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

OCR

THE ONLINE JOURNAL OF MONTANA ARTS 8L CULTURE

HELENA, MONTAN[...]

The editors welcome the submission of proposals
for essays and reviews on cultural productions—
inc[...]inquiry, food, architecture and design—
created in Montana and the broader American West.
Please send all queries and submissions to
info@drumlummon.org.

We are not currently accept[...]mlummon Institute

Copyright Statement

Copyright for contributions published in Drumlummon
View: is retained by the authors/artists, with oneitime publication
rights granted to DV Content is free to users. Any reproduction of
original content from Drumlummon View: must a) seek copyright
from the authors/ artists and b) acknowledge Drumlummon View: as

the site of original publication.

Cover Image: Pairicia Forxberg, Heart Twisting in the
Wind, 2006, gouatbe, ink and collage onpap[...]

THE ONLINE JOURNAL OF MONTANA ARTS & CULTURE

Editorrianbief Rick Newby
Art Diretto[...]ing Editorx
Adventure: Randall Green
Architecture & Design/ Material Culture: Patty Dean
Environment & Science: Florence Williams
Folklife: Nicholas Vrooman
Food & Agriculture: Max Milton
Media Arts: Gita Saedi
Nature & Culture: Roger Dunsmore
New Music: Bill Bo[...]

FROM THE EDITOR 6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 8

THIS ISSUE’S ORIGINAL WORK 9

Fiction 10

Excerpt from In [be Seatter oft/5e Moonligbt, a novel by
Scott Hibbard II

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

“In the Grips,” a story by Chris Nicholson 5I

Excerpt[...]29
Drawings, by Wes Mills (plus an interview with the
artist by Jennifer A. Gately) I30

FROM THE ARCHIVES I 39

Third installment: “Cabin O’Wildwinds: The Story
of An Adventure in “Homesteading,” by Ada
Melville Shaw; originally published in 777e
Farmer’r Wife, I93I I40

ESSAYS I 51

Education 151

“‘The People’ of Montana: In Exegesis of Indian
Education for All,” by Nicholas CP

Vrooman I52

Literature 1[...]Romanticism, Revisionism, and
Post—Revisionism in the Fiction of the American
West,” by Karen Fisher I60

“When Cowboys Became Capitalists and the

“‘I learn by going where I have to go’: Initiatory
Turnings in Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion,” by
Robert Baker 191

Rural Philanthropy 216

“‘Stuck Situations’ in the Philanthropic Divide: The
Need for Nonprofit Capacity,” by Michael
Schechtman 217

Science 53" Health 223
“Probing the Unknown,” an excerpt from theThe Hegemonic Eye: Can the Hand Survive?” by
Chris Staley 258

“Rudy Autio: Coming Home to the Figure,” by Rick
Newby 27o

RudyAutio, a short[...]an Cox 287

TRAVELS &TRANSLATIONS 308

“Dancing at Olympia’s,” an East African memoir by
Gilles Stockton 309

“Long Lines of Dancing Letters: The Japanese Drawings
of Patricia Forsberg,” by Rick Newby 314.

REVIEWS[...]offman 34.8

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

Danting to [be Edge, Tappan/Roberti/Williams Trio,
reviewed by Keith Raether 355

IN MEMORIAM 3 59

Rudy Autio, by Richard Notkin, Stephen Glueckert, &
Beth L0 360

Liz Claiborne, by Brian Kahn[...]

From the Editor

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

Speaking of books, Drumlummon Institute has

launched its book publishing program with two titles,

Food ofG'odx and Starve[...]eeted Poemx ofGraee
Stone Coatex (2007) and Notex for aNovel: 777e Seleeted
Poemr of Frieda Fligelman (2008).These two books, in
turn, launch our DRUMLUMMON MONTANA LITERARY
MASTERS SERIES. A reissue of Thomas Savage’s first
novel, 777e Pan, with an introduction by 0. Alan
Weltzien and published in collaboration with Riverbend
Publishing, will join the series in Winter 2009.

In 2009, Drumlummon is also publishing, in
collaboration with Bedrock Editions, another long[...]y historian Kim Allen Scott. A first
publication of Grace Stone Coates’ second novel, Clear
Title, with an introduction by Caroline Patterson, is
also in the works.

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

Books—Offprintshtml.

***

Like its predecessors, this issue of Drumlummon
Viewx ranges over a multiplicity of terrains. We
have expanded our offerings of original works, with
substantial selections of fiction and poetry, together
with a movin[...]

We continue our coverage of science and health
issues with an excerpt from a[...]n Montana biophysicist Jeff Holter, who ceveloped the
now—ubiquitous Holter Heart Monitor in his Helena

laboratory. Nicholas Vrooman acknowledges the

importance of the Indian Education for Al, initiative,
and we continue our serialization of Ada Melville
Shaw’s homesteading memoir, “Cabin O’Wildwinds.”
Our Literature section ranges from the creation of
post—revisionist western fiction (like Karen Fisher’s

A Sudden Country) to the development of western
literature by such figures as playwright[...]ovely meditation on Theodore
Roethke’s poem, “The Waking.”

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

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

info@drumlummon.org

Rick Newby

Editor—in—chief, Drumlummon Viewr

rnewby@drumlummon.org

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

Acknowledgmentx

Here at Drumlummon Viewr, we remain grateful to
three groups of generous folks, those who support our
efforts fi[...]tories, poems,
essays, reviews, images, and ideas to enrich each issue.
Without them Drumlummon V iewr[...]nstitute itself could not, and would not, exist.

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

share their marvelous efforts in DV’x pages provide the

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

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

Finally, our thanks go to Geoff Wyatt of Wyatt
Design, Drumlummon Viewr’Art Direc[...]

from In the Scatter of the Moonlight, a novel
in progress
Scott G. Hibbard

Army of Utah, Camp Scott, Utah Territory,
November 27, 18[...]and have lost one hundred and thirty-
four. Most of the loss has occurred much this
side of South Pass, in comparatively moderate
weather. It has been of starvation. Ihe earth
has a no more lifeless, treeless, grassless
desert; it contains scarcely a wolf to glut itself
on the hundreds of dead and frozen animals
which for thirty miles nearly block the road
with abandoned and shattered property; they
mark, perhaps beyond example in history, the
steps of an advancing army with the horrors

of a disastrous retreat.

ipbilip St. George Cooke,[...]rritory,
November 21, 1857

Carl Heinrich carried the carcass over his shoulders.
He had dressed and skinned the deer, and had removed

its head and forelegs to lessen its weight. His musket

lay on top of the glistening meat.

“Do you see that soldier there, packing the
Colonel’s supper?” Nathan Slater said.

Carl Heinrich walked by the dragoons where
they settled in at Camp Scott, on the timbered river
two miles from Fort Bridger, Utah[...]was
not a post so much as a windbreak, tents set in the
cottonwoods at river’s edge. Carl Heinrich had been
detailed as one of the hunters charged with providing
fresh meat to lessen the number of oxen the army
would butcher.

“Hey, soldier!” Moses Cole called out from tent
side. Dragoons milled through the campsite to gather
branches for firewood. Their trails traced through the
snow to scatter in the cottonwoods, as if defining a
migration of mice. “You can stop right here, footman!
Put your feet up while we cook that deer forthe embarrassment of makin’ the
Colonel eat deer meat!” Moses Cole shouted after him.
Carl Heinrich walked toward Fort Bridger with the
deer over his shoulders.

“Didn’t understand a word I said.Just another
Dutchman who fell off the boat.”

“That Dutchman was a sergeant over there in

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

“The Iron Cross. I saw one ofthose once’t. Made
out ’a horseshoe nails.”

“The highest decoration they give in Prussia.
Some general with gold—laced epaulets pinned one on
him for bravery in action.”

“What’d he do, send you a newspaper?”

“When the lieutenant sent me to Fort Bridger
yesterday I talked to some infantry They pointed him
out,” Nathan Sla[...]sfit,” Moses Cole said. “I’ll bet he
talks in one ’a them foreign—made accents you can’t[...]rmy over there,” Nathan Slater
said. “Not one of these cobbled together outfits that
can’t keep its crackers in the same box.”

Nathan broke the smaller branches with a foot
brought down sharply. They waited their turn for a
saw to cut the larger ones and to buck—up tree trunks
that rotted in the quack grass. “He was inthe firewood pile, twigs
from kindling from branches to saw. “Why’d they put
him ’a horseback? He’ll gather—in half an acre to the
pace.” Moses wiped his moustache and watched Carl
Heinrich stride offwith the meat and the musket

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

them legs.”

The horses and mules grazed guarded by
dragoons herding in half—day shifts. In the wane of
day herders hazed the animals back to the cottonwood
bottom to shelter for the night. The riding stock that
remained in camp waited its turn for duty tied to high—
lines strung in the cottonwood trees.

“Them tall guys fall off too[...]id.
“You wouldn’t think so with all them legs to wrap
around and hook—up underneath, but By God they
do.” Moses watched the tethered horses nod, sleeping
standing. “Top he[...]We don’t need
them foreigners tellin’ us how the world works.” Moses
propped a larger branch on[...]’t eat one.” Moses retrieved an axe and broke the
branch. “Shove it down a barrel and shoot it, maybe.”
He threw both pieces on the branch stack and grabbed
another to cut.

“Looks to me,” Nathan said, “he can shoot better
than y[...]in’ much,” Moses said.

“If he’s schooled in the European cavalry he’s

probably a horseman, unlike the glorified plowreiners

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

“Load it[...]r mama must have weaned you before she
taught you to read.”

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

“Damn sure did. Chasin’ chickens off the river
ice.” Moses looked at the woodpile as though he did
not see it. “After I learned enough to teach her, I quit
that punishment. Except for when I taught my wife to
read.”

Nathan twitched as if he’d picked up[...]e was real proud she could read. Read

them words of theat the woodpile. His voice stepped
away, dampened as if deadened in a tent. “Till there
weren’t nothin’ left, on them pages.” He looked at
tethered horses, fingered the leather patch sewn with
sinew on the cracked axe handle. “Every mornin’, every
evenin’ she’d read them words. Couldn’t get enough of
it.”

Moses looked atto the day she run—off with a
Mormon.”

Nathan looked as if the panhandle heated in his
hand.

“Got out of the army after chasin’ Apaches. Had a
little money[...]ed Isabella.
Worked my daddy’s farm. Taught her to read and she
read that Mormon book. Then she took up with the

Mormons.”

Horses whinnied in the cottonwoods.

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

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

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

“I expect I’ll find her in Salt Lake City.” Moses
wiped his moustache. “I can’t wait to shoot a Mormon.
For what they done, and for what they’re doin’.” Moses
looked Nathan in the eye. “I might shoot two of “em.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this.”

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

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

half of the chopping block and the handle hinged again.

Moses studied the bending axe. “Carve a new handle
while you’re atthe deer
hide offthat Dutchman, is what I’ll do. He’ll have it
skinned—off and fleshed—out by the time my stove—up
horse gets me there.” Moses[...]r tent. “Make rawhide

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

Seventeenth Ward, Salt Lake[...]also may fear.
—1 Timot/Jy 5:20

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

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

“Let the declaration now be made,” President
Everett said. “In accordance with the bylaws of the
Seventeenth Ward Female Relief Society, by majority
vote Sister Sophronia Fox is hereby expelled from the

Society for unchristian—like conduct.” With the scissors
she reduced the patch to pieces, strode from the sewing
circle and put the pieces in the stove, lifting the lid to
the firebox with a horseshoe bent for the purpose and
fitted with a wooden haft secured with wound wire, the
original lid—handle lost when the wagon flipped from
oxen panicked by prairie lightning.

Thankful Everett held a piece of weatherworn
canvas cut from a wagon cover. “We will now stitch
this plain white cloth into the quilt, serving to remind
us all of the blemish of unchristian behavior. I ask us
all to pray that Sister Sophronia regain her good sense
and her love of the Lord, and be forgiven by Him who
judges all.”

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

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

Everett surveyed the faces of the Society’s members.
They looked as if they’d received word that a church
had burned. “The Lord’s will be done,”Thankful said.

She handed the canvas to Isabella and took her
seat in the circle. Isabella snipped it to fit the hole
where Sophronia’s work had been, threaded a needle,
and took the first few stitches. Each member stitched
in turn until the canvas was patched—in. When finished,
the quilt looked like a smile short an incisor.

Isabella said, “I mean no disrespect, but we’re
trying to raise money, so I don’t know why we’re
disfiguring this quilt. It will only make it sell for less. I
mean, what is our purpose here—to chastise Sophronia,
or to feed and clothe the brethren in the passes?”

“It’s both. And it’s more.”[...]’ve
learned that whatever we do must be done as the work
of the Lord or it is done in vain.”

“Amen,” Emma Taylor said.

“We patch this quilt. We raise money in doing so
for the good of our militia, whose purpose is to protect
the Lord’s new Zion so His work may be done. We
als[...]give Sophronia a lesson she needs
so she may grow in spirit. And we also create a visible
symbol, if y[...]s.” Thankful looked as if she turned her

words in her mind, not looking at the circle so much

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

Emma Taylor, Secretary of the Seventeenth
Ward Female Relief Society, said, “I understand.” She
chuckled. “The Mormon version of the scarlet letter.”

“Something like that,” Thankful said. “Even if
forgiven, and the spirit evolves through penance, the
deed remains. We learn and we grow and hopefully[...]e say, less imperfect as Christians. We
heal, yet the scar stays.This reminds us of that.”

Isabella said, “I still say this quilt would raise
more money if we had left Sophronia’s patch in. She
does such beautiful work.”

“Isabella, the Lord will put it in some man’s
heart,”Thankful paused. “Actually, he needs to put it in
the hearts of two men,” she smiled, “to bid on the quilt
because of its reminder of human weakness, and the
endless vigilance required to improve as a Latter—day
Saint. And, of course, to clothe our troops who guard us
against the invaders.” Thankful Everett smiled.

“The army of the Pharaoh,” Emma Taylor said.
“May the winter swallow them like the Red Sea.”

Thankful continued. “I believe that, Isabella. Not

everyone does, but I do. As long as we do the Lord’s
work, the Lord will provide.”

“I must admit,” Isabel[...]did you learn that?”

“Why, from Mr. Everett, of course. Our husband,
the Bishop.”

In the style of the Baltimore Album, the quilt
was a patchwork of floral patterns and fruit, birds and
butterflie[...]s, signatures and mottos and
symmetrical designs. The idea had been to create a quilt
to sell at auction to raise money to split evenly between
recent emigrants destitute of food and clothing, and
Lamanites pushed from their native lands yielding
to the encroaching Mormons, and the Perpetual
Emigrating Fund to bring Later—day Saints from
around the globe to the new Zion. With the advance of
the United States army, however, the purpose shifted to
raising funds to buy supplies for the Legion wintering
in Echo Canyon guarding against the onslaught of the
army. The Seventeenth Ward Female Relief Society
would sponsor an auction and a dance, with food and
enough homebrew to make the men bid when the

were there for her children.”
Isabella pursed her lips. She studied her stitching.
“To leave a good man like Truman Fox who is

doing the work of the Lord.” Emma Taylor shook her

head. “The Lord has His work cut out for him this time.

Sophronia will take a good deal ofeffort.”

“I’m sure the Lord is up to the task,” Thankful
Everett said. She rested her hands in her lap, holding
needle and thread and a section of quilt, and looked
at the women seated in the sewing circle. “Now ladies.
We must be careful not to judge. We have acted in
accordance with our bylaws, not to condemn Sophronia
the person, but her action that is not in accordance with
Christian principles. I ask all of you to pray for our
sister who loved this Society, and gave it her best work.”

“Pray for me as well, sisters,” Isabella said. She
looked[...]bella, we know that,”Thankful said. “You
left to follow the command of the Lord, and you left
a husband who was deaf to his call.”Thankful smiled.
“Dear sister. You[...]voice trailed away.
“He was a good man.”

“Of course he was a good man. He married you,
didn’[...]r sister—wife’s
hand. “But he was not doing the work of the Lord. The

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

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

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

“Emma, you surprise me.” Thankful looked at
her. Emma stitched, her attention directed to her work.
Thankful’s hands were still. ”You must let go of your
spite.” Emma reddened. “Truman Fox would ask that.”

“Thankful, I appreciate your leadership as the
Presidentess of this Society, but I hear the word of
the Lord as well as you, and I don’t need you to tell
me what He says.” Emma stitched quickly, her work
showing the skill of a practiced seamstress.

“Oh dear me,”Thankfu[...]bowed her head and folded her hands, not waiting for a
response. The sewing circle did likewise. “Lord, please be
with us as we do Thine work in Thy new land. Guide us,
strengthen us, help us discern the paths Thou hast for us.
Please be with Sister Sophronia and Sister Emma, and
help us all to grow in Thy love and understanding. Help
us to be the people Thou want us to be. Help us to grow

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

sewing circle joined and the song swelled in the circle.

Second Dragoons, Henry’s Fork near Fort
Supply, Utah Territory, March 10, 1858

. . . the teamsters while drunk would knock
the heads in the [liquor] barrels with an axe,
and, because the mules refused to drink it,

flog them for their foolishness.

—Wi//iam Drown, SecondDragoom, Uta/J
Territory, February 25, 1858

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

in cordwood that grew further away. At the end of

day they gathered the animals by the coulee where

the Regiment encamped under canvas. They herded at
night, growing colder, guarding against Mormons a[...]as tent pins, no salt or
coffee.Their tents were the circular Sibleys, walls steep
as teepees, sleeping ten or more men.

The crowded tents kept the noise and stench of
men: snoring and flatulence, the rank unbathed bodies,
turning sleeping uneasily,[...]choking on
wood smoke, men going out, men coming in. Moses
Cole stepped from the tent to breathe. He coughed.
He looked at stars solid in their endless heaven and he
watched one and then another one fall. He thought of a
brace of wagons fired by Mormons pulled by panicked
horse[...]d been two years and
four months now, long enough for her to become a
mother. She could have carried his child[...]o would grow up calling a Mormon, “Daddy.” Or
the Mormon elder could have made her a mother. Or it
could be both. Did she live in the city at the Great Salt
Lake, did she live on a farm? Did she live in a house or
a homestead hut? Did she wear bonnets and walk on
a tree—lined street? Did she plow with a yoke of oxen
carving a field a furrow at a time?

Moses walked through camp passing the staggered
tents. Twenty or more tents stretched through the coulee

fires. When he reached the end of it Moses turned to
return to his tent and the smoke that layered there.

Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke tossed
in his bedroll. He wondered where they would graze in
the morrow, where they’d find feed for the oxen, mules,
and horses, these mouths of thousands they herded for
the Army of Utah. He wondered at the endless winter,
the relentless windchill the thief of heat, and the snow,
always the snow, as though the beast of winter were
the General Commanding. He thought of Napoleon in
Russia and the frozen soldiers.

“Push it away,” he said.

He thought of his daughter, Flora, married
to James Stuart, a lieutenant in the First Cavalry in
Kansas. Like himself, Lieutenant Stuart was an officer
of horse, a gentleman of Virginia, a graduate of West
Point. Cooke chuckled thinking of the change the
young man made after meeting his daughter—the
beard the Lieutenant grew to hide a slung—under chin
and to shed “Beauty,” the moniker it prompted. At
least when he grew a beard he grew a good one, he’d
allow that. He thought of the wedding at Fort Riley, its
military majesty and his beautiful Flora, so young and

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

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

At least he had the honor to drop it, growing the
beard, using his initials for a nickname sparing Flora,
daughter of a Lieutenant Colonel, the embarrassment
of a husband called “Beauty.”

“What gentleman would call himself ‘JEBW he
said.

Cooke chuckled at the choice his daughter made.
Say what he may, he thought, the young man Stuart
advanced faster than he had.

He thought of Rachael’s radiance that day, so
proud of her daughter following her footsteps and the
validation it gave. The scars marred each cheek, constant
reminder for all to see. Cook winced at the memory.

“God damn me,” he said.

He placed blame on the relapse of malaria and its
feverish thinking, the demented disease that picked up
the pistol. Weak with fever the mechanism slipped and
the ball knocked out half her teeth in the parlor.

“Shot my wife in the face,” he said, shaking his
head. “I deserve to be here.”

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

“What an idiot,” he said out loud alone in his
tent.

He remembered Black Hawk’s war, the dentist
with a practice back east collecting teeth from the
Indian dead before rigor mortis set in. For all he knew,
Rachael carried teeth from a Sac brave scavenged at the
Bad Axe River. He would never tell her what he had
seen there.

Too much time to think out here, he thought.
Too much time with too little to do but persevere. He
thought of the passage from Romans that Rachael
recited ever since the pistol incident: “We glory in
tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worke[...]ce,

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

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

boredom. The deep snow and precipice edges pursuing

the Jicarilla Apaches. The Sioux at Blue Water Creek,
the scalps of white women. It’s been a tiring and trying
ride[...]ve gleaned tribulation,
experience, and hope like the Bible likes. Not much of a
life, he thought, if hope is the highest promotion.

Nathan Slater pulled the buffalo robe up and over his
shoulders and closed it with an overlap under his chin,
the buckskin underside over his coat, hair—side to the
outside. It was pliable, brain—tanned Indian style, and
it was warm, the heavy hair of the buffalo’s shoulders
over his shoulders moving as the wind blew as though
living still, as though in kinship with the gathered
animals guarded on a bedground bigger than a farm,
the hair of the buffalo robe waving in the starlight.
Nathan did not know which was noisier—a tent full of
men, or bedded oxen. Among this many animals there
was always movement. An ox would stand to defecate
or stretch. Another would shift, extend a front leg and
lay his chin on it. Another would roll to his side while
another reversed that movement, ri[...]e pulling legs underbelly. Oxen chewed cuds as if in
dreams of green fields. Others groaned and twitched
as if they spoke from dreams like the men in tents did,
haunted by what had passed and what was to come.

The horses were more composed. Some lay down and

“That’s right,” he’d said. “Watch those fires so the
Mormons don’t steal your wood. Don’t worry about the
herd. They won’t bother them.”

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

Alone under starlight, a March night cold as
Christmas, Nathan remembered he’d left the life of a
farmer. Young and restless and captured by the romantic
notion of the mounted soldier and the name itself,
dragoon, as though there were something princely
about it. The knee—high boots and black tack, sash and
sabre, the grace of the gentleman the recruiter posed.
There was the freedom from the farm and its drudgery
and the chance to ride rather than drive horses. He
remained a farmer at heart, as earthy and intricate as
the soil that grew him yet restless for something better
that books and splendid houses s[...]an inquisitive itch that farming couldn’t
fix. The dragoons he could do, their payroll pay and

promised adventure, the horses and the riding of them.

The hardship marching surprised him. He’d
marched for weeks at a time, often riding far enough to
cross a Pennsylvania township five times to a day. He’d
seen country he’d seen in dreams and the more he saw
the more he missed wooded farmland. Distance didn’t[...]as islands. This marching confirmed
no yearning for the sea and yet he seemed like a prairie
seaman. At least they had this relief, camped near the
mountains as though finally finding harbor.

Funny, he thought, he had joined the army but
didn’t expect death. Horses by the hundreds, mules that
fell in singles and teams, farriers pulling their shoes to
use again. Rations adequate to fend off starving but
nothing they wanted to eat. Fingers and toes black
from frostbite, the wind steady as time. He had it
better in Pennsylvania, the comfort of the forest and
the close hills, the fieldwork and the meals, the warm
bed of a farmstead.The grit required to survive here had
astonished him. There had to be something at the end
of this that would make the journey worth it.

This too was new, this herding of animals
like the drovers in Kansas did. At home they had a
handful of cows and plow oxen, but nothing like this
expanse of animals. It would take an hour to ride
around this herd on a horse at a walk, and then the
Mormons might get him. He’d yet to see one herding

felt the muzzleloader move with the mule’s gait and
wondered what good one shot would do other than to
mark the time of his passing.

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

Echo Cany[...]Captain
Marcy’s herd, getting them shod, ready

for the march tomorrow. He did not bring
enough to fill up the regiment and the light
battery, and we were forced to draw sixty
mules in order to mount all our men. I
happened on a very large hor[...]condDragoom, Uta/J
Territory, juneu, 1858

A city of wickiups stood at the foot of the mountainsides
that defined Echo Canyon. Many were built in the
mountain faces as though huddled there. A construction
of huts crafted with poles and woven willow gave the
look of poverty and pride, a village replete with thatched
roofs sealed with matted grass and a mud mix of clay and
coarser soils placed to slow snow and its dripping through
ceilings heated from the fires inside. Firewood piles stood
by some of the huts to feed fireplaces cut in the banks

of the canyon side. The comfort of the makeshift village
surpassed that of the army’s camp under canvas. Some of
the huts had Dutch ovens cut in the clay bank next to the
fireplace to bake bread oven fresh as if home had never
left these defenders. Strung for more than a mile through
Echo Canyon the thin village was freshly neglected,
abandoned as though decimated by disease and left for
the elements to dismantle.

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

“I don’t like this,” Garrison Lloyd said. “Marching
into this gauntlet before the dragoons do.” He looked
at the slopes and the rock walls of rifle pits spotting the
canyon sides.

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

want the road first, me boy.”

“Oh, me l[...]Sergeant McMurray
said. “Tis us who will shoot the Mormons. They have
their rocks and we have our cannons, you see.” Sergeant
McMurray looked at the deserted works. “Don’t you
know they’ve fled for the valley below now. Run to the
women, they have. When it comes to killin’ a Mormon’s
got no stomach for a soldier’s work.”

The canyon amplified the sound of the marching
column till the soldiers sounded twice their size.

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

Like the country they’d covered since Fort
Laramie, that masquerade of a grassland in essence
a desert scarcely haired—over with prairie, this was a
country to pass through traveling to somewhere less
inhospitable. The huts were the exception, an attempt
to tame an untrainable beast, as though weather could
be gentled with a perception of order. This was tough
country with its rock—sided mountains that seemed
to fall through the canyon floor, hillsides suitable for
seasonal goats, the ground that showed the work of

wind. This would be a country where snow was bor[...]ilitia, me boy. We
have dragoons who will breathe the fire of hell itself.”

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

“For the love of Saint Patrick, laddy. If the
dragoons had ’a been with us instead of sent away by
some general the Mormons would ’a got nothin’ from
us.Tis the dragoons we needed.”

“Well, those lily—liv[...]ike we do. He don’t like bein’
afoot and left to do a man’s work. Oh, they’ll make the
Mormons pay they will.” Sergeant McMurray’s beard
widened when he smiled. “Tis a thing of beauty truly, to

see the horsemen charge.”

The four hundred horsemen of the Second Dragoons
halted at the mouth of Echo Canyon. All were mounted
now with many on remounts from Captain Marcy’s
expedition to New Mexico. At the mouth of the

canyon Colonel Cooke ordered a regimental drill[...]paulets when his horse turned, showing promotion

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

bishop the insignia signaled an aura of authority, its hint
of intimidation.

Officers shouted sounding like an army volleyed
voices and the rocks volleyed back as though venting
what lay wi[...]master and it was a wonder, Moses Cole
said, that the canyon didn’t collapse.

“Them rocks,” he s[...]me a bugler.”

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

Salt Lake City,June 26, 1858
On entering the city, we could see at a glance

that everything was laid out in the most

accurate manner, the city being laid off in

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

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

them apple and peach orchards in rear.

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

Ihe streets [in Provo] are very wide, regularly
laid out, and run at exact right angles to each
other. Along the sides of some of them run
small, rapid streams, in which great mountain
trout, weighing ten or twelv[...]ong. Ihe
children have fine sport throwing stones at

these beautiful fish, and trying to kill them.

—]eneA. Gave, Captain, Tent/[...]

Colonel Cooke thought of Lafayette Frost,
Corporal ofMormons. He saw a sha[...]e thought, he would be with their Legion
standing at a home as if standing to horse, holding a
torch as a sword of the Lord ready to immolate their
city. Colonel Cooke shook his head at the memory of
Lafayette Frost steady as steel as the bull closed with
the momentum of a locomotive. Lafayette Frost had
reenlisted, enticed by the new uniform and the addition
of eighteen cents a day to occupy San Diego with the
Mormon Volunteers and died there, disease taking the
body the desert couldn’t weaken.

Colonel Cooke muttered[...]rmy they made.”

“Beg your pardon, Colonel?”The voice came from
a staff officer riding behind him.

“Nothing, Lieutenant. Just looking for soldiers
I knew.”The Lieutenant looked as if he tried to
comprehend a mathematical equation beyond his
education. “The Mormon Battalion, Lieutenant.
Extraordinary soldiers.” Colonel Cooke rode at
the head of the dragoons and watched with head
uncovered.

Moses Cole watched also. Nathan Slater rode at
his side in their column of horsemen four abreast.

“Look at the old fool,” Moses said. Like the other
troops Nathan looked at the houses with their yards
and porches, fences and orchards. It looked as good as
the best he’d seen in Pennsylvania.

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

The sound of horse hooves filled the boulevard
then quit at the intervals that split the army by
companies marching in parade formation. In these still
intervals the creeks gurgled as though promenading
water to trees standing sentinel and to the gardens and
orchards of the citied homesteads.

“If it was up to me we’d camp right here. Move
right in them houses. Eat off them fruit trees and[...]

Louis, and these people did not have the material or
tools the craftsmen back east had.

“Them people owe us that much,” Moses said.

The yard fences and the shade trees and the
open streets they marched on and crossed over blended
the comfort of New England with a western sense of
space. Looking east over the tops of the trees and the
houses the mountains rose higher than Nathan thought
possibl[...]anyway?” Moses said. “He

never give us a tip of the brim.”

“Hold it down, Moses,” Nathan said.[...]gardens
brighter than a Pennsylvania forest full of fall splendor.

“Not once,” Moses said.

Nathan thought of framed paintings in a
Philadelphia museum. “Appreciate what we see[...]g time before we see this again.”

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

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

Tu B ’Shvat: for the Drowned and the Saved
Melanie Rae Then

The girl was radiant. I saw her in the shower naked.
Glistening with water, she seemed lit from inside, a
woman illuminated. I tried not to stare, then simply
surrendered.

Alone, I tried not to look in the mirror, tried
not to hear my mother: 777e old are more naked tban
tbeyoung. Before the camp, she had never seen an old
woman naked.

One day last week the slender girl flickered
beneath me.Three lengths[...]ve yards
underwater. She had strength and desire, the discipline
to stay down even if her lungs were bursting.

There are others like me at the pool, not that
old, but already too fat or too thin, trying to stay fit,
but already withered. There are others with scars: the
woman with one breast, the man who leaves his left leg,
his prosthesis, at the edge of the water.

The long, green—eyed girl gave us hope, a vision of
a human being perfected.

My mother weighed seventy—two pounds the
last time I dared to weigh her. I fed her puréed peas,
strained carrots, tiny spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. I
was always afraid. I thought h[...]I bathed her.

She no longer spoke out loud, but the voice inside

us said: Love is rtronger tban deal[...]ives—
chestnuts, cherries, pears, almonds—all the fruits of
Tu B’Shvat, the new year ofthe trees, God’s Rosh
Hashanah. My father said, God reeks M, [Mr day alzove all
otberr.

In Israel, cold winter rains turned to drizzle; sap
flowed through myrtle and cedar. Here in Salt Lake
City, I woke to see new snow on white aspen, the whole
world in pink morning light fractured. I envied my
mother, the ease with which she moved, free of her
body. She waited for me. She said, 77m ix rometbing.

By noon, sun shattered of snow, the day suddenly
fierce, the blue sky unbearable. Mother opened her eyes
wide, loving the light, able at last to take everything
inside her. Only thirty—five degrees, but I was hot in
my down coat, sweltering. I believed, yes: in this rage of
light, the Tree of Life, all life, might be reawakening.

I told myself: Rejoiee.

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

And so I was—but more grateful to come home
and close the blinds and close my eyes and let my
mother go and lie perfectly still in perfect silence until
Davia and Seth retur[...]

Davia in the living room, lightly playing one phrase at
a time on piano, then turning to the chair to invent an
answer with her cello. She plays as she[...]ceful
as water flowing, a girl who sees a mirage of herself
shimmering across the desert: as soon as she reaches the
place she appeared, she is already changing. My D[...]ars old, her whole body trembling. When
I put her to bed that night, she lay quivering, near tears,
unable to tell me why, unwilling to take comfort. Too
much, too soon, a mistake, I was sorry. But the next
morning, the trill of the piano woke me, Davia running
her fingers up the keys—a ripple of light, the body
becoming light, blood clear as rain—then down to the
lowest notes, the mind a waterfall plunging. She had
moved the bench to walk the full range, to touch every
key, to feel the hammers strike wires inside her—Davia
finding her first song, Davia in rapture.

Now she plays piano, zither, cello—Gi[...]dwig van Beethoven.
Now she serenades a doll; now the snow is dancing.
She conjures the carnival of Saint—Saens: kangaroos
and tortoise, wild asses, people with long ears—pianists,
fossils. She plays the songs Dvorak’s mother taught
him, the cello strand of “Transfigured Night,” Leonard
Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

She loves the cello because it vibrates through

her bones, and[...]came first, that night, that morning.
She loves the zither because even the wind knows how
to play it—as if her gift is not her gift, only the breath
passing through her. She lies on her bed in the dark,
headphones on, sound searing straight into her skull—
she’s safe for all time, sheltered by “The Protecting
Veil,” the voice of the Mother of God in a cello,Yo—Yo
Ma playing Tavener. She turns the volume down lower
and lower, until sound stops, u[...]ring vibration. Davia, seventeen, and good enough
for Juilliard, but she wants to live in the wild, meet the
snow leopard face to face, hear its still, small voice high
in the Himalayas—she wants to follow caribou across
mountains and tundra, record the sounds they hear on
their way to the edge of the world—Davia wants to
sing as elephants sing when they visit the bones of their
ancestors.

Seth already knows he’ll be a[...]him now, my thin boy with narrow
shoulders, small for his age, climbing the ropes at
school, proving himself, faster than the other boys and
able to squeeze his skinny hips through tight spaces,
Seth Betos, unafraid of smoke—filled tunnels—our
beautiful savior, b[...]ze with desire,
eleven years old, my boy, singing the Kaddirb, walking
into the flames, healing the wailing mothers with a
song as he lifts their babies from the embers.

My tbildren/ Let [be nigbt begin;[...]

The camp sat wedged between the Vistula and
the Sola, a swamp, a land of floods, soil impervious to
rain and melting snow, marl two hundred feet thick,
crumbling clay, impossible to drain and farm—but the
Nazis still believed they could make everything in the
world useful. Day by day for four years, they sent the
women to the fields—hundreds, thousands—marched
them five by five out the gate while the band played the
rousing March of Triumph from Aida, marched them
for hours, for miles, past deserted houses and evacuated
villages, set them to work uprooting stumps or digging
ditches, building roads, dredging fish ponds to spread
the muck with their own muck as fertilizer. If a stone

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

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

In the end, my mother’s captors contented
themselves with one simple project: to move the stones,
to even the banks, to make the river straight, to force
the Vistula to flow more smoothly.

I see her bones, all their bones, glowing white
through their skin, washing away in frigid water. Soup
was Goal, Eva said. 7771'}: ax[...]aineal me. My
mother lived because she was strong for her size and
not too pretty, because she stood st[...]omewhere. She
lived because life itself was proof of rebellion. One day
she collapsed and lay in the cold unconscious. When
the whistle blew, she did not rise, and two other wom[...]recall, whose names she never
knew, who whispered to her in Czechoslovakian or
Polish, used the last of their strength, their love, to drag
her back to the camp between them. My mother lived
because the river ran cold, because frostbite, because
fever, because too weak to march as the Russians
approached, because left to die and instead liberated.

Eva Spier became Eva[...]ghter: my mother lived fifty—eight years after the

war, twenty—three without my father—t[...]

Night after night, my mother liv[...]know that
my mother did not tell me, words I hear in the voice
of her violin, Bach’s “Chaconne” playing on ba[...]d witb banger, Ifelt my own banger.
I praired God for your noire, your flerb, your fatifor fear
I eoul[...]ody. Night after night, my husband lies beside me
in this unstable darkness. He sleeps as children sleep,
in complete surrender. He sleeps blessed, because he[...]nd,
famously patient. Doctor Liam Betos knows how to slip
titanium ribs into the bodies of children with scoliosis
so that they can breathe and walk, free of oxygen tanks
and wheelchairs. He is not vain.A man bad to build a
titanium bibe before anyone tbougbt to put ribr in a buman.
Liam’s children teach one another to do somersaults
and cartwheels. They hang by their knees from the
monkey bars at school, roll down grassy hills in the
park, then charge to the top again, laughing.

If Doctor Betos sleeps in peace, he has earned it.

This morning I kissed t[...]ve him, my good husband,
and I was unafraid, calm in the lavender light, no need
to shield myself against it.

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

God, bere, in all tbingr: tbe birdr, tbe rong, tbe rilenee,
tbe[...]loudr, tbe rpaee betweeni
tbe old terrier tugging at bir ebain, tbe band witb wbieb
I toueb and rootb[...]e, wine, wbeat, earobiar tbe
pomegranate we found at lartiar rweetpearr and nutx
and appler. God wbo r[...]m wonder.

I slipped, I almost fell, bedazzled by the thought,
as if hearing God’s Word, the seed in my heart, rupture
for the first time. Mother came, light as light.[...]

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

I was glad to see the green—eyed girl at the pool.
She restored me. Her beauty seemed simple today,
almost clear, not hers, merely the glass for God’s
reflection.I knew her name now, Helen Kinderman.
Sweetly she’d given it to me last week when I asked her.
She spoke softly,[...]ooked suddenly
small and bewildered.

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

Today, everyone looked perfect. O[...]atter? Carl
Ancelet pulled hard with his left arm to compensate,
and his right leg, his one extraordinary leg, kicked up
and down and side to side, as he glided down the pool.
A dark—skinned woman swam on her back, pr[...]ening lush, buoyantly healthy, pink suit
clinging to swollen nipples and navel, tight pink cloth
expos[...]th two bald women,
ones whose hair had fallen out in the grip of
chemotherapy, ones healing now with her, their guide,
their hope, because she had lost a breast at thirty—three
and was not afraid, because she gave them a vision
of how they might reclaim their strength in water—

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

long and w[...]urpose, stroked his smooth head, suddenly
ashamed of this indulgence.

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

I remembered my father’s blessings: for lightning
and thunder, for the beautiful ones, a narrow road
through red maples, green dragonflies and white
tulips, for lovely girls and strange—looking creatures:
Bar[...]b’riyot. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the
Universe, who makes the creatures different.

Kristina Everly spoke to her deaf twins from
across the pool, hands leaping in light, voice blessedly
silent. How lucky they were to speak this way! I
watched Ricky and Ryan dive deep to tell secrets
underwater. Idris emerged from the tunnel of the
dressing room, white towel wrapped like a skirt
a[...]e
and before her second, Idris gave me a tiny cup of
espresso at his coffee shop—warm and delicious it
was, bitt[...]ood; he believed me. But tome bark, he said,free

for you, any time, really.

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

lightly, as if it were not my name at all, but the word
for his favorite dance, [be Margali[, and as he spoke[...]e was bright, hair black, skin olive. We met
only at the pool—he seemed to know why—but I was
always glad on days like today when Idris chose the
lane beside me.

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

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

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

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

not vain, not driven. I loved[...]flowing. When she slowed, when she
lay still on the bottom, I thought: some new challenge,
some watery meditation, the mind making thein my
mind how I said it.

I confess: I grew vaguely irritated. She stayed
too close to the edge. Despite her depth, she distracted
me, and s[...]ip turn. I
forgot how lucky I was, how privileged to swim with
these people. I forgot about coconuts and pears and
olives, all the fruit at home, waiting to be cracked and
sliced, the endless gifts waiting to be opened. I forgot
about God as wine and swallowed a mouthful of water.
He left me sputtering, separate from all things, trapped
in myself, pitifully human.

My awe for the girl grew hard, a pit ofshame
sharp in my belly.

I swam over her three times before I thought to
go down, before I felt her as I’d felt the birds, before my
mother said, Sbe neealryou.

A trick, I thought, this voice in water. I did not
believe. I did not trust her.

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

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

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

Then the others came, xofmt, as if they’d felt my
grief move through the water: Idris, the closest one,
already on the deck, taking her in his arms, lifting
Helen away from me; Kristina waving furiously at the
lifeguard, trying to make that flushed boy comprehend
the wild silence of her language; then another guard,

a girl with a[...]red—
headed girl with powerful thighs like one of those
miniature gymnasts; and Louise Doren touching
Helen’s feet, believing the one who’d almost died could
heal the one not living.

The flustered boy yelled, commanding us to
step back, me and Kristina, Louise and Samuel, as
if we had no part in it, no place or purpose here, no
desire—running now, the guards, telling Idris to set her
down, gently, gently; scolding us with their voices, not
the words themselves, but the tone, the inflection, the
implication we’d done her harm, the insinuation our

touch was violent.

They knelt beside her—the boy, the girl, these
two, these children.The fierce little gymnast pumped
Helen’s chest, an[...]pple legs
weirdly bloated. Stop. I wanted someone to stop this.
But nothing stopped. In her chest, tiny bones cracked;
from her mouth and nose, water spurted.Then the boy
had his mouth on Helen’s mouth, and the girl pressed
hard with the heels of her hands, and Helen’s bones
broke and her body surrendered and there was hope
the lungs might heave, the heart clench, the love of life
return, the delicate pulse throb in her neck again.

Where was the manager?

Out back, smoking a cigarette?

On the phone, scolding her befuddled father?

What did i[...]re or why, legitimate
or foolish? She’d left us in the care of two teenagers
who had done the drill ninety—nine times but never
resuscitated[...]one, I raw 17er. Or maybe it was
Helen’s fault for swimming underwater so many times,
for teaching me, Idris, the rippled boy, Samuel Killian,
the buoyant woman—all of us—how strong she was,
how ridiculous we were to worry. I wanted to rage at
Helen, God, the manager. Wbere oreyou now? Wlmt are
you doing tlm[...]o firemen and a paramedic descended, dark

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

terribly efficient. Helen belonged to them now. They
had paddles to jolt her heart and a syringe full of
epinephrine. Her body rose and shuddered and stop[...]r rboreil knew i[ ax roon ax I [ouebeal ber.

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

We didn’t go home. We clustered outside, though
the day had gone dark, though the wind whipped
icy snow into dancing funnels. The pregnant woman
sobbed, blaming herself. I raw ber[...]p until Idris put his arm around her.

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

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

Carl looked in my direction, but his focus went

far beyond, to the trees, to the snow on the mountains
behind us. Louise and her two friends p[...]been Krim'na or Samuel
or V iole[[e. She touched the place where her left breast
once was to remind me: anyone can drown or save or
fail Or yo[...][oo la[e, Ialrir [be one wbo
wai[eal.

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

She drove me[...]ir job.

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

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

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

And then Louise closed my door, and I was alone,
completely, and everything in the house scared me:
fruit uncut, wine unopened, Moth[...]h
rolled tight, Mother’s white on white scroll, the Tree of

Life embroidered in satin stitches, a wedding gift from

I smelled Helen Kinderman in me—soot of
adrenaline, burn of chlorine—we shared this: one
scorched body. I wanted to wash her away, the smell,
the memory, the thing that had happened but couldn’t
be, and I tried to climb the stairs, butI was too weak
to stand, too light in the head, and I was afraid of the
water, my father there, dead of a heart attack at fifty—
seven, Leonard Lok crumpled in the shower, alone, two
hours—my father who might ha[...]ard a cry, if he hadn’t
hit his head so hard on the tile. Even now, today, he
might live—if onlyI could climb the stairs, if onlyI
could reach him.

How can tbis b[...]el eyes were
almost gold, because she scared them.The doctors
thought if they could sterilize a girl li[...]bearing only their secrets.

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

cold over my father’s cold body. You[...]eeuure you
were foolirbibeeuure you didn’t bide in time, beeuure you
didn’t believe, beeuure you c[...]d ur out.

Our good Cbristiunfriendr delivered ur to tbe roldierr. Ybe
midwife wbo brougbt me mfe into[...]obed me
now, deep inride every opening, reurebing for rturbed gold,
luminous peurlr, glittering rubier.[...]Kuturinu Szubo’piereed me. Ar if I
were notbing to berigout, dog, few, rtrungeriur up my
aunt Lilibe bud not bubed tbe tbreertiered wedding tube
for Kuturinu’r duugbter, or if my motber bud not re[...]?

Ybefumilyjewelr were inride, it? true, but not in my
bodyifour gold ringr, wedding bundr, ull we’d ever bud
between ur, four tbin ringr bidden deep in tbe belly oftbe
doll my fiztber brougbt me obrro[...]etb, u red tongue, tiny dimpler;
rbe looked reudy to rpeub, tbin pink lipr ligbtlypurted,
tbe p[...]

How can tbis be?

Even Bertok the carver couldn’t explain how he’d
done it.

In the camp, he extracted gold from the mouths
of the dead, found emeralds stashed in the bowel,
sapphires the soul didn’t need, diamonds his neighbors
had sw[...]ua, Tzili, judit. Her cousin Datiel lived because
the sun struck his face and he looked stronger than h[...]ugh like
them, almost a soldier. He wheeled carts of the dead
and almost dead. He heaved them into ovens.[...]quil anal wbo xball be troubleal. Datiel survived
the war and hung himself twenty—six years after.

They arrived at night on the train. Work would
make them free—if they were quick, if the wolf
dogs didn’t kill them. Somewhere in the eerie fog, an
orchestra played Hungarian Rbapxoaliex to soothe them.

Areyou mad? Ix tbixpomible?

And then they began to see, yes, a piano and
a cello, a violin dancing in the air, in the mist, and a
woman with a baton, standing very str[...]weird black dust everywhere
falling. Music muted the cries of children, and they
thought: Iftbe musie aloexn’t xtop, anytbingianytbing at
alliix bearable.

My mother’s grandmothers died[...]because he hobbled behind

them. Aunt Lilike took the hand ofa child, a little boy

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

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

a prayer began to pass among the women, a whispered

song between them, as if in a single breath they’d all
remembered the day, the hour, Sbabba[, the holy night,
the queen, the bride already here, radiant among them.
They had one choice: to live as long as possible, to let
God hold them in the river. Hungarian, Greek, Czeeb,
Polirbi Li[buania[...]and Godga<ve ur eaeb an ex[ra
roul, a boly rpiri[ forin [be wa[er, rilen[ women,
floa[ing Jewr, free a[ lar[, raved, delivered, bu[ [be wind in
[be [reer and [be wa[er o<ver roeks were [be pray[...][bis be?

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

My father said, E[...][0 kin bir
mou[b and eyelidr.

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

fell? Didyou die afraid, or rurrender in wonder?

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

I do love you.

Two hours gone since w[...]er
than death? Motber, are you witb me? I thought of
Helen’s mother, the words she might hear, her husband
the first to know, the one to tell her, the terrible sound
she might make as slowly she understood him. Do the
dead die when they die, or only when we believe i[...]e I knew it, and all that
time, if I imagined him at all, I imagined him walking
in the water, in the world, beside me.

The police found Helen’s father first, Peter
Kinde[...]own, and when he
saw them, he was afraid, but not for Helen—he never
thought, It’x ber, xbe’x gon[...]ugbter. He
thought accidental overdose, a mistake in a prescription,
a stranger dead somewhere or in a coma, his fault,
or the fault of one of his technicians. He made the
stuttering policeman say it three times. Drowned, today,
tbix morning, Helen. He walked from the drug store
to the library, thirteen blocks in the cold without hat
or gloves, and the wind bit and he liked it, the small
hurt, the swirling snow, the distraction, the drifting in
and out, thein relief and terror, grieving now for another man,
feeling him, the one he didn’t know, the father of a child
missing. Ob, Helen/ She was always the most sensitive
of his children, the quiet one, Helen who came from
the womb with her eyes wide open, just a few minutes
old and already watching. She would understand his
sorrow, the hours of pain when she didn’t come home,
when he began to take it in, when he couldn’t breathe,
when he had to invent words to tell his wife and
somehow find his other children.

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

Cla[...]my birtbday, not our
anniverxary, and bere be ii in tbe middle of tbe day, Peter
looking bandrome and rad, t[...]

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

He took her outside to say it, so she could wail
into the wind, so she wouldn’t have to hold it in her
body as he held it, so the cry wouldn’t splinter her ribs
the way his ribs were splintering.

I was not there; I did not hear the sound my
mother made when she found my father in the shower,
when she understood she’d lost him too,[...]Sunday morning, late summer, and Mother had
gone to the hospital to play her violin for the children.
Leonard Lok slipped free of his body fast to follow her,
to hear her play, to see Eva swaying to the songs inside
her—one more time, my love, my dar[...]is holy sparks scattered. She
stood with her back to the windows, face in shadow,
bright glass blazing behind her—Eva Lok playing her
violin for the children, giving them her wild joy, the
miracle of survival in these strings, an endless hymn of
praise, a vision of their own perfection—Eva playing
Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta and Marosszék, each one
a fusion, a rond[...]playing with her

beloved Zoltan, imagining him, the teacher who visited

her school, who believed eve[...]n’t ba<ve breatb; let your body feel it. And so in his spirit,
in his name, Eva taught a simple song to these children
in wheelchairs, the ones without hair, the ones without
fingers, the ones with fluttery hearts and failing kidneys,
the burned boy with a patchwork face, skin sewn from
the skin of others. He’d made a collage of himself, a
picture pasted together: right ear of a pig and tail of a
peacock, open eyes of an owl, closed mouth of a seal.
He offered it to my mother when she came, a gift, and
she saw who it was before he said it, and she touched
his left ear, the ear that was really his, the soft ear, the
ear that could still hear and flush and feel, an[...]ix xixter torebed tbe drapex, beeauxe tbey wanted to xee a
wall of fire, beeauxe tbe xixterfurled berxelfinxide, and tbe
brotber tried to rave ber.

My father blazed in the window behind Eva.
As light, he fell on ba[...]

witbout a witnem? How can anyone die in ber own bed, or
bix own xbower? How can a twentyrtworyearroldgirl wbo
learned to xwim before xbe walked drown in a pool? How
can you xurvive [be worxt and not liv[...]ack
porch, transfixed by their own reflections. The next
day, I saw one struck by a van, and I knew her, I
remembered her, lighter and smaller than the other
two, hungry like them because of the snow, desperate,
and so they’d come down from the hills into the city.
She leaped away, a miracle, unharmed by the van, alive
in the moment. But later, I was sure I felt her in the
snow, hidden in the park by the river. I looked for her;

I don’t know what I meant to do—lie down with her,
as I lay with my mother, float away at last, give myself
to the water? I was certain she would die that night,
th[...]My mother who lost everyone she loved rocked
me in her thin arms one day and said, I bave you and
Liam and Setb and Davia. My mother whispered, My
life for tbix, God bar merey.

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

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

to take these two if they could learn to milk cows and
pluck chickens, if they weren’t afraid to twist a neck
and break it, if they promised to love mucking stalls,
shoveling snow, heaving thir[...]eome
after. She meant when they’d saved enough to travel,
enough to bribe, enough to secure visas. She packed
their finest clothes: A[...]lining. Worthless, she knew: they
weren’t going to wear silk and lace on a farm outside of
Buffalo. 31979210: wbat did it mean, and wbere wa[...]rousers and handkerchiefs though
Antje begged her to stop, though Antje said: On [be
boat, everytbingy[...]sang as she
worked, peculiar melodies known only to her, giddy and
bright, then suddenly mournful. Ironing was perfect
bliss, folding her children’s clothes the piercing joy she’d
keep forever.

Their father[...]x.

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

never reached them. Their father wro[...]

Conxulate bar not approved our applieationr to immigrate.
We’ll try again in four montbx. Keep your faitb in ur. We’ll
be tbere. His scrawled note at the bottom of the page
sounded like a whisper, a secret sputtered at the last
moment before he could scratch it out or regret it:
Better we bave to wait. Your motber’x been xieb, notbing
xerioux,juxt rome fluid in ber lungxixbe’ll be well again
wben xbe xeex bl[...]ve. Sbe rayx don’t worry.

Their mother died on the train. Their father died
in Dachau.

Soon, after, delay, don’t worry.

You[...]eauxe even if God was deaf you wanted your
motber to bear you.

My father carried three photographs to America:
Greta and Hevel Lok six days after they married, a
clear alpine lake and snow—covered mountains in the
distance; Hevel as a child in short pants, a boy holding
a butterfly on his finger; Greta Erhmann walking
through a field of poppies, a hopeful girl, conceiving
two children in her mind, dreaming her life to come: I
did; I raw you. Hand—tinted, singular a[...]heir whole lives: together, apart,
before, after. The artist had flushed the girl’s lips and
shoulders, had revealed heat rising beneath the skin of
cheeks and fingers.The poppies glowed, lit from inside,

translucent yel[...]s these pictures were, they were not as
strong as the visions in his mind, the last days, the last
hours, Mother ironing perfect creases in his trousers,
Mother holding Antje’s cape, dancing without music,
swirling the long gray cape into a person. My father
remembered his father on his knees the day the blond
boys of Vienna became Nazi accomplices. They wore
swastik[...]ed their little
dog—whips.They wanted Hevel Lok to scrub the street,
to wash away the Austrian cross some rebel nationals
1ad painted.The doctor had known these three in their
mothers’ wombs, had felt Dieter’s appen[...]set Emil’s fractured legs after
1e leaped from the tree house, listened to Hendrik’s
1eart and lungs, laid his naked ear on the little boy’s
bare chest when he had whooping cough—because the
stethoscope was too cold, because he didn’t want to hurt
1im. Dieter, Emil, Hendrik! Hevel Lok wanted to say
their names, to call them out of themselves, to remind
them who he was, the one they knew, the man who
oved them.

My father’s mother loved her children enough to

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

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

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

leap, ones half—burned, ten thousand in one grave,
hundreds never buried. He saw how hungry they were,
the dead, limbs bent back, impossible angles, humans[...]llies.
Even now they cried and wasted. So bungry/ The dead
wanted my father to feed them. Each one was his own
mother. His broken father lay in the pit, whispering
the Kaddirb ten thousand times, then starting over.
Leonard Lok stared across the open grave and saw his
unborn child on the other side, his daughter ready to
leap, Margalit silently wailing.

He had never lo[...]and where was it?

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

Antje wrote: People go over Niagara Fallr in
barrelr, [o ray [bey did, [0 prove i[’rpomible.[...]e foolish men who risked their lives on purpose.

The ones returned from the dead told him stories.

They lived by chance, by grace, the sacrifice of another.

Beeaure I lied wben [bey arked y” I e[...]a needed a eellir[; beeaure romeone elre
bad died in [be nigb[; beeame I rpoke German; beeaure I
priek[...]reoured [beir [oile[r, and [bey weren’[ unkind in [beir boure,
and I eouldn’[ ba[e [bem, and rome[...]e, rome[imer I rueked milk pumped from [be brear[ of
bir mo[ber, and I war alwayx afraid, bu[ rbe never raw and
rbe never killed me.

They told of the ones set free who died anyway,
hundreds a day, thousands in every camp, because the
soldiers, the good ones, their liberators, gave them meat
and c[...]too
much, too fast, and their bowels twisted, and the food
that promised life became the poison that killed them.

Sometimes he sat with the children while they
ate, teaching them to take a little at a time, to trust that
there was more: chicken soup and bread[...]destroyed, Eva, a girl who still loved her life, the
thin thread of it, who weighed thirty—four kilos, nine
pounds more than the day she was liberated, Eva who

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

Imagine a love like this, here, after, in this place—
imagine a life where laughter is possible.

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

But he[...]while Eva played her violin, while light fell on the
stunned faces of fifteen children, ones outside of time,
ones caught in the rapture. Light was all the weight
they could bear, light the only touch tender enough not
to hurt them.

If my father had lived, he might have taught
some of these children to float, to swim, to walk in
water when their legs were too weak to stand, when
the frail rigging of their bones wouldn’t hold them.
Children like t[...]e body lover life! How [be body wann [0 beal/

On the last day of my mother’s life, I saw the
sores on her feet closing.

How can [bis be?

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

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

firemen and paramedic, the shaved boy, the swollen

woman, the one—legged man, the unborn child—and I
loved them too, and I knew that what had happened to
Helen had happened to all of us, and forever.

How can tbis be?

There are a thousand ways to die, any day, any
hour—yet one child lives, one little girl devoured by
the wolf cuts herself free of his bowel and walks out
of the woods into the sunlight. One woman in a pit
moves, and another one says, Can anybody bear me? A
wife pulls her husband from the shower in time, and
a doctor makes an incision just big enough to slip his
fingers inside, and this man, this doctor, this human
being, holds the heart of another man in his hand while

he repairs it.

Arire, my darling, my beautiful one, my daugbter. You ba<ve
reen Godfaee to fizee. Now all “firing is over. Now it is time
to forgive. Now it is time to rurrender. Love ixfiereer tban
deatb. I ret myre[...]d beeaure a woman
bungrier tban you, one too rieb to rwallow, gave you ber
roup and bread, and you raw tbat rbe war God, ofiering
berrelf to you even as rbe lay dying. I unrolled the white
tablecloth with its white satin stitches, and my mother
and father appeared, smelling ofin
the distance—owl and elephant, ram and raven: life[...]bour.

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

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

allow Karin to eat her lunch in peace while little Juli,
Prince of Denmark, sneaked outside to lie in the bed
of a truck, to get buzzed on cigarettes and blow smoke
into the mouths of her two boyfriends? Forever and a
day, Karin and Juli will blame their parents for these
terrible hours, macaroni and cheese, hot as[...]onda Jean, has
called her home from her honeymoon in Hawaii.
When she heard her father’s voice, she[...].

And perhaps she is right—perhaps he imagines
the tiny red bathing suit she wore, the strapless dress,
her near nakedness at this moment, but the words he
speaks are soft, and in the breath before the cry, all
transgressions past and still to come are by a sister’s
death forgiven.

Helen,[...]ours gone and Jay Kinderman, serving

his mission in Hermosillo, walks a dusty road at the
edge of the city, hoping to save one soul today, hoping
to win one convert. He does not know. He cannot
imag[...]r sisters.
He hears Helen’s mocking voice above the others,
Helen, three years older, calling him Elder Kinderman,
and he laughs at himself, atat last, as if she has whispered: I[’.c okay. Do i[...]anion is sick today—heaving, dehydrated, afraid
to leave his bed, afraid to drink the water. IfJay liked
Elder Mattea better, would they be more successful?
Something to overcome—in time, if possible—part
ofthe test, part of the challenge: surrendering to love
long before you feel it.

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

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

He sees a small Indian woman moving toward
him, slowly gathering herself out of the dust until she
becomes a shape he recognizes. He counts, he tries
to count, all her skinny dogs, all her skinny—legged
children, all the mottled chickens that lead this strange
procession.

And he thinks, Now, today, [bis ix [be boar, and
forto him, the failure of practiced
words, the hopelessness of his precise Spanish.

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

Jay Kinderman knows he will do this—for Helen,
with Helen. He will dance with enchanted legs. He will
learn every song the children want to teach him.

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

one converted.

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

Davia opened the door, and here they were, alive,
both of them, home, my precious ones, to help me slice
pears and crack coconuts.I touched[...]n’t know it, if they’d been conjugating verbs in
French or memorizing the names of tribes, learning to
spell, to say, to imagine Hobokam, Tani, Zapotek, Yaqui,
Eyak, Gwieb’in, Kuna, Maarai, Malagaray—if they’d
been watching a film about birds: snow geese in flight,
dancing cranes, emperor penguins emerging from the
ocean. Oh, if they heard now, how foolish and blessed it
would seem, this life, all of it!

Liam returned to us, just in time, just before dusk,
in the hour of twilight. We blessed the wine of every
season: white, pink, rose, red. We drank it down, the
year to come, the year behind us. We blessed each fruit.
We ate because God needed us—our human love, our
frail bodies—to restore Him, the Tree of Life, to give
God life in the world. Everytbing] 17a<ve iryourx/ How
slow we are to learn it. We ate pomegranates with shells
because[...]it with pits—because fear

makes a stone, sharp in the belly. We ate figs and grapes

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

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

Imagine the song you would sing if you loved the
mud, the weeds, the rocks rippling you. Imagine your
joy if you refl[...]owed them. Imagine
if you had no choice as creeks entered you, if you
wound slowly through silent woods, then with delight
roared down a narrow canyon—imagine the wonder of

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

you emptied yourself into the ocean. Never again, never
again I, never will I o[...]Davia’s voice, life beyond hope and fear, proof of love,
God unfathomable. Seth brought his fingers to the keys
in a jubilation of sound, three times Davia’s speed, but
with asto[...]illiant rain, water bouncing off water.

I looked at my husband’s hands, the hand
that holds the knife, the hand that slips a rib into a
child. I felt them here, the children whose lives he’d
saved—Sophie,Joseph[...]y—Nina, Dorothy,
Matthew, Eric—I saw each one of them and all their
children; I saw fathers and mo[...]oned.

You lived beeaure you ebopped fallen treer in a
nearby forert. One day you prayed ax you walked[...]. Everytbing bere reemed
bind Notbing bere wanted to billyou. 77m war bow wind
tbrougbpine answered‘[...]e more day, one more bour? If tbe
eloudr are part of God and part of you, wby ean’t tbey be
good? Wby ean’t tbey b[...]d Jay Kinderman is
learning Yaqui Deer Songs from the children, songs to

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

the flower universe.
777e deer look a[ a flower.
777e barb is ri[[ing under a [ree and ringing.
Wi[b a elm[er offlowerx in my an[lerx I walk.
77m ix [be [ru[b you mked for.
Dremed in flowerr, I am going

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

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

I bave earx [o [be wildernem, ax I a[...]ar a
voiee bebind me raying, 77m ix [be way, walk in i[.

Is this the truth they’ve asked for?

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

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

Helen, if [be bu[[erfliex ru[...]one more day, one more boar?

My children climbed the stairs, and their enchanted

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

throbbing pulse in my skull and pelvis.

I had to rise, or die there.

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

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

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

My mo[ber war alive again [oday, bu[ dy[...]ia, and I eouldn’[ [limb [be i[airr [o rave you in
[be xbower. 777en you all tame borne wi[b[...]

as Louise Do[...]starving woman wbo ofiQ’red ber soup and
bread to my motber. God beeame wine, and we drank Him.
Edi[...]ai, El Olom, El Kbai. Berto’k Spier
made a eofiin for bimselfwitbout wood or grief or nails.
Lilike saved tbe son of a stranger, and Juli Kinderman
erowned berselfPrinee of Denmark. Karin answered
every question: I ’m no[...]played ber violin wbile a burned boy slipped free of
flayed skin to emerge as owl, and pig, and peaeoek. Vonda
jean l[...]and tbeir
daugbter Helen tame bome witb open eyes to eomfort tbem.
Hevel Lok pressed bis ear to a ebild’s [best and beard tbe
boy’s blood roaring. All tbe bungry birds of Europe landed
at Eva Spier’sfiet, and sbe fed tbem, and sbe lau[...]tben be left us. My
motber’s bones wasbed away in an iey river, but we were

not afraid beeause tbe[...]and tbe doll named Anastasia split ber own skull to spill
ber seerets. Our ebildren beard tbefirst w[...]tbey gave me
strengtb, and I took Helen Kinderman in my arms, and I
kissed ber leg as sbe rose, and al[...]even now, Jay Kinderman begins his long walk
back to Hermosillo. Witb a eluster of flowers in my antlers
I walk. I bear tbe wilderness as I am[...]te.
There will be repercussions and restrictions, the ritual of
repentance or even a return home—depending. And[...]ho will understand him?
Only Helen. He was called to go, and made to follow,
and the children taught him a song, and the woman built
a fire, and the food they shared gave life to God inside
them, and they danced with enchanted legs, deer with
flowers in their antlers. Helen will understand when he
says: Nobody wants to die, but sometimes little deer brotber
ofilzrs bimself to tbe people. In tbe wilderness, I am killed and
taken. I am not a[...].” Ob sweet sister/ Ybis is
tbe trutb you asked for.

* Please note: the translations oflines from Yaqui Deer

Songs appear in Yaqui Deer Songs, by Larry Evers and

Feli[...]

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

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

strikingly in tone with the deer songs.

In the Grip;
Chris Nicholson

Man it a xign in furmit qfw/mt e/udex lyim.
—Martin Heidegger

Amid our infinite pillow talk while my heart was still
at its height, Miss Jens once asked me when I fell in
love with her exactly Without even thinking, I to[...]014]) defoudre that night we met last May:
a bolt of lightning, love at first sight. Strange as it may
sound, a truer re[...]er
[aid eyex on you.

I’ve never confessed this to Miss Jens, or
to anyone else for that matter, but I am all of
her ex—boyfriends. Even those who were never
her boyfriends—useless suitors begging for a
date, strangers calling out of the blue, forgotten
acquaintances sending shy letters[...]man and boy who
has loved her, simultaneously and in succession from
the third grade to this day, constitutes the past and
continuous present of my heart. There’s nothing crazy
about it: just a bunch of normal guys in the grips, a
bunch of guys who happen to inhabit me.

If you approach it from the right direction, the

metempsychotic mechanism isn’t hard to understand.

It’s not that the boy in the third grade became
the adolescent in the eleventh became the college
professor, etc., until Miss Jens met me,[...]at
a single, common spirit has possessed each one of
us in turn, and moving on has established a certain
con[...]men and over continents
as she flees before it.

Of that life called my own boyhood, I have
but drab, unmoving memories at best. Whole years
have been forgotten. Real life is in these lovers I’ve
discovered through Miss Jens. Their stories overlap
my own like snatches of another music played at odd
moments through the day. And this love, if you can
call it that, is a[...]nd: each
thoughtI might have called my own points to her.

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

so you’ll see the forces in motion.

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

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

away by the tussle of school children, then it opened
up in a baseball field toward the ditch on the far side
ofa worn and spacious acre. There, on the other side
of the yard, was a chain link fence meant to keep the
kids out of the thick, brown water, but the fence had
holes in it—and the holes were what saved us. Every
other recess, cro[...]balls ofvarying
size and air pressure but always the exact same red
would soar over the fence into the thick branches

of the willows along the ditch banks. A very hard

or deliberate kick sent the ball all the way over both
fences to the golf course that ran along the ditch’s
north side.

On the far side of that fence, old men in
sleeveless, v—neck sweaters and plaid shirts would
play through among the blue spruce and mountain
ash of the seventh hole. The greens and fairways were
well tended without being lush.The golfers gave of
a reified happiness, an intent and complex serenity
that was foreign to the schoolyard’s barbarian melee.
So foreign, sometimes a loose pack of third graders
would stand there briefly, fingers curling on the links
ofthe fence, to watch the old men pass, before the
pack took off again, shrilly calling out for adventure,
reinforcements, or an adversary.

One day, in the middle of the schoolyard’s hue
and cry one kid in the third grade stood stock still

to watch the young Miss Jens as she came to school

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

Recess fo[...]un, because boys against girls required everybody
to chase everybody else or try to block and if they
ran you down, they had beaten you, and then we all
switched sides. Out of everyone, Miss Jens had legs. I
saw her go after[...]rls and she
grabbed him and they tickled him half to death and he
just laid there gasping on the ground like a wounded
animal. Wow, my friend said, r173} flirt.

From that day on, Miss Jens was my pick for the
Kissing Corner. Most kids didn’t know much abou[...]hey did they didn’t like it. When
people kissed in the movies, we all covered each other’s
eyes, and groaned and shouted, Ir it over?!, almost
a parody of ourselves. Which is why the Corner—
between the drinking fountain and the cupboards
where we kept the glue—was really just for pretends,
and the boys would hold the girls and the girls would
scream and if kissing was out of the question altogether

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

entire third grade, I started getting in some smooches.
Miss Jens blushed.

Now, I had been a bug on and off for several years
before I met her. Each recess we would spread our wings
and soar screeching across the playground, descending as
locusts on some patch of grass, stuffing dirt and weeds
in our mouths like starving circus animals that eat[...]y are being watched. If we ate with gusto,
it was to prove to the girls how glad we were to disgust
them. Our faces smeared with dirt, dandelion leaves
chinked in our teeth cracks, we would rise with a cry and
su[...]less bugs than winged monkeys
from Oz—soar off in search of new prey, less crowded
pastures, giving the impression, at least, that we had
something better to do.

Once I met Miss Jens, though, I didn’t feel like
eating dirt anymore. Another fantasy took hold. In an
avalanche of daydreams, I became something more
human. Each dream began with an abduction: The place
and the hour varied, but usually a band of kidnappers
dressed in black jumpers and ski masks would scale
the porch on our house, loom briefly in the bedroom
window, snatch me from my bed and hustle me back to
a white van parked up thethe bed of the van when I was tossed in.

From there we were driven to their hide—out in

the woods and held in a small, stark room. Still tied up
and gagged, we couldn’t communicate except by the
warmth and movement of our eyes—an ideal situation
for two third graders incapable of small talk. The
action would be drawn out in negotiations between
the villains and local authorities, and punctuated by
grisly threats to our parents, who, like Miss Jens and
me, naturally grew closer during the abduction, and
probably talked a lot more.

Each abduction peaked with a shoot—out, the
woods crawling with federal agents on leave from the
stack ofcomic books in my bedroom. In the heat of
battle, during a lapse in our captors’ guard, Miss Jens
would free me, cutting through the cords with a rough—
edged rockjust loose on the floor. All we had to do
then was make it out of the house and across the no—
man’s land (her speed guaranteed this) before we could
be held as human shields in the kidnappers’ getaway.

While fantasy is all fine and good, dreams run
their course.I knew the kidnappers would never come
and save us, and decided I had to act: In a jeweled box
lined with purple velour, my mother kept her necklaces,
bracelets, and earrings. Standing in the shadows of her
bedroom while she was still at work, I found a thin gold
ring with a rock on it, a delicate thing with hooks at the
corners that I’d never seen her wear. Like any trespass—
sneaking into the closet to poke at

The next day during cleanup, I gave the ring to
Miss Jens’s friend Katie and told Katie to give it to
Miss Jens, who took it and put in on her middle finger,
where it didn’t fit as[...]that afternoon, when we were putting on our coats to
go, she stepped in front of me, which she never did, and
said Hey. I mean, [bank you. I swung on my backpack.
The bell rang in the hall. So she said Goon/lye! and so
did I, to walk home kind of whistling, floating along
with that backpack full of books, deaf to the shouts of
kids playing dodgeball on the blacktop.

That evening while my mother was going crazy
looking for her ring, her engagement ring, she whispered
to herself, I didn’t say a word. My little brother was by
the TV, and so was I. I knew he thought she was mad at
something he’d done, prolly didn’t even know[...]t
about it. We both got into our pj’s and ready for bed.
Then the Jenses called.

It was about their daughter’s d[...]0 [bank you [bank
goodnem/ Mom said, and reached for the car keys. Left
without a word and barely a glance at me. During the
long minutes while she was out, I went upstairs to my
room, slowly, and thought of nothing to do. The dresser,
the bookshelves, the bedposts smirked under their

reddish, yellowish stains. Dust rose from the carpet and

I coughed, for the next half hour shuffling dumb action

figures around in the dark.

If I had to thank somebody, Victor would be it. Miss
Jens and I met at his birthday party last May. The party
was in a smoke—stained bar near the Seine—narrow at
the front but flaring out in back, full of knotty pine,
smudged brass, and dusty bottles lined up on the
moldings—since Victor’s apartment was too cramped,
his friends too many for that sixth—floor elmmbre de
bonne where he liv[...]30 just a couple months before me and that
called for a celebration. Miss Jens walked in and sat
down on the low stool next to me bright as a marigold,
odd as herself (thinking[...]smiled like
he was handing me a prize, between us the sometimes
solidarity of guys. “I don’t think you two have met.”

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

“No. Why?”

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

“Sometimes. For house calls.” (“And bird calls,”
Victor aga[...]ut you, what do you do?”I
asked.

“Oh, I stay at home,” Miss Jens answered, and
added gaily, “Don’t do anything atto Realizations.”

“Such as?”

“Well thethe
carafe, “Here, have some wine,” and poured us[...]get out more.”

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

“Do you mind?”I said. No reply.

So we began walking towards the nearest metro
a few blocks away, soon riang on the same nonsense
in the same tone, not walking toward each other or
away, just talking out ahead of ourselves like two people
riding next to one another in a car, driver and passenger,
our minds and mouths two spinning pairs of tires that
would not touch or cross. The streets were lit a low
sodium orange—shadows in the doorways, chic heels
clackering here and there on curbs—each sidewalk a
stage waiting for its actors while the audience files in
and mills about.

When the conversation paused, the pauses were
pregnant. A beginning. And as we walk[...]e whisper, 8173 ix all tbingx
good. We were close to the metro when Miss Jens stopped.
She smiled at the breeze blowing off the gardens that
bloomed darkly in the shadow of a church downtown,

their hedges exhaling[...]

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

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

Nevertheless, as I walked back through the

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

the river water lapping, slow as life, at my sudden heart.

“Even a hint of hope,” Stendhal wrote, “is

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

Month in month out all through the summer I
pursued her, until she finally broke down and agreed
to meet again. I called and called, wrote and wrote
regularly—careful not to do so more than once a week.
She wasn’t hostile, but for reasons only Miss Jens can
know, she kept me at arm’s length. Sometimes I think
she even forgot[...]en, she
sensed that something wasn’t right. But the heat of the
season waxed, then waned again with fall, and so[...]ther women, but it did no good; they meant little to
me; one evening with Miss Jens had ruined the rest. By
my calculations, I’ve obsessed over Miss Jens about two
months for every one we’ve loved—with such balance
sheet[...]? And with what tools, if any, can

we bring them to fruition?

Now if this is true for love letters, it is ten times
truer for verse, poems intoxicated with late nights
dreaming on the rails, crossing countries that pass by
in shadow, yearning for this woman whom you know
to be alone. That was my case. For I was forced to
travel, and had to court Miss Jens from afar. Work
had sent me from city to city by train; my thoughts
remained with her.

After weeks of torment, after dozens of nights
running one or two lines over and over through my
mind until they finally were sound, the poem that had

tyrannized me assumed its terminal form:

hand in hand on the dimpled street
our swollen, dogworn eyes did meet[...]d drive.

and i was a silver platter

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

and she was the fey typhoon,
raining herself upon me

to a drumbly tumbly tune.

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

but not too long but not too late.

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

that tell of my claire de lune

and her distant castigation.

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

this waiting’s a punishing, dry a[...]

from looking for my Claire de lune

my dimpled eyes are dreary.

for the moon is a softer sun

whose home is fey and far

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

A love letter, a poem: It aches to be written and aches
to be sent, it overflows the brims. And once it has been
sent, the aching becomes one of expectation. With what
eyes will it be read? How[...]at was too far ahead. Before
anything else, I had to decide whether to send it. By
then, Miss Jens and I hadn’t even k[...]not that would actually be
a “date.” And yet the poem sat there on my desk like a
chunk of my own flesh, loud and red. Whatever existed
between us was germinating, and I tried not to kill it
with an excess of emotion, so those feelings stayed pent
up inside, flying on their trapezes before an audience of

one while I planned the next step.

*******

W hen mine uncle come with the clinkend money,
we up and hit the road to beaches so as to swindle his
contrition, flooze a little, and inflate my years. One of

the world’s favorite people, mine uncle, he’d weekly sent

me letters, for ideas grew out of his head, outstralling
inspiteof a baseball cap that read CATERPILLAR.
For example: “Let’s drive the fifteen hours,” he said, “to
the pied cities that march on amber ocean and we’ll see
what women do there when we whistle.” — “But in the
garage is a whole animal,”I said, “elksteak for months,
and why not butcher thethe mountains, the
carcass, my grandparents and my mother, who received
a note.

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

Hardly time for truckstops. Beside us birds the
color of dirt flew like dirt clods through the air above

aspen and stands of pine, sparrows and starlings arching
forward on i[...]we were, sagging and
swinging up again, as though the air and road were both
traversed by swells themse[...]on that
straight fleet cruisesome fleeway high in the afternoon
a heat dream shimmered forth on the shoulder, tripping
up the traffic with her thumb and wearing a man’s shi[...]o I yelled STOP! whereon
mine uncle did.

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

over,

—Howdy,I said.

—Hi, the girl.

—Where to!? mine uncle kind of yelled.

—Seattle. What about you?!

—We’re going to Humboldt,I said, then Frisco.

—My alma mater—hop in! mine uncle yelled,
which she did: climbed into the backseat with her bag
where I’d cleared a spot, wrinkled her nose. Don’t see a
lotta you gals on the freeway! he said.

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

—Bet you meet some weirdos!

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

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

—Where you comin’ from?

—Bac[...]York? mine uncle. Everybody’s got a
mouth!

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

—Isn’t it funny, Miss Jens said, how your
handwriting changes? (@iet.) Today, for some reason,
mine was round like a girl’s.

—[...]l’s butt, she said, if she had a hundred
butts. In a row.

—But you are a girl, I said.

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

Day wore on but easy while Miss Jens watched
it pass, her 1air covered with highway, eyes full of
illusions, skin shiny with a silken grain, which seemed
to sharpen my mind. The backseat smelled of old
oranges anc the sun was shining like it might teach
us how to sneak while dusk crept on its belly through

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

roll down t1e window was clean and my lungs filled
up with the whole joyful obligation of air. —How long
could it take, mine uncle said, til we spilled out and
scoured the country for a while? Show me a grief that
doesn’t deserve a wandering!

A moon, the mountains, Buick—Miss Jens

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

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

the night was put to rest and the sea slept foglit by
the watersides, dreaming he heard heels rapping on
flagstones with an insolence that in the evening boded
well. Those sweet faces armed him r[...]n his alonehood and go figger it didn’t fight at all.
—“We are not here for the world to sicken us,” mine
uncle said, looked at me, and winked.

But I was looking at his forearms covered with
minuscule tattoos, and[...]ack when he
was broke but tatooloving, which used to happen late
at night on the weekend, he would stop by a place he
knew to see what they could do for a dollar and twenty—
five cents (which went a lot farther then), and in their
kindness they had drawn him all these little flowers and
grimacing insignia that billowed up from the knuckles
like the bored erratic scribbles of a ninth—grade
notebook, in which he claimed he could read at least a
chapter of his life.

In that moment at a crossroads west ofthe car
careened, its front wheels crunching over the curb of the
lot as we skidded and raked through gravel and dirt up
to the bare, used and dimlit porch where a herd ofto card
here.” So we unfolded from the car, and as I came round
the front I thought the wheels looked wackled.

Then this bar walked in, beer moldering on its
breath over layers of decayed piss and abused varnish,
its walls jumped[...]posters, its jukebox
bragging an extinct species of rock and the local boys
roud and lowdy. Momentous entry as the bar hugged
us and we dazzled before a tiny stage[...]nial drunks, who
jammed there by themselves while the tables whispered
their appreciation and ridicule or ignored them in the
hinter nooks. Three wanton beers from the bartender, at
which point mine uncle presented himself to a woman
named Candy, who was pretty once and single enough
it seemed.

—Lotta people in here, Miss Jens said.

—Too many, I said.

—Middle of nowhere, too.

—Nowhere to go. . . . , I said. She nodded, set her
bag again[...]e

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

—Death is funny, for sure.

—And all this. . ..

—Gone, I said, th[...]just now, she
goes, where I flushed my body down the toilet.

—Just pooped it out?

—Like a baby.[...]ler when you take it
off. Like clothes.

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

—Kinda depends, I said, a nod toward mine
uncle in mid—carouse (or was he gesticulating?, or
wrest[...]. Coupla weeks?

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

—Dunno,I said, becoming afraid for mine uncle,
around whom a scuffle widened like a[...]Cbrirt/ Hey now! as he was being grappled toward the
door by two thick men, a couple friends ofCandy’s by

the looks. Uncle gathering speed.

—Know how to fight?

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

—Right. You comin’ with?[...]e long. Tell him thanks.

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

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

on the phone more and more. Once I had returned

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

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

how it went:

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

ensued.
kiss beg[...]s.

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

first and second floors, she collapses, a nose[...]pass and i’m shouting her name. finally
we get the elevator open and on stop. i pull j to
her feet and she’s coming back to lucid. in the apt

she sits down heavy on the couch. i get the water,

the oj, an avocado, salt. “don’t think it’s your kiss.

that’s happened to me before.”

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

u n
say, leave whenever you want.

s[...]lking and laying there restless. get up, take out
the clock batteries, go back to bed.

at five, insomnia. my one pillow given to j. she
shared it at the end. that’s when i told her i had a

poem.

“sort of rhyming couplets,”i said.

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

“i’m glad you didn’t.”

we eat some breakfast and she’s about to go. says
she doesn’t know how she feels. leaving today for
england. back sunday.

so, with a deeper knowledge of one another, a

deeper uncertainty.

Shortly after the fainting episode, a period of
long talking began. It was a new species ofin the act of love as Miss Jens rose above
me, sculpted as an antique Venus and her hair in
disarray, I perceived that we were of one flesh. And we
attained a mystic union parallel to the carnal. United, I
knew her and she knew me in some essential way, and
we knew something beyond either one of us by virtue of
that union. The whole issue of mind control or osmosis
aside, I felt we were in synch. Even now, now that we’re
“taking a break,”I will be thinking of her at the same
moment that an e—mail from her arrives. Even though
Miss Jens is of two minds about me, we remain one.

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

saw the leaves fan quick and shimmering, the buildings

whose every line, balcony, roof was du[...]derailed, had recovered its promise and a
plot.

At a no—name concert early in the winter, leaning
against a rail inside some pub near Pigalle, I watched
sparse couples stumble and entwine on the dark floor,
almost despite the band that strummed and hollered
loud and lost through Jimmy Buffet covers. While Miss
Jens went searching for a bathroom, my ears wandered
and I forgot the music, looked around. An old guy up
front with gl[...]theart
would cross under, laughing; they had lost the beat but
didn’t care. He wore his paunch so nat[...], hair on my nape. Her warmth. Froze
me. I looked for the old man, but couldn’t see him. The
music, galumphing and awry, confused with the blood
in my ears. Because for years you wait for that touch,
you wait so long your body forgets wh[...]with a girl one night you come home. Like a river
in you starts rushing deep and fast back to the place it
used to know. So I turned to Miss Jens, took her hands,

and we joined the other couples on the floor.

The next day Victor called. I’d dropped out ever
since Miss Jens and I had started dating.

“So what’s the news with Miss Jens?”

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

“Oh yeah? Does she know that?”

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

“How unspoken is it?”

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

“My God! I’m so jealous![...]Love’s got its downsides. Makes
you talk crazy, for one. Everything else goes out the
window.”

It was like that. Week after week inexhaustibly
I slipped deeper in. All our roller coaster happiness,
happiness so sudden and strong it feels like a grief the
way it splatters in the chest, began to rattle the rest of
my life.Take the office, for example: a dead—end job,
maybe illegal, defini[...]re I was, like a congenital idiot, half—smiling
at my desk till noon. The happier I felt, the less I could
concentrate. In the morning I’d show up unshaved,
unwashed, unfed and out of breath from the mad dash
between her place and work, but somehow[...]re a blackout
last night?”

Still, I’d prefer to be fired for loving well than for
almost any other reason. Sometimes you’re faced with
choices like that; it’s time to go and love will do the
trick.

The situation at the office naturally grew worse: I
was wearing my spare shirt too much, the one that lived
in my brief case for days when I came running from
chez Jens. Three or[...]ve nose. I knew she was probably talking
about me the way she talked about everyone else. Can
you rmell[...]she’ll ask
whenever a certain colleague leaves the room. Can you
rmell Mm? she’s probably saying even now. But listen to
me and I’ll tell you something: that stink was the smell
ofa man in love.

Life barreled along carefree and flushed for most
of November and December—the love, the stink, the
coughingflnd then I went home for the holidays. I
had been letting things slide with a[...]lear

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

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

Now Christmas is a carnival at my parents’ home,
a booming Montana reunion which, in its chaos, is
situated somewhere between a cross—town football
game and a war of the worlds.There is too much food,
too much noise, too little space, and a spirit of rumbling
inclusion and activity that succeeds for a week at least
in making all of us—aunts and uncles, brothers and
sisters, gran[...]ily again.
Nonetheless, I had found a little time for myself and
was thinking about my life with few regrets when the
phone rang. It was Miss Jens, calling me from across
the ocean.

“I’ve been thinking,” Miss Jens said, “I need a
break. I’d like to take a month off. Maybe we could see
each other a little less in January.”

“What did you have in mind?”l asked.

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

“I’m glad we have a couple more days to discuss
this,”l said, as it was still the last week of December. In
situations like this I stall and think, “Avoid[...]out it more when I get
back?”l proposed, hoping to somehow put the idea on

hold and freeze her heart before it drifted too far.

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

The signs, of course, had been everywhere.

As far as Miss Jens was concerned, commitment
called for a modal verb, an arm’s—length if and when.
Discussing our couple in the future tense required that
we shift into the realm of the probable, or improbable,
rather. Despite the joy and playfulness, the tenderness
and care that looked like they might c[...]ad trouble making long—
term plans.

Example I: The Conditional. Once she said
Ifwe’re rtill banging out in a little wbile, we xlwulal go
to Rome togetl7er. Hanging out in a little while—our
couple. Or another time: Wbe[...]next
rpring, if we’re rtill talking, I 21 love to meet tl7em.

Example 2: Pet Names. We never calle[...]they implied were out. If we ran into someone on the
street, I simply introduced her as Miss Jens; if pressed,
later, I might say we were “an item.” Only in my
thoughts did I call her beloved, talking to her aloud I
would say my little malady, or mypetite alireare, because
I felt it calmed her and gave the necessary space. For
her part, Miss Jens referred to me as The Pain, or Such
a Distraction, and I knew why: I was at her place six

nights a week. By invitation.

If I left through irony’s door, I came crawling
back in through absurdity’s window. Parting ix rue/.77[...]Or imagine we’d made love
and were just sitting in bed. Like a heroine doomed in

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

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

Then proposed that we not wait for her together. Her
eyes brightened, and she kissed[...]nce I met Miss Jens, I’ve experienced a rebirth of
sorts, reborn down a rabbit hole in a Wonderland all
her own. It seems she doesn’t feel the same, though,

so I’m going to ask what exactly I mean to her, and

why this sudden distance, just as soon[...]M elan ebole’, black bile—that humor which, in excess,
renders one pensive and withdrawn. An aca[...]hey go no further towards purging
our poison than the theories of Hippocrates. Such
contemporary ten—den—eier amount to a chemical
reeducation, a contingent, punctual remedy of
symptoms while our discontent abides. For cause, as
Kant argued, is fundamentally mysterious. We are
subject to wider determinations. And to locate the
deepest causes of that morass called the mind in the
serotonin reuptake inhibitors of its synapses is too
mechanical and complacent an[...]urotransmitters, another says neuroses, I say All of
History. Put another way: Is melancholy a disorder of
the individual in time or a disorder of the world? And if
it were the latter, what would they prescribe?

Yet I digress[...]ll you
about my dear Miss Jens? She was fresh off the boat
when I saw her high in the amphitheater on the first
day of zom—century French literature. She did not figure
on the rolls, so I approached her after class to enquire as

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

was I to refuse?

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

Miss Jens had a penchant for languages, and with
a little guidance after class she was soon reading her
assignments in the original. We read Gary’s Clair de
femme aloud, a simple exercise in enunciation. After a

month of those sessions, she started coming all dolled

up, dressed in a series of 1950s get—ups. I would see her
and sense my professorial persona begin to crumblefl
larger economy of feeling opened up. Once she arrived
looking like Marilyn Monroe, in a turquoise skirt
and her hair bobbed just so, bubbly and coquette, as
though she thought to inscribe herself in my own
boyhood. Indeed, for moments, I wanted to dance.
Epiphenomena of a tease, she stopped reading halfway
through the book, complained of boredom. So what do
you think I did?

I told her to sit down and get to work. Miss
Jens, lovely creature, was also frivolous and forgetful.
When she wanted to be. So sunny when she smiles, her
cheeks bunch up[...]ng those
Swedish honors, standing near Rossellini in the dinner
hall at Berns. (NB. Pronounced “Berryman.” Like the
poet. Americans put a “burg” in it in every sense, for we
are without culture or the possibility of it.) I sought to
correct this happy illiteracy in Miss Jens, at least. And
yet her very sunniness would distract me from the task
at hand: the thorough restructuring of her intellect.

Arm/fa, deridia, luxuria—sloth—a deadly sin
whose condemnation saw a vogue in the late Middle
Ages among engravers such as Durer, Dinckmut,
Bosch. To call it laziness would be to mistake its wider
applications, notably in the domain of melancholy and
its depths. I do not accuse Miss Jens of media, no, but

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

Miss Jens’s instruction and my writing. The chapters
of the new Anatomy slumbered in grubby sheaves,
moldered in boxes, overspilled their files until they were
unapproachable, impossible to think of. Thus it was I
who sinned in my way, for I lost control. Miss Jens was
no help.

Had she n[...]could I articulate it. Nonetheless, she
enrolled in my courses one after another, following
them as assiduously as she could for the next four years.
And if she had just stayed a little longer, I might have
grasped her, convinced her to devote herself to a life of
thought. Instead, I saw her traipsing across the greens
after class, admirers in tow, to be regaled with attention
and anecdotes in those horrid cafes near the square. I
knew her carefree ways, and felt the twinge of the Pisan
judge, his moglie stolen and seduced.

Miss Jens bad need of melancholy. That much
was clear. Contrary to popular chatter, the black bile
is not an emotion, and even less is it a disease. It is a
mode ofbeing, a way to go and meet the world, a way
to flee it. I would hazard that it is the precondition
ofa philosophic disposition, which is by far the most
noble, the most correct, the only possible bulwark
against that which awaits us as human beings thrown

into the world.

To begin, I instructed Miss Jens to pronounce
words properly, in English as in French. If she had
trouble with the gender of nouns, it is because she did
not care enough to learn. The world, I said, is a hard
place, and it is harder when one thinks. Yet you mmt
think.I endeavored, at length, to teach her the dry
and circular art of thought, knowing that once she
graduated she would need me, a stern provider, even
more—for how was she to learn? She was not made for
this world; she does not appreciate it.

Which is why I proposed. We would live in
supplementarity, I said, not short—circuiting our
differences, but building a new ethics out of their
collision. Her feelings would develop and c[...]d have her freedom.I believe I made that
clear by the end.

So three days after Miss Jens received her degree,
we were engaged to be married, and to her parents’
delight. “With an endowed chair!” her mother said. In
her father,I sensed the understanding that there was no
one who would be more indulgent of her foibles than I.
Her whole life was ahead of her: Latin, Greek, Europe,
an assistantship, peer—reviewed journals—in a word,
philosophy.

Yet six months later (one week before our
wedding), she was gone. Of course I know why, and I am

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

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

I[...]ssion. By now you know
me. You see this imbalance of desire, mine outweighing
hers. Since Christmas it has only gotten worse. Either
Miss Jens does not know how to love, which I doubt, or
she does not care to, which I fear.

The first three weeks of the new year have been
a wash. Lethargy . . . I haven’t been able to get out of
bed. Day is just a grayer form of night. In love, but lazy,
I am a bear half hibernating in this den of a studio on
the square east side of Paris, where every morning the
whole room is coated in a gray light t1at says: Don’t
[Jotben Don’tget up. [mt go bark to deep. Before me a year
of mornings, as inexorable as a bowe movement, where
I’ll wake up and the first thought wi be, I’m going to
die one oftbere dayx. And the second will be, ant’r [be
meaning ofmy life? And the third wi be, You didn’t med
to tbink tbere tbougbtr.

The fact of the matter—but how to separate

bitter fact from bitter feeling?—is t[...]hree times (—threeI), and I haven’t been able to
get a straight answer out of her about why we don’t
talk any more. She shudders at the word couple. Still,
she does call once in a while. “How are you?” she’ll ask.
We’re[...]ng more than we should be if we’re
not supposed to be talking at all, but even the chatter
has died down.

And what can I think? In the wake of our last
year’s love is a lone water skier who has lost his l[...]ins afloat. He
floats without sinking. Hangs on for dear life. But the
strangest thing is, the tow rope isn’t even there to grab
onto. He’s holding onto nothing and yet he stays there
in our wake, close enough to wave to us. This is love
once love is gone.

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

As far as I know, Paris has two pool halls in the
whole city, both of them on the Right Bank. One of
them doubles as a tango ballroom, so it doesn’t really
count. That’s where Victor and I were, in the pool hall
that didn’t count, him with a bottle of psychotherapy
in each hand and me with the pool cue, when I told
him about Miss Jens: that she hadn’t called in days,
that there was no end in sight, that I was despondent.
We stood with our backs to the horseshoe bar, our
faces sinister as Christmas, half red from the neon
beer insignia on the walls, half green above the table’s
brightly lit felt. Carlos Gardel was crooning Mi Buenor
Airer querido in the background as couples turned,
squeezed and faltered on the dance floor to our left.
Victor stood at the edge of the table and stared. Like a
pool shark confronted wi[...]d sign.”

La ventanita de mix taller de armbal, the tango ran,

“By the way,” Victor says, distracted, “have you
hear[...]nk I have that. I never know if I’ve had
enough to eat. Sometimes I’ll have dinner and I’ll stil[...]de nuevo boy volver a eontemplar

“You’ve got toat all and then I’ll wake up starving
in the middle of the night! What do you think I should
do?”

En la e[...]igure out what you need and measure it. Doesn’t the
government have some kind of website?”

unapromemy un rurpimr

“I don’t know if I’d trust the government toin mind?”

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

Mi Buenor Airer[...]

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

“No, I don’t[...]haven’t
bombarded her with letters like I used to, it’s because
I’m tired of making a fool of myself. Victor says I
should try to see her as much as possible now so as to
tire of her more quickly, but I’m not up for it. Lack the
will. Still, I’m beginning to wonder if that wasn’t Miss
Jens’ very thinkin[...]if it wasn’t her sabotage.

My grandmother, on the other hand, thinks I
should play hard to get: Women need to conquer, too, she
says. Of course everyone gives that advice and no one
takes it. Who has the strength?

Sidenote: every time Miss Jens decides it’s time
to be on her own again for a while, she makes a visit
to the dentist. Last time her crowns, delicate things
in the best of times, broke under the stress of the
separation (she clenches her jaw to hold her tongue).
This time it was a root canal. So during the very
maybe month of January, against my better judgment,

I sent Miss Jens this note:

You get cavities for company and tedium for tea,

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

Lonesome in the evenings, did you ever second
guess

the thoughts that made you think that we should

see each other less?
Next day, she responded:

Cavities for company—the most delightful
guests!

I cannot chew or drink hot tea or bite an apple
lest

The most delightful pains go shooting round
about my[...]annibal!

Indeed, Miss Jens is a man—eater, but of the
most delightful sort. Like her, I too practice a kind
of cannibalism, of which this chronicle is the proof.
Sometimes you eat your love and sometimes your love
eats you.

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

comfy in couples. In or out of love, however, her aim

is to please and to please absolutely, which invariably
provokes a disastrous response in the object of her
attentions: i.e. total infatuation, desire to possess, and
finally rancor. Her crime, if she commits any crime at
all, is one of excess.

Pursued by this surfeit of love, Miss Jens moves
from place to place and from boyfriend to boyfriend,
unable to escape herself or her admirers. She’s looking
and looking for respite somewhere. I hope she finds
it—that’s one of the few hopes I still cling to. Miss
Jens is at once Io and that angry goddess, chasing
herself through Greece to Egypt (the land of exodus
serving suddenly as a refuge). In her particular case,
refuge is perpetual exodus, for she is uncomfortable
with her gods. And yet her g[...]fectly matched: mine being gods ofloss, hers
gods of departure.

The second night I spent with Miss Jens after
we’d decided not to talk took a turn both painful and
unforeseen. It[...]sguised as love, whose
ulterior was only revealed to me by morning.

Perched on the second floor, Miss Jens’s bedroom
looks over a small street deep on the Left Bank. The
bedroom has one window whose shades cut the walls
with their striations as long as there is light. Outside:
mold on the concrete, drear on the asphalt, the clamor

and piss ofdrunks. Inside: a bed. So at the end of night,

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

That wasn’t just to break the silence after sex.
She meant that she hadn’t intended to see me, but,
voila, couldn’t help herself. Sbe[...]nto drinking
lemonade,I say, wben I ’m bot. But to myself I thought,
Minjens ix wing me for my body. To formulate and
admit that too often in the days that followed caused
me a sorrow, so I tried to block it out. This inability on
Miss Jens’s part to either completely quit or completely
join me has left me in ruins. What food is to Victor, I
am to her: she’s not sure how much of me she wants.
In the back of my mind, though, where things do work
out, I say to our phantom children: Your motber war only
after me for max, [mt] made a detent woman out ofber/

A sop for loneliness, a body for lust—I’m willing
to provide those services as long as there is love,
for the feeling transforms the act. We cannot hurry
lovemaking, or shrink away from[...]ome quiet wrong. We cannot gaze with
cold eyes on the beloved without him ceasing to be. The

stone light I see in Miss Jens’ gaze tells me that I am no

longer—in those days during Christmas, she somehow
routed me from her mind—the defeat, unbeknownst to
me, was total. A desirable outsider, at best. Since I have
realized that, of course, we rarely succeed in bed. I am
not responsive—for impotence is simply the man’s way
of saying, Idon’t like [Ms anymore. Sterility does the job,
too, but takes longer.

When I mentioned to Victor how Miss Jens was
using me for sex, he didn’t believe. Bulk/bit.” he shouted[...]ur
pre—Christmas romance seemed unreal. Already the
spirit was moving on.

Speculations aside, every time we met ever since
I began to love Miss Jens, I thought it would be the last
time we’d see each other. Finally I was right. The last
time was when, after two attempts at sex without love
and one without arousal, she came to my apartment to

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

Me: Want so[...]e.
Me: It’s already made.

Miss Jens: Oh, well, in that case—
Me: Sugar?

Miss Jens: Sugar? I’m[...]ing very
well. My throat’s hoarse.

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

Miss Jens: The Vicissitudes.

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

Miss Jens: . . . More VicissitudesI?

And[...]scribed as desperate, maniacal even.

Time seemed to unravel then like a thread that
had lost its spool. A doom unending as the Paris winter
brooded over us in my Spartan room. I didn’t know
what to do, so I handed her a mug and sat down on the

couch. After a silence, she continued:

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

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

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

Me: I see.

Miss Jens: Yes. I’m thinking in particular of the

one that instructs us in the art of letting go,
non—attachment.
Me: Have you been talking to your brother again?

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

and thinking of you.

Me: . . . Are you leaving me? Is this how
B[...]ns: Don’takeitwrong. I’ll be here if you
want to talk. It’s not like I’m walking out
of your life. But I think I need to leave this

couple dream for now.

In the weeks that followed, little transpired
between us. We were grinding to a halt. By the time
February rolled around, Miss Jens had decided to
prolong our separation indefinitely, though she would
occasionally break down and call, perhaps out of guilt,
perhaps from genuine affection.I thought of those calls

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

dose of the poison I adored. Her voice still echoed in
me sweet as ever, but it was a voice of leaving.

If those weeks of deepening solitude have
taught me one thing, it i[...]aths.Jet trails disappearing
among clouds. It was the end of the end.

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

taken from my journal:

Februarylz‘”
in with the odds and ends i sent back to jfl blouse,
some stockings, a hairpin and a deod[...]t I’m not tbinking ofyou, but [but 1407:?

want to be.

Mart/13'd

nothing reminds me of her like a phone call from
her. she calls and my[...]ed by a hopelessness. i have asked her, politely,
to stop.

from The Miterxbed Yearx, a novel
Russell Rowland

Exactly one week after my wedding, I waded out

into the early morning dew, shading my eyes from a
semicircle of sun. A voice from behind and to my right
startled me.

“Excuse me.”

I turned tofor only a second, I
could feel his strength all the way up my arm. His body
looked like a series of fists, muscles bunched and piled
up on top of each other, testing every seam in his sky
blue western shirt. Even his head sat on his shoulders
like the largest, most imposing fist of them all. His hair
was a red stubble, and he peered up at me through the
cloudy lenses of wire—rimmed spectacles that magnified
his blue eyes.

“I guess you’re looking for work?”

“That’s right.” His smile was mischievous. I also
noticed, behind the murky lenses, that the whites of his
eyes were clear, like egg shells. He was a bit older than
most of the men who showed up at our door, though

probably still in his twenties.

There were several other things th[...]t this introduction. First, a man who was looking
for work in our parts rarely showed up at 5:00 in the
morning. And second, if he did show up at 5:00 in the
morning, there was a good chance he was either st[...]acArthur
had even shaved. He didn’t have a hint of red whisker
on his chin.

“Where you comin’ from?”I asked.

“Well, I’ve been working for a man near Belle . . .
Tabor.” He had been twisting a gray felt cowboy hat in
his tight fists, and he now tugged it onto his head.

“And?”

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

My respect for this little man increased tenfold
with this state[...]w Garland Tabor from REA
meetings, and he was one of the more diffith men I’d
ever met.

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

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

I chuckled. “Funny you should ask. I just got
married a week ago, and I offered to milk the cow for
the first month we’re married. A little wed[...]

“Every morning at five.”

“Well, congratulations,” he said.[...]y come,” he said.

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

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

For the rest of the walk to the barn, and the time
it took to milk the cow, I asked Oscar MacArthur the
standard questions I’d ask any prospective hand[...]handshake
that this man had a job.

Although most of the ranches had become more
efficient since the war, with improved machinery and
better irrigation, they had also gotten bigger, with so
many people leaving in the thirties. Those of us who
stayed acquired land in chunks. So there was a lot of
work to do. The bigger ranches needed haying crews,
harvest crews[...]men who
organized these crews, moving from place to place,
earning most of their money during those seasons.
There were also the sheepherders, but this was a solitary

life, more suited for older, often eccentric men, who

were more comfortable being alone for weeks at a time.

If a young man was a good, steady worker, the
ideal position was to hire on as a year—round hand for
one of the bigger ranches. So ever since the war ended,
young men had been appearing at our door, sporting
a three—day stubble, and carrying a satchel filled with
work clothes. Many of these men were fractured
somehow, if not by the war, then by a lost love, or the
loss of their own family place. They were generally hard
on the outside but tender souls, unable to shake off a
harsh word.

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

And of course, there were also a fair number
of shady characters, who showed up with remarkably
bad haircuts, and shaky references. We usually turned
away the boys who were obviously just out ofto thieves only a couple of times,

for one simple but mysterious reason. Despite spending

“a nose for merchandise.” Countless times, I watched
my father talk to a man who said all the right things,
bore calluses in all the right places, and had all the right
gear. Dad would never look a man in theto keep my mouth shut. Sure enough, there
had been at least five instances where word came back
that t[...]Dad about it once. “All you gotta do is
listen to their voice. If they got something to hide, they
sound like they got something to hide.”

I tried to figure out what he meant by this, but
I could ne[...]d without hesitation. “Didn’t
make it through the Depression.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

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

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

ore u ever onew 0 ever ove[...]her,” Oscar said. “I really
can’t blame her at all. From the time I met Sadie, there
was something dark and powerful working away at her.
Something a hell of a lot more powerful than her—or
me. There wasn’t anything anybody could do to make
that poor girl see the good in the world.”

“That’s tragic,”I muttered.

“It is.” Oscar stopped. “It is tragic. Because the
world is a beautiful damn place.”

“Yes it is[...]mbarrassed by this sentiment,
and couldn’t look at Oscar.

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

“Let’s hear it.”

“How ’bout I milk that cow for you and we won’t
tell the missus.” MacArthur jerked a gnarled thumb
toward the barn.

If I hadn’t already been taken in by this man,
his method of asking for a job certainly would have
done the trick. “Well now, Mr. Oscar MacArthur, I just
might be interested in that proposition, but how much
is that little dea[...]w about six dollars a day?”

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

“Oh, are we neg[...]

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

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

“Was I smiling?”

She set a plate of eggs, bacon and fried potatoes
in front of me. “Like a circus clown.”

“I think I just hired the best hand in the county.”

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

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

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

for no better reason than that’s where I’d mustered

out of the Navy. Your postwar economy was an awful
sweet deal for a man who’d managed to avoid that
matrimonial bliss, and I was driving a two—tone T—Bird,
the Town and Country model. Built my own hi—fi out
of parts I got through a mail order catalog.

We’d throw up one of those GI—financed
crackerboxes, frame it at least, about every two or three
weeks, and I was[...]transit or whathaveyou, finish
cement if it came to that, and so on it goes, and I’m
building. Only time in my life I ever made more money
than I could spend. Course, I had my diversions, too,
couple of bad habits. Drank quite a bit, like everyone
did back in those days.Tried golf for a while, if you can
believe that. Like Ike. Mostly, though, it was work. Oh,

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

Ford ou[...]hat particular V—B, what
a mill—and you watch the needle swing right up to one
thirty—five, watch it hang there. You got the top down. I
knew a few girls, too, and almost every one of ’em liked
to cruise. That Philco was the best radio ever made,
and here’s a blond with a big, boozy grin, sitting right
next to you, maybe a few bugs in her teeth. You get the
picture.I had forearms on me like Popeye, had a little
bit of a savings account and a brain no bigger than a
walnut, and, all in all, I was doing okay.

Then one day Mrs. Schaeffer grabs me as I’m
coming in from the green grocer’s or whatever, and
she directs my attention to that oak stand she had out
in the hall where she’d leave the mail for her upstairs
tenants—she knows I never get anything from the post
office, not even bills, so she knows I’m not likely to look
for it, and so she shows me something’s come from
Miss Moira Houlihan in Elisis, Montana. It’s addressed
in pencil, in letters so tiny they look like hieroglyphics;
must’ve taken Moira about an hour to do this, and the
end result is that you’ve got to squint real hard just to
read it, and that’s her signature, really, some strange shit
like that. She knew where to get me cause I used to
send her a check every Christmas and a note every time

I moved, but it’d been at least a couple years since she’d

bothered to write back. I didn’t mind. I rarely called her
anymore—you’d call her and be tired for a week after.
See, my sister was demented. I knew she couldn’t help
it, but she was goofy in ways that had started to kind of
irritate me. Can’t help it, and she can’t hel[...]his deal. And it’s
not a letter Moira’s sent, in fact I don’t get so much as a
note tothe birth of another Qlentin
Houlihan on the seventeenth day of April, nineteen
fifty—five? Mother: Moira Houlihan. Father: Unknown.
They stamp the baby’s foot print on those things. That’s
wha[...]t. That little footprint. Looked like a sea
shell to me, the way it was turned in on itself, the way it
was, you know, perfect.

So I went down to the pay phone on the corner
and tried to call Moira and congratulate her. Maybe
congratulations are in order, maybe not, but I better call.
So I call over and over for about a week and never do
get an answer, so then I think to call Potter Blixt, who
I haven’t seen or heard from since the day in forty—two
when we shipped out in different directions, and I ask
him if he knows w[...]my sister. He tells
me he thinks Moira’s still in the old place, but he hasn’t
heard anything about a[...]o current. Says he only sees her a couple times
a year. They live in a town of five hundred people, and
I remember Potter as a[...]g. I’m wondering, among other things ‘What
is the deal with this baby?’Pretty soon, her phone’s not
ringing at all.

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

Back when we were growing up, back when the
sawmill was still running, there were four saloons doing
good business here in town. We had Doty’s Grocery
and Feed, and those four saloons, and the auto parts
store. My folks owned the Aces. Somewhere along the
line they’d got to be their own best customers, and a
lot of times they’d sleep down at the bar. They’d come
home to shower, Mom to pick up that week’s issue
of Look. As far as anybody raising Moira, I suppose
that was me. Afraid I did a poor job ofit, too, the
way things turned out. We had a pretty good time,
though—I think—when it was just the two of us in
the house. We’d get ourselves up and off to school, fix
our own breakfast, fix our own supper. I’d even read to
her sometimes when she was still tiny. We didn’[...]r own. Mind? We liked it. Moira
was Suzy Sunshine in those days. Really. Sweetest
person I ever knew. I think it was right around the time

she got her first period, though, t[...]

I think Moira must’ve been awful lonesome for
an awful long time. And I don’t think she was made
for it—course, who is? She was too screwed up to get
out of town or to find somebody to treat her good, and
so there she was, waitressing at the Stop N’ Eat for
years. Worked there, I guess, until they finally closed
the doors, and that place was a greasy spoon atto her and even tease her a
little bit, but she never claimed to have any love life,
and after a while I quit asking cause I didn’t want to
embarrass her. Later I get the lowdown and find out
she’d had all kinds ofboyfriends. About half the males
in Elisis have been her boyfriend for twenty minutes
or so. She should’ve at least charged for it, but I guess
all she wanted was the attention. By the time I got
home she’d even run through that phase, and she was
too used up to be a fallen woman anymore, or a harlot,
or whatev[...]alling it ‘home’now. Jesus H.
Christ. This is the last place I ever thought to be found,

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

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

reeking. Immediately overhead of you, just under the

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

Then the wasps drove me inside.

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

But I was there to see about the kid, and he was
nowhere in sight, and what I had seen so far was not
real pr[...]her boy. Is he here? ‘Nap,’ she
says. It’s the first word out ofher mouth, but it’s enough

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

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

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