with all the little bushy and brushy spaces behind and between stores that nobody ever looks at, with all the big boxes and fixtures and stuff the stores set out and don’t even bother to put into the dumpsters, and with the way the land has been changed so much over the past twenty or twenty-five years, that no one really could have it all memorized like you used to could when it was the same for decades on end. It was like all new land and construction and little places that no one really knew about or cared about.
Except perhaps Padgett. It’s possible and apparently increasingly likely that she may know it all better than anyone—planner, architect, store owner, cop with a searchlight, anybody. And then throw in all the people she knows. And all the howdies and smiles and “really-busy-today-ain’t-it?”s she exchanges, and you have that tapestry this reporter mentioned earlier.
Extensive internet and law enforcement searches later in the afternoon turned up no address for her, and hours of pre-deadline work tracking down her mother in Florida yielded a simple “try the mall,” before that long, bad-tone noise of when you get hung up on.
But several hard questions remain: Is Padgett somehow tied to the kiosk in ways that go beyond simple retail employment? For example, she told this reporter in an early-afternoon follow-up interview that her mother’s favorite song as a girl was Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl,” which you probably never heard of either and that this reporter never got the chance to verify with the mother. Number two: Is a job that’s only sixteen or twenty weeks a year actually enough to support a modern young American woman with heavy metal needs for the piercings without something weird going on? Or three, is the key to her situation really and simply the collective retail goodwill she describes out here at Honeymilk? Is there some kind of vast but shallow underground economy—a sort of informal welfare at the teat of Big Retail for those who need it? The worry of course is about just what all she may or may not have to give in return at any given time, especially as related to as sorry-ass a lot as cop-wannabe security guards really are. This reporter will be spending far more time at Honeymilk Mall and in detailed follow-up interviews with Bimini Padgett in the coming months in order to look into that and many other retail questions.
"St. Louis" was the first story I wrote with a sort of limited, unreliable narrator. I am pleased, these decades later, that I did not know that at the time; that instead I was lucky enough to live inside the main character's head well enough and long enough to find out what she would really do with her dream of travel, which is revealed only at the end.
The companion piece, "Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed," is the only other such unreliable-narrator story among scores written over the years since "St. Louis." In "Calendar Girl," I knew exactly who the narrator was from the start, and had to restrain myself—and revise repeatedly—to prevent giving him away too quickly. The story, which won a national contest judged by Ursula LeGuin, works to have the narrator give himself away only bit by bit, with the hope he is fully revealed at the end.
The two stories share something else. Both were spawned by places in Roanoke: "St. Louis" around the Roanoke River bridge and low-end retail at the bottom of Norwich Hill; and "Calendar Girl" by the mass of kiosks at holiday time in Valley View Mall.
Kurt Rheinheimer’s stories have appeared in more than 70 magazines, ranging from Redbook to Glimmer Train and have been widely anthologized, including in four volumes of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. His first collection, Little Criminals (EWU Press, 2005), won the Spokane Prize for Fiction and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times Review of Books. His second collection, “Finding Grace” (Press 53), was published in 2012; he is at work on a third. He lives with his wife Gail in Roanoke, Virginia, where he has been editor in chief at LeisureMedia360 since 1984. Leisure’s Blue Ridge Country magazine, of which he is founding editor, celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2018.
“How could Daddy give her nightmares? Mares were horses. Horses to ride in the dark. Daddy used to ride her on his knee, sing, ‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross to see a fine lady upon . . .’”
BY RUTH MOOSE - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, FALL 1973
A city girl, “little miss prissy,” my teen uncles called me. “Sissy,” they teased. When my mother wasn’t around, they called me other things, made fun of the way I walked in the cow pasture, stepping around the cow custards. How I wouldn’t go in the barn because it smelled like the cow pasture. Now they were away at college or the army, all six of them. Only my aunt Lucille was still home on the farm with my grandmother and then just weekends. During the week she had a “good office” job in Charlotte and boarded with three roommates in a big white house on Central Avenue. She’d finished Mrs. Morgan’s Business School with skills in shorthand and typing, gone out into the world knowing she’d never have to do farm work; things like hog killing, picking cotton, washing clothes boiled in big black wash pots over an open fire; things my grandmother and a lot of her neighbors still did. At this time my grandmother’s farm, like most of her neighboring farms had outhouses. No one had an indoor toilet. (One of the first things “the boys” as my grandmother called them, did after they came home from the war, and they did come home, all of them, was to put in a bathroom. My grandmother’s pantry, which was just off the kitchen, turned out to be the perfect size. And while she enjoyed the convenience, for years she mourned the loss of her pantry.)
But for now, we had to go down the path, open the wooden door and climb up on a rough bench that had a hole cut in the middle. I thought it smelled like the barn, the cow pasture and I was terrified I’d fall in the black pit underneath that I was sure went straight down to hell. My aunt complained about having to go to the “john” on weekends. She announced often that the man she married would have to have a house with an indoor toilet or she wasn’t walking down the aisle.
My mother said her sister Lucille had big ideas. Fancy ideas.
I didn’t know why mother ever agreed to let me spend the weekend on the farm so Aunt Lucille could make my “formal.” My dress for the Seventh Grade dance, a big, big deal, something I had been looking forward to… until now.
When I heard about “the dress,” I moaned, groaned, begged my mother no, please not, anything but a “mint green net over chocolate satin dress.” My aunt had seen a picture in a magazine and bought the material in Charlotte on her lunch hour.
She wasn’t as good a seamstress as my mother and grandmother, but she planned to cut it out and my grandmother would do most of the sewing and fitting. They planned for me to take it home after the weekend and my mother would do the hem. She was better at finger work than either of them.
I was a captive. A prawn. It was either let my aunt make the dress or not go to the dance, the biggest event of the whole year, the culmination of spending seven years at West Albemarle School and this final year being “big dogs,” the seniors, the graduating class.
And I had a date. A new boy whose family had only recently moved to town. In Albemarle no one much moved into or moved away. We had births and deaths, otherwise things stayed pretty much the same year to year. In fact you knew from one grade to the next who your teacher would be. You heard horror stories, none of which turned out to be true.
The new boy’s name was Reece. An odd name in a class of Charles, John Michael, John David, George and Billys. Plus Reece had a cowlick, a dimple, dancing blue eyes and dressed better than the other boys: his jeans had creases even, and he wore shirts with collars, not tee shirts. I thought him cute, far above the other boys who sometimes smelled damp from wrestling in the grass or faintly like leather baseball gloves. His hands and nails were always pink, clean. All the girls liked him but one day he passed across the aisle to me, a folded sheet of notebook paper with blocks to check yes or no. “Do you like me?”
I checked yes. After that he held the water fountain knob for me to drink first, hung my coat on the coat rack beside his and smiled at me a lot.
A week before the dance, he passed across another note. This one asked if I’d go to the dance with him. Of course I checked yes, handed it back and he smiled, tucked the note in his shirt pocket. We were all set.
Except for the dress. My mother and aunt had conspired against me to be the worst dressed girl in the room. The worst prom dress in the world. Mint green over chocolate satin. Yuk. Whoever heard of such a thing?
My friends were to wear pink or yellow. Blue. Lavender. Ruffled organdy dresses they had worn for the May Pole celebration the school had just finished celebrating. In chocolate satin and mint green, I would stand out like the May Pole, odd, alone and in the middle a sea of pastels. Mother said mint green was a pastel. But that was only the skirt and with the chocolate satin top and underneath I imagined it might look like a bit of grass over a cow pie.
So here I was standing on a stool in the middle of my grandmother’s farm kitchen my Aunt Lucille sticking pins in me. Or that’s what it felt like as she draped dark brown fabric across my chest and back, pulled and pushed and tucked cloth into the elastic of my panties, said, “Turn around. Stand still. Stand up straight.”
I wanted to jump down and run as fast as I could up the dirt road and get a ride with the first car that came by…which would either be the mailman or Blaine Tucker whose family lived on the next farm over. I decided I would even ride on a tractor or combine if they came by first.
“Don’t fidget,” my aunt said with pins in her mouth. “It’s like trying to make a dress for a galloping horse.”
I felt something wet and warm in my panties and thought now I’d have an excuse to get down. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“Well make it quick,” my aunt said. “I want to get the bodice basted before it gets too dark to see.” She unpinned the fabric, me jiggling all the while, saying, “For god’s sake don’t pee on this dress. I’d never get the spot out.”
What I felt in my panties, didn’t feel like pee. It felt thick, soft and sticky between my legs. I thought I knew what it was, but I waited until I got to the outhouse to pull down my panties and see for sure.
Months before I’d had one period and when I saw the blood, thought I was going to die on the spot, my life pouring out of me in one red gush but my mother hugged me, said, “Honey, it’s what happens to ladies.” She handed me an elastic band with safety pins attached to it. She adjusted it to fit my hips, showed me how to pin on a thick white cotton filled pad.
I said I didn’t want to be a lady.
She laughed, “I don’t think you have much choice.”
I hated the wad of cotton between my legs. I felt as if everyone could see it buldge from my shorts. And the smell. A dried blood smell. I felt I reeked of it, though there was not a lot and over in a few days. I thought that was it forever though mama said it would happen every month.
“Phooey,” I said then forgot about it. Since it hadn’t happened for several months I thought I was over it and could now be normal again, be a boy.
I’d race my brothers in the yard, ride bicycles with them down the street, roll with them in the grass. I’d gotten used to the freedom of being a girl. Not a woman. I wanted to always be a girl, to run, jump, climb things, be one of the boys. Ladies were my mother and her friends who did housework “from morning till midnight” I’d heard them say, never get thanked, never get done though they did sometimes sit across the street on Mrs. Hatley’s front screened porch and do each other’s hair, tell each other things they’d never want their husbands to know, talk about their kids. I knew my mother had told them about my “period” because several days after it happened, they hugged me, smiled, shook their heads. It was as if overnight, in a single betrayal of my body, I had become a member of their club. A club to which I didn’t want to belong.
Now the thing I dreaded had happened again. Curses, curses I’d heard cartoon characters say, which my mother and her friends sometimes called “their monthly curse.” Here I stood in my white nylon slip in my grandmother’s outhouse, staring down at blood in my panties.
“Are you ok in there?” Aunt Lucille knocked on the door. “Need some help?”
“Can you bring me some clean underwear?” I said through the door.
“Stay where you are,” she said. “Don’t move.” She was back in a few minutes, during which I watched wasps flit and fly around a gray paper cone of a nest near the ceiling. I worried they’d come down and sting me, but they seemed more concerned with their nest and each other.
“Here you go,” she handed me the panties through a crack in the door, waited until I took off and handed her my stained ones.
A few minutes later she came back with a pinned, stretched piece of elastic and the same kind of thick cotton boat I had to wear between my legs. Curses, curses.
“I’ll rinse these out, let them soak in cold water,” she said and shut the door.
When I got back to the house, she was handing my grandmother pieces of the ugly “chocolate satin” to seam together. Neither of them looked at me but I knew she had told my grandmother who turned to me and said, “It’s about time. I’d wondered when.”
That was all that was said except in the middle of the night my aunt woke me, handed me a hot water bottle, said, “This helps ease the cramps.”
When she drove me home Sunday she had my dress finished except for the hem all folded in a neat packet on the back seat. She handed it to my mother who asked “How did it turn out?”
“Pretty good when you consider the fact you’re trying to fit it on a galloping horse,” she laughed.
Sometime, maybe after I’d gone to bed, my mother must have hemmed the god awful brown sack. She hung it on a hanger on the front of my closet door. That was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next morning, I’d look like a burlap bag next to the rest of the girls at the dance. I could imagine Reese meeting me at the door to the hotel downtown where the dance was being held, (Patrica’s father was driving us), drawing up his face into a dark scowl and walking away, leaving me standing there even before I got to the dance floor. Especially when he took one look at my hair.
Mother had made me a beauty shop appointment. The day of the dance. My first perm. This had me yelling and screaming, no, I won’t go until she played her final card. “Wenifred’s feelings will be so hurt if you don’t come, let her do your hair for your dance.”
Wenifred’s name was revered among my mother and her friends. Her shop, Cut and Curl, on Love Street was a temple for them, a place they went weekly to worship. Wenifred could do no wrong. You never missed your appointment and you showed up on time or tongues wagged and tssked all around the neighborhood. You were outcast.
I went, mother’s hand under my elbow, pushed me in the Cut and Curl door, then abandoned me. I watched her walk away and wanted to run after her, beg her to let me escape this chamber of horrors where women sat under shinny bullets of helments or under black capes in chairs that swiveled in front of a row of mirrors. How anyone could bear to look at themselves in such states of disarray was more than I could imagine.
And the smell. Outhouse again. Pee and cow patties all wrapped up in one. My nose stung. The next thing I knew Wenifred grabbed me, smothered me under an evil black cape, started scrubbing my hair, then pulling and rolling it with a thousand metal rods, shoved me under one of those cone headed dryer and left me cooking under there. When I felt thoroughly roasted and broiled and my hair smelled burnt, she yanked me out and started unwinding my hair from those warm rods. My head felt hot all over.
She brushed my hair with both hands, then finally turned my chair around and there in the mirror I saw a freak. A bushy headed native from some wild country.
I cried all the way home.
Mother said it was beautiful and Wenifred had outdone herself. Then she showed me what the florist had just delivered in a cellophane box tied with a big pink bow on top. “Look,” she lifted out six baby roses backed with lacy fern. “Your first corsage.”
I could only try to hold my hair down, keep it from sticking straight out from my ears.
“You need to take a nap,” she said, “So you’ll be rested for your big night.” She pulled off my dress, patted the pillow and I lay down, closed my eyes, eyes still swollen from crying and the heat of that drier. My eyelids felt baked.
I slept until I woke with a jerk, had the feeling there were other people in the room, people standing around my bed, people looking at me.
I opened my eyes and screamed. My brother bent so close to my face I could smell his graham cracker breath. He laughed. All around my bed stood his friends, staring down at me. I screamed, then yelled, “You get out of here. Right now.”
They left, but not before I pulled up the spread and wrapped myself in it. Awful, awful. First that ugly dress, then my hair, now my brother and his friends seeing me almost naked.
Somehow I was thrust into that brown sack of a dress, then mother tied around my waist the green, mint green she kept saying, net over skirt. “Beautiful,” she had me turn around. Then she pinned the pink roses to my left shoulder. “You always wear a corsage with flowers at the top, the way they grow.” How did she know so much? And how much of it meant anything?
Patty’s daddy honked in front of the house and I trudged to the car, two already in the backseat, Patty in front. I squeezed in, my net crushed flat on each side the way I wished my hair could be. Nobody said much. Was everybody else as miserable as I was?
Marceline had on lipstick and rouge. Ellen wore gloves. I was the only one with a corsage. “Oh,” they ohed and ahed over it. I said, “Reece sent it.” They ohed and ahed some more. “Lucky girl.” I didn’t feel a bit lucky. I felt wavy in my stomach, worried I’d throw up in the backseat of Patty’s daddy’s car. And all over my friends.
At the hotel, we spilled out and Mr. Jinson drove off. We almost pushed each other to the double glass doors where Miss Ellis, our teacher and torturer waited.
Reece stood behind her, stepped forward when he saw me, grinned, reached out his hand. He led me to the dance floor where the rest of the class bobbed and swayed to piano music.
His hand was damp and I smelled some sort of lotion or wax he’d used to plaster down his cow lick.
We waltzed. We had cake and punch. We waltzed some more.
I decided I liked his arm around me, my arm around him, the way his warm hand held my cold hand, lightly, as though every bit of me was frail as the thinnest glass, that I was light as laughter, as valuable, as breakable as all those thin glasses in the bridal department of Belks, the blown glass globes on every Christmas tree in the world. I saw myself in his eyes and saw I was absolutely beautiful, the most elegant, outstanding girl in the room.
I danced as if I had feathers on my feet, but most of all, I couldn’t wait to tell my mother, to forgive her, to hug her and cry that it was all right for sending me out to embrace the world, and somehow, slowly, to accept and embrace myself.
I have always preferred working in the third person omniscient point of view but, as I’ve gotten older, found myself writing in first person more and more. Hence this “coming of age” piece. It was written in one day-long session at the computer, AFTER first being written in long hand. Some stories come whole! But not often.
Ruth Moose is the 2013 winner of the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. She won the PEN Award for Syndicated Fiction, the Robert Ruark Award for the Short Story, and the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award. She has received three Pushcart nominations and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. She's published three collections of short stories and six collections of poetry. Having served in the Creative Writing faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for fifteen years, Moose received the Chapman Award for teaching. She lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
"Soon you'll be back on this green lap of land / called Tennessee."
by linda parsons - from roanoke review, spring 2002.
for Paula Capps Kyser
The inner work must be done in the well
of drawer among pebbled buttons kept
for whenever, lavender sachets spilling
their guts, Grandmama’s cat’s-eye glasses
askance, my pride pierced on her pincushion.
Only there can I sift what hangs loose
on my shoulders, the stained, the torn,
the crocheted illusories that will never
see light of day. Keys to nowhere,
Irish pence, the pocket Psalms and Proverbs
have no providence, no commerce
in my wilderness, though I rub each
faux pearl as talisman, the Long Nights Moon
heartsick at my window. Strayed, undone
in the layers, I dig to the bottom, wooden thud
that nips my heel, turns me to the field
of what never emptied in the first place,
not bargain or plea but steppingstones,
uneaten breadcrumbs, one then another.
The buckeye and amethyst still harbor luck.
Old stockings will do for garden stakes,
for spring coming sure.
“Wanderlust” and “Inner Work” were written about sixteen years apart. In “Wanderlust,” I imagine my youngest daughter, Rachel, as she travels abroad to Wales and Scotland, the first time she’d been so far from home. I want her to experience life to the fullest, but I bring my own experiences to bear—fearfulness, danger, yet the thrill and great importance of independence. The usual mix of emotions a mother feels for her child leaving home as they sow “the rough seeds of becoming,” both together and apart. “Inner Work” is an interesting contrast to “Wanderlust.” The first poem is expansive, moving from home out across the Atlantic and back again. The second is rooted in the drawer of the psyche, digging past questions and answers, to the reserves of strength from the past, to what is still possible in the mounting losses as I age (an unexpected life change, my father’s worsening dementia) and yet keep learning how best to be human. We can only pray that, as we travel through our personal wilderness and continue to “become,” that we carry a mantle of hope on our shoulders “for spring coming sure.”
Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, freelance editor, and the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. She has contributed to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among many other journals and anthologies. Her most recent poetry collection is This Shaky Earth, and her newest endeavor is writing for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre.
"She is not well / and petunias give no / sympathy."
by kenneth pobo- from roanoke review, winter 1985 AND OPEN TO ALL, 2RIVER, MAY 2000.
about my spouse is talking with him,
about nothing, about the garden
and how the five-dollar orchid
that looked dead is sending out
new buds, or about things we shared
over twenty-thee years,
some I thought I’d forgotten,
but not stuff about computers and cars
and how to lower my taxes—I listen
and pretend I’m following along,
I mean, whatever does one say about
a vintage car that makes any sense,
it’s metal, it was popular,
it took people places.
In college geology the prof talked
of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary.
I’d nod, not getting it. We find
our way back to should we watch
a Dean Martin rerun or a Burns & Allen,
order a pizza as both cats
thump down wood stairs.
"Petunias Out Back" appeared in RR in 1985. I was 31 then—I'm 62 now. I'd like to say, maybe, that I was a "struggling" poet then, but I'm still struggling. Decades go by—and word choice remains central. One thing that joins past and present is the garden. Petunias in 1985—petunias ready for 2017. Poems look for their spring, the right conditions in which to bloom. Perhaps now I'm more open than I was then. My garden is less hidden. In "One of the Things I Like Most" I am still finding "our way back." I think I'll do that for the rest of my like, back and forward, hopefully with blossoms.
Kenneth Pobo has a new book from Circling Rivers called Loplop in a Red City. In addition to appearances in Roanoke Review, his work has appeared in Hawaii Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, Two Thirds North, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. He teaches English and creative writing at Widener University.
"'I've seen snakes in weeds and snakes in leaves and snakes in foxholes,' he says. 'I've seen snakes in vines and snakes in tents and snakes in sleeping bags. Don't make the snakes come out of your eyes.'"
BY ROBERT MORGAN - FROM ROANOKE REVIEW, 2003
When the war was over Nathaniel wasn’t sure where to go first. There was a girl in Virginia named Rebecca that he wanted to marry, if she would agree to marry him. The thought of her long red hair and lightly freckled cheeks had helped him through the long marches in mud and snow, in the cold nights with the Virginia militia. His company had been with General Morgan at Cowpens on January 17 and at Guilford Courthouse with General Green in March. They’d followed Cornwallis into Virginia, then returned to the Carolinas to join up with Lighthorse Harry Lee at Fort Ninety-Six or somewhere farther south. Then word reached them that the Virginia legislature had disbanded their unit. Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown on October 17. The colonel called them together and thanked them for their service and told them they’d be paid later with tracts of land. Now the state was broke and they were on their own.There was still some fighting farther south, but for them the war with the king was over.
The obvious thing would be to return to Virginia and ask Rebecca to marry him. It would take about two weeks to reach Culpeper. But if he returned now he’d have nothing but his ragged clothes, a rifle, and one worn blanket. Not much to offer the prettiest girl in the county who had many beaux. He could only blame himself if she turned him down.
Throughout the campaign Nathaniel had kept glancing at the chain of blue mountains to the west. They rose in soft and rumpled shapes out of the foothills and followed one another toward the southwest like a caravan of giant animals. In the foothills where the militia camped before and after the battle of Cowpens he saw deer and turkeys, the tracks of raccoons and foxes. On the morning of the battle there Tarleton’s army had driven deer and turkeys, foxes and a bear, and even a panther, before it onto the pasture which became the battlefield. If there was that much game in the foothills where the armies had been moving, it thrilled him to think how much more there might be higher in the mountains.
Nathaniel knew the mountains were Cherokee country. But rumor was that the Cherokees had withdrawn much farther west across the mountains. Some Cherokees had fought for the British and would stay far from the patriots. It was said land in the mountains would be divided among those who’d fought against the Crown.
As a boy Nathaniel had trapped mink and muskrats. He’d even caught four or five bobcats. He’d shot deer for their hides as well as for their meat. The wealth of the forest was in furs and hides and ginseng. With the war over there would be a market for furs again. Instead of returning to Culpeper and begging the beautiful and coy Rebecca to marry him, ragged and broke, he’d find a valley in the mountains and trap through the winter. By spring he’d have enough furs to sell to make Rebecca a respectable offer. She was not a girl who’d choose to live in poverty.
A number of horses had been captured from the British and kept at the pasture called the Cowpens after the battle there. The colonel said each man could take one horse on condition he sign a note agreeing to pay the Continental government later. Also lead and powder, hatchets and knives, could be purchased from the supply wagons with the same kind of promissory note. Nathaniel chose a small, compact mount black as Bible leather, called Pearl. And he took from the wagon as much lead and powder as he could carry. A keg of rum was opened and the men drank to each other’s health, to their sweethearts, and to General Washington and the end of the war. Nathaniel slipped away early next morning while everyone but the sentry was still sleeping.
Five miles north he came to the Broad River, and followed a trail along its western bank,through river birch and sycamores and past clumps of hazelnut bushes. It was late October and the trail was covered with new fallen leaves. Early sun shot through the trees in horizontal shafts,sparkling on the frosty edges of leaves.
“Pearl, old girl,” he said to his mount, “we’re off to make our fortune.” Nathaniel hoped the trail would lead into the mountains and all he’d have to do would be to follow it. For two years he’d followed orders from the colonel, the captain, the sergeant. Now he’d have to make his own decisions. The thought both scared and thrilled him.
Nathaniel came to a smaller river that plunged into the Broad, and had to make his first choice. The bigger stream came from the north, but the smaller river flowed from the northwest, directly out of the closest mountains, its water a clear green, as though issuing from a thousand mountain springs and branches. It was the kind of stream that would have many mink and muskrats along its banks. Maybe even otter. It must come out of remote valleys and hidden coves far back in the ridges. He longed to camp in a peaceful valley, far from the ugliness and filth of war, the dirt and endless boredom of the militia. He turned left to follow the smaller stream.
The trail along the green river was hardly a trail at all. It skirted canebrakes and disappeared in meadows of grass and wild peavines. Sometimes a track veered away from the river, and ran higher on the side of a ridge. Then it dropped back into the mud near the water. There were tracks in the mud, deer tracks, raccoon tracks, possum tracks, fox tracks. And once Nathaniel saw what looked like a human track, with no heel mark, the print of a moccasin. Could there still be Indians on this side of the mountain? Of course there were white hunters and traders who dressed like Indians, wore moccasins like Indians.
As Nathaniel continued up the stream he wondered if he’d imagined the moccasin track, for he didn’t see another, only sign of deer and other animals. Late in the day he came on a flock of turkeys among the vines by the river and shot one as it took flight. While it was still light he decided to camp beside a spring, and started a fire with his flint and steel. After dressing the turkey he roasted it over the fire, basting the body with its own grease caught on a piece of bark. The bird was so big all he could eat was one leg, relishing the dark meat. It was the best meal he’d had in weeks, in months. Then he lay on his blanket and looked up at the stars, and wondered where he would find steel-traps. Indians could catch mink and muskrats without metal traps. They used snares and dead-falls, but he never had. There were supposed to be trading posts all over the frontier. Surely there was a station somewhere in the region.
Next day he followed the river higher into the hills. The stream that had been so smooth and easy between its banks ran louder as it struggled over rocks. Stretches of lullwater alternated with shoals of white water. Water tumbled and crashed over logs. He entered a gorge so deep there was no sunlight on the river until near the middle of the day. Everywhere he looked for moccasin tracks and wondered how he would acquire traps. The brush along the trail became so thick he dismounted and led Pearl around boulders and up steep inclines.
It was near the end of the long ravine where he saw the red berries on stems near the ground.First he saw one plant and then others beyond. It was the first time he’d seen ginseng since he volunteered for the militia. Tying Pearl to a sapling, he got out his hunting knife, cleared away leaves and sticks, and dug up the bulging, fat roots. He’d never seen so much sang. People said a ginseng root was supposed to be shaped like a man, but Nathaniel had always thought of testicles when he saw a fresh root.
Before it began to get dark he’d dug more than a dozen ginseng roots. That much would bring him several shillings or dollars if there was any place to trade. He washed the roots in the river and put them in one of his bags. When he reached a level place, a kind of plateau, he camped for the night. Taking the saddle and bridle off Pearl, he tethered her in a peavine meadow and started a fire near a spring.
After eating more roast turkey he lay on his blanket and tried to recall the price of ginseng.Before the war roots had been worth more than shilling a pound. He had no way of knowing its value now. As he lay by the fire he heard a fox bark and another answer. Later he was awakened by an owl in the trees, and another owl that seemed to be down by the river. There was a howl like a wolf faraway on the ridge. When he woke and restarted the fire he wished he had some coffee. If he could find a trader’s store he’d trade the ginseng for traps and coffee. All he had now was more turkey meat.
Nathaniel expected to hear Pearl cropping grass, but the meadow was silent. In the dim light he couldn’t see her. Had he forgotten where he tethered the horse? He grabbed his rifle and tiptoed along the edge of the clearing. The horse was gone. The animal calls in the night must have been Indians calling to each other as they approached his camp and untied the tether line from its stake. As it grew lighter he could see the tracks leading not up the river but up the side of the mountain.
Without a horse to carry his baggage Nathaniel felt stranded. What he couldn’t carry in his bags he’d have to bury and come back for later, the saddle, some of the cooking utensils. He would not leave the cask of powder. All his plans had depended on a horse, to carry supplies, to pack furs and hides out of the mountains in the spring. Now all the had was shank’s mare. He could give up and hoof it back out of the mountains, or he could hoof it deeper into the mountains.
Burying what he couldn’t carry, slinging bags of ginseng and shot over his shoulder, tying the cooking pot to his waist, he held the cask of power under one arm and carried the rifle in the other. He entered a kind of bowl, surrounded by mountains. The river was smaller now, really just a big creek, or run, as they’d call it in Virginia. In the distance he saw smoke, and when he crossed a rise a cabin came into view on a high bank above the stream. An Indian woman on her knees scraped a deer hide stretched on the ground and held by pegs.
As he approached lugging his bags and the cask of powder, the woman looked up at him. She was younger than he expected, and plump. She wore a bright blue calico dress and had many strands of beads around her neck. She stared at Nathaniel for a moment without greeting him, and then returned to her work. Her black hair fell across her face as she scraped the hide.
“Anybody here?” Nathaniel called to the cabin. A bear hide was pegged on the side of the building and several rattlesnake skins hung from the eave. Two horses looked at him from a pen in the back. Steel-traps hung from the wall of a shed by the woodpile. A man with long gray hair and beard appeared in the cabin door.
“I’m Nathaniel.”
“McIver,” the man said and looked at the bags Nathaniel was carrying.
“My horse was stole,” Nathaniel said.
“So I see.”
McIver ducked back into the cabin and reappeared with a jug. “Have a drink, stranger,” he said and handed the jug to Nathaniel. Holding the jug with his thumb and slinging it over his shoulder Nathaniel took a swallow. The corn liquor was so strong his throat burned and his eyes smarted.
“Ain’t got no horse to sell,” McIver said. Nathaniel handed the jug back to him and the trader took a drink.
“What I need is steel-traps,” Nathaniel said. “I have sang to trade.” He opened the leather bag and showed McIver the roots he’d dug.
“Sang ain’t worth nothing because of the war. The harbors are blocked. Besides, that’s not even been dried.”
“The war is over.”
“I knowed the rebels would be defeated,” McIver said.
“The rebels won. I was in the militia.”
McIver looked at Nathaniel as if he suspected Nathaniel was lying. Like other Tories, he must have stayed back in the mountains while war raged in the piedmont. He shook his head and took another drink. The news seemed to make him look older.
“I can give you one trap for them roots,” McIver said and squinted at Nathaniel.
“For all this sang?”
“Best I can do, take it or leave it.”
Nathanie had no choice but to take it. As far as he knew there was not another trader within a hundred miles. Without traps he could catch no fur, and winter was about to set in. One trap was better than no trap. He handed the bag of ginseng to McIver and the trader called to the Indian woman and told her to take the bag to the shed out back. McIver offered Nathaniel another drink from the jug to seal the deal.
When the Indian woman brought the bag back to Nathaniel it felt a little heavier than an empty bag but Nathaniel didn’t mention it. The woman didn’t look at him, and returned to her work on the hide.
“Cherokee?” Nathaniel asked.
McIver shook his head. “Bought her from the Cherokees for a musket and a jug of applejack.”
McIver said Nathaniel’s horse was likely stolen by the Cherokees. They’d been hunting in the region, but with winter near they’d returned to their villages over the mountains.
“Might be a while before you see that horse again,” McIver said. From the wrinkles around his eyes Nathaniel guessed the trader was fifty or more.
As Nathaniel headed up the river he found the path well marked around a canebrake and then below a laurel thicket. Horses had passed this way recently. Most of the tracks were made by unshod horses. But one had shoes the size of Pearl’s foot. Surely McIver must have seen his horse if they’d passed this way, yet he hadn’t said so.
When Nathaniel stopped for the night he looked in the leather bag the Indian woman had handed him. There was a small steel trap in the bottom, just big enough to catch a muskrat. Now he had two traps, and it pleased Nathaniel to think the Indian woman had helped him. As he made a fire he tried to recall what the Indian woman had been wearing. It was a blue calico dress,and her leggings were buckskin with beads on them. Her skin was the color of new molasses. She’d not spoken to him nor looked him in the eye, but she’d given him the extra trap.
That night as Nathaniel slept with his rifle at his side he dreamed about Rebecca. In the dream she stood beside a well and as he approached she drew a bucket from the well and with a dipper scooped fresh water from the bucket. If she offered the dipper to him that meant she would marry him. But as he got closer and waited for her to hold the dipper out to him he woke. Stars gleamed through the trees. A moon thin as a reaping hook hung straight above.
All the next day Nathaniel followed the stream. There was no trail now, and boulders made the bank so difficult to follow he climbed up on the mountainside and skirted thickets of laurel. The river valley narrowed for several miles and the pinched stream tumbled and crashed on rocks.From the ridge he could see the mountains far ahead, lavender and brown now that the leaves had fallen, blue in the distance, then gray in the further distance where summits seemed almost to merge with the sky. Somewhere in those higher mountains he’d find the cove or hollow where he could camp and trap throughout the winter. With only two traps it would take him all winter to catch enough furs to ask for Rebecca’s hand.
It was late the third day after he left McIver’s that he came to the headspring of the river. He’d followed the stream as it got smaller and smaller, and then he followed a branch to where a fountain came right out of the mountainside. Three or four inlets in the spring, like nostrils, made sand dance at the bottom of the pool. He cleaned leaves and sticks away from the basin and saw mica and quartz glittering in the sand. He drank from the spring, water that tasted like it had run through silver and emeralds deep in the earth. He’d never tasted water with exactly that flavor. He wondered what special mineral might be inside the mountain.
With winter so near Nathaniel only had time to build a three-sided shelter called a half-face, a low cabin open on the side facing south where a fire would be kept burning. With the hatchet he’d bought from the militia it took him most of a day. He covered the structure with poplar bark spread on poles, then laid rocks and brush on the bark to hold it down. The half-face blended so well with the woods and thickets it would not be noticed from a distance.
When the structure was done Nathaniel took his rifle to look for a turkey or squirrel. He would settle for a rabbit if he had to. As he crossed the branch below the spring he saw a large track in the sand, a cat track, much bigger than a bobcat’s, bigger than any panther track he’d ever seen in Virginia. It must be a panther track, and yet it didn’t look exactly like a panther track. If there was a cat that big in the area he’d have to take extra care, especially if he was out before sunrise or after sunset. Big cats usually did their stalking in the dark. He shot a turkey in a peavine meadow a little farther down the branch.
With only two traps Nathaniel chose the sites to set them with great care, ranging downstream to places he found tracks of muskrat and mink in sand and mud. Traps had to be in water deep enough to drown the caught animal before it could gnaw its foot off to escape. If water was too deep over the trap the muskrat or mink would swim right over it. Best spots were near slides on the banks where the animals came down to the water. He caught two muskrats the first week, and a mink and three muskrats the second week. He stretched the hides on frames of sourwood sprouts to cure.
It was in the third week when he saw the big cat. He’d killed a deer and dressed it and hung the meat from an oak limb out of reach of bears and wolves and other animals. It was just before dawn when he woke and was about to build up the fire. He reached for kindling wood at the entrance of the half-face and saw an animal standing under the deer carcass where it hung, about twenty paces away. He froze and watched. It was a big cat, but it had spots and looked heavier than a panther. And when it turned he saw its face was round with whiskers like a tiger, not a panther. But tigers he’d seen in pictures had stripes. He felt for his rifle beside the blanket. The big cat circled beneath the deer carcass, looked toward the half-face, sniffed the air, and then strolled away toward the branch.
Nathaniel didn’t realize until the cat was gone that he’d been holding his breath. He gasped, and breathed out. If the big cat was not a panther, what was it? Its face looked like a tiger but it had spots. Leopards had spots, but they were sleek and slim. This animal looked heavy and powerful. He’d been worried about bears and wolves and panthers, but who ever heard of a tiger in the Carolina mountains?
By the time of the first snow Nathaniel had more than a dozen muskrat hides and two mink skins. He also had two deer hides he’d stretched on pegs on the sides of the half-face. Before the winter was over he was sure he’d be able to add a bear skin to his collection. Now bears had gone into caves or dens or hollow logs to sleep through cold weather. He could understand that tendency to sleep through winter. On the coldest days he didn’t go out to check his traps, but lay by the fire and dreamed about Virginia and Rebecca.
He had the dream again of Rebecca standing by the well and holding out the dipper of water to him. Her red hair glistened in the sun. But when he got closer he saw her face was wrinkled. Instead of freckles there were warts, and when she opened her mouth gaps showed in her teeth. He recoiled in astonishment and then woke up. He blamed the bad dream on the greasy turkey meat he’d eaten.
Later, in mid-winter, there was a thaw. Nathaniel decided to take the furs and deer hides he had to McIver’s for more traps, some corn meal, salt, and maybe coffee. He wrapped the furs in deer skins and tied them all in a bundle he would carry on his back. He calculated it would take him three days to reach the trader’s cabin. It made sense to go before he’d accumulated more furs than he could carry.
He’d not traveled more than a mile downstream when he saw in the sand a large cat’s track. It looked even bigger than the ones the tiger cat had left near his camp in the fall. But perhaps he’d forgotten just how big those tracks were. The giant feline had not returned since it had tried to reach his deer meat. He knew panthers roved over wide circuits in their hunts. Maybe this cat did the same. That night Nathaniel kept his rifle close as he lay in a small clearing near the river.
Two days later, as he approached McIver’s station, he saw several horses in the pen behind the cabin. One of them was black and looked a lot like his Pearl. He hurried to the house to ask who had brought the horse there. No one was outside and no one came to the door when he called.
“McIver,” he shouted and pushed open the door.
It was so dark inside he saw nothing at first. Then he made out the Indian woman sitting by the fireplace sewing something from buckskin. Bolts of cloth lay on the shelves and steel-traps hung from pegs on the wall. Barrels and bins of corn meal, gunpowder, and whiskey lined the wall. McIver lay on a bunk bed with a bearskin over him.
“What do you want?” the trader said.
Nathaniel dropped the bundle of furs and hides to the floor. “I need more traps, some cornmeal, and my horse,” he said.
“I’m sick,” McIver said. “The winter fever has got me.”
“That black horse is the one stole from me,” Nathaniel said.
“I bought that horse from an Indian,” McIver said. “You got no proof she was yorn.” His hand came out from under the bearskin holding a pistol.
Nathaniel looked at the Indian woman, and then back at McIver. “I need five more steel-traps, some corn meal, and lead and powder,” he said.
“Fur ain’t worth nothing now,” McIver said.
“I have five mink here.”
McIver spoke to the Indian woman in words Nathaniel didn’t recognize. She put her sewing down and stood up. With the pistol McIver pointed to the barrel of corn meal and the traps hanging on the wall. The woman handed Nathaniel two steel traps and scooped meal into a leather bag.
“I need five traps,” Nathaniel said.
“Two is all you get,” McIver said. He started coughing, a cough that sounded so deep it might have come from underground. He heaved and spat onto the floor. McIver’s face was flushed and he appeared to have lost a lot of weight. He coughed again, and spat again. “Take your stuff and go,” he said and pointed the pistol at the door.
The Indian woman handed Nathaniel the bag of corn meal, a bag of shot, and a small cask of powder. She didn’t look at Nathaniel at first, and then she stared straight into his eyes. Her eyes were dark as chinquapins.
“Be gone,” McIver said, and with the pistol motioned him toward the door.
Outside Nathaniel tied the cask and bags together and slung them on his back. He glanced at the horse pen and saw Pearl watching him. It appeared McIver was dying of consumption, or something like consumption. Nathaniel wanted to pause and think about the best way to reclaim his horse. But he heard McIver shout again, telling him to get away. The Indian woman stood in the doorway staring at him.
Nathaniel shouldered his burden, and holding the rifle in his right hand started up the trail. Once he got into the woods he had to stop and readjust the pack. The cask of powder kept slipping loose from the straps. He dropped to his knees and was retying the bundle when he heard steps behind him. When he turned he saw the Indian woman leading Pearl. Deerskin bags hung on either side of the horse. Nathaniel stood up and the woman handed him the reins of the bridle. She stared directly into his eyes and then looked away.
“Do you mean I can take her?” he asked.
The woman nodded and started back down the trail. He watched her blue calico dress disappear around a bend.
Nathaniel wondered if this was a trick. Would McIver accuse him of stealing the horse? But McIver seemed too weak to even get out of bed and his hand had trembled when he held the pistol.
The deerskin bags over Pearl’s back were big enough to hold all his baggage. Nathaniel packed everything, dividing the load between the two sides. Then he spoke to Pearl and caressed her nose. He imagined she remembered him, but couldn’t be sure. Taking up the reins he led her carefully up the trail, picking a way around boulders and over logs. Now that he had his horse back, he couldn’t risk her stumbling and breaking a leg. It seemed too good to be true that the Indian woman had given Pearl back to him.
That night as he camped by the river, with Pearl tethered close by, he dreamed of Rebecca for the first time in weeks. It was the same dream as before, but as he approached her by the well and her face showed all the wrinkles of age, she began to laugh at him like he’d made a fool of himself. Instead of handing him the dipper, she flung the water in his face, and the water was not cool but scalding hot. He wiped it out of his eyes and then he woke up.
When Nathaniel looked through the trees the stars were gone. It had clouded up in the night,and gotten colder. Something faint as the breeze from a mosquito’s wing touched his lips and cheek. Then he felt the wetness and knew it was snowflakes. It was snowing in the silent woods and the thaw was over.
Next day Nathaniel led Pearl through deepening snow along the river. In places it was hard to see ahead because of snow on limbs and brush. Once or twice on steep ground it looked as though Pearl was going to slide into the river. In some places it was easier to walk in the stream itself than to keep a footing on the bank. Once they passed the tracks of a large animal. But he couldn’t tell if it was a panther or the track of the other large cat because of the falling snow.
At day’s end Nathaniel decided not to make a fire. He tied Pearl to a tree, and seated himself against an oak, blanket over his head and around his shoulders, rifle in his lap under the blanket to keep the powder dry. Snow continued to fall, whispering and ticking on branches, seething faintly as flakes meshed together. He chewed a piece of dried turkey, and melted snow in his mouth for something to drink. Pearl munched corn from a bag slung over her ears.
Nathaniel was twice wakened as he leaned against the tree. Once he thought he heard an animal scream, a panther, and once a long note like a wolf or dog might make. But mostly it was the faint hiss of falling snow. Snow, especially snow in the darkness, created its own world, muffled ,cushioned, almost silent, almost beyond time. Deepening snow made you want to burrow under and sleep with the ground hogs and other animals, with the sap in maple roots, with the seeds, and salt in stones, and dream of spring.
When he woke the blanket weighed on him. More than a foot of snow had fallen in the night. Snow had built on Pearl’s back but she’d shivered it off. Nathaniel knew he was only half a day’s walk from his camp, but in the deep snow it would take him most of the day to get there. And when he reached his camp before dark he saw tracks all around the half-face, wolf tracks, deer tracks, tracks of the big tiger cat. Something had climbed the oak tree and jumped down on the hanging deer carcass and eaten from it. He wasn’t sure what animal would have done that, a raccoon, a bobcat?
It took him some effort to get a fire started at the entrance to the half-face. Snow had blown and drifted into the shelter and he had to clean the drift away from the circle of rocks. To find kindling he split some pine limbs to expose the resiny heartwood. He shaved curls and found a few dry leaves and twigs in the corner. With flint and steel he finally got a fire going and fed it carefully with shavings and pine splinters until the flames were hot enough to catch the larger sticks. In the deep snow his only choice was to break lower limbs off pines and knock the snow off and lay them one at a time on the fire.
When he emptied the bags slung over Pearl’s back he found a bag of coffee beans. Whether it had been put there by mistake he couldn’t know. But gratefully he crushed some beans between two rocks and boiled coffee until it was black and strong and scalding. As he sipped the brew it warmed his belly and bowels, and sent a light out through his veins to the tips of his fingers and toes.
As he drank the coffee and gnawed turkey meat and looked out at the snow beyond the fire, Nathaniel knew he had much work to do. He had to build a real cabin for himself, with four walls and a fireplace, and he had to make some kind of shelter for Pearl. She’d need a stall built of poles and logs. Pearl could not be left outside, tied to a tree all winter, as wolves and panthers,Indians and the tiger cat, came prowling
Nathaniel expected the snow to melt, but instead the weather grew colder, and more snow came. Snow and ice on the stream made it hard to find his old traps, much less set the new ones. Every day snow fell, and he cleared a yard around the half-face and shot turkeys and a deer that wandered near. He didn’t even have to go out into the woods to hunt. It was so cold turkeys died from suffocation as ice clogged their breathing holes. While the snow was so deep it was hard to get started cutting logs for a cabin and horse stall.
One night in late winter he heard Pearl whinny and her whinny rose to a scream. Nathaniel grabbed his rifle and a blazing stick from the fire. Pearl was jumping and kicking and he saw something spotted on her back. The horse thrashed and reared and bucked, but the animal stuck to her back. It had to be the big tiger cat he’d seen before. The weeks of blizzard had made it desperate for a kill. He couldn’t raise the rifle while holding the burning stick.
Pearl swung from side to side in terror and the giant cat gripped her flesh and bit her neck. Nathaniel stuck the burning stick into the snowbank where it blazed like a torch. He raised the rifle, but how was he to shoot in the flickering light without hitting Pearl? He had only one shot.If he missed, the tiger would kill Pearl before he could reload, and if he merely wounded the cat it might turn on him. With the end of the rifle barrel he followed the rising and falling, the lurch from side to side, of the horse and cat. It was too dangerous to risk the shot.
Stepping closer, just a few feet from the horse, he pointed the barrel behind the cat’s shoulders and fired. Pearl wheeled away, jumped and bucked, kicked out behind, and swung out of the light. The tiger cat clung to her back and Nathaniel thought he’d missed. There was no time to reload. Raising the rifle by its barrel he clubbed the cat on the head. The head fell to the side, and slowly the spotted body slid off the horse into the snow. He pounded the head with the butt of the rifle and the big cat lay still.
Blood seeped from the places on Pearl’s neck and back where the cat’s teeth and claws had ripped the flesh. He rubbed grease on the wounds, and whispered to the horse to calm her. He was trembling so he could hardly reload the rifle. Throwing more wood on the fire he made coffee and sat to calm himself until it was daylight.
When he looked closely at the carcass of the tiger cat he saw the spots were in clusters of four,almost in circles, around a central spot, like the leaves of four-leaf clover or the petals of a flower. It was the most beautiful hide he’d ever seen. Nathaniel ran his fingers over the fine hair. He’d never touched anything like it. The cat must be an individual that had wandered into the mountains from far south or west.
It took him most of the day to skin the big tiger cat. It was a male and must have weighed over two hundred pounds. The body was heavier and thicker than that of a panther, though not as long. He peeled the hide off with great care. No telling what he could get for such a skin, maybe enough for a new rifle, more traps, supplies for another season. When the big carcass was skinned he stretched the hide on the wall of the half-face with pegs stuck between the poles.
Nathaniel dragged the carcass to the edge of his yard and left it there. He shot a wolf that came at dusk to eat the flesh. The next evening he killed a bear that came to feed there. But when buzzards arrived on the third day he let them peck their fill. It took about a week for the scavengers to pick the bones clean.
A few weeks later the rains started. Never had he seen it rain harder or longer. Hour after hour, day after day, the water came down like an ocean dropping out of the sky. The great drifts of snow turned sodden, gray, and drained away. The yard filled with water and mud. Water seeped into the half-face. The spring flooded as snow on the ridge above melted and poured downhill. The branch spread far beyond its banks.
The corn meal he’d brought from McIver’s was ruined by water and had rotted. So had the turkey meat he’d dried over the fire. Water had gotten into his keg of powder. All he had left was the amount in his horn. With a piece of deerskin he rubbed water off the big cat hide. To cure it must be kept dry.
It was only when the rain finally stopped that Nathaniel realized a terrible flood must have swept through the valley below. The melting snow and endless rain would have scoured the river valley. When he went to look for his two traps they were gone. He’d not been able to set the new traps because of the heavy snow. Now it was too late in the season to catch fur in its prime. Soon it would be spring.
The only thing Nathaniel had to trade was the hide of the tiger cat. With so little powder left he had no choice but to go back to McIver’s to see what the trader would give him for the unusual hide. Folding the big skin, he tied it on Pearl’s back. As he led the horse down the valley he saw the effects of the flood. Trees had been torn out by the roots and piled up against other trees. Raw banks had been cut at the bends. The farther he traveled the more devastation he saw. Debris was left in meadows and trash caught in the tops of trees still standing. The flood had cut a swath up to the sides of the mountains.
There was no path now. He had to find a way around heaped brush, uprooted trees, boulders washed out of the mountainside. Landslides had piled mud and dammed the stream in places. He slogged through mud up to his knees.
It took Nathaniel four days to reach McIver’s station, and when he came into the clearing he saw everything was wrong. The cabin was not where it had been, but was turned sideways and leaning toward the river and the roof had fallen in. The fence of the horse pen was gone, and the horses were gone. The storage shed had been knocked over by the flood. Dead trees littered the yard.
Something moved to his right, and he turned and saw the Indian woman digging on the hillside.Nathaniel led Pearl in that direction and noticed a body lying on the ground wrapped in a bearskin. It was McIver. As he approached, the Indian woman ignored him and kept digging. McIver’s face was white as wax, almost blue.
“Can I help you with that?” Nathaniel said.
There was a trail in the mud and grass where she’d dragged the body to the spot on the hill. She dug slowly, as though worn out.
“Give me the shovel,” Nathaniel said. The Indian woman stopped digging and he took the shovel from her. Underneath the sod the dirt was red clay with only a few rocks and roots. He cut the corners of the grave hole square and carved the walls straight. Digging dirt was something Nathaniel had always been good at. Added strength always came to him when he cut into the earth. The Indian woman held Pearl while he worked. When the hole was deep enough they lowered the body into it.
Standing at the end of the grave the Indian woman looked up at the sky and said some words Nathaniel didn’t understand. She reached out a hand toward the west, and then laid the hand over her heart. They both stood silent for a moment and then Nathaniel began shoveling red clay back into the grave.
As they walked toward the tilted cabin Nathaniel said, “I see the flood was bad.”
“Flood took everything,” she said. Her calico dress was smeared with mud and her moccasinsand leggings were muddy.
Nathaniel looked into the leaning cabin and saw the barrels of meal and tobacco, gunpowder, whiskey, kegs of bear grease, had been broken open and ruined. A few traps hung on the wall, already beginning to rust.
“Did McIver drown in the flood?” Nathaniel said.
“McIver dead,” the woman said. She looked away toward the mountains.
“What is your name?”
“McIver call me Sarah.”
“Are you a Catawba? Cherokee?”
The woman turned and looked him in the eye. “Coosa,” she said.
“Coosa?”
The woman pointed toward the southwest. “Cherokee burn my village, take me, sell me to McIver.” She sounded sad but not angry. She stared at the tiger cat hide on Pearl’s back, and stepped closer to stroke the spotted skin. “Jaguar,” she said.
“Jaguar?” It was a name Nathaniel had heard, but thought that animal belonged to the tropics.
“Jaguar,” she said again, and it was clear she’d seen such a big cat before. Wherever she was from it must be far south where there were jaguars to hunt.
“Where will you go now?” Nathaniel said.
She looked away toward the mountains. “I go with you,” she said.
Nathaniel was surprised. The death of McIver, the flood, the jaguar, had changed everything. Should he go back down to the foothills and head for Virginia? He had nothing but the jaguar hide to show for his winter’s work. Should he help the Indian woman rebuild McIver’s cabin? Should he send her down to the settlements?
As he studied his options, the Indian woman stepped into the ruined cabin and came out with a dozen rusting steel-traps which she tied to Pearl’s back. Then she returned to the cabin and came back with a bundle of hunting knives and a leather bag of lead. On her next trip she brought several cooking pots and tied those to Pearl’s back also.
“Did McIver have any money?” Nathaniel said.
“Money wash away,” she said. Then she reached into a bag tied to her neck and took out three gold coins. “My money,” she said. Then she returned to the cabin and came back with a small cask of gunpowder.
“Is the powder dry?” Nathaniel said.
“Sealed with tar,” she said and showed him the seams filled with pitch.
As he watched her lash the keg to Pearl’s back Nathaniel knew a decision had been made. She’d made the decision for him. Or he’d made the decision when he chose to return to McIver’s. Or the flood had made the decision.
They started up the washed-out river valley by mid-afternoon, Nathaniel in front leading the horse, Sarah behind carrying a pack of muskrat hides and sewing things, beads and needles, knives and salt and herbs on her back. Redbud and sarvis were beginning to bloom. The scoured river banks were starting to dry.
When they stopped for the night Sarah started a fire and put a pot of water on to boil for coffee.Then she took a fish hook and thread from her pack, found white grubs under a log for bait, and caught three trout in the river. For supper they ate fresh trout and drank strong coffee. After they ate Sarah bowed her head and said a prayer. She said missionaries had come to her village when she was little and taught her to pray after every meal. Then she washed the pot in the river and unrolled a bearskin on the ground.
“I make you a coat,” she said and pointed to the jaguar hide.
“A coat for me?” Nathaniel sat with his loaded rifle beside him. Bears, wolves, panthers, Cherokees, might be prowling in the woods. But because the woman was with him he felt more at ease, a confidence he hadn’t expected. With another person the woods seemed different.
“I don’t know where we can sell furs now that McIver’s gone,” Nathaniel said.
“McIver sell his furs to Davis,” she said and pointed to the east.
“Maybe you can make a coat for yourself from the jaguar,” Nathaniel said.
“No, for you,” she said and put a hand on his cheek.
Later that night as he lay beside Sarah listening to the murmur of the river he thought of Rebecca and tried to recall her face, but couldn’t be sure he remembered any features except for the red hair.
When I wrote "Grace" a few years ago I was especially interested in telling stories of conflict, suffering, grace, and redemption in contemporary life, in the Appalachian community where I had grown up in western North Carolina. The character in "Grace" is based on an actual relative who did indeed die of acute alcoholism in a small trailer, alone on a winter night. Over the years since I have become increasingly interested in examining and portraying issues in history, turning points in American history. "The Jaguar" was an attempt to tell of a humble event in the mountains of North Carolina in 1781-82, the story of one individual moving into the wilderness to trap and taking an Indian wife, suggesting the beginning of the vast westward expansion of the country once the Revolutionary war was over. I wanted to make it an adventure story, with just a hint of romance.
Photograph of robert morgan by randi anglin
Robert Morgan attended the University of North Carolina at both Chapel Hill and Greensboro and currently teaches English and creative writing at Cornell University. He has received numerous awards including three NEA grants, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1988, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1988, and the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize—granted by the Fellowship of Southern Writers—and the North Carolina Literature Award in 1991. His writing includes several collections of poetry, works of fiction, and works of nonfiction. His novel The Road From Gap Creek (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Chasing the North Star (Algonquin Books, 2016) is his most recent novel.
"I saw the black cattle / as the wind whistled through my beard."
By Frederick C. Wilbur - from Roanoke Review, Fall 1968
Two mulberry trees grew entwined
and by the time we bought this place
they were more than a hug around:
trumpet vines had laced them together,
robin-crafted nests were badges, east and west.
Within a dozen years, they were dying,
shedding twigs and shards of bark,
so I had a local man come to cut them down
and I have burned them in the stove for a dozen more.
He left the two stumps, seemingly one,
a foot or so above the placid lawn
as if he thought I’d place a cement lantern
or a painted angel there to overlook the highway
as a warning for the curve ahead and I could have:
the stumps refuse to disappear and remain
odd keepsakes in our yard.
Now, to ready the property for sale,
I dig out those cuddling stumps,
begin with the offerings gathered to them
of broken iron and petals of painted porcelain.
I do not mistake my labor for indifference,
but decode their root language, their dialect,
the way they feel themselves around rocks,
the hole growing larger like the loss of life’s detail,
but I understand the burden of ancestors,
the hidden sorrows of fathers and mothers
so I cut the stump a foot or so below ground level
and I borrow three or four loads of dirt
from the woods nearby to fill
the missing hearts, to mound a slight memorial
for the acceptance to settle in.
“Auction” was one of my first published poems outside school literary magazines. As an apprentice poet, I was exploring voice and tone. It derives from personal experience growing up in a small town and portrays the life of the surrounding countryside (near Waynesboro, Virginia). It is light hearted with a few cynical twinges, a comment on the commercial and social aspects of such ‘household’ auctions.
“A Roots Reading” is set as well in a small town/country setting, but is a little more first person voice. My attempt has always been to ground abstracts in the mundane to afford a ‘literal surface’ while at the same time using language to its fullest connotation. I want my work to be compelling even as it may seem understated. Hopefully, this is achieved by provoking the reader to question the ‘mystery’ of the piece. Although this piece is in free verse, I frequently write in conventional forms.
Frederick C. Wilbur's work has appeared in many literary journals including: Shenandoah, The Lyric, The South Carolina Review, Cold Mountain Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, The Chariton Review, Roanoke Review, Able Muse, Poetry Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Slant, Appalachian Heritage, Plainsongs, Snowy Egret, POEM, and online, Verse-Virtual, Rotary Dial, and Silver Birch Press. His fourth book, a collection of poetry, As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, is to be published in 2018 by Kelsay Books. He is an architectural woodcarver and has authored three dozen articles and three books on architectural and decorative woodcarving (Guild of Master Craftsman Publications, Lewes, UK). He received a BA degree from the University of Virginia and an MA degree from the University of Vermont. He lives with my wife and family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia.
