The Crafts

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THE CRAFTS

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

Flannery O'Connor

The Linnet’s Wings 3

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Ride it on out like a bird in the sky ways Ride it on out like you were a bird Fly it all out like an eagle in a sunbeam Ride it on out like you were a bird Wear a tall hat like a druid in the old days Wear a tall hat and a tattered gown Ride a white swan like the people of the Beltane Wear your hair long, babe you can't go wrong T Rex Lyrics Excerpt, (Ride a White Swan) Art Covid Kid, Mari, Watercolour on Card 2021

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Escape, Watercolour on Card Linnet Stock 6

An Afternoon Muse Once upon a time the world was made square. But it was lunchtime before anyone noticed, well it was a dot-off midday. 11.59 AM to be exact. It was 11.59 AM when the clocks appeared to trip and a loud click was heard by all, and on that sound life switched, too. And all the clock and compass settings were redrawn to reflect the new world form.

Each corner held a major quarter setting with the minute marks falling on silver tines along the edge of the frame. They were like minor scales counting up and across and down and around and up again as time tapped out her rhythm. 12 o´clock now sat on the north-north-west angle, 3 o´’ clock, on the northnorth-east, 6 o’ clock on the south-south-east with 9 o’ clock on the south-south west angle.

And compass settings fixed themselves around the new drawings and each corner was magnified to pull ships and planes and cars and other types of traffic around bends to stop them falling off the edge of the world.

When folk caught up the with the event It was like they had stepped into an electricity short, you know the one that jiggles the household appliances when they stop and start again within a moment--within the flick of an eyelash or like a sun flare that glances off your sitting room window as it´s pushed by an almighty wind.

It was so fast; and in that moment, rope ladders fell down from the sky. And folk just grabbed them and when they did they were imprinted with a code. Well nearly everyone did. I think they thought they would fall in a heap at their feet when they reached for them, I think they thought that they might use them to build bridges across rough seas, I think they thought they were in a dream. But it was real and when they grabbed then, their hands stuck to the twine, and the ladders grabbed back and then they just disappeared: But in the half minute when folk touched them their DNA was copied and they were switched over to land on the midday-chime to walk onto 12.01PM and get on with things for the next quarter. When it happened again and again and again; most folk never knew the difference, they never knew they´d being primed, But not everyone played ball that day: Some just sat and watched, those who were used to observing rather than playing never thought to grab the rope, they just waited on 11.59 AM. They stayed where they were in their forever-land and ignored all the kerfuffle, as they stayed and planned how they might move on. And each time their friends passed they showed them new plans as they waived them on and up onto 12 MD and across to 12.01 PM, as twice a day they marched around the edge of the square.

Mari, Start of Covid, 2019 Madonna and Apple 7

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law., for permission requests mail the publisher: thelinnetswings@gmail.com ISBN: 978-1-9164622-0-5 First Edition: 01/2022

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For Ramon (1931, 2021)

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Proverbs of Hell

by William Blake - 1757-1827 From "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted

by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. The busy bee has no time for sorrow. The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.

All wholsome food is caught without a net or a trap. Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth. No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. A dead body, revenges not injuries. The most sublime act is to set another before you. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. Folly is the cloke of knavery. Shame is Prides cloke. ~ Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. The fox condemns the trap, not himself. Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth. Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep. The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.

What is now proved was once, only imagin'd. The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits. The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.

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One thought, fills immensity. Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow. ~ The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night. He who has suffer'd you to impose on him knows you. As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. Expect poison from the standing water. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title! The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth. The weak in courage is strong in cunning. The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey. The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest. If others had not been foolish, we should be so. The soul of sweet delight, can never be defil'd. When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius, lift up thy head! As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. To create a little flower is the labour of ages. Damn, braces: Bless relaxes. The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.

Prayers plow not! Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not! ~ The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion. As the air to a bird of the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible. The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white. Exuberance is Beauty. If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning. Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. Where man is not nature is barren. Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. Enough! or Too much! ###

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Still Life with Skull, Candle and Book by Paul Cezanne, Date: 1866

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Table of Contents Art: : Dietary Life Rules by Utagawa Kunisada, 70 Garden under Snow by Paul Gauguin 72 Carousel by Vilmos Aba-Novak 74 Costume design for “Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Maiden Fevronia” by Nikolai RimskyKorsakov by Ivan Bilibin 76 The Miracles of San Bernardino

by Pietro Perugino 78 Profile of a girl. Preparatory work for a decorative stain in red and green by Koloman Moser 80 Sky at Sunset by Eugene Boudin 82 The Rainbow, Hormandie by Robert Henri 84 A Linnet Swan, Inhouse Stock 92

An Afternoon Muse 5 Proverbs of Hell 8 Editorial 12

PART ONE Paper Moon 21 John Steinbeck and the Romance of Tortilla Flat

by Stephen Zelnick 20 Work of Ages Work of Comets by Tom Sheehan 32 Armstrong by Martin Heavisides 41 Bread and Potatoes by Mari Fitzpatrick 56

PART TW0 The Arrow and The Song 59 Bethlehem by Alisa Velaj 59 Pillows of Sound by Alisa Velaj 61 Mozart Appeared on the Stage by Alisa Velaj 63 Micro Section: 64 Smell of Rain by Ray Collins 67 Quisling by Lauran Strait 69 Diet-Tribe by Lauran Strait 70 The Language of Frost by Bill West 73 Wheelchair Waits by Bill West 74 Cut Loose by Digby Beaumont 77 Don Diego Takes the Miracle Cure At Ojo Caliente by Ann Walters 79 Meditations on dear Petrov by Susan Tepper 81 Pink Steel by Noel King 86 The Spite Apple by Harry Stone 93

ART Still life with skull, candle and book by Paul Cezanne, Date: 1866 10 Winter Moon over the Med (Inhouse Art) 18 Rembrandt Self Portrait, 30 The Jazz Singer by Charles Demuth, 1916, 55 Fisherman with Arrow, Ancient Egypt, Date: c.1422 - c.1411 BC Series: Tomb of Menna 56 Bethlehem by Konstantin Gorbatov, 59 Still Life with Guitar by Juan Gris, Date: 1920 61 The singer Francisco d’Andrade as Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera by Max SlevogtDate: 1912 62 Street Music by Theo Von Doesburg 64 Summer evening on the porch by Konstantin Korovin 66 Can’t anyone untie us? by Francisco Goya 68 13

Editorial I’m convinced Micro & Flash are fiction’s future.

Perhaps the future is already here because it’s the way people today like to read. More newspaper readers read the personal ads and the comics than read the editorials.

Is it shortened attention spans? It might be a Pavlovian “conditioned response” after four generations of TV idiots. It could be the effect of today’s mad dash to nowhere. Whatever, the crafts are here to stay.

In four to eight thousand word short stories the writer has time to describe the living room curtains and Ray Collins, 1931-2021 what the protagonist’s Aunt Maud from Wexford had for breakfast, but not in Micro or Flash fiction. The writer can imply we’re in the house and that someone’s in the kitchen. What the living room or Aunt Maud looks like is up to the involvement of the reader’s imagination.

In my opinion, that’s the key to the Micro & Flash crafts; “involvement”. With the writer’s skill at inference and implication the reader is invited to participate in the story — to become an onlooker inside the story who asks the characters questions.

These are not television stories where you’re spoonfed plot, settings, characters and dialog.

Please participate and enter ...

Ramon Collins The Linnet’s Wings Inaugural Print Summer 2007 ### From this first editorial, Ray Collins introduced and built a fine portfolio of Micro Fiction for The Linnet’s Wings, and this quarter it’s with a tip of the hat that we rerun some of that work that is still as fresh today as the day it was made.

Mark Zuckerberg founder’s letter on Facebook on the 28/10/21 came through on my FB feed as I was writing here and as he discussed his vison for his new META internet project he described it in a similar fashion. Mark knows the benefit of participation and involvement, his depends on the expertise of the programmer while ours encourages the expertise of the writer. “...an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build. The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence -- like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.

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That is why we are focused on building this.”

The internet and the magazine/book has to be about involvement or it would fail. It needs people energy in the same fashion that a supermarket needs product and shoppers; and a magazine needs readers, contributors and distributors.

It was with the help of Ramon,and a few other writing friends who got involved that our webzine/magazine got its start.

I joined the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, in 2004, it was a time when the INTERNET was just about text—long before the social networks. The previous year I had written half a novel and lost the copy. I didn’t mind too much, it had a word count rather than a story, but this first attempt gave me enough of a lift to want to carry on, and maybe even learn something more about the craft, so I went on-line to see if there was anyplace where I might have the opportunity to practice the art. I found a link for Zoe, joined and I uploaded a couple of flash fiction stories and Ray reviewed them for me. We got chatting and made a connection.

Then a few years later when working in Co. Longford I planned out our web zine and I decided to ask around my writing workshop site for writers who might be interested in fulfilling an editorial role. Ray was the first one I mailed, I was so delighted when he agreed; I already had my web man with Peter Gilkes. I knew Peter from a previous project and he had spent most of his career designing databases for the financial service industry, and had agreed to design our web presence.

However Ray was the only one of the six team members I ended up with who had any hands-on-media, experience..

I didn’t know any of this back in the day, I knew he had been a cartoonist, and I never inquired further because Peter Gilkes, 1950-2019 sometimes voice soars above all else as character comes through, particularly when its made from the indefinables like Sincerity, Honesty, Understanding, Loyalty, Truthfulness, Trustworthiness. Intelligence. Dependability: All these are recognizable in voice and they were very present in any conversation one had with Ray Collins.

We all liked the way Ray carried himself, and it was to be another few years before I heard about his ALS. Even now I don’t know who mentioned it, I think it popped up in a conversation thread over on the Zoetrope Virtual Studio website when he was comparing his condition to something else.

Ray worked alongside us as an editor until 2012, he gave us a good 5 years on our print design and spent a couple of years before that working on our webzines. By 2012, we were going strong and “Ray had joined the staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a artist in 1950.

He was appointed art director of magazines in 1964 and political cartoonist in 1970.

He left the Post Intelligencer in 1979, with a distribution agreement with the Chicago Tribune/New York Daily News Syndicate.

Cecil & Dipstick appeared in Seattle, Palo Alto and Bogalusa (Louisiana) and he Collins worked in television from 1981 to 1985. His cartoons appeared in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston and Atlanta.”

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Sheep with Attitude, Watercolour on Card, Mari 2019 16

during those years I watched him give a helping hand to a good few enterprising writers who benefited hugely from his experience as they began to establish a reputation in the market place. And after he resigned he kept in touch, I was a member of his writing office on Zoetrope for a few years and when he closed that I’d get the occasional email. A copy of one from 2015 when he was off form. ... tried to write this memo for 2 months and gave up in frustration for 2 months --i have good / bad news. good news; according to 3 or 4 doctors and 2 scans, i DID NOT have a stroke in june; it’s only ALS symptoms, bad news; it’s the DAMNED ALS. i’ve had it since 1978, so it’s a way of life -- lost my right side, but everything is almost back, ‘cept the right hand. making due with the left. and this note took an hour . .

By 2018 Peter’s health challenges were coming to a head, he had the Steve Jobs’ disease and he had struggled for a good few years. H died in the spring of 2019.

Ramon mailed me the summer after Peter’s death, to gee-me up, keep me going, he knew Peter’s shoes would be hard to fill, his web design and coding contributions were immense. we were down our best staff and he suggested that we might give some of the majors a run for their money if I could find a way to keep on track. “The Linnet’s Wings” produces beautiful print work, poetry books and chapbooks, it’s work that injects a shot of feel-good into a day.

When I received his mail I was in Portnashanagan, in Mullingar, in Ireland, I was watching the hours count down, recuperating from surgery, planning to take a year out and spent time in Dublin, doing what! I had no idea. I miss them both, they were positive voices within the web cawing cacophony that buries the best of us; they were reliable, decent men who gave their time and expertise to a group of writers and artists who were following a dream. Wherever they are, I hope they occasionally meet up for a jar.

Hasta la vista chicos!

Marie Fitzpatrick (MAN) “The Linnet’s Wings,” 09/01/2022 “RAMON COLLINS Ramon “Ray” Collins lost his 42-year battle with ALS on March 28th, 2021. He died peacefully at home in his sleep. Born in Poplar Grove, Illinois on March 17th, 1931, Ray was a child of the Great Depression. When he was very young, his family travelled west to eastern Washington where his father found work with the WPA. They moved to Port Orchard WA with the outbreak of WWII as jobs opened up at the Bremerton Naval shipyard. Ray excelled in music and sports and had a passion for drawing from an early age.”

Read more: https://obituaries.seattletimes.com/obituary/ramon-collins-1081957945 ###

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Winter Moon over the Med, 2020

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Part One Paper Moon Moses Pray: Don't you think I have any scruples?

Addie Loggins: Well, if you do, it's a sure bet they belong to someone else!

From Paper Moon (Film, 1973)

You don’t want to get to the top of the ladder only to find out you had it leaning up against the wrong wall.

Jack Canfield, “Chicken Soup for the Soul” 21

John Steinbeck and the Romance of Tortilla Flat by

Stephen Zelnick

In our time of troubles, the comic works of John Steinbeck lifted my spirits. Steinbeck (1902-1968) is remembered for Grapes of Wrath (1939), Of Mice and Men (1937), and East of Eden (1952); but Steinbeck’s comic novels lifted me from the Trump gloom and COVID plague. Sometimes we need to be somber; and 22

sometimes to laugh at our confused existence. Steinbeck’s first triumph was not a organ-toned piece on Depression suffering but Tortilla Flat (1935), a comic novel set in Monterey California just after WWI. Steinbeck wrote Tortilla Flat while sunk in misery; his mother dying and his father drifting towards death. It was, of course, the depths of the Depression, with the fertile valleys surrounding Salinas torn by strikes and reprisals. Portrayals of suffering and struggle made perfect sense; but times of trouble need the comic spirit, a way of looking that eases troubled hearts.

Steinbeck was born to a comfortable family in a town with grinding poverty, especially among Mexican-American farm laborers and their families. He did farm work, toiled in the town’s sugar factory, and was employed as a handyman. He enjoyed working people and paid them to hear their tales. This other world fed his realist works and his comic novels.

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[At age nine Steinbeck fell in love with Arthurian romance and followed the fantasy of Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur – Camelot and tales of the Knights of the Roundtable -- all his life.]

Tortilla Flat is based on the Morte D’Arthur. The narrator comments he has “put down [these tales] on paper so that in a future time scholars, hearing the legends, may not say as they say of Arthur and of Roland and of Robin Hood—‘There was no Danny nor any group of Danny’s friends, nor any house. Danny is a nature god and his friends primitive symbols of the wind, the sky, the sun.’” The legends are real; “the old inhabitants of Monterey are embattled as the Ancient Britons are embattled in Wales.”

Tortilla Flat resembles 18th C. British literary “burlesque”, where lower class persons are cast in the roles of exalted characters. Steinbeck’s chapter headings recall Joseph Andrews (1742) and Fielding’s good humor, as in: “Chapter six -- How Three Sinful Men, Through Contrition, Attained Peace. How Danny’s Friends Swore Comradeship.” In this, three loveable drunks burn down their friend’s house, share their wine with him, along with a massive brassiere for his girlfriend. The deeper root is Don Quixote, with its romantic sentiment and comic commentary on life downstairs from lofty ideals and decency.

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Tortilla Flat recalls also Canterbury Tales and Midsummer Night’s Dream, where lower class characters aspire to grand social and literary forms. These comedies explore humanity aside from social definitions. Steinbeck’s preface explains: “when you speak of Danny’s house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow.” Beyond conventions and decencies, we discover what sort of creature we are, the mixed joy and horror of our existence, and how to get on with it. Comedy is serious business.

In Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), for example, lower class characters adopt genteel disguises. When a crude bulbous woman imagines herself a sylph-like heroine, we laugh at her elephantine daintiness. The workmen in Midsummer Night’s Dream are sweet in their simplicity, their botched verses laughable. Yet, they are never mean-spirited and pose no dangers. While in reality the anger of field hands and mechanics towards their betters threatens communal harmony, Sancho Panza’s rascality poses no threat. These relaxed social notions of comedy fit the spirit of the United States and its insistence on the worth of every person.

[Mark Twain is said to be the father of American fiction, both for his lean and vernacular prose, as well as his boisterous assaults on convention and hypocrisies.]

Huckleberry Finn (1884) favors the rough and angelic genius of Huck over the bright and scheming Tom Sawyer. When Huck confuses ducks and dolphins for dukes and the Dauphin, Twain isn’t mocking his ignorance but instead the blighted social ascendancy for which proper folks hunger. Danny, the hero of Tortilla Flat, ditched his advantages -- “If the growing Danny preferred to sleep in the forest, to work on ranches, and to wrest his food and wine from an unwilling world, it was not because he did not have influential relatives.”

The tramps and bums we meet in Danny’s house are clowns in Hamlet’s world; they struggle, in rude language, with the mysteries of being.

II. The uneducated, ill-kempt, and morally odd dominate Steinbeck’s democratic burlesque, but his narrator knows the great books, wields complex language, rejects the rigged game of social conformity, and invites the 24

reader into an irreverent conspiracy. If Pilon and Danny are thieves and hypocrites, they are not any more so than business folk. Whatever their failings, “the paisanos are clean of commercialism, free of the complicated systems of American business.” For Steinbeck, US society is a war between property’s demands and the quest for freedom, between competitive struggle and communal bonds; a quest for grandeur beyond domestic order and careworn cupboard-keeping. Steinbeck’s humane moralism embraces cycles of error and forgiveness, and the luxurious freedom that belongs to a boy’s dream of pleasant afternoons. His characters evade responsibility; as Mark Twain put it, they “light out for the territories” where a man wipes his hands on his pants, doesn’t tip his hat to the banker, or please his betters to get on in life.

[Although Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson visited Monterey only briefly, Steinbeck was happy to claim him as a fellow westerner. Stevenson (author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Black Arrow) has been called the Shakespeare of boy’s books and picturesque adventure.]

Among Steinbeck’s Monterey trailblazers are R.L. Stevenson (1850-94) and American humorist Josh Billings (1818-1885). Billings assumed the style of the common man, and like Will Rogers (an Oklahoman and Cherokee cowpoke), served up uncommon wisdom in plain talk. Stevenson enjoyed the Pacific west. His “An Apology for Idlers” (1877) recommends: “A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill and a practical demonstration of the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.” Billings celebrated ease beyond good sense and propriety. He recommended the moral superiority of nature: “A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself ” -- a sentiment supported by Tortilla Flat and Travels with Charley (1961). This Steinbeck, different from the chronicler of Dust Bowl struggles, heralds humorists like Jean Shepherd, Garrison Keillor, and Kurt Vonnegut, whose small town paradises defy convention that drains joy from life. They protest boredom and the pressures of fitting in and making it.

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[Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) wrote wildly comic Swiftian satire, often measuring small-town life against global and cosmic perspectives. Breakfast of Champions (1973) follows Steinbeck’s pleasure in ironic perspectives. On that path go Will Rogers, Jean Shepherd, Garrison Keillor, and George Carlin.]

Danny’s world has felt the shock of the great world beyond it. Encouraged by patriotism and too much drinking, Danny and friends enlist in the war – Danny served as a mule-skinner. Pilon in the infantry, and Big Joe as an inmate in the stockade. On their return, Tortilla Flat, perched on a hillside above Monterey, is unchanged, preserving its antic Mexican-American character before it became California and was subjected to property rights, decency, and rapacity. Tortilla Flat is a bulwark against the practical new world and its threats to human nature, an eternal paradise happily disposed towards good and evil, all differences dissolved by friendship and enchantment. Poverty torments this little world, but restlessness haunts this boyhood paradise, the need to break cycles of routine that lead nowhere. This drive to push life beyond everyday dreariness to something transcendent is natural to those untamed by law, property, and common adjustments. Tortilla Flats, unincorporated, retains the joy and suffering decency does without; a place where art and feeling, risk and irresponsible lunacy, can flourish, and where poetic language wields its magic.

III. When Danny inherits two derelict houses from his grandfather, he faces the curse of owning property.

Before that legacy, he and his friends had been free: “They built a fire and broiled the ham and ate the stale bread. The brandy receded quickly down the bottle. After they had eaten, they huddled near the fire and sipped delicately at the bottle like effete bees. And the fog came down upon them and grayed their coats with moisture. The wind sighed sadly in the pines about them.” Steinbeck’s verbs are energetic: “broiled”, “receded”, “huddled” “sipped” “grayed” and “sighed” -- a paradise where nature and feeling are luxuriously attuned.

Steinbeck, a canny story-teller, knows also when to stay silent and let event and dialogue carry the point. When Danny wallows in grievances, a comic prelude to doing as he pleases, he comments: “Here we sit, homeless. We gave our lives for our country, and now we have no roof over our head”. Obviously, Danny has not given his life for his country, but we don’t need the narrator to enjoy the absurdity. If the reader isn’t swift enough, that won’t be the author’s fault.

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[Tortilla Flat (1935) was Steinbeck’s first commercial success, followed in short order by In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and Grapes of Wrath (1939). His comic works include Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1953).]

Danny’s pal Pilon is a master logician, a small town Odysseus. Mrs. Morales raises chickens next door, so Pilon cuts the fence and liberates them to nest and lay eggs for Danny and friends. Pilon cares for his companions: with two dollars in hand and briefly intending to pay Danny some rent, Pilon decides Danny would instead prefer two jugs of wine to share with his friend: “If I give him hard money, it does not express how warmly I feel toward my friend. But a present, now. And I will tell him the two gallons cost five dollars.” Chasing down the rooster next door and killing him for dinner, Pilon saves the poor cluck from the dangers of the road. With wit and imagination, Pilon manipulates a world stacked against him.

Like his character, Steinbeck’s moral reckoning is agile. There are two Pilons – one greedy and self-serving, the other the soul of purity: “Pilon was a lover of beauty and a mystic. He raised his face into the sky and his soul arose out of him into the sun’s afterglow. That not too perfect Pilon, who plotted and fought, who drank and cursed, trudged slowly on; but a wistful and shining Pilon went up to the sea gulls where they bathed on sensitive wings in the evening. That Pilon was beautiful, and his thoughts were unstained with selfishness and lust.” Devilish clever, Pilon invokes Saint Augustine: “A soul washed and saved is a soul doubly in danger, for everything in the world conspires against such a soul. ‘Even the straws under my knees,’ says Saint Augustine, ‘shout to distract me from prayer.’ … the soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil.

Who is there more impious than a backsliding priest? Who more carnal than a recent virgin?”

Pilon is complex, but who isn’t? We follow Pilon into his labyrinth of self-justification and, taking an unexpected turn, recognize ourselves. When Danny sends Pilon to purchase a box of candy for a prospective ladylove, Pilon returns with jugs of wine: candy is bad for you, and it would be better to share one gallon jug with his friend and present the second to his Dulcinea. When they down both jugs, Pilon figures Danny has been saved from a dangerous romantic entanglement.

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[As in Mallory’s conception, each broken knight of Steinbeck’s rustic roundtable has a specialty. Danny seeks spiritual grandeur, Pilon the ultimate connivance, Pablo kindness and gracious humanity, Santa Maria Corcoran empathy, Big Joe Portugal rough pleasure, and the Pirate natural simplicity.]

The central religion of these wandering wastrels is the search for the paradise of childhood. Drunk into smiling agreeableness, Pablo and Pilon conclude that only childhood fulfilled their desires. Drinking their jug to the dregs, “Pilon remembered how happy he had been when he was a little boy. ‘No care then, Pablo. I knew not sin. I was very happy.’ ‘We have never been happy since,’ Pablo agreed sadly.” The Pirate, blessed with mystical empathy, takes us even further from rational adulthood.

The Pirate works daily, earns money, and supports the larger community. Although his black beard and fearsome aspect account for his nickname, he is Edenic and free from violence and cupidity. The Pirate earns his two-bits a day gathering kindling from the forest to fuel households, workplaces, and restaurants. He saves his earnings to purchase a gold candlestick for the church and honor St. Francis. He expresses his devotion to St. Francis daily, however, in his familiar relationship with five dogs: “Enrique was rather houndish in appearance, although his tail was bushy. Pajarito was brown and curly, and these were the only two things you could see about him. Rudolph was a dog of whom passers-by said, ‘He is an American dog.’ Fluff was a Pug and Señor Alec Thompson seemed to be a kind of an Airedale. They walked in a squad behind the Pirate, very respectful toward him, and very solicitous for his happiness.” The Pirate places his dogs above himself, feeds them first, and consults them for advice. They know his feelings, respect his needs, and guide him. They are far more kindly, and more useful than his human friends, who try to “succor” their simple friend out of his savings.

In Chapter seven Pilon constructs an elaborate plot to rob the Pirate. Pilon torments the Pirate with tales of misers who buried their treasure only to lose it to theft. The Pirate cannot grasp what Pilon is up to: when he tries to figure it out, “his brain grew gray and no help came from it, but only a feeling of helplessness.” When Pilon invites him to live at Danny’s house, the Pirate turns to his dogs for advice: “And he looked to his dogs for comfort, but they would not meet his glance.” Later, when Danny and his friends fail to discover the hiding place of the Pirate’s treasure, the dogs mock them: “The dogs lifted their heads when Pilon entered, and Pilon thought they smiled satirically at him for a moment.” His canine friends keep the befuddled Pirate from harm.

The Pirate is blessed with innocence: each knight possesses a touch of God’s magnificence.

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IV.

Steinbeck’s comic novels are well crafted, every episode with an adroit opening, careful unfoldings, and a kicker to close. As with the Pirate’s tale, each chapter has a comic twist, a lesson on how this broken world somehow holds together. In Chapter Nine Danny becomes enchanted with “Sweets” Ramirez, arousing the “ugly beast of lust”. When she demurs, Danny bestows on her a gleaming vacuum cleaner, much prized, though Tortilla Flat lacks electricity. Her neighbors envy “Sweets”, pushing the machine across the floor and making humming noises. When Danny tires of Sweets, his friends “repossess” the vacuum, trading it for wine. Torrelli, the bootlegger, believes the machine will please his ever complaining wife, only to find that electricity cannot assist a machine without a motor. Often romance is a shiny object, useless, fostering pride, repossessed by trickery, and finally discovered worthless.

Sometimes, the surprise turn catches sentimentality off guard. Santa Maria Corcoran, a knight who feels things deeply, encounters a youth cradling his sickly newborn on the town’s main street. Corcoran brings the boy and his infant to Danny’s. The young corporal tells a tale of injured innocence; his beautiful wife and mother of his son had been stolen away by the captain of his regiment. Later, a mystic assured the corporal that if he repeated his wish, his son would someday become a general. Sadly, the infant expires, despite all Danny and friends can do, and the youthful father, so devoted to his infant child, will never see him prosper. We grieve for him until we discover his wish was not to have pride in his son but to exact revenge, his son as a general stealing from the captain what he treasures most. Tortilla Flat insists, “It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.”

In this comic tradition sex is ludicrous. As in Canterbury Tales and Joseph Andrews, it is great fun when a widow, well past romance, is courted by an unlikely suitor who falls prey to her ardor. When Big Joe stops off, in sandy squalor, for a glass of wine at Tia Ignacia’s house, Joe wants only some gulps of grappa and a warm place to snooze; Tia Ignacia wants more. When Joe falls into a drunken stupor, the lady, old but needy, in her frustration pounds him awake. While grappling to subdue her, Joe discovers love, and the amorous pair are later discovered by the local constable, in the dark, in the middle of the muddy road, in love’s embrace, and in a classic comic tradition.

V. [Steinbeck engages the western themes of breaking out and chasing the boyhood dreams of rootless companionship and boundless adventure. Californians Neil Cassidy (pictured here with Kerouac), Ken Kesey, and the Hell’s Angels carried that energy further.]

Tortilla Flat ends in dark tones. Steinbeck’s tarnished knights hope to elude propriety and domestic care -- a boy’s adventure of doing as you please, of enchanted woods, and outrages against civility. As in Travels with Charley, he’s happiest on the road; or, in Sea of Cortez (1941) with his friend Ed Ricketts, sailing 29

the “Western Flyer” into the Gulf of California. Danny’s demise and the titanic combat that destroys him shocks us. It is more Wagner than Mallory, Ragnorok than Lancelot, Gotterdammerung than Camelot, as Danny wars against everyday boredom to which boyish selves are inevitably doomed.

In Morte d’Arthur, Camelot collapses from disease at the heart of courtly romance. Danny’s shatters from his need to feel fully alive. Danny’s purely American lust for trouble leads to the dissolution of his household.

Steinbeck sets the tone: “On Tortilla Flat, above Monterey, the routine is changeless too; for there is only a given number of adventures that Cornelia Ruiz can have with her slowly changing procession of sweethearts.” As amusing as these peccadillos are, in the end they repeat themselves into monotony. As amusing as the paisanos are, they are what they are, repeated in anecdote after anecdote. Stories give out into foolishness and failure, as in the broken tales of Bob Smoke or the courting of the Montez sisters. Sometimes a tale evokes laughter, but of a kind that “squeezes your heart” or offers only unsettled meanings. Though the enchanted forest offers ancient treasures and restless ghosts, Tortilla Flat falls ultimately into its own cycle of repetition: “ … the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra [a water clock].” And so, the world is only what it is and never what the hungry heart could imagine.

Danny’s outlaw commune proves insufficient: “Danny began to dream of the days of his freedom. He had slept in the woods in summer, and in the warm hay of barns when the winter cold was in. The weight of property was not upon him. He remembered that the name of Danny was a name of storm.” The god he serves rides aloft in dark clouds of madness, pain, impulse and transgression. At first Danny disappears, hiding in the forest, rampaging the town, and bedeviling his friends, stealing the Pirate’s wheelbarrow, stealing their furniture, even stealing his companions’ shoes.

Towards the end, Steinbeck amps up the epic dimensions. Torrelli becomes a fairytale monster. Witnessing him sweeping down on Danny’s house, townsfolk lock their shutters against his fury: “his face suffused with a ferocious smile of pleasure and anticipation, the children ran into their yards and peeked through the pickets at him; the dogs caressed their stomachs with their tails and fled with backward, fearful looks …” We enter the horrors of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Old Roca, seeing Torrelli smiling, went home and told his wife, “That one has just killed and eaten his children. You will see!” Danny has humiliated Torrelli and seduced his wife. Torrelli’s fury is diverted by Danny’s friends’ trickery, but Danny has tipped into madness. Pilon concludes: “Truly he is mad. He is running through the woods like an animal.” We have entered a harrowing world, where “the sea gulls circled in the air, screaming tragically.” Danny becomes listless, scarcely aware of his friends. To Pilon he appears old; to Jesus Maria, “sick of fun, with some bitter secret in his heart.”

The narrator addresses his despondent character: “Poor Danny, how has life left thee! Here thou sittest like the first man before the world grew up around him; and like the last man, after the world has eroded away.”

Danny enacts an antique drama, beyond history, in the realm of myths and gods. His friends find Danny leaning on the wharf; as Pablo reports: “At first it looked like a black cloud in the air over Danny’s head. And then I saw it was a big black bird, as big as a man.” An unseen world hovers to gather him into darkness. Despite his friends’ efforts at rescue, Danny “turned back to the deep black water. Perhaps he whispered to the gods a 30

promise or a defiance.”

The party to rouse him from his despair decays into a brawl: with “roaring battles that raged through whole clots of men, each one for himself.” Party-goers saw Danny transformed, titanic and belligerent, his head nearly touching the ceiling. Like Melville’s Ahab, Danny calls out his enemy to battle: “I will find The Enemy who is worthy of Danny,” he bellows, and party-goers hear a baleful challenge from “the Opponent” in response, a shout “so terrifying it chills their spines”. When they find Danny’s broken body in the gulch below, he is beyond what doctors and priests and townsfolk and friends can offer.

[Melville’s Captain Ahab is the prototype of mad American questors.

Beyond the mediations of church and nation, of family and community, of corporate obligations and traditions of captaincy, of the bonds of companionship, Ahab alone and in the ocean’s immensities confronts the outrage of his injuries.]

Danny’s Opponent stalked all the mad questors of Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway and Philip Roth. Tearing loose from household and community, from women and family, from national purpose and history, these broken heroes, alone against immensities, fight and lose their battle against imagination and desire. Danny lives the counter-life of rascality in a boyhood paradise. He must be every moment original and instinctive and self-generating. Danny was a mule-skinner, a vaquero, a free man wandering Monterey’s streets drunk and disorderly, bedding wives and daughters, thieving and conniving, and daring all. Death is the Opponent worthy of his need for the unimaginable. His stately military funeral, gathering the outlaw back into order and decency, mocks the man -- his friends hiding their ragged dress, the dogs howling mournfully, is a more fitting tribute. In a comic coda, ladies, done up in false finery, follow behind the caisson “holding their skirts up out of the indelible trail of cavalry.”

The funereal ending is comic and overblown. Could it conclude with domestic bliss, or sudden riches?

Instead, we remember the comradery, colorful stories, and the permissive sense that all this might be possible, against the constraints of what serves as reality. Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s next comic triumph, takes us further into dreaming beyond the bounds. For the reader, it’s good medicine for bad times.

[Steinbeck was married three times, charged by his California neighbors with being a Communist, drank too much, plied his trade restlessly through several careers, advised Presidents (who paid no attention), despised the automated world suffocating the US, and wrote as if his life depended on it.] ***

31

32

The Rainbow

by William Wordsworth’s

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

Self-portrait in a flat cap and embroidered dress by Rembrandt, Date: 1642, Style: Baroque

33

Cottages Near Pond by Theodore Rousseau

Work of Ages

Work of Comets by

Tom Sheehan 34

“Dream all you want, son, dream like you might be king, which you won’t be, but they can’t take it away from you; just don’t do it crossing the street or walking down the railroad tracks. Pay all your dues as they come up, crow a little bit when in luck, shut up when you lose, but dream all you want. It might just become the biggest pleasure of your life. There are worse things to hold onto.”

The tip of the shovel had talked to him with a dull thud, not just through his ears, but totally. It came into his hands and up the stiffness of his arms, through the quick riot of nerves on red alert, through all passageways of recognition. It was wood!

At its tip was wood, a cavernous wood, a chesty wood, an enclosing wood. Promise poised itself, much like awards’ night and names to be named. Light leaped at his back, behind his head. Down through the awesome sky of darkness he could feel a star draining, down through thirty-five years of a hole.

For a moment everything was frozen, and he’d know this time forever; not a single moth traversed the light’s span, not a sound was made or heard; above him, millions of miles away but at his back, the weight of a lone star was known. He did not look at his friend, sure that Eddie would not wake up no matter what he did.

This was his time.

He scraped slowly with the shovel blade, moving gravel and hard pan and small rocks across a flat surface.

Indeed, the star was heavy. It bore down on him, but the tool was a toothpick in his hands. John Deere and Napoleon DeMars be damned.

They’d not known this, light of a star warm on the back of the neck, and dry was his throat, dry his lips. He dared not seek the wine bottle someplace behind him. In this vacuum he heard nothing. Even the silence was heavy, field of an anode, grip of a battery, the moon held at bay from good old Mother Earth.

Cleared, the wooden surface he’d hit was about two feet by three feet.

That it was man-made seemed obvious. In the air hung his father’s face, his father’s words about dreaming the good life. The sweetness of the wine came back like a retort. It crawled in his mouth smoothly crusty as talc or chalk. It coated his teeth, more so the backside nearer his tongue. At investigation it had granules as small as anything the tongue tip could isolate. The star loomed. He wasn’t sure now whether it was overhead or underfoot, but it was here!

Now a muscle began to talk to him, high on his back, just under one shoulder, at first an ache as dull as a starting toothache not yet localized, then telling of its small rawness. Perhaps it was descendent, alighting from someplace far away. Eddie could never understand all of this. It would drive him off the hill in a mad hurry. It would drive him off, noisily on his way. He’d fall, he’d scramble, he’d tear his knees. There’d be a glut of curses and terror in his heart, for this is where it had all been coming, all the damn time, all the crazy time, all the days and all the nights and all the bottles and all the kegs and all the nips secreted in pockets from bosses and supervisors and the merest of friends when his throat had been driest.

He’d been coming here since his father had told him of the good life that dreams would bring him to. No longer were there any secrets. It was all out here in the open in this magnificent pit under the weight of a single star; and then he could hold off no longer, and the bottle came alive in his hand and leaped upward and emptied downward and celebration came his due with the sweet mustiness working its reverent way.

35

The star was still heaviest on his head, all the onus of it; not on his shoulders or his back, for he could have shoveled forever, but on his head, thick with a headache and a throb and the punch of a star known by no man.

Struggling for leverage, he inserted the tip of the shovel under one edge of the flat surface at his feet. Like a crow bar, the long-handled shovel exerted enough energy to pry loose a piece of wood. Gold and silver and stones shone up at him! His father’s face, old bottles, old inscriptions, odd shining, the loosing of dreams, the whole angular mass of lights and reflections, all came at once, blinding him, a blitz of a blitz of light and color he’d not know again.

It was the barest, most lucid moment of his life that came at him then. And he knew he was trapped. Life would change dramatically and abysmally and he’d never catch up to where he was right now.

All of it he saw, and there were no dreams and no silence and no small darkness where he could huddle himself alone with his memories.

Dreamer Tory Malzone, the star burning on his neck, still a ponderous weight in his mind, tipped the bottle once more to his lips, and drank off the contents. Then slowly he began to cover the star buried so long at his feet.

Treasure there is someplace in life, at your feet if you stop to breathe, around the corner if you turn it the right way at the right moment, at the end of a quiet lane you might find yourself in by accident. Of this Tory Malzone was sure. Absolutely sure!

Two things rang true about Tory Malzone from the very first word said of him; he drank inordinately, excessively, purportedly without care, and he dreamed the same way, full- blown, full-scale dreams, wide, ambitious, Mississippian, artistic no less, and with an inveterate regality. His father had said to him one day when Tory was just a boy with a supposed minor attention span, advice which he remembered just about every day of his life (at least sober, and part way to that other place he inhabited so often), “Dream all you want, son, dream like you might be king, which you won’t be, but they can’t take it away from you; just don’t do it crossing the street or walking down the railroad tracks. Pay all your dues as they come up, crow a little bit when in luck, shut up when you lose, but dream all you want. It might just become the biggest pleasure of your life. There are worse things to hold onto.”

His father was only half right in his advice. There were the dreams, the endless and rich flow of them; and there was the mesmerizing bottle, the endless temptation somehow just a little too much each time for him. That too was dream stuff of another order, a whole magical elixir which, inexplicably, came to be in itself both cause and effect, end of a means and means to an end, a thing by and for itself. What else it gnawed at, licked its chops over, was all of time.

Thus he had come, into his thirty-seventh year, a bachelor cut right out of the drinker’s mold, a bit shaggy most of the time, starting to thin in his hair, eyes clear only slightly more than half the day. As a town laborer his hands were callused by pick and shovel, his back still showing ridges of muscle not yet worn down in their due.

But, above all of this, indisputably, he was an Earthmover of the first measure. Tory Malzone did not call himself a laborer or a shoveler, not a handyman hidden under another title, but Earthmover. Not two words, but one word, rolled up into its cosmic greatness, its spatial and glorious reach. He had dreamed it into existence, into place. No foreman or job super, and no peer could take it away from him.

Earthmover he was and Earthmover he would remain.

36

Eddie Higgins, tea tippler extraordinaire, brass rail bucko of the first order, current co-owner of the trench they were at the moment excavating under the hot August sun, flung a shovelful of gravel high, wide and handsomely to the other side of the pile and said, to Tory and the massive sense of oppression hanging like hate in the air,“I’d give my best arm for a cold one right now, Tory. A frosted glass, a bottle with ice still clinging to it, sliding slowly down the side of the glass, slippery, oozing, cold as the fires of hell when they are long out. What the hell time is it?” The wrists he held up were bare of adornment.

His dry tongue rode around the orbit of his dry lips, raspy, abrasive, catching on high dry spots. His beard was a day and a half old. Sandy hair he had, full of moisture the sunlight kept catching hold of. The large and awesomely veined hands spread about the shovel handle seemed sculpted out of a blue-red granite, the veins as vivid as tattoos. Thickly square on the ends, his fingernails looked as if they had been abraded by a rugged rasp.

One might have called him handsome, but no one, after a second look, would have called him out of place in the trench.

In his best friend’s face, Tory could see a bit of the hangdog holding forth. Did his own eyes have that same look in them, the last mile look, an also-ran look, their assurance and the day itself practically shot to hell already, and it not yet three p.m.? He decided very quickly that they did. If he had looked sharper, he knew he would have seen it a lot earlier. Hell! He would have seen a lot of things a lot earlier, but what the hell makes time so special now, now when all the dyes are cast. He’d kept saying that to himself for so long it seemed that it must have preceded anything being wrong in his life in the first place. Effect coming ahead of the cause. He tried to think that over and decided to take a huge shovelful on his next scoop, it was easier that way; the body allowed so much relief of itself, for itself, and that included the mind. Such an out! Giddiness, a surge of joy he knew was temporary at its absolute best, flowed through him.

The bright, flashing tip of the shovel slammed into the earth, cocked itself almost at once under a measure of hardpan and gravel he thought no man could possibly dredge up, and then the body pitch and sense of timing came geared together smoother than the best wine could ever be, or ever do. A definite knack was required of all this, that was for damn sure.

For the briefest moment, he was partly relocated down the street, on a high limb of a tree looking back at himself in the trench, seeing himself for what he was and where he was and what he was doing. The shovel, came his immediate response, was no different than a scalpel. Surgeons, too, did their digging, didn’t they, down through the matter of the body and the brain, clawing and pawing and ultimately finessing their way through to some resolution, some appointment in the narrowness of spaces, just as he was here in earth’s open aorta, this passage across the face of the earth, this single line of a massive network that would never be fully measured. Struggling in his mind was the idea of eternity and the plane he was currently on extending itself out into space and into limitless time. Being a part of that plane was important; on a pedestal or in a ditch, makes no difference, you can extend yourself only so far out on that limitlessness.

All of it hit him, as it often did, but there was no getting away from it; here in this life, locked to this place.

He drank, he dreamed, he knew it, and nothing was going to change it. That was one sure thing in life, and having anything that was a certainty was often a joy to hold to oneself. One could grab onto a certainty. Could almost wear 37

it. Toga. Mantle. Robe. A cover against most anything. Better than anybody bag, for sure, or a poncho looped about you in war’s action, in the rain, in a far land. Been there, almost done that, he thought.

Again, looking at his companion in the trench, fellow Earthmover on the face of the earth, color and complexion added to that assessment as he noted the redness pervading his friend’s face. Eddie, as usual here in the late noon of the day, was brick red, partly due to sunlight and partly due to whatever it was they had managed to knock off the night before. There had been bottles and glasses and kegs and cans and liquid movement for much of the night, and he couldn’t remember past one certain point... when they had the argument about hidden treasure on Vinegar Hill.

He had yelled at Eddie. “Damn fool drunk! What do you think old man Haskell and his kid have been digging up there for these thirty-five years? Not for their health, I tell you. They know something, trying to keep it from us. I keep seeing a box at the end of my shovel, a metal box, the pot at the end of the rainbow, and I know it’s full of gold and jewels and enough other crap to knock our eyes out. Every day of my life I’ve dreamed of it, even before I knew they were digging up there. I hear the sounds that come with it, the sound my shovel makes at contact, the squeak of old hinges trying their wings once again, the spill of such shining you couldn’t imagine in a hundred years. We could lie on the beach until our last drink had its way with us. I tell you, Eddie, there’s something up there, and they know it, and we know it. The stupidest thing we could do is to just plain forget about it. That’d really scratch a lifetime.”

“You dream too much, Tory, my friend.” His voice was thick and tortured in a sense, as if words were being squeezed out of him. Resting one foot on the heel of the blade, he leaned on his shovel. His chin sat on the tip of the shovel handle, posing him part Atlas.

Tory knew he’d remember his friend that way forever, whenever that came, as Eddie continued: “You stare out at space all day like you expect to see a star. You’re never going to see one in the daytime, so why look?

Then, the way you always do, getting loose or getting tight, I don’t know which it is, you turn around and stare at the ground under your damn feet like you’re in some holy place, or like something’s going to pop up in your face you’ve been waiting for. It’s just not going to happen like that, Tory. Things don’t go that way for us. All that stuff is way, way beyond us. We’re in our place, come hell or high water. We dug our way in. There’s no way out for us.”

There was a basic finality to his words, one without question, as if all had been drafted and done long before them, cut, shucked and dried. He added a closer he thought would be a telling one, “And, besides, you think too damn much! All the time thinking!”

Nothing new in those words; he’d said them before and most likely would say them again. A smile was offered with that pronouncement, a half-smile of instant neutrality, of taking back a piece of what had been said.

Tory smiled too, realizing he had just gone through the old argument. It must be a sign of our desperate straits, he thought, or our universal acceptance of being where we are and what we are. But I’d still rather have a drink, too! There was, appreciatively, nearly a kind of music and rhythm to his voice as the phrase sounded slowly in his ear, at the back of his head, at some hollow place he had no control over, indeed where much odd conversation took place in the accompaniment of spirits. Almost a song, he said under his breath. A thousand times he had uttered that phrase, and knew it was a part of him. Against the current obstacles he managed to wet his tongue, remembering, tasting.

38

Everything didn’t have to be so cut and dried, did it? A laugh began in his throat, as he found appreciation for his own humor.

“I’m going up there after work tonight, Eddie, and if you don’t want to come with me, that’s okay. But I’m going. Soon’s they’re out of there, I’m up there.” He let it sink right in with his friend, who, he knew, could never take the chance that he might come up with something, something big.

The bottles purchased had been dirt cheap, a Muscatel they sort of withdrew to when finances demanded. Before evening they were well into the storied steps of the bottles, Tory’s tales at last charming and mesmerizing Eddie so that he agreed to make the climb up Vinegar Hill, “come hell or high water.”

They would have celebrated, but they were already primed at partying.

The climb up Vinegar Hill was not without incident; Eddie falling a number of times, yelling out in the poor light that he might be damned to death for what he was trying, trespassing on somebody else’s private dreamland. Tasting dirt was not his favorite outing at anytime, and here he was, out of the trench he had spent his day in, and still locked into the taste of old earth, all of loam and gravel and hardpan; Tory, finding it clumsy to tote the extra fuel for lamps he had determined they would need, because the Haskells never worked late hours.

Once, in his protracted agony, he fell face down in the path, cursing at first the whole mountainside, finally managing a laugh only Eddie could understand and decipher, and he’d bet on that, he’d bet the farm on that, whatever damn farm that would be in all of creation. A drunk’s laugh only another drunk would understand, all the stress sound and punctuation in place. Believing for the moment that he was only slightly dizzy, he suddenly felt the affinity that brothers have, sharers, fellow sufferers; it cut right into him, a full presence, a knowledge once put aside would not be brought back to light, but if accepted, came down on a man hard as an avalanche.

Life came down with it, heavy as rocks, the tumble of agony and truth, the big bang of reality trying to get its way into the slightest crevice of his mind. He felt the penetration of, at once, despair and truth, fact and fiction, loss the likes of which he had never known.

The gold nuggets, the storied and dreamed nuggets, like the hard yellow of Lifesavers, came once again to fill his mind, the gold nuggets and bright silver by the bucket, and stones so precious in life they had entities of their own, and coin so varied in size and so crude in inscription he never would know its meaning He saw the words tumble from the corner of his eyes, the flash across the coming coins, the words even before they were in his eyes---their alliterative powers rolling in his mind---Cents and sense and silver storm, and only silver keeps you warm.

Eddie, of course, could not be told of this, could not be advised of this impact, could not even be warned. It would not be fair of me, not fair to him at all. They think that we cannot think, that we cannot mine the mind, the ‘they’ of his thought suddenly having the faces of just about everybody he knew in the whole town, in the whole world for all that matter; the finger pointers, the scorners, the nose-in-air judges, the temperate pretenders, the closet drunks, a vile collection of hoax and hokum spreading all across his wet life.

They can’t even believe the song that wine sets free or the words that leave off from where they themselves left them, in their darkness, in their lightness, in their great states of privilege. He could feel his face screwing up for a scowl, or a sneer of disdain. “Damn ‘em all,” he caught himself saying, as if it were a mark of punctuation.

39

Dusk had long gone over the rim of the hill when they arrived at the dig, as Tory sometimes called it, an angling and huge hole down through rock and gravel and ten million years of tossed stone, a hole whose walls carried the mark of more than one glacier it would probably prove out, a hole thirty-five years in the making, a dream in the minds and at the hands of a man and his son. From the rock walls to the span of the hole to the sense of depth that rose out of the bottom came a fistful of reality. It punched Tory right in the face, made him catch his breath. Thirty-five years at this was more than reality. It had to be more!

He and Eddie had carried lanterns to the site, and a supply of kerosene. They had brought no tools, depending on finding them at the site. The Haskells had, through the long years, etched a path up the long climb of Vinegar Hill, making the ascent much easier than imagined. Tory was not disappointed to find shovels and picks and buckets and ropes in a small shed situated down in the hole, behind a locked chain link fence in front of the shed.

The key, without difficulty, was found on a nail behind a pole, and they entered the site. The crest of hell, it seemed to Tory, had risen in their faces; real, with measurement and handles for touching, grasping. If this was daily fare for the Haskells, then the thirty-five years could only be assumed. No one could face this without reacting. Heat, he was sure, rose in their faces, a massive cloud of it that should have been dogged down and cool.

Freddie Rippon’s old mushroom house at the edge of the pond, from years past, leaped into his intelligence, how the steam at planting time rose upward like an energy on the loose, the spawn smell as thick in it as tadpoles in a May pool, the taste of sterilized loam still moving on the air from that long-past summer when he and the others had lugged it in baskets to cover the months-treated manure base in the multiple level beds. Back came the manure pile, too; in the dead of winter, stripped to the waist, they had tossed it into the turning machine, spraying it, the fertilizer having its way, steam risingaround their bodies from the turning pile as if they were caught in flameless fire.

There was, he vaguely remembered, a kind of hell in that too. He tried to recall how one whole crop had suddenly gone to disease in one weekend, tried to remember at whose feet that fault could be placed. It all faded too fast as if discovery was truly afoot. He grasped his smooth-handled, long-handled shovel. He knew where he was. For the time being anyway.

Under the glare of the lanterns they dug and picked their way through shale and stone for more than two hours, talking and grunting and drinking their way to wherever it was going to take them; China or hell, it getting sweeter by the minute, until Eddie lay down his shovel and placed himself beside it, his second day within a day of labor suddenly over and done with.

“My ass is dragging, Tory, and I feel like I’m some damn kind of idiot for being here, never mind breaking my ass at the same time. I’m tired and now I feel like I don’t give a hoot if we never find our way home again. I just want to sleep a while, but you can have the dreams. Just let me be.” Vapor came with his words, a wet mixture of muscatel and syntax. His lower lip had begun to drag itself under his words; the B’s and P’s and V’s falling away first, the first casualties of speech, shot down in mid-sentence. Eyes he no longer trusted had long since called for something at the back of his brain, and he seemed to meld himself into the floor of the hole, his back twisting about until it found its mating with Earth.

When his eyes closed, his breath coming a hoarse escape, now and then a bubble at the corner of his mouth, Tory knew his friend could probably sleep the night away if need be.

40

The shovel in Tory’s hands was an instrument indeed, and it pried under the pressure of his foot at the floor of the hole, tipped at theright touch and the right angle and came up with a all the way. They rarely thought about Mother Earth fighting back, but he knew.

The shovel rang at the touching, as it hit at stones in the pile, as it came back down to where his feet were, as it flashed in the light of the lantern like some sword being wielded in the half light of history.

He was glad his friend was asleep, that he was, for all intents and purposes, alone at this task, that the silence between strokes and slices and swings up over his head was meant for his ears alone. It didn’t matter what he’d find, not on this night or any one night, but that it was waiting there for him, as cold and as clear and as bright in its shining as any treasure would be, a perfect end of any dream; the eyes closed, the shine still coming unstifled from the long years of burial, the spill of all the years at his very feet. That was the way it would be. It didn’t have to be this night. He knew that. It didn’t have to be now, not at this precise time. Perhaps it didn’t have to be in this hole.

He smiled at the buzzing all about him, the two lamps whirring away like slight engines, now and then small delicate wings coming past him in the air, the light itself throwing a shine up on the walls and leaping straight upwards out of the hole. Only some distant star can see this light, he thought, the shaft of it climbing outward on its own beacon, its own endless journey, pursuing the star. To address a star, like this, was part of the dream, part of the treasure itself.

This was proof positive! Now it had hands and knuckles to it, stiff forearms able and adept and sufficient for the job. Eddie could never know it and was better asleep; this was the part that Eddie would never be able to handle, this coming so close, this spanning suchdistances to come so close.

An awesome energy traversed his shoulders and his upper arms. None of the past day was lingering there in the muscles. He felt the handle of the shovel, knew its smooth surface much like his own skin, could even feel the sense of his own sweat down inside it, the way sap lays under bark and skin of trees. God, he felt strong and close to something. Perhaps that star might at this moment be closer than it would ever be. ***

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42

ARMSTRONG

by Martin Heavisides “Comedian + Dancer in My Race”

I was tellin’ about the time when I was a little bitty boy in my mother’s hometown of Boutte, Louisiana. I was about five years old, cute little ol’ thing, too. Mayann, my mother you know, she said to me one morning, “Son, run down to the pond and get a bucket of water for your mama.” And I cut out for that water, and Mayann dug me when I come back without the water and poooh, boy! She said, “Boy, where is that water?” I said, “Well, mama, there’s a big old rusty alligator in that pond and I didn’t get that water.” She said, “Oh, boy, go get that water. Don’t you know that alligator is scared of you as you are of him?” I told her, “Mama, if he’s scared of me as I am of him, that water ain’t fit to drink.”

As quoted in Gary Giddins, Satchmo

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“Roses are red Violets are blue Lucille’s are pink I saw them on the clothesline Incredibly enough, there are musical purists who think Armstrong’s artistry was seriously compromised by his decision to mingle singing with his superlative instrumental work on cornet. Beckett’s first appearance in 20th Century literature (stronger than many of his later appearances in propria persona) was in Louis’s 1929 recording of When You’re Smiling. (Baby It’s Cold Outside—the live duet with Velma Middleton—is more like a Pinter play super-compressed to ten minutes.) Malcolm X never came close to delivering so fiery a denunciatory sermon (message conveyed purely by tone of voice) as Louis Armstrong’s Shine. Few vocalists have ever even attempted the lyric in full of Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, and surely Armstrong’s remains the definitive rendition (though I’ d be remiss in my patriotic duty if I didn’t cite the key importance in this recording of my countryman Oscar Peterson’s piano accompaniment.)

Even more incredible is the much larger contingent who think Armstrong’s comedy (“You weren’t at the studio you dog, you just/ Gone fishin’. . . “ “The Pope asked me if Lucille and I had kids and I said ‘No daddy, but we still whalin’. ” “What’s the matter witchou boy? Don’t you know I got a right to sing the blues?”) detracted from his serious work as an artist. You never hear anyone say that about Chaplin, Keaton or Tati, I wonder why that is? (Chaplin had an amateur’s interest in piano, I understand, but Fats Waller or Art Tatum he wasn’t. I’ ve heard his singing voice once or twice, it was passable; but Louis was passable in his idiom the way Enrico Caruso was in his.)

“The most refined lady bugs do it When a gentleman calls.

Moth in your rugs do it.

Well lookee here, what’s the use of balls?”

Roughly speaking (according to Fellini’s distinction in “I Clowns,”) Duke Ellington was a white clown, Louis Armstrong an auguste. (I always have to look these up to be sure which is which, so this sentence’s shout out goes to Goodsearch.) The white clown is the aristocrat, the mask or painted face of authority. The auguste stands in for the common run of humankind. (Fusing the utmost discipline with a potent intuitive genius, the auguste gives humanity a dazzling pinnacle of achievement to aspire to.)

(How does this distinction play out among comics? Well. .. I’ d say the long-running feud between Jack Benny and Fred Allen was an inching territorial battle between two white clowns with complementary cracks of neurosis along their respective facades—between their personae that is to say, in real life they got along famously. Richard Pryor’s an auguste, though his character Mudbone is an unusually poignant example of the white clown—perhaps that extreme rarity, an authority underscored by enough humanity to be actually legitimate. Don’t get me started on the white clowns in real life that have plagued human history: Napoleon who’s certainly more a macabre joke than anything else in Tolstoi’s definitive portrayal. Alexander the Great. Philip II of Spain, hey, hey! didn’t I tell you not to get me started?)

A quick-change character comedian like Lily Tomlin or Tracy Ullman may be a special case—some 44

of the roles they inhabit are white clown, some are auguste, but I’d say in propria persona both lean to the auguste. In joint interviews with her long-time partner Jane Wagner, Tomlin certainly plays auguste to Jane Wagner’s white clown.

On the record Fifteen Minute Intermission Cab Calloway plays white clown to a grousing band of augustes. “You’ll never get to heaven if you treat me this way. ” “We want a fifteen minute intermission boss. ” It wouldn’t be easy to say which of these performing styles is more innately subversive. The white clown’s art is to show constantly, while appearing to want at all costs to conceal it, the complicated human face beneath inevitable cracks in the simple mask designed for show and command. Plus, the white clown fusing a potent discipline with the utmost intuitive genius, gives even doddering regal secretly terrified authority an humanity vaster and more magnanimous than it’s typically able to grasp “The Dutch in old Amsterdam do it Not to mention the Finns.

Folks in Siam do it.

Think of the Siamese Twins.”

One of Armstrong’s most mind-blowing verbal ad libs: “Come climb the hill with me. We’ll see what we shall see.

I’ll bring my horn with me.

I’ll wait for you where berries are blue. ” Blueberry Hill (Al Lewis, Larry Lawrence Stock, Vincent Rose)l Yesterdays: The other white nationalities kept the Jewish people with fear constantly. As far as us Negroes, well I don’t have to explain anything. Am sure you already know. At ten years old I could see the bluffing that those old fatbelly, stinking, very smelly dirty white folks were putting down. It seems that the only thing that they cared about was their shotguns, those oldtime shotguns which they had strapped around them. So they got full of their mint julep or that bad whiskey the poor white trash were guzzling down like water, then when they got so damn drunk they’d go out of their minds, it’s Nigger Hunting time. Any Nigger. They wouldn’t give up until they would find one. From then on, Lord have mercy on the poor darkie. Then they would torture the poor darkie, as innocent as he maybe.Then they would get their usual ignorant Cheshire Cat laughs before they would shoot him down like a dog. My my my, those were the days.

As cited by Gary Giddins, Satchmo, p. 59 Louis Armstrong was born July 4th 1900, in the Back O’ Town JANE ALLEY section in New Orleans.

Mary Anne {was} the mother of two children who she raised and supported all by herself.

We did not have a father. They must have separated soon after we were born. Mama Lucy (my sister) nor I can recall seeing him. Anyway Mayann, that’s what everybody called her, worked hard to see that we had food and a place to sleep. We moved from Back O’ Town JANE ALLEY into the Third Ward (into the city), located at Franklyn and Perdido streets, where the Honky Tonks were located. A row of Negroes of all characters were living in rooms which they rented and fixed up the best way they could. We were All poor. The privies (the toilets) were put into a big yard, one side for the men and one side for the women. . . The folks, young and old, would go out into the yard and sit or lay around, or the old folks would sit in their rockin’ chairs, etc. Out in the sun until it was outhouse time. . .

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Everything went on in the yard. I remember one moonlit night a woman hollered into the yard to her daughter—she said (real loud) “You, Marandy, you’d better come into this house, laying out there with nothing on top of you but that thin nigger. ” Marandy said, “Yassum.”

As cited by Gary Giddins, Satchmo, p. 52 These are both quoted by Gary Giddins from unpublished documents he read while preparing his book. They can be matched by any number of equally frank passages in the published autobiography (intended to be the first volume only, and Armstrong said once the rest of it was so strong it could only be published after his death. Since when all trace of that extended manuscript has vanished—the likeliest candidate for its suppression being his manager Joe Glaser. Why would Glaser want to suppress a document of such historical interest, as well as literary merit if it matched the first volume? My opinion is that he’d had enough trouble with Louis Armstrong’s outspokenness in life—calling the white governor Faubus “an uneducated plowboy” when he sent out state troops to prevent school integration (I’m sure Armstrong found much choicer words than that in private, but in those days a newspaper wouldn’t print ‘em or even imply they’d been said)—suggesting in a letter to Eisenhower that the two of them go down to Mississippi, and Eisenhower take a black child by the hand and Armstrong a white child, and together usher them through the front doors of a contested school building, a breathtaking symbolic gesture Ike was just about the last person you’ d ask to attempt. If he did “disappear from” those pages it was before Armstrong’s death, since he predeceased Louis. Pity, but no help for it unless the typescript reposes in some forgotten trunk or drawer. . . ) A little of Armstrong’s background in his own words, with the many-sided ironic inflection typical of him always, is useful in getting a true measure of his comedy. Hostile critics of his humour may trivialize and evanish the rich life experience it’s drawn from, but they’re blaming Armstrong for their own failure of vision.

In an essay on Genet’s The Blacks back in the fifties, Mailer remarked that until recently there’d been many great black performers but few great black actors and theorized this was because actors depended on direct address whereas performers could bury their darkest intentions in subtext: a performance might be innocent on the surface, but carry an underground theme of murder. It’s an odd remark. If there’s one theme black popular art—you can generalize and say underclass popular art in any era, Jacobean theatre for example— has never been reticent or especially sub textual about, it’s that one. Armstrong’s is the finest interpretation I’ve heard of.

“You see pearly browns In beautiful gowns. You see tailor-mades and hand-me-downs.

You meet honest men And pickpockets skilled.

You’ll find that business never closes ‘til somebody gets killed.”

W.C. Handy’s Beale Street Blues Or what of a song that was. One of Louis’s signature tunes—performed and recorded at every phase of his career, often with improvised insertions:

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“You fed my wife Coca Cola Just so you could play on her Victrola.

That’s right, you dog, You rascal you.”

What’s the name of that tune? I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You. Really have to dig deep for the sub- text there, you bet.

Satchmo wasn’t entirely kind to James Stewart when Jimmy asked him if there were any exercises he could do to improve his embouchure for the clarinet scenes in The Glenn Miller Story: “Yeah daddy, get your old lady to sit on your face a couple of hours every night.” I doubt it was Stewart he was angry at though; he was putting in cameo appearances in one more bio flick about a white musician with a talent not much above mediocre, the studios were giving it out that Miller and Goodman and an overheated performance by Kirk Douglas supposed to be based on the life of a true innovator among white jazz musicians, Bix Biederbecke— all that mixed up mess of easy sentimentality was the history of jazz. They’d even hire a white musician to sing The Birth of the Blues! But was anybody rushing to make The Duke Ellington Story, The Count Basie Story, (not to put too fine a point on it) The Louis Armstrong Story? He knew exactly the right actor for at least one of those roles. Significantly, Armstrong disdained black entertainers who went along with the minstrel tradition, still rife in the 1920’s, of using burnt cork. Which is one reason he so admired dancer Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson:

“To me he was the greatest. He didn’t need blackface to be funny. Comedian + dancer in my race. Better than Bert Williams.

I personally admired Bill Robinson because he was immaculately dressed—you could see the quality of his clothes even from the stage, stopped every show. He did not wear old raggedy top hat and tails with the pants cut off, black cork with thick white lips, etc.

But the audiences loved him very much. He was funny from the first time he opened his mouth till he finished. So to me that’s what counted, his material is what counted.”

Gary Giddins, Satchmo (1927) Heart Beat Skin (Original composition) Armstrong’s first charted hit was Muskrat Ramble in 1926, and he’s never been long off the charts after that year, not even in the almost forty since his death. 1927 was a breakthrough year featuring at least half a dozen hits, possibly more—it all depends whose figures you trust (and there are good reasons for thinking none of them fully reliable). One of the most legendary hits of that year, with music and lyrics by Armstrong himself , in spite of the fact that (like The Trumpet Player’s Lament, a solo number cut from the release print of the 1938 movie Dr Rhythm) no copy of it seems to have survived—not a single disc of the thousands sold that year or in the two or three following, was Heart Beat Skin. The only clear indication it existed was the frequency with which it was cited in the twenties and for decades after, in spite of the fact that Armstrong doesn’t seem to have performed it after 1932 at the very latest. He certainly didn’t record as many versions as he did of Hello Dolly, regrettably on both counts. Just the one of Heart Beat Skin so far as anyone knows, and that one hasn’t survived. Still, as recently as fifteen years ago there were aging residents of homes who didn’t need much prompting to spill vivid memories of the impact that song had on their lives when they were in their teens or early twenties. True, often as not they seemed to be describing Cornet Chop Suey, Potato Head Blues, Tight Light That or Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, but you’ve got to expect things to slide together in people’s 47

memories at that age. Apart from these memories and impressions spanning seven decades, which give tantalizing notions of a musical classic that seems just on the edge of possibility to reconstruct, we have only three lines of lyric—I would guess, the three opening lines: “Where does the heart beat? All through the skin Everywhere a vein is, poundin’ like a drum.

Poundin’ from the inside, how’s about that?”

“I Look Through Him and See Jesus” Sometimes the picture of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the Crucified Christ; but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus.”

R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome “For every thing that lives is Holy; life delights in life.”

William Blake, Europe: a Prophecy Louis Armstrong’s sister—real name Beatrice but the family always called her Mama Lucy—didn’t care for her brother’s rendition of When the Saints Go Marchin’ In. (Family dynamics probably entered in here.

She wasn’t his older sister by much, but for care and correction both, she very likely always regarded him as her baby brother.)

(According to Gary Giddins this was the first jazz rendition of any spiritual—and I can’t think of an earlier example, unless Fats Waller’s sublime organ rendition of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child predated it. If it did, Armstrong’s was still the first popular jazz spiritual. Waller’s plangent organ work with its tonal translucence has always been known to a minority of his huge following—perhaps because it opens up more dimensions than they want to see of a remarkably multi-faceted artist—at another extreme, far fewer people are familiar I suspect with Hold Tight than with Honeysuckle Rose or Ain’t Misbehavin’.

In some ways, following my usual procedure (see I AM BEING EVERYBODY THEY CRIED), I should perhaps be writing about Waller rather than Armstrong at this length—and I’ m certainly not promising I never will. But an unjustly eclipsed reputation isn’t the only condition that calls for critical correction. There are reputations, like Armstrong’s, that are wide as the wide world but settle into stereotypes that conceal far more than they reveal. I’ m offering a few modest correctives to that tendency here.

I’ve no idea what the original sounded like, that Mama Lucy seemed to think he’d irreverently jazzed up, since his version supplanted it completely. He replied with friendly asperity that his sister didn’t seem to have any quarrel with bingo in church. The many recordings he made of spirituals over the years give ample evidence of his conviction that the Lord wouldn’t find anything sinful in making a joyful noise.

That exuberance bumps up the aggressive punch in a protest number--which many of the great spirituals are also. Doris Lessing once complained that the droning, dirge like melody of We Shall Overcome contradicted and overrode the defiance and resistance in its lyric. Fair enough unless you’ve heard the version Armstrong—with an ever -growing chorus welling behind—sang and recorded in 1970. Nothing somber or 48

dirgelike in that performance, more nearly ecstatic. Nor does the fierce energy of his version ever diminish— rather it multiplies—the solemn majesty of Go Down,Moses: “Well Israel was in E—egypt land (Let my people go!)

Oppressed so hard they could not stand (Let my people go!)

So the Lord said GO DOWN (go down) MOSES Wa-----ay down into E------egypt la--and To LET MY PEOPLE GO. “ (As close as I can come by transcription. You really have to hear it of course.)

And tell old Pha—araoh

It’s instructive to look at only the song list of Porgy and Bess when listening to Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald singing it: what a minefield of impertinently imposed dialect they had to sidestep in their resonant transcription! On his most heard recording of Going To Shout All Over God’s Heaven, the white chorus backing Louis persistently sings “hebbin, hebbin”; Louis sings back “heaven, heaven”. It may be just my ‘magination but I hear a growing asperity in his voice each time he sings it right again and they give it back at him incorrect.

What can you do? Some ofay cats won’t learn a proper lesson no matter what.

There are plenty of songs in Armstrong’s repertoire and catalogue that have a majesty in his transcription which, without his assistance, they consistently lack. This isn’t generally true of the spirituals, any more than the blues tunes he performed and recorded—those have plenty of majesty on their own, but his free flowing approach, always rich in wit, never detracts and more often than not enhances their power. How much he was drawing on the robust tradition of black evangelical church choirs I don’t know, but there was a streak of un-healthy sobriety in many black congregations—the kind that disapproves of sex standing up because it might lead to dancing—and they were obliged to disapprove of Armstrong , and jazz generally, ferociously. Armstrong never forgave the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell the sermon against that devil music jazz he preached at the burial of Louis’ mentor King Oliver. If anyone was principally responsible for exorcising (so far as it has been) that devil of cynical solemnity from black congregations, so that the glorious tradition of gospel could more firmly flourish, out of which came Aretha Franklin, Smoky Robinson, so many of the greatest musicians and entertainers of successive musical eras, I’ d have to think that’ d be Louis’ work mostly too (though there’s another kind of grandeur, equally rich, in Duke Ellington’s sacred music).

“If all are made in the image of Thee, Could Thou, o God, a Zebra be?”

That humorously pointed comment on black and white shades of humanity, sharply aimed at specious notions of racial superiority, is from his collaboration with Dave Brubeck, The Real Ambassadors. The title of this particular song, They Say I Look Like God, might seem grandiose and overreaching if it weren’t squarely based on the Bible account in Genesis. (Certainly there’s nothing remotely sacrilegious here: Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s oratorio delivery of the lines from Genesis (“God created man in his image and likeness”) wouldn’t be out of place in St Michael’s Cathedral or the Vatican Chapel. And the comedy’s so much an ingrained element, not only of negro spirituals themselves (Satchmo expanded on that tradition, he didn’t invent it) but of satire aimed at religious hypocrisy such as Lonesome Road and the Elder Eatmore sermons, and the Cab Calloway character Deacon Lowdown, that to call it sacrilege in this instance would amount to blanket con49

demnation in all the others. That might be a little extreme.)

The same approach in Shadrach and Ezekiel Saw the Wheel creates a curious double impression: they can be richly enjoyed (seeping into the skin of consciousness) when heard indistinctly as part of the background, but if listened to closely their effect is sharp, dizzying, overpowering—more so, not less, because of the comedy that infuses them.

On the other hand, in my view the best version he recorded of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen is the one where his delivery’s most straight. Again a curious alchemy takes place: his voice is so crystalline and luminous, it lifts the song above lament to a rough and ready love of life—with its punishments and travails.

Responding in 1949 to a “Blindfold Test”, in which he was asked to rate unidentified records with one to five stars, Louis Armstrong said: “I couldn’t give anything less than two stars. You want to know why? Well, there’s a story about the sisters who were talking about the pastor, and only one sister could appreciate the pastor. She said, ‘If he’s good, I can look through him and see Jesus. If he’s bad, I can look over him and see Jesus.’ That’s the way I feel about music.”

Gary Giddins, Satchmo “I’m Doing Something Different all the Time” Miles Davis—who to the best of my knowledge never said anything at all about Armstrong’s singing, and certainly disliked his comedy—said everything that could be done with trumpet—even modern— was done by Satchmo. Not a bad authority to cite, but anyone who’s listened to a good deal of his music will have noticed the enormous range it covers form end-to-end of his career, the restless energy that drove him in ever new directions. This was brought home to me once when I was listening to an obviously very gifted trumpet player doing Summertime. I commented to a friend at the time that it was incredible trumpet but I couldn’t put a name—Miles, Clifford, Dizzy? no—to the style. Then a pure-toned female voice came in over the trumpet—Peggy Lee? Then the male vocal came in and I knew suddenly who’ d been playing. I also knew who the other singer was, because I’ d read about their collaboration on a recording of Porgy and Bess, but this was the first time I’ d heard any of it: Ella Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong.

I ought to have known that. I’d listened to a great deal of Armstrong, from just about every point in his career, so how did so distinctive a shift of style sneak up on me like that? It obviously didn’t sneak up on Satchmo, but was elaborately and consciously devised as an approach to bring out the full resonance of the score. (The same is true of Ella Fitzgerald, particularly on Strawberries and O Doctor Jesus, which are quite unlike any of her earlier vocals that I’ve heard, even Miss Otis Regrets. Neither of them were resting on their laurels (or their hardys either).

It’s somewhat puzzling that what must surely be the definitive transcription of Porgy and Bess— not to mention a high point in the career of Ella and Louis (and Oscar Peterson on piano)—hasn’t been, either then or now, any sort of popular success. I suspect the timing was off. It has been speculated that Norman Granz, who brought together the creative team and produced the record, withheld it for commercial reasons— until after the release of the soundtrack from Otto Preminger’s film version. An astute commercial calculation would have been to release it ahead of that soundtrack, because it’s so much more powerful than that pallid version it would have cast it into shadow. Instead of which it’s likely that a lazy listening public, bored with that 50

soundtrack already, assumed that even Ella, Louis and Oscar would succeed only in giving them more of the bland, white bread same. Then again I’m hardly the go-to person for advice on how to succeed commercially at anything.

John Hammond the Columbia record executive thought Armstrong’s music in the fifties and sixties suffered from the fact that he rarely played with his musical equals. By that logic Armstrong’s music of the twenties, thirties and forties should have suffered just as much: there’s likely never been a ten piece band in the history of the world all of whom were his equal even on a single instrument, and while there’ve been moments in his lifetime you could’ve assembled five, it’s likely they wouldn’t all be on the same continent let alone in the same city: now of course they could use INTERNET technology to overcome even that barrier, but what there was of an INTERNET even in the early seventies was woefully inadequate to such demands.

We can permit ourselves, nevertheless, a tantalizing speculation or two. Armstrong did work memorably with Dave Brubeck at the top of his form, and the most innovative vocal trio in the history of jazz, Lambert Hendricks and Ross, on The Real Ambassadors. Louis, Ella and Oscar, all at the top of their form on Porgy and Bess. A video recording was made the one time Louis and Dizzy played together—a cutting session in which neither was a winner or loser, at the close of which they embraced. What an album those two might have joined forces to make!

What an album Duke and Louis did join forces to make! A fusion of the two great originating styles of jazz on one compact disc. Henry Purcell never produced a better trumpet voluntary than Armstrong blew at the commencement of It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) (bada ba dup dup ba ba ba dup dup baaaa). Then he pulls a trick I’ve heard on many other records, always with astonishment—lowers the horn from his lips and without a pause for breath starts in to sing. Kids! Don’t try this at home.

Nina Simone? How they’d have gotten along? I don’t know, but Armstrong had an even way handling some pretty prickly and irascible personalities in his time. If they could have worked together, what facets to explore! How many permutations of Armstrong’s trumpet, Simone’s piano and their two astounding voices?

Charlie Parker? I rather suspect if he’d managed to live a decade or two longer they’d have played together at some point. I cannot even imagine (only that it would surely be delicious) what an album of duets with Betty Carter would sound like.

Davis and Armstrong? I honestly can’t see how that collaboration could ever have come off.

Davis played with a lot of great musicians, but with serious horn rivals? not so much. Anyway Davis never dug anything of Armstrong’s act except his trumpet playing. He’ d probably have insisted Armstrong cut the clowning. Satchmo could do that easily enough, but I suspect he’d have refused since such a request is implicitly quite demeaning. Davis hadn’t much of an ear for comedy—maybe none of the boppers except Dizzy did—or he’d have understood Armstrong was a brilliant musical improviser in his rampant humour no less than his horn work.

I doubt there’s a greater master of dry, meticulous style than Miles Davis, but that itself may have put him at too far a remove to comprehend Satchmo altogether. Armstrong’s style, no less meticulous, was juicy (very much in the sense the word is used on the couplet he always tacked on at the end of Baby It’s Cold Outside when performing it live.)

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“There Are No Bad Songs” “Chim chim chimchiminee, chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chimine” It’s one thing to make a deeply moving elegy and anthem of protest out of a song, remarkable in itself, that had never been seen in quite that light before, and always has been since (What Did I Do/To Be So Black and Blue?). To blow trumpet so high and wild its rumoured to have woken a few of the dead, who thought they were hearing Gabriel’s resurrection blast (It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing) when your starting point’s a tune composed by the immortal Duke. Even to push through the musical stratosphere a better than middling composition like Porgy and Bess. But to make inspired art out of a song of little or no intrinsic merit— or of negative worth such as the odious bundle of minstrel show stereotypes Shine?

Of course he achieves it here by a method untypical of him—maybe even unique to his interpretation of this one song. He gallops through the lyric in a rage—I bet the microphone at the end of this recording was well slicked down with spittle. It’s a masterpiece of vituperation, but his usual method with a lesser song was more wryly subversive. He doesn’t attack Jeepers Creepers, which scarcely deserves the Shine treatment— it’s not odious, it’s even borderline competent—but a charming novelty tune at best in anyone else’s hands; lighter, airier, more resonant every way when Armstrong performs it. Perhaps the correct word isn’t subversive but transcendent; or both about equally. “‘There are no bad songs,’ he once told an interviewer, much as Van Gogh might have said there are no bad colours. ” Gary Giddins, Satchmo, p. 111 .

More than one black musician had to learn to paint in the same way, adding breadth and depth, spice and flourish and wit and panache to tunes conspicuously lacking any those qualities: since (in the first half of the twentieth century particularly) the songs they were offered by Tin Pan Alley tended not to be top or even middle drawer. Bessie Smith, Waller and Ellington had an advantage here, being composers themselves (and in Waller and Ellington’s case, working with first rate lyricists like Andy Razaf and Billy Strayhorn), but easily half of Billy Holliday’s classic numbers, maybe more, particularly in the first two thirds of her career, would scarcely be remembered at all, let alone as classics, if we’ d never heard them in her voice.

Of course Armstrong was his own composer sometimes too, more rarely his own lyricist—always his own comedy writer, often enough I’ m sure delivering himself of material right on the spot even as he spoke. But even the musicians who composed and wrote performed their alchemy on more than one song dragged up from the dregs of the music industry, and eventually began to be given the best songs to record, seeing how supercompetent they were at transmuting and multiplying the associative power of the worst -Chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee I choose my bristles with care, yes I do, A broom for the shaft and a brush for the flue. And though I spend time in the ashes and that, In this whole wide world there’s no happier cat.

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Chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee, chim chim chim chiminee

Barriers

I was quite enjoying an essay in Sex, Art and American Culture (on the whole—Camille Paglia is a decent stylist until she gets it into her head it’s time for a sample of her scathing wit, which more often than not produces a sample bereft of either quality), and then I ran up against this passage (particularly ludicrous in an essay properly chiding other scholars for their lack of serious reading in social and cultural history): Elvis Presley, one of the most influential men of the century, broke down racial barriers in the music industry, so that my generation was flooded by the power, passion and emotional truth of African-American experience. Aretha Franklin, Levi Stubbs, James Brown, Gladys Knight: these voices and a hundred others are seared into our consciousness.(p. 211 ) Elvis Presley didn’t break down racial barriers in the music industry, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington did. Billie Holiday didn’t front vocally for Artie Shaw’s band in 1958, grace of Elvis, but in 1938. Fats Waller was one of the world’s biggest radio stars when Presley was in short pants, and if he’ d been alive still in 1957 maybe he’d have had a big hit with Hound Dog and we’d know at last how that song should be done.

Flood-tide of African-American experience! Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Waller, Bessie Smith, Ivie Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Coleman Hawkins among many others, this was just an itsy bitsy teeny weeny wave perhaps? Art Tatum, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Willie “the Lion” Smith, Lambert Hendricks and Ross, Henry “Red” Allen, Clark Terry, Shirley Horn, Betty Carter, Benny Carter, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk? (all right enough already we get the idea!) Eartha Kitt, Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, Trummy Young, Dexter Gordon, Ornette Coleman (hey! didn’t I say enough already? All right! listen up! no more chocolate for you.)

There were makeshift barricades erected or re-erected when Presley came along, but surely the man who kicked them to pieces, and intended to, was the man who first recorded Elvis, Sam Philips. And whatever Aretha, Gladys, Diana Ross, Otis Redding, the Staples Singers, Solomon Burke and a host of others might owe to Presley, they owe far more to Louis Armstrong. So do we all.

“I see skies of blue and clouds of white, The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night. . . “ (1967) What a Wonderful World (Bob Thiele, George David Weiss) My niece Ula associated this song with Christmas—it gets a lot of play then, so I suppose by now a lot of people do. She was looking out her window in early December once she told us—snow gently falling— Louis coming through strong on the radio—that was her strongest memory of the song.

“I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you” Like Armstrong always at his finest—never more directly than here—it opens the shutter of the eye on a transfigured world, closely parallel to our own, that we can make a short visit to any time, or live in if we choose.

“I see friends shaking hands saying How do you do?

They’re really saying I love you.

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I hear babies cry, I watch them grow.

They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know (‘ Less they pay too much attention to teachers tellin’ ‘em‘ Don’t get smart!’) “And I think to myself. . . “ ###

Soundtrack Album {Playlist: What a Wonderful World, It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)(duet with Duke Ellington) , Go Down, Moses, When You’re Smiling, Gone Fishin’(duet with Bing Crosby)’, I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead (You Rascal You), Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Shadrach, Summertime(duet with Ella Fitzgerald) , They Say I Look Like God, Umbrella Man (duet with Dizzy Gillespie) Blueberry Hill, Jeepers Creepers(duet with Jack Teagarden), We Shall Overcome, When the Saints Go Marchin’ In, Chim Chim Cheree, Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, Fats Waller performs Hold Tight} So here it is, perhaps the first soundtrack album ever devised for an online monograph on a major musical figure-certainly if has been done before, it can’t have been before YouTube.

Omissions: the version of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen that I’d have liked to use, a live telecast with Armstrong performing with a globe of the world on a pedestal in front of him and a much larger, transparent globe seen in the background in a couple of shots, is unavailable for embedding, but it’s easily accessible on the YouTube site directly. Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) can be accessed, so far as I’ve been able to determine, only on specialty jazz sites which invite me to sign in with a password.

I can find renditions of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, but not the one I’m particularly thinking of, from the Live in Pasadena album. Same with the version of Shine I refer to in the essay, which I know exists because I have it on vinyl, as I do Live in Pasadena, but our turntable hasn’t been working in years; consequently it’s been years since I’ve heard those particular recordings. Other versions of Baby It’s Cold Outside stop short of the comic edge and bite of the Pasadena live recording; other versions of Shine follow Armstrong’s more typical strategy with a lesser lyric, swathing it in layers of irony that simultaneously subvert and transfigures it. They don’t illustrate the point I want to make: the first time Arm- strong heard (and recorded) Shine, it royally pissed him off, and he wanted that to be plainly evident to anyone with ears to hear.

Beale St Blues-couldn’t find that on YouTube. Magnificent recording.

The version here given of Fats Waller’s Hold Tight is fun, but it’s not as all-out exuberant as the one I have on CD. I may have to educate myself in the skill sets required to put tunes up there from our collection.

The playlist can be treated as extensive footnotes and citations-is my vocal transcription out of Go Down, Moses accurate? My reading of the deep melancholy in Armstrong’s earliest rendition of When You’re Smiling? Is Armstrong’s rendition of We Shall Overcome, as I contend, unique in its robust power? Am I right to insist Armstrong’s comedy and vocal stylings are central to his art, not something 54

tacked on and superficial, detracting from the magnificence of his horn? In general how do my impressions and interpretations stack up against yours? I’ll guarantee this, short of a tin ear you’ll have loads more fun with these than with the usual run of scholarly footnotes.

Bonus Tracks While looking up tracks for Louis to illustrate my study, I naturally strayed now and again to a few of his colaborators on some of these numbers. What would you suppose Ella Fitzgerald might do with It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing. There were at least two interesting versions that popped up, but the one I selected has an intro, just under two minutes, which is both hilarious and a brilliant lightning lecture on contrasts in musical style .

Miss Otis Regrets; one of Ella’s finest performances. At the risk of stating the obvious--since times have changed and the subtext Cole Porter didn’t think he needed to make explicit might now be more obscure-Miss Otis is black and her faithless lover white. Otherwise it’s unlikely she would have been sentenced to hang, much less lynched by an angry mob.

Reefer Song; one of Fats Waller’s all out wild man pieces--how’d he get the words out so fast and so clear?-- and certainly one Louis, with his lifelong fondness for cannabis sativa, would have richly appreciated.

It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing); the Duke, with Ivie Anderson on vocals, a singer with a phenomenal stylistic range (sample a few more of her vocals and see for yourself) who died tragically young.

David Danced Before The Lord; Duke Ellington conducting a full orchestra, Dr. Bunny Briggs showing tap moves that have to be seen to be believed, Jon Hendricks at the top of his form singing and scatting. I talk at length in my essay on Armstrong’s approach to sacred music; this is a prime example of Ellington’s contrasting, equally valid style. Jumpin’ at the Woodside; Count Basie conducting and accompanying on piano, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in glorious full-throated flight.

###

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Bread and Potatoes Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle adah Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle aday Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle adah There’s a story on the way I composed it in my head Well, I dreamed it up in bed But when I woke this lovely day I heard a tune I had to play And it went Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle adah Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle aday Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle adah Now I went to write it down But instead, I drew a frown And the music played away Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle aday Then on the frown I drew a crown And underneath a sixpence But when I’d try to write words down I’d hear the music in the distance Now there’s a story that I planned I know it’s there I dreamed it But it must be in other land Where someone else has claimed it And left me to Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle adah Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle aday Fi fiddle diddle fiddle diddle adah Fi fiddle diddle fiddly diddle away.

Mari, 2015 56

The Jazz Singer by Charles Demuth, 1916

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Fisherman with Arrow, Ancient Egypt, Date: c.1422 - c.1411 BC Series: Tomb of Menna, c.1422-1390 BC

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Part 11 The Arrow and The Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 - 1882

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

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Bethlehem by Konstantin Gorbatov, Date: 1935

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Bethlehem

by Alisa Velaj I had never set foot On that land Yet my memory fled there Following a star And began to shine

Translated from Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj.

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Art: Still Life with Guitar by Juan Gris, Date: 1920

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Pillows of Sound

by Alisa Velaj What more do you seek from sunsets, man?

A bunch of copper leaves Fell on the strings of the guitar leaning against the tree trunk And slept the most anxious sleep Using sounds as pillows The solitude of seas persecutes the leaves in dreams Like the shadows of seasons do to man What more do you seek from sunsets You being that keep travelling on the shores of oblivion?

The guitar will always succeed In weaving serenades An inexistent bridge can connect no river banks Be a sunrise if you want to understand the sunsets, man Someone called the Caspian Lake a ‘Sea’ And to this day they write it so on every world map…

Translated from Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj.

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The singer Francisco d'Andrade as Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera by Max SlevogtDate: 1912

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Mozart Appeared on the Stage

by Alisa Velaj

They all said that There was the place where acacia flowers take their rest They all said that And a child pointed to Salieri’s grave Lying a little further ahead At dusk when oblivion invades the rivers Mozart appeared on stage holding acacia flowers in his hands And wept…

Translated from Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj.

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MICRO Give it Up Give it UP by Frank Kafka

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was walking to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized that it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me unsure of the way, I did not yet know my way very well in this town; luckily, a policeman was nearby, I ran up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “From me you want to know the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I cannot find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up,” he said, and turned away with a sudden jerk, like people who want to be alone with their laughter.

Micro (Greek letter μ (U+03BC) or the legacy symbol µ (U+00B5)) is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10−6 (one millionth). Confirmed in 1960, the prefix comes from the Greek μικρός (mikrós), meaning "small".

The symbol for the prefix is the Greek letter μ (mu). It is the only SI prefix which uses a character not from the Latin alphabet. "mc" is commonly used as a prefix when the character "μ" is not available; for example, "mcg" commonly denotes a microgram.

This may be ambiguous in rare circumstances in that mcg could also be read as a micrigram, i.e. 10−14 g; however the prefix micri is not standard, nor widely known, and is considered obsolete. The letter u, instead of μ, is allowed by an ISO document.

Street Music by Theo Von Doesburg Other abbreviating conventions In some health care institutions, house rules deprecate the standard symbol for microgram, "μg", in prescribing or chart recording, because of the risk of giving an incorrect dose because of the misreading of poor handwriting.[13] The two alternatives are to abbreviate as "mcg"[13] or to write out "microgram" in full (see also List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions). But this deprecation, focused on avoiding incorrect dosing in contexts where handwriting is often present, does not extend to all health-care contexts and institutions (for example, some clinical laboratories' reports adhere to it, whereas others do not[13]), and in physical sciences academia, "μg" remains the sole official abbreviation.

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Or “MIC” A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike is a device – a transducer – that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and public events, motion picture production, live and recorded audio engineering, sound recording, two-way radios, megaphones, radio and television broadcasting. They are also used in computers for recording voice, speech recognition, VoIP, and for non-acoustic purposes such as ultrasonic sensors or knock sensors.

Several types of microphone are used today, which employ different methods to convert the air pressure variations of a sound wave to an electrical signal. The most common are the dynamic microphone, which uses a coil of wire suspended in a magnetic field; the condenser microphone, which uses the vibrating diaphragm as a capacitor plate; and the contact microphone, which uses a crystal of piezoelectric material. Microphones typically need to be connected to a preamplifier before the signal can be recorded or reproduced.

MICRO FICTION

Before Ramon Collins introduced Micro Fiction to The Linnet’s Wings In order to speak to larger groups of people, a need arose to increase the volume of the human voice The earliest devices used to achieve this were acoustic megaphones. Some of the first examples, from fifth century BC Greece, were theater masks with horn-shaped mouth openings that acoustically amplified the voice of actors in amphitheaters.

In 1665, the English physicist Robert Hooke was the first to experiment with a medium other than air with the invention of the “lovers’ telephone” made of stretched wire with a cup attached at each end.

In 1861, German inventor Johann Philipp Reis built an early sound transmitter (the “Reis telephone”) that used a metallic strip attached to a vibrating membrane that would produce intermittent current. Better results were achieved in 1876 with the “liquid transmitter” design in early telephones from Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray – the diaphragm was attached to a conductive rod in an acid solution.[4] These systems, however, gave a very poor sound quality.

The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone.

This was independently developed by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent (after a long legal dispute) in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention. The carbon microphone is the direct prototype of today’s microphones and was critical in the development of telephony, broadcasting and the recording industries. Thomas Edison refined the carbon microphone into his carbon-button transmitter of 1886. This microphone was employed at the first ever radio broadcast, a performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1910.

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Summer evening on the porch by Konstantin Korovin

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Smell of Rain

by Ray Collins

Scattered stains decorated dry grass that bordered the path leading down from a bungalow.

An elderly man sat rocking on the front porch, studying somber clouds across the valley. A tic under his right eye kept time with the motion of the chair. Tufts of white hair stuck out around a battered Tennessee Smokies baseball cap. Faded bib overalls stopped an inch above the tops of work shoes.

“Gonna rain ‘fore nightfall -- I can smell it,” he muttered to the hound napping on the floor. He readjusted the tobacco cud in his left cheek with his tongue, leaned forward and let loose a chocolate-colored stream that just cleared the porch railing.

He rocked back, looked down at the dog, rubbed its head. “Tell you what, Chaser, I’m in the record book and that means I’m still alive. Yessir, batting champion, Southern League, 1974: Hank Jenkins - .369. And that’s who I’ll be until some college kid outdoes me. Some kid who’s squeezin' zits in a bathroom mirror today.”

Two small planes droned overhead and banked toward the Mississippi River.

Henry glanced at the crumpled paper on the table beside an open packet of Brown Mule Chewing Tobacco.

He rubbed his jaw, frowned, tipped forward and squirted another defiant rivulet over the rail. “By gawd, I’m here ‘til something moves me out.”

Chaser looked up, yawned, then put his head down on his front paws.

Henry launched a weary sigh. "Wonder what will catch up with me first; that kid or cancer?"

###

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Can't anyone untie us? by Francisco Goya

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Quisling

by Lauran Strait There, there, poor babies." Elizabeth pats the side of the red Playmate cooler as she stares inside.

"Such little ones this time." She fishes out the last of the doves from their bed of dry ice. "What's the world coming to? Broken wings and plucked feathers. Have they no decency?

Sighing, Elizabeth places the bird on a strip of aluminum foil. She slides the shiny paper around the countertop until it’s in a beam of light.

“Time for your sunbath, little one. You look so pale without your feather coat. My, my. They didn’t have to strip you. Such barbarians.”"

Elizabeth turns away from the tanning dove and frowns at the remaining flock. Nine birds rest on foil strips, laid out in three rows of three-a mini cemetery-atop the granite countertop.

“I know, babies. You never saw this coming. Who would? They plucked you! Can you believe it? I’ll make this quick, preserving what I can. It’s the least that should be done.”

Sunlight through the window limns the wrinkles of Elizabeth’s knuckles as she carefully and solemnly folds the foil over each dead dove; she re-adjusts and fusses over the birds until she’s satisfied that the recently departed are secured in airtight shrouds.

“Nighty night, sweet ones.” Elizabeth coos baby talk babble while she entombs the birds in her freezer, alongside packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts she found on sale for $1 .75-a pound. As she swings the door closed, the light inside the frozen crypt winks out.

“Only two more hours,” Elizabeth says to the thawing bird lying in the sunbeam. “Should I serve you with rice or potatoes?” ###

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Diet-Tribe

by Lauran Strait You aren't really going to wear that, are you?” Annabelle, my sixteen-year-old, feigned a retch.

“Stop being so theatrical,” I said, admiring the orange sweater adorned with a forest of red-leaved trees.

“Be happy I'm not wearing the one with the battery-operated appliqué.” I smoothed a row of knitted trees across my stomach. “Maybe I should switch to the one with the grumpy gremlins, purple pumpkins, and scowling skulls? What do you think?”

“I think I'm gonna spew.” Nose and eyes squeezed into a sneer, Annabelle flounced on my bed.

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“No spewing in here. Hurl in your own room if you must.”

Annabelle smirked. “It's not funny. What if one of my friends sees you wearing that hideous thing?

Trust me, Mom. It's not a pretty picture. You look like a ginormous pumpkin on a stick.”

“Well, of course I do. So what? By wearing a tacky garment like this, I'm telling the world that I love Halloween so much I don't mind looking like I've spent the year consuming nothing but pecan pies and pumpkin lattes laced with rum.”

“Since when have you loved Autumn that much?

“Since never. But that’s beside the point. I just want to look like I do.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does. Imagine how surprised my friends will be come January when I've shed these fall sweaters and the December holiday sweaters and no longer resemble a Christmas dumpling. They'll wonder how I managed to lose all the weight over the holidays. I'll be the envy of them all.”

“Yeah, riiiiiight.” Annabelle rolled her eyes.

“I am right. And you too can be the envy of your friends, regaling them with your own dieting prowess in January, if you wear nothing but stuff like this for the next ninety days.”

“You're wacko. You know that, right?”

“I prefer crazy smart, thank you very much.”

Annabelle sighed. “So about your ornamental ugly-sweaters. . . do you really think I should wear them?”

“Sure.” Static electricity crackled as I pulled the woolen forest over my head and tossed it her way. “A word of advice, though—don’t look in a mirror while you’re wearing any of these fashion nightmares.

Might make you spew. Talk about embarrassing.”

Art: Facing Page : Dietary Life Rules by Utagawa Kunisada, Style: Ukiyo-e

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Garden under Snow by Paul Gauguin

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The Language of Frost

by Bill West

He drifts across frozen fields to the house beside the tarn watches her from the garden as she sits motionless at a Christmas table set for two, her plate untouched.

He strokes the window with phantom fingers and in the fractal language of frost he writes “love” on every pane. ###

The Language of Frost won our micro of the year competition.

The competition was judged by "The Linnet's Wings" editorial team and the voucher was sponsored by Ramon Collins

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Carousel by Vilmos Aba-Novak

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Wheelchair Waits

by Bill West

Spokes flash orange under street lights. Tires rumble across pavement cracks. Andrew bats his wheelchair wheels. The tires suck a dry track, picking up chip wrappers and leaves to scatter them in his wake.

He doesn’t care that the dogs bark and snap or that children jeer as he passes. He’s headed for the fair.

Music thumps in his chest; red, yellow and blue lights chase across his upturned face. He peers at waltzers, carousels and bumper cars. He licks his lips at the smell of hot-dogs and the sight of pink candy-floss on sticks.

He weaves amongst the crowd, his eyes fixed on the Ferris wheel with its red and yellow spokes reared up on a giant A and decked out with lights. Gondolas grunt as they are hoisted into the crisp, cold sky.

The man with slicked back hair and tattooed arms takes his money and lifts him into the gondola.

And then he rises. Each gondola fills with giggling girls and joking boys. The wheel moves again inching him into the sky.

He’s at the top. From here he can see the town, beyond the docks, across the river’s estuary. Below his empty wheelchair waits.

Stars rain pin-prick light on his face. The man in the moon swims out from a cloud and winks. That solitary cloud, green and ragged like floating seaweed, sweeps inland, bringing the tang of ocean- spray.

Closer, it looks like a fishing boat with nets spilling fish and mermaids singing in its wake.

And on the boat will be Andrew's daddy coming home from the sea.

And tonight there will be boiled sweets and angel rides, fish and chips and games by the hearth. Mum will lock the door in the faces of 'uncles’ smelling of beer and Andrew will laugh as he rides on daddy’s shoulders again, arms out-flung, spinning round and round, higher than everyone. ###

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Costume design for the Opera "Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Maiden Fevronia" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov by Ivan Bilibin 78

Cut Loose

by Digby Beaumont It’s impossible for my dad to move: overnight he’s turned into a kite.

He lies motionless on his bed, a checkerboard of garish red and yellow panels, such a contrast to the sober greys of his old three-piece business suits.

“First Mum, now this,” I say. “What were you thinking?”

“Check me out,” he says. “High-performance ripstop nylon sail, graphite spars and an eight-foot wingspan fully extended.”

“So what was wrong with your old life?” I ask.

“What, reaching for a hand that’s no longer there? Sitting hollow-eyed in front of the TV night after night? Lying awake alone?”

“You didn't consider my feelings?” I say. “You're the only family I have left.”

“Listen,” he says. “I'm counting on you.”

It’s a fresh October morning. He’s chosen a nearby beach. “Keep your back to the wind,” he says, “and hold me up till the current catches my sail.”

I do as he says and hurl him upwards. He hovers momentarily before swooping to the ground.

“No use,” I say. “Not enough wind. Let's go home, try again another day.” But I feel his gaze, so full of lightness and hope.

This time I lay him on the sand and step backwards, feeding out his line from its winder. Fifteen feet away, I wait. The wind gusts and I pull.

He takes off and soars skywards, his long tail streaming.

Not long after, another kite appears. Then another. Soon a dozen or so dot the skyline. One of the fliers approaches and we nod to each other.

By now Dad has climbed as high as his line will take him. He tugs, hoisting me onto my toes. I wave back before letting go, and the sun hurts my eyes as he continues his ascent. ###

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The Miracles of San Bernardino. The Healing of the blind and deaf Riccardo Micuzio by Pietro Perugino

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Don Diego Takes The Miracle Cure at Ojo Caliente

by Ann Walters What remains after pain is an uncertain quiet, an uneasy ease. He no longer knows how to fill the void that is left. It’s hard walking the path down to the hot springs without the pressure of swollen joints to temper each step. There is too much freedom. He feels like a calf on the wrong side of the fence. When no one is looking, Don Diego lets his arms swing wide and skips like a schoolchild. This will not do. Old cattlemen do not skip. The absurdity of an ‘old’ cattleman makes him laugh gruffly, like a lost steer coughing in a pine thicket.

He tries to find his swagger before he gets to the pool, tries to bend his knees as if hugging a saddle.

There’s nothing he can do about the silence except whistle a little to cover the absence of creaks and pops.

Don Diego tries to blow melancholy, but it’s not easy on warm red rock under a bright blue sky. When the girl with the towels starts humming along he gives up altogether.

In the night, he pulls a lariat from the bottom of his suitcase and twirls it in small circles again and again to warm up his wrist. Then he lassoes the bedpost – fifty, a hundred, two hundred times in rapid succession – until he feels his shoulder stiffen, his back begin to seize. He works the rope enough to get a small, welcome buzz of pain. Satisfied, Don Diego falls asleep to a litany of nerve and muscle complaints, the restless twitching of fingers tracing seventy years of work and ache. Tomorrow, he’ll test the waters again. ###

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Profile of a girl. Preparatory work for a decorative stain in red and green by Koloman Moser

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Meditations on dear Petrov Susan Tepper

Set in 19th Century Russia during a time of war

Grace You instruct me to go to the church. Defy the innocents. Rub holy water on my breasts. Put my lips to the lips of God. I stand before you staring at your mouth. Unable to speak. This journey, dear Petrov, will not be my saving grace. Salvation coming from the rocks and streams. The white birch forest. The mountain always in view. Protective. Its great shadow veils the house and what I most fear. Over top the guns fire. I try enduring that sound. Will I outlive the guns and cannon fire. A soldier you have no answer. A soldier coated in the stench of war. Though I brushed your coat and scrubbed your boots ‘til my hands ached. My sink a font. I bow to what my sink must endure. The birds come back each spring with a troubling regularity. They have the freedom to choose while I do not. I have few freedoms. Which hat to wear. Whether to darn my cloak or go ragged. The saints went ragged I say. Causing you to laugh considerably. Loud and bellowing. Crashing. Knocking your whisky over. I cover my ears and move toward the kitchen. Looking out its one smudged window. Singing a soft prayer: O black birds of Russia I know it isn’t true, the rage still burns bright in you.

Common Martyrs have been sacrificed in the great paintings. Room after room framed glittering gold. Splashes of red and a worried sky. The gleaming blade, dear Petrov. While crows poised in trees, mourners knelt on the ground in prayer. I saw the pictures as a child. Gripping my father’s hand. In the great city where the church spires shine golden too. Even without a shining sun. Our hands gloved and a carriage with a top cover and sides. Brilliant black. Blankets over our laps. Unlike my open trap to which I tether my horse. Oh beloved creature. I am happy to share my potatoes. Your tongue rolls rough against my palm. After feeding I take to your back once more. Riding slowly through this house.

A clip clop. Each room the sea changing color. Green to blue to dullest gray. Deplorable ruin. Down to the cellars where rough beams hang low. You know to duck your sweeping head. This trick I have learnt from you. My friend of a thousand seasons. One common potato. Clutching your neck I promise you one more.

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Sky at Sunset by Eugene Boudin

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Stitch I stitch my love on time. Imaginings. The brightness of grass again is stitched near the top. Warmth enough to float in the river stitched yellow. The flat river rocks heating my feet up through my skull stitched red. Along the borders. Everything happens along the borders you say. Blue stitching for the summer sky. Glorious blue.

Almost unreal. You ask if I am making a pillow. Yes. A pillow, dear Petrov. Soft. For you to rest your neck in battle. When the guns have quieted and you so long for respite. My breast and your head pressed together. The air coming out of you. Short warm bursts on my skin. Alive. You are still alive. Each night you are here your weight upon me. Crushing the straw mattress. Sighs. How I long to be out dancing when there is only music. No guns. No screams from the almost dead. Not that I am able to hear the almost dead. Only in sleep. Accompanying nightmares. Each dream stitched black. The owls and hawk. Other frightful sounds. Animals down the chimney. Winter lightning once struck the roof. You were away at battle. I thought it would take down the house.

Cave Trust I have little to spare. I have my house about to fall down. The harsh Russian winters. Once a very fine house. Before the wars. When most ran or were eliminated. A matter of luck. And my father. Away with a baby home in a cradle. Went simply unnoticed. Was that not luck. Depending. My father’s eyes died after. Is that considered luck. A tumble down house better than no house. Perhaps it’s best to dwell in a cave. Nothing to take when the time comes. I have what I have. My horse who lives and breathes alongside me. Through the days and nights when the walls change from land to sea. Night and its own confusions.

Tented star-studded black velvet. Much like your regiment sets up camp. The mountain shimmers purple, dear Petrov. Do you notice. Here rogues roam for money and drink. Keep the doors bolted, you say. These are strange and difficult times. You look content in your chair. Worn. Blue velvet I cover each time you leave. A cloth of cherries trailing green stems. Spring-like. Giving me some hope. The fever the moment the door slams shut behind you. I rush up the stairs to look out the attic spaces. Watching you stomp down the road. To meet your regiment somewhere past the curve. The road bends then lost to shadows.

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The Rainbow, Hormandie by Robert Henri, Date: 1902 Style: American Realism

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Aria Books in the house damp and dying. Opening one the cover falls in my lap. Stained. Gold on its edges razed.

Such a tragedy you would say with a smirk. But then you are a soldier. Tragedy occupies your time. I look toward the window. A small breeze swaying the sage. The day is temperate. Gathering my shawl tightly I walk the distance to the birch forest. Stepping into its shadowy folds. Cool white towers. Walking ‘til I find the small clearing. Lying down. Feeling my father pulsing below. Many seasons gone. The birches are perhaps the true ghosts. Guarding me in this land. Protecting what used to be. A girl who stumbled repeatedly refusing to fall.

Dear Petrov I have heard the stories of families levelled to dirt. What of my own. Does that story interest you.

Or have you been too shaped by war. While I am simply the slag left after the smelting process. Can you feel my hand touching your face. Neck. Anything beyond your most elemental needs. Whisky. The fire heat, food down your throat. A warm bed. You take me to the bed. Grunting as you move in me. I want to scream out an aria.

Inconsistent of course. The birches when they were as you and I. Must have been a glorious thing their coupling.

Becoming You ask why I wear white. To merge with the clouds on blue days. A comfort to a body cold and white as the snows. I don’t say I only wear white for you. Turning back time for a little while. To come alive again. That when you are gone I carry the end on my back. Dresses of coal and mourning. The hours huddled in my bed. Bitten by bugs in the straw. While birds continue to sing. As if being led I step onto brittle boards. I light the fire and sip my tea, dear Petrov. Winter releases its dark horn. Time changes, and again. Finally your boots. Stomping up my path. Covered in muck and blood. Reeking. Stench of a thousand battles. Do you notice the odor, dear Petrov. The last time during the blooming sage. A pity. I count the seasons as one. For you I rush to the wardrobe. Choosing the whitest day muslin. A white silk beginning to darken saved for the nights. Less obvious. Becoming the bride men fear to love.

###

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Pink Steel by Noel King I’m out. Leaving the high pressure of running my father’s family pub at night while being a teacher by day.

My son, Jeaic, has given me a list of seventeen milestones in his life I’ve already missed: his sixth birthday, his eighth birthday, the piano exams (Grade I) recital, the Kerins O’Rahilly under 10s county final and so many more. My son is only eleven-and-a-half years old.

A year ago his mother and I split. That’s another reason. She doesn’t have a new man in her life yet, that I know of. But before she does I want to be in control. I take Jeaic to his school then head to mine. He goes to an after school club till I collect him at 4.05. The rest of the evening is just me and Jeaic: his homework first, then a bit of sport plus a swim at ‘the complex’ perhaps, before dinner.

My biggest problem though is that I am seeing someone. And it’s not someone of the opposite sex. My 88

lover, Derek, is pressurizing me to meet my son, to let him know what we are. I am very slow to do this. I couldn’t face the derision of my ex-wife’s family, let alone that of my school. Not yet anyway, not until Jeaic is older.

Tonight we are at his homework. I didn’t even know that there were only eighteen characters in the Irish alphabet. However, many of the consonants and each of the vowels may carry diacritical marks. Then, to change the subject, we discuss the fact that soon, after he makes his Confirmation and finishes primary school, he will be going to secondary in September, will be coming to my school. I will be teaching him Geography and History up to at least at his Junior Cert level. We discuss how that will be. We’ll both get used to it, we suppose.

He is getting his head around this when Derek phones. He tells me he has bought Behind the Candelabra on DVD, that he will open a nice bottle of wine and we will watch it together arm in arm. When will that be, he wants to know? I tell him I hope it will be soon. I need a babysitter to go anywhere, naturally enough; but I can go places with Derek the weekends Jeaic is with his mother, of course. I tell Derek that it can’t be this weekend.

This weekend we are going to Dingle, we are going to see Fungie the dolphin before Jeaic is too old to do these things with me.

The school Jeaic and I will share is also the one I went to when I was his age. I only went there 1977 to 1982, but it could have been two centuries ago with the amount of changes that have taken place. It’s a space-age place now, science in our day was all Bunsen burners and experiments. Back then the school was years away from even having a computer. It’s such a scary thought… my son coming to my school, he doesn’t know I feel this way about it of course.

Jeaic asks if he could be allowed to watch Curb your Enthusiasm, that two of his acquaintances in school are allowed to watch it. “I don’t know,” I say, “I’ll think about it, if two of your friends do, then I suppose…”

“No Dad,” he says, “they are not my friends, they are my acquaintances.”

“I didn’t even think you knew such big words, son?”

“There’s a big difference, I have friends there too of course. About five or six really good friends, then I’d have about ten or eleven mates, then the same number again of acquaintances and then the others.”

“The others?” I ask.

“Yeah, well I wouldn’t call them enemies as such, they’re not like Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter, but they’re just, well they have no place really in my circle.”

I let Jeaic use my laptop more or less when he wants, but I am careful to delete my own ‘history’ first, don’t want him finding the gay sites I look at, although I look at them less these days as I’ve met Derek. Derek is the man of my dreams, almost. *** Summer comes, he’s made his ‘Confo’ and said goodbye to primary school, the weather gets good and we go to the beach. On the way we pass the old family pub, well it still is except someone else is leasing it now. I have no regrets leaving it for Jeaic’s sake. We get to the beach and child and I have a swim, re-apply our sun screen and play tennis. At the back of my mind I know there’s an area near the cliffs where gay men go to meet each other. When the lad wants to wander and go explore I decide it’s time to go home. Besides which, I’ve spotted a few of the gay lads I know heading in that direction. The last thing I want to have happen is for one of them to salute me, not call me by my real name, John but Robert, which is my alias for the gay sites and chat lines.

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*** September comes, I’m not sure which of us is more nervous on the first day in school, at the first time I see my beloved son in front of me in the first Monday in History class and next morning in Geography. We get the first week over us. It’ll be plain sailing here-on-in I tell myself. On Friday night Derek phones: “he’s met others of your mates, hasn’t he?,” Derek says impatiently, “so, what’s different about me? Can’t Jeaic just meet me in that same way?”

“No, it’s just that he’s too young to appreciate gayness and he’s just started going to MY SCHOOL for God sakes, where I TEACH!!! We must just wait, I’ll know when the time is right.”

So, there we were, my son and I coming out of the cinema the following weekend, we were clinging to each other under an umbrella on the way to the carpark and there he was, Derek. He took in me and the boy all in one go. I gulped and I think I reddened in the face. Jeaic glanced quickly from one of us to the other and back again. Derek uttered a few syllables and then he was gone into his car and we into ours.

“That was one of the.., reps,” I suggest, “who used come to the pub, pushing... product.”

My son shrugs.

Later on Derek sends a text: So, that’s the famous Jeaic, chip off the old block, for sure.

Well this night I am in the shower and my son has Daft Punk on his player. We have had an argument because he’s had a big fight with one of his teachers. The teacher of course is my colleague, over twenty years now, and is my friend! See, I told you it wouldn’t be easy having Jeaic at my school. Anyway, I hear the doorbell but nothing of it, his friends from the estate and some of my friends are always calling. I am drying my balls when I realize I don’t hear any chitter-chatter. I put on a toweling robe and go downstairs. Derek is sitting there on the couch, his legs crossed, tellingly, at the ankle. My son is absorbed in the TV, remote in his hand.

“John, can we talk,” Derek asks.

I use my left hand to indicate the kitchen.

“I’ve booked for us to go to Barcelona,” he says.

“What?”

“Halloween, four nights, you’ve already said the lad will be at his mother’s for Halloween. And you’re on holidays from the teaching and…”

“Hold it a minute,” I say in a loud whisper, “you’re making holiday plans for me without even discussing it first, since when have we…”

“You won’t talk yourself out of it this time. I’ve even got a bullfight booked.”

“A bullfight! Huh?” I ask incredulously.

“Yes, the best seats in the house, the most expensive.”

“Who the heck cares what the price of seats are at a fucking bullfight.”

“In the shade,” says Jeaic, I hadn’t noticed he’d walked into the kitchen and already returning from the fridge with a Mint Green Cornetto I didn’t even know was in there.

I stare at my son: “What?”

“Everyone knows,” continues Jeaic nonchalantly, “the most expensive seats you can buy at a bullfight are the ones in the shade.” And he goes back to the TV or whatever he’s at.

I start to feel under pressure. I haven’t smoked in just over five years but now I have the longing for a 90

cigarette. I pour a glass of wine and take a few deep breaths. I decide to relent on Barcelona, for now.

“Okay, let’s go for it,” I say flatly, “I haven’t been to Barcelona since I made up the number of adults on our school tour, oh years ago, ’twas even before the Barcelona Olympic Games. It’ll be interesting to see the infrastructure in the intervening years (I am playing for time here) and of course to see the Olympic stadium itself.”

In a short time Derek has left the house and I am acting ‘normal’. I tell Jeaic that I am going to Barcelona while he is with his mother for mid-term Halloween. The doorbell rings again and I nearly jump out of my skin.

Jeaic looks weirdly at me. I open the door, it’s his friends this time and I leave them to it, get in my car, go to both of the cheap German supermarkets and do the weekly shop. My ex-wife would tell me that’s all inferior quality, she’s a snob, she goes to Marks & Sparks for most things. I get a balance of pizzas and nice things along with fresh veg and stuff. The milk I always buy is Lee Strand as that’s the local milk. I am at a checkout when my mobile goes. It’s Derek checking that my passport is in date. I assure him it is. He says that for some countries now the passport has to be valid for at least six months from the date of return.

“That’s a load of bollocks,” I suggest, “and anyway mine won’t expire for, oh, four and a half or five years yet.”

My wife doesn’t know I now leave Jeaic on his own, or with his friends, for short periods of course. He will be thirteen next birthday for flip sake, what are they going to do, burn the house down, watch porn. I do warn him not to answer the door if he doesn’t know who’s there. Some trickster might be on the doorstep trying to collect money for Irish Water or sell bibles or shove religion down our throats. Jeaic I’d say wouldn’t be a sucker for those things, but what if it was Derek that came to the door again?

Derek, it’s easy for him. He has never been married you see. Did have a daughter at eighteen with some girl in his badminton set. She’s an adult now, has known about her father’s orientation since quite young. She went to college to do International Business or something and now she has a job in a bank in Luxembourg. *** Jeaic is bright, at the moment he is reading John McGahern’s, The Dark. That was banned when it came out first. McGahern was a teacher too. I am both pleased and a little bit terrified that my child is reading it. It’s funny, I let him read more or less whatever he wants but when it comes to films and TV I’m very selective. He has never seen an over-15 for example.

Last year there during the Easter holidays they were making this film locally, The Lobster, it was called. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz were the leading actors. For the craic, myself and Jeaic signed on as extras. He got to do a schoolroom scene and I got to do some stuff wearing an anorak out in the forest. What I am coming to is when The Lobster comes out next week I will go to the cinema to see it. Maybe I will have some of my friends there, or maybe Derek, but I can’t bring Jeaic as he won’t get in – it’s an over-18 movie. Maybe when the DVD comes out I can just show him the clips that he himself is in. I remember hearing about Anna Paquin who won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for The Piano. She was only nine when she filmed that extraordinary film, but she wasn’t ever allowed watch it until she was, I don’t know, sixteen or something. **** Halloween passes, the trip to Barcelona goes fine. My son’s week with his mother seems to have left him relatively unscathed. We are doing the Wild Atlantic Annual Charity Cycle. We are committed to doing it and there could be no excuse under the sun by which I could get out of doing the full thing. Jeaic can only come and watch, because legally you are not allowed do such a strenuous round until you are eighteen. He goes in one of 91

the cars that accompanies the race. Derek will be doing it too, in case you haven’t guessed.

I think one or two people in the cycling club may suspect that Derek and I are an item. I don’t know what evidence we might have given them; well at least what evidence Derek might have given them as I myself am the ultimate in discretion.

As I’ve said I’m worried about it getting out (excusing the pun) before I’m ready. The wife’s family would have a ‘field day’ telling her they ‘knew it all along’ and ‘how did she not spot it beforehand’ sort of thing. I can’t even begin to imagine the field day the teenage boys in school would have, my son’s school, mine and my son’s school. My head is wrecked from these thoughts and I try to think of what my late grandfather said about not wasting time worrying about what people think of you.

We meet this elderly chap, Mick, on the cycle, and when we stop for burgers he orders a vegetarian burger but the waitress doesn’t hear him properly and gets him a regular one. Then Mick tells us he hasn’t eaten meat since 1950.

“1950!” one of the lads asks incredulously.

“Yep, I was eleven and something we did in school...”

“Allright, I’m thinking I don’t need to know the whole story. Just wondering what age you are, if you chose to give up eating meat sixty-eight years ago.”

Another one of the cyclists says he was part of The Combined Universities and everyone whistles in reverence. Jeaic asks me what The Combined Universities means and I tell him they were the first Irish XV rugby team to beat the South Africans. Then my son is almost whistling softly himself.

The entire cycle over-nights in Kenmare, a nice hotel, and my son and I are sharing a room, naturally enough, I go to the bar to have a few pints with Derek and the rest of the lads. His mother wouldn’t approve of me leaving Jeaic alone in the bedroom. And I would say what the heck was she worried about. Did she think someone was going to break into the room and snatch him. I’d hate to see anyone try, as he’d ‘lamp’ them, would my Jeaic. There are two other sons of cyclers here, one aged a year older than Jeaic, another a year older again. I am pleased that the three have become friends, even though their fathers are rivals. We get the drift from them that they are fierce competitive among each other on behalf of their fathers. We find that amusing, but we are touched and proud as well. Two out of the three young lads are the ‘victims’ of what my mother would call ‘a broken home’. Well my home isn’t broken – thank you very much – it’s just my wife doesn’t live with us no more.

Some of the women in the group have nick-named the three lads, The Three Musketeers and my lad is called Aramis, if you don’t mind. I’m fierce proud of that too. We can all relax more or less when they are together as they are sensible out really, I don’t think any of them smoke or would take a drink or that, you know.

I leave my pint and go for a piss. Derek comes into the gents after me. He pisses a torrent so he does. He says he misses me, that his roommate is going home to the wife tonight and will I come to him? I tell him I can’t, how would I explain my absence to my son, but suggest in a humourous way: “You know what they say about sex the night before an important sporting activity?”

“Aw fuck,” he says, “look I’m sick of it now, so I am. I think maybe it’s time we call it a day.”

“Listen man, just give me a bit of time, ok, it will all sort itself out. He’s in my school, in FIRST YEAR for flip sake…”

Someone else comes into the gents and we have to break off the conversation. Later I send Derek a text: 92

Christmas. We’ll bring it out into the open at Christmas. 1st term down for Jeaic. When I get to the room Jeaic asks: “Can I have a sleepover with the other musketeers? One of them has a tent, down by the lake.”

“I suppose you can,” says I. “Will ye wake in time for breakfast though.”

“Ah we will,” Jeaic says. “It means you can invite Derek, here, to our room,” my son says to me as he is opening and closing the door.

###

“Pink Steel” won first prize at Maurice Walsh Memorial Short Story Award at the Ballydonoghue Bardic Festival in 2010

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A Linnet Swan Photoshopped, Linnet Stock

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The Spite Apple Harry Stone A Tale from ‘The Enchanted Forest’

350 earth time years after the act was perpetrated , 150 years after the publication of the story, The means of the criminal execution: The poisoned apple was found

The ‘For-Sale’ sign was posted in the garden of the ‘Snow White’ cottage on a Monday morning.

That evening, the estate agent was approached with an offer of the asking price. He phoned Mac, the owner’s nephew, who accepted the offer. When he asked the estate agent who bought it he was told that it was two sisters who wanted to be close to City College. They were moving up from Carmen, which was a small hamlet in the Southlands.

Delighted with the fast response, it was a short while later when he realized that he hadn’t cleared it with Elio, his uncle, who owned the property. Shortly afterwards he phoned him to confirm the sale agreed and get his recommendation for a furniture removal company, and then, he suggested they meet on Saturday for an early-bird celebratory dinner.

The contents were being sent for auction. While not considered valuable they were well-known; after all it was the ‘Snow White Cottage,’ where she had found sanctuary with the dwarfs while escaping from her wicked stepmother. The world knew her story. She was as famous as ‘Diana, the Princess of People’s Hearts.’ The cottage had been built by one of Elio’s ancestors and Mac lived in a similar one on the same bridle path.

The following day the removal company packed up the contents and later their office phoned to confirm that they had been delivered to the auction rooms and the receptionist asked if she might send someone in to clean as she still had the keys. Mac agreed and asked her to settle up the cleaning bill and add it to the final tally, and finally if she would instruct the cleaner to post the keys through the letterbox he would appreciate it. She phoned back later to say that she had organized a girl to go in on Saturday afternoon. With the fine details sorted Mac booked a table at Flores restaurant for 6.30PM on Saturday evening.

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Flores Restaurant looked directly onto the lake; the dining alcoves which wrapped around the exterior had viewing stages from where customers could eat while watching the sunset colours spill out onto the water. The men had just made themselves comfortable when Mac’s phone pinged.

“There’s a coincidence, Elio.” he said, “The cleaner found an apple.”

“Did she say where she found it?” Elio asked.

He shook his head as he made space for the waitress to put out the water jugs and tumblers and as she left he replied, “No, she just texted to say she posted the keys through the door, I think she added it as an afterthought. I wonder why she didn’t just dump it. I’ll text her back now.”

Shane MacFinley (known as Mac) was 38 years old, unattached, and recently retired. He had spent 15 years developing software and had sold his company to a large corporation for an eight-figure sum. He was unemployable as far as he was concerned. He’d been his own boss for too long to ever work for or with anyone else and he was in the process of paying his tax bill. When Elio asked him about his plans he’d say that he was negotiating terms with the local exchequer who would not be used to dealing with such large sums from an individual. Elio enjoyed hearing it so much that he had him repeat it at least once a week. Mac was no fool when it came to his money. He’d seen both days.

When the phone pinged again the men had just finished dessert. Over coffee Mac read out her reply: “It was in the alcove by the fireplace!”

“What was?” Elio asked.

“The apple. Elio, are you with me? It was in the alcove by the fireplace.”

Elio was remembering the layout not just the current one for there had been others over the years, but that alcove had contained a big old oak bookcase. Heavy, awkward, but beautifully carved, his own father had kept his collection of books there, no one would have wanted to shift it and in his time, as far as he knew it hadn’t been moved. It had cut its perfect form into the space.

“So, it must have been under the bookcase. There’s only one alcove, the other is level with the chimney.” His uncle said. “Well, that’s a big lump of furniture, no one was going to dust under it.”

“She left it in the garbage disposal,” Mac replied, “It’s disconnected, which is why it wasn’t dumped. Do you want to swing by on the way home? She only texted because she doesn’t want to be seen to be careless.”

Elio, thought for a minute, “If it’s been there that long it can wait until morning.” They both smiled.

The next morning the wind was whistling through the trees in the back garden as Mac entered the cottage through the kitchen door.. First on the scene ,he was just about ready to lift the apple when Elio arrived, saw him and called, “Leave it!” and then continuing in a softer voice he said, “If it’s the real thing, it’s a conductor and that means that it has special properties: Powers of repetition. It will continue to repeat a task until it has completed its instruction or it is deactivated: It will have been injected with destructive intentions, and it will source the energy it needs to complete the circle. Look how beautifully healthy it still appears to be.

Even here its shape and construction should have changed after all this time, if this is the original article it’s 96

Red Apples by Gustave Courbet, 1871 over 300 years old, but even here the air ages all. It’s best to phone the castle, phone it in,” He said.

“What are you on about, man?” Mac replied.

“Okay to sum up: An apple found in a dusty alcove in the old dwarf ’s cottage needs a bit of careful handling! And look at those teeth marks.” Elio said. “Come on Mac, if they were made yesterday they would have discoloured by now!”

Elio Beggs, was a direct descendant of the family who built the cottage, they were an old mining family who had invested wisely in the gem and gold mining sector, and they had built a number of small houses for their workers. The dwarfs were the second set of tenants to have lived there. As a child, Elio had asked his grandmother about the story and she made a connection to a ring, rather than an apple, and when he asked her about it, she said it referred to the seasons and how their goodness honored the earth. The way in which they completed the cycle year in, year out. He’d been nine at the time, now in his seventies, he was older than she was then. He still wondered what she was talking about, if it was metaphor or if there was a real ring hidden somewhere. Though now with the property sold on, he doubted if he would ever know the outcome to that one.

The men waited in the conservatory; it overlooked the orchard and garden. The house sat on about 5 acres in total. The cottage had three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a large kitchen with a dining room and a conservatory, which was a recent addition. Elio was recounting the story of the good morning tune: How he remembered his father soldering pipes to lay in the stream that ran through the copse and then cutting bamboo and angling it through the branches of the trees to catch the wind, all the work done to ring a tune out of the air on a windy day. “Who knew that the young trees would learn to hum “Clair de Lune” Elio exclaimed.

Mac was laughing at the idea, while wondering if the saplings back at his own cottage might be tuned 97

into something similar, through maybe a Sunday afternoon jazz session might be better suited to his style.

And then the hour was gone. And when the ‘Vacuum Truck’ pulled up at the kerb a short while later, a nice smart sports car pulled up behind it and a woman got out. About 5’8’ pretty with long dark hair and a slim figure, she was dressed in a red shirt that was belted under a pair of blue jeans that fell down over a pair of work boots. She was smiling as she walked towards the house and saw the door open.

From his vantage point at the window Mac recognized Annie Smith and hurried out to greet her.

“Last time we met was at the school reunion, must be 5 years ago.” He said smiling, standing back to let her walk through.

Extending her hand as she approached him, “It’s good to see you. I just happened to be in when the call came through. What a coincidence it is. The cottage location and a possible spite-apple. You know there are a few on display in museums. Can I see it please?”

Just then Elio joined them at the door, “Annie, meet my uncle, he has a connection to the old story!” and as they shook hands he said to his uncle. “Annie, short for Annabelle” he continued as he introduced them, “She and I shared a few classes in secondary school--not today or yesterday.”

“There yar. Annie! is it! Ye knew each other then. Lovely to meet you, but my connection now is very far out.“ He said as he shook her hand, “You are with the environmental agency?”

“Yes I am, and you!” She exclaimed, “You recognized a danger?”

“Well, from the old tales and I am not sure. Such a long time has passed, it’s a bit of a mad assumption. But it’s better to be careful with this one. I suppose it was the family I grew up in, when tales were told around the fireside. But it’s a beautiful rosy red color, and the teeth marks still appear fresh; the pulp still pure; there’s no discoloration.”

“So then Elio! you think it’s the real thing?”

“Well take a look for yourself,” he replied as he led the way into the kitchen. “If it had been dropped in the last few days it would have discolored.”

The apple was viewable from the door.

“How near can I get?”

“Well I nearly picked it up and the cleaner handled it, though she might have been wearing gloves, and so far we appear to be okay.” Mac replied.

Annie walked towards the sink, and as she did the apple pulsed and a piece of the pulp broke away.

“Did you see that?” She asked, “Elio, can you call Robert please and tell him to bring in one of the small steel boxes and prongs, we need a control environment to take a look at this specimen. Will you ask him to place the ‘Vacuum Team’ on standby so they can move in as soon as we leave. Did you see it move, Elio?” She turned but he had gone outside.

“Mac walk up and stand beside me, please, if you wouldn’t mind? ” she said.

As Mac walked up to join her, there was no response from the apple, it was just what it looked like: A big rosy-red half bitten fruit just sitting on the top of the drainer.

“It might just have been old acid settling down, maybe reacting to the light.” Annie said. But when she moved forward again the apple pulsed again and on another step it did so again, yet when Mac moved to join her there was no response.

Robert arrived at the kitchen carrying a small steel box and prongs. He was masked and gloved.

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His protective suit resembled that of a beekeeper. Placing the box on the table, he carefully moved towards the sink and catching the apple with the prongs he swiveled with it and dropped it in the box. He closed the top.

Annie walked across to the table, and as soon as she got near the box a sound emanated from the inside that suggested that the apple was knocking against the side. She unclipped a small key from a chain around her neck and locked it down.

“That’s so weird, there appears to be some kind of a chemical reaction when I get near it. Let’s get the team in, and get out: This type of investigation is so unreliable, anything can happen.”

And as the three guys and Annabelle watched from the gate the ‘Vacuum Team’ went in to fumigate the property.

The city council offices were based in rooms in the castle. With Mac driving, the men followed the recovery team in. Annie sent them through to her office where her secretary seated them in the private reception and took orders for coffee and biscuits.

Ten minutes later Annie brought the tray through and sat it on the desk.

“Have you exchanged contracts for the sale yet, Elio?” She enquired.

“No, we’re due to next week.” He replied.

“Well let’s see if we can tidy this up fast.” She said.

“Gentlemen have you heard anything about our Memory Room?”

“Your what?” Mac said.

“I just heard rumors! Really Annie. Is there such a thing?” Elio replied.

“Well, there is, how are your diaries? let’s see if I can book it,” She opened her computer screen and checked the time slots. “It’s free for the afternoon.” She said.

Mac looked at Elio and nodded, and he answered for both.

“Well we’re free too,” Elio laughed. “There’s nothing that can knock this one off the page.”

Making small talk along the way, they followed Annie up two flights of stairs and across the battlements. They stopped for a minute on the viewing platform on the high tower, to look out across the landscape; as far as the eye could see there were acres of forests and parkland surrounding cobbled pathways that bordered busy traffic-laden streets that were lined with colourful old style architecture. Beside the viewing point there was an elevator, which they boarded. The men, a little starstruck by the pace and with the beautiful vista still fresh in their energy were rendered speechless by the ‘James Bond’ private entrance that was hidden behind a fall of lush green ivy and when they stepped out into the chamber a few minutes later they were in a cozy room that had a blackboard on one wall. Annie went over to the board, took a chalk and wrote out five words and then motioning for them to take a seat she said: “ Let’s get on with a short explanation as to how we work here. Let me try and keep this brief and simple. Guys my job here is to access the timeline and attempt to re-ignite old energy. So in order to do that I have to collect personal information to include in the social mix. With the help of a few of our staff here I have created a formula which I hope will allow us access. This one is simple for we have a storyline; not every family has a storyline— due to war and natural disasters most can only trace their relations back through a couple of generations.”

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The men sat back into their chairs to give her their full attention.

Annie continued: We have five keys that make up that formula: Language; DNA; Calendar; Latitude and Longitude Coordinates; Maps “So let’s take them one by one please bear with me while I run through a few ideas. , LANGUAGE “How are our worlds constructed? I’m sure you have a fair knowledge of this already, but one area leads into another and from there if we get lucky, we can measure an effect, which is why I want to make a few assumptions. Let’s assume that the verb ‘To Be’ has two functions that are driven by different engines.

The first one would determine one’s permanent state, the state that one can’t lose a connection to like: Name; Place of Birth; Family. And the second would determine temporary truths: The feelings that are affected by the emotions. Would you agree that how we feel determines how we interact with our environment and with the people who are part of our world. If you agree I think it’s fair to say that emotions are the gas in the engine.

But who’s filling the engine?” Annie looked at the men and continued.

“Words have an effect, guys, we all know that; they are our thoughts speaking, they reverberate and have a consequence. But speech is only a form of sound, a form of communication, a way to project our feelings. Words are generated by feelings which are identified by emotions. Words have a sound attached and when one attaches an emotion it might generate a whole other form. A word is just a squiggle on a page, an utterance by a small child, until a feeling produces a perception that build a thought form and as any good advertisers will tell you, a thought is nothing more than a feeling that has been manipulated.” Elio was nodding in agreement; Mac’s expression was inscrutable.

“But who is in charge of ‘I Am?’ Are language and soul connected or is language separate? Are we silent witnesses to the happening in our own lives, or are we responsible for all that happens to us? Does the proper noun that holds the body in check control the verb or is it just a holder of information, a container that houses a voice; a form of identity that ties one to a family timeline. Can you step aside and look in on yourself!

And when you are in-body whereabouts are you? Are you in your head or are you living in your emotions or in some quiet spot that no one knows about, or are you being of use in the world? If I step into your energy field, where will I find you, or even will I be able to find you, if I want to.?” She got a laugh with that one The guys were sitting forward in their chairs listening carefully, she had their attention as she moved on.

DNA/Cells “Does our DNA determine our destiny? For example, are we making assumptions here because we know the Elio is a direct descendent and we have an old story? If we have an opportunity dhould we not investigate to see if the story is true? We know that we can map our health using DNA but what if it’s stirred into a larger internal mix. Can we do what police do when they use spoor samples to help trace criminals. Every time we move we leave a spoor that can be traced. What if the DNA in this case is a false lead? How can we check memory results in real time?”

“I have no idea, Annie,” Mac interjected.

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“It’s a difficult one.” She replied, “but we’ll give it a shot. Let’s continue. I’m nearly finished.”

CALENDAR “Our piece de resistance was developed by Pope Gregory XIII and without it our trace experiments are obsolete and just become useful tools. The way timelines are measured out to hold our histories ensures that the date stamps are tight, and we can step through in the knowledge that events will be found where they were set down. Our calendar gentlemen is a modern day miracle. The only order we have is what we bring to our days. If our ancestors hadn’t formatted a regular timeline we’d have no form or shape on a day or season.”

LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE CO-ORDINATES “Lining up the co-ordinates. We know that the cottage stood on this site 350 years ago. and with our co-ordinates we can pin the location to a definite place, and yes this is it.”

MAPS “We have the full inventory uploaded into our data stream.”

“And that’s it, we know these apples were primed to attack one person or a particular group of people, and we know that they target in on either an emotional, mental, or physical plane. They were programmed for one hit and once that was done the energy was depleted and they rotted away.”

With the introduction done, Annie cleaned the board, produced swabs and asked the men if they would mind giving her a DNA sample. Even more curious now they swabbed their saliva, put the sticks in a solution that sat on a tray that had their names inked into the plastic. Annie then pushed a button and a code was immediately generated, she printed off a reading for the men.

Elio threw an eye at Mac as he read his and mouthed. “Very efficient.” Mac smiled and Annie picked up the inference: “I have a good PA guy, not much gets past him. We just needed to be sure we keep it separate, if you hadn’t agreed to this there was no-loss on our side.”

Put back in his box Elio sat down only to stand straight back up, as Annie pressed a button on her phone and the chalk board opened out into a portal that surrounded a large metal door with a blinking eye centered in a cork surround. Annie allowed it to read her iris and the door opened out to a small cinema.

“This is it. Gentlemen, welcome to the Memory Room.”

“Holy smoke!” Mac exclaimed, “A ‘mancave.’ He continued as he looked around.

The back wall held a stage, there was a pulpit off to one side, similar to the ones found in old churches, it held a slim reading stand but under it there was an electronic control panel with the name, “Trawler,” inscribed on its side.

Behind it, a screen fell from a recessed case that sat just under the ceiling and the room had about 50 seats; a mix of armchair and sofa styles. Comfort was paramount to someone.

Once more Annie released the clip that held the key on the chain around her neck and held it in her hand.

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“How are you holding up there Elio?” she called to the older man.

“I’m impressed with the logic so far,” he replied, “but will it hold?”

“Do you want to take five in order to digest the relevance of keys before we take the next step?”

She held up a small gold key, again.

“Let’s brainstorm,” Mac suggested.

“On what? “Elio asked.

“Let’s brainstorm the co-ordinates …”

“We don’t have to,” Annie said, “I have the original story here. It’s not the first spite apple that’s been found: We think it was seeded. So, by default all of our council offices keep the story on file. Back in the day it was a weapon that was used by bullies.” She paused to allow the information to sink in and continued “And I have the location on here too.”

“And have you a timeline?”

“Yes. It’s attached to it, our historians gave it a line edit, they clocked each event as it occurred, this is not the first time the memory has been searched for interested parties.”

“Okay,” Mac replied looking towards Elio, “Why don’t we leave it to Annie. “ Elio nodded, folded his arms, and sat back.

“Okay, just to confirm for the tape, I have the key that opens the coordinate Trawler port and I have the documents and any relevant material organized to go and I am going to upload them now.” Annie said, opening her hand to show the key.

“Just before we start” Elio interjected, “why are we doing this if you have seen it a few times and have had your experts view it?”

“It’s POV Elio. You might have an interpretation that we missed, the story might open differently through your lenses. The camera will pick up nuance from the DNA that is being projected into your energy.

It never lies. So it’s your family’s reading and circumstances that’s showing up here.”

“Okay!” He replied.

“Well let’s not waste any more time, let’s search for the wicked witch of the big screen.” she said and she dimmed the lights and inserted the key into the control box. The screen lit up as she sat down beside the men.

She was as she had been depicted by the illustrators: Mac thought, as he looked at the screen he was remembering lines from the story. “Her eyes protruded, her nose hooked, her lips curved down to illustrate her frown.”

She was in a bed/sitting room. They watched her take an apple from a dish on a dresser. She placed it on her bed before opening her incantation book, drawing the shape of the rhombus in the air, mumbling a curse. Then as they watched, she opened the dresser, took out a bone from a drawer and scraped some of its marrow onto a saucer, then opening a small cut in the apple peel she shook the dusting in and closed it off with some type of liquid glue. Then standing in front of a gold leaf framed mirror she called in a sing song voice:

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Mirror Mirror on the Wall, who is the fairest of all?

My Queen, you are the fairest here so true.

But Snow White beyond the mountains at the Seven Dwarfs is a thousand times more lovely, fair and beautiful than you.

The guys were glued and Annie whispered loudly: “We got the timeline right!”

It was like a speech bubble was raised, to burst onto the screen when the witchy queen screeched and all three sat straighter.

Who’s there! Is there someone here? Where are you, show yourself? Mac put his fingers to his lips for shush. Is it the dead mother? Are you here!!” She screeched lifting the bone out of the drawer again.

Lit up with rage she danced in circles croaking as she did: Your mother, dead mother/both you and your mother/will soon be together/both dead in a gutter.

Annie pressed the pause button, “Charming lady, and her DNA is buried in the apple.” Elio said. “We have a piece of the old dear here with us.”

“But have we, Elio?” Annie questioned, “Is it one of the apples? Who’s marrow did she place under the skin. Are we making assumptions, are they Snow White’s teeth marks?”

“Of course,” Mac said, “Maybe we have all been nib-trapped.”

“Great expression!!” Annie said. “Nib-trapped indeed, even nib-captured!”

“Ha. Paper never refuses ink.” Elio said.

“Okay, now you are reminding me of mum, Elio. That is one of her favorite sayings, but let’s take it a step further.” Annie said.

“What do you mean?” Elio asked.

“I can move the timeline down to where the old hag knocks on the door of the cottage.”

“Are you just following the script, then, the old story?”

“I use the story as a guide for the timeline. I can place the queen at the door, but I don’t know what will happen from there.”

“Go for it,” Mac said.

Annie reprogrammed the Trawler and sat back down.

The camera zoomed in on an old gypsy hag, she carried a basket of fruit and flowers as she opened the gate and hobbled up the cobblestone path that was lined with summer beds.

She was about to knock on the door when it opened in, and a beautiful young woman stepped out.

For a moment they stood toe-to-toe, until the hag backed away.

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“Will you help an old lady, dear?” she asked. “Will you buy some fruit so I can get money to feed my family” she continued, as she held out a rosy, red apple? she continued pressing forward, “Isn’t this lovely, so sweet and wholesome,” And then she took a bite, and reaching into her basket she handed another to Snow White who was backing into the house as she moved forward.

Then she stopped, and took the apple out of her hand and beckoned to the old hag to follow her into the living room. She fetched money from a jar on the sideboard, and she was about to taste the apple when the old dear collapsed.

Snow White fell to her knees, she checked her pulse, saw it was still pumping. and then taken a cushion from the chair put it under her head. Running into the yard she found Sleepy, (one of the dwarfs) relaxing in a hammock and shaking him awake she sent him to fetch the doctor.

They were back within minutes and the doc., checked the hag’s pulse and heartbeat and then her airwaves: “Her breathing appears labored,” he said, so lifting her from behind he forced her diaphragm inwards and suddenly a piece of apple flew out of her mouth.

“Done,” he continue and said to Snow White, “give her a drink and she will be as good as new in a little while.”

When the men left, Snow White, made a drink for herself and the old woman who was sitting at the table gathering up her strength around her.

Snow White sat down across from her.

The lady looked Snow White in the eye and said: I had harm on my mind when I came here today, I am your stepmother and I had planned to make you pay.”

Snow White looked confused, remembering the dwarf ’s warnings.

Who! did you say? she asked.

I am your queen, your nemesis of old, and it’s through the magic mirror that I have kept score.

And in front of Snow White, she took on her own image, one of a good-looking middle-aged woman, Reaching for her stepdaughter’s hand she said.

From here on in, I accept my fate and you my dear must take your place: You are the most beautiful lady in the land, and I am now your biggest fan, to show my thanks, I bequeath you, my ring.

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And she handed Snow White, a red gold ring that was encircled with amethyst and ruby stones.

For Snow White it was the perfect end to the story and a little later she and her step mum strolled arm and arm down to the gate and there with a wave of her hand the queen called her carriage through to take her back to the castle.

Annie paused the film. No one said anything for a minute.

Then Mac said, “I suppose non-fiction was never going to be a big seller or even memory catcher.”

And they all laughed.

“I suppose, but the apple! What about the apple?” Elio replied.

“It wasn’t the only one in existence, but from this POV it has to be the queens.” Annie continued, “There were a few sorcerers plying their trade around that time. It pulsed when I approached it because I had a small sliver of DNA from one of the others in my pocket. Like an antenna. It picked up the signal.”

“So you knew coming to the cottage that there might be a connection?”

“Like you Elio, I grew up with the fireside stories and came prepared. We get a few call-outs to unusual activity and we are prepared for most events, everyone knows the cottage so I popped into the store room and picked up a small sample before I left here this morning.”

“So, the next question is.” Mac paused for effect. “Is the cottage the ‘Snow-White’ cottage?”

He looked at Elio: “Have you a ring? “ “I don’t but you have!”

“Yes, I think I just might have.” and the guys stood.

“You might join us for dinner next time Annie.” Elio said as they shook hands and waited to follow her out.

“Over at Flores?” She asked.

“Yep our favourite spot.” Mac said.

“I’d love to, you’ll phone me.”

“Will you remember to phone her, Mac?” Elio laughed, looking at the good looking young woman.

“Oh just before I finish up guys, do ye want to see a memory of the Ball where she meets the prince?”

Elio looked at Macha and together they just said “No.” As Annie showed the men out they were discussing the house sale. “ A good story has legs.” Elio said as the elevator door closed. “Could we ask for a price increase?”

“You’d be lucky, man! anyway, we’re good for our word, it’s sale agreed.”

“I’m not sure about that apple, Mac, where did it go? and what about that memory room”” “Oh suspicious minds!!” Mac replied and laughed. ***

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