Stupid

by Kat Mueller

We usually ride in silence. Sometimes we listen to talk radio. Or more like he listens to talk radio and I daydream out the window. There’s never music, always junk food. When I was a child I’d sleep in the back of the Suburban in dim twilight or dark night, with the smell of wet dog and the flicker of headlights, as he listened to talk radio. The drive is always long. Always. Coming and going in the dark. I have to ask to stop to pee, because he’ll drive forever.

This trip is no different. The drive is long. The air silent. But my heart is heavy and he knows it. My gazing out the window is different now than when I was a kid. I have the eyes of a refugee.

We stop in Cheyenne. We stop in Casper. Buffalo. And again in Sheridan— because I had coffee in Buffalo. I ask to stop, so we stop. We eat gummy orange slices and Boston Baked Beans. I hate them. But they’re there, stashed in the console like they have been forever. So I eat them. He listens to talk radio as I watch the countryside speed by the window and I feel like

I’m standing still.

It’s nearly sunset when we arrive and our legs are stiff. We stretch and unload and he starts a fire. It’s not cold, but he starts a fire. He always starts a fire. The country is beautiful and quiet, just as I remember it from the fall. The grass is green now, the crisp wind replaced by a pleasant warm breeze. The tall cottonwoods line the water, pure green against the clear sky that is now taking a hint of pink. Bighorns push up mighty in the far-off southwest. In their shadow a mountain that looks like a Bundt cake. The bugs are noisy. Grasshoppers. Crickets. What-have-you. The red winged black birds are busy complaining about something, as always, racing from tree to tree. I sit in stillness. He joins me after a while. It is perfectly

peaceful and it’s making me start to feel my skin again. Begin to feel like I live in this body as the sun disappears beyond the Bundt cake.

We rise early the next morning. I pack the food; he rigs the rods. It’s always this way. My job is easy, because neither of us eat much when we fish. Cheese. Coffee. Boston Baked Beans. The same ice chest. The same Stanley thermos. The morning is clear and perfectly spring. The bugs and birds are at it again. As I make my way to load the boat, hoppers leap from beneath my feet. It makes me think of the river and I get a little foreign quiver inside; something that feels like excitement. We fold the cover back on the boat. One fold at a time. Another, and another, the way we’ve always done it. Fold the cover to the bow. It takes no discussion. The rods are rigged and ready with whatever he has chosen. I slide them into place. Push rain coats up under the bow. Tuck the ice chest.

We drive in wading boots through the grassland. Pheasant make narrow escapes. Wild dogs bark. The boat click-clacks behind us. We let in at the dam. As I hold the boat the power of the water coming out of the dam makes me feel small.

We push off. I take to the front as he rows. He begins, as he does. Just as I expect him to.

“Get your rod.”

I do it.

“Cast at ten o’clock.”

I do it.

“Mend.”

“More.”

“Mend again. Just put a bunch of line out there.” he says.

I do it.

“Get ready. A fish is going to eat that.”

I get ready. It starts to drag so I pick it up.

“Too much line. Take in some. You can’t cast all that line.”

I do it. I cast. He wants ten. I give him ten.

“You gotta wait on the back cast. Let it straighten out. You’re gonna make a mess.”

I do it. I wait.

“Wait longer.”

I throw some line back on the water. Mend. Mend again. He slows the boat.

The rig is drifting smooth. I hear him telling me in my head, but he doesn’t say it. A fish is going to eat. I’m ready. Wait. Wait... The indicator drops and I lift my rod tip. It’s on. The fish takes off to the right. I let him run and begin to assess in horror the quantity of fly line at my feet. I frantically start putting it back on the reel. It’s under my left foot. It’s wrapped around my forceps. My pack. I’m getting panicky and fumbling with my left hand as I hold tight on my right, hoping my index finger has a better idea of appropriate pressure than my mind does. This requires a level of grace and coordination I don’t have. Even as a girl. But I continue to put line on the reel until the fish turns and starts heading straight at the boat. At me. So my left hand goes from the reel back to stripping handfuls of yellow line. The boat is turning a bit, as they do, and I can’t get this fish on the reel. My heart is pounding and I’m starting to feel like a circus act, with the line, and the turning, and the fumbling. My father’s eyes on my back. His mouth silent. But I do. I get the fish on the reel. Finally. And I fight him like a girl. Fight him to the right side of the boat as my dad prepares the net. The fish resists, as fish do, and I’m afraid to push him. Don’t rush him... I can hear my dad saying in my head, so I let him run again. I bring him back to the left of the boat, this time,now turned almost horizontal to the river. The fish gives. He comes in, with my arm burning and my heart racing, right to the net that my father has outstretched. A beautiful fat Montana rainbow.

“Good,” he says, and I smile.

We continue downstream and I cast at ten o’clock to the boat. Sometimes nine. Sometimes eleven, but I pick up and put it back out at ten. The rod is heavy and big for me, so I struggle a little until I find my groove. He watches me from behind and I wonder how ugly my cast is. How nauseated he is to witness it. Farther downstream we take to shore on an island. We always stop here. It’s a good spot. He instructs me again.

“Head 20 yards up. The fish are three feet out. Don’t walk into them. They’re shallow. Get a long drift. Let it tail out.”

I do it. I’ve taken many fish out of this hole on my own, but I do it. I do what he says. Because he knows. And it’s how we do it. I head up—guessing at what 20 yards might look like—find my spot, and cast. I get a fish on immediately.

He calls up from below. “What you got goin’ on there?”

I smile.

I bring the fish right up in the shallows of the bank as my father has taught me to do with no net. It’s slimy and flopping around. I set him free after a moment and he rushes away. It feels good. I get my line out again and get another fish. Just like that. My father is below me still, fiddling with something. He’s standing in his stance. The way he always stands. His silhouette only that of my father.

He calls to me again without looking up, “Don’t show off now.”

I laugh.

The fishing we experience is what we’ve come to call “stupid fishing”. And when you say it, you have to smile. It’s part of the effect. I fish all the way down the run as my father fishes the back side of the island and up to the top. I catch as many fish as I miss. It seems like a lot. I fight a seriously pissed and seriously strong fish for quite a while, with my heart racing and

my hands fumbling, until the delicate balance of too much pressure and not enough screws me. I lose him in heavy water. I break off to the split-shot and tie all the shit back on. Tippet, fly, tippet, fly. I stab my finger. My tongue. My finger again. Who hooks their tongue? I think. I can hear the sound of a thrashing fish from where my father exists somewhere beyond the bushes. I think about the fish I lost. My flies in its mouth. My inner soundtrack plays circus music in my head. My father comes around the bend smiling.

“Stupid,” he says.

We make our way down the river as the sun moves across the sky. From island to bank to wherever. He drops the anchor. I pull us to shore. In silence, for the most part, we do this. My father watches me fish. Directs me. Then he goes above or below and absolutely murders it.

“Keep your rod up. Keep him out of that heavy water!” he yells to me.

“Keep your rod up!”

I do it. I don’t respond.

He comes down to me from time to time to net a fish when the shore is too far. A big Brown breaks off at the net during a fumble.

“Don’t ever let anyone net your fish.” he tells me.

He always tells me this when he breaks off my fish. I put the rod down for a while and pick up feathers that blow across the shore. As a girl it was rocks.

Now it’s feathers. I sit in the shadow of old cottonwoods on a log chomped by a beaver. I watch my father fish. We listen to the sounds of the river. Wave at passing anglers. In silence for the most part.

“We’re going to get a hatch at sunset,” he says, as we travel to the next spot.

I nod, mouth full of Boston Baked Beans.                                           

I remember as a teenage girl wondering what he was thinking in this silence. If he was thinking I was doing drugs. If he was thinking I was having sex. If he was waiting for the right time to ask. And I wanted him to ask me, because I wanted to tell him that no, I wasn’t. That I was good. That he could be proud of me. But he never asked. Now, as an adult, I know why he never asked. Why we never spoke of such things. It’s because it’s not what he was thinking in those times of silence. He’s not sizing me up, nor waiting for an optimal time to drop an atom bomb of a question. He’s thinking about fish. Only fish. And I know this now, because it’s what I’m thinking. The only thing I’m thinking. Occasionally my mind drifts to home. To my shambles of a marriage that waits for me there. What the family I have made are doing right now in my abrupt absence, but a rising fish is enough to snap the thought away. And we both hear the sip and watch it. And we’re both wondering what the bugs are doing.

Yesterday, not even 24 hours ago, my father and I sat across from each other at Chuck E. Cheese. I wore my smile, as I always do, but my eyes couldn’t hold it up. I’m weary and my age is showing in my face from stress and crying. This stress. Birthday cakes, in-laws and friends, presents and noise. My precious child who has no idea what is about to happen to his life.

Everyone looking at me. And my father’s heart that’s aching for this boy who has become the apple of his crystal blue eye. His heart aching for the boy and for me: his baby girl.

“You wanna go fishing?” He asks me.

“Yeah,” I reply, “I’d like to go fishing. I’d love to go fishing. But I can’t. Not now.”

I dole out coins from a plastic cup to my excited birthday boy. He squeals something about guns and runs back into the madness. I smile again at my dad. But I want to cry, deeply ashamed that I can’t seem to hold it together for these people. These lovely people whom I adore.

“Let’s just go,” he says. “Now. After this. Just go grab your gear and we’ll leave. Be there by sunset.”

I shake my head. No, I can’t.

I turn and watch the two grandmas talking. Being cordial. My mother graceful and kind, as always. And I have to get the hell out of here.

“Okay,” I say, “let’s go.”

And we are here now on this river that seems like a million miles away from the ringing games, screaming children, and five-hundred-pound stone on my chest. My family, my child, my husband: watching me lace up running shoes. All of them wondering if I have the guts to go. All of them with an opinion why I shouldn’t. And the judgment is suffocating. I need this day. On this river. I need to breathe. And my father is handing it to me like a life raft.

As dusk comes, we approach the hole we’ve been planning for. Anticipating the sunset hatch. We set anchor below a butte in a turn of the river that runs slow and deep. We watch. The water is just about black now in the shadow of the butte and the temperature is dropping. I put on my jacket. Warm up my coffee as my father is tying on something. Biting line in his teeth. Flipping through boxes. Tying knots with his eyes on the water. I wait, getting a chill. A little mouth breaks the surface. Then another a few feet away. And another. We say nothing. Bugs are landing across the dark water. Floating like little mini sailboats on the sea. He hands me the rod.

“Okay. Get it out there.”

I do it.

I pick the line up and shoot for a fish that’s rising up above the boat. I miss.

By a long shot. I attempt again.

“To the left. Out more. Do you see that? Do you see that fish?” he says.

I see a black mouth on black water. It’s popping up intermittently. I don’t see this fish that my father speaks of. I don’t possess, among other attributes such as grace and coordination, my father’s X-ray fish vision. What I see could be one fish, could be five.

“Yeah. I see it,” I lie.

I false cast and try to avoid the Russian Olives that tangle themselves up the butte behind me. I try to count in my head how many times he unhooked me from the bushes today. How many flies he tied back on. My thoughts come back to focus on my cast. I search deep for rhythm. Timing. Grace. I wonder what I look like to him. To anyone. My one girl circus. I cast out over the location of this feeding fish. I cast several times until I nail my distance.

I set it softly on the water. It drifts with the rest of the sailboats. I can’t even tell the difference. A nose rises and sips it in. I lift my rod. The line goes tight. The air is quiet and cool. I let the fish tire out and then bring him quietly to the boat. Touch him. Release him.

“Your cast is excellent,” my father tells me.

My heart swells. A midge lands on my face.

The rises are getting more frequent and the bugs thick. We exit the boat quietly and wade waist deep into them. I hold onto my father’s shoulder. The fish are rising now in such numbers it’s creating an effect that makes me think of a hot tub. I have never seen anything like it. I cast to them as my dad stands at my side. I set the fly on the water. Soft drift. Quiet take. And then the fish goes bonkers. Jumps. Runs. Runs some more the other way until I bring him in. My dad nets my fish. We smile at each other in this silence. My dad heads off to fish below just as I hook another fish. He returns again, sighing with a smile. As I fight the fish, my dad hooks his net to my back.

“Here. Just take it,” he says, and he heads down to partake in this bubbling madness of noses.

The light is almost gone and the water to my waist is cold. I’m starting to shiver. If we had people waiting at the takeout for us, we’d be in big trouble tonight. But it’s just me and my dad and this ridiculous wet dream of a midge hatch. We’ve got nowhere else to be. I wade slowly back to the boat with my arm burning a burn I’d never complain about. I get back in the boat and bundle up to my neck for warmth. I watch my father in his stance, his black silhouette against the water, fishing with precision and grace. I think about him at my age. In my situation. If he was as confused and ashamed as I. If he still is. If any of this ever goes away. And a fish rises to his fly. His line goes tight. I smile and think... stupid. And for the first time in my entire life I realize: I am him. I am my father’s daughter. Through and through.

Kat Mueller is a photographer, writer, and third-generation flyfisher. As a little girl, she dove into the wrong race and beat a pool of boys at 25 yard freestyle. She never lost her love for the water. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her son Sam, husband Geoff, and wild dingo Mike. You can view her writing and fine-art photography at  www.katmuellerphoto.com.

Ghost Story

by Rick Bailey

She follows me back to my office. Her name is Donna.

She wears jeans like all the other girls. Only hers are the baggy kind, the comfortable fit for a woman in her thirties. She sits in the front row, one leg crossed over the other. It bounces, this leg, like she's a piece of machinery that's idling. It's the sixth week of class, and I know this about her: She hasn't been to college in fourteen years. She has two boys. She has a husband whom she has left but who refuses to leave her. Whatever we read in class she reads as if her life depended on it. This week it's Ibsen. To most students, reading “Ghosts” is like swallowing a horse tranquillizer. To her, the play is like liquid light, and she chugs it. Sitting there in class, two students over from my desk, she is a presence.  

I unlock my office door and let myself in. "What's up?" I say, dropping my books on the desk.

"I just wanted to tell you I may have to miss class." She leans against the door frame and tells me what I was afraid of. It's the husband. He's hanging around. She's fears he is going to take her kids. She's afraid.

"It shouldn't be a problem," I say, "if you have to miss." I tell her I can work with her.

"It's just that I'm enjoying this so much."

I tell her we're glad to have her in class. "That Paster Manders," she says, referring to the Ibsen. "When he tells Mrs. Alving: "'We're not put on this earth to be happy.' How can he say that to her?" She shakes her head. "Those people are so miserable."

"Just wait," I say.

She laughs. "I saw ‘Ghosts’ on the syllabus, you know what I thought of?"

It's my turn to laugh. "Patrick Swayze?"

"In school, like in ninth grade, we did this thing called levitation." She gives me an embarrassed look. "Did you ever levitate?"

Did I ever.

#

My first time was tenth grade. I was at Sandra Bremer's house. I guess it was a party, boys and girls together on a Saturday night, not couples, just six or seven unattached kids together, and someone said we should play "Let's pick him up." 

"You lie on the floor," Sandra said, "and everyone gathers around the person. You say these words together, and then, using just your fingertips, you can pick the person up."

We moved furniture out of the way. Someone shut off the lights. Then we took turns volunteering to lie on the floor, pretending we were dead, while the others gathered around, looking down at the dark form on the floor. It was a very solemn ceremony.

The first person said, He is dead. One after another, going around the circle, we took turns repeating that line and those that followed.

        Gone from the earth.

        Stiff as a board.

         Light as a feather. At this point we bent down and slipped two fingers of each hand under the person's body.

        The leader said, Let's pick him up.

        And we did.

        It worked every time. The dead person, no matter how big, would practically fly up to the ceiling, where we held him for a split second, before lowering him back down to the floor. We would gasp and scream for a minute or two, terrified and amazed by this mystery in the dark, then ask for another volunteer. No one tried to understand what was happening. We didn't want to understand it. It pure joy. It was like direct contact with the supernatural.

        When there were no more volunteers, we switched the lights back on, put the furniture back in place, and turned on Cat Stevens. If there was a scary movie on TV, we'd watch that.      

#

There's a reference to levitation as a party trick in The Magician's Own Book, or the Whole Art of Conjuring by Arnold George & Frank Cahill, published in 1862. The authors describe it as "one of the most remarkable and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame." In their description, they emphasize that it is a "heavy man" who is lifted when his lungs and the lungs of those lifting are fully inflated with air. The authors trace this magic back to an American Navy captain doing a demonstration in Venice. The critical detail, according to George and Cahill, is the breathing: "On several occasions [we] have observed that when one of the bearers performs his part ill, by making the inhalation out of time, the part of the body which he tries to raise is left, as it were, behind."

        Two centuries earlier, Samuel Pepys refers to levitation in his diary entry on July 31, 1665. He provides an account of leaving London to attend a wedding, noting in that week alone, some 1700 or 1800 people had died of plague (one tenth of the London population died that year). Pepys and his party arrive too late for the ceremony, but in time for dinner, cards, talk, and prayers. After helping put the newlyweds to bed ("I kissed the bride in bed, and so the curtaines drawne with the greatest gravity that could be, and so good night..."), he goes to a bed which, consistent with customs of the time, he shares with another guest.

Before sleep, the two men have a chat. "We did here all get good beds, and I lay in the same I did before with Mr. Brisband, who is a good scholler and sober man; and we lay in bed, getting him to give me an account of home, which is the most delightfull talke a man can have of any traveller." In the course of their conversation, Mr. Brisband speaks of "enchantments and spells" he has recently witnessed in Bourdeaux, France: "He saw four little girles," Pepys writes, "very young ones, all kneeling, each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the eare of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first." They whisper these words:

Voyci un Corps mort (Behold, a dead body)

Roy comme un Baston (Still as a stone)

Froid comme Marbre (Cold as marble)

Leger comme un esprit (Light as a spirit)

Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ (We lift you in the name of     Jesus Christ).

With one finger each, they raise the boy as high as they can reach. Brisband is "afeard to see it," and disbelieving, calls for the cook to come, "a very lusty fellow," meaning large, and, in like manner, they lift him as well.

#

For a while, every time that group of friends got together, at Sandra Bremer's or wherever, we shut off the lights and played dead, picking each other up. We reveled in the mystery of levitation. Like those little French girls, what we were enjoying was essentially child's play, like telling ghost stories, though, in our case, we didn't have bubonic plague adding spice to the experience. Looking back now, I marvel at the fact that we never dropped anyone. What were the chances? But no one banged his head on an end table. No one fell and broke an arm. I'm pretty sure my preferred role in the game was the dead guy. Lying on the floor, eyes closed, listening to the chant, then feeling myself lifted into the air was a rush, not so much out of body as an in-the-body experience. Some nights, along with levitation, there was talk of séances and hypnosis. I remember seeing kids bent over a Ouija board. Wouldn't it be freaky, someone said, to see into the future?

        Sure, but what if you had to see all of it?

        If there's any wisdom in becoming an adult, it's knowing that you don't want to know. We grow up. We marry and have children. We divorce and find ourselves alone again. In search of ourselves we fly off to faraway places and then come back home, still searching. Our parents, spouses, and friends, sometimes even our children, sicken and die. Between these events, there are the levitations, moments of genuine sweetness and mystery you share with other people. Lying in bed with Mr. Brisband, Pepys observes, "I have spent the greatest part of my life with abundance of joy, and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments," thinking of the wedding, the time with friends, as "greatest glut of content that ever I had; only under some difficulty because of the plague."  

#

Seeing Donna in class, reading and thinking and sharing, was like witnessing a levitation.

        A week passed before I heard from her. She called me to apologize for missing class. She was in a shelter. She said she couldn't talk long.  She said he didn't know where she was and that her safety, and the safety of her children, depended on keeping her whereabouts a secret. I told her to take care of herself, we were just finishing “Ghosts”, she could come back anytime, write the paper, pick up where she left off. 

        When we hung up, I knew I would never see her again. A week passed, then another. Nothing. That was it.

Rick Bailey's essays have appeared in The Writer's Workshop Review, Drunk Monkeys, Ragazine.cc, and Defenestration. He lives in Detroit and teaches writing at a local community college.

Poppies

by Lisa Lebduska

       

        Standing in front of a produce wagon on a tree-lined street in Bay Ridge, dazed but smiling, a swarthy teenage boy holding a basket of onions and swiss chard guards my kitchen. He makes an unlikely sepia angel, poised over a junk drawer in Connecticut. Some days he watches me watch chickadees squabble over thistle; on others he listens as I argue with my mother over the phone about why we need to retire her Honda, and with it, though I do not say this, her ability to drive.

Somewhere under the boy’s wave of chestnut hair is my grandfather.

        Cinched by a belt circling his waist almost twice, Pop’s pants jut out above his ankles and dusty broken shoes, inherited from his younger but fatter brother Tony. He holds the bridle of a horse that is wearing blinders. At sixteen he bought the horse without realizing that it could not see, discovering its dark truth in an epiphanic tumble that landed him, the horse, the wagon and twenty-five watermelons in a roadside ditch. Often have I stared at the picture and wondered if my grandfather had yet discovered the animal’s secret. He gazes out at me, far into a future that has outlived him, not knowing the woman who would be looking back at him, someone he would know only when he was an old man and she was a child, the granddaughter who had inherited his yellow eyes.

That blind horse, a parable for Poppy’s life, served as the center of Thanksgiving conversations that began with my mother’s declaration: “Pop never worried. He was no businessman. He bought the horse thinking he was getting a bargain. Women came to buy cucumbers and ended up with free strawberries and carrots. It’s a miracle we didn’t starve.” Whenever she said this, I would look at the ziti trays, roasted turkey and vegetables crowding the table and think the real miracle was that no one had exploded.

        Pop left the produce business to drive a taxi. One night, a man approached his cab at a stoplight, and when my grandfather rolled down the window to see what he wanted, the man reached in and tore off shirt pocket loaded with change and bills. The second time he was robbed, a passenger jammed a gun into the back of his neck.

        “Pop never worried,” my mother says while heaping mashed potatoes on to my Thanksgiving plate.

“Didn’t he get held up?”

        “Yes, but it didn’t faze him. He came home and said he was on the evening news. He never mentioned it again.”

Pop made Camels his daily passengers. Thoughts of his passengers’ vagaries may have played a role in his decision to smoke; likewise, careening cars, buses, trucks and other taxis, along with his need to support a growing family. Despite regular prodding by my mother and grandmother, he refused to quit. More evidence, my mother said, that he didn’t have a care, though sometimes she provided a denouement to his smoking tale in the form of a nurse who showed him an x-ray of blackened lungs. The next day he traded his Camels for sourballs. 

In his later years, Poppy resembled a smooth-shaven Italian Santa Claus: a prodigious belly braced by suspenders, full cheeks of baby skin and a twinkle in his cat’s eyes. He would eat a whole chicken in one sitting, smiling contentedly until the cannoli platter appeared, when he would announce he had “just enough room for dessert” and request two tablets of saccharin for his coffee.  

        Another picture, imprisoned in a Gimbel’s shopping bag at my mother’s house, once told a story similar to my sepia angel’s. I had not seen this picture in over a decade, but last month I rediscovered it during a search for the powder blue Dearfoam slippers my mother had bought but could not find. There’s a horse in this one, too, but it’s a pony, and a tiny girl, banana curls framing her face, sits upon its back, beaming. I recognize her, but I need my mother to tell me. I tell myself that if she can identify the girl, she will be more whole than not, more present than gone. If she passes the quiz, I tell myself, she will be happy and I am doing the right thing leaving her in this house with the wobbling toilet bowl and the crumbling roof, where she wants to be, with the mice and her memories.

When she sees the picture, my mother pipes up, “What a day that was. Aunt Aida was giving birth to Tony. They wanted to get me out of the house, so Grandpa brought me to Prospect Park. Just the two of us. We ate charlotte russe.” She smiles, satisfied with the joy that only the deep past now brings. She knows this story, where it will go, who the heroes will be, how it will end. It is all hers.

“I was so excited. I had never been on a pony. Pop spent a week’s salary to have my picture taken. Grandma almost killed him.”  I imagine my grandmother, renowned for her ability to cut any size cake into enough slices for seventeen people, asking her husband how they would pay their bills. On this particular day, I do not want to go there with my mother, so I return to the photo that I have studied on and off for the last forty years, hoping that it will save me, save us from that dark alley.

“Mom, what is that?” I ask, pointing to her girl self.

“That was my party dress. Grandma made it for me. I was so proud. It was yellow and edged in lace, and she did my hair. Those were the first pair of shoes I got that hadn’t been handed down from Aunt Susie. I loved those shoes.”

 “No, not the dress,” I say. “Over there, down by the saddle.”

She reaches for the magnifying glass and squints. There, where the back of my mother’s frilly dress meets the worn saddle, is a man’s roughened thumb, the sole trace of a vigilant father in heroic contortion to avoid the camera.

“Is that Poppy’s hand?”

My mother presses the photo close to her face. “Oh yes. That’s right. Pop was holding me up. He was absolutely terrified that I was going to fall off.”

Her memory belly full of sweet sponge and raspberry, she smiles. “I remember now.”

Lisa Lebduska teaches writing and directs the college writing program at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where her students bring lives to words. She has published work in such journals as Narrative, 4’33” and Writing on the Edge. With her husband, she grows prodigious imaginary vegetables for neighborhood chipmunks and deer, with the hope that one day they will stop settling for real-life seedlings and sprouts and she will be able to enjoy the first true tomato of her adult life.

Bliss

by Tom Liskey

When I was ten we lived in a narrow two-story clapboard that had been converted from a funeral home into low-rent housing. The place was a real dump. But there had been no single stroke of bad luck that drove us to this place. It was just the unforgiving calculus of divorce and bankruptcy.

The house's owners got out of the funeral business shortly before they retired. That happened at a time when more modern, larger establishments with plenty of room for parking were being built close to the highway. They didn’t put much money into the conversion and the work that was done was shoddy. But we got a good deal and leased the bottom floor. There was only one room there—and it was mine. My mother thought a growing boy needed some privacy.

The place must have been something grand in its heyday when this Mississippi River town was booming with commerce and industry. By the time we moved in, lead mining and rock quarrying had gone bust. The house, like our town, had fallen on hard times. The once ornate woodwork of the eaves had gaps in them, each empty space looking like a busted-out tooth. An iron smelter was only a few blocks away and the greasy sheen of smokestack grime covered the gable windows.

The owners had sealed the cellar off in my bedroom during the conversion from funeral home to rental unit with a wooden door. At night that six paneled door loomed large and terrible in my imagination. For some reason I believed that behind the door was where the dead had been washed and dressed for their final viewing.

We only lived in the duplex for the summer and part of the fall before my mom found work in a bigger city. All we had to cook on was a hotplate. So we only ate stuff like hamburgers, fried baloney, and hotdogs. Junk food. We didn’t have a fridge either and we kept quarts of milk in an ice cooler.

Before we moved into the duplex we had lived in a pretty little house near a lake beyond the town limits. Our neighbors—two elderly brothers who ran a small fishing camp on its banks—wore ironed overalls and trucker caps pulled low over their eyes.

A hand-painted sign on the side of the road near their property promised pristine waters brimming with overstocked bass just down the bend. But the brothers’ mucky water hole was barely a pond. They charged you by the pound if you caught anything. I went fishing there a couple of times, but all I remember getting was piddly looking perch.

We lost the house near the lake after my mom divorced my stepdad, a man from Georgia. She first met him when he called to offer his condolences when my dad died when I was five. He said he read about his death in the local obituary. That man from Georgia could spin a good yarn. The story he told her was that he knew my dad from his time working on a river tug. My mom and the man from Georgia only spoke a few times on the phone, but he swept her off her feet.

The first time I saw him he was clean shaven with a splash of cologne on his cheek. When he spoke, he always seemed to have a ready Bible verse on the tip of his tongue. The kind of things a churchgoing woman like my mother looked for in a suitor.

After a short courtship they married. But the man from Georgia started drinking again after the wedding. Back in the day in Missouri you called people like him ‘a six-pack charlie’ or ‘bottle-jockey.’ The thing was the man from Georgia couldn’t handle his liquor. He'd hit mom when he was drunk.

The last time I saw him was the year of the divorce. We heard he had been fired from the smelter and was living in a rooming house in town. But my stepdad was friends with a dispatcher and was hired on as a bus driver for the school district. He didn’t work my bus route, but I saw him at school once. He was eating in the cafeteria with some of the other drivers and janitors.

I got permission from a teacher and went to speak to him. When he saw me he didn't say a word. He just nodded for me to sit down. He had the red, puffy eyes of a man still nursing a hangover. Maybe the others didn't notice it, but I did.

We were both uncomfortable and I regretted approaching him. The strained father-and-son pretense had already crumbled. He asked about my mom as he slowly picked at his school lunch, looking past me most of the time. I didn’t tell him we had lost the house by the bass pond or that we were living in a rundown funeral home.

He kind of snickered when I mentioned that she had a new job. I felt heated because of it. When it was time for me to go back to my class, he slid two quarters across the tabletop to me. It was his change left over from lunch. The meal cost school workers $1.50.

“Get yourself a haircut.”

That’s all he said. I pocketed the coins.

I wanted that money to buy candy. I had a terrible sweet tooth back then. That’s just what I did. It was still hot for September and the chocolate melted on my tongue, but then turned sour in my stomach. I leaned against the building and barfed the chocolate up. I bawled my eyes out with snot and thin chocolaty streams of vomit running down my chin. I felt sick because I took those two coins from the man who had ruined us, from the man who broke my mother's heart.

My mom never found out about my taking the money, and I doubt she would have cared even if she had known. She would have probably made a joke about them being wooden nickels.

I almost told her once, about using the coins to buy candy that made me sick, but I never did. She’s dead now. She died shortly after my daughter was born. But something did happen to me the night I took the coins. I stopped being afraid of what was on the other side of the cellar door. It just didn’t scare me anymore.

Tom Darin Liskey lives in Texas but spent nearly a decade in Latin America.

Gentleman Farmer

by Bill Vernon

Mr. Francis Eustis immediately grabbed my interest when Larry Schmidt introduced himself by saying that his family had just moved onto one of three contiguous farms that Mr. Eustis had bought and joined together. The man himself lived elsewhere, in Indian Hill, an affluent Cincinnati suburb. “Farming’s just a hobby to him. He’s a millionaire."

I pictured a man with dollar bills hanging from his pockets. "I've never met a millionaire."

"Oh, he's pretty much like everyone else. My father managed a herd of Jerseys in Iowa and Mr. Eustis brought him here. They met at a cow auction. See, we raise Jerseys, which give the richest milk of all cows. Mr. Eustis is from New Jersey where his mother owned a Jersey-breeding farm so some of our cows are from there.”

“He raises Jerseys and he comes from New Jersey?”

“Yeah, weird, huh? Mr. Eustis put in the most modern equipment. He uses science in our operation."

Larry seemed proud, and Mr. Eustis sounded intriguing. He was not only rich enough to do what he wanted, but knowledgeable enough to employ modern agricultural principles. Seeing the place when Larry invited me to his house reinforced these thoughts. The big barnyard was impressive. Mr. Eustis had spared no expense. The board fence along the driveway and road and the four large buildings around the barnyard, except for red trimming, were pristine white. The Schmidts' house, set off behind a few trees, struck me too. It was ornate for a farmhouse, almost fancy, a reddish purple brick.

Inside this house was another surprise. The furnishings were comfortable but ordinary things the Schmidts had trucked in, except for two things on the fireplace mantel. Larry said, “Mr. Eustis made those.” Jersey cows, so realistic they seemed about to bellow standing in my hands. Mr. Eustis was also an artist, and from what I could see, a good one. What kind of man bought farms and cows, insisted on using the latest scientific equipment and knowledge, and hired people to do the work while he sculpted models of the animals?

I wasn't obsessed with the question, but for two years I did periodically sniff around to learn more. I rode horses with Larry at the farm, heard a bit more about the man, and alone occasionally walked the fence line of the farm from the town side, hunting in rabbit season, hiking for exercise and adventure, studying from a distance the farm buildings, fields and cows as if they might reveal more about Mr. Eustis. Then, at a goodbye reception for the Schmidts, Larry introduced me to the man, remarking that I was virtually a farm boy myself. I'd baled hay the past two summers at various farms. "Part-time," I said. "I'll work full-time next year during high school vacation."

It was a quick conversation, with Mr. Eustis offering me a full-time job next summer. My heart quickened at the idea. This man was an innovator, an artist, a rich man. I could get to know him and earn full-time pay at the same time. I accepted and we settled on the particulars.

After nearly a year of anticipation, my first dawn of helping to milk Eustis Jerseys came, and my interest in Mr. Eustis immediately increased. That morning he was alongside me on wagons stacking bales of hay in hot, humid weather. In the afternoon, enjoying a cool breeze during a break, he looked at me and said, "Bill, this work is good for your soul. It may not be clean work, but it's by God honest and straight forward. I like it. Baling's my exercise." Baling hay was exercise? Farm animals were subjects for art? He didn't have to work but he did?

I watched the man closely, trying to figure him out. He seemed all-business, consulting daily with the employees who lived on his farm, my immediate bosses, Merle, the Schmidts' replacement, and Wayne. Upon Mr. Eustis' arrival, the three would schedule jobs for that day and if necessary decide future things like how stock was to be treated, calves reared and sold, and dry cows bred. I caught snippets of their conversations by standing close or passing nearby on a chore. Within two weeks I realized that he related to people in a very defined manner. Always, the two employees, as well as outside experts who showed up, like veterinarians, spoke seriously with Mr. Eustis, listened intently, then gave way to his judgments. They may not have kowtowed, if you'll forgive the pun, but I imagined their foreheads would have touched the ground at his feet posthaste if he'd pressured them.

He simply assumed command, and of course we all deferred to Mr. Eustis because of his position as our employer. But there was more. His eastern accent and manner of speech, which was more formal than ours, set him off as well. Mr. Eustis was an outsider, and perhaps because of this we all talked about him behind his back, often with a tinge of sarcasm inspired by envy. When I caught myself doing it, or listened to the others go on, I felt oddly sorry for the rich man because he didn't fit in very well on a personal level with us.

Another reason for my empathy may have been that he treated me and Jim, my neighbor friend on the baling crew, with greater warmth than he showed his other employees, as if our backgrounds were similar to his own. Alone with us, he inquired about our family and our plans after high school, and he several times urged Jim and me to attend college. "You don't want to end up baling hay or shoveling cow shit all your lives."

"You bale hay yourself," I said, but I knew what he meant. He was one of the few adults, aside from my mother, who urged me to go to college and prepare for the future.

He further separated himself from everyone else by driving his car into the fields instead of riding a wagon with us. He always rode there alone except for the time he invited Jim and me to ride with him, first making us spread newspaper sections to sit on so our clothes wouldn't stain the upholstery. This was his new baby, after all, a Chrysler, and he proceeded to show off its main feature, which had him excited: Powerflite or Torqueflite, an innovative gear-shifting system. "Only push button car on the market," he bragged, ignoring the Edsel, whose advertising mentioned having it. He seemed to like the car's uniqueness as well as his own for possessing it. Jim and I had newly acquired driver's licenses, which had sparked a dreamy interest in automobiles, so we stared at the little square of buttons (in what he called a pod on the dashboard) and compared its shiny array to the drab, standard gear shifts in our parents' cars. "Neat," we said, unable to carry the conversation into any depth.

After his initial spiel of self-congratulations, Mr. Eustis settled into silence, concentrating on avoiding ruts in the path we were taking. As we exited the shiny car—this was just after lunch—Mr. Eustis opened the trunk, bent over to retrieve shoes from it, raised up and passed gas loudly. Jim and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Mr. Eustis put his hands on his hips. "God damn it, boys, can't a man fart in peace?" This comment increased the volume of our laughter, at which Mr. Eustis smiled and shook his head. He sat back against his rear bumper, dropped a shiny brown loafer off one foot, revealing skin tight, thin white socks beneath, and pulled on a scuffed black leather tie shoe.

I studied Mr. Eustis like that, as if what he wore or drove might show what kind of person he was. Sporty when he was with his own kind of people, I guessed, noticing in his car's trunk a white shirt, fancy blazer, and sharply creased blue trousers in a plastic dry cleaners’ bag. The way I had him figured, he'd return to Cincinnati after baling and, garbed in his trunk-load of spiffy clothes, go to an expensive country club dinner.

Maybe that outfit made me notice the individuality of his baling-hay attire. He wore tan corduroy trousers, not the common denim trousers the rest of us wore, and the wide, straight wales of his trousers emphasized his shape. His body was angular, about five feet ten inches tall, wide shouldered with hairy arms and chest. His square face had a straight jaw, his short black hair was parted on the left side, and his black eyeglass frames held unusually thick lenses, suggesting an eye problem. His posture was so straight, sitting, standing and walking, I wondered if he had a back ailment, but that seemed unlikely because he threw bales so well. These were all clues about his nature, and my youthful nature struggled, trying to combine what I knew into a coherent pattern.

Less acceptable behavior complicated my understanding of him. Jim and I were put to work in the hay barn cleaning out stalls for two horses. Fine, but why there? There was room for more than two horses in the handier stable. These stalls were out of the way, beneath the hay barn's main floor. To reach them from the outside, you had to use back doors that opened at the bottom of the hill whose top was the barn’s main floor. A heavy wooden door on the floor of that level hid the inside steps down to these stalls. Adding to the mystery, Mr. Eustis came in as we started working, watched us throw a pitchfork of debris, then said, "Don't tell anyone about the horses we put in here. They'll be our secret. And don't take them outside unless Merle says to."

What was going on? Jim and I let Mr. Eustis walk away, then abandoned our work, hurried over to Merle and asked. Mrs. Eustis, he said, was unhappy about her husband's obsession with useless palominos and had ordered him to sell the two he'd brought to the little farm she owned near Cincinnati. He'd agreed, but instead of selling them, he planned to hide them on this farm. Jim and I went back to work smiling at the deception. We were sort of the rich man's conspirators, weren't we? There was also the thing about lying to his wife. What should I make of that?

Before the horses arrived, Mr. Eustis personally inspected the stalls and asked us to spread a thicker layer of new straw and wipe down the board enclosures. Then feeding and watering the palominos the next few days, we found him almost always leaning on a gate, feeding them apples. His interest in the horses did seem to be a quirk, and it was a hard thing to put into proper perspective.

Another complication arose three weeks after the horses' arrival. Mrs. Eustis visited the farm, saying her husband was on a business trip and she'd promised to keep an eye on his Lebanon operations. We all thought she was seeking evidence that her husband was harboring animals she didn't want. The evidence, however, eluded her because she telephoned an hour ahead to announce her visit. Merle did escort her around, but only after he'd warned us not to say anything about the palominos. Also after he’d hitched up the horse trailer to the pick-up, loaded the palominos, and transported them to the farthest-away field where he left them and the trailer.

The consequence of such deceptions quickly became evident. Merle was unhappy to be involved in the dishonesty. "That man is something," he complained, and he didn't stay much longer in Mr. Eustis' employment. That fall he moved to his own farm of 135 acres near Clarksville and expressed pleasure at severing his ties with Mr. Eustis, but he also said, "God bless him. He's loyal as an old dog and has a heart of gold. You know he loaned me money to buy this place. Basically, he's really a good man."

What stuck in Merle's craw, as Merle himself might have said, was Mr. Eustis' mockery of Merle's and his wife’s religiosity. They were serious about it and Mr. Eustis was not, as shown by his occasional jibes, particularly at our noon meals, which Merle's wife prepared and served. These lunches were often a stage for Mr. Eustis to tell a lengthy story that involved sexual innuendoes. He would laugh at his punch lines, prompting Jim and me to laugh, prompting Merle at the other end of the table to smile and nod, prompting Merle's wife to flit between kitchen and table, working herself into an objection that was never very direct. "Now, Francis, do you really think young boys should hear such things?"

Her objection would prompt a similar reply every time. "Damn right they ought to hear it, Rebecca. They're almost men. If they don't know the facts of life, they ought to. Right, boys?"

We'd nod and grin.

Rebecca's creamy neck and face would flush, she would glance at us as if in despair, then hurry into her kitchen as if for some new serving. Mr. Eustis respected and admired her though, as shown by the fact that she was the only one I ever heard address him by his first name.

The jokes from Mr. Eustis at the noon meal not only titillated but also upset me. They didn't seem appropriate in front of a woman like Rebecca, but I'd always conclude that Mr. Eustis was trying to fit in by entertaining us. However, his actions did take advantage of his employer-employee relationship with Merle. Maybe he felt guilty about that. Maybe quilt led him to loan Merle money to buy a farm.

My connection to this gentleman farmer ended in a bittersweet and odd way, adding to the complicated nature I observed in the man. Our agreement was to pay me in lump sum for the whole summer's work, and he came to my home on a Saturday to do it, having forgotten to bring his checkbook to the farm the day before. He came in our front door, met my mother, and she left us to conduct our business alone. I offered him a seat, which he refused, saying in a serious voice that he'd decided I should receive $35 not $50 per week because I'd left work early, at 4:30 P.M., one or two days each week to play baseball.

My eyes widened. "That was part of our agreement."

He pulled a checkbook from his shirt pocket. “I don't remember talking about it. Now for 10 weeks of working, my calculations make your pay 350 dollars. Right?”

I was about to object when Mom stormed into the living room with a broom in both hands. She'd been in the kitchen, supposedly sweeping the floor but in fact listening. Mr. Eustis had pen poised over his checkbook when she said, "What kind of man are you, trying to cheat a child out of a few dollars? Did you agree to pay him 50 dollars a week?"

"Well, yes, but...."

"Then you owe Bill exactly five hundred dollars, as agreed." She shook the broom to emphasize the amount.

He put pen to checkbook, gave me the check, shook my right hand, thanked me, and left.

As the sound of his footsteps faded along our walkway, confusion surged through me. Mom said, "Bill, you have to develop a backbone and stand up for yourself. Otherwise people will take advantage of you. I won't always be here, you know. You'd better get some gumption."

"Gumption's got nothing to do with it." I hated severing ties with Mr. Eustis that way. I was sure I’d explained to him about getting off early to play ball. He’d probably forgotten that detail in our discussion. I also didn’t believe he was trying to cheat me. More likely he was trying to be fair as he saw it. Heck, he might have been trying to teach me a lesson in business. Then again, however, so was Mom.

There was a lot more to the man than I experienced, of course, but I learned no more about him until the Cincinnati Enquirer's August 5, 1996, obituary. Mr. Eustis died 84 years old. He'd been only 46 years old when I'd known him, the age of my father at his death, relatively young although at the time I'd thought of them both as old. He'd graduated from "the Yale School of Fine Arts" and "in the early 1960s" begun "his art career." That was a few years after I'd seen two of his early animal studies. Since those days, his art had become "renowned worldwide," with "a permanent exhibit" of his "finely detailed sculptures...on display in the Netherlands," the Cincinnati Zoo, which houses his sculpture of its "famous gorilla King Tut," and Lexington's International Museum of the Horse at the Kentucky Horse Park, which maintains the Francis Eustis Gallery and "features an exhibit of one of his favorite breeds, the draft horse."

My observations of Mr. Eustis lasted a short part of one summer and involved personal contact with him only at work. But he was a father-figure to me. He had flaws, yes, everyone has flaws. His may have included an aloofness that allowed him to dominate, impose on and even belittle others in an offhanded way. However, these traits seemed minor. His positive side seemed much more important. Mr. Eustis modeled for me several admirable qualities. He was good hearted, generous, talented, aware of the beauty in ordinary things, hardworking, self-directed, and certainly rich in many ways other than money.

The Francis Eustis Gallery online displays the wide range of Francis Eustis art.

"Clydesdale" by Francis W. Eustis

Bill Vernon

Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, and then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folkdances. Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town in 2005, and his poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Recent publications include two other Gentleman Farmer stories at The Circle Review and Quarterlife Quarterly.