|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
Backroads Originally published in The Mid-American Review Near his father from Ottokee to Tedrow, northwest across Bean Creek to Fayette, that town where my mother was born.
These flat lands fool my father. The
gridwork of roads, plowed fields, and abandoned railroad crossings crisscross the county. He
hasn’t lived here since 1956. Now his
father has forgotten how keys work, how this one starts the car, how another slides open the deadbolt. The old man has forgotten his son’s name. But if a body, mind, and soul are one and knit together one life, what thread unravels when a man can’t tie his shoelaces or button his shirt?
Where’s the soul gone when honey, salt, and dill taste the same?
My father’s father stares out the car window. Forty years ago, he and his son sold eggs in Wauseon and raised hogs, planted corn.
They built the Turnpike, a road that emptied the land west of by instinct. He knows
that, soon, he’ll have to give up, pull over and ask some stranger for help. * *
* After my grandfather has died, my father tells me this story, about backroads I’d never find on a map.
He tells me how his father said “Turn here,” pointing east, then said “turn,” and again, “turn,” past old barns, cottonwoods, all the way home. My father goes silent, and I know he tells me this story because he cannot say how he is proud, how he’s waited sixty years for this saga about his father, that last crisis where adrenalin rises and the heart’s ventricle squeezes blood to the brain, and fathers shed fear and shame like an old skin, tell their lost sons “here, turn here.”
And if my father and I cannot say where the soul goes when we die, or if we have souls, what we have is enough. I have his nose, his big thighs.
My body, older now, will make a good fit for his discarded skin. ****************************************************** Killing Pigs Originally published in Donna
Deason is having a problem with wild hogs digging up her
yard. She has spoken with the game
warden and he has approved
having them killed. If you are
interested in killing these
pigs, please get in touch with Donna at Baskin Robbins. These
pigs range in size from baby pigs to grown pigs. —University
email One woman wonders out loud which of these pigs works in our department.
One man warns, beware October’s special flavor-of-the-month. How can we resist? We are
trained in irony. We eye each other sidewise, wonder ourselves who secretly longs to cross over the semantic gap between having them killed and killing these pigs. * nine thousand years ago. and conquistadores brought pigs to the cloven-hooved, enlarged canines curling out each jaw.
“Tusks,” we say, just one gene we tinker with.
We breed Berkshire, Duroc, Landrace and Spotted hogs, fine names for tusk-less, thin-skinned swine. In Middle Georgia, one hundred thirty years ago, lost pigs scavenged the for yams, grubs, plump black raspberries. Burned or abandoned, no barn or sty was fit for them, no smokehouse, no penned wallow, these hogs engendering their wild progeny, come now to root up a woman’s yard. * Donna Deason, I understand.
In fifteen years ago, I watched infant marmots gnaw on the grass outside my kitchen door. The mother had made a winter den below the porch. Each pup was harmless, the size of my hand, all nine together nothing so fierce as a feral hog. Yet when I threw open the door, hooted and hollered, all but one scattered. Years later
I read in a book how a brood’s oldest sibling will stand guard. But I learned
firsthand how even a marmot pup’s teeth and hiss are fearsome to a bare-legged man standing near-naked in his morning robe. In The name does not matter.
Gardens are ravaged. A den once settled will not be abandoned. I could not kill them, Deason, but had it done. My landlord farmer and his son lay down in tall grass thirty yards off, rifles ready, took aim and one-by-one, each pup exploded. I didn’t see it, these groundhogs dying, these two men killing half-pigs without malice, wit, or irony. |
|
GCSU is a member of
and Writing Programs
One of only 20 member
colleges nationwide |
|
Creative
Writing Program Campus
English
Office: (478) 445-4581 MFA
Office: (478) 445-3509 |
