For Tony
For Tony, who would hate it.
Perhaps, nothing in life is as lonely, If only, I could have filled the gaps. He contemplated for long moments the hollowed ground. Some wild thing’s wallow. The grass mashed flat under the strength of some fierce body lying there. An artifact of another’s act. He imagined the impressions of hips and heads and the two scarred ruts made him speculate. He supposed that someone with experience could divine that signature of hoofs, but to his eye they could just as easily have been marked out by the heels of boots, legs splayed out and losing purchase. But bodies did this damage for sure, he imagined a doe and her fawn lying for hours until, perhaps rising with the dew of dawn, stretching long necks and nuzzling the earth. Those scraped out ruts the evidence of their bolt from this carefully circled swath, bounding grace and gone through understory. I should, before you go into it You should, mourn my reprise If after this repose, I ever should arise. If ‘Fare thee well.’ is too time worn And hopelessly archaic? Antediluvian, you beat me to it, Just say it. I was driving today out on FM 22 by the National cemetery, and just before the entrance on that split rail fence, there must have been 25 or 30 turkey vultures. On the ground, and in the trees, and 3 swirling on the updrafts in those lazy circles, round and round. Bird shaped holes punched out of the sky. Just off the shoulder, there was a deer. I saw it yesterday, as I drove by. Its slender form bloated, lying parallel to my passage like a scarlet wound splayed open in the tall grass, now stomped down. I had to stop and gawk and though the stench was close in the cab, drawn in with the conditioned air, I lingered inspired for some reason to count that dark number. Is it a murder? No, it’s a murder of crows, but it was dire business all the same. I told a friend about the buzzards and he said that a group of buzzards was called a wake, which made me laugh out loud. How perfectly named with beautiful purpose. Now I will always see those birds with a formal air, that gathering of darkly feathered forms forever changed. I had seen them as comic, but not now. Today is September 10th 2011 and tomorrow will mark that dark anniversary. The air-ways are full of somber recollections. They have unveiled the memorial and the somber faces of children who have born the tragic loss of a father, both victims and heroes. The authorities are concerned over the ‘chatter’ and warn of another plot, demanding due diligence. Police with semi-automatic rifles roam Battery Park and Ground Zero. The whole spectacle reeks like a carcass and I survey those fervent faces stretched across screens, flipping channels with no change. We have destroyed ourselves. I love an idea that is gone and a time that is over and may have never been, except as an artifact of youthful naïveté. Those two towers were a simple trigger, a provocation, a dare, but we pulled ourselves asunder. Slapped, we slapped back, what if we had paused, even if we ultimately decided not to turn the other? If I am American, then I am also these dark things, complicit in every enhanced technique, but I guess I always was. These dark forms, varied but of a type, huddled down the fencerow, dark bodies fierce with competition, but waiting for the flesh. Encircled. The underbrush a russet colored thicket, disheveled and spent, dry leaves dormant from the long heat, now limp. Why are they waiting? What more do they need from that swollen form? Perhaps it is a mannered wake. Perhaps they have an unspoken system of turns. Perhaps the alpha hasn’t arrived, and we all know that the alpha eats first. The garden sprawled around in dusty disorder, dormant from the heat. The air was full of smoky flavor; wildfires burning over in Georgia. He had heard on the news of fires raging in the west, along the coast in California and across Texas, hell the whole state seemed ablaze. 7 separate fires; 700 homes burned out north of Dallas. She sat with her legs pulled beneath her, her finely formed fingers cradling a porcelain cup, just one shade of difference but traced with filigree instead of creased flesh. She told long stories. They loved her with patience. ‘ I had a dream that I was lying in a field of lavender with my hair cast out, ensnaring twigs and bits of dried grass and leaves. And I awoke, slowly to the realization, dim, that I had dreamt of smoke, or campfires. Suddenly I had the clearest vision of Smokey the Bear, but I couldn’t hear him. It was rather like watching the television with the sound put down, but with crystalline clarity I read each exaggerated word. “Only you can prevent forest fires. “ Her sandy blond hair pulled back from the fine form of her face. I noticed one dark freckle over her right eye near her temple. She shielded her cigarette and blew out smoke, away, then broken up with waving hands. She blushed, not remembering if they knew that she had started again, “Well just until I am out of school,” she rationalized. “Of course, it is so stressful,” they cajoled. “So the smoke probably woke me up, but I didn’t know about the wildfires, yet. I found out on the morning news. And I was peeing and it finally registered that I smelt smoke. Walking back to bed I vaguely thought, hmmm smoke and I got back in bed and promptly went right back to sleep.” She tilted her head back as she laughed for effect, well really a kind of performed chuckle with the requisite gleam in her eye. |
Drought wrought dry fields, evaporate. Only memories of green remain. Dusty rattle grasses, the worst he’s ever seen. It rained sometime in May, or maybe February. Wind rolls the amber textures of the hills, across the apex and undulating down to the cattle tank, now a stomped out hole, like the impression of the heel of God’s boot on our throat. Collective lamenting for rain, no gage. The leafhoppers spring in unison, as he pushes past, parting. He can hear the clicking of their tiny power-full legs, flinging themselves into his progress in unison, landing with patterned thwacks! Eyes on the fence line, thoughts on the wind, blowing this way and that. The smoke darkens the skyline and chokes him through the bandana. His shoulders ache from flailing the flames, fighting them back, but when the wind got behind them…. Well, now he only watched with his palms pinned to his knees sucking and choking down breath. The flames ate up that tall tinder, fanned and fueled by the wind, heading for the house. For one last moment, numb, he stared at it perched there, white clapboard, red brick chimney, green asphalt roof marked out of that spectacular sky; everything. He stared at everything. All he had made and its impending destruction. It was magic. Horror large, filled his mind with an audible roar. Time crawled but he recognized memorable, in the moment everything held, all his hope, all his fear, in stasis on that hill. Now, impending freedom.
They shifted the ashes. He watched her squatting in the sun, with her skirt held up. Her bare legs powdered with soot, streaked clean by dripping sweat. Fat drops rolled from under her hem and down her calves. There were many small laments, a conglomerate of emotions pressed into a magnitude of loss. He found the family bible. It had burnt in a crescent, the binding clean in a half arc and charred black on its edge, the perfect silhouette of a dish or what, they wondered? The mantle clock was a wreck, its fine walnut stain bubbled, the wood buckled from the heat, it had belonged to his Mother and had chimed out his youth. He put it aside, piles for saving and salvage and trash. There were other artifacts, one entire wardrobe intact and filled with blankets and spare linen and winter things. It was a charred bulk bearing many small victories, including the wedding photos in a silver-faced album tucked beneath the quilts. The clean stains on her cheeks told of her secret tears that he hadn’t seen. As he watched her sifting debris, he felt inappropriately calm, almost relived. Time held and long minutes must have passed. He awoke humming and while in reverie, she had worked her way across to what was once the kitchen. The old apron of the cast iron sink shone stark against the charred rubble. He noticed that it still held last night’s dishes. Char- coal brittle bits blackened All these bitter bits battered Scrawl Remnant rich remains matter Echoes of latter Pall The kicked up clouds of sooty dust spun in small eddies, an overlooked wonder floating there over her shoulder. He imagined that his face mirrored hers, twinned strain, thinly masking a shared darkness. “How?”, seemed inadequate. He realized that she was whistling while she worked, shrill and tuneless intermingled with the clatter and clunking of shifting stuff, their stuff reduced to remnants. Perhaps, artifacts. Say crowded, ride way, ahead down deep divide. I’m fine, just fine. This time you’ve given me, now tied to tired, tomorrow’s wide wonder but willing, god willing. Stretched tight to the point of breaking, wound, and found wanting, please smile. Down, down, down; shake it down darling and fly, now. I’m tired of waiting, so shake it down, shake it down, and take your time, exhale, inhale, exhale. Pained smiles averted gaze, I’ve loathed your laugh for years and days, I could easily put out your face, put it out of exit, place. A hand along the small of a back, another grips the frame and the wall is cool, no, cold, window rattle. Long, so long, with the fans incessant beating at the air. Nowhere he imagined, but all the same he was here, perhaps here to stay, but here, all the same. Shaken down from our crown to our feet and our feet to our crown. I can hear the change clinking on the ground, clinking and tinkling all’ round, shaken down. Bring ‘round tomorrow and we’ll loose another round. Smile askew you, I first loved that crooked slight pout drawn down on one side, smile loud. Smile to fend off the crowd, that dark crowd taking places along side. Along side pain. Along side peril. Along side this now fertile ground, that surely will perform the miracle of pushing up life again; tomorrow. |
On Burning Down Houses On Burning Down Houses
1. We are born into the arms of our mother’s and the pride of our father’s and into our place in our families. We are the elder sons, the middle children or the youngest, each with our own role and its corresponding expectations. We are born into a mapped system of siblings, parents and grand parents…various uncles and aunts and cousins once, twice and thrice removed. In this structure we each have a value and we learn our values; the earned value of each individual and the inherited value of belonging to the family. Despite individual intelligence, morality or talents, we are each granted this familial value; the recognition that we belong to the group named with the protections and privileges thus conferred. I am a Williams. I am a Williams’ son, connected to everything suggested by the original possession implicit in the name. Or at least in theory. I submit to you that this is a house that should be pulled asunder, dismantled piece by piece and burnt to its elemental ashes. Even if after, it is returned to its familiar familial form by a now enlightened individual. Now they are your own, these ideals... once given and now known. 2. Rumor had it….. well, like most small towns, the Colony was fairly riddled with rumors of every sort and rumors of “no sort” you shouldn’t go starting with, but we’ll get to that. He had a ‘62 silverish-gray nova wagon that he drove to deliver mail. It wasn’t outfitted for this task, like a proper mail truck, so he improvised. He drove with his left foot on the pedals, while sitting in the middle of the bench seat, steering with his left hand and poking mail out the passenger side window with his right. He did this with the ease of long familiarity, like drawing breath. He was tall. Well, six foot two, with silverish-gray hair (that matched the Nova) hidden under a dove gray Resistol hat. Hand-crafted for over 75 years right here in Texas, it will resist – all you can throw at it. I wish I could say the same. Jack G. Williams (the G stood for Graves) was the patriarch of Williams Cattle Incorporated, LLC. and the Postmaster of the Tennessee Colony Post Office, which had exactly 3 employees. I watched him the way a sulky cat watches a sullen dog, maybe an old one with the ache of long years. Everyone knew him in the Colony, and most everyone round ‘bout, but especially those on his route. In the mornings he delivered out along FM 287 as far north as Bethel and his last route at 4pm took him in a long loop south, around Maesey Lake as far as Alligator Slough and back. Occasionally he traded and made the loop out past Cayuga through Blackfoot. The rest of 75861 just had to make due with a P.O. Box in town. He was born that fateful night of April 14, 1912, the very same hour that great ship went down. Duel calamities that she took as a sign, as if seen in loops of glistening entrails or tea strewn debris in the bottoms of porcelain cups. Silent and blue he slid from his Mother’s wrecked form. She listed, her diminished bulk desperate and stark, laid bare by the glare of the Hurricane lamps. Mrs. Queen probably would have bled out, her exhaustion dissipating as her blood spread down in a dark halo, marking her good chenille forever more. (No lye would take its stain completely out, back to rumors, again.) But Dr. Link packed her tight. Wool pledgets soaked in Lysol plugged that void in her, which she had just labored hard to push him from that dark night. It was just the beginning of her pushing him away. He was her last of four; Irving, two still-born girls and now her iceberg, his father named him Jack. She had only picked out Eleanor. The men called him anvil Jack for his way with words. Each ringing down with measured purpose, working his will into a man, made malleable but hardened off as well – better men by his regard. The hard ones broken on his intellect, under a barrage of words, spat out and sworn down, shaping them to his will as surely as a shoe under the blows of a hammer, down against that anvil. But most seemed to love him for it or what passed for love among hard men. The stupid with sincerity, and the clever playin’ at squaring him off. Prayin’ they weren’t caught out. But to her, who they called Queen, she preferred the other metaphor. From the beginning of the world he was always her iceberg, dragging himself with violence against her as an archetype destroyed and pulled down to dark waters on the vast void of her love. A raw and gapping hole that with time they would make together, a gulf. Being a woman of a certain age, she never learned to drive and even after he was long married, he drove her to Sunday service at the Union Church on spur 324, just past the intersection of FM 321 and 645. It was a point of pride that she was there by 10:30, service was at 10:45. The small stone church was white and had a proper steeple silhouetted against 180 degrees of azure East Texas sky. The stained glass windows were original, salvaged from the ashes of 1921. As well as the brass bell, ringing down, marking time. They drove in silence. She sat in the back. The dark bodies of grackles flew up against the sky like holes punched out or huddled down on trees and telephone lines. She watched them and mused, “Jack, do you suppose that blackbird would be electrocuted if his foot touched the ground?” She asked simply because it came to mind. “I don’t know Mother.” He never called her Ma, or Mom. Then with a secret grin, “But it sure would stretch the hell out of his leg.” Said without mirth and none expected in return. She went back to studying the secret language of bird forms strewn like code along the lines. He went back to watching the black asphalt slide by, both divinations of a kind. His eyes were an unfathomable blue, his glances glacial, measured and cool and every look a calculation, like you were a collection of numbers he was adding up. As though you could be tamed as a summation, a formulation, a running total. He was my Grandfather. Not Gramps, Grandpa or even Granddad. Certainly not Papa or Pops. He was a khaki man dressed in Carharttlong sleeveshirts the color of dust or fallen leaves with matching ecru pants, tertiary schemes of subtle value, cloaked in grays or tans or grayish greens implied by tricks of the light, you couldn’t trust gray for true neutrality. He had that big Resistol hat and those glacial blue eyes and underneath an array of beige, buff and sorrel, sage and tan like an old black and white photo that’s been sepia toned down to his bark brown Justin pull-on work boots. I thought of this as a Grandfather uniform. “Mother we need to talk about the house.” “ About the house? I don’t know what you mean, Jack. The house is fine.” “You know what I mean, Mother.” “The house is fine.” She interrupted, “ I had that man Bowman repaint it last Fall. Though he was no help with the attic fan, it still rattles something awful. Jack, you told me you would look at it last week. Do, you suppose a squirrel could have got in there?” Jack looked calm but she could see his irritation in the set of his jaw. “ Mother, Irving and Ruth have a room all ready for you. You just can’t be allowed to stay in this big ol’ house by yourself. And besides Doctor Tidwell agrees.” “Jack your going to make me late for church. “ “Mother” Jack rumbled. “Yes, I’m still your Mother. Go get the car, it’s 10:35.” Let me tell you ‘bout burnin’ down houses. I burnt one, once. It was the house of my Mother and the only thing remains is the brick chimney and hearth. It was slow at first. Deliberate. I thought it would go right up, like, you know, in the movies and on TV. But it ain’t like that at all. At first it just sat and smoldered and smoked. I just knew it went out, but after awhile…. longer than I expected, I saw the flames through the front windows. They were catching the curtains and I could make out the burning couch through the smoke. Hell, you wouldn’t think there would be so much smoke. It choked me where I stood in the yard. My intentions? Hell, I was gonna let her out. I just wanted to scare her. But it worked out, she broke out a window. I mean I’m not ready for Rusk, I love her and what kind of person would do such a thing. I was just mad, but you know I love her. She’s my Mother, after all. What kid doesn’t do some stupid thing and get in some trouble? She ran and got the hose pipe and tried to put it out, but once it got a good start…well, fire is an unforgiving fucker. 3 The dusty earth kicked up in plumes, acrid shit and fresh cut wounds all under a cloud wrapped winter sky. The cattle in the corridor of the shoot, bleating and mooing with their heads thrown up and eyes rolled back. A cacophony of sound and sight and smell, all intermingled. Sweaty men and the earthy musk of cattle, all overlaid by the smoky smell of burning hide and the ever present metallic undertone of blood. Cuttin’ nuts, as my uncles so eloquently put it, was an exhausting, smelly, bloody business. Fixin’ steers (Grandfather’s politer version) took place in winter to avoid the flies. Castration, cutting horns, tagging and branding played out with a chaotic efficiency, the order evident to the experienced eye. My job was doctoring and dusting, vaccinations and the application of insecticide dust for horn flies and winter lice. The trick was to swat them twice just above the shoulder before sticking the needle in. It worked every time with no fuss, except the initial flinch. The testicles of the yearling bulls were cut off with the practiced swipe of pocket knifes. My Father did the cutting and my Uncles in turn, one man working the squeeze shoot and the other behind, cuttin’ nuts. You had to hurry before they sucked them up or tomorrow you would be chasing round the field after that half-steer with his bloody ball hanging down, trailing in the earth. The glistening balls were thrown into a white enamel tub, saved for Calf Fries. I believed they were chicken nuggets into my early teens and like anything tender, they were damn good. The wily ones would head for the woods hiding among the scrub oak and sweet gums obliging the men to hazard the underbrush, armored as it were with a hundred different thorny things - yaupon and yucca, prickly pear and prickly ash. In went the cow dogs undeterred, Australian shepherds and various assorted mutts, to run them out in pairs, both mother and calf. Today an oxblood cow, her face mapped by a blaze of white and her calf glowing in the diminished light, with a mask like blood, one an inversion of the other, where threading a ravine that ran along the fencerow. The dogs close behind. The ground was littered with strewn bones; a cattle grave yard. Most of the carcasses lying where they were thrown or maybe drug out a ways by scavenging. The Hereford was keeping her body between the calf and the dogs, daring them into the ravine that was a deep gash of red earth, dug out by a spring fed creek. The bank steep, up over a man’s height to the water below, like a deep crease folded in to the face of the earth. “Carlton, keep her headed up stream and for God’ sake don’t let her cross. “ said the older of the two. “If we can keep driving her, she’ll be trapped and we can get a rope on the calf.” “Yah” Carlton shouted, both in answer and to drive the cattle. Carlton was lanky in the manner of youth and deferred to the older man, but he was better with a lariat. He had it in hand twirling it out in a big loop. He was hampered by the thicket of under story trees and the bulk of the cow blocking a clear throw. After each miss he reeled it in, hand over hand and resumed the twirling motion. “Damn it Carlton, get a rope on him!” Dollar Bill cursed. The dogs kept at the heels of the cow, snapping and snarling and tormenting her on, into the narrowing gap between the ravine on the right and the barbed wire, till she ran out of ground. The shepherd lunged at her hooves, nipping and dodging but she misjudged. Quicker than the eye, the cow kicked out. With a yelp, the shepherd rolled. Before the men could react, the Hereford, too close to the soft edge of the ravine went down. Tumbling over in an arc, her weight pulling her backwards into that cleft of earth. Her bulk snapped off the saplings in a succession of cracks like breaking bones. The men watched the horror of the calamity as she fell, landing on her back with a long bellowing yawp at the moment of impact. Landing at an odd angle, askew, but thrashing her life out, throwing up water. She thrashed for long minutes, drawn out by the agony of her loud deep raucous cries. The men stared down into the whites of her eyes, numb. Her pink tongue lolled out thick with spittle. “Ah, hell.” moaned Bill. Carlton stared down struck dumb. The cow’s hind legs had stopped twitching but her fore legs still flailed at the air, her spine surely snapped by the fall. “ God damn Carlton!” spat out as an accusation and as a question. Both men knew they were screwed. “ We gotta’ put her down Bill. “I know, go back to my saddle and get the 30/30.” But thinking better of it, “ No, wait! They’ll hear that all the way back to the barn.” “Bill, she’s in a hell of a bad way, we gotta’ end it. I’ll be back” “ No, I’m tellin’ ya, Mr. Jack ain’t gonna’ like this one bit. You want her head against your wage? Hell, there’d be nothing left this month and half of next.” Carlton looked stricken, considering but in the end glanced away. His eyes fell on the calf nervously stamping and calling out in long mournful wails answered from the cleft. He began to twirl the lariat. “Leave him.” “But Bill, we chased him all this way!” “I’ve never seen another like him in the whole herd. He’ll likely raise questions and I’m not answering the Anvil! We leave em.” He shouldered his way past the younger man and collecting the dogs, headed back to the horses. Carlton stood for long moments staring at his receding form moving through the trees, clenching his teeth and twirling. In the end he left her there to die beyond suspicion, the calf as the only witness. 4 John Updike died today. I heard it often said that he was the writer who best captured what it meant to be an American; well I read it on the back of books, anyway. I once read an Updike short story about a man who couldn’t learn to swim. He didn’t trust the water. He didn’t trust his father, and I knew what he meant. I knew how that went, down. Perhaps without John we’ll lose our way and slip past those murky boundaries brown. Perhaps we’ll drown, but perhaps we would have anyway. Updike doesn’t save anyone in his America. Once I had a race with my brother in the cattle tank. We were wading the shallows. We had been fishing. Our Father held the tackle and watched from ashore. “Hey, race to that log.”, my brother tempted; younger and bolder but perhaps it was our Father’s suggestion. Both amounted to the same, both knew my water weakness and both relied upon my pride. With apprehension. With the confidence of youth, two lithe bodies launched and slapped the surface tension thrown up in a doubled splash, one more like a swoosh, the other more like a smack. I flailed through opaque water thick with rusty earth, stealing a look on every other stroke at the safety of the log across the pond, and then one to judge John’s lead. The world blinked on and off, like a broken neon sign. Murky brown, stroke, brilliant blue, stroke, murky brown, breathe, brilliant sky, life’s pattern reduced to this syncopated rhythm. The sky without horizon, viewed askew. Scraps of clouds trailed by like stuffing pulled out, a sky too large and too blue for a Northern latitude, a sky that stretched 857 miles from El Paso to Orange. That scraped out hole, banked on one end with the pushed out earth, thick with cattails not yet ragged, and floating swaths of purple water hyacinth, the surface alive with skimmers and buzz-by dragonflies. My favorites were the dainty blue and green damsel flies, marked by a single pair of stained glass wings. I had stroked its length a hundred times. Hell, I’d swam it a hundred times today. John had pulled away, I registered with alarm, but why I couldn’t say. Stroke, murky brown, stroke, murky brown, stroke a scrap of churning blue. Lungs burn without the balm of air, gasping, arms leaden fire, lungs sucking that murky brown and feeling panic rise. In this recollection, I’m thinking of cattle eyes. Rolled back with fear and bulging white. In the shoot they smell the blood; it never lies. Adrenaline time is duplicitous; both immeasurably fast and unknowably slow. My father running while stripping off his clothes, murky brown. My brother at the log screaming - what? – sky askew, off comes a shirt, water choking down, out of the shoes. I remember with perfect clarity my father’s frantic face, his mouth agape in a soundless scream. His charming grin, his salesman smile, his snake oil sneer, all of these faces I knew. Who was this man, so sincerely shown? Clearly concerned, bordering on stricken fear. Which is to say love. In his boxers, stripped bare down to pasty white, he stopped just short of the waters edge and clapped his hands around his mouth. What? I caught the last or rather lip read an exaggerated, “ Hell-aup!” That pattern interrupted, all cool – a dark umber gradient to black. Life suspended and oddly calm. I thought of my Father’s small kindness, I knew he hated Mom. I thought, how pissed I was that my brother had won, again. I wondered why, since I loved her so. I wondered why, since I was older than him. That whole summer something brewed. All summer confused. In the murky depths, I turned it over. Then my feet found muddy purchase and with a violent thrust I burst surface. Lungs held long, expulsion. Air sucked down, within. Gasp, gulp, gasp, gulping down the air that tastes of blood. And then smack! – back to that awkward pattern again. Stroke, brilliant blue, stroke, murky brown, breathe, brilliant sky, life’s syncopated return. And rolling over on my back, I float staring up into that brilliant sky till my Father’s face ( upside down, with relief) floats into my view. And for a moment, like a stage with all the curtains thrown, I find love; well, concern - but then drawn down, a velvety shroud of raucous laughter. His fish white belly ripples, “You, rascal!” he applauds. All that summer I slowly drown. |
5 Jack G. Williams Services for Jack G. Williams age 87, of Tennessee Colony will be held at 10:00 A.M. Tuesday at Tennessee Colony Church with Rev. John Wisener officiating. Burial will follow in Tennessee Colony Cemetery. Arrangements are under the direction of Bailey & Foster Funeral Home, Palestine. Mr. Williams died Saturday at his home in Tennessee Colony. He was born April 14, 1912 in Anderson County to George and Zyphra “Queen” Williams. Mr. Williams was the owner of the Tennessee Colony Store for many years. He was a member of the First Baptist Church of Palestine. Mr. Williams was also a 50 year member of the Tennessee Colony Eastern Star #102 and the Tennessee Colony Postmaster for 25 years. Mr. Williams was preceded in death by his parents, and a daughter Carole Luevano. He is survived by his wife Jessie. A. Williams, his daughter Mary Richert of Texarkana, sons Jack (Butch) Williams, Jr. and Frank Lee Williams and fifteen grandchildren and eighteen great grandchildren. Condolence calls will be received from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Monday at Bailey & Foster Funeral Home, Palestine. In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Tennessee Colony Church Building Fund or to the Tennessee Colony Community Center. 6 Mary was a great beauty once, translucent and pale. Beautiful brevity, like a mated pair of Luna moths riding an updraft round and round, circling one another in an instinct for life. Bodies beating, one against the other they spiral battered down, ending with a final fragile fluttering down among the leaf litter. So much debris. But for now her beauty held, and she was sixteen with all that it promised to be. She would come to resemble her mother, but for awhile she was everything her mother envied; thin, young, and with possibilities. It hurt Jessie to look too long at her eldest daughter or to contemplate how it all could be, silly really to expect her happiness. “After all” she thought “It never happened for me. Why should anyone have more than the promise of heaven?” With these thoughts she went out to feed the girls. Speckled Sussex and Leghorns. Buff Orpingtons and Dominikers diligently scratching, sending up dust motes to hang in the morning sun. Jessie smiled at her girls and thought about the pecking order. The Buffs were shy and easily bullied, but she loved them for their irrepressible curiosity, especially Ms. Bitty who was in to every kind of trouble. She would fly up and stand in the pan at feeding time, picking out all the best bits. Jessie had long determined that that bird was not to be deterred and besides she enjoyed her antics, riding around in the pan on Jessie’s hip as she scattered scratch. The cock of the walk, for sure, at least in gumption if not in gender. The Sussex’s were small bodied but held their own with the Leghorns with opportunistic stealth and speed. They were a mahogany brown, and Jessie called them the seven sisters for their speckled patterns that reminded her of constellations, and like the mystery that was the night sky, she couldn’t tell them, one from another. Then there were the three Dominikers, barred in alternating patterns of black and white. Domino, Dot and Spinner all of whom thought they were in charge, constantly switching one, two, three down the pecking order. Lately Spinner seemed to have the edge, but the issue was far from settled. Eggs were a miracle to Jessie’s mind, not diminished by the daily occurrence. Brown and white and the palest tan, some speckled and some the slightest lavender-tinted brown. She never tired of gathering them warm from the bodies of broody hens marveling at these perfect gifts, in her mind a daily affirmation of faith, an affirmation of the bounty of God. Manna of a manner; perfection. She plucked them from the nest and put them in a wire basket. She might have once been thin but if so, it was a distant memory. Her eyes were the color of forget-me-nots, under the wide brim of her garden hat and she strode with purpose, her girth wobbling on her tortured knees under the calico prints that she favored. Today she was wearing blue patterned flowers that matched her eyes, maybe they were forget-me-knots or blue hydrangea or corn flowers. Jessie looked out over the back pasture towards the line of pines at the horizon and watched the grazing cattle. The ranch was really three pieces of land, well over 2000 acres, all total. The bulk was her inheritance, but they had 150 acres north of Bethel and 200 at the crossroads past Union Church, which was the original Williams’ homestead. Jack’s great-grandfather was the last to run the hotel that was now long gone except for in Grandma Queen’s exquisite memory. It was a wonder what the old bird could remember but Jessie had a bond with Jack’s Mother, both were long suffering. Over the years they had become reciprocal buffers, a symbiotic joining of feminine will. But her thoughts returned to Mary, she was troubled, but only long afterwards would she admit her duel jealousies, a sort of low grade fever underpinning her relationship with her eldest child. It might not have been so difficult if Mary was more plain, like the other. Mary walked the pasture. She loved to wander, alone or with one of the dogs; usually Shep who was too old to work cattle. They would stroll long miles without leaving her family’s land, out past the cattle tank and into the woods. Today she was following the firebreak towards the old barn. Shep trotting dutifully at her side, too old for the folly of chasing field mice or click beetles like the younger dogs. It was winter still. February. But the morning had revealed a promise of spring. It was unseasonably warm and the pussywillow and crocus were in bloom. She was headed towards the empty plot of the old homestead in the middle of the east pasture. Marked only by the stacked bricks of the hearth and chimney, still standing like some ancient monolith. A dark finger, silhouetted against a clear sky. A monument of sorts, but to what? Mary wondered why her father had never bothered to push it down. It was at the apex of the hill and every season it had to be plowed and planted around. But here it stood. Mary had spent her childhood mapping this land and this was a sanctuary, a stage to imagine a different world. She would often duck inside the hearth to climb the hidden handholds up the dark tunnel of bricks, as if to reach the sky. The view was spectacular. She had fashioned a seat and would sit for long minutes lost in the spectacle of height. There was the house on the rise of the next hill and the dots of cattle grazing in lines, sometimes she would see the tiny forms of the men working on horses or even her mother moving around the yard. Like Alice, she felt she had passed through her version of the looking glass, but maybe in reverse. The cast of characters sometimes changed but wasn’t her father always the Cheshire cat? Her Mother switched between the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter. And there were no shortages of Tweedle-dums and Tweedle- dees. Sometimes Mary would walk as far as the fence line that separated familial ground from the adjacent property, a huge swampy swath of forest owned by the state of Texas that housed the maximum security prison, Beto I. The forest was mostly swamp oak and bald cypress with the occasional Mayhaw along the crevasse of the creek that ran along the fencerow. As she walked the occasional bleached white bone gleamed in stark contrast to the dark loam of the forest floor. Whole carcasses with saplings growing up through rib cages and half entwined by tendrils of crossvine. One summer she came to the graveyard everyday for weeks and organized the bones by type and size. All of the humorous laid out in a wedge of descending sizes and then a grid of alternating skulls and scapula, bordered by a row of ribs splayed around like the rays of a dead sun, the contrast set off against the dark mosses and vines thickly carpeting the forest floor. 7 My uncle Irving was a beekeeper. As a child, I loved to visit Uncle Irving and Aunt Ruth. Their house was built into the side of a hill, and it had an elevator, and a basement with a pool table. All of these were oddities, within my 10 year old experience, but the oddest feature of all was a bee hive that Uncle Irving had built into the living room’s picture window, arranged so you could look down the rows of honeycomb and watch the bees at work. I would sit for long moments, more than fascinated, but entranced by the rhythm of tiny bodies crawling over the golden beauty of honeycomb. Even then I believed in the insects’ secret code, a code that surely Uncle Irving knew and that I had a deep need to discover and eventually know. It was a tortured room, full. I would sneak to the edge of the couch and sit for long minutes clutching the cushions. Her hospital bed was the most remarkable feature, so out of place with the Queen Anne furniture, this monstrosity of metal, all antiseptic white, strung with boxy equipment and surgical tubing. Monitors and masks. The silence punctuated by a mechanical beep. I sat very still, forcing shallow breathing, so she wouldn’t hear and god forbid, call me over. Her breath drew in and out, ragged but regular and I matched mine to the rhythm, hiding in pulmonary patterns. Simultaneously terrified and fascinated by her ancient frailty. I guess even then I recognized the reverence of her condition. A TV tray made-do as a bedside table, lined up with amber pill bottles with child-proof lids. Among them were littered plump orange Circus Peanuts, and near to hand that odd brown bottle filled with snuff. They soothed her gums with it as a teething infant and it soothed her still, this addiction finding her toothless again and in near constant pain, well beyond her addictions ability to contain, but for that there were the other bottles. I would have left, but for the bees. One drifted by, caught in the draft of the ceiling fan and drawn up, where it bounced about the ceiling, then unexpectedly it swung around the room in an angry arch, hurling its tiny body against the window. Bouncing off the pane and bouncing again and again with a spiraling rage, a mere fraction of an inch separating it from its desire. It might speed off to loop the room or just as likely beat out its life upon the glass. A pile of dry bodies littered the window seal, as silent witness. 8 He held his work worn palm across her mouth, his bulk pinning her fragile form. The swell of her young breast outlined by her cotton gown, stretched taunt. Little purple daisies encircled her nipple, translucent from saliva. The first time, it surprised him that she hadn’t fought and he hated her for it. The whore, the cunt, the miserable wretched little bitch. Shit! Wasn’t she made for this? Couldn’t she at least fucking fight so he could admire her spunk…and afterwards he wondered where she went. With no irony he felt that her acquiescence robbed him. The last thing she always remembered, was the smell of machine oil on his hand against her mouth before she drifted up and out and into the landscape she knew, drifting along the fencerow. She imagined herself in the form of a ghost-white calf, bellowing at the coming darkness, long bleating calls focused on a mother that lay broken in a ravine of her own choosing. She first imagined a horizon line, a smudge of dark forms, softly focused and white motion moved there, oscillating on and off like film. Through fog heavy lids she watched this form, at first a minute motion in her peripheral but now moving into centered focus. It had a 3 step rhythm, a canter she realized as she counted it off. One, two, three, one, two, three, its form came into focus, a white blur along the dark transition from pasture to woods. It felt familiar, well known, a motion worn – worn down, worn through – familiar in her muscles and bones, but more, but so much more. Familiar, through and through. Isn’t the root of familiar, family? Isn’t a familiar one’s altered form? These were answers she knew in the form of that abandoned calf, ghost white with that darkened blaze. Red as a blotch of blood wicking into the antiseptic white of a tissue and seeming to spread out between its eyes. So, this vision became her mantra, through nightly repetition. 9 Jack never learned to swim. Sure he could dog paddle or duck under and swim like a frog, but he never learned a proper stroke. He stood at the bottom of the high platform, with his left foot resting on the bottom rung. A tall teen was scampering up the ladder. Fat drops fell into Jack’s upturned face as he watched counting the rungs and holding his breath. The last had executed a perfect dive, not a flailing flop or a cannonball, but a perfect arc, momentum carrying his lean form out into space, where it seemed to hang for a long moment before gravity pulled it over, perfection along one clean line from pointed toes to out-stretched fingertips. Then cutting the surface, thrown back in a sharp splash, to disappear from sight under that aqua-marine surface. From a different angle Jack could have watched his dark silhouette slide deep, broken by the pools chaotic surface, refracting and reflecting, everything a distortion. Jack thought about childhood swimming lessons. Not in transparent teal blue pools that stank of chlorine, but in cattle tanks muddy brown and rank with shit. He remembered being thrown in and being willed to swim by the force of his Father’s determined anger. Success was measured by the fact that he never drown, though he wasn’t always sure that his Father would have minded failure. I have never known him, or if so, I’ve lost the memory, but on those rare occasions when he comes to mind, I imagine that I remember he was kind and we were close. I imagine patient lessons, I imagine proud results. I remember the local pool, ‘Its Olympic sized!’, we’d boast, with a 30ft tower and 25 ft deep. It was in the next subdivision across Howard Drive, further than we were allowed to roam alone but still within the measure of our ‘turf’. Slang courtesy of 70’s television, maybe ‘Starsky and Hutch’. I was straw blond from the sun and wobbly thin and my best friend Shawn was a taller version, without the gapped front teeth. We wandered the whole length of Barkley, from the railroad tracks past my house and down to the ice-house on the corner with its gravel parking lot full of old trucks and mysterious brown bottles that never bottled soda, I particularly marveled at the long necks, especially if it was Lone Star. The names printed in gold foil letters and mirrored by heraldry were even more mysterious still; Black Label, Buckhorn, Jax, Schlitz. Mickey’s Big Mouth, Double Diamonds “works wonders”. We walked the rails, with our arms splayed out, waiting for the trains. A long one was no good, hopefully it would be a couple of engines or a short line of cars. Pennies placed on the rail every second timber. The challenge was to find the flattened smears afterwards among the gravel full of glittering shards of glass. 10 He fucked her, hell, he fucked them all. If life was calamity, he offered no cure and plenty of cause. Why? Well, b’cause. He had always liked the insolence of “b’cause”, mainly since he would never suffer it himself. Once he had beaten Butch for relishing the word, backhanded him with piece of cord-wood across the face. It had bruised, a mean plum colored patch in a line over his left brow. Just recalling the memory, how he relished it, even now. 11 The daffodils were breaking. Large swaths of orange and yellow cups. Yesterday they were still tightly wrapped buds but today they unfurled, magnificently simple, arranged in rows. Whites with butter yellow, singles and doubles and the odd disheveled ones known as ‘scrambled eggs’. They spread like a floral glacier, pushing out from a small patch until they covered the crest of the hill. They were bushhogged every year, but it only seemed to make them more virulent as though they thrived on neglect. A floral malignancy devouring pasture. A golden smear across the crest of the hill, punctuated by that dark brick stacked finger, it seemed like an accusation, but of what? She wondered, but felt as though he knew, there was something about the set of his brow pulled down low that gave him away and if not that then the ticking of his jaw. Flocks of cow-birds stalked the bailer picking and strutting, iridescent black bodies shimmering in the late afternoon sun. Rows of round-bales littered the landscape reducing it to a number, 40, 37, 54, 105 and a mere 31 out of this eastern pasture. They lay like boulders, but the perfection of their forms silhouetted against the darkening dusk sky gave them away, too perfect a geometry for nature; familiar and foreign. Tomorrow the men would spear them with the tractor’s pallet fork and align them in rows, filling the length of the hay corral behind the barn, stacking them double when it is full. |