Into the Dreamin’ Cosmos
When I was in cosmetology school in Pensacola back in the mid-80’s, there was a Pensacola Jr. College student who came in early one morning before class to have his long black hair cut.
“Just give it a little trim,” he said as he pulled his faded green Army jacket closer to his thin frame, as if it were colder in the salon than in the chill outside.
I began to do as he asked.
“Those look sharp,” he said of my haircutting shears—the ones I had paid $100 for, which was astronomical for those times.
“They’re sharp alright. I cut myself pretty often. What’s your first class?”
“English Literature. I’m a freshman. I know I don’t really look like a freshman. That’s because I’m twenty-three. I fished for crab in Alaska for a few years. I thought it’d be fun. It was, and it wasn’t. It was hard. I’ll tell ya that much.”
“Sounds interesting,” I replied. I was envious. I had never done anything. I had never been anywhere. My experiences in life were relegated to interesting conversations with students attending Pensacola Jr. College.
“You into Punk Rock?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I replied less hardily than I felt. My heart thrilled. The Punk subculture meant everything to me. Angry, aggressive middle-class kids screaming that their lives had been ruined by this and that and the other, mainly their parents. Today, it all seems so silly. Then, it was what I lived for… while refusing to be a part of the burgeoning Punk scene in Pensacola.
“You act like a Punk Rocker,” he said. “You’re kinda tough and cool at the same time. You’re kinda… scary.”
I felt empowered. It didn’t take much to make me swell with pride in the browbeaten days of my youth. I mean, this little, wiry, dark-haired guy who could pass for a seasoned AWOL soldier or a well-traveled European was saying that I—a boy found mostly in a world of poetry and dreams—was scary.
“We’re the same age,” I said as I undid the nylon cape from around him and shook off the cut hairs.
“I guess you’re getting a late start in life too. Thanks for the haircut,” he said. “It looks great. My name’s Frithjof. It’s Norse.” He handed me two dollars as a tip and stepped out the door into the cold, unbuttoning his jacket as he went.
* * * *
Two days later Frithjof came back in. His hair was the same length as it had been before I cut it. This time as I trimmed his locks, the conversation was a bit more surreal.
“You ever fished for albermagon in Pensacola Bay?” he asked me.
“What are albermagon?”
“A kind of fish that taste a little like catfish, but not really.”
“I like friend oysters, but that’s about it for fried seafood.”
“Albermagon taste like oysters too,” he added. “You ever lived in Los Angeles?”
“No,” I replied.
“You will,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean by that, Frithjof?”
“Oh, nothing really. Only that one day soon you’re going to be living in Hollywood, California. That’s all I meant.”
“That is a really strange thing to say,” I said. I couldn’t help but laugh. Frithjof laughed along with me, and said nothing more on the subject. By this time I was fairly used to very strange people saying really odd things. It was Pensacola after all. A place that, to this day, I really despise, but that’s neither here nor there when it comes to the absolutely bizarre conversations one can have with seemingly normal people. There’s something in the air… or the water.
As I shook the thin nylon cape out again, Frithjof tipped me two dollars as he had done the time before, unbuttoned his Army coat and walked out into the cold January morning.
“Skip?”
“Yeah?” I turned to the voice of one of my female cosmetology classmates. It was Susanna.
“Skip, that guy you just cut… he came in three times last week. And every time his hair was the same length. I cut it all three times.”
“Really?” I replied. “That’s just weird.”
“You’re tellin’ me.”
* * * *
The next morning Frithjof came back in for another haircut. His hair was halfway down his back. I felt very nervous.
“Haircut?” he said. “You can take most of it off this time. Just leave me a long bang in the front. That’ll look cool.”
“Sure you don’t want a tiger strip mohawk?” I heard myself asking him.
“Can we do that?” His eyes grew wide with childlike glee.
“Sure,” I replied, excited to do something different than permanent waves and hair trims. “Let’s get your mohawk cut first, then we’ll mix up the bleach and get it lookin’ cool!”
I cut Frithjof’s hair the way he wanted it, and then left him there for a few minutes while I went to mix up the bleach. But when I returned, he was gone.
He never came back to the salon again.
Two years later I saw him walking down Hollywood Boulevard. Yes, the one in California. I wanted to say something, but he was too far away, and I didn’t want to yell. I was late for work anyway.
_____________________________
Skadi meic Beorh
Editor, Barking Rain Press
Acquisitions Editor, 27th Dimension Publishing
Skadi meic Beorh is the author of the novella The Highwayman’s Tale (27th Dimension Publishing), the poetry study Golgotha (Punkin House Press), and the story collection A Crazy Child Called Pinprick (27th Dimension) as well as a number of out-of-print books. Having made abode in many places and seen many wondrous things, he presently lives in an Edwardian neighborhood on the Atlantic Coast with his exceedingly imaginative wife Ember.
All books. All the Time. Established 2005
Friday, March 30, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Moonlight on Water
Moonlight on Water
by gina below
He lay still and smiled into the darkness, he could not help himself. He had awakened to the feel of her still in his arms and the comforting spicy smell of her in the air around him. He could have sworn she had been there the dream had been so real. But then again this was the way every dream of her was, so real he could taste her. Her words still floated in the air, as real as the warmth of the sigh she had spoken them with had felt on his neck, her soft kiss still warm beneath his left ear and the whispered words “Don’t forget” caressing his memory. He reached up and laid his hand on his heart where hers had lain and opened his eyes to search the darkness just for the hope that she would be there.
He sat up and as he rose from the bed he slid his old worn Levi’s on and zipped them leaving them unbuttoned as he walked toward the glass sliding door. He grabbed the Marlboro’s off the shelf and lit one as he stepped just outside into the winter night. The moon danced on the lake and he watched it as he leaned against the door jam and blew smoke rings into the dark. He was first generation Southern rebel boy born and raised, but with Yankee blood running through his veins on both of his parent’s side. He had a healthy dose of Native American blood thrown in for good measure so the cold did not bother him like it would most Southerners. But mild winters were a Southern perk.
How many years had he dreamed of her? She should be here now to share this beauty with him. She wafted through his soul like the wind through the trees. She touched every part of him. He knew what it would feel like to stand here and hold her as they watched the moonlight play across the water. How could he know that and not know her name? Not know where she was or how to find her? He knew in his soul she was more than a dream.
The magic of the dream still shimmered around him like the moonlight on the water, so he let his mind drift like the smoke from his cigarette. He knew exactly what he would say if she were here, “Come and look at this beautiful moon with me” and she would slide out of their bed and slip on his old flannel shirt as she walked barefoot toward him. She would fit right under his arm as he pulled her warm and soft against him and she would wrap her warm arms around his waist and lay her head against his chest. “Beautiful” she would say softly and he would look down at her and she would be looking up at him, smiling that smile of hers, the one where her one single dimple danced on her left cheek. He would hold her closer and they would watch the moonlit lake together in silence. No more words would be needed.
by gina below
He lay still and smiled into the darkness, he could not help himself. He had awakened to the feel of her still in his arms and the comforting spicy smell of her in the air around him. He could have sworn she had been there the dream had been so real. But then again this was the way every dream of her was, so real he could taste her. Her words still floated in the air, as real as the warmth of the sigh she had spoken them with had felt on his neck, her soft kiss still warm beneath his left ear and the whispered words “Don’t forget” caressing his memory. He reached up and laid his hand on his heart where hers had lain and opened his eyes to search the darkness just for the hope that she would be there.
He sat up and as he rose from the bed he slid his old worn Levi’s on and zipped them leaving them unbuttoned as he walked toward the glass sliding door. He grabbed the Marlboro’s off the shelf and lit one as he stepped just outside into the winter night. The moon danced on the lake and he watched it as he leaned against the door jam and blew smoke rings into the dark. He was first generation Southern rebel boy born and raised, but with Yankee blood running through his veins on both of his parent’s side. He had a healthy dose of Native American blood thrown in for good measure so the cold did not bother him like it would most Southerners. But mild winters were a Southern perk.
How many years had he dreamed of her? She should be here now to share this beauty with him. She wafted through his soul like the wind through the trees. She touched every part of him. He knew what it would feel like to stand here and hold her as they watched the moonlight play across the water. How could he know that and not know her name? Not know where she was or how to find her? He knew in his soul she was more than a dream.
The magic of the dream still shimmered around him like the moonlight on the water, so he let his mind drift like the smoke from his cigarette. He knew exactly what he would say if she were here, “Come and look at this beautiful moon with me” and she would slide out of their bed and slip on his old flannel shirt as she walked barefoot toward him. She would fit right under his arm as he pulled her warm and soft against him and she would wrap her warm arms around his waist and lay her head against his chest. “Beautiful” she would say softly and he would look down at her and she would be looking up at him, smiling that smile of hers, the one where her one single dimple danced on her left cheek. He would hold her closer and they would watch the moonlit lake together in silence. No more words would be needed.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Hot Dog Heaven
Hot Dog Heaven
I was eating hot dogs at home today and it finally occurred to me, THE truth about the main problem with hot dogs. I asked everyone in the room if they could guess this great truth that had just come on me; but no one even ventured a guess.
It reminded me of a few weeks ago when I had eaten a few hot dogs one day and felt inspired to post on Facebook a comment about the fact that I thought the best hot dogs in the world came from Jo’s kitchen in our home. I then challenged others to suggest their favorite place for hot dogs without putting any restrictions on where and what kind of hot dogs.
Though I have a few friends up in the northern states having spent some time in New Jersey, it is a tribute to all things southern that the places suggested by my Facebook friends were all in the south. Realize, I am not talking about an institutional bun and a wiener like you get in a foil wrap at a ball game, and then dress it with some stuff from those little plastic packs that are hard to open. When I am talking hot dogs I am focused on something that is prepared and dressed for a wiener and bun connoisseur.
While they have been closed so long most people have forgotten them, the Wilkinson family in Augusta, GA had the best commercial dog in that town. Before the days of malls in a small space in the ten hundred block of Broad they sold hundreds of hot dogs everyday downstairs from their upstairs photo studio. They mixed tobasco sauce with French’s mustard to make a HOT mustard which was an option along with the obligatory onions and chili. Steamed their buns in a GI can they did, and just heated the wieners in hot water. They were the best in town.
Now at our house a hot dog is usually grilled on a char-broiler and when it is streaked with black it is placed in a bun which is then placed back in the plastic bag the buns came in and the heat from the wiener steams the buns in that tightly closed bag. Toppings are hot mustard (Wilkinson’s recipe), ketchup, cole slaw, homemade chili (very few canned items are served in our kitchen), shredded cheddar cheese, diced Vidalia onions, and sometimes jalapenos. Hot dogs are a main course meal which draws friends and relatives from miles around when we have them. It was one of those events that inspired me to make my Facebook post.
I suggested a few places that had a decent hot dog in order to prime the pump and get the comments going. Jimmy’s in Albany, Georgia got some mention, Nu Way in Macon, Georgia and then the pool rooms began to show up. Cordele and Thomasville Georgia were mentioned. Both have windows from behind the counter opening to the street so patrons who don’t want to be seen in the pool room can still get their hot dog fix. The pool room in Aiken, South Carolina made the list, and then someone had the audacity to suggest the Varsity in Atlanta and Athens, GA. To me those hot dogs are more or less in the same institutional class as the fodder you get at a stadium or in a gym during a game somewhere, or maybe the Beacon in Spartanburg, SC.
Kelly’s BBQ in Walnut Grove, GA has a dog that is to die for but probably one of the best commercially prepared dogs is at Paul’s Place in Rocky Springs, NC, just outside Wilmington. Paul advertises that he sold over five million hot dogs from that location. His buns are split on top which I like very much because they hold the trimmings and don’t break in half like the ones spilt n the side.
To my surprise the place with the most mention was Jack’s Cosmic Dogs in Mount Pleasant, SC. The people mentioning Jack’s Cosmic Dogs were adamant, with some driving forty miles just to get a hot dog fix on a regular basis. These people seemed like they would fight if anyone besmirched the honor of a Jack’s Cosmic Dog. Though I was reared in the general area, and
spent ages going to Isle of Palms, passing through Mount Pleasant on the way, I had never encountered a Jack’s Cosmic Dog. I was fortunate that my son and his family were going to a wedding in Charleston the next week and I dispatched him to give me a firsthand review on the Cosmic Dogs. Sorry, to all Cosmic champions but William said the buns were too big and a great dog and toppings were overwhelmed by too much bread. Give me a small steamed bun that is split on the top anytime. It makes a difference. Just an opinion but a hot steamed bun, slit on the top of the rise is a bonafide sign of a good hot dog. Paul’s Place is still second to my very own kitchen on the list of best places for a hot dog.
Now I know that I started this essay on hot dogs off stating that I had been overcome with the TRUTH about what was wrong with hot dogs, yet I have wandered all over the Southern US without ever getting to the point. Before I do I want to mention that we have had a place or two open around Atlanta that has featured something called Chicago Hot Dogs which to my surprise have been good enough to make third place on my list. Fuddruckers too has a very good hot dog. Just one more tip, for those cooking at home, if the quality of the wiener is critical, try Boar’s Head, pricey and loaded with fat, but oh so good.
If there is anybody reading this that attended the University of South Carolina in the sixties, they might remember a place just off the Horseshoe called The Brick Shack, better known for great hamburgers, The Brick Shack could make a mean hot dog in their own right.
I’m not writing this to start a new civil war, but just to pay tribute to some great dogs and see who could mention them where. I do want to share my ultimate truth concerning GOOD hot dogs. They go away too quickly. I made two masterpieces today and the first was half gone before I could even develop a real deep appreciation for all that it represented in southern excellence. Even when I eat three dogs, it seems they are gone and the joy they bring has only a short half-life like some nuclear nugget. Next time you are blessed with a great hot dog, check out my findings. If your dogs are so tasty you get through with them before a true appreciation can be developed and expressed, you are on the trail to hot dog heaven.
________________
Bill Prince May 25, 2011 © All Rights Reserved
I was eating hot dogs at home today and it finally occurred to me, THE truth about the main problem with hot dogs. I asked everyone in the room if they could guess this great truth that had just come on me; but no one even ventured a guess.
It reminded me of a few weeks ago when I had eaten a few hot dogs one day and felt inspired to post on Facebook a comment about the fact that I thought the best hot dogs in the world came from Jo’s kitchen in our home. I then challenged others to suggest their favorite place for hot dogs without putting any restrictions on where and what kind of hot dogs.
Though I have a few friends up in the northern states having spent some time in New Jersey, it is a tribute to all things southern that the places suggested by my Facebook friends were all in the south. Realize, I am not talking about an institutional bun and a wiener like you get in a foil wrap at a ball game, and then dress it with some stuff from those little plastic packs that are hard to open. When I am talking hot dogs I am focused on something that is prepared and dressed for a wiener and bun connoisseur.
While they have been closed so long most people have forgotten them, the Wilkinson family in Augusta, GA had the best commercial dog in that town. Before the days of malls in a small space in the ten hundred block of Broad they sold hundreds of hot dogs everyday downstairs from their upstairs photo studio. They mixed tobasco sauce with French’s mustard to make a HOT mustard which was an option along with the obligatory onions and chili. Steamed their buns in a GI can they did, and just heated the wieners in hot water. They were the best in town.
Now at our house a hot dog is usually grilled on a char-broiler and when it is streaked with black it is placed in a bun which is then placed back in the plastic bag the buns came in and the heat from the wiener steams the buns in that tightly closed bag. Toppings are hot mustard (Wilkinson’s recipe), ketchup, cole slaw, homemade chili (very few canned items are served in our kitchen), shredded cheddar cheese, diced Vidalia onions, and sometimes jalapenos. Hot dogs are a main course meal which draws friends and relatives from miles around when we have them. It was one of those events that inspired me to make my Facebook post.
I suggested a few places that had a decent hot dog in order to prime the pump and get the comments going. Jimmy’s in Albany, Georgia got some mention, Nu Way in Macon, Georgia and then the pool rooms began to show up. Cordele and Thomasville Georgia were mentioned. Both have windows from behind the counter opening to the street so patrons who don’t want to be seen in the pool room can still get their hot dog fix. The pool room in Aiken, South Carolina made the list, and then someone had the audacity to suggest the Varsity in Atlanta and Athens, GA. To me those hot dogs are more or less in the same institutional class as the fodder you get at a stadium or in a gym during a game somewhere, or maybe the Beacon in Spartanburg, SC.
Kelly’s BBQ in Walnut Grove, GA has a dog that is to die for but probably one of the best commercially prepared dogs is at Paul’s Place in Rocky Springs, NC, just outside Wilmington. Paul advertises that he sold over five million hot dogs from that location. His buns are split on top which I like very much because they hold the trimmings and don’t break in half like the ones spilt n the side.
To my surprise the place with the most mention was Jack’s Cosmic Dogs in Mount Pleasant, SC. The people mentioning Jack’s Cosmic Dogs were adamant, with some driving forty miles just to get a hot dog fix on a regular basis. These people seemed like they would fight if anyone besmirched the honor of a Jack’s Cosmic Dog. Though I was reared in the general area, and
spent ages going to Isle of Palms, passing through Mount Pleasant on the way, I had never encountered a Jack’s Cosmic Dog. I was fortunate that my son and his family were going to a wedding in Charleston the next week and I dispatched him to give me a firsthand review on the Cosmic Dogs. Sorry, to all Cosmic champions but William said the buns were too big and a great dog and toppings were overwhelmed by too much bread. Give me a small steamed bun that is split on the top anytime. It makes a difference. Just an opinion but a hot steamed bun, slit on the top of the rise is a bonafide sign of a good hot dog. Paul’s Place is still second to my very own kitchen on the list of best places for a hot dog.
Now I know that I started this essay on hot dogs off stating that I had been overcome with the TRUTH about what was wrong with hot dogs, yet I have wandered all over the Southern US without ever getting to the point. Before I do I want to mention that we have had a place or two open around Atlanta that has featured something called Chicago Hot Dogs which to my surprise have been good enough to make third place on my list. Fuddruckers too has a very good hot dog. Just one more tip, for those cooking at home, if the quality of the wiener is critical, try Boar’s Head, pricey and loaded with fat, but oh so good.
If there is anybody reading this that attended the University of South Carolina in the sixties, they might remember a place just off the Horseshoe called The Brick Shack, better known for great hamburgers, The Brick Shack could make a mean hot dog in their own right.
I’m not writing this to start a new civil war, but just to pay tribute to some great dogs and see who could mention them where. I do want to share my ultimate truth concerning GOOD hot dogs. They go away too quickly. I made two masterpieces today and the first was half gone before I could even develop a real deep appreciation for all that it represented in southern excellence. Even when I eat three dogs, it seems they are gone and the joy they bring has only a short half-life like some nuclear nugget. Next time you are blessed with a great hot dog, check out my findings. If your dogs are so tasty you get through with them before a true appreciation can be developed and expressed, you are on the trail to hot dog heaven.
________________
Bill Prince May 25, 2011 © All Rights Reserved
Friday, March 23, 2012
BLESSED UNION
by Gary Carter
Her gloves are lying on the top of the low garden wall, pressed together as if clasped in earnest prayer. I can see them through the window from my chair at the dining room table, which offers a perfect view of the little patch over which she claims queenly dominion, giver of life, nurturing spirit. She must have forgotten them yesterday afternoon after weeding some of the beds in anticipation of spring.
“I know they’re under there,” she told me later as we sipped wine in what has become an early evening ritual over the last few years. “I can imagine the bulbs nestled in the soil, splitting open to allow a shoot of green to wiggle out, and already they’re pushing upward toward me. Any day now.”
I smiled at her gardening fancy, and I remember the wine as blood red and hued with the kiss of the dirt from which it had come. When I held it on my tongue I honestly could summon the pungent aroma of a vineyard in Umbria where we had stood alone one day, a little rented car ticking away beside the road, pushing our shoes and then our fingers into the flinty soil that broke apart and gave up its soulful nose. From that day, I found new meaning in Italian wines, and it also was the day, in that place, she told me finally I had waited long enough and patiently for her to heal, and now she would marry me.
“You’re getting to be an old man,” she teased. “Past sixty last month and definitely on the down slope to a dirt nap. I’ve decided to take pity on you and let you have me, mostly so you’ll stop begging, which isn’t very manly.”
I was surprised since she had told me repeatedly of her conclusion she would never marry anyone again, not after her husband had dumped her for a much younger woman, leaving only a terse note to state he had fallen out of love with her, needed something else, couldn’t wait any longer to start a new life. I’ve always had a smoky image of her at the moment she read that note, head bowed as the reality of it rolled over her. She became broken at that instant, she told me later, after we met by chance at the home of a mutual friend. She was broken and was certain she could not be fixed. But that challenge drew me to her in a searing way that actually frightened me. I was in my early fifties at the time, a hardened bachelor who had rationalized that I just never found the right person, when the truth was the right person, one willing to take me as I am, never found me, or was never willing to bear with my stubborn, willful ways and belief in taking life as it came rather than rushing about trying to remake it to suit some fantasy.
But she was like me, damaged by what we had been dealt by life, and therefore a worthy adversary with whom to battle over how a daily existence could unfold that would satisfy and nurture two dented, slightly out-of-order human beings. I’m sure we both knew we had love in us—we did love ourselves—but were uncertain how to extend that to the other without exposing our soft parts and placing ourselves in a dangerous place.
Somehow we hung together, and actually surprised ourselves at how simply and easily we integrated into a unit of two, merging our individual and independent selves into a single body that walked and talked and managed to survive each day as it came. At night, I know I disentangled myself long enough to savor the blessing of this strange, unexpected union.
And then, there in that ancient vineyard on a hill overlooking a patchwork of fields, she took my hand and said she wanted all of me, in every way she could have me.
In the next village, we cajoled and pleaded with an old priest to marry us. “But you do not have a license, you do not live here,” he protested. “We don’t care if it’s legal,” she told him in ragged Italian punctuated with that smile of hers. “As long as God knows and we know, that’s all that matters.”
With that, and the wad of lire I forced into his wrinkled paw, he relented and blessed our union, even I think enjoying watching us react like giggling teens. As we prepared to leave the shadowed chapel, just before we stepped into bright sun as new people, he laid his hands lightly on our heads and looked deeply into our eyes. “I feel you are special together,” he said. “Go with my blessings and live well in your joy.”
And that’s what we tried to do, and I believe we’ve done well at it now for almost sixteen years. I find it hard to believe I will soon be seventy-seven years old, but the hand on the coffee mug will tolerate no lies, no vanity. Nor will the vision I have of an old woman rising slowly, her knees aching, to strip off her gardening gloves and lay them there on the wall. Bending once more just to stroke the crust of the newly turned dirt with the tips of her fingers, which she then raises to her nose, closing her eyes to allow the pure life of it to enter and nourish her. There is an ever so slight smile turning her lips.
But now there are only her gloves, and my silence. I don’t hear my own breathing, but I can feel the thump of my heart against the wood of the old chair. In our bedroom, no more than twenty paces away, she is lying in bed, curled on her side—her favorite position—a strand of silver hair sliding along her cheek. It’s past the time now when she usually stretches like a long-limbed cat and whistles, letting me know she’s awake and in need of what she calls “her blessed morning kiss.” There will be no whistle this morning, nor again.
END
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
The Lights of Summer
The Lights of Summer
by
Peggy Vincent
The brick wall behind me is part of the 200-year-old farmhouse house belonging to an old friend I haven’t seen for far too many years. I’ve returned to central North Carolina for the first time since she and I attended college together way back when John Kennedy was president.
I’m comfortable in her presence. All the intervening decades disappear, and it feels as if we’ve never been apart. I’m pushing back and forth on a white wicker glider on her screened porch, and she faces me in a rocker. Beyond her is the green and darkening backyard of her rural home. We rock and watch the soft, humid Carolina evening settle upon the air.
I gaze at the scene, the lush lawn that we in California are incapable of growing, the towering magnolia with a bed of daylilies at its base, the gnarled old pear tree with a weathered wooden swing hanging from a convenient branch, the golden retriever dozing on the grass beside a black cat, and the dense and deepening woods beyond.
It’s so quiet. No blaring horns, no hum of traffic, no drone of distant planes. Just the frogs’ shrill peeps, so high-pitched they soon become part of the silence, and the last chirps and warbles of songbirds calling to each other as they settle for the night.
We talk lazily of grandchildren and children, husbands and friends, and soon the crickets join in. Our frequent long pauses are easy, natural. The dog pricks his ears at some sound we cannot hear. He lifts his nose, sniffs once or twice, finds all is well, and subsides.
Suddenly something, some quick movement at the edge of my vision, alerts me, and I turn to look. I see nothing, just the cosmos and poppies nodding their heads in a subtle breeze.
But I’m watchful, waiting, wondering…and then I see it again. Turning more quickly, I catch the flash of light. The light that once seen is forever remembered. The light I haven’t seen for far too many years.
Fireflies.
A group of five or six signal to each other, and while I watch in awe, a dozen more cruise by to play/
“Ah! Look, oh look,” I say, quiet as a sigh.
“What? What is it?” she asks, turning abruptly at my tone. She looks as though she expects to spy some moose stepping from the woods – but she sees nothing unusual in her tranquil yard.
“Fireflies on the lawn.”
“Uh…yeah…”
I look at her. She’s holding her glass of iced tea with both hands, just grinning at me.
“You see them all the time, I guess,” I say.
“Sure do. They’re just part of summer,” and we laugh.
“We don’t get fireflies in California, and I’d sort of forgotten about them. I’ve been away long enough to feel the magic all over again.”
She comes to sit beside me on the glider, and together we push back and forth, watching as the fireflies multiply, friends calling to friends. Soon perhaps a hundred come, frivolous yet somehow stately beacons illuminating the evening scene. From the magnolia to the swing, from the lilies to the poppies, from the blueberry bushes to the gravel drive, the fireflies flash their coded lights, signaling secret messages across the lawn.
I recall my childhood, the pleasure of running barefoot on cool grass, capturing a dozen lightening bugs in a Mason jar to keep at my bedside till my mother came and freed them at full dark. I remember my little sister peering into her cupped hands through a window of overlapping thumbs, her face aglow with light like a pale green moonbeams. I see again a neighbor’s baby pointing at a passing firefly; I see his puzzlement when the light disappears – and hear his squeal of joy when it flashes once again before meandering away.
“What are you thinking about?” my friend asks.
“I’m remembering a perfect night on the Jersey shore after a beach picnic. I was probably about ten,” I say, and I recall that the ocean was as still as oceans ever are. I lay on my stomach with my toes in the waves, my belly on the wet sand, and my fingers in the dry sand still warm from the sun. I could taste the shrimp and corn from a family picnic, and the sweet tang of lemonade. Fireflies appeared from nowhere, flashing at me from the beach grass high in the dunes, and I lay there listening to my sister laughing around the distant campfire.
I look at my friend and then at the woods beyond. “I think it was the first time I appreciated peace, the first time I didn’t take happiness for granted.”
In the sultry night air, we press the cool iced tea glasses to our cheeks as the fireflies swing their fairy lanterns above the grass. One alights mere inches from the retriever’s nose. He regards it with composure. Fireflies are just part of summer, he seems to say. Nothing to get excited about.
My friend stands up and goes inside. I hear her rattling in the old pine cupboards next to the kitchen fireplace. She’s making quite a racket. I assume she’s fixing us a snack, though how she thinks I could be hungry after the soft-shelled crabs, fried potatoes, butter beans, coleslaw, and rhubarb cobbler she’s just served me, I can’t imagine.
I look up when she steps onto the porch, and so does the retriever. I’m expecting to see a bowl of peanuts in her hands, and from the dog’s now alert expression I suspect he’s hoping for dinner’s leftovers.
But she’s carrying two empty Mason jars with holes poked in the lids.
“Come on,” she says, taking my hand.
The porch door squeaks when we push it open, just the way screen doors are supposed to sound on summer evenings. It slams behind us with that satisfying smack, and the metal latch jangles against the frame. We leave our sandals on the brick patio and step barefoot onto the cool grass.
I catch the first firefly and hold it loosely in my fist, watching the eerie glow illuminate the spaces where my fingers touch. Then I ease it into the jar. We swoop low beneath the pear tree’s branches, fly wide around the magnolia’s girth, soar to the very edge of the woods, dancing over the grass to capture the light of summer.
It’s dark now, fully dark, and we link arms and go inside.
She turns off the lights, and we put the fireflies in their jars on tables at each end of the glider. It’s not enough light to read by, but it’s plenty of light for sharing memories. We rock slowly, fan gently, and sip our iced tea, talking of love and babies, of life and old friends, of hopes and dreams…and gratitude.
______________________________
Bio:
Peggy Vincent, a retired California Bay Area midwife, wrote a memoir of her years of doing home births in Berkeley: Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife, published in 2002 by Scribner, Simon & Schuster . She lives in Oakland, CA with her husband and 2 cats. Three adult children live nearby. Peggy is currently at work on another narrative nonfiction book.
by
Peggy Vincent
The brick wall behind me is part of the 200-year-old farmhouse house belonging to an old friend I haven’t seen for far too many years. I’ve returned to central North Carolina for the first time since she and I attended college together way back when John Kennedy was president.
I’m comfortable in her presence. All the intervening decades disappear, and it feels as if we’ve never been apart. I’m pushing back and forth on a white wicker glider on her screened porch, and she faces me in a rocker. Beyond her is the green and darkening backyard of her rural home. We rock and watch the soft, humid Carolina evening settle upon the air.
I gaze at the scene, the lush lawn that we in California are incapable of growing, the towering magnolia with a bed of daylilies at its base, the gnarled old pear tree with a weathered wooden swing hanging from a convenient branch, the golden retriever dozing on the grass beside a black cat, and the dense and deepening woods beyond.
It’s so quiet. No blaring horns, no hum of traffic, no drone of distant planes. Just the frogs’ shrill peeps, so high-pitched they soon become part of the silence, and the last chirps and warbles of songbirds calling to each other as they settle for the night.
We talk lazily of grandchildren and children, husbands and friends, and soon the crickets join in. Our frequent long pauses are easy, natural. The dog pricks his ears at some sound we cannot hear. He lifts his nose, sniffs once or twice, finds all is well, and subsides.
Suddenly something, some quick movement at the edge of my vision, alerts me, and I turn to look. I see nothing, just the cosmos and poppies nodding their heads in a subtle breeze.
But I’m watchful, waiting, wondering…and then I see it again. Turning more quickly, I catch the flash of light. The light that once seen is forever remembered. The light I haven’t seen for far too many years.
Fireflies.
A group of five or six signal to each other, and while I watch in awe, a dozen more cruise by to play/
“Ah! Look, oh look,” I say, quiet as a sigh.
“What? What is it?” she asks, turning abruptly at my tone. She looks as though she expects to spy some moose stepping from the woods – but she sees nothing unusual in her tranquil yard.
“Fireflies on the lawn.”
“Uh…yeah…”
I look at her. She’s holding her glass of iced tea with both hands, just grinning at me.
“You see them all the time, I guess,” I say.
“Sure do. They’re just part of summer,” and we laugh.
“We don’t get fireflies in California, and I’d sort of forgotten about them. I’ve been away long enough to feel the magic all over again.”
She comes to sit beside me on the glider, and together we push back and forth, watching as the fireflies multiply, friends calling to friends. Soon perhaps a hundred come, frivolous yet somehow stately beacons illuminating the evening scene. From the magnolia to the swing, from the lilies to the poppies, from the blueberry bushes to the gravel drive, the fireflies flash their coded lights, signaling secret messages across the lawn.
I recall my childhood, the pleasure of running barefoot on cool grass, capturing a dozen lightening bugs in a Mason jar to keep at my bedside till my mother came and freed them at full dark. I remember my little sister peering into her cupped hands through a window of overlapping thumbs, her face aglow with light like a pale green moonbeams. I see again a neighbor’s baby pointing at a passing firefly; I see his puzzlement when the light disappears – and hear his squeal of joy when it flashes once again before meandering away.
“What are you thinking about?” my friend asks.
“I’m remembering a perfect night on the Jersey shore after a beach picnic. I was probably about ten,” I say, and I recall that the ocean was as still as oceans ever are. I lay on my stomach with my toes in the waves, my belly on the wet sand, and my fingers in the dry sand still warm from the sun. I could taste the shrimp and corn from a family picnic, and the sweet tang of lemonade. Fireflies appeared from nowhere, flashing at me from the beach grass high in the dunes, and I lay there listening to my sister laughing around the distant campfire.
I look at my friend and then at the woods beyond. “I think it was the first time I appreciated peace, the first time I didn’t take happiness for granted.”
In the sultry night air, we press the cool iced tea glasses to our cheeks as the fireflies swing their fairy lanterns above the grass. One alights mere inches from the retriever’s nose. He regards it with composure. Fireflies are just part of summer, he seems to say. Nothing to get excited about.
My friend stands up and goes inside. I hear her rattling in the old pine cupboards next to the kitchen fireplace. She’s making quite a racket. I assume she’s fixing us a snack, though how she thinks I could be hungry after the soft-shelled crabs, fried potatoes, butter beans, coleslaw, and rhubarb cobbler she’s just served me, I can’t imagine.
I look up when she steps onto the porch, and so does the retriever. I’m expecting to see a bowl of peanuts in her hands, and from the dog’s now alert expression I suspect he’s hoping for dinner’s leftovers.
But she’s carrying two empty Mason jars with holes poked in the lids.
“Come on,” she says, taking my hand.
The porch door squeaks when we push it open, just the way screen doors are supposed to sound on summer evenings. It slams behind us with that satisfying smack, and the metal latch jangles against the frame. We leave our sandals on the brick patio and step barefoot onto the cool grass.
I catch the first firefly and hold it loosely in my fist, watching the eerie glow illuminate the spaces where my fingers touch. Then I ease it into the jar. We swoop low beneath the pear tree’s branches, fly wide around the magnolia’s girth, soar to the very edge of the woods, dancing over the grass to capture the light of summer.
It’s dark now, fully dark, and we link arms and go inside.
She turns off the lights, and we put the fireflies in their jars on tables at each end of the glider. It’s not enough light to read by, but it’s plenty of light for sharing memories. We rock slowly, fan gently, and sip our iced tea, talking of love and babies, of life and old friends, of hopes and dreams…and gratitude.
______________________________
Bio:
Peggy Vincent, a retired California Bay Area midwife, wrote a memoir of her years of doing home births in Berkeley: Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife, published in 2002 by Scribner, Simon & Schuster . She lives in Oakland, CA with her husband and 2 cats. Three adult children live nearby. Peggy is currently at work on another narrative nonfiction book.
Monday, March 19, 2012
She Left Her Mark
She Left Her Mark
By Jane-Ann Heitmueller
“It’s time, Bob,” declared his wife Ludie in the troughs of labor. “Hurry up, the baby is almost here!” Obediently, Mr. Knight grabbed his hat and coat and rushed out headlong into the raging storm that frigid winter night, tripping over fallen brush and stumbling through icy streams to fetch Mrs. Howard, the local mid-wife who lived a mile away through the woods.
“Mrs. Knight,” said the midwife holding back tears, “I don’t know if your tiny mite of a baby will live through the night. She’s terribly small. We’ll just have to wait and see how she is in the morning.” And so it was with that proclamation little Ruth Knight was ushered into the world on Dec. 9, 1919.
Tenderly, Mrs. Howard wrapped the fragile, whimpering baby in a clean flour sack and tucked her snugly into a shoebox. “There now, I’ll just put her in this chair near the warm cook stove and she should be plenty comfortable the rest of the night. You try to get some sleep, Mrs. Knight, and don’t worry, I’ll stay right here to look after your baby girl.”
And live she did! Little did anyone realize at her birth what feistiness dwelt within the core of that frail little soul, but for the next eighty-nine years she proved her strength and determination to all who knew and loved her.
One example of her uniqueness showed in her driving ability…or lack thereof. Mom was simply a terrible driver. A fact known to everyone but herself. She relished her independence and at an advanced age continued to insist on driving, even against the wishes of family members, friends and her doctor. Mom used no rational argument in her insistence to keep her car keys, and although I dreaded doing so, for her own safety and the safety of others on the road, I finally brought them home with me. Until she passed away in the summer of 2008 she never forgave me for taking those precious keys.
From her dubious beginning Mom remained a small person in both weight and height. She was barely five feet tall and constantly struggled to weigh a hundred pounds. One can picture her behind the wheel of a car with her seat thrust forward as far as possible and her head only slightly visible above the steering wheel. This diminutive stature never lessened her control behind the wheel as she revved up the engine and shot headlong toward her destination, looking neither right nor left! It was ‘Casey, bar the door’ when Mom took control of that vehicle.
She was so proud of her shiny maroon 1979 Chevrolet Caprice and kept it maintained in perfect condition. Mom took great pleasure in washing, waxing and servicing her “chariot”, yet seemed oblivious to the numerous dings, scratches, dents and markings she had created by her erratic driving. There was the long, deep scratch on the trunk from the night she backed into a barbed wire fence, ugly black streaks on the whitewall tires from turning too close to the curb, the dangling antennae, created by pulling under the low drive through entrance at the local bank. Of course, none of these accidents were her fault and she had absolutely no idea how any of them had happened!
Mom lived about two miles from a local shopping center she often frequented. One day, returning from a shopping trip, she noticed that a police car pulled into her driveway behind her. She couldn’t imagine why he had followed an eighty year old woman the entire way home.
“Mam,” he politely addressed her, “did you know that you were not suppose to enter the northbound lane at that crossing?”
“But officer, with her hands planted firmly on her hips, I always turn that way to come home. I’ve done it for forty years!”
“Yes, mam,” he replied, concealing his amusement at her response, “ I suppose you just didn’t notice the red no turn arrow on the sign. Please watch for it next time.”
Then there was the time she came home with a smashed right fender and front grill.
“Mom, what in the world happened?” we asked in horror.
“Oh, my brakes wouldn’t work when I went to get gas, so I just drove around the block and crashed into the brick wall at Week’s Service Station to stop the car.”
When I rode with Mom I nearly pushed a hole through the passenger floorboard putting on the brakes. I dared not take my eyes off the road for a moment. “Stop, watch out, there’s a red light, that fellow is going to stop in front of you!”
I was a nervous wreck being a ‘backseat driver’. Mom never took offense to any of my criticisms, taking them all in stride and with good cheer. “That’s alright,” she’d sweetly smile and say, “ I need all the help I can get.” However, she never changed any of her driving habits.
Mom’s fearlessness under the wheel was demonstrated the year we went on vacation to the beach. She insisted that she and Dad, who had long ago given up his keys voluntarily, would follow in their own car. My husband, two sons and I would lead the way there and back. We were returning from our trip, when suddenly, fifty miles from home, the skies grew black and torrents of rain slashed down on the highway. The windshield wipers did absolutely nothing to help us see more than five feet ahead and we felt safer to crawl forward than attempt to pull over into the unknown roadside. All I could see of Mom’s car were slits of her headlights steadily creeping along behind us and I can’t recall ever having prayed more fervently for our safety on the road.
Drained, both physically and mentally from miles of tension, we thankfully reached home safe and sound. I was in awe of Mom’s control and calmness on the road that day. She was a cool as a cucumber and showed no signs of concern while dealing with such a frightening situation. That afternoon I came to the realization that there must certainly be a special angel in Heaven assigned to ride along on Mom’s shoulder when she was behind the wheel of a car. That was one brave angel!
Our last episode related to Mom’s driving ability came only a few months before she came to live with us that final year of her life. One Friday afternoon when I pulled up at her home, I noticed a huge dent in the door frame of the garage. The aluminum siding was twisted and the wooden boards underneath were splintered and broken. I was shocked and puzzled, immediately suspecting that she had hit the front left fender when pulling the car inside the garage. Sure enough, when I checked, there was white paint on the left headlight and fender and a wide, white scratch down the length of both doors on the driver’s side. When I showed Mom what I had discovered she was terribly insulted that I should suggest any of the damage was her fault. After all, hadn’t she driven her car inside those garage walls hundreds of times without incident during the past fifty years? Apparently, she wasn’t willing to admit it or actually did not recall having smashed into the garage.
One afternoon, shortly after that disturbing encounter, I gathered enough courage to ease her car keys from the hook in the entrance to her kitchen and slip them into my coat pocket. I wasn’t brave enough to tell her just then, deciding I would put that chore off as long as possible, knowing the day would soon arrive when she would discover what I had done and I would have to face the music. Turns out, it was a complete and never ending symphony!
Mom’s been gone nearly four years, yet we have not had the heart to repair that garage door damage. Perhaps it is because it always gives us a smile when we drive up and see it there as a tangible, visual tribute to the life of the spunky little lady who definitely left her mark on life. We miss you, Mom.
By Jane-Ann Heitmueller
“It’s time, Bob,” declared his wife Ludie in the troughs of labor. “Hurry up, the baby is almost here!” Obediently, Mr. Knight grabbed his hat and coat and rushed out headlong into the raging storm that frigid winter night, tripping over fallen brush and stumbling through icy streams to fetch Mrs. Howard, the local mid-wife who lived a mile away through the woods.
“Mrs. Knight,” said the midwife holding back tears, “I don’t know if your tiny mite of a baby will live through the night. She’s terribly small. We’ll just have to wait and see how she is in the morning.” And so it was with that proclamation little Ruth Knight was ushered into the world on Dec. 9, 1919.
Tenderly, Mrs. Howard wrapped the fragile, whimpering baby in a clean flour sack and tucked her snugly into a shoebox. “There now, I’ll just put her in this chair near the warm cook stove and she should be plenty comfortable the rest of the night. You try to get some sleep, Mrs. Knight, and don’t worry, I’ll stay right here to look after your baby girl.”
And live she did! Little did anyone realize at her birth what feistiness dwelt within the core of that frail little soul, but for the next eighty-nine years she proved her strength and determination to all who knew and loved her.
One example of her uniqueness showed in her driving ability…or lack thereof. Mom was simply a terrible driver. A fact known to everyone but herself. She relished her independence and at an advanced age continued to insist on driving, even against the wishes of family members, friends and her doctor. Mom used no rational argument in her insistence to keep her car keys, and although I dreaded doing so, for her own safety and the safety of others on the road, I finally brought them home with me. Until she passed away in the summer of 2008 she never forgave me for taking those precious keys.
From her dubious beginning Mom remained a small person in both weight and height. She was barely five feet tall and constantly struggled to weigh a hundred pounds. One can picture her behind the wheel of a car with her seat thrust forward as far as possible and her head only slightly visible above the steering wheel. This diminutive stature never lessened her control behind the wheel as she revved up the engine and shot headlong toward her destination, looking neither right nor left! It was ‘Casey, bar the door’ when Mom took control of that vehicle.
She was so proud of her shiny maroon 1979 Chevrolet Caprice and kept it maintained in perfect condition. Mom took great pleasure in washing, waxing and servicing her “chariot”, yet seemed oblivious to the numerous dings, scratches, dents and markings she had created by her erratic driving. There was the long, deep scratch on the trunk from the night she backed into a barbed wire fence, ugly black streaks on the whitewall tires from turning too close to the curb, the dangling antennae, created by pulling under the low drive through entrance at the local bank. Of course, none of these accidents were her fault and she had absolutely no idea how any of them had happened!
Mom lived about two miles from a local shopping center she often frequented. One day, returning from a shopping trip, she noticed that a police car pulled into her driveway behind her. She couldn’t imagine why he had followed an eighty year old woman the entire way home.
“Mam,” he politely addressed her, “did you know that you were not suppose to enter the northbound lane at that crossing?”
“But officer, with her hands planted firmly on her hips, I always turn that way to come home. I’ve done it for forty years!”
“Yes, mam,” he replied, concealing his amusement at her response, “ I suppose you just didn’t notice the red no turn arrow on the sign. Please watch for it next time.”
Then there was the time she came home with a smashed right fender and front grill.
“Mom, what in the world happened?” we asked in horror.
“Oh, my brakes wouldn’t work when I went to get gas, so I just drove around the block and crashed into the brick wall at Week’s Service Station to stop the car.”
When I rode with Mom I nearly pushed a hole through the passenger floorboard putting on the brakes. I dared not take my eyes off the road for a moment. “Stop, watch out, there’s a red light, that fellow is going to stop in front of you!”
I was a nervous wreck being a ‘backseat driver’. Mom never took offense to any of my criticisms, taking them all in stride and with good cheer. “That’s alright,” she’d sweetly smile and say, “ I need all the help I can get.” However, she never changed any of her driving habits.
Mom’s fearlessness under the wheel was demonstrated the year we went on vacation to the beach. She insisted that she and Dad, who had long ago given up his keys voluntarily, would follow in their own car. My husband, two sons and I would lead the way there and back. We were returning from our trip, when suddenly, fifty miles from home, the skies grew black and torrents of rain slashed down on the highway. The windshield wipers did absolutely nothing to help us see more than five feet ahead and we felt safer to crawl forward than attempt to pull over into the unknown roadside. All I could see of Mom’s car were slits of her headlights steadily creeping along behind us and I can’t recall ever having prayed more fervently for our safety on the road.
Drained, both physically and mentally from miles of tension, we thankfully reached home safe and sound. I was in awe of Mom’s control and calmness on the road that day. She was a cool as a cucumber and showed no signs of concern while dealing with such a frightening situation. That afternoon I came to the realization that there must certainly be a special angel in Heaven assigned to ride along on Mom’s shoulder when she was behind the wheel of a car. That was one brave angel!
Our last episode related to Mom’s driving ability came only a few months before she came to live with us that final year of her life. One Friday afternoon when I pulled up at her home, I noticed a huge dent in the door frame of the garage. The aluminum siding was twisted and the wooden boards underneath were splintered and broken. I was shocked and puzzled, immediately suspecting that she had hit the front left fender when pulling the car inside the garage. Sure enough, when I checked, there was white paint on the left headlight and fender and a wide, white scratch down the length of both doors on the driver’s side. When I showed Mom what I had discovered she was terribly insulted that I should suggest any of the damage was her fault. After all, hadn’t she driven her car inside those garage walls hundreds of times without incident during the past fifty years? Apparently, she wasn’t willing to admit it or actually did not recall having smashed into the garage.
One afternoon, shortly after that disturbing encounter, I gathered enough courage to ease her car keys from the hook in the entrance to her kitchen and slip them into my coat pocket. I wasn’t brave enough to tell her just then, deciding I would put that chore off as long as possible, knowing the day would soon arrive when she would discover what I had done and I would have to face the music. Turns out, it was a complete and never ending symphony!
Mom’s been gone nearly four years, yet we have not had the heart to repair that garage door damage. Perhaps it is because it always gives us a smile when we drive up and see it there as a tangible, visual tribute to the life of the spunky little lady who definitely left her mark on life. We miss you, Mom.
Friday, March 16, 2012
New Night Girl Needed at the Truck Stop.
New Night Girl Needed at the Truck Stop.
I saw Charles with the waitress girl from the truck stop which was at the edge of our town at the traveling carnival and James was with her friend. We lived in a small town near Augusta, Georgia. Navy personnel were involved in some sort of top secret research project nearby. The girl from the truck stop worked the night shift in the café while her Navy husband did some kind on security gig out at the research project.
It was over a hundred miles to Charleston so it was unusual for a Navy wife to be working at our truck stop. I was even more surprised that she and her girlfriend were out with Charles and James at the carnival because she was on record saying her husband was a jealous man and trained to kill. The little traveling carnival had a few fried food stands, some rides and a hoochee-coochee show. I was a senior in high school and Charles was a young working married man while James was in college. It would be hard for Charles and James to sport these girls, young women actually, in their mid twenties, without word getting back to Charles’ wife. James didn’t care much what people thought about him, but Charles was usually more cautious with his womanizing. Both young men were well known for getting after some strange women when they had a chance.
I sometimes would sit in the truck stop watching for customers while one of the guys would take the sailor’s wife into the back where there were three sleeping rooms for the truck drivers. I was pretty sure when they took her to the back there was not any sleeping going on. Charles had a thing going on with her, but he wasn’t the only one. Obviously she was a somewhat loose and unstable girl; she had tried to slash her wrists at the truck stop one night. She did a poor job of slashing and there was no danger of her bleeding to death. She was just trying for attention someone said.
I went ahead and took in the carnival, which only took about five minutes, skipping the hoochee-coochee show, then went up to the truck stop for a cup of coffee and found out that the Navy wife had asked off that night and they had some substitute help there. The temp said that Charles and James and the two girls had stopped in earlier and then left in James’ car going towards the next town which was where the sailor and his wife lived in a rented single wide trailer lined up in a trailer park. It was about seventeen miles over there. Just being curious I took note of the situation. I had heard that the sailor made his wife work nights as he did so she would have less opportunity to run around on him which was what it seemed that she was doing that night.
Home to bed is where I went maybe by midnight but got up early, about daylight, planning to go fishing for a little while before going to work on my week end job. I drove up towards the end of the county where the pond was which happened to be in the same direction as the town where the sailor and his wife lived.
Just before I turned off to go to the pond, I saw a man running up the road with his shirt unbuttoned. I did a double take and saw it was Charles. I went to pick him up because he was running like there was no tomorrow. When I got him in the car he was as exhausted as I had ever seen anybody and practically colorless, white as Casper the Ghost. He had good reason to be since he had just run about fourteen miles without stopping, according to him, and he being a heavy smoker didn’t have the lungs for that and was out of shape physically as well. Only fear could empower him to make that run.
As Charles got his breath he told me where his had left his car the night before and asked me to take him there, filling me in as I drove.
When he and James took the girls back to the trailer, where apparently they had been picked up by some prearrangement, they split up and James took his girl to the one bedroom which was on one end of the trailer and Charles stayed with the sailor’s wife on the other end where there was what we would call a living room with a sofa. A single wide house trailer is only eight feet wide with walls one inch thick usually with a hall down or nearly down one side, and an outside door into the living room and an outside door into the hall down near the bedroom.
Charles and the sailor’s wife were doing what they do, taking their clothes off, getting intimate, and not expecting any interruptions any time soon. Charles told me that James and the other girl were up to the same thing down the hall. He would have known because people in single wide trailers can pretty much tell a lot about what others in there are doing.
Charles said something woke him in the night, maybe a car door; he quickly put on his pants and shoes and peeked out the window. The sailor was coming up to the door most unexpectedly carrying some long object. James’ car was parked there in his place right outside the door. Charles said, ”I grabbed my shirt and slipped down the hall and left as the sailor opened the living room door.” Apparently Charles opened and slipped out the door on the bedroom end at the same time the sailor came in the other end. Charles slipped on his shirt as he began to run hearing several blasts from what turned out to be a shotgun in the trailer.
Charles said,”I began to run and run, and run.” It was a mile and half on the four-lane road to the smaller road that turned towards our town. The smaller road ran alongside the government facility and Charles probably ran near where that sailor was supposed to be guarding the top secret project, whatever it was.
I believe to this day that Charles ran than that mile and a half and put some distance between the trailer and himself fast enough so that he didn’t meet up with any police or ambulances coming to that trailer. They would have come and gone back in the opposite direction from which Charles was fleeing on foot anyway. If someone told me Charles could run fourteen miles without stopping, I would have said they better have an ambulance follow him because he would fall out in a mile or two, but when Charles said he ran every step without stopping I believed him. He was a scared man and full of adrenalin. I learned later in the military that adrenalin would take you much further than you thought you could go.
“So what happened,” I asked Charles. He said “Man! I don’t know but that sailor shot that place up. Take me to my car and keep quiet about this.” So now about fifty years later I am thinking about this and deem it worthy of documenting, but of course I have changed the names.
Instead of going fishing, after I dropped Charles off and watched him drive towards his house, I rode over to where the trailer was to see if I could see any carnage. It would likely have been a couple hours or more then since the action occurred, probably somewhat longer if Charles had walked some of the way. You need to understand that this was a rural road through a remote area, and there was not much traffic in the early morning hours, and I would guess that Charles might lay low for minute if a vehicle came, that is until he recognized my car.
This is what I was able to gather from talking to some acquaintances in that other town that morning and it was verified later as James’ people began to fill in the blanks. Turns out that the sailor suspected his wife was up to no good that night and decided to take leave from his duty a little early. Had he been quieter he might have caught Charles on that couch with his wife. Best anybody could tell, he burst through the door and shot his naked wife a time or two with that shotgun. Naturally being disturbed by such loud noises, James and the other girl rousted up and into the hall to be met by a hail of gun fire which dropped both of them in the hall way.
The trailers were parked in a row about ten feet from each other side by side. The people in the next trailer would have been maybe ten or twelve feet from where the sailor shot his wife. Naturally the neighbors bailed out of the nearby trailers and began to investigate, meanwhile someone called the police. There was no 911 in those days but the city police from that town were close enough to hear the gunshots as they sat out by their station house enjoying the mild evening.
The sailor’s wife was dead at the scene; he was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette when the law arrived. James and the other girl were badly wounded but alive lying in the hallway moaning. An ambulance took them to the closest hospital where they eventually recovered. James was somewhat of a local hero, having survived. The other girl went to who knows where. The Navy took the sailor to wherever they wanted him to be. It never came out that Charles was over there because James covered for him. The truck stop had to get a new night girl; then things pretty much went back to normal. I see Charles occasionally and he has never mentioned that evening to me since, neither did James have anything to say about it, but he joined the Army pretty quick. I guess when the small town law, the Navy and a top secret government project are involved, nobody asks many questions. The investigation was cursory. Everybody thought that the dead girl was pretty much a wacko anyway.
Bill Prince May 21, 2011 © All Rights Reserved
I saw Charles with the waitress girl from the truck stop which was at the edge of our town at the traveling carnival and James was with her friend. We lived in a small town near Augusta, Georgia. Navy personnel were involved in some sort of top secret research project nearby. The girl from the truck stop worked the night shift in the café while her Navy husband did some kind on security gig out at the research project.
It was over a hundred miles to Charleston so it was unusual for a Navy wife to be working at our truck stop. I was even more surprised that she and her girlfriend were out with Charles and James at the carnival because she was on record saying her husband was a jealous man and trained to kill. The little traveling carnival had a few fried food stands, some rides and a hoochee-coochee show. I was a senior in high school and Charles was a young working married man while James was in college. It would be hard for Charles and James to sport these girls, young women actually, in their mid twenties, without word getting back to Charles’ wife. James didn’t care much what people thought about him, but Charles was usually more cautious with his womanizing. Both young men were well known for getting after some strange women when they had a chance.
I sometimes would sit in the truck stop watching for customers while one of the guys would take the sailor’s wife into the back where there were three sleeping rooms for the truck drivers. I was pretty sure when they took her to the back there was not any sleeping going on. Charles had a thing going on with her, but he wasn’t the only one. Obviously she was a somewhat loose and unstable girl; she had tried to slash her wrists at the truck stop one night. She did a poor job of slashing and there was no danger of her bleeding to death. She was just trying for attention someone said.
I went ahead and took in the carnival, which only took about five minutes, skipping the hoochee-coochee show, then went up to the truck stop for a cup of coffee and found out that the Navy wife had asked off that night and they had some substitute help there. The temp said that Charles and James and the two girls had stopped in earlier and then left in James’ car going towards the next town which was where the sailor and his wife lived in a rented single wide trailer lined up in a trailer park. It was about seventeen miles over there. Just being curious I took note of the situation. I had heard that the sailor made his wife work nights as he did so she would have less opportunity to run around on him which was what it seemed that she was doing that night.
Home to bed is where I went maybe by midnight but got up early, about daylight, planning to go fishing for a little while before going to work on my week end job. I drove up towards the end of the county where the pond was which happened to be in the same direction as the town where the sailor and his wife lived.
Just before I turned off to go to the pond, I saw a man running up the road with his shirt unbuttoned. I did a double take and saw it was Charles. I went to pick him up because he was running like there was no tomorrow. When I got him in the car he was as exhausted as I had ever seen anybody and practically colorless, white as Casper the Ghost. He had good reason to be since he had just run about fourteen miles without stopping, according to him, and he being a heavy smoker didn’t have the lungs for that and was out of shape physically as well. Only fear could empower him to make that run.
As Charles got his breath he told me where his had left his car the night before and asked me to take him there, filling me in as I drove.
When he and James took the girls back to the trailer, where apparently they had been picked up by some prearrangement, they split up and James took his girl to the one bedroom which was on one end of the trailer and Charles stayed with the sailor’s wife on the other end where there was what we would call a living room with a sofa. A single wide house trailer is only eight feet wide with walls one inch thick usually with a hall down or nearly down one side, and an outside door into the living room and an outside door into the hall down near the bedroom.
Charles and the sailor’s wife were doing what they do, taking their clothes off, getting intimate, and not expecting any interruptions any time soon. Charles told me that James and the other girl were up to the same thing down the hall. He would have known because people in single wide trailers can pretty much tell a lot about what others in there are doing.
Charles said something woke him in the night, maybe a car door; he quickly put on his pants and shoes and peeked out the window. The sailor was coming up to the door most unexpectedly carrying some long object. James’ car was parked there in his place right outside the door. Charles said, ”I grabbed my shirt and slipped down the hall and left as the sailor opened the living room door.” Apparently Charles opened and slipped out the door on the bedroom end at the same time the sailor came in the other end. Charles slipped on his shirt as he began to run hearing several blasts from what turned out to be a shotgun in the trailer.
Charles said,”I began to run and run, and run.” It was a mile and half on the four-lane road to the smaller road that turned towards our town. The smaller road ran alongside the government facility and Charles probably ran near where that sailor was supposed to be guarding the top secret project, whatever it was.
I believe to this day that Charles ran than that mile and a half and put some distance between the trailer and himself fast enough so that he didn’t meet up with any police or ambulances coming to that trailer. They would have come and gone back in the opposite direction from which Charles was fleeing on foot anyway. If someone told me Charles could run fourteen miles without stopping, I would have said they better have an ambulance follow him because he would fall out in a mile or two, but when Charles said he ran every step without stopping I believed him. He was a scared man and full of adrenalin. I learned later in the military that adrenalin would take you much further than you thought you could go.
“So what happened,” I asked Charles. He said “Man! I don’t know but that sailor shot that place up. Take me to my car and keep quiet about this.” So now about fifty years later I am thinking about this and deem it worthy of documenting, but of course I have changed the names.
Instead of going fishing, after I dropped Charles off and watched him drive towards his house, I rode over to where the trailer was to see if I could see any carnage. It would likely have been a couple hours or more then since the action occurred, probably somewhat longer if Charles had walked some of the way. You need to understand that this was a rural road through a remote area, and there was not much traffic in the early morning hours, and I would guess that Charles might lay low for minute if a vehicle came, that is until he recognized my car.
This is what I was able to gather from talking to some acquaintances in that other town that morning and it was verified later as James’ people began to fill in the blanks. Turns out that the sailor suspected his wife was up to no good that night and decided to take leave from his duty a little early. Had he been quieter he might have caught Charles on that couch with his wife. Best anybody could tell, he burst through the door and shot his naked wife a time or two with that shotgun. Naturally being disturbed by such loud noises, James and the other girl rousted up and into the hall to be met by a hail of gun fire which dropped both of them in the hall way.
The trailers were parked in a row about ten feet from each other side by side. The people in the next trailer would have been maybe ten or twelve feet from where the sailor shot his wife. Naturally the neighbors bailed out of the nearby trailers and began to investigate, meanwhile someone called the police. There was no 911 in those days but the city police from that town were close enough to hear the gunshots as they sat out by their station house enjoying the mild evening.
The sailor’s wife was dead at the scene; he was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette when the law arrived. James and the other girl were badly wounded but alive lying in the hallway moaning. An ambulance took them to the closest hospital where they eventually recovered. James was somewhat of a local hero, having survived. The other girl went to who knows where. The Navy took the sailor to wherever they wanted him to be. It never came out that Charles was over there because James covered for him. The truck stop had to get a new night girl; then things pretty much went back to normal. I see Charles occasionally and he has never mentioned that evening to me since, neither did James have anything to say about it, but he joined the Army pretty quick. I guess when the small town law, the Navy and a top secret government project are involved, nobody asks many questions. The investigation was cursory. Everybody thought that the dead girl was pretty much a wacko anyway.
Bill Prince May 21, 2011 © All Rights Reserved
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
All Boxed Up With No Place to Go
All Boxed Up With No Place to Go
By Cappy Hall Rearick
_____________________________
“There’s a storm blowin’ up and it’s a whopper.” ~ The Wizard of Oz
“What,” my friend Joanie asked, “is your biggest fear?” I didn’t need to think about it.
“Uh … developing an allergy to chocolate?”
Joanie sighed. “Get serious.”
I was. My fear began following a crash diet of Saltine Crackers and Pepsi Zero. Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate then became my obsession. Since then, however, a tornado warning has caused me to reassess my fear factor.
Babe, having acted on the cockeyed notion that forewarned meant forearmed, bought a Weather Alert Radio. Bragging that Mother Nature wouldn’t dare sneak up on us again, he set it to go off like a siren and placed it on a far table in our bedroom.
It sat there undisturbed until one morning before dawn. My cat, Sophie Sorrowful, sprang off the foot of the bed like a greased Slinky while Babe turned over in bed and hit the snooze button.
When the alarm screeched again, he clicked on the Weather Channel before hitting the snooze button again.
TORNADO WARNING. TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!
I groaned. “What’s going on?”
“Tornado warning,” he mumbled
I sat up. “A warning or a watch?”
He yawned. “Warning.”
I yanked the covers off his Yankee butt and screamed louder than the alarm siren, “A warning? Get up! Get up! Where’s the cat?”
“Coffee,” he grunted.
At that precise moment, I knew for sure that my biggest fear had absolutely nothing to do with chocolate. Having lived in hurricane country for most of my life, I totally know the drill. When the storm troopers say “Evacuate,” I’m first in line. Nowhere on my Bucket List have I ever written, “I want to wake up and say, ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore.’
Babe shuffled off for coffee while I filled book bags with emergency supplies and looked high and low for the cat. When I got to the kitchen, I found Babe standing stupidly in front of the coffeemaker as though it were the Holy Grail, so I got busy grabbing cans of things that didn’t need to be cooked … like chocolate.
Babe turned. “Hey, Sparky. What’cha doing in the pantry with all those cans and stuff?”
“We need a storm cellar,” I cried.
He sighed. “Duh. We live on an island below sea level. Would you rather drown or wake up in Kansas?”
I gave him a look. “So where do you suggest we hide from the soon-to-be-here funnel-shaped cloud devouring everything NOT below sea level?”
He yawned. “The Box.”
When we remodeled the house, we installed a small elevator that we affectionately call, “The Box.” Babe’s former football days made mashed potatoes out of his knees, so an elevator seemed a less painful option than knee replacement. I should have thought of it myself as a possible escape hatch, but I was too busy filling book bags with canned salmon and saltines. I jerked on the elevator door and was tossing stuff inside when Babe moseyed up with a Krispy Kreme Donut hanging out of his mouth. He offered up a cup of coffee.
“How can you eat when we’re fixing to spin into Florida? Where’s the cat?”
He chewed on his donut and shrugged.
Turned out she was in Babe’s closet, shaking like the Wicked Witch was hot on her trail. I grabbed her and said, “Get in The Box before I make a dime bank out of you.” Babe was already in there rooting around in the book bags for anything not canned.
Sophie Sorrowful lived up to her name by carrying on pitifully. Babe, using a high-pitched witch voice, shrilled, “Make her be quiet or I’ll get you my pretty, and your little cat too!”
We closed the iron gate and the door, pushed the “down” button and stayed in The Box till noon with a freaked out cat, canned salmon, saltines and not one piece of chocolate.
When no funnel-shaped cloud rocked our world, Babe said, “Hey, Dorothy, I’m melting, I’m melting! Click your heels together three times and say the words.”
I smiled and said as dryly as possible, “I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“What else,” Babe insisted. I rolled my eyes. “There’s no place like home.”
Pushing me out of The Box, he added, “The yellow brick road is leading me to the kitchen, Dottie, so take off those silly red shoes and put on your apron. I’m starving.”
By Cappy Hall Rearick
_____________________________
“There’s a storm blowin’ up and it’s a whopper.” ~ The Wizard of Oz
“What,” my friend Joanie asked, “is your biggest fear?” I didn’t need to think about it.
“Uh … developing an allergy to chocolate?”
Joanie sighed. “Get serious.”
I was. My fear began following a crash diet of Saltine Crackers and Pepsi Zero. Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate then became my obsession. Since then, however, a tornado warning has caused me to reassess my fear factor.
Babe, having acted on the cockeyed notion that forewarned meant forearmed, bought a Weather Alert Radio. Bragging that Mother Nature wouldn’t dare sneak up on us again, he set it to go off like a siren and placed it on a far table in our bedroom.
It sat there undisturbed until one morning before dawn. My cat, Sophie Sorrowful, sprang off the foot of the bed like a greased Slinky while Babe turned over in bed and hit the snooze button.
When the alarm screeched again, he clicked on the Weather Channel before hitting the snooze button again.
TORNADO WARNING. TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!
I groaned. “What’s going on?”
“Tornado warning,” he mumbled
I sat up. “A warning or a watch?”
He yawned. “Warning.”
I yanked the covers off his Yankee butt and screamed louder than the alarm siren, “A warning? Get up! Get up! Where’s the cat?”
“Coffee,” he grunted.
At that precise moment, I knew for sure that my biggest fear had absolutely nothing to do with chocolate. Having lived in hurricane country for most of my life, I totally know the drill. When the storm troopers say “Evacuate,” I’m first in line. Nowhere on my Bucket List have I ever written, “I want to wake up and say, ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore.’
Babe shuffled off for coffee while I filled book bags with emergency supplies and looked high and low for the cat. When I got to the kitchen, I found Babe standing stupidly in front of the coffeemaker as though it were the Holy Grail, so I got busy grabbing cans of things that didn’t need to be cooked … like chocolate.
Babe turned. “Hey, Sparky. What’cha doing in the pantry with all those cans and stuff?”
“We need a storm cellar,” I cried.
He sighed. “Duh. We live on an island below sea level. Would you rather drown or wake up in Kansas?”
I gave him a look. “So where do you suggest we hide from the soon-to-be-here funnel-shaped cloud devouring everything NOT below sea level?”
He yawned. “The Box.”
When we remodeled the house, we installed a small elevator that we affectionately call, “The Box.” Babe’s former football days made mashed potatoes out of his knees, so an elevator seemed a less painful option than knee replacement. I should have thought of it myself as a possible escape hatch, but I was too busy filling book bags with canned salmon and saltines. I jerked on the elevator door and was tossing stuff inside when Babe moseyed up with a Krispy Kreme Donut hanging out of his mouth. He offered up a cup of coffee.
“How can you eat when we’re fixing to spin into Florida? Where’s the cat?”
He chewed on his donut and shrugged.
Turned out she was in Babe’s closet, shaking like the Wicked Witch was hot on her trail. I grabbed her and said, “Get in The Box before I make a dime bank out of you.” Babe was already in there rooting around in the book bags for anything not canned.
Sophie Sorrowful lived up to her name by carrying on pitifully. Babe, using a high-pitched witch voice, shrilled, “Make her be quiet or I’ll get you my pretty, and your little cat too!”
We closed the iron gate and the door, pushed the “down” button and stayed in The Box till noon with a freaked out cat, canned salmon, saltines and not one piece of chocolate.
When no funnel-shaped cloud rocked our world, Babe said, “Hey, Dorothy, I’m melting, I’m melting! Click your heels together three times and say the words.”
I smiled and said as dryly as possible, “I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“What else,” Babe insisted. I rolled my eyes. “There’s no place like home.”
Pushing me out of The Box, he added, “The yellow brick road is leading me to the kitchen, Dottie, so take off those silly red shoes and put on your apron. I’m starving.”
Monday, March 12, 2012
Sisters
Sisters
________________________________
It was not uncommon for Megan to drop by unannounced, but my apartment was a mess and her sister was dead on the couch. It was complicated, and about to get worse.
Samantha was a year older than Megan, with dark brown hair instead of blonde -- natural, not from a bottle. Megan liked imported beer and bloody steak. Samantha drank bottled water and sorted her trash into separate bins for recycling. The last place in the world Megan would expect to find her sister would have to be in my apartment.
The look on her face when the chain caught the door was priceless. Like the bewildered look of a toddler the first time his mother spats his bottom.
“What’s with the chain?”
My brain scrambled for an excuse she would buy. I stuttered something about needing to clean up the place, which was an understatement. She rolled her eyes and sighed.
“Open the door already. This is rude.”
She was wrong. It was survival. Megan dabbled in karate. I’m pretty sure she hadn’t earned a belt but I’d seen her break a man’s arm in a bar one time because he spilled his beer down her back. My fighting experience began and ended in the third grade when I got my eye blacked by Hector Gonzales because I called him a wetback.
Inspiration struck. I leaned into the security chain and whispered: “Beat it. I’ve got a chick in here.”
She laughed. “A chick?” She pushed the door again and made the chain snap tight. “Stop kidding around and open the door. I think something’s happened to Sam.”
My blood ran cold, like ice water, through my veins. I know that’s a platitude but it actually felt that way. First my chest went cold, then up the back of my neck like a chill. Had she been paying attention she would’ve seen the horror in my eyes.
“Samantha? What makes you think something’s wrong?” My voice cracked, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“She didn’t come home last night. Open the door, dork. You’re starting to piss me off.”
“Really Megan, I’ve got company. Samantha probably just got lucky last night. She’s probably home already.”
“Getting lucky for Sam means finding a good spot for another compost pile.” She tried to peep through the crack in the door. “I don’t see anybody in there.”
“She’s in the bedroom. Now can you go away?”
“If you don’t open this door I’m calling the cops.”
“No!” The word flew out on its own. It’d be just like Megan to call the cops as a joke. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? In they’d walk and there’d be Samantha on the couch staring up at them with her big brown eyes through a clear plastic bag.
“Ohhhhh,” she said, like she had just uncovered a secret. “A hooker? Really? If you’re that desperate all you had to do say so. You’re a dork but you don’t look half bad.”
“Thanks … I think … but I really wish you’d let me finish this.”
“Hourly rates suck, huh? Okay, I’ll go, but finish your business and call me. I’m really worried about Sam.”
“I’ll hurry. I promise.”
She couldn’t resist a parting shot: “I’m sure you will.”
At last she left. I closed the door and set the deadbolt. Samantha hadn’t gone anywhere, of course, and that had to change soon or Megan would be back. The problem was where to take her and how to get her out of the apartment building without my neighbors seeing. You don’t just throw a dead body over your shoulder and waltz down two flights of stairs then toss it into the trunk of a Chevy Impala. What I needed was a plan. I’d been flying by the seat of my pants since midnight and it hadn’t been working out so well.
I stood looking down at her on the couch. She lay on her back with one arm dangling so the knuckles rested against the beige carpet. The other arm rested on her chest with the thumb caught underneath the plastic bag at her throat. Her face was frozen in horror, like a snapshot, eyes wide and bloodshot. I didn’t remember them being bloodshot before. Perhaps, like me, she was exhausted and ready to put this sordid affair behind us. She wore a banana yellow blouse and orange tennis shorts. Her legs were toned and tan. Sam was hot. Hotter than her sister by half, but she never seemed to know what to do with it.
There was no blood and I was thankful for that.
Cadaver dogs can smell where a dead body has been. It almost didn’t seem fair. Move a body, dump it in an out of the way place, and here comes some dog pawing and barking at my sofa. I made a mental note to drive down to the public library and Google a way to clean the fabric. My mind was beginning to click. Internet searches leave a trail, and I was proud of myself for remembering it.
Maybe I should get a new couch. No, an entire living room suite would be better. Why draw attention to the couch? I could set fire to the apartment building. But I was getting ahead of myself.
I made myself touch the hand at her throat. There was a hint of warmth. It was the first time I had ever touched a dead body. The thought that she might still be alive almost threw me into a panic, but I looked again at her face and reassured myself that it was not possible.
First I tried to pick her up like a man carrying a sleeping child to bed -- one arm behind the neck, the other at the bend of her knees. She slipped through my arms like water. Next I tried to pull her up by the arms and heave her across my shoulder like John Wayne, but I wasn’t as strong as The Duke and had to drop her back to the couch. The back of her head hit the soft arm with a thud but her expression didn’t change. I had meant to carry her to the bed and wrap her in my sheet, but it would have gained me nothing but one more piece of furniture to replace.
The situation required calm planning.
I wondered how long it would be before rigor mortis stiffened her, but that had its drawbacks, too. For one thing, it would make her harder to get into the trunk of my car, and for the other it meant risking the return of Megan before the job was done.
An idea struck me from nowhere. Within minutes I turned into the parking lot of the hardware store. The big box store was huge and foreign to me, more daunting because I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for. Twice I declined help form friendly associates in red vests.
Time was not on my side. I wandered the aisles with only a general idea in mind. What I needed was some sort of black plastic bag large enough to stuff the body into and close with either a zipper or some sort of drawstring. I needed rope to lower the body to the ground from my balcony after dark. The neighbors directly below me were old and went to bed early, so they wouldn’t see the bundle dangling outside their back window.
I turned down an aisle with bags of cement mix and concrete blocks and nails. Fine if I wanted to weigh Samantha down and sink her to the bottom of a lake, but useless for getting her out of my apartment unnoticed. Then I saw a roll of black plastic sheeting. The bag said it was eight feet wide and one hundred feet long. I didn’t need anywhere near one hundred feet but that seemed to be the shortest roll they had, so I took it.
Finding the rope was easy, and there was a wide assortment. I wasn’t sure how far it was from my balcony to the ground but knew it wasn’t anywhere near a hundred feet, so I grabbed up a plastic-wrapped bundle of half inch polypropylene rope rated at just under four hundred pounds. Samantha couldn’t weigh much over a hundred, so it was more than strong enough. I still needed a way to seal the plastic.
Duck tape.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered my dad saying you could fix anything with duck tape. It was a funny name for tape, I thought, but figured all I had to do was find the aisle with other types of tape. That proved easy enough.
Duct, not duck.
Part of me wanted to telephone my old man and tell him he had been wrong about the tape, too. It had nothing to do with ducks. I paid two dollars more to get black instead of gray so it would match the plastic.
The young girl at the checkout scanned my purchases without the slightest hint of suspicion, easing my fears that I would be suddenly thrown to the ground and subdued for buying products so obviously tailored to moving a dead body.
I paid with cash.
As I walked between the RFID scanners at the exit I stiffened at the prospect of an alarm going off because some computer in the back caught what the checkout girl had missed. Somehow I reached my car without bells and whistles.
Megan was back. I saw her the moment I topped the stairs and rounded the corner.
“There you are,” she said, walking toward me. “She’s still not home and she won’t answer her phone.”
The thought occurred to me to toss my bags down the stairs behind me, but she was too close now and would notice.
“Where you been? I thought you had a hooker in your room.”
“Shopping,” I said, “and she’s not a hooker.”
She hooked the plastic bag with her finger and leaned forward to look inside.
“Mind your own business,” I blurted. She stopped abruptly and cut her eyes toward mine. They were the color of the sky on a clear summer day. Mixed in was something foreign. Something that didn’t belong. Hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that …”
“You killed her.”
“What?” How could she know? Hot sickness washed over my body.
“You killed the hooker.”
“The hooker? No, I didn’t kill the … I mean … she’s not …”
“You’re stuttering. Your face is beet red. What’d she do? Laugh at your pecker?”
“No, why would she … I mean, I told you she’s not a hooker.”
“So why’d you kill her?”
I was boiling in a soup of panic. Megan had taken one look at my purchase and knew I had a body to dispose of.
“You’ve been watching too many Lifetime movies,” I said, trying and failing to produce a laugh. “I … my dad called and asked me to pick this stuff up for him. I don’t know what it’s for.”
“Yeah, right. Your dad doesn’t even like you.”
“Yes he does,” I said, but I was not so sure she was wrong. Thankfully she didn’t belabor the point.”
“Go ahead and dispose of your hooker,” she said, brushing past me to the stairs. “Jail give me the hives.”
Samantha hadn’t moved. Of course she hadn’t. She was dead. Strange that I half expected to find her standing in my living room with the plastic bag over her head, staring at me. I placed the roll of plastic sheeting on the floor at the end of the couch and unrolled it to the other end. It was thicker than the plastic bag I’d used to suffocate her. Good, maybe it wouldn’t tear. I stood on the plastic and grabbed the dangling arm and matching leg and pulled her to the floor. Her limbs were starting to stiffen but not so much that I couldn’t lay her out straight, arms at her side, coffin style.
Even dead she was beautiful. A thought occurred to me. It was a sick thought, and it made me shudder. Using scissors, I cut the plastic to a length slightly longer than the sofa and rolled her up like a rug. Then I remembered the rope and unrolled her and tied the rope around her torso underneath the arms. I pushed the knot around behind her back and stretched the rope up past her head and off the plastic, then rolled her up again.
I used the entire roll of duct tape -- all fifty-five yards -- around and around the bundle from head to toe until she looked like a black mummy. There was nothing left to do but wait for nightfall.
I went to bed and tried to sleep. For the first hour I wondered if I would ever sleep again, then I drifted off into a dream and spent the next five hours being chased by a dead woman with a clear plastic bag over her head. It was Megan, not Samantha.
I jerked awake. It was dark in my bedroom. The time had come.
First I went outside and checked behind the apartment complex just to make sure there were no outside parties. There was just enough chill in the air to make it uncomfortable without a sleeve. The apartment below me was dark and that was good. I hurried back upstairs and deadbolted my door again.
She was easy enough to drag across the floor. The plastic reduced the friction and would foil the cadaver dogs should it come to that. The rope gave me leverage. Rigor mortis made her rigid. I lifted her over the balcony rail and twisted around my right hand. Gloves would’ve come in handy, but it was my first time handling rope and I had not anticipated the burn as it slide across my palm, inch by inch, until it went slack. I tossed the loose end of the rope to the ground and hurried out.
All sorts of scenes played out in my head as I strode down the sidewalk and rounded the side of the building. It was hard not to run, but it might draw attention. Headlights cut across the end of the building. Had the beams of light been blades they would’ve sliced me at the waist. Someone had turned into the parking lot on the east end. I turned the corner and pressed my back up against the brick wall. It was dark except for a security light at the far end. The light overhead had a busted bulb -- another detail I had not overlooked.
A creek ran parallel to the building about twenty feet out. Thick vines and scrub trees grew along its entire length, all the way to the street at both ends. Some of my neighbors had raised a petition to force the city to clear it, but the city didn’t seem to mind that snakes sometimes slithered out of the creek to sun themselves on the concrete patios of my ground-floor neighbors.
I coiled the rope and cut it short, then tossed the coil to the ground, making a mental note to get it on my way back. I grabbed the end of the rope still attached to the body and began to pull toward the creek. It slid easily across the grass.
“You really did it!”
I spun around and saw Megan’s outline against the backdrop of the distant security light.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, but it was exactly that, assuming it looked like I was dragging a dead body toward the creek.
“You can’t just dump her in the creek,” she said. “Is there even any water in it?”
“What? I … It’s not …”
“You don’t even have a shovel.”
“Get out of here! I don’t want you mixed up in this.”
“Mixed up? You’re the one mixed up.”
I gave the body another tug toward the creek. “Go home.”
“Throw me your keys.”
“What?” I stopped pulling and stared at her.
“Your car. Throw me the keys.”
“You want my car?”
“Shut up and throw me your keys.”
I fumbled my pocket for my keys and tossed them to her. Anything to get rid of her.
“Pull that to the corner,” she said, then hurried away.
I hurried to the creek with my cargo and began tearing at the vines to make a passage.
“I told you to pull that to the corner.” It was Megan again and she had that edge in her voice that meant she was irritated. “Get out of there and follow me.”
“What are you doing?”
“Helping you stay out of jail. Now stop being stupid and drag her up here before we both get caught.”
I don’t know why I obeyed her but I did. Years of habit, I suppose. Halfway across the yard I saw the tail end of my car on the grass at the corner of the building. The trunk lid was up and the lights were off.
“Are you crazy? Everybody can see that!”
“People don’t notice the obvious,” she said.
She helped me load her sister into the trunk of my Impala.
“Don’t make a habit of this,” she said. “Now let’s get moving.”
“No, not you. Stay here. I don’t want you involved.”
“Look around, genius. I’m already involved.”
Truth is I didn’t want her knowing where I dumped the body. She might get curious after Samantha was missing for a few more days and go take a peek.
“The less you know the better. Please. This is my mess to clean up.”
“Suit yourself. Just don’t get stopped for speeding. You’d better stop and pick up a shovel and bury her someplace in the woods.”
“I will,” I said, “now please go.”
She started toward the corner the stopped and looked back. “Remind me never to joke about your pecker.”
I drove out of the city and half the night toward Kentucky. Just after midnight I stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a shovel and a pear tree. The tree was so they wouldn’t be suspicious of a man buying a shovel in the middle of the night. Sometime before dawn I dug a hole beside a dirt road and laid Samantha to rest, then tossed the shovel and the pear tree off a bridge. By the time I got home I couldn’t have found the grave if someone had held a gun to my head.
Megan woke me up beating on my door. It was half past noon according to the clock on my nightstand.
“What’s wrong with you? I’ve been driving all night.”
“That was night before last,” she said. “This is Friday.”
Friday? I couldn’t believe I had slept for a day and a half.
“You left some rope out back. I disposed of it for you.”
“Heard from your sister?” I knew she hadn’t but she would be suspicious if I didn’t ask.
“Not a peep.”
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. As I turned toward the living room I noticed Samantha’s lime green purse on the floor beside the armchair. Megan had given it to her for her birthday.
“She’ll turn up. Probably joined some PETA protest or something.” There was distraction in my voice.
“Yeah, it’d be just like Sam to be sitting naked in a cage with people gawking at her.”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” I said, putting myself between her and the purse.
In all the years I’d known her, Megan had never turned down alcohol. She disappeared into the kitchen.
“Want one?”
“Too early for me,” I said, and pushed the purse under the chair with my foot.
Megan returned from the kitchen and plopped down on the couch and took a swig. Dark circles around her eyes made her face look gaunt. I hadn’t noticed it before but now it was obvious. Something distracted her. She looked around herself and sniffed the air.
“Your hooker wore the same perfume as Sam,” she said.
“That’s why I picked her up,” I said, grasping at straws.
She laughed. “I can just see you driving around the city sniffing whores until you found one who smelled like my sister.”
Samantha had been right. Megan was using again. It seemed obvious now. I wondered what made a person do that to themselves. She had been through so much. When Samantha told me she was going to the cops I snapped. Jail had almost killed her last time and I couldn’t let it happen again. Now it was too late to take it back. The weight of what I had done pushed me down into the armchair.
“She had a thing for you, you know.”
“Who?”
“Sam.”
“Me? I don’t think so.”
“I read it in her diary.”
“You read her diary?”
Megan got up and came over to the chair and sat on the arm. She put her arm around my leaned down and kissed me on the forehead.
“She was going to turn me in again. I read that, too. For my own good.” She laughed but there was no humor in it.
Tears filled my eyes. “You need to get clean.”
“I will.”
“Promise?”
“If you’ll help me.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Shhhh.” She rested her head against mine. “Don’t.”
________________________________
Author: Carl Purdon
Dew Review of his debut novel, The Night Train, on March 12th
Author of The Night Train, available on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/
Husband, father, and grandfather currently living in Pontotoc, Mississippi.
Website/blog: http://carlpurdon.com
Twitter: @CarlPurdon
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/carl.
Facebook book page: http://www.facebook.com/
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Don Jennings - He Will Be Missed
I was very sorry to hear that Don Jennings, one of the Dew's storytellers, has passed away. He shared some excellent stories with us over the years. His pen name was Randy Lowens and if you're interested, you may find some of his writing by following the below link.
http://todaysdeepsouth.blogspot.com/search?q=Randy+Lowens
http://todaysdeepsouth.blogspot.com/search?q=Randy+Lowens
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
Noon came and went before the doctor finally got there, Marlene Mae Haegar’s blood still wet on his clothes.
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
Like a tribe worshipping a false idol, we sat bowed around the big Philco radio in the living room, leaning forward not to miss a single word Rochester said about Jack Benny and his cheapskate ways. My brother Hursey came busting in, raring to tell Mother something or other. Although I motioned him to wait a minute, it was too late – we’d missed the funny part. It was done without giving it a thought, that hand I held up to stop Hursey from interrupting, but there was a look on his face I’d never noticed before, maybe because I wasn’t much interested in anything that didn’t have me in the center of it. Yet the hurt I sensed come over my brother at that moment came over me as well.
Grandma told me the story about when my brother was sick. It wasn’t like him not to be underfoot every minute, but one day he took to laying around, all the energy sucked out of him. Then he started complaining of a headache and felt warm. By suppertime he was burning with a fever that compresses didn’t do a thing to bring down. Next day he was vomiting and said his neck hurt, so the company doctor in Lynwynn, that’s the coal camp where they were living at the time, was sent for. But first he had to deliver Marlene Mae Haegar’s baby up Yell Again Holler. Marlene was having some trouble, so the doctor couldn’t say when, but he promised to come when he could.
Yell Again Holler got its name because it was so narrow ever little noise carried so far that if you wanted someone who lived along the flats, you just stood at the bottom and yelled the name of who you wanted to come down to meet you. You were sure to be heard by the first house; they’d yell again to the next, and so on, until word got to the right person.
The doctor delivered a baby boy to Marlene, a blue baby who never took his first breath. She was bleeding bad, so he’d had to tend to her, the baby dark and lifeless in her arms, before he could start for our house.
Noon came and went before the doctor finally got there, Marlene Mae Haegar’s blood still wet on his clothes. Grandma heated a basin of water and sliced off a piece of lye soap so he could wash up before he looked down Hursey’s throat and in his ears and up his nose and listened to the gurgles of his stomach and the beatings of his heart, prodding and poking at his little boy body. She remembered a streak on the doctor’s forehead where he’d pushed his hair aside with a bloody hand when he was tending Marlene. Funny how some little thing like that will stick in your mind.
Grandma stewed an old rooster until the meat on his bones fell off, thickened up the broth, and pinched off biscuit dough to make the kind of puffy dumplings Hursey liked. Still, he only ate a bite or two. The doctor was another story. He hadn’t eaten a hot meal since the day before, so he made up for it by downing a big portion of that rooster along with generous helpings from the pot of leatherbritches simmering on the stove - potatoes, onion, and a hamhock jiggling in the broth. Leatherbritches were green beans threaded onto strings and hung from the ceiling to dry, which toughened up the shells. If you wanted a mess of leatherbritches ready for supper, you had best put them on the fire before you measured out the coffee for breakfast.
He sure hated to eat and run, the doctor said, pulling off the napkin he’d tucked under his collar to protect his stained green necktie, but there’s a baby over yonder past the tipple just waiting to be born. Pray to God this young’un has a better outcome than the last. Try to get some broth down the boy, he said, and keep on with the wet rags too. There’s little else to be done.
All that time he was talking to Grandma, looking right past my mother.
Let me tell you, being ignored like that did not set well with her. When the doctor picked up his black valise to leave, Mother reared right up on her hind legs and told the doctor this was her child, and she knew a place something else could be done. She had driven a car since she was fourteen years old, so she’d picked Hursey up then and there and carried him out, all swaddled in a quilt, and laid him on the back seat.
My daddy and Grandpa were both down in the mines and there was no way to get word to them, so Mother drove through a snow storm to the hospital in Beckley, leaving Grandma to tend to my sister Vonnie, her still a babe in arms.
A man saw Mother struggling up the icy hospital steps, Hursey a dead weight in her arms, and took him from her and carried him inside. The man smelled of antiseptic and another odor she couldn’t name, camphor maybe, and when she followed him through the double doors those same odors, stronger still and mixed with bleach, sickened her stomach. She swallowed hard to quell the urge to retch. When she saw a Christmas tree in the corner of the room, she realized it was the pine she smelled. Unable to think of Christmas now, only days away, she turned her back on the tree and its hateful red and green lights.
The overheated waiting room steamed with faceless people in woolen sweaters and scarves and coats that gave off the odor of wet dogs. They hadn’t made her wait in that room though, and she was grateful to the man for that. Turned out he was the first of many doctors brought in to shake their heads over this child who was sick unto death.
The doctor ordered the nurses to strip Hursey and put him in and out of an ice bath until they got his temperature down. Over the next day or two they put him through every test they knew to do. The worst were the spinal taps, holding him down while they stabbed long needles into his back that made him scream like an animal. And the next day they did it again. Finally the big shot doctors who were pretty near as useless as the company doctor from home, least by her way of thinking, came up with a name for what my brother had.
Spinal meningitis.
It was a relief in a way to put a name to the enemy they were fighting.
But that was before she knew exactly what it was they were dealing with. The doctor who carried Hursey into the hospital explained that this spinal meningitis was an infection caused by bacteria that somehow got into the bloodstream and settled in the spinal cord and the brain. He was trying a course of sulfa drugs, but she should know she had a very sick boy. It was a fearsome battle ahead, and make no mistake, this disease could kill him.
If Hursey had only got the spinal meningitis a few years later, they might have given him penicillin shots, and that would have cured him before the disease took its hold. But it was 1937 he got sick. It wasn’t until 1944 that a patient at Fairmont General Hospital in West Virginia became the first person ever to be treated with a full course of penicillin. Fairmont was only a hundred and fifty mile drive from Beckley. But for seven years of time and one hundred fifty miles of distance, my brother might not have lost his hearing.
Of course, everybody was praying God would perform a miracle. Several went with Grandpa to the hospital and layed on hands and prayed that Hursey be delivered from the sickness that had him in its grip, but it wasn’t to be. Days passed with him in that bed, his neck rigid, the slightest movement causing him to cry out in pain. Unable to take more than a few sips of water laced with a little sugar and salt, his baby fat melted off, and muscle too, leaving only the skin and bones of him, at first feverish and convulsing then pale and still. But he was a fighter. And Grandma gave God the glory for that, for giving Hursey that fighting spirit.
No matter how many times he let her down, Grandma could always find something good to say about God.
Doctors came and stood over Hursey’s bed, defeat showing in the slump of their shoulders as they walked away not knowing whether he’d pull through another night. Yet pull through he did. After a few weeks, he began to improve. His eyes stayed open longer. And he was able to eat some. Bananas and custard and melted ice cream began to fill out the hollows of his face. Soon he could sit up in bed, then in a chair. Before long he was walking around the halls. Finally the day came he got to go home and be the child he was meant to be, playing in the yard and getting dirty like little boys will.
One day Mother called him for supper, but he never even looked up. She walked to where he sat holding a wooden car his daddy had made him for Christmas, which they’d put off celebrating until he got home. Hursey Clev, come on and eat before it gets cold, she’d said to him, thinking he was caught up in some little boy daydream of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. But when he still didn’t take notice, she’d reached down and touched his blond head.
It startled him, and he looked up puzzled.
I imagined my brother watching Mother’s mouth form shapes that floated toward him and dissolved into the air without making a sound.
And Mother would have felt the words he breathed out tremble her eardrums and make waves in her head until she finally allowed herself forced herself willed herself to hear what he was telling her plain as day.
Mommy, I can’t hear you.
He was five years old.
I didn’t understand why despite all the prayers of people of unbounded faith God went against his word and turned a blind eye on my brother. And I told Grandma so.
Not thy will, but mine be done, Grandma reminded me, like she’d heard Him say it yesterday.
I wondered why healing my brother wouldn’t be God’s will. From what I knew, Hursey hadn’t acted near as bad as me. Maybe I’d turn up deaf too. Or something worse.
Grandma said it wasn’t for us to know why. One day God would reveal his plan in all its glory and we’d understand clear as could be.
Doctors, specialists in hearing, tested my brother and fitted him with hearing aids, bulky black boxes that strapped to his chest with ugly wires running to earpieces that hurt his tender ears and didn’t help him hear even the loudest sound. He was stone deaf and no hearing aid would ever help. But they sold the useless things to my mother anyway, one after the other, always a newer better one, and for high prices too. Of course, it was really hope she was paying for. And sometimes hope comes in a black box with a high price.
One day Hursey ripped his earpieces out and sent the newest ugly box, wires flailing from it like tentacles, into our backyard fishpond to drown under the water lilies. He refused to wear hearing aids again, or to listen to anybody who tried to get him to. And if my brother didn’t want to listen, he had the perfect solution.
He simply closed his eyes.
________________________________
Drema Hall Berkheimer, a Beckley native, is completing a memoir, RUNNING ON A RED DOG ROAD and Other Perils of An Appalachian Childhood. Gypsies, moonshiners, and snakehandlers embolden her tales of childhood in 1940’s West Virginia after her father is killed in the coalmines and her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, leaving her with devout Pentecostal grandparents. She won First Place Nonfiction and First Honorable Mention Nonfiction in the 2010 WV Writers Competition and is published in WV South, The Beckley Register-Herald Divine Magazine. Plain Spoke, Flashquake, Brevity, Long Story Short, Persimmon Tree, Babel Fruit, Burnt Bridge, Southern Women’s Review, Muscadine Lines, The Dead Mule, Dew on the Kudzu, River Poets Journal, WV Writers, Military Writers Society of America and others. She does readings for groups and has judged various literary competitions. Affiliations include WV Writers, Salon Quatre, and The Writer’s Garret in Dallas. dremagirl@aol.com
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
Like a tribe worshipping a false idol, we sat bowed around the big Philco radio in the living room, leaning forward not to miss a single word Rochester said about Jack Benny and his cheapskate ways. My brother Hursey came busting in, raring to tell Mother something or other. Although I motioned him to wait a minute, it was too late – we’d missed the funny part. It was done without giving it a thought, that hand I held up to stop Hursey from interrupting, but there was a look on his face I’d never noticed before, maybe because I wasn’t much interested in anything that didn’t have me in the center of it. Yet the hurt I sensed come over my brother at that moment came over me as well.
Grandma told me the story about when my brother was sick. It wasn’t like him not to be underfoot every minute, but one day he took to laying around, all the energy sucked out of him. Then he started complaining of a headache and felt warm. By suppertime he was burning with a fever that compresses didn’t do a thing to bring down. Next day he was vomiting and said his neck hurt, so the company doctor in Lynwynn, that’s the coal camp where they were living at the time, was sent for. But first he had to deliver Marlene Mae Haegar’s baby up Yell Again Holler. Marlene was having some trouble, so the doctor couldn’t say when, but he promised to come when he could.
Yell Again Holler got its name because it was so narrow ever little noise carried so far that if you wanted someone who lived along the flats, you just stood at the bottom and yelled the name of who you wanted to come down to meet you. You were sure to be heard by the first house; they’d yell again to the next, and so on, until word got to the right person.
The doctor delivered a baby boy to Marlene, a blue baby who never took his first breath. She was bleeding bad, so he’d had to tend to her, the baby dark and lifeless in her arms, before he could start for our house.
Noon came and went before the doctor finally got there, Marlene Mae Haegar’s blood still wet on his clothes. Grandma heated a basin of water and sliced off a piece of lye soap so he could wash up before he looked down Hursey’s throat and in his ears and up his nose and listened to the gurgles of his stomach and the beatings of his heart, prodding and poking at his little boy body. She remembered a streak on the doctor’s forehead where he’d pushed his hair aside with a bloody hand when he was tending Marlene. Funny how some little thing like that will stick in your mind.
Grandma stewed an old rooster until the meat on his bones fell off, thickened up the broth, and pinched off biscuit dough to make the kind of puffy dumplings Hursey liked. Still, he only ate a bite or two. The doctor was another story. He hadn’t eaten a hot meal since the day before, so he made up for it by downing a big portion of that rooster along with generous helpings from the pot of leatherbritches simmering on the stove - potatoes, onion, and a hamhock jiggling in the broth. Leatherbritches were green beans threaded onto strings and hung from the ceiling to dry, which toughened up the shells. If you wanted a mess of leatherbritches ready for supper, you had best put them on the fire before you measured out the coffee for breakfast.
He sure hated to eat and run, the doctor said, pulling off the napkin he’d tucked under his collar to protect his stained green necktie, but there’s a baby over yonder past the tipple just waiting to be born. Pray to God this young’un has a better outcome than the last. Try to get some broth down the boy, he said, and keep on with the wet rags too. There’s little else to be done.
All that time he was talking to Grandma, looking right past my mother.
Let me tell you, being ignored like that did not set well with her. When the doctor picked up his black valise to leave, Mother reared right up on her hind legs and told the doctor this was her child, and she knew a place something else could be done. She had driven a car since she was fourteen years old, so she’d picked Hursey up then and there and carried him out, all swaddled in a quilt, and laid him on the back seat.
My daddy and Grandpa were both down in the mines and there was no way to get word to them, so Mother drove through a snow storm to the hospital in Beckley, leaving Grandma to tend to my sister Vonnie, her still a babe in arms.
A man saw Mother struggling up the icy hospital steps, Hursey a dead weight in her arms, and took him from her and carried him inside. The man smelled of antiseptic and another odor she couldn’t name, camphor maybe, and when she followed him through the double doors those same odors, stronger still and mixed with bleach, sickened her stomach. She swallowed hard to quell the urge to retch. When she saw a Christmas tree in the corner of the room, she realized it was the pine she smelled. Unable to think of Christmas now, only days away, she turned her back on the tree and its hateful red and green lights.
The overheated waiting room steamed with faceless people in woolen sweaters and scarves and coats that gave off the odor of wet dogs. They hadn’t made her wait in that room though, and she was grateful to the man for that. Turned out he was the first of many doctors brought in to shake their heads over this child who was sick unto death.
The doctor ordered the nurses to strip Hursey and put him in and out of an ice bath until they got his temperature down. Over the next day or two they put him through every test they knew to do. The worst were the spinal taps, holding him down while they stabbed long needles into his back that made him scream like an animal. And the next day they did it again. Finally the big shot doctors who were pretty near as useless as the company doctor from home, least by her way of thinking, came up with a name for what my brother had.
Spinal meningitis.
It was a relief in a way to put a name to the enemy they were fighting.
But that was before she knew exactly what it was they were dealing with. The doctor who carried Hursey into the hospital explained that this spinal meningitis was an infection caused by bacteria that somehow got into the bloodstream and settled in the spinal cord and the brain. He was trying a course of sulfa drugs, but she should know she had a very sick boy. It was a fearsome battle ahead, and make no mistake, this disease could kill him.
If Hursey had only got the spinal meningitis a few years later, they might have given him penicillin shots, and that would have cured him before the disease took its hold. But it was 1937 he got sick. It wasn’t until 1944 that a patient at Fairmont General Hospital in West Virginia became the first person ever to be treated with a full course of penicillin. Fairmont was only a hundred and fifty mile drive from Beckley. But for seven years of time and one hundred fifty miles of distance, my brother might not have lost his hearing.
Of course, everybody was praying God would perform a miracle. Several went with Grandpa to the hospital and layed on hands and prayed that Hursey be delivered from the sickness that had him in its grip, but it wasn’t to be. Days passed with him in that bed, his neck rigid, the slightest movement causing him to cry out in pain. Unable to take more than a few sips of water laced with a little sugar and salt, his baby fat melted off, and muscle too, leaving only the skin and bones of him, at first feverish and convulsing then pale and still. But he was a fighter. And Grandma gave God the glory for that, for giving Hursey that fighting spirit.
No matter how many times he let her down, Grandma could always find something good to say about God.
Doctors came and stood over Hursey’s bed, defeat showing in the slump of their shoulders as they walked away not knowing whether he’d pull through another night. Yet pull through he did. After a few weeks, he began to improve. His eyes stayed open longer. And he was able to eat some. Bananas and custard and melted ice cream began to fill out the hollows of his face. Soon he could sit up in bed, then in a chair. Before long he was walking around the halls. Finally the day came he got to go home and be the child he was meant to be, playing in the yard and getting dirty like little boys will.
One day Mother called him for supper, but he never even looked up. She walked to where he sat holding a wooden car his daddy had made him for Christmas, which they’d put off celebrating until he got home. Hursey Clev, come on and eat before it gets cold, she’d said to him, thinking he was caught up in some little boy daydream of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. But when he still didn’t take notice, she’d reached down and touched his blond head.
It startled him, and he looked up puzzled.
I imagined my brother watching Mother’s mouth form shapes that floated toward him and dissolved into the air without making a sound.
And Mother would have felt the words he breathed out tremble her eardrums and make waves in her head until she finally allowed herself forced herself willed herself to hear what he was telling her plain as day.
Mommy, I can’t hear you.
He was five years old.
I didn’t understand why despite all the prayers of people of unbounded faith God went against his word and turned a blind eye on my brother. And I told Grandma so.
Not thy will, but mine be done, Grandma reminded me, like she’d heard Him say it yesterday.
I wondered why healing my brother wouldn’t be God’s will. From what I knew, Hursey hadn’t acted near as bad as me. Maybe I’d turn up deaf too. Or something worse.
Grandma said it wasn’t for us to know why. One day God would reveal his plan in all its glory and we’d understand clear as could be.
Doctors, specialists in hearing, tested my brother and fitted him with hearing aids, bulky black boxes that strapped to his chest with ugly wires running to earpieces that hurt his tender ears and didn’t help him hear even the loudest sound. He was stone deaf and no hearing aid would ever help. But they sold the useless things to my mother anyway, one after the other, always a newer better one, and for high prices too. Of course, it was really hope she was paying for. And sometimes hope comes in a black box with a high price.
One day Hursey ripped his earpieces out and sent the newest ugly box, wires flailing from it like tentacles, into our backyard fishpond to drown under the water lilies. He refused to wear hearing aids again, or to listen to anybody who tried to get him to. And if my brother didn’t want to listen, he had the perfect solution.
He simply closed his eyes.
________________________________
Drema Hall Berkheimer, a Beckley native, is completing a memoir, RUNNING ON A RED DOG ROAD and Other Perils of An Appalachian Childhood. Gypsies, moonshiners, and snakehandlers embolden her tales of childhood in 1940’s West Virginia after her father is killed in the coalmines and her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, leaving her with devout Pentecostal grandparents. She won First Place Nonfiction and First Honorable Mention Nonfiction in the 2010 WV Writers Competition and is published in WV South, The Beckley Register-Herald Divine Magazine. Plain Spoke, Flashquake, Brevity, Long Story Short, Persimmon Tree, Babel Fruit, Burnt Bridge, Southern Women’s Review, Muscadine Lines, The Dead Mule, Dew on the Kudzu, River Poets Journal, WV Writers, Military Writers Society of America and others. She does readings for groups and has judged various literary competitions. Affiliations include WV Writers, Salon Quatre, and The Writer’s Garret in Dallas. dremagirl@aol.com
Friday, March 9, 2012
Buried
Buried
Half asleep, I thought it was one of the neighborhood girls screaming to high heaven. By the time I got to the little piney wood at the end of the lane, the Williper Street Boys had my nephew Smitty buried up to his sputtering lips. The red clay of South Alabama was making mud around his wet nostrils and tear-streaked rosy cheeks, and his blue eyes were closing with fear.
“He picked being buried alive, mister!” said Job Hackerby. “We gave him the choice of gettin’ buried or the Death Ray of Death. And he picked buried.”
My jaws got even more tart. I hate being called ‘Mister.’
“Lord of the Flies! Lord of the Flies!” Timmy Infinger said as he jumped around in a crazy jig and shook his carved oak staff. I noticed he was accompanied by the smell of french vanilla ice cream.
“No we’re not!” said Job as he bit into a nougat-filled candy bar, his round face exploding with an unusual amount of color. “We’re Apocalypse Now!”
“Pooka lips now! Pooka lips now!” said Job’s baby brother Attaway as he reached up for the candy but was slapped away.
“Come on, Smitty,” I said. “Let’s get you out of that hole.”
“You’re a jackass!” the oldest of the boys, Micky Masterson, said to me. “You can’t just come in here and mess up the Game like that! God! We planned this for three whole weeks!”
“I can just come in here too,” I replied. “Do you know who you’re talking to in that tone, son?”
I had gone to high school with Micky’s father John. The man never had any time for his kids. Micky got the brunt of it all, and it made him an out-an-out bully.
He glared at me. I took the shovel away from Job and started digging.
“Alright, then, boys. Death Ray of Death,” Micky said in the most menacing whisper I have ever heard. And before I knew what was happening, the gang had their guns pointing at me--six-shooters, snub-noses, machine guns, rifles, and space opera contraptions looking more like rocket ships than weapons. Then, with one collective ‘Rooooooooooooooo!’ from the young criminals, I buckled to the ground, the electrocuting pain from their death-rays collapsing my legs like two brittle twigs.
When I came back to consciousness, I was buried to my chin in red Southern Alabama clay--and it was only my quick-witted promise to cut each boy a slice of my wife’s famous pumpkin pie that saved the lives of me and my nephew.
_________________________________
Skadi meic Beorh
Editor, Barking Rain Press
Acquisitions Editor, 27th Dimension Publishing
Skadi meic Beorh is the author of the novella The Highwayman’s Tale (27th Dimension Publishing), the poetry study Golgotha (Punkin House Press), and the story collection A Crazy Child Called Pinprick (27th Dimension) as well as a number of out-of-print books. Having made abode in many places and seen many wondrous things, he presently lives in an Edwardian neighborhood on the Atlantic Coast with his exceedingly imaginative wife Ember.
Half asleep, I thought it was one of the neighborhood girls screaming to high heaven. By the time I got to the little piney wood at the end of the lane, the Williper Street Boys had my nephew Smitty buried up to his sputtering lips. The red clay of South Alabama was making mud around his wet nostrils and tear-streaked rosy cheeks, and his blue eyes were closing with fear.
“He picked being buried alive, mister!” said Job Hackerby. “We gave him the choice of gettin’ buried or the Death Ray of Death. And he picked buried.”
My jaws got even more tart. I hate being called ‘Mister.’
“Lord of the Flies! Lord of the Flies!” Timmy Infinger said as he jumped around in a crazy jig and shook his carved oak staff. I noticed he was accompanied by the smell of french vanilla ice cream.
“No we’re not!” said Job as he bit into a nougat-filled candy bar, his round face exploding with an unusual amount of color. “We’re Apocalypse Now!”
“Pooka lips now! Pooka lips now!” said Job’s baby brother Attaway as he reached up for the candy but was slapped away.
“Come on, Smitty,” I said. “Let’s get you out of that hole.”
“You’re a jackass!” the oldest of the boys, Micky Masterson, said to me. “You can’t just come in here and mess up the Game like that! God! We planned this for three whole weeks!”
“I can just come in here too,” I replied. “Do you know who you’re talking to in that tone, son?”
I had gone to high school with Micky’s father John. The man never had any time for his kids. Micky got the brunt of it all, and it made him an out-an-out bully.
He glared at me. I took the shovel away from Job and started digging.
“Alright, then, boys. Death Ray of Death,” Micky said in the most menacing whisper I have ever heard. And before I knew what was happening, the gang had their guns pointing at me--six-shooters, snub-noses, machine guns, rifles, and space opera contraptions looking more like rocket ships than weapons. Then, with one collective ‘Rooooooooooooooo!’ from the young criminals, I buckled to the ground, the electrocuting pain from their death-rays collapsing my legs like two brittle twigs.
When I came back to consciousness, I was buried to my chin in red Southern Alabama clay--and it was only my quick-witted promise to cut each boy a slice of my wife’s famous pumpkin pie that saved the lives of me and my nephew.
_________________________________
Skadi meic Beorh
Editor, Barking Rain Press
Acquisitions Editor, 27th Dimension Publishing
Skadi meic Beorh is the author of the novella The Highwayman’s Tale (27th Dimension Publishing), the poetry study Golgotha (Punkin House Press), and the story collection A Crazy Child Called Pinprick (27th Dimension) as well as a number of out-of-print books. Having made abode in many places and seen many wondrous things, he presently lives in an Edwardian neighborhood on the Atlantic Coast with his exceedingly imaginative wife Ember.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
The Night Song Singer of Broken Halleluiahs
The Night Song Singer of Broken Halleluiahs
Tom Sheehan
For the third night in a row, Cavan Woodmarsh (long, lean, young, often caught up in a dream) strolled to the far end of Riverside Cemetery with a guitar over his shoulder in a case the long road had beaten up as badly as old shoes. Most things about him were soft, suitable, acceptable… the long fingers, the readily available smile, a detectable aura packing no punch other than immediate belief carried in his voice. His gait was sure, and his eyes somehow fit midnight’s deep color. Hurry did not accompany him, though, or any sign of stealth. The prime silence was now and then cluttered by a post-midnight automobile on a distant road; but Cavan had earlier, on the two previous nights, found acoustical acceptance while playing the guitar beside a tall marble mausoleum where inscribed names capitulated to darkness.
This night he sat on a small stone bench, perhaps a mourner’s bench, he thought, and drifted further into the darkness.
Like all nights of magic, music came out the other side.
He half believed he had perfected a new song.
Soon thereafter, on the hill beside the cemetery, Sewell Grafton was sure of the odd disturbance. It was a guitar he heard, and faintly, over the chords, a word that sounded like a broken prayer. Halleluiah it said in soft and stretched out pieces, as if being parsed in English classes he once hated… Ha..lay… loo… yaaaaa. Again… Haa..laaay… loooo… yaaaaaaa, the syllables longer in breath, and rising uphill from old Riverside. It ran again, leaped again, carried past long breath up the slope of the hill, surmounting ledges, hardness, his ear.
If neighbors on the hill heard that one among them had called police about the lilted
Halleluiahs, they’d know it to be Sewell Grafton. A hundred to one it’d be Grafton. Two of the neighborhood women on the hill, one with a tongue loose as flannel pajamas, had reiterated what Grafton’s dying wife had said on her death bed, “This is one tough way to get rid of a husband, by dying.”
With a stab of decision, Sewell Grafton was on the phone to the police station. “I’ve had about enough of this revolutionary, holier-than-thou music, this midnight crap going on. It’s a disturbance of the peace, that’s what it is, and I want something done about it. It’s damned sacrilegious coming from the cemetery.” He took in a deep breath, tried to quell the rising anger taking over his whole person, and simply said, “Now.” He said it a second time, keying his intensity, “Now.” He could feel the sincerity of his threat, and measured the momentary silence from the other end of the phone line. He knew he had delivered the threat even as he heard the strummer again, from below in the cemetery. “Down there in the cemetery, he’s some Hippie probably licking his chops,” he muttered, to the dark night in general and to no one in particular, not even to the officer on the phone.
For the second or third night in a row, July crowding him on his porch, the trees alive, the flowers leaking into the sweltering heat coming to him from the nearby cemetery, only minor uncertainties in the air, Grafton had thought he heard music, strumming music, chorded music, but not his kind of music if he had a kind of music to favor. Practically to the very minute of his phone call, he thought it came from a neighbor’s raucous radio or television. All as if one of their kids, banging up the volume even though distant, was trying to get even with someone. Maybe out to disturb him; he’d had the thought before, though he didn’t know why, never knowing what his dying wife had said when she left this world nine years before.
The music, in spite of the late hour, seemed to him also, at that same moment, to be something else. The arrows of that thought clustered clearer in his mind, as the cemetery seemed to be revealed as the source.
Here, on his piece of the Henshit Mountain above the cemetery, but really a minor hill of two hundred or so feet, Sewell, in lonely retirement for all of those nine years, sat his uneasy way on the porch for better part of most days, and often long into nights whether melodious or not. Solitude became him, thinking it was his due, that all of good silence had been earned. At these sittings he had his old daydreams. He sat with his feet up on a soft but deep red and rugged ottoman. He sometimes kept his eyes closed for long minutes of deep ecstasy. He smoked cigars in spite of all threats, medical, social, and otherwise, thinking there was nothing wrong with a long, rich drag when he was alone, regardless of what it carried off or brought in upon itself in exchange. Silence, after all the harsh sounds of his life, was often one beautiful thing… it touched what he thought was his soul… his belief extending that far. It calmed him. His last ten years of work as a telephone solicitor, collecting the garbage of pennies for many causes, had colored his vision of life. Silence was his due… no more excuses, no lies, no hate plowing right through the ether at him. No abrupt hanging up of phones after a three minute delivery so smooth it promised to rankle no one but his own feelings in retrospect.
And now some damned Hippie was out on the night! Again.
At a repeated chord from downhill, the edge of his mind stiffened, then his jaw, and at length his backbone. Now he knew that the music was rising to grate him from the darkness of Riverside Cemetery, a plunging 100 yards down from his porch and a quick jump across Winter Street. It was, without a doubt, a guitar in the hands of some wise-ass kid.
The night desk man at the police station looked over his shoulder at Sgt. Culberson. “It’s that pain in the ass again up on Henshit Mountain. Old man Sewell. Says somebody’s down in Riverside Cemetery having a concert. Wants it stopped. ‘Now!’ he says.” He rolled his eyes in accent.
Culberson rolled his eyes in answer. “I’ll check it out. Be right back. Want a Duncan’s?” His tall and athletic frame rose to a distinctive six feet and four inches, his eyes bright, his hair prematurely white that gave him a handsome middle life look, ladies measuring him as virile from the outset. Crinkly crows’ feet made his face pleasant, thoughtful, calm. He’d been through a couple of wars of his own and wore the trappings well, as was said about him around town: “Culberson’s been where some of us have never been, and hoping it stays that way.”
“On you, I’ll take it.” The desk man’s nod was both an acceptance of appreciation and one of respect.
The headlights of the cruiser knocked out a slim tunnel of darkness as Culberson started down the middle road of Riverside Cemetery, the windows open as he listened for the upstart music. Inscribed stones, hundreds of faces marked with names, some he knew, many he didn’t, flashed data at him from the edges of each plot beside the road.
In a moment, in a stab of light, the name of George Hanover thrust itself from the past. The sergeant remembered the old man whittling on the steps of the house across the street from him, the tiny wooden soldiers that old George Hanover would drop into his young hands, him a wide-eyed general with an army of troopers in his back yard, leaded ones and wooden ones, infantry and cavalry and small armored columns, and the special soldiers he painted up with true uniforms. Then, in those young days, the neatness for him was most important, more important than the uniform, but not now, his now wearing the badge, the chevrons, and the golden braid.
He shut off the engine, shut down the lights as he saw again the image of George Hanover falling over from the very same steps, a half whittled Civil War soldier squeezed in his hand, the working knife fallen somewhere at his side, his breath gone elsewhere too. The whole scene caught at his heart all anew. Distinctly, down to the tarnished blue and marked remains of the uniform as if in a photograph, he saw that one Civil War piece sitting yet on his mantel at home, the lone remnant of his young days at war on the lot-wide spread of sandy dunes in the back yard.
He let the images drift away into the darkness, that flight too he had known many times, memory a continual part of his make-up, the past often sitting the same seat with him or running around in his head, directly behind his eyeballs. The punctuation he knew and the stumble to death and had been able to read much of it since that day an old man had squeezed him dry.
Darkness, in sudden realization, had often hidden both good and bad surprises; he was prepared for either.
For long moments he heard no sound at all, no music, no strum of an instrument he thought he would be hearing, no sweet pickings. Sewell, for that matter he realized, really was a cranky old man. It was not the first time he had called the station, late at night, about some rowdiness or noise, feeling picked upon; self-appointed pariah of Henshit Mountain.
Culberson wondered at length what motivated such people, how they might measure themselves coming up in others’ eyes, think what the world might think of them, if that mattered in the first place.
Cocking an ear, he turned his head sideways and stood still as a pole. The darkness thickened as though in a cake mix, all ingredients tossed in and coming up dim as chocolate, thick with promise. Some parts of music there were that he loved, could spend hours listening to: the Three Tenors, Andreus Boccelli with the fair English singer, Sarah Brightman, some guitar guys in the army that sounded as if Hank Williams senior was back at the mike, pure country with a soul echoing loss and pain, and the sad joys of love. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and Lost Highway took turns at revelation.
For moments he was locked into the sweetest reverie one’s mind can imagine. His body grew slack, then went into a momentary lift where light and music and touch overcame him. He was home in a kind of happiness he had not felt in a long time. It was fluid. It touched his skin. It swam about him. He could taste it. But he heard no music as he tensed in apprehension. Counted breaths went their way, sly as footpads in escape.
Then, a string at a time, each a distal note, a guitar’s exhalation crawled out of the darkness.
Faintly, on an upward lift of air, a zephyr of sound came to him from way down at the east end of Riverside, a scattering of notes that might have been jumbled on the air, a mix of keen sounds. Then he caught a chord of it, something soft and memorable, saying, deep inside, that he had heard it before. As quick as it had come, it faded away, as if a wind has tousled with the zephyr of air.
Culberson knew he was caught between something highly unlikable and something likable, cresting at the moment in the back of his mind as a kind of favorite from his past,
an ambivalence exerting itself through the life of his senses.
The long-time policeman thought himself dwarfed, made meek and mild, at the discretion of gods or god-like essences he might not have known before.
Upon measurement, he thought the strummer, the picker, to be a pretty good musician, having a belief in notes and what was to follow, to be melodious, to be warm, to cover and protect him here in the absolute darkness. But he was not sure of the voice thence coming at him on a sheet of slightly moving air, a thin element of voice, one on the alto side of the ledger. Voices, he knew, those voices that become favored ones, you had to warm up to, had to embrace, whether by repetition of favored songs, by the poetry they carried or by a story from their words, or else, by chords so beautiful and plentiful on the ear, they would not leave you in any hurry, words you could hum into music, remember like a fond face, a fair glance at beauty itself.
The far voice transmitted itself, reached, found a new level where warmth accompanied each following note, and ran the chords into a touching beauty.
Now, in this place, in this space, he was an in-between-er, struck and stuck there betwixt the new and the old, the moving and the sedate, the fresh and the stale. This night, he said to himself so as not to disturb the sounds reaching him, was at a critical juncture.
He had no idea of who the musician was, what he looked like, or what had happened earlier in the Center, when the beat officer, from his cruiser, spotted the tall young man walking slowly down the street with a guitar case slung by a hunk of rope over one shoulder. He had not recognized the late walker. Had not seen him before. Finding curiosity and wonder yanking at him for answers, he pulled the cruiser beside the young man.
“You from around here, son? I haven’t seen you before. Where you heading? Get a late start home? Need a lift?” Cautiously, he looked around to check if anybody else was about. Nothing but harmless shadows hovered in places.
“I was supposed to meet a pal and we were going to practice a few songs, but he never showed. I’m new here, living with my aunt and uncle on Winter Street for the time being.
The gray cape with the porch screens still leaning against the house, like they’ve been all year, maybe a couple of years.” A slight smile warmed his face. “I promised I’d put them up, for my uncle, Ned Garvey. Know him?”
“I know the place, and know him. Good luck on that. I hope they’re in good shape. They sure are kind of a landmark on the street. What’s your name, son?” The policeman’s voice had warmed up.
“Cavan.”
“Any good on that thing?” he said, as he pointed to the guitar case.
“I can celebrate a lot of things with it, including freedom and deep thought.”
The patrolman on wheels felt himself caught in place. He nodded and released the foot brake, easing away from the young man. “Good luck, kid. I mean it.” Shortly he had a Bruce Springsteen song on his radio, a night rider and cohort in dark patrol.
Culberson knew none of this that had happened a bit earlier, even as he decided to
lock up the cruiser and proceed on foot to where the music was coming from. His memory gave him a quick shot of a marble mausoleum, a stone bench, and the chain link fence that marked the end of the cemetery. He marked where the house of an old teacher of his was still painted pale blue on the other side of the chain link fence. Names of a few pals, now and then a partial view of a friendly face, came as company to a name, all buried at that end of Riverside.
He carried a flashlight in one hand, the beam shut off, as he started down the middle road in the black of night. It was close to one o’clock, a small disturbance puffed about in the air as if a flock of birds had lifted off into the night sky, and the new stretch of music clearly came to him from the heart of something other than darkness. He could feel it, not an immense declaration, but nevertheless a subtle incision into his psyche.
A hurried listing of adjectives swam upward within him as the music stretched itself in long reach. Things moving at him were nostalgic, moody, real, even before he heard the commencing words of a song he’d not heard before, not that he was any great aficionado of music. Halleluiah crawled to his ears out of a far crater, cavern, cave, moving within itself and echoing at the same time… making its own space…demanding space… Ha… lay… loo… yah… Ha… lay… loo… yah… Ha… laaay… loooo… yaaaaah. It was not a church song, as something else was vibrating in it, a touching, a reaching, a contemplative self-searching soul at its own observation and lamentation.
The duty sergeant halted in his steps as the small piece of the music hung over him and then dove into his own soul. Ha… laaaay… loooo… yaaaaahhhh. The sense coming at him was plaintive, he said within. For the moment he could find no other word to carry his feelings.
And then wondrous, he thought, some out-of-this-world element clutching at him, or leaping up from his innermost person as the haunting but sparse words made the deepest impression on him he could imagine. It was indeed making itself memorable and he was aware of the impact; haunting, sparse, riveting, grabbing him, stopping him in his tracks there on the middle road, forcing him to listen, to attend.
Plaintive, he said again, and pensive. Again, wondrous
In a wild moment of self analysis, he could not decide if the song rose up through his body or fell on him, grabbed him or stabbed him, touched his own reservoir of being or passed cleanly through his body and his senses and went elsewhere, perhaps like an x-ray, full of mystery but producing its mission, or the idea of electricity itself moving magic on wires without resistance. The mood created was greater than any magic he might have known. The darkness, he thought, might have a great deal to do with the impact, and the singer being unknown to him, singing in that darkness deeper than black was meant to be.
And right in the midst of that magic and measurement, life, in all its vagaries, its quick twists and turns, took entry. There came the strident, acidic yells of an angry man, who Culberson figured must be old man Grafton come down from his Mount Sinai, otherwise known as Henshit Mountain, screaming his own midnight disturbance at the unknown singer, guitarist, musician, magician. “Hey, you son of a bitch, I called the cops on you for disturbing the peace, and if they aren’t going to do something about you, I goddamn will!”
Those words gave Culberson the impression that a two by four or a baseball bat was being waved as wand of threat. Even as he began to run toward the singer, he tried to picture what Grafton looked like, having seen him a few times at Town Meeting making other wild demands. Nothing came to him but a Teddy Williams swing at the plate, slightly upper-cutting in its swing, demonstrative in its aim.
He ran faster, the flashlight suddenly stabbing a small tunnel of light ahead of him on the pavement of the road, bouncing on stone faces, names he could not read.
It appeared to Culberson that Grafton was about as far from the singer as he himself was,
his voice coming from on high, probably from just inside the stone wall that lined the cemetery on Winter Street and ran the whole length of Riverside. In his mind’s eye he could even see the bronze marker in the sidewalk noting the walk was laid by the WPA in the depressed ‘30s.
In those few moments, all the magic disappeared, the lamentation, the mystery, the internal glory that had warmed Culberson warmer than he had been in a long time. Downhill went the mood, the coveted tones, the music of the plucked and strummed strings. Reality came like a curtain closing down on a great Broadway show’s final performance.
“It’s about goddamned time someone from the police got here. I called it seems forever ago. This crap, this midnight sneaking about, has been going on for too long and I, for one, am damned sick and tired of it.” His arms stabbed the air, semaphoring.
Culberson flashed the light on the singer, then on the screamer off the hill. Here they are, he thought, and here I am, right smack in the middle. It was like being between heaven and hell, for the music still flavored him, clung at him, and Sewell Grafton was yet screaming and cursing at the musician, now standing open-mouthed but song-less against the shining granite slabbed mausoleum, his guitar hanging by his side. His thin and pale face, as if nutrition had been a recent problem, cut at the sergeant, tossed his mind back onto a few highlight photos of other singers as though they were looking for the next meal and needing it. He also noted the guitar case was completely opposite in condition from the instrument itself, a reflection of a distant light source coming off its wooden surface.
“He’s not hurting you,” Culberson said. “The kid’s pretty good with that guitar, plays real well. You want me to throw him in jail just to shut up some good music? That song he was playing is damned special. I never heard it before, but I know I’ll hear it again. If you are any way attentive to what’s going on around us, you’ll hear it too. That’s a promise I’ll make for the kid.” He paused for breath, thinking Sewell was going to leap down his throat, but saw, in the eyes lit by the flashlight, that the crank was at a pause. “Get on home now, Mr. Sewell. I’ll take care of the youngster. You’re making more noise than he did. I’m sure some of your neighbors haven’t appreciated that. Go on now, go home. SPD has responded to your call. Please go, sir, before there is a confrontation that needs not to happen.”
The next night, Riverside Cemetery, at the far end from the Center, against the small stream working its waters to the Father of Oceans a bare five miles away, was infiltrated by at least one hundred people, mostly young, extremely subdued, quiet, patient, at just past the hour of midnight. All had heard about the night before, about the guitar player and singer, about the noisy crank off Henshit Mountain, about the police sergeant’s claim that he had been transfixed, his whole being, by one song, one voice, for mere moments. They had come to hear, to believe, to place a value on something new. Hoping for it, looking for it, for a matrix of a new music or a new voice. Losing sleep would be worth it, or being late for work in the morning. To some a special song was important, or a new voice to capture and captivate. Before last night, it was apparent, nobody had heard of young Cavan Woodmarsh.
The night was hot and starless and Culberson’s T-shirt was tacky underarm. Out of uniform, on the other side of the stream running beside the cemetery and along the old and unused B&M railroad tracks, in a pal’s back yard on Auburn Court, Culberson and his pal were sharing the moment and a few cold beers. Occasional lights, mayhap cigarette lighters or match flares, gave evidence of the crowd, gathered in hushed testimony, their conduct unimpeachable. Culberson believed he understood why they had come.
“You tell me what you think, Hal, you have a better ear for music than me, that is, if the kid shows up at all. I might have my doubts.”
“It figures,” Hal said, a member of the local fire department and on the inside of all town events from whatever perspective, “that the crank from the hill has exerted some influence, but he sure hasn’t bothered that gang of kids over there now, though I know Nora Furbish and her husband Harry are in the mix. They walked down the Court to get there, talking about it as they passed by, and walked all around the Center end of the cemetery to get there. That means they’re interested, if only curious. But we don’t know. They’re on the edge of one element of age, like you said about the in-between-ers and how they’re either joining or leaving one or the other no matter what gear they’re in.”
“I didn’t think you’d remember that little talk of ours, Hal. And speaking about Nora, she’s always been an absolute knockout and therefore always in the mix of talk and such.”
Hal snickered. “You mean dreams count too?”
“With her, absolutely. Always has. Saw her once off a diving board, bare-ass ballicky and have never forgotten the sight. Seems a hundred years ago. Dreams count and with this new kid plunker over there too. I think he’s coming now.” He strained to look off into the heart of the cemetery, locking his eyes on small pieces of light falling upon those who had gathered. “Jeezus, Hal, that gang of kids is parting for him like the water parted for Moses. That spells more than curiosity, a kind of respect all rolled into one ball.”
Hal stared too, finding a fleck of amazement coming at him in concert. “How’d you get old crank Sewell off the kid’s back, and yours too?”
“Told him if he found himself running counter to something brand new and good, he was going to look awfully bad on that council seat he’s holding, getting free summer camp for some kids that couldn’t get it otherwise. Told him this new kid could be so connected to that kind of stuff without half trying that it’d be a shame to wreck a great opportunity.” He held a thought for a minor second and continued, “It’s as though he only operates or reacts to threat or fear.”
“Nuff said for me,” Hal responded, knocking off another beer, tipping the bottle to his pal in a sum of agreement.
Cavan Woodmarsh, about a half hour past midnight, plunked a single note on the guitar and the single note slipped into the night like a tonal comet. Instantly the dark audience was still, sitting on grass or stones, standing at total attention as if a maestro at the Pops or Symphony Hall had flicked his baton. Culberson and his pal stood rigid in Hal’s back yard, no more than one hundred and fifty feet from the granite mausoleum and the originator of the one note. Both realized they were transfixed, believed they were about to hear new magic come from the young man who had gathered the crowd in darkness, at the end of the cemetery, in a starless but warm night. Moisture sat in abeyance, and mystery, and motion … and all other sound, from every quarter of town and the universe, kept its distance.
When Culberson stared into the darkness it deepened and everything –the gathering of music lovers, the mood of the night, the mood of the town, the mood of two old pals standing in a piece of that darkness – became part of the night‘s tone. Something, Culberson said to himself, was reaching for everything the senses knew, the taste of rain, the smell of grass cut that day, the glittering quasi stars almost at eye level, the phantom hands reaching to touch and make a universal connection, the echo of the first note. The lit ends of a few cigarettes showed how well they could replace the stars long hidden by thick clouds promising showers in the hot night, as if a matter of combustion waited its peril.
From the façade of the mausoleum, like shivering tonal work at a symphonic hall, or clear as a bell at Matins, a second note rose and covered distance so rapidly one had to hold it immediately to memory or hold what it had caused or created within the mind, heart, or soul, as it fled through and past. It was an extension of the first note still holding sway, not all gone away to ether.
Rigid attention asserted itself as broad as the dark night, breaths held, belief taking place.
“Jesus, God,” Hal said and put a half bottle of beer back on the picnic table. “This kid is more than mystery. I bet I heard some of those notes the last few nights and I thought I was dreaming. Oh, the dreams we think and talk about. I recognize those notes. Dear God.” A dear, dear night, he thought, was about to come upon them.
It was then that stupid, noisy, cranky, inconsonant Sewell Grafton, unable to change his stance in spite of Sgt. Culberson’s prior and veiled threat to his reputation, once again threatened to destroy some beautiful thing as he yelled out, “No more of that frigging crap, mister. I’ll call the cops again. I’ll get them here pronto.” He spread his arms about, to encompass the gathering. “For all of you.” He started to move forward in the darkness, bare bulbs of streetlights soft as false dawn touching along the base of the hill. He had penetrated the edge of the gathering, knowing he was in the wide plot of the Stockman family, which had an early and steady impact on the town, had once owned the entire hill he lived on.
Disgraceful.
Grafton’s activities, as well as Cavan Woodmarsh’s, had obviously made the rounds of town. A flutter of noise rose in the cemetery, a very minor disturbance, casual almost, and Sewell Grafton spoke no more. Two very strong young men sat him down between them on the grass of Harland Stockman’s grave. In the flash of a cigarette lighter the engraving would have read Harland Stockman 1890 – 1981 and Helen Stockman 1899 - . And Helen herself might still be clinging to life, perhaps on the road above the cemetery, or nearby, another of the old breed on for a new ride. The young men were also from Henshit Mountain.
One of them, in the darkness said, “I am not threatening you, mister, but I am telling you to keep quiet, listen, and I swear that tonight you will be converted from the hell that has been your life.”
“You’ve got no right to do this to me, like that singer has no right to sing at this time of night.”
“Don’t be stupid, Mr. Grafton. Look around you. See the crowd. You’d recognize a lot of faces, people you’ve known or at least been aware of for a long time.”
“I don’t need to be curried by you and a crowd of Hippies. I speak my own mind. You can’t take that away from me.”
“I can do that very easily, Mr. Grafton.”
“How?”
“By telling people, including you, what your wife had to say about you the day she died. With her last breath, sir, her last breath. I could yell it out now so the whole town would know, not just a few of us off Henshit Mountain.”
Sewell Grafton, seeing his life spinning before him in a dizzying approach, carrying everything with it… the dread moments of meanness, the harnessed cruelty that had blossomed in him on too many occasions, the touch of flesh his hands and knuckles distinctly remembered, sat down atop Harland Stockman’s final home, as though he had fainted. The heat touched his face, came up through his buttocks, and there was a momentary acceptance of Hell at hand.
And, in the assured silence, in the heavy heat and the heavy darkness, off the façade of the granite mausoleum in some perfection of acoustic clarity, came the voice of the tall, lean young singer with the midnight voice many singers yearn and covet for years on end,
for full lifetimes.
Halleluiah, he let free, Haaa laaaay looo yaaah. Nobody in the large gathering breathed for long moments, open-mouthed though, waiting more, absorbing what had come at them, Haaa laaaay looo yaaah., the tone of it, the reach of it, the grace of it, the sincere and soaring clarity of his voice and the words, be they words or inner expressions of a thousand granite or marble stone faces and the utter and total acceptance the cemetery carried from that moment on.
Some people there that night, in later days, telling of the experience, said, “Cavan started at the back end of the song and brought us up to creation, back to front, up to creation itself, took us to the beginning, his beginning, and we were knowing it at the same moment. We lived his dream, and we ushered him into the world, the phantom grasp on phantom souls.”
Amen, they could have said: “We knew we had to share him, from that moment on.”
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Bio note: Sheehan served in Korea, 1951 and lives in Saugus, MA. Books are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans, Press 53; A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening, Pocol Press. He has 18 Pushcart nominations, in Dzanc Best of the Web 2009, and 260 stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. His newest book, from Milspeak Publishers, is Korean Echoes, 2011. Another eBook, The Westering, will be issued shortly by them and will be followed by at least 8 more. His work is in/coming in Ocean Magazine, Nervous Breakdown, Stone Hobo, Faith-Hope-Fiction, Canary, Subtle Tea, Red Dirt Review, Nontrue, Danse Macabre, Nashwaak Review, and Qarrtsiluni.
Tom Sheehan
For the third night in a row, Cavan Woodmarsh (long, lean, young, often caught up in a dream) strolled to the far end of Riverside Cemetery with a guitar over his shoulder in a case the long road had beaten up as badly as old shoes. Most things about him were soft, suitable, acceptable… the long fingers, the readily available smile, a detectable aura packing no punch other than immediate belief carried in his voice. His gait was sure, and his eyes somehow fit midnight’s deep color. Hurry did not accompany him, though, or any sign of stealth. The prime silence was now and then cluttered by a post-midnight automobile on a distant road; but Cavan had earlier, on the two previous nights, found acoustical acceptance while playing the guitar beside a tall marble mausoleum where inscribed names capitulated to darkness.
This night he sat on a small stone bench, perhaps a mourner’s bench, he thought, and drifted further into the darkness.
Like all nights of magic, music came out the other side.
He half believed he had perfected a new song.
Soon thereafter, on the hill beside the cemetery, Sewell Grafton was sure of the odd disturbance. It was a guitar he heard, and faintly, over the chords, a word that sounded like a broken prayer. Halleluiah it said in soft and stretched out pieces, as if being parsed in English classes he once hated… Ha..lay… loo… yaaaaa. Again… Haa..laaay… loooo… yaaaaaaa, the syllables longer in breath, and rising uphill from old Riverside. It ran again, leaped again, carried past long breath up the slope of the hill, surmounting ledges, hardness, his ear.
If neighbors on the hill heard that one among them had called police about the lilted
Halleluiahs, they’d know it to be Sewell Grafton. A hundred to one it’d be Grafton. Two of the neighborhood women on the hill, one with a tongue loose as flannel pajamas, had reiterated what Grafton’s dying wife had said on her death bed, “This is one tough way to get rid of a husband, by dying.”
With a stab of decision, Sewell Grafton was on the phone to the police station. “I’ve had about enough of this revolutionary, holier-than-thou music, this midnight crap going on. It’s a disturbance of the peace, that’s what it is, and I want something done about it. It’s damned sacrilegious coming from the cemetery.” He took in a deep breath, tried to quell the rising anger taking over his whole person, and simply said, “Now.” He said it a second time, keying his intensity, “Now.” He could feel the sincerity of his threat, and measured the momentary silence from the other end of the phone line. He knew he had delivered the threat even as he heard the strummer again, from below in the cemetery. “Down there in the cemetery, he’s some Hippie probably licking his chops,” he muttered, to the dark night in general and to no one in particular, not even to the officer on the phone.
For the second or third night in a row, July crowding him on his porch, the trees alive, the flowers leaking into the sweltering heat coming to him from the nearby cemetery, only minor uncertainties in the air, Grafton had thought he heard music, strumming music, chorded music, but not his kind of music if he had a kind of music to favor. Practically to the very minute of his phone call, he thought it came from a neighbor’s raucous radio or television. All as if one of their kids, banging up the volume even though distant, was trying to get even with someone. Maybe out to disturb him; he’d had the thought before, though he didn’t know why, never knowing what his dying wife had said when she left this world nine years before.
The music, in spite of the late hour, seemed to him also, at that same moment, to be something else. The arrows of that thought clustered clearer in his mind, as the cemetery seemed to be revealed as the source.
Here, on his piece of the Henshit Mountain above the cemetery, but really a minor hill of two hundred or so feet, Sewell, in lonely retirement for all of those nine years, sat his uneasy way on the porch for better part of most days, and often long into nights whether melodious or not. Solitude became him, thinking it was his due, that all of good silence had been earned. At these sittings he had his old daydreams. He sat with his feet up on a soft but deep red and rugged ottoman. He sometimes kept his eyes closed for long minutes of deep ecstasy. He smoked cigars in spite of all threats, medical, social, and otherwise, thinking there was nothing wrong with a long, rich drag when he was alone, regardless of what it carried off or brought in upon itself in exchange. Silence, after all the harsh sounds of his life, was often one beautiful thing… it touched what he thought was his soul… his belief extending that far. It calmed him. His last ten years of work as a telephone solicitor, collecting the garbage of pennies for many causes, had colored his vision of life. Silence was his due… no more excuses, no lies, no hate plowing right through the ether at him. No abrupt hanging up of phones after a three minute delivery so smooth it promised to rankle no one but his own feelings in retrospect.
And now some damned Hippie was out on the night! Again.
At a repeated chord from downhill, the edge of his mind stiffened, then his jaw, and at length his backbone. Now he knew that the music was rising to grate him from the darkness of Riverside Cemetery, a plunging 100 yards down from his porch and a quick jump across Winter Street. It was, without a doubt, a guitar in the hands of some wise-ass kid.
The night desk man at the police station looked over his shoulder at Sgt. Culberson. “It’s that pain in the ass again up on Henshit Mountain. Old man Sewell. Says somebody’s down in Riverside Cemetery having a concert. Wants it stopped. ‘Now!’ he says.” He rolled his eyes in accent.
Culberson rolled his eyes in answer. “I’ll check it out. Be right back. Want a Duncan’s?” His tall and athletic frame rose to a distinctive six feet and four inches, his eyes bright, his hair prematurely white that gave him a handsome middle life look, ladies measuring him as virile from the outset. Crinkly crows’ feet made his face pleasant, thoughtful, calm. He’d been through a couple of wars of his own and wore the trappings well, as was said about him around town: “Culberson’s been where some of us have never been, and hoping it stays that way.”
“On you, I’ll take it.” The desk man’s nod was both an acceptance of appreciation and one of respect.
The headlights of the cruiser knocked out a slim tunnel of darkness as Culberson started down the middle road of Riverside Cemetery, the windows open as he listened for the upstart music. Inscribed stones, hundreds of faces marked with names, some he knew, many he didn’t, flashed data at him from the edges of each plot beside the road.
In a moment, in a stab of light, the name of George Hanover thrust itself from the past. The sergeant remembered the old man whittling on the steps of the house across the street from him, the tiny wooden soldiers that old George Hanover would drop into his young hands, him a wide-eyed general with an army of troopers in his back yard, leaded ones and wooden ones, infantry and cavalry and small armored columns, and the special soldiers he painted up with true uniforms. Then, in those young days, the neatness for him was most important, more important than the uniform, but not now, his now wearing the badge, the chevrons, and the golden braid.
He shut off the engine, shut down the lights as he saw again the image of George Hanover falling over from the very same steps, a half whittled Civil War soldier squeezed in his hand, the working knife fallen somewhere at his side, his breath gone elsewhere too. The whole scene caught at his heart all anew. Distinctly, down to the tarnished blue and marked remains of the uniform as if in a photograph, he saw that one Civil War piece sitting yet on his mantel at home, the lone remnant of his young days at war on the lot-wide spread of sandy dunes in the back yard.
He let the images drift away into the darkness, that flight too he had known many times, memory a continual part of his make-up, the past often sitting the same seat with him or running around in his head, directly behind his eyeballs. The punctuation he knew and the stumble to death and had been able to read much of it since that day an old man had squeezed him dry.
Darkness, in sudden realization, had often hidden both good and bad surprises; he was prepared for either.
For long moments he heard no sound at all, no music, no strum of an instrument he thought he would be hearing, no sweet pickings. Sewell, for that matter he realized, really was a cranky old man. It was not the first time he had called the station, late at night, about some rowdiness or noise, feeling picked upon; self-appointed pariah of Henshit Mountain.
Culberson wondered at length what motivated such people, how they might measure themselves coming up in others’ eyes, think what the world might think of them, if that mattered in the first place.
Cocking an ear, he turned his head sideways and stood still as a pole. The darkness thickened as though in a cake mix, all ingredients tossed in and coming up dim as chocolate, thick with promise. Some parts of music there were that he loved, could spend hours listening to: the Three Tenors, Andreus Boccelli with the fair English singer, Sarah Brightman, some guitar guys in the army that sounded as if Hank Williams senior was back at the mike, pure country with a soul echoing loss and pain, and the sad joys of love. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and Lost Highway took turns at revelation.
For moments he was locked into the sweetest reverie one’s mind can imagine. His body grew slack, then went into a momentary lift where light and music and touch overcame him. He was home in a kind of happiness he had not felt in a long time. It was fluid. It touched his skin. It swam about him. He could taste it. But he heard no music as he tensed in apprehension. Counted breaths went their way, sly as footpads in escape.
Then, a string at a time, each a distal note, a guitar’s exhalation crawled out of the darkness.
Faintly, on an upward lift of air, a zephyr of sound came to him from way down at the east end of Riverside, a scattering of notes that might have been jumbled on the air, a mix of keen sounds. Then he caught a chord of it, something soft and memorable, saying, deep inside, that he had heard it before. As quick as it had come, it faded away, as if a wind has tousled with the zephyr of air.
Culberson knew he was caught between something highly unlikable and something likable, cresting at the moment in the back of his mind as a kind of favorite from his past,
an ambivalence exerting itself through the life of his senses.
The long-time policeman thought himself dwarfed, made meek and mild, at the discretion of gods or god-like essences he might not have known before.
Upon measurement, he thought the strummer, the picker, to be a pretty good musician, having a belief in notes and what was to follow, to be melodious, to be warm, to cover and protect him here in the absolute darkness. But he was not sure of the voice thence coming at him on a sheet of slightly moving air, a thin element of voice, one on the alto side of the ledger. Voices, he knew, those voices that become favored ones, you had to warm up to, had to embrace, whether by repetition of favored songs, by the poetry they carried or by a story from their words, or else, by chords so beautiful and plentiful on the ear, they would not leave you in any hurry, words you could hum into music, remember like a fond face, a fair glance at beauty itself.
The far voice transmitted itself, reached, found a new level where warmth accompanied each following note, and ran the chords into a touching beauty.
Now, in this place, in this space, he was an in-between-er, struck and stuck there betwixt the new and the old, the moving and the sedate, the fresh and the stale. This night, he said to himself so as not to disturb the sounds reaching him, was at a critical juncture.
He had no idea of who the musician was, what he looked like, or what had happened earlier in the Center, when the beat officer, from his cruiser, spotted the tall young man walking slowly down the street with a guitar case slung by a hunk of rope over one shoulder. He had not recognized the late walker. Had not seen him before. Finding curiosity and wonder yanking at him for answers, he pulled the cruiser beside the young man.
“You from around here, son? I haven’t seen you before. Where you heading? Get a late start home? Need a lift?” Cautiously, he looked around to check if anybody else was about. Nothing but harmless shadows hovered in places.
“I was supposed to meet a pal and we were going to practice a few songs, but he never showed. I’m new here, living with my aunt and uncle on Winter Street for the time being.
The gray cape with the porch screens still leaning against the house, like they’ve been all year, maybe a couple of years.” A slight smile warmed his face. “I promised I’d put them up, for my uncle, Ned Garvey. Know him?”
“I know the place, and know him. Good luck on that. I hope they’re in good shape. They sure are kind of a landmark on the street. What’s your name, son?” The policeman’s voice had warmed up.
“Cavan.”
“Any good on that thing?” he said, as he pointed to the guitar case.
“I can celebrate a lot of things with it, including freedom and deep thought.”
The patrolman on wheels felt himself caught in place. He nodded and released the foot brake, easing away from the young man. “Good luck, kid. I mean it.” Shortly he had a Bruce Springsteen song on his radio, a night rider and cohort in dark patrol.
Culberson knew none of this that had happened a bit earlier, even as he decided to
lock up the cruiser and proceed on foot to where the music was coming from. His memory gave him a quick shot of a marble mausoleum, a stone bench, and the chain link fence that marked the end of the cemetery. He marked where the house of an old teacher of his was still painted pale blue on the other side of the chain link fence. Names of a few pals, now and then a partial view of a friendly face, came as company to a name, all buried at that end of Riverside.
He carried a flashlight in one hand, the beam shut off, as he started down the middle road in the black of night. It was close to one o’clock, a small disturbance puffed about in the air as if a flock of birds had lifted off into the night sky, and the new stretch of music clearly came to him from the heart of something other than darkness. He could feel it, not an immense declaration, but nevertheless a subtle incision into his psyche.
A hurried listing of adjectives swam upward within him as the music stretched itself in long reach. Things moving at him were nostalgic, moody, real, even before he heard the commencing words of a song he’d not heard before, not that he was any great aficionado of music. Halleluiah crawled to his ears out of a far crater, cavern, cave, moving within itself and echoing at the same time… making its own space…demanding space… Ha… lay… loo… yah… Ha… lay… loo… yah… Ha… laaay… loooo… yaaaaah. It was not a church song, as something else was vibrating in it, a touching, a reaching, a contemplative self-searching soul at its own observation and lamentation.
The duty sergeant halted in his steps as the small piece of the music hung over him and then dove into his own soul. Ha… laaaay… loooo… yaaaaahhhh. The sense coming at him was plaintive, he said within. For the moment he could find no other word to carry his feelings.
And then wondrous, he thought, some out-of-this-world element clutching at him, or leaping up from his innermost person as the haunting but sparse words made the deepest impression on him he could imagine. It was indeed making itself memorable and he was aware of the impact; haunting, sparse, riveting, grabbing him, stopping him in his tracks there on the middle road, forcing him to listen, to attend.
Plaintive, he said again, and pensive. Again, wondrous
In a wild moment of self analysis, he could not decide if the song rose up through his body or fell on him, grabbed him or stabbed him, touched his own reservoir of being or passed cleanly through his body and his senses and went elsewhere, perhaps like an x-ray, full of mystery but producing its mission, or the idea of electricity itself moving magic on wires without resistance. The mood created was greater than any magic he might have known. The darkness, he thought, might have a great deal to do with the impact, and the singer being unknown to him, singing in that darkness deeper than black was meant to be.
And right in the midst of that magic and measurement, life, in all its vagaries, its quick twists and turns, took entry. There came the strident, acidic yells of an angry man, who Culberson figured must be old man Grafton come down from his Mount Sinai, otherwise known as Henshit Mountain, screaming his own midnight disturbance at the unknown singer, guitarist, musician, magician. “Hey, you son of a bitch, I called the cops on you for disturbing the peace, and if they aren’t going to do something about you, I goddamn will!”
Those words gave Culberson the impression that a two by four or a baseball bat was being waved as wand of threat. Even as he began to run toward the singer, he tried to picture what Grafton looked like, having seen him a few times at Town Meeting making other wild demands. Nothing came to him but a Teddy Williams swing at the plate, slightly upper-cutting in its swing, demonstrative in its aim.
He ran faster, the flashlight suddenly stabbing a small tunnel of light ahead of him on the pavement of the road, bouncing on stone faces, names he could not read.
It appeared to Culberson that Grafton was about as far from the singer as he himself was,
his voice coming from on high, probably from just inside the stone wall that lined the cemetery on Winter Street and ran the whole length of Riverside. In his mind’s eye he could even see the bronze marker in the sidewalk noting the walk was laid by the WPA in the depressed ‘30s.
In those few moments, all the magic disappeared, the lamentation, the mystery, the internal glory that had warmed Culberson warmer than he had been in a long time. Downhill went the mood, the coveted tones, the music of the plucked and strummed strings. Reality came like a curtain closing down on a great Broadway show’s final performance.
“It’s about goddamned time someone from the police got here. I called it seems forever ago. This crap, this midnight sneaking about, has been going on for too long and I, for one, am damned sick and tired of it.” His arms stabbed the air, semaphoring.
Culberson flashed the light on the singer, then on the screamer off the hill. Here they are, he thought, and here I am, right smack in the middle. It was like being between heaven and hell, for the music still flavored him, clung at him, and Sewell Grafton was yet screaming and cursing at the musician, now standing open-mouthed but song-less against the shining granite slabbed mausoleum, his guitar hanging by his side. His thin and pale face, as if nutrition had been a recent problem, cut at the sergeant, tossed his mind back onto a few highlight photos of other singers as though they were looking for the next meal and needing it. He also noted the guitar case was completely opposite in condition from the instrument itself, a reflection of a distant light source coming off its wooden surface.
“He’s not hurting you,” Culberson said. “The kid’s pretty good with that guitar, plays real well. You want me to throw him in jail just to shut up some good music? That song he was playing is damned special. I never heard it before, but I know I’ll hear it again. If you are any way attentive to what’s going on around us, you’ll hear it too. That’s a promise I’ll make for the kid.” He paused for breath, thinking Sewell was going to leap down his throat, but saw, in the eyes lit by the flashlight, that the crank was at a pause. “Get on home now, Mr. Sewell. I’ll take care of the youngster. You’re making more noise than he did. I’m sure some of your neighbors haven’t appreciated that. Go on now, go home. SPD has responded to your call. Please go, sir, before there is a confrontation that needs not to happen.”
The next night, Riverside Cemetery, at the far end from the Center, against the small stream working its waters to the Father of Oceans a bare five miles away, was infiltrated by at least one hundred people, mostly young, extremely subdued, quiet, patient, at just past the hour of midnight. All had heard about the night before, about the guitar player and singer, about the noisy crank off Henshit Mountain, about the police sergeant’s claim that he had been transfixed, his whole being, by one song, one voice, for mere moments. They had come to hear, to believe, to place a value on something new. Hoping for it, looking for it, for a matrix of a new music or a new voice. Losing sleep would be worth it, or being late for work in the morning. To some a special song was important, or a new voice to capture and captivate. Before last night, it was apparent, nobody had heard of young Cavan Woodmarsh.
The night was hot and starless and Culberson’s T-shirt was tacky underarm. Out of uniform, on the other side of the stream running beside the cemetery and along the old and unused B&M railroad tracks, in a pal’s back yard on Auburn Court, Culberson and his pal were sharing the moment and a few cold beers. Occasional lights, mayhap cigarette lighters or match flares, gave evidence of the crowd, gathered in hushed testimony, their conduct unimpeachable. Culberson believed he understood why they had come.
“You tell me what you think, Hal, you have a better ear for music than me, that is, if the kid shows up at all. I might have my doubts.”
“It figures,” Hal said, a member of the local fire department and on the inside of all town events from whatever perspective, “that the crank from the hill has exerted some influence, but he sure hasn’t bothered that gang of kids over there now, though I know Nora Furbish and her husband Harry are in the mix. They walked down the Court to get there, talking about it as they passed by, and walked all around the Center end of the cemetery to get there. That means they’re interested, if only curious. But we don’t know. They’re on the edge of one element of age, like you said about the in-between-ers and how they’re either joining or leaving one or the other no matter what gear they’re in.”
“I didn’t think you’d remember that little talk of ours, Hal. And speaking about Nora, she’s always been an absolute knockout and therefore always in the mix of talk and such.”
Hal snickered. “You mean dreams count too?”
“With her, absolutely. Always has. Saw her once off a diving board, bare-ass ballicky and have never forgotten the sight. Seems a hundred years ago. Dreams count and with this new kid plunker over there too. I think he’s coming now.” He strained to look off into the heart of the cemetery, locking his eyes on small pieces of light falling upon those who had gathered. “Jeezus, Hal, that gang of kids is parting for him like the water parted for Moses. That spells more than curiosity, a kind of respect all rolled into one ball.”
Hal stared too, finding a fleck of amazement coming at him in concert. “How’d you get old crank Sewell off the kid’s back, and yours too?”
“Told him if he found himself running counter to something brand new and good, he was going to look awfully bad on that council seat he’s holding, getting free summer camp for some kids that couldn’t get it otherwise. Told him this new kid could be so connected to that kind of stuff without half trying that it’d be a shame to wreck a great opportunity.” He held a thought for a minor second and continued, “It’s as though he only operates or reacts to threat or fear.”
“Nuff said for me,” Hal responded, knocking off another beer, tipping the bottle to his pal in a sum of agreement.
Cavan Woodmarsh, about a half hour past midnight, plunked a single note on the guitar and the single note slipped into the night like a tonal comet. Instantly the dark audience was still, sitting on grass or stones, standing at total attention as if a maestro at the Pops or Symphony Hall had flicked his baton. Culberson and his pal stood rigid in Hal’s back yard, no more than one hundred and fifty feet from the granite mausoleum and the originator of the one note. Both realized they were transfixed, believed they were about to hear new magic come from the young man who had gathered the crowd in darkness, at the end of the cemetery, in a starless but warm night. Moisture sat in abeyance, and mystery, and motion … and all other sound, from every quarter of town and the universe, kept its distance.
When Culberson stared into the darkness it deepened and everything –the gathering of music lovers, the mood of the night, the mood of the town, the mood of two old pals standing in a piece of that darkness – became part of the night‘s tone. Something, Culberson said to himself, was reaching for everything the senses knew, the taste of rain, the smell of grass cut that day, the glittering quasi stars almost at eye level, the phantom hands reaching to touch and make a universal connection, the echo of the first note. The lit ends of a few cigarettes showed how well they could replace the stars long hidden by thick clouds promising showers in the hot night, as if a matter of combustion waited its peril.
From the façade of the mausoleum, like shivering tonal work at a symphonic hall, or clear as a bell at Matins, a second note rose and covered distance so rapidly one had to hold it immediately to memory or hold what it had caused or created within the mind, heart, or soul, as it fled through and past. It was an extension of the first note still holding sway, not all gone away to ether.
Rigid attention asserted itself as broad as the dark night, breaths held, belief taking place.
“Jesus, God,” Hal said and put a half bottle of beer back on the picnic table. “This kid is more than mystery. I bet I heard some of those notes the last few nights and I thought I was dreaming. Oh, the dreams we think and talk about. I recognize those notes. Dear God.” A dear, dear night, he thought, was about to come upon them.
It was then that stupid, noisy, cranky, inconsonant Sewell Grafton, unable to change his stance in spite of Sgt. Culberson’s prior and veiled threat to his reputation, once again threatened to destroy some beautiful thing as he yelled out, “No more of that frigging crap, mister. I’ll call the cops again. I’ll get them here pronto.” He spread his arms about, to encompass the gathering. “For all of you.” He started to move forward in the darkness, bare bulbs of streetlights soft as false dawn touching along the base of the hill. He had penetrated the edge of the gathering, knowing he was in the wide plot of the Stockman family, which had an early and steady impact on the town, had once owned the entire hill he lived on.
Disgraceful.
Grafton’s activities, as well as Cavan Woodmarsh’s, had obviously made the rounds of town. A flutter of noise rose in the cemetery, a very minor disturbance, casual almost, and Sewell Grafton spoke no more. Two very strong young men sat him down between them on the grass of Harland Stockman’s grave. In the flash of a cigarette lighter the engraving would have read Harland Stockman 1890 – 1981 and Helen Stockman 1899 - . And Helen herself might still be clinging to life, perhaps on the road above the cemetery, or nearby, another of the old breed on for a new ride. The young men were also from Henshit Mountain.
One of them, in the darkness said, “I am not threatening you, mister, but I am telling you to keep quiet, listen, and I swear that tonight you will be converted from the hell that has been your life.”
“You’ve got no right to do this to me, like that singer has no right to sing at this time of night.”
“Don’t be stupid, Mr. Grafton. Look around you. See the crowd. You’d recognize a lot of faces, people you’ve known or at least been aware of for a long time.”
“I don’t need to be curried by you and a crowd of Hippies. I speak my own mind. You can’t take that away from me.”
“I can do that very easily, Mr. Grafton.”
“How?”
“By telling people, including you, what your wife had to say about you the day she died. With her last breath, sir, her last breath. I could yell it out now so the whole town would know, not just a few of us off Henshit Mountain.”
Sewell Grafton, seeing his life spinning before him in a dizzying approach, carrying everything with it… the dread moments of meanness, the harnessed cruelty that had blossomed in him on too many occasions, the touch of flesh his hands and knuckles distinctly remembered, sat down atop Harland Stockman’s final home, as though he had fainted. The heat touched his face, came up through his buttocks, and there was a momentary acceptance of Hell at hand.
And, in the assured silence, in the heavy heat and the heavy darkness, off the façade of the granite mausoleum in some perfection of acoustic clarity, came the voice of the tall, lean young singer with the midnight voice many singers yearn and covet for years on end,
for full lifetimes.
Halleluiah, he let free, Haaa laaaay looo yaaah. Nobody in the large gathering breathed for long moments, open-mouthed though, waiting more, absorbing what had come at them, Haaa laaaay looo yaaah., the tone of it, the reach of it, the grace of it, the sincere and soaring clarity of his voice and the words, be they words or inner expressions of a thousand granite or marble stone faces and the utter and total acceptance the cemetery carried from that moment on.
Some people there that night, in later days, telling of the experience, said, “Cavan started at the back end of the song and brought us up to creation, back to front, up to creation itself, took us to the beginning, his beginning, and we were knowing it at the same moment. We lived his dream, and we ushered him into the world, the phantom grasp on phantom souls.”
Amen, they could have said: “We knew we had to share him, from that moment on.”
_________________________
Bio note: Sheehan served in Korea, 1951 and lives in Saugus, MA. Books are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans, Press 53; A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening, Pocol Press. He has 18 Pushcart nominations, in Dzanc Best of the Web 2009, and 260 stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. His newest book, from Milspeak Publishers, is Korean Echoes, 2011. Another eBook, The Westering, will be issued shortly by them and will be followed by at least 8 more. His work is in/coming in Ocean Magazine, Nervous Breakdown, Stone Hobo, Faith-Hope-Fiction, Canary, Subtle Tea, Red Dirt Review, Nontrue, Danse Macabre, Nashwaak Review, and Qarrtsiluni.
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