Puta Caballo

by Miguel Lanigan (Colombia 1961–63)

About horses, I knew not much. The few I had ridden back in the States were beaten down robots one finds in rental stables — the giddy-up-go plodders that get you from A to B and back again. The horse the Colombian stable hands were leading up from the stalls below was a trembling, brown, mass of quivering  muscle.  The beast I was to ride furiously jerked his head from side to side; the whites of his eyes showed he did not want to be ridden — earlier riders had done him too much harm. How, I lamented to myself, had I gotten myself into this unhappy and dangerous situation I was facing.

. . .

Back in 1961, I had it made in Washington, D.C.: I was twenty-two, driving a black MGA sports car, was a co-chairman of the debutante committee, had a good paying job in the government procurement office of United States Steel, and had beautiful girl friends — the full bachelor package. Then, President Kennedy made his “Ask not speech”, and set the wheels of change in motion.

The metamorphosis from being a Washington, D.C. bon vivant to a Peace Corps Volunteer began one sunny spring afternoon as I walked back to my office on K Street, from a bid opening at Main Navy. As I passed the old ICA (now AID) building I noticed a little temporary blue card taped to the front of the building proclaiming Peace Corps in embossed white lettering. Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to check out this new program I had heard and read about. That tiny blue sign was to change my whole life’s trajectory.

I followed the signs inside to the recruiting office and looked in. There were some packing boxes with piles of papers stacked on top, three chairs, a desk and a young woman sitting behind it. She looked up from what she had been doing and asked if she could help.

“Yes,” I said,  “I’d like an application.”

She looked startled. “Just a minute,” she said, “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.”

I sat, put my briefcase beside me, and watched her scurrying down the hallway poking her head in offices.

She returned and sat behind her desk. The little office began filling with people, all trying to look busy. I was puzzled. It was only years later, when I applied to the same woman to join a Peace Corps recruiting team, that I learned I was the first person to ask for a Peace Corps application and they were all curious to see what one looked like.

One night, three months later, I got a call at my little bachelor pad out in Virginia. It was a man from the personnel office asking if I still wanted to join the Peace Corps for assignment to Colombia. That’s funny I thought, I didn’t think British Colombia needed help. “Yes,” I answered, and thus began the big adventure; I had been accepted to be in the first group in the Peace Corps.

My coworkers at the government contracts office were aghast. “You did what?” was the usual response. My father, who had pulled strings to get me the USS job, was puzzled and pissed, but I was 22 and it was my choice.

Being the first group, the Peace Corps training-staff wasn’t sure what to teach us to prepare us to go into outback Colombia to do our job of organizing rural community-development juntas. So, to err on the side of caution, they shot-gunned us with an amazing training course taught by academic PhDs who lectured us for twelve hours a day in Colombian history, cultural anthropology, Spanish, Colombian government, community development technique and other such academic subjects. Other experts trained us in more practical fields such as medical, first aid, self-defense and horsemanship. It was the latter that came to my aid this particular morning.

. . .

Eight hours out of the now infamous city of Medellin was my work site of Andes, Antioquia, a municipio (county) at the 4,000 feet level in the rugged mountains of Colombia, perfect for growing Colombia’s world famous coffee. I was assigned to work with the Federation of Coffee Growers that had a small agricultural extension office there already.

This part of Colombia has four annual seasons — two wets and two dry, so for half the year I was riding to the outlying mountain villages on horseback in the rain, on slick, narrow mountain trails. Riding tall in the saddle looks fun and adventurous in movies, but six or seven hours lurching up steep mountain trails, soaked and covered with mud splatter, got old very fast. Muscles in my legs and back, I never knew existed, shouted their existence.

Since arriving in Andes, I hadn’t found a horse I wanted to buy and had to rent the poor beast from Don Jose’s stable.

I was running late this day and arrived at the stable after most of the horses were already rented. The stable was located halfway up the only paved block in Andes. It had been paved in concrete to allow the publico bus/cargo trucks to make it up the steep grade to the central plaza during the rainy seasons. In my fledgling Spanish, I told Jose, the stable owner, that I needed to rent a horse for the day and part of the night.

“Bueno senor,” he said, and hollered to the stable hands below, “Triaga ‘El Gris.’ ” “Bring the gray,” I translated.

Oh no, I thought, not that gray horse again; she was the worst horse in the stable. Some one had broken one ear so that it permanently flopped to one side. She had a hernia the size of a cantaloupe on her left side that swelled alarmingly at any thing faster than a slow walk. Her fetlocks were badly damaged, and her lower lip drooped so that her yellowed teeth were always on display.

“No señor. No,” I said emphatically, “not the gris.”

“Bueno,” he said obligingly, and hollered below to forget the gris and to “Triaga el Puta Caballo.”

Again I translated tremulously  . . . “Bring the whore horse!”

A couple of minutes later, two stable hands led the whore-horse up from below; each tightly holding his side of the bridal. The horse was big, brown, muscular and supremely pissed. His eyes darted, his ears rotated like radar dishes. Oh Christ. I thought, the macho test the cultural anthropologist back in training had told us to expect, was upon me.

Out in front of the stable both stable hands continued to tightly grip the bridal waiting for me to mount. Another attendant lowered the stirrups to accommodate my much longer Gringo legs. The stirrups, as usual, were metal and looked like they came off a suit of armor for a small knight. They were favored by the campesinos since they protected the bare feet of the Colombians who normally rented. Another bummer — my size 13 Sears Roebuck, square-toed boots barely fit into the metal stirrups a couple of inches.

Up the street I could hear people calling out to others seated at the plaza having their morning “tintos” coffee break that the gringo was going to ride the whore-horse. Several left their coffees and hurried down the steep stretch of concrete to watch the fun. For me, it wasn’t fun — I was scared shitless, but of course couldn’t let them see it — this was my macho test.

I threw my saddlebags over the saddle, put my boot in the teeny stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. Puta Caballo was so mad he was trembling all over — that was good since it covered up my own trembling. I picked up the reins with the long, thick flat leather strap at the end and, in a bold a voice that belied my fear, I nodded and said “Bueno.” The two vaqueros let go of the reins and, knowing what to expect, jumped out of the way. Puta Caballo didn’t disappoint them. Freed from restraint, he flattened his ears, dropped his head and jumped straight up like a horse in a Remington painting. His iron horse shoes sparked on the concrete as he spun and bucked. So frantic were his leaps, his hind legs slipped out from under him and he plopped down on his haunches with me sliding me off behind him, but still standing and hanging onto the reins. The attendants rushed in and grabbed the bridal while the horse struggled to his feet. My saddlebags remained on the saddle. With great reluctance, I jammed my boot inside the bitty armored stirrup and, once again, swung up into the saddle. Puta Caballo was nothing like the docile horses used in our training — this beast was insane.

“Bueno,” I said in a faux strong voice. By now the adrenalin was being mainlined into my bloodstream. Puta Caballo lowered his ears and went bonkers again, with the same results — me standing on the concrete firmly gripping the reins.

Once again, the stable hands grabbed the bridal, and once again I reluctantly climbed on the beast for the third time — only this time I had a plan: I noticed he always lowered his ears just before he started his manic bucking. This time, however, as the ears were going down, I snapped the leather strap at the end of the reins down hard on his head between his lowering ears. Puta Caballo was so stunned he froze and stood perfectly still with his head lowered and his legs splayed out, which suited me fine. I gave him a kick with my heels to put him in gear. He took a couple of faltering steps and when he started to lower his ears again, I flicked the leather strap off to the side of his head where he could see it. His ears went up and he took a few more halting steps up the concrete road toward the plaza where I could see the coffee drinkers pointing and talking.  The campesinos that had gathered in front of the stable to watch the fun, nudged one another and commented about the “muy bravo caballo” the Gringo was riding. A few steps further on the ears started down, and again I flicked the leather strap by his face and the ears went back up. He continued up the road toward the plaza and the cobble stone road out of town.

And so I, and a very reluctant Puta Caballo, reached the plaza and rigidly rode past those sitting at tables having their morning tintos. We stutter stepped the two blocks to the edge of town. Behind us I could hear the buzz of conversation about El Peace Corps volunteer riding the whore-horse.

The town stopped abruptly two blocks on where the road made a sharp turn to the left so that we were out of sight. I was so amped with adrenalin by then I did a completely irrational thing — I reverted to the brute the Marine Corps had trained me to be:  I slid out of the saddle, pulled the reins over the horse’s head, and punched him as hard as I could on the white blaze in the middle of his forehead. The horse was as stunned as I was — this was something entirely new for Puta Caballo. “OK you son-of-a-bitch, it’s you and me,” I warned him, and pulled the reins back over his head, pulled them in as tight as I could so that his head was pulled in tight against his chest, and remounted.

“OK, let’s do it,” I said. Much to my surprise and relief, Puta Caballo had had enough of the American Gringo’s way of horsemanship and set off at a decent pace just nice as you please. I looked down at my swelling knuckle thinking that was really dumb.

I turned off the main dirt road and we started up a trail to get to one of the three villages I was to visit that day. I was delighted that this strong horse went up and over two hills before he showed signs of blowing. All the other rental horses became packhorses half way up the second hill. So I got off and we walked along for a while to give him a rest — I think he appreciate the act. We crossed over a small stream. I stopped to let him have a drink and another breather.

It was already dark when I left the last little village and headed back down the slick mountain trail to the road that lead back to Andes. It had rained and the narrow mountain trail, carved in the side of the mountain, was slippery. Rainwater had washed away dirt exposing large slippery round rocks.  I gave Puta Caballo a loose rein so he could lower his head and see where he was going. Several hundred feet below me I could barely hear the San Juan River babbling over the rocks in the riverbed. I was relaxed and lost in thought when Puta Caballo suddenly reared up and, while doing a one-eighty so that we were now going back up the trail, he twisted his head down and clamped his big grass stained teeth on my left knee. “Goddamn you son-of-a-bitch,” I screamed out to the night. Royally indifferent to my curses, the beast plodded back up to the top of the hill.

By the time we arrived, I had cooled off.  OK horse, that was fair; I did you, you did me, fair enough, we’re even.” I slipped the reins over his head and led him back down the trail to the road beside the river. Again, he was nice as you please and offered no resistance when I remounted. So he and I placidly made our way back through that dark night to Don Jose’s stable, each of us thinking, I’m sure, about the dinners that awaited us.

The next time I needed to rent a horse, I boldly strode into Jose’s stable and commanded, “Triaga el Puta Caballo.” Jose smiled — I had passed my macho test, and besides, Puta Caballo was strong and I figured we had reached an understanding.

More about Miguel Lanigan  —
Responding to President Kennedy’s “Ask not . . . ” speech, I quit my job as a government bid representative for United States Steel in Washington, D.C., and became a member of Colombia I (Rural Community Development. I worked with the Federation of Coffee Growers  (Cafeteros) in Andes, Antioquia organizing juntas and training a counterpart Cafetero community development worker.  Upon returning to the U.S., I was a staff member of Peace Corps training programs at New Mexico University (Taos CD Training Center) and later as Assistant Director of P.C. training at Southern Illinois University/Carbondale campus. In all, I worked on 19 training programs while getting my degrees in sociology and government. For nearly a decade, I worked for National and International Red Cross Disaster service. I worked 30 some disasters including six months in-country leading a 12-man American Red Cross team of Disaster experts on loan to Peru after their awful earthquake. I also directed relief operations in Wilkes-Barre, Puerto Rico, Majaro, Marshall Islands (another six-month assignment), and a couple of dozen more. Leaving the coat-and-tie behind, I moved to California and spent several years as a commercial fisherman, boat carpenter, metal sculptor and other such jobs. As the body aged, I finished up my working life as a writer/photographer for four Northern California newspapers. I retired to a life of writing short stories and photography — specializing in bird photography.

•

GYPSY GINA

by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96)

GINA LEANS into the corner of the tenement kitchen, trying to stay out of the way.

She’s only nine years old and doesn’t take up much space, pushing close up against the walls.  She idly stretches out a finger and runs it down the yellowed, chipped paint, and puts her finger into her mouth.  Streaks of dirt mark her cheeks; her black hair hangs in tousled strands around her face; her bare toes wiggle on the crusty linoleum floor.  She watches dust motes sparkling like tiny diamonds on sun rays filtering through the dirty window.

Gina is small and light, full of frenetic energy, chattering incessantly,  moving in perpetual pirouettes. She beams in wide smiles when pleased but, when crossed, her brow creases, and she crashes into thunderous tantrums. Her mercurial energy seems limitless but, when expended, she drops like a felled tree.

Gina’s mother yells at her from the doorway. “Stop pickin’ at that wall!  It’s dirty!”

Rosa is twenty-eight years old, statuesque, framed in a window where light plays upon her dark, long hair, and flashes from a dangling earring. Rosa is not her real name, it’s her American name. Among the Rom, or Gypsies, everyone has secret Romani names that godparents whisper into a baby’s ear, a name that only the family and spirits know. Rosa has an ofisa, a store front on the first floor of the building where a picture of an open palm hangs in the window with the caption, “Psychic Readings -  $10 special.” Rosa sometimes stands in the doorway and beckons to passersby; occasionally someone, usually a woman, will wander in for a palm or tarot card reading. Rosa adroitly increases the price to $20 or $30 at the end of her reading because, she explains, she had read two palms instead of one, or spent longer on the tarot cards than usual. Sometimes she gets a customer who comes back several times to solve her problems by following Rosa’s occult advice. These are the customers Rosa looks for, charging more for every session, relieving some gullible clients of “evil money.” At the first sign of any altercation that might lead to a police investigation, the family packs up and disappears.

Rosa stands at the stove stirring a pot of spicy stew, in a cigarette in her other hand balanced on her hip. The kitchen is furnished with a formica table and four straight chairs; a window looks out across an alley onto another dingy building.

Gina’s father, Danny, is out canvassing neighborhoods and parking lots in search of gaji, non-Gypsy, car owners, who might hire him to smooth out dents.  Since he has no license for such work, he charges $20 or 30 a job, for which a licensed repairman might  collect $200.  He also goes to used car sales, buys cheap and tries to sell expensive after he does some body work on the cars. He visits other Rom in the city, talking with the men about business and clan gossip, marriages to be arranged, or the health of an elder. Gina’s teen-age brother, Nicky, works with his father, and spends all his time with him.  He’s a tall boy with jet black hair that falls around his dark eyes. He shakes it back like a stallion would toss  its mane, a gesture that looks haughty, defiant, that appeals to girls.  He’s a leader among the other boys, the strongest when it comes to rough-housing, the slickest when it comes to smoking cigarettes and nipping from the grown men’s brandy bottles. But when they’re around gaji, Nicky lets his father do all the talking as he looks at the ground in silence. He wonders a lot about the gajo world,  the alien world he sees on TV where people live in big houses or even tenements like his, but whose family life is very different.  When Nicky asked his father about those people whose lives included school and careers, Danny told him to pay no attention, it was all make believe.  Nicky had gone to different schools until eighth grade, as they traveled around the country, and he knew how to read and write, which was a help to his father, who had never learned. Gina hopes she could go to school some day, but girls were usually kept away from gaji, who were considered to be a dangerous source of marimè . . . defilement. Instead, she would learn how to tell fortunes, “read people,” her mother would say. There was nothing psychic about it, just an intuitive ability that was cultivated early in Romani girls. Rosa laughed at gaji women who thought she had supernatural powers.

Rosa put a bowl on the table, and yelled again at Gina. “Come and eat!  You need to eat somethin’.  You’re too skinny.  Who’s gonna’ look at you when we go see your cousins, and they’re lookin’ for a girl for their sons.  Not too soon to be choosin’ someone for you, you know.”

Gina sidled over to the table and sat down in front of a bowl of steaming stew. The savory smell made her stomach rise, and with it a sudden surge of fury.  She slammed her spoon onto the table, hunched her shoulders and glared at her mother.

“I don’t wanna’ eat, I don’t wanna’ get promised to any strange boy, I don’t want you to keep telling me what I have to do.”  Her voice rose. “I don’t wanna’ live here . . . and I don’t wanna’ go anywhere else.” Her rage crested then flowed away into tears as she bent her head onto the table and sobbed.  “I don’t know what I want.”

Rosa stood still in the middle of the kitchen, staring at her daughter. The hand she’d raised to slap her, as she always did at such outbursts, fell to her side. What was wrong with Gina?  She’d never behaved like this before; she didn’t have her usual energy; maybe she was sick. Travel would cure her. Travel always cured the Rom, she reminded herself. Even old people who were very sick would be bundled up in a car and driven across the country, and they often arrived well. She touched her daughter’s neck with a light hand. “Never mind. You can eat later.”

Rosa heard footsteps outside the door, then Danny and Nicky walked in. Danny washed his hands and face, the gold chain around his neck swinging over the sink. Rosa watched him, thinking she’d better wash that shirt, a black nylon shirt that stretched across his growing paunch.  Wiping his hands on a towel, he raised an eyebrow at her and patted his belly, as she set plates on the table. Moments later, a knock at the door made Danny jump up from his chair.  He opened the door a crack and there stood a gajo, a young man wearing a shirt with an insignia on the pocket, a uniform  of some kind. Danny raised his chin.  “Yessir, what can I do for you?”

The man replied, “I’m from the Department of Public Health. We’re inspecting this building, along with others on the block, for lead poisoning in the paint.  We’ve tested downstairs and found that the walls are full of lead paint. I’d like to check your apartment.”

Danny blocked the doorway. “What do you mean, lead poison?”

“It’s a chemical that was used in paint years ago that’s very toxic, especially to children. We’re alerting landlords and tenants. We’re getting them to clean up these places, remove the paint, you know. Before people get sick.”

“So how would somebody get sick?” Danny asked.

“Just by breathing the dust from the walls, or, in the case of kids, putting stuff in their mouths that contains lead.”

Rosa stood a few feet behind Danny listening to the conversation. She interjected behind Danny’s shoulder.  “So how would you know if somebody was sick with this, this lead poison thing?”

The gajo replied, “We do blood tests on everyone to see if they have any lead in their systems. If so, there are medicines to eliminate the toxins.”  He peered inside the room and glimpsed Gina, who had retreated to her corner. “You should all be tested. Especially your little girl there.”

Rosa spoke close to Danny’s ear in Romanes. “I ain’t gonna’ let those gaji take blood from my baby.”

Danny poked her in the hip. “Shut up, I’ll handle this.”

“So, officer. That is, I guess you’re an officer, being from the Department of Public Health and all. When would you want to do these tests, when do you have to come in here? We’re not ready for you to do that now; we’re on our way out.”

“That’s OK,” replied the gajo.  “I can come back tomorrow morning, test the walls, and tell you where to go for blood tests. The Health Department’s not far from here.”

“OK,” said Danny. “We’ll be waiting for you tomorrow morning.”

He closed the door and shot the bolt.  He and Rosa stared at each other, an unspoken signal in their dark eyes, an unheard alarm in their ears. They feared gajo officials of any kind; they were all more or less police, authorities who could arrest them, take their kids away, cause them trouble. An unspoken message passed between Rosa and Danny. “We’re out of here.”

As Danny and Nicky ate, Rosa gathered their belongings, rolling up sheets, blankets, clothes and stuffing them into bags and suitcases. “Gina, eat now!,” she commanded, shoving a bowl of food in front of her. Gina picked at the food, ate a slice of bread and butter, and took a sip of Nicky’s coffee. They were moving again. They were always on the move. As soon as Rosa had washed and packed their pots and pans, they hauled everything downstairs and stowed it in their big, old Cadillac.

The sun was already sinking, but they had often set out on the road at dusk, rolling during the night through small towns with flashing lights that beckoned to motels and all-night restaurants. Gina knelt in the back seat, staring out the window at that yellow line that run forever down the middle of the road, disappearing like an arrow in the distance. In the morning, they would stop to eat at a fast food place where everything was plastic and there was no danger of eating off gaji plates. They slept in the car, Danny and Nicky taking turns driving, heading for homes and ofisa of people of their clan. Danny spent a lot of time on his cell phone, calling people all over the country to see who was ready to move on, whose place his family could move into for a while.  You were more welcome if you had baxht, luck, a roll of big bills and the power that went with it. Danny kept thinking, as he drove through the night, Nicky sleeping beside him, Rosa and Gina in the back seat, maybe Chicago would be a lucky place.  His cousin had a nice set-up there; Rosa was good at fortune-telling and he heard there was a lot of work with cars. They could make it there, way better than Boston. He dreamed his dreams at the wheel, that eternal wheel of Romani wanderers.

NEXT DAY the Health Department Inspector knocked at their door. It swung open. He peered inside to see all the shabby furniture more or less in place, but no sign of people. They were gone.  He thought about the mother, father and the young man; they’d all been living in a toxic oven for who knows how long. He thought about that little girl standing in the corner close to the walls. She ran the greatest risk of lead poisoning, because little ones breathe faster, and inhale more. What had frightened them away?

“Surely not me,” said the Health Inspector to himself.

About this story - In his youth John was a fan of western serials. John is a man of few words.
 

Who Was That Stranger

 By John C. Kennedy, Ghana (1965-68)

The passenger lorry slowed as it entered the old part of town.  Jason wondered if the large van had somehow become a time

John Coyne as a PCV

 transporter. The bank, built during his last year in the village, still looked new and out of place. The community center that had beenunder construction was still under construction. A large sign congratulated the paramount Chief on thirty years of service.

He nudged Karen, “He was a new chief when I came so that sign is new.  Everything else looks the same.”

“The electric wires weren’t here,” she replied.

Boys were playing basketball on the court Jason helped build.

“Amazing,” he mumbled. “Thirty years and the game goes on.”

They got down from the lorry.

A group of children chanted, “Foreigner, foreigner, give me penny.”

“Something else that hasn’t changed,” Karen noted.

They had arrived in the capital a few days before traveling to the village. Quite by chance, in a conference at the national university, they met a young man from the village. He was the son of Markus, Jason’s best friend during his time in the village. He told them the sad news of his father’s death a few months prior to their trip.  He also explained that the town was much improved and that it was now possible to find lodging by the night.

They located the place he recommended and asked for a room. The proprietress ushered them to the VIP suite. At $10 a night it was the most expensive.

The next day they walked to the location of the secondary school. They found only abandoned buildings. They crossed the street to the small shop where Jason had, every school day at breakfast break, purchased a coke and peanuts.

“What happened to the secondary school?” he asked the woman in the shop.

“They moved up to the new road about a half mile beyond the hospital,” she replied.

He asked about the old shopkeeper.

“He died a few years ago,” the woman said.  “I am his daughter. I am the small girl who sold you roasted groundnuts.”

“And very good groundnuts wrapped in newspaper,” Jason said.

“Your memory is good,” she said.

A boy of about ten brought them each a cold coke.

“This is my son,” the woman said.

“I used to drink these warm,” Jason mused.

“Yes,” the woman replied, “electricity has made our lives much better.”

They decided to walk to the new school along one of the dirt roads that connected the old part of town to the new road. Groups of children passed in school uniform.

 Some children smiled and called, “You are welcome.”

“They stopped asking for pennies,” Karen said. “Do you suppose their parents scolded them?”

“Perhaps, or maybe we are now known,” Jason replied.

On the new road an old Bedford passenger lorry, with the school’s name on the side, passed.

Jason signaled for the truck to stop.

“I believe it’s the same truck they got my last year,” Jason said. “Thirty years and still running.”

“Just like you,” Karen added.

“Welcome,” the driver said.

“Are you going to the school?” Jason asked. “Can I ride in the back?”

“No one but students are now allowed to ride in the back,” the driver answered. “The government says it is too dangerous. But, we have room for only one in front. The distance is short and you have been in these bone crushers before. Go ahead.”

Jason had a little trouble getting his leg up over the side of the truck.

“The mind remembers but not the body,” he said to Karen once he was in. “You’d best ride in front.”

For awhile, at the school, no one paid much attention to them.

They wandered around and marveled at the three storied classroom blocks.

“Wow, real buildings,” Jason exclaimed, “amazing.”

An older man approached and said, “Welcome. What is your business here?”

“I was a teacher here once,” Jason said, “My wife was a teacher in the city but came here sometimes. We want to look around and see how things have changed.”

He showed the man his photo ID from thirty years earlier.

The man looked at the ID, then carefully at Jason.

He smiled broadly then said, “You were here in my first year of teaching. I was at your wedding.”

“We brought a small album of pictures of the wedding,” Jason said.

The old teacher looked carefully at one of the group pictures and pointed, “That is me, right there. Welcome, welcome. Let me take you to the Headmaster.”

He ushered them into the Headmaster’s office. When Jason showed the Headmaster his old ID, the Headmaster insisted that Jason return the next day and address the students.

As they walked toward the edge of the compound, Jason asked the old teacher about colleagues.

“Mr. Ato lives in the next town and Mrs. Abene, who was a witness at your wedding, lives across from the bank. The others are no longer here.”

On the road, they stopped a taxi and asked the driver if he knew of Mr. Ato’s house. He did. When they arrived, a young girl answered the door and took them to a room where Mr. Ato was sitting.

He got up slowly and said, “Welcome. What is your business here?”

“I am Jason, the teacher from the old days.”

“Jason, Jason, you have come back. It is so good to see you.”

They talked of the old days and of their lives. Mr. Ato had become Headmaster at the school for awhile and he spoke of good times and bad.

As they rose to leave Mr. Ato said, “That boy you saved from malnutrition, Kwodwo. He is a teacher at one of the middle schools. He lives on the edge of town near the teacher training college.”

They returned to the old town and asked on the street about Kwodwo.

An old man said, “Do not worry. I will send a messenger to let him know that you are searching for him. He will find you.”

That night, after they returned to their lodgings, they heard a knock on the door.

Mrs. Abene  and Kwodwo stood quietly in the hallway. Jason invited them in and offered soda and snacks. They talked of life, school, and family well into the night. As they rose to leave, Mrs. Abene invited them to lunch the next day and Kwodwo asked to meet them again at the end of his school day.

Next morning they returned to the school. Jason spoke to the assembled students. He was moved to say, truthfully, that the students he taught in this town turned out be the best he would ever have in a long career of teaching.

Lunch was wonderful. After retiring from teaching Mrs. Abene had started a small business that catered birthday parties and other events. She made a little party for Jason and Karen with tasty sandwiches and local fruits.

After lunch they walked up to the seminary chapel where they had been married. The little chapel had not changed except an organ in the right front had replaced the piano in the left rear.  Jason sat down in the last pew. He felt a tear on his cheek.

“What’s wrong?” Karen asked.

“I was thinking of Markus playing the piano at our wedding. Now even the piano is gone.”

There was a lone grave in front of the chapel.

“Rev. Akwasi’s grave,” Jason said softly, “the minister who performed our wedding. He was devoted to this place.”

Later that afternoon they met Kwodwo on his way home from the middle school. They walked together through town to his house.  In his yard Kwodwo cut open two coconuts. They sat together and  enjoyed coconut milk and groundnuts. Mrs. Abene’s granddaughters stopped by to say hello on their way home from the experimental school run by the teacher training college. As the shadows grew long, they said goodbye to Kwodwo.

Jason and Karen walked together back through town, enjoying again, this place of their youth.

The next morning they boarded a lorry in front of the small shop to return to the capital. They waved goodbye to the shopkeeper and her son.

“Mommy, who was that stranger?” the small boy asked.

“That was no stranger my son. That was the Peace Corps Volunteer.”

The two ideas — paired missionaries, and the exotic, precarious city of Amsterdam — meshed in this story. It was once much longer, but I’ve tinkered with it over time, until it became rather naughty and twisted and something close to “flash fiction.”

Pink

by Susan O’Neill (Venezuela 1973–74)

James tenses, coiled in pink, his hand hovering.

Buzzzzz —

He lowers the hand. Presses hard, harder. Lifts. The mosquito is a red splotch on the pink sheet.

Thank you, Lord — the prayer curdles.

God sees him.

His finger is sticky; he aches to wash it. My blood? Hers? Or — a shiver — both?

Pink pillowcase. Pink ruffled curtain, growing luminescent with the sunrise. Lollypop-pink toenails, peeking from beneath the pink quilt-ish thing, so unlike his mother’s quilt on his bed in Provo.

They don’t call it quilt in Amsterdam. Dekbed, she said. Comforter.

Comfort.

James pulls his soiled hand under the dekbed. Stares at hair that pours over her pillow, liquid, oil, blackening as the light hardens. Silky as her skin. His hand remembers. Not blonde. Before he came here, all Dutch girls were blonde.

His eyes trace bare, curved dusky flesh half-hidden beneath the dekbed.

He inches up to sitting — must not wake . . . Martha? Marge?

Martje.

Martje. She wrote it on the napkin: t and j. You see, my sad boy? She laughed — low, bubbling, familiar. Promising.

Oh, God.

It’s Matthew’s fault.

He slips free, folds himself in shadows. Naked. So naked. Acid climbs his throat. Think of Sarah. Sarah’s dress, yellow flowers, swingy skirt . . .

He creeps toward the bathroom. Think of Sarah.

He eases the door, sweats at its squeaking. Inches it shut, drops in darkness, knees on cool tile. Now he knows what lies under Sarah’s flowered skirt —

He grasps the toilet.

What floods the toilet’s porcelain shelf — the few Dutch toilets he’s known here display what you don’t want to see like some fetid trophy; you can turn away, but you still perceive it . . . stupid thought; this bathroom has no window; he sees nothing — what he vomits here is disgust, fear, shame, but not the pancake. The pancake was last night and it must be digested by now . . .

Oh, God.

He retches again.

He draws back, empty. Gropes crepey Dutch tissue, tears it, mops his mouth. Drops it in the toilet, lowers the lid softly, softly. Lifts his buttocks onto the cool closed lid, presses sticky fingers into his temples.

He sits, panting.

It’s Matthew’s fault.

Matthew, his spirit Gemini; his slightly-elder Elder. In the rooming house, the streets: twinned shirts-and-ties in this city of orange soccer jerseys, T-shirts billboarding bands neither knew. Together they looked to grace, away from red-neon windows. Together, they damned sin, consoled sinners. Together —

He is so alone.

James wants to wash his finger. The blood. The smell. But Martje would wake; how would he explain? He’d had nothing to drink, no reason to be sick.

Irony.

More irony: she’s not from the red-neon windows.

He didn’t meet her in that coffeehouse Seth warned against. He doesn’t drink coffee. He doesn’t do those . . . other things.

They hadn’t met in a bar. He’s never stepped inside a bar.

It was a pancake house.

Not that you couldn’t buy beer there. Amsterdam is full of beer. Drugs.

Sex.

Which is why Amsterdam needs James and Matthew, Seth announced during their orientation. It had seemed logical then. Last week.

It’s Matthew’s fault.

He blames Matthew for being big and slow. They called him Ox. In Comparative Religions, one long year ago, Dr. Hershell said the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas’ name meant Ox, because he was big and slow. Bart Orham punched Matthew’s arm and the name was his.

The plastic toilet lid slews; James shifts. He is as big as Matthew, but agile; he stepped back when the fat woman on the bicycle came beating down the bike path. It wasn’t easy to look out for trams, buses, cars, bikes, especially in rush-hour traffic near Centraal Station. James had pulled back, pulled at ox-bulky Matthew —

Big, slow Matthew went down hard. The fat woman toppled. Her chipped grey bike, a fist-sized teddy bear tied above the fender — limp, mud-matted figurehead, streaked red-brown over one ear from Matthew’s blood, or hers . . . or both —

The toilet lid creaks. James freezes.

He remembers the dead mosquito, aches to wash.

She’ll hear.

Matthew lay prone, bleeding. An old man pulled over and waved bike traffic to a bottleneck. The fat woman rose. Matthew didn’t.

The old-movie two-toned siren.

James followed the ambulance in a taxi, the siren fraying out ahead.

Matthew is under observation at the Medisch Centrum. A concussion.

James is alone.

It’s Matthew’s fault.

No. Matthew didn’t tell him to go, alone, after, to the Dutch Authentic Pancake House for dinner. Matthew didn’t tell him to answer when the dark girl with the flowing black hair said, “You look sad. I will buy you a drink and you will tell me your trouble.”

Matthew would have approved when he declined the drink. And Matthew certainly would have approved of that pancake — sausage, cheese, peppers; a soft, eggy pizza, sinfully delicious.

Matthew might have approved of his plan to nudge her parched soul toward the Lord’s refreshing springs.

But Matthew would have pulled James’ own ox-dumb soul off the steps of the #1 tram to this suburb, this apartment, this pink and terrible mistake.

He was alone.

Now . . . he is more alone.

Sweat tracks James’ naked armpits. From the humidity. The humility. The bathroom walls press; the tired air reeks of vomit.

He cannot pray.

Light creeps beneath the door, behind which a woman he does not love — does not even know — will open her eyes to pink and wonder where he is. He slumps on his skewed seat, bent by the pain of her awakening — and worse: an awakening in that sly beast that reared up last night and buried itself in willing, slippery flesh.

His brain whirls. Think —

Do not think of Sarah.

He is aged. Yesterday, he stood young and strong in the Lord, swathed in true love, family, friends, future.

Now he is marked. Samson shorn. Tainted soul; filthy hands.

He cannot wash.

He cannot pray.

He cannot open the door to her pink room, her lurid pink bed —

And yet . . .

And yet.

Susan O’Neill’s own story — Susan is the author of Don’t Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam (UMass Press, 2004), a collection based on her stint as an army nurse during the Viet Nam war. She edits Vestal Review, a literary magazine for flash/sudden fiction. Her essay blog and some of her fiction and non-fiction can be found from her home page at SusanOneill.us. Susan is a photographer in addition to being a writer. You can see her black and white prints at her site. She and her fellow military and Peace Corps veteran husband live in the fantastic foreign land of Brooklyn, New York. Susan’s blog here on Peace Corps Worldwide is Humor: Off the Matrix.

Soutine and Dr. Maisler

by Stanley Meisler (Peace Corps Staff 1964–67)

Compared to the winter storms of Bialystok, it was hardly more than a whimper, leaving only the barest layer of snow, yet Paris shivered and sloshed on that night in January of 1940. I grinned and turned my head in mock wonder at my uncle, Dr. Hona Maisler (he spelled his name in the French way, not the way I spell mine now) as he struggled, seated in a sable-trimmed coat, to pull on enormous galoshes.

He was taking me along that night to see an old friend, the celebrated painter Soutine, who had just come back to Paris from the countryside in the South. Caught there by the war, it had taken him several months to push his way past enough functionaries to return. The government had restricted the travel of all foreigners, and both he and my uncle were classified as foreigners even though they had lived in France for thirty years. My uncle had three Soutines in his living room, two wild, whipped landscapes and a portrait of a terrified old man. In those days, I could see nothing in them.

My uncle, too, was celebrated, a scientist of renown, a battler against disease, although no one back in Bialystok liked to talk about what he battled. He was the scientific director of “Laboratoires de la Maislériase” on rue d’Alésia. La Maislériase, which he had developed, was an ointment used to soothe the symptoms of syphilis and other venereal diseases in women. As a lotion, in different strength, it could do the same for cows and mares. Even then, before the age of antibiotics, everyone knew La Maislériase was not a breakthrough, not a cure, but only a palliative. Yet it afforded my uncle a good deal of respect and income.

I had reached Paris barely six months earlier, just before the Russian troops marched into Bialystok. Bialystok was a vibrant, warm city of shadows and towers whose soul later vanished off the face of the earth. But that is another story. I had made my way to a Paris that was at war but not at battle. It still glowed in romance and awe. But I could feel its hideous fears as well and hear its cries of torment, especially in the flickering lights of night, and I never hesitated in my resolve, despite all the city’s beauty and excitement, to make my way somehow, someday to America.

My uncle stood up, tall and almost regal, handsome, despite a nose a bit too prominent, a bit too long. He was bald in a distinguished way, for the carefully coiffed, silver hair that curled beneath surely attracted more attention than the baldness itself. He perched a matching, Russian sable hat on his head on this night and carried the air of a maned monarch. He was a man of 53 years then, five years older than my father, from whom we heard nothing now in Bialystok.

Before leaving, he slipped into the enormous living room with its high ceilings, carved wood walls, blazing fireplace, door-length windows, elegant bookcases, and three Soutines to say good-night to my Aunt Khinia and her companion, Madame Doublet. My aunt had turned nearly blind a few years before after a series of failed cataract and retina operations and preferred to listen to Madame Doublet, a heavy, blonde French woman, read a novel than go out on this night, even for Soutine. My aunt was the same age as my uncle, for they had been students together at the École de Médecine, but she already had soft, wrinkled, yellowed skin. He whispered to her and kissed her on both cheeks while I waved from the hallway. She waved back, for she could still see shadows or pretend to.

My uncle strode through these streets deep on the left bank of Paris as if he ruled them while I skipped to catch up, marveling how a layer of less than two centimeters of snow could still manage to seep into my shoes and wet my socks. A cold wind whipped at our faces, but I could handle that easily, throwing a scarf up almost to my eyes. The Villa Seurat, the street where Soutine lived, was barely ten blocks from us, and we managed our way there in a quarter of an hour, stopping only for tramcars and an occasional skidding auto. You could still hear the fits of laughter in those days wafting from warm, lighted bars in the night.

The Villa Seurat had the air of a village tucked within Paris, a street of little buildings of odd shapes and sizes huddling together for strength. The buildings dated from the time near the turn of the century when entrepreneurs could earn handsome profits by building clusters of homes for the hordes of artists studying and working in Paris. The apartments, all with grand studios and high windows, still housed painters and sculptors mainly, though a few writers rented as well, hoping to absorb some of the atmosphere at the center of the world of art. Even in those days, even for someone like me who did not understand art as yet, the street pulsed with an excitement that made my temples dizzy in joy.

Soutine, a few years younger than my uncle, met us at the door of his apartment. In those days, the Sorbonne, where I attended classes in Napoleonic law, still abounded with tales of crazed bohemian life two decades before: a fiery, disheveled Soutine, unwashed and stinking with drink, a hand clutching the naked buttock of Kiki, often took center stage of such tales. I, of course, knew from my uncle that fertile imagination and wild exaggeration had distorted these stories far beyond reality and recognition. But this still did not prepare me for my first sight of Soutine, dressed like a bourgeois functionary in a wool, ill-fitting, double-breasted, dark blue suit, a black sweater vest, a white shirt, and a striped red and yellow tie. His long, black, oily hair was slicked down to the right, slipping over the tip of a bulbous ear. His features were large, his face blubbery, his head massive for his short height, all in all a sight of awkwardness, of ugliness. But he transformed the image into pleasant warmth with the flash of his smile.

He puffed on a cigarette that he held with long, slender fingers, admired my uncle in silence for a few dramatic moments, and then embraced him. He was so much shorter that he could not reach to kiss my uncle’s cheeks. As his head dropped on my uncle’s shoulder, I could see his eyes brimming.

He stepped back and laughed. “Hona, Hona,” he said. “It is a pleasure beyond all my hopes to see you.” Then he explained that his own apartment was as strewn and confused as a battlefield in the Great War, that Sarah, the sculptress from Russia, had kindly invited us all there for cakes and tea, that Helène, his new companion, was already there chatting and helping arrange the plates, and that we would head there right this very moment. He closed his door but not before I caught my glimpse of a luxuriant and feverish room crowded with jostling canvases in slashes and swirls of burning red.

Except for the dozen carefully displayed busts, the bookshelves and the floors of alcoves, the living room of Sarah, the sculptress from Russia, looked more like the salon of a Bialystoker grandmother than a Paris artist. Little lace squares lay on the heavy arms of the thickly upholstered sofas. Small bowls of almonds and raisins filled the open spaces near the sculptures on the low tables. I could recognize a bust of Soutine and of Léon Blum but no one else. Sarah herself, a heavy woman near sixty years old, wore a long, old-fashioned, neck-choking black dress and kept her grey-streaked hair combed back into a bun.

But it was Helène who attracted most of my attention. I fell in love with her that night like an orphaned pup. She was thin like a wisp of silk with soft golden hair and eyes as blue and green as the sea. She wore a girlish, green dress with petticoats that crinkled above her slim ankles. A small crucifix hung from her neck on a silver chain. The crucifix seemed a little out of place here in the Bialystoker atmosphere, but I put it out of my mind right away. She was like a dazzling princess, a mannequin from the Champs-Élysées, a star of the Comedie-Française, and I have never ceased to feel a raw pang of youth whenever her image flits across my memory. We spoke in French that night so she could understand. I did not realize then that she was crazed but it would not have mattered if I had known.

Sarah offered us a large dish crammed with pirogen. “I filled them with potatoes,” Sarah apologized. “It is so difficult to find good meat these days that I decided not to waste it in the pirogen but save it for the stuffed cabbage instead. Although, to tell the truth, I personally prefer potatoes in my pirogen. It has a taste.” Soutine dropped two into his mouth, quickly sucking in a gush of air. “Hot, hot,” he said, “but like nectar.” “You mean something else,” Sarah scolded him. “Nectar is what gods drink.”

Soutine shrugged. “I agree. The pirogen are not like nectar. Nectar, I am willing to wager, is no good for my ulcer anyway.”

“How is it feeling these days?” my uncle asked.

“Like always, like all my life,” Soutine replied. “I live with it like a wife. But, listen to me, Hona, you have not come here tonight as my doctor. We are not going to poke into my ulcer.”

“I promise you,” my uncle said, “I am only interested as a friend. As a doctor, I do not care one fig about your ulcer.”

“Good,” said Soutine. He paused for a few minutes in a grin and then went on, “I remember when beef was cheap and plentiful. Do you remember my slab of beef, Hona? Sarah?”

“Who could forget?” my uncle replied. Sarah nodded with a little, contented smile. But Helène said, “No, no, Soutine, I don’t know about the slab of beef. Please tell the story, for me.” Her voice was soft and sincere like that of a child. I, too, had not heard the story before and leaned forward eagerly, chewing happily on the wonderful pirogen.

“In those days, almost twenty years ago, you could buy a side of beef at La Villette for almost nothing,” Soutine said. He sat up straight, speaking softly and slowly, using his slender hands to punctuate his phrases, the curls of cigarette smoke moving across his face, turning it into an exotic, smiling mask. “I believed then, I suppose I still do,” he went on, “that Rembrandt had trapped all the secrets of death and life in his painting of the slaughtered ox in the Louvre. I can not explain it but, when I was a student at Beaux Arts, I could spend an hour at a time, perhaps even a second hour, standing in front of it in the dim light and trying or at least pretending to fathom its secrets. It was in the twenties that I decided I would attempt to set down in my own paintings of beef the few secrets that I had mastered. Of course, for my whole life, I can not tell you now a single one of those secrets that I thought I possessed then. Oh. But, what a bore, how stupid, how dull to tell you this. It has nothing to do with my story.” He tapped his forehead twice with the butt of his hand.

Sarah nodded and sighed. “Soutine, my Soutine,” she said. “It has everything to do with your story. But, never mind, go on and tell us your story. I love the part about the health inspector. He always tickles me.” She suddenly put a handkerchief against her mouth to stifle laughter.

“I was living with Paulette then in a studio near the Denfert-Rochereau station,” Soutine said, widening his eyes and turning to Helène. “She was not an angel like you, my dear, but Paulette had certain exaggerated, pleasing physical features. She also worked very hard. Oh, my God, what a wonderful model.” He stopped himself with a half-smile, as if afraid he was talking himself into trouble. Helène smiled back at him and moved her angelic, happy head from side to side in a gesture that told the rest of us nothing.

“We bought ourselves a whole side of beef at La Villette, and I hung it from a meat hook in the studio,” Soutine said. “I painted in a fever, working with all my soul to capture all the carmines in the beef. Every day Paulette would go back to La Villette to buy a liter of blood to freshen the colors in my beef. The neighbors did not like the project very much. They scorned my studio as the ‘Soutine butchery.’ Every once in a while, a neighbor would pound on the door and cry out, ‘Soutine, you worthless, foreign ninny, your stink is beyond belief.’ They were right, of course, but what could I do? I had to finish my beef.” He shrugged and held out his hands, asking us for understanding.

My uncle waved a finger at him. “If I had been a neighbor, I would have complained to the health inspectors,” he said.

“But that is the point,” Soutine said. “Someone did.”

“Of course, of course,” my uncle said. “I forgot the most important part of the story.” He puckered his mouth in good-natured embarrassment.

“Two inspectors showed up one cold, terrible morning,” Soutine said, “and announced that, as a result of numerous complaints, they had come to confiscate my beef. I turned pale like the snows of Mont Blanc. My heart shuddered in fear. My ulcers churned in pain. I needed two more days to finish my painting of my beef. I could not complete it without the beef hanging in front of my eyes. If they took my beef away, I would slash the canvas with a knife in despair. But I did not know how to protest, how to cry out, how to beg for mercy. Lucky for me, however, the chief inspector was a stylish young man with a waxed moustache and lucky for me Pauline was there to talk with him.

“Ah, Pauline,” he went on, looking away from Helène but rolling his eyes a bit so everyone could see he was hoping to provoke her a little. “She liked to walk around the studio in those days with nothing but a kimono over her nakedness. She was, after all, the eternal model. She let her kimono part in front and explained how the great artist Soutine needed only a few more days to complete his great painting and how it would be a sin against the culture and honor and glory of France to interfere with the work of the great artist Soutine.

“The sight of her luscious globules of breast maddened his heart and, of course, his loins and made him lose touch with reason. He announced a few ridiculous medical decisions. He would allow the great work to go on if only she would pledge to drip enough ammonia on the carcass every day to stifle the stench. He, of course, would come by every other day to inspect the meat and, of course, her breasts. Oh, what a glorious triumph for Paulette, for me. During the era of his health inspections, I managed to complete four paintings of the beef. None compared with Rembrandt, but, though I could not sell them for many years, they were among my best work. I do not believe the inspector ever indulged in any more than an inspection of Pauline, but, of course, I do not know for sure. He was a handsome, dashing, young fellow, unlike the great painter Soutine.”

“From the point of view of health,” my uncle said, “the ammonia was not a bad compromise.”

Soutine laughed at him. “Hona, Hona,” he said, “you are always the great scientist. It was a compromise for art and love, not science.”

Helène could not shake away a frown. “I do not think my bust is so very small,” she said.

“No one here said that it was, my little katchka,” Soutine replied, adding, “But shhhhh. You are embarrassing the young man.”

Soutine was right. My ears and neck had reddened beyond hope, inflamed by the fear that someone would notice my eyes boring into her dress for a glimmer of the depth beneath. I quickly stared ahead and prayed for someone to change the subject.

My uncle did. “I enquired about a visa at the American Embassy yesterday,” he said. “The lines are very long, too long for such cold.” He spoke softly and elegantly, his head raised, his nose high, almost evoking the splendor of a baron.

“So you, too, want to leave for America?” Sarah said.

Uncle Hona shrugged. “In truth,” he said, “I really want to see the New York World’s Fair. They tell me that it is even more spectacular than our Paris Exposition.”

Soutine grinned and wagged a finger at him. “But it does not have a dozen Soutines like our exposition did,” the painter said.

My uncle sighed and held his hands out for forgiveness. “That is its only failing,” he said.

“Well,” Soutine mused, “maybe that’s not such a terrible failing.”

“In truth,” my uncle went on, “I might want to look around in New York. I have cousins in the city. I have their addresses somewhere. But, in my heart, I would never want to leave Paris. We are as safe here as anywhere. I have faith in the Maginot Line. I have faith in France. Vive la République Française.” He raised his voice ever so slightly and lifted his glass slightly as well. Everyone else repeated his toast, and I remember wondering then if I could detect a wisp of irony in the care that the expatriates gave each word. But I could not.

“But, Soutine,” my uncle said, “you are someone who should go down to the American embassy and enquire about a visa. You are a great painter. Should the fascists, God forbid, ever multiply, they would harass great people like Soutine. But for you a visa would be easy, a simple matter. You have sponsors in America. You have rich people eager to purchase your paintings. They’ll sponsor you without a single argument, not one.”

Soutine laughed, clasped his hands and lifted his shoulder in the glow of comic memories. “Of course I can have a sponsor,” he said. “Dr. Barnes will be my American sponsor. He is a great scientist, a great scientific inventor, like Louis Pasteur and you, Hona. A word from him is all America would need to anoint me as a Yankee Doodle.”

“Ah, yes,” said my uncle, “Doctor Barnes, the inventor of argyrol, the medicine for every child in the world. But he is a different inventor from me, Soutine. He is a rich inventor, wealthy enough from his one medicine to buy all the Manets in the world, all the Monets, all the Van Goghs, all the Renoirs, all the Cezannes.”

“And,” interrupted Soutine, “all the Soutines.”

“Yes, and all the Soutines, all the Soutines in the world — except three, Soutine. I have three.”

“Tonight, you will have the fourth.”

Uncle Hona frowned and looked troubled. “No, Soutine,” he said, “you must not. Your paintings have become too valuable to just hand away to friends.”

Soutine smiled and poked a finger into the air. “All right, if you are foolish, Hona,” he said, “you will not have a fourth Soutine. I will give your fourth Soutine to this young man.”

I looked at everyone in the room, took in Helène’s little smile, felt a confused dryness in my mouth, and did not know what to say. But it did not matter. Soutine had started to tell another story, this time about Doctor Barnes.

“It happened almost twenty years ago,” Soutine said. “Dr. Barnes, rich and tall and wearing an overcoat of camel’s hair and thin glasses rimmed in gold, stood in the gallery of little Paul Guillaume on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré looking for another Monet or Renoir, I suppose, and spotted, by some accident of God, the only Soutine carried in Guillaume those days, a little pastry chef, perhaps my best pastry chef. And Doctor Barnes threw up his hands in joy and cried out that my little painting was a fruit, a pear…”

“No, Soutine,” my uncle said, “a peach.”

“Ah, yes, Hona, you are right, a peach. In English, a peach is a symbol, an image, as well as a fruit. It means something excellent, maybe something wondrous, something very good, a true compliment. But Guillaume did not know this. Guillaume was a good art dealer, and he knew how to charm rich Americans, but his English was not as good as he liked to pretend. ‘No, you are wrong,’ Guillaume said to Doctor Barnes. ‘It is not a peach. It is a little pastry chef.’ Ahhh, the great eyebrows of Doctor Barnes arched in fury. ‘I know it is a pastry chef, you fool,’ he thundered at poor Guillaume. ‘Show me more.’ Those words would change my life.”

I remember now an evening of soft talk and gentle laughter and the clinking of glasses of tea and the munching of wondrous pirogen and later of luscious stuffed cabbage. I remember as well the large sculptress Sarah like a Bialystoker grandmother fussing over all of us and the lithe, blonde Helène in her crinkled dress soothing my heart and the short, animated Soutine softening his large and ugly features with love and smiles and my Uncle Hona so measured, calm, wise, so brimming with admiration and kindness for his friend, the painter. That night transpired in a first moment of the most terrifying cataclysm in the history of mankind, but I do not recall any real discussion of the war. There was no more than the few words about visas and my uncle’s expression of hope in the Maginot Line. At home, Uncle Hona talked often of war. It worried him sleepless. He feared the Nazis and smothered that fear only with faith in the glory and universality and myth of France. Yet he held himself back from talking about war that evening because he worried more in those moments about the fragility of Soutine. My uncle did not want to upset him. “You do not meet many great men in a lifetime,” Uncle Hona whispered to me later. “You learn to cherish them.”

As we bundled ourselves to leave, Soutine hurried to his rooms to bring me something. He rushed back, walking awkwardly like an overweight midget, holding out a canvas on a board. “A Soutine for you,” he said, handing me the painting. I held it gingerly, my Uncle Hona steadying it to help me. It was a portrait of Helène but one that did not allow her to look like a golden child. The lips of the portrait were too large and the hair too dark and the wrinkles of age too twisted and clear. The eyes glistened in terrible fright and a cry of despair burned through the thick, angry swirls of paint racing around her head. But none of this made her grotesque. Her beauty remained etched for me like a Botticelli despite the age and despair in the thick, wild strokes. It was signed “C. Soutine” but had no date.

Helène turned red like borscht, her little mouth open in surprise. Her eyes widened in wonderment. “But, Soutine,” she said, “I thought that was your. . .” She caught herself and, still red, smiled at me, a puff of white that made me soar. Soutine smiled at me as well, a little elfin grin, blissful, happy, kind. He then winked at me as if I were a conspirator in some sly joke. That is my last memory of him. I never saw him again, and, when I try to conjure an image of Soutine now, I see first that wink on elfin, kindly, bulbous features.

My last memory of Uncle Hona comes from that night as well even though I lived with him and Aunt Khinia for another eighteen months. Soutine had tied old newspapers around the canvas, and Uncle Hona carried the large package in one arm, shielding it with the other, as we walked home in the cold on the thin layer of slush of the Paris streets. “You can not imagine,” he told me, “how proud I feel that he gave this painting to you.” The sable hat made my uncle seem even more towering and powerful and noble, and, not knowing what to say to him, I simply sighed in awe. “This may sound silly,” he said, “but you know that your Aunt Khinia and I have never had a child and somehow I felt when he handed you his wonderful gift that he was doing so as if he thought I had a son. I know it makes no sense.” I hugged him and inhaled the faintest trace of a French cologne. I suppose I hugged him that way because I knew then that I would not have a father. “Be careful,” he said. “The painting.” But he smiled at me. After we walked in silence for a few more steps, he said, “I wonder if she has the strength to take care of him. She seems so fragile as well, like a child.”

There is not much more to tell. On July 16, 1942, the French police, in a general sweep, arrested Uncle Hona at his laboratories and took him away to a camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. Many years after the war, records, kept meticulously by the Germans, reported that he was deported on train convoy no. 15 with 1,013 other Jews on August 5. The convoy reached Auschwitz on August 8. There were only five survivors.

I rushed up, down Paris in a panic, in a fury for three months groveling for scraps of news but knew nothing. At night I held Aunt Khinia’s cold hands in my own while she sang mournful songs for me. On October 23, the French police came to the apartment for poor Aunt Khinia. I protested and screamed that Aunt Khinia was blind and weak, could they not see. A fat flic, a contemptuous smile on his brush mustached lip, spit in my face. Two others threw me against the wall. I was not on their register so they did not take me. Aunt Khinia said nothing as she left, a broken twig of a woman, carrying a small bag. Madame Doublet was not there that night so my aunt had to pack the bag herself. She tried to wave good-bye to me but, not knowing where I was in the tumult, gestured at the wrong wall. My shoulders would swell and blacken and ache for many weeks. According to the German records, she and 744 other Jews were deported from the internment camp at Drancy on November 11, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War. The train, convoy no. 45, reached Auschwitz on November 14. There were only two survivors. I tried often years later to imagine what it was like for my naked uncle and aunt to claw over naked friends in the chamber for a catch of air as the gas streamed in, but I could not.

I did not return to the apartment for fear that my name would soon appear on the lists for roundups of Jews. I left with little but did remove the Soutine canvases from their boards and frames and roll them into my valise. I do not remember now why I did that then. Perhaps I wanted to save them from vandals so that my Uncle Hona would have them should he return. I know that I did not want to sell them. Madame Doublet, my aunt’s companion, returned to the apartment every few days and brought out things for me to sell: a silver menorah crafted in Crakow a hundred years before, elegant, soft books bound in leather, their French, Russian and Hebrew titles shining in goldleaf letters, crystal vases, silver knifes, bronze medals, platinum fountain pens. I sold them for very little and, refusing to wear a yellow star, dashed like a fugitive from the apartment of one Sorbonne friend to another. They were all frightened but swallowed their fear to save my life, each of them a saint; they deserve a thousand blessings every moment. So does Madame Doublet, a saint as well, smiling, laughing, shivering with fury at Marshal Petain and his scum. She brought me Uncle Hona’s mail every few days. They were almost all notices, bills, advertisements, occasionally a note from someone I did not know, but I devoured every line of everything.

One day a printed card came with black borders. The card, which had been addressed to my uncle and aunt and delivered by hand, said,

“You are invited to attend the burial of

Monsieur Ch. SOUTINE

painter

dead in Paris, 9 August 1943, at the age of 49 years,

which will take place Wednesday the 11th, at 14 hours, precisely, in the Montparnasse cemetery.”

The card was sent on behalf of Madame Helène Morrisot. Too much had happened for me to feel anguish at another death. I remember thinking only how wise it was of Helène to use an abbreviation for Chaim in those times; a snooper would assume that a Monsieur Charles Soutine had died. And then I realized it was already Wednesday and past two o’clock.

I ran on this grey, sticky summer day, my shirt flapping at the back. I stopped my run out of decorum when I came upon the gates of the cemetery, walking swiftly instead, my heels thudding on little stones of the path. I passed the tombs of César Franck and de Maupassant and could see a knot of people far in the corner near the tomb of Baudelaire. I caught my breath and hurried to the back of the group, careful not to disturb any of them. The services were over, and the mourners, perhaps fifteen of them, stood silently or milled silently around each other. At first I could recognize only the Spanish painter Picasso, fishgoggle-eyed, slight, smiling, arms folded. Just before leaving, he stepped to the open grave to squeeze a woman’s shoulders in sympathy. Only then did I find Helène.

I waited until last to face her. Only a couple of bored gravediggers hovered near. No other mourner waited for her. I realized that none of the friends of Soutine were friends of hers. The sky turned in kneads of black and blue as if a hot summer storm were coming. I looked down into the grave at an unfinished pinewood coffin like a packing crate. I then looked up into the fearful, glistening light blue and green of her eyes. She had aged, strong lines creasing below her eyes and from her lips. Her golden hair was stringy, sticky, a shade darker. Her mouth opened to show stained teeth. Her brow crinkled in anguish and panic. Yet she still glowed with an uncanny beauty, somehow enhanced in the fear and turmoil of the sky turning behind her. She looked, in fact, like the portrait that I now kept rolled in my valise. It was as if Soutine had painted her in the moment of his death.

At first she did not recognize me. I reminded her that I was the nephew of Dr. Maisler and had met her once for tea and pirogen and stuffed cabbage in the apartment of Sarah the sculptress. She smiled and laughed, a glint of joy appearing in her eyes. “Oh, yes, my young admirer,” she said. “Soutine made fun of me without mercy for two weeks after that night.” Her voice sounded like the chirping of a shivering bird. She wore a high white dickey over a black, threadbare dress that crinkled over petticoats like that other dress on that evening long ago. A crucifix still hung from a silver chain around her neck, but it did not, of course, look out of place in the cemetery the way it had in Sarah’s apartment. I did not know what to say in my embarrassment, but she did not wait for me to say anything. She told me that I must come back with her to the Villa Seurat; she had much to show and tell me. I tried to protest, but she hushed me and insisted.

It only took a half-hour to walk across the gloom of Paris to the Villa Seurat. She said little but pointed out shops that she had once adored but now found lifeless and almost bare. She cursed artists and writers who had made their peace with the Nazis and Vichy and now lived in bountiful homes. She hissed names out like Cocteau and Guitry. “And everyone is cursing me,” she cried out just before she unlocked the door of the building.

She led me into Soutine’s studio. I had only caught a glimpse of swirling reds through an open door on that night in 1940. Now, I could see walls crammed with paintings, mainly landscapes in turmoil. I could feel a group of a half-dozen or so paintings pulling me toward them, as if I were caught in a whip lashing me from one to another. My eyes fixed on a cluster of little houses pushing relentlessly leftward, the anthropomorphic buildings standing on their hind legs, their roofs reaching upward like the beaks of great birds. Years later I read that Modi had once said after a night of drunkenness, “Everything dances around me as in a landscape by Soutine,” and I understood.

The room itself was dusty and grey with a few old, sinking sofas and sturdy chairs, an oak table, a bed covered in a fading, flowered quilt. Except for the paintings, the room was empty of anything valuable, any silver or crystal or gold; there were no candlesticks or vases or bowls or figurines. I could not find any paints or brushes or easels or canvas either. Soutine had obviously not painted here recently. She sat me down on the sofa next to her and explained that they had lived in a village near Chinon in the Loire Valley for two years.

She spoke rapidly, her voice high and trembling, her eyes widening in loveliness. Little bubbles of perspiration emerged on her upper lip, and I shuddered in embarrassment, for, in a moment of fantasy, I felt that I wanted to taste each one. I smelled a faint, stale odor like musk, and it troubled me more than perfume would have. I hoped that she would not notice my foolishness but knew that she did, for she smiled for a lingering moment before beginning her morose tale.

She told me that she had persuaded him to leave Paris for both his health and his safety. Soutine seemed unhappy at first. He cursed the flatness of the landscape and the calm of the trees. He felt humiliated by his yellow star and, unable to pretend that he did not require one in a village so small, hardly left the farm where they lived. But, after six months, he started to paint again, creating wonderful, tumultuous landscapes despite the flatness and calm of the land around him. But they lived in tension. The nearest German post was only six kilometers away. Soutine kept his ear close to the forbidden Voice of America to hear of the sufferings of his Russian people. She had not realized the full horror of his illness before. Excruciating pain knotted inside more often than ever. The terrible war, the tension, the lack of news of his friends in Paris, the failure to sell more than a few paintings now that American buyers could not come to Europe — all this twisted the pain inside even more.

Only a week ago the pain had turned his face into a ghastly, pale grey grimace. He folded his arms against his middle and cried out for peace. She bundled him into their car and drove to the hospital in Chinon. A young doctor with cropped blond hair like a German examined him quickly, too quickly, and ordered immediate surgery. The ulcer was bleeding so profusely that Soutine was weak with anemia. But she did not like the doctor, his glibness, his sneer, the contemptuous way he poked into Soutine. Nor did she like the hospital, antiseptic, empty, glittering. She did not want him operated there but in Paris. Perhaps she did not want him to die there but in Paris. She refused the surgery and hired an ambulance for Paris. On the way, still anguished in pain, he told her that he wanted to see the sea once more before he died. It was a strange and woeful request. Soutine had never loved the sea, never painted the sea, never cared about the sea. But she ordered the ambulance to drive by way of Normandy. They stopped once so that she and the driver could drag him out for a view over a cliff. The black-blue sea hurled its foam upon islands of rock. He did not look for more than a minute before he begged for them to take him back. They had lost many hours for that minute.

When they arrived at the clinic on rue Lyautey in the 16th arrondisement in the early hours of Saturday, an aging surgeon with a grey-streaked beard and pince-nez glasses shook his head at her. But they operated immediately. By 6 a.m. on Monday, he died of a perforated ulcer. Doctors and friends soon demanded to know why she had delayed the operation so long. She lied in the face of their anger. She told them that no one in Chinon would operate. She told them that the ambulance had taken a circuitous route through Normandy to avoid German soldiers on the direct route from the South hunting for Jews. She told them anything to try to placate their anger but failed.

Her eyes shined now in the glint of fever. Her face came close to mine, the sweat streaking, an odor of staleness slipping from her lips. “When the war is over,” she said, “I will sell some of these Soutines on the wall and build a great marble monument over his grave with a wondrous cross from end to end.” She explained rapidly that he had never converted before his death but had spent endless hours on the farm in the village near Chinon asking her questions about Christianity. “I know he would have converted if he only had lived just a few more months,” she said. “What good was being a Jew to him anyway? It only brought him that despicable star.”

She pulled me to her in a sudden fury, tugging at my hands to show me what to do. I groped for the depth of her breasts and the darkness under her petticoats. Despite the heat of August, her skin was cold and hard and blue. I could sense a flush of fear within me, and I remember feeling for a moment like a traitor, a traitor to Soutine and to my Uncle Hona and to my Aunt Khinia, but I clapped the thought out of my mind. I knew she was crazed, but I loved her then in a time when such things did not matter.

She was my first love, and those moments in Paris should have seared my memory like first love seared the memory of Proust. Yet those moments came out of an era that people like myself have long tried to forget. For years, I did not flaunt my meeting with Soutine. I did not prattle about my love for his mistress. I pretended that I kept four Soutines on the walls of my living room only for aesthetic pleasure. I did not identify the woman with frightened eyes. I was not alone in letting memory sleep.

Only in recent years have I tried to remember and conjure images of Uncle Hona and Aunt Khinia. Like others I have felt the need to remember and witness and set it all down as if history could make sense out of obliteration. Yet it is not so easy to remember even when you want to. I remember my first love, of course, and then the images of that night with Soutine come to me in exquisite detail like dollops of joy, and then I can feel the warmth and love of Uncle Hona and Aunt Khinia. I still see Uncle Hona best that night with Soutine. Every image of my uncle that night was stamped upon my mind, waiting for my will to recall. But I can not make out his features after then. I do not really remember him after then.

I did not see Helène again. My chance to escape from France came swiftly, and I did not let it slip away. Guided by a Communist friend, I made my way across the Pyrénées to Franco’s fascist Spain, carrying my four Soutines all the time. But that is another story. After the war, Helène did as she vowed. She sold enough Soutines to pay for a huge slab with a carved cross to cover his grave. In the last few years, I have looked at it on visits to Paris, smiling gently, as if it were no more than the echo of a prank from my youth. The tomb is far less important anyhow than the wonderful statue of Soutine now in Place Gaston-Baty not far from his favorite cafés of Montparnasse. He stands there short, squat, a hat slouched over his eyes, hands deep in the pockets of a long winter coat. The crazed and beautiful Helène committed suicide in 1960, plunging a kitchen knife into her lovely, blue-tinged breasts. At her request, she was buried alongside Soutine beneath the crossed slab.

Stanley Meisler’s own story —
An early Evaluator for the Peace Corps, Stanley Meisler is the author of the biography Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War, United Nations: A History and When The World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years. Meisler served as a Los Angeles Times foreign and diplomatic correspondent for thirty years, assigned to Nairobi, Mexico City, Madrid, Toronto, Paris, Barcelona, the United Nations and Washington. He still contributes articles to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday Opinion and Art sections and writes a News Commentary for his website, StanleyMeisler.com.

For many years, Meisler has contributed articles to leading American magazines including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, The Nation, the Reader’s Digest, the Quarterly Journal of Military History, and the Columbia Journalism Review. While most of these articles focus on foreign affairs and political issues, Meisler has contributed more than thirty articles on artists and art history to the Smithsonian Magazine.

“Under Blossoming Boughs” is one of a group of interlocking stories set in Japan in the last decade of the 17th century and dealing with followers of Japan’s great poet, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). My intention is to create a unique world that is self-consistent, credible, and populated by characters authentic to their time and place. Many of the stories in this group are modelled loosely on the medieval Japanese literary form known as haibun, which is the prose equivalent of haiku, and I hope to capture something of the beauty and strangeness of that culture.

Most of my Japanese historical stories are in a collection entitled The Plum Rains, a new paperback edition of which is scheduled to be published in summer 2012. “Under Blossoming Boughs” originally appeared in Asia Literary Review. The other stories in this group have been published in literary journals in the US, Japan, Hong Kong, France and the UK.

Under Blossoming Boughs

by John Givens (Korea 1967–69)

Ohasu went upstairs to collect the scarlet underskirts herself.

A single wild cherry tree had emerged from the pre-dawn mists shrouding the moorlands, sparsely covered with blossoms and insignificant when compared to the grand cherry trees that grew inside the walls of the pleasure quarters itself. No one but she seemed even to have noticed the little tree, and Ohasu stood at the railing of the rooftop laundry platform and took comfort in its flowering, for she too often went unnoticed.

A small packet in her kimono sleeve contained a gift from her patron. The gel cubes of candied agar-agar were the color of the spring sea, limpid and glistening, and dusted with honey crystals like flecks of sunlight. Ohasu had been a child with neither breasts nor shame-hair when her patron began visiting her. She had wept at first but eventually stopped weeping, and she had learned where to place her fingers and how to move her lips in a pleasing manner although she was judged too small and too melancholy for an age that celebrated cheerful brightness. Her patron had remained steadfast for the most part, however, indulging himself only intermittently with other girls; but the years had passed, his courting become feeble, and although Ohasu still tried to encourage him with smutty gossip and loose sashes, sustaining the throb of love’s urgency was beyond the old fellow now, and most visits ended with him sinking sullenly to the bottom of a wine pot.

Ohasu checked the underskirts to make sure they were dry, then selected one of the cubes of agar-agar.

Her patron had watched her copying poems into a pillow book one night and told her that only by seeing into the true heart of a thing could you write about it. He said the great haikai poet Bashō himself had said it.

Ohasu had wondered how you could be certain that what you were seeing was really the heart. She pressed the yielding lump of gel against the roof of her mouth and felt it dissolve in a flood of sweetness. What if inside one heart you found another? Smaller, quieter, even more frightened?

There had been a wild cherry tree near her childhood home, and she used to play under it while her mother worked in the fields. She would make twig dolls and wrap them in mulberry-bark robes she stained with berry juices. But that world had ended and this one replaced it, and not even the beauty of seasonal changes could compensate her for what had been lost.

Ohasu smoothed out the scarlet underskirts they would wear that day then folded them neatly. She popped another candy in her mouth and hurried back downstairs.

Spring arrives
in the faint haze that wreathes
these nameless hills.

His eyes opened to the glow of a sun not yet risen. The air was dry and cool and still, and he listened for the first stirrings of neighbors then sat up and slid open his white paper doors.

Dew coated the planks of the narrow verandah-corridor. The leaves of the potted camellia were beaded white with it, and Old Master Bashō breathed deeply in the dawn air, his thin chest lifting and falling with the exaggerated effort he associated with good health. He lived alone now but still wondered at times what it would be like to share his cottage with another. His last acolyte had disappointed him by asking to be allowed to apprentice himself to a playwright known for his vivid imagination.

The day’s radiance had begun seeping up into low clouds that were strung like peach-colored banners above the shogun’s metropolis. Droplets of water fell back into the communal well, regular as heartbeats, and filling him with a familiar yearning to insert himself into the world and say what could truly be said about it.

Actors stamping and flapping and shouting imprecations. Gaudy costumes. Painted faces. Improbable coincidences leading to unlikely resolutions. Better by far to be an old man alone in a hovel, abandoned, gnawing on a fish bone.

He smiled at the hyperbole but also enjoyed the bitterness of it.

So, the sound of the water in the well and the sound of rain on the broad, raggedy leaves of the banana plant growing at his front gate . . .

Or the scent of rain arriving in dust. Or the color of rain shimmering in a hardwood forest. Or the shape of wind-driven rain striding across empty moorlands . . .

Or of rain lacing the river to the sky. Or pocking sleet floating on the surface of an old pond . . .

Or, rather, how rain in a rooftop collection barrel leaks out onto the roof tiles, the stillness of it understood at the moment of its interruption . . . or, better still, the murmur of rain dripping into the tub of scouring ash kept at the scullery door . . . not what it’s like but what it is . . .

He turned away, disgusted with his inability to resist embroidery, and sought refuge from himself in the magnificent cherry tree blooming in his neighbor’s garden.

One heavily laden branch hung over the back fence, the shell-pink clouds of blossoms glowing in the misty light with a delicate and preemptive beauty. He studied the unmoving masses of flowers then closed his eyes to see the image more intensely; and as he did so, a temple bell sounded in the distance, the long, slow, mournful reverberations of it like the voice of the Earth itself, reminding him of things he remembered and things he’d forgotten.

Clouds of cherry blossoms —
is the temple bell at Ueno?
at Asakusa?

The wife of the lesser of the Tada brothers believed in the virtue of steady accumulation. Those who placed their trust in the possibility of an unanticipated windfall profit were fools in her opinion, although she seldom said as much because her own husband was just such an improvident person, and nothing could be done about it.

Your services have been requested, she declared to the three girls kneeling before her. For a picnic outing on the riverbank under blossoming boughs. Merchants. Shogunate officials. And a poet.

The wife knew that pleasure seekers considered Oyuki indefatigable and Osome silly and pliant. Little Ohasu had seemed an odd choice, however, although older visitors enjoyed the girl’s fondness for linked poetry so probably the presence of the great Bashō explained her inclusion.

If they tell you to dance, sway like willows in a gentle breeze. Let the softness of the season suggest love’s languor. Your time has been purchased, but other arrangements have not been made. Let your sleeves hang long, loosen your bodices. They will wish to feel like superior beings. Ease them into it.

The wife of the Lesser Tada paused to make certain they understood her instructions.

You are to imply that more is available than might have been thought. Precious secrets, hidden mysteries. You are to suggest that your natural willingness to conform to the desires of others is impeded by constraints over which you yourselves have no control. You are to assure your guests that only here within the walls of the New Yoshiwara can the deeper hues of the colors of spring be revealed. Is this clear?

No one replied, and the scullery maid waiting in the doorway used this silence to announce that morning gruel was ready.

Is there anything about this you don’t understand?

The three girls looked down meekly at their hands, Osome and Oyuki contemplating breakfast and Ohasu wondering if she would have time to prepare a few stanzas of her own for the day’s linked poem.

How envious:
mountain cherries north of
this floating world.

Old Master Bashō dribbled a splash of water into the well of his inkstone then began rubbing his ink stick on its upper slope, the sour-dark scent of blackness rising into the splendid pink glow of his neighbor’s cherry tree.

He had hoped to edit his travel journal from the previous year; but the prose sketches of places he visited and the stanzas written in praise of them now seemed like lifeless husks to him, like objects draped with cloths so that their shapes remained even as the things themselves became obscured. What he wanted was to make statements about the world that deserved to exist in it. But ideas accumulated, images multiplied, and even as he struggled to cut out unneeded phrases, new ones occurred to him. Better ones. Different ones . . .

Neighbors began shoving night shutters into their wooden frame-holders, the swish-crack, swish-crack like the sound of loud counting.

His boy used to complain about it. He said it was too noisy for delicate ears. But the young fool soon would be prancing about on stage dressed in a woman’s kimono and wearing a wig, smirking at shouts of approval from bumpkin samurai and pouting flirtatiously. Delicacy indeed.

Old Bashō bent to his task. He would need a hokku head stanza to start today’s poem. The merchants who funded him styled themselves as followers of the way of haikai linked poetry, although for them it was hardly more than an amusing pastime. He had the last half of an idea — Nothing you own is yours — but no good image to introduce it; and as he pondered options, the first tentative squawks of the fresh bean-curd vendor’s horn sounded in the distance, lonely as a heron’s cry, and he heard in it a reminder of his own irrelevance.

Recollecting various things —
the blooming of
cherry blossoms.

Blood-red soul banners hung in a swollen mass under the eaves of the shrine for the unborn, the newer ones still bright with pain.

Osome went on ahead to the baths, but Ohasu waited with Oyuki as she bowed in the sanctuary and clapped twice to call her losses to her. On this day too I ask for your forgiveness.

Ohasu herself never became pregnant. She didn’t know why and she didn’t know whether she should feel relief or regret, but suspected that one day it would be the latter.

You who never were will never cease to be for me. Oyuki’s face was shadowed by the tumorous red bundle suspended above her. Although the supplications inked onto the newer strips were still legible, none of the soul banners carried a name. The unborn were like bits of foam floating anonymously as they transited to the yellow springs of hell. On your behalf I call for the relief of the pure promise of the Lotus Sutra. And also in the name of the Jizō Bodhisattva, I request it for you.

Oyuki had been betrayed by a lover she trusted. He was the son of a rich trader and famous in the pleasure quarters for wearing robes and sashes secretly lined with exotic silks from the land of elephants. The insides of his sleeves might show a pale apricot when folded back, a dark cinnabar, a rufous gold, or even the luscious gleam of ripe pomegranate seeds. Oyuki had given this Second Genji whatever he asked for — her money, her love, the best of the gifts she received — and he had pledged to redeem her contract one day and set her up in a cottage near his family mansion. But his father had betrothed him to the only child of a soy-brewing magnate from the west; and although the lovers had soaked their sleeves with weeping, Oyuki was left alone in Edo while her heart’s desire trudged off to assume his bride’s name, her father’s fortune, and the duties of family progenitor.

Except Oyuki hadn’t been left quite alone enough, and the abortifacient she took made her sick for weeks.

If the Second Genji had felt oppressed by his new responsibilities as adopted heir, he soon discovered the solace that could be obtained in the pleasure quarters of Old Kyoto. Carnal novelties filled his nights and days. Endurance matched invention; observers became participants; and outrageous tales of concupiscent glory reached Edo eventually, so that for Oyuki, the memory of the taste of his love on her lips became like that of bitter radish.

It’s not much, said Oyuki as the two young women continued down to the baths. To offer such prayers.

Perhaps not, said Ohasu. But they hear you.

Empty words, said Oyuki.

Perhaps. But there’s comfort in them.

A bush warbler
shits on the rice cakes at the
end of the veranda.

Cherry petals filtered down like flickering chips of pink light.

Lovely, yes, Oyuki said. She inserted the bridge then twisted the middle tuning peg of her samisen, the plucked note rising as the silk string tautened. But they won’t last the night.

No. Ohasu gazed out at the spring river thudding past, the heavy flow reaching the grassy edge of the riverbank. It’s the end of the season.

Talk that Old Master Bashō’s followers wanted him to take on a housekeeper had reached the ears of the wife of the Lesser Tada, and she had spoken with Ohasu as the girls awaited their palanquins. They feel he’s too much on his own now. You might be seen as an appropriate choice.

Ohasu knew that disposing of her person while recovering the cost of her contract would be viewed as a double blessing by the House of the Lesser Tada, for undesired pleasure-providers soon became burdensome.

Make yourself agreeable, the wife had told her. Show them how well you can obey. Speak in a mild voice. Don’t interrupt the gentlemen when they are composing their poems, and don’t offer any ideas of your own. But do try to find out who will make the final decision.

Oyuki flipped her sleeves back then began adjusting the top and bottom pegs, sending those tones too soaring upwards into the pink light of the cherry blossoms above them. Silly Osome must be lost, she said, and Ohasu nodded but said nothing.

She would not disturb the Old Master in any way. She would rise early and do her chores quickly and quietly. She would clean and cook and serve food beautifully arranged on decorative platters; and when other poets visited, she would wait unobtrusively in a corner and listen as they discussed literary matters. Probably they wouldn’t even notice her. But if someone asked her opinion about an image or a phrase, she would reply modestly but forthrightly, and they would appreciate that she was a person of substance.

Oyuki loosened her bodice as the merchants began arriving then shoved the neckband of her kimono back away from her nape. Money, she said, and plucked out the opening bars of a popular old remorse ballad, embellishing the arpeggios shamelessly, her skirt flap parting open when she leaned to the side and revealing the inner slope of a white thigh.

Their guests were ruddy, well-fed men, each secure in the magnitude of his own accomplishments. The merchants’ robes were muted shades of beige and lavender, taupe and pale grey, as required by sumptuary regulations; but cunningly wrought ivory baubles dangled from silk cords on their sash pouches: a grinning skull, a rat on a rice bale, a sleeping cat, a sack of coins, a snake tied in a knot, and a rare hinged one of a pair of baboons squat-fucking, the realistic action of which was much admired by connoisseurs, who detected in the intricacy of its design and the audacity of its mechanism the epitome of the style of the Edo townsman.

The merchants had sent servants at dawn to encircle the area around one of the larger cherry trees with red-and-white-striped barrier curtains. All down the length of the riverbank other parties had done the same. Red felt ground-mats covered the grass, casks of rice wine stood against the trunks of every cherry tree, and black lacquer stacked-boxes of seasonal delicacies dominated the centre of each picnic site, along with tray tables arranged for the convenience of pleasure seekers.

At last! Osome pushed her way through the barrier curtains, her plump cheeks rosy. I couldn’t find a good bush! Then I got lost coming back! All these cherry trees look alike!

Osome had broken off a flowering branch that she waved like a dancer in the new-style kabuki theatre. Oyuki whacked her samisen as if punctuating a dramatic entry, and Osome cocked a saucy pose then began singing, “Oh, come and look! What won’t you see?” in a sweet if reedy voice.

Start again, said Oyuki, struggling with the unfamiliar melody; but Osome continued with, “Rice crackers, salmon crackers and…” and I forget the rest of it, she said, smirking at her own foolishness.

Osome flopped down beside her companions, jarring apart the elaborate brocade mass of her front-tied sash knot. Next time I’ll just piss in those reeds down there at the water’s edge, she said, and Oyuki laughed. Wet feet!

The grassy scent of rice wine greeted Ohasu as she began filling the long-handled pourers. She could let it be known that she rarely became ill and still had all her teeth. And that because she was small, she wouldn’t take up much space. A scattering of cherry petals spangled the lid of the wine cask, the pale pink flakes lovely against the reddish-brown lacquer surface. She was careful not to disturb them as she replaced the lid. And her night visitors would all agree that she was a sensible person. Even if a little too quiet.

Osome came over to help, her collapsing sash knot clutched up against her midriff. Which one’s your famous poet? she whispered, then tucked in behind the tree to reconfigure herself.

He’s not here yet, Ohasu said.

And these are the ones who will decide it?

Perhaps some of them.

And you’ll go if requested?

Ohasu looked down at her hands. It’s a matter of the price for my contract . . .

Of course. But if you do go, then you’ll have lots of opportunities to practice your poetry. Osome began reconfiguring her obi, struggling with the stiff, new oversized knot. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Yes.

Under the trees,
soup and fish salad too:
cherry blossoms.

Petal fall continued throughout the afternoon. Every cherry tree on the riverbank had its crowd of revelers regretting the passing of the year’s most precious season, and consoling themselves with music and laughter. The rising wind riffled the surface of the river, blew up dust on the cart tracks, and sent latecomers scurrying through pink swirls of cherry petals as they searched for an open space where they too could celebrate what was being so poignantly lost.

Old Master Bashō accepted wine when it was offered but didn’t seem to mind when the pourers were commandeered by others. Osome heaped a dish with fish salad for him, and he smiled at the excess and said he couldn’t finish half that amount. Ohasu selected a few of the choicest tidbits and arranged them nicely, hoping that her sense of moderation might be interpreted as an indication of a subtle nature.

Bashō sat by himself at the edge of the red felt ground-mat. He replied politely to queries about his well-being and commented on issues of local concern but volunteered nothing about himself and asked no questions of his own. Ohasu watched him covertly. She thought he seemed exactly as he should be.

A provisioner to the shogunate dominated the conversation. You don’t need to control the source of supply in order to secure the hemp-rope market, he declared loudly, the wine making him boisterous. But you do need to control distribution. He held out his cup and Ohasu filled it. Manage your carters, said the provisioner, watching Oyuki as she worked out the complexities of the Rice Crackers Song. And your dockers too. Keep them sweet.

“What won’t you see…” Oyuki picked tentatively at the opening phrases, mistiming the tricky up-pluck syncopation. “Lips and … and tongue…” She tried it again. “A husband’s lies and a something something and lips and . . . lips and . . . tongue . . .” I just can’t get that part!

You’re too tentative, Ohasu said, starting around with the wine pourers again. Just jump at it.

Jump at it?

You have to make it bigger. Up quick then down hard.

Are you talking about me? asked a cotton merchant, his face flushed pink and his smile easy.

Or you could cheat and finger-pluck it with your left hand, said Osome; but Ohasu said no, the next stroke still had to be timed properly. Up big then down. Ohasu chopped the beat with her free hand as if wielding a plectrum herself, and the cotton merchant tried his joke again. So, it’s a thing that goes up and gets hard then comes back down again? Whatever can it be?

Oyuki stroked out the first notes of a love song and sang, “Some men yearn to discover a shy beauty waiting under the blossoms . . .” Then she released the tension in her centre string so the tone wilted in comic deflation. “And some to find her shame-place pink and slimy as the gill slits of a sea bass . . .”

What! shrieked Osome, and Ohasu laughed too. That’s smutty! she cried, but she was glad to see that Old Master Bashō seemed not to have heard.

You’re too much for me, said the cotton merchant, glancing around for allies. For all of us, the provisioner concluded approvingly. Girls swollen with the juices of spring. He could see how it would go.

Osome snapped off the tip of a blossoming branch then flopped down beside the cotton merchant, her sash knot collapsing in a surge of brocade that spilled down over the man’s sedate sleeves like a sack of dropped weasels. “Oh, come and look, what won’t you see!” Osome inserted the spray of pink flowers in his topknot. Who can be moderate under the blossoms? She twisted sideways and leaned against the cotton merchant to reconfigure her sash knot again, emitting little grunts of consternation at the effort required.

“Orange and pink on the . . .” No, it’s, “orange and pink on the . . . this and this!” Oyuki hit the up-twang perfectly. But no one seemed to be listening so she retuned her samisen and began strumming out the lugubrious opening bars of Green Willows Pink Blossoms, holding each note cluster solemnly before sliding on to the next.

“Spring rain sad in the dripping green of the willows,” Ohasu sang; and Oyuki joined in at, “Wetting my sleeves and the hems of my skirts, wetting the path as I walk on my weeping way;” then Osome came in as they sang, “Sad spring rain in the lonely sadness of the willows,” their plaited voices rising sweetly plaintive within the flickering pink lattice of falling cherry petals, while the merchants sprawled on their red felt mats discussed forward contracts and funding strategies as they sipped from their elegant wine cups, and the old poet on his own seemed aware of everything and nothing.

The sound of the bell fades,
but the scent of blossoms continues
for an evening.

The merchants dragged Osome off to see the evening cherry blossoms illuminated by bonfires suspended in iron baskets, but Old Master Bashō stayed behind at the picnic site. Ohasu poured for him. Despite the wife’s admonition, she had prepared a few ideas on the chance that she might be invited to participate in the merchants’ linked poem; but they had tossed out stanza after stanza with the casual ease of boys flipping pebbles into a cistern, and the poem was quickly completed.

It seemed too easy, Ohasu said.

It was what they wanted. Old Master Bashō had made suggestions for improvements here and there, and reworded a few awkward phrases, but the finished poem had met the aesthetic requirements of the fee payers.

Ohasu sat so as not to block his view of the river. Didn’t you want more from it?

The Old Master held out his cup and she poured for him. Does it matter?

Just that the blossoms will be mostly gone by tomorrow . . .

He drank again and thrust out his cup. That too is something over which I have no influence.

The rest of their party returned subdued. There’s a baby, Osome said.

A baby?

Floating in the shallows.

Ohasu and Oyuki followed Osome back to an inlet filled with rubbish and river foam. Servants at a nearby party had already waded out to retrieve the little corpse. It lay on the grassy bank, its umbilical cord still attached and the dead grey flesh spangled with cherry petals.

Osome clutched the front of her robe closed. It was a girl.

Yes.

Someone went to inform the abbot of a nearby Pure Land temple, and the others who were there soon began drifting off. Osome and Oyuki returned to the merchants’ party, and only Ohasu remained, kneeling beside the tiny body, the two of them within the blowing swirls of falling cherry blossoms as the evening wind continued to strip the trees.

The Old Master came up behind her, his carry sack hooked over one shoulder. You couldn’t leave her alone.

No.

She wouldn’t know.

I’d know.

Bashō told her he had waited all year for this day, determined to say what he truly felt about it. But all that had occurred to him were things remembered, phrases borrowed, images salvaged from previous failures. So his page remained blank. Perhaps it was better that way.

You don’t mean that, Ohasu said.

You’re telling me what I mean?

Ohasu gazed up at him then lowered her eyes. No, she said meekly.

If you love something in the way you describe it, then all you love is words.

Ohasu placed one hand on the baby’s chest. How would you describe her?

Old Bashō turned away and started trudging up towards the embankment road, and Ohasu called after him. They said you might need a housekeeper . . .

Who said it?

Ohasu looked down at her hands, embarrassed by her boldness.

I need no such thing.

I would do what I was told then just sit in a corner and learn from what you taught others.

About what?

The art of poetry. So I can write truly about my life.

Who would read it?

My mother.

Then what you want to write is a letter, not a poem.

She’s dead.

He looked back at her. And that’s what you think poetry is?

Because I had no chance to say I forgave her . . .

Old Master Bashō regarded her silently then said, We all need forgiveness.

But he also asked her if she understood the poetic requirements of the seasons, and Ohasu said she thought she knew most of them.

Only briefly
above the cherry trees:
tonight’s moon.

There was dancing that night, but it was the merchants who danced. They threw themselves about wildly, hopping and pivoting and waving their sleeves, executing clever steps and complicated figures, not all of which came off as intended.

Oyuki played the same tunes again and again, always willing to do whatever was asked of her; and Ohasu and Osome tapped on small hand drums and cried Hoi! Hoi! to encourage the merchants in their mad capering.

•

All poems in the text are translations by John Givens of haiku by Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694):

“Spring arrives / in the faint haze that wreathes / these nameless hills.”

Haru nare ya / na mo naki yama no / usugasumi. (1685)

“Clouds of cherry blossoms: / is the temple bell at Ueno? / at Asakusa?”

Hana no kumo / kane wa ueno ka / asakusa ka. (1687)

“How envious: / mountain cherries north of / this floating world.”

Urayamashi / ukiyo no kita no / yamazakura. (1692)

“Recollecting various things: / the blooming of / cherry blossoms.”

Samazama no / koto omoidasu / sakura kana. (1688)

“A bush warbler / shits on the rice cakes at the / end of the veranda.”

Uguisu ya / mochi ni funsuru / en no saki. (1692)

“Under the trees, / soup and fish salad too, / and cherry blossoms.”

Ki no moto ni / shiru mo namasu mo / sakura kana. (1690)

“The sound of the bell fades, / but the scent of blossoms continues / for an evening.”

Kane kiete / hana no ka wa tsuku / yūbe kana. (1684)

“Only briefly / above the cherry trees: / tonight’s moon.”

Shibaraku wa / hana no ue naru / tsukiyo kana. (1691)

Native Californian John Givens teaches fiction writing in Dublin. He earned his BA in English from California State University Fresno and his MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Givens was a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea for two years, studied art and language in Kyoto for four years, and worked in Tokyo as a copywriter and editor for eight years. Givens was creative director at K2 Design in NYC; he later had the same role at Digitas in San Francisco; and he was director of digital branding for Landor Associates, also in SF (all this floundering around within the greasy coils of the ad game ending before “Mad Men” made such behaviour chic, regrettably).

Givens has published three novels in the United Sates: Sons of the Pioneers, A Friend in the Police, and Living Alone. An e-book version of A Friend in the Police was released by Concord E-Press in 2011. The Plum Rains, a collection of short stories set in 17th-century Japan, was published in Ireland by The Liffey Press in 2011, and a revised edition is scheduled for summer, 2012. Nonfiction publications include Dublin Day: Mirror to the City and Irish Walled Towns, and short stories and essays have appeared in various publications in the US, Asia, and Europe.

For many years I have lived in and written stories about a very impoverished part of America, Michigan’s Copper Country. I’ve written three collections of stories set in the very isolated backwoods community of Misery Bay. “Claim” is set there. The characters are fictional versions of real people from the Copper Country. Their desperate circumstances are, in many ways, not that different from the despairing situations that I found during my Peace Corps service in Nigeria just before and at the birth of Biafra.

Claim

by Lauri Anderson

Am I angry? You’re damned right I am. I’ve watched my life slip toward oblivion on this useless farm at the dead end of a gravel road in the isolation of Misery Bay. Sometimes in summer, weeks go by without a single car or pickup daring our road’s potholes, creating a roiling cloud of fine beige dust. In winter only the county plow comes out here, pushing back the six-foot banks so my truck can squeeze through, throwing a fine mist of snow dust over the tops.

I’ve lived here nearly all of my life, with my mother. Now she’s dying on the same bed in the same room where long ago she conceived and gave birth to each of us. Life is strange — full of ironies and dead ends. I never intended to remain here. Neither did she. But her husband (my dad) did.

She’s lying in the master bedroom, drowning in her own fluids. She’s diabetic. The diabetes years ago ate her right leg below the knee and the left foot beyond the instep. She is nearly blind. Still, she bears it all without complaint. I can hear her wheezing away in there. She’s dying better than I face life. She’s terrified of actual death, however; she’s a Christian of sorts and believes in that Heaven/Hell stuff. What she’s really afraid of, though, is facing her husband wherever she goes. Probably Hell. As Sartre says, Hell is other people. I already feel old and hate it. I can taste death’s feverish breath. When I was young I read in Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-lighted Place” about the nothingness that overwhelms everything if we live too long. From Tolstoy I understood the horror of death through “The Death of Ivan Illych.”

I’m alone and I hate it. But soon the clan will gather. We haven’t been together as a family since each of us came of age and bolted — all but me, that is. I didn’t go anywhere. That’s not completely true. For awhile I did a variety of shit jobs in Houghton. I was a janitor for Mental Health for a few years. That didn’t pay, so I did odd jobs on the side, mostly carpentry-drywalling, roofing, flooring, siding. Then I accidentally shot myself in the head with a nailgun. It hurt so damned much that I flinched with my finger still on the trigger and with the guard pressed into my head. I shot six more nails into my skull. Since then I’ve taken neurontin six times a day to control the seizures.

One year I made a good living dynamiting nearby streams and smoking the resultant fish in the sauna. Some customers described my smoked native brook trout as the finest fish they’d ever eaten. Of course it didn’t take long to deplete the streams. Since then I’ve lived off disability — my own and my mother’s.

The only person I see on a regular basis is our neighbor, John Kernen. When I’m outside in the winter plowing and shoveling snow, he’s sometimes outside too. When I’m cleaning up the yard in the spring, he’s often out in his yard. We wave at each other a lot but rarely speak. He serves on the Township Council and is crazy as hell. He’s so far out in space politically that he’s disowned his own Finnish heritage. He says Finland is so socialist that it might as well be run by a Stalin. He describes all Californians as fruits and nuts. He hates people like me because I get a welfare check. He says my mother doesn’t need disability either. “Her son should support her,” he says. Obviously we don’t get along. Thank God, he’s too dumb to figure out that I stole his pig while burning down his barn. I slaughtered the pig out in the woods and fed the entrails to the dogs. I smoked the hams in the sauna and salted the rest of the meat in barrels. I fed the son of a bitch some of the head cheese. He seemed to like it. I told him that I’d gotten it from a Chandonais in Lake Linden in payment for a favor. “When are you going to slaughter your pig?” I asked. He said it had run off into the woods when the fire broke out — that panic had caused it to break down the sty wall.

There were five of us kids, and ever since our mother did what she did, we’ve been poster children for dysfunction.

One of my sisters is a sixty-eight-year-old bag lady in Hancock. She was a beautiful child and an even more beautiful young woman but now she’s a bent-backed, broken-toothed old hag who remembers next to nothing. Everyone in Hancock knows who she is. She walks for miles every day inside the twin cities of Hancock and Houghton, carrying her plastic bags filled with whatever. She never leaves the city limits. She hasn’t left the cities for twenty years, ever since she turned herself into a drug-crazed demon and attacked her boyfriend with a baseball bat. She broke his arm and cracked a rib before he got ahold of the bat, wrestled it away from her with his one good arm, and struck her on the spine, cracking her vertebrae. Naturally he got sentenced for assault because he was a guy but I knew what had really happened. I knew his story was true because I knew my sister when she was drinking and taking drugs. Get her drunk and she’ll turn into a tiger. And she used to be strong! She looked tiny but so does a wolverine.

Now she sits in a dumpy apartment in a decaying old brick building by the only streetlight in the capital of Finnish America. The building used to be owned by a local bigwig but he didn’t make the mortgage payments and the bank took over. Now my sister has to call bank headquarters in Houston, Texas, if she wants something fixed. She gets an electronic voice, punches in a number, and gets another electronic voice. If she does that six or eight times over a span of forty-five minutes, she eventually gets a totally useless secretary who may not even know where Michigan is, let alone the city of Hancock.

So nothing gets done. Last January the building’s furnace went out and my sister heated her apartment by turning on the electric oven and leaving the door open. She could have burned down the damned building. She’d've burned too because every time it snowed, which was every day all day in January, the plow came by and buried the only exit. Normally the landlord hired some loser to shovel it out after the plow passed but now the landlord is a big office building somewhere in Texas.

A few times after a really big storm, I drove more than fifteen miles to Hancock to shovel out that damned door. Once while I was shoveling, a young cop stopped. My sister had dialed nine eleven because she was going stir crazy. She needed to get outside and do her bag thing. Most of the local cops are okay. The chief of Hancock is a nice guy. But this particular cop cursed me out. He said my sister and the other tenants should have had shovels parked by the door in the hallway. “But they couldn’t get the door open from inside,” I told him. He argued they should use the fire escape, which was pretty rickety.

The cops know my sister. They see her walking. She also stole a UPS package from in front of the door of another tenant. The tenant called the cops and they confronted my sister. She had already torn open the package. It contained some expensive pants, but they were missing. The cops wanted to know where they were. They searched her apartment. “I gave them to the President,” my sister said. The cops wanted to know which one. “Bush,” she said.

Years ago my sister was identified as the woman who stole some oxycodone from the Medicine Shop. She was high and admitted that she’d done it but the cops couldn’t find the pills. “”I gave them to Reagan,” she said that time. I guess when she thinks of things stolen, she thinks of politicians.

Anyway, I’ll be driving in to get her pretty soon.

Sister #2 can drive herself. She’s been married twice — to a philanderer and to an epileptic. She didn’t know the guy was spastic until she was wearing his ring. She should have suspected. He wrecked his car when he drove full tilt into a light pole at WalMart — a huge parking lot, a tiny pole. He’d had a seizure and didn’t even know he’d done it until he came to.

Since then she’s spent her life working three jobs. That’s admirable, I guess, but she has no life. She gets up between six and seven every day, seven days a week, and goes off to her first minimum-wage job after walking her dog and taking care of her cats — litter boxes, food, lap time. Two of her jobs are doing the daily accounts at two different fast food joints. Then she takes the proceeds to the bank. The two jobs together take about five hours. Then she rushes home to walk her damned dog and let it pee and crap. The dog is a nervous Nellie, probably because it sits all day in an apartment when she doesn’t have it on a leash. The dog pants a lot, barks in her face, paws at her. She calls the dog her child. “Come to Momma,” she says when she comes home, and the dog rips paint and wood off the inside of the door in its anxiety to get outside.

Her third job is cashiering at WalMart. The combined pay for all three jobs lets Sister #2 almost survive. She drives a tinny little econo car, never does anything, never goes anywhere, and never sees a doctor or a dentist unless she’s practically dying. She needs good health coverage but those bastards in Washington will never do anything about national coverage. They only care about how much money they can suck out of the pharmaceutical companies.

Sister #2 works with a great bunch of folks. Three years ago she corrected the spelling of a fat, ugly woman with a butch haircut, who acts as a people greeter. The woman hasn’t spoken to her since. One of the workers has fourteen cats and smells powerfully of their urine. Another has studs and piercings all over his body — in his nose, his lip, his cheeks, his ears, his nipples, his privates. I could go on but I won’t.

When I drive in to get sister #1, I’ll have to pick up sister #3 too. She lives in a leaky old trailer up in the Keweenaw. She was relatively happy for awhile but then she had both breasts removed because of cancer. Her husband left her and she shot herself in the bowels with birdshot from a four ten. At least that’s what I’m guessing because she’s mean as hell— complains about everything. She insists it was a hunting accident and the sheriff’s department never proved otherwise (and probably didn’t want to) but she’s never been hunting in her life.

Doctors had to cut out a lot of her bowels and now she has one of those bags. She’s bitter — bitches constantly. Every month she gets a fat disability check but no one seems to know what she does with the money. Recently various State agencies had to pay all sorts of bills because she’d fallen way behind — an $858 electric bill, a $556 phone bill, a $700 cable bill, a $400 bill for groceries at the corner store. The Lutheran church recently gave her $100 to help her out with groceries and she complained. I suspect that she wanted to spend it on drugs. She says that she’s constantly in pain. She pops oxycodone four times a day at $80-plus a pop, but the State pays for it. She takes about fifteen other pills a day too. She’s probably addicted.

It must be tough to have an addiction but no wheels. She got drunk one time too many and lost her license years ago. Of course she has no license tabs and no insurance. She brags about still driving to town. She also brags about all the magazines that she subscribes to without paying. They just keep sending copies for months, she says, and sometimes for years.

The last family member I need to contact is my kid brother. He lives in an old rundown home not far from Agate Beach. I don’t visit him because he has a pack of vicious dogs, a depressed wife, and sick kids. The kids ate lead from old paints and they’re not developing normally. The house is full of lead. Now I hear the State is going to rip apart the place, right down to the frames. Then they’ll rebuild it. They’re going to get a brand new home for nothing. In the meantime they’ll live in a trailer that the State has parked in their yard.

I don’t hear Mother’s gasping any more. Maybe she’s finally gone.

After we’ve gathered here, we’ll talk for awhile about the old days, about our childhoods here on this place. The fields were open then — the scrub trees hadn’t yet filled in the pasture. The house was new, clean, orderly.

We’ll wonder what life would have been like for all of us if our mother had not had an affair with a married man who held the mortgage on our farm. Why would a woman with five small children have an affair anyway? And so, nearly sixty years ago, our father shot that man, that son of a bitch, dead in our yard when he claimed he was taking away our mother and the farm. Dad died in prison at forty-five. None of us were there. None of us claimed the body. We were too messed up at the time.

We’ll sing a couple of our mother’s favorite hymns — maybe “The Old Rugged Cross” and “The Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Then I’ll torch the place, and as the cleansing flames take over, we’ll form a circle and sing “May the Circle Be Unbroken.”

From here, at night, I can hear the loons calling on the lake.

We’ll put her ashes with Dad’s, in Marquette in the little prison cemetery for the unclaimed. He has a claim on her. We have one on him.

Lauri’s own story —

I am the Chair of Language and Literature at Finlandia University and have published seven books of short fiction, a novel, and a book of poetry, all with Finnish themes and characters. My books have been positively reviewed nationally and have been studied and taught at a number of universities. They have also been topics at conferences and of dissertations by doctoral candidates here and in Europe. My work has also been anthologized multiple times. Because of the subject matter, I have appeared on Finnish National Television and received nine study grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These grants have allowed me to study Slavic literature at Cornell, Twelfth-Century French literature at Mt. Holyoke, Commonwealth literature at Indiana University, the Mexican novel in Guadalajara, American humor at the University of New Mexico, Polynesian literature at the University of Hawaii, Islamic issues at Colorado College, and Appalachian literature at Ferrum College. I have taught in Nigeria, Truk Lagoon, and Turkey and lived in France, Mexico, and England. I survived the Biafran genocide and has been threatened at gun point twice, but my greatest achievement is raising daughters on my own.

I learned from this rich upbringing that even in what many call the greatest democracy in the world, the story is more complicated once one looks below the surface of the fine words and deeds. The two strands, my parent’s activism and idealism, and the struggles of my friends, were what lead me to answering Kennedy’s call, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Under the Elms

by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65)

Summer

She and I sat on the curb in the humid, panty-sticking heat, under the elms that used to line Brookes Avenue and asked each other what we wanted to do with the days that stretched before us, dull and buzzing with cicadas. Susan’s mother was waiting tables down at the Flamingo on Church Street. My mother was teaching summer classes at the high school. Motherless girls for the duration.

My mother arrived home at three in the afternoon, but she was no fun; she took long naps and if Susan and I were in the apartment we had to tiptoe around or stay put in my room with its double bed that practically filled the space. It had been my parents’ bed, but now they slept in the living room on single Hollywoods that converted to sofas during the day, once the maroon covers and matching bolsters were returned to place.

Susan’s mother didn’t get home until after the restaurant closed around ten. Only on her days off was she around. And those were the times I looked forward to. We didn’t sit out on the curb when Mary Talbot was home. We hung around their apartment on the second floor of a three story wooden building with outside staircases, situated dead in the center of the point where Brookes Avenue intersected in a T with Willard Avenue. From Susan’s outdoor staircase you could look all the way up Brookes Avenue and almost see our apartment on the second floor of a two-family clapboard house with indoor stairs. It was a little fancier up the hill, where most of the houses were single-family. But Susan and I were pretty much equally poor compared to the other kids in our neighborhood, even though my mother was higher paid as a teacher. Susan didn’t have a father to bring in extra wages and my father, though he worked, had a job with a goal of seeing that the farmers of Vermont could better their lives, or so my mother said, adding in her sarcastic way, “that’s why he plows back most of his earnings into his efforts.”

Every extra bit of Mrs. Talbot’s earnings were plowed back into making sure that Susan looked beautiful with her store bought dresses, spanking new shiny Mary Janes, and Toni perms for her shoulder length light brown hair. Susan had a closet full of dresses for all occasions and dozens of pairs of shoes. Every detail of her clothing was worked out to perfection. Even her anklets had frills to match the ruffles of her pinafores and puffy sleeved blouses. I had three home-made dresses, cut from the same pattern with differing embellishments, which I changed out of the minute I arrived home. I alternated wearing the dresses over ten school days; my mother said she didn’t have time to do washing and ironing more that every two weeks. My after-school pair of dungarees became my daily outfit during the summer. Eventually they yielded a skim of soft white inside from particles of my shedding skin. Boys’ department tee shirts covered my flat chest. At eleven, a year older than I was, Susan already had small beginnings of breasts. I was relieved I wasn’t yet burdened with the same. Susan was my opposite, a girly, pretty girl with a soft round face. Anytime she laughed or smiled, a dimple in her left cheek dug in deep and her hazel eyes squinted almost shut.

Mary Talbot let us play dress-up in her satin negligees and robes and encouraged us to clomp around in her mules, setting their pink feather wisps shivering in the air as we sashayed across the room trailing a wake of the eau de cologne embedded in her lingerie. She patted out faces with pancake makeup and painted our lips Scarlet Red by Ponds and pinned our hair with rhinestone clips. We were movie stars under the tutelage of Mary Talbot. When she was finished attiring us, she would curl up on the couch in her own red satin robe with a glass full of whiskey and tinkling ice and smoke cigarette after cigarette as she directed us in our scenes and applauded our best lines.

Mary Talbot looked like Judy Garland, her lustrous brown hair piled high on her head and her lips puffy and full, with a twist of a sad smile. Whether she patterned that smile after Judy, I’ll never know. What I do know is that she projected a similar vulnerability, a fragility that bespoke troubled waters.

When it was time for me to leave she’d take me into their tiny bathroom, slip off my metal framed glasses and scrub my face.

“Your mother won’t want to see you with powder and lipstick. I can tell she doesn’t like showy business.”

If she’d painted my fingernails she’d rub the color off with polish remover, her touch and the banana fumes making me woozy with pleasure.

“Now get on up the hill to your mama. Don’t want her blaming me for you being late.”

As the summer wore on I had to leave earlier and earlier, not to arrive after dark. August dusks came on cool and moist, the hint of drying leaves already in the air, mixing with my dread of the evening. It was like walking out of a Technicolor movie into a black and white. Silence usually met me as I closed the glass-paned downstairs door and climbed up to our apartment. Opening the top landing glass-paned door, I rarely smelled dinner cooking. No lights meant my mother was still sleeping. In my room I lay on the bed, one lamp lit, listening to the radio turned low, fingertips to my nose, breathing in the traces of banana solvent.

By now Mary Talbot had splashed more whiskey over her melting ice. She might even be singing or dancing around the living room, her head resting on the top of Susan’s head, her perfume filling the air. Or if a man had come to visit, as Susan told me often happened in the evenings when her mother was off work, always different men she said, he probably had joined in the dancing, gracefully leading Mrs. Talbot around the floor the way Donald O’Conner lead my current movie idol, Vera Ellen.

Autumn

The elms dropped their leaves mixing with the maples, and our favorite activity after school was to shuffle through the ankle deep accumulations setting them to a musical shushing. We loved falling backward into the raked piles in front yards along the way. We’d lie there covered in leaves, silent, taking in the sensuality of their delicate embrace. Late afternoons the air would become rich with smoke. We picked the remnants of our playing from each others hair before going our separate ways, breathless, ruddy-cheeked, and sorry to part. We weren’t consciously aware that we loved the smell of drying and burning leaves back then, but I know it now, for me it bespeaks a time of sheer innocence, of love and laughter with a girlfriend, of no terror in the night.

Winter

The snow piled high on each side of our walk until it was well over my head. The windows were frosted each morning with wondrous scenes of stars and mountains and fir trees, and whatever else my imagination could conger. Icicles hung dangerously from the eaves of our second floor apartment all the way to the ground, slick, thick as my narrow hips and opaque as clouds even when the sun shown on them.

In the middle of the night during a silent, heavy snowfall there was a banging on the outside downstairs’ door. My father was already up when the racket entered my sleep.

“Goddamn it, who the hell is that at this unearthly hour.”

Whoever it was kept rapping sharply against the glass.

My father went down. I stayed in bed.

“Who is it, Scott?” my mother called from the hallway.

He didn’t answer her, but I heard him say, “Come in, honey. Come upstairs. We’ll get you warmed.”

“Oh, lord,” My mother said.

“Let’s get her under the covers.” My father again.

“Sarah,” my father whispered, entering the room. “You awake, sweetheart?”

He sat on the side of my bed. “Your friend Susan’s here. She needs a place to sleep. She’s pretty cold.”

Susan crawled stiffly in under the covers bringing frigid air. She wore her nightgown and nothing else, the flannel fabric was frozen solid like sheets dried on the line in winter. Her feet touched my leg as she curled away from me. I felt the shock of ice. She began to shiver so much the bed shook and the springs creaked.

“You girls get some sleep.” My father was silhouetted in the door frame. “We’ll work this out in the morning.”
He left the door ajar. He said to my mother, “She came the whole two blocks in her bare feet. She didn’t even have a sweater on. Damn, what happened down there?”

Susan continued to shake. When I asked her what happened, she made a sound that was part animal, part little kid who’s been swimming in a cold lake too long. Her teeth were chattering too hard to get any words out. I wrapped my arms around her cold body and tried to hold her calm. It took a long time before she was still, before I could hear her just breathing softly and we could both sleep.

We were wakened by glass splintering and shouting so loud it must have been heard around the neighborhood.

“Where’s my girl? Is my baby up there?” Her cry was raw desperation. I could barely recognize the voice as Mrs. Talbot’s.

“Mommy!” Susan called.

“You stay put.” My mother appeared at our door. “Scott’s going down.”

“You give her to me, you bastard. You give me back my girl.”

My father’s calming voice, the kind of tone I’d heard him use at farmhouse meetings when grown men were having big trouble, came next, but he was talking too low to make out words.

“You let me have her, you fucking bastard. You and your fucking prig of a wife can’t keep her from me.”

The next that reached us up the stairwell was, “You bastards, you called the cops. I’m her mother. I’ve got a right to her.”

Susan struggled against my arms. “I gotta go down to her. She’s missing me.”

I held on tight. “It’s warm here. Stay with me. Tomorrow you can see her. We can go down to your house and play there. She’ll be okay. I promise.”

She lay still. I figured the warmth of the bed won out, that she still had a memory of being barefoot in the snow.

Everything became quiet again. My father came upstairs. I could tell by his slow walk that he was tired. He said so to my mother.

“I’m bushed. Let’s get some sleep.”

Susan couldn’t sleep.

“Look how pretty the moon is coming through the frost pictures,” I said.

It shown silvery and the windows sparkled almost like daytime.

“See the trees and doesn’t that look like a little lamb?” I spoke to her like to a baby.
After awhile her breaths became longer and longer and I knew we could both sleep through to morning.

We sat at the breakfast table in blinding sunshine. It was Saturday. My mother usually slept in on Saturdays, often until eleven o’clock, but this morning she was up early. My father had already left. He was driving down to Putney for a meeting, my mother told us.

I’d worried that she would be in one of her weekend angry moods. I didn’t want Susan to witness that. It could be awful with her stomping around the kitchen in a black silence, slamming pots into the sink, dropping plates heavily onto the table. But today she seemed excited, even happy as she made us waffles. My mother almost never brought out the old waffle iron. I felt proud to have Susan see our nice breakfast.

“We’ll have to get you something to wear, dear,” my mother said to Susan once we were eating.

We were still in our bed clothes. Susan was bigger than I and I knew she wouldn’t be able to squeeze into my things.

“We’ll go down street to Abraham’s, and get you a few items to tide you over.”

Susan could barely keep her head up, her face was pasty with fatigue, but she whispered, “I can get stuff at home. I’ve got lots of clothes there.”

“I know, dear, but you’re not going home today.”

She didn’t go home that day or the next, or the next. Susan stayed with us for months. She became my sister, and my mother who was usually thrifty, turned profligate, purchasing an entire wardrobe for Susan and even buying me new clothes to match hers. The item I remember most was a pastel raincoat; mine was a pale chalky green with a black corduroy stand-up collar and Susan’s was pink. They were the latest thing, modeled on old fashioned slickers, but made of rain resistant cotton. It was the only time I’ve suffered sibling rivalry, before of after. I recall a flash of searing envy, wishing her gone when we purchased those coats in Abrahams, knowing I’d never have been the recipient of such extravagance if not for Susan living with us. As for my mother, she was proud of herself, even I could see that, proud of how she was handling a difficult situation, a tragic case. But I hated her for it.

Mrs. Talbot had come screaming to our house once more, again in the middle of the night. She broke another window pane in the downstairs door and unlatched the hook. She was halfway up the stairs before my father stopped her.

“You fucking bastard, you’ve stolen my girl. You can’t have her, she’s my baby. Your fucking wife can’t even take care of her own. I took care of your girl. I made her happy when she looked so sad. Please, please, let me have my baby.”

I physically restrained Susan again, whispering, “You can’t go back there.”

“I have to.”

We could hear Mrs. Talbot sobbing and my father’s measured voice trying to reassure her that they’d work things out. “Just give it time.” Her sobs became muffled. She must have buried her face against my father’s chest.

“We’ll work it out,” I said to Susan. “But you can’t go back down there until they fix things.”

By that time Susan had told me what had happened. One of the men her mother brought home nights had gotten into Susan’s bed and his thing was stiff, she said and he’d gotten it part way into her. She’d showed what she’d meant with her finger, which shocked me and yet felt nice and made me wish for more. But it wasn’t his finger, it was his thing. Her mother hadn’t come when Susan called for help. The man said her mother was out cold and he tried to put it in deeper while he held her down, but Susan had somehow wiggled out and had gotten away and that’s when she left her apartment in only her nighty and bare feet.

“It’s still too dangerous,” I continued to whisper to her as my father comforted Mary Talbot on the staircase. “You can go home when the danger’s gone.” But I knew better. I’d heard my mother say on the phone, talking in her fussy voice, about making arrangements to get Mrs. Talbot committed to Waterbury.

Waterbury was the lunatic asylum in a big soot-darkened brick building with bars on the windows in the town of Waterbury, a place so terrifying you didn’t even want to drive by in a car with the windows rolled down because you could hear the rasping raging screams from the women within.

Late winter/Early spring

The statewide mandated mud season arrived and we had time off. It was a period of real freedom for the two of us. Before Susan’s mother was committed to Waterbury we had to have escorts to and from school, often we had to be driven in a police car. They were afraid Mary Talbot would have us both kidnapped or she would at least try to steal her daughter back. But with her mother put away and my mother going to the high school during vacation to catch up on her work and make up for the time she’d lost, “taking care of the Talbot business,” Susan and I were on our own. There was no mud in the streets in Burlington so we could take our bicycles — my mother had by then bought Susan a bicycle — and go off around town and to the far reaches, out to the Howard Johnson’s at the edge of the city where we chose from 24 flavors of ice cream or down to the shore of Lake Champlain where we found a narrow beach covered with flat black stones. We’d spend hours skipping those stones across the water until each of us had reached our top throws of sixteen skips.

Not even that accomplishment wiped away Susan’s sadness. She tried not to show her sorrow, tried her hardest to have fun with me and to make my mother think she was grateful. I saw that, was aware of her effort, but I knew my friend, knew the difference between these days of utter freedom, and the hours we used to spend in her apartment while Mary Talbot drank from the glass of whiskey with the tinkling ice and we paraded in and out in our best fashion, strutting for her approval.
We peddled back from the shore late one afternoon as the sun was lowering behind us over the broad lake, lighting up the town like glowing amber as we headed for home. Just before the intersection of Willard Avenue that would have led to her old apartment if we’d turned left instead of continuing straight, she stopped. She stood clutching the handlebars, her head bowed. I pulled up beside her. Huge tears were flowing down her chapped cheeks, over her chin and onto the collar of her jacket. We stayed like that, side by side in silence, she weeping soundlessly as night came on and the air grew cold with the dampness of incipient spring.

I couldn’t say anything, not even, It’s going to be okay, because in that moment I learned that you can’t lie to a person when the world has collapsed around her, can’t lie when the one person she ever really loved and who loved her and protected her until one fatal moment had disappeared from her life, leaving her with nobody, and no place of her own, so that in a way she didn’t exist herself.

The world came back to Susan; she stopped crying, wiped her nose on her coat sleeve, glanced over at me through her bangs my mother had neglected to trim and nodded for us to go. We continued up the hill, at first slowly and then Susan began to put on the speed and we raced each other through the descending night, bumping over the uneven sidewalk now in darkness until suddenly the street lights came on and we moved swiftly through one cone of white light after another, she particularly, bent on winning.

A while after that, when the first hints of green skimmed the maples behind our apartment and the air was redolent with the rich odor of pregnant earth, Susan was called out of the classroom by the principal. I watched her through the window in the door as she stood in the hall crying and smiling at the same time while he spoke to her. The principal came in again and conversed with our teacher and she went to the cloakroom and brought out Susan’s coat. Susan watched through the window but she didn’t look at me. I knew then that she was leaving me and there was nothing I could do about it. The teacher handed the coat out to the principal and in an instant they were gone. Nothing was said during the rest of the day, to me or to the class, about where Susan was going or why she had left us.

Mary Talbot’s relatives had sprung her from the asylum. My mother, furious, went to court to have her recommitted but the judge said if her family would take her across the state line to New York, she was free to go and he wouldn’t issue an order to have her sent back, nor would he maintain the order against her girl living with her.

“He just wanted her out of his hair,” my mother railed, “out of the system. He didn’t want the state paying her keep. That’s all he considered, not the welfare of that child. The same is going to happen again in New York, mark my word, that woman hasn’t learned anything from this about caring for a child. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I overheard her furious complaints. My father murmured to her. I couldn’t make out his words, but I knew he was giving a weak argument. He was never strong enough to come up against her directly. I wondered, though, if he wasn’t half glad that beautiful Mary Talbot had escaped and that Susan had her mother back. And I wondered if he was secretly pleased that my mother hadn’t won out for once.

Years later

I was twenty-three and living in New York City, when one night I turned on my little black and white television in my East Village apartment just at the moment when the participants in the Miss America contest were being given awards in various categories and they proclaimed that Miss New York State have been voted Miss Congeniality because she was loved by all the other girls and everyone else she’d come into contact with during the competition. And there on the stage receiving the honor was Susan, her face not as rounded as it had been, but as she beamed with pleasure, the dimple I knew so well dug into her left cheek and her eyes squinted almost shut, like upside down smiles. They never said her name, but I knew she was my Susan; it made all the sense in the world that she was Miss Congeniality.

That night I dreamed of the two of us, girls at the crest between childhood and maturity, riding our bicycles in the moonlight up and down the streets of our small New England city, safe, unseen, peering in windows to the lives of others, and finally, coming to rest in the shadows of the sheltering elms, now all but extinct.

Marnie’s own story —

My assignment in the Peace Corps was as a community organizer in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I lived and worked in the Cerro Santa Ana, a barrio situated on a hill on the north side of the city overlooking the Rio Guayas. My job was to develop activities and programs for the community center which had been built by the previous Volunteers. Using this as the platform, the community leaders and I went on to grapple with issues that plagued the neighborhood, such as overflowing sewage and contaminated water.

Returning home from the Peace Corps I worked for a few years as a community organizer in El Barrio and the South Bronx of New York City, after which I joined the John Lindsay administration as the Director of Summer Programming, responsible for coordinating all outdoor events throughout the five boroughs of the city. I left there to become Development Director for WBAI-FM, the Pacifica radio station in New York. I was later the Program Director for the station. I went on to run my own business producing large events, including benefits, folk/rock concerts, and city-wide outdoor festivals. And finally, when I was around forty-seven, I began to write. In 1994 my first novel, Green Fires, was published. Aptly, it was my Peace Corps novel. I’ve been writing ever since.”