David Matlin

   A Mud Loosed Tree

   “When wood’s thickness won’t do.”

   Dr. Blanchard wondered how that phrase from his mother’s spring observations mixed with the scents of raw garlic washing over this corner of land he’d been assigned to as a Conscientious Objector; Sanger, California, the small town laying in its bed of 1942 mid-summer heat. The news of the War, in both the Pacific and Europe, came in savage dribblings and no one in those months after his arrival was sure, either of him or of a “victory” which seemed as remote as the Sequoian Giants hovering in the Sierras where he went sometimes to draw and write and organize his medical notes on patients. The people he treated, though they needed medical care, were suspicious and often, overtly distant. One result was the grinding isolation of his young daughter and son; the other: his wife who had become increasingly moody. His alternative service was based on his Quaker beliefs not just in non-violence, but the adorable mercy of peace and its defiance of the sword as a Truth still in search of completion.

   He did not think his devotions were mystical and would have scorned such notions as deep and useless pretension that had nothing to do with his practice of medicine among the people he gently treated and respected who thought he was either an odd foreign agent or a Temptation whose kindnesses were to be used and then discarded.

   Joe Blanchard was up most mornings by 4:00am tending to births, fevers, infections, sunstroke, discoveries of cancer, and farm injuries which included lost fingers, lost arms, lacerations, and sometimes just drunken angers over work, gone to dead marriages, the moveless, looming High Sierras that seemed to scavenge men’s dreams, broke them and prompted them toward carelessness and its translations into women and men and children with cut lips and bruises. Dr. Blanchard also knew the constant weighing of absent sons and occasional daughters on faraway islands or continents killing and dying, nursing and being killed; everyone, home and homesick, scared and trying not to be scared, but being cinched tighter and tighter as to a sneaking sort of drought and its rainlessness, its swirls in a kind of helpless barrenness over the terrible war so distant and so horribly near.

   House calls. Mothers and kids. The young fathers gone to proverbs that evaporate the living. “Add to this recipe,” he noted one morning, “My own intrusions.”

   The absence of young men gone off to war inclined those who were left to feel like “leftovers” as a workable, partially maimed condition of their lives. The young, not of war-age boys, girls, women, and older men, had to somehow fill the space of desertions no one at that point knew the end of. Dr. Blanchard’s arrival, a healthy war-age man and medical doctor, escorted by wife and children caused many who saw or heard of him to sulk, as one might, in the beginning, over a leaf-eating caterpillar or two, observed while watering and seeing to a peach or plum grove; not a threat, but a small disorder that would allow no further gathering.

   “A Doctor’s skills? Sure we need’em. But our boys need’em more. And what the hell kind of Doctor is this anyways who’d let “imselp ride it out with wife’n’kids while a million others bleed alone?”

   No one really wanted questions like this to take root because of Dr. Blanchard’s fine care and gentle way.

   “A Doctor’s Doctor. Rare enough. And don’t make you feel like a dog neither,” one of the isolate, first settlement ranchers was heard to say while getting once-a-month supplies in town as if that pound of saying might dispel what sometimes grows best in any seasons of rainlessness; “seeds of gossip” which the rancher pointed out “cin sprout inna drop’a piss or pinch’a fire” by way of a reminder that though the war ran deep, it hadn’t yet conspired to make a total waste of their world, that they could still see it and live it everyday and “trust could start with one man going to another for simple help.”

   “Theo” was the rancher’s name. His father, a Civil War veteran, had come into the Sierra foothills in 1870 or so, when the San Joachin still had grizzlies and tule elk herds and sky blackening migratory bird flocks that took as much decided concentration to kill off as Indians.

   “No formal count. But it was by the millions. And my dad arrived in the last stages of the slaughter. An amputee whose one arm and hand,” Joe Blanchard heard from the fifty and more year-old son and other older patients, had more than enough strength, the understatement holding to itself even after seven decades, a respectful austerity having to do not only with physical strength, but the fact that he sheltered the occasional desperate Indians who came his way, would not allow any murderings, and was said to have broken the backs of two or three Indian Shooters who couldn't seem to let go of earlier habits along with an expected bounty and received, with equally applied understatement, “some payment for their trouble.” Theo’s father stayed his remaining life among these people, in that way, a kind of precisely defined but not distressful embarrassment, reminding those who had gotten, in those murderous years, to place in the whispered local terms, “How the gottings took place.”

   And the town wasn’t always glad about Theo. Thought what had landed under the tree had a full compliment of body parts. Otherwise that was probably the only difference.

   Dr. Blanchard had treated Theo.

   “Gone partially talkless, Doc. About to turn into a bad neighbor,” as the physician held the older man’s arthritic hands, touched them at their various swollen points, asked that fingers be flexed and unflexed, and then said little could be done; a good soaking in hot water once or twice a day with a shot of a man’s favorite whiskey would ease things up a notch or two, hold back at least some of the pain.

   The hard rancher noted how the physician had conducted the “house call”; rode the nearly trackless fifteen miles, took notes, asked questions, keeping in mind he was a stranger asking these questions that needed some precision so as not to pull up the wrong weeds about who died, who’d got sick and who didn’t and from what and knew enough about horses, cattle, the smell of fall in the air and color of midday sun to attract his four half-wild dogs.

   And the “minor” earthquake that took place while the “general practitioner” held the older man’s hands; the walls of the house swaying, chairs seeming to float a yard one way, then back approximately to their original position. And outside, the windmill creaking, the live oaks in their livid twisted rupture hovering over a creek dropping some of their limbs, a crack appearing in one of the oldest trunks (that would surely kill the tree in the last five of its five-hundred year life), the hills lifting up mists of displaced dust; the Doctor placing his glasses properly again on the bridge of his nose when the swaying stopped as if this were also a part of his vocation, not exactly companionable, but supposable as the rattlesnake bites he also sometimes treated if he could get to the victim or the victim to him in time.

   Theo did not ask though, “What is a Doctor doing here?” He could readily see for himself what was being done to the best of one man’s abilities, pouring an intelligence into the daily needs of a practice, keeping the hours exact and spare so as to get to know patients and their ways. He left “The Question” up to his neighbors and fellow townsmen. It was to Theo a “Democracy” and young men and women were dying for the price of such painful inquiries as the one beginning to emerge in the Valley that shifted and trembled below him. More than that and old Theo saddled up a horse to ride fences or shoot a hawk taken up a habit of raiding his chickens. It wasn’t that thought was certain, but that there were certainties and the immediate business was to know how far they’d come and go otherwise the exposed fronts caused a man to slow down some and sharpen his knife.

   The rancher had also fought in World War I, and the Doctor, as he examined the increasingly arthritic hands, noticed the burns on wrists and forearms.

   “Mustard Gas?” Joe Blanchard looked up into Theo’s eyes.

   “Can still see the fog making its mess, Doc. Part of my lungs too. Not enough yet to stop breathin’ though.”

   “Haven’t seen such burns very often, Theo,” as the younger man touched the still traumatized skin, applied stethoscope to chest, listened, took a salve from his bag, left it on the kitchen table and said, “When you run out, I’ll get more”.

   Theo remembered, equally, the young Doctor’s hands. His finger’s were short, the flesh thick and seemed unrelated to the physician’s tall, thin body until he touched a patient’s veins or joints, or felt an arm pit.

   It was hot that day. A 110 degrees and more and the younger man was grateful for the lunch of cool well water, hard boiled eggs, and smoked venison, along with some pick-me-up slices of lemon, peaches, and a pot of fresh honey.

   “Never had a better lunch, Theo. And never expected fruit or water this good”.

   “Father hauled the first trees on a pack horse. Made sure they wouldn’t get too rain resistant and break someone’s teeth. Got a small orchard now and some hives”.

   “Any more rain than the Valley?”

   “Can’t say much more. But the snow piles up pretty good. Poor man’s fertilizer won’t git anyone rich up here but down there it attracts the funniest gamblers ready for their hand of poker with the Creation. No other way I know to think about farming or ranching. Beautiful a devil as ever boiled up in a man's mess'a dreamings depending on your brand. If you’re ever ready to try it Doc, lemme know.”

   “Think I’ll let that epidemic pass me by for now.”

   Theo liked the younger man’s refusal. Its lightness gathered, but not too hard, and it was, with a little rummaging, given to the form of leisurely ambiguities that caught Theo’s respect for men who might find a way to belong anywhere in any world without having to scheme.

   “Yep. Don’t come lookin’ fer no company up’cher,” Theo added with a touch of the “listener” grown shrewd before the slippage of his own words.

   “Cattle running OK?

   “Help’s away fighting the war. But the sons help out when they can.”

   Dr. Blanchard knew Theo had sent at least four of the sons and daughters of his hired workers to college. And that the town whispered about this; the gossip reaching to Fresno and beyond; the too easy whispering about wasting money on Mexicans, Indians, Okies. The local and not so local people sneering over the thought, the intolerable proclamation of it. The other, perhaps more fearful whispers, had to do with Theo’s boyhood, specifically his earliest fascinations with geology and the rock boiled world that thrust itself up nearly three miles and held only the most fleeting possibilities for both the prosperous and the damned who might inject themselves with its invitations.

   “As a child he was a rock-hound. Didn’t you know?” As if that would explain a certain kind of helpless error akin to retardation, or, worse, a calling of the “Spirit” lying outside of the local Christian appetites for the “Rapture” and any messages to be sent to the sinful inhabitants of the Fallen World. The boy’s wanderings in places like King’s Canyon posed for the most faithful and devoted an insidious mischief. And a “committee” was gotten together once, before the turn of the century, for a “Visit.”

   Those visitors one Monday after the Sabbath saddled up some horses and for insurance took wives with baskets of food “in case of some sort of trouble,” said a local pastor.

   “Fear’a God must’a made’em unafraid to hide behind a woman’s skirts,” was the comment Theo’s father was said to have whispered through his gritted teeth after the “incident.”

   The party rode up into the foothills, two ministers, two wives, their horses and a mule to carry water and even a passenger if the footing became too loose or hazardous. The journey was said to take then five hours; late spring in that third year after Theo’s mother’s death. Sun was full out, so too the rattlesnakes and scorpions. And there were still scattered grizzlies in those decades as well as Yokut and Miwok burials with fine baskets the “ladies” used to decorate their parlors. The mother died a year after the son’s birth. “Valley fever” it was said; the mysterious infection named after the San Joaquin itself but also called “desert rheumatism” may be because no one knew what the hell else to say about such kinds of dyings. Theo told Dr. Blanchard as he took his notes, “Son-of-a-bitch wind, my father was heard to mumble when he’d gone a shot too far into whiskey after his visits to her grave. No one knowing in those decades what it was. Middle finger was where hers began. A small abscess along with the flu and some pain in the right side. Not a thought more than that as it was told to me other than rest in bed for a day, two at the most. Skin boils came. The other; crushing headache, hallucinations. Whole thing carried her off like the petal of a poppy without touching me or my dad.”

   Dr. Blanchard listened carefully. He’d seen other less dangerous symptoms, but ones that were persistent in their deliberations; fatigue lasting for years, a month only without explanation. No one knew exactly how it might turn out once the infection came. Dr. Blanchard knew its name: “Coccidioides”, a fungus hibernating in the dry alkaline soils, stirred by wind, or hoe, tractor blade, or a simple footstep and flying like some misaligned pollen from an earlier geologic age to the lungs of more recent species, human and non-human. The physician knowing the name, knew too that wasn’t quite enough. The disease was often difficult, chronic. So he noted Theo’s story having already attempted to treat others.

   The husband with his war ravaged body later thought when grief had subsided and he carried his longings after that, for “the Boy,” about not wanting any further wonder as to which or what women found dismembered men attractive. So he watched the small procession climbing toward the plateau; the “retreat” he constructed before his wife’s death to escape the stifling summer heat of the Valley. The women with long dresses and hats and scarves to ward off sun and wind, the men stiffly suited riding their horses badly. He had a world to water, a cow ready to drop a calf so as to show his son birth. He looked at the surrounding granite spires looming over his one thousand acre plateau with its arroyos and year-round streams, stands of oak and sycamore and cottonwood and wild flowered shadows, knew it would all still be around when the uninvited arrived.

   Amputation at the shoulder of his left arm; a sniper at Chickamauga, the inflammation of the Cherokee name, "River of Death," rising up, perhaps as terrible as the original bullet itself to send those parts of his body into hungers more rapacious in their invisibilities than the visible at the farthest boundaries its senescence could bear or comprehend. Such personal speculation had risen up out of the “absence” as Theo’s father referred to it, “the ocean where the soul might swim having its shores reduced.” So he walked two thousand miles learning in that after-war immensity to re-direct the balance of his body and it appeared to those who reluctantly marveled over it that he had far more arms than the countable comprehendable one with a hand that could lift a common man up to dangle in the air, which he'd done when necessary, “To prove that the end of the day will surely come,” and to further surprise the unsuspecting with the hid mysteries of the landscape.

   “Born on Long Island. Father’s people fishermen. Mother’s people farmers. 1840. Far from the clank of crowds,” he was heard to say, adding “I too started from Paumanok” and recited Whitman’s poem to his son as they shod and checked horses’ teeth, chopped wood and built a local fortune from land purchases and when the Southern Pacific came, that too, sending crops of fruit around the world. Sagaponack, the exact place of birth and a boyhood spent exploring the local bays with their barbaric defiantly firm names, the depths of their insinuations not yet broken at that point when he canoed as a fifteen or sixteen year old, the watery swells of the Shinnecock, the Peconic, the Mapeague Bays. He liked both fishing and farming but the storms and tides of the sea drew him more against his uncle’s fate (his mother’s beloved brother following a plow horse turned up a nest of ground hornets and was stung to death). And he the nephew could smell the currents, had an eye for sea distances, lay for sea colors, bones for weather. There was no decision really, no dilation of the will along with the memory of his uncle, bloated in his suffocation from at least two hundred stings; the plow-horse found nearly a mile away pulling at tufts of sea-grass on a dune overlooking the Atlantic with twenty or thirty dead hornets woven into the mangy disarray of its tail. What his pre-Civil War memories allowed him against the mountainous disallowances and erasures of the irresistible creature horrors which wanted him, wanted to immerse him, he knew, as another ocean memory could barely resist. The waters of Long Island Sound cutting his arms and shoulders from the thinning ice of early spring to the thickening ices of early winter, the haul of fish and nets (his and other waterlogged faces), fish and net weight cutting at his endurance, the smell and glistened bodies of sea lions waiting for their thefts, ocean spray burning his ears and eye lids, heaving sea and horizon close to the nose, porpoise timing their watchful passages into the air with the heavy or light undulance of sea swell: “Keep an extra eye for sharks, and if you got one, an extra hand,” the elder fishermen joked, their own nostrils wet with sea washed fish oil, fish blood; hair and ears under that sun glinted with scales of freshly clubbed sea creatures, the piles of flesh fishripe and slippery and one needed to watch for the clandestine gaff prong which could butcher either men or that unlucky sea serpent come for its lone mistake.

   One mid-day meal, along with a bowl of steaming cohogs, his mother set beside his feast for her son the collection of Walt Whitman’s poems “Leaves of Grass” which he memorized and recited to himself as he either re-strung or set nets, the labors and the poet’s phrasings setting a pace that brought him into and through the days “without feeling like a heaped up shade.” The book of poems appeared in his fifteenth year, 1855. When he later asked his mother about the gift, her explanation was “A fellow Long Islander had written them,” as if that response might admit light into shadow escorted by the calming practicalities of household chores as relief from the convulsed, glancing darknesses which had stolen the life of her brother. On that basis the family subscribed to the “Freeman,” Whitman’s newspaper in Brooklyn, and though it more often came late or not at all, Theo’s grandfather read the news, avidly looked for the poet’s journalism and recited it to Theo’s grandmother as she prepared Sunday chowder, baked bread, planned her garden for the summer. The maternal great grandmother; her name was Ora as if the tones of the central consonant encircled by the orbiting vowels were a well-footed not at all unpleasant solar system which in its gatherings also included her habit of befriending a new female goose of each generation who cried whenever she the mistress of the farm was seen to leave by those other feathered mistresses and protectors of the barnyard. She preferred not to be aligned, however, with any members of the family of orators no matter how persuasive except the one who struck the deepest chords of her admirations: Elias Hicks. Both her own and the Whitman family had gone to hear the great and compelling Quaker theologian whom the poet, in 1888, recalled in a scrupulous, intimate prose, the recollection tender and close, Whitman remembering himself as a boy of nine, no more than ten, and his father’s voice calling “Come, Mother, Elias preaches tonight,” and the young Walt allowed to go. Four years before his death, the old, partially paralysed poet wrote of the Quaker Speaker’s “agonizing conviction and magnetic stream of natural eloquence ... (different as the fresh air of a May morning or sea-shore breeze from the atmosphere of a perfumer’s shop).” In trying to define and hold (after sixty years) the presence of Elias Hicks, a fellow Long Islander “from Hemstead Township” Whitman said in his essay “There is a sort of nature of persons I have compared to little rills of water, fresh, from perennial springs - (and the comparison is indeed an appropriate one) - persons not so very plenty, yet some few certainly of them running over the surface and area of humanity, all times, all lands ... sparse, not numerous, yet enough to irrigate the soil ...” Theo in his boyhood, wanting to have a more definite sense of his father’s origins and what “look” the faraway Paumonok had was shown another paragraph from this essay his father thought contained some of the expression he would only stumble before, though he had been sharpened and fashioned by his apprenticeship of walking and discovering such sea and landscapes: “How well I remember the region-the flat plains of the middle of Long Island, as then, with their prairie-like vistas and grassy patches in every direction, and the ‘kill-calf’ and herds of cattle and sheep. Then the South Bay and shores and the salt meadows, and the sedgy smell, and numberless little bayous and hummock-islands in the waters, the habit of every sort of fish and aquatic fowl of North America. And the bay men-a strong, wild, peculiar race-now extinct, or rather entirely changed. And the beach outside the sandy bars, sometimes many miles at a stretch, with their old history of wrecks and storms-the weird, white-gray beach-not without it tales of pathos-tales too, of grandest heroes and heroisms ...”( the fragment from Whitman also calling for and giving courage-something about “hands tight to the throats of kings ... “).

   Theo memorized the passage and asked about its details as he examined the geological wonders surging thousands of feet into the skies of his own homeground. The father, at that point in his son’s obvious growing hungers for knowledge and curiosity, committed himself to the writing of “a kind of stack of memories, each of them to be thought of as a bail of hay personally harvested, bound, and stored up as a pile” along with Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and John Muir’s “The Mountains of California” with its descriptions of “The Bee Pastures”; plains of wild flowers creating various auras of light as far as the eye could trace the luxuriant sheets of wild colors vanishing into the distant hazes interspersed by groves of ancient oak casting their interlacing shadows and producing a sense in the walker of “wading in liquid gold” full of bird song and waves of fragrance. How would one in a time even of Theo’s emerging adulthood, just mere decades from these witnesses, consider their truths before the carnage-like transformations of those spaces -“the ambush’d womb of shadows” Theo’s father quoted Whitman trying to release both himself and his son from the bitterness of those negations and their powers.

   Maidu, Wintun, Yokut, Miwok. Theo liked to wrap these syllables into his explorations of the high meadows and granitic fastnesses which surrounded his boyhood world looking for big-horn, the remnant herds at his end of the Sequoia country not yet destroyed by the “hoofed locusts” as Muir called the domestic sheep introduced directly after the Gold Rush, denuding ancient forage and meadow, spreading disease for which the wild ungulates had no immunities. The sound of the rut, the bloodshot smaller thunder of the male bighorn collisions echoing off ice-grooved cliff faces was one his favorite observances and studies, though it too, strong as it appeared to be in its immense sensualities and desperations, was “tentative” - that word striking the ancient syllables of Indian nouns he pronounced below the warping granite spires with everything of a language clipped off but a core of leftover, hanging sorrows.

   The older mustard gas scarred rancher told the Quaker Doctor that as a boy he still saw many of the western hills covered the original grey-green and green grasses rather than the brown and golden forms that strike the mind in a sweep of sun-creased, grudging distances. “Wouldn’t believe it, Doc, but those old colors offered a gentleness to these spaces” as the Quaker watched the rancher almost sight the trail of his words moving toward the stories where no famine marked the earlier dwellers in a region rich in rivers, marshes, swamps fed by the unimaginably huge yearly snowpack melt of the Sierra Nevada and pelagic plains where tule elk, deer, pronghorn antelope and grizzly bear grazed lakes and riverine mazes provided nutrient plants, trout, salmon, and migratory birds. “Foundation for thousands of years, Doc, where the great Valley Oaks and their acorns cleared enough room for thirty human languages. Come up here at night and you can see the lights of small towns named “Tuolumne” “Mokelumne” “Chowchilla” “Kaweah” and in invoking the extinct vocabulary and its strangeness, Dr. Blanchard thought at that moment the thick finalities (as if they too were geologic forces) might shrink back with the pronunciations of these isolate but still breathed relicts.

   “Some say those speakers didn’t have a word for war or peace,” and as Theo let the speculation settle on the paradox of that double absence Dr. Blanchard, the “modern” Quaker in the shadow of a second twentieth century “World War” thought of William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” and how the “Founder” of that province had been generous and scrupulously fair with the Indians believing each of their ideals regarding Justice “were much the same” and that both peoples could live “side-by-side in peace.” It took only a hundred years, the younger man remembered, from those living moments when the “Founder” was most creative in “Kindness” and what he, the young physician thought was the recognition of the Carnal Presence of the Cross to remind women and men of the holiness of their dying and having lived, to the deadened seconds when the grandson, John Penn, in 1763, proclaimed a bounty for all Indian scalps sending the grandfather’s “Holy Experiment” into hollowing ruin.

   Theo’s father knew the small contingent of townspeople held “the Boy’s” studies and wanderings in the same suspicions as the fossil skulls of sea lions and whale vertebrae uncovered by the spring floods of Valley rivers or by the simplest act of applying hoe to soil in an “innocent” garden where the upheavals of the “Fallen World” could challenge the purest forbearances of the devout, upturning Satan’s Vulgarities posed as the cleverest lie before the the real age of the Creation. And “the Boy” after being allowed to read the works of von Humboldt, Lyell, von Beyrick, and the Lord’s acutest enemy, Charles Darwin, would explain to other children the “Miocene” or “Pliocene” fossil leaf impressions in rock or animal skull fragments and huge sharks' teeth aswim in the roots of peach trees (a backyard patch of a good Believer’s simple strawberries) he carried in his pockets weren’t three or four thousand years old but thirty and fifty million; an exaltation of the Abyss. One prominent minister’s wife hearing of Theo’s “facts” actually broke one of her molars over the thought of her children receiving “such terrible sorts of vice” and so swept up her skirts along with the others for this “visit.”

   The Civil War veteran understood the party had a kind of natural force to its determinations and thought for a moment some well-placed this side-of-fatal bullets would be a welcome rain but one, no matter the intent, that’d land all over Theo. For himself harm had little mystery to it, arriving as it could or must dry or moist. The two extremities a sort of cluster reminding him of the “where” he had come from and his arrival in this Valley which seemed to attract in its seasons mist and rain wind and lightening, dust-storms and a summer heat to turn the nerves into a vocation of threat; one to upturn trees or snap off a roof like it was a piece of brittle finger-nail; the other to char a horse from mane to hoof, kill anything trapped in a too open space, the mind searing snap of thunder equal to the dispossessing, explosive tremors which unfoot beast or person, ship-sized boulders from a one hundred thousand year perch. He and Theo watching the huge cliffs for those seconds tremble as parts of what had been four or five thousand foot faces of sheer granite walls turned to a peculiar dust at those moments. The “solidity” of any present world as he thought then, to be drifting and splitting as these five people were drifting, toward him. The lead woman’s husband had helped to bring in the railroad (Leland Stanford’s personal letter guaranteeing lasting prosperity was displayed in in-framed glass hanging prominently in the man’s study) and with it the exportation of every crop a farmer’s imagination could force upon any soil and begin from there a transformation into salt. He was a childhood acquaintance of Theo’s mother and had been in the process of courting when the Civil War veteran arrived “afoot in a dangerous country” as the locals still had it and reported it.

   He had in those years been mostly “afoot” from Sagaponack. Came home from 1865 to late 1867 to recuperate; help and be helped by his family and to begin reading again, his beloved Whitman and the image, for him, of Benjamin Franklin in last days praying “that God grant us that not only love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth”; that the whole world be “Home” for everyone. But he didn’t any longer quite know what “Home” was. And in thinking about both the “Printer”, and the Poet from Long Island - his works of seeing and hearing were a discord the newly one-armed man felt was irresistible, felt that if he didn’t walk he would rot. It was in the beginning “for balance” - he didn’t know anymore how to literally hold himself - the sensations of falling over on one side, feeling undermined, betrayed in the visible, this other portion residing in death, pulling at him (his family also unable to bear his anguish). So he set out one morning in 1867 to try to regain what poise there was left for him. What would “nature without check with original energy” be, every hazard of it permitted to speak as if that possible freest speech could quell the stale residual war sensations that aroused a craving in himself for something just this side of disintegration, to bluff his grief, his unworthiness before the deadnesses he’d personally conjured and could not subdue, walking as his mother said one night through her tears as if he were “a mud-loosened tree about to fall on everyone.” He took new courage from where, anywhere, he could find it and distinctly from the lines of “Song of Myself”:

      "Undrape!  You are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded ..."

   He went out and netted fish with his father for that last month; fish and boat and sea-weight making his hand and wrist throb and burn, the wave lurch, the bunching slanting heave pressing at him and the stump of his shoulder. He desired to meet the Poet but he was gun-shy; the weight of a rifle, the small mounds of blood-stained bullets, unhinged teeth next to a man’s body, the moments when hate had taken him in hand-to-hand combat frenzy. He had killed with the bayonet and that made him shy as he remembered equally stray fragments and phrases from “Song of the Open Road”:

   "None may come the trial, till he or she bring courage  and

     health”  or

   "These are the days that must happen to you..."

   Their insinuation made him withdraw further and there seemed less and less any safe distance to withdraw to. The fish which he hauled in, learning the world of one-handedness and its smallest rituals from grooming to dressing, staring even at the dis-figure; wondering at his sleeper’s weight and where it would land him, sorting through that unreality - the privacy of himself corpse-like, dazed with the busy smothering peculiarities of it. His mother smoked fish, dried apples, prepared for, at the most as she knew it had to be, two weeks of his journey wanting her war-broken son not to die, and no longer knowing what his life was nor how to keep him alive.

   That morning in late spring of 1867; it was before sunrise and his mother cooked his favorite breakfast of pancakes with fresh churned butter, maple syrup, blueberry jam, thick slices of bacon, milk directly from the udder rich and warm and creamy, his pack with a copy of the Poet’s book and it additions to 1867, fresh cobbled boots, fresh clothes, a walking stick his father carved from black walnut and whale-bone. The leave-taking was quiet. He remembered his mother kept her hands under her apron, his father ready for his own day fixing nets and boats for an new fishing season at sea, those hands forever swollen, more callous than skin. Every finger broken at least once. These images almost more than his parents faces a mocking parasitic anguish at the beginning of his journey fixed to the smells of kitchen and heavy thaw breezes that seemed to stick under the lids of his eyes. He could barely swallow his mother’s lovingly prepared food. The dawn filled with robins hopping, the deliberate, careful stuttering motions of their listenings helped to rouse him as did the returning Canadian geese (the fierce, watchful ganders that awed him as a boy and man with their deliberate courage whenever the hint of threat appeared to the resting, ground-borne flock), the taste of pancake and kelp-tinged wind on his lips.

   The journey took three years. In the winter he stopped and offered himself as a laborer for farming families in Ohio. At first the suppositions were a torture and threat of starvation. A Civil War veteran was fine, but a one-armed man and Yankee, what could he do that wouldn’t embarrass their charity? Such creatures came back to their home country-sides, many to give up, become drunks either of various violences or passivities; become a shambles gathered at the corners of everyone’s eye, the mutilations pure and simple in that way filling the villages and towns with a watchful futility. And here was yet another drifting through under what terms of vagrancy?

   Without work, work for food, no food. The simple mathematical reduction harbored no lies. He had to think of equally simple questions. The simple granite-like merciless bunching against him demanded it. The visible cliffs of Kings Canyon which surrounded him, he later thought, wonderful as they were, were the awkward twins to the more invisible geology he earlier experienced on the shores of the Ohio River as it plunged toward the Mississippi and the edges of the Confederacy. Was he the “erysipelite” of Whitman’s “Sleepers”, the “Idiot” or one of the “transient” meteors disappearing from the poet’s “year of forebodings” at the precipices of the Civil War?

   “A day? Let me show you what I can do in a day,” he offered without beggary, and as if he were the single actor in a traveling carnival offering carefully chosen temptation. He was as surprised by these words as the farmer who with thinning hesitation allowed him exactly that:

   “A Day.”

   To do what?

   Stack and fork hay.

   “Enough for a man with five arms. Didn’t use them words with the wife, though. She’s scared of strangers. Scared of the violent men who come home after the war as if they’d ate the Face of Doom, the meat sweeter than anything they’d ever had or got again. My own brother’s like that. Fit to shit and drink. War made’im slippery as a pig. Who knows how it’ll end. Probably he’ll get rich. But yer hired. You’ll sleep and eat in the barn. A plate’a food’ll be waiting at sunset.”

   With that Theo’s father was left alone and astounded by his capacities. The fish and sea weight carrying over into the central continent as he reckoned it, those waves of Sagaponack stroking, smashing, undermining the relic sensations of his previous body; the oddity, the perpetuity of the mutilation, pale, cold as he would then come to know the unyielding blankness of that half of himself not wanting to frighten anyone with it as he grew to understand in that barn, the mistrusting of himself as a too arousing curiosity at the edges, and thereby even more suspect; a war-wraith.

   His hand was swollen, blistered, and when he woke from an exhausted doze there was a plate filled with gone cold pork, a pitcher of water, a metal cup, two dried peaches he ate hesitantly having been already at the fearful borders of this life and breathing from his own partially entered bodilessness helped him to drift into sleep.

   The land-bound winter came in a different fury from the one he knew. The Bays so direct then to his recollections might freeze over but the sea swelled and rolled, ate the land-ward edged ice with tide and spray, rotting sea-kelp. Here wood needed chopping, trees downing, horses fed, groomed, tools oiled, harnesses and other leather mended and tended, machinery and buildings repaired even as blizzards came, subsided into searingly light cracked days, the sun unable to break even the smallest eye-blink of the cold as he chopped oak for its density and prolonged fire heat, wood chips from his axe acrid, spilled fresh from blade as they piled at the foot of an about-to-be severed trunk. He learned the arts of sharpening; wood-saws, axes, knives, scythes, harrows, thresher blades. Spent hours under a whale-oil lamp smelling this sea remnant and applying file to steel, learning the new forms of coordination, body and tool, mastering leverages, what could be held and could not as he experimented and recalled the initial frustrations and despairs over lacing and tying his boots, simple dressing, tucking in shirts, synching belt after his return to Sagaponack, each small cluster of the new orientations gathering (always to him) in their slow arrangements as he thought in that winter of Whitman’s “erysipelite” and whether this was the poet’s secret image of sorrows for a Democracy, not their immediate fatalities, but the generating disfigurement, once able to stake its claim, its full powers of inborn reduction and subtlest enfeeblements?

   When Theo’s father had a chance, he walked the countryside of the Lower Scioto River Valley as it drained into the larger Ohio, with his host, Asa Kendrick. It was late February and they were looking for “proper maples” as Mr. Kendrick described their wanderings over river bottoms which then still contained wild rye, white clover, and blue-grass meadows where Daniel Boone once hunted elk, grazing bison, and were, in 1868, “no more.”

   “Stay until early summer,” Mr. Kendrick said “and you’ll see enough mallards to suckle at least two new armies risen from their graves,” adding “when my great-grandfather came into this country most of it was forests of white and red oak; most trees at least six foot in diameter, and scary enough like those settlers said ‘ta’ fil’yer boots with the wrong color piss.’ Place still got enough lumber to build thirty cities; streams run like buttered blood, so slow the catfish and sturgeon bin known to eat one or two stupid horses come for a too easy drink and at least three smart politicians.” This said with a tone so flat you could practically ice-skate the syllables.

   Theo’s father liked Mr. Kendrick and his wife. At night, when his missing part ached, he thought of staying longer than he’d planned with the childless couple who were both half-Shawnee, who he learned, lost two daughters, one to measles, the other crushed under a suddenly fallen tree; “The Hazard of the Woods” not to be bribed by either devotions to sin or devotions to prayerful devotion put upon the deepest inquiries as to God’s mysterious frownings.

   “No warnin. Thing fell with hardly a sound, so rotted breath of a woodpecker could’a started the lean. Happened too, over in Adams County last year. A man and his son. Both of’em taken at the foot’a Peach Mountain. Some folks blame it on the Ghost of the Prophet.”

   Asa Kendrick didn’t want to say more at that point and Theo’s father recalling his mother’s words about himself, “A mud-loosened tree”; the name gathered and swelled with a now even more forlorn oddity that made him cringe. Voices heaving on the half-eaten rain, he thought, and nothing spared. Buy yourself some logic, get a bath, come clean. Take on the friendliest colors of your surroundings sweeping this or any region to be walked into with no names yet assigned except to some dry grasses gone pale in the thousand-eared night of his war horrors and their vocations carving and pre-empting any of his previous dreams headed as he might be into luckless drift and its nuances penciled with a warning about artillery explosions, bayonet charges; their invisible remnant lusts come to claw the valleys of this or other planets, cast a signature, then wander off into other distributions a billion years away, get thirsty one day for some better to forget reason and cause a local evaporation of the rivers and streams which no truce will ever come to. This heave in the body. Foraging for air and finding so little.

   And he wanted to know who the “Prophet” was so Asa Kendrick took him to “a ripe maple grove” nearly eight miles south on the shore of the Ohio; a stand of sugar trees, some grown straight, some at angles “rooted in the mounds,” Mr. Kendrick explained.

   “Ohio got a bunch of’em. Nobody knows for sure. Ancients in these hills and bottoms built pyramids and snakes; circles, octagons, perfect squares out of gravel, top soil, then clay to pack it hard and smooth. Much of it was done in relation to water far as anyone can tell. They constructed moats, wide avenues, effigies of puma and bear and eagle, most of’em next to a large stream or river. One here we’re walkin on must have been beautiful. Had an entrance avenue at least ten miles long. Embankments were about four foot high, width twenty feet following the flow of every ravine and hillside. Don’t know exactly who walked it then but I’ve gone down it at least twice a year since I was a boy in fall and spring. Wife’s gotten dreams about it since she was a girl. Says the People used different colored clays and carved faces at precise intervals along the whole way. Her dreams even bring some words:

      Who mixed Water with Dawn
      Who strangles War
      But Wakener of the Land

   Have no idea what it means but she can sing a month’s worth of such things. Indians far away as the Missouri and Susquehanna come once in a while to listen but it’s the “Prophet” you want to know about. Me and the wife are part of the story. Grandmothers were captives who married into the Shawnee; neither wanted to come back to white civilization. By the time they had children the messiahs had been springing up out of these forests for almost two hundred years to show the Indians how their souls were growing fainter each day over the loss of land. Story’s so huge seems to me it will never fit the combined footprints of a trillion people.”

   Theo’s father had found arrowheads in the marshes and tidal mud, and the place names of Long Island still held their penetrant resonances, uneasy, nearly hollow in these upturned and fragile appearances washing over him. Their exposure made him feel defenseless, especially as he thought of it now, walking over these spectral “earth things” as he thought to call them, as if the “Democracy” to his after-mind, risen from this still eyeless extremity were a disturbed ghost, the one he and hundreds of thousands of others had lost themselves to and would be the destiny of uncountable “furthurs”; these mounds rising as “waves” to drown them though they seemed in their present density and even airless ruin to be statically earth-held; were they some stranded oscillation waiting for the beguilements and nightmares that would pitch and heave them once more?

   “How old you think these mounds are, Mr. Kendrick?”

   “Shawnee and Miami say they’re old, Ethan. I guess at lest four or five thousand for some.”

   “Could it be more?”

   “Well, the Dreamers, those who are left and come once in a while to see my wife, think it’s way more, but about that I don't know."

   “Prophet connected to any of it?”

   At the moment of the question, the two men looked out at a nearby beaver pond which had partially flooded the ancient site. Primarily the lone beaver lodge throwing off steam, and at the ice-fixed tree roots and stone; snow-crushed grasses, and leafless, sapless forest.

   “No beaver at least in thirty years. First I saw that lodge steam, near scared hell outta me. Thought it was the dead ‘bout to give a sermon. Dead, far as I know haven’t took yet to gnawing trees. But’cha never can tell.”

   Asa Kendrick’s watchful, reluctant humor, the amputee thought, came and went like the spare flitting cardinal searching dry, cracked-leafed winter ground, its hard red opulence lingering somehow more at those points where any hearing or seeing merged with the frosted barrennesses of the local sky.

   “Heart of everything here is the Ohiopeekhana.”

   Theo’s father looked at Asa Kendrick, thinking of the older place names marking the American edges of his boyhood world and how different a sounding this one held, including the word he could still barely pronounce, “Chicamagua.”

   “Is it the River?” he asked not wanting the question to slip into either intrusion or unintended carelessness.

   “River of Many Whitecaps” the half-Shawnee answered as if in the saying he had partially left one world for another and was inviting Theo’s father.

   “Wind ever die down?” he asked the older man, remembering again his childhood study of the ocean and shore. What winds accompanied what waves and their temperatures, his mother’s brother, the one killed by ground hornets, who taught him and a generation of other local children to swim (“Best one to teach it. No drowning in this community for twenty years”), how to tell rip-tides by the changes of color in the water, the smell of a faraway storm, changes of speed in tidal currents; be on the lookout for quicksand and jellyfish; the glass-smooth surface of a bay where he knew the only breeze in all that space was his own breath, not even a grass-tip swaying in the stillness as seagulls watched and smelled and kept their eye-pecker distances.

   “River was known for the purest colors of its blues. French called it "La Belle Rivere” and loved the harvest of wild grapes on its shores. And to answer your question about wind; blows west down from the Alleghenies. River carries it and the restless armies of everything it seems, toward the Mississippi. Bet it carried you and your army too to that ugly appointment.”

   Theo’s father only nodded.

   “Still want to know about the ‘Prophet’?”

   The Long Islander didn’t move.

   Early April sun was shining, sky held no clouds. A sudden hard gust snapped at thin twigs, picked up some iced-snow, sprang and jerked as some broken possum tail to cut their faces. There was no thought of spite in either man who had experienced and lived through winters more profound. They wiped the tears from their eyes before those drops froze at mid-cheek. To what would they belong if not this too without comment or wasteful fuss?

   “Born name was Lalawethica. Tecumseh’s brother. Mostly he was a drunkard. French introduced brandy in the sixteen hundreds. Woods on and off been a kind of cesspool ever since. Heard my grandmother tell of forts constructed when these were real wildernesses slippery with beaver, whiskey, and any other gore you could name as the four directions lose their hold and slip off. Plague get the best and the worst. About halfway through the year 1805 man had a terrible shaking fit, then slept so hard everyone thought he died. Woke a few days later, though. Another kind of man. Couldn’t say he was Christian either, but he was dangerous. Shawnee and other Indians thought his dream had come to set him and them on a kind of a grim fire.”

   The brutal frost winds jammed into an old plow carved abandoned meadow; furrows heaved and swollen, ice-soil laced and split, all the undulance held and undrifted for that moment of their mutual observation, the invaded solitude cut and turned, stained with motionlessness except for a porcupine which had not detected them. They both watched as it sniffed, flexed its quills and wandered slowly over the eroded plow scars.

   “Hunger must’a woke it,” Asa Kendrick speculated. “Stay still usually twenty-two hours a day in winter. Other two. They don’t go far. Just to gnaw on bark. You’d think they sleep it through like bears. But they don’t. Quills pure as boiled water and don’t piss on your boots neither. Animal got a love for salt. Your own piss or sweat don’t matter. Boots’ll be eaten to shreds. Crickets gossip then about humans being the easiest fools from one hollow to another. Dog pisses on a porch. Porch gone next morning. Fireflies love it. Easier to talk about that than how a traveler a hundred years ago in search of shelter could'a been captured by either the American Militias or Indians and whose dry eyelids might still be preserved at the bottom of an old family teacup."

   “Ever shoot one?” the young Civil War veteran asked, pulling his host back from the wave of despair about to absorb him.

   “Bad luck,” Mr. Kendrick said, almost righting himself visibly, the simple question offering the old strain of habitual rage and something apart from its soaking, unchanging mockery.

   “Why’s that?”

   Another question to lessen the fixity; the dismemberments and their erasures murmuring venomously in either man through the back of the neck, pulling the hair only enough to raise the skin, peeling the human dignity one could be allowed.

   “Indians said it’s the Last Animal; for The Starving Only.”

   “Believe it?”

   “Stand here on this ancient road and no tellin what any man’s supposed to believe. Wife can hear the singing of the old processions. Maybe it was the death of the children made it so. May be not?”

   Then Asa Kendrick’s eyes gleamed a little as he watched Theo’s father get ripe with new questions, finished with his kind of invitation to stay longer.

   “Lalawethica,” The younger man repeated the old name.

   “Sure is a mouthful,”  Asa Kendrick responded trying to regain some lost ground and some bit of humor as they wandered and walked their way on this river shore full of stranded up-wrenched trees, drowned and now frozen cattle hawks and buzzards and some dog packs had gotten to as he guided the mutilated survivor.

   And Asa Kendrick began again.

   “Though a man could nearly choke on the Prophet’s original name his new identity, the one his Dreams gave him, now that might twist the listener’s ear too: Tenskwatawa rose up from his own ashes but couldn’t stop the general ash heap no matter how the Dead or the Sleep of the Dead come to re-arrange the Sleeper. Better be careful though. I’m beginning to sound like the wife. Scare me and you and those ravens jumpin and flappin on the dead cattle over on that shifted eddy there wonderin why we’re too stupid not to know good food when everyone else sees it; been stupid so long we went and got sick and mean with it. Got to be lived through even if the sickness takes most of the world with it.”

   Theo’s father hearing such words thought of the Montauks his grandparents often spoke of, the “Last Ones” who never volunteered to carry such closings as they worked the still vast clam beds of those Long Island estuaries. But they, nonetheless, were figures of irritation to those Quakers who saw in them and themselves a crumpling failure of the Experiment of Conscience whose repercussions were possibly his mud-loosened self and this elder who was saving him from starvation and suicide after the ravages of Chicamagua, he and his fellow recruits also floating down “La Belle Riviere” toward war soils that would set them to various rot, the dead and the lived having gone through with what they might or couldn’t.

   The young war veteran looked at his host, rubbed the snow with his one hand from the empty, shoulder-less coat-sleeve of his right side, the woolen extension hanging limply, breeze blown, the ghost limb on occasion still on fire, still to be smelled.

   “Little hesitant to ask, Mr. Kendrick, but what did his dreams mean?”

   “Don’t know exactly, and anyway though a part of it, I am usually a little afraid of the old Indians who seem to arrive once in a while, stepped outta the air itself to spend time with my wife.”

   “Why the fear?”

   “Some of’em old enough to remember another world. That’s all. Want to be able to forget it. Forget what I was told so I can live in this one with what I got left. Can only partially do it with them around. Pull me so I can’t be in either one.”

   Asa Kendrick’s tone was not bitter or tired, just cloaked and distant. And careful, Theo’s father noticed, wanting to divert any more nervous attention to what already had been revealed.

   “Luck, whatever you are, you must be something like the nearest bowl of shit,” Asa Kendrick said in retrospect to his own observations to nothing in particular as they began their long walk back, Mr. Kendrick letting the sad humor uncurl and flutter to heal both of their numbnesses for that moment, luck’s immensities as they knew it, coming with the earliest, barely discernable hints of spring thaw.

II

   About mid-March Theo’s father and hosts examined the largest maple trees in their forest grove, estimated the ages any previous tap scars were and then showed the “Long Islander” (their private reference), how to make two or three taps “three foot above the ground” Mr. Kendrick advised; “cut a diagonal gash 'bout three-and-a-half-foot long, lower end of the cut there, take out a four-inch long piece’a bark, set your hatchet right at the base and insert this wood spout I carved, then let it drip into this birch-bark bucket." (Mrs. Kendrick had fashioned a number over the winter, each meticulously folded, sewn, and sealed with pine sap).

   “Birch affords a fresher taste to me,” Mrs. Kendrick told both men and added, in case her husband strayed into any forgetfulnesses, “no tinge of metal.”

   So everyday he gathered the sap, took it to a boiling trough carved out of an old maple stump in a lean-to “sugar house”.

   “Large maple’ll yield fifty to sixty gallons; lot full of trees keep us going to the last spring freezes. Helps you to know you lived through one more.”

   Asa Kendrick’s voice enunciating this unsteady fact, held no linkage with either solace or futility. The intensity of what they were doing with the trees held them to a rich concentration. The labors, the odors of fire and snow and sap, the sap-weight in the birch buckets, the trees around them reddening, rising from their hibernations, the human breath deepening with the exertions held no deception, no panic.

   The Civil War veteran noticed his body seemed almost full again, the intimacy of his breath no longer so uncertain as it had been, no longer a “visitor” who patronized and lessened him; this too he had come to know, the “war’s damage”, part of him a corpse grown remote, out of reach from the longings of his breath to join the distance as he heard Mrs. Kendrick’s words once more, “Set the sap to a low boil; scorch it though and it’ll go dead under your hands. Got to have two colors in their variations, clear and light, dark and thick,” the extraordinary woman offered as if she had been following the curvature of the one-handed man’s mind.

   “I like it clear and light the best,” as they both watched the vat begin to come to a boil.

   The Kendrick’s also taught their guest to bring the sap down even further for fine sugar cakes to be stored in baskets. After the season they introduced their friend to venison garnished with maple syrup recipes mixed with corn and bear fat, showed him how to mix it with water from different creeks, each with a separate taste along with wild mints growing there, and herbs for delicious teas some of which relaxed him and brought precious comfort which inspired a recall of the lilac and its perfumes arriving with the sumptuous days of emergent warmth, and the snow drops uncurling in the mazes of rotting snow and ice, the ground bloating and releasing; “thawing”; he loved that verb, returning to the closure of his barn-nest and read from the sorrows of "When Lilacs Last In The Door-Yard Bloom’d." The gentle, at last the gentle acknowledgement and its sanity, the one he needed then and read quietly for his friends who had, in their almost inaccessible, evasive way given him courage again, letting it bunch up with each new, often awkward one-handed gesture until no longer in his surprise and confoundment was there any stumble:

   (Nor for you, for one, alone ;
   Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring :
   For fresh as the morning-thus this would I carol a song for you, O
      sane and sacred death.

   All over bouquets of roses,
   O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies  ;
   But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
   Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes  ;
   With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
   For you, and the coffins all of you, O death.  )

   There was no longer the humiliating struggle of tying laces, buttoning pants or shirts, washing himself with the remaining hand as if that appendage and its fingers were spreading a chill over his human meat. The unrelieved touch of finger-tips which had been to him a kind of sickening left-over bulk, a cause of panic crushing him in vague inflammation; more ignoble, lurching disgrace. But the “maple” labors, sharpening of tools, accumulation of small seemingly indifferent skills; the previously felt lamenesses and disfigurements now became indecipherable, unpronounced; the labors had turned him away from his weariness and its corrosions. He decided to stay an “extra season” with his hosts. In that year he devoted himself to carpentry (setting nail to hammer at first without injury), planting and harvest, horsemanship, constructing a beautiful chair for Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick.

   There was too his devotion to Whitman and to learning more about Tecumseh and the relationship of the Quakers to the Shawnee, the “Sa Wanna” as they were known to themselves, “People of the South.”

   Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick had old baskets, pottery, jewelry, turbans, a quiver filled with skillfully shafted poisoned arrows. “In case diplomacy failed,” Mrs. Kendrick let it be whispered.

   Theo’s father was struck by the brave reserve of his hosts, their mindful skills which so often in their subtle remove freshened even the hardest labors. They drew so little attention to the depths they belonged to, their two worlds. He asked himself if this was what Penn witnessed; the persons born of the malevolent, Godless wilderness who were diplomatic, reserved, knew the world “as home for everyone” as they well may have taught  Franklin and what did these two remnants though of mixed race actually represent in the face of the earlier Quaker approach to their Shawnee neighbors as equals? On the basis of such experiments of conscience could the Civil War have been avoided, the earlier transgression of peace arising in the simplicity of a woman and man’s heart and nowhere else?

   The unexpected vicissitudes of the question nearly froze him. He remembered Elias Hicks, his mother’s story of the Whitmans, and began to ask about violence, whether it is an obedience to evil even in the most favored circumstances and Hicks’ statement as it was reported to him about the blood of Christ: “the blood of Christ-the blood of Christ-why, my friends, the actual blood of Christ in itself was no more effective than the blood of bulls and goats-not a bit more-not a bit.” The humane challenge of Hicks’ statement, its sweeping away of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight years of deception and heartlessness caused the Civil War veteran to look more closely at Penn’s strict justice in land dealings with the Indians. Was this too a part of the Principle of Divine Light which initiated Penn’s examination of Justice and “personal safety”?

   He stayed another year and discovered the Kendricks had been given stories from their Shawnee and Quaker grandparents about William Penn which carried the Quaker’s presence as well as the Shawnee who were his direct neighbors. He spent those months struggling to reckon himself, his future, and what “Union” he would ever belong to after committing his violences in what he had assumed was the name of “Union” and “Abolition.” He concluded that body of thought may have held more injury than the body of injury he could never escape.

   In the spring of 1869 he prepared to leave.

   There was little ceremony because he could think of no proper way to tell these hosts how exactly they had helped him to want to be alive again, leave the smell of his missing appendage and its abductions.

   After the second season of tapping maples he announced himself.

   “Mr. and Mrs. Kendrick, I think it’s time for me to go.”

   The snow was rotting. The land bogging up finally after a brutal winter, no reversion to any late spring freezes and snow. Even the undergrowth was red, the meadows of pale green fern uncurling with each renewing advance of sun and warmth.

   “You’ve survived a second winter. Grandmothers told us the second winter after a war is toughest,” Mrs. Kendrick responded and touched the Long Islander’s hand as her eyes swelled with tears.

   He had not either expected Mrs. Kendrick’s gesture, its transposal to the exhaustions he had unwantedly embraced, posed in his vacancy as the often only hospitable conclusion he could bear.

   The Kendricks had already smoked and dried venison for him, picked herbs, dried apples and peaches without his knowing.

   “Sure you still want to walk to California? Mr. Kendrick asked and followed immediately with, “There is the Ohio. You can float down it. Mississippi’s there too. And trains? You can ride them.”

   That said he handed the younger man a hundred dollars not wanting to impose any further intrusions.

   “Can’t take your money.”

   “Oh! We think you can. And you should,” Mrs. Kendrick looked at her guest. “No trouble over it. I’ve got some eagle feathers for you too. They’ll help when the dreamings come.”

   He didn’t know how she knew about his dreams. Mrs. Kendrick kept to her guarded assertions and rhythms without display. The gesture was so peculiarly distant he felt childishly muffled, as if this elder had “supposed” him and would continue to. A kindness so distinct he felt at once crude and quickened by its unimposed inspiration.

   “What do I do with eagle feathers?”

   “Keep them near,” she said, adding nothing else.

   And so he set out on a flat boat late April, 1869.

   There was still ice on the Ohio but the days were warming, the fresh hatched biting flies drawing blood and welt, bird flocks headed north again. He loved watching bald eagles perched in the newly budded canopies of the tallest river edge oaks and sycamores eyeing un-weary fish, washed-up carrion, ospreys maneuvering through harsh early spring winds over the churning river, wings and tail folding with currents of driving, tumbling air. The return of egret, a flit of kingfisher, yellow-breasted chats and white-eyed vireos, birds the Kendricks had taught him to recognize and watch closely, were already building their nests. The chat’s yellow breast feathers absorbed and stung him with a longing, and as he watched this bird he let the thumb of his hand touch each of the four fingers. He was grateful for the web of this flesh. It no longer confounded him, stifled him with the sneaking sense of barrenness it had previously as a cruelly baiting remnant.

   The one stop he made: “Point Pleasant” rising toward the River’s great bend at Cincinnati; Grant’s birth-place. He walked the bluffs there overlooking the huge stream and thought of the violences Grant commanded, the tangled nothing he felt over his own killing which would never not glare at him, he knew, with its bunching strangulations. He stayed a day and a night at a local inn, got a ride on another old flat-boat to the Falls of the Ohio, then road down the Mississippi on a water-wheel steamer to New Orleans where he hired out as a passenger-crewman on a cargo ship hauling cotton and fine linen to San Francisco. He wanted to live and he wanted still terribly to walk but walking he felt would ensnare the days in the barren, dragging helplessness of his having killed other men.

   He loved the treacherous seas enshrouding the southern-most tip of the Americas; the final, scattered vertebrae still able to lash and sink the un-weary even at that farthest stammering of his beloved Whitman’s “Songs”. When he passed through the “Golden Gate” and landed in San Francisco he walked once more, this time in to the San Joachin, whose mapped outline looked to him, a Long Islander, as ancient a fish as “Fish-shaped Paumaunok.”

I I I

   As the Civil veteran looked down from his plateau he saw the “visitors” still stumbling in what was for them risky mid-day heat. When they came over the first bluff he already had set out fresh well-cooled water for them, cut peaches and lemons along with smoked venison and brook trout.  Their horses were lathered and rather than be angered over it he had Theo and his younger Miwok friend “Stephen” take the animals, to brush and water them slowly back to life again. About whether he could do this for their owners he didn’t know, didn’t care much, but they were here, not invited, and even so, he would honor their minor hardship getting to his second home. The hundred dollars the Kendricks gave him he transformed into, if not a huge fortune, then one based on shrewd land and water investments the “town fathers” could not touch since he owned what they most coveted. What they could touch was his son, give a useless misery to his young life that he would try to avoid. But there was a limit and beyond it he would pass their misery back to them. They knew too there were other banks, other investments which could “set back” their small town designs. They also knew he would try not to send Theo away to an Eastern school.

   “Mornin’ Reverend Petersen, Missus Petersen.”

   He also looked over Paul and Sally Eaton, the local banker and his wife who collected “Indian things.” The minister’s thin closely shaven face was reddened from the heat. His eyes partially glazed from the exposure. The dark suit he wore served only to procure him a more ample radiation. His wife; she wore a light grey linen dress, a substantial sun bonnet, red linen gloves to protect her hands and fared better under the on-set of heat and smell of draught-parched sage. Sally Eaton was a pre-49er “gringo” rancher’s daughter. Her father was said to have led certain “Indian shoots” and house burnings of the earlier Spanish/Mexican settlers whose lands were ripe. She was tall, hazel eyed, intelligent, cunning, used her religion and ambitions fanatically. Theo’s father knew the surface of good manners, handsome cheek bones and complexion which accompanied her equally and memorably delicate facial bones and almost raven-black hair could be used as a “corner” the un-weary might wander into. Her husband was irritable, disciplined in his greed, the outward congenialities and public spontaneity of the would-be politician a drapery and token for the colder rigidities of their shared alliance.

   “Sally. Paul. Looks like you could use some water.”

   They noticed his tone was friendly as they drank what was set for them in the crystal glasses he bought for his late wife on a trip to San Francisco. The air was still and hot as they ate the fruit, sampled honey, squeezed lemon over the smoked deer and fish.

   “Wish sometimes you hadn’t left the house after Julia’s death,” Reverend Petersen began.

   Theo’s father pulled trout off some rib, sipped the liquid, sampled a peach.

   “Part of the town seems so empty. I especially loved her flower beds,” Sally Eaton added, not wanting to wade much past her toes.

   The host looked down at his one scarred and wind swept hand and thought, as he listened to this chatter, “Enough yet like a good shovel. Thirty sharpenings  with luck. But not much goddamned more.”

   A third guest tried. Mrs. Petersen this time. “There are many mornings when we think of your Julia.”

   “Is that why you’ve come. To discuss Julia?”

   They each looked startled knowing he had pruned their small talk, and set them prematurely adrift.

   “Why, not Julia at all!” The banker was careful, not wanting to be too eager as his wife noticed the bent, sun-scathed fingers of this man who made her husband feel powerless, checked in his hungers for the lands of small farmers in their section of the Valley and herself less “prominent”, uneasy in her assumptions of triumph with each mortgage foreclosure, each “artifact” accumulated for display in her home then “given” to universities or museums in her name while despising the fact of her “host” financing the educations of Indians or Mexicans.

   “No. Julia, rest her soul, was our inspiration,” Sally Eaton finished her husband’s too hesitant declaration.

   Their host took another sip of water from the crystal he held, looked at each guest, then asked, “What inspiration is that? I doubt if she inspired your foreclosures, Paul. But you never know about the mysteries of inspiration.”

   “Julia was a fine mother,” Reverend Petersen said, wanting to tamp what he hoped was the so far minor bleeding of the conversation.

   “Didn’t have much chance, it seems to me. If she had lived, I’d have hoped to be the one to witness those virtues. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll go and see about your horses.”

   They knew they’d not be invited past mid-afternoon and while Theo’s father was gone they rallied a bit from the initial stumble of their words and gestures. The women straightened themselves, the men drank too much water and fidgeted as they looked out at the huge cliff country surrounding this parcel of land, one of the puzzles Theo’s father purchased and which allowed him further water rights. The banker understood a little more clearly from this vantage how the Civil War veteran had anticipated the need for vast amounts of water and irrigation and his fortune with or without the bank would shape the future of their town and Valley.

   “Horses are getting better,” Theo’s father announced, his tone holding no reference to the way the animals were used. “‘Bout an hour and they’ll be ready. Enough safe light for your return.” His mood was polite and formal. “You can please yourselves with sitting on the porch. I’ll have Stephen and Theo get comfortable chairs while you wait for the animals.”

   Sally Eaton asked then, “Don’t you think Theo might be happier in town?”

   “Is that what you’ve come for. Theo’s happiness in his mother’s name?”

   “Well, since Julia’s gone you’ve taken him so far from the home you made,” Reverend Petersen’s wife observed, regarding her words as a diplomatic triumph and containing the further unstated implication that to deny this would be to deny his wife and the welfare of his son.

   “Who among all you wives will volunteer to be his mother?”

   The challenge was obvious and cold and when Reverend Petersen started to say the first syllable of the dead woman’s name once more the host stopped him.

   “Please don’t. I know her name. I’ll be polite for the sake of that name. But don’t say it aloud one more time. And I’ll say this once. No discussion after that. Any more “visits” and I’ll find another bank. Any more foreclosures, any more grave-robbing, I’ll find another goddamned banker.”

   The “incident”, though it didn’t result in death or torn bodies, did become the foundation of the many family farms in their town, the “Backbone” the Civil War veteran thought, remembering the Kendricks and the world they held in their hands.

I V

   Dr. Blanchard gradually picked up the bits of story about Theo and his father. The linkage with the Quakers offered the young doctor a small forbearance and insulation, enough he thought to help his wife and children; the one wilting from loneliness and an increasing fear she felt dangling over them, with each hour more tense and less remote. The two children, a boy and girl friendless after a year, though their father gave medical care and expertise the local residents had never seen, letting payment come not always in money but vegetables, fruit, a tuned car for his house calls, baked breads, an oiled refurbished tool and when nothing could be afforded the best care he could offer without question. Still, his children heard whispers at school about their “coward” father, his strange non-violent ways; the son challenged once by three boys and beaten. He did not raise his fists, and that night humiliated with a black and blue face, their father attending to the son’s bruises and the shocked helplessness of the daughter told them the story about the Irish Quakers in the uprising of 1797: “They were advised by their elders and leaders, as they considered the violences that would surely come for each of their families, to destroy their arms. The loss of the temptation to save themselves by force, increased their faith and their assurance in their teaching of non-violence. But each Quaker family, I suppose like ours too, had to decide and what they did was open their homes to the sick, the injured, and all those who had been made homeless whether English or Irish. The smallest acts of mercy could have resulted in their deaths. They knew it. For your injuries and your tears I only have my Doctor’s hands and I’m not always sure if that will ever be enough. I don’t think we’re very much different from those earliest Quakers.”

   “ I’m not strong enough, Dad,” his younger son said in response to these references and as the father applied a cold compress to the boy’s swollen eyes and lips, he answered gently thinking of one his heroes, Thomas Hancock, a highly trained physician of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries deeply committed to the rejection of war, the use of force, and inspired the twentieth century doctor’s own pacifisms, “... and there is not, on the contrary, any one more truly bold who goes forth unarmed ... against the weapons of the cruel ...”

   The older daughter, though she was muted and withdrawn by the ugliness of the school-yard incident, the teachers who stood by and let the brutality find its own end, wrapped ice in a compress of her own folding and held it to a mean rib-bruise, a kick she knew came from a more exaggerated anger over her brother’s refusal to protect himself with his own violence as she pleaded for them to stop, that her family had done nothing to deserve this shocking hatred.

   The father watching the daughter’s gestures whispered to them both, “Violence does not stop and become peace, but leaves behind only loss and hatred and fury. My own father told me these exact words when I was also beaten as a boy and wondered too if the “Divine Light” and Liberty of Conscience were the beautiful words of fools and liars.”

   The acknowledgement of the bravery of his children was partially shattered as all three heard the mother’s hollow sobbing behind a closed bedroom door.

   Theo hearing of the school-yard beating decided to stay “in town” and came to Dr. Blanchard’s office on the pretext of “runnin through that stuff you gave me for muh old sores.”

   “Let me look for more, Theo,” the physician answered and unlocked a medicine cabinet.

   “Heard about your son, Doc. Anything I can do?”

   Dr. Blanchard weighed the two edges of the question: the sincere inquiry about the damage to his children and family; the threat the rancher was capable of imposing causing more resentment.

   “Thanks, Theo. Boy’s better today. But can’t say it wasn’t a scare. Keep the kids home till the end of the week. It’ll give their mother some reassurance and less worry.”

   Dr. Blanchard knew the words didn’t hide much but that Theo would respect their sense of restraint and privacy.

   As the doctor handed his patient the medicine, re-explained its application, and looked over the World War I mustard gas scars, the phone rang.

   “An emergency. Farmer’s son took a slice from his foot chopping wood. Better for me to go out than have them come here.”

   “So long, Doc. I’ll be by next week with a box of figs.”

   “Appreciate it, Theo. And be sure to keep those scars from too much sun.”

   Theo watched the “Visitor” drive south. Figured he was headed to Dinuba, even Yettem. Anything further and you’d need a better car or phone wires. “And what the hell was a goddamned kid doin with his toes under an ax any way fer shit sakes. Little fart must be smart as a box’a goddamned stones.” The rancher thought over that as he went about his errands and business over the next couple of hours. Went through his own mental list of local and near-local boys and none of the ones who came to mind were that stupid. He did remember one who picked up a rattler showing off for some girls, got a full bite on his forearm and nearly died from gangrene. “Father a dumb bastard too,” he grunted under his breath. “The mother. Why, by God she’d only let herself be fucked in a pond so cool didn’t know ever if you wuz the hungry boy which’d come first; yer withered balls or froze to a sawhorse dick while she laughed herself raw from that deep-freeze’a hers.”

   But he didn’t appreciate the suspicions which did take shape and became more refined as he banked, discussed crop profits with the manager, forecasts for field hands and railroad space, food output for war, what families needed money to get through until husbands, sons, daughters came home. Or.

   It was about 4pm when he stopped filtering the doubts. Wind had picked up and carried the smell of ripening orange blossoms, the coaxing sensuous perfume and white petals creased his face and arms and dropped swirling at his feet. He walked to a large in-town garage where he kept tools, irrigation supplies, tractors, parts, water and food in case of a really bad earthquake, and an extra pick-up for what work might be necessary.

   All he cared about was that the piece of steel started up.

   Theo drove first to Dr. Blanchard’s home, hoping to see the Quaker’s car in the front yard, the good Doctor back for a mid-day lunch, not having yet started his early evening rounds and home visits. He stopped, walked to the door, knocked. There was nothing. Neither wife nor kids. That told him more.

   He got back in his truck, checked the gas gauge, heard noise of crickets and the calls of red-wing black birds, pairs still feeding late nestlings, off in a near meadow. The foothills below the great Sequoias were beginning to glow with a sun-down haze of magnifying gold so achingly resplendent in this region of dwarfing hugenesses as he began driving south through the fields and orchards whose labyrinths he knew. Fruit pickers were still stripping some trees, field hands hoeing weeds, bent over their hoe handles; men, women, and children harnessed to the bloodshot labors. He recalled the newly arrived Dr. Blanchard trying to treat a field-hand in his early thirties, poisoned by a constant exposure to insecticide; cancerous lumps all over his body and the Doctor going straight to the presiding rancher to see if that particular someone would help with hospital bills, a sure to be widow and kids who’d probably come down with the same ravages one day after years of drinking the contaminated irrigation waters meandering through the furrows as everyone else who sank into that other “Gold Rush” bigger than anything Sutter or Jedediah Smith with his fur hungers ever dreamed. Theo didn’t completely know what to look for as he drove by drooping Valley oaks and sycamores getting through the rainlessness of summer as they’d done, each of them, for centuries. It was getting toward early evening and he could see workers stacking heavy ladders on trailers, women sharpening hoes and shearing knives, straightening bent backs, cramped legs and shoulders, tractors and their drivers covered with dust, a welt or two from an unseen branch across forehead, cut ear, a few wasps drawn to the blood and a few “growers” talking and smoking with their foremen about the closing day and where to begin the next tomorrow as harvest time was on the near and not far approach. But he noticed the number of “growers” and farm owners seemed damned small for the end of such days as they recognized his pick-up and waved. He reached over, opened the glove compartment, pulled out his father’s old Colt .44 pistol, spun the cylinder to hear that little orbiter sing a tune, squeezed some of that salve the Quaker recently gave him, rubbed it on the old World War I burns to remind himself why he was traversing this maze. Thought of his father’s single hand at the end, sun and wind whipped, hammer smashed, a gouge taken here and there, thumb nail that looked like the tongue of gila monster. Whole piece of flesh nearly used up. And how its touch in that final form could still calm a horse gone to fury; hold his collections of Whitman and other books, maps, and the things his mother sent from Long Island-China, linens, personally knitted sweaters, an eighteenth century silver tea-pot crafted in Boston as well as Theo’s mother’s beautiful gardens kept and manicured after she died.

   Dr. Blanchard’s wife had loaded their children in to a neighbor’s borrowed car when he hadn’t come home. Just gave into the general fears and started through the countryside having no idea about the labyrinths of fields, orchards, irrigation ditches, canals, dirt “roads” that ended with grower homes and often vicious dogs, suspicious wives and children unafraid to deal with strangers, shotguns and 30/30s nestled in an entrance door crook, trigger finger ready like some not yet classified chrysalis.

   It wouldn’t do to say she was frantic. The tone of disorder and loss lying at the confluences of the word’s pronunciation had not yet caught up to her cold anger nor to her children who were looking out their back windows desperate to assist their mother who had advised them to “please notice” their father’s car, a faded green 39 Chevrolet coupe, not very “respectable” but reliable even though it had, more often than not, bird splatter blotching it which went ignored sometimes for days as the “Visitor” did his rounds with the quiet, studied, calm formality which identified his view of the “profession” and its necessary demeanor in the face of human suffering (and occasionally, cure); hers now risen in the principle of a burning meteor, the stoic finalities of her personal Quaker guidances having crumbled into a fascination with the occult; vigorous, alert, suitable for the stark emptinesses of the American West which her husband had not mistaken and in his distrust of her practices, formed a withdrawal which persecuted them both. She looking toward Atlantis, the spiritualism of the Secrets of Nature about to be in their unfurlings, but not yet unlocked and the intoxications that would become the Afterward advancing with the “End of Time”: the secret details appearing only with one’s initiation into these mysteries. He in their deepest reservations thinking them both somehow debauched by the abyss risen between them called upon the pronouns of their revealed non-conformity thus addressing his wife not by her name but in the Third Person; “Thou” or “Thee”, depending. Adam and Eve once more as she saw their sadly emerging and inescapable repetition. How would they both abide for the sake of themselves and their beautiful children (even their, she still intermittently felt, beautiful religion) as she thought of her reading of William Blake’s difficult prophecy “The Four Zoas” and who become in this world “Natives of the Grave” as they, four as “family” walked this strange earth and the even stranger “Valley” of her husband’s assigned service in the veils of Conscientious Objection? She often thought of Hannah Whitall Smith whose honesty and ethics as a woman, whose comments upon the “loneliness of this world life” did not hedge in its forthright clarity either about “God” or a woman’s experience:

      “Thy loneliness is only different in kind but not in fact

      from the loneliness of every human heart apart from God.

      Thy circumstances are lonely, but thy loneliness of spirit

      does not come from these, it is the loneliness of humanity ....”

   Her own mother told her of, just after her birth in 1910, Hannah Whitall Smith’s visit to their household where, in her infancy, she was held and rocked by the great woman who then, seventy-eight years old, and though wounded by the deaths of her children, remained “undulled.” She the wife of the Doctor wondered still how her loneliness might call to her, take her as she searched for her husband’s car, trying to shield herself from the images of his being mutilated; shot, pitch-forked, his gifted Doctor’s hands cut off by some wrathfully crude farm implement and her husband allowed to bleed to death; the eruption of anguish over his imagined suffering causing an unbearable nausea and sense of being smothered as she reminded herself of her children alive and frightened in the back seat and endangered by her driving.

V

   It was nearly 6:00pm, the afternoon winds mixing with mirages and heat wave over fields of ripening tomatoes and lettuce, workers at break drinking insecticide-laced water, eating tortillas, jalapenos for enough energy till sunset and the end of a sixteen to eighteen hour day. There was a grower walking his potato field carrying a shovel, checking a stand-pipe, his gait a registration, Theo knew, of the burden of worries over what can and will go wrong.

   One grower, Theo noticed. And the others in this busy time. Where the goddamned hell were they? A swarm of bees was gathering at the end of a grove tractor road Theo was driving. He stopped, closed his windows, then continued slowly through the boiling mass of insects slamming against the steel and glass of his machine. It was one of the largest swarms he’d ever seen, tens of thousands of bees in their frenzy of whirled almost vindictive, crackling flight. Theo stopped again, for another moment letting himself become immersed, to hear the sound of the bee mass, and to wonder over the spectacle.

   He drove another two hundred yards thinking there was yet more dead end, the worry he felt suddenly arching and growing hot. But as he got closer he saw a bend. He came to its edge, stopped, rolled down his window and heard the combined buzzing of the swarm still vividly from this distance. He let the engine idle for that second, then shifted into first gear. The bend straightened out into a meadow full of draught resistant sun-withered weeds. A worn tractor path cut straight through the middle of the meadow and ended in front of a large barn bordered by lemon trees. There were also numerous cars and trucks parked around it.

   Theo stopped. Cut his engine. Reached for the .44; instinctively checked the cylinder, inspected the barrel, pulled and re-set the hammer. He got out, shut the door soundlessly, whispered his father’s name into the general emptiness and began walking toward the barn. Populations of the twilight had appeared; moths and butterflies, jackrabbits hurriedly nibbling tough weeds, ears nervously twitching, lizards open-mouthed, bodies flexing up and down, a startled covey of quail skittering for closest shadows, their fierce, shrewd defensive flight intensifying both the caution and hatred Theo felt.

   Ten yards from an open side door he heard voices and was surprised no one had taken caution to stand guard or sentry. He thought too was this the day his life and had come to and if it couldn’t be avoided, the shells in the cylinder of his Daddy’s .44 would insure some company.

   “Kill’im now. Don’t deserve last words like other men,” he heard a voice yelling in rage inside the barn.

   “No! Give’im the chance to be heard first. Don’t matter anyway,” another reprimanding voice countered.

   “Son-of-a-bitch worse than a nigger. Hung them in Indiana. Send this little bastard to hell with the rest of’em.”

   Theo appraised the parked cars and pick-ups. Estimated at least a hundred people; maybe more thinking this was a kind of swarm too made of a kind of spit nobody ever took the time to taste. But he would. Save everyone else the trouble so it wouldn’t grow into some sort’a sneaking ocean as things tended to do.

   “Cain’t wait to see’im deyad.”

   Theo recognized the voice of a rancher’s wife. A family he authorized a loan for just after the husband got shipped overseas to fight the Germans. “Both the women and men,” he thought as he walked into the shadows broken by the rays of late-day sunlight cutting through the shrunk siding.

   “Feels like a shit-sprung town or two,” Theo squeezed up a throttled mumble as he looked up at the thick ax-cut rafters. There was a rope slung over one. Theo let his eyes spill downward to where the rope’s noose joined Dr. Blanchard’s neck.

   The tight, sweat-drenched, curling viciousness of the spectacle nearly made the World War I veteran want to vomit. He looked around for a possible “leader”. Figured a messy shot through an ear would give the citizenry a minor set-back; get their attention. And if he had to he’d kill one of the women in the crowd to let every person there know nothin was gonna be free at the end of this goddamned day.

   Then he heard the Doctor’s voice.

   He was surprised by its fullness as well as his own sudden impression that he wouldn’t be able to save the younger man’s life even with the .44 ready to fire.

   “What is the work of Death?”

   Theo barely heard these initial utterances through the various angered breathings and resolved whispers of the lynch mob. Dr. Blanchard asked the question a second time and Theo wondered how he was able to gather a mysteriously stronger voice with a rope around his neck.

   The crowd began to quiet in a kind of shock over the singularly risen words those participants had assumed would remain muted, or, Theo thought as he watched, a thing risen from the Shores of Death to startle the rage and murder about to crumble this barn. Theo wished at that moment he’d had a mind to empty a few cans of gas around the building, murder every murderer there, and shoot the ones able to get out the door but Dr. Blanchard’s sudden vocabulary quieted Theo’s about-to-soar deadliness.

   “What is the work of Death,” the young physician continued once more adding, “that you and I will go forward into. And what you kill with this rope tonight. And who will be deformed? The questions fell thickly on these people who had let the Quaker Doctor treat them and their neighbors and their children.

   Theo looked at the crowd which had stopped milling and fidgeting with its secret business. He turned toward the waning light of the still open door and saw the Doctor’s wife and children standing, the horror on their three faces caught him throat deep in an undecipherable shock he had not felt since watching clouds of mustard gas float over armies, hearing other soldiers across the lines and trenches retching up their lungs in last hell sounds that still woke him in malevolent night helplessnesses.

   The wife and children saw the slung rope and covered their mouths. When they noticed the victim with a noose cinched around his neck the three moved forward toward him as the lynch mob, person by person, moved apart for them to pass, not knowing what to do either with the questions or these additional “Friends” who had come in “Kindness” and whose “Kindness” aroused this kind of fury and intent. The victim’s lack of resistance and now these three others seemed to unnerve those who let them pass.

   As the three went slowly forward they heard Dr. Blanchard continue:

   Theo was stunned. The Quaker was reciting the passages from Whitman’s “So Long” as if he too had drunk suddenly the same word-springs as the poet and Elias Hicks yet the recognition was broken by another voice demanding, “Someone hang the son-of-a-bitch. Don’t let one more squeak come outta’im.”

   And other similar yellings rose up at the same instant the wife and three children appeared at the place where Dr. Blanchard stood, and embraced him. None of the four made any sound at that joining.

   Theo knew the mob knew then all four demanded to be killed, demanded they claim the nerve of the full evil of their original sneaking theft of this man who had at mid-day been summoned to their false emergency.

   “Kill all four,” one voice yelled and with that the mob began to move away from the surrounded “Friends”. Began to disperse at the sight of the huddled, unwavering Quakers.

   Theo walked through the slowly thinning unsure mob knowing this last voice. It was a local rancher, who had a daughter in the war, a nurse on a navy hospital ship who witnessed Pearl Harbor, and was somewhere witnessing more. She was a loved daughter and though Theo wanted to ask that father how the daughter would have felt over a demand to lynch a whole family who came among them peacefully, he did not.

   Instead he found the rancher waiting for the crowd to clear. Theo saw he was holding a pistol. And Theo moved more cautiously, more slowly, the rank smell of dry cow shit and hay making his nostrils quiver as he maneuvered behind this other man whose honest, life-long struggle he thought to this point he knew. But this night was different and Theo understood this other man was ready to kill.

   So the World War I veteran came up without notice and placed the muzzle of the .44 hard against the back of the other man’s skull and cocked the hammer.

   “Drop your gun, Alfred,” Theo whispered. “Try to remember that daughter of yours.”

   Theo followed the demand by pushing the muzzle of the .44 harder against the other man’s bones.

   “I won’t miss,” Theo added.

   The rancher’s body shook and the pistol dropped to the floor.

   The remnant crowd moved away as Theo kicked the fallen steel out of reach.

   “Now Alfred I want you to walk straight to that family and undo that goddamned noose, since I know it’s you who put it there.”

   The wife and children still clung to the Doctor. None of the four knew quite what to do and so they stood peculiarly amazed any of them were still alive.

   When Theo and the other man came nearer the wife and children made a tighter knot and this enraged Theo and he almost killed the other man then, named “Alfred,” and the other man named “Alfred” knew it.

   “Un-do that knot now,” Theo whispered. “When that’s done you crawl yer ass outta’ here and think about that daughter of yours and how you’ll face her. And don’t forget the pistol you dropped. Either empty it in your own mouth so’s to clean the filth come out it. Or bury it.”

   Theo walked the family to their car and followed them to their home. Said as he helped the Quakers to the front door, “Anything you need.”

   He heard the next day that Mrs. Blanchard began screaming in the middle of the night and couldn’t stop screaming.

   David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include the books China Beach, Dressed In Protective Fashion, and Fontana's Mirror. How the Night is Divided, Matlin's first novel was nominated for a National Book Circle Critics Award. 

   His newest book, Vernooykill Creek: The Crisis of Prisons in America, is based on his nearly ten year experience teaching in one of the oldest Prison Education Programs in the nation in New York State. This extended essay is a discussion of the crisis of prisons, the invention of surplus populations, and how, in making prison our largest growth industry, we are mining our own civil disintegrations at an unprecedented level. Vernooykill Creek has already received important acknowledgements, among others, from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Eddie Ellis, founder of the Community Justice Center of New York City, and Larry Durgin of the Catskill Bruderhof.

   He is a native Californian and received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo where he studied with Robert Creeley, John Clarke, and Angus Fletcher. He lives in San Diego, where he is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.