Prose examples

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014


Prose examples

Throughout the book, I’ve shared excerpts of my writing. In this appendix, I’ve culled the full versions of those works.

The Skeleton Woman

(creative nonfiction)

“Tell them I am going to show them what they are.” This from my mother while dropping me off at primary school.

She’d agreed to come to Parent Show and Tell Day but we had to report to the teacher what our visiting parent would be talking about. I leaned forward to hug her and she kissed me on the forehead. I always looked up at her, reluctant to go.

“Go on now,” she’d say after a moment.

But once I was out of the car I’d always turn around and wave, as if the hug and the kiss hadn’t been enough. She would smile a warm, slow smile and then shoo me on with a flick of her wrist.

I’d walk away slowly so long as I could feel her eyes on my back. But when I sensed them move and heard the car pull away, I would stop and walk back, watching as she pulled out onto the road in front of the school. Her car was very loud and rumbled like a faraway storm. Unless a teacher made me move, I would wait listening until it reached the place half a mile away where the speed changed from 25 to 55. Then I would hear the sudden burst of sound that came when Mama stomped the floor. She didn’t know it, but that was her real daily goodbye to me.

“Go Mama!” I would say in my mind and wonder if she heard me.

Her car was an old Mercury Cougar she’d bought years ago, before she quit her job. It had an engine called a V8, like the drink I liked.

“It’s getting old, like me,” she’d say sometimes, “but it’s still got plenty of power. More than three hundred horses worth.”

*

“My dad’s going to bring his axe,” announced a boy to our circle of boys. “He’s a pulpwood cutter.”

“Cool,” said one of the other boys. “Mine works on cars. He’s going to tell about an engine he helped build for a race car driver named Ward Burton.”

The first one looked at me. “What’s your dad gonna show?”

Me. “My dad can’t make it, so my mom’s coming.”

“What does your mom do?”

Me, shrugging. “She stays at home a lot.”

First boy. “Ha! That means she’s a housewife.”

“They don’t even have jobs,” another boy said. “What could she tell about? They just stay at home and do what dads say.”

“Yeah,” said the first one. “Think of how dumb that would be for show and tell.”

Suddenly they seemed to remember me, then looked at each other and laughed.

“Housewife! Housewife!” they sang, laughing.

*

After lunch, the teacher went around the room, having inquired of the class who had a parent coming and what they would be showing or telling.

“My mom’s a secretary,” said the girl sitting next to me. “She’s going to show how fast she can type and then give us our words to take home.”

Then it was my turn. “My mom is going to show you what you are.”

The teacher, frowning. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s what she told me to say.”

Class snickering, slow blush filling my face.

Teacher again. “What does your mother do?”

“She can do a lot of things, but she almost always stays at home.”

“So your mother is a homemaker.”

“Maybe. I don’t know what that word means. I’ve never heard it before.”

Low sing-song whispers from a corner of the room. “Housewife, housewife.”

“Shhhh! Shhhh!” said the teacher, growing irritated. Then to me. “There’s nothing wrong with being a homemaker, but you should ask your mother if there is anything special about what she does before she shows and tells. A lot of what homemakers do is unremarkable and the same. We don’t want all the visiting mothers to say the same things.”

*

I cried sometimes during naptime because I missed Mama so much. To help with this she had given me a toy version of her car that was exactly like it in every way. I would lie on my mat and run the car over my chest and up and down my arms making a soft low sound like faraway thunder.

But then in my mind I could see her face at home and tell she was unhappy. My head began to throb and I would cry, softly and quietly, hot tears running over my temples and curving round my ears. It hurt my heart to know she was all by herself and unhappy. I wished I could be there with her. When the teacher grew angry and told me to stop crying, I always felt bad and apologized to her.

I wanted to stop crying, but I couldn’t.

*

By the time my mother completed her doctorate at the Medical College of Virginia in the late 1960s, her research had made her one of the world’s experts on the pineal gland, and so she received the rare professional privilege of a job offer from the school that had granted her terminal degree. She had been the only woman in her graduating class and, when she accepted the job, the only woman faculty member.

The first course she ever taught was in a large, sloping, concrete-floored lecture hall. One entered at the back and made a long descent to the stage, where stood two long chalkboards and a lab table.

Mama nearly always ran late so that on the first day of class, when she entered the auditorium at the rear, arms full of books and lecture notes, the students, over a hundred of them, all men, were assembled and waiting for her. Her lab coat distinguished her as a professor, but the expressions on their faces as they turned to consider her—disappointment, anxiety, dismissal—told the tale of their collective shock.

Whispers as she begins the slow descent to the stage, heels clicking steadily on the concrete. About halfway down someone launches a brief, piercing whistle—ancient trumpet sound of male admiration—applauded by sporadic laughs from his fellows.

Mama keeps walking.

At the bottom she mounts the two steps to the stage and walks to the lab table, where she sets down her books before looking up around the lecture hall, squinting slightly in the lights, taking in the vague sea of male faces.

She takes off her coat.

“That’s right! Take it off!” cries an anonymous voice somewhere off to the left.

“Take it all off!” exclaims another on the opposite side of the room.

Burst of laughter from all sides.

Hands trembling slightly, Mama takes hold of her lecture notes and turns to write on one of the chalkboards.

“Nice ass!” a voice calls.

Then a hollow, slightly grating sound of motion and muffled laughter. Turning from the board Mama spies an empty jar rolling down the central aisle, students seated to the far sides of the auditorium half-rising from their seats so as to follow it with their heads. Picking up speed, the jar hits against the bottom stage step and careens to one side. More muffled laughter.

Mama turns back to the board and keeps writing, listing her key terms for the day.

A minute passes, etched sound of idea transformed into symbol.

Then, again, the rolling sound—closer, louder, varied in texture—as the jar rolls over the boards of the lecture stage. Mama turning just as it glances off her shoe. Loud laughter this time.

As the sound dies, Mama walks to the lab table and sets her chalk down. Then she takes off her glasses and sets them down too. As she looks back up and out over the indistinct audience a slow, warm smile forms on her face—the easy natural smile of a cheerleader or prom court princess, both of which she had been. She looks to one side of the auditorium and then to the other, hands on hips, smiling.

“Cutie!” calls a voice.

“Hottie!” says another.

Smile still intact, unwavering, Mama strides across the stage to where the jar lies resting. Hands still on hips, attitude of sensual affectation, she lifts her right foot, arches an eyebrow at her audience, then brings it down suddenly, heavily, air of the room pierced as glass shatters, echoes, jagged irregular pieces sliding across the stage in various directions.

Silence, pause, then the lonely sound of Mama’s heels as she walks back to the table, puts on her glasses, and looks up around the lecture hall.

“Let’s get to work, gentlemen.”

Another time, lab, students about to begin dissecting cadavers, and Mama circulating about the room, prepping the class, heavy merged smell of chemical preservatives and disinfectant.

A tall student raising his hand, beckoning her toward his group’s examination table. “Professor, our specimen here seems to have a problem.”

Smirks from the others in the group and the nearby tables as Mama peers down at the cadaver to discover that on his forever limp penis someone has placed a condom.

She glances up at the student who has announced the anomaly, then looks around the table, noting the clenched jaws of his fellows, inner cheek linings held in check by clenched teeth. Then she smiles at them, her slow, warm, cheerleader smile, as if she too shares in the jest.

Leaning forward, she reaches across the table to take hold of the cadaver’s penis, tugging it out to its sad, unerect fullness.

“Hell yeah!” exclaims a student in another part of the room.

Then Mama’s other hand in motion, bearing her scalpel. Sudden, deft flash of metal in the fluorescent light and her hand comes away with the leaden member.

Sharp, collective intake of air from multiple mouths and a couple of audible groans.

“This little thing isn’t relevant or useful for this lab practical, or even to the semester’s curriculum,” she announces in her lecture voice, shaking the hand that holds it for emphasis. “It’s just not useful.”

With that she tosses it in the tableside biowaste container and moves on to inspect the cadaver on the next table, students falling back from her, two of them stumbling over each other, almost falling, as if some new invisible force surrounds this woman’s body, emanating outward on all sides.

When she quit she took everything her grant money had purchased: microscopes, vials, petri dishes, burners, hamster cages, protein formulae, a cross-section composite of a fetal pig, even a human skeleton.

“Surely,” said the department chair, “you are not taking the skeleton. It will be of little use beyond the academic community.”

“He goes with me,” my mother said, “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be too sure of anything.”

*

“There is … a class of monsters who might live, but which would always remain freaks.”

—Charles Sumner Bacon, “A Symposium on Obstetrical Abnormalities” (1916)

Sitting on a shelf in a little windowless supply room just off one of the dissection labs was the Medical College’s collection of genetic mutations: a dozen infants and fetuses afloat in large, clear glass containers of formaldehyde. I used to dream about them when I was younger.

The variations of these beings were obvious and subtle, shocking and secretive. Several were possessed of different degrees of encephaloceles, the meninges protruding from their heads’ occipital region in a number of different shapes and geometric designs. What would that feel like? One was visited with holoprosencephaly, its nostril displaced and its optical qualities all fused together into a great single orb. What might such an eye have seen? And an instance of doubling to balance this cyclopean collapse: an infant possessed of one body and two heads, the result of duplication of the neural tube. What would these heads have said to each other? What would they have thought?

Later, in college, reading on my own, I would come across a poem about a baby that was half-child, half-lamb. “In a museum in Atlanta,” it reads, “Way back in a corner somewhere/There’s this thing that’s only half/Sheep like a woolly baby/Pickled in alcohol ….” I thought so much of the poem that I resolved to study writing under the man who had created it, hoping perhaps to develop the powers to commit my own real and imagined monsters to paper—to afford them a kind of immortality through my rendering, which might also, in turn—I hoped—provide me with something at last from them. “Are we,” asks my old literary master, “Because we remember, remembered/In the terrible dust of museums?”

When I dreamed of them, they would move, but they never left their containers. Their meninges would pulsate, throb, with life. The mouths of the two heads would take turns opening and closing, bubbles emerging into the vat’s closed liquid world, traveling upward. And then, very, very slowly, as if awakening even as I slept, the lid of the great single eye would draw back and the enormous orb would regard me—neither warmly nor coldly, but with some vague aspect of feeling—watching.

Little lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

I suppose they did look monstrous and terrible, but I was never afraid of them. They were my friends.

If they could have smiled at me, they would have. And I would have smiled back.

*

The pineal gland is situated in the very center of the brain, in a tiny little cave-like enclosure beyond and above the pituitary gland, and directly behind the eyes—to which it is attached by the third ventricle.

It controls the biorhythms of the body, and though head injuries may activate it, it typically is triggered by changes in light, working in harmony with the hypothalamus gland to direct our emotions, thirst, hunger, sexual desire, and the biological clock that determines aging.

The Greeks considered the pineal gland our site of connection to The Realms of Thought. Descartes thought it the seat of the soul—the place where the interaction between the intellect and the body takes place. Myth and legend from a time before science? Even now there are those who refer to it as “The Third Eye.”

*

Sitting together in a pasture meadow, patched quilt spread out beneath us, Mama’s arm resting across my shoulders. Afternoon sun of spring casting long shadows of tree branches upon the ground, where the breeze flutters slightly the new blades of grass.

A blue bird, landing less than a foot from my foot, chirping and turning its tiny head sideways to regard me. Then he hops—three short, plump, quick hops—to the end of my shoe and bends forward, craning his neck to examine it.

I whisper something and he searches my face before hopping onto my shoe, glancing at me again, then launching himself, soaring up and then back behind us, toward the trees that cast shadows.

I turn back from the bird’s path to discover Mama watching me intently.

“Why did the bird come so close, Mama?”

“Animals can tell things about other creatures.”

“You mean just by looking?”

“More than just looking. We can’t really explain what they do because we are not them.”

“The little bird could tell about me.”

“That’s right. He could tell about you. That’s why he came so close.”

I lean my head against her and as I do she draws back her arm and then lets it fall, trailing her forefinger down my back, tapping each ridge of my spine as if marking a paper. Then the hand comes back up, fingers absently playing about my hair like butterflies.

“You are very nearly perfect,” she says. “Just how I imagined you would be.”

She draws me to her. “My precious creation.”

After a while I pull away and look up at her. “Mama, I can tell about you. You’re sad.”

“I’m not sad, honey. I was only thinking.”

“Does thinking make you sad?”

Short laugh. “It can, I suppose, but I’m not sad. You’re here with me and when we’re together I can never be sad.”

Silence from me and she smiles. “Now, what are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about the little bird who could tell about me. Do you think he’ll be OK when it gets dark? I wish I could help him.”

“I think he’ll be OK, but it’s good you want to help him. You must always help creatures and people if they need help and deserve it.”

“Why do I have to help people? Who’s going to help me?”

“When you get bigger you aren’t going to need help, but because you will have a powerful ability to help people, you must always do so. You needn’t help everyone. There are some who won’t want it and some who won’t deserve it, but you will be able to tell who they are. And remember that when you do help, it’s the help they don’t realize that helps the most.”

“You mean the secret help?”

“That’s right. The secret help.”

“What if I don’t know what to do?”

“It is part of a being’s existence to make mistakes, but you have to be brave and try. Even when there are many people against you. That is what is called courage. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“Then promise me you’ll do it.”

“I will, Mama. I promise.”

*

Mama was always running behind. Usually it was because she had stayed up too late reading or perhaps had lingered too long in bed the following morning with her coffee and books. Sometimes if I was upstairs in my room she would call to me and tell me to go get her a refill to spare her having to get up.

She claimed she hated going anywhere, but she loved to drive. Rushing to town, hopelessly late, well over the speed limit, she was happy.

“Always go into a curve slow and come out of it fast,” she would say, stabbing the accelerator as the road broke straight.

And, me, next to her, equally happy, standing on the floorboard, hands on the dashboard, peering out over it, wide-eyed, smiling. “Come out fast, Mama! Come out fast!”

Sometimes, if the road curved to the left, I would fall against the door. And if the curve to the right was a hard one, I would tumble over into her lap and lie there laughing, peering up into her face until she laughed too.

*

She kept the skeleton in a corner of the upstairs cedar closet. It was easy to miss on account of all the various things clinging to different parts of it: winter caps stacked upon its smooth head, heavy old shirts and frayed coats flung over its shoulders, an assortment of Christmas ornaments hanging from its lower ribs, and a child-sized basketball resting in its pelvis. The piled hats leaned slightly to one side, affording the skull a jaunty aspect, while the rough clothing drooping from the shoulders hung irregularly—not unlike rock-hewn prehistoric furs from some distant cold-climate predecessor of us. The basketball resting in the midsection suggested an impossible pregnancy, and the bone-suspended ornaments could not help but appear festive, speaking, it seemed to me, of some secret grisly truth yet to be celebrated. A big steel rod rose out of a metal base resting on rollers and ran upward through the spinal column before terminating in the skull, creating the illusion of a body somehow hovering in air of its volition, feet dangling three or four inches above the floor.

Despite the novelty of the thing’s presence, the skeleton really was just another item in storage—something put away, half-forgotten. Sometimes when I was helping Mama in the closet, she would address the occupant with “And how are we today, my good man?” or “Excuse us, sir” or “Don’t mind us, old friend.” She always seemed happy to see him—an acquaintance from another time; a fondly remembered ally from a war long over.

I would visit him sometimes when I was upstairs alone, rush of cedar as I swung forth the door and flipped on the light. Carefully I would place my little hand against his, studying the contrast, and then pressing each of my fingers against a corresponding fleshless digit.

Even at that age I did not need my mother to tell me this was what I would be some day. That it was what lay in store. Some fundamental cognition knew. And it was comforting in a way, a privilege, to have this visual testament available day or night, close at hand and always the same, which seemed to say, “Beneath all the motion and coating of life, here is what you are.”

I have no recollection of the truth of this ever troubling me. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact he did not seem to mind it so much himself. Whenever I opened the door, his expression was the same. He was always smiling.

*

Parent Show and Tell Day and Mama running even later than usual, the time for heading to school coming and going with her propped against her pillows, briskly flipping pages while sipping at her coffee.

“I’ll just take you when it gets to be time for my visit,” she said when I checked on her. “We’ll visit school together. Now go and get me another cup.”

Lunchtime passed and I was out in front of the house feeding butterflies, tips of my fingers all sticky with sugar water, when finally I heard her calling me. Upward patchwork flutter as I blew gently on my forefinger to dismiss my guest before turning to run around back of the house.

At first I did not think the woman standing next to the car was Mama, the figure in the sleeveless white spring dress and black heels and sunglasses appearing more like someone out of one of the women’s magazines I had seen in doctors’ offices. I hesitated, gawking. But then she smiled and waved for me to come on, and I knew it was her.

“Let’s go,” she called. “We’re late!”

Spray of rocks and scattering of panicked chickens as we plowed up the driveway, windows all the way down and Mama humming softly to herself a song I did not know, while behind us, on the back seat, a third passenger lay sprawled.

*

Faster than ever, around the curves and over the straightaways, occasional dry click of bone from the back when the swaying of the car forced an arm or leg to adjust itself. Trio of bodies reacting in unison—dead or alive, no matter—moving as commanded by the physics of motion. Smiles on all our faces.

Then glare of blue lights in the rearview mirror and blast of a siren.

Me, pivoting, knees on the seat, chin atop the headrest, peering backward. “The police, Mama! The police!”

Silently we slow and drift onto the shoulder to the tune of crunched gravel, engine relaxing into a low, steady growl.

Me, staring back at the man in the hat and sunglasses as he considers our car before glancing down. Then, door opening, he rises from his vehicle, sunglasses removed: a tall gangly fellow, polished black belt and holster set in relief against a garb of brown and tan.

And Mama, June sun smiling down into the car upon her, pretty in her sleeveless dress, slender arms rigidly extended, hands on the steering wheel, knuckles white, daring the road ahead with a fixed stare, teeth set to grind, eyes shifting to the rearview mirror as the man approaches.

Me, watching as he comes on, slight sway to his stride, careless gaze resting on the back of Mama’s head, ignoring me altogether. Watching still as he reaches the tail end of the car and leans forward, easy look drifting into the back seat—where something catches it, knocks it askew, then empties it of itself. Gaze jerking dumbly from the prone form to the back of Mama’s head, before discerning her eyes in the rearview mirror, sunglasses removed, boring into his, fixing him in place. He stands there frozen, as if changed to stone, face slack-jawed, blood drained from it.

“We are late for our school presentation, officer,” she calls back to him without turning.

The man, stammering, taking a few tentative steps toward the front of the car.

“It is a matter of vital importance,” she goes on, as if lecturing. “We cannot afford further delay. Much is at stake which cannot be made evident to you, and I do not have time to explain.”

The officer, a local deputy, draws even with her window, making his best effort to recover himself. “Are you some kind of doctor?”

Mama placing her forearm on the door, smiling up at him her warm, slow smile. “I am indeed a kind of doctor,” she says, “insofar as I am a woman, concerned with restoring or manipulating human health through the highly detailed study, diagnosis, and treatment of the human body.”

She glances over at me and smiles her true smile before turning back to him. “Beneath your clothes and your flesh, you are not very different from that fellow in the back seat. Have you ever thought about that? I mean really thought about it? Such is the nature of most all people on this earth: so few come to realize or even bother to think about the fundamental nature of themselves.”

Her smile hardens, then lapses into a line and she stares up at him. “We are going to show them what they are.”

The deputy, still very pale, nodding slowly and agreeably, wholly acquiescent even as he comprehends nothing. “Mam,” he says at last, “I think you know what your business is, and I do believe I am going to let you get about it right now.”

With that he turns quickly and walks briskly back to his car, hand slipping slightly on the door handle as he seeks to jerk it open—to get inside, away, anywhere else.

And Mama, back out on the road before the deputy is even in his seat, driving as fast as before, faster even, dials on the dash a confusion of vibrating needles, grinning at the long white highway lines devoured beneath us.

*

Sliding to a stop between two buses in the circular school parking lot, not far from the main entrance. Car doors open, front seats leaned forward, Mama motioning me to climb into the back.

Gesturing at the skeleton’s base. “Help me lift him, son.”

Me, curiously strong for a child my age, grasping him by the rollers and heaving upward and forward, slipping a bit as I step out onto the gravel, banging a femur against the door.

“Careful now,” says Mama, her steady hands clenched about his collarbone.

Then, me, letting down the base and together—me pushing and Mama pulling—bringing him upright. He sways slightly before leveling out between us, blinding white of bone and flashing metal in the end-of-school-year sun.

We roll him slowly, haltingly, over the gravel lot toward the entrance, me pushing while bracing the backs of his legs, and Mama steadying him, arm about his waist in the attitude a nurse will adopt while guiding a frail elderly patient.

Through the heavy school doors to discover emptiness inside, an industrial fan, nearly as tall as our companion, the sole occupant, blowing at the far end of a dim forlorn hallway, caressing our damp foreheads with warm air. Rolling him down the corridor, shut crayoned doors of classrooms passing on either side, the going much easier on the polished smooth floor though a wheel squeaks slightly, piercing occasionally the droning refrain of mechanically pushed air.

As we turn a corner a janitor steps forth from his closet, then, noting us, retreats wide-eyed back into it, drawing the door shut before him, water bucket sloshing—lapsing into a motionless silhouette behind beveled glass.

Arriving at last at the door to my classroom, student roster hanging on it with stars of different colors attending each name. Only a few next to mine, all of a lesser hue.

Mama absorbing this data in a glance, then hand on my shoulder, gentle and firm, moving me out of the way. “Stand aside, son.”

Door flung open, swinging inward, and in rolls the skeleton, Mama pushing him from behind, teacher and students frozen in their places, mouths rounded and agape, eyes nearly as large. The skeleton coming forward, passing between the main center rows of desks and up to the very head of the room. He stops before the teacher and Mama steps out from behind, appraising the woman with a frank stare, looking her up and down. The teacher had always seemed to me very big and very frightening, but next to Mama—so tall and pretty and smart in her heels and spring dress—she looked small and old and plain. I felt sorry for her. The teacher’s throat moved and she shuddered suddenly—at Mama or the skeleton I couldn’t tell which.

When Mama turned to address the class she rolled the skeleton about with her so that they turned together, gracefully, in unison, like dancers or skaters, the teacher falling back away from them, like a lesser actress abandoning the stage.

Then Mama began speaking to the students and as she did a strange glow came over her which I had never seen before. “I am sorry we are late today for show and tell,” she says, “but real learning never runs on time and for us I hope you will make an exception.”

Quick glance at the teacher, who nods uncertainly, before continuing. “I believe my son informed you that I would show you what you are.” Heads swiveling briefly to where I stand at the back of the class.

“Well,” she continues, “here you are. Here is what you all are beneath your clothes and your skin. Look at your arm. Look at your hand. Then think about that for a minute. Think about it.”

Students extending their arms, holding out their palms before them.

“Your human skeleton, this thing inside you, is very strong and very hard, yet it is relatively light. I bet your mothers weigh you sometimes. We like to know how big you are getting. In a man like this one who weighed maybe 160 pounds the skeleton is only 30 pounds.

“And it is perfectly adapted for locomotion and manipulation,” she goes on, lifting the skeleton’s forearm so that its elbow joint flexes. “See?”

Widening eyes at this.

“Now, it is our spines that are responsible for our upright posture,” she says, running her hand down the skeleton’s back. “Because we stand upright, we are able to use our hands in order to manipulate our environment. We reach out and we change things.

“An adult human skeleton consists of 206 bones altogether which are divided into two principal divisions: the axial skeleton and the appendicular skeleton. The axial forms the long axis of the body and it includes the bones of the skull, vertebral column, breastbone, and rib cage. The appendicular consists of the bones of the upper and lower extremities, the shoulder girdle, and the hip girdle.”

As Mama points to each bone grouping in succession, naming each again, the students watch her finger, then look down at the corresponding places on their bodies.

“I could show and tell about this forever,” Mama says, “but the best showers and tellers care about what other people want to know. I am interested in you all. What do you want to know?”

Stunned silence, then a lethargic stirring as if awakening from the same powerful dream.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” a boy asks.

“He was a man,” says Mama, “a very old man. You can tell he was old a lot of different ways, but all of you can see how he’s missing some teeth and the ones that are left are all ground down from use.”

“Why is that?” another boys asks. “Where did he come from?”

“Southeast Asia,” replies Mama. “I can tell because of his bone structure and cranial development.”

A girl. “Where is that?”

“On the other side of the world,” says Mama. “The people there are much poorer than you and I and don’t always get to eat their meals. Think about that for a minute. What if you missed your dinner for a whole week? Just imagine how hungry you would be. This fellow was hungry a lot of the time. His bones say so.”

The teacher, off to the side, rigid and frowning.

Another girl. “How did he come all the way here?”

“Sometimes when people die their bodies get sent to scientists so they can be studied. That is what I used to be: a scientist, a woman scientist. I studied bodies so that I could learn about how to work on the ones that are alive and make them better.”

Students staring at Mama in wonder, a pair of girls peering uncertainly across the aisle at each other, possessed suddenly of new eyes.

“I like talking to you all,” she says, smiling a warm, slow smile, and they all smile back at her. “Now for the real fun. Who wants to touch him?”

Eruption of hands and a piping chorus of “Me! Me! Me!” Bodies abandoning their desks, pressing forward as a body. My little classmates, weaving around the skeleton in a frenzy of fascination, quick touches from small forefingers—one girl reaching up to grab a bottom rib, then lifting her shirt to poke at her own.

And me, apart from the others, with eyes only for my mother: towering above the swirl of motion, commanding the classroom, beaming down upon the children, showing them themselves.

Satyr

(creative nonfiction)

“And here it may be randomly suggested, by way of bagatelle, whether some things that men think they do not know, are not for all thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.”

—Herman Melville, The Ambiguities

“Marvellous!” a character once exclaimed—a British character to be exact, hence the double-L spelling of the word. “The marvellous beauty and fascination of all wild things! The horror of man’s unnatural life, his heaped-up civilization!” As it is the magical essence of the former exclamation I wish to get at, I shall say again something of my own relationship with nature, for I have written on it more than once but never seem to get it exactly right. Too often I fear I dwell on its darker, wilder manifestations—the storms, the predation, the humanism—since it is they which have left the deepest marks on body and mind alike, shaping them in the process. Yet in truth I have loved just as well and been molded by a great host of harmless, benign representatives of the natural world, having always possessed, for instance, a pronounced fondness for flowers: whether admiring the uniform arrangements of rare varieties in gardens or watching the wild natural sort sway and bob on a windswept field. Even the manmade manifestations have proven attractive and moving to me on occasion, in particular those which grew beneath Grandmother’s needle as I sat at her feet holding the quilt and watching.

Though it was home to three separate fenced-off pastures—the wire of which I had spent many a weekend and summer day running tree to tree or post to post, or some mixture of the two—my family’s farm was covered mostly in woods. I am well aware I am not alone in having always felt there is something about a forest, any forest, when considered as an entity of its own, that remains primal, enigmatic, and majestic. It resembles a vast dark sea in the mysteries it conceals and the manner in which it envelops you. One may judge by its sounds how it senses and greets your approach—the scattering and silencing of wildlife, the modulations in bird song, the give of the ground and the old decaying matter beneath your feet. Though I have always found that greeting reassuring, as though returning to a beloved homeland or other scared place, it is a response which nonetheless forces you to sense your insignificance. You do not matter to a forest. Yet the knowledge is comforting to the extent that it also renders your modern trials—paying a bill say, or quarreling with a coworker over some forgettable trifle—into their proper place of insignificance. In a forest the synthetic human communities and accompanying rules which modern life forces us to function within and observe are made to appear ridiculous. Stay there long enough and your concerns give way, consciously or no, to the old animal verities of food, shelter, water. Your shoes and clothes begin to look and feel increasingly out of place, ridiculous even. Our bodies make themselves known to us again and, in doing so, move us a little closer to the stripped down essence of ourselves.

I have found it a great joy and privilege in the woods merely to sit and listen. Doing so over the course of your youth develops within you certain gifts: the ability, for example, to close your eyes and tell what time of year it is solely by the manner in which the leaves rustle. So precious were the woods to me during my own youth that I went through periods during which I loathed to leave them at all and would spend the entire weekend, day and night, within their confines. In preparation for a night’s slumber in the forest I would always try to find the thickest bed of bracken to lie down on—often set on the north face of a hillside beneath a dense stand of mountain laurel or rhododendron. If I had heard tell of rain or knew of its coming by other means, I would choose a spot where the leaves on the overhanging branches were thickest so that they might shield me. Otherwise, I slept beneath an opening in the canopy where I might contemplate the moon’s cataract or the slow sweep of the stars. Then I would fall into an untroubled yet attuned slumber known only to hunters and other forest folk. Sometimes it seemed to me as though the ragged brittle leaves and sharp pine needles I had heaped about and upon my body were the forest’s version of the protective wings of some great loving bird which sought to enclose me in a downy safety. And I loved how the pale white sycamore branches, rising from the low watery places and visible sometimes even in a moonless dark, called to mind bone or silk depending on my mood. They came to be a second home to me, those woods, though a full understanding of them would always evade me. I never felt fearful or restless there, but rather loved that long silence which has been likened to death but in truth was merely the life of the place.

For all their subtle teeming life, it remains forests are places which know death constantly, that rely on it in fact for the ongoing promulgation of their life systems. The most notable human participation in death’s function in a wood or grove presents itself nowadays via the mostly lamentable pastimes of logging and hunting. The former most often takes the form of outright annihilation—the severe alteration of the environment into a non-forest: something unrecognizable, or even just “not”—while the latter, though distasteful to many forest lovers, visits a far more negligible impact. Yet the endgame of both actions is “caused death,” which is really a form of murder. I continue to count a number of hunters and loggers among my friends, despite the fact I consider them death dealers by virtue of their craft. And I myself—having grown up on a farm and cut short the life of many a tree and creature—would be remiss not to acknowledge my complicity in such actions. But then we might say something similar of undertakers and doctors who specialize in terminal maladies. There is, after all, an art in the way a being chooses to render death; there is too an art of dying. And at least one of those blank canvases will be set before each of us, ready or not, at a certain time, appropriate or not, during the course of one’s life.

*

The stallion was my father’s great love among all the creatures of the farm. He was, by designation, a rescue horse, delivered from a situation in which his owner could no longer afford to feed him and had grown weary of the expenses, along with the animal’s exasperating stubbornness and frequent propensity for loosing the gate hitch with his teeth and liberating himself so as to tear at the rich orchard grass which grew beyond the fence of his own wanting, grassless, dirt pasture. Starved as he was at that time—bones protruding here and there amid the sunken places in his sides—there remained great lumps of muscle about his shoulders, chest, and neck which somehow refused to diminish even after such a prolonged period of wanting care and nutrition.

Malnourished as he was there clung within him a power he refused to abdicate—which he had secreted away somewhere in his soul and translated itself proudly in certain portions of his body. In that condition he had borne the elements beneath leafless trees, without benefit of a barn or even a rough old shed, and yet never known a veterinarian’s touch. It was these things, I believe—these manifestations of the spirit of the animal in the face of his privations—which led my father to buy him and, later, love him: just as I would come to in time.

There was something flinty and familiar about the stallion which inaudibly spoke to us: a gaunt, stoic, brutal survivalism harkening back to the nature of my father’s Smoky Mountain people, clinging precariously to their hollows and mountainside soil, doing battle with the slope’s rock to eke out what crops they could. “Who on the hills,” inquires a poem of Robert Penn Warren’s, “have seen stand and pass/Stubbornly the taciturn/Lean men that of all things alone/Were, not as water or the febrile grass,/Figured in kinship to the savage stone.” I count it a unique and priceless gift to have known such men early on in my life. The stallion was like them.

When he first came to the farm I took to watching him for long periods of time on account of how different he was from the mares and geldings—even other stallions—I had seen. He cropped the grass in short jerks, shifting his hooves, never leaving his head down long but raising his long neck frequently, ears pricked like daggers, directing the furnace of his gaze out over the world that was his pasture, that he naturally considered his, and every inch of which he would come to learn—more by heart than mind. Even in the confused jumble of dirt, dust, and mud around the stables he would learn to gauge and recognize all the little prints: which people and which of his herd had passed—and when and at what rate of speed, even under what circumstances.

The establishment of his ownership was a natural affair and peaceful as there were no other stallions on the farm, though he would find it necessary to kick an overproud dog or two. When I saw him shake his dark red mane in the snow-covered pasture of his first winter on the farm it was as a flag unfurling, a standard waved to and fro—a banner of sovereignty and challenge. And he guarded what he took to be his with a jealous fury as demonstrated by the carcasses of untold wild dogs, even a beautiful grey fox, he stomped to death beneath those sharp, quick, heavy hooves. Much as a cat will torture its prey so as to convey to it or its owner a meaning, or simply to amuse itself, the stallion did not always kill trespassing animals outright, such as the hunting beagle he left whimpering, dragging its useless hindlegs, every inch a new agony, toward the fence line where I stood waiting with a rifle.

Riding the stallion afforded the impression of a force of nature that seemed not quite animal. He was not overlarge for a horse, but something in the way he assumed command of an outing—the manner in which he adjusted the tack to his liking through a series of powerful shakes, elected where to place his feet, and exhibited a nearly human forethought—made him unlike any others of his kind I had encountered. Sometimes when he ran it felt like clinging to a falling stone, or, at other times, being borne as by a great gust of wind. Even at rest he seemed to emit a dark, invisible fire, the depths of his eyes stretching away into a labyrinth of stern, cruel memories, which—if one stared long enough—collapsed eventually into a wild blur of darkness.

The stallion was the same age as me, my father’s favorite, and so I called him brother. Because he was my elder in life experience, I learned far more from him than he from I. For his part, he did not consider me his sibling or equal; he cared about me about as much as the forest did. But he became in time one of my great teachers, whether he wished it or not.

*

For reasons still unclear to me, Mama had at last resolved to go back to teaching. She did so at Sweet Briar, a woman’s college not far from where we lived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She took me with her sometimes, partly I think to keep an eye on me but also to keep her company during the drive and perhaps afford me some subtle introduction to the world of higher education which was second-nature to her but an alien realm to my then largely barbarian teenage self.

The college reeked of wealth for reasons I could not immediately discern in their entirety at the time. Part of it was all the nice cars in the parking lots, although a greater portion of the impression seemed to stem from more pervasive, albeit subtler, sources. The architecture, for example, was one such element. It was dominated by the work of Ralph Adams Cram, who had also lent his expertise to the campuses of Princeton and West Point. His signature look whispered an elite understated Gothicism which made for a curious effect amid the bright, rolling pastoral landscape surrounding the college, the holdings of which spanned more than three thousand, mostly wooded, acres and included two or three mountains.

I had read somewhere the institution owned part of Bear Mountain, which I knew was where some of the Monocan lived still. I was excited about hiking to it until Mama told me it was nearly ten miles away and cut off from the rest of the school’s land by sizeable chunks of private property. At first I thought she was trying to dissuade me out of concern for my safety by making it sound farther than it really was. But when I looked it up in the college library I discovered what she had said was true, though the mountain lay not quite so distant as she had suggested. I developed an immediate fondness for the names of the other nearby places I discovered on the maps in the library—Fern Woods, Merry Woods, Kentucky Ridge—and resolved to visit them all while Mama taught her classes and held her office hours.

Mama must have sensed in me my plans for exploring, for she took me aside by the arm before departing for her first class and instructed me to stay out of trouble. Then she sighed, which I took to mean she had understood the hopelessness of her imperative even as she had uttered it.

I do not believe I was an especially bad boy, but expecting a heterosexual teenage male to keep from getting underfoot on a campus made up of several hundred mostly well-to-do, mostly attractive, young women must be considered a tall—if not downright unreasonable—order by most any standard.

I did alright for a while, keeping to the trails and paths for which I had discovered maps in the library. Mama had said nothing—purposefully, I believe—of the strong equestrian tradition at Sweet Briar. Probably she feared I would leap on the first horse I saw and gallop it around in the unsubtle, uncouth manner that was mine in those days—that was indicative of my man, or not-quite-man, versus beast mentality. And, of course, that is precisely what I did when I discovered the animals of my own accord, peacefully grazing in a hillside pasture. As manicured and well-groomed as their owners, I thought to myself, when I glimpsed their shiny sleek forms for the first time. I took turns trying out different ones, riding them about the fields bareback as furtively as I might, out of sight of the stables.

Then I became bolder and began letting the ones I liked best out of the pasture through a rear gate so as to gallop them up the Paul Mountain trail. That is how it all came to an end. One early afternoon as I stood trailside behind a stand of dense mountain laurel, one hand hanging on to the halter, the other otherwise occupied, I finished and turned, leaning out of the bushes, abdomen and lower body still obscured, to behold a young jogger, face a mixture of curiosity and fear, as her eyes drifted from the upper part of me protruding—frozen, in fact, at the sight of her—from the privy hedge back along the density of foliage to the place where it terminated and where stood partially obscured equine haunches, tail swishing about them.

Without uttering a word she took off down the mountain at a dead sprint, long ponytail bobbing not unlike a horse’s tail. When I regained the pasture perhaps half an hour later, I discovered a buxom woman who must have been the stable master—at least that is what I took her to be—striding toward me across the field, hard face offset by the fact that her body appeared rounded in all directions. I noted, as most any teenage boy would, that she was possessed of a big round bust, and in this description no insult is meant. There was nothing plural about her great curved breast: it loomed in its roundness armpit to armpit, swaying as she came on. When she turned suddenly to look back toward the stables, perhaps for the purpose of signaling a coworker, I discovered the same was true of her bottom—it exhibited the identical lack of pluralness as her bust, only there was much more of it.

When I turned to run back toward the woods, she called after me in a harsh voice, yet I kept on, running easily, knowing she possessed not the means to catch me.

To my knowledge there was never any fallout or publicity from the incident though I assume the campus’s security must have been alerted. Of course, I mentioned nothing to Mama, who only became aware of it—or, rather, will only become aware of it—when, like you, she read/will read the account I have set down here.

I have found occasion to visit Sweet Briar a few times in recent years and those days of Mama’s brief return to teaching and my even shorter pastime of horse-jacking come to mind whenever I do. And when I do think about that curious interval of my life it is the startled jogger, the look on her flushed face, I always end up dwelling upon the most. How I must have appeared to her on that forlorn mountainside: the protruding head and torso of a blemishless golden-haired adolescent boy followed, some yards behind, by the hind end of a horse. I wish I knew if she still thinks about that encounter (if in fact she remembers it at all). I’d like to know if she considered it something frightening or if for her it remains somehow a vision of unqualified wonder unlike anything else she has experienced.

*

I had sex for the first time not long after the events at Sweet Briar. It was with a girl who would never have any opportunity to attend an exclusive private woman’s institution, or any other college for that matter. Perhaps she never even finished high school. I can’t remember; I don’t know what happened to her. Guilt rises in me on those rare occasions I recall her—guilt at not wondering about her more than I do.

Her face, childlike and round, had a certain immobile quality to it regardless of what happened to be going on around her, yet this dynamic was offset by her highly attentive, almost astonished, blue eyes which usually looked as though they had just witnessed something highly unexpected. Her full little mouth not only never smiled, but seemed altogether incapable of forming that expression. Lusterless mousy hair hung in clusters on either side of her head as if its intention was to appear as lifeless and flaccid as the expression on her face. Her shapely bosom breathed calmly like that of a wild animal lying at rest yet alert. Most any girl would have been something of an enigma to me in those inexperienced teenage years, but this one came across especially so. My initial response to her was neither one of attraction nor disinterest, but rather a kind of inquisitiveness I did not understand. Many girls might have possessed such qualities as hers without being remembered for them, but I remember on account of the part she played in my life.

The first time I ever took notice of her was in a class—the subject of which now escapes me—in which the discussion had drifted fancifully off topic toward the question of whether there was more grass covering the planet or more sand. Though I was dozing in the back, as was my custom, I remember one of the serious, scientifically-inclined boys asserting there most certainly was more sand on account of the size of the world’s oceans and that most all their deep dark floors were covered with it. But to this Emily—that was the girl’s name—responded with something to the effect that those same deep recesses might instead lie covered in a dark waving grass that required almost no light: a grass that no one probably had ever even seen but that likely was as tall as trees and stood in stands that rendered miniscule the earth’s greatest prairies. Miles beneath the undulating surface, she maintained, it moved like corn in the wind.

The class had laughed at her when she had finished conveying her deep ocean vision and though I believed their opinions meant almost nothing to her, she had blushed nonetheless. I myself said nothing, did not move even from my drowsy reclining position, but in that moment Emily had won me as a devoted admirer and friend.

And we did become friends, our bond sustained by the most unlikely of variables and exchanges. I admired, for instance, how she smoked in the bathroom between classes, yet was never actually caught doing so even though everyone—teachers, janitors, students—knew her as the culprit. I liked the way in which the rancid tobacco odor would drift across the room to me in the one class I had with her. A student or two sitting close to her occasionally would wrinkle their noses in disgust at the smell, but for me, assigned to a seat on the far side of the room near the back, the wandering smell was a way for her to reach me. When it wafted my way and entered my nostrils it was as though she was sitting beside me so that we might witness the farce of yet another high school class session together.

When not at school we often frequented cemeteries. Why? “Because a lot of them are beautiful and no one’s usually around,” she said, “and sometimes the tombstones are flat so you can lay down on them and watch the sky.” There was more to this, of course, though I did not realize it until much later. Part of what had attracted me to Emily was her fascination with death: with physical being and its lack. Her mother, she said, had bore many children, some of them afflicted or dead on arrival, and one of Emily’s favorite and most entertaining pastimes was musing upon alternative scenarios involving these doomed or damaged siblings.

“If that one hadn’t died,” she’d lament, “I’d have had a playmate almost just my age.”

“What if he were right in the head?” she’d say, another time, of a younger brother who wasn’t. “Wouldn’t all the girls think he was handsome?”

Despite this sad family history, however, or perhaps because of it, Emily was not very sympathetic toward the shortcomings of other people and, in fact, took great pleasure in criticizing their flaws.

“Have you ever noticed how ugly most people are?” she asked me once. “You’d think they’d try to make up for it by being more agreeable.”

Her fascination with death and critiques of others had led her to a profound fondness for the carnal aspects of existence: slumber, food, and—especially—sex. Indeed, as if vaulting beyond any ordinary natural impulse, Emily seemed determined to couple with as much frequency as circumstance and her impressive resourcefulness allowed. And so there would be a cold, hard tombstone beneath my back, bouncing breasts and blushing, grunting face above, while a blue sky, stars, or the clouds of night or day wheeled above.

“Emily, I don’t want you just for this,” I would say, believing I meant it, even as my bobbing cock nodded otherwise.

On one such occasion some lines came to me from the Jove and Europa story translated in my Latin class a week earlier: “Dignity and love are seldom known to go to bed together.” I wondered then and know now I did not love her. She was the first girl I had sex with, which for a fourteen-year-old boy seems like love, and we enjoyed some of the offbeat-young-couples-fun that made me think we might could be a couple. But for the most part I found myself shrugging off too much contemplation or misgiving and, as they say, simply enjoying the ride. Walking on jelly legs, surroundings a confusion, head and body reluctant to process them in the wake of what they had just experienced, I would absently consider her in retrospect.

“So this is having your brains f---ed out,” I would remark in my mind.

Though it disappointed me at the time, I have grown to be glad that she was the one who ended it. Of course, many of the clichés one expects of a terminating teenage relationship came into play, including the moment when she said, “We can still be friends.”

When she said we could still be friends it served as the verbal articulation of an end of sorts, but only what might be termed a preliminary end. Young as I was, I realized it wasn’t so much that she wanted to be friends as that she wished to preserve her claim on me. I had learned even then, even in that pre-sexual zone I had been inhabiting and can no longer recall or even imagine, that girls could be like that. So many of them, it seemed, were loath to let a boy go even when they had lost most of their interest in him or sworn devotion to another. I hadn’t encountered any boys in my class who seemed cognizant of this quality in girls; indeed, most of them became angry or even abusive when subjected to such conditions. By contrast, I found this quality in girls very precious and endearing when it concerned me—this confused, groping, hanging on which made little sense to either of us. Most often I would treat it with levity or a slow steady vanishing on my part—a firm, gradual disappearance from their lives—as dictated by the circumstances.

Once removed from them, perhaps already nearly forgotten, I could then observe them quickly resigning themselves to the more immediate dynamics of their lives, before rousing myself and moving off toward the next chapter of my own existence, like the spectator who rises last with a yawn, having lingered in the dark of an auditorium long after the falling of the curtain and the departure of the other theatergoers. Upon the arrival of that point at which I sensed I might never even have existed for them, I wasted little time in disappearing from their hearts and minds forever as though sinking into the earth.

I can imagine quite a few readers shaking their heads at such an outlook and its accompanying behavior, but we were a strange people then in those desolate rural parts of the hill-South and there was an old saying among us: that we made good friends but worse enemies. I believed the saying to be true and thus tried to avoid the latter whenever I could help it.

“I believe I’ll always have something of a weakness for girls like Emily on account of her,” I told my friend S— when it was all said and done.

“It’ll pass,” she had replied with authority and conviction, tossing aside the whole thing as though it were a gum wrapper. “A lot of the girls in that family are pretty when they’re young, but look at their mammas and you’ll see they’re a fat, unhealthy race of folks on the whole, and I know a fair number of them have like to died young.”

*

Things changed in my relationship with the stallion after Emily. He knew I had become sexually active long before anyone else in my family suspected. Something was lost between us. Whereas before I had been his collaborator and fellow adventurer on rides as well as a sibling who moved in another sphere, I now constituted—somewhere in the recesses of his masculine equine sensibility—a potential threat to his herd and livelihood. Likely his sensitive olfactories discerned an alteration in my biochemical processes and perhaps my general manner changed as well. Indeed, though I would have remained unconscious of the fact, I believe the latter probably did occur in the wake of the thrill and pleasure that accompanied my discovery of the new thing of which I was capable.

So it was that he came to watch me warily in the pasture and, if we went for a ride, would wait for my attention to wander before drifting toward the edge of a trail so as to bang one of my kneecaps on a passing tree. And then, one day, when I was turned from him to fetch his halter, he bit me on the shoulder, hard enough almost to draw blood. So shocked was I at this betrayal that when I turned back on him, I hesitated a second before delivering a roundhouse punch to his mouth that sent him snorting and stumbling backward out of his stall. When I held up his halter again and peered into his long face, his eyes—wide and unrelenting—never blinked. It was a sign of obstinacy I understood. I had seen the same expression in the mirror.

The stallion grew more irascible with age, even after I left the farm. Indeed, we both did. Even Mama, who had broken countless horses for Bert Allen in her youth and had learned the art of horsemanship from him and the best of the Meadow Farm and Warwick Stables crowd of the late 1960s, struggled with him, with us, sometimes.

Mr. Allen knew something of the stallion from the pictures Mama sent him along with her greeting cards and read the meaning of his lines, carriage, and disposition without ever having laid eyes on him as only a master trainer like Mr. Allen could.

“Every good horseman,” he counseled her, “needs one good horse.”

Mr. Allen was not evading the issue in this declaration, but rather underscoring the fact that the stallion’s increasing violence and eccentricity remained ultimately of little moment in light of the remarkable thing he continued to constitute to the human who sat atop him—or rather would allow to sit atop him.

*

I rode him for the last time on a sunny late-November day, scent of light soot drifting on the air—a remainder of the woodstove’s morning fire. The season’s last clinging leaves hung flat and colorless.

We were, as I said, the same age, but he had grown old, ancient by equine standards, and I had been warned by Mama not to let him run. Yet when we had trotted out of the pasture and reached the first hill, he strained the reins with his old power and shook the harness. An understanding came to me and I gave him his head so that his great forelegs heaved forward and he sprang away, deep already in the old remembered thing he loved.

I knew I would catch hell if he died, but I knew too he would like nothing better than to die in the wake of one of his dead gallops. Perhaps it was even what he wished, what he was attempting, and so I let him gallop until he had run himself out. When we stopped running wisps of steam were rising from his flanks and I dismounted so as to lead him along and stretch my legs, which had grown cramped clenching the saddle as a result of my being out of riding practice.

As we made our way back toward the farm, a storm blew up suddenly, the wind cutting through my clothes and rending the air with despairing shrieks and groans as it assaulted the forest canopy. Limbs cracked apart from massive trunks and fell here and there like arms torn from sockets.

Through it all the stallion never spooked nor seemed much troubled. Whatever the decline in his physical being, his old spirit and courage were there intact. We reached home safely. That was not his day to die.

In the last few weeks which remained to him of that, his last, season of life, I saw the stallion but little. The trials of my own life kept me away.

When at last the day came when that beautiful strength settled itself to earth, it did so gently as though relaxing into a comfortable state of repose. The expression in his eyes I will never forget. The old labyrinth of stern, cruel memories—the wild blur of darkness—was gone and in its place was something contemplative, yet all its own: like if you threw a stone up in the air and it didn’t come down, but rather just stayed there. Perhaps he died marveling at the strange beauty of such a sight.

When he was dead a tractor with a backhoe dug his grave and a great rusty chain was wrapped about him so as to drag his great form to it. He lies there now in the fashion of a hundred other animals of that farm, having returned to the earth. I think of them sometimes, the various spots where they have been buried, spanning all the way back to my childhood, and how some of those places are covered now in saplings and thickets or mown over, or, in a few cases, marked each spring by the emergence of daffodils or tulips. Most farms are like that: landscapes of the dead, from which new things are always growing. But I don’t like to dwell on that too much.

Yet when I do think of death—of how I would like to die—it is usually in the prone form of a large animal, yet such an animal as God must have saw when he first envisioned the creatures of the earth before all time. Never in my life have I known a being truer to the nature of itself.

Farm Boy: A Writing and Agricultural Life in the 21st Century

(creative nonfiction)

It is often the case my farm seems to me the only sane place in this country. I take it this is because, other than my wife and some animals, no one else inhabits it. Madman, bore, or perhaps something in between, I am the primary possessor of the human agricultural perspective on a bit of earth American law recognizes as mine, but which, in reality, possesses me as one of its minor living inhabitants. I have tried to do right by it within my significant limits, but, alas, have made enough agricultural mistakes in my life to forget most of them and curse myself in remembrance of those I do recall with a silent condemnation. Since my school days, truth be told, I have not ceased to marvel each year at the fool I have been the year before. Yet, on the extreme other side of these many active mistakes there dwells an attitude of complacency reflected in the way I sometimes idly watch the fields from my rocker, contemplating them all the while—particularly if a jug is handy. The agricultural problems and attributes of the landscape are laid out before me—the solutions to which, if any ever present themselves, destined eventually, in retrospect, to be reckoned ignorant and those of a fool. The former version of me, the doer, is something of an innovator (however meager his rate of success); the latter, the muser, a leisurely pragmatist with a practical, rather than idealistic, penchant for strategizing an approach to something that may never occur. I will be the first to admit my perspicacity often is suspect and misspent, but then trial and error are part of the farmer’s (as well as the writer’s) trade.

I have chosen to write briefly on my agricultural identity for a number of reasons, not least of which is to combat ongoing negative stereotypes of farms and farmers. In popular culture farm life frequently continues to be characterized as stagnant, dull, parochial, stupid, and backward, largely on account of its hard remitting toil. As with all stereotypes, each of these qualities may prove true depending on a given farm. Yet I also find each one of them problematic with regard to my own agricultural background and observations. As one who has traveled a bit, I would take special exception to the first pejorative word—”stagnant”—by noting simply that all excursions are relative and carry with them their own inherent limitations: life remains life wherever one idealizes and experiences it, even in transit or within the space of a few square miles. Moreover, I would assert the other characterizations primarily arrive from the observations of those who either suffered tragically in their agricultural upbringings or who failed, sometimes willfully, to discern the value of a farm’s many underlying nuances.

One simple fact is that the labor farm life demands of an individual usually is to the purpose of the betterment of the self, literal and artistic. “Work is the law,” wrote the painter da Vinci. “Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of useless rust, like water that is an unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some trace of ourselves on this earth.” Work delivers people from evil, or at the least lessens the evil they would do, in most any vocation. In farming, seasonal changes, the almost imperceptible lengthening and shortening of light hours, and variable weather make its undertaking a constant and rigorous exercise in observation, planning, and critical thinking. There is always something different to do, and it may demand to be done very quickly—as during harvest—or at a more leisurely rate (the mending of fences in winter comes to mind).

It was the slow, reflective periods of agricultural life which afforded humans the leisure to develop the arts for hundreds of years until widespread mechanization changed that process in the early twentieth century. Yet everything—the most fundamental and essential qualities of existence (all the elements of art)—may still be found on a farm: strife, peace, love, nature in most all its aspects, ideals, boredom, disgust, inspiration. And they are all diminished or intensified and combined to the degree one wishes or allows. It would be crude (and erroneous) to say these are predominantly surface phenomena. They appear so only until one comes to understand, with time and repetition of experience, their deeper implications. I have found that when possessed of free time, farmers seldom waste it. We may snooze in a rocker or take in the last ten laps of a stock car race, but, to my knowledge, we are least among the professionals when it comes to candidates for sustained outright sloth. We may on occasion appear set in our ways and unwilling to change. I believe this to be a byproduct of our strength, though it is possible for us to waiver and neglect many things for a time—even forget to be ourselves. But that has never much troubled me. At least never for very long. I know such men and am one of them.

*

When I am away too long I miss the qualities of the farm that abide in memory: the crows of the roosters and, yes, even the caws of crows; the gentle roll of the fields; the feel of a heavy maul or lightweight hoe in my hands; the odor of mown hay. In essence, I miss what is pleasing and beautiful about a farm; I pine for what Walt Whitman called “the secluded-beautiful, with young and old trees, and such recesses and vistas!”

There was a time a few years ago when I thought I would be leaving my farm and living in a city, and I actually attempted to do so for a matter of days, securing an apartment in a sprawling early 1900s building which sat alongside a crowded, narrow sloping street. I found myself existing in a dreamlike state whenever I was there, combined with a dreamlike sense of insecurity. When I laid down to try and rest I felt both lost in bliss and ready for any catastrophe. After a time I could feel the greatness of spaces I had known while taking my rest on the farm had disappeared, replaced by labyrinthine darkened walls and other lives pressed close all about me. I found I could not sleep alone in such an environment and would drive out of the city with my camping gear to one of the spots I knew in the national forest. There I would rest in contentment until the morning sun struck my eyelids, turning them red. In truth, I spent not a single full night in the city and when I returned to my farm it was with a powerful sense of relief.

Why was this? For one thing, I know for a fact there is an unbroken line of farmer men on my father’s side of the family stretching back to the Bavarian region of the Middle Ages and, I suspect, far beyond. May one simply break that line suddenly? For me, the answer appears to be no. And yet I can hardly remember my feelings toward the farm of my youth other than the vague sensation that somehow I belonged there—that it was where I was supposed to be. Perhaps most all children feel that way about the places they are reared. My memory of my childhood farm still wrestles with itself as if it were an angel or something else fantastic—the clear lights and ugly shadows of those unforgotten days wrapping about themselves in tumult. I do know that with regard to the continuum of agriculture in my life, its earliest recollections have such a peculiar quality that they have become merged into a single sensation of profound emotion containing both careless joy and an invincible sadness. It is this feeling which continues to form me and casts a shadow over the rest of my life, including all I write.

*

In 1953, the Appalachian writer and farmer Byron Herbert Reece remarked to a reporter that his novel writing had been interrupted by the need to plow his potatoes.

The reporter noted, “Anybody can plow potatoes,” and urged him to get back to his book.

More than a half-century ago, the reporter’s statement was perhaps true, but I would wager in the second decade of the 21st century more people can write novels than plow potatoes.

Indeed, we have lost many of our agricultural ways—even the simplest of them. To know they are something of a rarity is evinced by the fact that when I take my tractor less than a mile up the highway to the gas station I am waved at by numerous anonymous people in passing cars. The children in particular gesture and point in the same manner they might gesticulate at Indians or buffalo: because of the rarity of the spectacle—something they’d heard of and never expected to encounter on account of the phenomena’s fame for near-extinction.

In truth, there are more of us than one might think, though we often pass in disguise. Most all people who farm nowadays, self included, are industrial farmers in the context of Henry Ford’s vision: that is, out of economic necessity we work part of the time on the farm and part off. Like writers, farmers are not capable even of subsistence; our farm profits would not be sufficient to pay our property taxes and expenses without the income from our jobs.

Why, then, do we keep on doing it?

*

Here I should say something of my other vocation, which is responsible for the thing you find yourself perusing, and its relationship to farming. When it comes to farming most authors I know who write on the need for agricultural responsibility wouldn’t know which end of a horse to feed sugar to. They mean well, but I know for a fact the reality of day-to-day living would not agree with them. For one thing, it would quite simply kick their asses. Unless possessed of exceptional constitutions, at the end of a farm day they would be too spent to write, or do much of anything else for that matter. This was a fact the literary southern agrarians of the 1930s quickly discovered while trying to translate their principles into action, Allen Tate’s lazy incompetence at Ben Folly serving perhaps as the best example. A couple of them backed up their pens with pitchforks capably enough—Andrew Lytle, Madison Jones—but for the most part folks writing about agrarianism maintained a safe distance from actually practicing it. There is good sense in this since farming can actually kill you, as it did Byron Herbert Reece, who suffered and perished before his time.

The most famous of us, Wendell Berry, has remarked the only real time his farm chores allow him to write is winter. I generally agree with this assertion, though to an extent that season, too, is interrupted by my teaching duties. Yet it does afford more time than the others because one is not cultivating earth, planting, gathering wood, tending bees, and performing other tasks the remaining three seasons demand. Regardless, it is important to plan both one’s farming and writing endeavors with a minimum expenditure of time in mind. Though I occasionally experience impatience with a perceived slowness in others, I count it a great advantage to possess as one of my few gifts a penchant for efficient, streamlined thought.

As I have been seeking to establish, farming and writing are more alike than one might think. They are concerned with the essences of things. It has been remarked neither one’s fellows, nor one’s god(s), nor one’s passions will leave one alone, yet the work of farming and writing constitute realms in which one may find meaning and good during one’s fleeting significance in life. Writing affords the writer the privilege of relating all the manifestations of existence, great and little, superficial and profound. The successful writer independently creates through imaginative effort and against all difficulty of expression. And in order to achieve the best creation the writer must sacrifice something—give up some essential shred of the self forever. Writing, then, like farming, is at once painful and taxing and rewarding—only in different ways.

*

And so we reach the time of harvest for this essay. With some reservations, there are a few particulars I feel tentatively certain about. For one thing, this piece has led me to a recognition of the relationship between my occupations of writing and farming—that, in many ways, the latter anchors the former. Farming provides diversion, protection, consolation, the mental relief that comes from grappling with material problems, the wisdom of dealing with other forms of life in all their cycles, and the feeling of well-being that accompanies “riding”—note I refrain from using the word “harnessing”—the elemental powers of nature to a respectable harvest. Nature’s power often is hidden, sometimes overcome, though never extinguished. So powerful is its hold on me that I can not give it and its cultivation up. I know because I have tried.

Invariably, farmers and writers answer that call to do our work which comes from within us—which is a way of coming from nature—and has made us who and what we are. We make our farms and writings even as we are made by them. Noticed or unnoticed, ignored or commended, we meet, as best we can, the demands of our special and specialized work and lives. Somewhere within the sincere endeavor to accomplish, to go as far as strength will carry us, to continue undeterred by reproach, lies that integrity which is ours. And if we deign to add to that integrity charity toward our fellow writers and farmers, especially those not so fortunate nor so far along as ourselves, then we approach an even greater good, and one in which there can exist no measure of excess.

Only in our imagination and in nature does every truth of existence find its existence. Imagination and nature, I believe, are the supreme masters of life. The tending of fields, like the rendering of memories, is as much a rendering of fields as a tending of memories. My first great adventures—at least those that were so to my mind—occurred on farms and so, I suspect, will my last. The localities of those early places had definite importance. Yet in the recounting of such a life a certain amount of naïveté, sentimentality, and even flat out error is unavoidable. I remain unapologetic for them as they are natural and probably impossible to overcome. And this fact is as true in farming as it is in writing. Indeed, I have witnessed the wisest and most venerable of farmers and writers betrayed by the hardest of their earned knowledge as they struggled to practice some new task. Some observers, such as myself, are supportive under these circumstances—even admiring of the courage necessary to risk failure in attempting something genuinely new—while others will exhibit only scorn at a person stumbling while seeking to break out of their established mold and identity. Which kind of reader are you?

*

If I could identify the attitude in which I approach writing and farming, and the writing of farming, I would articulate it as the spirit of love. It is a love that springs forth from the fragility of the human species; that—as was not the case three quarters of a century ago—the species possesses the means to destroy itself. What a weak, fragile thing it has transformed itself into—not unlike some delicate, endangered heirloom variety of vegetable. I think we have an obligation to care for it as best we can.

Though much of this essay has been concerned with farming as investigated through the medium of writing, I refrain from laying serious claim to the titles “writer” and “farmer” myself. After all, can one truly know the nature of even one aspect of life? How can we when we don’t know even our own thoughts? One may love writing and farming without that fact making one a legitimate participant in those vocations. True, I have loved them and practiced them for decades, but it is not for me to gauge the measure of my failures or successes. Nevertheless, right or no, I have found myself bold enough here to speak of them with a certain measure of authority.

I like to think that when I grow too old to be trusted with a pen or set of tractor keys, I shall lay down my books, quit my fields, and contemplate a place to be buried or, in the old northern European tradition, burned atop a pyre. Perhaps I shall have my books and tractor burned with me, which no doubt would make for an entertaining spectacle among the mourners as well as a source of much gossip in my little rural county. Why not? Who says one cannot both fade away and burn out?

We all have noted how things have changed—the sky, the atmosphere, the light of judgment which falls on our labors, renowned or obscure. No one succeeds in everything they do, and in that sense we are all failures. Yet there are farmers and writers still planning, planting, gathering, even now—reaping the honest harvest of a duty faithfully if imperfectly performed.

Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House

(creative nonfiction)

“It is a place where one’s instinct is to give a reason for being there.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Hotel Child”

The lot of us recently had ventured just beyond that age at which boys learn how to kiss and fondle girls in the back seats and truck beds of remotely parked vehicles while also waxing prodigious in their capacities to render mischief falling on the wrong side of the law. That we found ourselves on that particular Friday night speeding down dark country roads in a Chevy Blazer which sent up cascading fountains of gravel whenever it slid to a stop so that one or two of us might disembark at a dead sprint, bent upon swiping a Christmas lawn ornament or two from someone’s yard, constitutes perhaps as sorry a delinquent pastime as ever there was. True, it was not so violent nor federally prosecutable as, say, blowing up mailboxes with dynamite or demolishing them with aluminum bats or cinder blocks flung, drive-by style, from a window or truck bed; nor was it so tame as the more nuanced and, dare I say, graceful (even at times intellectual) art of shoplifting. It must, I reckon, have resided someplace in between.

“I’m so drunk,” complained Guy, the driver of the Blazer, which—I have neglected to recount thus far—was given to weave as well as speed along those narrow familiar dirt back roads of our beloved country county.

“Where’d my gloves go?” angrily demanded Brent, the boy riding shotgun, his query apparently aimed at no one in particular and ignoring entirely Guy’s lament, probably on account of the fact he was equally drunk.

I watched the erratic jolting and jerking of the backs of their heads—the byproduct of unrelenting torque, poor roads, bad shocks, and equally bad liquor—from my place behind them.

“Gloves or not, here’s the last stop,” slurred Guy, mashing the brakes so that we slid to a stop yard’s edge—a little into the ditch, in fact—of a long brick ranch house horrendously decorated, flooded and mired by the season’s yuletide, its rectangular form outlined, bound, by a sea of blinking, multi-colored orbs.

“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” screamed Guy into Brent’s ear like a Sergeant Airborne directing a jump in a combat zone.

And, door flung open, go Brent did, stumbling out onto the frigid slippery grass, then losing his footing and falling to a knee in the ditch, before rising with an oath and sprinting toward the elaborate manger scene perhaps thirty yards distant in the center of the yard—scores of plastic desert people, robes ostensibly meant to appear soiled by the Khamaseen dust winds of Arabia; elaborate two-storey manger diademed by a bright flashing purple Christmas tree; and most all the animals of Noah’s Ark milling about below it in various three-dimensional still lifes of locomotion or repose—all of it illuminated in a bright spectacular criss-cross of spotlights no doubt employed for very different purposes during deer seasons of Christmas’s past.

On ran Brent, bowling over a zebra and striking a glancing blow to an antelope as he approached, not unlike the manner in which he had flattened and shed would-be tacklers during football season, before ducking into the bright manger aperture and lifting from the raised golden crib—really more a diminutive gaudy throne than a crib—the likeness of that peculiar infant folks even now tend to get mighty worked up about, especially in remote counties such as ours, during that particular time of year.

Deft scoop, smooth swivel, and Brent was sprinting back toward us, deified infant likeness tucked under his arm like a misshapen football. Yet even as he approached porch lights ignited behind him and the front door of the house swung inward, vague male form emerging, waving its arms and shouting something incoherent.

“Woooooooh!” Brent hollered, redoubling his pace, stoked by this new element of peril.

I cheered him on, identical yawp answering his, half my torso protruding from the Blazer’s rear passenger window, before shifting my attention to the house.

“Merry Christmas!” I bellowed at the newly dispossessed homeowner.

“God dammit!” screamed the man-form shrilly, voice suddenly coherent on account of its having ascended an outraged octave, “I’ll shoot every last one a’yall sons a b----es!”

Turning, he scurried back through the door in a crouched loping manner reminiscent of a hunchback or some half-crippled simian beast, blubbering, apparently incoherent with rage, probably in search of his shotgun.

But already we all were beginning to laugh, for Brent, though winded by the cold air and his drunkenness, had reached the Blazer, Guy flooring the accelerator before the passenger door was even shut, jerking us into the next curve, forcing me to bang my head on the window as I withdrew it back inside. Yet I barely even felt the blow on account of all the liquor and laughter. And indeed the whole Blazer seemed full of it at that moment—alcohol and chortling, that is—in addition to its small new divine occupant.

“Haha,” gasped Brent when he could breathe again and give voice to his mirth once more, hefting the faux infant one-handed like some newly won athletic trophy. “What do those fuckers have to celebrate now?”

Then, cradling the baby Jesus in the crook of his arm, he leaned forward and punched it hard in the face twice, grunting as he did so, before tossing the doll over his shoulder into the backseat.

It landed face-up in my lap, sullenly peering up at me with its paint-chipped black eyes: weather-faded, misshapen likeness of some disillusioned deified offspring—swaddling gold towel bleached by the elements to a urine-colored yellow, head dented slightly from Brent’s formidable punches. I lifted it before me, grinning into its face.

“Mm, mm, mm,” I chided Brent. “Beatin on little Baby Jesus.”

“Shit, Clabough,” he sneered, head half-turning back toward me, profile a silhouette against the green glow of the dash lights. “You got no room to talk. I heard one of the old ladies in my church call you a demon a couple Sundays back. You believe that? A demon from hell. Said she’d never let her granddaughter go out with a hellion like you.”

“Yeah?” I said, mildly interested on account of the fact I could sense Brent wasn’t lying. “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Missy Robinson. That sophomore with the nice rack.”

Then me, smiling, trying not to crack up. “Too late.”

And then we were all laughing again as the Blazer sped and wove onward through the night, bearing us toward a place which required none of us to utter its name—where we wouldn’t need the services of the Chevy and might restock our stores; reload, as it were—while mingling with friends and strangers alike. A place to serve as harbor and haven for our wasted crew of teen land pirates—that had done so more than once before. That understood destination where all the county’s young revelers, partygoers, no-good-doers, and ne’er-do-wells eventually assembled on a Friday night. A place known to them—to us all—as Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House.

*

Obvious as the nature of such a place might seem to discerning readers such as yourselves—and already I can perceive it forming, with reluctance or anticipation as the case may be, in a number of your minds—it is perhaps best to err on the side of caution here and remark that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House was in fact a house: one of those newer structures of perhaps six thousand square feet and three stories (if one counted the basement) that seemed to be cropping up in little clumps during those years on the western edge of the county which lay closest to the city (some fifteen miles distant) and thus proved attractive to upwardly mobile professionals and people of like financial resources who desired vaguely pastoral and ostensibly safe, albeit largely sterile and uniform, communities and neighbors.

The particular domicile in question stood in candid relief—a little more to itself than the others, perhaps forty yards from the road—and probably appearing altogether unremarkable if one glimpsed it in daylight, which none of us ever had. However, though the outside of the house was conventional enough for new homes built during that first half-decade of the 1990s, the interior was highly irregular, even downright bizarre. It was said that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s wife or mistress or housemate—the enigma of her status was consistent with everything else about the place—had been given free rein to design the interior to her fancy. For one conversant in the art of home decoration it quickly would become apparent this mysterious woman had possessed a fine eye for space and color but, for one reason or another, either had lost hold of her gifts so that they had run amok or purposefully set them loose as a dogfighter releases his pit bull when the last bet is made and the final bit of money changes hands. Indeed, it appeared almost as if the limitless freedom Willy’s Mann’s Uncle had imparted to his beloved architectural muse had driven her decisions to the maximum of hyperbole in nearly every regard. There were rooms possessed of odd shapes, painted in overpowering colors; sliding doors and hollow panels which often as not led nowhere in particular; ceilings of erratic height which seemed meant either to crowd the occupant or make them feel tiny to the point of insignificance; and long thick rugs dyed in blunt primary colors which matched neither the walls nor the trim of the room or hallway at hand.

As a result of these features the whole physics of the place seemed askew or even reversed and, as if this eclecticism wanted yet another variable, it was rumored that upon the completion of the home the mysterious woman had taken up residence on the side of the structure she had designed especially for her own habitation only to make the tardy revelation that it faced north and, what’s more, stood almost next to a thick stand of full grown bushy cedars and stately Virginia pines, so that it remained perpetually darker and colder than the rest of the domicile. Her solution, it was recounted, rather than having the trees cut or moving her effects into the opposite end of the house and forsaking her most favored colors, secret panels, and oddly shaped rooms, was to quit the place entirely—and apparently forever—leaving Willy Mann’s Uncle with a freakish alien home that afforded him neither joy nor comfort and, indeed, became a place he was reputed to visit but rarely, though apparently he had made no attempt to sell it.

Here it should be pointed out that of Willy Mann’s Uncle no one knew a thing either—not even his name. He was as mysterious as that departed female we referred to, not without a certain measure of awe and reverence, as Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman. Though we frequented his house weekend after alcohol-soaked weekend, no one of our acquaintance had ever laid eyes on him. Willy Mann himself we did know as a peripheral athlete, partier, and classmate—fast to laugh and even faster to take up whatever mischief might offer itself to his twinkling eyes and ready smile. Purposefully vague in his answers and apparently viewing the ritual of these parties as a delightful whimsical game, he was of little assistance to those few who bothered asking him about the man whose house they regularly occupied and occasionally trashed. Indeed, Willy Mann lived at that time what must have been a fascinating existence, at once poor and extravagant: electing to act out a meager sort of social role himself, yet flinging open the doors of his uncle’s abandoned house to any and all comers.

And come they did, the rowdiest youth of all central Virginia and points beyond, to this place where the routes of very disparate sorts of people crossed paths and conspired both to create and witness together a remarkable, weird, voluptuous scene. As no one ever wished to be the first to arrive at Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House on a given weekend night, vehicles customarily would cruise back and forth in front of it once nightfall came on, slowing as they passed, before one eventually committed and turned into the driveway at a slow, respectful speed and at last tentatively rolled to a stop in some discreet, remote location on the lawn in anticipation of the scores of vehicles destined eventually to follow. Usually it was the younger kids who arrived earliest, boys newly possessed of their learners’ licenses, younger friends piled in with them, eager to witness for the first time the incredible mythology of the place that had been recounted to them by their slightly older siblings and acquaintances.

If an observer were to attempt to track types, or perhaps stereotypes, one might safely say it was most often the rednecks who were next to appear after the newly mobile youths, truck engines rumbling to a halt wherever they pleased, often belligerently taking up significantly more space than they needed. Then the occupants of cab and bed alike would gather on flung-down tailgates, waiting—boots dangling, drinking cheap beer, muttering jokes and oaths—until enough other people arrived for them to make their collective move toward the house. Following these rednecks there would appear the socially ambitious preppy kids, mostly of white middle-upper class stock and overanxious in their desire to exhibit their studied potentials to appear cool. The Sports Utility Vehicles and occasional sports cars of the parents of such youths would be followed by the heavily-stickered, more rundown vehicles of the alternative crowd, who cared almost nothing for the scene and merely desired a place to get high, listen to their music, and converse quietly among themselves. Often the alternative kids lapsed immediately into critiquing and laughing at those who had arrived before them, for knowing themselves to be different—in appearance, if nothing else—they proudly claimed and reveled in the deviant license of the counterculture minority status they had staked as their own. At last came what was commonly referred to as “high tide”: the big push or surge of jumbled people, not all of them high schoolers, representing all manner of identities and walks of life. There were, of course, the athletes and a couple carloads of the least socially-inept and more self-possessed geeks from school, but also there were those we labeled “has-beens,” the recently graduated young people who had not departed for college and still awkwardly sought to run with the high school crowd. A certain strain or unease accompanied the presence of these ghosts of classes past. Yet more peculiar than them were the full-fledged adult participants: the falling-down middle-aged alcoholic man everyone laughed at, the thirtyish blonde whore who had done the better part of the football team in pairs or in groups (“Yall are at yall’s sexual peak,” she had said to us more than once), and a nondescript fatherly man we initially had taken for a narc, but who eventually had earned our trust, functioning as a kind of unofficial vendor of liquor and cigarettes, and never hesitating to transport the younger kids on their maiden beer runs.

Throw these people together, deep in a collective state of social confusion and chemical inebriation, and one might imagine the shifting tide of crazily happy faces that rose and receded each weekend in the various rooms, hallways, and dim stairwells of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House. True, it was, by turns, a beautiful, terrible, wrong, and lovely thing, but the force of its existence proved both undeniable and overpowering to us all, for within that house, though we could not articulate or even fully grasp it, all of us heard and felt, however vaguely, that feverish, short-lived heartbeat of teenage wildlife which called to each of us, stoking every youthful heart to dreams, possibility, and action.

*

I doubt my own experience of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House was much at variance with that of my companions and fellow revelers, though I did have my own regular way of going about the place. I made it my habit, for instance, to first investigate the kitchen every time I arrived, always noting how there hardly ever was any food inside the stained and smeared refrigerator, while some form of alcohol seemed to lie behind the door of nearly every cabinet and closet, waiting to take part in the unceasing flow.

I have described the peculiar quality of the interior’s appearance and indeed one could perpetually feel that strangeness, even when the house was packed to capacity and the music turned up to a level at which you could feel it in your chest and barely make out the mouthed scream of the person at your side. Long departed was Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman, but the aura of her—of her peculiar architectural imagination—remained a powerful—at times, overpowering—presence: the indelible remnant of her eccentric yet august taste.

I was then going through a phase of my youth in which I generally disliked meeting new people but enjoyed the feeling of encountering familiar faces without ever having to make their acquaintance, allowing them to disappear from memory until the next occasion their appearance produced some flicker of recognition.

Inevitably, it seemed, I would encounter “that guy” or “that girl” from the last party at Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House, but they remained only that. And it reassured me to come across them, early or late in the evening’s revelry, standing as they always did, saying the same things, dressed not much different from the last time, signature drink in hand. I was always happy to see them and they me.

“Hey girl,” or “What’s up, man,” I would say, and they would offer something in kind as we floated past each other like soul ships in the night bound for separate, far off ports. Then it would be over between us; nothing more ever was said. Seldom did we cross paths more than once per party, unless pure coincidence conspired to have us briefly glimpse one another emerging from a bathroom or straightening from an open cooler, shaking ice and water from a free hand. Such secondary chance meetings might elicit a smile or a wave but nothing more. Words were out of the question. Indeed, even so much as uttering each other’s names—if in fact we knew them—would ruin the precious magic we enjoyed in being “that guy” or “that girl” to one another and destroy the comfort each afforded the other by way of that curious near-anonymity on a more or less weekly basis.

On the particular Friday night we had kidnapped Baby Jesus prior to our arrival at Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House (on the later side of things, as it happened), I found myself, having performed my customary survey of the kitchen, standing with two couples the girls of which I knew vaguely—neither too well, nor too little—and the boys not at all, which was just as I preferred. I had slept with the girls within a few weeks of each other the previous summer, but each of the trysts had been more or less understood as frivolous even at the times of their unfoldings which allowed us all to remain on more or less comfortable speaking terms, albeit a little guarded if a current love interest or two happened to be on hand.

The looks, names, even the personalities, of these two girls I took to be more or less interchangeable and when I smiled at each of them I enjoyed no luck at all in recalling which I had slept with first.

Their boyfriends, both of whom were from the city, had never visited Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House before and were chattering about sports cars—a little self-consciously, I thought—probably on account of the fact they knew hardly anyone in the place. Yet during a lull in their automotive conversation the novelty of their surroundings appeared suddenly to dawn on them, slicing through the confused haze of their social unease, significant egos, and shared automotive jargon.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” one of them asked me. “This guy’s uncle?”

“Yeah,” the other, taller, drunker one said. “Where exactly are we?”

“Don’t know, guys,” I said, shrugging. “No one’s ever really seen him, except maybe Willy Mann, I guess. He’s got a pretty cool house, though.”

To this they could not help but offer up their assent and they looked about them—a little more comfortably, it seemed—before taking up their previous conversation. Turning my back on them, I winked at their dates before moving away across the room in search of a refill.

One of the great wonders of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House lay in the menagerie of new faces it offered up week in week out. Some never-before-glimpsed set of features would drift in on a tide, as it were, only to find itself borne away by some invisible current, never to be seen again.

So it was that when I returned with a new drink the couples of my vague acquaintance were gone but in their place stood a girl of ripe and abundant charms who appeared lost, or, in any event, separated from anyone she knew. From the way she carried herself, it was obvious she was proud, as she had reason to be, of her breasts. She was shapely, dark, good-looking, yet it was not so much her prettiness that captivated me as the pronounced naturalness—the comfort with herself—which made her stand out, despite the uncertainty she was experiencing at that particular instant, among the more affected fellow party goers in her midst.

As I zigzagged toward her, evading swaying bodies and disarrayed furniture, I became aware of the familiar electric tremors moving within me and a slight pressure deep in my head. When she discerned my approach she appraised me flatly and as I arrived at her side, said nothing, waiting instead for me to speak.

“Lost your people?” I inquired.

She nodded coolly but offered no comment.

“It happens,” I said. “This house has a tendency to swallow people. They go down a hallway or disappear into a room and you just don’t see them again.”

She smiled at this, glanced around, and then spoke for the first time—a breathy voice with a slight twang. “I’ve never seen the like of it.”

I asked her where she was from.

“Nellysford. Born and raised.”

“That’s in the mountains.”

She nodded. “You?”

“This very county. Raised but not born.”

“Doesn’t count then,” she said. “Where are you from?”

“Richmond.”

She smiled. “Ah, city boy.”

I ignored the insult. “I was made there,” I explained. “A long time ago.”

“That’s an odd way to put it.”

I smiled at her, then nodded in agreement. “Best I can do, I’m afraid. Football. All those knocks on the head. Makes the slow ones like me even slower.”

She laughed at this but shook her pretty head, a little reproachfully. “That’s no excuse. All my brothers played and they’re still sharp guys.”

The conversation moved on from there to her interests and comparisons of our respective schools and upbringings. I studied her when she spoke, noting how hers was a vacant yet categorical sort of beauty that might have been a projection of her mind. She knew she was beautiful yet this knowledge seemed to make her sad. Despite my odd wariness toward dark-haired girls in those days, I decided I liked her—more than liked her really, under the circumstances, and suddenly—pressure in my head deepening—I felt as though I knew everything about her: her religious conviction (or lack thereof), her sexual history (adventurous within certain bounds), and her great life aspiration (to be envied and adored by great hordes of her peers).

I saw in my mind too in that moment—by way of a certain form of foreseeing, right or wrong, accurate or not—that she probably never would be truly satisfied; that she would serve as bridesmaid more than a dozen times before she reached thirty; that she would have affairs only with married men; that she would frequently be gossiped about and despised by lesser females. All this revealed itself to me as one glimpses an expanse of rugged terrain in a flash of lightning. But being a fatalistic loner I knew I would never get to know her better. “There is this night,” I thought. “There is this night only.” I grinned and, bending to swipe a can from a lonely unattended cooler at my feet, offered her a beer.

Just then a heavily hair-sprayed blonde ran past us, Guy in close pursuit, casting a sleazy drunken smile my way as he pressed past.

“Stop it, Guy! Stop it!” we heard in another part of the house a couple moments later.

The girl I’d been talking to looked troubled, but I smiled, retrieved the beer I had given her, and popped it open for her before handing it back.

“That happens most every time those two come here,” I said with a bemused shake of the head—lying, smiling, vaguely worried about Guy’s girl on account of what I knew of him.

But when the girl at my side smiled I knew the comment had done its work and saved the awkward moment, much to my relief and satisfaction. It humored me to believe I was something more than the meaty, insipid stud-males like Guy the stupid randy girls seemed to fall for so often, but then, at other times, I wasn’t so certain.

And this girl was no fool, for suddenly her smile had disappeared, replaced, it seemed, by some wondrous intuition that if she came to know me better I would needlessly complicate her life. It was as if in that moment she saw directly into the shallow portion of my mind possessed of that simplicity which could not realize there were certain perfectly obvious things you could not do without involving yourself in more trouble than they are worth.

An awkward silence ensued and we averted our eyes from one another, glancing around, taking in the magnificent revel. I tried absently to gauge how drunk I was, yet this proved impossible since everyone around us was drunk too.

Just then something struck me near the top of the back, forcing me to take an involuntary step forward. I turned to discover an inebriated boy, much larger than me, laughing in the wake of the shove he had just delivered, though his eyes remained hard and refrained from participating in his guffaws. I noted too the girl I had been talking to had vanished into the crowd.

“That’s my cooler, asshole,” he said, pointing to the open igloo at my feet.

“Cool,” I said, bending to retrieve another beer from it and handing it to him. “Have a cold one.”

Drunk as he was, his face already was red, but it grew redder still as he swiped the beverage from my hand.

I waited, watching him. He was a couple inches taller than me and probably sixty or seventy pounds heavier, but he was fleshy and soft. Probably he was an offensive lineman, second string if the team was any good, or a starter if he happened to play for one of the sorry private school, rich-kid teams in the city.

He threw his beer down and took a step toward me, not realizing the mistake he was making. In those days I weighed probably a hundred and eighty pounds but could bench-press nearly twice my body weight and run fast and forever. I crouched, dropping my own drink and edging backward as he came on unsteadily.

“P----,” he said in a low, slurred voice.

Then he lunged at me, or lurched rather, and began pummeling me clumsily with his fleshy fists. My raised right forearm took the ill-begotten blows readily enough and I noted between them how he was breathing hard already.

He was a fool. I knew all it would take was a slight shift in my footing and then the uncoiling upward.

Voices around us hooted. “Fight!”

“Hit him!” a part of my mind implored me seductively. “Destroy his face!”

But another part spoke too. “He’s winded and played out,” it murmured reassuringly. “He can’t hurt you anyway.”

Bad as I wanted to, I didn’t hit him. Something in my head wouldn’t let me. Perhaps it was the fact that he was a fool: a fat, drunken, f---ed-out fool possessing no inkling of the nature of his opponent or even where he was. All he knew in that dim-minded moment was his beer stash had dwindled by two and that it was worth fighting over.

But just then our own ungraceful drama gave way to another in the form of cries of alarm and the sounds of confused motion in other parts of the house.

“Cops! Cops!” someone yelled shrilly and suddenly all was a tumult—previously coveted coolers kicked over; drinks hurled down; illegal stashes hastily swallowed, shoved beneath cushions, or cast through open windows; stylish coats and pocket books stomped on—as indecision took hold of the partygoers and each contemplated somewhere in their minds whether to flee, affect innocence, or embrace the presence of the law and tearfully confess all their crimes and those of their friends.

My assailant having vanished—or rather lumbered away, pressing his own path through the confusion—I retreated slowly until my back brushed up against a wall next to one of the windows which had been flung open. I took a quick peek through it, noting the manageable distance to the barely discernible lawn, feeling the frigid refreshing December night air wash over my face. I could have jumped then, but I didn’t. My curiosity held me in check. I knew I was clean and enough in control of myself to pass any drunk test, save a breathalyzer, and I wasn’t driving. I wanted to see what the cops would do.

So I waited and soon there came the sound of authoritative adult male voices and the filing into the room—which, it so happened, was the largest in the house—of glum apprehended revelers, heads and shoulders drooped in dejection, fatigue, or perhaps the prospect of some indeterminate punishment.

The last of them were followed by two county deputies—a skinny, harried-looking man possessed of an angular, tight-lipped countenance, and a taller portly fellow whose expression was not unfriendly though his left hand never strayed from the top of the night stick dangling from his shiny black belt. When they had us all lined up along the walls and facing where they stood in tandem in the middle of the disheveled room, the friendly-looking one spoke in a voice many a country preacher would have envied for its affected warmth and goodwill.

“Now, friends,” he said, “We’re sorry to break in on your little assembly here, but it seems that in addition to the underage drinking goin on in here, there’s been a most heinous theft performed by one in yall’s number tonight.”

As he let these words sink in on us the skinny deputy seemed about to speak, but instead bit his lip, face troubled and sour.

“Now it may be,” continued the round, oily-voiced deputy, hand casually shifting from night stick to belt buckle, “that there don’t got to be no arrests tonight. It may be everybody can just drive on home from this crazy-lookin place that we’ve known about for some time.”

“For some time,” he repeated for emphasis, nodding as he did so, eyes sweeping back and forth over us.

“But all that can cease to matter right here and now if one of yall tells us who’s driving that green Blazer out there—the one with all the dents and the Farm Use plates.”

I felt my body involuntarily tighten when these words were uttered, but then relax when I realized Guy wasn’t in the room and that we had arrived late enough not to be observed getting out of his vehicle, which, in truth, was largely unknown even to our friends on account of the fact it seldom strayed from the pastures of Guy’s family’s farm, where he was fond of taking it down creeks and ramming it into terrified cattle.

A silence set in, which at last wrenched from the thin-lipped skinny deputy the words he could keep under wraps in his throat no longer.

“Where’s that Jesus yall stole?” he asked in a short, clipped voice—a manner of speaking meant to throttle back the significant outrage which lay behind it.

Everyone looked around the room at each other, some in our number too drunk even to follow what was being asked of them.

“Looky here now,” said the fat deputy, voice still smooth, “This can be a kindly-solved case or one that might call for a little pain and trouble so that we can get at the truth.” He paused for effect. “But it will be solved tonight.”

“Oh yes,” he said, smiling again and offering another slow nod. “It will be.”

It was then, as if the action was one he had rehearsed, the taunt slim officer dramatically drew out his night stick and began circling around the room, eyeing each of us in turn.

“Where’s that Jesus?” he asked, clutching the weapon tightly as though he might wring the answer from it. “Don’t nobody steal Jesus from a preacher’s house in this county and get away with it.”

“Just before Christmas too,” said the fat one, voice somber, reproachful, seeking to elicit guilt even as the demeanor of his partner threatened. Good cop, bad cop, I could not help thinking.

The angular deputy passed by me, peering searchingly, meaningfully, into my face, and I cast down my eyes with a humble nod so as to appear in full compliance.

“Yall best tell us where that Jesus is at,” he repeated, moving on, addressing no one in particular.

It was in that same moment, as if in answer to this incessant line of questioning, that the house itself responded—or seemed to—for all the lights in the place died simultaneously, sentencing everyone en masse to a blind placelessness that rendered us at once equals and strangers to one another.

An anonymous, democratic orchestra of stumbling, crashing, and curses filled the dark as young suspects made for hastily imagined exits while the deputies likely fumbled for their flashlights.

My proximity to the window made my own departure perhaps the most convenient of any in the place. Having located its sill, I stepped up onto it and then hopped out into the external lesser darkness, hitting the ground—some ten feet below, I’d guess—without so much as a stumble.

I landed in back of the house where a dim stretch of yard lay before me, framed on three sides by the deeper darkness of woods. It was the darkest patch of trees off to the left I made for, which, had there been more light, I would have recognized as the thick grove of old Virginia pines and cedars Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman had refused to have cut. Yet I knew it as such when sticky pine resin and cedar burrs greeted my hands and face as I entered the stand, slowing my progress and dissuading me from venturing too far in.

I turned to look back at the house, mist from my mouth floating across my field of vision. Noting that I hadn’t been followed and that the structure was still possessed of a yawning blackness, I resolved to have a seat at the base of one of the cedars, head just below its bushy, prickly lower limbs. Hardened as they were from farm labor, my palms nonetheless gathered more burrs when I placed them on the ground so as to scoot to a slightly more suitable position, back against the trunk.

I have to say I was not uncomfortable then, sitting in the cold, dark, venerable grove Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman had found unable to timber—whose solemn silent presence had ushered her away—waiting to see what would happen next.

Eyes having adjusted to the dimness of a post-midnight quarter moon hindered by periodic cloud cover, I watched as thin shafts of light began to dart about inside the house, the deputies, I assumed, having located and ignited their flashlights at last. There was the sound too, from in front of the house, of slammed vehicular doors, awakening engines, and a barely audible fragment of voice here and there as my peers effected their getaways.

At last the irregular light show inside ceased and there occurred a final slamming of doors and starting of engines, before all was abandoned to darkness and silence. I kept as still as I could beneath the cedar, barely breathing, eyes fixed on the hulking blackness of the house. It was very cold—probably in the lower teens—and I had left my jacket inside, but I smiled in the dark, not knowing why I was happy, just knowing that I was. I sat there for a long time beneath those elder evergreen trees which had driven away Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman, alternately studying the house and the sky, enjoying myself in a way that was all mine. I tell you, I could have sat there the whole night and cannot recall anymore what drove me to elect not to. Cold has never much troubled me.

*

It was through the ornate basement entrance that I reentered Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House, its French doors already open, yawning tragically in the dim moonlight, white floor-length curtains billowing inward like beckoning valets. Between them I passed like a thief in the night, a forefinger barely tracing the outermost flutter of the curtain to my right.

I made my way about the place slowly. Here and there small battery-powered nightlights revealed meager stretches of floor and wall. Above one such illumination on the wall hung a clock which had stopped running, preserving indefinitely the instant at which the house had answered the deputy.

Of course, it was obvious to me that someone had thrown the main power switch in order to plunge the party into darkness and aid the revelers in escaping the police, but I came across no power box in the basement and, looking back now, likely made little effort, if any, to locate it. I much preferred the idea the house itself was responsible—that it had resolved to pause, freezing the downward current of its sands, as if to reflect on the events of that night, strangle the prospect of further action within its walls, and perhaps gather itself anew. Houses, I have learned, in the courses of their histories, witness many sad and happy sights, and some are more apt to forget or recall them than others. I knew even then Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House was a domicile that did not forget. Its memory was elephantine. It was one of the reasons I loved it.

As my friends were all long departed and the telephone receiver I succeeded in finding proved dead as the rest of the house when I lifted it to my ear, I made my way out as best I could, bumping a corner or chair with my hip here, toppling an empty or half-empty bottle with my foot there. Fond as I was of the place, gaining the front door was a relief, the frigid air of the late watch a blessing—not unlike a greeting from an old friend.

At the terminus of the frost-covered front yard which lay strapped by numerous tire tracks, I turned to take in the house a final time before starting down the road in the direction of a teammate’s house I knew lay two or three miles distant. But barely had I mastered a hundred paces, approaching a point where the road curved dramatically, when I became aware of headlights and the roar of an engine coming toward me at an extraordinary speed. Indeed, it seemed sound and light were almost on top of me so fast, I marveled—even amid my alarm as I leapt into the ditch—how the car could master the curve at that speed.

Yet the driver must have been extremely familiar with that stretch of road, for he not only negotiated the curve, but used it as a kind of slingshot to propel the low, sleek shape of his car, brakes wailing, skidding toward the mailbox of Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House, where it came to a stop, not two feet from it, expertly aligned.

A hand deftly flipped open the door of the box and, joined by its other, withdrew a mountain of printed material. Then the car’s engine revved and the machine jerked into the driveway, thin metallic sound of beer cans crunching beneath it, and the hollow roll of a bottle on pavement, to which the car must have struck only a glancing blow. The driver came to a stop precisely where he must have known an automatic outside flood light would switch on, for come on it did, bathing the rumbling dark shape in a stark white light, removing the night’s mask to reveal a cherry red Camaro.

Either power had returned to the house since the short interval of my departure or the motion-triggered flood light was solar-powered (a distinct rarity in that region in those days). No matter, the nature of the vehicle was revealed to me, as was the figure now emerging from it with a great mass of mail tucked beneath an arm. He shut the car door gently and then turned to appraise the house, reclining lightly, casually, against his car as if he did not wish to disturb or trouble it too much. He was a slim man probably in his late thirties or early forties. Though not tall he was possessed of that sort of ranging leanness that lends vicarious inches to a man. His mouth and chin were sculpted in profile, and his nose would have been a fine one did it not seem a little askew, as if it once had been broken in such a way that ever after it must incline a little to the side. Though he slouched against his car, making no move to approach the house, there was an air of assurance about him—of ownership. It was difficult to be certain in that light, but it seemed his face was stubbled as though he had not shaved for perhaps the latter half of that week, and his dark hair was swept back, rather cavalierly, I thought. Half-zipped jacket by Members Only.

It was Willy Mann’s Uncle. It had to be.

He took a few paces toward the side door of the house, ignoring the litter of beer cans and other trash in the driveway and yard, before turning to look back in my direction.

It was possible he might have glimpsed my moving form on the road as he sped into that curve as only he could, yet it was a distinct impossibility he could see me now where I stood, obscured by the night and trunk of a roadside oak. I say it was impossible and yet he stood there a moment longer, gazing in my direction, with an expression that might have been a smile—that I choose to imagine as such.

Then, turning suddenly, mail tucked beneath his arm—each parcel bearing the name I would never come to know—he flung open the door. He entered his house.

*

I turned it all over, or as much as I could, in my mind while walking down that quiet country rode, its silence and stillness deepened by the intense cold.

It felt to me then, as it does now, that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s grand, sudden moonlight arrival and my witnessing of it had signaled some kind of final departure for us all.

“We’ll be back next weekend,” everyone would say as a matter of course at the conclusion of a party.

But it was not true that night, for none of us were ever coming back any more. Time would move on in spite of the stopped clocks of Willie Mann’s Uncle’s House and reveal the majority of we country folk as retail salespeople and manual laborers living day to day, or—as then—weekend to weekend. Some of us would become alcoholics, several of us already well on our way, and others would do and sell drugs, commit brutal acts of violence, and engage in smalltime crime.

A couple would kill people and a couple others submit to a kind of stupefied despair, culminating in the extinguishing of themselves. How our seemingly inexhaustible springs of freshness and emotion—a bubbling cauldron or torrent when gathered together in that house—would diminish into bare trickles or bone-dry depressions in a matter of years.

Of course we none of us, even the most intuitive of our lot, could foresee with any clarity those sad destinies at that time. Our youth blinded us, as do the youths of all beings in all times. A kind of felt green and growing world surrounded us even in winter, vining about our minds, and we succumbed to it willingly enough, the overpowering brilliance of its intense sun discouraging us from gazing too long or intently at anything far off—any particular horizon.

For this reason and others, I choose to view that period of the 1990s as the time when the people of the generation I am counted among felt themselves most fully alive. And Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House enjoyed a paramount role in that experience, coming to possess us all after a fashion, though what particular brand of fascination or madness unwound our brains I am still at a loss to say. It almost seemed as though that house, as if conscious of its strange power, had demanded of each of us a conquering despot’s fealty, an exorbitant price, that each of us eventually would be obliged to pay—sooner or later. Even me.

It is my belief, too, that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House had, through its fueling of our lives, in some way come also to determine them, for when I had looked back at the house that final time, silent and inscrutable in its shroud of darkness, I had felt a connection with it—a vague feeling that my own usefulness was just beginning even as its had only just been used up. But then a deep and powerful yearning had taken hold of me when the house had released me and I struck out down the road again—a hope that in coming to be used up myself I might, in the process, discover some manner by which to recall and memorialize that pulse of savage exhilarating youthful life, of as many passionate lives, as that house had.

The Witching Women at Road’s End

(creative nonfiction)

Slightly more than a century ago a Mr. Sherman Clabough was sheriff of Sevier County, Tennessee. One of his now scarce-remembered duties was to see to it that any young man in the section who turned twenty-one work the roads for an indeterminate period so as to pay off his mandatory poll tax. Of course, in theory a young man might satisfy the sum out of pocket, but it was irregular for anyone to have much, if any, money in those times, especially folk who came from families back up in the hollows and hills. So it was that between the young men in the district and whatever convicts happened to be on hand, the roads in the county—some of which spanned and twisted high up onto remote lonely slopes of the Smokies—were tenuously maintained.

The sheriff was a tall, stern man with blonde hair and blue eyes that occasionally were remarked upon for their piercing quality.

“He don’t need that six-shooter to put holes in a body,” a local man was heard to remark.

The sheriff’s pa, dead for nearly a decade, had been a Captain in the 9th Cavalry during the war and Sherman, as his name intimated, had inherited much of his father’s martial bearing. Though he was the runt of the family and the youngest of the four boys, it was he who took after his pa the most and so everyone allowed it was natural he should become a lawman or a soldier rather than a farmer or a preacher.

Before he was twenty he married a Dodgen girl, Mary, who gave him one child and died trying to deliver another not long after she turned eighteen. He remarried to an Ogle named Beda inside of two weeks, before Mary and her infant were even settled in the ground, and she filled his house with six children in eight years, the last four all born within a year of each other.

Now entering his fourth decade and with a sizeable family to feed, Sherman did not take unnecessary risks, though in his younger years he had drawn his pistol more readily and even killed a man on one occasion while riding against the White Caps. Sevierville, having cleared its streets of such vigilantes and been purged by fire at the turn of the century, had become a peaceable hamlet and Sherman found his duties not especially perilous. The occasional family feud in the mountains and mean weekend drunk were the only times he ever gave thought to drawing his pistol, and more often than not it was his capable deputies who handled such matters as these.

*

When trouble at last found Sheriff Clabough it was of a particularly woeful variety as it both implicated his official position and involved his extended family. One of his nephews, Columbus Clabough—the fifth child in his eldest brother Isaac’s brood—had disappeared high in the mountains while working the roads to pay off his poll tax. Now everyone knew Columbus was no ordinary youngun of twenty-one. For one thing, he was either envied or admired among his male peers for having won the affection of the girl widely considered the prettiest thing around Gatlinburg, Cora Nichols. He was also the prized son of his father Isaac on account of having stayed on to work the family farm rather than taking flight like his older brothers and running off to Knoxville or joining up with the army.

It was a fact, however, that though Columbus was respected in those parts for having remained to help his ma and pa, there were aspects of his personality which were deemed not exactly in his favor. Some thought him mighty queer on account of the fact he always kept to himself so much, never leaving the homeplace up at the head of the hollow unless it was to attend the Banner schoolhouse, which he ceased to do at the age of fourteen, or run an errand for his folks in the Burg, which he always did directly and without any tarrying of his own. Though possessed of a good singing voice, he never attended church—not even revival, which generally was thought the best opportunity for a young man to accomplish any serious courting. Instead it was Columbus’s habit when not working the farm to stray across the mountains—hunting, trapping, or gathering big messes of sang or ramps. What he came back with was always of uncommonly good quantity and quality, which drove more than one young man to try to follow him so as to determine where he harvested his bounty. Yet none ever succeeded in doing so. Either in a stream, a thicket, or on a rocky hillside, the boy’s trail eventually would fade out and the thwarted tracker would return, not a little agitated and remarking how queer it was for a body to just melt away into the mountains like that.

Given such behavior, it surprised folks all the more that a gal like Cora Nichols had set her head on marrying a fellow like Columbus and done everything she knew to bring it about, from baking him cakes and pies aplenty to delivering them in her best red and yellow dress with neck cut low. She met with no initial success on account of usually finding Columbus out working the fields or away from home altogether on one of his jaunts across the mountains. By and by, however, he began to take notice of her and would bring vittles and furs and other things down the hollow to where Cora lived in a little cabin with her Aunt Azelia. Whenever he came to call the three of them inevitably would end up out on the porch in twisted old hickory limb chairs, perhaps in the wake of a meal, and hunt their heads for words to trade. Often this was a chore since Columbus wasn’t the talking type and Cora and her aunt had said about everything two women could to one another on account of having lived together ever since Cora’s folks had passed away when she was nigh more than knee-high. Yet they were all comfortable enough in each other’s silent company in that way people not much given to talk often are.

There was never any sparking to speak of, nor even what might rightly be named courting, but a day eventually arrived when it may be said an understanding came about.

“How come you quit the Banner school,” Cora asked Columbus, leaning forward in her chair so that it creaked, “when you was the best at reading for your age?”

It was the most direct question she had ever asked him and Columbus was silent for a long moment before responding. “I don’t rightly know,” he said at last, eyes vaguely peering up the hollow. “I reckon I’d about learned what I could and didn’t much care for the company no more.”

Undeterred by this response, which implicated Cora since she had attended the school as well, she followed it with another question, just as direct. “And why is it you never go to church and never been to revival?”

Columbus shifted a little in his chair in what might have been a slight show of discomfort, though when he answered his voice was the same. “I reckon again I don’t much miss the company and most times I’m away across the mountains somewhere come Sunday.”

Then Cora asked her most direct question, the one in fact which brought about their understanding. “Do you reckon when your ma and pa are gone you’ll live all alone in that house up at the head of the hollow and never go nowhere except across them mountains?”

Columbus was silent for a long time, but when at last he answered he looked Cora directly in the face, with the same blue eyes his Uncle Sherman had. “I’ve never given any thought to the time when ma and pa are to be laid to rest, and I reckon there’ll always be spells when I’m away in the mountains.” He paused before continuing. “But whatever others may say, there is folks I like visiting and company I hope to always keep.”

Columbus grinned as he uttered these last words even as Cora blushed, and though Aunt Azelia remained silent as a porch post, the words in her mind were “Praise be.”

*

Though Sherman Clabough did not know the particulars of his nephew’s vague and unconventional engagement, word had reached him of the young man’s impending marriage to Cora Nichols. A fair judge of folks on account of the duties of his office, the sheriff was not so surprised as others by the arrangement. Having sporadically taken note of the boy as he grew, he admired rather than took umbrage at Columbus’s withdrawn silence, independence, and penchant for hunting up things in the mountains. Moreover, the fact that the boy had stayed on to work brother Isaac’s farm was a comfort to his mind and he mused more than once that if the youngun were to become a little more sociable and were so inclined, he might make a decent deputy by and by.

Yet now Sherman feared the worst and suffered a not insignificant burden of guilt as each day passed following Columbus’s disappearance. After all, it was he who had allowed the boy to conduct his road work alone, as he had requested, along the most obscure of mountain thoroughfares, many of which constituted little more than trails. At the time it had seemed a natural fit for his nephew’s independence and extensive knowledge of the slopes. Yet now all manner of potential dangers haunted his mind: from chance encounters with rattlers or painters to human menaces from the likes of bootleggers or jealous admirers of Cora Nichols.

Columbus’s axe, rake, and shovel had been discovered resting against a stunted chestnut tree at the end of a road high on a rocky peak as if they had been set there in no particular hurry, yet in vain Sherman rode the nearby trails and hillsides, putting his deputies and volunteer searchers to shame by staying out the better part of several nights and occasionally even sleeping in the saddle. Still the mountains offered him no clues and with each passing day Sherman’s hope waned even as his deputies took to trading uncertain glances among themselves and the volunteers began to straggle away. After all, it was not unusual for a man to be taken by the mountains and the folks who lived among the Smokies had a feeling—not unlike a clock in the head—when it looked as though a body was gone for good. And as much as Sherman Clabough sought to ignore the ticking in his own mind, he had begun to accept, loath as he was to do so, that too much time had elapsed and it was not for him to lay eyes on his nephew again.

*

On the day of his disappearance, Columbus Clabough worked steadily toward the end of the road he knew was about to give out. He had passed the last residence, a dilapidated abandoned cabin said to have been built by a trapper before the war, some two miles back down the mountain and kept on along the switchback curves and crumbling limestone roadbed as the way grew ever narrower. Here and there saplings had sprung up in the road due to its lack of use and these he felled with one-handed blows of the axe, leaving them where they lay as he moved on, rake and shovel gripped together in his other hand. A more challenging task was lifting or rolling to the roadside boulders which had tumbled down into the thoroughfare. Some were the manageable size of cantaloupes or watermelons while others proved more on the order of trunks or chests. It was these latter rocks he struggled with the most, grunting as he awkwardly turned them end over end toward the road’s edge.

It was getting on late in the work day. The sky remained overcast. Even though it was only the beginning of October, the air was raw and pointed, propelled by a constant breeze one often encounters when nearing the summit of a mountain. Columbus knew if he lingered much longer he would be hard-pressed to make it home before dark. Yet something within him—pride, stubbornness, the vanity of youth—filled him with a desire to finish off the road: to see both it and his labor on it to their respective ends.

It is not difficult to guess which course of action won out. Toil on he did, hurling or rolling boulders and chopping saplings, until he arrived at what he reckoned must have been the road’s terminus. One must say reckoned, for though the imprint of the roadbed continued on, the saplings sprang up in clumps, mere inches from each other, and two great immovable rocks the size of wagons blocked any further potential progress by a wheeled vehicle.

The clouds had thickened, dimming the mountainsides, and casting the hollows into a deeper hue of darkness. Columbus knew it was time to depart and that he’d likely be walking in the moonlight ere he reached the other side of Gatlinburg. Yet he lingered on for a moment considering with some satisfaction first the cleared way behind him and then the wall of rock and wood which dictated the thoroughfare’s end. But just as he turned from taking in the sloping mountainside forest which lay beyond the cessation of his efforts, his nose caught a whiff of wood smoke and another odor he could not quite place. Taking note of the shifting breeze, he determined the smell was borne from around the mountainside. He paused only for an instant, realizing that searching out the smoke condemned him to a night’s journey or sleeping in the woods, yet he had embraced such privations before and, besides, had made it his life’s business to search out the mysteries and forlorn places of the Smokies. Carefully he laid his tools against a chestnut trunk and set off in the direction the wind beckoned.

He walked perhaps a quarter of an hour in the fading dimness before he caught the smell again. It was stronger this time but issued it seemed from a place higher up the mountain. Accordingly, he adjusted his course, making his way patiently, taking short shuffling steps so as to avoid slipping on an invisible loose rock or tumbling over a wayward root.

The mountainside steepened, the quantity of trees lessening and giving way to bushes and outcroppings of rock. Columbus found himself leaning forward, grasping narrow trunks and edges of rock for support, before collapsing to all fours and drawing himself up bodily wherever his hands found something sturdy enough to bear him. It was dark now and he advanced as much by touch as sight.

At last he emerged on a rock plateau of sorts where he could stand straight again, and it was here his search concluded, for some way across the rocks, accompanied by the now-familiar odor, he made out the faint glow of a fire flickering in the breeze and what he took to be the hint of a voice.

It was not difficult to walk quietly over the rock and Columbus advanced slowly in the darkness, taking short steps, ears attuned. Yet silent as he treaded, when he came within perhaps twenty paces of the fire, a voice rang out—feminine, old, raspy.

“Come on over and fool your face, pilgrim!” it exclaimed.

“Yes’m,” he replied into the mountain wind for lack of anything else better to say.

As he advanced the unsteady flames revealed two old women clad all in black standing on either side of the fire, on which stood a large dark pot.

The sight of the pot revealed to Columbus the odor he had been unable to name: moonshine. Yet he had never heard tell of woman bootleggers and ancient ones at that. Indeed, their bearing and the whole scene rather suggested his mother’s childhood tales of witching women. Lacking in superstition, Columbus felt foolish at the thought but troubled nonetheless.

When he came to stand within the full illumination offered by the firelight, what he saw added to his discomfort. The two female figures might have been twins in their horrid decrepitude. They shared the same deep wrinkles, hooked noses, and toothless mouths, only one of the old women—the one he guessed must have called out to him—possessed twinkling, hard black eyes while the other wore a near-oblivious expression on her hanging yellow cheeks.

The more observant of the pair watched Columbus as her hand stirred the pot with a thick stick.

“Welcome, Columbus Clabough,” she said.

“You know my name?” replied the incredulous youth.

“It’s long been our habit to know what goes on in these mountains,” said the old woman, “and we figure there’s less than the number of fingers on a hand, the men who might hunt us out when we’re about our business—and Isaac Clabough’s wandering boy is one of them.”

“But I won’t hunting you,” said Columbus, growing more uncomfortable.

“Yet here you are,” said the old woman, black eyes flashing briefly in the firelight. “Here you are.”

To combat his growing anxiety Columbus began to talk, unconscious of the fact his words occasionally stumbled over each other. He was working the old road that ran up the other side of the mountain. He had smelled the smoke. It was nothing to him what the two old ladies were doing up here.

The speaking crone interrupted him. “When there’s folks that take an interest in a body’s business, even if they don’t mean to, well then them’s folks a body most likely can do without.”

For the first time the other old woman made a sound—a guttural, watery, ascending noise that might have been muffled laughter.

Columbus fought back something akin to fear. He was being threatened. The thought of such feeble creatures doing him any physical harm seemed laughable, yet he wondered if they were alone or if there could be others somewhere out in the darkness. How had these two hags toted a big pot to the summit of the mountain without benefit of any road or trail Columbus knew of? He shivered involuntarily.

“There’s a comet a-coming,” said the first one.

“What?” asked Columbus, nearly at wits’ end. “What’s that?”

“A thing that flies from place to place across the heavens. Folks will have never seen the like.”

The other hag grinned.

“It’ll glow at night,” continued the first one, “and the tail that comes out behind it will be near as wide as the sky and black as coal.”

She ceased stirring the pot suddenly and, flattening her wrinkled hand, passed it over the pot.

“The tail of that comet will sweep across the earth,” she continued, “and when it passes some things will be changed though folks won’t know what they are.”

Then she lapsed into a raspy fragment of song:

There was an old woman didn’t have but one eye.

But she had a long tail that she let fly.

Every time that she went through a gap,

She left a piece of her tail in a trap.

The crone grinned at Columbus in the wake of the last verse, the gaping blackness where her teeth should have been transforming the expression into a disgusting, mirthless gesture.

“What’s the tune about, boy? It’s a riddle.”

Columbus shook his head, no longer capable of thinking clearly.

“Why, a needle, of course,” said the old woman, as if instructing a child.

“Now looky here,” she continued, “you do something for us—you make like that needle and go where we say go for a spell—and you needn’t pay no mind to comets and ailments and the like. You’ll live a long life to boot, though its writ on you you’ll never have any younguns to call your own.

“Elect to do otherwise and you’ll have worries aplenty, now and on up till the time of your dying.”

Columbus looked from one hag to the other, taking in again their dreadful physical degradation which nonetheless afforded them a power he lacked the capacity to fathom. He realized suddenly he had been sweating heavily, his shirt well-nigh drenched. The breeze shifted suddenly and the smoke of the fire washed over him, forcing unbidden tears to form in the corners of his eyes. He coughed softly, lowering his head, and on trembling lips he offered them his response.

*

Columbus Clabough died in December 1973, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday and just a handful of weeks before I entered the world. True to the prophecy of the witching women he and Cora Nichols never had any children, and true to an oath they exacted of him, he never told anyone the nature of the service he performed for them. His body lies in Lynnhurst Cemetery, Knoxville, the secret buried with him.

The Succubus and I: A True Romance of the Twenty-First Century

(fiction)

Succubus (suhk-yuh-buhs): a supernatural female entity who engages in sexual intercourse with a mortal man, feeding on his life force to sustain herself until he is exhausted of all energy and/or perishes.

—Professor Nicolas Bourbaki, Necronomicon Concordia, Volume III

In truth the collective identification and study of the curious entities termed Succubi among English-speaking scholars of the occult has unfolded only as a most gradual process of distillation across time and cultures, so that even now—in this unprecedented era of highly specialized scientific disciplines and technologies—these paranormal females remain but half-believed manifestations of vague legend or rumor, inhabiting precariously only the remotest recesses of the popular mind. Yet it remains they constitute a fundamental phenomenon, a kind of barely discernible archetypal echo, tethered to our very beginnings and, moreover—that is, if we happen to cast an uneasy eye toward the other end of the great divide of existence—one that seems destined to dwell with us: to accompany our sad species, not unlike an attractive date to some dreaded momentous social function, as we approach our impending collective end. Or at least I can here step forward from this introduction’s cloud of ruminative abstraction to attest that, in my own circumstances, the being of their kind with whom I became acquainted elected not to abandon me at the threshold of death.

Doubts notwithstanding, it should prove easy enough for even the most skeptical and iconoclastic of readers among you—those whose polite disdain for the supernatural long ago mushroomed into unfeigned ridicule—to envision and appreciate the nature of Succubi since they have come to be—however unconscious the apprehended presence of their being—something most all of us vaguely sense or otherwise know, lurking about, as it were, within the liquid-wall confines of what the mind scientists once termed the collective unconscious with an apparent total disregard for and immunity from such otherwise limiting factors as borders, beliefs, and epochs. In a number of African cultures, for example, the Succubus is known as “the witch riding your back,” while the Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria variantly refer to her as “Ogun Oru,” which means “nocturnal warfare.” An obscure and as yet untranslated article in the Chirurgical Journal, that authoritative nineteenth century periodical of parapsychological studies, noted that in the frigid and forlorn island folk culture of Iceland she is called “Mara,” and here we must note that our still much-used, perhaps overly-used, word “nightmare” has drifted down to we speakers of English by way of that name. Other traditional European cultures recognized her in like fashion and named her in kind: the Proto-Germanic “maron”; the Old English “mære”; the German “Mahr”; the Dutch “nachtmerrie”; the Old Norse “Faroese”; the Old Irish “morrigain”; the Polish “mora”; the French “cauchemar”; the Romanian “moroi”; the Czech “mura”; and so on.

By definition and persuasion she is a taker, a conqueror: a powerful being driven nonetheless by great hunger, prodigious needs. In India, where she is called Mohini, she ascends into the world of mortals by way of a remote deep well—the appearance of which, when you peer down into it, is really more akin to an abyss than a well—in search of that particular male lover who might help to provide her with the more-than-human child-being she desires. In New Guinea this process of male-harvesting is called “Suk Ninmyo” and is believed to originate from certain sacred trees which feed nocturnally on the essence of human men in order to sustain themselves.

In Greece and on Cyprus, where the Succubus might take the name of Vrahnas or the more ominous-sounding Varypnas, she is said to abscond with her victim’s speech—his fundamental ability to form words—as well as his energy and love, and is known sometimes to sit atop him, pressing down upon his chest with extraordinary force, occasionally to the point of asphyxiating him. Similarly, in Hmong culture there exists a description of an experience called “dab tsog” or “crushing demon,” in which the victim becomes aware of a tiny female figure, no larger than a small child really, straddling his torso and squeezing with a power capable of fracturing a strong man’s ribs. And as incredible as the fact might seem to the educated contemporary mind, it is nonetheless all too tragic and true that the vast and disturbing number of American Hmong males on record as having died in their sleep for no apparent reason has prompted the Centers for Disease Control to add to its distressing institutional vocabulary the specialized term “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome.”

Indeed, as the story I am about to convey will attest, men of our own time are far from spared the dire, yet ultimately largely traceless, otherworldly presence of these Succubi. Of special note, in sections of the American South (the states of the old Confederacy), including my own native Virginia, she often is referred to as “Old Hag” despite her alluring appearance of youth and beauty, though in the mountain South of my father’s people, the craggy hills and hollows of Appalachia, she is more likely to be labeled a “haint,” a visitation from whom usually serves as an omen for some approaching tragedy or mishap. The death of a great uncle, in fact, was foretold in just this manner when a haint of extraordinary beauty and force called upon my great-grandfather as he lay sleeping beneath Heintooga Bald in the midst of a winter journey across the Smoky Mountains to Asheville during the eighth decade of the nineteenth century.

As I was not the first in my family line to encounter a Succubus, what more might be said here of the nature of the visited, for without such men as us there would exist no record of the entity? Does our victimhood, such as it is, derive from some arcane curse or gift? Or might there be more tangible reasons—traceable variables or traits—that lead us to be chosen? In researching these questions parapsychologists have pointed to a link between male sexuality and ultraconsciousness—that is, a communicative association which couples the masculine sex drive with certain paranormal predispositions. The concomitant measure of each, proclaims the data, is determined largely by a combination of a man’s psychological attitudes toward sex and a complex array of particular genetic factors as determined and modulated by the pineal gland: a tiny endocrine gland located deep inside the skull which functions both as an eye receptor and a regulator of sexual maturation.

Is it possible, then, that there is something about the victim which dictates the attraction and subsequent conduct of a Succubus? Might it turn out, after all, in the great majority of cases, that he is truly less a victim and more a catalyst—perhaps even a catalyst possessed of some curious degree of agency? Could it be that we victims so-called are as much the haunters of their world as they of ours? Perhaps the successful proof of such a hypothesis would indeed prove something unprecedented and even profound, though I am not at liberty to say what. And whether it ultimately would have, beyond the most restless shadows of doubt, any bearing upon the unlikely events I am about to recount likely will never be known.

I shall tell you what occurred. You can judge for yourself.

*

I had fallen into an existence of cloudy weather, eschewing both the spotlight of stark illumination and the sightless black of darkness deepest. There is many a person whose soul, at one time or another, has gone to sleep like a leg, and such a person then was I. My usually responsive face, perpetually open and receptive to all the four winds, had taken on an abstract look as though posing to the various beings and things it encountered the same unanswerable question.

I had been suffering from a medical condition, an especially debilitating manifestation of a certain peculiar affliction which had haunted me since my earliest days but had grown much worse of late, until at last it had broken me. The effect of this defeat left me not so much a bad man, but, in a very real and unfortunate sense, a ruined man—that is, damaged in such a way that seemed beyond my capacity to self-diagnose or repair. It was as if I had realized very suddenly just how debilitated and exhausted I gradually had become and, as a result of the jolt accompanying that epiphanic knowledge, had subsequently collapsed into a low ebb of existence—a particular, self-styled Slough of Despond—which those conditions prescribed and demanded.

It is true that even before my illness I had been described on occasion by even my fondest of acquaintances as eccentric or mysterious or even sorcerous, but we are not privy here to the requisite space for an investigation of these purported unnatural—what some might even consider “magical”—qualities. I believe you will agree when I suggest these outlandish (and, I dare say, wholly inaccurate) characterizations must necessarily prove of little relevant moment in light of the nature of that otherworldly being who sought me out. This document should be more her story than mine, or, at the very least, the faithful account of my dealings with she who I suppose must be labeled the heroine of this tale.

Here I am strongly tempted to dawdle for a while and indulge in the particulars of how the association between the Succubus and I began and unfolded. Indeed, were I to follow my own wishes, I would assemble a minute and detailed description of our first encounter as well as the ensuing earliest meetings—of our various talks and hastily deepening bond. Fortunately, however, I am aware the great majority of readers in your midst would not share my enjoyment of such an exercise. To combat that risk of readerly superfluousness then and get on to the more crucial events, I shall reluctantly omit the particulars of those initial episodes in favor of summarizing their general flavor and hue. In other words, let’s keep a few paces back from the canvas for now, taking in the whole of the painting, rather than drawing out some magnifying glass and craning forward to scrutinize one of its insignificant corners.

I should admit, however, before proceeding further, that the narrative decision I have just settled upon is as much one of literal necessity as it is a carefully weighed preference, for were I to attempt a conveyance of the details of my initial meetings with the Succubus, it likely would neither form in my mind nor leap from the page very readily. Though the precise reasons for this haziness of recollection and expression evade me, I am not especially surprised by the condition, knowing as I do how my great-grandfather’s memory of his episode with the haint on the Heintooga mountainside was afflicted by a similar lack of detail: a like degree of impeded clarity, a blurriness with regard to past experience. Attempting to summon up an account of my very first meeting with the Succubus, I am rewarded with almost nothing, though I do recall that it occurred very late into the night, perhaps closer to early morning. I recollect too the unprecedented sensation of becoming aware of a mysterious and powerful sensual essence beyond any state of dream which slowly coalesced into the felt form of a female being. Beyond the intensity of sexual experience which followed, however, I can offer very little. Whether we kissed once or many times I cannot recall. The truth of whether we joined in love once or repeated the oldest human dance twice or more is gone from my mind now as well. And it troubles me to no small degree, as moving as the experiences was—among the most significant of my life, really—that I cannot recollect more.

I can tell you that the nature of the visitations, for she did come again, over the course of the ensuing nights altered slowly so that they seemed less wild physical passion and more the delirious abstract promise of overpowering happiness. In fact, the sensuousness of sensation seemed as much an exchange of minds as of real or imagined bodies. She murmured sympathetically to me about matters concerning myself as well as my closest relations, followed by long meaningful silences of the sort that occur without awkwardness only among the best and most intimate of confidants. I awakened mornings with a sense of undeserved joy hovering about the bed. Despite the fantastic—perhaps even the outrageous—quality of what was transpiring, I have to say that my reaction to her discovery of me was not one of surprise. Rather I felt as though I had been expecting her my entire life.

From my very first acquaintance with the Succubus I realized she possessed a degree of beauty and intuition that living females do not enjoy. Though I could not see her, the image of her form that came to me most often was of a young woman in a long white dress swaying slowly, rhythmically, patiently, in a rocker or porch swing, seemingly at her leisure yet all the while marking intently the world about her. Whenever she appeared to me the nature of existence itself suddenly became a beautiful and enchanting phenomenon, the very air shimmering with her presence and echoing with a high, cascading, sustained sound not unlike wind chimes. I relate these descriptions, mind you, with the full realization that their fanciful quality is likely to deepen those reservations of skepticism harbored by some of you and perhaps lead others in your midst to proceed even further and reckon me mad. Be that as it may, I hope that for the moment you will suspend your judgment of me in favor of focusing on and appreciating the nature of the entity I am describing. For truly she was something at which to marvel. And surely any man among you—regardless of time and circumstance, including those of you just becoming young men in this uncertain now of today—would quickly come to adore and treasure a being such as her. I must insist that it would be so, for I cannot imagine otherwise.

Very quickly it seemed to me as though the Succubus became my female counterpart or equivalent in just about every particular. We felt little need for asking each other questions. We seemed to know each other better than anyone else. It was like this: we grew into each other like two winding trees rising from the same bit of earth: pressing, touching, overlapping. And in the midst of this growing, against the backdrop of our shared silence, I became aware of a pleasant low hum as if some expert chorus of molecules had come to inhabit and serenade the air around us. At first I did not know what this meant, but gradually it dawned on me. What I was hearing was the sound which announces that love has begun.

Our happiness was lyrical. “I am the embodiment of all you have ever wanted in a woman,” she would say in that husky voice of hers. And in the same voice she informed me of the previous men whose lives she had emptied or otherwise claimed, drawing on them until they were little more than hollow-eyed, lean-jawed shells. There had been a great host of them and they all had wanted her very much. “But you are different,” she would say in the voice. “You are the one I will leave yourself so that you might dwell with me.”

But then, very suddenly, as is often the case in life, the course of events changed. The meteorological hue of my sunny, almost daily experience with the Succubus, which had smiled upon me warmly up to that point, began to darken and cool, slowly altering its expression to that of a frown. It was if she had come to sense some hesitancy or reluctance on my part toward the overpowering quality and depth of our connection and had not the capacity to process that impression with anything other than fear and resentment. I knew very little about her past at that time, but I was visited by the impression that here was a being whose experience had taught her to fear the worst even as all appears well. It was as if the anxiousness with which she watched me gauged by subtle signs some imminent unpleasant event, the flames of her anxiety fanned by an intimate knowledge of how he or she who has lost and who fears the more remains always the inferior and the sufferer. I would add to this interpretation of the ripples of her thought the simple observation that, in my experience, any gifts added to a beautiful and remarkable woman must be paid for—that is to say, those very qualities which pass as positive characteristics in less attractive and accomplished females too often manifest themselves as dangerous liabilities in their more desirable sisters. Despite her supernatural essence, I believe she was subject to this all-too-human truth.

And so the whimsical sensual nature of the Succubus that had so drawn and compelled me turned brooding and lugubrious. Her voice, theretofore a delicious medley of rare hot spices and rich soothing honey, came forth now with dog-voiced harshness. I am ashamed to admit that my response to her anxiety was wanting, for I made the mistake of attempting to reason with her, recalling too late that a tactic of that sort falls in line with certain forms of magnanimity which function very well among men but are usually misplaced, if not utterly disastrous, in dealings between men and women. There is, as the saying goes, a man’s atmosphere and a woman’s atmosphere, and it is rare for them to mix very well except in the proper place: beneath the sheets. Thus the Succubus turned and changed, her alteration hastened by fear, while I failed repeatedly in my attempts to soften or placate her. She ceased to visit me altogether and in place of her presence I began to awake in the night with a tightness in my chest as though some invisible force sought to pin me to my bed. I knew nothing then of Hmong culture or “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome”—I had yet to embark on the formal study that would contextualize the precise nature of what I was I dealing with—but my dark vivid dreams and occasional near-suffocation constituted sufficient evidence that my nightly discomfort stemmed from something more than coincidence or a sagging mattress. I sensed the imperceptible movements of her graceful hands behind my cloud of discomfort and came almost to be afraid of her.

It was during this period of adversity and uncertainty that I might have made one of those firm and fine moral decisions people make in books and resolved to shun her, quitting the region perhaps and removing to some other part of the country. As I was, by that time, well on the way to recovery from my aforementioned malady—my experience, my romance if you will, with the Succubus having hastened my convalescence—I felt healthy enough to knock about again as I once did and, indeed, the temptation at that time to disappear for a week or so into one of the vast stretches of Virginia’s national forests, as I had done on occasion in my younger years, was very great.

Instead, owing to my general state of indecision and perhaps a craving for some limited measure of distraction and fellowship, I resolved to spend an evening with a friend at a favorite café. I had many friends in those days, most of whom owed me a favor or two on account of some secret, unbidden deed I likely had performed on their behalf behind the scenes. It was one of the things I was known for back then. The friend I had selected to share my company and absorb the unburdening of my dilemma was a fellow I knew neither too little nor too well. A steady chap, he might have been called—unimaginative, balanced, conservative—whose discreteness I knew had been favorably put to the test by others of our acquaintance on a number of occasions. Gauging my own mind as a whimsical one, I likely hoped his more sensible outlook might offer a judicious perspective on my circumstances if one was to be had.

Indeed, such was the almost unflappable quality of this fellow’s steadfastness that his eyebrows raised but slightly as I completed the account of my association with the Succubus up to its then current state of menacing downward trajectory.

He sipped at his drink, for a long pull would have violated that signature cool steadfastness, and leaned back in his chair before speaking. “Why did you keep on seeing her when it started going all to hell? Why are you still sleeping in the same bed, the same house, now?”

“It’s like I’m compelled to. She draws me, I reckon.”

“Draws you?”

“Draws me.”

His eyes grew more intense as I repeated myself, until they acquired a slightly glazed quality. “If that’s the case, then I think its all the more crucial you keep away from the place.”

“What if she follows after me?”

“Well, you say she hasn’t been visiting you lately. Maybe she won’t.”

“I was thinking just that thought when I fell asleep last night. It was when I heard her voice in my head.”

“Her voice?”

“Yes. She wasn’t there. I mean, I didn’t feel her presence. But I heard her. I heard that voice.”

Phlegmatic as my manner was in those days, I must have looked disturbed when I answered, for his lips were already slightly parted before he asked the inevitable question. “What did she say?”

I hesitated before answering. “What she told me was that when I died I would be hers.”

In the ensuing moments both of us were silent, each of us toying with our drinks, our eyes wandering around the other tables of the dark little café, reluctant to meet each other. At last he began holding forth with the long-winded clichéd perspective on life which I had expected to receive beforehand and knew was designed to rally my spirits.

“All of this will pass,” my friend said as he neared his conclusion. “People don’t live in a state of emergency forever; things work themselves out. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way—its kindly meant—but I think maybe you’ve been spared some of the periodic jolts the rest of us encounter fairly regularly. Perhaps when you do happen to experience a real crisis your friends are slow to recognize it on account of your having been that fellow who has been there so often for them. That and you always seem to have it together—at least outwardly. I believe our mutual friends tend to buy into a certain illusion that your life is settled and easy just because you’re clever and good-looking and are rumored to have a fat cock or whatever. It’s shallow but understandable, you know?”

He laughed abruptly before allowing the lines of his mouth to lapse into a sympathetic smile. Yes, I did know, but merely returned his smile and said nothing. I had learned it is just as well to let friends tell you things you already know when they wish to. It disposes them kindly toward you if you suffer them to impart information they deem, however erroneously, special and their own. In truth, as cynical as it might sound, I have to say I expected no real wisdom from him or even an intelligent understanding of my trials. My friends in those days were all very charming, and charming friends need not possess much in the way of minds for us to be fond of them. I was of a kind who loved his friends most dearly—would do anything for them—yet I had long ago ceased to confide in them anything of an especially private or significant nature. I was decidedly out of practice then when it came to disclosing the complexities of my inner life and probably had done so poorly on this occasion. When I thanked my friend I did so with heartfelt gratitude and sincerity, but it was accompanied by the sad and helpless abstract feeling that I had come to know too many people and had been much happier when there were not so many in my life.

I dwelled on that somber thought again as I lay in bed that night but made no further progress with it. It was replaced following a period of dozing by the words the Succubus had uttered to me the night before: “When you die you will be mine.”

I possessed no inkling then that this statement might eventually confirm itself as nothing short of true, and, indeed, how could I? At that time I was still laboring beneath the misconception that I remained master of my fate. Whatever the limits of my perceptions and devices, however, a collective darkness—what might be labeled, in the vernacular, a “bad feeling”—perpetually inhabited the fringes of all my ruminations, and the essence of it existed in—was articulated by—the words of the Succubus. There was something in their sound and meaning that felt wrong and humiliating, like overhearing one’s partner joke with their lover about your most intimate shortcomings and faults. Yes, there was something of that. But worse than hurtful irreverence, worse even than the declaration that all I constituted was destined to become forcibly owned, was the coupling of the two of us—of the Succubus and I, of all that so recently had been beauty and love and freedom—beneath so cruel and black a banner of fate. It felt to me, as though in a nightmare—like thought melted into nightmare—as if some great winding dark sheet were descending from the heavens to envelop us both in a common grave.

*

We arrive now at the big gap of time that stared me in the face when I began this narrative, and though minute actions certainly occurred during the interval we are about to skip over and life went on, I believe it is in the best service of what I wish to convey to pause briefly for the purpose of engaging in a little necessary speculation and reflection. As I have refrained to this point from relating too many tiresome particulars, I hope you will see fit to perform a kindness and indulge me a little here.

Chiefly, I wish to address the important question of why I might have been singled out by the Succubus, for beyond the genetic and parapsychological factors I outlined in my ponderous introduction, there is little really which has established me as being much at variance with other men of my time. Yet it is true that throughout my life I have been something of a wanderer and a wonderer and a taker of risks—far beyond the extent, in fact, of anyone I have known—and I believe that is one of the chief reasons the Succubus was attracted to me so. By any conventional measure, I should have died on a number of occasions, and eventually, of course, I did. For here I must own up that I have been deceased these past two years. I hope you will forgive me for withholding this crucial fact up until now, but it seemed necessary to do so in order to establish between us something resembling a bond. For those readers among you who may feel slighted or cheated or betrayed by the tardiness of the disclosure rest assured the particulars of my demise are directly forthcoming. I trust you realize how truly grateful I am at the privilege of having passionate, discerning readers such as yourselves considering my words at all and my gratitude in light of your generous and enduring patience is especially deep and appreciative. Thank you for bearing with me, for suspending your impatience, that we might soon come to understand one another a little better.

When I graduated from college, there were two things I could do remarkably well: write a passable paper and deliver prodigious amounts of pleasure to those with whom I found myself intimate. Despite having chosen as mine a retiring sort of scribbling academic profession, the second of these abilities—a talent for loving, it might be called—proved far more meaningful and rewarding over the course of my life than the first.

I seem to have been born with an ability, often associated with those possessed of an artistic temperament, to place myself in and experience the lives of others, and, in particular, I have always felt a special affinity for girls—that is, the behaviors and manners that mark them as girls and which conspire to make them appear whimsical and even altogether traceless to most all boys. Even at the very first childhood dances of my youth—the girls huddled at one end of the floor and the boys at the other, unmindful of the urgings of chaperones and parents—it was I who broke the stalemate, drifting across the empty divide and selecting always the girl who seemed to me the most alone, the most apart from the others. She might have been the prettiest girl though most often she was not. Remarking first upon her hair or how her earrings matched her shoes or the way in which the manifold shades of her long dress seemed to flow so fluidly into one another, I would get around at last to requesting that she join me on the dance floor. Though the following statement very well may be construed as a manifestation of pride or vanity, I must offer nonetheless that not on a single occasion was I rejected. And once this groundbreaking action was performed—my chosen partner and I swaying alone in tandem, apart from everyone else, the sole denizens of a dim musical universe—the others gradually would pair off and fall in, helping us to people that curious space we two had been first to discover and explore.

Because I was genuinely interested in the girls that I knew, I always listened to them very closely, and, in turn, they treasured the unusual fact that a boy their age would be interested enough to listen and, moreover, take their concerns seriously. For this reason, on a number of occasions, I often was the only boy in attendance at some birthday party or social function otherwise populated solely by girls and perhaps a few of their mothers. Either out of politeness or genuine acceptance, no one to my knowledge ever commented upon the curiousness of this phenomenon. If anything, the mothers in attendance tended to make over me more than the daughters of their peers, referring to me as a good sport and a little gentleman and so on. As for my own mother who bore me to these functions the mild social oddity of my being the only boy in attendance either passed unnoticed or seemed a subject of relative insignificance to her formidable and otherwise occupied nonconformist intellect.

And so the girls at these parties giggled and squirmed in their chairs, white stockinged feet in shiny black buckled shoes tapping loudly on hardwood floors beneath some white table-clothed dining room table, while I smiled and looked on and joined in when it was time to blow out the candles or sing a song. Afterwards I would dutifully play the games that had been planned—pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey a mainstay among them—performing neither too well nor too shabby, pacing myself alongside those girls who tried but a little or tried hard and failed, so as not to arouse jealousy or call too much attention to myself. And if our play spilled out of doors into some spacious backyard or shady country grove, skirts and ribbons fluttering amid the headlong, I inevitably was assigned the role of fort guardian or prince or king in the imaginary scenario at hand, though I was always careful to remain within the limits of the stage directions given me and not adlib too much. If, however, it happened that one of the younger or less popular girls began to cry on account of being left out, I would then take it upon myself to shape the collective story, lightly sketching along the corners of its canvas you might say, by drawing the sad girl in question aside and informing her that she was in fact the king’s daughter or the prince’s younger sister, either prospect of which delighted her since it meant she was a princess of some importance.

As we all aged and changed my appearances at such functions and then the very occasions themselves became rarer and rarer until at last they disappeared entirely, passed on like some treasured outgrown hand-me-down to our younger sisters. But though these events melted away the associations that had accompanied them did not, for to a few of these girls I would remain something on the order of the elder brother they never had, brushing away a tear or offering a shoulder to cry on when another of my sex had torn or wrecked their hearts and sometimes their bodies. “You are,” I would say at such times, having drawn them aside, “a woman of some importance.”

If pressed to speculate upon identifying a reason as to my strong and early connection to girls, the best explanation I likely might offer would come in the form of an additional anecdote involving another and very different peer group of females. I am speaking here of my grandmother’s circle of Bridge Club ladies—all of them widows, all of them cultivated and accomplished, all of them well within a decade of their deaths.

These monthly Bridge gatherings were stately occasions for the venerable ladies involved as they constituted the only activities which drew them from their homes save church and the various mundane weekly errands that sustain an elderly woman in her widowhood. Who can blame them for uniting with each other and making the most of such times—for donning their favorite jewelry and sleek antiquated evening dresses: outfits that surely would have been considered scandalous demimonde attire in the matronly eyes of their more severe churchgoing contemporaries? Indeed, it affords me a curious happiness even now to think of the pleasure they must have taken in slipping on and parading for each other those treasured things they had not worn in years, perhaps decades.

I do not recall any other child ever having been in attendance at these Bridge Club gatherings and I find myself struggling, as much from a wanting vocabulary as a hazy memory, to articulate the exact nature of the relationship that existed between that remarkable circle of women and myself. I do remember, however, very clearly my grandmother’s pride as the ritual of their making over me ensued at the outset of each gathering, my smile fixed like one in a photograph as I beamed up at them all.

“What a little gentleman he is!” one would exclaim.

“But look at his eyes!” the faded beauty in their midst declared, clasping her ringed hands together. “He is an angel, a little angel sent from God!”

“I shall arrange a marriage between him and my great niece who is about to start St. Catherine’s!” another announced with equal enthusiasm.

“They are both blonde,” she continued by way of explanation, her gin glass suddenly empty.

Then they would pass me around among them, smell of tobacco and alcohol and mints on their dry stale breaths as their withered lips kissed me and whispered endearments in my ear, before pressing me to their soft drooping bosoms, until it was time for the night’s agenda to commence and I was banished to some unoccupied corner of the hostess’s home, often the study of her long dead husband—walls lined with war medals, advanced degrees, deer heads, pipes—where I entertained myself as best I could among his musty effects.

It was my favorite of the group, a sassy little woman named Miss Ruby whose husband had owned the Lucky Strike cigarette factory in the state capitol, who usually came in at the conclusion of the evening to wake me, brushing my cheek or fingering a pale strand of my hair, as I lay sprawled on some sofa, rug, or chair.

“You are our little mascot!” one of them would declare as I stood bleary-eyed in their midst, eager to depart, and they would all hug me yet again, squeezing me tighter than before.

“Promise you’ll always be a good boy,” Miss Ruby would say, “and won’t ever forget us.”

“I promise,” I would reply. But of course I would go on to break both conditions of that promise all too frequently over the course of my life—sometimes outrageously. Yet setting down these words here should serve as proof enough that I never forgot those splendid grand dames and the impression they made upon me. Indeed, I think of them even now on those infrequent occasions when I have managed to be of genuine assistance to a woman who needed me—when I truly have been good.

It was my grandmother, a vivacious personality and master storyteller, who made it possible for me to appreciate the ladies of her Bridge circle. Otherwise, I might have taken a conventional young boy’s jaundiced view of the aged and reckoned them all dull crones. But with grandmother everything, even a morning of widow’s errands in town, became its own adventure, deepened by its shared quality between us. And when she recounted to me a selection from her rich collection of tales the past would spring to life in vivid colors, smells, and sensations. Again there would arise that element of sharing as she gauged my reaction to each sentence—to each new twist and turn in the narrative.

“They said she lived beneath the ground,” grandmother said, rocking in her chair, eyes shining, hands busy with her knitting, “in the muck where it’s cold and wet.”

She was telling one of the stories I liked best: an old Tidewater tale concerning Grace Sherwood—“the Witch of Gisburne” who had lived in Princess Anne County.

“And they said she had webbing in her armpits like a fish,” she continued, dropping a needle and leaning forward to poke my armpit with a bony forefinger. “The better to slide through the mud. It opened like a lady’s fan when she raised her arm—so thin you could almost see through it.”

I would giggle then and ask the question I always did. “She wasn’t like normal people, was she?”

And grandmother, erect in her chair, maintaining an air of mock-severity while suppressing a smile. “She most certainly was not.”

“And her fins helped her swim,” I would exclaim with increasing enthusiasm, unwilling to wait for her to tell the next part. “She swam with the Devil in the water, didn’t she?”

“That’s right. They say she would frolic with the Devil out in the Chesapeake Bay on moonlit nights. The witch and the Devil would swim and dive and play like newlyweds on their honeymoon.”

“They were happy together.”

“Yes,” she would say, fingers slowing in their work as she moved her head so as to peer out into the dark woods beyond the porch. “I suppose they were. Boatmen spied them way out among the whitecaps and hunters glimpsed them in lonely tangled inlets when the tide was going out. They rode on the current, you see; it carried them with it. And the winter that Caucus Bay froze over one old fisherman even saw them dancing on the ice in the predawn—just dancing away like a couple of lusty young lovers.”

And on it went, the weaving of the tale proceeding between us in this way while grandmother’s hands kept busy at their knitting and I sat or lay on the floor before her, gazing up into her face warmly, adoringly, living my entire life inside the world she had summoned forth from her mind and made real for me with her words.

*

I suppose, then, it was impression made upon me by the remarkable females of my acquaintance—those unique personalities I had the good fortune to keep company with and draw lessons from during my earliest years—that figured most prominently into the Succubus’s attraction to and selection of me. It is true she never said as much, but the manner in which she responded to certain things I uttered or did led me to strongly believe that it was so—that owing to my encounters with certain particular females she treasured in me something that was perhaps rare in all but the smallest handful of males. The world is a very curious place and it so happens I have discovered that people may become quite valuable, even obsessively coveted, on account of their singularities—their uniqueness, their eccentricity, and, yes, even their madness. Yet it remains that between the sexes, like thoroughfares between provinces, there are certain common roads travelers are expected to take—that lie within our best interests to frequent. To journey along those more tangled and obscure paths is to do so at one’s peril.

So it was during that interval when the Succubus had refrained from visiting me a heavy sense of foreboding nonetheless permeated my waking moments, particularly after midnight when single moments develop the capacity to stretch into vast ponderous labyrinths of feeling and meaning. It was an ominous time, uneventful on its surface but possessed of a calm not unlike that before the proverbial coastal gale. The presence of the Succubus kept away but into its place there crept a shadow or echo of her essence—what might be termed a kind of trace element—which I could sense reconnoitering me, gauging my movements, even my thoughts. Discount this intuition, unsubstantiated as it is, if you like. I hope you will believe me when I profess I am loath to engage in too much fanciful speculation or to arouse additional conjecture concerning my mental constitution, but, after all, this is a supernatural tale and thus fantastic elements such as these should not be ignored or discounted.

Despite the general disquiet and feeling of imminent adversity that haunted my daily living during this period, I was not idle and, in fact, used my constant anxiety as a catalyst for becoming proactive in responding to the circumstances in which I found myself. For it was during this time that I took it upon myself to master all I could from the spectral body of recorded evidence—half-science, half-myth—concerning Succubi and, what’s more, if possible, learn what I could about my particular entity: who she had been when, like you, she traversed the world of the living.

I am not boasting when I contend that what I conveyed to you in this narrative’s introduction is but a small sampling of the vast knowledge I managed to attain on the subject of Succubi. The hours I spent in study were both exhausting and exhaustive. I journeyed to a number of distinguished libraries and scholarly holding sites, corresponded with the best minds in the field, and even proposed a collaborative research project to be administered and published by myself and a distinguished German parapsychologist whose state-of-the-art laboratory facility lay on the outskirts of one of those small decaying cities along the Rhine.

My efforts concerning my own Succubus, however, afforded me almost nothing, though the one shred of information I did uncover—the record of a tombstone bearing her name in the oldest cemetery of Virginia’s state capitol—proved crucial enough in that it led to our next meeting: the last occasion in fact that I ever would draw breath as a living creature upon the earth.

It so happens the day I sought out her grave exists now not so much as a day of its own, but a date that stands between other days as a kind of divide. It was after the lunch hour when I reached the cemetery and as I passed through its gates a watery sun bashfully showed itself for the first time through densely layered clouds. Her simple marker was not difficult to find. It stood on a sloping hillside where the cemetery’s peripheral plots give way to the dense undergrowth which falls away in the direction of the river. The simple moss-flecked stone bearing her name bore no epigraph nor any dates. It was as if that name—which I must reluctantly refuse to record here—captured and defined all there was to know and understand of her.

I stood there mutely, staring down at the marker, thinking of what it must be like to have departed the world of the living yet still retain one’s consciousness—some vague alimentation of feeling and thought. Would one still sense the stifling fumes of the damp earth, its soil darkened and enriched by the nearby ancient river, its lower layers inhabited by the alien fossils of distant epochs? Would you be capable of feeling the funeral garments which cling to your former body? And what of the absolute blackness and the silence which I have heard described as a “sea that overwhelms”? What of the unseen but palpable presence of the scavengers of the earth burrowing through the recently disturbed ground around you, relentless in their hunger? Could it be that the atoms of some of the oldest decomposed bodies find their way to life again in the form of the dark bushy holly and tangled ivy covering the damp invisible terrain as it slopes away toward the endlessly-flowing river?

I thought too of the Succubus as a mortal woman drawing breath and wondered what it might have been like to know her as such. It was then the sad thought struck me that so many things in our lives seem to happen out of alignment and sequence, as if all the pages of some voluminous picture book are torn out by invisible hands and thrown into the wind to flutter and land where they will. We had missed each other in time, she and I—missed the living of each other’s lives—yet something had brought us together nonetheless. Suddenly I felt very tired, given to a burdened leaden sensation unlike any I ever had experienced. I allowed my body to sink to the ground and seated myself with my back against the stone surety of her gravestone. The cool of its smooth surface penetrated my shirt, causing the skin along my spine to tingle. The sky had grown overcast, its clouds having darkened and drifted lower, paralleling the course of the river in their slow procession eastward. The air was still; not a single note of birdsong or rustle of foliage disturbed it. Slowly my head came forward as though descending into— affording a long slow single nod of agreement to—slumber.

That was how she found me in the twilight of that day: sleeping on the grass at the southern boundary of the city’s oldest cemetery. I grew aware of her in my slumber as she drew near, the familiarity of her presence filling my mind in such a way as to make it seem as though we had never been parted all those weeks and that, in truth, my soul had lived side by side with hers throughout that interval like shoots sprung in tandem from the same rare root.

“I have missed you,” I heard my voice say in my mind.

And she replied in kind in a soft voice that sounded musical as if singing to itself quietly.

“Sing me a song,” I said.

“What kind of song?”

“It doesn’t matter. No, wait, make it a sad one.”

And she sang to me then a song I did not know, but one so tragic and beautiful as to deepen the gathering darkness that lay beyond my sleep, as if hastening that defining day’s journey into night.

“That was wonderful,” I murmured when the song was over. “Could you sing another?”

“Of course,” the answer a song in itself. “I have forever. I’ll sing to you here as long as you like.”

Her voice became music once more and as it did I felt my heart sinking into my shoes as my body lay there listening among the old cemetery’s assortment of stone angels, little marble lamps, and the occasional granite cross. It seemed that only then did I realize how much I wanted her. It was as if I was glimpsing too late the true nature of things cast against that canvas which showed a tale of the degree to which I cared.

I knew it was weak of me to linger on that way, listening, but the line between thought and action had somehow become severed. It was like being under the fascination of a serpent. I thought to get up, to stir my prone body, but it proved an idle thought only. And in the instant when she stopped singing suddenly I knew that any course of action on my part was too late.

She gave me a look as though she might kill me, and then she did, the essence of my life burning and melting away within the depths of her eyes. I could not see them, mark you—could not see her—but I felt, as much as I ever have felt anything, their absorbing look. Such was the way in which she drew the life out of my being. Life and breath flowed out of me together.

*

Verily what are the things that lie in and behind the taking of a life?

Back during my time as a young runner who seldom lost races I often would look for things to amuse me as the athletic season wore on and my workout routines dwindled into some stale combination of strides and twenty minute runs. One afternoon prior to another such mundane practice I was delighted to find in a dark corner of the school’s equipment room an archaic javelin possessed of a rusty iron head and a smooth wooden shaft lined with small jagged cracks. Toting it out to the old football practice field beyond the tennis courts, I amused myself hurling it again and again until my coach yelled at me to fall in with the other runners for stretching.

The casting of the javelin became a daily ritual for me and he could not see the point of it, my coach, on account of the fact that the throwing of javelins did not constitute a sanctioned competitive event.

He viewed my hurling of that antiquated object as a waste of time, though he did afford me the grudging remark, “If javelin were a high school event in this state you’d win it easy.”

“I don’t care about that, Coach,” I had replied with a smile. “I just like doing it.”

He had shaken his head as he turned and walked away, but he stopped and looked back at me after a few paces. “You know, son,” he said, “if you did really care about winning, if put your heart and soul into practice the way you do tossing that stupid old stick, you’d be one holy terror of a runner.”

But the nature of an event—the nature of any action—has always held a greater degree of fascination and satisfaction for me than its prospect of competitive success. Earlier in my life, when I was a boy growing up on a farm, my father had ordered me to use something other than a gun whenever possible to dispatch the predatory nocturnal varmints that plagued our livestock so as to ration his stock of bullets. My implement of choice for this chore became an old pitchfork which had journeyed northward to Virginia with my grandfather from the Smoky Mountains. I liked not only that its many prongs, five all told, increased one’s chances of connecting with its target, but also that, if thrust with enough force, it would pass all the way through the animal’s body and embed itself in the ground or the old soft wood of the barn floor or whatever happened to lie behind which might give a little. Thus the pierced creature would find itself pinned, squirming, trapped, crucified, until breath and life departed it.

Despite being only a boy I became very good at wielding that pitchfork—expert, you might say. Never have I encountered anyone who handled one so well. It came to fascinate me too how when I withdrew the pitchfork from a pierced animal the prongs would leave five neat little red points where they had penetrated the hide. These small circular crimson blots always created in my mind the fantastic impression that the creature’s life might have been extinguished—sucked out, as it were—not by the pitchfork, but rather by the penetrating fingertips of God himself. And, indeed, sometimes I did let go the implement’s antiquated chestnut shaft in favor of reaching out my little fingers to touch gently those red holes which welled but slowly or brush ever so slightly the creature’s fur so as to feel the fading of its last warmth.

“We are the children of death,” said prophet, “and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life.”

Much later, as a young man living on a farm of my own, at the end of a chore involving a pitchfork—the same one, in fact, for it had been passed on to me—I sometimes would carry that remarkable family heirloom out into the pasture and cast it a few times just for the sheer joy of it, admiring its arc against the sun as it attained and then curved rainbow-like beyond its zenith. Beginning with a slow trot, knees thrusting high, I would hold back, waiting to achieve the proper speed and rhythm, before planting my forefoot and allowing the smooth rotation of the shoulders, the flow of my long muscular arms, to roll forward.

I have always imagined I must have appeared a little ridiculous heaving that old pitchfork clad in my shirtless overalls or torn up farm jeans, but I can tell you that people who witnessed me doing so never laughed. If anything their manner was politely noncommittal though on at least a couple of occasions the onlooker offered a bland compliment, perhaps in a fruitless effort to mask the troubled expression that had formed behind the eyes. And I have to say that though I took great pleasure in the activity, I wasn’t playing around when I did it. I mean, I really threw it out there.

*

Queer and inexplicable as the business of my death may seem, I did not hold any of it against the Succubus. I do not regret it, though I would not relish the prospect of going through the experience again. The truth of the matter is that I welcomed my death, realizing even then that its surface misfortune was, in reality, my good fortune. Whatever lingering shortcomings to which my faculties may have been subject at that time, they proved acute enough at least to appreciate that to experience love deeply and romantically in death or in life, regardless of any and all circumstances, is a precious gift and a very rare thing indeed. Its fundamental essence is a sublime and indescribable joy which ultimately makes small or renders moot the nature of a living existence or its lack. She had left it for me to choose and I had.

And when at last I was dead I finally was able to see her. I had felt her, of course—each minute aspect of her form—many times: every curve and contour memorized in the sweet-scented darkness of joy. And I knew from this profound touching, as a blind man might, that she was beautiful—something of a goddess really, with her perfect cheeks and lips, her supple neck and arms, her heavy breasts, her silken skin and hair. But it was only when I was dead, after she had killed me, that I finally was able to see her truly: a radiant being of loveliness, staggering features surpassed by graceful manner—those slow, purposeful motions. She had, in particular, a way of moving her hips and a charming manner of tilting her head which touch alone failed to convey in fullness. When I looked at her face it was impossible for me to remember the faces of other people. Surely, I thought, she was the flower and consummation of her kind, whatever the nature of any others.

What more is there left to tell? Only this. Joining our ghostly hands we drifted east along the serpentine course of that river named for an inept and long-dead king, and then up into the streets of the state capitol—the city, in fact, where, at different times, both of us had entered the world of the living. It was a place I seldom visited in my adulthood, but I discovered its sloping streets, old magnolias, and rocky river were surroundings of happy familiarity for her. Appropriately enough, it is a city where very few things begin but many things end, yet each of us had begun there in our own separate fashions.

Often we watch the people passing down Grace Street or moving along over the crest of Shockoe Hill, meandering to the eye yet all pregnant with some manner of purpose—the eternal life of each of them not so very distant from that instant in which they are glimpsed by us. But my favorite occasions are when we depart the city gliding west, flying just above the surface of the river. Startled geese flap up from their sandbars and shadowlike bass dart beneath rocks at our approach, but not a single human eye ever fixes its sight upon us. When the sun is out during such excursions I wait for the light and time of day to become exactly right, slanting from the west, and when it does I peer down at the bright smooth surface passing beneath us and watch her moving face on the water.

When I was alive people often would remark how deeply I loved rivers and animals and other manifestations of nature. And also how these entities seemed to love me: the cats that sought out my lap, the dogs slumbering curled atop my feet, the butterflies or honeybees that flitted about my head, occasionally lighting upon a finger or shoulder—even the way in which the waters of the river bore me along, buoying me up, or how its breezes played about my brow as if caressing it. But I have to admit that though I was grateful for the love of these things, they were not things I had always loved. For isn’t it so that even the best of us tend to take the best of things for granted? Rather the things I make mention of were things that over time I had learned to appreciate—had learned to love. Things I had learned to love, and chief among them the Succubus: who came for me and found me—who entered my life and claimed it—who killed me and made me hers forever.

Gold Thong

(fiction)

“I only put it on when I’m desperate to get out of a big slump … All of them [Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Johnny Damon, Robin Ventura, Robinson Cano] wore it and got hits … The thong works every time.”

—Jason Giambi, #25, formerly of the New York Yankees

My opinion of Shay Garehart changed after he loaned me the Gold Thong. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s what professors tend to do, mind you: lurching in our generally uncoordinated pompous geeky manner toward our answers and conclusions, usually without the necessary degrees of perspective and lived experience to make them accurate or even relevant.

Not Shay Garehart. Shay the studly writer and campus super scholar—hated and envied by many, some of whom find themselves pining for him nonetheless. I’m not gay, at least not consciously, but I must admit I once counted myself among that latter group, the members of which vehemently curse his name even as many of them find themselves drawn on by a reluctant longing.

As you might imagine, Shay doesn’t look or sound like an academic at all, but he negotiates the ponderous mire of a college campus better than any pencil-necked, egg-head lectern-boy or sloppy neurotic feminist I ever saw. He runs rings around us all even as we mumble through our meetings and classes while seeking simultaneously to embrace and problematize the latest discursive fashions on the research front in the hopes of getting ahead, or at least pulling even, in our various fields of inquiry.

Not Shay. Perhaps I felt an initial bond with him on account of flattering myself there might be a little of his manner—a very, very meager portion of his magnetic eccentricity—lurking somewhere inside me. I recall last year how the campus sororities had selected us both as judges for Hopwood College’s Miss HC Contest. The third judge, a befuddled elderly dean who did not seem entirely certain why he was there, and myself had waited as the contest’s start time came and went, and still no Shay. The mindless pop music blared on from the massive speaker cabinets and the sorority presidents nervously conversed onstage in their evening dresses while the audience grew antsy.

At last he arrived, sauntering down the auditorium aisle with a smile and an easy swagger. Rather than the irritated boos I half-expected to shower him, I was surprised to witness his greeting articulated by a booming chorus of cheers from the undergraduate masses.

He waved at the sorority throngs as he came on toward the judges’ table, voice ringing with goodwill: “Hello girls! Hello!”

A particularly buxom lass in the front row squealed excitedly and jumped up and down, gravity accentuating her charms, while holding a large sign over her head which read “I ♥ Gare ♥!”

He slapped me on the back, a little too hard I thought, and sat down next to me, casting a subtle nod and knowing wink in my direction.

“Let’s get this meat market going!” he hollered at the stage and the audience applauded again.

The elderly dean scowled, but it didn’t matter; Shay had gotten tenure the year before.

A swanky, slightly tipsy MC proceeded to approach us one by one with the request that we rise and introduce ourselves to the clamoring young hordes.

The elderly dean went first, muttering something lengthy and incoherent, and when the mic proceeded to come before me I stuttered slightly but received a generous measure of applause, which caused me to blush despite the overwhelming ridiculousness of setting and circumstance.

Then it was Shay’s turn.

“Shay Garehart, writer,” he said, leaning toward the MC’s offered mic, and the ovation thundered.

Then he grabbed the mic from its complacent faraway-eyed owner. “Good people,” he said, the warmth of his slight southern accent filling the auditorium, “I want you to know I got the automatic dial on my cell set to 911, ’cause tonight I’m fully expecting to witness a talent overdose!

Wild cheers ensued as he tossed the mic to the MC and rolled his hips in a little victory dance, which concluded with a smooth foot-slide to the left. Laughter, applause, and high-pitched squeals of delight made up his garland of approval as he resumed his seat.

To say Shay Garehart possessed a strong rapport with the students was a gross understatement, but oh how he grated upon the tender frazzled nerves of his colleagues. Likely he knew too well the extent to which he inhabited our heads: the unspoken measuring stick of academic success. How we hated his good looks and the apparent ease with which he had published the five books before the age of thirty-five. How we despised his strong youthful body and relaxed demeanor, and the fact that visiting writers and scholars had read his work and knew who he was, seeking him out at receptions while ignoring the rest of us. How we hated the awards he received and his natural inborn freedom and creativity—his damn near sorcerous ability to conceive and then subsequently implement new and sometimes lucrative ideas. But more than any of this, we hated the fact that he seemed to evince limited or only playfully half-serious interest in the rest of us—in our concerns.

“He never comes to our parties,” someone inevitably would say.

“He’s stuck up,” another would add.

“Maybe he’s just got a life,” I sometimes would offer. “Look at everything he does. How does he do it?”

Indeed, how Shay spent his time had become a popular topic of interest and wide-ranging speculation among my own particular circle of campus friends. There were stories of secret trips to beaches and other countries, of affairs with students and faculty wives, of half-crazed pedagogy, of terrible things he had said to and about colleagues. But then there were the equally compelling and numerous tales that balanced and discredited these rumors: the books, the sky-high teaching evaluations, the student publications, the financial loans and ghost writing he performed for hard-pressed colleagues.

Ever did the enigma of Shay Garehart appear to expand and deepen as he strode carelessly across campus, a book or two beneath his arm, a twinkle in his eye, and a ready smile for life, the universe, and everything.

*

It was during the recess following the talent component of the Miss HC Contest that I tentatively hazarded to feel Shay out on the matter of his hazy campus identity. He eyed me with amusement as he professed that such topics were of little moment to him since they hadn’t much to do with life’s primary concerns.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he explained. “I think academics are OK people and all, but, come on, they’re academics. Their lives are boring. Listen to what they talk about off campus: stupid school shit mostly, or how little Rudy crapped her pants but got over her cold. Fuck that, man! That’s not how I’m spending my time off the clock!”

Just then a stunning slinky blonde appeared behind him and, bending over his shoulder, whispered in his ear, softball-shaped breasts pressed against his back. I could have sworn I saw tongue as she pulled away. Shay laughed loudly and swiveled in his chair to playfully make cat claws at her as she retreated smiling and melted into the audience.

“Not a student, I gather,” I commented dryly, having reluctantly withdrawn my eyes from the back of her departing form.

“No,” said Shay with a chuckle. “I got her at church.”

“Church?”

“Sure. Think about it, my man. We live in a backward southern city with a large fundamentalist university on the opposite side of town. Odds are most of the attractive chicks are going to be down with J.C. You got to know the kind of game you’re playing if you’re going to score big.”

“So you go to churches to pick up women?”

“Why not?” he shrugged. “Sunday morning’s a slow time of day anyhow; beats nursing a hangover. The formula is to tell the Sunday school class or whatever that you’re on the fence about coming to J.C. but still have your doubts. Apparently it’s some kind of glory to God or something for them to win over new followers. They basically trample each other trying to convince you to join their particular herd. I can tell you, man, it ain’t hard at all to pick and choose the phone numbers.”

Shay grinned. “Then it’s on me, so to speak,” he said, “to do the converting: from J.C. to Shay-Gay, that is!”

I laughed uneasily, but even as I did Shay suddenly seemed to turn serious. “You know, every night I fall asleep thinking my life can’t get any better ….”

He paused, as if for effect, his expression one of baffled marvelment, before adding, “but then it does. It’s like I can’t help it, man. It must be magic or something.”

Oh, how we hated Shay Garehart! How his unconscious grandeur cut us wide and deep!

But this opening has run a little long and, as I say, all of that changed with the Gold Thong, which brings me, at last, to my story proper.

*

I might have departed the Miss HC Contest feeling every bit as bitter, envious, and fascinated toward Shay Garehart as many of my campus friends if, having delivered the contest trophy to a bareback tri-delt and sung her praises over the PA system, he had not pulled me aside confidentially as the auditorium emptied.

“Look,” he said when we were alone, the slight drawl in his voice earnest, “this ain’t any of my business, but I hear you been told you got to get going with your pubs.”

Shay’s comment took me off guard and I stammered. “Is that common knowledge?”

“I don’t much give a damn what passes for knowledge around this place,” Shay said, irritably making a dismissive gesture, “but if you need any help, feel free to call on me. I’ve been known to scribble a line or two.”

Flustered, I thanked him awkwardly as he turned to go.

“Wait,” I said. “A question. Writer’s block. What do you know about writer’s block?”

Shay faced me again, his expression more serious than before and tinged with a slight degree of reproach, as if I had just uttered something offensive and forbidden. “It’s the writer’s worst bane,” he said. “You got all your info ready but the engine won’t fire. Many is the time I’ve tucked tail and turned from the computer screen to the bourbon bottle in despair at not being able to find those precious words.”

“Is there a solution for it?” I asked. “A trick or something you know about?”

Shay considered this for a moment with downcast eyes, hand upon his chin, before his gaze rose to meet mine, expression grave. “The Gold Thong,” he said at last.

“The Gold Thong?” I repeated.

“It’s the last line of defense with me and my writer friends,” he elaborated. “First, there’s the cop mustache. You’re not allowed to shave until the words start coming the way they should. It’s predicated on pressure, you see. So long as you don’t write, the hair above your mouth grows. Eventually you wind up with a stupid fucking mustache that makes you look like a highway cop, especially when you wear sunglasses. It’s worked before—for me and others.”

“But if that doesn’t do it,” Shay continued, “or if you’re in a rush, then it’s time to break out the Gold Thong.”

Again my face told a speechless tale of incredulity.

“I know it sounds ridiculous,” Shay said quickly, “but it’s the bonafide secret weapon—the doomsday motherload—when it comes to writer’s block. Now, in point of fact, no one knows where the Gold Thong came from, but it’s saved me and my whole circle of writing buddies many a time.”

“How does it work?” I asked, helplessly enthralled despite the insanity of what I was hearing.

“You just wear it,” Shay said with a shrug. “Wear it and plant your ass in front of the computer until the writing comes.”

I must have looked uncertain for he continued. “Look,” he said, “I know you read fiction, even though it’s not your field. Wil Hickson’s book Grab You a Handful? Gold Thong. John Towne’s novel Jane Anor, Space Nurse? Gold Thong. There’s even this woman scribbler—a rough old d--- down in Texas who does children’s books. Word was she hit the wall when it came time to finish up the last volume of a trilogy about an androgynous cat that does homework for its little-girl-owner by working math problems on this calculator that has those super-sized number pads for old people. Now from what I hear, that old gal wasn’t too keen on men—to put it mildly. But when the going got tough and the writing deadline loomed, guess what she had on under them men’s jeans?”

“A gold thong?” I answered tentatively.

“You bet your ass she did,” Shay said with conviction. “The Gold Thong, that is.”

“There’s only one, you see,” he elaborated.

“I see,” I muttered weakly, before rallying as best I could. “Look, it’s true. I’ve got to publish some articles or I’m likely done for at this place, but I haven’t written hardly anything since graduate school—at least nothing of any value. I just can’t seem to get it going at the keyboard. Could you let me try this thing out?”

“There’s no try to it!” snapped Shay. “All of us—Hickson, Towne, Van Holmes, that crusty old d--- down in Waco, yours truly—all of us wore it and beat the block to glory. The Gold Thong works every time. But it only works if you’re truly hard-up and desperate—I mean really balls to the wall—and from what I’m hearing, you’ve definitely got that going for you.”

“One more thing,” he added, “before you commit for sure. The Gold Thong’s been worn a lot. It’s as dirty a garment as you’ll ever see. It’s got stuff on it—stains—who knows what all? And it smells. I mean it smells bad—just godawful. But here’s the thing: you can’t wash it. It can never be washed. In fact, you’ll have to fork over to me a security deposit, which I’ll be obliged to keep if the Gold Thong is washed or damaged in any way.”

“We’ll make it a modest amount,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder and softening his voice. “Us teachers don’t make a hell of a lot, do we? But believe me buddy, it’s better to risk losing a few bucks than have a mob of angry writers track you down to take it out of your ass if something happens to the Gold Thong.”

“Alright,” I said, troubled and ashamed by my own pliability, yet desperate and helplessly compelled beyond reason. “I promise not to wash it and we get paid at the end of the week.”

“Alright,” echoed Shay, shaking my hand as if we had just successfully negotiated some momentous life decision—and perhaps we had. “I know you’ll be good for the security deposit so I’ll have the Gold Thong mailed here priority right away. I’ll bill you the postage, of course.”

“Mailed?” I asked.

“Sure nuff,” said Shay. “It’s in the UK right now. Wales. A buddy of mine just used it to finish his creative writing dissertation. He’ll be loath to part with it, I can tell you. But I’ve got news for that limey, which you’d just as soon hear now too. The Gold Thong heeds no master.”

“Heeds no master and grants no quarter,” he said, smiling, eyebrows raised, before shaking his head. “Wales, England. The Gold Thong does get around, don’t it?”

He winked at me again and, turning, sauntered up the aisle toward the exit, whistling “Dixie.”

*

The transaction went well enough, I guess. Payday came and I reluctantly handed over the five hundred dollars Shay demanded. It was a far steeper security deposit than I had expected and more or less guaranteed I would be behind on my rent again. A shrug and an easy smile accompanied by a scattering of words of encouragement constituted Shay’s brief rejoinder to my lament before he abandoned me to my doubts. Was all this really necessary? Had my writer’s block come to this?

Early the next week I arrived home from class to find a small, slightly dented cardboard box stamped with British postage sitting by my doorstep. Pulse quickening, I bent to collect the parcel and remarked its lightness, which in turn made me shake my head in bafflement at why I might have expected it to be heavy. Inside the house I placed the box on my work desk in the back room, a little ill-insulated add-on meant to serve as a guest bedroom. Taking up the letter opener, I began cutting the tape along one of the edges. But then something made me pause. Placing the letter opener on the desk, I stepped back to consider the box: its British postage—the profile of some snotty nobleman—and my own address, wrought with the broad confident strokes of an overseas Sharpie.

What was it I was doing? I blinked, aware suddenly that something like hysteria had crept upward from my bowels to tug subtly yet insistently at the corners of my mind. But then, as if banished by my awareness of it, the panic subsided and I laughed suddenly, my voice loud and harsh amid the stillness of the little room.

“We’ll just see about this,” I said resolutely, and, seizing my laptop, headed for the sofa, determined to get an article going without any measure of Shay Garehart’s support, including his ridiculous imported undergarment.

*

Hours elapsed. Dusk darkened the windows until only the cold pale glow of the empty screen illuminated the room, the blinking cursor mocking me in time. Blip, blip, blip, blip. On it went indefinitely, as it had so often of late, measuring out the tale of my futility like an hour glass possessed of inexhaustible sands. The muscles in my back ached from the uninterrupted hunched position I had assumed hours ago before the despairing screen, not unlike an unwilling attitude of prayer. The burden of my head waxed immense atop my tired shoulders, grown rounded and weak like an old woman’s, yet with nothing to show for their fruitless toil and sacrifice. I felt tired and old. Tired and old and empty.

As my eyelids drooped a vision of Shay’s youthful smiling face loomed, bobbing before the empty screen, the magnificent blonde Christian woman behind him, biting her lip suggestively and tracing the contour of his ear with a forefinger.

His drawl echoed in my mind. “Many is the time,” it said, “I’ve tucked tail and turned from the computer screen to the bourbon bottle in despair at not being able to find those precious words.”

With a groan I closed the laptop and staggered to my feet, palms pressed against my eyes. Stumbling blindly into the kitchen, I jerked open the cabinet next to the refrigerator, the hollow sound of heavy glass clinking as my hands rummaged for the right bottle.

I spied the desired decanter, could just make it out, resting undisturbed near the back, its small greeting card secured by a red band about the neck and flapping slightly as I drew the bottle forward. On the label was a black and white illustration of a cavalryman charging, saber drawn, beneath which a caption proclaimed “Especially for the South.” This was the unopened fifth of Rebel Yell Shay had presented to me three years ago when I’d moved to Lynchburg.

“Just shut up and drink,” prescribed the familiar scrawl inside the little card, “but don’t be afraid to holler.”

Ripping open the bottle, I cursed Shay’s name by way of a toast and took a heavy swig. Never having been a bourbon drinker—fruity rums and vodkas are my typical fare—I immediately wanted to gag at the brown liquid’s remorseless overpowering odor and the terrible burning it inflicted upon my nose and throat.

But then, as I brought the bottle down, I could hear Shay’s voice again, talking down to me, like a kid brother. “Hey, it’s OK,” it said. “It’s not everyman can drink straight bourbon. Let me just run out and get you a wine cooler or something.”

Cursing, I again brought the bourbon to my lips and guzzled. Eyes beginning to tear, I set the bottle down and stumbled to the sink, flipping on the faucet. As I eagerly leaned forward, however, my gut convulsed unannounced and instead of imbibing cool water, I found my parched mouth spewing forth the contents of my stomach. Desperately I gripped the kitchen counter, holding on for life, while the torrent of meals past poured forth, my throaty ejaculations echoing hollowly off the kitchen linoleum as my abdominal muscles writhed in a tangle like a bed of serpents.

At last the eruptions subsided and, emptied and breathing hard, I leaned forward again to partake of the faucet. How cool and comforting was the water as it passed between my lips and embarked upon its journey down my ravaged esophagus.

Then, suddenly, again, the convulsed unexpected agony of the stomach’s contents desperately seeking liberation and I violently gagged anew, dry heaved, before collapsing to my knees before the sink, choked with frustration.

“Damn you, Shay Garehart!” I cried, sputtering and shaking my fist at the ceiling, tears rolling down my cheeks, insides all aflame. “Damn you!”

*

I arose late the following morning and passed the day in the company of student papers and multiple pots of coffee. When at last night returned and I felt once more myself, I poured a tall glass of water and headed back to my study.

Upon the desk it sat still, the package from Wales, patiently waiting. With a resigned shrug of inevitability I took up the letter opener, cut away the remaining tape, and tentatively proceeded to raise the top of the box. However instead of the shining gold fabric I had expected to encounter, I was greeted by a dense bed of packing peanuts atop which rested an anonymous note on a small slip of vanilla paper.

“Get ready to write, mate,” it read, “and kiss those days of being a word wanker goodbye. God bless the Gold Thong and God bless Shay Garehart!”

Cursing under my breath, I crumpled up the note and tossed it into the waste basket. Then, with sudden resolve, I took up the box in both hands and, flipping it over, shook the contents onto the desk. A larger object tumbled out amid the blizzard of packing material, landing with a light thump. And there it was amid the scattered packing peanuts: a soiled crumpled lamé thong of gold, tastelessly adorned with black tiger stripes and set off by a flame-colored waistband. A heavy stale musky odor arose from it which turned my still-vulnerable stomach and I placed a hand over my mouth and nose as I backed away.

From a safe distance just inside the doorway I considered the garment anew and shook my head, incredulous at the nature of the circumstances surrounding me. My career had come to this? To hang in the balance of a thong?

The Gold Thong!” Shay’s voice thundered suddenly in my head and I started in spite of myself, glancing about wildly, half-expecting him to step forward from a dark corner.

*

For two days I could hardly bear to glance at it, much less consider putting it on. Yet its presence pervaded and dominated the house and my thoughts nevertheless. At odd moments when I was supposed to be folding laundry or making the grocery list I would find myself standing motionless in the doorway of the study contemplating the thong where it rested in a wrinkled mass amid the uncollected litter of packing peanuts.

Then, on the second night, I dreamed of it—a long exhausting affair of flight in which the thong flew after me, literally, for it had taken on the aspect of some predatory reptilian bird of ages past. On went the pursuit, down labyrinthine networks of dark alleyways and across vast paper recycling depots consisting of great hills and valleys of old student essays. Up I would climb, my hands sinking into a hillside of paper and ink, and at the top achieve neither pause nor rest, for the thong threateningly fluttered ever about me. Instead I would hurry down the opposite slope, rolling and sliding, falling, face and naked arms stained with the ink of a million printers.

The chase unfolded endlessly in the manner time may be drawn out or otherwise hindered in the netherworld of slumber, thus forming a seemingly eternal landscape of fear upon which we journey forever and from which there may be no escape save in waking. But then, as I climbed and clawed my way up yet another mountain of undergraduate detritus, hands riddled with paper cuts, the thong continuously diving and wheeling above me, a gold-colored chopper descended from the heavens and drew nigh, causing student documents to fly up into the air all around me, loose pages slapping me about the face and lodging in the folds of my clothes. A helmeted pilot in shades waved and gave me the thumbs up. It was Shay.

“Quit running from the thong!” he hollered, his voice barely audible amid the noise of the engine and whirring blades. He said something else I couldn’t make out before nodding and smiling reassuringly.

“You’re ruining my life!” I screamed, impotently hurling a handful of papers in the direction of the chopper, two of which immediately flew back and affixed themselves flat against my face, temporarily blinding me.

I peeled off the pages to discover the gorgeous blonde Christian woman had somehow joined Shay in the cockpit, straddling him and showering him with kisses, clad only in a red string bikini.

“Gotta go, champ!” Shay hollered, smiling and giving the thumbs up again.

Then the chopper departed, weaving a little lopsidedly, papers fluttering from the hilltops beneath its irregular path of flight.

*

Next morning, dark eyed and somber, I resolved to email the writers Shay had mentioned by name as having used the thong with favorable results and request information as to how exactly it worked—if in fact it did. It was not long before two of them responded, though the answers were not particularly helpful. Each sung the thong’s praises, proclaiming it seemed to function via some untraceable mystery, yet their subsequent speculations as to the nature of its underpinnings struck out along divergent strands of analysis.

“It’s because you’re not worrying about your hands or the keyboard,” Wil Hickson’s message hypothesized. “You’re only worried about the uncomfortable feeling you’re receiving down below.”

John Towne entertained a different theory. “It keeps one side of my brain occupied when I’m writing longhand on my legal pad,” he explained, “thus keeping the other side slightly off-center and out of balance, which is where it’s supposed to be for artists—or at least that’s what my shrink says.”

I was in the midst of reading the conclusion of Towne’s message when the phone rang. It was Freida Bond, a friend and confidant from Hopwood, always in the know and much given to relating the sad minor circumstances that pass for campus intrigue among our humble circle of friends.

“I heard you got that awful thing from Shay,” she said, her voice soft with concern, “and wanted to let you know that asshole’s likely just playing an elaborate joke on you.”

I was surprised to experience relief rather than outrage.

“You know Ted Fabrice?” she inquired. “That short guy over in Econ? Well, his wife’s best friend took a ballet class at Virginia Tech with our wonderful Mr. Gay-hart. Apparently that’s another way he picks up women, since he’s almost always the only guy enrolled. But that’s another story. Anyway, she says he found that thing one night on the floor of the men’s locker room when he was changing for class. Says he had it on over his tights when he came out and was dancing all around, proclaiming he would let everyone touch it for a quarter. Then he took it off and was waving it over his head like a lasso or something.”

I thanked Freida and got off the line as quickly as I could, careful not to reveal anything she might add to her store of tales and pass on to the next listener.

“Well that’s that,” I thought to myself with a deep breath.

Or was it? Upon further review I found myself wavering. On one side stood the testimonials of two published writers. True, they were friends of Shay’s. But what was in it for them to perpetuate the hoax? Also, I doubted seriously I occupied enough space in Shay’s mind, if any at all, for him to concoct such an elaborate scheme at my expense. Doubtless he had, as he was often fond of boasting, “Bigger chitlins to fry.” Though it had been related by a friend, the account of an idle campus gossip suddenly seemed rather flimsy in light of the alternative evidence from legitimate writers.

But there was only one way to find out and my ensuing long sigh of resignation was heavy enough to have contained oceans of apprehension and house all the despair of the world.

*

Before me I held the Gold Thong at arm’s length, employing only the very tips, the very nails, of my thumbs and forefingers, touching it as little as possible. Though its odor had subsided somewhat, its funky scent remained much in evidence and the garment itself hung stretched and filthy, hazy lines of grime lining its seams and the narrow inner strip of its rear enclosure stained with the skid marks of untold literary bottoms.

From it I glanced down to the open laptop on the sofa, its white screen blank, the cursor blinking, waiting with indefatigable patience. Letting go an exhalation, I brought the thong down before me and stepped into it slowly, one leg at a time. So far so good. Then a deep intake of air and I held my breath as I slowly pulled it up around my hips. This limited maneuver accomplished, I exhaled again and glanced down to consider the thing which now formed an aspect of myself. I was embarrassed to note that the silky feel of the lamé afforded a pronounced sensation of sensual comfort, while the elasticity in the waistband allowed the upper part of the thong to hug my midsection thoroughly enough. However the lower reaches, front and back, were loose—a good thing, I thought, in the back, where the narrow rear strip hung slightly below my bottom. On the other hand, the bagginess in the crotch made me feel a little, well, inadequate.

“Don’t feel bad,” I could hear Shay’s voice remarking. “Look who broke it in good.”

Shaking my head to dismiss the thought, I inhaled deeply yet again. Slowly, wincing slightly in apprehension, I lowered myself to the sofa and gently lifted the laptop onto that which I hoped would constitute the source of my salvation.

*

I sat there quietly, the shadows of the room lengthening, telling their story of time—of another day passed—the laptop’s cursor verifying the tale in its own measured language. Blip, blip, blip, blip. Expectantly I waited, the windows growing dimmer, the light of the world abandoning my house to the pale glow of a small computer and all my future hopes.

Blip, blip, blip, blip. On and on it went and still nothing. I waited and waited, until after a time I became aware of a tightness forming inside my chest—a rising bubble of pressure which I knew intuitively must be home to my long-stowed and ill-dealt-with wrath—the essence of all my frustrations. Again, an image of Shay Garehart. Of his loud laughter as he considered my useless near-naked form on the sofa, clad in the thong and hunched before an empty computer screen. And, of course, at his side, the magnificent blonde Christian woman in her red string bikini, divine body coiled about him, pointing and laughing in complement.

Suddenly the bubble in my chest burst and out poured all my misbegotten hatred into a keyboard-pounding, expletive-laden email to Shay—an account of all my trials and agonies at his hands, concluding with the wild accusation that he was in fact a demon. No! The very devil himself!

“Damn you, Shay Garehart,” I muttered under my breath as a final click dispatched the message.

To my surprise it was answered almost immediately. “Don’t get your shorts in a bunch over this,” Shay’s message read. “Give it time. And so what if it doesn’t work? This whole academic thing’s a swindle anyway: a house of straw or, perhaps more properly, a shanty of flimsy old solar-powered pocket calculators.”

“We all got our ideas,” it went on, “of how things are supposed to play out in this life. Me? Just give me a fast yacht with its own margarita machine and a nickel-plated Zippo to light my hair on fire. Burn and fly, baby! That’s what I say. Maximum overdrive—’til the bottle and tank run empty!”

I deleted the message with yet another curse and, flinging the laptop to the side, began to rise. Then Shay’s voice was in my head, louder than it had ever been, hard and irritable at having been summoned from someplace infinitely more interesting and pleasurable.

“Just wear it!” it boomed with authority. “Wear it and plant your ass in front of the computer until the writing comes.”

Suddenly the Gold Thong seemed possessed of an immense weight, an impossible heaviness, as if crafted of a substance possessing a density vastly greater than iron. From the half-risen position in which I had paused to heed Shay’s words, I began to sink slowly back toward the sofa, midsection guided by a force resembling a pulley or, perhaps more properly, an invisible tractor beam. And as I sunk, the nature of the Gold Thong altered. No longer did it hang baggy and loose but suddenly seemed possessed of an incredible gripping elasticity which it now employed to constrict itself about my thighs and groin. I gasped as my legs went numb and found myself dropping the short remainder of space toward the sofa’s cushions. The distance couldn’t have been more than a few inches but the fall, as though unfolding in dream, seemed to exact an eternity.

When at last my bottom struck the sofa the concomitant sensations of weight, elasticity, and timelessness vanished suddenly. Woozy and rubbery, I felt as though my body had just been released by an incredible power—something beyond the world—a force that if it were a hand might deign to crush reality itself in the palm of its terrible grasp. There I lay, helpless, breathing hard, uncertain of what had transpired—unable even to think, to order my thoughts. My eyes blinked rapidly, focusing unsteadily on the computer screen—on the cursor that blinked continuously upon its white field of nothingness. Blip, blip, blip, blip.

Then it came. Unannounced. Silent lightning from nowhere. The first sentence.