Fullness of Time

Praise for William Kloefkorn’s This Death By Drowning “An elegant, moving little book . . . that reflects the author’s fascination and intense personal involvement with waters big and small, from farm ponds to the South Pacific. The author writes of his youthful wonder at the family’s cistern; of watching his grandmother at a washtub in the backyard, ‘washing her long white hair in rainwater’; of his and a paraplegic friend’s baptism in Shannon’s Creek, performed by a preacher whose sermons were like ‘Kansas waterways, neither deep nor wide.’ Water drenches these pages, written about in a style that both immerses and quenches.”—Kirkus Reviews “Is there any human corner left to illuminate? To surprise? Absolutely, as these wondrous recollections by poet Kloefkorn prove. This slim volume is filled with provocative perceptions garnered from daily life. . . . After the last line, readers will turn back to page one and start again, slowly.”—Publishers Weekly “Kloefkorn writes prose with pensive grace, one thought flowing into another as water flows into rivers, lakes, and oceans that become his metaphors for the world’s connectedness. This is a quirky, funny, moving memoir full of unforgettable characters; readers will not have seen its like before and shouldn’t expect to again.”—Library Journal “Sad, humorous, whimsical, sentimental, and of course poetic, these memoirs celebrate the profundity of life and death.”—Booklist “Kloefkorn is a perfect blend of poet, raconteur, and scholar. He provides breathtaking descriptions of nature, and he quotes fascinating authorities on lands and rivers, including John Neihardt, pioneer James Evans, Mark Twain, and many more. This Death by Drowning, like Kloefkorn’s poetry—perhaps like all poetry—is about the price of wonder. Wonder at nature, wonder at fate, and wonder—finally, luminously—at the miraculous depths and tributaries of the human soul.”—Brent Spencer, Nebraska Life “Kloefkorn’s style comes not only from long attention to the world, but from sustained immersion in the art and craft of language, and from granting himself the freedom to write at length and in depth about the people and places he cares about most. Such work can rise toward sublime visions of the interconnections of people and place.”—Jeff Gundy, Georgia Review

Praise for Kloefkorn’s Restoring the Burnt Child “All writers can grasp—and all readers enjoy—Kloefkorn’s vivid recreations of a way of life going fast if not already gone, his talent for seizing the most luminous detail of our gray lives, his love of language, and his feel for the American idiom. . . . As history both personal and communal, and as performance both written and oral, this book gives us [Kloefkorn] at his best.” —David R. Pichaske, Great Plains Quarterly “Imagine the renegade, 14-year-old spirit of Huck Finn in the massive body of Merlin Olsen, gentlest of the giants who were the L.A. Rams’ legendary ‘Fearsome Foursome,’ and you’ve got Bill Kloefkorn. Or as close as you can get.” —Harold E. Hall, Lincoln (NE) Journal Star “A marvelous book, full of the intensity and grittiness of language drawn from rocky Kansas fields and from great literature. Kloefkorn’s voice provides a perspective unlike any other I’ve read, one that has had me reading out loud, saying, ‘Listen to this.’”—Peggy Shumaker, author of Just Breathe Normally “A fun, interesting, and compelling read, combining the best of fiction writing with the intimacy and material of memoir.”—Dianne Nelson Oberhansly, author of A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Praise for Kloefkorn’s At Home on This Moveable Earth “Kloefkorn’s sonorous prose and poetic sensibilities heighten the reader’s perception of life . . . the book’s structure is carefully wrought; he uses counterpoint, flashbacks, shifting points of view and variations on themes to shape his memoir. Kloefkorn is a consummate storyteller with a keen eye and a gift for language that is beautiful in its simplicity.” —Publishers Weekly “Richly evocative. . . . With deftly wrought imagery so powerful and yet so poetic, this son of the plains and prairie gentles the reader back to days that nostalgia dictates must be remembered as sweetly unadorned. And yet, as Kloefkorn so cogently illustrates, no time is truly simple, and the transition from innocence to knowledge can be both magical and frightening. It takes a rare and gifted writer to seamlessly transport the reader through the devastating fury of rumbling tornadoes and the delectable freshness of romantic awakenings. Kloefkorn is just such a writer, and the journey is a lyrical experience.”—Booklist

“Kloefkorn has a marvelous prose style that manages to be both plainspoken and fluid, with frequent dollops of humor.”—Lori D. Kranz, Bloomsbury Review “This author knows how to make the best of his experience, ordinary and plain and apparently dull or not. . . . The simple fact of the matter is that Kloefkorn is a writer who makes nearly anything, no matter how seemingly boring, lively and engaging.”—G. C., Sewanee Review “Ultimately this book, like Kloefkorn’s previous memoirs This Death by Drowning (1995) and Restoring the Burnt Child (2003), is a textbook for writers. Its eleven exemplary monologues jump cut delightfully through time while remaining grounded in place and theme: one good story after another. . . . Kloefkorn belongs in the company of Twain and Frost because he gets the authentic American tone of voice in his work. The joy of his poetry and of this memoir is his exploration of the familiar territory of our language and our personal and collective history.”—David R. Pichaske, Great Plains Quarterly “What a joy to swoop with Bill Kloefkorn through circles of memory. He leads us down into the soil of the cellar so that we might soar into the sublime tower of the tornado of his recollection.”—Linda Hasselstrom, author of Between Grass and Sky “Completely delightful and yet deeply thought-provoking. The voice of these essays is so personable, so easy, so intelligent, and at the same time so humble, that I felt at times as if I was listening to these essays rather than reading them.” —Kent Meyers, the author of The Work of Wolves

Breathing in the Fullness of Time

Breathing in the Fullness

University of Nebraska Press : Lincoln and London

of Time

William Kloefkorn

Chapter 8 originally appeared in Ascent 30, no. 1 (Fall 2006) under the title “The Undiminished Gift of Consolation.” Chapter 7, under the title “At Home in the Garden of the Gods,” first appeared in the South Dakota Review 43, no. 4 (Winter 2005). Chapter 11 is reprinted from the Chrysalis Reader Passages: Timeless Voyages of Spirit 13 (2006, West Chester pa: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers), where it appeared as “At Home Wherever Home Is.” Chapter 9, under the title “A Place between Sky and Earth,” first appeared in the Sewanee Review (Summer 2008). My special thanks to the editors of these periodicals. Publication of this volume was assisted by The Virginia Faulkner Fund, established in memory of Virginia Faulkner, editor in chief of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kloefkorn, William. Breathing in the fullness of time / William Kloefkorn. p. cm. isbn 978-0-8032-1932-8 (cl.: alk. paper) 1. Kloefkorn, William. 2. Poets, American—20th century— Biography. 3. Poets, American—Homes and haunts—Nebraska. 4. Kloefkorn, William—Family. 5. Nebraska—Biography. i. Title. ps3561.l626z466 2009 813´.54 dc22 2008038781 Set in Minion by Kim Essman. Designed by Joel Gehringer.

For the following: Eloise Ann, Terry Lynn, John Charles, Tracy Ann, Robert Karl, Bernadine Frances, and Johnny Lee. And in memory of these: Katie Marie and Ralph Leroy, Gladys Elnora and Alva Foil.

Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air In his own ground. — Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude”

Breathing in the Fullness of Time

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All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies. — James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”

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Desire. Without it, you might as well pack up and go home. Fran Welch, Coach Welch, had said this when the season began, then repeated it at frequent but irregular intervals as the season moved along. By now, I had decided I no longer wanted to play college football. So I turned in my gear and went home, but not before Coach Welch gave me an asschewing I’ll not live long enough to forget. Before the chewing began, though, he wanted to know why in the name of Christ I was quitting. No desire, I said. I have lost my desire to play football. Coach, sitting behind a wooden desk in his small office at the stadium, grimaced, as if someone had struck him in the solar plexus with a closed fist. The grimace revealed two rows of yellowing teeth. I remember thinking that those teeth appeared to be aching to bite something. No desire, he said. Yes, sir, I said. I have lost my desire to play football. Coach removed his ball cap and wiped his forehead with the palm of his right hand. I was certain that the practice I had skipped that Monday afternoon had been a tough one; two days earlier the Emporia State Hornets had beaten a stubborn band of Gorillas on their home field, but the win had been sloppy. And Coach Welch did not approve of sloppiness. I could envision the entire nest of Hornets doing more wind sprints than I cared to imagine. But because my resolve to leave the team was firm, it now pleased me that I had not been one of the sprinters. No desire, Coach said again. No goddamn desire. Yes, sir, I said. No desire. It was the truth. To this day I do not know what prompted my loss 3

of desire, but I know absolutely that it vanished almost entirely—not overnight, but over a series of nights during which I had discussed my dilemma with one of my roommates, Gene Carpenter, who like me had believed at the outset that playing college football would be pretty much the same as playing the game in high school, and who, as it turned out, was also experiencing a loss of desire. Then let’s stop talking about it and turn in our gear, Gene said. I’m ready if you are. Gene was a year older than I. I had known him for as long as I could remember. We played on the same football team, the Attica High School Bulldogs. He was the third son of a railroad foreman, and probably because he was several years younger than his brothers, and because his parents could afford it, he had been pampered. After graduating from Attica High, he enrolled at the University of Kansas, where Acacia—a fraternity maybe as disreputable as the one I would join at Emporia State—took its toll. He finished his freshman year, then in a moment of clear-eyed sobriety decided not to return to Lawrence—elected instead to join me and our mutual friend, Toar Grant, at Emporia. Gene was blond and congenial, with a round, dimpled face and teeth that, free of tobacco stains, would have made the most fastidious dentist justifiably proud. He was confident and competitive and good-natured and always certain that his next change of mind would be the one to take him wherever he was destined to go. He then would commit himself to the newest change until another one came along, whereupon he would commit himself anew. I’m ready, I said. Gene grinned and lit a cigarette. He was sitting at his desk in our modest, second-story sunroom, his bare feet, crossed at the ankles, resting on the top of the desk. I was sitting on the edge of my narrow bed. The room itself was wide but not very deep. Windows lined the north, south, and west walls. We paid twelve dollars each to rent the room, and what it lacked in privacy it made up for in coziness. I occupied the north one-third of the room, Toar the center portion, and Gene the south. Each of us had a desk with a chair, and each had a free-standing closet 4

near the head of the bed. It was a very difficult room to rearrange, maybe even impossible, but it was a rather easy place to despoil—not horizontally, because of the limited area, but vertically, because the room had a high ceiling. So in lieu of spreading, we piled—and piled and piled— until one of us, most likely Toar, who had been raised on a farm and knew both the pleasure and the necessity of ridding a barn or a henhouse of manure, would begin sweeping and shoveling and sorting and discarding until finally Gene and I would feel guilty enough to help; and in what seemed an interminable time, we would return the room more or less to its pre-catastrophic condition. We can skip practice tomorrow, Gene said, then when practice is over and everyone is gone, we can show up and tell Coach Welch we’re quitting. What do you think the old turd will say? He’ll want to know why. He’ll tell us to reconsider. Gene giggled. He’ll do a lot more than that. He’ll rip us a new one. I’m betting he’ll call us some names we’ve never been called before. I tried to imagine what some of these names might be, but because I had never heard them I could not call them up. Yet I knew that Carpenter was right. The old turd’s off-the-field vocabulary was probably unlimited. Carpenter finished his cigarette and suggested that, to celebrate, we go see a movie. Maybe the late one, I said. I’ll be at the cafeteria until eight. I had taken a job at the cafeteria when I realized that my bank account probably would not see me through an entire term. Emporia State—Kansas State Teachers College—was not an expensive institution in the fall of 1950 (seventy-eight dollars for fifteen credit hours), but I did not have a scholarship, athletic or otherwise, and after I had purchased my books and paid the rent and bought a desk lamp and a sweatshirt with Corky the Hornet on the front, and some additional necessities, it occurred to me that perhaps I should find a job. I found one soon enough—feeding dirty dishes into the maw of a steamy washer under the omnipresent eye of the cafeteria manager, Miss Helen “The Nose” Bishop. For my services I was paid a modest hourly wage augmented by free meals. 5

The second showing at the Orpheum began shortly after nine, a Technicolor rerun thriller whose title I cannot remember. Fred MacMurray was in it, and Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson. What I do remember is the absolute joy—with its first cousin, fear— that I experienced as I anticipated an existence unencumbered with the smash-mouth trappings of football. Not football per se, but football as coached by Fran Welch. And perhaps, after all, it was Coach Welch who was responsible for my lack of desire. He was indeed an old turd, his grimace so often a part of him that without it he appeared deformed. And he walked with a slouchiness that seemed to me at odds with the coaching of football, a casualness that suggested retirement more than involvement. And almost always he kept his hands in the back pockets of his trousers—not trousers, actually, but the tan pants of a football uniform he bloused at the knees. He always wore a white T-shirt with a hornet on it, and a tan baseball cap on a head that was losing its hair. In this outfit he roamed the field while his assistants, Gus Fish and Shorty Long and Keith Caywood, did almost all the coaching. Or so it seemed. Is it possible that this man was the reason I no longer had the desire to play football? The seats at the Orpheum were inordinately comfortable, plush and sensuous to the touch. I had bought a large sack of popcorn soaked in butter. I was pleasantly tired, having fed perhaps a million plates and saucers and glasses and pieces of silverware into the hissing, relentless mouth of the washer. My friend Bill Johnson removed and stacked the dishes as they emerged; he was an upperclassman, a young black student with impeccable diction and a fondness for yodeling, a skill that he would teach me, or attempt to, before the end of the semester. From time to time Helen “The Nose” Bishop materialized to oversee our work. She was tall and thin, with black eyes the size of marbles and a nose long enough to stick into everyone’s business. I liked her, though, because she had hired me without asking more than half a dozen questions. She always appeared without warning or fanfare, perhaps because she moved pretty much at the speed of light. One moment only Johnson and I at the washer. The next moment, behold! Helen “The Nose” Bishop there between us, her black marble eyes making certain nothing was amiss. 6

At eight o’clock I had removed my white soggy apron, hung it on a far wall to dry, then helped myself to whatever the customers, mostly students and faculty, had chosen not to order—ham loaf or tuna salad, most likely, and the less desirable pieces of chicken. But there were choice leavings, too, such as apple pie or chocolate cake. And always there was cold milk, whole and plentiful, milk I swear as fulfilling as the milk I had coaxed from the udders of a long line of Jersey cows in south-central Kansas. Carpenter had his own sack of buttered popcorn, and he was digging into it with an energy worthy of the position he was about to retire from, that of middle linebacker. He was resting one shoe atop the unoccupied seat in front of him. There was a pretty good crowd at the movie, but no one was sitting in the seats next to us, so we had plenty of room to relax and extend our arms; to give ourselves even more freedom, we had left one seat empty between us. When it comes to flat-out, unadulterated comfort, there are few places to equal a movie theater. Something akin to the spiritual takes place when the lights dim and the curtains part and the fuzziness that was the picture behind the curtains becomes the images of scenes so sharply focused and so beautifully colored that you wonder whether the cameraman has performed some trick to make reality more real than in fact it is. You spend the first few minutes settling in, rearranging yourself in the plush seat, and adjusting your elbows to the armrests so that you can handle the popcorn with a minimum of inconvenience. If you are not soon far removed from whatever had bothered you before you entered the theater’s inner sanctum, the cartoon completes the removal for you—and, following that, the previews of coming attractions and a newsreel that depicts a world of characters and events almost as surreal as Tom and Jerry or Elmer Fudd. Once in a while, in spite of your involvement in the action before you, or maybe at times because of it, you think of something you’d rather not think of—Coach Welch, say, standing on the sideline with his hands in his hip pockets, shouting something to Coach Fish or Coach Long who in turn will shout something at you, shout it into the hole of your helmet until your ear rings like a 7

church bell—and the thought causes your blood to freeze and your head to spin, until you remind yourself that in less than twenty-four hours such bullshit will be always and forever behind you, at which moment you lapse into a calmness even more serene than the one you enjoyed before Welch and his henchmen popped like little demons into your consciousness. Meanwhile, Fred MacMurray or his equivalent moves at a steady pace to reassure Barbara Stanwyck or her equivalent that as long as she stays with him she’ll be perfectly safe, and you nurse the buttered popcorn now one fluffy kernel at a time, hoping to make it last until injustice has run its course and is punished, and innocence is rewarded with a kiss.  Carpenter coughed all night and was still coughing when I left for my eight o’clock class. When I returned he was sitting at his desk, wearing a red plaid robe and smoking a cigarette. His cherubic face was flushed, his eyes rheumy. He exhaled, sending a shaft of smoke almost to the edge of Toar Grant’s bed, which was empty, Toar having left for work at Reeble’s grocery. Carpenter grinned. I’m too sick to quit football today, he said. You can do it for me. The truth is this: I had decided to drop football, come hell or high water—or, now, my buddy’s illness. So I did not waver when Gene delivered his prognosis. I instead told him that I would be more than willing to do his quitting for him. And here, while I’m at it, is another truth: I did not altogether dislike Coach Welch, certainly not enough to blame him entirely for my loss of desire. His temperament was a factor, but not the only one. And if another truth must be told, let it be told now: There were times when I admired the old turd, times when his pugnacious approach to the coaching of football revealed a wryness and a sense of theater worthy, almost, of Edward G. Robinson or Fred MacMurray. Case in point: Billy Freeman and the significance of desire. Billy Freeman was a sophomore who at first glance did not appear to be much of a football player. Too short, too baby-faced. And much too good-natured. To be a legitimate football player, one must not resemble too closely an altar boy which, from any angle you looked at him, Billy 8

certainly did. At the same time, he had been impressively assembled; neither slight nor chunky, he was beautifully proportioned, an Adonis, really, someone to admire but not fear. At our first squad meeting I took special note of Billy Freeman; I was wanting to find someone that I might feel equal or even superior to, a feeling that in turn would give me confidence. I was a small-town greenhorn who needed any type of assurance he could muster, and Freeman gave me an opening. Many of the other players, on the other hand, deflated my ambitions; some were behemoths, while others resembled the specimen on the back of so many of the comic books I read, the one who, as he strolled the beach, made a practice of kicking sand in the faces of his scrawny victims. But Billy Freeman—well, he was neither a behemoth nor a Charles Atlas. He appeared to be a well-formed boy among an assortment of ruggedly chiseled men. We had checked out our gear and placed it into our assigned lockers, whereupon we assembled in the squad room for introductions and what Coach Fish, in his gravelly voice, called “an overview of the system.” A major segment of the overview was the showing of a game film. The sixteen millimeter projector sat on a metal stand near the back of the room, its operator a good-looking young man who could tape ankles and knees as well as run a projector. The following week I’d see him out on the playing field, kicking a football, and watching it sail sometimes more than sixty yards. I’d ask one of the upperclassmen why he wasn’t a member of the team. Too valuable as a track man, he’ll say. That’s Freddie Wilson, the best fucking high hurdler on the planet. Can’t take any chances with those incredible legs. The introductions that preceded the showing of the film had been alternately long and short. Coach Fish, we learned, was to handle the offensive line, and for almost half an hour he told us what he expected it to accomplish and how he expected the line to carry out its job. Coach Fish’s gravelly voice was complemented by a weathered face redder, as one of the seniors later would phrase it, than a baboon’s ass, and his large eyes seemed on the brink of popping out of his head. To clarify 9

each of his major points, he drew Xs and Os on a chalkboard. It was difficult for me to follow his scribblings because, for one thing, they were so plentiful and, for another, I was at once charmed and distracted by his gravelly voice. It was a deep voice, and Coach Fish with every word seemed to be trying to clear it, but without success. I found myself wanting to help him by clearing my own throat, which I did a couple of times, as quietly as I could, but my sympathetic attempts did nothing to help him out. Eventually, though, once I realized that the sounds erupting from his throat were beyond modifying, I began to pay less attention to them and more attention to the Xs and Os on the chalkboard. Next on the docket was Coach Shorty Long, who, having stood as high as he could on the toes of his white tennis shoes to clear the chalkboard, spent no more than five minutes emphasizing the importance of special teams. As he did this he held the eraser in his left hand and a small piece of white chalk in his right. To underscore a word or a sentence he would point either the eraser or the stub of chalk at one of the players and, pretending it was a weapon, would shoot the player squarely between his eyes, Pow! being the exclamation mark to punctuate his point. From the moment I saw Coach Long I admired and trusted him, and I believe my response was that of every other player in the room. Genuinely free of pretension, he had a face you needed to see to believe. It wasn’t homely, exactly, or ugly. It was instead slightly off-balance, the nose crooked, eyebrows thickly joined, both ears large and leafy, and not level, the left one a good inch lower than the right; and he seemed to have difficulty keeping both eyes, which were small and blue, focused. His speeches probably were brief because his lexicon was not very extensive, and he did not mince those few words he had at his disposal. He was an intense, frisky man wholly incapable of being disliked. Even when he chided you, you loved him. Popcorn, he’d say to me when I bungled a pulling movement from my position at left guard to lead the ball carrier over right tackle, you couldn’t hit a hole even if it had hair around it. His remarks might be crude, if not downright vulgar, at times, but they were always on the mark. I would come to respect him even more the following semester when 10

I’d have him as my boxing coach. Everyone who graduated from Emporia State was required to have a minimum of four credit hours in physical education, so to fulfill one-fourth of this requirement I enrolled in Fundamentals of Boxing. Why not? I had never boxed before, and I might find the new experience exhilarating. And, too, the course would be taught by Coach Shorty Long. Here is the scene: a midsized room on the second floor of a red brick building whose gymnasium served as the location for each semester’s madhouse enrollment proceedings. Most of the wood floor is covered with a mat used for the class, Fundamentals of Wrestling. Two large punching bags, the “heavies,” hang from the ceiling, while three smaller bags, the so-called speed bags, used for conditioning and timing, are affixed to wooden overhangs on apparatuses with metal platforms. Two windows are at the back of the room, but they are always firmly shut, which means that the air smells thickly of sweat socks, stagnation, and human exertion. There are no chairs. Here are the players: fourteen male students, each wearing black shorts and a gold Corky the Hornet T-shirt, white socks, and tennis shoes of several different colors, and one instructor, Coach Shorty Long, who will meet his three o’clock class consistently five minutes late each Monday and Wednesday afternoon. On the first day of class Coach Long appears with a clipboard in his right hand. He is wearing black tennis shoes, a gold Corky the Hornet T-shirt, and gray sweatpants gathered at the ankles. His hair is a mid-1940’s flattop. I am surprised to see that he is wearing glasses. He never had them on during the previous semester on the gridiron. Shorty is all business. He takes the class roll, asking each student where he went to high school and why he is taking Fundamentals of Boxing. Then very matter-of-factly he tells us to sit down on the floor and listen up. He has a lecture to deliver, he says, and he wants anyone who doesn’t care to give him his full attention to get the hell out right now and not bother to shut the door behind him. No one leaves. Good, Coach Long says. Now listen up. 11

We listen, our heads tilted slightly back to see clearly the face of the lecturer. Almost as if responding to our staring, Coach Long points a finger at his face and asks whether any of us has ever seen such a pitiful mess. Anyone? Hah? Look at this nose, he says, pointing, anyone ever seen a disaster like this one? Hah? And these ears, he says, pointing, you know what these ears are? Hah? I’ll tell you. They’re cauliflowers, you beautiful shitbirds, that’s what they are. Cauliflowers, fresh from the garden of. . . . We learn that once upon a time Coach Long had been a pretty fair amateur boxer, good enough almost to turn pro, but after suffering some knockdowns and a few knockouts, all of them delivered by one of the most lethal weapons ever devised by man or god—it’s called the human fist—he hung up his gloves and resorted to the coaching of football. You want your face to look like this? You want your buddy’s face to look like this? Of course not. All you shitbirds have faces I’d sell my mother into slavery to have. Hah? So all right, let’s keep them that way. Now listen up, he says, then insists that if he ever sees one of us hitting someone else in the face, gloves on or off, he will personally kick that sorry individual’s ass up somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder blades, a threat that pleases me because it is one I had heard many times back home in the pool hall and the drugstore and the barber shop. Any questions? Someone wants to know what we are going to do in class if we aren’t going to box. Shorty smiles. He probably knows what some of us are thinking— that we enrolled in the class to become future boxing champions of the world, a Joe Louis, maybe, or a Rocky Marciano. Now here we are sitting on the floor listening to a has-been with a lopsided nose and cauliflower ears telling us not to hit one another. Is this an introduction to boxing or a Sunday school class? We’ll learn some moves, Coach Long says. And if we learn them well enough, we’ll put on the headgear and do some basic sparring. But mostly we’ll hit the heavy bag (he points with the clipboard toward one of the giant bags hanging from the ceiling), and we’ll learn to hit the 12

others, the little ones on the swivels (he nods at one of the speed bags at his right) until they rat-a-tat-tat like machine guns. He stops suddenly and looks at me, and just as suddenly I realize that, as the sissy who left the football team the semester before, I am probably the only member of the class he recognizes. I try to make myself disappear, but the effort doesn’t work. Behind the glasses, his little blue eyes, perfectly clear, stare directly at me. Popcorn, he says, stand up and show the others how it’s done. How it’s done? He must be joking. But he isn’t. He is serious. There is the trace of a grin on his lips. I stand and with Coach Long’s silent encouragement I walk to the nearest apparatus and confront the bag dangling from its swivel. The bag is light brown with Rawlings printed in black around its lower, and larger, end. Pretend it’s a scrotum containing the balls of the one you hate the most, Coach says. He says it flatly and mechanically, as if reciting a line from an X-rated melodrama. But take it easy on the poor bastard at first, until you get the hang of it. Then you can let loose. The hang of it? Until I get the hang of it? I address the tan bag, my fists raised, then with the right one I give my enemy’s scrotum a punch that is maybe stronger than Coach had suggested. And the “poor bastard,” apparently not aware that it is neither poor nor a bastard, responds by smacking the wooden overhead from which it is suspended half a dozen times before I am prepared to strike it again. I wait, then, until the bag hangs more or less limp, then hit it once more, this time with my left fist. And again the bag moves too quickly for me to make contact. I lower my fists to my sides. I feel giddy. Not as easy as it looks, is it, Coach says. Here, he says, move over. The bag appears to be a trifle high for Shorty Long, but Coach compensates by raising himself until he is almost standing on his toes. Before I can seat myself, a virtual machine gun erupts, and with my classmates I watch slack-jawed as the little guy with the misdirected nose and the offkilter ears rat-a-tats the swivel bag with a swiftness so precise I can only mention, not describe, it. He performs for less than a minute, working the bag not only with his fists, but once in a while with an elbow, and 13

suddenly he seems larger—more muscular, certainly, and perhaps an inch or so taller—than in fact he is. All you shitbirds have faces I’d sell my mother into slavery to have. Well, Mother of Shorty, you can stop worrying. At the moment your son is handsome.  The final assistant to be introduced was the one who’d be coaching the running backs and special teams. Keith Caywood. He was the youngest of the three assistants, and he talked to us calmly and softly, almost confidentially. Let me tell you a secret, gentlemen—if we are to win games this fall, we must outscore our opponents. Do you hear me? And here’s another secret: To do this we will need running backs who know how to block as well as how to run, and special teams that are fearless with their tackling. These are our little secrets, gentlemen. Do you hear me? Do you understand? We nodded. We heard him, certainly, and the bond of intimacy he created as he shared his secrets convinced us that we understood. He was a graduate of Emporia State, loyal and committed and still agile and strong enough to demonstrate whatever it was he wanted us to learn— qualities we’d come to appreciate later, after we had donned the pads and the head-knocking began. Coach Welch, of course, concluded this opening session. Hands in his hip pockets, on his face a slight grimace ready at the least provocation to erupt into a full-blown one, he reviewed what his assistants had said, then told the projectionist to roll the film. He removed one hand from its pocket, then grabbed a pointer half the length of a pool cue and used it to highlight a player or a formation or whatever else he wanted to emphasize. We were watching a game played the season before, a squeaker that the Hornets lost to the Washburn Ichabods. The film was in black and white, grainy much of the time, and Wilson—“the best fucking high hurdler on the planet”—followed Coach Welch’s instructions as though he were reading the old man’s mind. Early in the viewing, after several rewinds and slow-motions, Coach signaled Freddie to stop the film; he wanted us to see what Number 63 was doing. 14

You see what Number 63 is doing? asked Coach Welch. The smaller tip of his pointer was resting on the sternum of Number 63, as if poised to impale him. Number 63 was standing with his hands at his sides as an opposing player with a football cradled in his arms rushed past him. Number 63 is watching a football game, Coach Welch intoned. Number 63 has the best goddamned seat in the house. Coach removed the point of his stick from the sternum of Number 63; then, stretching his neck and scanning the squad as if it were a multitude, he asked, Is Number 63 in the house? If so, would Number 63 please stand up and be recognized? After a significant time, during which Coach Welch manufactured a grin, a large young man with a boyish face stood up. Meet Number 63, Coach said. Some of you know him, some of you don’t. Someone clapped, and the rest followed. Number 63 blushed. When Coach Welch nodded, Number 63 sat down. Now, back up the film, Coach said. Wilson ran the film in reverse; Hornets and Ichabods scurried backward like demented robots until Wilson, at Coach’s signal, stopped them. Now take her forward, Coach Welch said. We watched the footage we had seen before, and the film had not gone very far into new territory when Coach asked it to be reversed. He said he wanted us to see just one more time the unparalleled inactivity of Number 63. Wilson found the desired frame and froze it. Coach, still holding the pointer, scanned his congregation until his eyes settled not on Number 63, but on Billy Freeman, the smallest man on the squad, the one I thought I might have a chance to outshine. Mr. Freeman, said Coach Welch, please stand up. Billy stood. Yes, he was indeed the baby of the bunch, his smile wide with charm and innocence, his face so dimpled and round you were tempted to call him pretty. Now, Mr. Freeman, Coach said, answer this question: What is the most important attribute a football player can possess? 15

Without hesitating, Billy Freeman responded. Desire, he said. And the second most important attribute? Dee-sire! And the third? Deee-sirrre! Coach Welch, so pleased that no trace of a grimace now marked his countenance, smiled the smile of the totally gratified mentor. Freeman, an impish grin on his pretty face, sat down. Did all of you hear what Mr. Freeman said? asked Coach. There was a mumbling. That’s what I thought, Coach said, his smile fading. Mr. Freeman? Billy stood. Coach repeated the questions, and Billy, dutiful as a sunrise, answered them: Desire. Dee-sire! Deee-sirrre! Did all of you hear Mr. Freeman’s answers? asked Coach. There was a clamoring, ending with Desire. Dee-sire! Deee-sirrre! What I did not know was that this was one of Coach Welch’s rituals, one that during the course of the season he would repeat whenever he deemed the moment ripe, occasionally on the field, more often during a chalk talk or a pre-game pep talk. Mr. Freeman, please stand up. Now, Mr. Freeman, answer this question . . . , and so on, the benediction always the escalating chant: Desire. Dee-sire! Deee-sirrre! Something else I did not know was that Mr. Freeman was one hell of a football player, a dynamo with blue eyes and dimples. His energy, his toughness, his unerring instinct for the ball—these made him the most tenacious, elusive, down-and-dirty little shitass that pound for pound I have ever seen on a football field. It is strange, but something happens to some football players when they don the jockstrap and the helmet and the pads. They become someone else, an identity I believe they are not altogether aware of. One of our tight ends, for example—Rich Sanger— could sprint faster with his pads on than with them off, and I believe the reason was that, with the pads on, he became someone else, and this someone, whoever it was, was simply faster than Rich Sanger. Billy Freeman was such a player. Only when he was dressed in street clothes did I ever have a chance to outshine him. 16

 Coach Welch, as I told him about my lack of desire, seemed confident that I was not serious. And if you are serious, he said, then you should very seriously reconsider. Right now. This minute. On the spot. No, sir, I said. I have already reconsidered. Here. In my right hand, which I was hiding behind my back, was my copy of the official playbook, a volume I had been given at the end of our first “overview” session, a thick compilation of plays and formations that Coach Caywood had told us to study as diligently as we studied biology or business or sociology or any other subject. Lose it, he said, and you had better give your heart to Jesus, because. . . . I placed the playbook on Coach’s desk. He looked at it for a long time, as if it were a messenger conveying information that needed to be decoded to be understood. When he looked up I could see in his eyes that he was now truly convinced I was serious. Your buddy Carpenter, he said. He quitting, too? Yes, sir, I said. He isn’t feeling very good. He’ll probably be in to see you tomorrow. There was a long pause. Coach Welch was not going to let me off the hook until I had done some wriggling. Carpenter, he said finally. If he had any guts he’d make a pretty fair country linebacker. And if you had any guts you’d maybe do at guard or tackle—in a pinch. Now tell me: Did Carpenter put you up to this? The question caught me off-guard. Carpenter in fact had planted the seed, but it was my own nourishing that had brought it into full bloom. Almost a week ago, after an especially grueling practice, Gene said that if Coach Welch didn’t play us on Saturday we should call it quits. I wasn’t sure whether he was serious; he often made decisions that I thought impulsive, but nearly always they did not involve me. When the semester began, for example, he was certain he wanted to major in business. Before the drop-add period ended, he had withdrawn from his accounting course and had substituted three credits of animal husbandry. 17

Animal husbandry? I said. What’s animal husbandry? He explained, more or less, then said, I’ll tell you what. I might even make it my major. I had nothing at all against animal husbandry, whatever it was, but Carpenter’s interest in horses and hogs and cattle and such—“the knowledge of and concern for animals,” as he had defined it—defied all expectations. So I asked him the obvious: Why? Because my accounting course was too damn tough, Carpenter said. So I dropped it. I needed a replacement, so I shut my eyes and put my finger on animal husbandry. I like it, and the professor is terrific. Clinefelter. He’s not very old. He’s one heck of a guy. Clinefelter, I said. Clinefelter, Gene responded. He went on to talk about Professor Clinefelter and animal husbandry and the need for more animal husbandry majors, the field wide open, the job possibilities endless, until it seemed he was more interested in convincing himself than in convincing, or even enlightening, me. That was Carpenter’s way of handling his own impulsive decisions. So I hadn’t altogether disbelieved him when he suggested that we drop football—drop it, that is, if Coach Welch didn’t give us some playing time in the upcoming game with Pittsburg. We both knew that our chances of playing were slim. Each Saturday we hoped for playing time, and each Saturday, with a couple of very brief exceptions, we watched the game from the sidelines. Carpenter’s suggestion, then, if we took it seriously, was pretty much his way of saying he had had his fill of Fran Welch football. Coach Welch was waiting patiently for my response. No, sir, I said. It might have been Carpenter’s idea to start with, but the decision to quit is my own. Carpenter’s suggestion had set both of us to thinking until we considered it, if not gospel, then at least a very likely possibility. Gene had his own reasons for not wanting to continue, and I had mine. Too little time for relaxation. Too many hours at the cafeteria feeding too many dirty dishes into the washer. No possibility of driving home to see my 18

girlfriend over a weekend. Too little time to devote to my classes, one of which, Beginning French, was a daily challenge, and two of which, one a survey of American literature and the other a composition class, I found myself thoroughly and surprisingly absorbed in, and I wanted to spend more time preparing for them and less time trying to decipher Coach Caywood’s playbook. Then, too, there was the matter of ego. I was a hayseed who at the beginning believed that the bumpkin might do great things on the football field. But when I saw the other players, so many of them so physical and so dedicated, I began to waver, my desire to wane. Even Billy Freeman, that angelic little prick, outshone me. Neither Carpenter nor I saw action against the Pittsburg Gorillas. We had given our coach a final chance, and he hadn’t taken it. Wasn’t it therefore time to call it quits? Coach Welch nodded. He seemed resigned. You will regret this decision the rest of your life, he said. You know that? Yes, I said. Maybe. Your buddy, too, Coach said, and something in his voice suggested that he perceived Carpenter to be the more liable culprit. Coach Welch was one smart cookie. Well, he continued, having exhaled for some time, son of a bitch. You try to put a winning program together, and . . . . He moved then into a subdued rant, one that from time to time singled Carpenter and me out for special recognition, while at other times it generalized—the program cannot be successful without players who commit themselves to it, and so on. When the comments, or invectives, were intended specifically for me, Coach would look at me directly; when he generalized, his eyes turned away from me to look at what might have been a large audience that had gathered to learn about the potential woes of Emporia State’s football program. I was not surprised that he was angry—and disappointed. But I was surprised at the duration of the rant, and equally surprised at its subdued intensity. When Coach Welch joined his grimace to his earthy vocabulary, the 19

result was a well-modulated barrage that somewhere in the annals of ass-chewings deserves an award. I stood absorbing his language, wanting to remember its choicest segments so that I might convey them to Carpenter to prepare him for what he’d confront tomorrow or the next day or whenever his illness went away. How long I stood there can be measured only with—what? Not a watch, certainly, or a clock or a sundial. With a defective chronometer, perhaps, or with an hourglass, maybe, if it has something stuck in its throat that prevents its sand ever from falling down. Eternity, they say, has no end, but this one—ultimately—did, and it happened when Coach Welch turned again from looking at his larger audience to look at me. Get the hell out of here, he said, and I did. I was convinced at the time, and I remain convinced, that my decision to drop football was the correct one, though my timing was probably unfortunate: I should have waited until the season was over. On the other hand, I had confronted the lion in his familiar den, and I had been as honest with him as my limited courage permitted. I most certainly had not tossed any decisive wrench into the cogs of Fran Welch’s gridiron machine; his success is a matter of record, and that success did not much depend upon the minimal skills of a disillusioned yokel who had lost his desire to play football. I turned in my gear (Wilson the track star was tending the supply room), then—feeling a peculiar mix of relief and exhilaration—I went home, if by home you mean a shared sunroom on the second floor of a wood-frame house two blocks east of the campus, where I expected to find Carpenter sitting at his desk coughing and smoking a cigarette and contemplating a change of major from animal husbandry to speech or physics or manual training or, what would be most likely, child psychology.

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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it. . . . Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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On a bright, windless Sunday afternoon in late April of 1954 I found myself standing near a barbwire fence northeast of Emporia admiring one of the most beautiful and expansive scenes the Flint Hills had to offer: grasslands as far as the bewildered eye could see—short grasses, yes, but grasses rich enough in minerals and nutrients to make the landowners prosperous beyond their forefathers’ dreams. Cattle—red Angus and black, Holsteins, a scattering of Herefords—grazed the rolling hillsides, fat bovines any one of which might have served as the centerfold for Animal Husbandry Illustrated. And the sky—well, it was bluer than I had ever seen it, and the cumulus clouds to the west whiter than white. The air I was breathing cleared not only the lungs, but the mind. Behind me sat a green, 1941 Ford Coupe, my brother John having signed over his half of the vehicle as a wedding gift. I was in desperate need of such a place, somewhere to be alone where I could look at a sizable chunk of creation without being told to kiss the hem of its creator’s garment. I didn’t necessarily object to paying obeisance to a higher power, but I preferred to do it in my own way, on terms that I thought might satisfy not only myself, but also the one to whom I was offering my gratitude. You must understand that when my desire to stop playing football waned, the void soon was filled with other desires; first was the urge to marry the young woman I had known for ten years and had dated for at least the latter half of that time. She and her family—mother, father, older brother, older sister, and younger sister—had moved into 23

my town, Attica, in south-central Kansas, from their farm several miles northwest of town, when I was in the fifth grade. She was a small girl with dark hair and dark eyes, and it is possible that my affection for her was triggered one morning early in the school year when I caught sight of her upper thigh—and the lower portion of the white panties that began where my view of the upper thigh ended—as she was leaning over Miss Yoder’s desk to examine the workings of a large gold pocket watch. For several days we had been studying the subject of time, its various manifestations, its unwillingness to stop for either man or beast, and especially its manifold ways of being measured. For example, we had been taught how to plant sticks in our own handcrafted sandbox to construct a sundial, and we looked at maps of the sun and the moon and the constellations as our teacher attempted to explain the passing of time in terms of their juxtapositions. She spoke of time as if it were a first cousin she alternately admired and despised, and she certainly got my attention with the poem, Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in. Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in! Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me. Say I’m growing old, but add: Jenny kissed me! Now, she would say, a thin smug smile on her lips, let’s talk some more about time. She was not a young woman, Miss Yoder, but she was not old, either, old being a word I associated with my German grandmother or my paternal grandfather. She was instead a woman who seemed to me stuck in time, one who had come into this world looking pretty much as she did each morning when she greeted each of her students at the door, and one who undoubtedly would continue into eternity to look as she did on 24

each of those mornings. She was a tall woman, and stout, and she wore her reddish hair in a bun secured with several small combs. She dressed plainly, and if she applied cosmetics she did it sparingly. I admired her a lot. She seemed at home in her room, at ease with her students—though the way she held herself, her back always straight as a ruler, and the way she looked at you when she talked or when she was waiting for you to talk, suggested that she had better not be trifled with. She had a wide smile, too, when she wanted to use it, and she did so frequently. She had brought her maternal grandfather’s pocket watch to class, she said, because she wanted us to take a close look at its internal workings—movements delicate and precise, she called them, there being no room, she said, for even the tiniest miscalculation. She further explained that her grandfather had carried the watch for more than forty years. He was a railroad man, she said, and time—and timing—were crucial: one little slip, and who knows what might have happened. Bad timing on the railroad might cause all sorts of calamities: the colliding of one train into another, or the derailment of a freight carrying perhaps many tons of cargo, or of a passenger train carrying a full load of passengers. She showed us how both the face and the back of the watch could be removed by twisting them counterclockwise, showed us then the precise and delicate threads that secured them. Time. It is the stream that Henry Thoreau said he went a-fishing in, while in Leigh Hunt’s poem it is the “thief ” who enjoys putting “sweets” into its bag—among them weariness and sadness and an absence of health and wealth, but also the never-to-be-forgotten act of spontaneous affection. And it is true that, as Andrew Marvell says, we cannot make the sun stand still, yet we can make him run! Case in point: Johnny and the disposal of time. We were in my twelve-foot johnboat, my brother and I, floating serenely down a wide stretch of Nebraska’s Loup River—Wolf River, or, as the Skidi (a close relative of the Pawnee) called it, River of Small Potatoes. We ourselves were small potatoes, my brother and I, though in the short green aluminum boat, loaded as it was with tents and tent poles, sleeping bags and fishing tackle and stink bait and nightcrawlers and 25

boxes of food and cases of beer (we were one vessel in an armada of half a dozen), we perhaps appeared larger than we were, our load of gear so huge that our bodies were cramped for space. One of us—probably Johnny, sporting a white sailor cap and sitting on what we called the Loup River Icebox, a container made of plywood inside of which was a second container made of Styrofoam, inside of which were at least two six-packs of Lone Star covered with ice—noted that some of the water that constituted the river we were adrift in was moving off to port to form a narrow, well-defined channel that was cutting through an expanse of meadow that looked for all the world like paradise. Let’s take it, Johnny said, and, pushing the right oar while pulling the left (or was it the other way around?), I maneuvered the johnboat— Our Lady of the Loup—into the smaller stream. There were many such streams in the Loup River, some of them rather enticing, but we rarely took them; they most often defined one side of an island and usually became too shallow to float our boat, so we’d give the secondary current a wave while keeping Our Lady in the principal channel. But this time the stream at our left was too seductive to resist. For one thing, a lot of water was turning into it; surely there would be more than enough of it to keep the johnboat moving. For another, the stream was well contained by banks of dark soil that appeared too compacted for easy erosion. And, finally, the narrow channel was moving into an expanse of lush farmland that appeared to have no end. So where was this small, migrant stream headed? Oblivion? Could it be another river altogether, one not shown on any map? What did it have in its clear, meandering mind to do should it ever arrive—anywhere? Let’s find out, we said, and before we could change our minds we were drifting lazily in a channel that soon carried us, cargo and all, beyond sight of the River of Small Potatoes. On either side of Our Lady we could very nearly reach out and touch the dark soil of the shores. The calm was so distinct that my brother claimed he could hear birdsong from more than a county away and, after I had retired the oars and requested a beer, and settled myself on a cushion of life preserver, I’m damned if I couldn’t hear the birdsong also. Bobwhite. Oriole. Brown thrush. Jay. 26

We had not drifted long before Johnny said idyllic, and I agreed. The meadow was bristling with foliage and grasses and flowers—yellow daisies, prairie clover, wild indigo purple as anybody’s passion. And through it all Our Lady was moving so slowly, rounding each bend so lazily, that my brother, in a selfless attempt to put an end to time, removed the watch from his left wrist and dropped it into the water. Idyllic. Yes, idyllic was the perfect word to describe that experience. The situation and the setting created a mood, a feeling, of existing away from, outside of, time itself; and this mood took control of us as we watched my brother’s watch, this physical reminder of temporal struggle and existence, slip down and away into the flowing waters of the river. There we were, floating like feathers on the surface of the Loup, sublime conquerors of time. And did I then follow my brother’s example? Did I remove my own timepiece and sacrifice it to the waters? And, later, when the others in our flotilla learned of our experience, did they too give their watches in an attempt to share our mystic adventure? Or, mesmerized by my brother’s gesture, did I merely dream that my mates and I shared actively in the hypnotic happening? Regardless, Johnny’s watch did what it could: It retarded the passage of time considerably. Under a blue sky, and scarcely moving—no longer the prisoners of time—we saw what Adam and Eve must have seen before they shared the apple, and we inhaled a mingling of aromas sweet as honeysuckle. Johnny, sitting atop the Loup River Icebox, wondered if he shouldn’t be lashed to what he was sitting on; he expected at any moment, he said, to hear the singing of sirens, and he did not want to become their servant, not if subservience required him to leave his post aboard Our Lady. I think I remember grunting. The small stream took us into the meadow, then deeper, and maybe somewhere along the journey we dozed. Our only timepiece, the sun, was about to set when we saw the river we had left those seeming eons earlier: Loup River, Wolf River, River of Small Potatoes. And we were small potatoes, my brother and I, and time was small potatoes also, it perhaps having been more suspended than done away with. We drifted closer and closer toward the wide, rushing waters of the Loup, more 27

water than we remembered having left, until with an abrupt slap-slap against the starboard side of Our Lady we were moving rapidly in a current highly conscious of time.  Have I mentioned that Miss Yoder had an alto voice? She did. And I found it hypnotic. Each morning, after roll call and the flag salute, she would use that voice to start our day, would use it to read a few pages from Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. When the semester began, in early September, and she told us something about the book, and opened it then and began to read, I thought that the woman might not be entirely sane. The book was huge, as thick as a Sears catalog, and Miss Yoder had told us that she hoped to finish it by Christmas. She said this as if she believed it. I looked at my buddy Larry Prouse and watched him roll his eyes. After she had read from the book several mornings, I found myself not caring whether she finished it by Christmas—or New Year’s or Valentine’s Day or Easter or, in fact, ever. I was lost in two worlds, one of plot and the other of Miss Yoder’s incomparable alto. In one of his poems, William Butler Yeats asks, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Surely, he was thinking of Miss Yoder when he wrote that line. I simply could not distinguish plot from voice, could not imagine the chase occurring without Miss Yoder’s voice describing it. I was involved in the characters also, of course, with the good and the bad—Cora and Alice, Uncas and Magua and Major Heyward and Hawkeye and, above all, Chingachgook, whose name as pronounced by our teacher was synonymous with mystery. But without the cycle of chase and rescue, capture and chase again and once more rescue, the mammoth book, in spite of Miss Yoder’s voice, might not have retained its flavor.  To facilitate our viewing of her grandfather’s pocket watch, Miss Yoder called us in groups of four to come to the desk and observe the watch, lying facedown on the desktop. The new girl in class, Eloise Ann Baker, 28

a member of the first group, stood at the back side of the desk, the one nearest the first row of our student desks. As she stood there, high on her toes and bending over the desk, her short dress failed to cover her thighs. I saw them, and Larry saw them, too, and into the bargain we viewed also the lower portion of her white panties, and it is possible that my interest in the girl from the country began at that moment of high epiphany. In any case, it was a prolonged moment, Eloise Ann too absorbed in the delicate and precise movements of the watch to be aware that others were absorbed in noting the delicate and precise makeup of her anatomy. We were married in late January of 1953, approximately ten years after the affair of the pocket watch. Desire. Without it, Coach Welch had said, you might as well go home. At that time, in late January of 1953, we had it both ways: the desire, and likewise a home to call our own, though it was in fact a small, upstairs apartment on Constitution Street, an intimate suite we rented half a dozen blocks from Kansas State Teachers College, from which institution I intended to graduate in May of the following year. Then I would show the world what desire truly means. I would become a United States Marine.  Before the graduation that would precede the Marine Corps, I became passionate about a job I hoped to cultivate into a full-blown profession. I had a compelling desire to become a distinctive voice on the radio. I wanted to be on the air. I was not much aware of this desire until an upperclassman, Robert Monahan, approached me one morning after speech class and asked me whether I might be interested in doing some commercials for the local station, ktsw. Monahan was a large-faced, young man with sandy hair and a voice you wanted to place a mike in front of. He had visited my speech class several times to talk about the opportunities that radio offered, and it is possible that the man who taught the course, C. Richard Orr, had given him my name. 29

Let’s give it a try, Monahan said. Just come down to the station and dry-run a few commercials and we can take it from there. The offer stirred a desire I hadn’t known existed. Radio! Dry-run a few commercials! I could take it from there, take it all the way to— where? Well, fame and fortune, maybe. Who knows? Just give it a try. At ktsw I sat at a table in what was designated the “program room.” It was the largest space at the station—a table with two microphones, walls lined with blue quilts to absorb sound, several chairs. Robert Monahan adjusted one of the mikes, gave me several sheets of paper bearing typed commercials, then retired to the control room to flip and push the appropriate switches and buttons—and later to play the tape so that he could help me improve and correct whatever mistakes I might have made. I made plenty—so many, in fact, that I thought my career as a radio personality might end before it began. But Monahan did not seem to share my discouragement. Instead, he offered specific suggestions, underlined words he thought should be given more emphasis, read the material as he believed it should be read, then told me to try it again. It is a strange thing to hear your own voice on a tape for the first time. You don’t know whether to weep or applaud. You believe, as you speak into the mike, that you are doing fine, maybe even better than fine. Then you hear your voice coming back at you and you cringe as you smile; you look at Monahan, who is looking at the sheets of paper you read from, and he is nodding, and you try to figure out what the hell the nodding signifies, but the nodding, and the look on Monahan’s face, are fraught with ambiguities too rich in their multiple layers of meaning to be deciphered. So you cross your fingers and wait. Good, Monahan said, finally, except for. . . . So I read the commercials again, then again, and finally Monahan told me that we had a “keeper.” I’ll run the tape by the manager tomorrow, he said. I’m sure he’ll like it. And, lo and behold! he did, and before the week ended I had signed a contract to do not only the commercials, but also to serve as an appren30

tice to Monahan and another announcer, Tex Smiley, for one month, during which time I should learn enough, Robert said, to pass a written test that would grant me a Third Class Operator’s License; then I would be a bona fide announcer, Monahan said, one who could handle everything—switches and dials and phone jacks, and so on—in the sacred room with on the air glowing its fire-red warning over the doorway. But while on the air was a phrase that betokened mystery and intrigue, Third Class Operator’s License sounded ominous and threatening. I did not much like tests in general, and this test in particular, just thinking about it, with its probable questions about airwaves and electrical currents and other unfathomable subjects, made me almost giddy. Even so, I managed to learn how to manipulate the tangle of gizmos in the sacred room, flipping them on and plugging them in and turning them to adjust and balance sound, until I felt both confident and comfortable in the control room. ktsw was located at the southwest corner of town. Constructed of concrete blocks painted white, with an antenna that seemed remarkably high, the building was divided into five sections—the program room, where I had auditioned for the job; the control room, where Monahan had taped my efforts; a shoebox-sized reception room, where a young woman with an engaging smile answered the phone and wrote memos; a newsroom, where wire services kept us up to date on national and international happenings; and the space behind the technical equipment in the control room, where the chief engineer, Wilmer, hung out, adjusting wires and cleaning the ends of connectors and in general making certain that the station maintained the specified wattage and whatever else it took to keep its signal up and running. Wilmer was an older man, nondescript except for a wry and seldom-employed sense of humor. A slight upturn at each end of his mouth suggested that Wilmer knew something the rest of us didn’t, which was true, the rest of us having settled for Class C licenses while Wilmer’s was Class A—or A plus, probably, if the ratings went that high. You watched Wilmer go about his business, checking this and modifying that and, regardless of how high your rating as a radio personality had taken you, you knew that you did 31

not know jack shit about what most fundamentally kept you on the air, and you were humbled. Before my apprenticeship ended, I drove to Kansas City one day and passed the test for my Third Class Operator’s License. I was given a certificate and, to prove that now I was legitimate, I immediately planned to frame and hang it on the east wall of the control room beside a glossy black-and-white of Teresa Brewer. Actually, I must confess that the test had been too easy for anyone not having had a lobotomy to fail. The more stringent test had been to get to the place where the exam was administered. Locate the building in the metropolis. Find a place to park (I was driving the green Ford coupe that my wife and I now owned outright, thanks to my brother’s generosity). Locate the appropriate room inside the building. . . . Large cities are constructed, of course, just to intimidate hayseeds. But I found my way without too much difficulty, and then was encouraged and delighted by the simplicity of the test. A double victory! Buoyed by the certainty that I had passed, I rolled down the window and sailed back to Emporia—back to the cozy apartment on Constitution Street, back to the open arms of my anxious woman—without so much as a minor dip or swell to deter me. I rolled down the window to give the cattle along the way a chance to enjoy my basso profundo: I’m looking over a four-leaf clover, I sang, that I overlooked before. Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, I sang, all I want is loving you—and music, music, music. Yes indeed, already I knew where I’d hang the certificate. Not counting my wife, Teresa Brewer was the one I’d have chosen to spend the rest of my small potatoes life with.  Shortly after receiving my certificate, I was given the privilege of opening the station each weekday morning—at five-thirty. ktsw was an eighteen-hour facility, sign-off at midnight, back on at six. I would arrive at five-thirty (an ungodly hour, certainly, but the pleasure of shouldering the responsibility of opening the place all by myself counterbalanced the sleepiness), flick half a dozen switches to their on positions and, while 32

waiting for the machinery to warm up, go to the wire services in the newsroom and select and assemble the stories for the six o’clock news. Those early mornings were warm and pleasant times, even during the coldest days of winter. If I arrived promptly at five-thirty, and most mornings I did, I’d have plenty of time to flip the switches and prepare the news. The clickety-clicking of the wire services provided a pleasing sound, and an energizing one, too, suggesting that many things out there in the wide, wide world were happening; and I took pleasure in knowing that I would be one of the privileged few to announce these happenings, or some of them, to an awakening audience. One morning, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s plane went down in a remote area whose name I can’t remember, and I was the one who announced his probable death to my listeners. I was fond of Hemingway, his adventures no less than his stories, and I took his unfortunate accident personally. I aired the story somberly, then aired its follow-up the next morning with a delight I did not try to conceal: Papa had survived the crash, had told the reporters who greeted him that, no, during those moments when death seems imminent your past does not suddenly parade before you. After delivering the six o’clock news, I’d host a dj program labeled “The Bluestem Roundup,” country western mostly, Texas Jim Robertson and Lefty Frizell, and other favorites, too, such as Frankie Laine and Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers. I took requests, and one of the most popular songs was “Me and My Teddy Bear,” as sung by Little Jimmy Dickens. Its popularity amazed me. Me and my teddy bear, got no worries, got no cares. I knew that many of the listeners, probably most of them, lived on cattle ranches in the Flint Hills near Emporia, and I found it difficult to believe that they honestly enjoyed listening to such a sappy song. But they did, if requests mean anything. Me and my teddy bear, we play and play all day. Can you imagine? I tried to, tried to visualize a burly cattleman sitting in his kitchen eating ham and eggs and toast heavily doctored with sorghum as he listened to Little Jimmy Dickens sing about a teddy bear. After breakfast, then, the rancher might put on his fleece-lined mackinaw and go outside and count the number of newborn calves, or maybe help a struggling heifer with her delivery, all 33

the while humming, or perhaps singing, Me and my teddy bear, got no worries, got no cares. . . . My closest co-workers were Robert Monahan and Tex Smiley. Monahan had what might fairly be called a flat-out penchant for radio. He had the voice and the timing and the drive—let’s call it deee-sirrre—to succeed. He was a senior at Emporia State, a double major in speech and theater, and at ktsw he was looked upon as the employee most likely to rise to the top, wherever that top might be and whatever obstacles he might encounter along the way. But I saw more of Tex Smiley than of Monahan, because Robert worked the late afternoon and early evening shift. Tex, on the other hand, reported the news at eight each morning, while I was on duty, then stayed to put together a call-in show, “What’s on Your Mind?” that aired an hour after he had reported the noon news. Smiley was a tall, lank man in his late twenties who lived up to both his names; each morning he came thumping into the studio in his high-topped cowboy boots and cotton shirt with its pearl buttons, and always he was grinning like a gopher. He was a good sort of backslapper. He’d ignore the on the air sign and stride into the control room and smack me on the shoulder as I was reading a commercial or introducing “That Lucky Old Sun” or “Mule Train” or some other favorite, and he’d whisper something I couldn’t hear before he’d spin on the heel of one of his boots and leave the control room and go to the newsroom to put together the eight o’clock news. Shortly before that time, Wilmer would arrive to see that everything electronic was in order; he’d spend most of the day in that cramped space behind the equipment in the control room, puttering and adjusting and doing whatever someone with a Class A license does to keep things working. I did not go to the station on Saturdays, and my Sunday schedule was not very demanding—a situation perfectly suited to a young man who was inherently meditative and who that semester needed a lot of extra time to try to master a course that the college catalog called, in a fit of understatement, Fundamentals of Mathematics. There was no 34

“Bluestem Roundup” on Sunday, just a news report at six o’clock, followed by music not too raucous for the Sabbath, and reasonably free of noisy commercials—music from somewhere out of that vastness between country and classical. Perry Como, maybe, or Vic Damone or Nat King Cole (“Mona Lisa” was a safe one to bring out on Sunday morning), or a long-player featuring Phil Spitalney and his all-girl orchestra. Then at eight I’d plug in the Catholic Church and settle back and try again to understand the fundamentals of the Fundamentals of Mathematics. I was taking the course as a senior because I had not taken it as a freshman, and I had not taken it as a freshman because for some unaccountable reason I had done so well on my entrance exam that, according to a note from the registrar, I would not be required to enroll in that particular course. Not many joys can equal the one derived from news that you do not have to take a course in mathematics. Perhaps the words in one of the songs I sang when I believed in church say it best: It is joy unspeakable, and full of glory, and the whole has never yet been told. Surely, the writer of that hymn was inspired by the news that in heaven he would be exempt from all courses in mathematics. In any case—though the whole can never yet be told, nor the joy adequately expressed—when I read of my exemption I was ecstatic; a burden of indescribable heft had been lifted from my non-mathematical, hayseed shoulders. Imagine my dismay, then, when almost three and one half years later a letter from the registrar informed me that I had not yet taken a course in mathematics. If I did not register for such a course, said the letter, and complete the course with a passing grade, I would not be eligible for graduation in May. My dismay was laced heavily with anger—until I remembered that I had filed away the earlier letter, and that I knew precisely where the file was located, and that I could damn it all go to that file and find the letter and take it to the registrar and stick it under his official nose and ask him what the hell he meant, anyway, scaring me like this. I found the letter. I took it immediately to the registrar—along with the one that had delivered the sickening news. 35

Sir, I said, I have a problem that I believe is based upon a misunderstanding. You see. . . . I showed him both letters. He read them, nodding. He was a registrar not unlike, I suppose, thousands of others—calm, assured, patient, humorless. He had removed his glasses to read the letters. I see, he said finally. Well, he continued, what this means is that you were exempt from Fundamentals of Mathematics, but not exempt from mathematics altogether. How quickly dismay and anger can metamorphose into abject futility. You must take a course in mathematics to fulfill that section of the basic curriculum, said the registrar. Your test scores apparently were high enough to give you the option of enrolling in a higher numbered course, say Mathematics 252, which is Advanced Mathematics. Is there a level lower than abject futility? Is despair? Misery? Anguish? Mortification? Is there a hymn whose lyrics are equal to such a feeling— It’s despair unspeakable, and full of anguish, and the whole has never yet been told? He went on to say that he assumed I had not enrolled in Fundamentals of Mathematics because I saw myself as too advanced for such a basic course, which meant that I should have enrolled in an advanced course, but, because I hadn’t, I’d better do it now or face the likelihood of not graduating in May. You see, he said. . . . I saw, but I did not approve. Nor did I quibble. I folded both letters and placed them in their respective envelopes, after which I said Thank you without entirely meaning it, then hurried over to the gymnasium to enroll in Fundamentals of Mathematics.  It was a Sunday morning in late April, maybe even Easter Sunday, when I committed a sin against the Catholic Church, a sin so godawful that many of its members could not find it in their hearts to forgive me. I had not intended to commit the sin, but I was told by one especially angry Christian that a lack of intention will not get me off the hook on 36

Judgment Day. I was in the control room where, having connected to the Catholic Church, I was in a deep state of relaxation preparatory to tackling yet another bewildering assignment in Fundamentals of Mathematics. Organ music swelled the room, followed by a series of responsive readings not intelligible to a backslidden Protestant. It was difficult for me to concentrate on the math assignment (the intricacies of the casting out of nines, or some such), so I turned down the volume; from time to time I could look at the needles in front of me to make certain that the sound level of the service was neither too low nor too high. I also had cued up a Rainbow bread commercial that I’d play shortly after the close of the service. It was an ideal setup for studying, if studying must be done. I was not settled into my math problems very long when the phone rang and an angry voice at the other end of the line called me a name not in the least Christian. You prick, said the voice. What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know that Father O’Donnell is trying to deliver his homily? I was stunned. Yes, I knew that Father O’Donnell was speaking, or had been when I turned down the volume, and if what he was saying was a homily, and if homily was synonymous with sermon, or even with a prelude to a sermon—well, I guess I must have known that, too. When I turned down the volume he was beseeching his congregation to dig deeper into its pockets for several causes, none of which I had heard of. Turn the damn thing off, the voice said. Turn it off now! He said now! as if he were not speaking at the other end of a distant line, but were instead standing beside me with the jawbone of an ass poised above my head: now! Cowering, I looked at the needles. Sound levels, both volume and pitch, were fine. I looked to my right, where Teresa Brewer was hanging prettily beside my framed Third Class Operator’s License. I looked to my left, and. . . . Shitfire! There, beside me on its turntable, the Rainbow commercial was playing and, as the tone of the voice at the other end of the line had suggested, it was playing directly into Father O’Donnell’s homily: 37

Patty cake, patty cake, Rainbow man, We bake the best bread in the land . . . . Quickly, I flicked the switch to stop the commercial. Sorry, I said to the caller, who was no longer there. Then, turning to make eye contact with Teresa, I said, Now how in the hell did that happen? Not all of the world’s problems can be solved by the casting out of nines—or of demons, either, myself foremost among them. I received many calls that morning from a disgruntled multitude, those worshippers who for one reason or another were forced, or chose, to hear that Sunday’s homily by way of radio. It was good to know that the listenership of ktsw was extensive, but it was disheartening that so many of the listeners wanted to tie me to a post and leave me there to rot. True, the commercial probably did not complement the thrust of the Father’s homily, in spite of its Eucharistic overtones—Good bread, fresh bread, great is the word for Rainbow bread!—and true, also, that playing the final words of the jingle dozens of times (the needle having stuck at the end) undoubtedly prompted many of the innumerable calls. But it was not just a matter of numbers; it was also the venom spewed by so many of the callers. With the possible exception of prick, they used words borrowed, I’m sure, from the Old Testament: vile and unclean, for example, when they reached for adjectives, plague and abomination when they preferred nouns. A couple of times I begged forgiveness but was denied. One exception gave me hope. It was a bass voice that spoke slowly and shakily, suggesting that it belonged to an elderly man. He told me that the commercial enhanced the homily, that it was, in fact—so long as the Rainbow lines lasted—the best homily he had ever heard Father O’Donnell, whom he dubbed “the old bastard,” deliver. I wanted to talk with him until noon, or the Second Coming, but I had switches to flip and another church, this time Protestant, to plug into, so I thanked him profusely, and told him that I hoped the Lord would bless him richly and forever, and hung up. By the time Smiley arrived to relieve me, I was drained—and to make matters worse I had not begun to solve those pesky problems in my math book. Solve problems? 38

Holy cow, Miss Brewer, I was not a man to solve problems; I was a man to create them. And the major one hung around in the form of a question: Would the manager, who was certain to hear of my gaffe, fire me? To be honest, I did not feel much guilt or remorse for having sinned against the Church, although it had not been a pleasant experience listening to the tirades of sinned-against Christians; but my chief concern was that word of my transgression, having gone the rounds, would put a hasty finish to my career in radio. I remembered a similar lapse that had occurred on a Fulton Lewis Jr. newscast, one that ktsw and almost every other station in the universe carried. I was in the control room during that broadcast, tending the switches, when I heard someone say, with an emphasis that denoted genuine sincerity, Horse shit! Was I alone, or had someone ignored the on the air warning and slipped into the room? I looked around. No one in sight. I looked through the glass in front of me into the program room. No one. Lewis meanwhile reported—as all of us had for more than a month— on the raging battle at Dienbienphu: Colonel de Castries was calling for more food and wine to be dropped into the area where his twelve thousand–man force was hoping to repel a Communist force of more than forty thousand. And is this enemy, asked Fulton Lewis Jr., being supported by the Chinese? Here, dear listeners, is the answer: Their tracers come at the French thick as flies, all of them buzzing with a Chinese accent. But will the forces of justice—the French, the North Africans, the Foreign Legionnaires, and the right-thinking Vietnamese—prevail? Yes, because de Castries has proclaimed that he is going to kick the opposing general’s teeth in, “one by one.” I had to conclude that Horse shit! had gotten on the air unintentionally, which turned out to be correct. The following evening, the famed announcer clarified everything, explaining that his chief engineer, frustrated by a piece of uncooperative equipment, had not been able to restrain himself and thus delivered the expression which, of course, no amount of frustration could excuse. Lewis said he had summarily dismissed the engineer, though regrettably, because the man had worked for 39

him for almost two decades. Even so, the man, whose name Lewis magnanimously declined to reveal, must be held accountable—and so on. I remember feeling deeply sorry for the engineer, and equally angry with Fulton Lewis Jr. Granted, the expression in question was probably not appropriate in the context of Lewis’s news report, but it was an expression that most of Lewis’s listeners had heard, and used, before; surely they would be able to find it in their hearts, or elsewhere, to forgive the engineer and keep him on the payroll. Fulton Lewis Jr., however, did not have such an accommodating heart. Taking a road high enough to touch the underside of heaven, he sent the misbegotten engineer packing. So might I also be sent packing? Maybe. The thought chilled me, though it was late in April and the sun was bright and the sky was workshirt blue, except for some cumulus clouds off to the west. Tex Smiley had arrived a few minutes before noon, in time to rip fifteen minutes’ worth of news from the wire services. He clippety-clopped into the control room, smiling, slapped me on the shoulder, and asked whether anything of note had happened during my tenure at the mike. When I told him about the Rainbow bread miscue, he erupted, guffawing and slapping his thigh, and I cued up another commercial, one I’d play between disengaging the Protestant service and introducing Tex and his noon report. When he recovered, Smiley said that I’d likely burn in hell for my waywardness, though he doubted, he added, that the manager would fire me. Outside, I started the green Ford coupe and with both front windows down I drove to Sixth Street, then headed east. Emporia was not a large city, and there wasn’t much traffic, mostly churchgoers going home or to a restaurant for fried chicken, say, with gravy and mashed potatoes and peas or corn and maybe a slice or two of Rainbow bread, so even driving slowly I reached the city limits in only a few minutes. For some goofy reason I couldn’t get the Rainbow commercial out of my mind: Patty cake, patty cake, Rainbow man. . . . It stuck to the neocortex like a tumor, and in spite of myself, I was singing it with a subdued but Satanic glee: We bake the best bread in the land. . . . 40

A mile or so east of the city limits I turned north and drove on gravel roads for a while, knowing as I drove that I should be going home, where the girl whose thighs I had first admired in the fifth grade as she bent over the teacher’s desk, studying the intricacies of time, would be waiting for me, hungry, probably, but not wanting to fix anything until I showed up. But I continued to drive, north another mile, then east, then north again until the sights and sounds and smells of the city were replaced with the open country of the Flint Hills—rolling pasture dotted with cattle, a few trees, cottonwood and scrub oak, mostly, and barbwire fences that yielded occasionally to stretches of piled-up rock. And I thought of a poem we had discussed in one of my American literature classes, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the poem begins, “that sends the frozen ground-swell under it, / and spills the open boulders in the sun.” Well, some of the rocks here in Lyon County, Kansas, had been spilled also, maybe by ground-swells brought on by time and weather, and by animals, both higher and lower. My paternal grandfather farmed a quarter section near Cedar Vale in southeastern Kansas, where rock fences were as much the rule as the exception. Grandfather’s fences, though, were made mostly of barbwire attached to Osage orange that over the years joined the wire to become a tangle that only the most desperate bovine dare challenge. Did his fences make good neighbors? Perhaps. They gave him something to walk and repair, provided lines that were clearly drawn and that most of the time kept his few cattle and fewer horses contained. I parked the green coupe at the side of the road, at the top of the highest rise in the area, then turned off the ignition and sat waiting for the cloud of dust that had been trailing me to settle. Patty cake, patty cake, Rainbow man. . . . Dienbienphu. You hear a word often enough, pronounce it at least a dozen times each morning for a couple of months, and even though you don’t really understand most of the implications of what is going on at Dienbienphu, the word becomes as familiar as an old shoe, or an old tune: Me and my teddy bear, got no worries, got no cares. . . . Out of the car, I stood looking at a vista that those who only fly over 41

Kansas at more than thirty thousand feet cannot conceive of. Who was it that said of the Sunflower State, love a place like that, and you can be content in a garden of sand? Inhaling air so fresh I swear I could taste it, I was tempted to pray that person into the lowest corner of perdition, but the scene, and the day, were too immaculate to be wasted consecrating flicker at the expense of flame. How long did I stand there, watching and listening to the theology of open space? Half an hour? Two hours? A lifetime? I don’t honestly know. Thirty years hence, my brother would remove the watch from his wrist and drop it into the clear, slow-moving current of a stream so imbued with audacity that it left its parent channel and struck out for new territory. Fifty years hence, I’d remember this moment, this place where no doors exist to nail a message to, and where the hem of no garment calls (as if calling finally matters) to be kissed. After the moment, or the lifetime, had passed, I returned home—if by home you mean an intimate suite on the second floor of a woodframe house on Constitution Street, where the woman in my life was waiting—with a meat loaf and potatoes in the oven and a fresh-baked apple pie on the kitchen table and a generous serving of forgiveness— for her prodigal husband to return.

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If the Army and the Navy Ever look on Heaven’s scenes, They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines. — Marine Corps Hymn  Courtesy is the accepted form of politeness among civilized people. . . . Civilian rules of courtesy are generally applicable to the military life. However, military courtesy has developed certain special forms of politeness and respect which you as a Marine must be thoroughly familiar with and must practice. — Guidebook for Marines

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If Corporal Blankenship were not the most dutiful Drill Instructor ever manufactured by the United States Marine Corps, he only missed it by the skin of his teeth—which were surprisingly white when you consider the abundance of down-home language that passed through them each time he spoke. We were standing in platoon formation, more or less, and Corporal Blankenship was strutting back and forth in front of us, slapping a swagger stick against dungaree trousers that had been pressed to a farethee-well. His cover, too, had been blocked and pressed, and his black boots, inside of which trouser legs were neatly tucked and bloused, were spit-shined to an almost blinding sheen. He was short and thin, wiry, with blue marbles for eyes and a chin that at the slightest hint of disobedience would jut forward like an umpire’s whose call had been, however directly or obliquely, questioned. All of you are college jerk-offs, Corporal Blankenship said—deliberately and matter-of-factly, as if identifying an especially virulent strain of parasitic bacteria. He emphasized college, making it clear that the college jerk-off was a subgenus distinctly inferior to the jerk-off who had yet to matriculate. He told us also that we were, all of us, candidates, a word that as he pronounced it—can-di-dates, slowly and disdainfully—sounded like college jerk-off’s twin brother. Should you survive this boot camp, said our Drill Instructor, which is not likely, you can-di-dates will undergo further training to be commissioned as officers in the finest fighting machine on planet earth. Do you understand? 45

Yes, sir! What we understood was that because we had joined this Platoon Leaders Class of our own free will, we were at liberty to drop it whenever we pleased and go home, thereby subjecting ourselves to the draft. What we did not understand was the extent to which Corporal Blankenship, and his sidekick Sergeant Tecca, would test us. I am a man with four hearts, said Corporal Blankenship, three of them purple, courtesy of North Korean Gooks, and I have placed them inside the hut above the three doors you college jerk-offs will be privileged to enter. Do you understand? Yes, sir! But before you enter the hut, he continued, you must stop and genuflect. I do not give a theological shit whether you have been circumcised or baptized or sanctified, or whether your parents, if you have any, might approve of my request, which is not a request but an order: You must genuflect before you enter the sacred confines of our hut. Do you understand? We did—with the possible exception of Steckman, the candidate standing at my left—a tall, lank, good-natured, and remarkably innocent young man from Paducah, Kentucky, who giggled. Corporal Blankenship, whose ears were disproportionately large, heard the giggle. He strode to the offender and jutting out his chin wondered whether the candidate had thought he was joining not the finest fighting machine in the universe but instead a motherfucking daisy chain. I don’t know what a motherfucking daisy chain is, he said, and Corporal Blankenship looked at Candidate Steckman as if observing the last member of an endangered species. Then, smiling—though trying not to—he shook his head. College, he said, not to Steckman, but to the .50-caliber casing that served as the head of his swagger stick. Don’t they teach you jerk-offs anything in college?  Six weeks is a long time to spend with the likes of Corporal Blankenship and Sergeant Tecca, though the sergeant was not nearly as demanding 46

as the corporal. Tecca was always at the corporal’s side, quietly watching and listening, and from time to time offering something that Blankenship had forgotten—or perhaps had pretended not to remember, just to give the sergeant a chance to declare himself. No doubt they had been involved in many such boot camps, and by now had polished a series of routines that we blindly mistook for improvisations. In any case, they worked well together; it did not seem to matter to Tecca that he outranked the more dominant Blankenship, nor did it appear to bother Blankenship that he was outranked. In its own way Sergeant Tecca’s silence was as threatening as Corporal Blankenship’s harsh admonitions. What might the sergeant do if one day he could no longer contain his silence? Explode? Injure, or maul, or do away with one of the candidates with his own swagger stick, which was longer, and bigger around, than Blankenship’s? His potential for destruction seemed to me, and I believe to others, a possibility not to be toyed with. Case in point: Sergeant Tecca and the well-inspected hut. We had not enjoyed weekend liberty since training began three weeks ago, nor had we been given on-base liberty at day’s end, after evening chow. We had learned to assemble our m1s blindfolded. After the first morning, we had learned to anticipate reveille to the extent that when Corporal Blankenship conducted morning muster, we were already in formation, standing at attention with our eyes fixed straight ahead and our weapons beside us. We had learned where and how to wash and iron our dungarees, how to spit-shine our boots, how to make up our bunks with their top blankets taut as the head of a drum. We had discovered that the m1 weighs nine point five pounds, that its length, minus a bayonet, is forty-three point six inches, that its clip capacity is eight rounds, and that its average rate of aimed fire per minute is thirty rounds. I had also learned, when punished for dropping a few m1s during a stacking of arms exercise, that if you place the rifle on the backs of your hands and extend your arms and hold the nine-point-five-pound weapon in that position for more than one minute, you’ll vow never again to misjudge the position of the swivel when stacking arms. 47

Soon after the mishap with the rifles (my arms still aching from holding the weapon on my outstretched hands), we began to train for the rifle range. We practiced the four positions—standing, kneeling, sitting, prone—from which we would soon be squeezing off live rounds. This is what you will hear as you prepare to fire, Corporal Blankenship shouted. Ahlllll ready on the right! Ahlllll ready on the left! Ahlllll ready on the firing line! Watch your targets! Targets! And the targets will rise, and when the order to fire is given you will squeeze, not pull, the trigger, and if you are Can-di-date Steckman you probably will not only not score a bull’s-eye, you will not even hit the target, and a red flag will be hoisted by the Marine who is superintending that target, and he will wave the flag so that Steckman, and the rest of Fox Company, can see it. This flag is known as Maggie’s drawers, Blankenship said, and I don’t want any of you jerk-offs earning a goddamn Maggie’s drawers. And that includes you, Can-di-date Steckman! “Maggie’s drawers.” A comical name, I thought, and certainly a name for a flag that all of us, those who give a theological shit and those who don’t, will pray never to have hoisted as a shameful sign of an inept performance. Near the end of the third week Corporal Blankenship gave us some good news. Professors, he said, today we are going to prepare to celebrate one of our nation’s greatest triumphs. Would any of you knotheads happen to know what that triumph might be? We were in formation on the paved street east of the hut. Earlier, we had marched to the mess hall and had stood for thirty minutes, marking time, waiting for the chow line to dwindle. Now we were standing at attention. Yes, sir, a voice behind me shouted. It’s our triumph over the British! Corporal Blankenship smiled, his white teeth aglint against a rising sun. He stood before us with his thin legs far apart, the fingers on his right hand moving up and down the polished wood of his swagger stick. Sergeant Tecca stood off to one side, observing, the brim of his olive drab cover pulled down to shade his eyes. There was not the slightest 48

hint of a breeze. This day at Camp Upshur in Quantico, Virginia, was going to be a scorcher. The numbnut is correct, said Corporal Blankenship. And do any of you brilliant jerk-offs know what we call this day of triumph? Sir, responded several voices, mine among them, we call it the Fourth of July! Have I mentioned that my brother, Johnny, had joined the plc program with me? He did—and so, too, had two of our mutual buddies, one of whom had driven us to Quantico in his burgundy Buick with its state-of-theart Dyna-Flo transmission. His name was Benny Macha; the second was Jim Fisher. During the process of mustering in, Macha had been sent to Able Company, while Fisher and my brother and I were assigned to Fox. It hadn’t taken our dis long to label my brother and me with nicknames. Johnny’s was “Little,” a synonym for “slim.” Mine was “Big,” a euphemism for “rotund.” We call it the Fourth of July, echoed Corporal Blankenship. And to celebrate our victory over the British, we are going to enjoy on-base liberty tonight at the beer garden! Though we were in formation, standing at attention, I could hear the undercurrent of a murmur move through the ranks. Had our dis heard it also? Probably. And no doubt they were quietly pleased that their bow in the direction of mercy had so stirred the hearts of their congregation. Corporal Blankenship, with occasional nods and mutterings from Sergeant Tecca, outlined the day’s activities. We would spend the morning cleaning our rifles. After noon mess, we would scrub the hut until it sparkled, as the corporal phrased it, “like a diamond in a goat’s ass.” (I had never seen a diamond so located; I had almost never seen a diamond, either. So in order to appreciate Blankenship’s figure of speech, I’d have to use more imagination than, at the moment, I cared to generate.) And when the hut passes inspection, the corporal said, and following evening mess, he’d march us to the beer garden where, without ben49

efit of supervision, we could spend the rest of the evening until curfew at twenty-two hundred hours. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Oh, sweet Jesus! A few hours of liberty at last!  Three weeks ago, on the first day of boot camp, our dis taught us how to field-strip, then reassemble, our m1s, then how to clean our living quarters. We had been issued rifles and were gathered near the south end of our large Quonset hut, just outside the area where Blankenship and Tecca had their quarters. Bunks and metal lockers lined the east and west walls; an aisle about four feet wide ran between them. Under each lower bunk were two wooden footlockers, one for the candidate who slept in the upper bunk, the other for the one in the lower. Several unused lockers had been stacked about twenty feet from the south door to form a wall between us and the instructors’ space at that end of the hut. An off-green blanket hung across an opening in the middle of the wall, providing a door through which only those who were called dare enter. And, if called, you knew you were in big trouble. On that first day, we were crowded into the space between the makeshift wall and the first set of bunks, an area just large enough to accommodate the entire platoon, if the candidates had no objection to intimacy. There, like so many sardines, we sat cradling our rifles as Corporal Blankenship spoke in some detail about the superior firepower of the m1: chamber pressure per square inch, 50,000 pounds; muzzle velocity per second, 2,600 feet; maximum range, 3,500 yards. Then he taught us how to field-strip our weapons, step by step, piece by piece, as he disassembled his. It was not easy to find a spot to lay the pieces, but urgency, girded by fear, created spaces that we otherwise would have overlooked. I wanted to place the pieces in an orderly line, so that when the time came to assemble them I’d need only begin with the last piece and work my way back to the first. But not even urgency, or fear—or both—could provide such a luxury. Nervously, fumbling along, I stacked the parts in what 50

came to resemble a dam put together by a drunken beaver—large pieces and small, hammer spring and clip ejector atop the trigger housing, operating rod catch assembly under the clip latch and bullet guide, and on and on—until by the time Corporal Blankenship finished the strippingdown, I (and most of the others) had created mounds of metal that only a surrealist could appreciate. And now, said Corporal Blankenship, standing erect in front of the off-green blanket that served as a door to his suite, you have precisely sixty seconds to put your rifles back together. He looked at his watch. Begin! Begin? I looked at my jumble of parts. I was holding one orphaned piece in my right hand, the emptied stock of my rifle in the other. I looked around at my fellow candidates. With one exception, they, too, appeared bewildered, their fingers fumbling to fit one piece—the wrong one, most likely—to another. The exception was a candidate whose name I cannot remember, a supercilious redhead who I’ll learn later would graduate from the Citadel. This individual—I’ll borrow from Corporal Blankenship and call him Candidate Shitbird until his real name comes to mind—assembled his rifle before the minute was up, an achievement that of course endeared him only to our dis. Corporal Blankenship, having berated us for not knowing our collective asses from a hole in the ground, guided us through the process, whereupon we disassembled and assembled and disassembled until some of us could very nearly equal the skill of Candidate Shitbird. Candidate Steckman, however, consistently needed extra time, and consistently the dis granted it; the reprieve gave them the opportunity to point to Steckman as an example of what the colleges in this great country had come to. You watched Candidate Steckman sorting through the pieces of his rifle, looking for something that might fit into, or abut appropriately against, something else, Corporal Blankenship meanwhile speaking unkindly about the deficiencies of higher education, and you wondered whether the di might be onto something. On the other hand, there was Candidate Steckman, his legs in a long V before him, a mound of thing51

amajigs between them, giggling as he tried to solve the puzzle, and absolutely unwilling to desist until he had solved it, and you chalked one up for the tenacity of the human spirit, if not for the quality of higher education. We then shifted our focus from our m1s to the care and cleaning of the hut. Each of us had been issued a small galvanized bucket containing one scrub brush, several squares of cotton cloth, one small box of powdered soap, and two small metal containers of polish. Corporal Blankenship described, in elaborate detail, the use of each item. You go to the head, he said, where you fill the bucket with warm water. You return to the hut, where you mix a little soap with the water, after which you go to your knees (he nodded at Candidate Steckman, who was stifling a giggle, and who went to his knees, his bucket near his left hand). With your scrub brush in one hand, you dip its bristles into the soapy water, then proceed to scrub the deck, moving your hand always and only in small, counterclockwise circles. (I would not attempt, here or elsewhere, to repeat Corporal Blankenship’s language precisely as he spoke it, filled as it was with off-color adjectives and earthy expletives, some of which even my experience in the drugstore and pool hall and barbershop had failed to teach me. Corporal Blankenship moved easily and comfortably over and through the several levels of language, from the formal at the top to the vulgar at the bottom, with doses of informal, slang, obscene, and profane in between. He was careful not to discriminate, not to short one level by underworking it. He was likewise careful not to resort to the lower levels only when he was angry or excited. No, he used these levels when he was not in the least agitated, employed them even on those rare occasions when he seemed happy, if not elated. His skill with language suggested that, had he gone to college, which his attitude toward us indicated he hadn’t, he could have majored in linguistics, with perhaps a minor in theater.) On his knees, Candidate Steckman illustrated the movement, his circles at first too large, then becoming smaller as he responded to Corporal Blankenship’s instruction. Our di spoke to Steckman, and to all of us, as if we were children, and mentally deficient. This exercise was, 52

of course, a dry run, there being no water, soapy or otherwise, in Steckman’s bucket. Soon all of us were invited to go to our knees, which we did, and all of us, brushes in hand, dry scrubbed the cement deck until Corporal Blankenship, his silent accomplice, Sergeant Tecca, beside him, was convinced that we did indeed have a working knowledge of the process which, if it weren’t a dry run, would include a rinsing of the cement floor with clean water, followed by a thorough mopping-up. And the squares of cloth that were in the buckets, and the polishes? You apply the metal polish to the bunks and wall lockers, the wood polish to the footlockers and the frames around the doors, being careful, professors, not to so much as touch the purple hearts hanging over the three doorways where you must stop to genuflect—Do you remember?—before you leave or enter the hut.  So it was the Fourth of July, and the day had gotten off to a bright, unusual start with Corporal Blankenship telling us that, come evening, we would celebrate our victory over the British by enjoying a brief span of liberty at the beer garden. Then he had outlined the day’s schedule, one that we jumped into with a fervor reminiscent of happy childhoods. We field-stripped and cleaned our rifles, lightly oiling the pieces and polishing the stocks, until the weapons very nearly cried out to be inspected. We finished this task in time for an hour or so of close-order drill, up one street and down another, then west on yet another street to where we could see the beer garden. It was a grassy, level expanse with one of the camp’s few trees at its center. Circling the tree, and scattered randomly about, was an assortment of wooden tables. At the south edge of the area was a small white building with an open front and a waist-high plank that served as a bar. Behind that bar, tonight, would be a keg, and in the keg would be cold beer, and. . . . We marched smartly past the beer garden, Corporal Blankenship beside us barking cadence, telling us between barkings to keep our eyes fixed straight ahead, telling us—hup! two three four—that in one hand, between the thumb and index finger, is the end of a rope you are pulling 53

exactly twelve inches before you pull it back with the other hand, telling us—hup! two three four—that oblique, whether or not we jerk-offs agree, rhymes with strike, telling us that next week on the rifle range we will have a chance to make him proud of a platoon that frankly he doesn’t yet believe is worth the cost of the tnt it would take to blow out the brains of a Gook, telling us—hup! two three four. . . . I do not know how many troops Camp Upshur could handle in the summer of 1953—a battalion, surely, more likely a regiment. It was an expansive layout filled impressively with huts, orderly arranged but, all of them, including the mess hall, depressingly alike. Beyond the huts was a ragged, uneven landscape, its sparse grasses marked with gullies and washouts. To the east of Fox Company’s hut—the home of Blankenship’s and Tecca’s platoon—the land sloped gradually downward toward a narrow creek that wandered off to the southeast. The creek was shallow, and muddy, and its route to wherever it was headed was a series of bends, some of them sharp, all of them easy to see if you were standing in the street that ran by our hut. At high noon Corporal Blankenship marched us to the mess hall, where we stood at attention until we were told to fall out and chow down—which I was willing to do, my heavy thighs having begun to ache with their heaviness. I was not very fond of marching, to be honest, though from the beginning I had had no problem with keeping in step. In high school I played the snare drum, played it each morning at practice, played it at basketball games during tournaments, even played it in my football uniform at halftime because I was the only drummer in our band. So I knew my left leg from my right, thank you, and in my ignorance I supposed that everyone else knew left from right also. The distinction was not one that we paid much attention to in high school, though; we were a small contingent whose members, in spite of my drumming, went pretty much their own ways. But at Camp Upshur such individuality was severely curbed. Candidate Steckman, for example, had difficulty distinguishing his left leg from his right; on many occasions, noting Steckman’s problem, Corporal Blankenship would insinuate himself into our moving ranks and with his swagger stick at54

tempt to teach Steckman’s legs the meaning of port and starboard. For a few minutes, then, it would seem that Steckman’s legs understood the distinction, and Candidate Steckman, smiling if not giggling, would march in step until the lesson, like weak medication, wore off, whereupon the legs would return to their own generic rhythm. After chowing down, we were marched back to the hut, where for three hours we followed Corporal Blankenship’s earlier instructions. We began by placing the foot lockers on the lower bunks and polishing them with the appropriate liquid until the old green-painted wood shone—not like a diamond in a goat’s ass, perhaps, but close enough, we believed, to win the approval of our dis. Then we did the same for the wood outlining each door, noting with reverence each purple heart so perfectly in place. We applied the appropriate polish to the metal bunks. In small circles that moved counterclockwise, we scrubbed the deck until it resembled the surface of a frothy sea. An observer might have assumed that we had been together for years, considering how smoothly and efficiently we performed as a group. But we were virtual strangers, a platoon comprised of young men from around the country (Candidate Steckman represented the great state of Kentucky; others hailed from Oklahoma and Iowa and North Carolina and Wyoming, from Tennessee and Ohio and New York, from Texas and West Virginia and Oregon. And indeed we had begun to come together, to form a bond as Fox Company survivors. Several candidates had not been able to withstand the rigors of training, or were so fond of their homes that they had already told Corporal Blankenship where to place his swagger stick—and had gone home). Meanwhile, the rest of us were functioning as a unit, one with a single mind and a common objective: the beer garden. I didn’t much care for beer, but my brother—at an early age—had developed a taste for it, and our colleague Jim Fisher would not turn away a schooner if it somehow drifted into his ken. I would have one or two, of course, just to acknowledge the high significance of the occasion, then I’d sit back and inhale the evening, perhaps tapering off with a Coke or so. 55

Rinsing and mopping-up were the most difficult steps. It took a lot of clean water to flush away the suds, to sweep them out the doors so that we could mop the deck, then swab it again, until it was ready for the dry mops; finally, the deck was clean enough to eat from. Corporal Blankenship had told us to have the hut cleaned, and ourselves cleaned as well, before evening chow, and to a man we were anxious to oblige. While the deck dried, we showered and primped and secured our dirty clothing in laundry bags and put on fresh-pressed dungarees whose creases we bloused into our spit-shined boots. Oh, sweet Jesus! The hut was a veritable salon, a garden whose effluvia of lotion and deodorants, spices and powders and polishes and oils suggested that something ceremonial, if not outright wicked, was in the offing. When a shout from the south end of the hut told us to fall in, we fell in hastily, our genuflections so swift that hardly a knee touched down. Our corporal, swagger stick in hand, called us to attention. In freshly pressed dungarees, he looked like a front cover for Leatherneck. He was a feisty little bastard, all right, a full-time Marine who carried his cockiness like a combat ribbon. And I believe that, as we came to attention, all of us squeaky clean and smelling like a million bucks, we were proud to be serving under Corporal Blankenship; his gung-ho pride and confidence were contagious, and we had caught it, or some of it, and were glad we did, and to show our appreciation we stood with our backs straighter than ever, our eyes fixed straight ahead, our chests out, our jaws slightly jutted. We marched to evening chow with gusto, marched as though the July sun would not be causing us, in only a matter of minutes, to swelter. While cleaning the hut, scrubbing and washing it down, we had not been much concerned about the heat; nor had we cared much about it as we dressed for chow. But now, marching in formation under the same sun that earlier we had ignored, the only breeze the insignificant one our movement offered, we were forced to admit that the late afternoon, and the early evening, too, were going to be so hot that nothing short of a cold beer and a Coke at the Camp Upshur beer garden could make it bearable. 56

 On several occasions, as we stood in formation dutifully at attention, Corporal Blankenship told us that a marching competition might take place some time during the final week of training; and if that should happen, he wanted to make good and goddamned certain that his platoon placed first. He would not settle for anything less. He had not been awarded three purple hearts, he said, just to be sent from one hell hole to another to teach a bunch of college jerk-offs how to march without those college jerk-offs becoming the best goddamned marching unit in the battalion—and so on. His desire to win the marching championship was so intense that he drilled us relentlessly, stealing from us any extra time we otherwise might have spent catching our breaths or twiddling our thumbs—or perhaps contemplating the assassination of at least one of our dis. So having finished evening chow, we were marched back to the hut to retrieve our rifles from our wall lockers—You have precisely seventeen seconds!—and return to formation. Seventeen seconds my weary ass. It was not possible for all of us to enter the hut (genuflecting, more or less, at the doorways), secure our weapons from the wall lockers, and fall back into formation in seventeen seconds—and Corporal Blankenship knew it. The chief obstacle was the combination lock; it required several seconds to manipulate, another several if you failed to dial the combination correctly. We did the best we could, but our best was never quite good enough. Each time, our tardiness gave Blankenship exactly what he wanted—another excuse to sound off, another justification to punish our miserably incompetent hides. As noted earlier, the .30-caliber m1 rifle weighs nine-point-five pounds, when first it is hoisted onto a shoulder. The weight increases in direct proportion to (1) the length of time the weapon is left on the shoulder; (2) the number of times the weapon is moved from one shoulder to another; (3) the clothing being worn by the one toting the weapon; and (4) the amount of direct sunlight the candidate absorbs as one interminable instant moves into another. 57

All four of these conditions were taking their toll as Corporal Blankenship marched us around the battalion area. The scenery, of course, was familiar—huts too numerous to count, black asphalt streets describing an assortment of grids, ragged terrain beyond the grids, a small creek to the east of our hut, and to the west the beer garden where, as we marched steadfastly along, we saw that already some of our more fortunate comrades were gathering. By now my dungarees were well on their way to becoming soaked. The sun, though low in the sky, seemed dead set on withering us all. The .30-caliber m1 rifle on my shoulder had long since become an anvil. I was seriously considering saying no to the Cokes and yes only to the beer. We marched forward and to the rear, columns right, columns left, single file and oblique (which rhymes with strike); from time to time Corporal Blankenship jumped into our midst, wielding his swagger stick in an attempt to correct Candidate Steckman’s incorrigible legs. At other times our di would take a break, and, standing on the pavement’s curb, shout cadence until we could no longer hear him, until one of us mustered the courage to shout To the rear, march! and we reversed directions and returned to Corporal Blankenship, to the familiar bark we soon were back in step to. I was almost ready to collapse when our di halted us at the east side of the hut and told us to secure our rifles and return to formation: And you have precisely seventeen seconds! I scurried into the hut to put away my weapon, gleefully anticipating my well-earned reward. The cleaning and marching were over. Now for the beer garden! We were back in formation when Sergeant Tecca materialized; he came sauntering up from the bowels of somewhere, his face uncommonly sober. Corporal Blankenship turned and saluted, smartly. Sergeant Tecca returned the gesture. Corporal, he said, I have inspected the condition of our hut, and it pains me to report that it does not pass muster. Blankenship’s mouth dropped open. Well, I’ll be dipped in shit! he 58

said. Our jerk-offs spent the better half of the afternoon cleaning it. I can’t imagine. . . . Each was speaking louder than necessary, and more slowly. They apparently did not want us to miss a single word of their production. I found dust atop Big Kloefkorn’s wall locker, Tecca said. I found a wad of some foreign substance under Candidate Steckman’s bunk. I found also. . . . Dust atop Big Kloefkorn’s wall locker? Not by a bloody fucking long shot is what I believe I thought, but didn’t say. I could feel my hot face growing hotter. I regretted that I had stashed my rifle—and its bayonet—in the dusty locker. Sergeant Tecca was not exploding or injuring anyone, physically. But I began to sense that in his deadpan, understated way his litany of outright falsehoods was laying the foundation for something ominous. When the sergeant finished, Corporal Blankenship said again that he’d be dipped in shit. For some time they stood facing each other, sober as zombies. Sweat meanwhile was running down my forehead and into my eyes, its salt, as I tried to blink it away, blurring the outlines of the dis. Dust atop Big Kloefkorn’s wall locker. Bullshit. I had cleaned the top of the wall locker myself, had taken down the heavy blanket roll attached to the knapsack and with cloth and polish had virtually rubbed the green from the metal. Sergeant Tecca, the sly, silent weasel, was using me as a scapegoat. Then suddenly, having snapped off a salute, the sergeant turned and ambled off, returning, I suppose, to the haunt from which he had emerged—or to the hut to conduct another inspection. Corporal Blankenship, not saying anything about Sergeant Tecca’s report, ordered a right face and marched us as directly as possible to the beer garden, most of the route taking us head-on into a sun that in another eternity or two might set. I was licking my lips, anticipating relief. When the beer garden came into view, I thought seriously of smiling. The phrase “beer garden” was new to me. I don’t know whether it was new to my brother, or to Fisher, but it was new to me. From the start, though, not wanting to reveal the depth of my ignorance, or innocence, 59

I acted as if the phrase was one I had grown up with. Beer garden. A garden wherein beer is served. Any college jerk-off worth jerking off could figure that one out. I had spent a lot of time in the local pool hall back home in Kansas, when I was a youngster, shooting eight-ball and snooker and watching geezers finger their dominoes for long periods of time before playing them; but even in that place, which was the town’s only official den of iniquity, I had never heard the term “beer garden”— perhaps because the smoke-laden pool hall was anything but a garden, and even more so because no beer was served there, my town being dry as a bone. Now here is an interesting question: How long must a Marine Corps plc candidate march before he realizes, fully and finally, that his drill instructor is satanically deceptive and thus has no intention whatsoever of permitting his troops to sit down in a beer garden and refresh themselves? The answer: Forever. We marched along the north side of the beer garden, along the west side, along the south and east sides; we were told then to reverse ourselves—to the rear, march!—so that we might appreciate the garden, and its occupants, from different angles. I am convinced that everyone, with the possible exception of Candidate Steckman, realized what was happening long before I did. When finally the depth of my ignorance was sounded, I rebuked myself silently in language almost worthy of Corporal Blankenship. Yes, the corporal was indeed deceptive, and so, too, his accomplice, Sergeant Tecca; but in my ignorance I was, if not deceptive, then certifiably gullible. But what none of us guessed—not even, I believe, the prick from the Citadel who had assembled his rifle in the allotted time—was that Corporal Blankenship would bark us back to the hut, where, in single file, he’d march us off the street and down the ragged slope to the muddy creek, where, yet in single file, he’d march us through muck and stale water until we’d be strung out like some disenfranchised serpent. We would not be able to see Corporal Blankenship, because he’d be perched somewhere on higher ground to the west, out of sight behind patches of 60

scraggly bushes and trees, but we’d hear his voice counting cadence or berating us for not keeping in step. Ah, such a memorable evening in Prince William County in Virginia! Moon rising, sun setting. Blankenship’s raw and raspy voice carrying all the way to the Atlantic. So deliberate would be his cadence that I’m sure he intended us to follow it and, still a victim of my own ignorance, I’d be trying, honestly trying, until I’d realize that the impossible was not to be realized, at which point I’d throw in with the others and slog and splash and stumble and fall and regain my feet and stumble again, dungarees soaked and heavy, boots oozing mud, Blankenshipian expletives streaming in hisses from my lips.  A lovely orange moon was rising when we were given a column left and marched up the slope and halted in the street at the east side of the hut. We fell into platoon formation, then stood at attention as Corporal Blankenship stressed the importance of keeping in step, regardless of circumstances. If there should be a battalion marching competition, he said, he full well expected us to win, come hell or high water. . . . I was too tired, too mud-soaked to give a tinker’s damn—about the possibility of a competition, about Corporal Blankenship, about anything, not even hell or high water, both of which I assumed were behind us. I was wrong. When Corporal Blankenship finished his oration, he marched us to the north end of the hut and again in single file we sloshed and stumbled—not in the muddy creek, but into the hut that had failed to pass Sergeant Tecca’s inspection. Our di had graciously opened the door, at the side of which he stood counting cadence as we moved through, our genuflections, at best, skimpy. Someone had taken the trouble to remove several footlockers from under their bunks and had placed them across the aisle at intervals of maybe a dozen feet. It was easy to hear Corporal Blankenship’s voice, but his cadence was not possible to match. We were marching down the aisle, hurdlers too weary to hurdle, our boots scattering mud and dirty water as we moved, our 61

progress interrupted by the footlockers. Blankenship seemed to know when the head of the file was approaching the blanket that served as a door to the drill instructors’ private space; just in time, he ordered a reversal of our movement, and we went stomping and stumbling and sliding not only over the footlockers, but also over the water and slime that decorated the path we had recently taken. We must have resembled the bellows of a dilapidated accordion, now compressed, now extended. Corporal Blankenship had us stomping into one side door and out the other, then around to the north door and out one of the side doors; when we weren’t an accordion, we were a snake with its head at times in a position to bite its tail, the hut meanwhile beginning to look more like a swamp than a home suitable for a platoon of would-be commissioned officers. And I believe I remember thinking, Is there no balm in Gilead? The question amused me, it being so unlikely. Or maybe it wasn’t really unlikely, because I had heard it so many times back home in church. I could not remember, though, why the question had been posed, could not remember anything about Gilead. I knew what balm was, analgesic balm; I had used it during football season to soothe aches and cramps, mostly in the legs, so I was able to deduce that Gilead—like Big Kloefkorn and his fellow candidates, and the home they were despoiling—was in bad need of soothing. How long did we march in and out of the hut, leaving slosh and sludge behind us? I don’t honestly know. Time was passing, I was certain of that. The moon had done some marching of its own; it was full, and its orange, so rich and brilliant earlier, was becoming lighter. Is orange the color of the balm so needed in Gilead? The head of the column had been sent through the west door and out the east when Corporal Blankenship directed it to fall into platoon formation. Dog-tired, sweaty, smelly, boots and trousers soaked and mud-splattered, softly grumbling—we moved into our familiar places. Corporal Blankenship, erect and immaculate in his well-creased dungarees and spit-shined boots, waited until we were spaced and aligned and at strict attention. 62

Professors, he said, you have shat in the very nest you sleep in. For shame! Now you must clean up the mess, and yourselves as well. At precisely twenty-four hundred hours Sergeant Tecca and I will visit the hut to observe your progress. He smiled, broadly, his white teeth aglint against the rising moon. Then tomorrow night, he said, we will consider spending some free time at the beer garden. That is, if you college jerk-offs—and our hut— pass inspection.  Two days later, and for several days thereafter, our dis, connected to the outside world by way of a daily newspaper and a radio in their quarters at the south end of the hut, gave us running updates on the Battle of Pork Chop Hill in Korea—until finally they told us that the Marine Corps’ 7th Infantry Division had been ordered to evacuate its defensive positions. There were heavy, even staggering, casualties. At one of these sessions, each of them held shortly after evening chow, Corporal Blankenship brought something he wanted one of us to read. He sought a volunteer by asking, Can any of you college professors read? Before I could restrain myself, I said, Sir, my brother can! Little Kloefkorn! Corporal Blankenship looked at Little Kloefkorn. I doubt it, he said. You, Big Kloefkorn, he said, now looking at me. Stand up and read this. I stood up. He handed me one sheet of single-spaced material. Much too terrified to refuse, I took it. The material had been written by a general in the United States Army. I do not remember all of it, of course, but I recall much of it very clearly. The general, having derided all petty quarrels and prejudices among the branches of the military, declared the power and the purpose of the combined United States Armed Forces. Freedom was a key word, and unity. There is no order of significance, wrote the general, when it comes to individual branches; the Army, the first to be organized, can63

not assume a superior standing because it was indeed the first, nor can the Air Force argue that its might is superior because without air superiority no modern war is likely to be won. Nor can the Navy—and so on and so forth—or the Marine Corps. . . . Big Kloefkorn read the words with the best voice he could manage. Though he was a bona fide radio announcer with a Third Class Operator’s License to prove it, he faltered a couple of times, and a dry throat pestered him throughout; it wanted to be cleared, but Big Kloefkorn did not want to stop the flow of his reading to clear it. He was standing with his fellow candidates in the open area near the south end of the hut, the same place they had occupied when learning how to field-strip, then reassemble, their m1s. He stood in front of the blanket that served as a door to the drill instructors’ quarters, Corporal Blankenship at his right, Sergeant Tecca at his left. Insofar as possible, he made eye contact with two or three candidates in front of him, and two or three times he turned to his right, then his left, in an effort to include the dis; but most of the time he looked hard at the typewritten words on the page, hoping that the general would not toss him an unpronounceable curve. When he finished, Corporal Blankenship and Sergeant Tecca applauded—not for Big Kloefkorn’s rendition of the material, I’m sure, but for what it said. They had not applauded more than a nanosecond before the others joined in. It might be possible to read too much into this event, but it seemed to me that what was happening at Pork Chop Hill, as reported by Blankenship and Tecca, somewhat changed the tone of their command. They would not become soft, of course; on the rifle range they would curse and cajole and demonstrate the positions until even Candidate Steckman qualified as a marksman. On extended hikes and bivouacs, they would lead us into territory that I swear lay uncharted, their endurance under a blazing Virginia sun remarkable, their desire to disrupt our sleep insatiable. Security. Always it was security. Wake up, you educated jerk-off (the smaller end of a swagger stick, the end with a point, digging into my lower lumbar), it’s time for you to relieve Little Kloefkorn—or Candidate Fisher or happy Steckman or someone else. The road to hell, you know (though I didn’t, and didn’t care to learn), is paved with the bones of lieutenants who failed to post security. 64

No, neither Blankenship nor Tecca softened, or relieved the pressure. But there was something about their demeanor that made them seem less driven, less demonic. They continued to keep us up to date on the happenings in Korea—the Battle of Kumsong River, the downing of an enemy transport near the Manchurian border and, finally, on 27 July, the signing of an armistice. When Corporal Blankenship told us of the truce, something in the blue marbles that were his eyes suggested a long-distance comradeship that someone without three purple hearts—or their unsung equivalent—could not live long enough ever to understand.

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Hail, holy light! offspring of heav’n firstborn. — John Milton, Paradise Lost

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When we entered Southern California and saw its palm trees, and shortly thereafter its shoreline, my wife and I ascended to the top of the ninth cloud, where we remained for several sun-soaked days. It was early March. Boot camp was a black-and-white movie that its owner ran only when memory could not be checked. Eloise Ann sat in the front seat of their almost-new 1954 Bel Air Chevrolet, its eight cylinders purring, its colors—ivory at the top, desert tan below—brilliantly clean, the vehicle having been washed only moments ago at a Conoco station. They moved with the windows down. They breathed deeply. They had some money in their pockets, with more on the way. Travel allowance. That’s what the Marine Corps called it and, in due time, after they had found a place to live and had settled in, they would receive the allowance and would cash the check and Christ on a popsicle stick! what might they do with all that money? They would spend part of it on a new Admiral television set, would spend this portion before the allowance arrived. They had not intended to do this. They had supposed they’d look two or three days for a place to rent, an additional day or two cleaning and rearranging the place, then the rest of their time checking out the town and its alluring beach. With such a landscape before them, who needed television? Palm trees. Sunshine. An ocean that apparently had no end. They had seven days before the unwashed lieutenant was to report to regimental headquarters for assignment, and they did not want to waste a single moment. They had driven much of the way from Kansas on Route 66, the same highway that John Steinbeck’s Joad family traveled when they lost their 69

land in Oklahoma. When Eloise and her lieutenant were forced to stay overnight in Albuquerque, thanks to a faulty generator on the otherwise spiffy Chevrolet, it was the lieutenant who offered consolation by recounting one or two of the many delays the Joad family had experienced, most notably the one where Tom in no uncertain terms addressed Casey, a well-meaning preacher who worried about the future at the expense of getting something done in the present. The Joad vehicle had stalled, again, and it fell to Tom, who was not much of a mechanic, to see that repairs were made. Of course the lieutenant was not able to quote Tom’s speech verbatim, and some of the details relating to time and place were fuzzy, so he had to improvise. He did remember, though, that a bearing had burned out, that a connecting rod had broken, and that Tom was determined to find someone to replace or repair them. He called one of them “this little piece of iron and babbitt,” and he said, more or less, “This little piece of iron and babbitt’s the only goddamn thing in the world I got on my mind.” At that moment, Tom was not interested in what lay ahead, whether there might be jobs when they reached California, and whether, if there weren’t any, the family might be forced to break up, or, even worse, starve to death. So you see, I said to Eloise Ann, who had not been listening as attentively as I believed she should, our dilemma is nothing when compared to that of the Joads’. By morning, I said assuringly, our mechanic will have her fixed, and we’ll be on the road again. I hope so, said his helpmate. But I have my doubts. I had my doubts also, to be honest, because the mechanic had not seemed to be functioning with a complete set of tools. Mostly, he appeared uncertain. He was a small man with one eye that wandered, and after most of him disappeared under the hood I could hear tappings and clinkings that suggested exploration more than a pinpointing of the problem. But we were in no position to quibble. By morning, however, our doubts were laid to rest. The generator had been replaced, though you can’t imagine, said our small mechanic— one eye fixed on me, the other looking off toward a wall lined with fan 70

belts—the trouble I had finding a rebuilt one. I could have installed a new one, he continued, but you know how damned expensive they are. I didn’t, but I appreciated that he had saved us some money, and I told him so. He smiled. He was wiping the grease from his hands onto a greasy rag. Another thing, he said. Your tailpipe has a hole in it. Not a big one, but it won’t take her long to get bigger. Then she’ll sound like a Sherman tank. I wondered aloud why a fairly new car would have a faulty tailpipe. My mechanic frowned. When it comes to tailpipes, he said, these ’54 Chevys are a pain in the you-know-what. They’re nothing but elbows, and they hang so low you can barely go over a train track or a pissant without dragging. I was learning that I had misjudged my mechanic. Not only had he found a rebuilt generator to replace the defunct one, but also he had a good eye—though probably not the one that wandered—for spotting small holes in tailpipes. But how long to install a new one? I asked. And how much will it cost? Like Eloise Ann, I was in a hurry to push on to California. And I was trying also to be frugal. We had some money, thanks to the Marine Corps, to the eagle that had relieved itself generously each payday during the several months of officers’ training, but we did not want to spend any more than necessary on generators and tailpipes. He finished trading the grease on his hands for some of the grease on the rag, then pushed the rag into a hip pocket and gave me an approximate time and price, both of which—but without enthusiasm—I agreed to. Eloise Ann, perhaps remembering that by comparison we were much better off than the Joadses, took the news in stride. We could pass the time by walking the other side of the street this time, couldn’t we, she said, the side across from the motel we had spent the night in, and maybe something in a store window would catch an eye or strike one of 71

our fancies, and we could check it out, and shucks before we’d know it it’d be time for a sandwich and a malt, and if we walked long enough we might find a place that served them, and then we could walk some more until some more time passed and before you could say Jack Robinson it would be time to pick up the car and it would be ready as promised and we’d pay the bill and with a rebuilt generator and a new tailpipe we’d be on the road again before sundown. Wouldn’t we?  We rolled into Oceanside shortly before noon the next day, cruised what looked to be the main street, drove down a slight incline to the beach where we saw a long pier grow narrower, it seemed, as it stretched out into the water, drove back to Hill Street, which was Highway 101, saw a sign that said Apartment for Rent, pulled in, and in less than forty minutes had rented the apartment. Why not? Yes, it was small, but there were only two of us, and we had just moved out of a smaller place, a box made of concrete blocks that seemed designed to retain heat in the summer and cold in the winter. It had been our home during five months of officer training at Quantico. The apartment we now had rented was one of several in a complex of buildings located rather close to Highway 101. But the traffic did not seem very severe, and it was moving slowly, this area being well inside the city limits. Our new nest was spic-and-span, totally furnished and ready to move into. And from the front room—which became the bedroom when you lowered the bed from the north wall—you could see the mighty Pacific Ocean through the large west window. The beach of course was obstructed by trees and houses, but you could look out and follow one of the waves very nearly to the shore, could stand at the window, as we did that morning and many mornings thereafter, delightfully mesmerized by the ebb and flow of more water than you had ever seen before. The apartments in the complex were arranged in a semicircle, with a driveway and garage for each, and green grass flourished in a parklike area at the half circle’s center, with palm trees of various heights waving 72

their fronds as if extending a personal greeting. I think I waved back as we walked with the manager to his office, where we signed a paper or two, put down some money, took the keys from his hand, left the office, and walked out and into the arms of Southern California. We had parked the two-tone Bel Air in our driveway; as we approached, I could see its new tailpipe hanging only inches above the concrete. I called it to my wife’s attention and, because she had not been present when I discussed the tailpipe with our mechanic, I said, Don’t worry about it. Tailpipes on 1954 Chevys are a real pain in the you-know-what. They’re nothing but elbows, and they hang so low you can barely. . . . Let’s unload the car now, she said, before we have lunch. Okay? It is surprising how much stuff you can load into a 1954 Bel Air Chevrolet. We had brought mostly clothes, and some bedding and towels and a few dishes and pots and pans, a teakettle and silverware and a tablecloth or two, with some napkins that Eloise had sewn with her portable machine—probably our heaviest item—which we had packed in the trunk. It is surprising also how little time it takes to unload what took a considerable time to load. No one can organize empty space, and into this space breathe the warm breath of life, any better than can the woman I had the good sense to marry. She is not very tall and, soaked from head to foot, weighs little more than a hundred pounds. My maternal grandmother, when I told her the name of the girl I proposed to, and who knew her almost as well as I did, exclaimed, Mercy! You will have to shake the sheets to find her! Grandmother said this, mind you, as she stood on her toes looking up at me. And I thought of the irony of it all, since she was at least two inches shorter than my wife. The old woman was German, and more than a trifle possessive; her objection was her way of protesting what I believe she perceived as the loss of a grandson, but doing it with her tongue ever so slightly in her cheek. Our apartment was squared away in a matter of minutes. I almost regretted that Sergeant Tecca was not there to inspect it. It was more than squared away, actually, because in addition to having found the proper 73

place for the pots and pans, silverware, and sewing machine, Eloise had covered the kitchen table with a sky-blue cloth and, after I lowered the bed (the manager had glamorized it with the label, “Hollywood bed”), she covered the thin mattress with white cotton sheets while I wrestled pillows into their pure white cases fresh with the faint aroma of bleach. Finished, we looked at the apartment as if surveying perfection. It was every bit as cozy as the one on Constitution Street in Emporia, where we had spent our honeymoon, and in addition the view here was far more scenic. We stood for some time looking out the window, watching the waves to the west roll in, eager to slip into our swimsuits and go down to the beach and plunge in. But we hadn’t eaten anything since early morning, and Eloise proposed that, first, we take care of our tummies, and maybe do a little shopping. She thought some fresh flowers—over there, on the blue tablecloth, she said, maybe half a dozen red roses garnished with baby’s breath—would provide the final touch. Oceanside was a busy little city, but not crowded. A number of offduty Marines, in their khakis, mingled with the locals and the tourists. Most of the shops were small, with the exception of a corner store that sold uniforms, and the restaurants were small also. The doors of all the businesses were open, including an especially wide one in front of which stood a man whose face was mostly teeth, and when he looked at us and said, Good afternoon, we returned the greeting, and when he added, Won’t you step in? I have something special to show you, we looked at each other and shrugged and followed him in. The store smelled richly of new appliances. Our guide, all business, lost no time finding his way to a line of television sets. Stopping in front of one of them, the only one showing a picture, he turned and smiled. He was all teeth. He pointed to the picture and asked, Isn’t that the clearest image you ever saw? I had to admit that, yes, it was indeed an impressively clear picture. It was a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Tom was holding a stick of dynamite in his front paws, looking in disbelief at a burning fuse. It’s the latest model, said the salesman. It has the clearest picture in the store. 74

As the salesman spoke, the dynamite blew Tom onto the top branch of a very tall tree. His face was black as coal. As he looked squarely at the camera, several of his teeth fell out. I was not very knowledgeable about television sets, nor was Eloise Ann. I saw my first one in a speech class when I was a freshman at Emporia State. The professor, C. Richard Orr, turned it on and attempted to demonstrate its possibilities. He called it the “wave of the future,” though at the moment the wave more nearly resembled a snowstorm well on its way to becoming a blizzard. I could detect some figures moving about in the storm, and I could hear what they were saying, but neither did much to advance any discernible plot. Professor Orr, however, could not be discouraged. He was a large, jolly man who seemed to believe that human progress was inevitable, and that it depended chiefly upon the advancement of technology. I did not necessarily disagree with him, but I was tired of hearing about “advancements” that would come to fruition, as our professor phrased it, “in the not-too-distant future.” Always it was the “not-too-distant future,” a time that, having arrived, would fail to deliver its product; so you sat back, inhaled deeply, and waited for another “not-too-distant future” to arrive. It had been the same old story when I went to the movies back in my hometown of Attica, a newsreel, or one section of a newsreel, displaying some amazing gadgets and doohickeys that in the “not-too-distant future” would be on the market and would change our overwrought lives forever; everything would be easier and more pleasurable. A year or so later I saw another television set, and this one, behold, was more image than snow. I spotted it in the window of a store in downtown Emporia as I was on my way to a movie at the Orpheum. The set was large, its picture reasonably clear. A sturdy man with a beard was standing at the bow of a ship, facing into an impressive wind, and in a deep-throated baritone was singing: Mariah, Mariah, they call the wind Mariah. In spite of the glass that separated us, I could hear his baritone distinctly. I remember that I was compelled by his voice no less than the clarity of the image. A few scattered snowflakes wandered in and out of the picture, but for the most part it was sharp, and I stood there watch75

ing and listening—enthralled—well after the song was finished. Was it possible that the “not-too-distant future” had arrived? Now it appeared that Tom had the upper hand. He had managed to nab Jerry and was threatening to squeeze him into a “mouse pie.” It’s an Admiral, said the salesman. What do you think? Whether I thought it then, or am thinking it just now, I know it is true: Watching television can become addictive in a matter of seconds. And it is also true that the man whose face was mostly teeth had us pegged from the beginning. From my crew-cut hair to the shine on my shoes I must have looked like a newly arrived Marine, and with Eloise at my side we must have resembled a couple looking for something in which to invest a portion of our travel money. I don’t know how Jerry managed to escape, but he did, and when I turned back to the screen, having looked at the salesman when he asked, What do you think? Tom’s tail was in the wringer of a washer and he was pleading with Jerry not to turn the handle. No down payment. First installment due in sixty days. No carrying charges. And isn’t tonight the night for Jackie Gleason? We signed some papers, then returned to the apartment to get our car. The two-tone Chevy sat in the driveway, obedient and patient. She looked lovely, sitting there so quietly, wearing whitewall tires, fender skirts, and a windshield visor. Was she proud of her rebuilt generator and her shiny new tailpipe? She was, after all, a bit of a showgirl: a demonstrator at the dealership where we purchased her, almost a year old but low mileage and not a scratch or dent anywhere. In its box the new Admiral fit nicely into the trunk, though we had to secure the lid with some twine the salesman located in the back room. We were excited about our purchase, with no regrets or second thoughts. We would pay off the note, every penny, when we received the travel money, with enough left over to buy some other items, perhaps even a few necessities. We were in Southern California, weren’t we, and did it not behoove us to behave accordingly? And would you believe it? There was a device for connecting the tv to an antenna in the wall across from the Hollywood bed, and using nothing more than a screw76

driver I quickly made the hookup. Eloise, impressed, joked that maybe her husband had missed his calling. We flipped the channels, watching each for a minute or so, pleased that the images on the screen were as clear as the ones back at the store. When it occurred to us that we still hadn’t eaten anything since early morning—and that the table in the kitchen, with its sky-blue cloth, still needed its bouquet of red roses—we reluctantly turned off the Admiral and retraced our steps downtown. Palm trees provided a canopy over the wide concrete path. We were walking down a long aisle, or so it seemed, fronds waving above us as if the arms of family wanting to take us in.  Is there anything in this world more pleasurable than not having to report to regimental headquarters for a solid week, and then to spend that week combing the beach and confronting its waves and lying in the sun and walking to the end of the long pier at night, there to sit on a bench eating from a large cup of small shrimp soaked in a red sauce as you watch the whites of breakers until you are giddy with the immensity of it all? Only this: the news that for the first time in your hayseed life you are going to be a father. Are you sure? Pretty much. I’ve been having morning sickness almost every night. Haven’t you heard me? I said that, no, I hadn’t, but from now on, I said, you must wake me up, and—are you absolutely sure? Already it was almost August. Already I had been in charge of an anti-tank assault platoon for nearly four months. Flamethrowers. Rocket launchers. Demolitions. Forty-five Marines home from duty in Korea. Pretty much. But I’ll need to go to the naval hospital for a checkup. The naval hospital at Camp Pendleton was a large complex, white wood-frame buildings shooting off in all directions. We checked in, and while the doctor did his examining I waited in a reception room stark as a cell. To be alone in such a place, waiting to hear what you are reason77

ably sure will be good news, is a test of patience and an open invitation to self-doubt. Is this what we really want, a baby, after all? Is this the best time and place to have one? What if something goes haywire? What if the mother, for some reason, decides she doesn’t want to be a mother? What if. . . . Then, finally, after the passage of several eons, the woman in question appears, grinning like a gopher, and you can’t wait, though you will have to, to be a father.  We had brought Eloise’s portable sewing machine with us, perhaps because, as a woman, she was that intuitive. Or maybe she was simply practical enough to realize that her husband’s dungarees or khakis would need occasional mending. In any case, the machine found a home at one end of the kitchen table. Fortunately, it was a reliable piece of equipment, and with the help of its operator, it produced pile upon pile of articles calculated to keep the baby both warm and decent. Bibs of various shapes and colors. Blankets—mostly cotton, but a few made of fancier, slicker materials, for occasions that called for more delicate and upscale sleeping. And several dozen night shirts, diaper shirts, infant kimonos, each trimmed brightly with bias tape. These, she said, showing me an article fresh from the sewing machine, can be worn by either a boy or a girl. So, I said, which is it going to be? Her aunt Maggie, she said, believed that if the infant was carried in a high position, it probably would be a girl. If it has a rapid heartbeat, look for a boy. The smallest marine in my platoon, the one who looked more like a boy than a man, carried one of the flamethrowers, a weapon that, filled with gasoline and napalm thickener, weighed seventy-two pounds. You stirred the napalm, a substance that resembled Jell-O, into the gasoline, five and one quarter pounds of the former into twenty gallons of the latter, which mixture you poured ever so slowly into the fuel tanks. And if the infant is carried in a high position and also has a rapid heartbeat? 78

Twins, probably. That is, according to Aunt Maggie. The range of the thickened fuel is forty-five yards, unthickened fuel, twenty. Total firing time: nine seconds. Thickened fuel, napalm, looks like a flaming rope upon firing, and thus is more accurate than unthickened fuel, which upon firing moves in a billowing, swirling configuration, and which is more likely to bring about the desired result—the burning, asphyxiating, and blinding of enemy personnel. On a bright Saturday morning in late August we decided to drive to Tijuana and do some shopping, maybe run across something that the baby would have a difficult time surviving without. Last night there was a ring around the moon, I said. We were not far from our destination. What might your aunt Maggie say about that? We didn’t mix and fire live fuel very often. Most of the time the flamethrowers were filled with water. And most of the time the rocket launchers were fired without rockets. And demolitions? We sometimes patted trinitrotoluene into place on the girder of an imaginary bridge, but we never wired or fired it. We had no demo expert in the platoon, myself included, and the regimental commander, though a bulldog otherwise, did not want to be forced to explain unnecessary fatalities. We did not enjoy the trip to Tijuana. To be pregnant in a place so pitifully filled with indigent children was an irony that neither of us could ignore. We walked the streets, refusing to buy whatever the children were selling—candy, gum, themselves, if they were old enough, or thought they were—until finally we bought a gift for the unborn child. It was a colorful maraca, orange and green, and the man who sold it, for only fifty cents more, carved our child’s name into the soft wood: John Charles, the first name after my brother, the second after my own middle name. But what if the baby is a girl—or twins? We hesitated. We had talked about some possibilities—Elizabeth Ann, Terry Lynn—but we had not made a firm decision. No, not right now, we said. Maybe we’ll come back and buy another later, after the baby arrives. Later? said the man. Why later? Now is better than later. 79

The three-point-five-inch rocket launcher is a two-piece, smooth-bore, open-breech weapon that fires electrically. Its rocket contains a shapedcharge capable of penetrating eleven inches of armor. Maximum range is approximately nine hundred sixty yards. Effective range is approximately one hundred fifty yards. Corporal Terrell: How would you like to be inside a tank that one of these babies has penetrated? We placed the maraca atop the Admiral, where we could see it and talk about how much fun it had been to buy, as we watched and listened to a clear image of Snooky Lanson singing one of the top songs of the week on Your Hit Parade. . . .  Almost the start of a new year. To celebrate, we determined that come the first day of January we would drive north to Pasadena and watch the Rose Bowl parade. We knew that we could not possibly get tickets for the football game—ucla, the home team, was confident that its Bruins could take the measure of Michigan State—but we supposed that if we were patient and persistent we might find a place to see the floats with their unbelievable arrays of flowers. We would leave early, to avoid the rush; Eloise would pack a lunch. I’d have the two-tone Chevy gassed and washed. We would be celebrating not only the beginning of a new year, but also the start of the final eight weeks of our pregnancy. Oh, sweet anticipation! The day dawned windless and bright. On the driveway, our Chevrolet’s ivory and desert tan glistened bright as—what? As a diamond in a goat’s ass, Corporal Blankenship, Sir, bright as a diamond in a goat’s ass. Inspired by our chariot’s gleaming beauty, and of course thinking of its near-new generator and tailpipe, I felt idiotically confident that she would deliver us to the Rose Bowl parade posthaste, or sooner—and in high style. We were on Highway 101, driving north, shortly after seven. We had eaten a light breakfast, black coffee and toast spread thickly with peanut butter. In a small ice chest, to accompany the sack lunches, Eloise had packed several cans of soda and juices. 80

I drove slowly, because an early-morning fog had not yet lifted, though it was beginning to thin. On the radio, kbig, from its station at Avalon, was playing popular music frequently interrupted by commercials. My beer is Reingold, the dry beer, think of Reingold whenever you buy beer. The tune, sung by a woman with a warm, seductive voice, was catchy, and probably helped sell a lot of Reingold beer. It’s not bitter, not sweet, extra dry-flavored treat. . . . We hadn’t decided on a girl’s name, though we were leaning toward Terry Lynn. Whichever it was, girl or boy, it lately had been doing its own close-order drill, shifting and turning, column left, column right, movements that according to its mother were fine during the day but disruptive at night. I did my best to reassure her, saying, for example, that an active unborn child, according to an uncle on my father’s side, was destined to be a gifted child—unless, of course, there is a ring around the moon two nights before the child is born, in which case. . . . As the fog thinned and lifted, I gradually gave the Chevy her reins, until soon we had reached the speed limit. The traffic was becoming heavier, most of it passing us, with only a few other drivers willing to observe the posted speed limit, sixty-five. Eloise sat holding our sack lunches on her lap, one hand atop each sack. She was wearing a dark brown skirt that she and the portable sewing machine had assembled, a half circle on its front cut away to make room for the baby. She had sewn the yellow blouse, too, had stitched the figure of a pale green flower on its pocket. The traffic grew as we neared San Clemente, then increased more and more, until by the time we had cleared the north end of the city it was so heavy I was forced to match its speed—seventy, then seventy-five. I was following the car in front of me too closely, I knew, but the car behind me was so near I was afraid to slow down. By this time I was feeling very uncomfortable. Was everyone in Southern California headed for Pasadena? I was in the center lane. At my right a car was moving like the rest of us, now more than ten miles over the limit. At my left a truck with a high silver bed was likewise keeping pace. Eloise’s hands were squeezing the tops of the lunch sacks. 81

I was too preoccupied with my driving to start a conversation, until, perhaps twenty miles north of San Clemente, I said, I’m getting off at the next exit. Eloise Ann did not respond. I need a breather, I said. Eloise did not respond. I knew I wouldn’t be able to move into the right lane in time to take the next exit, but fortunately the car beside me exited and the next one followed, and the space they left allowed me to enter their lane. I glanced quickly at the hands atop the sack lunches. Their knuckles were remarkably white. Ten miles later, at the next exit, I left Highway 101 and pulled into a service station. Phillips 66. We sat quietly for several minutes while the sensation of moving too fast in too much traffic eased away. I watched my wife’s hands begin to release the tops of the sacks. She asked, Do we need gas? No, I said. But I need a breather. And maybe a change of underwear. Eloise laughed. Me too, she said. Then she asked, Isn’t the Rose Bowl parade going to be televised? I think so, I said. And don’t we own one of the finest TV sets in all of Southern California? You bet, I said. It’s an Admiral, it has the clearest picture in the store, and the son of a bitch is paid for. Only a few moments later the two-tone Chevrolet was looking for the ramp that would return us to Highway 101, to those lanes heading back to Oceanside. It found the ramp. It found Highway 101. It moved into the center lane, which was comparatively free of traffic, as were the lanes at the right and left. And, most important, it insisted upon moving at, or just slightly under, the speed limit.  We watched the Rose Bowl parade while eating sandwiches from our paper sacks. The parade came to us in black and white, its announcers, 82

too, in black and white, their comments more flowery than the flowers their scripts labored to describe. We were pleased not to have driven all the way to Pasadena, pleased to be safely in our apartment eating sandwiches and drinking fruit juice and from time to time going outside to inhale a breeze that swept in from the ocean. Three months ago we had moved into a larger space—the same apartment complex, but a different apartment. Now we had a bedroom with a bed that did not disappear into the wall. Beside our bed sat a crib we had bought at a furniture store downtown. We had a small dining room, too, and a living room with a large window facing south. Through it, if we stood far to the left, we still could see a stretch of the Pacific off to the west and, during much of the day, with the curtains open, sunshine brightened both the room and our rising spirits—because February was just around the corner and the first of our four children was about to be born.  At the naval hospital a corpsman told me that, no, I could not be present in the delivery room to watch the arrival of the baby. You can wait right here, he said, right here being a small square space devoid of windows no less than of personality. I’ll let you know, he said, when the event occurs. When the event occurs. There was a certain sterility not only in the phrase itself, but also in the way the corpsman spoke it. He was gone before I could reply. Did time pass slowly, or not at all? We had arrived at the hospital at oh six hundred, neither of us, I believe, completely awake, yet both very excited. Now I was sitting on a wooden chair in a room that smelled like a medicine chest, watching a wall clock whose hands were moving sluggishly along. Or were they moving at all? There are times when you want time not to move, times when you want the pleasure of the moment to extend itself indefinitely, as I had that Sunday afternoon while standing alone in the Flint Hills northeast of Emporia, far removed from angry, unforgiving callers, or that beautifully tranquil day when my brother dropped his watch into the water of a stream that moved so slowly it 83

seemed almost to be mocking time. But there are times also that, in their refusal to hurry along, promote anxiety or fear, and you do what you can to hasten one moment into another, but of course nothing works; the more you try, the slower the tempo becomes. The hospital clock continued to move slowly. Tick and tock. Had time crept by like this as my parents awaited my own birth? So slowly. Tick. And. Tock. Slower than molasses in January: It’s what my mother, Katie Marie, called anything, or anyone, that moved too slowly for its motion to be detected. And sitting in that bleak waiting room, I recalled the time long ago when I concluded that Mother herself moved too slowly or, rather, that she was to blame for time’s seeming to stand dead still. And I remembered feeling helpless, even somewhat angry, that my own Mother would cause time to behave like molasses in January. This happened when she was selling Avon products. My mother did whatever was necessary to make enough money to keep food on the table and clothes on the backs of her three children. She was friendly and gregarious, full of spunk and optimism and easy banter, all of which enabled her during the years of the Great Depression to find work when others less outgoing couldn’t. One of her jobs—the one that followed her stint with the local weekly, the Independent, when she gathered news by phoning those who she thought might have news to give her, and the one that preceded her tenure as a clerk in a grocery store and later as a cook and waitress in a café—was that of selling Avon products. It was an ideal setup because it required all the traits and skills that my mother possessed, some of them in abundance. Perhaps most important for this particular job was her ability to believe, deeply and honestly, that what she was doing was, beyond any doubt, the right thing to do. Selling Avon products, then, was the right thing to do, not only because the family needed the money, but because Avon products were superior to all other such products and therefore should be purchased by anyone who needed them and who wanted to be a partner in doing the right thing. I was quite young when I went with her, for the very first time, to deliver an order to a woman who lived on a farm north of town. The 84

woman, at Mother’s request, had invited some of her far-flung neighbors to be present when the delivery was made so that, as a group, they might learn of the many superior qualities of Avon products and, having learned, might be wise enough to do the right thing and purchase some of them. Mother carried her samples in a bulky leatherette case. And though she was bulky also, she carried it with upright assurance, toted it into the living room of the farmhouse where the women had gathered, some sitting around a large oak table, others standing here and there around the room. It was a day in August, a hot, airless day, and there was nothing more than a pitifully small fan to cool things down. But it was not the heat that bothered me as much as did the aromas—these, and the chatter of the women as they dabbed their bosoms and sprayed their wrists and rubbed lotions and salves onto themselves and each other, Mother in the middle of things with her leatherette case agape at the center of the table. I accepted a short glass of lemonade from the hostess, then another. The women’s talking, and their laughter, and most of all the mixture of quaint and powerful effluvia, were taking their toll. Except as a small object to whom lemonade was offered, I either did not exist or was too insignificant to be noticed. Nonetheless, I stayed in the room until I thought I might be sick, at which point I asked Mother if I might return to the car. I did not tell her that something large was rising in my throat. She looked down at me, smiled, sprayed a wrist that already was noticeably wet, and nodded yes. Fresh air, too, can be the right thing. Outside, I inhaled and exhaled several times, happy that with each breath the lump in my throat grew smaller. Convinced that I was not going to be sick, I hurried to the car, opened a door, and climbed in. Soon Mother also would return to the car, wouldn’t she, and we’d drive home, she telling me things I’d not understand, her sentences laced with the lexicon of Avon products—lipstick, rouge, powder, lotion, body cream, blush. Soon she would return to the car, wouldn’t she, would place the case of samples on the backseat, her ample body then settling in behind the wheel, her right hand reaching for the ignition. Soon. . . . 85

But no, she did not return—would never return, I thought, because time had stopped dead in its tracks; I would spend eternity in the front seat of a decrepit Chevrolet, inhaling upholstery, driving wherever my frantic imagination took me, or drawing faces in the dust on the dashboard, while forever my mother, Katie Marie, would be laughing and sniffing her wrist and writing down orders from other women who’d be dabbing their bosoms with powders and lotions while oohing and aahing because they’d be doing, or about to be doing, the right thing. A farmyard in south-central Kansas on a hot day in August can be a bleak and depressing sight, a few scrawny chickens picking at the dust for bugs that long since have burrowed into the ground, or have found a rock to take refuge under; a dog lying in the shade of a back porch; leaves on a walnut or Chinese elm curling, hanging on, wanting a good slow soaking rain. You look at these, study them, memorize their movements, their configurations, the windshield you are looking through as if glass magnifying—and threatening to set afire—a cache of human tinder. Yes, the windows are down, but there is no breeze; and sooner or later you begin to soften the bleakness by partially closing your eyes, squinting, narrowing and narrowing the aperture until everything beyond is pleasantly out of focus, until time moves slower than molasses in January, until it becomes a warm and intimate darkness or, what is more likely, ceases to exist.  Darkness gave way to light when the corpsman shook my shoulder. I was awake immediately, if in fact I had been completely asleep. You have a daughter, he said. She and the mother are doing fine. I followed him to a room where my daughter lay almost invisible on a cart beside the bed where her mother, on her side, was studying what she could see of the baby. It’s a girl, she said. She looked relaxed and utterly happy. I know, I said. The corpsman told me. Look at her hair, she said. Just look at that hair! It was black and thick and long; someone had combed it down her 86

forehead into a neat row of bangs. Only the hair and her face were visible. The rest was covered with a thin pink blanket over a white sheet. She’ll stay here with me, said the mother, even at night. They call it living in. A corpsman walked by, stopped, returned, and said, When she wakes up, Dad, you can hold her. Are your hands clean? When the baby stirred, I reached down and pulled back the blanket and sheet and picked her up. She opened her eyes. Unable to speak, I merely stood and studied this wonderfully small and dependent figure, its features delicate and intact. She watched me also, I believe, as I counted her fingers. A few months from now I’d hear Tennessee Ernie Ford singing a new song, “First Born,” his bass voice resonant in the room where I’d sit rocking Terry Lynn, and twenty-five years later I’d try to restore the moment with lines in which I hoped to focus upon the wonder and mystery of birth: Remembering you as the beginning I am not at all surprised that the earth took a morning turn: beasts of the field stretched their slumbering legs, their uncontested wings. Lying in your crib you breathed for all of us who had lost for a time the simple art of breathing. And the lungs of the universe swelled then to an immense proportion, each planet with its orb equal and opposite, each star with its sometimes rising, sometimes falling, moon. 87

Daughter, you are the first force pulling the water to its habitual shore. Finding legs at an early age you rose completely only to keep on rising, and we sensed how our world with you at its summit turned, and we looked and we saw that it was good, and we wanted more.  I lie on a blanket on the beach, my daughter beside me reaching for sand that, if I don’t watch her, she’ll eat by the fistful. Already she is well on her way to becoming just like her mother, a self-proclaimed beach bum who serves as the infant’s model. On most weekends, though, when my platoon isn’t attached to a rifle company with orders to attack a pillbox or assault a stretch of sandy terrain due north of San Clemente, on a regimental or division exercise, I join the model and her daughter, and the same sun that shines on them during the week shines on me during the weekend, the lungs of the universe swelling to an immense proportion. The child, her dark bangs intact, is wearing a blue diaper shirt open at the front, and a yellow bonnet stitched carefully together from scratch, and without a pattern. The one who did the stitching lies on her stomach nearby, her head on her hands, her flesh pink as smoked salmon. Time moves slowly, but not slowly enough. We are a picture waiting until now to be taken.

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Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. — Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

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A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since my days as a platoon leader at Camp Pendleton: one year of teaching high school English in Ellinwood, Kansas; one year of graduate work at Emporia State, where I wrote a novel for my thesis (unpublished, it fills space and collects dust in the college’s William Allen White Library); four years teaching composition at Wichita State University; then the beginning of a long tenure at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. I had come to Lincoln because a colleague, Leon Satterfield, told me that a position was open in the English Department. Satterfield was an Emporia State graduate, and a friend of my brother, who had resigned from the plc program and was soon drafted into the army—at about the same time as were Satterfield and several other college classmates. I was reluctant to interview for a position at Wesleyan. It was, and still is, a school with an identity linked to the Methodist church, and I was a backslider well beyond redemption, or so I hoped. But Satterfield had been there for two years, and his record as a backslider was at least equal to my own. He admitted as much himself. And he was still on the payroll. So don’t let your fallen condition stop you, he told me. Methodists to the contrary notwithstanding, he said, it’s a damn good place to teach. I believed him. He was an honest young man, having spent his youth attempting to grow up in western Kansas, and he was also an army veteran who, in league with my brother, had kept the peace in Europe. And I needed a job. I had been told by my department chairman at Wichita that if I intended to advance in my career I would need a PhD. 91

You can teach here at Wesleyan, Satterfield said (he was on the phone), and work on your degree at the University of Nebraska at the same time. That’s what I’m doing. And it’s going well, he said, Methodists to the contrary notwithstanding. I mailed my resume, such as it was, to Professor Harold Hall, chairman of the English Department, then several days later drove two hundred and fifty miles on snow-covered highways to keep my appointment with him. He was a short, frisky man with enormous confidence and a laugh that could be heard throughout the halls of Old Main, where the interview took place. He asked me a few questions, one or two about my relationship with Satterfield; it seemed apparent that he had a lot of respect for him, both for his candor and for his ability to write a declarative sentence “free of flapdoodle,” as he put it. Matter of fact, he said, I hired him because I was impressed with the opening sentence of his letter of application. I’m looking for a job. How’s that for an opening? Not bad, I said. Matter of fact, I added, that’s why I’m here. I’m looking for a job. After the interview, Professor Hall took me to see the Dean of Men, whose office was in the same building. Sam Dahl. He was a middle-aged Swede whose blue eyes could not stop twinkling, even when he broached subjects that were purportedly serious. He sat in a large swivel chair behind a cluttered desk, doing his best to appear official. His role in all of this was to ask me a series of questions, all of them dutifully listed on a piece of paper that he held gingerly in front of him, as if he were handling not paper but a soiled dishrag. Are you a member of any church? No. Do you drink? Alcohol? Yes. Alcohol. Yes. Do you belong to any professional organizations? No. 92

Do you smoke? No. And so on. Sam Dahl’s demeanor had made me feel at ease from the moment I shook his hand. I could sense that he did not enjoy asking such questions, but I assumed that the procedure was an archaic ritual that the Methodists required but paid no attention to. I therefore answered each question as seriously and as honestly as conscience and discretion allowed. During my extended tenure at Nebraska Wesleyan, my admiration for Sam Dahl would increase with each passing semester. His respect for academic freedom was a major reason. On only one occasion did I question this respect. It was an episode involving Dante, the Dean, and Hell and Damnation. As a first-year teacher in a church-related institution, I was careful not to rock the ark. I was especially careful not to employ expletives to underscore whatever point I wanted the students to remember. This was not easy for someone who learned to swear by his father’s, and others’, example. From my father I learned not so much the vocabulary as the rhythm, though, as a child, when I first heard him blow his top, I must have been primarily impressed by the words themselves. Later, I’d learn that the words alone cannot carry the full burden of the message. Mark Twain clarifies this view in a story he relates in his autobiography. He was in the bathroom, he wrote, preening, being careful not to awaken his wife, Olivia. He was adjusting his suspenders, or trying to, when they became twisted and unruly to the extent that Twain could not contain himself: He cursed, and cursed some more, not realizing that the swearing was louder than he intended, nor aware that he had awakened his wife. She slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, where she stood silently in the doorway, observing and listening. Twain meanwhile continued to wrestle with the suspenders, still cursing, until at last he gained the upper hand and the galluses hollered Uncle! Pleased, Twain finished his primping. When he turned to leave the room, he saw Olivia standing in the 93

doorway. She said nothing, nor did he. When he approached the doorway, his wife turned, giving him room to pass; but as he moved by her, she whispered several of his choice expletives into his ear. He moved on, surprised to have heard Olivia speak words that under most other circumstances the gentle, soft-spoken woman would have bitten her tongue to repress. He continued to walk down the hall, but after a few steps he stopped and turned and, looking at his wife, said, Livy, darling, you know the words, but you don’t know the music! This was a significant, even profound, observation and, after I had considered it, and pondered it long in my heart, I concluded that my father was one of those who knew both the words and the music—and knew also the value of intensity, because he often uttered the words through gritted teeth with sufficient class and determination to impress the most discriminating fan of the art of cursing. Because I am my father’s son, and because this son listened not only to the father but also to a host of other practitioners—in the pool hall, the drugstore, the barber shop, the filling station, the depot, the creamery, the café—I found it difficult not to erupt, once in a while, in the classroom. But as a first-year teacher in a church-related institute, I determined to bite my lip. I was doing well, or so I believed, until one morning I was called into Dean Dahl’s office. His eyes sparkling but the rest of his face sober as a stone, the Dean advised me that three of my students had come to him, one at a time, with complaints about my language. I was stunned. My first inclination was to say, Bullshit! My second inclination was not to say it. Who were the students? They asked me not to reveal their names. Then I’ll ask you not to honor their request. Who were the students? They came to me one at a time. Three independent complaints. I cannot ignore them. Do you know what classes they are in? Or did they ask you not to reveal that also? 94

No, I do not know the classes. Only that in them, they said, you are using language they find offensive. Did they give you examples of my offensive language? Yes. They said that hell was used frequently, and damnation. Hell and damnation. Hell and damnation. Hell and. . . . And suddenly I knew what the students were objecting to, and I could not resist a chuckle—or a mild oath. Damn it all to hell, Dean, I said, these three students are in my masterpieces class, and they have come to you one at a time to give the impression they are reacting independently. They aren’t. The little puritans are conspiring to put my ass—I beg your pardon—in a sling. Sam Dahl looked puzzled as he struggled to follow my deduction. His brow furrowed and his blue eyes narrowed as he studied something—a yellow pencil, maybe, lying on the desk in front of him—with a devoted intensity. I gave him plenty of time to sort it out. Hmmm, he said finally. Do you suppose? Yes, I do. I don’t doubt that the young ladies are offended by such language, but Dean, sir, I am using the language in the context of discussing Dante’s Inferno. Dean Dahl stopped studying the pencil and looked slowly up, his face showing signs of bemused recognition. Dante’s Inferno? Yes, sir. Hell and damnation, excrement and bile and blood and pus and. . . . I know. Well, he said, I should have quizzed the young ladies more thoroughly, shouldn’t I. Then there’d have been no need to bother you. No bother, I said, though it had been. But the bother would be more than offset by the pleasure I’d have watching the faces of the three girls as we moved circle by circle deeper into the pit of Dante’s inferno. What would be their reaction to encountering fortune tellers with their decapitated heads reversed on their necks; grafters, sunk in boiling pitch, guarded by demons who rip them to shreds with grappling hooks and claws if they rise above the surface of the pitch; sowers of discord hacked 95

and torn eternally by demons with bloody swords; and falsifiers afflicted with darkness, thirst, filth, stench, diseases, and shrieks and. . . . I left Dean Dahl in his chair in his office. Both of us were smiling.  I had no further confrontations with Sam Dahl, and as the years moved by I discovered that, generally speaking, the use of expletives in the classroom should be determined not only by their appropriateness in context but by intuitive urgency: If the word or phrase must be said, then say it. For me, this very situation would occur at various and unpredictable times, one of which was provoked by the accidental breaking of a piece of chalk—or, more correctly, a new length of polychromatic alphasite, a yellow, flaky chalk substitute that must have been given to those institutions with compassion enough to accept it. I’d take a new piece of this synthetic abomination in my hand and, before I had written more than two or three words on the blackboard, it would break, and invariably I’d be surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, and just as invariably I’d become a sorry version of Mark Twain working to untangle his suspenders. With each outburst I was embarrassed. I’d apologize to the class and ask its forgiveness, and never did one of the classes fail to give it. Then one morning a new length of polychromatic alphasite broke, and for some inscrutable reason the duration and intensity of my tirade broke all previous records. Spent, I faced the class and told it how genuinely sorry I was. And as I studied the roomful of forgiving faces, it occurred to me that maybe I could negotiate a way out of my awkward dilemma. I was absolutely convinced that some damning of the superficial chalk must be done— but must I always be the one to do it? No—not if I could get a volunteer to do it for me. Summoning up all my powers of logic and persuasion, I told the class the swearing must be done (the alphasite deserved it, and so too did those who procured it), but I was starting to fear that the responsibility for damning the chalk was perhaps more of a load than one individual should have to bear. And, finally, I confessed that I was beginning 96

to feel selfish about keeping all to myself the cathartic joy of cursing the chalk. Would someone therefore volunteer to assume the role of surrogate swearer? Two hands went up immediately, one belonging to a young man at the south end of the middle row, the other to a young woman in the center of the back row. Cindy, I said, I believe your hand beat Derek’s by a finger. She seemed pleased. She was a plucky little blonde roughly the size of the woman I married, the one I have yet to have to shake the sheets to find. Cindy, I continued, are you willing to assume the duties and responsibilities of a surrogate swearer, with all the honors and privileges appertaining thereunto? She nodded affirmatively. Good. You are now this class’s official surrogate swearer. Congratulations! After some moments of spontaneous applause, I told the class that, because my response to the breaking of the phony chalk had always been an automatic reaction, I could not totally guarantee that I’d be able to refrain entirely. But I promised I’d do my best. Time (or was it sleep?), wrote Shakespeare, knits up the raveled sleeve of care, or words to that effect; he might have added that time (or sleep, maybe) also permits one to forget. So a week or so later, when I broke another piece of alphasite, I began another tirade. But I was only a word or two into it when I heard Cindy’s voice from the back of the room, and immediately I hushed. Now I must be honest, even though the honesty might be construed as sexist. I chose Cindy over Derek not because her hand was up first, but because the hand was attached to a female. I was curious, and doubtful: Could Cindy, a female, do justice to an art that most often, in my experience, fell to the purview of a male? Frankly, I didn’t think so. Little Cindy, though plucky, must be merely sugar and spice and most every97

thing nice. Gender, finally, would prevail, and Cindy, true to her dna, would fall short. I was remarkably wrong. Cindy cursed the alphasite, and all of those responsible for its existence, in a stentorian voice that set me back on my heels and left the students slack jawed in their desks. It was not a long performance, but it was inclusive, and it came directly and sincerely from the speaker’s heart. When she finished, her congregation sat speechless for some time, too astonished to applaud immediately. I believed then, and I believe now, that each young man who was in attendance that morning fell instantly and irrevocably in love with our surrogate swearer, including those who so foolishly believed they were in love with someone else. I would learn somewhat later—chance adding a perfect conclusion to the tale of the substitute swearer—that Cindy’s parents, both of them, were ordained Methodist ministers. When Cindy’s mother visited the class later in the semester, and I deliberately broke a length of alphasite, and Cindy responded appropriately, her mother glowed proudly; and, her title and affiliation to the contrary notwithstanding, I admired her to the very edge of love.  Our older son, John Charles, the first baby born in Emporia in 1958, seemed to appreciate the maraca we had purchased earlier in Tijuana. But by the time he reached the age of ten, the maraca had yielded to a genuine all-leather football. I bought the football at Kep Harding’s and paid more for it than my salary at Wesleyan warranted. But, because of Bob Devaney, I had no choice. He was the head football coach at the University of Nebraska, having arrived there at the same time I got to Wesleyan, the late summer of 1962. Anyone familiar with college football knows that when Coach Devaney came to town, Nebraska’s football fortunes were dead and knows also that Devaney, as if a messiah, resurrected the comatose Cornhuskers and presto-change-o led them into national if not intergalactic prominence. Throughout the state everyone, or everyone who 98

had a discernible pulse, was delirious with football fever, and before long rumors were flying, among them the contention that, if you had a son, you had damn well better train him to be a Husker, which meant that by the time his age had reached double digits he must own and be training with a genuine all-leather football. I did not know what might happen to me or to John, or to other members of our family, which now included a second daughter, Tracy Ann, should we ignore the rumor, and I didn’t want to find out. So off to Kep Harding’s we went, John and I, where we handled an assortment of footballs until finally we settled on what John, who would be ten in January, called a “dandy.” And indeed it was, its brown leather nicely textured and richly aromatic. John sat beside me in the front seat of the Chevy, the football in his lap not much smaller than the one who held it. He was so pleased that he said nothing. And now I felt safe, knowing that our family would be protected from any havoc that the Devaney cult might have wreaked. We pulled into the chat-filled driveway of our home at 63rd and Huntington. Probably I was thinking about something unrelated to football—a stack of essays waiting to be graded, say, or some notes that needed to be taken on a story—because I went straight from the car to the screen door at the front of the house and was about to open it when something tapped my right hip. I turned, and there was John, grinning, and before I could say anything he had thrust the football into my stomach and told me to throw him a pass; he was going to run an out-and-down pattern, he said, and I took the ball as he started to run his route across the yard. He was poetry in motion, if the poetry were free verse and its lines surprisingly irregular. I watched him, watched this version of poetry in motion, my eyes admiring its skittish flow at the same time that my fingers were absorbing the texture of the football. It is difficult to release new leather from your admiring hands, difficult not to raise the leather to the nose and inhale it, but now John was 99

running his route, calling for me to throw the ball, saying he was wide open, saying throw the ball, saying throw it, Dad, throw it, throw. . . . A young mountain ash was growing near the center of the yard, and a linden, maybe ten feet high, stood in the southwest corner. For the moment, they are not trees, but cornerbacks, and John, free verse in motion, fakes each defender out of his socks and heads for the end zone, normally referred to as Huntington Street. Finally, the one with the football stops feeling and sniffing it, cocks his arm, and delivers a pass that sails in a perfect spiral over the linden and into the arms of the receiver who, standing in the center of paydirt, cradles it for a few moments before tossing it high into the late summer air, time on the clock expired, victory over the opponent we most detest assured.  Apparently buying the new football did the trick. Coach Devaney, whose Huskers were demolishing their opponents, did not demolish my family, and my progress toward earning a PhD at the university downtown was moving slowly forward. I finished my course work, then passed the French exam. Next would be German. I’d meanwhile be putting notes together for the dissertation. But, as Robert Burns tells us, plans can go awry; and so it was that three events conspired to change the course I was so dutifully following. The first was the death of Mrs. Snow, a lovely retired professor who was tutoring me in German. She reminded me of my maternal grandmother, Anna, except that Mrs. Snow was gentler and more soft-spoken, and did not go about the house in stocking feet. But she otherwise resembled Anna—short and substantial and white-haired, with a squarish face bedecked with wrinkles. I was being tutored by Mrs. Snow because, as a youngster, I had refused to take lessons from my grandmother, and I had refused because she was German; a war was going on, and Germans were Krauts who wanted to exterminate me and my grandmother and everyone else who did not bow down to the swastika. No, as a loyal American boy I would not learn the language of the fatherland. Not long after Mrs. Snow passed away, a second occurrence provided 100

an additional speed bump on my road to a PhD. My dissertation advisor, Professor Robert Hough, died also—suddenly and unexpectedly—as he was on the running track about to begin his daily exercise routine. He was a boyish, energetic, middle-aged man who looked to be in excellent physical condition. I appreciated his sense of humor and his exceptional tolerance. He was a Mark Twain scholar, if not in fact a reincarnation of Twain himself. For example, when I told him the working title of my dissertation, “The Judeo-Christian Symbolism in the Selected Works of Ernest Hemingway,” he neither guffawed nor had me committed. He only smiled. But it was a wry smile, one that suggested less disdain than pity. In its own way it carried more weight than a guffaw, and enough irony to last well into the next semester. I was introduced to Professor Hough when I enrolled in his Mark Twain seminar, perhaps the most enjoyable and instructive class ever concocted. Among its many virtues, it opened my eyes to the joys of both over- and understatement. One of Professor Hough’s favorite passages, for example, is in Roughing It, where Twain describes Mono Lake in California: “The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen’s hands.” He then draws a dead-pan conclusion—“This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin”—after which he offers this description of a dog: “We had a valuable dog. He had raw places on him. He had more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw.” The scene, then, is set: an alkali lake and a raw dog. And, sure enough, the dog “jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies” and, sure enough, Twain with his feigned innocence enlightens the reader: “But it was bad judgment.” The writer’s account of the dog’s antics, how “He yelped and barked and howled” as he swims for shore, and how, when he reaches the shore, “ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward,” lays the foundation for a masterful example of understatement: “He was not a demonstrative 101

dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before.” Professor Hough regarded this sentence as a masterpiece of understatement. He could hardly read it without weeping and chuckling at the same time, although he tried not to do either, and tried mightily. Watching him, I could tell that, as the reader, he wanted to remain as innocently detached as the narrator. But he couldn’t do it. He’d break down, and his students would break down with him, and there was nothing left to do but weep and laugh together. The third event occurred over a period of several months. It began when Professor Hall, my department chairman, told me that Gary Gildner, a poet from Drake University in Des Moines, would be on campus early next month to visit several classes and deliver a reading. Would I care to introduce him? I was given an oversized manila envelope that contained the information I’d need for the introduction. I remember looking over the poet’s vita, which was not extensive, then at a sampling of his work—ten poems from his first book, First Practice, forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. On top was the title poem, a short one that ran twenty-seven lines. I read the poem quickly, and before I could move to another I found myself reading it again. After the doctor checked to see we weren’t ruptured, the man with the short cigar took us under the grade school. . . . Well, blow me down, I said aloud, I know these men, know them, as Twain might put it, by the back. The doctor is Montzingo, a rotund man who came to my high school early each fall to check the hearts and groins of the football squad; and the man with the short cigar is coach Rockholder, that red-haired perfectionist who walked three miles to school every weekday morning because, he said—his cigar to the contrary notwithstanding—he wanted to set an example. 102

What the coach in the poem did and said, beyond those opening lines, continued to strike in me the most recognizable of chords. He informed his players that he was made of tough stuff: “he was / a man who believed dogs / ate dogs, he had once killed / for his country. . . .” I had never read a poem so in tune with my own experience, had never thought that poetry might drive its pickup into my yard and shout for me to get off my hayseed butt and jump in and go for a ride. The doctor in “First Practice” was not in fact Montzingo, of course, and the coach was not Rockholder. But both had the feel of the men in my hometown; Gary Gildner, with his clear and uncompromising language, had given them the aura and texture of my own coach and doctor, and probably of countless other coaches and doctors in small-town America. Until that moment I had believed that the nearest and most authentic voices in American poetry were those of Walt Whitman or Robert Frost or Edwin Arlington Robinson—believed this, because I was impressively ignorant of anything being written by young contemporaries. This is not to suggest that the young contemporaries were superior to the established poets, only that I was amazed to learn that they existed at all—and that at least one of them, Gary Gildner, was writing from an experience he might have filched from my own. Well, blow me down, I said again when I reread “First Practice.” I know these men, and the boys the coach is trying to impress as he pushes them to the limits—I know them by the back. Another of the poems was “Letter to a Substitute Teacher,” the letter addressed to a Miss Miller and written in four-line stanzas. In the final line, the speaker in the poem identifies himself as “The Boy in the Green Shirt.” In the preceding lines the boy declares his love for Miss Miller, sometimes in language that could be considered a bit too sophisticated, or clever, to be entirely plausible—“tell me how I can forget / your unforgettable voice,” for example—but such language is every bit as believable as Frost’s New England farmer saying “my little horse must think it queer.” Perhaps farmers in New England talk like that, but not the farmers I knew in Kansas, including my grandfather, whose words, though wise and enjoyable, did not come from his mouth in iambic tetrameter. 103

And, too, it seemed to me that the youngster in Gildner’s poem was every boy who had ever fallen in love with a teacher, or thought he had; Gildner gives him the words that the rest of us, with our little inhibitions and erections, had suppressed. Well, blow me down! The poet from Des Moines arrived on schedule, met with two or three classes, and gave a reading, after which several from his audience— a convivial group, mostly students, but also another member of the English Department, and a psychologist—adjourned to Bob’s Tavern for libations. And what occurred that evening is what prompted me to begin writing poetry. We were talking about the relationship of sports to poetry, probably because Gildner was a young writer who yet fancied himself a pretty good country athlete. He was handsome and well-built, and knowledgeable about the finer points of football and basketball and especially baseball. After a couple of beers from one of the bottomless pitchers, and when the opportunity presented itself, I told him—and the others, too, if they cared to listen—about my experience as the sixth man on a high school basketball team that lost something like sixteen games in a row. Yes, such a string makes for a long season, I said, but our consolation was the attitude of our coach, Bo Spoon. He refused, absolutely, to give up. We’d be sitting in the locker room at halftime, already trailing by more points than I care to remember, and Coach Spoon would lay out a plan for the second half—a perfectly sound plan, no doubt, if he’d had some talented players to execute it—and we’d listen to him as if hearing the scheme for the first time. The locker room was not much larger than a shoebox; it smelled of old tennis shoes and sweat sox and analgesic balm and, if truth matters, defeat. But Coach Spoon, having finished laying out his plan, would assure us that one of these nights we were going to jell. One of these nights, boys, we are going to jell, he’d say, shortly before the buzzer sounded to call us back to the court, and when we do. . . . Well, Mr. Gildner, I said, the season ended and we didn’t jell. We finally won a game—just barely—but we never jelled. For a few moments no one said anything, and for those same mo104

ments everyone in Bob’s Tavern hushed, perhaps having sensed that the unfolding of a major tragedy had reached its conclusion, and deserved a brief interval of respect. It was Gildner who broke the silence, but in a voice not much louder than a whisper. Did Coach Spoon ever tell you when you were going to jell? No, I said. All of us assumed that he meant some time before the end of the season. The poet grinned. He had good teeth. That’s your mistake, he said. Your assumption is your mistake. I poured myself a fresh beer. My assumption is my mistake? Yes, said Gildner. You assumed that Coach Spoon meant you’d jell before the end of the season. That was your mistake. But we didn’t jell, I said. Not yet, said the poet. But if Coach Spoon didn’t give you any specific time for the jelling to take place, isn’t it possible that your team might yet jell? I looked hard into my beer for an answer. Nothing but amber under a layer of white foam. One of the starting five, I said, Evan Bullard, is dead. Gildner laughed softly. If you’re going to let death get in the way of your team jelling, he said, then you should stay away from poetry and pursue a terminal degree in business. At that point the silence in Bob’s Tavern ended, and a sudden hubbub of voices warmed the place like a comforter. The students laughed. The other member of the English Department laughed. The psychologist raised his schooner and proposed a toast. I looked at Gildner and said, Well, blow me down!  Not long after Gary Gildner left town, I sent my first poem, “Waiting to Jell,” to the Prairie Schooner, whose editor, Bernice Slote, returned it with a long, handwritten rejection. Her comments were incisive and kind. The 105

poem contained too many unnecessary words, she said, among them lines too frequently repeated, though she understood and appreciated, she said, what the repetitions were attempting to do. When I looked at the poem again, I could see that she was correct. But her criticisms did not prevent her from mentioning one or two strengths, and at the end of the letter she asked me to submit again. Two or three months later I put together another packet and mailed it to the Schooner. The editor accepted “Funeral for an Old Man,” which was to be my first publication in a major periodical. And this would be the final incentive I needed to drop my pursuit of a PhD. I had other incentives, of course; the most obvious was a longtime desire to write fiction. I had completed a novel for my master’s thesis, then two additional novels that were scorned by the publishers and eventually were committed to backyard bonfires. I also had written a number of short stories, several of which had been published in university periodicals. But until I read Gary Gildner’s poems I had never thought seriously, or at all, about writing poetry. It had not occurred to me that my experiences might provide grist for the poetry mill. But when the Schooner accepted one of my poems, I realized what I probably should have known for a long time: Since I could not not write, I needed to be free to find my own way as a writer. I further realized that finishing the degree might earn me more money and an opportunity for swifter advancement in rank—and perhaps a small measure of academic prestige—but it probably would not enhance either my teaching or my writing. My graduate school classes demanded a good deal of writing, of course, but not the creative efforts I enjoyed most—and felt compelled to attempt; and I now admitted to myself that penning scholarly papers just to satisfy the requirements of graduate-level courses was not at all satisfying. I discussed the matter with the woman whose white thigh I had so admired in the fifth grade as it revealed itself during Miss Yoder’s demonstration of her grandfather’s watch. (Time. See how delicate and precise are its internal workings, no room for even the tiniest miscalculation.) Eloise told me to do whatever I thought best—for myself, for her, for 106

the children. When I told her that my ascent on the salary scale would be something less than meteoric, she frowned knowingly and shook her head. When I told her I’d probably not advance very quickly in rank, she rolled her eyes and said tsk tsk tsk. When I told her. . . . My wife having more or less spoken, I went promptly to the department chairman and told him what I had decided to do, assuring him that the time I’d otherwise spend writing a dissertation would now be devoted to the writing of poetry, with maybe a short story or an occasional novel tossed into the mix. Professor Hall, a pragmatic man, told me what I’d expected—that, yes, salary and advancement in rank might be affected by my decision, but otherwise he thought that for me the choice was a sound one. Now, many years and many poems and stories later, I have no regrets. At regular intervals, in fact, I stop whatever I’m doing and thank the god I no longer subscribe to that the dissertation was not finished, though my heart goes out to those Ernest Hemingway aficionados who must ferret out for themselves all that Judeo-Christian symbolism.

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This: A poem is an attitude looking for something solid to sit on. And this: Poems are words that nibble at the edge of something vast. — Anonymous

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The poetry of earth is never dead, according to John Keats. But when you are in your office reading through a reservoir of essays that seems to have no bottom you begin to wonder. I was in my office at Nebraska Wesleyan one morning in early October, reading through such a stack, when the phone rang and a woman who identified herself as Gloria said she’d like to meet with me as soon as possible and discuss a program that she was excited about, and she thought I’d be excited, too, when I heard about the program, so could we meet right away and talk about it? She had a voice that I couldn’t turn down. We agreed to meet in the Campus Center on Friday afternoon, after my last class. I showed up a little late. I didn’t know what Gloria looked like, but there was a woman sitting in a corner booth that I thought resembled a Gloria—graying hair, a square, handsome face, and eyes, when they looked up to see me, bright and brown, with wrinkles at the edges when she smiled. She said hello and have a seat. She was eating a cheeseburger and fries and nursing a chocolate malt. It didn’t take long to conclude that she was a remarkable woman. For one thing, she managed to eat and drink without losing eye contact, and for another she fairly glowed with a sense of optimistic well-being. Yes, she had read my work and liked it and was convinced that I was the man for the job. I asked, What job? Poet-in-residence, she said. It’s a position made possible by a new National Arts Foundation program called Poets-in-the-Schools. She explained the program. You do residencies in public schools, she 111

said, a residency being five consecutive days, or one day a week for five weeks. All day? I can’t spend that much time away from Wesleyan. No, she said, one hour each visit, and in the same classroom. Well, I said, that’s more like it. We want to take poetry into as many classrooms as possible, she said. Not that some of the teachers aren’t already dealing with poetry, but we want to give the students a chance to work with a living poet. She smiled, as if to acknowledge that I fit into both parts of this category, then offered me a couple of fries, which I declined. It pays such and such, she said, naming a figure I can’t remember but was impressed with. Should be more, she said, but it isn’t. We’ll start with elementary students, she said, and with schools right here in Lincoln. You know how many elementary schools there are in Lincoln? I had no idea. More than two dozen, Gloria said. That should keep us out of trouble for a while. She said us as if I had already signed a contract. But there is one teeny-weeny hitch, she continued. The writer who goes into the schools must be what the guidelines call a master poet. Well, I said, that lets me out. I am a teacher who tries to write poems, but I am not a master poet, whatever that designation means. Gloria smiled, then began an explanation that I had some difficulty following. It means that, to become a master poet, you must serve an apprenticeship with a master poet who would have earned his title by serving an apprenticeship with a master poet. Do you follow? I’m not sure. You mean that to become a master poet I must have worked with a master poet? Yes. Well, as I said, that lets me out. I have not worked with anyone who, according to your guidelines, qualifies as a master poet. So I am not a master poet. 112

Gloria was finishing the second half of her cheeseburger, which she had cut into two equal pieces with a table knife. Red tape, she said. Isn’t it a pain in the you-know-what? She reached then for the table knife and, holding it by its blade, she raised it and, before I knew what was happening, struck me atop the head with its heavy handle. There, she said, I herewith have dubbed you a master poet, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereunto. She was grinning like a schoolgirl. Son of a bitch, I believe I said, I do feel different. And I did, Gloria having wielded the table knife with impressive authority. Good, she said. Now let’s go over the fine print. . . .  I went first into Hawthorne Elementary. I was accompanied by an aspiring young female poet, Nancy, who served as my apprentice and, at the end of two residencies, would become officially what I had become by way of a thump on the head—a master poet. You judge a school not only by its curriculum and its staff, but also by its aura, most especially its vigor and aroma. My apprentice and I arrived several minutes early, in time to be welcomed by students in several lines streaming out through several doors, a welcome that we soon recognized as a fire drill. It was a Monday morning, and early, but the kids were all energy and spice. A few minutes later, walking down the hallway toward Mrs. Andersen’s classroom, I inhaled the ambience of sawdust swept over tongue-and-groove floors, and the odor of paste on multi-colored paper. It was an old brick building whose interior was trimmed with pine that had never been painted, and its pine floors creaked underfoot. Mrs. Andersen met us at the door of her classroom. She was a pleasant woman in her mid-thirties, full of the same zest we had seen in the students. This is Nancy, I said, and Mrs. Andersen shook hands with my apprentice. Through the open door I could see a classroom full of students at their desks, and suddenly it occurred to me that, though I 113

had four of my own and thus believed I knew how to handle children, I was now about to launch into new territory—that is, I was about to confront a swarm of fourth-graders, five times more children than I had ever faced before. The poet, though having been smartly dubbed a master, was nervous. Probably Mrs. Andersen spent too much time with introductions. She wanted her students to know that they were being visited by living poets, so she repeated herself, saying more times than necessary that her visitors, both of them, were alive and writing poems, and that the students were fortunate to have them here in the classroom, alive, to talk and to write some poems with them. The unspoken assumption, I suppose, was that in order to be a poet one must not only have written poems, but also must be dead. Nancy was sitting on a wooden chair near one of the windows. She was a tall, pleasant woman whose face dimpled when she smiled. Mrs. Andersen stood at Nancy’s left. She was willowy, with a fair face and short blonde hair cut neatly in bangs across her forehead. Having established that Nancy and I were alive, she explained that we would be returning each day for one week, then gave me the floor. I said, Good morning. The students responded: Good morning! How many of you have written poems? Every hand went immediately up. How many of you have written stories? Every hand shot up. How many of you have written a book? Approximately half of the hands went up. Has anyone written a best seller? Two hands went up, but not all the way. Well, I said, it’s great to be in the company of so many writers. I looked at Mrs. Andersen. Do you write also? Mrs. Andersen smiled and blushed. A little, she said. A girl in the middle row raised her hand. Before I could acknowledge her, she said, Would you write something for us? On the board? Her question caught me off guard. But, given Mrs. Andersen’s intro114

duction, it was perfectly reasonable: If I am a writer, and alive, I should be able to write something. I’ll give it a try, I said, but only if you promise to help me. Will you do that? Of course they would. They were writers also, and much more alive than the one who purportedly was their master teacher. I located a piece of white chalk—genuine chalk, not polychromatic alphasite—and on the blackboard I wrote two words: bathtub and pony. Now, I said, let’s look at these words for a few minutes. First, bathtub. What do you know about bathtubs? The students looked at each other quizzically, as if the master poet were not really a master at all, but a shyster working to pull a fast one. But soon one of the more daring boys broke the ice, saying he didn’t much like a bathtub. His directness tickled his peers. He preferred a shower, he said, but if he were forced to use a tub he’d fill it almost to the top with hot, soapy water and lie back and daydream. What would you dream about? Several helpful hands shot up. My birthday party, one said. My mom, said another. My dog. . . . When the boy who had broken the ice was given a chance to speak, he said, My uncle’s farm. He raises horses. I’d dream of horses. Every time I visit him, he lets me ride one. My favorite is a pinto. I was scribbling words and phrases on the blackboard, the piece of white chalk refusing to break. When the boy spoke of his uncle’s farm, and the horses, I wrote the notes under pony, then invited the class to tell me what they knew or thought about horses. You put saddles on them, someone said. Someone else added bridle. A third told the class how once upon a time he had been thrown from a horse and almost broke his arm. Someone else. . . . Soon enough the board was half filled with scribblings. Bathtub and pony. Pony and bathtub. It was not easy to keep pace with the students; they had more responses than my unfortunate penmanship could keep 115

up with. I was never very good at cursive, anyway. Somehow the Palmer method, so highly valued by my teachers and those of my grade-school classmates who so quickly mastered it, never appealed to me. I’d grip the pencil too firmly, so firmly that two of my fingers to this day bear calluses, and “arm movement”—the free flow of the arm as the hand and fingers shaped the letters—remained, for me, more a concept than a reality. Good penmanship, I said, scribbling yet another note (I was muttering to myself, offering myself an excuse that I quite honestly believed), is not finally synonymous with writing. I know people whose penmanship is exquisite, but they can’t write anything worth reading. On the other hand, I know people who. . . . At last I called a halt to their responses. I stepped back from the board and looked at the notes. They were impressive in their density and lopsidedness. I singled out one of the girls on the front row and asked her to stand and read them. She gasped and looked at the boy beside her. He grinned. She stood and read. And the words and phrases, as she pronounced them, seemed somehow to gain in significance as they accumulated, so that by the time she finished they had come to sound almost like a poem in and of themselves. I applauded, and the others joined in. Now, I said, let’s see if we can write a poem using some of the chicken tracks here on the board. Using the chalk as I pointer, I said, Over here we have some words that are related to bathtub; over there, some things that came into our minds when we talked about horses. Let’s see how we might connect them. Again the students furrowed their brows and bit their lower lips, no doubt again entertaining the thought that the master was more shyster than poet. But again one of them broke the ice. Let’s start by writing, I’m sitting in the bathtub, she said. The students laughed. Sitting in the bathtub! Clearly, the girl was sitting in a desk at Hawthorne Elementary. I wrote the sentence on the board. I’m the secretary, I said. You tell me what to write, and I’ll write it. Maybe. For a minute or so the students sat silent. I believe they needed some 116

time to realize that writers can project themselves into a situation both imaginary and real. I turned the chalk in my fingers, determined to wait them out, until a student raised her hand and said, I have my eyes closed. I wrote the sentence on the board, below the other one. And when I turned around I saw several hands in the air, and one by one I called on them, and wrote down what they told me, and back and forth we went, adding a sentence that later we’d revise, choosing a word and then a better one, until the poem, eight short lines, was more or less finished. When I asked for a volunteer to read it, at least a dozen hands were raised. I selected the boy who would dream of riding a pony on his uncle’s farm. He stood and read our poem, which we had titled “Daydream.” I’m sitting in the bathtub with my eyes closed. I’m in the middle of Texas, riding a pinto Pony, and its mane and the saddle and bridle are so fresh and clean they smell like soap. We applauded—not only his reading, but the poem that we had spent most of the hour putting together. One of the students, though, was bothered because so much stuff I had scribbled on the board had been left out. Warm, soapy water, for example, and—his suggestion—a name for the pony: Dobbin, maybe, or Evelyn, which was his sister’s name. I told him—and the others—to copy down the notes, and the poem, and to take them home and work them over until they had them exactly the way they wanted. Or push aside the poem we wrote today, I said, and write a completely different one. Yes, they might want to use the same two words we started with, bathtub and pony, or they could choose two 117

other words. No, the poem does not have to rhyme, though it might. Yes, you will have a chance to read your poem in class tomorrow. Okay? They nodded. And I can still hear the lovely rustling of paper as they smoothed the blank sheets on their desks and began to write.  Any poet who has children of his own—and is, of course, not yet deceased—knows that it is difficult to be around young children without thinking of your own. And it is even more difficult, when the little students ask where it is you find something to write about, not to tell them the truth: in the words and actions of others, including those of your own children. As examples of how a poet finds subjects to write about, I told the children—beginning at Hawthorne and later at other elementary schools I would visit—how three of my poems grew out of happenings involving my little daughter. I refer to these incidents as Tracy and her shoestring, Tracy and her braces, and Tracy and the grasshopper that didn’t get away. Shoestring. She broke it one morning as she was preparing to leave for school. I was in the kitchen, probably staring at the breakfast dishes, wanting them to rise from the table and go to the sink and wash themselves, when I heard a distinctive moan, followed by Oh, no! I hurried into the living room to find Tracy Ann, age eight, sitting on the couch, her right leg raised with its shoe on a cushion, in her right hand a length of shoestring. My shoestring broke, she said. She was on the edge of crying. I’m going to be late for school! Don’t worry, I said. I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy. Broken shoestrings in the shoes of children can present a formidable, if not downright impossible, challenge, especially for someone with overly large, clumsy fingers that have yet to learn the Palmer method. I fumbled with the string and was approaching success when one end escaped, and I had to begin again from scratch. In my youth I had attained the rank of Eagle Scout. I knew a bowline from a sheepshank, a 118

half hitch from a clove. But I had not learned how to connect, quickly and with a square knot, two short, thin lengths of string, one of them in a shoe that an eight-year-old was wriggling as she told me to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, I’m going to be late for school! I was trying to tie a square knot, my favorite, because I know it is the most reliable. But I settled at last for a granny, hoping that my scoutmaster, wherever he was, would forgive me, and hoping also that the inferior knot would see my daughter through the day. The granny secured, I tied the strings and told Tracy that now she knew a father’s definition of jiffy. She wiped her eyes. They had begun to seep. She stood and confronted me and tried to smile. Dad, she said softly—and I leaned forward to catch every word—I think I’m falling apart! Throughout the day, at irregular but frequent intervals, her words returned: Dad, I think I’m falling apart. So after my afternoon class I sat at my desk and wrote a poem that, along with a new pair of shoestrings, I gave to my daughter that evening. I think I’m falling apart. My socks are full of holes, and this morning, as I hurried to get ready for school, both shoestrings broke. I have a loose front tooth, a snag in the right knee of my blue-jeans. My eyes have come unscrewed from watching tv. Do me a favor: pull this loose string on my sweater and watch me disappear. She read the poem, or tried to, then asked me to read it to her. She giggled. She said that most of the poem wasn’t true, that she had broken 119

only one shoestring. And I said what now she probably truly understands: You are young. Braces. The following year the young lady with the broken shoestring was fitted for braces. She was excited but apprehensive. On the one hand, she wanted to keep pace with those classmates who already were wearing braces; on the other hand, she feared that the braces would be painful. What if they hurt? she asked—more than once. Then we shoot the orthodontist, I said. Her mother, who had never worn braces, assured her that they wouldn’t hurt—not much, anyway, and probably only for a short time. But what if they do? Then we shoot the orthodontist, I said. As it turned out, the braces, she said, did not hurt, but—and she said this through waterfalls of tears—they have ruined my beauty! It was interesting that she had not anticipated this ruination. She had foreseen the potential pain, but not the destruction of her beauty. Maybe she had not noticed the extent to which her classmates’ loveliness had been reduced, or obliterated, or maybe she did notice the change but assumed that she, a very special creature indeed, would be given a reprieve. But the reprieve was not given, or so she believed, and when she saw herself in the mirror she concluded that her beauty had been dealt a blow from which it could never recover. Her tears continued to fall. And that’s not all, she said. Before he started, the doctor said he was going to put some wires in my mouth. Dad, he called it hardware! That’s all right, I said. First thing in the morning we can shoot him. That night I had most of the poem composed in my head before going to sleep. The gentle doctor called it hardware the gear he used to wire my daughter’s doubting face toward beauty. 120

You can’t even tell I have them hardly unless I smile, laugh, talk, or yell, she says, and I see a thousand ships shining in Aulis Harbor, their masters’ hopes, hard as fish fins, fixed on Helen’s wayward teeth— and in the near distance Iphigenia, bleeding at the gums. Dear daughter: Smile. Laugh. Talk. And yell this poem if some day I should promise you Achilles. When I showed the poem not to Tracy, but to Eloise Ann, she grimaced. Too many fancy allusions, she said. Tracy will not understand it. I agreed, so I filed the poem away for approximately a dozen years, then gave it to our daughter when she was enrolled in my masterpieces class at Wesleyan. At that time she was no longer as young as she had been. And I believe that now she understood it. Grasshopper. Tracy, home from school, was smiling through her braces; soon they would be removed, and, voila! her beauty restored. When I asked her what she had learned in school today, she replied promptly, I don’t like having a grasshopper in my hair. The school year was about to end, and a grasshopper, perhaps feeling as chipper as were the students, found its way into the classroom, then into Tracy’s hair. My daughter, according to her own account, panicked, 121

causing the most undaunted member of the class, Jimmy, to respond. Quick as a wink, Dad, she said, his hand was on my head and he captured the grasshopper and took it outside and probably smashed it. I was shaking like a leaf. I just don’t like having a grasshopper in my hair! Triteness to the contrary notwithstanding—“quick as a wink” and “shaking like a leaf ”—I found her story both funny and potentially bothersome. And why not? Fathers do not want to see their daughters leave home, especially if they are to be married to men who probably do not deserve them. Yet there are a few males out there who, if not perfect, are sound enough to be judged worthy. Jimmy might well have been one of those. So I had to acknowledge him, had to admit that he, or someone else, would one day rescue my daughter not by removing a grasshopper from her hair, but by taking her away from those others who loved her. The poem, then, ends like this: And when she sits on my lap, and my hand hops upon her head, I grow grasshopper legs for fingers. They are slim and hard, and though they mean no harm they touch the fair small scalp defensively, aware of Jimmy.  The poetry of earth is ceasing never, wrote John Keats. Do you suppose, when he wrote that line, he had my younger daughter, Tracy, in mind? Or Jeremy? Along with Nancy, who entered freely into the discussions and the class collaborations, I worked closely with Mrs. Andersen’s students at Hawthorne. After three days, I knew most of their names and some of their fears and preferences. Jeremy, for example, was the most theatrical student in the class, and maybe the most likely to succeed—or fail. Julie, who sat in the front row not far from the door, was a young lady who wanted to know everything, and immediately. At the start of the hour on 122

Wednesday she asked me for my own definition of a poem, probably because near the end of the period Tuesday I had borrowed from Alexander Pope and Robert Frost for definitions: What oft is thought but ne’er so well expressed and a momentary stay against confusion. I shouldn’t have tossed out those definitions; they were too lofty for fourth graders, and would require more discussion than we had time for. The master poet, who had spent too much of his adult life as a graduate student, had not been able to resist borrowing from others, especially from those who were no longer around to explain or defend themselves. My guess is that Julie, the girl who missed nothing, remembered that her teacher had introduced me as a living poet, and the young student therefore did not want to settle for definitions left by the dead. If the master poet is indeed alive, let him offer his own definition. But the truth was that, master or no, I didn’t have one. I had relied so entirely upon the dead that I hadn’t bothered to rely upon myself. The young lady, as perky as she was blonde, seemed mildly stunned. In an effort to prevent her from moving into shock I asked for clemency. If she would let me off the hook, maybe even try to forgive me, I would promise to have a definition by tomorrow, honest. Cross my heart. She looked at me sternly, then nodded her permission. Thank you, I said, and before I could say anything further the bell rang.  I had my definition with me the following morning, but Jeremy—or rather the absence of Jeremy—caused both me and Julie to forget it. Where is Jeremy? asked Mrs. Andersen, who took roll by noting empty chairs. Didn’t I see him earlier on the playground? Yes, he was on the playground. Playing football with Ted and Kevin and some others. One of them, or maybe more than one, tore Jeremy’s sweatshirt. But they didn’t mean to. I suppose he’ll show up any minute then, said Mrs. Andersen. We can go ahead and start without him. She hadn’t reached her chair when Jeremy showed up. He walked slowly into the room, his eyes downcast, his sweatshirt, which was a bril123

liant red, hanging loose and in tatters on his lean, narrow shoulders. His hands were deep in the pockets of his jeans. He did not go directly to his seat. Instead, he shuffled to where I was standing at the side of a large desk. He stopped and raised his head until his blue eyes met mine. He was an urchin impossible to dislike. His cherubic face was a mask of despair. One day, I thought, this young man is going to be a fine actor. Sir, he said, look at my sweatshirt. It is torn to pieces. I looked at the red sweatshirt, which of course I had already looked at. Yes, I said, your sweatshirt is indeed torn to pieces. What happened? Jeremy frowned and narrowed his eyes, as if to suggest that his answer would deepen his despair. I was playing football, Jeremy said. Tackle. Someone grabbed me by the shirt and tackled me. I’d say that someone grabbed you several times, I said. It looks to me like the sweatshirt is too far gone to be mended. Jeremy nodded. He waited then, unmoving, while the silence in the room accumulated. His sense of timing was impeccable. Finally, he fixed me with his blue eyes and said, Sir, do you know what is going to happen to me? I appreciated that he called me sir, but the way he said it made me feel as if he were setting me up as his straight man. No, I admitted. Tell me—tell all of us—what is going to happen to you. My mother, he said, with a seriousness that was difficult not to take seriously, is going to kill me. I tried not to smile, remembering that more than once I had been admonished by a mother who had been taken to the end of her rope by my shenanigans not to do this or that or, so help her Jehovah, she was going to erase me. She never followed through, however, for which I remain thankful. But the threat was enough to give me pause. Perhaps Jeremy’s mother, I thought, was somehow related to mine. Look, Jeremy, I said, rising suddenly to the occasion, I have a plan that just might save your life. 124

He looked at me doubtfully—surprised, I believe, that I was taking him so seriously. Take your seat, I said. I went then to the blackboard and with a new length of white chalk wrote sweatshirt at the top of one of the sections. Now I need another word, I said, one that does not seem to be connected to sweatshirt. We had done this exercise on Monday with bathtub and pony, and again on Tuesday with doorknob and chocolate malt. So it did not take long for someone to respond. Sparrow, said Alyssa. Some of the students looked at her and smiled. Sparrow it is, I said. I wrote the word at the top of another section of the board. We proceeded then to brainstorm. Most of the comments were related to sparrow, a bird that several of the students objected to. Too plain, they said, too ordinary. Why not cardinal or oriole or bluejay? You know, something brighter, more colorful. But sparrow prevailed, thanks to a budding little philosopher who said that most of us aren’t colorful or bright; most of us are common, just common people, like the common sparrow. I scribbled words and phrases under each heading—tree and nest, branch and maple and feather, and a number of synonyms for torn: ripped, broke, split, shredded, mangled, sundered (Nancy and Mrs. Andersen were joining in), disconnected, and so on. Soon the board was virtually alive with squiggles, and I asked Nancy to stand and attempt to decipher what my failed Palmer method had recorded. In a voice calm and confident she read back the list; I then moved to a clean section of the blackboard and, with the rod of white chalk poised, asked the students to give me an opening line. The process of composition is not easy to describe, especially when you are listening to suggestions coming from twenty very different directions. When I was a Tenderfoot, I learned to box the compass all the way from north-northeast to north-northwest, with something like a dozen other directions in between. But such boxing was an orderly 125

exercise, one direction named before another was turned to. Here in Mrs. Andersen’s classroom such precision was not possible. The process, I thought, was a mixture of chaos and harmony. Yes: harmonious chaos. The students’ many suggestions kept me busy, adding this and deleting that, pausing to decide upon the choicest word, wondering whether a line should end here or there, until finally we had a rough draft: The sweatshirt I shredded today is in an elm tree now, and a sparrow is sitting in the nest, looking warm as wool. It’s a red sweatshirt, someone said. Red should be in the poem. I added red to the poem: The red sweatshirt I shredded today. . . . If you shredded the sweatshirt today, said someone else, I don’t believe the sparrow would have time to put some of it into a nest. Then let’s say yesterday, offered another. I changed today to yesterday. But it happened today, objected one of the girls in the back row. Then let’s pretend that today is tomorrow, suggested another. That’ll mean that today is yesterday. I looked at Jeremy, who seemed a trifle confused. That all right with you? Jeremy nodded. Okay, I said. Now is everyone satisfied with the form? It’s too short, said one of the boys. We spent all that time writing a poem, and now we have only four lines. Then let’s make the lines shorter, said one of the girls. I tinkered with the lines, taking the liberty to arrange them in short stanzas. After we had done some fine-tuning, the students seemed satisfied that we had a final draft. Before asking someone to read the poem, I asked for suggestions for a title, and the class quickly agreed that the most obvious choice—“The Red Sweatshirt”—was also the best one. 126

the red sweatshirt The red sweatshirt I shredded yesterday is in an elm tree now, and a sparrow is sitting in the nest, looking warm as wool. I called on Jeremy to come forward and read the poem aloud. He seemed pleased. He stood off to one side and read with gusto, his red shredded sweatshirt adding a nice touch of verisimilitude to the moment. When he finished, all of us clapped appreciatively. I then asked whether someone who had mastered the Palmer method might like to write the poem on a clean sheet of paper. Yes, of course, Julie, you can do it. Then we shall cut the poem from the paper in the shape of a heart and pin it to what is left of Jeremy’s sweatshirt. Jeremy, I said, you can show the poem to your mother. Tell her how it came to be written, if you like, and my guess is that she will spare your life—that is, if she has any feelings whatsoever for the common sparrow. I was tempted to launch into a homily with transmogrification as its subject—the sweatshirt is not dead, Jeremy; it has only changed its shape and thus the nature of its usefulness, and so on—but the look on Jeremy’s face told me that he had heard enough. Having dealt with Jeremy’s problem, I then turned to keeping my promise to Julie. I have come up with several definitions of a poem, I said, but this is my favorite: A poem is an attitude looking for something solid to sit on. And, I added, here is another: A poem might be something you can write to keep your mom from stomping the daylights out of you. See you tomorrow. 127

 Did the poem in fact save Jeremy’s life? I must conclude that it did, because the following day he was back in class, wearing what appeared to be another new sweatshirt, this one blue as the eyes above it, though not as bright.

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I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry, “Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.” — Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

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My brother had been drinking, of course, but he was on time. He was standing straight as a ramrod near the carousel where my luggage soon would appear at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport. We shook hands. He was smiling with his mouth closed. His brown eyes were bloodshot. He wore tan wash pants, a light blue cotton shirt, and a brown tweed jacket. He had gained weight and his blond hair was thinning noticeably. That afternoon he had called Eloise, who then called me to relay his message: He needed to see me right away, as soon as possible. He did not tell her why. Such a message—from my brother, an independent spirit— was too rare to be ignored. The department secretary had written it on a scrap of paper and delivered it; I was in Old Main’s room 109 meeting my final class of the day, Masterpieces, and we were discussing a Greek play, Euripides’ Medea. I read the note, dismissed the class, and went straight to the telephone in my office. Time and chance happen to us all, says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, and I am inclined to believe that the dead anonymous Hebrew knew what he was talking about. Yes, a United flight would be leaving the airport in little more than an hour. Yes, I might make it if I hurried. I hurried. I believed—and so did my wife, who had my suitcase packed and ready—that John’s urgency was related somehow to his drinking. But on the phone, said Eloise, he sounded calm, not ruffled at all. That’s another of his talents, I said. Shortly thereafter, I was at a window seat looking down at the roof131

tops of Lincoln as we circled and headed west. Shortly thereafter, I was standing near a luggage carousel shaking hands with my brother. In the parking lot, I said I’d do the driving, though I was not looking forward to manipulating first the lot, then the maze of streets leading to Interstate 25, a major highway that surely would be crowded, although it was already late in the evening. No, said my brother. I’m fine. Much of the time during the flight I wondered why John had chosen this particular day to call me. He had been drinking for a long time, and so had I, and his consumption was steadily increasing, or so I believed. Had I expected him to call me sooner? Or was I surprised that he called me at all? I didn’t insist that I drive. I should have, but I knew John wouldn’t listen, and I knew also, or wanted to believe, that he was a better driver drunk than I was sober. We were in his pale green Oldsmobile, moving south on Interstate 25, when John invited me to reach under the seat and bring up a fresh quart of bourbon. I declined. There was a lot of traffic on the highway, but it was far from bumperto-bumper. John sat heavily and easily behind the wheel. I had confidence in his driving, but I did not want to erode my confidence by offering him additional whiskey. He had had enough already. Well, brother, I said, tell me why I’m here. I need to see you. Well, here I am, I said. Take a look. I need to talk with you. Good, I said. What shall we talk about? Anything. Anything at all, except the dire consequences of drinking too much Johnny Barleycorn. No snake oil. No lectures. No sermons. It took a minute or so for this to sink in, then another minute or so for me to believe him, because I had run several scenarios through my mind and had settled on the one that showed my brother as an alcoholic who had struck bottom and honestly wanted to talk about it—might 132

even want my advice, not a snake-oil remedy but some suggestions. If so, I’d be his most likely confidante. For one thing, I was his brother, and we trusted each other and enjoyed each other’s company. For another, he respected my attitude toward the cure-alls advocated by social and religious panhandlers, it being an attitude precisely in sync with his own. And for another, I was well on my way to becoming a sot myself. Fair enough, I said. No snake oil, no lectures, no sermons. John turned his head and grinned. Agreed! In that case, I said, reaching down for the bottle of bourbon, I think I’ll have a drink. I must have been enormously relieved to learn that we were not going to discuss the endless complexities of alcoholism—so relieved, in fact, that my first gesture was to indulge the problem I was so happy not to be confronting. The bottle was in a brown paper sack, which I did not remove. Kessler? Maybe, John said. I can’t remember. With a confident twist I removed the lid and offered my brother the first drink, which I labeled a libation. He thanked me profusely. At Castle Rock we stopped for a hamburger and fries. We had been nursing the bourbon, careful to make it last as long as possible, my brother contending that, though he had never been to Hong Kong, he had nonetheless learned patience from the Chinese. The burger and fries were a perfect complement to the bourbon, and eating them gave us the illusion that we had been returned to sobriety— which meant that soon after entering Colorado Springs we stopped at a liquor store for a back-up bottle. Let’s take a stroll through the Garden of the Gods, he said. We drove west, then north toward the Garden. After parking the car in a small lot near some huge rocks, we walked along the road until we arrived at a massive boulder balanced precariously atop another one. From where I saw it, under a slant of late September moonlight, it appeared about to topple. It’s not going to fall, John said. Not right now. 133

He stopped, as if to give the boulder a chance to prove him wrong, and we stood looking at it, at how it rested near the edge of another boulder, much of it hanging over; the positioning suggested that, in spite of my brother’s assurance that it wouldn’t, it was going to fall—at any moment. Let’s stand here until she goes, I said. John approached the boulders and leaned his considerable weight against the lower one, careful not to drop the bottle hid under his jacket. She refuses to budge, he said. I’ll need your help. There was no wind, and the high-altitude air was joining the whiskey to make me pleasantly giddy. A couple walked by. They were holding hands. I greeted them. They turned and smiled. John backed away. Know what this boulder is called? Balanced Rock. Because it’s so incredibly balanced. I remember, I said. We soon left Balanced Rock and drove down into the main area of the Garden of the Gods. After parking the car again, we sat for a while, sipping bourbon and talking quietly. The Garden is free and open to the public, John said, thanks to a man whose name I can’t remember. You knew that already, didn’t you? Yes, I said. You told me all about the Garden the last time we were here. The one who bequeathed the land, John said, stipulated that no entry fee was ever to be charged. You know that? I remember, I said. Twenty minutes or so later, John said, Well, let’s walk a bit. He tucked the fresh bottle under his coat and headed into the Garden. I followed. We had walked the Garden of the Gods several times, but never at night, and never with a bottle of bourbon tucked inside my brother’s brown tweed jacket. I was concerned that we might be confronted by someone official, maybe someone with a badge on his chest and a re134

volver on his hip, but we saw only two or three couples, and none of them seemed much interested in me and my brother. We strolled along a narrow concrete walkway until John left it to follow a path that led to an opening in a high sandstone wall. You first, I said. I could not tell how deep the opening was. Not without something to dull my fear, John said. He sat down with his back against the wall and removed the whiskey from under his jacket. I sat down beside him. I could look ahead and up and see, beyond a skyline of rock, a moon that was almost full. John pointed to the left of the moon. Camels kissing, he said, and along the skyline I could see the shapes of two heads facing each other, camels’ heads, their noses very nearly touching. I remember them, I said. The famous Kissing Camels. We were surrounded by conifers, sitting on pallets of their needles. The whiskey was reassuringly warm. Hope I didn’t completely upset your schedule, John said. No, I said, you didn’t. I was in class when I got your message. Almost time to turn the little shits loose, anyway. The students actually had been reasonably involved, for a Friday afternoon. But no one objected when I dismissed them. So what did the message interrupt? Medea, I said. We were discussing Medea. We talked softly, not in whispers but in lowered voices, because we were not eager to be detected. Free and open to the public, John had said, explaining our easy access to the Garden. But no booze is to be sold or consumed; that’s the way the founding father wanted it, and that’s the way it is to this very day—with now and again an exception, he said, and to illustrate his point he lifted the bottle and drank. He had been drinking also on that cold day in January when Gunner Johnson picked him up and delivered both of them to a snow-covered field east of Emporia, an expanse covered with scrub brush and plum thickets that surely must be crowded with cottontails, Johnson said, and if we don’t 135

run out of shells—and we won’t, because the trunk of this god-forsaken Nash is bloated with ammo, .12-gauge Winchesters enough to blow up most of Lyon County—we’re going to bring down more rabbits than we can skin in a month of Sundays. And Gunner knew what he was talking about, which wasn’t always the case, John said, Gunner being fond of overblown speculation; but on this occasion his speculation turned out to be understatement, cottontails shivering their little white asses off in every shrub and thicket, their bodies easy targets as they were flushed from their refuges onto snow that kept them in low gear, like shooting ducks in a barrel, John said, the air thickly acrid with potassium nitrate, the reports from the shotguns probably still echoing somewhere, until Johnson turned to his left and his shotgun, as if it had a will of its own, exploded, and the inside of his buddy’s left knee exploded also and the dead rabbits they had stacked near one of the thickets were forgotten as they looked in disbelief at my brother’s leg, blood the color of the rabbits’ blood soaking the leg of his trousers. John could not remember the name of the man who had perceived this place as a garden fit for the gods, so he had tagged him the founding father. I suppose the founding father had the Greeks in mind when he named the place, John said. He handed me the bottle and I drank. Johnson, not wounded, was beside himself, as his companion, wounded, told him what to do. There was a gaping hole on the inside of my brother’s knee, the surface freckled darkly with pellets. Over the snow they stumbled and lurched, Gunner supporting his buddy, each with his free hand holding a shotgun, Gunner’s swearing prompted by exertion no less than the odd quirk of misfortune. He didn’t know, goddamn it, how or why his weapon had so misbehaved, it never having done so before, John meanwhile telling him to move slowly, to watch his step, to keep his hold on the wrist that was resting on his right shoulder, at last to open the back door on the driver’s side of the Nash and guide him onto the seat, after which he asked Johnson, who was sitting now behind the wheel, his white hands gripping the wheel, to kindly pass back the pint of whiskey that John knew was in the upper pocket of his buddy’s coat so that he might use it medicinally, if not to stanch the flow of blood at least to reduce the pain. 136

Now I remember, John said. The name of the man who donated the land was Perkins, Charles Perkins. He didn’t officially donate the land himself; his children did the donating because they knew he intended to. But he died before doing it. So his children did it for him, in his honor. Here’s a toast to Charles Perkins, and another to his children! He put the bottle that I had given him to his lips, tilted it up, and drank. Slow down, John had said, but he said it too late, or, what is more likely, he said it soon enough but wasn’t listened to, and the Nash moved into an icy spin it couldn’t recover from, Johnson and my brother and the Nash coming to rest in a ditch replete with snow, but the motor was running and the heater worked and they were not in danger of freezing when a pickup stopped and the driver with the frantic help of Gunner transferred John from the Nash to the pickup where he sat next to the door with Johnson beside him as the driver, whose name John could not remember, took them to Newman Memorial Hospital where the bed in the room, John said (we were talking on the phone, had been talking for some time) was as close to a blessing as a man could hope for, but shitfire, he said, the nurse was homely and, though there were corner brackets on the wall, they held no television. Now that I think of it, John said, it wasn’t Perkins who named this place Garden of the Gods. It was someone else, Rufus somebody. He and another guy ran across the Garden when they came down from Denver to survey the area for a town site. The other guy said he thought the place would make a splendid beer garden. Rufus somebody didn’t disagree; he just said the area would make a place fit for the gods. Ergo, Garden of the Gods. I should have majored in history, brother, don’t you think? We had heard no voices for some time; probably now we were the only ones in the Garden, excluding honey ants or perhaps a magpie or hawk, or even a rattlesnake asleep in the crevice we sat beside. I asked John if he remembered that day a long time ago when he removed the watch from his wrist and dropped it into the slow-moving water. Yes, he said, he remembered it clearly, as clearly as if it had happened only yesterday. Here, he said, try a shot of this nectar. 137

He handed me the whiskey, and I drank. And suddenly there I was, standing between two beds in a room in Newman Hospital in Emporia, where John was an instructor at Emporia State. He lay in one bed, a man recovering from a heart attack in the other. The television I had rented, and that John and his roommate had agreed to pay for, rested firmly in place on the wall brackets at the far corner of the room. I would proctor exams for each of my brother’s classes, would explain to the classes what had happened, would smile when one of the students wondered whether Gunner Johnson had mistook my brother for a cottontail, would smile again when a different student said he doubted that I was my brother’s brother, but all of them soon bending their heads over their essays, which I read and commented on and affixed grades to, and the television I rented, though not an Admiral, displayed a sharp picture, but the sound as we watched it one early afternoon was too loud, John’s roommate Alvin said, so I stood and walked over to it and turned it down, and when I turned around I looked at Alvin for his approval only to see that his face was an ominous shade of purple, too ominous for the nurses, or the doctor, who arrived a few minutes later, to restore, and he died without knowing how the program on tv ended. Remember that time at the hospital in Emporia when your roommate died of a heart attack? I asked. I sure do—really a nice guy, John said as he accepted the bourbon I offered. The doctors had pronounced him fully recovered. He was scheduled to be released the next day. Did you know that? I remember, I said. But I’ve always thought poor Alvin went too far out of his way just to avoid paying his half of the tv rental, John chuckled. He raised the bottle and drank. As our supply of whiskey dwindled, I told John about the large canteen I took one year on the Loup River, canteen filled with one half gallon of bourbon, enough to quench the thirst of Jim Healey, who had lost most of his gear when his canoe capsized as in a downpour all seven of the boats attempted to land, five canoes and two johnboats, two of them capsizing, the rest staying afloat but two of them taking enough 138

water to soak much of the gear, mine included, and when the tents were pitched and inventory taken we learned that Healey, who was an Eagle Scout, had suffered the severest losses, duffel bag with its supply of whiskey missing, sleeping bag long gone; the only item belonging to Healey not soaked or drowned was his spirit, which he used to somehow find enough dry tinder to start a fire, other members of the expedition having erected a canvas canopy to shelter the flames. Were you in the old blue and yellow tent? asked John. He had not been a member of this particular flotilla. Yes. My tentmates were Marty Klein and Charles Stubblefield, and we pitched and deadmanned the tent and snuggled in and Old Faithful never leaked a single drop. I believe it, said my brother. We snuggled in, brother, but not right away. My duffel bag had taken some water, and so had Stubb’s, so we emptied the bags and sorted through our gear, separating the dry from the wet. Mine was mostly wet—shirts and shorts and socks and a pair of trousers. Stubb’s gear was pretty wet, too. And of course what we were wearing was soaked. How about Klein? Marty was drenched, but everything in the little turd’s duffel bag was dry as a popcorn fart. John, you should have been there to see it. Marty’s duffel was a big one, government-issue, like ours, but his wife had lined it with two plastic bags. Then she’d packed it, Marty said, and sealed it, and he wasn’t sure what all it contained. But she’d made use of every square inch; the bag was so tight you could’ve used it for a drum. John offered the bottle. I took it and drank. Then what happened? John asked. Well, soon someone outside the tent was saying knockknockknock, and when I unzipped the door and turned back the flap I saw Healey standing in the downpour in his poncho, wanting to know if we were all right and whether any of us wanted our clothes dried—he had the fire going good, he said, and had put together a drying rack made of limbs bound together with gauze from his first-aid kit. He would dry our clothes, he said, and fold them, if we could see our way clear to 139

paying him one jigger of whiskey for each item dried. His own cache of booze had been swept away when his canoe capsized, and he claimed he needed something to warm his inner recesses, those places that not even the flames of the fire could reach. And my right arm took its cue from my brain, and in a matter of moments it had found its way into my duffel bag, had found its way then to the bottom where, behold, lay the canteen with its one half gallon of bourbon intact. John, I said, I don’t honestly know what prompted me to buy and fill and take along such a large supply of whiskey. But I did, and there it was, and seeing that none of it had escaped I said yes to Healey’s demand and handed him a dripping bundle of socks and shorts and shoes and one pair of trousers. There is a divinity that shapes our ends, John said, rough hew them how we will. Shakespeare. And Stubblefield? He didn’t have much to bargain with, except his talent for wheedling. But Healey would have none of it. One jigger of hooch for each item dried. Period. No exceptions. No extenuating or mitigating circumstances. It wasn’t that Charles didn’t drink, but he didn’t drink enough to bother bringing along something to drink. I know Charles, John said. I have known him since the dawn of time. I love his occasionally generous ass like a brother. May I bother you for just one more sip? I handed him the bottle and he drank. I went along with my tale. So a short while later I heard knockknockknock again, and when I turned back the flap I saw Eagle Scout Healey standing with one hand under his poncho, hand that he brought forth to offer me ever so quickly a dry shirt beautifully folded. I received the shirt and laid it near the head of my sleeping bag, whereupon I lifted the canteen and took it to the flap behind which Healey stood, his poncho deflecting the downpour, his right hand holding a tin cup into which I poured what I estimated to be one jigger of bourbon. Healey nodded. He wanted to know if I had other articles of clothing to be dried. I gave him another shirt. He nodded. I closed the flap and turned to see that Stubblefield was readying his sleeping bag, and that at its foot rested a pile of soggy gear. 140

Marty meanwhile had taken a three-cell flashlight from his duffel bag and suspended it from a loop at the top of the tent. John, I must tell you that Marty’s duffel bag contained enough items to make a magician’s mouth water. A tin of chocolate bars, spare batteries, towels, toilet articles, clothing folded neatly and tightly, two softback novels and two guidebooks—one for fish, the other for fowl—a notebook and pencils, insect repellant, binoculars, sunglasses, extra shoes, a camera, a red umbrella with a handle that telescoped. Jesus my all! His wife had sent along enough merchandise to start a store. And all of it dry as the tinder Healey had found to start his fire. John offered me the bottle, and I took it and drank. With each knockknockknock I responded with a jigger of whiskey, and I received my articles of clothing one by one and placed them one by one at the head of my sleeping bag, and from time to time I sipped from the canteen, and Marty sipped from a small bottle his wife had not neglected to pack in the duffel bag, and time passed and the rain continued to fall and Stubblefield crawled into his sleeping bag and except for the top of his head, which was mostly gray, disappeared, and now and again I’d work the zipper on the door and ease back the flap and look through the rain to see Healey tending the fire and turning an item of clothing on the drying rack as several others warmed themselves beside the flames. Well before midnight all of my gear was fluffy dry, including the clothing I had been wearing when we came ashore, and I offered Stubblefield’s gear, one article at a time, to Healey, and one at a time he returned them, each time receiving an estimated jigger, until Stubb no less than myself had a fresh supply of gear, Marty meanwhile having joined Charles in the arms of Morpheus. I knew that Healey had not singled out the blue-and-yellow tent for preferential treatment; he had bargained with the occupants of the other tents also, tradeoffs that must have pleased him enormously, because not only was he living up to those points of the Boy Scout law that called for helpfulness and friendliness and courteousness and kindness, but he was also boosting another of the points, cheerfulness, by accepting payment for his services. Lying in my sleeping bag, I could hear him singing as he worked: Trail the eagle, 141

trail the eagle, climbing all the time. First the star, and then the life, will on your bosom shine. . . . The rain against the tent provided a pleasant complement to Healey’s singing, and I thought of my own involvement with the Scouts, hikes and cookouts and jamborees and the slow but steady accumulation of merit badges. Blaze the trail, and we will follow, hark the eagle’s call. On, fellows, on, until we’re eagles all! Yes, I said, I could have done what Healey did, but I lacked the desire, perhaps because I was the one with the largest supply of whiskey. Did you run short? Not that night, or the next, because most of the beer had been saved, and beer is what I relied on during the day. But I tell you, John, the rain would not let up. It poured all night, then all the next day and the next night, and we didn’t see sunshine until midafternoon of the third day. Healey cooked breakfast, of course, and we gathered under the tarp to eat, all of us enjoying bacon and toast and scrambled eggs, washing it down with beer from one of the coolers, all of us praising Healey to the high heavens. I gave John the bottle. It was nearly empty. He drank, but only a sip. Ah, but Stubblefield! Knockknockknock went the voice of Healey, again and again, but the old-timer in his sleeping bag never budged. And time passed, and not far from us the river flowed swiftly, rising with the falling of the rain, and Stubblefield slept, and Marty at regular intervals offered me chocolate bars, and under his umbrella we’d make our way to the fire where we’d warm ourselves, and two of our members who were fishermen caught channels that filleted and fried in butter tasted more succulent than sex, Stubblefield all the while dead to the world. We sat there for a few minutes, enjoying the quiet and the faint outline of rocks where the camels undoubtedly were still kissing, though we could no longer make them out. Finally, John shook me out of my reverie. How about the rest of the Loup River saga? he asked. He had left a final half jigger for me, which I accepted. I tilted the bottle and drank. Oh, yes, I said. Back to the river. Well, shortly before noon of the third day, I left the fire to check on my elderly tentmate, and what I witnessed 142

caused me to leave the tent in a flash to tell the others the news: The rain was about to stop! And as one they looked at the sky, where dark clouds were moving swiftly and, because the rain was falling, though lightly, they scoffed and guffawed and wondered where and how I had arrived at such a ridiculous conclusion. The rain, they said, would never stop; we would be camping here in this water-soaked clearing, they said, forever. No, I said, the rain is about to stop, and my proof is this: Only moments ago, in the tent, where I went to check on Stubblefield, I saw him stir, saw him open his eyes and look at me and yawn. This is the truth, I said, and I’ll swear that it is, and you can believe me or not, but I saw it with my own eyes and after I have eaten some of Healey’s delicious sandwiches I am going to pack my gear and prepare to shove off. And a majority of them scoffed some more, and guffawed, but several of the others registered doubt, you could see it in the quizzical attitudes reflected on their faces, and one of the faces—Erickson’s, I believe it was—turned suddenly pale and he pointed in the direction of my tent and shouted Look! and as one we turned and looked and there in the doorway of the tent stood Stubblefield, his mouth spread wide open in a monumental grin, the fly on his boxer shorts equally open, and now everyone knew that I had told the truth, knew that the rain most assuredly was about to end, which it did, and the last of the dark clouds moved away and by midafternoon the sun had dried the tents and we loaded the canoes and the johnboats and before pushing off we conducted two ceremonies, one to saint Healey and the other to knight Stubblefield, Saint James and Sir Charles, and under a sky blue as a Dutchman’s britches we pushed off and found a deep, swift-running channel, and my boatmate Marty sat like a pert little figurehead at the bow, a chocolate bar in one hand and his open umbrella in the other—to keep the sun from frying his delicate skin, I suppose, or as a safeguard against the sudden gathering of another storm. I’m sorry I wasn’t there, John said. Especially for the sainting of James and the knighting of Charles. I had drained the bottle, what little there had been to drain, and 143

now my brother suggested that we return to the Oldsmobile and drive home. I stood and looked around. The moon, mostly obscured by heavy clouds, was high above the heads of the kissing camels, and growing dimmer. I told John that I’d like to leave the Garden as we entered it, by way of the balanced rock—on the off-chance that we might see it fall. Good idea, John said. Now give me a hand. My knee is stiffer than a teenager’s dick. We locked hands and I helped him to his feet. He stood for a minute or so, testing his equilibrium and shaking the kinks from his left leg. Still a lot of pellets in and around the knee, he said. It’s where Gunner Johnson nailed me with his .12-gauge. You remember? I remember, I said. We retraced our steps slowly, conifers at either side of the pathway holding us in.

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All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious. — Homer, The Odyssey

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John Charles would be the first of our children to marry and leave home. So here was the question: What gift might you give to the son who has discovered his life’s passion in the form of a beautiful, darkeyed woman? I settled on a poem about my son’s darting across the yard ten years ago, sidestepping the linden, catching and cradling the new football, then tossing it so high into the late summer air that I am waiting yet for it to come down. He ran what he called an “out-and-down pattern.” out-and-down pattern My young son pushes a football into my stomach and tells me that he is going to run an out-and-down pattern, and before I can check the signals already he is half way across the front lawn, approaching the year-old mountain ash, and I turn the football slowly in my hands, my fingers like tentacles exploring the seams, searching out the lacing, until by the time I have the hands positioned just so against the grain-tight leather he has made his cut downfield 147

and is now well beyond the mountain ash, approaching the linden, and I pump my arm once, then once again, and let fire. The ball in a high arc rises up and out and over the linden, up and out and over the figure that now has crossed the street, that now is all the way to Leighton Avenue, now far beyond, the arms outstretched, the head as I remember it turned back, as I remember it the small voice calling. And the ball at the height of its high arc begins now to drift, to float as if weightless atop the streetlights and the trees, becoming at last that first bright star in the west. Late into an early morning I stand on the front porch, looking into my hands. My son is gone. The berries on the mountain ash are bursting red this year, and on the linden blossoms spread like children. No doubt Eloise and I gave the newlyweds additional gifts, but the poem is the only one I remember. I took some liberties in writing it, as those who work at composing poems sometimes do, because I believe 148

that fact and truth are not necessarily synonymous. The existence of calendars, for example, suggests that time is a real thing, a fact, and that its passage can be neatly divided into weeks and months and years. What the calendar does not suggest, however, is that time can pass quickly or slowly: You throw the little son a football in 1968 and in a blink of the eye it is 1978 and you are attending that same son’s wedding. Is such a swift passage of time a fact? No. But it’s the best kind of truth—poetic truth, if you will. Several months after the wedding, I went on a reading tour that I hope Time, that incorrigible thief, will add to its ongoing list of treats. I had given readings before, many of them, and conducted writing workshops and served on panels in Nebraska and around the country. But this tour was longer than most of the others, one full week, and it started only several days after the arrival of my first granddaughter, Michelle, who happened to be the daughter of the son who little more than ten short years before had run an out-and-down pattern—and who as a young man had further enhanced his reputation by discovering his life’s passion in the form of a beautiful, dark-eyed woman. So I was not altogether eager to leave home. What if my granddaughter needed someone older, and perhaps more poetic than her parents, or even her grandmother, to recite some lyrical stanzas calculated to charm her into sleep? What if, in the dead of night, she called out for someone to explain the intricacies of the use of the trisyllabic foot in iambic measure? What if. . . . These and other concerns stayed with me throughout the tour, and perhaps because of them, I remember that one-week adventure in such detail. It began when Craig Volk, a representative from the South Dakota Arts Council, picked me up in Lincoln. Volk was a pleasant, sandyhaired young man whose dimples when he smiled made him look like an innocent child. But if he was a child, he was one who knew what he was doing. He had put together a formidable schedule, one that took us from the university at Vermillion to retirement homes and elementary schools and high schools (and a bar in Mitchell, where my guide had failed to book us into the Corn Palace). On our way to Aberdeen, we stopped for lunch at Marlo’s Café in Watertown. It was a busy place, 149

filled with truckers and the divine aroma of french fries and hamburgers, and the jukebox was playing just loud enough to be heard over the din of voices and the clacking of dishes. One of the truckers must have been especially fond of a Bobby Bare number I had not heard before, because he kept playing it: Oh dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life! The fries were delicious—greasy and overcooked—and the hamburgers, topped with lettuce and pickles and slices of red onion thick and juicy, were cooked perfectly. Apple pie, then, for dessert, garnished with vanilla ice cream and, for the benediction, a refill of hot black coffee—and just one more rendition of Bobby Bare asking Jesus to dropkick him through life’s goalposts. It is both truth and a fact: The poetry of earth, as a poet observed, is never dead, whether you are in a university listening to a Shakespearean sonnet or in Marlo’s straining to hear a contemporary singer’s pigskin lyrics. At first I wondered about Bobby Bare’s choosing dropkick over placekick, the former having been absent from football for many years. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that dropkick was the better choice; its success relies strictly upon the kicker (assuming that the snap from center is a good one), while the success of a placekick depends upon both the kicker and the holder. Yes, I concluded, dropkick was the better term. From Marlo’s we drove to Aberdeen on a series of blue highways. Craig Volk was not a representative of the South Dakota Arts Council by accident; he was born and raised in South Dakota and knew its history and its hangouts. He agreed with me that dropkick was preferable to placekick. He wondered, though, why the songwriter had selected football as his metaphor—why not basketball, or (and may the gods forgive me) golf? Oh slam-dunk me, Jesus, through the horrid hoop of life! Oh one-putt me, Jesus, on the grassy green. . . . And so on. And incidentally, he said, he had made a couple of phone calls last night and, yes, the performance with the string quartet from Juilliard was on schedule. We’d meet them day after tomorrow in Montevideo, Minnesota. Okay? 150

I nodded. I was tired, and secretly hoping that the readings the next day in Aberdeen would finish the tour. But I had never shared an evening with a string quartet from anywhere, much less Juilliard. It should be educational, maybe even fun. As my guide, and driver, Volk had been easy to get along with, and I had no reason to quarrel with any part of his scheduling. Except for our lodging in Aberdeen. It was an old, refurbished hotel, and Volk’s description of it piqued my curiosity. It would be spacious, he said, the fixtures and furniture mostly brass and oak, all of it, he said, restored to replicate the originals. Do I like to sleep under a quilt and between sheets that smell like Clorox? There’ll be no air conditioning or tv, of course, because authenticity carries its own price tag, but I can leave the window open and let a fresh breeze blow into the room. And the lounge, he said, you’ll love the lounge; it has a high, rounded ceiling made, he thought, of mahogany, and the bar is made of mahogany, too, and we can eat there if we like, and have a couple of drinks before we go to bed, and. . . . The drinks went down easily, and my sandwich—several layers of tender South Dakota beef between two large slices of dark wheat bread— was every bit as good as the burger I had enjoyed at Marlo’s. The lounge was indeed impressive, its bar and tables and chairs comprised of wood enough to start a lumberyard, all of it highly polished; the beer taps were large and their brass fixtures shiny, and the beer that emerged from them was served in mugs that had been stored on ice and were colder than the liquid they contained. To prove my satisfaction, I ordered another. My room was on the third floor, Room 300, and it was stuffy and hot and smelled stoutly of restoration. I liked the quilt on the bed, though, and to test Craig’s description of the sheets I lifted the edge of one to my nose and inhaled deeply. Yes, the scent of Clorox was there, all right, palpable enough that suddenly I was seeing and hearing an old Maytag slosh-slosh-sloshing on the porch back in my hometown, beside it a tub into which I would drain the water, then carry it outside and dump it on a patch of bunchgrass east of the outhouse. 151

I opened wide the authentic window to let Craig’s breeze into the room, but there was no breeze, not the slightest whiff. But there was electricity, so I spent an hour or so scanning some material I’d be reading the next day—poems for the students at the high school in the morning, and other poems again for the folks in the nursing home in the early afternoon. We would be finished at the nursing home in plenty of time for the drive to Montevideo. But I could not go to sleep. The heat was stifling, and the smell of Clorox soon lost its appeal. I had forced the window up as far as it would go, in case an errant breeze might stumble along. None did. Instead, an irregular flow of traffic kept me wondering whether truckers ever shut down their rigs long enough to sleep. Aberdeen is not a large city, and not much of a tourist attraction; but that night it seemed to be the most popular hamlet west of the Mississippi River. I lay on my back, having listened to an eighteen-wheeler rumble by, wondering when another would follow. And always another did follow, and always the driver would sound its horn to let me and the rest of Aberdeen know that, come hell or high water, it was coming through. Roaring and honking and hissing, the trucks—both actual and anticipated—were enough of a distraction to keep me awake, and I soon compounded my restlessness with thoughts of home. I kept thinking about the birth of my first grandchild, and as I recalled this event I experienced an uneasiness that could only be diagnosed as homesickness. Almost a week ago I had said good-bye to her as she lay in her crib, just a fancy basket, actually, in a room with maybe a dozen other newborns at Bryan Memorial Hospital. I stood outside in the hallway, looking at her through a large window. She was asleep, and all of her, except for the small pink head, was tucked tightly beneath a blanket. Was she breathing? Yes, of course—but I could not see the blanket moving. I eased my face closer to the glass until my forehead almost touched it. Breathing? Of course, but. . . . Finally, I moved closer until my forehead was firmly against the glass, where I held it until at last I saw the blanket rise and fall, ever so slightly, rise and fall, until, satisfied, I said good night. At what time (time now moving too slowly to be measured) did the 152

number of trucks become fewer? I’m not sure. When I realized their numbers were decreasing, I listened carefully for the next one, convinced that I could hear it leaving Mobridge, far to the west, convinced that I could follow the ascending roar of its diesel until it exploded into Aberdeen and began to apply its brakes to make its movement alongside Room 300 last as long as possible. In an effort to divert my attention away from the trucks, I thought of my family, of my wife and our four children, and of the new granddaughter, who would be out of the hospital now and at home, probably sleeping in the small, white-slatted crib I found at an antique store and sanded and painted, its restoration rivaling that of the Ward Hotel. When at last the trucks became fewer and fewer, I drifted off. I had memorized the beginning, or maybe the ending, of a poem I would work on later. O Michelle! O infant far from everything but home! On our long descent to sleep we are all of us one family, after all, and all alone.  A light rain was falling as we drove into Pioneer Village at Montevideo, Minnesota. After leaving Aberdeen, we had taken our time, because we had plenty of it: a stop for gas and potato chips and Cokes at Milbank, another stop at Appleton, and finally a third stop for supper at Montevideo. The shower was falling straight down, and it made everything smell almost as fresh as white sheets pampered with Clorox. Craig parked the car near the little church where I’d be reading with the string quartet and, using a thick assortment of trees serving as umbrellas, we walked around Pioneer Village. It was neatly and compactly arranged—a few business places, including a barber shop, grocery store, and livery stable, and a few houses of various sizes, everything painted and trimmed and restored in meticulous detail. 153

Back at the church, the rain now no more than a drizzle, we went inside. It was a small church, six or seven pews on each side of the room, separated by an aisle down the middle. The front was elevated a couple of feet, providing a platform for the pulpit and, at its left, four short pews for the choir. There were three stained-glass windows on each side of the sanctuary, one of them depicting Jesus sitting on a boulder in the Garden of Gethsemane. On the backs of the oaken pews, hymnals rested in holders also made of oak. A long table sat at the back, and before I had thumbed my way through one of the hymnals the table was laden, and heavily, with plates of cookies and cakes and urns of coffee and lemonade. By the time I finished my thumbing, the church was filled. But there was no string quartet from Juilliard. I assumed that most of the people were there to listen to the quartet, and that if the quartet failed to appear the audience would be disappointed; maybe some of them would leave. But no, this was Minnesota, where shortly after entering the state Craig and I had seen a huge sign beside Highway 59: be nice. you re in minnesota. These good people were here for the evening, all of them probably Minnesotans, all of them therefore nice, all of them willing to suffer through a poetry reading if, at the end, there would be a reward of cookies and cakes and hot coffee and cold lemonade—and perhaps some gossip, or an offhand critique of the evening’s performance. Even so, where in the name of Christ were those musicians from Juilliard? They were entering the backdoor—glory be!—each toting an instrument, each being welcomed by those in charge, who were maybe as apprehensive as I. They came dripping into the sanctuary, past the table where they stopped to remove their raincoats, then down the aisle to the platform. I followed them, introduced myself, told them I looked forward to sharing the program with them. They were a convivial quartet, two men and two women, all young and damp-haired and bright-eyed and eager to perform. I told them we had about seven minutes to put our program together. Plenty of time, they said. They were removing their instruments 154

from their cases; one, the cellist, was already tuning up. Another asked me what I thought the order of the performance should be. I looked down at the hymnal I was still holding in one hand. Because we were in a church, where inspiration was no stranger, and because now we were down to five minutes, I said we should open with a hymn. You can play it and invite the congregation to join in. Loosen them up. Give them a chance to enter into the festivities. Then you can play whatever you choose for fifteen or twenty minutes, I suggested, and I’ll follow you with, say, a thirty-minute reading, and you can end the program however you like. Good plan, one of them said. He was tuning his violin. What hymn should we play? The clock was winding down. Four minutes, if we wanted to start on time. I turned to the alphabetized list of titles at the back of the hymnal. Again, place and circumstance—the church and the rain, which had picked up again, bringing its aromatic freshness into the sanctuary— conspired to promote inspiration. “Showers of Blessing,” I said. Page one fourteen. Fine, they said. “Showers of Blessing” will be fine. Two minutes now, if we were to start on time. I gathered four hymnals from the backs of two pews and gave them to the musicians, who placed them on stands beside their other music. They now were sitting on wooden folding chairs near the front of the platform, still tuning up. One cello. One viola. Two violins. The sanctuary was filled to overflowing. Most of the people had stopped talking and were listening to the quartet tune their instruments, as attentive as if hearing not a tune-up but the start of a full-blown concerto. Now it was time. Craig took to the platform to welcome the audience and tell it about our reading tour of South Dakota. Then he introduced a young man who represented the Minnesota Arts Council and who had been traveling with the quartet, serving as guide and program coordinator as they moved about the state. He said that he and Craig Volk were friends, that they had arranged the performance as what they hoped 155

would be an appropriate finish for both tours—a happy union, he called it, of music and poetry. A happy union? It turned out to be that, and more, because the quartet consisted of musicians who knew how to make remarkable— no, other-worldly—music. I had sung “Showers of Blessing” more times than anyone could count, nearly all of them with a congregation that, like me, followed along to the playing of a piano, with Anna Mae Hoyt at the keys. Anna Mae was a fair-faced woman whose ample thighs covered most of the piano bench, and whose spine, as she sat, was straight as a bed slat. She was a good-humored woman who took her piano playing seriously. Her face, for example, would reflect an impressive variety of contortions as she studied the notes in front of her, and she struck the ivories with large and equal amounts of skill and ferocity. For me, she was the Alpha and Omega of accompaniment. She was at once the best and the worst. She was what the singing of hymns demanded, or what they had no choice but to settle for. The Juilliard foursome was wonderful. I am glad I was sitting at one end of a front pew, with my back to the congregation, so they could not see my jaw drop open when the quartet played a lead-in to “Showers of Blessing”: Mercy drops ’round us are falling, but for the showers we plead. The final lines of the chorus ran through my mind as the quartet played the lead-in, its sounds rich and resonant and harmonious and beautifully on key. I don’t know much about music being on key, except to say that when it is beautifully on key you somehow know it; its precision prickles the scalp and sends a thin filament of voltage up the spine. You sit mesmerized. One cello. One viola. Two violins. You cannot resist rewriting the Scriptures, reducing them to a single sentence: In the beginning was the music, and the music was without words. Even so, on cue we joined the quartet. There shall be showers of blessing, this is the promise of love. . . . At first we sang tentatively, as if our voices were an intrusion, which, by any objective measurement, they were. But we sang anyway, our confidence growing as we became slowly convinced that we were worthy. There shall be seasons refreshing, sent from the Savior above. . . . If you are not an accomplished singer, but 156

you’d like to sound like one, it is wise to position yourself beside someone who is, or to be in the same sanctuary where four talented musicians can offer excellent support. Showers of blessing, showers of blessing we need. . . . And maybe, just maybe, you are a better vocalist than you give yourself credit for. Mercy drops ’round us are falling, but for the showers we plead. . . . Maybe, just maybe, you are good, maybe—just maybe—you are damn good. Do you suppose? I cannot remember the titles of anything else the quartet played, though I’m sure they were classics; and I am certain they were rich and resonant, and were played beautifully on key. But I do remember “Showers of Blessing,” perhaps because Anna Mae was lurking somewhere in the shadows of memory, her face contorted, her fingers striking the keys with a noticeable absence of mercy, the sounds from the untuned piano providing a touchstone against which to measure the sounds from all subsequent instruments. One cello. One viola. Two violins. My time to read came too quickly. I stood behind the pulpit and tested the microphone; though the church was small, someone on the back row might appreciate the additional volume and, besides, a microphone would help soothe a voice that during the previous week had been given a strenuous workout. Except for “Out-and-Down Pattern,” I cannot remember any of the poems I read. No doubt I selected a couple to more or less fit the situation—“Prophecies,” say, or “Ringing the Church Bell”—but otherwise I have no idea what I offered to the assembly. I probably chose to read “Out-and-Down Pattern” because my son and his baby daughter (my first grandchild!) had been so much on my mind that sleepless night before. At any rate, I remember clearly that these Minnesotans, being from Minnesota, and mostly Lutherans, were nice—attentive and responsive and capable of providing a table laden with cookies and cakes that, after the quartet finished the program and, at the insistence of several nice Minnesota women, I sampled. I was about to finish my third cookie when a woman with soft eyes and a plain but attractive face approached me. The serious look on her face didn’t seem to fit the occasion, but if soft eyes can pin someone against the wall, these were the eyes to do it. I stood, pinned, one small bite of cookie in my left hand, one glass of lemonade in the other. 157

Without bothering to introduce herself she said she would like to talk with me—now, and here in the church. I nodded. Fine, I said. She had spoken slowly, her words, like her eyes, soft. I looked around. A few of the good folks had left, but it was obvious that most of them wanted to stay for a while and talk and enjoy the refreshments. The rain had stopped. The back door was open, and the breeze that last night had refused to show up at Room 300 was now pleasantly wafting into the sanctuary. It smelled like damp leaves. Since no one remained on the platform where the quartet and I had played and read, I suggested that we go there—to one of the short pews that no doubt on Sundays was occupied by members of the choir. We chose the back pew, where we sat half facing each other. Because I had no idea why this woman wanted to talk with me, I felt bewildered. I clutched my glass of lemonade in both hands between my legs. The woman introduced herself and smiled, softly. She had enjoyed the program, she said, all of it, but especially she appreciated that poem of mine, the one where at the end the blossoms from the linden are spreading like children. What was its title? “Out-and-Down Pattern.” Yes. Well, she said, it’s a lovely poem. And I want you to know that I know just how you feel. Thank you. I wrote it as a tribute to my son. He. . . . Of course. I remember the line. My son is gone. Yes, he. . . . I’m so sorry. I know just how you feel. I didn’t know how to respond, so I took a long sip of lemonade. I was wiping my mouth with the back of my free hand when the woman continued. She told me that with the passing of time I would come to accept, not that it happened (“it” not yet having a referent), but that probably there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. Isn’t that true? I suppose so, I said. I’m not sure. She nodded. Her soft eyes were moist. I was confused. 158

The loss of a child is a terrible thing, she said. I can’t think of anything more devastating to a parent. It was the way she said loss of a child that caused me to begin to understand. My son is gone. Yes, gone—from home, but not gone. . . . My son was riding his new bicycle, she said, on a dirt road that runs in front of our farmhouse. The driver of the pickup hit some loose gravel and lost control. Time. It can pass slowly or so quickly you do not believe in its having passed. Watching the woman’s face as she spoke of the death of her son, I soon realized what she most wanted was to console me or, maybe in an effort to comfort me, console herself. I don’t know. Time was passing. People were leaving the church. She asked, Would you send me a copy of the poem? Or a tape of you reading the poem? Yes. Of course. She wrote her name and address on a white card she took from her purse. She handed me the card. Thank you, she said. And time passed and I did not tell her the rest of the story—that my son reached out and caught the football, that before I could blink an eye he was a young man placing a ring on a young woman’s finger, and that their daughter was resting now in a small, white-slatted crib purchased and restored by her grandfather. Nor did I tell her the truth, which maybe she already knew—that a small boy’s body running a pattern across the front yard can be the poetry in motion that brings forth the poetry on the page that compels the woman with the soft eyes to give me, with spoken words, the undiminished gift of consolation.

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To sing, must I feel the world’s light? My green, graceful bones fill the air With sleeping birds. Alone, alone And with them I move gently. I move at the heart of their world. — James Dickey, “In the Tree House at Night”

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In September of 1972, when I returned to Lincoln after a long weekend in Colorado Springs, I resigned myself, insofar as possible, to the death of my brother. We had spent three days talking and drinking and taking an occasional walk—and on television watching Coach Devaney’s Huskers pummel Army, 77–7. We had said almost nothing about what would surely happen if the drinking did not at least slow down. Each time the subject tried to insinuate itself into our conversation, we shoved it aside. Through it all, John’s wife, Mary Ann, remained discreetly in the background. She did this not through fear or intimidation; she did it, I believe, because she respected the importance of our privacy. Perhaps she thought that regardless of what we were doing or saying, our being together would pay dividends. I shared this hope, but back home in Lincoln I saw it as being thin, if not downright anorexic. I had been reading the poetry of James Dickey, and one of his poems in particular, “In the Tree House at Night,” haunted me. The tree house brought to mind the houses my brother and I had tried to build when we wanted a place of our own to escape to; and the tone of the poem, Dickey’s attitude, struck me with a force I find difficult to describe. It seemed to exist somewhere between slightly hopeful and deeply somber, a nebulous stretch of emotion that could be felt but not explained. I read The wind changes round, and I stir / Within another’s life, and I felt that Dickey knew more than any so-called higher animal, poet or otherwise, was entitled to, that to a significant extent my 163

life was not entirely my own, much of it having been usurped, however compassionately, by a stranger. So Dickey’s tree house was therefore mine, especially the one my brother and I built, or tried to, high in the branches of a Chinese elm. We had spent most of the morning nailing two-by-fours onto some passably horizontal limbs to form a foundation, and most of the afternoon wandering up one alley and down another, looking for almost any type of wood strong enough to provide a floor. We found it when Johnny pointed to Mrs. Detweiler’s outhouse, to some loose boards at the back, a couple of them about ready to fall off, and said, Why not take the boards from there? Why not indeed? Mrs. Detweiler had passed away about a year ago, and no one had moved into her house, or probably ever would, the house being too rundown for anyone without divine powers to restore. With a hammer we freed several of the boards. They were tongueand-groove, beautifully weathered, and strong as steel. All afternoon then we measured and fitted and sawed and measured again, until by early dusk the floor was laid and hammered down, its surface smoothed somewhat with pieces of sandpaper. We gave it a final inspection and pronounced it ready for occupancy. No place is more private, more sacred, than a tree house, even if the house consists only of a floor made of boards from a dead woman’s outhouse. How well James Dickey must have known that! In our tree house at dusk we sat dangling our legs over the side, talking, mystery in the form of darkness moving in. And what were we talking about? This and that, mostly—the building of the floor we sat on, the good fortune of having spotted the loose boards on Mrs. Detweiler’s outhouse, and the basketball goal with its backboard attached to the side and roof of the ramshackle garage, goal we could see through the leaves, in spite of the deepening shadows. It was the goal we had been playing at one afternoon when our buddy, Carter LeRoy Hays, approached us and introduced us to an object we had never seen before. It’s a golf club, Carter said. A number three wood. He handed it to Johnny, who looked it over from head to shaft. We knew very little about 164

golf, my brother and I, only that it was a game played on a green field by people who dressed well and had money. We had seen the little course at the lake near Anthony, sixteen miles away, but we had never observed a golf club close up, had certainly never handled one. Johnny handed the club to me. It was heavy at one end. The number three was visible on a small metal plate affixed to the wood. Looks good to me, I said. I returned it to Carter. Where did you get it? North of town, Carter said. At the dump. Carter LeRoy Hays was the sort of boy in a small town who always seemed to be around. He suffered from asthma, but it usually did not slow him down. His parents both worked full-time. He was supposed to be under the control of his grandparents, but they let him do as he pleased. So I had to envy Carter. Not only was he a free spirit, but also a few years older. At that time I even admired Carter’s nickname, although the local wags that assigned it to him did not intend it to be complimentary; they were simply having fun, at his expense. This nickname grew out of sheer coincidence, and out of Carter’s propensity for talking too much and too loudly. The name “Carter” was a strong reminder of the product “Carter’s Little Liver Pills” and, for a time, that was Carter’s handle. He was simply “Carter’s Little Liver Pills.” But it was not long before the wits brought in his middle name, “LeRoy,” along with a dash of rhyme and alliteration and a touch of vulgarity, for the final form of his name: “Carter’s-Farters-Little-Liver-Pills-Louder-LeRoy-Hays.” It was a humorous mouthful, to be sure, but Carter would simply ignore the laughter and move on. Carter was not at all irresponsible. He simply roamed the area with abandon, following his nose, as my mother phrased it, wherever it led him—to hitchhike to nearby Sharon, maybe, or late at night to the drugstore to watch some nightowls play the pinball machine, or to the village dump north of town to scavenge for treasure, like the number three golf wood he had just shown us. Johnny had not found the club very interesting, so he retrieved the basketball and was shooting lay-ups when Carter went to the basket and, raising the wood, attempted to block my 165

brother’s shots. It did not take long for this action to evolve into a game that after several minutes I couldn’t resist. Carter would position himself near the basket, under it or to one side, where he’d wait for Johnny or me to take a shot that we hoped would drop through the basket before Carter could deflect it with the club, or punch it up and out of the goal, which had no net, just as the ball was dropping through. Soon all three of us were moving furiously about, Carter’s asthma causing him to wheeze strongly enough to be heard over the shuffling of our shoes. Sometimes the ball would drop through the goal before Carter could stop it, and sometimes he’d catch the ball on its way up and deflect it, or he’d manage to poke the ball up and out of the rim just as it was descending. He was a spirited defender whose asthma one day would bring him down. But not today. Today, though wheezing as if each breath might be his last, he was playing Golf Club Basketball, his energy and timing often more than equal to his opponents’ challenge. I don’t yet know why Carter lowered the club to attempt a deflection; perhaps his arm was tiring, or maybe he wanted to contact the ball at a lower height to hit it with additional force. Whatever the reason, when he lowered the club and swung, and missed the basketball, the face of the number three wood hit me squarely on the center of my forehead. You went down like a dropped stone, Carter said. You were bleeding like crazy, said my brother. They were standing nearby, watching my mother apply what she called a butterfly bandage, something to get me by, she said, until tomorrow, when Doctor Montzingo would be back in his office. But when tomorrow arrived I did not go to see Doctor Montzingo. For one thing, the butterfly bandage seemed to be doing the trick, according to Mother, in spite of what looked to me to be a substantial gash. I was standing in front of a mirror, admiring the breadth and depth of the wound, remembering with pride and trepidation the words of Carter and my brother. You went down like a dropped stone, Carter had said, and I tried to imagine myself as a stone dropping down, straight down, hitting the ground with a heavy thud. 166

You were bleeding like crazy, my brother had said, and I knew what he meant. The palm of my right hand pressed firmly against the gash had done little to stanch the flow. And crazy was how I felt, too, especially when I stood and tried to walk; and I was still woozy, if not crazy, as Mother wiped away the blood with one towel and dried my forehead with another before applying the butterfly bandage. But by morning, Monday morning, I felt fine. Mother changed the bandage and determined that a visit to Doc Montzingo’s office wouldn’t be necessary. The wound, she said, will heal nicely; it will leave a scar, she said, but nothing large enough to lose sleep over. She smiled warmly, patted me on the head, and that was that. But wasn’t there another reason why I didn’t pay Doc Montzingo a visit? And wasn’t it directly related to a lack of money, and wasn’t that related to my parents’ quarreling? Maybe. Probably. Yes. And the strongest indication of money problems was revealed through what I came to think of as the saga of the store-bought dress. It was late August, 1944, almost one year before the mishap with the number three wood. My sister, Bernadine, was about to enter the eighth grade, and for the opening day she wanted a new dress—nothing fancy, of course, but new, and by new she meant store-bought. Some of the other girls intended to start the new school year wearing new dresses and, for them, according to Bernadine, it went without saying that these dresses would be store-bought. Zelma Lee Hays, for example, would be wearing a new dress. So, too, Patsy Shroyer and Margaret Thomas. One must understand that in those far-off days, grade eight was a pinnacle from which the past might be looked down upon and the future looked up to. For in those far-off days, the hierarchies of education, at least in my little town, were precisely divided. First, there was grade school, grades one through six, with no kindergarten to provide an introduction to the initial hierarchy. Nor would there be any formal public acknowledgment or acclaim upon the completion of grade six, only the thrill that derives from thinking of entering the second hierarchy the following September. This was the briefest of the three—junior 167

high—but not by any means the least significant or exciting. It was a purgatory of sorts, a platform from which the innocence and ignorance of pre-pubescence could be shucked and regretted, and the wisdom and worldliness of puberty absorbed, even as the glory and freedom of high school, the third hierarchy, were anticipated. Entering junior high was significant, but leaving it was indescribably exhilarating—and the leaving could begin only by entering its higher level, grade eight. Especially for a girl, it was absolutely crucial to wear the proper attire on the first day of the final year of junior high school. So, my sister told our mother, I need a new dress to wear on the first day of school. And I don’t want it to be handmade. I wasn’t present, of course, to hear all of their conversation, but I knew them well enough to infer from bits and pieces of off-and-on dialogue, and long moments of silence, that their wills were going to clash more than once before my sister’s request could be honored or denied. I knew that we were in a financial squeeze, about to be forced to move from the largest and most comfortable house we had ever lived in; the owner of the property was raising the rent, and in all likelihood we could not afford to pay it. The thought of leaving a place with an indoor bathroom sent my mother into fits of despair laced heavily with rage. It was possible—no, probable—that the next house would not have an indoor facility, that instead of moving up we’d be moving down. Money—the relentless need of it warred incessantly with its everlasting absence, and my mother, who wanted desperately to avoid what she called “destitution,” would do almost anything to keep the wolf from our door. At the time, she was working for the local weekly, the Independent, gathering news—mostly by way of phone calls—and going from one business to another in search of ads. She was ideally suited for the job, as she had been for the selling of Avon products—friendly and personable and good-humored. She knew everyone and everyone’s dog; she had spent most of her life in that little town, had graduated from its high school with a class that boasted some of the village’s leading and most affluent citizens. These were some of the folks she lived among and tried to keep up with. But the pace was tiring, and at times impossible, 168

to sustain. Her husband did his best, working from sunup until sundown—driving a road grader, feeding sand and cement into the maw of a mixer, mowing roadside weeds. But his best was seldom enough. Like my mother, he too was paid little more than a pittance, and his work sometimes led to expensive consequences—a double hernia, for example, then a floating kidney, and finally the loss of the tips of two fingers. Unfortunately, my father was not a very social person. He was not a high school graduate, having left school to work on his father’s farm after completing the eighth grade. He also didn’t know how to dance, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to learn. And, finally, unlike my mother he was not a talker—unless the subject was his work, or the weather, or when something broke down, as it regularly did, at which time he’d erupt into a pattern of speech I both feared and admired. All in all, it was not a good time for my sister to want a store-bought dress for the first day of school. No, said Mother. We can’t afford one just now. But I can ask Mrs. Wingate to make you one. At this, my sister must have sighed theatrically. She must have furrowed her pretty, blonde brow, must have taken her lower lip in her teeth and squeezed it until she cried. As young as I was at the time, I sensed that everything was in place for a classic mother-daughter confrontation. Mother would not, could not, must not back down. Once committed to a position, she was a pillar. Nor did my sister take Mother’s no for an answer. She badgered and pled, pled and badgered and hounded and beseeched and implored. The pride that enabled the mother to hold her ground was akin to the pride that prevented her daughter from retreating. It was a lovely standoff, one that Johnny and I watched with disinterested impunity. Would it ever end? Yes, surely, because school was about to begin. Who, then, would be the winner? The answer presented itself (or so I thought) one late afternoon as I was about to finish my paper route. For some time I had been delivering the Wichita Beacon, had been trying to do my part to keep the family’s 169

financial head above water, especially that section of the head belonging to the older son, whose desire for comic books and Jack Armstrong pedometers and other necessities was insatiable. I’d snip the wire that secured the bundle of papers that Mr. Evans delivered each day, except Sunday, to the Champlin station, then sit on a green-slatted bench inside and fold them, sixty-eight in all, reading over and over the headlines and a few of the sentences beneath them as I did the folding. Almost three months ago the Allies had hit the beaches in France. I expected them to move swiftly, and without much opposition, straight into Paris and Berlin; but the enemy had resisted forcefully at Normandy, especially at Omaha Beach, and over the days and weeks that followed, the movement was steady but not as rapid as many in my hometown thought it should be, in spite of one story that said In southern France the Allied fist struck deep into a surprisingly flabby belly. Some of the stories carried numbers that I could scarcely imagine—one million Germans killed or captured in less than three months; only one day after D-Day, three thousand prisoners taken; in northern France, enemy casualties estimated at 400,000. And so on. You sit on the green bench in the Champlin station, folding papers, and it is difficult not to memorize more numbers and names than you want to. The names themselves become bold-faced icons: George S. Patton. General Sir Bernard Montgomery. Major General Alexander Patch. And of course General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And not all of the stories feature American heroes—as, for example, the news article that told of the capturing of seven enemy soldiers in a dugout, one of whom, after being deloused, removed a wallet from his filthy German uniform to show his captors his credentials. He was ten years old. Papers folded and secured in a canvas bag, I wrapped the bag’s strap around the handlebars of my bicycle and began the route. I dreaded this particular day not only because the war news was pretty much the same old thing—troops on the east front stalled, troops on the north front advancing, or was it the other way around?—but also because it was time to collect. I wanted the money, certainly, but I did not like to stop at each business and each house and ask for it. Some of the customers were 170

polite and prompt—old Mr. Fenton, for example, who put the money, three quarters and one nickel, in a Bull Durham sack and hung the sack on a nail inside a box affixed to a gate post—but others were outright tightwads. Ruby Shoemaker was one of these. She seemed to believe that my monthly request for payment was an intrusion or, more accurately, an infringement. What right did I have to interrupt whatever it was she was doing and ask for eighty cents? Couldn’t I see that she was busy? If I must ask for money, I should do it when she wasn’t tied up with something important. So she’d sigh and shake her head, as if she were about to perform a charitable deed of immense proportions, as if she were unaware that for a full month, every day, someone had left a Beacon on her front porch, including the Sunday issue, which weighed approximately half a ton. She was a large, garish woman with thick lips that she tried to conceal, but instead highlighted, with lipstick red as the local fire truck. She’d rummage through a handbag that could have served as a suitcase until she found a coin purse that she’d pry open; then, squinting and breathing heavily, she’d hold the gaping mouth of the purse close to her face to see if she had enough change to meet my request. Eighty cents, is it? Yes, Mrs. Shoemaker, eighty cents. And she’d stare into the coin purse until three quarters and one nickel materialized and, smiling, she’d fetch the coins from the purse and deliver them ceremoniously into the outstretched palm of my hand. Thank you, Mrs. Shoemaker. And she’d nod, more to place a bow on the gift of her generosity, I believe, than to acknowledge my thanks. Probably the Terrell brothers, though, were the most pestiferous. Charlie and Ora Terrell owned the local Chevrolet dealership and were therefore looked up to—if not always admired. They’d be sitting in the showroom with two or three others, talking about the war and wondering when the numbnuts in Detroit might begin turning out new cars again. Well, shit, Charlie, things are bad all over. But things are about to change. That Montgomery, he’s British, but even so he’s on the verge of kicking German ass until hell won’t have it. Whitewalls? I ain’t seen a whitewall since Hector was a pup. When I entered the room the men would glance up, note that I was 171

nothing more promising than a paper boy, then immediately look away and return to their conversation. I’d say that I was there to collect for the paper, and they’d nod and go on talking. They seemed to derive a lot of pleasure from withholding payment, from making me stand and listen to their prattle, whatever it involved, or maybe they considered their conversation to be too important to be interrupted. So I’d stand there like a lump on a goddamn log, holding a folded Beacon in one hand, listening to speculations and conclusions that had I been an enemy agent I might have informed the Third Reich of and thus changed, forever, the course of human history. I do not believe that the Terrell brothers were mean-spirited, but they seemed to enjoy making a lowly paper boy uncomfortable. They were older men, comfortably well-fixed. They owned two of the largest houses in town; and they drove the latest Chevrolets available, 1941 models, both cars still sporting whitewall tires, which meant that the man who said he hadn’t seen a whitewall since Hector was a pup was perhaps stretching the truth. Sometimes, collecting, I’d not be in a hurry—on a rainy day, or a cold one—and I’d wait patiently until Charlie or Ora would rise and make his way to the cash register and lift up the correct change from the tray and bring it to me and trade the money for the paper. If the day were especially messy, I might hang around for a few more minutes, soaking in the warmth of the potbellied coal stove, and maybe even enjoying some of the prattle. But if the weather was nice, and I was looking forward to playing some basketball with Bullard and Woods and the Lew brothers, whose outdoor court consisted of two hoops nailed to the trunks of a couple of elm trees, with an expanse of well-worn bunchgrass in between, I’d become impatient, and fidget and hem and haw until Ora or Charlie finally got the message and paid me. I’d be so angry, sometimes, that when I left the showroom, and was safely out of hearing, I’d damn the Terrell brothers until hell wouldn’t have it, calling them every name my young but growing vocabulary could muster up. The clash between my mother and sister over Bernadine’s desire for a store-bought dress reached a tentative conclusion sometime in late 172

August of 1944—just before Labor Day and the start of a new school year. I recall that on that day I was collecting for the paper, which I did at the end of each month. I waited impatiently for Charlie or Ora to pay me, after which—well out of their hearing—I called them names connected chiefly to parts of the body. I retrieved the Bull Durham sack from its nail in Mr. Fenton’s handcrafted box, thanking the box as if thanking Mr. Fenton himself. I stood by restlessly as Ruby Shoemaker searched the innards of her handbag for three quarters and a nickel. One by one I collected from my customers—from those who were at home, that is—until near the end of the route I found myself knocking on the door of a small, white, wood-framed house where I knew its occupant, Mrs. Wingate, would pay me promptly, and with a smile. She opened the door and mumbled, Come in. She was a short, frisky, elderly woman with white hair tied in a knot at the back of her head. Today, her thin lips were clamped tightly on several straight pins, forcing her to speak, or mumble, without opening her mouth. She managed a smile, though, and I nodded and followed her into the living room. I was not prepared for what I saw there—my older sister, Bernadine, standing on a chair with a new dress hanging primly from her shoulders. I didn’t say anything, just looked at her as, for only an instant, she looked at me. She obviously was surprised to see me, and embarrassed. Her fair face turned pink. She straightened and stood stiff as a post, her eyes narrow, her lips pressed together so firmly I thought she might suddenly break into tears. The dress was pale blue, with several small white flowers in a line near the top of the bodice. It was a nice-looking dress, surely as nice as anything she might have found in a store, and it seemed to fit her perfectly. Obviously, Mrs. Wingate had been hemming the dress when I knocked, using her mouth for a pin cushion, and I could see that she was nearly finished. A talented seamstress, she was fond of my sister and had sewn several dresses for her, and my guess is that she did the work for practically nothing. 173

She left the room for a moment, then returned, carrying a purse in one hand and the pins she had removed from her mouth in the other. She laid the pins on the top of the chair at my sister’s feet, then backed away and, opening the purse, found a dollar bill and handed it to me and told me to keep the change. She was the only customer who regularly gave me a tip. Well, she said, looking at my sister, who continued to stare straight ahead, as if mesmerized by one of the purple flowers on the wallpaper beyond. What do you think? It looks nice, I said. It looks great. Mrs. Wingate smiled. My sister had relaxed her lips. She no longer looked to be on the verge of tears. Yes, said Mrs. Wingate. Your sister is a fine-looking young woman. I handed Mrs. Wingate her paper. I was standing beside an old wooden rocker, wondering how long my sister, standing high and rigid on the chair, could hold her pose. And looking at her it occurred to me that Mrs. Wingate’s observation was amazingly correct. I had never thought of my sister as a young woman, but now, seeing her in the new dress that fit her so perfectly, I could not deny that she was no longer just a girl. Jesus! I suddenly began to realize that her argument with Mother was more than a disagreement about a store-bought dress; for my sister, it was all about a girl becoming a young woman. Had Mother failed to understand what they had actually been fussing about? Not until it squeaked did I notice that with my left hand I was moving the rocker. In my other hand I was holding the bill that Mrs. Wingate had given me. I was staring at my sister, who was looking beyond me at a wall whose paper was gaudy with large purple flowers. Had I been a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, I would have thought that, yes, Mother did in fact win the battle, did in fact force a compromise on her adversary. But in the adversary’s eyes I would have seen something— pride, determination, desire—too compelling to conclude that the end of this family confrontation was in sight. The mother’s victory was a tactical one; but the final outcome of the war would be decided on long174

haul strategies, and my sister, now a fine-looking young woman, was in this conflict for the duration. And somehow, at that young age, I knew that she would not, finally, be defeated.  In the tree house at dusk my brother and I watched as our “green household”—to use James Dickey’s delightful phrase—yielded to darkness. Thanks to Mother’s job at the Independent, and to Father’s tenacity as he worked at various jobs for Harper County, we had managed to continue to live in the house with an indoor toilet, which pleased all of us, especially Mother, though the scarcity of money continued to cast its long and persistent shadow. When the shadow was exceptionally long, and the air in the house too thick almost for breathing, Johnny and I would retreat to the tree house where we would talk about anything not related to family finances, or to what those finances were probably leading to. The butterfly bandages meanwhile were doing the trick, as Mother put it, and the gash was healing, though there would be a sizable lump on my forehead, and the scar was going to be a dandy, jagged and wide, a subject for conversation for a long, long time.  So in late September of 1972 I returned to Lincoln from Colorado Springs, trying to resign myself to my brother’s demise. It would be an unpleasant deterioration, no doubt, mornings of illness and evenings of whatever it took to provide elation enough for another morning of illness. And so on. In one of the four classes I was teaching at Wesleyan, an introduction to the types and techniques of poetry, we were looking at several of James Dickey’s poems, among them the one previously mentioned, “In the Tree House at Night.” His tree house was larger and more private than the one my brother and I assembled; we had only enough outhouse boards for a floor, whereas Dickey’s house had walls made of blankets: The floor and the walls wave me slowly. The speaker in Dickey’s poem lies 175

with one of his brothers on the floor of the tree house; the other brother, though dead, is a presence that haunts, yet comforts, the speaker. He cannot deny his deceased brother’s absence, nor can he deny his lingering presence. Ultimately, it becomes so palpable that he has difficulty separating the dead from the living: Who is dead? Whose presence is living? The speaker is alive. One of his brothers, the one beside him, is alive. The tree is alive, and so too the birds: The needles and pine cones about me // Are full of small birds at their roundest. . . . The other brother, however, is not alive. Or is he? Each nail in the house now is steadied / By my brother’s huge, freckled hand. In class we talked a little about types and techniques—free verse in general, Dickey’s use of the anapest in particular—and a lot about brothers and tree houses and trees (no willow or conifer, I said sagely, is a good tree in which to build a house), about death and life and the sometimes uneasy distinction that separates them. These are matters, of course, that are suggested in hundreds of poems, but Dickey places them in a context that struck me squarely where I lived. His tree house called to mind the basement where Gary Gildner’s coach addressed his covey of athletes in “First Practice,” and I was struck by how the setting, in both Dickey’s and Gildner’s poems, complements what is happening and what is being said. The underground location in Gildner’s poem suggests an assortment of connotations, especially the feel and smell of an appropriate dampness. The above-ground setting in Dickey’s poem provides a place between sky and earth, a vantage point from which the poet can see lakes / Of leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth. . . . Well, if earth is an encumbrance, then to be rid of it should be a blessing. Or if earth is not an encumbrance, but a necessary element, then it should be embraced. Or. . . .  Weeks passed, then months, and I did not hear from or about my brother. I sent him a letter or two, assuming that he’d answer them, or one of them, when the time was right, should that time ever come about. I called him, but something in his voice told me not to bother calling 176

again. The voice was not hostile, but quietly resigned. I continued to meet my classes, and to enjoy a family whose youngest member, Robert, was quickly becoming no longer young. And I was working on some poems that I hoped one day might become a full-blown collection. I would call it Houses and Beyond; the poems would trace the movement of my family from one house to another within the city limits of Attica, Kansas, and one of the houses would be the mansion with the indoor facility and the hoop so beautifully suited to the playing of Golf Club Basketball. And, of course, one of the poems would have to be about the tree house my brother and I so regularly escaped to. Before I wrote about the tree house, I returned to James Dickey’s poem, hoping that it would lead me into something of my own. It did. Soon I had written myself back into the branches of the elm to listen to the pulse of the wood, to hear its music, to sit on those tongue-andgroove boards on a late afternoon and wait for my brother to join me, which shortly before nightfall he did: . . . brother, in this gathering darkness, leaves unmoving, wing of a dove slanted white in the shaft of a sturgeon moon, you are rising to join me, rung by rung to join me, to sit with me here in this gathering darkness together to hear the song. It is one thing to be with your brother on the page, another to be removed from him when the book with the page inside is closed. I waited for a letter, for a call. Once in a while I’d determine to break the ice, but each time I lifted the receiver to dial his number, I had second thoughts—and each time they prevailed. Meanwhile, on the page, my brother continued to rise, rung by laborious rung, to join me. 177

 When news of my brother’s condition at long last arrived, by telephone, I received it with a considerable chunk of incredulity. With Mary Ann’s support, he had checked into rehab and was making steady, if not amazing, progress. He’s going to make it, she said. Good. Tell him to call me. Tell him the shortest distance between two points is an airplane. Tell him. . . . I can’t remember what else I told her to tell him. Whatever it was, though, it must have helped. He had his lapses, of course, but they were both few and brief. He was, after all, not only his mother’s son, but also his sister’s brother. And perhaps I should confess that there were no steps or rungs leading up to the little platform my brother and I called a tree house, only a limb hanging low enough to be reached with a running jump. I put the rungs into the poem hoping that—like Jacob’s ladder, say—they would help to make more meaningful, in a quest for poetic truth, whatever it was I was trying to convey.

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As Fred Glanz, a onetime World’s Champion Hog Caller, put it, “You’ve got to have appeal as well as power in your voice. You’ve got to convince the hogs you’ve got something for them.” — William Hedgepeth, The Hog Book

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My desire to enter the hog-calling contest at North Platte, Nebraska, was at best lukewarm, until I saw the trophies. There were three of them, one for each winner in three divisions: pork queen, female, and male. I saw the trophies and my desire transmogrified instantly into lust. I was in North Platte with a colleague, Charles Stubblefield, the same gentleman who took to his sleeping bag during that stretch of monsoon weather on the Loup River—Sir Charles, as we dubbed him, whose record for uninterrupted slumber in a tent during an endless downpour remains, to this very moment, intact. We were in North Platte, population somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand, to award belt buckles to the winners of a fiction and poetry contest for high school students, this competition one of the many festivities that comprised what the organizers called “NebraskaLand Days.” We had driven from Lincoln to North Platte on Friday afternoon, awarded the belt buckles that evening at the high school, then decided to stay in town for some of the events the following morning, beginning with a pork-chop breakfast on the city’s mall. After breakfast, we intended to take in whatever the celebration had to offer, then in our own sweet time return to Lincoln. The pork chops were delicious, thick and juicy and boneless, and they came with hash browns, scrambled eggs, Texas toast, and hot black coffee, whose pretension was noted, several times, by my appreciative colleague. By eight o’clock we had drunk several cups and were considering another when we were accosted by two lovely young women dressed in white miniskirts and white blouses fringed with strips of white leath181

erette. They wore white cowgirl hats, their wide brims trimmed in red. Their slippers, too, were white, and spangled in gold, with heels just high enough to provide a suggestion of uncertainty, if not danger, as they walked. Each was wearing a purple sash that hung at a forty-five degree angle across her chest, the sashes declaring what I recognized as names of counties in Nebraska—Sheridan and Buffalo. They approached us, smiling, holding large round buttons declaring Hogs Are Beautiful. They were bright of eye and round of face, pink-cheeked and—how shall I say?—wholesome. Yes, they appeared wholesome, an attribute related, no doubt, to their being the daughters of farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods depended upon the raising and selling of hogflesh—and cattleflesh, too, and horseflesh, and maybe here and there the flesh, as well as the wool, of some sheep. Clearly, the ladies were not shills, not just glitzy girlies paid to promote a product they cared nothing about. No, these were vibrant young women who believed in the worth and beauty of hogs as sincerely as my mother had believed in the value and appropriateness of Avon products. They stood before us for several seconds, smiling, as if to determine our willingness to let them proceed. Hi, they said, and we said Hi right back, and with movements too quick to be followed with the naked eye they pinned the buttons on our shirts, and before we could say anything more than Thank you they turned on their uncertain heels and left us greenhorns for other, maybe greener, pastures. I looked at Sir Charles, who looked at me. Well, blow me down, I said. Stubblefield nodded. I looked around. Our young ladies had disappeared into the gathering crowd, but others were taking their place, all of them wholesome nymphs in white skirts and wide-brimmed hats and purple sashes scurrying this way and that, pinning Hogs Are Beautiful on the shirts of the young and the old, and everyone in between. In a few minutes I would learn that these young women were known as Pork Queens, that they had been chosen to represent twenty-two of the ninety-three counties in Nebraska, that they would constitute one of 182

the three divisions in a hog-calling contest that would be under way in fifteen minutes, and that the Pork Queen Division, as the loudspeaker declared, would start the ball rolling. The mall by now was bustling; it was a sea of humanity and nonhumanity, the latter represented by two or three dozen shoats enclosed in a wire pen. Hanging on the wire that enclosed them was a large sign, with white letters on a green background: prettiest pig contest. The shoats—Hampshires, durocs, Poland Chinas, you name it—were decked out in coats and hats, bonnets and bows and ties, and they were squealing and nosing each other and looking wide-eyed beyond the holes in the wire as if questioning the behavior of the higher animals beyond it. I could see a flatbed truck sitting in the center of the mall, and climbing some easy-angled steps to its bed a steady line of pork queens. I nudged Charles. The hog-calling is about to begin, I said. Let’s go have a closer look. By the time we reached the truck, the pork queens, all of them—the twenty-two Nebraska county representatives, plus the Nebraska state queen and the national queen, each duly labeled by a purple sash—were standing erect and glistening on the truck bed. The rising midsummer sun was at their backs. To a queen they appeared unruffled and lovely— and wholesome. And then I saw something else: two men and one woman, obviously the judges, ascending the steps to the truck bed, each with a clipboard in one hand and a trophy in the other. When I saw the trophies, golden hogs atop pedestals that appeared to be made of walnut or mahogany, my desire to possess one of them was insatiable. As I watched the three figures walk behind the microphone and take their seats on wooden folding chairs near the back of the cab, I told Stubblefield that, if it weren’t too late, we should enter the contest. My appetite for a trophy had moved well beyond desire, all the way to the highest level of lust. I want one of those trophies, I told him. Stubblefield mumbled. Well, then, I said. Let’s get our names on the list. I looked at the judges sitting on the wooden chairs; beside them, on 183

the floor of the truck bed, sat the trophies. One of the men was studying some papers attached to his clipboard. I suggested to Charles that this judge might be the one to approach. I don’t think so, Stubblefield said. I mean, I don’t think I want to enter the contest. I was surprised. Sir Charles, though no longer a young man, was yet a free spirit. He was an inveterate storyteller, a pleasant, gregarious man who was always on the alert for more tales to tell. His face resembled photos I had seen of Knute Rockne. But would he consider entering the hog-calling contest? No. But he’d sign me up, he said, if it wasn’t too late, and to prove that he wasn’t a total chicken shit, he’d serve as my coach, and wouldn’t charge me so much as a red cent. I knew that Stubblefield had coached many aspiring high school football players, but I knew also that he had never tutored a novice hogcaller. But time was running short, so I agreed, and with a tip of his hat—an off-tan Panama that made him look like a Mississippi riverboat gambler—my colleague disappeared into the throng. He soon returned to tell me that my name was on the list, that probably I’d be the last caller of the day, and that he had taken the liberty of telling the master of ceremonies, whom he had found near the cab of the truck giving his lists a final going-over, that I was representing the Platte Valley Hog Growers Association. I made that up, Stubblefield explained, unnecessarily. It might help, he added, for you to claim affiliation with such an association. As a liar, if not a coach, Sir Charles was without competition. He stood there in the warm midsummer sunlight, grinning, pleased with himself, obviously delighted to be playing a role in this unfolding drama. We were pretty much dressed for the occasion. I was wearing jeans, a blue lightweight cotton shirt with imitation pearl buttons, and a brown felt cowboy hat that Eloise Ann had given me when I threatened to become famous as a country western singer. With the help and support of our sons, who would write some of the songs, I’d waste little time in rising to the top of the charts—or so I dreamed. “You’re Both the Rock and 184

the Hard Place I’m Between” would launch my career, “Wilbur Woman” would bolster it, and, with lyrics like these written by my older son, how could I possibly miss? She was beautiful—almost. But I guess I shouldn’t boast. She really wasn’t anything all that special. Yet she was beautiful—I guess. But Just about like all the rest. And That’s why I kept on walkin’ down the road. And I just kept on walkin’ until I got to here, Sittin’ on the sofa, drinkin’ Miller beer. And thinkin’ of a lady, of a lady I once knew, Who was beautiful—almost. But for me, that wouldn’t do. Very appropriately, I was wearing also a belt buckle that I had been given the night before when Sir Charles and I presented the winners of the poetry and fiction contest buckles of their own. The buckles were large and heavy, made of showy silver and bronze and bearing a likeness of Buffalo Bill. Stubblefield, too, was dressed just right for the occasion—brown trousers and a light green shirt, and, yes, a belt buckle the size of Vermont—though the off-tan Panama, as noted earlier, gave him the appearance more of a cardsharp than a cowboy. He needed only a cigar to complete the ensemble. Now a young vigorous man was standing at the microphone calling for everyone’s attention. He was swarthy, with long black hair tied neatly, and aptly, into a pigtail. His name was Tom, he said, and he worked for the local radio station, kody, and he would serve as the master of ceremonies for the hog-calling contest, which would begin momentarily. Tom explained that the contest would determine statewide champions in three categories, or divisions: pork queen, female, and male. Behind him three imperfect rows of pork queens nudged each other and smoothed their purple sashes and giggled, thus displaying a wholesomeness I, for one, paid strict attention to. When they smiled, their 185

teeth, as if facets of diamonds, fairly glinted. They seemed eager to move into the competition. Not everyone on the mall, of course, was focused upon the impending contest, but a sizable number, including, I believe, the well-dressed shoats in their pen maybe forty yards to the west, were watching and listening, eager to hear the first caller. She was from Webster County, and her call was more sweet than convincing. Sir Charles looked at me and raised his brows. When the pork queens are finished, he said, I’ll give you a couple of pointers. The young radio personality from kody kept the event moving swiftly, though after each performance he gave the three judges a few seconds to take notes and mark the appropriate boxes. I was surprised at how quickly the two dozen pork queens’ hog calls were disposed of, perhaps because I found them as compelling to observe as to listen to. Tom would read the name of the contestant, and perhaps say something about the county she represented—Saline, for example, so named because it was supposed to have harbored enough salt deposits to flavor everything, eternally, from soup to nuts, and Lincoln, of course, because it’s the county that boasts the city of North Platte and the refurbished ranch that once belonged to Buffalo Bill, the county’s name having been changed from Shorter to Lincoln in 1866 to honor the memory of the assassinated president—then he would move off to one side to permit the pork queen plenty of space for her call. The national pork queen was the last in this division to perform. She was a tall brunette with a distinctly alto voice, and what her call might have lacked in tonal variations was adequately compensated for in volume. When she finished, her voice for several moments resounded from the fronts of several distant stores in overlapping echoes. She stood at the microphone for some time, smiling, until the final echo had thundered away. Tom led a round of applause—for the brunette, certainly, but also, as he said, to acknowledge all of the pork queens, who forthwith in single file made their way across the truck bed and down the ladder and into the crowd, which was on its way now to becoming a multitude. He told 186

us then that none of the winners would be announced until the competition, all three categories, was finished, and only the first-place winner, he said, would receive a trophy. I licked my lips and looked at my colleague, who had taken a small blue notepad from his shirt pocket and was scribbling something on one of its pages. When he looked up, his brow was furrowed. He was the coach now, Knute Rockne in an off-tan Panama. Two things I want you to remember, said Coach Stubblefield. First, swallow the goddamned microphone. He paused, giving me time to absorb that first piece of advice. Swallow the goddamned microphone. Yes, it was a point worth taking. Several of the pork queens had stood well away from the mike, as if they feared it, and their voices did not carry more than a few feet beyond the truck bed. The mall at North Platte, Nebraska, was a vast expanse of buildings and concrete and, unless you swallowed the goddamned microphone, you stood little chance of catching a hog’s, or a judge’s, attention. Next, said Stubblefield, assume a pose. None of the ladies did this. You notice? They stood stiff as statues. I asked Coach if he would tell me what sort of pose I should assume. Bend the knees, Coach said. Like this. He bent his knees slightly, his legs wide apart, his right foot ahead of his left. Then, he said, make a megaphone of your hands and hold them, he said, against the sides of your mouth, like this. I imitated his pose and held it while he looked me over. Good, said Coach. That’s good. Now Tom was back at the mike, his pleasant baritone reminding us of some of kody’s outstanding features: newscasts, for example, every hour on the hour, and up-to-date figures on grain and cattle prices, and music to fit everyone’s preferences, as long as the listener preferred country western. As if to illustrate what he meant by country western, and having pinched his nose with a thumb and forefinger, he sang the opening lines of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” his rendition, except 187

for the pinching of the nose, beautifully convincing—his baritone slow and mellow, molasses not in January but in early July. Several listeners were so impressed they let go of their balloons and clapped, prompting many others—those with balloons and those without—to follow suit. Tom smiled and nodded and told the audience that he appreciated their response, and stressed the fact that kody was sponsoring the hog-calling contest, which meant that the station had bought the trophies (one of which was the object of my unrequited lust). And now, he said, it was time to hear from the callers in the female division. One by one the ladies were called to the microphone; one by one they ascended the stairs, and one by one they performed their calls. Meanwhile, Coach Stubblefield scribbled away on the small pages of his notepad. Unfortunately, most of the women had not been very well coached; time and again they failed to swallow the microphone, and more often than not they performed the call without assuming any sort of a pose. One exception was an elderly woman who resembled my maternal grandmother—short and full-bodied and undaunted. With both hands she grabbed the metal rod that held the microphone and squeezed it mercilessly as she delivered her call. A rasp in her voice gave the call both timbre and credence; I was convinced that had I been a hog, hungry or not, I’d have responded. Three young girls—children, maybe eight or nine, requiring Tom to lower the mike—offered calls. The first very meekly said, Here, pig. Come here, pig. Come here, pig pig pig. She delivered the words with a modesty that prompted Tom to nudge her closer to the mike, then request that she perform the call again, which—meekly and modestly—she did. So impressed was the audience that it applauded, and the young lady, taking the applause to mean that she should repeat the call, did it again. Eventually, when the first young competitor stopped and her peers took their turns, each did a call amazingly similar to the one that had elicited the applause. Here, pig. Come here, pig. Come here, pig pig pig. Obviously, the first young lady had established a precedent, and the other girls did not dare to fly into its face with anything resembling deviation—or 188

originality. Nor did the audience waver in its response, each time applauding with gusto. And it occurred to me that such a contest might well be decided by variables too elusive to be anticipated or contained. For example, the pork queens were lovely, all of them, and each in her own way revealed an attraction that must have influenced the judges, however objective they wanted to be. And the children. They were demure beyond description. Was there a box on the score sheet labeled demure? Would it be possible to disregard the girls’ sweet faces long after their calls had turned to silence? Is modesty finally the most effective route to a hog’s stomach? And so on. To my knowledge, not much has been written about the art of hog calling. Perhaps the closest thing to a definitive work is William Hedgepeth’s The Hog Book, in which the author declares hog calling to have been “institutionalized as a rural and exclusively American art form in the 1930s, when the calling of hogs first took its place as a competitive event on those festive occasions when farm folk gathered for outdoor fairs.” He goes on to list five criteria by which hog calls have been, and one assumes should be, judged: First, the call must be strong enough to be discernible to the hog from behind a bush across a forty-acre field. Second, the quality of the call must be interpreted by the hog as one of warmth and friendly expectancy. Third, the call must be sufficiently original so that the hog can distinguish the style of the individual who’s calling, especially for him. Fourth, there must be a sense of persuasion and promise in the call, a flavor of charm compelling enough to woo the vagrant hog from his private digs. Finally, within the call itself there must emerge enough tonal variations so as to appeal to the hog’s multifaceted nature and changeable mood. As I stood listening to the women—young and old and in between— administer their calls, I was not thinking about Mr. Hedgepeth’s five criteria. I had not read his book, and wouldn’t for another twenty or thirty years. But two or three of his points touch upon matters that reach beyond the logical: They are impossible to interpret objectively. At best, 189

they are colorful and somewhat amusing—but not useful. And, yes, the call must be loud enough to be heard by the hog. And, yes, the call should reflect at least a modicum of tonal variations, though modicum might finally be difficult to define. The other matters, though, are concerns that skirt, if not delve into, the ephemeral, or at least the richly ambiguous. How do you discern the extent to which the call suggests “warmth and friendly expectancy”? By what standards do you judge originality? Or a “sense of persuasion and promise,” or a “flavor of charm”? These are mere abstractions, too obtuse to be of much help to the humble student of the art of hog calling. They raise questions more nearly related to the spiritual than to the material. For the most part, Coach Stubblefield emphasized the practical matters. Swallow the mike. Assume a pose. And after the women had finished their performances, he added two more: Sustain the call until you feel the veins at the neck about to burst, and Begin with a brief anecdote to endear yourself to the judges. These were down-to-earth suggestions, I thought, because I had watched many of the callers, nervous and apparently anxious to retreat, hurry their calls, some too brief to make an impression. And Coach Stubblefield’s final bit of advice also made sense. The spinning of a short anecdote might help personalize the caller and provide a backdrop against which the call itself could resonate. Tom gave the judges ample time to arrange their notes and mark their score sheets before he introduced the first caller in the male division. In spite of a deliberate effort to remain calm and collected, I began to feel uneasy. I had never entered such a contest, which meant that almost everything I did and said would be sheer improvisation, in spite of Stubblefield’s coaching. I knew I could handle his instructions, because they were so flat-out practical, and now, as I listened to the first male caller, I arranged them in the order I’d perform them: Relate an anecdote. Assume a pose. Swallow the mike. Sustain the call until I feel the veins at my neck about to burst. But what might the call itself, the final product, sound like? Would it impress the audience, most especially the 190

judges? Would the shoats in their pen stand up and squeal—or even take notice? As I watched and listened to the men—and one boy—deliver their calls, I rated them, telling myself that if the caller didn’t receive at least a six on a scale of one to ten, surely I could outdo him. For the most part, the men’s performances mirrored the women’s: brief, nervous, reluctant to embrace the microphone. That one with his blue shirtsleeves rolled up well above the elbows? Give him a five. And the elderly gentleman politely holding his seed cap in his right hand? A six, maybe, out of kindness. One of the men, though, was a genuine crowd-pleaser. He was red faced and stout and cleanly bald, perhaps forty years old, and, curiously appropriate for this particular event, he had the snout of a fully matured Poland China. He must have overheard the first half of Coach Stubblefield’s instructions, because he formed a megaphone with his hands and, pressing his wide proboscis against the microphone, began a series of grunts and snorts and other gutturals and nasals so wholly authentic I questioned some of the branches on his family tree. Grrrr-unnnt. Snnnn-orrrrt. He moved his head back and forth, up and down, his nose against the mike as if rooting corncobs in a mud-filled sty. Snnnn-orrrrt. Unggghhh. Grrrr-unnnt. It was clearly a contest between the contestant and whatever it was he was trying to uncover. And the crowd responded with pockets of spontaneous applause. Begrudgingly, I gave him a seven. But it seemed to me, in all fairness, that his production was less a hog call than an imitation of the hog he should have been calling. I told this to Stubblefield, who was standing at my right grinning like a sophomore. We’ll see how the judges score it, he said. But right now, he said, he’s the one to beat. Only one youngster was represented in the male division, a boy with blond hair, wearing blue overalls. After Tom lowered the microphone, the lad approached it slowly, then stopped and looked at it for a few long seconds, as if he had come upon something—a living creature, say— that might suddenly charge or spook. As if convinced that the contrap191

tion was not going to leap at him, or fly away, he looked at the crowd, all of it, until finally his reason for standing there must have leaked into his consciousness, and he performed a call undoubtedly influenced by the young female callers who preceded him. Here, pig, he said, warmly and matter-of-factly. Come here, pig. Come here, pig pig pig. He stood then, bemused and inscrutable, as if he had created something out of nothing, until the generous audience—out of kindness, I suppose—applauded. I gave him a five.  When Tom called my name, several contestants later, I flinched. You’re on, said Stubblefield. Now go win this one for the Gipper! I made my way to the steps and ascended them, thinking not only of the instructions passed along by Coach Stubblefield, but also reviewing some thoughts I had about the call itself—its volume, its variety of pitches, its attitude and texture, and so on. As a youngster I had admired Roy Rogers, his singing no less than his exploits as America’s bestloved cowboy. I especially admired his yodeling, a talent Bill Johnson, my co-worker in the cafeteria at Kansas State Teachers College, shared with Roy, and one Bill often demonstrated—when our boss, Helen “The Nose” Bishop, was out of earshot—as he attempted to teach me the fundamentals of yodeling. I’d do my practicing on the sly, trying to move the voice from a low baritone into a falsetto, and back and forth, without causing permanent damage to the epiglottal fold. The trick, or one of them, was to move from one level to the other cleanly and smoothly, and to do this rapidly for a few moments, then slowly, all in an effort to keep the listeners, should one day there be any, wondering what might come next. Again, I admit that I used to entertain the dream of being a famous country western singer; by the time Bill Johnson took me under his melodic wing in the college cafeteria the dream had begun to fade away, but it nonetheless had never disappeared entirely. Another of my heroes was Johnny Weissmuller. I watched and listened to his call again and again in such movies as Tarzan and the Amazons and Tarzan’s Secret Treasure and Tarzan and the Ape Man. He was everything 192

a boy growing up in south-central Kansas might want to be—strong and wildly handsome, constantly amused by the antics of mischievous Cheetah, and happily mated with lovely Jane. And his rallying call was a feature that I sometimes imitated to let my buddies across town know I was alive and well and wanted to know if they were alive and well also, hoping they were and that we could meet where our calls intersected and plot something to make the jungle we lived in seem worth it. These, then, would be the basic ingredients of my hog call, and I determined to stir them up and add to them as the call proceeded. Standing at the microphone, I was suddenly aware that the crowd was larger and more colorful than I had realized. The air was filled with balloons, their reds and yellows and blues distinctive and, off to my left, not far from the pen that enclosed the shoats, the grills that earlier had cooked the pork chops and hash browns were being prepared to cook the hot dogs and hamburgers that would constitute lunch. The mall was a mass of movement and non-movement, hats and heads weaving in and out among those who were standing still, the smoke from the grills providing a pleasing olfactory sensation. I looked at the judges to see if they were ready. They were, or seemed to be. Not yet wanting to swallow the mike (I’d do this in a few moments when I moved into the call), I told the audience what Coach Stubblefield had told the master of ceremonies, who had failed to mention it, that I was a member in good standing of the Platte Valley Pork Growers Association. With my right hand I rubbed my new belt buckle, as if to suggest that it was somehow connected to my affiliation with the Association, which of course it wasn’t. The gesture was nothing more than pure prehog-call reflex. For my anecdote, I announced that my paternal grandfather taught me the art of hog-calling. He was a dirt farmer in southeastern Kansas, I said, who called his hogs by slapping the side of the slop bucket with the palm of his free hand while shouting Sooooo-eeee several times, and the call always worked like a charm. By the time he reached the hog pen, I said, its occupants, all three or four of them, would be at the fence, standing on their hind legs looking for all the world like the suppliants 193

they were, their eyes beseeching, their tongues hanging out. Then, trying my best to ignore the laughter induced by the anecdote, I bent my knees to assume a pose, moving into the microphone and swallowing it and completing the step by forming a megaphone with my hands and beginning the call with a low baritone growl that moved sweet as molasses in July up and into a falsetto that moved suddenly downward to become the semblance of a yodel that metamorphosed into a jungle call that trailed off into the unassuming understatement that had characterized all three of the young people’s efforts—Here, pig. Come here, pig. Come here, pig, pig, pigg-eeeee—and when the pigg-eeeee seemed at the very edge of fading entirely away, I revived it suddenly with a snort and a grunt and a series of soooo-eeees whose volume and longevity surprised me and, when I was reasonably certain that the veins at my neck were about to explode, I dropped the sooooo-eeees and returned to a companion series of pigpigpigs, each series delivered more softly than the preceding one, until pigpigpig was little more than a whisper and, when the whisper gave way to absolute silence, I stepped back and removed my felt cowboy hat and waved it at the sound of clapping. Then with a dip and a wink I was down off the truck’s flat bed, shaking hands with Coach Stubblefield, whose smile, as Ring Lardner might say, had a future in it. But, as it turned out, I was not the final caller, as Coach had believed. Two others had sneaked in under the wire. The first one’s holler deserved no better than a three, but the second hombre posed a very definite threat. His would be a call, he said, calculated to summon the razorback, which is a hog, he declared, best known in Arkansas. He himself had spent his formative years in Little Rock, he said, where he learned the ins and outs of hogology from his uncle Elmer. He (the man from Little Rock) was a tall, thin-haired entrant whose exposed pate was beginning to show the effects of a North Platte, Nebraska, sun. With his long, lean arms he gestured as he spoke; I had trouble relating the gestures to what he was saying, though together the movements and the words bespoke a self-assurance that cut deeply into my earlier sense of confidence. His call was peculiar. It reminded me of the voice of Glenn J. Biber194

stein, who sang contra tenor in the choir at the Methodist church back home in south-central Kansas. It both intrigued and frightened me to watch Glenn J., because he’d close his eyes, or very nearly close them, and with his chin elevated he’d seem to be singing to something or someone high above him—a cirrus cloud, maybe, or a cherub sitting cross-legged on such a cloud, or something equally holy and diaphanous—and there would be only the smallest variation in pitch, unless having reached its apex it somehow found a way to rise a note or two higher. Glenn J. was at his best with “Tenebrae Factae Sunt,” which was probably the only number in Latin ever performed by any choir in Harper County, if not all of Kansas. For some reason, the unintelligibility of the words seemed to provide a divine complement to Glenn J.’s contra tenor. Perhaps it was an instance of one type of loftiness cohabitating in felicitous syncretism with the other. The man from Little Rock, however, was not intoning “Tenebrae Factae Sunt.” He was supposed to be performing a hog call, one guaranteed, he boasted, to summon the Arkansas razorback, one that sounded a lot like Glenn J. wooing the ephemeral. And while Glenn J.’s voice was always in lovely communion with his subject, the voice of the man just now at the microphone did not produce a sound fit to be heard anywhere near a respectable pigpen. What razorback in its right mind would respond to such misplaced warbling? Admittedly, I was not an objective bystander; I coveted that goddamned first-place trophy, and I did not want to lose it to a high-pitched interloper from the wilds of Arkansas. At my right, grinning as if he were enjoying himself, Coach Stubblefield stood transfixed. Well, I had to remember that he had spent many years coaching high school football in Texas, so perhaps the voice and the antics of the man at the microphone seemed to him more normal than bizarre. When finally the tenor’s sorry call was over, Sir Charles turned and remarked that this guy, and the one who had done so much grunting and snorting, were the ones to worry about, a conclusion I had already reached. I nodded. Tom meanwhile had returned to the microphone. He didn’t want to 195

hurry the judges, he said, so to give them time to tally their evaluations he reminded us again of some of kody’s most salient features—the frequent newscasts, both local and national, grain and cattle prices, and of course country western music. Speaking of which, he said, let me give some of you ladies in the audience—and you’ll know who you are— some free Tommy Taylor advice. He paused until most of the congregation had hushed, then he spoke slowly and somberly into the mike, which he had swallowed. Mamas, he said—and you know who you are—don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys! Then smooth as molasses in July, he began to sing a second Willie Nelson song, telling those women who knew who they were to encourage their babies to become doctors and lawyers and such—anything, almost, except cowboys. Again he pinched his nose with a thumb and forefinger, which provided the nasal quality required for any authentic imitation of Mr. Nelson. Tom Taylor was good. He sang only two or three lines of the song; then, lowering his fingers from his nose, he said he wanted to mention just one more time that the hog-calling event was being sponsored by kody, which plays more country western music than any other station in the area, including kcow at Alliance and, by the way, he said, today’s event is being taped by kody and portions of it will be used all next week as eye-openers for the early-morning grain and cattle updates and, if that ain’t enough, friends, a national news station, he thought cbs, was doing some recording of its own, some filming, and don’t be surprised if you see yourself on national tv tomorrow or the next day and, incidentally, he said, I have here the name of the winner of the prettiest pig contest, and he pulled a small piece of paper from a pocket and holding it at arm’s length, for effect, he cleared his throat and told us that the winner was none other than Hamlet, a Hampshire shoat, a prince of a hog, he said; and after this incredible announcement had been digested by the audience, Tom Taylor gave us a quick rundown of the afternoon and evening activities, which would include a rodeo beginning at seven o’clock, and he was about to tell us something else when one of the judges, the woman, interrupted and handed him several sheets of paper. 196

This is it, said our master of ceremonies. He shuffled the papers, putting them in the proper order. First, he said, the winner in the Pork Queen Division is—and here he paused to execute a drum roll with a convolution of voice and tongue that must be heard to be appreciated, or believed—and he pronounced the name of the national pork queen, the brunette whose alto call had smacked the fronts of several of the mall’s stores, then echoed, then returned again until it ran out of energy and retired to an enormous silence. The young brunette in her gleeful haste tripped only one time as she skittered up the steps to receive her trophy, which she held in both hands. She was radiant and wholesome and all tears and flapdoodle. She thanked God and Tom and kody and her fellow contestants and the audience and her family, most of them, she said, still living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where she herself had grown up—and, again, she thanked her God. In contrast to the tall brunette from Grand Forks was the winner of the female division, the elderly woman who resembled my maternal grandmother. She took her time ascending the steps, stood poised and erect as she received the trophy, and, with a husky rasp in her voice, thanked only Tommy Taylor, whose offer to escort her down the steps was kindly refused. I turned to look at Coach Stubblefield, who had turned to look at me. You’re next, he said. Are you ready? I wasn’t, but when Tom spoke my name, I found myself standing suddenly before him, though I could not remember having climbed the steps. My right hand clutching the golden hog at the top of the trophy, I leaned into the microphone to give credit to the Platte Valley Pork Growers Association, to my coach, Charles Stubblefield, and to my paternal grandfather, who was no longer living. But who knows? Maybe he was here, I said—and I meant every word—in spirit.  197

It was late evening when we started the trip back to Lincoln. We had enjoyed hot dogs and cold beer for lunch, and had driven to the Buffalo Bill ranch, where we inhaled its fresh air and read the inscriptions on its plaques and statues until time for a siesta. Refreshed, we then decided to take in the rodeo, but we did not stay for all of it; unfortunately, many of the entrants had not followed their mamas’ advice not to become cowboys. So we dismissed ourselves from the Buffalo Bill day festivities and settled into the front seat of Coach Stubblefield’s high-mileage, creamcolored Cadillac and headed east. Coach said that because the Cadillac’s air-conditioning system was low on Freon, we might want to roll down the windows and enjoy the cool night air. Because we had watched too many riders fail to stay on their horses, we knew that we would not be home before midnight. Western Nebraska in early July, especially on a clear, balmy night, is a fine place to drive across. There is the sweet aroma of newly mown alfalfa, and if you have a workable radio in the car you can listen to a clear-channel station from as far away as Clint, Texas, or turn the dial to kody and maybe catch the baritone voice of Tommy Taylor introducing something by Reba McEntire or Tanya Tucker or—Willie Nelson. It is also a fine thing to be gliding along in a vehicle roughly the size of Rhode Island, behind its wheel a driver who, relaxed and in good spirits, seems to have found a home away from home. And if there happens to be a hog-calling trophy lying on your lap, pristine and precious, well, so much the better. And inhaling deeply, you rest your right arm on the rolled-down window and in the moonlight look for cattle you’d continue to sing to, if your colleague hadn’t objected. At the outskirts of York, we stop at an all-night diner for what Sir Charles calls sustenance. Eggs over easy with hash browns and black coffee and several—make it half a dozen—well-done strips of home-grown bacon.  The following evening, an hour or so before sundown, I took a call from Wichita. My mother was at the other end, wanting to know whether I 198

had seen myself on the cbs evening news. She was almost certain she had seen me, she said. I was wearing a cowboy hat and was standing at a microphone Lord knows where doing, of all things under the sun, a hog call. I just know it was you, she said. Wasn’t it? Yes, I said. It was your older son. There was a short pause. Then she said, Are you all right? I’m fine, I said. And, as clearly as I could, and in some detail, I told her where I had been and why I was there, and about the hog-calling contest—and of course I included a description of the trophy. Well, Mother said when I had finished, forevermore! Her intonation suggested that she was more pleased than surprised. Well, she said again, I just knew it was you. Are you sure you’re all right? My mother was like that. She was concerned about me, yes, perhaps wondering if maybe I was on my way to a breakdown, but also she was always ready for something interesting she might share with others who had an hour or so to kill. She would mull over a story as if confronting a mound of bread dough, would flour it and knead it and turn it over and over and pat it and shape it until it was ready to be baked and then served with matriarchal pride. And my own personal concern was not that she’d tell it, but that she might embellish it beyond the reach of fact or plausibility. That worried me. It worried me a lot.

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This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury, and my passion, With its sweet air. — William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

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Our younger son was in high school when he began his interest in music, determined to master the banjo. He was a bright student, a competent second baseman, and, at that time, a chef at the Villager Motel. I’m going to learn to play the banjo, Robert told me one evening after supper. I looked up from a stack of freshman essays. A large portion of my past flashed before me, in vignettes. In high school I played the snare drum in a twenty-four-member band. Eloise Ann played the trumpet in the same group. But neither of us progressed beyond “Colonel Bogie” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Earlier, we had taken shots at learning to play the piano, she because the house her family had moved into, from the country, had a piano, and she was the only one who showed any interest in it; I because my aunt Ruby could play the ivories by ear, according to Mother, and because I resembled my aunt—our eyes, for one thing, were the same shade of green—Mother concluded that I had somehow inherited my aunt’s play-by-ear talent. Eloise tossed in the towel early in her career, her instructor insisting that the girl’s stubby fingers would never be long enough to reach an octave. My own dalliance with the piano lasted longer, but not by much. I took little interest in practicing, and spending money on a boy who would not do his homework—in spite of his latent genius—did not set well with the one who had prodded him into such a disagreeable corner in the first place. Mother therefore gave me permission to drop piano. Money, she said, doesn’t grow on trees. Our first three children insisted that they wanted to be musicians; 203

the girls, neither of whom had green eyes, chose the piano, while the boy selected the trombone. Their parents, of course, because they were parents, encouraged them. The son blew mightily into a mouthpiece for a week or so before he disassembled and encased his instrument for a final time. The girls, though they persisted long enough to master several elementary etudes, decided that the world needed listeners no less than performers, and tearfully—because their parents insisted—informed their teacher themselves that they were quitting, a trauma that even today disturbs the family psyche. Samuel Clemens declared in his autobiography that banging your head against a brick wall indefinitely is a sign of mental retardation—or words to that effect. To illustrate his point, he discussed several projects he had sunk money into in an effort to become a millionaire. One of these was a transatlantic cable, an adventure that excited Mr. Clemens and no doubt all of those who, like him, had invested in it, and substantially. Unfortunately, his cable did not work out, while another company’s succeeded, and Twain was left nursing his financial wounds. But he did not despair. He would become an overnight millionaire, or know the reason why. So he invested a considerable amount—some fifty thousand dollars—in a linotype machine that was about to be invented, one that would turn the printing world on its ear. Again, though, a competitor beat Twain’s inventor to the punch. And again, Mr. Clemens was left to lick his wounds. By that time he had learned his lesson. Twice he had banged his head, hard, against a brick wall, and twice it had repelled him. He was a determined man, at times a stubborn man, but he was not a fool—or, if he was, he was God’s fool, and God therefore must share—divinely, of course—the blame. These investments had cost Mr. Clemens a great deal of money, but he felt that the experience had made him much wiser. So when a man knocked on his door and tried to sell him some stock in a company that the man said would make a product that would surely be the wave of the future, Sam Clemens girded his loins and stood his ground and kept his wallet in his pocket and turned the man away—but not before he had 204

heard the name of the inventor of the product he so adamantly refused to endorse. It was Alexander Graham Bell. The question, then, is not whether you should bang your head against a brick wall but, rather, when should you stop the banging? Robert had not said, May I attempt to learn to play the banjo? No, he had said, I’m going to learn to play the banjo. There was a certainty not only in the statement, but in his tone of voice. It left me little chance to decide whether I wanted to be included in another effort to break through the brick wall. Already the die had been cast. In that case, I said, you will need to buy yourself a banjo. I knew nothing whatsoever about banjos, but I had not been the snare drummer in a band of twenty-four members for nothing. That is, I knew that your skills or talents could be severely impaired if you were playing a second- or third-rate instrument. I conveyed this insight to my son. I know, he said. That’s why I’m going to buy a good one, a Fender Leo, when I get enough money. Right now I have one that’ll do to learn on. It’s out in the car. I’ll go get it. I was taken aback. Already he had bought a banjo? He returned in a flash. The banjo was a hybrid of reddish wood and plastic. He strummed it a couple of times, then handed it to me. It was surprisingly heavy—certainly enough heft to convince me that it was all right to learn on. I turned it this way and that, and ran a thumb across its strings, as if to suggest that I knew more about banjoes than in fact I did. Well, I said, it looks all right to me. Now, I said, you’re going to need a teacher. I have one. Karen Johnson. I’ll be taking two lessons a week. I didn’t ask him how much the lessons would cost, hadn’t even thought to ask him the price of the banjo. His job as chef at the Villager paid well, and Robert knew how to handle his paychecks. She plays guitar more than banjo, Robert said. But she can teach me some of the fundamentals. Fine, I said. Robert went upstairs to his bedroom and I returned to my stack of freshman essays, thinking, Can it be possible? A musician in the house of Kloefkorn? 205

Although Robert’s parents and his siblings had all tried and failed to master a musical instrument—had banged their heads against that particular wall—I nevertheless felt that this time someone in the family might succeed. I remembered Sam Clemens’s tale about his failed investments, recalling that the point of his story is that he stopped trying too soon. Who knows? I thought. Young Robert might be offering our family what Alexander Graham Bell tried to give Sam Clemens—a real chance to succeed. Fortunately, it worked out that way.  When Robert was very young, three or four, he would ask me to read him something, almost anything, before taking him to bed. At first I saw it as a simple tactic for delaying sleep, which perhaps it was; but the delay never lasted very long. After only a few minutes I could feel his little body relaxing, and often he would be asleep before I could finish whatever I was reading. I would read him poems, mostly, nursery rhymes that both he and I enjoyed. One late evening, reading through a new collection of these rhymes, I came upon a brief little poem that neither of us had heard before. It was called “The Little Elf Man.” I met a little elf man once, Down where the lilies blow. I asked him why he was so small, And why he did not grow. He slightly smiled, and with an eye He looked me through and through. “I’m quite as big for me,” said he, “As you are big for you.” He asked me to read it again, and I did. Then he looked up at me and said, Grow. I am growing, I said. I slapped my stomach to prove it. 206

No, he said. Grow. It took me a few seconds to catch his drift: He wanted me to say a word that rhymes with grow. When finally I said snow, he laughed and shook his head approvingly. This was our first venture into the realm of give-and-take rhyme, into a kingdom of sound that pleases the ear. If grow and snow fit pleasantly together, then why not cat and bat? Dog and frog? Head and bed? Over many nights we played the game. Always we started it after I had read “The Little Elf Man.” Always the game gave Robert immense delight. To heighten this delight, or to prepare for it, I’d read the poem metrically, exaggerating the iambs as I moved along, sometimes putting a melody to the tetrameter and trimeter lines. It is possible, of course, to experience too much of a good thing. I became downright tired of “The Little Elf Man,” so weary that I wanted to tell its author, Anonymous, what I was feeling. But I didn’t because I couldn’t; though the author appeared in any number of books, he was nowhere to be found. Robert meanwhile did not share my animosity. His respect for Anonymous never waned. I would read the poem, and like clockwork the rhyming would begin—words with single syllables, then words with double syllables, or two short words, as we extended the pleasure. What rhymes with kitten? Mitten. Bad man? Sad man. We were improvising poetry on its most fundamental level. Bad man, sad man, where is your mitten? Bad man, sad man, it’s only a kitten! Then one evening the routine very suddenly changed. I read “The Little Elf Man,” of course, but I had barely finished when Robert jumped from my lap and disappeared into the dining room, where the family desk—a large oak desk with a roll-down top—was located. Through the archway that separated the dining from the living room I watched him pull out the chair from beneath the desk and climb onto it. I could not see clearly what he was doing, because the side of the desk hid his arms and hands. But I could tell that they were busy at a project that maybe eventually I’d have the privilege of looking at. After several minutes he returned, carrying a white sheet of paper 207

on which—using only crayons—he had created a drawing, a surrealistic work that I had trouble making sense of. Look, he said, handing me the drawing. Book, I said proudly. No, he said. Look! I examined the drawing from all possible angles. The colors were primary, and thus very striking. It’s pretty, I said. I like it. All of these green lines going up and down— they’re beautiful. Green is my favorite color. They’re lilies, Robert said. The lines are lilies. He seemed proud that his drawing was getting some attention, and he did not seem to mind that I did not, at first glance, understand his work. I held the drawing at arm’s length to give me a different perspective. Yes, I said, I can see now that the green lines are lilies. There were some purple lines, too, shorter lines with a circle the size of a quarter atop one of them. The circle was an unbroken mass of purple. That’s the little elf man, Robert said. He seemed to know precisely where I was looking. Yes. The little elf man. And this other color, the red—what is it? I knew what it was, or thought I did; it was the “I” in the poem, the narrator. Robert had used a brilliant red to depict this character, a red gaudy enough to remind me of the lips of Ruby Shoemaker. But while the short, straight lines of the other figure suggested a stick man, the large, uneven lines of this figure, the narrator, suggested something impressively powerful. That’s me, Robert said, seeming a trifle miffed that I had not recognized him. Of course, I said. Well, it’s a fine drawing. We can put a frame around it and hang it on the wall. No, said the artist. I’m taking it to bed with me. And so he did; and when he brought it downstairs the following morning the wrinkles it had accumulated while sleeping with its creator gave it a texture that enhanced its surrealistic overtones. Robert, for 208

a time, did not appreciate the enhancement, but after I smoothed the drawing somewhat with his mother’s iron and took it to the garage and built a frame for it, one whose corners might have fit more snugly had I owned a miter box, he was more than pleased. We hung it on the wall at the head of his bed. And perhaps for the benefit of those not familiar with contemporary art—that is, for those who lack the knowledge and the imagination to appreciate anything beyond the purely representational—he titled it “The Little Elf Man.”  Time. A small slice of it—fifteen years—had passed when one morning, rummaging in the basement for a work I’d never find, I ran across the book of poems that Robert and I had spent so many evenings with. On several occasions over the years I had thought of the book, of “The Little Elf Man” in particular, and certainly I did not need the book to be able to recall the poem. It had a permanent place in my limited trove of memorizations. I put the book on my desk, and that evening, after supper, I showed it to Robert. Remember this? He looked at the cover, front and back, then said no, he didn’t. Turn to page seventeen. He found the page, and I gave him some time to scan the poem before I asked, Remember that one? Before he could respond, I recited the poem, slowly, as Robert followed it on the page. When I had finished, he smiled. I remember, he said. Didn’t we read that poem sometimes before I went to bed? Many times, I said. It was your favorite. He was reading the poem, taking it in again, this time at his own pace. When he looked up I said, Well, what do you think of the poem now? Is it as good as you thought when you were not yet majoring in engineering? I like it, he said. Nice cadence. Easy rhyme. 209

Anything else? If you were in class, and the professor asked you to discuss what you thought was the strongest element in the poem, what would it be? Robert and two of his buddies had enrolled that fall at the University of Nebraska, all of them declaring majors in engineering, a field that did not require courses in which one looked closely—or at all—at poetry. But Robert, who was learning to play the banjo, had a lot of poetry in him. Well, he said, the last two lines are pretty good. I recited the lines: “I’m quite as big for me, said he, / As you are big for you.” So you think those lines are pretty good, I said. Why? Because they make me think. What about? About size, Robert said. About different sizes. Reminds me that not all of us need to be the same size. And I remembered watching Hamlet being performed by a troupe from Japan, how Hamlet at the opening was sitting cross-legged at the center of the stage and how, when he came to his feet, the audience laughed—not because something amusing had been said, but because Hamlet’s shortness undercut the audience’s expectations: Can Hamlet be a tragic figure when he stands barely five feet tall? We moved then from size to color: Must a person be this or that color in order to be a complete human being? Religious beliefs? Do differences include one sect at the expense of another? Social positions? Political stances? And so on. Later, remembering our conversation, I concluded that Robert’s reactions to “The Little Elf Man” reflected a perfectly natural sequence. As infants, we respond first to sound, perhaps because we spend the first nine months of our lives so close to our mothers’ heartbeats. One of the first sounds we hear after arriving is that of our own voices; another is the voice of someone else making sounds we’ll need to hear a lot more of before we understand them. It seems reasonable to assume that in our subconscious we retain the sound of our mothers’ heartbeats and, since we now have fully developed heartbeats of our own, we are inclined to 210

respond favorably to a regular beat; and if the beat is accompanied by a variety of intonations and repetitions, so much the better. For a while, we respond less to what is being said than to the sounds themselves— and to how they are formed. Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll called it; it appeals chiefly to the ear, and can be soothing or threatening, depending upon how it is delivered. Robert and I, during those early years, had done some improvising of our own: Now no new nard need noddle over nat, for frolic lies the fanfare in the fat. The ear of the child might find such a statement delightful; the alliterations tickle his fancy, and the child smiles or chuckles as he asks you to say it again, then again, until he too knows it by heart. Children who like to jump a rope know how important the beat is. It can be slow or fast, low gear or hot pepper, or some speed in between. Or it can move from sugar to hot pepper, as long as the movement is steady. To accompany the beat of the rope, they chant poems to pleasure the ear. Fudge, fudge, fetch the judge. Mama just had a newborn baby. It isn’t a girl, it isn’t a boy— It’s just a plain old baby. The children do not wonder how or why fudge might be related to the judge; the answer, very simply, is that fudge rhymes with judge. Nor do they question the matter of preceding baby with newborn. Ever hear of an old-born baby? The rope jumpers need a line that complements the beat of the rope as it nibbles at the front-yard crabgrass, and newborn does quite nicely. And do they wonder about the baby’s being neither female nor male, but “just a plain old baby”? Not a bit. They are not training to be pediatricians or psychiatrists; they are jumping rope, ears attuned to the sounds of words and the slapslapslap of rope against crabgrass, feet and legs working to jump high enough, and at the precise moment, to avoid the snarl that might cause them to lose the game. Nor do the children treat the newborn baby gently after it has arrived: 211

Wrap it up in tissue paper, Put it on the elevator. How—many—floors—does—it—go—up? The newborn is less a human than an unfeeling object, an “it,” and what the adult might call baby abuse the child might see as amusement, not to mention the aural pleasure derived from the near rhyme of tissue paper and elevator. The final line invites the rope-jumper to count the number of floors—that is, the number of times the jumper can clear the rope without missing. If those holding the ends of the rope increase its speed, moving it all the way into hot pepper, the sound of the counting as the rope hits the ground provides a rhythm that makes the jumping both a challenge and a dance. There comes a time, of course, when image takes its place alongside sound, as it did when Robert translated “The Little Elf Man” by way of a crayon drawing. The eye does not replace the ear; it joins the ear, and together they respond to whatever sounds and images the poem conveys. When the child hears the line, A rubber baby bumper bumped a baby boy, he probably chuckles at the alliteration. When he is older, hearing the same line, he might ask, Was the baby hurt? His ear has heard the alliteration, but his eye sees the collision of bumper and boy, and he wants to know the extent of the victim’s injuries. And there comes a time—time being both thief and teacher—when the reader not only hears the sounds and sees the images, but also thinks about what they suggest. One possibility is that they suggest nothing beyond sound and image. Another is that they provoke a pleasantly wide range of possibilities, or meanings or insights or whatever it is one chooses to call the reactions that the words have inspired. Robert Frost called it wisdom: The poem begins in delight, he wrote, and ends in wisdom. Another dead poet said that the good poem teases the reader into thought. Another, using the word thought in a different context, wrote that a poem is “what oft is thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” When the little elf man says, “I’m quite as big for me . . . as you are big for you,” the careful reader finds 212

himself wondering about his relationship to others—their relative sizes, beliefs, colors, opinions, and so on—until it is possible that the reader, having laid the poem aside, can take up his banjo or pen and go about his business both entertained and informed.  I never heard any maddening screeches from the strings of my younger son’s banjo—not even during his first few weeks of practice, or that evening when, having told me he was going to learn to play, he went upstairs, and I returned to my stack of essays. I could hear an occasional plucking of strings, but nothing to fray even the most sensitive nerve. Without much searching, he seemed to have found what the other members of his tin-ear family had been looking for. There are times when the sounds of an instrument—banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, harmonica—are so crisp or enlivening or soothing, that you are tempted to believe that in the beginning was not the word, but the music, and the music was without words. One such time is late evening, dusk, that period between dark and not dark, when there is nothing in the air but stillness, except for the small sound of water trilling if you are sitting at a campfire on the bank of a river; or perhaps the air is carrying the aroma of new-mown grass if you are sitting on the front porch with someone who, like yourself, is going nowhere in the fullness of time. You sit looking to the west, where darkness slipping in from the east will soon prevail, and you believe you hear, in the distance, a familiar tune—“Peaceful Easy Feeling,” maybe, or is it “Blackberry Blossom”?—and you ask the one at your left whether she hears it, too, and when she nods you listen more intently, and sure enough the tune becomes more and more distinct, and it is “Blackberry Blossom,” no doubt about it, so you settle back and close your eyes, knowing that the tune will become more and more crisp as it approaches, as its notes leap from the strings of the banjo to give the stillness a cadence it must have thought itself incapable of, until, when you open your eyes, there he is, the musician you thought you’d never live to see—there he is, having walked into your ken all the way from the backyard. Yes, there he is, 213

playing a Fender Leo, a beauty if I’ve ever seen one, the silver on its neck and body catching and reflecting the last of the waning light. And almost before the tune has ended he will be off to Arizona where he will meet the woman whose eyes he can’t resist, and don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, but the catch is this: the melodies of earth are never done: bullfrog, thunderbird, a west wind soughing through the saguaro— and the fish I’ll hook, but not possess, its body, sleek as love, this night forever at home wherever home is.

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Inebriate of Air—am I— And Debauchee of Dew— Reeling—thro endless summer days— From inns of Molten Blue. — Emily Dickinson, “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”

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Christmas was not far away, and the geese were not the only creatures getting fat. You need to lose some weight, my wife said. She was mixing and stirring dough into what would evolve into cookies—oatmeal and snickerdoodle—several containers of which she’d place in a cool, dry place, most likely the northwest corner of the basement, until time to do the baking. She would be following her dead mother’s recipe, had she been able to find it, notations on a card that I doubt her mother ever bothered to read. Perhaps some things are best left to the science of intuition. Her mother was a soft-spoken, unschooled woman who reached the hearts of many by way of their stomachs. But she knew how to use her hands for something more than gripping the handle of a pan in one and a potato masher in the other. She also spent a lot of time crocheting and knitting and tatting, more and more so as she grew older, her gnarled fingers working the needles as if they had minds of their own. As she approached ninety, she claimed that she was very nearly blind; yet sitting in her pink easy chair, tatting—an art too mysterious to describe—she’d not only never miss or drop a loop, but also she was able to call the balls and strikes as she watched the Cubs lose yet another game. She was living testimony to the adage that an old woman should be listened to but not always believed. And, as I watched her create a beautiful afghan, I learned that she was also living testimony to the power of generosity. A year or two before she died, my wife’s mother began knitting a blue afghan. The blue of the yarn reminded me of an experience I once had in France, listening attentively as a guide emphasized the blueness of the 217

windows at Chartres cathedral. While Eloise and I were in Paris with my brother and his wife, we enjoyed an afternoon excursion to Chartres. So there we were, standing inside that hallowed cathedral, listening to a guide who, having told us that a description of the blueness in the windows was not possible, attempted a description, one that lasted half a lifetime before he slapped his forehead with the palm of his right hand, exclaimed Mon dieu! and gave up. Anyway, that’s essentially what the blue in Gladys’s yarn looked like— like the blue in the windows at Chartres. And every bit as lovely. With this blue yarn, she was knitting an afghan as she sat in her pink easy chair admonishing the Cubs, whose uniforms displayed a blueness akin to, but not the equal of, her yarn. She began the project in late spring. It was only a fledgling when I first saw it, several feet wide but not more than a foot deep. It would need a lot of time and patience before it tried its wings. Gladys held the yarn just under her chin, fingers working the needles slowly, eyes moving back and forth from the game to her knitting. She had assembled dozens of other afghans—and tablecloths and bedspreads and doilies and what have you—but never one (or so it seemed to me) so deliberately unhurried, as if somehow she knew she’d live to finish it, however many weeks or months or years it might take. Well, I was somewhat skeptical, influenced by the unlikeliness of it all—not only because she had exceeded her three score and ten by more than twenty years, and was losing her eyesight, but also because she was putting together the afghan so precisely, its lines perfectly even and tight. Her patient tenacity suggested a definition of faith that a misbegotten backslider like me could recognize but never live long enough to practice or understand. The next time I saw her, in autumn, the afghan had reached her waist and was about to level out and begin its journey over her legs. She did not work much while her son and daughters and their spouses and children were there, of course; there were too many things to talk about, too many people—including her deceased husband, Foil—to remember. She could go from the pink easy chair to the kitchen, or the bathroom, 218

with the help of a walker, moving almost as slowly as the motions of the knitting needles; she was a study in what the body can accomplish if it sets out strongly enough to do it. In the kitchen she would stand gripping the walker, smiling, watching her daughters do what she had taught them, though behind the smile I could see, I believed, an almost irrepressible desire to toss the walker into the middle of next Wednesday and join them, to push her arms elbow-deep into a mound of bread dough, say, or to scramble a dozen eggs, or several dozen, before pouring their lovely mass into a waiting skillet. In mid-December I saw her again, and the afghan now had moved across and down her legs, its early yardage becoming a rising bellows of blue scarf at her swollen ankles. She moved the needles in slow motion, her fingers feeling the yarn as she worked. The afghan looked like a blanket designed and assembled especially for the one it covered, leaving visible only a face and a pair of hands. And I was impressed with her timing, how the afghan, so nearly finished, was providing her the extra warmth that her frail body must have appreciated. She finished the afghan the same morning that the wind shifted and the snow fell, large flakes and many of them. Sitting in a soft chair not far from where Gladys was tying off the final strand of yarn, I could see peripherally both the whiteness of the snow and the blueness of the afghan. And again I thought of the windows at Chartres cathedral, how if they could see the blueness of my wife’s mother’s afghan, they’d be humbled and envious. Gladys turned to me and smiled. That’s a nice snow, she said, isn’t it? Yes, I said. If it continues, you might not get rid of us until spring. Then she surprised me. She began slowly to lift and to fold the afghan. She did it carefully and precisely, and with a confidence that kept me from offering her a hand. Little by little the afghan rose from the floor, moving then up her legs and across them and up her chest until finally it was lying in a tight blue rectangle in her lap. With the palms of both hands she patted it as if soothing a child. 219

Now it belongs to so and so, she said, naming a granddaughter. Now it belongs to her. And where was the granddaughter she had named? Upstairs, probably, with the other grandchildren, or maybe in the kitchen, where at least half a dozen cooks were beginning to think about cooking. So there it was, the bluest and most beautiful afghan ever devised by human hands, afghan that, the moment it was finished, no longer belonged to the one who had brought it into the world. Is this what it means to have what is called a generous spirit?  The television was playing, but the sound was off. Players in green and yellow were about to receive the opening kickoff. Gladys was watching them, her hands at rest on the blue afghan. Though unable to see clearly, she nonetheless watched the game with a bemused intensity, from time to time assisting the officials with their calls; and when a halfback broke free for a long gain, or Bart Starr scrambled out of the pocket to complete a pass, she’d laugh and clap like a schoolgirl. But I knew that watching television would not satisfy her for long. Soon enough—probably shortly after the last of her company had said good-bye—she’d begin another project. With fresh skeins of yarn—green, say, for the season that lay ahead, and yellow for the jonquils that would be blooming just outside the window—she’d begin again the business of extending her life with the hope of giving it then to another.  I was about to read three of my Christmas stories to a gathering of adults and children. We were in a small, upstairs room above a bookstore in downtown Lincoln. The bookstore was owned and managed by Jane and Norman Geske, the former a lifelong lover of books, the latter a congenial man who for many years had served as curator of the Sheldon Art Gallery on the campus of the University of Nebraska. He, too, enjoyed the company of books. Christmas was only a week away. The cookies that Eloise had spent 220

several hours shaping and baking were continuing to wait patiently in sealed containers atop a table in the northwest corner of our basement. I had not lost any weight, but only yesterday I assured my wife that it was going to happen. After I’ve eaten the final snickerdoodle, I said, I’ll make a New Year’s resolution. She was finishing the last of several pie crusts that she’d put into the freezer. Her response was not audible. The room above the bookstore was warm and cozy. Some forty or fifty people were present, youngsters with their parents and other supporters, all sitting on metal folding chairs. An oak table rested at the front of the room, and beside it sat an old wooden rocker. I’d sit in the rocker to read the opening story, then either lean against or sit on the table as I read the others. My granddaughter Anna was there, with her parents; they were sitting near the back, Anna next to the aisle. She was four years old and every inch as pretty as her older sister, Michelle. She was wearing new white shoes and a yellow dress. She sat very primly atop the metal chair, and her eyes, large and wide open, were taking everything in. The south wall was lined with windows and, though the Saturday afternoon sky was overcast, the weather was almost balmy. Jane introduced me, and I went to the rocker, sat down, and proceeded to read “Rocking-Chair Travel,” rocking slowly as I read. The story concerns a young girl whose Christmas gift, a rocking chair, enables her to travel wherever she pleases; she simply closes her eyes and rocks the chair and sings a little ditty to help her decide: When I’m in my rocking chair, I can go most anywhere. Back and forth, back and forth— Shall I go south? Should I head north? She goes first to Phoenix, where she learns the true meaning of sunshine as well as the melodic sounds, and latent danger, of ocotillo and saguaro and prickly pear. When she tires of Phoenix, she simply closes her eyes and, singing, begins to rock: 221

When I’m in my rocking chair I can go most anywhere. Back and forth, back and then— Suddenly I’m home again. She sings her way to other places, of course—Alaska, where, riding in a moose-jeep, she encounters a moose; Colorado, where, atop a mountain, she watches a bird with wide wings fly into a cloud and disappear; and New York City, where, standing on the head of Miss Liberty, she sees more water and more people than she had ever seen back home in Nebraska. She travels to each of the four great directions, then yields the rocker to her little brother so he might do some traveling himself, and learn whatever it was his older sister had learned. Before reading this story, I had nudged the rocking chair just enough to give me a better view of Anna. She had heard the story before, but not in this context, and her expression suggested mixed feelings—delight that she had been listening to something familiar, and a measure of awe, as if she had never dreamed that the story would ever be heard by such a large and variegated audience. So I knew that the next story would surely compound that mixture of delight and wonder, because one of its characters was based upon a cat that had been Anna’s faithful companion. In the story, the cat, in the form of a newly born kitten, is left on the doorstep of Santa and Mrs. Claus’s home at the North Pole. It is Christmas Eve, late at night, and Santa has just returned from his appointed rounds. He is sitting in his favorite chair, eating jelly beans; Mrs. Claus, in her favorite chair, is about to finish knitting a lavender shawl with yarn made of goat hair. When they hear the kitten meowing, Santa goes to the door, opens it, and is surprised to see something gray and white with a black circle around one eye lying in a basket on the doorstep. He picks it up and takes it inside. Mrs. Claus, also surprised, lays aside her knitting and looks at the kitten. It continues its meowing, so Mrs. Claus, having uttered Cheese and crackers! fetches the poor little thing a platter of salmon and a bowl of fresh milk. 222

Before going to bed themselves, Santa and Mrs. Claus prepare a bed for the kitten, a pallet made of a folded quilt. They place the pallet in the bedroom where their adopted daughter, Candice, lies sleeping. Then Mrs. Claus covers the kitten with the newly finished shawl, and moments later it is fast asleep. When Candice awakens early the next morning, she sees the kitten asleep on the quilt, its head with the encircled eye visible, the rest of its body tucked warmly under the goat-hair blanket. She can hardly believe her eyes. She rubs them and shakes her head, as if to clear it, only to discover that her dream, if that’s what it was, does not go away, but instead becomes more and more strange. The kitten suddenly awakens, stands and stretches, then begins to sing: I’m a cat of ten colors, so help me cat, When I’m out of the bag, I’m out of the hat; I can grin like a Cheshire, can fight like a pug, And show me party, I’ll cat-lick the jug! Candice, still not certain whether she is awake or dreaming, watches the cat as it goes through a series of changes, and with each change the feline dances and emotes, and sings a different song. Candice especially likes the theater cat: On the stage I’m a regular wizard of Oz, I’m Dorothy, too, and I’m Toto, because When I put on my cat mask and cat walk around, I’m the fat cat that feeds on the talk of the town! The wonderful thing about reading to children—and to their parents and friends, who tend to like what the children are enjoying—is that it gives you a chance to become a child yourself, to immerse yourself in the story they are lost in, to be Candice sitting cross-legged in her pajamas watching and listening to a cat do a one-cat show, your imagination let loose to go wherever the story goes. 223

And it goes, finally, to the cat’s returning to what it was at the beginning, a small kitten that sings a final aria: I’m a kitten from some place, I don’t know just where. I was told in a dream that my name is Cashmere. I was told in a dream that my name is a shawl, And I don’t understand it at all—not at all! Candice doesn’t understand it, either, but later Santa and Mrs. Claus explain. The kitten was left on the doorstep, they say, and it was afraid and meowing, so they took it in and fed it some salmon and milk and made a pallet for it to sleep on, near Candice’s bed, and Mrs. Claus covered it with a new shawl she had knitted with yarn made of goat hair. And you know what some goat hair is called, don’t you? asked Mrs. Claus, and when Candice shook her head Mrs. Claus said, Cashmere. Cashmere? asked Candice. Cashmere, said Mrs. Claus. And they gave the kitten the name the kitten had not understood, though probably she understood it now, and Mrs. Claus said, Cheese and crackers! and they all went into the kitchen to eat a hearty breakfast. The audience applauded, and before the applause ended I saw Anna rise and leave her chair and begin walking up the aisle toward me. She was moving assuredly, as if on a mission. Neither her mother nor father had done anything to restrain her. I could not imagine what she was up to. I had told the audience that I would read three stories, and everyone except Anna seemed to realize that I had one more story to go. The room went silent; all eyes were upon the yellow dress, and the four-year-old inside it. They followed her as she marched to the front of the room where her puzzled grandfather stood holding the book he had read from. When she stood before him, he knelt down and, before he could ask what she wanted, she said, I have something to tell the people. Something to tell the people? Yes, she repeated, I have something to tell the people. 224

She spoke formally, as if reading from a document. I was impressed with her certainty. I have something to tell the people. I lifted her atop the table. Now we could see eye to eye, but she was not looking at me. Her large blue eyes were making contact with the people. She used both of her hands to brush down the fullness of her yellow dress, then cleared her throat and said, I want to tell you that my kitten was Cashmere, and she was run over by a car and killed. She spoke the words slowly and deliberately, as if pacing and emphasis would make it unnecessary for her to say it again. And she didn’t. She stood looking at the people, and waiting for me to lift her down. Yes, Cashmere had been run over and killed, but. . . . I waited for Anna to say something further, perhaps about the endearing nature of Cashmere, or about the funeral she orchestrated in the backyard. But she remained silent. When finally she looked at me, I leaned toward her and whispered into her ear. When I straightened, I watched a wide smile cross her face. Oh, yes, she said. I have a new kitten now. It’s name is Maxwell! The people applauded. I lifted Anna to the floor, and she returned to her chair, walking briskly in her new yellow dress—and as tall as her four-year-old body would let her be.  I read the third story, but I can’t remember what it was. Anna’s interruption was in the forefront of my mind. She had not scolded me for resurrecting Cashmere; she very simply, and significantly, wanted the people to know that in its earlier incarnation the kitten had belonged to her, and that it had been run over by a car and killed. What happened thereafter to Cashmere—and there could be only one feline with that name—was strictly up to liars and pretenders such as her grandfather.  My wife’s mother passed away on the first day of January, 1997, and late in March her son and daughters hired an auctioneer and disposed of all of Gladys’s possessions, excluding a few items they could not bring themselves to part with. 225

The daughters chose not to watch and listen to the auctioneer; they stayed in the house and gave it a final cleaning—which it didn’t need— using a vacuum sweeper almost loud enough to drown out the voice of the auctioneer. The day was bright and warm. Saturday afternoon. A few clouds were gathering off to the west, enough to concern the grandsons, who were anticipating an evening of fishing at some farm ponds owned by one of Gladys’s nephews. The auctioneer was one of the Grigsby boys, a red-haired young man with a fine set of teeth and a voice that, boosted by a handheld mike, could surely be heard well beyond the city limits, in spite of the vacuum sweeper. By two o’clock, the time scheduled for the auction to begin, the backyard was filled with potential buyers, and with browsers and friends of the family who were curious and polite—and with those addicted to auctions, who could sniff out a sale anywhere in the county. I had wandered around the area, staying mostly in the shade of a sprawling elm, one that my brother and I would happily have built a tree house in, had the tree been on our property—on any one of the eight places where we had lived within the city limits—and had the boards on Mrs. Detweiler’s outhouse held out. Grigsby had helped himself to a large portion of the shade, the bed of his oversized pickup rigged as a stage for the auctioneer. I went from one table to another to see how many of the items I recognized, and at the table where my wife’s father’s tools were displayed, I spent quite a while lifting and examining and testing them—all collectors’ items, if they hadn’t been so worn down or worn completely out. I was not alone at this table. One heavy-set man was lifting each tool with a gentleness that betokened expertise. On the back of his black T-shirt—in bold white letters—was this assertion: Whoever owns the most tools when he dies, wins. Watching him, I thought perhaps I had dismissed the worth of the tools prematurely; maybe the pipe wrench, for example, did not have to be functional to be valuable. Maybe for a collector it was valuable to the extent that it was not functional; if so, my wife’s father’s tools might well be worth a small fortune. In any case, I made a mental note to keep an eye on this man. On another table I saw, lying in a white wicker basket, an afghan—not the blue 226

one Gladys had knitted for granddaughter so-and-so, of course, but one that looked almost as new. Its colors were orange and brown and green and, when I lifted the afghan from the basket and partially unfolded it, I could see that it reflected no springtime pattern—no patches of green to indicate grass, for example, or yellows arranged to form the petals of newly opened jonquils. Instead, the colors moved in neatly symmetrical zigzags. I was reasonably certain that the afghan was not Gladys’s last, but that she probably had put it together after the color scheme of orange, green, and brown had dropped out of fashion, and then she had chosen to keep that afghan for herself until the scheme regained its popularity, regardless of how long that might take. So she had placed the afghan in the wicker basket, probably having wrapped it in something for protection, and put the basket on a shelf in the closet and began the long wait for its combination of colors to reclaim its lost appeal. By late March of 1997 the reclamation had not taken place, so Gladys’s three daughters looked at the afghan and wasted little time in relegating it to a growing stack of items to be auctioned off. They were dutiful young women, and they loved and appreciated their mother beyond measure; but they were also young women who refused to compromise their aesthetic sensibilities. No, they said—not individually, but as a chorus of three—this afghan must be sold, and “ugly old thing” was probably the most frequently used phrase to describe it, though the individual words “horrible” and “awful” and “wretched” might well have been in the running. Actually, I am quite sure that “ugly old thing” nosed out the other descriptions, because, as it turns out, there is more to this story. Yes, I bid on the afghan and bought it, and it now warms a spot in the basement of our home in Lincoln; and each time Eloise Ann notices it, or I mention it, the phrase “ugly old thing” is resurrected, as if it had been coined specifically to describe the out-of-fashion afghan. I must confess that I had not intended to bid on the afghan; instead, after studying it closely and deciding that, in its own peculiar way, it was beautiful and would indeed eventually be recognized and appreciated for what it truly was, I decided to take it, wicker basket and all, and conceal it in the trunk of my burgundy-colored Buick. I was, after all, my 227

mother-in-law’s son-in-law, a bona fide member of the deceased’s family, and as such I could do this, well, honestly—maybe even with impunity. But I didn’t because, just as I was folding and returning the afghan to the basket, the Grigsby boy cleared his throat a final time (he had been clearing it off and on for the past twenty minutes) and announced the start of the auction. And suddenly it struck me that I should acquire the afghan not by exercising the right of marital privilege, but by bidding on it and paying for it. Some of my hard-earned cash would go to the young auctioneer, whose stentorian voice was now rocking the neighborhood, and the rest of my money would go to Gladys’s children, three of whom had labeled as an “ugly old thing” the very afghan that would help enrich them. Call it irony laid on thickly, as if with a trowel. I was pleased. Those few clouds to the west were moving closer—nothing threatening yet, but gathering sufficiently to suggest that by nightfall they might be dropping some much-needed rain. Well, it would have to be a downpour to discourage the grandsons. They had fished at the pond many times, in both sunshine and rain, their wives and children with them, some fishing and some not. The pond had belonged to one of Gladys’s older sisters, Maggie, perhaps the most inveterate fisherwoman ever to bait a hook. She was a farmer’s jovial, long-suffering wife, who, as late as her mid-nineties, spent much of her time at the pond sitting on a camp stool admonishing a nightcrawler to do its work, the hem of her dress aflutter in the breeze. When she died, and the property was taken over by her son, the unofficial name of the place, Maggie’s Pond, stuck. It was Maggie’s Pond before her death, and it undoubtedly will be Maggie’s Pond as long as the young people who have been there are still around to remember it. As the auctioneer began to sell my wife’s father’s worn-out tools, I watched the man in the black T-shirt closely: The one who owns the most tools when he dies, wins. He bid on each item—awl, screwdriver, pliers, hammer, hacksaw, level, square, rule—until he owned it, then expanded the definition of “tools” to include Mason jars filled with nuts and bolts and washers, screws and nails and puppy-dog tails, his tenacity setting an example for all the bidders. On two or three occasions he was not 228

bidding on individual items, but on assorted thingamajigs that had been tossed into an old bucket or half-bushel basket, and I wondered if he might have been as interested in the container as in what it contained. Maybe. In any case, he pretty much swept the table. If he isn’t the winner when he dies, I thought, he’ll at least have left the world of tools as a major competitor. It was after three o’clock when the Grigsby boy lifted the white wicker basket and called for a bid. Two dol-lahs? One dol-lah? I raised my hand, which held a card with a number on it. Now two dol-lahs? He dipped a hand into the basket and brought out the afghan and held it up. Two dol-lahs? Someone across the way held up a number. Three dol-lahs? The Grigsby boy was not a rapid-fire auctioneer, but he was patient, and good at run-on repetition. Dol-ahdol-ahdol-ah. Half-a-dol-ah-half-a-dol-ah. And in between these utterances he supplied enough gibberish to keep a cadence intact. He knew most of those in his audience, and they knew him, so he’d take frequent breaks to talk to them as friends, speaking in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, reminding them that this article was one that Mr. and Mrs. Baker took special care of, or that item was one that probably hadn’t been used very much—just look at it, neighbors, don’t it look as good as new? Or this afghan—isn’t it a beauty? Each time someone raised my bid, I would top it. I was the only male interested in buying the afghan, and I tried not to make my desire for it unduly obvious. The other interested parties—there were only two additional serious bidders, one off to my right, the other at my left, and it is possible that they knew each other and were indulging in a friendly competition—were likewise concealing their enthusiasms, though one or the other did not hesitate very long before raising the bid. Seven dollahs? Eight? What the women did not realize was that I was going to buy that damned and blessed afghan if I had to hock the family Buick—and one or two of the younger children—to do it. Nine dol-lahs? Ten? Fortunately, neither of the women cared to raise her bid beyond ten dollars, so the Buick, and the children, would not need to be sacrificed. Having outlasted the competition, I went directly to the cashier and paid 229

for the afghan and its basket, then stashed them in the trunk of the car, concealing them under a pinkish throw rug Eloise long ago had declared both unserviceable and out of fashion. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching and listening, and feeling a trifle smug, and—when the Grigsby boy was about to sell a large, sturdy picnic table, one that on many occasions I had sat at, eating potato salad and baked beans and fried chicken and peas and corn and slaw and, if the fish at Maggie’s Pond had been biting, some well-fried bass and catfish—I decided to bid on it, too. Earlier, I had seen a rather scruffy man in faded blue overalls walking around and around the table, eyeing it closely and touching it as if to determine the strength of the two-bytens. The look of desire in his eyes made it obvious that he wanted the table. So when the bidding started, and the scruffy gentleman folded at twelve dollars, I took up his cause, raising each bid until the Grigsby boy said going, going—gone! and pointed to me and read the number on my card. Again, promptly, I went to the cashier and paid for the table. Next, I took the receipt to the man who had lusted after it and, when I gave him the receipt and told him the table was his, with my compliments, he registered disbelief for a moment before he accepted the receipt and shook my hand and told me several times that I shouldn’t have done it. I’m from out of town, I said, and I have no way to take the table home. He seemed more than willing to accept my offer, though he told me once more—this time without a shred of conviction—that I shouldn’t have done it. And one more time he reached for my hand and shook it.  Soon after the auction ended, and the other tables had been folded and returned to the nearby place where we had rented them, Eloise and I drove out to Maggie’s Pond to watch the sons and daughters, and their children, pitch their tents and gather wood for a long evening’s campfire. Some rain had fallen, just enough to make everything smell fresh and clean, and the clouds had dispersed, leaving the sky as blue as the windows in Chartres cathedral. The pond was enclosed by trees and 230

bushes—cottonwood and hackberry and willow—and the breeze was riffling the surface of the water. It was one of those times when you want to inhale more deeply than possible in an effort to store away what you know is impossible to retain. I had tried the same tactic that Sunday afternoon many years ago in the Flint Hills as I looked out and over the rolling prairie and the grazing cattle, none of which seemed to give a tinker’s damn that a Rainbow bread commercial had interrupted, and perhaps improved, Father O’Donnell’s homily. And I recalled those times when I was in the Marine Corps, how once in a while the air along the beach at Oceanside had a purity I wanted to take with me, especially the air at sundown, when the wind from the ocean stopped suddenly, leaving its moistness to cover me like the sheerest gown. And I was transported back to that day when I floated in a johnboat with my brother on a prodigal stream, the wide open air filled so delicately with the mixed aromas of prairie clover and yellow daisies and wild purple indigo. I inhaled deeply that day, too, wanting to save what couldn’t be saved, my brother deliriously happy because he felt he had checked the movement of time by sacrificing his watch to the current. The sun was setting when we left Maggie’s Pond to begin the journey back to Lincoln. The children, with their children, had pitched the tents and started a small campfire, and as we drove away I saw an angler across the pond casting a lure, heard laughter coming from the tents, and the staccato sounds of a banjo, and, because I inhaled more deeply than possible, swelling the lungs to an immense proportion, the air of Maggie’s Pond was with me on Highway 15 just north of Newton, with me through Clay Center and Washington, and with me on that final leg from Maryville north to home—if by home you mean that place where, beyond all others, you’d prefer to be, trading again and again the old air for the new, breathing in the fullness of time.

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