LIBERTAS v ol . 23, n o. 1
Featuring Davidson’s Award-Winning Artists
SATREBIL LIBERTAS EDITORIAL
Se ptember 2016
Ladies’ Room
EDITORS IN CHIEF
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Attapulgus
Caroline New ‘16 Charles E. Lloyd Award, Creative 2nd Place
Alyssa Glover ‘17 Samantha Gowing ‘17
Element
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Gray
EDITORS
The Basic Steps
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Past Graviry
Maddy Page ‘20 Quinn Massengill ‘19
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Spring Cleaning
Scott Cunningham, Megan Feichtel, Peter Haugen, Nick Johnson, Graham Marema, Jane McGehee, Cormac McShane, Isabelle Sakelaris, Caroline New, Lucy Sexton, Tyler Wilson Libertas belongs to the students of Davidson College. Contact the editors at libertas@davidson.edu
Caroline New ‘16 Vereen Bell Award, 1st Place Peter Haugen ‘18 Best in Drawing
Abraqa M. Swarthmire: Certified Medium
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Graham Marema ‘17 Vereen Bell Award, 2nd Place
Ruin
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Cormac McShane ‘17 Vereen Bell Award, 2nd Place
Tower of Tears / Cheer Up
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Tyler Wilson ‘16 Senior Exhibit
Thomas Waddill ‘19
CONTRIBUTORS
Megan Feichtel ‘16 Senior Exhibit Nick Johnson ‘19 - Past Gravity R. Windley Hall Award, 1st Place
Elisabeth Anthony ‘19 Sweetened & Steeped
Jane McGehee ‘17 Honorable Mention Caroline New ‘16 Vereen Bell Award
Caroline New ‘17
Hannah Fuller ‘17
Lucy Sexton ‘16 Senior Exhibit
Soft Hands & Soft Hands II Evening Hymn Quite Red
Isabelle Sakelaris ‘19 R. Windley H, Creative 2nd Place 14
Isabelle Sakelaris ‘19 R. Windley Hall Award, Creative 2nd Place Lucy Sexton ‘16 Senior Exhibit
special thanks to... Faculty Advisors: Zoran Kuzmanovich, Paul Miller (emeritus), Scott Denham (emeritus), Ann Fox (emeritus) Previous Editors: Meg Mendenhall, Michael DeSimone, Jordan Luebkemann, Will Reese, Emily Romeyn, Vincent Weir, Mike Scarbo, Vic Brand, Ann Culp, Erin Smith, Scott Geiger, James Everett, Catherine Walker, Elizabeth Burkhead, Chris Cantanese, Kate Wiseman, Lila Allen, Jessica Malordy, Nina Hawley, Kate Kelly, Zoe Balaconis, Rebecca Hawk, and Hannah Wright Founder: Zac Lacy
visit us online: https://issuu.com/libertasmag
Cover Art: Scott Cunningham ‘16 Best in Printmaking
Attapulgus Ladies’ Room
Caroline New
The town was named after the Indian word for dogwood tree. Attapulgus. Petite, spreading little things, ticklish, that blushed all over everything come April and May. Six generations later no one remembered which Indians or what the word meant, but they found a new type of clay, white unlike the normal bloody soil. They named it after the town, which was named after the tree, which was nothing like the rock, but two white generations later no one remembered. Across the road was Aunt Net’s house. A one-room, wood-boarded box covered in license plates from all over, though I think her and Bobby never got further than Alabama; the dust blended the mosaic back into the wooden walls. Behind was the old donkey field now empty, the forest’s fingers pressing on its skirts. The trees were populated by the sisters, brothers, cousins; I only ever met the aunt whose pink house perched right at the edge, but I knew the others lived somewhere tucked in deep. From the road you might have called the thing a forest, but I think it was probably something more. Swamp? Bog? Jungle? Things must be named to be protected, and no one names what they cannot see. These trees no one ever saw. Nine-year-olds don’t count; barefoot little girls don’t count, not yet. Was it a swamp? In June, it was always wet by at least a foot; the whole floor stretched into water. Floods crept in silently to wrap around the trunks, seep into the scalp. But by June the water was no longer water. It turned brown and began pulsing and breathing as tiny creatures were born, swelling over the threshold until our nine-year old human eyes could see them. By July it never quite burst, but the skin writhed and the whole floor came alive with the millions of them. We were too old to be watched but not old enough to stay put. We clambered over the red ditches that propped up the road to Aunt Net’s, across the field into the tree-line. I never saw the other sisters or brothers or cousins, but I knew they were somewhere, and I knew they could have been there for generations and never seen the same places we saw. We didn’t know what snakes were yet and we waded into the forest floor, holding onto the oak roots, balancing on cypress knees, admiring at the sea of sudden-born creatures. They never shied from our faces, nose to nose with the waterskin, never even shied from our ankles, our knees, our hands, scooping up warm handfuls into buckets and jars. From the road, you can’t see the old porcelain bathtub behind Aunt Net’s house, stark and lonely, sometimes filled with garden tools, but that’s where we put them. Running buckets through the trees back across the old donkey field, careful for forgotten barbed wire, chests wet with the water sloshed over. Halfway we filled the tub with the whole jiggling, legless mass of them. Then we stripped down and wriggled in with them, nine years old, no one could see. Unnamed, unknown, not yet. Our lovely children they were, fed on cheese and dandelions and cat food and undying, nine-year-old love. We topped the tub with more water each day to temper the South Georgia sun. Watched them grow legs, eyes, little arms, from fish-worms into brown little babies. But when August came we crossed back over the red ditch road to rinse our feet to climb into Daddy’s white pick-up. We joined the other children for multiplication and solar systems and Dick and Jane in the county seat, far from the trees and the donkey field and the bathtub. And they stayed. Baked into a crust on the porcelain, into the brown layer that coated everything else in that town, a forever film of dust, hay, insects, years. No one remembered the tadpoles left in the bathtub. No one remembered the Indians either. No one remembers the nine-year-olds, the bare feet, the June, replaced with new Junes, new flowers on trees named after dead people, flowers naming rocks, rocks turned to clay coating our bare feet, nine years old in July, unnamed, unknown, not yet. Things must be named to be protected. Things must be seen to be named.
Gray The playground was a giant field that wrapped alongside the school. One end was a baseball diamond engraved by kid feet that backed up to the landfill. The rest was ringed by a pine forest kept at bay by a chainlink fence, save for a few heavy oaks that crowded around the wooden benches where the teachers perched in their shade. Sometimes we would hide behind the twisted trunks and watch for the dog-man who lived in a tent in the woods with his dozen mutts. Never saw him, but heard barking sometimes. The grass was gone at the end nearest the road, trampled into a hard-packed clay body scuffed with sandy heels. Red gorges opened through it when it rained, separating the swingsets from the rusted firetruck frame from the dilapidated, rotting fort. This was the battlefield. Mama taught 5th grade history. Or she tried. Everyone loved her, her strange Midwestern accent, the games she subbed for books. She hadn’t learned in Illinois that the Civil War was not truly history. That it was not truly over. It was her favorite thing to teach. She planned a reenactment of 5th graders each year in the playground which was more of a dirt field between the school and the forest. She dressed in blue and the English teacher across the hall dressed in grey, and all of the kids chose a side. They all chose grey. Every year, black and white chose grey. I would have chosen grey too, but I didn’t tell her this while she sewed me a sharp blue uniform. I was going to be the one blue by her side. I was eight years old and I dreaded that day. It was Gettysburg each spring. The playground filled with fifth graders, a patchwork of gray, some with hats from their great-greatgrandfathers and medals pinned to t-shirts. The trees were stripped of
“Element,” Jane McGehee
their lowest arms and shouldered by thin collarbones. Point and pull. Keep both eyes open. The dry red clay burst like gunsmoke. Mix it with sweat and it turns to blood. Mama hadn’t learned in Illinois that the Civil War was not truly history. That it was not truly over. That here, to delegate it to thin textbook pages, easily smothered by a cardboard cover, was but a lovely little farce. The blue always won. Nobody was happy about that. The parents complained. The kids were bitter. They knew it was coming, but they also knew it should never have happened. As if each cycle of tenyear olds somehow thought they could right their history, vindicate their great-grandfathers by winning them this last battle. They never did. Mama thought history was a curriculum, a past with lessons we should learn. She drew it in a line, with a start and a finish. Something to remember. Something to live past. She knew it was not stagnant, knew it was not dead, but she couldn’t feel its breath hot on her neck. This is not Gettysburg, not Illinois, not the United States. This is the forgotten blister of Georgia, a scarlet smudge brushed beneath the pine needles. Where the humidity lets nothing die and nothing breathe. Mix it with sweat and it turns to blood. When I was in 4th grade, they changed the curriculum so that she didn’t teach the Civil War. In the books, Gettysburg was won by the blue, but my tiny blue uniform remained unfinished in the attic. The gray always won.
Caroline New
Lucy Sexton 3
LIBERTAS, Vol. 23, No. 1
LIBERTAS, Vol . 2 3 , No. 1
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Excerpt from
PAST GRAVITY Nicholas Johnson Art: “The Basic Steps” Megan Feichtel
It only took a week for me to realize that Page wasn’t interested in George, and I felt bad for the kid. He was just a little awkward, a little too quiet. George’s infatuation with my daughter didn’t bother me; I had long ago realized that it was a rite of passage for boys to constantly readjust the folds of their pants for the girls they had grown up with. I had flirted on the beach and gone on a date with his aunt once. Seeing how closely to Page’s towel George had set his own on the beach that day, I knew I had been before where George unwittingly lay. As Page’s father, I couldn’t intercede. I knew I had better not do anything. But that Friday afternoon on the beach I practically had to sit on my hands as Page silently intimidated George into applying sunscreen to her back, then challenged him to race out to the buoys thirty yards from the shore. All he wanted to do was read that novel he had brought to the beach for the past three days. It lay opened and face down on his beach towel, where I had seen George glance at it every once in a while. I stared at the paperback and felt equally helpless in this predicament. I curled my fingers when George sprang after Page into the calmly flowing surf. Berk looked at me: a warning against empathizing with George. I shrugged, unable to help myself. Even at three o’clock in the afternoon, the July sun boiled the white grit I burrowed my toes into. The seagulls’ floating on outstretched wings and the waves’ rhythmic caressing of the beach seemed the calm that opposed the brutal disillusionment that I knew awaited George when Page finally stopped toying with him. I looked to the small boulders beyond the quarter-mile of hazy sand populated in dense clumps. I hoisted myself out of the low beach chair. A walk across the familiar beach had enticed me. “Berk, do you wanna go for a stroll?” She raised one single index finger as she finished the sentence of her magazine article, dog-eared the page, and placed the glossy pages into her oversized beach bag. I offered my hand, and she burst upward to meet me. She hugged my whole arm as we walked away from our son Jared and his friends, who were loafing around cracking jokes in the sand. Berk must have been losing her patience with their raucous noise in this heat. She, like Page, did not have the complexion to tolerate heat as bad as it was that afternoon. As we descended the gentle slope of the beach towards the dark-
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er, cooler sand, I looked for Page’s familiar sunburst of hair between the waves. It bobbed as she swam, a flash of sandy blond skipping eagerly across the surf behind her. The elderly Mr. & Mrs. Ross passed us at the water’s edge. The heat didn’t even slow them down. Berk smiled and waved. I inquired about their nine grandchildren. Mr. Ross smiled while Mrs. Ross replied, “They’re busy doing all sorts of things with their young lives. Speaking of young lives, is that your Page swimming out there with George McIntyre? How funny that scene looks to my old eyes. Certainly familiar, isn’t it?” Berk laughed politely, but I could only manage a crooked smile, so familiar I wish it weren’t happening. We kept walking across the beach towards the rocks. We passed folks we knew from our years of coming to the beach, and young couples I had never seen before. The muddy sand eased the tension between my toes, under my knees, and even on either side of my neck. I peered at my wife, and she smiled back at me, “Penny for your thoughts, Max.” “That would require me to think,” I joked tonelessly. Berk grinned, tilting her head back to catch the sunlight overhead, “What do you think of George?” Last Saturday flashed in my mind. George had appeared at our house to take Page out on the date that started all of this. His jacket was the light brown color of semi-dry sand, and it made his neatly coiffed hair look blonder. His gentle smile glowed in the glittering sunset over the water. I welcomed him into the living room before calling up the stairs to Page. “So what are you two going to do tonight?” I gestured to the couch. The young man hemmed and hawed before forming a coherent sentence. “We’ll do dinner at the restaurant, and then see if we can grab Topper’s on the way to the movie theater.” Had I known then, perhaps I might have warned him not to get attached, despite Page, but instead, “You’ve got it all planned out.” George had shrugged, checking his wristwatch, “We may miss the movie if dinner takes too long, but I wanted to start with a plan and improvise later.” I raised my eyebrows at that, “I wish I had thought of that mantra
years ago.” Berk’s admonishing look brought me back to the present, “Don’t worry about Page and George. It’s better that they figure out their plan on their own.” “Their plan?” the tide dribbled over our feet. I tensed up to my calves as the crisp chill rushed over the tops of my feet. Berk sighed almost to herself, “This little romance of theirs has to have some kind of plan once we leave, you know.” I stopped to look out at the two bobbing heads as they crested a wave. George had caught up to Pagey, and they were swimming abreast now out to the buoy. The styrofoam marker jaunted on top of the water about five meters away from them. “I didn’t think Page was interested in him. It seemed like she was just humoring him.” “Max,” Berk looked at me straight on. “She wouldn’t want to go swimming with him every day if she didn’t like him. She wouldn’t want him to touch her body if she wasn’t comfortable with him. What gave you the idea Page wasn’t interested in George?” I drifted back to the night of their date. I enjoyed my chat with George before they left. Pagey surprised me when she came home with very little to say about the young man who had grown up alongside her on the beach. “He’s really quiet, you know. We talked over dinner, but then he didn’t say anything during the movie.” “From what Pagey told me after their night out together, I thought George bored her.” “Right: Page is going to tell her father all the fun she had with the wonderful boy she’s practically grown up with on their first date.” I stopped speechless in my tracks for a second, “This whole situation reminds me of the summer when I dated his aunt, Caitlin. We went swimming near the end of the summer, and she told me at the buoy that we weren’t going anywhere. I hate talking about this, but I don’t want Pagey to do that to George, not that she reminds me of Caitlin. He’s just doesn’t deserve that.” “You need to stay out of it, or Page won’t know what to think,” Berk calmly turned away and started down the beach. Is there something
that the two of them don’t want to tell me? I walked calmly after her. I caught up to Berk as we reached the point where the flat surfaces of the dark rocks protruded, forming shallow pools of briny water. In these pools, a few toe-headed children shrieked in their search for small crabs to put in their yellow plastic bucket. I recognized Page’s friend, Catie Tremaine, as she watched the children from the dry sand that rose at a sharp incline out of the shallows. I waved to Catie, who pleasantly greeted Berk and me. We stopped just beyond the little crabbers. My feet sank into the cool, muddy sand at the edge of another pool. Berk smiled as if I were testing her patience. The white rocks littered the incline of the island beyond my wife, and the sun’s glare reflected harshly off of them. I rose a hand to shield my eyes, “Berk, what doesn’t Page want me to know?” Berk lay a hand on my chest, “I’m not saying I know any more than you do. All I know is that there are plenty of things that I hid from my father about my relationships. Even when I started seeing you, what, at the age of twenty-five, I didn’t tell my father everything! We’ll know what we’re meant to know when Page wants us to know, and you can’t get involved before then.” The beach typically cleared up by four-thirty, with the mothers of young children going home to shower and feed their kids before going to a cocktail party. The undisrupted calls of seagulls on the whistling sea breeze with the undulating waves underneath it filled the absence of the usual crowd on the beach. I stared at the same page of my book for a halfhour and strained not to bother Berk, Pagey, or George as they dozed intermittently between reading their own books. Jared was off at the rocks now with his friends, scrambling on the large white rocks above the shoreline, the only moving objects on a still landscape of late afternoon. I tried to doze, but every time I closed my eyes, they peeked suspiciously at Page and George. Pagey lay there on her towel, right next to George. In the small gap separating them danced an invisible gravity. This old force pulled on me as well. I felt drawn into the allure of my daughter’s relationship, because the gravity revived my past. Berk had warned me not to get involved; she knew it would evoke the summer I had devoted myself to Caitlin, and I had no defenses against it.
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weetened &
teeped
I. Sweetened and steeped and boiling. So God created us. My crib was barred with alligator teeth. I laid my head on Mama’s tongue as she lullabied Old Rugged Cross. I was the first, and a sister followed each year after. We were too young to be ladies; we taught each other with fists, taught each other the taste of blood. Thicker than river mud. Stairsteps. They couldn’t fit a year between us. Thicker in six braids by Mama’s hands. Everything cut and toothmark she cured with salt, sealed it right up, right in. The house had thick white thighs, always freckled and peeling, sweating down its tin scalp. Never a quiet thing— tossing little girls down wooden stairs and storing front teeth in its floorboards. The windows waved like circus mirrors, deranged by the heat, warped like everything else that stayed too long. Come supper each night, the front window stared like a gaping, black throat to a world bayed behind the crooked glass. I could count the six ghosts dancing in it, a huddle of bulbs echoing from the chandelier. They never died; they were not alone. From the porch, I counted ghosts in the white gourds hung beside laundry lines for the birds. I played with ghosts instead of baby dolls. I prayed to ghosts before bed. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. II. Some things were borrowed, somewhere was blue. The sky rubbed raw. Every color I knew was ripped from this scarlet wound called Georgia. […]
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The world was flat. We were rolled in this rattlesnake country, our little girl bodies blistered by rye that topped our heads. Just us and the newly weaned calves. Our favorite game was graves—dig your home and see how long you can die in the field before Daddy notices you’re gone. Let your lashes bake onto your cheekbones; let the critters wriggle through your braids. No one came looking; we scrambled back when the diesel brayed. We played house in the rusted train engine that stayed sunk down by the river, even after they promised to haul it to Kentucky. Asbestos, they said. Infested, they said. But where else would we hide and seek, where else would lovers scratch their names into peeling paint. There’s no promise more permanent. The pesticides will get us anyhow. […] You can learn it all and never really know. Hear a wolf and it’s a coyote. Hear a woman wail and it’s a screech owl. Hear a woman scream and it’s a panther— I could bellow like all. I learned how terrifying a woman can be. Little girls stolen off to the water at sunset, practicing; we called and they answered. III. Lemonade to lighten the freckles and copper our dark hair. We became dropdeads. When they baptized me, I held my breath for too many years and swam away. […] Didn’t know the difference between grease and grace. I had a left-lane death wish. I learned to be a charlatan; I thought I was a lady. Didn’t know the difference. […] Learned how to run, outrun Daddy, outrun the blue lights, cutting right through Blackjack, right off the blacktop, back out to the cotton to rot guts with peach jack. Taught my sisters how to run, stairsteps scattered, ducklings flushed out from the reeds. Run across the bridge across the river
and run faster when you hear the train. Know what you can’t outrun and learn to jump. We were dropdeads, flawless, but little things can break the skin. Mosquito tongues, cypress roots, tire treads, boy tongues, bottle necks. Little enough to ignore and we were invincible. Sugared and sliced, never think twice is the secret; never think once the survival. IV. I thought I was a lady. I strung pearls around my skinny throat like a suture. Never could extract them, not even to release the swelling when my heart chewed me inside out. He was a beautiful, warless buzzcut. Kissing turned to hissing turned to kissing, and I believed when they told me I was mammal. Sweetened and steeped and boiling, we took a sip and burned our tongues. Oxygen only inflamed it all, and the world dropped dead around us. Forgot to fear lightning and God and studied the electricity of skin instead. Science, they called it. A new god. Studied how skin sounds when the cicadas are muffled by walls, how things bloom muffled by sheets. I gave god a new name. I pinpointed him down to the species, down to the hairs on the back of his neck and the designs of his dark eyes. We were boiling, boiling and we did not flinch; motions that always ended with evaporation, disintegration. God-smitten. Took me three years to realize I was never a virgin. We were both ensnared, but I was still kissing his lovely damp lips when he finished gnawing off my leg. I wouldn’t run when he gnashed, so he played dead. I learned terror. I fled tail-tucked back to the reeds, to my rattlesnake country. I heard him wailing through the underwood. He called and I did not answer.
cropped from “Spring Cleaning,” Peter Haugen
V. I ran. Found new lovers and fell into a habit of dancing with carcasses who had never tasted horse shit or peach. I believed in all gods and believed in ghosts more. Learned to worship in a church of backseat fucks, kissing with teeth in ways that convert sinners and turn stomachs. […] I unnamed myself. Severed from sisters. I braided myself too dark to bleach. Nothing was painless. I spent every day praying to become a ghost. Pesticides got most of us anyhow. Abnormal findings, they said; not elsewhere classified, they said. The rest went to the rain, to rubber rolling over rain, rolling into ditches. I watched pretty things die young. God smote me when I mixed him up with Bacchus. It happens in the heat of the moment and I never apologized. Know what you can’t outrun, and run faster. VI. The earth is round; run away and you run right into home. […] The river is the same warmth, the creek the same cool, and everything is still thick. Mama still sways, sings, still soft, and Daddy will not leave us in the rye; he idles the diesel as we scramble from our graves. […] We see teethmarks on each other and remember. We hear screams and know they are the owls. Steep us and boil us clean. Carry us on your back through the old donkey field, through the reeds. Carry us back to the tall grass and give us back to the gator jaws. I can’t tell the fingers from the gnats. I can’t tell heartbreak from home.
Caroline New
LIBERTAS, Vol . 2 3 , No. 1
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We pushed back the tables. Closed all the curtains. I told Lillian to pull back her hair and roll up her sleeves. I dragged in two stiff chairs and brought the breakfast table from the nook in the kitchen and placed them all in the center of the living room. It always helps to have an animal nearby. A black cat, preferably, or a bird, if possible. Today I’d brought my roommate’s grey tabby, who curled up sleepily on the sofa, which I’d shoved into a corner. He blinked at me and flicked his tail as I settled around the table with Lillian. Hair pulled back, the skin of her face seemed taut. She watched me pull out my velvet bag and begin placing items on the table. I explained them as I did so. “Tarot cards of course. Essential. And these are the crystals. They generate the type of aura we’re looking for. My Ouija board, just in case. A flashlight, I’ll go ahead and turn it on. A candle, and we’ll light that now –” “So these are all…” Lillian stared down at the assortment of items. The old, dented cards. The candle bumpy with wax. The black and grey Ouija board. “They’re all items to… for him to communicate?” The first time someone says out loud that they’re trying to speak to a ghost is always the hardest. “Yes,” I told her. “You never know exactly what an Other Worldly Being likes to use.” I’ve noticed it’s best to come up with your own personal phrase for a ghost. Spirit, Lost One, Energy. It makes the client feel like you’ve developed your own branch of study. “Come, Jasmine,” I said to the grey tabby, whose name was Brick. Brick winked at me and flicked his tail and sneezed. “I see,” I said. “Jasmine feels uncomfortable. There’s definitely something here.” Crinkles appeared around Lillian’s eyes. The house was small, only one floor, most of it the living room. With the curtains drawn it felt like a cave. Hardly any pictures. I’d only gotten the idea for this a couple months ago but in that time I’d done six cases, and in all of them I’d noticed an absence of pictures. Took me a while to piece it together. Recent loss meant stowing away all the pictures of the lost love (now an Other Worldly Being). And if the OWB was your husband, he took up a lot of pictures. “Are you ready?” I asked Lillian. She nodded. Her shoulders and hands shook. She didn’t look like someone who would email a medium. None of them do. I took her hands and she let me. Brick sat up and yawned. “Close your eyes,” I told her. She did. I did too.
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“Now I want you to clear your mind. Listen to the pattern of your breathing. The slow inhale, the even slower exhale. Let the air in the room fill you up again and again. Now try to make your breathing as quiet as possible. So that no sound escapes. You’re listening not with your ears now but something else.” There came a moment when I heard no sound from her breathing but the quietest of sips. I opened my eyes and observed her concentrating. A strand from Lillian’s hair had come undone, had fallen down into her face. Her eyes closed, she looked even younger than she was (how old could she be? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? How young had she married this man, the man she called Willy?). In the light of the candle she looked fifteen, maybe younger. A tiny blonde child in a collared shirt holding the hands of a woman hardly older than her, in her cave of a living room, listening to her breathing. “Good,” I said, and closed my eyes again. “Very good, Lillian. Now listen harder. Use the same thing you were using before to listen to your breathing, not your ears, but something else. There’s something in the room – Jasmine can feel it, I’ve felt it the moment I walked inside, you’ve been feeling it for days now. It’s the same as your breathing, something you can hear in your body without hearing it with your ears. Listen, Lillian. It’s trying to speak to you.” Weirdly enough, something about Lillian reminded me of my first client. Didn’t make much sense, as he was a balding middle-aged man who wanted to connect with his dead cat Amy. He’d wanted to convey one message – I’ll stay outside all night. And that was all. I still wasn’t sure how he found me. I was working at an arts festival during the summer soon after graduation, and an unknown phone number called me up one afternoon. “I got your number from a friend,” he said. “Said you might be able to… you know… help me talk to someone… someone others can’t talk to…” The first time someone says out loud they’d like to talk to a ghost is the hardest. I suppose the friend wrote down the wrong number. An 8 instead of a 6. Or the balding man’s hands, which shook just like Lillian’s, dialed incorrectly. What’s even harder to explain, I’d imagine, is why I said yes, why I said, “You’ve reached the correct number” when in fact nothing could have been more untrue. Maybe it was the way he closed his eyes so earnestly that reminded me of Lillian. In between scripted dialogue I sat there wondering. She shook even harder than before, and I knew that she, just like the balding man, was trying with all her might to hear with a pair of ears that didn’t exist. The man had begun to sweat, he bowed his head, he kneaded my fingers with his until they went numb. Lillian gripped me and sweated and breathed without sound and listened and I watched her and then closed my eyes again so that I could continue. “Speak to us, Willy,” I said. Upon saying his name, I thought I did feel something. But I believe it was something from Lillian’s hands rather than from the haunted air in the stale living room. We sat in silence for a few moments. I wondered whether Lillian was breathing at all. And then, with my eyes closed, something in the room changed. Physically changed. It took me a moment to realize what
it was – a smell, a feeling? – it was the tinge of pink that fluttered against the insides of my eyelids, the presence of light without being fully seen. A section of it had just gone dark. I opened my eyes and saw that Lillian had opened hers as well. We looked down at the table. The flashlight had flickered into darkness. Strangely enough I had never felt guilt during my paid hoaxes. My roommate told me it was unethical, that people’s loved ones, their mothers, their sisters, their husbands, had died, that these people were suffering and putting them through a fake encounter with their loved ones was not only immoral, but unwise. I guess she believes in the same way my clients do – reluctantly but without much choice. She believes that meddling with the spirits of the dead – even fake – is dangerous. But I never viewed it that way. These people were willing to email a complete stranger – an odd name they found on a flier in the subway, on a streetlamp, in a library. To reveal to this person their deepest, most painful, most infected, festering cut, their loss. And ask not for this person, this thing, this cat or dog, to be brought back, but just for communication. To be able to say one last thing. I’ll stay outside all night. And then, as far as they knew, that’s what I gave them. They cried, they thanked me, they referred me to their friends. Everybody won. Lillian and I stared down at the flashlight. Brick flicked his tail from the couch but didn’t otherwise move. “Willy,” I said, my voice so loud in the silence it almost scared myself. “Is that you?” We sat. We watched. And then the flashlight turned back on. It – and the candlelight I suppose – cast watery shadows against the cheap wallpaper of Lillian’s living room. I felt suddenly - in an intoxicated sort of way – that the shadows represented something that had once been, a myriad of people lining up flat in the house, looking at one another and breathing and flickering. Willy among them, I guess, and Lillian and Brick and me. I guess. A hundred ghosts in a hundred different lights. Lillian’s face was pale. Her hands shook worse than ever. I remembered the numb feeling of the balding man’s hands kneading mine as he wept over the death of his old tabby cat Amy. “I miss her so much,” he said as we sat there waiting for a light or a memo on the Ouija board a breath that wasn’t ours. “She brought a warm light into every piece of this house, and it doesn’t make sense that she’d take it all away in one little second when she dies.” One little second, as if all seconds weren’t the same size. But I guess it’s true, that the second when something dies seems very small, very short, to take such a thing away as a life. Brick started hacking. Lillian twitched but didn’t look around. I suspected he was extracting a furball. “Willy if that’s you,” I said, my voice shuddering a little even though I didn’t mean for it to, “listen to what Lillian has to say to you and let us know that you’ve accepted her message.” Lillian looked up at me, startled. I could tell she didn’t think she was ready to speak to her dead husband so soon. Here
she was, sitting at a table with a twenty-seven-year-old woman dressed in Mardi Gras beads and a cheap head scarf, holding hands, breathing silently, sitting in her cave-like living room where there were no pictures of him. And she had to now look him in the face and say something. The last thing, the thing he would take with him to heaven or hell or nirvana or whatever (I was an arts management major, what did I know about religion?). “I…” she said. Then swallowed. The sound was loud in the silent living room, silent except for Brick’s hacking and the unsettled sputter of the candlewax. “I… Willy, if you’re there… I guess… I guess I should tell you to be at peace. You know, to go on and don’t worry about me and stuff like that… And I would. You know, if that’s what you’d like to hear. But I think I’d rather you haunt me, you know, break plates in the kitchen and scare away all the guests and rip the wallpaper off the walls and cause as much ruckus as you can. You know. I think that’d be better, Willy. So if you’d like to stick around and wreck stuff now and then and do a good old fashioned haunting, I think it might be a good idea.” Lillian looked at me as if ashamed of her message. But before I could answer, the light turned back off. It really felt as if Willy had reached over my shoulder and turned it off. But he hadn’t of course. The flashlight was a miniMaglite with a two-cell AA and an incandescent light bulb. If you unscrewed the top ever so slightly, when the light was on it heated up the reflector, expanding it until the light turned off on its own. Once the light was off, the reflector began to cool, and once it had deflated enough, it turned back on. One of the simplest tricks in the arsenal. Once Lillian had her answer, it was only a matter of breaking the circle, thanking the spirit, catching Brick before he ran hissing under the sofa. We turned the lights back on and stood awkwardly in the living room observing each other. I thought in that moment that maybe Lillian knew what I was up to. That she didn’t believe at all and that she’d been playing a trick on me instead of the other way around. Her eyes were puffy as though she’d been crying even though I hadn’t seen a single tear. She fixed them on me, hard and flat as pavement. Something about them called up that old phrase that the balding man had said to his cat Amy, the tabby who liked to sit in the windowsill and swat at flies old enough to circle down into her paws. I’ll wait outside all night. “I hope it all works out,” I said. “And if not, call me up. We’ll see what the trouble is.” “Thanks,” said Lillian. “I don’t think there will be anymore trouble.” Brick sneezed again in my arms. I believed her when she said it.
Graham Marema
LIBERTAS, Vol . 2 3 , No. 1
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RU I N The fire started in the broken house. The blood sun melted into the fields, giving way to the night. It spread slowly, marshalling the wood of the furniture to the cause. Patches of flame appeared on the floorboards. The growing heat built to spite the night’s cold. The once dark building illuminated the empty fields surrounding it. Its beams bowed to the weight of the growing warmth. Books were first. Then pictures and clothes. With them memories of people long dead were burned from memory. Metal twisted and groaned with the flames, turning blackened steel into orange plasma. Plumes of smoke rose into the air, though it merely clouded the already dark night. Cracks broke the near silence and the roof caved inwards. Walls buckled and tumbled, and a place that had been host to both births and deaths became shelter no more. Memories unconsidered disappeared as evidence of their existence fuelled the night’s light. The sun rose as the fire whimpered out. A blackened husk of beams and floor boards sat between empty fields. A black and white 1963 Ford Custom turned onto the road. The sun framed the ruins, making it almost beautiful but for the smoke that hung where the roof had once been. The loose steel of the cruiser rattled as it rolled down the gravel lane and over the bridge and into the field in front of the house.They parked, and stared at the rubble. The two men sat silently, observing an unspoken moment of remembrance, though neither had much to remember. The place had always just been there. “I doubt much is left. I’m gonna call it in.” He hawked and spat. “No point. It’s finished. Let them sleep til we check.” The other officer turned and looked at his parter and nodded.“Imma take a look.” The younger man stepped out of truck and slammed the door shut and the sound spread over the land around the house. He reached into the top pocket of his shirt and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. His partner stepped out of the car, who in turn slammed the door shut and pulled out his own cigarette. The younger man wandered around the edge of the foundation and he felt the warmth leftover from the night before. “Careful of the settling beams there, Preston.” Officer Preston nodded and kept strolling, eyeing the way the doorway had held until collapsing under the weight of rafters and floors. “Who lived here, Connor?” he shouted as he rounded the far side of the house. “They used to be rich. Now they’re not. Dead most likely.” Connor stubbed out his cigarette on the ground and leaned through the window of his car and placed the butt in the cup holder. He grabbed the canteen of coffee from the other holder and drank deeply from it. Preston joined him after completing his survey. “I think there’s a way in round back. The lintel by the back door has held up pretty good. Think we can shimmy through there If you wanna take a look inside while we wait? These folks must have been pretty rich.” Connor smirked but did not look at his partner. He handed the canteen over and Preston brought it to his lips. He grimaced and spat out the liquid, and glared at his partner. “It’s gone cold,” said Connor. “You prick.” Preston spat again to clear his mouth and brought his sleeve up to wipe his lips. “Well? Shall we?” Connor nodded and followed his partner around the edge of the house. Dark patches of soil littered the grounds beside the house. Most lay barren, with a handful of weeds and twigs sprouting in the more fertile parts. Or so he assumed. “Flowerbeds? Must’ve been nice before.” “I would guess so,” replied Connor. He was not guessing. He knew it had been nice. Around the back the porch stood relatively intact, a testament to 11
LIBERTAS, Vol. 23, No. 1
how little wood had been used in its construction. The officers climbed the concrete steps and crossed into the charcoaled ruins. They walked along what was clearly once a hallway, and turned into a largish room, melted metal lining sections of the floor. “Kitchen?” “I reckon,” said Connor. Commotion had once been here, with men dressed as chefs shouting at one another thinking that the food trumped the person next to them. There was a clear hierarchy here that was based in a tangible merit, unlike in the rooms further on. In place of this energy now sat pools of iron and steel lining scorched floorboards. He had only been back here a few times. There was nothing of worth left intact there. Signs of stoves and vents were clear, though not in any salvageable state. They quickly moved on. The dining room came next. It had once had high walls adorned with the paintings of the original patriarch’s and their descendants and heirlooms from the ‘war of Northern Aggression’. Once again nothing that of worth was to be found here. Next was the living room, though this had once and often been referred to as the parlour. It was a harder room to enter, as the floor of the second story had collapsed inward on the room as if it were burying evidence. This did not deter the officers. Connor held the beam that barred the doorway as his partner entered and Preston did the same in turn. They traversed the room slowly, wary of the wood crisscrossing the room for fear of it falling and crushing them. In the rubble Preston glimpsed metal, and beyond it a charred white of bone. “Fuck me. That’s an arm Connor.” Connor stared at the lighter and the hand gripped around it and
The now skeleton paused, drawing on his cigarette deeply. And when he exhaled he spoke again. “All of it.” its knuckles were bone white save for the scorch marks on the ossified calcium. He had last seen the lighter surrounded by the same bones, though they were enfleshed and attached to the body of his friend. It had lit his cigarette as the two men chatted outside the bar in town. The early hours of the morning were always the venue for thoughts not spoken. They had talked of the evening first, how the people in the town were all the same and that they all shared the silent fear of the outside and that their world was clearly the best possible world, and it was likely because they were God-fearing people who failed to understand faith. And then they discussed faith and God and life. Twelve drinks in the skeleton mentioned Ivan and the bar, but Connor had not understood what he was talking about. And as the bone lay under spent wood and metal Connor thought back to this night. “It’s just kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?” Drunk, Connor grinned. “Which bit are you talking about now?” The now skeleton paused, drawing on his cigarette deeply. The embers on its end glowed, showing his pursed lips and furrowed brows in the mid month dark. And when he exhaled he spoke again. “All of it.” “All of what?” “Everything. They all just take it a little bit too seriously.” Connor’s face tightened and his lips fell over the whites of his teeth. “You’re an asshole.”
CORMAC MCSHANE Jack smiled and the edges of his mouth grew just shy of his ears and Connor couldn’t help but copy at the ridiculousness of his friend’s face. “Is it the money?” “No, it’s the fucking drink.” Jack laughed and the noise pierced the the barren Main Street. “Fair enough. You’re wrong, but fair enough.” “Well shit, it’s easy to think life is a joke if you’ve never worked a day in your life, Jack. I mean, you’ve never struggled or fought or lived for anything. I don’t even think you believe. So you’re just wrong.” “Maybe. I don’t think so.” He stood and ambled off the porch and out onto the stone of the street beyond. He brought his glass up and drained it and smashed the glass on the ground. An old man on the road snapped his head at the noise and his eyes widened and his body leapt back into the brick behind him. And then he saw Jack and the source of the noise, and his eyes burnt at the young man. “Your father would be ashamed of you.” The voice rattled in keeping with the brittle bone and melting flesh hanging from it. “My father is dead.” Jack glared at the old man. And Connor thought that he saw dread fall onto the man’s face before he quickly turned and ambled off into the unlit part of the street. Connor came alongside Jack. “I was ashamed of him too.” “What?” Boots crunched on the floor behind Connor. “Well, shit I didn’t know anyone lived here.” Connor ripped his eyes from the past to look at Preston. “Not anymore. Bag the lighter and let’s keep looking.”Connor didn’t mean what he had said. He found what he half-expected to see. Preston wrenched the lighter from its tomb and dropped it in an evidence bag. “You think we need to call Arson over in Richmond?” “No. This was it. It was him.” “How can you be sure?” “I just know. Lets keep going, see if there was anyone else here.” Preston nodded and walked through the threshold into the next room. Connor waited for a moment and stared at Jack. He crossed himself and followed officer Preston. “They owned a tobacco company.” “Huh?” “The people who lived here. They had a tobacco company. But it went under a few years ago.” Connor chuckled. “Rumour was it was Batista’s favourite. Made sense that the company went out after the communists took over.” “The Cuban fella?” “Yeah. Jack hated him. Said that he ‘lacked legitimate authority’ or something.” Connor looked back through the doorway. “Asshole. Shoulda run for office.” “What? Who’s Jack?” “Skeleton back there.” “Huh. Guess you knew ‘em?” Connor dipped his chin. The officers split to look more through the rubble but could not find anything. The fire had devastated the rest of the house. The officers made their way back out past the living room and the skeleton and out through the kitchen. The men each lit up another cigarette as they made their way around the other side of the ruin and back to their cruiser. Small building dotted the property, untouched by the fire. “Slave houses?” said Preston. “Sure they used to be. Others were grain stores or workshops or just general utility buildings. Think some belonged to the people they hired to farm the fields, but there haven’t been any left near ten years ago now.” Con-
nor looked at the building where his uncle had once lived, and then died. Winters were harsh for a man in his mid-sixties working another man’s fields.They walked to the car and leaned on the hood while they finished their cigarettes. “Think I should call it in now?” Connor nodded as his cigarette glowed with an in-breath. “Imma walk around one more time.” He stubbed the cigarette on the ground and left it there. What did one butt matter now. Connor walked again though the barren patches and around to the back of the house. On the far side behind the house sat a building identical to the other outhouses dotting the land. It was small and square, made of brick and topped with a steel roof that had once been green but now gleamed silver through in holes so large that one would think it was a silver roof with green spots. He opened the door and went through under the lintel. The room was small and simply adorned; a twin bed lay in one corner with a cast iron frame, and a table and chair in the other. Connor pulled back the chair and sat in it. And as he sat he thought of the night Jack had smashed a glass and burnt his hand. Jack had been playing with the lighter, trying to flick the cap and the flint with the same motion. The flint caught this time and the lighter burst into flame, igniting the welled gas in the cap. Jack reeled his hand back in and flapped it. He could not stop laughing. Connor grabbed the lighter from the ground, replacing the cap and placing it in his friends top shirt pocket. Jack nursed his hand as his laughter died down. “It’s not the money. I couldn’t care about it. Well. Maybe it afforded me the time to realise what I did. It’s just, meaningless.” “How can you say that? Look at how happy people are in there. Some work ten hour days to get by, and none of them are upset with their lot in life. And you, you rich prick, have the stones to say that you think life is meaningless because you don’t value anything? Of course you don’t. You haven’t worked for a damn thing.” Jack picked up Connor’s drink as if it were his own. “It’s possible. Maybe probable. Maybe what I think is a rational justification of how I feel. But. Maybe how I feel is because of how I think, and I think that life is meaningless. Not just for me. Objectively.” “You don’t believe in God? So what. Life can still be meaningful if you don’t. Look at love or beauty or happiness, or the feeling you get with other people.” Connor snatched his drink back and drained the whiskey. “I think you’re wrong.” Jack turned and marched back into the bar. Connor thought of following. He couldn’t tell if Jack was drunk or sincere. Or both. But this was not the first time Jack had acted like this, nor would it be the last. Connor left the bar, and walked the three blocks home. The next week the tobacco company announced it was going under. And Connor did not see Jack. Connor rose from the chair as he heard wheels rolling down the gravel. He pushed it in and closed the door behind him. He walked back to the car and stood with officer Preston as the firefighters arrived to clear the rubble. The chief climbed from the cab of the truck and crossed the circle to the two officers. “Any motive?” Connor spoke before his partner.“Accident I think. Nothing left, just some metal and a skeleton. Had a lighter in his hand. Maybe a pipe came loose and ignited when he was smoking?” “Good enough for me.” He walked off and signalled to his men to get to work. Connor and Preston got back in their cruiser. The engine turned and they drove back down the lane.
LIBERTAS, Vol . 2 3 , No. 1
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Isabelle Sakelaris
“Tower of Tears” over “Cheer Up” Tyler Wilson
soft
soft
hands Yours is my favorite hand to hold. A squeeze for a story, A caress for coming back, A shake for “I love you.”
hands II I’ve been seeing your angel everywhere: glistening gold leaf and stoic face. It never answers me but with its constancy, a gift I wish I could have given you, but nothing is ever accomplished without some grief. Your likeness is everywhere: soft hands, steady heart. You declare your presence on the eagle’s wings, on every item you ever owned. I wish I could read your life like a truth, But nothing is ever accomplished without some grief.
Your hands are so soft. When I was little, you told me I would need soft hands To catch a ball and tie a knot and write in cursive.
“Gentleness and self control: against such things, there is no law.” One day I will live in accordance with them. I wish I had realized it years ago, as you did, I asked Fra Angelico’s angel to look after you. but nothing is ever accomplished without some grief. The painter was a monk, you know. That must count for something. He will surely talk to God for us and ask Him to take care of you. His hands are soft—painted so smoothly. He is puro and devoto. His hands will bless you.
The only time drinking is acceptable is during the Eucharist. But the wine stains me like blood. I haven’t written in a few days, But writing is my salvation. I am drunk with language; Intoxicated by meaning Until my head aches with reality in the morning.
Art: “Quite Red” by Lucy Sexton
Isabelle Sakelaris
Now I am aware of my tense hands As I write a poem and dry my eyes and wave goodbye. I will smile and try to be softer for you. I will hold your hand until the angel comes. 13
LIBERTAS, Vol. 23, No. 1
LIBERTAS, Vol . 2 3 , No. 1
14
LIBERTAS last word
“Phalo,” Katie St. Clair “My painting practice is built off what I see, what I experience and how I interpret the landscape,” Professor Katie St. Clair writes in a reflection on her artistic process. “Whether deep in a cave or hiking over a volcanic mountain, I gather inspiration from the rich sensations of living or dying life, the crunching of pine nettles under my boots or the specific texture of lichen on stone. These perceptions inform my subject matter and working methods in the studio. My paintings reveal themselves as complex layers of paint, experimental processes, collage material and photographs that reflect upon the natural world.” Katie St. Clair is a current visiting professor, teaching at Davidson for the first time this semester. She earned her MFA from University of Michigan–Stamps School of Art and Design. Her paintings have exhibited nationally and internationally in places such as Ireland, Detroit, and Chicago.