Ernie Reynolds Migrations

Migrations

He arrived in dogwood season, the same afternoon she’d spotted the first

returning junco come to feed after a winter in the coves. She was chain smoking

Newport menthol kings on the porch, considering should she change out of the Winn

Dixie poly blouse and walk to the point for a sunset cocktail or just take it easy, get

dinner started, when he halted the old truck right in front of her trailer. Calming

Jack’s bark, he waved his way onto her porch that day. Admitted he was lost. Needed

water for the rusty pick-up’s radiator.

This Anglo, she sensed, was different. The only one she’d seen so deep in the

reservation not driving a white DOI sedan or garbed in a blue Health Services uniform.

The first stranger of any variety Jack had let pass so freely. Too, he didn’t have that

cocksure swagger of a government-issued man. No, he was searching, or perhaps just

wandering, following the breeze. Aside from the matted red beard and freckled skin,

she’d seen his look in Eastern Band cousins and old classmates back from Vietnam.

Thirty-somethings now who left the rez as horny teenagers to return hazed stoners

who’d been taught seven ways to kill but couldn’t conjure the energy or intent these

days to do more than tend a patch of Easy Buds and maybe a few rows of corn and

potatoes.

Next afternoon, he stopped back by, offering a six pack for yesterday’s

directions. Jack greeted him for a belly rub, didn’t bark at all this time. They visited,

she and he, got to know each other sharing the beers. She liked his easy way, the

bushy beard and army tats, the weed he’d rolled when the six was drunk up. They

walked out to the point together, sat in the heath bald, finished down a Smirnoff

tenth she’d lifted from Winn Dixie. She told him of the sunset point’s history in

Cherokee culture, its name Dough nad agave—“til we meet again”—a generations-old

“goodbye” to the sun. In a few days, he became familiar, then more. Capricious, but

dependable, somehow. Expected. Like the mountain wind. He introduced her to

Joplin, Hendrix, the Dead. Woke her up some nights in fits of scream. In June he

drove to Asheville, returning with lumber to rebuild the trailer’s rotting porch.

Come an early October morn, he was gone. Stepped over the squeaky

floorboards, stashed his trash, gave Jack a sturdy goodbye pat, surreptitiously roll-

started the truck. From the rear view, he caught a glance of the trailer disappearing

into scarlet dogwood and maple leaves in the false sunrise’s incandesce. Jack sitting

upright, watching him go. He couldn’t have told her why. Just had to leave. It was

easier just to leave, save whatever sorry ass explanation he might trip over. Whatever

fray she might conjure. Maybe every place was haunted. Maybe the haints lived in his

head, would be at the next stop, too. Or, maybe, there was peace he hadn’t found

yet further north of the 17th parallel. Up there, out there. Somewhere. But not here.

He drove the reservation’s Jeep trails, never getting out of second gear,

careful not to break an axle, flatten a tire in the deep washouts. Entering federal

land, the road improved to macadam so little traversed that kudzu vines encroached

beyond its shoulders in jagged advances. Breaking daylight made the enormous

carcasses of long dead yellow chestnuts and eroded mountainsides even more

grotesque, like God’s personal apocalypse on Cherokee country. Descending into the

coves, he upshifted, passing the occasional trailer or clapboard homes, their windows

dark, yards strewn with toys, cannibalized cars, other sundry projects forgotten but

by their incompleteness. By mid-morning, he’d made the little town of Cherokee,

pulled into a small truck stop for fuel, oil and coffee. Glimpsed an elder brown-

bagging under the counter. Back on the paved Cherokee four lane, he followed signs

towards the new Interstate 40. Dialed up an AM station, snow was expected in the

elevations a twangy disc jock announced after spinning a hit. The timing was good. He

took the west ramp. Bigger mountains, he’d heard. Maybe Canada. Hell, a five-day

bender at a roadside motel’d be a good start. He’d think it over at the first open bar.

Think over the perils of having lived too long to die young, of having nowhere to go

and every day to get there.

In waking she was slowly surprised. Worry, then anger—his gear was gone—

melded into a well-acquainted melancholy. Gloom, somehow consoling like a well-

worn enemy. She squandered the day in the blues—no-showed work, ripped off the

bedsheets, broke into the Jim Beam before noon. As afternoon waned and cooled, she

drew herself from the couch, pulled on an old barn coat, pocketed the dwindling fifth

and stumbled outside across the porch’s broken promise. Jack fell in pace, the two

meandered the short walk to Dough nad agave. Crouching behind a windbreak

boulder, she drew down on the Jim Beam, lit up. Jack stretched his long spine, first

dipping his forelegs, then reversing, like a rider-less seesaw. Content, he circled into

a ball on the soft humus, backside drawn to her hips for warmth, his nostrils flared

toward the north winds. Surely, he could smell them. The seeded clouds. Fall’s first

snow in the horizon.

She came to rest on her backside, leaned against the boulder, pulled the coat’s

worn cord collar under her ponytail, rested one cool hand in its flannel pocket,

another on Jack’s furry neck. For distraction, she studied the familiar shapes of

ancient mountaintops, sketched them in her imagination. A buck snorted and

wheezed somewhere in the near woods, Jack raised to his hind legs, ears up for a

moment, and with a short grunt of his own settled back in. As the sunset’s colors

waned, the world diminished into skeletal shadows of yellow birch and mountain ash,

the ghostly sound of a rambling night breeze searching, too, perhaps, for a place to

settle.

Having nodded off, she woke in the diminutive light of a crescent moon. Rising

for retreat to the trailer, she staggered for a moment, caught herself. Took a brace

from the fifth. Her mind was placid, sleep gently beckoned her back. But first,

dinner. She stoked alive a fire in the little stove, put on beans and wild onions.

Tonight, like too many others, she’d lie alone, still a little hungry, drunk. Morose.

Tomorrow, maybe she’d believe again. She always had. Believe as her ancestors in

the certainty of hearth and home, the absoluteness of love eternal, in the juncos’

return. It was only October, each winter grew longer, each spring shorter. There were

dead, she believed, who longed for her, who would have taken her on their passage

could they have. Ones to meet again. Migrations to make.

Ernie Reynolds

Ernie Reynolds teaches creative writing, literature, and composition and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He has read or published short fiction on NPR, Vanderbilt’s Nashville Review, The Writer’s Loft and other places. Prior to his studies, Ernie coached professional and NCAA athletics and was a certified arborist. One of his favorite places is the Tennessee backcountry.

The Stone Carver

I call it Laughter’s Child, this marble head. Who was the boy, you ask? Who knows! Who knows! One flash of a face in the street he was, one glimpse as he passed my open workshop door—one blink, lit by a shaft of sheerest dazzling joy at his mother’s hand— so bright with love complete, he blazed me awake to vision. Just that glimpse, then gone in the dust, in the noise, in the faceless crowd.

More than a year I worked, chipped and carved, for the boy’s face to rise out of the stone, as though that stone were the soil and seed of joy. A shapeless lump of rock, but the face was there, those lips pulled wide with glee, his eyes— those eyes— hunched in the marble, waiting for me to strike, poised for that flash of terror down my hands, down to the gravid rock, my midwife stroke— burning to crack that stone-bound laughter awake; then steel on stone, chisel and point and rasp— But who was the boy, the mother? Gone in the crowd. I have paced those hard streets, the shops and alleys, but never since have seen nor heard of them, nor heard again that wild trill of glee.

The people, they wander in to watch that head, to warm themselves at the boy, my laughing boy. Look! How they stare at his eyes that are gazing up to his mother’s smile. They straggle in from the street just to look. They tell me his eyes are fixed on God, on Jesus, on ranks of angels aflame— on all their hopes, on all their vast loss. They call him The Prophet Child.

Step here, where we can speak. That older man who stands there still, staring at the boy’s face, his eyes fast to the boy’s eyes, his hands tremulous, clenched—do you see? He has fallen to me, and now he is mine. Alert, alive in my gut, his image snared—no longer lost in the world, bur seized and saved as once I seized that boy— his image cries to me: This! This is your task.

Do you see? Beneath this cloth—no fine white stone, clear, like laughter’s pure boy—but gray and laced with darker lightning? Right! That man, that sum of all those wanderers wandering in from the shrill streets, he will join Laughter’s Child.

My vision knew, as a falcon knows its prey, gave me the boy for the sake of the old man’s gaze at the boy’s eyes, the Prophet Child’s eyes where the old man caught some light that you nor I, nor he, nor all our worlds could ever bear except as a flash, except as a glimpse of love in the roaring crowd, somewhere, a blink in the dust.

Paul Z Panish

Paul Z Panish has had poetry published in Signal, Bluestone, The Formalist, and others. His short opera libretto, Marry Up, Marry Down, was performed in 2017.

Poem on My Eighty-Seventh Birthday—A Confession

It is March—I have stumbled into my eighty-eighth year since that winter of nineteen thirty-five when I twisted my soul into the squealing flesh of a frail, new-born body on a new-born earth.

My world was me; a patch of desire, an island, a safe, wondering land in a warm sea. I sucked at the breast and sucked at the sun and the songs, my mother’s gentle songs she sang to herself like a tiny bird.

What else fed my life? Music there was, sounding throughout the house, and father’s voice—I can hear it—reciting Shakespeare— Oh, it was light, it was luminous, bright with love! But later—a dreamy boy, in school and out— the squawk of teachers shrilled into my daydreams hauling me back to the school day. Then those boys, their fists beating me down for the sins of the Jews and the death of Jesus, shouting, You killed our god! I didn't. Weeping homeward: They killed God!

But all through my life, there are moments—unforeseen and sudden—they hold me, dazzle me, force me to see; moments of beauty, moments of silent assent. Even now, in the darkening world, a light will burst, surpassing the light of common day.

How to seize it, own it, tell it, sing, embody it in some shape or sound or act, spin that word-web, shining, out of my blood? Any excuse to pluck that moment’s fruit! to shape some full, ripe shape of words to save, preserve from going, all that goes and goes. Hard! Hard to keep my gaze on the light and still maneuver the concrete-gray ways.

And so I became a man-of-a-hundred-mistakes, blundering on, trying a hundred trades, ever distracted by something not in the rules—

as a soldier, mumbling Shakespeare on maneuvers, lost in the sessions of sweet silent thought (those words I mumbled), how could I hear the command Gas masks on! The scandal! The shouts of the sergeants! The curses! You! The deaf one! Twenty pushups! There! In the mud!

Or the jobs and jobs and jobs, stealing time on the job to command an image, a metaphor, a rebellious gang of words that struggle against the stern demands of song—

Ah, once more it is March; I dodder along, warming my hands, buying too many sweaters. Another birthday declares this old guy lives, has not yet stumbled off to the World of Truth— he still spins out those webs of words to trap that light. This old poet still walks the sounding world— humming his own song.

Paul Z Panish

Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue 17 Fall/Winter 2022

fiction Bruce Spang, editor Peter Alterman Gail Hipkins Stan Werlin

non-fiction Peter Alterman, editor Emily Cain Steve Wechselblatt

poetry John Himmelheber Pete Solet Bruce Spang

art & photography Terry Johnson, editor

editor-in-chief John Himmelheber