Drumlummon views: the online journal of Montana arts & culture, volume 2, number 1 (Fall 2008) (2025)

OCR

We are not currently accepting unsolicited fiction,

po[...]artists, with oneitime publication
rights granted to DV Content is free to users. Any reproduction of
original content from[...]must a) seek copyright
from the authors/ artists and b) acknowledge Drumlummon View: as

the site of o[...]g, Heart Twisting in the
Wind, 2006, gouatbe, ink and collage onpaper, 4.375 965.75
intbex. © 2[...]

“Tu B’Shvat: for the Drowned and the Saved,”a story
by Melanie Rae Thon 27

“I[...]olas CP

Vrooman I52

Literature 159

“Pioneers and Indians: Romanticism, Revisionism, and
Post—Revisionism in the Fiction of the American[...]en Fisher I60

“When Cowboys Became Capitalists and the West
Became New,” by John Clayton I7[...]

“‘I learn by going where I have to go’: Initiatory
Turnings in Poetry, Philosophy, andto the Figure,” by Rick
Newby 27o

RudyAutio, a sh[...]on, reviewed by Hilary
Hoffman 34.8

Poemx Arron [be Big Sky/4n Antbology of Montana Poem,
edited by Lowell Jaeger, reviewed by 0. Alan
Weltzien 353

Danting to [be Edge, Tappan/Roberti/Williams Trio,
reviewed by K[...]rian Kahn 366

Senator Pat Regan, by Teresa Cohea and Mignon
Waterman 368

ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS 371

SUPPORT DRUMLUMMON 380

From the Editor

Welcome to the fourth issue of Drumlummon
Viewx, the online journal of Montana arts and culture.
For those of you who have followed DV from our
beginnings in 2006, you will have noticed that our
progress has been slow but stead[...]of DV per year, but
it’s become clear that one and possibly two issues per
year is more nearly realistic, given the limits on our
time and energy. We take some solace in the fact that
each[...]tial, essentially the
equivalent of a large book. And we are grateful for the
patience and kindness of our supporters, readers, and
contributors.

Speaking of books, Drumlummon Inst[...]publishing program with two titles,

Food ofG'odx and Starvelingx: 777e Seleeted Poemx ofGraee
Stone Coatex (2007) and Notex for aNovel: 777e Seleeted
Poemr of Frieda F[...]77e Pan, with an introduction by 0. Alan
Weltzien and published in collaboration with Riverbend
Publish[...]ine Patterson, is
also in the works.

Finally, we have begun a series of offprints from
Drumlummon V iewx, featuring essays and portfolios
of particular interest. The first is Patty Dean’s superbly
researched and illustrated essay on architect Cass
Gilbert and his designs for the Montana Club. The
second is a[...]first venture into color books by Drumlummon
can be ordered at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/
detail/313138.To order any of Drumlummon’s books and
offprints, go to http://www.drumlummon.org/html/

Books—Offprint[...]Viewx ranges over a multiplicity of terrains. We
have expanded our offerings of original works, with
substantial selections of fiction and poetry, together
with a moving memoir by 0. Alan Weltzien and an
insightful interview with artist Wes Mills.

We continue our coverage of science and health
issues with an excerpt from a lengthy biographical essay
on Montana biophysicist Jeff Holter, who ceveloped the
now—ubiquitous Holter Heart Monit[...]tance of the Indian Education for Al, initiative,
andto the development of western
literature by such figures as playwright Bert Hansen
and novelist Caroline Lockhart. Poetics scholar Rober[...]eodore
Roethke’s poem, “The Waking.”

Thank you for your interest in Drumlummon
V iewr—the last twelve months have seen downloads
of more than 30,000 files from the Drumlummon site.
Please continue to let us know how we’re doing. And
watch for our Spring 2009 issue, due out in May, which
will focus on the built environment and landscapes of
Butte and Anaconda, Montana (in conjunction with
the June n[...]aboration with
the Montana Preservation Alliance, and its guest editor
is public historian Patty Dean.

If you’d like to join our Drumlummon Alerts
email list, send an email to that effect to

info@drumlummon.org

Rick Newby

Editor—in—c[...]on.org

77m imue ofDrumlummon V iewr ix dedicated to tbe
memory ofMorgoret Regan Gnnr (19227200[...]

Here at Drumlummon Viewr, we remain grateful to
three groups of generous folks, those who support our
efforts financially, those who volunteer their time and
wisdom, and those who contribute their stories, poems,
essays, reviews, images, and ideas to enrich each issue.
Without them Drumlummon V iewr and Drumlummon
Institute itself could not, and would not, exist.

To see a complete listing of our financial sup—
p[...]umlummon Institute home page
(www.drumlummon.org) and click on Drumlummon’s
Funders. Our volunteer supporters are too legion to
list here, but three groups deserve our utmost gr[...], Jeff Wil—
liams, Matt Pavelich, Niki Whearty, and Rennan Rieke;
second, the knowledgeable members o[...]e page, click on Drumlum-
mon Board of Advisors); and third, Drumlummon
Viewr’ contributing editors, who come up with many of
our story ideas and indeed contribute their own work
to DV (see the journal’s masthead).The writers, think—
ers, and artists—from many different disciplines—who

share their marvelous efforts in DV’x pages provide the

journal’s lifeblood; you will find their names in this
issue’s Table of Contents and their biographies in our
contributors’ notes.

Our gratitude, too, goes to the following in—
dividuals and institutions who have helped in myriad
ways: Chere Jiusto and Christine Brown, Montana
Preservation Alliance; t[...]tana
Historical Society Research Center; Liz Gans and
Marcia Eidel, Holter Museum of Art; Barbara Koostra
and Manuela Well—Off—Man, Montana Museum of
Art and Culture; Debbie Miller, Minnesota Histori—
cal[...]tely, Portland Art Museum; Wes Mills; Rudy,
Lela, and Chris Autio; G. B. Carson; Patricia Forsberg
and Stephen Speckart; and the many others who have
offered us story ideas, moral support, and good cheer.
We are especially grateful to Jodi Schmitz, the editorial
intern from Carroll College who contributed mightily
to moving this issue—and all our projects—forward.

Finally, our thanks go to Geoff Wyatt of Wyatt
Design, Drumlummon Viewr’Art Director, who has

once again designed DV so beautifully.

I have one hundred and forty-four
horses, and have lost one hundred and thirty-
four. Most of the loss has occurred much[...]ss, grassless
desert; it contains scarcely a wolf to glut itself
on the hundreds of dead and frozen animals
which for thirty miles nearly block the road
with abandoned and shattered property; they
mark, perhaps beyond exa[...]ed the carcass over his shoulders.
He had dressed and skinned the deer, and had removed

its head and forelegs to lessen its weight. His musket

lay on top of the glistening meat.

“Do you see that soldier there, packing the
Colonel’s s[...]of the hunters charged with providing
fresh meat to lessen the number of oxen the army
would butcher.[...]m tent
side. Dragoons milled through the campsite to gather
branches for firewood. Their trails traced through the
snow to scatter in the cottonwoods, as if defining a
migration of mice. “You can stop right here, footman!
Put your feet up while we cook that deer for you!”

Carl Heinrich smiled and walked on.

“Won’t cost ya but a hindquarter!”

Carl Heinrich passed by.

“We’ll spare youwho fell off the boat.”

“That Dutchman was a sergeant over there in

Dutchland. He won the Iron Cross, for God’s sake.”

“What’d he do, send you a newspaper?”

“When the lieutenant sent me to Fort Bridger
yesterday I talked to some infantry They pointed him
out,” Nathan Sla[...]he
talks in one ’a them foreign—made accents you can’t tell
is French or Chinese.”

“They haveto cut the larger ones and to buck—up tree trunks
that rotted in the quack gr[...]firewood pile, twigs
from kindling from branches to saw. “Why’d they put
him ’a horseback? He’ll gather—in half an acre to the
pace.” Moses wiped his moustache and watched Carl
Heinrich stride offwith the meat and the musket

prone on his shoulders. “He could outrun a horse, on

them legs.”

The horses andto the cottonwood
bottom to shelter for the night. The riding stock that
remained in camp waited its turn for duty tied to high—
lines strung in the cottonwood trees.

“Them tall guys fall off too easy,” Moses said.
“You wouldn’t think so with all them legs to wrap
around and hook—up underneath, but By God they
do.” Moses watched the tethered horses nod[...]ride better than we can,”
Nathan said.

“Then what’s he doin’ a—foot? Ought ’a crate ’em
up and send ’em back, Iron Cross and all. We don’t need
them foreigners tellin’ us[...]works.” Moses
propped a larger branch on a rock and jumped on it. It
wouldn’t break. “What good’s an Iron Cross anyway?
Can’t eat one.” Moses retrieved an axe and broke the
branch. “Shove it down a barrel and shoot it, maybe.”
He threw both pieces on the branch stack and grabbed
another to cut.

“Looks to me,” Nathan said, “he can shoot better
than you can.”

“That ain’t sayin’ much,”[...]

we are.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that. But I do know
that man there would wear a horse out at a walk from
here to the Lieutenant’s tent. Look at the size of him.[...]d of a
mule packin’ him.”

“He was assigned to the artillery,” Nathan said.
“Probably because he was the only one smart enough to
understand ballistics and windage.”

“Load it, point it, and shoot it. What’s so hard
about that?”

Nathan Slater shook his head. “Moses, you’re
hopeless. Your mama must have weaned you before she
taught you to read.”

Moses split a branch and the pieces cartvvheeled.
“She didn’t know how to read,” he said. “She’d always
wanted to read, so I learned enough to teach her.”
Moses lowered his voice. He rested the axe. “As luck
would have it, I taught her before she drowned.”

“I did[...]ough he did
not see it. “After I learned enough to teach her, I quit
that punishment. Except for when I taught my wife to
read.”

Nathan twitched as if he’d picked up[...]nside canvas. “Didn’t know I was married, did
you?”

Nathan’s mouth hung open.

“Married right up to the day she run—off with a
Mormon.”

Nathan l[...]Apaches. Had a
little money saved—up. Went home and married Isabella.
Worked my daddy’s farm. Taught her to read and she
read that Mormon book. Then she took up with[...]”

Horses whinnied in the cottonwoods.

“Took to one of the elders.Thought him the Lord
his—self, all that bible talk, and there she went, straight
off to

Had to been that elder. Snuck it to her.” Moses raised
the axe and split the chopping block. The axe hinged at
the p[...]e. He looked
at Nathan. “Then I reenlisted, for to hook up with the
Army of Utah, and here I am.”

Troopers walked paths through camp with
armloads of twigs and sticks and branches toyou,” he
said. “You don’t look like the marryin’ type.”

“I e[...].” Moses
wiped his moustache. “I can’t wait to shoot a Mormon.
For what they done, and for what they’re doin’.” Moses
looked Nathan in the eye. “I might shoot two of “em.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this.”

“I told you now, and you don’t need to make it

nobody’s business.” Moses stuck the axe in the standing

half of the chopping block and the handle hinged again.

Moses studied the bending axe. “Carve a new handle
while you’re at it,” Nathan said.

“Leather,” Moses[...]ache. “Fetch the deer
hide offthat Dutchman, is what I’ll do. He’ll have it
skinned—off and fleshed—out by the time my stove—up
horse gets me there.” Moses retrieved his saddle and

saddle blanket from their winter tent. “Make rawhide

and fashion a new patch, for to occupy my mind.”
“For to fix our axe handle,” Nathan said. He
smiled. “Why patch—up the old when you can start
new?” he said. His smile faded. “St[...].”
Moses looked at him, then carried his saddle to
the high—lined horses.

Seventeenth Ward, Salt[...]5:20

Isabella held the scissors, using the point to sever threads
at a corner of the appliquéd apple tree and beehive

and intricate signature spelling Sophronia Fox, gaining
purchase for the blades to snip the patch from the quilt.
She snipped, then passed the scissors to let another snip,
and so on until each member present had done her part[...]hed—in edges. Isabella
handed the excised patch to Thankful Everett, President
of the Seventeenth Ward Female Relief Society.

“Let the declaration now be made,” President
Everett said. “In acc[...]

Thankful Everett lifted the piece of canvas
overhead for all to see, as a priest blessing a communion
wafer.

“May we all remember that the careful work one
may do may be undone, or should I say, that remarkable
achievements can be obscured by poor judgment, or
disrespect for the[...]patch she held, then rested
her hands in her lap and looked off. “Such exquisite
attention to detail. Such a lovely signature sewn in
those bold letters. And now, in this quilt it is forgotten,
replaced by this empty and coarse fabric. May she and
we learn from this, and be the better for it.”Thankful

Everett surveyed t[...]rd that a church
had burned. “The Lord’s will be done,”Thankful said.

She handed the canvas to Isabella and took her
seat in the circle. Isabella snipped it to fit the hole
where Sophronia’s work had been, threaded a needle,
and took the first few stitches. Each member stitche[...]said, “I mean no disrespect, but we’re
trying to raise money, so I don’t know why we’re
disfi[...]uilt. It will only make it sell for less. I
mean, what is our purpose here—to chastise Sophronia,
or to feed and clothe the brethren in the passes?”

“It’s both. And it’s more.”

Isabella frowned.

“Isabella, if we have learned anything, we’ve
learned that whatever we do must be done as the work
of the Lord or it is done in vai[...]so
for the good of our militia, whose purpose is to protect
the Lord’s new Zion so His work may be done. We
also, with God’s help, give Sophronia a lesson she needs
so she may grow in spirit. And we also create a visible
symbol, if you will, that moral transgressions have
consequences.” Thankful looked as if she[...]

“This quilt is for all to see, including people who
have no idea who Sophronia is or what she did, but
the message is there if they care to discern it. This is
how we do the Lord’s work while tending to our daily
chores.”

Emma Taylor, Secretary of t[...]like that,” Thankful said. “Even if
forgiven, and the spirit evolves through penance, the
deed remains. We learn and we grow and hopefully we
become, let me say, less imperfect a[...]s
heart,”Thankful paused. “Actually, he needs to put it in
the hearts of two men,” she smiled, “to bid on the quilt
because of its reminder of human weakness, and the
endless vigilance required to improve as a Latter—day
Saint. And, of course, to clothe our troops who guard us
against the invaders.” Thankful Everet[...]rovide.”

“I must admit,” Isabella said. “You are a blessed
speech maker. Where did you learn that?”

“Why, from Mr. Everett, of cour[...]um, the quilt
was a patchwork of floral patterns and fruit, birds and
butterflies and honeybees, signatures and mottos and
symmetrical designs. The idea had been to create a quilt
to sell at auction to raise money to split evenly between
recent emigrants destitute of food and clothing, and
Lamanites pushed from their native lands yielding
to the encroaching Mormons, and the Perpetual
Emigrating Fund to bring Later—day Saints from
around the globe to the new Zion. With the advance of
the United States army, however, the purpose shifted to
raising funds to buy supplies for the Legion wintering
in Echo Can[...]rd Female Relief Society
would sponsor an auction and a dance, with food and
enough homebrew toand she runs

off with a grocery clerk. Thank[...]

doing the work of the Lord.” Emma Taylor sh[...]d deal ofeffort.”

“I’m sure the Lord is up to the task,” Thankful
Everett said. She rested her hands in her lap, holding
needle and thread and a section of quilt, and looked
at the women seated in the sewing circle. “Now ladies.
We must be careful not to judge. We have acted in
accordance with our bylaws, not to condemn Sophronia
the person, but her action that[...]ccordance with
Christian principles. I ask all of you to pray for our
sister who loved this Society, andYou
left to follow the command of the Lord, and you left
a husband who was deaf to his call.”Thankful smiled.
“Dear sister. Youyou,
didn’t he?”Thankful Everett patted her siste[...]rk of the Lord. The

world is full of good people who misspend their lives.”

Thankful returned to her sewing. “We came here to
have a hand in correcting that.”

Emma Taylor said, “Thankful is right, Isabella.
You did what you had to do. But Sophronia, and may
the Good Lord forgive me, has the faith of a snake.To
think of it, at her age.” Emma made a tsking sound with
tongue to teeth. “Forgive me, Thankful, but she was an
embarrassment to the Church and a disgrace to our
Female Relief Society, and I’m glad she left. May the
Lord give her what she deserves.”

“Emma, you surprise me.” Thankful looked at
her. Emma stitched, her attention directed to her work.
Thankful’s hands were still. ”You must let go of your
spite.” Emma reddened. “T[...]ciety, but I hear the word of
the Lord as well as you, and I don’t need you to tell
me what He says.” Emma stitched quickly, her work
showi[...]nkful said. “Let us pray.” She
bowed her head and folded her hands, not waiting for a
response. The sewing circle did likewise. “Lord, please be
with us as we do Thine work in Thy new land. Guid[...]elp us discern the paths Thou hast for us.
Please be with Sister Sophronia and Sister Emma, and
help us all to grow in Thy love and understanding. Help
us to be the people Thou want us to be. Help us to grow

in forgiveness, and to do the work Thou want us to do. In

sewing circle joined and the song swelled in the circle.

Second Dragoons,[...]ck
the heads in the [liquor] barrels with an axe,
and, because the mules refused to drink it,

flog them for their foolishness.

—[...]snow cover, where grass had its
back bent, bared and beaten by an ill—tempered wind,
dragoons herded[...]d bit, where it picked up
snow as a thing of play and left it for coulees to keep,
dragoons herded mules and the mules turned always
leeward. Where snow calloused over they herded
oxen, clustered to break snow crust, and the oxen fed
in the broken snow. With teams too weak for draught
work, dragoons drew wood wagons by hand to haul

in cordwood that grew further away. At the[...]t
night, growing colder, guarding against Mormons andand stench of
men: snoring and flatulence, the rank unbathed bodies,
turning sleeping uneasily, hot and cold, choking on
wood smoke, men going out, men coming in. Moses
Cole stepped from the tent to breathe. He coughed.
He looked at stars solid in their endless heaven and he
watched one and then another one fall. He thought of a
brace of w[...]panicked
horses falling off a cliff. He wondered what he would
do when he found Isabella. It had been two years and
four months now, long enough for her to become a
mother. She could have carried his child when she left,
who would grow up calling a Mormon, “Daddy.” Or
the Mormon elder could have made her a mother. Or it
could be both. Did she live in the city at the Great Salt[...]a house or
a homestead hut? Did she wear bonnets and walk on
a tree—lined street? Did she plo[...]

Lieutenant Colonel[...]w, where they’d find feed for the oxen, mules,
and horses, these mouths of thousands they herded for[...]nter,
the relentless windchill the thief of heat, and the snow,
always the snow, as though the beast of[...]eral Commanding. He thought of Napoleon in
Russia and the frozen soldiers.

“Push it away,” he said.

He thought of his daughter, Flora, married
to James Stuart, a lieutenant in the First Cavalry i[...]ting his daughter—the
beard the Lieutenant grew to hide a slung—under chin
and to shed “Beauty,” the moniker it prompted. At
le[...]f the wedding at Fort Riley, its
military majesty and his beautiful Flora, so young and

full of promise, wife now to a life of waiting, wife to a
husband’s love of honor.

Beauty, Cooke thought. “For God’s sake,” he said.
His son—in—law had carried the name, “Beauty.”

At least he had the honor to drop it, growing the
beard, using his initials fo[...]barrassment
of a husband called “Beauty.”

“What gentleman would call himself ‘JEBW he
said.

Cooke chuckled at the choice his daughter made.
Say what he may, he thought, the young man Stuart
advanced[...]so
proud of her daughter following her footsteps and the
validation it gave. The scars marred each cheek, constant
reminder for all to see. Cook winced at the memory.

“God damn me,” he said.

He placed blame on the relapse of malaria and its
feverish thinking, the demented disease that picked up
the pistol. Weak with fever the mechanism slipped and
the ball knocked out half her teeth in the parlor[...]face,” he said, shaking his
head. “I deserve to be here.”

Rachel looked more astonished than hurt at first,
and then the pain came. The dental surgeon had done
what could be done. That lovely, loving woman deserves[...]

“What an idiot,” he said out loud alone in his
tent.[...]ged at the
Bad Axe River. He would never tell her what he had
seen there.

Too much time to think out here, he thought.
Too much time with too little to do but persevere. He
thought of the passage from[...]also; knowing that tribulation worketh
patience; and patience, experience; and experience,

hope; and hope maketh not ashamed.”
“Who the hell thought of that?” he said, and

he turned under his buffalo robe. If hope is the best
you can do, why bother? His life had been a trail of[...]ht. The waterless marches of the
Southwest desert and the oxen with bleeding feet. The
Snively affair and those damned Texians. Fremont and
his pompous posturing, the humiliating court—ma[...]olera,
dysentery, the impairment of malaria. Sick and dying
dragoons and always horses breaking down. The slow
promotions, detailed to desolate places while a war was
won in Mexico. The prairie campaign’s perseverance and

boredom. The deep snow and precipice edges pursuing

the Jicarilla Apaches.[...],
the scalps of white women. It’s been a tiring and trying
ride, he thought, from which I’ve gleaned tribulation,
experience, and hope like the Bible likes. Not much of a
life, he thought, if hope is[...]motion.

Nathan Slater pulled the buffalo robe up and over his
shoulders and closed it with an overlap under his chin,
the buckskin underside over his coat, hair—side to the
outside. It was pliable, brain—tanned Indian style, and
it was warm, the heavy hair of the buffalo’s sh[...]mals there
was always movement. An ox would stand to defecate
or stretch. Another would shift, extend a front leg and
lay his chin on it. Another would roll to his side while
another reversed that movement, ri[...]as if in
dreams of green fields. Others groaned and twitched
as if they spoke from dreams like the men in tents did,
haunted by what had passed and what was to come.

The horses were more composed. Some lay down and

The herders would stop to warm up at the fires
and they took turns tending them. Then they’d walk
and ride coaxing their shift to pass.

Alone under starlight, a March night cold[...]emembered he’d left the life of a
farmer. Young and restless and captured by the romantic
notion of the mounted soldier and the name itself,
dragoon, as though there were something princely
about it. The knee—high boots and black tack, sash and
sabre, the grace of the gentleman the recruiter posed.
There was the freedom from the farm and its drudgery
and the chance to ride rather than drive horses. He
remained a farmer at heart, as earthy and intricate as
the soil that grew him yet restless for something better
that books and splendid houses suggested. Something
pulled him,[...]fix. The dragoons he could do, their payroll pay and

promised adventure, the horses and the riding of them.

The hardship marching surpri[...]ched for weeks at a time, often riding far enough to
cross a Pennsylvania township five times to a day. He’d
seen country he’d seen in dreams and the more he saw
the more he missed wooded farmlan[...]This marching confirmed
no yearning for the sea and yet he seemed like a prairie
seaman. At least the[...]orses by the hundreds, mules that
fell in singles and teams, farriers pulling their shoes to
use again. Rations adequate to fend off starving but
nothing they wanted to eat. Fingers and toes black
from frostbite, the wind steady as tim[...]better in Pennsylvania, the comfort of the forest and
the close hills, the fieldwork and the meals, the warm
bed of a farmstead.The grit required to survive here had
astonished him. There had to be something at the end
of this that would make the[...]in Kansas did. At home they had a
handful of cows and plow oxen, but nothing like this
expanse of animals. It would take an hour to ride
around this herd on a horse at a walk, and then the
Mormons might get him. He’d yet to see one herding

He’d see the Gre[...]ny rate, which
the freighters had said was as big and devoid of life as
the desert it lived in. He’d see the city the saints had
built, and he’d watch over Moses to keep him from
doing something foolish.

Echo Cany[...]ory,June 20, 1858

Everything here today is hurry and bustle,
drawing horses and ponies from Captain
Marcy’s herd, getting them[...]for the march tomorrow. He did not bring
enough to fill up the regiment and the light
battery, and we were forced to draw sixty
mules in order to mount all our men. I
happened on a very large horse, white as milk,

and I think he is a good one.

—Wi//iam Drown, Seco[...]there. A construction
of huts crafted with poles and woven willow gave the
look of poverty and pride, a village replete with thatched
roofs sealed with matted grass and a mud mix of clay and
coarser soils placed to slow snow and its dripping through
ceilings heated from the fires inside. Firewood piles stood
by some of the huts to feed fireplaces cut in the banks

of the canyon[...]he huts had Dutch ovens cut in the clay bank next to the
fireplace to bake bread oven fresh as if home had never
left t[...]glected,
abandoned as though decimated by disease and left for
the elements to dismantle.

Scouts had seen the canyon when the Nauvoo
Legion was posted there and reported the certain
annihilation of the Army of Utah if it attempted to bull
its way through.

“I don’t like this,”[...]efore the dragoons do.” He looked
at the slopes and the rock walls of rifle pits spotting the
canyon sides.

“Aye, to walk in their dust and the messes their
horses make, is it? You march with dragoons now, you’ll

want the road first, me boy.”

“Tis an easy thing to burn wagons and steal cattle
that aren’t guarded. Tis another to face an army of
United States infantry. You mark me words, laddy. We’ll
have to hunt to find a Mormon to shoot.”

Like the country they’d covered sinc[...]ly haired—over with prairie, this was a
country to pass through traveling to somewhere less
inhospitable. The huts were the exception, an attempt
to tame an untrainable beast, as though weather could
be gentled with a perception of order. This was tough
country with its rock—sided mountains that seemed
to fall through the canyon floor, hillsides suitabl[...]ground that showed the work of

wind. This would be a country where snow was born.

“They have their mounted militia, me boy. We
have dragoons who will breathe the fire of hell itself.”

“The dragoons have done nothing but eat
our rations, and now they ride in the back when the
Mormons are up front somewhere,” Garrison Lloyd said.

“F[...]ven’t shown
me much.”

“Aye laddy. But they are mad. A dragoon don’t
like starvin’ and freezin’ like we do. He don’t like bein’
afoot and left to do a man’s work. Oh, they’ll make the
Mormons[...]d when he smiled. “Tis a thing of beauty truly, to

see the horsemen charge.”

The four hundred ho[...]any on remounts from Captain Marcy’s
expedition to New Mexico. At the mouth of the

canyon Colonel C[...]paulets when his horse turned, showing promotion

to full colonel not yet one week old. Like the ring to a

Somehow an order was sorted and the Regiment
drew sabre and the canyon sounded as if it split. At the
command to return sabre it sounded like train rail fell
on train rail for the full defile of the canyon and then,
for a moment, the canyon stood still. Then orders were
shouted and the canyon shouted back and bugles blew
moving four hundred horses and it sounded like the
mountains switched sides. Colonel Cooke smiled and
he turned his horse and the insignia glinted as though
wishing to soar on the pinned wings and Colonel
Cooke led the Second Regiment, United Sta[...]ost

accurate manner, the city being laid off in

perfect squares, every street as straight as an
arrow, and fifty yards wide. Ihe houses are
built of stone and sun-dried brick, and, as

a general rule, one and a half stories high,
each house having about four acres of land
in the enclosure, which is loaded with grain,
garden vegetables, and flowers without limit.
On each side of every str[...]all these little
streams, or irrigating ditches, are rows of
beautiful shade-trees; every dwelling nearly
has a nice paling fence in front, and many of

them apple and peach orchards in rear.

—Wi//iam Drown, C/Jingug/er, Second
Dragoom,]zme 26, 1858

Ihe streets [in Provo] are very wide, regularly
laid out, and run at exact right angles to each
other. Along the sides of some of them run
s[...]ut, weighing ten or twelve pounds, can
frequently be seen coursing along. Ihe
children have fine sport throwing stones at

these beautiful fish, and trying to kill them.

—]eneA. Gave, Captain, Tent/[...]

Colonel Cooke muttered, “God bless these
people” and he thought, their courage knows no
boundary. He shook his head again and he said, “What

an army they made.”

“Beg your pardon, Colon[...]rs
I knew.”The Lieutenant looked as if he tried toand watched with head
uncovered.

Moses Cole watched[...]oops Nathan looked at the houses with their yards
and porches, fences and orchards. It looked as good as
the best he’d seen in Pennsylvania.

“These people tried to starve us, and he takes his
hat off,” Moses said, as though not minding who heard.

The sound of horse hooves filled the bou[...]ls the creeks gurgled as though promenading
water to trees standing sentinel and to the gardens and
orchards of the citied homesteads.

“If it was up to me we’d camp right here. Move
right in them houses. Eat off them fruit trees and
gardens,” Moses said.

Nathan had not se[...]

Louis, and these people did not have the material or
tools the craftsmen back east had[...]owe us that much,” Moses said.

The yard fences and the shade trees and the
open streets they marched on and crossed over blended
the comfort of New England w[...]of
space. Looking east over the tops of the trees and the
houses the mountains rose higher than Nathan[...]paintings in a
Philadelphia museum. “Appreciate what we see here,”
he said. “Might be a long time before we see this again.”

Moses l[...]dragoon riding
in front of him. “I don’t care about the pretty,” he said.
“Just want ’a give these people what they been askin’
for.” Moses bobbed in the saddle in cadence with his

horse’s gait. “Just come to do ajob, is all.”

The girl was radiant.[...]lit from inside, a
woman illuminated. I tried not to stare, then simply
surrendered.

Alone, I tried not to look in the mirror, tried
not to hear my mother: 777e old are more naked tban
tbeyoung. Before the camp, she ha[...]eventy—five yards
underwater. She had strength and desire, the discipline
to stay down even if her lungs were bursting.

There are others like me at the pool, not that
old, but already too fat or too thin, trying to stay fit,
but already withered. There are others with scars: the
woman with one breast, the man who leaves his left leg,
his prosthesis, at the edge[...]eighed seventy—two pounds the
last time I dared to weigh her. I fed her puréed peas,
strained carro[...]onger tban deal/.77. Trait me.

Yesterday, Mother and I bought figs and apples.
She was strong, yes, five months dead and still walking.
She squeezed a plum. 777ere aren’t ripe, she said. And,
W170 will bavepomeg‘ranater?

She wanted carob[...]fruits of
Tu B’Shvat, the new year ofthe trees, God’s Rosh
Hashanah. My father said, God reeks M, [Mr day alzove all
otberr.

In Israel, cold winter rains turned to drizzle; sap
flowed through myrtle and cedar. Here in Salt Lake
City, I woke to see new snow on white aspen, the whole
world in p[...]ned her eyes
wide, loving the light, able at last to take everything
inside her. Only thirty—five d[...]rage of
light, the Tree of Life, all life, might be reawakening.

I told myself: Rejoiee.

I whispered: For your motber’r rake, lze tbankful.

And so I was—but more grateful to come home
and close the blinds and close my eyes and let my
mother go and lie perfectly still in perfect silence until
Davia and Seth returned from school, until I heard

her bones, and its voice is almost human. She loves

piano becau[...]loves the zither because even the wind knows how
to play it—as if her gift is not her gift, only th[...]he Protecting
Veil,” the voice of the Mother of God in a cello,Yo—Yo
Ma playing Tavener. She turns the volume down lower
and lower, until sound stops, until she becomes its
lingering vibration. Davia, seventeen, and good enough
for Juilliard, but she wants to live in the wild, meet the
snow leopard face to face, hear its still, small voice high
in the Himalayas—she wants to follow caribou across
mountains and tundra, record the sounds they hear on
their way to the edge of the world—Davia wants to
sing as elephants sing when they visit the bones of their
ancestors.

Seth already knows he’ll be a fireman and
a cantor. I see him now, my thin boy with narrow[...]hool, proving himself, faster than the other boys and
able to squeeze his skinny hips through tight spaces,
Set[...]their babies from the embers.

My tbildren/ Let [be nigbt begin; [etyourfatber tome

was too heavy to lift, a root too deep to dig, your shovel

too dull, the clay too resistant—if you stopped, if you
staggered, if you reeled, dizzy from hunger, the Kapo
beat you with a stick and you found the strength or
died there.

In the end, my[...]ors contented
themselves with one simple project: to move the stones,
to even the banks, to make the river straight, to force
the Vistula to flow more smoothly.

I see her bones, all their[...]mother lived because she was strong for her size and
not too pretty, because she stood straight, becau[...]father or one cousin lived as
she lived, by faith and will, by chance, somewhere. She
lived because life itself was proof of rebellion. One day
she collapsed and lay in the cold unconscious. When
the whistle blew, she did not rise, and two other women
whose faces she did not recall, whose names she never
knew, who whispered to her in Czechoslovakian or
Polish, used the last of their strength, their love, to drag
her back to the camp between them. My mother lived
because th[...]ecause frostbite, because
fever, because too weak to march as the Russians
approached, because left to die and instead liberated.

Eva Spier became Eva Lok and

more survivor who never recovered, whose bones
carried an irrevocable message: she couldn’t walk and
then she couldn’t sit; one stroke took her desire to eat;
another stole her voice in every language.

Night after night, my mother lives and dies.

I touch her bones. I smell her. I breathe[...]she won’t stop. Am

I awake or dreaming? There are things I know that
my mother did not tell me, wor[...]h’s “Chaconne” playing on barbed
wire. Wben you tried witb banger, Ifelt my own banger.
I praired God for your noire, your flerb, your fatifor fear
I eouldrootbe witb a rong, and banger I eouldratifl witb
my body. Night after n[...]eeps blessed, because he
deserves comfort. I wake and wake again, and though I
know it is unjust, each time I wake, I b[...]nd,
famously patient. Doctor Liam Betos knows how to slip
titanium ribs into the bodies of children with scoliosis
so that they can breathe and walk, free of oxygen tanks
and wheelchairs. He is not vain.A man bad to build a
titanium bibe before anyone tbougbt to put ribr in a buman.
Liam’s children teach one another to do somersaults
and cartwheels. They hang by their knees from the
mon[...], roll down grassy hills in the
park, then charge to the top again, laughing.

If Doctor Betos sleeps[...]it.

This morning I kissed them all goodbye, Seth and
Davia and Liam, and I forgave him, my good husband,
and I was unafraid, calm in the lavender light, no need
to shield myself against it.

I walked to the pool alone, but not lonely. Mother
comes when[...]nnot choose the day or
the hour. Birds flew tree to tree, gathering twigs and
hair, fur and feathers, hopeful and foolish they were,
everywhere building. From a dense hedge, a hundred
hidden sparrows sang, and I felt the sound, all their
bodies in my body trembling. I smelled damp earth
beneath melting snow and heard every seed, shells ready
to split, green shoots quivering.

God, bere, in all tbingr: tbe birdr, tbe rong, tbe ri[...]tugging at bir ebain, tbe band witb wbieb
I toueb and rootb bim. God immanent, God bumble, God
wbo ofiQ’rr Himrelfar olive, wine, wbeat, earobiar tbe
pomegranate we found at lartiar rweetpearr and nutx
and appler. God wbo rertorer Himrelftbrougb as eaeb time
we eat w[...]ost fell, bedazzled by the thought,
as if hearing Godand rtill you’d fall on your fate witbout me.

YEr,forty7”our and m tired, and too weak to walk
maven Math, and fumbling in my [Jody witboutyou.

I was glad to see the green—eyed girl at the pool.
She restor[...]day,
almost clear, not hers, merely the glass for God’s
reflection.I knew her name now, Helen Kinderman.
Sweetly she’d given it to me last week when I asked her.
She spoke softly, strangely shy, like a child; and though
she stood five inches taller than I, though she glowed,
blond and pale, a Nordic queen, she looked suddenly
small and bewildered.

I loved her for this, the absence of all arrogance.

Today, everyone looked perfect. One leg, one
breast—no fat, no hair—what did it matter? Carl
Ancelet pulled hard with his left arm to compensate,
and his right leg, his one extraordinary leg, kicked up
and down and side to side, as he glided down the pool.
A dark—skinned woman swam on her back, pregnant
and joyful, frightening lush, buoyantly healthy, pink suit
clinging to swollen nipples and navel, tight pink cloth
exposing her, leaving her[...], because she had lost a breast at thirty—three
and was not afraid, because she gave them a vision
of[...]water—

Louise, still alive at thirty—seven, and now her hair grew

long and wavy, pale blond, shot with silver.

A tall boy with rippled muscles, one who’d shaved
himself on purpose, stroked his smooth[...]f this indulgence.

We were whole, each one ofus, and all of us
together.

I remembered my father’s blessings: for lightning
and thunder, for the beautiful ones, a narrow road
through red maples, green dragonflies and white
tulips, for lovely girls and strange—looking creatures:
Barutb ata Adonai Elobeinu Meier/.77 ba’olam mix/bane];
bab’riyot. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the
Universe, who makes the creatures different.

Kristina Everly spoke to her deaf twins from
across the pool, hands leaping in light, voice blessedly
silent. How lucky they were to speak this way! I
watched Ricky and Ryan dive deep to tell secrets
underwater. Idris emerged from the t[...]nd him. One day after my mother’s first stroke
and before her second, Idris gave me a tiny cup of
espresso at his coffee shop—warm and delicious it
was, bitter and sweet as melted chocolate. I told him I
would never need anything again, and he nodded; he
understood; he believed me. But tome bark, he said,free

for you, any time, really.

I didn’t come. I was afraid of him, his beauty and
his kindness, the way he said my name, Margalit, so

Two more appeared, the last to join us, Samuel
Killian pushing his wife Violette in her wheelchair. I
loved to see him: stooped old man, thin skin speckled
with dark bruises—dear, faithful husband, delicate and
determined, every bone of his sternum visible. Fragile
as he might seem, Samuel had the will to wheel his tiny,
white—haired wife to the edge of the pool, lift her out of
the chair, and ease her down to the water.

I thought what a blessing it was to swim with
them, what a gift that they would allow it.

My father taught me to swim before I learned
to say no, before I knew fear in any language. He
could teach anybody to swim: little girls crippled by
polio, soldiers wi[...]ld women
terrified of water. My father said: Wby be afraid of [be
[bing [ba[ boldr m? My father said: I ’m rigb[ bere; I ’ll
walk in [be wa[er berialeyou.

When Helen swam below me today, I found her
foolish and splendid, extravagant in her strength, but

not v[...]sense, floating twelve feet under,
flaming on [be bo[[om, but this is what I saw, and in my
mind how I said it.

I confess: I grew vaguely irritated. She stayed
too close to the edge. Despite her depth, she distracted
me, and so I blamed her when I missed my flip turn. I
forgot how lucky I was, how privileged to swim with
these people. I forgot about coconuts and pears and
olives, all the fruit at home, waiting to be cracked and
sliced, the endless gifts waiting to be opened. I forgot
about God as wine and swallowed a mouthful of water.
He left me sputter[...]ly.

I swam over her three times before I thought to
go down, before I felt her as I’d felt the bird[...]ot
believe. I did not trust her.

Dive, she said, and I obeyed, but the breath I took
was quick and shallow. I had to rise again and gasp, and
dive again to reach her.I thought I’d find Helen, green

ButI touched her arm and I knew; I knew then
already.

Limp, the girl, water—logged, heavy, no breath
in the lungs and so she floated on the bottom. I took
Helen Kinde[...]arms; I wrapped my arms
around her.I kicked hard, and we rose like this, not
joyfully, together.

Then[...]ristina waving furiously at the
lifeguard, trying to make that flushed boy comprehend
the wild silenc[...]rful thighs like one of those
miniature gymnasts; and Louise Doren touching
Helen’s feet, believing the one who’d almost died could
heal the one not living.

The flustered boy yelled, commanding us to
step back, me and Kristina, Louise and Samuel, as
if we had no part in it, no place or p[...]o
desire—running now, the guards, telling Idris to set her
down, gently, gently; scolding us with th[...]he fierce little gymnast pumped
Helen’s chest, and we saw her: Helen Kinderman
exposed, pale skin blotched and blue, supple legs
weirdly bloated. Stop. I wanted someone to stop this.
But nothing stopped. In her chest, tiny bones cracked;
from her mouth and nose, water spurted.Then the boy
had his mouth on Helen’s mouth, and the girl pressed
hard with the heels of her hands, and Helen’s bones
broke and her body surrendered and there was hope
the lungs might heave, the heart c[...]e?

On the phone, scolding her befuddled father?

What did it matter where or why, legitimate
or foolish? She’d left us in the care of two teenagers
who had done the drill ninety—nine times but never[...]f us—how strong she was,
how ridiculous we were to worry. I wanted to rage at
Helen, God, the manager. Wbere oreyou now? Wlmt are
you doing tlmt’r more important?

Two firemen and a paramedic descended, dark

birds in black jackets, fast and graceful, called by God,

terribly efficient. Helen belonged to them now. They
had paddles to jolt her heart and a syringe full of
epinephrine. Her body rose and shuddered and stopped
and rose and shuddered and stopped and rose and
shuddered and stopped, and then these three raised her
on their wheeled cot and took her away from us.

Gone, our beau[ifi4lgirl, gone all [be way over, already
on [be o[ber rboreil knew i[ ax roon ax I [ouebeal ber.

Now the jittery manager and her quick guards
herded us to the locker rooms, told us not to shower.
Drem anal go bome. Pool eloreal for [be day. Come barb
[omorrow. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Violette sat in her chair, cap curled u[...]like a cape around her. Crippled queen!
I wanted to kneel before her.

We didn’t go home. We cluste[...]p until Idris put his arm around her.

She wanted to touch me because I’d touched
Helen, because she thought I was good, because she
believed I’d tried to save her.

I let her believe; I let them all believe what they
wanted.

Carl looked in my direction, but his focus went

far beyond, to the trees, to the snow on the mountains
behind us. Louise and her two friends pressed up
against me, and only then did I realize how weak I was,
that I ha[...]whispered, Sbe’albe alive if

I 21 gone rooner. And Louise said, I[ eoulal bave been me
or joan or Ha[...]touched the place where her left breast
once was to remind me: anyone can drown or save or
fail Or you, she said, you migb[ bave been [be one on [be
bo[[om, Ialris [be one wbo alo<ve [oo la[e, Ialrir [be one wbo
wai[eal.

She meant to be kind, but her words pierced me.

She drove me hom[...]ob.

I nodded. Bu[ we were [bere, wi[b Helen, in [be
wa[er. I didn’t say it.

She wrote her phone number on a little scrap of
paper. Call me 1f you neeal rome[bing la[er.

I thought God was here, in this room, still alive
but unable to help us, revealing himself to me in Louise
Doren. I couldn’t bear Him, His grief, His terrible need,
pomegranates and grapes, three fat pears, a jar of black
olives, all that fruit, Hir fruit, in my kitchen.

And then Louise closed my door, and I was alone,
completely, and everything in the house scared me:
fruit u[...]

How can tbis be?

My mother’s sister Edith died because she was[...]died barren, bearing only their secrets.

Any day you might be the one, or the one
of a thousand chosen. Beeuure you rerirted, beeuure
you rtumbled, beeuure one tell grew wild, beeuure you
rpit blood, beeuure you beld your breutb, beeuure you
[bore to rtuy under. For two hours the water ran

cold over my father’s cold body. You died beeuure you

were exeeptionully kind; you lived beeuure you were
rpeetueulurly eruelibeeuure you were wire, beeuure you
were foolirbibeeuure you didn’t bide in time, beeuure you
didn’t believe, beeuure you couldn’t imagine.

How tun tbis be?

My mother said, Our neigbborr turned ur out.

Our good Cbristiunfriendr delivered ur to tbe roldierr. Ybe
midwife wbo brougbt me mfe into[...]er wept,
wutebing. ‘Pleure, rbe’rjurt u girl, be eureful. ’But Kuturinu’r
fingerrpurbed burd. Kuturinu Szubo’piereed me. Ar if I
were notbing to berigout, dog, few, rtrungeriur up my
aunt Lilibe[...]ud not rewn tbe
wbite drem und rtitebed u bundred and twelve glam beudr
into tbe bodiee.

How tun tbis be?

Ybefumilyjewelr were inride, it? true, but not[...]den: or if we would return, or if our boure would be our
boure, tbe doll unerurbed, Motber’r ebinu e[...]etb, u red tongue, tiny dimpler;
rbe looked reudy to rpeub, tbin pink lipr ligbtlypurted,
tbe prineem Anurturiu rweetly rmiling. I rtured ut ber on
tbe rbelf and all tbe wbile Kuturinu probed, redrtongued

Anaxtaxia kept ber rilenee.

How can tbis be?

Sbe badgolalen bair, xilby bair, buman bair eurleal in
ringletx. I would eruxb ber now myxelf to xtop remembering.
My mother’s uncle Tamas died[...]agogue in
Vienna. He carved headboards with vines and flowers,
cradles that never tipped, caskets without nails. In
silence, in delight, he carved nutcrackers and puppets.
Bertok Spier carved the delicate legs of chairs and
tables. In sarvar on the Raba River, no one asked, no
one cared, if these legs belonged to Jews or Gentiles.
For his son and daughters and nieces andyou
could see, a man with a dove, a miniature Yonah.

How can tbis be?

Even Bertok the carver couldn’t explain how h[...]la died because she
carried Tavi, three years old and always hungry. Efron,
jozxua, Tzili, judit. Her cousin Datiel lived because
the sun struck his face and he looked stronger than he
was: older, taller, al[...]m, almost a soldier. He wheeled carts of the dead
and almost dead. He heaved them into ovens. On Roxb
H[...]x written, on Yom Kippur it ix realeal: wbo
xball be tranquil anal wbo xball be troubleal. Datiel survived
the war and hung himself twenty—six years after.

They arri[...]ie fog, an
orchestra played Hungarian Rbapxoaliex to soothe them.

Areyou mad? Ix tbixpomible?

And then they began to see, yes, a piano and
a cello, a violin dancing in the air, in the mist, and a
woman with a baton, standing very straight, and then
forty other women, female shapes shifting be[...]where
falling. Music muted the cries of children, and they
thought: Iftbe musie aloexn’t xtop, anytbi[...]ild, a little boy

lost, a waif abandoned. Lilike and the son of a stranger

died together. You li<ved beeaure your rboer almor[fi[ and
you found a pieee of wire [0 [lore [bem, beeaure you r[ole a
rpoon from a dead man, beeaure you [ore bir rbir[ [o wrap
your fee[, and your fee[ didn’[ freeze and rwell and blir[er,
and [be rorer didn’[ [ripple you; beeaure you pulled [be
r[raw from [be dead one’xpann [o Silffl your own pann,
beeaure you weren’[ afraid, beeaure [be dead were dead
and eouldn’[ bur[you.

You died beeaure you failed [0 bu[[on your [unit [0
[be [0]), beeaure you failed [0 make your bed fla[ and [uek
[be eorner, beeaure you fiziled [o r[and [bree bourx in [be
freezing rain ax [be guardr ealled your ridieulour numberr,
ax [beir dogr rearebedfor [be oner wbo didn’[ anrwer, [be
oner wbo failed [0 rire, [be oner wbore bear[r and mindx
bad failed [bem.

One day my mother thought she would run into
the buzzing fence and end it. A song, it was, electricity
in wire, a sw[...]fio I/Val[z tenderly
tempting. She didn’t care about her own life or the fifty
women the guards might shoot in retribution. I dared
God [0 aeeme me of murder. But she stepped outside the
barracks into the light and the sun on her bare arm
felt warm, and the sun on her skin saved her. Another
day, later[...]o eold, ro rwee[ [o rlip under, but twilight came and
the sky turned pink and lavender beyond the trees, and

a prayer began to pass among the women, a whispered

song between t[...]dy here, radiant among them.
They had one choice: to live as long as possible, to let
God hold them in the river. Hungarian, Greek, Czeeb,[...]n mi meleeb
malebei bamlaebim Hakadorb Barueb Hu. And [be angelr
tame and bovered [bere, elore, [bougb we worked, [bougb
we eouldn’[ Mop working, and Godga<ve ur eaeb an ex[ra
roul, a boly rpiri[ for [be Sabba[biHe ga<ve urfive roulr;
He gave urfifly; He gave ur all [be dead rwirling down [bir
ri<ver. Did we ring aloud[...]eard, wounded
ur one by one, lef[ uxfaee down in [be wa[er, rilen[ women,
floa[ing Jewr, free a[ lar[, raved, delivered, bu[ [be wind in
[be [reer and [be wa[er o<ver roeks were [be prayer and [be
rong, and [be river and [be nigb[ and [be wind raved ur.

How can [bis be?

You lived because your bones heard Aida in
your sleep, and the beat of the drums kept your heart
beating.

My father said, Even Morer didn’[ wan[ [0 die.
Old ax be war, Morer feared [be Angel ofDea[b. Wben be
elimbed Moun[ Nebo a[ lar[, Morel arked God [0 kin bir
mou[b and eyelidr.

Fa[ber, didyou wai[for God? DidHe kisryou asyou

Helen, I wife“, I bimed you: as Idris lifted you out of
my armx, I premed my lipx to your legito taxte, to know, to
love you.

I do love you.

Two hours gone since we lost her. Is love fiercer
than death? Motber, are you witb me? I thought of
Helen’s mother, the words she might hear, her husband
the first to know, the one to tell her, the terrible sound
she might make as sl[...]? My
father lay dead nine hours before I knew it, and all that
time, if I imagined him at all, I imagin[...]r first, Peter
Kinderman, a pharmacist downtown, and when he
saw them, he was afraid, but not for Hele[...]bix morning, Helen. He walked from the drug store
to the library, thirteen blocks in the cold without hat
or gloves, and the wind bit and he liked it, the small
hurt, the swirling snow, the distraction, the drifting in
and out, the seconds when it was still untrue, a terr[...]m, her distraught father, while he
wept in relief and terror, grieving now for another man,
feeling him[...]t sensitive
of his children, the quiet one, Helen who came from
the womb with her eyes wide open, just a few minutes
old and already watching. She would understand his
sorrow[...]f pain when she didn’t come home,
when he began to take it in, when he couldn’t breathe,
when he had to invent words to tell his wife and
somehow find his other children.

Peter Kinderman climbed the winding stairs to
the fourth floor of the library because even the[...]se,
too much like water—the fourth floor where you
can see paintings by Fra Angelico or read the words
of Mahatma Gandhi—where you can visit Saigon,
Macchu Picchu, Wounded Knee—where you can climb
Denali. The copy of John James Audubon’s Birdr of
Ameriea lies in a glass case, protected. If you took it out,
it would stand three feet high and be too heavy to steal.
Sixty pounds! Ob, bow Helen loved it.

Clare Kinderman saw her husband and
thought, Wbat a lovely rurprixe, not my birtbday, not our
anniverxary, and bere be ii in tbe middle of tbe day, Peter
looking bandrome and rad, told and dixbeveled, but rurely

be’x not rad beeauxe be’x eome in time for luneb, like tbe dayx
wben we were firxt married, before tbe ebildren, before
Vondajean and Helen, before jay and Karin and juli,
wben tbe day wax too long to be apart, wben be bad to eome,
rometimex tbree timer a day, just to look, juxt to xee tbatI
was Killl bere, Killl bix, Killl real.

He took her outside to say it, so she could wail
into the wind, so she wouldn’t have to hold it in her
body as he held it, so the cry wou[...]ove, her Leonard.

A Sunday morning, late summer, and Mother had
gone to the hospital to play her violin for the children.
Leonard Lok slipped free of his body fast to follow her,
to hear her play, to see Eva swaying to the songs inside
her—one more time, my love, my[...]is holy sparks scattered. She
stood with her back to the windows, face in shadow,
bright glass blazing[...]ection—Eva playing
Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta and Marosszék, each one
a fusion, a rondo and a rhapsody, playing with her

beloved Zoltan, imagining him, the teacher who visited

her school, who believed every child could sing, who
said every child muxt sing whenever possible. Hum if you
don’t ba<ve breatb; let your body feel it. And so in his spirit,
in his name, Eva taught a simple song to these children
in wheelchairs, the ones without h[...]without
fingers, the ones with fluttery hearts and failing kidneys,
the burned boy with a patchwork[...]lf, a
picture pasted together: right ear of a pig and tail of a
peacock, open eyes of an owl, closed mouth of a seal.
He offered it to my mother when she came, a gift, and
she saw who it was before he said it, and she touched
his left ear, the ear that was really his, the soft ear, the
ear that could still hear and flush and feel, and she said,
It’x beautiful, you’re beautiful, tbanb you.

How can tbis be?

Beeauxe tbe boy’x motber fell axleep, and tbe boy and
bix xixter torebed tbe drapex, beeauxe tbey wanted to xee a
wall of fire, beeauxe tbe xixterfurled berxelfinxide, and tbe
brotber tried to rave ber.

My father blazed in the window behind Eva.
As light, he fell on bare heads and throats; as light,
he warmed naked legs and shoulders; as light, he
transfigured all these shattered faces. My mother saw,
and almost understood, but couldn’t believe it.

And then a cloud passed, and as light leaves, he
left them.

How can a[...]

Helen, I ran? make xenre ofit.[...]ections. The next
day, I saw one struck by a van, and I knew her, I
remembered her, lighter and smaller than the other
two, hungry like them because of the snow, desperate,
and so they’d come down from the hills into the cit[...]k by the river. I looked for her;

I don’t know what I meant to do—lie down with her,
as I lay with my mother, float away at last, give myself
to the water? I was certain she would die that night[...]organs bled, weak
muscles quivered.

How can [bis be? Even now, I hear Helen’s mother
softly say it.

My mother who lost everyone she loved rocked
me in her thin arms one day and said, I bave you and
Liam and Setb and Davia. My mother whispered, My
life for tbix, God bar merey.

My father and his sister Antje lived because their
mother had a cousin of a cousin in America, a man with

a farm and a wife but no children. Miklos Zedek agreed

to take these two if they could learn to milk cows and
pluck chickens, if they weren’t afraid to twist a neck
and break it, if they promised to love mucking stalls,
shoveling snow, heaving thir[...]eome
after. She meant when they’d saved enough to travel,
enough to bribe, enough to secure visas. She packed
their finest clothes: A[...]lining. Worthless, she knew: they
weren’t going to wear silk and lace on a farm outside of
Buffalo. 31979210: wbat did it mean, and wbere war it? She
ironed Leonard’s trousers and handkerchiefs though
Antje begged her to stop, though Antje said: On [be
boat, everytbingyou‘vepaebed will trample. She darned
their socks, toes and heels, saving her children’s lives
with tiny knots and stitches. Their mother sang as she
worked, peculiar melodies known only to her, giddy and
bright, then suddenly mournful. Ironing was perfect
bliss, folding her children’s clothes the pierc[...]elay.

Their mother added:]u.ct afew more montbx. Be
good, my darlingx.

And they were good, very good, and they slept
in one room, in one bed, at the back of the house
where the rain came through the roof, and the heat

never reached them. Their father[...]

Conxulate bar not approved our applieationr to immigrate.
We’ll try again in four montbx. Keep your faitb in ur. We’ll
be tbere. His scrawled note at the bottom of the pag[...]could scratch it out or regret it:
Better we bave to wait. Your motber’x been xieb, notbing
xerioux,juxt rome fluid in ber lungxixbe’ll be well again
wben xbe xeex blue xby and tbe weatberir warmer Sbe xendr
ber love. Sbe rayx[...]d
in Dachau.

Soon, after, delay, don’t worry.

You died beeauxe you kept your faitb. You lived
beeauxe you loxt it. You rang wben you beard bow your
motber died, beeauxe even if God was deaf you wanted your
motber to bear you.

My father carried three photographs to America:
Greta and Hevel Lok six days after they married, a
clear alpine lake and snow—covered mountains in the
distance; Hevel a[...]iving
two children in her mind, dreaming her life to come: I
did; I raw you. Hand—tinted, singular and precious—this
photograph held their whole lives[...]after. The artist had flushed the girl’s lips and
shoulders, had revealed heat rising beneath the skin of
cheeks and fingers.The poppies glowed, lit from inside,

tr[...]nd, the last days, the last
hours, Mother ironing perfect creases in his trousers,
Mother holding Antje’s[...]ccomplices. They wore
swastikas on their armbands and flicked their little
dog—whips.They wanted Hevel Lok to scrub the street,
to wash away the Austrian cross some rebel nationals[...]mbs, had felt Dieter’s appendix before it
burst and saved him, set Emil’s fractured legs after
1e leaped from the tree house, listened to Hendrik’s
1eart and lungs, laid his naked ear on the little boy’s
b[...]tethoscope was too cold, because he didn’t want to hurt
1im. Dieter, Emil, Hendrik! Hevel Lok wanted to say
their names, to call them out of themselves, to remind
them who he was, the one they knew, the man who
oved them.

My father’s mother loved her children enough to

et them go, to believe, to trust, to lie: One day roon we
will all be togetber.

My father the Austrian orphan became an
American soldier, a liberator of Mauthausen who

saw the dead—in pits, in the quarry, ones forced to

He had never lo[...]ought love
might kill him.

How could he go home, and where was it?

Antje wrote: 121 ineber ofrnow in Bafialo [bir
winter andr[ill rnowing. He wanted to be there, under
the snow, with her, with them, to sleep without dreams
and not be dead but never wake from it. He stayed
behind to work in displaced—persons camps in Austria,
then Germany To his sister Antje he wrote: I [bink I
can be meful.

He meant nothing else makes sense. Nothin[...]0 prove i[’rpomible. He hated
these foolish men who risked their lives on purpose.

The ones returned[...][bey arked y” I eould play aeeordion;
beeaure [be oreber[ra needed a eellir[; beeaure romeone elre
bad died in [be nigb[; beeame I rpoke German; beeaure I
prieked my finger and rubbed blood on my liar and ebeeks

[0 look rory; beeaure I war a ebemir[; beeaure God filled my
lungr andIrang “Un bel di”and [birpleared an ofiieer, and
be [bore me [o wa[eb o<ver bir ebildren, beeaure bir wife war
[00 [ired af[er [be balm and I rerubbed [beir pom, and I
reoured [beir [oile[r, and [bey weren’[ unkind in [beir boure,
and I eouldn’[ ba[e [bem, and rome[imex I r[ole [be balgl’r
bo[[le, rome[imer I rueked milk pumped from [be brear[ of
bir mo[ber, and I war alwayx afraid, bu[ rbe never raw and
rbe never killed me.

They told of the ones set free who died anyway,
hundreds a day, thousands in every c[...], the good ones, their liberators, gave them meat
and chocolate and wine and cigarettes, and they ate too
much, too fast, and their bowels twisted, and the food
that promised life became the poison tha[...]t with the children while they
ate, teaching them to take a little at a time, to trust that
there was more: chicken soup and bread and oranges,
carrots and peas and milk and potatoes. And then one
day she was there, Eva Spier, an orphan just like him
but not destroyed, Eva, a girl who still loved her life, the
thin thread of it, who weighed thirty—four kilos, nine
pounds more than the day she was liberated, Eva who

gave bread to the birds, who said, Enougb [o rea[[er on

[be ground, enougb [0 xbare, imagineThe crumbs on the
ground and the birds at this girl’s feet were life, all of
it, all he needed forever and ever. If she could choose
life, who was he to deny it? When the bread was gone,
the birds pecked her bare feet, and she laughed, and he
laughed with her, these two, these motherless[...]ce—
imagine a life where laughter is possible.

To Antje he wrote: I ’ll never leave ber.

But he[...]ould bear, light the only touch tender enough not
to hurt them.

If my father had lived, he might have taught
some of these children to float, to swim, to walk in
water when their legs were too weak to stand, when
the frail rigging of their bones wouldn’t hold them.
Children like these saved him every day, and every day
he needed saving.

How [be body lover life! How [bebe?

I was glad when my mother died. I don’t deny
it. I thought now she and I can rest, now we can stop

hurting. But it doesn’t stop. You might be ten or sixteen

or ninety, you might be a hundred and twenty, old as
Moses, and still be afraid to leave this earth, still cling
to your precious body. At the top of the mountain, you
might insist God kiss your eyelids. You might surrender,
yes—you might forgive the one who gave you life to
lose—but still weep, still wish to touch the body, the
face, the mouth of every one taken before you.

Four hours gone, and even I who held Helen
Kinderman in my arms can’t believe i[...]distracted me. I started my
flip turn too soon, and my feet missed the wall—no
push, no glide, no rest for the weary—and I saw her
again, the second time, just moments after the first, and
I blamed her. I didn’t love her then, not enough to sense
despair or know her sudden weakness in that moment.
I swam to the shallow end and back, and I was slow, too
slow, because I was tired, and I saw her the third time,
right where I’d left her, twelve feet down, twelve feet
under, and I think I was afraid, but I didn’t want to be
afraid, so I was angry instead and I sputtered, and my
mother said, Dive, and my mother said, Sbe needryou.
And I did dive; I held her in my arms, and I understood
how it was, how it will be, and I kissed her leg as she
rose, as Idris lifted her away from me, and I loved her
as God loves—in helpless grief, in terrible pity—and
then the others came, mfizfi: Louise and Violette, the

firemen and paramedic, the shaved boy, the swollen

How can tbis be?

There are a thousand ways to die, any day, any
hour—yet one child lives, one[...]voured by
the wolf cuts herself free of his bowel and walks out
of the woods into the sunlight. One woman in a pit
moves, and another one says, Can anybody bear me? A
wife pulls her husband from the shower in time, and
a doctor makes an incision just big enough to slip his
fingers inside, and this man, this doctor, this human
being, holds th[...]Arire, my darling, my beautiful one, my daugbter. You ba<ve
reen Godfaee to fizee. Now all “firing is over. Now it is time
to forgive. Now it is time to rurrender. Love ixfiereer tban
deatb. I ret myrelfax a real upon your beart. Trurt me.

And so I rose. I did as my mother asked. I did
everything she’d taught me. You lived beeaure a woman
bungrier tban you, one too rieb to rwallow, gave you ber
roup and bread, and you raw tbat rbe war God, ofiering
berrelf to you even as rbe lay dying. I unrolled the white
tablecloth with its white satin stitches, and my mother
and father appeared, smelling of rosewater and myrtle,
shimmering behind lush white leaves, then hiding

themselves again so thatI could see dove and goat,

lamb and lion, wolf and weasel, snake and tiger—three
fish swimming under roots, one tiny bear growling in
the distance—owl and elephant, ram and raven: life
everywhere, life abundant.

Now, tbis ix tbe bour.

I imagined Davia walking from Rowland Hall
to the McGillis School, five steep blocks, to wait for
Seth and then walk two miles home, together. Every
day she goes. They could take a bus, but never do.
Time to tbinb, she says, and berider, 1min bim. She
will not say she’s afraid. I know she can’t explain it. A
child doesn’t need to hear a story to feel it. The story
is there, trembling in the body and the blood, in the
wind through the pines, over ro[...]in lies in its case, but the zither plays itself, and the
song swells unspoken.

Let me rpeab now, my ebildren. Let me tell you.

I saw Karin and Juli Kinderman coming home
too, on the same bus, but not together, a kind of
agreement they have, to pretend to be strangers,Ju.li
a freshman at West High, Karin a senior. They’ll find
their parents in the living room, and they’ll know their
loss before they hear it. Al[...]ay in school
today, why he let Juli dress in drag to play Hamlet, why
he let Karin learn to pose questions in Italian.Are you
afraid?Areyou bungry? Wbo iryourfavorite raint? Sball
we go to tbe opera? They’ll rage. How could their mother

allow Karin to eat her lunch in peace while little Juli,
Prince of Denmark, sneaked outside to lie in the bed
of a truck, to get buzzed on cigarettes and blow smoke
into the mouths of her two boyfriends? Forever and a
day, Karin and Juli will blame their parents for these
terrible hours, macaroni and cheese, hot ash, complete
ignorance.

Peter Kinde[...]er father’s voice, she thought: He
knowr abou[ [be blaekfio[ed alba[rom and [be black rand
beaeber, [be orange amaryllir growing rofar[I beard i[,
[be pink bibireur. He knowr abou[ [be firr[ day, a wa[erfizll
wi[b [bree rainbowr, re[...][brougb
a forer[ ro green i[ reared me. He knowr [be rea ix bluer
[ban [be rky, [be world upride down, beaven underwa[er.
Myfa[ber wbo lover me [00 mueb knowr abou[ [be [equila
and ginger I med [0 ease [be i[ing ofrunburn, [be mango
daiquiris lar[ nigb[, [be flaming rambueear af[er dinner.

And perhaps she is right—perhaps he imagines
the ti[...]nakedness at this moment, but the words he
speaks are soft, and in the breath before the cry, all
transgressions past and still to come areand Jay Kinderman, serving

his mission in Hermosillo, walks a dusty road at the
edge of the city, hoping to save one soul today, hoping
to win one convert. He does not know. He cannot
imag[...], three years older, calling him Elder Kinderman,
and he laughs at himself, at his white shirt, stained
with sweat, filthy from dust blowing. He laughs and
she’s there, watching, his Helen. He loosens hi[...]anion is sick today—heaving, dehydrated, afraid
to leave his bed, afraid to drink the water. IfJay liked
Elder Mattea better, would they be more successful?
Something to overcome—in time, if possible—part
ofthe test, part of the challenge: surrendering to love
long before you feel it.

He is forbidden to work alone. All day, he
has been disobedient. Not one crime, but a crime
committed moment by moment, street to street, hour
by hour. It would have been right to stay with Jared,
good to care for him today, to watch over him as he
slept, change the sheets a third time, fetch the bedpan
or a doctor—it would have been generous and just to
boil water clean and sit with Elder Mattea as he sipped
it. But there will be other days to learn this kindness.
Today has been a gift, time[...]but now, as twilight comes, he feels

calm again and strengthened—and he is not alone:

Helen has come to walk this scrap of earth beside him.

He sees a s[...]ecomes a shape he recognizes. He counts, he tries
to count, all her skinny dogs, all her skinny—legg[...]tled chickens that lead this strange
procession.

And he thinks, Now, today, [bis ix [be boar, and
for once he won’t preach, won’t try so hard,[...]e. Helen is here. Helen
has revealed his mistakes to him, the failure of practiced
words, the hopelessness of his precise Spanish.

He knows what his sister would do, knows she
would walk in silence with this woman and her seven
skinny children and her six scrawny dogs and her
multiplying chickens, knows Helen would walk side
by side along the tracks to the Rio Sonora. His throat
is too parched to speak of God and salvation. Even
the chickens refuse to squawk. It is better to go home
with the woman and her children, to offer the rice and
beans and corn he always carries, to drink their water
unafraid, to trust, to keep his faith, to help them cook
this food over an open pit, to sit, to eat, to share this
meal.

Jay Kinderman knows he will do[...]legs. He will
learn every song the children want to teach him.

And he will be the one swayed; he will be the

one converted.

My ebildren/ Let [be nigbt begin! Mayyou all
forgive me/

Davia opened the door, and here they were, alive,
both of them, home, my precious ones, to help me slice
pears and crack coconuts.I touched their faces, and they
understood everything had changed, though I dared not
tell them what had happened. I imagined how it would
be if Helen were their sister, if she’d died today[...]rench or memorizing the names of tribes, learning to
spell, to say, to imagine Hobokam, Tani, Zapotek, Yaqui,
Eyak, Gwie[...]ai, Malagaray—if they’d
been watching a film about birds: snow geese in flight,
dancing cranes, emp[...]rom the
ocean. Oh, if they heard now, how foolish and blessed it
would seem, this life, all of it!

Liam returned to us, just in time, just before dusk,
in the hour o[...]hite, pink, rose, red. We drank it down, the
year to come, the year behind us. We blessed each fruit.
We ate because God needed us—our human love, our
frail bodies—to restore Him, the Tree of Life, to give
God life in the world. Everytbing] 17a<ve iryourx/ How
slow we are to learn it. We ate pomegranates with shells
because[...]makes a stone, sharp in the belly. We ate figs and grapes

and apples—we devoured them whole because God
longs to enter us whole, to become one with us.

We sang as trees sing: Ebyeb arber ebyeb, I am
wbatI am beeoming. And the silence between words, our
breath, was the fruit of God unseen, too sweet to taste,
the fruit of life, ethereal. Three deer came to the back
porch and stared inside and were not afraid of us.

Later, our children passed some secret sign
between them. Davia rose and Seth followed. Our
daughter began to play the piano, low and soft, in
a rhythm impossible to repeat, moonlight through
fluttering leaves—the wind, and then the water. I was
hearing notes, but Davia was listening to the space
between them, hearing the song inside h[...]the note where she might
join them. I was afraid to lose her, but she trembled
with pure joy, the bliss of finally going. And then it
came. I don’t know how she did it. A single bell rang
clear and high as one by one the low notes faded. Davia
dove. Davia concealed herself as water.

Imagine the song you would sing if you loved the
mud, the weeds, the rocks rippling you. Imagine your
joy if you reflected stars, then swallowed them. Imagine
if you had no choice as creeks entered you, if you
wound slowly through silent woods, then with deli[...]arrow canyon—imagine the wonder of

it all, how you’d laugh and leap as you ceased to be, as

you emptied yourself into the ocean. Never again, never
again I, never will I on tbis world be walking. This was
Davia’s voice, life beyond hope and fear, proof of love,
God unfathomable. Seth brought his fingers to the keys
in a jubilation of sound, three times Da[...], Dorothy,
Matthew, Eric—I saw each one of them and all their
children; I saw fathers and mothers spared, sisters and
brothers not abandoned.

You lived beeaure you ebopped fallen treer in a
nearby forert. One day you prayed ax you walked‘ Pleare
tome, pleare tome. You meant God, deatb, your motber,
your fatber. But inrtead you raw blue butterflier, a quick
fox, tbree rabbitr[...]. Everytbing bere reemed
bind Notbing bere wanted to billyou. 77m war bow wind
tbrougbpine answered‘ Iftbe butterfly rurvived tbe nigbt,
wby ean’t you live one more day, one more bour? If tbe
eloudr are part of God and part of you, wby ean’t tbey be
good? Wby ean’t tbey be rentient?

Thirteen hours gone, and Jay Kinderman is
learning Yaqui Deer Songs from the children, songs to

carry them from here to over there, from this world to

Never again I, never willIon [bix world be walking.

Somehow he has to get back to Hermosillo.
Surely Elder Mattea has exposed the depth of his
betrayal. How will he explain what he saw here in the
wilderness?

I bave earx [o [be wildernem, ax I am walking

Wbe[ber I [urn [o [be rigb[ or [o [be le [, I bear a
voiee bebind me raying, 77m ix [be way, walk in i[.

Is this the truth they’ve asked for?

Here in [be wildernem, I am killed and [aken.

The four boys who have all become little deer
brothers laugh at him, his stiff attempts to dance as
deer dance.There is a song for his failure: You wbo do
no[ bave eneban[ed legr, wba[ are you looking for? There
is sorrow: 777efizwn will no[[...]There is
consolation: Wbi[e bu[[erfliex in a row are flying.

Helen, if [be bu[[erfliex rurvived [be nigb[, wby ean’[

we live one more day, one more boar?

My children climbed the stairs, and their enchanted

father followed. But the music did not cease. The song
surged through wood and wire, a wild river of blood, the

throbbing pulse in my skull and pelvis.

I had to rise, or die there.

I came to Seth and Davia in their dark rooms
to kiss their mouths and eyelids. They allowed it; they
indulged me, my generous ones, my children who are
not mine, who do not belong to me, these two who
belong to God and rain and river, who saved me with
a song, who found the secret chord, who held me even
now, floating on the surface of their music.

I kissed them, and I left them; I let them go, my
darlings.

I came to my own room, the room where my
husband lay on the bed, not undressed, not sleeping. I
opened the window to feel snow fall: everywhere, snow—
six inches since morning, feathery and light, merciful
snow, silent snow, snow that would be fast to melt, snow
that in the dark seemed endless. Liam rose and stood
behind me, and I leaned back; I let my weight fall against
him; I let my husband gently rock me. And in the hour
that came at last, in the new day just beginning, I began
to speak, and he began to hear me.

My mo[ber war alive again [oday, bu[ dying, and
my fiz[ber fell ax ligb[ on [be [ree wbere Da[iel ix banging.
Edi[b, Efron, Tzili,]udi[. Helen drowned [oday wi[b Se[b
and Davia, and I eouldn’[ [limb [be i[airr [o rave you in
[be xbower. 777en you all tame borne wi[b Amiela and Eva,
and [bree deer i[ared inride [o blem m. Davia played eello
and piano wbile [be wind played violin and zi[ber. Se[b

sang Hallelujab as be walked into tbefire. Cbildren witb
metal ribs elimbed trees and leaped to tbe ground witbout
breaking. Samuel eased Violette into tbe water, and my
fatber walked in tbe water beside tbem. God appeared

as Louise Doren. God appeared as bidden sparrows. God
appeared as a starving woman wbo ofiQ’red ber soup and
bread to my motber. God beeame wine, and we drank Him.
Editb Spier beeame berself and bore tbree ebildren. Sbe
ealled tbem El Sbaddai,[...]ief or nails.
Lilike saved tbe son of a stranger, and Juli Kinderman
erowned berselfPrinee of Denmark.[...]ot afraid; I ’m not bungry. We ate
pomegranates and plums and apples, and God as fruit
sustained us. Karin said, Ceeilia is my[...]n wbile a burned boy slipped free of
flayed skin to emerge as owl, and pig, and peaeoek. Vonda
jean lay down naked on a black sand beaeb so bot ber wbole
body melted, and tbe ’apapane birds sang ber name and

tbe darkreyed man ate fire. Peter Kinderman saw Clare

as sbe was before sbe knew, before sbe imagined, and tbeir
daugbter Helen tame bome witb open eyes to eomfort tbem.
Hevel Lok pressed bis ear to a ebild’s [best and beard tbe
boy’s blood roaring. All tbe bungry birds of Europe landed
at Eva Spier’sfiet, and sbe fed tbem, and sbe laugbed, and
my fiztber swore be’d never leave, and tben be left us. My
motber’s bones wasbed away in an iey river, but we were

not afraid beeause tbe twiligbt tame, and tbe song, and

tbe angels, and we bad survived," we bad lived tbrougb it,
and tbe doll named Anastasia split ber own skull to spill
ber seerets. Our ebildren beard tbefirst word and laugbed
like God as tbey beeame water. Ybey beld me, tbey gave me
strengtb, and I took Helen Kinderman in my arms, and I
kissed ber leg as sbe rose, and all ber people, all tbeir love
and grief poured into me.

Now, even now, Jay Kinderman begins his long walk
back to Hermosillo. Witb a eluster of flowers in my antl[...]erness as I am walking. Late, so late.
There will be repercussions and restrictions, the ritual of
repentance or even a return home—depending. And if
that, how will he explain and who will understand him?
Only Helen. He was called to go, and made to follow,
and the children taught him a song, and the woman built
a fire, and the food they shared gave life to God inside
them, and they danced with enchanted legs, deer with
flowe[...]Helen will understand when he
says: Nobody wants to die, but sometimes little deer brotber
ofilzrs bimself to tbe people. In tbe wilderness, I am killed and
taken. I am not afraid I am joyful. Ybe busb unde[...]ng as “I.” Ob sweet sister/ Ybis is
tbe trutb you asked for.

* Please note: the translations oflin[...]Songs appear in Yaqui Deer Songs, by Larry Evers and

Felipe S. Molina, and come from numerous songs.

The phrases have been rearranged and juxtaposed
(and occasionally altered) in Jay Kinderman‘s mind

to create his own deer song, a prayer of praise and
wonder. He hears the words of the prophet[...]

I’ve never confessed this to Miss Jens, or
to anyone else for that matter, but I am all of
her ex—boyfriends. Even those who were never
her boyfriends—useless suitors beggi[...]eir place
inside this skull, these ribs. Each man and boy who
has loved her, simultaneously and in succession from
the third grade to this day, constitutes the past and
continuous present of my heart. There’s nothing crazy
about it: just a bunch of normal guys in the grips, a
bunch of guys who happen to inhabit me.

If you approach it from the right direction, the

metempsychotic mechanism isn’t hard to understand.

It’s not that the boy in the third[...]mmon spirit has possessed each one of
us in turn, and moving on has established a certain
continuity am[...]a godlike love, pursuing
Miss Jens through bodies and men and over continents
as she flees before it.

Of that life called my own boyhood, I have
but drab, unmoving memories at best. Whole years
have been forgotten. Real life is in these lovers I’[...]ther music played at odd
moments through the day. And this love, if you can
call it that, is a magnet re—northing my mind: each
thoughtI might have called my own points to her.

Don’t worry—I’m not going to bore you with a
complete history of our affair (it would be as tedious
as anything else that pretends to be complete), but as I
tell this story I’d like to relate a few of those old loves

so you’ll see the forces in motion.

The bell rang for recess and a tumble of dry leaves
skittered and hesitated over the asphalt just past

the school exits. The crust ofgrass in the schoolyard
dipped and bobbed where the lawn had been scraped

to watch the young Miss Jens as she came to school

for the first time. Her family had just moved into the
mad, high house to the north of town. She was on her
mother’s elbo[...]ngs like a ray of sun—blonder then—her skip—to—
my—loo legs propelling her in always a new d[...]rs were light. The pencil in her hand
just turned and turned. And as for that kid, that kid was
me: the first time I saw her I had a feeling.

Recess followed recess, and it didn’t hurt that she
could run, because boys against girls required everybody
to chase everybody else or try to block and if they
ran you down, they had beaten you, and then we all
switched sides. Out of everyone, Miss[...]saw her go after a kid once with two other girls and she
grabbed him and they tickled him half to death and he
just laid there gasping on the ground like a w[...]the
Kissing Corner. Most kids didn’t know much about
kissing yet and if they did they didn’t like it. When
people kissed in the movies, we all covered each other’s
eyes, and groaned and shouted, Ir it over?!, almost
a parody of ourselv[...]s why the Corner—
between the drinking fountain and the cupboards
where we kept the glue—was really just for pretends,
and the boys would hold the girls and the girls would
scream and if kissing was out of the question altogether

they would just hug. To the surprise and horror of the

Now, I had been a bug on and off for several years
before I met her. Each recess we would spread our wings
and soar screeching across the playground, descending as
locusts on some patch of grass, stuffing dirt and weeds
in our mouths like starving circus animals that eat still
knowing they are being watched. If we ate with gusto,
it was to prove to the girls how glad we were to disgust
them. Our faces smeared with dirt, dandel[...]ked in our teeth cracks, we would rise with a cry and
suddenly—resembling less bugs than winged monke[...]mpression, at least, that we had
something better to do.

Once I met Miss Jens, though, I didn’t fee[...]an. Each dream began with an abduction: The place
and the hour varied, but usually a band of kidnappers
dressed in black jumpers and ski masks would scale
the porch on our house, loom briefly in the bedroom
window, snatch me from my bed and hustle me back to
a white van parked up the hill a ways. Sometimes[...]ouse afterwards, sometimes she
was already gagged and trussed up against a tire well on
the bed of the van when I was tossed in.

From there we were driven to their hide—out in

the woods and held in a small, stark room. Still tied up
and gagged, we couldn’t communicate except by the
warmth and movement of our eyes—an ideal situation
for two third graders incapable of small talk. The
action would be drawn out in negotiations between
the villains and local authorities, and punctuated by
grisly threats to our parents, who, like Miss Jens and
me, naturally grew closer during the abduction, andto do
then was make it out of the house and across the no—
man’s land (her speed guaranteed this) before we could
be held as human shields in the kidnappers’ getaway.

While fantasy is all fine and good, dreams run
their course.I knew the kidnappers would never come
and save us, and decided I had to act: In a jeweled box
lined with purple velour, my mother kept her necklaces,
bracelets, and earrings. Standing in the shadows of her
bedroom[...]ar. Like any trespass—
sneaking into the closet to poke at Christmas presents,

reading your[...]

It was about their daughter’s diamond ring—she
said it had come from me. 017 God 0 [bank you [bank
goodnem/ Mom said, and reached for the car keys. Left
without a word and barely a glance at me. During the
long minutes while she was out, I went upstairs to my
room, slowly, and thought of nothing to do. The dresser,
the bookshelves, the bedposts sm[...]dish, yellowish stains. Dust rose from the carpet and

I coughed, for the next half hour shuffling dumb action

figures around in the dark.

If I had to thank somebody, Victor would be it. Miss
Jens and I met at his birthday party last May. The party
w[...]out in back, full of knotty pine,
smudged brass, and dusty bottles lined up on the
moldings—since Vi[...]He was
turning 30 just a couple months before me and that
called for a celebration. Miss Jens walked in and sat
down on the low stool next to me bright as a marigold,
odd as herself (thinking[...]hocked there was a
time I didn’t know her yet), and we got acquainted.

“This is Miss Jens,” Victor said, and smiled like
he was handing me a prize, between us the sometimes
solidarity of guys. “I don’t think you two have met.”

“You’re the scientist, aren’t you?” Miss Jens said.

“No. Why?”

“Oh, you look like a scientist, you know: the jaw,
the brow,” and her fingers made a study in the air to
trace the jaw and brow, “Well, what do you do?”

“I’m a bird—a bird masseuse,”I coughed and

nodded, glancing up.

“Masseur,” Victor said, and flexed his hands. Miss
Jens grimaced.

“Masseur yourself,” I said.

“I see,” she said, “and do you fly south for the
winter?”

“Sometimes. For house calls.” (“And bird calls,”
Victor again.) “How ‘bout you, what do you do?”I
asked.

“Oh, I stay at home,” Miss Jens answered, andAnd what do you do . .. when you’re not doing
anything?”I asked.

“Well,I come to Realizations.”

“Such as?”

“Well the other day I found out what was Wrong
with me.”

“Great!”

“But it’[...]ain I’m not all that unhappy.”

“Well there you go,” Victor said, and took the
carafe, “Here, have some wine,” and poured us both a
glass.

“This is nice,” she[...]get out more.”

On that note we stood, turning to other friends
of Victor’s, and with a nonchalance that said I ’ll talk
toyou man, we mingled away from one another in the
beery air and steady racket of the party. Didn’t speak
again for the length of the evening. When she got up
to go, though, I followed her out of the humid brawl[...]resh May air, the cool
attention of night.

“Do you mind?”I said. No reply.

So we began walking to[...]ut ahead of ourselves like two people
riding next to one another in a car, driver and passenger,
our minds and mouths two spinning pairs of tires that
would not[...]adows in the doorways, chic heels
clackering here and there on curbs—each sidewalk a
stage waiting for its actors while the audience files in
and mills about.

When the conversation paused, the pauses were
pregnant. A beginning. And as we walked I was lifted
up, half—blind with t[...]e whisper, 8173 ix all tbingx
good. We were close to the metro when Miss Jens stopped.
She smil[...]

“Do you smell that?” she asked.

I stood still then and breathed in—boxwood—
glancing at her. Slender[...]iling,
Miss Jens was radiant in the streetlights, and she had
dyed her hair. Red, she had dyed it, red[...]ighlights. She wore a white shirt of light cotton and
blue jeans and long boots. A living trieolore, latter—day
Marianne. For it must be said: Everywhere that Miss
Jens went she stood out. You could spot her across
the room. In the street were certain menflttuned
to a beauty more noble than mundane—who craned
their heads as she passed. In bars since (I have seen it),
strangers and drunks will walk up to her simply to say
thanks for stopping by. Merei, they say, mem'.

That first night I just saw her to the metro. At
the entrance, limned with the fluo[...]derground, we paused. I gave her my
phone number, and, not to be outdone, Miss Jens gave
me hers. In her eyes were drawn the liquid ounces of
my loss; pain fiddled and the future danced: It would
be better 1f you tailed me in tbree weeks, she said, I ’m bury
rigbt now. —What can you say to that? It’s better than
nothing, that’s what. Any port in a storm, any molehill
on the Russian[...]as I walked back through the

orange—lit night to that bar near the Seine, I could feel

the river[...]is
one of those natural phenomena whose immediate
and overwhelming consequences seem to outweigh
the cause. Yet basic science dictates that however
implausible the origins of a feeling may be, our
judgment of its truth must stand or fall on what is
manifest among lovers, rather than those eternal criteria
dear to the skeptic or the fool. Well, reader, here is the
toadstool army, here are the barns of ash.

Month in month out all through the summer I
pursued her, until she finally broke down and agreed
to meet again. I called and called, wrote and wrote
regularly—careful not to do so more than once a week.
She wasn’t hostile[...]of the
season waxed, then waned again with fall, and so did
her distance. Don’t think I had a choice[...]ther women, but it did no good; they meant little to
me; one evening with Miss Jens had ruined the rest. By
my calculations, I’ve obsessed over Miss Jens about two
months for every one we’ve loved—with suc[...]ahead? How often do these
obsessions bear fruit? And with what tools, if any, can

we bring them to fruition?

Af[...]er dozens of nights
running one or two lines over and over through my
mind until they finally were sou[...]yes did jive

on dimpled street, on humid drive.

and i was a silver platter

and she was the claire de lune,
then i was an ocean liner

and she was the fey typhoon,
raining herself upon me

to a drumbly tumbly tune.

above she flees above sh[...]th her nightbird eyes;
her wingbeat tells me just to wait

but not too long but not too late.

for time is a gravelly song
and singing an expectation,
decked out in ballads long
on heavenly gyration

that tell of my claire de lune

and her distant castigation.

“not yet!” the words are like a hell!
because, asunder, dry’s the well
and long’s the road; because, in part,

this waiting’s a punishing, dry art.

now nights are drowned with a fervid croon,

now days are blind and bleary.

my dimpled eyes are dreary.

for the moon is a softer sun

whose home is fey and far

from the gelid grass and frozen ground
of earth, whose light you are.

A love letter, a poem: It aches to be written and aches
to be sent, it overflows the brims. And once it has been
sent, the aching becomes one of expectation. With what
eyes will it be read? How will it be taken?

But already that was too far ahead. Before
anything else, I had to decide whether to send it. By
then, Miss Jens and I hadn’t even kissed—we hadn’t
even seen ea[...]f we did meet, whether or not that would actually be
a “date.” And yet the poem sat there on my desk like a
chunk of my own flesh, loud and red. Whatever existed
between us was germinating, and I tried not to kill it
with an excess of emotion, so those feeli[...]en mine uncle come with the clinkend money,
we up and hit the road to beaches so as to swindle his
contrition, flooze a little, andto
the pied cities that march on amber ocean and we’ll see
what women do there when we whistle.” — “But in[...]a whole animal,”I said, “elksteak for months,
and why not butcher the poor thing now while it’s still
light?” — “You suffer from excessive diction,” he told
me, “and you’re chicken.” So we quit the mountains, the
carcass, my grandparents and my mother, who received
a note.

Aboard the stinkhole Buick, amid his junk and
leavings, mine uncle turns to me and says: “We are
masters of time, son, not of space.” (Coke cans rolling
by the pedals, deep and mingled strata of hamburger
wrappers and receipts across the backseat, a tennis
racket, a[...]from the trunk.)
Fast as a bomb through stillness and the highway flying
underneath I ‘magined to myself that high city ’mongst
the clean clouds in a movable light where mine uncle
might be king and dignified, time crouched at his feet.
And so our flight wound roadlong up one river and left
it, ascending steep valleys onto thin plateaus and farm
acres before finally curling down the far g[...]l on some town or other where the
freeway knotted and then hurried on.

Hardly time for trucksto[...]

aspen and stands of pine, sparrows and starlings arching
forward on invisible wires like we were, sagging and
swinging up again, as though the air and road were both
traversed by swells themselves lon[...]shoulder, tripping
up the traffic with her thumb and wearing a man’s shirt,
all elephants and mr.Ts, so I yelled STOP! whereon
mine uncle did.

She ran to catch up with the car, then looked us

over,

—Howdy,I said.

—Hi, the girl.

—Where to!? mine uncle kind of yelled.

—Seattle. What about you?!

—We’re going toyou gals on the freeway! he said.

—Oh yeah? We just don’t have to wait as long for
rides.

—Bet you meet some weirdos!

—Hitch—hiking, she said, has restored my faith in
people. Plus I have a knife.

—That’s what I mean! mine uncle said. I looked
at him, turned:

—Where you comin’ from?

—Back east, New York.

—New York? mine uncle. Everybody’s got a
mouth!

And the car did us the favor of saving the
conversation even if we didn’t have something to say
every second, and the counties unfurled.

—Isn’t it funny, Miss[...]e was round like a girl’s.

—Li {e a girl’s what? mine uncle asked.

—Li {e a girl’s butt, she said, if she had a hundred
butts. In a row.

—But you are a girl, I said.

—W 1at does [but have to do with it? she said,
and laughed to herself.

Day wore on but easy while Miss Jens wa[...]ons, skin shiny with a silken grain, which seemed
to sharpen my mind. The backseat smelled of old
oranges anc the sun was shining like it might teach
us how to sneak while dusk crept on its belly through

the timberlands. A wind so cold it was clean and to

roll down t1e window was clean and my lungs filled
up with the whole joyful obligat[...]ould it take, mine uncle said, til we spilled out and
scoured the country for a while? Show me a[...]

dozing on and off. Viscous skiffs of snow flashing
through a dark city of trees while mine uncle, to

keep himself awake, fiddled with radio and muttered,
waving his hands, of a trek through Mexico and of the
Amazons before the Spanish won, and the volleyball
champions of nubile Tehuantepec who reign on even
now, and how one summer he had lingered where

the night was put to rest and the sea slept foglit by
the watersides, dreaming[...]ing boded
well. Those sweet faces armed him round and beat
down his alonehood and go figger it didn’t fight at all.
—“We are not here for the world to sicken us,” mine
uncle said, looked at me, and winked.

But I was looking at his forearms covered with
minuscule tattoos, and my notice caught his notice and
he started into his old story about how, back when he
was broke but tatooloving, which used to happen late
at night on the weekend, he would stop by a place he
knew to see what they could do for a dollar and twenty—
five cents (which went a lot farther then), and in their
kindness they had drawn him all these little flowers and
grimacing insignia that billowed up from the knuc[...]rds away, a signboard flew up—LUCKY

LIL’s—and with a “Maarrvelusl” from mine uncle the car[...]crunching over the curb of the
lot as we skidded and raked through gravel and dirt up
to the bare, used and dimlit porch where a herd of trucks
were nosing.[...]awake. —“Keep your head
up,” he told us, “and have fun. They’re not going to card
here.” So we unfolded from the car, and as I came round
the front I thought the wheels lo[...]ldering on its
breath over layers of decayed piss and abused varnish,
its walls jumped up with curling posters, its jukebox
bragging an extinct species of rock and the local boys
roud and lowdy. Momentous entry as the bar hugged
us and we dazzled before a tiny stage lit with blue and
yellow lights playing over some genial drunks, who
jammed there by themselves while the tables whispered
their appreciation and ridicule or ignored them in the
hinter nooks. Thr[...]nder, at
which point mine uncle presented himself to a woman
named Candy, who was pretty once and single enough
it seemed.

—Lotta people in here[...], I said.

—Middle of nowhere, too.

—Nowhere to go. . . . , I said. She nodded, set her
bag again[...]ce brushed us then, whispered Intimate

xtmngerx, you will part. Miss Jens looked over the crowd.

—Isn’t funny how you die? she said. That’s what
I’ve been wondering about . . pondering. She looks at
me with what seems to be an established expression.

—Death is funny, for sure.

—And all this. . ..

—Gone, I said, thinking how we[...]d it out?

—Like a baby. Only it was me.

—So what was left?

—Well, your body’s a lot smaller when you take it
off. Like clothes.

I looked at her and for a second thought she was
a ghost. Miss Jens wasn’t tethered very tight to this
place. She looked at me again. —How long do you
think you’ll be on the road?

—Kinda depends, I said, a nod tow[...]or
wrestling standing up?). Coupla weeks?

—Do you think a swing north on the way back?

—Dunno,I[...]widened like an oil slick, but
jerkier.

—Well you should —Kid/ mine uncle yelled
Cbrirt/ Hey now![...]y

the looks. Uncle gathering speed.

—Know how to fight?

—He just wants you to go, not t’fight.

—Right. You comin’ with?

— I need a ride north, she smiled, hand on my
arm. I won’t be here long. Tell him thanks.

So I left because I had to and that’s howI saw
her when I saw her last, runnin[...]n as phone
calls, where his hat was on the ground and he was
explaining to the gentlemen that it had been Candy’s
idea and he hated to dance and anyway it was none of
their business what kind of steps he knew. Made sense
to me, but I didn’t matter; they walked back insid[...]d stars staring down like fish eyes in a flood,
and mine uncle’s own flushed face, burned gaze fixed
on the porch still, wanting from the bar what the bar
wouldn’t give. I got in the car.

Leaving Lil’s, the unperturbed Buick spat,
turned, groaned and gained hopefully in speed until it
swept humming[...]rd rumoring cities somewhere.
Mine uncle, bruised and alone in the light of the dash,
had lost his gab. To myself I thought I’d be long time
alone, and curled up by the window to mull. Dreams
rose all around and I walked down their hollow road,
that one[...]

Despite setbacks, Miss Jens and I started talking

on the phone more and more. Once I had returned

to Paris, we began to go out. We met for coffee,

then for wine; we went to a play, then a movie; one
imperceptible thing led to another. The real turning
point, if there was one, came about two weeks after.
According to my journal entry from October 27‘1“, this is

how it went:

j was leaving, and already in the lobby, when I
pulled myself together and told her i wanted to
kiss her. “i want to kiss you,” i said. discussion

ensued.
kiss begins. time dilates. kiss ends.

says she’s light—headed and leans against the wall.
says she might need a glass of water. between the

first and second floors, she collapses, a nose dive, i
bar[...]her head lolling against me.

four floors pass and i’m shouting her name. finally
we get the elevator open and on stop. i pull j to
her feet and she’s coming back to lucid. in the apt

she sits down heavy on the cou[...]on’t think it’s your kiss.

that’s happened to me before.”

a pale—faced hour goes by. she wants to go home
but can’t walk straight. “nothing has to happen,”i

u n
say, leave whenever you want.

so we don’t sleep. barely even touch. a long time
talking and laying there restless. get up, take out
the clock batteries, go back to bed.

at five, insomnia. my one pillow given to j. she
shared it at the end. that’s when i told[...]“sort of rhyming couplets,”i said.

“i want to hear it,” she says. i recite it to her.
“that’s good,” she says, “i’m kind of shocked.”
“i meant to send it weeks ago.”

“i’m glad you didn’t.”

we eat some breakfast and she’s about to go. says
she doesn’t know how she feels.[...]

Can you blame me if I spent every minute with
her last fall? I look back and see the precious hours as
proof that this everyday existence is not our only life,
that we are not limited to the quotidian, that a sister
life and sister soul await. The air thickens, nights, heady
with low laughter and the scent of limbs. It was that
second of all our double lives, the one that sidles up to
wink at the workaday, that gave me meaning during the
months I was with Miss Jens. As I rode the metro to
her apartment, I told myself, I am on [be way to my [07233.
As it would emerge from underground, the aerial line, I

saw the leaves fan quick and shimmering, the buildings

whose every line, balcony, roof was dutiful and right.
Life, so long derailed, had recovered its promise and a
plot.

At a no—name concert early in the wint[...]ub near Pigalle, I watched
sparse couples stumble and entwine on the dark floor,
almost despite the band that strummed and hollered
loud and lost through Jimmy Buffet covers. While Miss
Jens went searching for a bathroom, my ears wandered
and I forgot the music, looked around. An old guy up[...]dancing: one
after another, he would lift an arm and one sweetheart
would cross under, laughing; they[...]gut like that someday, when Miss Jens slipped up and
hugged me from behind, folding her arms across my
ribs and resting her head high on my back. Cheek on
should[...]an, but couldn’t see him. The
music, galumphing and awry, confused with the blood
in my ears. Because for years you wait for that touch,
you wait so long your body forgets what it means, and
then with a girl one night you come home. Like a river
in you starts rushing deep and fast back to the place it
used to know. So I turned to Miss Jens, took her hands,

and we joined the other couples on the floor.

“So what’s the news with Miss Jens?”

“It’s babies forever,”I said, “we’ll be announcing
the wedding soon.”

“Oh yeah? Does she know that?”

“I haven’t told her, but we have a kind of
unspoken understanding.”

“How unsp[...]”

“Pretty unspoken. Don’t mention anything to
her,”I said. “But I can tell by the little things, like the
way she nuzzles.”

“My God! I’m so jealous!”

“No no, don’t be. Love’s got its downsides. Makes
you talk crazy, for one. Everything else goes out the[...]our roller coaster happiness,
happiness so sudden and strong it feels like a grief the
way it splatters in the chest, began to rattle the rest of
my life.Take the office, for[...]illegal, definitely shady, run by a psychopath.
And there I was, like a congenital idiot, half—smil[...]e morning I’d show up unshaved,
unwashed, unfed and out of breath from the mad dash
between her place and work, but somehow shining.

“Whatto be fired for loving well than for
almost any other reason. Sometimes you’re faced with
choices like that; it’s time to go andYou’ll
understand if sometimes I stank.I knew it be[...]y sensitive nose. I knew she was probably talking
about me the way she talked about everyone else. Can
you rmell ber? 14gb, wlmt perfume ix [1741? she’ll ask
whenever a certain colleague leaves the room. Can you
rmell Mm? she’s probably saying even now. But listen to
me and I’ll tell you something: that stink was the smell
ofa man in love.

Life barreled along carefree and flushed for most
of November and December—the love, the stink, the
coughingflnd[...]I
had been letting things slide with a full heart and clear

eyes and lo, vacation came, sent me packing for ten days

or so, and gave me the space to reflect a little on the
state of my life.

Now C[...]ed somewhere between a cross—town football
game and a war of the worlds.There is too much food,
too much noise, too little space, and a spirit of rumbling
inclusion and activity that succeeds for a week at least
in making all of us—aunts and uncles, brothers and
sisters, grandmothers and cousins—a family again.
Nonetheless, I had found a little time for myself and
was thinking about my life with few regrets when the
phone rang. It[...]” Miss Jens said, “I need a
break. I’d like to take a month off. Maybe we could see
each other a little less in January.”

“What did you have in mind?”l asked.

“Well,” she said, “I was thinking we could just not
talk,” and she laughed that curt giggle of hers which
indicates how much she feels this to be desirable as well
as true. A giggle of embarrassed sincerity, an appeal.

“I’m glad we have a couple more days to discuss
this,”l said, as it was still the last week of December. In
situations like this I stall and think, “Avoid big decisions
long—distance.”

“Why don’t we talk about it more when I get
back?”l proposed, hoping to somehow put the idea on

hold and freeze her heart before it drifted too far.

“Well,” she said, “I would like to see you when
you get back . . . perhaps one evening.”

The signs[...]t
called for a modal verb, an arm’s—length if and when.
Discussing our couple in the future tense r[...]probable, or improbable,
rather. Despite the joy and playfulness, the tenderness
and care that looked like they might carry us past th[...]till banging out in a little wbile, we xlwulal go
to Rome togetl7er. Hanging out in a little while—o[...]next
rpring, if we’re rtill talking, I 21 love to meet tl7em.

Example 2: Pet Names. We never called each
other girlfriend and boyfriend—titles and everything
they implied were out. If we ran into[...]ly in my
thoughts did I call her beloved, talking to her aloud I
would say my little malady, or mypetite alireare, because
I felt it calmed her and gave the necessary space. For
her part, Miss Jens referred to me as The Pain, or Such
a Distraction, and I knew why: I was at her place six

nights[...]

If I left through irony’s door,[...].77
rweetfun, I wrote her once, let} do it again. And she
wrote back: If I eoulaljmt leave you everyday forever anal
ever, [bat would lze enougb. Or imagine we’d made love
and were just sitting in bed. Like a heroine doomed in

matters of the heart, Miss Jens would toss her hair and

say: I don’t expeetyou to wait for me. So I said I wouldn’t.

Then proposed that we not wait for her together. Her
eyes brightened, and she kissed me.

Everything was topsy—turvy, but[...]doesn’t feel the same, though,

so I’m going to ask what exactly I mean to her, andand withdrawn. An academic’s
disease. Prozac and its derivatives may stalk America
on happy feet,[...]crates. Such
contemporary ten—den—eier amount to a chemical
reeducation, a contingent, punctual re[...], as
Kant argued, is fundamentally mysterious. We are
subject to wider determinations. And to locate the
deepest causes of that morass called t[...]take inhibitors of its synapses is too
mechanical and complacent an enterprise. One says
neurotransmitt[...]he individual in time or a disorder of the world? And if
it were the latter, what would they prescribe?

Yet I digress before I begin. What can I tell you
about my dear Miss Jens? She was fresh off the boat
whe[...]ure
on the rolls, so I approached her after class to enquire as

to her presence. She said she would be an auditor. Who

was I to refuse?

I had been working on the book for several
years when I met her: it was to be a treatise on
melancholy, a sequel to Burton’s Anatomy examining
the biles that beset our age.The idea came to me as
my wife was dyingfl work exploring heartache and
human ordeal amid mail—order brides, cellphones[...]ty, the mechanisms of
propaganda, violence, guilt and alienation which coopt
us at every turn.To abstract me from the sufferings.
Like most such undertakings, it remains unfinished,
due to both the grandeur of its predecessor and the
quagmire of its subject matter, rendered all[...]th, long neck—though her nose was more
aquiline and Roman. If you have ever seen Ingrid in
Cukor’s Garligbt, then you have a fair notion of Miss
Jens, for she is determined and limited by her fear. A
creature given to sudden moods, gazing at you one
moment as though you were her salvation, the next like
a frightened an[...]ucation.

Miss Jens had a penchant for languages, and with
a little guidance after class she was soon r[...]d in a series of 1950s get—ups. I would see her
and sense my professorial persona begin to crumblefl
larger economy of feeling opened up. O[...]looking like Marilyn Monroe, in a turquoise skirt
and her hair bobbed just so, bubbly and coquette, as
though she thought to inscribe herself in my own
boyhood. Indeed, for moments, I wanted to dance.
Epiphenomena of a tease, she stopped reading halfway
through the book, complained of boredom. So what do
you think I did?

I told her to sit down and get to work. Miss
Jens, lovely creature, was also frivolous and forgetful.
When she wanted to be. So sunny when she smiles, her
cheeks bunch up ju[...]ans put a “burg” in it in every sense, for we
are without culture or the possibility of it.) I sought to
correct this happy illiteracy in Miss Jens, at least. And
yet her very sunniness would distract me from the[...]s among engravers such as Durer, Dinckmut,
Bosch. To call it laziness would be to mistake its wider
applications, notably in the domain of melancholy and
its depths. I do not accuse Miss Jens of media, no, but

rather myself. In regards to my work I was lax, both in

Miss Jens’s instruction and my writing. The chapters
of the new Anatomy slumb[...]files until they were
unapproachable, impossible to think of. Thus it was I
who sinned in my way, for I lost control. Miss Jens w[...]she not been so frivolous, so forgetful, we
might have made more progress that first semester,
but I di[...]assiduously as she could for the next four years.
And if she had just stayed a little longer, I might have
grasped her, convinced her to devote herself to a life of
thought. Instead, I saw her traipsing across the greens
after class, admirers in tow, to be regaled with attention
and anecdotes in those horrid cafes near the square. I
knew her carefree ways, and felt the twinge of the Pisan
judge, his moglie stolen and seduced.

Miss Jens bad need of melancholy. That much
was clear. Contrary to popular chatter, the black bile
is not an emotion, and even less is it a disease. It is a
mode ofbeing, a way to go and meet the world, a way
to flee it. I would hazard that it is the precondit[...]waits us as human beings thrown

into the world.

To begin, I instructed Miss Jens to pronounce
words properly, in English as in French[...]r of nouns, it is because she did
not care enough to learn. The world, I said, is a hard
place, and it is harder when one thinks. Yet you mmt
think.I endeavored, at length, to teach her the dry
and circular art of thought, knowing that once she
gr[...]me, a stern provider, even
more—for how was she to learn? She was not made for
this world; she does[...]ut of their
collision. Her feelings would develop and complexify
with time; there would always be a “between” between
us; she would have her freedom.I believe I made that
clear by the en[...]er Miss Jens received her degree,
we were engaged to be married, and to her parents’
delight. “With an endowed chair![...],I sensed the understanding that there was no
one who would be more indulgent of her foibles than I.
Her whole l[...]our
wedding), she was gone. Of course I know why, and I am

not bitter. We may have a relation of nonrelation now,

but I expect she’ll be back someday, knocking on my
door for counsel as she used to, asking for a translation of
this or that. She was simply too young, too irresponsible,
to spend her whole life with me, she said. She wanted to

have “fun,” and I could not dissuade her.

It should come as no o[...]should
come as no rurprire, my obsession. By now you know
me. You see this imbalance of desire, mine outweighing
he[...]gotten worse. Either
Miss Jens does not know how to love, which I doubt, or
she does not care to, which I fear.

The first three weeks of the new year have been
a wash. Lethargy . . . I haven’t been able to get out of
bed. Day is just a grayer form of nigh[...]says: Don’t
[Jotben Don’tget up. [mt go bark to deep. Before me a year
of mornings, as inexorable as a bowe movement, where
I’ll wake up and the first thought wi be, I’m going to
die one oftbere dayx. And the second will be, ant’r [be
meaning ofmy life? And the third wi be, You didn’t med
to tbink tbere tbougbtr.

The fact of the matter—but how to separate

bitter fact from bitter feeling?—is that I returned on

nd

January 2 and have hardly seen Miss Jens since. We
met three times (—threeI), and I haven’t been able to
get a straight answer out of her about why we don’t
talk any more. She shudders at the word couple. Still,
she does call once in a while. “How are you?” she’ll ask.
We’re probably talking more than we should be if we’re
not supposed to be talking at all, but even the chatter
has died down.

And what can I think? In the wake of our last
year’s love is a lone water skier who has lost his life
jacket and his skis but somehow remains afloat. He
floats[...]rangest thing is, the tow rope isn’t even there to grab
onto. He’s holding onto nothing and yet he stays there
in our wake, close enough to wave to us. This is love
once love is gone.

When I first got back, I knew enough to at
least check in with Victor. He and I have known
each other for years. I owed him Miss Jens, among
many other things, and I needed to talk. And Victor
is, by all indications, a genius. The only[...]nows this, but that knowledge only gives him more
to worry about. Last he told me, he’d decided to cure
his anxiety with alcoholism—psychoa[...]

La ventanita de mix tal[...]n,

“By the way,” Victor says, distracted, “have you
heard about that disease people get where they don’t
know i[...]z muelmeba en flor

“No.”

“Well I think I have that. I never know if I’ve had
enough to eat. Sometimes I’ll have dinner and I’ll still
be hungry so I keep eating and just make myself sick!”

quiero de nuevo boy volver a eontemplar

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

aquellor ojor que maritimz a] mimr.

“No! And sometimes I’ll go all day and not feel
like eating anything at all and then I’ll wake up starving
in the middle of the night! What do you think I should
do?”

En la eortada mdr malewz u[...]. . . measure your food out, I guess.
Figure out what you need and measure it. Doesn’t the
government have some kind of website?”

unapromemy un rurpimr

“I don’t know if I’d trust the government to tell
me what I should eat.”

[Jarro’ umz [dg‘rima depend aquel mntar.

“Really?”

“Do you honestly think they have our best
interests in mind?”

“As a matter of fact, I—O.K., look, forget it.
How about Weight Watchers? They should be able to
tell you what a guy your size should be eating. They’ve
got all the calories figured o[...]uerido,

“A guy my size! I’m five foot eight and I weigh
130 pounds! Less than that! Weight[...]

“Yeah, me neither come to think of it. How bout
some chocolate?”

“No,[...]t thought—I’m gonna go get us some
chocolate. Be right back.”

If I haven’t called my love recently, haven’t
bombarded her with letters like I used to, it’s because
I’m tired of making a fool of myself. Victor says I
should try to see her as much as possible now so as to
tire of her more quickly, but I’m not up for it. Lack the
will. Still, I’m beginning to wonder if that wasn’t Miss
Jens’ very thinkin[...]her, on the other hand, thinks I
should play hard to get: Women need to conquer, too, she
says. Of course everyone gives that advice and no one
takes it. Who has the strength?

Sidenote: every time Miss Jens decides it’s time
to be on her own again for a while, she makes a visit
to the dentist. Last time her crowns, delicate thing[...]he stress of the
separation (she clenches her jaw to hold her tongue).
This time it was a root canal.[...]my better judgment,

I sent Miss Jens this note:

You get cavities for company and tedium for tea,

and doubt has come to dinner bearing glad’s
apologies.

Lonesome in the evenings, did you ever second
guess

the thoughts that made you think that we should

see each other less?
Next d[...]lest

The most delightful pains go shooting round
about my mandible.

Honeypie,I had it coming. Your swee[...], of which this chronicle is the proof.
Sometimes you eat your love and sometimes your love
eats you.

If I bring up that snippet of correspondence,
however, it is to drive home another point: Miss Jens
charms me. She is most comfortable at play and least

comfy in couples. In or out of love[...]

is to please and to please absolutely, which invariably
provokes a di[...]of her
attentions: i.e. total infatuation, desire to possess, and
finally rancor. Her crime, if she commits any cr[...]this surfeit of love, Miss Jens moves
from place to place and from boyfriend to boyfriend,
unable to escape herself or her admirers. She’s looking
and looking for respite somewhere. I hope she finds
it—that’s one of the few hopes I still cling to. Miss
Jens is at once Io and that angry goddess, chasing
herself through Greece to Egypt (the land of exodus
serving suddenly as a r[...]l exodus, for she is uncomfortable
with her gods. And yet her gods, like all gods, will not
release her[...]t I spent with Miss Jens after
we’d decided not to talk took a turn both painful and
unforeseen. It was a night disguised as love, whose
ulterior was only revealed to me by morning.

Perched on the second floor, Mis[...]n the concrete, drear on the asphalt, the clamor

and piss ofdrunks. Inside: a bed. So at the end of ni[...]g shipwreck of inattention, Miss Jens rolled over
and laid her body next to mine. The dawn had turned
a deeper shade of blue as the sun crept round, and the
stripes cut daintily across a drawing on her wall. Miss
Jens and I lay drowsy and tense (what could it mean?)
in a dark hollow ofthe bed, she on her belly and I
on my back, when she turned to me and said, Motber
Nature playr tritkr. 8173 [ms 4 way oftritkingyou.

That wasn’t just to break the silence after sex.
She meant that she hadn’t intended to see me, but,
voila, couldn’t help herself. Sbe[...]nto drinking
lemonade,I say, wben I ’m bot. But to myself I thought,
Minjens ix wing me for my body. To formulate and
admit that too often in the days that followed caused
me a sorrow, so I tried to block it out. This inability on
Miss Jens’s part to either completely quit or completely
join me has left me in ruins. What food is to Victor, I
am to her: she’s not sure how much of me she wants.
I[...]my mind, though, where things do work
out, I say to our phantom children: Your motber war only
after[...]p for loneliness, a body for lust—I’m willing
to provide those services as long as there is love,[...]with
cold eyes on the beloved without him ceasing to be. The

stone light I see in Miss Jens’ ga[...]

When I mentioned to Victor how Miss Jens was
using me for sex, he did[...]ing his beer. I said women were human, after all,
and people had needs. So Victor asked, Well, wlmt ify[...]tions aside, every time we met ever since
I began to love Miss Jens, I thought it would be the last
time we’d see each other. Finally I wa[...]was when, after two attempts at sex without love
and one without arousal, she came to my apartment to

visit for half an hour. With her, a complaint:

Me: Want some coffee?

Miss Jens: I don’t thinkI have time.
Me: It’s already made.

Miss Jens: Oh, we[...]. . . Well, ifyou did want sugar, how much
would you want?

Miss Jens [laughing]: A little.

Me: All r[...]at’s hoarse.

Me [pouring the coffee]: Oh yeah? What is it do
you think?

Miss Jens: The Vicissitudes.

Me: Ah! And what do you need for that?

Miss Jens: . . . More VicissitudesI?

And were she not so gentle, with such a high and
lilting voice, her laughter would have been properly
described as desperate, maniacal even.

Time seemed to unravel then like a thread that
had lost its spoo[...]ooded over us in my Spartan room. I didn’t know
what to do, so I handed her a mug and sat down on the

couch. After a silence, she continued:

Miss Jens: The literature of the East has much to
teach us, don’t you think?

Me: Oh, I think it’s been said, most of it.

Miss Jens: I’m talking about the other literatures
of the East.

Me: I[...]

Miss Jens: No, I’ve just been doing some reading

and thinking of you.

Me: . . . Are you leaving me? Is this how
Buddhists break up?

Miss[...]d.

Me: —

Miss Jens: Don’takeitwrong. I’ll be here if you
want to talk. It’s not like I’m walking out
of your life. But I think I need to leave this

couple dream for now.

In the weeks t[...]d, little transpired
between us. We were grinding to a halt. By the time
February rolled around, Miss Jens had decided to
prolong our separation indefinitely, though she would
occasionally break down and call, perhaps out of guilt,
perhaps from genuine[...]se calls

as her little gifts, gifts of atonement and farewell, a final

dose of the poison I adored.[...]of leaving.

If those weeks of deepening solitude have
taught me one thing, it is this: passion knows no[...]he end of the end.

Our chronicle spent, the will to write exhausted, I
have nothing left to give you but two last notes. Again,

taken from my journal:

Februarylz‘”
in with the odds and ends i sent back to jfl blouse,
some stockings, a hairpin and a deodorant stick—was a
note:

113 not [but I’m not tbinking ofyou, but [but 1407:?

want to be.

Mart/13'd

nothing reminds me of her like a phone call from
her. she calls and my first feeling is joy, but that joy is
followed by a hopelessness. i have asked her, politely,
to stop.

“Excuse me.”

I turned to find a man no taller than a pony.
“Mornin’,” he said.

“How you doin’?”

“Good . . . good. Name’s MacArth[...]which was as hard as a stone. I told him my
name, and although we shook for only a second, I
could feel[...]y
looked like a series of fists, muscles bunched and piled
up on top of each other, testing every seam[...]ng fist of them all. His hair
was a red stubble, and he peered up at me through the
cloudy lenses of w[...]tacles that magnified
his blue eyes.

“I guess you’re looking for work?”

“That’s right.”[...]g shells. He was a bit older than
most of the men who showed up at our door, though

probably still in[...]There were several other things that were unusual
about this introduction. First, a man who was looking
for work in our parts rarely showed up at 5:00 in the
morning. And second, if he did show up at 5:00 in the
morning,[...]nce he was either still
drunk, or very hung over. And third, Mr. MacArthur
had even shaved. He didn’t have a hint of red whisker
on his chin.

“Where you comin’ from?”I asked.

“Well, I’ve been w[...]sting a gray felt cowboy hat in
his tight fists, and he now tugged it onto his head.

“And?”

“Well, I’ve been working there for several years,
and that situation has just run its course, you might say.”

My respect for this little man inc[...]tatement. I knew Garland Tabor from REA
meetings, and he was one of the more diffith men I’d
ever met.

“Walk with me,”I said. “I need to get my milking
done.”

“You can’t get your wife to do the milking for
you?”

I chuckled. “Funny you should ask. I just got
married a week ago, and I offered to milk the cow for
the first month we’re married. A little wedding gift, you
might say.”

“And you don’t regret that offer?”

“Oscar.”[...]“As tight as they come,” he said.

“Well, you’ll fit right in here. I’m Scottish myself,”
I said.

“I thought Arbuckle might be one and the same,”
he said in a perfect Scottish brogue.

For the rest of the walk to the barn, and the time
it took to milk the cow, I asked Oscar MacArthur the
standar[...]efficient since the war, with improved machinery and
better irrigation, they had also gotten bigger, with so
many people leaving in the thirties. Those of us who
stayed acquired land in chunks. So there was a lot of
work to do. The bigger ranches needed haying crews,
harvest crews, and shearing crews. There were men who
organized these crews, moving from place to place,
earning most of their money during those s[...]life, more suited for older, often eccentric men, who

were more comfortable being alone for weeks at a[...]was a good, steady worker, the
ideal position was to hire on as a year—round hand for
one of the big[...]ring at our door, sporting
a three—day stubble, and carrying a satchel filled with
work clothes. Man[...]ally hard
on the outside but tender souls, unable to shake off a
harsh word.

The pattern was often pr[...]ew weeks,
something would rub them the wrong way, and their
productivity would drop in small but steady increments.
They would disappear for three or four days, and come
back with the battle scars of a bender. We always asked
them to leave after these episodes.There were other
places that were more forgiving, but we didn’t need to
tolerate the unreliable with so many prospects.

And of course, there were also a fair number
of shady characters, who showed up with remarkably
bad haircuts, and shaky references. We usually turned
away the boys who were obviously just out of jail. But
occasionally[...]ed—maybe a rifle, or a saddle.

We fell victim to thieves only a couple of times,

for one s[...]

I asked Dad about it once. “All you gotta do is
listen to their voice. If they got something to hide, they
sound like they got something to hide.”

I tried to figure out what he meant by this, but
I could never hear it. I apparently didn’t inherit that

particular ear.

“What about you, Oscar? No family?”

“I had a wife,” he sai[...]’t
make it through the Depression.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Took her own life,” he offered, an unusual
confession to someone he barely knew, I thought. I
didn”t know what to say.

“It was a horrible thing to do,” he continued.

ore u ever onew 0 ever ove[...]om the time I met Sadie, there
was something dark andto make
that poor girl see the good in the world.”[...]Yes it is.”I was embarrassed by this sentiment,
and couldn’t look at Oscar.

“I got a proposition for you,” Oscar said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“How ’bout I milk that cow for you and we won’t
tell the missus.” MacArthur jerked a[...]n,
his method of asking for a job certainly would have
done the trick. “Well now, Mr. Oscar MacArthur, I just
might be interested in that proposition, but how much
is that little deal gonna cost me?”

“How about six dollars a day?”

“How about four dollars a day?”

“How about six dollars a day?”

I laughed. “What the hell kind of negotiation is
that?”

“Oh, are we negotiating?” He smiled, and his blue

“You got a horse?”

“Oh, do I have a horse . . .” Oscar pointed toward
the house,[...].”

I smiled. “Okay. Six it is.”

We shook, and I swear, my hand hurt for the next
four hours.

Oscar went off to take Patsy to the barn and get
her fed and watered. When I came back to the house
and sat down at the table, Rita took one look at me and
asked, “What are you smiling about?”

“Was I smiling?”

She set a plate of eggs, bacon and fried potatoes
in front of me. “Like a c[...]

Another (blentin Houlihan
Matt Paveljch

You get a milion guys come home like that, all at

once, and a milion women waiting, and whattaya think
will happen? It’s hot times in the maternity wards,

and up go your suburbs, and up go your freeways, and
whoopdeedoo. There for the first ten, twelve years after
the war, about all I ever did was swing a twenty—eight
ounce f[...]rton,
Longview, out on the coast where I happened to be

for no better reason than that’s where I’d m[...]postwar economy was an awful
sweet deal for a man who’d managed to avoid that
matrimonial bliss, and I was driving a two—tone T—Bird,
the Town and Country model. Built my own hi—fi out
of parts[...]e GI—financed
crackerboxes, frame it at least, about every two or three
weeks, and I was known as a guy who could sink a
sixteen—penny nail, run a transit or whathaveyou, finish
cement if it came to that, and so on it goes, and I’m
building. Only time in my life I ever made[...]did back in those days.Tried golf for a while, if you can
believe that. Like Ike. Mostly, though, it was work. Oh,

every once in a while I’d get a wild hair and run my

Ford out into some desert or wheatfield somewhere,
put my foot down and open up all four barrels, and,
whoosh, cheap gasoline just pouring through that
carburetor—man, how I loved that particular V—B, what
a mill—and you watch the needle swing right up to one
thirty—five, watch it hang there. You got the top down. I
knew a few girls, too, and almost every one of ’em liked
to cruise. That Philco was the best radio ever made,
and here’s a blond with a big, boozy grin, sitting right
next to you, maybe a few bugs in her teeth. You get the
picture.I had forearms on me like Popeye, had a little
bit of a savings account and a brain no bigger than a
walnut, and, all in all, I was doing okay.

Then one day Mrs.[...]coming in from the green grocer’s or whatever, and
she directs my attention toto look
for it, and so she shows me something’s come from
Miss Moir[...]ey look like hieroglyphics;
must’ve taken Moira about an hour to do this, and the
end result is that you’ve got to squint real hard just to
read it, and that’s her signature, really, some strange shit
like that. She knew where to get me cause I used to
send her a check every Christmas and a note every time

I moved, but it’d bee[...]

bothered to write back. I didn’t mind. I rarely called her
anymore—you’d call her and be tired for a week after.
See, my sister was dement[...]lp
it, but she was goofy in ways that had started to kind of
irritate me. Can’t help it, and she can’t help it, and she
can’t help it, and so forth—what good is that?

So, with Mrs. Schaeffer standing right there—
she’d be long gone by now—I open this deal. And it’s
not a letter Moira’s sent, in fact I don’t get so much as a
note to explain it; no, what I’ve got is a birth certificate,
an original birth certificate, stamped and sealed; and
what does it certify but the birth of another Qlentin[...]the baby’s foot print on those things. That’s
what got me first. That little footprint. Looked like a sea
shell to me, the way it was turned in on itself, the way it
was, you know, perfect.

So I went down to the pay phone on the corner
and tried to call Moira and congratulate her. Maybe
congratulations are in order, maybe not, but I better call.
So I call over and over for about a week and never do
get an answer, so then I think to call Potter Blixt, who
I haven’t seen or heard from since the day in forty—two
when we shipped out in different directions, and I ask
him if he knows what’s going on with my sister. He tells
me he think[...]in the old place, but he hasn’t
heard anything about a baby. So maybe his information

is not too curr[...]ear. They live in a town of five hundred people, and
I remember Potter as a very sociable sort, too, so I’m
wondering. I’m wondering, among other things ‘What
is the deal with this baby?’Pretty soon, her phone’s not
ringing at all.

I let that eat at me, and it’s hard to even believe
it now, for a good solid year before I finally decided to
take a drive.

Back when we were growing up, back[...]od business here in town. We had Doty’s Grocery
and Feed, and those four saloons, and the auto parts
store. My folks owned the Aces. Somewhere along the
line they’d got to be their own best customers, and a
lot of times they’d sleep down at the bar. They’d come
home to shower, Mom to pick up that week’s issue
of Look. As far as an[...]e two of us in
the house. We’d get ourselves up and off to school, fix
our own breakfast, fix our own supper. I’d even read to
her sometimes when she was still tiny. We[...]

Home.That’s me, calling it ‘home’now. Jesus H.
Christ. This is the last place I ever thought to be found,

and I remember rolling back into town—hadn’t laid
eyes on it since Ensign Taylor took me to Butte for my
physical—and you’re away from Elisis any amount of
time, just any amount oftime at all, and all you’ll see
by way of change is what’s collapsed or caved—in since
you left. Oh, I guess they’d built the new grade school
by the time I came back, but that thing was ugly to
begin with. There’s no improving Elisis, that’s what I
thought—you might fix up cities that’ve been bombed
to brick and ash overseas, but there is no fixing what
weather and neglect do to this town; and we sure never
got the relief they sent to Germany and Japan. You
know, we’ve got forest for hundreds of miles on[...]n this valley
it’s just high desert. Sage brush and cheat grass in clay.
Lot of nothing, really. Even so, this is country you can
develop a taste for. But not for Elisis. Elisis—god—all—
Friday, this town is a firetrap. It’s an eyesore and has
been forever.

So, in spite ofmy better judgment, I came back.
Certainly hadn’t come to stay. And I drove up Aeneas
Street to the Houlihan household, scene of my odd
little youth, and I saw it was still wearing the same coat
of paint Dad stole from the WPA, which I remember as
gray, and the siding’s twisting, and cupping, and pulling
away from the wall, and on the porch I find a box trap
with a cat and a porcupine in it. They’re dead. They’re

reeking. Immediately overhead of you, just under the

eave at the gable end, you got a wasp nest as big as a
basketball. And it’s busy, and I am ready to turn tail and
run and not look back. But I don’t. I knock at the door,
I call in. I crack it open and call in again. Nothing.

Then the wasps drove me inside.

So I’m in. I step through the mud room and on
into the house, and there’s Moira, she’s been sitting
there in her recliner all along. I get around in front of
her, and she’s awake, seems happy enough to see me,
and I wonder if she’s gone deaf and that’s why she
wouldn’t answer the door or th[...]it
get cut off that way. A couple words, though, and I can
see she understands me. She just doesn’t feel like saying
anything yet. But she did want to hug me. She got up
out of that chair, and when she did I saw where she’d
left a little tr[...]ed like bad fruit. She wasn’t thirty years old, and
already every tooth in her head’s been pulled, which I
happen to notice cause she can’t for the life of her keep
the plates stuck to her gums even just to breathe quiet
or try a smile. She does want to hug me, though. Wants
to kiss me on my cheek. She always was sentimental.

But I was there to see about the kid, and he was
nowhere in sight, and what I had seen so far was not
real promising; so we don’t get too much hugging done

before I ask her about her boy. Is he here? ‘Nap,’ she
says. It’s the first word out ofher mouth, but it’s enough

to get her started, and then she’s off on the subject of
poison. There’s poison in every innocent thing: potatoes,
and rhubarb, and fish, and anything, critter, fruit, or
grain, that was harv[...]n the municipal water supply. Few minutes of
this and my brain is Jello, and we never did get around
to ‘hi—how—are—you—how’ve you been?—how’s old so—
and—so?’Just Moira and her theories on bad air. Wonder
anybody’s survived at all as far as she’s concerned, and
she goes on about it seems like forever, and the whole
time I’m getting more and more wound up about this
kid; I didn’t think at that time it could be healthy for

a child to be sleeping so much during the day. I didn’t
know about naps. Didn’t know about children generally.
Knew they were loud and I liked to avoid ’em. But I can
also see my sister is way around the bend, and I can see
that she must make for a very uphill mother.

So it’s a relief, a big relief to me, when the little
bugger finally swaggers out[...]op,
on his buttflnd it hardly even slows him up, and I
didn’t know that he’d be able to walk, or what he’d be
able to do at that age, and I certainly didn’t think he
could be much of a person yet, but he makes straight
for me—kid’s already learned to mostly ignore his
motherflnd, he makes straight for me and he puts
his fists on my knees. He’s got fists like dough. And he
looks me up and down as much as to say, ‘Who the hell

are you, mister?’
This was an above—average baby. He sure had my

number.

I was once a hero, don’t you know? Oh, yeah, they gave
me the Bronze Star. For valor, no less—I’m twenty
years old, about as useful as a blister, and I happened to
wander on deck one morning to throw some garbage
overboard, see we weren’t st[...]ew where we were, they
knew exactly where we were and they didn’t like it, and
along comes a flight of Jap fighters and strafes Manley
off the aft twenty millimeter guns; they smeared the
poor guy against a bulkhead, and since we’re in convoy
we’ve got air support, and our boys get right after those
fighters and run ’em off, but they’re no sooner out of
sig[...]out of the sun. So there I am on Manley’s gun,
and I’m firing. They come at you from behind, you’re
sitting on a hundred and forty thousand barrels of
aircraft fuel, you’re north of Okinawa, steaming for the
Imperial Palace as far as they know, and if they manage
to get even close to the Guadalupe before they blow up,
then up she goes, too, and it won’t be down with the
ship, it’ll be up with the ship, and not a glob of grease
left ofher, or you, just flame and black smoke. Those

oilers ride low in the water when they’re heavy. What a
fat target we were.

So I’m firing, and my first burst takes one of ’em
out, but the other one is all over the sky, and I just can’t
find him, and what I’ve been for the last cruise and a
half is a messman down in the scullery, a greasemonkey
in the hold, and this is my first firefight—I remember
my old training a little, remember I’m to stay off the
trigger til he’s in my sights, I’m supposed to fire and
let up, fire and let up, keep the barrels cool, keep the
mechanism[...]ut I can no more stay off
that trigger than . . . and I’m firing; and he’s all over the
sky cause they don’t give ’em any flight training to speak
of, don’t even teach those boys how to land, and I’m
firing, and his propellor has that same oily shine to it
as a dragonfly’s wing, and the kid’s got no ammunition,
nothing but himself and that plywood airplane and
the fuel in it, but he’s coming, and I’m firing, and he’s
coming, and then he’s spinning ass—over—teakettle across
the ocean, and he sinks just short of us.

So the next day I’m at sick bay with what I think
is the worst case of strep throat I’ve ever had, but the
corpsman happens to know I’ve been in combat, and
so he tells me my throat’s just raw from the screaming
and the smoke. Screaming? I wasn’t screaming. Sure,[...]d shit myself. Well, I did not shit myself. I did what I
had to do when I had to do it, and I got promoted back

up to petty officer again, and I got that medal, which I
still have somewhere, I think, and all of it together was
pitiful little to show for being twenty—three months
seasick. I was not much of a sailor, and I’m still not
much of a patriot. But, there you have it. You do what
you do. I got to Elisis, and Moira really gave me no
choice in the matter. Tha[...]no choice at all.
Nowadays, I imagine, there’d be a pill for what
was ailing Moira, but in the fifties you really didn’t
want to make a big thing of it if you thought somebody
was a little off, cause they wer[...]n. Had a gizmo they’d run up
through your nose, and—snip—snip—nobody’s home.
That, and they were shocking em damn near to death.
You had some hard, mean psychiatrists around in those
days. And I’d have to say, can’t help but freely admit
it—Moira was of no earthly use to anybody, but she
was also harmless, so I couldn’t see her as a ward of
the state. You hear how Warm Springs is really pretty
nice. A ni[...]or it. Bullshit. There’s wire over the
windows, and I don’t care how pretty the mountains are.
Oh, but Moira had turned spooky, especially when you
weren’t used to her. Spooky, and that’s putting it mildly,
and I just knew if she was left on her own for very
m[...]y likely end up in the booby
hatch. Or somewhere. And in the meantime she’d be
that baby’s whole world, that’s what I couldn’t hack—
the thought of my sister talking to that boy all the time

about thalidomide and arsenic and nuclear winter and
whathaveyou—Jesus wept—even I could see where[...]some better stimulation than that. No kid should
be so unlucky,I knew that much.

I went back to Washington where I could get a
decent price for my car, and I sold it. Sold my truck, too,
and bought a better one, a panel truck this time, and I
rounded up all my tools and headed back. I had the idea
I’d get things sorted out. The first thing I did, my first
and worst mistake, was to buy that Zenith television,
big old console model; we got the one channel of some
crummy airwave, picture and the sound were both like
something they poured through sand, all static, and that
thing was on from the farm report in the mor[...]played the national anthem at night. Then she’d
be staring at that test—pattern Indian. So you’d switch
it off, empty her tray, clear her mess away, and throw
a blanket over her. She didn’t ask for much; you could
never call her demanding, but you damn near had to
dust her. After that teevee came in, Moira was there
and breathing, and that was about it.

So what I did was get us a paper route; that was
me, a grown man with a paper route. Had my panel
truck and the contract for delivering Mimouliam from
Dog Lake to Hog Heaven, rural delivery, and there
wasn’t much money in it, but it wasn’t much work,
either, except in bad weather, and we generally made

our little bit every da[...]

Thing I liked about him, one of the things, was
that Qlent was a real[...]first
started the route he was still in diapers, and so we had
that godawful diaper bucket, and sometimes toward
the end of the day when the diaper bucket’s half full
and the heater’s going full blast and the windows are
up, that’d get a little ripe in there, give you a headache.

Wasn’t too long, though, before Qlent could hold it
better than I could, andand gravel road, a man can
piss up to twenty times a day. But the point is, I liked it.
We got used to each other, and when you get to where
you’re easy in somebody else’s company, always easy,
that is a rare thing, and there you are, you’re living the
best couple years of your life, and you don’t even know
it yet, but you do know you’re having a pretty good
time. I remember him po[...]d completely disappear up in there.

Then, before you know it, it’s kindergarten, for
Christ’s sake.

Man, how I hated the dayI had to turn him over
to Mrs. Whatshername. What was her name? Anyway,
the old girl led him away v[...]done
that for the little ones many hundred times, and there’s
all the other children, lot of ’em scamps, running around
in their socks, and Qlent’s looking back at me, and
he’s fine—I’m not, though, I am not at all fine; I know
he’ll show ’em what—for, I know he’ll shine, but up to
now he’s been shining just for me, and I am every bit
as jealous as a mother might be, and I’ve got no desire
at all to share him. None. I like it best when he’s mine—
all—mine, and even though I know it’s kind of ugly of[...]

So then it was the Christmas pageants and the
plays and the concerts and the May Days and the two
hundred other deals they liked to put on every year,
keep everybody busy and distracted, and I’d talk to
his teachers every so often, and I’d bake cookies and
make fudge, and of course this routine really put the
kibosh on that paper route, so I dropped that and put
together the cabinet shop.I did cabinets and upholstery.
Built the shop just behind the house, that way I could
be covering a couch and have bread in the oven, too.
Betty Crocker had nothing on me in those days. Also,

I wanted to be handy when Qlent came home from
school. The busin[...]even
more than I wanted, but it kept us afloat, and then I
did good enough thatI could knock down the folks’
house—what a mausoleum that was, bat shit six inches
deep in[...]e. Anyway, with Qlent in school, I just went back
to work. It’s what I do. It’s what I am, and some I know
are proud to be this way. But I. . . you’re kidding yourself
if you think you’re ever getting anything done.

Qlent had quite the little motor in him, too.
He’d be at one thing or another pretty hard all day. He

ate like a ditchdigger and burnt it all up. Kid could get
himself around six of my big caramel rolls all at once,
no sweat, and he’s lean as a whippet. He never had
much use f[...]tle guy. I bought him a bike, but he liked better
to run, and he’d be up Skunk or I’d hear he’d been seen
way—the—hell—and—gone up in Mill Pocket. That Qlent.
Had a range on him like an elk or something.

About the time he hit the third or fourth grade
he started to look like what he’d be as a man, and
that’s when the daddy mystery got cleared up: h[...]f a good sire. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to
see it, but no one ever said a word, at least not to me.
Not to Qlent, as far as I know. And I wonder if it was
too obvious to need saying or if. . . . Ijust know that I
myself never said a word.

You’d pass the guy in the street, run into him at
a[...]r parade or somewhere, run into
him all the time, and you’re with his son, and the man
doesn’t even have the good grace to be embarrassed,
or try and look away. Nope, Delbert knows he’s got a
catch colt, andand getting my ass kicked.

Oslavski wasn’t[...]

The thing to do was shoot him, really, but that would’ve
bee[...]lent was a restless boy. At times it
sort of hurt to see it. He wasn’t like one of these mutts
who can’t concentrate; you could slow him up with
food, and now and then he’d stop to read, and once he
got fascinated with rocks he’d stop anytime or anywhere
to look at one, he probably knew the name of every
rock in the ground. But when you think of him, the way
he was as a boy, or always,[...]t I also remember how his mom would
wave him over to her chair. She’d glom onto him, grab
his hand and hold it, and then he’d stand there beside
her, kinda have to lean in sideways the way she’d get
him, and she’s hanging off him, and she’s got her mouth
half open and she’s glued to Green Aerer or some happy
horseshit. Qlent’d stand there for as long as she wanted
him to, never complained or even fidgeted. He’d just
stand there, and, man, that broke my heart every time.
Sometimes h[...]d of hair.
Moira did at least keep herself clean, and for that I was
very grateful. Imagine if I’d si[...]e,
scrubbing her. No, but she kept herself clean, and even
kept herself kind of nice for as much as she’d wasted
away, and I have to give her high marks for grooming,I

suppose.I always wanted to forgive her, but I couldn’t.

There was nothing to forgive, so where does that leave
you? Most of the time I thinkI must’ve treated her
like a piece of expensive furniture, cause, you know, I
just couldn’t muster any more feeling for her than that,
and I didn’t want to give her an opening to get off onto
fluoride or one of her other topics[...]Qlent’s of running or at school or in his room, and
pretty soon I’m Moira’s company most of the time, and
she’s mine—I gotta say, there were some long, long
Sunday afternoons with my sister. You wanna be kind
or pay attention or something, but why? After a while,
what’s the point? She was just as happy to be ignored,
and she took very little interest in me, I can tell you.

So I had my stack of National Geographer, and I
read every page of those many times. Guys with hoops
in their noses, you know, fishing with blowguns—I
had that. Had my magazines, my soldering gun, that
stereo I built and built on and never did get it to play
right—thin soup, pretty fucking thin. And poor Qlent
built himself a trestle bridge out of[...]e some
finding, too, it was a very narrow gauge, and we put that
up on top of the structure, damn near to the ceiling. He
had his chin—up bar and his dumb bells in there. You’d
look in on him, and there he is reading that War and
Peaee; he read that book all one winter, w[...]

and was snowed in thirty pages, completely flummoxed
by those people’s names. Names and titles, not for me.
Anyway, unless you liked your television, and you liked
it going full blast the way Moira did, you kinda kept to
your room. Wasn’t long before that arrangement[...]walls in that house.

I could go the track meets, and I could go basketball,
but after a while I couldn’t stand to watch him play
football anymore. You’d see Qlent rock up onto his
toes, and you know he’s about to fly. Out on that field
he’d make those other boys look tired, make ’em look
like they came to watch. He was so much faster, and
shifty. You just knew those little sonsabitches probably
wanted to hurt him. The ball is in his hands every play,
and I’d want to go down to the sideline and yell at his
coach, ‘Give him a break, would you? Don’t youand I’m told I missed
some real exhibitions; they t[...]d take a
solid lick. I was all right with reading about it in the
newspaper the next day.

So now he’s[...]s

shy as he’s ever been, all these new friends are no boon
to him. If it isn’t a girl on the phone it’s a recruiter, and
Qlent’ll be nice to em, he’s pleasant enough, but he’s
never on for too long. What’d I call him, elusive? He
was alone whenever he could be, and I saw less and
less of him all the time, and here it is getting closer to
graduation, and I’ve started to wonder, way too late in
the game, I’m wondering a little bit, ‘What have I got
myself into?’I am not looking forward to the me and
Moira show. I’m getting the preview—in many ways
Qlent was gone before he ever left.

You know, we stood two years there of visits from
assistant coaches, and head coaches, and alumni, and
a whole herd of people who probably never before or
since set foot in a class C town.That was hell for all of
us. There you’d be, trying to be polite with some poor
guy at the kitchen table who’s been sent to get himself
an athlete, and the guy’s eyes keep flipping over to that
specimen in the living room, and some of ’em even try
and sweet talk her. That must’ve been real strange duty;
plenty lined up to do it, though. So it was a little odd,
after all[...]Berkeley,
California, a full—ride scholarship, and just for a score
he got on some test. For years t[...]s out of his shell. So he tells me
he’s decided to go down there and study Anthropology,
which I ’ve heard of[...]

sure what it is, and I’m still not sure after he explains it
to me. They study human beings? The nature of human
beings? Can that be right? Anyway, anthropologist was
not everybody’s idea of local—boy—makes—good. They all
wanted to see him play ball somewhere. People around
here w[...]cause of that—like
it was any of their business what he did or didn’t do.
Then, and I don’t think it was even two weeks
after we go[...]d for no particular reason.I came out one morning
and there she was cold in her recliner, and she must’ve
had about the gentlest death there ever was, but she was
still dead. We took her out to Lonepine and planted
her next to Mom and Dad; we took the recliner and
the Zenith, which was still going strong after all those
years, we took those out to the dump, and that was that.
Came home to a big hole in the living room. That living
room w[...]erwhelmed
with grief. Don’t know how Qlent felt about it; he
never said, and that’s not the kind of thing you ask
somebody, but I knew the next time I had to let him go,
he’d be long gone. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
That last spring he spent with me he was running
track for the pure hell of it, and he was far and away
the fastest schoolboy in the state. He was r[...]d dash in under ten seconds, seemed

like he took about ten yards a stride. You watch those

sprinters, when you watch ’em from up close, you see
how their faces quake every time they hit the ground,
they hit so hard, and most of ’em look quite grim, like
it really costs ’em something to go so fast. But Qlent
would smile. Might be a little harder to spot it when
he was really hauling, but he always smiled when he
ran. Smile and pull away, and it was the greatest thing I
ever saw. Course I also had the walking pneumonia that
spring, and those track meets did not do good things
for it.[...]nt was of fighting fire, sick when he went down
to school. I stayed sick for about a year there, miserable
and puny, and just barely able to work. Geeze, I felt like
a plowhorse:

And I’d got into some trouble with the IRS.

Many y[...]a mistake in my
book keeping, an honest mistake, and I’d underpaid
my taxes, but not by much. Never mind that it was
an honest mistake, and never mind that it was a
small one and they took their own sweet time finding
it—with penalties and interest, it turned out to be a
very substantial sum, and then I made it much worse,
much, much worse, when I got my back up and hired
a lawyer, a guy who told me from the start there was
nothing he could do about it, but I made him waste
his time and my money trying, and meanwhile that
interest is compounding, or whatever it does to make

it get so far outta hand, and before I was through, I

He stayed—they stayedflbout a week, and
then they went south, and I have to admit I was so
embarrassed about losing the house, and about not
having any way to help him out down there at school,
it wasn’t al[...]chance, but at the time I
told myself I didn’t have the oomphta or the cash to
go anywhere, which was really pretty true, and I got set
up in my little trailer out by the highway, one of those
things like a guy might take up hunting, about as big as

a two—seater outhouse, and it rocks every time a semi

goes by. Was I feeling sorry for myself? Yes. But I did
have the same post office box, and I had phone service
with the old phone number, and at leastI was where
Qlent could get in touch if h[...]shows
is a lack of imagination. I think that’s what kept me
in town, I could never come up with a cle[...]ther. For quite a while there I lived on macaroni
and postcards that took months to get here. He’s in
Honduras, he’s in the Yucatan. At first he’d just tell me
where he was at, and how the food was, and once in a
great while I’d get a picture, but it[...]. After he’d been down there a while he started
to throw in little bits about imperialism, and this—that—
or—the—otherism, and I am just praying I don’t catch a
whiff of Moir[...]f. Police states, he says. He
don’t like ’em. Who does? So why would you go so far
outta your way to go be in ’em?

At least I’m getting my postcards.[...]other from either end of a tunnel.
I didn’t ask what he was doing, and he never offered
to tell me. I hoped he was doing nothing. Nothing, I[...]m him, but I never sent him any back, never tried to,

house with a nickel in her jeans, come back two weeks

later and she’s been drunk the whole time, even if she
hasn’t ate, and she’s been to parties in three states. I
never got in her way,[...]ty sociable couple, considering I was half of it,
and we’d go over to somebody’s house for dinner and
wind up sleeping their floor. My liver didn’t[...]dn’t pay. She was in Elisis
purely by accident, and once I gave up on her she had
no reason to stay. Eventually she was up in Canada—
she was[...]id she
was all worn out inside. She didn’t seem to be too
shook up about it, though.

In the meantime, I just went out and busted ass,
an old man working like a young one. At some point
your back gets to be a whole different deal, and it takes
you about a day just to get over a day of doing rough
carpentry. But that[...]been torched. After Phyllis, I had few expenses, and I’m
back at it, and, as I say, little—by—little I got well. Man,[...]d again; had a standing
deal with Garney Fronapel to keep my freezer filled
with grass—fed steak. A[...]was when I first
started doing my carvings, too, and when they got
decent enough that I could stand to look at ’em, I’d go

to the craft fairs and sell ’em. I was doing a lot of bears’
heads at first, and then I got on to my rowboats with
the miniature oars; those were v[...]se
first few things for five, ten bucks apiece, and I thought
I was making out like a bandit, to get paid anything for
goofing off, sure, I’ll take that. So, anyway, you’d have a
lot of hippies at those events cause they’ve all got the
same basic idea as I do, try and sell some kinda trinket,
some harmless thing, and every so often I’d catch some
kid outta the cor[...]walking, kid with a mop like they wore back
then, and that’d bring me up short. I don’t know why. I
had my eye out for him even when I knew he couldn’t
be there.

Eventually he worked his way north again.[...]on the docks; he sawed
logs down around Medford, and for a good while

he worked a fishing boat out of Sitka. And if he still
never stayed put for very long in any[...]y had a good address for him, usually he’d
even have a phone—and you don’t want to intrude,
but you write, you call, you kinda wait to hear about
what he saw down there in the tropics that makes him

sound so old sometimes, but he doesn’t talk about that,

doesn’t talk about much, really, if it has to do with
him. I’d slip him a few bucks from time to time, and
he always sent it back. Said he was probably maki[...]ht’ve been true, but I’d
been living so close to the bone for so long I had no
need for any extra.

He used to come to see me in Elisis . . . well,I
guess he came twice. Once he came with another one
of those hippy girls, and the next time he’s got a dog he
picked up on the road. Crippled dog. He came to ask
me how I’m doing, and, to tell you the truth, that gave
me a little case of the yips. How’m I doing? How am
I supposed to know? You want a bear head? You want
a little boat, got some toothpick oars in it? Really, I’m
just itching to ask him . . . what? I don’t know. He is in
some ways his mother’s son, and you get the impression
that for all his smarts and his big heart and everything,
he could just up and drift away on you some day, and
without ever leaving the room. I guess I wanna ask him,
‘What’s eating you?’ Strikes me he might be inclined to
check out like Moira did.

So that’s why I started to think maybe it’s up
to me, maybe I better do something. I didn’t have the
slightest idea what it might be, but one day I threw a
war bag in the truck and drove out to see him. He was
in Seattle, or close to it. Had a maintenance job at a
hospital. Had an apartment. And what I didn’t know
til I got there—he had a[...]

She says they are very happy together, that they
understand each ot[...]thinking she might better
understand how he tends to take off. Qlent tells me
he’s saving money to go study computers, and that’s
practical, that’s more of a plan than I’ve heard from him
in quite a spell, and I should be pleased to hear it. He’ll
have all the work he wants, I suppose, and never dirty
his hands. But I remember when he men[...]thing I felt like I’d been kicked in the belly,
and I remember when he said a couple months later he
was off it, I felt good about that, too. But then he got a
job fixing coffee machines. What in the hell? Seemed

like kind of a step down for him. And [[7372 he tells me
he’s marrying Rebecca, and I wonder, ‘Does she know
about this?’, cause she doesn’t seem to me like the kind
of girl to settle for any kind of mechanic, much less a
guy[...]not too impressed.

But here he is on the phone, and he says they’re
getting married. I could hear s[...]attaya do with that
information? Got in the truck and drove on out to
Seattle again. Rented a tuxedo, even had to rent the
shoes, which, to my mind, t1at’s about the same as
wearing somebody else’s underwear. Who knows who’s
been in them rented shoes? But I bought some black
socks, and I went ahead anc wore ’em. And at this
wedding you got the groom’s side of the aisle, which
is me and the crew of a coc boat and some little dark
gal who doesn’t have a word of English, turns out she’s
a net mender, comes from Portugal—and on the other
side you got Rebecca’s peop e. A lot of’em. These are
people what we would’ve c led swells in the old days,
and the presents they broug1t . . . it was ridiculous[...]lot of those envelopes tied up in silver

twine, you knew what was in ’em.

They got married, anc he[...]

home.

You get old, and you look back on your life, and you
see where there’s big chunks of it you can’t hardly
remember cause they weren’t worth remembering.
You’re fifty, sixty, seventy, and so on, and you been
stuffing your face and sleeping. And what else?
Meanwhile, you got the rheumatiz, got your arthritis,
and there’s more hair growing outta your nose than
grows on top of your head. You get ugly, is what you do.
Real ugly.

Personally, though, I’ve been an artist, and I’ve got
no room to bitch. An artist. Me. Just tickles me pink. I
went ahead and put a lot of windows in my kitchen, tore
those appliances out and put ’em in the basement where
they belonged, and I sat down and started whittling
pretty serious. Out come snakes and snowflakes. In
time I’m doing hummingbirds and geese and about
anything I want. My little discovery,I guess you could
call it—there’s this species of spruce up in the Thompson
River country, and I can buy it a thousand board feet at
a time, buy[...]uy it raw. If I
cure it right, cut of short cants and kiln cure ’em, I can

do almost anything with it; it’s got a very forgiving grain;

and then when you’re finished, then a piece always colors
up somehow and it takes on a life of its own. There’s
been a s[...]’ve ever carved. So here
I’ve sat, whittling, and you look down at your hands, and
they’re like your pals, the guys who actually know what
you’re talking about, and you can get just as lost in that as
anybody ever got[...]I know it, my stuff’s in the shops in Missoula
and Kalispell and Bigfork, I mean the nice shops, and
even in a few little museums, places where they really
know how to light it so you look like a genius. And they
give me good money to do this—who would’ve ever
thought? Hell yes. I’ve just sat here, and sat here, and
whittled away, and I’ve called no man boss—unless it was
the tax man.I don’t see where I can complain too much.

Andhave to say, before I figured
out that’s what he was doing. I didn’t expect the
thing with Rebecca to work out, and maybe that was
wishful thinking, but you got a fart in a whirlwind
and a rich girl—who would’ve been optimistic about
the chances for that. I was wrong, though. They b[...]ed out fixing those machines

all day every day, and this is a lot more complicated

equipment than I ever thought it could be, and fixing
’em is top money; then he’s got his own company, and
he’s training other people to fix ’em; then he’s selling
’em; and then he’s selling the damn things all over the
world. He goes to Switzerland all the time. After a
while I’ve go[...]l. They’re busy people, so I leave ’em
alone, and he’s always saying to come out and see ’em, to
come on out. But I don’t.

After they had their[...]ictures, too, which is all right cause
those kids are gorgeous, and I’d send the little ones
their checks on their birthdays, fifty bucks a whack,
which may be kind ofajoke to them, or it will be soon,
but I keep track of their birthdays, Christmas and
Easter, and that’s about as much of the year as I pay
any attention to. ‘Come out,’ he says all the time, and
I know he’s proud of what he’s got, what he’s done for
himself out thereflnd you can tell he’s real proud of
those babies—but I still never go. I got a camper and
everything, and I go everyplace else, drove all the way
up the AlCan and back, twice, but for a real long time
I never got out to see Qlent and company. It was silly,
and I’m not too sure why I stayed away, but I have
noticed that when you live by yourself it doesn’t take
too long at all before you’re weird, and I was kind of

an odd duck to begin with, and I really can’t imagine
anybody should have to put up with me. So he says
‘come,’and I say I’ll be out when I’ve got the garden
put up, when I’m finished canning, which, to tell you
the truth, I rarely do that. He says ‘come,’and I tell him
I’ll come when I’m done fishing.[...]somewhere.

So there’s a lotta phone calls back and forth, but,
one thing led to another, and I never saw him for nine
years. Finally he just sent me a plane ticket and a note
to say he was sorry he hadn’t thought of it sooner. That
forced my hand, of course, and a good thing, too. I’m a
little ashamed of the wayI get. One way or the other,
it’s always been Qlent who grabs me by the scruff of
the neck and shakes me out of it. So there he was at the
airport, waiting for me, and he’s got a hundred—dollar
haircut and all, but he’s still got those same eyes he
inhe[...]ski; kind eyes, I’d call
em. I won’t even try and say how good it was to see him.

But then we get to Merton. He’s brought his
little boy with him, and the kid’s a Hoolihan through
and through, except he’s better looking than the usual
run ofus, and I guess I’m supposed to get that family
feeling for him, or something, but I don’t, cause in
the flesh this kid is very hard to like. He’s an asshole,
this Merton, and that’s about all I remember from the
airport. I count on my fingers and figure up that he’s

seven years old. I[...]

We got on the ferry out to Vashon, and Merton
wanted to stay in the car. He wants to sit there and
goose his thingus til the batteries wear out, or until I
kill him. Qlent, of course, has to sit there with him.
But I didn’t have to, so I got out and went on up to
the upper deck, as far away from Merton Hoolihan
as I could get on that boat, and I’m standing there,
catching rain in my mouth.[...]oddamn thing on the Merton score.

So then we get to the ferry landing and the
kid’s gone to sleep.I count my blessings. We do the

ride to Qlent’s place without saying much. I make a
few brilliant observations—it’s pretty, its green, and
so forth. Whatta they call ’em now? Communicati[...]he
doctor bought it for ’em. Qlent tells me him and
Rebecca unwind on the weekends by doing their own
landscaping, and there’s not an inch of their ground
that hasn’t been planted and pruned and prettied up.
It’s a little fussy for my taste, and a lot more yard work
than I’d ever do, but you’d have to say it was nice. And
that house. Somewhere under there was the cottage[...]th, but it’s been remodeled into a castle.
Must be four or five thousand feet wrapped in cedar
board and cedar shakes, and it’s gussied up in some
kind of copper trim that was new to me. I’d never seen
anything like it before. Inside, you got your parquet
floors and marble countertops and about an acre of
windows looking out over the water. Th[...]s like
a great big movie screen, there’s barges and whales and
schooners and all kinda trach in those windows.

Then Rebecca c[...]ttle Daisy
on her hip. The females of this family are something
else, I tell you. I gave Daisy her angel, cause it was what
I’d carved for her, and that angel’s head goes straight in

her mouth, and as soon as Rebecca’s convinced there’s

So then we had a drink, or in my case a couple.
Some kinda real pricey bourbon. Tasted so good and hit
me so hard, I had to excuse myself before supper was
ready, and I can see where they were making a production
out[...]near as hungry
as I am tired. So Rebecca shows me to my room, and
she’s got a funny little grin, and I’m thinking its cause I
can’t hold my liquor and I’m acting like a tourist in their
house, but she lets me in that room, and I get in there
and see where it’s been all set up for me. Everythi[...]ding a set of very fancy
Japanese carving knives, and some pieces of cherry wood
and walnut. There’s a card on my pillow. Rebecca wr[...]m’s mine, she says. It’s here whenever I want to
use it, for as long as I want to use it. I got a lump in my
throat so big I damn near puked.That was a fine note to
pass out on.

That next morning I rode into work with Qlent,
and he apologizes that we have to take the ferry again.
Hell, it’s something he has to do every day, why should
I mind? His business tak[...]building smack in the middle of downtown
Seattle. You got your showroom on the ground floor,

repair and fabricating over that, and on the top floor

there’s offices. We breeze through the whole deal, and
it’s, Mr. Hoolihan this, and Mr. Hoolihan that, and
everybody’s just delighted to meet me, like I’m just the
most wonderful geezer they ever saw, and every place
we go Qlent solves some little problem for somebody,
just fixes it on the fly. You can tell he’s been good to
these people. You can also tell he’s in charge, which is
a little[...]ever seen on him before.
When the tours finished and all the introductions are
over, he takes me to his office and makes me the best
cup of coffee I ever drank. No,[...]et this straight, I suppose. All I
know is, I may have to start using that machine he sent
me. No wonder he[...]some kinda tasty rocket fuel.

Then he settles in to make phone calls all day.
He apologizes about that, too. No problem.I take a
little walk around Seattle. Got in the wrong part of it,
of course, and some wino mugged me, and he damn
near conks me over the head with a pipe before I can
convince him, no, I don’t have a credit card. Guess I’m
the last guy on earth without a credit card.

Then it’s back out to the island and another nice
dinner. I get the impression they do this every night—
you got pasta and a big old salad and a slab of pig in

sweet and sour sauce, and the kids are set up with their
own separate meal. There’s a sound system that pipes
that sticky dead—guy music to every corner of the house,
which is not so tough on the ears after you get used to
it. Rebecca opens up a forty—dollar bottle of w[...]ay off the
booze. Drunk or sober, I still don’t have a thing to say
for myself. They’re trying so hard. I’m just wishing I had
one interesting thing to say. Next day I stay home with
Rebecca and the kids, and we’re out in the yard, and I fix
a gate for her, and then I get to playing hide n’ seek with
Merton, and I find outI can stand him after all. He’s
still a house ape, mind you, but you get him outside and
playing around, and he’s a kid like any other kid.Then
that night Qlent comes home late and takes us out to a
restaurant. They treated me like royalty the wh[...]here. I was wishing I’d done a little something to
deserve that.

That was my last night there, and while Rebecca’s
of giving the kids their baths, me and Qlent step out
on the deck. The stars are out, kind of unusual in that
part of the world. So I take the opportunity to tell him
how proud I am of him. It’s hard to explain, but here he
is, he’s made enough money to retire already if he wants
to, and he’s been all over the world and ate things I’ve
never even heard of, and he’s almost got his head down
about it. This is what I remember about him—right

from the beginning, nobody ever had[...]nt than Qlent did. He was always so terrible
easy to embarrass, and I remember that was one of the
things that made me so awful tender about him. He’s
kind of a heartbreak, and neither one of us really knows
why. So I tell him[...]been anything but proud. He tells me he wants me to
come and live with ’em. We both know what the answer
to that’ll be, but I am kind ofweak in the knees to get
the offer.

After that I started visiting eve[...]atched those kids grow up a little bit at a time, and
that was good fun. Merton turned out to be a whizbang
lacrosse player, and I caught a couple of his games before
he graduated. Daisy just kept living up to her name.
Meanwhile Qlent’s getting richer and richer and not a
year passes when I’m not a little fonder[...]also . . .I don’t know. I’m on the phone more
and more with Qlent the older he gets, and more and
more he wants to talk about old times. Then one day he
calls and asks me to meet him out at the Elisis airport
cause he needs to get in some twin—engine time. He’s
been flying a few years now, and he’s just moved up to
this Beechcraft. That’s a damn short runway, I tell him,
and it’s just dirt, but he says he’ll be fine. Sure enough,
two, three hours later there he is, coming in over Baldy.