Fragile Landscapes

by Gillian Haines

“The war made us all sick fucks.” Wulf rubbed his shaven head and revealed a shrapnel wound that skipped and puckered along the pale underside of his right arm. “I’m glad it’s starting to come out. You should check out the articles I’ve been reading. One in Men’s Health describes this soldier in Iraq. He zeros in on this kid just as the kid takes aim to kill him.” Wulf’s freckled hands grasped a phantom M16 and he mimed looking through the sights. “The soldier doesn’t miss, the kid dies, and the soldier ejaculates. He’s horrified. Ashamed. But later, he can’t climax without that image.”

Wulf dropped his voice to a tired whisper. “It’s not just that. There’s two things going on. National Geographic says soldiers are brain-damaged by their training even before they get to war. Every time something goes off, you lose something. You can feel it!” he said, placing his hands on his ribs. “Those I.E.D. blasts! After every battle, blood comes out your ears, nose, and throat. How can we not be fucked up?”

He looked at me without blinking for a long time, and I nodded. He’d been issued prison coveralls too small for his bulging thighs.

“I’ll read them,” I promised.

Eight years ago, when I first volunteered to visit four inmates, I wasn’t sure why I felt such a tremendous pull toward confined men when I was already giving too much to a husband who was trapped in a different type of ruin. I didn’t think it was because I grew up in a country founded by convicts, or even because the government had hung my great uncle for setting fire to a hayrick. Only now can I admit that suffering had isolated me and I thought I could understand the loneliness of prison.

I sighed. I hated that plain white, windowless visiting room. Above us, a florescent light buzzed and flickered. Those lights that cast no shadows seemed to undress us. “I’m so sorry. I understand your disgust for people who don’t want to know about what soldiers have to do.”

He nodded.

“You say were a good soldier and you were promoted to Sergeant. What made you good?”

“The ability to keep calm in chaos—the worse it gets, the more focused I become. I kept my team together and did the job, whatever the goals.”

“That steadiness in a storm, I’m like that, too. When my husband was in the ER, the family in the room next door shrieked hysterically. They carried on so much, the doctor threw them out. In that instant, I knew the icy calmness I felt was essential.”

John, my husband of twenty years, had lost a fifth of his brain to a stroke on the day we moved to Tucson, ten years prior. He’d been a genius. He still scored in the ninety-ninth percentile for some cognitive tasks but he scored in the first for quite a few others. His fertile mind had been excavated and I was still seeking him in jagged crevices. Peering into sinkholes. Truth be told, I was looking for myself in those same places. I left Australia to follow him and in America, I gave up a job to look after him. I’d been the wife of a charming professor but suddenly I’d not been able to leave his side. Even after he’d shrugged off paralysis and returned to academia, his disasters consumed my life: dousing bonfires he lit in the fireplace, turning off our stove’s hissing gas jets, racing across town to deliver anti-seizure meds that he’d forgotten to swallow, and shrieking as he readied to throw our daughter into the air and into the whirring blades of a ceiling fan.

Early on, I sometimes had to drag myself to prison, wrung out and depressed. But then I’d started to look forward to going. I wanted to know how the men were doing. I’d become used to bearing the weight of their conversations. At some level, I knew they made me stronger. I listened with my ear and my heart and I forgot myself. The prisoners’ complications made mine simpler. By making space in my mind for their voices, I re-set my attention away from the hurried world where I lived—a world that judged before a thought had been completed—to a place of receptivity and openness, where two people paced their breath and pulse. 

 I gazed at Wulf, relaxing in his seat while I perched on the edge of mine, despite an ache in my lower spine. There were no tables. Just four mandated feet of space between our knees. Although Wulf took his ease against the backrest, I had no doubt of his complete attention. He ignored the many distractions across the aisle—shapely ankles in strappy red shoes, lustrous brown hair pinned with a yellow flower, bright swirls on a floral dress—distractions he must have hungered for. Such intense focus was rare, even on the outside.  

“Keeping your men together must’ve been a challenge. Some must have been terrified.”

 “They watch. They take their cues from you. You have to tell them it’s all right, even if it’s not.”

I nodded. When my husband’s body had first writhed as though captured by an invisible predator intent on breaking his neck, I’d squeezed my eight-year-old daughter’s hand. John’s rehab hospital had trained me for that moment so I was able to say, “It’s a seizure. Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’ll just be a few minutes and Dad will be okay.” She had stared at me, wide-eyed and unblinking.

“Were you scared?” I asked Wulf.

“No. I trained for it all my life.”

“But at first. You couldn’t have imagined what it was really like. Surely, then.”

“Maybe. But your training takes over.” He laughed. “It doesn’t prepare you for the stench. Dead people stink! Everyone releases liquid shit when they die.”

Across the aisle, a baby wailed and a prisoner placed it over his broad shoulder. It quieted immediately, hanging like a limp comma in a pale blue onesie.

 Wulf snorted. “The Hajjis stink when they’re alive. Urgh! Sweat and piss, they don’t wash much.”

I didn’t react when he bad-mouthed his enemy. It was probably essential if you were going to kill someone. And I didn’t want to silence him.

“When you survive a battle, every cell feels alive. It’s a rush! Sexual arousal is common.” His eyes never left my face, gauging my reaction.

I nodded soberly.

“Rape happens every day. It’s not the rare thing the news makes out. Rape and killing. The Hajjis hate us and we hate them. You get to a stage where killing means nothing.”

With all my heart, I hoped this man I cared for was a soldier who had never raped. Maybe I was a coward but I never asked. In prison, the fortress of boundaries, I drew a line I never crossed: only ask when you can deal with the answer.

But without realizing, I crossed that line. I asked Wulf why he was sent to that prison, a facility that specialized in sex-offenders, snitches, ex-gang members and the chronically ill. I thought his war wounds had been the ticket.

His handsome face went wooden. Wulf always looks me in the eye but for a long moment he couldn’t. Someone thumped the vending machine. The microwave pinged and the smell of bacon disturbed the layered flavors in the air: a woman’s floral scent and the reek of a full diaper.

Wulf looked back at me and raised his chin. “Conspiracy to transport a minor over state lines for unlawful sexual purposes.”

I felt like I’d trodden on a landmine. His forty-five-year sentence was so long I’d wrongly assumed he’d done something traitorous. In all the years I’d known him, he never flinched at my probing questions and was prepared to show himself in unflattering ways. We’d talked about sex and lovers using anatomical terminology, not interested in salacious details but curious about the rules of intimacy, the accommodations and the friction. I never detected an unhealthy interest. When he said his cellie was a gunner, a prisoner who masturbates in public, Wulf was so indignant. He said he wouldn’t live with a guy who jerked off where people could see and he forced the guy to stop. I’d believed that meant Wulf wasn’t a sex-offender.

I don’t know how I replied to Wulf’s tense recital of his crime. Somehow I continued the conversation but afterward, I didn’t remember a single thing. I kept my appointments to visit other inmates but was ensnared by a numbing fog. I know I laughed with them but the only thing I remember is that the Kung Fu shoes had gone. Prisoners now wore pale grey Crocs. I drove home troubled, feeling slightly nauseous.

I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I’m naïve. I went over all my interactions with Wulf but found nothing creepy. Quite the opposite. We had different values and disagreed about everything but he never got angry. He’d crossed boundaries I couldn’t imagine: from idealist to cynic, patriot to mercenary, protector to killer. I thought violence was a sickness and he thought it was the only way. But he protected mentally feeble inmates from prison bullies. He gave welcome packages of shower shoes, soap and deodorant to new men in his block and he told them how to survive. He gave prisoners ideas on setting up businesses and had shown the newest one how to iron tortillas to make burritos.

I shook my head. What sex crime could be so horrendous that just planning it got him forty-five years? What troubled me most were my feelings. I still cared for him, the worst kind of sex-offender: one who had hurt a child.  

Home life with a man who’d become like an autistic person had prepped me for prison. I got better at relationships with men I couldn’t fathom. And over the years, I’d already worked hard to understand rather than condemn Wulf. When I learned that he didn’t believe women belonged in the army, I was surprised. His blue eyes had shone. “I’m reading this real good book on the differences between the sexes. It supports what I’ve always thought: a division of labor makes sense. Women can’t carry the weight in my pack and every woman in the army has mental issues.”

When I challenged him, he listened good-naturedly and let me tease him about outdated attitudes. This willingness to banter made it easy to accept his sexism. But when he absorbed the racist prison code, I was dismayed.

“I’m not ignorant,” he’d said. “I’ve met two blacks in my life that I liked. I understand what you’re saying about pre-judging.” The freckled pink skin on his bald head shone as he turned to the right and then to the left. “You say this. But now I live with them, I see that. They’re noisy, they steal, and they don’t raise themselves up.”

Oh, yeah? And I guess Obama raised himself too high. But I tried to imagine what would happen to me if I were locked up in a place where fear forces you to form alliances based on color. When your life shrinks to the size of a prison bunk, it’s not just your joints that knot. Your thoughts become contorted, too.

“You give me so much trouble,” I’d said. “I keep leaving here thinking, how can I care for you? You’re sexist. You’re racist. You’re suspicious of altruism. And you believe in eugenics, for goodness sake!”

An amused expression had animated his face. “I keep telling you, you haven’t had the experiences I have.”

          “You know, that’s a bit…” I’d paused and then went for it, laughing. “It’s arrogant. I will go to my death bed believing in kindness!”

Wulf had looked at me with such a glint in his blue eyes that I thought he wanted to scratch me behind my ears. “Look, I’m glad there are people like you. It makes everything I’ve done worthwhile.” In his mind, war was worth it to protect goodness, a worn and faulty rationale for violence, but I didn’t say so.

At some unknown point, we’d shared so much of ourselves, we became friends. “You’re it,” he’d said. “I need you. I need to talk to you about what’s going on because you’re all I have. You have no idea what you do for me.” Like most prisoners’ families, Wulf’s abandoned him when he needed them the most.

Ours was a strange friendship. A friendship that would never have had a chance if we’d met outside prison. But Wulf allowed me to witness his struggle to make sense of a thwarted life, even as I fought to love a husband diminished, a man whose needs thwarted my own once-cherished hopes. Wulf helped me inhabit more of the person I wanted to become.

One day, he had exhaled loudly and looked away. “I miss fighting.”

My smile disappeared. He knew I was a peacenik. “How can you miss war? The fear, the danger? The killing?”

“If I was out today, I’d sign up in a minute! For anyone.”

“As a mercenary?”

“Yep.”

“But you have sons! How could you kill other people’s children for a cause you don’t believe in or understand?”

“You think government-sanctioned killing is more legitimate than killing for money?”

My spit had evaporated. I slumped backwards and remained there while he watched me. “With wars fought over oil, you’re right.”

He nodded quietly.

“But that doesn’t make it okay! It’s not good for your soul.”

“It happens all over the world. Right now. And I’m good at it. Look,” he regarded me intently. “I don’t take pleasure in killing. I’m not a sadist. It’s a job. And I miss it. The intensity. It’s not fear. When you know you might die today, everything becomes crystal clear. It’s powerful to be with men who are good at what they do and who have accepted death.”

Shocked and at the same time, riveted, I tried to understand. “War must heighten everything. You live in the moment. And when comrades share that profound clarity, when they share the danger, and you trust them to watch your back, it must seem like a special brotherhood. Is that what you mean?”
          I watched his eyelids open very gradually until blue eyes locked onto mine. To call it a blink would describe the action but not the duration. At the same pace, he recaptured my own eyes and held them, nodding silently.

I understood that shared adversity unites. John’s stroke had been mine, too.

But I’d always imagined that soldiers overcame a reluctance to kill for duty and patriotism. Despite knowing that career soldiers existed, it never occurred to me that combat could exhilarate.

We lionize historical warriors like Patton and Lee, although both admitted to loving war, but it’s not acceptable for contemporary soldiers to speak unashamedly about their passion for combat. While I didn’t support the war Wulf fought in, I believe we are all responsible for the roots of conflict. And we set up young soldiers for isolation. After we train them to kill and they have achieved their purpose, their experience makes them social pariahs. I decided to deal with my discomfort at Wulf’s disclosures.

“It’s rare to talk like this,” I’d said, uneasy and fascinated. “Our values are so different and you must think I’m naïve but neither of us gets angry. I get to understand you because I’m not busy defending myself.”

I drove away from prison that day past desiccated creosote and wrinkled cholla, still green but wearied by drought. Mesquites thirsted for a rain that wouldn’t come, their canopies strung on branches like limp dishrags.

At the coffee shop, I sat beside my friend, Jim. “Now I know Wulf was going to hurt a child, I’m surprised my affection hasn’t disappeared. I feel like a bad person by association.”

Jim was detective-handsome with epaulet shoulders. Wavy grey hair added gravitas but it was an infectious, good-natured smile that made my women friends swoon. Now retired, he’d once specialized in sex-crimes but today worked as a private investigator. Although he loved crime novels focused on the dark milieu of world-weary gumshoes, his own demeanor was up-beat and compassionate. In my mind, viewing others with compassion after twenty-five years on the force made him due for a medal.

We never scheduled our meetings but had hung out on a nearly daily basis at Starbucks for a decade. We hugged only on birthdays but felt comfortable enough to lapse into silence or ignore the other while we typed or texted at our shared table. We were lonely. Jim was single and looking for a partner. I shared a marriage bed with a man whose brain injury made him forget how to love me.

“What you do in prison is a good thing,” Jim said. “You won’t stop seeing Wulf?

“No. I signed up to support men who’ve done terrible things because no one is beyond redemption, no matter how long it takes. No one deserves decades behind bars without a soul to visit. I won’t stop going but it’s hard.” I shot my hands in the air. “I don’t know what Wulf was planning to do to that kid. The title of his crime rocked me but now I’ve had time to think, he could have run away with an underage girl he loved. Wrongly! Stupidly! Illegally! That would be the best scenario. But I can’t help imagining others that are lots worse. I have to find his case somehow.”

“What if you find something that changes how you see him?”

“I know. But I’m already upset. I have to know the details and then I’ll settle it in my mind.” I sighed. “It’s stupid, really. I knew about this possibility from day one.”

“You’ll be all right.”

But I wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I’d cracked Pandora’s Box and burned to peer inside. Disgusted, I told myself that my job was to support Wulf while he endured prison, not to satisfy voyeuristic curiosity. But for peace of mind, I wanted to know the worst.

On my next visit, Wulf walked toward me with an easy grace born of fitness, holding his sculpted, bald head at a proud tilt, allowing his indigoed arms to swing loosely.

Before he even sat down, I blurted, “I can’t stop thinking about your crime. It’s messing with me. What happened?”

“I was back from Iraq doing this woman. She was fucking with her kid.”

“Abusing? Sex?”

Wulf nodded, pressing his lips together until they whitened.

“Why would you want a relationship with someone who did that?”

          “I was fucked up. I knew I wasn’t coping and had signed up for another tour. I didn’t belong here anymore. War was the only thing I understood.” He looked away. “I knew the woman was doing it. Their interactions were off. But it was none of my business.”

My stomach plummeted.

The skin on his face stretched tight over chiseled bones, as taut as I felt he was stretching our friendship. “Anyway, she didn’t have a car and asked for a ride. I dropped her and the kid off someplace.”

“Across state lines?”

“I lived five minutes from the border.”

“She made the trip to hurt her boy?”

“I didn’t know. Didn’t care, either.”

My mind went round and round. He’s a dad. How could he ignore an abused kid? I ached for that trapped child. It hurt to imagine a woman so damaged that she would inflict such pain. And I thought war had loosened Wulf’s grip on his soul.

As soon as I got home, I turned on my computer. The online documents I found said Wulf urged the woman to have intercourse and oral sex with her ten-year-old son while Wulf took photos. I slammed my computer shut and cried.

The tears dried but left behind an ache in my chest that made me want to run. I didn’t want to know more but I couldn’t not know, either. With my hand still over my mouth, I re-opened my laptop. I wanted to read the case transcript but could only find a decision denying Wulf’s appeal: a brief summary of the case. But I did learn that soldiers returning from combat in Iraq commit more violent and sexual crimes than their civilian counterparts. After the slaughter of war, I could imagine a heightened tendency to explode, to slash, and to screw. I could understand attempts to replicate combat’s adrenaline high when life at home seemed pedestrian and trivial. But the quiet perversion required to photograph a mother opening her legs for her boy’s virginity was something else entirely.

I dreaded my next prison visit. But when I got there, Wulf talked about his boys and I was able to cope.

“I call every night but they haven’t answered for six months.” Relaxing, he stretched his feet forward. He’d been issued a torn Croc shoe. “It used to amaze me how much Cliff remembered. He was only six when I fell. But if I was home, he was with me.” He smiled. “If I worked on the car, he was beside me. If I hung out with my guys, he was there.”

Tenderness washed his face. “When I came home injured from Iraq, I still had the bloody field splint on. I was helicoptered to the Green Zone and then to Germany but decided to come Stateside for surgery. I came through the airport doors leaning on crutches, and his little face fell. I threw my crutches down and called him over. I picked him up and he pressed his face in my shoulder.” Wulf’s arms moved to cradle the memory of his son and he laughed. “It hurt so bad! I was biting my lip so he couldn’t hear me crying. My dad came over and I had to lean on him. But I kept saying to Cliff, ‘It’s okay.’”

For six years, Wulf wore a beard that kinked its way to his chest, looking like it had been steeped in blood. But one day, he entered the visiting room with a neatly trimmed goatee. There was stubble on his head, too. He’d ditched that menacing prison style: bald and bearded.

“I like it.”

          “It’s a very pretty red,” he ran his hands over his hair.

The color was beautiful but I stared, checking my laughter, searching for a hint of self-ridicule. Surprisingly, there was none and I chuckled. “Even if you say so yourself!”

The room was full and noisy. Groups of loud visitors sat on either side of us and I jerked the row of connected seats forward. Two seconds later, an officer leaned over me. “Move it back!”

Wulf caught my eyes, twisting his lips together, as if saying, Welcome to my world. Then his handsome freckled face abruptly lost its vigor and his chest heaved. “I don’t feel like I’ve got much to offer. Life doesn’t change in here. I was listening to this guy tell his story; I’ve heard it at least six times before and I started thinking, ‘Do I bore her?’”

“No! We talk about so many things. Those conversations we always come back to are contentious and fascinating. You’ve helped me learn things that are important to me.” I shrugged, embarrassed. “I only knew it in theory before but friendship can flourish even when values don’t coincide. I’ve learned to suspend judgment in favor of curiosity and wonder.” I shrugged, embarrassed again.

But he nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t feel like I’m an asset anymore.”

“You are to me. You’re a window to worlds I don’t know. War, the military, prison, your peccadilloes. I don’t know anyone else who can disagree so adamantly without getting angry.”

He raised his eyes and sat straighter. “It’s true, contention is interesting. I like hearing different views in case there’s something I haven’t considered.”

He held my gaze for a long time. Then he whispered, “I just paid fifteen hundred dollars to a lawyer to review my case.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t do it.”

Connected by his silent stare, I regarded him closely. Strung about his neck, in place of a crucifix, hung a miniature axe. He was the most fascinating man I visited but he challenged me constantly. His laughter, his tenderness and his roving intelligence had not lulled and blinded me to the cut of his blade.

“Why didn’t you ever say?”

“Ambiguity matters. Character shows.”

I liked that he’d never tried to persuade me, that instead, he thought I’d work it out.

 “You took a plea bargain. You pled guilty.”

“I did transport the kid. But no one took photos. If there were photos, they would have charged me with that. They charged me with conspiracy because there was no evidence. His mother made it up to get me involved and to bargain for a lower sentence for herself.”

“Did you witness the acts?”

“No. But I knew something was up.”

I put both hands on my forehead. “My head’s reeling. I can’t process it, yet. You’re innocent! God, to go from the intensity of war to a cell, you must have been climbing the walls.”

“No. I was in shock. It was so far out in left field, I was stunned.”

I believe him. Oh, you’re so naïve. Why would you believe a felon? All you have is his word.

Almost as soon as those thoughts arrived, I didn’t believe them. In all our time together Wulf had displayed startling honesty and the courage to show himself even when he knew I might not approve. My decision to accept his innocence wasn’t necessary to avoid internal discomfort. When I thought him guilty, I learned to accept it and feel comfortable that I cared for him, still.

Eighteen months later, his lawyer said that Wulf had been imprisoned illegally and that he would fight for Wulf’s release. But such legal battles take time and Wulf and I will continue our conversations in prison for many years.

Conversations forge a path to those in-between places, like marshes that are neither sea nor land. Oozing, slimy places where missteps are fraught. Those fragile landscapes are disappearing because we want to drain them and fill them with rubble. But marshes are rich with tasseled reeds and the dense Belgian lace of interwoven roots. Wulf was not my guide when we explored there, nor I his, but you can’t go there alone.

Gillian Haines lives in Tucson’s desert where she loves hummingbirds and saguaros. For the past eight years, she has volunteered to visit four men in maximum-security prison because they only know the desert’s thirst. Her work has been published or accepted for upcoming publication in The Ilanot Review, Gravel Literary Magazine, Rain Shadow Review, Stories from the Other Side 6^th edition, and an as yet untitled Punctum anthology. She is writing a memoir about her prison experiences.

Pictures

by Jean Berrett

The walls had always hung heavy with pictures, gilt‑framed, dark and dimming, holding fiercely onto what was already lost. Old pictures of Baltimore, the streets of cobblestone and white scrubbed concrete steps in front of the row houses like nuns waiting for supper.

In some of the photos, the people stood tall in front of cardboard cutouts of mountains and lakes, infinite shades of gray. The women in corsets that propped their bosoms high up under their collarbones and the men in wide lapels with hats tipped at a devil‑may‑care angle. The photographed children looked unhappy, smiles forced over frowns or whimpers, little girls in dresses flounced and laced, row upon row, and little boys standing straight as infantry.

In one of the largest frames was a drawing of a stone cathedral, medieval‑style: two massive, ornately sculpted towers, a huge rose window in the columned belfry and three high arches that pointed to God, each topped with its bleeding stone crucified Christ above the three stone entranceways.

Her husband had left her for another woman twenty‑five years younger than both of them. In the long year following divorce, those pictures still hung from the rosy wall‑papered walls, gray and gilded and moldering green. One day I remarked that her house still looked like a parsonage (the husband had been a minister). Two days later, when I stopped by, the walls were almost bare. Where the pictures had been, pale squares and rectangles on the faded clustering roses marked their absences.

All the pictures were gone but one, a two foot by three foot lithograph in a carved oak frame, which surrounded an inner frame of tarnished metal crosshatched in gold and black. Under the aged glass of the frame was Uncle Joe, half‑bald with a thick but neatly‑trimmed mustache curling over his upper lip and around the corners of his unsmiling mouth. Everything, even his white man's face, had faded to shades of tepid brown. He too wore a wide lapelled suit and a stiff white shirt with the collar pressed down around a small triangular cravat. The look on his face not sad but intent, as if he studied the scene before him and seemed to be saying to all who looked, "You whose hearts still beat, whose blood pumps into your brains and behind your eyes so that you can see what I cannot, you, who believe somehow that I watch your strange, strange lives from behind these ink‑print eyes. I am bones at most by now, my dear. But you know, I lived. My blood too pumped through muscles and brain and limbs as my own inconceivably magic heart did its inexplicable dance for a while.” Almost a kindness in Uncle Joe's eyes. His picture remained alone on the walls.

The following week, new pictures hung across from Uncle Joe. Pictures which she herself had painted during those long years of marriage. Pictures selected from those kept hidden behind an ancient wood desk, canvases unframed and stuffed in a narrow slot against that wall where bookshelves filled with heavy books hung above and all the way down on both sides.

A painting of a turtle's face peeking out from under a yellow and orange and green‑streaked shell. Black eyes, one almost round and open, the other one angular, half‑closed. Two small dark holes at the snout on a face where soft‑blended reds and blues and violets made a mixing of sundown above the animal's two front claws. The fine‑brushed outline of those claws was filled with tiny trapezoids of brown and orange and yellow and white. Most amazing was the turtle's mouth, a line crossing the face from side to side. At the center, the line lifted slightly and wavered—a warily hopeful smile.

Above the turtle were two other canvases, both of them paintings of luminous crabs. Viewed from the top, the shells on their backs were shaded and stroked with dark and light greens and dark and light blues. The eyes protruded bright, bright red under an arc of red and blue and lavender claws balanced on the other side of the shell with orange and green and lavender flippers. The sand behind stunned to pink and orange by the sunlight that must have fallen that day on the moon‑loving tides of the Chesapeake.

Hung on a diagonal from Uncle Joe was a close‑up painting, a side view of the large blue head of a blue‑eyed bird, its orange beak open as if in song. It was thick with feathers that seemed to have burst that very moment from neck and head, and the white ring around the bright blue eye grew a luxurious circle of lashes. Out of the top of the feathery head poked three small heads of hungry nestlings with wide open mouths that had to be fed.

Three full‑grown children came that night to have dinner with their mother.

Jean Berrett has been publishing poetry since 1973, after she took the first graduate Creative Writing-Poetry course to be offered by University of Wisconsin-Madison. The instructor told her that he thought she was the best poet in the class and encouraged her to begin submitting her poems or stories to magazines. She obtained her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and taught English at College of Menomonee Nation in Wisconsin. Since she first started sharing her work professionally, she has published ninety-two poems. Other publications include translations from Virgil and Lucretius and stories and book reviews. She has two sons and seven grandchildren.

Patriarch

by Susan Moldaw

          My father was proud to be the patriarch of our family of four—my mother, my sister, and myself. When he was eighty and his cancer was diagnosed, it was a surprise, though I knew he would beat it.

          I sometimes drove him to the cancer center for treatments. He always walked in, unlike other patients, who came by wheelchair.

          One day, nine months after his diagnosis, my father finally requested a wheelchair when we got to the hospital. That morning, he asked his radiation oncologist how much longer he would live. “Five years?” he asked. Reluctantly, the oncologist said that his cancer was fatal, and would probably kill him within the year. My father’s face fell. I felt my heart drop, seeing his disappointment. Besides—my father was invincible. He couldn’t die. The oncologist didn’t say what the primary cancer doctor gently told me, later, in the brightly lit hallway outside the examining room—that my father had only a few months. Her compassion let loose my fear and sadness. My eyes widened; tears pooled. She gave me a heartfelt hug.

         

The author and her father

My father and I slowly drove home. Neither of us spoke. He winced with every bump in the road. After I helped him out of the car and we walked what felt like an interminable distance to the front door, he put his arm around my shoulder. I felt his arm’s weight and the welcome burden of his need as I helped him navigate the threshold, cross the hall, and get into bed. That was the first time, and the last, that he ever leaned on me. When I was young—and older too—I’d leaned on him, and wept—at times—into his kind, capacious chest.

Susan Moldaw works as a chaplain in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine, Lilith, Literary Mama, Narrative, and other publications.

Unhitching

by Jason Bruner

It isn’t that faith doesn’t exist for me now; it’s just that most of it was left behind in the places I tried to take it.  

By age ten, my select cadre of heroes was decidedly masculine and eclectic: Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo from Star Wars, Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves, and Jim Elliot, an American missionary who was killed in a South American rain forest. I was so struck by the story of Jim Elliot that I wrote a fifth grade book report on a devotional account of his short life. I opened my report with a quotation evocative enough to lodge itself firmly in my young psyche: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” I admired, even envied, his clarity and conviction.

Jim Elliot, a Wheaton graduate with the distinctive wholesomeness of mid-century Americana, traveled to the Ecuadorian jungle in the mid-1950s, along with four other young white evangelical missionaries. One of them, a prodigious pilot, managed to land a plane on the sandy bank of a meandering river in an attempt to reach the “Auca Indians” (most modern anthropologists refer to them as the Huaorani). Shortly after landing, they were stabbed with spears, making Elliot in particular a household name among American evangelicals. Not technically a saint, Elliot came as close as we had to sainthood and was welcomed into the pantheon of White Missionary Heroes.

The White Missionary Hero had to forego the comforts of Western civilization and brave the forces of darkness in order to bring dark-skinned people the Word of God. This was the duty of the true Christian—the one who was really “on fire”: to sacrifice his life to bring light to the darkness. This was a faith and a masculinity defined by atonement, measured by sacrifice. Dating, sports, and “secular” music were steps along the way to being speared in a jungle.  

I could be that bold. Or, at least, I should. I would give it a shot.  

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Gabi was 7 and lived in a Mexican border town. She was smart and somehow quietly effusive and, as I was soon to discover, creative. I’d come with a church group to bring the Good News to Mexico, but I’d run out of things to say, and my silence reflected just how little I knew of her world.

Gabi was frequently by my side for the few days we were there, even when we had nothing to talk about. We sat on a rough pew that wobbled on an uneven concrete floor. To break the uncomfortable silence, I asked Gabi about her favorite Bible story. We were leading a Vacation Bible School program at the church in her barrio, after all. 

She paused for a few seconds and then launched into an animated telling of her favorite parable: “Habia una vez…” (Once upon a time…)

She had different voices ready for each of the characters, which changed with her posture as the drama unfolded. I got a little lost, more because of my limited horizons than the storyteller’s skill.

As a teenager, I had a pretty encyclical knowledge of the Bible, but I was having trouble placing this one. She was talking a lot about animals. Noah and the flood? I kept hearing tortuga. And conejo. They were … racing? And the conejo was … having lunch with a friend?

To this day, Gabi gave what is easily the best telling of the tortoise and the hare that I’ve ever heard.

Well, she is probably from a Catholic family, I thought at the time. I bet they don’t even read the Bible.

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A few years later, I sat on the makeshift second deck of a motorized canoe, floating in the middle of the Milky Way. The Amazon was so wide and still that the white heavenly dust stopped only briefly at the thin forest horizon before circling back underneath us to be churned up by the outboard motor. This ring lit our way hour after hour after hour.

We were a few days’ travel from electricity, and our tiny engine was determined to push us through the humid darkness that kept everything else in its place. As missionaries, we came to tell these people how to get out of the darkness—from the things that held them there—and move into the light.

We had no idea where we were.

Back in Georgia, our mission had been clear. We felt a calling to be missionaries, a calling to the Amazon. We were placed with a team and sent through training where we learned trust falls and how to walk through obstacle courses when muddy. One of the leaders, a preacher, with his impassioned face clay-red, went hoarse yelling about how, as Christians, we needed to be like “a big Nalgene water bottle that splashed water on everyone when it was shaken.” The love of Jesus sprinkled upon the heathens.

They said that the Amazon would be an adventure in testing our faith. An adventure in bringing light to a dark place.

Or, maybe, just an adventure.

The thin canopy of the horizon grew thicker as the black Amazonian lake slowly narrowed itself into a serpentine tributary, the jungle increasingly interrupting the starry ring.

“Get your bags together. We’re almost there,” called a voice near the motor. We brought a lot of stuff.

I looked up as we came around a final bend in the river and saw a new light, then another, then a whole line of lights, flickering along the river. Not the clear white of the Milky Way but the soft dancing yellow of candles in glassless windows, moving with the silent current, welcoming the Americanos.

As I watched the candlelit shore, I drank from my Nalgene bottle, filled with iodine-infused river water. What did I really have to “shake out” onto these people—the Uraina? I had nothing to bring. Light was already here, reflected in the quiet, eternal darkness of their own water.

I realized they didn’t need a white missionary hero. The sacrifices I’d made—adopting a new diet, enduring the heat, braving the piranhas—only measured my faith; they didn’t impart it. So I went home to Georgia.

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I stood at the northwest corner of the city square in Matamoros, Mexico on Wednesday afternoon, August 4th, 2004. There was a single trashcan and a couple of benches, and that’s exactly where I left it behind: the wooden popsicle stick from the ice cream bar I had just finished, along with faith, evangelicalism, whatever else that I’d been tentatively hanging on to. But I had known this was coming.

Six weeks prior, I arrived at a mission camp in northern Mexico, a base for American evangelical youth groups to have week-long mission trips.

My first morning in Mexico, I stood at the back of the short worship and prayer service with some of the adult chaperones. The worship leader asked everyone to pair up and pray for the other person. Next to me stood a pastor from one of the church groups. We introduced ourselves and began our generic intercessions. The worship leader called for everyone’s attention, but my prayer partner had something he needed to tell me: “This hasn’t really ever happened before, but I had a vision while we were praying.”

“Oh?”

“You were in a tractor, out in a big field. You were doing work, driving the tractor through crops. But it was like there was just a wagon attached to the tractor. It was the wrong thing. So nothing was happening. You were working but with the wrong tools. I don’t know you. I don’t know what it means, but I thought I should tell you.”

  

I puzzled over the prophetic riddle as I watched the sunburnt Christian soldiers load into worn fifteen-passenger vans, which then funneled into a clunky convoy that dispatched them to their ministry sites: orphanages, churches, soccer fields. My prophet and his group left the next day. This schedule would become my rhythm for the six weeks that followed, minus additional personal prophecies.

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The Mexican border town—its poverty, heat, dust, hope, and desperation—had made him want to be more like Jesus. And that was the problem.

I watched as mud dripped off her face and onto her shirt—stains of a misguided act of faith. Her: the Mexican woman who had trouble seeing. Cataracts, probably. Her need inspired him to act. Him: an American youth pastor.

Because one time Jesus saw a blind man and made mud and smeared it on the blind man’s eyes and he could see. It was a divinely-proven formula, scientific in a way. Of course, he didn’t have the saliva of the God-Man, which was an ingredient in the biblical precedent. We mumbled prayers as he made do with a decent substitute: the purified water in his bottle. He prayed and smeared the mud over her blurred vision. He prayed again. Rinsed it off—only the mud, not the cataracts. The mud dripped onto her white blouse. We watched disappointment wash over them both, though for different reasons. His miracle was deferred; her laundry wouldn’t be.

The poverty, the desperation, the heat—they make it hard to think straight. The youth minister was bewildered. He really had expected a different outcome, and he was now left with the task of locating where the formula broke down. Was it his insufficient faith? Hers?

I don’t know if he ever considered that the problem was the premise of the encounter itself—the certainty of our goodness, of our helpfulness, of our beneficence. 

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By the end of my time in Mexico, the square in Matamoros was one of my favorite places to visit. It had abundant shade that beckoned folks to relax and rest, making it an ideal target for visiting evangelicals looking to share the Good News.

Our small group of adults broke into pairs, each with a translator, and planned to reconvene at the northwest corner of the square in ninety minutes. I went to the ice cream shop on the west side of the square, then struck up a conversation with a man whose perceptive critiques of American religion and foreign policy eventually surpassed my ability to keep up. Both of us were frustrated: me for reaching the limits of my linguistic capabilities, him for the obstinacy of yet another gringo who was defending things he didn’t understand.

The pairs of gringos returned to the corner. I asked one man what he’d done. With the confident calculus of an evangelical abroad, he responded: “We got five and it looks like that group’s working on three. How many did y’all get?”

“Zero,” I responded, and realized I was proud of it.

So I unhitched my wagon on the northwest corner of the Matamoros city square and went home.

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I never told Gabi that her story wasn’t from the Bible. Maybe she knew and was testing me—the guy who thought he knew enough to spend a week parsing right from wrong in a Mexican border town he couldn’t even find on a map. Maybe she just had a more inclusive canon.  

So I sat there, not knowing how to respond to the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Thankfully, she simply returned the question I had originally asked her. I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for “prodigal,” so I just went straight into the story, which my mediocre Spanish only allowed me to tell in a faltering present tense: “There is a father who has two sons. One son says to his father, ‘I want my all money.’ The father it gives to him and son leaves. The son goes to a country really far and now has no money and is very poor. He thinks about his house and his father. He says, ‘I go to my father because there I have food.’ The father sees his son and says, ‘This is my son. We have a party.’”  

All of the characters had the same voice in my version—a distinctly American voice. Gabi was intrigued and confused, but certainly not entertained, much less transformed. So I tried to drive home the point: “God is the father and we leave and do sins. But God loves us.” She preferred her story, perhaps realizing that I had told mine more for my sake than hers.

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Jim Elliot had gone to a far country. I imagine his father thought of his son’s missionary career in Ecuador as a sacrifice, even before he was killed. It was too far off for his father to see him again—at least for a long time. But there would be no return. His son’s blood was spilled into a remote Ecuadorian river not so different than the thin Amazonian tributary I puttered up in a motorized canoe many decades later.

But after floating in that same beautiful darkness, mine isn’t the heroic line of the sacrifice. Mine is the defeated arc of the prodigal. Somewhere between northern Mexican border towns and the Peruvian Amazon lie the certainty and clarity that propelled me to the far country in the first place. Sometimes, the better news is that the tortoise wins. Sometimes, our water only gets other people dirty. Sometimes, the darkness is more beautiful than the lights we carried. Because, you see, the prodigal loses it all—the things he brought, perhaps even his faith—but he holds onto his life. That’s the difference between sacrifices and prodigals: prodigals come home.

Jason Bruner is an assistant professor on the religious studies faculty at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and cat. He has published scholarly articles on Christian missions, British imperialism, and the history of Christianity in East Africa. His writing has also appeared in Religion & Politics, Marginalia Review of Books, Religion Dispatches, and Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality.

Sisters

by Bari Benjamin

She smiles when she sees me and her skin stretches tightly over her mouth and chin. Her cheekbones and collar bones jut out, sharp and pointy. I sit by her hospital bed, trying to understand what has happened to my seventy-two-year older sister. Just three weeks ago, we spoke on the phone. She asked about my daughter. “You’ve done everything possible for this child.” And I knew she meant it.

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She was twelve and I was five, an annoying younger sister who adored her. One day she taught me to ride my big girl bike. We inched down the cobblestone road when zoom—she let go of the seat and I sped off. My hair flew in my face; my hands clenched the handle bars, my knuckles big and white. My eyes stared wide open.

But the next day she hated me. Often she scared me; she looked like a witch, skinny with long fingernails and straggly, thin hair. We played outside one day, when she hid behind the side of our house. “Boo,” she yelled as she wrapped her gnarled fingers around my neck and squeezed. Hard. She tortured me. “Eat, eat more. Eat for me,” she said, as she pushed food in my face. It didn’t matter what—candy, bread, doughnuts, fruit, whatever was in the fridge.

I became the focus of her rage. Not only did she desperately control what she put in her mouth, she controlled my diet as well. And so it went, I struggled with my sister’s intense emotions, and my mother struggled to keep peace. Her illness divided my parents: My mother protected my sister and my father defended me. “Mommy, please, “I cried, “I don’t want any more to eat. I’m stuffed. I don’t wanna throw up. Help me.”

“Leave her alone,” my father yelled, again and again.

Madeline and Bari

Soon my sister’s condition became critical (she was five feet seven inches and weighed sixty-five pounds) and she was hospitalized for many months. (I believe she had the distinctive honor of being the first patient with this kind of eating disorder in Pittsburgh.) I was promptly sent to live with my grandmother in Florida for a solid year. I begged, “Mommy, please don’t make me go, I’ll be good I’ll be good I’ll be good.”

A year away from my family at the age of five fractured my vulnerable sense of security. But my sister got better. She stopped starving herself and stopped scaring me. There was peace in our home but we remained distant, and it wasn’t until our adult years that we gradually grew closer. Our daughters provided a bond, a safe island upon which to connect. She embraced the role of big sister, advised and comforted me when my daughter’s troubles emerged. Did she have a special understanding of how wounded a child can be when they feel utterly helpless? When they have so little control over their lives?

At six months old, my daughter had been left in a carriage in a train station in Moscow. Sometimes I imagine her crying and crying, her baby face scrunched up with rage, her terror at not seeing her mama’s familiar face. Police rescued her and placed her in one of the city’s twenty-five orphanages. And then at age two, she was flown halfway across the world with another unfamiliar face. My sister, the experienced parent, helped me navigate those early years.

“She won’t make eye contact with me. That’s not normal. What should I do?”

“Don’t worry,” she soothed me. “It’s a temporary delay. Sit with her, rock her, hold her.”

But then, adolescence exploded like a series of firecrackers. I bore the brunt of her rage. “I hate you, you bitch,” she’d scream, as she stormed out the door.

My sister didn’t experience that kind of trauma, but did she feel abandoned when our father, (who was in the Navy during her early years) came home and showered her younger baby sister with affection and attention? Did she cry, “What about me?”

I climbed up on my father’s lap and rested my head on his shoulder. “Daddy, why are you so mean to Maddy? Please be nice to her.”

He grabbed me and set me down hard. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he growled.

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“She’s taken off again. What should I do?” The police won’t do anything. I’m scared.”

“She’ll be back. Try to stay calm, “she said.

Then: “Should I place her in a treatment program? They say they can help her. But I hate to send her away.” I worried, was I repeating history?

“I understand but you have to keep her safe. This is her chance.”

Finally: “She’s coming home. And she’s better.”

“Thank God. You did the right thing.”

We never spoke of her illness.

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I left the hospital that day, haunted by my childhood memories. My sister, who had become my friend and my advisor, spent the next four months in the hospital, in and out of intensive care. There was pneumonia, and then heart failure. She recovered from both but then she simply could not swallow. No one knew why.

My sister had just turned seventy-two when she died. She never made it out of the hospital, unlike her first hospitalization at age twelve. I found myself almost stoic at her funeral, detached and cold. Shock? Denial?  Survivor’s guilt? I just know I couldn’t find my tears.

Then two weeks after her death, I drove to Zumba class one rainy Sunday morning, my daughter’s favorite rock radio station blaring. I recalled her dancing to the music just the other night, her large, dark brown eyes sparkling, and my heart swelled with that special love that parents have for their children. And then it hit me: I can’t ever call my sister again to talk about our daughters. She isn’t home.

My sobs stunned me. My body shook. I pulled over. I finally surrendered to them and when I finished, a sense of peace enveloped me. I drove on.

Bari Benjamin, LCSW, BCD, is a former English teacher turned psychotherapist with a private practice in Pittsburgh, PA. Her essays have been published in Adoption Today and StepMom magazines, as well as Chicken Soup for the Soul books and several anthologies. She is currently working on a memoir book of letters to her adopted daughter.