\Winter-Spring 2000

     

 
 

 
REG UL OAR REVitw

Winter-Spring 2000
Volume XXXV Issue 2
 
This book is dedicated to the memory of Jim Cash.
 

y

Re oe ie hae
Editer CARRIE PRESTON
Aisociate Editen DOUG DOWLAND

Fiction Editer JENNIFER BIDLINGMEYER

Atsistant Editors MEGAN MCCLURE
JIM OLIVER

Business Editor JULIE BAGLEY
design Editor LAURIE SCHILLER
Atsistant Design Editor RACHELL GAUTZ
Publicity BOBROMASHKO

Readent ANDREA ALEXANDER
GRACE ARNOLD
ANNIE BALOCATING ~
BRAD DeEMAAGD
EMILY HARTMAN
SARA M. HUMMEL
ELIZABETH KENDALL
MICHAEL KIRKLAND
CONOR M. MCHALE
HEATHER MORELAND
KATHLEEN O'NEILL

Advisozr MARCIA ALDRICH
DIANE WAKOSKI

   

Red! Cedlar Review is a biannual literary magazine published on the campus of Michigan
State University for thirty-five years. Subscriptions are available for $10 for one year.
Sample copies are $3. Correspondence should be sent to Real Cedar Review, 17G
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This issue was designed in PageMaker 6.5 and printed by McNaughton and Gunn,
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point, titles are in Kaufmann 36 point, and authors are in Geometric 8 Point.

Cover art: Pleiades (1949) by John DeMartelly; this oil on canvas painting hangs in
the lobby of the MSU Union Building. Photo by Heather Moreland.

 

 

 

©2000, Red! Cedar Review Volume XXXV Issue 2
Cijm | ENTS

 

CAMILLE-YVETTE WELSCH SANJANA NAIR
10 16
BRANDON GRAFIUS PAULA V. SMITH

Guardians Inscription on Delos
11 18
HEATHER ABNER JIM HARRISON
An Angry Young Man Serget Yesenin 1895 — 19.25
12 20
Interview.
PRISCILLA. ATKINS 24
June
13 DENNIS MUST
Queen Esther
C. MATTHEW TUSA 48
‘The Elymology of Science
14 PHILIP RUSSELL
Inventing an End The Refugee
15 55
VANESSA FURSE JACKSON

Grandmather s Faststeps
64
 
 
CAR ILL Foy VE hte. Wer tS

What Slaves

Dont bother to look for anything less simple

Than simple myrtle, suitable to the scene:

The garlanded cupbearer waiting, and garlanded I,

Here in the shade of the arbor, drinking my wine.
Horace, i38

Come into the arbor, the bower,

and we will consider, first with our hands,

the arched backs of leaves,

trace the veins barely raised,

rub between our finger and thumb that skin
until it yields, a little damp, beneath our touch,
filling the dry riverbeds of our prints with green,
creating moist swirls that might stamp our skin.

Bring the wine in its season, watch

its legs climb the wall of the goblet

and linger against the sides, one

breath, one drop, caught tremulous as dandelions
on the curved lip of the glass. How it trembles!
How it waits to be caught and broken

by the same breath, against the same tongue

and the taste, let it be rich and full,

let it last in the dark fold of our mouths

where every taste might be another.

Come garlanded — in what? The sun,

a hot breath around our shoulders, dappled

and erratic through the trees. Come with the garland
of my arms, full-white around your neck,

with the stain of wine against your lips,

and mine, the myrtle blossom beneath us,

pink and white, ground into green, a mosaic

of the moment, a subtle pattern against your back.

Don’t bother to look for anything less simple
than the arched backs of leaves and the sweep of my spine.

- 70°
Peat GRATIS

One night he lay cold as a stone slab beside her
as she broke the covers off.

She began to walk towards the door when

her toe nudged what was a pile

of laundry in the daytime, coiled on the floor.
The warning hissed until she crawled back

and curled onto her side.

He holds her like a ball of string that he is slowly unraveling.
When she opened his bedroom door to leave

she found a maze of hallways, dry earth lit by flickering torchlight.
She remembered the last time she had tried to leave—

The corridors seemed to fold on top of each other

and she heard the footsteps behind her again

until his voice came, calling her name

as patiently as a pendulum.

Turning around, she saw she had returned to his door.

She knows that each slice will shorten the arc.
She used to think that pendulums tired

and finally gave up. Now she wonders

if maybe the air

grows nauseous from continuous parting
and finally decides to hold still.

She will wait for shedding skin to blind him,
and keep pulling at both ends of herself

until the wave’s curves flatten.

“7]
HEATHER AG NE

An Angry Young Man

I found a drone struggling

outside the hive like a drunk husband
and dropped him in a paper cup.

The sound of him was the sound

of a retreating motorcycle,

and of the neighbors cursing

down the street.

Strange boy in the gold

and black stripes of an electric guitar,
loud punk, listening to no one.

I drizzled a circle of honey

around his body

in case he had a hunger,

but he didn’t eat.

Just sat there bellowing

in the amber light.

All the angry young men

I’ve ever fallen for,

sitting in miniature

at the center of my palm.

‘o7
Pe SA LL A Ae

fume

We launch our small red canoe

into the tree-green river,

wake to the chi-chi-chi-chi of kingfishers
leaping from branches

to skim low and low and lower

over the length of the loin-rippled water.
All day we’re held in the rhythm of paddle,
breath and sweet, sun and shadow,

until a sudden orange flash of oriole,

or better still, the primordial flap

of slate-blue wings as a heron lifts

into the span of trees: down and up,
down and up, until it blurs

and disappears.

i,

Il.

Dusk folds over the trees

before you lift the book from my hands,
feather fingers down my thigh,

curl and slide into night-lit waters.

Now we ride the pulse of tides,

a thin layer of air closer than skin touching,
your cheek and my cheek,

close, but not touching,

and then a quickening, a fluttering,

the rising upwards, sweep of wings
and final sounding, moments looking
down, the turn and drifting

past the bend, places we are leaving,
things we’ll never leave behind.

“sss
C.-M ret WY LGA

The Etymology, of Science

Think of the zoologist

who translates yellow umlauts
on the spotted shells of turtles,
who combs the lip of a bayou

mimicking the dialect of geese,
who huddles knee-deep

in the soft mud to see a moccasin
curl like a tilde towards its meal.

Think of the botanist

who presses his ear deep

in the sweaty crotch of a cypress,
who scours its knotted trunk

scraping through the grammar
of earthworm and beetle,
searching for meaning

in its think tangled root.

Think of the medical student
whose red-inked scalpel
slices through the intestine
of a word.

-f4-
Ser LE WW 7}

Iwenting an End

For Leanne Thibodeaux, whose body was never found.

Maybe he’s straddling you in the soft mud,
his eyes the brown shells of beetles,

your voice a yellow-jacket buzzing

in the sweaty throat of his palm.

Maybe the sunlight bleeds onto the ground
as the sharp black wings of crows ripple

in the rusted steel of his switchblade,

or, maybe he has a gun.

The end is always the same: your pale body
spun deep in the muddy mouth of a river
where rusty lures flicker like flashbulbs

and the spotted scales of bass blink

through green lashes of eel grass.

In my mind I see you reaching through a cloud
of cattails, hair tangled with leaves, lips curled
around your final watery word.

ae fo
SANJANA NAIR

My old lover, this is your song of sorrow.

It has played itself out and you’re gilded

with an antique’s lacquer, novel

in your useless oddity. You are an old fashioned
abacus, carefully counting out blue-beaded lovers.

A dynasty of women stretches its lines about you.
Strung together, they are the notes of your tune.
The women spiral down your spine.

They are the spirits that made you

and they have gone and you have no climate.

You live on stories —

their breadth and width and sacrifice.

For each woman purchased, a finger was lost.
After fingers went toes until you were handless,
footless, unable to touch and turn.

So you stay where you are

where thumbs are the first to go.

One held you so tight, bound

up in ropes of her hair, that

she convinced your grip away from you.

Then went the next.

She demanded the forefinger

pointing to other beauties with legs,

long legs and beautiful breasts. She demanded
the pointing stop, and you agreed.

Then went the angry one.
The fuck finger another
said was never enough.
Let me count myself

in each of them.

- 76°
Counting Fingers

The ring finger was hardest.

You never wanted a conjugal bed.

Offering it up was the closest you could come.
I have it in my back pocket.

And it still bleeds.

‘Je
PAIL NY. SM ie

Inscription on Detos

I am glad someone understands these languages.
You had found them old
inarticulate voices heard by the sea

by crevices in rock, concavities in sand.
But this summer you changed, skin a fine clay
fired to cinnamon against the blue.

Closing our eyes during light,
we awaken hours later to read
constellations night swept in circles.

I notice your face is made of lines
that break mid-sentence; living on islands,
must have reminded you

not only how things are defined by contrast,
but also that a measure of the practical
gets you across the rocks |

to the low-tide mark, teaches you to forget
everything as you search through dust
and heat, scanning the scarp

for figures in chariot races
even at the height of the sun. So,
having been in the sea (breath spreading

like waves), hair wrinkled with salt,
specks of silica and volcanic ash
decorating the skin's molten surface--

by that time you knew

I was trying to do something
in another language: trying to forge

Je
Inscription on Delos

a primeval knife,
its hilt a mirror
the blade equally dangerous.

Because you understand this,

I am ready to forgive you your old habits

of excavating my skeleton, my intact jewelry,
poring over the small things left in my grave.

«fo
JIM HARRISON

1599 es

to D.G.

This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin

bought at a Leningrad newstand—permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me

he stares at nothing; the difference between

a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.

And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both

of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing

and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved

in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge

near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity

this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light year away.

So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose which came

to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!

a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart

it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat

as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose

© Jim Harrison

originally published in Volume VIII, Issue 2 of Red Cedar Review
December, 1973

<a) *
 

 
 
Yotemiow. with
jum Aavison

Interviewed by Carrie Preston and Anthony Michel

“As a child, fresh out of the hospital
with tape covering the left side

of my face, I began to count birds.
At age fifty the sum total is precise
and astonishing, my only secret.
Some men count women or the cars
they’ve owned, their shirts—

long sleeved and short sleeved—
or shoes, but I have my birds...”

from “Counting Birds” in The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems

For a graduate student in American Studies just finishing his thesis and
an English senior preparing to enter graduate school, traveling to Jim Harrison’s
home outside of Traverse City in Northern Michigan, was an unusual oppor-
tunity to go to an interesting area to speak with one of the more intriguing
personalities in contemporary literature. Preparing to meet the novelist
(Sundog, Dalva), screenwriter (Legends of the Fall), and poet (Outlyer), we
were particularly intrigued by the implication in many articles that there is an
ambivalent and, at times, tense relationship between Harrison and academics,
journalists, or literary critics.

The day we spent with the Michigan State University graduate and re-
cipient of last year’s MSU Distinguished Alumnus Award, was starkly differ-
ent from what we were led to expect by the increasing body of work devoted
to explicating something like a “mythos” surrounding Jim Harrison’s work and
person. Meeting us at the door with a quip, “this one must be the girl,”
Harrison exuded a contagious sense of peace with his immediate surround-
ings. We found ourselves immediately drawn into conversation, and it wasn’t
until ten minutes after a tour of his home, when we had settled into an old
granary, converted into Harrison’s writing studio, that we realized the inter-
view had already begun. With the exception of a quick changing of the tape,
and an occasional formal question drawn from our seldom-used script, this
interview is better characterized as a terribly interesting conversation with a
man who speaks openly about writing as both a calling and the most prefer-

a a
Interview

 

photo by Carrie Preston

able of the various types of labor he has done in his life.

The conversation that follows is permeated with a concern, found in
Harrison’s works, for rituals that mark the passage of time and the significant
events in our lives: graduations, deaths, traveling, and returning home. The
rituals appear with raw, coarse power in such acclaimed writing as Harrison’s
poem “Counting Birds,” which uses images of nature and an Anasazi legend
to represent birds as the messengers between temporal lives and transcen-
dent spiritual existence. Asserting himself as an “outlyer,” Harrison prefers
the rivers and forests surrounding his secluded home to the more recognized
reservoirs of culture including the academy, Hollywood, the East Coast pub-
lishing industry, and Paris. His works and life, however, belie a concern for
how individuals move between the natural world and various communities.
Following the day we spent with Harrison, including a tour of his farm, lunch
at a local greasy spoon, and always, intriguing conversation, we understand
this interview as less a commentary on Harrison’s literary works than as a
meditation on how each of us attempts to mediate the tensions between where
we have been and where we may go.

* 245°
JIM HARRISON
Carrie Preston: How do you remember your experiences at Michigan State?

Jim Harrison: | had personality differences with some people. You know how
you develop those with teachers (laughs). You simply don’t like each other,
and the people I didn’t like in the English Department didn’t like me either.
But Herbert Weisinger' was in the position to facilitate things. He was the
director of comparative literature. I don’t even know if they have that any-
more. It was very active then, and to me it was more interesting. I like to study
world literature and, at the time, I was interested in French and Spanish litera-
ture. Weisinger, who died last year, was maybe the largest brain they ever
had at MSU. He was at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies for a
couple of years and the Warburg Institute in London, and he was one of these
great European émigré scholars that didn’t even have to read the book. He
had a vast, vast library in Okemos you know, and a vast, vast wine collection.
He was a different kind of teacher. As the head of the department he got to
do whatever he wanted, and he got me the degree so that I could go up to
Stony Brook with him. After three years of manual labor in northern Michi-
gan, mixing mud and carrying sod in February, going to New York seemed
more and more attractive. |

Anthony Michel: So you went to Stony Brook to teach?

JH: Or as his assistant; I taught a course in modern poetics. I only lasted a
year and a half. I sacrificed a whole truckload of student papers in a fire. So
when they asked where their papers were, I said they’re being kept for re-
search. Already I was doomed, I mean, I flunked out of graduate school, and
they finally facilitated my degree after I had my first book out with Norton.
They never had a student that had a book out so they thought it would be
nice.

AM: What would you have done if you didn’t become a writer?
JH: I have never thought about it, but I can’t come up with anything.

AM: Not teaching?

 

' Herbert Weisinger was a professor in the Department of English at Michigan State
University from 1942 until 1966. In a personal remembrance written after Weisinger’s
death, Harrison describes the profound impact the teacher had on his life: “Herbert
Weisinger was certainly the mentor of my life and for a while very early a stepfather.”
Harrison describes his forty-two year relationship as seminal in the development of his
interest in good wine, Freud and Jung, mythology, iconography, anthropology, nature,
and Mexican art.

- 26°
Interview

JH: No, the trouble with teaching, for me as a writer, is that colleges are al-
ways in the wrong place. I didn’t mind teaching; I mean we’re all proselytiz-
ers. For instance, I’ve got a children’s book coming out this year called The
Boy Who Ran Through the Woods. It’s one of these recovery children’s books
that draws on my interest in the natural world as opposed to cities, where
colleges are usually located. After I was seven years old when I lost my eye,
I was more interested in rivers and forests and so on. While I like to go to
Paris and New York occasionally, I can’t live in a semi-urban atmosphere. Here
we have one hundred and twenty acres, and I will never have to have any
close neighbors. I’m claustrophobic, and when I got the MSU Distinguished
Alumni Award this spring, I had to stay in a motel over in the southwest
corner of the campus. Four times a day this driver would come pick me up to
go do something I didn’t want to do which was invariably non-smoking
(laughs). Anyway, we had to drive right past where I’d lived in married hous-
ing, thirty-five years ago. It was enough to puke a maggot. That sense of
claustrophobia—I mean there’s only one way to drive from married housing
to Morrill Hall. After you’ve done it five hundred times there is an accumula-
tion of emotions you have, which is called torpor or ennui. I have my cabin in
the Upper Peninsula, and it’s quite remote. And then our casita out on the
border in the mountains where we don’t have real neighbors for a couple of
miles. Somebody said about Picasso once that he carried his environment wher-
ever he went. As a writer, you have to create in your writing, and in where
you live, your own sort of soul’s habitat or else you can’t function. I think
the tough part for my writer friends who still teach, and the reason that I think
they should get a lot more money than they do, is that they are never done.

AM: Do these friends of yours that are teachers work in universities?

JH: Yeah, but they have to be professors because the odds of making a liv-
ing as a novelist are a hundred thousand to one, if that. I can’t think of a
more unpromising profession anyone could enter. That’s what I think is sort
of sad about all of the MFA programs. It’s the same problem as the well-edu-
cated students in Africa. This is a bit of a jump, but it works. You have all
these very educated Zambians and Nigerians and there’s no place in the
economy for them. There’s no place in the U.S. economy where there’s room
for so many MFAs. It’s what they call a revolution of rising expectations.

CP: Do you think higher education of that kind is worthwhile at all?
JH: No. Not for writing. I think a gorgeous model for universities is Italy in
the 14th century where a scholar would take eight students and teach them

everything he knew for a year. The contemporary university is a formalization |
oi that process. You had certain teachers that you were sort of spellbound

«ag *
JIM HARRIS Ore
by. That’s what makes it worthwhile.

CP: What do you think about literary theory? Do you think it adds anything
of value to English education?

JH: Oh, sure. Oddly enough, I’m relatively intellectual for a novelist. I want
to entertain all of the possibilities, and I think that the history of literature is
important. I was fascinated by Northrop Frye, and Kenneth Burke, but I by-
passed deconstruction because I thought it was an elaborate plot to make
the instructors more important than what they were reading (laughs). But those
things seem to fade. I mean they have their efflorescence for a while and then
they dissipate.

AM: Do people send you their scholarly work?

JH: No, I don’t cooperate in any way. But there is this guy, Bob DeMott,
who is a big deal Steinbeck scholar and they’re more interesting than ten thou-
sand Eliot scholars. The big problem in America is that it is very difficult for
critics to take a writer seriously who actually goes outside rather than stays
inside. I tease Tom McGuane’, with whom I still correspond every week or
two, that his problem is living in Montana. Larry McMurtry used to wear this
wonderful shirt that said “minor regional novelist.” It seems that every one
that’s not in New York City is a “regional novelist.”

AM: Do you think that’s changing at all?

JH: No, but I don’t think it matters. One thing you learn is what to exclude in
your life, and for me, a concern with that kind of thing would be something to
exclude. Literary criticism is not my business or my calling. My business is to
write the novels and the poetry. If you let what they say about you concern
you, it could piss you off.

AM: So you exclude a concern over how you are being categorized.

JH: Oh sure. There’s this Spanish critic, I forgot where I read this, but he said
that I was doomed not to get certain prizes because I made fun of white men
all the time (laughs). I don’t know if I’m pro-feminist or not but they’re on the

money. The suits control the world, and in my mind that’s comic.

CP: You’ve introduced feminism, and we found in New York Times Magazine

 

* Tom McGuane, a founder of Red Cedar Review, is author of several acclaimed books
and essays including The Sporting Club (1968), The Bushwacked Piano (1971), Nobody's
Angel (1981), Something to be Desired (1984), and Nothing but Blue Skies (1992).

“25 °
Interview
where you talked about...
JH: Writing as a woman?
CP: Yes, using female narrators.

JH: Writers have always done that, and critics treat it like it’s something new.
Writers have been doing that for centuries, and Flaubert’s Madam Bovary is
just one example. If I can’t write from a woman’s perspective, then I’m cutting
off half my world. I can’t say whether I’m pro-feminist or antifeminist. I let
that kind of thing go by too. As with any form of politics, I can’t seem to
digest it all. I was an old laborite, and as a former member of half a dozen
unions, I thought that when the Equal Rights Amendment first started they
ought to strike for equal wages for equal work. That’s the one that counts.
When I went to Stony Brook with Herbert Weisinger, the first thing he did
was to pay female assistant professors the same as male assistant profes-
sors. Before we got there, the women were about twenty percent lower. Any-
body who has an ounce of democratic sentiment knows that’s just wrong. If
you don’t have equal pay for equal work, you’re fucked from the beginning.

AM: Did you make any kind of conscious decision to start using women’s
voices in your writing?

JH: No, I was just tired of what I was doing. I wanted something new. When
I wrote Sundog, that was an interesting, different kind of man. But—I first
said it in The Paris Review years ago—I don’t want to be limited to the main
subject matter of white middle class novelists in America which is “nifty guys
at loose ends.”

CP: How is your character in Sundog different from one of these guys?

JH: Because he’s not the usual kind of man. This is a more interesting person
than a professor on summer vacation who has an affair with his babysitter.
There are all sorts of permutations of that kind of thing.

AM: It seems that in Sundog, there is a recovery of the invisible workers.

JH: Oh, yeah. You know, there’s a fascinating thing you should read in the
new Harpers on that. In the front, where they gather work from other places,
there is part of an essay by Hayden Carruth, a very good poet, where he
identifies the real working class that nobody knows exists. These people don’t
even own farms, and they don’t really have factory jobs. They sort of mill
around and do odd jobs. A farmer is a different thing. A farmer is a land-

* 29 *
JIM HARRISON

holder. On the border, and here to a certain extent, if you own some land you’re
a Mister. Down there, you’re El Don. But I like the way Hayden Carruth iden-
tifies this whole class of people. I was one of them until I was forty. I could
even finish roughing houses or big footings. You do everything just to make
a living, in addition to your writing, which doesn’t do it.

CP: | think that kind of work is different from what most writers engage in.

JH: Well that’s true, but it’s very bourgeoisie. I was reading a Dan Wakefield
essay where he says that when he was in New York, his parents would visit
him on a train. That was totally out of the question for somebody from my
background. I moved to New York with twenty dollars, and I don’t know if
my parents had ever ridden a train. I think my father had been on a train. We
didn’t quite make middle class, well, I suppose we did when my dad was a
county agent.

CP: My dad was a farmer and also a 4-H county agent. I’m curious, because
our family backgrounds are somewhat similar, how your background informs
your work.

JH: Well, it does because it links you to the natural world and as Naneus
said, ““We’re a heap of all we have met.” It’s the foundation of how I look at
the world; it’s the way my brain is programmed. I know the names. Robert
Graves advised poets to know the names of things. My dad could drive down
the county road and name all of the weeds by the smells, all of the trees, all of
the crops, natural watersheds, the way the earth is shaped. That’s a different
kind of knowledge. I don’t mind mentioning the mind doctor I visit in New
York at least once a year. He told me once, “Think of what it’s like to treat
people who never see the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth.”
You see, there’s a whole set of problems there.

AM: I’m really interested in the contrast between the way you describe your
orientation to the natural world and the way you describe driving through
the campus area in East Lansing. Does that kind of orientation to the natural
world seem more consistent with your sense of the way you’re marking time?

JH: I’m sure that, just because your parents and grandparents did, you think
in terms of specific seasons, and everybody is happy at the solstices and it’s
actually sort of primitive. It’s just the way you look at the world. But even
those midway points in Lansing... I remember a bunch of students and gradu-
ate students were growing pot in the big swamp behind Spartan Village. They
were watching out, but I don’t even think at that time, in the late fifties, that it
was particularly against the law. It wasn’t any good anyway; it was like the

* 30°
Interview

pot people used to get from Indiana where you’d have to smoke a cigar be-
fore you would get anything.

CP: This poem called “Counting Birds,” that Anthony and I discussed for
most of the drive up here, I heard you read it at MSU two years ago and it
really stuck with me. You use an Anasazi myth about birds, and it seems that
the speaker in the poem is using the birds as a way of marking time in the
way that Eliot’s Prufrock marks out time with coffee spoons.

JH: Yeah, maybe so. I never thought of that connection, but that’s obviously
true. The Lakota and the Chippewa, had what they called winter counts. They
had a cane and they’d draw little petroglyphs of the events of the winter. It’s
like time, a time passing, though they tend to be less swallowed by time. In
other words, it’s not the clock, but it’s the event. I’ve never been good at
time at all. For instance, I don’t remember my career in terms of the books, but
of what dog I owned at that time. That’s how my mind works. I was at the
Tuscan airport and my watch had stopped. I was getting my boots shined
and I asked five different passing Mexicans what time it was. Nobody had a
watch and it was marvelous. It was the usual gringo question, and this old
man told me, “What time is it? Who the fuck cares!” Sometimes they want to
help you: “Uh, it’s maybe noon” (laughs). That is a wonderful attitude com-
pared to the way the White Anglo Saxon Protestant thinks about time.

CP: Do you think we have this necessity of marking time or counting time or
accounting for your life in terms of something?

JH: Yeah, we all have these ways. The Romans used to mark time by how
they were aging: “Oh I have a wrinkle,” or something like that. What are the
events in your life? How many divorces? We’re always keeping track. With
so many men, it’s how much do I have in my 401K or my IRA. What’s my
salary now? What is the inflation compared to what it was, because we are
always counting.

AM: Do you find yourself feeling a sense of counting time through the events
of your publications?

JH: No not any more. I did for a while. Everybody in our culture teaches that
if we even blink, we’re going to fall behind. People aren’t even taking all of
their vacation time. Now they’re working longer hours because there’s always
this fear of being outsourced. Even in our highest prosperity, people are more
insecure than when they didn’t have any money. I have a number of friends
who are very wealthy, and they seem to be more like victims than Joe Blow
who spends his last five bucks down at the tavern. I was thinking of it in

© 2g is
JIM HARRISON

Biblical terms. When you’re reading the Bible, which I did a lot as a young
man, so and so rich man had nine cows and three horses and a granary full of
wheat. That was a rich man then. Now what is it? I had three land cruisers in
a row, because I’m out in the boonies. When I went to get another one, sud-
denly they’re fifty eight thousand dollars. I got in it and I said that the inside
of this car looks like Liberace’s toilet (laughs). It’s no longer a functional ve-
hicle; it’s being built now for soccer moms. It’s amazing. You can get the one
I want, but you can only get it in Africa. They’re about thirty grand there and
they’re functional, but they don’t have our emission standards. I looked at a
farm, I certainly don’t need another farm, but I was looking at a farm and this
is what drove me crazy—in the UP there’s eighty acres and this house for
fifty eight thousand. That’s why it squared with me. So you could buy a whole
fucking farm for the same price as you can by a car, you know. Why would
anyone do that? But that’s just an older man reflecting on how things have
changed.

CP: This is interesting. In one of the poems I was reading, “Drinking Songs”
from Outlyer, you wrote, “I want to die in the saddle / an enemy of civilization
/ while I walk around in the woods and fish and drink.” Do you think that the
Jim Harrison of today differs from this portrayal?

JH: Not greatly. I did that this summer, although now I’ve pretty much given
up hard liquor in favor of wine. I like really good wine. It’s a little expensive
compared to just a shot and a beer, but it’s basically the same thing. I feel
most at home at this one place up in the UP that’s fifteen miles from every-
thing. But I also like certain cafes and bistros in Paris very much, and I feel at
home there. I feel much more at home in Paris than I do in New York City. I
think they’re more receptive. You know, my last book got up to number three
in France.

CP: Why do you think the French are more receptive?

JH: Just because they’re tired of only Parisian literature which is more like
New York literature. The French are more fundamentally rural than we are. If
they live in any of the big cities, they’re always trying to get out. Except the
upper class, of course, but they already have an estate.

AM: One of your interviews suggests that the mainstream is shaped by New
York, and having grown up in Iowa, I found that everybody’s sort of aspiring

to that conception of cosmopolitan life.

JH: McGuane and I used to always try to get each other to say things that
needed to be said so that we could blame it on the other person. But McGuane

“a? *
Interview

said, “Why don’t you say that southern writers have always had their
crotchless panties aimed at New York” (laughs). That’s a real McGuane witti-
cism. He did an interview once with a gay magazine, and everybody has a lot
of friends that are gay. I told him to say that you can’t make a philosophical
system out of your weenie. So, he said that and he got viciously attacked for
years on that comment (laughs). I thought that was funny. But I feel uncom-
fortable because the University Press of Mississippi, you know Old Miss?
They are considering a collection of my interviews next year with DeMott,
the Steinbeck scholar, and Patrick Smith as the editors. I’m doing a lot of
French interviews too, and I have no monetary interest in this. I’m just won-
dering what they’re going to come up with. The French are odd because there
are about eighty newspapers in France that have full time literary critics, and
here we only have one in Washington, one in Los Angeles, and some in New
York. This old man said to me once, “How much has your poetry been af-
fected by the early poetry of Robinson Jeffers?” I’ve never been asked that
question in America. It is strange how much they have studied American lit-
erature.

CP: When I first started talking about wanting to interview you, I was told
there was no way possible that I could get you to do an interview. Why did
you agree to talk with us?

JH: I don’t have any idea (laughs), because I turn most of them down. I think
it was an odd image to me that you should publish this. When they started
Red Cedar Review, with McGuane and Walter Lockwood and those guys, I
was an aesthete then. I wouldn’t have anything to do with something so taw-
dry (laughs). I remember going into this office in a corner room of Morrill
Hall. I said once, “Where’s Tom?” We didn’t know each other that well, but
we would stop and talk about literature, because we both wanted to be writ-
ers. It was either Walter Lockwood or somebody else that said, “He’s in the
closet with a bottle of whiskey and a secretary from Lansing.” I admired Tom
because he was so good looking. He was worldly and rather than putting up
with coeds, he and a couple of his friends would go down to Lansing to these
dances. They were secretaries’ dances and they would just clean up. He had
all these girls with beehive hairdos driving around with him. Just normal girls,
not some difficult, neurotic student, but a living breathing girlfriend from
Laingsburgh... Where did you grow up in Iowa, Tony?

AM: Ames.
JH: Oh yeah, that’s a fascinating place. I finished a new novella a couple of

months ago with an odd title: The Beast God Forgot to Invent. It is about a
guy, a young man. The narrator’s an old creep, but it’s about a guy who has a

“53°
JIM HARRISON

head injury from running his motorcycle into a beech tree. I got hundreds
and hundreds of books on the brain under the hubris that after a couple of
months of reading I could understand the human brain. Well, forget it. Any-
way, here’s one of the great ones, one of the most difficult ones that I’ve
almost made it through. I love this title: Neural Darwinism. Wow. Anyway,
one of the great brain centers in the world is in Ames, Iowa.

AM: Did you spend a lot of time driving around the Midwest?

JH: Yeah, because that used to be one of my so-called therapies. The other
trouble with teaching is that you don’t have freedom just to go. My wife’s
secretary always could tell when I was getting weird, when I just needed to
go on one of my car trips. I remember driving 12,000 miles in a big circle, down
into Mexico. I rarely ever drive on freeways. I have a compass in the car and
go on the county roads.

AM: So you have a sense of being able to do that at any time?

JH: Yeah, number one it’s not expensive compared to anything else.

AM: What about that looming pressure for getting the next book out?

JH: I don’t think about it. I might have at one time, but the biggest liberating
point was when I quit writing screenplays essentially two and a half years
ago. That’s why I know a lot about the money trap, which is the big trap.
AM: How would you characterize your relationship with Hollywood now?
JH: I still have some friends out there. It’s one of those places where you like
one out of a hundred people you meet, which is about the same as academic
life. I don’t find it morally or ethically any different from book publishing. I
don’t find Hollywood types any lower on the squeeze box of life than the
book publishers. Nine of our biggest publishers are owned by the Germans.
Before that it was corporate America blah, blah, blah...

CP: Why did you stop writing screenplays?

JH: Just fatigue. What happened was that ten years ago, I hadn’t saved any
money and I had to go back to work out there to make some money. Because

I’m in a free economy, and I don’t work for anybody.

AM: I was really interested in your comments about teaching a while back.
Do you think it is possible to teach writing in college or high school class-

G4:
Interview
rooms?

JH: I don’t know, you know, it’s an odd thing. There was a teacher at Michi-
gan State who was quite extraordinary—and then he had some problems. But
he was a big shot, and after Michigan State, he went to Berkeley as a full
professor. He was a brilliant man who taught the only essay writing course |
ever had in my life. Every week, our assignment was to imitate a great essay
writer, and I just loved doing that. I thought that this was a way you could
teach writing. Philip Caputo, who’s a novelist friend of mine and wrote A Ru-
mor of War, went broke as a novelist and taught up in Cedar Rapids, lowa. He
was supposed to be teaching a course on the modern novel but ended up
teaching six courses of composition. It really pissed him off. I bet they learned
something, though, because he’s a tyrant.

AM: What do you remember about learning how to write?

JH: Nothing except what I remember from that essay writing class. You can
only learn how to write by writing, and I started in high school. You know,
writing down thoughts—your pompous thoughts (laughs). And I read a lot
because, oddly enough, for an agricultural family we read quite a bit—mostly
modern fiction. It was my dad who gave me Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner
and things like that.

AM: So, were you pretty clear that you wanted to be a writer from the begin-
ning?

JH: Yeah, and I didn’t really know if I needed college. I quit school five or six
times to go to New York or San Francisco or Detroit to write, but when that
didn’t work out, Johnny Wilson who was the head of scholarships would al-
ways give me my scholarship back. And then I got married rather early, and
the year after I got married, I took eighty-eight credits just to get the degree. I
also worked practically full time, so it’s no wonder I was a Wombat.

AM: This distinction between academic knowledge and experience reminds
me of one of the major threads in Dalva. There is an interesting comparison
between two conceptions of history embodied by the characters of Michael
and Dalva. Michael seems to be unfavorably cast as the Western academic in
comparison to Dalva’s more nativist, circular, conception of history.

JH: Yeah, although I find academic history very interesting. That’s one thing
about Michigan State. I never took a course from him, but I knew Russell Nye
very well. And you could walk down the hall and ask any question you had
in your brain about American history and he’d know about it. Then you could

* 345°
JIM HARRISON

go down the same hall and ask Weisinger anything you wanted to know about
world literature. Both of them would start dictating these monstrous answers,
and that’s the real value of a university. It can promote a kind of contiguity
with people.

In Dalva, Michael presents one possible view of history. It reminds me
of a new historian—I wish I could remember her name—who was at Harvard.
She said that she liked Dalva, except for Michael. But you have to have a
character like Michael who serves as the clown, just like in Shakespeare. He’s
the buffoon outside comment. And Michael has a lot of very valid points.
But he also represents conceptions of American history that we were taught
in school that leave out women, Mexicans, Indians, and immigrants. It’s a vi-
sion of American history that never existed in the first place.

AM: What is interesting about that is there’s a line where Dalva says some-
thing about his writing and, I can’t remember exactly the line, but his writing
is a bit stiff.

JH: Yeah, there’s a great saying—he’s got the top screwed on too tight. Of
course Michael’s an obsessive-compulsive manic-depressive, and I often find
that these kinds of people are the ones you want to listen to. Because any
conception we have of normal is always an extrapolation of someone who’s
bored with his life.

AM: Do you think that academics do a kind of violence to history?

JH: Well, sometimes they do. But then without them, we don’t have anything.
For instance, in all of this stuff about the Columbine high school shooting,
nobody has mentioned Richard Slotkin’s absolutely epochal study, Regen-
eration Through Violence. | was going to write Noah Adams at NPR about it,
but I keep forgetting. I mean, you have a lot of dimwitted pundits blaming the
television, and no one considering how such events fit into the tradition of
America. When I was in high school, if you had a difference you’d walk the
distance down to the grain elevator and fistfight. That’s how things were done.
Even the coach would have us put on sixteen ounce boxing gloves. This sort
of thing happens less now. I’ve been going down to Montana for thirty years
and it’s interesting that today the cowboys are the dope smokers and they
don’t fight anymore (laughs). I mean it’s really amazing how things, like smok-
ing dope, have made their way down the food chain. So it’s interesting that in
some places like bars, there isn’t as much violence as there used to be.

CP: Do you think that is unfortunate?

JH: No it’s a good thing. They banned arm wrestling at Dick’s tavern a couple

* 36°
Interview

of years ago, because it was causing fights. One guy would get pissed off
after he lost.

So, to answer your question, no I don’t think academics necessarily do
violence to history. Sometimes they do, but then what kind of history could
we have without them? I used to complain about university presses a lot, but
in a totally market driven economy, you have to have venues for academics
to publish important studies.

AM: A related question: How do you feel about seeing your book, Legends
of the Fall, go through the process of being mediated through Hollywood
which is increasingly being viewed as the source for historical and literary
information? That’s unsettling for a lot of historians.

JH: Well it should be. It ‘s just so funny. I mean there are mines of material in
anything you read from some of these University Presses. Oklahoma and the
University of Nebraska Press are just fabulous in contrast to Hollywood’s
views of history. Fortunately, the guy who directed Legends is a Harvard gradu-
ate. We talked on the phone a lot and there was no way he was going to
sacrifice important historical information. Unfortunately, that has been done
over the years in Hollywood. The Indian nations are represented by Jeff Chan-
dler and that kind of garbage. But, I do think they’re trying to be a little more
accurate as the years pass.

AM: Were you pleased with the way that film went?

JH: I’m never pleased by anything, because I saw it differently. I think the
main thing that went wrong with Legends, which wasn’t a bad movie, is what
Jack Nicholson said about it: It wasn’t gritty enough, whereas the book is
gritty. The art director got a little out of hand, you know, and everyone looked
too pretty. But they essentially told the story. I went to a couple of early ver-
sions of the screenplay, but then I gave it up. The guy that did the best work
was the screenwriter who also wrote Lonesome Dove, Bill Wittliff. Lonesome
Dove was the best thing on TV that dealt with the Western movie. It was
really on the money. But Wittliff was a Texan with a background in that area
and Lonesome Dove was totally accurate. So anyway, he had done the basic
version of Legends. It is the only reason it was as acceptable as it was.

CP: What is the fascination for you with the American West?
JH: Oh, I don’t even think there is one. I hitchhiked out there a lot when I
was young, when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen to look it over. I sup-

pose it is just the natural extension of the American East: Greed goes West.
Fucks it up. Hits L.A. Then it filters back across the country drowning every-

«97»
JIM HARRISON

thing in its lint. The West is misunderstood. Demographically, the L.A. area
has a much higher concentration of readers than the New York area. Isn’t that
amazing? But if you think of New York, people often mistake Manhattan for
New York and that is only a hundred thousand people on the uppity side.

AM: Jim McClintock gave the Russell Nye lecture last year and it was about
your writing and the relationship of your writing to Carl Jung and James
Hillman.

JH: That Hillman thing was interesting. I don’t know how directly apropos it
is, but my brother is quite a book collector and, for a brief period, we owned
together the collected works of Carl Jung. All twelve volumes. I really liked
the pictures, you know, the pictures of a tiger eating the sun and all those
primitive images. So, I read a lot of Jung and it seemed like Hillman was his
best explicator. And Jungian theory isn’t as dreary and sodden as Freudian-
ism.

CP: How have you used Jung and Hillman in your writing?

JH: I’ve been influenced by some of their ideas, especially in regards to con-
ceptions of masculinity and femininity. I think it was Hillman quoting Jung
who asked, “What have we done with our twin sister that the culture has
forced us to abandon at birth?” So many Middle Eastern poets and Spanish
poets were virtually androgynous in the way that a shaman is androgynous
and can move between sexes, at least philosophically. I think poets are mostly
shamans without portfolios, and very bad ones at that. Failed shamans. Take
Robert Gray’s White Goddess, about Celtic folklore and the emergence of po-
ets in ancient Ireland. Gray writes that if you wanted to be a poet, you trav-
eled around with a woman who taught you the names of everything. The
woman was thought to be more related to the moon, hence more related to

poetry.
CP: What kind of spiritual orientation, if any, informs your work?

JH: I don’t know if any does. I suppose I am essentially Christian because
that is my mythos. I said once in my food column in Esquire that I found it
was easier to believe in the Resurrection than the Republican Party. For me
anyway, it still is. I’ve studied Zen for twenty-five years but that is more of
an additive than an attention to detail. Most of our lives are dissipated on
garbage and nonsense, and Zen philosophy keeps you attentive. There is
this old Japanese guy who taught that you must concentrate yourself wholly
to each day as though a fire were raging in your hair. You know, there is a
high level of attention there, which is good for me because I don’t have any

* 35°
Interview
discipline. I never did. I’m only writing because that is what my calling is.

AM: Do you have to instill any structure or sense of discipline in your prac-
tice?

JH: Not when I’m working on a novel or a novella or poetry. When I wrote
screenplays, I had to tell myself, “Go do three pages and then you can go
bird hunting or fishing.” I had to write by quota every day.

AM: Conversely, do you have to stop yourself?

JH: Yeah, that’s my main problem. When I finished Dalva, both my eardrums
were broken and I didn’t even know it. I mean, I had the flu, and it was just
insane. The same thing happened when I wrote Legends, which I wrote in
nine days. I was clearly deranged by the time I got done. It is what Walker
Percy calls the re-entry problem. That is why writers are generally drinkers.
Alcohol is a way to get back to the world from your daily voyage in your
fiction. It is an interesting point of view. And some people like to stay in that
world all of the time which is problematical. Even though I was gentler with
myself on The Road Home, it still caused a lot of problems. The back and
forth between these parallel universes is hard on yourself physically and men-
tally.

CP: I read an interesting piece in Smart Magazine called “Mid-range Roadkill.”
You tell the story of how a friend illegally shot a turkey and brought it to you.
I’m wondering if cooking is another way...

JH: Oh, I’m sure. See, when I was ruining my brain by going to the bar di-
rectly after work roughly twenty years ago, I got more and more interested in
cooking as a great way to return to earth. An illegal wild turkey is a great gift.
There is nothing that tastes any better than a not totally adult wild turkey.
And this guy was real coy because he said, “I hit it with my car,” and there
was a neat little .22 hole in it. I said, “Do you have a .22 mounted on your
bumper?” If you are depressed, gifts like that change the nature of your think-
ing. Once when I entered in a depression, I went to Costa Rica and I was fine.
That was where I met the man who gave me the idea for Sundog. This brings
up another trap with academic life, at least for me. Just about all of the novels
I wrote after Wolf depended on me being free and easy in my travels. I don’t
know if I would have gotten any of those ideas if I had been limited to the
classroom. I can’t think of any of the novellas that didn’t depend on knowl-
edge of the Mexican border, or Canada, or Europe, or parts of the United States.
I mean academics can have quite a free schedule, but it is still a schedule.

99 *
JIM_HARRISON

AM: So, you met this guy in Costa Rica and then some idea started to germi-
nate...

JH: Yeah, it starts to germinate. Sometimes it takes several years. Right now
I’m working on a novella, a comic, in the Jacobean style. Not a farce or any-
thing but I’m trying to write something about success and it is called, J For-
got to go to Spain. Because that was true in my own life. When I was nine-
teen I was obsessed with Spain and Spanish poets: Lorca, Neruda, Hernandez.
I just had to get to Spain. I never got around to it, and then when I made a lot
of dough, I just wanted to go to Michigan’s Upper Penninsula and get away
from the accoutrements. So, when I was in France in May, I finally thought,
“Hah, Why don’t I fucking go to Spain?” I was busy in Paris, and I just
thought, “Hah, I’ll go to Barcelona for the night.” It’s only a couple of grand,
you know. I'll stay in a simple hotel. This guy reserved my room and when I
got in this hotel, it was just a bathroom with a balcony. This woman came in
and spread a linen cloth by my bed so my feet didn’t have to touch the rug.
And I thought, “This is the real Spain that I thought about when I was nine-
teen.” That kind of crap. And then it got very hot. It hadn’t occurred to me
that it would be hot because I like to walk, and I could only walk at night. I
stayed two nights. It was sunny and this French vogue magazine gave me
some money, in cash, for something I had written for them. I got an air-condi-
tioned Mercedes and a guide who spoke perfect English, an architectural gradu-
ate student or something like that. So I went to see a bunch of art work with-
out getting out of the car. You know, it is what happens to successful people—
so-called successful people. What happens is that you become utterly re-
moved from any kind of life you value—unless you are very careful.

CP: Do you feel like you have avoided those kinds of problems in your life?
JH: Somewhat, but not totally.

AM: What about the threat of having a mystique built around you—if you
lived in New York for example.

JH: I couldn’t do it. It is harder for me in public in Paris than it is in New York.
A lot of people recognize me in Paris. New York somewhat, but what I do is
just avoid everything now. I didn’t for a while. You can avoid a lot of prob-
lems associated with success with sufficient alertness. Only there are some
situations where you are trapped. I did a nineteen-stop book tour last fall,
and it took me three months to recover. I got over it by writing last winter. I
correspond with Louise Erdrich who is a writer that I greatly value, and she
was making the same complaints. She was sitting with a bunch of Bostonian
ladies at a book luncheon and she told me that she had this really strong

-H0 >
Interview

urge to say, “Wouldn’t you old bitches just like to sit down and have a bunch
of martinis? Wouldn’t that be better?” But she also said, “Just remember back
when nobody wanted you to go on a book tour.” It’s just something that you
have to do, that I find really difficult. But, of course, it is even tougher not to
have a successful book tour. Like when you make a stop and nobody shows
up. That’s something you have to keep in mind. But, if you have a situation
like I did in Mississippi last year, where I signed seven hundred books in four
and a half hours, you’re not really very happy about it.

AM: Do you feel like you are expected to maintain a specific persona at such
events?

JH: Yeah, you do a little reading and then go to dinner. But writers are never
famous. I mean someone like Hemmingway was, but writers are usually well
enough known to get irritable but never famous. I spend a lot of time around
people like Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, and Sean Connery and those are
really the people who can’t go anywhere without people being insane.

CP: Do you ever desire that kind of recognition?

JH: No, no, Christ no, nobody would in their right mind. Nicholson was a
master because he always wore dark glasses. That means no eye contact, so
people will feel nervous. Even being blind in one eye, like I am, it’s harder for
them. I can always get away with it because they don’t know if I’m returning
their look. So they can’t say, “Hi, I’m dirt. Maybe you would like to read the
manuscript of my novel.”

CP: How do you think you are perceived here in Michigan?

JH: Oh, I’ve always gotten along OK because I started out here. I did a lot of
manual labor, so I feel no resentment. Rich people who move in here don’t
know that if you aren’t nice to the plumber, he doesn’t come to your house. If
I call the plumber, he’s here in five minutes. If they call the plumber, he’! let
them wait four or five days—which is appropriate, if you ask me.

AM: Another interesting thread that seems to be coming out of this conver-
sation and also out of a book like 4 Good Day to Die is this notion of the
outlaw. In some ways, there is a suggestion that the outlaw, or the people
who define themselves as being outside of mainstream society, are the sane
ones.

JH: Well, possibly, but this is odd. I remember once when we were broke and
it was just before I had gotten successful with Legends. They called me from

a
JIM FARKIS ON

this university, because even then I had a small cache, three books of poems
and a couple of novels out. They had a creative writing program and they
offered me seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars—and this was over twenty
years ago. I said, “You’re kidding, that’s a lot.” But I said, “No,” to the dis-
couragement of my in-laws. “I can’t do that,” I said. Somebody’s got to stay
outside. That is what Outlyer means. I can’t say that they are the sane ones
because they are transparently not. But it gives you a way of looking at your
own culture if you are on the outside.

AM: What would you say is the state of our culture, U.S. society, now—
especially in contrast to when you wrote A Good Day to Die.

JH: Sometimes, the places I choose to live in don’t give you as good a view
of the entire culture as even television does. Living in the U.P. and on the
Mexican Border where it is really remote offers a view of a different kind of
sub-subculture. For example, I was asking this guy, a sort of hippy, half Mexi-
can, and half gringo, “Why isn’t there any crime around here?” And this hippy
said, “I don’t allow no fucking crime.” This is definitely a subculture.

But I’ve seen over the last thirty years that we are as completely sub-
merged and drowned in outright banality, where greed and apathy are the
ultimate virtues as we were in the twenties. It’s hard on university people too
because they say that they and their families have bypassed that. They are
really getting paid miserably compared to what they probably should be, as
far as I’m concerned. I noticed that in France, the reason teachers are so re-
spected in each community is because they are usually the highest paid people
in the community, outside of the banker and the doctor. And if you don’t
value your teachers, the culture snubs them. By making fun of the govern-
ment, Reagan did a great deal of damage to the country because to infer that
the populace is collectively more intelligent than the civil service is a big mis-
take.

There is another myth: these small businessmen feel that if it wasn’t for
the constraints of government, they would be wildly successful. I ought to
ask them about Bill Gates. I mean, give me a break. Obviously, even here in
my so-called retirement, I would deeply enjoy a fifty percent drop in the stock
market. Anything to slow down this craze.

CP: You mentioned the affect of this craze on professors and their families.
Have your decisions made it easier for your family to have a different per-
spective on work?

JH: My youngest daughter hated college. She’s too excessively attractive,

which, Carrie, you probably know about. Anyway, she just likes to work in
bookstores. But my older daughter graduated from a little podunk high school.

“47>
Interview

Her counselor, they are usually lamos, told her to try to go to a small college
but she went to U of M and graduated Summa Cum Laude. I mean, she was
her high school’s first National Merit Scholar, and that didn’t merit a sen-
tence in the newspaper because they’ve never had one before. But, I never
could understand where she got her study habits. I certainly didn’t have them.
I started out a term and took perfect notes the first day. The second day it’s
tits and ass, and the third day I cut class and I’m at Mac’s Bar playing pool. I
mean it was just hopeless. It was a good thing that I was sort of smart be-
cause back then, they let you comp the basics. You could take the test and
not take the class.

AM: How was high school?

JH: I was reading James Joyce when I was sixteen. I had a couple of good
teachers, one even subscribed to the Nation magazine, which caused a little
talk because he was a left winger. I had another high school teacher who was
a POW from WWII who had been in a German prison. That kind of experi-
ence gives you a view of the world. But, I naturally liked to get out of there. I
hitchhiked to New York when I was sixteen. I knew that was where I wanted
to go. I wanted to be a bohemian instead of hauling corn.

AM: What did you think about the whole Bohemian movement then?

JH: Oh, it just seemed like more freedom. When you’re that age, all you want
is freedom. I don’t even know how young people survive these days because
back then we had so much less scrutiny from the world. We were people with
our own culture, and now right from the cradle these kids are under such
incredible scrutiny from parents, PTA, and everything. They are being told
never to talk to a stranger, you know...

After a brief pause, Harrison abruptly signals a shift. “Let’s go get some

lunch.” The conversation continued, however, at Dick’s Bar and Grill over
burgers and beer.

“43>
JIM HARRISON
Works By Jim Harrison

FICTION

Wolf

A Good Day to Die
Farmer

Legends of the Fall
Warlock

Sundog

Dalva

The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip

The Road Home

POETRY

Plain Song

Locations

Outlyer

Letters to Yesenin

Returning to Earth

Selected & New Poems

The Theory and Practice of Rivers & Other Poems
After Ikkyu & Other Poems

Essays
Just Before Dark

-4U >
 
 
a]

 
DENNIS MUST

Lyeen Esthen

Perhaps the most interesting bureau drawer in Ben’s mother’s room was
her unmentionables drawer. Most of the items looked fragile, the same shade
of pink, coral and dusty rose, stacked in three rows like silk scarves. Further,
once the compartment was drawn open, a sweet aroma wafted out of a calico
sachet bag.

Petticoats, half slips, camisoles, panties, and, at the very bottom, the
ballast—a chunky girdle festooned with bone stays, wire fasteners and elastic
straps with catches that kept her nylon sheers from drooping like loose skin
on her legs. “It doesn’t belong here,” thought Ben. He recalled an aged catfish
he’d once pulled out of a pond with wire leaders and hooks decorating its
mouth.

Ben had looked forward to this day. She’d promised the two of them
were going on a special trip. He sat all dressed on the side of the fully made
bed. His father had left early to hurry onto the golf course.

“Where are we going, Ma?”

“To a Queen Esther social.”

Queen Esther was the name of her Sunday Bible class. All women, most
of whom Ben thought looked like boarded-up Victorian houses. His mother
was the youngest and prettiest in the group. He watched her draw cocoa
stockings up her legs, careful so as not to cause them to run, then roll their
ends in cloth covered rubber bands high on her thighs.

‘Are the seams straight, Ben?” she asked. Lifting up the half slip.

“Yes,” he said. She never asked his father.

“Ben, go get the clear nail polish.”

He watched her dab its applicator brush on the snag that threatened to
travel a cloud stream down her leg.

““What’s a social, Ma?”

“An occasion when women get together.”

“What do they do?”

“Oh, talk. Drink tea, and there will be much to eat.” He’d seen the fresh
macaroni salad sitting in a container in the refrigerator that morning.

“What will I do?”

It didn’t matter, actually. When he was invited by his father to go
someplace, it meant sitting on a barstool downing several fountain Coca-Colas
while studying reflections of the patrons in the giant bar mirror. It was always
dusky in those places, and smelled of Lysol. His father never wanted to leave.
But he and his mother took long drives in the country; she’d turn on the car

-4§ >
Queen Esther

radio and sing like Jo Stafford. Sometimes she’d drive thirty miles to Warren,
Ohio, to visit her aunt. Ben would walk down the street to the crossing and
watch the freight trains move through. Alongside the tracks a black man owned
a shack roofed with metal Royal Crown Cola signs; he sold bread, milk, candy,
and soda chilled in an ice trough. Ben liked to go inside and “fish” for a bottle
of lime green soda. The store had a dirt floor. Black children would fish with
him in the soda trough, too. They liked purple soda.
“You will do what you’ve always done, Ben... stick by me.”

The social was being held in a rambling Queen Anne Victorian with a
grand wrap-around porch in a rural community called Harmony. Several wicker-
back rocking chairs with peony cushions lined either side of the oval windowed
entrance like Hotel guests taking the morning sun. When the pair climbed the
steps to twist the bell, Ben spotted goats in a penned enclosure alongside
the driveway.

“See,” she said, “I told you there would be something for you to do.”

Ben immediately recognized Grace McKibben when the door opened,
the president of the Queen Esther class. Except he was used to seeing her
dressed in black wool, layers of it—blouse, cardigan sweater, a jacket, and
skirt that fell just above a short expanse of her black cotton stockings and
string-tied heels. A cameo brooch was the only color in the whole expanse of
garments, and it rested tight against her Adam’s apple. Mrs. McKibben always
wore a pill box hat in church, too, with black netting over her chignon—a
dark scrim that she might pull down over her chalky face at a moment’s notice,
he thought.

But this Saturday morning she met mother and son at the door in a dress
patterned with a riot of melon peonies, like those on the porch rockers’
cushions, against an ivory background, and matching salmon satin slippers
and hose. Stuck in her gray bun was a sprig of baby’s breath.

“Welcome to Queen Esther’s soirée!” exuded Mrs. McKibben.

“Oh, Grace, you look so beautiful,” Ben’s mother declared.

““What’s a soirée?” he whispered as they were being escorted into the
dimly lit vestibule.

““Shhhh,” she admonished. “It’s a woman’s social. Now be on your best
behavior.”

It was a grand interior. A Matisse odalisque hung in the paneled hallway.
Oriental carpets jeweled its dark parquet floors, and like young girls, huge
Chinese jardinieres stood sentry at the living room entranceway. Ben could
see perhaps a dozen women standing, talking to each other animatedly, all
attired in muted spring dresses with white or pastel slippers. When the hostess
opened the French doors the fragrance of a sweet perfume momentarily
overcame him.

“Katherine Daugherty and her Gainsborough son, Ben!’ the hostess

“HO -
DENNIS MUST

gushed. The women all turned and smiled at the pair, one of them commenting,
“Oh, Katherine and Ben, we are so glad you came.” Ben watched a fawn-
colored Siamese cat with gas-blue eyes brush up against the shiny hose of
several of the guests. Cookies and delicate pastries graced glass-topped tables
throughout the grand room. At one end in a circular alcove with curved
windows sat a home organ. Mrs. McKibben was the organist for the Second
United Presbyterian Church.

“It looks like we’re all here,” the Bible class president declared. “Please
sit down, ladies.” Eyeing Ben standing at his mother’s side—‘‘and gentleman.”

The room is as large as our downstairs, thought Ben. Tufted sofas, love
seats and overstuffed chairs were backed up against oak wainscoting. Timbers
lined the ceiling.

“We have some minor class business to conduct before we begin the
SOIREE ...” she hesitated, and several women giggled. Ben’s mother smiled
innocently, not knowing anything more than he did. “But before that, I want
to introduce you to my dear friend and companion.”

She opened the French doors to the dining room. A diminutive woman
entered, perhaps a decade younger than the hostess, with marcelled raven
hair, pale skin, and wearing a watery persimmon red lipstick. Mrs. McKibben
wore no make-up, except white face powder.

“Lydia Hopkins, ladies.” Miss Hopkins curtseyed. The Queen Esther
president grasped her hand and directed, “Go bring in the tea, dear.”

The woman was as young as his mother and, Ben thought, as attractive,
too. “Where’s Mr. McKibben, Ma?”

Katherine Daugherty scowled.

“Who takes care of the goats?” he asked.

“Ben!” she hissed.

Miss Hopkins wore a crisp white waitress’ apron over a black shirtwaist
dress. Its collar, unlike Grace McKibben’s, was open and exposed a flushed
expanse of flesh. She had a self-effacing manner, and was given to uttering
short sentences.

“Oh, you’re welcome. I’m sure.”

“Yes, isn’t it a lovely home? Grace has such exquisite taste.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t bake these brownies. Grace did. She’s a marvelous chef.”

“Does she take care of the goats?” Ben asked.

Lydia Hopkins, who stooped over to pour tea in their bone china cups,
smiled. Katherine Daugherty grinned sheepishly.

“Oh, why are you so nosey?” She glanced up at Lydia, appealing for
her understanding.

“Yes, I tend to the goats, Ben. I’ll take you out to meet them later this
morning.”

He liked her right off. As the Queen Esther women palavered about the
upcoming business of the Bible class, she’d periodically glance over at him

40°
Queen Esther
and wink.

Soon the noise in the large room subsided. The hostess had excused
herself minutes earlier, and her guests were all comfortably ensconced, waiting
for the next turn of events. Ben fidgeted like it was getting stuffy.

There were occasional puddles of hushed conversation, but most of
the women sat decorously mum, a few studying the sunlight filtering through
the stained glass window over the double keyboard organ. When, stunningly,
Grace McKibben swaned through the dining room doorway bedecked in a
bottle-green velvet chapeau festooned with plastic cherries, one banana, and
an orange. Throwing her arms wide, she kicked off her salmon slippers and
cried:

“Welcome to Queen Esther’s Soireé!”

The ladies burst into laughter that sounded more like delighted squeals.

President McKibben sat down at the organ, and broke into a rousing
chorus of “Mississippi Mud.”

As she furiously pedaled, and pushed and pulled at the concert stops—
the living room literally swelling with brass instrumentation—an
undernourished Aunt Jemima shimmied into the gathering wearing a red
bandana—just like on the box of pancakes Ben loved so. Lydia Hopkins’ milky
white face, now marred with burnt cork, and in her hands—bones.

At the nodding of Mrs. McKibben, Lydia obliged her accompanist with
a stiff one minute jig and rib-clapper percussion.

The women were in titters.

Lydia curtseyed once again. When the ringmaster held her hands high
in the air, requesting silence, Ben wondered if they'd visit the goats with Lydia
wearing blackface.

“Ladies,” Mrs. McKibben barked, “Now for the surprise. Queen Esther’s
Morality Play! But you must all take part.” Conspiratorially, she swept her
chignon about and glared at each woman assembled. “But never breathe a
word of this to any of our congregation. We’ve survived for thirteen years
through ecclesiastical famine and scarce liturgical fortune. But the God of
Mercy loves each and every one of us. Pray and be merciful, He admonishes.
And, above all, HAVE INNOCENT FUN’”

The ladies applauded, even Ben’s mother. The cat jumped up between
the pair and rolled its back into his side. Ben thought the shade in the room
had become rosier. As if the sky outside had begun to bleed salmon. The
floral upholstered furniture... all of it gave off a pale carnation glow just as
did the soft-hued women’s dresses. The tinted flesh of the photographs
hanging on the wall. The painting over the fireplace—a pink calliope unicorn.
The coral bordered carpet in the grand living room with a mimosa center. Peach
roses now began opening in their crystal vases, releasing their perfume. Ben,
wishing he were outside with the goats, and slowly succumbing to the

-4+A7:
DENNIS MUST

chamber’s rising temperature.

Lydia Hopkins opened the double glass doors to the hallway, and
switched on the tear-drop chandelier, illuminating a wide staircase with fanciful
mahogany balusters. It was as if the women were sitting below a proscenium
arch.

The audience was aroused by the sound of bells Ben had heard on
horses pulling wagons for hay rides. Leather belts festooned with silver balls
inside which rolled steel bearings. The straps shook several times, to announce
an appearance. All eyes were fixed on the upper level of the staircase
illuminated by a stained glass window.

Lydia Hopkins cried out: “QUEEN ESTHER!”

About her neck a black strap of Christmas bells, and scantily attired in
a champagne brassiere, one of those catfish-hooked girdles with catches to
which her black mercerized hose were fastened, and no shoes—her pasty
flesh, mounds of it, harnessed by the unmentionables, brocaded and laced
but still looking very much like saddles or straps—Grace McKibben held aloft
two tambourines like the tablets of Moses. Each step she descended, the
harness bells jangled, accompanied by a furtive glances she, Queen Esther,
shot to her admiring, but noticeably embarrassed, dark-faced Lydia.

The Bible class, at first stunned, gradually effected a smattering of
nervous laughter. When Grace reached the last step, they were applauding.
Ben heard the goats bleating in the dooryard. Without any prodding, the
auburn-haired women sitting alongside Katherine Daugherty darted into the
dining room towards the back stairway. Momentarily, she, too, appeared on
the upper landing, slapping her hand against a pressure cooker she’d lifted
on her way though the kitchen. She wore no shoes or stockings, a purple
petticoat, and had a carrot stuck in her hair.

The guests egged her on as she flounced down the steps. Soon the
women were waiting in line to be the next on the illuminated stairway. The
hilarity was building.

Grace McKibben and Lydia sat on carpeted Kurdistan cushions in the
vestibule, clapping robustly for each grand entrance.

Another member of the Bible class (Ben recognized her as the Union
Trust bank teller’s wife, Sylvia Lowell) poised on the landing behind an ironing
board, her dancing partner. Out and in she moved it in clipped tango fashion,
to the snapping of fingers in the audience. You couldn’t see her entire body
until she began to do a liquid turn as she and the dancing board “male”
descended the oaken stairway as partners. She wore Titian-shaded panties,
and for Ben’s sake, one presumed, spools of thread cellophane-taped to her
nipples.

Ben had forgotten the goats. He couldn’t even hear them. Would his
mother dare do it? The women all around her were plotting, getting ready.
Finally, one of the last, Katherine Daugherty rose. Ben stood up, too.

os «
Queen Esther

“T want to do it,” he begged. She shook her head and sat him back down.
The women snickered. Soon she, too, appeared at the top of the stairs in a
red and white gingham tablecloth.

“Ohhhh,” her classmates teased, as if they were men. Katherine
Daugherty held up her hand to silence the impatient, and with cunning
deliberativeness, pealed the tablecloth off her body. Instead of panties, she
wore a flour sack dishtowel diaper and copper wire pot scrubbers she’d strung
over her breasts with kitchen twine. From behind her back she proffered an
iron, and at each stair pantomimed steaming the creases out of her thighs and
derriere.

The assembled stood and huzzahed. Ben heard the goats —e What
if Mr. McKibben comes home? he worried.

The last member of the Queen Esther class to descend the stairs was
Pastor Rose’s wife, Blanche, who’d tied a length of clothesline about her upper
torso and another about her waistline. To cover her bodice she’d attached
labels from canned goods to the rope by clothespins. Over one breast was a
Del Monte Corn label, the other—Campbell’s Pork and Beans. Two clothespins
held the crushed tomato labels over her pelvis, front and rear.

The congregation had finally spent itself.

Gathered closer together—huddling actually—in the center of the
capacious living room, they sat with their legs folded beneath them, some on
pillows, still wearing their improvised costumes, or wrapped in bed sheets
that Lydia had supplied. The detritus of domesticity—sundry pans, scrubbers,
iron, ironing board, clothesline, clothespins, ersatz fruit—and even silk panties,
girdle and one camisole—lay in a heap over by the organ.

They ate coleslaw, macaroni salad, potato salad, and baked beans on
paper plates served by Miss Hopkins, who by now had cold cream buttering
her face. Coffee was perking in the huge metal church urn in the kitchen.
Katherine Daugherty made a plate of food for her son, who sat off with the
cat, wondering if Mr. McKibben might take him out to tend the goats. It felt
like it was getting that time of day. The dusty rose atmosphere in the room
had begun to give away to a chromatic blue, and the strong fragrance of
lavender sachet had evaporated, perhaps much earlier when Ben was watching
the stairway show. Shadows had converged on the room. Several of the
assembled looked pale under their sheets; others shivered in their
unmentionables.

Katherine Daugherty finally stood, and gathered her clothes. The rest
of the Queen Esther Bible Class did likewise. |

“Oh, Ben, we didn’t even get to feed the goats, did we,” Lydia said.
“You come again. We’ll do it first thing.”

Mrs. McKibben hovered behind her. “Did you enjoy Queen Esther’s
soirée, son?”

AZ °
DENNIS MUST

“T did,” he said.

“Now you won’t breathe a word of it. Promise?”

He nodded.

“Scout’s honor?”

Ben extended his index and middle finger.

“You’re still a little man. That’s why your mother let you attend. We
don’t permit grown men in Queen Esther’s Bible class.”

He could understand why.

-5L >
Pea ive oer i

The, Refugee

I’ve given up sleep now like everyone else, traded blankets for books
and pillows for papers—flow charts and flash cards, diagrams and drawings.
Through my window the moon is setting; it’s past two in the morning but still
I’m cramming, trying to memorize the Kreb’s Cycle now, the biochemistry of
human energy. That sounds interesting, even metaphysical, but actually it
isn’t. It’s just phosphates. ADP. ATP. An hour ago it was clotting factors,
and an hour from now it will be something else, if I can stay awake—bacteri-
ology perhaps, or maybe some pharmacology. But it’s not just tomorrow’s
comps.

I can’t stand my dreams anymore. Too many times Daniel has come
back, the boy I knew like a brother, the man I didn’t know at all. The dreams
have no boundaries. Sometimes I glimpse the person he will never become
now, and sometimes I dream of Daniel as he was long before I ever knew him.
I see him at five or six, sneaking into his father’s bedroom. I watch him open a
bureau drawer, take out a belt, run the dark leather through his hands. He
looks puzzled, as if he were trying to understand. The belt is as wide as his
fingers and supple as a snake, although the brass buckle is already pitted
with greenish corrosion. He raises the leather to his nose and inhales deeply.
His eyes are closed and his forehead is as wrinkled as an old man’s.

I’m tired of this. Exhausted really, bone weary, thoroughly sick of ev-
erything—anatomy and histology and microbiology, the life cycles of patho-
gens and the natural history of disease. Outside my window I can smell the
late spring, the cool moonlit night. A gentle wind rustles perfectly formed
pale green leaves against the screen. I push my papers aside and I can’t get
Daniel out of my head and as usual everything else feels pointless. Stupid.

What I’Il never understand is why he needed to kill himself. Came back
to Connecticut on the cusp of salvation only to follow his father’s path, to
hang himself in his childhood bedroom. The room we shared in high school,
still full of the shelves we built, bricks and boards collected from the dump at
Brooksvale Park, stocked with books and bones and the music we listened
to. A place of ideas and sharing, Richard and Daniel, one mind touching an-
other. Emerson and Thoreau. Self Reliance. Walden Pond. Where once I
thought we could create our own selves. Whoso would be a man must be a
nonconformist.

His sister found him. Spinning at the end of whatever it was—a rope, a
wire, his father’s belt. I don’t know. There are some questions I can never
ask. In my dreams I’ve seen his toes trying to reach the chair just kicked away,

+ 545°
Pt PRES Se

his fingers trying to get under the thing at his neck, that dark line twisting
into his flesh, cutting off his air. Black tongue swollen and distended. Pants
full of urine and feces and semen. I don’t need to ever dream the details again.
In most of my dreams Daniel uses his father’s belt.

His father committed suicide when Daniel and Sarah were still in gram-
mar school. Hung himself also, showing his son the way. I will make the fo-
cus of my graduation thesis depression and despair. Alcoholism. Suicide.
There is a responsibility to the people we haven’t become yet.

In the daytime, hustling through the clinics, there is no time to think.
There’s too much to do and you’re always on the defensive, open to chal-
lenges from anyone, everyone—fifth and sixth year students and the resi-
dents and staff physicians and attendings. They think it’s their job; they con-
sider it teaching. There’s too much to remember. All the different signs and
symptoms, the tests and normal values, the drugs and the glittering machines.
And although it’s true that a lot of this stuff works, unfortunately it depends
on what you’re starting with.

It was so raw in Pensacola, detox units primitive everywhere, physical
and pharmacological restraints and the beds filled with people screaming at
horrors only they could see. We call them delirium tremens but actually the
hallucinations are their own history; the snakes and rats they can’t throw off
are bits of their own past sucking at them like leeches. Memory crawling un-
der closed doors, desire slithering out of every closet and bureau, the pa-
tients sweating behind their rope nets. It might have been Victorian London,
the hospital at Bedlam. It made me want to give up drinking myself.

Still, Daniel came through all that. And when he returned last winter I
was full of hope—I thought he was saved. I thought I had saved him.

Winter is over now and Daniel is gone. Although everything else just
continues as usual, as if nothing of consequence ever happened. Daniel has
journeyed from life to death and I’m still sitting in the same chair I was in
when he telephoned me last January. Three in the morning the night before
our mid—year exams, Daniel calling to report he was about to commit suicide.
The first time he’d called in years. He talked about childhood and he talked
about his father—fishing with him on a river somewhere, the dark green ca-
noe and the bright shiny lures. How once when he was five or six and terri-
fied after watching a horror movie his father came up to tuck him into bed and
brought him a stuffed animal even though he was too old for stuffed animals.
But he also talked about all the dinners his father missed, and the fighting
that woke him at night. The birthdays and vacations that never happened. He
talked in a rush and he made no sense and when he hung up I tried to call
back but he didn’t answer. So I called the Pensacola police and they gave me
a hotline number for their local crisis group and the dispatcher there said she’d
send someone out. Then I called his family in Connecticut, but I couldn’t

- 456°
The Refugee

wake anyone at Sarah’s house, even though I let the telephone ring and ring—
Sarah and her mother were always luxurious sleepers, jealous and guarded.

I packed a bag and called the airlines and wrote a note to the dean ex-
plaining why I was going to miss my mid—years, our most important exams
except for the two—year comps, and then I was driving south through the
winter night to Logan International, still two hours away. It snowed lightly
the whole way down, and the roads were greasy and slow.

Over the last few years Daniel and I had grown as distant as people
can get, and it wasn’t simply geography, the thousand miles of American east
coast. It wasn’t the bootcamp mentality of medical school either, the way ev-
ery minute of my life was spoken for, planned out, co—opted by someone else.
No. It was more like Daniel was evaporating somehow, slowly disappearing,
like he was burrowing deeper and deeper into a place where you couldn’t
really follow him. I think he was fundamentally embarrassed, that his failures
had raised a wall between us. And I think he was scared; I think now he must
have been aware every minute of the legacy from his father.

Daniel never finished his first year of college. He stopped going to
classes and he didn’t show up for any of his finals—in fact he was still holed
up in his dorm room after the semester closed and everyone else left for the
summer. He’d spent that whole year drinking, doing drugs, building these el-
egant bookcases. I’d seen some early ones. They were beautiful things, tall
and graceful, all bird’s eye maple with mahogany accents. I wonder where
they are now. I was a senior in high school then, and we spent that whole
visit staying drunk, even though drinking was already starting to frighten me,
the way you woke up sick the next morning and despite all the nausea and
your brain split open, still, all you could think about was the next drink. Daniel
taught me about the hair of the dog. But later it seemed he’d just wanted a
drinking buddy, any old drinking buddy, good buddy. That he’d forgotten me
as a friend. And he never came north again, except that last time. Maybe he
realized returning would close the circle too tightly. Year passed into year.

Now I think Daniel was trying to achieve perfect drunkenness, and I
guess you could say he made that his life’s work. I think he wanted to be
drunk forever, permanently stopped at that moment on the curve when every-
thing seemed ideal, that space between the nagging worry of alcoholism and
absolute dumb narcosis.

I called his place again when I landed in Pensacola, but there still wasn’t
any answer, and it occurred to me the number I had might be out of date, that
the address could be wrong as well and I considered calling Sarah then but it
seemed better to have some answers first so I called information instead, con-
firmed the number and address, then I got a cab and drove out to his place.

His door was locked and I knocked loudly and for a long time but there
was no response except from a neighbor. I went around the unit looking in
the windows until I saw Daniel lying on the floor in the corner of the living

- 47°
PHIL iP. Risse. 6

 

room, curled up on the rug like a dog before a fireplace. But this was Florida,
there was no fireplace, just air conditioning and wall—to—wall carpeting and in
Daniel’s case wall—-to—wall vomit and empty whiskey bottles and white plastic
pill bottles and ashtrays spilling cigarette butts. I banged on the window but
there wasn’t any response so I cut the screen with my jackknife and forced
the window up and I climbed into his house and went over to him.

The vomit was a good sign. Daniel was still breathing and his pulse
was steady although not very strong. I tried to shake him into conscious-
ness, calling his name, but I couldn’t rouse him. I made the neighbor call an
ambulance, and I washed Daniel’s face with cold water, then I collected the
pill bottles and sat down next to him to wait for the EMTs. I thought about
calling Sarah and her mother but I decided to wait until I knew something.

I spent the rest of that morning waiting on the wrong side of doors in
the Pensacola Hospital, first outside the ER as they pumped Daniel’s stomach
and gave him narcotic antagonists, then at the nurse’s station in the ICU while
they put in IVs and hooked him up to different monitors. I spent a lot of time
filling out forms and signing papers, making financial arrangements, offering
myself as a guarantor. I gave Daniel’s history to several doctors. Finally they
sent me home, suggesting I not return until tomorrow.

I fell asleep in the cab on the way back, and when I got to Daniel’s
condominium complex, I was disoriented and I couldn’t remember his number.
The driver must have thought I was some nodding junkie, because I couldn’t
find Daniel’s unit, but the places were all identical, white concrete slabs set
down on artificial grass like giant mausoleums. I wondered how he ever found
his way home when he was drunk. Finally I identified his place as the one
with the cut screen.

I called Sarah, a number I knew by heart, and this time she answered
immediately and when I told her everything that had happened she insisted
on coming straight down. I said she didn’t have to, I told her, “There’s noth-
ing you can do here. He’s in the ICU now. Nobody can see him. They kicked
me out an hour ago.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why don’t you come down after he’s released—that’s when he’ll re-
ally need you. He’s okay right now.” I thought for a moment. “But I don’t
know how long they’re going to take care of him. You should be here for him
when he gets out.”

‘And if he doesn’t?”

“Doesn’t what?”

“What if he doesn’t make it?”

‘‘He’ll make it. He’s stable now.” Which wasn’t really true; that’s why
they put him in the ICU.

“T’ll meet you this afternoon,” she said, then she hung up.

Next I called the dean at UNEMC, but I could only leave a message

- 5S °
The Refugee

with his secretary. Then I cleaned up Daniel’s apartment before Sarah could
see it. I kept looking for some evidence of our past, some link back to the
people we once were together, even the smallest thing—a book, some music,
a picture. But Daniel’s apartment could have been anyone’s—there was noth-
ing of Daniel in it at all, no sign of the person he used to be, no sign of the
person he was now. It was hard to believe he’d lived there for years. His home
was like a hotel room, but without the cleaning staff. What I still don’t under-
stand is why Daniel would settle down into that isolation, that place with no
one so far from home. The refugee. Washed up like debris in a strange sterile
land. : .
I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for Sarah. And as the day
dragged on it occurred to me that’s all I’d ever done, I’d waited far too long
where Sarah was concerned, I’d waited until it was too late. For years I’d
thought of her as a sister, and once she seemed like my lover. But then she
announced she would marry, and I suddenly felt a future I’d never consid-
ered before forever closed to me. And with that closure came a comprehen-
sion I didn’t want, and a longing that would grow all through the winter and
the spring. An emptiness would form that would somehow be connected to
the loss of Daniel, but would include and then become the loss of Sarah her-
self.

It was late in the evening when the cab brought Sarah to Daniel’s con-
dominium. We went out for dinner but neither of us really ate anything. That
night Sarah slept in Daniel’s bed. I slept on the couch in the living room, and
I had bad dreams there. Daniel’s dreams, dreams of the refugee. A tunnel with-
out lights. Black loneliness and despair.

Early the next morning we went to see Daniel, and learned he’d been
moved out of the ICU. We went up to the detox unit, and they let us onto
that ward almost without caring. When the ambulance brought him in yester-
day, nothing I could say could get me past the front desk—not that I was
Daniel’s friend, or that I rode in with him, or was his brother (which was al-
most true). When I told a nurse I was a medical student at UNEMC, she
laughed.

We walked down a broad hallway separating private rooms. The place
was overrun with staff, the orderlies and nurses and aides almost all men.
The patients were mostly men too, various ages; they all looked old. I glimpsed
one man in heavy restraint sobbing before his door was closed from within.
There was one woman I heard screaming through a closed door, just inarticu-
late terror. People in mauve and teal went in and out of her room but they
couldn’t make her stop. In Daniel’s room a heavy screen covered a narrow
window that looked down several stories onto a parking lot and a golf course
beyond. There was a television and some magazines, two copies of impres-
sionist paintings, and a rope net surrounding the bed, thick nylon strung be-
tween sturdy tracks bolted to the ceiling and the bedframe. Daniel’s skin was

a >
PPS eee

wet and pasty. He groaned and turned away.

“Jesus,” I said. I looked at Sarah. Her eyes were wet but her mouth was
grim. I got an orderly to unlock the net and slide it back against the wall.
“Daniel,” I said. I touched his shoulder. “It’s me, Richard. And Sarah.”

Daniel blinked his eyes. His face looked swollen and thick and I wished
Sarah hadn’t come. She sat on the edge of the bed and took Daniel’s hand in
hers. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Daniel coughed and motioned for water and I got him some. “Thanks,”
he said finally. His voice was wooden.

‘How are you feeling?” I asked.

He shook his head and closed his eyes.

“Do you remember yesterday?”

But Daniel didn’t answer. We sat in silence for a long time. Eventually a
nurse came in and told us we should go and let Daniel get some rest. She
gave him some pills and said we had about five more minutes. Daniel looked
ashen against the white bedclothes. His breathing was gentle and regular. He
didn’t stir when Sarah let go of his hand. She rose from the bed and went to
the bathroom to wash her face. I was about to leave myself when Daniel slowly
opened his eyes, focused on me with an effort and said, “Do you remember
the first time?” He looked like he was going to cry. “You took care of me.” I
squeezed his hand. “It was like magic,” he said. “Then it was gone.” He closed
his eyes again. “Magic,” he murmured. Then he was asleep.

I’m not sure what they gave him but for the first time Daniel looked
peaceful, and I was thankful for that, whatever the pharmacology was. In his
sleep he was smiling now, and I wished him a long rest, untroubled by dreams.
Who needs dreams anyway? Daniel had his memories. Let him write his own
history, create his own past. We all make up the truths we need to survive.

“Magic,” the nurse sniffed behind me. I swung around scowling but
she just stared right back, that purulent look I’d been noticing recently, dis-
dain for doctors seeping out everywhere. She was right though, and she knew
it; finally I was the one who had to look away. It wasn’t magic Daniel remem-
bered—it was just shape-shifting, transient as smoke, not real at all. I turned
back to the bed.

This was real. This gray boy—man on the white sheets, the twilight
half-life that brought him here. You took care of me Richard. But I couldn’t
remember that. In my whole life I don’t think I ever took care of Daniel—it
was always the other way around. His was the older brother’s role.

In high school they called him Prince Daniel, after the time a girl stumbled
out of the main entrance and fell down the front stairs. She was high as a kite
and she bounced on her ass all the way to the sidewalk, scattering her books
and papers behind her and jamming her skirt way up past her hips. Then she
just sat there next to the buses, dazed and confused, stoned out of her mind,
her legs spread wide and anyone could see she wore no underwear. Every-

* 60°
The Refugee

body stood around laughing and staring. Except for Daniel. He ran over to
help her, shaming the others to silence; he covered the girl with his jacket
and made me gather up her things. She was shaking hard as he helped her to
her feet, and he had to support her by the waist as he walked her past the
others to his car. Prince Daniel. But they never forgot the way he made them
feel, and the name was always tinged with contempt.

Do you remember the first time? | remembered the bulletproof feeling
clearly enough, and the way time started sliding around. Being late for school
and leading Daniel up those same granite steps on a leash. How quiet it was
inside at first, everyone already in class, the empty hallways stretching away
on either side like dim and dusty tunnels. The school felt old to me as it never
had before, ancient, almost archeological, and I wanted to linger there and
understand that, but Mr. Pfnausch came roiling out of his office then and he
changed everything. Then we were running and some others started running
and by the time we ducked into the empty auditorium five grown men were
chasing us. Daniel opened an emergency door and we ran across the parking
lot and the football field; we ran all the way up the hill on the other side be-
fore we stopped to look back. The alarms going off and Daniel still on his
leash.

I remembered how inviting my school looked from that perspective, the
broad expanse of sunny brick long and low and warm, and how small Mr.
Pfnausch seemed in the doorway. If only he’d been calmer. His distant shouts,
the tiny figures at his side. They could have been us.

It was like magic. A perfect morning and a perfect escape, right out of
the books. The sun-drenched hilltop in the clear spring light. Daniel pulled
off his collar, saying, “Thanks. I won’t need this anymore.” I stood next to
him with my arm around his shoulders. The day was just beginning, and life
seemed limitless.

Of course there was a following day, the appointment in Mr. Pfnausch’s
office. There would always be following days. Mornings after. One tomorrow
after another stacking up beyond belief, beyond endurance. I touched Daniel’s
shoulder under the crisp white sheet but it felt bony and cold.

You spent your whole life looking for magic, going back over and over,
trying to find that place again, that hilltop in the sun, that moment before
tomorrows when everything seemed perfect. And all the time your life kept
moving forward, while you kept going back, until what you finally found was
just yourself for a moment, lying at a crossroads, true and gray against bleached
hospital sheets. Daniel.

Drinking was the great expansion, where all the rules were suspended
and nothing could ever go wrong. I came to believe it was like sex, always
there just under the surface, silently organizing everything and everybody.
The want that could not be satisfied, the voice that would not be stilled—

-6/°
Prlitee Ril Ss Get.

whispering to you endlessly with its promise and its power. Promising every-
thing, conscious and unconscious desire, waiting for you forever. But the
promise was always the greatest part, and always disappointing in the end.
No one could keep promises like that.

But more than broken promises, I think the tomorrows finally over-
whelmed Daniel. The immensity of them stretching away. When I picture him
now I see him exhausted, I see him scared. Scared for a long time, a lifetime. I
don’t think he was ever able to face his fears. Except maybe at the end—and
maybe that’s what killed him. Perhaps he always knew it would—perhaps he
spent a lifetime sobering up to terror. Self—loathing and defeat and the knowl-
edge of his father’s death. The knowledge that this thing was his inheritance,
his birthright, greater than he was and maybe from the start he knew he was
doomed. Maybe from the very beginning he could see all the way to the end,
the dangling belt.

Here, we learn the most basic things—electron orbitals, positive and
negative valences, the way atoms combine to form simple molecules. We pro-
ceed step by step biochemically—through sugars and fats to proteins and
nucleic acids. Then microscopically, histologically, anatomically—cells to tis-
sues to organs to organ systems. Finally we consider the human organism.
It’s very thorough. |

But no one ever asks why. No one even remembers.

Here, we understand nothing. Not even simple physics, the second law
of thermodynamics. We forget that chaos is the natural order of things. That
ultimately everything comes apart. Life is futile beyond words, a puny hold-
ing action against the inexorable scraping of the universe.

We’re nothing but a collection of molecules, spinning through the void—
atoms linked for a moment by shared electrons, seeking balance and stability.
Driven by positive and negative forces, trying to equalize opposite charges,
always looking for the perfect match. Is that the same as loneliness?

I think of Sarah a lot. I was the one who gave her away when she mar-
ried last week. She asked me to walk up the aisle with her and I couldn’t
refuse—I took her father’s place, her brother’s place. But across this long
spring I’ve come to realize that I wanted to take the grooms place, I wanted
to be the one to walk down the aisle with her. I wanted to start a life with
Sarah, not mark the end of one. There are too many endings here.

Once Daniel was like a brother, showing me the way. But I’m not sure |
want to continue anymore. Four more years here and residencies after that
and anything that matters just sort of tacked on later as an afterthought. Love
and marriage. Or not marriage. Eventual children. A friend’s suicide. What’s
the point of going forward? I want to go back, start over, find the wrong turns
and make the right ones.

My first mentor, Skip, tried to teach me to get used to the idea of dying,
death. But personally I don’t think you can ever do that. Sometimes I think

° 62°
The Refugee

hope is all we have, and the loss of that is unbearable. But hope is just igno-
rance; knowledge reveals that.

I wish for a return to simplicity. A hilltop in the sun. I’m sick of think-
ing. Remembering and dreaming. I want to find those memory links and break
all the connections, clog the receptor sites, flood the synaptic spaces with
some kind of useless analog. I want to forget.

I am so weary. ADP, ATP—there is no energy left. Tomorrow at eight
we start our two-year comps, the exams they use to determine who gets to
continue. Right now, all I want to do is get drunk. It’s a desperate feeling.
Scary. Where a phosphate ion ought to be binding with adenosine diphos-
phate, I just see ethyl alcohol. A much simpler molecule.

“63°
VANESSA FURSE JACKSON
Grandmother :

I was twelve the summer Grin’s boots finally fit me. For years, I had
been going to the cupboard under the stairs with its dirty black and white
floor and feet-worn smell of very old gumboots, and pressing my own feet
down onto the imprint of hers. Not gumboots, these, but brown leather ankle-
boots with sturdy, flat heels, round toecaps, and a big metal zip right up the
front. Winter boots with sheepskin inside, only the sheepskin was worn to
lumps around the shape of her feet at the bottom, and fluctuated in thin yel-
low curls around the ankles. I think I had memories of her gardening in them,
but I’m not sure if I really saw her wear them, or if I just knew that she had,
once. Not like her faded black coolie hat with the pointed crown and long
raffia plaits that hung down on either side of your face like real hair. I had
short hair that never seemed to want to grow much, and I loved wearing that
hat, and tossing the plaits with a rustle over my shoulder just as if I had long
hair myself.

Grin let me borrow the hat if I was careful with it, but she wore it quite
often herself in the summer when she went into the walled garden to weed or
prune or deadhead. She looked like a little Chinese doll from a distance, spe-
cially when Johnno was with her, panting up and down somewhere close to
her, or sitting on a nearby bench as if he were on a mantlepiece. He was a
Pekinese with a silky coat of wheat and a snarffly nose, and ever since he
was a puppy Grin kept all the hair she brushed out of him to have woven into
knitting wool some day. After he died two years ago, she burnt it, though,
and I was secretly rather relieved. I had a feeling it was me she was thinking
of making something for, and I don’t think I could have worn Johnno’s fur,
however nicely she knitted it.

She was a wonderful gardener, who could coax any plant up from the
heavy black soil as if it was springing through the most airy of peats. Her
snowdrops hung heavier heads than any in the surrounding woods, lavender
grew for her into great silvery cloudpuffs, and fuchsia tangled into the Jjas-
mine and honeysuckle climbing the wall behind it. Irises and columbines, lily-
of-the-valley, musk roses and forget-me-nots, marigolds, mallows, mimosa and
pinks—the walled garden where I spent so much of my time rioted with her
green power. You should have seen it.

She wore plastic sandals now, with ankle socks, because she said they
were soft and really quite cheap, so that she could buy several pairs at a time
and store them in the larder, in a dark corner beneath the great slate shelf. She
told me that sun was bad for them. The plastic was transparent, and I thought

- 64°
Grandmother's Footsteps

it was odd to see my grandmother’s socked feet through them, smoothly
shaped like hot-dog buns, but I never thought much about it. I didn’t ques-
tion my grandparents like I did my parents.

I went to stay with Grin and Granpa every summer while my parents
went abroad to France to eat. Sometimes I stayed with them at Easter, too,
and once I had been there for Christmas with my parents, but I knew that had
been a long time ago. Then, if I stood tall, I could just rest my chin on the
dining-room table. I liked the cool, waxy way it stuck to my skin as I dipped
my head first to one side and then the other. But I was the only child there,
and I had to be very quiet. My mother made much of scooping me up and
kissing me when it was time to take me upstairs to bed, but she never stayed
and read to me, and Uncle James and Aunt Lara kept asking me questions
that they didn’t wait long enough for me to answer. I felt myself physically
shrinking in size like Alice, and imagined myself walking easily up and down
the stairs of the doll’s house in the nursery, and climbing into the fourposter
bed beside the little Victorian lady with red circles painted on her cheeks. Only
Grin and Johnno treated me normally, but Grin was distracted with so many
people there, and seemed to spend all her time counting to make sure she had
enough things to go round. Eight, nine, ten potatoes left; a dozen eggs ought
just to do breakfast if there are still seven sausages; six napkins means one is
missing; are there enough soup spoons if both Thompsons stay for dinner?
One pot of raspberry, four of rhubarb, only Lara won’t eat that, two peach,
one marmalade, it’s not enough. She still counted, but now she did it on little
pieces of paper. It took me ages to work out what they were when I first found
them lying around the house.

The walled garden was no place to wander in the cold, January rain,
even if I had been allowed out alone. Grin came with me one morning when I
had been hanging around her skirts to show me the black and cabbage-grey
dyingness of it, and after that I hid myself in the nursery with Johnno. I played
with the old toys that my father and Uncle James had played with, and Grin
and her sister before that, and I inhaled the cedar-damp smell of the deep
cupboards in there, and wished that me and Grin were the only people in the
world. I much preferred coming here in the summer.

Sitting in my shorts on the muddy black and white floor, I zipped and
unzipped the boots several times, a most satisfying sound and a most satis-
fying tingle up the middle of each foot as I did so. I pushed away my aban-
doned Reeboks, and stood up into the heavy hanging macintoshes and tweed
jackets, clumping the boots solidly up and down for a moment. A perfect fit. I
could remember the disappointment when, so many times before, my feet had
slid right out of the boots even when they were zipped up, and I had been
able to move the boots only by dragging their heels along the floor. I pushed
my way out of the cupboard, and walked slowly down the long wooden floor
of the passage to the kitchen, listening with a hugging delight to each step’s

- 645°
VAMESSA Figs JAC RS OM

hard clop, and feeling the alien weight at the end of my legs like extra years.

Grin was making pastry. There seemed to be yards and yards of it spread
like a blanket over the old kitchen table.

“Pies for an army, Grin?” I asked.

‘What army?” she said, and broke off her smooth motions with the roll-
ing pin. “What army are you talking about, Child?” I had always thought her
eyes were the blue of bright sky, but they looked dull this morning, and wisps
of white hair were sticking like feathers through the net that was supposed to
keep her tidy.

‘“You’re making lots of pastry, Grin. I just wondered.” For a moment I
really did wonder. “I mean, a lot.”

She looked at it. “I added some more flour, and then I think I needed
more margerine. And more flour. And water. I had to get the balance right.
Did I remember salt, now?”

“Tt looks good,” I said, hoping she might offer me a little raw handful of
it.

“You can never have too much,” she said. “You never know when you’re
going to need it. Quite suddenly.” She looked down at her blanket with a
certain air of puzzlement.

“Grin,” I said. “Would you mind awfully if I wore your boots?”

“Boots?” she said vaguely.

I stuck a foot out. “These boots. I fit into them. They’re really nice.”

“Stand next to me,” she said, “Shoulder to shoulder.” I shuffled along-
side her, till my shoulder touched hers and we could just squint round at each
other. She smelt a bit like the cupboard under the stairs, and was just as famil-
iar and dear to me. “You’re as tall as I am,” she said. “Look how you’ve grown.
Another year and you’ll have grown past me.”

I'd always liked the fact that she wasn’t so very much taller than I was,
didn’t tower and lean like so many grown-ups. But I hated the fact that she
might soon be smaller than me. “We’re equals, Grin. We’re twins. Peas in a
pod.” |

“Sisters,” she said unexpectedly. “Ellie and Ursula.”

My Great Aunt Ursula had died in a hotel fire in Marrakesh twenty years
before I had been born. I used to have nightmares about it, and wake sweat-
ing and suffocating into my pillow with the smell of smoke tangibly in my
room.

“Little Ursula,” said Grin, and she swung round and looked at me with
her eyes full of tears. I felt myself blushing. I couldn’t help it. “Of course you
may wear my boots,” she said fiercely, and her feathers of hair shook for a
moment. “Of course. Now go and leave me in peace. I should never have made
so much if you hadn’t distracted me.”

The morning seemed suddenly light and long. I clopped back down the
wooden passage again, past the dining-room that was completely shut-up now,

ae
Grandmother's Footsteps

and ran across the wide hallway covered in prickly brown matting that muffled
my boots. I walked through the open front door onto the stone slabs outside,
and into the lovely, green-scented air. My footsteps on the slabs sounded
like my father’s when he was dressed for the office: firm, authoritative, click,
click, click on the hard pavement, in a hurry, earning money, going to meet-
ings, man to man. I strode round the small stone square, wondering, as I had
most of my life, what it would be like to be a boy. Then I thought of what it
would be like to have a sister, but without the sense of loss I used to feel. I
was glad to be here, alive this morning and on my own.

I decided to walk down the long driveway, whose hardened gravelly-
with-bald-bits surface made a lovely scrunching, scraping sort of sound, like
chewing on dry cornflakes. I still felt unlike myself, or rather like myself ex-
tended into someone else, someone in charge, a soldier or a nurse or a John
Buchan hero. You know, Richard Hannay with a spare shirt and a toothbrush
and a book in his pocket, and nothing else for a ten-day hike among the hills.

Half way down the drive, I turned off into the best of the rhododen-
dron caves that flanked it. Grin had first showed me this one when I was quite
small, and told me that it should be mine for as long as I needed it. She gave
me the oval wooden base from a box of dates, on which I painted
“Misselthwaite Manor” before being allowed to nail it to one of the rhodo-
dendron trunks. And trunks they had, these huge gnarled rhododendrons.
Planted by my great-great-great grandfather, they were bent over one another
now, intertwined, fallen in to form earthy, fragrant caves big enough to stand
up in, with branches that made seats to sit in or swings to swing in, or rig-
ging to play Pirates in—round and round the cave without your feet touch-
ing the ground. Misselthwaite was my house, my sanctuary, my theatre, and
the scrubby little rhododendron bush at school could sometimes make me
cry with its pale travesty of a scent that would make me homesick all my life.

I sat on my favourite branch, and spread my boots out before me so
that I could admire them. I stretched out first one leg and then the other to
see how they looked. The surface of the leather was crisscrossed all over
with tiny lines, rather like those on Grin’s face, especially after she had taken
her afternoon nap, only Grin’s face was soft and warm, and the boots were
hard and sassy. There were deeper scratches here and there, and almost no
proper brown left on the toecaps, which were a kind of wounded yellow colour.
I leant forward and stroked them gently. “I’ll get you some polish tonight, I
promise,” I said. As I looked down at them, I felt a protective, lurching-in-the-
stomach kind of love for them. I drew my feet up, and clutched my arms right
round the soles, feeling the thick worn leather of them and the little nails and
the square ridge of the heels, hugging them as if, painfully, I was about to
lose them.

I thought about Grin and her pastry, and the pairs of plastic sandals in
the larder, and the scraps of paper covered in sums, and the box of used elec-

‘67°
Vet toeAot URS EA Ce tN

tric light bulbs in the big kitchen cupboard, and the notes that she left every-
where to herself. I mean, everyone writes notes to themselves every now and
then. I do. Grin’s had begun to make me feel unhappy, though. I had found
one yesterday in the bathroom that said “Remember to look at note on left of
sideboard in kitchen.” I wondered if Granpa knew she was worried. I knew,
but it wasn’t the sort of thing that she and I talked about usually. With Grin I
could talk about birds and books and flowers and about how I was doing in
school and things, but it would never have occurred to me to talk about her.
It wouldn’t have seemed right. I don’t think until then that I’d realised that
the years I longed for to make me grow tall and free from childhood would
make Grin old. Not old like she’d always been, but really old. I didn’t think
about her dying because that seemed like at the wrong end of a telescope,
but I thought of her here alone with Granpa after I’d gone home, and it made
me want to cry. I hugged my boots tighter, and took a big long breath of
rhododendron air. I wondered when she had bought the boots, and what they
looked like new in the shop, and where the shop was, and what Grin was
wearing that day, and why she had decided on that particular pair, and whether
she could ever have imagined that one day I would be big enough to wear
them too. And I felt a bit better, though when fear pushes inside you, it’s as
hard to ignore as pain. I got up out of the silence, and pushed my way out
through the Misselthwaite leaves. As I walked on down the drive, I listened
only to the hard responsible sound of the boots tramping until I had reached
the wide and rather dirty white gate that led out into the lane.

I stood on the bottom rung of the gate and leaned my arms over the
top, and the thickness of the boots under my feet was comforting. I could
hear, somewhere far off down the lane, the familiar grumble of Granpa’s car,
so I waited to open the gate for him and maybe to catch a ride up the drive
with him if he was in a good mood. Granpa was one of my favourite people,
but from a distance usually. I don’t mean I was afraid of him or anything, just
that while I admired him a lot, I couldn’t share important things with him like I
could with Grin. Like I might with a friend. Talking to him was sometimes diffi-
cult, as if we didn’t quite use words the same way, or as if we had only just
met for the first time and weren’t sure how to get acquainted. He was writing
a book about local history, which he had been writing ever since I could re-
member, and he spent much of every day sitting at the huge desk in his study
surrounded by books and papers and maps. I loved his study. It had books
from floor to ceiling, and a particular leathery church smell to it, and lots of
little tables all over the place that had wonderful things on them. A zebra-skin
drum, for instance. An old tin monkey whose legs went up if you pulled his
tail. A fly whisk made from the tail of one of Granpa’s favourite horses when
it died. A stuffed barn owl with scary wings outstretched. A real pelican’s
egg. I liked it when Granpa sat back in his chair and lit his pipe, and let me
move around the tables touching his treasures. But I didn’t really like it when

68°
Grandmother's Footsteps

Grin asked me to go up and tell him lunch was ready because I never knew if
he wanted to be interrupted or not, and sometimes he didn’t, and either growled
about damnfool women and their everlasting meals, or ignored me altogether,
coming downstairs ten minutes later to complain about cold food.

I liked it best when I could watch him from a distance, and then I knew
why I loved him so much. He could play the piano fast enough to make your
skin go funny. He could do tricks with a yoyo that left me green with envy
but that he said were impossible to teach anyone else, and he was the best
fisherman for miles around. It was a special treat to follow him down to the
river, and watch him thigh-deep in the pushing water, whirling the line above
his head and sending it sissing into the deep shadows. He rarely came home
without a fish, and would present his catch with a ceremonial bow to Grin,
who would invariably sigh and say to him, “Oh, Arthur, all those scales,” but
then serve it up just the way he liked it with melted butter and parsley from
the garden and one slice of lemon. I liked watching Granpa shaking out his
big Sunday paper, or stuffing his pipe with tobacco. I liked watching him strid-
ing across a field with his tall, blackthorn thumb-stick, or laughing with his
head thrown back at something one of the neighbours had stopped to tell
him. When I watched Granpa, I was always proud of him.

I swung the gate back, and he stuck his head out of the car window.
“Want a ride?” he asked. I moved the two Tesco’s bags full of groceries to
the back seat, got in beside him, and shut the car door carefully. It was a
rather old Toyota. We sat there for a minute in silence, and then he said, “Play-
ing Grandmother’s Footsteps, I see.”

It was so often like that. I didn’t have a clue what to say.

“If the boot fits, wear it, eh?”

“Oh, boots,” I said finally. “Yes, I’m wearing Grin’s boots. She said I
may. And yes, they do fit. My feet have grown.”

Granpa said in a grave voice, “Showed him his room where he must
lodge that night. Pulled off his boots, and took away the light.” He put the
car into first gear, and as its tires began to roll, they sounded as if they were
popping the little pieces of gravel beneath them. “Milton,” he said.

I kept quiet as we drove slowly up the drive until he said unexpectedly,
“Bought those boots for her myself. Might almost be yesterday. Good lord.”

“You did, Granpa?” I couldn’t help it. I was astonished.

“Marshall and Snelgrove, 1948. January sales. Icy weather. Lot of
damnfool women and Ellie’s feet were cold. She liked the zips.”

“So do I, Granpa,” I said. “I really like the zips.”

“Good lord,” he said again. “1948.” He parked the car under the corru-
gated-iron roof of the lean-to that sagged out from the end of the walled gar-
den, and we sat there in silence for a moment, staring out at the shadowy wall
in front of us. I waited for him to tell me more about the boots, but he just
sighed. “Anno domini,” he said finally, and got out of the car. I didn’t ask him

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LANES SAS FUR Sb dg ACC KS ON

what it meant. I sat and watched him in the mirror as, without another look at
me, he began walking off slowly towards the house, a plastic Tesco’s bag
hanging heavily at the end of each arm. He looked very small.

I glanced down at my boots as I opened the car door. In 1948, my father
hadn’t even been born yet. I went into the walled garden, and began to walk
up and down its paths, testing the boots first on a cobbled path, then on a
cinder one, then on the concrete one by the little shed. My feet were getting
a bit hot, but the satisfying authority with which my heels met the ground
was giving me back my still center that fear and Granpa had unsteadied. I
could feel the hollow inside me begin to close its edges together.

A long time ago, the garden had been laid out in three parallel segments:
a vegetable garden at one end, a flower garden at the other, and a narrow
lawn set between two yew hedges in the middle. The vegetable garden still
had a few vegetables in it and a strawberry bed in one corner, but most of it
was just weedy earth now. The yew hedges needed cutting, and the lawn
was more like rough grass, though Granpa did occasionally come out and rather
crossly push a mower through it. In the flower section, you could no longer
tell it had ever been a rectangle, or see it had ever had a pattern to it. It was a
wonderful jungle of lush bushes, pergolas draped with trailing roses, little
winding paths, benches almost too overgrown to sit on, and everywhere un-
expected bright spaces glowing with brilliant clusters of flowers. There was a
pond and a sundial and a herb corner and a stone summerhouse that I think
must have had an open space in front of it once and a view of the little pond,
but had green leaf-blinds pulled down around it now. Don’t think this had all
happened by accident, though. This was the careful work of Grin, who spent
long hours there, planting and dividing, grafting and feeding, labelling and
watering and planning. I knew because I had spent so much time there in the
past working with her, one or other of us always wearing the coolie’s hat with
the long plaits, me asking question after question, and her always trying to
answer everything properly. Do you know how rare that is?

I was on a gravel path now that ran round the pond and then led to the
one bench I knew was still useable because it was on a little bit of paving in
front of the fig tree. Grin used to sit there when her legs started aching. I sat
and breathed in the heady scents of roses and nicotiana and somewhere,
faintly, rosemary. I wondered how many of the flowers I could still name, and
whether Grin had added any new ones this year. I wondered if she was going
to come out this afternoon, and whether she’d mind if I wore her boots and
her hat. I wanted to toss those plaits over my shoulder just like I had for so
many summers, and I wanted Grin to be talking to me about which plants lived
happiest together, and about the science of pruning an Albertine, about bal-
ancing soil acidity, and how bees found their way back to the hive. This sum-
mer, I was beginning to see, she was always writing lists or notes, or she was
taking a nap, or she was waiting for something, or she was just too busy, and

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Grandmother's Footsteps

then I was afraid that it was me, and I was making all this extra work, so I
didn’t ask her any more. But I thought perhaps in this blue and fragrant sun-
shine that this afternoon she might be persuadeable, especially if I had some-
thing to show her.

Ground elder is also known as goutweed, which always used to make
Grin and me laugh, as we couldn’t quite imagine some old curmudgeon with a
bandaged foot yanking up difficult handfuls of the stuff and then boiling it or
crushing the root or whatever you’d do with it. “It probably gave him the
gout in the first place,” she’d say, puffing as she pulled and dug with her
trowel and tugged at the noxious weed. She would talk to it in quite a cross
voice. “Come on, you stupid thing. No, you may not go running under the
jasmine. You really have no business in my garden at all. You are not wel-
come, do you understand?”

It’s no good just pulling up ground elder, breaking off the bits you can
see. You have to dig down, gently if it’s close to a precious piant, and trace
the tough white roots, and get every last one of them out if you’re really
going to do the job properly. Of course, you never entirely get rid of it, but
me and Grin were pretty good at keeping it under control. I went to the little
shed, and found a trowel and a small fork and the wheelbarrow with the dippy
wheel, and I got to work. Almost every bed in the flower garden seemed to
have ground elder creeping across it, as well as other easier weeds like ground-
sel, and it was quite hard to know where to start, so I just went back to the
bench by the fig tree and began there, working my way backwards from the
wall, and concentrating on a small bit of earth at a time, so that I wouldn’t get
discouraged. Sometimes I had to stand up and dig. Sometimes I had to kneel
down and scoop with the trowel, then I had to half get up again and pull. It
was hard work

Hard work brings its own reward. Granny always told me that, though
I often wondered how she knew, as she never seemed to me to do any real
work at all. Granny was my mother’s mother, and she lived in a tall London
house in a square that had a communal railed garden in the middle that was
hard to get to because of all the traffic that constantly streamed round and
round the square. It looked nice from my high bedroom window, though, when
I could look down through its tall trees to its green grass and its formal rose
beds, and lots of scarlet and yellow tulips in the spring. Granny was eight
years younger than Grin, and they had been great friends a long time ago
when Granny was nineteen and about to marry Grandfather. She lived alone
in the tall house now, except for the Jephsons, who looked after her, and
Freddie, who was a rather beautiful corgi with a head like a regal fox and legs
like a clockwork mouse. I liked Freddie. I wasn’t allowed to take him for walks
on my own when I stayed there because of the traffic, but I used to take him
out into Granny’s long, narrow garden behind the house, and play with him
there. He’d hurl his roly body recklessly after a ball for hours, and as long as

oe i dae
VANESSA 2 RSE oe eo

we didn’t stray off the lawn onto a flower-bed, we were left alone. Mr. Jephson
did the garden, and he kept it very tidy indeed. Nothing rioted in Mr. Jephson’s
garden. Everything grew symmetrically and neatly, with no weeds and no in-
tertwining, but a lot of pink and lilac and white and green, and a miniature
croquet set pressed into the lawn if it was warm enough. I thought it was a
lovely garden to grow in a town. It was still and clean in an otherwise noisy
and dirty place that I wasn’t sure I liked, and I enjoyed its crisp, delicate lines
just as I enjoyed Granny herself.

I had stayed with her this past Easter, just for the long weekend, while
my parents went to stay with my godmother, who lived on her own and didn’t
like children. My mother didn’t exactly say that. What she said to me was,
“Cecy will want to talk and talk about her new book, darling. You’ll find it all a
terrible bore. Wouldn’t you be much happier having a cosy weekend with
Granny?” Cosy was a funny word to choose, but I didn’t at all mind swap-
ping my godmother Cecy’s expectation that children should be present but
silent for Granny’s more relaxed assumption that I would keep out of the way
until she had time to give me her full attention. I liked visiting Granny. She
had lovely fingernails and ankles, and was always immaculately turned out.
So I went to the tall house, and played with Freddie, and went with Mrs.
Jephson to Marks and Sparks to buy hot-cross buns, and watched TV in my
bedroom in the day time (not allowed at home).

Granny was busy, as she always was, rushing out to visit people or
talking on the phone or writing letters in the little green room she called her
haven, into which I had never seen anyone go but her and Mrs. Jephson. But
on Saturday morning, she took me with her to the Brompton Road to help her
choose a pair of evening shoes. At least, that’s what she said. I certainly
wouldn’t have chosen the green suede pair with silver leaves on them that
she did. I’m not sure I could have walked in them. But then she said she was
feeling generous, and she bought me a pair of high-top Reeboks just like that.
Black, too, which I knew my mother would disapprove of. See why I like stay-
ing with her?

Granny is fun. She thinks my parents are too serious about things, and
she laughs when I tell her what we get up to at school, and best of all, when
she’s in the mood, she tells me lots about her own life, and about her friends
and things, which even my parents never do. And without being asked, she’ll
often talk about her younger days, and show me improbable-looking photo-
graphs of herself with long dark hair and bare legs, or of my mother and her
two sisters, all smaller and skinnier than I am. It gives me the real crawlies
sometimes, thinking that one day I might look like they do now.

She showed me photographs later that Saturday, after I’d exhausted
Freddie in the garden and nearly gone to sleep on my bed in front of an old
TV film called Easter Parade. We had tea together in the sitting-room, and
when we’d finished she got out her wedding album, which I’d never seen

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Grandmother's Footsteps

before. I must have seen most of her other albums, but never that one, though
I’d looked many times at the big photo in the silver frame that was always on
the piano. Her and Grandfather kissing each other, her veil almost obscuring
his face, though you can see how young and thin he looked. I remember him
as being almost totally bald, with a huge belly that caved you right in when
you had to kiss him, and odd, sweet breath. He had died when I was seven,
though, and I couldn’t remember him very clearly. I had once overheard my
father telling someone on the phone that his death was a blessing in disguise,
but I’m still not sure if it was a blessing because his heart was so bad, or
because Granny didn’t like him very much. I watched her place the album on
the small table in front of her, and I stopped poking down the back of my new
shoes at the blisters there, and moved up beside her on the sofa as she slowly
turned the pages. After she’d dropped me home earlier, she’d gone out to get
her hair done, and I could smell the hairspray as I bent down to look at the
photographs.

“What a day,” she said.

“Was it very exciting?” I asked her, looking at her five little bridesmaids
with some envy. I had never been a bridesmaid.

“My parents made sure it should seem the most wonderful day of my
life,” she said, and I wasn’t certain exactly what she meant.

“They made it magic for you?” I prompted her.

“They made sure,” she said, “that it happened, and that every moment

of it should appear part of the fairy tale.”
“You looked lovely,” I said. It was true. She looked just like a princess
in a fairy tale should look, and so totally unlike the stiff-haired Granny I was
sitting next to that it was hard to connect the two people, though of course I
wouldn’t have said so.

“There was still rationing then,” she said. “Goodness knows what my
mother had to do to get the material for that dress. It was very uncomfort-
able,” she added, tracing the dress’s outline on the open page with one fin-
ger, “but it rustled beautifully. I can still hear the rustle.” She gazed for a mo-
ment more, then sighed and turned over the page to a group of guests stand-
ing on the church porch. All the women wore fur coats. I was rather shocked.

“T would much rather have had a summer wedding,” she said. “It was
so cold that day. Sunny, but cold. Icy weather.”

“Look,” I said, pointing, “There’s Grin. Doesn’t she look young? And
elegant. I’ve never seen her look like that.” Standing at the end of the second
row, there she was, small and straight, with a little fur hat to match her coat
and lipstick on her smiling mouth.

“Oh, Ellie,” Granny said. “Impossible Ellie. How angry I was with her
that day.”

“With Grin?” I said. “Why?”

Granny paused for a moment, looking at the photograph, and then turned

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her head away from me. She moved her hands absently across the open book,
so that I couldn’t see the photos anymore. She didn’t answer for a while.
Eventually she said, “Well, it doesn’t matter now.” She cleared her throat.
“She was the only person there who didn’t tell me how lucky I was. She said
to me after the service, ‘it’s going to be hard work, I’m afraid, but you’re strong.
You can do it. Good luck, my dear.’ And she kissed me, with that assinine
husband of hers just smiling beside her. I was so angry with her. We were
never such friends again after that, though I think we were both glad when
our children married each other.” She turned and gave me her pleased-I-was-
here smile, but I could see she wasn’t really looking at me.

“Hard work being married?” I asked, not until much later connecting
the assinine husband with Granpa.

She shut the album with a hollow thud, and pushed herself up from the
sofa. “I don’t know why I started looking at all this stuff,” she said. “So maud-
lin. Let’s play a quick game of Scrabble together, my darling, and then I shall
have to run. My dear friend will be picking me up at seven o’clock, and I
must have a bath.”

Hard work brings its own reward. As | dug and pulled, I thought about
how often she had said that to me over the years, and it occurred to me for
the first time that she didn’t just mean working hard at school or a job or at
playing the piano, even though she would say it when I told her I hated prac-
tising. I straightened up. I had nearly a whole wheelbarrow full of ground
elder, and I surveyed the clean, dark earth of my labours with some pride. The
clumps of flowers and the bushes that I’d cleared around already seemed to
be expanding into their new spaces. I don’t think I’d ever worked for so long
in the garden by myself, and I made a vow that if Grin were still busy and
tired, I would go on coming out until the whole garden was free from weeds. I
wanted to show her, I think, that I was no longer the little girl with all the
questions, but someone who could be a help to her so she wouldn’t have to
worry so much. And of course at the same time I also wanted to be the little
girl again, with Grin beside me telling me what to do and answering all my
puzzles, and that made me want to cry again, so I concentrated my whole self
on the sound of my boots clomping onto the cobbled path at the bottom of
the garden, growing harder-edged as they shed the earth that was stuck to
them, the little nails clicking and sliding on the stones.

I pushed the wheelbarrow along to the weed-heap at the corner of the
vegetable garden, and into my mind came what Granpa had said about play-
ing Grandmother’s Footsteps. Such a silly game, but it always made your heart
beat incredibly fast, specially if you were the one in front being pursued by
everybody else, the one in charge who could freeze them all by turning round,
yet the most scared in a way because there were so many of them creeping —
up behind you, just dying to catch you and touch you so that you lost. Like
walking through a field of bullocks. You can hear their legs swishing in the

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Grandmother's Footsteps

grass behind you and their long breathy sighs in your ears, but you have no
idea if they’re about to get dangerous, and butt and jostle past you. It’s re-
ally quite frightening. Was he just being clever because I was wearing her
boots, or did he mean something else? You never knew with Granpa. She and
I were the same height, and of course I knew that I hadn’t stopped growing
yet, and so in that way I was catching her up and would even overtake her,
but wouldn’t she always be in front? Grandparent, parent, child was how it
went, I knew, yet at this moment I had the feeling of being right next to her, as
close as I imagined sisters to be, and I felt almost suffocatingly protective.

There seemed to be an awful lot of weeds, and I had to tidy the pile
with the fork before it would make a proper mound. My fingernails were packed
with earth and my hands ached with all the pulling. So did my back and legs,
and I thought with real longing of the bench under the fig tree, but I wanted
to go and find Grin and to tell her what I’d been doing, and if possible to get
her out here to show her all my hard work. Thin high clouds had begun to
film the sky, and the garden had a still, end-of-morning feel to it all of a sud-
den. As I washed my hands the best I could in the little pond, I felt lonely
and lucky at the same time. It was an odd feeling.

When I got back to the front door, I scraped as much dirt off as I could
on the scraper, then I sat down on the stone slabs and unzipped the boots.
My socks were quite hot. I carried the boots across the prickly brown mat-
ting that dug into my feet, and reluctantly went into the cupboard under the
stairs. It was really hard to put them down on the muddy black and white
floor and to put my boring soft Reeboks back on, but I left them carefully
side by side and directly under the black coolie hat, one of whose plaits, I
could see, needed sewing up again at the bottom. I vowed I would come back
and do it later when I returned to polish the boots. As I walked down the
passage to the kitchen, I felt as if my feet didn’t quite belong to me, while my
legs seemed heavy and unresponsive, like when you’ve just jumped off a tram-
poline, you know?

Grin was standing at the sideboard beside a row of pies, some round,
some oval, some square, one looking suspiciously as if it had been baked in
Johnno’s old enamel dog dish. One or two were a little burnt, and there seemed
to be a lot of different smells coming from them, but overriding these was a
warm, rich pastry smell that hung comfortingly over everything, and with a
rush brought back so many summer mornings like this one.

“Grin,” I said. “Guess what I’ve been doing?”

Grin didn’t react to me, and I realised she was counting. “Six, seven,
eight,” she murmured, and stood still for a moment before turning round, her
face flushed and slightly bewildered and her hair-feathers more ruffled than
ever. “Oh good, you’re here,” she said. “One of these is for lunch, but how
can I possibly tell which one? So stupid. I should have put pastry leaves on
top, or L for lunch or something, but I didn’t, and now I’m going to have to

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VASE SSA FURST JAR Ret

cut them all open to find the right one. What a nuisance this all is.” She turned
back to the pies, but made no move to carry out her plan. “Why am I so stu-
pid?” I heard her mutter, though I don’t think she meant me to hear.

“Grin,” I said. “I’ve got an idea. What did you put in the pie for lunch?”

“Put in?” she asked vaguely, still looking at the anonymous row before
her.

“Yes, in the pie,” I said. “The lunch pie. What was it?”

She turned back to me. “Some had apple and raisins, and some had stew-
ing steak,” she said. “And kidney, though the price is fast becoming quite
outrageous. And one had bacon from last night with some potato added. And
I think there was another.”

“Was the bacon and potato one for lunch?” I suggested.

“Your grandfather likes bacon and potato pie,” she said. “But I can’t
find it. This food is all such a nuisance, you can’t imagine, Child.”

I went over to Grin and I kissed her. I think I surprised both of us. Then
I bent over the pies, and it really wasn’t difficult to pick out the bacon and
potato one. Some of it had come out from under one side of the crust and
you could smell it. “This is it, Grin,” I said. “Shall I put it on the table for
you?” I wiped the table, which was still a little floury, unearthed a mat, then I
carried the pie over and set it down. I laid the table, and Grin watched me,
wiping her hands on her apron as if it had been a towel.

“T put the rest of the pastry in the fridge,” she said. “I didn’t want to
waste it, but there was so much of it. I have no idea where it all came from.”

“T do love you,” I said.

“T can’t think why,” she said quite sharply. “Now, let’s bring your grand-
father down here and get it over with. I’m much too busy to be wasting time
standing around like this. Go on, Child. Go upstairs and tell him lunch is
ready.”

But I didn’t. I went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled that lunch
was ready, and I didn’t wait for his reply.

“‘He’ll come when he’s ready,” I said to Grin, and I sat down at the table.

She looked at me, and her blue eyes were very bright. “Poor Ursula,”
she said. “Such a nuisance for you.” I blushed. I wanted to tell her I didn’t
mind doing it for her; it was not knowing what he might say that I didn’t like.
“He always went his own way,” she said. “Always did exactly as he pleased.
But he never amazed me as he amazed other people. Poor Arthur.” She plac-
idly began to cut open the pie, and was spooning a third portion out when
Granpa came into the room and sat down in his chair-with-arms at the head of
the table, and shook out his napkin as he always did, with the same force he
used when sneezing.

“Pie, Arthur,” she said, passing him his plate. “And do try not to make
so much noise, if that’s possible.” She quite often said the same thing to him.

Granpa sighed. “Little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and

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Grandmother's Footsteps

troublesome insects of the hour,” he said, but he was looking at me from un-
der his bushy brows, and I wondered if I was in trouble.

“Edmund Burke,” said Grin. “Such a loquacious man.”

“What’s this?” asked Granpa, forking a piece of pie into his mouth.
“Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails?”

Neither Grin nor I answered him, though for once I could have. But his
voice was cheerful and in a funny way gentle, and besides, the pie was quite
good and I was hungry.

“Cat got your tongue?” he said, and this time he was looking at Grin.
She went on cutting up the tiny portion of pie she’d cut for herself, and eat-
ing bird-mouthfuls without raising her eyes from her plate. “Stepped out of
her shoes, then, have you?” he asked after several moments of silence, and I
guessed he must be talking to me.

“T’ve taken off the boots, yes,” I replied. “I put them back in the cup-
board.”

“Like those boots, do you?” he asked, but he was still looking at Grin.

“T cleaned a patch of the flower garden this morning,” I said, and now I
wasn’t sure who I was talking to. “I pulled up a whole wheelbarrow-full of
ground elder, but there’s an awful lot more to go.”

“T must go back there sometime,” Grin said, half to herself, I thought.
“But there’s always so much to do.”

“Have you forgotten those boots, Ellie?” Granpa said. “Young Ursula
reminded me of them this morning. Bitterly cold, do you remember? And some
damnfool wedding—whose was it now?”

Grin chewed on her last mouthful of pie without answering, but I was
sure she knew whose wedding he was talking about just as well as I did.

“Your grandmother’s, that’s it,” said Granpa, smacking his napkin against
the edge of the table with a whipping sound. “Your other grandmother’s, that
is. And what a funny little thing she was, wasn’t she, Ellie?”

“Funny?” said Grin, sounding as if she was thinking of something else.

“You know what I mean, Ell. Always up in a snit about something or
other. Always Miss Perfect. Felt sorry for that poor bugger she married even
as she swept up the aisle towards him.”

“Sorry for him?” Grin said, dabbing her finger onto her plate to collect
the pastry crumbs there, and eating them very slowly.

“Goddammit, Ellie, stop repeating what I say.” Granpa frowned at her,
but his voice sounded more coaxing than angry. Grin just went on eating her
crumbs, and finally he sighed. He looked at me, then he chuckled and looked
hopefully over at her again. “Remember how livid she was with you that day?
Remember that, Ellie? Lord, she was ratty. Don’t think she ever got over it,
did she?”

“Got over what, Granpa?” I asked after a pause, though I could hear
Granny’s voice in my head more clearly than I think I had at Easter.

oT
V AMES SM FURS E JAC eS

“It was those boots, wasn’t it, Ell?” Grandpa said, and he gave a short
laugh that almost sounded like Ha! “It was those boots. There you were in
sable and zip-up boots. Zip-up boots.” He wiped his eyes. “She must have
thought you were deliberately insulting her and that family of hers, all in their
little crocodile flim-flams, just because your feet were cold and there happened
to be a sale. I don’t know what you said to her after the service, but I remem-
ber her ice-queen look alright. Almost made me laugh. Lord, lord, and all for
zip-up boots.”

Granpa was still chuckling to himself as he began scooping up the re-
mains of his pie. I looked over at Grin, and suddenly she looked up at me, and
her eyes were a bright blue, twinkling at me just as I remembered, yet drawing
me closer to her than I had ever come in my life. I began to smile back, but
even as I did so, it was as if a haze quietly appeared and filtered out the bright
sky, and then she wasn’t looking at me any more.

Granpa put down his knife and fork noisily, and wiped his mouth sev-
eral times with his napkin, but even when he took a loud drink of water and
then banged the glass down again on the table, she said nothing to him. When
I turned round after carrying the dirty plates over to the sink, I saw that she
had gone back to the remaining pies on the sideboard, and was writing a note
on an old envelope she had pulled from her apron pocket.

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- af
COON TRIB UT toe

Heather Abner is currently attending the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing
at the University of Michigan. She lives in Ann Arbor.

Priscilla Atkins was born and raised in Illinois and currently lives and works
in Holland, Michigan. Her work has recently appeared in Poetry, The
Midwest Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, Blue Mesa Review, Flyaway
and elsewhere.

Brandon Grafius is in his second year in the Creative Writing program at the
University of California at Davis. In May of 1998, he received a BA in English
from Michigan State University. His poems have been published in The
Roanoke Review, Mobius, and Digression Digest.

Vanessa Furse Jackson has lived in Corpus Christi for nearly thirteen years,
but she comes originally from England where she worked for ten years in
professional theatre. She came to the States to pursue an MFA in Creative
Writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She received her doctor-
ate in English in 1990. Author of a book about her great-grandfather, The
Poetry of Henry Newbolt: Patriotism Is Not Enough, she teaches and writes
at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Her fiction has appeared most
recently in The Crescent Review, The Marlboro Review, and The Palo Alto
Review.

Dennis Must is founder-editor of Flying Horse, an alternative literary journal.
His plays have been performed Off Off Broadway, and he has published, or
forthcoming, work in Red Hen Press’ Blue Cathedral, Writer ’s Forum, Salt
Hill Journal, Sun Dog, The Southeast Review, Southern Indiana Review, and
many other literary journals and anthologies. He was awarded First Place in
The Alsop Reviews 1999, Taproot Literary Journal’s 1998 and The Oval’s
1996 fiction contests. A collection of his short stories, BANJO GREASE, will
be published in spring of 2000.

Sanjana Nair resides in New York City where she teaches at John J. College.
Her work has most recently appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review.

Philip Russel is a father and dentist living in Well, Vermont. He studied writing
at Brown University and received his MFA from Vermont College. His stories
have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in a score of
magazines in the United States, Canada and Japan—including The Capilano
Review, Lynx Eye, Porcupine, Thema, The Wascana Review, The Worcester
Review, Wind, and YoMiMoNo. His novel, Body and Blood, named Publisher's
Finalist by the Heekin Group Foundation, was released by BkMk Press

(UMKC) in 1998.

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CAON TRIBU | ORS

Paula V. Smith teaches creative writing and literature at Grinnell College. Her
work has appeared in literary reviews including Four Quarters, Mati,
Xanadu and Flyaway.

C. Matthew Tusa was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in Zar River Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review,
New York Quarterly, Sundog, Tundra, Crab Creek Review, and others. He is
presently pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Florida in
Gainesville.

Camille-Yvette Welsch is a poet in the MFA program at Penn State Univer-
sity, where her work has appeared in regional publications.

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IN THIS ISSUE:

POEMS by Heather A\bner, Priscilla
Atkins, Brandon Grafius, Jim Harrison,
Sanjana Nair, Paula V. Smith, C. Matthew
Tusa, and Camille-Yvette Welsch

INTERVIEW with Jim Harrison

SHORT STORIES by VVanessa Furse
Jackson, Dennis Must, and Philip Russell

$5.00