Archive for the 'Short Fiction' Category

Thanks to the person in Montreal, Canada. Not fiction–but truth.

Published by Jamie on October 2, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Short Fiction, Uncategorized, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

The story, West Toward Berkley, is an autobiographical story about the principal in my high school.  The man was literally “bigger than life” and he inspired me and moved me and contributed to who I am today.  It is very gratifying to hear from readers who read my bits and pieces and recognize the truth of them.  In truth, his name was Red Benson.  I so honor this man for what he taught me and I hope others will see my post on this great man. 

True confessions.  Every word of this story was true.

 

Jamie Lee

West Toward Berkley, a short story

Published by Jamie on August 22, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Short Fiction, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 1 Comment .

 Jackie wanted someone to admire, someone wise and noble with qualities she could refashion like fine strands of silver and wear around her neck.  She lived on a reservation in northern Minnesota in the second poorest county in the nation and worked in a twenty-four hour restaurant/bus stop that served up lumpy potatoes with thick gravy to tourists and hot chili late at night to men who lined up at the counter and slurred their words and smudged chili over the counter-tops like children with finger-paints.  Only it was a greasy, reddish paint, a war paint, a paint that stained and smelled and made Jackie’s stomach uneasy. 

Sometimes, while walking home near midnight, she would stare down the deserted grubby main street and compose poetry in her mind.  She kicked at old wine bottles and crushed paper cups.

 Yellow trashcan

Tipped disconsolately

Disgorges its wealth

Upon the empty street. 

 

She stared up at the sky trying to see past the town, past the reservation, past the confines of her own seventeen years.  Milk white lamps stood useless sentry in rows along the avenue.  And when she couldn’t get past the weak glow of street lamps to the dark wide sky beyond, she tried instead to open her belly and let the sky come to her. 

 

Lifeless neon

Calls to no one

No one answer. 

 

Something was blowing up inside of her, a mass or a tumor of emotion that needed to be bled off or poured into something worthy.  It made her silent and watchful.  It made her want to finger the faces of the townsfolk, to crawl behind their eyes into complex optic networks and explore neural catacombs and pathways.  She listened, wanting to reach past greasy insides to feel a heart.  Was it pumping?  Throbbing?  Alive? 

She went to school, went to work, went home.  She went to parties and pretended to join tribal dances around beer kegs on deserted beaches where young warriors honored the sky with thin sticks of marijuana and peace pipes full of hashish.  Even here she tried, working hard, to learn the mathematics of human existence. 

But it never added up.  Not in the early seventies.  Vietnam, the American Indian Movement, drugs, education, parents, values–do what I say and not what I do.  Finally she chicken-scratched with a dark lead pencil every wrong answer and found only that she had no respect.  None. Finally, bloated and thick with anger and not understanding, she became a child activist showing up at city council meetings, racial forums, writing pieces for the school paper, speaking loud and out and waiting to see what happened.  Nobody paid much attention to a noisy child who partied and worked in a greasy spoon–except Smith.  Smith noticed.

Smith was a huge man, a giant of a man and the principle of Jackie’s high school.  “Smith” was his first name.  He was a white man with a gray fuzzy tangle of hair on his head and shoulders so broad they carried the whole school, teachers and students alike.  Smith didn’t mess around.  It was not unusual to see him strolling the halls of the high school with a smirk on his face as if he wished a fight would start so he could stop it.  And when a fight did start the huge bear of a man would grab a squirming ninth or tenth grader in each hand and hold them inches above the floor against the cold metal lockers and demand, “What is the problem here?  Is there a problem?”  The boys would shake their heads wildly, their feet dangling like horse-thieves beneath a rope.  The truth was, none of the kids wanted to risk attracting Smith’s attention.  Normally he was as gentle as a mamma bear with her cubs; playful, pawing, teasing, making even the poor reservation town a den of safety.  And he didn’t watch just the tough kids having tough times–he watched them all.  He watched Jackie. 

Of course there was much about Jackie that he saw but did not understand.  For instance, he didn’t know that the year before Jackie had decided to quit crying.  And since making that decision, she had only cried once.  Last September. 

True, it was a hard, sucking avalanche cry that took her breath and buried her momentarily.  Grandma Clara had a stroke and Jackie’s mom sent her to wait for the ambulance.  Something about seeing her great, huge grandmother’s form so still and helpless on the floor caught Jackie in the middle like a hard punch.  Clara, who grew bright finger carrots and let the kids pull them from the stubborn dark soil and wash them under the outdoors faucet, sweet and good.  Clara, who played 31 like a master, gathering grandchildren’s dimes in a neat pile with hands delicate and bluish and then, at the last minute, would go soft-hearted and give the dimes back.  Or Clara, who fingered holy beads with a whisper, her lips moving in long lines of Hail Mary, Mother of God.  Jackie did cry then.  When Clara hit the floor.  But that was the last time she cried.  

Not even when she visited Clara and hated the nursing home with its acrid smell and Clara, so thin now, would move the lifeless left arm by a bony wrist with the hand that still worked and lean over toward Jackie with a sagging mouth and ask, why?  Why has God done this to me?  Why?  Please tell me.  And Jackie had nothing to say about nothing and only made herself more determined to find out why, God.  Why? 

After that she also quit going to confession and stood firm like a warrior in spite of glaring looks as the congregation shuffled up to receive the body and blood of Christ every Sunday morning.  Confession, like tears, did nothing, as far as Jackie could tell.  Smith did not hear her swear silently that no more would she kneel to a God that had no ears or let the holy mass swirl around her like stinging hornets of fear and retribution.  These were the decisions she made as she scanned the world for what meant something. 

It was painful to be awakening and impotent at the same critical moment.  Idealism, wishful thinking, raced through Jackie like strong medicine and it didn’t seem fair that with the world marching on campuses, on the steps of the Whitehouse, in Georgia–she was trapped shuffling from typing to world history, mute and acquiescent.  So when students began donning black armbands and protesting Kent State, it was time.  She enlisted two friends, Dee and Wayne, and together they bought rolls of black crepe paper and typed up notices and snuck into the paper staff room and mimeographed half-page notices and wandered the halls slipping them to students both Indian and white.  It felt right, to do something.  Anything.   WE CANNOT LET THEM KILL US! Screamed the half sheet of paper, declaring that on Tuesday, at 2:00, the students were to rise from their desks, don the black arm band and leave the school to sit on the front lawn in protest of the police action at Kent State. 

It was important, she believed.  It was essential, she believed.  It was about speaking out, being heard, showing concern.  Probably everybody believed as she did, thought Jackie.  Probably the ones that really cared were just shy or uncertain.  Probably the 23 kids that showed up on the school lawn at 2:00 really did care about more than a lark on the lawn, a chance to dump last hour. 

And probably it was not apathy, but some heavier layer of belief, that made 20 of them scuttle back into the school the minute Smith stood on the steps and said “Git to class” in that big voice of his.  And maybe there was a reason that Smith dismissed Dee and Wayne with a glance and stood so long on the steps looking at Jackie like he was wondering what to do next and finally just said quietly, “When you are done, please come and see me in my office.” 

And when she sat in front of Smith’s desk with him towering over the whole room with its stacked desk, sagging bookshelves and a window that looked west toward Berkeley, it seemed to Jackie that his face was the center of a Mandela of high school talismans and she waited.  Unafraid.  She was prepared to pay a price for what she believed.

But she wasn’t prepared for Smith’s deep warm chuckle sprinkling out over her like warm rain and a voice as soft and tender as the wind in trees.  In fact, she would rather he picked her up and dangle her from a locker somewhere in a glossy hallway and not just sit there.  Silent.  Looking her in the eye as if she were his equal.  Respecting.  Her.  For that she was not prepared.  And the words that followed scattered her elementary mathematics like torn pages tossed.  “Why didn’t you come to me?” he said.  “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about the students of Kent State.” he said.  “I would have helped you.”  And what he said next was like driving little dry sticks and pebbles down her throat because she knew he spoke the truth.  “Those others don’t care.  Don’t you see that?  They just wanted to skip out of school.  They don’t care, Jackie.  Do you understand?”

And she did understand but she didn’t want to understand and suddenly Jackie didn’t know then where she belonged because Smith did care.  That was what really struck her.  He did care.  And he was a big giant of a man and old, and she was a young wisp of a girl and intense and they sat across from one another and talked for a long, long time after school on Tuesday and when she left a strange, shaky feeling had formed in her middle and it may have been sadness or youth leaving or simply knowing she didn’t know anymore.

Two years later she was in college and heard about Smith’s stroke and that things had turned to shit at school.  The police spent noon hours walking the halls of the high school and the little man who had taken Smith’s place stayed in his office and tried to manage things from there.  Jackie went to the nursing home and found Smith in the physical therapy room doing rope exercises and he was still a big giant of a man in spite of the wheelchair and loss of speech.

When he saw Jackie his eyes twinkled and he would have chuckled that deep chuckle if he could have but instead he just raised a big trembling paw in her direction and she walked across the room and held the hand of a giant.  It was still a big, strong, honest hand in spite of the stroke and she was glad to hold it in both of her smaller hands.  She knew he could still hear and understand but that he wouldn’t be able to speak so she talked long in the safety of his silence.  There were things she wanted to tell him–things she wanted to tell herself.  That she had it figured out, that it made sense now, that she deserved his respect, but she was speechless, thoughtless, about these things.  Instead she talked about college, the snow on Diamond Point, how she liked to park her car on Lake Bemidji and walk to class and how many other campuses could boast a parking lot of ice?  But all the unspoken things gathered in her throat and stuck there and when she left there were only a few hard, river-rock tears that she wiped on her sleeve like a kid.

 

 

Farmer John and Candide

Published by Jamie on June 11, 2008 in Our Straw Bale Project, Short Fiction, Uncategorized, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

We are home again and I am scrambling to get my home garden in.  We shot a lot of footage and Milt is producing something he calls “The Blueberry Chronicles”.  You can see them at http://www.hollowbonefilms.com  He is having some fun with it. 

I have a cold and am not good company tonight so I’ll skip out and put in a bit of fiction instead.  I like the beginning of this odd series I started that is my version of “Candide” and “Siddhartha” combined.  I’ll let you figure that one out.

 

Evida
Or How a Forest Girl Discovers the World

Evida Takes a Walk and Finds Herself Separate 
There could be no better place on earth than this the young girl thought as she stepped her toes into the muddy edge of the pool of water to catch a closer look at the water spiders skimming the clouded surface.  She was in a small clearing carved out by road workers who had taken the red soil for their road-like purposes and left behind the moon.   The clearing was dotted with rough craters that were filled with water and each pool birthed a new universe teaming with tadpoles, water spiders, bugs, birds feeding, and scruffy grasses poking up among the reddish mounds. 

She was eight years old the summer she awoke from childhood to find her self encased in a wrapper of skin that separated her from this beloved world.   Up until that moment, it had not occurred to her that she was separate. 

Evida lived along the northern edge of the nation in what she simply called Blueberry Country in honor of the low bush berries that filled her forest.  No one else ever came to this small, scarred piece of earth but Evida, and she came daily that spring to watch the transformation between winter and spring.  It was, in truth, a muddy mess, but she loved it.  She ran along the plowed ridges that separated one small pool from another so often that her bare feet padded and packed the sand as if it were an ancient road carrying tribal inhabitants across the Bering Strait. 

Life was good.

Down the road her parents had built a house that sheltered Evida and her five brothers and sisters in a cocoon of warmth and safety.  That her dad had tried to defy Mother Nature and built his house in a swamp seemed not to matter to them.  When the ditches filled with murky water, Evida and the other kids leaned over the edge to see the wigglers that bred there by the millions and would soon turn into mosquitoes.  It was a small price to pay for paradise–a few hundred red, itchy welts and the little screamers buzzing them to sleep each night.

Evida couldn’t figure out what was different this spring, different from all the others she had endured in her full eight years.  Something had changed.  The color of a single green leaf bud opening on a twig belonging to the larger tree pierced her eyes almost painfully.  The dry grasses of last year, as they gave way to the newer shoots poking up from some mysterious earth ethos, seemed to say reassuringly, “We go gratefully, never mind.  We’ve had our season.” 

Wind, sun, birds, the tiniest flowers, all spoke to her in a language once incomprehensible, but now understood clearly as if by magic.  Going to sleep each night was almost a burden, that she must close her eyes to such beauty for the dimmer world of sleep and dreams. 

She took to speaking aloud, only when alone of course, to the many offerings of nature.  I love you, little bird.  I love you tiny clover.  I love you big mamma tree.  I love you creepy little spider on my hand. 

What had caused such an awakening?  She didn’t know, couldn’t understand.  Perhaps an old bearded philosopher standing beneath a tree watching her from his invisible vantage point would nod knowingly and whisper, “Ah, she now feels her self separate from.”  It didn’t matter to Evida.  In truth, there wasn’t a bearded old one to explain that where once she was simply a part of nature, like trees and grass, now she saw her self as occupying a human body. No, she simply drank the realization in, letting it fill her soul and spirit with such rich nectar that by noon she was drunk, intoxicated and asleep on the grass. 

When she opened her eyes again there was a blue-silk sky wrapping her like a sari.  It was exotic, foreign, scented with the spice of Mother Nature’s unique perfume.  When she stood again and stretched her arms to touch the blue silk, she glanced down and saw the imprint of her own small body in the grass.  She felt just the slightest shiver of what could be fear or foreboding, a wisp of warning of things to come, but she tossed her blonde hair and walked off.

Thirty years later, she would return to this same spot, now an overgrown piece of the forest once again, desperate to find the slightest indentation she had left on Mother Earth. 

Walking back into her Mother’s house in her newly found eight-year-old body was like finding an alternate universe with an entirely different set of shapes, forms, tastes and smells, and its own moon and sun.  The blue silk sari dissolved like a thin skin of ice beneath the heat of this new sun, and the blue was replaced with the gray garb of an ordinary peasant

“Where have you been, Evida?  Lunch was over an hour ago and little Johnny has a dirty diaper and Rocky has a fever and and and and . . . .”

Evida stood for a moment, stunned and shrinking rapidly as all the wide thought-forms fled the little house where her parents ate and slept and were raising six children like raising chickens in a wire coop.

“Yes, Mamma.”  She said.  “I’m here now.”

Here.  Now.  The rest would simply have to wait out there in the wilderness for her return.  Evida turned her attention once again to the business of being eight, third girl in a family of six.  It was okay, this life in this house.  She helped her oldest sister, Kay, fold clothes and roll socks.  She helped her next oldest sister Ann change little Scott.  Ann and Evida got the giggles when Ann removed the nasty diaper and jokingly pointed to his tiny penis and said “Ready…aim…fire.” only to have the little squirt–squirt.  Ann panicked and threw the new diaper over the warm stream, and then had to use a third diaper to have the baby officially and legally changed.  

Kay, Ann, Evida, William, Joseph, and Scott had checked into the family in polite two-year intervals ranging from ages twelve to two.  If you added their ages together it came to forty-two and Evida couldn’t begin to imagine herself at forty-two.  She tried it once, but it was unfathomable. 

All in all, it was a pleasant family to find one self suddenly occupying. 

 

 

Girl on the Northern Range

Published by Jamie on May 29, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Our Straw Bale Project and Short Fiction. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

A guilt piece–I haven’t written in here for too many days.  I’ve ordered my blueberry plants and Saturday we leave for northern Minnesota to check out our land.  Here is a very autobiographical piece about growing up on the iron range of Minnesota.  This became a long series of “stories” that later I realized were very close to the bone for me.   Call it fiction.

Here it is.

Jamie

 Girl On the Northern Range

 

In the middle of the town square sat a chunk of taconite as tall as a tree.  It stood like a forward guard before the tiny string of shops that formed the main street and the downtown of Babbitt, Minnesota.  There was a Laundromat, cafe, grocery store, drug store, and post office-all in a single long building set off the main street.  The small mining community, folded deep in forest country just minutes from Canada, twisted out and around the jutting rock. 

  The chunk of rock had stood, silent gray sentry, since the early fifties when the humble potato field was laid flat and barren by cheerful yellow bulldozers.  Contractors opened veins in the earth and dropped in sewer systems and water lines, and concrete trucks with swirling bellies rumbled and growled, spitting out sidewalks and driveways.  Houses sprouted rapidly in small semicircles around larger semicircles until, from the air, the humble potato field looked like the patterned swirls of a fancy ceiling.  An elementary school was built, and a single strip of shops that housed a grocery store, a drug store, and one café. 

Young couples, blinking and shading their eyes, came to inspect the empty houses that stood waiting while realtors, working for the company, waved icons of security before the hopeful young men and women.  No crime, they said.  Superior schools, they said.  Job security, a place to raise a family, a chance at a new life, they said.  Papers were signed and keys distributed. 

The houses filled quickly with watery-eyed young women stroking swollen bellies.  The husbands became company men and carried their lunch in black tin boxes.  They stood on assigned corners at 6:30 a.m. or 3:30 p.m. and were swallowed alive by buses, digested daily by the taconite mine tucked up behind a hillside.

Taconite, a rough ore mined for the iron.  Tons and tons of earth gouged from the gentle, aching hillsides were dumped into an ear-shattering crusher (one of the largest in the world), as the iron ore, red as blood, was extracted from the earth.  The useless tailings left behind in lifeless gray-red mounds looked like fresh graves along the northern range.

Babbitt, cut and sewn from a single hastily-woven piece of fabric, was a postcard town plopped down in a hollow at the end of the civilized world.  It was cut off, isolated, as sterile as dental instruments lined up on a gliding tray.  There were no theaters, no bars, no shopping malls or traffic-and no tourists or travelers, and no strangers.  Those headed for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area never reached Babbit, but turned north two miles before on the highway to Ely.  In its raw, red-faced infancy there were also no old people, no teenagers, no divorces, no rich and no poor.  And there were no Black people and no Indians.  With ancestors from Norway, Finland, and Sweden, all inhabitants were as fair-faced as the blanket of winter snow.

It was to this bewildered wilderness that the children first opened their eyes. 

Sissy lived in a pale green house at 48 Garden Circle.  Her father built a stone step with black wrought-iron railings that made their house stand apart from the others so carefully placed along the semi-circle.  Sissy was a middle child, in the middle of the wilderness.  It was in this place that she first attempted to find her own outline, like a single tree against the sky, but when she looked about she could not see the tree for the forest was everywhere.  A strange wonder and a bewilderment set in. 

Although, at age seven or eight, there was no reason to believe herself different, still, something in Sissy felt foreign and apart.  Alone.  It came to her at odd moments, unexpected, like a secret, like when she would tumble onto her back in the dry, crisping grasses of autumn edging the forest and the full wide blue of the sky would instantly steal away her age.  It spoke to her in the tongues and mantras of ancient prophets and seers.  “Look here”, it would chant, “I am your looking glass.  As big as I am . . . so are you.” 

A holiness and a wonder would fill her tiny spirit and lift her into a blue baptism of ecstasy and sky and then, when she could stand it no longer, she would roll over onto her belly and be equally awed by the sandy scent of the earth as it withdrew from summer.  Finally, her senses drunk and reeling with autumn gods come alive, Sissy would race down the ditch toward home, stop, and approach the house cautiously.  So carefully would she fold the blue-sky spirit, like a tablecloth, and tuck it away, and only then enter the house. 

The house was noisy.  And stale.  It smelled of furniture polish and diaper pails.  Little boys squalled needfully and older sisters whined and fussed at each other and at nothing.  The television squawked and clamored in a broken language, certainly not the language of wind in the trees and skies that speak.  She felt like autumn itself, pulling in all of its life-giving forces, tucking its roots, curling its leaves.

Sissy did her chores without words.  She tended to little boy runny noses, socks stuffed into corners, and white metal kitchen cabinets smeared grimy with finger prints.  Every moment was a forever, a waiting she could scarcely endure, but did.  Out of doors, they played on without her, the trees and skies and songs on the wind, and it was not easy, this waiting.

There were so many things that Sissy did not understand.  She did not understand about hard wooden school desks and sitting still.  Or about gray buses that shoveled up fathers on street corners every morning and afternoon.  And she didn’t understand uninspired women with swollen bellies wandering from one kitchen table to another in houses so all-the-same that you never need ask where’s the bathroom, or where’s the light switch?  And she really didn’t understand Sunday mornings and chapel caps and genuflecting and black robes and strange melodic masses that didn’t sound at all like the sky, but were called God.  It was these things she didn’t understand that made her feel alien and foreign somehow.  These things were not like the things that she did understand; the things that happened out there, on the edge of the world.

She understood the woods.  She understood that if she ran a certain way through the underbrush, with a certain understanding, she could run real fast and never be switched with a branch or tumbled by a root or jutting log.  But she had to run a certain way, like all of her parts were loosely assembled and separate from one another, and yet together.  When she ran like that, she ran like a deer runs or like a wolf runs.  She also understood that she must stay in the little woods because she was little.  The big woods went on to forever once you crossed the skinny stream, skinny as an old brown pencil, connecting two muddy ponds.  The big woods were for bears and big things.  The big woods would swallow a little girl like her, and this she understood and respected.

And the icy spring-fed Birch Lake in summer-that she understood, respected and loved.  Those iron-rich brown waters would envelope her heated skin with a shock and a jolt like memories leaping from nowhere.  Sissy loved to swim way out and lay on her back-unresisting, sinking, until inches of water lay over her like translucent, textured glass.  In this place, with the bright skies blurred yellow and blue, and all sounds muted and drowned, then she would feel in her right place. 

Always she sought a better match mate than the even rows of houses lined up like teeth on gums in obsessive half-circles.  Inside her was a great, stretching hungry mouth that wanted to bite down hard on something.  Anything.  So when her mother gathered her brood and walked down past the chunk of taconite to the town library it was like that mouth had found, at last, its desired food.  Books; forests on shelves, introductions to other places, far away places, and people, like her, people not content with four walls and sameness and steady, expected trails going nowhere.  But the feast of books, rather than filling her, fed only her appetite and made the mouth inside link up to a great empty belly, ravenous and greedy, and aching.   

To satisfy the hungry thing, she went more and more often to the great stands of pine, birch, and maple to listen.  She found dry, rocky places filled with scraggly raspberry bushes and tasted the tiny red jewels, or sat in the sodden lower areas and looked, eye-to-eye at blueberry bushes, their berries glowing like deep blue pearls. 

She was a quiet child, well mannered, and shy, and did as she was told.  She sprinkled the laundry with a pop bottle corked by a metal cap full of tiny holes.  Carefully, she sprinkled, rolling each piece and tucking it into a plastic bag with the other damp-smelling shirts and sheets and dish towels.  She did not ask why or verbalize these foreign things, these rough pine-bark, high-sky things to anyone.  She didn’t know the words to speak.  She didn’t know the words. 

Then, slowly, there opened a great space between the things she understood and the things she did not understand and she stood puzzled, chewing a single fingernail, between a grand stand of forest and a pale green house on Garden Circle and, try as she might, Sissy could not reconcile one with the other.  Confusion descended like a veil or thin membrane that made all things difficult to see and understand.  A ragged whispering began in her head and continued from day into night and night into day and it spoke to her of the world.  She listened, a barren dry kind of listening, not understanding, or not wanting to understand.  The skies grew silent.  The trees stood tight together and seemed to exclude her.  She turned away.   

The chasm widened and the spell of blue-pearl berries, big woods and tall golden grasses became like bright, wild eyes that, giving a final look, blinked heavy-lidded, closed, and drew a blanket around her youth.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Aunt Carol

Published by Jamie on May 7, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Short Fiction. 0 Comments Tags: , .

It has been awhile since I posted any fiction.   I clicked through files and found this story.  It has never been published but it did find an interesting home.  In the nineties when Milt and I were producing radio documentaries, we decided to do a documentary on the human heart-is it just a biological pump . . . or something more?  While deciding the approach, we thought it would be fun to weave ordinary documentary material with fiction, and I chose this story to use as a backdrop for the documentary called “You Got to Have Heart”.  It is still probably one of my favorites of all the documentaries we produced during that time.  We had some fun with composed music, poetry, fiction plus real interviews with heart transplant patients, the doc who first performed a heart transplant using a machine instead of a real heart.  The show aired nationally on PRI on Valentine’s Day.  You can still get it on a CD or (soon) as a download.  Go to www.oyate.com and visit the store to find it. 

 Be sure to leave a comment or sign up to get this blog.  It keeps me writing to know people are actually reading it.  JL

 My Aunt Carol

 ”Oh, you know how your Aunt Carol is . . . ”

I was twelve the first time my mother said that to me, like I really did know. Or like I possessed a wisdom beyond my years or something.  I did not know how my Aunt Carol was.  Not then anyway.

Aunt Carol lived in Santa Fe in one of those old adobe houses just a few blocks from the main plaza.  Mom was worried about her poor sister in Santa Fe, so we went to visit her, just mom and me.  It was my first trip out of South Dakota so I was pretty excited. Anything past Newcastle, Wyoming was “the big world.”  You see, at twelve, I had this lump in my middle; I mean, it wasn’t a real lump, not like a hunchback’s lump or anything, but it was a thing buried down there somewhere and I could feel it.  It made me hungry all the time for wanting to know about stuff.  So when my mom said “You know how you’re Aunt Carol is.” I checked the lump to see did I know?  What did I know?  What should I know?  I really wanted to know.

Aunt Carol was selling her furniture and most of her belongings.  Mom’s cousin called in early May from Los Alamos-that’s where they made the Bomb, you know.  Anyway, the cousin visited Auntie, learned about the selling of the furniture and the belongings, and called my Mom IMMEDIATELY because she thought my Mom should know what Carol was up to NOW.

On the trip to Santa Fe, Denver was my favorite.  It showed up all smeary and gray with cars and city scattered everywhere like a lost monopoly game.  The whole world was so buried in clouds that I couldn’t even see the Rocky Mountains until Denver was already behind us.  Then, all of a sudden, we flopped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS.  I almost cried, the lump hurt so hard.  But I didn’t want Mom to think I was like her sister or something so I pretended I wasn’t even very impressed when we just dropped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS. 

I tried to get it out of my Mom.  “What’s wrong with selling your furniture?”  Mom had that pinched, whitish look when I asked that, her eyes squinting and red lipstick bunching together making her lips look as thin as fingernail cuttings.

“Your Aunt is very peculiar, dear, a dreamer . . . ” and then her sentence just dropped like dust onto the dashboard.

Oh sure, well that explains everything, I thought.  I’m not usually sarcastic but her answer made me crazy.  I didn’t know much about my Aunt.  I knew she had done a lot of neat things like gone to college, traveled through Europe, got married, got divorced.  “What does Aunt Carol do for a living?” I asked Mom.  The question sounded absurd to me.  We were south of Colorado Springs now.  The thing that seemed absurd was the way adults say “for a living” and here I was, twelve years old, and saying it myself like it was a sacred mantra or like it meant something to me.  Do for a living.  It sounded sort of once removed from life, like when somebody says “her cousin, by marriage” as a way of letting you know they are not REALLY related.  That was how “for a living” sounded to me and yet here I was asking my Mom what Aunt Carol did “for a living”.

Mom wasn’t much for talking right then.  She just sort of stared and drov and drove and stared.  I felt like we had separate rooms and she had her door closed, so I read a book, felt for the lump, and wondered exactly HOW peculiar Aunt Carol was going to be.  I secretly hoped she would be VERY peculiar so I could be like Mom and say how very peculiar my Aunt Carol is.  That would be something.  I have a peculiar Aunt who lives in Santa Fe without any furniture. 

Maybe I needed something out of the ordinary or maybe it was the lump in my middle that made me feel so peculiar.

Soon we mounted Raton Pass like it was a pony and tumbled down toward Santa Fe.

Santa Fe was something; all the streets named “Calle” instead of regular street names like Oak or Maple.  And no sharp corners on the buildings, just round adobe edges like castles in beach sand.  Even the shabby tumbling adobes looked like they belonged there, not like you should toss a little gasoline on them and remove them like the wobbly wood houses in my hometown.  Mom surprised herself by finding Aunt Carol’s place without getting horribly lost. 

Mom and Aunt Carol hugged and laughed and cried and spun little circles on the stoop of Carol’s adobe.  I was surprised.  I really expected my Mom would be much more reserved around such a peculiar person, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t at all.

Aunt Carol didn’t know about the cousin informant or that my Mom already knew about the missing furniture.  Evidently, Aunt Carol had taken up collecting pretty old furniture and antiques years earlier and had quite a collection before she decided to sell it all.  But I had been instructed to not SAY A WORD about the furniture.  (Mom’s can be so peculiar sometimes, weaving a lie just so.)  Anyway, I was naturally dying for them to stop hugging and crying and get on with it.  Finally we got our bags from the trunk and went into Carol’s house.

My mother seized the moment.  “Carol.  My God.  What has happened to all your beautiful furniture???”  I grinned.  I couldn’t help myself-the lump was giggling.  (I was beginning to think of it as a friendly sort of tumor.) As for myself, I was disappointed.  I’m not sure what I expected but it wasn’t this.  There was, well, no furniture, not that her living room was empty.  Not at all.  There just wasn’t anything regular like you expect to see when you go into an ordinary old living room.

 Carol grinned at me (why did she grin at me?) and winked.  I felt like I had snuck in and sold her furniture myself.  Aunt Carol looked at my mom and said, “I sold it, Beth.”

That was all she said.

“But why?  Why would you sell all those lovely old pieces?”

I finally really looked around.  I didn’t know what she sold but  I thought what was left looked better than most anything I’d ever seen.  The floors were wood, shiny as marbles, with thick, velvety rugs everywhere that had flowers and fancy designs dancing around their borders.  Giant colorful pillows were stacked in one corner around a low table with a glass top (the ONLY piece of furniture in the room).  Above us, a cloth fan-folded screen drifted down from the ceiling and almost hugged the low table.  There were no lamps except for ghostly white paper globes, three of them, each a different size.  I say ghostly not because they were white paper but because they were so light they looked like chubby angels flying above us, still swaying from when we came in the door. 

That was about it.  A few pictures on the walls and, oh yeah, two other things.  One was a painted wooden carousel horse that, had I been six and not twelve, I would have already been on its back riding like the wind.  The other thing was a large painter’s easel that held a huge canvas filled with flowers. 

It stopped me.  That painting.  I could almost smell those flowers and it made the lump ache awful to look at them.  I wanted to pluck a flower from that beautiful, ironed-flat garden, but couldn’t bring myself to touch it.  Carol, my most peculiar Aunt, was looking my way out of the corner of her eye, smiling while she talked patiently to my Mom.  I got the feeling that she saw the lump and maybe wanted to paint it or something. 

I didn’t know my peculiar Aunt was a painter.  I was a painter.  Or at least I secretly dreamed about being one.  I could remember my first box of crayons like it was yesterday, each waxy stick glowing hot like colored candles.  My Aunt Carol watched me, still smiling, and then she turned back to my Mom. “Oh, Sis, that old furniture didn’t mean anything to me anymore.  That’s all.  And I needed the space to do my painting.  This isn’t a very large house, you see, and all those heavy dark things were so . . .  so heavy I couldn’t breathe.”

“But, Carol, what did you DO with it all?”

“I sold some.  Gave some away.  You know.”

Now my Aunt was saying, “You know” to my mother as if she did know.  She didn’t know.  I could tell by the way her face moved against itself like a lake in a storm.   She definitely did not know!  But what I didn’t know was why Mom looked so pinched and why Aunt Carol looked all lit up like there was a candle behind each eye.  Shining.  That was what I wanted to find out about my Aunt Carol.  Mom couldn’t get her mind off what was missing long enough to notice what was there.  When Carol and my Mom went into the kitchen to drink tea and “get to the bottom of this,” Carol took her garden painting off the easel, handed me her pallet and brush, placed a small stretched white, whiter than snow canvas on the easel, winked again, and said, “Here baby, have some fun.” 

         *              *               *

 I’ve been looking for My Aunt Carol all my life but, instead of an easel with a glorious flower garden splattered and taking root on a canvas, I have a neat, tight-assed little computer, a Papermate pen, and reams of paper painted in ink and pink and purple and blue and black and every bit as beautiful as my Aunt Carol’s canvas. 

It’s the Gypsy in me.  I must have been a Gypsy in a past life because, sometimes, I forget that I’m not in this lifetime.  When she visits me, I’m older than time, younger than a minute.  If not constantly vigilant, I could mistake my Suburu wagon for a Gypsy caravan and find myself loading it with a few pots and pans, a set of tarot cards, writing a bad check, and off I go. 

The first time the Gypsy came I was in college killing myself to make enough money to deserve to be there. Unfortunately, I discovered that Highway Two runs not only through Bemidji, Minnesota but keeps on going all the way to the west coast until it reaches the Puget Sound.  This was a perilous discovery. 

How about it?  Pretend I don’t know I am a student, tuition paid by pushing drinks in a supper club filled with people floating around the bar like amoebas in a primordial sea that smelled strangely of Miller Beer?  Simply forget?  Become a Gypsy in a greenish-blue Buick speeding toward the Puget Sound?  Couldn’t get lost if I tried?  The map promised that-an invitation out of lake country.  The Gypsy read my palm and promised me a long loose life if I followed that single line west-all the way west. 

Of course, I never did.  I never followed Highway Two all the way to the Puget Sound.  I was a responsible student, after all, sitting in intro to education classes with puffed up professors declaring that I would soon hold the youth of America in my hands, the power to mold the young minds of the future.  Ha!  What Gypsy, running west with bangle earrings and inner voices could lure me from such a noble path?  I ignored her and she slept like Van Winkle for a hundred years.

A second Gypsy invitation came years later in Colorado, while stuck on a prairie with car trouble, three kids, and a husband who thought my name was “Whythehelldidn’tyou?”  When we finally made it off the stark yellow prairie to a hotel room, the television lulled the stretched-tight rubber band family back into shape.

I went for a walk down a concrete sidewalk thinking about whether to step on the cracks or not, and whether it would do any good or not.  Now that I was a mother, I considered these things more carefully.  I thought I wanted only a cup of coffee, a short respite from the kids, but somewhere along that sidewalk she jumped out of the covered caravan of my mind and joined my walk. 

“We could walk across Colorado” she said. “To the mountains.  To the sea. 

“You mean not go back to that hotel room.  Not go back to him?” I queried. 

“Yeah, I mean not go back.” 

I was shocked, naturally.  My heart began beating rapidly, and I shivered.  She went for me then. 

“You know all those people who just disappear?  They aren’t lost.  They know where they are.  You would know where you were, too.  Maybe for the first time ever, you would know.  Even if nobody else did!”

I got hot.  And then I got cold.  Would he report me as a missing person?  Would he even notice me missing?  True, it was a miserable life I was leading.  Who could blame me? But would they spend forever wondering was I alive, dead, disappeared?

That time it was short, chubby little arms that reached out a great distance to pull my ears and grab my hair.  He was only two, my son.  Somehow that two seemed more powerful than a Highway named Two.  I never thought of fate as having little fat pudgy hands and fingers that, had I left, would have clutched at me until forever was over.  So there you are.  No Gypsy–and no Aunt Carol. 

Although later I did unload most of the furniture, and him, (my husband, not my son) and invited the Gypsy to bring her computer and tambourine and come live with us.  She hangs out in the kitchen before a bright white stretch of countertop like a short road, and dreams about the sea while watching the apple tree bud, bloom, bear, drop, and rot, only to start all over again.  She never lets me forget that she is near. 

 

 

All My Relatives

Published by Jamie on April 9, 2008 in Short Fiction. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Below is a story I wrote a number of years ago.  The genesis of this story is my own husband’s adoption story.  This story still touches my heart.

Jamie

 

 

All My Relations

by Jamie Lee

(Published by Heartlands Magazine, October 2005)

 

Bill carried the plain manila envelope around all day but every time his fingers reached toward the small metal clasp holding it shut they pulled away.  He drove home with the thing, like something alive, on the car seat next to him.  Normally he loved driving through the soft valley to their house tucked up against the Black Hills, but today he saw only the envelope.  He carried it into the house.  Jessie, his wife, knew instantly what it was. 

He went to the couch, sat down, opened the envelope, read the thin file of adoption papers for 13 minutes, got up, silently handed the papers to Jesse, and walked into the kitchen.  He polished the stainless steel teapot with a scratchy green pad and a pearl of dish soap.  He filled it with water, lit the stove, stared at the dancing blue flame, and then Jessie was standing behind him, arms circling his middle, saying, “Such a sad story, honey.  I can’t believe that this baby is you.” until sharp slivers of thought caught in the back of his mind.   

The soft, mothering part of Jessie made him want to tie feelings like small pouches of tobacco and hang them from her branches like prayers.  Later, she said what broke her heart was that he had no name, not for three months, except the names the nurses and nuns attached the nameless baby; Daniel in the hospital, later John or Peter in the mission.  And Jessie was furious at cruel, cutting notes scrawled into the records by well-meaning nuns referring again and again to how “fortunate” that Boy Daniel (or whatever) does not look too Indian. 

Bill was half Lakota, some Cherokee, some Cree, and who knew what else.  A breed, he thought.  It always comes down to that, breeds and pedigrees, a race of people forced to carry papers and proof of blood quantum.  It pissed him off.  Royally.  It did.  His only goal in opening the adoption file was to register with the tribe to get financial aid as an Indian for graduate school.  He hadn’t anticipated questions of place, and belonging, and blood quantum to thicken like blood pudding in his mind. 

It became the Indian Question.  What does it mean to be Lakota?  Blood, birth, state of mind?  He caught himself staring in bank windows at his own high cheekbones and wondering about Lakota, or staring down at the flat fingernails on the ends of his fingers, another sign.  And he didn’t understand Jessie saying “No wonder, honey!  Good God, no wonder.”  And when he questioned her she said only that he was always waiting.  

He didn’t quite get her meaning but the adoption papers had lit a lamp on the screen of his mind.  Scenes of a young mother staring through pane glass at the tiny bundled boy that is her son.  She is small, hair braided, cheek pressed to cold glass whispering “My son.”  The babies hair is dark like night sky, flying from his scalp.  She considers that it was his feet poking against her womb these many months, his fingers now uncurling and reaching–seeking her–only her.  And then she disappears, unable to sign the papers, unable to stay. 

How?  How could she do it?  It wasn’t a real question in Bill’s mind.  He knew how.  After years wandering around these South Dakota reservations, he’d seen a hundred girls just like her; scared, young, foolish, drunk, incested or raped by uncles and strangers, girls like his mother.   

The birth record said her name was Forrest.  What had it been before?  Had it been Stands in Timber or Catches the Wind?  What would his name have been if she had not given him up for adoption, if she hadn’t died, if the white man had not named her grandparents ‘Forrest’ to make the bookkeeping easier?

Three days after reading the papers Bill blew up at a guy who hung a Sundance skirt on a wall like a trophy animal.  The guy said he was a real Indian.  Bill told him to stuff it.  Sure he wasn’t raised on Pine Ridge.  Sure he’d had whiteman advantages, raised by a nice couple in eastern South Dakota, didn’t talk Lakota.  So what?  He’d trade it all to know a single grandfather, to have one uncle guide him into his vision, to sit in the Inipi ceremony and know just who the hell he was. 

Not Indian.  Not white.

If it weren’t for Jessie, he’d be a crazy man.  Jessie was white but had spent the first twenty-five years on a reservation in northern Minnesota.  Talk about racial confusion–she seemed more Indian than he.  Oh, how he loved watching her bow to the flowers, or spread her arms above her head to greet the sky or a tree.  She seemed born to the land although no Indian blood ran through her veins like red water. 

Bill tried to shake off confusion like a dog crawling out of a creek.  His confusion was compounded by Jessie’s odd delusions.  Last night she’d wrapped her arms around his middle and said once again.  “I think I’m pregnant”.  She crossed the room, sat down in the old orange, uglier-than-sin rocking chair that was too comfortable to throw out, and rubbed her belly in small circular motions.  Her face was round and soft and smiling as she stared at an oily spot on the wall across the living room. 

Bill didn’t understand.   “No honey, you know you aren’t pregnant.  You know that, so why do you keep bringing it up?”

“I don’t know.  I feel it.  I feel like I’m pregnant, that’s all.”

“Look honey.  You aren’t pregnant.  You couldn’t possibly be pregnant.  You know I had a vasectomy.  I’m forty-four, and you’ve had your babies and I’m sorry you didn’t have them with me, but you didn’t.  You aren’t pregnant.”  He didn’t want to sound exasperated but he was.  Bill loved Jessie, but strange things were about and he didn’t understand why or how it coincided with wanting to understand what is Lakota? 

To tell the truth, she looked pregnant.  She hadn’t gained weight or showed any physical signs, but her skin was clear and shining, her eyes bright and expectant. 

“Have you been dreaming again?” he asked her.

“Oh yes.”  She looked straight at him “Do you want to hear about it?”

“Sure.”  He smiled for the first time that day.

“This time we were up on a high trail at Bear Butte, almost a ledge, and there were others with us, all others, all of our relatives were there.  Oh Bill, it was the holiest place ever.”

She sounded like a young girl–not his thirty-eight year old wife and mate.  He crossed the room, sat on the floor at her feet, and rested his head against her knee, suddenly tired of thinking, and questions.  Jessie told him of her dream. 

“Part of the trail was buried with rock that had tumbled from above.  It had the strangest sound.  Bones, I thought.  It sounded like bones and broken crockery and I knew right away why this place is holy.  The whole mountain is nothing but bones; mountain bones, Indian bones, bones from animals, and god bones, and bird bones.  So many bones.”  She stopped talking and fanned all ten fingers out to feel his scull beneath her hands.  His scalped tingled as if her fingertips were fireflies emitting tiny chemical jolts into his scull.  His middle grew mossy, and he was afraid to breath, afraid that if he moved she too would fly off and leave him.  Waiting.  Waiting. 

She talked on.  “Then you took my hand and said come on.  I wanted to take one of the bones with me so I went down on my knees and found a small stone shaped like a scull.  I stuck it in my pocket but it was hot.  When I stood up, it felt like wind prayers coming from out across the plains and surrounding us.  Remember the sound of that silence, and that wind?  God, it was something.”  She laughed quietly and leaned her upper body to form a soft feminine shelter over him.  “Maybe that’s what made me pregnant.” 

He loved her dreams, words spreading over him like yellow cream, or surrounding them like an oily, rainbow-bubble flown from a child’s lips.  He wished he understood what gentle force gave her these sweet dreams but feared if he discovered the source, it would prove to be illusion only with no sweet blend of pious gentle love wrapping them both like a swaddling cloth. 

In this space it only mattered that he loved her.  All that was lost could be found again if he just stayed in this place with her.  He knew that.    “I wish I could give you a baby.  I do.”  He was apologizing. 

She shook her head and kissed his warm brow.  “I don’t need a baby silly.  I just need to be pregnant.”

Bill closed his eyes for a moment and saw a range of hills, dark-skinned and feminine, wearing the golden prairie like a skirt of soft, yellow buckskin.  Mother Earth.  She had birthed them all–that’s what the stories said.    This gentle mother had not given him away but, rather, drew him in closer and closer until his own heart beat a single rhythm with hers.  His painful questions suddenly lost their end marks and their power to wound.   

Jesse was pregnant.  So was he.  So were all the people, both on the reservation and off, because the earth herself was expecting, poised in a single breathless moment of waiting for the new time and in this time, they would all be born new.  Didn’t the old stories say it? 

And the Earth took the ones closest to her inside of herself…

 

Sketching the Male Protagonist

Published by Jamie on April 6, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Short Fiction, Uncategorized and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So often when I present programs people or students will ask, “Where do ideas come from?” For me, that is part of the magic of writing. I never actually know where anything is going to come from until I am in the middle of it. The post tonight is a bit of wild mind writing I did while trying to learn more about the male protagonist in one of my stories several years ago. (A Good Soft Blanket) I like it because it shows the total organic emergence of a character. I had no idea that this was part of Charles’ history until I scribbled these words. You’ll see what I mean . . .

Sketching the Male Protagonist

Charles. He is like pudding, loose and soft, his shape never molding. He walks the frames of each scene like bluewash background; no stiff poke, no grit, no getty-up. He is the tender, perfect boy who slips into the back desk in the classroom and listens, never asking questions, never offering opinion, sprung from nothing into nothing. He is a cartoon without color or feature, with no secrets, no sins and no sinister bottom note to the perfect top.

What can I add to this poor pasty man whose life unfolds around him in passive acquiescence? What will wake him up? What does he fear?

He fears fire. He fears loss. He fears being left once again among the living. Charles blames himself for mom and dad’s grief–and his little brother’s death. It was a spark, only a spark–a smoldering error never extinguished, never put out, still burning in his soul.

I like it, the helpless go-along has a reason to not make waves, not engage fully, not be worthy to have the care of innocents or father a child or love a child.

Yes, this deepens the man–puts the boy back in his soul. No, Charles is not pudding but water and charred wood and a long stretch of scar tissue on the upper arm that failed to pull the little brother out through the window of his parent’s burning farmhouse. His fault. His secret. His torment.

How did the fire start?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Everybody knows that model glue is flammable. Charles, seven years old, and his younger brother hide in a tiny back closet assembling the model ship with secret plans to sail on great oceans. They work for hours—until dark—until little brother says, “I’ll light a candle so we can see what we are doing.”

And Charles, preoccupied, not hearing the little brother, steps out for just a minute–just one short, sixty-second god-damn minute and then whoosh, the world bursts into flame.

Oh my god, oh my god–for the rest of his life he hears that oh my god scream from his own lips and from the lips of his little brother before he died.

Yes. Charles built the boat that carried his little brother across the sea to the other realm. And the punishment? To never be happy, never cover the scar, never wear long sleeves or care for children. Again and again he turns from what will make him happy, from Rose (his pretty woman) and from her children and the children they could have together.

Ah, this leads smoothly to the forest fire in my story–to the sacred ring where all children are kept safe by magic and grace. Now, at last, Charles must face his fear or lose them all—and his own soul as well.

Later, after Charles has passed the test, little Emily, precious psychic child, sees the younger brother laughing and playing and she tells Charles he need not torture himself–little brother lives in a splendid castle on the other side.

‘

Charles looks different to me now. Finally I find an empathy with his heart, with his suffering as he finds his true place upon the page. He attracts me, awakens my healing heart that wants to smooth the scars along his arm. Now, he is ready for Rose. Now we can discover how a man with the heavy burden meets a magical woman under a Tucson sun.

He will resist, of course, and move toward and away again and again but, oh the love is strong and the pull of destiny even stronger. Now the high tides in the blood ruled by the moon will move them. He will lose the fight and he will love her. And he will learn to trust again that the world is a good place–even when it isn’t.

. . . that’s the man I was looking for.

If you like the stories and bits and pieces I am posting on my blog, please forward it to others and invite them in to check it out. My goal is to widen my readership over the next year and you can help. Thanks.

Jamie Lee

The Auction

Published by Jamie on April 6, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Short Fiction and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

It is late but I feel like posting something tonight anyway so I went searching old files for a story.  This one was actually published in the South Dakota Review many years ago but I was so amazed to read it through carefully and see how rough it was.  I did a bunch of editing and am posting it anway.   For the past year and a half I’ve been teaching a course using a textbook by Dr. Rita Smilkstein called Tools for Writing.  This book has given me more than a four year English degree did in terms of my grammar and punctuation.  Suddenly I am able to see what I was doing wrong.   I also have had some wonderful help from Page Lambert and others from my writing group (Bearlodge Writers) on point of view and narrative distance.   What blows my mind is that I’ve been submitting work for over 25 years but without the skills I needed to be effective.  Anyway, here is the story with a bit more spit and polish than it had many years ago.  I still like the story.  It came to me when my sister told me the story of a farm auction in eastern South Dakota and I thought how odd it must be to see your life ”auctioned off.”  

 

The Auction 

 

Grandpa stood at the lace-curtained window looking down from the second story bedroom to the yard below.  Look at all those people down there, he thought.  Must be at least thirty or forty, maybe more.  The crowd below was milling about in the early autumn sun.  He thought that perhaps a person ought to feel more than he was feeling.  It was odd . . .and then to have the whole family skating around his moods so cautiously. 

Imagine all those people, Grandma, coming to the farm to pick over all of our old junk.  He rubbed the lace between his fingers; it smelled dusty, and he thought about his wife again . . . his mate, his friend.  The missing her didn’t stop–not for a moment.  Oh, it eased a bit, settling into his middle like a heavy cat on his lap, soft, but heavy. 

But still, there was the missing her.

The farm auction was scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m.  Furniture littered the yard in ragged rows hauled out early this morning by a couple of young fellows.  He saw the oak credenza brought over from Germany a century before by Grandma’s family; the tattered curved sectional, bounced nearly to death by generations of grand kids; the kitchen table, so many hours sipping coffee, making plans, talking; and still more tables, chairs, beds, and boxes and boxes of accumulation.  Forty-seven years of marriage, weddings, births, school kids, graduations were now strewn about in boxes and fingered by strangers–all due to be sold at auction at 9:00 a.m.  In less than one day, a century of stuff would be scattered and sent off in opposite directions.

Why does it all seem so silly and dull, he wondered.  He watched the three men set up the auctioneer’s stand.  The bald one’s head is shining already.  Going to be a hot one.  The two younger workers were taller but quick to take orders from the squat, balding man.  From the window, they all looked like speechless dolls dancing noiselessly around his sunburned yard. 

“Dad?  Dad, are you up here?” 

He heard his oldest son, Jim, thump up the stairs just has he’d done a thousand times before.  It was a familiar, comforting sound.

Jim came into the bedroom but stopped abruptly as he saw his father near the window still clutching a bit of lace in his fingertips and staring down at the yard.  “Oh, sorry, Dad.” he said.  “I didn’t mean to bust in on you.  Maybe you would rather be alone.  I’ll just go back down . . . .”

“No.  It’s fine.  In fact, come over here a minute, son.  Look at this.”  He waited until Jim stood beside him and then he pointed down at the yard.  “Did you ever think so much stuff could come out of such a small house as this?  Lord, it never seemed that big—to hold so much.” 

They stood side by side and gazed quietly at the yard below.  “Years ago, we were settlers, and now we are settling up.”  He chuckled just a bit at his own play on words.  Jim didn’t seem to get the humor.

Grandpa looked across the yard and to the east.  Away from the auction activity a long table covered in pretty linen, Grandma’s linen, stood alone beneath the crab apple tree.  It was covered with dishes and figurines and dainty little porcelain boxes.  On one end a tall pewter candelabrum stood sentry over the long rows of assorted pretties.  He saw his grandchildren, sixteen in all, milling around the table carefully fondling each pretty bauble.  In a few minutes, they would line up oldest first, youngest last and begin the slow procession past the table.   Each child would choose some special thing one at a time to keep from Grandma and Grandpa’s things.  The line would move until the table was bare or each child, (some not so young anymore) was satisfied with his or her finds. 

Jim squirmed uncomfortably beside him.  “It seemed the only way, Dad.  Sure hope you don’t mind.  Mary and I thought the younger ones should have something . . . . ” His voice trailed off apologetically.

Grandpa knew that Jim didn’t understand his silence, yet how could he tell his son that it wasn’t displeasure—or even sadness.  He’d never been one for talking about how things were on the inside and he didn’t know how to start now.  Even as he spoke, his words sounded useless, like drops of rain hitting hard clay.  “I know Jim, Grandma wanted the kids to have something.  And the apartment will be great, really.  All of those people my own age and new things to do.”

Jim stood a while longer and then backed away slowly as if not quite sure what to do or say.  Finally, he smiled stiffly and said, “Well, guess I’ll leave you alone for a bit.”  And then he was gone again, and Grandpa smiled and chuckled a bit.  The boy was just like his father—long on feelings, short on words.

He finally turned away from the window and sat on the small loveseat he’d decided to keep for his new apartment because it was small.  Well, how the hell do you explain it?  I mean, a man ought to feel something after farming the same spread for better than fifty years and then just stopping all of a sudden one day, selling the whole works to some young couple with grand visions of their own?  He could already see them filling the empty spaces he and Grandma had once occupied.  They would turn the soil, raise families, make memories and fill the house with their own years of accumulation. 

Life was such a mystery.

No, Jim couldn’t understand.  Not yet.  It’s only things ,son, he thought.  Only things.  It gets real easy to let the things go when it’s just the missing that is left—missing Grandma, missing the farm, missing youth . . . Lord, who’d have ever thought we would live so long anyhow. 

The heavy cat feeling shifted and was settling in his lap again.  Things don’t make a life, and they don’t go along in death.  They’re just things.  His heart felt full and heavy.  It was good to just sit by a window and see–really see–that all that stuff down there was not what life is about.   No, the good things were all safe where nobody could get at them.  These things couldn’t be auctioned off at any price.  These things were given away for free. 

Right Grandma? 

The microphone screeched as the auctioneer began.  “Gather round folks, we’re gonna be all done by mid afternoon so let’s get it started.” 

It was 9:00 a.m. straight up.   

 

 

An Eyelash Away From Creation

Published by Jamie on April 1, 2008 in Short Fiction. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Anybody who has spent time with Natalie Goldberg’s writing books has probably done “writing practice.”  The bit below was a spin-off writing practice that followed A Good Soft Blanket.  I tried to get Milt to tell me if I was getting too edgy and risking my “reputation.”   He said I didn’t have to be a Pollyanna.  I’ll let you tell me.

 

Writing Practice

 

So, what if the good soft blankets were all distributed but Doria had a continuing connection with them, what stories would they tell?  Go.

Charles stared at Doria across the kitchen table of the tight apartment they had rented for the winter.  “You’ve done it, Doria.  Now let it be.  Let somebody else take it up.”

She was like glass, opaque and rippled with story lines etched and bubbling themselves into her surface.  He saw her—no he saw through her and it scared him.  Transparent.  See through.  It was only when he was looking elsewhere and not at her that he got that impression.

“You were giggling in your sleep.  But when I flicked on the light, your eyes were open and tears were streaming down your cheeks.  I couldn’t wake you.”

The smile was soft, petal soft.  “I know.  It’s like I go there. I am given the scenes, months of scenes in a moment.”

“What was this one?”

“Do you remember the banker from Mt. Pleasant, Michigan?  The one that was so damn sure of himself?”

Charles remembered Brent, in his suit, an unlikely candidate for one of Doria’s blankets and yet there he was, in three piece glory, dragging down, down into the pile of soft fuzz and plucking a pale peach and cream comforter from near the bottom.  Even the color seemed unlikely to go with the dark blue suit and burgundy tie.

Charles plucked a cherry from the dish and bit flesh and juicy red and stared in amazement at the pit revealed.  “I remember him.  Peaches and cream.  What did you dream?”

“It started out, he took a pottery course, you know, one of those convenient, cheap community ed classes . . . .”

Brent was proud, proud of his position, his philanthropy, his wife, his two kids.  A man who has worn thee pieces has no business picking up something as damp and clammy as a lump of clay and slapping it on a wheel and using a perfectly shined shoe to turn a kick-wheel.  Why, anything could happen.  Anything at all, if his hands have anything to say about it, cupped and slipping over the mound of slick clay until it becomes the oiled breast of a woman he never met.  A push of the thumbs and a nipple rises, erect, but still soft.  He closes his eyes and moisture gathers on his brow and, hastily, he flattens a palm over the offending appendage. 

Oh, but see, the mound elongates and the non Indian suddenly spies the two-spirit of his nonancestor.  A penis.  He drives his thumbs into the head of clay and a cup swirls effortlessly and he thinks, ah, the pot, I approach the cup, the center.  He cannot stop his hands from trembling and the virgin clay collapses in on itself.

By now his eyes have whitened and his underarms are damp and the aging woman potter with hair too permed and too frosted and too tired to find it’s way between anybody’s fingers steps near his right elbow and whispers “Oh, too bad.  It was coming up nicely, don’t you think?”

It takes a moment to understand what she is talking about–his first pot.  The class is over and he goes home and has his first wet dream in over 20 years.

He wants to forget but all week, between the first class and the second, his hands, like Adam and Eve, think only of fruit.  The serpent, the garden, everything he touches feels cool.  And damp.  Like a cave.  “Silly fricking class…” he mutters to his wife.  Too old, he tells his children.  And then he picks up his Sunday paper and reads about a mud slide in California and gets an erection.  Jesus, he thinks.  A doomed man.  A banker.

Week after week he goes back to the wheel, the clay, the hands holding and holding, to center the clay, his shoulders ache and he asks the teacher could he come in between classes. 

“Addicting, isn’t it.”  She nods, gives him a key.  To the classroom.

His shoulders widen.  His suit feels tight.  He ignores the secretaries, the tellers, the way they gape when he walks coat-less into the bank.  In his pants pocket, a zip-lock bag with a small hunk of wet clay that he pushes and pinches into a thousand different shapes even as he flips pages with clients to examine profit and loss.

Profit.

And loss.

He thinks that next winter, when all outside dissolves into icy white, he might try a sculpture class. 

 

“So, that was my dream.  I guess it’s like that for so many of them.  Probably we are so obsessed with sex because it is only an eyelash away from creation.  What do you think?”

Charles’ mouth is still sucking the cherry pit that, only a moment earlier, had been embedded in the womb of the fleshy cherry.  “I think you must be right.”