The Examination of Li Gang

Li Gang, from Changshan, was a student with brilliant prospects, even though he had grown up on the edge of poverty. Recently, his wife had died from a mysterious illness that filled her eyes with blood and enlarged her head to the size of an elephant’s head. Forlorn, torn, and reluctant, Li Gang bade good-bye to his father and mother (holding Li Gang’s one-year old son) in order that Li Gang should take the first second-degree examination in Jinan, at the provincial level in Shandong.
Li Gang excelled at his first-degree examinations, not to mention the preliminary for the licentiate, but he needed to do even better on his second-degree examinations. Walking slowly, he fretted. Would he ever exchange the hemp and linen garb of the peasant for the blue gown and square cap of the scholar? His knapsack, crammed with classics, study guides for classics, sutras, and arcane books on magic, Li Gang faced northward, bit his lip, and worried. The cottage on the three-acre farm—the barn falling apart, and the fences needing mending. His poor wife, his poor son! Why me? He had two taels of silver up his sleeve, given to him by his father to give to his father’s cousin, Xu Kong, abbot of the monastery on Mount Tai.
Cypresses gray, willows going bald (an early chill had caused the willows’ leaves to denude the willows’ crowns), pine trees aloof, Li Gang walked homesick and sad.
But he was still standing still. In mourning for his young wife he grieved to the point of not caring where he walked. But he had to care, he had a son to look after. Tears cloaking the monastery on the scruff of Mount Tai, the farther Li Gang walked, the farther Mount Tai receded. Mountains clouds, clouds mountains. When Li Gang entered an oak forest, he kept feeling the gossamer of spider webs brushing his face, which he kept spitting out like hairs.
“Li Gang! Li Gang!” he heard, or thought he heard a couple girls say.
Li Gang swiveled, pivoted, craned–but saw no one, nor could he see spiders anywhere, or even any spider webs.
Li Gang, dragging his sandaled feet, asked a woodcutter, sitting in a straw hut by the side of a ditch, choked with dried vines, for directions to Xu Kong’s monastery.
“It used to be about thirty li I reckon, but it burned down last week—hit by lightning!” said the woodcutter, his face ballooned around his cricket-colored eyes when he talked, his front buck-teeth and white gums protruding. “You can stay here! Iffn you like!”
“I plan to study for the examinations there!” said Li Gang, feigning enthusiasm.
“Oh that! Dey’re rigged, aren’t they, Zhang Wei?” said a fisherman with his pole, crawling out of the hut, with spirits on his breath. “I tried that thing, flunked it—never, am not going dere again—who needs them? Inks gives me the rashes. And look at me—Jiao Hua, fisherman! I’m happy as a shrimp now in the four wide oceans!”
Jiao Hua lips turned red like angry worms.
“You can stay here the night for free,” said Zhang Wei. “It’s getting earlier darker now or darker earlier now–or however you say that!”
Li Gang paid these drunks no mind and after a while he stumbled upon the monastery. He toggled the brass bell. The abbot, Xu Kong, opened the gate, a few monks sweeping the porch of the temple.
Xu Kong was ancient. The smile from his mango-shaped head expressed a faint superiority from long meditations on the mountains of the immortals. His skin was dry–bleached white by the sun and moon, his wispy hair, beard, and mustache as fine as a baby spider’s first spider web. Turtle-eyed Xu Kong, tallying beads, eroded by his austerities, recited threads of prayer even while he walked Li Gang to the spare room his cousin had reserved for him. Its one window looked out over a stream whose fall of water over rocks provided Li Gang with the right mood, he hoped, needed for memorizing the Confucian classics—although he had really only wanted to read Daoist texts on magic. He wanted to bring his young wife back from the dead more than he wanted to live himself. King Yama in the Underworld, it must have been a mistake. Check your books again! He returned to the Eight-Legged Essay, but he couldn’t think in a straight line anymore. If he could, he was dreaming.
That night a rapid knock on his monastery door startled him.
“Who is it?” he asked, sleepily wiping the blear from his bleary eyes. “Come in!”
“What are you doing?” asked the girl.
“Well,” said Li Gang, assuming she was a Buddhist nun, but not convinced she was, “I was supposed to be studying for the provincial exams, but instead I have been working on magical spells to summon up ghosts to help me write my Eight-Legged essay.”
The girl was pretty, and prettier still by the way she wore a loosely-fitting red, gold-brocaded robe with wide sleeves, which revealed a sheen on her porcelain shoulders—
long black hair tousled as if from tossing and turning over in bed. Her pouty lips were red, reminding Li Gang of a perch he had once caught, which had swallowed his hook so deeply that he had cut himself and bled like a cherry, jerking the hook out.
“Can I be of any help? I have a few charms—” she said, walking on clouds with her tiny steps.
“NO!” said Li Gang. “I must study. I must place first, and to do that I have to study these rare Daoist texts and figure out a way to summon a ghost to help. Sorry, but I must ask you to leave!”
As soon as he closed the door behind her, he heard her tiny fist tapping on the door.
“Who is it?” asked Li Gang. “Uncle?”
“It’s Liu Ying ying, Li Gang!”
When he opened the door Ying ying was standing on his threshold with her robe down around her bare ankles.
“Well, I could probably afford to lose one night of studying,” reasoned Li Gang.
Without even wondering how Liu Ying ying knew his name, the next night, Li Gang, making up for lost time, instead of working on his Eight-Legged essay, pored over his alchemical texts by the light of his lamp. Nervously, he noticed a distant storm brewing—rumbling, then he heard thunder like walls of bricks crashing down—tael-sized hail—flying tiles from the roof smashed against nearby walls—the stream outside his window, in full spate, gushed, its mouth shouting rocks and fish.
When Li Gang sat back down at his table, his favorite brush turned into a rat. The rat bit his thumb and snipped off a piece of flesh. He cursed the rat, but a king-size crab
landed on his chest, bowling him over. When Li Gang screamed, the king-size crab turned into purple-pink smoke, which then slithered through a crack in the wall as if inhaled through a pipe-stem. Li Gang’s ink-stones turned into fish-hawks howling in circles over his head, even shitting on him—and before he could save his Eight-Legged essay draft, the scroll recoiled, covered in shit. Then his essay scrunched itself into a ball. The ball became a bat, and flew toward the window. Fish-hawks chased the bat while Li Gang yelled for help, but the bat flew down Li Gang’s throat, choking Li Gang’s throat like a pair of wrestler’s hands. He stumbled into the hall, where he heard Xu Kong’s heavy feet walking toward him. Li Gang, retching up the bat, asked Xu Kong about the thunderstorm. Xu Kong stood there in a pedestrian way, holding a rattling pine crate, that he allowed to rest on his lump of a stomach.
“What thunderstorm?” said the abbot dolefully, without a scintilla of doubt.
“You heard nothing?” incredulously asked Li Gang, feeling the world lose some of its solidity.
Li Gang instinctively looked at his own two bare feet to make sure he was standing in the Middle Kingdom, not chasing rabbits to the moon.
“No, Li—besides I had a dream,” said the abbot Xu Kong, “about Liu Ying ying, who a week before her wedding was attacked by the shave-headed soldiers when the Northeners invaded her village and killed her betrothed. She drowned herself in the nearby river, to save her sanity. The village recovered her body. I received her bones recently and placed them in this pine box. In my dream she asked me to ask you, Li Gang, to take her bones home for a proper ceremony. Tomorrow morning, you must take
her bones by the river to her village. Or she will be Yama’s concubine forever. Whatever you do, don’t open the box, or you will wind up in Hell’s own Hell—with unendurable tortures on the eternal wheel of infinite time.”
Li Gang did not sleep—he kept his lamp lighted all night, and he remained in a cold sweat, staring at the pine box of bones, wondering if Ying ying was going to spring forth from it in the middle of the night. What would he tell his parents? He could lie and say he took the examination, but was bound to fail.
Given the directions to her village, Li Gang slouched from the monastery at dawn, and headed east into a gradually boiling day—wood box of rattling bones strapped to his back.
He jumped when he heard the bones cry:
“Let me out! Let me out of here, Li Gang! It’s me, Ying ying! Open the box!”
“No,” said Li Gang, as if he were a soldier off to war, “you threw my Eight-Legged essay out the window last night. Now I forgot what I wrote. I’m going to fail so badly I’d rather be dead! No more favors!”
“That wasn’t me, I promise!” said Ying ying. “That was a fox fairy!”
At a river’s edge, Li Gang could walk no farther (it felt like summer in autumn it was so hot), and he collapsed into a deep dream on the shore in which he saw himself eavesdropping on two girls swimming in the river:
“There’s the boy we saw last night from the trees. Now he’s with your favorite ghost, the little minx Ying ying! He’s so handsome, handsome and cute too!”
“He has good bone structure, Fang.”
“I bet you’d like to jump on his bone structure, Yue.”
“And he has the high forehead of a scholar, sister,” said Yue.
“I know how much you like high foreheads, sister,” said Fang.
The sun was setting slowly like a man going to bed, but Li Gang sat up. He saw
Fang, bathing from her waist up. Li Gang immediately put back in his eyes that had popped out. He plucked out a hair from his mouth. The river, flowing between her legs, looked inviting, splashed up like that, and when Yue arose from the river naked, she only had to splash some water ashore to coax Li Gang to join them.
“Help! Li Gang!” cried Ying ying.
No sooner had Li Gang submerged into the cold water, then Woodcutter Zhang and Fisherman Jiao were making off with the box of Ying ying’s bones. Even though the wine-soaked thieves bumbled haphazardly down the riverbank westward toward the same oak forest where they followed Li Gang, Li Gang could not catch up to them—so suddenly tired, he fainted. Fighting as if punch-drunk to stay awake, his head bobbing, eyes closed, prostrate, his mind like a wick went out.
Meditating from the uppermost bough of the uppermost elm tree, the abbot Xu Kong had watched the doings below. With one finger, he twisted a lock of his old hair. With his dragon-headed staff, Xu Kong launched a volley of fireballs around and above the two thieves, ensconcing them in rings of fire. Xu Kong jumped up like a monkey. After flipping one hundred and eight times in the air, he landed off-balance on his right foot (his dry bones were so old), and he almost died when he flew backward into a mulberry
tree that nearly cracked his skull in half. Nevertheless, Xu Kong intoned a magical spell, which plunged the two inflamed thieves in the river.
From their mouths, a demon in purple-pink smoke poured out—a demon with the head of an earless elephant and eyes of blood. The flailing thieves drifted off, fish-hawks landing on their sorry heads only to pull out their eyeballs by their eye-strings.
“Xu Kong,” said the demon with a condescendingly dry grin, “you’re too old now to protect ghosts, aren’t you? Now that you’re just an old, old mangy Daoist without teeth!”
“Gui Mei,” said Xu Kong, “everyone gets old, including you.”
When Xu Kong tried for his dragon-headed staff, advancing like an aged king-sized crab, Gui Mei grabbed him by the ankles. Shooting pains rushed up Xu Kong’s doddering legs. Gui Mei, with his viperish incisors, had perforated Xu Kong’s skin and pumped venom into all his capillaries. Kong took three steps, took one last gander at life in an oak forest and was dead.
Gui Mei whistled. He grabbed the flying box of Jiu Ying ying’s bones out of thin air.
“Help! LI GANG! Open the box!” screamed Liu Ying ying.
The soul of Xu Kong left his body. As a hawk returns to her nest to feed her young, the soul of Xu Kong then entered the dying Li Gang. Hearing his name called out across Mount Tai, Li Gang jumped to his feet. He somersaulted through the air to the top of Mount Tai, uprooted a pine tree, and twirled it like a pinwheel. He blinked, returned, grabbed the fox fairies, Yue and Fang, by their fox-tails, and flung them into the next kingdom.
“Stop! Gui Mei!” said Li Gang, turning around. “You demented old rat! I don’t suppose you know whose bones those are?”
“What do I care?” said Gui Mei, running away. “I’m going to have them for dinner—I don’t care if they are the relics of Buddha. I like my bones!”
Gui Mei threw forty-four ivory-handled daggers at Li Gang’s head, which passed like rice balls on puffs of wind. Gui Mei pulled out a hemp rope and lassoed Li Gang’s feet together and threw him in the sky, hurtling him toward a crescending moon. Li Gang reached for the moon and brought it down as a sword; he hid it behind his back. Then he chopped off the demon’s elephant head, which thudded to the ground like a Shang bronze cauldron. The head turned into hundreds of white termites. The trunk of the demon was still standing upright, just a headless torso. Li Gang ordered the termites to eat the trunk; in a matter of seconds they were done eating.
Li Gang plugged his ears with clay and finally reached the village of Liu Ying ying, where he gave her a proper burial.
And then fate twisted Li Gang’s way when Liu Ying ying was reincarnated one village over into the body of Li Gang’s recently deceased wife. She revived from her death bed and stood up to greet Li Gang, when he returned home.
Overjoyed, having failed to take the second examinations, he told himself he did not care for the life of the scholar, he would live.
Soon thereafter, Lord Yama of the Underworld, looking over his accounting books, decided that Li Gang should be rewarded. Weeks later at home, working on the farm, with his wife, father, mother, and son, Li Gang laughed when he saw the official sedan
chair (amid gongs and bugles) arrive at their scrawny thatched door. An envoy stepped down and thrust a document into Li Gang’s hand proclaiming that Li Gang had passed the provincial examinations with a perfect score.

An American Childhood in London

The BOAC 707 landed in London at Heathrow airport—and from the jet’s candy-shop windows I picked out—like brands of candy bars—BEA, Lufthansa, Air France, Alitalia, Pan American, TWA, and Aer Lingus. Then: Mercury-red, double-decker buses with strawberry hubcaps (black null-set symbols on white eggs) swayed down the blissful streets in the radiant and dense azure. Summer of 1967 London sky, a blue Botticelli-irised sky. Bobbies in blue metal turbans, women in striped mini-skirts and pastel-colored tights, Savile Row-dressed carrion crows, and lorry drivers with faces like smashed biscuit tins, unloading trucks full of shiny new biscuit tins. Chirring, buzzing, coughing motorized men in motor coats spat out the carbonized automotive exhaust from their European flying machines. The London Underground stations were ice-cream freezers exhaling milky clouds of ice cream and sherbets, ozone coating my skin with vanilla. A calliope of urban hubbub and hullabaloo followed me so that my urchin ears flew off cartoon-like down every sidewalk and jubilating street corner. I looked at myself ten times to see if my hair had the right wavey wavelengths in every mirror available. Yes, my trench coat was dull as dishwater. And with the beige buttons, blue cotton shirt, and dark slacks, my conservative American-square tie choked me as if on purpose. My father, mother, older brother, and I, eleven years old, held hands like a street sign rebus. We walked on a zebra’s back and stood on the curb. Satin-black Austin taxis driven by flabby cabbies, ex-rugby players, or mummified bumble bees buzzed back and forth shouting for customers. Shopping bags, suitcases, boxes of Bombay gin, and violin cases—took off. Cabbies like mushroom-capped jockeys, bobbed on the galloping backs of sleek Stubbsian thoroughbreds. Horns, whistles, engines crying—confusion, wrinkled the very freckles on my nose, not quite ready to laugh. I sniffed fumes of petrol, eau-de-cologne, perfume, newspaper sheets, woolens from the worsted sweat of overdressed tourists, greasy fish, fat chips, and sour vinegar. What ho, Smith’s Crisps! Smith’s Crisps! How miraculously different was England from the States, to my fascination! How Kodachrome the celestial colors to my shade of pale! To market to market/To buy a fat pig/To market to market/And home again. My mom pinched my nose and wiggled it with a tender glance. London overwhelmed her too, a small city girl who went to South High School in Minneapolis and met my dad at a high school cafeteria dance. That was a year or two—no one quite remembers—before Uncle Sam called his number for another war. No center lines, English and French cars zooming randomly in counterpoint—if they did have a direction, it was the wrong one.
The way nostalgia overcomes you, you see the buzzing breezes over the flickering, misty, wistful grass. So the large dry leaves of the plane fall and crash to the ground. Nostalgia brushes past. It’s always summer in the childhood of nostalgia. The winters are warm, and the rain turns into roses in Regent’s Park, scarlet incarnadine under a perfect, gold-piece sun. The old never mind old; the young are always merry as roses. The bus fare is always one-sixteenth of a penny, and dinner is always a perfectly roasted, long-necked goose with rosemary potatoes. Even the countenances of the dead are bright and cheery, eating their rosemary potatoes. Homesickness is fatal, added with the loneliness of looking back at the missed exits. Homesickness ended up killing me in the long run. Dashing down the streets of London out of joy! My shoes like Trafalgar pigeons flying up at my approach, wings clanging like car horns, and sunbeams dripping from my face of freckles. Never happened. It was only nostalgia: νόστος and ἄλγος, meaning “home” and “pain.” Nostalgia was first diagnosed as a medical condition of melancholy in Switzerland. Those Swiss mercenaries who died of nostalgia weren’t goldbricking. They felt it. Time trickles by and then you are on the river bank as it sweeps by, you can drown by thinking about it too much.
“Mom, what kind of car is this? It’s a Bentley? Is this car for us? Is this car better than one of those Cadillacs? Is it more expensive? Are we going to buy a car? A car like this one? Why is this chauffeur driving us? Is that what he does all the time? Is he our chauffeur? What’s his name?”
Rolls Royces, Aston Martins, Citroens, Volvos, Fiats, Mini Coopers—and even more strange models flitted about with names that never rang bells: Vauxhall, Southampton, Chichester—cars hopelessly antediluvian to an American family in 1967, which is to say behind the American times. The London police drove antiquated vehicles you wouldn’t inflict on a UPS man nowadays. Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse behind the wheel of a Porsche chasing Rodney Rodent in an Alfa Romeo might be next.
My dad doffed his felt fedora and fiddled with the feather in his hatband while he chatted with Longworth Pines, the Continental Oil company chauffeur. My dad once had been with the British Eighth Army in England on sick leave. After the Allied victory he was in Germany under Eisenhower—even walking through the Buchenwald concentration camp—only to wind up, having slapped on a Schmidt’s-beery fifty pounds, back in England, married with two sons, talking to a company chauffeur named Longworth Pines. Longworth wore a thin plain gray broadcloth overcoat, white dress shirt, and a black bow-tie as plastic as his matching visored cap. Longworth’s also livery, spotted skin was be-moled and dried-out in a fascinating dead way. His face had a crepuscular glow as from a dark museum’s vitrine. His lips were the stone lips of a cemetery angel’s on a snow-covered Michaelmas headstone in Surrey. My dad’s gold-capped molars glittered with laughter at something Longworth Pines whispered in a slight whistle. I pointed at Longworth Pines’s hearing aid, ensconced in its furry hole like a baby tree shrew, and I laughed cruelly for no reason. Mom smiled politely, which meant disapproval, while pinching the corners of her lipstick-sticking lips. She had possibly not caught my rude face.
“Look!”
I looked.
“Made you look!” said by telepathy to my brother (older by five years), grabbing my chest in order to administer a knuckle-burning, skin-rubbing to make me howl.
“Move it, I can’t see out the window,” my brother ordered, sulking behind his big blackening glasses, what a schnozzle.
“That’s because your schnozz is so bi-i-i-g,” I said, and on and on went the sibling ribbing . . .
Longworth pulled us up at a garden level flat. Crowded, cramped, damp; it was a hole in the ground. I half-expected rabbits to dart out, chased by mice wearing pointed felt hats, with scrunched-up voices provided by Mel Blanc. A Victorian writer I never heard of named Anthony Trollope had lived down there, as evidenced by an unreadable black plaque on the white brick. I quietly assumed my father had lost his job and we were going into hiding to print false passports. Someone big and plaqued like Anthony Trollope could afford only a flat of moldy monotony and plaster, oh no! Inside, I laughed at the toy gas stove, the “refrigerator” (an ice box), the kitchenette, the “water closet” with its “washbasin,” and the bathtub. Soap itself arrived in smaller bars and no longer smelled like candy . . . in this incredibly shrinking world, quaint or not—even the toilet paper was a weird, brittle, brown hard paper—something an American vendor at a ballpark might wrap a hot dog in to keep the mustard and ketchup from splattering. Ketchup was spelled “catsup” but mustard stayed the same. “Toothpowder” instead of toothpaste and “hair wash” for shampoo. Our television was an electrical box, sporting chestnut-colored rabbit ears and a mahogany-entombed, moss-covered, black-and-white cathode ray tube with watery images arising (the beam slowly poured photons out of a pinhole in the center) from Aladdin’s lamp. It might as well have been Aladdin’s lamp, because there wasn’t anything on the TV, which explained the lack of a TV Guide with Merv Griffin on the cover. The English light bulbs sloughed off gray weak light. The flat was like an American garage. We were “renting” from the vaunted British Empire! It didn’t make American sense. I thought my dad had been promoted; I thought he knew what he was doing; I thought he was raising a family–that’s all! I soon had reservations. Why did we Americans have to look upward at the English feet on the sidewalk through a stairwell’s fence—unless my dad had done something very bad—like swearing a lot in a confessional, starting forest fires in Connecticut, or forging American Traveller’s checks. I would wait for some sort of formal explanation.
As sober as a country vicar, a look of suspicion on his upper eyelids, Longworth Pines appeared in the morning (thin, leather driving gloves with holes in them to let his moles breathe comfortably). Off we went sightseeing. He showed us the new Post Office Tower, a neo-Deco chess piece or a “Spacely Sprockets” from The Jetsons. Zoooom? Did the English approve of American cartoons? Soon our “Cook’s tour” burned our reservoir of kilocalories. The dome of St. Paul was covered with scaffolding, the giant ants fixing, climbing, and sliding down a majolica blue sky as if it were majolica.
Here, men and women who had class dressed up. I had no class, I had surfer shirts. I remember my dad opening his shaving kit, which fascinated me and my boyish fascination. The shaving kit, next to the shoe shine kit. All the complicated kits men needed to be men awaited me. The leather bound alarm clock. I was being primed and prepped for the tribal initiation whose threshold all boys walk through with trepidation feet.
Splashes of white from the clouds of white froth overlay the painted town busily painting itself into a capital town, peopled with funny carters, fun-loving draymen in work vests, jobbers about dawn to dusk, and toothless haulers, machines strapped to their breaking backs. Pigeons with green-shimmering wings like flakes of mica surrounded us at Trafalgar Square. Pigeons in Hyde Park, at Speaker’s Corner, flustered a tattoo-suited, pagan Popeye who gobbed about nothing. The Thames/The Tower of London/Buckingham Palace/Parliament/London Bridge . . . and then like a dream we floated on the Thames and whirled around the obelisk of Lord Nelson at Trafalgar in the Battle of the Pigeons. Back to Anthony Trollope’s flat-out, tuckered out flat.
The fresh and tender happiness of my parents—their hugging nearness!—a feeling of love, never expressed as well as understood, overwhelmed me. I said my Catholic prayers for my parents every night (I always added a peculiar clause after the last Hail Mary that I die before them, because I would miss them too much to live if they were gone), and I stood up and crawled between the ever-frozen sheets. A few months later we said goodbye to Anthony Trollope and moved out of his cramped, stodgy flat. Longworth, looking like a Spartan on his shield, drove us to Harley House, our new apartment on Marylebone Road, orthogonal to Harley Street where renowned doctors and brain surgeons plied their trades and made their quid. We were important because important people lived nearby. Later I understood Trollope’s amazing work ethic. He was sick of freezing all the time.
Harley House was Civilization. My new home was a chocolate-filigreed chateau, a castle in the air with a caramel, palatial roof, the casements with pointed-up oriels of ornamentation like the flèches of Chartres cathedral. Its windows were plate glass, mullioned, and rotary-opened with door handles. The muslin curtains flowed with the breezes as from a plantation in Bermuda. I looked at my bedroom. It was a cell in a monastery with a tiny monkey window, overlooking a window well and an alley of sooty stone. Looking out the living room window, a blue skyey sky looked over the city and me, clouds angelically tufted with giant eiderdown cumuli. In the front of Harley House, I saw plane trees with banana drooping leaves hedged against the passing traffic on Marylebone Road. I sighed with the plane tree leaves over their wicketed, lazy foliage. Up you grow, but take your time. The plane trees had birthmarks as I did. My mind was lost in the jigsaw shapes from a jigsaw puzzle of plane trees in which a real boy was growing. The black railings against Marylebone Road provided a protective portcullis like a phalanx of Celtic spears. That fence helped fence in the Harley House porters—brass-buttoned, indigo-gold-braided—tunic soldiers with English accents of harsh linen or burlap rubbing my ears. Here, I could be a king. If I played my cards right, if I prayed at night, if I learned my lessons tight, I would have a blessed life, along with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
“Nawt laike when Sor Thaamas Byeechum leved hhhyere,” said Hutton Hambledon, a porter, a tad miffed, the fleshy corned beef-colored nose, the ears, hairy as his hands, the teeth broken as old sugar canes, the hair platted down over greasy, bald spots.
“Thomas Beechnut Gum, Beech Boy Thomas Bum!” I often repeated nonsensical strings—in and out of my own world all the time back then.
My parents stared at the parquet floor.
“Geez? Who?” said my dad, taking out a handkerchief. Mom had her hair funneled in a statuesque headscarf.
These periodic bouts of irrational happiness accidentally sprayed everyone about me like a shaken-up can of Coca Cola.
“But this Nick Jagger lives here now,” said Hutton, his eyes like saddlebags on a deserted donkey. “And ‘is young birds!”
I was about to dance and explode! I stopped—as if a black stripe of paint had been applied to my face, leaving the brushstroke behind to dry while I reconsidered.
“Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones?” my brother and I chimed.
Core blimey, we were Beatles fans. Neither of us had bought a Rolling Stones record. But, they weren’t bad, even though they didn’t have any warmth. Nor the psychedelically fun, magically momentous sound of less consistent bands like The Easybeats, The Status Quo, Procul Harum, or The Moody Blues. Actually they were rude, pissed-off jerks. They couldn’t write a catchy melody unless their island lives depended on it. And yet . . . they were big, really big! And getting bigger. My American mind later saw an opportunity for profit. I looked at my brother . . . our eyes were two iota dots and our two mouths O’s—as drawn in Herget’s Tin Tin. Upright rigor mortis set in. Our eyes froze. The curtains froze. The world tilted, plane trees and all.
“Aye, I t’ink as mooch,” Hutton grunted, carting in our luggage with my father, the porter’s face—a boiled cabbage complexion of decomposing druid and nanny goat beard. I stopped to admire the lace-work wrinkles networking across his crickety face. The canals of Mars seemed applicable.
“Dolly birds all over, ‘ave to shoo ‘em away!”
My brother and I conspired silently together to acquire Mick Jagger’s autograph. Maybe even a lot of them. Maybe turn Mick Jagger into a Mick Jagger factory of Mick Jagger autographs and make a mint, drop out, and go into business. So we moved into Harley House, and plush chairs dotted the corners. The living room was from Buckingham Palace. It contained two hassocks, gilt mirrors, and chandelier raindrops of crystal. The showy sofa felt as coarse as a fustian cocoon—scratchy itchy in its formidable formality while warding off interlopers and creating a sense of incipient allergy. A coffee table planted itself. Its marble top swirled like blue and smoldering charcoal smoke. On top of the table stood an alabaster scale of justice that weighed out in little brass pans Heaven and Hell. A divan stood on a white, thickly-piled carpet, wall to wall, like a sheep’s back. It discouraged me from walking on its very bleating whiteness. We proudly possessed the world’s greatest Magnavox HiFi console. I turned its five large control pots and torqued on the radio tuner. The phonograph itself lay in a medieval chest with a speed selector, a tone arm, and an upper sliding panel that grooved back and forth so that you wouldn’t actually hear the turntable turn turn turn. The state-of-the-art sliding side door between the cabinet speakers revealed spine-out vinyl 33 & 1/3s. My 45s, I stashed in a lime green, latched carrying case. The whole family had fifty albums at most. Often after homework I lay listening to record albums next to the console (no one had headphones then), reading the liner notes, not understanding that the word “high” was a sly joke, nor the word “love.”
One night, I sneaked out from under the bedspread in my silk pajamas and slid into the kitchen. I stood, listening to a solenoid, in awe of the great new American Frigidaire self-making ice cube refrigerator, making ice in the middle of the night, grinding all night long to make American perfect ice. Hail, Columbia. No question, Americans knew how to make perfect ice. The canoe-shaped, silver ice cubes start, creak, awake, and march forward in perfect squares of formation. All the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ideas of progress, and the World’s Fair we attended in 1965 were contained in the march of those ice cubes. With bang-up explosions, the ice cube soldiers fell forward into the tray! I stuck my wet thumb into a box of Jell-O, sucked it, prayed for my parents’ immortality, and yawned in my luxurious bed under the round moonlight. It was crucial that I die before my parents. Since prayers were heard by God, I assumed God’s silence was a nod of approval in the dark.
I look back at the shirts and ties I once coveted. The ties! The ties were magic. Silk, satin, and velour neck ties attracted my taste buds. Beauty is life in a necktie 4-inches wide, 48-inches long, made of orange velvet or of silk shantung with a rose design. My turtleneck (preferably Liberty cotton for the softer and hazier feel) collection and my thin-waled corduroys were for slacking in the park. I’m not going into a pile of shirt, Great Gatsby-style, because ever after the event that changed my life, I hated shirts and ties—never wore a tie again with one exception.
I made friends with Bernard, an American my age, who lived in Harley House three floors up. We loved picking out the cars we wanted to own someday when we were richly famous. For now, just nonchalant muftis choosing camels. The boot-black hackneys, the Citroen, and the Deux Chevaux immediately disqualified themselves as dull, unhealthy, or just plain French. Then we ran up and down Selfridge’s escalator the wrong way. And terrorized Harrods. And Foyle’s. At the Tate Gallery, we behaved. I liked the Modiglianis. Maybe it was the fun name: Modigliani, Modigliani, Modigliani. We double-deckered home and I finished A Tale of Two Cities that night, but the realistic detail bored me. Why stick to reality? Same with Robinson Crusoe. And The Three Musketeers. After reading Gulliver’s Travels, which depicted Gulliver the Lilliputian sliding down a woman’s breast (that was more like it, wow), I woke up on a flying bed that night. Then I was flying without the bed. I heard a noise in the hall. I crept past the humming, glowing space heater. A deer emerged from the bathroom and I startled awake from a Chagall painting as it walked toward me.
My weekly allowance was five shillings. The bus was thrupence. Farthings, haypennies, pennies, tuppence, thruppence, sixpence . . . it was an economy of pennies. How many ways could an Englishman shave a penny? Only Newton knew. Around the corner on Baker Street, W. H. Smith had kiosks full of magazines, and men lined up like telephone booths to read the thousands of magazines. Were they smut? “Smut” was an unknown word to me. I assumed the men in the mackintoshes were reading about WWII—like me, ensconced in A.J.P. Taylor’s article on Spitfires. Dirigible-sized cigars emitted a comfortable, maple syrupy pipe smoke that mingled with a hookah steam coming off the floor in fumaroles and solfatara.
Sherlock Holmes lived in the apartment down the block.
After my bath in the morning, I was captured by the swirling force in the bathtub drain’s spittle. I realized I would die—the thought struck me like a flashing, lightning bolt. I vomited something. But when good boys die, they take planes to heaven, don’t they?
The first day at the American School of London, where everything was American, because an American in an English private school wouldn’t escape without a shellacking, my mom brought me to the front door, and I trudged like Sydney Carton toward the far, far scaffold. . . . the strangers . . . alone with complete strangers . . . my nerves jangled, having stayed up late reading The Picture of Dorian Gray only to be confronted by an image of me as Marat in the bathtub. The gray cotton fog stuck to the plane trees like spit, puffy and sticky. The weather itself had caught a cold and coughed, rasp, rasp. I feared the 5th grade teacher standing arms akimbo, scowling at everything I said, forcing me in the corner, yelling at me for having to pee, getting lost in an SRA reading lesson, or trucked over by a lorry of new tin biscuits. Other fog-drenched shades appeared—classmates on their way to school, their mothers more Jane Eyres at Thornfield Hall.
I entered a dingy pasteboard white terraced building of black balustrades and railings from a lane whose streetlamps shaped light like carriage house lamps. The paving stones sounded like incantations of horse-drawn Whigs, their lodgings where East India Company lackeys could have lived out their days, bombed on gin. Steam radiator whistling, the class room was plaster-washed and whalebone white. I smelled the brown, curling linoleum that revealed the ugly flooring in uncertain soggy, unglued corners. More American children filed in.
We met our home-room teacher, our new demiurge, Miss Vanessa Van Vechten.
“Life is real, life is earnest,” she said, was to say, and repeat all year long, perspiring in humid summer or in the radiator humidity of the winter and its singeing, singing heat pipes, over and over until we were sick again of hearing her motto. Soon, we mocked her behind her back with exaggerated imitations, her stern lips pressed together.
“Bernard, what did I just say?”
“I don’t remember,” said Bernard like a spaniel puppy, with ear nose and throat ailments, always some dried mucus on his upper lip, always something awry with his sinuses, though he had a mod, silk, and flowered tie. “You said . . . um . . .” he rubbed his nose with his pink palm as if washing a window.
“Tony?”
Tony had on a smartly-fitting, tan mohair or cashmere suit jacket, a blue tie, and brown shoes–odd, but it worked.
“I don’t remember,” said Tony, a charming, nervous operatic smile.
“Jamie?”
Jamie was busy busting out of his blue blazer jacket, white shirt tail out, white shirt buttons
popping off, and buckle shoes unbuckling. He squirmed and licked his fat lower shiny lip, then began chewing it.
“You said,” began Barry, so bravely in his plaid, touristy sport jacket, looking stuffed into it by his mother. Barry lost his train of thought and started slobbering spit on his gaudy lapels, he was spitting out nervously apologetic words no one could catch, and we were too busy dodging his warm splashes. “You said you were . . . something!”
“Earnest!” said Eric, squinting and sitting back into a splinter.
Eric’s black, knit, square-bottom tie askew, rested outside his dark suit jacket, his top blue oxford shirt button undone. He twisted off his chair, sloshing around in his brown hush puppies, the tan laces completely untied in ten more seconds. Looking down but unable to reach his squinting shoes, he fidgeted—he wanted to tighten his shoes, but he had cerebral palsy and had crutches. His parents kept him in a crew cut, which made him stand out like an aircraft carrier. She had spared the girls. Probably because she thought they were even more of a complete waste of her time. We weren’t sure.
“That is cor-rect, Eric!”
Facing the window, I sat across from Julie Simon—sailor suit dress, striped Russian navy-type shirt, a blue and white cap, and a charm bracelet. Julie, me? And I noticed how her Botticelli legs like blonde chopsticks reached down to her bobby sox and her black, buckled Mary Janes, so that she seemed to have no gravity. Her breasts were the stubs of pencil erasers. Not so coincidentally, her father also worked for Continental Oil and was friends with my dad. So both families visited back and forth.
In any case, as the weeks played on I floated like Fred Astaire above the American version of childhood: hide and seek, kick the can, fresh coconut halves, wiffle ball, Hardy Boys, tether ball, red light green light, bb guns, flying kites, first bikes, summer hammocks, climbing trees, cartoon afternoons, slingshots, nature walks, ant fights, whoopee armpits, apple trees, following creeks, building dams, pet chameleons, screen doors with mosquitoes in them, movies with volcanoes in them, chasing ice cream down the street, catching grasshoppers with butterfly nets, Treasure Island maps, Ouija boards, multiplication flash cards, role-playing Tarzan movies, books on Famous Americans like Luther Burbank, Dr. Seuss’s book on flivvers, playing U. S. Army, pretending to be Dracula, and boring babysitters.
One day, after we had settled in comfortably, Miss Van Vechten, flustered from slipping in her brand new raincoat on the front steps of her flat, entered the classroom almost a full minute late, plastic pink jackboots for the rain. She apologized and sneezed, her face round like a meat pie; the rain had bespattered her face, and the perspiration that had accumulated turned into white vinegar, glossing her cheeks like wax apples.
“Stop that, silly boys!” she said when she saw kittens fighting over stale milk. “Remember we are going on a field trip to the Tate Gallery today.”
Then we were all sitting there over our pints of milk, and we were studying our lunches amid the grayish bottles capped with “aluminium” tops, oh the stale liquid, the white mud, the stale milk tasting like the plaster on the walls and the walls tasting like the smell of papier-mache: the rain outside the window, a mist like snow. Time was passing in—the tick tock of a clock ticking off a second a second, but the only real sound I heard was the sound of pencil on paper, scratching little birds’ claws.
At the Tate Gallery in front of a Modigliani I gave Julie Simon the charms my parents bought for me in Paris, Rome, and Florence when as a family we made the Grand Tour for souvenirs.
“Do you like them?”
“I do,” she hid her smile behind her embarrassed shoulder.
“Bon jour,” said the French teacher, Mademoiselle Lichman after we bussed back to class. Mademoiselle Lichman carried the body shape of a hurricane lamp. Her bust busted out all
over; she had very, very faint kitty whiskers on her upper lip; she probably didn’t shave her pits; I’m pretty sure we respected her because we didn’t know what sex was. She probably loved Maupassant, because I did too later on in life. She brought out the Impressionist, Post Impressionist, and even Pre-Impressionist postcards and quizzed us: guess who?
Whoever guessed the best won a sleek, black Thames & Hudson paperback from The World of Art series.
“C’est un artiste? Est quoi?”
Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaughin, Braque, Miro . . . they were as easy as breakfast cereals to identify for me, although I couldn’t draw a stick.
“Modigliani!”
“Oui, Abel!”
Outside our window, a rainbow in a spinning wheel reeled over Regent’s Park.
“Arc en ciel,” said Mademoiselle Lichman, pointing a red nail out the window..
I passed the Modigliani book around the room so everyone could share and see. Mademoiselle Lichman was a safe harbor—or a second mother or a third Virgin Mary. For a moment, light christened the classroom with the waters of a rainbow river and covered my eyes with the sparkling, crystalline dust of the sun. I rose from my own flesh as in a waking, lucid dream in London, in Regent’s Park, the home room, the French postcards, the sour old milk bottles, and Julie. I shivered with the surety that I was not alone in the world. After French we had home lunch, gym, art, more classes I can’t remember, and then we went home to homework and to the telly, attracting me like a tide toward a lunar mass. England had no daytime TV period. British TV at best was: The Avengers, Science Tomorrow, a comedian I loved named Tommy Cooper who did bad magic tricks, and Derek something who stuttered and lisped, That Was the Week That Was (David Frost, big deal), and my fave of faves—Top of the Pops (which had a popular host Jimmy Savile, who wore dresses and did the Top Twenty count down).
Meanwhile my best friend Bernard and I learned the ropes: London was a laboratory of strange and exotic chemistries, alembics of cultures, retorts of music and the avant-garde, which, by osmosis, reoriented our inner compasses toward a different sky than our parents’ London. We had Carnaby Street to ourselves. Our parents couldn’t get in. It was like a souk flown in from Istanbul, with it stalls and racks of colored suits, where ties out-competed candy bars, where we bought our hip-huggers and our double breasted jackets and our pink shirts, our refurbished uniforms from forgotten wars (at Lord Kitchener’s Valet) with our English bank notes, large as the maps of Ortelius and stamped with Queen Elizabeth II, who looked like my mom. Queen Mom had been imprinted on everything but the Wimpy burgers. Fashion invasion called The Peacock Revolution: the upper class were being out-classed by mods, rockers, and musicians. Mind the gap. You don’t get how cool your kids are. And whenever we saw tinted windows on Carnaby Street, we looked harder to see who was behind the wheel—Cat Stevens (“Matthew and Son”) we saw there once, flinging his dark curls around, stuck in traffic. The Troggs, The Tremeloes, the Twiggies and those angular and somewhat ugly Mary Quants, and everywhere lurked the immanence of the Beatles—at any given moment, the Beatles clowned around the corner, having run right up and out of the silver, starry screen of A Hard Day’s Night, then up the aisles, down a manhole in Kensington, out of a King’s Road boutique, up the steps of Oxford Street Station, and down Marylebone Road to my house playing their records. And as I bought more Beatles records the more my taste in music became fine-tuned. I learned to make distinctions as to whether you were middle class, bourgeois, petit bourgeois, kiddie bourgeois, baby bourgeois, or unable to afford music entirely.
The art teacher, Mr. Jesse, a beatnik with a groovy beard, fluffy smock, and tufted beret, looked real but not earnest. I didn’t care if he wore stinking sandals and played the bongos, because he had seated me next to my crush. I didn’t feel a thing when I could sit next to her. I couldn’t hear Mr. Jesse through my crush; something about making mobiles like a bloke named Calder; I heard only cheerful ocean waves crashing happily on the shore with whole beaches of sand pebbles.
Her voice made my heartbeat come alive, more than a Kandinsky, when, one day, she moved her hand over and revealed a folded-up piece of paper? Well you know that can’t be bad!
The epistle read: “I like you!”
I skipped a beat, and my heart . . . followed.
My cheeks’ blush made her cheeks bloom (“like” was a serious word for an eleven-year old!),
awareness causing flushing and blushing causing fear . . .
“Do you like Herman’s Hermits?” she blurted with the fresh complexion of a peach madonna.
Nobody would openly prefer Herman’s Hermits to the Beatles, not even Herman’s Hermits’ hermitically-sealed hermit girlfriend-hermits. Why they never bothered to look like real hermits, that would have been much neater, I’ll never know.
“‘Silhouettes in the Shade,’” I said without con brio. “Dont you like ‘Henry VIII?’” she ventured.
“Don’t you like the Beatles?”
“I asked you first.”
Pause. Pause. Pause.
“Do you like the Rolling Stones’ song, ‘She’s A Rainbow?’” “Yes, very much!” here she stepped back like a bashful collie.
She stepped forward to pinch my sleeve. “That’s my favorite song! How did you know?” “Because it’s mine too!” I blushed (a blooming lie).
She astonished me. I mean she already knew everything; she spoke in natural sonnets; her
mobiles were going straight into the Tate Gallery I thought tomorrow, walking home, passing the plane trees’ leprechaun leaves, which lifted themselves in the air as from the breath of a snoring giant in Regent’s Park. The porters shooed away the pigeons and the dolly birds in homely overcoats perched in front of the parterre. Aston Martins and Mini Coopers in the tiny front parking lot looked a lot like Corgi toys and Matchbox cars. Green blades and wisps of grass glistened in a green glow. I felt the shade from the plane trees’ coolness, obscured briefly by the passing clouds above London. Whether the universe was billions of light years wide or only as big as the London Planetarium, with its riviera of Milky Way light bulbs on the ceiling did not matter to me.
Wait, it’s Mick Jagger—his face rough, haircut brutish, slurry voice—was heading toward his tinted-window Jaguar XKE, the car referred to by my father as “Yaeger’s car.” This Germanization of Jagger’s name always drove me into mad banana tantrums.
“Mick, can I have your autograph?” I grinned and handed him a folded-up missive when he stopped.
The whole transaction proceeded after Mick—in a fur coat, purple pants, striped shirt, and incongruous scarf—had stopped to tie his black bootlaces.
“Yeah,” he said, sounding very well-mannered, almost like a Beatle, which was strange. “Do you have a pen?”
I trembled. Mick Jagger talked right at me, as if I existed! A pen! Of course I had a pen on me for this very reason. But I dropped the pen. He stared at the dropped pen, his lips hanging down, his eyes red in amused disbelief. He looked at me to see who would pick up the pen.
I saw Rod Laver diving for a net ball in a Wimbledon final against Ken Rosewall and I snapped up the pen. He signed. I ran off ready to scream. I absconded with his “Mick Jag,” which not even the dolly birds could get. That night I dreamed (“Mick Jag” in my safety deposit box) I was flying, my bedstead arose off the floor, I couldn’t even jump down from the bed—it was like a rubber raft high in the air—it was also a Chagall, my eyes looking aslant over a blue violinist. That dream was like a rock. I lifted it up and looked under it, but it was much too heavy. I tried screaming, but my teeth and my gums glued stuck together. I moaned through one big pink gum of taffy tissue, covering my mouth. When I awoke I shook, and I had to pinch my cheek. I ran into the long narrow hall, but a deer walked toward me, a doe; when I went up to pet the deer’s back, the deer bit my hand. Hard-stung pain rifled up to my shoulder. The deer woke me up in shocking pain.
I wandered into my parents’ bathroom, and I stared at my father’s shaving cream in its bowl, with the brush in it, ready to lather on his chin; and the razor heavy as a small hammer, and the fascinating smell of the complicated toilet, the talcum powder, the shaving lotion, and the impossible-to-translate-into-action-what-was- awaiting-me-as-an-adult awareness at last brought me back to Earth. Mom and dad liked to go out and see plays, ballets, operas, and musicals. My mom always had the enigmatic, far away smile of one whose teeth had decayed, probably not wanting them to be seen—outlined in a geisha black ink, centers as nicotine-yellow as corn kernels. Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in The Royal Ballet had sold out at Covent Garden; mom and dad had missed it. I wondered whether Margot Fonteyn had rotten teeth, making Nureyev wince at their openings.
The morning was warm, the asphalt shiny as Domino sugar in a sugar bowl, and the rain pressed down on the flowers in the rain. Silver diamonds bouncing off pristine pavement. The faint sound of music everywhere. Germinating. The weather, rain or shine, swashed over me. The food was first shrimp or scampi cocktails, then pot roast and roasted potatoes, carrots, peas, and desert sherbet with a trifleing wafer thrusting out of it. Football pools on betting sheets. Brass rubbings of the illustrious armored upper class. Strawberries, powdered sugar—we ate them with chipmunk cheeks like Alvin and the Chipmunks. One American (overly air-conditioned) restaurant by the Embassy grilled big California hamburgers and made chocolate malts called Yankee Doodle or Yankee something, where the ex-pats ate with nostalgic relish. The American Embassy had American dirt, which we Americans liked to steal . The novelty shops. The apothecaries. The tea, stirred white, with sugar and clotted cream. (On the Grand Tour for souvenirs it was: Continental Breakfasts: jams, jellies, and marmalades. Hard rolls and squares of melting butter. Shot glass of piquant orange juice, and we were off to the museums whose guide at the Uffizi was me.)
In case of rain, I played Careers, Life, Monopoly, and Acquire, playing each player, all of whom wanted to be millionaires, like the stereotypical American businessman in a Shaw play.
“I got Mick Jagger’s autograph,” I announced to Julie before class started.
Julie flung her palms to her cheeks, her belladonna blue eyes ashine, and her jaw clicked open as if I had just given birth to a batch of kittens. I felt a wet, thin moth land on my cheek—it seemed stuck there so that I would have to pluck it off—but it had already butterflied off when I reached for it. She kissed me (artfully when Miss Van Vechten’s back was turned) when we filed into the room!
“Do you like me?” she asked.
I held my heart down.
“I like you,” I wrote on the autographed piece of paper, turned over.
Julie pursed her mouth, looking furtively one way and the other, and used the epistle as a bookmark in a math book, whose protective cover was cut from of a grocery bag.
In art class, we muddled through the construction of mobiles, ourselves like mini-Calders, not
really understanding what our motivation was for wanting to wreck good coat hangers. Then we flowed toward and into the school basement’s music room, a musty little bucket, where Miss Van Vechten issued us each one chime. She announced: “hit your chime with your mallet everybody, hit your note with your mallet, does everybody have a mallet and a note?” The glockenspiel was always awarded to one lucky soul, and Bernard was the lucky one. Whoever held the glockenspiel held the key to a Pythagorean universe in which mere thought resonated with thought molecules that could do anything. We knocked off “High Hopes,” “Don Gato,” and right in the middle of our last song, “Whoops There Goes Another Rubber Tree,” Bernard flashed his Mick Jagger autograph across the room toward Julie.
My heart shrank to a pit.
“What are you doing with that?” I mouthed. “It’s mine and I’m giving it to Julie!”
“She already has one!” I yelled across the room.
“Liar, that’s not what she said!”
I threw my B flat chime and mallet across the room.
I walked toward Julie, and in anger I pulled on one of her braids—when Eric stood up
clumsily putting his hands in my face. Miss Van Vechten had not seen this, quickly turning her head, frowning something was wrong.
“And you’re a jerk!” I said pushing him down.
Miss Van Vechten walked up to me, and she slapped me across the mouth.
“You apologize for what you just did!”
“No! I hate you all!” I ran up the crooked stairs.
The burning rain was acid when I walked home under it. My parents were not home and I
took the phone off the hook like a little criminal. I was so confused, what was I going to do? Drown my sorrows in Bovril? Or Bosco? Or eat Malted Milk Balls until I threw up like cannon fire? Which is what I did. I ate so many candy bars (even the ones I never ate like Mars bars and Nestles Crunch):—the twelfth one squirreled around my throat and then they all pulsed right out my piehole: I was on my knees sweating over the toilet. I knew I would have to go upstairs and apologize to Bernard, I truly did love him as a brother, even as much as my bully brother on the keyboards, talking through the bathroom door at me.
“Hey, Abel, Mom and Dad went out tonight to see The Barretts of Wimpole Street, so I’m babysitting.”
My brother was back at the piano, Melody Maker, not sheet music, under his microscopic examination, his flowered shirt just flamboyantly dull.
“There is a new Who, a Jimi Hendrix Experience, and a brand new Beatles called Sergeant Pepper’s in the living room!”
“I don’t care!” I said.
“Are you sick? It kind of stinks like vomit out here!” he said, returning to the bathroom door. “Yes,” I said, crying, “I ate some bad licorice. Somebody left it on the radiator. It was rotten!”
“That’s not odd. You’re always throwing up about something. Do you remember how you used to throw up in church all the time, then you threw up all over our pew in Notre Dame Cathedral at High Mass. Do you remember that? Mom and Dad were so mad at you! Pee—uuu!”
Big Brother decided to practice his piano version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” because he was in a band and could not spend more time on not being famous. So he forgot about me—his piano playing sounded like “cocktail music” or some American schlock anyway, but he left me alone!
I entered the plush-and-velvet lobby where the old walnut elevator would be going up—I pushed the UP button. Then I went up and knocked on Bernard’s door. Bernard had been crying. His eroded face was all dirty gullies from tears.
I apologized. I was sorry. I was not used to saying I was sorry. And I was sorry about that. We played a board game called Flip Your Wig, which we thought was weak compared to Risk.
Later, his sister entered her brother’s bedroom.
“Paul McCartney is in the elevator!”
She flew around like a wounded bat. We raced down the carpeted stairs encircling the lift. An iron birdcage (with a telephone inside) with wooden commode doors, which popped out: Paul McCartney, dressed in a mock I-don’t-know-what-war uniform, paisley shirt and striped tie or paisley tie and striped shirt, mustaches like two black Yorkshire terriers barking at each other. He had a surprised expression and eyes purple and dark as wine glasses.
“‘Allo luv!” he said to me, waiting for me to ask for his autograph (he is so conditioned his hands are out) but I don’t have paper and pen (nobody!). I’m so stunned I’m wax.
We agreed to go up on the roof, because we knew—if McCartney just left, Jagger was home. By leaning over the railing we had a line of sight into Jagger’s kitchen. His little brother Chris was always going into the fridge for a sandwich, leaving dishes in the sink, and finished it off with a glass of milk. Chris! Get out of the kitchen. Kitchen sink and refrigerator. Waiting on the roof? It was like a Catholic mass or something else as endless as reading a missal. I thought about throwing up. All across London the twilight spiraled upward from the rooftops, the chimney pots blurred into giant Anglican grasshoppers, and the streetlights illuminated moons drifting around the streets like balloons, and behind the crenellations more chimney pots grew from the asphalt roof pools.
“I really like Julie,” I couldn’t help saying, because it was getting boring, sitting up there. “She’s mine, I liked her first!” said Bernard.
“I like her now! She doesn’t like you anymore!” I said, unsure of my ground.
Twilight was an aurora from a distant supernova, throwing out handfuls of starbursts, reds,
greens, and purples melting like gothic spires. Victorian filaments with flaming hues draped over the pools like spilled gasoline on the far windows.
“No! She likes my autographs more than yours!” insisted Bernard.
“We’re going to go steady someday!”
“No you’re not! Because you don’t even know what that means.”
“Yes we are,” I said. “And then we’re going to go get engaged after our honeymoon. Julie is going with me to Paris and we’re going to fly on Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space.’”
Bernard pulled out a grapefruit spoon with sharp little piranha teeth from his belt, cutting himself by mistake. I had Bernard by the Adam’s apple between the railings and then he was choking and then he cut me in the thigh like a snake bite, but I still had him; and we were both crying, bending over the railing, wondering what we would do next—the spoon slipped and twirled six stories down like Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” except not really like Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” but that’s what it reminded me of, and then from conjuror’s smoke, I heard:
“Hey you kids, get awff the bluudy roof!”
Mick Jagger leaned out the window with a glass of milk in his hand, not Chris. Bernard ran down the stairs. And I pushed the down button to go down the elevator. Jagger was going to come out of his apartment, I predicted.
“Tomorrow after school, a duel!” I yelled down the stairs after Bernard. “Like in The Three Musketeers!”
The lift door opened. A man wearing a Prince Valiant haircut (he seemed to be without eyelashes) cast a blank at me from his ruddy mug. Blood-rimmed eyes, hair cut straight across, he looked like an old man in a young man’s page boy, thin-thin lips pursed. As if to say, hmmmm? The nose is a little twisted, with the slit eyes of a ruddy squid. He was on the telly!
“What’s your name?” he asked, his eyes bilious. “Aren’t you on Top of the Pops?” I asked.
“Do you like candy?”
“Yes. Rolos.”
“Shouldn’t we go get some candy then?” “I don’t know.”
“I think that would be fun!”
“Okay.”
“If you like Rolos, do you like Rolls Royces?”
“Yes. I think so. Do you know the Beatles?”
“Why . . . yes! You can sit in the back. That’s my driver in front, Percy. Okay, Percy, we can go now to the candy store! You know, the candy store! And to the Beatles!”
Jimmy Savile’s nervous upper lip quivered into a joker’s hollow grin, flushed with a prickly glow on his nose: for  the first time I noticed a wartlike cyst next to his nose. It had the head of a parasitic worm just poking out for the first time. He reeked of cigar, like mud and bulrushes, and his breath was like ammonia. I regretted immediately getting in, but celebrity dust had been fairy-sprinkled on him.
London at night: the huddled couples resembled giant black moths in bowlers and parasols fading like ink past the lights, mere brushstrokes of vanishing boot heels. Clubs: red-nosed females, ungulate high-heels, bare thighs and wolves made out of ubiquitous shadows smoking in doorways, then the wolves who strolled in high-laced boots of white vinyl neon-bombarded me. I was leaning out the window of Jimmy Savile’s Rolls Royce. Peter Max five-pointed stars and rainbows of trilling lightwaves excited the air— cigarettes, liquors, airlines, movies—vibrant palisades of tangerines, globular clusters of light bulbs, bullets of fruit spangles, signs like illuminated Smarties, and Piccadilly capitalism everywhere! We drove by a street corner in Piccadilly Square, and there stood my mother, in her beige cashmere sweater and gloves and white leather purse and pearls, next to the double-parked company car, Longworth Pines, opening the door of the Bentley!
“Hi Mom! Hi Dad!” I yelled out the rolled-down Rolls window.
My dad jumped like a goldfish out of his bowl, his gold-capped molars flashing. The Bentley caught up to the Rolls in no time, and Longworth Pines shoved it off the road. My dad opened the Rolls Royce door, and dragged a stunned Jimmy Savile out of the back seat, flailing his arms and cigar. A quick uppercut caught his tongue between his teeth. He punched my dad in the gut, soft with fat. My dad was clumsy and exhausted, he was on all fours trying to breathe, and by now Longworth Pines had stuck his fingers in the eyes of Savile’s chauffeur, Percy, temporarily blinded by fingers; my mom took her purse out and bashed him. Savile was saddled on my dad, and beat drunkenly on his bald head. Then my dad roared like a bald lion, rearing his head backward into Jimmy Savile’s private parts. Savile grimaced, groaned, he grabbed his groin; then my dad, with the old U. S. Army kicked in, stood up and around, and fisted the old British Navy sailor Jimmy Savile right between the lamps. Longworth Pines and my mother by now had Percy back in the Rolls, slumped in front of the steering wheel. We limped back to the Bentley, except Longworth Pines who was smiling and whistling, “Is That All There Is?” by Peggy Lee.
My father grabbed me in the back seat, my mother in the front, and spanked me with the Playbill in his hand, a rolled up The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
“Don’t ever do that again!” he yelled.
We were driven back to Harley House, and my brother was still sitting at the piano contemplating his next masterpiece, a sound casserole of reheated Chopin—not that I could play a single chopstick.
“Did you forget we’re going to Ireland tomorrow? It’s only for the weekend. You’ll love Dublin,” said my mother. “Your brother wanted to go, but he has to give a recital Saturday night. He’s not afraid of trying new things and going to new places!”
“I don’t want any new things,” I said in an imperious tantrum. “I like things the way they are!”
I stamped my feet. I clenched my fists. I cried for Julie. How could I go to Ireland? I was too busy lying to myself. I was “getting married in the morning.” My parents arranged a weekend sleepover for me and my brother at Bernard’s apartment, while they researched the Irish family tree in a town called Cashel.
The next day, after school, Regent’s Park was glowering green, a green like the glow of uncertain mushrooms at night. Ambulating the garden perimeters, majestic trees threw the lakes bordered with willows and poplars and reeds into eternal shade. Canals with wooden bridges arched and grew hairy with plighted ivy and vines tangled together.
“Fight! Fight!” said the entire fifth grade parade behind us, shoving us forward. “Fight! Fight!” said the English private school kids gathering behind us.
“Stop!” Julie ran up with Miss Van Vechten, cool as a chromolithographic soldier
smoking a Gauloise on a biscuit tin lid.
She still had the Mick Jagger autograph, flipped it over:
“I like you,” it said.
“See! I still have the same autograph you gave me!” said Julie. “This is my favorite one!” Bernard pulled out more Mick Jagger autographs out of his inner pocket.
“What am I going to do with these? I can’t even sell them for sixpence.”
Everybody pulled out Mick Jagger autographs out of their inner pockets. Bernard had flooded the market. The ruddy bloody muddy nutty floody English faces, the wormy skins so sensitive but packed in wool—they dispersed.
I apologized again to Bernard, and then Eric made his way over. And we shook hands.
After everyone left, I proposed to Julie. Actually these fake marriages were pretty common in our grade, and we knew we were rehearsing for our own great expectations. Bernard, after straightening out the knot in his flowered tie and wiping his nose with the rest of it on his tie, was my best man.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” Eric pronounced, squinting, shrugging.
I kissed Julie on the cheek and we held hands. I reached into my inner double-breasted jacket pocket for a brand new roll of Rolos. I peeled open the candy roll. With our arms intertwined we each ate the chocolate caramel frustum like wedding cake slices.
Now for the honeymoon. What was a honeymoon? Was that like a blue moon? Honeymoon? That was like the reception, but somewhere else.

 The Biwa

Sometime after the ascension of the 74th Emperor Toba to the Chrysanthemum Throne, in the small village of Saga, near Yoshino Mountain, in the prefecture of Nara, there lived a young biwa player named Ryuunosoke, who had a birthmark shaped like a purple teardrop, covering his right hand.
Every night Ryuunosoke visited the Saga village cemetery—headstones as closely packed as teeth in a tortoiseshell comb—where, inspired by the legendary, blind biwa player Hoichi, Ryuunosoke played his biwa for the love of Yumi.
Ryuunosoke had wanted to marry Yumi, a friend of the family’s daughter, but the sky withered and a great drought followed; both family’s fortunes declined, the villagers began deserting the bean fields of Saga; and then Ryuunosoke’s parents started to cough up bloody phlegm, and they weakened, and died.
Hearing of this state of affairs, Yumi’s father, Ichirou, decided to betroth Yumi not to Ryuunosoke, but to a ronin named Sora, because Sora had recently found work as a bodyguard for a wealthy tavern-keeper by the name of Takashi, who lived in Kinogasa, by Lake Tsuburo.
The tavern keeper, Takashi, had a beautiful daughter named Reiko, and when Sora discovered that Yumi, his wife, was in fact going deaf, Sora lost interest in Yumi and secretly began to hate her. As soon as Yumi appeared pregnant, Yumi disappeared.
.Ryuunosoke wept when he heard that Yumi had run away from the village.
For her, he sat underneath a camellia tree until the Hour of the Rat, and if for some reason he could not go to the cemetery until the Hour of the Rat, he would make offerings of rice to Yumi on his family’s household shrine–until he had to stay with his poor uncle, who quickly found a job for Ryuunosoke in Kinogasa, at whose temple his nephew could work as a bell-ringer.
The night before Ryuunosoke left Saga for the temple in Kinogasa, the cemetery lay under a yellow moon shaped like a small Buddhist lamp. Ryuunosoke had reached the camellia tree a little late, having tried to collect a drink of water from the Saga cemetery’s dried-out well. All the offertory cups to the dead were bone-dry too, he noticed. Even the crickets sounded parched, and the sakura trees crooked their boughs and branches like the charred bodies taken out of a burned-down house.
While he was tuning the silk strings of his biwa, he imagined himself playing like the blind Hoichi, the legendary master. Blind Hoichi had entertained the ghosts of the Tokugawa clan only to have his ears cut off—because he forgot to tattoo his ears, like the rest of his body, with the Diamond Sutra, and the ghosts attacked.
Ryuunosoke felt a snowflake burn on his cheek. When he stood up, a skinny mouse scurried under his leg, as he tried to kill the vicious, thirsty mosquitoes. Bats grazed Ryuunosoke’s black bangs and swooped on the vicious, thirsty mosquitoes that hovered around the drooping camellia.
A sudden wind rushed through the cemetery. Yumi appeared over the dry well. A white kimono of supernatural snow wrapped around her bare shoulders, when she breezed up from the dry cemetery well, with her long silk thatch of black hair flowing and crackling. A large gash oozed from Yumi’s torn head in the back. Some dried blood stood crusted in her hair in the front. Ryuunosoke felt his skin twitching and his spirit rise from his body as it did so, when he saw Yumi holding a stillborn baby in a white shroud of frayed linen. Blood crawled from its mouth like cherry-red centipedes. The baby’s flesh looked like the shell of a cicada, and its face looked like a giant fly’s.
“Ryuunosoke, since you have faithfully kept my memory alive, I will grant you any wish!” said Yumi.
“I want to play the biwa just like the great mimi-nashi-Hoichi!”
“Granted!” said Yumi, a cold smoke flowing from her mouth into Ryuunosoke’s eyes, and then the light from the smoke dimmed Ryuunosoke’s eyes.
“I can’t see anything!” announced Ryuunosoke.

“Hoichi could not play like Hoichi,” said Yumi, “distracted by the world.”                                                                                                                        Yumi took Ryuunosoke’s biwa, breathed into it like a dragon, and handed it back, the biwa covered top to bottom with the words of the Diamond Sutra.
“I have made you a master of the biwa. But you must never tell anyone how it is you attained such mastery,” said Yumi, her neck elongating like a long white leech, three times coiling around the camellia tree in spirals then up Ryuunosoke’s shirt, “or you will lose it and never remember having it,” —around his ears whispering:
“Sora threw me over for a tavern-keeper’s daughter named Reiko. He split my head open with an axe and threw me into the dried-up cemetery well over there, and I died in childbirth, giving birth to this stillborn dragon.”
Dawn alighted on the clouds making them look like mountain peaks, but Ryuunosoke felt only the warmth of the sun bake his blank face. An insubstantial ghost to himself, Ryuunosoke held the biwa on his lap and played: sometimes with his plectrum he strummed, sometimes he just whacked the biwa with the plectrum held flat, but whatever he did, he could not play a wrong note! It was a toy, so simple! No one he had ever heard could play the biwa like this! In fact his own playing made him cry.
The sound of his music was so alive it caused the ashes in the cemetery ground to have heartbeats. A single note resounded up Mount Yoshino, heard by all the butterflies and giant hornets. From their nests, out poured big black ants in wonder, heading in the direction of the biwa. While Ryuunosoke was stumbling around like a crab, he found a sakura branch for a cane, and he poked his way down the road toward Kinogasa, not knowing one step ahead of the other, but confident he could still work as the bell-ringer, although blind.
“Where are you going?” he heard.
“Kinogasa,” said Ryuunosoke, not knowing he was talking to an ant with a long white beard and gray hair. “And I am so thirsty, and I haven’t had a sip of water for so long!”
“There is a tavern right outside Kinogasa. I can take you there! Now walk straight ahead, and I will guide,” said the big black ant, waving on the others to follow.
“But why would you want to help me?” asked Ryuunosoke, his throat dry with kicked up dust. “I am only the son of a poor bean farmer!”
“The world is a burning house,” said the big black ant. “And we are here to help each other through this house of smoke!”
Indeed the day was so scorched, every breath Ryuunosoke drew in was like inhaling a cloud of black pepper. As they walked along the path of dirt, dried sedges, browning reeds, and dead lotuses, more big black ants followed behind the blind biwa player, poking forward, and Ryuunosoke played his biwa with a distant smile on his face, as if he knew how much pleasure he had brought to his followers.
“Could I speak to the proprietor?” said Ryuunosoke, entering the tavern, where a few wealthy merchants sat drinking their expensive wine.
“What do you want blind man, I don’t have any eyes for you!” said Sora, turning to Reiko, and grabbing her waist, as if she might be stolen.
“I just want a sip of water!” said Ryuunosoke.
“What is that on your hand?” asked Takashi, the proprietor, entering from the kitchen. “That birthmark! My father had one there just like it!”
“That’s not a birthmark! That’s a skin disease,” said Sora. “And what are you doing here? Aren’t you Ryuunosoke from Saga? And now you are blind? You worthless son of a bean farmer!”
“Aren’t you Sora?” asked Ryuunosoke, looking upward with a confident grin. “The ronin who threw his pregnant wife down a well and left her for dead to marry this woman Reiko?”
“Lies!” said Sora, his mouth contorting with sudden fury. “Where did you hear that? You can’t prove it.”
“Stop, Sora,” said Takashi. “He is my father, your grandfather, reborn! He owned a biwa covered with the Diamond Sutra just like that!”
When Ryuunosoke reached for his biwa he felt a cool, swift blade between his neck and his head. He felt as if he were flying, because it was his head that had been cut off by Sora. The blind head of Ryuunosoke swirled around the drinkers who had been sitting and drinking. When they ran outside, they saw Yumi flying on a dragon toward the tavern over a field of giant black ants.
Reiko crept up behind the torso of Ryuunosoke with a dagger. Because Ryuunosoke was playing the biwa so quickly his hands were a blur, Reiko lunged and missed. Yumi picked up Reiko and threw her through the tavern’s door. Reiko was soon covered with big black ants, except where she had became a nopperabo—where she had no face. When Sora screamed at this, the big black ants heard him and swarmed over his body too.
“Stop!” screamed Sora. “I never murdered my wife!”
“Yes, you did, Yumi told me!” said the head of Ryuunosoke. “She gave me a magical biwa! And now I am better biwa player than Hoichi!”
Yumi vanished. The ants vanished. Ryuunosoke’s floating head returned to his body. The biwa fell to the ground, and the wood cracked, and the Diamond Sutra slithered into the ground like water. Even his birthmark cleared up. He was completely ordinary. Sora and Reiko fled the premises. Later they married with the blessings of Takashi.
Ryuunosoke never played the biwa again with any skill, nor did he want to. Although he planned to live out his days as a bell-ringer at the temple in Kinogasa, on the shore of Lake Tsuboro, he never arrived at the temple in Kinogasa.

 Blind Talk

     I hereby declare I, Michael Holden, to be of sound mind and wish to be buried alongside my brothers in Life and Christ at the Birch Coulie cemetery in Renville County, Minnesota.

     I arose an hour before sunrise, slapped on my overalls, dressed fully in the dark, and saw my breath in giant clouds float across my bed. I said a prayer to provide us five brothers with a handsome profit on our wheat. After amen, I walked into the darkness outside. The snow crunched with the sound of the Devil’s laughter. I turned around, stopped, and crossed myself. As I made tracks for the barn, my dream came back to me. I stopped to remember it, but it fled before me like a wild beast.  I felt out of my body.  Was it heaven I dreamed?  But I never dreamed no heaven dream in my life. Daniel and Sean had milked the cows. Connor and Richard had fed the horses. I was late because of the lost dream I had. Our usual haul of wheat—a 35-mile trip by two draft horse teams and sleds would take two days. Daniel calculated by the stars. The night sky was the Atlas. He owned a brass sextant, which he said was from Babylon. He had a keen mind and liked to talk big about newfangled inventions like that.

     I remember how that morning began.

     “You know, Michael, they got portable typing writers these days,” said Daniel. “I read about them in a magazine, they’re for newspaper-writing men like you—mechanical typing machines out East. It will be a blue moon before we see them crazy contraptions out here.”

     “I had enough out East,” said Sean, his back up straight, square shoulders, black hair thick as a haymow, and salmon-colored cheeks with scaly flakes. 

     “And I don’t want to see another ambulance,” he added, “—pray to God!” 

     “Thank God for this divine morning,” I said cheerfully.

     Big Sean cut a jig with his boots off the ground, his one arm churning like a handle, his blueberry eyes all a-pucker at the edges. When Sean sang a Kilkenny air, bless his soul, he made us all laugh or cry. We hitched up the horses to the front of the sleighs, loaded the sacks of wheat, and climbed onto our seats—the leftover coffins Sean sold on the side because he worked wood into everything. The morning stars swayed above our thoughts. People said us Holdens were as alike in countenance as Holy Bibles, with cracks in the leather making the little different patterns of face, but I never saw the resemblances. Sean had a square face because rebel buckshot broadsided him when he was an orderly in Pennsylvania, so that his jaw looked like an oak that had been hit by a stroke of lightning. Connor had a pointed nose and was studying to be a priest, and he had just been confirmed by a Monsignor for the diocese in St. Paul. Richard had a wagon-wheel, rounded face without the spokes, or maybe a sunflower.  Richard had difficulties learning and they said he would always be slow.  Well, he sure was slow to comb his hair, which looked like a railroad switch most of the time.  He had a way of revealing his gums when he was laughing at nothing, as if feeding on oats.  We loved him as our brother just the same.  Daniel was the smart one, talking about logarithms, Euclid’s geometry, imaginary numbers, the stars, and all sorts of strange squares he called “quaternions.” I myself wanted to be a newspaperman, but neither luck nor pluck ever worked out in my case and didn’t work out when father got sick with a fever in Boston, and we weren’t going back to Leinster. I never did see one of those portable typing writers. Adam, our elder draft horse, we called Adam the Elder.  He stood as tall as Sean at the withers, and shared about the same age, but Adam the Elder was black and had a large nose white as the stripe of a skunk. The other members of our team were bays, duns, and whites. The timber-framed general store was stacked with tins, mason jars, bottles, bins, and gunny sacks.  We rode past the store at dawn, and then past the painted-red schoolhouse and the two aspiring churches facing each other.  So we drove North, the Sun dawning bright as rapeseed flowers over the wild prairie springtime. The Sun was like a golden goose’s golden feather, the feather’s gold flakes like the prettiest little suns across the sky. It was a fine morning, fine like when you’re feeling fine and you know you have God alongside you sowing alfalfa, putting up the hay, and chopping firewood. We always reaped God’s green. As we rode into Long Lake toward noon, we saw that damned Owen Heaney and his six sons ahead of us. Feeding the horses, we watched with envy and not a little spite, Heaney’s freshly-fed teams of oxen hoofing it ahead of us toward Willmar. Heaney’s eight ox-teams commanded respect but on Sundays when he took up the hymnal, it was to show the whole congregation, with a peacock flourish, who had the best crop of wheat and who had the best prospects for marriage. We talked to the Heaneys after mass every Sunday. We talked about whose horses were the sleekest, who would have the prettiest wives, and whose wives wore the finest shirtwaists of calico. I heard the eldest Heaney, Micah Heaney, say he wanted to have Beaver Creek incorporated. There would be a New City of Zion upon a hill. Micah crowed some fol de rol, thumb in his waistcoat, flapping his gathers and snapping his suspenders. Are you on fire with the Lord today, neighbor? And then, in the vestry, under his breath he’d whisper like a lowdown snake oh how he hated them Protestant Finnlanders, them Kaitonens, and them Jurgensens.

     “Them’s Luther’s boys! Not like us, neighbor, talking in that crazy Scandinoonian babble . . . I am a good Catholic. My father spoke German.”

     “I reckon we travelled about seventeen miles,” said Daniel. 

     In the Northwest, a speck dotted the horizon, and then a squall formed pitchfork tines. A snowy powder sifted down like quicklime, here and there, swirling. The wind played a music box, droning through the pinewood stands. White pebbles bounced on the hard-packed road. Then a cold gale rushed in a tidal wave, like the Flood. Sounding like a pack of wolves, the snow howled louder and louder.  Like smoked bees out of a tree when they come after you, the hailstones were aswarming and astinging us—and the temperature plunged so fast we gasped like one breath. We fastened our coats, shivering, and the snow covered us with monks’ hoods. The storm raked us like grass, and we couldn’t hear our own voices for their being blown South like fallen leaves. Tree bark cracked and snapped like whips. Sean remembered that Kai Kaitonen lived nearby in an underground sod shanty.  We might tarry, unhitch, blanket the horses, warm up, eat, and rest there. A horse’s head, a mane, and a harness poked out in silhouettes.  The miles themselves were receding when I saw, coming our way, the Heaney boys, marching like shadows toward us.      

    “Turn back, Brother Sean,” said Owen Heaney, trooping out of the storm, leaning into Sean’s face, and disappearing into the wind, bearded white by the snow, frosty-eyed. 

     Owen’s face had the sideways look of a pecan-eyed shoat, propelled into retreat.       

     “Turn back! Neighbor! This is the Devil’s work!” echoed Micah.

     Micah Heaney moved his mouth around, which moved his eyebrows, so his eyes emanated as from far in the back of a house of pigeons. 

     “Of course,” yelled Connor, “so you Heaneys can get your damned wheat to market before us!”

     Obviously Kai had no room for Owen Heaney and his bunch, which I confess I was mighty glad of. The Lord arranged it for us. Although now I confess this was a pride, and forgive me God, for I was such a sinner all my life I was not worthy of believing in You. When our team reached Kai’s swamp, the ice rang like a bronze bell in a frozen belfry.  The door to Kai’s shanty opened underground, and the chimney came up to my knees, also buried in a beach of snowdrifts. The wooden-splintered steps creaked down to six smoky children, a Holy Bible, a bed, a chair, a hard coal stove, Kai, and his wife Lina who was sick with a green face.  There was something poking out of her, and the children, who had the colic, lived within a space 16 x 16 feet. The eldest twins Matti and Marya played on either side of the copper kettle, strung from a pole over the cold hearth.

     “What are they, papa?” asked Matti.  “Monkeys or snakes?”  

     Where the smoke above the oil lamp flickered, dark as a coal mine, cooking soot clung to the rafters like horse flies.

     “Nay, it’s the Devil himself,” said Kai with the head and horns of a goat.  “Get behind me children!  Get out you white demons!”

     “I never breathed in needles like this,” said Lina, picking up a broom and sweeping it at us.  “Get out!”

     “You can’t stay here, Satan,” said Kai and reached for a Springfield rifle. “Ain’t room for Satan and his devil’s brood.”       

     Now that was a lie even though they shared one big bed, half the size of the room. 

     Sean said maybe we could stay on the road, because the road was high up with drainage ditches on either side.

     “It’s the cabin fever,” said Sean.  “Kai and his family are possessed from living like pigs underground.”

      Daniel said we needed seven more miles when a river of snow swept past us and that he was right glad to get shed of those horned devils beneath the dirt.

     Sean’s cheeks pied with a glazed crust over them. Yet he brimmed so cheerfully, I thought he might have had some barley corn or dip, but that was impossible. I felt a little chestier now that Heaney and his boys were in retreat, meaning we would get a better price without their competition and prove our mettle against their weak resolve in God. I looked at the drifts like doves, their wings beating upward, shifting the hills, and I felt the voice of God rise within me with a new confidence and spirit.

     “We’ll make it boys,” I yelled into the wind. “We’re the Irish from Kilkenny!”

     I looked to Brother Sean for approval and his face was hoar-frosted like the bridge over Beaver Creek.

     “And we don’t stop for no hare-brained Lucifers!” said Richard, and he did a little half jig. 

     “Like arrows in the hands of the warrior Cuchulain, we are” said Sean, still smiling when his hat took off and disappeared so that he had to wrap his head in his scarf. 

     So his head was exposed.

     “Erin go forward!” Richard shouted, and we all laughed at his feebleness, but Richard was the type—after a week you had known him forever I swear. 

     Connor gave Richard a hearty back slap, and Richard’s eyes welled up like little marbles. Daniel grinned under his frozen scarf—I could see his eyes wrinkle and twinkle.

     “Aye! That’s the spirit, little brother,” said Connor, giving Richard a warm hug like the Prodigal Son, and I could see ice crystals on the sides of Richard’s nose.

     “For you shall inherit the Earth,” said Connor, holding his broken brass spectacles.

     One eyepiece fell into a snowbank.  The wind picked up the lens and blew it away.  

     Consumptive trees in the snow appeared like smoke, their branches braiding in the wind. 

     “It is six and a half miles at best,” said Daniel.  “The wind is coming in at 35 miles an hour, and that could slow us down another hour and a half.  The road is uphill at an angle, and that incline will tack on more time.”

     Behind our teams, I saw Kai’s shanty drifting over, the snowdrifts shaped in enormous white lilies. The front team’s horses, Ezra and Ben, were winded because they were younger and not used to the wind blasts, and they weren’t good for no more than four hours’ hard pulling.  I grabbed Elmer and Adam the Elder and trotted them to the front. Likewise the second team. Aaron and Mathew were getting winded, so I replaced them with Willard and Bucephalus. Then I switched the entire second team for the entire first team. So Willard and Bucephalus were in front, but they balked. I led them a ways by hand, but they refused to bend a knee. All the spooked horses in their harnesses halted. Richard, Sean, and I dumped wheat sacks from the coffins to lighten the load, but when I looked back I could not see Connor or Daniel. I figured Connor had gone to fetch Sean’s hat.

     “Adam the Elder’s fallen,” I heard Connor’s forlorn voice shouting faintly against the wind.

     Sean went to fetch Connor. Richard and I huddled in blankets on the coffin seat. So much time passed shivering that the increasing pain of the cold became unbearable. We turned the sleigh around to look for our family. An enormous crash jolted us off our sleigh into the pounding wind and glassy snowdrifts.  Willard and Bucephalus had rammed into the other sleigh.  I heard my brothers shouting stop and whoa! We sensed it was getting dark, but the whole landscape was blind with snow. Daniel had a timepiece, but it had clouded over and froze hours ago, so that time had no use for us.

     “This will blow over,” said Sean, chin up, but somewhere in his face a crevasse opened like a vale of tears and shut again. 

     Sean tied his scarf like a man with a cracked skull, trying to keep his head together.  We had to get the lead horse Adam the Elder back on his feet. Later I realized that were it not for Adam the Elder, we might have continued and reached Aug Jurgensen’s place. The road vanished.  We  writhed like a worm in a cocoon of snow.  The wind slashed us to pieces. The Devil toppled the cedars, and we heard branches breaking like twigs. Grabbing the coffins off the sleighs, we got all the coffines lined up like a graveyard, and we built a wall with them and then with the tail-end boards of the sleighs, we built a ceiling, which we covered with blankets and sacks of wheat as ballast.  We blanketed over the entire structure. I blanketed the horses, and Connor tied the loose horses back to the sleighs and gave them the last of the oats. Our make-shift hut pointed North like the whale of Jonah ribbed with men. An entrance blanketed the south side. Sean and Daniel crawled into the make-shift shelter first. Then Richard, Connor, and I lay at their feet on the south side. We, as best we could, said the Rosary.

     “And after this blows over, we can make it to Aug Jurgensen’s and still get to market tomorrow night,” said Sean.

     “We’ll be late, but,” Daniel reminded us, “by about six hours.”

     “Remember, Aug Jurgensen has a field of forty acres, and has that fence which has that newfangled barbed wire,” I said. “If we get to the barbed wire, we are saved.”

     “Jesus, save us!” said Connor.

     “My feet are gone. I can’t feel them,” said Richard.  “My feet or toes.”

     “Get up and tramp around, for God’s sake, Richard,” said Sean. “Are you helpless, little man?”

     “Devils abound,” Richard stooped and left with tears in his voice, all quavery and hurtlike.   

     An immense pain stabbed my groin area, as if I were trying to pass shards of glass from my bladder.  I was no longer shivering, but stone still. My blood began to freeze too. We took turns roosting in the coffins.

     “Does blood freeze, Daniel?”

     “Hare by the tree froze to death back a ways, saw a blackbird in the cedar shatter when I touched it,” said Daniel matter-of-factly. “Everything freezes when it dies.”

     “It’s a judgment, brothers,” said Connor, training his eyes on Daniel. “We had all better thank Jesus for it.”

     “Thank you, Lord,” said Richard. “For the End of Days.”

     “Jesus,” I began slowly.  “What did you say, Richard?”

     Richard scuffed around in circles because he was not warming up any, and he wasn’t saying anything either, which was unlike him. He faltered at the threshold then slogged outdoors. When we called for Richard and he did not answer, Connor pulled a long face, got up and went out into the blizzard. The snow drifted into the hut on top of Sean on the north side, so that the snow clumped into Sean’s coffin and fastened him with the coffin’s resin, so that we could not pry him from the coffin or move him from the ground.

     “Those winds,” said Daniel, “they’re twice as fast as before, up to seventy miles an hour. Judging by the angle of the wind we should proceed 45 degrees clockwise to that when the wind dies.”

     “If the Devil can rip a cedar out of the Earth, turn animals to stone, surely Jesus can save us if we are worthy,” said Connor. “Would you place your soul in the hands of God and quit bedeviling us with numbers, Daniel?”

     “I figure,” said Daniel, “about thirty hours have gone by and in thirty more we will be flat-out dead.”

     “Then we should get the horses their oats,” I said. “I think we still have a bushel, don’t we?”

     I couldn’t remember. My brain was numb, and I wondered whether the tissues inside me were swelling up and causing the pain I felt, because I heard my skull crack like a frozen lake. Then I went to untie the horses, but I couldn’t unknot the harnesses until I cut them free with a knife as best I could, but the horses were drifting away like logs down a river. Suddenly I tottered forward, unable to raise my arms or provide support for my legs. I heard Connor shuffle in with only Adam the Elder. But old Adam the Elder had manure frozen to his rear side, which had locked his legs, so he moved like a Trojan horse, not like a real horse.  Only forwards or backwards. Sean’s coffin continued to pile up with snow, but none of us had the use of our hands, our hands having become ice-locked fists. My mittens clawed into my skin. Nothing but volleys of pain up to my elbows at that point. Sean’s eyes had frozen open, looking ready to shatter. We tilted him up, so he stood flat like a mummy. I looked at Sean—his eyebrows and ears and sideburn hairs crooked out like birch trees from his bony face, cut with cheeks burned raw by freezing cold winds.

     “Legs cramped,” said Sean through the wool blanket sheeted with ice. 

     The coffin slipped.  Adam the Elder lumbered over.

     “Adam! I’m sorry,” said Sean.

     Adam the Elder crashed on top of me. Folding his legs to break his fall, the horse broke one of my ribs. I was trapped under a half-ton of horse flesh. I lay there until Connor and Daniel pushed Adam the Elder off of me, and I wriggled out like a snake.

     We blew our breaths at Sean, rubbed him, but the scarf had frozen into his mouth like a gag, and he couldn’t talk or barely breathe. The scarf seemed to have a life of its own and wanted to hang him with his own spirit, and his nose was an icicle.  When Sean did not answer, Connor, who had been leading our Rosary, picked up where he had left off, but Connor left off in the middle of another Hail Mary and declared that he would administer the Unction to Sean instead, considering himself ordained to do so. Connor recited Scripture over Sean’s dead frozen body.

     “May the Lord who frees you from sin, save you, and raise you . . .” said Connor, barely finishing his sentence.

     “Connor?” Daniel cried.

     Daniel sat down and wrapped his arm around Connor.

     “I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill,” said Connor.

     “There ain’t no God,” continued Daniel, “and there ain’t no Jesus, and there sure as hell never was no Holy Ghost! There is only a Milky Way with no milk for no mankind.  Nothing, nothing but God’s shit on top of nothing!”

     “Daniel! Your soul be damned!” I said, made the sign of the cross, whirled around, kicked and choked Daniel with the Rosary frozen in my stub of a mittened hand.

     “We were damned when we were born,” the last thing he said.

     Connor leapt up and pulled me off Daniel. Connor went out and stomped and came back and lay beside me, his beard shocked white. Connor gave out and did not speak. And we sat frozen together, silent. Now I was alone. And I heard myself confessing my sins, knowing I was going to Hell, treading snow, leaving behind the dead horses, my dead brothers, all dreaming a dream like the dream I had before setting out, shared by other dreamers. Looking up, I saw Jesus nailed by ice spikes to a cross frozen to a white dome. He was looking down at me, over my head. Jesus was in front of me, a huge furry animal in the snow, with its arms forward, standing on its hindlegs, froze. I turned His head. I saw that Jesus was Richard frozen, impaled by Aug Jurgensen’s barbed wire fence. I lay on top of Richard to rest, because I had not eaten for so long, until a sharply-pointed thorn pierced my cheek on the fence. I shambled on all fours. Then I banged on Aug Jurgensen’s door with my head. The Jurgensen family lurched back when I fell forward into their dugout. Cut out of my clothes, I saw that my arms up to the elbows were black. The storm continued for another day while I thawed, waiting for sensation in my frostbitten arms and legs.  Owen Heaney found Sean, Connor, and Daniel in the hut. Micah found Richard on the new barbed-wire fence. The Heaneys had gone back to the Kaitonens, who had let them stay with them after all.  God bless the Heaneys. And this I have dictated to my good friend in God and sole heir, Owen Heaney, after taking the railroad with me from Willmar to St. Paul, as I am awaiting the surgeon, who is to take off my arms and legs.