The Power of Story

 

The boy on this picture is my grandfather, who lived with his immigrant parents on a farm in the middle of South Dakota Dutch settlement for a couple of years. His father and mother didn't stay out there long; there were hard years, and many who'd come, seeking a new life on cheap land, eventually pulled up stakes and departed back east. Successive droughts, hungry hoppers, and intense heat and cold successfully killed off the dreams that brought them there.

My grandfather graduated from high school in Parkersburg, Iowa, in 1898, then left for Michigan, where he graduated from the Theologische School of the Hollandsche Christielijke Gereformeerde Kerk in June, 1900 (his diploma is on the wall); and from seminary a few years later.

Somewhere along the line, he married a sweet woman--or so I've always heard--who was also a distinguished seminary professor's daughter.

They're all long gone now, of course, so I can only speculate; but I'm quite sure the homesteader's son "married up." After all, the distinguished professor was from Holland, from the old country.

After graduation, Grandpa's first church was, oddly enough, back in rural South Dakota--not Harrison, the place he'd left as a boy, but Bemis, farther east, but just as rural.

We have letters from the Professor to his son-in-law and daughter, telling them that he's doing all he can in Michigan to get them out of that place--and soon. The distinguished professor clearly assumed Bemis, South Dakota, to be the end of the world.

The Rev. John C. Schaap, my grandfather, and his wife stayed in South Dakota a bit less than two years before taking another church, this one safely back in Michigan, in civilization once more.

I would love to know what went on in Bemis, South Dakota, for those two years. Grandma was just a young girl--was she homesick? Was it tough for her to adjust to being married? Did she despise South Dakota? Did the professor so deeply miss his darling daughter?--did his wife miss her? Did they really believe their sweet little girl couldn't survive the west?

There's more. When the Rev. Schaap decided on Bemis for that first call, he knew he had a sister there because one of the women in the picture above had married earlier and moved, with her husband and family, to the neighborhood of the church. Thus, while South Dakota may have been endless prairieland, and massively rural, and maybe even (by his father-in-law's standards) somewhat backward, the young married Schaaps weren't going somewhere completely foreign.

My grandmother--the professor's wife--died during WWII, when she and my grandfather had five stars on their front window, five kids in the war effort. She was not healthy, my father used to tell me. But every single living child--and she'd born ten--used to talk about my grandma's grace, her loving nature, her goodness. I believe them in great part because they all had her grace herself. The Schaap family were warm and wonderful people.

Some time ago, at a dinner for scholarship donors and recipients, I sat beside a distant relative, a descendent of that sister of the preacher, one of the young women in the picture above, the one who lived in Bemis, South Dakota, when Grandpa Schaap and his new, young, city wife made their short stay at that rural church.

When I mentioned my grandfather, he smiled. "You mean the one with that uppity wife?" he said, chuckling.

More than a century has passed since the Rev. Schaap went to Bemis, SD, and then left, the horses hardly rested. But the spin that this distant relative puts on a story I know from an entirely different side makes me marvel and even rejoice at the sheer power of story and how they animate our lives.

Hardly anyone else in the entire world could have that conversation--most of my relatives know nothing about my grandpa's whirlwind first charge. Few relatives of this distant cousin of mine, sitting next to me at the table, know a thing--or care--about what their great-grandmother thought of her little brother's wife or their quickly aborted stay out on the frontier.

But the story--and the spin--still exist and will be told, as it is here, right now, at least one more time.

The powers of myth in Native culture and religion are substantial. But we don't have to look to Sitting Bull to understand the strength of shared stories. They're all around, even within. 

I should really tell my relatives this story. Others should know :).

Leaving Returns

 

[An old post, maybe ten years ago.]

Somewhere in central New Mexico last Sunday, somewhere around the pueblo named Laguna, I felt an echo of de je' vu and remembered the time, more than thirty years ago, when me and the cat were packed into a sky-blue VW hatchback, rumbling along the very same corridor on I-40, leaving Arizona and the Southwest and returning to the green cusp of the Great Plains, where I've lived ever since. The cat died years ago. That's another story.

On that trip, it was just she and I, a gorgeous calico. My wife and brand new baby girl had flown from Phoenix to Sioux City that very day, as I remember. A litter box was on the floor in the back; and by the time I got to Winslow or so, she'd stopped howling. Poor thing had never been in a car. The howling had been awful. She'd almost died in the desert. I almost killed her.

It wasn't the cat I remembered last Sunday, it was the memory of a strange feeling that something was over. Our four-years in Phoenix, our first four years. I'd really loved teaching in the kind of city high school I'd wanted to be part of since Welcome Back, Kotter or Room 222.

Me and the calico--our leaving meant the end of all of that, but I didn't regret putting Arizona in the rearview. I remember thinking good things about returning to small-town Iowa, to the college where I'd been taught Calvinism--among a load of other things, some good, some not so.

The Arizona administrator who'd hired me just two years before really disliked my returning to Iowa. "There, everyone's like you," he told me. "Here, you're really special." But it was a college job. I knew if I were ever going to write anything I had to get out of the high school classroom--no matter how much I liked it--and get to a place where day-in, day-out classroom prep didn't entirely exhaust whatever creativity I had. I wanted to teach in college. I remember having the feeling that I'd not travel this way again--from Phoenix to Siouxland. That a four-year chapter, an important one, was done, finished, over.

Last Sunday morning--sun so bright I couldn't see half the time--there I was again, same road, Laguna pueblo--I've got pictures--looked a whole lot different thirty-plus years before. The landscape is the same, of course, just more people. Even pueblos spread.

One never really closes up shop, I suppose. Once, years ago, I thought I was on that section of freeway for the last time. Several times I've been there since, twice in the last six months; and, I'm betting, I'll be there again--soon, in fact.

Doors don't always close the way we expect, I suppose, don't lock but once maybe.

It was a gorgeous Sunday morning in the New Mexico highlands. Odd, isn't it? All that determined leaving just then returned. 

What happened at Fort Laramie

It's the oldest military building in Wyoming, the oldest documented building, period, the oldest standing building in the state. Once upon a time, it stood up high on a hill above prairie grasses mostly, here and there rowdy belts of sandstone on the way to the Rockies. For emigrants on the Oregon Trail, it had to have been a welcome, a place they'd spend a few days in camp, pick up supplies, trade horses or oxen teams, and mingle with folks on their way to Oregon, California, and Oregon, Ft. Laramie was a bus stop surrounded by camping grounds spread over a couple of miles.

This grand old two-story souvenir of the American west was and still is called "Old Bedlam," because the bachelor officers who made their beds there, some historians suggest, did some serious carousing out on the frontier, where day-to-day life was never as wild as it is in Western movies. Biblically speaking the troops gave themselves over to all kinds of drunken rowdiness; thus, the place has been "Old Bedlam" forever after.

In the remodeled front bedroom a volley of signatures are scratched onto the wall above the fireplace, as they likely were 150-plus years ago. 

The name at the very top is recognizable, if you know Western history. Let me bring it up closer.

That helps. "John L. Grattan, Bvt 2nd Lt 6th Infy," I think. After graduating from West Point, Grattan got himself assigned here, to Ft. Laramie, along the North Platte and Laramie rivers, a place, a kind of citadel ever since days of the fur trappers and their annual summer rendezvous.

Brevet Lt. Grattan went out on a patrol in August of 1854 and encountered some real trouble communicating with Conquering Bear, a Lakota headman, and his warriors, of whom there were many, more than a thousand. A cow that belonged to a Mormon emigrant wandered off from a campground to a place where an Lakota kid named High Forehead shot the poor beast, then called his friends over for a feast. 

The Mormon on his way to Zion didn't take kindly to his own cow being served up as the entree of some Indian gala. To him, that animal was pure loss, so the weary traveler complained bitterly and publicly. Grattan, who'd never had an encounter with Indians, got the assignment of picking up High Forehead and trucking him back to the fort. He must have smiled greatly. He'd been known to utter more than a few brash words about how much he was looking forward to licking redskins. 

When he and the men he'd taken with got to the Lakota encampment, you might think his fever would have grown a bit cold. At least it should have, more than it apparently and reportedly did. As many as 4000 Lakota were camped out, and there were hungry warriors all over, more than a little ready to fight. 

Tensions rose, tempers flared, things just got out of hand and blew up, and Brevet Lieutenant John L. Grattan never returned to Old Bedlam. For Grattan and 28 others under his command, that August day was the end of the trail. Not one of them returned. When, four days later, the Lakota long gone, a burial party went out, they identified Grattan only by his watch.

By treaty, enforcing the law among the Ogallalas wasn't the army's job. That job belonged to the agent. From the day he arrived at Laramie, Grattan had been spouting off about how much he relished a good fight with the bad guys, the Injuns. Historians might quibble, but these days, so many years later, it's seem pretty easy to think of Brevet Second Lieutenant John L. Grattan as the wild west's first rogue cop. 

He got it. He certainly did.

Fourteen years later, right about here, across the Fort's grounds, on the other side of the Laramie River, hundreds of Cheyenne and Lakota met with big wigs from the Great Father in Washington to work out the terms of yet another treaty. When deliberations ended, dozens of Lakota and Cheyenne had signed, promising to stay out of the way of the wagon trains, the mad gold rush, and all those who'd created crowds every summer, the likes of which no one had ever seen. In return for letting them pass, the Lakota people would retain rights to their land, the western half of South Dakota, and the sacred Paha Sapa or Black Hills, theirs until the rivers run dry. . .and all of that. That was the Treaty of 1868.

Six years later, General George Custer grabbed a couple of would-be geologists and sent them hunting for gold in the streams in the neighborhood of the town that today bears his name, Custer, SD. Those two amateurs found a smattering of gold, just enough--which isn't much--to awaken awaken madness in the multitudes who followed up and thereby make the Treaty of 1868 into little more than toilet paper.

So much for that promise too. 

Fort Laramie, a grand place, is far off the beaten path. You have to make a point of visiting. If you miss it this summer, you're missing  the Grand Central Station of the West, a place for decades the very capital of the west, a place, trust me, where there's just so much to learn.

The gooney bird and the bubblehead

If you’re over forty years old, chances are pretty good that at one time or another you were aboard a Douglas C-47, or its civilian equivalent, the DC-3 airliner. When you were, chances are pretty good that the only quaking you did about your flight was whatever fear roiled in you already because nobody—no, nobody—was ever scared of a C-47, even decades after World War II, when the Skytrain was everyone’s favorite, meaty pack horse.

Tell you what—imagine for a moment a two-engine plane, jet or prop, makes no difference. Inside there are three seats to a row, two on one side, one on the other. For the last half century, C-47s, which is to say DC-3s, went everywhere. That’s how it is I’m saying, chances are better than good you know what kind of bird I’m talking about even if you’re not looking at a picture.

I don’t know that anyone ever said it, so let me be the first: the Douglas C-47 won the war. Okay, that’s overstatement, but not by much. They toted gliders, carried and dumped paratroopers, and ferried GIs all over the world, including back here when injuries and wounds sent boys home. During the Normandy invasion, the Army’s own C-47s carried 50 thousand troops over and beyond the beach.

Somehow—no one knows exactly why—the C-47, or one of its variants, earned a nickname. Those who ran ‘em started to call them “gooney birds,” out of pure devotion. They were big and clumsy but sure as an old boot. And they were repairable; few had to be sent back to the tax-payers.

In August of 1944, one of the hundreds military C-47s was jockeying a couple dozen in-training pilots from Nebraska training base to another in Pierre, South Dakota, where these young guys would be training on planes they considered a breed apart from the old Skytrains that brought them there.

Up at Pierre was the real prize, a P-47 Thunderbolt, a fighter, not a freighter. The P-47 was a heavyweight that still was the fastest-diving American aircraft of the war—it could reach speeds of 550 mph. Uncle Sam wanted its fighter pilots to be risk-takers, pilots who knew what it meant to apply brakes, but rarely did and never wanted to. You can only imagine how much those hot shots loved the P-47, mounted as it was with eight 50-caliber machine guns. When called upon, the P-47 could become a fighter-bomber capable of carrying five-inch rockets or a bomb load of 2,500 pounds. The Beast of the Airways, they called it. During the war, the Thunderbolt was responsible for downing 7000 enemy aircraft, half of those in one-on-one battles in the skies over Europe.

On that August night in Nebraska, that C-47 was toting a full house of 24 young pilots, each of them itching to get more training on the Beast of the Airways, all of them anxious for dogfights over Germany. None of them knew anything about the Bulge, but then no one did. They were just a bunch of young jackass pilots, full of the Devil.

You may well have guessed by this time that this Nebraska story will not end well.

No one knows what happened, but that gooney bird got ripped into pieces—maybe through a storm, maybe not. When it went down, it left parts over a two-mile stretch of Nebraska pastureland. Here a wing, there a motor—there the cabin with all the passengers, none of them alive.

A State Historical Marker calls that crash “the largest single military air disaster in Nebraska history—and there were others. Four members of the crew were killed, and 24 young, high-spirited soon-to-be pilots. None of them—not one—survived. Allied forces lost a battery of young gunners that night, August 3, 1943, 28 boys—we called them—the Allies honestly couldn’t afford to lose. 

What’s worse, 27 families (there was a pair of twins) lost boys, never to return. Their families almost certainly have not forgotten them.

That horrible crash got a couple inches on the third page of the New York Times a day or so later, once the dead were transported out to the nearest road by horse and buggy. There were bigger stories: in Germany, Hitler was issuing death warrants to those he thought responsible for trying to kill him.

I happened to be out there not long ago, a half-mile east of a little burg named Naper, on highway 12, where I spotted the sign. I didn’t know the story, hadn’t heard of it at all, just happened to stop and read the story.

Tell you what, if you’re out there on highway 12, stop and read the sign for yourself.

Soon enough it’ll be Memorial Day, isn’t that great? We can all throw the doors open to summer. Just remember the gooney bird.

The Un-Oscars

Francis McDormand and Chloe Zhoa

Let's cut to the chase. For Hollywood, it was a very strange year, which is why, people say, the Oscars had zilch pop, zilch glamour. Impossible to imagine, but true. I didn't watch myself, but for weeks before the show and certainly any summary since, appear to agree: last night were the un-Oscars.

With good reason. Covid shut down theaters, literally and figuratively. Even had you wanted to, for a long time, you couldn't buy a bag of popcorn, much less sit through a feature. Gadzillions of the Americans tuned in to Netflix or Hulu or Britbox--no shortage of subscribers there. But theater tickets died an agonizing dry-rot death because for long stretches of time no one went, no one could.

I watched Best-Picture winner, Nomadland, the first week it opened in the theater down the road. My wife and I were two of the five people in the audience. Granted, it was mid-week, and granted, also, that Nomadland wouldn't have drawn the masses, even if Covid had spawned little more than a Tylenol headache. It was no blockbuster and wouldn't have been anytime, anywhere. 2020 was long, long way from Goldfinger, and Francis McDormand is no Halle Berry.

Which is not to say, McDormand wasn't a convincing winner. Rarely do movies like Nomadland even get made, movies in which character--as opposed to plot--is the show. The movie's strange setting is a gang of eccentrics who clump together in rugged locales in the American West and live, like nomads, as if they're parked on Walden Pond. The heart of the story is Fern who Chloe Zhao (who won for Best Director) claims is as singularly attractive in character and movement as Charlie Chaplain. People just love to watch her.  Who knows why? They just do.

If I were more steeply invested in the industry--I'm not--I'm guessing it wouldn't be hard for me to spell out a doomsday scenario for Hollywood, both the place and the world. Millions of people didn't see the nominees. Reportedly, even some of the judges had to scramble to find them. There were no blockbusters, no swashbuckling, no gala openings, no red carpets; the Oscars themselves lacked spectacle spectacularly. Woe and woe and woe.

But a friend of ours put up a note on Facebook last week, announcing that she and her husband had finished whatever Netflix series they were watching and were yearning for something just as good to start on once more. It's familiar, painful territory for millions of people these days--you love what you've finished and hate to take up the fearful hunt for something, anything, that good to take its place. "Any suggestions?" she asked her Facebook friends.

She got 'em. Tons of 'em. Suggestions galore. The Schaaps just finished (seven seasons!) The Seaside Hotel, a zany Danish comedy about a cast of well-heeled patrons who spend summer vacations at a hotel on the North Sea. It's just a ball. 

There's irony in the story of the un-Oscars. While Hollywood is tipping toward irrelevance in the era of the pandemic, more people are watching more shows for hours on end than maybe ever before. Television is in a golden era. 

And the result couldn't be sweeter. Francis McDormand, Nomadland, and The Seaside Hotel (the eighth season now being shown in Denmark)--out here on the prairie we're happy as clams, oddly enough, spending all sorts of quality time in front of the screen.

Hollywood? --who cares? Right now, Danish TV is smokin'. There's no end to great shows from all around the world.

Reading Mother Teresa--Amazing Grace

 

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith

 – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God

 – not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8–9

It had to have been a troublesome question – “have you never had any doubt about God?” That’s what he asked her, a journalist, someone undoubtedly given to announce her answer as publicly as a billboard, maybe more so. He was writing her story, after all.

Anyone who reads her letters and notes knows the answer, sort of. Of her doubts, there were many: doubts the size and intensity of a killer twister, doubts that Jesus loved her, doubts that she was worthy, doubts that her savior was anywhere near Calcutta.

But that’s not the way she answered the writer’s question. “There was no doubt,” she told the journalist. “. . . The moment you accept, the moment you surrender yourself, that’s the conviction” (259).

Excuse me?

Did MT lie? I don’t think so. Mother Teresa’s doubt had far more to do with her than it did with Jesus, far less to do with his love than her unworthiness to receive it. It’s impossible not to think her answer wasn’t heartfelt truth – “There was no doubt,” she told him, and she meant it, no matter what we might think ourselves.

And let’s be clear here. I’m not sure anyone – even Mother Teresa – really understands grace. An old preacher once told me he thought it more than passing strange that we human beings love to get most anything we can for free . . . except grace, which all of us really want to earn. Most every Christian I know wants to be worthy of God’s love, to be someone God smiles upon because, my goodness, we’ve battled the tempter for all these years and kept him at bay. We’ve run a good race. We’ve kept the faith. We’ve deliberately walked the paths of righteousness.

To all of that, grace says, “Big deal.”

I can’t help but think once again of Martin Luther the Scale Santa, going up the stairs in Rome in the prescribed way, the holy way, on his knees, only to get to the top and be haunted by the conviction of a false promise. The story goes that once on the top stair, his mind kept saying, the just shall live by faith, not works – that any man should boast. That’s the way the story goes.

“Without Him I can do nothing,” Mother Teresa told the reporter. “But even God could do nothing for someone already full.” And then: “You have to be completely empty to let Him in to do what He will” (260).

Completely empty, she told him. Completely, totally empty.

I’m not sure any human being in her time did as much to empty herself as did Mother Teresa. She’d promised her body and soul, in life and in death, to her faithful savior Jesus Christ; she tried to be nothing, nothing at all. Still, she spent most of her life determined that he’d somehow abandoned her.

Maybe what she wanted to feel was her own unworthiness, what she wanted to offer God himself was a life that had absolutely nothing to do with self, a life that was not her life but his. She attempted self-abasement to be loved by the God who’d sent her on a mission she’d begun and then run among the poorest of the poor. Because she needed to be nothing, she got down on her knees and suffered the debasement of selflessness because she wanted so badly to love and be loved.

I don’t know that anyone really understands grace, understands love that is totally unmerited, catches on to the logic of the gift of life forever. Like the Galatians, for some human reason, we all want to earn it.

All of us.

Pew and pews

The decline over the last decade in the share of Black (-11 percentage points) and Hispanic adults (-10 points) who are Christians is very similar to the decline among white adults (-12 points), according to Pew. The number of college graduates leaving the faith (-13 points) is similar to those without degrees (-11 points). The decline in organized religion is indeed much bigger among Democrats (-17 points) than Republicans (-7 points) and among Millennials (-16 points) compared to Baby Boomers (-6 points), but the trend is very broad.

It's not particularly easy to get excited about Pew's latest research into America's religious life because it's difficult to be optimistic. In almost every area of our culture, the practice of religion (most specifically, church attendance) is on the wane, as it has been for some time. People appear to be less religious than they were.

I'm hardly an expert on Japanese religious practice, but I do remember being told that despite the fact of there not being a church or temple or synagogue on every other block, as is true here, Westerners shouldn't begin to believe that the Japanese are secular people. The lack of brick-and-mortar churches may not mean that the people aren't not religious.

Nonetheless, in most Western democracies, we've always judged the level of spirituality in terms of church attendance. Those who do, are; those who don't, aren't. Today, those who don't have outnumber those who do. That's new.

What's more, the old definitions--"conservative/liberal"--don't really hold much water. Traditionally conservative people in the evangelical world may well blame "liberalism" for the obvious decline--"the church isn't as strong as when I was a kid. We've cow-towed to the liberals, and the result is religious practice that's got no discipline at all. We don't know what it is we believe anymore."

On the other hand, traditional liberals look at a county like the one I live in and point at politics as the savior. If 80% of the populace--highly religious--chooses Donald Trump as the man to lead the nation, the church has lost its way and become, quite frankly, little more than a political party who won't don masks in an epidemic.

I was 18 years old on the very first Sunday I lived in Sioux Center, Iowa. That day and that night (two services) I attended First CRC in town because I was CRC and First was closest to the campus. A bunch of us walked those five or six blocks together, got there a bit late, and were ushered upstairs to the balcony, where there was still one pew--way in the back--untenanted.

I remember that night better than any Sunday I lived there, because the church was jammed, even the balcony. I can't begin to remember the sermon, but the preacher was likely the president of the college. Still, what I remember is being packed in. The place was overflowing.

Today, I'm a member of the fellowship that meets in that same church. We haven't used the balcony in years, if ever. Covid has fractured attendance. We're there in shifts so there are far more empty chairs than occupied.

A half-century ago, there were only two Christian Reformed churches; today, there are six, one of them Spanish-speaking. The town is almost twice the size of what it was in 1966. There are more churches, period, in town, but several have no evening services, and, of those that do, none, I'd guess, fill balconies.

Does that mean that Christianity is on the wane? I can't help thinking that yes is an easy answer to a complex phenomenon. The degree to which ethnicity is linked to religious practice among most Euro-American fellowships is, in many cases, dying or already dead. The vast majority of students enrolling at the college down the street from First CRC, Sioux Center, in 1966 had their membership in the CRC. Today, the percentage of students at the college (now, "university") who are members of that denomination is less than half. Whole denominations, across the board, are in decline.

What Pew has been watching for decades is a sea change in religious practice throughout this country. If you think it's just you or yours, you're badly mistaken.

In my lifetime, perhaps the most significant cultural change has come in religious practice. That's what Pew uncovers every time they determine to ask questions, once again, about how we do our faith.

The Guernsey Tracks

They're sweet these days, as long as they stay in their banks. When and if they flood, they're a pain. Most do flood come spring, unless they're damned up somewhere and disciplined into behaving. Outside of a now-and-then outpouring, they're a darling feature of our landscapes, home to ducks and geese, and life for deer and coons and a whole gallery of wildlife living nearby. But, that's it.

Their placid nature makes it easy to forget that rivers--like this one, the Laramie in southeast Wyoming--were once upon a time our interstate highways. If you were traveling a great distance, say, across the country, you never left a river valley because the livestock, not to mention the wife and kids, couldn't go without what rivers had in abundance, water.

Today, come summer, some residents of Guernsey, Wyoming, get out old tubes and ride the Laramie, I'm guessing, although right now you'd suffer. In the fall, maybe kids shoot ducks out here--or try. Snowmobiles likely find the Laramie a fun winter highway. Cattlemen may well grab what they can of the Laramie for center-point irrigation, but mostly, like this old bridge--constructed in 1875-- the Laramie's real life is, as they say, pretty much o'er.

Forty years before the bridge, hundreds of thousands of emigrants left their tracks here literally, on the Oregon Trail. The Guernsey Tracks are like none other, trust me. They predate the Civil War. They're worn into the soft sandstone because those hundreds of thousands of people knew well that you couldn't be haphazard about time or place if you were going to make it all the way west. You needed to stay near water on a trail that would keep you from the most horrendous climbs through the Rockies. If you were going to Oregon or Utah or California, you stayed with the rivers and made tracks where others already had.

These tracks are there own kind of funnel. Everyone had pass to this way, what seemed to the Lakota an almost endless train of Conestoga wagons and Mormon handcarts, more white people than they'd ever seen or even imagined, extremely concerning. Taking a path anywhere north or south would have been a heckuva gamble. My guess is that everyone remembered this place; yet today, this place remembers everyone.

There are other spots where wheel ruts still tell the story, but if you're anywhere near Guernsey, Wyoming, you really should pass by. After all, 175 years ago--no foolin'--hundreds of thousands did.



As you can tell, in stone, 175 years later.

The Obdurate

Perhaps it was more typical than not--that night, I mean. The guy worked a high-crime district, West Palm Beach, where being a cop meant hot nights, especially in December or January, when, by day, the streets were full of people looking to warm their lives in balmy Florida. People think of retirees as "snowbirds," he told me, but the citrus and the palms attracted thousands and thousands of others too, low-life men and women who thought nothing of shrugging off the law.

He was the law. He was an elder in the CRC, a fifteen-year veteran of the West Palm Beach police force, an immigrant himself, who, as a kid, spent three WWII years in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia, where he once stood at attention and watched a commander kill a man with his bare hands. By the time he came to Florida, he was no stranger to the darkness, and I was in his squad car that night to experience whatever it might be he would experience, riding along, doing a story on him and his life for the Banner.

That night, I was struck by how little I knew of his world. He drove the Dodge with "Supervisor" written above the lights on the hood, an assignment he was given because the captain knew there was a civilian--me--along to witness, a journalist. I was doing a story on a CRC cop in crime-ridden South Florida. The "Supervisor" had discretion; he could pick and choose the action. He told me I made his job easier that night.

At the outset of the story I wrote, I quoted from the Canons of Dort because I loved the sound of a word I knew so little of--obdurate. The Canons define the darkness in all of us by running through the blessings of creation before the fall. Then, somehow, through our Edenic forbearers, we walked away from godliness and "became involved in blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity, and perverseness of judgment; became wicked, rebellious, and obdurate in heart and will, and impure in his afflictions."

By the time the morning came, I witnessed very little really, only the bloody after-effects of a fight between people who did business with each other, all of them drunk. They got into it after one of them broke into the other's late-night bar and stole a couple bottles of hooch. There was blood. The perp cut his hand when he busted out a window.

But that was it that night. The truth?--I felt relieved, although a bit cheated by getting by so easily. The super's world offered no picnics--that much I knew; but that night was pretty easy.

What I remember best is not some third-degree burglary, but the fashion by which the night began, the way NYPD Blue used to begin every episode, the captain up front outlining the concerns in a half-humorous monologue that ends with a finger pointing in the air--"Hey, and be careful out there."

My supervisor took me along to hear the agenda, a room where maybe 30 guys, white guys, listened in but were rowdy in the way boys can be while the boss is running through the business at hand.

What I've never forgotten was the stone foundation of voluble racial prejudice in that evening's agenda. I don't remember anyone using the n-word, but you can avoid the usage and still make the point; and the point was made, time and time again, in jokes that made no attempt to dodge purely obdurate racism.

All of that was forty years ago. I have no doubt that were I to attend the evening's agenda with the West Palm Beach police tonight, the room would include men and women of color. The atmosphere now cannot possibly be what it was then.

Still, what I remember best about that whole story is the first half hour when a room full of white guys did their best to make jokes about the obdurate they were sure to find, that night, on the streets of the city.

People mean a variety of different things when they talk about "systemic racism," but my understanding will always begin with what I saw and heard in that meeting at the station. That level kind of racism takes years decades to mitigate.

You can read the story for yourself, if you'd like--I'll send you a copy. But nowhere in what's there in black and white on the page will you find a word about what I witnessed before that night's supervisor and his ride-along took off from the station. I didn't report any of that.

I can't help believing this morning, the morning after Derrick Chauvin heard a jury's three guilty verdicts, that my not writing anything about what I saw and heard that night in the meeting is also what people mean when they talk about "systemic racism."

Makes me wonder about "the obdurate."

Worshipping at Zion

I hardly dare to say it, but I found Zion National Park a bit, well, busy. I happened to be there mid-week, mid-April, at a time when I'd guessed things wouldn't have been so thickly peopled, but Zion is Zion, one of the really great national parks, one of America's all-time favorites--fourth place favorite, I'm told, a place that even on off-days, draws a crowd. 

I was passing through, if anyone can actually do that in a state as magnificent as Utah, so, like an idiot, I hadn't planned ahead. The woman at the state info desk in St. George offered some immediate sympathy for the fact that I could no longer get a shuttle ticket, but, she said, if I'd watch my phone at 5:00 that afternoon, I could try to secure a ticket for the next day, the day I already had planned. I was on the road.

"You can drive through," she said blessedly, as if I'd been rescued from sin. So I did. I drove back and forth, snapping shots of the place named by its first white resident as "Zion," a place apart, a rugged, red canyon for meditation, a place for awe.

Mountains--even generic mountains--take your breath away if you're a flatlander. They're massive, but almost entirely useless. I suppose there may be some minerals in these canyon walls, but cutting them up for whatever reason would be sacrilege--it's Zion, remember.  Spend a couple hours at Zion and Teddy Roosevelt will find his way into your thanks.

I have no doubt that my way of visiting Zion, simply driving through, is not the way to visit; but even if you can't get a shuttle ticket, a couple hour's worth of the place, even if you never leave the road, is not to be missed. You can find a way, I'm sure, to worship at Zion.

Booty (finis)

I went to bed in my childhood bedroom that night, and for an hour or more before I finally closed my eyes I searched into the darkness for some vague sense of why I still felt cheated, why I felt like standing up and going to his room, to say something, to get something from him that I still needed.

I never did fall asleep. It was after one when he got me up and into my clothes because he said the snow had settled too heavily on the branches of trees that had not yet shed their leaves. What called my father up was some premonition that his trees were in danger in the heavy snow. It was a freakish storm, coming as closely as it did on summer's heels. Lightening occasionally slashed over the peaked corners of our house from a sky made luminous with snow, and thunder rolled and crackled the way it does in May and June when in the Midwest all eyes look west for the funnels that fall from thickened, late spring skies. The lawn was already white, and even the sidewalks had disappeared in the kind of heavy snow that falls in clumps.

"I don't trust it," he told me as we went out the door. "It's too heavy. There's too much weight."

A mountain ash at the southwest corner of the house swept so low to the ground it looked as though it were weeping. The branches of the oriental elms on the south side hung like inverted fishhooks, and the smaller shrubs twisted awkwardly against their shapes.

'There's a broom in the garage," he said. "Take the west side."

I ran around the house toward the garage in the eerie light of the storm. Snow covered the garden lot in the southwest corner of his backyard, even though what was left of cabbage plants jutted up like something emerging from the darkness. I turned the latch nailed up against the side of the garage, then pulled the door open. It was dark inside, so at first I felt along the wall where I thought the broom might be, just as I might have years ago, as if nothing at all had changed. Even in the dark, my hands found the horseshoes I remembered had hung there from the time a neighbor gave them to him, broken. My father had taken them along to the foundry to have them repaired, even though he never threw horseshoes himself.

The straw bottom of an old broom formed in the darkness, standing up against the bench, so I grabbed it and headed back outside and right then, all around town, the snow had become too heavy for the elms and maples and cottonwoods that line village streets. Already thick with leaves, the trees held tons of wet snow that wasn't melting. The temperature was right and the snowfall was heavy enough to make weary branches all over town submit, right then, right at that moment, to the early storm's thick burden, and in the midnight village stillness the crack­ing branches rang like gunfire, shot after shot echoing down the empty streets like nothing I'd ever heard before, limb after snapping limb like errant potshots taken in the darkness, one after another, an endless series of vicious cracks and the sound of thrashing branches falling in clumps.

I ran toward the side of the house, carrying the broom in both hands as if it were a rifle, then swept and swatted at the bushes. I attacked the oriental elm with the broom up over my head. A lower branch had already split, leaving a long thin blonde slash like an open wound.

I found my father hiked up in a front yard maple, not high off the ground, his booted foot coming down hard, stamping away, shaking loose the burden of snow. Bang, bang, bang-down came his foot, angrily, in a way I'd never seen before, one arm like a grappling hook around the trunk. But beneath his boot, the branch rose steadily with every jarring kick, slowly, loosened from its burden of snow, coming up free.

I stood there in the vicious rattle of gunfire all around, watching the father that I respect, and even love, his old broom in my hands like some useless weapon, and I realized that no matter how hard I might try to forget him and the booty of a life I thought behind me, this man and his saintliness, my father --like the God he loves and serves --is forever a part of me.

Reading Mother Teresa--Loneliness

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? 

How long will you hide your face from me? 

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts 

and day after day have sorrow in my heart? Psalm 13:1–2

More gun deaths result from suicide than murder. Seriously. More Americans take their own lives than the number who die from car accidents. Seems impossible.

Never in my life have I read the local obituaries as closely as I do now that I’m getting old; still, the facts I just mentioned shock me. But then, I’m sure that very few obits would ever mention suicide; few, in fact, divulge cause of death.

Maybe I’m shocked because I’m not a coroner. Perhaps people don’t tell the truth aloud, especially in a small town like the one I call home. Still, more suicides than murders?

In all my years of teaching Hamlet, Act V’s graveyard scene had to be explained to kids – college or high school: Claudius and Gertrude cut a deal with the church, a deal that allowed Ophelia’s body to buried somewhat honorably, despite her having taken her own life. However, the priest had insisted that not all of the rites ordinarily given to someone of her class and standing could be granted to her body, given the means of death. Her brother, Laertes, is incensed when he sees her dishonored by such paltry rites. He jumps in the grave, Hamlet goes in after him – and we’ve got action.

Kids today have trouble believing that not all that long ago the mortal coil of those who took their own lives would be buried somewhere less honorable than the community cemetery. People reasoned that suicide grew from despair s
o desperate that there could have been no hope, and the hopeless, ultimately, are faithless. Thus, no “Christian” burial.

Compared with life a century ago, we’re dashingly more affluent. The poor we have with us always, but comparing our lives with much of the developing world, we’re loaded. Despite our wealth, people kill themselves at alarming rates.

Loneliness, people say, creates a level of sad resignation that can all too easily lead to suicide. A life without human intimacy is a life that is alone. Some say, as a society, as a culture, we prize our own freedoms so greatly that we’ve begun to eschew traditional institutions like family, church, work, and play. If we bowl at all, we bowl alone. We hole up in our own worlds, some of them virtual, then feel stranded on the island we’ve created, where the commodity we most need – the loving touch of another human being – is impossible.

But tragedy is rarely that simply diagnosed. Few human beings were more celebrated than Mother Teresa, few touched more lives, few were more universally loved. Literally – physically – she touched thousands who loved her. Yet, her own terrifying isolation, hard as it is to believe, brought immense psychic and emotional pain: “nothing enters my soul,” she told a friend, a priest, someone she’d wanted to speak to, but simply couldn’t. “I was longing to speak to you in Bombay – yet I did not even try to make it possible.” And then this: “If there is hell – this must be one” (250).

Who knows? It’s possible to argue that few human beings gave away more love in the 20th century than Mother Teresa; yet her own isolation seemed unrelenting.

To know that about her makes us all sad. B, but to those who know the depths of loneliness and darkness, that she suffered something of what they do is oddly comforting. We are not alone. We are never alone.

Booty (vi)

He raised his eyebrows and looked out at the snow, and I told him the whole story, how we'd taken it along to check traps, how Mugsie had yelled at me to throw it across the river, and how it had gone in, how we'd looked all over and never found it. "Some nights I'd sit here at this window when I was a kid," I told him, "and I'd just about die thinking how much I wanted to go down and tell you the whole story. Confess, you know-confess the whole thing. But I never could. I just couldn't do it, Dad. Go!, I wanted to, but I couldn't." I picked up one of those leggings. "I sat right here on these steps, night after night, and I'd tell myself to go down and tell you. I was so scared." He had a faraway look in his eyes of someone almost lost. "I figured I could get away with it, I guess. And I did."

He ran his tongue along his lips, and his eyes showed this shadowy kind of questioning that I could almost feel because something was hap­pening in his mind. "You're telling the truth?" he said.

"Lots of nights I sat here and even cried," I told him. "But I never told you, not in all these many years. Isn't that something?" I tried to make it a joke. "I couldn't even pray, Dad," I told him. "I remember sitting right here on the steps and thinking that maybe if I could pray I could live with it --with what I'd done. But I couldn't because I knew that God wouldn't give me any peace until I told you. And I couldn't do that." It seemed so crazy. "I just couldn't." I stretched out my hands again. "It was about this long, and it was black, in a sheath."

He pulled his handkerchief up to his face and blew his nose once or twice, then brushed it across his nose.

“You don’t even remember it?” I said.

"When the war ended I had two daughters I didn't even know, and I wasn't thinking about booty. I was thinking about your mother and your sisters," he said. "You know, your mother worried back then about who I'd hug first when I got off the ship --her or the girls. What did I care about booty? What did I care about some Japanese bayonet from a scrap heap?"

He turned to look outside at the falling snow. "But what gets me," he said, "is why you couldn't tell me." He raised his hands in front of his face. "Did you think I'd be so angry?"

"No," I said. "I couldn't stand the idea of letting you down."

"Letting me down?" he said. He brought his hand up to his lips and his eyes rose over my head as if my whole childhood were replaying somewhere against the wall. "To lose that bayonet?" He looked straight at me, full in the face. "Was I that hard to live with?"

"No," I said. "Of course not. You were perfect, absolutely perfect, the most perfect father anybody could have. You never did a thing wrong. Never. I can't remember a time-"

"Oh, Lane," he said, "I was far from perfect. Oh, my Lord, I wasn't even close."

"Don't say that, Dad," I told him. "That's just like you. Don't say that."

He laid both hands down on his legs once that lost look came back into his eyes. "So I was perfect," he said, as much to himself as to me. "You really thought that, Lane?--you thought I was perfect. Oh, Lord," he said, "what did I do to you?" He tightened his lips, then looked straight ahead, almost as if something had finally come clear. "And today you can't talk to God."

"Don't say that, Dad," I told him. "That's the way it always is with you-all your life you took it all on yourself, everything. It's not your fault-nothing's your fault."

"You couldn't talk to me --that's what you said. What kind of father is it you can't talk to --tell me that, Lane? What kind of father is that?"

"I stole it," I said. "I grabbed it right out of the closet and I never asked you. I stole it, Dad-and then I lost it. Nothing's your fault here."

The face that had hung before me on so many childhood nights now stared incredulous, full of that innocence I had always known would hurt me, even back then, the same painful purity that made him so unap­proachable on those winter nights. Thirty years later I still laid a wound on him with that old bayonet.

"Did you think I wouldn't forgive you?" He removed his glasses and rubbed the moisture out of his eyes. "Did you think I didn't love you, Lane --is that it?"

I looked away.

"You think I'd punish you so hard?" he said. For a minute his eyes escaped, then refocused. "Then I failed you right there," he told me, and he grabbed my shoulder tightly, shaking me, as if I were a boy. "Then right there is where I failed you."

"You don't understand," I told him. "I'm just trying to tell you what I did, how it was for me. I'm just trying to get you to forgive me," I said, laughing the way it came out. "Thirty years ago already. My word, it's something I've never forgotten."

And just like that his back straightened, his eyes narrowed. "You remember all of that, don't you?" he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Some things you haven’t forgotten,” he said, nodding.

“I lost the bayonet and I never told you.”

He kept nodding, looking at me as suddenly I were his boy and not the man I had become. “I’m glad you remember,” he said. That’s what I pray for, Lane—every day. That’s exactly what I ask the Lord—just that you remember some things.” 

“I can’t forget,” I told him. “Not even try.”

_________________________ 

Tomorrow: The effects of the storm.

Booty (v)

I never told my father, not until last week, thirty years later, when the two of us sat together on a pair of hassocks at the very spot at the top of the stairs where I spent too many anguished nights. My father and I sat in front of the closet where the bayonet should have been, where the samurai still leaned against the wall studs, perfectly sheathed.

''I'd almost forgotten that thing," he said when I pulled it out from behind the aquarium. "We were in the Phillipines just a couple of weeks after the war, and they had this whole pile of junk there. The CO said we could take what we wanted."

He rubbed his fingers over the flowered handle, and I saw very clearly that the sword meant nothing to him. He handled it as if it were a museum piece, then put it down and unrolled his father's high school diploma, dated 1898. "Look at this," he said excitedly. "Your grand­pa had 36 weeks of Cicero in high school. It's listed here, right on the diploma. See that? --36 weeks of Cicero. My goodness, what an education."

I waited for him to mention the bayonet.

"You know that sword is probably worth something today," I said. "Didn't I read somewhere about samurais being collectors' items? Maybe we ought to sell it.” I picked it up and laid it across my lap, turning it once or twice and running my hands over the bronze sheath.

"If the price is right," he said, putting down the diploma. "I don't need money. You want it, Lane?" he said. "I don't think your sisters want it, do you?"

Of course, I wanted the sword. "Sure," I said, "I'll take it," because I knew right at that moment that he would have given me the bayonet too, had it been where it should have been; and I knew that even long ago that lost piece of war booty had been predestined for me too. What I'd lost years ago was always really mine.

"You better start a pile," he said, pointing. "We got a lot of odd things to go through here. What else we got in there?" he said, nodding back into the closet.

I had to tell him the story. I had to open it up, I guess, if not for him, then most certainly for me. "That's it?" I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Of the war --of what you took back?"

"It's been almost a half a century since I thought of that stuff," he said, thumbing through the photos. "Not the war, I mean. You think of it now and then. Maybe every day something comes back --the way the ship used to rock in the swells, nausea." He seemed distanced as he looked over what we'd pulled from the corner. "I used to have a duffle, remember that? I think you used it, didn't you? It seems I remember you hoisting it up over your back. White one. Maybe it's gone now."

The leggings lay in a dusty heap, and a pair of pants I had forgotten hung from a hanger against the wall.

“You don’t remember anything else?” I said.

"You get to be my age, Lane, and you won't remember things that happened two weeks ago." He flipped the leggings over. "Didn't I have the whole business at one time? Seems to me I had my dress uniform."

If I hadn’t told him, I knew then he wouldn’t have remembered.

“What about a bayonet?” I said. “You remember a bayonet —Japanese bayonet? You had a bayonet too, a little one, a black one with a wood handle?”

My father has a way of staring when he channels his mind. His eyes glaze, as if the volume of whatever is playing in his head shuts out the world around him. He reached up with his right hand and took a hold of his ear, shook it. "A bayonet?" he said. "Japanese, you say?"

"You had a bayonet, a little one," I said, stretching my hands.

"I don't remember a bayonet," he said. "Somewhere I got some pictures of the signing of the peace declaration. You ever see those? A whole bunch of them. I bought them in a set-all pictures of the Japs giving up. You could buy them on Guam. The brass, in their best dress uniforms, chests full of medals. Admiral Nimitz. I have those somewhere. Maybe Mike wants them."

Mike is my son.

"The bayonet, Dad?" I said. "You don't remember?"

He was lost in a world of ships and ports and tropics.

"You had one," I said, "and I lost it."

He looked at me as if all of it was silly, his eyes hesitant and skeptical. 

"Years ago, I took it out of this closet without asking you. I stole it really, and I used it when we used to go trapping. You remember?"

"You and Mugsie?" he said.

"Yeah. I snuck it out of here --out of this closet-and we used it trap­ping."

"Sure," he said. "I had this sword here and a little bayonet with a hook that goes over the barrel. Sure, a bayonet. I remember."

"I took it," I said again.

It seemed still something of a mystery. "What for?" he said.

"For trapping, Dad," I told him. "You remember how Mugsie and me---and John --we used to trap?"

"You took it?" he said. "You needed it?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I can't say I needed it --not really. I just took it, and I lost it. I threw it in the river --not on purpose, Dad. It wasn't on purpose. Mugsie asked for it, see? --and I threw it and it went in the river and I never found it back. It's not that we didn't try."

He shook his head. "Is that right?" he said. "You lost it way back then. How old were you? --grade school? You used to take your bikes. Sure, grade school." His eyes came in at me. "It seems like a strange time to tell me now," he said. "What is it? --thirty years?"

"Maybe it's the right time," I said, trying to laugh.

"You lost it?" He shaped his mustache with his fingers and leaned back off his elbows. "You and your buddies heisted it right out of this closet and you lost it in the river --that's what you're saying?" It somehow struck him as funny. "I guess you got away with one, didn't you?" He giggled to himself. "I suppose it's too late to do any punishing now, isn't it? --what are you, forty years old?"

“It’s history,” I told him.

________________ 

Tomorrow: But for him, the lost bayonet is more than history.

Booty (iv)

The night I had snuck the bayonet out for the first time and showed them, we were in Mugsie's backyard, standing around his burning bar­rel. Our traps, strung on an iron pole, were set over the flame to soak up the scent of burning leaves, a ritual we thought would rid the traps of human smell. Mugsie hauled the bayonet out of its sheath and held it high above his head, the snapping flames throwing a savage redness over his shoulders and his face.

“Your old man say you could use that thing?” John said.

I shrugged my shoulders hard enough to let them know that my father wasn’t aware of it being out of the closet.

“You just grabbed it?” John said.

Years later, when Mugsie became a preacher, he told me once how he'd never forgotten the morning we'd lost it. He mentioned it one day in a reverent, priest-like tone, as we sat over coffee in a sandwich shop, nudged the memory out as if he were bringing up something that might still be very painful. "Remember that?" he said. "You remember that day? Wow, I'll never forget where that thing went in. I was so scared." 

But the night I lost that bayonet-and for weeks afterward-I laid in bed and told myself that I had to admit the whole story to my father, if for no other reason than I simply couldn't live the lie with him. I was in seventh grade, and the loss of that bayonet colored every mo­ment of my day and kept me awake at night when I sat perched at the top of the stairs, guilt weighing on me so heavily that it pushed me downstairs to tell him.

But I was afraid, not of some exploding wrath, not even of punish­ment. I was afraid of hurting him because this perfect father had an imperfect son. So I wouldn't go down those stairs, I wouldn't tell him, and I'd go back to bed and try to sleep. Sometimes from the floor beneath I'd hear hymns coming from the radio above the refrigerator, my father sitting at the kitchen table, working on a Bible study or a school board proposal, and I'd tell myself that he really wouldn't hurt me. What I feared were his tears.

Seventh grader I was, and I felt the stain in me of something I'd never seen in him, so I hid, like Adam, ashamed of who I was before my father's face, sat upstairs for what seems now to have been hours, star­ing out of the window where my neighbor's dim garage lights spilled long yellow shafts over the pines in our backyard, and where, just a few nights ago, heavy snow lay softly stretched on the telephone wires in clumps the shape of that very bayonet.

_____________________

Tomorrow: The bayonet's appeal.

Booty (iii)

Mugsie had knee boots. He came down off the bank and sat on his haunches at the river's edge, as if it were all he could do. "Don't kick it," he said. "Whatever you do, don't kick it."

I imagined it floating beneath the surface of the river current, a sub­marine drifting in slow motion toward some shallow spot downstream where it could rest up against a rock, a place where you might even spot it from the bank. I followed the path of the river in my mind, try­ing to find a rapids or a crossing up ahead, a place the bayonet might come to rest, a spot where we could just pick it up after school when we'd come back to hunt some more.

We kept walking, feeling over the bottom with our feet, kept search­ing through the gravel and the mud closer to the edge, but I realized I had lost the exact spot. "Where, Mugs?" I yelled. "Where did it go in?"

"Somewhere there," he said, and I knew from the way the passion had emptied itself from his voice that he'd already given up. It would be impossible to find it now, just a stroke of luck.

"You guys keep looking," Mugsie said. "I'll check the rest of the traps on this side."

I hadn't thought before that moment about time. There were more traps to check, a long bike ride back to town, and school.

"I better go on," John said. "You stay here. I'll get the rest of the traps."

I kept feeling along the river bottom, alone now and desperate. When I found something that crossed my foot, I reached in, oblivious to the soaking my jacket took. I dipped down to my shoulder to get in deep enough, but it was only a muddy, leafless stick.

Alone, I could cry. Why? --I started asking myself why: why on earth did I take that bayonet? what was in it for me?-the chance of looking tough? We didn't need that bayonet. We'd never really needed it. Hatchets worked better. Why did I steal it out of the closet the way I did? What did I want to prove? I swore at myself, cussed myself for the lame thing I'd done in the name of silly adventure.

"God, please," I said, "help me to find it." 

But right there in the river my father's God listened to my pleading and answered with silence. I was a child, my father's child, and I was sure I'd broken God's trust. So my father's God shook his head, because what I'd lost in the river's cold flow was something I'd taken in sin. I knew he couldn't bless sin.

So I stopped praying. Right there in the river, I knew it was hopeless. 

When we returned after school, the slow autumn sun had dried the grass. Sweat ran down behind my ears and into my hair by the time we reached the bend where the bayonet had disappeared. This time I went in without pants, barefoot, searching every inch of the muck close to the bank, reaching in for every stick or branch long enough to pro­mise anything. Mugsie and John stomped through the river with me, but I was the only one who was stripped.

Even when the sun fell beyond the cottonwoods at the edge of the pasture where the river turned back north, my friend never mentioned quitting. Finally, they let me say it: "It's gone forever probably," I told them, stepping out of the muck, my jaw quivering. "There's nothing we can do anyway."

Neither of them dissented.

___________________ 

Tomorrow: So many years later, he approaches the story with his father.

Booty (ii)

At the end of the war my father picked up two pieces of war booty somewhere in the South Pacific-a samurai sword and a small black Japanese bayonet, wood-handled, still greased, as I remember, probably never used. It pulled hard out of its sheath, making a scraping, metallic shriek--to me, a child, the screaming sound of war. Its blade was tarnished, unlike the samurai's chromed brilliance. Both of them were kept in the upstairs closet with what remained of his Navy life: an ordinary sailor's hat that looked silly when my sisters wore it upside down to the beach; a duffle bag I used for going to Bible camp; and some marching leggings I remember wrapping around my legs on a rainy afternoon, all of it hid­den away upstairs where no one ever saw it.

Except me. The bayonet made a perfect machete. I remember sneak­ing it along on the trapline for the first time, shoving the long sheath through the belt loop on my side so that the hook and hole at the top of the blade caught at my waist, as if I were carrying a sword. I would never have taken the samurai. Its bronze sheath and the engraved flowers made it ceremonial, but the black bayonet was made to use, not show. Hatchets were sharper and heavier, cleaner in hacking, but a hatchet had no history, not like my father's black Japanese bayonet.

It disappeared one morning at a point where the river flattens and elbows west, at the very spot where one day I remember searching with my foot through the water for the chain of a trap that had disappeared from the weeds where it was staked. When I found the chain, I raised it slowly and came face to face with a snapping turtle with the girth of a wash basin. We killed that ugly beast, chopped it in two pieces, then walked the rest of the trapline, only to find both halves still writhing when we circled back to the bridge. That's where I lost the bayonet, at the spot where we'd killed the ancient turtle.

It was early November, about the same time of year it is now, but there'd been no early storms. I don't remember why Mugsie asked me to throw it across, but I had done it before, so I did. I don't know why I messed up, but the moment I knew my father's bayonet wasn't going to make it to the other side, regret, then guilt, pried me wide open like that turtle split in two on the bank, its insides spilling, as the bayonet spun, then fell without a splash, into the flow of the river.

"Geez," John said. All three of us stood perfectly still, our eyes planted on the very spot where it had disappeared.

I knew it was gone. Even before it hit the water, I knew it would be lost in the roots and clams and rocks.

"You stay there, Mugsie--watch the spot," I yelled, and John and I stumbled through the wet grass, our hip boots still rolled down and sloshing against each other. "Stay there," I said again, pointing across at Mugsie, not even looking at him, my eyes still focused on what seemed with each passing second to be an indistinguishable spot of river current.

"We can feel it with our feet," John said. "You'll be able to feel it. It's all muddy on the bottom, and you can feel it."

We unfolded the cuffs of our boots so that the edges reached our thighs, and we waded in, knees stiff against the press of cold water. I had no idea how deep the river would be where it went in, but I kept my eyes on the spot.

Heavy rubber soles of hip boots are not good for feeling something lost on a river bottom. But in the middle, the muck firmed into gravel, and for a minute I thought it could be felt on the gritty stones. I would hear it, I thought, shrieking like something alive when I stepped on it.

"There," Mugsie yelled, "that's where it went in."

I stamped around, trying to distinguish anything on the bottom, my arms held out from my side to keep balance in the current.

“Right there,” Mugsie yelled.

John was right up behind me, hands tugging at the edge of his boots to keep his crotch dry.

“Right here.” I was sure of it. “It’s got to be right around here.”

"It could go," John said. "Shit, it could flow along the bottom-you know-the current."

I knew it too. I didn't want to say it. "It's got to be here," I said again. "This is where it went in."

________________

Tomorrow: In his memory, the fruitless search continues frantically.