And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were

born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took
them wives of all which they chose. There were Nephilim on the earth in those days; and also
after that when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bare children to them,
the same became the Gibborim which were of old, men of renown.

Genesis 6: 1-4.

Its curious how we act in moments of despair.

Lawrence Welk

Once an angry father dragged his son by the hair, dragged him from the barn through two
rows of apple trees. Stop Dad! the young boy finally cried. Stop! I bet your father did not drag
you this far!

It is hard living down the violence that shapes us as a youth. Born to that violence we
then face it again every day of our lives in ways that burden us and dull us, in ways that flatten us
and limit us. It is in fact hard to live down the violence, we see it first in others and perhaps in
things around us and then we finally see it in ourselves. It is hard: At some point we may decide
it is time to change, that the harmless ones we bring into being can indeed be spared of our sins,
but more likely we will die thinking little of what we could have changed, regretting even less of
what we did not care to struggle with. It is hard to live down the violence that shapes us as a
youth and smolders within us as adults and pulls down on our bones when we are old for what
else can take us to the grave? It is hard: even as it never ceases and never lessens and never
loosens its grip and never vanishes with the morning light and never fades like a bad dream and
never heals like some scars and so never can be forgotten.

In this story there are mothers and fathers, and these mothers and fathers had mothers and
fathers, and before them there were also mothers and fathers. At one time a great grandfather
and great grandmother or perhaps a great great grandmother and great great grandfather came
here to this town of B and here they stayed. We dont know what brought them here or why,

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perhaps they were escaping, perhaps they were drifting, perhaps they were following a voice,
perhaps they were being pushed, perhaps they found the Messiah here. They came here perhaps
without intention or purpose, that is perhaps they came the way drift comes to the river shore, the
way a piece of tin blows in from a storm. But what is important for this story is that we dont
know all such things, we dont know why they came here, and it is important that we dont create
a reason, that we dont assume. They came here perhaps just as some rocks may have come here
pushed here by the receding glaciers, they came here as a tree came here from a seed shat from a
bird migrating elsewhere. We cant assume. They came here and stayed here and that is all that
matters. We know this because at some point this great grandfather and great grandmother, the
ones who came here, took the time to sit on chairs on their porch of their home so that someone
took a photograph that is now between plastic covers in a book of photographs in the attic of a
home. This is all that exists of them, a picture that points to no place, no actual time, just two old
people sitting on chairs on a wooden porch somewhere. Who are they? Where are they from?
Nothing exists to provide an answer. Their stares are blank, vacant, dark eyes like upholstery
tacks in their heads. What thoughts they had in their heads were vacated just in time for this
picture to be taken. Their mouths are closed upon wood chips and dust perhaps. Their faces are
too old, perhaps you think with prejudice, and have lost the shape that offers intrigue, that gives
story to a life, life to a story. Instead, what you gain from this picture are other things. For
example: how when black and white photos age faint shades of color seem to seep in. And how
people long ago did not smile in pictures, perhaps it was impolite to flaunt a toothy happiness, to
boldly display ones ochre chompers, to guffaw at the camera, to split open a body cavity
towards a device that was ready to aspirate your soul. Yet those eyes, as blank as tacks as they
may have been, those eyes saw something, and once confined to these chairs on this porch with

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nowhere else to go, what did those eyes see? Did they see details none of us would ever see, not
now? Did they see the veins of the leaves grow yellow before turning color and dropping off the
tree? Did they see cracks ache across the plaster ceilings? Did they watch the suns path break
across the curling peels of paint on the side of the house, shadows moving like tiny waves? Did
they come to feel times force upon clouds stacked against the horizon, a certain heaviness
gradually weigh upon them, as if increasingly reluctant to let their waters spill? Did they begin
to notice the sounds that in youth one never hears or takes heed of such as the whistle of the low
wind through the row of trees along the roadway, the steam that restlessly crawled through the
radiator, the creaking of the wormed and weathersoddened timber from which this old house was
built? Or as such lessening sounds and shadowed sights fainted away, as the entire world grew
more and more smudged behind the dulling tears of old age, as the familiar landscape faded to a
dull smear, did past events surface more to life: smiles of bucktoothed children, hands grasped
against the cold on evening walks, dogs when young, the acrid smell of a fire that burned in the
back of an uncles Cadillac, a song that burned a young soul, the dried blood on a lifeless face, a
Green Giant tin can set on a brick that should have been shot instead of a sparrow on a wire
above, stars never noticed, never permanently set in their obvious constellations. Once the
outside begins to fade what light still shines internally? As sound dissipates what music remains
playing? The fact is, nothing more is known of these two people in this photo, except that they
died, except that they gave life to three daughters and that one of these daughters was Jesse
Callaway, the one who is important to us and so here we can begin our story.

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And in another world, the castanets chatter like invisible creatures

titillating the darkness outside, rattling, chattering in a cacophonic unison, in
impatient urging, the castanets chattering like the insects outside.

What is important to our story is that we do not pretend to know all the answers, that we
do not seek all the answers, that we accept that not all is known, that we accept that not knowing
is part and perhaps the whole of the story, maybe more than knowing. It is easy and it is hard. It
is easy and it is hard for those of us who have been separated, distanced, who now look back and
believe we can see with confidence and perspicuity, it is easy to laugh knowingly at what we
think we hear, it is easy to ooh and aah at what we think we see, it is hard nonetheless for we are
separated not by choice but by design, distanced by a time that has no palpable feel, cast off from
this apparent destitution to fill other empty lands.

Even when we are old it is hard to think of ourselves as old, we continue to see ourselves
as young or as younger than. Yet to be reminded that we are awake we have to first be asleep
and then when awakened from that sleep we know we are then truly awake. Then and only then
do we know that we are awake as for all the time we are awake we remember it not, we
remember it as if we were asleep and so goes life and so goes a generation and so goes an epoch,
so goes an era. To remember that we were young can only happen when we are old and forgetful.

At the bus station near the river in B, a grandmother, a mother and a young girl stand
plump belly to plump belly in a circle next to the broadly painted yellow do-not-cross caution
line. Paddy-cake-paddy-cake Three members of the same family across which the same

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features are shared: a shortened, chinless face, bulging eyes blanketed under heavy lids, pupils
magnified by thick glasses; three generations of the same tribe, their buckteeth shoving aside
their struggling smiles that vanishing into a beak of a mouth; three of a clan each with a head set
without a necks advantage upon sloping shoulders; three endomorphic torsos pleasantly round
beneath pants pulled high above the waists, shortened limbs that waddled and waved about: three
three three with phylogenetic (as in tribal) features that smooth out from one generation to the
next, grow progressively less repulsive, three blending from a grotesque equine grandmother to a
homely bovine of a mother, finally to a comely porcine daughter perhaps ten years of age, the
inherited ugliness softened, set differently on her face in terms of only millimeters, yet you are
sure she enjoys a life of smiles, of being praised, of being and kissed and told just how cute she
is.

Paddycakepaddycake

The three wait at the gate, circled onto each other, herded against all the others, each
taking turns to flash nearblind eyes towards the movements about them, laughing more loudly as
they swap partners in a quickening: Pdycakpdycakebakrsmn three three three passing on
from generation to generation that which will keep women strong and united (while men grow
feeble, degenerate). They, all three, will take the bus from B and never return, while a man, a
father, a husband, perhaps asleep, perhaps blinded by some fury he swats the air as if at a storm
of wasps around his head, too far gone to follow. These three will not figure in this story, but
they will be noticed, their portraits painted and something used.

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This here is the beginning of our story, beginning with the story of the Walkers. This
would include Wayne Walker who married Alicia Callaway who became Alicia Walker. They
had one son, the young Walker, who would go on to have this own family and his own story,
which too must be told. There are others and their stories, which must also be told, stories of
mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, offspring and relatives. These stories too will be told.
But we begin with the Walkers.

This too is the story of the town where these people lived, the town of B, a town in the
heart of the heart of the country. Here stories were told and retold just as after winter comes
spring and from spring summer, summer fall and then winter. And as the same returns then the
stories are told again.

Here pigs were killed, chickens choked and slaughtered, kittens drowned, dogs
bludgeoned, birds shot, deer rifled, gophers and rats pistoled, trapped and poisoned: this was a
place where animals died frequently and as a matter of course. People died here too, frequently
and some could say as a matter of course: tractors overturned, cars hit trees, people fell down,
gun shots went off accidently, livers gave out, kidneys wore out, brains imploded, lungs dried up.
To live in B was to be surrounded by death, although life is required for there to be death, the
origination of life was of little notice and little consequence here in B while the termination of
life was the routine, the way of things.

Really, this story is a history of women, and not so much of men. Although we will
spend considerable time telling the stories of men, the true history being told is the history of

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women and I will try to tell a history of women as a woman would tell it, as I might try to tell a
history of men as a man would. If there is one thing for sure about histories it is that they are
created to be retold, some more so than others, mine as much as others.

***

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You many think this is indeed a story of men, but it is really a story of women. That we
must speak of men is apparent, that we must speak of men as if this was a story about men and
not a story about women is what we must do here first, in order to begin.

Like all stories, this one has meaning not only in being told, not only in being told once,
but in its repetition, the repeating of its telling, the retelling of its words, the time and again of its
being, the sameness being presented on a different time in a different way.

Here men viewed the world in its totality with respect but without awe, without wonder
and knew as the world was, they too were made of dirt and clay, that they were nothing special
or of special substance really, each man had come to be and would cease to be all the same as
any other, they thought of themselves as atoms in the world, one of a million billion such atoms,
not special or individual, not chosen or gifted, but a piece of an unfathomable multitude, born
into a universe that was made up of the living yet tied to a universe that extended in one direction
to the past and in another direction to the future, just as it extended in one direction to the dead
and in the other direction to the yet to be. There was nothing special about a man, nothing unique
about an individual, each man was to do what he was to do and he would do that the same as any
other man; the men who strove to be different than any other man had not god or any other force
to guide them against the crushing weight of the entropic world that would eventually obliterate

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their puny and individual efforts, crush them down to the same dimension and significance as all
others, and it was all man could do to push forward with his insignificant but worthy efforts, to
join in unison with all other men during before and after his time and so contribute to this
massive migration that man was on, no direction really, just a mass movement towards no other
destination than maintaining this life here as best he could, as well as any lump of dirt and clay
could muster.

Said in another way: just as there was a calling to every man to be different, to be better,
to be superior to every other man in some way or other, there was a calling in every man to deny
that difference, in each man there was pride and the need to be different, just as in each man
there was a feeling of embarrassment at being different, at being recognizable above any other.
Just as there was a need in every man to be the dominant one, there was a similar and some may
say exact need to be nothing but the same as any other. Such were the bonds that held men
together, that tied society unto itself, the structured cities and states, that unionized nations, that
even ultimately tethered the world together, history to itself and the future to something
understandable.

It was this sameness, that is, this identity with all the atoms of the universe that allowed
man and all like him to exist and live and even thrive without the benefit of god or any sacred
thought whatsoever. In this, mans consciousness was the final and indisputable belief that his
life, no matter what the course of events, no matter what the trials and tribulations, no matter
what the hardships, and no matter what the blessings or the terrors, was no different than any
other and as he lived so they the other lived and as they the other lived so he lived. With this

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belief was the other belief that with the world there was a sameness to history, and there would
be a sameness to the future, that the changes you see and the changes you expect were nothing
really, nothing that point to a change in man, what counted about being a man stayed the same
and would never change, that element of being was forged to the core tightly and without
possibility of release, it was an element of the flesh, but more than the flesh, it was an element of
the body but more than the body, it was an element of the chemical but more than the chemical,
it was an element of the mind, but more than the mind, it was an element of the spirit but more
than the spirit, for it resided in man as it resided in trees, as it resided in rocks and air and water,
it was a nature that could be tempted but never teased into its own, could never change. That
core would be adorned with all sorts of costumes and figures and ideas and beliefs, but the core
itself would never change.

And so while this is a story about women, to tell it we must tell the stories of men. We
may allow the women to tell the stories, let the women tell the stories they have about men.
Through these stories about men and through their telling and retelling we will get the story of
women. Such was the story of Walker, a story we can garner not from him, but from the women.
Walker was a man who lived in the shadows and had no future about him. He had no past and he
had no future. All he had at the beginning was a name that made some people think he was
something, that he had come from somewhere. There was no reason for this, no tradition to
impart this importance to his name, but it was a name that garnered some level of esteem for no
other reason than that it did. Some were not even sure where Walker lived before he appeared
one day in B, not sure if he even lived in a place, in an abode, a house of some sorts. All anyone

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knew about him was what they surmised about him which was that what was most important to
him which was first his horses and second his freedom.

And in this world, a trumpet peals its call of loneliness, across a

terrestrial sea, across an ocean of soil, of memories, a trumpet peals.

The widow who lived alone on West Avenue Road told the story of this man who one
early morning appeared on the road above her home with two chestnut horses in tow, he had
stopped and stood there about a quarter mile from her house where she could see him from her
window and there he stood and did not move until he became but a black silhouette against the
sun that went down and then that red fire vanished behind him and night fell. She knew he was
still out there as she could hear the horses questioning their cold circumstances and she could
sense the dark heat of his being and this frightened her, but she knew she could do nothing, if he
wanted to come into the house and have his way he could, there was nothing she could do, and
this was indeed part of the fear in which she always lived, every day since her husband died and
left her alone here in this house adrift on these fields of corn and hayfeed, beneath a uterine but
barren sky. So when she awoke and saw the man still standing there the next morning, standing
there as tall and straight and resolute as if it was the same morning as before, she put on her
clothes and went out to see this man because she knew her fear would be no different whether
she faced him or not. She wrapped herself in a long coat and walked down her driveway and
when she got there she found a good looking man, dark in face and countenance, dark in
expression, a bit darkened with the dirt of perhaps several days on him and yet he was polite and
called her maam. She asked him what he was doing here and he said, rightfully nuthin maam.

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She asked him to come into the kitchen for some coffee and he said not another word, just tipped
his hat and stood as unmoving as when she first saw him and so she turned and walked back to
the house. After some time he led his two chestnut mares down her drive and tied them to a tree
and then came to the door to her kitchen and knocked, his hat in his hand as if holding a squirrel
against his chest.

His hair was black and thick across his scalp like rivulets of oil, she

remembered thinking, his hands darkened with the grease from engines and motors and
generators, his nails round dirty bits of pink opal stuck in the grime of this hands. He did not say
a word but ate the toast she gave him not touching the butter and drank his coffee black without
asking for more. He came to stay in her barn where he kept his horses and with a firm but
unspoken agreement between them he tended her land until she died not long thereafter in the
comfort of the safety he had given her, the first comfort she had had for years as a widow. While
everyone was at the funeral, he was preparing his horses to leave the barn when a man in a fine
city suit appeared. You who they call Walker? the attorney asked. I reckon I guess, Walker said
clearing his nostrils and then wiping his nose on his sleeve. With soft freckled hands, the
attorney handed Walker an envelope filled with paperwork. This heres yours now I guess, the
attorney said. And indeed, Walker was the owner now of these ten acres of land, the widow had
bequeathed the lot to him with the house and barn. That day Walker immediately set to tear
down her house with his own hands, dig up the foundation and then left what remained as an
empty field while he continued to live in the barn.

Walker knew things by what he saw and what he felt. Life had meaning if it bull-whipped
across his nerve endings and yanked like a meat hook at his spine. The closer things were to
death, the more meaning they had. Death he knew was something all things avoided, that all

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things fought against from the simplest insect that struggled to crawl despite being crushed, to
the cats and gophers and even deer which amputated by the thrashers scattered like wild
dervishes through the grass on their remaining two or three legs, like people who seemed to live
despite having no sight, no mind, so strength in legs or arms, when no reason to live was
apparent. He knew this and other things, but these things did not guide him, these things simply
answered questions as and when they arose.

Yet in fact it may be observed that Walker was indeed guided by some certain thoughts
and beliefs, and one of those thoughts was that people suffered. He in fact saw suffering as the
one thing all people had in common, and as the one thing that was the same in all people. And so
his relations, his humor, his satisfaction, his principal means of interacting with another human
being was to cause in that person some level of suffering, to watch that reaction and through that
to find a kindred relationship, to see a kinship, to understand the other. This perversion applied
not only to humans by the way but to animals as well. He would rarely pass one of his horses
without slapping it on the rump a little too hard, or flicking its ear with the end of a whip. He
used fear to create a relationship between him and his animals, even the ones he loved the most,
a fear that he drove into them with spurs and heels and stick and shouts and the smell of a man
who smelled as if he were on fire, burning in rage, an unctuous diesel kind of fear to which all
his animals finally succumbed as Walker was as relentless as he was determined. With humans,
his interaction was the same, albeit more subtle. He brought pain to everyone that allowed him
proximity, a pinch, a grasp that was too hard too long, even the burn from the tip of his cigarette
allowed to drift carelessly close to skin or hair. All of this evoked in Walker that guffaw of

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laughter of course and the more pain the higher his lips parted from his teeth and the greater his
shouts of laughter.

There are no true beginnings to these stories, no points of origination, no paths we can
follow. We dont know about Walkers childhood, we dont know if what he experienced was
even more terrible and terrifying, even more sadistic and cruel than what he imposed on his own
son and other relations, perhaps he lived in horrors far beyond what we know the young Walker
had to endure. Whatever the case, the young Walker grew up to believe that his father, Walker,
was the strongest, most courageous man there was, he grew up to believe that there was nothing
that his father could or ever would fear, he grew up to believe that there was nothing in the
universe greater or more omnipotent than his father, nothing that his father could not conquer
and vanquish and so the young Walker grew up believing that world was a place that harbored
little if anything to be feared, the only thing to be feared was in fact Walker himself, his own
father. The rest of the world was a safe and accommodating adventure.

Walker knew how the world could change. And he knew that life could change like the
world did, like the weather did, which was capricious and unkind.

Walker had a chiseled and sunhardened handsomeness to his face. He had the look of a
Hollywood cowboy, rough, rugged, leathered, oiled, slender and wiry. His eyebrows pushed into
deep furrows in his forehead. His black hair was always neatly greased and combed, the part in
his hair like a razor cut through bloodless flesh. A thin pencil moustache darkened his upper lip.
His neck was tan and sinewy and held his head up with defiant purpose.

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It wasnt looks that attracted women to him. Some said he looked like a Jew, some said
he had some Italian in him, some said some Persian, some said he must have some nigger blood
in him. But, it wasnt his looks that attracted the other sex. Women were attracted to the look in
his eyes, the faint panting of his nostrils, the slight wetness on his skin, his fear, they were
attracted to his fear like mosquitoes to the radiance of body heat.

It wasnt his intelligence. One did not look at Walker and wonder what was this man
thinking. He had an old country look to his face one that was creased like an old leather glove
yet uncrossed by thought, at least not until necessary, but when necessary the thoughts, real and
effective, were abundant and forceful. Walker had one thing, he had a dream. Walker had a
dream of building something, building something great, something that had never been built
before, something he would have liked to talk about it excited him so much, but of which he
never talked about as he never came to the point of forming a verbal idea of what it was he
would build that would in fact alter the world.

If one were to give Walker a philosophy this may be it: there is only one life, this one,
which is being played out with murderous certainty.

***

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This is about Americans, which is more an idea than a people. An idea sometimes
wrapped in red and blue. An idea that sells more than it buys. And before I say any more, I have
to admit that I have thought little about what it is to be an American. And what I am writing here
will not change that. I have no idea of what it means to be a part of the new world versus the old
world. I have some idea of what it means to be in the first world versus the third world, but if
you asked me to point to the second world, I would not know where to put my finger. I have
ideas about generations and about traditions, ideas that could be as wrong as they are correct. I
know something about fathers, as I had one, but I am sure I know more about other fathers and
less about my own. I know something about the women in my family as they seem to have a
substance that is more palpable and therefore more memorable than the men. And if I tend to
describe the women here in this story in terms that make them seem stronger, more substantive
than the men, that may because this was true and they were stronger and more substantive, but it
very well could be otherwise.

The privilege of being an American is one with the privilege we all share to not
remember much of who we are.

To remember who we are is not to glory in our

accomplishments but to relive the embarrassments of the past, but mostly to remember is simply
unnecessary, to remember is a skill, a game, an activity that we do not cherish enough to make it
part of life, we relax in the thought that someone else will remember for us, the past is not worth

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the paper it is written on, even if it were true, especially if it were true. But some people
remember if for reasons we will never grasp fully, someone will remember because they cannot
so choose to shut out the past, others simply because they have no choice but to be surrounded
by the past.

My past was kept in the attic of a one story farmhouse on the plains of the Midwest. This
was a house that began small and grew ever smaller as I grew older, a house that otherwise
remained standing and pretty much the same through snow storms, hail storms, rain storms,
floods, twisters and tornadoes, that stood its ground as the ground around it changed, as roads
were put in, as neighboring farms vanished, as new buildings were put in, as civilization sprouted
all around it like some quickly maturing crop. It is still there today. Perhaps.

In the attic of the house is this story, or at least the story I am trying to tell. The story is
real, but what I am telling is made up for the most part, perhaps has nothing to do with the real
story, but as such it is an account that draws its breath so to speak from the elements and
individual aspects in that attic, in that house, in that place.

Before me came my mother and my father, before my mother came her sister and her
brother. Before her brother and sister came her mother and father and before them came their
mother and father, and before them came a mother and father who came here for reasons long
forgotten and forever forgiven. Forgotten or forgiven, what remains of their stories are in this
attic. Such are the things collected and organized here, such as the things that are wrapped and
boxed and stacked and piled here. Such are the things that are displayed and hung and tucked

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away and hidden here. Such are the things on racks and in boxes, in drawers and hung from the
rafters here. There is love here, there is violence here. There is laughter here, there is pain here.
There are dresses here, row after row and rack after rack of dresses, some wrapped carefully in
plastic, some smelling of mothballs, some hung on satin hangers, many collecting the dust and
becoming misshapen with the weight of time. There are dresses of certain styles and dresses of
certain periods, there are dresses of heavy white materials with black vinyl belts and large black
buttons, there are satin dresses with frilly lengths and puffy sleeves, there are woolen dresses in
grays and browns and blacks, there are pink dresses with black collars and green dresses with
white trimmings and striped dresses and cottony sun dresses. There are promises here, there are
forgotten vows and unforgotten disappointments here, there are hopes on display here, there are
times that could have been and memories of what might have been. There are shoes, boxes and
bins of shoes, shoes carefully displayed on wooden racks made especially for shoes. There are
high heeled shoes and thick heeled shoes and low heeled shoes, there are sandals and there are
slippers with brilliant glassy stones clustered on the toes as if hatched beneath a shattered
window, there are boots, cowgirl boots made of ostrich, cowboy boots made of alligator, there
are high calf length boots and low ankle high boots. There are smiles and excitement and the
smells of ancient sweat here, and there are wrinkles and spills and stains and traces of tears here.
There were hats here, all kinds of hats, some in boxes, some hats hung on wooden pegs. Velvet
hats with long feathers were here as were small white macram hats and hats made of felt with
ribbons and fake gems sliding off the spots of glue that held them. There were dolls in this attic,
dolls with ceramic faces and frilly dresses covered in plastic, here were dolls made of rags and
dolls with dirty faces that had been worn and dragged and played with for a lifetime or two, there
were dolls that were puppets, there were large stuffed animals, tigers and lions and bears and

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dogs; there were ceramic animals and animals carved from wood and animals pulled into shape
from once molten glass and animals chipped from crystal, there were glass birds and ceramic
alligators and clay squirrels and fish made from tiles; there were boxes of old albums, old
spinners, old forty-fives and seventy-eights and vinyl LPs, there were recordings of Frank
Sinatra, recordings of Benny Goodman, recordings of The Lennon Sisters, recordings of
Lawrence Welk, there was an album of Miles Davis here. There is sacrifice and loss here, there
is bitter recognition and foolish acceptance, there is unbearable denial here. And in this attic
there were shelves of items that one could never imagine collecting, let alone organizing in such
a fashion, there were collections of rubber bands, sorted by color, sorted by thickness; there were
collections of paper clips and collections of pencils, some sharpened and some never readied for
us; there were collections of ballpoint pens; there were collections of erasers, some of them gum,
come of them pink, some of them a brittle amber in color; there were magazines, piles and piles
of magazines, piles of Readers Digest, piles of National Geographic, piles of Country
Gentleman, piles of Life, piles of Look; there were books, collections of Nancy Drew, collections
of Sherlock Holmes, collections of Readers Digest Condensed Books. There were secrets here,
many secrets here. There were a thousand things that did not fit into a collection, but were
individual pieces picked up who knew where, there were handkerchiefs embroidered with
pictures of puppies, dinner plates with pictures of Disney characters, there were lamps that
looked like palm trees, there were salt shakers shaped like drunken Mexicans, there were wooden
stage coaches and horses made from felt; there was toy soldiers and old telephones; there were
collections of thimbles made out of ceramic and painted with gold paint, there were collections
of spoons each of a different state; there were collections of salt shakers, therere were shakers
that looked like dancing mushrooms, there were shakers that looked like rainbow trout, there

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were shakers that looked like dairy cows, there were shakers that looked like antique cars, there
were shakers of black Aunt Jemimas; there were coin collections and jars filled with old nickels,
old pennies, old dimes and old quarters; there were small blue books filled with old silver coins,
buffalo nickels and silver dollars; there old toys, wind-up toys that danced and jigged, there were
batter operated toys, there were race cars, there were toy locomotives, there were radio operated
airplanes, there was a bartender who mixed drinks until his nose turned read, there were birds
that perpetually dipped their beaks into a pool of water. There were memories here, fingerprints
of those who remembered, smudges of those who remembered, chips and cracks and tears left
there by the ones who remembered. There were memories here, mementos, there were photos
here, photos in frames set upon a table top or vanity table, some hung on the walls, some
gathered in photo albums, slipped between sheets of plastic. Some photos had names and dates,
some photos had dates only, some photos had names only, some photos had a description such as
Jennifer at Tom Eliots birthday party, or Buddy on an air craft carrier off to Korea. There were
feelings here, there were thoughts and emotions here, all wrapped and sorted and left to dust, left
to time. They were packed into a hull, they rode a ship, they were afloat on a sea, they had great
distances to travel before they would be opened, before they would be revealed, before any
questions would be asked.

There was an album by Miles Davis here, Sketches of Spain, an album with a black
figure of a man on the cover, a small black man so black, so thin and so contorted behind his
trumpet that he looked as if only the charcoal essence remained of this man; this album cover
was worn and tattered; how many nights the lonely trumpets over Spain played at night; how
many times did this black man fill this sorrowful house with his sorrowful tones? The song that

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begins with the castanets clattering chattering like the insects in the night, clattering in the night,
chattering.

To be an American is to be a being that has no real idea of its being. It is and is not
something that impales itself onto a consciousness. It is and is not something that can be
faithfully discussed. For the most part, to be American is to be new, which means not to
compare itself with the old, but to ignore the old and to never in fact fully acknowledge the old,
the old is not just what was it never really was and so what is is not anything in relation to the old
and so equally without relation to what will be. There was nothing and there will be nothing.
But what is is and is new and so better than the old, which is never discussed at all. Of course
there are discussions all the time about the old, and remarks and stories and tales told that seem
to indicate that the old was indeed very real and quite meaningful. But that would be to give too
much weight to conversation, which is no heavier than the dust on butterfly wings. Youth is
remembered, childhoods remembered although vaguely, mothers and fathers are remembered but
even more vaguely still, grandmothers and grandfathers have been reduced to a few stories, a
few sentences of memory, a faint image, a single image, one that no one remembers except as an
image. And beyond grandfather and grandmothers, nothing is known, nothing remembered and
so very little talked about. Gravestones marking our ancestors are meaningless but in name and
date, they do not point to a body below the surface that once ambulated, ate, gave birth, cried.

Opinions here (perhaps mine as well but we are not talking about my opinions even as
they shape this story like rinds of an orange) were formed and repeated verbatim like epithets
etched into the stoniness of life, he was a good man, he was a scoundrel, he was a character, and

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these lived with the bearer. Here men never really grow up, not in mind, not in intellect, not in
feeling. All men were good boys and all women were good girls, but not all good boys were
good men and not all good girls were good women, the cause of the last could have been fate,
could have been chance, could have been luck, could have been biology.

And the trumpet sang of what her heart knew not, the trumpet sang of
what her heart knew not but desired; the trumpet sang of what her heart
knew not, what her heart desired and what she knew she would never have;
the trumpet sang of what her heart knew not, what her heart desired and
what she felt was hers to keep; the trumpet sang of what her heart knew
not, of a land she knew not, of a place she would never know, a place she
felt was hers to keep; the trumpet sang of what her heart knew not, of a
place that was hers never forever.

* * *

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It is time to understand Alicia Walker. What is to be known first of Alicia Walker was
how she traveled the road from high school beauty queen of milk white skin and raven hair to a
worker in a battery factory where her skin grew pocked and festered with chancres and boils,
where her teeth blackened and her hair thinned to but a faint smoky halo about her head. How
she became squat, round, close to the ground in such a way that she came to mimic the gnomes
and trolls that she planted in her yard. To understand Alicia Walker is to see how she lost any
sense of her being important in the world and to such an extent that she had no real care if she
lived or died, and so she could one day be attacked by a swarm of bees or find herself stranded in
her car in the middle of a cold winter night and not seem to care at all, neither shooing away the
stinging bees or seeking help on the freezing night.

There are always exceptions. In some cases, exceptions mean everything. In other cases
exceptions mean nothing. We cannot allow exceptions to rule our thinking. Yet we cannot
blindly overlook the exceptions that seem to disprove the rule. The exceptions may be the rule,
but exceptions do not rule the rule.

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To understand Alicia Walker is first to understand Jesse Callaway, also requires

understanding Jesse Callaway, Alicias mother, to some extent in that both hid all important
feelings, hid them away like all was hid beneath the cover over the water well. To know Jesse
Callaway is to come to know the Callaways, and to know the Walkers it is unavoidable to come
to know the Callaways. But we will come to Jesse Callaway and all the others later.

Alicia Walker grew up in shadows. Shadows were the substance of life, the reflections of
what was known and unknown, the cover of safety and the lurking unknown. And so Alicia
Walker grew up in the strange shadows of her mothers delusion, grew up in a world that was
dark, dusty and cheap, but was also beautiful and dear, forming a split in her world that
eventually divided her mind and so she grew up to feel wanting of marriage but at the same time
disdainful of marriage, she grew up longing for love but was spiteful of love, she desired success
but was repulsed by success. And of this we will come to know more about.

The men who came to see Alicia Walker while she was a beauty queen came from all
strata of this Midwestern American town. Her radiance and beauty attracted the educated and
wealthy; her orneriness brought the debonair and the worldly who could not resist the challenge;
her reputation for being loose and wild brought her the boys who wished to be men; her swelling
ankles and freckled skin brought hope to the local boys that they too might be considered. She
wanted none of them.

Alicia Walker knew she was beautiful, and she was beautiful enough to have made
anyone happy, yet she was not happy, she was not unhappy because of her beauty, which actually

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did in fact make her very happy, she was unhappy because she knew her beauty would not last
and she was not a person who could live and appreciate what she had in the present, all she could
think about was the fact that she would have to live with something different in the future than
what she had now.

Alicia sought freedom over love, sought independence over anything else and so
willingly went to work on an assembly line during the war, where she lost her girlish ways and
then lost her caring about her girlish ways which meant she lost her need for those girlish ways
and so the dresses, the hats, and the shoes were wrapped in plastic and stored up in the attic as
she no longer had need for any of them.

In older age, men were whatever they had gained to become a man, ask any man at an
earlier stage in his life, what he has that has made him a man and invariably he will stutter and
hum, squint and fumble with his hands in the pockets of his pants, rummaging there for keys,
coins, wads of paper, a soiled handkerchief, that is all he really has, and to a man they lose this in
their older age, they lose what they think theyve gained at an earlier age which made them at
least for a time a man, and so in older age men can again become boys and they do this by losing
what they had earlier gained, that which gave them independence, that which gave them
confidence, that which gave them authority, authority over each aspect of their life even living
and dying, which they lose when they grow older, they lose even this authority over living and
dying and lose everything else that made them a man.

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Walker offered Alicia nothing but revenge pure and simple upon her father, this was the
only way to hurt her father, by torturing herself beyond anything her father could have imagined.
As for Alicia Walker, as time went on it became clear that she was not right, that something
inside of her head had finally developed to the point of expression, something that would disrupt
all that had been planned for generations. But Walker made her happy too.

Women here are born dependent and only become independent when their husbands lose
their manhood and so the woman must become what the husband had promised to be and should
promise to be but lost as he grew older and so the woman, the wife, she has no choice but to be
the one to acquire and uphold those traits of independence the man gave up as he grew older and
she will continue to have to uphold this independence even as the husband grows older and ever
more dependent until she is caring again for a child, an infant, until she is caring for him like she
would have to care for a baby.

And the trumpets peal is one of loneliness, of calling, a lament, the

castanets in the background like the insects outside, like tongue clicks and
teeth clicks urging us along; the trumpets peal is one of loneliness, of
longing, the castanets rattling softly their reminder of things forgotten but
stored away; one of loneliness, the trumpets peal is of a place unknown, of
a place imagined and wished for, of a place where the insects rattle like
castanets making the air shimmer with your presence and a voice calls out
softly.

27 | P a g e

***

The Walkers who we are coming to know now, and Callaways who we will know, were
none purely a Midwestern folk, they had merely been carried here by the flow from a storm that
rushed them past the iron and coke cities below Lake Erie, a flow that was not strong enough to
push them beyond the plains, they drifted here, like feathers off a bird, like tumbleweeds, like
bits of detritus that finally reached firm ground.

When Alicia Walker chose Walker as her mate, a darkness of a kind fell over B, and all
who lived there knew that all hope was gone, not because of evil or the triumph of evil over
good, but because they now saw that hope was nothing but a fraud.

She wore a red dress at her wedding and blackened her hair to a ravens sheen. Walker
wore a white tuxedo with white patent leather shoes and a white top hat dressed with a grey
velvet sash. In one of those gestures that defines a man by painting him as enslaved to his

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irrational desires, Walker whipped the horses drawing their marriage carriage to the people
waiting at the reception, throwing the new Alicia Walker from the seat and onto the ground, and
causing him to cut his hand to the bone, the blood deeply staining his white tuxedo.

How quickly Walker acquired a status from nothing, having nothing to give him rank or
station he nonetheless achieved one by a meticulousness that he applied to all and everything that
he touched with his hands, he crafted it from wood, from metals, he painted it, craved it, drew it,
built it, grew it from the ground, nurtured it by the time he was finished building his house and
his barn, he had achieved a position of recognition and admiration that would take him years to
destroy.

When Walker married Alicia Callaway, Walker went from being a nobody, or at most an
enigma, a ghost, a gypsy, a man who had no place, no role, he went from this place of nothing
and uncertainty to being a wholly different kind of a man. It is uncertain how or why this
transformation took place. Some say it happened within the community in order for everyone to
make sense of the marriage in the first place. Some say it occurred due to the mysterious nature
of Walker, a dark, gypsy sort of a man, who had appeared like a quixotic apparition and came
bearing a set of silent but leviathan skills in the ways of building and creating. Some say it came
from Alicia Walker herself, not in anything she said, but in what she conveyed from her person
as if she had been imbued with a sudden power and nobility, as if she had indeed been
transformed and so with her transformation were born the myths about Walker.

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Walker began to substantiate his own myth by taking to building their home with his own
hands on the ten acres of land left to him by the Widow. The men who watched him at the
beginning of his build said it could not be done. He went about doing it all himself, digging the
basement, framing in the foundations, tying the rebar, pouring the concrete that he mixed in a
wheelbarrow a sack at a time. Other men watched him as he cut the floor joists, set them in
place with the help of his horses, and tied them in to a side; as he began framing the outer walls,
building them first on the leveled ground then pull them up with a pulley he tied to a nearby tree.
Then a few men stepped in and helped him raise the walls, curious how Walker had managed to
build the walls in such a way, and then they helped with the trusses that would go across the
garage roof, these men amazed at the techniques Walker employed to strengthen the beams and
tie in the truss so solidly into place. More men came to watch and see for themselves the
manners and techniques that this strange and silent man used in all aspects of his building,
manners and techniques that seemed superior and more modern yet at the same time more
ancient than their own, as if this man Walker possessed some knowledge that they had long
forgotten. They came to watch and learn and they came to help bringing cement mixers and
sledge hammers as they poured the cement floor in the basement, as they leveled the cement
floor of the first floor and raised the roof over the entire house. Men and women had joined to
put in the windows and doors, to being to fill in the asbestos and nail the plywood to the wall
studs, to put up the plaster board and layer the siding and being to layer the shingles on the roof.
By the time the house was done, done to the point that all it needed was the finishing plaster on
the inside walls and paint on the windows and doors, not only had a town come together to help
the Walkers, but Walker had cemented his own reputation as a man unlike any other.

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When a tractor fell over on Farmer Schmidt, the first person who stopped after seeing
Schmidt from the road called out for Walker. When the city council wanted a new design for the
sign on Route 80, the four members in attendance unanimously thought of Walker. When the
electricity went out and the pigs began to die in the heat of their pens at Strabbs Pig Farm the
call went out to Walker. When the television reception went out in the middle of the college
game, the phone number the bartender asked for was Walkers. When a horse lost half its leg in
a freak accident with a hay binder, the only person anyone could think of was Walker. When it
was predicted that tornadoes would touch down upon the city and that storms would come and
carry away the crops and animals and all kinds of insects would descend on flesh and plant, a
woman fell to the ground and wept how could this happen to a town with a man such as Walker.
When a child got stuck in a carnival ride, the mothers screams went out to Walker. When an
airliner crashed in the cornfields out past Simmons fields, the whispers of the onlookers who
dared go no closer to the billowing smoke of the burning wreckage was of asking for the
whereabouts of Walker, surely he would go forth.

Unlike the others, she had not been drawn to the fear in him, the fear in him was not an
attractive force. She was attracted to his eyes where she saw not fear but sorrow, a heaviness, a
sad and deeply rooted weariness, she saw in those eyes a mans trip far across the earth, she
could measure his wanderings, their length and solitary hours, in his eyes, she could plump how
far his soul had traveled.

Walker told Alicia Walker how he hated her nigger music. Walker told her how she hated
that blaring trumpet, that blaring noise, that blaring nothing but nigger noise. Alicia told Walker

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that he, Walker, looks like the nigger man on those albums. Walker told her that she should go
live with niggers then or go be with her nigger loving brother who gave her the music.

The misery of Walker and Alicia Walker is what made them a solid and permanent part of
B. They took in friends on the weekend. In the morning Walker drank coffee while listening to
the farm report on the radio, made himself eggs which he ate with ketchup and coffee, smoked
his cigarettes and looked out the windows as dawn soaked its way across the horizon. He was a
welder during the day, worked on his own, a free man who picked his own jobs whether they be
mending or making fences, gates, railroad cars, tractors, pulleys, roofs. At night he worked in
the barn, drank the wine that he made and talked to his horses as if her were playing poker with a
bunch of buddies.

Church had vanished from the Walkers lives, not though any willful decision but slowly
until it no longer had any function or physical form in their existence; the farm became their
church although there was nothing religious about the farm, if anything the farm had a pagan
element to it, which protected it and its inhabitants from the God who came to visit the living in
the manifestation of weather and death. Only through death and destruction did God show his
hand.

Then there is the story of Paul who was not a Walker or a Callaway, but a story that needs
to be told as well. Paul was an egg farmer who had once lived next to Alicia Walker and Walker
on a farm that had long since torn down and replaced with a small shopping mall. Paul had
pocketed some good retirement money as he called it from that sale, not nearly as much as he

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could get now or if he had had some smarts about him, but like he said there are some things that
are never gone to change.

And once some time after Walker had died, some years after that

event, Paul came by Alicia Walkers house with a bouquet of flowers in his hand. He had gotten
a haircut and even allowed the barber to remove the few hairs that had sprouted from his nose.
He had scrubbed his skin and tried to remove a few of the blackheads that had spotted his face
for decades. He brushed his teeth, put on some cologne that had not been uncorked for more
than twenty years since before his wife had died and he rang the bell at As home. Oh my Paul!
Alicia said, I aint seen you in more than fifteen darn years. I knows it darn well enough I guess,
Paul said, and so here I is like a fool anyway coming here to ask you to marry me. They married
a few weeks afterwards and Paul moved in with Alicia Walker to the Walker home. Together
they were happier than any couple ever could admit.

***

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On these plains, homes were not castles but more like ships cast afar on a gently
undulating sea, such was the isolation, such was the feeling amongst all those who had never
seen for themselves an ocean other than this one on which they lived, and such was the attitude
that to know this ocean was to know all oceans (to know part of the ocean was to know all the
ocean), and to grow upon the ocean was to know nothing but the ocean and so not know or trust
in any other world. And so on this ocean if but water and things dissolved in water one took
great pain to collect all that was soiled and dirty.

Catastrophe
Cataclysmic

Catarrhal
Here are vast, sterile fields, flat swathes of sterile land where nothing grows but the rows
of genetically constructed grain we feed to swine and distill into fuel. Here are the vast fields,
brutal landscapes broken by patches of trees like the missed stubble on an old mans face. Here
are the vast seas of sterile land where a farmers home sits with shed, garage and barn, a raft
afloat on this terrestrial sea, alone on this vast sea of chosen loneliness, their self-contained,
enclosed insanity. Here are vast seas flat and straight broken up by the sinewy highways that
snake for no reason across the geometrical fields, the cell towers that rise ever few acres with

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blinking lights and long tethers of wire that keep them perpendicular to the earth, the water
tower, small and desperately inadequate, as if a dew drop held above a vast desert. Here are
unending fields of grain, of dirt, of dust, where houses are surrounded by trees as if ashamed of
their nakedness, where the skies above road ways are littered with billboards for cancer
treatments, advertisements for Alzheimers, strokes, assisted living, assisted memory, assisted
hearts and assisted lungs, fast foods cooked in butter, Jesus Christ our savior only an exit away,
motorcycles, trucking jobs, new housing developments called Shangri La, called Belle Epoque.

One drove here across vast flats of land, fields of corn, fallow fields stubbled with broken
stalks from the season before, you drove past unending fields where a neglected barn or house
would suddenly appear, as eyeless as a cows skull in the desert of land, your drove past small
glades of trees left behind like stubble from a careless shave, you came upon factories that rose
up out of the nothingness with their tall silos and round corrugated bins, their smokestacks of
steam or smoke, the buildings that housed the ethanol machinery, you drove past windmills
which rotated with such a slow and sleepy motion, begging you to bend your head to the side, to
lie down and take a nap, you drove past tractors pulling great contraptions in their tow, alien
looking machines that tamped the ground, machines with long arms the injected gases and
chemicals, that culled the soil, that planted the grains, that raked and groomed and readied the
fields, you drove through areas where telephone and electrical wires seemed to converge and
cross this way and that, covering the ground with a form of Spanish moss, a broad and terrible
cobweb, you drove past towns which were nothing more than a few homes, a few brans, a few
red brick buildings and maybe a gas station that had gathered together as if flotsam caught in a
random ocean eddie.

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And despite the dust cars and pickups pulled from the many miles of gravel roads, despite
the clouds of dust from tractors in the fields, the great clouds of insecticide and other chemicals
long armed monsters prayed across the fields, despite the blasts and toiling in the dusty quarries,
the skies over these vast fields remained clear, extending the distance to each horizon,
diminishing the land and expending the ever reaching, overarching sky.

The question is, how did Walker acquire a rank and status with nothing to substantiate it
in family or land or other holdings? He achieved it by a meticulousness that he applied to all he
touched with his hands, he shaped, he built, he crafted it. And they respected it. For what it was.

* * *

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The Walker home was small but representational. It represented all the possibilities that
life had to offer, it didnt need to be bigger, any more complex, as in its elements and the
arrangement of the houses elements were all the possibilities of the world and so like a dream,
but a dream that could fail.

She lived for sixty five years in this house, until her face came to look like the skin of a
chickens foot.

The Walker home was created out of the city in which it is created and for the Walkers
this was no different. There was a religious tendency in this town of B and there was a pagan
tendency in this town of B and there was a scientific tendency. There was a spiritual tendency
and there was a tendency based on superstition. There was some tendency to think in scientific
terms but there was an equal if not greater tendency to think in terms that were instinctual,
perhaps derived more from another source than one that might be called scientific, and might be
better called religious than anything else, a pagan religiosity if anything of any kind. And all
this was easy to see. On the lawns of the homes were the many items that represented their daily
homage, the deer cast from cement, the plaster squirrels and chipmunks, the cast iron turtles, the

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plastic birds tied to tree limbs and gutters, plastic owls nailed to the rooftops and eves, the plastic
alligators that were set near small wooden bridges spanning make believe streams. And here
there were the little gnomes, the elves and fairies set amidst the gardens and shrubs, there were
the knee high characters from Disney, there were the plastic fish and squid and other creatures
tied to the fences. Come Easter and the gardens and driveways and fences and patios were
covered with even a greater number of animals: bunnies, chickens, baby chicks; come Halloween
and the yard and house were filled with vampires and bats and werewolves and witches and
caldrons and zombies; come Christmas and the entire place was outfitted with blinking lights and
displays of Santa and his reindeer, elves and their presents, polar bears and their cubs, giant
snowmen in their scarves and hats. And so it was a religiosity that was tied to the land more than
to the Church, superstition flowing from lips more than scripture.

The inclination here was to recreate not to copy the fashionable, painted walls were made
to look like wood, columns painted to look like marble, designs meticulously recreated in
pattern, texture and quality.

At holidays the families would gather, the children would retreat after dinner and lie in
front of the TV, the men would take to chairs and slowly fall asleep, while the women would
gather around the large horseshoe shaped table in the breakfast nook to talk. Talk always began
with the niceties, with the remarks about some and some and whats his name that commended,
praised, repeated an age old admiration. But wine or no wine, the real talk would not get started
until it became a spirited one about all that was bad, all that was twisted, abnormal and evil.

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Winter came upon the land and the home and covered the trees with sheaths of knobby
ice, the snow piled up on the thinnest of surface, fences and wires, growing to impossible
thicknesses, inches would turn to feet of snow that covered everything leaving only the antlers of
the cement deer still peering above the crusty surface, a few twigs from the bushes along the
driveway barely stretching forth for some sun. Sleet planted its faceprints against the windows,
ice covered the sidewalks and tugged unmercifully on the canopies no one brought in from off
the porches. From foggy windows one could burrow a hole with the side of your hand and peer
out into what was nothing but a grave, perhaps a few birds bouncing across the snow like pine
cones being tossed in the wind. The wind would come and surround the house, embrace it
around one side and coo down the chimney sweep. The wind would seem to buck up against the
floor board and the rafters would creak, the walls pinch and snap, while icy branches scratched at
the glass window panes that separated you from all that was death.

Outside a dog shivered

curled into the snow.

Animals were but things but like rocks but like clods of dirt. Somehow you were able to
ignore the eyes that looked at your eyes, the skin that shivered when it was tickled and touched,
you were able to ignore the queer and imperfect but obvious attempts to communicate, you were
able to ignore the life that was protected by that purse of bones and tissue and skin and fur which
you shot, cut, killed, slaughtered, broke, maimed, drowned or clubbed like a fly that bothered
you with its incessant banging at the window.

* * *

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So far the story has been about mothers and fathers, and to some extent their mothers and
fathers to which we will at one point return. But this story also needs to be about the sons and
daughters, the offspring of these mothers and fathers. And so this story now needs to be about
the young Walker, the son of Walker and Alicia Walker.

Walker painted photos of his newborn and infant son as if to create something both more
modern and something older than it was; he painted a beauty and a glow into the boys eyes and
cheeks which were not to be found in the ordinarily sullen face, and he painted a nobility and an
intelligence and a refinement in the boys expression and posture that did not exist, as if painting
both a future he knew he would never have and a past he would never know.

There were the large ways of Walker and then there were the small ways of Walker. The
large ways of Walker were the ways he had of making himself a part of the world and thereby
conquering the world in his own way. The small ways of Walker were the ways in which he
sought to steal a piece or a bit from the world for his own and thereby removed himself from the
world and made himself smaller and more insignificant. These were the large and small ways
that his son, the young Walker, came to slowly understand in his father.

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Religion

Revelation

Rebellion
Often when as a boy the young Walker was out with his father, his father would do
something such as flick a whip at another persons horse, or if they were walking on a street in
town, Walker would flick a burning cigarette butt into the open door of a shop. This made the
young Walker uncomfortable because he was never sure his father would not get caught and he
always wondered why his father did these things and he knew that he could not ask and he knew
that if he did ask he would get both that crooked Walker smile as well as a reprimand if not now
then later when his father would flick him with a whip or toss a cigarette butt into his hair.

From this the young Walker evolved from believing as children believed that the world
was as his father said was to believing that the world was outside and separate from his father,
and in fact came to believe that the world was something outside and separate to himself as well,
something that one planned a strategy against, that one decided was against and contrary to ones
own best interest at least part of the time if not most of the time, and so began the process by
which the young Walker came to prepare and thereby came to understand the world.

Walker taught the boy how to use tools, taught him both the skill and beauty as well as
the cruelty of tools; how to create something was to destroy something else; how to create a
beautiful birdhouse was to destroy the wood you built it from; how to create a design out of
wrought iron was to destroy the design you held in your mind.
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The young Walker can feel what it is that he gained from his father: it is a stone that will
not move from its place, the hard center around which all else will grow, the seed of an ugly
pearl.

The young Walkers wife, Jeri Lynn, was an unfortunate specimen lacking a chin and
seemingly a mind and personality as well; she was narrowed at the shoulders and wide at the
hips, her arms and legs too short for her body, her feet were long and the toes splayed. Jeri Lynn
had no noticeable or demonstrable passion, no interest, no abilities as either a woman or
potentially a wife, and so her sudden courtship to the young Walker was a surprise to most of all
her family. Jeri Lynn was with child before she married the young Walker, pregnant to a man
who had raped and beat her, left her for dead, who left her without much of a mind thereafter.

Jeri Lynns family did not approve of her marriage to the young Walker, believing that
their daughter for what had been done to her was so far below anyones rank and station in the
world that shed be nothing but mistreated, abused and eventually hurt and even destroyed if she
came to be owned by someone else, she was especially far below what they esteemed of the
Walkers status if not by family name then by what they had built around them. But Jeri Lynn
did not care a bit about her family and their fears.

Jeri Lynns inner thoughts began to come out when she married the young Walker. Walker
was by this time dead.

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Jeri Lynn and the young Walker eloped. She left with the young Walker as a chinless,
hare brained child and returned as a mother and a wife with a solid, stronger will than any could
have imagined.

After the young Walker and Jeri Lynn were married he started to think about building his
own house. This process began in his mind for first they had to live in a small four room rental
which Jeri Lynn fixed up with curtains and bright paint and flowers and small trees that she
planted out along a brick walk. The young Walker did nothing to improve that small house for
he was preoccupied in his mind with the house he was building. He wrote down no plans, drew
nothing out on paper, he simply collected his thoughts in his head and from there he began to
architect what would be one day his home. His father had taught him everything he needed to
know, he knew how to dig the foundation and cellar, he knew how to put in the supporting walls,
how to lay the floors, how to put in the joists using mortise and tendon joints without glue or
wedge, he knew how to join parquetry, he knew how to create the tall double doorways, French
windows, he knew how to create space and support with the proper engineering, he knew how to
bend the metal and set it properly on concrete or on wood, he knew how to set the double walled
safety glass, he knew how to build in the extra support that would protect them from twisters and
tornadoes, he knew how to double set the eaves so that no wind would blow them away, he knew
how to lay the roofing tiles, how to cement and fortify the chimneys, he knew how to build the
all glass davenport, how to level and set the windows so that they would bend with the house
without breaking, how to set the foundations between pads of hard rubber so that they would
shift with the settling of the ground; he know how to collect water and how to set up glass panels
between black PVC so as to heat water for the shower or bath, he knew how to dig and set the

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water pump, he knew who to dig the septic tank, he knew who to irrigate the gardens and corps
and he knew how to run electricity from the house to the barn and to the work shed, he knew
how to split plumbing between floors of the house, he knew how to fix the oldest of tractors be
they John Deeres or Sears Roebuck, he knew how to overhaul a diesel engine, how to replace
brakes, how to caulk tiles, how to plaster walls, how to fence in a pasture, how to erect a barn,
how to dig a basement, how to level a driveway, he knew how to pour and smooth cement, he
knew how to tar a gravel road, he knew how torch cut a chassis and weld a engine block, he
knew how to plant strawberries, he knew how to grow and harvest corn, he knew how to cut and
stack hay, he knew how to stud a horse, he knew how to sheer a sheep, he knew how to slaughter
a pig, he knew how to kill a chicken or a calf, how to unhook a catfish, he knew how to capture a
snake, he knew how to treat a snake bite, he knew how to make a fire from stones and dry grass,
he knew how to predict the rain and prepare for a winter of snow, how to shoe a horse, how to
change a transmission in a 1954 Ford Truck, he knew how to kill a rabid dog with a piece of
string, he knew how to put in an electric garage door, he knew how to light the Christmas lights
all the way down the road and back, he knew how to rewire anything electrical and rebuild
anything mechanical, he was as good with cutting the most delicate designs out of wood as he
was twisting the most impressive shapes out of iron, he could cut and roll sheet metal into any
shape or form, and he could create the most exquisite formations out of cement and plaster. All
this he learned from Walker and all this he knew and all this he did all in his head while he
waited until he could build his own house.

What was remarkable about the young Walkers house when he finally did build it was
not so much in what it was but in what it was not. It was not a Walker house. It was not low and

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tight to the ground like Walker built his home, it was not tight and logical in it dimensions, it was
not economical, it was not created so as to conserve any and all resources that it consumed. No,
the young Walkers house was large and expansive just as Walkers house was small and
compact, it was spacious and wasteful just as Walkers was economical, it was grand and
taunting just as Walkers was squat and inconsequential. The young Walkers house had tall
ceilings and exposed rafters where as Walkers house had low and plastered ceilings. The young
Walkers house had broad doorways and long windows what opened an immensity into each
room, while Walkers hose had small windows that would be bolted tight against the storms and
winds. The young Walkers house was space enshrined, in fact it was nothing but space, he
applied no decoration and Jeri Lynn did little to add to any of the long, tall walls that lined each
room. The rooms were sparse with furniture and the entries and exits dominated them, the
doorways, the stairways and the windows that opened to the outside. Indeed there was little
logic in the young Walkers house and you could get lost going from one room to the next as
there seemed to be no way to maneuver the hallways and doorways and passageways without
finding yourself in a destination not only of a different room but sometimes onto a different floor
as well. Balconies suddenly cast you over a living room, stairways suddenly opened up into a
pair of bedrooms, porches cantilevered out over the driveway and looked towards the barn.
There was no way to determine how the layout had been decided, but one was certain that the
young Walker had perhaps spent far too long with these plans in his head for although he had
built a magnificent and palatial farm house, he had clearly combined too many thoughts into one
idea.

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The young Walkers house was not made to protect, it was not made out of fear of the
world, fear of the outside, it was a statement to the contrary, it stated the lack of fear, it dared the
world around it but daring to be as large and as open and as nonthreatened of the world around it
as the world was of him. He was not going to lie and wait for the winds to pass over head, he
was not going to hunker down and fear the twisters, the hail, the snow, the rain, he had built a
city with his home, he had built a ranch inside these walls, he had built his own ark, his own
ship, there was nothing that would threaten or contain him.

For the young Walker, reality was being cut off from reality, first with the home a good
five miles from the nearest neighbor and then through his own attempts to further his isolation by
building what he called his laboratory in the basement of the home, all an effort it seemed to
make up for the lack of imagination his father had had to create the same distance.

The young Walker learned that he was not controlled by his father. How he learned that
is not known. But it came with time and when it came it came powerfully so. And it came years
after Walker had died.

Walker was deep down was a religious man who took his sins and sinning seriously and
thereby knew he was playing a game, building a rising tower of sin in fact, that would
completely overshadow any good he had ever accumulated but such was his way that he chose
not to address this disparity. This religiosity of Walker was not unnoticed or unseen by his son
and probably had all the more impact for its removal from a church or a thick book and so
combined with the blatant discrepancy between life and this religiosity was all the more potent,

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troubling and so would have an impact far greater than any education or indoctrination. This
religion was in the end the only feelings the young Walker had for his father if nothing else the
fear it imparted of something left undone, something out of balance, an error that the young
Walker feared would have to be corrected or ultimately answered to.

Jeri Lynn as a girl never went to church and had no apparent religious inclinations yet
once she married she would not be found more than a long reach from her Bible and every
Sunday was a day of worship as if she sensed the young Walkers feelings of doom and
responsibility.

The young Walker and Jeri Lynn had only one child, and so with the young Walker ends
the legacy of the Walkers. Later, mother, daughter and granddaughter would gather themselves
unto themselves and set forth, leaving a past behind.

Walker saw increasingly in his son the reincarnation of himself, a transmogrification that
Walker both despised and glorified as when he painted the photos of his son in glowing pastels
giving the skin a glow, the eyes a radiance, the background a regal tone and quality so that one
might see a portrait of a Buddha rather than a welders son. Walker may have relished this idea
as it offered an escape, a relief in that his son would have to carry the imbalance and deal with
the discrepancies of life that he, Walker, had carried. The young Walker was never part of
Walkers daily living, always a part that would take effect after Walkers death and so his
resentment as he would never see the results and culmination of all he had done, good, evil or
indifferent.

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Mothers need to leave their sons, this must happen. To do so is a difficult task, for it is to
abandon what is most vulnerable and to accept the ways and mercy of the world to be gracious
and kind and accepting to this soft and fragile being that will change and grow and so become
something the mothers eventually detests as much as she detests the man she married.

Jeri Lynn was the force that drove the young Walker from his mother. A child needs to
leave his mother. The time always comes. It can happen easily or it can happen with force and
hurt. Jeri Lynn was the force that broke the young Walker from his mother, Alicia Walker, Jeri
Lynn was the force that spun them further into their orbit of independence that marks the lives of
the people here, the young Walker would not have done this himself, an only child he was, and
so too much in ownership not only of his mother but of the things that surrounded her, besides he
had not the strength or the wherewithal or the courage to break those bonds that need to be
broken, wrapped even tighter around him by Alicias sickness.

In the young Walkers house, in the living room was a painting hung so high on the tallest
wall that a ladder would have been required to straighten its crooked perch.

Jeri Lynn insisted that the young Walker come to church and so he sat through the
embarrassment of it all, of the ceremony, of sitting there mouthing the words that had no
meaning, singing songs that had no purpose, knowing that eyes were upon him since he looked
so ridiculous and looked even more ridiculous in his self consciousness, but he continued to
mouth the words and read the book and sit by his wifes side.

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* * *

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The men of B were men of substance, men of meat and potato substance, broad, large,
full men who filled out their clothes, who filled out their shoes and who cut a swath through life
just as they cut a swath through the corn fields and hay fields. In comparison, Walker was a man
of little substance, Walker was thin and small and nearly nonexistent compared to the other men
of substance of B; he did not have the size or substance of the other men of B, he did not have
the weight or mass that formed and shaped and defined the other men and so in a way one could
actually say Walker had evolved, he had made the transition to being a new kind of man while
the others with their broad shoulders and thick legs and barrel shaped torsos, with their bulbous
heads and fatty faces with small unfinished eyes, small mouths and blubbery chins, compared to
these men of B, Walker was a modern man, a man who had mutated and perhaps even evolved
away from the population of men which to the contrary did not make him feel superior, to be
further removed from the peasants who had come here, no, in fact it made him smaller in stature,
in appearance, in existence.

The biggest fear anyone had was not knowing what lay hidden inside a person; what
hidden thing could one day be revealed, leading to consequences both unknown and probably
terrible in nature, such was the nature of the unknown, regardless of how closely it set to the
known and knowable.

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The hearts of the heartland: what was American about all these so American Americans?
What was it? In their face? In their bodies? Their clothes? Their manners? Their time? Their
place in time?

By the time you decide if you know better than me at these things it will be too late your
chancell be gone. These things cant be decided so. Doesnt matter to me. I will never know
and for all its worth my not knowing is best if I knew then youd only deny it and rassle with
me about it.

So Walker spoke, but Walker spoke to no one about his dream but to his horses.

I imagine there is a thing ifn I could make it, no, ifn I could conjure it up in my mind so
that I could then see it fully and before me so, that would be such a thing that as small as it may
be within it, built into its complexity, built into its structure would be not only it as itself but all
things that could be made with it. I know, it is hard to explicate, it requires a engineering of it in
order to see it, I know, and that is why I aint got a start on it yet, you see, cuz it aint nothing
more than an idea I got, one that I gotta sit down with one day and realize to its fullest, and so
you are probably saying well you are sitting there Walker, you are waiting in a way that is
probably most suitable for you to fulfill this task, so why not utilize this here time and
opportunity and realize this thing you got in your head, and you are right, as right as a dumb
horse can be, but what you dont realize cuz you is but a dumb horse is that sometimes a man has
to take his time with an idea, sometimes it aint a matter of squeezing it out like some turd no he
got to let it fester inside there, let it manifest as they say, you try to squeeze out something that

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dont wanta come out and what do you get huh? Hemorrhoids is what you get. But you are a
dumb horse and I aint never seen a horse with no hemorrhoids. And also what you dumb horses
dont know is that sometimes an idea can have a frightening element to it, an element that wants
you to keep it in the dark for a while, course a horse never bothers much with ideas in the first
place not like a dog which gets some ideas in its head and tries to act on them, like ol Pal whod
think he knew I left the barn and so he can sneak in and eat the bologna sandwich I left in there,
something he wouldnt touch if I was around, and so I seem to be leaving knowing I am only
doing so to trick ol Pal and so I see him, there goes ol Pal right around to my study here and it
takes him a moment before he puts up his paws on my desk and he is just about ready to take off
with my bologna sandwich when I catch him with the whip right across the snout, a little too
hard I guess as it split him open some and so now instead of bologna hes licking blood off his
nose in the corner there, but no I aint seen a horse have any such ideas, not really. And so
anyway that is how it is with my idea that I have, there could be something a little frightening
about it, something that makes it better kept in the darkness so to speak, but this I know, this idea
of mine is a thing of ultimate and permanent change, thats right, cuz even though I cannot fully
manifest it in anyway, this thing which has in it not only the pure elements of itself but all the
greater elements of what it can make in itself something that is ultimately and permanently
changing upon the world, no doubt about it. Now I aint talking about something like snowflakes
or even molecules or anything like that. Them are all things that have been thinked about
before, they are all ideas that we now accept as common things and so we dont even think about
them at all. No, what I am considering aint ever been revealed and as such would probably be
met as blasphemy actually, that is what I would be a heretic, no one would believe me, no one
would want to believe me, that is how we human beings are, we is always fighting anything that

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is new like that, anything that cant be said to already exist, we dont want to know about it, men
kill over just a few things in life, they kill over women first, then they kill over money or pride
next, and finally they kill over things they dont understand. Just them three things. You never
see a man kill over a horse or a dog. He might beat up the other fella some, but he wont kill
him. You wont see a man kill over a job, not a man in his right mind anyway, and you wont see
that man kill over a piece of land. No we got ways to work out those difference of opinions. But
he will kill over a woman, and he will kill over you taking his money or his self from him and he
will kill when he dont know something so much it scares him. So you could say if I were not
careful that someone, somebody could kill me over this idea. It aint got nothing to do with his
woman, it aint got nothing to do with his pride, but it sure is something he dont know and he
cant figure out and so he mightn just take up and kill me for that. That is how men be. But you
know how long Ive been riding with this idea of mine, you know can accept it as it is, that it will
not disturb mens souls the way other unknown things disturb their souls, and it wont cause men
to kill and it wont cause men to fight and to go to war, and be it a house, or a plant or a moon.
Thats what I got in me, thats what I got, its in there like it causes destruction on this here earth
as this idea come manifest has a purpose and that is to foster creation, not destruction, it is to
reveal the simplest element of all that can be created and created rightfully, well I aint going to
give it up, let it stay in this head as some kind of unresolved situation or such until the time is
right, until the time comes, then it will come forth all manifest and real, its substance will be
revealed, its nature will be revealed, its function and purpose will be revealed and hopefully such
a thing will occur at a time when all it right

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How did morals originate, evolve, erupt, effuse, leak out of a man like Walker? They
came to him without training, without predecessor or precursor, they came to him without
example, without thought, written it seemed in his DNA, emerging from some biological
substratum, the same foaming tissue that caused him to throw up, to defecate to sweat, to feel
cold and feverish.

Coruscate
Scintillate
Irradiate

Walker knew nothing of the future and cared not a spit for the past. This put him firmly
and ineluctably into the present which was where all the demons were he needed to fight.

* * *

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This is not a womans history but a mans history, perhaps even a boys history told
through a man. A womans history as I have read may be more detailed in certain aspects, more
rhythmic, repeating and repetitive in the way that crocheting is repeating and repetitive, both
necessary and soothing and yet purposeful and necessary. A mans history is rarely soothing,
rarely repeating and repetitive, more of a destructive event that tears things apart in an attempt to
put things together. More of a break it to see how it works before trying to put it back together
again. We all have to operate according to our natures, according to our predispositions, we all
have to do as we were made and created to do. And so I will not crochet nothing here, nor will I
weave as gently and as effectively as a woman may weave a history, but then this is not hers but
a mans history.

These families that we are to learn about were families of loss, of destructiveness. Each
generation is always trying to rebuild out of the ashes. Walker left his family nothing but debt,
nothing but a name that was more a curse, more a snarl, more an ugly spat. Walker left his son
with more than this debt, he left him with the idea of the Midwest, the isolation, the nothingness,
the distance between entities that was to be calculated and increased. Walker was a failure, not a
man to look up to, not a man to emulate, and so his child had to recreate the idea of a parent for
himself, had to devise anew.

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B was a part of the vast plains where entropy was the rule, the governing force. If there
was a center here it was a center for dissipation. What was created here was a pattern of
disintegration and destruction. Metals rusted here, plants and animals died here, buildings faded
and crumbled here, stone become pitted and weak and crumbled into sand here, lakes turned
green, then brown and died here, winds tore apart anything that was built, rains eroded anything
the was carved from the land, snow caked and splintered anything that was lift to its mercy.
Twisters ripped asunder even the strongest structures, floods buried the most valuable beneath its
mud, at night darkness

Survival of the fittest was not a rule of law here. Evolution only operates in a dynamic
system, not in one that is declining, drifting off into some kind of oblivion. And so other rules
took precedence here, laws other than scientific laws, laws other than religious laws, laws other
than manmade laws.

You cannot write a history for a place and a people that have nothing but an end, the
beginning having been lost, more than simply forgotten it is lost, its land is being swept to sea on
great rivers, its dust is being swept to foreign skies, it has already been reduced to but a flat and
level field, no mountains or crevices which are the sign of newer earth, only flat, bald and older
earth, no valleys or hills that show at least a old sign of the earths impatience, broad plains

Everything here is repetition, each day is a repeat of the past, each person is a character
one already knew, each birthday, each anniversary, each car crash a thing that can be compared

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with another either recently or long gone. Each season brings the slaughter of hogs, the cutting
of hay, the picking of corn, the bottling of jam, the shoeing of horses, the killing of chickens, the
tuning up on the tractor and the truck, the painting of a fence, there was living on land that was
your fathers land, there was becoming as your father was, there was begetting a son that would
become as you were, there was the rhythms of life, the births, the marriages the death that flowed
time after time in the same motions and oscillations.

* * *

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Life here was a simple reduction of everything to the meaningless yet ineluctable cycle of
life and death. Everywhere, everything: flies and spiders, winter and spring, planting and
harvesting, birth and death. Everything had a beginning and with that beginning everything
marched ineluctably towards its end.

Dialed 911
Put on Hold
Sure wish I had
That gun I sold

Here a girl was brutally raped.

* * *

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This is a story about voices, many voices, male voices, female voices, motherly voices,
fatherly voices, voices of people who are joyous, voices of people in pain.

I was incited to begin this adventure by reading a book that I knew few others had read, a
book perhaps read by only one other person except for me, an old man, the chances of that were
not unlikely, but this old man who read this same book and wrote the preface was himself a
writer whose books long ago had incited me to scribble my first horrible sentences to paper, a
writer I did not care for but whose words have stuck with me like bad memories of beautiful
things, his prose flew into your eyes like a breathful of splinters, one image of twigs like cracks
in a glass of water stayed with me all my life, a puss-filled centerpoint in my life, around which
all else is woven, will be woven, like a scar around a splinter.

There are strangers in B, and sometimes strangers are people who have lived in B for
years, but because of their ways, because of their failure to contribute in some way to the
surroundings in any other way than a selfish way, these people become and stay strangers. One
person who lived in B was such a stranger, this old man lived in a small house near the edge of
town and only a few miles from Walkers. Along the dusty gravel road he would walk most days,
during the colder months wrapped in a heavy black coat and with a furskin hat pulled over his
head, ears and face. In warmer months he wore a pair of overalls, as if he were hankering to be a
farmer, Walker would say, with a straw hat on his head, his face round and pale and trimmed in
white hair. The stranger walked but he never stopped to say hello. In fact, Alicia said, it did not
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seem none that he walked either, for you never seen him walking, just seen him standing and
looking, staring down a field of corn or a mess of hay feed as if there were something to see in
all that, stopping to contemplate the sky or the same barn or the same tree as before, as if things
changed and were different from day to day.

They knew the man was a writer, that was all. Wonder how he eats, Alicia asked. Dont
matter none how he eats, Walker would say, if he starved then that is probably all such a writer
deserves. What else is he contributing that he should not starve after all?

Sometime the man appeared with his wife -- it is not his wife, Alicia would say, he is not
married to her, she is his companion is what they say. His companion? Walker would say, why
would a man take a woman for a companion?

But when he appeared with his companion, the woman companion, it was she who
walked not him. While he stood and contemplated a post or a tree she walked ahead of him her
head down determined in her walk, studying her feet like all walkers should do. And why do
they walk you think? Alicia would say. Cuz they got no car, Walker would say. But they are
walking to nowhere and then back again, Alicia would say. Then they come the next day and do
it all again. Seems like what a writer would do, Walker would say. I been thinking I should
warn them about the Altschulers dogs over yonder, Alicia would say, them being a perty ornery
slug of dogs that I wouldnt want to come upon them on foot like that. Perhaps theyll run on
into Altschulers dogs, Walker would say, and then they will discover that walking aint all so
good for you after all.

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From our house, the writer said, there is really only one way to walk if one cares to take a
walk, and without a walk at least once a day the feeling of being a shut in can begin to overtake
you like a form of fever, ones life becoming a jar of preserves in the cellar, a spider web spun
and respun between the panes of efficiency glass. But if we were to walk towards town we
quickly reach a bridge where we have to choose either to walk along a path in the dirt below the
bridge and cross a small creek that sometimes rises after a rain or winter melt and risk falling in
the mud or twisting an ankle on the rocks, or we can walk across the bridge which has no path
for pedestrians and is busy enough that invariably there will be a car and truck approaching in
both directions and no room for us to pass. A situation I want to avoid. So the only way to walk
is the other way, the direction away from town and away from the bridge where after about a
mile the paved road gives way to a gravel road and from there you walk further and further into
the seas of corn and hay, where the houses and barns float so sadly and magnificently like ships,
where the silos rise like perpetual erections and water towers look like giant drops of water
betraying all we know about gravity.

I enjoy this walk, he said, which is about three or four miles out and then back again.
But Mary Pat, my wife, does not care much for it. It bores her, she says, but still I can count on
her to accompany me at least once a week, until winter comes of course. And then she comes
with me only because she is worried I will fall into a snow drift and freeze to death, wont be
found until spring, perhaps my head or my feet thawing first, revealed along the roadway like
some Neanderthal specimen. I enjoy these walks not only because I can move away from my
studio, but because there is so much to see. Between my mind and what is out there in the world

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is a gulf that is so unfathomable, I nearly cry every time I see it. How many times have I gloried
in my small attempts to bridge that chasm between real and imagined, but then I see something, a
speck of color in a leaf or the inexplicable swirl or an unnamed cloud and I am tossed back to
where I started thirty, forty, or was it fifty years ago? Used to be I was devastated by these
confrontations with reality, but that was when I had an immature and counterproductive idea of
time, an idea about time that the young have as the young do not seem themselves as defined in
time, but constantly fighting it, they do not understand that they are simply part of a river that
carries them along and what they see and know will be in that river, not outside the river, you
cannot escape the river. Now I know that time will be unkind as long as you pay attention to it.
Ignore it and it is beautifully benign.

I cant help but be amazed, he said, at how each day what appears to be the same
elements in this small channel of the world can exercise themselves so differently simply
because it is sunny or cloudy, earlier or later than the day before. Wind creates changes in the
fields just as wind creates changes in the ocean, the swells rise and fall, the eddies swirl and
vanish then reappear somewhere else, on certain days one can catch sight of the dust devils that
childishly mimic the tornadoes that everyone here respects with an ancient fear. While I may
have seen the same barn a hundred times now, I can swear that it changes each time I see it, ages
like we age, sheds light, grows color, becomes heavier, more transparent, breathes differently
through the slats in its side, sleeps more soundly beneath a blanket of snow.

Mary Pat is not amused or much interested in any of this, he said, all too often I look up
to see her far in the distance, her figure slumped over as she walks as if she had long wearied of

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this journey, like some old Chinese woman in the timeless middle of that wearisome country. I
walk so as to see people, people I would never see if I stayed in my studio all day and all night, I
walk to see the people who inhabit this land, yet it is the things that capture my attention most,
and the people, well, I have to admit I am a bit afraid of them. I can only imagine what they
think of me, even though it has been two years now since we moved here, I have not met anyone
along this road, never even received as much as a wave from a passing car, towing its cloud of
dust, but then I dont offer a wave myself, in fact I look away, I do, I know this. I turn and look
away, as if studying something, which in fact I probably am as there is always something to
study whichever way you turn. I have come to know the houses and the farms quite well, and I
am not hesitant to imagine from what I see in the architecture, the landscape, the things that
collects by porches, next to the garage, the elements that make up the gardens, the driveways, the
things you find scattered about, piled purposefully, discarded thoughtlessly, in all of this I can
generate a person, a family, a circle of relationships, a history, a culture so to speak. I do this
purposefully and perhaps quite recklessly, but that is what I do.

There is a pig farmer, he said, who in defiance of the myth about pigs keeps the cleanest
farm I have ever seen. The pigs themselves are spotlessly clean, pink and round and perfectly
happy it seems despite being crowded behind aluminum fences and sleeping on concrete pads.
They move slowly and methodically not rushed or hurried as a frightened animal would do.
Their lives are controlled and safe and methodical, a perfect life it seems for a pig, as long as you
ignore the final coming. But the pig farmer is a large man who wears clean, pressed overalls
every day. He wears a white hat and a plaid shirt and rolls the sleeves up to his elbows. He is
amazingly agile for such a large man, I try to mimic the way he bends down to pick up things

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without bending his knees and find I cannot come close to the task. He twists and turns and
stands with a single foot hooked under a fence rail to grab the misting hose and bring it over for
cleaning or repair. His arms are long yet thick with muscle, I imagine he could grab two pigs
under each arm and carry them across the entire yard, squealing and all. He never slips, he
moves with purpose and with a solidity that anchors his entire being to this earth. There is a
stronger pull from the earths center on this man than there is on me, that is why he is so sinewy
and strong and I am but flab and wasted muscle.

His wife is a small woman, he said, petite to the point of hilarity when she stands next to
him, her face comes just above his bulging belly while if she reached up with her arms she could
not even grasp his neck unless he lowered it like an obedient horse. He seems to love her in that
way men who have no emotion love women, which is to obey them and never ignore them when
they are around. She seems to love him too, and why not, she has a protector and a stalwart mate
who will make sure her existence has security at all times. But what makes these two interesting
is not themselves, but their two daughters, twins clearly, two girls probably nine or ten years of
age. Some joke was played on the man and wife when they had these children, or perhaps it was
simply a compromise that looks like a joke but between his gargantuan size and her petite
feature, these two girls gathered enough from both parents to look just like two little pigs
standing and running upright on their flubby little legs. Uncertain that age will cure them of this
beastly affliction, I fear the two girls are destined to be forever akin in appearance to the animals
they raise for commerce. From the tiny feet to the bulging thigh and bulbous butts, to the
barreled bellies, neckless shoulders, round head and yes, turned up noses, these two girls were
condemned to a plight that would be hilarious if it were not so tragic.

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Further up the road was a much more interesting dwelling, he said, a small home tucked
back behind some fir trees, a house that was painted bright green with white trim and behind it a
larger barn that was painted red. A woman who appears ducking in and about her trees and
shrubs, very much like a living version of the munchkins and elves and trolls that she has placed
throughout her gardens, so much like a living version of the cement deer and rabbits and plastic
owls tied to the eaves, the ceramic Disney characters that look lost and forlorn, the rubber
alligator, the little boys in leprechaun outfits that sit on each side of a small wooden bridge above
a small artificial pond. She is a gnome among gnomes, a troll among trolls, but she is alive and
performs her functions with great alacrity and patience. She picks up the dead branches and
rakes away the fallen leaves. She trims the errant bits of shrubbery, she replaces a stone that has
fallen from its place, or shoves gavel back to where it belongs. In the spring she comes out with
paints and applies new feathers to the cardinal on a fence, she paints the eyes back into on the
baby deer that the winter storms had washed away, she paints the posts across which the wire
fencing keeps out the cows from the farm next door. She sweeps the cement porch, she clears
the leaves and muck from the drains, she clears the gutters and washes down the window sills.
She is short and low to the ground, she moves without a care as to the flies that buzz about her,
the bees that leave their nest and swarm on her head and neck, with a casual flap of her hand she
knocks down the huge garden spiders that make webs twenty feet in width from tree to tree, she
shoes away the corn snakes and hisses back at the possum that crosses her path.

* * *

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And now it is time to bring this part to an end, to conclude with what is most important to
conclude and to repeat what is most important to repeat.

There is a massage parlor in downtown B where there are Chinese masseuses. It is here
that Walker goes when he gets drunk. It is here into this parking lot of a small shop off main
street that sometimes he would find himself pulling up to a small shop just off the main street.
After spending a few minutes in the car to smoke a cigarette and listen to a song that he suddenly
wanted to hear on the radio, he would flick away his butt, get out of the car, nod to the hefty man
sitting outside on a tattered banquet chair and squeeze through the glass door. Once inside he
would be excited by the very things that would in a half hour nauseate him, the chink music
playing on a small squawk box, the dragons of fake gold with catfish whiskers, fish scales and
terrible claws on the wall, the finely carved birdcage that he made a note of every time he saw it,
the curved pieces of wood, the fine lattice work, the ways in which the frame was set, to study
more so that he could copy it and make his own. His wife would like it he knew that.

The girls inside, dressed as they were in their outfits various and cheap, their stockings,
their nightgowns and lace, all smiled and spoke to him altogether only thing he could understand
amidst their quick and warbled chirping was: Walker, chirp, chirp, Walker

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And in a few minutes she would appear, not thin but not fat, in a black teddy that she
always wore that perhaps he always requires but it had been so many times that the requests was
now automatic and she would smile with her freshly painted lips and hold back the glass beads
which he had long ago noticed were made of some kind of plastic that looked more like glass
than any plastic he had ever seen before and so each time he walked through it he thought about
grabbing one so he could study it more as that was a fine plastic these beads were.

And suddenly with the sight of her before him, her hands holding back the glass beads,
her not so thin thighs white as plaster next to the black of her teddy, her hair black like tar against
her white face, her eyes black like the eyes of a bird beneath her fallen eyelids, and he would
wonder as he always wondered was this woman some strange species brought here from the
Orient or was she an injun brought off the plains, and suddenly as if to answer him he heard
again the faint Chinese music, perhaps the sound of a waterfall somewhere, the lights behind her
seemed to fade and he was brought into a chamber of linen and silk, that smelled of sweetness
and blossoms and fragrant wood, and he would feel himself pulled into the otherness, into the
vague but consuming otherness which he knew he had never known but had always sought but
had always denied himself but could always find here, as long as he was ready for it which the
whiskey had helped, as long as he was open to it which a certain weariness facilitated, as long as
he had no fear which the cloak of darkness helped alleviate, as long as he was willing which
came from the child deeply hidden inside him, as long as he was accepting, and so as she
undressed him she would ask as she always asked if he wanted her to wear this for him, and he
would say yes and they would sleep onto the sheets and with a hidden reach behind her she
would then set the timer.

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It is here that Alicia Walker goes when she goes looking for Walker, after she has been
told by someone that Walkers truck is parked outside this massage parlor, it is here where she
barges in screaming and shouting like a woman on fire, pushing past the bouncer who can do
nothing but grown as he lets her past, bursting through closed door, bursting through the curtain
of glass beads and into the back room where the compartments between the massage tables are
separated by cheap white sheets, as she slashes and tears across the curtains with her nails and
her purse, upsetting a half nude customer, causing the women to shriek and panic and the madam
of the massage parlor to once again telephone the sheriff who will arrive only to listen for nearly
thirty minutes to Alicias ranting and ravings about how between alcohol and this decadence the
entire moral fiber of B was rotten, rotten to the very core, and of all people he was the one who
could do something about it, do something about it before all people were lost, not the people
like Walker who was already irredeemable and lost forever to this and any other world, but do
something before a child is lost, before a young innocent falls prey and steps in here and across
this threshold into a realm of complete and utterable nonreturn. And how dare Walker come here
in her station wagon, how dare he park her car out here in front of this filthy sinful place, how
dare he sit his filthy disease ass on the seat of her car after being in this god forsaken place, how
dare these women take the genitals and filth of other men into their hands and who knows what
else, how dare these chinks come here and disrupt the values and goodness of a town like B,
these women who are not from here, could care less about our boys here, are nothing but niggers
with slanted eyes, who invited them, who asked you and who asked you and who asked you to
bring your slutty filthy disease riddened bodies here to our town, get out you filthy whores, get
out you diseased sewer rats off some boat from Pearl Harbor or Nagasaki or wherever the hell

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you rats come from, look at you, you look like rats, filthy rats, giving your diseases and your
fleas and your hell knows what to our men and our boys, who are you to come here, who are you
to leave the hellhole where you ought to stay and come here to our town, why come here, why?
of all the god damned places to pick why in the hell did you chose to bring your diseased mouths
and diseased cunts to our town? Why? Why? Why couldnt you have stopped someplace,
anywhere else? Why here, why America? Why here for Christs sake, of all places why here in
our town? Are we that diseased in ourselves that we feel the need to live with the likes of you
rats, you diseased and filthy whores? Why cant you coolies and you chinks just stay where you
belong, stay with your own, wherever you live? We should throw you back, that is what I say,
we should send you all back, if that is what it takes, send your diseased cunts back to infect your
own diseased people, not our people and especially not our boys, our innocent boys who should
never have the inclination let alone the opportunity to touch your diseased cunts or have your
diseased hands touch them

And here the narrator has a decision to make as he realizes he has allowed himself to
descend, if that is the right word, into an area that is entirely out of comfort, as he attempts to
follow his character, Alicia Walker as she descends herself into her mind, which he, dangerously
though, assumes is like that of a tightrope, a thin strand across which she walks, ready to fall in
either direction into some depth or abyss or mental realm that would be beyond all description
and knowing to any of us

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 should all die those cock sucking cunts those slant eyed gooks why come here why our boys

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Her walk on this tightrope made possible with the ballast of her fury on one side of her
balance against the rage she held out to the other side of her, whether anger or rage would
suddenly upset her delicate position one could not know and what would lie below and beneath
was equally unknowable, and so all the narrator knows is that she at times maintained this
balance and did not fall, stayed abalance her precarious rope, which was a state of mind as dark
and fearful as any other.

And the trumpet sings alone, low, slow and alone; low, slow alone the
trumpet sings, calls, sings, alone, low, slow; the song carries her there, far
from here, far to a distant place where she can dance to a different life, a
different time; the trumpet takes here there.

* * *

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After the pigs were slaughtered the guts and shit and blood were gathered and what could
not be fed back to the still living pigs was spread upon the fields, and so out of the guts and
blood and shit came forth corn, and hence the cycle of sameness, the never to be developed
identity, the oneness of all from shit and blood back to life again.

The Walkers had nothing in their history to hold them together, nothing on which to build
one generation into another generation, all they had was what they had each escaped from, all
they had was what they thought they had escaped from and the fear that they had not escaped and
the fear that what it was they were escaping from was really very much alive and threatening to
them.

It was said and so therefore believed of Alicia Walker that she began her collections and
storage of things solid and materials when she began to see her life as she assumed it would be
disappearing, when in fact the truth is she stated this collecting and storing far prior to her life as
she fantasized it began disappearing, she started this collection and storage far in anticipation of
all this disappearing.

Evolution is a force that shapes our tendencies because of the pattern of repeating that
underlies its process, without the process of repeating evolution would not be a living tendency
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that we would embrace, there would not be a scientific tendency that we would embrace, there
would not be a religious tendency that we embraced, evolution would not hold force. Everyone
has in their living repeating; repeating of every kind of thing in them, repeating of every
impatient feeling they have in them, of the anxious feeling almost everyone has more or less in
them. (Crocheting, building, making, planting, growing, killing, cleaning, waking, sleeping)

This is more a history of feelings versus a history of actions.

Resisting being implies having a choice, the determinism in the lives of the savages.

My way has been to try to go from the concrete to the abstract, as a way of seeing and a
way of knowing, a way of perceiving and a way of comprehending, a way of experiencing and a
way of the intellect, a way of biology and a way of cognition.

The old men and women of B when they died, died very much like a plume of smoke,
they go as if but a puff of the briefest smoke, vanish just like that, transmogrified from a
substantive human being with weight and solidity to something in death that is without weight,
that is as light and as wispy as smoke. And so Jesse went as a plume of smoke, and so Alicia
Walker when Alicia Walker went, she too went as a plume of smoke.

When it comes to death, one can wonder what the deceased thought they would take with
them into death, there was Walker who took his many mysteries if he took anything. If Walker
was about anything he was about mystery; he was always seeing the bad as a way to counter the
good as a way to negate anything positive; as a way of changing his chances in death.
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Exudates

Excoriate
Exuviate

And the trumpet sang of loneliness, a lament for a land one would never know; the
trumpet sang of loneliness, a lament of a time that had passed by long ago; the trumpet sang of
loneliness, a song that had captured a life with its every note, a song from a black man who
never met the small insignificant Midwestern wife who play endlessly his song of laments, his
songs of a land that she imagined longingly as his land, a land she would never see, never visit,
never know, but would always cherish.

Sometimes these stories seem like fragments, sometimes they seem like collected wholes
ruined with detail.

I love this telling of this history as much as it may be annoyance to the stranger who
reads it, and I dont know how to bridge that gap between my joy and the strangers annoyance.

Listen: the trumpet; listen: the castanets; listen: the calling, a wish, a thought.

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