The Consultation

by Brett Rutherford

Miss Schreckengost,
the principal, my parents,
and my small self
stand in the third grade
classroom. What trouble
am I in this time? Did
the comics I draw
and circulate among
the tittering students
offend someone?

“We called you here,”
the principal says,
bass voice held down
to an unfamiliar whisper,
“to talk about your son.
He's too young to take
an IQ test, but he,
I assure you, is way
beyond our teaching.

“He could skip two grades,”
Miss Schreckengost says.

“Or even three,”
the principal asserts.
“He really belongs
in a private school,
a place for young geniuses.”

My parents say nothing.
Then “Private school ...
you have to pay for that.”

“Yes. But for the best.
We don't know what
to do for him, except
to let him roam the stacks
of the town library
and read what he wants.
Do you have books at home?”

“Not really.”

Sliding to save the day,
the principal back-tracks.
“Well, it is said
that jumping ahead
can interfere
with any child's normal
development.”

“Oh, we wouldn't want
that. He should be normal.
Normal is best, isn't it?”

“Very well, then,”
the principal sighs.
“But while you're here
there's one more thing.
We had to move your son
to the third row, right here,
since he can no longer see
the blackboard. Glasses,
eyeglasses he needs.
You must attend to this,
and right away.”

Another silence.
My father assents and asks
the name of an eye doctor.
My mother just says,
“Glasses. My god,
he has to wear glasses.
Going around
with glasses.
I'm so ashamed.”

I stood,
the object talked about
praised and condemned
in short order.

No one asked me
what I thought
or what I wanted.

As we walked home,
beneath my breath, I said —
“The slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune.”

Under Every Bed

by Brett Rutherford

In high school years

my slave duty each night

was washing dishes.

An AM radio my only

companion, I sang

along with Beethoven.

When the plug was pulled

because Westerns prevailed

in the TV room, I sang

anyway, inventing whole

symphonies as I went.

An open window

above the steaming sink

sent my voice out,

where a thin man

full camouflaged

and ready to battle

the Communister

Atheist hordes, leaned

to listen. That year,

I fueled his worst

fantasies. First off,

I taught myself

Cyrllic and bellowed

out Russian folk-songs.

Volga Boatmen for you,

and for John Birch, too!

Kalinka, Kalinka,

and Stenka for good measure.

This drove him mad,

so that he sent his sons

to lurk beneath

my bedroom window,

listening to hear

my secret broadcasts

to Leningrad.

Comrade Krushchev,

coordinates here

for the Nike missile site,

just as you asked.

On Friday nights,

the radio was back

in my control.

The Pittsburgh station

marked shabbos

with cantor songs.

"And now,

cantor Richard Tucker

sings ..." and I,

as best I could,

in my best tenor

sang with him.

Out the window

went my mangled

mock-Hebrew,

and just below

the open window

the man in camouflage

said to his son,

"God damn, I told you.

Russians are in there,

and Jews, too!

What are we going to do?"

Things We Don't Do

 by Brett Rutherford

Go to church?
We don't do that.
No money to give;
nice clothes, never.
Father an atheist,
Mother afraid
of the taunts
of the church ladies
about her family,
the things they did
in that shack in the woods
when men came calling.

One summer they let

a church put on

some Bible classes

at the schoolhouse.

I was sent. Bright books

of Bible stories laid forth

Old Testament and New.

I asked too many

questions, mostly about

dinosaurs and other planets.

They sent me home,

asked that I not

come back again, ever.

Things we don't do

include bicycles,

new shoes, clothes

from a big store,

and Boy Scouts

because all that

took money.

I found a copy

of the Boy Scout manual.

Cover to cover I studied it,

envied the boys

those tent nights

and knot-tying skills.

Nowhere was where

we went all summer.

Once a museum

glimpsed from the car;

once or twice

a beautiful house

blurred in passing.

Ten aunts and uncles

never visited,

cousins unmet.

I did possess

a chemistry set,

with not much left

of its supplies.

In the dark cellar

I did my best

to create monsters.

At school,

it was assumed,

as I soared in reading,

that I must come

from the finest family,

that wealth surrounded

a seven-year-old

already reading

Faust and Hamlet.

It was my game

to let them think it so.

Thelma, Then Irma

by Brett Rutherford

An old house it was,
brimful of overstuffed
sofas, side chairs
and love-seats.

When we came in,

boys of ten years and six,

Aunt Thelma leaped

into action. A drawer

flashed open, and white

embroidered doilies

flew onto every place

a child might sit.

"Wait! Wait!" she cried.

"No dirty necks allowed

against the sofa,

no dirty elbows

on the arms of chairs!"

We had to wait until

every surface was covered.

She flitted nervously

throughout our visit,

edging each vase away

from table edge,

a towel draped

over her thin arm

in case of spills.

Nervous she remained,

and nervouser still,

until they took her away

to Torrance, that place

they whispered about,

where the walls were doilies.

On our next visit,

Aunt Thelma had been replaced

by Aunt Irma,

her cousin whom one took to be

Irma's identical twin.

Uncle Ron was a cipher.

No word was said, nor questions

asked, about the prior Mrs.

The house was the same,

with every doily left

exactly as Thelma wanted them.

I swear the same

chrysanthemums

stood upright in the same

glass vase pushed back

so that no passing elbow

could dislodge it.

As we walked in, she rose,

and running to bar us,

Aunt Irma shrieked,

"No dirty necks allowed

on the white doilies!

No dirty elbows either!"

Barred from sitting,

we played on the porch,

ran off to a movie,

ate in the kitchen,

then slept on beds

whose crisp sheets crinkled

over some waterproof,

germ-free mattress.

Leaving, we trailed past

the doilies, the

never-changing

doilies, necks proudly

unwashed.

The Cold Wave, 1958

by Brett Rutherford

i

Slept on a church pew, walnut-hard
close enough to the still-hot radiator
she could roll up her thin cloth coat
to pillow her head. She licked cracked lips;
her numbed toes finally warmed. Three days
below zero and no sign of better to come!
She dreamt of a steam-hot kitchen, turkey
baking as in those long-gone Thanksgivings,
Charles and LeRoi anticipating
how much stuffing and sweet potatoes.

Lights red, lights blue, lights amber gold,
not from the Christmas tree past but from
the stained-glass morning sun-up
warming her face, oh! just an hour,
an hour longer rest; no one would know
how the unlocked Methodist Episcopal
had been her hotel for one night only.
She’d wash up in the bathroom below,
then come back up and give a nod to Jesus,
thank him out loud before she tip-toed
out to frozen ice-pack of sidewalk.

After what seemed only an eye-blink,
the windows were brighter, hotter,
and a hand poked at her shoulder
rudely. “Ma’am,” a man’s voice,
low like summer thunder on the hills’
other hollows, rumbled, “Ma’am, wake up."
Cora sat bolt upright, one hand tugged
down her long black skirt, the other across
her bosom, sliding away from where
the unwanted hand had prodded her.
The man’s form changed, dark silhouette
to sun-paint, his white skin mosaic’d red
and blue and gold. His name was Ernest.
She knew him, and sometimes she mended
the clothes his mother brought over,
piecework she did for many in town.

“Ma’am,” he told her, “You can’t be sleepin’ here.
It’s not allowed.” “Hmm,” she muttered, and took
the coat and slowly unrolled it. She rose
to bundle herself back up for the winter air.
“I don’t mean to be a bother. I —” She stopped
as Ernest suddenly backed away. He saw her face.
He didn’t know her at all. Of course we are the same
and all alike to them, she thought. And then he did
the thing with his nose, that testing-the-air twitch
to see if you smelled funny. No matter
that Charles always told her no lady
had ever smelled so nice as when
she morning’d him with her rosy air.

“I’ll get in trouble if the pastor sees.
You’d better go down and out the back, now.”
He pointed. He looked at his watch.
His teeth looked to chatter squirrel-like.
“I’ll be on my way, Mr. Ernest,”
she answered him. “Just let me give
a nod to the Lord, and I’ll not trouble you.”
Before he could protest she reached the altar-rail,
looked up in awe at how the morning light halo’d
the sad Christ, while red-glow dabbles
daubed his wounds and nails that put them
in hell-light. He may have fed five thousand,
but a house and a warm bed were something else.

ii

She had to walk slowly. Loucks Avenue
was piled with snow. One narrow way
had been shoveled and tramped to some
resemblance to a foot-path. Somewhere beneath
the hillocks of snow were peoples’ cars.
Her shoes slid this-way, that-way; she tumbled
sideways more than once until Broadway
where she could walk the roadway.
Few cars were out, and let them make way
for her instead of she for them. She was
seventy, and seventy should have at least
the right of way on a Sunday morning.

Nothing was warming up. Trees groaned
as they tried to gird themselves in
against the killing cold. Her thoughts
in the mile she’d have to walk, were on
the sun that would soon pain her eyes
as it slid its low path into noon-time.

That sun might warm her house a little,
she reasoned. And there was one last plan
to get her through the cold spell. But first
she had to tread the long walk of mill-fence —
nothing shoveled, no path except the road —
along the smokey factory that made long tubes
of shiny metal that filled the rail-cars, day
and night of pounding and grinding, lights
on and off at all hours. Coal, coke
and the working of the earth’s metals were all
that this town was about. Charles had worked,
until the black lung killed him, one mine
and then another and another, always
the parts of the mines the white men avoided.

Charlie and the Negro gang worked side
by side with a bunch of Hungarians, almost
as much despised for their one-off language,
their dark-eyed pride and intransigence.
Just to defy and baffle their bosses,
some of the Negro miners learned “Hunky talk,”
enough to joke and drink together, enough
to be able to fool the foreman and warn each other
when something too dangerous was asked for.
She went along. The Hunky women didn’t like it
when she learned a few words on her own
and Charlie and the Kovacs and she
would laugh and pass a bottle amongst them.
But that was before …

iii

Over the bridge and past Caruso’s, the store
that gave her credit and saved her more
times than she could count, then up the hill
to her own steep-stepped house she went.
In through the unlocked door, into the kitchen.
Lightless, heatless, her breath went icy
the moment she got inside. It was colder here,
for she had covered up the window so wind
would not get in, but neither did the sunlight.

No matter. She had her plan, the one
that came to her just as she awakened.
She only needed a little coal. The furnace, dead,
would never come to life until a truck came,
filling the chute below with welcome fuel.
But the coal stove would do, and huddled near
she could get through the day. Tomorrow’s mail
might bring the cash that LeRoi sent
each month from his pay in far-off Korea.

This was pride swallowed, her pride of home
and of needing nothing, ever, ’cept what folks paid
when she helped them out, or sewed, or watched
a baby that needed minding. Now she, Cora,
would beg from door to door. The neighbors
would hear her bowed voice a-tremble and ask
for just a bucket or two of coal. That’s all.

She lifted the bucket. She opened the door.
Five houses this side of Kingview Road, five
on the other side. That ought to do it.
They must all be home. Smoke rose black
from every chimney. It wasn’t as though
she was really begging: the loan of some coal
was all she would ask, and then she’d pay
it back when the delivery came. That’s all.

Knocked on one door. They yelled inside,
argued on who should answer her knocking.
Man’s voice bellowing, woman in turn.
Two lions in a cage would have been quieter.
She knocked again. Lace curtain parted.
Two eyes regarded her from shadowed parlor.
Then from behind those eyes, the man
called out, “Get off our steps! Go on!
Whatever you’re selling or preaching,
just go away!” She turned and sighed.

At the Polish neighbors’ home, despite
the puffing chimney, there was no answer.
They went to Mass early, she remembered.
They would be back, confession-clean,
but not for hours to come. She tried
another door, the old widower’s, but no,
he didn’t answer, either. The bottles piled
along the porch floor told a dead-drunk tale.
He might not rouse himself till after noon.

Her feet gone numb again, she knocked
at the Kovak house. Charlie had worked
with their father until the explosion
made Mrs. Kovak a widow, her sons
into angry orphans always in trouble.
Now Cora smiled as someone came running
for she had a way in mind to reach out
to the reclusive and suspicious widow.
It was the younger boy who answered.
He had just got out of bed; his hair
was awry in every direction; he rubbed
his eyes and tried to make out her face.
“What d’ye want,” he asked her angrily.
“Let me talk to your mother, please.”
He shrugged and walked away. She waited
and felt the rush of warm air from the open
doorway. The disheveled mother came.

She spoke almost no English, after all these years!
“Mit akarsz?” she demanded, closing the door
so only her head and shoulders stuck out. —
“I am your neighbor, Mrs. Kovac.” She paused,
then sorting her memory of the old days,
“Szomszéd. Neighbor.” — The woman started.
“Mit akarsz?” she asked again. What do you want? —
“I am Charlie’s wife. Charles felesége. Szomszéd.” —
The woman held out her hands in consternation.
Cora raised the empty bucket. “I need some coal.
Van … szén?” — Then Mrs. Kovac backed away.
The door got wide again. An older boy 
came up behind her. He had a stick.
He slapped it against his open palm. “Some coal.
Van … szén?” Had she forgotten everything? What word
would make her message clear except, “Please, please?”
There it was: the word. “Kérem. Van szén?”
The door slammed shut. At five more houses,
there was no one present, or everyone pretended
to be somewhere else, intent on television.

Cora sat in the kitchen. She wrapped herself
in a blanket, tied rags around her feet to keep
the frost at bay. She’d seen a movie once
where they broke up the furniture to feed a stove,
but she didn’t know how to do that. Two hands,
at seventy, frost-bitten and without a hammer,
what could she do? Would the neighbors talk?
Would they come around at last when they realized
she was there alone with no light or stove or coal?
Did the Methodist Episcopal Jesus care?

iv

I was ten years old when the police came,
and then an ambulance, and there she was
on a stretcher, the bundled-up frozen woman.
The door had blown open; the mailman found her.
Neighbors flowed out of their homes like wax
atop a fast-melting candle. All bundled up
against the cold wave, the word balloons
above all their comic-book faces repeated:
She froze to death. She froze to death.
          She froze to death.

One voice opined, “How could this happen here,
right in our midst, right on our street?”
“She was too proud to ask for help”
          someone else offered.
The new word-balloon passed among them.
It was taken up as an anthem, too proud, too proud
to ask for help, of course we would have helped.
Too proud, too proud to ask for help.

And then the little Hungarian boy called out,
“But there was a Negro lady asking for coal.
I saw her. A Negro lady asking —”

A hand reached out and covered his mouth.
The crowd went on murmuring
          until the ambulance was gone.
As the last door to the last house closed
the word-balloon lingered, one cloud
over all the chimneys, lettering
She froze to death. 
          She froze to death.
                    She froze —

 From the forthcoming book, The Pumpkined Heart: The Pennsylvania Poems.

1796 Edinboro Lake

by Brett Rutherford

Off the Venango path and north
of the place called Cussewago, they found  (1)
the uninhabited lake. What did it look like then?
Crammed to its edge with ancient trees
a woods in perpetual dusk where one
could walk for three days before
another cabin smoked out in a clearing.
Here and there along the way
some rotted, roofless ruin lay
where an Erie long-house had been,
or a mound mysterious full of arrow-heads,
a place whose people had vanished,
driven by the Canada’s enraged Hurons
into extinction. No more Eries, no more
this lake a place of winter refuge.
It was empty, and waiting.

So why not claim it? Why not this lake,
so like the lochs of Scotland, why not
this man, John Culberston, Scot-born
but free? From Philadelphia west
he had come; he had weathered out
that Britain-versus-America problem
and it was time to put down roots.
Why not this kettle lake, carved out
of the underlying rock by the glaciers?
The Indian, a Mingo, had told him
about this place, and called it
Conneautee. So here it was,
just as the guide had promised,
a placid little loch just half a mile
across, with pines enough around
to build a town, flat land for grain,
and for the grist mill he would build;
for grain and whisley were the way
to wealth. “What think
you, wife?” he asked his silent consort.

Jeanette took in the sweep of clouds,
the sky-enfolding blue waters, watched
as a flock of crows cawed and winged
welcome. “I like it,” she said.
The half-naked Indian grunted.
If he knew more about the place,
he said nothing. The dark swamp
nearby was well concealed by trees
and the nodding cat-tails. (No need
to upset them about what lived there
and how no one slept well
on certain nights when sorrow
rose like a beast from the bottom!)
Man, woman, horses and wagon
stood for a long time, the little clouds
of their breathing in chill air
as calm as a peace pipe.
Everything they owned,
     they had dragged here.

Down at the lake-edge
their shiny boots ground
time-worn gravel beneath them.
They knew nothing of Ice Ages,
departing glaciers and porous
limestone. They did not know
how shallow the soil was, how brief
the growing season, how deep
the snows piled on in winter,
a place where frost came in August
and snow remained till May.

Still, nothing could be worse
than Scotland: this they would say

on all the winter nights to come.

They canoed to the north, reed grass
and full of inlets, fish abounding,
fens buried in mists, tall pines bent
and fallen to the earth. Something
had walked here unhappily, storms
called down in its anger. Pray
that its time has come and gone!

Pools dank with toads alternated
with blue patches herons favored.
Fog started there, it seemed.
The dusk-mist that rose
around them thickened.
Only the warm spot of sunglow
guided them back again.

And then they found the creek,
the lake’s shallow outlet,
good land on either side
for houses, a place to dam up
and run his mill. All good,
it seemed. “This is home,”
he said to his wife, “now
and for all the time we have left.”

“There’s no church,” she worried.
“Oh that will come,” he answered.
“There will be no stopping them.”
“What shall we call the place?”
“Edinburgh.” He said. “The only city
worth its name in all of Scotland.”

The sun set, the swamp exhaled
its methane-rich vapors, the frogs
began their melancholy chorus.
Back at the lake-edge vantage,
they made their tent, their fire
the first that the land had seen
in over a hundred years.

They did not dream that night,
but something in and under them
dreamt of their lives and deaths,
their burials on this very ground,
the slow seep of waters upwards,
an inverse sun rising
in the names of their children to come.
______

Note 1: Cussewago was the Indian name for Meadville, PA.

1973, rev. December 2019, Rev April 2020

Let Them Play!

From Scottdale, PA in my childhood. My grandmother, Olive Trader Rutherford, tells me stories from her mother, Mary Ellen White Trader, who was a Mingo Indian. I just wrote this, in a torrent. The voice of the long-gone great-grandmother is in boldface type.

LET THEM PLAY!

by Brett Rutherford

“Mother, would you call the girls in? It will be dinner soon,”
Aunt Margie shouts from back in the kitchen.
I sit with my grandmother on the cool porch glider.
Across the street and on up the park's hill, her daughters climb
the steep sliding board and breeze down its shiny, polished curves.
Up again, downsliding, exulting the brief up-skirt blush,
legs not tiring, up again, down again, dolls put aside
in favor of the giddy height, the pull of gravity.
On a higher-up hillside, boys scale a tree, ride swing-sets
out and up almost to escape velocity. Ray guns
have replaced cap pistols, star-dreams of rockets in their heads.

My grandmother just smiles. “Oh, let them play!” she says to me.
“Another story I know, that I can tell you, aside
from the back-and-forth of the secret names of animals
(she never finished that one!) is why I say Let them play.
My mother told me true, one day in the clearing, The day
will come when you have two, three, or half a dozen children,
and you will treat each one as a new-found jewel, a pearl,
a lump of gold. Then you will want to keep each one at home,
in sight, never to leave your guarding. I say, Let them play!

Let them run in the woods. Let them chase and be chased.
Let them bite and be bitten. Let them climb up tree and rock,
wash their own little wounds in a clear, calm stream. Do not call
them until the last possible moment, till bread-crust cools
and the meat is singed black on the open fire. Let them play!

“Why, mother,” I asked, ‘should I let them run so late,
until it is so dark I can hardly see them coming? ”

It happened, she said, not here, but three villages
down creek and around the sharp-peaked mountain.
It was the time of harvest dance, a thank-you stomp to sun
and sky, just when all the trees had gone crisp and color-up,
a night when all the men would drum and dance on till midnight,
and songs would go on until it was too cold to sing
another, and the fires grew ashy and dim. With sweet fruit
and sassafras tea and honey the children and their dolls
were sent to bed, tucked in and hugged, warned that the Wendigo
must not be permitted to see them. No child was to peek.
No child was allowed to stand in pretend-dancing that night.

In their long-house beds, the children fidgeted, their blankets off,
their blankets on as they heard the drum beats, the water-drums,
the shrill flutes, the deep-voice song of the men. One, whose name was
Not-For-You-To-Know, blew into a gourd and made sounds.
The women's chant answered, high and low. They all watched,
as those shimmering stars — the Seven – what do you call them?”

“The Pleiades, grandmother?”

“Yes, the Pleiades!”

“My mother called them something else, but she showed me
their glittering up-rise from the edge of the world. She told me:

As the lonely, the desolate, the shimmering sisters crept
from the edge of the earth into the peak of the sky.
They could not harm the dancers – too far and too weak
in their sad darkness — but the children! "Ah!” she puts her hand
to her bosom and gasps, and pauses — “Mother!”
comes the call from Aunt Margie again. “Please call them in!”
Grandmother leans close to me and continues,
channeling again her own mother’s speaking:

But the children were not tired. Far from it. The song-dance twitched
in all their fingers and toes; their knees and elbows jabbed out
at one another in their beds. The straw ejected them.
They sat up They crawled unseen into the dark-on-darkness. 
In the shadow of the longhouse, no one could see them go.
And they began to dance! They danced! Up, knees! Down, feet!
The lonely spinster Pleiades, childless, saw them dancing.
They were light as feather-down, the children. They joined their hands
All their feet went up at once. A little breeze lifted them.
The Pleiades with bird-claw fingers, lonely among stars,
ah! how they wanted to have their own sons and daughters! —

“Mother! Do I have to go get them myself?
I know you’re out there. I heard the glider squeak.
I hear the two of you talking!” Aunt Margie calls, close by
from the living room, the smell of apple pie-cinnamon 
wafting out to us.

“Not quite yet, daughter,” my grandmother calls back assuringly.
“They’re right where I can see them!” I look at her expectantly. 
“And then? And then?” (Not another unfinished and interrupted tale!)

And then! she answers me. While all the elders are thanking
the sun and the moon and all the good winds, thanking the Crow
for not taking more than his share, and the Bear for forbearing 
to tear up the bark and logs of the longhouse —
a whole long, ancient list of Thanksgivings you can be sure,

The children are all trying to echo them, and just at
Crow-Thanks and Bear-Thanks, just when they hear
the elders address the Snow, that he should
not come too soon this winter nor stay on too long —
by then the Pleiades have got the children, the big ones
first, full of ten years, the not-so-big ones so full of corn
and six or seven years, even the sachem’s dear son!,
even the tiny ones whose dance was no more than a stumble 
foot-stamp. All of them up! All of them higher than cornstalks, 
higher than trees at the edge of the clearing. Fog-fingered 
and jewel-eyed childless sisters of the cold space of night —
they took them screaming into the ink-black sky. Children, gone!

That is why their village was abandoned, empty. We passed
it with sadness and shuddering along the way. We wept:
their name was soon gone at the Council Fire.

I look at her in disbelief. “I have said.” she finishes.

“Mother!” Aunt Margie shouts, her face appearing close-up
behind the porch screen-door. 

“Let them play, I say!” grandmother repeats. “Let them play
until they are so tired they drop to sleep! It is that time
of year. It is November and the night sky is lonely.”

“Those stories again!” Aunt Margie complains. Her hands go up
as though to block her ears. “Why tell your grandson those stories?”

Grandmother stands. Her tiny profile and her jet black hair
defy her tall daughter. “I have said, or memory dies.”
Soon the exhausted daughters are called inside to dinner.

[Revised at Lake Atsion NJ, April 2019)

SUBJECTS: Mingo Indians, Native American stories, Olive Rutherford, Pennsylvania, Pleiades, Seven Sisters, Scottdale.

Out Home: A Prose Memoir

OUT HOME

When I was around fifteen, my grandmother, Florence Butler Ullery, decided I was old enough to hear grown-up things. She told me how her father, Albert Butler, had robbed a bank sometime after 1910. He had miscalculated what day the payroll cash arrived, and had come home with only $30 for his trouble, followed within an hour by the police, who dragged him off to jail. She showed me a photo of him — a middle-aged man with a Masonic pin on his lapel — taken in Scottdale, apparently the day he went off to serve his prison term. On the back was written, “The pictures with both of us in them didn’t come out. Good-bye from your Pa.” He never returned, leaving my great-grandmother Christina Butler, and her children, to fend for themselves.

“Those were rough years, during the First War, and then the Depression came,” grandmother sighed. “But folks got through.”

 Great-grandmother Christina had died four years before, preceded by “Homer,” the cigar-smoking old man who boarded with her and to whom it was said she was “secretly married.” Homer had presided over one room, piled to the ceiling with cigar boxes, old 78 RPM records and back issues of Popular Mechanics. Helter-skelter piles of yellowing newspapers in English and German were hurled out of the window after his death and burned.

My grandmother, a wide-faced, simple woman, sat peeling onions, her chair pulled near the “slop bucket” where the peels fell. “The truth is like this here onion,” she said — the first and last time I ever heard her speak metaphorically.

“What do you mean, Grandma?”

She held the onion out for me to examine. It was partially cut open to reveal the white under the skin. “See here — I peeled it and there’s the white part.” She cut some more. “Now look — there’s some dirt and another peel inside.” She cut again, halving the onion. “Now the rest is all white. That’s the way people talk to you. There’s always a lie outside, then a little truth, and then some more lies, and then the inside is all true.” She asked me if I understood.

Yes, I said, there were people in town who said one thing and did another. Like my stepfather, “Uncle Joe.”

My parents had divorced the previous summer. My mother took up with my father’s sister’s husband. Two divorces ensued. “Uncle Joe” became my stepfather, proclaiming how happy he was to have such brilliant stepsons and how he would make sure my brother and I got to college. We moved to a new town where nobody knew us, and Uncle Joe and my mother pretended to be married.

One Saturday Uncle Joe came into my room and told me, “You’re not welcome here. There will be food on the table, but that’s it, since we get child support from your father. The day you graduate from high school, I want you out of here, and don’t expect anything from me.” I later found out he had dumped his children by a previous marriage in an orphanage some years before. From that time forward, I heard nothing from him except verbal abuse. He condemned me for “sitting around and reading books.”

To get away from Uncle Joe and my mother, (“Gertrude and Claudius” in my own Gothic imagination) who were quickly becoming the town drunks, I spent that summer with Grandma, who lived alone now since my grandfather’s death. I remember taking Grandma Butler’s old rocking chair and placing it under the huge pine boughs, reading Poe and Lovecraft, Dumas and Hugo until it was too dark to see. I had books to read, and woods to roam in, and a quilted bed to sleep in.

Everyone called the four-room house, never completely finished and covered only with black tarpaper, “out home.” A coal stove heated the kitchen and a system of pipes and flues heated the other rooms as well. It was snug and warm in winter; in summer, open doors and windows admitted a cool mountain draft, and a lot of chores and food preparation moved to the back porch. There was a dark cool cellar with what seemed thousands of jars of home-canned raspberries, peaches, yellow string beans and apple sauce. Water was carried from the nearby spring in buckets, and when it rained, all the washtubs were rushed into the yard: free bath water!

Sitting in the kitchen one rainy afternoon, I noticed something I had never seen before. Grandma had a loaded shotgun near the door.

“What’s that for?” I asked, alarmed. I was terrified of guns.

“It might be for your Uncle Joe,” she said. I smiled at the thought, but assumed she was joking. While my grandfather was alive I had never seen a gun in the house.

The next day, a car came up the long driveway and grandma called me in and told me to turn off the light and duck down in her bedroom. She turned off the television and all the other lights, locked the door, and came into the room and crouched down on the carpet.

I heard the chickens scattering in the yard, then a single set of footsteps on the porch. A light knocking on the door, then louder. Then an angry pounding.

“God-damn it, Florence — I know you’re in there! I just want to talk!”

It was Uncle Joe’s voice. He must have known I was in there, too, but he didn’t call my name. (I can’t recall him ever addressing me by my name).

He called “Florence!” one more time, pounded again, cursing. We could hear his angry breath puff out. He stood for a while. He waited; we sat in silence. Then the footsteps tromped down off the porch. There were chicken noises again — a loud one as the rooster went for him and he likely kicked it; anther round of cursing as the rooster followed him to the car;  and then the car started up and did the turnaround to retreat back to the mountain road. We waited until everything was quiet again.

“What did he want?” I asked.

Grandmother was livid. She shook  with a combination of rage and fear.

“He comes out here, on days when he’s supposed to be working. He wants me to go to the courthouse and sign my property deed over to your mother. I told him ‘No’ twice. I have three children and this will always be home for all of them. He wants to use me and your mother to get this house. Your Uncle Ron and Uncle Bob will always have a home here, and your mother too. When Joe comes in the daytime like this, I just turn out the lights and hide.”

That night I dreamt of Grandma shooting Uncle Joe dead. It was a good dream.
 

                                       *     *     *

A few days later, while peeling potatoes over the slop bucket, Grandma bent her head toward where the gun stood, and she saw me looking at it, too. She took a deep breath and told me another story.

“My mother — your grandma Butler — lived here for a long time after my Pa went to jail. You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in the country, running a house all alone. Your husband’s in jail, or in the war, or dies, and there are all these men sitting around in roadhouses reading the paper, and they see the name, and they remember you. They know you’re alone — men you haven’t seen since you were a little girl in school.

“One day a car comes up the drive and it’s two or three men. They see there’s no car in sight, and no man anywhere around, so they get out. They’re real polite and respectful. They knock on the door with their hats off. They bring a big sack of groceries. They come in and sit down and have some of your bread. There’s a bottle of whiskey in that sack, so they say, ‘Let’s open it and have a drink.’ And you want to be polite, so you get the glasses out.

“And then one of them says something about how lonely it must be out here without a man around. And they laugh and make jokes until you blush. And then they suggest something, and if you had a whiskey with them and you’re a little silly and you give in —“

She paused and looked at me, not sure if I, at fifteen, knew what she was saying. I knew. I just looked at her and waited for the rest.

“And if you’re dumb enough to do that, then there’s no stopping it. They tell their friends, and pretty soon they come by the carload. That’s the other reason I keep the shotgun there. That’s the kind of thing that happens to … women.”

I had visions of my grandmother — and her mother before her — fending off rednecks with the shotgun, and I never forgot the story.

                                          *     *     *

My grandmother Florence has been dead for many years now. Her oldest son Ron, a tall lanky man with speech as slow as melting tar, lived far away and didn’t look like anyone else in the family: he’s dead too. Her son Bob lived in the house until his passing a few years ago, a recluse. My stepfather, “Uncle Joe,” finally moved there with my mother, and gasped his last from emphysema in the run-down shack he had so coveted. The porch sagged in and collapsed. New tarpaper was nailed over the roof while the windows and doors began to rot. My mother is long gone, too, having spent her last years in a high rise where no one had to carry water in buckets from a spring or trek to an outhouse.

Curiosity about Great-Grandma Butler and her Alsatian ancestors led me into some genealogical research a few years ago. I discovered cousins I never knew, and some of them visited the house and sent me photographs. The roof had crumbled and the house was now a ruin. Through the wreckage of the house I could see tattered curtains and the frame of my great-grandmother’s bed. 

Another photo came a few years later: the land had been sold for taxes and the farmer next door acquired it. Nothing remains of the trees around the house, and of the house, there is now only a slight rise where the foundation and cellar had been.

The cousins interviewed some of the neighbors and found one farmer who remembered all his parents’ stories about the Butlers. He knew about the bank robbery, and that Albert Butler was part of a gang of three robbers, all of whom went to prison.

After Albert Butler went to prison, the neighbor farmer reported, Christina Butler supported herself by making and selling moonshine, all through the Prohibition and for some years thereafter.

“Yes, she sold moonshine there,” the farmer reported. “But she didn’t just sell moonshine. She sold herself — and her daughter Florence.”

Truth is an onion. My grandmother, at its white heart, had prepared me to understand it when the time came: “the kind of thing that happens … to women.”

But was it as simple as that: men taking cruel advantage of women?

What did I know about Christina Butler? Once, after sharing a slice of the best bread in the world, fresh from the oven, she showed me a picture of her grandfather, standing in his grape arbor in Alsace. She told me he had been a water-boy for Napoleon on one of his campaigns. “We all loved Napoleon,” she told me, “because he overthrew the monarchs.”  (Napoleon loved his Alsatian troops. He said of them, when questioned about their loyalty: “They speak German, but they saber in French!”) She died when I was eleven, and as I seldom visited her, I do not remember much else.

More papers came my way, and they were startling. Christina was married twice. First, she had married a man from Lorraine named Georges Jaquillard, who divorced her saying she had committed adultery “with numerous persons on numerous occasions,” a charge not contested in the divorce. So Albert Butler was her second husband.

It also turns out that the mining towns around Pittsburgh were a hotbed of anarchism in those days. The IWPA was started there and its “Pittsburgh Manifesto” urged violence against capitalists and a maximum of personal freedom for both men and women. “Free love” was one strong component of the movement. Emma Goldman had toured not only Pittsburgh but the coal and coke towns, fomenting radicalism. Freiheit, the German-language anarchist newspaper, was everywhere.  Was Butler’s bank robbery a political act? Did Christina have to make a bonfire of anarchist literature after the failed heist?

Christina practiced “free love,” and apparently did so for profit when she had to. And what should one make of the two men, old “Homer” and my grandfather, who made “honest women” of Christina Butler and her daughter Florence? Homer was a classic recluse, the type of what happens to old anarchists. Who knows what ends their “marriage” served?

My grandfather, averse to labor to the very end, lived off “relief” all his days. Once a year, when it came time to pay property taxes, he would trek off, with dread and disgust, to work in a coal mine, but only long enough to raise money to pay the tax bill.

A profound distrust and hatred of politicians prevailed in my grandparents’ house, and church-going was treated with mockery. “They dress up on Sunday,” my grandmother recalled bitterly, “and they make fun of you for what you wear. And then they talk about you behind your back.” I am not even certain that my grandparents were legally married to one another.

These values carried over to my mother, who seemed averse to any public activity. I think she even dreaded going to the post office. I was brought up being told, without explanation, that we were not the kind of people who could go to church, or join things. Not even the Boy Scouts for me.

Not one place I lived in as a child remains standing. Yet in my mind I always knew the Diebold-Butler place was there, a last resort and refuge. “Out home,” you could grow your own corn, tomatoes and radishes, keep a few chickens, and steal electricity by climbing the power pole and attaching your own wire. Water always filled the spring, and the rains always came. A “relief” check came once a month, and once in a great while, someone had to go and buy new tarpaper to redo the roof.

At night, you closed the windows tight and a carpet of desperate moths covered the glass on the outside. Whippoorwills echoed back and forth, and, once in a while, something large would lumber through the darkness, making the dogs howl. If you took your name off the mailbox on the road, no one would even know you existed. What you did there, and with whom, was nobody’s business.

I would not and could not have gone back there, but it will never leave my consciousness. I look at the photographs of the ruined house, with sorrow and loss. “Out Home” is gone forever.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost Reads Us Little Black Sambo

I

We three boys, in the third-grade playground,

one skinny (that’s me), one short, and the fat one,

horn-rimmed glasses all, schoolbooks and lunches

in hand-me-down, important-looking briefcases.

We are the serious scholars, the brainiacs —

we know what the ominous Sputnik is beeping

and even why it’s there and doesn’t fall —

just ask us! We are no good at sports,

try not to be noticed amid the yelling,

the bigger boys’ heave and toss of baseball,

football, basketball, whatever ball

it is the season for. We trade our comics,

Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern,

and offer furtive glances at the forbidden ones,

brain-rotting horror comics some Congressman

has warned our parents to confiscate and burn.

We’re saving up to buy sulfuric acid;

a long list of chemistry projects depends

on the pharmacist, Mr. Hoffmann, dispenser

of potions, acids, saltpeter and horehound drops.

“Now, boys,” he’d warn us, winking,

“don’t go mixing saltpeter with sulfur,

’cause that plus a little charcoal is gunpowder.

Don’t get yourselves in trouble, okay?”

Oh, no, Mr. Hoffmann, we promise,

we’d never do that, Scouts’ honor.

Not one of us is a Boy Scout.

The sun-drenched playground, dark

in the hulking late-day shadow

of the brick schoolhouse, knows fear:

the monthly air-raid sirens, the file

of all of us quickly-quickly-quickly-now

to the basement shelter, the practice

of “duck and cover” in the event of a flash,

a boom and a mushroom cloud

obliterating Pittsburgh on the horizon.

Russkies and Gerries, Japs and Fascists,

Jack-in-the-box Communists

beneath the bedsprings, enemies everywhere.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost, sometime

between geography and “Our Friend the Atom,”

reads an old book to us — you’ll like this,

she tells us — it’s Little Black Sambo.

It even has pictures.      The tall boy,

the altogether too tall boy in the front row

sinks into his seat.  All eyes are on Ritchie,

the Negro boy, held back a year, two years

from the looks of him, too broad of shoulder

to even consider playing with us.

He sits all day where the teacher can mind him.

The story unfolds. Proud little Sambo,

in his new red coat, his beautiful blue trousers,

is ambushed by tigers who want to eat him.

He bribes one with his jacket, one with

his beautiful trousers, runs home

stark naked to his mother and father,

Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo.

Black Mumbo, who looks like Aunt Jemima,

celebrates the boy’s escape with a pancake dinner.

As the book is held up to show its cover

someone calls out, “Hey, that’s Ritchie!”

Laughs roil the air like veldt heat.

On Tuesday we add Ritchie Barton

to the list of things to be afraid of.

The downhill road to Caruso’s market

becomes a gauntlet run — the price

of a candy bar was meeting Ritchie’s fists.

The older boys, untouchable, catch on,

yell Sambo! Look out for tigers!

from the schoolhouse windows.

Your mama’s name is Black Mumbo!

Your pappy’s name is Black Jumbo!

One day the fifth-grade bullies,

to our slight relief,

are knocked to the ground before us.

Words thunder                                      AIN’T

     punctuate the blows                         NO

     as he pounds Timmy                         TIGERS

     to the pavement                                 IN AFRICA!

Smaller boys run,                                 MY MA’S NAME

     take the long way home                  IS ABIGAIL!

     as he pummels Anthony                  MY PA’S NAME

     against a fencepost                            IS SAMUEL!

Fist-crack, nose-break,

tooth-snap, Ritchie’s

near-baritone shouts

haunt our dreaming.

II

Miss Schreckengost makes seat assignments

for our field-trip to the hydroelectric dam.

“Forty of us,” she counts, “and forty seats.”

A kind of chill comes over the classroom.

“Of course we’ll draw lots for seat-mates.

You will stay with your seat-mate for the whole trip.”

David, the Polish boy, the smallest in class,

is told he will sit next to Ritchie Barton.

At recess, he bursts into tears in the playground.

“I can’t sit next to him. I just can’t do it.”

And I say to Dave, “You’re prejudiced.

You’re only saying that because he’s a Negro.”

That ends the conversation.

The one thing no one wants is to be prejudiced.

That’s worse than being a Nazi or a Communist.

Dave says, his back to all of us,

“I just don’t want to get beat up.”

The day of the trip to Confluence Dam,

the Polish mother keeps her son at home.

Ritchie sprawls across two seats, feet up,

a clenched right fist slapping an open left palm.

We walk a double-line with seat-mates,

Richie alone and trailing far behind,

Miss Shreckengost flamingo-tall ahead of us,

arms pointing at engineering wonders and waterfalls.

I sit in the seat behind Ritchie; Gertrude,

a girl reputed to have head lice,

sits next to me, red pigtails flying.

I have a headache, some dark thing troubling me.

If I’m not prejudiced, I think, then I should sit

in that empty spot beside Ritchie, whose fist and palm

keep time to the road rhythms. All I can see

are noses, teeth, crutches and splints.

I do not want to be beaten, either.

I am not prejudiced.

One day, I would read in Homer:

More hateful to me than all the gates of Hell

is that man who, holding one thing in his heart,

says another, as I would learn the word hypocrite.

Whatever that thing was that I had uttered,

and could not undo, I was ashamed of it.

I vowed never to do it again.

III

Years later, new town, step-fathered,

we take a family road-trip to Washington.

The parks are filled with picnickers,

families in Sunday whites, blankets and baskets,

matrons with parasols, young couples courting.

They are dressed better than we are,

and there is not one white face among them.

Our angry car passes them, windows up,

doors locked, from Washington Monument

to Lincoln Memorial, a cursory nod

to two Presidents, then off we go

to stepfather’s cousin in Maryland.

I remember a handsome, ranch-style home.

I was sent to the living room, turned on

an expensive stereo, where I listened to

the Glazounov Concerto, played by Heifetz.

These must be nice people, I thought.

I went to the kitchen door, listening:

Never seen so many in one place, you say?

They own the city. No decent white folk

will even go there. In a couple weeks

they’re gonna have a Civil Rights March,

a half a million niggers all together,

and that Commie Martin Luther King.

Wish I could get to a rooftop

with this here rifle —

and I know how to use it, too —

wish I could pick him off

and take as many of them with him

as I could, along with those Jew lawyers

I tip-toe back to Russian Glazounov,

          to Jewish Heifetz.

IV

College, and freedom:

“You’ll do it with me?” he said, incredulous.

He thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

Once I had said yes, I had to do it.

I’d done it by then,

with artists, frat boys and athletes,

my notoriety a sure ticket

to never having to ask: they asked me.

But no one black had ever asked me.

His basketball arms and legs,

     impossibly long,

     thrust out of his clothes at impossible angles.

An African prince,

     he could snap me in two easily.

“You know what they say about us?”

he asks, teasingly, shirt sliding off.

     I nod.

“It’s true. You’ll see. No turning back.”

His lithe and supple body presses me,

each second more of him

hot against me. I’m shaking.

He pushes me downward,

my hands on his chest

exploring the statue-lines

smooth as marble.

We end up in bed, I’m gasping

against his spent repose. He lets

me examine the palm of his hand,

yes it is lighter there. One rivulet

of pearl-white fluid remains

upon his dark brown forearm.

He puts my mouth there.

I am afraid to pull away.

It is too quiet. I start to shiver.

I am waiting for the rage-burst,

counting how fast I might make it

to the door and out.

 “I’m not going to hurt you,”

he assures me. “That was good.

We’ll do it again sometime.”

He stays a while. I ask

a torrent of questions,

want to know his feelings,

the truth beneath

the hard and proud exterior.

“You want to know

that no one will rent me a room

in this town? Or about the girl,

the white girl who’ll only see me

under the bridge at midnight?

Or what they’d do to me

if anyone found out?

Or where I’d be

if I didn’t play basketball?”

Just as he’s leaving, I say,

“Oh, what’s your name?

I’m sorry I didn’t ask it.”

“Ritchie,” he says.

“My name is Ritchie.”