Deep Dixie

A FOOT IN TWO WORLDS: Photos of Alaska & Pennsylvania

HE SAID/SHE SAID: A Love Story

1.  One Winter's Afternoon, After A Snow-Storm, He Prepares to Shovel The Drive and Front Walkway            

 

She said, "Isn't it just beautiful out there?  Look at the icicles hanging from the limbs and power lines!" 

   He said, "I hate snow.  I hate the cold.  I hate shoveling."

 

She said, "It makes me miss Alaska."

   He said, "You miss Alaska?  Why did we move here then?"

 

She said, "To be closer to where YOU work."

   He said, "So, you're saying you would go back there?"

 

She said, "Look at that view.  Doesn't it make you homesick for Alaska, even a little bit?"

   He said,  "You're nuts.  You know that, don't you?"

 

She said, "I'm nuts?  You're the one wearing a knit cap with a pom-pom on top."

   He said, "Hey, it does the job."

 

She said, "And makes a bold fashion statement in the process."

   He said, "So now I should shovel snow AND make a fashion statement?"

 

 She said, "I'm just saying. . . ."

    He said, "If you wanted a man who could make a fashion statement, you should've married Tim Gunn."

 

 She said, "Tim Gunn's not into women."

 (long pause)

    He said, "Tim Gunn is gay?"

 

2.  Early One Morning, He Enters The Kitchen Where She Is Making Coffee and Feeding The Cat

 

He said, "Hey, did the cat just drop a turd in the litterbox downstairs?"

   She said, "I think he must have.  Smells like it."

 

He said, "Oh, good.  I thought that was my breath."

 

3.  After She Brings A New Kitten Home

 

He said, "What's that?"

   She said, "A cat."

 

He said, "I mean, whose cat is that?" 

   She said, "It belongs to Beau.  He's lonely."

 

He said, "You got a cat for the cat?" 

   She said, "Yes.  He's been very lonely since the old cat died."

 

He said, "Oh for God's sake.  He's not lonely.  He's a cat.  He eats and sleeps and craps."

   She said, "He is distraught with grief.  And lonely.  Even a blind man could see that."

 

He said, "He doesn't even remember the other cat.  He's a cat.  A cat only has about three brain cells."

   She said, "One to remember me, one to remember the old cat, and one to remember the new little cat."

 

He said, "Hey, what happened to one for remembering me?"

   She said, "You're the one with the mad math skills. If you wanted him to think of you, you should have given him four brain cells."

 

He said, "So now it's my fault that he's dumb?" 

   She said, "Oh look! He's licking the little cat.  He likes the little cat!"

 

He said, "He's probably just cleaning him up good before he kills and eats him."

 

4.  They Approach, Again, the Subject of Valentines Day Gifts

 

He said, "Hey, check this out:  it says here that you can buy your sweetheart a star for Valentine's Day.  Only $49.99.  And they'll give you a chart and a deed to it."

   She said, "That's crazy-talk.  They can't sell a star.  They can't sell something they don't own."

 

He said, "I'm just telling you what the ad says."

    She said, "Tell me you didn't buy one."

 

 He said, "I didn't buy one."

    She said, "Good."

 

He said, "But you have to admit, getting a star would a lot better than getting chocolates. Or flowers."

    She said, "Since when?  With my luck, five minutes after they sent me the deed, the damned thing would explode and fling hot gas and debris towards the earth and the force of that explosion would send the earth careening towards a black hole and the force of that would pull the planet nearly in two and people would die horribly.  And then the few survivors left will make sure everyone knows it was MY star that killed off  half the human population. I don't want to be remembered like that."

 

He said, "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

    She said, "Hey, I've read the Book of Revelations. It's biblical."

 

He said, "So, are you saying you'd rather have flowers and chocolates like everyone else?"

    She said, "Tell you what.  Forget stars and outer space and the cosmos and, for once, just do the stuff normal people do on Valentine's Day."

(pause)

 He said, "So, does this mean you want me to return the star?"

 

 

 

photo courtesy of photos.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A WHITE TRASH STARTER KIT: What You'll Need

 

 

 

 1.  A trailer, single-wide, set out under pines and live oak, and monthly lot rent 'til the day you die;

 2.  Your grandmother's lace curtains at the kitchen window and, on the sill, those three monkeys always on your back: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil;

 3.  In the dirt yard, a  bent aluminum lawn chair missing most of its webbing;

 4.  A good-sized plastic cooler with a duct-taped handle, for keeping beer and sodas cold and for sitting on (see #3 above);

 5.  A shoebox with a lid in which to put away, for good, all your girlhood dreams;

 6.  A man your mama warned you would come to nothing but trouble;

 7.  His recliner in the living room;

 8.  His porn by the toilet;

 9.  His truck, up on concrete blocks in the yard, sporting his Confederate flag in the busted rear window;

 10.  His skinny hunting hounds sleeping on the stoop;

 11.  His velvet paint-by-number Jesus painting hung over the living room sofa;

 12.  The camo Snuggie he gave you last Christmas;

 13.  Pride: not the kind of pride that "goeth before a fall," but the kind of pride that lets you pass – head-up, unscathed – through a sea of your "betters" as you read on their faces, There but for the grace of God. . . .

 14.  A strong back, strong arms, two good feet that can carry you to the bus stop and back again in any weather;

 15.  The prayer you begin every night as you fall into bed, Anywhere, Lord, but here. . .

 16.  The exhaustion of having spent all day, every day, elbow-deep in dishwater and detergent taking you under long before the bars close at 2 a.m. when the man will  stumble in raunchy with beer and smoke, reeking of other women, to slur in your ear, Hey, Baby, you awake?

 17.  The way you have learned to feign sleep so as not to have sex with him;

 18.  The minute between when his infernal snoring begins and your insomnia returns;

 19.  The way you think, those nights, you hear the kitchen matches taunting you, Strike One.  Strike Two.  Strike Three.

 20.  And all the mornings, after a night like that, that begin with some other broken, barren thing coming to your door to borrow a cup of sugar.

 

photo courtesy of Markt3

 

THINGS I DISCOVERED THIS YEAR

 

  

Instead of making the list of resolutions on New Year's Eve as many of my friends and family are doing tonight – that list of resolutions likely to be broken (given my proclivities) and likely to leave me riddled with guilt and loathing about my ability to stick to even a plan I'd made – I've decided to make another kind of list while waiting by the fire to hear the arrival of the New Year heralded by the local church bells and the fireworks in town square. . . .

Today:  I'd thought I would amuse myself by making a list of "Things I Discovered This Year."  I ended up with a 15- page list – shocking even to me – but here, for your amusement and horror, are 25 of them:

 1.  About transvestites:  always use the pronoun which corresponds to the gender presentation.  (Thank you Eddie Izzard for the clarification!)

 2.  Dandelions do not "nod in agreement."  (So saith two of my fellow writers.)

 3. What the world really wants from a Southern writer is a "White Trash Starter Kit."  (I'm working my way through that one right now; it's a long list too, and more sordid than this one.)

 4.  Memory is an unreliable narrator.  (Excellent news in regards to putting together that White Trash Starter Kit.)

 5.  The Devil's knickers are full of hot chili peppers and spicy salsa.  (Don't ask. Don't.)

 6.  The devil singing in my inkwell has perfect-pitch.  (That's how I know he's the Devil.)

 7.  Some days I am so close to being utterly lost, I let God play me like His fool.

 8.  There is a swing-shift at the local slaughterhouse.

 9.  You may explain the tides to me.  You may point out the moon.  But I will have to decipher for myself the undertow.

 10. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones, had such a profound effect on me that, even in my dreams, I still conjugate the verb infinitive to be.

 11. Something in me is always choosing.  But between what and what, I do not always know.

 12.  Human beings have a large amount of retroviral material in their "junk" DNA.

 13.  Sometimes I am wrong –  no; often I am wrong.  And sometimes willfully so.

 14.  I miss pistons sometimes – the herky-jerky hump and frenzy of them under the hood – exchanged as they are now for the more efficient hum of the motherboard.

 15.  There is a difference between the rain and its parade.

 16.  Death sings nine songs as he comes for you.

 17.  Sometimes a dark bell rings me to sleep.

 18.  Some days, every cup in my kitchen cabinet wants to fly off its handle.

 19.  When I sense something is about to happen over which I have no control, I have that dream again I had as a girl:  a man with a knife in his teeth looking at me as if I were hot butter.

 20.  God sleeps with one eye open.

 21. I bought an old trunk at an estate sale and found in it a Book of Spells, but someone had torn out the pages for "Resurrecting the Dead."

 22.  When you are very ill, the wind can carry your soul away and even the smallest thimble can hold all the crumbling syllables of your name; that's how slender the tether is from you to the-world-as-you-know-it.

 23. When I am committing the world to memory, I do not appreciate it when someone annoys me with the facts.

 24.  A man cannot promise you the moon when all he has is a barn.

 25.  When it comes to rodeos, my sympathies lie with the bull.  

 

photo courtesy of photos.com

DAY TWO: THE BREAD OF HEAVEN

 

The snow clouds that only threatened yesterday are making good today on their promises:  it's beginning to snow outside and I can see this clearly from the hospital window where I have taken up my second-morning vigil.  Large, irregular-shaped flakes are slamming wetly against the panes already and the nursing staff arriving for the day shift are pink-cheeked and glad to be indoors.  The morning temps are hovering around 20 degrees and, while there's no wind today, it's damp and cold and miserable out there: a good day to be inside, out of the weather of the day. Or so they tell me. 

So then, why do I want to be out there in it myself?  Or, rather, to be well enough again to be out there in it, to be part of the whole rushing, slushy, wintry morning and those who are traveling miserably through it.  There is nothing like a brush with serious illness to make you see something that ridiculous, this clearly.

Sitting here in the high-backed chair at the prow-front windows of my fourth-floor room, looking down on the streets and the hills far off to the west that I can only barely make out now in the early flurries of the day, I think this early-morning view may still be one of the most beatific I've seen in a long while.  The city seems wrapped in its soft gray flannel and the streets are shining with snowmelt already.  The dullness of the day makes the particulars of all the small bright things stand out today starkly so that I notice them  when I didn't yesterday: tail-lights and brake-lights on the commuter's cars, the bright green wreaths on the door and windows of the house below me, and the elementary school children in their bright parkas and boots, walking down the sidewalks together towards school.  And that little church with the wooden cross on its front – the Lebanon Wesleyan Church –  which has a sign out front that reads, "Many an argument is sound – and only sound." 

I've been puzzling on that one this morning.  Do they mean "noise," as in full of sound and fury? Or do they mean "solid," as in sound of mind?  Or are they implying that being sound is just not sufficient unto itself?  That's the problem, I suppose, with signs and bumper-sticker slogans and their employment of clever twists and turns of phrase: it's so easy for the meaning to slide right past you and to saunter on down the block. 

Farther down the block, the rowhouses still gleam in their bright colors but today they look wet – as if some painterly hand has just laid on the colors – and today many of their chimneys have small spires of hearth-smoke rising out of them. 

It's not exactly a Norman Rockwell scene from middle America, but it's got a certain appeal and charm today for someone like me.

                                     * * * * *

 In the two days I've been up here on the fourth floor, I have learned a secret about this hospital:  the dietary services food staff makes and serves the best warm bread pudding that I have ever put into my mouth.  I know bread pudding – in all its various and nefarious forms – and I'm not exaggerating here.  It is warm and buttery and sweet and the whole concoction is swimming in butter.  It's like a wallow of all my favorite ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and a little cinnamon.  I found it my first day here on the dessert part of the menu the staff hands out to patients, and it's available every day at two meals: lunch and dinner.  You can have as many sides and appetizers as you want – unless you happen to be on a restricted diet, which I thankfully am not – and you can have as much bread as you want.  Drinks too.  But, they warned me, you can only have one entrée and only two desserts.

Two desserts! 

Two desserts.  It's a bit like having died and gone to kindergarten heaven.  Never have I been allowed to even think it is proper to have two desserts at one meal.  Yet here is the dietary services corps of the Good Samaritan Hospital giving me permission, in my illness, to indulge in such sweet madness.  Still, my upbringing won't let me take two: the guilt of it would do me in.  But I do order one warm bread pudding with each lunch and dinner I have.  I save the pudding for last – along with my half-pint of cold whole milk from the local Swiss dairies – so the little dish of warm bread pudding is the last-and-best thing I will savor of the meal.  Just like I used to tell my undergraduate students in Composition classes:  save your best point of persuasion for last. 

When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to warn me, Never eat food made by a mean-spirited cook.  (Or a sick one,  or a spiteful one, or a sad one: the saying shifted slightly to accommodate the proper lesson for the day's woes.)  She said that kind of cook would poison the pot and, if you ate the food, it would bring you no end of trouble, digestive and otherwise. 

That may sound like charming folk wisdom.  Like an old wives' tale. Like some quaint grandmotherly expression.  But my grandmother was always tapped into some deep knowing about how things actually worked and I knew that even then, so I tended to pay attention to what she said.

So here's what I think today.  The antibiotics and steroids are doing a little work towards making me healthy again.  So is the respiratory therapy department.  The nursing staff of the hospital helps it along a little more.  The rest and sleep surely help healing along too.  But as good as those things are, they fall just slightly short, pointed as they are and relentless about the push towards health. 

But I'm pretty sure it is that cook – that happy, indulgent cook baking away in the hospital kitchen – who is doing the heavy-lifting work of making me well again right now.  All that voluptuous attention to taste, to something sweet and warm.  All those eggs and milk and flour.  All of it beat and stirred and poured into a pan and sent into the heat of the ovens.  And that final little whiff of warm cinnamon every time it comes to the bedside table!  The whole thing is working towards the satisfaction of some longing I didn’t even know I had.  It's not even meant to be healthy for me; it's a dessert, mind you, and its sole purpose is to move at someone with the intention of delivering a sudden jolt of pleasure and satisfaction through the teeth and tongue and taste buds and down into the stomach.  For an unapologetic hedonist like me, that IS the ticket to well-being.  At least it is for today.

I don't know who here gave this dish such a modest name, but I think it might be something more than just the "warm bread pudding" it's billed as.  I think it may be the Bread of Heaven, going incognito as ordinary pudding, a poor man's dessert made from leftover crusts of bread and sauced up with eggs, butter, milk, and cinnamon.  Or maybe the bread of heaven IS just ordinary food, a warm dish made by a happy cook in some kitchen that is not your own, and served up to you by a Mennonite volunteer who delivers it to you, smiling, as if it were not the miracle it really is sitting there in its steaming little white ceramic dish, waiting for you to take it into yourself and be made whole – or at least pleased – again in a way you can't remember having been  since childhood.

 

 

 photo by the author, December 11, 2010

 

 

WAITING FOR THE SUN

 

It's been a very long time since I had a vantage-point like this:  four stories up, facing west, overlooking a cold, dark, sleepy town in the foothills, staring up at the starless sky, waiting for the sun to arrive.  Well, I have no assurance that the morning will be sunny, not gray and overcast or foggy, as early mornings here in the hills and valleys of Central Pennsylvania can often be.  But I'm hoping for sun.

I've gotten up early and moved my bed – tilted it askew actually – so I can see out the prow-front double window of my room:  room 452, Good Samaritan Hospital, Lebanon, Pennsylvania. 

By seven a.m., I've already had blood drawn, had a nebulizer treatment, have had two of the myriad intravenous antibiotics prescribed for the pneumonia, and have phoned in my selections for breakfast from the "Room Service Dining" Menu.  Now, I'm sitting here upright, watching the sky pink up and waiting for first sun and that steamy bowl of Cream of Wheat, when it suddenly occurs to me, I am breathing again.

And now, as if on cue, the sun crests somewhere behind me, over the eastern ridge.  I can't see it, but I know it's happening:  all the windows of the row-houses below flash like brightly-burnished mirrors and their twilight-dulled colors leap into rich barn reds, dove-grays, burnt golds, Williamsburg blues, and that late-70s Dusky Rose that's come into fashion again across the country.  I can distinguish again the lush evergreens from the bare-limbed oaks and maples and sycamores.  The street below my window is thrumming now with morning traffic and the large, wooden, burnt-umber cross on the church across the street comes into sharp relief against its ochre-colored clapboard and rusting steeple spire.  The house to the left of the church – one half of a two-family house – has greenery wreaths  tied with big red bows in celebration of the holiday season.  Maybe tonight, I'll be lucky enough to see this town transformed again by street-light and holiday-light before someone arrives at the appointed time to pull the heavy drapes into place again and turn down the room-lights.

I can make out the brickworks and glass of the old steel foundry building and its tall, rust-eaten water tower midway across the valley and I am reminded of how much steel once meant to this state and the hard economy of loss that followed as production shut down, foundry by foundry.

                        * * * * *

Midmorning now and the clouds are moving in from the west, damping the blue morning sky and throwing into shadow the whole sun-bright town, and my IV monitor (Horizon® Nxt – Modular Infusion System) starts pinging like a mad devil of sonar and is flashing red digital letters across the front: OCCL. . .OCCL. . . .OCCL. . . .  An occlusion somewhere in the line.  And though I am at the farthest end of the hall from the nurses' station and have promptly rung my call bell, as instructed, it will be a while yet before anyone comes to reset the beast.  I know this because I can hear several other things pinging and ringing down the hall.

So here's what I'll do.  I am going to sit here at my fourth-floor window breathing again, in and out and in, without having to will my lungs to expand and contract – blissfully ignorant again of the mysterious workings of my ancient reptilian brain - enduring the annoyingly loud, fouled mechanics of modern medical technology while I look westward, to the foothills and ridges beyond Lebanon Valley, watching the snow-clouds move in, feeling my whole body pinging with a strange happiness at being right here, right now, in the world and of it. . . .

photo courtesy of photos.com

THE MAP, THE COMPASS, THE ROAD AWAY

We were third-graders then, and learning the Florida State Song – "We are the children of Florida, F-L-O-R-I-D-A…" – and drawing, from memory, the state flag, the official seal at its center.  Mrs. Danforth has been telling us the "first stories of our fair state:" the Spanish galleons arriving; Ponce de Leon, his long hair flowing, wearing a leather breastplate and balloon-legged pants and tights, stepping out to plant the flag of Spain on the white dunes; the search for the Fountain of Youth; the Seminoles and their chief, Osceola; the deep Everglades the Seminoles vanished into rather than sign the treaties and live on the reservations they were offered. 

She moves us forward, through time and space, to the city in which we live.  Jacksonville.  Then she tells us that its first name was Cow Ford, named this because this is the very place where the herders brought their cattle in order to drive them across the river to the other side.

 What, she asks us sweetly, twirling the chalk in her long fingers, is the name of that river?

 Bobby Thompson shouts, without even raising his hand, The River Jordan!

But no; this is wrong. Mrs. Danforth tells us so and we believe her, though we are surprised a little by the news because we have all heard in church that the River Jordan is where one crosses over to the other side.  We take things literally and this is no fault of our own.  Castro's bombs are real to us as they are to our parents.  And Mrs. Danforth has told us the world is now "teetering on the brink of annihilation."

 Annihiliation.  She says the word twice. And we all know that to say a word twice – a word with five syllables, a word that sounds like all the breath in your body is escaping when you say it – is to make it true.  And so each time the sirens go off, we line up and follow her out the schoolroom door, across the playground, beyond the chain link fence, across the gooey midday asphalt of the road, into the drainage ditches.  We will crouch there, next to her, through the sirens' long wail.  Even when the ditches are half-filled with rainwater, we will follow her in our one pair of good shoes, in our picture-day, Sunday-best skirts, with our fear of the water snakes we have seen swimming in them.  Whatever evil a snake might do to us, fangs and venom, is small next to something like annihilation.  In the seconds between the end of the sirens and the one long blast of the all clear, we think we might understand what it is to teeter on the brink of something terrible; we feel the edge of it around us there, though we do not know, exactly, what that something is.

But this morning there are no sirens, no mucky ditches to crawl in and out of, and we are content to sit here in our sunny classroom and be astonished that the "other side" is just across the St. John's River from us.  We go on drawing the flag while she tells us the story of our town, Jacksonville, renamed for Andrew Jackson: "Jackson's Village."  We listen to her while we draw, rapt and almost-interested, but later – at recess under the tall pines – we will make of that name a little joke among ourselves:  Jack-SIN-ville.  We say the word under our breath – like a nasty word we say only when adults are not present to punish us for it – and we snicker because that is sometimes what Preacher calls it from the pulpit on Sundays.

But now, I am trying, for this test, to remember the insignia, that blue and gold place at the heart of the white flag.  I know there is a sun, a ship, a Seminole woman. . .but I cannot remember what else is there.  An alligator?  Some flowers?  Some trees? I think, for a moment, that I would be able to remember it, exactly, if I could just let my eyes drift – for just a second – over Delia Becker's drawing.  She is sitting at the desk directly across from mine.  It would be so easy.

This will become the story of my life, though I don't yet know it – this wrestling with the Angel of Small Deceits.  This time, however, I win out: I keep my eyes on my own flag.  The blue crayon, clenched in my right fist, is poised an inch, maybe two, above the white square of the flag. I am still sitting like this ten minutes later when time runs down and the history lesson is over and the papers must be passed forward.  I beat the Devil. . .and am defeated again: defeated by the desire to please God and to keep Jesus – that One-Who-Watches, that Peeping-Tom-Who-Has-His-Father's-Ear, from having to put one more black mark beside my name.  How many marks does it take before God's eraser smudges someone's name from the Book of Life?  And how many Xs are there, already, next to my own name?

I surrender the blue crayon again to the darkness of the cigar box which still smalls faintly of cigars, the smell I believe is the smell of Cuba and Castro.  And now it is time for maps and the color for maps is black: X marks Jacksonville, the city of our childhoods; O marks the capital, Tallahassee; E is the mark where the Everglades and the swamps sprawl; P for the Pacific Ocean; G for the Gulf of Mexico, and GA for Georgia, which stretches beyond the dashed boundary lines just north of our city, the live oaks there heavy with Spanish moss.  Because this is only a practice for the real test, which will be tomorrow, we don't have to turn in our maps.

On my left is John Galway, a mean Irish boy.  His map turns ugly right away.  He is drawing brown stick figures hanging from the trees.  He's lynching colored people, the way we've heard his daddy really does some nights.  To my right, Delia, in her blonde braids and blue satin ribbons, has got the Pacific Ocean where the Gulf of Mexico should be.  She figures this out though and she changes the compass points on her map.  East goes West, and North goes South, and Florida dangles there still at the bottom of the page, a large tonsil of land – a peninsula – just under Georgia.  When I see her do this – when I see Delia change the directions -  I notice at last the small compass at the upper right-hand corner of our maps: a star-pronged thing like the star of Bethlehem with a corona at its heart, all the spokes of it pointing away from its center to something important, something maybe only the Wise Men, the Three Kings, would know about.  But I am in third grade and I am not kingly nor wise, nor ever likely to be.  Wisdom is not my gift; my gift is sin.  I have a penchant for it.  A predisposition.  So says my Sunday School teacher who would know.

So I draw a likeness of this compass, a second compass, over this city, my city, the city in which I live.  I am here, dead-center of JackSINville, at its dark coronaed heart.  All the compass spokes point away from here:  East is on my right: the Pacific, water, ocean.  West is the Gulf of Mexico, more water.  I am afraid of water, afraid of drowning though I do not know, exactly, what drowning is.  My grandmother has warned me about it, mostly so I won't wander off too near the pond in the woods near our house.  She has told me it is possible for a grown man to drown in a teacup of water: it gets into his lungs and that's it for him.  Drowned.

Too much water, East and West.  And South is just more Florida, the endless search for the Fountain of Everlasting, for Youth.  And at the end of Florida is more water.  Beyond that water, somewhere off the end of our maps, is Cuba and Castro, the bearded dictator who puts his poets in prison, and the Bay of Pigs.  Between us and those waiting bombs, the Everglades rises, thick as Eden with snakes, with cypress and palmetto, wild boars and Florida panthers, and deep in its watery mucky heart, the toothy croc circles – the old Leviathan of the Swamp – with his five sets of teeth and his great hunger.

I feel him there this morning, just below the bright noontime sun of Jacksonville and the ringing of heat in my ears.  I can almost feel the wide yawn of his jaws, that great jaw hooked by God who, Preacher says, has "created the Destroyer to destroy."  He is waiting out there, Leviathan, with his teeth and his open maw and his great empty belly-of-the-beast hunger. For me.  I am making my map of escape already – me and my little Jonah heart – crossing over to the other side: North – away from the terrible hungers of beasts, beyond the lit streets and the neat green lawns, past the live oaks of Georgia and the old ghosts of hatred that still haunt them, past all the sharp compass points of this Nothingness to the Something that I will one day travel to, inhabit, and make my own. . . .

 

SUMMER CAMP - Arrivals & Departures: The Leviathan

Pastor Dan.  That's what he told us to call him.  We'd been invited to be practically on a first-name basis with someone who was probably already at least twenty-four!  He was from somewhere down around Apopka, or maybe it was Sanford.  He was unmarried and handsome, I suppose, in a Nordic way and his arms and legs seemed to throb with muscles.  He had wavy blonde hair and blue-as-the-Caribbean eyes and two deep dimples that were evident even when he wasn't smiling, which wasn't often.  He carried himself with the ease of one who knows he has been "called" to greatness.  He moved through and the sea of campers parted, then closed again to fill the empty space he'd left behind.  And when he smiled and said, Praise the Lord," the girls really, for once, felt like praising the Lord.  Boys our age paled next to him and seemed, well, so boyish.  There was just something about the way he looked and how he wore that sleeveless t-shirt and khaki shorts that kept the girls in my bunkhouse whispering long after lights-out each night. There was something about him that kept the girls painting their nails and brushing their hair until it shone.  There was something about him, I think, that must've made them feel funny in their "parts."

Oh brother, I sighed when I saw Sheryl Coker and Lynette Johns giving themselves over too to the new mob adoration of the young pastor.  I was baffled by what was going on with the girls.  We all knew plenty of guys on the football team at school who had bulging thighs and curly blonde hair, the sleeves ripped from their shirts in order to show off their muscles.  But things like that, frankly, just didn't impress me.  What I liked was a guy with brain, a good mind. So the new youth pastor just wasn't that interesting to me.  Not in the way he was for them anyway.  What I liked about Pastor Dan was how he spoke in metaphors and allegory, always using one thing to talk about another, to shed a little light on what seemed difficult to comprehend.  I liked how he began his sermons with little anecdotes and stories to make his point rather than lecturing or "sermonizing" like our counselors tended to do.  And I found him curiously open-minded and nonjudgmental, a modern-day cross of Thomas Aquinas and the Age of Aquarius.

He'd announced right off that we could play pur guitars each night at campfire and sing modern Christian songs like "Kum-Ba-Yah" and "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," thus abandoning the traditional hymns that few could ever remember all the words to, especially the new campers and converts.  The first night at campfire, he'd borrowed my guitar and played and invited us all to sing "Amazing Grace" with him – but to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun."  It felt delicious, singing like that, the holy and the profane commingling in the music.  It felt right, somehow, like something whose time had come.  It felt like we felt at that moment, our backs chilled by the night's cool darkness and our faces flushed hot in firelight.  We began to feel something new, something dangerous, flaring up in us.  And we almost wanted it.

In between verses, we would drop down into soft humming so any camper "moved by the Spirit" could stand up at fireside to testify.  On the first night that summer, a boy confessed to having smoked pot and taking LSD and to stealing beer from a store when he was only 14.  But last summer, at this very camp, he had given his sorry life over to Jesus; he had been baptized in the muddy lake and now those temptations were gone, gone from him forever.  While he talked, he wrung his hands and a tiny muscle in his left eye jittered, like a shutter opening and closing in a fickle wind.  Pastor Dan held his Bible up, lifted his face to the heavens, and closed his eyes as if he were in rapture and he said, Gracious Lord we thank you for the miracle of this salvation.  Thank you for the Blood of Lamb who washed away our sins and makes us whole again. Amen.  And we all chorused, Amen.

Then on Monday night, during the bonfire, a petite, beautiful blonde girl none of us knew – a girl whose parents had driven her to camp themselves all the way from Ft. Lauderdale – stood up and told us how she'd gone all the way with a boy one time at the drive-in and had gotten pregnant and then had gotten the baby aborted so her parents wouldn't find out she'd had sex.  The boy had been sent off to Boys Town by his people because he'd stolen money from them.  To pay for the abortion, she'd said. She told us she'd wanted to die lately so the guilt would finally leave her alone, even if it meant she had to take a whole bottle of pills to kill herself. Even if it meant she'd have to go to hell forever for taking her own life.

She put her face down into her hands then and sobbed, she sobbed so hard her whole body shook.  When she looked up again she said she'd been the worst a girl could be and all she really wanted just then was for Jesus to touch her life and save her from the shame of her sin and from eternal damnation.  Her pale eyes were wide open and they darted wildly around the circle of campers, from one of us to the other, looking for God-only-knows-what.  Her blonde bangs had shaken free of her ponytail and hung down limp and wet over her high forehead.  Black mascara was smudged in circles underneath her eyes and was beginning to run down over her flushed cheeks.  I saw snot trickling down the little cleft channel under her nose and drop over her upper lip, into her mouth.

She looked like a Jezebel to us.  She frightened us with how easily she could step forward and expose her worst sins like that. Openly.  We couldn't ever not know that about her now.  It was forever, that kind of public confession.  Why hadn't she just gone to the pastor and told him about all this? The campfire sputtered and seemed to grow hotter, like hell-flames had drawn close to us in her telling of the tale.  We all were  so flummoxed by her unexpected testimony – she who had been aloof and so proper, so snooty to the rest of us girls – we forgot to keep humming.  There had been no Amens or Praise the Lords from us when she'd finished talking. We didn't know what to do with something that, like her.  It was way beyond anything we had ever imagined.  So we just stood there, silent as the abyss, studying our feet, toeing the sand.

And that's when Pastor Dan stood up and put his arm around her as if she were still as beautiful as ever, as if she were spotless as the Virgin Mary.  In his other hand, he lifted his soft-cover black leather Bible up over his head and closed his eyes again.  The gold edges of the pages flashed in the firelight.  He prayed to Jesus to forgive that girl, and to bless her.  And when he said Amen at the end of his prayer and none of us had echoed Amen after him, he fixed his blue eyes on us, one by one, and he reminded us sternly that Jesus had forgiven Mary Magdalene and had saved her from the thrown stones of the religious leaders and she had been the town harlot, so how could we not forgive this fallen young woman, too, whose only real sin had been to love too deeply the wrong boy at the wrong time.  He thanked her for her courage then and she staggered back to her seat on the log, sniffing and wiping her eyes and nose on the back of her forearm.

Pastor Dan had told us earlier to think of a testimony as a candle to hold against sin's darkness. A tether to heaven and to God and to whatever little piece of God was still alive in others around us.  A tether to keep us steady in a rough wind, a wind so foul and strong it could sweep you away from all that you'd ever loved and wanted.

He spoke like that all the time.  That is why I listened to him.  That is what I liked about the youth pastor. . .though I did not like his way of smiling all friendly-like at the girls who fawned around him all day and night, vying for the seat closest to him at campfire. And I especially hadn't liked it later that night when I was taking the footpath to the lake later that night and I'd come upon him and the girl from Ft. Lauderdale and overheard him murmuring something to her in that gravelly Rock Hudson voice he always reserved for the pretty girls at camp.  On that footpath, I'd hesitated, wondering if I should turn back or find another way to the lake - maybe through the palmettos alongside of me - when he'd suddenly put out his hand and clamped it to her bare arm and pulled her roughly towards him. The gooseflesh rose on me in a curious and way then and I became kindred to stone, my tongue rooted against the roof of my mouth.  He'd turned down his flashlight then, his hand still around her upper arm, not saying anything.  I couldn't see anything clearly.  I didn't know whether he was going to pray for her or murder her. I didn't know whether it was kindness or malice I was witnessing in that moment.   I just knew that something felt off, especially when she'd tried to wrench her arm free a moment later.  I must have made some kind of noise then because they looked back and saw me there finally.  He had let go of her arm and they'd stepped away from each other.  The girl headed, head-down, back to the bunkhouse and I stood there like a stump while she rushed past me and on up the path.  I wasn't certain, suddenly, about this youth pastor who would clutch at a young girl on a dark path.  Nor was I less uncertain about him when he'd folded his arms across his chest and hollered after me then, God go with you, Sister. . . . his voice trailing off where he would have added my name had he known or remembered it.

All that night and into the next day, something bothered me about what I'd seen on my way to the lake.  I couldn't put my finger on it, exactly. I wondered if I should have reported the incident.  Or if I should have said something to him, have asked him what was going on out there.  But I was a coward, back then, prone to getting tongue-tied and stammering and turning bright red in the face when I had to speak to any adult.  And what would I say that he couldn't deny anyway or explain away?  And even if I could say, clearly, that I thought I'd seen something about to go wrong, badly wrong, out on that path, who would believe me over that man?   One moment I was telling myself that youth pastor was at fault.  The next, I questioned that assumption and wondered if he hadn't been merely firmly stopping her from doing something wrong-headed.  It was hard to know, standing in a dark place, what was actually happening right in front of you.  So I spent most of rest of the week troubled and restless, wrestling with what to do and think, with what to mak of what I'd seen and heard, or thought I'd seen and heard.

Friday night at campfire, as we were all coming to the end of singing, starting to turn it down to a hum for testimonies, Pastor Dan had taken a seat on a log across the fire from where I was sitting.  Sitting down in an empty place was how he cued us that it was time for testimonies of faith. I was already bracing myself for the ever-increasing lurid details and hysteria the testimonials had been taking on as the week had gone by – one fallen sinner trying to outdo the next – when there was a low bellow, a rumble, across the night.  Our humming dropped away then to the night-sounds of the swamp: mosquitoes, crickets, wild night-birds.  We listened hard.  A boy near me stood up and squinted out past Pastor Dan, somewhere just over his right shoulder, to the far, barely-lit edge of the clearing.

What's that?

He pointed and everyone else strained and squinted towards the dim-lit rim where the campfire's light thinned and melted away into swampy darkness.  Something large and low to the ground squatted almost directly behind Pastor Dan. It wasn't moving; it was just hunkered down in the dirt at the light's edge.  Someone else whispered that, gosh, didn't it have what looked like a jaw full of teeth hanging open and shouldn't we all move away from there quietly so as to not disturb it.  In response, a few campers started to stand up.

Then one of the boys hollered, Gator!

After that, there was the sudden loud chaos of campers and counselors jumping from their seats, bumping against each other, backing up, stumbling and falling down and getting back up again in their hurry to get away.  Sheryl Coker moved off at a run towards the bunkhouse, dragging Anna Binkley along after her.  I remember being mildly surprised at how quickly Sheryl could move for a girl her size.  Something I vowed to remember when time came to pick my team for relay races the next morning.

I stood slowly then and crept around the fire, moving towards that thing at the edge of light. I stared hard into the darkness at the clearing's perimeter. And when my eyes had focused sufficiently to convince me that it might not be merely a log that resembled a gator, I decided maybe I should move off too.  Only a fool would tempt God – or a gator.  But just as I was turning, Pastor Dan, who had stepped over the log and beyond the campfire's circle, to investigate, had also figured out it wasn't a fallen tree trunk.  Turning, he ran, full-tilt, into me and knocked me backward over the log and into the sand on my backside.  Without so much as an Excuse me or an Are-you-okay? or a hand to help me on my feet again, he leapt over me and over the log I'd fallen against.  In his frenzy and terror, though, he'd misjudged the trajectory of his leap: he landed square in the bonfire, embers flying up in the black night.  Flying, like prayers: up, up to God.

Girls started screaming. Boys stood with their mouths gaping open, rooted in place, unable to move towards the sizzling man.  I was still trying ungracefully to get up from the thick sand and to dust myself off.  It was a good thing for Pastor Dan that the Hogan brothers had had the presence of mind just then to scoop up handfuls of dirt and to throw it over him, to "put out" his flaming britches before he could be seriously burned.  A few others saw what they were doing and joined in too.

The gator had turned and roared off, startled by the sudden ruckus, toward the lake again, so all I'd heard when I stood and listened after him was the sound of something large knocking through the palmettos and thick underbrush. That quickly, the terror and excitement of the night were over.  One by one, two by two, we'd all trickled back to our bunkhouses and one of the older boys had driven the youth pastor into town for gauze and ointment.

The next day, I struggled mightily to keep my mind on the morning sermon.  Friday night's bonfire was still running through my head, over and over, forward and backwards then forwards again, like a film turning and turning between its spools. The responsive reading was from a passage in scripture where Jesus tells his disciples, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the ends of the earth." But all I could think of just then was how, as that pastor had rushed to get out of that gator's way, the "end" that had gone by us, flaming, had been quite a sight to behold.

All that morning, in chapel, those of us who'd seen him panic the previous night had shuffled and fidgeted in the chapel's chairs, trying not to break into giggles, trying to be respectful. After all, he'd been a hero to us, better than us somehow, more perfect and godlike with his straight teeth and blonde good looks and his modern Christian music and the easy way he could forgive and accept even the worst of our sins. But then the terror had come upon him – as it comes to all of us sooner or later. Then the leap and bright fall.

Like Lucifer, I'd thought.

I pitied him then. I pitied him in that deep, heart-felt way that only a very young girl can pity a man when he suffers and falls short of the glory others expect of him and think he should rise to, always. Maybe it was because I'd recognized on his face something of the humiliation that had haunted my own face at times.

All through that sermon, Iwrestled with whatever devil in me loves to run wild stories over and over through an idle mind. Somewhere in my heart's core, I wanted deeply to be a good Baptist, a good girl, one who could listen earnestly as a youth pastor in a shirt and tie and dress slacks moved the sermon through the parable of the Prodigal Son and whatever good lessons about forgiveness it had to teach me.  But my mind kept drifting back, again and again: to that great brown lizard bellowing and thrashing off in the dirt and pine straw, trying to get back to the safety of the swamp where it was most at home. I kept remembering a bunch of skinny white kids screaming, testimonies and faith in God forgotten, guitars flung into the outer darkness of the night.  I kept recalling that man of God leaping, in his terror, over me and straight into the bonfire which, with the sweat of his body, popped and sizzled like I imagined the hell-flames might sizzle when the damned are tossed in.

Come that afternoon, Pastor Dan was wearing again his torn t-shirt and khaki shorts. We could see, on his scratched, muscled legs and on his scraped knees and blistered shins, places where the hair had all been singed away.  And I am woman enough today to admit to you that I took a sinner's delight in trying to imagine what other body parts might have been scorched in that impressive leap into the fire.  I can also admit to you that I delighted secretly when the other girls in my bunkhouse stopped fussing with their nails and their hair and took to snickering and calling him Hotpants behind his back which, as it turned out, was a fortunate thing for the boys our own age who had resumed being the objects of our affection and curiosity.  Bunkhouse talk returned to them, those boys, and we drew big hearts in our notebooks again and wrote their initials inside of them. 

All of us except for that girl, the girl he'd so eloquently forgiven that first night at campfire. Oh sure, she sat with us now behind the backstop at the boys' softball games and had her meals at the tables with us. But her eyes followed Pastor Dan. And she sought him out for new-convert counseling on those afternoons when the rest of us girls decided it was more fun to swim in the lake with boys our own age or to lie about, slicked up with suntan oil and mosquito spray, on our bright beach towels in the hot afternoon sun while the counselors went off to do the things counselors do when teenagers are enjoying an afternoon away from Bible study and prayers.

I do worry, a little, that this story, written down like this, will make its way into the hands of some other Baptist camper from that summer who might, out of some old spite or sense of indignation, show it to that man.  Surely, he will recognize himself in it.  Surely he will feel again the old wasp-sting of humiliation, even after all these years, he'd who quietly reminded us on the final day of camp that "whatever happens at camp should stay at camp." Meaning, I supposed, that we should never tell anyone else how he'd gone yellow, how in his zeal to get away from a sleepy old gator, he'd run over a girl and had leapt over her and straight into the flames then, by accident, and set himself on fire.

Maybe I'm wrong about that though. Maybe there were other, darker ways in which he had fallen from grace that summer. Maybe he'd needed the adoration and attention of adolescent girls to convince himself he was powerful. Or desirable. Maybe he'd done more, before camp was done, than merely let his hand linger on a girl's bare arm in the charged heat of a humid summer night. I don't know for sure. But if it's any consolation to him, for my part in telling it all here like this, I think I'll send a little money after all – maybe out of some old flame of Baptist guilt that lingers in me still – to that blonde, smiling middle-aged preacher in this photograph who wants to bring those unhappy-looking boys to a Baptist camp next summer, to bring them in touch with whatever bit of wilderness might still exist out there somewhere in the swampy summer Florida nights.

 

Some of the names here have been changed in order to protect the innocent and the unintentionally-wicked. 

 

SUMMER CAMP - Parts 2 & 3

The newly-built chapel at Lake Yale, circa late 1960s

Part 2 – Campers, Happy and Otherwise

For seven days each summer in the 1960s, Baptist parents in my hometown and other small towns up and down the Florida panhandle sent their children to Lake Yale Baptist Assembly Grounds, a summer campground that hovered at the edge of a lake, a lake that was more a wide, boggy pond in those days than it was a recreational lake.  The campground itself was a strange congregation of concrete, barracks-style bunkhouses outfitted with stacked metal bunk beds and old standing lockers arranged in no particular order between the painted concrete floor and the exposed, unpainted rafters from which cobwebs dangled and blew about in the hot summer breeze.  Torn screens were all that stood between us and mosquito swarms and all the other assorted, bloodthirsty flying things that take up summer residence near bog-lands. 

Shower rooms, sinks, and toilets were, largely, communal affairs. The chipped porcelain sinks were stained brown and the handles were, inevitably, reversed so that the tap's cold water was marked with an H while the hot water was marked with a C.  That always made for an interesting start to the morning.  The water in the bathrooms, both hot and cold, was riddled with a foul sulphur smell and a light mustard color: an altogether unappealing combination for the camper . . . though, should we be tempted to complain about it, we would be tersely reminded that our "modern" facilities were not as rustic as those neighboring secular summer camps where outhouses were still in use.

 

For propriety's sake, the girls' toilets were housed in individual wooden stalls with latching plywood doors.  And between each shower-head in the bunkhouse bathroom, a plastic, mildew-speckled shower curtain hung from rusted metal hoops which, while unattractive and barbaric, still afforded Baptist girls the modesty which they'd been encouraged to uphold.  The camp showers may have been primitive, less elegant than the bathroom accommodations at our homes, but at least they weren't like our gym locker-room shower at Lakeshore Junior High School, which was open, and uncomfortably public. At school, there was a large tiled trough which ran along one end of the locker room from ceiling to floor.  From it, twelve sleek silver showerheads and twenty-four handles and twelve soap dishes stood in sharp relief against the white tile and grout.  Most Baptist girls shuddered to even consider that oversized shower stall, to think of stripping down to the altogether and standing there among the shapely secular girls who were lathering up, shampooing their hair, and talking about boys or class assignments . . . as if their everythings and altogethers were not on display for just everyone to see.  Baptist girls learned, instead, to tolerate the ripe after-smell of sweat and dirt on our bodies, or to muffle that fragrance with a generous sprinkling of baby powder.

It had a devastating effect on me, I'm certain, in ways that I'll probably never fully comprehend or own up to, that struggle between remaining modest as the Church insisted I should and the deep-seated, and probably devilish, desire I felt back then to move into the wider circles of adolescent society.  I suspect I had grown up classically repressed, or so the psychologists would have probably diagnosed me had my parents believed sufficiently in psychology or therapists to send me for therapy.  But no; what my parents believed in most was honesty and humility; they believed in right-standing with God and modesty of the flesh and the spirit.  And in the Word of God and its commands to avoid all worldly enterprises that might cause me to fall into temptations of the flesh. So, like most Baptist girls from my church, I avoided anything to do with exposing my most-private body parts to anyone around me, even if that meant I had to stay clear of showering after gym class.  That practice provoked Bobby Thompson to loud ridicule of us when, to get a laugh from other kids at school, he'd announced one day in the hallways between classes that "You can smell a Baptist coming before you can see a Baptist coming."  I put my head down and kept walking and praying whole-heartedly that there would be a special place of torment awaiting that little perv in the after-life.  Baptist girls might smell odd after gym class, but that sure didn't stop him from trying to cop a feel from one if he found her alone.

 

What seemed most odd to me at summer camp though, looking back on it now, were the yearly rumors that circulated among the girls about the boys' dorms and toilets at Lake Yale.  The boys may have been having a good time at our expense, but that didn't occur to us back then.  My first summer at camp, I heard that the boys had been instructed to sleep with both hands out from under the sheets, folded across their chests.  To insure that the new rule was followed, the counselors made nightly flash-light checks in the boys' bunkhouses.

Why? I asked once and Wendell Harris told me that there should be no "touching" of their privates, even in sleep.  What made counselors think the boys would fondle themselves while they slept?  Unless.  Unless they knew it could happen because it had happened to them too, once-upon-a-time.  Still, it was hard to imagine such a thing, looking at some of those camp counselors – some of whom were only a year or two older than we were.  Some of them looked so androgynous, it was almost hard to imagine they even had fully-loaded privates.

My second summer at camp, Granville Jones had whispered to me that the long wall of urinals in their bathrooms had been "altered" for privacy: plastic hinged lids had been fitted over each urinal and, somewhere about halfway up the front of each lid, a circle had been cut out – all so a boy's modesty could be preserved while he peed.  He just had to unzip and quickly flip his member into the porthole in the lid.  No one would be tempted to satisfy his curiosity by peeking at another's parts or making comparisons or, God forbid, be tempted to anything lurid or lustful.  Or perverted.

Right away, what came into my mind, as Granville talked, was how some of the smaller boys – like the Hogan brothers, twins from Apopka who wore little round John Lennon spectacles and Beatles' bangs – would have looked, stretching as high as they could on the tips of their toes, trying to reach that porthole, or how the larger, taller boys would have had to squinch down, knees bent east and west, in order to get to it, all of those boys with desperately-full bladders, all of them fumbling with zippers, holding their privates in their hands.  Of course, the "flaw" in my imagining was there, right there, right where I'd arrive at the specific moment of their desperation: though I had both a brother and a father at home, they too were typically Southern Baptist in their modesty, so the only penises I'd ever seen belonged to pets or barnyard animals.  Somehow, the amusement I'd felt at imagining the absurdity of those covered urinals was forestalled by having the imagined boy fumbling to extricate from his breeches something which faintly resembled a cow or goat or donkey penis.

The bunkhouses, which our counselors called "dorms," spindled outwards from the two larger, more significant structures of the camp.  The largest was, in our later years, a new chapel with arched, open, wooden rafters and stained-glass windows.  It was a magnificent structure with its stained wood inside and outside.  No painted drywall anywhere.  And the traditional pews had been replaced by folding chairs set up in a line or semi-circle, which seemed oddly at odds with the wood siding and interior woodwork of the chapel.  The second-largest structure – and perhaps the most intimidating to campers – was the dining hall where we took our meals three times a day.  It was an odd, oblong concrete-block building that had been badly white-washed and peppered with doorways which were badly-fitted with unpainted screen doors which banged ceaselessly whenever a wind came up.  Inside the dining hall, rows of folding tables and long metal benches were arranged haphazardly.  At one end, nearest the doors, were several ping-pong tables – but never any paddles or balls.  Useless things.  White-trash décor.  That's how we spoke of them. And along the far wall, nearest the kitchen, was the infamous "food line."

Each morning, we rose from our bug-infested bunks to shiver in cold showers and brush our teeth with the foamy yellow gunk our toothpaste became when it was mixed with the cold sulphur tap-water.  We rubberbanded our ratty, sleep-tangled hair into ponytails and pulled on clean shorts and t-shirts after shaking them wildly to free them of any spiders or ticks that might have taken up residence in them overnight.  When the morning bells sounded, we took ourselves, Bibles in hand, en masse, across the dew-wet pine straw and dirt paths through those torn screen doors of the mess hall, to face again the long double-rows of industrial-sized metal trays of the food line which were heaped with rubbery pancakes and thick grits and the grayish-yellow lumps that hand-lettered placards identified as "scrambulled eggs."  Some days there were sausage links but, after a first summer at Lake Yale, most campers knew enough to religiously avoid the breakfast meat.

At the end of the food line was a bucket-shaped plastic jug filled with grape jelly.  Over it, all morning, the flies circled and did touch-and-go landings, lifting off again after having deposited into the warm purple goo all their gathered bacteria and, probably, the microscopic eggs of their young.  Beside the jelly jug was a charcoal-riddled steel pot, about the size and shape of a football helmet, which had been suspended over a lit Sterno can.  In it, hot syrup roiled: for the pancakes, if you dared to eat them.  Which we did.  Every morning.  Those powdered eggs were unthinkable to us.  Well, to all of us except Sheryl Coker who ate them and rolled her eyes to heaven and praised the Lord and Jesus and the Holy Ghost for such yummy yellow miracles as scrambled eggs by the heaping plateful.  She was a twelve-year-old from Palatka and she was crazy for the Lord, and for the abundance of the earth, even then weighing in somewhere around 170 pounds.

The buttered white bread, toasted on one side only, was soggy on the underside and scorched on the topside and it was obvious to even the inexperienced campers among us that the long ragged gashes on the toast-top meant that the more severely-burned layers had been scraped off into the trash barrels.  The smell of burned bread hung in the air, suspended there among the other lunchroom smells: dish detergent, souring garbage, the bite of ammonia in old mops and cleaning rags, and the human sweat smells.

On Sunday – the Lord's Day as it was called at camp – there were the inevitable weekly flecks of green and red "vegetables" in the recycled egg mix which had been flattened somehow and cut into squares and were being passed off as "Vegetable Omelets."  Most of us recognized that those flecks were the leftover, already-going-soft green and red peppers from Saturday evening's dinner salad, so we mostly bypassed the Sunday special and continued working the rubbery pancakes with hot syrup.  And we also had large jugs of Ovaltine on Sundays, something to stir into the glasses of lukewarm powdered milk.  If you added the syrupy mix to the milk, it turned an unappealing shade of gray.  If you didn't use the Ovaltine, you just drank the same watery-looking milk you'd been drinking all week long.

But because it was Sunday, and because even Baptist lunchroom staffers felt compelled to ease the burdens of the less-fortunate among them in any small ways they could on The Lord's Day, there were also little plastic tumblers of cloudy apple juice.  Also warm.  But after a week of powdered milk and sulphury tap water, the pulpy juice tasted good as sin to us, like something that would do you in on any day except the Sabbath. . .and maybe on the Sabbath too if you were reckless: some of the first-time campers went back for second helpings of that apple juice.  After stomach cramps and the skittles took them down for a day and night, they never did that again.

That, we were all told later, is what greed will get you.

That, they assured us, is the wages of gluttony.

We were reminded, in case we had forgotten, of all the starving children in Africa who would be glad to share a glass of apple juice between them. . . .

 

Part 3 – Instructions in Sin

We were told other things too.  Each morning after services, we were sent off to be "counseled."  Girls were counseled separately from boys, so I can't tell you what the boys were told, because even my good friend Donnie Ledbetter wouldn't tell me what went on in the boys' counseling sessions. I figured it must be pretty bad because, whenever I tried to press him too hard for information, he'd turn red in the face and start making circles in the dirt with the toe of his tennis shoe.

We girls were told by our counselors that Lake Yale would tolerate no "fraternization" between boys and girls.  We belonged to the Lord. Our bodies were his temples.  Holy. Holiest of holies.  We were expected to "save" ourselves for marriage.  Just what part of that temple we were supposed to save for marriage was mostly unclear to us back then. They didn't explain and we didn't yet have the courage to ask.  All else, however, was spelled out pretty clearly.  No sneaking off.  No kissing. No necking or petting. No buttons unbuttoned.  No zippers undone.  No pressing up against another.

These things, we were told, would get a camper sent straight home. And not a one of us wanted to go home just then any more than we wanted to bring the awkward temples of our girlish bodies, saved or not, to marriage. Not even the ticks and snakes or the counselors or the sulphur water or the long daily sermons were as bad as sitting back in Duval County all summer, bored, hot, and with no social life to speak of because everyone interesting in our world was at summer camp.

The problem with Lake Yale Baptist Assembly Ground was that it had been built – and solemnly dedicated to the Lord's work – on swampland.  This guaranteed that campers got eaten alive by mosquitoes all the blessed day long and then had to pick the ticks off each other after campfire each evening. And trust me when I say you don't want to hear about the chiggers and gnats.  Even if we'd known, back then, what necking and petting were, even if campers had wanted to engage then in a little harmless touching, who could have withstood the lemon-Pledge fragrance of our mosquito spray?  What boy would have had even a fighting chance with buttons or zippers given the oil-slick of our bodies, perpetually-thick with Coppertone, insect repellent, and sweat.  What boy would have thought any of us even remotely attractive with our shins skinned from volleyball games in the sand, or our arms and faces and legs covered with scabs where we'd scratched, endlessly, the bug bites?

But all that never seemed to occur to the counselors.  Our inability to fathom even the simplest sins seemed just beyond them. What mattered to them, most of all, was that we would never be able to say, from those summers onward, that we hadn't been warned.

Sin.  We were to avoid it.  Strenuously. At every turn.

In order to avoid it, one red-haired girl from Sanford suggested to the counselor, don't we need to know exactly what sin is?

Oh, you'll know it, said "Sam-which-is-short-for Samantha," our fierce, muscular counselor who looked solid and beefy as a football player in her short-shorts and tank top.  You'll know, she said emphatically, fingering the tarnished silver cross knotted onto a leathery string around her neck, her sweat-stained "Jesus-is-Lord" ball cap covering hair so severely shorn you'd have sworn she was a guy had you walked up behind her.

You'll feel the warm glow of it all over you at first, she warned us, and it will seem sweet.  So sweet.  You'll feel so happy.

A far-off, dreamy look came over her then, a look like old folks get sometimes when they speak of their lost youths: that look they get that tells you that the better years of their lives are far behind them now, mere memories.

So happy, she repeated dreamily.  Yes, little sisters, that's what sin will make you feel like.  Black, bitter sin.

But the way she said "black" and "bitter" and "sin" soundly oddly sweet.  Delectable. Like rich chocolate cake. Like a triple fudge brownie. Like a hot fudge sundae topped off with whipped cream and nuts and a maraschino cherry on top of it all which was saluting you honorably the whole time with its little red stem.  And that was always the problem with these little sessions: the counselors never seemed to realize they were taunting us with sin, tempting us to it, even as they strenuously forbade it.

Sam-which-is-short-for-Samantha went on: It might feel good at first, deep-down in the pit of your stomach.  Or in other parts.

Parts?  Anita Knold interrupted, What parts?

Sam snapped back then, looking around at us as if she'd just remembered we were there. She cleared her throat and was fully back with us then.  And fully, wholly determined that we should understand the spiritual and physical consequences for "giving in to boys."

Women, she said, are vulnerable to certain kinds of sin. And she went on then to tell us how, as females, our souls were in peril and, if we ever found ourselves feeling "that way" in our parts, we should run as fast as possible to the chapel and fall on our knees at the altar of God and pray, pray, pray for our eternal souls.  With each pray, she slammed her hand on the cover of her Good News Bible so that all the crimson ribbons marking scriptures fluttered and shook like a belly dancer's scarves.

Belly dancers.  Good and evil were taking each others' hands, in every thought I had.  Even then.

Thus went the girls' counseling at Baptist summer camp.

Each summer the faces changed: ours, the counselors'. Our bodies changed too.  As did the yearly definition of sin which, with each successive summer of counseling, swam more and more sharply into focus.  Still, we were reminded, we were Southern Baptists.  No dancing. No drinking. No fraternization between ourselves and those boys who seemed to be studying us with ever-growing interest.  No matter what changed, year to year, for Baptist girls, the message never changed:  thou. shalt. not. 

And therein for us lay one of the chronic problems with being Southern Baptist: nothing ever changed, really.  Once saved, always saved. Henceforth and forevermore.  Our Catholic girlfriends had Vatican I, then Vatican II.  Our Mormon girlfriends had a living prophet; when he died, they got a new one. First they had polygamy, then they had monogamy.  And then there were the Methodist girls, who were always the most enviable among us: they got to dance and play cards.  When they came of legal age, they could drink.  Dancing and drinking, though even they couldn't "go all the way" with a boy at the drive-in and had to "save" themselves for marriage.  But dancing could get pretty close to fornication the way we Baptist girls saw it from the sidelines. All that grinding and hip-bumping to the rock music. All that steamy dance-floor sway-and-rumba with boys.

Sometimes it is pure torture to be Baptist, Anita Knold sighed once from the sidelines of the junior-high school dance, and every good Baptist girl around her then sighed in agreement because that's how it felt to be a known quantity – a "good girl" who wouldn't let a boy get to first base.  I'd sighed too, sweating indelicately in my borrowed blue chiffon gown with the spaghetti straps, that white orchid pinned awkwardly to the left strap stabbing my shoulder whenever I slumped. I'd meant it too, that sigh.  Lord God in heaven, how I'd meant it.

Shortly after that dance, shortly after the whole blasted evening of standing at the side of the gym while other girls got asked to dance, summer was upon us again and we were heading back to summer camp.  Most of us were fifteen by then, almost old enough to start dating.  Each of us owned a new transistor radio which we tuned to the Big Ape, WAPE.  Each of us were curious about love and romance and all those unnamed ways we could fall, with a boy, from grace. Each of us wanting to know exactly what went on between boys and girls in those parked cars at the drive-in movies.  Each of us wearing our first bra, an uncomfortable contraption with stitching around the cups that made them look pointy and unnatural, no matter how well-endowed we may be.  Each of us waiting, hopefully, for some first sign of "The Curse," so we might have to use those sanitary napkins our mothers had packed in the bottom of our suitcases, just in case.

We expected seven days of Bible lessons and memorization of scripture.  We expected nights around the bonfire with guitars and singing.  We expected to meet other Baptist teens from Baptist churches in Sanford and Apopka, from Palatka and Clearwater.  We expected counseling sessions and sermons daily in the new chapel.  We expected miserable meals and bugs and stinky water.  What we weren't expecting was the arrival of a new youth pastor. . . .

 

 

SUMMER CAMP - Part I

 

 

Part I – Lamentations

Most poor women who live in the South complain; it's what we do best, an art form, of sorts.  It's what we were handed at birth in lieu of a silver spoon.  It's the one good gift handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter.  And we take it up almost as soon as we have any capacity for real speech.  It becomes the way we know, finally, that we are card-carrying members of the Daughters of Dixie.  From the day's temperatures, to how the humidity makes our curls fall limp, to the cost of a new pair of stockings, to the enduring dearth of eligible, desirable boys in our hometowns, we complain our way through childhood and into adolescence, preparing ourselves for the inevitable day when we will turn the full force of our complaints upon the one man who will be expected to bear them silently, as did his father before him, until death do us part.  And why do our men bear our complaining silently? Because it baffles them.  Because they have no gift for it themselves.  Because that silence-in-the-face-of-a-woman's-complaining is their inheritance, passed down father to son.  They lock their jaws and hang their heads, if they are wise, and they ride out the storm and they do not talk back.  They get that stunned, far-off look on their faces like that look the cat gets when he's hunkered down over the litter-box.

Men, especially Southern men, do not complain.  Ask them and they will tell you this is true.  Men comment.  Men accuse.  Men rant and rail and hold forth. As in the way they speak when someone brings up the Internal Revenue Service:  those yellow, Commie, snot-sucking sonsof bitches will bleed us all dry one day.

                                                *  *  *

Somewhere along the way, however, as we inch towards full-fledged womanhood and then settle into our thirties and forties, our finely-honed art of complaining falls to naught, particularly if it happens to be levied in the direction of the United States Post Office.  We can stand in line and grumble about the price of a first-class stamp – which indeed rises faster than the mercury in midsummer – or how things we mail out get lost almost as often as they arrive.  We raise our finely-arched eyebrows and roll our eyes and tap one foot and gripe under our breath while the counter clerks creep and crawl and meander their way through the workday like lost souls drifting reluctantly towards eternity.  But complain within earshot of them and they'll double the time they spend in back "searching" for some errant package or misfiled letter.  And no matter how many times we address the issue of those annoying and endless "Occupant" and "Resident" brochures which overfill our mailboxes – and which we have asked sweetly and frequently that the mail carriers throw out rather than stuffing them into the box – our complaints fall on deaf ears.  Complaining does not even seem to slightly annoy mail carriers or counter clerks.  Revenge seems to be their cup of tea:  go to the roadside mailbox six days out of the week and what you'll mostly find there is a collection of junk mail:  endless advertisements and solicitations for money from charities.  Thank God, I complain to my man who must listen to me,  Thank God for the Sabbath Day on which the offering plate comes by only once and for which God is only expecting ten percent of the Friday paycheck.

                                                * * *

Today I dig out an impressive stack of flyers and envelopes from the mailbox, so large and unruly a stack that the mail carrier had to rubber-band them together so they wouldn't fly about in the wind when the lid was opened.  God forbid something annoying should not make its way to the mailbox. Today, there is one from St. Joseph's Indian School; another from the United Spinal Association; another from the American Lung Society, which has arrived with lovely floral address labels preprinted with my name and address: no charge, but a donation would be appreciated.  Also among the solicitations are over-sized envelopes from  St. Jude's Children's Hospital (more address labels, though with an error in my street address) and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, who have kindly gotten my address correct but have gotten my name wrong:  I am "Anna Castón," which sounds so very chic and French that I am tempted to mail them a small donation just so I can use the labels guilt-free.

Today's cache is similar to most every other day's mail call: invitations, all addressed to  "Our Neighbor at 19 Campbelltown Road" or to "Occupant" or "Resident," and some are even addressed to me by name, asking me to please send money – whatever I can afford, even a few dollars would help – money which I could, they suggest, write off on my taxes as a charitable donation.

One invitation today is from a pastor in Chicago, a man who is, according to his letter, trying to raise enough money to take a group of "troubled, inner-city Black and Hispanic youths" to a Baptist summer camp in the wilderness.  He's enclosed a photograph: dead-center stands a middle-aged blonde man in khaki shorts and a white t-shirt on which is stenciled in red, WWJD? The man is holding a basketball in both hands, awkwardly, as if it is the first time he's ever held such a thing.  Six adolescent boys – three on either side of him – stand a good arm's-length apart from him, hands on their hips, their muscled legs braced widely apart.  The boys wear baggy shorts, low on their hips, very low, so low the waistbands of their boxers are exposed.  Two wear no shirts; the others wear short, torn ones, so their bare midriffs exposed.  Two of them wear do-rags.  The boys look defiant and stern, as if they are unhappy to be there, standing in such close proximity to this pale man at the center who is holding their ball, grinning ear-to-ear like the village idiot.  No one else in the photo is smiling, only the man.  Behind them all is a brick wall painted with what looks, in its lettered elegance, like gang graffiti.  At the far right of the photo is a tall metal pole from which crookedly dangles a metal hoop.  No net. 

This letter is familiar, in both its strategies and requests (also in its "nonprofit" omission of a postage stamp) to many others I receive each day.  But there is something about this man at the center.  It's a grainy photograph.  And it has been thirty-something years – so how can I be certain?  Still, it's familiar enough to send me spiraling back to the long hot summers of my youth, to the week spent each June at a Baptist summer camp in Florida. . . .

 

                                                            (to be continued next week)

 

BOYS

When I was in third grade, I had my first crush - on a boy named Stanley.  He had wavy brown hair which he Brylcreemed into place every day and he had brown eyes with little flecks of amber in them and he wore neat khaki pants and plaid shirts with sharply- ironed creases on the sleeves.  He had a dimple in one cheek that showed when he smiled and he was the smartest boy in Mrs. Danforth's class when it came to math and geography.  I liked geography too so we became fast friends, talking about the places we each might one day travel to when we were grown up, places that were only coordinates on our maps right now, places with strange, exotic names.  

Stanley also liked to measure things so, some days, he would put his protractor down and write down some numbers, adding and subtracting them, and then he'd say things like,  Australia lies 37 degrees west of the unnamed atoll and other clever things like that. 

I wasn't the only third-grade girl who thought Stanley was interesting, as third-grade boys went.  At recess every morning, while the boys broke low-lying limbs from the trees and made them into weapons, chasing each other around the playground with their battle-cries resounding off the dugouts and backboards of the ball fields, we girls would gather armfuls of fallen brown pine-straw and build mammoth nests under the tall pines.  We would sit inside of them, content to be out of the hot Florida sun and in the cool shade of the trees. We'd talk about stuff that third-grade girls talk about.  Nail polish.  Older sisters.  Younger sisters.  Boys.  Mostly which boys we thought were smart or cute.  Which ones showed some kind of promise.  Which ones ought to just be crossed off ALL the lists. Forever. Which ones we might grow up and marry and have babies with. Back then, love wasn't a word we used to talk about boys and husbands.  Falling in love was a foreign country to us.  We imagined that it was a matter of looking over the prospects and then choosing one. One which "fit" our dream of a life. 

Even then the girls in my nest were planning out lives that followed neatly and precisely their mothers' trajectories for happiness, even if their mothers didn't seem all that happy. Mostly, the girls spent recess in girl-talk and dreamy imaginings that followed pretty closely the happy-ever-after fairy tales that we'd all heard at bedtime: the handsome prince, the rescue from the heart of the forest, the poisoned apple dislodged from the throat. Most of the third-grade girls, in dreaming, skipped right past the dating and engagement, past the wedding and honeymoon, and went straight to the shining new appliances in their kitchens and the perfectly-manicured rooms of their houses and the master bedroom with its two matching twin beds. Third-grade girls saw themselves - and their future husbands - in lights, on-stage, the same way they saw the "happy" couples on television: Ozzie and Harriet, June and Ward Cleaver, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.  No girl ever imagined herself as Dennis the Menace's mother.  Neither would she imagine that she might become the addled, infinitely-likable spinster of Aunt Bea on "Mayberry RFD."  Third-grade girls dreamed themselves long-legged and beautiful, standing at the front doors of their houses, waving their husbands off to work each morning and waving them home again each evening.   They imagined themselves with permed hair and well-manicured nails, dressed in satiny shirt-waist dresses over full petticoats and stockings, wearing pearls and pumps around the house, playing bridge by day with other neighborhood wives and serving delicious meals to their husbands each evening, husbands who would, of course, look more like Dr. Kildare or Ben Casey than the ordinary grown men in our town.  That's how third-grade girls saw it all.  Back then. 

And those wild third-grade boys, running full-tilt past us on the playground, kicking in our nests every chance they got, spitting into the dirt, cussing, those little spite-bags of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, they had no idea what big plans the girls were hatching for them, even then, as they put their kicked nests back in order and grumbled about boys.

Still, I knew, even then, my own dreaming was too odd  - compared to the other girls in class - so I never shared the "dream" of my life with them.  I had this vague future in mind that included a husband who would be taller than me, a charming man who smiled a lot and liked dogs and who'd wear glasses when he read.  He'd wear comfy sweaters and button-down shirts when he got home from work.  I think I imagined him as a scientist.  Or a teacher.  A likable chap, but really smart and terribly interested in the planets and stars and old maps. A man who knew what a compass and sextant were and how to use them.  A man who would walk in the door after work one day, put down his books and briefcase, and announce, How would you feel about a little trip to The Azores?

A rare sort of man. 

He wouldn't be bothered by me humming at the kitchen sink while I washed and dried the dinner plates and glasses, and I would smile to myself hearing him putter around in his untidy study, looking for something he'd misplaced - or which I had put away in its proper place earlier in the day because that's how I was being hard-wired, even in third grade.  But at the end of the day, after the dishes were done and his paperwork was finished, I imagined we'd sit together in front of a crackling fire and we'd drink big mugs of steaming hot chocolate with marshmallows melting in them and we'd watch the fire and speak together quietly about what we'd read or heard or seen that day.  Outside, the snow would be falling in the darkening night and any troubles the world had would seem far, far away from us. 

I wouldn't be wearing a petticoat or stockings under my skirt, and I sure wouldn't have on pearls or nail polish.  I'd have my messy hair piled up on top of my head and I'd be barefoot except for some wool socks.  I'd be sitting on the floor, cross-legged, with books piled up next to me.  My boots would be next to his boots, by the back door radiator, drying out. I suppose I didn't really "see" any children back then, in third grade.  That would come later.  Mostly, I was trying to figure out how to be the kind of woman I wanted to be and to still be at ease with a man. 

Mostly, I think, I am still trying to figure that out.

It was fun each morning to sit in that nest at recess and listen to the other girls talk about their future "television" lives and who they might fall in love with and marry and have babies with and what they would name their children.  And it was nice, in those first days of third grade at a new school, to know that I liked a boy and he liked me back, that he would sit in the lunchroom and library with me and we would talk in hushed excitement about places we had read about in books. 

It wasn't long though before one of the "nestlings" ruined that.  Jealousy carried a bright and vicious torch back then when it came to third-grade Southern girls.  Janice had stepped into our nest one morning, looking very smug, and she'd eye-balled me as she sat down and told all the girls that one of the boys in class had seen Stanley put his finger into his nose and then put it right into his mouth.  She laughed a real ugly laugh then while the other girls all gasped and said, Eewwww and Nasty. Then they looked at me and didn't say another word.  They didn't have to. In the Deep South, silences were as vicious as any words could be.  And we all knew that, even in the third grade.

I didn't think it could be true though  - not about Stanley - and I said so to them.  He was so neat.  And smart.  And, after all, weren't spite and meanness and jealousy chronic visitors in our particular nest?

Later that morning, in the lunchroom, the boys jeered at Stanley when he sat down at the table with me to eat his lunch, wondering loudly what kind of girl would eat lunch with a "booger-eater."  Stanley was embarrassed.  I was embarrassed.  But we never spoke of it.  He hung his head and stood up: he put his tray up and went back to the classroom. I sat there by myself, my face turning a bright crimson, and I didn't know what to do. Or say. I sat there, rooted to my chair, staring down at my bruised apple and half sandwich, pretending to be very interested in what ingredients were listed on the side of the little half-pint carton of pasteurized Vitamin D milk. 

And, just like that, we were no longer friends, Stanley and me.  He'd been bullied back into the world of third-grade boys, a world so far removed from what I knew that I could barely see him clearly anymore.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say I couldn't see the things in him I'd seen before and liked about him.

In the days after that, he spent recesses running with the boys on the playground, playing war, smashing everything to smithereens with a big stick, timidly kicking dirt into the girls' nests, mocking them.  He went off to eat his lunch at the boys' table, smashing sandwiches down into milk cartons and smirking and sniggering at "fat girls" who happened to walk by the table where the boys sat.  I went back to sitting with the girls at their "girls-only" table, not really listening anymore to their girl-talk and who they liked.  I mostly sat there sipping my milk, chewing on silence, choking down my half-eaten sandwich, swallowing hard, as if it wasn't hung in my throat like the Queen's poison apple. . . .

 

BOTTOMWATER

 

Everywhere we looked that day there was food – food like we'd only ever seen on television:  bottles of Coca Cola stuck into metal washtubs of ice and hot dogs sizzling on the grill and sliced watermelon on plastic trays.  Aunt Vonnie had made fried chicken and Mama had made two bowls of potato salad with little chips of sweet pickles in them.  Uncle Bill was churning fresh peach ice cream for Aunt Vonnie – that's short for Vonceil – who was expecting again and craving peach ice cream.  She sighed that craving peach ice cream meant they would probably just get another girl.

My brother and I had never been to a lake before.  We had bathing suits and new flip-flops for the occasion.  Also big beach towels.  We weren't sure what to do at a lake that big.  But at least, as my grandmother said, we had each other.  So we sat together near the picnic tables and try to be unnoticed and waited to see what everyone else would do.  And we eyed the food.   So much food....

It was our second summer with our new mama – who was also expecting a baby – and an older sister.  I used to be the oldest, but my father had gotten himself married again a year earlier, so Julie – that was my mama's daughter – had become, officially, by four years, the oldest.  That made me a middle child, for the first time in my life.  Something strange and new.  Something I wasn't entirely sure I liked.

We'd come here on the Fourth of July, the summer of my ninth year, to Strickland's Landing with my new mama's relatives:  aunts and uncles and a large assortment of first and second cousins.  Everyone who had no money – and  that was this family and everyone this family knew – went to Strickland's Landing to celebrate the Fourth because for one-dollar-and-fifty-cents a whole carload of people could get into the public lake to swim and picnic and could stay to see the fireworks after dark.  With this family, that was the best deal going, so everyone piled into station wagons and trucks and cars and made the forty-minute drive from Jacksonville to the boonies.

Beyond the picnic tables, on shady playgrounds, the littlest cousins swarmed like ants over the monkeybars and swingsets.  This family had children, lots of children – more children than sense, my grandmother was fond of saying – and our new mom and some of the aunts were expecting again.  The pregnant women sat in the shade on lawn chairs and fanned themselves, sweating and rubbing their bellies or their swollen ankles.  Every now and then, one of them struggled up to see about a wailing child or to settle a fight.  Afterwards, she sort of hovered for minute, then dropped herself down again into a rickety aluminum-framed lawn chair among the other women who were fanning themselves and complaining of the heat and eyeing the white sand beach where old people were playing badminton and where the littlest children and the babies dug with their plastic buckets and shovels. 

A long dock ran from shore straight out into the lake and two more docks jutted out sidewise from it.  If I squinted, the three docks made a kind of capital F on top of the water.  The two spokes of the F separated the swimming areas.  The close area was shallow water – less than four feet deep – for waders and those who didn't swim or didn't like to.  A lifeguard sat on a tall chair under an orange umbrella.  All day he sipped Cokes and kept watch, like a slicked-up guardian angel, over the heads that went under, watching the water until they surfaced again. 

Sometimes, my boy-cousins held their breath as long as possible underwater, just to see if they could make the lifeguard nervous.  Sometimes this worked.  But it made the lifeguard cranky.  We could tell by his face that he suspected they were making trouble on purpose.  After that, he was just looking for a reason to make someone sit out, so whenever one of the bigger kids started shoving or dunking, the lifeguard blew his whistle and pointed.  Everybody stopped swimming then to watch the shover who had to climb out in front of everybody and sit on the dock for fifteen minutes.  By noon, we knew who all the bullies were.

The far area was for people who knew how to swim.  There was a concession stand at the end of this dock where a man worked whose arms were tattooed blue with snarling dragons.  All day long, he sold grape popsicles and hot pretzels and beer in paper cups.  He piped music in over a loudspeaker.  I didn't know those songs, but I knew the station:  WAPE, the Big Ape, the station that played an ape yell, like on Tarzan, every time the announcer said, "You're listening to WAPE, the Big Ape."  That ape yell drove my parents crazy, so crazy that they bought an earplug for Julie's transistor radio so they wouldn't ever have to hear it in our house again. 

The Big Ape played fast songs, songs to twist to, which Julie and her friends liked.  Sometimes, when Mama and Dad went out for bowling, Julie would take the earplugs out and turn the radio up and do the twist in our living room.  When she did this, she looked like one of the monkeys at the Jacksonville Zoo trying to scratch an itchy spot in a hard-to-reach place.  My brother and I laughed at her and made monkey faces behind her back.  My grandmother used to say that listening to the Big Ape had "affected" Julie.  And watching her dance, I thought this might be true.

Beyond the first dock was where Julie and her friends hung out – near the older teenagers and the adults who drank beer.  I thought it must be really cool to be old enough to drink beer.  My grandmother always said that Julie liked to run with the fast ones, so I thought that was why she hung out on the other dock, that and because she could swim.  She was always trying to look and act all grown-up:  she'd convinced Mama to buy her one of those padded swimsuit tops this summer that made her look like she had boobs.  Julie had a lot of things, but she didn't have boobs.

Before we left the house that morning, Julie had painted her fingernails and toenails "Passionate Pink" to match the new two-piece swimsuit and the pink flip-flops she would wear  that day.  She liked things to match.  She had her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail and she twisted and twisted the end of her ponytail around her fingers, trying to make a curl.  This was because she had straight hair and curly hair was what everyone really wanted in those days, including Julie.  I had straight hair too, but it was what my grandmother called "hopelessly straight" hair.  I thought this was much worse than just plain straight hair, so I knew I was just going to have to wait and endure until I was old enough to have a permanent wave put in, probably thirteen or fourteen years old.  Until then, I was convincing myself I couldn't care less.  Watching Julie fidget and fuss the curl into her straight hair was fun enough for me.

My brother and I had never been swimming before.  Even bathtubs had us in a kind of terror.  I think this was because my grandmother had told us, for years by then, all the terrible stories she'd ever heard about kids drowning in bathtubs and backyard pools or ponds.  She said it was possible for a grown man to drown in a teacup of water.  I think she did that – told us those grisly stories – so we wouldn't do something stupid and, in the doing, accidentally drown ourselves.  It worked too:  my brother and I never put our faces into the bathwater and we never went close to the pond near our house.  Part of that was because of the quicksand that got ahold of Tim Riley's dog once and sucked him under.   It had taken hold of his hind legs first and we'd had to watch while Tim whistled and whistled and cried and his dog howled and bayed.  At the end, the dog tried hard to lift his face out, but the quicksand got him anyhow and, when it reached his mouth, he made a gurgling sound and then there was a sucking sound, and then the whole woods went still except for Tim sobbing and tearing off through the palmettos towards the road again.  Then just the heat and mosquitoes.

Mostly we didn't go near the water though because our grandmother had warned us about how ponds could suddenly drop off to deep water. 

You'd drown she'd say shaking her head sadly, and then how would we find you to give you a Christian burial?  Christian burials were important to her.  They're decent, she always said and that's something she and my mama agreed on.  Mama would sometimes look out the window and say there was nothing she could imagine worse than a child's body rotting alone somewhere and no place to bring flowers to on its birthday.  She'd get that look on her then and I'd know she was thinking of that little girl who was stolen right out of her parents' car one night at the 7-11 on San Juan Boulevard and nothing was ever found of her except for later when her dress was discovered by police dogs down under the St. John's River Bridge and it was all bloody and torn like a wild animal had got ahold of her.  That girl's momma stopped going to church altogether and finally her daddy did too because they said that it just seemed to them like if God was omnipotent and merciful He ought to have been able to keep a little child from harm or at least to let them find her body and bury her decent. 

So that day, for a long time, my brother and I didn't even go down to the lake's edge.  Only after the uncles start telling my father how they taught their kids to swim – by throwing them into deep water – did we creep into the shallow water and wade and splash around, trying to look bold and unafraid...as if that was swimming, as if that was what we really wanted to do.  Finally, because we were the oldest kids in the shallow water and we must've look strange splashing and playing among all the little kids and the babies, Uncle Bill – who my grandmother always said was a merciful man, and I believe that too – brought out inner tubes for my brother and me.  Suddenly it looked as if the day would be great after all, because we finally got to float around in the lake water with the other cousins our age, out in deeper water, out by the second dock.  We were having a good time then; we were having such a good time we didn't even feel our sunburned shoulders and faces anymore.  We learned to hang on and spin and spin in the water.  We did it for hours.  We did it until we made ourselves drunk.  We did it until we felt like we would throw up. 

Right after lunch, my new cousin Buddy – who was one of the troublemakers – started monkeying around.  He swam underwater and yanked my brother's legs down hard through the hole of the inner tube.  He did this to pull Michael from the inner tube, to frighten him.  He did it like he did everything in those days: out of spite and mischief. But my brother held onto that inner tube like a mad thing and came right up again, gasping and choking and snorting.  There was water in his eyes and up his nose.  His face was running with snot.  He thought he was drowning.  I thought he was drowning. I realized suddenly that I didn't know exactly what drowning was, just that it was supposed to be terrible and that you could die from it. 

Then my brother started to wail.  That was one thing about him: he never settled for just crying softly.  Not when he could work up a good head of scream. He always had to carry on, screaming and screwing up his face and hollering like devils were after him.  Once, when he started up,in the doctor's office, when he got his vaccination shots, people in the waiting room thought someone was being hurt:  the littlest children sometimes climbed on their mother's laps and started to cry when they heard all that hollering.

Michael made so much noise, crying and carrying on like all bejesus, that the lifeguard climbed down from his high chair and helped him up out of the water.  My brother sat on the side of the dock with his legs dangling over the side, crying and sputtering and hiccoughing, while strangers hovered over him and tried to figure out who his parents were and what to do about him.  Then the lifeguard made Buddy come out too.  It served him right.  He had to sit right next to my brother.  They looked at each other real mean and then they looked away and Julie, who'd been watching all this from her sun-tanning towel, ran off down the dock to get Mama and Dad. 

I climbed out of the water then, dragging my inner tube behind me, and I sat down next to Michael.  I put my arm around him.  He was my brother.  I was afraid because he was afraid...and I wanted to smash Buddy in the nose.  I told him so.  He told me, Just try it, horseface, and he made a mean face at me.  I didn't waste anymore time on him after that; there was no excuse for calling names.  My grandmother said calling names just meant that someone had a poor vocabulary and Buddy was definitely limited in the language department.

Over Buddy's head, I could see my father running pell-mell down the long dock.  Mama was behind him and Julie was right behind her, throwing her hands around and carrying on like she always did when she got to telling on someone.  Julie sure loved trouble, so long as it wasn't her getting into it.  Mama's face was a storm.  But when my father got there, things seemed to go okay.  We all talked at once – Buddy, Michael, Julie and me, the lifeguard – trying to tell my father what had happened.  He looked confused.  And worried.  A crowd was gathering around us on the dock.  At last, my father understood that Michael was okay, just scared.  My father relaxed then and smiled, brushing the water from my brother's blonde crew-cut.  Michael sniffled up at him and the other people turned back to their beer and music and sunning. 

But one man, a big, hairy man with a belly that hung way out over his swim trunks, belched loudly then and said, Sissie.  The boy's a sissie.  Can't even take a little water in the face.

A quiet came on the dock then.  Not the kind of quiet like the good quiet in church after prayers or candle-lighting.  It was the quiet like the quiet before a big fight, just before someone throws the first fist into a nose or jaw. 

I realized then that I was waiting for my father, my smallish father, to hit the big man.  But he didn't; he just stood there, looking down at my brother, with a pinchy look on his face, that look he got sometimes when he came home from work and we'd been bad and my mama would tell him he had to give us a spanking so we'd learn to behave.

Mama and Julie turned away.  Julie was chewing on the end of her ponytail and Mama was wringing her hands.  The man had upset them.  This beer-drinking man with a big fat belly had upset them.  At least, that's what I thought, until I heard my mama mutter between her teeth to my father, He needs to learn, Tom.  So does she.  Teach them...now.  Then I understood; it wasn't the fat man; it was what he'd said...that word, the sissie word.

My father straightened and squinted up at the sky.  He stood like that for a minute, as if he was suddenly pained, and I noticed how skinny his legs were:  little white legs with spikey black hairs sticking out of them.  His knees were boney and looked like the doorknobs in my grandmother's house.  He had on a pair of baggy blue swimming trunks and a white v-neck t-shirt like old men wear because his skin burned easily.  He was paler and skinnier and smaller than all the men on that dock.  I remembered how, at the wedding last year, one of the uncles  had joked  about how my mama was marrying a boy, hardly big enough to be called a man, scrawny like a chicken.  My father had looked away and smiled and I thought maybe he hadn't heard, but my mama must have heard it because she'd had the same look on her face then as she did just then on that dock.  I wondered if someone like this fat, hairy-bellied drunk man had ever called my father a sissie. 

My father ran a hand through his black hair and looked down at us.  Then he turned to my mama.  She was standing there in her turquoise bathing suit, tanned and petite, those big-framed sunglasses on her face, looking for all the world like Jackie Kennedy.  She liked it when people told her she looked like Jackie Kennedy.  She dressed like her too:  pearls and gloves, little pillbox hats that matched her dresses.  My father thought that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  And surely he thought so just then.  I thought it too.

My father sighed; he shrugged and struggled to lift my brother in one arm and me in the other.  Probably because I was heavier, he threw me first.  One minute, I was falling through air, the white clouds spinning overhead, and the next, I was sinking, falling through water, my eyes wide open and burning.  Then, there was a strange sound, a whooshing, and I saw my brother plummeting through the water above me, a stream of white bubbles rising behind him as he sank. 

My brother was more terrified of drowning than he was of anything else except for burglars and prowlers.  That is what saved him, I think, that terror of the water and drowning.  He looked at me with his shocked blue eyes, then he turned upwards, towards the light,  kicking and flailing his way to the surface again. 

For some reason I can't remember now, I didn't turn my face upwards or kick my way up again like Michael had.  I looked behind me, to where the long trunks of the dock pilings rose, green and slippery, from bottomwater to the underside of the dock.  I sort of pushed myself over to one.  The bottom of the lake was slimey and a brown scum cloud rose each I time I put my foot down or lifted it up again.  There were things under there covered over with a drowned skin, things that had gotten dropped there and never retrieved.  Things that had taken on the darkness of scum and lake mud:  tree stumps or tires or shoes or cans.  Some shapes I couldn't put a name to. 

Topside, the hot sun was beating down and the music was playing and the drunks were stumbling against each other.  Down there, the blistering mid-summer sun was far off.  Bottomwater is quiet and cool and dark, like my room at night when I drift into sleep.  I was weightless there, floating and strangely calm.  Nothing there was terrible as I thought it would be.  I could stay here, I thought, surprised that drowning was that easy, just a matter of giving myself over, of letting go the air inside me, of letting myself fall and settle among the other drowned things. 

Then all at once, the air inside me was trying to let go; my chest ached with trying to hold it in.  I felt dizzy and my eyes were stinging.  I remembered my father...and my terrified brother.  I let out all the air in my lungs then.  Little globs of bubbles rose to the water's surface, up there where the light was, and then they broke open.  I could hear the popping noise when they let go to the air again.  I turned and shimmied up the dock piling, feeling the slime against my legs and arms and the side of my face.  I felt the water lifting me.  When I broke the surface, I hung on like death to the slick piling, which was almost directly underneath the planks of the dock where everyone was standing together, waiting for me to come up again.  I tried to take in my air again then without making a lot of noise.  It was shady and cool there in the dock's shadow and the water slapped against the pilings.  I wanted to cry, I think.  But something in me wouldn't let go.  Overhead, on the dock, I heard Julie and Mama fretting, talking to strangers and to each other.  My brother was whimpering.

It's okay; she'll be up any minute now.

Oh my God.  Oh my God.

Do you think she's okay?

Did she come up farther out?  Over there maybe – what's that?

Finally, I heard my father say, I'm going in, and there was a splash where he hit the water.  I slid my body to the backside of the piling – to make it harder for him to see me.  I watched him surface, watched him take in big gulps of breath, watched him dive again.  It took him several dives before he realized I was under the dock.  He saw me there as he was catching his air:  I saw him look right at me.  Or I thought he had.

But then he took another breath and dove under again.  I sometimes wonder, looking back on it now, if he did that for me. And for himself.  That way, it would look as if he'd had to find me, as if he'd had to save me, as if I were in great peril.  No one would know I'd been hiding out under the dock, embarrassed, not wanting to come out again, and no one would expect him to punish me for it. 

He surfaced under the dock next to me.  Drops of water hung from his long, dark lashes.  One by one, they dropped off and down his face and chin like tears.  But that had to be wrong because my father never cried.  Even then he looked at me, steady like he always did, but a little dazed, as if he couldn't quite figure out what was going on.  All I could think was that I didn't want to go back up there.  I didn't want to be a part of the singing and dancing and swimming and the hot sun and the gulls waiting for scraps. 

But my father motioned to me to hold my nose and we went under together, surfacing again just beside the dock.  He tried to hand me up out of the water to the lifeguard standing at the edge of the dock, but I refused to let go, so he had to climb the ladder out of the water half-carrying me. 

When I was standing topside again on the dock, I didn't look at my father.  I didn't want to see him small and afraid of what others thought.  But who would I look to, if not to him?  Then suddenly, even in the July heat, I was shivering and blue.  Mama wrapped a towel around me and shuffled me off, in a crowd of aunts and cousins, back up the dock towards the picnic area. 

You'll feel better when you get something in your stomach, she told me and I was strangely comforted, knowing I was to be rewarded with a hot dog and a Coca Cola for almost drowning.  Michael hunched himself against me as we walked back together, shivery and quiet, our towels dragging the ground.  Julie followed along behind us, and I could hear her saying something to Buddy about how she was thinking of letting me listen to her radio after what I had been through.  She said it always calmed her down, listening to good music.  Buddy said he thought that was a good idea too.  I looked back over my shoulder.  Beyond them, at the end of the dock, my father dropped to a wooden bench, heavily, as if his knees had given way, and the man with the big belly was drinking his beer, his eyes closed, his face to the hot sun, doing the twist and singing along with the Big Ape. . . .

 

 

*Some names have been changed to protect the innocent and the unintentionally-wicked.

 

photo collection of the author

(from iStock.com)

THE JOURNEY HOMEWARDS

In a small town in Alabama, my four small children and I returned from Sunday Services to find a collections man nailing a notice to the front door of the house where we were living: my former husband's house.  I stood with my children, awkwardly, out on the sun-bright lawn, the children still in their plaid shirts and hand-me-down pants and Sunday-best shoes.  The oldest two boys weren’t quarreling or shoving each other as they usually did; the girl wasn’t fussing with her barrette. And the baby was smiling up at me when I looked down at him, a new tooth shining from his pink gums.

Where, you might be asking yourselves, was the husband, the children’s father, who owned the house and was supposed to be making the payments on it until it sold? The terms of the divorce settlement had been clear, after all. Were the sins of the father to be visited so irrevocably upon the sons?

Well, perhaps the particulars of back-story are not so important to this tale and anyway hadn’t I always believed that some stories are better left untold? Let it suffice, for the sake of this story, to say that I woke suddenly that morning into the stern fact of that moment and its implications and there’d no refuting it; no act of imagination I might call to bear on it would change the indisputable fact of it: home was no longer this house where we’d lived together as a family for four years and where I’d brought the infant home following his almost-Christmas birth ten months before, swaddled like the Christ-child, and as adored by beasts and wise men alike, even with his egg-shaped head and his chronic colic. 

There I stood in the bright fall afternoon, while the maple and sycamore trees offered up their autumn gold, and the twisted rows of thistle bent their ravaged heads along the falling-down fence in a yard that used to be mine, while two officious-looking men pitched the things I’d thought of as "mine" out the door and from small high windows of the house: my grandmother’s tatted pillowcases, baby books and photographs, the boy’s second-hand crib and bedding.  My books. My books.  Save for one still tucked in the diaper bag that was still slung over my right shoulder.

At the far edge of the property, the gnarled apple tree – sundered nearly in two by lightning in a summer’s thunderstorm – stood bare, emptied of all its autumn fruits except for the last windfall apples that lay rotting underneath where the silent deer came, hungry, each night to eat them. Inside the house, twenty-three neatly-labeled jars of homemade applesauce were still cooling in the pantry. Neighbors looked on curiously from doorways and porches, then turned back, without a word to us, into their own homes, thinking their own thoughts which were not my thoughts.  Of that I was certain.

In the crook of my left arm, I held the baby who was, by then, a pleasant baby, ten months past his three-month-long post-partum colic and fretting.  He still seemed frail to me, this final child, this fragile boy who’d barely survived his birth, but I was encouraged by the way he smiled up at me from his blanket, blue-eyed and calm as the Pacific, whenever I ironed or mended clothes or cooked lunches and dinners in the cramped kitchen all day.

My right hand held, that afternoon, to my oldest son’s hand, and his other hand held to his younger brother’s hand, whose hand held fast to his older sister’s hand.  We stood there like that, holding hands, linked together by whatever the ties are that bind one to another in families, and the thought crossed my mind that, if someone watching had squinted, we would  resemble the cut-out paper-dolls my grandmother had taught me to fold and cut from brown grocery sacks when I’d been a girl in Shreveport.  When you opened the folds, a string of ragged, faceless paper dolls held hands in a long line. How delighted I’d been as a girl to learn the trick of it. How easily my grandmother had been, tatting nearby, letting me do the thing myself, letting me make the world new again with scraps of paper and scissors, with thread and needles and pieces of cast-off clothing.  But my grandmother was dead now – a fact potent and irreversible as the moment we were caught in just then, there in the sun-bright yard.

On my right shoulder, the diaper bag sagged, an oversized plastic bag with big pockets and pouches that I’d taken to church that morning, filled with the useful necessities for going to church with small children.  In it was a bottle of whole milk, six folded cotton diapers, two pairs of rubber pants, a pacifier, my coin-bag of spare change, half a roll of cherry Lifesavers, a fistful of broken crayons, several ballpoint pens which were missing their lids, a pencil, and a worn black Bible, the one with only my first name, "Anne," engraved in gold letters on the front cover – and I recall being grateful in that moment that I hadn’t added my last name – my married name – grateful that I’d not had his last name engraved on it too (though that had only been a matter of cost back then, not prescience), the Bible with the page titled  “Marriages” missing: the page on which had been recorded the time and place and date of my marriage to the children's father, February 17, 1972. The page which I’d torn out the afternoon the man had announced to me he was leaving.  No sense, I’d thought that afternoon, in torturing myself with that memory every time I open the book in church.  The page that had followed it was torn out too – the page titled “Deaths” – because, in a fit of pique and spite, I’d written the man’s full name in there on the day the divorce had been finalized and, alongside it, in my loopy cursive hand, the words, He’s dead now, to me.  As the shock of the man's leaving had settled, I'd grown ashamed of myself for that and decided to tear it away so my children would not have to be reminded of it by stumbling across it in the years to come.

And so it was that, while all our earthly belongings were thrown out onto the yard, in a heap, breaking or broken, I took my frightened children by the hand, and set off walking.  I walked in a straight line away from the debris and I did not look back.  And while I led them away, I told them stories and recited all the poems I knew by heart.  The children made up songs of their own along the way and they all played in the city park together until sunset, the boys running after squirrels and my daughter sucking slowly on one left-over cherry Lifesavers, seeing how long she could hold it on her tongue before it dissolved to just a sweet aftertaste.  But when the sun dropped, the children grew tired and fussy. The twilight chill was setting in and the boys were shivering in their thin shirtsleeves.  Their good brown shoes were scuffed and dusty from playing in the dirt. I noticed then that my daughter’s arms were covered with chilblains though the girl had not uttered even one word of complaint.  Nor had she even asked a question about what was happening to us.  At six-and-a-half years old, she probably had an idea that things had, somehow, gone wrong.  Or, as my people were wont to say, that things had "gone South."

The children were no longer pacified by then with the left-over candy pieces. They wanted their sandwiches and half-cups of milk, their beds, their footed sleepers, and their blankets.  The baby slept on my lap, still wrapped in the blue blanket that could have covered all of them should the occasion arise. And it occurred to me, just then, that the occasion might have, in fact, arrived. 

I took the children in hand then and led them down under the basement steps of the schoolhouse nearby, settling them to sleep against me, tucking the covers tightly around them as they tangled together in sleep just the way they slept most nights at home, the two youngest boys sucking their thumbs, the girl pulling her ponytail free of the green rubber-band and barrette.

Like a litter of puppies, I’d thought, those mornings when I’d risen to set the oatmeal cooking in the steel pot and had gone in to waken them, finding them all piled together in one bed or another.

I watched over them all that night in that way a mother watches her children when the world shifts, darkly, around them.  Sometimes, when they fretted in half-sleep or uneasy dreams, I hummed to them.  But I never, ever wept.  To every thing there is a season.  And, while a hard season had certainly come upon us, this was not yet a season for weeping.  This was a season for practical matters like finding food and shelter until I could think my way clear, until I could find some means by which to set the gone-crooked things of our lives straight again.

Next morning, I woke the children early, all of them rising before the slumbering townspeople rose, before the garbage trucks lumbered through the starless, early-morning streets, before the stray dogs overturned the over-full silver trash cans in the alleyways between the downtown storefronts.  We set out walking again, the four of us holding hands, me shifting the baby back and forth from one stiff hip to the other.  I whispered to them, We’re going on an adventure today. 

What, Mama, they wanted to know, what adventure? Where are we walking to today?

So I told them stories about a place called "The End Of The World," a long walk from Alabama, a kind of start-over place, and a very long walk from the front yard where all the remnants of their former life lay splintered and damp in the dew-wet morning.  And that’s when my middle boy, the odd one, remembered something he had wanted to tell her before the officers had arrived.

Mama, he said, his dark eyes widening, did you know Jiminy Cricket can play the violin?

I smiled then and told him that, yes, I did know that and wasn’t it an amazing thing that a cricket could play a violin? He nodded excitedly and his older brother and sister had to admit it was pretty amazing.

He went quiet then and we all went on walking together, on our way to Somewhere Else.  Then the boy said, I would like to walk somewhere with that cricket, just him and me.  We would walk a long way and I would make up songs and he would play his violin.  We would walk and walk until we got to the end of the world.  Then we would sit down and take off our shoes and hang our tired feet out into space.

I was surprised by that and asked him if he wouldn’t miss everyone who loved him.

He thought hard about that for a minute and then he said, Oh good idea, Mama.  We will take Bear with us.  But as for the fleas, they are going to have to stay home with you.

The other children laughed at him then, the funny, odd, middle brother.  I laughed too.  And then we all grew quiet again remembering, maybe, what the boy had forgotten: that Bear had died last winter.  We’d found him in the shed, stiff, his fur matted with feces where his bowels had given way in the night.  I'd had to dig a hole in the hard December ground, had had to lift him by myself and wrap him in the old blanket he’d slept on for two years, had had to carry him awkwardly and roll him into that hole all by myself, nine months pregnant, because the man refused to be party to the dog’s burial since he’d never wanted a dog in the first place and had told her so time and again.  So I’d called the children out to stand around the hole in the yard, to say goodbye to Bear, then I’d sent them back inside again while I’d shoveled the dirt and clods of winter-brown grass over the hole in which the dead beast lay.  Only when I'd finally finished and straightened up again, holding to the shovel’s rough handle, one hand in the small of my aching back, had I seen the children clustered at the back window, watching it all.

For my middle boy though, the only world that mattered was the world as he made it up.  And Bear was still somewhere in that world, as far as he could tell.  The burial hole didn’t wholly exist for him and neither did the rough cross I'd made of two garden stakes wired together to mark the dog's place in the yard.

A handy thing, that kind of gift, I thought. A gift I’d like to have had in times like these. A gift for making the world over again. In your own image.  To your own liking.

By noon, the children were starting to whine for food, tugging at my skirt and sleeves, stumbling against each other.  I kept saying, as much for myself as for them, Soon, babies. Real soon.  Just let me think a minute.  But the bitter pill of truth was that I didn’t know where I was going to find them a next meal.  I stopped and leaned against the lamppost as the weight of that fact hit me.  And while I leaned there, head down, trying to think, holding the half-full bottle of lukewarm milk in my hand, I fell asleep on my feet.  For just a second.  Maybe two.  It was the shattering glass that woke me.  A real-world echo of something starting to shatter inside of me.  I felt my stunned face crumpling when I saw the only bottle I had left on the sidewalk. In pieces. Something like our lives, I thought.

To everything there is a season…a  season…a  season….

The meaningless loop of that line from the old Proverb kept playing in my head, like a badly-scratched record, not moving on, endlessly replaying itself. The children started crying then, because I was, and the baby squalled loudly on my hip, hungry, wanting his bottle. And, in that moment, it was as if I could almost hear them.  From far away.  In a country outside of myself.  Strangers to me.  My own children.

What story could I tell just then that would make any sense to them?

And that is when the man who owned the drugstore walked outside and touched my arm and, because I was stunned and lost, I let him lead me and the children inside, speaking quietly to me though it seemed I could only take in parts of what he was trying to say to me.  Something about him having another bottle inside.  Something about sitting down in one of the booths to rest while he brought the children something to eat.

I mumbled back at him, told him I only had nickels left in my coin-purse. Not enough to pay him for it, any of it.  He went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle filled with cold milk for my baby boy who took hold of it, sucking loudly at the nipple.  Then the man brought hamburgers and French fries to the rest of us, and on each plate was a slice of a kosher dill pickle, the garlicky kind like my grandmother used to give me when I was a girl.  The children ate, greedy, and did not thank the man. So I thanked him for them and began to relax though I could not make my mind step one minute past this kindness and back out onto the street.  When he placed a plate before me, I thanked him again, but I did not eat the sandwich. I wrapped it in a paper napkin when he wasn’t looking and tucked it inside the diaper bag – “just in case,” I told the children who watched me, wide-eyed, not knowing what to make of it, though even I did not really know “just in case” what.

When the man sat down in the booth seat across from where I sat, with his cooking apron still tied on, he spoke to me in that tone of voice people use to tell each other a secret.  He told me about an abandoned mill at the edge of town, near the old graveyard and the farmers’ fields, a mill where other women were living: some with children and some who were widowed or immigrants.

People who have no one else, he said.

I looked up at him then, as if I were waking from a long stupor. I noticed that he wore a plaid flannel shirt under his starched white apron and that the apron was very clean.  How, I wondered, does he cook and not muss his apron?  I had always been a clumsy cook.  Even my best aprons were always smudged or smeared, stained with blueberries or gravy or some other ingredient I’d been cooking with.  And I’d have smudges of flour or cornmeal on my face where I’d pushed back my stringy bangs with my cooking hand while I read the recipe.  The man I had been married to complained about that when he was leaving, about coming home every evening and finding me there, looking “bedraggled,” looking like something the cat had dragged back in, half-dead, from a muddy field.

A man likes a woman to be the woman he married, he’d said, Sexy, and smart. He'd said I had begun, with each new baby, to look more and more like an old dish-rag instead of a twenty-six year-old woman.

And that’s what I thought about while I listened to the neat man sitting in front of me: that he was neat and clean and efficient.  Things I had wanted, once upon a time, to be.  Things I had aspired to.

 People who have no one else, the neat man had said.  And that surely was me, though it was the first time I had thought of it exactly in that way.  He'd said, My friend, Darlene, is coming to drive you out there. 

His "friend" he’d called that woman who was coming to get us.  Of course someone like this man had friends.  I hadn’t had a friend in years.  Not one.  Not a neighbor who dropped over for coffee and gossip.  Not someone I’d gone to high school with.  Not the women at the Baptist church. And certainly not the man I’d been married to for eight years.  No friends. Not a single one.

What I’d had was four children and a stillborn, premature child no one mentioned, ever, in my presence.  What I'd had was a house to clean and a garden to tend and clothes to mend and beds to make and meals to cook and dishes to wash and floors to scrub.  What I’d had was busy hands and a mind that churned on dreams, on the “one-day-soon” kind of dreams that get you through the endless minutiae of a life filled-to-bursting with diapers and potty-training, the kind of dreams that get you through the relentless, every-endless-day of it all, the times you find yourself elbow-deep in dishwater.  I’d had faith too once.  Faith like a mustard seed, I thought: a little, stingy faith, a mean one, truth be told, and kindness barely enough to fill a thimble. 

You’ll be safe there, the man said then, and before he stood up again and went back behind the counter, he placed his hand over mine in a way that I thought was kindly for a stranger.

So in the twelve days and nights and days in that abandoned brick mill, in the days before I found my way into a borrowed house – a “subsidized” house, as they’d called it in the Welfare Office where I’d put my name on a list and had endured, in silence, the loud remarks and jeers of the other women there who were insulted that a white woman had “let herself come to this” – in those twelve days and nights, I had learned gratitude.  First for that man, then for the Sisters of Mercy: nuns who brought over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Koolaid every midday, even Sundays, to the women and children who lived in that mill.  The nuns who sometimes included Cheese Nips and Oreos. Nuns who had never borne or raised children of their own, never married, those Brides of Christ made widows at the altar of God, who seemed pleased with the mill children’s squeals of delight at seeing the extra treats.  And once, apples.  Apples that reminded me of the charred tree that had provided so many jars of homemade applesauce and windfalls for the deer.  Apples. And memories that made me homesick.

Homesick.  I was homesick.  Heartsick, too, maybe. 

I did my part, though, passing the days tending children – mine and others – or taking turns with the other younger women who sneaked off to wash diapers and clothes in the icy creek at the edge of the farm nearby.  I hummed and taught the mill children how to make cat’s cradle with a knotted piece of yarn torn from a cast-off sweater.  I told them bedtime stories.  From me they learned songs like “B-I-N-G-O’ and  “I wish I was a little bar of soap,” a song that made the children fall to fits of giggling every time they got to the word “hiney.” And when someone got sick, it was I who felt their foreheads, who sent my boys to dip the pieces torn from slips and discarded petticoats in the ice-rimed creek, I who placed the cool rags on their foreheads.  I sat watch all night over the sick ones, just as I had in the years in which I had worked the hospital wards.  And when the gastroenteritis took the youngest and the frailest off to wasting and early deaths, I helped carry their bodies to the far edge of the field where a farmer would bring a cart for their bodies and see to it that they were "properly buried" in pauper's graves.

I rocked the little ones who remained, who were orphans then, and shushed them calm again until they went off with the nuns to become wards of the state or be adopted.  And I sat silently with the grieving mothers, feeling that little gnawing in my gut that I knew was fear.  Surely, I thought, surely God has required enough of me.  Surely, He will not ask this of me too. And I watched my children zealously for signs of fever or diarrhea, for malaise, for anything that might go suddenly, badly wrong.

At night, when the mill was quiet and the women had gone out who would be with men for money – money which they would exchange for groceries and medicine and bring back to those of us who did not go out to men – I would fill again that old ache in me for books.  I would pull out the Bible from that diaper bag and read it by the window if there was a moon.  And I argued with God.  Took up again then my old quarrel with Him, with this God of my father, this omnipotent, all-seeing, merciful God who wanted something I was not willing to give just then: praise.  I started with the Psalms, the first one right on through to the final one.  Then I moved into Jeremiah because, of all the prophets – those old mouthpieces of doom and gloom – Jeremiah was the only one who’d gone beyond the retribution part and had mentioned the coming-home again.  With weeping.  Which in my estimation, would have to be part of any kind of coming home again.  Sorrow and joy mingling.  Jeremiah 31: With weeping they shall all come home again.  With weeping.

And as the nights went by in that mill, I took to writing in the white spaces, into the neat, empty margins around the old Psalms and the Proverbs, writing my own dark little psalms, first to God, then to the departed ones, then to no one in particular except maybe some lost version of who I used to be.  Once upon a time.  Writing my way out of this – whatever "this" was turning into – and back, happily, into the ordinary, daily ever-after, though I hadn’t been able to see it as clearly as all that back then, elbow-deep in dishwater and detergent, toddlers perpetually underfoot, a baby wailing in his crib, the pantry more and more bare with every passing day.

That’s what I had, in those days and nights: my dark little hymns, my own raw gift-laid-on-the-bloody-altar-of-life kind of singing.  I thought the endless walking past all this and on to Somewhere Else might just BE the thing that could save me, that and the double-edged blade of my own voice, my stunned singing.  Walking and singing.  Holding my children’s hands and singing my dark little psalms to nobody in particular.  And walking. Walking past the all hard and gone-wrong things to the end of the world where I could sit down at last, me and my children, and hang our tired feet out into space where it would be cool and dark and filled with stars.

 

 

 

Photo collection of Anne Caston (courtesy of photos.com)

Animal Husbandry

 

Fairbanks, Alaska, 1999:

 

I am having a luncheon out today on the deck of Pike’s, a popular local Alaskan restaurant on the river.  I am with five women whom I don’t yet know very well, five women who are colleagues at the university where I have just been hired to teach creative writing and literature.  These women are well-dressed, intelligent, and attractive, in that very distinct way that educated, independent, middle-aged-or-approaching-middle-age Alaskan women are considered attractive and, by that, I mean they are not “pretty” in the frail, feminine, doll-like ways that men elsewhere like their women.  They are laughing and drinking Margaritas and Martinis and something called “Wallbangers” here in the midday late-summer sun, enjoying the time with each other in a way that tells me they have done this many times over the years they have been living here. 

I am trying to imagine that I might, in the next few months, come to be one of the inner circle of their friendship.  I am imagining that I have something in common with them, with some of them anyway, though I cannot imagine what that might be other than the genitalia with which we were born.  I am not like them, in some profound ways.  They seem comfortable here. With each other.  With themselves.  They are a bit bawdy.  And they throw back their heads and laugh loudly when they are amused.  They eat like bears eat after a long winter, exuberantly, loudly, leaning over their meals, pushing the food in, smacking their lips.  And they seem likeable.  At least, I am imagining that they are likeable.  Infinitely likeable.  And so, among them, I can imagine myself likeable too.  Likeable, in some abstract, charming, womanly way. 

And while I am trying to imagine myself into their group – one of the “girls,” as they call themselves though they are well into middle age and beyond anything which could even remotely be considered “girlish” – the hot topic under discussion turns suddenly to the outrageous responses some women have to being “cheated on,” from going into life-long psychoanalysis to slashing the guy’s truck tires, to showing up at the new lover’s doorstoop waving a shotgun and shouting death-threats.  They are talking about women they’ve known – friends, neighbors, sisters – who have reacted badly to being “cheated on” by boyfriends or husbands. It strikes me, sitting here among them on this end-of-summer deck by the Chena River, that probably none of them have ever been “cheated on” by their men.  Otherwise, why would this behavior seem so unfathomable to them, so ridiculous?  And though I have no interest in adding my own two cents to that discussion, I chuckle at that expression, cheated on, and I say that that it sounds so blasé, as if love were a board-game or a game of cards – Hearts, perhaps – at which one could cheat or be cheated.

“Well, what do you-all call it in the South?” the youngest of the women, Francine, asks from across the lunch table, her voice drawing the words out badly like some actress playing a Southern character in a movie or on stage but who is clearly not of the South.  She is “tipsy,” or outright drunk.  Her eyes have that loose-in-the-socket roll that happens after four or five martinis…her drink of choice this afternoon. She leans back, her petite sun-bronzed face half-hidden in the deck umbrella's wide shadow cast by the deck.  Another of the women snickers at her syrupy Scarlett O’Hara accent.

You-all?

Please. I have, for the record, never used the word you-all.  But I can fence with the best of them when the occasion arises. And it seems to me that the occasion has, indeed, arisen.  I’m a newcomer to the farthest-north university in America, a woman with a deep drawl who can, all-too-easily slide into diphthongs and a genial demeanor which belies the blade-sharp mind kept hidden beneath the faćade of a rather ordinary face, a newcomer who, it seems, is about to be served up, du jour, alongside the main course and dessert: Southerner a la mode and Women-Who-Have-Been-Cheated-On-By-Their-Menfolk.  So much for me imagining myself into this group of women-friends.  Fiends is more like it.

“We-all call it being jilted,” I say, quietly, without so much as a hint of a drawl,  studying my salad intently rather than lifting my eyes across the table to the shadows in which she is seated.  I am certain, even now, that I can out-fence anyone, man or woman, who sets out to openly mock me or humiliate me.  I have had a lot of practice at this. Growing up in the South, in that god-forsaken country of heat-riddled tempers lacquered over with propriety and good manners, my defense – my only worthy defense – was an acerbic wit and a lightning-quick tongue with which to deliver back, two-fold or four-fold, any venom delivered unto me.  Cast your bread upon the waters, scripture says, and Francine has cast it out.  

It is about to be returned to her.

Over and over, Mama used to caution me: “Keep it up.  One day everyone will think you’re a girl with nothing going for you but a quick wit and that will be your undoing.”

Better, I’d think to myself, than being a half-wit. Or a nit-wit.  Or a dim-wit.  

No wonder the girl wasn’t getting dates, she’d murmur to that no one in the room with whom she seemed to endlessly have these conversations when I didn't appear to be taking her advice seriously.  No wonder, she'd sighed to that no one, her daughter wasn’t being asked to prom. 

As if a girl with a mind was some kind of third rail.  Electric.  Dangerous.  Something to stay clear of. 

“Well, we'all in the South sometimes say someone is cuckolded, though some of we-all know the term is rarely used accurately now,” I say, matter-of-factly, not in that voice of melodramatic commiseration that my mother has practiced, all her life, on me.  I figure using we-all twice will send the message clearly: if you think you can out-mock me, if you insist upon making light of me or the decent, hard-working people from whom I come, then you deserve whatever sad fate befalls you on this deck on this summer day in the far north. 

She gets my drift right away.  She has the decency to look embarrassed and to mumble an apology.  In her own voice.  Pittsburg, I think.  Or Princeton. I can’t decide.  But definitely a Northerner. A Southerner would have mouthed a wide “O” and declared that, Oh dear, she most certainly had not intended to insult anyone.  My goodness no.  Heaven forbid.

I take a breath and go on, reluctantly surrendering up – yet again – the fleeting dream of finding a few women friends with whom I might, occasionally, go shopping or share a pleasant luncheon or a phone conversation, someone with whom I might, at Christmas, swap secret-pal gifts or family recipes.  Instead, I am wading deeper and deeper into what I know is going to be a terrible lesson in Southern semantics and etymology. And bad manners.  I do what I always do: I leave the disappointment of the body and the spirit and I bore head-long, full-throttle, into the cerebral: 

“A cuck is, technically, a married man who finds himself the unfortunate victim of a sexually unfaithful wife. The word derives from the Old French word for the Cuckoo bird – Cocu + the pejorative suffix – ald:  a bird with a reputation. Thus cuckold. The female bird lays her eggs in other bird’s nests, thus freeing herself of the burden of nurturing or caring for her eggs or feeding her hatchlings.”

I pause to place my butter knife alongside my plate and to wash the last bite of dinner roll down with a long sip of sweet iced tea. The Chena River moves along beside us, carrying on its brown back a duck and her ducklings.  I toss a piece of crust into the water just to see the ducklings scatter and rush to gobble it down. Then I go on.

“Thus a married woman who was unfaithful sexually, made a ‘cuckoo’ of her husband who was, unknowingly, providing her and her potentially-illegitimate offspring with shelter and protection, much as a tricked bird does to the cuckoo’s eggs.  Lately, the word’s connotations have broadened, though, to include any male (married or unmarried) in a relationship to a hotwife – a term most often used to refer to the unfaithful woman.”

The women rather like that part, it seems.  The part about a hotwife.  And I can tell, by the nervous giggling around the table, they are also embarrassed by it, these women who have spoken openly – loudly – through the lunch, of religiously faking orgasms and of the fast-withering erections of their husbands and lovers who fall deeply asleep immediately after sex. 

There are some jokes all around the table about hotwife and Dierdre wonders aloud if that is where the word hottie comes from. Lilly, returning from the restroom, hears the butt-end of the conversation and the word hottie and asks, “Hey, are you talking about me again?” 

Laughter erupts all around the table.  They wink and laugh and nudge each other while Lilly sits there puzzled and a bit bereft after thinking she’d just scored the trick. That’s what they call it – scoring the trick – when one of them one-ups another with a joke or quick retort, when one suckers the other or makes the other the momentary object of ridicule or laughter. 

“What?”  Lilly asks, wide-eyed, looking from one to the other of us, folding her cloth napkin into place again on her lap. “What, for Chrissake?”

And, just at this moment, I think I might still have a shot at this women-friends thing after all, a thing I have not quite managed, not well anyway.  Not even well enough.  I, who have spent much of my adult life hung in a kind of androgynous intellectual purgatory. I who have worked mostly, and most comfortably, with men who are generally more comfortable with apparent intelligence and scientific observation and logic, men who are less comfortable with conversation about lovers and husbands and children and aging parents, and much less comfortable in the presence of emotions and intuition.

Among men, I am often “invisible” as a woman, assuming my cerebral life, a life filled daily with facts and diagnoses and observable, documentable events. A logical life.  A reasonable, practical life.  Among men, it matters hardly at all that I am ordinary-looking or unable to flirt respectably or play coy or dress fashionably.  I have a role to play in what they are trying to accomplish.  Among men, I am a colleague in sheep’s clothing: nothing much to fret over.

Among women, I am also relatively invisible, probably because I have concerned myself only marginally, if at all, with the things they seem to do with ease. Things like flirting, laughing at or teasing their men, like talking easily about taking lovers, like having sex, and all the thousand other things that fill their daily, ordinary, womanish lives: high heels and designer handbags, the perfect brownish-black waterproof mascara, face-lifts and nose-jobs, blow-jobs and breast implants.

I feel today like those Bonobo apes must feel at the Great Ape Trust, the Bonobos who were “rescued” from impending extinction in the Congo, saved apes whose closest ties are now with humans.  They can communicate fluently with their human caretakers, using a lexicon board. They are well-socialized enough to share brief time with strangers, like the reporters and photographers and tourists and philanthropists who come to see them at The Trust.  They are deeply-attached to their human caretakers.  And, when I look at photographs of them, they seem shot-through with a profound sadness, as if they sense somehow that they are no longer a part of the ape-world and only marginally part of the human world.  In limbo. In some place of no-belonging, hung between two opposing forces, longing like all get-out for something you can’t even name. 

I feel like that most days. Especially today, among these women.  Sad.  As immigrants and refugees are sad.  Sad as exiles are who find themselves in a country where they cannot speak the language and so are thought to be imbeciles.

Maybe I could re-enter a life that is lived, easily, among my peers, among women; maybe I could relearn, even now, what it is to be back “in the wild” of being a woman.  Maybe this shot at friendship would be enough.  A good, once-in-a-lifetime shot.

And this is precisely when our waiter, a handsome man whose nametag reads “Raoul,” puts down my plate of beautifully-glazed salmon and roasted new potatoes, then faces me.

“So," Raoul asks me in his heavy, Latin American version of English, "jou are from the South, so tell me: why is it every time there is a love-gone-wrong episode in the South, the woman throws all the man’s shirts out in the rain and sets fire to his trailer?” 

That’s a cliché:  tossed clothes in the bare dirt yard and a trailer in flames. Yes, it is.  But it’s nevertheless true.  Every salad fork at our table hangs suspended in mid-air.  Lipstick-glossy smiles freeze on the faces of the women at this dockside table, smiles which are locked crookedly, off-kilter, under their aquiline, aristocratic-looking (some surgically-corrected) noses, odd smiles, faces which look as if some mortician forgot to place the corpse’s denture in straight before wiring the jaw into place for the viewing. 

And God only knows what storm-cloud is trying to move in over my brow.  I feel the familiar throb behind my right eye where a full-blown migraine will take up residence a few hours from now.  Stress: hair-trigger of the gun that’s going to one day kill me.

But what I do just now is smile up at Raoul, at his handsome-in-a-dark-and-exotic-way face which is looking down at me with such innocence and anticipation that it is hard for me to imagine that he is some young woman’s heartbreak-about-to-arrive. So I smile back up at him despite the throbbing behind my eye. 

Why not?  It is a gorgeously bright day and I am best at this kind of smiling: smiling under duress, smiling in the face of insult, smiling in the face of being openly-ridiculed and publicly-jilted. Yes, that too, though I’d rather take a cup of hemlock than admit it. I’d rather my uterus fall out in the grocery store aisle than have to speak about that time in my life.  But, if nothing else, I am mistress of a dazzling, toothy smile.  So I smile.  No matter what fate has brought to my feet.  Or my table.

I smile.  And I dazzle.  I dazzle like a cobra dazzles. 

I fill my lungs with all the air that the afternoon seems to have suddenly emptied itself of.  I smooth the white linen napkin into place on my lap, though it has not shifted out of place, and I look up at this stranger, this handsome black-haired, raven-eyed waiter, Raoul, who is standing there, perplexed, in his best starched white shirt and black dress pants.  I say in my best Sunday-school-teacher voice, sotto voce, “Raoul, I have been married five times, to four different men, three of whom ‘cheated on’ me, and I have never, ever burned down a trailer, mine or anyone else's.”

Raoul is leaning in now, his eyes widening in their sockets, his white shirt flapping in the dock-side wind like a flag of truce.  Or is it surrender?  He pretends to be horrified at first, then he grins down at me and pushes my shoulder in a friendly, kid-brotherly kind of way.

“Oh, jou!” he says then, smiling down at me now, as if I have been teasing, as if I have been having a good joke on him.  The five women around the table are, well, shocked, I suppose, and utterly speechless, though Diedre begins to cough as if she’s swallowed a small bone that has lodged itself in her gullet: not dangerous, but annoying.  Like listening to a cat trying to hork up a hairball.

I am taking shape before them suddenly, a new and strange creature: a woman who has married five times, divorced four times; a woman who has never once – despite the myth that Southern women have a bent towards jealousy and hysteria – burned down a trailer, "mine or anyone else’s." A woman who will declare, publicly, that she has married many times, many men, and not look a bit chagrined about it.  Or apologetic.  I am a woman who has been "cheated on" and might admit it openly.  A woman who might have very interesting things, dangerous things, perhaps, to say. I am becoming a woman who might have a reputation.  I am becoming, in this moment, visible.

There is a moment when the world, as you know it, tilts on its axis and a new true north struggles to take up its place.  The spinning intensifies, as if you have been sitting in a chair all afternoon, napping, fanning yourself, sipping strong juleps and then you rise too abruptly.  Everything around you spins.  A low buzzing begins behind your left ear and time halts on its long foot-path across space.  It is the kind of moment when babies come into the world, the moment before they will either breathe or not breathe.  It is the kind of moment where the preacher has asked if you’ll promise to love, cherish, and obey “till death do you part,” the moment right before you will – or you won’t – whisper I do.  It is the kind of moment when anything is possible.  It is the pregnant pause, filled with everything and nothing.  It is the moment between the flash and the thunder’s rumble deep in the basement. 

This is that kind of moment.

 

*Note:  all names - except Raoul's -  have been changed to protect the innocent and the unintentionally wicked. 

photo courtesy of The Great Ape Trust

The Calling, The Fold, The Children of God (Plus, Or Minus, One)

In the early sixties, I was a relatively-happy if somewhat ignorant girl growing up in a working-class, predominantly-Southern Baptist community in the deep South.  Largely because of the circumstances of my birth  (I'd been born to a father who was, by the time I'd come along, was a new convert to the faith, a good man who very much wanted right-standing with God and, if not a pulpit of his own, then maybe one day a deaconship), I was immersed in the Church and its activities: choir practice, Sunday School, Training Union, Girls’ Auxiliary, Lottie Moon Christmas fund for the missionaries, Thursday night visitation, Wednesday night prayer meetings, Sunday sermons, Bible drills, Vacation Bible School, Summer Church Camp, to name a few.

I was also trying to figure out some of the church's more perplexing tenets:  the just and the unjust (the rain fell on both equally, according to Preacher, but the just one always has the satisfaction of knowing that if drowned he’d be called straight to Glory); the saints and the sinners (we were all sinners, born that way, and the only way out of it again was to "die to the world" and "live in the spirit"); the saved and the damned (which had something to do with sheep and wolves and how the sheep were able to hear the Good Shepherd’s voice when He called them). The saved were those "called" by God; the damned never got the call – or, if they did, they didn't answer it.  The saved ones were safe in the "Fold of God."  The unsaved, uncalled, were wandering alone through the world without God's protection, among the wolves-in-sheep's-clothing in the wilderness of man's Original Sin which, by the mid-1900s, had been neatly categorized into sins of commission and sins of omission.  Or as my grandmother used to wryly put it, Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I listened so hard back then, so intently, for that Call, I think I missed a lot of what was said to me at school, at church, at home. I was in trouble for not paying attention at school, I got into trouble at home for not listening to my parents, and at church, I was fidgety and restless and full of questions that were "off-topic, young lady." I was like a stunned thing, unable to attend to anything except that intense listening for a "still, small voice" that I was certain was somewhere just underneath the loud racket of the world.  I worried, day and night, that God would call and I would miss it.  Worse, what if He had already called and I had not heard?  Maybe He thought I had heard but had refused the Call.  So each night I would lean on my windowsill and look up at the star-strung sky and pray as earnestly as I could, God, I am listening very hard now.  Please, please call me again. Please. 

 On my way home from school each afternoon, I would head down to the riverbank near my home, thinking that maybe I'd be able to hear The Call if I was someplace quieter, if I was calm and easy and at peace, which I almost always was when alone by that river.  When that didn't work, I went deep into the forest near my house – to listen.  And to be where no one would see me if I cried, in frustration and shame, when no Call came.  I already knew, even at eight, that I was "peculiar," an odd girl.  I cried easily.  I stammered in school if I was called on or made to talk aloud.  I sat at the edge of the schoolyard and didn't join in the games.  I rarely spoke.  I'd rather spend any day lost in a book and stories than ride bikes or play outside with the other kids my age.  I was peculiar.  And that is the truth of it.  I could accept that most people around me thought so and steered a wide path around me, but what if I were even too peculiar for the Alpha and Omega?  What if I was no good fit for heaven?  What if I was no child of God after all? 

One early spring morning, when I was eight, just as I was giving up on God – or I thought He might be giving up on me – a miracle happened at the Lane Avenue Baptist Church:  I got called.  The invitational hymn was underway.  In the congregation, all heads were bowed, all eyes closed, and the choir was humming in four-part-harmony the chorus of “Almost Persuaded, Now to Believe,” while Preacher stood at the front of the church, his hands raised, his eyes closed, entreating us to “listen for that still small voice.” 

“Respond to God’s call,” he urged us, “ as Eli did in the temple: Here am I, Lord.” 

It was just about then that I heard my name:  Ruth Anne...Ruth Anne.  Whispery.  Over my shoulder, behind my right ear.  Hushed.  Barely audible.  And sort of girlish.  Maybe God had sent an angel to do his bidding.  He was sort of famous for that.  The angels stayed pretty busy, according to the Bible, going back and forth from heaven to earth and back to heaven again. The quiet, girlish voice called softly again, just underneath the piano and the humming choir. But clearly my name. 

So I knew I should step out then from the pew, to walk forward in a kind of confused joy, moving forward, one awkward step at a time up the wooden floorboards of the aisle, stumbling on feet that had always seemed to have a will of their own even when God wasn't involved, towards the pristine altar where The Word of God lay open on a white cloth and a vase of sickly-looking flowers bloomed, towards Preacher, towards the kingdom of heaven, to declare Here am I, Lord and to take my place at last among God’s chosen, to be a child of God.  There would be much amening and praise-the-lording across the congregation.  There was always a good deal of joy when a sinner was called out of the cold world and into the "Fold," which is what Preacher sometimes called the group of believers, though I never could figure out, at eight years old, just how the saved had gotten folded. 

It seemed to me that the congregation would be unusually joyful – or was it relieved – that one of the more ardent young "fibbers" among the Church families was to be "saved."   Finally, I would be God's problem, not theirs.  Or that is how I imagine it now, looking back.  My young father, who would be directing the choir, would look over his shoulder and smile in a kind of amazement.  In the choir-loft, a look of profound relief would pass over my new mama's face.  My four-year-old sister, Michele, would be standing up in the pew and waving wildly at me because that's what she always does. 

And me?  I would do what I always do when a crowd of people suddenly turns its full attention on me: I would stand facing the congregation, biting my bottom lip and staring down at my shoes, a hot crimson flush moving up my neck and into my face.

But try as I might, I could not get my feet to cooperate.  I was rooted to the floorboards of the sanctuary. So I'd convinced myself that I would tell my parents what had happened first, let them decide if I'd really heard right.  I did, too – tell my parents, I mean, right after Sunday dinner. They encouraged me to step forward that evening at service, to walk the aisle and take Preacher's big hand and make that commitment to follow the Lord. 

So I did it.  I managed, somehow, to take that long walk up to the church altar and tell Preacher what had happened.  To my surprise – and terror – I was also invited to participate in the baptism that night right after the service.  Now that was a whole other matter.  I hadn't brought along a change of clothing.  Maybe Mama would say I would have to wait until the next baptismal service for that.  I returned to the pew.

Later, I discovered that the "still, small voice" I'd heard calling my name had been Elizabeth Harvey, the preacher’s daughter, who had been trying to slip me a Sunday church bulletin where she'd drawn a booger falling out of the nose of John the Baptist as he baptized Christ in the river.  

A mistake then, that Calling.  One I couldn't easily explain or take back.  I waited until the time came to head to the back room and "robe up" for the baptism, then I found Preacher and confessed the mix-up to him while my Mama was off somewhere trying to figure out what I would wear underneath the baptismal robe.  Preacher said sternly that he would take the matter up with Elizabeth first and then with the Holy Spirit and then he would get back to me.  But I suppose even after lengthy and earnest consultation with the Most High Host of Heaven, he also couldn't figure out a way to take back, or make null and void, a public confession of faith.  How could anyone mortal – especially a girl – just say Oops, sorry, my mistake to the Great Everlasting, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, once the promise to follow Him had been made? 

 I sat as penitently and quietly as I could, outside that Prayer Room, on the old half-pew in the vestibule.  I could hear a few words of the conversation inside, a conversation Preacher was having with two deacons.  Things drifted out to me like, Well, maybe this is the Grace of God in action.  After all, the Lord’s ways are mysterious.  Things like, Well, Elizabeth is saved and thus she is an instrument of the Lord.  Things like, Well, I don’t see any way around it.  We’ll have to give it to her. 

 And so it was unanimous:  the conversion stood.  I was saved. 

I was relieved.  I could finally stop straining to listen for that Voice, that Call; I would be folded too, a child of God among the other children of God.  But somewhere in all that evening's relief, I remembered there was to be a baptism – and in the Baptist church, baptism means complete immersion in water, head to toe – and that I might also be joining those who were already slotted for baptism.  Then I got the news: I was to be "baptized straightaway" and I, who for most of my life had been terrified of deep water and drowning, went back to Preacher and pled earnestly, to be “let off” of the commitment then.  Maybe it was a mistake, I said.  Maybe we ought to think about it and pray about it more.  Maybe God would be mad for the big rush.  But to no avail.  The decision was unanimous: I was saved now.  And that was that.

So, down I went into the chilly waters of the baptismal pool in a white robe about three times too large for me and I stood, shivering, with my arms across my chest and listened for my "cue:" when Preacher said, I baptize you in the name of the Father and The Son and The Holy Ghost, I took a big breath and closed my eyes tightly.  Preacher placed a white hankie over my mouth and nose and leaned me backwards into the water. But something went wrong: the hankie wasn't tight enough and the heavily-chlorinated water rushed up into my nose.  Something took hold of me then and I don't think it was the Holy Spirit.  When my feet went out from under me and it seemed like it was taking a long time for my sins to be washed away, an unholy terror seized me and I clawed Preacher's arm hard with my fingernails and tried to fight my way back into the air.  It surprised him and he let go for a second.  I remember falling and the burn of the chlorine in my nose and eyes. I swallowed water and came up choking and sputtering and wailing.  Suddenly, salvation and the kingdom of heaven seemed a lot less appealing than it had before I'd entered the waters and troubled them – and that was just fine with me.  It could wait.  That whole washing-away-the-old-sinful-life and being-resurrected-to-a-new-life-in-God had almost drowned me dead.           

Too close for comfort, my grandmother said sympathetically when I told her about it later.

I would think, for many years to come, about that good dunking I'd gotten on that Sunday evening.  Our family transferred membership to a new church the next year, one closer to where we lived, so I could almost forget how embarrassing and terrifying that baptism had been for me.

A few summers later, at Baptist summer camp, all of us church kids were gathered around a campfire one evening singing and playing guitars – mostly, singing and swatting mosquitoes – and we got to a song, an old spiritual, that went something like this: "The Gospel Train's a-comin'. I hear it just at hand, so come on children get on board and join that holy band. Get on board, little children; get on board, little children; get on board, little children, there's room for many a more."

I stopped singing somewhere around the second "get on board, little children."  It occurred to me that the Gospel Train might be just some other Baptist trick to lure children into heaven and I might not want the ticket to Glory to be handed to me so quickly as all that.  Maybe later, I told myself, when I was older and not afraid of water and everything else.  Maybe when I trusted adults more than I did back then.  Maybe, until that day, I'd just bide my time on this earthly plane and enjoy what could be enjoyed here, in the flesh.  After all, what did I have to lose?  I'd heard all my life, "Once saved, always saved."  That's how Baptists see it.  And Lord knows, I had been saved:  called, folded, dunked in the waters, declared a child of God - though, in those days, I wasn't sure exactly what I'd been saved from.   Thus came I, at the ripe young age of eight, among those who call themselves the children of God...though perhaps I am not so certain as others are of that "salvation," and though perhaps I am, more accurately, a step-child of God:  in by the skin of my teeth and Preacher had the claw-marks to prove it.

 

 

THE HEART

                                                            

Notebook Entry: Anchorage, Alaska, November 2008

I have heard something on the radio that has stripped me down again to raw muscle and sinew, all the way down to the inelegant underpinnings of being human, down to some raw, flayed-open part that causes a constriction in my chest.  Under physical duress, I might’ve called this “heart pain.”  But I am familiar with human anatomy and I know where the heart lies in the dark, damp ark of the human body.  This is not that kind of heart. Not that kind of pain.  

Many atrocities have come to light over the last years. What is one more?  There is always some bad news traveling at light speed towards us these days.  And telling myself this allows me to go on doing whatever it is that I do on any ordinary, sunny, sub-zero day here in Anchorage, Alaska.  Things like driving up into the hills to get a wider view of my particular corner of the world, a view that makes my own personal sorrows seem small and womanish and of no real consequence when standing in a landscape that I know will endure long past the time I am gone down again to dust and ash.  Things like getting a free turkey at the Fred Meyer for buying $100.00 of groceries this week.  Things like going to teach a class of young writers tonight.  Things like facing down my body’s slow and certain decay and the mind’s growing grief that I will have to leave all this too soon, too soon.  Even about that, I have a tale to tell:  I’ve had a fabulously-rich life, not a moment of it was waste, and I’d choose it all over again even knowing what I’d come to in the end.  Every word of that tale is true.  What was it Horace wrote and Dryden translated:  “What has been, has been / and I have had my hour.” 

I have had my hour.

But what is their hour like, any one of those doctors and nurses, lawyers and students whose countrymen come upon them now daily or nightly, in stealth, who abduct them, who bind their hands and feet and then systematically torture and kill them?  At 7:40 a.m. Alaska Standard Time, I hear of their last hour. Another thirty bodies have been found.  Thirty.  More than the students in my class.  Double almost. Three times more people than those who waited with me in line this morning at Starbuck’s.  Twice as many as the elementary school children who waited raucously at the corner this morning for the school bus.

Thirty.  Gone now, just like that.  And by “just like that,” I mean exactly like that:  the reporter said that the instrument of torture was an ordinary household electric drill.  How does the mind steel itself against that?  What story can I tell myself this morning that will allow me to go on believing in the inherent goodness of mankind, or the mercy of God?  What shall I say to myself that might allow me to go on today, or tomorrow, or the next, quietly sewing a collar-button on my husband’s dress shirt as if it mattered, or to stand idly drinking my coffee at the sunny window, or taking up my pencil to write? 

Maybe because I am a writer, I force myself to imagine, somewhere behind my eyes, the whole scene of it.  I try to fathom it, the picture of it, that kind of torture.  I can imagine the burnt-out house, somewhere in the Middle East.  I can almost see the faces of those who are being brought, bound, to their torturer and executioner.  I can even imagine the face of that one - or ones: a human face.  A face that resembles, in many ways, a kindly uncle or neighbor, a face not unlike my own.  But every time I get to the whirring drill bit – to the hands of the man who holds it to the kneecaps or the soft temple of another person, every time I get to the fact of the waiting flesh and bone at the other end of the spinning bit – I recoil.  My mind cannot enter it.  My imagination refuses the assignment.  The stage goes dark. 

 Yet, for all my failure to imagine it, it happens. Those thirty bodies are testimony to it: a grisly “body of evidence” which would stand in any court in this country and make of those dyings a crime against humanity.

What shall we call it, this act of torture-unto-death?  How many bodies must be unearthed before we put some name to it? Thirty?  Thirty, plus the one whose hand holds the drill?  Thirty, plus the one who holds the drill, plus the one who turns, briefly, away?

This too is part of my hour here on earth, isn’t it?

Maybe I was right earlier, when I said that what I felt this morning was “heart pain.”  Maybe it isn’t high cholesterol or high blood pressure or AIDS or smallpox or depression that is going to do us all in.  Maybe acne and wrinkles and PMS and menopause and erectile dysfunction aren’t what is making us feel so bad.  Maybe the Doomsday we’ve been so certain will come is already upon us.  Maybe the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have ridden through town and we slept through the thundering hooves. 

Or maybe all those old doomsday stories got it wrong. Maybe the only thing we can tell ourselves anymore is that we are making, or have made already, a world in which we can no longer live and remain fully human and humane.  Maybe the mind cannot find a suitable place to lay something like this in among the other memories and dreams without it affecting those, disturbing the order of the mind. Maybe something like this doesn't yet have resonance in either the brain's center for language or for sight.  Maybe things like this are stored elsewhere in our bodies: somewhere far from where we might be forced to confront them: in the extremities, perhaps; at least the name seems appropriate.  Or maybe there is no safe way for us to know, just know, and that's why we look away, why we resume – or try to – the daily, mundane rituals of our lives, to stay busy, to move fast, move past.  Or maybe it's just that our hearts cannot bear the news from anywhere anymore. 

 

 

 

 

photo courtesy of photos.com

COPYRIGHT

© Deep Dixie 2010. Unauthorized use or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this author is prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Anne Caston and/or to Deep Dixie, www.annecast.typepad.com/myblog.  I am always inclined to give permission, but I appreciate being asked. Contact me with questions or requests at: anne.caston@gmail.com.  Thank you.

  

THE ROAD TO BABYLON

  

                                       Sunrise over downtown Jacksonville

            Once, when I was a young woman, I returned to my parents’ home - broke as a beggar, humbled as a prodigal - after having made a very brief foray into the “bigger world.”  And by "bigger world," I mean a rented room and a temp job across town from my parents' house.  I'd been working 12-hour days in order to pay my bed and board and I could see I was going to be on that tread-wheel to nowhere for a long, long time – maybe forever – so I swallowed my pride and returned home, knowing I would come, like others before me, to that Robert Frost moment: two paths diverging in a yellow wood.  I would have to choose then: 1) either follow my girlhood dream of moving outward into the larger world, journeying through it, experiencing it, writing about it and, in doing so, be required to forsake life in the small, safe, Baptist community in which I had spent most of my days and nights until then, to really throw myself on the mercy of the larger seething, heathenish world I'd only read and heard about, or 2) to just stay put, as my family and friends expected, to take the “safe” road and accept some decent-paying secretarial or receptionist position there in Jacksonville, living at home and saving my money, maybe buying a second-hand car, until I'd “found a man” and married – though it was questionable whether anyone, including my parents, thought any man would be brave enough to “take me to wife” (as my grandmother so delicately put it). 

            By then, I'd been dreaming for years of another kind of life: a life traveling the country, maybe even the globe, a life of the mind, that solitary life with writing and good books at the center of my life, of living by my wits “out there” somewhere beyond the city in which my family lived, in order to search for that one place I believed I would know when I came to it because everything about it would afford me the opportunity to be who I felt I was becoming: someone living in that place I'd finally call home.  It would be, or so I told myself, a place where I'd come to know my own worth in the world, a worth I could discover for myself as I went through it, something apart from the way others saw me and imagined me, when they thought about me or noticed me at all.  To stay in that town of my upbringing, to remain invisible there in the well-mannered, deeply-Christian South, to try one more time to be a respectable member of that Southern Baptist family and community in which I’d been raised, well, that would mean I would have to give up my dream, that I’d have to just open my hand and let it go for good there was no way to make it happen there in that place where the Good Book was the only acceptable literature, where any attempt to think and write creatively against or outside of its premises was suspect, was akin to the “lie,” and all devout Southern Baptists can tell you who the Prince of Lies is. 

            As I was weighing what it would cost me to go, or to stay, (otherwise known as throwing myself a rather loud and mournful pity-party), I turned to my Grandmother Fleecy, who was someone I felt would kindly tolerate my whining and complaining and not hold it against me or think me any more odd or foolish than I already was.

            "Maybe I could do it," I said to her finally, in a fit of frustration, in a bout of sudden cowardice, "Maybe I could just settle down with some local boy and have a passel of children and raise them to be good and godly and upright citizens like mama and daddy did with all of us.  But maybe even that dream isn't something I can really pull off.  Not me. I mean, look at me.  I'm no prom queen: who would want to settle down with me? I'm plain and bookish, and my strongest attributes are a quick mind and a sharp tongue. How many times has someone pointed that out to me?  What makes me think. . ."

            It was then that my grandmother slammed her hot iron down on the iron rest and narrowed her marble-blue eyes at me.  It caught me by surprise, that shocking vehemence with which she'd interrupted me.

            “Be careful, girl,” she said, “lest you linger too long in Babylon and forget who you are.”  Then she picked up the iron again. She spit on it to make sure it was still hot enough for a good crease, as if it might have gone cold in the brief circle of her inattention like the old irons of her childhood would have.  The spit sizzled hotly and then dissolved into a quiet last hiss.

         I didn't know how to respond to her.  She was always speaking in odd metaphors or allusions, most of which I couldn't unravel, even when I tried to. I snapped myself up so straight then that my spine hurt.  My mind went still.  Vacant.  She nodded at me then, with what seemed, to me, a kind of satisfaction, and took up her steamy work again as if she'd never left off doing it, pressing down hard on the starched collars and cuffs of the dress shirts that had been delivered into her care, laundry she took in twice a week from other women more well-off than she was, married women and widows who brought her their washing and starching and pressing work which added another two or three dollars a week to the $57.00 Social Security check she lived on every month.  Out of that meager portion, she paid her own rent, walked to the store and bought her coffee and meager groceries – the corn meal and sugar and eggs for the cornbread she'd make, the white ball of Coats & Clark's tatting thread, the thick cream for her morning coffee, the buttermilk and corn meal, the little bag of birdseed for her parakeet, Tony, one in a long line of parakeets she'd always named Tony – and her "smokes," her single carton of Winston cigarettes per month, her one and only vice if you don't count the True Confessions magazines stashed in a brown cardboard box under her bed, the box my mama found after my grandmother passed.  I still recall with a kind of morbid delight the little gasp that escaped Mama before she pressed her hand to her sputtering mouth, and the look of horror that crossed her face when she opened the box flaps and found those hoarded back issues of True Confessions, embarrassed by the lurid titles – "He had his way with me and then went back to his wife" and "Pregnant and Unmarried: My Story" – and the only-slightly-provocative cover photos of young women in heavy, movie-starlet make-up, sporting some deep cleavage.  She'd told me to take "that trash" to the trash where it belonged, meaning the dumpster at the end of the block.

            All my grandmother's widowed neighbors had stood at their screened front doors or on their little porches as I'd made my way to the dumpster with the heavy box and they had called out to me in tender voices as I passed by, "How're you doing, baby?"  and "How's your daddy and momma?" and  "We sure do miss Fleecy around here."

                                                            ~

            It had surprised me a little that day, my grandmother's remark about Babylon. I didn’t think she even knew scripture, much less know it well enough to be able to talk about Babylon as an allegory for Jacksonville, Florida, or for the larger South into which we'd both been born and had lived in all our lives.  It had surprised me also because by then I knew how she had pretty much given up her own life in Louisiana, years before, to follow my young father to Jacksonville and, eventually, to help care for my brother and sister and me after our biological mother had packed up and left one afternoon, running off to chase her own dreams, though no one could guess what those were.

            What about my grandmother's dreams?  Surely, she'd had them.  And I doubt they'd included the life she'd ended up with: leaving her sisters and mother in Shreveport, following her only son to the big city, care-taking her grandchildren, taking in ironing, living in a two-room subsidized apartment.  Surely, she understood the cost of that decision in a way I couldn't yet imagine.  And hadn't she once been a champion fiddler, winning awards, playing alongside some of the South's famous musicians?  What had happened to that life, and when?  When had she left the wildness in her and entered captivity in Babylon?  What came to mind just then was the Old Testament scripture where the captive had written once, mournfully, "By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept, for thee, Zion."  I knew what it meant to long for something, but you could hardly call my life a "captive" one.  But my grandmother.  She might know all about such a thing as being led away from home and lingering too long.  And what part had I – or her love for me– played in all that?

 

            I don't know now whether it was out of guilt or fear or just some recklessness in me that I inherited from her, but I did set out, almost immediately, following that flawed, sometimes-failed map my old dream had become.  For almost twenty years, I followed and followed the changing routes along that map until I ended up in Alaska with my own four small children, in the golden heart of the last frontier, on my second marriage – a kinder marriage than the first – and still with little to show for all my journeying or my dreaming about writing. 

            It's curious to me that the way there – wherever "there" happens to be – is never as straight-forward as the traveler thinks it will be; it's almost always more of a long, convoluted meandering, or so it was with me, through the many tangled wildernesses of a life with children, life as a home-maker, life as an ordinary woman, life as a nurse, and that woman's not-so-ordinary life with – or without – husbands.  For 8 of those years, I worked nights on the graveyard shift, tending to the wounded and sick and dying.  During those 8 years, I surfaced like a strange creature each morning, from darkness into the day-lit world, and some mornings I didn't even recognize my own face in my mirror, much less be able to recall my old dream. I might even have lost that dream entirely for a while, so weary was I from the long days and nights of work on the hospital wards and raising children and keeping house and all they'd each required of me.  What I had to show for that old dream wasn't much: an old trunk half-filled with daybooks and notebooks in which I had been faithfully writing down what I noticed, what I heard, what I felt and thought as I moved through the days and nights and days of my very ordinary life.

                                                            ~

 

            I’ve circled back to Alaska many times now, first Fairbanks, then Bethel, then stateside again to finish my BA and MFA, then back to Fairbanks again.  This last move back to the "wilderness" was, ostensibly, for a more practical reason: to take a job teaching at the university, a job with attendant perquisites, like having a regular salary and medical benefits and a retirement plan.  That was what I told myself and it was what I told anyone else who asked, back then, what had brought me to the "last frontier," because holding down a job is important.  It buys you some freedom from worrying about how you'll eat or where you'll sleep or what contribution you will make to the world.  It makes you, suddenly, visible. It makes you, suddenly, matter.  I wish I had a nickel for each person who, over the years, looked at me with a kind of wonder or astonishment as I spoke in my heavily-accented drawl then asked me, What brought you all the way to Alaska?

            I guess it just seemed simpler, cleaner somehow, or less complicated, to say that it was the job, the teaching that brought me to Alaska this time.  As much as I like my work though, it isn’t really the work that brought me back here, and I can see that now.  I could see it then, but I didn't yet have the courage – the "gumption" as my people call it – to tell anyone else the real reasons that I returned to Alaska over and over.

            In those days, I could not have said aloud to anyone that I came back to Alaska again and again because something bigger than me is here in this place and I sense it, something more ancient than humanness, something inexplicable and, at times, terrifying.  Solitude is deep here.  The dead of winter is a still and, sometimes, lonely place: the physical world’s manifestation of the lyric moment.  And about the time you grow accustomed to that isolation and quietude at the heart of a Fairbanks winter, summer staggers in with its chronic light.  So much light.           

            There are things in Alaska that will run you down, things that will kill you and eat you and it won't be personal; it won't be anything beyond sheer animal hunger and need.  There are things here that can do you in, in the blink of an eye:  like losing your way in a snowy field in a night that's at -50 degrees; like the heat going out in the night while you sleep; like the drive to town for supplies or medicine in a winter white-out; like an avalanche; the snow covering the crevasse that you can fall into and not be found until spring; a week-long blizzard that buries the well-traveled road; the unexpected Chinook and the pond-ice cracking in places where, just hours before, you had firm footing; the upward heave of permafrost on a winter-slick road; the cold brakes that do not "catch" and the bull moose who has suddenly stepped into the icy road in front of you.  And more.  Much more.

            How could I have explained to anyone that coming to Alaska means you acquire a staggering new sense of scale, that you suddenly see how small and fragile and brief even the largest life is, or that this is a place where you cannot avoid, for long, the stern and unyielding confrontation with your own failures and regrets.   And any writer, any woman, who won’t do that – who won’t look steely-eyed at herself and at the more difficult and unnerving tendencies of people around her and of the disinterest of the “natural” world around her – well, that woman probably doesn’t have much to bring to the table, whatever that particular "table" is, whether work or friendship, whether teaching or marriage or writing. 

            Again tonight, my grandmother's warning comes to me from that long-ago day at the far other side of this continent: Linger too long in Babylon and you'll forget who you are.  

            It is simple, maybe too simple, in the larger literary and commerce centers of this country, to be seduced, to come to believe you are more, worth more, than you actually are.  You can become convinced, by the contests and awards and books published, convinced by the honorary degrees and titles and endowed fellowships and the grants, convinced by the generous blurbs of more-famous writers, convinced by all of those things that you belong there, in Babylon, that you are one of its charter members, its citizen by birth and longing. 

            I have traveled a long way, in my life, to know who I am.  It is, I am finding, a largely circuitous journey, from the deep South to the farthest north and to the South again.  And back.  When I go somewhere else for a long time, when who-I-am and who-I-am-becoming begin to slip from me again; when the glitter and glitz of Babylon has convinced me that I am not ordinary as rain, a simple woman – like so many others – trying to make sense of a complicated life; when whatever newest Babylon I have entered, actual or imagined, turns its bright lights and smoky mirrors on me and I begin to go invisible again; when the alabaster palaces and well-engineered monuments of that place shimmer before me, when that Babylon brings its great appetites to my doorstoop and sets its hungry look on me, then I come home, to Alaska, to pitch my small tent again in the shadow of something larger than myself.  Larger even than Babylon.  I come home again to something wild and intractable and far beyond the seductions of the modern kingdoms that can lay a writer to waste and then dump whatever remains of her at the curbside like Monday morning's trash.

            It may well have been some unreasonable dream, some youthful fantasy, some "romance" of the last frontier, that brought me here all those years ago, but I suspect it’s the tidal pull of needing-to-be-true to whatever and whoever I am in my deep heart's core that has kept me circling here, to this one place I have come to think of as home, a home that I can return to, again and again – as easily as others return to the hometowns of their childhoods – coming home again to that solitariness in which I can live and write honestly, even in the first twilight of the Shadow of my own Unmaking that will step forward, wiping its hands on its apron, opening its arms to meet me, welcoming me home again, for good, one day in the not-so-distant future.

 

 

 

 

 All photos courtesy of photos.com, collection of Anne Caston

DIRT

 

Dirt

                                                    "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." – old proverb

I am someone who, early on, acquired a healthy appreciation for it.  Each morning, I am out digging in it, putting my hands into it, forging again an old relationship with dirt, the stuff of terra firma.  But a Southern woman's relationship to dirt gets to be a mixed blessing somewhere along the way, especially if that woman happens to also have been raised by devout Southern Baptists for whom "cleanliness is next to Godliness."  I have wondered about that alluded-to relationship between being clean and being close to God.

I was baptized in a sanctuary, in a baptismal pool, and the water in it was always clear, faintly blue, and heavily-chlorinated.  that water was so clean, you could have drunk it down by the glassful, made sweet tea of it, or lemonade, if only you could get past the fact that so many of us, sinners and all, had tromped down into it and had been dunked good, then raised to a newer, cleaner, more redeemed life in Christ. Or so said Preacher.  He said the water was sanctified, made clean by the power of God and faith of the saints.  And sure enough, it never seemed to get dirty, not like bathwater did after a good scrubbing.  So I thought there must be something strangely holy about it: water purified by the righteousness of God. I thought it must be something like the water-to-wine miracle of the New Testament, knowing nothing then of the importance of good filtration systems and pumps.

Nothing could grow in that water, my grandmother was fond of saying.

But just how clean is clean?  And how does one get to the kind of clean that is close to Godliness?  I wondered it often through my childhood – and I wonder about it again today, as I'm digging in the dirt of my own yard.

~

This dirt isn't the dirt of my childhood in the South:  that dirt was almost black, a rich loam thick with rolly-pollys and earthworms – those other toilers in dirt and the best natural aerators in all creation.  That dirt was the rich dirt given me, happenstance, by those who came before me, by my French ancestors: those who'd come to America to escape the displacements of the poor itinerant farming families who'd worked the lands of the country gentry until the Industrial Revolution had pushed them, finally, to the cobbled, crowded cities and mines that had almost killed them off.

For my French ancestors, the poverty of the cities had been an immense and devastating poverty.  Being poor in the countryside had at least afforded them the riches of the natural world: open skies and wide fields, meadows draped in mists, small brooks winding through thickets and trees.  Countrysides in which they could walk to chapel together on Sunday mornings and through which their children played away their early childhood years.  The wives and daughters of those itinerant farmers had spent their days and nights in fine needlework, handling the colored threads and ribbons and working the fine Irish linen into undergarments and corsets, embroidering the stiff collars and cuffs and bonnets that the gentlemen farmers' wives and daughters and infants would wear.

Flowerers, they were called, those women and girls who were my ancestors, those who did fine needlework all day while their husbands worked the fields and gardens of the landed gentry.  In that part of France, lavender fields were abundant and the young flowerers were sometimes allowed time off from their needling to go into the fields after a good harvest, to gather the fallen stalks and stems and buds that had been left behind.  From the remnants of fine linen and silk, they'd stitched and embroidered little lavender sachets, something to sweeten the rough cotton garments they'd made for themselves and tucked into the trunks they'd carried from farm to farm, something in which even the poorest among them could put away the handmade dresses and gowns and undergarments for the brides they one day hoped to be, or the batiste bonnets and dressing-gowns for the babies they imagined would one day fill their arms and their lives with something like a purpose, something like a life, something like love.

My great-grandmother, Mary Caroline Caston, from her girlhood had loved the clean pungent smell of the lavender fields.  Even in her late, invalid years – bedridden – her room smelled faintly of it, as did all her white-worked nightgowns and handkerchiefs.  She kept that fragrance of her  homeland and her youth near her all her life, thus did it, in turn, become the fragrant undercurrent that ran through the four high-ceilinged rooms of my own early childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana.  What I remember now about that house on College Street is that pervasive scent of lavender, that clean, bitten-through smell.  It alone could obliterate the damp stench of mildew always lingering behind the wallpapered walls, of rot creeping under the wooden floors, obliterate too the moldy, moth-ball smell of old wool coats and tall chifferobes.  It was a smell that I imagined heaven must be full of: like a good strong soap, a scent so strong nothing can prevail against it, not even sin.  Not even the devil and all his angels.

It's a fragrance I return to often now in making soap, a fragrance connected to my early love for her, for that bent, crippled, delicate ninety-year-old woman who I only vaguely remember now.  Whatever is left, whatever else I know of her story or of her life before she came to America, was handed down to me by her daughters who too are long-gone now, every one of them:  Annie Lou, Billie, Callie, Tiny who I never knew, and Fleecy, whose granddaughter I became.

The poverty of the French countryside had been one kind of poverty; the poverty of the cities had been a worse one.  The streets and buggies, the horse-droppings and littered streets, the factories and smoke-riddled skies, the rented rooms in which many families lived and slept and ate, the exhausted faces of the fathers, pinched and pale from days in the factories or the mines – those faces which had been ruddy with sun in the country – it was all a dire poverty for them.  Where had the wide blue sky gone? Where the good dirt smalls after a hard rain?  I once overheard my great-grandmother tell her daughters that the city, after rain, was "like putting one's nose to horse piss."

~

I made the grave mistake of repeating that once, in Shreveport, after a two-day-long siege of rain had kept my brother and me indoors.  We'd had to sit at the windows watching the colored children – that's what we called them back then – squealing and splashing, playing happily in the rain-filled gutters along the street.  White children were, as the dear great-aunties reminded us over and over, prone to ringworm so we weren't allowed to play like that in the rain.  We were relegated to sitting at the windows all day, longing for that kind of play, that kind of adventure and abandon.

I suspect it was out of some five-year-old sourness or spite in me that I muttered, at the sill, on that second afternoon of rain, "It probably smells just like horse piss out there." The parlor, full of great-aunts drinking their afternoon coffee milk-thick in demitasse cups, came to a standstill and an awkward silence moved in behind me.  Then everything broke loose at once and I got a lesson in propriety and Christian piety and a mouth-washing to remember with a rough bar of that strong, homemade lavender soap.  Even then the two – righteousness and cleanliness – were inextricably linked.

~

My French ancestors left those reeking cities eventually, boarding boats which crossed the stormy Atlantic, immigrating to American, and settling in the Louisiana Territory where the women once more resumed their delicate stitchery, their cleaning and scrubbing, their charities and church-going, and where the men and older boys returned, happily, to their hard work in the rich, loamy dirt of Southern fields.  The good Christian women and mothers undertook again, with great zeal, their former, greater work: to insure that the men-folk kept the dirt of the fields in the fields and off of their "belongings."  And to my eternal good fortune, they – as God had commanded – were fruitful and multiplied.  Prolifically.  Thus came I, somewhere along the way, into a dirt-digging, God-fearing, cleanliness-riddled family: a girl who would fall, one day, into a mad kind of love with the whole dirty and disorderly world, and, simultaneously, with the whole clean ordering of it.

~

My grandmother and mom were both meticulous women who kept their houses clean with an almost-religious zeal.  Dirt, ash, and dust were the enemies: fine for outdoors, but fatal for carpets, tile, furniture, and walls.  And nearly-catastrophic for the man – or child – who unwittingly brought such things inside.  Yet these two women also had a great affection for "growing thing:" my grandmother kept little pots of blooming snapdragons and pansies on her windowsills which she tended carefully until they were hardy enough to move to the well-tended beds outside.  Once, in her late years, a groundskeeper had cut back the English ivy clinging to the brick walls outside her living quarters and she flew at him in such outrage and fury that the neighbors still spoke of that day in awe for many year after she'd passed.

My mom, retired now, has a solarium off the back of her house where she reads her daily devotional and her Bible and prays every morning, a place where exotic potted things thrive under her care: large ferns and dieffenbachia, African violets, orchids, and other climbers whose names I do not know. It's a room which smells, faintly, of rain and potting soil, of sunshine and greenery, a damp and humid place, a place so rich in that good dirt smell it makes me tremble and almost swoon just to be in it.  In her yard, the old oak tree stands so tall now and wide, the branches catch in electric lines.  Azaleas and camellias bloom each spring across her front lawn, her pride and joy, which send my father into yearly fits of sneezing and allergies.  Her yard, like her sunroom, is a testimony to her love for the lushness of the earth, the earth from which all living things come.  And to which they will all return.

But I did not learn my love of dirt from either of those good women.  From them I learned cleanliness.  And godliness.  And silence.  And forbearance.  How to keep a stiff upper lip and a calm demeanor.  How to keep putting one tired foot in front of the other, no matter what God or the devil deals you.

I learned my love of dirt in first grade, in elementary school, where we had been instructed to save our milk cartons from the lunchroom.  We had taken the waxy, emptied, half-pint cartons back to our classroom.  We'd gathered around the pitted porcelain sink in the back of the room and, two by two, we'd filled the empty cartons with hot-as-we-could-bear-it water and soap suds, gleefully washing the milk-smells form them.  Then we'd returned to our desks and had cut off the tops – sawed them off, more accurately – with the blunt safety scissors. So we had our perfect pots for seedlings.

~

In the South, holidays are taken seriously. Not just the big ones, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, or Easter or Fourth of July.  We celebrated Hallowe'en with a devilish fervor, sparing not one of our mothers' half-spent tubes of lipstick or eyebrow pencils or old bed-sheets in our childish attempts at ghoulishness.  Each May Day, we dressed in our white shifts and petticoats and we donned our Sunday-best patent-leather shoes and lace-top socks and our mothers curled our stringy hair and braided white ribbons and flowers into it and we danced, wild as heathens, around the Maypole, throwing flower petals at the scowling boys in our class who looked on from the sidelines and muttered and wanted to be anywhere else just then.  Fishing, most of all.  And then Arbor Day was bearing down upon us, another holiday of sorts, that we could throw ourselves into: we were learning by heart the Johnny Appleseed song and Joyce Kilmer's poem, "Trees."  We were preparing the marigold and petunia seedlings for the ceremonial transplanting along the circular drive of Lane Avenue Elementary School while our parents and younger siblings looked on.  We'd march in lines, side by side, singing down the sidewalk, circling the flagpole, holding in our cupped hands the bright blooms which we had, with our own hands, planted and watered and raised.  Thus we had been excited that day as we filled our seedpots with soil from the schoolyard. . .and "dirty as devils" which was how my grandmother saw the whole ordeal when she saw the dirt crusted under my fingernails and the red clay smudged on my dress.

Devils. A delicious word.  A word that hinted at sin, something I was only just then beginning to take an interest in.

How happy I was that whole afternoon, even when I was sent straight to the bath to wash away the evidence of my uncleanness.  Dirt was, as I came to understand that day, for boys, along with snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.  Girls were to be clean and sweet and nice (not to mention well-mannered and seen-and–not-heard). Even after I'd scrubbed myself, lathering and rinsing head to toe – including even my hair which had NOT been in the dirt – in my grandmother's strong lavender-scented soap, I kept dreaming of that digging I'd done behind the schoolhouse and along the drainage ditches: how I'd dug down with my own hands, doing what I did that day with a fervor that was something like the way I prayed at six years old.  I remember this still, also the slimy earthworms that had slithered through the deeper, darker soil where I'd knelt on bare knees on the soft spongy ground and had worked earnestly under the hot Florida sun to find the deepest, richest, moistest dirt with which to fill my waxy seedpot.

~

There is a smell to the earth when you get down that deep. . .like rainwater and rot mixed up together.  Like things fermenting.  Or decomposing.  It excites and disturbs me, that smell, in a curious way I cannot explain, something like the excitement and agitation I feel when I step close to the precipice edge of a high cliff.  A feeling like dread and pleasure, one inextricable from the other.  A whiff of near-disaster rising from the heat of any ordinary Southern day.

Those who grow up in the South come to know, sooner or later, that dirt is the final consolation of being mortal.  I went to my first funeral when I was seven where I watched a man toss a handful of dirt into an open grave.  I didn't know why he did that.  Preacher was saying something about "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and women were weeping openly.  The men looked uncomfortable scratching or pulling at their tight stiff collars.  Behind us all, in the hot midday sun of Florida in June, two thin Negro men leaned on shovels.  The summer air rang with mosquitoes and heat.

~

And how many handfuls of dirt did I see, in my youth, thrown onto the coffins of boys with whom I'd grown up?  One by one, two by two, they'd gone off to the war.  They'd come home again from Viet Nam, some of them, in wooden crates or body bags, some in pieces so scarce – a jawbone, some teeth, a  splintered femur, dog tags – a shoebox would have been sufficient for the burial.  Lord only knows why those families paid dear money for the elegant, mahogany, satin-lined caskets.  Maybe for the boys they each had been.  Maybe for the men they would have become had the war not come for them first.  Maybe it was some gesture of consolation.  For themselves, perhaps. Or for us.  Or maybe it was so that, on that great getting-up morning at the end of time, those boys could blink and sigh and find themselves, for once, in something more extravagant than anything their lives had afforded them.

For the better part of eleven years, I gathered with friends and families at gravesides and stared at my feet, too stunned to cry myself, as the grieving mothers or girlfriends or young widows tossed a rose – white or red – into the open hole in the ground, or as the stoop-shouldered fathers or sad-faced brothers and sons tossed a handful of dirt into the open grave and crossed themselves after.  It was our job then, the job of the survivors, to turn away, to turn back toward our lives.  And so we did.  But didn't the solid, too-final thud of that thrown clod also follow us away?  Didn’t the fragrance of the deep, mossy earth trail behind us at a distance for years, like a last faithful dog, like some ghost of the time-to-come?  And wasn't it then that all the old notions of godliness and cleanliness shifted on some axis of loss and sorrow and tilted us toward some fiercer, more desperate love for the earth and our brief lives on it?

Whenever we returned – IF we returned – to those graveyards in the seasons to come, soft grasses shifted in the wind, blurring the hard edges of the dark trenches we'd remembered.  Only the markers placed there - the headstones - had let us find our way back to the ones we'd loved and lost.  Here lies. . .Beloved son. . .Rest in peace. . . .

My oldest son, Scott, lost his dog some years back, a Sheltie named Lady.  She'd lived with him for many years, outlasting several girlfriends, outlasting the roommates who had come and gone, through the campus classes and parties.  We'd given her to him when he'd gone to college at Towson, to help stave off the loneliness he sometimes felt being far away from his hometown.  She'd died anyway, of cancer, though he'd spent all of his savings to get her the operation that might save her.  Then he'd gone to see her at the vet's that afternoon and she'd seen him and stood, wobbling over to him, wagging her rump and lying down on her back so he could see – and stroke – the long incision where she'd been opened, emptied of the tumor, and sewn shut again.  He'd been looking forward to bringing her home again.  He'd talked softly to her before he left that afternoon, saying over and over what a good dog she was, assuring her – as if she could understand him – that he'd return on the morrow and take her home again.  He'd stroked her shaved belly a last time before he left.  That night, she died in her sleep.  He's had her cremated and says that one day – when I settle down in one place for good – maybe he'll bury her ashes under the roses in my garden.

~

Word has come, from Alaska, that my friend is dying. There is nothing to be done.  It is going to happen whether any of us agree to it or not, whether the new drug can stay the ravenous course of the cancer another year or two, or whether the Gleevec, like the Temozolomide, will fail.  I try not to think of my friend's family, gathered around an open grave when the ground has thawed sufficiently to allow a burial, his wife holding a thorny rose, his eldest son reaching for a clod of dirt, his youngest son looking down at his feet, lost and emptied of words.  I, who am fierce enough to look at almost anything, am not ready, yet, for that.  So this morning, I forego the spade and the trowel.  I dig way down through the silt, through the damp clay flecked with limestone, through to the layer of rocks ad stones and left-over concrete chunks someone buried here years ago. I dig and dig, until a little dark water pools at the bottom of the hole. I dig until my fingernails break off and my crooked spine throbs and my finger-joints ache, working to make this plot of dirt amenable, as I've promised, making it a well-turned bed for the roses and peonies, making what might become a suitable resting-place for the ashy remains of my son's dog and the two loved cats who have also passed.

I'll tell anyone who stops to ask me this morning that I am preparing to plant roses.  And maybe I am, though it is possible that I am only practicing: edging closer and closer to the old terror of what-comes-after, learning to stomach it, the idea of it, moving relentlessly down through the dirt.  Past the cleanliness.  Past the godliness.  Past the whole crazy way we return to the earth, in the end, whether we want to or not.  This morning I am going down deeply into it, leaning into it while I can still smell it, while all my senses can still reel with the heady, dangerous feel of it, whatever the it is.  Going bare-handed and dirt-fisted at it while I still can.  Before it comes for my friend.  Before it comes for anyone else I love.  Before it comes for me.

 

all photos from the collection of Anne Caston

roses courtesy of Getty; window by iStock.com

headstone photo courtesy of Jan Bronsdoka

"Litany" a poem by Billy Collins as recited by a 3-year-old

Oh, graduate poets and friends!  Listen to this darling rendition of Collins' poem.  He puts us ALL to shame (including Collins) with this recitation!  Enjoy, Anne

P.S.  Copy and paste this into your browser to get to the YouTube site player for the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVu4Me_n91Y&feature=player_embedded

Lives and Half-Lives: A Love Story

 

Lives & Half-Lives: A Love Story

I once saw a small boy stop cold on an Alabama sidewalk when he saw a half-brick in his path: just a common red building brick with dirty white mortar still stuck to its sides.  He had been chatting about something happily, holding fast to his mother's hand, but when the brick presented itself, he dropped her hand, forgetting her completely, as he was struck by the half-brick there before him on the concrete walkway of the city.  He squatted down to look at it more closely. 

 Huh!? he gasped, expelling all the air in his mouth and lungs quickly like someone who's been sucker-punched.  He was in an altered state.  State of awe.  Or reverence.  Or wonder.  Whatever it was that so captivated him about that half-brick, his mother had a dickens of a time pulling him off of it.  No matter what she said about its worthlessness ("It's just an old brick" and "There are hundreds of them in that building over there") he sat there staring and staring at it, as if it were gold. Finally, though, and because she was growing impatient with him, the boy let her take his hand again and move him on down the sidewalk towards wherever it was they were heading that morning, though the boy continued looking backwards, over his shoulder, at that dislodged, busted brick until the two of them rounded a corner and were no longer in sight.

It occurred to me that the boy had remarkable vision – not sight, mind you, but vision, that seeing-beyond what is visible to the ordinary eye.  He was asking the deep questions about what had fallen in his path.  He was seeing the possibilities, mulling them over.  Wondering.

I taught my first writing class in 1997 at St. Mary's College of Southern Maryland – a workshop of twelve aspiring young writers.  After a few weeks of workshop, the students struck me as an unusually uninspired bunch:  they disliked the work of writing, though they often spoke dreamily of what it would be like to be published and "famous."  And worse, I was beginning to detect traces, in their writings, of boredom with the known world, that old ho-hum of the jaded cynic. In discussions, they mostly complained about the literary canon, mocking what was, claiming they would write and breathe life into the literary world, something radical and "new."  They were the self-proclaimed revolutionaries of contemporary American literature.  They had adopted, for themselves, dull green and brown t-shirts with the face of Che Guevara on the front and they wore those shirts to campus with great pride, though I doubted they really understood anything about Guevara's revolution.  Even then, I knew how easy it is to speak of making a difference in the world from the comfort of an air-conditioned, well-lit, well-appointed corner of academia.

So I thought I'd take them out of that comfortable element one day, that I'd get them out of the classroom with its polished veneer conference table and gray upholstered chairs, and I'd get them - and their backsides - back in touch with the nitty-gritty of the actual world.  I wouldn't even have to take them very far: just out into the courtyard, to the bell-tower and brick walkways of the college itself.  I borrowed, from a colleague in the sciences, a Geiger-Mueller Detector – colloquially-known as a Geiger Counter – and I led the twelve young writers out into the bright afternoon sun, to the little bricked square under the north clock-tower.  It was a warm day in Southern Maryland, but not uncomfortably so.  And this wasn't about "comfort" anyway, I reminded myself. I had them sit down on the bricked walks and instructed them to just listen to the bricks around them, to be out there among them, to touch them, to put their ears against the wall and walkways, and to listen to the stories the bricks had to tell.  After half an hour or so, we'd gather back under the clock tower and they'd have to tell us all the "story" the bricks had told them. 

I saw the side-long glances they threw each other as they turned to walk up and down along the brick walks and walls that made up the little courtyard, that old Oh-my-God-why-does-she-have-us-doing-this look.  So the half-hour passed uneventfully and they gathered back under the clock-tower, sitting dutifully down in a circle and leaving a little extra space, for good measure, between me and the ones on either side of me: just like they did each Wednesday afternoon in the classroom.  When I asked who wanted to go first, I was surprised to see them pulling sheets of paper from their notebooks and pockets.  After all, I'd said we'd tell each other the stories, not write them down. But I kept quiet and let it play itself out, for better or worse.

Then, as one after another read their "stories," I could see they had not only written them down, they'd also been revising them, editing and changing them along the way, scratching out a word here and there, inserting paragraphs in the margins, drawing little arrows so they'd remember the order.  All this in half an hour!  One brick, it turned out, had a step-mother who rivaled Cinderella's in cruelty.  Another had a recent heartache.  Another, unrequited love.  Another brick spoke only in gerunds, no nouns, no actual verbs. all single words down the left-hand margin of the page, something faintly resembling a poem.  One brick was giving the listener the cold shoulder, refusing to talk.  Another told a story about a frat party-gone-wrong and all its morning-after regrets. 

What a coincidence:  the bricks were telling the same stories the young writers had been telling, in obscure poetry or dull prose, for weeks now.

When all the stories had been shared aloud, I stood up. I took the small Geiger Counter out of the brown grocery sack I'd brought out to the courtyard with me.  I turned the dial and walked up and down the bricks of the columns, the bricks of the walkways, the bricks of the walled structures.  I ran the sensor over the newer bricks of the clock tower.  It chattered, sometimes slowly, sometimes a little more quickly.  Chattered.  It was the only sound around us.  For a long time, it seemed, no one spoke.  Only the bricks were talking.

I kept my silence too, putting the Geiger Counter back into the sack again and taking my place again among the students.  And in the awkward weightiness of my silence - something which they could never bear for long - their questions began:  Are bricks radioactive?  Why?  Is this something to be worried about – after all, the college is mostly brick?  What does this have to do with writing?  Is this some metaphor?

And so on.  And so forth.

When they had ceased their chattering, I took out a cassette player on which I'd recorded what two of my sons and two friends of theirs had said the night before when I'd brought them out there and put them through the exercise as a sort of "test run" for today's lesson.  Here's what they'd said:

1.  These bricks are foreigners.  They don't speak English so they can only talk to the ivy and the gnats.  Sure, they might be telling the gnats and mosquitoes their stories, but I can't understand a single word.  It's like when my mom and dad fight: I don't know what the words mean.  I just wanna get outta there.

2.  If I ever do something terrible and it starts to eat me up, I will come out here and tell my horrible secret to these bricks.  They keep everybody's secrets.  Even their own.

3.  Today I have a headache and a sore throat, so I have to whisper.  I think I might have an earache too because all I hear when I put my ear against this brick is ticking.  Like a little clock.  Like a big fat time-bomb ready to go off.

4.  My mom's a little nuts.  She thinks bricks can tell a story.  That just proves how nuts she is.  Now all of us guys are starting to act nutty too, because we don't want to hurt her feelings or make her cry.  Knowing my mom, I bet she comes out here sometimes and listens to this wall.  I bet when nobody is looking, she gets down on her hands and knees and puts her ear down to this brick walk, just like the Indians used to do when they were listening for the calvary [sic] to come riding in.  I don't hear a thing, but I bet she does. She's always listening for something.  That's how nuts she is.

The boys and I had continued to sit there for a long time in the courtyard, chatting amiably, while the dusk descended and the gnats swarmed and made little tornado shapes in the air around us.  We laughed and laughed at each others' stories and we made up a few more just for the fun of it.  We were strangely happy.  Full of that giddy, silly feeling that comes over you when you just feel the pleasure of playing with words and ideas and you're not being graded for it.  When it got dark and the mosquitoes, the little blood-suckers, came out in earnest, we all piled back into my old yellow station wagon and drove into Lexington Park for ice cream sundaes, my treat to them for having helped me out with the lesson.  It seemed a fitting ending to a good evening together: something sweet with a lot of calories. 

When the sundaes were brought to the table, one of the boys asked the waitress if she could see anything in his ear.  Like what? she asked, squinting up her face and peering into his ear canal.  Oh, he answered, brick dust.  Or gnats.  She backed off to a safe distance and the boys laughed at her reaction.  Their version of a  little inside joke.

But that afternoon on campus, after the actual class lesson was over and the workshop time was up, my undergrads patiently packed their notebooks and folded their notes into their backpacks and book-bags, stood up, and dusted the dirt from their purposely-tattered jeans before stumbling off to their next classes.  They seemed unhappy to have been upstaged by four little boys and a Geiger Counter.  I felt like the worst teacher ever.  What had I been thinking?  By the time they get to higher education, students have been too well-schooled to just let go and enjoy anything ever again, in the classroom at least.  Grades are at stake here.  Scholarships. Degrees.  Careers and salaries are attached to everything they are working for. How, by then, can you un-teach them all those well-learned lessons so they can learn how to see something wondrous again in the world and in themselves, and to marvel at it with something akin to pleasure?  How can you introduce them to the new old world all over again, these little self-proclaimed revolutionaries of literature?  I didn't know.  I still don't know.  It's like explaining how to fall in love:  it can't be done directly.  You have to tell it slant.  And my slant on it all had failed so utterly, it hurt a little.  From life to half-life, just like that.

In the years since that afternoon, I have wondered often at those students' lack of wonder, their absence of delight.  It troubles me.  Deeply.  What had jaded them so at such a young age, what hurt them so deeply that they had walled off their hearts and couldn't even hear the ticking underneath it all – that little time-bomb of mortality? I wondered what they made of that lesson and the chattering bricks, wondered if it has ever even occurred to them.

Not long ago, a letter arrived in my campus office in Alaska: it was from a young man who'd been in that undergraduate writing workshop.  He was writing to tell me that he'd gone on to earn his BA in Language and Literature, a MS in Nuclear Physics and then, later, his Doctor of Divinity degree, that he was married with a son and was working now as a minister for a small church in upper New York State.  He wrote that he'd thought about that lesson in the courtyard from time to time and it bothered him that he thought he'd missed something important in it.  He'd learned, somewhere along the way, about that radiation in the bricks, about the process of brick-making, and the lives and half-lives of the radioactive ore used to make them.  He went on to tell me about how the ore that is used in refractory brick is commonly found alongside the presence of naturally-occurring radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium.  These bricks aren't dangerous, he assured me, even though they emit enough of a "pulse" to sometimes send a Geiger Counter chattering.  Not dangerous, that is, unless one was to crush the brick into a fine powder and dust and then expose humans to it. 

His letter went on to discuss what he'd learned of the lives and half-lives of some common elements: Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years whereas the half-life of Uranium-230 is somewhere around 4.5 billion years. Imagine that, he wrote, a half-life of four-and-a-half billion years! 

I thought I heard, just then, something like wonder creeping into his voice.  He'd finally, all these years later, started the conversation I'd hoped to have on that spring afternoon in Southern Maryland.  And had I been so inclined, I would have written back to him about my experience with some of the half-lives of medicine's nuclear discoveries, like those which use Iodine-131 which has a half-life of only 8 days: what procedures it is used in and what we can see  in its "ghost" as it travels whitely through the human body.  But I didn't tell him that story.  Anyone could have told him that one.  I had a different tale to tell. A story about how the earth was made and how it still ticks wildly with a radioactivity that's been there from its birth. It's a good story, I think, and as plausible as any.  It was a story I thought a young minister might appreciate.

I have a story for you too, I wrote back to him yesterday, about the chattering bricks.  They have been made, like us, from the earth – the dust and ash and the clay and spittle of it – the earth, which is also made up of naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORMs, they are called, and how appropros that acronym seems).  The bricks' story, I went on, is the story of the earth.  Their story begins almost where the dead sea scrolls began their story: " In the beginning, God, the heavens, and the earth. . . ."

It gets me to thinking, today, about how most things seem to retain some of the characteristics of their making, like us, like humans, both those ticking, volatile, detectable elements and the silent mysteries of creation and what things have put us through the fire, have forged us, have made us who we are.  We have the imprint of our making all over us, the fingermarks of creation, literal and figurative. So much is still unknown to us, so much still to wonder at and about in the crumbling mortar of our world and ourselves. And what of writers, those of us who tell the stories, compose the poems:  who among us can mark the time, the precise moment, when that thing we call our life meets the moment of our half-life, that moment where the steady and precise decline into the final silence begins, that moment when the chatter of our lives grows faint, then fainter, and then is no longer discernible to any listening ear?  

 

photo by Anne Caston, taken in St. Mary's City, Maryland 

Kitchen Mercies: Remembering the Maker (and a secret BONUS, a soap-making recipe, and visual tour of the process)

Fleecy Lavinia Caston Philyaw, in the 1940s

Today is soap-making day.  The kitchen smells bittery and sweet, a mix of the lime and the sugar (I'm making Lime Rickey Goats Milk Soaps) and, smelling that sweet lime fragrance all day, I just want to eat the refrigerator empty.  Something that smells this good ought to be edible. I'm sure something about this fragrance will be deadly for my waistline if I'm not careful.

Today, while I stir soap, I am remembering my grandmother, Fleecy Lavinia Caston, and am grateful for how she passed the old ways down to me when I was a girl:  about soap-making, about tatting and sewing, and especially how to take threadbare scraps and bits of fabric and put them together with cotton thread and a silver needle so tiny you could barely see it, all in hopes of making something beautiful and functional as a quilt. One winter afternoon when I was four, she showed me how to make a doll from a cotton diaper, embroidering the face by hand, using yarn for hair, wrapping it all into a blanket remnant so I had a baby doll which, at that age, I wanted very much. I thought it was a miracle.  I hope I thanked her for it.  

My grandmother never had much, not in the years I knew her anyway, but she certainly knew how to be grateful for the things she did have: for good friends, for a simple home-cooked meal like turnip greens, and for a piece of sweet cornbread crumbled into a cold glass of buttermilk. She saved her pennies and, once a month or so, we'd put on our "walking shoes" and walk the hot mile or so to the Woolworth's - she called it the "five-and-dime store" -  where she'd buy herself a spool of tatting thread and treat me to rock candy on a stick. She knew the value of a clean conscience and a good night's sleep and a peaceful heart and I think she may have passed a longing for those things along to me, though I admit here to you today that those lessons were slow in coming to me.

Today, I'm recalling that, as much as she taught me how to piece and quilt, how to make soap and "make do," she also taught me about being kind to others, about minding my manners, about having a thankful heart, and that mercy is sometimes better than justice.  It isn't that she talked to me about any of these things directly; rather, I watched her live these things out in front of me as I grew from being a small girl into young womanhood.  I noticed how she was kind to everyone we encountered in our walks and in the stores or at the post office, even kind to people who weren't always so kind to her.  She delighted in people, with ALL their quirks.  She never forgot to smile at and thank the boys who held the door for her or bagged her groceries, those who complimented her, or those neighbors who stopped by to bring her a potted geranium or a slice of pie.  And what seems most uncommon was how she always liberally dished out mercy for me when she might have just as easily judged me.  I appreciated that about her most of all, I think.  I was awkward, shy, prone to blushing and stammering, easily flustered and frustrated, and she acted as if I were the smartest, most clever, best thing she'd ever had come into her life.  Everyone needs someone like that in a childhood, and I was fortunate to have her. I know that now; I knew it then.

It's only natural that I think of her today, here in my old farmhouse kitchen in central Pennsylvania, bare-footed, an apron tied around my hips as I pour and measure (haphazardly, letting my nose be the guide, as she taught me) the goats milk and the fragrance oils, stirring the hot soap in a warped aluminum pan until the mix is smooth and milky and setting up, then pouring it into molds. Even when I am the only one home, I am never alone on days when I make soap: it's almost as if I feel her here, next to me, as I stir and pour the hot soap into molds.  I can almost hear her gravelly voice over my shoulder as she inhales deeply,  muttering, Umm-umm.  Now THAT'S something to write home about. 

BONUS:  Here's a recipe and a visual walk-through of the soap-making project in my kitchen.  This recipe is for making the Tart Lemonade Goats Milk Soaps.

Recipe (per bar of soap):

1.  Place the following into a steel or aluminum pan:

8 cubes of solid glycerin

1 TBSP of sweet almond oil

1 TBSP of grapeseed oil

1 TBSP of Mango Butter (or Almond Butter, if you prefer that, or both)

1/2 TBSP of shea butter

1 tsp of honey powder - optional

2.  Heat all ingredients over LOW heat on the stove-top until the mix is melted.  (Stir gently throughout the heating process - not so hard or fast that you get a froth on top of the soap.)

3.  When the mix is fully melted, remove the soap mix from the heat and sift in powdered goats milk (about 1/4 cup per bar), stirring it in until smooth and creamy.

4.  Add the fragrance oil, using a dropper (I add in about 8 droppersful of the Tart Lemon fragrance, per bar).

5.  Stir thoroughly and pour immediately into individual soap molds.

6.  Allow the bars to set up (approx. 24 hours).

7.  Release the bars from the molds and set them out in the air to cure (three - six hours more, depending on the humidity level that day).

8.  Wrap the bars using your own signature style of papers and store in a cool, dry place (a refrigerator works great for this, or a root cellar).

The Photographic/Visual "How-To" follows:

Step One:  Assembling the ingredients and tools

Step Two:  Cooking and stirring together the fats and glycerin

Step Three:  Measuring out and sifting in the powdered goats milk

Step Four:  Pouring the hot soap mix into molds

Step Five: Setting the finished bars out to "cure" in the air

Step Six:  Wrapping the cured soaps with Savannah Blues' signature wax-lined, preprinted papers

Step Seven:  Preparing the rest of the Savannah Blues' wrappings.

Step 8:  Preparing to add the postmarks

Step Nine:  The finished bars, wrapped

The Final Step:  Because I also have an online shop (Savannah Blues Shop) at the Etsy site, I have to finish by taking a photograph of the soap in a setting for use in the online catalogue.

Down South

August 6th - I'm somewhere around the Mason-Dixon line today, writing and scouting around my old stomping grounds with the camera while Ian is hard at work in the office.  It is HOT down here: check out this photo of my car's dashboard this afternoon:

The postcard version would read:  Having a great time, snakes and all.  Wish you were here!  xoxo Anne 

via annecast.typepad.com

Deep Thoughts in Deep Dixie

Deep Thoughts, Deep Dixie 

This morning I wrote to a friend that I was returning today to a ruined homestead I'd stumbled upon yesterday in the woods near Cecil's Mill in Southern Maryland.  I told her how the little shack was perched on a muddy ledge near a running creek, that the tin roof was rusted and coming apart, that the whole back side of the house had fallen away  – that it all had probably tumbled into the creek below it years ago – and that I had been able to see right through the back of it and into the trees beyond.  I told her about the rusted padlock on what had once been a front door with one of those old knobs that you see for sale in antique stores all over the country.  I described for her the rotting timbers of the door and the busted windows and how the one dingy white curtain that remained hung still, torn and in tatters, at the window.

 How interesting, she wrote back, Tell me more.

 So I told her I'd send her a link to the piece I was writing on the new blog about the little house I'd found and that she could see the photographs of it there too.

 Blog?  YOU have a blog? she wrote back in capital letters with several exclamation points at the end. (Despite everyone's complaints to the contrary, it's pretty easy to read tone in an email. I'd have gotten her drift right away, but she went on.)

Oh blogs, she wrote back to me, what a nuisance they are: all those ridiculously deep thoughts…like what some woman had for a midnight snack, or how a man is thinking of leaving his wife because he has "fallen in love" with the wife of his best friend.  What some 16-year-old Valley girl had for breakfast. Who got new boobs and how much it cost her old man. . . .

How simple it is, then, to ridicule the lives of others, and what is important to them. I wondered if this is how everyone feels, secretly, but doesn't have the heart – or tactlessness – to say so.

 Still, I have to admit it made me think back to that scene in the movie, Julie & Julia. You remember it: the moment where Julie steps out of her little kitchen and announces to her husband, "I have thoughts.  I could write a blog."

As if to merely have thoughts is the essence of writing.  As if "I-think-therefore-I-am" is sufficient to keep anyone interested in the story you are telling.

 And maybe it is.  For some.   But my thoughts don't run that deep.  (Or that shallow.)  Whatever this wild river is that I'm on right now, I'm going with the current of it and hanging on to any drifting thing nearby to keep myself afloat.  But she got me to thinking – again – about why I'm writing.  It's not as if I have hundreds of readers.  I have a scant handful of people who read these postings regularly and most of them are good friends and even some of them read the stuff I write, I suspect, out of reckless pity and compassion: 

 Oh dear.  Anne's doing that writing thing again. . . .

 Let's be honest here: my life is full-to-bursting as it is.  Why take on one more writing assignment each week?  Why crawl around in the woods and climb into the rotting haylofts of old tobacco barns; why hang at the frozen edge of a fence waiting for muskox to step forward from the ice-fog or watch the cat studying the wasp's nest in the eaves with great interest; why pay such relentless attention to all the small, ordinary things as I'm inclined to do? Why do all that if there isn't some story waiting there, patient as eternity, for someone – maybe me – to discover it and bring it into the raw light-of-the-world-we-live-in-now?  

Why leave the muggy woods and the tangle of underbrush you spent all afternoon picking your way through – red-faced, thirsty, jeans muddy and your shoes wrecked with river mud – just to settle back into a car and discover a snake has settled himself there on the floorboard, seeking out a little cool shade, while you were out traipsing through the underbrush?  Why throw yourself out onto the ground then, thrashing about in terror, though your brain has already registered that it's only a little green snake.  Harmless.  Well, nearly harmless except for the heart-failure you experienced when he suddenly slithered under the gas pedal near your foot.  At best, it was embarrassing.  And no one even saw it: you flailing around on the ground like that, hung half-in/half-out of the Land Rover like you were having some sort of grand mal seizure in the dirt at the side of the road. 

 Maybe I write because, as the physical body fails and the soul's dwelling-place washes down to almost-nothing-left-now, it seems I still have words to serve as some little channel marker on the sea that indicates I was here, in this time, in this century, in this place or that. Here or there.  Snooping around in the woods or the cool caves or along the mud-banks of the rivers.  Poking my nose into other people's business - or what's left of it anyway.  

 My father says that my four children are what will be left of me and I should be happy with that.  Maybe he's right.  I don't know.  I know I prefer not to burden them with all that.  I gave them their lives once, rather ingloriously: strapped to a gurney on my back, my sock feet up in the gleaming stirrups, pushing each one of them into the blue-white light and sterile chrome of the delivery room in the latter quarter of the last century.  I named them.  And then, when they grew up and became who they wanted to be, I sent them out again with my blessings into their own happinesses and troubles.  They will have enough to do, I suspect, without having to be some kind of living memorial to their mother.

But these writings, these notes, the two books I have written and published and the ones still to be written – Lord willing and the creek don't rise, as my people are wont to say, setting the blessing over the curse – these are some odd version of a ship's journal, I think, something I'll leave behind when the tide of what-is-coming finally takes me under.  Every poem, every essay, every blog-piece lets those who come after me know some things about who I was and the moment in history in which I lived out my life.  It lets them see the map and the stars I steered by.  Where I went. What I saw.  What I heard or overheard. What spoke to me over the din and dull racket  of this world and all its machinery.

Here, it will say on one waterlogged page, I was here today.  I saw this. I heard that.  This thing troubled me. I gave myself over to that.  And there, right there, is where I made it through a dark storm.  Here, I was swept overboard.  I traveled for a time in the dark, quiet belly of Leviathan. I had a sea-change there.  Only the moon looked on. And here, here is where I was swept away. . . .

 And alongside those entries will be others too, entries not so much about me:  You were with me here.  I saw you there, from a distance. You waved to someone.  You seemed happy.  I almost knew you. I lost you there.  I've placed a marker for you here. . . .

Archives

All the entries have now been transferred from the old blog host to this TypePad site.  Feel free to look over them or not - they all follow this note below.  I'll be putting up a new post later tonight or first thing in the morning, depending on how long it takes me to download the photographs I took in Southern Maryland and to make thumbnails of them.

Back at you soon, 

 Anne

Crossing The Devil's Heart

"Now you must go out into your own heart as onto a vast plain."

                                                                                     - Rainer Maria Rilke

If you look at my birth certificate, you will know some things about me. You will see that I was born in May, 1953; that I was the first-born – a daughter – of Thomas Caston Philyaw (20 years of age) and Ruth Ann Philyaw (17 years of age); that I was born in the Ouachita Memorial Hospital in Clark County; that I was a "live" birth; and that the town of my birth was Arkadelphia, in Arkansas.

And that is all true. Or mostly true. The part that isn't accurate, not exactly, is the name of that town: Arkadelphia – Arkadelphia, which is now one of the "Fifty Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family," according to the City of Arkadelphia website. What isn't there - either on my birth certificate or on the website - is the name by which the town used to be known: Arkadelphia is the sanitized name of the that little town set on a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains. Every map you look at now will point to that place as Arkadelphia. But the original name was a bit more precise, a bit less Baptist, a town named first by the early Scottish and Irish settlers in the region, a name that spoke to the wild nature of the place. The town had been renamed Arkadelphia by the good Methodists and Baptists who settled there much later and who had been much unsettled by the town's former name: Devil's Heart.

Those first Scots and Irish named the town Devil's Heart for the way sudden and terrible storms originated there in the little gully town between the mountains and the river below them. Violent storms seemed to come up out of nowhere, moving outward in all directions from there, devastating the outlying tenant farms and homesteads, leaving houses splintered and crops uprooted and scattered. Lightning struck the trees and set wild-fires among the thick forests; tornadoes set the treetops whirling and lifted shanties off their dirt floors; animals, it is said, went mad with fright when thunder rumbled underground, thunder that occurred with the regularity of freight trains. Rumor has it that in the foothills, in the hardest wintry years, babies were born ruined or stillborn. And once, in a freak summer windstorm, a weathervane spun so hard it lifted off and circled a barn-yard before flying into the window of a sharecropper's shack.

No wonder they named it as they had. No wonder it stuck, that name. No wonder the old-timers whispered that name - Devil's Heart - and crossed themselves after saying it. And so I come, later in my life, to the truth of my birthplace and my birthright: I was born in that stormy place, dead-center of the Devil's Heart which is, it seems, somewhere in Arkansas.

 

Recess

                 

  RECESS

     Below the open window where I work at my desk today, from across the schoolyard playground of a local church school where the teacher leads the preschoolers through a game of Mother-May-I, the loud voices of children drift upward to me and to my cat who sits in the window while I work each morning and who finds small children odd and frightening when they're too close in proximity to him. But, from such a safe distance as this, and looking down from such a height, the cat is more curious today than disturbed.

     When the teacher is called away, when she steps back inside the building, Julio changes the game, changes even the terms of the game. No more Mother-May-I? No more civilized, orderly entreaties. No more call and response. No more polite steps forward - baby steps or giant steps - no more please and thank you.

    "You're it!" he shouts and punches Emma's shoulder - punches her so hard her blonde braids bounce forward then back. Julio has run off screaming and the playground breaks down into bedlam. The other preschoolers squeal, and scatter like buckshot.

            That Julio is trouble. Just ask his teacher: she'll tell you, just like she tells him every morning on this playground right before she sends him to a time-out on the concrete stoop. That boy spends as much time watching the play as he does actually playing.

            The tagged girl - the new, blonde "it" - stands there for a moment, rubbing her shoulder, her crumpling face looking for all the world as if she'll cry. But then she clenches her small fists and screeches, "Ready or not, here I come," and she sprints off across the playground in the direction of the arbor vitae and the oak thicket between my side yard and the church school playground where Julio headed seconds ago. The other preschoolers disappear, laughing, crouching behind thick tree trunks and bushes and the gardener's shed at the back of the property. I see that Emma has stepped through the arbor vitae and has a hold on Julio's shirt collar. He looks surprised to see her there, and to see how determined she is to have her revenge on him, cooties or not. He's learning something right now, something even a blind man could read on his astonished face: don't mess with girls. And I chuckle and say to the cat that Julio's face looks just like the faces of a few men who have tangled with me over the years.

            And just as the hide-and-seek, tag-you're-it silence falls over the schoolyard, the teacher steps out again. Seeing none of her charges where she left them, she grabs her whistle from her pocket and blows it three times loudly. I hate that whistle. I hate it even more today as, one by one, the children re-emerge and stagger out again into the bright hot sun - all but Julio and Emma who, having heard the teacher's shrill warning - are crouching now on my side of the arbor vitae watching the others line up, boys to the right of the long line, girls to the left, facing the teacher. It strikes me as a peculiar gesture for Church of Christers: more like Southern Baptists, in its tradition of separation of the genders almost from birth. The children aren't talking, so she pulls one boy roughly from the line and shoves him toward the church door. Going for the principle, I suppose, or maybe the pastor.

            Good, I think to myself; now someone will rescue them from this beakish woman with the sharp face and shrill voice, this woman who pushes a little boy in front of his schoolmates today. What I am working on falls away, seems suddenly unimportant, as two little girls begin to sob and the woman waxes on and on, demanding to know who changed the game and why they all followed along. And that is when the boy returns and a small man in a starched white dress shirt and tie steps out beside the woman and joins the inquisition.

            "Who started this?" he wants to know and I am thinking how you could slice open the fear in the stiff unyielding morning air of the playground. The teacher's brow has drawn itself into almost-precise alignment with her frown. There'll be no mercy from her - and haven't I seen her, heard her, single out the boy every school day as I've sat here at this window, working. He's missed more recess than any of the other children. That concrete stoop should have a sign on it that reads, Reserved for Julio.

            I don't recall, just now, exactly when it first occurred to me - when I first noticed - that the bird-faced woman sends him from the play at precisely the instant he chases the little girls. The girls always shriek and squeal, Cooties! and they run, hand in hand, away from him. ALL the little preschool boys do this, of course, chase the little girls at playtime; it is their one greatest joy and delight, to chase and terrorize the girls. But only Julio gets sent to time-out on the stoop for doing it. Gorgeous Julio, brown-skinned, nappy-haired. Julio, who sets off some tsunami in the skinny, hard-faced woman who teaches preschoolers here.

            So it is in this moment - "just like that," as my grandmother used to say in wonder and astonishment when something extraordinary seizes someone like me - just like that, I decide to be the angel of this playground. No others have appeared - and who can say what will happen once they line up and march again over that doorway, back into the classroom, beyond the ordinary angels who would intervene on their behalf.

            I take the stairs, two at a time, push through the back screen door, and feel the cool of the old farmhouse fall away to the heat of the yard. I cross to the side-yard, to where the two preschoolers are crouching side by side now. When my shadow falls over them, they squint up at me and rise together. Julio takes Emma's hand in his. She looks at him with a kind of gratitude. And now they look at me. And this is when I see it: the fear in their eyes. What, in the four or five years of their short lives, has frightened them like this about adults? Or is it that I am a stranger - and they've surely had that talk from everyone by now.

            Shhh, I say, and motion to them while I check the situation on the playground. It'll be okay. I promise. Come with me. Stay close. I take one of their small hands, each, in mine and walk them around the arbor vitae thicket, towards the playground, towards the stern woman and the officious-looking man who is sweating now in wide, wet circles under his arms, down his sides, and along his thin chest. The birdish woman is too intent on fixing the children in her stern glare to notice me at first. And the man is shaking his finger at the sky - a warning, perhaps, about God's displeasure. Or maybe how He sees everything and knows who started this.

            Only the line of preschoolers sees us standing there. And maybe because they are staring openly now at the three of us, the two adults turn and notice us too. They seem word-struck, unable to say anything. It seems to me that this might be the perfect time to return the two preschoolers to their proper places. I tuck Emma into place among the other girls and push her braids back over her shoulders. Then I take Julio's gritty, chubby hand in mine again and walk him down the line. I tuck him into place among his friends, these other boys who also have cooties and chase girls and make them run away. And because my back is to the two adults, I wink at him and smile my biggest smile at the other boys who are slack-jawed, looking with a kind of wonder at the tall woman in torn jeans and flip flops and an oversized man's dress shirt with paint all over it. I must look like a giant to them. And I must look gigantic too to the small thin woman with the pinched look on her face and the fragile-looking headmaster - or minister - both of whom are at least a head shorter than I am.

            I turn back to the two adults, and look over the rim of my bookish-looking glasses, fixing them in my stern amber stare, hoping they feel something, in this moment, strangely akin to how these preschoolers must surely feel most days. I ask them both quietly who is in charge here and who left such small children unattended here, on this playground so near a busy road. Then I go silent because I know that silence is more unnerving than words in moments like this one. And because something slightly wicked in me - some old, odd ghost of the frightened girl I once was - enjoys the discomfort I see on their faces. And because I think, today, these children need to see that this too is possible.

            The headmaster apologizes for any "inconvenience" the children have caused me and assures me that they teach them, at this school, not to bother the neighbors. Interesting, since I am the only one whose property borders this churchyard. The beakish woman takes up the man's note, saying something about how surely I know how small children are prone to mischief. It does not escape me that neither of them has addressed my actual question. I let them stutter on until they sputter and fall into an awkward silence too. Only the cicadas and the birds are crowding the hot morning with song. I want - more than almost anything - to close my eyes and stay in this moment, to linger in it, to relish it for the bright jewel it is among the lesser days of my life. But when a truck rumbles by on the macadam, and I see the woman turn her glare on me, furious at the nerve of me for interfering in her affairs, I see that the moment is already gone.

            I point up at the double windows on the upper floor of the old farmhouse we bought last winter. I am a writer, I tell them, and that is where I work all day, at my desk, facing this schoolyard. The children lift their faces to look up at the window where my cat is sitting now, looking down on them. I say I like the children's noise - their mischief as well - and that I see them going and coming. I hear, I say, everything that is said down here. These children, I say, are not an "inconvenience" to me. I emphasize the word and then I wave.

            Bye, Julio. Bye, Emma. Bye, children.

            I turn and draw myself up now, as tall as my 5-foot, 5-and-a-half inches allow. I will myself to walk slowly, deliberately, back across the schoolyard, past the arbor vitae and the oak, up the back steps and across the threshold, back in to the cool shadows and the neat order of my own house. Only here, holding to the edge of the kitchen sink, do I allow myself the luxury of shaking, of shivering as if I were standing barefoot in a snowbank, shuddering along the whole length of my body, shivering in that way I used to shiver in terror and embarrassment at the front of the schoolroom, my open palms upturned, held out in front of me, quaking in anticipation and the teacher counting out each blow as it falls: one... two... three... four....

 

 

 

God's Will

GOD'S WILL 

When a baby does not get born right, everybody goes to church – only it's not Sunday School or worship or dinner-on-the-ground or choir practice, and nobody passes the plate. This is a funeral, and for a funeral, you must wear your blackest, plainest, ugliest dress. No one appreciates a fashion statement at a funeral; that would be like spitting in God's eye and everybody knows only the Devil would do such a thing and look where it landed him. 

 When you come into the church-house you must sit quiet and still as death with your eyes downcast – like the deacons do when the sermon is on womanizing or adultery – and then there will be some singing of sad songs. "Amazing Grace" is a favorite song for funerals, especially if the organist can get the "bagpipes" key on the organ unstuck. "In The Sweet Bye-and-Bye" is another popular funeral song, one that talks about heaven as a sweet bye-and-bye, not the sour kind of bye-and-bye like when my grandmother used the term to talk about the woman in her housing project who is "loose," as in, "Bye and bye, that red-headed hussy is gonna get her just desserts." 

 At a funeral, there is some singing and some weeping and then everyone lines up, single-file, to walk past the little wooden box where the baby is laid out in a starchy white bonnet and gown. The ladies sniffle and daub at their eyes with their hankies and the men all stand nearby in a clump, scratching under their stiff collars, eyeing the ladies in case the vapors should come over them and someone should swoon into a black heap on the floor. Mostly the women don't – swoon, I mean – but men are generally nervous about what a woman might do in a group, especially when there's a baby involved. 

 After everyone is done looking at the baby, the men stand out in the churchyard and shake the daddy's hand real hard and say, "Sorry for your troubles, John."

The women gather around the grief-struck mother under the shade trees and they take her hands in theirs, one after another, and pat it and say things like, "Don't blame yourself, honey; these things happen." Or they say churching things like, "God's ways are mysterious" or "You'll see that blessed little baby again in heaven" or "He's happy in God's hands now, sister."

In case none of this seems to comfort her much, if she tells them all that none of that matters and all she wants is her baby back again, the ladies go on to the inevitable: "It's God's will."

 That usually works.

 It works, I think, because it baffles her. Like God's will baffles me. Preacher says it's God's Will for every one of us to turn our back on the Devil and sin and to be saved and live with him forever in glory. Preacher says whenever a child of God is saved, all the angels in heaven rejoice and Gabriel blows a tune on his horn. There is shouting in the church then and rejoicing and clapping of hands and hallelujahs all around. This is called a jubilation. Jubilation is allowed in church, but only if you keep your feet still on the floorboards. If you move your feet, then it is called dancing and dancing is NOT allowed in church. NO DANCING. Dancing is too close to fornication and we all know where that will get you.

So when you're saved, there's a party in heaven. But on earth what you get is a good dunking in cold water in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But no party. This is because, if God gets you, you get no credit for it because it was God's Will anyway. But if the Devil gets you, that's nobody's fault but your own and there'll be hell to pay for it.

But I guess God's Will, today, is the baby in the wooden box and his mother who is cross now at God and how all of us are going to have to stand a while in the heat out back of the church-house, after the funeral, and watch as two colored men plant the baby beside other babies in a long row, babies who are all in God's hands now, though their boxes are lying under little white staves with their names painted on them, just like the little staves we push into our garden furrows each spring so we won't forget what we planted and where.

 

 

 

Entourage

  

ENTOURAGE

 When my two oldest boys were small, I'd entertain them by writing something on paper in black ball-point ink. Whatever they told me to write down, I penned there in my large, loopy cursive handwriting. Mostly it was something silly like Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, or Hinka-binka-a-bottle-of-ink, I pooped my pants and now I stink. Or other boyish nonsense and tom-foolery. Then, when they'd had their fun, I'd dip an empty pen-point in a tin cup of milk and write my own lines in between the inky lines, like the old Greek scribes used to do. I'd write, I love you. I'd write, Now is the time for all good men. I'd write, Say you love me back. I'd write their names. I'd write my own, which changed so often back then with each marriage and divorce that I sometimes woke wondering who I was. When the morning heat of the kitchen had dried the milk and the words had gone invisible, I'd ask the boys to tell me what had been written there, in between the black ink lines which still showed plainly, as before. Sometimes the boys could remember; but mostly not. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old adage goes.

So then I'd go outside to the wobbly second-hand grill a neighbor had given me and I'd take a piece of charcoal in hand. I'd go back inside and rub it between my palms until it began to crumble and a fine dust coated the paper underneath it, and all its writing. Then I'd lift the page and shake the loose charcoal dust out the open window. When the paper was on the table between us, the words were visible again.

Wow, the boys would say, and Whoa, and they'd snatch the paper up and take it out into the backyard, holding it up to the light, squinting at it, poring over the magic of it, wondering how something which had been visible had gone invisible for a time and how, with just the right element added, it had become visible again. They thought it was better than any other experiment we did. They'd beg for it again and again. I took to leaving notes on the refrigerator with "secrets" written in milk just for the pleasure of watching them run outside to the old grill and take the charcoal in hand.

Their clothes and hands were dusky with charcoal afterwards and I had to scrub them clean at the kitchen sink where the porcelain finish had long ago worn thin. Sometimes, the charcoal stained those thin places and I had to scrub all week to remove the traces of it. Sometimes, I could see, for days, the lines in the boys' hands where the fine charcoal dust had settled, intractably, into the empty places, the fine places which had not been visible until stained. Eventually, though, it all washed free.

Gone, I'd think and feel a small, baffling knot of sadness in me rising; all gone.

If you were to see me now, writing at my desk, tending the thorny roses outside my house, talking to the cat, singing at the sink, preparing lessons for my grad students in poetry, a middle-aged woman in jeans and men's baggy dress shirts (my husband's outcasts and hand-me-downs), painting trim or hanging wallpaper, sitting on the summer porch reading or just idly watching the day wheel by into twilight – if you were to see me like this, you'd think nothing of it except that I'm a woman ordinary as rain, nothing remarkable. What you see is what you get. That woman.

You'd be wrong, of course.

I am not what is written plainly as all that. I live also between the neat lines of who-I-seem-to-be. Always, despite the placid countenance and the genial smile, there is an entourage inside of me. The infant boy lying all night in the crook of a grown man's arm in that over-crowded morgue. The gray fetal bodies in their glass jars of formaldehyde lining the shelves of the anatomy lab closet. The burned boy whose drunken father set him afire one night for disobeying him. That first man I saw naked, dead. And all the ones who followed away from there.

There is more than mere memory here too, a mind recalling something long-gone. There is also the body itself remembering: the nose recoiling as it conjures up again the stench a burned body gives off; something in the stomach's unruly pit knotting itself; the left palm and how it rested against a fevered brow while the right hand fingered a thready pulse; the texture of a woman's long hair in my hands as I washed it for her, toweled it dry it, brushed it into place around her thin face in preparation for the family's arrival – or the mortician's; bare pink fingertips recalling again the post-operative feel of the swollen stump and its sutures, the sticky wet weeping of the wound and, later, the crusted cluster of epithelials sealing, the healing begun at last; the sloshy gauze I'd taken in my hand – the hand I write with now, feed myself with, cook with, caress my husband and hug my children with – that strong right hand stained orange once with Betadine where I'd swabbed a woman's chest one morning, prepping her for the double mastectomy; and my ears which still hear always, waking from dreams, their little moans of pain.          

 This is what is written, in the interstices between one visible thing and the next. The milky ink of who-I-also-am. And when I write them back to me again - as I do sometimes - they are not "art" to me, not the stuff of rank sensationalism and poetry. They are who they are. Or were. And I am standing again at the old crossroads considering once more the twin devils of suffering and mortality. I am wholly myself again then, the visible and the invisible body. The quick and the dead. A house and all its rooms.

Flight

FLIGHT

The great jet has stalled, mid-runway, for de-icing. From behind the boardroom’s plate-glass window, I watch as a white truck with a bucket (like the large buckets telephone linemen use) suspends one helmeted, yellow-slickered man over the plane. He holds, in both hands, a large coil of white hose, moving it first over the nose, then inching it along the sleek body and over the great wings, down to the tail-fin. As he sprays, a thick gray fog engulfs the plane until it loses its particular shape and begins to resemble, from where I stand, a large whale, a Leviathan: a beast in whose belly sits my husband.

 I have counted down the lit cabin windows to a place where, as closely as I can gauge, he sits - 19A, mid-cabin or thereabouts - impatiently waiting for the complicated machinery of flight to resume. My husband is an aerospace engineer. He designs landing systems. And he hates flying. Maybe it’s because he knows too much about all the ways in which that machinery can fail. Maybe because he knows the design is “safe” only to ten-to-the-minus-10 degrees and not one degree further. Maybe it’s because he knows, after all his years of studying how flight happens, that despite all the well-laid plans of intelligent men and women, despite all the intricate and elegant designs in aerospace and physics, every inch of it can be undone in one millisecond by something ordinary as a flock of migrating birds or volcanic ash.

If the travelers around him are lucky today, he’s already nodding off, eyes closed, the noise-canceling earplugs in place. Later, when the flight attendant shakes him awake and tells him to remove the ear-pieces for take-off, he’ll pull them out. He’ll be worse then, having to re-enter the crowded world of that slender cabin where people are herded in like cattle.

My husband does not care, much, for people. He does not wish to know the disappointments and struggles of their lives. He does not love the loud Texans with their big hats. He does not love the elderly who arrived in wheelchairs, the confused ones who sit delicately as porcelain in the seats into which they've been strapped by the flight attendants. He does not love the exuberant voices of the young women gossiping and getting to know each other. He especially does not love their small, squalling children.

What my husband loves is machinery, the clean sheen of steel, the precise way the moving parts are organized and maintained. The elegantly-coded software that drives it all. He admires software and computers and technology. He longs for down-time and quiet-time and machines which are reliable in all the ways human beings cannot be reliable. He wants things around him to stand a little apart from him, quiet and predictable and unvarnished. Like me.

Only when the plane has reached 10,000 feet above the earth's surface and the announcement has been made, only then will he be satisfied as he replaces the noise-canceling ear-plugs with the ear-buds of his iPod. He will dial the flywheel of the iPod upwards, some headbanger tune roaring mindlessly from it and into his head while he nods off again, while he snoozes and snores, dreams and drools, oblivious to anyone – everyone – hurtling, alongside him, through the high, thin winter atmosphere of sub-space.

Belly of a whale; belly of a plane. It’s all the same to him, my malcontent, modern-day Jonah, never bargaining for favor with anyone – God or otherwise – taking whatever the moment brings, whether it’s bliss or disaster, just as he must surely take this moment for what it is: fog dissipating, lights rising bluely down the runway in front of him, the queue for take-off resuming. And so the great machinery points its nose, cargo weighed and stowed, travelers strapped in for the mad hurtle through the blue-black morning, towards Tarshish or Ninevah or Dallas-Ft.Worth. And finally the loud lifting-off: that head-long rush into the un-firm firmament above, day breaking grayly over the tarmac, and me firmly in my place on terra firma, already distant, already beyond him now in the almost-forgotten glittering seaside city below.

 

The God-Tree

THE GOD-TREE

Save me, O God, for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in mire where there is no standing. I am come deep into waters where floods overrun me.   -- Psalm 60: 1 – 3

Spring. Season when all the dormant things rise again, in flagrant color, from the warming earth. Season when the light returns. Season when frigid ground thaws and parts its bars in order to allow the first daffodils and tulips to enter. Demeter welcoming the stolen daughter home again from the underworld. Season of ripening bloominess, the air fragrant with something like promise – and rich in the pollen that bees love and which those with allergies do not love so much. And always, there is that Midas-touch over everything: spring's gold, dusting the porches and cars with a fine yellow haze.

In the small town where I live now, people come out after the long winter, into their yards to work and plant. The women hang laundry on the line again and beat the dusty rugs with steely mallets. Menfolk hang over fences to chat with their neighbors and tell each other how long the winter seemed. How the wood ran out before the cold did. Children grab their father's screw-drivers and punch holes in the lids of bell-jars, hoping twilight will bring the lightning bugs which they will chase, barefoot, over the twilit lawns. In the cool of evenings, the runners emerge again in their spandex leggings and trainers, earphones and iPods in place, jogging along the sidewalks and roadways where, not long ago, an icy slush was an impediment to running. Treadmills and home gymnasiums sulk, neglected, in basements: chrome and flywheels and LCD displays are no match for sunshine and gritty air and the heady smell of loamy soil. The town's long-lived widows stroll, arm in arm, through town, admiring the gardens, speaking of their lost husbands, sometimes complaining about how difficult their men were in life, openly aching for them in that way only the long-married can ache when a spouse passes first.

At the edge of town, farmland is being tilled and prepared for planting. The pungent attar of manure blows into town and wafts into the open windows, a fragrant mix of decomp and decay and sweet rot. Even the young boy-cat senses something is changing. His old companion is gone now and, in the heady aroma of the fields and flower beds, he has begun to lose the scent of the old cat. He seems lost and baffled as he walks from chair to rocker to bed, to sniff at all the things where the old blind cat lay for the past year. He is beginning to forget. When the scent goes, there will be little left to remind him. So the young male cat has taken to watching the comings and goings of the birds as they fly by the summer porch with twigs and dirty string, lifting up into the bloomy limbs of the tree, disappearing into the newly-hung birdhouse. He has that look on his face as they wheel past. You know the look I mean: old look of the predator when the prey draws near. Hunger.

To shake loose whatever winter-grief still lingers in me, I decide to drive outside of town, to the open fields, to see if the lambs and kids and calves are out in the fields now with their mothers. I will make a point today to overlook the red-tagged ears of the adult animals among them: a solemn reminder that spring - the season of birth and rebirth - is also the season of slaughter.

My grandmother told me a story once of the Caston men when they'd first come to America. They were farmers. Apparently, they weren't very good businessmen though since they'd bought the land without seeing it first. When they'd arrived, the stony land they'd purchased was crowded with hardwoods that had to be cleared before the fields could be tilled and planted. So began the long weeks of back-breaking cutting and clearing of the land. You couldn't feed a family if you had a proclivity for sparing juniper or oak, and you couldn't feed a family on scrub pine. And feeding the family was what mattered most to them in those days, fleeing, as they were, the old hard poverty of the mother-country.

But, as in the old country, one tree in each field was spared the ax. Each man, no matter how large or small the field he owned, left one tree standing. Not a fruit tree. Not a tree which would provide shade on a hot August day. Not a blooming tree, pleasing to the eye. The solitary tree had to be particular, and each man searched diligently for the proper tree: the God-Tree, they called it quietly. Reverently. From a distance.

The ideal tree would be damaged. Twisted. Gnarled. Grotesque. If that man was fortunate, it would be marred by catastrophe. Perhaps by a lightning strike, split in two and charred. Or by pestilence, stripped-free forever of its greenery, its tap-root gone. Such a tree was the god-sign and it alone determined the field and everything around it. At a safe distance from it, the barn would be built, and the house, and all its outbuildings. The scarred tree – the ruined tree – would serve as a "draw" for lightning. It had an affinity for catastrophe – the scar was proof of that. Everything else was safe so long as a respectful distance was kept from the "draw."

I find that tree today again – the God-tree – in almost every tilled field I visit. One bare, lone tree. Dead-center of the field. Standing solitary, nothing else near. Not even a fence-post. Farmhouses stand far-off, intact. Fences keep a respectful distance. Only the hawks and buzzards take up watch there. Sometimes a few crows. And a long silence, like the silence of a graveyard. Something weary and accustomed to its bleak habitation.

I think, sometimes, I am that god-tree, as a writer and as a woman. Some days, there is a slight scent of old brimstone in my hair. Of fire and something singed. Of wrecked things. Of old scars, mine and others. I am the thing set apart from the normal, the beautiful, the longed-for ones. I am the "draw" for catastrophe. The one who insures the safety of the others. The solitary one, the sentinel at the center of the unsafe places. A warning. A reminder. A monument. One does not, after all, live for many years tending the sick and wounded and dying, and walk away unmarred. . . .