In 1916, photographer Herbert Pelton carried his box camera up Chicken Hill to take this record of Asheville spectators lining the old Haywood Road Bridge to observe the floodwaters of a devastating deluge that would hold records until Hurricane Helene hit us in 2024.

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, and fiction can’t help but follow in its wake.

My upcoming novel Floodmarks is winning advance praise from Foreword Reviews as “thoughtful and powerful,” evoking how our past haunts our present, with “ruminations on the impermanence of memory, the power of redemption, and the truth buried in both.”

In 1986, my last year working at the Asheville Citizen-Times, I researched, reported and wrote a long feature story on the devastating Flood of 1916 that marooned the mountain town for months. My friend and fellow writer Mc McIlvoy admired my journalism, and told me, “You know this is a novella.”

I did not know that. I’d never written one before.

After I was laid off from the newspaper, the fate of far too many American journalists, I mulled that idea over in the back of my mind. In 2024, I sat down and wrote the story of hapless George Flack, the cub reporter trying to get at the life story of Miss Nellie Lusk, the last living survivor of the Flood. Miss Lusk is still angry that his newspaper had never offered a formal correction and apology for mistakenly listing her among the dead 70 years before.

Regal House was interested in my tale, and I signed a contract that summer for Floodmarks. A good day for any writer when a book will be launched into the world.

Two months later, what happens but Hurricane Helene, following the same patterns as the 1916 tropical storms that had brought devastation up and down the French Broad River and across the western half of North Carolina.

But Helene was even more hellacious, breaking all of 1916’s records for floodstage, leaving 100 people dead across the Tar Heel mountains and billions of dollars in damage.

Two years later, Asheville and Western North Carolina are still recovering from the devastation. Some places, along the river seem like nothing has happened, the placid currents flowing along restored walking paths and bike lanes. But go down river, you’ll pass still abandoned buildings with graffitied walls. Some areas of hard-hit Swannanoa remain horribly scarred and almost untouched since the waters receded. Federal money promised by our politicians has been woefully slow.

Too many locals feel a strange pit in their stomachs whenever the wind picks up and a storm blows overhead. You don’t ever forget the force of a wall of muddy water more than three stories higher than a person roaring down a riverbed or howling winds ripping and uprooting giant trees and forests on high ridges.

Writing Floodmarks, I wanted to explore how people deal with devastation and loss of their everyday lives, how they have to find the wherewithal, the courage to rebuild their lives, to live on. I took for my epigraph from a letter that my literary idol Thomas Wolfe had written to his own sister in 1929.

“I have a thing to tell you now: that is, you can’t go home again, but there are other places you can go. So why not try to find them?”

I also wanted to pay tribute to my old newspaper, the Asheville Citizen-Times, where I worked and wrote for 34 years. American newspapers have largely dwindled away in the past decade, due to the Internet and the greed of private equity owners looking only for profit at the expense of informing our citizenry.

George recounts his nights working with seasoned and jaded journalists at the Citizen-Times at its old headquarters on O. Henry Avenue across from the storied Grove Arcade. My novella resurrects names and faces familiar to long-time subscribers of the newspaper in its heyday. Tony Kiss, John Parris, Jay Hensley, Lewis Green, Steve Dixon, Phil Luther, Lucille Hearn, among others.

Floodmarks is my elegy for the Asheville I found when I first moved here in 1983. What I’ve discovered is that our town has always been changing decade after decade almost from its start. As Wolfe said, we keep making and remaking ourselves at home in these ancient hills.

Floodmarks releases Dec. 14. Think of getting a jump on your Christmas shopping by reserving your copy today.

PREORDER

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Collecting the fragments and shards, how my heart broke open, and my childhood memories spilled out with the last days and the passing of my mother on Easter Monday, April 6.

It had been only nine months since my sister and I moved my parents out of their house on 3533 Woodmere Place, my childhood home, into assisted living at Brookdale Reynolda only a few miles away in Winston-Salem, but a great leap out of their long-settled ways for so many years. “It’s all happening so fast,” my mother kept saying, months before we realized she was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Their decline was evident when I saw my mother at Thanksgiving, 2024. down at my sister’s home in Charlotte. My mother was taking baby steps, complaining of back pain. Our Sunday phone conversations had changed; she would announce everything was boring, they were boring, their life was boring these days. She worried constantly about my father, who hardly conversed these days, content to nod off in his easy chair. He had had a pacemaker sewn into his chest years ago, and we all expected him to pass before his 90^th birthday, but he kept plugging along.

It all came to a head in January 2025, when my mother announced on the phone, that she had had a mishap, ramming their SUV into a neighbor’s tree while backing out of their tricky driveway. She had hit the accelerator instead of the brake. With rear tires in the air, and the tree bent under the chassis, they had to get a tow truck to pull it off. My mother quit driving after that.

Not that my father was any better. With his arthritic neck, he was unable to turn his head to look either way at intersections. He had to rely on her to tap his arm and say it was safe. At which, he would slam the car forward with too heavy a foot. An accident waiting to happen.

Then their plumbing began to break in the 60 year old rancher and they were deluged with workmen. They seemed confused.

I drove down on Memorial Day weekend last year, and found things were far worse than we had known. My mother had a bandage on her forehead and a scrape on her arm as she shuffled out of the hallway. Losing her precarious balance, she had fallen backwards in the kitchen. My father managed to the urgent care to get five stitches in the back of her head, which she proudly wanted to show me.

She was falling more often. But she shrugged off the idea that anything needed to change. She worried more that my father was losing his cognitive grip, lost in his own daydreaming ways. He wasn’t right, she insisted.

The next month, my sister and I went down together to tell them the hard news. They needed help. They needed to move into assisted living, and we began the search for the place that could provide a room for two people. We settled on the Brookdale Reynolda, a single floor facility, clean and well-kept and homey.

My mother was not impressed. Even though the staff soon helped her learn to negotiate the hallways with the walker she had previously refused. She complained of the food, of the people (who were all so disabled, she seemed to feel), of the activities (which seemed childish and beneath her), of the Sunday church services (which weren’t Baptists enough, not like their beloved Salem Baptist).

But at least, we thought they were safe.

Kim Miller, who headed the nursing services at the time, said my mother was her own woman. “You knew who ruled the roost.

She didn’t’ like staffers talking to her husband, in conversations she couldn’t follow with her damaged hearing aids. She overruled any activity that the staff suggested, didn’t want to be separated from her husband for any period of time. She wanted to keep driving the car they parked out back. . She pointed to a newspaper article she had seen, extending a grace period for renewing a drivers license for two years, due to backlogs at the state DMV. My father was still legal to drive with his 90^th birthday no longer a hard deadline.

By October, my mother was diagnosed with cognitive impairment. My father remained clear-headed but cowed by her. In her last weeks at Brookdale was growing more agitated, actually slapping at my father who was helpless to try to move her from the wheelchair she was confined to. “She slapped the fire out of him,” Kim said.

My mother was taken to the Valley Mountain Hospice Center up in Dobson, a hour in the country north of Winston-Salem, for a week’s respite, to get her medications in order, trying to calm her frazzled nerves.

Meanwhile, my father was taken to Baptist hospital, After my mother had left, my father had called for help, complaining of adnominal pain. Kim checked him out and feared a possible hernia needing immediate surgery, so the ambulance came for him.

Palm Sunday, April 29

On this holy day,I made a strange pilgrimage down the mountain, heading up I-77 to the hill county, and pastures around Dobson, with a glimpse of Pilot Mountain on the eastern horizon, that landmark that we used to see driving out of our old neighborhood daily, turning onto Robinhood Road until the Methodist Church added a huge three story fellowship hall that blocked our view.

I drove into downtown Dobson, finding the closed corporate offices. I called the number I had, and was directed back up the road to the new landscaped medical center I had passed on my way in.

It was a nice facility surrounded by green pastures, with waterfall feature outside the drive-through portico. I went in and found the nurses station, asking for Mary Jane Neal. “Oh, she’s a sweetheart,” said the pleasant doctor on duty, who led me back to my mother’s room.

The room was spacious and well apportioned with nice furniture, like an upscale hotel room, except for the hospital bed in the middle. My mother sat beside the bed in a lounge chair, her hands in her lap.

“It’s it about Daddy?” she sked. Worried about her long-time spouse, she likely thought I came with bad news — that he’d died.

“He’s fine. He’s in the hospital. He’s in the hospital and I’ll go see him shortly, but he’s fine.” I said.

I sat beside her and patted her liver-spotted hand. She was peaceful, quit, able to say a little. She kept pointing to the bathroom, as if worried the light was on. She pointed to the hospital bed beside her, as if to ask what that was for.

“Fine. Yes, that’s fine. “ I kept saying all would be fine,” quietly trying to reassure her. I turned out the bathroom light and closed the coor, thinking that’s what she wanted. Her hands kept moving across her lap, shaking a little.

But she knew who I was.

I stayed maybe twenty minutes, trying to talk with my mother, largely deaf without her hearing aids. She would nod, I think she understood.

Finally, I said I had to leave and check on Daddy down at the hospital. She waved, as if she was tired too of the company. “Say hey to Cynthia,” were the last words I heard her say, a parting gift to my wife, who had her own fraught relationship with her strong-willed mother-in-law.

But there was no rush. The hospice staffers were gathering in the quiet clean lobby. Something was happening. A black bag on a gurney wheeled out by a man in a black business suit. The front doors were open as staffers lined either side. There was a smell in the air. At first, I thought it was coming from outside, all those pastures next door, the whiff of a barnyard or stable. I held my breath, waited, realized what I was smelling was death itself.

I drove to Baptist and wandered the hallways on the fourth floor of the North Tower in search of my father’s room. I stopped and asked an orderly. He pointed me to a ward, where I found my father in a ward, with curtains drawn around, an uneaten meal served at his bedside. Unshaven, unkempt in his loose hospital gown, the pacemaker outlined under the skin at his collarbone, keeping his heart going. He had with a catheter bag on the bedside, draining away his urine. His bladder was evidently blocked by some tumor or pressure, unable to void itself. He couldn’t explain what the doctors had found on the CAT scans, nor did he mention anything about my mother, after I said she looked fine up in Dobson.

We talked about small things, inconveniences, but he looked alert, well-cared for, but frail. Skin and bones as the cliché would have it.

He looked forward to returning to Brookdale, to await his wife from her own exile.

Easter Sunday, April 5

The details that I can’t shake, the last days that won’t leave me even now.

My mother’s hands, small and liver-spotted with the tendons more pronounced under the bruised crepe-thin skin. She would wave them about expressively, but unable to find any words to speak, to articulate, Alzheimer’s wearing away the lobes of her brain, synapses crackling and shorting instead of connecting.

But her hands were still able to wave and point and worry themselves in mid-air as the end approached for her.

On Easter Sunday, when I reached Brookdale, she was lying in her hospice bed with my father sitting beside her, holding her hand. Brookdale had moved his battered easy chair in so he could attend these final hours with his wife.

I sat on her old love sofa at the foot of her bed and watched the old couple, my only parents playing out the last scene. She pulled her hand free from his, a fierceness in her dark eyes, her mouth agape, unable to speak or smile. She began to wag her finger at him, as if to scold him, remind him, reprimand him, how could you let this happen to us? But he treated it as a playful game. He extended his own index finger to touch hers, like Michelangelo’s Creation on the Sistine ceiling, or E.T.s long glowing digit in the Spielberg film, sweet somehow, literally touching in all senses.

Then she began to swat at his hand. “It’s like she’s trying to hit me.” My father recoiled.

I took my father’s chair as he went into the next room.

I showed her my phone with a photo my newspaper colleague Craig Shaffer had sent me from years back, when he and I had visited my grandmother’s farm in Watauga County in the 1980s. We had dreamed big of creating a photo album, my own version of the Agee-Walker collaboration in “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. I’d taken Eric to meet my Great Uncle Frank at his farm up thee road. Craig had sent me the photo of the gap-toothed Frank in hie overalls and farmer’s jacket holding up a billy goat by his front legs. “Remember him. Remember Frank?” I coaxed my mother.

She took the phone in her shaking hands and peered at his face. She knew him, the last of her people, of her childhood in Beaverdam, that remote mountain cove under the Frozen head and the Raven’s Rock, the landmarks of hers and my childhoods.

Easter Monday

I drove again the next day, two and half hours from Asheville to Winston-Salem, to keep the vigil. My father was still at his post. My mother’s eyes were vaguely open. I’m not sure she could see us.

Talking more with my father as they moved his chair away from her bed, to face me, could see Kim working with swabs to clear the constant saliva in my mother’s gaping mouth, lest she become asphyxiated. I spent a few hours with them. The end was near. I felt that immensity, that emptiness, the hole opening up in my days and years, in my life.

Later, I held her hand when my father could not.

I kept saying platitudes I don’t remember. “it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be okay. I love you.”

She suddenly squeezed like hell — a fierce strength in her little grip, surprisingly strong for a frail 98-pound 88 year old woman. She kept squeezing my hand, viselike, trying to send me a message. I didn’t know if she was trying to admonish me for letting her die.

But later, I came to understand that gesture, that squeeze of my flesh and bones as more than mindless muscle reflex. She was saying in the only way left to her in the silence between us, that she still had a hold of me. She had been the first to hold the squeeze of my newborn hand around her finger as she held me to her breast so long ago. She was letting me know now that she wasn’t letting me go, even after she would be gone. Not a death grip but life’s continuing grasp. As if to reassure me this wasn’t over between me and her, not by any stretch of my imagination. By the pressure of skin and bone and sinew, she shared with me her still racing heart, the fierce love of her living touch for her firstborn.

It wasn’t over yet. She might last another few days, Kim told me, but soon.

I drove back up the mountain to rest up for the continuing vigil.

When my cellphone chimed just before midnight, I bolted out of bed. It was Kim calling. My mother was gone

She had said her goodbyes and made her exit when all her family had gone to bed.

Night night, Mama.

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Memories are always ripening and subject to revision. They are slippery and don’t stay still in the back of your brain. As Heraclitus said, a man can’t step into the same river twice. That goes doubly well when you’re talking about the massive river of glass that is the Everglades. Last week, I attended Wally Camp, an annual conference of alums of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Up at Mt. Holyoke College, I heard Anne read her memoir of her more than 20 years as a paddling guide through Florida’s Everglades, recounting that fateful journey when she, along with me and my wife Cynthia, lost our bearings on a four-day canoe journey. Anne had her own memories, but I needed to revisit my own, revising my previously published Substack post. Paddle with us again into the Heart of Greenness.

Florida has never been my favorite place, where America seems to drain down into gator farms, and fake mermaids, citrus stands and hanging chads back when the 2000 election hung in the balance. Last year our current Washington regime designated the wild Everglades as the official location for a concentration camp for detained immigrants gathered up in ICE raids. Alligator Alcatraz.

Aside from another stain on the American spirit, this make-shift prison is yet another manmade-scar on a remarkable landscape at Florida’s southwestern tip. As our country slowly loses our way, I can’t help but think how rare is the place where individuals can lose their way.

In January 2015, my wife, Cynthia, and I drove down from Asheville to paddle the Everglades, four days into the waterways, the mangrove mazes, the bays named and unnamed, to be lost and to lose our civilized shells, to go off the grid. Our friend Anne McCrary Sullivan, an avid naturalist, accomplished poet and seasoned guide, served as our Virgil leading us into the green unknown. Little did we know we were going back to primordial times, and the ancient fears hunkered in our own reptile brains, confronting a harsh environment where fresh water is at a premium, where hurricanes come to land, and thunderstorms are hatched on the horizon in summer. You are more likely to be eaten alive by mosquitoes at dusk than any alligator.

Two nights out on the water, three days from setting foot on dry land, pitching your tent on platforms known as “chickees,” roofed docks, you begin to feel unmoored, unplugged, off the grid, fingers no longer itching to swipe a screen, to check the email, Facebook and Twitter for the latest tasty tidbit of useless information. You begin to settle into your life. The charts before you, the mangroves reflected in the perfectly still water, a mirror image of the clouds puffing over the end of Florida.

Mangroves – the name comes from the Arawak people who once thrived across the Caribbean. It means “mangle” in that indigenous tongue. Once you’ve paddled past a million of these mangroves, what the Seminoles called walking trees, sending their arms down into the salted water to take root, to multiply and create thousands of islands out here, you begin to appreciate the seemingly endless maze that is the Everglades.

Then we get lost.

It starts with a wrong bearing off the Lane Bay chickee, heading southeast across the bay in search of the close channel that leads to Hell’s Bay. Names are foreboding but important in a wilderness like the Everglades. Hell’s Bay doesn’t sound inviting.

“It’s hell to get into and hell to get out of,” a ranger once said.
Figure it’s a purgatory even getting to Hell’s Bay.

We get lost by degrees.

“I think that may be it,” I call from the bow. Anne rudders the Mad River canoe into a narrow passageway, a few twists and turns and we’re heading steadily northeast, instead of our desired southeasterly bearing. The sun gets hotter. We keep paddling. Anne checks her navigational charts.

When we come out on a bay again, wondering if this is Hell’s Bay, then off to the north, we spy the Lane Bay chickee, its Portajohn visible on the dock We all laugh hysterically, in dismay. We have spent all afternoon, wandering in a big circle
Then we lose sight of the chickee and paddle into another bay.

The sun is setting.

Mangrove islands are no friends, their knees high in the water, with nothing but muck for men to step into. Here in this nameless bay, what Anne seeks is an island with a mahogany, a tree that needs high ground to thrive. We paddle toward the island, aiming our bow into the overhanging underbrush, toward what looks like a gator slide, a shelf where one of the Everglades’ residents will sun himself, wait for dinner.
I step up onto dry land, and crash in-land, through the thickets of laurel, poisonwood, fern. There’s just barely enough space beneath the mahogany at the center of this hammock to pitch a small tent. My wife and I will spend the night here, while Anne sleeps in the canoe.

In Anne’s account, she seems relieved we have the high ground, that we have not lost our heads. We seem safe, even happy. Our laugher from inside the tent reassures her.

She battens herself under a tarp, tucked into her sleeping bag, bundled in clothes, with mosquito netting swaddling her like a mummy. All seems well as the wild darkness descends.

Then she makes a mistake. She gets out her headlamp, her journal and pen. She of course wants to write. (The audience at Mt. Holyoke laughs aloud. Anne looks startled at the podium as this unexpected punchline. Of course, poets are doomed to write against all good sense.)

When she snaps on the headlight, a million mosquitoes come swarming across the dark bay to buzz her head, a deafening roar in Anne’s ears. They want blood, stabbing their tiny vampiric proboscises through the tight netting.

Not a fun night for Anne at all.

But we are not happy campers on our spot of dry land. That laughter Anne had heard? An involuntary, half-lunatic laugh, the dark laugher of the lost.
We do not sleep well. A great munching sound comes outside the tent; we imagine a gator chewing over the remains of some large dinner, the cracking of bones. Oh, Cynthia is mortally terrified of snakes, even the idea of a serpent. I once heard her shriek like a monkey when she inadvertently picked up a small black snake in a tangle of Spanish Moss on a South Carolina sidewalk.

After reading all the news accounts of the invasive escapes from Miami invading the Everglades, even tangling with the top predator alligators, Cynthia could only imagine a 20-foot python silently slithering our way.

But day dawns again. No alligators, no snakes. We have survived. Unzipping the tent, we see water only a few feet away from our perch, lapping at the little dry land here.
We are twenty-four hours lost, but Anne has sent out satellite transponder signals to her padding partner back in the world. Standing up in the stern of the canoe, Anne gets a few bars on her cellphone and calls Holly. We have a location point from my Garmin watch, a point of reference, but we are unable to find our abstraction on any map. Holly can pinpoint us and chart us a way back on the map.

We are not exactly found, but we are not lost now. We have directions. We are saved.

In her memoir, Anne recalls Cynthia’s remark after making our way back to our launch point and solid ground, the end of our adventure. “The best part of all was getting lost,” she proclaimed we said our goodbyes

What Anne couldn’t know was what my wife said safely in the car, headed home. “We’re never doing that again.”

Getting off course is how discoveries are made. Getting lost is how you find things. Our knowledge, our maps are finite; we expand when we explore. We keep our heads, even when we lose our bearings.

We made it home safely. On the nautical charts Anne gave us, I penciled in the name of a small island in a unnamed bay, west of Lane Bay and north of Hell’s Bay.
Welcome to Neal Key, where we were the first people to camp in the endless maze of mangroves and memories, the labyrinth of bays and lakes and channels, that is the Everglades.

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It’s been a season of passing for my literary godmothers and godfathers.

First, Ellen Bryan Voigt, the Virginia-born poet who kept her polite drawl in hardscrabble Vermont, her iron grip on the rudder of the low-residency MFA program she invented and guided at Warren Wilson College, who died last October. Now, her friend and colleague, Stephen Dobyns, who died this weekend.

Stephen was my first supervisor when I showed up as a naïve newbie at my first residency in 1985. He headed a workshop of a dozen residency students auditioning for a seat in the competitive two-year writing program. And he was the first to introduce me, a young journalist with an ambition for fiction, to the patron saint of short story writers, Dr. Anton Chekhov. I still can recall Stephen’s loving admiration as he read us scenes from the story. The Schoolmistress, about a young teacher’s own strange journey to a new village.

Tall and lanky, Stephen could be an imposing mentor, always demanding more from his poems and stories, and those of his students. But like Ellen Voigt, he could also dance, cut a real rug, taking to the floor at the dances when the Talking Heads went “boom, boom, boom, that’s the way we live” on the speakers.

He started himself as a young reporter for the Detroit News, and he counseled me to keep my job with the paper while I was pursing my fiction. Just so long as I was working nights, I would have my mornings free for my own writing. Good career advice.

He offered plenty of wisdom in the collection of epigrams and short prose poems in The Porcupine’s Kisses, which I took down from my shelf upon hearing of Stephen’s passing.

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But it is the collection Cemetery Nights I most remember, which he read from during those residencies in the mid-80s at Warren Wilson on those Blue Ridge summer nights. His poems were strange, often violent and grim, but filled at the core with vulnerability and wisdom. Go deeper. There is always more than what you see at a first glance, Stephen seemed to say.

Especially about grief and death, which concerned his whole career of poetry. Afterall, it’s the ending that is already written for us all, but Stephen always marveled at its potential for surprise.

Adieu, Stephen, but not farewell. Not so long as the poetry remains on the page.

FUNERAL

When her coffin had been carried from the room,

the house remained exactly as she had arranged it —

her thoughts present in the position of each chair,

in the snapshots of the dead upon the mantel,

and by the kitchen door a smudge where her hand

had often rested. Her grandson, by himself

in the house, drags a chair over to that spot,

climbs up and just touches his tongue to the mark,

and in its salt and faint taste of cinnamon

a hundred bright occasions return to him.

With his eyes closed and his tongue pressed to the wood,

he can feel the house unfurl its wings, rise up

and glide over the fields of wheat and small farms

like a horned owl from the branch of a dead tree.

His heart quickens with excitement. No telling

where he is going, and will she be waiting?

Stephen Dobyns, from Cemetery Nights, 1987

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I like to start my day, walking my dog a couple of miles up and down Sunset Mountain in north Asheville. In the woods, we often spy white squirrel, mama bears with their cubs, deer, even a glimpse of a stealthy bobcat, all of which generally shy away from the likes of a late-middle-aged man and a white Standard poodle on a harness and leash.

But for the past few weeks, Merlin and I have encountered the kind of wildlife that keeps a cold eye on us.

Trust me, you don’t want to be followed by a coyote.

You occasionally hear coyotes yelping high on the mountain, a pack striking up a howl after dark, but they are rarely seen. There are too often posters stuck on phone poles of missing cats in the neighborhood – more often than not, easy pickings for these predators. I believe one of our kitties, Peaches, fell victim to one night some years back. So I don’t romanticize these beasts.

In May, which is the season for coyotes to deliver, nurse and seriously guard their pups in makeshift dens, I was strolling around a bend in the road, with the woods still filled with debris and windfall from Hurricane Helene’s rampage two years ago. Down below, on the thick trunk of a felled hardwood, I saw a tawny movement. A bobcat? But then I saw rounded ears. Hmm, could that be a coyote pup?

Merlin was curious as well, pulling for a better look. I yanked him along and we continued our walk.

I don’t walk with Airpods or stare at my smartphone screen, like so many runners and walkers I see on my morning rounds. I want to hear the world around me, the noises, not stay cocooned in my own cranium, canceling outside sounds.

I don’t think I heard anything, but I suddenly knew to look over my shoulder.

A lean, tawny coyote was trotting up the road after me, with his sharp ears and toothy snout. A real honest-to-god wild animal, not the clutzy Wiley B. Coyote of the Roadrunner cartoons. This animal meant business.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I yelled. But he kept coming. I yanked Merlin along harder, even as he grew more nervous.

It seemed a bad idea to turn my back on him and just flat out run, knowing that coyote could charge us. I’ve never heard of a coyote attacking a human. I worried more about a tussle between my dog and the coyote, who matched Merlin pound for pound. And Merlin is no fighter.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I kept yelling and moving backwards and sideways up the road, afraid to lose eye contact with the creature. The coyote would hesitate, as if he might go down the bank into the woods, but as I kept going, he kept coming.

He must have followed us for almost hundred yards. Around the next bend, I came across a man in a ball cap walking his lean hound dog on a leash. “There’s a coyote,” I warned him.

And true enough, Mr. Coyote kept coming up the road, taking on two men now, and two dogs.

We yelled. The guy took a big deadfall limb and threw it on the road. The coyote paused for only a beat and resumed his advance.

We kept moving back. “I don’t’ need this shit,” the man with the hound dog said, obviously unnerved by this creature who refused to retreat.

Almost a quarter mile now past that tree trunk where the mother still guarded her cubs, the male coyote finally stopped on the roadside and sat on his haunches. He raised his white muzzle skyward and began to bark frantically, a last warning for us to stay the hell away from his family.

So we did.

I would take the long way around down past the Grove Park Inn to get back to my house.

And no, I didn’t stop to take any snap shots with my iPhone, which has a zoom function but still way to close to get a candid shot. That picture on this post is courtesy of Wikipedia, and bears a striking resemblance to the male casing me.

I don’t see any need to go exterminate the coyotes, minding their own business, but I did get the message to stay from the den until they are good and ready to move on themselves. I changed my daily route for a few days to give them their space. But they won’t be rushed. They don’t share my timetable.

Just the other day, resuming my usual route with Merlin, I saw the pair of coyotes coming down the hill. I didn’t see their pups, but I was certain they were safely hidden away close by.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I yelled again but the coyote couple walked slowly behind me and Merlin. Not as aggressive this time, but now it was two-on-two.

We got their message and moved on. When I looked back, they had vanished.

The wild offers an invitation to remember the world is larger than just the human and what we are thinking and imagining and ruminating upon on our walks. There are other beings among us, and we are rightly, instinctively visited by primal fears when we encounter them.

Animals if we are aware of them can offer instructions. Meeting that coyote on his turf knocked me out of my mundane everyday world and put me in touch with the uncanny.

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In my novel Appalachian Book of the Dead, I made a female coyote a recurring character in my Southern Buddhist thriller about of people and animals dealing with reincarnated killers roaming the strange woods of Appalachia. Buddhists believe in the wheel of reincarnation, animals are only another stop on the ceaseless cycle of lives beings will share over the eons. Human, animal, demigods and demons, each existence has its own special fears.

Novels after all are where we can safely go and have those encounters with the uncanny.

The coyote bitch had been in the cove only a few weeks, chased over the ridge by the logging crews, their roaring chainsaws and lumber rigs. This uncut range was rich with rabbit and squirrel. She let the bears be, steering wide of their clawing and backscratching on rough hickory trunks. She’d come with a brother and a sister from her litter, and they had brought down a calf or two, gorging themselves in a last family feast, then going their separate ways for the season.

The clouds drifted across the sun, drawing their long shadows over the mountainside. She started and raised her muzzle, sniffing the change in the air. Dark ruff raised on her hackles, she softly growled and bared her teeth. In the surrounding stillness, not a blade or leaf or branch dared to stir.

Something was stalking her.

Her instincts couldn’t foretell what came her way, another predator, a bigger beast never before encountered, a killer more cunning. She whined and slunk into the undergrowth, her silver tail bristling in the green.

Regal House Publishing is reissuing my novel Appalachian Book of the Dead in December. You can get your preorder here if you want to read more.

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Ladies like knowing your past. If a woman asks me over dinner or in bed, I’ll talk about my friend Walker and the summer we spent training in the rabbit-punches of romance. Stay clear of clinches in dark corners, he said. Never drop your guard. Walker warned I had a glass chin for love.

“Loosen up, Leftwich. You gotta learn to snap your punches.” Walker sat on my bed one night, critiquing my form as I endeavored to put my fist through the door.

“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” I grunted with each blow. Pounding my knuckles felt better than the steady ache I suffered inside. Carolyn Smathers did not love me after all. Her last words over the phone: “That’s really sweet, but I don’t think so.”

Along with the door workout, Walker encouraged deep howling. “Right out of the solar plexus. Get primal! Let those kinks out of your kundalini.”

I let out yowls that should have chipped the blue of the sky. I threw another roundhouse at the door.

“No, no, no,” Walker chided. “You skin your knuckles when you swing wild. Punch it! Punch it!”

An unloved man will stand before his bedroom door and pound his fists until something breaks — either wood or bone. I threw everything – arm, shoulder, back, heart — into the last blow. The splintered door hung crooked on its hinges. My hand swelled to twice its size. Walker drove me to the campus clinic where the doctor gave me a cast for the two broken fingers and sprained wrist.

“This boy, Walker, he hurt you very badly, didn’t he?” a woman named Diane once asked me.

Her eyes were green and her shoulders bare as we shared our histories over gin fizzes. Later she stroked the back of my right hand. Her questions seemed innocent enough, but I felt vaguely incriminated as I talked about my ex-best friend.

For the record, Walker Braxton Hodges IV stood last in a line of lawyers and politicians. “A man with no first name and a law firm for a signature,” he introduced himself. We split the rent on a house off campus that summer before our senior year. Walker never graduated -- he didn’t even pose for any of the yearbooks that collect dust in the back of my closet, but I keep a picture of him in my head.

The Walkman, a scarecrow with straw hair spiked out with gel and a gold hoop through his left earlobe. His chin was small but always angled out cocksure. His wardrobe consisted of black jackets from the Salvation Army, blue jeans with chewed-out knees, red high-top sneakers, skinny silk ties and a dozen pairs of sunglasses.

I desired to be as nonchalant, as existential, as cool. That June, I audited a fencing class. Swordsmanship would make me as dangerous as Walker. I brought home foils and masks so we could practice our repartee.

“En garde!”

The tip of his foil hissed in the air. Walker, of course, had studied saber under a Hungarian coach in prep school.

Zorro versus Captain Blood. Furiously, we swept through the living room, around the coffee table. Lunge to quarto, parry, riposte to sextet. Walker toyed with me, then whacked the crown of my head.

“Fight fair,” I complained. “Only the tip counts.”

“To the death, villain!” he sneered in a strange accent, probably learned from the Hungarian.

Walker jumped on the couch. I slashed at his feet, but he leapt over my deadly blade, and landed on top of me. Hilt to hilt for several straining seconds. I could smell chili and onions through the mask. I shoved him backwards.

His next charge chased me up the stairs. His flurry raised red welts across my arm, but he could not land his point on my chest. At the top of the landing, I had nowhere to go. I looked for a chandelier to leap to, ala Errol Flynn. I considered a sliding escape down the banister.

Walker lunged high and the tip caught my collarbone. His blade bent in an arc, then snapped. The broken metal snagged the shoulder of my sweatshirt, pinning me to the wall.

Walker peeled away his mask. Sweat pasted his blond hair to his temples. My roomie looked as if he were the one who had been run through. My stomach churned, and I half expected to find blood trickling down my chest when I looked.

“Only a flesh wound,” I said.

“I thought I’d killed you.”

“So did I for a second.”

We quit fencing in the house after that. Instead of the sword, I took up the sonnet, writing about my unrequited love for women I spied at supermarkets and stop lights.. When I showed Walker one of my poems, he countered with a limerick: “There once was a girl at A&P...”

I decided to drop the poetry bit, too.

“Did you really?” my future ex-wife asked.

Before we were married, Julie liked hearing about Walker and me in our salad days. “I can’t imagine you doing that.” She studied my face. Julie was a student of profile, convinced that the blows of the past left indelible marks. I never flinched under her scrutiny.

“Yes.” She touched my brow. “I can see that in you.”

But there were some things I never told her or any one. I’m not sure who would understand a story as wild as what happened at the Safari Room.

Walker often commiserated with me at that watering hole, frequented by student jocks hoping to graduate with beer guts and by blue-collar workers retired with veinburst noses. Walker called it the “So-Sorry Room.”

“Forget what’s her face. Forget true love.” Walker poured me a glass from a pitcher of draft. “All you need is to get laid.”

I shook my head, and sipped my beer. I sensed a presence looming over us. A hefty woman swayed by our booth, then plunked her ample Levis down, squeezing me to the wall.

“Want to arm wrestle?” she asked. Her name was Katy, and we saw her regularly at the bar, challenging lesser men to manual combat. A woman with biceps bigger than mine has always scared the bejesus out of me, and that evening, Katy seemed drunker and more intimidating than usual.

I raised my injured hand in its plaster cast, shook my head sadly.

“How about you, hon?” Katy turned a glassy-eyed attention to Walker.

He grinned. “What do I win if I beat you?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” She said coyly.

I was referee. Their hands locked in mid-air, and I signaled the battle to begin. I thought Walker could take her, but after a few seconds, the tendons popped out in Walker’s neck and his face reddened. Maybe he was toying with her, I thought, just as his arm buckled then collapsed in a sticky puddle of beer.

“I win! I win!” Katy squealed.

I raised my cast to the side of my face — a white blinder to hide my humiliation. Men all along the bar had been watching. Shaking their heads, they turned their attention back to the TV.

Walker routinely cheated in Monopoly and dealt off the bottom of the deck in five-card stud. He was such a bad sport that I had given up any friendly competition with him. I couldn’t believe how well he was taking his loss.

“Rematch later?” Walker rubbed his whipped muscles.

“Any time you want, sport,” Katy gloated.

After she excused herself to got to the “little girls’ room,” Walker leaned over and whispered. “This ain’t over ‘til we hear the fat lady sing.”

Katy returned with another pitcher of beer and pressed me to the wall once again. She was a big girl, but I kept noticing how blue her eyes were, the most delicate shade I’ve ever seen in a woman. Perhaps it was the beer going to my head, but the rub of her thigh against mine evolved from claustrophobic to desirable.

Two pitcher later at 2 a.m., we closed down the place and staggered out into the dark. “The night is still young,” Walker proclaimed. “No more than middle-aged,” I agreed. “What are we waiting for?” Katy giggled. Arm in arm in arm, we lurched down the block to the apartments where Katy lived, up a rickety flight of stairs to the second floor.

She didn’t bother with the lights. In the door and out of our clothes, the three of us wallowed on a queen-sized mattress, a tangle of limbs, mouths and rolls of sweet fat. She stroked my head of brown hair, his of blonde, as we lapped at her breasts. But the heavy plaster on my hand proved awkward in this arrangement. Walker elbowed me out of the proceedings. I rolled off her side and off the side of the bed.

Lying drunk of the floor, I listened to the commotion in the dark. I lifted my mending hand and touched a naked foot. My fingertips stroked the warm sole, but I was unsure whose skin I tickled. No one laughed.

The carpet smelled clean so I stayed there the night. I dreamed Walker was leading me through a slaughterhouse. Pink carcasses hung from the rafters, and soon I lost sight of my friend amid the sides of flesh.

The next morning, our deed sprawled under the knotted sheets. Her long brown hair swept over her broad shoulders. How soft she looked in the morning light. I wanted to touch her to see if she was still alive. Walker was already sliding out from under the covers. We tiptoed around the room, gathering our clothes while Katy gently snored.

Out on the street, Walker lost it. He beat his forehead against a telephone pole, doubled over and slapped his hands against the sidewalk. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Can you believe it? You, me, and the fat lady!”

My back was stiff from sleeping on the floor, my head throbbed with a hangover, and my skin itched under my cast, but I had to smile. Though technically I was still a virgin, it was as far as I’d ever been or have since with a woman blessed with biceps and remarkable blue eyes.

“Whatever happened to your friend?” A blonde named Sandy wanted to know. A weekend of steady drizzle at a rented beach house, and she was starting to look bored. I couldn’t rub oil on her shoulders, so I laid it on thick about Walker. How he left makes another good story women always want to hear.

Toward the end of the summer, Walker and I were in the kitchen one midnight. I was telling him about a visitor that afternoon.

“What did this guy want?” Walker asked. He had gotten in late, red-eyed and wired, suffering from the mulches. For his late supper, he devoured potato chips, french onion dip, peanut butter and Oleos over the kitchen sink.

“He didn’t really say,” I said. “Sounded like he was looking for a buy.”

“So what did he look like?”

Long-haired with a Fu Manchu, blue jeans, black Harley t-shirt and a vest the color of a gravy stain, the stranger looked the same as any low-life Walker dealt with in the parking lot of the Safari Room. But this was the first to coming knocking at our front door.

“Probably a narc.” Walker stuffed his mouth with chips.

“How can you tell?”

“You saw a lump in his jeans, right? A narc keeps a Beretta snuck down in his crotch.”

I remembered the narc had kept his hands in his pockets as we talked through the screen door. I replayed the conversation in my mind, going over the transcript the DA would read in court if the undercover agent had been wired. Did I mention anything illegal: MDA, Valium, Percodans, Quaaludes or any of the other pharmaceuticals stashed in the freezer between the ice cube trays and the Rocky Road? Walker once told me all you needed to be a dealer was a refrigerator and an ability to count cash.

“Leftwich, I think you saved my life.” Walker grinned teeth black with Oleos.

Two weeks later when classes started, he was gone, leaving me with an empty refrigerator, the busted door to replace and none of his share of back rent.

I’ve heard all sorts of rumors about Walker since.

Everyone who’s met him seems to have a story. Walker was spotted in Mexico, running a heroin lab. He was spied on a Montreal street corner, his body for sale. He was playing bass in an L.A. punk band, Lon Chaney and the Hunchbacks.

My life hasn’t been nearly as interesting. Graduation. Jobs. Marriage. Julie made a thin bride, but I divorced her after she became an anorexic wraith stalking me through the few rooms of our first apartment. I’ve had my share of wall banging and howling and waking the neighbors. I know now if I keep my hands in my pockets, gripping loose change and keys until my fingers hurt, the rage will walk away.

As I outgrew the post-adolescence of my twenties, the stories I heard and told about Walker grew more mythic. One New Year’s Eve, he was mixing martinis in a Manhattan penthouse when a fire broke out dozens of floors below. In the confusion of revelers fleeing down smoky staircases and fire escapes, Walker was last seen headed toward Port Authority with two bottles of Tanqueray tucked under his arm.

His family filed a missing persons report, but I never heard that he turned up again. In seven years, he would be legally dead or he would have made good another escape.

At least I thought so -- until the knock at my front door.

There comes an hour at the end of the day that made you nostalgic, the way the sun slants through bare trees, the golden haze you walk into that looks warm, but always a cold breeze blows through it. I was caught in such a light in my living room when I saw a shadowy figure at the door, a hand held to side of the face to peer through the screen.

“Leftwich? You at home?”

I shook my head in the drowsy light I thought was playing tricks on me. “Walker, is that really you?”

Walker opened the door and stepped into my life again. “Things sure do change.” His voice had the same jaunty tone, but the chin that had seemed perpetually cocked had lost its angle, and burrowed into his wrinkled shirt collar. His hair was starting to thin on top.

“How about a cold one?” I offered like old times, like only a day had passed since I’d last seen him instead of a decade.

Walker grimaced. “How about some water?”

He sat down then struggled forward on the second-hand sofa that always threatened to swallow my guests whole. Between his knees, he set a metallic briefcase, its shiny surface dinged as if by bouncing bullets.

Clearing his throat, he shook out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. I brought his glass of water and an ashtray. Walker tapped the cigarette on his knee for a full five minutes before he lit up.

Myself, I had quit a few years back, cold turkey, but now I craved one badly.

I couldn’t help but be curious about Walker and what he’d been up to. The resume was spotted, he said: insurance salesman, used cars, carpets on commission, then time shares on the telephone. Sales and marketing consultant was his latest title.

“Been a tough year. You might have noticed I’m not exactly the picture of health.” He pinched his wan cheek. “Got hepatitis from a meatball sub a Greek sold me. Just getting back a human flesh tone now, knock on wood.”

And he did just that – leaned over my wobbly coffee table and rapped the dull finish with his knuckles, a knock that echoed in the darkening room.

“But I’m a businessman.” He balanced the aluminum case on his knees. “You’re my oldest friend, and the last person I ought to be asking this, but I want you to keep an open mind on this. We’re talking real money here.”

I was mentally flipping through my checkbook. Bills had erased last week’s pitiful pay stub, but I saw my hand rounding out big zeroes. After ten years, Walker comes waltzing back in the front door. How could I resist the invitation to dance?

But I tried. “I don’t want to get into anything shady, Walker.”

“Shady? Shady? We’re talking absolutely clean. This stuff is guaranteed.” He drummed the metal sides of his briefcase.

No telling what he was carting into my house: bags of finely cut white powder, thick stacks of money, probably a snub-nosed automatic.

“You still owe me from the last time I saved your ass,” I reminded him. “Remember the narc?”

“Narc?” Walker popped open the locks on top of the case.

“The undercover agent who came to the house?”

Walker looked dumbfounded, then he slowly smiled. “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten all about that. He was just a guy looking to collect some money I owed on a ball game. You thought he was a narc.”

“You said so.”

“I was just a smalltime dealer. I never got that big.”

Walker opened the case and handed me a sales brochure. Dozens of soap samples lined the interior: a carpet cleaner, a car wax compound, industrial strength spot remover, sidewalk cleaner, rust eradicator. Anything to do with the removal of stains, spills, spots no matter how old, Walker’s products were guaranteed to clean or your money back.

“Say you take a few of these.” He stacked samples on my coffee table. “Show ‘em around the office. Tell the neighbors. Everybody needs something cleaned up, some troublesome spot taken care of.”

“You got the wrong guy,” I said. “I wouldn’t know how to live too clean.”

“Hey, it doesn’t look too bad around here,” Walker lied as he glanced around my reduced circumstances.

“Tell that to my girlfriend.”

Walker looked defeated. Restacking the samples inside his case, he closed the metal lid and snapped the locks shut with his thumbs. “The ladies always did like you.”

With a smoky sigh, he snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray, glanced at his watch. “Well, hey, this has been fun, but I’ve got some miles to make.”

He waved away the brochure I tried to give back. “Keep it. There’s a toll-free number. Here, have some complimentary bath salts.” He tossed the package on the coffee table.

“I can’t help you,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Soap,” he said. “Just think about it.”

At the door, he shifted his briefcase from one fist to the other, then shook my hand. “Good to see you again, Leftwich. We really ought to keep in touch.”

That was the last I saw of Walker Braxton Hodges IV. Standing on the sidewalk before my house, he put on his sunglasses, then tipped them up on his forehead like a visor, uncertain if there was enough glare to matter any more. Hoisting his case of soap, he headed down the street for yet another door, hoping for a sale before the end of the day.

I picked up the bath salts on the table. They would make a good gift for Michelle when I drove over to her apartment later that night. But I wasn’t sure how good an ending Walker had made for my story until I finished telling it in bed.

“Poor guy.” Michelle propped her head up on an elbow, the satin sheet sliding off her white shoulder. “I feel sorry for him.”

“Yeah, he’s down on his luck.” I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing the soles of my feet against Michelle’s wonderful shag carpet. “I should have done something for him,” I ventured.

She reached over and ran one of her perfect fingernails down my spine. “Now, don’t go feeling so bad. Sounds like you were a better friend to him than he was to you.”

I put on the bathrobe I kept at Michelle’s, cinching the silk belt tight.

“Great legs,” she said.

“It’s my great training.” Grinning, I threw her a feint with my left, a jab with my right.

“Hurry back, champ,” she said.

I danced out the door and down the hall like the world heavyweight champ headed for the spotlighted ring. I jabbed after the long shadows that played on the walls to the bathroom. I was forever grateful to Walker for his instruction: keep moving, don’t drop your guard, never pull a punch. My blows brushed the walls soft as kisses.

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Water boiling on the stove, the phone ringing; the daughter pulling at her skirt, pestering her once more to french braid the doll’s synthetic blonde hair; the son at the top of the stairs, at the top of his new voice, wondering the whereabouts of his scout uniform in the endless cycle of laundry; and the husband not helping matters by answering the persistent telephone and the telemarketer she had hung up on three times already this week, who was pitching the newspaper she once read, wanted to read, had no time to read, let alone recycle.

The oven clock that always loses time shows her home for all of seventeen minutes.

She burns herself, transferring pot to sink to drain the overcooked pasta, steam rising in her face. Her daughter’s wheedling. Her son’s shouting, her husband who won’t hang up, who will never hang up. She slaps away her daughter’s insistent hand. Barbie lands in the puddle of pasta water on the chipped linoleum. “Not right now,” she meant to say, but hears herself scream: “No!” She wheels from the sink, faces her family, freezes them into stone, her thoughts like snakes shooting out her throbbing skull. They recognize her for the Monster Mom she truly is.

Jim hangs up the phone, rescues Barbie from the floor, takes Katy to her place at the table, tells Kevin to cool it. “Keep your pants on, kiddo, we’ll find the shirt after we all sit down and have this nice meal your mother has made us.” The patient husband reassures their startled children, makes time go forward, while she stands in the fluorescent glare of her kitchen, reverberating.

Long married, the mother of two, far too rutted in her career path to turn back now, settled, that word she would have never thought to call her life, Val Parker has finally found herself saying “no.”

Later in bed, Val tried to explain, to apologize. “I’m sorry. It’s the job. It’s everything. I just can’t think.”

What she found hard these days was simply catching her breath. Her lungs seemed to have sprung a leak; she never could find a full, deep breath of air. She panted through the hours of her day, her pulse racing at stoplights, late to pick up Katy at dance, drop off Kevin at Scouts.

“I know, love,” Jim said.

She lay on her side while her husband’s expert hands kneaded the tight muscles of her back, his fingers finding the excess energy trapped in the rings of bone. Val talked about getting away, reassessing her life, prioritizing what was important. Reassess, another word she never thought she’d use regarding herself.

“Go. You should, you know.”

His fingers tiptoed playfully over her hip. She hoped it would go no further than that. Fuck that. She didn’t need that. She stiffened.

He read that flinch in her and his hand withdrew. He rolled over, pulling the cover with him. “Whatever, Val.”

Much can be said for family togetherness, but more should be said for emptying a household of all its inhabitants, freeing them for a time from terrible obligations of love and nurture. Kevin off to scout camp. Jim starting summer classes. Katy, she shipped to her own mother in Philadelphia, an annual sacrifice to that shrine of china and damask Val had fled years before. Grammy would take her shopping, buy her makeup, adorable dresses, charm bracelets. Katy, the perfect girl’s girl Val never was, loved it, loved that harridan who Valerie had never failed to disappoint when she was growing up.

Val had time coming herself, two weeks, not counting the days rolled over from last year, not that anyone ever used all of the vacation allotted by the non-profit agency that aided unwed teenaged mothers. Still, the pregnancy rate couldn’t climb higher, the office wouldn’t collapse if she took a long weekend. A few nights away from her real life, perhaps she could reach some conclusions, or at least right her listing sense of self.

She packed their second car with an overnight bag. She gave her husband’s cheek a dry peck. He smiled and waved as she backed out the driveway. He was probably glad to see her go. At the top of the cul-de-sac, she braked, stared into the rearview mirror. Jim was ringing his mistress, Kevin getting high with the Second-Class scouts at camp, Katy likely picking out her gown and escort for her debutante ball. Turn back, now, no, too late.

She didn’t recognize the feeling at first. Then it came slowly, almost a gasp, a relief from the tightness of her ribcage. She was free for the next four days.

Val merged onto the turnpike, then took the interstate up the valley toward Vermont. Driving north, concrete curves and straightaways in endless repetition, the amnesia of the interstate. The high walls buffering the traffic from neighborhoods fell by the wayside, then, slowly, the land shifted. Solitary boulders stood by the highway’s shoulder, fallen from the blasted cliffs.

As she drove, she played her old divas, Linda Ronstadt, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday, the soundtrack of her youth kept in a shoebox. Val embarrassed herself, reminded of her mother swooning to Big Band swing while driving the Lincoln to visit her father’s grave. Besides, the tapes were so old, they broke when Val tried to rewind. Static hissed through the speakers.

She snapped off the stereo, and drove in silence, alone now for more than two hours. What was that? Yes, she heard herself thinking. With each mile rolling up on her odometer, she felt a year rolling off her. She cranked down the window and let the hot wind fill the car, roaring around her ears, ruffling her blonde hair at the nape of her neck. She had on sunglasses. She looked good in the rearview mirror.

Things looked different driving into downtown Burlington; more stores, more traffic, but she had to admit it had been almost twenty years. Drifting through the busy intersections, the old turns of her life, she caught glimpses of the waterfront, the great lake stretching to a hazy range on the distant shore. She once knew her way around town but had had downloaded Internet directions to her bed-and-breakfast to be on the safe side. She didn’t remember this particular street, even though all the houses had been here in her time, rambling Victorian manses that once housed the counterculture, psychedelic flophouses where long haired men and women in peasant blouses had made love and grown pot in the attics, now beckoned to balding men and thickening matrons seeking nothing more hallucinatory than fall foliage.

The woman she had spoken to on the phone showed her to the third floor, to what must have been a little girl’s bedroom or even a servant’s cell with its dormered windows and the sloping ceiling she could almost touch above her bed.

“Oh, how lovely.” Val bounced on the edge of the bed like Katy would have. She stifled the delicious urge to squeal.

“It’s yours if you want, the whole house,” the innkeeper said. No older than herself, the woman was slumped in the doorway, her arms crossed warily.

Suddenly, they were sharing a confidence Val neither expected nor welcomed. The woman and her husband had come years before and bought the house, lovingly renovated it, weeks of sanding and stripping, finally finished, opened for business. The nameless He had fallen for someone else, a guest. Now the woman wanted to tear the house down, run through the rooms, raking the pretty wallpaper with her fingernails.

“No one knows what it takes to keep a place like this going. Strangers coming to stay night after night.” the innkeeper said sadly, then she politely, professionally brightened. “But you’re all set. We have pastries and coffee down in the parlor starting at seven. Let me know if you need anything.”

Alone in her room, solitary, Val wished she could share this rare feeling with some one. It was so pretty, this room to call her own for the next four days, she wanted a picture of it. But she had packed no camera. She could buy a postcard but to whom would she send it, and what could she say on the back of a three-by-five slip of paper about why she was here?

She unpacked her tote, arranged her clothes in the dresser drawers of the old but not antique bureau. She had packed light. No laptop, no cellular phone, lest she be tempted to check her e-mail or voice mail. She brought pens and legal pads for her reassessment, and then, at the last minute, rescued from the closet a journal of her time in this town. She flopped across the bed and opened the blue marbled cover, leaving through the stiff pages, her old life:

I am not a person who deals well with parties, particularly after a night of work and on my feet. Met one interesting man though. Not what I thought of as my type. He was tall, even sitting down against the wall. Actually, he sat on the back of the chair with his feet on the seat, like a gargoyle or a bird of prey about to swoop down on the sweaty maidens. He asked me to dance. Gangly, I thought following him onto the dance floor. Then he turns into Fred Astaire. The man can dance, can actually lead. Dips, twirls, spins. And he has whipped me out into space and I swirl back into his arm, tight against his body, his chest, his arms. We’re in the movies. People are watching us. They actually applaud when the music stops. I think he said his name is Henry. Definitely Henry.

That summer seventeen years before, she had kept her journal religiously, filling the pages in between customers. The other waitresses where she worked thought she was tallying her tips, which she did, along with her passing thoughts. She noted her every expense, how much for rent at the house where she lived, how much she spent on beer and wine, worried she was drinking too much. She was saving for a car, a trip to Europe, the life to come. She worked evenings, went dancing with girlfriends, went home with boys one after the other, slept in mornings in her own bed, and rose late to drink coffee, complete the crossword and to record all that she had thought or felt in those twenty-four hours.

Val recognized her wry humor, how she so quickly sized up people and took their measure, a savvy that had advanced her career at the non-profit agency after having her kids, but now she seemed only judgmental with a tendency to quickly stuff strangers into mental boxes, close the lid and label. No more thought necessary.

She saw the girl who once was her, lounging with her hand in her chin, the book open for her thoughts, her fingers rubbing the rim of her coffee cup. Sitting in the northern sun, she turned to bronze, her hair spun to gold. She would spy boys on the street, let her eyes linger after their broad shoulders, their tight hips down the street. And when they turned the corner out of view, she found herself gazing at the great dark lake, imagined an icy plunge into its depths. She shivered with possibilities. The days were impossibly bright, the nights never long enough. She was saving for Paris. From Burlington to the boulevards. She would look at art. She would eat petit fours. She would meet a French boy, no, a Frenchman with a chateaux, who would know how to please her.

“Your change, ma’am.”

Her server held a plastic tray of loose coins. The girl was blonde and well-scrubbed, the image of herself years before when one was only an unannounced waitress, not a self-introduced server. What had the girl – whose name Val had automatically forgotten – what had she called her? Ma’am? As in matronly?

A metallic bitterness rising in her throat. As if the girl had made her swallow the change, one penny at a time.

“Please don’t. I’m not...” It was impossible to explain. She was tempted to stiff the girl her tip, then she put down too much money, as if trying to buy the girl’s understanding.

The trip was turning out to be a mistake. No one knew her now, no one noticed her, a single middle-aged woman hurrying along the sidewalk, pushing past window shoppers. She felt like a ghost, not visible as flesh and blood by the people who lived here now. She passed a club where she once danced, but the sound shoved out the doors seemed louder than she remembered. Music without melody and a rhythm like that of a garbage truck making the rounds of a sleeping neighborhood.

She stopped at a pay phone, dug through her purse for the calling card. Disoriented, she needed a voice from her current life. Jim would say something bland and reassuring. But after four rings, the machine answered, the friendly voice. “Hi, you’ve reached the Parkers. We can’t come to the phone right now....”

“It’s me,” she said, waiting for the damned beep. “I’m OK. I just wanted to say hey. Hey. Have you heard from Kevin or Katy? Is the house still there? You won’t change the locks while I’m away.” She paused. “Hey, I love you.” How strange that sounded, then she added, “That’s all,” and hung up. The machine now blinked its red eye in their empty house.

She hesitated in the phone booth, her palm still clammy on the receiver hung in its cradle. There was a town directory chained beneath the shelf. She opened it, searching for someone, anyone familiar, an old girlfriend from her time here. The first page she turned to, her eyes fell on his name. Unbelievable. Henry still here, after all these years. Henry Hill. It wasn’t the same number, the one she knew by heart and thought she had forgotten. It was like karma, kismet, a crossword word. Henry, her heartthrob, the best dancer she ever knew, the first unfumbling lover, a man, not a boy. He lived around the corner from where she was staying.

It was embarrassing to remember how much she loved him. Smitten was the only word. Even now she felt a pang in her chest. She crossed the street and counted the addresses. Oh God. Here was the house, No. 18. She felt like a schoolgirl, a groupie. She darted up the drive, to a vintage Volvo parked by the weathered porch. On the cluttered dash, she saw an envelope with his name. For a second, she wanted to steal his electric bill.

Later that evening, middle-aged, mature Val Parker found herself standing once again at the foot of the driveway. She walked past the car and the porch and into the backyard beneath the shadow of the spreading oak. She was tempting fate, or at least ridicule. Only a crazy woman stands in people’s back lawns at night, spying into their lighted windows. Still she stood there, listening, waiting until it came, like an answer, and made her throat tighten.

She heard his laugh, a goofy, high-pitched cackle. She had loved how Henry laughed, how it shook his whole body, turned his face red until she thought he was choking to death, and people stared at them in public places. They had laughed in bars, and in bed, and driving around town and through the beautiful country. It was impossible but it was him, years later, Henry still laughing. Mosquitoes were making mincemeat of her calves, once the slim muscles of a girl who loved to dance. They were drawing blood, her blood, but she could not pull herself from the past. She stood in the dark, holding her breath, waiting for his laughter.

Henry the dancer called me finally. My roommate took the message. “May I have the next dance?” Just tell her that, he said. Roommate sounded envious. I called back and we decided on dinner. Afterwards, a walk by the lake. How terrible first dates. I wish sometimes that we could just strip ourselves naked. This is the part I love best. No need for words. How shy he seemed. He slips under the sheets with me, and we move together so sweetly. I love how he laughs. We were so sweaty. We danced to Little Richard, to Talking Heads, to Rolling Stones, to whatever they played. And then we walked home. I remember his hand at my back that touch, there was an electricity between us. No man has ever touched me there, so tenderly. The small of my back. He belongs there.

At a sidewalk café, she watched women like herself eye storefronts stocked with quilted coverlets, overpriced local crafts, knickknacks of Vermont they did not need. They darted in and emerged with their loot in string bags, loaded their luxury cars to drive back to the City. Weekenders, the people she used to despise as a waitress, even as she counted her tips, hoarding loose change to take her to Europe. They reminded her of her mother. Crossing nervously her feet beneath the table, she kicked the paper bag filled with guilty gifts. For Katy, a nice doll, A Swiss Army knife for Kevin. Nothing for Jim, a man so contented he was impossible to buy for, but in the bookstore she found something for herself, a handmade journal.

She dated the first blank page and wrote her unusual location, then had gone blank herself staring at the lined page for twenty minutes, gnawing the cap of the pen. She thought of a thousand things to say about her life, but in the end, closed the book and put away the pen. She had fallen out of the habit. The hours and pages and paragraphs she had spent recording the weather and her own fickle moods seventeen years before had been pared down. Now she noted sunshine and rain, blue days and sunny dispositions in her electronic organizer. Her quotidian life could be summoned with a keystroke command: “Good Day” or “Hard Going today” or “Today Sucked.”

Still thinking over her lost days, she gathered her treasures from beneath the table, turned and collided with a passerby. Instinctively, she tightened. Her bag spilled across the sidewalk.

“Why don’t you...”

“Sorry. Sorry. Let me help.”

The man knelt apologetically, as she snatched the journal, the doll, the knife from his unhelpful hands. He had on sandals with rag wool socks. Dark hairs running along his shapely shins. He wore a white shirt, the sleeves rolled neatly. She looked into his face, the graying beard, the wrinkled eyes.

“Sorry,” he offered again.

“Henry?”

“Jesus, Val?”

They rose as one, laughing in disbelief. It wasn’t possible. Encounters like this happen only in real life, never in stories. No one would believe her, she thought, then she was thinking that she couldn’t tell Jim this. She would tell no one.

“It really is you, isn’t it?”

No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.

They did their awkward dance on the sidewalk and decided on a mutual hug. He patted her back softly. She squeezed his lean ribs, smelled the scent of his chest.

“My God, I can’t believe it. Val. He held her back at long arm’s length, and said her name, “Val,” more than a little wistfully, she thought.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

“Seventeen years,” she said.

They walked to his house, but he did not invite her inside, but left her with the propriety of the front porch while he went in for some beer. She wondered what his life was like inside, still messy? He returned with two cold sweating bottles, and played the host, offering a ratty rattan chair. Henry leaned back in his chair, balancing himself with one lanky leg against the porch post. Val hiked her white legs up on the rail. They did not look so bad from this angle, she smiled to herself, then she turned that smile toward Henry.

Strange how little time it takes to fill in the details of the past two decades. She opened her wallet and showed the pictures of her husband, her two children to her old lover. She talked about her job. She mentioned her mother, still in Philadelphia.

“You swore you’d never be that woman.”

She drank him in. “Henry Hill, oh, it is definitely you.”

He didn’t laugh now, but smiled, wistfully, she thought. “Tell me about your husband.”

“Jim.” Val sat up, her feet on the floor instead of up in the air. “Oh, he’s a good man.”

After the obligatory post-college backpacking about Europe, she met and married Jim Parker, a graduate student in Boston, who became a very good English teacher adored by his girl students. Assistant headmaster at a private school, not the most prestigious but academically strong. Of course, without the endowments and the through-the-gabled-roof tuition of the better known boarding schools, they paid their faculty poorly.

“We joke that we’re only pretending to live in Connecticut. Any day now they’ll pass a law for a minimum bank account and run us out of the neighborhood.”

She could feel herself frowning, the worry lines of her mother wrinkling her mouth. She quickly gulped more beer. “And you, Henry Hill, what’s happened to you?”

He had never quite finished the graduate degree, hung around the university for years, but never sat down long enough to write the dissertation. He still had all the notes, maybe someday. He’d just closed a business on Main Street, a little comics shop. She might have passed it. Construction sometimes in the summer, though he was getting too old for the long summers, the trickle of extra income teaching Transcendental Meditation.

“Oh, I remember,” said Val. “Did you ever learn to fly?”

He shook his head in all seriousness. Once he’d shown her how the gurus could levitate from a lotus position. He called it flying, although it looked suspiciously like he was hopping on his butt. “I went out to Iowa one summer and took classes at Maharishi U.,” he admitted. “It takes years.”

He sank deeper into his chair. Val felt the same weight, too much gravity, so many years. Meditation hadn’t saved his marriage, but kept him sane through the divorce and helped him deal with his son. Named Dylan, fifteen now. Purple hair cut, nose and eyebrow rings, super smart but suspicious of affection, although Henry tried on his alternate weekends of custody. Besides splitting a son, he shared rent and bed with a Dutch woman, a massage therapist. He said nothing more about her, but the strange gesture of his head and shoulders, somewhere between a shrug’s resignation, a nod’s curt knowledge, said everything.

They sat on the porch and fell silent. The beers grew warm in their hands. A breeze blew across the yard, flipped the underside of the sycamore leaves and raised chilblains on Val’s bare legs. The wind came from the dark lake, the reservoir of glaciers melted ages ago, an icy reminder of the returning cold.

Val shivered and blew her own odd note across the lip of her bottle, then swallowed a bitter mouthful. Instead of a Dutch masseuse and Jim, instead of difficult Dylan, and her babies, Kevin and Katy, it may have turned out all so differently. Her heart raced right to the edge of a void in her gut, and teetered there. She did not know what she wanted.

She stood and heard her knees crack, betrayed by joints that once had been supple. “I really must be going. This has been so nice.” She swore she would never be this cold and distant, but too late. Val heard her mother’s voice coming out of her mouth.

Henry stood too, poor man with battered hands and a helpless look, still a good dancer, a decent man without a clue to his life. They hugged and swayed slightly as if listening to some tune out of their past. Blushing, she craned her neck and brushed his lips with her own. She had forgotten what it was like to kiss a bearded man. If he had asked her inside then and there, led her by the hand, she might have gone. But he let go and they stepped apart into their separate lives, their histories, their futures yet to come.

“We should keep in touch,” Henry said.

“Yes, of course.” She found a business card and on the back scribbled her home phone. He slipped the card into his shirt pocket, patted it with a knowing smile. She knew Henry; he would lose it.

On the first page of her new book, she jotted his name and number. So it would be an address book, not a journal after all.

“You’ve still got your writing, I see.” His smile was shy in his graying beard.

“Oh, this.” She stuffed the book in her bag.

“I saw you for weeks at that café, always with a journal. I thought you were a novelist. You used to get out of bed and write things. I wondered what you put down about me.”

“Only good things, Henry.” She laughed as she lied.

She had not written everything, that was the problem, she decided later, walking back to her bed and breakfast along sidewalks busy with summer visitors. Festive crowds in shorts and sandals and sneakers hiked the asphalt and cobblestones, in search of New England. What had she been thinking, what had she thought she would find, poking about her past? She had her life, her children, her work, and Jim, always smiling, always understanding while she played the moody one in their marriage. He was no Henry, thank God.

Jim would smile at a goof like Henry, his long legs folded into a lotus position, trying to clear his long-haired head of the laws of gravity. She laughed, first at Henry, then, more bitterly, at herself. Weren’t her journals the biggest joke, nothing but the notes of a flighty girl? She had breezed through the unpleasant, edited her life to fit the nicely lined pages. What about the part she left out, that pregnant part?

In the same casual way they had talked over the tab for dinner or drinks, Henry offered to split the bill for what she finally decided needed to be done. That, they did not talk over, that was her deal and hers alone in their unspoken agreement. He had driven her to the clinic. Not so many years before and this would have been illegal, unthinkable, dangerous. But Henry could go no farther with her. He waited in the car, afraid to be the only man sitting in a room of such women. But when she came back out, she found him lying in the grass beside the car.

“So soon?” He got to his feet, brushing stems from the frayed sleeves of his white shirt. Had he fallen asleep?

They drove back to Henry’s apartment. She went into the bedroom and lay down. The rickety springs shifted as he got into bed and held her. There were no tears in her. They seem to have been surgically removed along with the fetus.

But she heard him crying. “You wouldn’t have kept it? We couldn’t have?”

You sonofabitch, you never asked. If you had only asked. You selfish bastard. Why ask now? But she said nothing.

The light slanted through the green trees of Vermont waving outside her window. The season was changing. Soon winter would come. Lying this close to Henry, she felt herself moving miles away, already driving away..Along the road, the hills flashed glimpses of granite, vestiges of the glaciers that had shaped this world in ancient advances and retreats, leaving their long scars

Three days in Vermont and enough lattes to last a lifetime. She emptied the dresser drawers, packed the suitcase, set it by the door. She studied the room, the solitude she was surrendering a day early. She stood a long time at the window overlooking a dying elm tree and the play set in the yard next door.

At the fateful pay phone again, she punched in the complicated numbers of her calling card. She shaded her eyes against the glare off the lake.

“Hey, it’s me,” she said when he answered. It was good to hear his calm voice.

“You had enough time to think?”

Yes, she was thinking. That night in bed, his strong hands kneading her back, she would turn to him. He would raise himself over her, a dark hovering angel, press into her. “Have you reassessed your life?” Yes, oh yes she imagined herself melting, moving beneath him.

“What?” On the phone, Jim was saying something she didn’t quite catch. “I’m sorry. “What did you say?”

“I said it hasn’t been the same here. I miss you.”

“Me too,” she said softly.

She checked the rear-view mirror and drove on, not looking back. In the seat beside her, the new journal, unmarked, undefiled, lay on the faded cover of her old one. She resolved to write in it, write more, and more than weather reports and passing moods, but about progress, what she felt, how far she’d come.

Share Dale Neal: Mountains & Rivers

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She sits naked in a green leather wingback chair, her long legs tucked beneath her, as she begins a postcard: Dearest Dreama…

Dreama Honeycutt shivers in the chill of the air conditioner and in her own delight.

Our weekend in Charleston was so wonderful. I requested the best room in the house just for us.

They found perfection waiting for them. Chilled champagne, chocolate mints on fluffed pillows, a four-poster bed with lace canopy, guest stationary. The champagne is half-gone by the night stand, the bubbles stilled. She’ll save the cork as a souvenir. The rich candy melts on her tongue as she writes, And our lovemaking...

Dreama chews the tip of the pen. What would he write?

Dwight Jenkins is still asleep. His sweet mouth is open, her hair mussed like a little boy’s. The sleeve of his t-shirt is hiked up his arm, revealing the tattoo he is embarrassed to sport twenty years since service. The triceps is inked with a mermaid, her seaweed-green hair tousled against his pale skin.

Not knowing what Dwight would say, she puts the postcard aside and dresses. Dwight will probably sleep late after the long drive down last night. She can take a walk, having the morning to herself.

The air in the courtyard is heavy with the fragrance of the magnolia’s drooping flowers. All the guests staying in the former carriage house are asleep. She crosses the street into the seaside park. Old guns still aim at the island in the harbor, the first famous target of that old war. The cannonballs are cemented into neat pyramids. Statues of men with sabers and long rifles stand at each corner, mute sentinels guarding gallantry, sacrifice, doomed struggle. Spanish moss waves from the trees like tattered flags.

“I could make you a uniform. It’s not like I can’t sew,” she said when Dwight mentioned his Civil War hobby. At first Dreama though he meant he dressed up in re-enactments. As a girl, she once saw men wage make-believe war in a cow pasture. They slept under canvas tents, made johnnycake on cookfires, played “Dixie” on plaintive harmonicas. Her class had taken a field trip, fourth-graders marching through the battlefield.

“You could wear the plumed hat of a cavalryman,” she said. “I could be your Southern Belle.”

Dwight blinked his blue-gray eyes. “You don’t have to pretend. You’re not Scarlett, my dear.” he laughed.

Dwight does not dress up in the past. He is a student of obscure skirmishes rather than large campaigns. Driving the interstate, he suddenly pointed into the distance. “This exit, go left a few miles, there’s a battlefield, a marker where Stoneman’s raiders rode down a rag-tag bunch of Rebs, farmers mostly who didn’t like their barns being burned down.”

Dreama took his word, though all she could see on the horizon were overpasses and towering gas signs.

Yesterday, Dwight pointed to an approaching line of headlights. They watched the military convoy pass for miles. Helmeted soldiers rode in pairs in camouflaged Humvees. Transport trucks rumbled along the right lane, canvas tops flapping in the wind. Thunderheads swelled the western sky where the troops seemed headed.

“I hope it doesn’t rain on them,” Dreama said. She was thinking of the National Guardsman she had dated before Dwight. She slept alone every third weekend while he was on maneuvers. Later he admitted he was seeing someone else.

“Clear skies ahead,” Dwight said. “Don’t you worry.”

He had planned their first weekend out of town, making reservations and mapping out the historic sites they must see. Dwight promised to show here where the war really started. Last night after checking into their room, they went for a walk along the seawall, but it was too dark to see the famous fort three miles out in the harbor.

“They fired the first shot early in the morning,” Dwight lectured. “Not here actually, but up on Cummings Point, then Fort Moultrie joined in. Beauregard had forty-seven mortars and howitzers. They hammered the place non-stop for nearly two days before the Yanks surrendered. Four thousand rounds and nobody got killed.”

They strolled by a cannon aimed toward the unseen island. A black couple perched on the barrel, their mouths straining in a deep kiss. The girl’s ankles were demurely crossed. The boy kicked his unlaced sneaker against the cast iron.

The black kids are gone this morning. Sun glints off the choppy bay. Dreama has to shade her eyes. A jogger pads behind here. Drops of perspiration fall from his arms like hot rain on the sidewalk. Dreama breathes in the salt air, the smell of sweat.

From the Battery, she ventures into the narrow streets of the old city. Sidewalks scattered with broken palm fronds lead past shuttered windows, brass-fitted doors. From behind the brick walls, she hears a baby cry, the yap of a small dog. She smells coffee and bacon, magnolia blooms, the sea. She peers through iron gates into verdant courtyards. A man sits in a small green jungle, rattling his morning newspaper.

The mailman is already out on his rounds. He wears a pith helmet, short sleeves, blue shorts, calf-length hose — the same clothes Dreama wears to work back home. She wants to say something when he goes by, but she is out of uniform. She is on vacation.

Actually, she had met Dwight, delivering his mail. Everyday, she stopped by his insurance office with a stack of bills, claims, policy cancellations. He eyed her long legs whenever she wore the blue shorts. Flustered by his attention, Dreama had asked about those charts he was always frowning over.

“Actuary tables. They tell the insured when he can expect to die. Very accurate,” Dwight smiled. “Did you know insurance used to be outlawed in the Middle Ages. It was considered gambling on a poor sailor’s life.”

Over dinner, Dwight told her he had served as a gunnery assistant on a battleship. Before computers or pocket calculators, the Navy taught him to use a slide rule to calculate trajectories of projectiles, how far a shell would carry before it met its mark.

Funny, now he calculates his clients’ lives, Dreama thought, but knew better than to say aloud on a first date.

The mailman works his way down the street. At each house, he sorts through his leather sack. Junk mail makes up the bulk of her deliveries as well. It’s the letters that are the best to slip in the box, They give the job its real weight, but people don’t write like they once did. Her mother used to send letters, filling pages of lined notebook paper with a crabbed Palmer script, right up until her death from cancer. Now, holidays and birthdays, Dreama’s sister in Florida sends greeting cards. “Found anyone special yet?” Sis always draws a smiley face.

The carrier stops beneath a Confederate flag draped over the doorway. His blue uniform suddenly strikes her as out of place. Did the mailmen every wear gray, delivering the news from Bull Run, Gettysburg, Appomattox at last?

Dreama stops at an oak door, pushes the brass lid of the mailslot. Her fingers slide in imaginary condolences, a wax-sealed envelope perhaps, addressed with the flourishes of an old-fashioned quill.

Dear Mrs. Jessup, it befalls us the sad duty to inform you of the death of your gallant husband in the noble cause. Capt. Dwight Jenkins died from wounds suffered in a courageous assault upon impregnable enemy positions. Be proud to know he carried our banner to the crest of the hill before he fell.

The brass slot falls back in place. The door opens.

“Oh, excuse me.” Dreama steps back.

An old woman stands on the threshold. A liver-spotted hand clasps her robe’s frilly collar tight at the hollow of her throat.

“Oh my God. You have some word?” The woman asks.

“Sorry,” Dreama tries to say. The sound starts as a hum in her throat but won’t come out between her teeth.

“Don’t just stand there!” The woman shrieks. “Have you found him yet? Tell me!”

The woman’s look is so awful, Dreama can’t meet her eyes. She looks past the woman’s trembling head at an old clock ticking on a highboy, at a hardwood staircase, at a man in pajamas running down the steps. He gently takes the woman’s elbow and pulls her inside. “Would you please go away,” the man says. “Please leave us alone.” The door closes.

Dreama walks fast, her face burning. She hurries past the high houses and the lives locked within.

“Where have you been?” Dwight sits in the wing-back chair, wrapped only in a towel after his shower. The sideboard is set with a breakfast tray, croissants, cheesecake, coffee, crystal goblets of orange juice.

“I went for a walk,” Dreama says. “I thought you’d still be asleep when I got back.”

“I could get used to the Life of Reilly here. You could be the Queen of Sheba. Roll?” He offers her a croissant split and smeared with marmalade.

She shakes her head. He takes a big bite, brushes crumbs from his unshaved chin.

“You better eat up. I got a big day planned for us.”

Still chewing, Dwight goes into the bathroom. She hears the quick bursts of the faucet, the squirting foam from the can, the scrape of the razor over his face. The leather chair is damp where Dwight was sitting. Dreama stands in the middle of the room, crossing her arms against the chill of the air conditioner.

“Do you think Southern hospitality is a lie?” she asks loudly.

“What are you talking about?” Dwight answers from the bathroom.

“I mean people don’t seem all that friendly down here. I was walking along the street this morning. This woman opens her door and starts screaming at me. It was so strange.

“Probably an old blueblood, doesn’t like tourists poking around her old house.”

“She thought I had some news for her,” Dreama says. “She wanted to know if I’d found him yet.”

Who? Dwight doesn’t bother to ask. The faucet blasts again. Dreama sees her postcard on the table beneath a half-drunk glass of orange juice. She rescues it from under Dwight’s glass, but a ring has soaked through the card, smearing her unfinished message.

“Dwight, if you were going to mail me a card, what would it say?”

“What?” Water rushes in the sink.

“I said if you were going to send a postcard, tell me what you would write.”

“I don’t know. Wish you were here?”

She tears the ruined postcard in two, and writes in her head: Dearest Dreama, That day I felt I could walk forever with you by my side. We picked out the house we would live in when we moved to the city. We knocked on the door and they welcomed use inside because they knew how much in love we were.

Their sightseeing begins inside a mansion inside the Battery. They join a quiet group of Japanese, waiting in the front parlor for the tour to begin. The guide is a silver-haired matron. Bifocals hang on her bosom, hung from a strand of pearls. She puts the spectacles on her long nose. “We request no pictures please. Postcards are on sale at the backdoor.” The Japanese nod their heads when she points to their Nikons, wagging her finger.

“Follow me please.” She takes them into the sitting and dining rooms. Priceless china figurines crowd the mantels. The walls are hung with portraits of mutton-chopped men, oval-faced women.

“These are the original owners. Their descendants still own the house and make their home in the living quarters on the top floor,” The guide says in a practiced voice.

Dreama wonders if they descended the stairs at night, walked through the darkened rooms of their ancestors. She can imagine the people who once lived here. They listened to recitals of high-strung violins, mournful cellos filling the gracious rooms. They sat in leather chairs, feet slippered in velvet. They drank fine teas in bone china that delicately chimed when tapped with the silver spoon.

On the second floor, the guide points out the library with its Audubon folios, the snuff box once owned by Napoleon’s field marshal. Books bound the Moroccan leather line the cherrywood shelves. Dreama spies the parchment on the writing table, the quill in the ink stand. There is no plume to the feather, the paper is yellowed, the ink turned brown with age.

Dearest Dreama, Idly I pulled down a book in the library while waiting for you to come down. I imagine you in your best organdy gown with pearls adorning your white neck. Your silk fan wafts the perfumed air. You curtsey, I bow. Forgive your gentleman caller, but I think only of sweeping you in my arms, carrying you back up that stairs.

On the balcony, the guide waits patiently for stragglers before resuming her recitation. She points to the fort in the harbor, flying its tiny striped flag. In her uninflected voice, she explains how the family watched and cheered the shelling from this vantage point.

“Just like the Star Spangled Banner,” Dreama says.

“Wrong war, dear,” the woman says.

“The first shot came at 4:30 in the morning,” Dwight mutters.

“That’s correct, sir. Family correspondence makes mention of the long night waiting. If there are no further questions, our tour concludes here. Please continue back down the stairs and left to the door to exit the house. We thank you for coming.”

Dwight leans over the iron railing, his blue-gray eyes trained on the fort. “It must have been a real fireworks show.”

“Do you ever pretend things,” she asks him. “Like you’re someone who was there, the man who lit the fuse.”

“No.” Dwight shakes his head. “I just like to see where things happened.”

Outside the house, the Japanese board a buggy tour. Dwight decides against such a ride after counting the money in his wallet. The rest he stashed in a dirty sock in a suitcase at the room. “I suppose I could get more if we find a bank.”

“Let’s just walk, Dwight. I could walk here forever.”

Everywhere Dreama notices the Spanish moss dangling from the thick trees. She picks some from a low branch, runs the strange gray beard through her fingers.

“Wouldn’t this be pretty worked into a wreath? I could put this on the door to the condo.”

“No, it would freeze where we live.” Dwight frowns.

“It might not,” she insists. “A wreath would look pretty, Dwight.”

Shaking his head, he picks the strands from her fingers. Dreama has rearranged everything in Dwight’s condo, made it look nice. Perhaps he resents this although he has never sad so. Maybe he doesn’t want their relationship advertised on his front door.

At the old market where slaves were once sold, vendors have set up a flea market: tie-died t-shirts, Confederate flags, driftwood carvings, crocheted baby clothes. Dwight buys a Charleston shirt with a big red heart instead of the word “love.” For Dreama, he buys a basket woven by a Gullah woman. The church tower tolls out twelve chimes of a heavy iron bell. The sun is hot; the streets are filled with people in sunglasses, shorts, sandals. On King Street, they window-shop the specialty stores along a hotel facade: chocolates, lingerie, men and women’s clothes. These are the fashions Dreama has seen in slick magazines.

She catches Dwight gaping at a mannequin in a black lace teddy. Dreama knows she’s no beauty. Her hair is brown, cut short. Her breasts are nothing. Dwight’s fancy would hang like a dishrag on her coathanger frame.

“It’s air-conditioned in there. We could go in, look around,” he suggests.

“No,” Dreama is suddenly embarrassed. “You wouldn’t like shopping with me.”

In his tank top, cut-off shorts and sandals, Dwight looks less like an insurance salesman on vacation, more like a sailor on shore leave. Dreama wishes she had known him when he was in service. She could have written him letters, told him not to ruin his skin with that ugly tattoo. But, at least, it’s not a woman’s name written there forever.

They trudge toward their room. King Street’s boutiques and shop windows give way to old townhouses and tiers of porches pointed to the sea winds. Dreama recognizes this street as the one she walked this morning.

Dwight grabs Dreama’s arm as a sedan lurches out of a driveway right in front of them.

“Hey watch it, bud!” Dwight shouts. “You want to kill somebody?”

An elderly gentleman clutches the wheel, trying to turn his stiff neck far enough to see behind him. In the passenger seat, an old woman stares straight ahead, fingering a long strand of pearls over her flat chest. They are the same couple Dreama saw earlier at the door. Instead of nightgown and pajamas, they are dressed in mourning clothes.

“I’m sorry,” Dream whispers. The old woman cannot hear her.

The car horn blares. The old man waves them back. Dreama and Dwight are reflected in the passing windows, their red faces like balloons. She feels the heat of the exhaust pipe sigh across her legs. The sedan backs into the street and lurches off, spewing a cloud of diesel fumes.

“Damn snobs. They act like you’re not there,” Dwight says.

“Can’t you see they’re upset?” Dreama says.

“What?” Dwight stares at her. “We’re the ones who ought to be upset. They about ran over us.”

She wasn’t sure before, but now Dreama understands. She points to the door where the wreath hangs. Chrysanthemums and tiny American flags, a pale ribbon.

“Somebody’s died, Dwight. Have some respect.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know?”

“People live here. Keep your voice down.” She glances at the houses, afraid someone is looking. No curtain parts, no door cracks open.

These are not tacky people, Dreama thinks. They do not yell in the streets like a man with a tattoo and a skinny woman with a basket of cheap souvenirs. They wait upstairs. The real inhabitants will come down after the tourists are gone. Their lives are gracious, seemingly untouched behind their historic doors and walls.

I wonder who she lost, Dreama thinks, as they walk back to the room in silence.

Dwight decides against the boat ride around the famous fort in the harbor. The tour takes four hours under a broiling sun and Dreama reminds him she gets seasick easily. Instead, they will go to Fort Moultrie.

They drive out of the city, crossing the James River on a suspension bridge bowed to let ocean-going ships pass underneath. Dreama marvels at the cables strung like a harp. At the crest of the bridge, she can see the warships at Patriot’s Point, the aircraft carrier big as a shopping mall.

“Don’t you want to see the ships?” Dreama elbows Dwight.

“No siree. After a year in the South China Sea, I’m not about to pay money to set foot on one.”

One war is not the same as another, she thinks.

The highway heads north to the beaches. They pass no historic districts, only shopping centers, fast food restaurants, convenience stores. These are people more like us, Dreama thinks. Women with kids push grocery cars through parking lots, men in shirt sleeves and ties eat lunch after selling insurance, used cars, real estate. Parking lots and stores give way to salt marshes and marinas. Beach cottages spring up in ramshackle rows. Through breaks in the dues, Dreama catches glimpses of the ocean.

At the Fort Moultrie parking lot, a fluttering American flag slaps the lanyard against the metal pole, a pinging sound regular as radar. South Carolina and Confederate flags wave from neighboring staffs.

Inside the visitors’ center, Dreama heads for the restroom. She splashes cold water on her dry face. Without any make-up, she can’t see how Dwight can bear to look at her. She’ll buy some cold cream before they go back to the room.

Dwight waits impatiently by the exit doors, already having gone through the hall of glassed displays. He waves to her to hurry along.

“What’s in the exhibits?” she asks.

“Old stuff they fished off the beach -- shells and junk, rusted spoons.” Dwight opens the door for her. “Out here is where they fought?”

Their shoes crunch across a walk of crushed shell. They descend through an arch in an earthen wall, into the past.

Dwight carries a pamphlet for a self-guided tour. The oldest parts of the fort date to Revolutionary times, Dwight says. They see the magazine rooms where gunpowder was stored, empty chambers with whitewashed walls. Dreama expects a sharp tang in the air, but it smells musty like a basement. Brick walls give way to metal bulkheads. During the ‘40s, the Navy manned these underground bunkers, listening offshore for the echo of German U-boats.

“Rooms are preserved behind glass, depicting life in these quarters during 1942-45,” Dwight reads aloud. His voice booms along the metal walls.

They pause at a plexiglass-enclosed room with scarred desks and swivel chairs. An Eisenhower jacket with divisional insignia hangs in the corner. Betty Gable peeks over her shoulder from a poster taped inside an open locker. On the nearest deck are Life magazines, an old-fashioned telephone, an ashtray with snuffed-out cigarettes, a pack of filterless Camels. A loudspeaker plays snatches of Benny Goodman, a radio announcement about coastal blackout, radar blips, bursts of ancient static.

Dreama sees a letter half-finished on the desk. She presses against the glass, trying to make out the message, imagining whoever was writing it is about to return. Was it a man on duty? Or perhaps the man was killed before he could give his love to his mother, his wife, his sweetheart.

Dwight leans over her shoulder. Reflected in the breath-smudged plexiglass, they look like the old couple in the doorway. Dreama has her hand spread under her throat like the woman holding the frilly collar of her nightgown. Tendons are starting to show on the backs of her hands, where liverspots will paint her skin in years to come. Dwight grows decrepit in this light. His hair recedes, the skin under his chin sags and wattles. He is the man in pajamas, squinting into the past.

“What would you write me,” even her voice croaks and falters, “if that was your letter on the desk?”

Dwight’s lips move close to her hear. “This.” His hand squeezes her breast. The spell is broken. She pulls away from him.

“Let’s go back,” she says.

They retreat along the bright hallways of the bunker into the corridors of older wars. Her sandals, his flip-flops slap against the flagstones. In the darkness, children scream and shriek, pretending bombardments.

Sunlight explodes overhead, and the cries of the children are lost in the crash of the surf. They are outside the fort near an unpainted beach house. Dreama blinks at white sheets flapping on a clothesline.

“Must have taken a wrong turn,” Dwight says.

But Dreama doesn’t want to go back. She picks her way across a patch of sandburrs, a miniature minefield. A rock stubs her toe, and she swears out loud, unladylike.

“Dreama, wait!. What’s the matter?” Dwight catches up to her, spraying sand with his flip-flops.

“Nothing,” Dreama shakes her head.

Perplexed, he scratches at the tattoo on his arm, now sunburned after a day uncovered by a shirt sleeve. The mermaid’s green hair, the scales of her tail, the lewd grin are highlighted against red skin.

“I hate that tattoo,” she says.

“So do I.. Ever since the day we steamed out of Manila.”

“You’re never romantic,” she says. “Why can’t you be romantic?”

Dwight looks for his answer at the fortress, at the sea, then at his feet. He wants a way out of this moment.

“How about a walk on the beach?” he mumbles.

They walk in silence against the wind. Sand grinds into her cut toe. Crying would feel good, but her eyes are too dry from the salt air.

“Is that stupid fort out there again?” She shades her eyes against the glare on the waves. Sailboats and windsurfers, brightly colored triangles, dodge across the old target.

Dwight shakes his head. “I still can’t figure out where the first shot came from. Maybe that point up ahead.”

“Enough history,” Dreama says. “Let’s just walk.”

The tide rushes in, foaming at her feet. Resting her hand on Dwight’s shoulder, Dreama lifts one foot, then the other, slipping off her sandals. The bloody toenail stings in the salt water. She splashes through the surf. Dwight stays on the dry beach, but he hangs onto her hand.

It is dark when they drive back to the city, the night wind rushing in the open windows. Lightning flashes over the salt marshes, but there is no thunder. They climb the bridge rising like a lighted harp over the river and the warships. Their room is perfect when they come in: chilled champagne, mints laid on fluffed pillows, white sheets folded down.

They make love without speaking. His tongue and his touch feel strange to her skin. She arches her back on the soft bed. When Dwight is done, she rolls on her side. In the dark, she can make out the white blur of the postcards on the table. Only she knows what they say: perfect and empty.

Dreama knows soon she will sleep, then awake in a strange bed in an unfamiliar place. She will sleep, then awake in Dwight’s bed at his condo. When she leaves him, there will be no long letter, no last word, no need to explain. She’ll go to work, shoulder her bag of mail, make the appointed rounds. She has not lost anyone, Dreama will say to her sister, to anyone who asks. She has not found him yet.

Dwight rises in the darkness over her shoulder. “We saw the fort today. Tomorrow, we can drive out to the plantations. I’ll let you play Scarlett, if you want.”

She closes her eyes, listens for the crash of the waves against the seawall, echoes of the famous barrage.

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April 15 is not just Tax Day, but more importantly (in my mind) the birthday of Henry James, one of my literary idols known to his peers as the Master. To mark the occasion, I’m posting an old short story of mine, “Swimmingly,” concerning James’ stay at the Vanderbilts’ sumptuous Biltmore House in Asheville. He was not terribly impressed by the scale of…

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Going through my files, I’ve come across this early story of mine, which was part of my graduate thesis for the MFA at Warren Wilson College. This is set way back when the Buncombe County Jail was the best view in Asheville, atop the county courthouse.

I’m running the broom around the thirteenth floor like Sloane said to, piling up cigarette butts, dead bugs and ghost turds. Don’t ask what’s a ghost turd. I did and did I get jumped.

“You be mouthing me, boy?” Sloane swelled up and pointed to a dirty bit of fluff in the corner. “That,” he said, “is a ghost turd. Let me see one goddam ghost turd on this floor and your skinny white ass is back in lockup.”

Sloane’s the worst of the jailers. His kicks come from calling white guys “boy,” but he treats the brothers just as bad. Some days I’d like to coldcock him with a sock full of soap bars even if they added an extra six months to my time.

Pushing the broom, I wonder about the ghost turds. They’re like the stuff of fancy pillows that a rich lady would rest her head on. We don’t get pillows in the cells, just a plastic-covered mattress, a yellowed sheet, and a scratchy blanket. I sweep and mop the thirteenth twice a day, but it’s a mystery to me how the fluff keeps showing up. Maybe it comes from some spirit trailing Sloane when he makes his rounds late at night and shines his light in my cell.

“Hey, trusty, come here,” a voice calls me from Right Center cellblock, the Lockbox.

“Mosely, what do you think I am? Damn room service?”

I can count on Mosely to be hanging on the bars, bugging me. The big black dude’s always wanting something. He’ll run you ragged to make a phone call to a girlfriend, or to pass a note to a buddy locked downstairs, or sneak him an extra candy bar in his store-box. Mosely will shortchange you and act like you should make up the difference.

“Hey man, gimme a cigarette.”

I pull out my tobacco and papers and start rolling him one. I refuse nobody a smoke, even Mosely. I make no enemies that way.

Another voice calls from inside the Lockbox. “Hey, what time you got?”

Seems like I’m the only guy on the floor with a watch, and it’s a cheap Timex that runs slow. Someone’s always bumming smokes and the time from me, but I recollect what it was like in Lockup and try not to begrudge them. “Two o’clock on the nose.”

Mosely looks at my tobacco and chuckles. “You got Prince Albert in a can, don’t you? Better let that mother out, he gonna suffocate.”

The dude tells the lamest jokes. I don’t even laugh since my name’s Albert and I’ve been choking on Mosely’s funky smell and this stinking place for thirty-seven days now. I’m building a solid ninety, day by day, with no good time off.

“Johnson.” My name crackles through the halls. “Albert Johnson.” Mr. Randy is calling me over the intercom. “Get your ass up here. You got a phone call.”

Mosely’s still laughing, showing his pink tongue where his front teeth are missing. “Albert’s in the can, better let that mother out.”

Upstairs in the jailers’ office, Mr. Randy points to the receiver dangling from the pay phone. “Says it’s your wife.”

Jewelle’s voice comes on all sweetness, even though she’s the one who put me here, tacking on her non-support charge to the outstanding warrants. “What you doing, baby?” she asks.

“I’m doing time. What the hell do you think I’m doing — sitting in a Jacuzzi?”

I should have hung up then while I was ahead. She starts screaming on her end, calling me all sorts of names. I’m trying to keep my voice level and still let her have her share. But Jewelle knows how to hurt me. She brings up Rose and how only a felon would miss his baby’s second birthday. I hang up but the receiver pops out of the cradle. I want to punch the coin box even though it’s no quarter out of my pocket.

“Take it easy on my phone, Johnson,” Mr. Randy says.

“Family spat’s all,” I say but I slap the railing down the stairs to the thirteenth floor.

Julius would have loved this, and I wish he were still here, even if he did have that mouth on him. He could make me laugh at about anything even myself, but he got out this morning. We were about to pass out the lunch trays when he got called upstairs. “Oh man,” Julius groaned and went, but in a flash he came running back down.

“See you in Beaverdam, whitebread,” he whooped.

Julius always kidded me how there are no blacks where I come from. “Serious man, I coming to see you when we get out. I’ll bring my mama’s white bedsheet and you and me can go burn some crosses. Just don’t be siccing no dogs on my when I come.”

He’d grin real big, then change his voice. “Looky yonder, ma. ain’t that one them African-Americans?” Julius could pluck out a perfect Beaverdam drawl, twangy as a banjo.

“Man, white folks crack me up,” he laughed. “Just tell me one thing. How far is yonder?”

“Yonder is a little ways more than just far,” I explained.

“Looky yonder,” he mimicked my drawl and we laughed.

Now Julius has long gone yonder himself.

I’ve been looking the guys over in the Lockbox when I pass the trays in at mealtime. I’m shopping for a new tattoo. When I was fifteen, Junior Greene carved a girl’s name on my shoulder with the heated tip of a Phillips head screwdriver while I knocked back shots of his daddy’s best moonshine. Junior rubbed india ink into the wound that read “Renee,” but after ten years her name is as hard to make out as old Egyptian writing. I forgot about Renee when I met Jewelle. But I’ve never been tempted to scratch Jewelle in my skin to show my true feelings.

In the Lockbox, I’ve seen skin that would shame a circus lady. Dragons and cobras coiled around forearms. A regimental eagle screams across biceps. A technicolor spider crawls up one guy’s tit. A skull grins out from beneath a cowboy hat on another fellow’s back. This biker shows his Ghostrider colors even with his jacket off.

The kitchen stacked an extra tray on the cart for tonight. A new man waits at the back of the crowd. Glasses on his nose and no tattoos on his knuckles, this guy looks badly misplaced in the Lockbox. He looks too clean to be in with the weekend drunks next door in Thirteen Right. In here, he’s got company the likes of Mosely who faces time for robbing a package store and feeling up the clerk. Greenlee’s waiting trial for braining his mother’s boyfriend with a baseball bat until the dude went into convulsions. Greenlee brags the neighbors had to shove a spoon in the man’s mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue before the ambulance came.

I greet the new man when he comes up last for his tray. “Hey professor. When did you get in?”

His eyes float watery behind his thick glasses. He stares at his tray with cooked cabbage, navy beans with sliced onions and canned pears. It’s crude grub when you’re used to a life of clean underwear, but it sticks to you on the way through. He shakes his head and walks off, taking just a glass of milk.

“Professor. Yeah, that’s a good one,” Mosely laughs, grabbing the extra tray. I see the name I gave the new guy is going to stick for whatever time he’s got.

After I collect the trays and glasses, the afternoon is my own. I have a window with a view that even bars can’t spoil, and the sun makes a fine show setting over the mountains. I can name what lies over that ridge and the next ridge and the one after until you get to Beaverdam. I have a trailer two months behind on the payments, but I’ll go there when my time’s up and hope there’s no padlock on the door.

From my window, I look over Eagle Street, and the start of the dark side of town. Julius must be in his old haunts down there, running numbers in the alleys, hitting all the shot houses, or hustling some babe for the night. He’s home now, but he’ll probably be back upstairs before my time is done.

Raising the window, I set a bottle of milk through the bars to keep on the ledge overnight. I can look down on the City Club in the bank building across town where the high and mighty eat. I imagine the clatter of silver against china, men in suits and women in furs, cloth napkins wiping the fancy food from their mouths. Except for the bars, their view is no better than mine.

After dinner, I favor a cup of coffee and a smoke. I take a bottle filled with coffee left over from breakfast in a back room where Sloane won’t spot me. I wind some toilet paper around my fingers, then tuck the sides in to make a tight ring. Fitting the bottle inside, I light the paper to make a jailbird stove. Lean back and wait for my hot coffee

At the first jingle of keys, I throw the burning paper in the toilet and flush.

“Johnson, get your butt out here!”

I can hear Sloane’s boots sounding down the block. I undo my pants then walk out of the cell, making a show of having finished my own natural business. “Here,” I say. “Hold your horses.”

Sloane’s come to tell me Mr. Randy wants a watch on the new man in Right Center. Keep my eyes open, keep him company, and it might count as good time.

“Guy with glasses?” I ask. “You mean the Professor.”

Sloane frowns at his clipboard. “Name’s Sullivan.”

“What he do? Is he crazy or something to need me as a babysitter?”

“Johnson, you asking me questions? You getting an attitude?”

“Oh, no sir.” I need to keep in mind the proper attitude, according to Sloane. He says “jump,” I better say “how high?” He says “shit,” I say “what color?”

Sloane marches me over to the Lockbox. “All right,” he yells down the block, “everybody in their cells. Move it!”

They bitch and moan. Usually lights don’t go down until ten. Inmates can roam the walkway, play poker on the benches or fight over what to watch on the one black-and-white tv.

Cell lockup is hard time to build. Your room to move is cut from thirty paces along the block from the shower to the door to just eight shoelengths from your toilet to your cell bars.

Soon the walls look like they might be squeezing in on you. I’m not a big fellow, but I can stand by my bunk, spread my arms and touch both walls with my fingertips. If the walls don’t get you, the noise at night will -- coughs rattling out of ribcages, teeth stubs grinning, foreskins flapping under the sheets. Sometimes in lockup, I’d have to sit on my bunk and let the back of my head thump against the metal wall, just to have a noise to call my own.

“Move it Mosely!” Sloane yells. Inside the lock control box, he pulls a lever to shut the cell, fifteen sounding as one giant door closing. Then he unlocks the main door and walks down the block. I follow after as he tests the bars at each cell, checking that they’re secure.

At the new man’s cell, Sloane points to the bench outside for me to sit down. “You best be awake when I make my rounds, Johnson, or I’ll put you in with Mosely.”

Mosely’s hanging at his bars, scratching at his red bikini briefs. “Oooh, Prince Albert, don’t make me want you.”

“Shut up.” Sloane yanks the tv plug on his way out, then he shuts me inside the Lockbox for the night.

Something’s happened for Mr. Randy to want a lockup of Right Center and order a babysitter for the new man. One look at the Professor in his cage and I see why. His glasses sit crooked on his nose and there’s a nice shiner under his right eye.

I take out my tobacco, cross my legs and start rolling out some smokes for the evening. I wish it was real weed I was rolling, but the last time I had any of that, I got busted back to Craggy Prison for a nine-month stretch. The Professor crouches on the edge of his bunk, watching me.

“Smoke?”

“I was trying to quit,” he says.

But he takes the cigarette and I cup a match in my hands through the bars. In the glow, I can see the shiner under his eye turning purple. “I went two weeks.” He coughs.

I ask about his eye. “You fall down?”

“The black guy, what’s his name? He wanted my candy bar.”

“Who, Mosely?”

“Oh Christ.” The Professor’s shoulders start to shake. He tries to hold himself still, but can’t. He’s choking to keep the sobs from breaking out of his throat. I’ve seen it before and it’s bad to watch to watch a man go to pieces.

“Mosely’s one sick mother. Don’t mind him.”

Mosely must be listening at his bars or I don’t keep my voice down. “Hey whitey, what you call me?” he hollers. Come here and say it.”

I sigh and walk over to Mosely’s cell. “I said you’re one sick mother. You and your mother.”

He lunges for me through the bars, but his hand misses my faces by inches. “I kill you, man. I rip your head off and spit down your neck.”

I start striking matches one by one, flicking them through the bars onto his mattress. Then I flick matches at Mosely. He backs off, swatting at the sharp little flames like a man swarmed by bees.

Someone left a half-used roll of toilet paper on the bench. It would just fit through the bars. I light another match under the torn edge. “You best be careful, Mosely. I’d hate to see you catch on fire lying in bed tonight.”

Mosely’s not so cocky now. “Be cool, Albert. I was just funning with you, man.”

I go sit back down in front of the Professor’s cell. Mosely’s probably done wet his bed, because he knows I meant my threat.

The Professor - I forget his name, Sullivan? - he’s rubbing his face with his hands, the thick glasses moving up and down on his nose under his long fingers.

I try making conversation. “I seen that happen in Craggy, man burn in his cell. Guys soaked down a roll of toilet paper with lighter fluid, tossed it in on the dude. Strange, but the brothers don’t get any blacker when they burn, the skin turns pink. Never heard screaming like that in my life. Still, it ain’t as bad as this jail. At Craggy, they let you out for exercise.”

He ignores my story. “Where am I?” he asks. “It seems like forever going up in the elevator.”

“Yeah, thirteenth floor. There’s a good view from the trusty block. See the whole city at your feet.”

I wish I hadn’t said that. It might make him feel worse inside the Lockbox where the sun has to creep around corners and bars to find him.

But he starts laughing. “Thirteenth floor? Who ever heard of having a high-rise jail in the middle of downtown? I can’t think of a finer fire trap.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. This place catch fire, and we’d all look like that dude in Craggy.”

The Professor wrings his hands, brushing one palm against the other like they were covered with dirt. I ask him what he’s in for.

“Manslaughter, I think, maybe death by motor vehicle. They’re going to say I killed someone. I don’t remember. Maybe a Highway Patrolman.”

“A trooper?” I take a long low whistle at this. “You didn’t kill just someone there.”

I can tell though he’s torn up bad about what he’s done. He probably thinks he’s better than me and the others up here, but he got drunk like the rest of us and did something he would have plenty of time to regret.

“I suppose I’m allergic to alcohol,” he tries to smile. “I drink it and it makes me break out in rash actions.”

The Professor has the saddest story and he tells it in the finest words. He takes some good-looking woman to a fancy cocktail party, I’ll bet at the City Club, wining with the rich folk on top of the world. But the woman walks off, leaves him at the open bar. He gets in the car, expensive foreign make, I’d guess, and goes screeching down the road, but he’s driving blind with booze and hurt, he doesn’t see the blue lights ahead. He blacks out and crashes through the roadblock. Trooper’s down and dead before they pull him out from under the sports car.

“Take it easy, man,” I say when he finishes his story.

His hands jump on his lap like DT’s are sneaking up on him. Winos in for drunk-and-disorderlies get that shaky after about a day off the juice. They snooze for about five minutes, then something jumps from their mind onto their bunks. By morning, they’ve strangled the life out of their blankets. The shakes creep up the Professor’s arms into his shoulders, and he’s sobbing and rubbing his eyes again.

“Lay down, man. Lay down and get some sleep. I’ll sit and watch,” I say. He stretches out on his bunk and crooks his arm over his eyes, trying to shut out the feeble glare from the hallway light.

“Goodnight, Sullivan,” I say.

My cigarette glows red in the dark, and the Timex sweeps its green arms slowly on my wrist as I wait in the Lockbox for Sloane to come.

Jewelle comes to visit on Sundays. She has always been faithful in that way. During my nine months at Craggy, she visited regularly. When I did time for the bad checks, she drove out to the work farm. She always brought clean socks and underwear.

But Jewelle hates coming here. A jailer downstairs goes through her handbag every time. She says what she has looks so sad spilled out on the counter. Loose change, hair brush, wads of tissue paper. They don’t allow the nail file or even the cheap ballpoint pen to go upstairs. Dangerous weapons.

“Don’t take it so personal,” I tell her. “You didn’t have to bend over like I did and offer your hind end for inspection.”

The glass that separates us is smudged with fingerprints. Too much breathing has fogged the surface, blurring her face. Jewelle’s gained some weight from when I first knew her at 14, but she still looks fine. Her denim dress is slit up the front over her thick legs.

“How’s the baby? You and her getting along?” We speak through the wire mesh of a speaker box.

“Doing fine. Everyone’s fine,” Jewelle says.

I look up at the ceiling. Some joker has scrawled YER ASS BELONGS TO RANDY RAY.

Jewelle tells me about her new job as a flag girl on the road crew. She’s making five dollars an hour, but she doesn’t like all the honks and whistles she gets from truckers. I can see the outline of her bra through her blouse. I have forgotten what her breasts look like.

“I wear two sweaters and my big coat and I still about freeze,” she is saying.

“Have you got on underwear?”

“What?”

“Lift up that skirt and show me.”

“Albert!”

“Come on, for old time’s sake. Show me.”

“Albert, grow up.”

“Sorry. I’ve got to tell you something.”

Jewelle pushes her hair back and leans her ear closer. I see the pink swirls inside, the gold loop dangling from the fat lope, but I don’t dare whisper what’s been locked up inside me.

I’ve been sitting in front of the TV for most of the day. Don’t remember what day it is nor do I much care. I take out the tobacco with my name on it and start rolling a smoke. I’ve been trying hard not to think all day, but there’s too much time on my hands. When I stick out my tongue to lick the paper, I notice my fingers all yellow and stained.

This morning, they found the Professor hanged in his cell. He was sitting in the corner with one end of his bedsheet knotted to the bars and the other end tied around his neck. Sloane said his glasses were folded neatly on the floor beside him, like he didn’t want to see the end too clearly. But I can see those blue eyes rolled back in his head, his long fingers finally lying still in his lap.

I think about Julius, how he’s going to visit me in Beaverdam like he said. I like to think the Professor would have come too. We would have sat in the trailer with Jewelle fetching us beers and me bouncing my baby on my knee. We would have been regular citizens and happy.

It’s not the TV, but a gentle cooing that brings me back from Beaverdam to the thirteenth floor. I look up and see a pigeon walk through the unlocked door into the cellblock. It struts, bobbing its shiny green head from side to side, its blank yellow eyes ignoring me.

When I try to ease out of my chair, I spook the pigeon into a flutter of feathers. It flies about, bumps into the walls, shaking ghost turds all over my clean floor.

“Hey! Hey!” I chase after it, my shower slippers flapping as loud as the pigeon’s wings. The bird and me go past Mosely at the bars to the Lockbox, around the corner at Thirteen Right where the weekenders sleep, and down the runabout to the barred windows.

The pigeon bangs against the glass and falls to the floor. I trap it in my arms. I hold it close to me, feeling the flutter of heart and wing against my chest.

But the bird’s not hurt. It will fly if I let it. I could watch it soar over Eagle Street where Julius runs the alleys, see it shoot past the City Club where the Professor drank too much. I could follow its flight all the way over the ridge into Beaverdam. Lifting the window, I slide my prisoner through the white bars.

Stupid bird sits there. Won’t even spread its wings.

I shove it off the ledge. Damn thing drops like a rock out of sight.

Twisting my face against the bars, I try and see where my pigeon went. Thirteen stories down, I count a hundred birds grubbing on the wet sidewalk.

I grind the bones of my face into the cold bars. Flecks of paint peel away in my fists. My arms are shaking as bad as the Professor’s. The scream I’ve guarded inside me finally breaks free, the long cry I kept down in lockup, thumping my head against the wall.

On the rainy street, white faces look up from beneath umbrellas. The flock explodes into the wet air.

“Yonder,” I yell over the beating wings. “Yonder. Over yonder,” until I heard Sloane running down the block to shut me up.

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Cleaning out my parents’ house after moving them into assisted living last summer, I’ve come across the forgotten treasures of my youth, including well-thumbed paperbacks that I devoured as an early reader. It’s been an eye-opener, revisiting those reads for the adventure I craved, and seeing things now that I missed earlier.

Vardis Fisher’s novel Mountain Man was first published in 1965, providing the basis for Robert Redford’s epic Western film Jeremiah Johnson in 1972. Redford’s photo in snowshoes on the book’s cover caught my eye browsing the wire racks at the local Eckerd’s drugstore. I was a Boy Scout, age 15, headed that summer to the Philmont Scout Ranch out in New Mexico, following in the tracks of those legendary mountain men.

I’d devoured the movie with its grand backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, the high snows, and the aspen forests. Redford learns the ropes as a tenderfoot trapper, who vendetta against the Crow Indian tribe after his Indian bride and adopted son are killed in a surprise massacre. It was one of the first Hollywood movies trying to accurately depict Native American culture, instead of haphazardly slathering extras in gaudy headdresses and warpaint

Robert Redford donned furs in the bitter cold to play “Jeremiah Johnson” in 1972.

In the novel, Fisher’s main character is named Sam Minard, a red-headed giant of a man with a killer’s instinct and a poet’s sensitive soul, who likes to whistle tunes from Classical composers as he gallivants across the grandeur of the Rockies. That is when he’s not killing and scalping Crows warriors, his sworn enemies.

Fisher brings in troves of research on the lives, times and attitudes of the solitary trappers known as Mountain Men, who preceded the white settlers into what was Indian homelands in the 1830s.

Fisher modeled his character after a man named Jeremiah Johnson, also known as “Liver-Eating” Johnson. In real life, Johnson was said to have lost his wife and an unborn child to a group of Crows when he left them to trap a beaver. Johnson embarked on a vendetta, killing some 300 Crows over a bloody career, scalping them and eating their livers.

Vardis’ novel is very much an artifact of its time in the mid-60s, even looking back to a previous century. I had not remembered the casual racism among the mountain men with their off-handed remarks with the n-word, nor Fisher’s own mixed attitudes in his omniscient narration. He’s either looking at Native Americans as superstitious and childish, or elevating them into Noble Savage status.

Unfortunately, none of his Indian characters come across as fully developed as his Mountain Men, who often seem silly and outlandish themselves, with quaint dialect out of Mark Twain.

Fisher himself is largely forgotten, though he was once known as the Dean of Western Letters, with 36 books to his name before his death in 1968.

But Fisher doesn’t whitewash or romanticize the violence of that era. I had forgotten the jolting opening of his novel. Sam rides up on a strange battle between two unlikely and mismatched opponents, a 1000-pound grizzly bear trying to ram his snout and jaws down a hole after a small badger. The angry badger latches onto the bear’s nose and won’t let go, until the infuriated bruin rips his assailant to pieces. “Like a prince of dignity overwhelmed by disgust, it flung the bloody pieces to the earth and still crying like a child with a broken heart, it sank soundlessly to front feet and loped softly away into a river thicket.”

Sam rides over to find the bear’s nose still in the badger’s bloody jaws.

Wooed by Fisher’s lyricism, I suppose I raced through all the blood and gore and racism. I was thrilled by Fisher’s paeans to Wilderness with Sam Minard striding through rainstorms atop high mountains, roaring out his gratitude to God’s Creation.

Redford’s slightly gentler version and its soaring cinematography captured my adolescent heart. we certainly didn’t watch Redford scalp his foes or cut out or eat anyone’s liver. In my Boy Scout troop, we adopted the lingo of Will Geer and Redford’s stoic mountain men, calling each other “Pilgrim.”

Fisher’s violent novel is part of the revision of the Western myth pitting Cowboys against Indians, white hats versus black-hatted villains. In 1969, Sam Peckinpah painted blood in technicolor with the final shoot-out of The Wild Bunch. Twenty years after “Mountain Man,” Cormac McCarthy publishes Blood Meridian, a beautifully written but brutally plotted novel about a gang of scalp hunters ranging across the Southwest, led by a brilliant yet evil giant known as the Judge. Liver-eating Johnson would have fit in well with that crew of stone cold killers.

Leonardo DiCaprio

And Fisher does mention the storied Hugh Glass, the trapper left for dead by his comrades after a grizzly bear attack and who crawled hundreds of miles to seek his revenge. Leonardo DiCaprio was following in Redford’s footsteps, when he won his first Oscar for the 2015 movie The Revenant, based on the Glass legend.

The violence reminds me of D.H. Lawrence’s appraisal of the American character, especially as it plays out in our epic Western myths in books and movies. Lawrence nailed us in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, especially Last of the Mohicans. “But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Hard to argue with the curmudgeonly Lawrence with all that is happening in our county these days.

Redford would go on to become a movie legend before his recent death at age 89. I can see him almost reprising his Jeremiah Johnson role in his 2013 film All Is Lost, about a solitary sailor whose sailboat is damaged by a stray shipping container on the high seas. Redford is alone in the movie, hardly talking with only 50 words of dialogue, mostly relying on action and facial gesture to relay his brave efforts to survive against all odds.

That was at the heart of “Jeremiah Johnson” for me, a man braving the elements and appreciative for the joy to be found even in hardships.

By the end of Fisher’s novel, we do see that Sam has lost his taste for revenge and endless war and makes peace with the Crow chief and with himself. He heads back to the geysers of what would later become Yellowstone National Park, more eager to hear the birdsong that outdoes Beethoven in the heart of this mountain man.

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They once were as dependable as the sunrise itself, local newspapers delivered daily, rain or shine, those inky pages rolled up just so and tossed each morning at the end of the driveway. Spread those pages on your kitchen table for breakfast, you could discover what happened in the world just yesterday, editorials debating the ideas and issues of the day, along with the box scores of your favorite teams, a slew of comics and puzzles, and for the older readers, the last word of all their peers who had passed on in the obituaries.

Those local newspapers have been dying off by the thousands for most of this century, and the journalists and others who made them have lost their livelihoods.

But it hits too close to home when The Washington Post lays off a third of its newsroom under the fiat of the Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. The storied paper that stood up to Nixon with the dogged reporting of Woodward and Bernstein, those heroes of the First Amendment, the writers who were unafraid to speak truth to power under the ownership of Katherine Graham. Bezos, well, thinks he can write off that kind of inconvenience to the rest of his empire.

I’ve read through the elegies of reporters who used to call the Post home, and who bemoan the shell it’s become in the past year, including Ashley Parker, Sally Jenkins, Carlos Lozada and book editor Ron Charles. The Post didn’t just lose personnel, but entire sections were shuttered including the Sports department and the Book Review.

And the Post is not alone. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quit printing its daily edition at the end of December and this past week laid off another 50 journalists and others. Published since 1786, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will close come May.

The news is not good for newsfolk.

For me, the massive layoffs bring up my own demise from the Asheville Citizen-Times back in 2016, ten years ago this fall. I had taken a job in journalism out of college, not out of any real crusading quest to tell the truth. I just wanted to be a writer, and I observed that newspapers would actually pay you to do such a thing. After a few years in the trenches at weekly newspapers in Clemmons and Mocksville, NC., I arrived in Asheville in 1983 as a cub reporter working for the same newspaper my first literary hero, Thomas Wolfe, had delivered as a paper boy in the African American parts of town below Eagle Street.

I would stay for 34 years, revolving through most of the beats available, but perhaps my favorite was as the Sunday Book Reviewer, able to interview outstanding writers such as Fred Chappell, Richard Ford, Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, Charles Frazier, Ron Rash, and others. I put my two-cents worth on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which made news with the Ayatollah’s fatwa or price on a novelist’s head. And I was able to introduce readers to soon-to-be classics such as Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.

I was more than a little dismayed when I was reassigned in the mid 1990s or so to other coverage. Management didn’t want my hours consumed with books, when stringers could do it for free. The bean-counters were always breathing down our necks as we bent over our keyboards, clicking out inches of news column in those pre-Internet days.

But I would cover amazing beats, including religion, business, government, environment, science and technology, editorials, and features. It was a blast, but the job came with not just the pressure of deadlines, but also with shrinking budgets from the corporate cutters.

We had been having rounds of layoffs for years, and offers of buyouts, but I always thought I was the exception. I used to jokingly bill myself as the Last Surviving American Journalist, until the day I got the call at my desk.

Oct. 26, 2016 had been marked as the day when the next layoffs were to be announced. The HR director asked me to come upstairs to her office. I knew what was coming.

I walked right out the door onto the street at 14 O. Henry, and went around the block to the Basilica of St. Lawrence. I went in and sat on a cool pew inside the quiet vaulted dome beneath the gleaming stained-glass windows. I wasn’t so much praying as collecting myself, steeling myself against the news.

I could be late to my own lay-off.

Citizen-Times newsroom circa 1939. I would set in that back corner myself in the 1980s.

So I mourn like the rest of Americans when we see a pillar of the First Amendment such as the Post or any local paper lose its focus, lose its staff, close its doors.

But it’s also good to see that journalism continues online as more ex-journalists migrate from newsprint to Substack. All is not lost in America quite yet as long as people keep speaking out.

The Citizen-Times has long since moved out of the O. Henry building, but if lives online still trying to get out the news with a smaller staff. And nonprofits such as the Asheville Watchdog and my old colleague John Boyle keep up the fight.

Yes, I am nostalgic for the old newsroom, my old career, and I miss my friends and colleagues, many of whom have died. I’ve been able to rescue them, resurrect them in my new novella coming out this December from Regal House.

In 1984, cub reporter George Flack is angling for his first big story for the Asheville Citizen Times when he gets assigned an interview with a cranky reader. Miss Nellie Lipe wants a correction and apology from the newspaper for reporting her among the dead from the devastating Flood of 1916. As George digs for the details of her family’s deaths and how she recuperated from a crippling case of polio, the testy spinster also forces George to face his own buried secrets. Years later, George returns to an Asheville about to be hit by Hurricane Helene to make peace with his past.

Here’s an early look at the cover.

And you can already preorder your copy here.

My layoff lingers with me as a deep wound. But looking back, I never regretted my impulsive decision to join the Fourth Estate with its vows of poverty. I got all I ever really wanted — a chance to make my way in a curiouser and curiouser world as a writer.

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Even before hitting the ground, Andrea felt herself break inside. The night was cold and quiet as they fell through it. Tumbling through space, she saw their lives flying apart. When she opened her eyes, the constellations were wheeling across the sky. Her husband was a crumpled heap in the darkness beside her.

They fell off the roof because Andrea had wanted a photograph.

From the safety of their second story apartment, she’d watched the Maxey Christian Home for Men across the street. On nice days, the drunks carried chairs into the yard where grass refused to grow. They sat and stared at the broken wine bottles and crushed beer cans littering the sidewalk in front of the last place they could imagine living.

“There but for the grace of God...” Dan said, peering over her shoulder.

For a newspaper reporter, Andrea’s husband wasn’t very curious. His pat pronouncements on grace, luck and fate infuriated her. The Maxey’s drunks had a certain quality she could name but that she had seen before in photographs by Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus — their sharecroppers, prisoners and prostitutes met your eyes, dared you to look away from their lives.

On the night that they fell, Dan had made a fire in the hearth and gathered the week’s newspapers to clip out his articles. Andrea was browsing through Avedon’s collection of posed cowboys. Firelight flickered across the slick pages. She mentally rearranged the photographs to her liking. A tilt of the head here, more of a slouch there, leveling the look of their bright eyes.

Outside, an ice storm had coated the world in crystal. She could hear tree limbs cracking under the weight of the ice, tires squalling on the glazed pavement. Across the street, icicles fringed the gables of the Maxey. The front of the house was dark, but she spied movement upstairs. A curtain rustled in an open window. A pair of pants left on the sill to dry had frozen stiff. Andrea imagined a wizened drunk inside, shivering naked.

Trembling herself at the image, Andrea fetched the used Leica Dan had bought her for Christmas. When she raised the window, a draft blew Dan’s newspapers across the floor.

“Hey!” Dan scrambled for his clippings. “What do you see out there?”

“That pair of pants hanging down with all that ice.”

Dan came to the window. He kneaded her shoulders with gentle hands, the way he did in bed before they made love.

“Don’t you think that’s the saddest picture you ever saw?” she said.

“Nice, but it won’t make the front page.”

Andrea climbed out onto the dormered roof with her camera. She wanted a tight frame to capture the heartbreaking lines of the ice and pants. Her butt slid off the windowsill. Ben grabbed at her.

“This is crazy. Why don’t you come back in the house?”

“Just a minute. Hold on.”

Her feet shuffled on the roof as she adjusted the camera. Black ice layered the shingles. Shutter speed at half a second, faster than the blink of an eye. Exposure wide open. There was just enough light from the street lamp. Elbows poised on her knees to support the camera. If she didn’t breathe, didn’t flinch, she might get her shot. The blurry ice came into sharp focus, the trousers flapped stiffly in the crosshairs of the lens.

Andrea leaned forward, clicked the shutter and started to slide. Roofing nails tore at her jeans but could not stop her. Dan toppled out the window behind her, his fingernails snagged in her sweatshirt. Together — Andrea on her back, Dan headfirst, the camera between them — they slid down the roof, tumbling over the gutter and dropping seventeen feet into the yard.

Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. Cassiopeia. Perseus. The names spun in her head as the stars blinked in frozen space.

She rolled over in the cold grass. Dan’s head rested next to the sidewalk. His hand twitched on the concrete. He had lost one of his slippers, and his pale foot jerked from side to side.

Andrea hobbled across the street to the only place with any lights on, any sign of life. She pounded on the front door of the Maxey. A boy with bulging eyes peered through a beveled side window.

“Help me! My husband’s hurt.”

Distorted by the glass, the boy’s face leered at her. Finally, an older man opened the door.

She shivered in the foyer as the man dialed 911. The television was on in the next room, but the drunks sitting on the sofa all watched her.

At the emergency room, the doctors insisted on admitting Andrea for observation. Dan had already gone upstairs on a gurney. Her injuries proved not as serious as his, but extensive: a twisted knee, a dislocated shoulder, a cracked rib, a bruised kidney that had the nurses emptying her urine bag hourly. She was listed in good condition.

Upstairs in ICU, Dan lay unconscious. He had suffered a hairline fracture at the base of his skull and a dozen broken bones in his right hand. The doctor said he was lucky. Another three inches, and Dan’s head would have hit the sidewalk. A few degrees colder, and the ground would have been no more giving than the pavement.

Andrea was released the next afternoon, but she could not leave the hospital. She waited in his room, by his bed, dozing in a chair, until 11, twenty-four hours after the fall, before Dan finally awoke.

“Thirsty,” he said.

She started in her chair then fumbled for the glass on the sidetable. He sipped it through a straw.

Groggy, but out of danger, he was moved out of the unit to a regular room. Andrea stayed by his side. She watched tv with him, adjusted his pillows, fell asleep late at night in the chair by his bed.

The swelling in his head took a week to subside before Dan could go home.

A cheerful male orderly rolled Dan out to their car in a wheelchair. He put Dan in the passenger side, and, before closing the door, said “Stay away from open windows, you hear?”

“I’ll try.” Dan managed to smile.

Andrea drove home with a grimace: operating the clutch hurt her bandaged knee. But she was more afraid any sudden lurch might kill her husband with his skull wrapped in fine gauze.

She parked on the street and with her cane limped around the car to help Dan. The unseasonably warm day had brought the drunks outside the Maxey. They watched the new invalids, unsteady on their feet. Dan saluted with his bandaged hand, but the drunks did not wave back.

“Not much further. A little more. That’s it.” Andrea coaxed him up the stairway.

Dan’s bad hand weighed across her shoulders, the other turned white gripping the banister. The stairs seemed higher than before, more treacherous. The lip of each step caught at Dan’s heavy feet and at the tip of her cane. Andrea kept her eyes down, counting under her breath: ten narrow steps to the landing, then two to the right, another small landing, then five to the top.

He must not fall, not ever again.

At the last landing, Dan hesitated. “Who’s hanging on to who?” he asked.

Her fingernails were digging into his arm.

Headaches had never bothered Dan before. Now Andrea didn’t dare run the vacuum -- the noise hurt his head. The television was too loud. The lowest volume disturbed his rest. When he slept, she sat quietly and watched the dust settle.

Dan had never even taken aspirin before. Now brown plastic prescription bottles littered the apartment. Insurance had picked up most of the hospital stay but didn’t cover the price of pills. Dan needed so many -- vitamins, painkillers, tranquilizers. Andrea wrapped her knee in an elastic bandage and hobbled to the corner drugstore for more medicine.

They lived on a downhill street in a neighborhood poised between historic district and slum. The genteel families who had once owned these Victorian and Queen Anne houses were long dead or withering away in nursing beds. No one protested as former mansions became group homes for the mentally retarded, the schizophrenic, the addicted. All of Andrea’s neighbors were recovering from some affliction.

As her injuries healed, Andrea took to longer loops around the neighborhood, instead of the beeline between pharmacy and sickroom. She picked her way carefully amid patches of snow and frozen puddles. Tree roots buckled the sidewalk, making her stumble. She saw how the rain had ripped away the asphalt to reveal the original cobblestone street. The stones were stamped with the faint name Reynolds Block. More names marked the street corners: Waneta, Cullowhee, Soco, City Works Department, 1921. The letters were obscured by dirt, dead leaves, cigarette butts.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Andrea remembered the childhood chant when she came across the faded outlines of a hopscotch pattern chalked in white. She walked everywhere with her eyes down.

One day Andrea collided with a fat woman. “Bitch! Look what you done!”

Andrea hadn’t seen her coming down the sidewalk. Groceries spilled everywhere. Andrea quickly knelt at the woman’s swollen ankles, stuffing cans of beans, soup, and cat food back into the paper bag.

“Sorry, my fault. It was an accident,” Andrea apologized, rising with the reclaimed groceries.

The woman’s coat reeked of perfume, tobacco, sweat. She wore a respirator over her nose and mouth as if repulsed by her own smell.

“Sorry don’t help what happened,” the fat woman muttered under her mask. But she took the bag from Andrea.

When Andrea got home, Dan was sitting by the window in the weak sun. He was feeling stronger. For therapy, he practiced his signature with cramped fingers. At his feet were yellow pages torn from a legal pad, marked with a spidery hand Andrea did not recognize.

“Something very strange happened to me downtown,” Dan announced.

That morning he’d gone downtown to the newspaper office for the first time since the accident. Andrea knew he was anxious about returning to work.

“Yes, go on. I can hear you.” Andrea trembled in the kitchen as she washed her hands. She could still smell the fat woman on her fingertips.

“Someone pulled a gun on me in the street,” Dan said.

She left the water running and walked to the doorway, her hands still dripping.

Dan sat with his legs crossed at the knee, his right foot kicking leisurely in the air, as if waiting for nothing in this world. His hands, good and bad, rested on the carved arms of the chair.

“I’m walking and I see an armored truck pull up,” he went on. “Guard jumps out with his bag and heads inside the store. He passes me and I see him pull his gun from his holster and hold it at his side. It’s like he knows what I’m thinking and he’s ready to shoot me.”

“What were you thinking?”

“The bills, where we’ll get the money to pay them.” He ran his good hand across the top of his skull. His hair had grown back no fuller after the hospital shaved it all off.

“Do I look so desperate that guards should pull their guns on me?”

“We’ll be OK,” Andrea said. She went back into the kitchen and turned off the faucet.

She could hear Dan sigh, a resignation of pent-up breath that seemed to fill the room. Say it, she thought, just say it. Bitch, look what you done! Sorry don’t help nothing!

Since he couldn’t handle the stick shift, Andrea drove Dan to the clinic that specialized in the treatment of hand injuries. Most of the patients had lost digits to power tools, chain saws, lawnmowers. Andrea waited anxiously in the reception area, afraid someone would come rushing in with a severed part. She was grateful Dan’s hand was still attached even if it was useless.

“It’s as if your hand has eyes at the fingertips. If injured, it becomes a blind hand,” the therapist told Dan and Andrea. “It can’t tell the difference between a paper clip and a safety pin, or between silk and sandpaper.”

Waiting on Dan, Andrea flipped through tattered issues of Readers Digest and National Geographic. She remembered how Dan waited on her to get dressed when they were going out. From the bedroom, she could hear his fingers drumming the armrest of his chair. She missed his irritating habit of cracking his knuckles one by one, or how he snapped his fingers whenever he scored a point during an argument. “Just like that.” Snap.

How expressive hands are, she thought, full of gesture, handshakes and fists, slaps and caresses. Dan’s hand was dead. His fingers looked withered, drained of feeling. Whenever Dan touched her, it felt like he was patting her with a club.

They fought now more than they touched.

The other night Dan had sat at the foot of the bed, taking off his shoes. “Lately I think you’ve been ... I don’t know ... distant,” he said, his back to her.

“I’m right here.” Andrea pulled the covers to her nose. The smell of sickness lingered in the quilt no matter how many times she washed.

Dan gave the bed a bounce. “Springs still work.”

“Say what you mean,” Andrea said.

“You know what I mean, what we’re talking about.”

“Don’t blame me,” she said. “You never touch me anymore.”

“Whose fault is that?”

Dan unlaced the soft brace on his hand and put the contraption of cotton padding and wire stays on the dresser. Then he emptied his pockets as he did every night of their marriage: loose change, penknife, key ring, a worry stone Andrea had found at the beach years ago.

Dan turned out the light and got into bed. Andrea rolled on her side and put the spare pillow between her legs, where his hand used to move her so tenderly.

After a month of sick leave and three weeks of vacation, Dan lost his job as a reporter. He got the news his first day back at work.

“An old pro, he says,” Dan mimicked his managing editor with a nasal whine. “A valuable addition to the copy desk, he says. Please consider this a promotion and not any reflection on yourself or your recent mishap. Mishap, Christ!”

Andrea wished he wouldn’t dig his hands into his pockets, a habit now whenever Dan was talking.

In his absence, the newsroom had hired a young girl, top of her class at the state’s leading journalism school. She was good, scoring two bylines on the front page this week alone. The editors wanted to keep her on the beat. Dan would no longer be responsible for covering city hall, the machinations of municipal government. Instead, he would be laying out features for the women’s section.

“Those who can, write, those who can’t, edit Dear Abby.”

“At least you’ve still got a job,” Andrea said.

“Yeah, despite our recent mishap,” he said.

Monday morning, Dan stood before the fogged mirror in the bathroom, fumbling with his tie. Andrea watched as she made the bed. A closet full of ties, and his fingers could no longer manage a Windsor knot or a four-in-hand. Unlike most men, Dan actually liked ties. He appreciated the expensive silk ties she gave him every Christmas. One year, he even mastered tying bowties.

The mirror cleared and Dan saw her watching. “Aaagh.” He raised the tie like a noose around his neck, crossing his eyes and dangling his tongue.

Andrea turned and punched the pillows.

Dan finally emerged in a nice crewneck sweater. “Dear Abby awaits.” He gave a stiff salute. She heard the clunk of his shoes down the stairway, the hesitant step of a man starting over.

Later, after Dan had left her for good, Andrea was the one starting over.

She bought a new camera and began taking photographs again. Mugshots for passports, houses for real estate advertisements and weddings for friends. On the weekends, she sold matted prints at craft shows. Andrea got good at her work.

She converted a spare closet into a serviceable darkroom. Flush under the red safety lights, she watched the images appear in the chemical baths: dead leaves skittering across a hopscotch pattern on broken pavement, the slow-shuttered blur of a masked woman trudging the sidewalk, a house slipper lost beside a patch of cobblestone.

One day, Andrea found her old Leica while cleaning out a chest of drawers. It was a bulky thing wound with an elastic bandage. She unwrapped the camera and gazed through the viewfinder. The room cracked in two, seen through the broken lens. She rewound the film still inside.

In the darkroom, she switched off the overhead light and began to process the film. Shaking the can of developer with its sloshing maraca sound, Andrea wondered what images would bloom on the acetate. She remembered how perfectly she’d framed the icicles hanging from the Maxey, the drunk’s frozen pants. But had she snapped the shutter too eagerly, triggering the fall?

The timer buzzed. She lifted the spool from the canister and stretched out the roll. The frames revealed blurred shapes that might have been buildings, bursts of light that might have been stars or streetlamps, clouds that might have been bodies falling through space.

Andrea came out of the darkroom for a better look. Holding the roll before the window, she saw nothing that resembled the Maxey. Her fingers ran over the smooth negatives as over a braille worn illegible. There was nothing.

Across the street, the drunks’ house was gone too. She saw a gaunt man wandering through the weeds of the empty lot. He walked through the space where walls had once enclosed rooms, before the city demolished the Maxey. Perhaps he was a former resident, off the booze and sad to see his old home gone. He might have been the same man who let Andrea in the night they fell, the one who called the ambulance and saved Dan’s life.

A city bus stopped at the corner. The drunk hesitated only for as long as it takes a man to decide the rest of his life. He ran out of the vacant lot, out the vanished door to the waiting bus. With the Maxey gone, Andrea thought, maybe he had no place else to go but downtown for another drink.

She saved the ruined film and rewound the broken camera in its bandage. When she found Dan’s sweat-stained brace behind the bed, Andrea kept that too. The bottom drawer of the dresser filled with useless mementos. Sometimes she would take out the mold of Dan’s hand and press it to her cheek, her arm, her breast, trying to remember his touch.

When the divorce papers came in the mail, she didn’t open them. She stuffed the thick envelope into the bottom drawer with all else that had been broken, smashed, ruined.

Andrea always remembered that Dan had suggested their last outing.

“This is too nice a day to stay cooped up inside,” he announced one Saturday, pointing out the window at October’s blue sky and gaudy trees.

Andrea packed the wicker basket with left-over chicken, cold beer, half a baguette, a pint of strawberries out of season.

Swinging the basket between them, they strolled to the park like a happy couple. They had lunch on a bench, checkered napkins in their laps, a clinking toast of beer bottles. The park was deserted except for a man waiting at the end of a leash for his terrier to finish its business.

“That would make a good picture,” said Dan. “But I guess you only like sad pictures.”

Andrea shook her head. “Looks sad to me.”

Dan bit into a strawberry, then wiped the juice from his chin. “Dessert?” He offered her the other half. When he placed the fruit between her teeth. Andrea nipped his finger.

“Ouch.”

At that moment, Andrea wished she could take a picture of his expression, simultaneously sad and sweet, pained and pleased. Dan had feeling back in his hand.

“That smarts.” Dan sucked at his finger. “Why you...”

But Andrea was already up and running across the park. It was hard to run and laugh at the same time. She could hear him closing on her, his breathing growing louder, his feet crunching through the fallen leaves. Dan caught her shoulder and spun her around. Andrea wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his face close. She thrust her hips against his until they lost their balance and went down together.

Andrea rolled over on her back and watched the clouds slide overhead. It was so peaceful, she could fall asleep here beside her husband. But when she closed her eyes, she could feel the earth moving beneath her, the sickening spin of the planet through black space.

Her fingers crept through the leaves, tearing at the grass, searching for Dan’s hand.

“Stop.” She grabbed hold of his hand. “Stop it.” Her eyes started open.

“Stop what?” Dan sat up, brushing bits of leaf from his sweater and hair. “Andrea, what’s wrong?”

“We fell,” she whispered. A sharp taste filled her mouth. She swallowed her rising nausea.

“Are you hurt?”

“You don’t get it: we fell down.”

“I know.” Dan flexed his hand. “Look, it’s all right now.”

She tested herself, closing her eyes. The vertigo was gone. The planet had stopped. When she looked up again, Dan swayed unsteadily above her.

“Come on fun and games are over,” he said.

“Why are you always getting up?” Annoyed, Andrea rolled onto her side and hugged her knees.

“Come on,” he said.

She rubbed her cheek against the sharp grass. “You can’t blame me, you know.”

Dan was looking around the park, as if embarrassed someone might see them like this. “You can’t just lie there. Get up now.”

“You blame me.” She felt his cold shadow covering her.

And then he was shaking her. “Stop it. Stop it.” His voice rose. His fingers dug into her arms. Her head rolled from side to side on the hard ground, but she wouldn’t give in to him.

“Not fair. It’s not fair,” she cried.

Dan stood up. “Lie there. Wallow for all I care. I’m gone.”

And he was gone, when she looked.

The park was deserted. The wicker basket was upended beside the bench: chicken bones, wadded napkins, beer bottles spilled on the ground. She got up, gathered the ruins of their picnic, and started for home.

The sidewalk seemed to shift underfoot; each crack yawned wider beneath every step. She didn’t dare look up. Ahead, Andrea could hear reverberating booms like muffled explosions.

“Watch it!” A passerby jostled her elbow, but she kept her eyes down.

The thumping grew nearer, louder. Her head bowed, Andrea saw the basketball bounce into view, the stride of unlaced sneakers toward the park, then they passed out of sight.

When she finally looked up and found herself on the sidewalk in front of their home.

Now the noise was across the street. Men armed with crowbars and sledgehammers were ripping apart the Maxey. From the upstairs windows, they threw down scraps of lathing and crumbled plaster that raised dusty clouds upon hitting the ground. The broken boards piled in the front yard where the drunks used to sit.

Andrea was crying when she turned to go inside, and it was the view through her tears that she would remember. The blurred picture of Dan at the upstairs window, looking at the condemned house come down, looking down on her. The terrible resignation of his hand letting the curtain fall over the panes of glass.

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photo credit: Hassan Tahir

Going through the archives in my writing office downstairs,, I came across an old short story that never found a home in the lit magazines way back when. Proud to let my character Micah tell his story in this Substack debut. And why not, here’s the place to brave new and old narratives we all tell ourselves.

God help me (if I still believed in the big Him) but I can’t help myself — my heart warms immeasurably whenever anyone tells me I’m headed for hell. Bless anybody with a gift for tongues to dog-cuss my kind. Flute Smith, a black boy whom I once played in a strange Sunday round of bad basketball, was the first to so direct me eternally downward, and I’ve never forgotten the mouth on him, let alone forgiven him.

I can still be caught unawares, like the other day turning the wrong corner when I walked smack into the Word of the Lord.

“Publican,” this stranger hissed.

Now I am middle-aged and hard-hearted enough to pass by homeless vets and boozed-up beggars without blinking an eye or breaking my stride. The poor we will always have with us, even unjaded Jesus had to concede, but I had to halt at this unprovoked slander.

“Did you just call me a Republican?”

“No, Publican,” he pointed at me with a black-nailed finger and a stink eye. Not your typical homeless man, unleashed by his lack of meds. All he lacked was a brokeback King James Bible to flap in my red face. I hadn’t seen his ilk in years, since the ordinances now in our politically correct city outlawed those old fashioned street preachers who hollered about heaven without permit or permission.

The Baptist node in my brain set on automatic flinch, I couldn’t help but lean in closer to heed his words.

“Pharisee, Philistine, Faggot, take your pick. You’re headed for hell any old ways.”

Later at the office, I had to Google what he’d said. The oracle that is the Internet coughed up twenty-three million possibilities in point-twelve seconds. How bad could it be? I would discover: “Publican”- the Jewish low-lifes who strong-armed their fellows for the Roman taxes, not the good guys.

Me? I blinked hard at my PC’s pronouncement upon me, shifted my steadily expanding backside in the mesh of my ergonomically correct chair, pushed my paunch back from the retractable keyboard tray. A sigh of frustration flew up from the corners of my frown, a habit from childhood when my unbated breath could lift the bangs from my high forehead, back when I had hair follicles there and faith in my heart or at least the fear of God, that tight knot of anxiety in my chest.

Flute Smith only amplified that feeling, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I had my first taste of hellfire at an even more tender age. Maybe eight or so, the age of accountability, the Baptists of my church believed, when a kid could decide whether the eternal address for his immortal soul should be heaven or hell. And me? Finicky eater, recovering bedwetter, practiced prevaricator, future insurance agent, I just had to dip my toe in the everlasting lake of fire, or at least the sweltering temperatures inside a Chevrolet Corvair on a summer Sunday.

I sat there most of the morning, waiting for the service to be over and my parents to drive me home. Sitting in my Sunday best, sweat soaking into the polyester, the sun beating on the roof. If I were a dog, my brains would have baked. All because I had become lost in the warren of Sunday school hallways, in that huge complex of classrooms and nurseries, of slow falling dust of chalkboards and crayoned posters of Jesus and little lambs. With my recent birthday, I had been promoted from the Little Angels Sunday School class to the Lord’s Young Lions, but I had no clue as to the location of my new classroom. My pride wouldn’t allow me to ask an adult for the embarrassment of appearing, well, childish. I should have foreseen the angst of junior high with class changes rung by bells and locker combinations to master.

At least, I knew where my father had parked the car and I was determined to wait until Sunday School was over.

I lay on the seat, then lay down, rubbing my cheek against the rough upholstery that smelled vaguely of popcorn and piss, the essence of an eight-year-old. When I was but a baby, I could fit myself snugly in the scooped out well between the rear seat and the back glass, but that exposed metal was like a tin coffin, searing to the touch. I turned and tried to keep my head in the shade. The Corvair of course would be roundly cursed as a fireball waiting to happen on any American highway, according to Ralph Nader in his first incarnation as a consumer’s angel. I can report no angels. I thought of Israelites in the desert. I saw burning bushes when I closed my eyes. Distant bells from the big, rich churches downtown tolled out the noon. The Sunday School hour was long past, and now even the morning worship service.

I must have nearly passed out, when I came to, my mother was loosened my shirt and tie, made me strip down to my underwear, but I was too far gone to be embarrassed by the attention. She was nearly hysterical, insisting we drive straight to the emergency room. My father kept shushing her, and hunkering over the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead as he drove home, his fearful eyes glancing up in the rearview mirror, seeing if I had expired or not. The rush of the July air through the vented windows revived me from my fugue state. I popped up in the backseat, like Lazarus.

“Lie back down, sweetheart.”

“Do what your mother says.”

Home again. She put me to bed with cool washcloths laid over my burning head. I lounged in the faint breeze of a big box fan stirring the air over my single bed and the pages of my comic books. I sucked at banana popsicles, my favorite, foregoing the tough pot roast and wilted broccoli that had otherwise awaited me for Sunday dinner. I felt simultaneously sick and happy, saved from certain death by my concerned parents.

Later in the cool of the evening, my father came to the door, all business, no doubt pushed to the deed by my nervous mama.

“You pull a trick like that again. I’ll get my belt out, mister.”

And so he did, pulling it from the loops of his slacks, and coiling it there around the doorknob, like a serpent that would surely strike me if I took that forbidden step.

I’ve never been a particularly bright fellow, I suppose, though I’ve known I was different since forever and decidedly gay since college. I tried to pass myself off as straight and normal with a brief marriage to a soprano in our church choir. I even went so far as as a weeklong retreat up in the mountains, to pray the gay out of me, hoping the power of faith could exorcise my lusts as a wrong choice I had made in a crooked moment, rather than a kink in the DNA my parents had raveled for me. But all I could focus on was the brawny-chested Christ who would save me with those languid limbs stretched out to hug even me.

I still call mother religiously each Sunday at the Baptist Home. Just last week, we chatted about her latest outing. In the dawn, the retirement ladies boarded an air conditioned luxury bus with the tinted windows that let them look down on the road and the cornfields hurrying by the roadside beyond the billboards advertising the world’s allures. They rode to Cincinnati to visit the Creation Museum, a multi-million dollar testament to men’s stupidity and the belief that, by God, the Bible means what it says about the six days to get this world up and running. Counting back by the genealogies that everybody skips, there was no Big Bang to the beginning, but clearly God cleared his throat some six thousand years ago, and here we are today, with everything about to end just about any second now when Jesus jumps down, raining holy hell on anybody who ain’t believed by now.

My mother suspected all along I was not a true believer, but was too polite to point out that I could be risking hell with that attitude, eternal damnation, along with my tendency to vote Democrat way too often.

“We have faith, but we’re not fanatics,” my mother once quietly informed me, which explained why we would forego saying grace before our meals.

She looked askance at the plain-faced people in calico dresses and plaid shirts who would bow their heads with bad haircuts to give thanks before diving into their McDonald’s double-cheeseburgers. You didn’t call attention to yourself is the lesson I learned.

The closest my mother ever came to discussing my orientation, came in junior high. “That Elton John, please don’t be like him,” she said waving a dust rag where she polished to a shine the dining room table where no one ever ate. I took after her with my obsessive neatness, I suppose, and I’ve always thought that Rhinestone Cowboy too tacky for words, let alone a role model, even though he’s been knighted by the Queen of England.

My father ­- bless his heart, corroded with cholesterol until it seized up, sending him to his Maker - perhaps he knew, but he never broached the subject with me, or anything sexual in nature after the awkward discussion in the seventh grade as he made me strip down and get my jockstrap on correctly before my first gym class. Perhaps he knew what kind of ordeal P.E. would prove in the years ahead, but he never said another word, made an insinuation. Like father, like son. We were standoffish with each other. My father never pressured me to toss a baseball in our challenged backyard or made me suffer hooking worms on boring fishing expeditions, and I wasn’t so obvious as to request dolls or pink sweaters for my birthdays. He seemed to look beyond my obvious limitations in the masculine departments, his eyes always squinting to the distance well past my left ear. Direct eye contact would have perhaps killed us both, to discover we shared the same blue eyes. A modest man. I don’t believe I ever saw him naked.

He believed though. I could come upon him unawares, when he was whistling to himself, always a hymn from the battered Broadmans in the church pews. “Rock of Ages,” or “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

We were never close, but I still feel his absence.

So we were Baptists, living in the South, but not of the Southern Baptist denomination proper, with those Lottie Moon offerings and such. The church’s founding fathers had peeled off from the denomination, not willing to shell out any of their offerings that I helped collect as a junior usher. Not that I knew any better, or differently. I had been spoon-fed God’s word straight from the Scofield Reference version of the King James Bible. I sued to joke in college that Elizabeth English was what Jesus spoke and all in RED.

Our church had grown up in an old mill section of the town, not far from the stone and bigger brick sanctuaries of the First Baptists, First Methodists, First Presbyterians who had staked their claim to the bigger offerings of the merchants. The neighborhood was different. The white working class who had once filled the bungalows and shotgun shacks had moved out. We still drove across town to go to the church where my parents had started when they first moved here in the Fifties. We had risen in that world, making our way west to a larger house in what would become the suburbs. Blacks had moved in our abandoned abodes without a word, small yards full of dark loud children like starlings surrounding the decaying bungalows of the shut-ins, those strange sect of members we were asked to remember earnestly in our prayers. With my eyes shut so tightly, I always envisioned of old people locked in steamer trunks and musty closets, their wrinkled flesh like furrows catching the sweat of their bald and bluehaired heads, trapped as surely as a little boy cooking in a Corvair.

Maranatha was meant to be a fortress in a fallen world. The Sunday School handed out helpful pamphlets that warned against the Peace Sign, which was actually an upside down cross with broken arms, that demonstrated how hippies and secularists and atheists meant to break Christianity in our nation, while the Peace sign that you held up with your two fingers, versus the Vulcan hand salute of splayed fingers that Spock used, that V for Victory hadn’t been subverted for peace and harmony in the diabolical age of Aquarius but actually spelled V for Victory for the Communists. You can imagine we heard about the demonic rhythms of rock n roll that could sway an impressionable mind toward Satan.

The world intruded enough with the three story brick Sunday school building erected back after the War, and in its deepest recesses, the yellow and black triangular warning signs showed the fallout and fallback positions in case the Godless Communists jumpstarted the Apocalypse with a nuclear strike.

I’m still not sure how that jived with what the ancient pastor, Dr. Stanley, preached about the Rapture and Tribulation, all the frightening stuff of Revelation, way cooler than the sci-fi movies showing down at the Bijou. We were all supposed to be whisked away before the really bad stuff happened, and the bombs starting raining down on the heads of folks headed for hell anyway.

So why would we need the Fallout shelters, I began to wonder.

About then, all of thirteen years, my faith would collide with the likes of Flute Smith.

I was in the foyer leading into the sanctuary, where nervous brides awaited their turn with their big-walleted daddies to march them down the marital aisle. Having finished my duties as a junior usher, I had brought the polished wooden plates back to the chief deacon for safekeeping, when I heard a sound out of place for a Sunday — the telltale boom of a ball bouncing, back when there were probably blue laws against basketball.

The choir was finishing up the offertory, the organist hitting the real heavy notes that nearly swallowed the telltale dribbling sound. When the chief deacon was hunched over the Lord’s own lucre, I slipped out of the air-conditioning through the fogged glass door and out into the late morning heat of early August. I slipped down the walk to the parking lot, to see a strange dervish of a black kid shooting hoops badly.

Usually, the parking lot was full, but it was summer now and hot in the South, and the church services weren’t as well attended as families took their vacations going up to the mountains, or many went to the beach, and the plumbers had started going fishing at the lake down south, running their bass boats, or taking their kids skiing behind new speedboats. They said their prayers, grace over picnic lunches in their bathing suits, bowed their heads for bounty,

But fewer sedans in the north parking lot had left an opening for anyone who took a notion to shoot hoops on a summer Sunday morning, He was small, several inches shorter than even me. He looked like an agitated accountant, the sunlight glaring off the too large plastic black-rimmed spectacles. He had a small Afro, in the fashion of the day.

I came closer, hands thrust into the tight pockets of my pants, jealous of a boy who could wear cut-off shorts, a t-shirt and sneakers on a Sunday morning, rather than the blazer, tie and white shirt, shiny dark pants and clunky oxfords I was expected to sport each and every Sabbath. Clothes that were made not to be played in, or dirtied. My mother complained that I still sweated too much for a such a little boy, as close as we came to mentioning that embarrassing fiasco so many Sundays before.

“We’re having church, you know. You really shouldn’t be here.”

“Who made you Jesus, whitebread?” he kept dribbling, then heaved a shot toward the blackboard that actually teetered on the rim, then dropped.

“Flute, Flute, Flute,” he grunted.

“What’s that?”

“My name, fool. I can give you an autograph.” And he drew his name large in the air with his hand. “Flute Smith.”

He drove toward the basket in his skinny legs and black Keds and missed the backboard completely, then scampered after the ball, like it was all intentional, dribbling between his legs like he was just fooling with me.

“So what’s your name, whitebread?”

“Micah.”

“What kind of whitebread name is that, Micah?”

“It’s from the Old Testament. Micah was one of the Jewish prophets. It’s also a kind of rock. Shiny like you see glinting in the road.”

“Still sounds like a whitebread name to me.”

“Better than Flute.” I stood up straight and white and pale, none too tall, but taller than him.

“Flute is something you blow, fool. You ain’t a cocksucker or something?”

“You’re not really supposed to be here.” I looked over my shoulder of my blue blazer, and my polyester clip on tie. I shed the jacket and folded it on the hood of the nearest station wagon.

He flung a set-shot hard against the heavy air.

“Air ball,” I observed.

“Airy Fairy, yourself,” He bounced the ball at me and I caught it in my solar plexis with a grimace. In my hands, the ball needed a little air. It didn’t so much bounce as thud against the broken asphalt under the rusted pole when I heaved it heavenward to miss the backboard.

“So what you do in that church? You a choirboy or something?”

“I’m an usher. Junior usher.”

“Is that like a deacon or an elder or something?”

“Just pass the plates during the offertory, but you have to pay attention. No butterfingers.”

I feared I would drop the plate and watch all the coins roll down the red carpeted aisle.

“You ever take some for you self. Say a little candy money. Um hm?”

I let my mouth hang open a bit too long, looking I’m sure like a deranged mouth-breather, before I snapped my jaws shut and shook my head firmly, all to Flute Smith’s bemusement.

“You don’t want to go to hell, huh? You all chicken shit when it comes to your whitebread excuse for a soul, huh?”

“No,” I said, and I jumped up for a rebound.

We were both bad. I heaved a shot hard that thwacked the backboard. There were no nets, just the rusted rim. Fortunately there was a brick retaining wall there to serve as a backstop. Or else we would have been chasing that ball all the way down the street, the hill.

I was sweating through my white shirt and my toenail was turning blue in my too tight Oxfords. I took the ball out and back in, driving hard, then skidding to a sudden stop, spinning on my leather sole and then back, while Flute waved his pale palms in my face, the glint of Sunday in his spectacles. I lobbed it over his short up-reached arms, like a lifeline over a drowning man, and watched the parabola it took.

“Jesus,” I whispered. It was so sweet.

“You gonna let a white boy beat you like that?”

A slender black girl, more bone than flesh, like an emaciated Ethiopian, stared down at us from the top of the brick wall, more like a blackbird than an angel come down to gloat.

“Leave me be, girl,” Flute was furious.

“Who’s that?” I whispered.

“I’m his sister. Not that anybody asked you, white boy.”

“Cain’t you see I’m whipping this whitebread’s ass, girl?”

“You want me to come over there and show you how it’s done,” she said.

“You aint’ allowed.”

“You better get your scrawny black ass on home for Mama comes out to whip it for.”

Flute slammed the ball hard and made if finally bounce over his head. “This ain’t over by a long shot, Whitebread.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Next Sunday, you and me, Whitebread.”

“I’ll be here.”

We were hands on our knees, sweat dripping from our noses, bent over as our lungs about to burst in the heated, humid air.

“No, we’ll have to make it more interesting. Make it worthwhile if you catch my drift.”

I wasn’t following Flute by a long stretch. He had the same exasperated look my father got, trying to explain the world, higher mathematics or how gas pumps worked.

“A bet. If I win, you got to usher me up front in your church. Seat me down like I’m a VIP, a visiting bishop from the church of the out of sight.”

“I can’t do that. I mean, you’re, uh.”

“Black, is that what you saying? You just afraid I’ll whip your whitebread ass come next Sunday.”

“And what if I win?”

He glanced at his sister. The girl was swirling around with one hand on the metal pole that held the backboard, turning her lithe body like a precocious titty-bar attraction, humming to herself, waiting evidently on her talkative brother.

He lowered his voice.

“You can touch her boobie, bro. Try you a finger in that sweetpie. Don’t worry, she kindly likes it.”

I swallowed hard.

“Next Sunday.” Be here. We got a date.”

My ears were red for a week thereafter, the words that Flute Smith had pushed into my ear canals, infected my brain. I would never play as good a game as I did with Flute. I went home and to my father’s amazement, pumped up the basketball in the garage and took a few shots at the net he had hung in our driveway in his delusions of my boyhood. Air ball after air ball, no satisfying swish to be had far into the dark when the lightning bugs fired their fluorescent thoraxes. I would solicit pickup games with the boys in my neighborhood and was subsequently slaughtered. I was slow and flatfooted and awful, far worse than my nemesis, Flute Smith.

Mostly I lay awake all night, wondering what it would be like to touch a girl’s secret parts. All the boys at school talked in low, lewd whispers, and the thought terrified me. I had no desire for that. My itchings were elsewhere, though again it would take me years to see I wanted nothing more to lean into Flute’s skinny little frame when we went up for the loose ball.

The next Sunday, I pleaded a sick stomach. My father went on to church without us, my mother tending to me in my sickbed, as I fussily paged through my Archie comics, trying to forget my pledge. Then the following two Sunday, we were in the car headed to and from the beach for my father’s annual vacation. It wasn’t until August that I was back at church. The parking lot was filled only with Christian cars and not with the bouncing doomsday basketball of Flute Smith.

It was not my last encounter with Flute Smith. School desegregation came to our town, and in the ninth grade, I would travel half an hour by bus from my suburban ranch house just a block away from the spanking new junior high to a falling down brick monstrosity with radiators that hissed along dim halls of green linoleum. Flute Smith in the flesh passed me in the hallway, and I caught the flash in his spectacles. For that heartbeat, we were Whitebread, the junior usher, and Flute, the ladies own instrument, reunited, but I dropped my gaze and we pretended in that mysterious manner of sixteen year olds to be perfect strangers, aliens with inviolable orbits.

I kept watch on him, stole glances in his direction, spied on the soft flutter of his eyelashes behind those still owlish spectacles and the thin whisper of mustache he sported over his wide mouth. I saw very little of him that year, it was a big school, and the blacks were still a minority, instead of a nonentity as in my junior high. They slumped in desks at the back of the classes, many with their heads down on the desk, pillowed on their soft afros that were coming into fashion, with the black power fist picks at jaunty angles. They came alive only at P.E., when they hooted and jeered and slammed me with Kill Ball.

Flute pretended not to know me, even in the locker room after gym, where he sat pulling on his faded gray underwear, and I stretched the thin scratchy towel about my pale loins. The next semester, we shared no classes, and in our sophomore year, I never saw him in the hallways. He must have dropped out or moved away.

It makes me uneasy to make this some morality tale of race relations in my childhood, some sort of MLK Day greeting card, though in most tales of the dark, dire South of that time, there should have appeared a villain that long ago Sunday, perhaps the deacon of the church, a fat perspiring man in seersucker or black suit, a voice like he was gargling with molasses in the noonday sun. What y’all boys think y’all doing ou’ here.” I would like to say I experienced an epiphany that my life had suddenly and irreversibly changed, but as I’ve said, I’ve never been a particularly bright boy. I would be of course lying. It wasn’t that day, nor the next year, that I had found that I had lost my faith, which was not a big deal, but more like the sadness of growing up and learning that your folks with all good intentions had been gulling you with the myth of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and guardian angels.

But I was called that day. I heard my name coming from the direction of the sanctuary. Church was out and my parents were picking their way across the parking lot. My mother carried a face full of dismay, wide-eyed and mouth hung open, while my father looked crestfallen — I finally understood that word, the ridge of high regard he tried to carry about his person collapsed in catastrophe like a mudslide. Mud, merde, not glittering Micah, was my name.

“Son, you ain’t been sitting in the car again?”

What can I say in my flopsweat, dark stains in my polyester shirt that would later turn a faint yellow in the wash, an everlasting reminder of my cowardice, and how I feel too many mornings waking up uncomforted in my narrow bed yet another Sunday in this small life that has played out for me. Yes, oh father, lo these many years, still waiting for a kinder word.

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May 1, 1903

After the dreary rain of recent weeks, we are blessed with fine weather. Our hired man has been so good as to clear a plot by the house for a formal garden. Hensley spent the better half of the day, spading manure in the soil. One breathed in little but the barnyard. Yet close your eyes, imagine all the future fragrances. Listen closely, for flowers speak. Columbine stands for forsaken lovers; snowdrop means consolation; bluebell for constancy, verbena, enchantment; wisteria, poetry; lupine is imagination. Remember the forget-me-nots....

A knucklebone rapping at the door. “Elizabeth?”

The squib of her pen squeaked to a halt, blotting ink in the last loop of her fine hand. The imperfection bloomed over the ledger’s crisp page. She pursed her lips, brushed straying hair from her cheek, but Elizabeth Porter did not turn.

“Yes, William?”

She saw him reflected in the window before her desk, a ghostly image of a man loosening the cellophane collar under his adam’s apple. She dreaded what she knew he would call to her.

“Come to bed, love. It’s late.”

“I won’t be long, dear.”

She bent her head, praying for the apparition to disappear. The candle flickered by the inkwell with his disapproving sigh.

She sat by the window, listening to his heavy tread up the staircase, then to his boots, one after the other, falling to the floor above. Springs creaked in the massive four-poster. She could see him lying in bed, hands crossed behind his head, waiting.

She chewed the inside of her lip, pressing her eye tooth into the wound of her own making. Nightly, she regulated a small sharp pain there as her husband made love to her.

“Lie still, love.” His hand would lift the nightgown above her narrow hips – “don’t move” – roll the hem over her small breasts. “Still, yes, very still.”

He’d begin to move against her. Her legs would cramp as she tried to hold herself rigid. He reared above her in the darkness, his head thrown back, eyes tightly clinched. He did not see her. She was a statue lying in the moonlight.

She turned her head on the pillow, bit her lip. Sometimes she woke up with bloodstains on her pillowcase.

“Love grows under many names,” Elizabeth wrote in her new ledger. “My house shall be fluent in the language of flowers.”

Extinguishing the candle, she surrendered the room to the night. Outside on the lawn, the disc of naked earth gleamed under the full moon, Diana’s chaste countenance.

“Still a mite early to count on spring. I seen it snow in May when trees have already come out. Dogwood snow.”

“But spring does come here, doesn’t it?” Elizabeth wondered.

Mrs. Hensley laughed. “Ain’t seen us miss one yet.”

While her cook peeled potatoes at the sink, Elizabeth tallied the grocery receipts at the kitchen table. Most households employed Negroes but William believed that the local mountain people would make more dependable domestics. Elizabeth didn’t trust Mrs. Hensley’s arithmetic; yet she found the mountain woman delightful company, full of folk wisdom regarding the use of roots and herbs to cure warts and thin the blood. Superstition and nonsense, no doubt.

“Now one day you’ll be needing to plant birthwort ‘stead of just flowers out there,” Mrs. Hensley advised. “Use it to staunch the blood after a baby comes.”

Elizabeth bit her lip. “I don’t believe so.”

William was also waiting for that from her. Her husband had installed her as lady of the house – a house with an empty nursery – waiting for Elizabeth to work her end of the biblical equation and multiply. But just the monthly curse of all Eve’s daughters could put her to bed for days; surely anyone could tell at a glance that she was too delicate for motherhood’s duty.

“Spring’s the time too for ‘sang, but you have to go dig that.” the cook rambled on. “Root looks like a man when you yank the plant from the ground. Chinamen brew ginseng into a love potion, believe it makes their little fellers stand up straighter.”

“Mrs. Hensley!” Elizabeth colored.

“Sorry, ma’am. Them Chinamen are all heathen.”

Elizabeth probed the tender spot inside her lip with her tongue. Lie still, love, don’t move. She concentrated on the figures, carrying the amount into the next column. Simple addition, that was all.

“What’s that fool up to now?” Mrs. Hensley suddenly stood on tiptoe to bang at the window.

Outside, Hensley scrambled to his feet, rubbing the back of his overalls where a wet stain spread over the seat. “Too early,” he hollered to the women watching from the house.

“What is he doing?” Elizabeth asked.

“Testing the ground,” Mrs. Hensley explained. “When you can set down on your bare backside, it’s warm enough to plant.”

Elizabeth was grateful that the hired man had not dropped his overalls for the neighbors to see.

While her husband evidently avoided it, hard work had worn Mrs. Hensley to gaunt skin and knobby bone. Elizabeth’s only complaint concerned the woman’s snuff habit. More than once, the cook had been caught with a dribble on her chin before she could wipe it away with her apron, but otherwise, Elizabeth had found no other vice in her.

“How many eggs again, Mrs. Hensley?”

“Three dozen, ma’am.”

“And you’re quite sure about this bill for the butcher?”

“All I know is that man has a mighty fat thumb on the scale. Thinks that wink of his blinds all the ladies.”

The cook gouged out an eye from a potato. “It’s a sin how some men want it.”

“I know,” Elizabeth agreed, “but at least there’s something to be grateful for, at your age, being past all that now.”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?”

“The change of life. No babies, no bleeding, all that business with men over, it must be a relief.”

Mrs. Hensley splashed the peeled spud in the sink. A flush reached up the nape of her neck and spread under the roots of her tightly pinned hair. “Ain’t much that changes,” she muttered.

“Oh.” Blushing herself, Elizabeth shut the ledger even though the dollar twenty-three was still unaccounted for. “Do be more careful with the bills, Mrs. Hensley.”

Elizabeth paused in the parlor. Delicate porcelain rested on the cherry sidetable – a Dresden shepherdess with stray lambs. Antimacassars adorned the arms of the horsehide chair. From the mantel came the muffled tick of the gilt clock.

But amid this civilizing calm, her heart galloped. Since she was a little girl, she had been warned to watch herself as too excitable. Give her imagination full rein, and it might take her over the brink.

She looked at the porcelain, the lace, the fine wood, all the accoutrements of a tasteful life. She closed her eyes. Roots and thumbs, dirt and filth, images bred for a barnyard rather than any lady’s bedroom reared in her mind. She tasted warm blood in her mouth.

May 10, 1903

My seeds arrived in the post this morning, and I’m worse than a miser counting his treasure. I pour out the packets, rake their contents across the page, study their shapes under William’s magnifying glass. Imagine what they shall look like weeks from now. Tucked into the soil, kept warm and wet, these sleepers will raise their green necks and dream of colors for all to see.

Where there are only dry seeds scattered on this single page, I shall write a book of blossoms.

Elizabeth sowed her bed from a milkstool, her skirts tucked carefully to one side. The earth was pocked with a triad of holes each time she moved her seat. Humming with her work, waving her trowel like a baton, she felt like a conductor calling forth sweet notes: an aria of asters for fall, the fanfare of fuchsia in mid-summer, interlude of impatiens. Colors sang in her head.

“Where you want it?” Hensley hoisted the heavy flagstone.

“There is fine.” Elizabeth indicated the next step of her walkway.

“Rocks get slick. Bust your -” He turned before she could catch the rest of his insolence.

“I beg your pardon?”

From beneath her straw brim, Elizabeth studied the hired man. His skinny arms were all tendon and bone, nut-colored. William’s limbs were soft and white in comparison.

“Do you not care for flowers, Hensley?”

“Cain’t eat ‘em.”

“Some would say they feed the soul.”

“You want a good feed, now, dig up some ramps.”

“Ramps?”

“They grow wild back of the hollers. Like onions, ‘cept a mite stronger. Ora won’t kiss me for three days after a mess of ‘em.” He grinned with his yellowed and missing teeth.

Elizabeth winced. “More rocks, please.”

She scratched her nose with the back of her work glove. Smell of leather and dirt mingled with her own perspiration, the perfume of pleasant labor.

Hensley, however, emitted a ranker air when he returned. Dark half-moons stained his shirt beneath his overalls. After tamping the slab into place, he produced a bandanna from his hip pocket to mop his brow.

“No siree, a man cain’t fill up on flowers. But I could eat me a ramp right about now.” He smacked his lips and daubed at the corners of his mouth with his bandanna.

Ignoring him, Elizabeth funneled the seed from her gloved fist into the parted earth, patted it smooth with her trowel.

When Hensley kept wiping his mouth, she said, “I believe there are still more rocks.”

“Flowers, huh.” Hensley wadded the rag into his pocket and tracked heavy boot prints across her garden.

June 10, 1903

Do gardens grow on the Sabbath? I wonder if Christ ever grew a garden, prayed over a garden, rather than in one at Gethsemene?

From the porch, one can see the day lilies raising their stalky heads at the center of the garden. Waiting for impatiens to fill out the borders takes patience. But today is the Lord’s, that first Gardener, and if he could rest from the watering and weeding of this fallen world on the seventh day, so must I.

“My dear, you must come in, it’s much too hot out there.”

Elizabeth shaded her eyes with her hand, peering toward the porch. “These plants will die. They’re positively parched.”

“Get Hensley to water this evening. You’ll burn yourself blacker than a Zulu.”

Reluctantly, she came out of the sun and took a seat on the porch swing.

“I can’t have my wife grubbing about on the Sabbath,” William smiled at her, “what would the neighbors think?”

She raised her feet and rode the swing on creaking chains. The wake of her ride rustled William’s paperwork.

“Confound it, Elizabeth.”

“How is it that you may work, and I may not even give a dying plant a drink of water?”

“Justice is blind, but the judge isn’t. He’ll know if I’ve not prepared a good case.”

William had not budged from the porch and his papers since they had returned from their early Episcopal service. Her husband made a comfortable income, protecting year round the interests of transient tycoons who summered here in the Southern Highlands. “The rich may take vacations, law does not,” he always said. His work largely consisted of drafting impenetrable documents with the necessary filigree of words. Rarely did he have to appear in court to back up his words as he would tomorrow.

Elizabeth knew he was nervous. When worried, her husband had the unfortunate habit of nibbling his mustache.

During their courtship, he used to recite Rossetti as they strolled through the park of their native Northern city. When they stopped to rest in a secluded glen, she wove him a garland of flowers. “My conquering hero,” she said, though he looked ridiculous. His balding pate protruded through the monkish tonsure of dandelions.

The air was warm, the sun drowsy, the moment propitious. She shut her eyes and leaned close, waiting to be kissed - their first. His mustache alighted on her lips, fluttering like a wayward moth. Her eyes flew open - although in all the novels she’d read no heroine had ever dared kiss other than blinded. And with good reason: there was nothing to see but the pores of his nose and the bushy roots of his eyebrows. She parted her lips under his, not as an invitation, but to gasp for breath. His front teeth bumped hers. The fact men had teeth had never been noted in all her fictions about kisses.

Abruptly it was over. Elizabeth fingered her bruised lip.

“I say!” William looked dazed, the garland tipped over one ear.

She snatched the silly ring from his head.

“Um, shall we go?” He helped her to her feet and gave her his arm as they walked quickly on.

The following spring, Elizabeth took his arm at an altar overpowered by chrysanthemums and took the vow to honor and obey him as husband.

Instead of garlands now, he affected an eyeshade. The light through the green cellophane cast a sickly hue over his pale features. His forehead furrowed when he was lost in thought. When he was not lost, Elizabeth had to admit William was a very kind and decent man. Still, she remembered his teeth at times and shuddered.

Presently, William pinched the bridge of his nose and announced a headache.

“Do you want some tea? Chamomile from the garden. Mrs. Hensley said it should ease any headache.”

William frowned. “This is the twentieth century. Wouldn’t it be better to go inside and take the aspirin?”

“Tea wouldn’t hurt.”

“Such persistence.” He forced a weak smile. “Have it your way. Go to your garden. I think I’ll lie down.”

“I’ll have your tea in no time.” Elizabeth promised.

In the garden, the heat made her dizzy as she bent over the drooping flowers. She listened to the whispering flowers. Lobelia is for malevolence. Chamomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows. Sage for esteem. Thyme for sweetness. Pots of geraniums set along the border. Musty smelling weeds, they meant folly. A garden grows all sorts of emotions.

Was it such a sin on the Sabbath to touch the earth, to work the soil under the fingernails, to feel the bed of your own mortality?

The heat poured down her back. Her skin itched under her dress. By the time she had picked enough chamomile, she had a terrific headache.

“Mite warm for field work.”

The Hensleys stood at the edge of the garden. They were dressed in their Sunday best, a black dress for the cook, freshly starched overalls for the hired man. They stared at their employer toiling on hands and knees in the dirt.

“Feeling all right, Miz Porter?” Mrs. Hensley asked. “You look a little peaked.”

“It’s so hot.” Elizabeth rubbed her fist against her forehead, smudging the skin. “All my flowers are going to die. They need watering.”

“It’s Sunday,” Hensley headed for the shade.

Mrs. Hensley ignored her husband’s rude manners. “Grady was hunting ramps on the way home from Sunday meeting and look what he found.” She held out a clump of dirt and weeds.

“What is it?” Elizabeth squinted against the glare of the sun, the throbbing in her temples.

“Ginseng, remember I told you about it.” The cook flipped the plant over, exposing the forked root. “Now this would make a good love potion for you and the mister.”

“Not now, Mrs. Hensley. Mr. Porter has gone inside to lie down. I have a headache.”

“Ohhh, headaches,” Mrs. Hensley said knowingly. “This’ll right what’s wrong in any marriage bed.”

She shook the plant at Elizabeth. With its upended skirt of earth, the plant looked like a woman turned on her head, naked legs kicking helplessly in the air.

“Don’t be vulgar.” Elizabeth shoved the chamomile leaves at the cook. “Please be so good as to fix us some tea.

“But ma’am -”

Elizabeth looked about for Hensley. The lazy man squatted on his haunches against the side of the servants’ cottage, mouth slightly open, probably dreaming of his horrible ramps.

“And have him water the garden.”

“But Sunday’s our day off,” Mrs. Hensley argued. “It’s the Sabbath.”

“Hang the Sabbath! Do as I say!”

Later in the shade of the porch, Elizabeth sipped the herb tea Mrs. Hensley reluctantly made. Hensley moped among the withered plants of her garden, cutting hard looks her way.

The gentle scent rose from the cup cradled in her hands. She still felt flushed from her fit of anger. A shameful display. After all, Mrs. Hensley had meant well.

But she could not help seeing that root in her mind, its poor crotch.

June 21, 1903

Flowers are so much more discrete in their reproduction. How sweet to have the bees as messengers carrying billet-doux from stamen to piston. There’s none of this thrashing about, flower mashing against flower, the coarse rubbing back and forth. Flowers maintain the decorum so necessary to any sense of romance.

“An excellent supper. Mr. Porter particularly enjoyed the roast.”

“Thank you ma’am.” Mrs. Hensley washed dishes and silverware at the sink, her hands swimming in the soapy water amid the tines and sharp blades.

Elizabeth pulled the envelope from her skirt pocket. “Ah, I nearly forgot.”

“Much obliged, ma’am.” Mrs. Hensley nodded toward the counter for Elizabeth to leave the wages.

But halfway down the hall, Elizabeth realized she had forgotten something. Tomorrow evening, they would be dining out with one of William’s clients. The Hensleys could enjoy an additional night off.

“Quit that now!”

Elizabeth paused by the swinging door. There came a low growl on the other side as if a hungry animal had crept into the kitchen. Spying through the crack, Elizabeth saw Mrs. Hensley at the sink, her head thrown back, with Mr. Hensley standing close behind her, kneading her shoulders.

The woman rolled her head back and forth, and her hair was coming unpinned, falling over his wrists. “Umm,” she groaned.

He answered with the peculiar sound Elizabeth had first heard, a growl in his throat, deep as a stuck bone.

“Um hum.” Incoherent, Mrs. Hensley lifted her dripping hands from the water and leaned her belly against the counter. Her hips began to move and the man’s with her. They moved together. Elizabeth chewed her lip, watching through the crack in the door. She wondered if they would fall to the floor and take their pleasure right in her kitchen.

The envelope with their wages lay beside the sink. She could see Hensley’s rough hand sliding down his wife’s shoulders down her arm toward the money. The cook trapped his wandering fingers in her own soapy grip.

Then she cried out when he twisted her arm behind her back.

Careful not to rustle her skirts, Elizabeth stole down the hall toward the parlor.

William was reading the evening news in his horsehide chair. She composed herself on the sofa, hiding her consternation in a new novel. Her eyes darted over the words, refusing to enter into drawing room romance after what she’d witnessed in the kitchen.

“Another female fiction?” William gave her a bemused smile.

She had to glance at the cover. “Desiree. I’ve just now begun.”

“Shall I tell you how it goes? A headstrong damsel is besieged with suitors, vacillates whether to surrender herself to the brooding baron or the mincing marquis, when all along she secretly has aimed on the handsome commoner who turns out to be a true prince. The girl gets her wish, get kissed. The end.”

William wagged his head, amused keeper of a flighty feminine pet. How dare him?

Elizabeth glared at her husband, but he never once glanced up into her harsh appraisal. Haloed by gaslight, with his rosy jowls and pouting mouth, he looked like nothing more than a overgrown child, some silly cherub -- this man who sat there like that, filling his head with rubbish.

Dishes clattered from Mrs. Hensley’s kitchen where the woman lived her days in a world of dishwater and boiling pots, vegetables to be cleaned, meats to be stuffed, always feeding and cleaning, feeding and cleaning. Amid the clatter, Elizabeth listened for the woman’s muffled sobbing.

Outside, she heard Hensley’s whistle and the spray of his watering can among her flowers. A shadow moving amid the stalks she had planted.

July 10, 1903

Weeds unwanted will intrude upon any kept place. I gather them, pull their stubborn roots, the vines that would choke my children, the tall stalks that elbow aside my pride and joy.

Cultivated herbs do guard against other pests. I have noticed fewer mosquitoes this summer since planting the lemon sages. Rue harvested and hung in the windows keeps out the flies. The vermin are black and slow at this altitude. I have seen Hensley catch one and shake it in his fist close to his ear to hear the buzzing.

Hensley left one morning without a word to anyone.

From upstairs, Elizabeth had last heard him on the back porch, the rasp of his whetstone sharpening his scythe. With that grate in the air, she could hardly concentrate on her romance. She must have read Desiree’s climatic declaration of love three times, not getting a word of it, when suddenly she heard the silence of the house. She listened hard for what should be in the air, the faint whistle of the blade felling the grass.

She carried the book downstairs, her fingers marking her place. The kitchen was abandoned. Unattended pots sat on the stove, water boiling over. She found the cook on the back porch, wringing her red hands in her apron.

“Mrs. Hensley?” Elizabeth asked.

The woman kept blinking at scythe and the stone lying in the tall grass.

“Mrs. Hensley, where is your husband?”

“Sometimes he takes a notion to go off. I was praying he’d be good this time.”

“What do you mean gone off?” Elizabeth said. “What about mowing the grass, cutting wood? Who will water my garden?”

The cook shrugged. “You seen how he’s got his own mind about work.”

“I’ve seen...” Elizabeth hesitated. “I’ve seen how he treats you” is what she wanted to say.

“Please inform me when he returns,” she finally said.

“Yes’m.”

Elizabeth spun her skirts in a huff. But the cook halted her. “You know Grady’s a good man underneath?”

A telltale dribble of tobacco juice ran from the side of her pinched mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. Afraid to spit before her employer, Mrs. Hensley simply swallowed.

July 11, 1903

In the absence of our hired man, slugs have gotten into my garden. Mrs. Hensley pours bowls of beer that I set out at night. In the morning, I find their white bodies drowned from their drunkenness. My nails feel sticky with the flowers’ sap as I decapitate the withered heads. At least, the sweet William thrives in my garden, playful little flowers of red and white. Not enough leaf on them for the slugs to bother with.

Elizabeth selected a violet from the cuttings spread on the newspaper and placed it inside the pages of Desiree. Pressing the book shut, she almost expected to hear a faint scream.

“The butcher’s bill seems a trifle much.” William gnawed his mustache as he went over her household accounts.

“Remember the leg of mutton and the chops?”

William was studying at her flowers, rather than her figures. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; Pray you, love remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts...”

“Shakespeare,” he explained at her annoyed look. “Ophelia. Hamlet.”

“William, please, the accounts.” She insisted he look them over each month. After all, he was the man of the house.

While he worked through the ledger, she carefully pressed all the violets. Figures are easily fudged, a dollar twenty-three one week, ninety cents the next, but never flowers. One could tell at a glance if a single petal were crooked. Violets mean modesty.

“Well everything seems to be in order.” William closed the book. “You’re such a wonder with the house and those flowers.”

He stole a nasturtium from her cuttings, twirling the petals under his nose. “Wonderful aroma.”

She snatched the flower from his hand. “Have you had a chance to decide what to do about Hensley?”

“I thought Mrs. Hensley said he should be back shortly.”

“So you plan to shovel coal while Hensley’s out gallivanting?”

“Why can’t she?” he said half in jest.

“William, we can’t have domestics who aren’t dependable,”

“I suppose not,” her husband frowned. He hated to be bothered about household affairs. She also knew how it pained him to admit his progressive ideas about servants were wrong.

She crushed a columbine at the start of Chapter XII – columbine for the forsaken lover. Poor Mrs. Hensley, the salary slipping out of her soapy hand, her arm twisted behind her back. Elizabeth turned the page and felt the flower flatten under pressure, its life crushed out.

“I’ll place an advertisement in the newspaper tomorrow,” William said. “I suppose you can start interviewing for their replacements.”

“Their replacements? I only meant him.”

“I’m afraid he goes, she goes too.”

“But I have no complaint with Mrs. Hensley. Remember how you raved over her roast the other evening?”

“My dear, they’re married. What did you expect?.”

Stunned, Elizabeth did not know what to say. She stared at the book on her lap, bulging with flattened bouquets.

William smoothed the ragged end of his mustache. “Perhaps we should employ a Negress this time.”

She had run out of arguments and all her eloquent flowers, speaking virtues such as love, patience, modesty, chastity, were silenced, shut up inside a cheap romance.

“It’s late.” He yawned.

All that remained were cuttings of rue.

“Elizabeth?”

Rue is for disdain. She would never run out of rue, would she?

“My dear.” William waited by the door. “Come to bed.”

But he was not sleepy.

Their intercourse was not as painful as a few months before. She had learned how to poise her hips in such a way to accommodate him, while he had shaped her to his quick ends. She lay still, her head turned on the pillow, watching the moon rise in the window as William made his marital assault. Soon enough, he rolled off her and onto his side of the bed. “Oh my love, oh my,” he murmured. Soon he fell asleep, snuffling like a child treated to candy.

She was wide awake, feeling Diana’s cold caress on her face. From the window, she heard singing, faint and out of tune.

“Git along home, Git along home...” The song slurred even as it grew closer. “Wish I were an apple...” Lyrics were lost in pauses for breath, then the wretched wailing resumed. “Take a bite of meeee.”

Elizabeth slipped out of bed, from beneath the arm William had flung across her bosom, and went to the window. Below, she could make out a figure staggering across the yard. The song abruptly ended when the singer stumbled into her garden.

Despite the commotion, William had not stirred in bed, blubbering in his sleep. She wrapped herself in a robe and hurried down stairs.

In the moonlight, the garden had grown a human leg. The remainder of the body was swallowed in the flowers. She touched a bare foot propped on the border of rocks. The sole was calloused, cracked like dried leather.

“Hensley?” she whispered.

“Is it him?”

Elizabeth started at the figure standing behind her. She could not see the face, only the halo of the moonlight in wild hair.

“He’s bad to drink, but he always makes it back.”

Now she knew her cook’s twangy voice. “Your husband seems to have lost his shoes.”

“Check his pockets.”

Elizabeth stood, refusing any such role.

The cook knelt and ran practiced hands over her husband. “Nothing. Drank it all up again.”

Elizabeth ignored the whine in her voice. “Think we can manage to get him up?”

“Oh no, we can’t do that.” Mrs. Hensley cringed. “He gets mean if you rouse him.”

Such a stupid face she had. Elizabeth suddenly saw how easy it was for Hensley to beat his wife. A hand flying out almost of its own angry accord to slap shut that silly mouth, blacken those dumb eyes. Elizabeth pinned her own hands under crossed arms.

“Let him sleep it off,” the cook pleaded, “just ‘til morning.”

“But the man is in my flowerbed.”

“Please ma’am, he’s good for the damages.”

Elizabeth still wanted to shake sense into her. “I’m sorry, but there’ll be no more pay for Hensley.”

The cook seemed to shiver, drawing her tattered wrap tighter.

“I’m giving notice. I’m afraid any references will be out of the question.”

Mrs. Hensley’s head shook slowly, then came to a halt, cradled on a thin shoulder. “They look like no trouble at all when they sleep like that,” she stared at her husband.

“Never know how sorry they are til they get up each day.”

Two women, one erect in moonlight, the other cowering in her shadow, studied the fallen masculine form in the garden. The man might have fallen from the moon; his presence seemed so alien.

Elizabeth happened to look up at the window silvered with moonlight, where another man sprawled unconscious in her bed. She remembered his weight pressing down on her, his insistence that she not move night after night.

“Mrs. Hensley..” She patted the cook’s bony shoulder. “Ora, you can stay. No one’s making you go.”

But the woman shrugged off her condescending hand. “I have to go. He’ll make me. He’s my husband.”

“Mrs. Hensley, wait!”

But the cook did not come back. Shoulders stooped, she walked slowly across the grass that rose like knife blades in the moonlight.

Elizabeth squatted beside the garden where the body lay so still, it might have been a marble faun toppled from its stand, the reed pipe broken in the fall. The bare foot raised in mid-air, shin barked on the rough rock. The other leg drawn up, crushing the chamomile. Arms flung through the columbine, impatiens weaving through fingers. Her flowers struggled to right themselves under his weight.

“Oh.”

She lost her balance, rocking back on her heels to catch herself stiffly with one hand. Beneath her nightgown, a trickle rolled down the back of her thigh, not blood, but the limp seed of her husband falling, too late, out of her.

October 7, 1903

The last aster finally wilted, despite all my instructions to the new girl to please, please, please water. Daisy is a sullen sort, contrary to William’s image of cheerful blacks. Many things in reality run contrary to William’s wonderful ideas.

I would try a garden again next season, but with the coming child I fear I may not have the energy or inclination. The women of my family have always tended toward the frail, and more than one has not survived when their time came.

So my gardening is done lying in bed. Instead of turning soil for next spring, I turn these pages, marked with the dried remains of violets, columbines, nasturtiums, chamomile, even the rue. So pretty yet so frail – a baby’s touch would crumble all to dust.

It stirs within me. I fear I should have planted birthwort.

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We’re about to write an end to the tumultuous year of 2025 and flip the calendar ahead, but it’s that season now of reflection and looking back at the highlights and lowlights, professionally, personally, politically.

Substack has been a godsend for me, a chance to connect with new readers and old friends. I want to thank each and every one of the folks who chose to subscribe or follow the 46 different posts I published in the last 12 months.

Now is the time to look back over the posts that proved the most popular.

Topping the list, Genius of Place began as an essay and a short talk I gave in April 2024 in Raleigh at the conference of fellow writers published by Janie Royal at Regal House Books. More than background or stage scenery, Place counts as its own character in my book, creating the atmosphere and ambience surrounding people in the ground where they stand, move and move away from. It’s an idea I first heard expressed by the Southern enchantress Eudora Welty, who I was privileged to hear speak in Asheville back in the 1980s.

How Libraries Make Writers came out of the talk I gave to various audiences on my April road show tour of the Northwest Regional Library System from Dobson to Mount Airy to Sparta to Yadkinville, discussing my novels Kings of Coweetsee and The Woman with the Stone Knife. Writers may be born with some innate talent, but they make themselves as they create new books out of the books that came before them. And libraries are the public commons where creativity is nurtured from generation to generation.

What Kind of Writer are You? Kevin Mc McIlvoy’s craft book “Willingness: a writer’s meditations on crossing the flood,” was finally published in October, two years after his sudden death in 2023, pieced together through the tireless efforts of his widow and fellow writer, Christine Hale.

Mc was a huge influence on me, serving as friend, mentor and a probing critic of my fiction. I still miss him terribly and often think in the mornings of my writing: What would Mc do?

I offered an overview of Mc’s thought-provoking takes on the art of prose fiction, how some writers aim toward completeness and mastery while others tend toward fullness and mystery. The truth of course is that most writers fall somewhere in between, but Mc offers new ways of thinking about revision and what we’re trying to achieve when we sit down to write. There was so much to talk about regarding Mc’s book, that I wrote more than one post. Be in Readiness for Wonder also won much love from the Substackers.

Dancing With Poets: The year saw plenty of losses, but perhaps none hit home harder than the death of Ellen Bryant Voigt, the award-winning poet and the matriarch of the low-residency MFA Program for Writers she pioneered at Warren Wilson College, (of which I am a proud alum.) Here was a brief take on Ellen’s influence and a chance to revisit one of my favorite poems Dancing With Poets. God speed, Ellen.

Writer, biographer, poet and naturalist George Ellison entertained and illuminated readers of the Asheville Citizen-Times for decades with 1,500 weekly Nature Journal columns, written from his home surrounded by the Smoky Mountain National Park outside Bryson City, NC. My Substack post, Making Patient Poetry from our Mountains, came with the release of George’s poetry in “Land of Blue Shadows: Mountain Life in Verse & View,” illustrated with Elizabeth’s watercolors and oils and daughter Quintin’s accomplished photographs. This handsome collection makes a vital contribution to our local lore and a continuation of the Ellison legacy that has found deep art in our deep mountains.

I posted old and new short stories through the year, but the most popular pieces came from a portion of my novel The Woman with the Stone Knife, which I cut from the final version. Based on the memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake, my story is a fictionalized account of the ill-fated canoe trek Henry made down river to visit the Overhill villages of the Cherokee people, where he would meet my novel’s heroine Skitty. You can read parts 1 and II here with Timberlake’s Canoe Journey in 1762 and Going to Meet the Bear.

We Are All Living in the Aftermath: This past year, we’ve watched the slow progress of streets being rebuilt around my Asheville neighborhood as our region slowly recovers from the devastation of Hurricane Helene which hit us hard in September 2024. My post marked the one-year anniversary of that Biblical- scale deluge, termed in hindsight by scientists as a geologic event that reshaped our rivers and mountains.

Also popular was my post Remembering the River That Was and Will Be, my homage to the ancient French Broad River, a waterway that’s older than the dinosaurs or even the mountains that channel its flow.

Finally coming full circle, I’m reposting my inaugural Substack Post When Asheville Jumped the Shark, a piece I wrote for my old employer, the Asheville Citizen-Times about a decade ago. The more Asheville changes, the more it stays the same, the complaint that its most famous native son Thomas Wolfe coined as “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

But all is not lost. Wolfe also wrote to his sister Mabel in 1938 ­— “I have a thing to tell you now: that is, you can’t go home again, but there are other places you can go. So why not try to find them?”

Again thanks for reading and supporting Mountains & Rivers. Happy holidays. We’ll see you again in the New Year where we’ll look for those other places we can go.

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And to that litany, we can add “Life is books.”

Come December, I find myself thumbing back through the books that mattered for me over this troubled year. Here are a few that were the standouts for me.

Stone Yard Devotional

Charlotte Wood

I picked this Australian writer’s latest up after a glowing review in the Washington Post. An atheist joins a convent of Catholic nuns in the Outback. Nothing much happens other than a horrific plague of mice, and the arrival of a celebrity activist nun accompanying the remains of a sister murdered on a Bangkok mission to be buried on the grounds. But along the way, we get the memories of the narrator not so much going over or coming into any definable faith, but making peace with her difficult childhood and her own mother. And there is wisdom in these pages. A nun admonishes the narrator “over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile; forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me.”

Diver

Lewis Buzbee

In this autobiographical novel, Buzbee offers a compelling portrait of father and son, and family life in suburban California The book is narrated in part by Robert, only 12 years old when his beloved father succumbs to a fatal heart attack, just hours after watching the news clips of the shootings at Kent State University during the fraught Vietnam War days. “The memories began then, assaulting me, in shards, and the questions I needed to ask my father, and all the stories he’d told me, these flew at me, surrounded me.” Buzbee turns these “shards” into a collage, giving us not only Robert’s childhood, but taking us into the adventures of the father, Mac Macoby, an Okie orphan who joined the Navy to make a career as an expert deep-sea diver. A beautifully wrought novel, “Diver” lives up to Kafka’s own idea: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” And Buzbee takes the deep plunge into those dark and luminous waters.

Cipher, Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries

by Jeremy B. Jones.

of a coded diary by a common man who died in 1859 was discovered and its secrets unlocked by a retired cryptologist. Now imagine if that diary belonged to one of your ancestors. A writing professor at Western Carolina University, Jeremy B. Jones unlocks the secrets of his great-great-great-grandfather who seemed to sleep around with most of the women in lower South Carolina and later Western North Carolina, including his own slaves, and documented each and every time he got laid or touched a “boobie.” William Prestwood was a man of his time, a witness to America’s original sins, profiting off the sale of enslaved people, helping round up Cherokees for the Trail of Tears. He was even loitering about the courthouse where Frankie Silver was tried and later hanged, the first white woman executed by the state of North Carolina.

“Cipher” reads as a moral mystery and an American portrait of the skeletons we can shake out of our family trees. I especially related to Jones’ examination of his own assumptions and how he’s raising his sons in our current political climate. Anyone driving on I-40 through his ancestor’s old tramping grounds in Burke County can’t miss the giant Confederate flag by the highway, a fuck-you message aimed at real and imaginary enemies. “Twenty miles later, an identical flag took over the skyline Get out of here, this one waved at the other edge of the county – my ancestor’s home bookended by hate.”

Jones bravely explores that strange guilt: how reading our past history still incriminates our present lives, despite how lucky and privileged some of us remain.

Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood

By Kevin McIlvoy with Christine Hale

This is the book that I’ve been awaiting for years. McIlvoy died suddenly in 2022 from a heart attack on the tennis court. He left behind a wonderful career of teaching and marvelous if quirky novels. His widow, Christine Hale arranged the book, not in linear, familiar chapters, but along the lines of a 152-word koan that Mc had composed, with paradoxical pairings to ponder, beginning with “Honoring the will of the work to impart, enact/ Honoring the will of the work to enact, impart.”

Don’t go looking for any easy advice on how to write that best-seller in ten easy steps, the come-on of most craft books for aspiring writers. Here’s Mc being upfront with his readers: “I’ve come to believe that it’s the best possible thing for anyone who presumes to make art to place yourself in uncertainties, to be in over your head, to realize that the work is asking you to rise above your limitations.”

And he prods the writer to ask more and deeper questions of the work on the desk. As a philospheoer once said, “The answer is the misfortune of the question.” And Mc’s book become more aobut soul-craft than word-craft, the writer putting aside ego and forcing the book to perform rather than digging into the dark luminous beauty, the energies locked inside the sentence.

His is a friendly supportive voice that can accompany any writer on the long journey and life’s work that is making literary art. Bub he makes

What We Can Know

Ian McEwan.

McEwan uses the existential threat of climate change as the backdrop for a compelling human drama and our species’ ongoing yearning for poetry in his most accomplished novel since “Atonement.” In the Year 2119, an academic Thomas Metcalf is taking a ferry across the inland seas that cover the Lowlands of England, on his way to a library saving the scraps of 20^th century history. He’s searching for a poem “A Corona for Vivian” proclaimed by an award-winning poet Frances Blundy at a famous dinner party for the British literati in 2014. The poem has been lost to time, and Metcalf could make his name if he could ever find the missing manuscript. As narrator, he fills in what he knows of Blundy and his second wife Vivian and the Great Derangement of a society (that means us now) which will lead to climate change’s worst outcomes, reshaping the world that Metcalf and his students will inherit. McEwan turns the tables in Part II as Metcalf’s literary discoveries turn out to be a much different story than he ever suspected. Think James “The Aspern Papers” meets J.G. Ballard’s dystopian “The Drowned World.”

And if you’re shopping around for books for your holiday giving or reading lists, let me shamelessly add to the list my own novels from 2024 – Kings of Coweetsee and The Woman with the Stone Knife.

One can never have too many books on the nightstand or up on the shelves, salves for troubled times, when we just want to turn the page and enter a new world, a small escape from our current unrealities. In the meanwhile, happy holidays ahead and let’s hope for a better year ahead.

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My father never mistreated me growing up, but there was one summer I knew for a fact I’d been raised by wolves.

The pack howled beneath the dinner table whenever I ate without a fork or spoon. I buried my face in the plate, devouring the entrails of my prey.

“Stephen, please,” my mother chided. “Who raised you with such table manners?”

“Wolves!” I cried. My eyes teared up, my heart flip-flopped, I almost believed.

My father paid no attention. He chewed a mouthful of tuna and potato-chip casserole, while he studied the next bite impaled on his fork. Nothing else existed when his mind trained itself on a task. My father capitalized every effort – Office, School, Home, Supper. I knew I was no relation to him.

“Stephen, don’t upset your father tonight,” my mother said. “Let’s try to act human for a change.”

Raking my fork across the china was the loudest sound I dared make, but I listened secretly to my wolf teeth tearing the food in my mouth.

My mother shot a glance at my father. “Work tough today?”

“Same,” he grunted. His brow furrowed as he concentrated on Chewing.

“I’ve got choir practice tonight. Why don’t you take your son for a nice walk after supper,” she suggested.

My father shook his head as I hoped he would. “Yard needs mowing,” he said, showing the casserole in his mouth.

On our last ill-fated outing, I had taken the lead, flailing a stick through the weeds. My father followed close behind, and it was my fault, my stupidity that a backswing caught him smack in the face. My instinct was to run, but my legs wouldn’t budge from where I stood. I cowered, waiting for him to hit me.

“Careful,” my father said, daubing a fingertip in his split lip. Careful, nothing more. But his disapproving silence whipped me all the way home.

I wiped crumbs from the corners of my mouth, folded my napkin into halves, then quarters. “Can I be excused?”

My father considered his next bite.

I tried again. “May I be excused?”

The dismissive wave of his fork freed me from the table. I scraped my chair on the linoleum and bolted for the door. “Don’t forget your bath” were my mother’s last words after the slap of the screen door.

My best friends, Gene Gillette and Jerry Miller, were waiting for me by the fence. Barbed wire separated the regular lawns of our neighborhood from the overgrown pastures of an old farm. Those fields were ours, shared with but a dozen cows. We pretended to be Sioux braves whooping along the Great Plains, Arab traders caravanning over deserts, Viking marauders sailing green seas.

“About time, Fuller,” was Gillette’s greeting.

“Did you clean your plate like a good little boy?” Miller said.

That summer, we aimed to be cool even when our voices cracked high and low. We beat the bushes with sticks, threw rocks into creeks and looked for dead things. We had started calling each other by our last names. After Jerry Miller’s example, we tried swearing and smoked our first cigarettes.

“So, we gonna play explorers or what?” Gillette asked.

“Play explorers,” Miller mimicked him. “Don’t be such a wuss.”

Gillette cringed. “What did you call me?”

“A wussy,” said Miller. “A wimp screws a pussy, and you get a wussy,” he explained, then he went too far. “In your case, a four-eyed wussy.”

Gene Gillette only wore his glasses to school. The rest of the time they lay neatly folded on his bedroom dresser while he squinted his way through the world outside. I never teased him about his perpetually puzzled look since he outweighed me by twenty pounds. Make fun of Gillette’s glasses and you would find him sitting on your chest, which is what happened next to Miller.

“Take it back.” Gillette bounced his butt on Miller’s ribs.

“Knock it off, you guys,” I said. “We’re wasting time.”

“Get off me,” Miller howled. “I kill you, goddammit!”

Miller was crazy. He was always cursing to chill your blood. I risked lightning bolts, being in his vicinity. Once at a church service, Miller swore under his breath goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, six hundred and sixty-six times – the Antichrist number – just to see what would happen.

“Come on. Truce,” I urged, but Gillette wouldn’t budge from Miller’s chest. “We could go to the Spook House,” I suggested. “We could go inside.”

They stopped tussling.

We had discovered the deserted farmhouse at the end of school, venturing further from our neighborhood than in previous summers. Our course followed the high voltage lines as we trekked across three pastures, skirted an impenetrable cedar grove, then waded an ocean of kudzu. Marking under those electrical pylons toward the sun made us feel destined.

Yet every time we’d reached the dark house, courage had deserted us at the front door.

“This time we do it,” said Miller as Gillette finally got off him.

But he took his revenge at the fence, snapping the strands as Gillette was climbing through. Miller laughed as I told Gillette to stop wiggling on the barb. Unhooking his shorts, I stepped back to play referee in case Gillette started swinging.

My father had warned me about bullies when I had started first-grade. “They mess with you, let ‘em have it. Like this.” How silly he looked bouncing in black wingtips, fists cocked in front of his face. No one ever fought like that on a playground. All the battles I witnessed were flurries of slaps, punches, kicks and scratches until the loser blew snot and blood from a swollen nose.

Now Gillette backed away from the fence, squinting at Miller, rubbing his wounded posterior. Suddenly, he was fighting the air, flailing his arms, ducking his head from a swarm of blowflies. Another step in the high grass and his big sneaker would have plopped into a ripe carcass quivering with winged and crawling life. We gathered around the body and pinched our noses.

“Wonder what killed it?” Gillette said.

“Bet it was some big animal.” I guessed. “Maybe a wolf.”

“Could be a trap,” Gillette said.

“What do you think it is, was?” I asked.

“It’s a cow, for chrissake!” Miller ended the discussion, disgusted at our ignorance. He prodded the belly with a stick, prying dried flesh from the ribs. “Gillette about died when he stepped on it.”

“Screw you. Did not,” Gillette flared. “Besides, it’s just a cow.” He poked his toe at the corpse.

“Couple of weeks ago, my Dad and me found a real dead guy,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, right,” Miller scoffed.

I was incredulous myself. Things dead can’t be kept secret from friends, but this was the first Gillette had mentioned it.

“It was so cool,” Gillette went on. “We’re driving back from a Scout meeting when we run into this real thick fog. My Dad’s all bent over the steering wheel. Then there’s this tennis shoe up ahead, lying in the road. My Dad runs over it, then he says ‘Somebody’s been hit.’

“He backs up, and there’s this guy and his bicycle in the ditch. My Dad says it was hit and run.”

“What did it look like?” I asked. The only dead person I had ever seen in real life was my grandfather at the funeral home. The body in the casket looked shriveled like Pop had fallen asleep in the bathtub.

“Well, it wasn’t like he was all bloody. He looked kind of pale, but his head was turned the wrong way.”

Miller was still suspicious. “How come you’re just telling us?”

“We were on vacation,” Gillette said. “I guess I forgot.”

True, the Gillettes had been at the beach. For the past week, I had to check their mailbox and get their newspaper. I suddenly envied Gene his sunburn, how he would peel those long strips of blistered skin from his arms.

“Lie, lie, lie. You’d wet your pants if you saw a dead body,” Miller said.

Gillette studied the carcass, then kicked the head clear of the rotted body. “My Dad says there’s nothing to brag about finding a dead man.” He glared at Miller. “But I saw it.”

I thought of what my father would do in that situation, what he could possibly say to me. Mr. Gillette wore glasses like Gene, but he had spotted the shoe and knew instantly what had happened. My father would have missed the whole thing, concentrating on the Fog.

We stood for a long time around the dead cow, our head bowed. And in that silence, I secretly wished I had another father.

“Bet that skull will look really cool when all the skin falls off.” Gillette squinted. “I could hang it in my room.”

“Shit,” Miller said. To make his point, he jabbed his stick into a cowpie. Manure splattered across my shin.

“Hey, watch it,” I said.

With a grin, Miller flicked more on my leg.

“War!” I cried. I scooped up a handful of dung and side armed it at Miller’s head, but my missile disintegrated into a rain of fine dust in his hair. More manure slapped my shoulder, and I whirled about, catching Gillette brown-handed. We were swept into the midst of a shit storm, dodging and running and laughing around the dead cow.

“Uh oh,” said Gillette when we had flung all the cow flop. He tugged at the bottom of his new Myrtle Beach t-shirt. Shit flyspecked the blonde hair of the mermaid on his chest. “My mom’s going to kill me.”

“Mine won’t care,” said Miller. “Hell, I could go to bed like this and she wouldn’t mind.”

Miller awed us with the freedom of his life. He didn’t have a father, and when his mother wasn’t working odd shifts as a nurse, Jerry said she moped around in bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.

“She slides me these notes under the door late at night,” he once told me. “‘Don’t forget to buy bread tomorrow.’ ‘After school, pick up milk and Kotex.’ I hear the ice cubes in her glass so I know it’s her and not some burglar.”

Gillette and I, however, still had parents who minded our appearance. We decided to wash in the creek where the cows watered. We wrung out our shirts, then slipped out of our sneakers, spooking water spiders as we waded in the knee-deep pool.

Miller refused to get near water. He always wore long dungarees even on the hottest days. They protected his skinny legs from briars and let him sneak contraband.

Sitting on the bank, he hoisted his pants leg. A pack of Marlboros was stuffed in the top of a red-striped athletic sock. He hiked the other leg. A row of stick matches peeked out of the sock’s elastic.

We splashed out of the water and up the bank. Miller shook out two cigarettes from the pack, cupped a match for Gillette, then held it for me. He knew to strike a new one for himself Three on a match was always fatal, according to comic books. I imagined German snipers lurking in the hedges.

Miller could blow wondrous smoke rings, and I marveled how he kissed out smoky haloes. It was a feat for me to inhale without coughing. The tobacco made a faint buzzing sound in my head like the katydids in the grass, and my neck hairs crackled. I understood the reverence Indians gave to the peace pipe. Smoking is a holy thing.

“Wonder what time it is,” Gillette worried. “It’s probably getting real late.”

“Don’t be such a mama’s boy,” I said. “We haven’t even been to the Spook House yet.”

“It’ll be good and dark when we get there.” Miller grinned.

There was nothing to fear. We had not found any ghosts around the Spook House, but plenty of treasure in a shed out back. Miller had uncovered a calendar with a woman in a one-piece bathing suit. He burned holes in her boobs with a cigarette. Gillette discovered a blue medicine bottle that he threw in the creek on the way home. But I had kept my loot – a 78 rpm record thick as one of my mother’s Wedgewood plates. The label showed a Dalmatian listening to a gramophone. One night, I opened the scrolled panels of my father’s hi-fi cabinet and placed the record on the turntable. The needle rode over the dusty grooves, spitting out decades of static and scratches. I put my ear to the speaker mesh and heard the past’s faint voice singing “Pitter Patter of Tiny Feet.”

We followed the power lines west. As we neared the farmhouse, bats flew in crazy zig-zags. Miller threw a rock in the air and they darted towards it.

“You’ll get rabies like that,” Gillette warned.

“Vampire bat!” Miller bared his teeth and thickened his voice into his best Bela Lugosi. “Dey vill suck your blud.”

“Cut it out or I’ll sit on you,” Gillette said. He was afraid of everything. I wondered how he could have seen a dead man and survived.

The Spook House loomed behind a shroud of kudzu hung from strangled trees. We marched to the collapsed porch, but halted at the steps. The house seemed more sinister and rundown than I remembered from our last trip. Most of the windows had been broken out. A door with a ripped screen stood partially open. A cardboard sign had been nailed to the porch post: “No Trespassing. Violators prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Miller whistled a rock at the sign. It missed and banged against the wall. We all jumped.

“It’s dark in there,” Gillette observed, but I had already made up my mind this time.

I gathered old newspapers, twisting them around a discarded broomstick. “Give me a light,” I ordered Miller.

The makeshift torch slowly caught fire, casting a glow on our faces. As torchbearer, I climbed the steps and led the way inside.

Gillette was panting behind me. I looked back and saw he had one hand over his eyes, the other outstretched for cobwebs or monsters.

“Watch it,” I hissed.

Gillette bowed his head. “Balloons,” he pointed.

“No, dipshit,” Miller laughed. “But somebody’s been having a party.”

Spent condoms littered the floor along with beer cans and cigarette butts. A ripped mattress was scrunched into one corner, its cotton innards scattered across the room.

Miller picked up a filthy scrap of cloth from the floor and twirled it beneath the torchlight. It was a brassiere with lacy cups for a large woman. Giggling, Miller slipped it over his chest and started to dance a slow hootchie-kootchie.

My throat tightened, and my underwear got suddenly uncomfortable in my crotch. Someone had had sex in this room. I breathed in a mysterious scent like that of dank towels and rumpled bed sheets, and in the dark, I could imagine flashes of naked skin.

“Ooh kiss me baby. Feel me up.” Miller’s mouth made a big pouting “O,” as his hands roamed over the cups of the bra. Gillette watched spellbound. Miller swiveled his hips from side to side and thrust his pelvis back and forth.

“Knock it off, you little faggot,” I said. I was afraid he might do something dangerous.

“Bite these.” Miller squeezed his pretended bosom.

“Shush,” Gillette said. “Did you hear that?”

I listened for footsteps, the heavy breathing of a maniac. I strained to catch the crunch of gravel beneath the police cruiser patrolling for trespassers, boys acting like perverts in a condemned house. My underwear relaxed its grip again. What would happen if my father found us here with Miller and the bra?

“Aiiieeiyeee!” Miller screamed.

At that instant, everything went wrong. My torch popped and hissed as the newspaper unraveled from the end. A burning scrap fluttered on my wrist. I dropped the broomstick on the discarded mattress. Time slowed down so I could watch my mistake. A glowing sheet of fire covered the old bed.

Miller was the first to turn and run. I could hear his feet pound across the porch outside. Gillette hesitated, backed out slowly, then he was gone too.

I kicked and stomped at the flames, but they kept crackling over the trash, the rubbers, the dirty beer packages. Acrid smoke billowed into my face.

“Cowards!” I screamed out the door, across the porch and down the broken steps.

Gillette, I quickly overtook as he huffed through the kudzu. Miller was still far ahead, hurdling over the knee-high vines, but I started to gain on him in the open pasture. I grabbed for the bra straps bouncing up and down on his skinny shoulders but clawed only the air. Diving, I tackled him at the heels, scrambled up his back, then rolled him over.

Blood and snot smeared his face. My knees jabbed into the bra, deflating the empty breasts. With my hands around his throat, I bent my face close to his. “Your mother’s a lush because of you,” I hissed.

Where that came from, I’m not sure, but I knew it was the worse thing I could say to Jerry Miller. His face changed. The pupils shrank to black pinpoints in his pale blue eyes. A lump moved in his windpipe beneath my thumbs, and he stopped breathing.

For an instant, I thought I had killed him, but when I got off him, Miller gasped for air.

“I hate you, Fuller. You’re a pussy, Fuller, a pussy,” he said but his voice kept breaking. Gillette staggered towards us, out of breath. Tears made streaks on his sunburnt face as he ran. “Oh shit, we’ve done it now,” he wailed. “What are we going to do?”

My fists hung helpless at my sides. I looked back to the west for the smoke and fire, but there was nothing more remarkable than the sun falling behind the trees like a kid’s red ball.

“Damn, oh goddamn.” Miller sat up. The bra shook its empty cups as he started to cry.

We left Jerry like that, alone. There was nowhere for us to go but home. Gene stayed close by me, glancing over his shoulder every few stops. He was afraid of everything. Maybe he thought I could protect him as Miller’s howls grew fainter in the distance.

“What’s he saying now?” Gene asked.

I stopped and listened. What was he crying? It sounded like “mama, mama” sobbed over and over until the words ran into a senseless murmur.

We steered clear of the cow carcass near the fence. Mr. Gillette was probably right. Finding something dead was nothing to brag about.

“Do you think we’ll get in bad trouble, Steve?” asked Gene. “Are you going to tell your Dad?”

I couldn’t say. My throat ached from cigarettes and curses. My eyes and nose were caked with dried tears and snot. I wanted to cry, but not until I had faced the worst.

We parted at the drive to my house. I skirted the newly cut grass my father had warned me never to walk on. “Fescue bruises,” he’d said. Lightning bugs flashed randomly over the precise lines where he had pushed the mower up and down the lawn. The clippings had been raked and bagged; the walkway swept clean to the front door.

Inside the darkened house, I followed the blue glow coming from the den. In front of the television, I found a stranger asleep in my father’s chair. The man looked like my father who came home from work in short sleeves and clip-on tie, his face on a plant badge pinned to his shirt pocket. But this man wore a torn t-shirt, frayed chinos and grass-stained sneakers.

I crept closer to be sure. Wisps of gray hair flew out from his temples, and his rasping breath blew a spit bubble on his lips. Like a wolf, I sniffed him. He smelled of rank sweat and sweet grass, but I recognized the faint scent of Royal Lyme, the aftershave I bought my father every Christmas.

I crouched at his feet, hungry for some word, a little praise, the secret to why I hurt all the time. My father jerked his right foot once, twice – a dreaming dog. His mouth opened, freeing snorts, grunts, wheezes, all the sounds he kept caged under his ribs.

I listened intently to his wild sleep.

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I’ve often tried to recollect my childhood, whether I was happy or not, but a bad memory and myopia make the earliest versions of me seem blurry at best. “Focus. Try harder,” insists my therapist, evidently used to clients with total recall, repressed memories or glimpses of previous lives. I grit my teeth, cast about in my mind, but shake my head. “Nope. Nothing.”

To dig out the root causes of my midlife irritabilities and insomnia, the therapist sends me home with a prescription for a daily exercise: Close my eyes and count down the candles on my birthday cakes, each year growing dimmer with the dwindling number of flames. Visualize walking backwards from the insolent slouch of adolescence, skipping and stumbling as a boy, wobbling side to side as a toddler, finally crawling again on sticky palms, pudgy knees.

This must be it, my very first memory. My parents have Fifties feet, my father’s white bucks and pegged pants, my mother’s saddle locks and plaid skirt. Even the kitchen table wears a bright check over its chrome legs. There’s me, scooting across the waxed diamonds of the linoleum, gurgling the happy noise of not knowing any better.

I can’t recall any words exactly, but an argument in the air made an impression, pierced the embryonic blowhole in my still unclosed skull. How could you? It just happened, okay. Never again, I promise. What about the baby, what about us, what were you thinking? I still love you. Don’t say that, not now.

Or what if there were no words, only the squeak of the saddle locks turning away, or the sigh of the bucks shifting uneasy weight from one sole to the next? An ashtray drops from the counter, explodes into a hundred and one pieces across the floor. I grab for one of the bright shards. Too late my mother reaches me, hoists me into her arms. My mouth opens as I watch the glass turn red in my hand. It must have hurt, but nerve endings fortunately have no memory. I throw back my head, howl, shit my diaper. The red scrim of tears, then nothing more comes to mind.

My mother tells me I was a forgetful child and somewhat accident-prone, likely to drift away from the everyday world and its every present dangers. Don’t look now and see what happens -- like that day in first grade when I didn’t pay attention.

My teacher wrote her name, Mrs. Brown, on the blackboard. By year’s end, she said we would be able to write our names as well. I recall she taught us never to say “shut-up” – that we weren’t boxes to be opened and closed on a whim but little boys and girls. “Hush now, I said hush boys and girls,” Mrs. Brown would say and we minded.

Closing my mouth, I made an accidental discovery. My tongue clicked against the roof of my mouth, slapped into the saliva behind my baby teeth and created a loud clopping sound that struck my fancy. I clicked my tongue again and imagined a pony. Suddenly I was Yankee Doodle riding into town, wearing a bowl of macaroni on my head, as that strange song said.

“Hush now, hush. Who’s making that noise?” Mrs. Brown turned at the blackboard. She took the heavy glasses from the tip of her nose and let them drop over her paisley bosom, suspended by a chain of pearls around her thick powdered neck. She peered about the classroom.

No macaroni and cheese running down my neck, only goose bumps. I stabled my galloping tongue behind my teeth.

“Dale, were you making that sound?”

I made no sound now. Mrs. Brown seemed hurt that I had not hushed. “Please see me after class.”

After the bell rang, I stood trembling by her desk as she wrote out a note in her nice looping handwriting. She wore a sweetish perfume overpowering as the honeysuckle that waited for me along the road home. Mrs. Brown folded the note, slid it into an envelope.

She daubed her fingertips with moisture from her mouth to seal the flap. Evidently, sticking out your tongue was not polite.

“Please take this home to your mother. Now you won’t lose it? You’ll remember, won’t you?”

I carried the letter like a banner and watched it flap in the air as I galloped down the side of the road, hooves clicking in my mouth. The day was hot and the air filled with the honeysuckle. A voice called and I looked over my shoulder. There was no one there, but I had heard my name or thought I had. I kept looking behind me, listening for the soft voice. “Hush now, hush,” I whispered and walked faster.

I walked into the side of a tree. Too late, my eyes widened at the deep grained bark, then I saw a flash of white light.

I woke up on the ground, a root poking my ribs. I blinked at the stupid tree that had sprouted and shot up in my way while I was at school. The right eye didn’t seem to be seeing and tears obscured the world in my left.

“What happened?” My mother noticed straight away when I walked in the door. “Did you get in a fight?”

I wanted to say it was a tree, a strange tree that had ambushed me, but I kept hearing my voice in my head to shut up, shut up. My mother put a damp rag over my swelling eye, then opened the dirty envelope and read Mrs. Brown’s note. She sighed.

“You weren’t paying attention. See what happens when you don’t pay attention?”

I didn’t tell her about the voice that called my name or the tree that suddenly grew in one day or that momentary vision I had of my eyeball impaled on a broken branch.

My chronology is not clear but some time later, my mother took me to see an ophthalmologist. A quiet, curt man who frowned at children, he kept a model of a bloodshot eyeball, big as a grapefruit, and next to that, a long hypodermic needle propped in a dusty glass, which I was terrified he would jab deep into my eye.

Instead, I was made to press chin and forehead against cold metal bars and peer through black discs big as dinner plates. The lights went out and on the far wall I could see a strange writing that doctor ordered me to read. EXYWBC. I decided this was an alternate alphabet that spelled out the secret names of space aliens or ancient civilizations. As the ophthalmologist kept dialing down the lenses, I read the same lines over and over, smaller and smaller, until I couldn’t make them out.

“Look up.” Before I could blink, the doctor had dropped a thick liquid in my eyes. My mother led me by the hand out into the sunlight, my dilated pupils protected by wrap-around sunglasses. I must have looked like a little blind man.

By the third grade, my report cards improved since I sported horn-rimmed spectacles -- the hieroglyphics that once blurred on the blackboard became legible as numerals and letters. Glasses, though, offered an incomplete field of vision, clarity straight ahead, but at the corners, the world remained fuzzy.

My father, for instance. I can’t really recall his face as a whole. I remember the rough sweep of his whiskers when I kissed him goodnight or the size of his teeth when he ate what my mother cooked each night. How his kneecaps poked through his pants when he sat behind the evening newspaper. The glint of his belt-buckle, which made me tremble even when I had done no wrong. When I was bad, he kept the belt coiled on the doorknob to my bedroom, the simple threat of his displeasure.

And he would have whipped me if he’d caught me playing with his clarinet. Sometimes when he wasn’t home, and my mother was outside pinning laundry on the line, I would creep into the hall closet where he kept his instrument. Huddled beneath the canopy of his overcoat, I would open the case and run my fingers over the three interlocking pieces, like black bones cushioned inside red velvet. I smelled the mouthpiece for his breath, but the reeds were kept separate, and there was only the smell of wood.

The rule was I couldn’t disturb my father when he was practicing his clarinet. He kept puckering and unpuckering his lips, flipping the page back and forth. His cheeks hollowed out, as he made the notes spring out whole into the air, but only for a bar or two, then he stopped frustrated he couldn’t swing. I wanted to close my eyes and follow where he led, that pied piper, but my being there bothered him.

“Son, don’t you have anything better to do?”

I would skulk away to my room, still listening for the music, but already he was blowing the spit from the reed, dismantling the clarinet, tucking the ebony bones into the velvet cushions, clicking shut the case and back into the closet beneath the overcoats.

There were other closets, other secrets too. In the back of my mother’s closet, behind the high heels, I found a black clasp purse, stuffed with scented letters. One by one I unfolded them, studied the imprint of the lipstick kiss she placed at the end of each one.

“I’m just a nut, but I can’t help thinking of you. Call me crazy, just call me, I keep waiting by the phone.” “I know you think I’m no good, that we’re not right together.” “It broke my heart when I saw you with Carol at the dance. I stood by the wall, and turned my head so no one would see my cry.”

She never called my father by name, only “Dearest” and “Darling.” I was just old enough to be embarrassed by what I read but I couldn’t stop. Finally, I shoved the letters back in the purse and placed it exactly as I had found it in the back of the closet. The next time my mother was out of the house, I went to look for the letters again but the black purse was gone.

I couldn’t meet my mother’s eyes for days, and when I did, she looked away herself. Had she realized I was snooping? She never said a word. And after a while, I wondered if I had dreamed up the letters in the purse, if they ever existed.

My father played in a summer orchestra in a historic village of cobblestone streets and Colonial candle shoppes preserved and promoted as a tourist attraction. In the bandstand on the green, he took his seat in the horns and woods section every other Saturday night during June and July, to mutilate Big Band and Sousa marches.

Families gathered on the grass with quilts and folding chairs. I brought two plastic soldiers, who killed each other in the grass while the patriotic music played on.

A pair of giant yellow flip-flops came into view, threatening to crush my poor Army men. I looked up at a girl towering over me.

“Whacha doing?”

“Nothing.” I made machine gun noises deep in my throat while my Army men sprawled latex limbs in death throes.

“You want to catch fireflies or something?”

She squatted, thrusting a jelly jar in my face. Winking within were a dozen lightning bugs, their pale yellow tails glowing dimmer as they slowly suffocated.

“What’s your name, little girl?” My mother asked.

“Amy Tanner.”

“And whom do you belong to, Amy Tanner?”

The girl scratched a scabbed knee, and turned the jar of bugs upside down. They fell down the glass sides and lay dim against the punctured lid. “My dad, I guess.”

“Hi, Amy,” Mr. Oliver chimed in. He arrived early to help his wife set up her kettledrums at the back of the bandstand, and he always saved my mother and me a spot of grass next to his lawn chair.

“Isn’t your dad, Bill Tanner?” Mr. Oliver asked. “Plays the tuba, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, tuba.” Amy Tanner ballooned her cheeks and blew a big raspberry. “So you want to play or not?”

I sighed as I got up, unhooking my glasses from behind my ears, folded them neatly and handed them over to my mother. Solemnly I surrendered my two soldiers.

Amy Tanner grabbed my wrist and off we ran. She was a few inches taller than me, and her grip was merciless. We ran down the streets, her sandals and my sneakers slapping against the cobblestones. She nearly yanked my arm out as she pulled me to a stop under a sycamore and finally relinquished her grip. I rubbed my red wrist and panted the humid air in and out of my sore lungs.

“Know where we are?” she asked.

I squinted about “It’s the graveyard.”

“Best place in the world for catching bugs.” She unscrewed her jar and freed her captives with a shake. “These are all dead.”

“Yuck,” I said. Bugs usually didn’t bother me, not even deceased insects found lying on the ground, but a cemetery was too much. I suddenly imagined dead bugs and dead people buried underground.

She walked out among the headstones and I seemed to have no choice but to follow if I didn’t want to be left alone.

“You know who’s buried here?” Amy Tanner whispered.

“Yankee Doodle?”

“Who?” She gave me a funny look over her shoulder.

“Nobody.”

“My great great grandfather. He was real old and lived a long time ago. You want to see his name?”

“I don’t have my glasses on.”

“You’re kind of weird, aren’t you?”

“I guess.” I said agreeably. I squinted hard, trying not to step on any dead person whether Yankee Doodle or Amy Tanner’s great-great-grandfather. I kept thinking of cold macaroni covered with dirt and bugs.

“You know what’s really cool?” Amy Tanner asked and then answered. “You get a flashlight, and come out into the graveyard and hold your head down like this and walk around and people driving by will think you’re a ghost going around looking for your lost head.”

“That’s neat.” I nodded unenthusiastically. It was getting darker and I didn’t see any lightning bugs between the tombstones.

“You know it’s against the law to be in a graveyard after dark? We could go to jail.”

“Maybe we better go back.”

I could hear the music coming down the hill, muted through the trees where the katydids were making their nightly racket.

“This is far enough.” Her leg went around my knee, and she gave my shoulders a push, and down I went. We were lying on a grave and Amy Tanner was on top of me, peppering kisses across my eyes and my nose and my mouth and my cheeks and my ears no matter how I turned my head.

“Stop it. Stop,” I began to cry.

“I love you. I love you,” Amy Tanner whispered. She twitched on top of me then lay still. She let out a long sigh and I could feel the breath leaving her. “Let’s pretend we’re dead.” She whispered in my ear.

“Shut up! Shut up!” I don’t where the strength came from, but I threw her off and bolted from the graveyard. My sneakers slapped along the cobblestones, the bass drum boomed time with my heartbeat, and the katydids kept up their end from the trees shadowing the graves.

I ran into the square, to the corner where my mother’s folding chair sat empty. I looked blindly about. My glasses were folded neatly on the webbing of the chair, and when I put them on, I found her and Mr. Oliver at the corner of the green by the whitewashed fence. Mr. Oliver gallantly offered her a light for her cigarette, and her hand touched the back of his, steadying the flame.

I ran hard into her and wrapped my arms about her waist. The heat from her sweating body fogged my glasses.

“Hey, what’s the matter? You’re not playing with your friend?”

Mr. Oliver laughed. “Never trust a tomboy.”

The music suddenly ended with a flourish, a drum roll, a crash of cymbals, the crowd’s applause. My mother and Mr. Oliver pouted their cigarettes in their mouths and clapped their hands.

“Well, over so soon,” he said.

“That was nice,” my mother agreed.

I gave my mother another squeeze lest she ignore me. “Honey, you don’t have to be this way around people.”

“Better go help my wife with her drums,” Mr. Oliver said. “Guess we’ll see you next Saturday, Jane?”

Of course, I knew my mother’s given name. I’d seen it on letters in the mail, but I rarely heard it spoken aloud, let alone by a comparative stranger like Mr. Oliver. My father only referred to her as “your mother,” at least when I was around. I suspected my parents knew each other so well they didn’t have to use each other’s name.

“Sure, Tom.” She knew his name as well.

I squeezed her hard and she made an unladylike grunt.

“Okay. We’re going too.” She patted my head. “Let me go.”

I couldn’t see but I knew she held the cigarette in the hand mussing my hair. What if she caught my head on fire? Still I clung to her, my face burning against her breast.

If I lived to be a hundred and ten, I would have perfect vision. My myopia should improve with age, doctors say, as the shape of my eyeball actually changes. Slowly, objects will find focus on the retina of an older, wiser eye.

Meanwhile are all those years of spectacles. Hornrims, wireframes, tortoise shell, aviator style and octagonals, I’ve gone through all the fashions, discarded them in dresser drawers and the glove compartments of cars I’ve traded in. I’ve tried contacts, hard lenses, soft, disposable. The indentations in the bridge of my nose have long since disappeared. Yet my mother’s smoking irritates my eyes no end.

We sit in the kitchen of her new condo, drinking instant coffee. She is talking about her new boyfriend.

“We’re going to the symphony next week,” She waves her cigarette like a baton. “I don’t how long it’s been since I’ve been to the symphony.”

“That’s good.”

“What?”

“I said that’s good. That’s great. That’s all I said.”

“No need to mope,” she says.

I am not moping.”

“Your lip comes out any further — ”

“I said I’m not moping.”

“I haven’t been to a symphony in years. I’m allowed.”

Of course, she is allowed. Who can argue with that, or with her boyfriend Bruce? My father has been dead some years now, enclosed in the velvet lining of a coffin lowered into the ground of another city. It was not the same cemetery where Amy Tanner had tackled me years ago, but grass looks like grass everywhere.

“What about those concerts on the green?”

“What?”

“Remember, when I was little, we had to always go to these concerts to listen to Dad play in the band?”

“Oh, that summer he thought he was going to take up his old instrument from high school. They were pretty terrible, and he wasn’t that much better.”

“I remember him practicing all the time.”

“No, he didn’t. That was his problem,” she says bitterly.

Once I saw my parents passing in the hallway of our house. He caught her in his arms, and her dress swirled out, as if they were about to dance. My mother laughed and I rushed to press between them, my favorite spot whenever my parents hugged, but my father let her go and walked down the hall, as if he had only touched her to pass her by. “Jerry?” She said, but he didn’t answer.

“You grew up just like him, you know that?” she says now as some maternal matter of fact. “Stubborn.”

But I don’t want to be just like him, the man who walks away, oblivious to the woman who only wants to dance in the hall. My ex- kept harping on my emotional unavailability, the distance I always kept between us. How many times listening to this had I slumped in the therapist’s office?

I wave away my mother’s notion as if it were nothing more than her annoying smoke in my eyes. “I wish you would quit. It’s nasty.”

“I wish I could to but I can’t. You have to remember I started back when smoking was something. Everybody smoked then, even your father. He quit and I didn’t, but he never seem to mind.”

Never mind? Never minded the letters not to him? He never minded Tom Oliver and all the other flames that had drawn my mother’s flighty attentions?

“How do you know?” I argue. “They’re finding out stuff about it every day now, like second-hand smoke”

She props her right elbow in her left hand, tilts her head, and takes a drag off the cigarette between her two fingers, a gesture she probably copied from an old black-and-white movie.

“How do you mean second-hand smoke?”

“You don’t have to smoke yourself to die from cigarettes any more.” I slurp my coffee, a habit I know annoys her.

“So you’re blame me now, is that it?.” She stamps out her cigarette furiously in the ashtray. “Fine then.”

“I’m not blaming anybody. I’m not saying anything. I’m not moping.”

What I am doing is lying. I know all about my parents now, my own broken marriage holds a mirror to theirs. Hindsight makes everything clear: my father’s curt lips, his furrowed forehead, my mother’s flirtatious mouth, her self-conscious laugh. The love letters and the affairs my mother had over the years. I know, since my ex- treated me the same.

Staring at the floor, I trace a familiar pattern of diamonds, listening to the smoky air. There are no words now between us, just as I heard none spoken between my parents in my very first memory.

“You know what I remember? Right from the beginning? His shoes,” I say slowly, as if only now it’s come back to me. “It’s the very first thing I can recall, his shoes. I must have been playing on the floor, crawling around the kitchen table. Daddy had on white bucks and you wore bobbysox with saddle locks.”

“Saddle locks,” My mother giggles. “Why I haven’t worn something like that in ages.”

“It’s when I got hurt.”

I watch her eyes widen with panic. Her baby hurt, how?

“You were having a fight, I remember. You threw an ashtray and I crawled over a broken piece and cut my hand.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“This scar! See my hand here? I was just a baby.”

“Oh honey. Baby, I’m sorry.” Across the table, she takes my hand, studies the white indentation in my palm.

“You’re right, it was in the kitchen, but that’s not how it happened. Your father was putting you in your high chair and got your hand caught in the hinge of the tray. You cried so, it just about killed him.”

She carefully folds my fingers over the scar, pats my hand. “Don’t blame him. You survived, didn’t you?”

I raise my fist, ready to pound the table in protest. But too late, my mother has lit another cigarette in the endless chain of the years. I let it drop as my fist taps the cheap, familiar Formica, a hopeless knock she ignores.

“White bucks,” she muses. “I don’t believe he ever wore white shoes his whole life.”

Her smoke still makes my eyes sting. Blinking hard, I open my hand, checking if it’s still there, what she’s given me and almost afraid she’s made it go away, that first precious scar of my only childhood.

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These are the primal scenes of my childhood, the images that have haunted my dreams and made my memories. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to put words to what I see in my mind’s eye, when all I can say is look and see for yourself.

My great uncle Dallas Wilson

These are the landscapes of my current novel in progress, or the memories of the characters living in a place called Lonesome Creek. Here’s the haiku that seems to capture the ambience of my novel

Up on Lonesome Creek

so lonely God gets shivers,

misses his pal Satan.

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