Mississippi Goddam

"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.

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In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more.  Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east.  They all ran from it, they had to.

“We go now and we go on foot!” Virgil shouted.  Nobody knows how to swim, he thought, but the wagon will just slow us down. “Leave everything,” he called to Lizzie who had climbed onto the horse that was slowly sinking into the mud.  

While the others rushed to join the lines of people heading east away from the rising tide, carrying whatever they could, Sol ran directly for the shed and jumped up for the highest nail where he’d hidden his slide whistle from his father.  He’d made it himself from an old bicycle pump, fashioning it on a picture he’d seen in a magazine.  Someday he would play the slide in his own band, but his father thought the slide was nonsense and talk of a band was even worse.  He thought singing should be confined to church.

Sol felt the river seeping into his shoes. The floorboards were turning red.  It was coming to get him!  He stuck the slide whistle into his shirt and splashed his way out.  The water soaked his legs, the slosh and grit of it, the sweat of it in the swelter of day, the cold and chill of it at night.  Added to that was everyone’s abiding terror that the white people might do anything at all in their panic.  They were never safe when white people were scared.

He spied his mother and grabbed her hand to calm the panic expanding inside him, higher in his body with a faster heartbeat, each time it rose.  “Sol-o-mon!” Lizzie sang out, tugging his arm to pull him to one side of her with Virgil on the other. “Stay close. That beast is fast and it is deep.”  

They joined the line with the others, holding onto each other, trudging the flat land east, away from the river with its creeping, rising tide, slipping on mud banks, climbing levees, whatever high ground they could find, and always watching where the birds flew to follow and rest with them on a roof or in a treetop.  Stories passed among them about black men in Greenville being taken at gunpoint to the levees, forced to dig, to pile sand, to be back enslaved to the white man’s will, shot dead if they refused, drowned if they faltered, and to survive if they were lucky. 

Sol was silent.  His heartbeat began to slow to an even rhythm, from knowing his mother was there.  He didn’t have to be touching her or even see her to feel her presence.  He’d learned from an early age, even when he was left alone in the shade, lying in an old crate stuffed with cotton while Lizzie was pumping at the washboard or spreading cotton sheets across clotheslines.   He could hear her breathing hard and it comforted him.  He could smell the sweat of her body, the bite of milk that had soured on her apron.  His tongue would begin to suck his cheeks and his lips would quiver just from her nearness.  Sol learned to whimper instead of crying out for his mother.  He knew early in his life that she would always come to him.  If not at once when he wanted her to, then eventually.  As a young boy, Sol never minded his mother kissing him, even in front of other boys who would scrunch their noses and turn away, mocking him.  Lizzie’s hands were as big as a man’s, but they were hands that had never struck him.  As Sol grew into a man he began to appreciate his mother’s beauty hiding in all that Mississippi dirt and sweat.  When she relaxed in the evening under a tree or dressed herself for church, he felt a stiff, reliable kind of pride-- her face framed by a straw hat, her teeth large and strong, her arms smooth and her step steady.  Who wouldn’t love a mother like that? he thought.  I’ll find me a wife just like Lizzie.

On that first day Solomon, Lizzie and Virgil clung to each other like mud on shoe bottoms.  Linked together through their arms and hands, the three of them were like one silky machine humming along with the others.  Virgil led the singing with his enormous voice, but first he said those special words to everybody:  “I dedicate this song to my son, Solomon.” And then everybody sang into the night air.

Walk together children

Don't you get weary

Walk together children 

Don't you get weary

Oh, talk together children

Don't you get weary

There's a great camp meeting in the promised land

 Sol Later they liked to brag about how they outwalked the Mississippi, how they found dry land and kind, generous people along the way who offered a cup of clean water, or a roasted potato, maybe a dry place to sleep.   They were even happy then, when Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hand, pointing to the thin line of pink along the horizon at sunset—“God’s paintbrush,” she said reverently, and Sol searched for anything that would burn so they could have a fire.  Then Virgil’s enormous voice filled the air as night drew closer, and Sol felt the comfort, singing along quietly under his breath.

There was a time, before Sol’s voice changed to a man’s, father and son used to harmonize.  Virgil was the bass and Sol was the tenor then. Then Sol’s voice began to change, at first cracking and unable to find its steady course, then settling into a baritone, until finally, as the boy reached his late teens, it fell into the bass range.  No longer did Virgil want to sing with Sol since their sounds were no longer unique or harmonious.  Virgil said they sounded like two pigs in heat.  Once Sol tried to fake a higher voice just so Virgil would sing with him.  He missed his father’s attention.  There was nothing he wished for more than to sing as they had.  Virgil said that Sol sounded like a weasel in heat.  Sol walked away from his father’s taunting with a bitterness and blame that spoiled the harmonious sweetness they had shared.  And a competition ensued with tense, unwritten rules.  One never sang when the other was singing.  One never admired or praised the other for their singing.  They never spoke of it.   The competition included both singing and Lizzie. 

Many days later Sol, Virgil and Lizzie found their way to her family—the Moores—where, farm outside of Starkville, at last they could rest.  Maybe they would stay there or maybe they would go on up to New Albany where Virgil’s people, the Brysons, lived.  One thing for sure, they knew they were not returning to the Delta.

Lizzie’s family stayed on the farm--Sol’s grandfather, Dick (everybody called him Granddaddy) and grandmother Emma (everybody called her Big Mama), plus his aunties—Mollie, Lelia and Lucy--all except the oldest, Julia, who had disappeared the previous year.   Nobody knew where she was.  They had stopped looking, stopped asking.  

Dick Moore had fought with the Union Colored Troops during the Civil War, and still, sixty years later, visitors respectfully referred to him as Corporal.  He carried himself like a soldier, straight- backed and grim.  He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to--he had made much of his life, and everyone could see that.  After the war,  in January 1868, Emma Parham had married Dick Moore on a warm day, years after they had met when Dick escaped the Alabama planation during the war that ripped open the land, the people, everything, after the old man in Washington emancipated them, and after Dick fled to the Union Army and enlisted for two and a half years, mustering in at Corinth in 1863 and mustering out at Baton Rouge on the last day of 1865.  Eventually Dick and Emma harnessed a mule and rode for days to Starkville where Dick claimed the acres Lincoln had promised freedmen for their service to the Union.

It was beautiful, rolling farmland.   There was a creek full of sunfish at the bottom of a hill, and there were six houses—a larger cabin that Granddaddy and Big Mama lived in and five identical small ones, all in a row, leading downhill to the creek.  The cabin sat across from a straight row of daughters’ houses and a bit up the hill from them, “so we can keep an eye on you,” Dick had said when he finished the last one.  He’d built them one by one in the girls’ age order, with Julia’s first, then Lizzie’s, and so on.  “That way,” he told Emma at the time, “maybe they’ll stay.”

There was one called “Lizzie’s House,” where Lizzie and Virgil and Sol stayed, two rooms and a front porch with a view of the woodland, the ducks, the sunset. To Sol, Granddaddy meant safety and Big Mama meant plenty.  Pale rhododendrons and bright azaleas bloomed wild, bits of cotton floated through the warm air, and even the mosquitoes were kind and left him alone. To Sol this place was a bit of heaven.  Big Mama kept chickens, so he could have an egg every day if he wanted one, and he and Lizzie could bake cornbread together.  Granddaddy gave the blessing at every meal, just like a pastor, which he was not. 

On that first morning home, even though each sister had her own little house, they all came to Big Mama’s kitchen to eat.  Lizzie was up early with her mother, rolling out the dough and patting the biscuits.  Soon the cousins, Ernest, Suda and Corene pushed open the screen door, letting it slam, and busying themselves with pumping water, clattering pans, passing biscuits and eggs.  Uncle J.D. and aunties Lelia and Lucy were there, too, all the females in aprons, all the males in denim, all hands washed as Big Mama required at her table.  The men announced they were hungry and Suda could not find her doll and Corene needed someone to tie her bow.  

Lizzie laughed at the sudden and unfamiliar commotion, the warmth of her family rising inside her like liquid.  She wiped her hands to embrace them one by one, to look each one in the eye, as it was her way to do.  She tied Corene’s bow and sat at the long oak table.

“Been way too long,” J.D. started.

“Brother, yes,” she said, whispering, “Anybody heard from Julia?”

The two younger sisters shook their heads and rolled their eyes to let Lizzie know there was more to the story than could be told at the table.

“I hear you’re planning a wedding,” she said to Lelia, who was about ten years her younger.  “Make it like mine, Lelia.  You were just a kid, probably don’t remember when Virgil and I were hitched.”

“Tell us,” said Lelia, “tell us.”  She had both girls’ attention and J.D. was listening too.

“Well, it’s not that it was such a big wedding.  More that it was true love—meant to be,” she began and the girls swooned.  “We met here in Starkville when Virgil was laying tracks and cross ties.”

“Pounding spikes and hammering the timbers, Virgil used to brag,” said her sister, Lucy.  “I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“Well, Big Mama invited the whole railroad crew to supper after church one Sunday to meet her daughters.”  At the sound of her name, Big Mama came to the table, a bowl on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand, and they turned their eyes to watch her.

“And Virgil, he liked Emma and Mollie and Lizzie, but Lizzie was the one we wanted married next,” said Big Mama.  “Uh huh.  She was fourteen already.”  Big Mama nodded and nobody said a word.  “And Virgil knew there was an order to such things,” she added, catching each listener’s eye and turning her back.   Lizzie broke the silence.

“Solomon was born the next year,” she explained.

“And you never had another child after that?” asked Corene, and J.D. felt mortified by the question.  He cleared his throat to change the subject when Lizzie responded.

“The Lord never saw His way to making that happen,” Lizzie said.  “Or maybe it’s on account of my “woman problems.”  And she didn’t tell it to them, but she had to agree with her husband who had told her he always wondered if there was something wrong with his seed, and if God was punishing him for spilling it in too many wrong places.  As God-fearing a man as he was, he had his weakness—women.  The screen door slammed shut and Virgil came inside.

“Morning, everybody,” he said, cheerful as a chipmunk.  The girls replied all around and Big Mama bought Virgil a cup of coffee.  Big Mama was a dark-skinned woman with hair straighter than the others, on account of some Chickasaw blood, she said, and she pulled it back and tied it in the back to keep it from falling into her face and their food.

“Thank you, M’am,” he said, smiling, bringing the hot, black liquid and its sweet steam right under his nose.

“I was trying to remember,” began J.D.  “When was it you all left here for the Delta anyway?” Lizzie waited for Virgil to reply because he had been the one who wanted to get away from her family, especially from the tension between him and her parents.  

“Well, it was when Solomon was old enough to do his share,” said Virgil in a light voice, not wanting to complain about the backbreaking work they’d done in those hot, buzzy fields, plowing and planting cotton in one season, chopping the next, and picking the last.   “I didn’t mind the work.  Honed the edge of my hoe splinter thin and iron strong,” he said proudly. Yep.  One year, in my rush to get the most cotton bolls into the machine, I lost three fingers,” he said, holding up his right hand.  They all knew the story—the whizzing saws inside the cotton gin.  How he was unable to pick cotton that fall, so Lizzie and Sol picked his share and their own, too. 

When the Moore sisters began to fight, the fighting infested the others, too.   “The girls are at it again,” Big Mama said, “and only a week since Lizzie’s been back.” “Every time a new man comes onto this land, Mollie starts.   It’s a shame.” 

Over the years Lizzie had gotten used to the fact that Virgil was a pretty man and women liked him.  He wasn’t a big man or a fancy man, but he was a charmer with a dimple in one cheek and an easy smile.  His eyes had a way of talking that his mouth lacked.  So this time Lizzie didn’t say a word to him, but when she saw Mollie leaning into him, making herself and her little house open to Virgil, she warned her younger sister.

“You stay away from him. I’ll kill you, I will.” 

“I’ll kill you, I will,” Mollie taunted back. 

Something in Sol liked to hear his mother fight like that, to see a fire explode in her, make her not just his mama, but something more.  Silently he took her side, but he didn’t believe she’d kill anybody--why, her heart was so big she had trouble wringing the necks of chickens when it needed doing.  

At night Sol fell asleep on the floor beside his parents, where he could feel their silent coldness.  He was used to feelings coming and going, crossing like trains on the tracks.  But when he woke in the night and his daddy’s side of the bed was empty, and he saw a lamp in Mollie’s window and his mama sliding a shotgun underneath the bed, then Sol knew then that this bit of heaven was ending and they would have to move on.  

He got up to use the outhouse. Low sounds came from the cabin window of Mollie’s house.   On his way back he could hear his father and his aunt talking. Sol tiptoed to the spot beneath the window to listen.  He heard his father say to Mollie, “Well, the boy never could carry a tune anyway.”  Sol didn’t cry or whimper, but ran back to Lizzie’s house.

The next morning Sol grabbed an apron and boiled coffee, adding a beaten egg and crushed shells to the grounds to make it smooth.  Virgil sat at the table devouring blackberry jam and biscuits like he’d swallowed so much Mississippi dirt that he needed something sweet to go with it.   Sol saw Granddaddy coming from the bedroom and he poured a steaming cup of coffee for him, too.   Granddaddy dropped a metal strongbox on the table right by where Sol stood.  It looked like something he might have salvaged from a Confederate garrison during the war.  Inside was a roll of ten dollar bills the size of Big Mama’s fist.  Granddaddy counted out some of the money slowly, like he knew just how much things cost.

“Here you go, little man,” he said, putting a pile of bills in the pocket of Sol’s apron.  “It’s time you began taking care of your mama.”  Virgil glanced at the roll of bills.  “Now, “ Granddaddy continued, “you go to town and get two tickets on the Illinois Central so you and your Mama can ride all the way to New Albany.”  He stared at Virgil who did not look up from his plate.   “Your daddy here,” he nodded at Virgil, “looks like he’s got more energy than one man needs.  Why he can just walk to New Albany. The road will do him good.”  Sol knew that Virgil had heard what Dick said, but he also knew his father would not react to being shamed in front of his own son.  Maybe he’d walk to New Albany and maybe he wouldn’t, thought Sol, but he wouldn’t let them know.  That’s for sure.

That night Virgil visited Mollie’s cabin again and the whole farm knew it, what with the windows open and Mollie singing Bessie Smith and Virgil backing up a chord in bass harmony—announcing their dirty stuff for everybody to hear.Sol saw Lizzie softly close the door to her house up the hill and he felt that sharp cut in his gut again.   “You hurting my mama!” he cried outside of Mollie’s house.  He knew he couldn’t out-fight the man, but maybe he could out-sing him.   He started with the “St. Louis Blues.”

The door to Mollie’s cabin popped open and Virgil appeared on the porch, pulling his suspenders up around his small shoulders and scanning the yard.  He stepped down to the grass and circled the cabin, slowly, deliberately, looking for Solomon.  Leila and Lucy raced to get Lizzie and they all three hurried to the big porch to where Dick and Big Mama were sitting in their rocking chairs.  

“I’m gonna go stop those two now,” Dick said reaching forward for the railing to pull himself up.   His body teetered as he rose.  

“No, Daddy!” shouted Lizzie. “This is something Solomon’s going to do for himself at last.”  Her words surprised them.

Unlike his usual pattern of repenting to the Lord and of begging Lizzie for forgiveness, Virgil returned to Mollie’s cabin and closed the door without a sound.  Soon the kerosene lamp glowed in the window behind the curtains.  Then the singing began.  The family listened in the dark as Mollie’s high notes and Virgil’s low notes strained to be heard, then turned to full-throated tones that seemed to rumble down the hill past Lizzie’s house.  Sol was in the yard, still circling, then standing still, putting all of his life into his voice, deep and dark, he sang “I hate to see that evening sun go down,” like he was the one making it go down against his own will, and the other voices soon faded and Sol’s was the only one in the night.  That was when he reached inside his shirt between the buttons that Lizzie had sewed on the front, wrapped his fingers around the slide whistle and pulled it out into the air.  He wet the reed that he had shaved thin until it fit perfectly into the mouthpiece at the top of the tube.  He brought clean saliva from the back of his throat, let it fall lazily in whatever pattern it made, and wet his lips inside and out, pulling the reed through them over and over until it was just the right mix of soft and stiff.  Then he began to blow into the whistle, softly at first, until he had the slide arm in place;  then he filled his chest with air and softened his wet mouth again, blowing with all might so the sound would carry back to the Delta.  He pulled the whistle’s slide slowly so that its taunting would rise and fall in a mocking rebuke, announcing to the world that his father was a mean-talking, hypocritical SOB.  Sol did not have to say a disrespectful word.   The shadows fell over him and slipped past Leila’s house into the foundation of Lucy’s house at the bottom.  Julia’s house stood empty at the top of the hill.  Mollie’s shadow stood by the window to her cabin as she closed the windows and Sol’s last clear note sounded in the damp Mississippi air.   It wasn’t long before the farm was so silent that only the crickets and the frogs had anything to say.

In the cooling night air, Sol turned toward his mother’s house.  There was a kerosene lamp shining in the window but the wick was burning low.  Could Lizzie be asleep? he wondered.  He needed her strong arms around him and climbed the two wooden steps to the little porch.  He was worried about entering the house.  How would his mother feel about his shaming his father?  He was her husband and she was  a loyal wife, after all.  Afraid to know and afraid not to know, he sat on the old bench and leaned back against the house.  There was no pleasure in this victory, if it was a victory, and he could only find that out from Lizzie.  He got up and tiptoed to the door.  He turned the knob and stepped inside.  He looked around.  Was she there?  He went to the table to turn up the lamp.  His pallet was tidy on the floor.  His parents’ bed covers were messy and nobody was there.  He looked out the window—maybe she was out there looking for him—but there was not a sound or a sight to be had.  Just dark and quiet.  He could not sense Lizzie anywhere and he began to panic.  Had his father killed her?  Taken her away?  There were no big hands to hold his, no arms to comfort, no approving kiss.  Sol was too old to cry and too tired to go searching for her, but he would not stay in that place of No Lizzie.  He ran outside, slamming the door, cracking the night’s silence as he went. 

In the morning, when Big Mama stepped out in the damp grass and growing light, she thanked the Lord for the day He’d given them.  She found her grandson leaning against the outhouse, humming to himself.  Solomon’s a man now, she thought. That little boy is gone, dammit, he’s a goddam man.   

“Come on now,” she said gently and brought him in.  

Granddaddy was only partially dressed, still in the long johns he wore year round.  He was pulling up his overalls when Sol stepped inside the cabin and sat at the table. “Well, young man,” Granddaddy said.  “You sure gave your Daddy your own brand of a what for.” He looked up at his smirking grandson. 

An emotion stuck in Sol’s throat and Dick recognized it—the moment before a grown man breaks into tears. The old sofa creaked as Dick leaned against a pillow and pulled his grandson’s body up against his own, holding him firmly in both arms like he did frightened, homesick soldiers during the war.   Sol’s fists opened slowly then and rested gently on the folded quilt that lay across the sofa’s back.  His breathing quickened as hurt rolled down his cheeks in thick lines and fell wet and heavy onto the cloth of Dick’s overalls. 

“Well, well, well,” said Dick, like it was just another day.  Sol looked up at him.  “Unfortunately, you had to be the one to teach your daddy not to take what is not given.  The seventh’s commandment, you know. And the sixth,” he added.  “It’s the Lord’s Word.”  The old man drew a deep breath. “Solomon, where’s that money I gave you for train tickets you so you and your mama can ride to New Albany?  Did your daddy take it from you?”

Sol grinned.  “Oh, no, Granddaddy.  I bought the tickets and buried them in a box by the henhouse.”  

No one ever spoke of the victory Sol had over his father, because Virgil had started it, because two wrongs don’t make a right, because it is a confusing thing to defeat your own father and, strangely, Sol thought, pride is not a part of it.  Sol knew what he liked and arguing was not one of those things.  He’d been shocked by the intensity of what had happened.   He kept quiet about it.  Big Mama brought Sol some buttermilk and they left him on the sofa to sleep. 

Out on the porch of Lizzie’s House, Virgil was whimpering, begging Lizzie for forgiveness.  

“Your pride is hurt,” Lizzie said. “That’s natural.   Solomon out-sung you and you couldn’t enjoy the night the way you’d planned it. “ 

“But darlin’, you know it’s only you.  You and me.  We should take those tickets back home ourselves.  Leave Solomon here.  He likes it here, you can tell.  And the country would be good for him.”  He tried to catch her eye, but Lizzie wasn’t letting him.  She poured the last bit of whiskey she could find into him and let Virgil lie in her lap one more time. 

“I know, honey, I know,” she said, stroking his foolish head, sighing, thinking that they’d run away from one nightmare in the Delta right into another.  

“And it’s a long, long walk to New Albany.  I just don’t think I could walk that far.”  Virgil smiled and settled into her lap, finding his place again, like he always did.

“Oh, it is a long way, isn’t it?” she replied.

Virgil woke to the fading sound of a train whistle, crazy from not being in his own charge, and without his wife and unable to speak.  He thought of Mollie and knew that for Lizzie’s sake, he had deserved what he got.  He forgave himself, but could he ever forgive Solomon?   That day he sought everywhere the comforting heat of the sun on his face while he sipped Big Mama’s sweet tea through a straw.  Days later, Virgil decided to follow the railroad tracks to New Albany instead of taking the road through Tupelo.  The day he left the Moore farm, Mollie stayed out of sight all day, moving aside the curtain on her window only one time to peek.  She had her own shame to work out.   Big Mama and Leila and Lucy were in the kitchen while Dick just kept rocking on the front porch, keeping his eye on Virgil’s back until he saw it disappear up and over the hill.   

Along the way Virgil met hobos in their camps and joined them in a careful, but friendly way, sharing the food Big Mama had packed for the trip, turning his pockets inside out to show himself penniless, not worth robbing.  There were five men and they all seemed to be loners, but they shared their smokes and their campfire.  They took turns keeping watch for wolves and worse while the others slept. In the morning, the men showed Virgil how to hop a freight train, how to judge its speed and measure your own, avoid the railroad guards, stay away from the coupling, find the open door, a steady handle, locate the right-size mound next to the track to take off from.  It involved complicated maneuvers and it took Virgil all of one day and most of the next before he gave up and decided to walk. He laughed.  His farming days were over, he knew.  He would try to get his old railroad job back. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Lizzie and to see his parents.  But he didn’t care if he ever saw Solomon again. 

Over the next few years, as Sol grew into a New Albany Bryson, he stayed out of his father’s way and spent most of his time at the local colored school trying to catch up with what his cousins had already learned.  In the Delta, he’d been unable to attend school most of the time because of crop schedules, and the fearsome distances he’d have had to walk not knowing if white people would bother him, and because his parents couldn’t pay the heating fee that was required by the colored schools in winter.  When he wasn’t doing reading and writing lessons, he sometimes hauled water and peeled vegetables with Lizzie in white people’s kitchens. On Sundays they attended church together at Hall’s Chapel on the corner.  Although Virgil stayed home, Virgil’s father, called Daddy Bob, his brother, called Uncle Henry, his mother, Granny Siller, and all the others gathered outside to walk down the dirt road together, meeting other families along the way, making small talk.  The women and girls in the family committed the sin of pride on Sundays when they adorned their natural beauty in layers of pastel cotton that Granny Siller had dyed herself.  They wrapped soft sashes around their slim waists and tied woven bonnets with ribbons to keep the sun off their faces.  They flirted with Sol who wore a blue suit and sang a solo in the Sunday choir.

Sol liked to brag to his cousins about the juke joints in the Delta, acting like he’d frequented them.  He hadn’t.  Lizzie never would have allowed that kind of devil’s work, but that hadn’t kept Sol from standing outside and listening.  When they all sat around in summer after sunset, if someone else started an evening blues tune or a work song, he’d add his bass to it, and some workhouse song gutteral, “a note or two, here and there, to taste,” he’d say, “the way a good cook adds pepper.”   

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain, ( Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone. 

Virgil never joined the singing, but Lizzie could tell he wanted to.

“Tell that boy to get himself into trade school,” Virgil told Lizzie one day, right in front of Sol, not speaking to him directly.  Sol wasn’t interested in learning a trade.  He had a natural talent he intended to use—his voice, a round tone, smooth as sunflower oil rolling down the throat.  Daddy Bob had bought a radio for the house—they were the first Negroes in New Albany to own one.  The cousins would come over in the evenings to listen to music coming out of Chicago and Harlem.   They danced to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s tunes to get the music out of them and into their limbs, into their feet, but when Paul Robeson’s voice came over the airwaves, everybody stood completely still to let the mood soak deeper inside.  Paul Robeson, Sol thought— football player, Broadway star, the man with the voice, another singer from Harlem.  “That’s what I want,” he said.  That’s where I’ll go.  That’s who I’ll be.”

“Chicago,” they insisted to Sol.  “Not New York.  We know people in Chicago.  We don’t know anybody in Harlem.  Why that’s another country.”  

“Harlem!” Sol smiled.  Everybody could see the stars in his eyes.  “I’ll find Paul Robeson, I’ll sing spirituals.  I’ll be on Broadway like him.”  Sol’s mind was made up and they could respect that—the boy was a man now and everybody knew he had real talent—if he had a chance, he should take it.

Virgil was working out of town the day Sol said goodbye to Mississippi, and the rest of the family, Uncle Henry and the cousins all came to the station to see him off.  They’d seen lots of young men leave New Albany, and the scene was a common one.  A boy might have to travel alone, but no one left without family seeing them off.  They even pooled their money for Sol’s ticket, but they came up short.

“That’s alright,” he said, upbeat.  “It’s enough to get me to Washington, D.C.  Why that’s almost next door to New York.  I’ll find a job and get the rest of the way on my own.  Much obliged.”  

At the platform by the colored car, he turned to face Lizzie.  His mother had worn her Sunday best, even the straw hat he’d once found, cleaned up and given to her one Easter.  There they stood, their arms around each other, their eyes drinking in a long last look.  

Suddenly, Lizzie pushed Sol away.  “You go on now,” she said.  She took a deep breath then and exhaled a hum as strong and long as the train he was about to board.  “You come back,” she sang out to him, but Sol did not hear.

On the train Sol took an aisle seat and looked around at the crowded car that had come up all the way from New Orleans.  By the door at one end of the car he saw a Pullman porter in a dark suit with shiny buttons down the front.  The porter straightened his cap and eyed Sol, approaching him with a broad smile and a crisp ten-dollar bill, folded lengthwise.  He held it between his fingers as if paying for something. He leaned in, whispering to Sol.

“I used to work with your daddy.  He asked me to give this to you.”  

Sol Bryson joined the great migration north, taking a train from Union County, Mississippi and arriving at Union Station, Washington, D.C. where he found a white marble city full of black people--with a respected university, a vibrant community, and a spirit of freedom and insistence that became his own.  Sol rented a room for ten dollars per month at 726 Second Street N. W., and he looked for a job.  Two things he knew for sure--how to cook and how to sing.   Everybody needs to eat, he thought.  And everybody needs a song. 

Author’s Note:  Sol Brtyson was my father-in-law who was blessed with a beautiful baritone voice. The dates, places, and characters in this story are real, but the facts are imagined.  I call this form “family fiction.”

Summer of Love

This memoir excerpt was published i Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023.

In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program.  He asked and I said yes and watched him move into action.  Pete was the great planner, the great provider, controller, idea man, with notes on index cards in his pocket and boxes of loose change on the dashboard.  We had to get to California soon.  But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; Virginia, where Pete lived, prohibited interracial marriage. The laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master's property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines.

      One week the law was violence; the next week the law was liberation, and (to paraphrase Dinah Washington) what a different a week can make. On June 12, 1967, a date now known as Loving Day, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Loving vs. Virginia, struck down anti-miscegenation laws, starting with the one in Virginia.  Aware of the historical moment we occupied, Pete called ahead to let the Arlington County Courthouse clerks know when we were coming. The person he spoke with was flustered and said that they were not ready. They said that we should wait, but we were not waiting for Virginia anymore.      

     “We’ve not received the Supreme Court’s order back from the Attorney General yet,” the clerk said to him.  Oh, cradle of the Bill of Right, get your foot off our necks!

     “Well, we’re coming,” Pete replied.   “We’ll be there Friday, so I guess we’ll have to bring a Washington Post reporter with us.”   Pete was bluffing, of course, about the reporter.  But when we appeared on June 16 at the courthouse, no one blinked an eye.  The forms asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked "race," Pete wrote "B" for Black and I wrote "H" for human.  The justice of the peace, who was also a Baptist minister, seemed excited to perform the ceremony—not because we were the first interracial couple in Virginia’s history—I’m not sure if he even noticed that—but because he had composed what was then something new, an ecumenical wedding service between a Christian and a Jew.  He was planning to use it the following week and said he’d like to practice his ceremony on us—since Pete was B for Baptist and I was H for Hebrew!  Ours was a short wedding ceremony in chambers with four of our friends, and a judge prattling on about Adam and Eve and a babbling brook.  We suppressed giggles, rolled our eyes, and got out of there as fast as we could.

The next day, we loaded up Pete’s taxicab with its new $29.99 Earl Scheib aqua blue paint job.  Then Pete and I, like thousands of young people that summer, went to San Francisco, where we lived in Haight Ashbury.  After all, it was the Summer of Love.

If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful

Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

BLAST, The Missouri Review’s online-only prose anthology, features fiction and nonfiction too lively to be confined between the covers of a print journal. Jacqueline St. Joan’s story “If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful” is infused with rich historical detail drawn from the author’s research into her own family’s history–research that has inspired a collection in process.

———————

Glenties, County Donegal, Ireland 1819 

I pray I’m not breaking the sacred seal of the confessional to tell you that the townspeople think Nancy Boyle is a bit strange—but lovely. Of course, they don’t say so to her face, as she already has pride aplenty and doesn’t need a drop more. The general opinion is that Nancy’s vanity is due to the sad fact that she is an only child, which is her mother’s sorrow—and now that sorrow is turning to shame, what with Nancy being with child, but unmarried. When Richard Moore confessed to me his willingness to wed Nancy Boyle and take her to America, I asked her parents, Peter and Margaret Boyle, and Nancy herself, to meet me at the rectory. And, later, to join Richard Moore in a cup of tea at their house so we could discuss what was to be done. As the town’s only priest, I knew it was my duty, even though this kind of thing should be the Lord’s doing and not mine.

I plan to say little or nothing at our meeting, and I am a bit late, snapping the horse’s reins as we ride through County Donegal, a vast landscape of stubbly fields where stumps and roots from the old forests are scattered here and there. Cloud formations broad as the fields reflect off frosty lakes, run pink to red in the late winter sunsets; and just before evening, all the colors fade like dried blood. The Boyles’ home at Glenties is more than a hovel but less than a farmhouse. Once inside, I feel a bit trapped with curtains of gray rain closing in, and for a moment I long for a sight into the distance, but the few windows are foggy. Before I take a seat, I make the sign of the cross and bless the house.

“May the Good Lord bless the four corners of this house. Bless the door that opens wide to stranger and to kin. And bless them all who come within.”

“Amen,” says Margaret, getting up from her knees, leaning on her husband’s arm.

The house is a thatched, modest place improved largely by Margaret’s sense of organization and her insistence on cleanliness, as well as Nancy’s pencil sketches that adorn one corner. Peter Boyle, in his fresh white shirt, sits with the young couple, Richard and Nancy, lighting his little clay pipe. Margaret, with her unwashed hair pulled back tightly into a bun the size of a biscuit, stays behind her husband. Nancy is silent in what must be her best dress, moss green and modest, around her neck, a tiny cross from St. Patrick’s Day. Richard, in his common linen shirt, waistcoat, and heavy black boots, is telling Peter about Europe where, four year earlier, he fought with the Irish 44th Regiment in the British Army at Waterloo and then joined the occupation of Paris. Peter interrupts Richard and looks my way.

“Something for a rainy weather, Father?” he asks, already starting to pour from the old jug. Recently Peter has become an old man crippled by life. “Will ya take another drop?” Peter asks Richard. Richard squeezes his lips together and shakes his head. Peter leans forward, craning his thick neck toward the window, wiping the glass with his fingers. His face makes a shadowy reflection, the chair rocks, and he fumbles. “Looking for me hound,” he says. “Did ya see her out the door, Father?”

“I didn’t,” I say.

“That dirty dog is not coming into my house,” insists Margaret, sniffing in Nancy’s direction.

Peter looks at Margaret, who refuses to return his gaze. “Well, it looks like rain, so she’d best be coming in.” He strains to stand, and Richard reaches to steady the old man. Don’t bother,” he says, slapping Richard’s hand away, making light of his injury and its unending pain. “Ox got the best of me . . . long time ago now.”

Margaret sits behind her husband with her needles and patches in her lap. She runs her palm across the handiwork and relaxes back into the chair. Her nose is red from a head cold or from crying, or maybe both. She takes a white handkerchief from her dress pocket and blows her nose. Margaret’s political opinions are well known, and she is not at all sure about this Richard Moore. She does not cater to Irishmen who take up arms for the Protestants to fight Catholics—even Catholics who are French.

“Sure and it must be a mortal sin, Father,” she said to me at the rectory when I mentioned Richard Moore as a husband for Nancy. Margaret is old enough to remember when it used to be hunting season for priests in Donegal and the Holy Mass could only be celebrated in hiding. Once, the English arrested her own kin for not paying their taxes and their tithes. “They were screaming for help to us—we were also the helpless—as they carted them away.” Whenever she tells that story, she cries like the child she was when it happened. Margaret cheered with the others when a landlord was shot after evicting a dozen families. She said it did her heart good to know there were those who opposed the tyrants. And she still can speak what was our own Irish tongue, before it was outlawed by the English and forgotten by the people.

Now Nancy—her only surviving child—first raped by a stranger while she was salmon fishing at Lough Anna and now having to make the devil’s choice—bear a child unwed or marry a traitor like Richard Moore. That’s how Margaret sees it. “God forgive me,” she pleaded to me, “but I pray He takes that child back, so I may have my only daughter again, or I’ll raise that baby for her! Who knows where this fellow might take her—India or Canada or some wild place called Ohio?” Margaret does not want Nancy going away at all, especially not so far away. It will be a kind of death for her, another endless ache. Still, she is a practical woman and knows there is a big problem and a task at hand: to nab a good one for Nancy—quick, before her star fades.

Richard Moore sits, wicker chair by wicker chair, next to Nancy Boyle and the glowing fire. He holds out his cup so Peter can pour the whiskey. Maybe the drink will help with the talking. We say what we do know how to say:

Take another drop?
That’s a fine hound ya got out there. 

Oh, it’s not worth a cuckoo’s spittle. 

Richard is a tall man, lean and straight-backed with ruddy skin, sandy hair, and soft, lidded, pleading eyes. He is the kind of man who lives in the future—planning, dreaming, saving today for tomorrow, restrained—like a real man should be. He’s a bit of a snob, bragging to me that he understood the “peasant mentality” and all; but, to be fair, Richard’s had lots of experience with it since his return from the British Army—mean looks, challenges to fistfights, dirty names and curses that follow him on the street. It’s another reason he plans to get away—plus the intoxicating idea of being landed. The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs.

“Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.” We laughed about it then. Still, we all agreed that everybody in the room must consent to a marriage and a voyage to America. Richard knows he has the advantage, given Nancy’s condition, but he senses Nancy’s uncertainty and her mother’s outright disdain.

Nancy pours for her mother and herself from a china teapot—chipped and cracked in several places but repaired and painted with delicate bluebells and catmint. Her long black hair is tied up with hemmed strips of cloth she saved from her mother’s old dresses. Several long wavy strands refuse to be confined.

“Our Nancy brewed that tea from chamomile she picked herself,” Peter says, pausing, pointing up at the tied bunches of dried wild plants suspended from the rafters—nettle leaves, dandelion root, calendula flowers, and thyme. “Not a lazy bone in that girl’s body.” He smiles, then looks away, grimacing. The mention of Nancy’s body causes the embarrassing memory of its condition to rise in all our minds. Margaret blushes, but Nancy does not. It is not clear whether Nancy will accept Richard, but her dark eyes shine when she looks into his. It is a bold step for a young woman—to let a man know she will look that directly and deeply.

Peter is at the window with his cane, acting like he’s checking for weather, but we all know knows he’s hoping to catch sight of the dog. He has a chicken bone in his hand.

“That hound ought to be catching her own birds,” Margaret shouts to Peter, which starts her coughing fit. Nancy turns away from her parents’ squabble and faces the raindrops catching on the windowpane and offering their soothing soft sound.

Richard is nodding too much, talking too fast, as he makes his case to Peter, when it’s Margaret he should be convincing.

“Our sergeant saw the broadsheets outside the American Land Office in London, and he told us all about it,” Richard is saying. “Best financial opportunity in history—lots of land for very little money, rich land with water and forests full of deer and game of all sorts. They are wanting people along the Ohio River.” Now his hands and arms spread open and his eyes include us all. “You only have to put a quarter down and build a small cabin within two years, they give you a loan, and it’s yours, on the installment plan. ‘Land is freedom,’” he quotes the land company brochure. To Richard, America is a giant step away from being an Irish cottier and a tiny step closer to becoming gentry.

“I hear there are savages in Ohio,” Peter comments, leaning forward, placing his elbows on his knees for balance, and getting just that much closer to Richard. He is asking the questions he thinks Nancy must be mulling.

“Savages are everywhere,” Richard responds quietly, “like what happened to Nancy.” Everybody knows it was rape, and as it was a stranger who’d done it, and the officials caught him, too, and jailed him quick. The man rushed to confess like a sinner on Good Friday, so they don’t fault Nancy. Still, there is some unwarranted shame, plus nobody knows what will happen to a bastard child like that, God love him. “But you don’t have to worry,” Richard is explaining, “the Americans have fought off most and made treaties with the others. They’re only selling land where the Indians have moved far away.” He pauses, uncertain whether Peter is convinced. Margaret signals to Nancy to pour her another cup and clears her throat to be heard. She does not look up or speak to anyone in particular.

“God punishes those who take land from the ones it truly belongs to—the ones who had it first,” she says. We know she is talking, not about America, but about Ireland.

“I hear there’s a Petition to the British Parliament for Catholic Emancipation,” Richard says, changing the subject.

“Pray God,” she replies, and we all mutter agreement.

“But there’s lots of Irish in America already, so we’ll stick together,” Richard laughs. “They say that’s why they call it O’Hio.” Peter and I chuckle, as expected, but the joke falls flat. “Plus I’m pretty good with a pistol and a musket,” Richard adds, and thunder cracks. Nancy startles at the mix of it—the thunder, the pistol and the musket. She must want his promise of protection.

Richard is from nearby village of Ardara. He and Nancy were childhood sweethearts of a sort as youngsters in school at St. Brendan’s, and, when I asked her, she said she’s always carried what she called “a feeling” about Richard. She did not say just what the feeling was, and I did not ask. His family is respectable—good Catholics and hard workers; they even own cows, pigs, chickens, and goats. In the early days, before the incident with the ox, Peter cut turf with the Richard’s family for the church when it was being built and mixed the limestone too. Margaret tatted lace for the altar cloths and the curtains. Nancy was only three years old when they buried their firstborn son, taken by brain fever, in a tiny grave behind the church, so St. Brendan’s is a place precious to them. Nancy and Richard grew up, and he went away to war. Now Nancy is a grown woman, not one to fancy a man’s pity, but she must wonder who would marry her. What will happen to her? Will she remain a spinster at her wheel in her parents’ home? So when I told them that Richard asked to visit, to ask for her hand, her father said to her at the rectory out loud and clearly before God, “Nancy, I want ya to have a new and better life. Love him,” he said, “and let him love you.”

Peter opens the subject a bit. “Have ya saved enough money for the down payment and all that?”

“I have, sir. Plus enough for the voyage, and the carriage travel, plus the things we’ll need—a one-room cabin to start,” he adds, looking around their one-room cabin. Richard glances at Nancy, and she smiles, looking excited. “We’ll have to work hard and send crops to market to pay for the installments,” he says. Nancy nods her understanding of the hard labor he is asking of her. “But we’ll get land along the river, so we won’t have far to go to market.”

Peter interrupts. “I’d like ya to have all the money before ya go. If you’re wanting to take our girl all the way to Ohio, you’d best have all of it.” Peter’s words draw Richard’s eyes toward him. “I’m afraid there will be no dowry,” he says plainly. “Crops have been few.”

“And the landlord takes most,” adds Margaret, “and the King just keeps placing more and more debt on us.” She pauses when she sees Peter pour himself yet another one. She’s used to counting them, and lets him know it with a side glance. She brags, “Why, Peter used to make horse collars, but no more now that the English replaced ours with their own.” She told me she wonders what ideas Richard picked up from the English while he was in the Army? She wants him to know that her husband is not lazy. She gets up to put on the kettle, turning her back to the fellow who intends to take her Nancy away, and she reaches for a dishtowel so fresh she must have put it out just before he knocked on the door.

“Of course,” says Richard, pouring himself a small one. “None expected. Not in America. A dowry is an old-fashioned idea anyway. And there’s no rush to sail. We can live in Donegal and save for the rest, if that is your wish.”

Nancy is squirming in what Richard is weaving—I imagine her drawing the line of his profile down the center of a page, a kind of a heart-shaped face, a pouty mouth, always a little bit open, and shining light eyes. But what moves him inside, she wonders? She hungers for real contact, not an imitation of it, and she may be terrified, but she looks completely calm. Richard is a handsome, traveled, God-fearing man with some money in his pocket and big dreams. Nancy has dreams herself—to make a home, of course, but she also dreams—she told me—to cross the ocean and find a new place to be, new lakes and skies to draw with her colored pencils, new earth in which to plant seeds she would take with her to this Ohio. Is Richard the best opportunity in history or just another English speculation? Is she a fool to go with a man whose soul she does not know? Or is she the luckiest girl in the county to have Richard Moore at her parents’ hearth asking for her hand?

Nancy is a dreamer. Oh, she does her work—about half, anyway—and then she appears in the woods with her herb bag or by the river or the lake with her fishing net and the pencils and paper she must have. She scrubs floors at the manor and cleans shit houses for the shillings to buy them. But the pictures Nancy draws can break something open inside you. And Richard has not even seen any of them up close. Margaret silently rearranges the baskets and the pans near the stove. Nancy brings her the old teapot and stands close enough to her mother to listen to the rhythm of her breathing, and I realize that Nancy will be homesick for this old woman.

What will Richard say next, to sign off on this contract? He’s not hearing any objection from Margaret; if she feels one, she is keeping it to herself. And Peter is with him. Anyone can sense that. Richard turns to Nancy, who is moving away from her mother and stepping into the corner where her bonnet hangs on a ten-penny nail. There’s a small statue of the Virgin Mary, and Nancy’s sketches are tacked to the wall.

“Come,” Nancy says, gesturing for Richard to take her outstretched hand, and I can imagine her gesturing to him like that through the years, allowing him to be closer and closer. He draws himself up next to her. Margaret looks pleased. She tries to catch Peter’s eye to share their knowing of what Nancy is doing—she’s putting Richard to the test. They trust that Nancy knows how to get to the heart of the matter. Peter opens the door to let the hound in from the cold. There is a quick, electric scent in the air, and then the door shuts. She’s a skinny brown thing and she smells like a barnyard. The dog goes straight to Richard, sniffing his boots suspiciously. Peter upends his cup of whiskey, then limps to add a chunk of peat to the fire. When he stumbles, Margaret is there to catch his arm. There is a shift of light toward evening. Margaret reaches for candles while sheets of rain drench the fields of Donegal, the lake overflows its banks, and the young salmon hide in murky water under a darkened, colorless sky.

Nancy and Richard stand in front of her three drawings, their backs to her parents. Nancy points to her sketch of Lough Anna. It is a large drawing, the size of a side table, and it is tacked to the wall. It shines in silver shadings with such detail that I swear I can see wrens in the distant trees beyond the water’s edge, the flat hills at a distance, the burly cloudbanks of winter. Richard tilts his head, reading the corner date.

“You drew this recently?”

Nancy nods.

How can this drawing be so beautiful when something so terrible happened to her there? There is no trace of pain in it, but neither is it a pretense; it is more like a place that has held so much for so long that it has incorporated all of that into itself.

Nancy watches Richard’s confused response to her work and points to the second sketch. The thick paper is creamy and rectangular. It is a colored drawing of a faceless soldier. Richard’s eyes widen; obviously, he recognizes himself in it. There are no marching lines of young men in their bright stockings and red coats, no fifes and drums. No, none of that. It shows a lonely man sitting on the ground, his back to a wall, his bare head thick with reddish, matted hair and resting in his hands. Bones on bones, muscles on muscles. Against the wall is a musket, and on the ground, a three-cornered hat and an old rucksack. The soldier is crying; he is crippled by war, but will not let it show, and the artist is kind enough to respect that. Richard takes a sharp breath, and I know what he is remembering. He once described to me his pal, Paddy—how he’d abandoned Paddy on the field to die alone—and he is thinking of the stunned eyes of the French soldier who cried out to God, “Mon Dieu,” when Richard’s saber cut open the boy’s guts. Richard doesn’t look at Nancy, who must know all these things that are broken inside him.

Nancy reaches for the last drawing. She removes the slender nail and places the paper in Richard’s trembling hands. It is another black-and-white pencil sketch of a gray, shimmering graveyard where a little girl stands, looking up at her mother, whose face is soaked with tears and whose thin body is heavy with grief. What could be a worse sight for a child to see? And its weight is doubled by being recalled on the page and now tripled in the seeing of it. A single tear appears in the corner of Richard’s eye. Nancy’s gaze follows the tear as it reaches the peak of his cheekbone and falls onto his boot. She bends down, takes the drop with her finger. She places it on her tongue, and drinks his tear.

***Author’s note:

Richard and Nancy Moore were my great-great-grandparents. This story is part of a collection of short historical fiction I am writing—what I call “family fiction,” as it is based on deep research into my own and my former husband’s ancestry. Richard and Nancy arrived in New York in1825 from New Brunswick, Canada, on the schooner Lady Hunter, accompanying an unnamed girl. With my cousin’s help, we identified and visited the seventy acres in Salineville, Ohio, (about twelve miles west of the Ohio River) that Richard Moore purchased from the US Government as evidenced by a deed signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1831—one year after the Indian Removal Act forced the native people of that area to migrate west of the Mississippi River. Research for this story included a visit to Glenties and Ardara in County Donegal, as well as research in museums, churches, and other historical sites in Ireland. In writing this family fiction, I tried to rely on documented facts, and the rest I had to imagine.

Life in Two seasons: Love Here, Love Gone

It is a world of birds here in the morning.  Busy magpies with sticks.  Occasional duck couples settle into the lake.  A thousand starlings fill the empty branches of an enormous poplar. When I look up at the tree again, and the black birds have all departed without a sound, without a trace.   I am stunned.  I  grieved the whole year my last child left home.  When I dream at the change of seasons,  it is often about them as little children, as they were then, sleek and wild, our life full of surprise and struggle.  In the dreams we are together again, as if they arrive and depart from me regularly due to the energy and excitement of the equinoxes.  All the seasons of my life  circle around and I can be all ages.

There was a thrill last Fall, driving along Cherry Creek, my hands on the wheel,  traffic rushing the other way, my eyes watching the flock of wild geese flying overhead.  It was more than one flock, there were twenty, then thirty or more geese.  Oh, my, here they come.  They are honking the familiar uh-whonk, uh-whonk.  Even more.  And more.  They kept sweeping along, crossing the flood plain at fifty feet.    My head was halfway out the window, twisted upwards, peering into the heavens, and I was starting to slow traffic behind me.  I stopped counting at a hundred. I glanced at the oblivious drivers passing, lighting cigarettes, their windows up.   Look everyone.  They're back!  Look now!    I almost began honking my horn.  Listen to them.  Please just look!  I remember how I felt when their feathered underbellies, their horns honking, their wide winging and careening confluence graced my day, opening my mind from its tight nucleus of pettiness to the fabulous expanse of the wild world.  I felt lonely for the people of Denver, the ones who didn't notice them.   At that moment I envied the families of geese for their very familyness.  I was a  lone human being,   joyful in their presence. 

The first time I noticed Canada geese flying was an October several years before.  My daughter Dana had just entered college, so I sold our Victorian home near City Park and bought a simple,  large, inexpensive townhouse for myself.  I was smoking a cigarette on my tiny, concrete patio, resting from unpacking, surrounded by a privacy fence and the top windows of  my new boxed neighborhood.  The geese appeared suddenly, and it had the same effect as later on the day down by Cherry Creek.  Taking my breath with them, they soared over, not thirty feet above my head, forty or fifty geese en route to New Mexico, honking at dusk.  Throughout that autumn I would listen for their arrivals, and run out on the balcony, the patio, the driveway, anywhere,  anytime--toothpaste on my lips, or laundry detergent in hand, nightgown, glasses or no glasses--just so I could feel that sensation when flocks fly over:    I hear you.  You are beautiful.  Take me with you. 

When love is new it is like wild geese skimming the ground.   Once I fell in love with someone I shouldn't have--like that, out of the blue.    It was the season of endings for me.  My father had died the month before, and my world was starting to shift on the diagonal.  There was something about the shape of neck and the way I felt completely safe: a deep need I fell into.  I remember standing in the naked dark facing out the bedroom window, watching the rain fall on the pines in streetlight.  It was a kind of magic sprinkling over my life,  entirely elemental and transient.

Today when I searched for the Canada geese, I returned to the place where I raised my own brood--in the neighborhood near City Park.  If they were anywhere they would be there among the mallards and the blackbirds, the cattails, the joggers, the drug dealers.   I've seen them congregate there for over twenty-five years--not flying really, but swimming, eating, sunning in the park, where I'd steer my toddlers away from the goose poop and onto the gravel of the playground.  I circled the avenues around the barren park until I found one flock, only ten geese, grazing the sports field directly north of the Museum of Natural History.  They were one whole team and a coach, feeding on the brown grass of the infield between first and second base. Geese prefer the wide open spaces where they can keep an advantage over their opponents.

These ten compact, well-proportioned geese are small, maybe ten pounds each.  I have a heavy cat at home, just about their size and weight, which gives me an idea of what it would be like to hold one close to me, to carry it around the house showing it my things, feeling it relax over my shoulder, trusting.  Canada geese appear to be gray, an impression created by the shaded scrims of neutral grays, browns, whites, and blacks.  The feathers are smooth, as if someone had just combed each goose and sent it outside to play.  They have long pointed bills for eating, and a snowy bib under their chins.  Their necks are very long and black with a white chin strap at their jawline, giving them a dignified, uniform, slightly military carriage.

I am bundled in goose down myself this morning, plus fleece pants, a baseball cap, dark gloves and glasses.  I woke early to the click of furnace igniting, feeling the warmth of the down comforter my son Chris gave me for Christmas.  My cats lay still like three piles of furry need and hunger staring at me on my old country bed.  But  I dressed quickly and went out in the March morning to sit in right field pretending to ignore Canada geese, trying to appear non-threatening.  The geese have had me under constant observation since before I got out of my car.  The sentinel goose, its stalk of a neck straighter and higher than the others, scans the field with a three-quarters range of vision.  Ignore me, I think.  Imagine I'm a squirrel.  He continues as sentry while the others feed.  The eating is intense.  They seem to peck and pull at the grass repeatedly forty or fifty times per minute, then rest for thirty seconds or so.  Several sleek feathers float on the tips of brown grass, preened and discarded, fletching the park.  I tug on the bill of my cap, scanning the ground like a goose.  Indeed, even though the lawn looks entirely brown, there are short blades of new green growth all over the area, and under my knees.  I could lean over to bite them off with my own teeth, if I only had a bill that was long enough and sharp. 

Colorado Boulevard traffic continues steadily just fifty yards to the east.  A service road between the museum and the zoo is mostly empty.   An occasional car or light truck passes.  I know a man is behind me in the parking lot; I hear his engine turn over.  I am having a hard time keeping my mind on geese.  They seem to fade into the cityscape along with the asphalt, the yellow brick, the steel posts.  I remember the Kelly green uniforms Dana wore to play soccer with the Leprechauns over in that field.  The humming of the traffic and the constant feeding gestures of the birds make me sleepy in the cold morning air.  To observe is to keep my mind on the goose.  But my mind slips into memories of last night, when Chris came over for dinner.  I'm drawn back to something about the way he sliced a hunk of fresh bread.  My mind is re-writing my life, like it always does when loosened.  Given enough freedom, it would keep mixing memory with perception, present me with innumerable versions of my past, and then convince me by its trickery that each and every story  was the truth.  Exuberance can be my downfall, since I can convince myself of the rightness of almost anything if I can work up enough interest and excitement about it.  Since for now the geese have wrested my imagination away from other possible interests, it becomes the geese that I both fear and desire.

Now they look neither fearful nor desirable.  They have taken positions five to ten feet apart from each other, covering the outfield methodically, like the teeth of an infield tractor smoothing the ground between innings.    I move ten feet closer to them, very, very  slowly. 

One of the geese-- I have no idea which one, since the only ones I can begin to distinguish are the sentry and its nearby mate--begins to lead the others from this baseball diamond to the next.  This happens very calmly, quietly; they are lining up single-file like first-graders crossing the field, heading to the edge of the infield in the middle diamond. 

Today the lead couple takes turns, one leading the flock, and the other one bringing up the rear. They have their long feathered periscopes up, scanning as they go. This couple has mated for life, as I have done.   Several times.  Geese literature is full of  romance--the courting, the calling, the defending, the harmless fighting, the mounting, the language before, during and after love.  I read a story about Duke, a gander whose little family of goose, two yearlings, and two goslings was shot down one by one from a hunter's blind in a Wisconsin field adjacent to Heron Marsh.   Duke flew high and fast and barely escaped massacre himself while listening to the cries of his daughters below.  Duke circled around and returned after dark, honking loudly.   No response. 

Uh-whonk!  Uh-whonk!  Silence.
Uh-whonk!  Uh-whonk!  Only the background of bullfrogs and cicadas.

Duke stayed in that refuge the entire winter, forgoing the tender grasses of the south for acorns so that he could remain near the piece of  sky where he last saw his mate.  He stayed alert, sounding the distress cry of separated, lost, and widowed geese:  oh!-oo, oh!-oo.  He was attuned to the sound of all birds in his desperation to hear the responding call of his familiars.  The gamekeepers named him Duke, and fed him grain all winter.  oh!--oo,  oh!-oo.

The next Spring Canada geese returned to the refuge, but Duke kept to himself.  One day he saw a lone goose swimming,  and although it was not his missing mate, he replied when she called to him:  Uh-whonk!  They swam together that day, and he watched while she fed,  and she watched while he fed.  The gamekeepers noticed they spent most of their days together:  "Looks like Duke has found his Duchess," they remarked.  Seeing the geese together so constantly also relieved something in the men.   Duchess led Duke on a walk to the other side of the marsh, where ducks dove and emerged from the deep lake with fresh tendrils of cattail roots clinging to their backs and their feet.  The ducks shook off the vegetation, a delicious meal for the two geese, who floated steadily a short distance behind them.

The other Canadas continued north, eager to begin their Spring nesting.  Duke had walked and swam and fed with Duchess, but, since he had mated for life with a different goose,  he had restrained himself from mounting her.  He would wait until they flew north together.  One morning he flew high, calling to her to follow him, while hundreds of geese all over Heron Marsh were lifting into the skies.  She called back to him, flapping her wings furiously, honking and honking,  until she was exhausted from the effort.  She never left the ground.  Duke watched her from above, circling around, as she turned from him and floated towards center of the lake to rest.  He called to her again.  This time she moved towards the edge of the water, walked out of the lake, again beating and shaking over and over, calling to Duke:  uh whonk!  uh whonk!  But Duchess could not fly.  She carried a piece of metal deep in the tissues of her chest, and although one wing was wide and open, the other was contracted next to her.  When she attempted expansion, the wing would fail.

Duke left Duchess there that day, and didn't return until Fall.  The men saw a lone Canada circling several hundred feet above the refuge, as was his way, as he always did at first, and they knew it was Duke because he was so high and alone.  He called down to the refuge, unable to spy her among the thousands that had landed.  He called again and again, until the goose he was looking for, the one who waited for him, floated quietly around a mound of bulrushes, her eyes scanning the sky where she heard his call.  Uh-wonk, uh-wonk uh-wonk,  she repeated, beating her wings  enthusiastically  in the water, splashing, calling his attention to her.    Within minutes, she heard his low short grunt, as Duke planed down and settled in beside her to stay.

When love grows cold it is like an invisible wild goose silent and circling.  There is a man is Wisconsin who fell in love with me because, he said, I was not like the woman back home.   He said I listened to him without criticism, or grasping, or expectations.  Then he lied to me once;  so  I packed his bags for him, without criticism, or grasping, or expectations, and dropped him at a the sign marked "Departures," so he could catch the next flight out.  What exactly happens at times like that I do not know.  He is a good man,  really  a very sweet man, and the truth is I could have loved him back.  I see myself  sitting in front of a cup of cold coffee with tears rolling down my face.  I see him not knowing what to say.  I see him wanting to fix it.   He married the woman back home and quickly regretted it, which he wrote to let me know.   Now he calls me long-distance whenever business takes him out of town.  We never  really know how much time we will have together.

Geese usually fly in tandem, one resting on the curve of air behind the other one's flight.  Geese find City Park every Spring and every Fall, where they mix with the local Canadas, and stay for a day or two or three to eat their fill before moving where their instincts direct.  Human history is part of their history in Denver.   Canadas choose to land in Denver during their migration, in part because other Canadas reside here year round.  The presence of others in a place is one way a  high-flying goose decides where to land to feed.  They conclude, as most travelers do, that where others have found safety, water, and food, they can find the same.  It's like choosing a restaurant in a strange town by the number of cars lined up in its parking lot at supper time.  

Why did some geese decide to make Denver their home?  Until outlawed  in 1935, one woman raised Canada geese to sell them as live decoys to hunters who, without the live decoys, were unable to match their own wits against the intelligence of the geese.  The decoy Canadas would  attract flocks of migrating wild geese.  People exploited the strong family ties of these birds by separating mated pairs from their young.  The birds would begin calling to each other: a loud peeping of lost goslings alternating with an alarmed honking cry of the parents. 

Thus  the distress would attract wild birds from other flocks as well.   After this practice was banned, the descendants of the decoys and the descendants of geese injured in these killings, became the local non-migrating population who remain year 'round in the generous and open parks of Denver.  Today if a local goose is separated from her goslings, and she calls to them in her panic, she can expect to hear in reply, a rapid series of light, soft notes--wheeoo, wheeoo--the coos of contentment sounded by goslings to express their relief at being found. I remember homesickness as a child as a longing so full of dread and disorientation that to spend the night two blocks away from my mother was physically painful.  The only relief was to hurry home, with no spoken explanations, and fall asleep to the canned laughter of the 1950s, my mother's favorite shows on the TV downstairs.  Now I don't know who I really feared for, my mother or myself, since the emotional distinctions between us were weak in those days.  Since my father worked nights, and since my older sisters had married, now if I slept over at a girlfriend's,  my mother was home by herself. She never complained that I left her alone, or even hinted that I should come home early.  But there was something in the tone of her voice, the quality of her breathing, that let me know that really she'd be much happier if I was home with her.  And I would no longer be homesick--that sense of unending loss and displacement.

When my son was an infant, I placed him carefully in his green carriage and wheeled him to the store, where slept there while I shopped. 

Attracted by  shoes in the next department, I moved away from him and for the next five minutes I forgot I was a mother.   Then, remembering, I rushed to him--certain I would be punished by an empty place in the carriage where he used to be.   I felt alarm, grief, shame--at the fragility and randomness of human error--to lose something  so fundamental to your life in such a casual and final way, a way that could cause someone to raise the question of whether  I should be trusted with the task at all.  Imagine then having developed in your life a strong sense of direction and  belonging, and suddenly losing yourself, the home you return to. 

Today I hear a lone helicopter chopping above City Park.  Unseen birds calling from somewhere to the west.  A truck downshifting.  Seals barking from inside the zoo.  The heavy equipment generator humming.  The piercing cry of a peacock.  Ten silent Canada geese eating peacefully in a park in the U.S.A.  Suddenly, another flock of geese circles fifty feet above.   Ten more Canada geese calling from above me!  The sentinel replies to the calling goose.  They circle again.  But, of course, they see me, and circle away from the baseball field in the direction of the lake.  They are flying high, running reconnaissance, scanning the skies for safe feeding grounds near the locals.  I asked one expert who has been studying wild birds in Colorado for over thirty years how to tell the migrants from the locals.  "That's pretty hard," he said, "Honestly, lady, I have no idea."  I am guessing then that these geese flying high above me are probably early migrants, having departed New Mexico for an early nesting in Alberta or Saskatchewan.  They are stopping here to rest and to feed before continuing their flight north. I like to think they  are the ones most longing for home.  

I focus my attention on the Canada geese feeding on the lawn.   I count twenty-eight.  They  are feeding in the same areas, passionately pulling the new grass up by  helpless roots. I cannot tell if there are now three flocks or two;  but from the way they are grouped around the lawn, either theory  is plausible.  I find out in the only way I can:  I get up.  Immediately three goose heads shoot their full vertical lengths. Three sentries are on duty, and I conclude there are, in fact, three flocks of Canada geese on the lawn west of the museum in City Park.  I turn to step away from them and hear three honks behind me;  I keep going and leave the question open, as to whether they are confirming my finding that they are three flocks or objecting to my departure.

The Canada geese spend half of their lives arriving and departing, skirting climate and food supplies in both directions.  They depart Canada in early Fall each year.  Those that fly over Colorado gather in a staging area near Calgary like thousands of troops assembling for a mission.  They  converge to follow one of twelve migration corridors, each one 30 to 50 miles wide.  The goal for the geese is not only arrival, but survival.  From the heights of the sky, they search for waterways, the most likely indicator of new vegetation growth.  They prefer the young green vegetation of early Spring, and grain, when they can find it.  Like all travelers, they must combat fatigue, hunger, disorientation.  And in the Fall, the geese are all under fire.   Wild geese  are careful and rarely make the same mistake twice.  Once they have witnessed the slaughter of their own, or been pipped themselves, if they survive the aftermath of it, they will likely avoid that killing ground for the rest of their lives.  Survivors go where there is refuge from the gun.

The Canadas that fly over Denver are the Highline Population that breed in the high plains of the corridor that runs along the east side of the Canadian Rockies, across Alberta and Saskatchewan, into Montana, Wyoming, and ending in the marshes of New Mexico at the Bosque del Apache refuge south of Santa Fe.  They are three kinds:  Western, Great Basin, and Giant Canada Geese, and, if they survive the journey, they will remain south until Spring.  If feeding drives them south, surely sex drives them north.  They sense the vernal shift in the angle of the earth's relation to the sun, and the geese begin departing in small flocks, and at a more leisurely pace than in the Fall.  Often the yearlings join other flocks, as the Canadas begin their flight north to the birthplace of the mother goose, who returns to nest in her own brooding ground.  There they will mate again, and she will lay five or more eggs, and incubate them with her body, while the gander surveys dangers, threatening any comers with his strong, long neck, his extended tongue, his horrifying hiss, and the display of his daring wings.  In the short summer months they will raise the goslings to young geese, spend a month  molting, all of them flightless while they grow new feathers.  Then just in time for the Fall chill, new growth and full-fledglings  prompt them into the southern skies. 

Almost every state in the union witnesses the great migration.  The magical navigation  of the geese is a result of their uncommon strength and range of vision.  They can recognize landmarks and  read the paths of waterways as they fly, travel by starlight at night and by magnetic fields in cloudy weather. With tail winds they may easily fly forty or fifty miles per hour 100 feet or more above the earth's surface. I asked my expert how long does it take them to get to Denver from Calgary.  Days?  Weeks?  Months?             

"Well,"  he said, "That's a tough one too.  But I can tell you this.  There was one time when I was down near La Junta and some of the boys there kept in touch by short wave with the boys up north.  They'd call down in the Fall just as soon as the geese took right off.  This one time they got the call as usual, but there was  a terrible storm near Calgary, high blowing winds, rain, cold, and all the geese took off in it.  Headed south.  They were all very worried about them."  He paused.  "You won't believe this, but the geese were in La Junta the next day!  So that's what they can do when they put their minds to it and have a good wind to carry them."

Today the newly arrived flock  lands east of Ferril Lake, where they have a postcard view of the boathouse, the downtown skyline and brilliant Mount Evans.  Spots of frost on the grass seem to puff up and then melt.  The sun sends winter luminance over a circular collection of brambles in a flagstone courtyard where  yellow roses reign in summer.  The new flock did choose to land where others already were.  Thirty geese are now feeding in this open area west of the museum, where once I met someone else's husband secretly for lunch.  One Canada looks up at me and sounds a soft low, intimate little grunt . He is very handsome;  I decide he is responsible and strong, the marrying kind.  He continues eating, and every few steps emits one low, steady honk in my direction.   I see what I assume to be the wife come running to him from behind me.   She is only slightly smaller, does no honking while they eat, and even though she could--and often does do it as well--she lets him do all the sentinel work for the entire flock.  

Since geese are rarely alone, almost always at least in a couple, and often traveling in extended families of other geese, communication is paramount for both individual and group survival.  It is by their honks that you know them. When they talk, what do they say?   The low, short repeated grunt I was hearing, is one mate calling the other, "Come, come."  Researchers have classified the lexicon of the geese into ten comments:  hissing at threat; honking  to advertise one's presence and to greet a separated mate; the kum! kum! kum! grunt I had been hearing this fellow make;  a loud, prolonged, snoring sound peculiar to the male and directed only at his mate;   the after-sex  snore, light and brief;  the scream of pain when bitten;   distress due to separation or attack;  loud peeping when lost;  and a rapid series of light soft notes made by lost goslings when found.  

"What if there be no more goose music?"  naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, expressing his fears of the destruction of the natural world in our time. Imagine the silence in the great expanse of history and geography. 

Historically, ancestors of the Canada geese emerged fifty million years ago, when mammals were only beginning to appear on earth.  Geographically, today the dappled blue expanse of water and land on a map of North America is Canada, where the  generous lakes and snaking rivers of the North provide safe harbor for the birds, where they can mate, sleep, incubate their eggs until the chicks pip.  Imagine the migrating hordes of the past and the future converging to darken the sky, circling the West, lower and lower, putting out their webs, braking with their wings and surfing along the water, now folding their wings, now floating together becoming one goose.  Now hear a low short grunt, as a second goose planes down and settles in beside the first.                 

A portion of this essay was published as “In Flight,” in Empire Magazine, Sunday Denver Post, Oct. 1996.
Copyright Jacqueline St. Joan, 1996.

Cough Drop Joe

This “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society

In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was.  It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by.  There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke.  I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen. 

            I was working on a piece about one of Washington’s local characters—a kind of tramp himself, a tortured soul, but one that somebody must have loved.  His name was Joseph Ratto, an old Italian who was known around D.C as “Cough Drop Joe.”  He got his name from one of his many trades—selling those smelly Lewis’ cough drops to politicians returning to the Capitol from their martini lunches at the Old Ebbitt Grill or the Occidental.  He picked up a few cents that way and got to rub elbows with the high and mighty.  Everybody in D.C. knew Joe as the man who had held the horse of John Wilkes Booth outside the Ford Theatre on April 14, 1865.  . . Or did he?

            It was seventy years after the assassination, Joe Ratto was in his eighties, and I was determined to get the story before he passed from this earth.  Joe had a back room above a second-hand furniture store.  He was friends with the padre at Holy Rosary and I’d heard he went to late Mass on Sunday mornings, so that’s where I caught up with him. 

It was a warm autumn day, the kind that holds the sharp scent of boxwood in the air.  Joe was blessing himself with holy water when he came through the church door and he leaned his body against it, holding it for a few old women who followed. Joe was only about five feet tall and was wearing the double-breasted winter coat I’d seen him in for many years.  The coat almost reached the ground.  He had a brimmed felt hat in his hand.  That hat had seen better days.  He pulled it down to his ears and buttoned his vest.  His leather shoes were filthy and all his clothes were wrinkled.  As I approached, Joe looked up at me with his murky eyes, and he took my hand when I extended mine.  He didn’t quite smile, but his long white moustache curled a little around his mouth.

“Buongiorno,” I said, hoping my accent would please him.

“I speak English, young man” he said with a thick accent.  “Do you?”  Then he laughed and I laughed and I knew we were off to a great start despite my misstep.  I offered to take him to lunch—“wherever you want to go,” I promised him.  We were standing in the alley behind the church,  “The Willard,” he said right away.  “My niece married a cook at the Willard, you know—although the Casassas always called him a chef.  They were a bit high and mighty, you know, pearl necklaces and tinted photographs for all the daughters, stuff like that.”  We started out of the alley and he turned his head in my direction.   “You want to know what they all want to know… did I hold that getaway horse or didn’t I?”  He gave me an opening so I took it.

            “Well, Mr. Ratto, did you?”  He burst out laughing

“Didja hold the horse, Old Joe?  Didja make some money on it, Joe?  Didja hold it long?  Did you hold it tight? Didja?  Didja? Didja?”  His voice was low as he shook his head and upper body.  I said nothing.  He was getting mad.  “Just like all those loafers and newspaper boys—the ones selling the Post in the morning, the Star in the evening.  They were a scary lot when I was younger, the way they’d follow me down the street with their newspaper sacks slung over their shoulders.  On each corner another one would join in.  “Didja hold Booth’s horse?  The man killed Lincoln!  Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” All my life they’ve been circling me, pointing their inky fingers in my face, spitting out their ugly words.  ‘They can’t prove it!’ I’d yell back at them.  ‘A man’s innocent until they can prove it!’” 

“That’s the American way,” I agreed.  I’d heard that old Joe would chase his tormentors with a cue stick he carried for protection. Lots of people saw him coming and poked fun at him because the John Wilkes Booth horse rumor had become part of Washington lore and an immigrant like Joe was an easy target. 

We walked down F Street in silence.  He was strong and solid for an old man, but his steps were short.  At 11th Street I took his elbow at the curb and he jerked it away, giving me a look that told me he was insulted.  Then we walked slowly side by side.  I wondered why he was giving me this interview and just how much he would admit.  “Where are your people from?” I asked.

“Northern Italy,” he grumbled, then paused and looked up at me.  “Not southern. . . get that part right,” he insisted, gesturing with his fingers in the air.  “I was just a kid, but I remember a big sailing ship and all of us piled in together--parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, everybody starving from those freezing winters and the killing frost that ruined the early crops.  They were all peasants.  Everybody was—contadino—so there was no shame.  We grew God’s good food. Grazie Dio!”  He looked into the blue sky.  His eyes had a milky look; he probably was half blind.  I hailed a Diamond cab and it dropped us on Pennsylvania Avenue at the Willard Hotel catty corner from the White House. 

The uniformed doorman opened the cab door, appearing shocked to see a man in Joe’s dirty condition.  I rushed around to take Joe’s arm and we walked down the carpet under the arched awning together.  I knew the maître d’ who gave us a corner table in the back of the dining room.  He took Joe’s coat and hat, holding them with one extended finger.  Joe’s hair was oily and raggedy but still fairly thick.  He held onto the table as I put the chair behind him and then he plopped down.  He was tired from the walk.  His fingers soiled the white tablecloth.

“Cocktail?” I asked.

            “Vino,” he said, not looking up at the waiter.  “Vino rosso.  Italiano.”  Joe scanned the room—the delicate murals on the thick columns and ceiling, the wooden paneling, the tile floor.  A little smile appeared.  “And olives,” he added looking up at me with a wish on his face.  I ordered the olives and a Campari and I waited for Joe to open up.  I’d heard that over beer Joe had told one confidante that he never held Booth’s horse, but that he had confessed to another that he actually did.  Probably Father DeCarlo at Holy Rosary was the only one who really knew the truth. 

“You have family here?” I asked.

“Oh, the Rattos have pushed fruit carts and vegetable carts of all kinds on every side of every marble building in this town.  Probably some paisano pushed these olives right into this restaurant.”  He sipped wine from the crystal glass like a gentleman.  I downed my Compari and called for another. 

“And you?  Did you have a pushcart too?”

“I was a ragpicker for years,” he said with no shame.  “Trash cans, gum wrappers, tin foil, anything on the street.  Peddling old newspapers was my specialty.  Thank God for your monkey business or I’d have starved years ago.”   He jabbed his elbow in my direction.  “I had my own cart once.  I’d collect yesterday’s newspapers and take them to all the vendors, to wrap up the apples and oranges, the lettuce and tomatoes.  Then I knew all the vendors and had the muscles to push that cart.”  Soon he was slicing his filet into tiny pieces and taking bites of the buttered potatoes with fresh parsley.  He had ordered the best beef on the menu, so I was feeling entitled to ask what I wanted to know.

“So tell me about the Ford Theatre that night that in ’65.  Were you there?”  He chewed as he considered my question.

“You’re gonna tell it straight for once?” he asked, pointing his fork in my direction.

“Just like you tell it to me, Joe.  Just like you tell it to me.”  He buttered his Parker roll.

“Yes, I was there.”

“Ok.  You were there.  Tell me more.”

“Hold your horses, young man.  I’d like another vino, per favore.”  I signaled the waiter while Joe ate.  I wondered what would come next.  There were those who said he never told the truth about his role in the assassination, but that he traded on it—maybe like he was doing with me—for a hot meal or a little fame.

“I was an eleven years old twerp,” he began.  “Slogging for my uncle--my father died on the boat and my mother died in childbirth soon after the ship landed in Philadelphia.  Riposare in pace. My uncle took me in and we moved to D.C. when I was so young I don’t even recall when.  But my job in the family was to pick up money wherever I could and put it in the biscotti jar by the stove where we all put money for food.  I did odd jobs, and sometimes I did hold horses for people at the theatre.  It was hard work. Those were very big horses and I was a very small boy.  But it was one of the best ways to earn a nickel—those who came late didn’t have time to find a stable, so us boys would hang around outside hoping to get one.  They let us do it.  It was a service.”  Joe held his fork in abeyance and kept his eyes on his plate as he spoke.

“It was honest work,” I said.

“It was,” he agreed, and his voice choked up and a tear rolled down his cheek.  The waiter took away his empty plate.  Joe did not look up as he spoke.  “Booth was a famous actor.  Everybody knew him, they said, but I didn’t.  I was just a kid.  What did I know?  He needed somebody to hold his horse and I was there.  So yes, I did hold it.  Did I know about his getaway plan?  No.  Were we for the Union?  We were.  Did I love Old Abe.  Yes, I did. We all did.”  He looked up at me.   His eyes were wet.  His cheeks.  His moustache.   “And you see the penance I have had to pay for the past seventy years?”  He swallowed hard and then he spoke:  “Isn’t it enough, mister?  Isn’t it enough?”

There before me was a broken man with the soul of a boy who did wrong by trying to do right.  He was an eccentric, haunted by a memory that may or may not even have been truly his own. Joe believed the story, but I had to wonder.  Was his memory the result of his tormentors?  The rumor mongers?  The newsmen like me who wanted a story? 

Suddenly he smiled.

“They’ll never prove it,” he said, returning to his gelato.  “They’ll never prove it.”

***

Reports on “Cough Drop Joe,” published after his death, indicate he was buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Washington, D.C.  by a “distant relative,” who I know, because my mother told me and the cemetery records confirm, was our kind grandmother, Blanche Casassa Sheaffer.  She bought a casket and had a headstone carved for Joseph Ratto (1854-1946) where she is now buried along with our grandfather, our parents, aunt, and of course, Uncle Joe.  Our grandmother’s own mother’s birth name was Ratto, and although I’ve not yet been able to determine exactly how we are related to Cough Drop Joe, I believe we must be. I’ve visited the small town in Italy where the Casassas came from and noticed plenty of Rattos buried in the cemetery there.

My primary source for this fictional account is an interview conducted in the 1930s by Denver writer, Donald Bloch, who eventually wrote Joe’s story.Bloch returned to Denver and became proprietor of Collectors’ Center, 1640 Arapahoe Street, specializing in rare books and collections.In 1969 the story was published and filed in Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection.As recently as 2007, a Lincoln historian, in his book, Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President, identifies “Peanut” John Burroughs, Nathan Simms, and “Coughdrop” Joey Ratto, all of whom allegedly held Booth's getaway horse outside Ford's Theatre the night of the assassination.

Ghosts in the Writing Field

When I was growing up we had two magazine subscriptions in my house:  Reader's Digest and Arizona Highways.  We were not a literary family;  yet, my mother, who was just a country girl, had been a student with perfect spelling, perfect penmanship, and perfect attendance.  She had memorized perfectly, poem after poem after sing-song poem: 
Shoot if you must this old gray head,
but spare our country's flag!
she would bellow dramatically, her right arm waving above her head.  She sang it seriously and with such passion I was sure that if she ever saw someone threaten to shoot Old Glory, she would happily re-direct a rifle to her heart and die a martyr to the red white and blue.
The gingham dog and the calico cat, 
she'd begin and a weird light would spark in her eye.  To my mother a poem was a workout:  every poetic idea had a gesture to accompany it.  I was only six myself, but I could see how she must have looked at my age, reciting it in the parlor on Sunday for company. 
Half past twelve and what do you think! 
Not one of them had slept a wink! 

Her pointer finger was wagging in the air, and she was winking and rocking. It was a little embarrassing to see her bald effort at elocution,  but I couldn't take my eyes off of her.  Her store of corny pone was always full:  
Oatspeasbeans and barley grow
Oatspeasbeans and barley grow
or 
Would you rather be a colonel with an eagle on his shoulder
or a private with a chicken on his knee?  

Then her words would singsong here and singsong there, and they still do.

Writing begins in my body and ends up in your head.  How do you ever think up all those things?  someone asked once after a poetry reading.  I don't think it all up.  Thinking comes later.  First,  I have to hear it.  Don't play what you know, Miles Davis advised young musicians, play what you hear.

But even before I hear it, I have to feel it start and stop and start again.   Robert Hass writes that "rhythm has direct access to the unconscious; because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power."  I hear the powerful thing and it makes me feel something. 
It makes me wiggle and want to move towards the paper and pencil. It's not an emotion that has a name: not sad, bad, mad or glad.  The urge to move is more neutral, both voluntary and involuntary. The trick is to get that far and then get out of the way.  Follow it to the first words. Then follow it right into the field.

It's a place.  The words come into the body like a lump or a bump or a bad case of the mumps, but they also come around the periphery of the field of consciousness, what Joy Harjo calls the "field of miracles."  The words are hiding near dreams. 
I often sense I am lying in that field in the morning.  I believe I know without looking how many of my cats are still on my bed. I say all three cats are on the bed, then I see that one of them is not.  She is sitting over there by the glass door licking her front paw.  You can be wrong in the field; in fact that is an important part of it -- you are encouraged to make mistakes.  In this field of the periphery it's right to be wrong.  Here you are looking up between the cracks in the world from your spying station.  Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to stay there quietly in the light where they can see you and just watch them in the shadows:   images form; sounds come forth.  Do nothing, and a  message will arrive.  You have the rest of your life.  We are all waiting to die.  Anyway, Lorca says that's where the poet's true fight is.

As a child I sometimes wished my mother could go to school too.  She seemed to like it so much.   She was especially excited when we were assigned compositions.  She would traipse up the attic stairs and emerge with one or two volumes from the dusty corpse of an encyclopedia she stored up there. The books were dated 1908.  The only thing I'd ever seen that old was a dime my grandmother showed me once.  Somehow Mother would always find something useful in the old books, and I'd wipe the Formica table clean after dinner, pull out the red plastic chairs, and we'd set to work.  This went on for the first few years of grade school.  She would practically write my compositions herself, and I would feel guilty turning them in as if they were my own.  Finally I had to put my foota stop to it.

The composition was a biography of Susan B. Anthony.  I took scissors to the encyclopedia and cut a picture of Miss Anthony in the shape of an oval so it would look like the cameo at the throat of her high-necked white shirt.   I pasted it on the cover of my composition, and using a Sheaffer's washable blue ink pen, I began my final draft.  With great concentration I copied the roughd draft proudly one by one. By the time I came to the final paragraph, I was falling in love with my own writing.  I was lost in the scene that described Miss Anthony as an old woman, delivering a speech on the stage -- something about justice and equality. She was standing alone at a podium in a shawl, looking "frail," it said.  "Frail"? The word "frail" was inserted in the earlier draft in my mother's neat hand. It was not my word.  I had no idea what "frail" meant. But the paragraph was so beautiful, and I didn't know a better word, and I didn't want to call my mother's attention to the moral dilemma I now was in, since she had put me in it. So I learned the compromises writers make, copied the word "frail," and finished the job. I was ashamed because it was a fraud. The next time she got that "Let-me help-you-with-your-homework" sparkle in her eye, I turned her down. 

"Oh, now you're so smart you don't need my help.   It's  ‘Mother-please-I'd-rather-do-it-myself!’ is it?" she replied, mimicking the television commercial that featured the impatient teen-age girl fronting-off her mother.  "Just like when you were little and wouldn't hold my hand crossing the street!"  she continued, going off somewhere in the wind without me.

I could hear something calling me from out in the field.  Something else was starting to die. It would take many years of waiting before I could tolerate this ongoing tension between what was calling me and the dying me. 

The problem is that as soon as we start to wait attentively for the sound, the image, or the beat, our minds start to spin somewhere else.  We forget to remember to keep waiting.  We lose our concentration, and the inchoate sounds of poetry become the drone of the shopping list.  Shifting images that resonate in timelessness become of the familiar pages of the Day-timer full of lists of planned activities jotted down next to the numbers we assign to time. 

This is what takes us away from art -- not the need for money, or for uninterrupted time, or for the right teacher, or for a publishing contract (These do have important effects all their own.)  Forgetfulness steals us away from the paper and pencil that betray their art.  The mind is looking for something to do, anything at all.  So you give it the shopping lists and the calendar.  You control it with no better effect than you control your mind.  Write it on your prayer flag, my friend:  Remember!

My father was a music teacher.  I could listen to the lessons from the top of the basement stairs.  His student's clarinet  played slowly and deliberately while his loud deep voice intoned the beat:
                        Baaa/BaBa Ba
                        Baaa/BaBa Ba
                        Baaaaa!

The bass line of my writing today was born in that basement.  The  treble was trained by television. 
During the years I was in high school, my father was teaching himself to play the flute.  He was a union man--a working musician. Art and beauty were good -- very good.  So were good wages and reasonable hours.  He would work at night.  During the day he would teach students, attend union meetings, have dinner with us, then nap in front of the TV until it was time to get ready for work again.  With a schedule like that he had no time to practice the flute, so he played during commercials.  He kept the instrument primed laid across the mantel.  Dinah Shore would start singing about Chevrolets, and he'd switch off the sound, pick up the silver tube, run a few scales, check his embouchure in the mirror, adjust the position of his fingers and elbows, and finish all the variations in several keys before the horses and guns appeared again on the screen.  Then he'd settle back down in his chair from where Bart Maverick and Ben Cartwright were his kind of guys.

What keeps me from writing is a certain weakness of the mind and a little dread.  Trepidation.   I recoil from the mystery with a lingering sense still stored in my body that writing is not a legitimate way to live.   In this matrix of generating material,  I have to get out of the way of my life, so that I can truly have my life.  Otherwise, I forget my intention to write in the field and instead fill my days with items from "the list," all those obligations frozen in time.  I could die, I fear, and never complete them.  In the field of the imagination all of this makes perfectly good sense--just like shamanism or infinity or the dual nature of light.  In the field, time melts, but you must be brave. 

From the time I was ten or eleven I felt that something was terribly wrong. I polished my saddle shoes nightly, and had my homework ready on time.  My mother stood on the speckled linoleum  and ironed my blouses long past the age when I could have done it myself.  Now I think she kept doing it to keep her sanity in those years when she was so unhappy and we couldn't talk or do anything about it.  The shirts were clean and bright and carries so much promise.  In those days I'd rush home from a friend's house in the cool dark morning of winter  with a growing sense of disaster at home.  But ther was no obvious disaster.  She'd be watching television and waiting.  Or ironing and waiting. 

Always waiting.

My first short story was about a lonely little girl in a park with an imaginary playmate and a mother in a mental hospital.  She was really a very angry little girl.   I entitled the story in code:  "Step on a Crack."  Since everyone knew the rest of that verse, my outcry was complete.  We could pretend the story was fiction, and since I never said my mother was crazy, I without fault.

Meanwhile my father kept playing his sax:  a one and a two and I love Paris in the Springtime, I love Paris in the Fall.  Because he was a music teacher, he knew about the importance of practice -- that as long as you put in your time, your star would climb. You'd improve;  you had to. His body, as much as his mind, was learning to play the flute.  My body does the writing and my mind takes the hits.  Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls, says the key to any success is being in continuous motion -- repetitive drills that train the player on an experiential level to develop an intuitive feel for the connection between their own movements and the other players.  Anyone who is open and receptive can have the ball in this place of total and profound relaxation.

It's the field again. 

For example, whatever made me write about my father fitting music practice into his schedule?  You think I sat down and tried to think up a good example to persuade you to squeeze writing in between Cosby and Star-Trek? No way.  I don't have that kind of control.  I just was sitting here typing and feeling relaxed watching the cursor move across the screen, and I started hearing  my father's voice -- Ba/BaBa/Ba -- and I could see his right shoe tapping, and the next thing I'm telling you about how he was a teacher and then about how he learned to play the flute.  I had no idea I was going there anymore than I knew I was going to describe my moral dilemma with my mother over the word "frail," and pages later tell you about her frailty.   My point is that I didn't do it.  The words did it.  I just followed along.                   

My mother died this year. She slowly lost her mind.  Her brain responded to the interrupted flow of oxygen with little bursts of electrical charge that zapped first her memory, then her energy, and finally her life.   

The day before she died I visited her.  She was all dressed up and her fine white hair was fixed.  She slumped down in her wing back chair. One side of her mouth drooped and she couldn't talk. She could make sounds, but her eyes were red and strained, flicking around her mind, searching for the word that would unlock the door to the world of words again.

I wasn't sure she understood the words I spoke, so I sat on the floor at her feet by the chair, and I wrote her a few:   

Your name is Peggy. 

You are my mother. 

I love you. 

You will feel better soon.

I handed her the little notebook as if to ask her the check my spelling.  She turned it this way and that.  I started to take it back to read it aloud to her, but she snapped it away from me with all her strength.  She kept turning the words this way and that, over and over, until finally, exhausted, she surrendered back into the chair. She looked so frail I believed she would be dead soon.

Later that night my sister and I helped her into her bed.  She was agitated, pulling her nightgown off, her underpants too.  She wanted to be naked.  So she curled up on her side, pale and soft between the white sheets.  She was the shape of a scoop, a slice of the moon, the line of an egg. We pulled up the sheet to cover her in the dim room and she pulled it right down, hard, squeezing the palm of her protective hand down in there between her legs.

Ten years before this, waiting outside of the hospital room where my father would die,  my mother and I sat in silence.  We were tired from the on-going strain of it all.  She turned to me and said:  “He told me to meet him at the pass.  I could hardly hear him at all, so I leaned over to put my ear right over his lips.

“Meet me at the pass,” he said,  “Come alone.”

In the field of reverie I am wise and wordless.  The urge toward words is small and moves quietly, simultaneously with all else that cannot be named.  The urge widens my world.  In the field of ghosts I dream of my grown children as if they were six and eight years old. I contact another galaxy where my father's foot is under the kitchen table, tapping the back beat; and my mother is out there with him, winking and wagging her finger in his direction.  She picks up the iron and pushes words back and forth across the board.  She is preparing it for me.  She is ironing a clean white shirt.

Glenn Miller Was Missing

Published in War, Literature and the Arts, 1997 and in Thomas J. Cooley Journal of Clinical and Practical Law, 2001.   It won a Clincal Legal Education Association poetry award.

Glenn Miller was missing.  Somewhere over the English Channel,
his plane went down in December 1944.  You'd been drafted,
even with a wife and two daughters to support and
day work in a defense plant and night work in the clubs,
your teeth clamped onto the reed of  a saxophone,  chin tucked in,
neck thrown back under the black and silver clarinet.
Even in your tuxedo, you were slated for war.   
If Glenn Miller could die, you could die.
I don't know what it looked like,  you two too scared to be
separated.  They say your bags were packed for months.
You had to be ready to go.  Even the birth of a third child
couldn't stop it now.

By Springtime in Berlin Hitler was dead, or so it was reported. 
The war camps were being emptied of some, and filled with others. 
The boys were coming home, but no one was sure
whether to celebrate or not.  No one knew if you might still have to go
or not.  The war with Japan continued. Scientists were speeding their experiments. 
Khaki uniforms crisscrossing the globe.  Drop the bomb.
Alternative plans on the political front. Pressure from the Allies. 
Hurry before they do it first!  Americans were sick of war.  
In August, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I was born
forty days later.  In the hospital my mother counted all
my  fingers,  all my toes.  A baby whose father never had to go. 

It's as though it was set like a bomb fifty years ago,
and now it goes off  when the phone rings and it's my mother
calling  to hear my voice and she asks me if I know
that she is leaving by air transport.  She says,
I'm leaving for the war, and her 85 year old voice begins to tremble.
Will you take care of my children? she begs me,  warning,
it's a big job.   She is making these last requests of me,
This woman forever in fear of what the neighbors would say
this woman whose  sins I am sick to death of listing
and won't.  I think

how brave she is, this warrior, packed for the end, ready to give her all
for her country.  So I lie to her, and I tell her
of course I will take care of the children, they are such good girls.  I wish her luck 
and thank her for the sacrifice she is making  for us all. 
I pray you'll be home by Christmas, I say over the phone,
 and I mean it.  Her voice sounds so sad. I hope so, she whispers.
I imagine her head is down, phone at her ear, talking into her breasts,
loose now in a loose gown.  And then it is quiet.
I am lost in this when she starts to laugh.
I've been sitting here with the other girls, she tells me. 
Jane had a date last night.  I just don't know why Daddy
hasn't come to pick me up.  She begins
talking about you,

You over there on her dresser in the white tuxedo
with the black bow tie, your wavy hair so light,
your  green eyes young in smoky shades of sepia,
and folded in the other photo next to you
As you two were in the mahogany bed,
is this delicate young dark-eyed woman,
a farm girl pretending sophistication, a studio portrait,
something taken in the thirties, hinged there forever
looking out, not at us, not at each other, you have become
not even you, but Youth, so sweet
So strange to hear my mother now asking for you,
when the last time I saw you, your neck muscles
were finally surrendering to the pillow.
Anita wrapped your dentures in Kleenex.
I tried to tie my silk scarf around your head
to keep your slack mouth shut, but the weight was too much
or the scarf was too narrow, or my will to force the act was too weak,
and we dragged home to tell our mother. 
We lied to her that your death had been painless. 
Now we conspire again to protect her
and I wonder if that's what you did
when she says she saw you just the other day and
you acted like you didn't even know her.  I would never
cheat on Jimmy, she says to me now, I love him so much,
but now I don't know if he loves me.  Why doesn't he
come and get me?  I love him so very much, she repeats, more and more desperate. 
So I tell her you are nearby and she is safe right where
you want her to be, and she agrees that it's all for the best.
She calls me by her sister's name, lifts her voice, pauses and asks me,
and how are the children? 

One thing I can't explain is how I feel when people say
it must be so hard to see your mother's mind fail,
when I feel like finally, finally,
all of her places and years come pouring out to me.
And I think it is me she tells these things to
only because I am here, and because
when Glenn Miller was missing and
she was afraid of war and so were you, 
you comforted her all night long.
So that now, nine months and fifty years later
when I walk through the door
with my trench coat folded over my arm,
she looks long into my green eyes,
and she thinks I am you.