NE CADANT IN OBSCURUM

 NE CADANT IN OBSCURUM

(First published in the British magazine Postscripts, 2010)

This is how the story ends:

There is a farmhouse, tucked into a fertile river valley in Ohio.

On a hot summer evening, dark clouds build behind the northwestern hills, then spread south and east over expanses of corn and beans. Distant arcs of lightning announce the thunder, flash and sound separated by several seconds, but growing closer together as the storm advances. The rain starts as slow fat drops that splat on the rutted dirt lane. It falls harder, heavier, faster, until it pummels the ground so viciously that the drops are shattered into pinprick mist and thrown back upward. Next comes the hail, chunks of ice the size of silver dollars, pounding buckboards and breaking twigs from the trees. There’s no wind, not yet.

As quickly as it begins, the hail stops. The rain stops. The lightning and thunder stop. The clouds directly above assume a churlish green hue, although a gap has now appeared at the horizon where the setting sun peers through. The air has almost a gassy smell. In ominous silence the rotating cloud base lowers, and from that bulging underbelly a slender finger spirals gracefully downward. It grazes the fields, churning up mud and crops and whistling like steam from a teapot. The sound grows louder, deepens. Now it’s a train, now a hundred trains approaching on converging tracks. The sinewy funnel is strangely beautiful, backlit by the sun, its narrow edges limned by fire.

 The occupants of the farmhouse are distracted by fiddles and clapping and dancing and, in one dark corner, planning and plotting. They don’t notice the danger, not the rain or hail, not the train sounds. The whirlwind takes the shuttered windows first, which gets their attention but too late, too late. The wood shingles go next, then the entire roof. Without the roof, the walls cannot hold, and they explode inward. The storm tosses the broken frames of two buckboards onto the foundation, and a tree onto the buckboards. Luckily, the horses are in the barn, which escapes the maelstrom’s fury.

Within the house, delicate china and framed photographs are left miraculously untouched while the wood-burning stove is ripped from the floor and hurled into a field of corn. Only one of the fifteen people present survives to tell the tale.

This is how the story ends.

****

Inside a music hall, faded velvet curtains have been pulled back to frame the stage in red. An old upright piano abuts the back wall. No one is playing its chipped ivory keys today. A man prepares to address an audience from behind a podium. Middle-aged stoutness strains against the buttons of his vest. He adjusts his string tie, then his reading glasses. “Religion,” he says, “manufactures narrative out of empty air. It draws straight lines between disparate and incongruous points.”

He’s a courageous man, I’ll give him that, making this claim, to these people, on this day. It is Good Friday, after all. His opponent is an old-time country preacher, a living cliché right down to his black suit and worn bible. The preacher fidgets on a chair to the speaker’s left, waiting his turn. He knows the sympathies here lay squarely with the Lord. Folks are being surprisingly polite now, though, with only moderate grumbling and baring of teeth. The hallelujah and pillory session will start later.

An old farmer in the next seat nudges me with his elbow. He smells of rusted plows and hard work. A woman with leather-tanned skin sits at his right side. “Do I know you, ma’am?” the farmer says. “You with that feller up there?”

“No,” I say, smoothing some imaginary wrinkles in the ridiculous calico dress I’m wearing, “just passing through.”

“We wouldn’t’ve come, but we told the Reverend we would. How ’bout you?”

“I thought it sounded interesting.” Actually, I’m not sure why I’m here.”

“What’s your name?”

The leathery woman must be his wife. She squeezes his arm and whispers, “Henry, let the lady be.”

“It’s all right, ma’am,” I say. “My name is Anna.”

Henry touches his forehead as if tipping a hat. “Pleased to meet you.”

The speaker at the podium pounds his fist into his palm as he makes a point. “The great conflict between North and South is nearly over,” he says, his voice rising in mock evangelical fashion. “We have seen good and evil at work in our lives. It does not emanate from above, or from below, or from without. It resides nowhere but within the hearts of men. Religion imposes false grandeur on small things.”

The preacher smiles grimly and scribbles a note in his bible, the chapter and verse of his rebuttal.

“You got somebody in the War?” Henry says to me. “Sweetheart, brother, papa?”

“No, luckily, I don’t.”

“Well, ain’t that somethin’? Most ever’body does. Our boy was with Sherman in Georgia. ’Spect he’ll be comin’ home soon. Got a letter from him just … when was it, Mother?”

The wife shakes her head sadly. “We got a letter. Not from him. Our boy ain’t comin’ home.”

“Is so,” Henry mutters, his eyes suddenly glassy and fixed on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I stand up, a sense of tragic familiarity pressing in on me. “Excuse me.”

“Ma’am?” the farmer says.

I retreat up the aisle toward the door. The hall is only half full, common folk in work clothes, bankers in bow ties and their petticoated wives, a few young men in tattered Union blue, and, surprisingly, a family of recently emancipated slaves. Faces turn to me as I pass, approving. They, too, wish they could walk out on this nonsense, but they promised the preacher.

****

A nine-year-old girl in a lacy white dress sits primly in a Catholic church in Parker, Wisconsin. Her name is Anna. She has no family to hold her hand during the Requiem Mass. How brave she is trying to be. Two hearses wait outside to carry her parents away to dwell with the saints in darkness. It was a car accident, a missed stop sign. I see her, I see myself, as if I were watching from a dream, from outside the boundaries of this earth. This is 1958, just before Vatican II. Everything is still in Latin. Even at her young age, the girl knows all the verses and their English translations. At this far remove, the one that especially sticks in her mind, in my mind, is:

Libera eas de ore leonis                     Deliver them from the jaws of the lion,

ne absorbeat eas tartarus,                  lest hell engulf them,

ne cadant in obscurum;                      lest they fall into darkness;

Sed signifer sanctus Michael              but let the holy standard-bearer Michael

repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam     Lead them into holy light …

Ne cadant in obscurum. Lest they fall …

Since then I’ve often felt as if I live under a sphere of darkness, a streetlamp that casts not light but shadow. Only time can lead me to holy radiance, but time is no angelic flag waver. It’s a Trickster, a laughing Coyote which lacking mind nonetheless has purpose. I move, and forget in the direction of the movement. Go forward and I can’t foresee the path, go back and I can’t remember it. The future in the past is unknowable until it happens. The past in the future is learned from books, but the relevant threads are always absent when it’s most important to recall them. It’s an ongoing cycle of forgetting and remembering and forgetting that I remember.

It’s time toying with me. Memories are not restored until it’s too late, or too early, to do anything about them. I affect nothing, I change nothing. I experience history, but only as a spectator, with neither foreknowledge nor recollection of the now, whenever now is. As soon as I stop to witness I become part of the scenery.

That little girl in the white dress grows up. She moves on. She goes from family friends to orphanages to foster homes, from school to school. She never bothers with playmates because she’ll lose them anyway. Nothing is constant but the words in books. She hoards knowledge as if she is the last repository of the world’s memory. It’s all interesting, but in a life where her only lights have been borne off to the saints, she withdraws, she becomes sullen. And when Vietnam begins, when the assassinations come, when Watergate shames a nation, when Three-Mile Island reminds us to be humble before the power of the atom, she allows herself to be seduced more and more by thoughts of war, and murder, and storms, and dark things …

****

It’s Good Friday, a warm and sunny April morning. Dogwood trees are in bloom. The fragrance of garden flowers almost cancels the stench of horse droppings. Soldiers are trickling back into the city, exhausted, elated. Five days ago Lee accepted Grant’s terms of surrender at a home in Appomattox Courthouse.

I’m thinking of a similar home, not Appomattox, but a farmhouse from a story my parents told me when I was a child. The memory is incomplete now, but momentary images still peer through: a valley, a whitewashed house and red barn, fields of corn and beans. Inside there is music, dancing. One wall is lined with picture frames displaying black-and-white photos of children living and dead.

They used to photograph dead children. I shudder.

“By a single stroke of grace,” my father said the last time he told the story, “was our family line continued. It was the hand of God reaching down to preserve the future.” Two days later he missed a stop sign, and his future was over.

I turn right onto 10th Street. Brick and wood buildings line both sides. Even now they look old and dilapidated: boarding houses, saloons, a theatre with a placard advertising the actress Laura Keene. A soldier whistles at me, a horse whinnies, a dog barks. Across from the theatre is a house with rooms to let. In this place and time it’s improper for a woman to travel alone, but in my innocuous calico dress surely I look like any one of tens of thousands of war widows. Still, the lady inside, someone called Mrs. Peterson, is suspicious that I intend to employ the room for immoral purposes.

“I’m not a whore,” I protest, but she turns me away.

“Only a whore would use the word ‘whore,’” she adds, apparently unaware of the inherent implication of that statement.

When I come out of the house it’s raining and a week earlier. The city is abuzz. There are rumors that Lee might surrender.

****

Sometimes it seems as if I’m remembering someone else’s life, but it’s so clear in my mind, this past that is yet to come.

Anna extricates herself from the arms of her lover, and I can still feel his sticky sweat, hear his piggy snores, smell his rancid breath. They’re sharing a mattress in a Hollywood dive in February 1922. Morning sun sluices in through holes in the window shade. Yesterday’s newspaper is on the nightstand—perhaps scandal sheet is a better term. Anna doesn’t turn on the light. The headline is in big block letters. Two days ago the moving picture director William Desmond Taylor was murdered.

“It happened again,” she says, tossing the paper down. The floor is already cluttered with empty bottles, dirty clothes, boxes of junk, food crumbs, and skittering roaches. Of course, now she remembers, two days too late. Damn the Trickster.

Her lover is a two-bit wannabe actor who was once onscreen briefly as an extra in a one-reel comedy. He is drunk and hopped up on reefer. He grunts once, makes a burbling sound, opens his eyes. He tries to hook an arm around her but misses. “Huh?”

“Go back to sleep.”

“No, I’m list’nin’, baby. What d’you say?”

She has so few people besides herself that she can talk to, tell things. She’s careful to keep her secrets, the world’s secrets, the ones she can remember—not that time would let her give away anything important anyway—but this man is too wasted to understand what she says, so he’s safe. “I wanted to find out who killed the Dahlia in 1947, but I overshot the date by a few days.”

“What’s a Dahlia?”

Anna sits up and dangles her feet over the edge of the bed, her back to him. She is still naked. “Nickname of a girl. Someone cut her in half, then brought her body to an empty lot on South Norton here in Hollywood. The murder has never been solved.”

Her lover pulls himself up to his elbow. “Cut her in half? In Hollywood? I oughta’ve heard ’bout that.”

“It was January 15, 1947. I couldn’t save her, because she’d been missing for a week, and history never recorded where the murder happened, but I thought I could at least give her justice. I meant to be in the lot that morning to see who put her body there so I could tell the police. But then I overshot the date, got there too soon, and couldn’t remember why I’d come. I know now, but in 1947 I didn’t know any more about what was going to happen than the people living then. I didn’t realize there was a Dahlia, or that I needed to go to the lot, until after it happened. Whatever sick bastard did that to her got away with it and will always get away with it. I can never seem to hit on the right date.”

“The hell you talkin’ ’bout, 1947? Nineteen-forty-seven?”

“One nine four seven, yes. Who can I warn now? She won’t even be born for two years. They’ll put me away if I come to them with a story like that—pretty, sad girl’s going to be butchered in 1947 and left in a field.”

The man laughs, collapses onto his side. “You kill me, baby. You can see the future, why not do somethin’ useful with it? Who’s gonna win at the track today? Chaplin ever gonna hire me?”

“Shut up. It doesn’t work that way.”

“You whooshed in here, why not just whoosh on back to 1947?” He’s laughing so hard now Anna thinks he might pass out. She hopes he does.

“I can’t,” she says, “except the same way you do: day-by-day. By then I’ll be twenty-five years older and will have forgotten, again, what I was there for. Time is like that. I probably came here thinking I could solve Taylor’s murder, too.”

“I saw him on a set once, him and his hoochy-koo, Mabel Normand. Goodbye, I say. Asshole didn’t hire me, either. I gotta pee.” Her lover stands up, scratches himself. He takes a half-smoked marijuana cigarette from the chair on his side of the bed and offers it to her. “Have some reefer. Or a story like that, maybe you already did …”

Anna watches him lumber toward the toilet, and I watch with her. Anna, I remember saying in her mind, how on earth did you end up in bed with that?

****

It’s March 1865, and the war is going well for the North. Near the White House I and the man escorting me see the President and Mrs. Lincoln out for a carriage ride. The President’s face is so care-worn, and yet, today, from my brief glimpse, he looks almost peaceful. Perhaps his burdens have been eased by promising news. He smiles at his wife and pats her gloved hand. My companion tips his hat stiffly as the carriage passes. I wave. The President doesn’t notice, but Mrs. Lincoln gives me a stern look.

I’m now wearing petticoats and lace. I don’t recall changing clothes, but then I never do.

“He means to make citizens of niggers,” my companion says. I don’t know his name. “Is that what this war is for?”

The Anna from 1922 whispers in my ear, Yes, well, where did you get this one? I jerk my hand away from the man’s elbow. “I hate that word. Mr. Lincoln has a wonderful vision.”

“A vision, is that what it is? I call it treason. I’m afraid, madam, that this is where you and I part company.”

He brushes the sleeve of his topcoat where my fingers had touched the material, as if cleansing it of contagion, then marches off in the direction opposite that of the carriage.

Where did I get this one? If my jumps are too small, I can’t know what I might have done, or who I might have met, last week. Did I sleep with him, too? Anna is laughing.

The President’s carriage crests a hill and disappears into a fine spring afternoon. Earlier this month he gave his stirring second inaugural speech. I realize there are blind spots in my understanding, events I cannot know because the knowing has potential to change the thing known, but what magnificent, hopeful words they were! Words to carry the nation through the war and his second term. They’ve already been reprinted all in the newspapers.  

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives       us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s    wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his        orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among   ourselves and with all nations. 

I allow myself a moment of optimism. I would have to stop my sojourn and live my days and years forward to see the war through to its end, but reading those words, I feel confident that the North must have won, and that the South was accepted back into the Union with the grace and mercy that Mr. Lincoln wanted.

****

But in truth, optimism rarely enters Anna’s thoughts. Why the allure of darkness? she wonders. Why the song of death? Is it the loss of her parents, of my parents? The upheaval of the sixties, the rebelling against traditional values? Is it loneliness, bitterness, or simply a seeking out of the pain of others, pain worse than her own? Perhaps it’s no more than morbid curiosity.

Anna, you cannot know, I remember telling her, but it doesn’t stop her from trying. It doesn’t stop me. It never has.

Having learned her lesson in 1947 and 1922, she leaves reminder notes in her pockets and heads for the East End of London in early November 1888, chasing the holy grail of unsolved murders. By 1900 she’s changed clothes and the notes are gone, but she still remembers she needs to find Mary Kelly’s room at Miller’s Court in Dorset Street. Twelve years earlier, though, in different clothes still, she’s fending off amorous drunks in the rainy back alleys of the Minories, listening to horror stories about the Ripper, and wondering what the hell she’s doing in the slums of London.

 Actually, with all the hysteria on the streets and in the papers, it’s pretty obvious why she’s come. She just doesn’t know when the next killing will occur. Without that information, she’ll just have to wait and see, like everyone else. This journey, like all the others, is useless.

It’s time to move on again. Her birth era is irrevocably lost to her now, except via the grave. Day-by-day from 1888, at her current age, she could reasonably expect to live until 1940 or so. She won’t be born until 1949. How odd her tombstone would look: born 1949, died 1940, aged 82.

There’s only one direction to go. She now remembers the events of 1922, and sees no reason to waste a normal life getting back to that. Her answer, if there is one, lies in the past.

****

Nothing is holding me to Washington, or 1865. I missed whatever it was I came here to learn, or solve, or prevent. Since I don’t know what that might have been, I don’t know how much I missed it by.

Nine years earlier, I meet some people, I make some friends, I find a cause.

The Kansas Emigrant Aid Company of Northern Ohio is plotting its strategy. Kerosene lanterns are hung from the ceiling rafters, throwing light, shadow, and fumes throughout the house. The furniture in the main room has been pushed out of the way to create a dance floor. A caller sings out the dance steps and a fiddler plays while four young couples, the future emigrants, promenade and allemande in celebration. A child named Josephine rocks in a chair and watches the festivities. She is fidgeting and pouting. Either she’s bored or she wants to join the dancers but has no partner.

In a corner of the room opposite the child, the Reverend John Lewis is speaking with much animation to myself, the banker Hancock, and the farmer Booker, who is little Jo’s father and, I believe, a distant relative of mine. I’m the only woman in the conversation, so my opinions are not strongly sought.

“We must prevent more bloodshed in Kansas,” the Reverend Lewis says.

“What for?” says Booker. “If the border ruffians have their way, they’ll kill every Free-Stater in Kansas, and the whole country’ll go over to slavery. Just see if it don’t! All we can do is flood the territory with our own people so there’s more of us than them. They kill one of us, we kill three of them.”

“Patience,” the Reverend says. “The Lord will aid us in our good work, but only if we avoid the path of violence. When Kansas and Nebraska become states, we must vote slavery out.”

“He’s right,” Hancock says to Booker. “I hear the New England Emigrant Aid Company has over twenty thousand settlers set to move west and vote for freedom when the time comes. We got to do our part, too. I’ll finance as many as I can.”

“You’re ‘flooding’ Kansas with four couples?” I say.

The men barely give me a glance. “Well, the ruffians ain’t gonna stop killin’ us just ’cause we stop killin’ them,” Booker says. “Eye for an eye, eh, Reverend?”

Jo climbs down from her rocker and approaches me. She tugs on my sleeve. “Miz Anna,” she says, “no one will dance with me.”

I’m irrelevant to the discussion with the men anyway. “I’ll dance with you, sweetie.” I pause, wondering if sweetie is a proper term of endearment here, or perhaps an anachronism that hasn’t entered the language yet. No one seems to notice.

I excuse myself.

She takes my hand and leads me toward the dance floor, stopping en route in front of some black-and-white photos on the wall. There are five of them, all children ranging from a few weeks old to toddlers.

“That’s me when I was little,” Jo says, pointing to the last photo. “The others’re my brothers and sisters. They’re dead now. Consumption, or somethin’. Mama died having me.”

I lean in for a better look. Her siblings’ eyes are closed. I step back, feeling something akin to horror.

“They were dead when the photographs were made,” Jo says solemnly. “It’s all Mama and Papa had to remember them by.”

The square dance caller starts a new song, accompanied by a lively fiddle. Lewis, Hancock, and Booker raise their voices loud enough to be heard over the music. The passions are so high, and not just here in Ohio. It’s the summer of 1856. Despite the Reverend’s commendable desire for a peaceful solution, Kansas is already bleeding hard, the two factions butchering each other over the right to own other human beings. There’s talk of a larger war, one that will engulf the entire country. There’s talk of secession. It’s a conflict virtually written into the Constitution by our Founding Fathers when they compromised over slavery.

“We may have to wait,” I say to Jo. “It’s a square dance, there’s only room for four couples.”

“That’s all right,” she whispers shyly, “I need to go outside first anyway.”

“You know where the outhouse is. You’re a big girl, you can go by yourself.” I open a shutter and look out. The sky has darkened in the northwest. “Hurry, it looks like it’s going to rain.”

“Can I pet the horses in the barn?” Jo says. Already she’s learned to use her pretty brown eyes to good effect.

I smile and pat her cheek. “Don’t be long. You owe me a dance.”

****

Anna has never wondered if there are others like her, others who can do what she does. Nor has she ever considered the mechanism of her travel. Call it God, magic, astral projection, desire, delusion, or pixie dust, it doesn’t matter. After more than two decades of drifting through her natural life as an orphan, always isolated, alone with her books, she discovers she can do it, and does. This is 1979.

The Dahlia in 1947 is not her first stop. Rural Parker, Wisconsin, calls her back, back to her parents, back to the car, back to that stop sign on a country road few people ever use. The date is March 19, 1958. All she wants, all she has ever wanted, is to find a way to say, “Dad, be careful, there’s a pickup coming.” She was in the car as a child but didn’t see the truck, either. Now, as an adult, when she knows it’s coming, knows it, she can’t get to where she needs to be. She overshoots the date and has no idea why she’s there. One moment it’s 1979, listening to disco and fretting about Three-Mile Island, and the next it’s 1958, hula hoops and bobby socks, and Elvis on the juke box. It takes her a long, long time to get her bearings, and when she does, March 19 has come and gone.

Anna has to read about her parents in the paper, and the little girl who survived. The words harrow her soul. It’s like experiencing the accident again, only from outside the car, watching, helpless as the driver’s door crumples inward against the passenger’s door, extinguishing her only lights in a tangle of metal. She replays it all in her head, and the worst of it, by far the worst, is remembering her horror when she awoke in the hospital and realized that, although her mother and father were dead, she was going to live.

Anna tries to get back to 1979, but quickly learns that pixie dust does not work in that direction. She lives forward a few months, then returns to March. She misses the date, and reads about the accident, and is devastated anew.

Time and again, live forward, travel back, live forward, travel back. Anna, Anna, I say, let them go. It’s more than you can bear.

Ne cadant in obscurum … There have been other deaths, other tragedies, millions she will never know about, but a few that she does. Maybe I can change one of those, I remember her thinking. Just one. Solve it, prevent it, avenge it, something. As if that will raise up her parents, as if that will restore to them a single moment in the light above the darkness, or lacking that, give substance to their passing.

Anna, I say, you’re trying to manufacture meaning out of randomness.

She’s seen photographs of the Dahlia, before and after. January 15, 1947. Pixie dust works in space, too. She’s in Hollywood but does not remember to go to the empty lot on South Norton.

****

Little Josephine Booker dashes from the outhouse to the barn just before the clouds unleash a torrent of rain and hail. The storm is very loud, and yet the caller calls, the fiddler fiddles, the dancers dance, and the men discuss, oblivious for the moment to the outside world. In spite of the passions and tensions afoot in the country, it is a time of joy. I turn from the window to observe them. The four young couples, with prosperous and safe lives in Ohio, will soon give up everything they have here for a dangerous frontier, risking hardship and death so that others will not be slaves.

It is a great cause, a noble cause.

But nature makes no distinctions between good causes and bad. I hear an ominous whistling outside, like steam from a teapot. I look out the window as a delicate funnel descends to earth. The roiling black mass scours the fields but bypasses the barn.

This is how the story ends, then. Perhaps time is not such a Trickster after all. Perhaps it has played us straight up all along: The future is yours, use it as you will, but the past is mine. It is a set piece. You can look but do not touch.

“By a single stroke of grace was our family line continued,” my father said two days before his death. Oh, yes, I remember it now, I remember it all, all the history, all the stories, all of my attempts to get back, back, back—to my parents, to victims who were not mine to save, to the darkness, and to my self.

Here is the calling I have heard every day since March 19, 1958.

What now? the Annas of my past future ask. I draw all the fragments of me into myself. That’s it, then, isn’t it? After every tragedy, every lost chance, every stagnant lover, every disappointment, the question is always, What now?

Watch, I say. Watch.

The shutters in the farmhouse’s windows blow in first, and then the screaming starts. Only one of the fifteen people present survives to tell the tale.

Requiescamus in pace, Anna.

I am not the one.

END

FLASH FICTION

SOULS OF THE HARVEST

(Published in Flash Fiction Online, 2008)

Time period: Contemporary

You can’t harvest a crop without killing something. A combine ain’t particular, it cuts whatever’s in its path. There’s no malice in it, just a part of the season, like rain and heat. Food or nesting draws critters in, but come harvest the combine keeps rolling. Some run and live. Others don’t, and don’t.

After a good day’s labor I like to sit on my back porch and breathe in the autumn air when it’s thick with the smells of the earth. Clouds in the west promise rain, but up above stars speckle the night, old Orion coming around earlier now on his way to winter skies. Crickets chirp under the house and frogs sing in the ditches where water drains from the fields. And though they’re almost done for the year, fireflies drift up out of the flattened crop. They shine their little lights like spaceships or angels come to carry away the souls of the beasts that offered themselves up to the harvest. Got fireflies in front and stars behind, and a land flat and dark as oceans stretching out into the night.

Used to be I could hear the old wood floors inside creaking about this time, and I knew Sal was heading out to join me, maybe have a smoke and a laugh. She’d bring me a beer and a cool wet cloth for my head and we’d chat about whatever news was on the TV that day.

No footsteps rattle the boards now but my own. Sal’s been gone these several years, and my boys got called away to the city like boys do. So it was only me at the clinic this morning when the doctor’s report come in. Somebody’d circled some splotches on an X-ray, looked like yellow crayon, and there was this paper full of big words. Doc tried to explain, but hell, I said, the circles tell me all I need to know.

He said, you gonna be okay with this?

I said, sure, why not, and I went home, climbed into my combine, and farmed till sundown, same as yesterday.

The clouds have swallowed up the stars. I love a good storm, but there’ll be no ruckus from this, just a gentle emptying of God’s pockets. I walk out into the field as the first drops fall. Down by the gully where my boys used to help me make fence, I hold my hands out from my body and lift my face to the sky. The rain is cool in the sticky air, washing over me and cleaning my skin of the day’s work. Nothing can wash away the stains inside, but the fireflies rise up around me, rise up through the rain and into the heavens, and I know, now, that there’s a light for me here somewhere, too, waiting its turn. If the good Lord’s coming for me, let him come. He can take whatever part of me he’s entitled to, just leave the rest, leave me to lie down in this field and take root in the earth. That would be all right with me. It’d be all right.

END 

 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE HAND OF THE DEAD

(Published in Flash Fiction Online, 2008)

Time period: Contemporary

This story is not fiction, but rather what I call speculative nonfiction

The entries are written in Spanish, proud, feminine strokes sandwiched between the Apocrypha and the Gospel of St. Matthew. The Bible itself is a recent acquisition, rare Americana from 1792. Each entry begins with a name. 

Andrea Francisca

Nacio en New York en 25 de Diciembre 1808 

This little daughter of unknown parents, born on Christmas Day in 1808, is the first of eight children listed. The last in this generation is Maria Veidra, November 12, 1831: Twenty-three years of childbirth preserved in a sacred ledger. The entries continue but the hand falters, Spanish gives way to English, the proud strokes become more uncertain, sexless. In 1854 Maria marries a man named Francisco. The ceremony is held in her mother’s house and officiated by the Reverend Mr. Smith of St. George’s Church.

A child of this union, Elizabeth Andrea, ensues on October 8, 1855.

And then there are no more entries. After nearly half a century, the story of a family mysteriously ends, with no hand to record the inevitable.  

Who came before Andrea, or after Elizabeth?

I close the Bible, stack it on top of Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Books are meant to be stored in this manner: not upright but flat, safe from the ravages of gravity.

I collect books for the same reason many people do, to connect with the past, to wonder about those who have held what I hold, seen what I see, thought what I think: as if the spirit of the dead could reach through the ages and touch my sense of awe. I consider this luxury of names I have stumbled upon.

Andrea struggled into the world a scant six weeks before the birth, in Kentucky, of Abraham Lincoln, but had chance dealt some other hand, the two of them could have met. They could, in fact, have married. Perhaps it’s Andrea who gasps in horror at Ford’s Theatre as the assassin’s bullet shatters her husband’s skull and a nation’s triumph. Perhaps it’s their son Robert—Roberto?—who must replay this scene twice more in his lifetime, with Garfield, with McKinley.

Or everything could have been different.

What if, for instance, Andrea doesn’t like plays? Johnson never has to assume the Presidency, nor face impeachment: just another forgotten VP. Maybe Grant and Hayes still follow, maybe not. A very young Garfield may step onto the stage early, avoiding the wound he would have survived anyway had medicine then been as it is now.

Or perhaps Andrea is disinclined toward politics altogether, and she and Abe set up a home in rural Illinois or New York, where he practices law and she tends a garden. The Civil War is managed by a less committed man, and the South wins. There are now two countries where there was once one. Southern blacks remain slaves. England favors the Confederacy for her cotton, which eventually leads to another war.

I rub my temples: So many possibilities . . . No, not possibilities, just what-ifs. The past is fixed. It doesn’t allow for alternatives. Andrea and her line stop with Elizabeth, disappearing into a backwater of history which stagnates with names and events that do not matter and insists the world remain what it’s always been. But what force drives the choices? What force decides that Abraham Lincoln will be born who he is, when he is, so he can be where he’s needed at the precise moment of crisis? What decree keeps two people a half a continent apart, drowning one in perhaps happy obscurity, while bathing the other in tragic glory?

We hold human life sacred, we make speeches and deliver sermons, we teach our young to find meaning in their lives, and we believe that love will outlast time. And yet the vast majority of humankind is weightless flotsam, bobbing on the surface of history for a few years until, desiccated, they drift away to brackish oblivion, failing in any measurable way to have registered their existence. They bear children who bob and drift, their children bear children who bob and drift, and so on down the generations, people who do the best they can and then, through no fault of their own, are simply lost. Lost. It’s as if there’s only so much gravity to go around, and those who are called great get it all.

But what of those faceless names in birth certificates and antiquarian Bibles, employee lists and tax rolls? Who is left to tell their stories, sing their songs, note their passing?

I would do it if I could. I would walk back to New York in 1808 and find Andrea’s mother and I would tell her, “I will remember you.” I would introduce Andrea to Abraham Lincoln, as though it were possible for the weightless and the weighty to strike a balance. Then I would walk to 1855 and witness the birth of Elizabeth. I would watch her grow, and I would follow her where she goes, steering her away from those algaed backwaters, refusing to allow her to become becalmed in time. I would say to her, “Learn to sketch and paint, write novels, scratch your name in the cornerstones of buildings. Cry up to the heavens, I am here! Don’t get lost, Elizabeth.”

And if she smiled at me then, she would not get lost, for I would take her smile with me into the future.

The world has turned since 1855, like numbers on an odometer. Everyone who was alive then is now dead; the great, the forgotten, and the never-knowns. They are gone, and I am not. And that is the difference, for I have been to the past, by way of elegant strokes entered into an old Bible by the hand of the dead, and I will keep my promise to Andrea’s mother.

I will remember.

END 

 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

MR. KAMINSKI

(Published under the title “In an Old Man’s Lap”

in Flash Fiction Online, 2011)

Time period: 1950s

Colleen Kelley relaxes in the visitors’ lounge of the Barnet Convalescent Home in London. The facility is immaculate, even if the history of the neighbourhood around it is rather sordid. She writes Tuesday, 1 December 1959 in her diary as her granddaughter Jacqueline scurries among the residents, making a nuisance of herself. Old age is a strange thing to the little girl, the spotted hands, the papery, wrinkled skin, the stale breath and shallow breathing, the eyes blued by cataracts. Although they’ve come to see Colleen’s grandfather Patrick, Jacqueline climbs onto the lap of anyone able to bear her weight and tolerate her presence. Most of the old dears seem charmed by her, or maybe they’re just lonely. In all the time she’s been coming here, Colleen has only seen a handful of other patients’ relatives.

Are they are as intrigued by J’s youth as she is by their age? Colleen writes. Do they resent her for it?

Tuesdays are music day at the Home. A sincere but ungifted pianist plunks the keys. He’s chosen songs from the twenties, but even those are too new, as some of these people were old even then. The Gay Nineties would be more appropriate. The residents who aren’t being pestered by Jacqueline either deal cards and argue decades-old politics or tap their toes and sing any lyrics that come to mind, regardless what the pianist is playing.

“Grandmum, look!” Jacqueline says. She’s pried a hearing aid from Mrs. Stephens’s ear. The old lady is oblivious to Jacqueline’s antics. She is oblivious to everything, and has been for years.

“Put it back,” Colleen says. Jacqueline pouts but pops the device into the woman’s ear.

Patrick sits in his wheelchair next to Colleen, wrapped in a blanket. He is no more alert than Mrs. Stephens. How old is he? she writes. Born 1863. So: 96. Victoria was nearer the beginning than the end then, two years on in her grieving widowhood. Oh, Granddad, do you even know we’re here?

It doesn’t matter. She gets something from their visits, whether or not he does. She smiles warmly at him and realizes how little she knows about his youth. He’s senile now, but how would he judge his life if he could judge his life? He stares at the overhead light and mumbles to whatever ghosts of memory remain. All your years, all your experiences, everything you’ve ever done or wanted to do, was or wanted to be, has been reduced to empty stares and mumbles. If you’d known it would come to this, would you have allowed yourself to grow so old?

The pianist is attempting a ragtime version of Noel Coward’s I’ll See You Again, but can’t quite master the syncopation.

Jacqueline has invited herself into the lap of an old man named Kaminski. He bends his lips into a grin and pats her hand. “What’s your name?” he says. Mr. Kaminski has no teeth, and his cheeks sink into the hollow of their absence. A growth the size of a grape protrudes from the left side of his jaw. He’s bald, and scabs pock the top of his head, former pimples, probably, that have been picked at until they bled and then picked at again so often they never heal.

“Jacqueline,” the girl answers as she examines the strange defect on his jaw. “What’s this?”

“The missus clipped me a good one,” Mr. Kaminski says with a laugh. He looks at Colleen and winks. “Aiming for me ear, she was. How’d she miss this big flapper, eh?”

Colleen studies the old man, so like Granddad Patrick. He seems like an innocuous fellow. She imagines scenarios for his life. In some he is good, in others an outlaw. But is a person ever just one thing? We humans are so uncharitable in our opinions of others. If this man has led an honourable life but for one bad act, we will forever remember him for the one bad act. And it doesn’t work the other way—a villain may perform a noble deed but he is not redeemed by it. Can there be redemption for anyone when all we see is the evil? Pity.

Colleen closes her diary. The Barnet Convalescent Home is located in the same borough of London where Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum has stood since the 1850s. According to some theorists, seventy-one years ago the infamous Whitechapel fiend was bound over to the asylum, which is a tidy explanation for why his killings stopped. The murders were horrific, ghastly beyond words. Witnesses who saw the Ripper in 1888 described a man of about twenty-five years. Had he lived, he would be 96 now, same as Granddad Patrick. The experts always speak of the monster in past tense, but what if he isn’t dead? What if he’s been confined to institutions from that year to this, leading a blameless life—a life, perhaps, of reflection, repentance, and regret? Indeed, what if he’s redirected his energy to help his fellow inmates, improving their lot, doing good?

Colleen eyes the male residents. She laughs nervously. What a silly thought. Of course the Ripper is dead ...

Jacqueline has curled up in Mr. Kaminski’s lap, asleep, her head resting against his chest. Humming along with the piano, the old man strokes her hair and smiles.

END

 _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 INDICATIONS

(Published first in Flash Me Magazine, 2010

and reprinted as a chapter in our historical novel, A Killing Snow, 2016)

Time period: 1880s

Truth is, none of us ever saw a live chicken stripped naked by a cyclone, though of course we all know someone who knows someone who has. But Professor Josiah S. Kunkel of the University of Chicago is fixing to test the matter. We hauled our Civil War cannon out for the Centennial celebration last month, and the professor means to load five ounces of powder and a chicken into it to determine how much wind velocity is required to suck a living bird’s feathers right out of its skin.

I could tell plenty of stories about the funny things twisters do, as I’m the one who telegraphs weather readings from Fort Union, Dakota, to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Washington. Then they issue the indications for the area.

But there’s no need for them to predict the weather for us today. It’s August, the mercury says ninety-four, and the anemometer’s cups are standing dead still. Barometer’s steady at thirty inches. I can’t send in the official readings till precisely two, so I can only watch Professor Kunkel and his assistant from the bank’s roof, where my instruments are set up. A crowd of curious onlookers has gathered round the men. The cannon’s in the park at the edge of town, but seeing how the edge of town and middle of town are pretty much the same thing in Fort Union, they’re right under me, across the street. I can see and hear everything just fine.

Kunkel talks smoother than snake oil. The widow Bohnet has donated a fine Brahma hen to the cause. The chicken paces in a cage at Kunkel’s feet. Either way you look at it, the bird’s prospects are dim, as it was slated for the ax tonight anyway.

“This is science,” Kunkel proclaims to his audience. “It is my contention that the near vacuum in the center of a cyclone will remove a bird’s feathers slicker than any chicken-plucker mother’s son. Now, it goes without saying that we cannot duplicate conditions at the center of a cyclone, but what we can do, friends, is duplicate the wind velocity. I estimate the cannon will propel this creature at three hundred miles per hour, which is less than the force mathematicians predict in a cyclone. But the pressure inside the barrel will be higher, naturally, since the bore’s so much smaller than a funnel. Thus, the lesser force times the greater pressure should yield a reliable figure.”

The hen looks dubious about the whole affair.

What I want to know is how in blazes a chicken could ever get to the center of a cyclone? Winds would blow it away long before it ever made it inside. Seems to me that all the good professor’s gonna do is show that high winds have an unhealthy effect on wildlife.

“If I am correct,” he says, puffing out his chest and hooking his thumbs into his vest, “then this bird will be naked as any Sunday entrée—pardon my language, ladies—but still quite alive.”

“You’re gonna shoot that chicken outta the cannon?” old Hank Mohler says.

“I surely am,” says the professor. “I expect it to sail over the plains, then glide to earth squawking indignation in all its bare-skinned glory.”

“How’s it gonna glide with no feathers?” Hank says.

“Who’s the scientist here? I tell you, the finest brains in this great land have calculated figures down to the tiniest fraction. There can be no doubt of the result.”

“What’ll this cost us?” Hank says.

“Not a red cent, friend. I intend to publish a groundbreaking study in which you will all be compensated for your contribution to science. My publisher will pay each of you a Morgan silver simply for witnessing the event. My assistant will take your particulars.”

“Well, get to it, then.”

As his assistant moves through the crowd with pencil and paper, Professor Kunkel ramrods a powder pouch down the bore. The chicken raises a furious ruckus about being stuffed tail-first on top of the powder.

A hush comes over the onlookers. “Anyone have a match?” the professor says, though I ‘spect that’s just for dramatic effect, as I seen him light up a cigar earlier.

Hank gives him one. Professor Kunkel says, “Step back now.” He strikes the match against the sole of his boot and touches the flame to the fuse.

After a few agonizing seconds there’s the terrific crack of cannon shot, and that Brahma hen arcs out over the prairie west of town, trailing plumage and smoke like a falling comet.

The crowd applauds with great enthusiasm. The feathers have come out, all right. ’Course, the blast has blown the chicken to smithereens, but in all the confusion, by the time someone thinks to collect the body, the assistant has picked their pockets clean and Professor Kunkel is long gone.

END

 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE DEAD-LINE

(Published in Frontier Tales, 2011)

Time period: 1860s

Tom Beecher was a boy from Tennessee who fought with the Union. In August of ’64 he decided to go home to his sweetheart, but soon as he hopped the Dead-Line fence, a Reb sentry put a musket ball in him. The fence wasn’t even waist high, narrow planks nailed end-to-end on posts that circled the camp inside the stockade wall. Tom staggered, then fell back over it onto the prisoner side.

Our regiment’s sergeant had no doctor schooling, but what he did have was a knack for setting bones and binding up wounds. Me and him rushed to the fence. Tom was breathing in gasps and hiccups. Sarge rolled him on his stomach to have a look. When he saw that the ball had gone in the ribs and out the spine, he just shook his head.

Tom had shit himself something awful. Wasn’t his fault. “Can’t feel nothing down there,” he said, his accent Southern even if his heart wasn’t. His nose flared, and he said, “That me?”

The whole camp smelled like that, so what was one more stink?

“Why’d you do it?” Sarge said. “You know what happens we cross that line.”

“In my pocket,” Tom said.

The Rebs stole our money after Chattanooga—Union greenbacks was worth ten times theirs—but they let us keep most our personal things. Sarge reached under Tom and pulled out a watch with a tintype of his gal inside. She might’ve had the blessed soul of an angel, but Lord, that girl was plainer than a wood stump. Tom was no particular friend of mine, which I figure was why he never showed me her picture before. “She’s pretty,” I said. Sarge handed me the watch, then plugged up Tom’s wounds with strips he tore off his own shirt.

“No she ain’t,” Tom said, and his breath bubbled in his chest. “But she’s the light of this world.”

Then he left this world for the next.

Sarge turned Tom on his back and palmed his eyelids shut. The sun was just rising, but already the Georgia air was hot and wet as a swamp. Sarge squinted up at the pigeon roost. “Bastard,” he yelled, though he’d been fighting too long for real anger anymore.

“Mind your tongue, sir,” the sentry shot back. “Want someone to blame, blame him. Anybody else runs, I’ll give him the same. Now, throw him over. Wagon’ll be along directly.”

The boy talked tough, but his voice was shaky. Must be new to the war. He stood at his station and lifted his eyes to the sky.

***

Back in January when we heard we was being transferred from Danville down to Georgia, we was happier than swine in corn. It was so cold in Virginia that the Jim River had froze solid, and anyway, we was plenty sick of eating wharf rat soup. Georgia was farther away from our homes, but being deep South, it wasn’t so prone to villainous winters. The camp was big, they told us, with beautiful forest all round, wooden shacks for us to live in, and three squares a day.

I remember me and Tom riding down in the same car. We sure was pleased to be out of that cramped train and into the fresh warm air. But one look at the camp and Tom said, “Christ almighty, can this be hell?”

The forest was pretty, all right, but for the rest …

The prisoners was covered head to toe in all manner of filth, more skeleton than flesh. They had scurvy and the bloody flux and God only knows what other infirmities, forty-five thousand souls stuffed onto twenty-six acres. Weren’t no shacks, and not enough tents for a tenth of them. Those fevered boys had dug holes in the ground to get out of the sun. Nothing they could do ’bout rain but take it as it came. The stream they used for drinking, bathing, and relieving themselves was a sludgy ribbon of sewage and flies. For food they was given a brick of johnnycake a day and scraps of salted pork twice a week. Only the South was short of salt, so they tried preserving with ashes, leaving more maggot than meat.

The Rebs took a roll call of us Illinois men, then herded us into the stockade. The commandant, Captain Wirz, was surely the meanest scoundrel to ever walk the earth. He warned us right off about the Dead-Line. Since then I personally seen some twenty Yanks shot down making a run for it.

Wirz wouldn’t let us bury our dead, or even hold services. Soon as someone passed, we was to push him across the Dead-Line. A wagon clattered by every morning to collect the bodies. They was taken to a field and thrown in a hole like common beasts. We didn’t have room for the living, never mind the dead, but goddammit, we weren’t beasts. People deserve Christian respect without regard to the color of their coats.

Me and Sarge rolled Tom under the fence. Seeing his face in the sun, all handsome and dead, I thought about the news his sweetheart was gonna get. That poor gal had waited all this time, loving her Tom, hopeful, scared, heartsick with not knowing. Then one day a letter might come. First she’d think it was from him, and when it wasn’t, I could almost see her sink down onto her Daddy’s porch and look out at the hills and the crops and maybe a little barn, all the things she and Tom might’ve had themselves, and now wouldn’t.

Made me want to jump the fence myself, climb the pigeon roost and teach that sentry what killing meant. But there’d be no sense in that. Plenty of Reb gals had sat down on their porches, too. Sarge touched my shoulder and said, “Come on.”

I hummed a hymn for Tom. A quarter-hour later the wagon took him away and dropped him in the hole.

END 

 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

CHANCE

(Published under the title “Is, Not Oughta Been”

In Flash Fiction Online, 2010)

Time period: 1860s

Some folks see the hand of the Lord in happenings that nothing but dumb chance. They say He separate people or bring them together by His own plan. Well, I say God don’t bother Hisself with our daily affairs, so if you see a man in a place you don’t expect, then that just one of them things. Ain’t no beam of light breaking through the clouds or angels singing hallelujah. Just is, is all.

So when some Yankee officer come to the cook tent and say, hey you nigga boys got burial detail, me and the others from the colored regiment pick up our shovels and head out to the battlefield. This time of day the sun be in our eyes and the air stink with gunpowder and dead flesh, but everything’s peaceful now the fighting’s over.

And when I see only Rebs, I don’t think nothing of it. Yanks win a battle, they bury their own and leave the rest for us to throw in a pit, or just let them rot where they fall. Rebs win, they do the same.

The officers say it fine if we take a little something for ourselfs, some boots, a coat, a brick of hardtack. We don’t get to keep no weapons, though. Like we gon turn on them. Hell, they the ones giving us freedom, whether they think so or not.

And when after a hour of hauling carcasses I see the dead white face of my old massa’s son Zachariah, I just shrug and say huh. I knowed he was gon go off to war, and here be as good a place as any to meet the everlasting. Now, Eli, my friend who escaped north with me couple years back, he get hisself all worked up. He say, well sumbitch, looky who we got here, and he kick that poor dead boy in the belly. Can’t say as I blame him. Daddy massa cut off his toes first time he try to run. And he whipped all us whenever the mood was on him, even me, who was never a field hand, ’cause I was the only slave could read his children to sleep.

Borned who he was, maybe Zach woulda growed up mean too, but he never gon get the chance to be one thing or the other. I say Eli, the young massa’s past your righteous fury now, you can’t do nothing to him ain’t already been done. No reason to hate him no more.

And Eli yell, he ain’t nobody’s massa! You like him so good, you can go curl right up in the ground with him. And if you wanna hold his hand till kingdom come, that be you own business. But don’t act like he oughta be forgived just ’cause he got hisself killed. This cotton ball be burning in hell, and I say he getting off easy.

Then Eli, he stomp away to bury other massas’ sons.

The day’s about over and dusk light be turning Zach’s white skin pink and yellow. The flies is getting bothersome. Zach got a hole in his chest the size of my fist, but ain’t no marks on his face. Sweet Jesus, he is only a boy. He don’t look evil, he look like a angel sleeping. His cheeks be smooth as silk pillows. I sit down next to him and touch where his heart used to be, and for a short spell it just him and me and the setting sun.

I say, son, what make you people think like you do? What make you look like regular folk on the outside and stir you up so wrong inside? I got my own share of confessing to do, but I ain’t never owned nobody. What you gon say to the Lord? You best hope He judge a man for what he is and was and not what he mighta been.

Zach know the answers by now, or else there be no answers to know, but he just lay still, his dead fish eyes staring up into nothing.

END 

 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

MERCY

(Published in Frontier Tales, 2012)

Time period: 1860s

He was a handsome boy, even with his face contorted in a scream as my husband Jim applied the first stroke of the bone saw to his arm. We had long since used the last of our chloroform, and the whiskey had been insufficient for the task. The boy wore no uniform, but I believe he was a Rebel. He had lain among the dead on the field for the better part of the afternoon, until the North’s Negro gravediggers could carry him into our home in their makeshift shell and stretch him out upon the table. He was in a frightful state, feverish and weak from blood loss. A musket ball had shattered his right elbow, and his forearm dangled at an angle God did not intend. When in his delirium he cried out to Jesus and Mama and someone named Susannah, it was in a Southern accent.

We had been at this for hours, yet Jim worked tirelessly, pull after push after pull, the teeth of that saw grinding through the boy’s arm with a terrible rending sound.  Bone dust clogged air that was already a miasma of putrefaction, loosened bowels, and vomit. “Tighten that tourniquet,” he said, his halting speech the only indication of his weariness.  His skin oozed sweat, and he had to pause frequently to wipe his hands so they didn’t lose their grip.

I did as he instructed, and a few moments later the arm dropped to the floor. Mercifully, the boy had lost consciousness by then.  I had no squeamishness left in me as I grasped the mangled thing by the wrist and took it outside, stepping over other ailing soldiers. By now there was a trail of blood across my floor and out my door.  I threw the boy’s arm onto the pile of severed limbs by the well, where it dislodged a boot with a leg protruding to mid-shin.

 It was a hot July evening, the sun just setting on what, until today, had been our lovely Pennsylvania countryside. Within the house I had to steel myself against the moans and the sobbing, lest despair rob me of the strength to do what was necessary. At least out here it was quiet, the cannon and the rifles now silent, the awful Rebel yell subdued by exhaustion, sleep, or death.  

Still, I kept my eyes on my feet as I turned back to the door. I dared not look out to the field to see how many more unfortunates might yet need our assistance.

When I returned, two Union officers were lifting the boy from the table. They had removed their own coats to serve as bedding for him. They laid him down tenderly, then brought us the next patient. This one sounded as though he were inhaling liquid, such was the bubbling in his chest. He had a hole in his abdomen.

Jim looked at him and then at the officers. He shook his head. The officers set the man aside to await his appointment with the everlasting.

“Who’s next?” my husband said.

One of the officers placed his hand upon Jim’s shoulder. “You’ve done all you can for now, doc. Rest.”

This fight was not ours. We were simply ordinary folk caught between two armies.  Jim slumped into a chair and gazed at the handsome boy. “You gave him your coats. What if he’s a Reb?”

“The Rebs are out there,” the second officer said, pointing to the door. “In here they’re just men.”

I knew my husband held strong views against the Confederacy, but he just nodded and leaned his head back against the wall.

While he dozed the officers and I tended to the wounded. I mopped their foreheads and brought them fresh water from the well. Despite grievous suffering, the ones who could talk were polite and respectful, calling me ma’am or angel. I was no angel, but with our temporary respite, I could once more open my heart to them. I could hear their cries, and I could hold their hands.

Despite our efforts, though, the Lord chose to take many of our brave invalids. The handsome boy had lost a dreadful amount of blood on the battlefield, and when I came again to him, he was awake but pallid and slipping away. I thought to ask his name, but I would know it soon enough anyway. Men from both sides had taken to sewing their names inside their collars so they would not die anonymously.

“Hello,” I said.

He squinted at the stump that had once been his right arm, now ending in bloody rags six inches below his shoulder. His eyes then moved slowly to my right arm, my weary, aching, but whole arm, and for an instant I thought I saw envy or anger or accusation in his face. But then his expression softened, and he said in failing breath, “Susannah?”

I cradled his head to my bosom and, as he died, said, “Yes, my dear. It’s your Susannah.”

END 

 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE EXECUTION, BY HANGING, OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH

(Published in Flash Fiction Magazine, 2023)

Time period: 1850s

Mr. Thaddeus Sunseri and Mrs. Jonathan House maintained a respectable distance from one another as they conversed where Garden Court Street emptied into Boston’s North Square. They stood close enough to be heard but far enough apart to avoid the appearance of impropriety. It was an early Monday morning, and already a sea breeze carried with it the humidity that would mix with the hot July air and create an oppressive day.

“I am disappointed,” Mrs. House said. “Mr. Corbett usually preaches here on Sunday evenings. He’s been absent for two weeks.”

Sunseri laughed. “Old ‘Glory to God Man’ is a lunatic.”

Mrs. House adjusted her bonnet. “Harsh words, Mr. Sunseri. Idle gossip, nothing more.”

“Not gossip, madam. Corbett is a hatter on Washington Street, or so I’ve heard. Although I cannot fathom why, a high proportion of men in that profession find themselves separated from their reason.”

“Despite his reputation, I rather enjoy his sermons.”

“I have my own minister to consign me to Hell, thank you very much.”

“Language, Mr. Sunseri.”

“It is but the name of a place.”

“A very bad place, sir, wherein neither of us should like to reside.”

A hansom cab clattered to a stop across the street and deposited two well-dressed men in the Square. They spoke briefly, then went their separate ways. “Bankers,” Sunseri said. “I have never learned their names. I call them Smith and Jones.”

“Are you not also expected at work? Do not let me delay you.”

“Mrs. House—Elizabeth, if I may—there is no one by whom I would rather be delayed.”

The married woman’s cheeks flushed. “You are a scoundrel, sir.”

“That is my hope.”

“I must get to the market while the vegetables are ripe and the fish are not.”

Sunseri took a step toward her, allowing himself a brief glance toward the maritime inn just south of the Square. “The sun has not been up two hours. The vegetables and fish will keep. As will my employers.”

“What are you suggesting?” She was doing her best to act shocked, but a coy smile betrayed her.

“Must we be so careful every time, Mrs. House?”

“We must. My husband has an abhorrence for forgiveness.”

“As does my wife…”

A man in a black swallowtail coat approached them. Sunseri cleared his throat. “As I was saying, madam, Mr. Corbett is not mocked as the ‘Glory to God Man’ for nothing.”

“He is sincere in his love for the Lord.”

“Can an unbalanced man be sincere?”

Overhearing them, the passerby stopped. “Pardon me, I do not mean to intrude, but do you speak of Thomas Corbett?”

“The man I refer to is called Boston.”

“Thomas and Boston Corbett are one and the same.”

“The fellow who preaches here on Sunday nights?”

“That’s him. Have you not heard? He’s dead.”

Mrs. House gasped.

Sunseri mustered a shrug. “How?”

“I cannot say in the presence of the lady.”

Recovering her sensibility, Mrs. House said, somewhat indignantly, “I am a woman grown, sir. I needn’t be treated as a child.”

“I daresay you would not be so certain of that if you knew the truth.”

“Try me.”

“Very well. He was found on his bed in the boarding house where he rooms. The sheets were soaked in his blood.”

Mrs. House crinkled her nose but remained steadfast.

“It was murder, then?” Sunseri said. “And why not? Despite his delusions of goodness, he arouses resentment when he pronounces a judgement of Hell upon people he doesn’t know.”

The man in the swallowtail coat shook his head.  “This was no murder, sir. He kept a journal. The outrage was committed by his own hand. He did not intend to die, but die he did.”

“Perhaps I do not want to know after all,” Mrs. House sputtered.

“As I warned you.”

The man tipped his hat and started to depart, but Sunseri stopped him. “You cannot leave the story untold,” he said. “Mrs. House, if you would be about your business at the market…”

“Yes, of course.”

She proceeded to cross the Square, heading south. When she was out of their hearing, the man said, “But the market is to the west… Ah.”

Sunseri now felt the color rising in his cheeks. “About Mr. Corbett?”

“The ‘Glory to God Man’ indeed, as I heard you tell the lady. It seems that two Fridays past—July 16, I believe—Mr. Corbett was accosted by two women with, um, er… shall we say, impure motives.”

“We are both men here, sir. Whores?”

“Yes, yes. They solicited him with an indecent offer.”

“One would hardly expect a decent solicitation from whores.”

“But you see, sir, Mr. Corbett had been for some time gripped by the religious fervor he has become known for. He was disturbed by their words.”

A stiff wind came up out of the east, bringing with it the odor of horse droppings and brine.  “As any moral man would have been. An indignant no would have sufficed.”

The man looked furtively around, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “He did refuse, but according to his journal, he was … Oh, dear, how do I say it? Interested?”

Sunseri grinned. “Corbett was tempted by sins of the flesh? Corbett?”

“To his shame, yes. Seeking penance, he…”

“Killed himself?”

“Not on purpose, I told you. He meant only to, to, to … mutilate himself. ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee…’”

Sunseri’s breakfast gurgled unpleasantly in his stomach. “Except it wasn’t his eyes that offended.”

“It was not. He objective was to remove the twin sources of his temptation forever.”

“And in so doing he bled to death?”

The man nodded.

Sunseri shuddered. Elizabeth would be at the “market” by now. Good God, what a relief she’d been spared the details!

Fortunately, his own scruples, and hers, were less demanding than those of Boston Corbett.

Still….

END

THE GAPS IN THE STORM

 (Published in Short Story Journal,” 2001)

                This is no simple winter storm, it’s a full-blown blizzard, heavy snow, gusts to 60 miles per hour.  The temperature is dropping dangerously.  We scrape frost from the window and watch patches of whiteness obscure the city for long moments, tiny ice crystals, thicker than fog, driven to lethal force by an Alberta clipper.  It’s death to be caught outside in such weather.

            When the winds subside briefly, bits of the city peer through, snapshots in white and gray, here the flat geometry of a building, there the dark and ravaged branches of a tree, occasionally the headlights of a car as it struggles along nearly impassable streets.  Then another blast sweeps across our vision, and everything is lost.

            Although we can’t leave the restaurant, we seem less trapped here than suspended in time.  The four of us have converged on the Kitchen, our custom on Saturday afternoons, to discuss ideas introduced to us in college and still important now that the classes are over.  The rest of the week we are a CPA, an assistant manager at a video store, an insurance salesman, and a security guard, all working hard at our jobs.  But on this day we think of ourselves, almost, as one, four aspects of a single entity.  Here we have no ambitions, no pressure to meet quotas or deadlines, no angry clients, no spousal obligations, no cellphones.  Here we gather to talk, to wonder, to dream.

            The snowstorm has been predicted for a week, but we came anyway, not expecting it to intensify to such ferocity so quickly.  We thought we had time—and now we do, for we must stay, the four of us, the waitress, and the cook, until the storm whips its fury northeastward and the plows can dig us out.  That may be hours, perhaps a day.

            “Beauty is but a flower,” one of us challenges, “which wrinkles will devour.”

            “Brightness falls from the air,” another answers and in unison with the first, “Queens have died young and fair.  Dust hath clos’d Helen’s eye.  I am sick, I must die.”

            We all chirp in, “Lord have mercy on us.”

            The waitress, whose name is Jodie, knows us well enough to expect poetry.  “I hate Shakespeare,” she says.

            “Not Shakespeare,” we say, “but same era.  Thomas Nashe.”

            “What's this one called?” she sighs.

            “Summer’s Last Will and Testament.”

            “Oh,” she says, and we all glance out the window.  “Can I get you anything, coffee, hot chocolate?”

            “A flagon of ale, wench,” one of us says, “and roast pigeon.”

            Had the speaker not been female Jodie might have been offended, or at least pretended to be.  “This ain’t no tavern, milady, and we’re out of pigeon.”

            “No pigeon?” we cry.  “Scandalous!”

            At this point our conversation could degenerate into ribaldry, it’s happened before, jesting with fake British accents in what we imagine to be a proper Elizabethan manner.  This is not inappropriate on our winter’s day.  We have only to look outside.  Any time or place could lurk behind that curtain of white.  We needn’t be limited to now: who’s to say during our next respite, when a gap appears in the crystal mist, that the concrete geometry won’t give way to stone spires, that the headlights won’t become lanterns, that the transportation won’t whinny and neigh?  Perhaps a weary traveler, coming in from the cold, will announce, “Babington has gone to the gallows.”  Perhaps we will raise our glasses and toast the Queen, or lament the plot that failed and the poor man who had to die for that failure.  Either way we will discuss it.

            “Babington was a dupe,” one of us will say.

            “In a nonexistent plot,” another agrees.  “There was never any real threat from the Catholics.  The whole thing was manufactured by the government, the secret letters, the conspirators, all of it.  They created a plot just so they could crush it and frighten anyone who might be planning to rebel.  Someone had to die, and Babington was just stupid enough to let them use his name.”

            “You question the Queen’s methods?” the traveler demands, drawing his dagger.  “Do you doubt her wisdom?  Traitors doubt.  Subjects of the Crown, we who uphold the true faith, do not.”

            We look down, not wishing for trouble.  “No, sir, you mistake our meaning.  We simply regret that the affair had to end like this.  Babington was so young.  Was he drawn and quartered?”

            “That is the penalty for treason,” he says, reluctantly sheathing his blade, “and rightly so.  Tell the owner of this establishment that he should take care what kind of people he serves—he would not wish to become embroiled in matters of state, as Babington has learned to his sorrow.”  He glares at the four of us with contempt.  “Myself, I will not eat in such company.”

            The traveler is so confident, so assured, in his moral indignation.  He sees no gray.  We admire the simplicity of his world, the certainty.  Our own lives are more complex and less sure.  He pulls a cowl over his head and lurches through the door, into the storm.  The snow closes around him.

            “Scandalous!” we repeat to Jodie.  In lieu of pigeons and ale, ribaldry and fake British accents, we order two burgers, a pork chop, a chicken sandwich, three coffees and a tea.  As she takes our tickets to the cook, we watch her and wonder how her life will be.  She’s two months pregnant, young, and alone.

            “She's just a baby herself,” we comment, and then we can’t think of anything else to say about that.  It’s sad, and joyous, too.

            The restaurant usually pipes in music, but today it’s not.  In that absence, when we’re not speaking, there’s an eerie stillness.  Inside we’re insulated from the cold, but also from sound.  Only occasionally will the wind’s shrill moaning penetrate the glass.  Then we’ll turn our heads to the storm and be amazed at nature’s ghostly display, images raging silently on a screen.  That scene is hypnotic, an undulating flow of blindness and half-light.  (We wonder: caught in this Arctic nightmare, will our traveler regret his haughty disdain?  Probably not.  He’ll urge his mount forward, the poor beast already coated with ice, his own clothes saturated and starting to stiffen.)

            We’re the only customers here, the only people, it could be argued, foolish enough to be out on a day like this.  Jodie’s come back, and she invites herself to join us while we’re waiting for our food.  We’re delighted with the new blood.  She sits down and lights a cigarette.  “Do you mind?” she says, and we say no, though we do.  Pregnant women shouldn't smoke.

            “Ever been on a cruise?” she asks, her eyes on the blizzard.  “I was, once, in high school.  Well, it wasn’t really a cruise.  We were on one of those tours, you know, where the teachers say they’re showing you culture and history, but really they’re just chaperones?  Who pretend they’ve seen it all before, even though this is their first trip overseas, too, and they’re almost peeing their pants they’re so excited?  When you couldn’t care less what they want you to see, you just wanna scope the European guys?”

            Yes, we tell her, we took one of those in college, although instead of a teacher, our tour guide was an Austrian student, a few years younger than us.  We confess: we were interested in culture and history.  We could scope here at home.

            “Anyway,” Jodie continues, “we were sailing from Holyhead, that’s in Wales, to Ireland.  You know, on a ferry?  I was seasick at first, but then I got used to it and went out on the deck to watch.  I’d never been on that much water before.”  She nods toward the window.  “It was cool.  The weather was bad, only it was rain, not snow.  The water was black and choppy, and the rain was gray, and it was just like this, rain coming over the bow in sheets so thick you couldn’t see nothing, then it’d let up and there’d be all that black water behind the gray.  You know?”

            She exhales a plume of smoke that curls leisurely toward the ceiling and dissipates.  “Well, my friends thought I was nuts standing there on the deck like that, and they took me into the cafeteria and made me drink hot cocoa till I warmed up.  Probably woulda caught my death if they hadn’t come, but it was just the most beautiful thing I ever saw.  It was just like this.”

            We can see her black water in the gaps of the storm.  An iceberg appears where the building once stood.  Can it be an iceberg?  We point it out to her.

            “There’s no icebergs in the Irish Sea,” she begins, but we’re off on another challenge, and she doesn’t get a chance to finish.

            “Was Captain Smith trying to set a record crossing the Atlantic?” one of us thinks aloud.  “Was that why the ship didn’t slow down at night?”

            It takes a moment for the rest of us to catch the reference.  Ah: “And why did he ignore the ice warnings?”

            “If the lookout is given binoculars, he sees the ’berg in plenty of time and it’s an uneventful crossing.  Maybe Smith gets his record and retires in glory.”

            “Murdoch should’ve just rammed it.”

            “What are you nuts talking about?” Jodie asks, exasperated.  Yes, she knows us, but even now she has trouble following our train of thought.

            “Murdoch was the First Officer.  If he rams the iceberg instead of trying to miss it, there’s some damage, but the ship stays afloat.  By swerving, he does the only thing that can sink it: pops rivets and knocks holes in its side for three hundred feet under the water line.”

            “Wasn’t that just human nature, though?” another of us counters.  “He couldn’t foresee what was going to happen.  Nobody would choose to let a ship carrying 2200 people collide with an iceberg.  He had to try.”

            “Here’s human nature for you: they locked the third-class passengers below until most of first- and second-class were loaded onto the lifeboats!”

            “Well, it’s a moot point anyway if the Californian answers their distress flares.  What was it, ten miles away?  Five?  Nobody had to die.”

            We turn to Jodie.  “Some of the survivors were still alive in the early 2000s.  Terrible what they must have gone through, yet they’re always so gracious in the interviews.”

            “Think of the horror of watching fifteen hundred deaths, of surviving when so many didn’t.  Maybe you’re steerage and everything you own is on board when the ship goes down.  Worse, maybe your husband or child is there.  Imagine how you’d feel.  The ship split in two.”

            “You’re in a lifeboat on the ocean, the water is twenty-eight degrees, and somewhere in the night people are screaming, wailing, crying, praying.  You can’t see them, only hear their voices, and it’s a heart-wrenching sound.  You’ve moved away from the ship to avoid getting caught in the whirlpool when it goes down.”

            “Only there isn’t a whirlpool, it just slips under the water smooth and quick.  Meanwhile hundreds are drowning and freezing.  They’re calling for you to save them.  Your lifeboat is only half full.”

            “And so the question becomes: do you go back, knowing you can’t possibly rescue them all, knowing too that in their panic they may capsize your boat and kill you?  Do you risk your life to save a few, or cover your ears until the screaming stops, and so survive?”

            The cook’s voice booms over the intercom.  “Jodie, please.”

            “Your orders are up,” she says and grinds her cigarette into the ashtray.  She’s not impressed with philosophical mind games.  “You guys are weird.  Did this really happen, or what?  ’Cause if it did, you can’t change it, so it don’t matter what anybody shoulda done.  All that’s left is what they did do.”  She stands up.  “I tell you what, though, I’m never gonna go on a cruise again.”

            She leaves and our eyes, as usual, drift to the window.  Is it an iceberg that looms through the gap, or just flat concrete geometry?  Certainly there is no black background, no calm seas on a cold April night.  It’s all white, white interrupted by gray, inundated by white.

            We wonder if there are people in that building across the street—people who see our light and think of us as nighthawks in a daytime maelstrom, Nighthawks, like the Edward Hopper painting.  Do they consider us lonely, pathetic souls with nothing better to do, drawn to brightness, converging here to give color to our lives?  Or are we merely survivors?  We may well ask the same about them.  Maybe we should throw each other a lifeline and see who reaches for whom.

            “What if the snow were clouds,” one of us says, changing the subject, “and we’re not looking out, but up?”

            “Then we’re in a rocket!”

            “Pretty soon those clouds are going to part for us for good and there really will be blackness.  Infinite blackness.”

            “Not infinite.  We’ll have the stars.”

            “Infinite blackness and infinite light, too.”

            That panorama explodes before us, distances so vast our minds can’t hold it.  We are weightless in the void.  Galaxies swirl into existence out of superheated gases left over from the Big Bang.  Stars wink, flare, fade or are born anew.  We’re seeing the past—not only the past, but somewhere out there, the Beginning.  What are we, measured against the wheel of heaven?  Religions teach us we’re at the center of this wheel, that we’re the hub around which everything spins, but we’re not at the center, not at all.

            We think of our Elizabethan traveler, moving away from us at the speed of silence, dropping his shoulder to the wind and once again glancing back at our faint, or only remembered, glow.  Navigators on ships, before the days of compasses, used to find their position by using the stars, dead reckoning.  Are we a point of light to this man, guiding him not toward but from?  We could still bring him home if he’d let us, if only he had the humility to turn around.  But no, Babington has been torn apart and can never be untorn.  The traveler must continue.  He knows his path.

            We do not yet know ours.

            “Where should we go?” we ask.  “We have unlimited worlds.”

            “But not unlimited time.  The nearest star is how many light years away?”

            “The speed of light is no barrier.  Thought is instantaneous.”

            We agree and find a planet of fantastic cities, culled from the memories of science fiction novels we’d enjoyed in college.  For convenience we create an atmosphere with the proper mix of oxygen and nitrogen and populate the cities with humanoids who speak English and know our Earth histories by heart.  We envision technologies we can’t envision, civilizations spanning solar systems and benevolent governments to rule over them.  We are the travelers here.  Perhaps we’ll enter a restaurant and talk of Watergate, or Teapot Dome, or Five Year Plans, and the locals will cock their heads in amusement.  “It was nothing,” they'll say, or, “Yeah, you really screwed that one up.”  Things are always viewed better from a distance.

            Our world is perfectly conceived.  We marvel at its luxuries and enlightenment: a free society without superstition or rituals or need.  We ache for what we could become in such a place, where ideals have replaced strategic plans.  This is a startling contrast to what we know.  If only we could live to see it.

            Jodie interrupts our speculation with food.  She distributes the burgers, the pork chop, the chicken sandwich.  “Look,” she says, “this stuff you talk about?  You guys are all married, right?” We nod: three wives and a husband among us, and two kids.  “Well, isn't that enough?”

            “Sometimes it’s too much,” we say, and sometimes too little, and seldom just right.  Always the past or the future calls us, never now.  That’s why we have Saturday afternoons in the Kitchen.  Because Monday will come.

            She shakes her head, shrugs.  “Anyway, I just checked the parking lot.  Our cars are drifted over.  I mean, you can’t even see them.  We’re not going anywhere.  There’s no blankets here, so we’ll have to sleep in the booths and use our coats.”  She rubs her stomach with both hands.  She’s not showing yet.  “Am I gonna have to listen to you idiots all night?”

            Jodie is eighteen or nineteen and unmarried, but if parenthood concerns her she doesn’t say so.  We ask her about it.

            “I just want to have my baby,” she says.  Then she indicates the phone by the entrance.  “‘Course, none of you was smart enough to bring your cells, so you probably need to make some calls.”

            One by one we do, to tell our spouses we’re okay.  The entrance door is all glass and frost has built up on its perimeter, leaving an irregular circle in the center.  The blizzard rages on outside, and in the gaps a world of stone passes by, a luxury liner speeds toward an iceberg, a starship sails the endless sky.  In the snow our traveler’s mount has stumbled and will not rise.  Zealous and inflexible, the man chose conviction over comfort.  At least he’s always moved in certainty: his belief in his Queen and his God has seen him through.  But not here.  Here the storm overwhelms him.  He drops to his knees, pats his dying horse.  Resting his face on the animal’s heaving side, he listens to its final furious breaths.  Then, resigned, he lies down with his trusting servant, its heat radiating away into the wind.  Perhaps this will seem right to him.  Does his faith ever waver, now, when there are no causes left?  We cannot know, for the curtain of white engulfs him, and he’s gone.

            The four of us have watched the blizzard from the shelter of the restaurant.  Our meals steam on the plates, our drinks are hot, our families are home and safe.  We have discussed and wondered and dreamed, imagining the wind to be some kind of metaphor for time.  Sometimes we see clearly, sometimes not at all.  Eventually, we know, the single entity that is us will have to split up, each following a different path.  That inevitability saddens us, but the disquiet we feel isn’t the fear of separation or failure, or even death, but of uncertainty.  And the wind isn’t just time, the wind is life, and it blows by quickly.

END

A History of the “Star-Spangled Banner”

Everyone knows that Francis Scott key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was on September 14, 1814, to be exact, during the War of 1812 while awaiting the results of the Battle of Baltimore, in which British ships bombarded Fort McHenry. When Key saw the American flag still waving in the morning, he was inspired to write his poem.

But he didn’t call it “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Instead, he titled it “The Defence of Fort M’Henry.”

The tune was lifted from what people refer to as an old British drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” There’s no doubt about the origin of the tune, but whether it was a drinking song, well, judge for yourselves. The melody was written by John Stafford Smith and the lyrics by Ralph Tomlinson for an 18th-century London social club called the Anacreontic Society. The Anacreontic Society was a group of amateur musicians, all men, who got together and did what groups of men frequently do. “To Anacreon in Heaven” was the club’s official song. Here are its lyrics. Well, there is a lot of talk about drinking in it, and Bacchus, of course, was the Roman god of wine and intoxication…. I left the spelling and punctuation as it was originally.

TO ANACREON IN HEAVEN

O Anacreon in Heav’n, where he sat in full Glee,

A few Sons of Harmony sent a Petition,

That he their Inspirer and Patron would be;

When this answer arriv’d from the Jolly Old Grecian

“Voice, Fiddle, and Flute,

“no longer be mute,

“I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot,

“And, besides I’ll instruct you, like me, to intwine

“The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.”

  ****

The news through Olympus immediately flew;

When Old Thunder pretended to give himself Airs.

“If these Mortals are suffer’d their Scheme to persue,

“The Devil a Goddess will stay above Stairs.

“Hark! already they cry,

“In transports of Joy,

“Away to the Sons of Anacreon we’ll fly,

“And there, with good Fellows, we’ll learn to intwine

“The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.

****

“The Yellow-haired God and his nine fusty Maids

“From Helicon’s banks will incontinent flee,]

“Idalia will boast but of tenantless Shades,

“And the bi-forked a mere Desart will be

“My Thunder no fear on’t,

“Shall soon do it’s Errand,

“And dam’me! I’ll swinge the Ringleaders, I warrant.

“I’ll trim the young Dogs, for thus daring to twine

“The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.”

****

Apollo rose up, and said, “Pry’thee ne’er quarrel,

“Good King of the Gods, with my Vot’ries below:

“Your Thunder is useless”—then shewing his Laurel,

Cry’d “Sic evitabile fulmen you know!

“Then over each head

“My Laurels I’ll spread;

“So my Sons from your Crackers no Mischief shall dread,

“Whilst snug in their Club-Room, they jovially twine

“The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.”

 ****

Next Momus got up with his risible Phiz,

And swore with Apollo he’d chearfully join—

“The full Tide of Harmony still shall be his,

“But the Song, and the Catch, and the Laugh shall be mine.

“Then, Jove,be not jealous

“Of these honest fellows.”

Cry’d Jove, “We relent, since the Truth you now tell us;

“And swear by Old Styx, that they long shall intwine

“The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.”

 ****

Ye Sons of Anacreon, then join Hand in Hand;

Preserve Unanimity, Friendship, and Love!

‘Tis your’s to support what’s so happily plann’d;

You’ve the sanction of Gods, and the Fiat of Jove.

While thus we agree,

Our Toast let it be.

May our Club flourish happy, united, and free!

And long may the Sons of Anacreon intwine

The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.

I’ve seen the original music to “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and it is strikingly similar to the tune we now know as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Oddly enough, Francis Scott Key seemed to like that melody a lot, because “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” wasn’t even the first poem he used it with. An earlier poem of his, “When the Warrior Returns,” was also set to that music.

Within a couple of months of its composition, “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” was renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and printed as sheet music, often with the note “Sung to the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven.”

Although only the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is the only one ever sung now, or ever, really, the poem originally had four verses. Here they are:

THE DEFENCE OF FORT M’HENRY

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Of course, it was the third verse that did, and still does, cause controversy. Some argue the reference to slavery implied support for that “peculiar institution.” Others say it was a reference to the American slaves who were promised their freedom by the Brits if they’d fight for the old Union Jack (the British flag) against the United States. The debate continues.

Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” was popular almost from the time Key first wrote his poem, it wasn’t until 1918 that a bill was introduced in Congress to make it America’s national anthem. That bill failed, as did six subsequent attempts. It took over five million signatures on a petition to finally get the bill through in 1931, and it’s been our national anthem ever since. Before that, such songs as “Hail, Columbia,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and “America the Beautiful” served as de facto anthems.

All of the above information is true (but don’t take my word for it–look it up!). The only opinion I’ll express is this: I don’t much care for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Musically, the octave and a fifth range is hard for most people to sing, and lyrically it’s just a bit too, um, bombastic for my tastes. I’m not a religious guy, but I’d still have preferred “America the Beautiful.” I find its melody much more pleasant, and hey, I’d rather sing about beauty than about blowing stuff up.

But to each his or her respective own.

The Jefferson Bible

Many people who would like religion taught in public schools often cite the fact that the First Amendment does not actually use the words “separation of church and state.” This is true. It doesn’t. However, on October 7, 1801, the Baptist Association (Church) of Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to newly elected president Thomas Jefferson to ask his views on church and state. The Danbury Church thought church and state should remain separate.

To this Jefferson replied on January 1, 1802, and I quote:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

This letter, in fact, has been cited in two Supreme Court cases which affirmed the separation of church and state: Reynolds vs the United States (1879) and Everson vs. the Board of Education (1947).

Jefferson’s letter concerned the First Amendment. However, for people who bought into the idiotic conspiracy nonsense that Obama was a Muslim (he wasn’t and isn’t), it wouldn’t have mattered if he was, because here’s what the Constitution itself says about federal office holders. It comes in Article VI, clause 3:

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

In other words, the government can’t require its leaders to adhere to any (or no) religion as a qualification for office. Constitutionally it’s perfectly acceptable for Muslims, atheists, or any other person of faith or lack thereof to hold office.

But back to Jefferson. My religious friends might also be dismayed that, while a theist, Jefferson wasn’t a Christian in the sense that many people define the term. He admired the teachings and morals of Jesus, but thought all references to the supernatural were nonsense. To this end, twice he cut and pasted sections of the New Testament (KJV) to construct his own little book. It contained the sayings of Jesus, but excluded references to the virgin birth, angels, miracles, the Resurrection, and any passages that portrayed Jesus as divine.

His goal was to clarify the teachings of Jesus, which he believed provided “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

Explaining why he edited out the supernatural parts, he said, “In extracting the pure principles which [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves.”

He constructed the first version of this book in 1804, but that copy has since been lost. He wasn’t satisfied with it anyway, so he made what he considered a better version in 1820. That version still exists in the Smithsonian. Although I don’t normally buy reproductions of old books, I do have a facsimile of this one.

Jefferson never called it a Bible, but rather, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. However, it is now commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible. (Don’t take my word for it, BTW. You can look it up. A digital version of the entire text is available online, courtesy of the Smithsonian.)

That said, Jefferson never intended it for the public, but rather for his own private use.

So just a gentle reminder: when claiming all the Founding Fathers were Christians, remember that Thomas Jefferson took scissors and a razor and literally cut a Bible apart, then glued the fragments into a book he found more acceptable.

Historical Counting Errors, Popes and Kings

Papal trivia: Although the last Pope named John was number XXIII (23), there have actually only been 21 Popes named John. John XVI (16) was an antipope later removed from the list and John XIV (14) was listed twice due to a medieval counting error.

There have also been kingly counting errors. Edward I of England was actually the fourth king named Edward (after Edward the Elder, Edward the Martyr, and Edward the Confessor). However, the first three ruled before the Norman Conquest in 1066. Thus, Edward I was the first Edward after the Conquest, so I’ll give them a pass on that. Then, there was no Edward V (5). The boy who would have been Edward V was one of the Princes in the Tower who was (probably) murdered by his uncle Richard III in 1483. When his father, Edward IV (4) died, his son should have succeeded him, but since he was in the process of becoming dead, he was never crowned. Therefore, when Henry VIII’s son Edward succeeded him in 1547, he did so as Edward VI (6), even though he should have been the 5th (or the 8th if you want to count the three pre-Conquest Edwards).

A Brief History of Three Traditional English Ballads

I’ve written original musical arrangements of three traditional ballads, “Greensleeves,” “Scarborough Fair,” and “Auld Lang Syne.” Those scores, if you’re interested, may be found by clicking on the links given below. The arrangements have in common four-part choral harmony and an acoustic guitar accompaniment. “Auld Lang Syne” also has a string quartet, “and “Scarborough Fair” has a string quartet and flute.

All of these songs are in public domain, and so are fair game to anybody who wants to use them. The same cannot be said for my arrangements of them, however. Those are protected by copyright. At some point in my blog I’ll talk about copyright laws, particularly as they pertain to material in the public domain.

Here’s a little history of the three songs.

GREENSLEEVES

Almost everybody has heard the tune to “Greensleeves.” Without taking a scientific survey, I’m guessing most people know it better as the Christmas carol, “What Child Is This.” However, that poem, by William Dix, wasn’t written until 1865, while the melody goes back at least as far as 1580.

Speculation has it that the original song was written by Henry VIII, perhaps for Catherine of Aragon or Ann Boleyn. There is no evidence for this, but it makes for a good story. Henry died in 1547, thirty-three years before “Greensleeves” saw print. While it is true that folk songs often exist for decades or centuries before they’re written down, there just isn’t anything to indicate that Henry composed it. That doesn’t mean he didn’t, just that it can’t be proved.

The original lyrics to “Greensleeves,” printed below, are light years away from “What Child Is This.” While the song is about a spurned lover who wants his lady back, the title—which is used as the lady’s name—is essentially a dirty joke. In Elizabethan England green was symbolic for sexual promiscuity. A lady might have green sleeves or a green gown because she lay down in the grass to, um, shall we say, “engage in the process of procreation.”

Greensleeves

Alas, my love you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
Delighting in your company.

Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves, my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves?

I have been ready at your hand
To grant whatever thou would’st crave;
I have waged both life and land
Your love and goodwill for to have.

Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves, my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves?

Thy petticoat of slender white
With gold embroidered gorgeously;
Thy petticoat of silk and white
And these I bought gladly.

Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves, my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my lady Greensleeves?

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a friend/rival/acquaintance of Shakespeare’s, wrote “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” in the late 1580s or early 1590s, although it wasn’t published until 1599. You may find it below. It’s one of the most famous love poems in the English language, and it’s contemporaneous with the printed appearance of “Greensleeves.” For that reason, it seems like a natural that somebody would have set Marlowe’s words to the tune of “Greensleeves,” particularly since there is some similarity in lyrics. Apparently no one has, though.

Well, I’ve filled in that gap.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd’s swains shall dance and sing,
For they delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

You can find the score by clicking here:

Passionate Shepherd

SCARBOROUGH FAIR

First of all, let’s be clear about one thing: Paul Simon did not write “Scarborough Fair.” He and Art Garfunkel did write “Canticle,” the counter-melody in their classic recording. “Canticle,” in turn, was adapted from a Paul Simon poem, “The Side of the Hill.” But the base song, “Scarborough Fair,” had existed for over 250 years before Paul Simon was born. It first appeared in print around 1670, and probably existed for at least a hundred years before that.

The song has a myriad of variants. Oddly, neither “Scarborough Fair,” nor the famous refrain, “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme” were in the original lyrics. Those both derive from the 19th century. Other place names have been used, such as Wittingham Fair, and some versions don’t mention a place at all. While the herbs parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme have symbolic meaning in matters of love, and so fit the meaning of the song, they were probably a corruption of earlier lyrics, such as “Every rose grows merry with time.”

The plot of “Scarborough Fair”—that of former lovers giving each other impossible tasks before they will reconcile—seems to have been lifted from an old Scottish ballad, “The Elfin King.” That was a common theme in English folk ballads.

The song is often sung as a duet between the two ex-lovers.

Here are the lyrics, circa the 19th century, and their impossible tasks. I’ve left out “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” and “”for s/he once was a true love of mine,” because those are repeated in the second and fourth lines of every verse.

Scarborough Fair

Male part:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Remember me to the one who lives there.
(Translation: If you see my ex-, say “Hi” for me)

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Without any seam or needlework.
(Make me a seamless shirt without sewing it)

Tell her to wash it in yonder well,
Where never sprung water or rain ever fell.
(Wash the shirt in a dry well)

Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn,
Which never bore blossom since Adam was born.
(Then dry it on a branch that never grew)

Female part:

Now he has asked me questions three,
I hope he’ll answer as many for me.
(Oh, Yeah? Well, he needs to do these things for me first)

Tell him to buy me an acre of land,
Between the salt water and the sea strand.
(Buy me land that lies between the ocean and the beach)

Tell him to plough it with a ram’s horn,
And sow it all over with one peppercorn.
(Plow the land with the horn of a ram and plant the entire field using a single seed)

Tell him to sheer it with a sickle of leather,
And bind it up with a peacock’s feather.
(Harvest the crop with the sole of a shoe and bundle it together using a feather)

Tell him to thrash it on yonder wall,
And never let one corn of it fall.
(Thrash it against the wall without breaking the stalks or losing a kernel)

When he has done and finished his work.
Oh, tell him to come and he’ll have his shirt.
(Once he does these things, he can have his damn shirt)

My arrangement of “Scarborough Fair,” just called “Scarborough,” retains the initial verse (“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?” etc.) as the first and last verses, but I wrote my own lyrics for the middle three verses. No impossible tasks in my version, just sad, unrequited love. You may find the score here:

Scarborough

Like “Greensleeves,” the original ballad is in public domain, so I can do anything I want with it—except, of course, copy other modern arrangements, such as Paul Simon’s.

AULD LANG SYNE

The Scotsman Robert Burns is credited with writing the poem “Auld Lang Syne” in 1788. However, at least the first verse and the chorus existed long before Burns. Below are some of the lines a fellow named James Watson wrote in 1711. (And Watson’s version itself was probably “borrowed” from one or more earlier poems.)

Compare those with Burns’ version, which appear below those.

Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,
and never thought upon;
The flames of Love extinguished,
and fully past and gone.

On old long syne my Jo,
On old long syne,
That thou canst never once reflect,
On old long syne.

The origin of the tune is lost in the mists of antiquity, but it was a traditional melody, well known in England and Scotland for a century or more before Burns’ time.

Here are Burns’ original lyrics in his Scottish dialect.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stoup!
and surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.

Now, to a lot of folks, the Scottish dialect is, well, gibberish. In my arrangement, I modernized and Americanized the lyrics, giving them a decidedly sadder tone.

The choral arrangement doesn’t do anything terribly unexpected, although there are a couple of spots where I swapped out the expected B flat chord for an E7-9. Sounds pretty cool.

The other thing I did was add quite a bit of original music. There’s some of that in both “Greensleeves” and “Scarborough Fair,” too, but almost half of “Auld Lang Syne” is my own composition. The score is here:

Auld Lang Syne

Through a Dark Age

(Published in the Wapsipinicon Almanac, 2009)

On the night my brother died I saw a skunk crossing a road inside the city limits. The squad car in which I was riding had just turned off University Avenue onto Progress, where the cities of Waterloo and Cedar Falls merge. The skunk staggered as it walked, and I commented to the officers that it must be rabid, but they only looked at each other with sad bemusement. It was Monday, July 13, 1981, at 3:30 a.m., still nearly eighty degrees, and I was freezing. 

“Can you crank up the heat?” I asked. 

“Sure,” said the bald cop with unfeigned sympathy, switching off the air and twisting the knob to hot. A thin crescent of gray illuminated the crown of his head in the lights of an oncoming delivery truck. The car’s cherries flashed outside the windows, engulfing us in a pulsing aura of red and blue. The policemen were taking me to my aunt Joan’s house, where family and friends were converging.

 “Is there anything we can do?” asked the other officer. He was a wiry fellow with dark hair and a moustache. Yeah, take me back four hours in time and let me warn him. I didn’t say this, of course, for it would have sounded like sarcasm.

We were now on the side streets that lead to the Waterloo subdivision known as Alabar Hills. This was the place of my childhood, a place transformed and embellished by memory into a wonderland of snake, frogs, turtles, and ground squirrels, where salamanders were a currency that could be bartered for anything, where Tom and Bob and Kevin and I marched in imaginary armies, fighting dinosaurs and villains with penknives and stick-guns, where Kristi nursed our wounds with prescient earnestness, and where an adventuresome neighbor girl once showed us hers when we showed her ours. The Alabar Hills of my past was a Shangri La of such carefree joy that every subsequent event in my life has been measured against it, and found wanting.

In those days we were a family of six. My parents, Wayne and Peg, had had four kids, Mike (1952), me (1956), Cindy (1959), and Patti (1961). We ate supper together, just like Ozzie and Harriet. We marveled at Flipper on the first color TV in the neighborhood. We played with our dog Bandit. We wrestled and fought, and every summer from 1963-1971 we went on vacations to places like Washington D.C., Yellowstone, and Mexico. Otherwise I didn’t hang out much with my siblings then, nor for many years afterward. There’s nothing odd about this. At that age siblings are rarely friendly, let alone friends. As adults we may wonder why this is, why we didn’t at least make the effort. We realize now that we won’t have each other forever—but who knows at 8 what he might lament at 25? Happiness can’t be hoarded in advance and then parceled out later to dull life’s traumas. It’s not a winning bet that can hedged against future losses: our lack of foresight can only be recognized in hindsight.

It was regret, as much as grief, that nagged me as I was trundled toward Joan’s house that sultry July morning, regret that I didn’t say more and do more and feel more when I’d had the chance. At seven minutes after midnight on Monday, July 13, our family of six had dwindled to five. That was the exact minute my brother Mike, a Waterloo police officer, died after he and his partner were shot during a routine domestic call. They had asked some people to turn their music down, and were killed for it. His partner had died instantly, Mike fourteen minutes later.

 Ironically, perhaps, the movie Dead Man’s Curve had just ended. I had turned off the TV around 1:00 a.m., then listened to the radio in my Cedar Falls apartment as I typed a letter to a friend. It struck me later in the police car, and has bothered me ever since, that had I been paying attention to the radio I might have heard about the tragedy on the news. Not the names, of course—we had not been notified yet—but that two Waterloo policemen had been slain. As it was, I pecked away at the keys in blissful ignorance, using the sounds of the radio as background noise. Around 3:15 a.m. somebody knocked on my door. I was surprised to find two Cedar Falls patrolmen standing in the hallway. My first thought was that my neighbors above had complained about the banging of my old manual typewriter. That, however, was not the reason for the officers’ visit. 

They said I should sit down, then told me Mike had been shot. And when I asked the question I dreaded to ask, the question I had to ask, their answer was three simple words: He is dead.

It’s a curious thing what happens when a person receives news like this. Some, I’m sure, must weep hysterically, or collapse in a faint. Some vomit and scream (as Dad did). Some sit and quietly sob (Mom). Perhaps some go into denial. Others pray. I did none of these things. Instead, all of my senses suddenly became super attenuated, surreal, as if I were experiencing first-hand Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory, with its eerily melting clocks. Every sensation, every detail, became intensely clear, yet distorted like images in a carnival mirror. I noticed everything and felt nothing.

Clad only in blue gym shorts, I pulled on a pair of white painter pants, tennis shoes, and a polo shirt with red and blue stripes, then walked out to the police car in that sticky summer heat and began to shiver. The officers helped me into the back seat. It was shock, certainly, that made me so hyper-alert, that made me note the skunk and the light on the top of the policeman’s head. It was shock that made me ask aloud why it couldn’t have been me instead of Mike. I had no wish to die, but that night I meant it. He had a wife and two young sons. I was single with, at the time, no romantic prospects. He was an upstanding citizen with an important job, maybe the most important job; I was a hanger-on with a college degree working part time at the university library and taking occasional graduate classes while I waited for my life to begin.

I shed no tears, then. But I was cold. So cold.

I saw the skunk on Progress. We passed Pumpkin Park on Sager Avenue. At Saint Andrew’s Church, I recalled how as kids my friends and I used to “drown out” ground squirrels from their holes in the churchyard. (This method of capture was harmless to the rodents, although it did require getting them wet, which annoyed them.) The pastor at Saint Andrew’s paid us 25¢ a head to take them away so he wouldn’t have to poison them. We removed the creatures during the day, then released them back into the churchyard at night so we could recapture them the next day and collect our quarters again. It was a lucrative little enterprise until the pastor caught on.

Was it irreverent, disrespectful, even, to reminisce about childhood shenanigans at a time like that? Ground squirrels, when my older brother, my only brother, had just been murdered? Conning quarters, as I was on my way to face heartbroken parents and grieving relatives? Or was there something more, or less, to my reflections than that? Something as simple as regret that my friends and I had never invited Mike to join us in the churchyard?

On the other hand, I had not been to Alabar Hills for a long while, although I only lived a few miles away. When better to think of my days of innocence and petty piracies? Mike may not have shared those adventures with me, but he shared something far more important: the times. He wove threads through the tapestry of my past, always present to add a bit of color here, a texture there, a frame, a shape, a feel, a look. Mike was there, a part of the whole without whom the Alabar Hills of my recollection could not have existed. And so, for a moment on that terrible, terrible night, he gave me back pleasant memories, made bittersweet by the circumstances.

As we turned right onto Sheerer Street I saw that a dozen or more cars had already gathered at Joan’s house, halfway up the block. My parents were going to be the hardest, facing their grief and knowing there was nothing, nothing, I could do to ease their pain. How must my father feel, I wondered, having spent twenty-five years as a Waterloo police officer without once having drawn his weapon, only to have his son gunned down at 28?

The officers dropped me off at Joan’s, wished me well, and drove away. The front light was on, and as I entered the door Dad rushed to me, wrapped me in a bear hug, and cried, “Mike’s dead!”

“I know, Dad,” was all I said, all I could say. I found out later that he had wanted to break the news to me himself.

Always an emotionally demonstrative man, he dashed through Joan’s house, back and forth, unable to contain his dreadful grief. “I was so goddamned proud of him,” he shouted over and over. Then he’d rush outside to throw up. When he came back in the cycle repeated.  

Mom was quieter. She sat with Joan, her sister, at the kitchen table, sobbing softly. Coffee cups steamed untouched in front of both women. No mother should outlive her child. Her eldest son had just been murdered, so she had every right to self-pity. Yet her concern was not for herself, but for Mike and his family. “Now he won’t get to see his boys grow up,” I heard her say. That was Mom.  

I mostly sat on the couch under a blanket as more relatives straggled in. Each new arrival brought more tears. My sisters didn’t get to Joan’s until around 4:30 a.m., and Dad did break the news to them. They’d known only that Mike had been shot and was in the hospital.

 “How is he?” Cindy asked.

 “He didn’t make it,” Dad said, wrapping his arms around both girls.

 “Oh, no,” Patti whimpered, and once more the crying erupted, spreading throughout the house like a round, first my sisters, then each relative in turn, adding his or her own voice, repeating and reinforcing this song of mourning.

Again I was powerless to comfort them. It wasn’t until several years later that I realized they didn’t need me to comfort them. Grief is an intimate and private emotion that every person ultimately must come to terms with alone. For the most part, closure comes from within, not without.

 I also learned that in trying to be strong for others, I was refusing to acknowledge my own feelings. Repressing one’s pain allows it to fester and grow beneath the surface, changing it from honest, cleansing grief into something uglier, more insidious, and, if possible, more devastating. But in July of 1981 that rough beast—depression—was still almost a year in my future. On the night of my brother’s death I was naively agonizing over my inability to help my family.

 I was heartened somewhat by a conversation between my Dad’s brother Dale and aunt Joan. Both devout Christians, the two were long-time friends. At some point they found a chance for a quiet word together in the kitchen. Joan told Dale that Mike had accepted Jesus and so had been saved, which I hadn’t known. Dale wept with relief. I am not a religious person. Unlike my aunt and uncle, I harbored no hope of ever seeing my brother again, in this world or the next. But at that moment I was gratified that their faith gave them a measure of peace. They believed they would see Mike again. How could I not be envious of that?

 Mike’s wife Denise and their two boys, Michael and Travis, were with Denise’s parents in Cedar Falls. At about 6:00 a.m. Dad, Mom, my sisters, and I drove over to see them. Denise had finally gotten to sleep, but woke when we arrived and immediately began weeping. The boys were playing, too young to understand what had happened to their father. This was demonstrated two days later at the visitation, in what was to me the most heartbreaking incident of the entire ordeal. My brother, dressed in his favorite blue leisure suit, lay in his casket in the back of the parlor, his face calm, almost as if he were sleeping. Little Travis, then 3, rushed up the aisle and grabbed my finger, pulling me toward Mike and saying excitedly, “Come and look at my Daddy.” Come and look at my Daddy. So innocent, so beautiful, and so completely unaware, a small boy in a green outfit asking me with such pride to look at his dead father. Who could witness such a scene and not be moved? I wish the killer could have seen Travis that day, and Michael, too. Perhaps then he would realize the magnitude of what he had destroyed.

We stayed with them for a couple of hours, numbly trying to wrest sense of the senseless. Then it was time to make Mike’s funeral arrangements. Dad and Mom dropped my sisters and me at Joan’s again and left to perform that grim task. 

I may have eaten something, may have gotten some sleep, but by 1:30 Monday afternoon I was awake and restless. Unable to remain idle, I decided to walk through the old neighborhood, reminiscing about snakes, frogs, turtles, and ground squirrels, and the exchange rate for salamanders. That Monday was hot and humid, as Sunday had been. As I headed south on Sheerer toward Downing I thought about irony. It was ironic that Mike wore his bullet-proof vest 90% of the time but hadn’t when he needed it most. He’d taken it off because of the heat. Had the night not been so hot, he might have survived, for the fatal wound was to his chest. It was more ironic that he’d been there at all, answering that domestic call. He hadn’t been scheduled to work, but agreed to come in for someone who needed time off. I have never blamed the officer in whose place my brother died. It wasn’t his fault. He had requested the night off not to avoid death but because he had something else to do, something routine, adjusting his schedule as people in every profession do all the time.  

As I turned right onto Downing I started playing the “if only” game. “If only” Mike had not gone into work, “if only” he had worn his vest, or, for that matter, “if only” his killer had never been released on parole in Kentucky and come to Waterloo.

 Maybe there’s a parallel universe where “if only” comes true. In that universe Mike stays home with Denise and the boys and watches TV. Yes, but then, just before Dead Man’s Curve comes on, he impulsively decides to take Michael and Travis to a convenience store for a soda. En route his Blazer is broadsided by a semi, instantly killing all three.

In another universe they get back safely from the convenience store, but one of the boys plays with a lighter, ignites a curtain, and fire guts their trailer home. In those universes Mike’s grieving brother laments “if only” they hadn’t gone out that night, or “if only” they had kept the lighter out of the reach of little hands. Or “if only” Mike had been scheduled to work…

After all, what bad could happen to a cop in Waterloo, Iowa?

Perhaps there are an infinite number of scenarios in an infinite number of universes, and somewhere one may exist where everything always goes right and there is no need to play the “if only” game. But that is not this universe. Horrible as Mike’s murder was, we can never know how many other tragedies were averted when he reported to work that night. What happened, happened. There is only what is and what was. It is pointless to wonder what might have been, because what might have been, wasn’t.

That was difficult to grasp on the afternoon following my brother’s murder. I turned right onto Scott Avenue, the street where I’d spent the first ten years of my life. As the sun beat down and I approached my old home, I noticed how little things had changed since I had last lived here, fifteen years before. The two elm trees that used to stand in the front yard had been removed, but otherwise everything was much as I remembered. Pausing momentarily at the foot of the sloping driveway where I had once ridden my bike, where I had watched a garter snake give birth to live young, I was surrounded not by ghosts but by the actual physical trappings of my youth. Mike and I had roughhoused in this front yard. Our dog Bandit romped in the back. Tom lived next door, Kevin across the street, Bob at the end of the block, and Kristi around the corner. All gone now, all of them, out of my life by death or distance. Only the buildings remained. I was struck then by the immense gulf that separates one age of our lives from another. We can walk the same ground and never touch the place we knew.

Mike had passed away. Every memory and every future experience would be forever filtered through that stark fact. The rose in the glasses had lost its bloom.

Still, all was not darkness on that sunny day, nor in the days that followed. Many uplifting events transpired in the aftermath of the shootings, a kind act here, a compassionate word there. Perhaps the most spectacular were the thousands of people, from all walks of life, who after Mike’s funeral lined the streets along the route to the cemetery, bowing their heads as his hearse passed. It was a touching gesture of respect, one Mike would have appreciated. His family certainly did.

The most personal of these experiences took place during my sojourn through my past that Monday afternoon. The parents of a young woman named Paula lived near the intersection of Scott and Sager. Paula had resided in Alabar Hills when I did, fifteen years before, although I hadn’t known her then. As often happens in life, we didn’t meet until we both moved away. In our case, it was in the dormitories at the University of Northern Iowa in the late 1970s. Even there she was never more than a casual acquaintance, but she knew who I was and had heard about Mike. When she saw me stroll by her parents’ house, she came out and joined me. We walked for blocks, never once touching, never once speaking. Paula asked nothing, expected nothing, offering me the company and silent comfort I didn’t realize I needed. Unlike Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, I have never depended upon the kindness of strangers, but on that day I did. I don’t know how Paula knew, but she did, and I will always be grateful. I have not seen her since that day, thirty-eight years ago. I hope she has had a happy, fulfilled life, and that, when sorrow came, she had someone to walk with her.

 After parting with Paula I returned to Joan’s house to spend the next day and a half in a state of complete unawareness. I vaguely recall watching reruns of The Rockford Files at 10:30 on Monday and Tuesday nights—a program I once enjoyed but have never been able to watch since—but otherwise I have no memories of anything between Paula on Monday and Mike’s services on Wednesday. All I know is that we all stayed at Joan’s until the funeral.

 And I know it was at the funeral, with Mike’s closed casket draped in a flag at the front of a Baptist church he had never attended, that the devastating truth finally sank in: my brother was gone, and he was never coming back. At last, at last, after three days, I allowed myself to weep. My uncle Dale, sitting behind me, offered me a handkerchief, and as I dabbed my eyes I felt my entire body shudder. I had not experienced death in any meaningful way since 1969, when my maternal grandfather succumbed to the injuries of a car accident. Even then, I was only 13, incapable of fully understanding what it meant when somebody died. Now it was no longer an abstraction. Death was here, hard and merciless as that coffin enclosing Mike’s body. There could be no appeal, no reprieve, and no more denials.

 Mike was dead.

 He was dead.

 He was dead.

 This is why we insist on staging funerals, to force bitter facts on the unbelieving, the appalled, the frightened, the desperate. It is an acknowledgment that one of our own has crossed into that undiscovered country, and will not, whatever our religious beliefs, return to this life and this time again. The service is the last time, ever, we will be in the physical presence of our beloved dead. We gather to sing and remember, to celebrate and grieve, to pray, wish, hope, and lament. We gather to hold on and we gather to let go.

Funerals mean goodbye, but they are only the beginning of closure, not the end. Next comes the committal service, the interment, the well-wishes of friends, the reunion with long-absent relatives (who will soon disappear again), and the aftermath, when we go home to our altered lives and face the question, “What now?”

Along with all that we had to deal with the media, at the church, at the cemetery, through the killer’s capture and trial, and continuing, to a lesser extent, even to this day. For the general public most deaths are noted by an obituary in the paper or a sound byte on the local news, but then memories of the departed are left in dignity to the grieving families. But in Waterloo, Iowa, bad things usually do not happen to police officers. When they do, it is news. Big news. Unending news. In the hands of the media this news is sometimes intrusive, sometimes sensitive, sometimes unfeeling, opportunistic, and cynical, sometimes well-meaning and inspirational, but almost always a ratings bonanza.

For us it was constant. Every local newspaper and TV news program carried the story every day. Every day. Every day.

At the cemetery my friend Paul resorted to interposing his body between us and the ubiquitous photographers so our pain would not be displayed on the front page of newspapers. (Although it was anyway.) A local woman took advantage of the occasion to espouse her personal political agenda, and the media jumped on that. A TV reporter called Dad a year later and asked if Mike’s death still bothered him. Letters to the editor. Front page, back page, every page except the sports. Lead story for hard news, fluff piece for human interest. Every day. Every day. Every day.

My family understood all this. We knew it was a big story that would go on for a long time. We knew the public had the desire, and the right, to know. We accepted that our grief would not, and could not, be private. But surely there comes a point, after the newness has worn off, after the bodies are laid to rest, after the arrest and trial and sentencing, when the needs of the families outweigh the needs of the public, when those closest to the victims must be given the space and the time to heal.

If that time ever came, it was too late, for the emotional scars left by that night are deep. The media certainly didn’t kill my brother and his partner, but they exploited the tragedy to their own benefit, and they replayed it continuously, as if it were theirs to use any way they chose. It almost became a regular feature, like a sitcom without the humor, or a blockbuster event during sweeps week. Except that this sweeps week lasted for years.

But in my anger there was hypocrisy. The human interest media focused its attention, rightly so, on Mike’s wife and sons, and on my parents. While outwardly I resented the papers and TV for not leaving my family alone, for forcing them to relive the nightmare over and over, there was a tiny, entirely contradictory voice inside my head that said, “Hey, what about me? I lost somebody, too. Why don’t you ask me how I feel?”

The media never did ask, but the people close to me did, and in the end that was what mattered.

Nothing can erase the emotions of such a traumatic event, but time blunts even the deepest hurt. I suffered my annus horribilis in 1982, a debilitating, year-long depression that started ten months after the tragedy, one so severe that the only reason I’m here today was because I knew my parents could not bear to lose a second son. With the help of family, friends, good counselors and, of course, time, I overcame the depression in 1983, although I still refer to that period as my lost year.

I’ve come through a dark age since July of 1981. The weeping is over. The sharp grief is gone. There is still an empty place in my life, unfilled and unfillable, but for the most part I have reached an accommodation with Mike’s murder, and, in a larger sense, with death itself. Since then I have lost both parents to cancer, Dad in 1989 and Mom in 1996. Aunt Joan succumbed to the same affliction in 2000. Watching loved ones suffer and decline was excruciating, but their deaths were natural and, ultimately, expected—and, except for obituaries, media-free. My sisters and I were our parents’ bedsides when they died, and I was with Joan until an hour before she passed away. Of course it was difficult to let them go, and I will certainly miss them, but we had made our peace. With nothing left unsaid between us, I can look back without the turmoil of “if only.”

Mike will always be harder, for his life was ended at age 28 not by accident or disease, but by the hand of another. Would he have chosen to die that way? I think not. In the line of duty, yes, but finding a lost child or rescuing a hostage, not asking some people to turn down their music. He would have chosen to live, to watch his boys grow up, and, after a long and satisfying career, to withdraw to a dignified retirement of well-earned comfort, with a nice house and regular visits from his grandchildren.

That was not to be.

He will be remembered in this community as a hero who died young in the performance of his duties—and maybe he was, maybe he was a hero. In any case, it’s good that people honor his sacrifice. But they know him only for his death. I knew him for his life, and so I choose to remember him not as hero or even police officer, but simply as my brother. That’s enough for me. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “He was a man, take him for all in all; I shall not look on his like again.”

His family endures. Cindy has one son, Patti two. Several years ago they moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where all are happy and healthy. Mike’s widow Denise is remarried, and his sons Michael and Travis are now fathers themselves.

I have never left the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area. The life I was waiting to begin in 1981 finally did. My part-time job at the University of Northern Iowa library blossomed into a rewarding, full-time career, and in 1999 I married for the first time. My wife Joni brought two great children into the marriage, Jon and Jovan. And so I am a father, too, of the step-variety.

I still have no religious beliefs. Perhaps someday I will find an answer I can believe in. If not, if I can never look forward to a reunion with my loved ones in the soft glow of an afterlife, then the time will come when at least I will join them in serene darkness, covered by the warmth of the earth and the beauty of the sky. That will be all right with me.

 I hope my remaining family members are at my side when I die; that my thoughts return to Alabar Hills, with its snakes, frogs, turtles, and ground squirrels, with salamanders that could be spent like money; and that my last memories, que les éclairer se faner, are the faces of my Dad, my Mom, and, of course, my brother Mike.

History in Perspective, Part II

The world didn’t end with the first millennium, and alas for my readers, neither did this blog entry. The second thousand years are easier than the first, because there probably hasn’t been a day since the year 1000 when somebody we’ve all heard of wasn’t alive.  That allows me to pick and choose….

ELEVENTH CENTURY

Edward the Confessor (1003-1066) – Son of Æthelred Unræd, Edward was a so-so king (ruled 1042-1066) but a pious fellow—so pious, in fact, that he never consummated his marriage with Edith, which, of course, resulted in no children. That left the question about who would succeed him as king after he died. While in exile in Normandy years before he apparently promised the throne to William of Normandy (AKA William the Bastard, AKA William the Conqueror), but on his deathbed promised it to Harold Godwinson.  A council of nobles known as the witan elected Harold, which made William angry, with famous results. One major accomplishment of Edward was the building of Westminster Abbey.  Sadly, he died on January 5, 1066, before it was completed.

Pope Urban II (1035-1099) – In 1095 Urban convened the Council of Clermont to debate Church reforms. The most significant result of this was a call to arms to attempt to wrest the Holy Land back from the Muslims. This was the first of a series of clashes that would come to be known as the Crusades. There were a total of sixteen crusades over the next five centuries.

Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) – Persian mathematician and philosopher, Khayyam is best remembered for a series of quatrains (poems) he wrote in which he asked God some pretty tough questions. Seven hundred years later these quatrains were collected, translated, and put into a single narrative by Edward FitzGerald. You know this narrative as The Rubiat of Omar Khayyam.

Eleventh century people who didn’t get profiled on this list include Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (El Cid), St. Anselm, Lanfranc, Hermann the Lame, and of course, William the Conqueror.

TWELFTH CENTURY

Abelard (1079-1142) and Helöise (1098-1164) – Peter Abelard was one of the greatest philosophers of his age, but he is best known for his tragic love affair with Helöise. He was a wandering scholar, stopping here and there to teach, then moving on when his brilliant but unorthodox ideas offended local authorities. Helöise was a gifted student trusted to Abelard’s tutelage by her uncle Fulbert, a canon at Notre Dame in Paris. However, teacher and pupil soon fell in love. They secretly married and Helöise bore a son—though not in that order. Fulbert was really annoyed when he heard of the union, so much so that he sent some thugs to jump Abelard and, as my old Dad would say, “made a steer of him.” Abelard then joined the monastery of St. Denis and Helöise became a nun at Paraclete Abbey. They rarely saw each other, but they corresponded regularly, and those love letters have survived to become the stuff of legend. Abelard died in 1142 and was buried at Paraclete Abbey. When Helöise died in 1164 they were reunited. Their bodies lay side by side at the Abbey until the 19th century, when they were moved to Pére-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Genghis Khan (1162-1227) – He was the Mongol chieftain and military genius who conquered much of the world between the Adriatic Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Actually, “Genghis Khan” was not a name but a title that meant “universal leader.” His given name was Temujin. He had an equally famous grandson, Kublai Khan, who expanded his empire and for many years hosted Marco Polo at court during the latter’s travels

Left out: St. Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Beckett, Henry II of England, Frederick Barbarossa, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, King John, St. Francis of Assisi, and (if he existed at all) Robin Hood. Among others….

THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Roger Bacon (1220-1292) – An Englishman called Doctor Miribilis (‘wonderful teacher”) by his contemporaries, this great Franciscan philosopher preceded the High renaissance by two centuries, yet had a scientific genius that rivalled Leonardo da Vinci’s. Bacon studied mathematics, astronomy, optics, alchemy, and languages. He was the first European to mention gunpowder, recording its formula but warning of its potential for evil.  Bacon also proposed motorized ships and carriages and, like Leonardo, even flying machines.

Giotto (ca. 1267-1337) – The greatest Italian painter of his era, Giotto was a harbinger of the Renaissance to come. He started a trend away from the static Byzantine style of painting, and was one of the earliest artists to explore emotion and perspective in his work. His realistic depictions of Bible stories made Christianity more accessible to the common person. His emphasis on perspective was a small step in getting people to look at the world through human eyes, rather than Church dictates, which eventually led to the explosion of learning and art that became the Renaissance.

Left out: William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, William Wallace (“Braveheart”), Edward I of England, Robert the Bruce, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan….

FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375 – He was the Italian author of The Decameron, a combination of wit, drama, comedy, and bawdiness that was the model for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Boccaccio’s use of Italian finished what Dante had started in The Divine Comedy: elevating the vernacular to (nearly) equal status with Latin.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) – A minor official in the retinue of King Edward III, Chaucer produced some of the most beautiful writing in the English language. He wrote A Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Cresida, and of course his masterpiece, Canterbury Tales. Sadly, when he died in 1400, he hadn’t completed Canterbury Tales, leaving us with only a small fraction of the work he intended to write. Alas!

Henry V (1387-1422) – Henry was the king of England whose soldiers won a miraculous victory against overwhelming French forces at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. This was the decisive battle in the Hundred Years’ War.  The English army went on to capture so much territory that the French King Charles VI was forced to name Henry as his successor. Had Henry only lived two months longer, he would have become king of England and France, but he died of a fever at age 35, leaving his infant son, who he’d never seen, to reign as Henry VI.

Left out: St. Catherine of Sienna, Nicolas Pisano, Petrarch, Jan Huss, Wat Tyler, William Langland (Piers Plowman), Edward the “Black Prince,” John of Gaunt, and Brunelleschi….

FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Masaccio (1401-1428) – In his brief life Masaccio changed art forever. His frescoes and paintings used colors, shapes, perspectives, and emotions that even Giotto would never have imagined. This early Renaissance painter would influence literally every artist who came after him.

Thomas Malory (ca. 1405-1471) – The writer of Le Morte D’Arthur remains a shadowy figure. First of all, there were at least four guys named Thomas Malory wandering about England in the fifteenth century. The most likely candidate for our novelist was one Sir Thomas Malory, who, despite being a knight of the realm, was apparently a real skunk. In and out of prison for rape, assault, and theft, he had plenty of time to pen the first prose work about King Arthur.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) – What can I say? The man was a genius who could do damn near everything, and did.

Left out: This will be the last of the “left outs.” The 1400s were loaded with famous people, and it only gets worse from here. Trying to list them all would be impossible. Folks who inhabited at least part of this century include Joan of Arc, Fra Lippo Lippi, Johannes Gutenberg, Sandro Boticelli, Ghirlando, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella, Richard III, Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Huldrich Zwingli, Henry VIII, Savanarola, John Skelton, Donatello, Raphael, Titian, Ignatius Loyola, Lorenzo de and Medici, Lucretia Borgia, Niccolò Machiavelli, and on and on and on…

SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Michel de Nostradame  (1503-1566) – Yup, he’s THE Nostradamus. A physician and astrologer, Michel began making prophecies in 1547. Because some of them appeared to come true, he became famous, and was invited to read the astrological charts for the children of Catherine de Medici and her husband, Henry II of France. Nostramus’s acclaim continues to this day, having purportedly predicted such things as the French Revolution in 1789, the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, and the assassination of the Kennedy brothers in the 1960’s. What do I think? Let’s just say his prophesies were written in a hodgepodge of languages and were so arcane and obscure that they could be interpreted to mean just about anything. Shoot enough arrows into the air, and you’re bound to hit something eventually….

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) – The second brightest light in the Elizabethan literary heavens, “Kit” Marlowe was, to me, much more interesting than his illustrious contemporary—Shaxpur, Shakspear, something like that. He was a government spy who disliked the Queen, an atheist with a Masters in Divinity, a homosexual in an age when such an “alternative lifestyle” was even more frowned upon than it is now, a smoker of that new-fangled fad, tobacco weed, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and oh yeah, a pretty darn good writer. It was Marlowe who introduced blank verse to the Elizabethan stage. You’ve all read or heard some of his lines, the most famous of which undoubtedly is this from his Dr. Faustus: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Marlowe was two months older than that other guy, but before his untimely death at 29 his talent was more developed than that of his famous rival. He was so good, in fact, that the Bard freely stole from himj. Here’s Shakespeare’s version of the line quoted above: “…the face that launched above a hundred ships.” Above a hundred ships? C’mon, Will, that’s not only plagiarism, but it’s bad plagiarism!  According to history Marlowe died in a tavern brawl, but there’s evidence that he was murdered for reasons involving the spy business. Whatever caused his death, though, imagine how enriched our literature would have been had his talent continued to grow. Shakespeare who?

Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) – A prelate in the Anglican Church, Ussher is now known, and frequently ridiculed, for counting all the “begats” in the Bible backward and declaring that creation occurred at noon on Saturday, October 23, 4004 B.C.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673) – You know him better by his stage name Molière. A prolific genius, Molière wrote such classic plays as The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and The Imaginary Invalid.

Isaac Newton (1642-1726) – Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion are as valid today as they were then. Everyone knows he was a great scientist, but he was also a devout Christian and an alchemist. He formulated his laws of physics within the framework of a biblical creator—there was no conflict between science and religion to Newton! While doing all that cool genius science stuff, he was also trying to figure out how to transmute lead into gold. Hmmm….

Edward Teach (1680-1718) – Also known as Edward Thatch, but best known as Blackbeard the Pirate. Teach was indeed a pirate, but he wasn’t as murderous as his reputation would suggest. A shrewd and calculating leader, he rarely used force, relying instead on his fearsome image to get cooperation from the people he robbed. Contrary to the modern-day picture of the traditional tyrannical pirate, he commanded his vessels with the permission of their crews. There is no known account of his ever having harmed or murdered those he held captive. However, he did run afoul of Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood, who sent a party of soldierly types to capture him. A nasty battle ensued, resulting in several deaths on both sides, including Blackbeard.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – He was a gnarly philosophical dude who believed how you thought was more important than what you thought. In fact, he didn’t think people could truly know much of anything on a metaphysical level. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas had written his five proofs of God. Five hundred years later Kant demolished those proofs and said, “You just gotta believe, baby. You can’t prove the existence of God, so it all comes down to faith.”

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) – The philosopher with a difference. He was a proponent of Utilitarianism, which simplistically put, states a person should do whatever s/he finds most pleasant. If you like going to the opera, cool. If getting stinking drunk is your thing, then do that. This is known as the Principle of the Greatest Happiness. Bentham was an odd fellow in life, and even odder in death. First, he instructed that his cadaver be dissected, embalmed, dressed, and placed in a chair, and to this day resides in a cabinet in a corridor of the main building of University College in London. According to tradition, every year on his birthday like-minded individuals haul out his body and drink a toast to him.

Jeremy Bentham as he appears today

NINETEENTH CENTURY

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – Some applaud him, some hiss when they hear his name. He wasn’t the first to propose a theory of evolution, merely the most famous. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, for instance, suggested evolution and the connectedness of life many decades before Charles. An interesting bit of trivia: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.

Charles Dodgson (1832-1989) – You know him, of course, as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. What you don’t know is that he was almost certainly a pedophile with a taste for young girls. Whether or not he acted on his impulses is a matter of debate. But wait, there’s more. A book written several years ago accuses him of being—need I say it?—Jack the Ripper. This falls into the “if you were alive then you are a suspect” category. Take it from me, if Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper, then I was the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll in 1963.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965) – You’ve all heard of the man who was Prime Minister of England during World War II, but did you know there was also an American author named Winston Churchill (1871-1947)? The two Churchills were acquainted, but not related. Interestingly, it was the politician Churchill, not the novelist Churchill, who wrote a famous essay called “If the North Had Won the War.” It’s told as if the South had won the Civil War, and then speculates what the world might be like had the North won. It’s a brilliant bit of alternate alternate history.

Jeanne Calment (1875-1997) – The oldest fully documented person to have ever lived. Ms. Calment was 122 years old when she died in 1997. She lived through 24 U.S. Presidents (25 if you count Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms), from Ulysses Grant to Bill Clinton. She knew Vincent Van Gogh.  She was born before telephones or cars and lived to see cell phones and space flight. Pretty cool, eh?

The “Centurion Trio:”

Eubie Blake (1882-1982) – Wonderful jazz and ragtime pianist whose song “I’m Just Wild About Harry” was blatantly plagiarized by the folk singer Donovan in his hit “Mellow Yellow.” Blake, who wrote his first song in 1899, performed on Saturday Night Live in 1982 at age 100. He died shortly thereafter.

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) – Born Israel Baline, Berlin was a self-taught composer who couldn’t read music and played almost everything on the piano in the key of F# so he could stay mostly on the black notes. He hired a “musical secretary” to transcribe and harmonize his music.

George Burns (1896-1996) – His real name was Nathan Birnbaum, but by any name George Burns was a funny fellow. He never recovered emotionally from the death of his wife Gracie Allen in 1964, but he continued to entertain audiences up until about a year before his death, when a fall in the bathtub curtailed his extraordinary good health. He had been booked to play Vegas and London in his centennial year, but his fall, alas, made that impossible, and he died shortly after his 100th birthday. Say goodnight, Gracie.

NINETEENTH, TWENTIETH, AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

Emma Morano (1899-    ) – As of this writing, Ms. Morano of Italy is not only the world’s oldest living human, she is the last person left on earth who was born in the 19th century.  Must be quite a responsibility to be the only survivor of an entire century! She just turned 117 in November. Here’s to many more, young lady!

TWENTIETH CENTURY

There are so many that I could go on for years. I’ll settle for a little trivia.

Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) – Austrian actress who later moved to America. While best known for her films, Lamarr, along with composer George Antheil, invented a radio guidance system in World War II that prevented Germany from jamming Allied signals. Their invention is still being used today in Wi-fi and Bluetooth technology, and in 2014 both were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The rest of these are a little morbid, centering on November 22, the date President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was assassinated.  Below is a list of some of the folks who also died on November 22.  Two of them, writers Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) died on the same day the president did in 1963. The rest of them died on November 22, but not in 1963. One of them didn’t even live in the 20th century, but we’ve seen him before in this column, so I’ll mention him again: Edward Teach (Blackbeard the Pirate), who died November 22, 1718.

Others who died on November 22 include:

Walter Reed (1851-1902) – Yeah, he’s the guy the famous hospital is named for.

Jack London (1876-1916) – Heard his last call of the wild on November 22, 1916.

Mae West (1893-1980) – She probably should have considered dying before she made the movie Myra Breckinridge, which was—what’s the word I’m looking for?  Oh yeah, dreadful.

Shemp Howard (1895-1955) – One of the Three Stooges, older brother of Jerome (Curly) and Moe.

Scatman Crothers (1910-1986) – Perhaps best remembered as Turkle the night watchman in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he had a long career in music, movies, and television. He was also in John Wayne’s final film, The Shootist, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Parley Baer (1914-2002) – Who, you say? Okay, he’s obscure, but if you’ve ever seen The Andy Griffith Show, you’d recognize him as the mayor of Mayberry.

Mary Kay Ash (1915-2001) – The Queen of Cosmetics.

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) – Author of many novels, including A Clockwork Orange.

Lana Peters (1926-2011) – Another “who?” At birth she was known as Svetlana Josifovna Stalina, the youngest child of Josef Stalin, who was a Very Bad Man.  Svetlana defected to the U.S. in 1967, married Wesley Peters in 1970, at which time she took the name Lana, and had a daughter, Olga, in 1971. She became a U.S. citizen in 1978, but in 1984 returned to the Soviet Union with Olga, where both were granted Russian citizenship. But wait, there’s more. In 1992 she also became a British citizen. She lived there until 2009, when she returned to the U.S. for the final two years of her life. Her daughter now lives in Oregon under the name Chrese Evans. Chrese is a tattooed Buddhist who runs an antique shop. When it comes to her grandfather, the apple rolled very far from the tree indeed!

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

It’s not over yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m sure it has, and will continue to, produce thousands of noteworthy people. (Hey, all people are noteworthy, right?)

And so ends this blog entry covering 2,000 years of history, an unbroken chain of famous lives, one overlapping the other, from Jesus to Lana Peters.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Plainview

My short story “Plainview,” which was published in the British magazine Crimewave in December 2010, was my first attempt at writing a mystery. Surprisingly, it’s gotten some very nice reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. On this side, it’s been selected for inclusion in a best-of anthology called “The Interrogator and Other Criminally Good Fiction,” edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg. Other authors in the antho include Joyce Carol Oates, David Morrell (Rambo), Max Allan Collins (“The Road to Perdition”), and Michael Connelly (“The Lincoln Lawyer”), among many others. Pretty cool, eh?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Another of my favorite poems is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  I don’t usually care for this kind of poetry — Eliot’s most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” leaves me cold — but I love this one.  It’s very long, so I won’t reprint it all, but here are the last few stanzas:

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I love the rhythm, the sound, and meaning of this poem — so much so, in fact, that I used part of the last line, “Till Human Voices Wake Us,” as the title to one of my short stories.  (Unfortunately, two decades after I used the title, some scoundrels in the movie industry decided to give their film the same title.  My story and the movie are nothing alike, but for the record, I thought of it first!)

Other Lives

We’ve subjected you to a lot of stuff about our own writing on this site, so now I’d like to talk about someone else’s.  First, a bit of background: For as long as I can remember, even when I was a child of three or four, I used to watch cars go by, look at the people inside, and realize that these people had entire lives — kids and jobs and dogs, hopes and dreams and sorrows — yet all I was ever going to see of them was this one brief moment.  I used to think about that all the time, and it both bothered and awed me.  (Okay, so I was a weird kid!)  Imagine my amazement when I came upon the following poem by a guy with the decidedly unpoetic name of Vern Rutsala.  It’s called “Other Lives,” and it just blows me away, even 30 years after I first read it.

OTHER LIVES

You see them from train windows
in little towns, in those solitary lights
all across Nebraska, in the mysteries
of backyards outside cities—

a single face looking up,
blurred and still as photograph.
They come to life quickly
in gas stations, overheard in diners,

Loom up and dwindle, families
From dreams like memories too
far back to hold.  Driving by
you go out to all those strange

Rooms, all those drawn shades, those huddled taverns on the highway,
cars nosed-in so close they seem
to touch.  And they always snap shut,
Fall into the past forever, vast lives

over in an instant.  You feed
on this shortness, this mystery
of nearness and regret—such lives
So brief you seem immortal;

and you feed, too, on that old hope—
dim as a half-remembered
phone number—that somewhere
People are as you were always

told they were—people who swim
in certainty, who believe, who age
with precision, growing gray
like actors in a high school play.