A Sense of Wholeness: An Interview with Kai Carlson-Wee

A Sense of Wholeness:
An Interview with Kai Carlson-Wee

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       On the pages of RAIL, the musings, torment and wanderlust of author Kai Carlson-Wee are laid bare, offering the reader an intimate look at his life and psyche. Throughout this journey into Carlson-Wee’s story lines become blurred—between the symbolic and the real, the fleeting and the essential, the memory, and the dream. This shifting spectrum reflects the nature of the life depicted in RAIL: hopping trains, life without an address, drug use, danger and psych medication. However, RAIL’s frequent tone of pain and desolation is juxtaposed with vivid descriptions of beautiful landscapes and warm moments, assertions of the power of camaraderie, and a strong case in favor of resilience. 

       The following interview attempts to dive deeper into RAIL, by clarifying the creative process, separating reality from symbol, and fleshing out the landscapes, both physical and psychological, that comprise its poems. 

1.     Homelessness and depression, or mental instability, are two topics that recur throughout Rail.  These are things that you obviously have personal experience with, as your poems are derived from a deeply personal, if not autobiographical place.  What do you think Americans need to know, or to understand, about the reality of mental illness?  Despite it being something that people work to avoid, do you think that there is anything romantic, or positive about depression?  Is there anything valuable in the way it affects or changes the individual?

       I wish I could say yes, that it’s valuable somehow, but my relationship to depression is complicated. When I was in my early twenties I had two mental breakdowns. Each one lasted about a year and I didn’t really know what was wrong. I couldn’t read books. I couldn’t focus on basic conversations, anything happening in linear time. The world seemed fragmented and I spent long stretches in bed. I was eventually diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and borderline schizophrenia, which basically means that I have a depression cycle every few years that can trigger distorted thoughts. At it’s worst, I experience panic attacks and paranoid delusions. I start thinking people are conspiring against me and trying to poison me. My doctors had a hard time pinpointing the problem, and I eventually healed myself through a combination of medications, writing poetry, and traveling on my own. Hitchhiking, road tripping, backpacking, train hopping. These experiences became the basis for my book, RAIL, and I honestly wish I could have romanticized it more. I wish I could have done more of ‘hero’s journey’ type thing, but the truth about depression, at least in my experience, is that it just plain sucks. It sucks and it’s made worse by the way we stigmatize mental health problems in America. We tend to see them as either chemical problems, requiring drugs to fix, or behavioral problems, requiring therapy and a shift in behavior (willpower). There’s a feeling that there’s a “correct” way to function in American society, to behave in “normal,” capitalistic ways. The problem with this is that people who are experiencing mental health issues are expected to see themselves as deficient. The value of the experience is in the individual’s effort to “get better” and eventually triumph over their mental illness, regaining some sense of normalcy. This results in people not wanting to admit when they’re sick, not seeking treatment, and believing in a social stigma that assumes healing is up to the individual. When I was depressed I was very lonely, I was very lost, and the “value” I found in the experience was figured out much later. The past is often revised by the present, and I’ve revised that chapter of my life to be more interesting than it was. During the actual periods of depression, it was just very bleak. 

 

2.     Rail describes, vividly and personally, individuals that have been pushed past the borders of mainstream society into the fringes – the homeless, the different, the mentally ill.  Do you think that those in mainstream society generally lack empathy for the people on the fringes of society? What forces influence and pressure people into ignoring and disregarding these types of people?  What have you learned about the experience of homelessness and what might a more compassionate understanding of it look like? 

       I was never really “homeless” while I was traveling. I slept outside and went for months without an address, but it felt different than some of the people I met on the street, who were suffering from a variety of issues. I had a family, I had a home to return to if needed. I was never destitute. But again, the situation was not as black-and-white as most people want to assume. Some of the folks I met on the street had families to return to. Some had apartments or houses, but chose, for various reasons (addiction, mental health issues, divorce, life transitions, etc.) to live outside normal American society. In train-riding culture there’s an idea of transience that goes back to the Great Depression and the myth of the American West. It’s an idea as much as it is a reality. Most of the people I’ve met riding trains are itinerant more than they are homeless, but the idea of homelessness still persists. In a larger context, it’s also related to ideas of transience in blues music, spiritual hymns, Westerns, folk music, country music, the history of America itself. There’s a story of rootlessness and immigration infused into many aspects of American identity. In my own family, my ancestors immigrated from Norway in 1903, and, like so many other families in this country, began effacing the cultural identities of the homeland they left behind. It’s no surprise that Americans value freedom over national identity, future possibilities over  reconciliation with the past. When I write about homelessness in my book, I’m writing about all these different things at once. In my own experiences traveling I’ve met many people living in ways that would be considered ‘homeless’ or off-the-grid, and each one has a unique story and a unique reason for living the way they do. One of the problems with the conversation is that labeling people as “homeless” tends to dehumanize and stigmatize their experiences, rather than allowing for channels of empathy. We look at people on the street and tend to pity them, assuming their circumstances are tragic. But what happens if we listen to their version of the experience? What happens if we value their insights to the same degree as we value our judgment? In RAIL I tried to write about real people I met on the road without painting them as ‘homeless’ or down-and-out or whatever. I tried to write about their actual perspective more than their circumstance. 

  

3.     Although Rail is full of creative, descriptive, and rhetorical language, much of the content of your poems and their titles are very direct and realistic, examples being “DEPRESSION” (p. 19) and “CRYSTAL METH” (p. 46).  Do you believe that creative literary expression is most effective when the subject matter is approached and addressed head-on?  Is there an element of artistic therapy, or creative release, in writing about such challenging subjects and experiences in a direct way?  Do you think that, in general, there is something to be gained by approaching our personal difficulties or traumas head-on? 

       I think so. Naming a thing is a powerful act. Giving language to the world is a powerful act. It’s maybe a way of reclaiming ‘lost time,’ or redefining a stigmatized term. I mean, it took me a long time to admit that I was depressed, that I could write about depression as a way of moving through it. For me, titles like “Depression” are not signifiers of an edgy experience but are ways to make the title my own, on my own terms. It feels liberating to me. When I started writing RAIL I was very conscious of wanting it to be autobiographical and based on actual experience. I might have changed a location here or there, but the poems are based on real people and real situations. The persona poems are dictated from actual conversations. Not much has been altered there. The travel poems were largely written while I was actually traveling. I wanted the poems to be drawn from reality, from fact more than fiction. There are many poets who try to make their work dramatic by being elusive or appropriating other people’s experiences as their own, and, while I don’t think it’s necessarily off-limits, it’s just not my project. I wanted to be able to stand in front of an audience and read these poems with conviction, with something clear and empirical to offer. Naming something directly can be cathartic and part of healing various traumas, but it can also be part of the contract you make with the audience, the way you give integrity to the work.     

  

4.     In “MENTAL HEALTH” (p. 24) you reference and describe taking specific psych medications, namely Ativan and Seroquel.  These are medications that can have a profound quieting effect on the mind, on thought, and on perception.  For many, psych meds can bring desperately needed stability – did they do this for you? Conversely, could you speak to the dark side – the unadvertised, unexpected, destructive side of psych meds? Can you describe how it felt, in terms of your identity, and your ability to express yourself, both creatively and in general, to be on a powerful antipsychotic like Seroquel?   

       I started taking Seroquel because my therapist thought I was suicidal. This was around 2006, during my senior year of college. My head was in a very bad place and I was having a hard time separating delusion from reality. I was cutting myself and thinking obsessively about burying myself in the ground. I ended up in the emergency room at one point and spent a night climbing over the guardrail on the Washington Avenue Bridge. My psychiatrist wanted to quiet the delusions, which, I admit, probably needed to happen, but the effect was very destructive. After a few weeks it felt like someone had drilled a hole in my head and sucked out my imagination. I couldn’t think abstractly at all and my life just seemed to pass in front of my face like I was watching it underwater. I quit having panic attacks and the paranoia disappeared, but I was pretty catatonic. It felt like a lobotomy. I was on those drugs for about four months and I’ll never go on them again. They made me gain weight, they canceled my personality (glazed eyes), and they prevented any imaginative thinking. Seroquel and Abilify, both very difficult for me. I’m on Wellbutrin right now and I still take Ativan from time to time, but I’ve had positive reactions to both. Wellbutrin makes everything brighter and more available. I’m a big fan of Wellbutrin. 

Portrait of Kai Carlson-Wee by John Haynes

 5.     Rail describes a somewhat cold society, one in which outsiders must endure physical and emotional pain throughout the fight for survival. Do you think that the reality of this kind of cold society, lacking compassion and often very difficult to exist in, is inevitable?  If the kind of outsider described in Rail were to wake up one day in an ideal society – the kind of society that could mend their wounds, lift them up, empower them – what would that society look like?

       I don’t know if there’s an answer to this. Sociologists and philosophers have been trying to figure this out for a long time—the ideal society. Many religions function in ways to create socio-economic leveling effects, empathy between classes, at least in theory. In America, we’ve got a capitalist system that has replaced gods with celebrities, spirituality with ideals of personal freedom. We worship the Kardashians and James Franco and the stock market. We turn to influencers and tutorial videos on YouTube for guidance. The sacred has become boring somehow, old fashioned. Through social media platforms, we’ve actually started to worship ourselves, weirdly enough. We follow people who are interested in the same things and cultivate idealized portraits of ourselves based on the reward system of “likes.” There’s not much room for honesty, artistry, debate, radical thinking. Everything we post becomes watered down and homogenous. Most of the stuff I post on social media has already been compromised by the time I post it, however subconsciously. We supposedly have access to unlimited information but we end up living in these solipsistic echo-chambers. The goal, it seems, is to narrow our identities down a single note (sentimental positivity) and to become famous to only ourselves. I don’t know if this is a contemporary problem or a newer version of a old human problem, but we can’t seem to understand that existence is fluid, part of a larger whole. The “society” that could possibly mend our wounds already exists, we already have access to it, but our definitions of selfhood, of culture, of healing, are too limited. When we can see ourselves in the fabric of a continuum, when we can value the life of a single ant, of a single flowing river, of a single cloud, as much as we value our own, then we might be able to finally wake up in healing world. But the healing won’t come from philanthropy or donations to a cause, it will come from within.

 

6.     Frequently throughout Rail, and in detail in poems like “AMERICAN FREIGHT” (p. 51) and “RIDING THE HIGHLINE” (p. 69), a kind of lust for motion, for escape, for leaving the place that you happen to be in favor for the journey towards somewhere else is described.  In what ways is motion, or leaving, therapeutic?  During the days of your life described in Rail, what did motion mean to you, and in what ways was it able to function as a coping mechanism?  

       Movement has always been important to me, as a physical thing but also as a kind of principal. Growing up, I spent a lot of time biking and skateboarding, riding go-carts, sledding down hills, etc. Anything that allowed me some speed. When I was thirteen I discovered rollerblading and became unnaturally obsessed. I skated for 10 years, 5-10 hours a day, and eventually moved out to California to do it professionally. I fell in love with the feeling of grinding down handrails, sliding from one location to the next. When you’re skating a rail it feels like some form of levitation, like sliding on ice. It’s a beautiful feeling. 

       When I was twenty-three I quit skating and I went through those breakdowns I mentioned earlier. Looking back on it now, I think it was probably because my brain was being starved of Dopamine and Serotonin after so many years of skating, getting rush after rush of adrenaline. There was the physical release of positive brain chemicals, the synaptic satisfaction, but there was also a feeling of flow I would enter, of moving in synch with the universe. Athletes and musicians often talk about this kind of feeling. A departure from time, a release from conscious thought. When I started traveling spontaneously, without a plan or destination, I discovered a similar feeling. It was a departure from life in a physical sense, from responsibilities and relationships, but there was also a spiritual element, a feeling of freedom and release. In a weird way, I think I was trying to replicate the feeling of skating, but on a larger scale. I took psych meds, I ate healthy, developed positive routines, but the movement was also important for healing. It seemed to reignite my brain.

 

7.     The Cloudmaker is a recurring figure in Rail, and in “THE CLOUDMAKER’S BAG” (p. 38) some of his background is revealed.  He is described as “seven years homeless” (12-13), scraping out a precarious survival from “handouts, gravedigger jobs he has only been fired from” (13-14).  Approaching the Cloudmaker as a tangible, real, individual person – is there hope for him?  Would it be possible for him to integrate into mainstream society?  Would he even want to?  Would that kind of reintegration be good for him?  What is the best possible resolution for the Cloudmaker?

       The Cloudmaker is based on a real guy I met in Seattle, in 2007. He had this shock of white hair and a big gray beard and looked a little like a young Walt Whitman. I thought he was slightly crazy at first, but the more I talked to him, the more his logic became clear and I realized he had this electric view of the world. He said he could control the weather, that he had a ‘cloudbuster’ machine that he would stand in to harness energy (something William Burroughs also did). He said he could talk to birds and that cops had one time drugged him and implanted recording devices in his brain. He said they would steal his dreams and make maps out of his unconscious mind. I had been paranoid about stuff like this in the past, and I just really empathized with what he was saying. I thought he was extremely interesting. I’ve met plenty of people with wild theories and unique philosophies, but he was more inspiring somehow, he had a light around him. In making him a character in the book, I didn’t want to use him symbolically as some sort of social commentary, I wanted to show the logic of his mind and the originality of his thinking. 

 

8.     The people described in Rail, yourself included, are deeply affected by pain, by the loss of romantic and familial love, by battles with physical and mental health.  Despite all of this, there is an aura of hope surrounding Rail, an imprecise notion of the existence of beauty and positivity despite all of those things. How do negative experiences – pain, hurt, rage, sorrow, regret – provide inspiration?  How would you define or describe the positive that comes from negative emotions or experiences?

       I think the positive side of those experiences is the book itself. The negative experiences don’t provide inspiration necessarily, but they do provide a need to create meaning. In a lifetime you are given a wide variety of experiences. Good, bad, random, traumatic. Your life can be going pretty well for a while and then suddenly, in an instant, everything can shift. It takes a moment, a single day. The most painful things tend to be the experiences we can’t control or we feel disenfranchised by. Even positive experiences can have a negative effect if we feel our agency is compromised and someone else is pulling the strings. One of the great gifts of being a writer is the ability to shape and reshape your narrative. Doesn’t matter if the experience is good or bad, pedestrian or heroic, random or pre-determined, as a writer your job is to find inventive ways to translate your life into language. Sometimes this means taking a shitty experience and finding a way to make it beautiful. Sometimes it means taking a cliché experience and making it strange, defamiliarizing it in a unique way. The hope you mention in RAIL is not about liberation or salvation or anything like that, it’s about acknowledging the meaninglessness of life, the crappiness, the discomfort, and believing in a continuum beyond the self. It’s about the faith in motion and disintegration, seeing the beauty in a broken world and persisting regardless. 

 

9.     Many of the poems in Rail are rife with vivid descriptions of physical locations and surroundings, of minute details that cement the memory of a given place as unique.  Your location and surroundings appear to be deeply important to you, as an individual and as a writer.  How do you view or perceive the relationship between one’s surroundings and their mental, emotional, or spiritual state?  To what degree is our mental state influenced or determined by our surroundings?  Is there a relationship between this dynamic, and your consistent desire to move, to leave, as described in Rail?

       Landscape has always affected me deeply, not just a physical location but the way the wind moves, the quality of light, the smell of a rainstorm. People tend to see landscape as a background detail, incidental, a stage for the human drama to play out in. But I think it’s the other way around. In my experience, consciousness adapts to the atmosphere it exists in. Culture develops according to the tonal vibrations of a place. When a person moves from one country to another, one climate to another, they don’t just have a hard time adapting because of cultural differences, they’re also adapting to a new consciousness intrinsic in the weather, the climate, the land itself. 

       When I write about soy fields, for instance (which I write about a lot in my poems), I’m writing about the consciousness of the speaker. Soy fields represent a bland mass-produced product. Homogeny, repetition. Alfalfa fields, on the other hand, represent a uniquely brilliant flowering. Alfalfa fields have a lovely aroma and appear almost neon gold when they bloom. Each location contains a different consciousness, each city a different tone. In the intro to Rail, Nick Flynn pointed out the use of ‘secondary cities’ in the poems. Fargo, Dundas, Minot, Bellingham, etc. In part, this is because those cities are on rail lines, but also because those cities represent psychological states. Dundas is synonymous with memory and childhood, Bellingham is synonymous with depression, Portland is synonymous with the unattainable (heaven), Northtown Yard is synonymous with community. The locations in the book migrate from the Midwest to the West Coast, then back to the Midwest, and the consciousness of the speaker changes in relation to the landscapes. 

       The whole book moves in the shape of a circle, but a circle that ends a little askew from where it started. For instance, the first poem is about outer landscapes and oil, and the last poem is about inner landscapes and fire.   

 

10.  In “AMERICAN FREIGHT” (p. 51), and in extensive specific detail in “O DAY FULL OF GRACE” (p. 92) you invoke your grandparents, and their experiences of struggle and disaster.  How are you specifically, and humans collectively, influenced and shaped and molded by the experiences and strife and joys and horrors of our ancestors?  Do you believe that it’s important to know and understand what our ancestors went through in the process of forging the present?

       Yeah, definitely. Our identities are not limited to our selves. We extend backwards into the past and forward into the future. The story I’m trying to tell is also my father’s story, my grandfather’s story, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. We are part of a web of inherited history and I wanted this to be present in the book. 

       For instance, my grandmother on my dad’s side (Elizabeth Wee) suffered from Alzheimer’s during the last ten years of her life, and there’s a theme throughout the book about the dissolution of memory and the erasure of the past. This is a comment on America itself, but it’s also about my grandmother. At the end of her life she couldn’t remember much, but she could remember how to play songs on the piano. That’s why there’s a large theme of music and recurring sounds throughout the book. 

       On my mom’s side, my grandfather (Roald Carlson) was a lover of water. He loved boating. He loved being out on the open sea. There’s a theme of boats and floating that reverberates through the book. Ocean, water, waves. This is his theme, his melody. I tried to fill the book with a sense of mythology that was personal and unique. There are metaphors and similes, of course, references to other poems, but the larger structure is autobiographically symbolic, based on personalized archetypes and recurring themes. 

 

11.  Although it does look towards the future, the impersonal past, and things not bound by linear time, Rail is highly reflective.  Clearly, your personal memories, of real events and the associated emotions, were the primary source material.  Further, “PIKE” (p. 65) examines the relationship between your grandmother at the end of her life and her memories.  In what ways are our identities intertwined with and defined by our memories?  Since we are constantly engaged in the process of creating new memories, what can or should we do in the present to make our eventual memories more powerful, more meaningful, more vivid?

       Memory is a tricky thing. In one way it seems permanent, immutable, but in another way it gets revised as we age. The same way history gets rewritten to serve the needs of a contemporary narrative, our memories are edited to serve the needs of our current identity. This isn’t a new idea, but I wanted to explore what happens when that process breaks down, when memory dissolves via mental illness or something like Alzheimer’s. What happens when you don’t remember your own children, but you remember a song from your childhood, for instance. What do our memories mean once the narrative thread is lost? 

       When I went through my second mental breakdown there was a feeling of my entire ego collapsing, an “ego death” it’s sometimes called, and I felt all the pieces of my life, my entire history, every possible future, every single memory I thought I owned, completely fall away. I thought I was dying or had already died. My brother found me collapsed outside, vomiting into a snowbank. This experience, along with a few other visions I’ve had, have made me think about memory as a much less stable thing. There’s a dismemberment theme in the book, animals and people getting cut into pieces, tornados breaking things apart, and I was thinking about how American culture commits a similar kind of historical violence, a memory violence. 

       I don’t know what we can do to prevent this from happening, but part of the job of being a writer is to invest in thoughts, moments, fragments, illuminations. “Spots of time,” as Wordsworth says. In the end, of course, we’re all going to die, and with each death, a universe also dies. But through art there’s a loophole, a way to stop time and preserve, at least in glimpses, a sense of wholeness.

 

12.  In spite of the moments of serenity, camaraderie, and love in Rail, you clearly went through a journey of difficulty, depression, sleep deprivation and hunger, and extreme uncertainty.  How would you describe the person that emerged from all of those things?  How did those things shape and create the person and writer that you are today?

       When I go through periods of depression I  get very superstitious. I feel a lack of meaning and clarity and my mind starts to make sense of things randomly, almost out of desperation. I attach a lot of significance to trivial things, like a word on a billboard or the color of a plastic bag. I start noticing synchronicities and coincidences, ways in which the universe is trying to communicate. When I travel, especially if I don’t have a set plan, this all gets exacerbated and there’s a sense of fate that emerges. It’s one of the mystical things about traveling and I honestly don’t know if my brain is just inventing stuff or there’s a deeper force out there directing me, operating on a frequency I can occasionally tap into. Either way, it’s made me a more spiritual person. More open to circumstance and the beauty of movement. I take photos and shoot video sometimes, and I can feel a version of this happening when I’m really tuned into my surroundings. Things tend to constellate and symbols emerge. For instance, throughout Rail I use the color green to signify this phenomenon (green waves, green light, turtles, etc.). I had a vision once where I saw all aspects of the world connected by a green, web-like substance. It looked like liquid spiderwebs weaving everything together, existing outside of time. I don’t feel like I’ve emerged from these experiences exactly, but I know I’ve been changed by them. I’m still being changed by them. 

 

13.   In “POET AT TWENTY-FOUR” (p. 35) you describe the way that you looked out towards the world, in its constancy and simplicity, for inspiration.  If you had to issue a thank you to the elements of life, society, existence, America that provided you with the greatest inspiration – that catalyzed your success as a poet and creative – who, or what would you thank?

       Oh man, that’s a hard one. So many things. So many people. I suppose I’d first want to thank my parents for the way they raised me. Unconditional love—the deepest kind. They supported me through so many tough patches when I had a hard time believing in myself. They are my heroes. I’d thank my brothers, my extended family on both sides. The community of Holden Village in the Cascade Mountains. It’s been such a healing place for me over the years. Railroad Creek for all it’s taught me. Kabekona Lake. Copper Peak. Bolinas, California. Buena Vista Park where I go running every morning in San Francisco. My coyote friend who lives there. I’d thank the animals I’ve killed and/or eaten in my life, the plants I’ve killed, the eagles that have offered me solace at times, the trains that have slowed down unexpectedly, the cars that have pulled off to the shoulder to offer me a ride. The artists and poets who have inspired me to continue. I’d thank the people I’ve shared intimate space with, the friends who encourage me toward magic. I’d thank the words that arrive and keep arriving, the forces that allow me to exist in the world, in this body, for a short time between two equal infinities. I’m so grateful for all of it. The whole song and dance. The panoply. 

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Kevin Monagan is a student at the University of Minnesota, studying psychology, political science, and English. His principal interest is in language and the ways that it can be used to tell our stories.

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (BOA, 2018). He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, and The Missouri Review, which awarded him the 2013 Editor's Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. With his brother Anders, he has co-authored two chapbooks, Mercy Songs (Diode Editions) and Two-Headed Boy (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the 2015 Blair Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.

The New House

On the night that Yom Kippur began, my older sister, who rebelled against anything Jewish and flew into fits of rage whenever our mother tried to tame either her manners or her wild, kinky hair, ran away. It was a mild evening in early October and she couldn’t have gone far. Where could she go? We lived fairly far out in the countryside, and though that countryside was rapidly diminishing under bulldozers, its fields turning into the raw red muddy earth that was the precursor to rows of new, large brick houses, we barely had any neighbors, and those neighbors we did have were far-flung, not a part of our circle, slightly forbidding even, with their mild blue eyes and Harvard-educated accents, their walls hung with framed oil portraits of their ancestors. We, Jews, were the interlopers, new people. Though we weren’t harassed or even particularly noted, we ourselves knew we were different, strange, not quite on the mark. Which was why our father was building The New House, on acreage that he’d bought years earlier, as an investment, acreage he at first had planned to sell but instead held onto, planning for the day that he would have saved enough money to build the house of his dreams, the one that matched the new self that he also hoped to create, that he was in the midst of creating, that was the reason why we lived in a drafty and isolated house the Virginia countryside rather than in the city, or even the suburbs, near other Jews, to begin with: we were to be rough and tumble, children who climbed trees and swam in ponds, but also, like our father, book-driven, ambitious, intellectual.

When our father discovered my sister’s absence, he stood there, in the hallway, shaking with rage, getting white in the face, and clenching and then unclenching his fists. “On the holiest night in the year!” he muttered, as if each syllable were a shard of glass. He never raised his voice let alone his hand, though he did, on occasion, slap us on our rear ends, more for effect than for the sting of it, but his fury was terrifying anyhow. His pale green eyes fell first on me---I was dressed in a pleated skirt matched with a new white blouse with puffy sleeves, with dark blue leather shoes with kitten heels, my first real grown-up shoes—and then on my brother and sister as he asked each of us in turn if we knew where our sister was, had she said anything. She hadn’t. We didn’t know. But we did know what our father also knew, that for days she’d been threatening to run away if he made her attend synagogue services on Yom Kippur: she hated services. They bored her. Moreover, she was a junior in high school, with too many important things she was studying, things she couldn’t miss without fear of falling behind--which was ridiculous, we all knew it was, and yet when she made the argument, her voice growing harder and harder as her face grew redder and redder, it made a certain kind of sense, because alone among the four of us, my sister was slated for great and glorious success, for the same kind of academic stardom, in fact, that had propelled our father from the lesser neighborhoods of Jewish Queens, (in his case, a shabby street of bungalows in Rego Park) to, well, us. Us as we now stood, arrayed before him, in our synagogue clothes, with the late afternoon sun slanting in through the tall windows of our house in Virginia, with our dog, an elderly English Setter named Horatio, wagging his tail vapidly, the way he did when there was a storm approaching. But there was no storm approaching: the afternoon was clear, the colors of early autumn vibrant, the sun warm on our backs.

“We’ll just go without her, then,” our father finally said.

“You go,” our mother said. “I’m calling the police.”

“No,” our father said. “Susan is in no danger. She’ll come home of her own accord.”

Our mother, herself dressed in an outfit she’d recently bought for the occasion, a linen suit that flattered her athletic shape and showed her strong, tan legs, began to walk towards the phone that sat in our front hall on an antique chest of drawers. The chest of drawers was from England, and both my parents were very proud of it. But our father restrained her and, using his professional voice, his lawyer’s voice, the one that argued cases in courtrooms all over the country and which he deployed when talking to senators and judges and the other important people in Washington who made up his daily round, told her that under no circumstances would he permit her to call the police in on a matter as silly as Susan’s having run away.

“But she’ll be eaten alive by the mosquitos,” our mother pointed out.

“Then she’ll learn her lesson, won’t she?” our father said before herding his three remaining children, me first, into the car. There was a terrible moment when our mother, otherwise unmoving, flinched under our father’s pale gaze. He looked back at her twice, both times standing stock still, but letting his eyes fall on her, as if the effect of those twin beams would, on their own accord, force her to join us. It was the second time that she flinched.

I don’t remember anything about synagogue that night other than what I remember, in general, about synagogue on all the other days and nights that our father made us go with him, usually to the Orthodox synagogue in downtown Washington that he preferred. To wit: the service was endless, it was boring, none of us other than our father knew so much as a dot of Hebrew, and though there were English translations on the facing pages, the prayer book was incomprehensible to me, and in any event, I couldn’t make myself interested in endless, repetitive prayers that, one after the next, extolled God’s greatness in unceasingly overblown terms. And why would God need us to tell Him how Great he was, anyhow? Didn’t He already know that? And why, if He was God, would He care? But whenever I took these questions to my father, he said the same thing: “Prayer isn’t for God. It’s for us." Which also made no sense, because if prayer was for us—which I understood to mean for human beings—then why wouldn’t it suffice to pray to God privately, the way people did in books, and the way I myself occasionally did? True, my own prayers were hardly elevated: on the whole I prayed for things like reasonably good grades and that my mother, whom I loved more than anyone else on earth, not be struck down by lightening or a falling tree branch or cancer or a violent man with a knife (you can see how my imagination, lit with a lurid kind of fever, was in a constant state of fear, a constant anxiety based on the possibility of disaster) but they were heartfelt nonetheless. Unlike the droning dirge of the synagogue chant; the moaning; the swaying; and the terrible, tuneless music.

On second thought, I do have some memory from that night. The first had to do with the place itself, and the fact that, as girls, my sister and I could not sit with our father and brother. They sat downstairs, near the raised bima, under the gaze of the rabbi. My sister—she was five years behind me in school, and still quite a little girl—and I were up in the women’s galleries, behind a scrolled iron gate through which you could look down on the proceedings below. Not that there was much in the way of that, much in the way of praying, or pretending to pray, at all. Instead, the women seated on the benches in the gallery around us talked quietly among themselves, sometimes bursting out into a surprised or delighted “You don’t say!” or even a giggle, before lowering their voices again, passing news from one to the next behind their unfurled hands. I heard one of them say: “Ira needs to have his head examined, is what Ira needs. Poor Doris…" and the other say in return: “Well, if I were Doris, I’d be looking for the best divorce lawyer in town.”

Gossip intrigued me. In fact, had I followed my own inclinations, had I not been taught some semblance of manners, I might have leaned in closer, to listen. Instead I passed the time thumb-wrestling with my little sister, who didn’t seem interested in the women’s gossip around us, or in much of anything other than getting through the endless evening, and what might be waiting for us at the end of it.

“Do you think Dad will punish her?” she said quietly, as if merely asking the question made whatever punishment Dad planned on meting out that much more severe.

“Probably.”

“What will he do?”

“I don’t know."

All four of us dreaded our father’s punishments, but not because they hurt, or were even particularly severe, but rather, because of the sting of humiliation, of shame, that came with them. Once, when I’d called my brother a fart, my father dragged me by the elbow to the sofa in play-room, flipped me onto my back, and washed my mouth out with soap. Another time, when he caught me with my brother’s Playboy Magazine, he made me scrub out the toilet. But even in the absence of an actual punishment, merely being on the receiving end of his gaze was enough to let you know how disgusting you were, how you needed to be put in place.

My mother explained that Dad never yelled or hit because his father, an anxious, Old World, Orthodox Jew, had spluttered and raged, all but foaming at the mouth, whenever any of his children had upset him, which apparently was often. My grandfather, Mom said, had been a compulsive worrier, the kind who checked the locks a half dozen times, and couldn’t sleep at night worrying about whether his savings would be safe at the bank, after what had happened in Nazi Germany, and even before that, during the inflationary years between the wars---well, Mom said, he worried. He worried himself right into an ulcer, that’s how much he worried, because even though he’d landed America, where he’d been lucky to have a decent job, a safe job, the job he’d kept until he’d retired during my own childhood, as a foreman at a printing press, the uncertainties of his own childhood haunted him. All that, though, was for me the stuff of myth, things that had happened back in Rego Park, where the row houses were stuck together like melting squares of chocolate, and summer nights were always sticky with heat, lit up with cigarettes, dirty with exhaust fumes, with things floating over the East River, with boys and girls who spoke too loudly and danced too wildly and would never amount to anything, not to mention the neighbors, their fights, their private bedroom activities, their screaming babies.

.…whereas, Mom would say, our father had gotten himself up and out, all those brains of his, that amazing, focused, hard intelligence, first college, then law school, and then rather than return to New York he’d decided to make his life here, in the nation’s capital, to start his adult and professional life without the sting or taint of pull or even the nostalgia for his own history, an idealistic young lawyer among other idealistic young lawyers, seeking to serve and to do right—hence the hours he put in, his decision to move his young family to the countryside, and why, now, he and Mom were building The New House.

The New House! Even now, when I think of it, I’m filled with a kind of yearning, hopeful giddiness: how we’d pore over the architectural plans, and then, as the contractor broke ground, the visits we made, inspecting the newly poured foundation, then walking through the fragrant framing, stepping into the plywood-clad enclosure of my own future room. And all of it, all those glorious high-ceilinged light-drenched rooms—it was all one story, and would have huge floor-to-ceiling windows and hard-wood floors—was surrounded by woods, fields, thickets of Mountain Laurel, stands of River Birch, the mudflats along the river rippled with Skunk Cabbage, Bloodroot, Aster.

The other memory that stays with me was of how hungry I was, even though before we’d headed to synagogue we’d had a large meal. But that Yom Kippur, for the first time, I was old enough to fast. My little sister and I rose, then we sat; then we rose; then we sat. The women around us swayed and dipped over their prayer books, then sat and whispered. By ten or so, the service was over, and my sister and I shuffled downstairs with all the other girls and women to meet our father and brother on the front steps of the synagogue, and from there, to the car, parked a several blocks away. It was a wrinkle, an inconsistency, that as a child I wasn’t aware of: that religious Jews don’t drive on holy days, including, of course, Yom Kippur. Our father explained that he didn’t want to offend anyone by driving right up to the synagogue to let us off: that’s why we had to walk. We didn’t question it. Like everything else our father said or did, it was just the way it was.

On the way back, my little sister got to sit up front, the privileged spot, with Dad. My brother and I sat behind, and as the car slid over the Potomac, he pinched me, hard, on my left nipple. He did that sometimes: pinch or punch me, but usually when the grownups were elsewhere, when it was just the two of us, but he’d never touched me there before. And boy oh boy, did it hurt. It hurt so much I screamed. Dad told me to quiet down—it was Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year—and when I opened my mouth to protest, to tell what happened, he shut me down, said that I needed to work things out with my brother, and that in any case, I was exaggerating. But I wasn’t exaggerating. I knew I wasn’t exaggerating. “I am not!” I yelled as tears backed up my throat and clogged my nostrils with mucus. “Want to see?"

“That’s enough,” Dad said, and a moment later, he pulled the car over, the way he did when we didn’t obey. He didn’t start driving again until there was silence.

At home, Mom was frantic. She’d called everyone she could think of, the old neighbors, the new neighbors—those she knew on the long winding road on which the new house was being constructed—even the parents of some of Susan’s classmates at the private school she attended. No one had seen her. Then, falling into panicky sobs, she turned to our father and said: “If she’s not back in one hour, I’m going out to look for her.”

“I can’t stop you,” our father said.

“I’m going now!” she said.

“I don’t think you should.”

“This is our daughter we’re talking about!”

“Exactly.”

Mom grabbed her car keys and her pocketbook and, nearly catapulting herself behind the wheel, yelled for me to come with her, the way she did sometimes when she didn’t want to be alone. Not that my presence could have given her much in the way of comfort: I was too afraid to say much of anything, and even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have known what to say. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine seemed stupid given that she was exactly out there, in the woods with their ceaseless late-summer chirping and humming noises, with their snakes and frogs and bats and, who knew what, or who, else? There were bad men in the woods, bad men who made you look at their penises, who sometimes made you touch them. We’d been warned against exactly such a bad man some years earlier when a girl whose house was two or three hills beyond our own had come across him, a man in the woods, a man using the path that connected River Lane to Millstone Road, we all used it sometimes, a shortcut.

“Oh God,” my mother now said. “Oh my God.”

I began to cry. Not for Susan, though, or even for Mom. I was crying for myself, for my bruised nipple, and for the punishment that I sensed was in store for me—why, or when, I didn’t know. But it gnawed on me, this sense of coming pain, of future humiliation, so much so that I forgot to tell Mom about what my brother had done, and how Dad had dismissed my complaints, telling me not to be such an actress, that I was worse than Sarah Bernhardt.

We drove around and around, up the Pike, past my sister’s friend who lived on the other side of the creek (hers was one of the houses you could cut through the woods to get to), up and down the empty streets of the half-built development that was soon to be encroaching on the quiet of our own quiet house, the funny, oddly-designed, drafty house perched at the top of an impossibly steep driveway that we children loved to sled down, during those winters when there was enough snow. The house we would soon to leaving, selling to someone else. The “For Sale” sign had not yet gone up—my parents were waiting until the following spring—but already they were talking to realtors, thinking about moving vans and boxes. And we were all making plans—for new furnishings, for curtains and wall paper and throw rugs. My own room was to be decorated in shades of pale white and deep yellow, with slashes of brown. Just a week earlier, Mom had taken me with her to the paint store, where we’d stared at fabric and wallpaper books for hours. Now she said: “What if she’s dead?”

“She isn’t dead,” I said.

“But what if she is?”

“She isn’t.”

And I really didn’t think she was—dead, that is, or even in danger, though I did think she was crazy, risking not only our father’s wrath but also a full night spent in the woods, where if she was lucky she’d find a comfortable enough place, perhaps on mosses, to spend the night — and had she even thought far enough ahead to pack a blanket or a sleeping bag? Knowing my sister, the answer was “no." Knowing my sister, she hadn’t even taken a change of clothes, or a book, or a flashlight.

But I was wrong. When we found her, about an hour later, curled up on the poured concrete floor of what was to be her room in the New House, she had with her a lantern, canteen, pillow, sleeping bag, and her bookbag, packed with the books she’d need for school the next day, a change of clothes, and a hairbrush. There was still no running water in the New House, no plumbing at all, but when we found her there, reading by the light of a lantern she’s scurried up among our brother’s Boy Scout things, she merely said that she could go in the woods. “I don’t think the squirrels care,” she said.

I don’t know what transpired that night between our parents, only that by the time we got home, the house was dark and everyone was asleep. Mom cried with relief all the way home, and then made Susan take a shower. She’d been right about one thing: Susan was covered with mosquito bites, which were already angry and red. Susan let Mom put her back to bed, promising that she wouldn’t run away again, or at least not unless Dad made her go to synagogue, which, she said, she loathed. “I don’t believe in God, nor in organized religion,” she said, her voice tinged with irony. “And I can’t miss school.”

She didn’t miss school, either, because in the end, Dad agreed that it would be better to allow Susan to go to school than to risk her running away again, either that or what was the more likely scenario, namely, that she’d throw a fit in the middle of the prayer service, and stomp out. In any event, that day, the following day, the Day of Atonement itself, the rest of us went back to synagogue, where I fasted all day, and then into the night, and then into the next day too, fasting and fasting, growing sleepier and sleepier, until it all seemed like a dream.

---

Jennifer Anne Moses is a multigenre author whose many books include Tales from My Closet, Visiting Hours, and Bagels and Grits. Her journalism and essays have appeared frequently in Time magazine, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other publications.

Mental Health

One pill in the morning with breakfast. Orange juice
and oatmeal. Brown sugar melted on top. No coffee.
No cigarettes. One multi-vitamin with extra niacin for
stress relief, natural. One St. John’s Wart and a dab
of Valarian Root extract under the tongue. Hold it
for ten seconds and swallow it down. Leave the house
in the rhythmic rain. Two blocks waiting for the city
bus under the awning of M & H Gas. Two dollar fare
for the next four hours. The crowded seats and broken
black umbrellas against the edge. You can ride all day
if you know the right driver. Half an Ativan under
the tongue for stress relief. Hold it until it dissolves.
Chew the powder from molar to molar. Swallow
the excess down. Ride the rain-soaked streets of fog.
The rising fog and drifting fog that slithers on the lake.
The parking lot fog and cemetery headstones, branches
of maples and swerving commuter cars finding their way
to the fastest lane. The folding doors open and people
continue to climb the lighted stairs. Stop after stop
and the plastic goulashes and shopping bags dripping
with rain. The man behind you selling a rock of crack
to a younger man, homeless. They shake the plastic
bag and all goes on again, normal, with real affection.
Weather and breakfast and Halloween costumes and
where the bus might stop next. Open your backpack
and take out a racquetball. Squeeze it between your
thighs and remember to count your breaths. Think of
your favorite places to hike. The mountains extending
beyond you forever in four different fields of cloud.
Decide to get off the bus and walk. The driver nods
and rain beats down and the uptown businessmen
shuffle beneath the bulbous roof of glass. All your steps
are washed away in the smallest shining flood. Walk
the blocks and count the squares and count the endless
passing cars. The lights are red and liquid gold and fog
continues to touch your legs and search for a way inside
your brain. Your ears, your open mouth, your nose.
It moves itself toward every hole. Open your backpack
and take out a Seroquel, morning and night, for distorted
thoughts and hallucinations. Hold the taste against your
tongue and count your breaths and close your eyes
and remember to watch the graceful gait of mule deer
crossing the ridge. Barely a year old, lonely together,
they move through paintbrush and dew-soaked heather
and alder and aspen and down through larches and gold-
tinted boulders to drink from Railroad Creek. You watch
the cars divide the fog. Water rolls between the lanes.
You cross the K-Mart parking lot, the Lake Street bridge
and drowning lights. You count the weight of every
breath. You know it can’t go on like this. But here you
are. This is life. This is the way your day begins.

---

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL, forthcoming from BOA Editions. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, and The Missouri Review, which selected his poems for their 2013 Editor’s Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. With his brother Anders, he has co-authored two chapbooks, Mercy Songs (Diode Editions) and Two-Headed Boy (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the 2015 Blair Prize. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and teaches poetry at Stanford University.

Flight

September 1981, 3 a.m., Arlington, Texas

I am drunk and walking down the middle of Cooper Street. On my way to the leaf hut where I have been hiding out for a month, I stop beside a late-model BMW. Yuppie bastard, I mutter, then slam the toe of my Tony Lama roach killers into the street side taillight. The sound of shattering plexiglass echoes down the street. A warm glow, akin to orgasm, rises in my chest and dissipates through my limbs. I take out the taillights of the next car, and the next, and the next.

This stretch of FM 157 is lined with restaurants and bars. No latenight refrigerator raiders to flip on porch lights. No dogs to link together a neighborhood chain of barks. The owners of these unlucky cars are nowhere around, having fallen asleep in beds not their own. Before breakfast they will ride back in silence. When they see their wounded cars, they will curse in voices scalded from tonight’s booze and sex.

I glance down at taillight remains scattered like pieces of a broken stained-glass window. They are my declaration of contempt for all self-absorbed, beautiful people who know what they want out of life and are getting it. Each red shard is the initiation of a dialogue across space and time. In this moment, I am in control of—if nothing else—the transmission of a message that will change tomorrow’s water cooler conversations, and edit the stories told to husbands and wives and lovers about what happened tonight.

Countless cars later—I don’t know if it’s been ten minutes or an hour—I am standing on the overpass spanning I-20. The beams of oncoming headlights below me split into horizontal lines, like ones on the TV screen in the opening of the ‘60s show, Outer Limits. I try to recall the narrator’s exact words, but only a few phrases bubble to the surface of my brain’s murky swamp of beer.

“Louder,” I shout to the starless sky. Then, laughing: “If I wish to make it softer, I can tune it to a whisper.”

I control the horizontal, the vertical, speaks an internal voice.

“Yes, that’s the line,” I think.

Lifting up a challenge to the God I no longer claim is there, but Whom I have spent half a lifetime serving, I yell out: “There is nothing you can do to stop me!”

Silence. Proof that He does not exist—or worse, that He does and is ignoring me. Four years ago in seminary I could have answered the accusation with memorized quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas or Paul Tillich.

Now I am only sure of the cold as I work my way north. I spot the familiar deer path leading from a warehouse alley into the woods. Five minutes later I can make out the mound of leaves at the base of a forked tree. It looks like a massive furry creature without head or tail—an alien, yet familiar, species. I push midway between two scrub-oak ribs, and its prickly-skinned door gives way. I crawl inside the beast’s belly. I reseal the opening with clumps of damp leaves. They stick together like freshly picked scabs reapplied to an old wound, the new blood clotting and clinging to the creature’s skin. The outer world disappears.

Spring of 1958, 3rd Grade, Pinckneyville, Illinois

One Sunday afternoon my mother called me in early for supper and told me to sit down on the couch. She said she had something very important to talk to me about. I was worried that I had done something wrong, like the time I drew pictures with captions beneath them in my pocket spiral notebook. I had gotten the biggest lecture of my thenshort life about not wasting the paper my father worked hard to buy, and about how any art other than Christian art is of the devil. Afterwards, she ripped the pages out and flushed them down the toilet.

“We’re going to church tonight.”

“Why? I asked.

We attended every Sunday morning, but I had never been to an evening service.

“Tonight we’re observing The Lord’s Supper. Do you know what that is?”

Of course I knew. I’d heard about it in Sunday School, and read about it in the Bible for as long as I could remember. The bread and the wine symbolized the body and the blood of Christ. Except in The First Baptist Church of Pinckneyville the bread was really tiny, unsalted, square crackers, and the wine was Welch’s grape juice. I’d seen the deacons in a room off the choir room pouring it from the same bottle we had in our refrigerator. Only Catholics used real bread and wine. And they believed in magic. They thought that the baked dough and fermented grapes turned into Christ’s flesh and blood.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.

I checked my mother’s upper lip to gauge what might be coming next. If it was quivering, it meant something bad. I couldn’t see any movement. My stomach relaxed a bit.

“I wanted to have this little talk with you, so you would understand that you are not to take any of the bread or grape juice tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have to be a member of the church in order to take The Lord’s Supper. And to be a church member, you have to be a Christian.”

“What?”

Something had to be wrong. I’d been attending church since I was five years old. Not a member of the church? I was holding back tears.

“That’s right, son. Only people who have become Christians by accepting Jesus into their hearts as their Savior can become members of our church. And only members of our church, The First Baptist Church of Pinckneyville, can take The Lord’s Supper with us. We practice Closed Communion . I think you should talk to Brother Swinbourn. He can explain it better than I can. I also think that it’s time for you to think about becoming a true Christian. He can tell you more about that, too.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Inside my head I saw the word, “No!” as if it were printed on the large billboard that loomed over the Y in the road outside of town, the left branch leading to St. Louis, the right to Mueller Hill Cemetery. The black letters had dried and cracked, having been exposed to the weather for a long time. I imagined tiny flakes breaking off the “N” and the “O” in my brain, travelling through blood vessels that led to my stomach, where they turned it into a dark, hollow cave. Not a member of the church? Not a Christian? Who was I? What was I? I must have been something horribly evil if I wasn’t worthy of drinking the grape juice and eating the crackers with my mother and aunts and uncles and cousins.

That night when the round plate of white crackers, and the silver tray of clinking, miniature glasses of grape juice were passed down our row, I leaned my head forward into my arms crossed on the back of the pew in front of me, scrunched my eyes closed, and arranged red letters inside my head: H-E-L-P! If there were a God, He would know that I needed it. I was eight years old and on my way to Hell because I wasn’t a real Christian.

1955-1959

Once a week, during my first four years in elementary school, my mother picked up the receiver from the cradle of the classic black telephone sitting on the small end table beside our living room’s only chair—overstuffed and covered with a white chenille bedspread to hide its frayed cloth. After “Hello,” and a pause, she spoke into the mouthpiece the words that I knew meant my father was on the other end of the line:

“Where is it from, operator?”

I knew the coded dialogue by heart, as if I had memorized the lines for three actors in a school play: my father’s, the long distance operator’s, and my mother’s.

Mother: “Hello?”

Operator: “Collect call for A.M. Lucas.”

(Code from Dad for “I’m checking in to make sure everything is okay.”)

Mother: “Where is it from operator?”

(Code for “Everything is okay.” If it were not, my mother would have accepted the call.)

Most operators wouldn’t tell where a call was from, so my mother feigned disbelief that A.M. Lucas would be receiving a collect call at this number, and asked the question with a tone of surprise in her voice. Hearing the question was my cue to get up from the floor beneath the open archway that only partially divided the living room from the area where a single bed served both my mother and me, and run to her side. Putting together a puzzle or working on my stamp collection, pasting the commemoratives that my Uncle Jack brought by every week into my Traveler Album with thin, pale-green hinges, was not as exciting as catching the sound of the voice of the man who I was told is my father. I seldom saw him, mostly only heard his gruff voice in conversation with my mother through the operator, because there was no money for long distance phone calls. There was not always money for food, even when my father was working. When there wasn’t, my mother borrowed ten dollars from Aunt Liza who worked at Luke’s Café, or from Aunt Hattie who started collecting Uncle Luther’s Social Security after he burned up in his truck with a load of penny postcards.

Operator: “Barstow, California.”

It could have been “Joplin, Missouri,” or “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” or “Pueblo, Colorado,” or a hundred other places I dreamed of traveling to. Mom’s response usually was:

“Operator, there’s no one here to take that call.”

(Code for a question to my dad—“Is everything okay with you?”)

 Now was the final chance for my mother and father to speak without going through the operator, with the possibility that I might be able to speak to my father myself—ask him when he was coming home, when we could go camping like he had promised for years, and when he was going to buy a house out west in New Mexico or Colorado so we could come live with him, and so I could learn to ride a pony. Usually my father’s response was:

“Just cancel the call, operator.”

(Code for “Everything is okay here.”)

If there had been some reason for my father to talk to my mother, he would have said:

“Tell that party that anyone there can accept this call.”

The operator would then repeat, as if my mother hadn’t heard him:

“Ma’am, my party placing the call says anyone can accept it.”

And then my mother would say:

“Alright, operator, I’ll accept the call.”

I can count on one hand the times my mother accepted a collect call from my father. Most of the time the news was bad—when my father rolled his truck nine times off a cliff and almost died, when my grandmother died and he came home for the funeral, the times my father lost his job. The one time the news was good was when he told my mother that he had bought a nine-year-old pickup truck and was on his way from Farmington, New Mexico to Pinckneyville, Illinois to pack up everything we owned, and move us out into the house he had just bought with his G.I. Bill. That call came the summer of 1959, between my fourth and fifth grade.

But most of the times after my mother hung up the phone, I didn’t think much about my dad, except for the numbers. Seventeen nights at home one year. A year and a half without seeing him after he hitchhiked to New Mexico to find work in the oil fields. Six weeks without a collect phone call from him to let my mother know where he was, if he was even alive. He freighted numbers older than mine. Some as heavy, some heavier. Nine years old, when he hopped a freight train to escape his father’s shovel handle. Five years riding the rails during the depression, making his way to New Orleans where he lived with three prostitutes. Going back home at age fourteen, spending one night. When his father came at him, my father beat him up and cleared out the next morning. Number of times he saw him after that? Zero. The same number of times I felt comfortable in his presence.

The smaller the number the more it weighed. One Purple Heart. One Silver Star. Six Bronze Stars—one for each major campaign he fought in WWII. But Dad’s fourth-grade education plus all his medals couldn’t buy a job in Pinckneyville after my mother pressured him to get out of the army. By the time I came along, my father had gone back on the road as a long-haul trucker. That’s when my mother lost any say in what my father did, where he went, or how long he stayed.

Until the summer of 1959, I had no real memory of my father being around, no memory of his face between visits—only a few pictures of him holding me with his tattooed, truck-driver arms—the faded green outline of my mother’s featureless face on his forearm, and the unreadable military I.D. number on his shoulder. His sergeant-square jaw was always set somewhere between a sarcastic grin and a bark aimed at the world.

What my memory did hold was all the stories my mother told about my father. One of the earliest was about him lighting a cigarette in our kitchen on one of his layovers. I was either four or five years old—not yet in grade school. Evidently he opened a drawer, took out a pack of matches, tore one off, and struck it with a popping sound against the sandpaper strip on the match cover. I looked up at him and said, “Them’s our matches, but you can use ’em.”

I don’t remember how old I was when I realized that Mom told and retold that story less as a cute anecdote about her son, and more as a two-fold put down of her husband. First, that he smoked cigarettes—an anathema to my mother, along with taking a drink of any alcoholic beverage, saying “damn” or “hell,” or taking even a single dance step across the floor—all were of the devil. Second, that he was a stranger to his only son because he wouldn’t take a local job pumping gas or working as a clerk in a store, so he could come home every night and fulfill his fatherly duties.

Once we moved to New Mexico, I anticipated his visits with both excitement and dread. He usually brought me some kind of present that was met with Mom’s disapproval—fire crackers from Texas, cactus candy from Arizona, a postcard or some kind of tchotchke from a trading post or gift shop on route 66 that had an off-color joke or image decaled on it. As soon as Dad was gone, my mother threw them away.

My father always came home in the middle of the night. I knew because of the yelling that woke me up. My parents couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without one of them exploding, setting off the other. Dad referred to my mother as “The War Department,” sometimes even in her presence.

“Can we go to a drive-in movie tonight, Dad?”

“You’ll have to check with The War Department, son.”

She spoke about him, and to him, as if he wasn’t as good as we were in some way. Everything he did seemed repulsive to her, from driving“that old stinking truck,” to reading “those trashy westerns” she found in his duffle bag when she washed his clothes. He would respond with something about “that ole stinking truck” paying the bills, and “those trashy westerns” keeping him from blowing his brains out on the road.

I never could figure out as a child why my parents got married, and I secretly wished they would get a divorce. Or, if not, that Dad would get fed up with Mom’s nit-picking, get in his truck one day and keep on driving, the same way he had left his father for good at the age of fourteen.

I was torn between hating my father like my mother did for shirking his domestic duties, and wanting him to be home, like she said she did. My mother successfully transferred her feelings of abandonment to me, so I easily dismissed him as a father figure, and felt less guilt for my mixed feelings of wanting a father, but not wanting him to come home because I was afraid of him. I dreaded the out of control yelling and throwing of things when he was in our house.

The number I remember most is the number of times I wanted to see him again every time he left—zero. I would open my pocket spiral notebook and write zeros between the blue lines. Such perfect, peaceful numbers. No sharp, jagged edges of feelings on their graceful, curved, event horizons. Round white holes I filled in with my no. 2 pencil. No one, not even I, knew what lay inside their dark centers.

War

The family story is that my father met my mother at Luke’s Café on the square in Pinckneyville the first week of December 1941. My mother and her sister, Liza, were waitresses, who happened to serve my father and an army buddy. The sisters went out with the soldiers. But on their first double date, my father was coupled with Liza. After the date, either the girls talked or the men talked, or both, and the pairing was switched, so that by the 7th, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, my father was interested in my mother. After three dates, they were married on January 7. My father left with the First Armored Division (Old Ironsides), on February 7 for Europe to fight in the war. Quick, neat, and tidy.

An examination of the record, however, does not corroborate all of those dates. The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, my father’s division was stationed at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, having already done maneuvers in Louisiana. They left for Ft. Dix, New Jersey in March of 1942, landing in Ireland in May/June. Knowing that he didn’t leave for the war on February 7 places some of the other facts in the story under doubt.

Even so, their marriage certificate is dated January 7, 1942, and I know that my parents escalated their relationship because of Pearl Harbor. Each of them told me separately that they would have never gotten married had it not been for the fact that they wanted to have sex before Dad left for the war. Southern Baptist religious taboo in rural Illinois against premarital sex was that strong. And even though neither one of them wanted to be married (my mother told me she figured Dad would never return and he told me that he didn’t think my mother would wait for him), they wanted to have sex more. Five and a half years later, when he returned from the war, they were strangers. And once again because of a religious taboo (this time against divorce), they remained married for the rest of their lives, making each other—and me when I came along in 1949—miserable.

Camping in Colorado, my father told me stories no nine-year-old should hear. Shot up in the desert of North Africa, with a gangrenous arm and no food or water for five days, my father wandered until Arabs found him. They tried to feed him but he couldn’t keep anything down. His digestive system had already shut down, along with several of his other organs. They were able to get him to a U.S. Army field hospital, where the doctor began preparing to amputate his arm to save his life. My father, delirious but true to his character, grabbed a nurse and held a knife to her throat, telling the doctor he would kill her if he touched his arm.

They put him in a straitjacket, gave him antibiotics, and he recovered—at least physically—enough to face a court martial in which he was found to be temporarily insane and was shipped back to the front lines. He didn’t tell too many people the story of the padded cell, how he made it through the rest of the war only because of the vodka he drank constantly—who knows where he got it.

The stories he told were mostly dark—how he and his men loaded a group of Germans into the back of a truck with a pitchfork after he shot them for not complying with the order to climb in. How he had been captured very early on in the war, along with a hundred or so other G.I.s. How he decided he wasn’t going to spend the war as a prisoner, so he orchestrated an escape. He was one of only four soldiers who made it out alive. They hid from the Germans, while trying to find their unit—which they never did. Instead they found Patton’s army. Dad stayed with them for a few days before running out on them in the middle of the night because, in his words, “Patton was crazy, and he was going to get me killed for sure.” He eventually made it back to his own division and fought the Germans at Anzio, Salerno, Naples, Kasserine Pass, and other major battles. Dad told me how he had been court martialed three times and won all three. One was after he shot his captain.

“He was a ninety-day wonder,” my dad said.

That was the slang term for college graduates with three months of training before they were made officers and sent into battle. My dad didn’t have much use for them before this particular captain. And after he panicked under fire, standing up and yelling, “Every man for himself, ”my father loathed them. My father shot him in the back like a common deserter as he ran away. He marshaled the troops, saving lives in the ensuing panic.

Of course, the shooting had to be investigated. At his general court martial, after he told his story, corroborated by witnesses, Staff Sergeant Lucas was stripped of his stripes and sent back into battle yards from where the shooting had taken place. It would, as it turned out, not be the only time he had to re-earn his rank.

One of the most memorable stories he told me took place when he was the sergeant over a POW camp. It wasn’t clear to me if his immediate superior was stationed at the camp or not. It was common, I suppose, for a non-com to be in charge of groups of men and operations when the commissioned officers had been killed in battle.

A new group of prisoners had been shipped in with a German officer who had two things my father detested: 1) an attitude of non-compliance that was stirring up all of the other prisoners; and 2) a German police dog the officer insisted remain with him. My father felt he was losing control (something he never allowed), and so he decided to demonstrate his authority. He lined all the prisoners up and ordered the officer to step forward. He announced that if the officer didn’t change his attitude, he would shoot him and bury him outside the fence in plain sight of his men. He figured that this would prompt him to demonstrate an even more rebellious attitude, which it did.

That night, asleep in their compound, the German prisoners were awakened to the sound of several shots. The next morning their officer was missing. When they looked outside the fence to their compound, they saw a freshly dug grave, with the officer’s hat on the end of his rifle, stuck at the head of the grave.

Someone reported the incident and in a day or two my father saw the dust of a general’s jeep making its way to his camp. He was relieved of his position and told that he would be court martialed for executing a German officer. My dad asked what proof he had for the crime. “Right out there, that grave where you buried him,” said the general. My father told the general that loose dirt was no proof; only a body was proof.

So the general ordered some men to go out and dig it up. What they found was quite a surprise. It wasn’t the German officer, but rather his police dog, shot and buried in the grave.

What my father had done was to sneak out the German officer in the middle of the night, transferring him to another POW camp away from his men, where he couldn’t do as much damage. The general, embarrassed at being shown up, got back into his jeep and ordered his driver to turn around and drive away, without saying a word to my father. My father said that the general never bothered him again, leaving him alone to run the POW camp his own way.

1956, Pinckneyville, Illinois

“Why are there no Negroes in my school?” I asked my mother.

There had been several in my kindergarten class in Ohio.

“They’re not allowed to spend the night in Pinckneyville,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“The last one found in town after sundown was tarred and feathered,

and ridden out of town on a rail.”

I wouldn’t hear the term “sundown town” for a decade or more, and I had no idea what the “rail” part meant. But I could sort of picture someone being dipped into the big bucket of smelly, hot tar that was parked in front of the McElvaine’s house across the street last summer when they had a new roof put on. Would people actually dunk someone in that steaming tar? And then what? Take turns throwing feathers on him? Chicken feathers? Where did they get them? From real chickens? From inside pillows? How could he breathe? Did he die?

Like Mary in the Bible, I thought, after the angel appeared to her to announce that she would have a son even though she wasn’t married, I pondered these things in my heart.

I was born a Southern Baptist. In the 1950s in Pinckneyville, Southern Baptist was the most popular name brand that religion was sold under. I say “religion,” rather than Christianity, because of course in Pinckneyville if you were religious, you were a Christian. America was a Christian nation, and there was nowhere more American than southern Illinois. Every morning in school we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag and to the Christian flag, concluding with “and to the Savior, for whose kingdom it stands, one brotherhood, uniting all mankind in service and love.”

“Was it because God put a mark on them?” I asked my mother a few days later.

“On who, honey?”

“On Negroes. Brother Swinbourn said that God put a mark on Cain after he slew Abel, and that if anyone found him, he should kill him. Jamie says that the mark turned him black.”

“I don’t know.”

I wanted to ask whether Jews and other people who didn’t believe in Jesus, or people who didn’t believe in God at all, were allowed to spend the night in Pinckneyville, since our preacher said the Jews killed Jesus. And the Bible said that if you didn’t believe in God, you were an infidel—something that didn’t sound good. But I didn’t ask any of those questions. I figured I already knew the answers. Jews wouldn’t be allowed to spend the night in Pinckneyville any more than colored people—probably any color, but black for sure.

Years later, when I was thirteen or so, my mother gave me a pre-dating lecture (not that I was anywhere close to being ready to date, she emphasized). But she let me know in no uncertain terms that it was against God’s law for people of different races to marry. “All people are equal in the eyes of God,” she said. “But God never meant for people to marry someone other than their kind. The same thing goes for church. Negroes should worship with negroes. Whites with whites. And don’t think about marrying someone that isn’t a Baptist—preferably Southern Baptist. Certainly not someone who is not a Christian. The Bible says not to be “unequally yoked together.”

I wondered if God thought that my mother and father were yoked together at all.

Lesson

When I was eight years old, my father taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands and how to satisfy a woman sexually, all in the same conversation.

That night in bed I visualized would-be attackers writhing on the ground, gasping for breath from a single blow to the hollows of their necks that had collapsed their windpipes. I would be the hero for saving my mother or Faith Christenson, my classmate with the shiniest blond hair I’d ever seen. I couldn’t form a picture in my mind of doing to Faith what my father had told me “big girls” liked, but I got a tingling below my stomach that I’d never felt, thinking about how she would kiss me for saving her life.

I didn’t think it strange that my father told me how to take care of myself, and how to take care of women. When he was nine, he lived on his own and had learned these things the hard way. He told me it was time I learned them, and that it was his duty to teach me. I had no way of knowing that there might have been another reason, that he might have told me sooner than he had planned.

A few days after the lessons in self-defense and sex, I was playing in the front yard with neighborhood kids, and the screen door squeaked open. When I looked up, my father was standing beside me with his army-green, duffle bag over his shoulder. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the short, one-sided conversation went something like this:

“Dad’s got to go find work, son, but I’ll be back for you and your mother.”

These words I do remember verbatim:

“You’re the man of the family now.”

And then he turned and walked down West South Street toward the highway that led to the rest of the world. I didn’t realize that he was hitchhiking west. I didn’t know that in a few days I would forget his ruddy, freckled face, his red hair, his massive arms, his graveled voice. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t miss him. I just went back to playing with my friends after he shook my hand, as if he were walking to Luke’s Café for a cup of coffee, or to the newsstand for a pack of Lucky Strikes, and would be home for supper. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t see him again for a year and a half.

To the Letter

My mother carried her trauma differently than my father. Hers was hidden behind a Mona Lisa smile that presented the same impenetrable flat surface to all observers, never truly engaging anyone, not even herself. Her pain rarely escaped through her lips. Instead, it settled into every muscle and joint, prohibiting her body from enjoying any movement. Likewise, the air she inhaled was never sweet. I always felt she was the happiest, celebrating her despair from behind a cold washcloth laid across her eyes, lying in a dark room alone, moaning softly to prove that the shot of pain killer her doctor had given her was no match for her migraine.

My father’s roiling turmoil was never completely out of sight. The seething lava pooled inside the rims of his eye sockets cast a permanent red glow on his forehead and cheeks, accentuating deep lines that threatened to collapse into a life-threatening caldera at any moment. The volcano that was my father would remain dormant for days. When my mother started climbing on him, he would erupt without warning, and everyone within range (mainly me, his only child) became a target for the explosion of steam and magma hotter than the inside of the sun. And then it was over.

Both of my parents told me more about themselves than any nineyear old should know. My mother carried the heavy load in her body of seeing her father physically abuse my grandmother. Decades later, my  therapist would explain to me that my mother tried to fix her relationship to the archetypal masculine that was shattered by her father’s abuse by fixing Dad— meaning taking out all of her anger against her  father on my  father, mostly passively by finding fault with everything he did, but occasionally actively during arguments after he exploded. Then my father would leave, and the only person my mother had to fix was me.

My mother constructed a box with a maze inside it that I had to run each waking moment. Like a child playing a video game, she lost herself in me. Although I never doubted her motivation to provide the needed structure  in my life that she lacked as a child, from my vantage point, she had changed the “u” to an “i” and the result was stricture.  Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year she only loaned me to my teachers. But with the ringing of the final bell, I was scooped up and placed back into the Gladys Lucille Lucas regimented control box.

Mother only tolerated people if they ran the maze, meaning that they believed and behaved the way she did, the way she had been taught all her life by the Southern Baptist Church. Deviate in the slightest from her way, like Mormons believing that drinking coffee was a sin, and she’d ignore you. A lot, like Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to salute the flag or pledge allegiance to it, and she’d run you off the porch with her broom.

Each person had to avoid both sins of commission and omission in order to remain in good standing. Except for me. I couldn’t do anything bad enough to get thrown out. But I could be relegated to one of the box’s corners if I didn’t run the maze exactly right. My mother applied the letter of the law equally to everyone. The punishment meted out was just different with me. Everyone else would be ignored, cut off. I would have to endure my mother’s helicopter presence. And her interrogations.

Every evening after school, the first turn in the maze involved reporting everything that happened at school that day, including what I had observed about my cousins. Then my mother checked my lunch box, and I reported on how everything tasted. If any items were uneaten, I had to explain why, and sit down right then at the kitchen table and eat them. Waste was not something my mother tolerated.

After doing homework, I had to let her check it over. If it passed inspection, I could go outside and play for a few minutes before supper. If she found anything amiss, I had to make it perfect right then.

After supper, I was never allowed to go outside on a school night, but I could read or play with one toy at a time—a different toy each evening—before putting it away in the closet. Then we did the Bible reading for the day, discussed it, and I said my prayers before going to bed. We had no TV until I was nine. No, that’s not right.

 We had a large Muntz TV in a beautiful wood cabinet with doors that opened up to reveal the blank, gray-green screen that never lit up, because we could not afford to replace the broken picture tube. I would sit on the floor before this electronic god, open the heavy doors to its inner sanctum, and worship. Like the God I was taught to pray to, this one didn’t answer either.

But I loved pretending. I loved the mushy glub-glub sound the channel changer made, and the way the on/off knob had so much play in it that I had to guess when I would feel the click that would have powered up the tubes, had it been working. Instead, that knob switched on my imaginary programs—World War II battles in which I sacrificed my life for my men and was shipped home in a wooden box covered with the U.S. flag, my fourth grade classmates standing at attention during the funeral, while a general tossed a Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor into my casket. Or I would pretend being in a wagon train to New Mexico, where my mother and father and I homesteaded, raising all the food we needed. I would catch wild horses and break them to the saddle, but keep their lively spirits to the amazement of all the townspeople.

Sundays were different. After Sunday School, Worship Service, and lunch, I was allowed to go outside and play (usually by myself), until it started getting dark or too cool for my health. I caught honeybees in Welch’s grape jelly jars, punched holes in the top with a screwdriver so they could get air. I would catch a frog, place it in a jar with a cotton ball soaked with ether from a can Dad would use to start his diesel truck in cold weather. Throwing the jar as high as I could with a spin, I would let it land in the soft grass over and over, until the frog lay limp. I would then dissect it, and identify every organ, before burying it all in the narrow space between the backside of the garage and the fenced-in cornfield back of our house.

I loved Sundays. It felt like I got to come out of the box for a few hours and take deep breaths of fresh air, move around and stretch my muscles the way those frogs in the jars couldn’t. The way I couldn’t when Monday morning came, and my brain went numb, and my legs were stuck in molasses as I tried to get out of my dreams and out of my bed. Before I had to climb back into the maze.

Wall of Fire

 A few days after not taking the Lord’s Supper I heard my mother talking on the telephone to my Aunt Liza:

“Terry’s reached the age of accountability  and he’s under conviction. Please pray for his soul.”

Later that day, Jamie, who had walked the aisle for Jesus the previous winter and had been baptized (he got to drink the grape juice and eat the crackers), babysat me while my mother walked down to the store.

“What was it like?” I asked.

“What?”

“Getting saved.”

“I saw a wall of fire. And Jesus—He was standing on the other side of the flames—called to me: Jamie, come on over to my side.  Over and over, He said that. And so I walked right into the fire. I felt a hand grab hold of me, and the next thing I knew I was on the other side with Jesus.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Now I’m going to Heaven and will never have to face the fires of Hell again.”

“I don’t want to face those fires.”

“Then He’ll call you, too. You just have to listen for Him and then do what He says. He talks to me all the time, now.”

“For real? You actually hear Him talking with your ears? Not just inside your head?”

“Sure—all real Christians do.”

The Lie

The morning after my conversation with Jamie, I got up at 6 a.m. and climbed into the big overstuffed chair beside the bed my mother and I slept in. The bed barely fit into a recessed space off the living area allocated for sleeping. The chair was fully in the living area.

I closed my eyes and waited to hear Jesus’s voice calling me. Nope. I wasn’t doing it right. I scrunched my eyes really tight and clenched my teeth as hard as I could—I would focus with my entire being, so He would know I was ready to hear his voice. Nothing. Maybe it didn’t work sitting in a chair. I dropped down to the floor and pressed my face into the dusty rug. Feeling the course fibers on my nose almost made me sneeze.

“Help me,” I whispered again.

Still nothing.

Every morning before my mother woke up, I repeated this procedure with variations. But I never heard Jesus calling my name the way He had called Jamie’s, or the way he had called out Samuel’s name in the middle of the night as I learned in Sunday School.

 A few days later, my mother’s friend, Helen, came over to our house for coffee. My mother drank a couple of pots a day, as did my father when he was home. I had been introduced to coffee, blowing on the steaming brew in the chrome cup of my father’s Stanley thermos and slurping a sip to test the temperature, before handing it to him.

I went into “the bedroom” to play, but I could still hear every word that Helen and my mother were saying. They must have forgotten I was on the floor on the other side of the bed, out of sight.

“Terry’s not yet a Christian,” my mother told Helen.

I had taken about as much as I could about not being a Christian, so I stood up and walked to the entryway between the living room and bedroom.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“What?” said my mother.

“I’m a real Christian. I heard Jesus calling me and I invited him into my heart.”

“When, honey?” my mother said in surprise.

A couple of weeks ago at 6:00 a.m. sitting right there in that chair.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” my mother said.

I don’t remember exactly what I said. But I remembered what Evangelist Angel Martinez said in our winter revival meeting: “Salvation doesn’t come from the church, it’s between every individual person and God.” I regurgitated his line the best I could. Evidently it worked, because my mother came over and gave me a big hug.

“I’ll schedule an appointment with Brother Swinbourn, so you can tell him the good news,” she said. “You can make your public profession of faith next Sunday.”

After walking down the aisle for Jesus the following Sunday, standing at the front of the auditorium, the entire congregation walked by and gave me “the right hand of Christian fellowship.” When Jamie got to me, he stopped and whispered in my ear.

“You heard Him, didn’t you?”

My silence sealed my guilt. I would grapple with my lie for the next twenty years. Every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, during the invitation service, I wanted to run down the aisle, stop the music, and confess to the congregation that I hadn’t heard the voice of Jesus calling me when I was eight years old. That I hadn’t really accepted Him into my heart. That I wasn’t a real Christian.

I didn’t know what it was in me that caused me to lie. I could have just told my mother that I wasn’t ready yet to be a Christian, that I didn’t hear Jesus calling me. Plenty of church kids weren’t saved until they were teenagers. Then, sitting in a revival meeting, where Angel or Homer  Martinez preached on God’s plan of salvation from the book of Romans, and told stories of teenagers who didn’t know Jesus as Savior being killed in car crashes, they would feel the Holy Ghost urging them to go forward and fall on their knees and beg God to save them. But somehow, I had gotten the idea that there was a lot more riding on my being saved at an early age than just my own escape from Hell, as important as that was.

I sensed a cloud of unseen witnesses surrounding me, like the one the Bible talks about—generations of my ancestors who had been failures at life, waiting to see if I would be the next in a long line of failures, or if I would give the futility of their lives some meaning by accomplishing something extraordinary for God, like Albert Schweitzer who spent his life as a medical missionary to Africa. I figured I needed to balance out all the bad things my family had done.

I guessed that a greater good would be served by fulfilling the expectations of my parents and my ancestors, than by admitting that I didn’t hear anything or feel anything when I prayed to God. Actually, I did feel something—shame. A shame that weakened me so much that, more than my own integrity, I wanted the praise of my mother, and for her to be proud of me, so we could measure up to her sisters and their children, all of whom had already secured a place in God’s Kingdom.

Years later, back from Vietnam, sitting in Luke’s Café one night, Jamie would hear a voice in the deep fryer telling him kill to his waitress. Although he would be unable to catch her, he would run naked across the tabletops with a butcher knife, and spend the rest of his life in the state hospital in Anna, Illinois.

M.I.A.

 About a year after my father left, my mother called me into the living room and said she had something to tell me.

“I haven’t heard from your father in a month, and I’m going to have to call the police, because no one knows where he is. No collect calls. No money. Nothing.”

Her voice broke when she said “Nothing.”

I had secretly fantasized that my father would never come home, and now my wish was coming true. My stomach hurt and I felt a warm glow in my chest at the same time. I knew that Jesus wouldn’t approve of my being happy about the prospect of my father never coming back, but it really didn’t matter because I was going to double Hell anyway for lying about being saved.

We quit going to church. My mother told me she was tired of people asking, “How’s Mike?” or “When’s Mike coming home?” She hadn’t told anyone about him missing except for her sisters—my Aunt Hattie, Aunt Liz, and Aunt Vera—and her two brothers, Uncle Al and Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack came around more often, and when he did, he and my mother would go into the other room and speak in whispers. I knew something was really wrong, but I didn’t feel like it was, because nothing had changed for me. Except for the way my mother was acting—something I learned my mother’s family (the West family), called “the West way.”

Aunt Hattie held to “the West way” more than the others. My mother had told me how her husband Luther had burned up in a truck hauling penny postcards. He swerved off the highway to save a family whose car was stalled around a blind curve. His truck went over an embankment, exploded, and he burned to death along with all those postcards.

The night of the accident, Aunt Hattie called her sisters—Liza, the youngest, Vera, the oldest, and my mom, Gladys, the closest to her in every way. I’d heard the story so many times from both of them, I knew some of what Aunt Hattie said to my mom, by heart.

“Gad?” (What all her siblings called her).

“Yes?”

“Luther’s died, but don’t tell anyone.”

“What? How?”

“Burned up in a truck full of penny postcards.”

And then before Aunt Hattie hung up, she repeated:

“Don’t tell anyone.”

One day when I came home from school my mother was crying again, and I figured my father had been found dead. But, no, the New Mexico State Police had found him alive, out of work, living with a friend—Noel Ride—in a small trailer in a remote area of the northwestern New Mexico oil fields. My mother told me that as soon as he got another job, and saved up enough money, my father was moving us out to New Mexico to live with him. My father did get another job, and saved enough money to buy a nine-year old pick-up truck. He used his G.I. Bill to buy a three-bedroom, two-bath house (what would we ever do with two bathrooms?), and drove back in the summer of 1959 to move us out west. My mother never again mentioned anything about my father’s disappearance. My stomach aches and migraine headaches got worse the closer the time came. But so did the warm glow in my chest, thinking about moving to the land of John Wayne and Geronimo, thinking about those horses still running wild in New Mexico that my dad had told me we would see.

And remembering that he told me I might get one of my own.

December 25, 1958, Pinckneyville, Illinois

My best Christmas would be a tie between the first one in New Mexico, when my father gave me a genuine Stetson cowboy hat, Justin Wellington boots (I pretended they were cowboy boots), an embroidered cowboy shirt, vest, jeans, and a Colt Cap Gun Revolver with leather belt and holster. It was between that Christmas and the last one we spent in Illinois when I got my Western Flyer bicycle. Since my dad was present when I got the cowboy outfit, that Christmas gets extra points. I’m told I would give him a hug after opening each package. But my dad was not yet part of my everyday life in 1958, and the desire to expand my territory, exploring distant vistas on a sleek two-wheeler that was all mine, had filled my fantasies for so long that I have to give my Western Flyer Christmas the nudge.

Even though I remember the details of each article of cowboy clothing that I wore playing in the painted hills of New Mexico—the precise fold of the felt hat, how my index finger perfectly fit the middle groove, and my middle finger and thumb gripped the ridges formed by it when I took it off to wipe my brow, wet from the moisture that accumulated beneath its brown sweat band, the way those boots rubbed my legs raw on long walks down arroyos with sand that pulled against the stride of my sixty-pound frame, as if I were making my way on a planet with double the gravity of earth—nothing in my eight years of living compared with the freedom of coasting down Randolph Street, blocks away from our little duplex, pretending I would never go home. I would glance in the window of Edward’s Grocery store, seeing my reflection, hair blowing in the wind, knowing that, for the moment, I had harnessed the wild force of gravity. And that only I determined where I peddled, coasted, turned, and stopped.

My bike had been “under” our Christmas tree—which in reality was really beside it—for a several days. My mother, I later learned, paid the owner of the Western Flyer store an extra $2 to assemble it. Of course, there was no way to wrap it, so my mom just put a bow on it, as well as an invisible no-enter zone, to keep it off limits until the big day. On Christmas Eve, I couldn’t keep my hands off it any longer, so my mother, in a rare instance of exception-making, allowed me to take it outside and ride it on the sidewalk in the dark, down to the corner and back—one time. Then I had to return it to its place beside the tree, and wait until Christmas morning to possess it fully. Of course, I never went to sleep, and at 6:00 a.m., unable to contain myself any longer, I woke up my mother, and before breakfast she let me take my real first solo ride.

The frame was red, with a built-in headlight on the front fender and a red reflector on the rear. It had a chrome bookrack over the rear fender as well, streamers coming out of the red rubber grips on the chrome handle bars, and red reflectors on the silver metal pedals. Whitewall tires were the only other accessory, and they set off the silver spokes and pinstriped chain guard in typical 50s style. I was the envy of my friends, neighbors, and cousins. Never did any parent score more brownie points from spending $29.99 than did my mother when she bought what was the most beautiful bike I had ever seen. Beauty, I learned, however, can bring out not only the best in people but also the worst.

Since first grade, Eddie Heavener, although not the brightest boy, had maintained more status than I because he owned a bike. By fourth grade, even though his bike still was in operating condition, it was old, paint-chipped, and rusted through in several spots on the fenders. But since not every boy in our neighborhood had the luxury of a working bicycle, Eddie maintained a modest level above me in the pecking order. Christmas afternoon, I met up with Eddie in the schoolyard, where the in crowd jumped curbs. We rode around the streets for a while, side-byside. Presently, we turned into my yard for water and a snack.

My mother asked Eddie what he got for Christmas. His answer surprised me. “A new bike.”

“Really?” my mother replied.

I hadn’t heard this either, so I was suspicious. My mother pursued the conversation.

“Why aren’t you riding it?”

“I’m saving it so it won’t get scratched. That way I can have it nice and shiny when I get older.”

“I see,” said my mother.

Eddie was in deep now and couldn’t find his way out.

“What color is it?”

“Purple,” replied Eddie, “Purple, with sparkles in the paint, and diamond

chips in the fenders.”

“Wow, I’d sure like to see that bike,” my mom said.

“Oh, I can’t bring it outside, I don’t want it to get messed up.”

On and on the conversation went, Eddie digging the hole deeper by the second. I was embarrassed for him, and ashamed of my mother because she was pushing him so hard.

“Let’s go for another ride,” I said.

After we got around the corner, Eddie burst out crying and admitted that he had made up the story about the bicycle. I learned a lesson that day about envy and pride. I also learned that my mother had a streak of something dark inside her. Something I did not understand. Later when my mother told the story to Jamie, I laughed with her. That’s when I  knew that something dark lived inside me as well.

My bicycle riding territory had boundaries. Water Street to the north, and South Main Street to the east. The railroad tracks ran diagonally through town from the southeast to the northwest. They were my territory’s southern and western borders. My mother made it clear that if I went outside the boundaries, something bad would happen.

“Don’t forget not to go outside the boundaries.”

How could I forget? Every time I left, no matter how many times a day, every time I got back, even for just a drink of water, I was quizzed about where I had gone and whether or not I had gone “outside the boundaries.” I never did.

I would ride up to them, stopping at the railroad crossing and rolling my front tire up to the first railing, just shy of touching it, to see how it felt. How those green lawns on the other side pulled at me.

I would ride my bike down West South Street to South Main (the highway that went out of town, south to Carbondale, and all the way to Kentucky, if you took it far enough). I would stop at the stop sign on the corner where Rick Thurman lived in the big house on my left, look up the street toward the town square and down to where the road disappeared into cornfields and adventures I could only imagine.

Then I would do a U-turn and go back up past our house to the other end of my territory, where the railroad tracks cut through Jamie’s yard, and ride as far as I could up the embankment to the tracks, and sit and watch the coal cars go by that Jamie regularly ran alongside, grabbing a ladder, and scrambling to the top of an open hopper to get rocks for his collection, before jumping down just in time to land in his yard, before the car disappeared around the bend.

Like a cat, I patrolled my territory. Several times a day, I made sure the boundaries were still there. I fantasizing about crossing them. For weeks I went through this ritual of hearing my mother’s voice—“where did you ride?”—thinking about crossing the line, but not doing it. Until I did.

One day while riding on a street that paralleled West South Street on the southern side of my territory, I came to South Main Street and stopped, like I always did, preparing to do a U-turn. I looked to the left. No cars approaching. To the right—none there either. I looked across the street at houses and yards and trees I had never ridden past. The next thing I knew, I was through the intersection, peddling fast. It was the first time I remember consciously breaking through a limit that either one of my parents had set.

It was exhilarating. The houses were huge. The trees taller than any I had ever seen. The grass, the flowers, more lush than paradise. I was coasting down the largest hill I had ever been on—I seem to remember even taking my hands off the handlebars—when I looked to the right and saw my Uncle Jack standing in the front yard of a house. “What was he doing here”? I thought. He waved. I turned my head away and immediately turned left at the next intersection, continuing down the hill. I was so much in a panic that I didn’t bother stopping at the stop sign. I saw a car approaching from my left, but I was traveling so fast I couldn’t stop. I ran into the front right fender of the car, flipped over the handlebars, across the hood of the car, and onto the pavement. The man and woman in the car immediately jumped out. I picked myself up and went around to retrieve my bike.

“Are you all right?” they asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, not looking at them, so they couldn’t identify me later.

“We should take you to a doctor!”

“No, I’m fine,” I insisted, as I pedaled away, conscious that I had left their fender scraped and dented, but thinking only of how I could get out of this mess.

I was around the corner before they could get back into their car. After a block or so, I pulled over into some trees to hide. It was then that I noticed that my handlebars had been knocked sideways. I straightened them—thank goodness they weren’t permanently damaged. I checked the rest of my bike, and found that there appeared to be no additional damage. It took a while for me to ride home. I was gathering myself, thinking about all of the possible consequences to my crossing the boundary.

When I pulled into our driveway, Uncle Jack’s old painting van was in front of our house. Somewhere inside me I knew I was doomed. But I was not ready to give up. I walked in all cheerful, acting as if nothing untoward had happened.

Uncle Jack and my mother were sitting on the couch. At first they didn’t speak, taking their measure of me. Then my mother began:

“Where have you been?”

“Oh, just out riding,” I said.

And then the dreaded question:

“Did you stay within the boundaries?”

“Of course,” I said.

“That’s strange,” said my mother. “Because your Uncle Jack says he saw a boy riding past his house that looked a lot like you, on a bike that looked a lot like yours.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“He says that he waved at you and you turned away.”

“Nope, must have been someone else.”

Then Uncle Jack started in on me. My mother jumped in and they took turns grilling me. I was standing in the center of what now felt like a courtroom. I was in front of the prosecuting attorney and the judge, with no one to defend me. But no matter how many times they cross-examined me, I held to my story. And then they stopped, and just stared at me again.

That did it. I could deal with their accusations. They were something I could push against. But I couldn’t deal with this—this cold silence. A silence where, instead of God’s wrath pointing its fiery finger in my face, and naming aloud my sin the way it had with Moses in The Ten Commandments—there was only a blank space that offered neither resistance, nor help. My upper lip started quivering. I began sniffling. Then I let out a wail that exploded through the house and burst through every open window.

“I lied!”

I ran into my mother’s arms. After a good lecture, all was forgiven.

But I was grounded. The next time I got to ride my bike, I stayed within the boundaries. And I never crossed them on my bicycle ever again.

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Terry Lucas is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2016), and In This Room (CW Books, 2016), in addition to two prize-winning chapbooks, Altar Call (2013) and If They Have Ears to Hear (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2012). His poems, reviews, and essays have been published in scores of national journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Cider Press Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Great River Review, Green Mountains Review, Prime Number Magazine, among others. Most recently his poems can be found in Alaska Quarterly Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Star 82 Review. His essay, “The Crack in Everything: Metaphor and Love in the Poetry of Alicia Ostriker,” appears on the companion website to Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Ostriker (University of Michigan Press, 2018). His essay, "The Future of American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century: Trajectories of Content and Form,” appearing in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, is currently being translated into Russian. Formerly the co-executive editor of Trio House Press, Terry is now a free-lance poetry coach, and the current Poet Laureate of Marin County California (2019-2021). More about Terry and his work can be found at www.terrylucas.com and on his blog at www.thewideningspell.blogspot.com.