Issue 16: Mapping This Place

faith in literature and art

mapping this place /.

fiction little farms poetry to have another go in

the

swearing from

green to

Deborah

stain have Joy

of a

moss

canned

Corey

/.

like from

Scott Tania

from

ham

arks

in

art

the

from

Cairns Runyan pantry

spiritual

Leif and

/. and

mapping

Nikunen elbows

/.

drinking

nonfiction always from

a

choice

David

Hicks

16 ISSUE

Summer 2 0 1 0

$9.00

Kristin Brenneman Eno. Sow (Jerusalem/New York). Oil on canvas, seeds, fabric, thread. 14 x 14 inches. cover art: Frida Sasson. Hope. Collage on canvas. 23.6 x 35.4.

why

ruminate ?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse

; to meditate; to think again; to pon

der

RUMINATE is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. RUMINATE magazine was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke—longing for the significance they point us toward. Please join us.

RUMINATE MAGAZINE

Issue 16

Summer 2010

Ruminate: Faith in Literature and Art (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly by Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 140 North Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521. Postage paid at Fort Collins, CO. Copyright Š 2010 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and visual art submissions year-round—you may submit online at our website.

For information on Ruminate submission guidelines, Ruminate resources, and to submit your work, please visit our website at www.ruminatemagazine.org.

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Subscriptions are the meat and bones of this operation and what keep the printers printing and the postage paid.

Please consider subscribing to Ruminate. One year, $28. Two years, $52. If you receive a defective issue or have a problem with your subscription order, please email us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org. Send all subscription orders and changes of address to Ruminate, 140 N. Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521, or send an email to editor@ruminatemagazine.org. Subscription services available through EBSCO and WT Cox Subscriptions.

DISTRIBUTION Ruminate Magazine is distributed to bookstores by Kent News Company, 1402 Avenue B, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 and through direct distribution.

FRIENDS OF RUMINATE This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Spring 2010 and Summer 2010 financial support has helped establish Ruminate at the intersection of faith, literature, and art. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors: Steve & Kim Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, John & Janice Zeilstra Patrons: Melissa Bingham, Judith Dupree, Grace Church Presbyterian, Imagined Design, Katie & Ryan Jenkins, Katie & Tim Koblenz, Paul Miller, Richard Osler, Brian & Anne Pageau, Chris & Becky Pittoti, Richard & Rachel Rieves, Josh & Nicole Roloff, Neal & Becky Stephens, Ben & Morgan Van Dyke, Matt & Lisa Willis Sponsors: Gary Burlingame, Nancy Ellison, Clare Gorham, Jed and Whitney Hale, John Fitzpatrick, Norma Hopcraft, Manfred Kory, Nathaniel Lawrence, Rob Lee, Paulette Lein, Mary McCabe, Janos and Margaret Shoemyen, Janet Penhall, Gwen Solien, Kelly & Brandon Van Dyke, Barbara Warner, Paul & Sharon Willis

Ruminate is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses.

s t

a f f

Brianna Van Dyke Amy Lowe Stefani Rossi, Stephanie Walker Alexa Behmer, Whitney Hale, Phillip Henry, Marci Johnson, Libby Keuneke, Nicholas Price, Jonathan Van Dyke Edie Adams, Hannah Blair Anne Pageau, annepageau.com

editor-in-chief senior editor associate editors readers interns design

contents

Notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Contributors’ Last

4 5 24 46 48

Fiction Mollie Murray 18 Generation

Leif Nikunen 34 Ironpaws

Poetry Jae Newman Doors Among Trees Wired Jaw

6 7

Deborah Joy Corey

Patricia L. Hamilton Geocentricity Thirst

Nonfiction

8 9

10 Relations, 1968

Scott Cairns Kol Nidre

Art

14

Frida Sasson

Tania Runyan For Theirs Is the Kingdom of Heaven For They Shall Be Called Children of God

16 17

Alan Berecka The Value of Salt

cover

Kristin Brenneman Eno inside front cover

23

inside back cover

29

15

30 31

32 33

25 26 27 28 39 42

44

back cover

Heather Cadenhead Autumn claims my bones Love Song for Elimelech

Blood Donor Eschatalogical Barbeque Self Portrait as Saint Embracing both parts Me and the Mexicans in the Greenhouse Julie’s Studio

Micah Bloom

Dane Cervine Small Pebbles in the Heart

Lead, Kindly, Light

David Hicks

Benjamin Myers Fragments After the 51st Psalm Mid-Winter: Clarksville, Arkansas

Sow (Jerusalem/New York) He turned their waters into blood (Tigris/Mississippi)

Kathleen Gunton

Jonathan Austin Peacock The Harvest

Hope

Escapee

ruminating

EDITOR’S NOTE

I’ve been thinking a lot about mapping, and how art, in a sense, maps our lives. In fact, I’ve even been thinking about creating my own art-filled map.

I would be eating dinner with a new friend, and after we’ve pushed away from the table and the conversation lulls, I’d turn to her and say there’s something I wanted to show you. We’d walk down the stairs into my office, turn on the light switch and wait for our eyes to adjust.

I’d reach up and pull down one of those wall-mounted roller maps, like the kind we all had in elementary school. And where Egypt should be, there’d be a charcoal drawing of my eyes in college when I first met my husband. In place of Arizona, there’d be the acronym my best friend and I created in second grade to seal our friendship, B.L.L.M.P. Alaska would be draped with the fabric from my baptismal gown, the one my grandmother sewed when I was just weeks old.

My children’s names would cover Africa, and my Lord’s names would cover all the oceans. Thailand would be the first poem I memorized, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow . . . and the rest of Southeast Asia would be lines of words I’ve loved. Colorado would have a twig-made home covering it, or maybe a mud-caked adobe.

This is my map, my life.

Oh, my friend would say, I see.

And she would. She’d see the way God tracked Himself through my history, His faithfulness and all the monuments erected, like Joshua’s pile of rocks in the Jordan. She’d see me. And then we’d make plans for dinner at her house next time; her map next time.

As Joshua reminds us, remembering is a calling, and therefore, so is mapping. How powerful it is when we attentively remember our past and all of the provisions we’ve been given. Or, as David Hicks says of his art in this issue, when we methodically approach spiritual mapping “to track, record, and remember personal spiritual experiences.” It’s the remembering that is so important—but without the tracking and recording, the paintbrush strokes and the erected rocks, the scribbles of words and sketches of moments, our memories fail us. We need the monuments, so that in the future, when we’re asked, “What do these stones mean?” we can answer.

And so, may this issue be a kind of map for you, pointing you toward the landscape and histories that we all share. And may these new friends’ attempts at mapping their hearts and prayers on the page invite you to do the same.

Warmly,

Brianna Van Dyke P.S. I think I’m going to search eBay and see if I can locate a roller map, one with a long string dangling down and plenty of white open space for remembering “the small brilliances of life” (as Tania Runyan says).

4

Issue 16 //

SUMMER 2010

ruminators

NOTES FRO

M YOU

In honor of our upcoming issue on the theme of pilgrimage, send us your best or worst pilgrimage in 50 words or less, as well as any thoughts, questions, or comments to editor@ruminatemagazine.org

While I love the magazine and the design, I do wish you wouldn’t print the poet’s biographical note on the same page as their poems. Poetry has its own shape and form and the bios often seem to clutter up the pages.

Richard Chicago, Illinois *Thanks for the suggestion! We’ve always wanted to highlight the community of people that make up Ruminate and have traditionally put the bios alongisde each contributor’s work, but we do hear you on it “cluttering” the page. So we’re trying something different. We now have a “Contributors’ Notes” section at the back of the magazine with our friend’s bios.

We hope everyone enjoys all the open space. ~Ruminate Staff

Ruminate is possibly the best name ever for a Christian literary magazine. Years ago, at a friend’s ordination, I heard a great sermon. It was on the imagery of us as sheep and Christ as shepherd, and it meditated on just where in that order clergy fit (bellweathers, it turned out). The sermon spent a fair amount of time talking about how goo-brained sheep are, how dirty, how prone to wander off, how they are perfectly capable of standing in rising water until it drowns them, and how all of that makes sheep pretty good metaphors for humans in relationship to Christ. There is also Donald Hall’s wonderful poem “The Black-faced Sheep” in which he makes many of the same comparisons. And then there is Handel’s Messiah—you know the chorus, “All we like sheep have gone astray . . . ” and the wonderful text-painting when the music goes all twirly on “have gone astray.” Sheep, of course, are ruminants, like cows, who are also not generally noted for their intelligence, lovely animals though they are. So the title of the magazine carries all that nice baggage with it, for me, anyway. My husband the medievalist, on the other hand, immediately popped up with “Oh, it has Rumi right there in the word.” That works for me, too. Pax, Devon Miller-Dugan Newark, Deleware

After reading Issue 15: Now we are blessed with a genuine literary magazine with great stories, poetry, and art. It didn’t take you long to arrive here! Congratulations from a happy reader in Alachua.

Happy Reader Alachua, Florida It was a pleasure getting a chance to meet Ruminate at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing. I’m enjoying reading the magazine and am looking forward to receiving it as a subscriber. It’s wonderful to have a publication that presents artful words and images, too. Thank you!

Angela Shupe Milford, Michigan

5

Jae Newman

DOORS AMONG TREES Lost on your childhood trail

we came upon hundreds of doors leaning upon trees

scattered in an Alleghany abstract of strange colors with wood chipped into splintered echoes

the windows missing as the thought of being lost was lost

and replaced with the childish awe of a fantasia world

as if our bodies weren’t just pushing through brush

looking for the road but in search of something holy

something hidden in the foothills

6

Issue 16 //

SUMMER 2010

Jae Newman

WIRED JAW Honey-laced flytrap, it isn't your fault you are broken or that words started coming here to die. At rest in my mouth, old grievances bumble through final testimonies, fully aware this is it, this is where what was urgent or deliberate will sound the same as what is already forgotten.

Here, in the garden of memory, we can bury what we did not say beneath what we said and wish we had not. Flash a light inside past these bleeding gums; Look hard past the rot.

Is there a holy word gaining shape, an inaudible reply? I heard my name before the vow, heard it said one last time by the voice I loved most then hurt slightly as its erasure confirmed my namelessness. Wired jaw, shatter! Let everyone hear this voice now for the first time, let them ask, Isn't he the man whose lips blurred like blades of swaying grass?

Isn't he the man whose mumbling causes waitresses to lean in?

My broken stereo-phonics restored, these words, hallelujah! still vibrate, still glow.

7

Patricia L. Hamilton

Geocentricity Tucked away in the backyard, a slender pink dogwood blushes like an ingĂŠnue, shyly longing to be noticed, secretly hoping one day her beauty will command universal admiration.

Towering behind the dogwood, a black walnut draped in lavender wisteria flings its dark branches upward with operatic grandiloquence, a practiced suppliant, adept at the annual spring pageantry.

Beyond, the unfathomable blue sky is merely backdrop, stage scenery, and the magnificent white clouds drifting by like silent continents only props suspended on hidden wires by some unseen hand.

8

Patricia L. Hamilton

Thirst Day after day the haze shimmers, each afternoon's mirage dense with the promise of relief, the gauzy heat a limbo between sky and fissured earth.

In the yard the oaks and elms droop like day laborers whose shoulders sag each time they are not chosen.

Along the road a line of slender pines waits motionless, needles fanned to catch any blessing of breeze, praying for roiling cumulus burnished as the throne of God to mount up, dispensing rain like mercy onto parched tongues.

9

Deborah Joy Corey

Relations, 1968 Y

ou see it from the time you are small, touch the hem of dresses and tailored pants worn by relatives who come back home, relatives that left long ago, their feet no longer dusty from the road and driveway and creek path.

Your daddy’s sinner words greet them, “Gee-hoo-va Jesus,” he hollers stepping out onto the verandah. It is noontime and he is home for lunch, “Damn Ellis, why didn’t you tell us you were comin’?”

You repeat the swear words and hold them under your tongue like stolen candy.

Someday, you will swear, too, out in the open, just like him. You will be like the crows, free and making scoldings, those stored words as cool as mints when you release them.

Your father and uncle shake hands and hug, and then Uncle Ellis and Aunt Myrtle greet you and your little brother like the children you are, patting your heads and telling you to visit them at the lake while they are home from Connecticut, telling you to come on out and go for a swim. You picture it, the red cottage with its New Brunswick flag on the porch post, the whining green screen door, the cool lake water lapping against the shore. When you finally get to swim in the lake, you will pretend it is all yours, the cottage and lake, even the world. Paddling in the water, you will study the square-rigged sailing ship on the flag and you will wonder if it is like the ship on which your father’s ancestors traveled from England. And after, when you come back home and remember floating in the lake imagining all your relations, it will be like standing at the window of a dream.

Your uncle and aunt step up onto the verandah. You can tell they are happy to be here. After all, it is the family homestead, but still your uncle hesitates, stepping slowly like he doesn’t really know how to be here anymore. Like this place is a tune he can’t quite remember.

“That’s a gorgeous car, Ellis,” your daddy says, but before they can start up a conversation about the motor or the extras, your mama, who rushed to comb her hair when they drove in, comes out. Her face is flushed, maybe from the heat or maybe from the surprise visit. Still, she practically pulls Uncle Ellis into the kitchen.

“Come in. Come In.” Your daddy escorts Aunt Myrtle inside behind them and you marvel at the sight of them without really understanding. If you were older, you would ask, What is this gracious exchange of wives whenever brothers get together? It somehow reminds you of playing house and trading dolls.

“Hey,” your brother says, “let’s get in Uncle Ellis’s new car.” His eyes reflect its shiny blue gleam. He wipes his hands on his shirt before touching the chrome handle.

10

The beige leather seats are warm and smell good. Once you heard another uncle describe the smell as factory new. There is a string of uncles, all of them tall with skin that tans. And often, they stand in each other’s driveways admiring a new car while they smoke their cigars and cigarettes.

Your brother lies across the back seat. He stretches out like he’s floating on a cloud and folds his hands over his chest and for the shortest second, you imagine that he is lying in a casket. You grab the wheel frantically, pretending to drive away. Off to Connecticut you go, to the land of prosperity and of factory-new cars. “Someday,” your brother says, dreamy, as if he is thinking the very same thing as you, “someday.”

Coming from the kitchen is laughter, big and round and welcoming. Even so, you know your mother is scurrying around trying to make a better lunch than the Sunday dinner leftovers she had planned. When the relations leave, her welcoming smile will fade into worry, “Why am I always at my worst when family comes? Why don’t they call first?”

After, she will swear to always keep a canned ham in the pantry. After, she will swear never again to be without a choice. A choice. The word that comes as a vow from her will stick in your head like a warning. And you will be reminded of the word when you swear too. Not on that day. Not while watching the shiny blue car race away toward the lake, making dust, but later, when you are older and your little brother comes home with a wife and lake kids of his own. You will know then that long ago, while watching your father and uncle stand united, their arms crossed comfortably, their slim hips pushed slightly forward, you made the choice to always love your brother.

After lunch, the men walk around the edge of the lawn and have a smoke.

While your little brother sneaks back into the car to hide, you follow the men about. You are no more than an animal to them, a cat or a squirrel that they think is incapable of understanding their language. You lie on the grass and shade your eyes while looking at the puffy clouds. There’s one shaped just like the big sailing ship on the New Brunswick flag, but it somehow appears to be snapped in two. That’s what happened to the Titantic, you think. Who could ever have imagined that before it happened. Who could have imagined something so majestic cracking in two.

Out of the blue, Uncle Ellis says he has cancer. You know the word because it has already belonged to another uncle; your father and uncles carried his casket into the family cemetery last summer.

11

“No,” your dad says low.

“Yes,” he says, “I had the test. Damn near killed me. I’m gonna be operated on when we get back to Connecticut.”

They look at each other and then Uncle Ellis stares back at the house he grew up in, taking long drags from his cigarette. Now he is looking at the house like it is a friend, not a stranger. He smiles, “For the test, they get this thing like a steel pipe and drive it up your ass.”

You expect your dad to laugh, but he tilts his head and squints, chewing at his plush lower lip.

“And they don’t give you a thing for pain. Something about the bowel not acting normal if you have medication. They tell you right up front it’s gonna be a little uncomfortable. What they don’t tell you is you’re gonna feel like they’re ripping you a new asshole.”

Again, you expect your father to laugh, but he doesn’t. Uncle Ellis takes a long last drag and then flicks his cigarette all the way to the gravel driveway. It goes up in an arch like something shot from a cannon. He wipes his lips which are tanned

You expect your dad to laugh,

but he tilts his head and squints,

chewing at his plush lower lip. like his face, and then crosses his arms. “I had this pretty little nurse assisting the doctor. She kept wiping the sweat off my forehead and she kept saying, ‘Easy now Mr. Corey. Easy.’ So after a while I looked at up at her and I said, ‘Listen little darlin’, I’d like to drive this thing up your ass and say easy’.” Now, they both laugh long and hard, their brother chests beating up and down like twin engines, and then they both take out their white hankies and wipe away their tears from laughing.

You smile, snatching the word ass to store away with the others, just like money in the bank for your future. Won’t you be something?

In the kitchen, the lunch dishes are clinking as they get washed and dried and you hear the voices of women and something of their sighing in between. You recognize the rhythm. A breathy yes and sigh, an mmm… that usually goes with a nod, and a really. It’s the language of women. You know they are talking about their families, because you have listened like a cat on the kitchen couch while your other aunts visited.

12

Aunt Myrtle is probably talking about her only child Jean who is already grown up and studying to be a nurse. You think how sweet it all is with the mothers in the kitchen and the fathers in the yard. Just the way things should stay forever, you think, but soon your aunt comes out on the verandah and calls to your uncle.

“Dear, we’d better get to the lake,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of unpacking to do.”

Only when they are comfortably in their car does your brother sit up in the backseat, popping up like a jack in a box. You know he seriously wants to slip off with them. He was dreaming of swimming on this hot day, of the world being his, but they don’t invite him. They just laugh like that’s the end of it. That’s the joke.

And your father opens the door for him to climb out, and for a moment, you are all washed in the scent of factory new.

Looking back, you will remember the way your mother’s shoes looked as she stood in the yard waving them off. Her navy housework shoes. They were not white sandals with a little heel like Aunt Myrtle wore; they were shiny without a speck of dust on them. They were gleaming like the new car. You will remember your little brother popping up in the backseat, the red-faced grin looking for an invitation, which was a look of both bravery and rejection, all in one, like that of a departing soldier. But mostly you will remember your uncle’s face after he told the cancer test story. And how when he was done laughing so hard that tears rolled down his face, he looked at the house and his easy smile turned to a grimace. At the time, you thought it might have been from embarrassment for the weathered homestead, the house that had first appeared to him as a stranger and then as a friend.

When word comes of his death the following year, you will remember the grimace and think maybe it was from contemplating his own death that froze his face like that, but now that they are all dead, your mother and father, your aunt and uncle and even their daughter Jean, murdered by a jealous boyfriend, you know differently. You know he was not contemplating death. When your younger brother drives into your yard now with his shiny new car and wife and lake-loving kids of his own, you travel backwards, all the way back to your father’s feelings that inhabit you now, to his timeless welcoming words, to the day you made a choice to always love your brother.

And you remember your uncle’s momentary look of tortured stillness. And you know it came from thinking he might not return. He might never again stand in front of the homestead with his brother. It was no doubt as ominous as a block of ice about to snap everything in two. In the face of such heartache, the threat of death must be no more than a simple tune that you have momentarily forgotten.

Then you hug your brother and you pat the heads of his children, while saying, Come in, Come in. Damn, it’s good to see you . . . . . . . . .

13

Scott Cairns

Kol Nidre Good to reconsider, and then to disavow

whatever mitigations one has let usurp, eclipse, or glibly water down whatever good

he may have thought to offer. Some untoward something will often sprout from any swollen hull thus sown.

The unforeseen is guaranteed to flourish well beyond the harried terms of any vow expressed

from one’s more narrow sense or solitary will.

Good therefore to have another go at what

might prove of use beyond one’s dim intentions, no?

Good thereafter to unsay, recant what harm

has billowed, subsequent, from ill-considered promise. Good that one prepare ever to repent.

14

Issue 16 //

SUMMER 2010

Kathleen Gunton Lead, Kindly, Light. Photography.

15

Tania Runyan

For Theirs Is the Kingdom of Heaven Problem was, I had to talk to Jesus to get there, the man whose giant white robe flowed through the pages of my Golden Children’s Bible.

Oh, the fright of all that sunlit hair, sheep and children jostling for his arms!

I found my comfort lying alone on the shaded slope in the yard.

I didn’t have to look into the expectant eyes of Christ, but the magenta clouds of bougainvillea rolling over the fence.

I gathered the fallen blooms, reading the stories of drizzle and ants written on the papery bracts.

On a parallel hillside he quieted himself so he could listen to the universe in his heartbeat: planets coolly ticking off their orbits, gills pulsing, electrons darting in the bread. As the sky began to darken he sank even deeper into the earth, his elbows drinking in the green stain of moss.

He exhaled the stricken faces, the tear-drenched kisses and shouts, the leprous hands tugging at this sleeve, and closed his eyes, searching for peace in the afterlife of shadows.

16

Tania Runyan

For They Shall Be Called Children of God I do not concern myself with things too marvelous for me.

I pull young buckthorn after the rain and watch the cranesbill fill in, tie a clover around my child’s wrist to stop her from crying after a fall.

I do not concern myself with matters too great. I skim the article once or twice—rebel fighters, refugees, tankers billowing smoke.

Shall I say each time my eyes wander to the blue stars of lilacs tumbling from a jar on the table, that I love those lilacs more?

I will die being no help to this man curled around a broken IV on a floor in Sri Lanka.

I would like to sink into his stare and pray him through his nightmares.

But first I lie in the grass and bury my face in the great skirts of the sky, making peace with the carpenter ants and the other small brilliances of my life.

17

Mollie Murray

M

Generation

y mama’s crazy, but I don’t tell that to the teachers. In fact I don’t say anything to the teachers, just “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” added on to my answers when they ask me questions. And they usually don’t ask me questions because I make sure to sit in the back and keep my mouth shut.

I like school. What I don’t like is going home after school and walking across the city that Jesus hates, according to my mama. I pass the pretzel stand and the old man behind it always smiles at me and says something like, “Look at you all grown up and smart,” because he sees my school uniform. Sometimes I wonder if he could be my daddy, and that’s why he smiles at me. But mostly I believe my mama on that, and she says that I don’t have a daddy because I have so many mamas looking after me. That’s why my mama’s crazy, because she doesn’t ever look around and realize that she’s the only mama in our house.

I like the city. When my mama was younger than me she moved here from a farm, and she is always complaining about the noises that you hear from the street.

It seems to me that Jesus must like quiet and that’s why he doesn’t like it here, but Mama says that the farm made a lot of noise too, just a more natural kind. So maybe it’s natural things that Jesus likes. I like the smell of hot pretzels and the way that people in the city put up colorful posters over all the concrete. That is something I would never tell my mama.

Mama doesn’t think it was her that got me the scholarship to go to school, and that’s another reason she’s crazy. Every time she talks about it, and that’s almost every day before I leave to walk across the city, she says that it was either Mira, that’s my great grandma, or Jesus, or both of them working together that did it. Now I know that’s not true because I was with my mama when she signed all the papers and marched into the school to talk to the fat man that became my principal. I was with her when she walked out again and when she held my hand on the walk back and cried. So I know that it was her who did it, not Jesus and not my great grandma Mira either.

Mira is the main character in all of my mama’s stories. She tells me that’s who keeps us safe in this city that Jesus hates, but when I learned about main characters in school my teachers didn’t say anything about them keeping people safe. In school they always stay inside the books, and they can only talk to other people in the same book. Mama says that Mira still talks to her and so I’m pretty sure she’s crazy, because I sleep in the same room with my mama and I’ve never seen my great grandma Mira before in my life.

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Issue 16 //

SUMMER 2010

There is one story of my great grandma Mira’s that my mama only tells at night, when Jesus has left and we are lying in bed next to each other. It’s her favorite one, and I can tell when she’s about to tell it because her eyes get real wide, and I can see the white parts of them in the light that comes in from the street. When she’s about to tell it, she sits up real straight in the bed and turns to me. “In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and my grandma Mira,” she says, and does this big cross over her chest.

When she starts to talk, her voice changes like it’s really my great grandma Mira speaking and not just my mama in her old green nightey.

I know what it’s like to be dead. Once a train ran over my arm an took it on down the track. It was the 5:45 Westbound, an I like to think about my arm makin it all the way out there to California, where I never did get to. I like to picture they faces, all the folks waitin there at the train station in Los Angeles, starin straight down the tracks at my left arm in the headlights. But I don’t know if any of it really happened.

There I was, a layin down next to the tracks with only one arm left an wailin like the end was near.

My brother was the first one to hear me, from where he was workin in the field, his hands bleedin from the spurs in the cotton. He heard me a yellin an a screamin like I was seein the Lawd Jesus himself face to face, only things had gone bad an he was a tellin me that I was goin to hell. So my brother set off runnin towards the house to get the truck from old mister Jeffrey, ran faster than he ever knew he could.

An I’m a layin there, bleedin from the place where my left arm used to be, before it got carried on down the tracks an out west to end up in some wax museum. Blood was pourin out all over my dress an I knew that if I still had a mama on this here earth that she was gonna wring my neck for soilin my pretty little dress, although it wasn’t so little after all. So I’m a layin there, an all the sudden I see Lawd Jesus himself a comin down at my face from the clouds an he says to me, “Mira baby, you ain’t gonna die today, but I’m gonna show you what it’s like so you’ll think twice the next time you go runnin next to a train.”

Now I never knew that Jesus looked like me, with dark skin an all, so I stopped all my screamin an cryin so I could ask him some questions I’d been thinkin on, like why did my brother’s wife spend so much time at mister Jeffrey’s when she should be home tendin to her babies. So I stopped makin such a big fuss an what do you know it, everyone in the fields they lifted up they hands an praised the Lawd for takin me up quick so I didn’t suffer none, an they had no idea that the Lawd God Jesus was settin just down the hill from all of them.

Now me an Jesus, we thought this was mighty funny, an so even though I was a little nervous, I poked him in the arm an said, all mockin like, “Oooh thank you Lawd Jesus for finishin me off quick!” an he thought that was pretty funny too so he started to chuckle an he held on to my face there an he says to me, “You’re welcome, Mira baby, you’re mighty welcome.”

An it was just about then, with me spurtin my dark red blood all over the grass an my dress, just hangin on there about to die, when I hear my brother a screamin like he got the Holy Spirit in him, runnin down the hill almost as fast as that train was goin an he yells to me, “Hold on Mira, I’m comin, I’m comin! You just hold on there, Mira!” An he’s all out of breath an I see him come over the top of the hill but my vision’s kind a blurry like, so I turn back to my friend Jesus.

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I want to say, “Hurry up Jesus an kiss me, because if my brother finds us alone together here you’re gonna be in some fix!” but Jesus is a lookin up towards my brother too, an I don’t say nothin cause from that angle I see that it ain’t the Lawd Jesus that’s holdin me, but mean ole Patrick that knocked up my sister Sherry last winter an here he is, pretendin to be the Lawd Jesus Almighty an really just wantin to get me into trouble like he done with my sister.

I see my brother comin closer, still a pantin an a runnin, an even though I’m mighty angry I don’t want mean ole Patrick to die yet so I tell him, an I push him hard with my only arm left when I say this, I tell him “You get away from me you good for nothin devil, an I don’t want to ever see your face again!” An he looks scared for a second, not at all like Baby Jesus I tell myself, an he runs away.

An then I’m a layin there bleedin all over the place an my brother gets there with mister Jeffrey, an they’re both scared to see all my blood all around us an my arm gone on the train to California, an as they lift me my brother he asks me, “Who was that talkin to you when I come over that hill?”

An I look him straight in the eyes my mama gave him before she left this here earth, an the last thing I say to him before everything goes dark an spooky like, before they get me back to the house an splash me with water, I say to my brother, “It was the Lawd Jesus settin with me an holdin my hand until you came,” an I swear to God Almighty I ain’t never told a lie before in my life.

I never know what to think when the main characters are men. Mama says that all men should be like Jesus but they never are. In church, when we go, we are told that we should all be like Jesus, every single person. I don’t want to be like a man. I think that God sounds a lot nicer

Jesus hates liars, too,

but probably not as much as he hates this city,

from the way my mama talks about it.

than Jesus because He’s a lot further away. He looks in on us and sends us messages but he’s never creeping up beside you or with you all the time, even when you pee, like Mama says Jesus is. I like to live with my mama, even though she’s crazy, and I think God understands that. But Jesus is always pounding on the door, asking to be let into our lives and telling Mama to open up and give him a key. Now this is where my mama and I disagree, because Mama always lets him in, no matter how much he smells like the street does when you’re not walking past the pretzel stand. That’s why when Mama lets him in and I smell that street smell that makes me want to vomit, I stay away until he leaves again.

Mama says that going to school will teach me how to get us all out of the city again, but she never really says where we would go. I don’t know why she came here in the first place if she

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hates it so much. I imagine someplace calm and cool, somewhere that Jesus wouldn’t burn his feet on the pavement in the summer. I bet he burns his feet too, even if he doesn’t complain about it like Mama says I do. Sometimes when we are walking Jesus picks me up and lets me sit on his shoulders so my feet won’t burn, but I think he just wants me to love him like my mama does. She says Jesus always went barefoot so I shouldn’t make such a fuss, because he lived in the desert which I guess is even hotter than the city in the summer. But I find that pretty hard to believe.

Not that my mama would ever lie to me, at least on purpose. Grown-ups lie a whole lot, especially my teachers. My teachers say that old men on the street, like the old man with the pretzel stand, are dangerous. I didn’t even have to ask my mama whether that was a lie, because even when the street smells like vomit the old man behind the pretzel stand never does, and neither do his pretzels.

Jesus hates liars, too, but probably not as much as he hates this city, from the way my mama talks about it. But it’s bad news for me either way cause I like this city, and I don’t mind telling a lie either. Not all the time, of course, but when Jesus comes around knocking on the door and making a whole lot of noise, I like to open the little slot in the door and tell him that my mama isn’t home and please don’t come back, even when my mama is laying down on our bed and when she hears me she comes running to the door and pushes me right on out so she can make more room for Jesus. And he walks in and smiles at me and rubs his hand over my head like it was all a big joke.

He is not really Jesus, even I know that. I just call him Jesus because I only hear my mama shout like that in church on Sunday and when she’s with him.

Jesus is supposed to know everything, but he doesn’t seem to know that my mama’s crazy. He doesn’t know that she keeps the man who might be my daddy locked up under our bed. I’ve never seen him but I’ve seen the box she put him in and now I know why the room always smells a little funny after Jesus leaves because I bet the man who might be my daddy gets jealous and his sweat probably smells real bad.

My mama has only told one lie in her life, from what I can tell. And that lie is about the man she keeps locked under the bed. One night when Jesus didn’t knock on our door to come in but to take my mama out, it got dark and I got scared so I went to hide under our bed. We read a story once at school about a boy who hid under a bed from a monster, and everyone laughed because their mamas always told them that monsters hide under the bed and not little boys, but I thought it was smart of the boy because what kind of monster is going to look under a bed when there are so many more interesting things to steal, like jewelry and knives and television sets?

So I waited under the bed until my mama came back, without Jesus, and I was starting to wonder why it smelled so bad under that bed and why my mama hadn’t made me clean it. She came through the door, a little wobbly on her feet, like maybe she was nervous, and when she saw me crawling out from under our bed she started screaming and crying all at the same time, so that I couldn’t tell what she was trying to say. After a minute she calmed

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down but she pulled me in real close. “What you see under that bed?” And before I could even answer she grabbed my face and put it right up against hers, only mine was a lot smaller, and my skin’s not as dark as hers, and I could smell that street smell that makes me want to vomit, but she was holding me so that I couldn’t turn away. She stank like Jesus, and it looked like she had been sweating blood on her cheek.

“That’s right you didn’t see nothin under that bed. And if you did, you ain’t never gonna tell nobody. You understand?” I couldn’t move because she was holding me up against her so tight, like she was going to drown in the sewer on the street corner and I was the only thing holding her up. Then her eyes got this look they do when she’s thinking about my great grandma Mira, and she says real slow in her Mira voice: I am your mama, an I ain’t never killed a man. You ain’t got no daddy an you can thank the Lawd Jesus for that! Ain’t nobody gonna hit my baby girl an walk outta my door still breathin! There ain’t nothin strange under that bed, baby, an I can promise you that. Nothin but a devil who deserves to be there.

She said some more things I didn’t understand, but I played like I do in school when I don’t understand my teachers and I nodded my head all serious. Now I know that there’s not a monster under our bed but a man locked up who might be my daddy, even though my mama says I don’t have one. Jesus still knocks on our door, but not to take my mama out and leave me in. He knocks only to come in, smelling like the street, and so my mama can push me out until he leaves.

When my mama was little like me she came to this city with my great grandma Mira. She didn’t have a daddy either so I guess that’s why she got to know Jesus so well. I don’t want someone like Jesus. I’d rather it just be Mama and me, and I could even be real quiet so she’d like it better. Maybe we could throw out the smelly trunk underneath our bed and set the man who might be my daddy free. And when I get bigger I can follow my great grandma Mira’s arm out to California and get as far away from Jesus as I can. In church they say it’s not possible no matter how hard you try, but I’ll bet I could do it. He’s too busy yelling at my mama to notice me anyhow. Now I know that my mama’s crazy, but even crazy people shouldn’t get yelled at all the time.

I learned that in school. But who’s going to listen to me? I never even met my great grandma Mira, and for all I know she could be the one hiding in that trunk and talking to my mama late when she knows I’m fast asleep from my slow breathing. Maybe one night I’ll lie real still, quiet like Jesus and my mama like it, and I’ll hear my great grandma Mira telling my mama how to make it to heaven.

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Alan Berecka

The Value of Salt

You are the salt — Matthew 5:13

My father covered his T-bones and fries in blizzards of salt. He insisted that I try it, forcing me to shake a dusting onto my food. He claimed the seasoning brought out hidden flavors, but all I could ever taste was salt.

In the winter he carried a torn bag of rock salt. Like a farmer feeding chickens, he scattered handfuls to melt the iced walk that led to a rusted Rambler. He drove us into the city on a bed of salted sand,

to early mass at Saint George’s where a stern friar stared down from the pulpit, warned his flock not to become salt that lost its flavor, while I gave thanks for my father's diet— the long odds of salt ever being bland— and sensed the hint of God’s savor.

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ruminator

ARTIST’S NOTE

David Hicks received an MFA in painting from Indiana Uni-

versity, Bloomington in 2008. While there, he created large scale paintings, reminiscent of art historical altarpieces. Highly influenced by artists Stanley Spencer and Jacob Lawrence, he considers his work contemporary expressions of faith. Interested in further unveiling the notion of forgotten altarpieces, David considers his paintings as such and has donated them to the permanent collections of religious organizations. More recently, David was awarded a teaching fellowship at Herron School of Art & Design.

Spiritual Mapping: David Hicks Using crude, sometimes naĂŻve mark-making and paint application as language, I attempt to investigate contemporary spiritual experience. And more recently, my art-making practice has evolved into methodical approaches to spiritual mapping. This theme and process attempts to track, record, and remember personal spiritual experiences, and through careful exploration, my work hopes to better understand the divine.

I am often toeing the line between two extremes in my work: I work from direct observation, and I work from memory. I create work that is driven by symbol, and I create work that is driven by the physical imagery alone. The subject matter in my paintings is at times believable, other times it becomes fantasy. The themes often range from comedic moments of human bumbling to creating a somber mood of contemplation, and sometimes a mix of both. My paintings can be humorous; yet they are contemplative. In these six works, I have attempted to bring together the extremes found in the reality of being simultaneously human and spiritual.

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David Hicks. Blood Donor. Oil on canvas. 30 x 24 inches.

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David Hicks. Eschatalogical Barbeque. Oil on board. 96 x 72 inches.

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David Hicks. Self Portrait as Saint. Charcoal, pastel on blue paper. 39 x 27 inches.

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David Hicks. Embracing both parts. Oil on canvas. 36 x 17 inches.

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Jonathan Austin Peacock

The Harvest June and the last bug-riddled scraps from my father's garden.

Southern depression. The avenues. The exterior

of the house. The antebellum shimmer

of the floor.

Broken architecture in a series of aged photographs.

The smileless summer boy holding leeks and a single ripened tomato.

July and the slow-moving blood.

The callous medical men. And him. Jaundiced.

A pre-mortem estate-planning checklist and the unsteadied hand.

Phrenology because it mattered.

Rabbit-eared pages

of the Life Extension Society pamphlet.

My mother's other vices. The safety pull-cord and children, lynching their toys above the mostly immaculate linoleum surface. Expansion in my mind. Details.

Notate and harvest. Notate and harvest.

August and the departure. Meditative.

Father's judicial eyes and the scarcity of color.

Chiming breeze.

Porch door poundings.

I was the prodigy and the sheep and the poppy field beside my father's garden all over and over again.

What remains in stillness, irony. Clods of peat find home on the vestibule floor.

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Benjamin Myers

FRAGMENTS AFTER THE 51st PSALM Like a burning field, smoke and light making liquid of the fence-line behind it, weed and sapling bent to flame . . .

How will I speak after you have spoken?

How will I speak after you have not?

Like a church split along the aisle, the choir bare-headed to the sun . . .

Coming up from the subway my eyes are two cursors flipping out and in of existence.

Are you the zero curved perfectly back on yourself?

Though the western light gets lost in the glare of the car lot, let me sing a little something in the evening.

Open my lips, O Lord.

You are the lily and the rock a figure standing on the lawn post-dusk, the passing train and just after.

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Benjamin Myers

MID-WINTER: CLARKSVILLE, ARKANSAS

For two months the puddles have sat fat as bankers on the lawn, the sky one itchy dry skin. I saw at the curb children falling onto the school bus, one boy, bare-armed, impervious by virtue of neglect, his sharp, small elbows cutting crescents into the a.m. frost, the other children sealed like letters into parkas. It is too cold now for philosophy, too cold for consolation.

It is cold and only cold. The fish in Little Piney Creek have painted their complaint in circles on the stream’s surface. We can ask, with any justice, for little more than that.

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Heather Cadenhead

Autumn claims my bones as I meet with the peeled-back sky on this rooftop. There is something in being cold, alone, and ripe.

A plum waiting on a tree.

The stars, like me, are exposed.

I feel them asking do you deserve to be here?

I don't have an answer. I have skin.

The obituaries tell me who was once here, they tell me who survives the dead. Three children lined up like china dolls on a church pew. Hush, be still.

There is a pain that comes with branches breaking from the mother-body.

Plucked from the limb, we are forgotten in one place and born in another.

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Heather Cadenhead

Love Song for Elimelech 1.

We have been hungry, bodies like tree-limbs, torn from something larger, left discarded.

I have watched your bones grow brittle. The meat that once covered you has been skinned, slowly, until there is nothing for me to hold onto.

2.

Here, my body learns food again. It takes a new shape: first, from bread and then a second swelling.

We name this bird in the hollow for Judea, for the thing we remember.

It was not yeast that filled my insides, or wheat that made me moon-bellied.

3.

Do not call me gracious one, since I do not bend like a willow branch. I am split like a dead tree. But with you, I will go even to the ground.

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Ironpaws Leif Nikunen

I

n later years, the story went round that Isaac Silbernagel was first called Ironpaws in 1922, when he bought the worn-out junk of a threshing machine company called The Bull—the same time, incidentally, that he began to sign his last name with the Star of David instead of a dot over the ‘i.’

But the truth is that Isaac started using neither of these things in 1922—not the nickname, not the Star of David—but earlier, according to the local historian, Willow Strand. The truth was muddied with fictions promoted by Isaac Silbernagel himself after World War II when he held a post on the James River County Relief Board that allowed him to lecture impecunious Catholics and Laestadian Lutherans and Baptists for producing too many children and not enough income. He put his thoughts into what Seamus Kinsella, Catholic, father of 11, called The Lecture. Seamus had got parts of it by heart.

Isaac would say, “I notice you are quite the family man. And that is all to the good—praiseworthy. You want to have lots of children, fine. You love them, God loves them, another redheaded Irish baby’s come into the world, everybody’s happy. But then somehow you haven’t got money to pay for them—now does that sound like God? I think maybe God told it to you but you missed the part about making money. You seem to think it’s good theology not to take risks, not to want to make money. Is money dirty, does money make you sick, does God not like money?”

And then—this was the part Willow Strand later heard about from Seamus and others— Isaac would bring up the events of the year 1922. He would say, “Now I know from my own personal experience that God is not opposed to money, because it was the day before Midsummer’s of 1922, which is St. John’s Eve, for God’s sake, a Christian holy day, when I took the big plunge and started making some serious money. And what can I say about that? St. John, being a Jew, must have thought we should stick together. Very ecumenical guy—at least he always treated me right. God and his holy saint rewarded me for that bravery and made me stinking rich and successful and happy.”

Then he would smite the unfortunate Christian on the shoulder and say, “So what’s your problem? Are you an atheist or something? Is that part of your secular humanist religion, to think there’s no work, no God, no money? Well, I don’t believe it, pal, I think that’s absolute garbage. Un-American garbage. You want to know what America stands for, I’ll show you.”

And he would pass out an historical text reprinted at his own expense from a popular American tract of the year 1836: The Book of Wealth; in Which It Is Proved from the Bible, that It Is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich.

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“Read it. Learn from it,” Isaac would say. “That bright idea you get sometimes?

That comes from God. You know what you ought to do? Act on it. America’s a great country, they don’t put you in prison for having good ideas about making a little money.

Well—some ideas they might, but you know what I mean, you know the difference.

Now get out of here, and don’t come back around looking for a handout until you’ve tried something really outrageous and profitable.”

So that the word gradually went around that Isaac Silbernagel had been poor, too, once on a time, barely holding body and soul together until that day in 1922 when, like a flash of revelation, he conceived the idea of buying the worn-out threshing machines of The Bull and re-selling the worn-out parts to farmers whose threshing machines were even more frayed than their lines of credit. And eventually he began selling worn-out tractor parts, worn-out plows and cultivators, worn-out rakes and mowers.

“But it all started with the threshing machine company called The Bull,” Isaac would say, “when I talked them down, argued them out of a fair price for their machines— why not come right out and say it, jewed them down, in fact—and got that junk for next to nothing. I won’t even tell you how many times that investment turned over, I feel guilty about it myself. Like spoiling the Egyptians, the cash I came up with out of that deal.

And I could see God was on my side, the God of Israel, blessed be He, and so that’s the time I started to sign my name with the sign—the Star of David. He was not ashamed of me, and so I am not ashamed of Him. May not have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done—like waving your arms around and yelling, Look at me, I’m Jewish, I’m different!

And so that’s about the time that people started to call me Ironpaws, too. Out of resentment.”

So—a fiction. For the historical record indicates that this emphatically is not true.

Willow Strand had records of railroad shipments of wheat and flax and metal from 1918 that showed a Star of David by Isaac Silbernagel’s name. And for the nickname, he had the gray evidence of newsprint. That nickname appeared in a rather scurrilous letter written in 1919 to the local newspaper, the James River County Courier, by a notorious anti-Semite, Hemming Oxenstjerna. It was in a paragraph about war profiteering in which Hemming Oxenstjerna said it was the work of financers, and that every residents of every town or city with its own Ironpaws named Isaac or Saul could draw their own conclusions about who was involved. If there were any doubt about how that letter was received, and by whom, Isaac Silbernagel cleared it up two issues later by writing a lengthy letter to the paper in which he referred to Hemming’s letter as the starting point for a lengthy discussion about subtle differences between financers and financiers, and noting that his own extended family in Poland and Germany and Russia generally preferred to use financier—perhaps that was the word Hemming was after.

Willow also had the witness of memory. For on Midsummer’s Eve of 1922, Willow Strand, then a boy of seven, heard the neighbor, Anton Tiillikov, warn his own father they must keep an eye on Old Ironpaws that day. It was that day the owners of the threshing machine company called The Bull were meeting at Reinholt Strand’s farm to discuss selling their machines to Isaac.

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“A Jew’s just like a magpie—he’ll pick up anything shiny. One Ironpaws is like another— always looking about for bits of metal to put in his pockets to sell.”

It happened that Palmer Odegaard, the photographer, was there to take a picture of the threshing machines that day. He was a simple man, not very clever, and that’s why Willow remembered the joke he made. He said, “Better watch that he don’t put one of them threshing machines in his pocket, then.”

One of the historic photographs that came into Willow’s hands years later shows Isaac walking up to the farmhouse with four other men. And Palmer Odegaard’s childish scrawl identifies him on the back of the photo as Isaac “Ironpaws” Silbernagel, third from left. *** The owners of the threshing company called The Bull were drinking coffee very noisily that day in that sunlit silence when Isaac Silbernagel walked in. They called the meeting to order and then sat there staring at him but he paid it no mind; he went up to the coffee urn and stroked the side of it with the affection of a man who used to buy metal to make shell canisters for the war in Europe. He said, “Well, will you look at that? God be praised for three pounds of good steel. Man, the things you could do with it.”

And he poured a cup of coffee and said, “See, that’s the thing about metals that people don’t get. Its value is not in itself—the value is in its possibilities. Myself, I say steel is a repository of usefulness in the same way gold is a repository of value—not intrinsically valuable in itself but valuable because it can be converted to something else. Which is the only reason, I have to say, that I am interested in buying that decaying old threshing machine company of yours.

What did you call it again?”

“The Bull,” Reinholt Strand said. “God knows why they named it that.”

“Ah yes, I’d forgotten. An aging bull, I should say. You’ve got two machines and what was the newer one, a Rumely Ideal? And that hasn’t been new since, what, 1904. Chances are I won’t be able to sell it again as a threshing machine, much less operate it. But if I pay what the steel is worth, or not much more than that—but don’t badger me, gentlemen, I’m not going to let myself be taken too badly—then just possibly I may make some money. Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

“Did you ever think of taking it apart and selling it for parts to other people with the same make of threshing machine?” Bjorn Tomasson said, slyly, with a look round at the others.

“What a thought. No, I hadn’t considered that,” Isaac said.

“Now that’s odd. Because Tomas Hokanson, who’s got shares in that rig by Columbia, says you’d talked to him once about that Rumely of theirs. He says you told him you could supply parts for it if it ever broke down, cheaper than factory parts.”

“Did I say that? It’s possible. I may have had a Rumely sitting in the yard at that time. But I think I put it on a train and sold it for scrap—yes, I’m almost sure I did. Now that one I’m absolutely certain I didn’t get my money out of. Once bitten, twice shy.”

Then Reinholt Strand, whose farm it was, in whose parlor they were meeting, cleared his throat and said, “Perhaps you’d wish to discuss details of your offer.”

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Isaac Silbernagel said, “And I should be coming to the offer soon. But first let me say, in response to the gentleman’s comment, that if indeed I offered to sell machinery parts— and is that against the law gentlemen, if I did say it?—then it’s little enough I’d have to sell. But if someone were to ask me about parts from some of that broken down junk of mine, well, perhaps I would take a look and see what parts I have. As a way of helping others. Because I can well appreciate the hardness of the life people have out here on the Plains; having been there myself.”

“Having been there yourself ? Ho!” Anton Tiillikov said.

“Yes—having been there myself. Don’t laugh, gentlemen. Just because I don’t belong on the land doesn’t mean I haven’t been there. The Promised Land spewed me out, that’s a fact. Which it only had the chance to do because in my family we were all the victims of

do you gentlemen believe

in devils?

well, i do;

i do.

my mother’s pastoral visions of the New World—a deceiving spirit must have sent her those dreams of paradise. Do you gentlemen believe in devils? Well, I do; I do. How else would we have ended up nearly freezing to death in Dakota; what made the family think that was such a great idea?

“The mystery about that is that in our corner of Lithuania we were with those who oppose. Story of my life, to this day I still don’t vote for anyone at election time, I only vote against. And we were against everything; Hasidism, in particular, I don’t exactly remember why, but almost everything else, too. Well, except for my father, who seemed drawn to heresy of all kinds, to hear Mama’s side tell it. Yet my father was the only one who opposed coming to America and homesteading in Dakota—why is that?

“Of course I have listened to Dad on this, and so I think the malice of devils must have afflicted our family at that time. As though Satan had been walking up and down in the earth, going to and fro in it, and had stopped by Lithuania the night Grandpa and my uncles got together to decide what’s to be done to help out little Hannah, the only daughter in the family—that’s Mama, you know—who’d had the misfortune to marry a Silbernagel boy up from Poland who doesn’t own land and has not even figured out a decent trade for himself. And I have this picture in my head of Satan sitting down at that table

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in the guise of my Uncle Oz—you’d have to know him to understand why I say that—and finally pounding his fist on the table and saying, ‘I got it! Let’s send them off to the New World!

They’ve got absolutely no chance of seeing their families again and they can buy overpriced land that is best friend to various kinds of weather and misfortune!’ And I see my grandfather saying: ‘Oz—that’s a great idea! A piece of land is just the schoolmaster to teach my son-in-law discipline!’

“Because something like that is basically what happened; there we were for two years hanging on by our fingernails to a piece of dirt that cost us way too much money. Times I remember my father asking my mother, ‘What’s a Jew doing out here? This is not just life in the country, Hannah. This is Auf dem Lande, auf dem Lande. Vei is meir, such narishkeit. Promise me we’ll leave before the Kellers and the Coehns leave, because if they go, we haven’t got ten Jews left to bury us right.’

“Some of the others, the Dorfmanns and the Greenbergs, they wanted to stay because they were cattle-buyers, but oh my God, what about the rest of us? What were any of us doing there? Well, except for Mama. She had it from her dad pretty bad, this thing about dirt. What can you tell to people like that? Coming from Poland and Lithuania, they all think the world is their garden. You get them out on a piece of land and they do not speak the tongues of mankind anymore, they stand there communing with wheat and dirt and junk like that. But Dad and I did not exactly enter in to that conversation.

“I remember looking around at those farmsteads on the quarter-sections around us—there were a whole handful of Jewish farmers, believe it or not—and thinking, Oh my God, the farms are all like this—little arks! And look at all these little Noahs, clinging to them with their wives and kids and farm animals! But every one of them knows deep down inside they don’t really belong here, and someday a wind’s going to come along and just sweep them off !

“And that’s just what did happen. The first winter or two just blew them off the prairie.

Which was the kindness of God; because if the wind hadn’t blown them off, I believe the prairie would have swallowed them up—imagine, all those little arks, little ships, little farms, sinking down into those black fields with scarcely a ripple.

“I remember my dad, he’d look out at a sunset—winter’s the time I remember it—and say: ‘Prairie.’ Just that one word, like that—Prairie. Isn’t that just the most awful word when you say it like that? Like a cold, cold wind. Mama was happy, all right, she had this itch to put her hands in dirt whenever she was by a piece of farmland. Descendents of Cain on her side of the family, I shouldn’t wonder, and maybe given to black magic—thought she could shake a hoe over Dakota and make it turn into Lithuania or Poland. But not Dad. He knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. You could say I learned from him. We’d look out the window from the breakfast table, both of us, and Dad would mutter, ‘Devils must have put in our heads the thought of coming here. And that’s the sound of them gnawing at the house.’

“Mama would say, ‘That’s only wind, Jacob—wind is what it is. What’s a little bit of wind?

God sees us. God will provide.’

“And Dad would say, ‘Of course God will provide, I know God will provide, you think I don’t know that? But how are we going to hold it all together until He provides, hah? What are we going to eat in the meantime, Hannah? Bacon, like the Johnsons? Maybe salt pork?’

“Summer was no better, it was terribly dry. All summer there was lightning but no rain. Dad would sit up and watch it and figure out to the nickel how much money we were losing. Yeah,

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David Hicks. Me and the Mexicans in the Greenhouse. Charcoal on vinyl. 42 x 99 inches.

Dad was the smart one. Cynical, but smart. Not as booksmart as Mama, maybe, they had that thing switched in our house—she being the daughter of a rabbi and having sneaked a peak in all his books. But Dad was the one with walk-around smarts. Turned out to be a pretty good businessman. Praise the God of Israel, blessed be He, for that. I remember the day of our deliverance. Dad walked around the yard the better part of one day, round and round the house like Joshua’s army contemplating Jericho, and then he walked back and forth in a straight line for an hour or two, you could almost see the wheels in his head turning. Then he came in at supper and said, ‘Mama, it’s come to me: You know what Dakota’s got more than other places?’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t know, Jacob, let me guess: sky? Miles? Space?’ And he said, ‘No, Hannah, not those things—weather. Dakota has an abundance of weather. Vile weather in particular. This place is a cornucopia of unpleasant climes and vile weather. And I believe a guy could make some money off that.’

“She says: ‘What, Jacob—you’re going to sell it?’ “‘Sell weather, no. Sell clothes. Clothing. These people will die if they don’t have clothes, Hannah. Winter or summer, heat or cold, either one will kill them, absolutely, if they haven’t got the proper clothes. And that’s what I’m going to provide.’

“Mama did not know what to say about that because she was not a town person. She was a farmer and the daughter of farmers—in fact part of the reason her dad was a rabbi was because he was the best farmer for miles around. Same guy you come to ask about the Torah, you can also ask about planting your rye and barley—efficiency. So Mama just could not imagine making a living by selling stuff to people. She thought you had to grow it in the dirt, or have folks bring you something they had grown in the dirt so they could ask your old man about the Torah. And so for a while they went round and round, my father and my mother, like the good angel and bad angel wrestling over the fate of our family, and all us little children crouched around, trembling. It was terrifying, not knowing which way the thing would go—hell or salvation, country or city? And Mama was awfully good at

39

arguing—her dad’s the rabbi, right?—but Dad had the flashes of genius. And that is when I can honestly say the God of the Christians stepped in and helped us.

“My father, I don’t know if I ever mentioned this to any of you, once thought about converting to Christianity. It’s absolutely true—he was this close. That was back when he lived and worked with his uncle in Russia. Then Uncle Reuben figured out what was up and sent him home to Poland so nothing bad would happen to that nice Jewish boy on his watch. Seems he’d been visiting with a young Orthodox priest when he was supposed to be moving sewing machines and sacks of grain. Turned out he had even borrowed a few books about the Christian faith and studied on it quite a bit. But I can honestly say that on that day it came in handy.

“He said to Mama, ‘Hannah, I can see you don’t appreciate the market potential that exists here. But that is because you’re used to living with Jews, who understand about money. But many Christians are not like that, they do not understand money. It’s a great mystery with them—how it comes and goes, it meets their needs but then sometimes it

Nature with a big ‘N.’

That’s the Nature that’ll kill you; grind you under its paw and leave you to die. doesn’t, and so they associate it with the Divine. So let us consider an actual example from Christian history. There was a man named Ambrose Zertiss-Kamensky, archbishop of Moscow and maybe someplace else I forget, but it’s not important anyway. What’s important is how many shirts he owned. Do you know how many?’

“Mama says, ‘No, I don’t know how many, did I do his laundry, how could I know how many? Seven, eight, nine? I don’t know.’

“And Dad says, ‘That’s not right, but that is not a bad guess. He did own something like nine pairs of gold-plated spectacles, maybe you’re thinking of that. But at his death he also owned something like 252 shirts of fine linen, give or take a few. Now that is the way to live. Who would not want to belong to the church, with results like that? Give me that old-time religion, and let me sell cloth to that man of the cloth. But the funny thing is, Hannah, as I discovered, the Russian Orthodox believers were slightly ashamed of him—an entrepreneur like that. They’d rather he’d stayed poor so they wouldn’t have to apologize for him. But that was a different country and we are now living among American Christians, Hannah—they’ve got all the right instincts that the Russians do not have.

They’ve taken up from the Calvinists of the Golden Age of Netherlands, like a baton of the Reformation, the belief that it is a sign of God’s favor to make money and spend it on

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whatever they like—the more the better. I don’t say it is right or wrong, Hannah, I don’t weigh in on that part, I only say I am at the service of their dreams and their theology, such as it is. We will partner with these American Christians, Hannah, by selling them clothes and stuff which they can conspicuously consume in front of everybody else to show that God is with them.’

“I specifically recall that he said just those words, conspicuously consume. Which is really quite amazing. I have made it my personal study of late, how people think about money and so on, and that phrase, conspicuous consumption, does not exist before 1899. That’s when Thorstein Veblen used it. And here it was no more than six years later than that, 1905, and my old man was already alluding to it. It just goes to show that my dad was acquiring book learning from somewhere on the sly, maybe from that kid of the Goldsteins who was a socialist—Samuel, the one who died in the flu down here in Edinburg and wrote those crazy letters about economics to the Edinburg American. Yeah, Sammy. Just think, if his family had stayed in Russia, he could have been a Bolshevik, one of the ruling intelligentsia, but instead he dies a sick crank in America. Thank you, Goldsteins, for bringing Sammy to this land of opportunity. But the point is, Sammy, or whoever it was, helped Dad by teaching him a few things about economic theory. And that impressed Mama.

“She said, ‘Oof, Jacob—I think of my father, the rabbi—what he would say. But do what you want.’

“So we moved to the big city of Edinburg, South Dakota. I think it was a little better than an hour by train when we made the trip. And I could have got down and kissed the ground behind the mule’s feet when we got to Edinburg and took the mule trolley from the station past stores, real stores, made of brick, with people sweeping the sidewalks out in front and those big canvas awnings, and a few drunks sunning themselves with their backs against the bricks in an alley way. Beautiful, beautiful! What a great day it was. Because you can live with human nature, a guy can make some money off it.

But you can’t live with Nature nature—Nature with a big ‘N.’ That’s the Nature that’ll kill you; grind you under its paw and leave you to die.

“Yeah, the city. There was real cement under that dirt, I remember it. And the driver told me one of the mules was named Maud. Maud! Such a fine name for a city girl! I could have kissed that mule, I was that glad to be back in a town again. If you’ve ever lived in a city after living out there on the plains, you know what I’m talking about: That emptiness never leaves you. So once you get to a city again you’ve got this feeling of being inside, safe, away from all that sky and all those miles and miles and miles of nothing. The God of the Hebrews led us out of that wilderness—did I tell you there was a big cloud in the southeast the day we got on the train? There was. Big, puffy white tower of cloud. We could see it from the depot, and we were heading exactly that direction to get to Edinburg, South Dakota. And Dad shouts: ‘Hannah! Would you look? It’s a pillar of cloud!’ And that was about right. I felt like I’d come up out of Egypt into sweet Canaan. Swear to God I did.”

That day in 1922 when he told about it, Isaac Silbernagel said, his voice shiny with admiration, “Nah, it was no life for me, auf dem Lande. But if I could help those people out there on the prairie, yeah, I still would, to this day. I owe them that. Even

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David Hicks. Julie’s Studio. Charcoal on paper. 35 x 59 inches.

if all I could to help them was to sell them good, cheap, affordable used parts for threshing machines and tractors. Because what you got to remember when sailing your little arks, gentlemen, is what God told to Noah: You’ve got to save life alive, all right? Preserve life. And that means you, since you’re the papa, along with mama and the kids. And how are you going to do that? Well, you do that by working the land; that’s how you stay afloat on that big ocean of farmland, gentlemen. And for that you need iron. Just like Noah needed iron to hold the boat together, right? For nails and stuff like that, anchors, who knows what all. And that’s what I could provide.

I’m not the man my father was, but that’s what I could provide.”

But Gustaf Nikkila rubbed his thinking place in back of his ear and frowned and said, “Now, my father always thought Noah would have used dowels—wooden pegs, you know. And he thought about that quite a lot, being a carpenter and all.”

Isaac Silbernagel looked at him and said, “Now that is an interesting thought.

What are you—Baptist?”

“Lutheran,” Gustaf said. “Laestadian.”

“Oh, Lutheran. Funny, I believe that’s exactly the kind of thing a Baptist would think about.”

And Isaac tossed the envelope on the table beside the coffee urn and the samovar—who knows why they had a samovar, only Anton Tiillikov drank tea—and went outside to wait for them to look over his offer.

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“And they took it!” Isaac Silbernagel would say triumphantly when he told this story years later. “Well, not that very day, I believe there was some commotion there; I think a boy went in the river and drowned. But next day they decided to take my offer: St. John’s Day. Maybe St. John’s the patron saint of Jewish junk dealers. It could be.”

When he was old, Isaac Silbernagel started to tune in a program of the evangelist Johnny B. Denton, who drove a Cadillac with personalized Iowa license plates that said, YRU POOR. Isaac sent ten dollars once so that he could get a handkerchief that Johnny B. Denton had prayed over. And sometimes when Johnny B. Denton came out with other offers—Gethsemene Olive Oil of Anointing to use when praying over the sick for healing—Isaac Silbernagel would call out to the kitchen: “Gethsemene Oil of Anointing, Anna, for healings. Can I send money? That would be a nice little item for the coffee table.”

His wife would say: “Isaac.”

He would say: “I just really do admire his business acumen, though—the man understands America.”

He did send away for the Brother Johnny B. Denton packet of handy scripture promises to pray for Health, Wealth, Prosperity, Divine Favor, and Protection from the Strife of Tongues. Also one on Investing in the Kingdom that had Johnny B. Denton’s address on the back.

It did seem to Isaac Silbernagel those decades afterward, when he passed the seasick farms riding the fat black swells of farmland, that he had done his part to make this place, Dakota, prosperous. Because he could see the iron outside the farmyards, implements hung there like anchors at the sides of arks, old threshing machines and combines, worn-out, old feed mills and tractors and mowers and rakes. Hanging there useless as sailing gear or fishing tackle now that those arks had beached upon Ararat and the inhabitants, the children of each farm, in the best Judeo-Christian tradition, had swamped ashore to spend their lives grinding out ordinary stories of toil, drunkenness, flight from God, repentance, religion, poverty, and wealth.

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Dane Cervine

Small Pebbles in the Heart Picking my way round massive boulders along the river, I see in the flank of one a perfect, small bowl carved concave by millennia of rushing water, small rocks swirling round and round as a patient potter carving in stone. Such patience.

Perhaps the mad rush of thoughts whirling round in me —so many loose pebbles—will slowly, relentlessly carve an empty bowl in the stone of my heart. Wide enough, finally, for every jagged thing.

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Ad Lib 2010 15th Annual Retreat for Writers and Artists of Christian Mind and Faith October 15-16-17, 2010 Join us at the Franciscan Retreat Center,

Colorado Springs, for times of worship, fellowship, learning, and critique. Bring your work to show and share!

Keynote Presentations: “Forming Culture”

by Dr. Ben Witherington, III Writers’ Workshop led by Brianna Van Dyke, Editor-in-Chief, Ruminate Magazine.

For information: richard.terrell@doane.edu (402) 440-8851

Subscribe to Ruminate www.ruminatemagazine.org one year = $28 . two years = $52

ruminators

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Alan Berecka grew up in the rural part of the Mohawk Valley. He and his wife live in Sinton, Texas, where they raised their two children. Currently, he earns his keep as a reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. His poetry has appeared in such places as the Concho River Review, Texas Review, Christian Century, The Penwood Review, and Windhover. His first full collection, The Comic Flaw (NeoNuma Arts, Houston) was released in January, 2009.

Micah Bloom is married to Sara Bloom and they have three girls: Eva, Magdalana, and Aletheia. He just received his

MFA from the University of Iowa in painting and drawing, and challenges artists and non-artists, alike, to ride bicycles.

Prior to graduate school, Bloom taught elementary art in St Paul, MN. In 2010, he will exhibit works at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Shanghai, Des Moines Art Center, and the Figge Art Museum. You can find out more at micahbloom. blogspot.com. Micah writes: “The ‘434 Hawkeye Dr’ series investigates the relationship between domestic harmony and incongruous, impersonal living spaces. Presenting my family in daily activities, some moments quiet and ordinary and others isolating or unsettling, “Escapee” invites the viewer to share the intimacy and austerity of our apartment. Replete with personal symbology and detailed specifics, this home scene presents my family’s daily journey of trying to live a non-estranged life in an estranged environment.”

Scott Cairns is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. His most recent poetry collection is Compass of Affection. His spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, and his translations, Love’s Immensity, appeared in 2007. His book-length essay, The End of Suffering, appeared in 2009. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and is Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at MU. He has lately become a blogger for The Huffington Post, and hosts a podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

Dane Cervine has new work in The SUN magazine and invites readers to visit his website at www.DaneCervine.

typepad.com. Dane’s work has also appeared in a wide variety of journals and received awards from Adrienne Rich and Tony Hoagland. He enjoys playing guitar, loving his kids, and living along the Pacific coast in Santa Cruz, California.

Deborah Joy Corey’s stories and essays have appeared in many magazines and journals including Agni, Review,

Ploughshares, Story, Carolina Quarterly, Image, and others. Her first novel, Losing Eddie, won the Books In Canada First Novel Award and was named Best 100 Novels of the Nineties (McFarland & Co). Her second novel, The Skating Pond, won the Elle Magazine Reader’s Prize. Recently, she was chosen by Selected Shorts to win The Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.

Heather Cadenhead lives in a turquoise-blue house in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband. She is a fiction intern at a publishing house. Her first poetry chapbook, Inventory of Sleeping Things, is being released this August by Maverick Duck Press.

Kristin Brenneman Eno is the founding director of Little Creatures Films, which makes live-action films based on young children’s imaginative play in the natural world. Kristin has exhibited her paintings and films around the country. She writes, “The ‘Superimposed Cities’ paintings in this issue feature overlapping city maps. ‘Sow’ marks the death and resurrection of Christ and the city where I live; ‘He turned their waters into blood’ marks the cities devasted by Hurricane Katrina and the U.S. War in Iraq. Sheer pockets containing seeds hover in the footprints of historically significant landmarks. Using a range of art materials to collapse space and time provides a transformative way for me to process meaningful and traumatic events.” Kristin lives in Brooklyn with her husband Sean Eno and their daughter Marion Magnolia.

Kathleen Gunton entered the convent at the age of 17. After leaving she found her vocation in art. Her work (prose, poetry, and photography) has appeared in publications such as America, Christian Science Monitor, NCR, Inkwell, and Sojourners. She believes one art feeds another. She writes: “John Henry Newman might appreciate his words being used for this photograph of a 21st century building devoted to music. Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle is frequently captured from

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above. However, on an early morning walk I witnessed the play of ephemeral light on the steel and aluminum shingles. A contemplative moment. I followed the light with my zoom lens and was lead kindly as I captured this image.”

A native of Southern California, Patricia L. Hamilton is an associate professor of English at Union University in Jackson, TN, where she teaches creative writing, eighteenth-century British literature, and American ethnic literature. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia. Her most recent publications include poetry in Timber Creek Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, and Off the Coast. She received a Pushcart nomination for her poem “Rhapsody in Blue” in 2007. Given a choice, she would take an earthquake over a tornado any day.

A native of Savannah, Georgia, Mollie Murray is currently working on an MFA in fiction at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She received a BA in Russian from Middlebury College. She is interested in the way that stories approach the spiritual indirectly and writes with the hope that answers will be revealed through the writing process. When she is not writing, she is learning how to skijor with her dog or planning a vegetable garden. This is her first publication.

Benjamin Myers’ first book of poems, Elegy for Trains, will be published this summer by Village Books Press. Ben, as most folks call him, has gone far in life—approximately five blocks. He lives in his boyhood hometown of Chandler, Oklahoma, where he partners with his wife Mandy in raising three good kids and likes to think of himself as the Okie Wendell Berry in his devotion to localness. Ben is an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He has published essays on topics in poetry ranging from the Renaissance verse of Edmund Spenser to the postmodern experiments of John Ashbery. He also teaches Sunday school and occasionally goes fishing.

Jae Newman lives in Batavia, New York, with his wife and daughter. He works as a writing instructor at Jamestown Community College. In 2006, he earned an MFA in writing from Spalding University. His work has appeared in many national journals and reviews including Redivider, The Bellingham Review, and 5 AM. He continues to tinker with his first manuscript of poems entitled Postage.

Leif Nikunen writes about the prairie from his home in South Dakota. His short story, “Thieves’ Weather, 1996,”

appeared in Issue 9 of Ruminate in fall 2008. His current interests include the poems of Czeslaw Milosz and Ruth Pitter, the journals of Julien Green and Alexander Schmemann, and the novels of Torgny Lindgren and Thomas Bernhard.

Jonathan Austin Peacock was born and raised in Pensacola, Florida. He is currently completing his MFA in poetry at Oregon State University, where he also works as a graduate teaching assistant teaching composition, poetry writing, and business writing. He has accepted an offer to join Teach for America, a prestigious AmeriCorps affiliate dedicated to closing the achievement gap in high-risk, under-funded urban and rural public school districts.

Tania Runyan’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, The Christian Century, Willow Springs,

Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Her chapbook, Delicious Air, was awarded the 2007 Book of the Year Citation by the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and her first full-length collection of poetry will be published by WordFarm in 2011.

Frida Sasson was born in Israel in 1961 and currently lives, creates, and produces her art in Jerusalem. She writes: “I

play on the range between the abstract and the figurative. Most of my work avoids showing a clear and distinct demonstration of objects. Rather, they provide clues, in different resolution, as to what is being depicted. All of my recent work is made of bits of paper torn from newspapers, without any additional color or paint. The color of the artworks is the original color as it appeared in the newspaper. In “Hope,” the composition of the donkey in a bright starburst is symbolic.The donkey represents grayness, humility, hard work, submissiveness, but still is surrounded with brightness. Hope. Perhaps it is he who creates this light and hope all around.”

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ruminated

LAST NOTE

Ruminate’s Map Key 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

Chewing on Life Humor’s Grace Reconstruction Benediction Flux Epiphany Addictions Summer Communion Reverie Passages

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Four Years

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12 13 14 15 16

Summer Confession With Earnest Jest Borrowing Mapping This Place

To suggest a theme that needs mapping in a future issue, visit our blog: www.ruminatemagazine.org/blog

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Map Key Detail.

Map Key

Kristin Brenneman Eno. He turned their waters into blood (Tigris/Mississippi).

Oil on canvas, seeds, moss, silk, thread. 90 x 54 inches.

1. Aimma Bridge, Baghdad 2. Iraqi Ministry of Defense, Baghdad 3. Iraqi National Library & Archives, Baghdad 4. Iraqi National Museum, Baghdad 5. Danziger Bridge (I-90/Industrial Canal), New Orleans 6. Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture, Baghdad 7. Palestine Hotel, Baghdad 8. Industrial Canal Levee & Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans 9. Iraqi Ministry of Oil, Baghdad 10. Charity Hospital, New Orleans 11. Superdome, New Orleans

Micah Bloom. Escapee, 434 Hawkeye Dr series. Oil on panel. 9 x 12 inches.