Deborah Voorhees' Writing Corner

Excerpt from "Where the Rainbow Waits for Rain"

2009-06-17T13:19:00.003-05:00

Where the Rainbow Waits for Rain

By Deborah Voorhees

Days of riding where there rode no soul save he… – Cormac McCarthy

Chapter 1

1967

“Father had a long, quick stride. For every step he took I had to take four, and still he was always a few steps ahead. Catching up to him was like trying to catch the vanishing point on a line of telephone poles. No matter how fast I ran, he was always just out of reach.”
All around the dark-eyed girl, structures made of brick and rock and mortar and adobe and steel and glass dot this baked corner of the earth, a giant rock garden filled with yuccas and prickly pears and sand and more sand – all in varying shades of browns and greens – all in varying stages of thirst.
The Franklin Mountains divide the city east and west, while the Rio Grande cuts through the southern and western borders. The desert, with its dunes and precipices, proves an inconstant lover, altering its shape to suit the whims of the wind – as a wife is to shape herself into her husband’s image, or so says Rachel’s father.
The smatterings of wild grama grasses and tumble weeds assume the pale color of a skinned-coyote hide, bleached from hanging in the sun. Rain rarely touches this border town, leaving it sparsely vegetated and with far too little adhesive to bind the sands that lift and swirl at the slightest gust. Even a man’s shuffle can cause a faint swirl about the ankles of his boots.
When the winds are high, as they were last night, dust clouds blind as surely as any snow blizzard. Even the sanctity of the home can’t escape a storm’s intrusiveness. The powder seeps into cracks in walls, windows, doors, leaving no orifice inviolate.
The dust falls not with the speed and weight of raindrops but rather ethereally like soot, settling on everything and everyone not in motion. Each particle joins large and small drifts, which form even amid the creases and folds of those who sit in one place too long. To Rachel this brittle spot on the globe seems in a constant state of surprise that anyone would opt to stop here let alone build and stay.
Still she, like her father, has been seduced by this exotic and even erotic city, a desolate beauty that most must acquire a taste for like a sweet vintage port. Here, the lyrical language of Spain mingles with a somewhat bastardized version of the King’s English. The dark-skinned natives, the Isleta Indians, still paint their faces and dance the dances of centuries ago. Colorful serapes, adobe homes, red-tiled roofs are scattered about. In the spring, the prickly pears bloom crimson sunsets, and when the rains do come, green covers the valley and the Rio Grande swells. The sky is expansive and blue, blue, blue. And then there are those dark-eyed Mexico girls, whose veins pump the blood of the Aztecs and Spaniards, the conquered and the conquerors.
Rachel resembles these beauties more closely than her freckled ancestors. The slight crook of her nose and architectural cheek bones typify the people. This dusty child balances on the raised edge of a 1951 Dodge truck bed, where a mess of rattle snakes lay in a wire-mesh cage. Their scaly bodies entwine and tangle on top, beneath and amid each other like a mess of worms thrown in a coffee can for fish bait. Her moist bare feet squeak as she slides them against the metal, placing one foot in front of the other as if it were a tight rope.
She slips, jostling the cage. In unison, a dozen heads strike at the mesh. Rachel watches their frenzy with no more concern than she’d give to a cage of harmless rabbits. She has heard this sound many times before.
‘‘Rattlers go blind this time of year, striking at anything.’’ Or at least that’s what Rachel’s Daddy says. Perhaps they ain’t literally blind, she figures, but they’ve been hibernating in their dens since fall, and they surely come out hungry.
The bell, hanging from the gun shop’s door, jingles. As it swings open, her father yells out, ‘‘get down off of there. Behave like a lady. And put your shoes back on.’’ Before he had spoken all the words the owner walks in from the back of the store holding up another gun. Her father’s last few words fade as he steps back inside to look. Rachel, who has her back to the door, teeters on the truck’s edge with acrobatic precision. She understands the advantages to adding tension to her performance. Then, with equal precision, she springs upward and does a cartwheel off the truck. Her dress flies up and then swirls as she spins to face the now empty spot where her father once stood. Her expression that says, ‘‘Tat tam!’’ melts into disappointment.
She plops down on the curb in front of the gun shop. Her black braids fall into her lap, as she pokes her elbows into her knees and rests her chin on her palms. The El Paso desert sand has powdered her brown legs, brazenly spread with no regard for the exposed cotton triangle flashing beneath her pinafore. Her pout turns into that vacant far off look that only a truly bored child can muster.
Rachel would rather be doing anything other than sit here by herself. It’s not that she doesn’t cherish her time with her father. Quite the opposite. She jealously guards each second with him. The way she figures it is that gun her daddy’s holding is stealing what she wants most. Perhaps, somewhere in her eight-year-old mind, she knows her time with him is almost up.
The door’s bell jingles, again. Rachel spins around, hopeful her father’s attention will be hers. A tall, slender man walks outside. He musses Rachel’s hair as he strides toward his plain green Ford, similar to the unmarked cars policemen drive. And yes, “policemen’’ is correct; it’s still a few years before the feminists revolution questions such patriarchal terms – at least in this town and in this family. Rachel and her father have never seen a woman in uniform, and in all likelihood no one with breasts has worn a badge in this place of pick-up trucks and low-riders. There’s far too much machismo on both sides of the border. Oh, perhaps a dispatcher has been estrogen heavy, but not an honest-to-God-boy-in-blue who straps a piece on his hip and yells “spread ‘em.” TV cops are still the likes of the dourer Sergeant Joe Friday on Adam Twelve. Mod Squad’s Julie won’t come into Rachel’s living room for several more years.
“You’re gonna grow up into a real looker, Miss Rachel,” says the man, getting into his car. She doesn’t know exactly what a looker is but since Mr. Hacker delivers the line with a smile, she figures it must be good. Accepting the compliment, she smiles back.
As Mr. Hacker drives off, she pulls on the ruffled bobby socks that always creep down past her heels (the elastic was spent 10 washings ago). Then she slips her toes into her scuffed white patent shoes, allowing her heels to flatten the back of the shoes so that they’re worn more like sandles.
Rachel goes and peers through the gun shop’s glass door, smeared with hand, paw and nose prints, left by unwelcome mutts and stragglers of the small-fry variety. A few belong to Rachel, recording her past visits like fossils documenting history. She lowers the barrel of an imaginary rifle to the precise spot where her father’s silhouette fondles a pistol. His string-bean frame barely manages enough girth to hold onto his Wranglers. Still stiff. Still shiny blue. And still heavy from when he sat himself – jeans and all – into a tub of water. The idea is to wear them until they dry, allowing the material to sculpt to the body like papier-mâché. Why Ira Vandoren bothers Rachel doesn’t understand. No matter what, his pants always look as if they’re ready to drop if not for his tightly drawn belt. He has no butt to assist in the effort, either – not even the slightest curve. In fact calling it flat is entirely exaggerated. Rather it’s concave with less form than a deflated tire. Rachel breaths on the glass and wipes a spot clean with the side of her fist. She can make out his black-wire rim glasses perched on his Roman nose, and the water beads muddying the dust of his brow and forming rivulets along the crevices in his temples. A life-time in this moisture-sucking desert has already left its marks on his 29-year-old face. With her father in her sites, she pulls her imaginary trigger—an act she feels mildly guilty for since he always stresses never point a gun at anyone. She re-sheaths her pistol on the side of her hip.
Sticking her head inside Jake’s Gun Shop, she hollers, “Daddy, can I have a quarter for a soda and candy?”
“Hell, no. Money don’t grow on trees.’’
“No, it grows in your pocket. Why don’t you share some?”
“Get on outta here. I got business to tend to.”
“Grandma says you better not be spending the grocery money on a gun.”
“You best be mindin’ your own business or you’ll be cutting me a switch when we get home.”
“Oh, man,’’ she says, drawling the last word out into a long pathetic pout as she lets the door slam behind her.
Realizing she has quite a bit more time to wait, she hops onto the back of the pickup – stick in hand – prepared to do anything to break this ungodly boredom. The afternoon sun intensifies, heat vapors dance across the black-topped parking lot, and the rattlers quicken their primal tune. It’s unusually hot for June. The barometer pushes toward a hundred – usually these intense temperatures wait for July and August.
Slightly hunched over, she approaches the pile of snakes, eyeing them as if they can squeeze through the mesh and strike her if she isn’t nimble enough on her feet. She reaches for a green tarp dropped in a clump on the truck’s bed. Shaking it causes a whirl of dust to tickle her nose and eyes. Her face twitches and scrunches but no sneeze comes. Inching closer and closer, she tosses the tarp on top of the cage as the snakes hiss and strike at their unseen nemesis. Racing to the far end of the truck, the rush of fear reduces her to sweaty palms and a palpitating heart, making her reel with laughter.
Now, all she can do is wait for her victim.
After she etches a tic-tac-toe in the layers of dirt that have settled on the truck’s bed, Rachel looks up at the still pale sky. The dust blurs all things around her. She scrawls: X, O, X. Without finishing the game, she destroys it with the soles of her white shoes.
Fed up with the stiff patent-leathers pinching her feet, she yanks them off and tosses them behind her, hitting the cage and setting off a new round of hissing and striking. Rachel plops down on the open truck bed door and dangles her feet as she sticks the end of one of her braids into her mouth, grimacing at the taste. That morning her father soaked the ends in iodine to break her nasty habit. Stubbornly, she sucks and sucks knowing that as gum eventually loses its flavor so will this. She shifts her legs slightly, feeling the metal’s heat seep through her dress.
A child’s eternity passes, until her perfect victims—the twins Janie and Jodie—come skipping out of the five and dime. They tote a sack full of candy: jaw breakers, candy cigarettes, and a six-pack of miniature wax-soda bottles filled with cherry, lime, orange and such flavors in them. Holding hands, the two, with blond pigtails and starched dresses, giggle at Rachel’s less than pristine appearance: crusted green below her nose, skinned knees poking beneath a hem that’s coming unraveled and a cod-liver oil stain down her front from when she jerked her head away from her father’s prodding spoon. Rachel’s knows she’s too old to resist the spoiled taste of “father’s daily miracle medicine,” but she figures the more that goes down her dress; the less she has to swallow.
The tar has grown so hot it has a wet sheen to it, causing each of the twins’ steps to hesitate slightly as it sucks at their soles.
“Janie, Jodie,” Rachel calls out. “For a quarter I’ll show my snakes.”
“No one wants to see your stupid garden snakes,” says Janie, taking a long drag off her cigarette then biting into its candied center.
“These are rattlers, fangs and all. Biggest I’ve ever seen. One’s so big I saw it eat a 12 pound dog in a single swallow.”
“Really?,” Jodie asks, moving slightly closer.
“You promise you ain’t gonna throw nothin’ on us?,” Janie inquires.
“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
This childhood sacred vow seems to be enough to convince these lanky girls to move closer.
“All right show us.”
“Money first.”
“We know your ways Rachel Vandoren. You ain’t getting no money until we see the snakes.”
Rachel, with her stick whacks the side of the cage, sets off a frenzy of hissing and rattling. The girls’ eyes grow wide and each slap down their quarter on the truck’s edge. Rachel throws back the tarp. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop—like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. One by one the snakes explode pieces of skin and meat flying. All the girls scream—Jodie and Janie in fear and Rachel in awed and confused amazement.
Rachel’s father sticks his head outside. Seeing the messy site, he exclaims, “Dagnabit! That venom ain’t worth nothin’ now.” Ira really wants to yell “shit” or “damn” but he won’t utter obscenities in front of the “fairer sex,” except when he has too much to drink or forgets their present (which he always apologies for). Oh, and except for “hell,” which he says ain’t a cuss word because it’s a real place. These unguarded moments are how Rachel has acquired most of her four-letter vocabulary (the words she doesn’t use in front of her Daddy). Well, she has also learned a few words from her rebellious Aunt Etta May. Ira refers to her as that “neutered sister of mine” because of her refusal to marry. He doesn’t allow her in his house because her “trash” mouth and “unlady-like” cigar habit might unduly influence Rachel.
On the drive home, Rachel scoots as far over as she can and leans on her Daddy’s tanned and re-tanned arm. Sure, she wants to avoid the exposed springs in the passenger seat, but mostly she just wants to breathe in her daddy’s musty smell. He lays his hand, palm up, on her knee. Rachel snatches this invitation and laces her fingers into his, except for the pinkie. Her reach isn’t quite that wide yet, so she cheats and slips that one next to her third finger.
A hunting rifle with a scope hangs on the gun rack. A loaded pistol sits on the seat, and a new Colt .45 is tucked in the front of Ira’s jeans. The crack in the window, caused by a flying rock, keeps expanding like a line on an Etch-a-Sketch board.
“Daddy, they popped just like someone stuck a stick of dynamite in ‘em. Why’d they do that?’’
“I reckon their blood got to boiling and like a simmering pot that can’t let off its steam they just exploded. Rattlers carry on like they’re a rough bunch, but they’re sissies like Californians. They can’t take the heat. That’s why they crawl into their dens. The desert earth is always 70 degrees—cool and nice. ”
“Why don’t we live in the ground?”
“Perhaps we ain’t as smart as snakes.”
Her father’s thick fingers reach inside a brown paper bag, pulling out a shooting target. “Lookie, here. They give it to me for free. It’s the “Iotola Komanie.” I’m gonna enjoy poppin a couple at him. I’m gonna get him right in the nose.”“Me too,” she chimes in.

2

1996

The “It’ll Do Motel” sits on a parched stretch of land with cracks running through it like veins in an old man’s hands. Nothing much happens here in Rio Pecos, New Mexico. It’s a speck people seldom come across except the occasional soul, who gets lost on the way to somewhere else. Few ever see the place, fewer stop, still fewer do more than ask for directions on how to get out, and only one man calls it home.
Standing in a doorway, that rickety man leans on the door jam. His gut—rounded and hard from gout—hangs out his unsnapped shirt, which is thinned and sweat stained.
He eyes a stranger driving a washed-out red convertible, lunging over dunes and trying to avoid the creosote bushes and ocotillo cactus that have about overtaken the rarely traveled road. Perhaps calling this ghost town a spit-in-the-road isn’t really accurate since the gravel road has been left five miles back. Almost a century ago, when the railroad didn’t see fit to come through here, life moved on. About all that’s left of the town are abandoned granary silos and empty hulls where the old opera house and saloon stand, looking more like a facade for an old west film than the real thing. This road isn’t on the map and for that matter neither is the town, at least not any made after 1955. It lies about a hundred miles outside Deming, New Mexico about a day’s ride to the edge of the Gila Wilderness.
Not much is left of the man’s home except a broken down barn, a shed and the sun-blotched aqua-blue adobe the old man stands in front of. The mud structure is a favorite spot for insects of all kinds: centipedes, spiders and especially ants and ants and more ants. Religiously, every summer the colonization begins, carving out roads and domiciles. These invading armies come in as if survivors of some mass exodus. The walls are especially vulnerable to an invasion after a heavy rain followed by several weeks of drought. The mud becomes saturated, swelling and splitting. Then the heat sucks it dry, widening the cracks and causing chunks to fall. The exposed mineral-stripped soil becomes as easy to access as the U.S. border, the old man often comments.
Pinching a leafy wad from a Red Man pouch, he tucks it between his cheek and gum, allowing it to settle into the cradle that the acid has carved over the years. The stranger brakes, kicks up dust as the back wheels fishtail over the loose shale. She throws the parking brake on, and the Virgin Mary, swinging from the rearview mirror, slows. She’s not religious, nor Catholic. She just collects religious icons, mostly mass-produced plastic Saints acquired from flea markets, a handful of remaining Five and Dimes and Mexican supermarkets. This used to agitate her ex-husband, who had been schooled by nuns in full penguin git-ups. To him they were cruel reminders of his ruler knuckle-bashing days. It’s not that she was trying to upset him, but perhaps she didn’t really care if she did.
The old man doesn’t offer help, as she pulls the bags out of her back seat. Instead, he stays put, glancing up at the clouds that swell and darken, teasing the earth with the promise of wet drops.
The twin mesas, cradling the motel on its northern and southern borders, have turned this spit-way-off-the-road into an amphitheater for the thunder and lightning. When the lightening comes, as it does now, the canyon’s valley holds it captive. Hostile toward its jailer, it branches into numerous fingers, seeking an escape. The bolts shattered the murky sky, and for a split second the pieces look as if they could fall to the earth like shards from a broken glass. The winds pick up, but the rains play coy.
“The devil must be beating his wife,” says the gritty clerk to the stranger walking up the dirt path.
“If that’s what it takes to get a little rain, the devil should beat her more often,” responds the stranger.
Dressed all in black—jeans, T-shirt, sunglasses, combat boots—she looks like something off the streets of New York, not the dusty back roads of the Southwest. A single freckle, shaped like a tear drop, below her left eye makes her appear perpetually forlorn.
As the man sizes her up, he inquires, “You lost?”
Saying nothing, she drops a faux-leather bag by his boots and then traipses back for another case sitting in the back of her Cadillac convertible, the same make and model she swore would be hers a couple decades ago. She had planned on buying it long before now, but this gas-guzzling dinosaur is all she can manage on her newspaper salary. With the ripped canvas top and rusted frame, it’s only a shadow of its youthful image as is the man she has come to see.
She scans the aging “It’ll Do” motel up and down, trying to remind herself that this is only for one night. The 1950s-style adobe motor court is in dire need of painting – something it’s needed since the first day it was brushed on more than 40 years ago. A sand storm blew in, imbedding its grains in the now dried and flaking paint.
This all-but abandoned town mostly fits into a single structure that houses a six-room motel, general store, a dried up gas pump and out back a stable of horses. All the rooms haven’t filled up at once since the county quit tending to the road ten years ago. About the only people who find this spot are the explorer types, who come to ride in the hoof prints of Geronimo, Cochise, Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid, Kit Carson. Here is where Geronimo roamed, and where he and his Chiricahua Apache warriors raided miners and settlers through much of the 19th century. The only way into the wilderness is by foot or horseback—no motorized vehicles are allowed.
Looking up at another round of lightening, the old man shakes his head in disgust, “For all the wrath-of-God theatrics, God only knows if it’ll rain. Usually storms blow on by before doing much more than spit.’’
The stranger drops another bag by his feet, but still she says nothing. After having made umpteen wrong turns, she isn’t interested in chatting. The maze of unmapped roads has always made Rio Pecos difficult to find, but complicating matters further is the town sign, stolen by vandals years ago, has never been replaced. Exhausted, dusty, she has more grit in her teeth than she ever cared to taste. All she wants is a bed and a shower, and she’s too tired to care what order they come.
So where ya from?”
Ignoring his question, she gestures toward the motel’s sign, “Name fits. How much for a room?”
The man eyes her. There’s something familiar about those black pools staring at him. He goes behind the desk to get a room key, teetering from side to side like a flat-footed platypus.
“Got any magazines?”
Tossing one at her, he quips: “Keep it. Just another one spouting off about child abuse. Hell, ain’t no such thing. If you don’t beat ‘em once in awhile, one day they’ll show up out of nowhere and blow your head off.”
“How much?”
“$35. Cash only darlin’.”
“I’m not your darlin’. And I’ll give you “$30.”
Taking the money, he asks, “Got a name?”
“Vandoren.”
His toothy grin grows wide as he, with surprising agility, makes his way out from behind the desk. His excitement has made his limbs forget, at least temporarily, that they’re arthritic.
“That’s where I know you from. It’s those eyes. You got crazy old man Vandoren’s eyes. You must be Rachel.”
“Yes, Sir. I guess you’re Baker.”
At age 36, Rachel isn’t a traditional beauty, but, all the same, the camera loves her. Even as a child her brown eyes seduced the lens, loving her black brows, sharp-angular jaw and high-cheek bones. Rachel still has the same long, wispy limbs that give her a model’s statuesque appearance, but she’s far from the sunken-eyed heroin waifs that proliferate on the pages of glossy magazine ads. Her figure is a closer cousin to the full-busted pin-up gals of the 1950s, meaty, shapely. In the last couple years her waist has thickened slightly, but she still looks to be in her late twenties, or she would if it wasn’t for the hint of gray she refuses to color. Her ex-husband used to call her his Elizabeth Taylor, because as he put it: “You really know how to move a slip around.” Clay still owns the drive-in movie theater in Balmorhea, Texas that the couple once ran together. He’s obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor movies, hard-boiled detective novels and Rachel. He’s known for holding on too tight. She walked out on him. Any man who’s tried to own her, she’s left.
“I figure I must be your father’s best friend, or at least I would be if he had any friends,’’ says Baker, oblivious to her indifference. “He said you’d come for him. I didn’t believe him. Nope. I surely didn’t believe you’d come. Boy, do you have his eyes.”
Baker’s thick fingers deliver the key, “Room 2-A. Jiggle the handle.”
“On the lock?”
“The commode. The bucket of water you’ll see beside the toilet is for the tank so you can flush it and the one by the sink is for washin’. There’s another on the dresser for drinking. That’s all you get for one night so you best conserve.’’
“There’s no running water, great.’’
“Oh, all right since you’re Vandoren’s daughter. There’s a pump out back. Take as much as you like. Just need to prime it a bit if the water doesn’t come. You’re all he ever talks about. Rachel this and Rachel that.”
As he chats at her, Rachel notices Baker’s hands are her father’s: leathery, callused, creases filled with the black stains from gunpowder. Baker’s hard to slow down once he gets to gabbing. He doesn’t get much company way out here. Like a starving animal will gorge until its stomach explodes, Baker binges on conversation. Responding to him isn’t necessary, just a warm body fuels him.
He tells Rachel about his heifer that adopted an orphaned pig and how that pig stood on its hind legs to suckle. She learns of his wife’s lost-battle with lymphoma, and how his kids – Kyle, Becky, Wesley, Katie – all left Rio Pecos for the big cities of Abilene and Odessa. He tells her that he’s native to the town and for that matter the last citizen of Rio Pecos. “My mother Ruth Ann gave birth to me, squatting in that corner right there,’’ he says, gesturing to the anointed spot. “A doctor’s fee was more than my Daddy and my Mamma could swing, but being rich wouldn’t have changed how things unfolded that day. I was demanding to see the world within the first hour her contractions started. The nearest doctor was too far away, and Rio Pecos had no midwife. My Mamma just locked my father out—cause he was screaming and she wouldn’t have none of that from anyone but herself. She’d never born a baby before, and she’d never seen one born either. She just went with her instincts and remembered what an Indian woman once told her: squat and push. Yep, that’s the best way to birth a baby. My Mamma swears by it.’’
For the last several minutes, Rachel has been trying to politely break into the conversation, but he doesn’t pause, that is until he remembers Rachel’s reason for being here. His mood shifts abruptly. He hems and haws and kicks at the dirt, struggling to tell her…
“You know he isn’t doing well.”
Her downward glance tells him she already knew this.
“I’m going to need a horse in the morning.”
“We got ya takin’ care of. Your father had me bring his horse, Red, in for you. He ain’t much to look at, but he’s about as good a horse as they get. Just keep a firm hand on him and don’t let him drag ya under any trees. He’s fast and likes to haul. So don’t let him go wide open or when it comes time to stop him, you’ll have to have the will of the Almighty Himself. He’ll get you to your father’s place and back, though. He knows the way. You’ll need to cover at least 35 miles a day to make it in two-days. That’s some pretty fast riding in this rocky country. The trails aren’t well tended. Don’t worry about Red. He can make it. I’ve seen him do more than that with a two hundred pound man on his back. A little light thing like you won’t even make him sweat.”
“Two days? I should be able to reach his place by night fall. He’s just right there on the east fork.”
“He was getting passerbyers every month or so. He said that was every month or so too many so he moved on. You can sleep at his East Fork cabin tonight and then head on out. He found an abandoned cabin that he fixed up and moved into about five years back. It’s so heavily covered with vines that the forest rangers don’t even know it’s there. Without Red with you you’d sure to miss it. If you meet any rangers out there it’s best not to mention why you’re there. They’d sure to throw the old coot out if they knew.”
With a worried look in his eye, he adds, “I wanted to bring him out of there last time I brought him supplies, but Ira wouldn’t have any one but you touching him or his things. That’s his request. I honor it.”
Rachel has so many questions she wants to ask Baker about her father: Does he still like fried potato pancakes for breakfast? Has his hair gone white? Does he still drink whisky from a tin can? Just how bad is bad?
Her lips and tongue refuse to speak, but her mind isn’t so easily hushed. She remembers Baker’s words: “You’re all he ever talks about.” That’s the last thing she expected to hear. Sure, at one time, she was confident that she possessed her Father’s love, but he always had a way of making her feel as insignificant as a spilled beer on a pool hall floor. During the good times, he used to sit on the floor eye level to Rachel, and in his sweat-stained cowboy hat, he would play his guitar and sing: “You are my brown eyes, my brown eyes... I’ll love blue eyes no more.” All that changed, the first time blood soiled her white cotton panties.

3

Ash spills to the floor; his boot’s edge sweeps the burnt tobacco through the warped wooden slats. His leathery skin is as crinkled as the elk-hide pouch he keeps tucked in his front pocket. Untying it, he pinches the tobacco and sprinkles it in an even row across the thin paper. His nimble movements belie his gnarled joints, which have become so deformed as to resemble parasitic-barnacles. As he rolls, he seals the contents with a lick, places it between his lips, and strikes the match on the bottom of his boot. With a ragged breath, he sucks until an orange cinder glows. The butt’s heat has etched thousands of hair-thin creases that circle his mouth. As he draws the smoke in, a gurgling in his lungs attest to the disease that has come to claim Ira Vandoren. Out here his only visitors are the infrequent hiker or hunter. His closest neighbor is Baker in Rio Pecos. Ever since Rachel walked out on him, he has lived as a recluse off the East Fork of Gila Wilderness, where his old family’s homestead has been passed down son-to-son since 1889.
Full and content after a meal, Ira leans back in his great granddaddy’s rocker. Pushing off with the ball of his heels, he teeters back and forth; his eyes closed and the cigarette pursed between his lips. Grasses grow tall and wild around the one-room cabin made of rock, pine and railroad ties from an abandoned track a half mile down the dirt trail. Vines twist and weave through the spaces in the boards and over the roof’s top; even the beginnings of a big-toothed maple pokes through where a slat is missing. Nature has come to reclaim this piece of ground.
Ira hardly minds; he figures one man can only hold the forces back so long. As a single blade of grass pushing through concrete attests, all things eventually return to the earth. A smile spreads across his face. He can feel four eyes on him. Looking up, he confirms his suspicions. Directly in front of him sit Emily, a St. Bernard/Great Dane mix, and Duke, a calico cat. Both lick their chops as their eyes dart between him and the remains of that wild turkey Ira had roasted in his wood-burning stove. Teasing with them a bit, he stretches and pats his full stomach. “Hmmmm, that was good.” Emily and Duke take that as a cue to move in closer, playfully pawing at the dirt and wagging their tails. Emily’s tail wags with the fast and furious movements that can clear a table with one swipe. Duke tries with all her might to do the same but her long-flowing tail just swishes. To her chagrin it lacks the stiffness of Emily’s tail.
Ira cannot help but grin at this orange-and-chocolate anomaly sitting before him as he sets the plate down for the two to share. A cat who thinks she’s a dog. Duke will lay down with her head on her front paws, wag her tail (or rather swish her tail), play catch and tug-a-war. She plays dead and dances for treats. Her first attempts to make sound frustrated her to no end. She’d try and try to bark. First, she’d stiffen her entire body, pressing down on all four paws (as if to concentrate all her efforts), and then she’d force the wind out her throat, trying for a bold, harsh woof but only squeaks would come out. She always seemed so shocked that this high pitch was coming from her. She’d try again and again, but her vocal cords refused to cooperate. Eventually, she had no choice but to give in to the softer tones.
Ira found her years ago, on a frosty morning when icicles hung from the roof’s edge: Ira saddles up Red just as he has done every day for many years to gather berries, nuts, wild onions and possibly to hunt if some irresistible meat presents itself. Right now, hunting isn’t his first concern. He has plenty of jerky stashed beneath his cabin, and with the cold weather it should keep for some time. Just the same, Ira has slipped the rifle into its leather sheath at the saddle’s side. Fresh meat is always a pleasure. By the time the sun is at eight o’clock, Ira’s fallow deer saddle bags have been filled with wild onions and prickly pear paddles, which he likes to dice and sauté together in butter with a touch of jerky; the same way his mother used to prepare green beans.
As he heads back toward the cabin, he notices fresh tracks, reins Red to a stop, and leans on the saddle horn to study them. The claw marks in the snow tells him that the predator cannot be a bobcat because its retractable claws would not be visible, and it cannot be a hiker’s dog because the tracks are straight and purposeful rather than bounding playfully. A kept dog knows where its next meal is coming from and has time for folly. This is a hunter, a lone coyote, perhaps the same one that killed his hens and cut off his fresh egg supply.
Ira unsheathes his rifle and reins Red off the primitive trail and down the mountain’s side. Red prances and snorts, bobs his head up and down, hesitant to yield to his master’s orders. Ira knows this as a good sign. The scent must still linger, meaning the bandit is close by. He nudges the horse forward with another kick. Red obeys but his steps are cautious, his ears cock straight ahead as he scans the forest. Ira tries to soothe him with the sound of his voice. A horse’s survival depends on being herd bound, and when danger is near its first instinct is to run. Everything unfamiliar is put in one category: four-eyed horse eater. Ira is not only asking Red to go it alone, which Red is fairly used to, but he’s pushing him toward a sworn enemy. Red doesn’t grasp that coyotes rarely attack anything near the size of Red or Ira—but they will if threatened. Complicating matters further, Ira’s never shot from on top of Red—something he’d rather not try for the first time while tracking a predator.
In the distance, they both hear a high-pitched whimper. A bitch with pups, Ira figures. Red stiffens, prepared to bolt, but Ira holds firm and pushes him through a rocky pass so narrow that its jagged rocks scrape the sides of his boots. Through the eye of a needle, Ira muses. Looking up, the tips of the walls jet up so high that its tip seems to peer into the clouds. When the two reach the path’s edge, Ira has to choose between following the safer switchbacks and possibly missing the coyote or maneuvering down the precariously loose and icy shale. Without a cue Red knows the answer and sits on his haunches and slides down the shale toward the child-like cry. Leaning back to help Red balance, Ira and Red pick up speed and barrel toward hundreds of burnt-out trunks, stubs and rapier-sharp appendages. Ira’s experienced hands bend Red’s head from side-to-side weaving the two through the forest’s gantlet of talons, spikes, and clubs. Ahead, a petrified tree’s sword seems to reach out to impale the two interlopers; Ira leans hard and draws Red’s right rein too deep. Red, with his nose against Ira’s scuffed boot, jerks his head slightly lose from Ira’s grasp so he can gain just enough balance to prevent the two from toppling over. Ira understands his error and calls out “Sorry, boy” just as a branch swipes him across his face, drops of blood make it difficult to see out of his right eye. His jousting opponent draws first blood. With no time to nurse his anger, Ira pulls Red’s neck to the far left to try to miss a trunk as big around as four men. Both lean into the turn. As Ira’s leg bashes into the side of the massive trunk, he hears a loud snap and a rush of pain shoots up his leg. The world blurs as haunches and withers and arms and legs spill end over end and the two skid to a stop. Red throws his head forward and lifts himself up on shaky legs, careful not to step on Ira’s still body. Red watches his master for any sign of movement. When the man doesn’t stir, Red drops his nose and nudges him in his ribs. Groans encourage Red to try harder. Using his lips, he tugs at Ira’s jacket to force him to sit up. Ira slightly lifts his head and calls out as if to a nagging wife: “I’m up, I’m up.” Relieved, Red whinnies and paws at the ground, but then the he stiffens when he hears the whimpering from the bush in front of them. Red’s instinct is to run, but he stays planted because he’s more afraid of being without his only herd buddy.
Ira figures he has found the bitch’s den, but the bitch must be gone because he would have already felt her fangs grip his throat. Still he reaches for his pistol, but his holster is empty and the leather strap that holds the antler-handled revolver in place has torn off. It must have tumbled out in the fall. He stares up the mountain’s side and sees his silver Colt .45 gleaming in the sun. Lot of good it does me there. Ira slips his bowie knife from its sheath, crawls forward on forearms, and brushes the sage aside. A cinched up burlap bag wiggling, a site Red just cannot handle. He scampers to the side, but not too far from his Ira, who opens the bag to find a kitten crawling over the remains of her siblings. Her eyes were not even open, and she was smaller than his palm. Apparently, someone has dumped a whole litter of kittens in the woods to be rid of them. The others probably starved, and this little one is close to death. Ira considers riding on, but he figures suffocating it or breaking its neck would be kinder, so he grips her windpipe. A pinch is all it will take. He counts to three and counts to three, but the burly man, with the gray stubble, just could not cut this little determined one’s life short. The same man that has lived solely off his own kills for more than two decades years just cannot steal this kitten’s breath. The whole way back to the cabin Ira curses himself for he disdains cats. What am I going to do with a damn cat?
That night he rewraps his damaged ankle, which had swollen up like a melon. It will be a few days before he learns that it’s a torn a ligament, not a broken bone. The kitten that he names Duke after John Wayne suckles on Emily’s hind tit alongside her six black-and-white and brown-and-white patched coyote pups. He figures any creature—no matter how tiny—deserves a tough name if she can survive what Duke survived. The mutt, who has the height of a Great Dane and the width of a St. Bernard, readily adopted this calico cat that can fit into Ira’s shot glass. Ira chuckles at nature’s odd coupling. Already the pups must be at least ten-times the kitten’s height and weight.

As the moon rises to the sky’s center, Ira’s lantern glows and the wood-burning stove warms the one-room cabin. The kitten has fallen asleep in Ira’s breast pocket and Ira’s eyes fight to close. His body grows still and his breath shallow, only the balls of his feet seem awake enough to at least unconsciously keep the rocker in motion. On the armrests his fingers fit precisely into the prints seared into the wood. About 50 years ago, his great grandfather had been staring out from his covered-front porch in Laredo at a lightning storm gathering force inland from Mexico’s coastline. He always loved watching the storms come through. On this summer’s eve, a bolt of lightning shot through him and forever seared his hand prints into the wood. From that day on, his legs would tell the family when rain was due. His joints would stiffen and he’d limp, dragging his left foot as if it were too heavy a club to lift.
At the tips of Ira’s fingers lays his favorite vinyl albums: Sons of the Pioneers, Tom T. Hall, Porter Wagner, Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash. When he wants to give ‘em listen, he takes them to Baker’s. He only goes into town, meaning Rio Pecos, occasionally to pick up staples such as rice, flour, sugar, beans, corn meal and ammo. Sleepily, Ira reaches down for his Johnny Cash album and mutters the words he has long known by heart: “Well, my daddy left home when I was three and he didn’t leave much to Ma and me. Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze…” An Army-issued short-wave radio hisses a few words in Italian. The sing-song rhythm tells Ira that it’s probably a commercial selling some new improved product, perhaps laundry detergent. He hears the words he waits for every Saturday night “American Broadcast Radio.” Before the anticipated opening is even heard he giggles like the long-gone boy once did when he would hear the narrator hauntingly say, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The weed of crime bears bitter fruit… The Shadow knows.”
On this particular night, his eyes are destined to close soon after the famed introduction. As he often does, he has swallowed a few too many shots of his Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey. In his boozy slumber, he watches his daughter’s Texas license plate—GTL-102—fade into the distance of the shaded blacktop that snakes pass his hacienda in the valley. The morning sun during this August of 1979 already sears down on any in its path. Ira’s in the backyard pulling up the irrigation paddles to soak his five acres of peach trees. The water flows from the Rio Grande into the concrete canals that wind through the El Paso valley. Farmers and land owners saturate their fields and yards. Moments Ira opens the gates, the water rushes in and he wades through murky fluid in his black rubber boots. After tightening the rope that cinches the excess material of his britches to his bony frame, he fills a can with river water. Muttering and cursing, he sprinkles the flowers in the boxes under the windows. This is what Ira calls “wimmin’s work.” He is stuck doing it because his head-strong daughter refuses to have duties delegated to her based on her sex. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the barefoot Rachel throw a duffel bag in the back of her El Camino truck with the back bumper that he had tied on with bailing wire. Wading through the water bare legged, she wears only cut-offs and a tank top and stares Ira straight in the eye.
“I’m outta here.”
“Your hair’s short,’’ he protests.
“So is yours,” she fires back pleased at her latest rebellious act. One of the many rules in her father’s house is “Girls wear long hair. Period.” Earlier that morning: she stares into the mirror at her black hair falling passed her butt. When she gathers the strands into a rubber band, her hair is as thick as a horse’s tail. In truth she loves her iron-board straight hair, but she wants to rile her father more than she wants her hair. Holding back tears, she hacks and hacks at the thick mass with a hunting knife her father gave her before her first period came. The jagged ends look as if saw teeth have cut the strands. Her sorrel eyes seem to see beyond the image in the mirror to a simpler time when her sex did not interfere with her and her father’s relationship. She misses the afternoons at the gun club or pool hall where the prepubescent girl sneaks a swig of beer and a puff of her Daddy’s cigarette. The big girl steps over the fallen strands and stomps out to the backyard where her father curses as he tends to the flower beds. Now the stubborn girl stands before the stubborn man.
“You look like a boy.”
“So do you.”
“These days boys look like girls and girls like boys.”
“Yeah, it’s a wonder any of us breed.”
Failing to catch her sarcasm, he comments: “Yep!”
“How can one man be so archaic? Gloria says ‘a liberated woman has sex before marriage and a job after.”
“Wash your mouth out with soap. Who the hell is Gloria?”
“Steinem, Daddy; Steinem. Watch the news. The world is changing.”
Ira cannot fathom when exactly his life turned upside down. One moment men brought home the paycheck and girls spent their allowance fixing their hair and painting their nails, content and dossal housewives. How did the beauty-shop girls get so riled up over something called the ERA. At first he thought it was kinda cute to see the barefoot “flower” girls protesting braless, but now the Bee Gees sing soprano, Billy Jean King has challenged a MAN, and his daughter has just neutered herself and refuses to serve her brother his dinner. Ira hardly minds if a woman has rights as long as she does it between cooking and cleaning, which to him seems like a reasonable compromise. Ira doesn’t grasp that the women’s liberation movement may have ignited the spark that sends Rachel walking out the door, but it is hardly the real cause. For years the kindling has been so dry between the two, anything could have and would have fanned the spark into flames.
Ira watches his baby-faced 18-year-old girl climb into the truck’s driver seat—its stuffing coming lose through its ripped red vinyl. It takes two tries to slam the door fully shut. Her dripping wet feet work the clutch and accelerator; she shifts into reverse, screeching as she wheels spin out of the drive way. Shifting into drive the wheels kick up the gravel as she pulls away. He thinks Rachel will sleep off her anger at a girlfriend’s house and then come home, just as she has done many times before, but Rachel knew she could no longer live with this Neanderthal—she dearly loves—and grow into the woman she dreams of being. Rachel doesn’t know that if he had understood she would not come back, he would have run after her.

4

The next morning Rachel heads out to the corral to saddle her ride. Built like a prize fighter, Red is short and stocky with a speckled hide that calls to her mind the eggs that the Red Cardinals used to lay in the honeysuckle vines of her childhood home. Running her hand down Red’s long neck, she senses his restless spirit, his need to run the trails. He snorts and paws at the dirt and nods his head—his mane springs up and down to the rhythm of his movements. She fingers the scars from bites and kicks to his hindquarters, face and neck. Even though he’s a gelding, he foolishly spars with stallions twice his size. Castration didn’t tame his wandering eye. Rather he ended up being proudcut—part of one testicle lay lodged inside him, leaving him with the desire but not the ability. Once he tried to scale a six-foot rock wall to get to a mare.
Baker has already finished saddling him and is leaning against a corral rail with a coffee cup in hand. Rachel nods to Baker and then runs her fingers across Red’s velvety gray muzzle—nothing except perhaps the skin behind a woman’s knee or baby’s behind is as soft. She lifts his head slightly to check the bridle’s bit, his metal mouthpiece. Satisfied, she runs her hand down the horse and pulls at the saddle horn and then the leather cinch tightened around the horse’s girth.
“That saddle ain’t going nowhere,” Baker says, slightly annoyed that she’s checking his work. He knows he shouldn’t be since he’d never start out without double checking. It’s just that a woman questioning him irks him. He softens though when she gives him a nod, affirming his good work. She ties on her pack, which carries enough food for three days onto the back of the horse. A canteen filled with water hangs on the saddle horn by its leather loop.
“A stream runs most of the way along the trail. You can refill up on water there.” Handing her a valve of iodine, he adds, “It should be safe but add a drop of this to the water, and it’ll kill any bacteria. It won’t taste as sweet but at least you won’t have to worry about the runs.”
“If you’ll hop up I’ll adjust your stirrups,’’ he says. “I’d recommend letting ’em hang down so low that you almost feel like you’re bareback. You got a hard three-day ride ahead; any higher will make your legs and knees sore.”
Taking his advice she allows him to adjust the stirrups to his liking.
After a moment of silence she asks, “Is my father happy?”
“I guess that’s something only he can answer.”

The Misunderstanding in the Garden of Adam and Eve

2009-06-15T09:56:00.003-05:00

Deborah Voorhees
131 Cedar Crest
Nogal, NM 88321
575.354.3217
Deborah.voorhees1961@gmail.com

The Misunderstanding in the Garden of Adam and Eve

For centuries those in the Christian and Judeo religious communities have clung to the belief that evil lurked in the Garden of Eden; if this concept is to be believed than the root of all evil—of man’s downfall—would be knowledge; yet, such a belief cannot stand up to reason. Surely man is not expected to accept as true that science, math, and the written word are sinful. This would mean that every invention from the creation of the wheel to the automobile to the spaceship has been an immoral act, and that every medical marvel from vaccines to antibiotics to organ transplants is equally wicked in the eyes of God. Schools would be bastions of hell, not institutions that foster man’s desire and search for progress and enlightenment.
Blame for man’s downfall, more often than not, has been cast most heavily on Eve. If one accepts the fact that knowledge is not the root of evil than one has to consider that Eve didn’t sin but rather brought a crucial element to the development of mankind—an element so crucial as to make her an equal to Adam. With this view religious clergy, particularly the early fathers of the Catholic Church, would have had to acknowledge that women are responsible for bringing mankind’s second greatest gift—knowledge (the first being life)—and they could not deny woman’s rightful place alongside of men as religious leaders. This begs the question: Why would such a pivotal contribution be viewed negatively?
Intellectual writers and poets have tackled the question of Eve’s “sin” for centuries. Even Milton, who adheres to the Bible’s most traditional translation and believed his writings were Godly inspired, offers evidence against his own theory. In "Paradise Lost," Milton refers to the tree of knowledge as the Mother of Science and depicts an Eve who uses reason and logic to eloquently argue with Adam that Eden cannot truly be paradise if fear exists: “Let us not then suspect our happie State Left so imperfet by the Maker wise, As not secure to single or combin'd. Fraile is our happiness, if this be so And Eden were no Eden thus expos'd.” (Milton, Book IX, 337-341)
Milton’s intention was to prove “ingrateful” Eve’s inferiority to Adam, but if blind faith is taken out of the equation, Eve transforms into an intellectual woman questioning a legitimate point. A perfect Garden of Eden never existed. Perfection surely can’t exist where evil threatens to bring shame and death. One of mankind’s early feminists, Aemilia Lanier, passionately defends women in her "Eve’s Apology in Defence of Women," when she argues the absurdness of vilifying Eve when “Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke from Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke.”
Over the centuries many liberal-minded scholars, writers and religious clergy such as the Cathars and the Gnostics have openly challenged what has become the traditional interpretation of the biblical creationist story. While these debates at their worst have been volatile, most scholars and clergy—on both sides of the argument—will at least begrudgingly agree that the Bible has been translated and rewritten so many times it’s impossible with 100 percent accuracy to decipher its original intent. Considering this fact coupled with even the briefest examination of the early church’s bloody history—from the Crusades to the Inquisition—raises serious questions. Could the Book of Genesis been intentionally distorted to satisfy man’s voracious desire to control women? If so, the question remains why have men felt compelled to dominate? Evidence suggests that it might hinge on early man’s deep-rooted fear of the female sex, fear of woman’s intuition, fear of woman’s sensuality, fear of woman’s ability to manipulate man through his desires, fear of woman’s healing abilities (midwives and healers), fear of woman’s ability to deliver life. What better way to vilify Eve—all of womankind—than to make her the barer of sin.
Evidence of early man’s fear of women is seen throughout history—long before the early Catholic fathers. In Senaca’ Tragedies, VIII it states “No might of the flames or the swollen winds, no deadly weapon, is so much to be feared as the lust and hatred of a woman who has been divorced from the marriage bed.” The Roman philosopher and politician Cato says “When a woman weeps she weaves snares. And again: When a woman weeps, she labours to deceive a man.” In Greek mythology, Pandora, like Eve, is believed to have brought sin into the world when she opens the forbidden box that releases all the evil, disease, and corruption. The Greek Sirens lure mariners to their death with their exquisite songs. The ancient Sumero-Babylonian Ishtar is an evil woman who destroys her lovers. In medieval Europe the Succubus, a female demon, fornicates with men in their sleep to steal their semen and at times to even steal their mortal bodies and immortal souls. Ancient Jewish folklore tells of the temptress Lilith, who seduces men to create a demon race (some scholars have argued that Lilith was Adam’s first wife). Second century A.D. Christian religious writer, Quintus Tertullian, writes to women that “You are an Eve…you are the devil's gateway.” (Catholic Encyclopedia online)
In medieval Europe, independent women, who lived outside the patriarchal society, were most likely to become victims of the witch trials. The most conservative executions by hangings and burnings are approximately 40,000 to 50,000 (only 20 to 25 percent were men). Steven Katz wrote in The Holocaust in Historical Context: Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age, “Women are anathematized and cast as witches because of the enduring grotesque fears they generate in respect of their putative abilities to control men and thereby coerce, for their own ends, male-dominated Christian society.” (Katz)
Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments for the early church fathers’ fear of women lies in the widely referenced handbook, the "Malleus Maleficarum," which was once used to identify and prosecute witches in medieval courts. In the early 1300s the Roman Catholic Church brought witchcraft under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction. Pope Innocent VIII commissioned two Dominican inquisitors, Kramer and Sprenger, to compose the "Maleficarum." The misogynistic writings declare that “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!” (Sprenger)
In part women were targeted as “witches” because they had a stronger connection to Paganism, where their voices had a place in religious life. Christianity had little to offer except the accusation of Original Sin. In the Encyclopedia Mythica, Ilil Arbel writes that the founding church fathers “considered (women) weak, stupid, faithless, and hardly above beasts of burden. They had no rights, no protection, no dignity. In almost every way, they were slaves. The strong women of the Old Religion, the priestess, the Witch, the teacher, the healer, became the enemy of all that was sacred. How could they accept Christianity? Diana's cult remained so widespread, that the Church viewed her as an arch rival.” (Arbel)
This fear of Diana permeated the emerging Catholic Church, which resorted to demonizing the goddess as the “Queen of the Witches.” Paganists saw this as bastardization of their Diana, who was their Queen of heaven, huntress, goddess of wise female healers, as well as a benevolent nurturer and the provider for all creatures, slaves, and plebeians. Meanwhile the Old Testament decreed “that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed.” (ACTS, 19:27) This vilification of Diana spread to all women, starting with Eve. In the Bible women are depicted as temptresses who lead men into adultery, a crime that the God of the Old Testament openly condones the burning and stoning to death of whores. (Ezek 16:50) Of course, in the church’s early days adultery didn’t necessarily mean a woman had voluntary sexual relations with a man. Simply being alone with a man or being rape could strike down this accusation. The Bible also instructs men to only marry virgins; divorced women or widows are considered unclean as “a menstruous woman.” (Ezek 18:6) The very idea that a woman’s menstruation cycle—a natural part of preparing the womb for later conception and birth—would be seen as unclean would seem preposterous to those worshippers of the matriarchal Diana. Women and men from the Old Religion worshipped a woman’s body because of her ability to carry and deliver life. This is hardly the case with the New Religion. Worse yet, the Old Testament at least tacitly condones violence against the female offspring of Eve. No God steps in to punish Lavite and a fieldman who offer Lavite’s concubine and the fieldman’s daughter, almost as a ritual sacrifice, to the men of a village just to save themselves from harm. While the women are raped and beaten throughout the night, Lavite and the fieldman enjoy food and drink. The next morning Levite finds his concubine dead. (Judges, 19) He shows no more remorse than a one might for a calf slaughtered.
Other early Christian doctrines have often rationalized the harsh treatment of women because of Eve’s Original Sin. In Friar Cherubino’s "Rules of Marriage" he advices “When you see your wife commit an offense, don't rush at her with insults and violent blows. Scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if this still doesn't work...take up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body...Then readily beat her, not in rage but out of charity and concern for her soul, so that the beating will redound to your merit and her good.” (Cherubino)
Of course, not all early Christian religions believed in Eve’s guilt. Many splinter sects of Christianity such as the Gnostics revered women’s contributions to mankind and viewed Eve with admiration. In the Gnostic Church women had active roles in religious life. As priests they taught, ministered and performed baptisms and exorcisms. In fact, the Gnostics creationist story varied widely from the Old Testament’s version. Eve, the teacher, is sent to raise the soulless Adam so that he can become light’s vessel. When Adam first sees his mate he says: "You will be called 'mother of the living', because you are the one who gave me life." (Gnostics) Not surprisingly the “fallen daughter’s of Eve” clashed head on with the early church fathers’ lust for power and dominance. Diversity in Christianity wasn’t an option for these leaders. The removal of women from religious power became an important element to conquer paganism and the splintered Christian sects because women were the most resistant to the New Roman Catholic Church.
During the Inquisitions, the church armed its vast armies to slaughter thousands and thousands of “heretics.” Among the vilified were the Gnostics, whose teachings were open to Paganists and Christians, male and female. (Grant) In the Gnostic manuscripts found in the last century, God informed John in the scriptures of Thomas: “I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son.” This clearly suggests that women should be at the center of the faith’s soul, a position that would at least be equal to men. Gnostics agreed; hence the clash. Further angering the early Catholic leaders, the Gnostics preached that the Old Testament’s deity was not the True God, but an evil Demiurge who deceived mankind to trap souls to the impure earthly matter, causing humans to be exiled from their “divine home” in the Light. (Grant) Gnostic priests and priestesses believed in a loving deity incapable of the envy and wrath the “false god” demonstrates in the Old Testament. In "Gnosticism: A Sourcebook of Heretical Writings from the Early Christian Period" Robert M. Grant wrote, “Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion… This divine current was perceived as the feminine, healing and nurturing energy of God’s Holy Spirit.” (Grant)
Even within the King James’ version of Genesis, certain passages closely align with the Gnostic version of the creation story. After Adam has eaten from the tree of knowledge, God says, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” (Genesis 3:22) And Adam calls to his wife Eve because “she was the mother of all living.” (Genesis 3:20) Both passages are in the Gnostic scriptures and hardly seem to fit with God’s earlier cries of damnation when he sentences the Devil, Eve, and Adam to a life of toil and pain. Also similar to the Gnostics was the Cathars, another splintered Christian sect that believed in the equality of men and women. Although, the Catholic Church never acknowledged them as Christians, the Cathars had many followers and sympathizers because they lived in true poverty as the “bejeweled-Catholic clergy” claimed was the righteous way to exist. Townspeople, including many Catholics, saw this hypocrisy as ample reason to throw stones at their own religious leaders. (Katz) Not surprisingly, the Cathars soon found themselves an enemy in the church’s sacred war, “The Crusades.” Perhaps the Cathars greatest sin was the refusal to pay its tithes to the church. As far as the issue of Eve’s sin, the Cathars believed that godly souls chose to join physical matter: hence giving up the heavenly for physical incarnations. The souls would reincarnate from earthly matter to spiritual light and back again until the souls could rejoin God.
This all leads back to the perhaps the unanswerable question: What is God’s intended message in the Book of Genesis? Was Eve a wonton temptress who brought down man as many church leaders, even today, protest or a woman of intellect who gave the gift of knowledge and life to Adam and mankind?
On a strictly intellectually basis, knowledge cannot be blamed for man’s downfall. Clearly, intellect is the foundation of our very existence. It separates us from the mindless eukaryote that transforms at the will of evolution. Even Dante, who writes of internal damnation in his epic
"Inferno," understands that knowledge is essential to mankind. “Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” (Dante) Ironically, the very woman who brought his coveted “virtue and knowledge” to mankind he has cast her into hell’s limbo for all of eternity, an odd choice for the woman who saved us from living as brutes.
True, knowledge often brings sorrow and pain, but joy cannot rejoice without experiencing pain; light cannot illuminate without darkness, one cannot embrace life without embracing death. As Kahil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one.” (Gibran 80) The same holds true for good and evil. The knowledge of good cannot be complete without the comprehension of evil. Mankind must be a free-willed spirit with the capacity to choose to walk in the light or in the dark. Otherwise, knowledge in of itself would have no more meaning and depth than the flat pages of an encyclopedia: all facts and citations, no passion.

Works Cited
Arbel, Ilil. "Witchcraft." Encyclopedia Mythica. 19 Sept. 2008 .
Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. New York City: Feminist Press, 1970.
Cherubino, Friar. Rules of Marriage. 1400.
Ellis, Barbara. "Some Observations About Hawthorne's Women." Women in Literacy and Life Assembly (1993): Vol. 2 .
Gibran, Kahil. The Prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Grant, Robert M. Gnosticism: A Sourcebook of Heretical Writings from the Early Christian Period. New York, 1961.
Hoeller, Stephen A. "The Genesis Factor." The Quest; reprinted in archives of Gnostic Society (1977).
Katz, Steven. The Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1994.
King James Bible. New York: University Press, Oxford, 1903.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost (Book IX). Hanover: John Milton's Reading Room at Dartmouth College, 1674.
Sprenger, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob. Malleus Maleficarum. Wiscata Lovelace , 1928.

Deborah Voorhees
131 Cedar Crest
Nogal, NM 88321
575.354.3217
Deborah.voorhees1961@gmail.com

Master Murialist John Biggers' struggle in the White Art World

2009-06-13T17:50:00.005-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees

HOUSTON - John Biggers sits in a bowed-back chair, straight and erect, and as regal as the many carved African figures surrounding him. Still, he's as casual as his workman's jumpsuit, which has a slight rip on the breast pocket.

His voice rises and then falls to a whisper as he sorts through his 73 years. Here, in his long-time home in Houston's Third Ward, he tells of a day decades ago when his direction was still unclear: A boy of no more than 7 or 8, with high cheek bones and a full set of curls, stands in the post office in patched clothes, dirty from playing in the creeks and alleys he frequents. He feels the cool marble under his feet, as he gazes way up at a man painting on a huge wall the image of blacks picking cotton. "I was fascinatedby this."

The youngest of seven has no idea that the very thing that has so entranced him will become his calling. As a black child, he can't afford whimsical dreams of being an artist. He lives in the segregated South of Gastonia, N.C., where the train shakes the ground as it rolls in, and "Negros" are expected to toil in fields, scrub laundry and clean white people's houses - not create masterpieces.

Yet, this urchin, standing on the marble floor, is destined to grow into one of America's most important black artists, and many will claim that history shall one day acknowledge him as a 20th-century master. More than 10 years passes before the child discovers his life's work: To paint his people with dignity and respect - not the grotesque "Amos and Andy" caricatures that proliferate the day.

In doing so, he ignores a chorus of voices: " A black man can not do fine art; " "there's nothing aesthetically pleasing about blacks." His only hope, his fellow brothers and others say, is to adhere to the European model: Paint white faces. "But am I not black?, " the young idealist often pleads. Thoughtfully, Mr. Biggers shifts in his seat, and explains, "This was in the 1940s, a time when a black man was to `know his place.'

"Mr. Biggers `place' in the world has became something quite different than the chorus tried to predetermine. His national retrospective, "The Art of John Biggers: View From the Upper Room, "has received many accolades and has just completed its two-year seven-city tour.

This award-winning artist not only founded the art department at Houston's Texas Southern University, where he taught for 35 years, but managed a thriving art career that includes 24 murals and many more drawings and paintings hanging in museums, institutions and private collections around the country. Robert Farris Thompson, professor of art history at Yale University, compares Mr. Biggers' Shotguns to Grant Wood's American Gothic calling it a "richly nuanced masterpiece of American painting." Olive Jensen Theisen, author of The Murals of John Thomas Biggers, says "John has been dismissed in the white art community. But I suspect that his work will endure because it has substance." Alvia Wardlaw, curator for Mr. Biggers' retrospective, says his work expresses the richness of America's south and "reaches people in the same way as a Rembrandt or a Goya."

In the past, Mr. Biggers' been accused of being derivative of Mexico's Diego Rivera, the renowned muralist who painted the struggles of his country's underclass. "There was a short period that you might call his work derivative because John was deeply influenced by Diego, " says Ms. Theisen." He wanted to do for black Americans what Diego did for his people, but by 1974 or '75 he had broken out of that mold. An art historian who looked at his work in 1955 would not see the same work in 1985 or '95."

The seeds for Mr. Biggers murals and paintings are sown in the country town of Gastonia where horse-drawn wagons and Model-T Fords often line the paved streets. Everything young John sees, feels andexperiences becomes an intricate part of his art, his story.

In the earliest pieces is the anger and bitterness at the bigotry and poverty surrounding him, and in the later ones - after visiting Africa - the healing. His childhood day-to-day surroundings - shotgun houses, washboards, black iron pots, railroad tracks and such - are all apart of his symbolism and storytelling. For example, the shotgun house becomes the temple that represents the mother, explains Mr.Biggers. "Every time you walk into your home you walk into your mother's womb."

The work ethic John Biggers grew up in a modest two-bedroom home, with the front porch notched into the square frame and the wood graying from lack of paint. Crowders Mountain stands in the distance with its maple trees reaching as high as the pines. A place so dear to him that he and his wife, Hazel Biggers, split their time between Houston and Gastonia, North Carolina. (Close by their North Carolina home, Mr. Biggers still owns 12 acres of the former plantation, where his Grandma Lizzie had been a slave until age 6. The land has been in the family ever since his grandmother inherited it from her father, a white plantation owner.)

Here, Mr. Biggers sees the shadows of the past: His older sister Ferrie propping him on her hip; his pipe-smoking Grandma Lizzie firing her shotgun; his mother, Cora, refusing to drink anything but clear water or cool lemonade (soda pops weren't fit to drink).

When John is still a little boy his father, Paul Biggers, a diabetic, becomes ill and the family has to take in laundry. Religiously, John fills the black iron washing pots and builds the fire. "He'd have the water boiling by the time my mother and I started to work, " says Ferrie Arnold, his only remaining sibling.

The women of Mr. Biggers' childhood are found throughout his paintings - not necessarily their exact likeness but their spirit and strength. For example, his Grandma Lizzie inspires his renditions of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. In fact, the very essence of what "woman" is at the core of his art. As he puts it, `She' is the creator - the past, present, future. This is evident in his mural Web of Life, where Mother Earth cradles the living and the dead in her womb, transforming death into life as a skeleton's ribs grow into a tree's roots. With the sheer enthusiasm that usually only comes with newdiscovery, Mr. Biggers picks up one of his many African woodcarvings, a mother and child, and uses it to illustrate his point.

"See one eye is the sun and one is the moon, and with her breast she offers nourishment not to just the child but to the world. In Africa, all villages must have an altar of a mother and child or they can't organize a village. This has been going on for more than 12,000 years."

Young John's life is good at home until he wanders beyond his family's protective cocoon. "We were aware of being second-classcitizens very early on, " recalls Mr. Biggers. The white children received new books; the black children used hand-me-downs. He still remembers the shame and embarrassment when a white man yells: "Nigger, boy you get off the sidewalk. You walk in the street.' Oh, yes, we had people like that." Thoughtfully, he adds, "You know the worse thing about prejudice? You never know when it's going to happen so you never feel safe.

"I'll never forget the time we went to the public library in Gastonia." He and his brother walk inside to check out a book by Mark Twain, when a librarian with red-hair and freckles screams in shock at the little boys. Black children, they learn, aren't allowed inside. Remarkably, Mr. Biggers holds no hostility for the past. "Anger only kills you. You have to learn not to be cruel to yourself. When you look at mankind from afar, social problems have been around as long as man has been on this earth, and they might not get solved in your lifetime. You still have to live your life."

This wisdom has come with age. As a child and youth he feels the anger and bitterness. "I'd see John coming down the road with these deep frowns in his brow, " says Ms. Arnold. "I'd ask him what's troubling him, `Oh, I just look around and see how bad people have to live. I just wish Ic ould do something about it." 'Not knowing how to stop the pain, John's thoughts turn to revenge: A boy of about 8 climbs up to the top of one of Gastonia's two high-rises, where he helps a brother, who's a janitor, cleanup. Up on the seventh floor, he looks down on the square.

"I thought a machine gun would be the perfect weapon. I figured Icould shoot everybody in the square before they could get to me. "Rather than giving in to this little boy's fantasy, Mr. Biggers puts his anger into his art. "Everyone has to have a place to put his anger or they become distorted. "His early works focus on poverty. The downtrodden, he paints in rich red, blue and green hues. The figures such as the "Laundry Woman" or the "Mother and Child" all have large well-used hands, signifying the day-to-day toil.

In "The Garbage Man, " an old guy with his toes sticking through his shoes, combs through the backalleys picking up thrown away produce. "He's not getting food for the hogs, " says the muralist and painter. "That's for his family."

In "Dying Soldier, " his first mural, is his anger when Pearl Harbor is bombed. The young college student knows he might have to die for a country that has labeled him second-class. The piece becomes a part of the "Young Negro Art" exhibit at the Museum ofModern Art in New York. Critics of the day dismiss it as "screaming propaganda." Other naysayers criticize his paintings for not being "pleasant." Never deterred, he continues his work. "I had to express the great problems of the world." Regardless of how depressed his subjects' lives, they always have a quiet dignity, much like the man himself with his snap-cap pulled down over his graying curls.

John Biggers calling comes in the early 1940s while on a work-study program at Hampton Institute, near Norfolk, Va. This pristine campus, now called Hampton University, forever changes him. Many mornings, the lean sinewy Biggers strolls along the waterfront watching the ships go by and wanders among the school's many buildings that range from Gothic, Bavarian and Victorian to Greek and Roman revival and Colonial (all will become major vocal points in his 1991 Hampton mural House of the Turtle).

For this teen, Hampton symbolizes freedom and liberation. The very land it sits on has been transformed from a slave plantation, Little Scotland, to a place of learning, founded by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong in 1868 for ex-slaves and their descendants (Booker T. Washington attended here).

Beyond the school's long-gone farm fields and orchards, sits theEmancipation Oak where slaves first heard Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Named one of the 10 great trees in the world by the National Geographic Society, the oak spans 98 feet in diameter. Her branches, as thick as most trunks, literally swoop down to the earth as if she could comfort all of humanity. Under her protective cover, young John stares up into her dense and twisting web, coming to her for picnics with friends, and alone to sketch or to contemplate the past, the future.

"It was like coming into our Great Mother's arms." The lad doesn't know that a half a century away, young men and women will file into the one-time library, where he so admires Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson, to see his national retrospective, "View From the Upper Room." And just across campus from this same building, which is now a museum, the yet to be built Harvey Library will house two of his major murals, House of theTurtle and Tree House. The latter has at its center theEmancipation Oak.

Originally, John comes to this school to learn to work the wrench and plunger, but his quest to be a plumber is short lived. Fond of sketching, he takes a night course in drawing, where he meets his life-long mentor and friend, Viktor Lowenfeld. Newly escaped from Nazi Europe, Mr. Lowenfeld speaks in brokenEnglish, the words John desperately needs to hear. Mr. Biggers still recalls them: " `Art is a field of absolute freedom. No man can interfere with that.' That's why I went into art. Freedom is what it means to me."

Mr. Lowenfeld teaches John to paint what has meaning for him. "Iknew then that this was something I really wanted to do. Even though it was risk, I didn't care. I was too fascinated to turn back."

"When we heard he was going to be an artist, we thought, `Oh my, he's going to die poor, ' " says Ms. Arnold. Of course, that didn'thappen. "He's helped out all his siblings. He'd bring everyone to his exhibits around country. And he and Hazel took Mother to live with them her last 13 years and dressed her up so nicely I didn'trecognize her."

Back at Hampton, John enjoys going to Mr. Lowenfeld's home for dinner, where they discuss art and play the music of great classical composers. Here, John discovers the connection between music and painting. To this day, he creates to music: Beethoven and Brahms for planning and jazz and gospel for painting.

One night with Mr. Lowenfeld stands out in Mr. Biggers' mind. The weight of the evening's news still shows on his face: Mr. Lowenfeld drives down a gravel lane at dusk with John in the passenger seat. He pulls his black Chevrolet off the road and opens a letter from the United States Department of State, reading it aloud for the first time. It notifies him that his family has been burned in a concentration camp.

"I saw a man full of sadness, " recalls Mr. Biggers, remembering Mr. Lowenfeld's words: "John you have to ride on the back of buses, you're segregated and you have to face prejudice all the time, but they're not burning you."

At this moment, John learns the horrible thing called hatred isn't just black and white. "From then on I set out to understand the nature of prejudice." He believes he's found the answer: Economics.

While tending to his class work John hears that the renowned African American muralist Charles White, on a Julius Rosenwald grant, is coming to Hampton to paint "The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America."

Determined to learn from him, John stays close to him, sweeping floors, mixing paints or whatever he can to make himself useful. Eventually, it pays off. Not only does John observe the masterworking, but Mr. White asks John to pose for him. John's image represents a runaway slave in that mural, which still hangs in the school's music hall.

In 1946, after a brief stint in the Navy, John follows his beloved instructor to Pennsylvania State University, where Mr. Biggers eventually receives all three of his degrees. One of only a handful of blacks, John is terribly lonely. About three weeks into classes, John walks out of the campus library, which sits on top of a hill. Two intellectual Jewish activists approach him, asking him if he wants to join the NAACP. John responds, "I've been a member all my life."

Within minutes John accepts an invitation to indulge in the box of goodies that just came from one of their homes: salami sandwiches and some cake. "Up until then nobody had said hello. In the North, people were cold. At least in the South, people talked to you even though they walked in that door and you walked in another door."

Finding his new acquaintances stimulating, John joins up with them, becoming the first African American to join Penn State'schapter of the NAACP. "Before I came along they had been protesting but without a black person they had trouble making their point."

Soon John and his new friends are protesting barbershops that refuse to cut his hair, and they are leaving their food untouched at lunch counters that won't serve him. Even with his friends, John's time here is difficult. Art professors push him to quit his studies, telling him blacks can't do fine art and that he has no talent. In his physical education class book, he reads that blacks run fast because they have the same leg bones as a gorilla.

After college the hip, in-place for an artist to go is New York City, but John doesn't follow any of the so-called "cutting-edge"causes to catapult him into "inner" circle. His mission is simple: to paint his people."The one thing that characterizes artists in the 20th century is that they all want to be on the cutting edge, " explains Ms.Theisen, author of The Murals of John Thomas Biggers. "But the cutting edge keeps moving, which means the average artist gives reaction to the subject-of-the-moment rather having a clear vision of what he wants to say before his painting life is over."

John has that vision. "Turning his back on New York City, Mr. Biggers heads to Houston in 1949 to start the art department at Texas Southern University with his bride, Hazel Biggers, of one year. He takes with him his strong work ethic he learned from his parents - something that becomes crucial to starting the school's art department while still teaching and painting. This intense and passionate young man often works seven days a week when creating amural. It's not unusually for him to get up at 3 or 4 just to paintand then drive across town around 9 to teach.

"Just like a farmer with a hard rocky field to hoe, you work from caint see to caintsee, " says Mr. Biggers.

During his 35 years at TSU, he wins several art awards including two in the early 1950s.

Segregation keeps him from going inside the Texas museums to accept his drawing awards: The Schlumberger Prize at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston for The Cradle, and the Neiman Marcus prize at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts for Sleeping Boy. The reception for the Dallas event is cancelled and are presentive gruffly hands him the award in the parking lot. In Houston, the reception honoring him isn't on a day that blacks can attend, so Mr. Biggers is once again shut out. The director, James Chillman, gives Mr. Biggers a private showing and then sets about to have the rule abolished.

As an educator, Mr. Biggers mixes Mr. Lowenfeld's teaching philosophy with his "no excuse" toughness - something he's still teaching today. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Biggers, in his jean jumper and cap, stands in a foyer of the University of Houston's downtown campus where he's completing the mural Salt Marsh. Most students hurry through between classes with hardly a glance, but many others stop to shake the master's hand or to give a compliment or to argue an artistic point.

One passerby turns up his nose, "Why is it so dark? "Uninsulted, Mr. Biggers simply says, "There must be darkness before there's light. "Toward the end of the day, a youth probably in his early 20s comes by. Scolding him, Mr. Biggers asks, "So what happened to make you afraid of us?" Flustered, Shannon, a student at the University of Houston, swears he isn't fearful but he's merely been outfinding work. "What does that have to do with your art? All artists have to find work but you still have to do your art."

With a reassuring smile, Mr. Biggers points to the image of a wooden plank in his mural. "We need a pigeon for right there. You bring a sketch and then you can paint it." The slightly intimidated but delighted Shannon leaves swearing to return no later than Tuesday with his pigeon drawing in hand.

Chuckling as he watches him leave, Mr. Biggers says, "It'simportant that the students are involved with the work. It has more meaning that way."

Through the years Mr. Biggers, with his wife, has traveled throughout West Africa: Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Sudan, Dahomey (now Republic of Benin). This place forever changes him and his art. In Ede, Nigeria, they're greeted by an elder, who introduces them to a crowd: "These are your brothers who have returned after400 years."

Everywhere they go they're treated as family. Strangers welcome them into their homes offering food and shelter. At times, interpreters help with the language barriers and other times, the couple manages with hand signals and such.

With a faraway look in his eyes, Mr. Biggers says, "I enjoyed my time there so doggone much."

Even in Africa, in a place he feels such a kinship with, Mr. Biggers won't relax. Every day he busily snaps photos and sketches the world around him. The artist knows he has much painting on Africa to do, and he'll need the images to meld the visions of Africa with those of black America."

John wanted to stay in Africa, " says his wife with her soft Southern accent. "You have to understand that when we first went to Africa things were rough in the states. Segregation, discrimination. It was bad. So many places you couldn't go. To go to a place where you had some freedom was something.

"Ultimately, Mr. Biggers knew it was more important to return home to his family and to educate people on what he saw. "Perhaps if I didn't have family here I would have stayed, " he now says. "This might seem strange but your home is your home."

After several trips to Africa and much soul searching, Mr.Biggers hit a creative crisis that he says landed him in the hospital. Medically it's called tuberculous, but Mr. Biggers, who nearly died from it, sees it differently. He believes his problems had to do with his psychological drive to create as an African craftsman. He no longer wanted to draw and paint analytically and visually.

"I was trying to paint entirely from the interior, which hasnothing to do with perspective, nothing to do with balance of colorand space."

For seven years during the '70s he fears he will never paint again. When he finally picks up a brush, the experience is cathartic. Hired to paint the mural "Family Unity" at Texas Southern University, Mr. Biggers never knows from moment to moment what image will emerge next.

For three long years, it comes in pieces, a struggle for a man who methodically sketches out his murals. Suddenly, his figures become less distinct, more universal, bordering on abstraction. Geometric shapes are integrated into his works in the form of quilt patterns, which were inspired by the "poetry" that his mother and grandmother made when sewing together fabrics cut from worn clothes.

He no longer is painting of just the earth, but of heaven, the universe, the cycle of life and the idea of the human soul and mind moving toward wisdom. It's as if Mr.Biggers evolves from painting the Crucifixion to the Resurrection.

Now, Mr. Biggers is trying to complete what he tells his wife will be his last mural (though, she's not betting on this), and he's battling his health. Diabetes has caused Mr. Biggers' kidneys to fail. When the doctor first tell him dialysis is the only answer, Mrs. Biggers says, he refuses to go to the kidney center. Fearing he'll be an invalid, he turns to a Chinese herbalist and an acupuncturist, but nothing helps.

With his health deteriorating, the doctor finally tells him it's time or he'll die. Ever since last February, he has been on a homedialysis machine just a little more than 11 hours each night. In pure Mr. Biggers style he speaks of getting a chance to read and sketch, not of the hours confined to his bedroom. "He never talks about when I retire, " says Earlie Hudnall, a former student."

It's always about what work he has yet to do. That fire in his belly is always going."

Indeed, Mr. Biggers says he doesn't plan on dying anytime soon. "I have much more to paint."

Deborah Voorhees as DMN comedy critic

2009-06-13T17:25:00.005-05:00

Deborah Voorhees
Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

Political humor hasn't exactly been cutting-edge this year: The dated themes include "Bob Dole is stiff, " "Bill Clinton is overweight, " "Janet Reno is manly" and "Ross Perot is little, squeaky and has big ears."

Unfortunately, the Dallas comedy troupe Four Out of Five Doctors hasn't upped the ante in its latest political show, Sex & Politics'96: Either Way You're Screwed.

Of course, it's not entirely the Docs' fault. Their cues come rom master comics such as Jay Leno and David Letterman. Even Rep. Susan Molinari of New York got in the act with her dig during the Republican National Convention. "Bill Clinton's promises have the life span of a Big Mac on Air Force One, " she said in her keynote address.

Just how many times have the words Big Mac and Clinton been uttered in the same sentence? Surely, this chronic overuse should be a crime.

The Docs' infraction rises from a petty offense to a felony through plain disrespect for the audience's intelligence. They claim to be lampooning the current political scene, but their material lags at least two to three years behind. About the only thing they seem informed on is that Mr. Dole is a presidential candidate. Other than that, they are still lamenting the 1991 recession and the Branch Davidian tragedy.

Another snag is the show only supplies half its promises.There's no sex, unless you count as phallic symbols the many handguns used to spoof the National Rifle Association.

Although precious few, the show has its moments. Mark Fickert plays the monotone Mr. Dole beautifully, right down to the clutched pen and the cadaver posture. But perhaps his impression works too well. The pitfall in portraying stodgy and dull is becoming tiresome yourself. Particularly when Mr. Fickert exhausts another old barb about Mr. Dole's habit of referring to himself in the third person, which even Mr. Dole has stopped doing. This bit has run its course, as have the Docs. Perhaps it's time for them to retire their political stethoscopes and head to the first tee with Gerald Ford.

Byline: Deborah Voorhees

If Jerry Seinfeld had a twin, it would surely be comedian WendyLiebman. Both find humor in daily situations, and both have asmooth, understated delivery.

Where Ms. Liebman separates herself from the master is in her pauses, which are followed by whispered throw away lines. It works something like this: "I feel all puffy 'cause I'm retaining [pause] a lawyer . . ." "I love to shop [pause] lift . . ." "I'd never get implants, but I did have plastic surgery once.[Pause] I had my credit cards cut up . . ." "If I was a mom, I'd be over protective. I'd never let it outside[pause] of my body . . ."

Her delicious wickedness makes her a favorite on the comedy-club circuit. This 35-year-old Long Island native comes to Dallas for the second time this year, this time with her own 30-minute HBO special ready to air Aug. 23.

As expected, she's in top form: "I'm old-fashioned. I like it when a guy pays [pause] for sex. . . . My mother always said, `Don't marry for money [pause] divorce for it.' "

Margaret Cho review
By Deborah Voorhees

The energetic 27-year-old Margaret Cho is, in many ways, like the classic Playboy centerfold model - the girl-next-door who happens to get caught with her pants down. Ms. Cho offers pretty much the same thing. She comes off like an all-American girl who just happens to do stand-up comedy, tossing vulgarities to a rowdy crowd.

The schtick works well because it doesn't seem contrived. Ms. Cho holds her good-girl image intact even while discussing the illicit sexual practices of male comics and the dirty job that nurse Gwen has taking care of feminine hygiene at the doctor's office.

At the Addison Improv Friday night, Ms. Cho balanced this spicy, colorful talk with funny and honest autobiographical bits such as what happened when she found out her ABC sitcom, "All American Girl," was canceled. She read it in the newspaper.

"I freaked out, panicked, " she exclaimed. "I could see myself on cable saying, `The first time I called the Dionne [Warwick] psychic line . . .' "

She brought the same honesty to a hysterical bit about a phone conversation with a Hollywood producer. After the obligatory kissing-up, he moves into the "but" statement. "Well, we had a meeting and decided it would be good if you'd lose 10 pounds before we start shooting . . ." Ms. Cho responded: "I don't mind that they bring it up, but the very idea that they had to have a meeting on this. . . . What did they do, roll out a picture of me and say, `Here are the problem spots?' "

Ms. Cho also hit a home run when talking about her family. Because of her work supporting AIDS research, people often assume she's a lesbian.

"My mother's always trying to get me to come out of the closet.She says, `It's OK, it's OK, I have a k.d. lang album.' "

Since Ms. Cho's sitcom was canceled last fall, she's starred in her first dramatic role, "It's My Party" with Eric Roberts and Gregory Harrison. The film opens Friday.

Ms. Cho plays Charlene, the best friend to a man dying of AIDS. He decides that, rather than succumb to the disease, he should kill himself - that is, after one last bash with his friends and family.

"Ultimately, this film is a celebration of this man's life," says Ms. Cho in an recent interview by phone from Los Angeles. "It's less about death and more about how people cope with this disease."

Ms. Cho's long-term goals include continuing her stand up, acting in films, launching a new sitcom, and writing and producing her own screenplays.

"I want to do everything."

Photographer Laura Wilson

2009-06-13T14:03:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE

Weighted down with camera equipment, international photographerLaura Wilson crosses a crowded border bridge into Mexico's Nuevo Laredo.

It's broad daylight and very close to the immigration station. Seemingly undeterred, would-be immigrants pop out from behindbushes that line the Rio Grande's edge and wade across the murkywaters.

Suddenly, a dead body is spotted floating by. But Ms. Wilson's reaction isn't to recoil in fear, go for help or even call the authorities. "Immediately, the photographer kicks in and you know it's apicture. My first thoughts were `f16 at 250, actually f16 at 500' -it was a very bright day."

This 56-year-old photographer, whose striking good looks havebeen likened to film actress Jessica Lange's, has made documenting little-known or dying American subcivilizations her life's work.

Most recently, the faces of the Texas/Mexico border have aroused her curiosity: dogs sniffing out men huddled in trucks under heavy canvas tarps as they attempt to cross the border; socialites of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo dressed in elaborate $20,000 gowns for the debutante ball honoring "El Presidente George Washington and the First First Lady."

In the past, she has turned her lens to the dusty cowboys of Watt Matthews' ranch as well as to the man himself - one of the last great Texas cattlemen. In Montana, she has focused on the isolated Hutterite colonies, where these Christian pacifists commune.

"What I'm interested in are the enclosed worlds - groups who live outside the cultural, economic and social mainstream of America, " says Ms. Wilson, as she relaxes at home on a cream-colored couch with Navajo rugs at her feet and on the wallbehind her.

"A girl growing up in San Diego dresses in the same clothes, watches the same TV, reads the same magazines as a girl in Portland, Maine." Ms. Wilson searches for those who don't subscribe to the homogeneous American landscape.

Here, in her sprawling, ranch-style Dallas home, her love of the West is evident with tastefully decorated rooms in Western and Southwestern motifs. Several late-19th-century buffalo prints hang on the walls, as do 19th-century Plains Indian clothes with detailed beadwork.
In her office, floor-to-ceiling paneled windows look out over her wooded yard with the larger-than-life buffalo created by artist Bob "Daddy-O" Wade and the swimming pool where she exercises.

From here, she plans her projects and fields calls from editors of The New Yorker, London's The Sunday Times - The Magazine, Texas Monthly, Germany's fashion magazine Marie Claire and The New YorkTimes Magazine - all vying for her time.

The latter recently ran a photo essay on female Olympic athletes. Inside, the deck proclaimed "15 of the greatest female athletes shot by 15 of the greatest female photographers." Her shot of Sheryl Swoopes, the basketball player, took the cover.

Her provocative photographs of the Hutterites have beenp ublished in this month's Aperture - an honor akin to a writer getting into The New Yorker. Her shot of five Hutterite women sitting on a hill of hay made the cover.

Ms. Wilson is an intensely private woman who measures everything she says for the printed word. She's not particularly fond of this talk-show mentality where everyone shares life's intimate details. And when she does share, she wants to give a full and precise answer.

She has a quiet elegance and confidence. Her posture is perfect and even when she hurries, her walk is more of a glide - the same one Henry Higgins taught his protege in My Fair Lady. She wears little makeup and is as comfortable in running gear as silk. She has a love for literature and lives by the quote from Henry James: "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."

"Intense" is the word that repeatedly comes up when others describe Ms. Wilson. "Her quality ranks among the best, " says Pat Vanecek, a photographer and printmaker who assists Ms. Wilson onher shoots and in the darkroom. "The hardest part is to get a print she's happy with. At times she's difficult, but in the long run it's improved my printmaking ability."

Ms. Wilson's fascination with the photographic image began early, while she grew up in the small country town of Norwell, Mass.

"I've always had a reverence for the photograph, " she recalls. "As a child, I remember being stuck at home sick and spending hours going through family photographs. I was so struck by what my father looked like at a time when he was younger than I was and by what my mother looked like as a college girl. It's just so miraculous that you can see someone in another time.

"Photographing is about staving off loss - loss of place, youth, family."

Ms. Wilson credits her father for piquing her curiosity in people - crucial to her work. Everyone has a story, she says, if you take the time to listen.

"My father wasn't a writer, but he had a writer's sensibility -a true storyteller, " says Ms. Wilson. "I grew up going places with him and listening to his stories - meeting unusual people."

One day, she and her father were on horseback, riding through the woods - it was a cold February with snow on the ground. The sun was brilliant and bright. "We came out of the woods into a clearing and all of a sudden the horses stopped short, " she says. "Out of the woods came a man just raving with his hair all matted and dirty- no shirt on. And, of course, we're all bundled up against the cold. He was very tan and muscular and talking nonstop.

"I was startled and the horses were startled. My father just talked very calmly to him, and I could tell he was enjoying the conversation. I couldn't understand a word the man was saying. He seemed to becrazed and completely separated from reality. The man abruptlyturned and went back into the woods and we rode on. I asked my dad, `Who was that?' He said, `That was Doe Macy. He's the last of the great whaling-ship-building Macy family of Nantucket.' "

In this small Puritan town, Ms. Wilson met a real cross-section of people. "I went to grade school with a girl who had one dress -a thin, pale pink dress - she wore day after day, even in winter, "she says. "Another classmate would go to the Bahamas for vacation."

Having relationships with a variety of people gave her the ability to talk with anyone. This has proved beneficial more than once: There was the time the London's Sunday Times editor gave her an assignment to photograph sculptor Donald Judd from Marfa, Texas. (Shots from this photo shoot also appeared in Texas Monthly.)

"When we first met him, he didn't want to give us any time or access to anything at all, " says Ms. Vanecek. "He was very stand offish." At first, he would consent only to being followed on the property for candid shots. Ms. Wilson needed several hours so she could put him in a variety of places. It wasn't long before Ms.Wilson charmed him.

"By the end of that evening, we were sitting in one of his buildings drinking vodka with him, " says Ms. Vanecek. "Two hourslater, we finished off the bottle, and he gave us the next two days- not totally - but a lot more time."

Her ability to get others to warm up to her also came in handy when she began her apprenticeship with Richard Avedon, the renownedAmerican fashion photographer. The Amon Carter Museum commissioned him to produce In the American West, a photographic book of the men and women who do uncelebrated jobs of the West.

During the summers of 1979 through 1985, Ms. Wilson, Mr. Avedon and two assistants traveled through 17 Western states in a Suburban- going through the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, fromCentral Texas to the Sierra Nevada range, and from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. They went to fairs, rodeos, coal mines, uranium mines, the kill floor of meat packing houses - wherever there were large gatherings of the working class.

In the end, they photographed 752 people; the final book included 124 images.
"Dick gave me my Ph.D. in photography, " says Ms. Wilson. "It wasn't the technical aspect of photography. It was about how to approach a project. How to present it. How seriously you should take the work. It's a great experience to see how someone who's at the top of his profession does it. There's no better way to learn."

Ms. Wilson's jobs were many. She not only documented the trip with her camera and wrote the text for the book, but also handled the research.

"Laura subscribed to every newspaper in the West, which meant she soon knew who all the newspaper editors were, the politics of the towns and where to find all the fairs, " says Mr. Avedon by phone from his studio in New York. "She did incredible research. She knew the West as if it was her own back yard.

"By the time we'd get into a town, she knew who to speak to, had already made arrangements to have dinner with key people in the town, and had updated me on what kind of cooperation we could expect.

"She briefed me almost like a presidential briefing, " says Mr.Avedon. "She was not only the front-runner, but she set the tone for the whole project. She never failed me and, at the same time, she never stopped photographing our trip. It's an amazing body of work. She'll publish it one day."

After updating Mr. Avedon, Ms. Wilson would then approach the subject. "She is immaculate and has the air of the school principal, " says Mr. Avedon. "Laura carries with her an authority and decency; she's a rare beauty. Everyone wants to say yes to Laura. She simply was never refused."

All day and well into the evening, she and Mr. Avedon would discuss photography. "Laura never stopped questioning why I was doing what I was doing, " he says. "There's nothing I like to do more than to talk about photography. Laura always knew how to catch my interest. She's an A-plus student, as you can see."

On the road, Mr. Avedon says, she treated him and his assistants as if they were her sons, teaching them to starch their shirts and insisting on clean shirts for dinner.

"She had these beautiful Mexican dresses - cotton ones that were sort of loose - with embroidery at the top and always perfectlypressed, " says Mr. Avedon. "She'd wear different ones every night.It was such a pleasure to see her, we all felt we had to have cleanshirts and ties on."

Five days after she finished her work with Mr. Avedon, Ms.Wilson's passion for the West brought her to Watt Matthews' Lambshead ranch, a 62-square-mile spread about 140 miles west of Fort Worth. It was 1985. There, she began her first major work.

When she started the series, she wasn't sure whether she could make a book of photographs from such a small population of people. In short order, she realized she had roped a true American legend: At age 97, Watt Matthews still reigns in much the same way his father did more than 100 years ago. For the next four years, she returned to the ranch again and again.

"Watt's a direct link to the frontier, " she says with a sense of awe. "Where I grew up, there would be 11 generations going back tothe first settlers. Watt's one generation removed from the actual frontier. His mother was a child of the frontier. His uncle was shot by the Comanches. He carried an arrowhead in his back for 15years."

In her book, Watt Matthews of Lambshead, published by theTexas State Historical Association, Ms. Wilson captures the rawnessof the land and the people.

"His way of life is so fragile that even people who have been in ranching for generations are wondering what's going to happen to the American West, " she says. "I was talking to one rancher, Bob Green, who said, `I'm beginning to feel like an Indian.' "

Her greatest coup to date is gaining entree into the secluded world of the Hutterites, a relationship that started in 1983 whenshe helped Mr. Avedon get brief access to a couple of the colonies.

Three years later, she began her own 10-year exhaustive documentation. This religious sect - which originated in Moravia in the 16th century - lives in colonies of 35 to 150 people. Like the Amish, they shun the modern world: no television, no cars, no telephones. The only exception they make is to use high-tech equipment for farming. Schooling stops at the eighth grade. Making her job all the more difficult, photography is usually forbidden. It's considered vain glorious (their homes don't even have mirrors except for a tiny one by the sink to straighten their scarves).

Regardless, Ms. Wilson's fascination with these men in black peasant work clothes and women in modest, high-necked dresses kept her going back. Her pleas for access were met with much resistance. She went from colony to colony, most of the time being politely refused.

After several trips, as the Hutterites started to trust her, she made inroads. She began staying in several of the colonies for two weeks at a time. Things still weren't easy. Every time she wanted to click a photo, she asked permission. Sometimes the answer was yes, and very often it was no.

"The work was long and slow, " she says. "I have great admiration for what they're trying to do, which is to hold on to their way of life - spiritual life, family life - to stay close to the land and close to each other. They're trying to lead an idealized life against the odds."

During Ms. Wilson's visits, she grew fond of them and they of her. They brought her into their homes and shared their world and conversation.

"The great drama of Hutterite life is the young girl finding a boy and her going to see him or him going to see her, " Ms. Wilson says. The rituals of courtship are even more dramatic there than here because they don't have TV, movies and videos to steal their attention.

The adults were dazzled by the cost of her camera equipment."The children would ask me, `Laura, why doesn't your hair ever grow?' " she says. "They don't cut their hair. They braid it and wear it under starched kerchiefs."

The Hutterite photographs as well as the ones from Watt Matthews' ranch opened the door for her to exhibit in London at the Special Photographers Company, which now represents her, as does the AfterImage Gallery in Dallas.

"She thinks about the people she's photographing first, " says Catherine Turner, the owner of the London gallery. "A lot of photographers can find quite cruel situations, which they used for dramatic effect. She could have portrayed them and their values as absurd. Yet she never exploits them. She gives them dignity." Currently, Ms. Wilson is working on a book about the Hutterites.

In many ways, Ms. Wilson's own upbringing reflects the rural life of the Hutterites. "I only have one older sister, but I have a large extended family, so I'm used to the fun and commotion of a large family, " she says. "There were no TVs, no movie theaters, no book stores. We had very little outside stimulus. We relied on family and a community of friends for entertainment." For Thanksgiving they'd have 45 people over, and Christmas was a festival of activity, going from one relative's home to another.

It was Ms. Wilson's mother, now 88, who urged her and her sister to get a good education and to follow what interested them. "She brought out the best in us because she was so loving and giving and unselfish, " says Ms. Wilson. "You never questioned that you were loved - that gives you a loyalty to life, a confidence about yourself."

Heeding her mother's advice, she did what many young girls in the early 1960s did: She enrolled in a small woman's school -Connecticut College for Women. She studied painting, English and art history. "There were no sororities or anything like that, " she recalls. "It was just work, but the education was excellent."

There she met her husband-to-be, Robert Wilson, on a blind date. Robert's sister was going out with a boy much older than her, so his mother insisted that the two be chaperoned. The boy set Robert up with his cousin, who turned out to be Laura.

"I wasn't that good of a chaperone, but it turned out to be very lucky for me, " says Mr. Wilson. "I kind of pushed things along by asking her to marry me on the second date. . . . I really wasn't teasing. I just liked her a lot."

They married three years later, when she was 23. A year later, in 1964, she gave birth to their first son, Andrew. In 1966, the couple moved to Dallas, and Owen and Luke came soon after.
She was a hands-on mother. When her three boys were at home, she scheduled visits to the museum, ran foot races with them and often took them to Watt Matthews' ranch and on excursions through the American West during her apprenticeship with Mr. Avedon.
She encouraged her boys to play outside and explore.

"We had this great Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn type of growing up, " says Owen, speaking from New York, where he's stopped on business to finish a screenplay for New Line Cinema. "She had a real sense of fun and adventure."

All three of her sons now live in Hollywood andwork in the film industry. Their movie, Bottle Rocket, came out on video earlier this fall. Owen wrote the script and all three brothers starred in it.

"Mom gave us a sense of possibility, " says Owen. "She showed us we could live a creative life - take risks. Thank God she did it. In my case, if you look at my transcripts, you know there was no threat that I would become a lawyer or doctor."

As a wife, Ms. Wilson had this same adventurous spirit. When her husband wanted to walk away from a lucrative promotion at the Public Broadcasting System, where he was president of KERA (Channel 13), to start his own business, she didn't flinch.

"If I was scared, she must have been scared, too, but she didn't show it, " says Mr. Wilson, who now owns an advertising company."She has always been supportive and caring of me when I wanted tomake a change - not blind support but a willingness to take risks."

As a young mother, she stayed home photographing the boys. The results went from simple snapshots to something more.

"Her real work started in the mid-'70s, " says Mr. Wilson."There's one shot of the boys - two of them on the horse and Luke standing in front of the horse - that to me marked the beginning of her career. It was beyond a snapshot. Not to overdramatize it, but you felt the uncertainty of life with the three boys."

Soon after, the couple built a darkroom." She'd come whipping out of there with the excitement of seeing the pictures, " says Mr.Wilson."There was just something in the sound of her voice when she was holding those wet prints that I knew she found something shereally loved."

Now, she fits her on-the-border series in among her demanding editorial work. Some of these shots - socialites of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo preparing for their debutante ball - ran in a Texas Monthly photographic spread in March 1995. "I had assumed there would be lots of Latina girls in simple white dresses. But it was girls of all different backgrounds - Anglo and Mexican - coming out in these amazing, elaborate dresses that take a year of peasant labor to assemble with beads and pearls and rhinestones and glitter."

Getting to the debutante cotillion is no easy matter. The dresses are so huge the girls can't get into a car, van, bus or limousine. Rather, they're strapped in three and four at a time into an 18-wheel moving van.

The strength of this image sparked a new project for Ms. Wilson. "From my three extended trips to Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, I realized that it too is a world apart from mainstream America, like Watt Matthews and the Hutterites. The border - running 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific ocean - is its own separate world."

Riding Illegally into the Badlands of Old Mexico

2009-06-13T13:29:00.002-05:00

Publication: THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
TRAVEL

PASO LAJITAS, Mexico - Scribes have long romanticized thedesolate beauty of Mexico's Chihuahuan desert with itsconquistadors, banditos and dark-eyed maidens.

So, as we set out to conquer this land, we decide to travel as they did - close to the earth - not as interlopers in aclimate-controlled vehicle. Besides, where we are heading, theBadlands of Mexico, not even the all-terrain Suburban can go. Our selected mode of transportation: the horse.

This three-day trip, packed by Lajitas Stables, marries twoextremes: the rugged and the pristine. It's for those who want tosee Mexico away from the resort hotels and from other tourists, forthose who desire to wander among its people and countryside.

Our ride begins in Paso Lajitas, Mexico, just south of the U.S.border town of Lajitas, Texas. Here, most of the 20th century dissolves in an instant. Dirt streets are lined with humble flat-roofed casas made of adobe, stone and concrete. Most have running water and electricity, but clearly a few, with nothing but mother earth for floors, are too primitive for either. The long-crooked arms of the ocotillo fence in pollos, cabras andcaballos (chickens, goats and horses).
The Rio Grande, which divides the two towns, has long been used as a crossing, dating to the conquistadors. Its hard limestone bottom makes it ideal for artillery wagons and such.

After our group's guides - veteran vaquero Onorio Orozco and 16-year-old wrangler Mesquite - match the guests' riding skills to the appropriate horses, we head out of town into the sparsely populated back country of the Chihuahuan desert. Here, barbed-wirefences are a rarity. The ground is hard and rocky and looks sunstripped, an opal color, rather than earthy, and the dust stirs at the slightest breeze or movement of the hooves.

We ride up and over the rocky hills of the desert, past abandoned haciendas to the dry creek bottom of Las Mangas, where we weave through squat limestone canyons. The walls are so brittle it's as if this arid land has robbed them of moisture. Limestone sheets along the floor of the creek form periodic tinajas, catchbasins for water, where the horses drink.

For miles in every direction, all is raw and barren, seemingly uninhabitable. Yet, a few Mexican families continue to eke out an existence. At times, hillsides are so blank it's easy to assume they've been strip-mined, but it's just the lay of the place. Not ablade of grass exists from extreme overgrazing and draught. A cow eats a worncotton T-shirt.

Little grows other than tuffs of mesquite, creosote and sage, and smatterings of purple prickly pear and ocotillo. Even the turkey vultures, eerily absent, seem to know this place is void of life and consequently of death. As if to prove us wrong, a dot of yellow flits by. The butterfly looks lost in this dry desert.

Equally out of place, growing almost flat to the ground, is a clump of yellow flowers. Senor Orozco, the head wrangler, dismounts and picks a petal. Offering it to everyone to smell, he explains that it's Lemoncilla, a plant used to make a lemon-flavored tea.

As we move on, we learn of a Mexican legend right beside us. The blond Mesquite started riding at age 4 and began training horses just three years later. A U.S. citizen, she lives on both sides of the border and speaks both languages fluently. Since taking this wrangler job, she has been renting a room in Lajitas, but she still stays occasionally with her mother, a nurse, who has been allowed to live among the Mexican people because she gives them needed medical care.

Sitting astride her feisty stallion, Mesquite explains that Mexico can be very old-fashioned. Girls spend their days tending to household duties, not riding horses. Mesquite not only doesn't stay close to home, she breaks broncs. On most days, she can be found racing her horse across the
desert.

"People I don't even know will stop me and ask if I'm Mesquite, "she says.

Legends, old and new, make this place all the more unique: stories of hidden Spanish treasures, Comanche and Apache raids, and the hunters and gatherers who inhabited this place long before the Spaniards came to conquer.

Tres Boquillas, one of the stops of the day, is an Indian site with metate holes, which archaic Indians used for grinding grains. Later tribes created wonderfully clear pictographs of running horses. The paint used in these bright-red images is probably a mixture of water, an iron-based mineral called ocher and then a type of binder such as urine, blood, honey or egg whites.
Other sites on the ride have piles of broken rock and charcoal-colored earth, marking where Indians cooked sotol, which is said to taste sweet like cabbage.

As the sun drifts downward, the evening light turns the dull, lifeless colors of the desert into rich purples, reds, oranges, golds and yellows. On this first night we sleep on the grounds of a modest ranch, where the horses can be corralled.

On the rancher's covered patio of his cement hacienda are three spent golden shells, probably from a .22. About 50 yards off, up on a rise, sits an untouched Tecate aluminum can. To the house's westare healthy rows of corn.

Behind it, on top of a rocky rise, is a capilla, a doll-size chapel, with a wooden cross and corrugated-tin roof. Inside the concrete structure are spent candles, a box of matches and a framed image of the Madonna. These miniature chapels dot the countryside. It's not uncommon for vaqueros, in dusty jeans and sweat-stained cowboy hats, to pause from their chores to pray for safe passage, for rain, for the sick or for any such thing.

After Senor Orozco shoes a couple of the horses, he prepares a supper of pork, tomato and green pepper as Mesquite makes a chocolate cake in a dutch oven. We eat by the light of a propane lantern, shortly afterward falling off to sleep exhausted from the day.

After a breakfast of Mexican egg burritos, fruit and yogurt, we mount and head out on a 20-plus-mile ride to the town of San Carlos, or Manuel Benavides - maps use the latter, locals the former. We start down La Mora trail, which locals say has been traveled for at least 200 years. It's hard to argue differently when hoof prints have actually been embedded like fossils in the slabs of limestone.

This worn trail leads us into the San Carlos mountains and the Badlands, both formed by ancient volcanoes. Ash - with layers of gray, purple and red - created the Badlands' narrow canyons and its other-worldly formations. Some resemble castles and Moorish temples; others are more lunar in shape. Regardless, nothing grows in the ash, which at times is as fine as baby powder.

Lunch time takes us to one of the miracles of the desert. The wetness of natural springs invites tall cottonwood trees to pop up like mirages. In this spot, the trees' gnarled roots form a perfect circular dam that stands a good two feet off the ground, looking like something out of a Tolkien fantasy where elves, sprites and fairies should light. After watering the horses, we fill our bottles where cool spring water flows in a steady stream as if from a faucet.

From under the shade of the cottonwoods we can see far in the distance, the Chisos and Sierra del Carmen mountains as well as a notch in the horizon from the magnificent Santa Elena Canyon. In the foreground is an abandoned limestone ranch house and corral -the perfect spot to eat our steak burritos with avocado slices.

Senor Orozco points to a white speck just south of the mountains and explains that that's his ranch.

"I've traveled through all this land, but not on a pleasure ride, rounding up cattle, " he says.

After lunch we head out to ride around the San Carlos mountains made of lava. Intruding between the deep purple rocks of La Morapeak are tall limestone fingers with crevices situated just as the holes in an organ's pipes.

Little time passes before the afternoon sun turns our newly found water hot. While it still provides the body what it needs, the mouth longs for something cool. Some riders begin incessantly discussing anything cold: snow, mountain creeks, Colorado wintermornings.

Later, Senor Orozco tells us about the "Mexican walk." In this country, horses aren't for hobby as are many of their northern brethren. The animals must work cattle and often are the only form of transportation. In fact, Senor Orozco, after finishing his job at Lajitas, rides horseback 25 miles home across the desert.

Mexican ponies are taught with a strong hand to have a fastwalking gait. The training process is evident as Senor Orozco tames the skittish mare he's riding. Repeatedly, he takes a thin piece of leather and snaps it on one side of the neck, then the other, letting it know the slow "gringo walk" just won't do.

About 4 p.m., our thirsty, dusty crew spots a long line of cottonwoods far off in the distance. This means water! Our supply is low and almost as hot as if coming from a simmering pot. Spring-fed San Carlos creek, unlike the dry creeks we've been traveling through, flows with real water over rocks and boulders of limestone.

All along this amazing site is the town of San Carlos. Built here because of the water source, the town seems close enough to touch, but things always appear closer than they are in the desert, making it all the more miragelike. We keep moving closer, but the town remains evasive.

About an hour later, we finally reach this pristine, sleepy village. Most of the streets have been modernized with concrete, but some are still cobblestone. The casas, modest but meticulously kept, are made of real mud adobe or concrete or limestone. Most of the yards have a good sampling of fruit trees, gardens, horses, goats, chickens. Compared to Paso Lajitas, the town looks quiteprosperous.

A dark-eyed nina with long-unsculpted locks peeks through herscreen door as the desconocidos (strangers) pass through town. A couple of ninos in bleached white T-shirts peer from behind the side-yard gates. Senors and senoras stop their chores to watch, albeit subtly. They come to their windows, doors and gates. Some smile, some are expressionless. A girl in a thin blue dress shyly giggles as she flashes a stranger a grin.

Unlike tourist destinations, no one has anything to sell. There are no mercados, only a small drugstore for locals to buy everything from fruit and vegetables to ice cream.

At the end of a cobblestone street is our destination: Gloria'sBed and Breakfast, a pristinely kept casa with a veranda wrappingaround it. A true slice of paradise, with its terraced garden of bougainvillea, roses, yucca and a water canal. Gloria, the owner, also grows watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and chile peppers, as well as pecan, peach and mimbreo trees. The latter, similar to the apple, is stewed for making jams and such.

The home, with its picturesque view, is circled by hills, mountains and mesas on all sides, and is a stone's throw from the spring-fed creek. From here are lots of places to hike: Indian caves, old mines, the ghost town of Mina Grande, the mine of MinaDos Marias and the canyon of San Carlos. The Sierra Rica mountains also are close by with their pines and oaks and trees that smell of cinnamon.

As we stop our horses, Gloria, in a brightly colored dress, greets us with ice-cold, hand-squeezed limeade. This honey-sweetened delight goes down quickly with our thirsty bunch. Inside her meticulously kept place are photos of her on the film set of "Streets of Laredo," but the most impressive site for this crowd are the oversized bathtubs in which to get squeaky-clean.

Most nights, dinner is served on the veranda, with starched, bone-white tablecloths, but a sudden high wind and the threat of rain causes everyone to grab the vases of bougainvillea and race for shelter. Still, nothing could spoil the gourmet Mexican dinner of mole chicken, spicy cactus, guacamole, beans, rice and flour tortillas, handmade just before they're passed out. After dinner, the winds have gone and, for all the wrath-of-God theatrics, barely a spit of rain hits the ground.

Gloria opened her B&B because San Carlos is her childhood home. After living on both sides of the border, she decided this is the place for her.

"The pace is slower and less stressful, " she says. "Just to live is so expensive in America."

She knows her venture is risky, considering she's in such a remote spot. But she also knows if the right people find out about it she'll do fine. It's perfect for anyone wanting to get away from it all. Gloria knows that better than anyone.

"Here, I can retire, " she says. "If my business fails, I can live off my fruit trees and garden. If I can't afford it, I don't need electricity."

After dinner, some relax on the now calm patio while a couple of us head into town to take one of Gloria's helpers home. There the husband, sitting at the kitchen table with the glow of the TV in the background, is quick to apologize in Spanish for the slightly cluttered table, explaining his wife has been working all night.

We stay only a moment, then head into the town square with its white gazebo. All along the way, homes are lighted and mariachi music reigns. Gloria explains this party atmosphere with a simple statement: "It's Saturday night."

In the square, the town's people have gathered for a Baptist revival and fiesta. "There are not too many Baptists here. Any excuse for a party, "she says.

Nov. 1-5, she says, is the big Catholic fiesta. People from the small ranches and towns all around bring their babies to bebaptized. "There will be dancing everywhere, cockfights, horse racing andlots more, " Gloria says.

Not much has changed since Gloria was a 14-year-old.

"I remember sitting right there on that bench. I wasn't supposed to have a boyfriend yet, " she says. But a boy she liked came to court her. "My uncle took me home right then. Oh, I cried and cried. They were very strict back then."

Now with a 14-year-old daughter of her own, Gloria says she too has to be strict - but perhaps she wouldn't take her home. "Some of the ranch families are still that strict. Here, you have to be strict with your girls. Boys, they can do anything, but not girls."

And apparently the people are strict with their women, too. Only men are allowed in the cantina. Mesquite explains that only a woman selling herself would dare go in, and she would be shunned by society.

In the morning, Gloria fixes us a huge Mexican breakfast with garden-fresh watermelon on the veranda. Afterward, we slip into shorts and sandals for a hike up San Carlos creek, which runs over a bed of limestone rocks and boulders. On the towering canyon walls ferns grow where springs trickle down.

A limestone enclave has a constant mist raining down, and just a little farther up, low to the ground, is a shower of springwater, warm from volcanic activity. This is a tropical sub-climate, surrounded by cliffs with sotol, mesquite, yucca and prickly pear pushing through the canyon's rock sides.

At one point, way above the creek is an Anasazi-style ladder leading to a niche in the limestone walls. Inside is a santos witha candle for worship. There's an old Indian site here, too.

Later in the morning, we head back into the Chihuahuan desert toward the town of Paso Lajitas, understanding full well why Gloriahas decided to stay right here. Next trip, we plan to stay awhile longer, too.

Lajitas Horsewoman Linda Walker

2009-06-13T13:21:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees

Astride a feisty black mare, Linda Walker explains that her job has two requirements: the ability to "shoot bull and ride."

This red-headed wrangler and former team roper can surely shovel and ride with the best. At her stables in Lajitas, Texas, Ms. Walker runs horseback trips that can last up to five days through the Chihuahua desert of Mexico and Texas. The windswept, wide-open vistas are as much a part of her as the octillo and cholla are a part of the landscape - a desolate stretch along the Rio Grande.

"This big, unpeopled land is essential to my well being, " says the 43-year-old Ms. Walker. "It takes away the layers of the onion and leaves no place to hide. "It's being able to see yesterday going and tomorrow coming."

Few folks have the disposition to live in Lajitas, one of Texas' last remaining outposts. It takes the likes of Ms. Walker, who has the heart of a hippie and the soul of a wanderer. She doesn't see isolation or emptiness as she looks out over the sandy hills and desert mountains.
"It looks vast. It looks like opportunity, " she says.

These days she gets paid to do what she grew up doing. Her earliest pack trips started while she was a youngster in Colorado, where she'd hunt with her father. They stalked deer and elk for food, not sport.

"Given the choice of shooting a spike (a young elk with just one fork on his rack) and an 8-point bull, my father would tell me to shoot the spike. They're much more tender. The older bucks are tough and not as tasty."

When not in school, she'd ride and work with her father, Billy Walker, who in his day managed several ranches in Colorado. Her chores ran from working cattle to something "as benign and wonderful as going out and pulling our own carrots and as realistic as butchering cows and chopping chickens' heads off."

By age 15, entertainment meant gathering a few friends and riding into the wilderness for days at a time, packing in food and supplies. Linda was as comfortable sleeping under the stars as most are snuggling in their beds.

All this became the groundwork she'd need to run her own string of horses, learning many do's and don'ts along the way. "I've been in more physical scraps than I can shake a stick at." To name a few: She has had horses roll off mountains ("taking them where they don't belong"). She's been dragged across rocky terrain with her spur caught in her stirrup. She's been thrown a few times. A couple of hard hits gave her a concussion and a broken back.

The latter happened during her first month running Lajitas Stables, her home for the past 10 years. "Right out of the box, I had a runaway."

That morning she had sent 10 guys out with a wrangler on an all-day ride. Concerned some might want to bail, she had planned to meet them for lunch. Her first mistake, she says, was letting a novice with horses hook up her wagon team. Her second was having him fix the bridles he had improperly put on the horses (he had placed the bit under the chin rather than in the mouth). Instead of keeping hold of the horses, he took the bridles completely off the horses, and the newly freed animals bolted with Ms. Walker on the wagon."I rode it for a quarter mile, maybe a half. The wagon started fishtailing and I was afraid it would roll so I jumped off the side. I flew with the greatest of ease but didn't land so well."

This was a harsh welcome for a newcomer who wasn't at all sure she even wanted the concession. Friends of her grandparents asked her to take over the stables after hearing she, along with her sister, Debra, used to run seven- and 10-day pack trips, mostly for groups of women, into the wilderness of Colorado (where she also worked as a vet assistant at a clinic in Durango).

She turned the offer down. They asked her to make an offer. She did. "Much to my surprise they took it, " she says. "What they didn't know is I didn't have a clue how to do an hourly trip. I had never even been on an hourly ride. I came in real green."

By year two, she added pack trips to her repertoire, becoming one of the few - if not the only - to regularly offer multi-day horseback wilderness adventures in Texas. Her next bold, which came seven years ago, was to ride into Mexico. At the time, she didn't even speak the language. The trips have become some of her most popular. Initially, she would run six or seven trips a winter. Now she leads that many a month.

Much of her success on the border is her respect for Mexico's culture.To gain permission to cross Mexican landowners' property, she sends a male delegate to negotiate. In the United States, she's accustomed to bargaining for herself. Plus, guests have to understand the town of San Carlos, designated as Manuel Benevides on many maps, which they'd often pass through, is not a border party town.

Few norteamericanos ever come through here, she says. "You have to act like you're a guest in someone's home - be on your best behavior." Women are not allowed in the bar, and Ms. Walker asks the men to stay away also. "The combination of drunk Americans and Mexican bravado can be volatile. We have turned many of Mexico's border towns into sideshows. We do things in their front yard we wouldn't do in our backyard."

Border trips are a tough sale during the summer, when desert temperatures are like standing next to a blast furnace. To keep her string of horses earning their hay, she hauls them north during the hottest months. Some of her horses give hourly rides on a 3,000-acre ranch just outside of Canyon City, Colo., and others join her for pack trips in Taos, N.M.

For her, it's the perfect set-up. For a few months, she enjoys the restaurants and chamber music of Taos and Santa Fe, and then the rugged beauty of the Big Bend country the rest of the year.
When Ms. Walker left her Durango, Colo., home for Lajitas, her family thought she had lost her mind - especially her mother. As a young woman, she had lived in this town when Ms. Walker was just an infant. Her father had gotten a job on a seismic crew. "When my mom got there, all there was was a trading post and three adobe houses - no running water and no one spoke English . . .

"Lajitas is either a place you really like or really don't." Her nieces and nephews call her "crazy old Aunt Linda." Her siblings, who have 9-to-5 jobs, have a hard time understanding her choices. Ms. Walker doesn't.

"If I fell over dead tomorrow, I could honestly say I've lived my life fully. I haven't put off until tomorrow to live.

"I have friends who think they're going to make their stories tomorrow. I have great stories today."

Urban Scrawl: Graffiti Artists

2009-06-13T13:15:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees

When New York sanitized its subways and ghettos of graffiti in the late 1980s, Norman Mailer compared the city to a jungle without foliage. He even bemoaned the controversial art form's death. That assessment has proven premature.

Galleries around the country, and especially abroad, are showing the work of graffiti artists with nicknames such as Crash, Stitch, Phase 2, Ozone and Vert. Last month alone, exhibitions opened in Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Germany and Australia, as well as in the Dallas area.
"Aerosol Scrawl: An Indoor Graffiti Extravaganza" runs through Saturday at the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson.

"Graffiti art is going through its first revival since [Keith] Haring, [Kenny] Scharf and [Jean-Michel] Basquiat had front-row seats in the art world in the late '70s and early '80s, " says Greg Metz, coordinator for UTD's main gallery. "It's time for graffiti to claim its place as an art form."

These days accomplished graffiti artists, called "writers," receive commissions to do work for bars, galleries, restaurants, record stores and other businesses. In New York, three former street kids - who go by nicknames Nicer, Bio, BG183 - started Top Artistic Talents to create urban art; clients include Coca-Cola, Reebok and Seagram's Chivas Regal. Others have taken the skill they honed on the street to Internet Web sites and advertising art.

Even lesser-known artists are getting commissions for their work. Dallas graffiti artist Greg Contestabile (a.k.a. Ozone), whose works are in the UTD exhibit, makes much of his living painting urban scenes and graffiti for clients that include several Deep Ellum clubs and area businesses, as well as the television series Walker, Texas Ranger.

"When they're doing an episode about gangs or an urban scenario, they call me to do the graffiti, " says Ozone, who's 36. "I've done about five or six episodes now."

Even though graffiti has gone beyond the scrawls on bathroom walls and subways, it remains a contentious subject because of its roots in vandalism. "It's discouraging when you see "Lobos' or "East Side Homeboys' scrawled across a wall, " laments 19-year-old Luke Harnden (a.k.a. Vert), who also has work in the UTD exhibit. "That's how many people view graffiti. "Masters' [accomplished graffiti artists] set out to make the environment look better, not worse."

Of course, the Dallas city ordinance banning graffiti reflects a different perspective. "I've seen some great work out there, " says Dallas police Sgt. Mark Langford, who serves on the gang unit. "Some of these guys have real talent. But it doesn't matter if it's a gang symbol or a pretty picture. If they don't have the owner's permission, it's illegal."

Vert has done illegal pieces. Some owners and anti-graffiti citizen groups "paint over anything in the realm of graffiti, whether it has artistic merit or not. That's [disappointing] but someone has to clean up, I guess." The ultimate compliment to artists is when their work is left alone.

Vert has been fascinated with graffiti since age 13 when he first saw it towering 10 stories above on an abandoned rice mill in Houston. "It drove something inside of me, " he says. "There's just something exciting and dynamic about the architecture of words, bending letters around and making them into images."

Early on, the danger element appealed to him, but these days Vert and his peers are as likely to paint legally as illegally. Not having to worry about getting caught gives them the time to do detailed pieces. "I'll approach bar owners and other business owners and proposition them, " says Vert.

Local artists rarely see their works in galleries; for some, the UTD exhibit has been their first chance. Mostly, their work is temporarily displayed on a few walls and fences around Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville. The free-for-all space where owners have given their permission is limited and highly competitive, and work can literally disappear overnight. Part of the tradition of graffiti is to photograph your work; often, it is the only lasting record of it.

"There's always another artist ready to paint over your work, " says Vert. "I try not to let it get to me."

In Dallas and around the country, graffiti art has not held collectors' interest since the first surge in the early 1980s. Still, last November, the self-portrait by Mr. Basquiat, the late graffiti artist, sold for $3.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York.

"Internationally, graffiti art has remained very hot in Holland, Germany and now Japan, " says Jan Ramirez, deputy director of collections at the Museum of the City of New York. "Many of the early New York writers - Crash, Daze, Phase 2, Mico, Lady Pink - have gone on to have major international careers."

Despite the renewed interest among some galleries, museums rarely explore the genre. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had the Bay Area graffiti artist Twist spray a wall mural in 1996 that stayed up for four months. The Museum of the City of New York owns urban artist Martin Wong's private collection of New York graffiti art and hopes to mount an exhibit in 2004 after completing a new 35,000-square-foot hall.

Historically, graffiti has always been primal and public. "Prehistoric predecessors wrote on cave walls, " says Mr. Metz. "Many were done similarly to spray painting. They'd blow pigmented oxides through hollow bones to record their signature or codifier. It became a permanent record [or] shadow of their temporary life form."

Throughout history, the impulse to make one's mark in a public space has endured. Pompeii and the Great Wall of China are famous for their graffiti. In World War II, troops scrawled messages on walls.

As a contemporary genre, graffiti first came out of the ghettos, subways and sewers - a kind of modern cave - in the 1960s as a way for gangs to mark their territory. The writing explosion didn't occur until 1971 when The New York Times profiled "Taki 183, " a delivery boy who wrote his "tag" nickname all over the city rather than just confining it to his own neighborhood.

"The newspapers were a great stimulus to graffiti because they covered it like they were covering a war, " says Jack Stewart, who earned his doctorate in subway art from New York University. "They [the youths] all wanted to get their names in the papers."

By the end of 1971, the scrawl covered the city. Writers had to invent new ways to draw attention to their name. Bold color and exaggerated three-dimensional letters began showing up, and the images grew larger and more abstract.

"It was the voice of the people from the underground, " says Vert. "It was a common man's way to fame."

By 1972, the subway was carrying youths' names around the five boroughs of New York, and the once isolated gangs formed writing clubs as a way to exchange creative ideas. "They got to know each other because they admired the talent of writers from other neighborhoods, " says Mr. Stewart.

Graffiti art is as uniquely American as jazz, rap and rock 'n' roll. The New York graffiti marks the first stylistic change to wall scrawling since Paleolithic times, says Dr. Stewart. "There has been no other graffiti that was created as a work of art until these youths in New York, " he says.
Graffiti artists such as Vert still follow their lead. The style of lettering remains remarkably the same whether the graffiti is in Italy, Germany, Holland or any American city. Artistic talent and daring feats, such as hanging over a bridge to "bomb, " or paint, a hard-to-reach spot, are still highly regarded.

Unlike their predecessors, Vert and his peers think nothing of using brushes and rollers along with their spray can. The skill that's required when working a spray can is still admired. Drips come from the inexperienced hand, and Vert, as those before him, uses different size tips to get varying spray widths. Some tips he plucks from other aerosol cans and others he makes himself.
Writers still have tight networks, but their selection of canvases has grown much larger. Not only do graffiti artists share "pieces" from around the world on the Internet, but they also no longer just paint their own cities.

They travel the highways to reach legal walls. Cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, Kansas City, Mo., and St. Louis have put on writing events for artists around the country. In August, Vert and his crew rented a van and headed to St. Louis to participate in a massive aerosol "bomb" on a Mississippi River flood wall, which runs several miles under a railroad bridge through downtown.
Crews marked out their spots, like homesteaders plotting off land. Vert and his crew ended up at the end of the line with about an 80-foot section. At events such as these, they meet other writers, exchange ideas and often stay in touch. Vert, who gets a particular thrill painting freight and passenger trains, receives letters from artists in other cities who have seen his work.

Trains offer youths increased visibility that the metropolitan transit systems just can't. But more has changed than national recognition among these artists. Characters and images - something purists balk at - have been creeping into the art form for years.

"If it doesn't have letters, it's not "graf, ' " says New Yorker Hugo Martinez, who 27 years ago was the first to encourage graffiti artists to put their work on canvas. He owns Martinez Gallery, which shows graffiti art.

Ozone sees it differently. His attraction has always been to images, not letters. He's known for a cartoon punk with bug eyes and a pack filled with aerosol cans slung over his shoulder. At the UTD exhibit, the character stands in front of a fire hydrant looking out over the city.

"That's where the symbolism comes in, " says Ozone. "He's like a dog marking his territory."

Swing time: Three women played professional baseball in Negro League

2009-06-13T13:08:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees

Mamie "Peanuts" Johnson just wants folks to know that three women played professional ball in the men's Negro Baseball League.

"We were there all right, " says Ms. Johnson. "Not too many people know about us now."
But in their day, they drew crowds for the Indianapolis Clowns. Their names and images were on posters tacked up in barber shops and grocery stores.

"Everyone was curious about the girls playing, " says Gordon "Hoppy" Hopkins, a former teammate who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. "They had never seen women play before and they wanted a firsthand look."

The first woman to break the "gender barrier" was 32-year-old Toni Stone, who played second base for the 1952-53 season. Her real name was Marcenia Lyle Alberga, but she thought that was too cute, so she changed it.

The next year, the Clowns recruited second baseman Connie Morgan. And pitcher Mamie Johnson, who will be at the African American Museum in Dallas Saturday as part of an event commemorating the Negro League. She is the only one of the three women still living.

"Some say it was done strictly as a gate attraction, " says Larry Lester, an independent Negro League researcher. "But these women could hold their own on the ball field. When there was a collision on second base, they were able to brush themselves off and go back to the dugout. They were athletes first."

Ms. Johnson's training started on her South Carolina farm, where their home had a fireplace in every room and a big wrap-around porch. By age 7, she and the neighborhood kids regularly put games together, and when no one could play, her Uncle Leo tossed balls to her.

"There was nothing else to do where I come from, " says Ms. Johnson, 63. "This wasn't the city. The houses were about a mile apart, but everyone knew by the end of school where we were going to meet to play ball after chores were done."

By age 11, pitching became her specialty - a skill that would eventually earn her a spot on a men's team, the Alexandria All-Stars, which played in the Washington, D.C., area. Her dream was to play for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was chronicled in the movie "A League of Their Own." But Ms. Johnson's attempts to try out were blocked. She heard the same story many black men had heard before Jackie Robinson broke the major leagues' color barrier in 1947: No blacks allowed.

All was not lost for "Peanuts, " a nickname she got for being so tiny: 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds. In 1953, the Clowns saw Ms. Johnson play at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and asked her to come to a city park to try out. Her pitching landed her the job. "I was overjoyed because it gave me the opportunity to do just what I wanted, " she says.

Her specialty pitch was the curve ball. She learned it during a game with the Kansas City Monarchs. The great Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige came over to her. "I was so little, he said he'd teach me something to keep me from throwing my arm away." That curve became her "ace in the hole." She struck out a lot of players with that pitch. "If you struck out any of those men, you were good, " she says.

The man responsible for bringing the three women into the Negro League was McKinley "Bunny" Downs, a former player and the Clowns' business manager. "Bunny used to tell us, "The girls are the moneymakers here. I want you to treat them like ladies or you can be replaced. If anyone messes up, I'll walk you to the bus station and buy you a ticket home, ' " says Mr. Hopkins.

Ironically, the women's big drawing power improved the men's salaries, he says. "One time, Toni got hurt, " says Mr. Hopkins. "Her right arm was in a sling. But they had posters out saying she was playing. Bunny said she had to put on her uniform and play anyway." And she did. For most games, she'd come out for the first three or four innings, and then one of the other players would take over, says Mr. Hopkins. When asked why she didn't play the whole game, he just says, "You don't have to give folks a whole hog for them to know they're eating pork."

For the 1954 season, Ms. Stone was traded to the Monarchs, who paid her $400 a month plus a $200 bonus, and the Clowns recruited Ms. Johnson and Ms. Morgan.

The women took to the road - side by side with the men. For nine months, they played seven nights a week, sometimes two games a day. Ms. Johnson pitched every five or six days. The players usually slept on the bus, as they often had to drive all day and night to reach the next game. When they did stop for rest, Mr. Downs always made sure the women had separate accommodations, says Mr. Hopkins. "He took real good care of them."

"Quite often the women were underestimated, " says Layton Revel, director for the Center for Negro League Baseball Research in Dallas. "When Mamie was pitching, they'd think, "Oh, anyone could get a hit off this "girl." ' The next thing the batter knew, he was walking back to the dugout with his bat in his hand 'cause he just got struck out."

Ms. Johnson says she never heard a bad word from any of her fellow players. "Back then, men were gentlemen, " she says from her home in the U.S. capital. "Even if they didn't like you, they wouldn't say something bad."

Things were different for Ms. Stone, who clocked in at 11 seconds in the 100-yard dash. She set the tone for the other women. "I still remember a story Toni used to tell, " says Mr. Revel. "When she was signed, she was asked to wear shorts, but she wouldn't have anything to do with that. She told them she was a ballplayer and was going to play like everyone else."

At times, the guys gave her trouble in the dugouts, too. Mr. Lester quoted Ms. Stone saying to him in an interview: "They give me a fit when they started bench jockeying. They tell me to go home and fix my husband some biscuits, or anything. And they didn't spare me because of my sex. But I've heard so much cursing in my life and have been called so many bad names that now it doesn't upset me at all."

Ms. Stone was cut from a different cloth, says Mr. Lester. "She walked with the strut of a man, had unmanicured fingernails and had a rough appearance. Connie and Mamie could have been beauty contestants. But all three were excellent athletes."

When Ms. Stone signed her contract with the Indianapolis Clowns, she agreed to play for $350 a month.
Her biggest moment came one Easter Sunday during a game in Omaha, Neb. She stepped up to the plate with Satchel Paige on the pitcher's mound.

"That was the happiest moment of my life, " she told Mr. Lester. "I got the only hit we had against him that day."

Play time for Albert Wong, 9-year old prodigy, is playing classical music like a pro

2009-06-13T13:01:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees

CARROLLTON - Nine-year-old Albert Wong isn't blessed with the long, elegant fingers of a classical pianist. His tiny hands look as if they would be more proficient at constructing mud forts than tackling Beethoven or Bach.

Yet this child, with his buzz cut and untucked T-shirt, has amazing command of the keys with strong, assured strokes that han- dle the complicated fingering of Mozart's Twelve Variations K. 500 and Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu Opus 66, a standard piece for concert pianists' encore repertoire.

"I've seen university students who have studied the piano for years who aren't at his level, " says Joseph Banowetz, a professor of piano performance at the University of North Texas in Denton who is also Albert's coach. "In raw talent, I'd say he's in the top 1 percent."

Dr. Banowetz first met Albert when the boy was only 5. One of his former university students, Alton Chin, prodded him until he reluctantly agreed to an audition. Dr. Banowetz decided he'd test the boy, politely suggest a couple of piano instructors and move on. He had never taught a child and didn't intend to start now.

Besides, his hectic schedule as a professor, international performer, recording artist and competition judge did not allow for private students. That is, until Albert. Immediately, Dr. Banowetz saw that the boy knew his way around the keys, but that wasn't enough to alter his thinking.

The difference came when he tested Albert's pitch memory. First, Dr. Banowetz played individual notes. By sound only, Albert properly named each one. Dr. Banowetz played several clusters of notes. Albert named each one. Finally, he slammed his fist onto the piano, and Albert also named those notes. Instead of refusing Albert, he found himself accepting - temporarily - the coaching position he had no time for. That was four years ago.

"There are different degrees of perfect pitch, " says Dr. Banowetz, 64. "His is extremely acute."
At a recent solo recital, Albert walks onstage, bows and smiles an endearing yet awkwardly boyish grin. He's playing a benefit for the Texas Steinway Society's scholarship program.
To reach the pedals of this black grand piano, he has to sit on the edge of the bench. Using no sheet music, he lays his hands on the keys, pausing for just a moment, and tackles works from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Chopin and others.

After his Mozart piece, he hops up and walks off the stage. It's not the intermission, and within moments he returns, bows and begins again. This is one of his concert rituals. At least once, he'll stop to hug his mom, who always waits backstage for him. He likes having someone he knows close by, says his mother, Yen-Lih Chang.

When Albert plays, the little boy in him disappears. He feels the music's emotion. Closing his eyes, his shoulders rise and fall as the music intensifies and softens. At times his fast, aggressive fingering blurs his hands as they fly across the keys.

"The technique you have to practice, but the feeling comes naturally, " says Albert, who made his debut at age 5. His performance of Kuhlau's Sonatina Op. 55 No. 2 third movement earned him first place and a grand prize at the 10th annual North Texas Music Competition at Richland College. Since then he's performed recitals at UNT and with the Northeast Orchestra of Fort Worth and Fort Worth Chamber Music Society.

Neither of Albert's parents is musical, but when Albert was 3, Ms. Chang was overwhelmed trying to sate her son's appetite for knowledge. Learning an instrument, she hoped, would help keep him busy. He picked the piano because he liked its sound.

Albert studies with the professor at the university for a couple of hours each Thursday. He doesn't like to play a piece more than 10 times before a recital, and practice sessions typically last two hours, five days a week.

Technically, Dr. Banowetz says, Albert's not quite ready for the most advanced Beethoven sonatas or Rachmaninoff. "Piano is a building process, " says Dr. Banowetz. "You don't tackle the last Beethoven sonatas until you've had a sampling of the early and middle sonatas. . . .
"But I teach Albert phrasing, style, balance just like I do advanced university students. This isn't a case of monkey see, monkey do. He's extremely intelligent." Nothing needs to be dumbed down for him.

And that goes for all he tackles. Albert is not an idiot savant, excelling at one thing. Rather he's a child prodigy. By age 3, he started reading. Even then, he constantly asked questions about everything from what are infinity and negative numbers to how does the digestive tract work. By age 4, he taught himself to write by tracing letters with his finger. He has also taken up the violin and gave his first solo performance with the Dallas Chamber Orchestra at age 6.

These days, he's home-schooled by his mother, who's an engineer with two master's degrees. She quit work several years ago to raise Albert, and his father, Chi-Pong Wong, is a senior engineer at IBM.

Even above music, he loves reading. He'll read anything from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Mark Twain's short-story collection to a biography on Thomas Edison to the encyclopedia.
Popular music such as rock and country hold little to no appeal. "Rock is too loud, and the tunes are very simplistic, " says Albert. "They keep on repeating themselves."

Albert's big frustration with his own music is that his hands can't reach an octave, limiting his repertoire. As soon as his hands grow, he has his ears on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody and Beethoven's Concerto No. 5.

MARY NAN WEST: The boss lady runs Rafter S

2009-06-13T12:49:00.003-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE

RAFTER S RANCH - Mary Nan West's grandfather once told her that she needed to be as comfortable in the parlor as sitting on the side of the corral.

Running the family's South Texas cattle ranch has come naturally for this 73-year-old stalwart of the West. She's at home among the Rafter S' scrub brush, where for years she rounded up cattle from horseback, and vaccinated, branded and castrated alongside hired hands.

It was the parlor lessons that used to give her fits. "A needle was just something that never fit into my hand, " Ms. West says. And she didn't care much for the piano practicing that her Victorian grandmother, Robbie Bedell West, insisted on.

"When my grandmother would take a nap, I'd get one of the [workers' daughters] to pound on the piano and I'd run off and ride the calves, " Ms. West says. "I knew about when she'd be getting up, and I'd make sure to be back in that seat before she woke."

The young Mary Nan preferred driving cattle or taking daily shooting lessons with her grandfather, George Washington West. "He used to stand behind me, and he'd help me hold a .45 pistol. I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 years old, but I remember it as if it was yesterday." Her parents divorced when she was about 2 years old, and her maternal grandparents raised her.

Mary Nan's grandfather groomed her to take over the ranch from a very young age. He had her do everything from work cattle to mend fences and windmills.

"He used to tell me, "If you don't know how to do something, you can't tell someone else how to do it, ' " she says.

Proficiency with firearms was another thing her grandfather stressed. He was there when Mary Nan killed her first deer. "I don't remember exactly how old I was; I just know I was very young. I shot it with a 30-40 Krag, " she says. "It kicked like a mule. I had a bruise on my shoulder and the side of my face. My grandfather was so proud."

Mary Nan's grandmother often scolded her husband, saying he was trying to turn the girl into a boy. To counter the ranching and hunting, her grandmother insisted that Mary Nan go to society parties in San Antonio.

"That was something I never enjoyed, and most particularly if I had work to do here, " Ms. West says. "That was a constant tug-o'-war beween my grandmother and me." But her grandmother did reap the benefits from some of the boyish activities. Mary Nan and her .22 bolt-action rifle kept her grandmother supplied with squirrels, a delicacy she loved.

By the time Ms. West turned 19, her grandfather was aging, and the time had come for her to take over the 36,000 acres of ragged country landscaped with mesquite trees, blackbrush, catclaw and guajillo, a desert brush that has tiny, lemon-yellow blooms inthe spring. The same land her grandfather started working almost a century before.

"Whatever is here in the way of flora is thorny, " Ms. West says. "Anything else that's alive will either sting ya or bite ya, including rattlesnakes."

The country is made for cattle, not sheep, Ms. West says. "It's too brushy and thorny. It will pull all the wool off."

These days, she's affectionately called "The Boss Lady, " and everyone says, "Yes, ma'am" to her out of respect, not fear.

"She's a throwback, " says George Bodden, her 29-year-old grandson. "She believes you can make a deal on a handshake. . . . You always know where you stand with her because she'll always let you know."

Not surprisingly, these are the same words Ms. West uses to describe her grandfather. After all, she is her grandfather's granddaughter.

She still runs her life and ranch much as he did. "I was raised that I didn't have to sign my name to a piece of paper to have a binding contract, " she says. "My word was my bond."
But the times have made ranching more complicated. She has to deal with more government regulations, and higher property taxes and overhead.

"A good ranch truck used to cost $1,500. The last one I bought was about $27,000. . . . And I assure you that rural electrification didn't come cheap."

Ranching today requires more than a knowledge of livestock. "You have to know bookkeeping, tax laws, federal and state regulations, and it doesn't hurt to have an "in' in the political world, " she says. "You have to be half doctor and half nurse when you grow up in the country, especially early on when we didn't have phones."

Her grandson, an agriculture graduate from Texas A&M, is her foreman. "George came back [from school] with good ideas such as clearing land and adding permanent grasses, " she says. "Wonderful idea. I couldn't understand why I never thought of it." He also saves on vet bills because he handles the medications and palpates the cows (checking for pregnancies).

These days, Ms. West and Mr. Bodden run the ranch. She's a part of buying and selling livestock, and she still feeds the herds, but she leaves Mr. Bodden and the hands to handle the cattle in the pens.

"She's the boss, though, " Mr. Bodden says. "I check in with her. She just can't scale a fence to get out of the way of a steer as fast as she used to."

As a youth, Mr. Bodden worked beside her, filling syringes as she vaccinated and castrated.
"I can remember her horseback. She sure knew how to work cattle. She could ride with anyone."
Her work force is smaller than when she took over the ranch, and the only horses left are retired. Roundups are done with trucks, utility vehicles or helicopters.

"If you have someone who knows what they're doing, you can drive the cows all the way to the pens with a helicopter - all you need is a guy to open the gate, " says her son-in-law Richard Traylor, who also uses helicopters on his ranch about an hour away.

"Cowboys have almost become a thing of the past, extinct you might say, " Ms. West says. "We still need someone who knows how to handle cattle in the pens. We still firebrand, and we still castrate with a pocket knife. Some things don't change no matter what they teach you at the university."

As for the mechanization of the ranch - she hasn't decided if it's good or not. "Oh, I suppose it is, " she says, grudgingly. The roads have made fixing fence and getting around the ranch easier. "But every time I turn around, something has broken down. You didn't used to have breakdowns because there wasn't anything to break. Now we have so many conveniences, but never any time to sit on the porch and rock."

Over the years, she has survived many droughts, including the seven-year 1950s dry spell that inspired Elmer Kelton's novel "The Time It Never Rained." Her grandfather died in 1956, one year before the drought ended. She remembers going to him for advice. "He said, "This won't be your last drought if you stick with this business, ' and I said, "Yes, sir.' So, in other words, "Deal with it.' "

Many ranchers and farmers lost everything. Others moved their cattle to greener pastures. She considered doing the same. George West believed leaving would cost more. So she stayed.
"That was a goody. We weren't into a big cow/calf operation at the time, " she says. "We had steers, which was good. Steers you can unload any time."

By the time the cows had eaten most of the prickly pear, she bought green-corn silage at $3 a ton and packed it into pits with a bulldozer. The concoction kept what few cows she had alive.
"That drought was odd. There was no forage on the ground, but we never had a tank go dry, " she recalls.

Her land is a bit wetter these days. Ms. West looks out the kitchen window surveying it. "This is my favorite time on the ranch. There's just nothing like the green after a rain."
She recalls how, as a child, the Leona River, which runs through the property, was her playground.

"I fished and swam in it. We'd get ticks all over us. When we got too many, I'd divide the girls and boys, and we'd strip down and wash them off, " she says. "When we saw a snake, we'd kill it. We grew up knowing how to take care of ourselves."

And that's how she raised her two daughters, whom she brought up after divorcing their father, Joseph Clarence Adams Jr., in the early 1950s. The girls were about 6 and 7 years old.
"By the time I was 7, I could prepare a dinner and put it on the table, " Mary West Traylor says. Her sister, Robbie Bodden, was the tomboy. She spent her time in the pens with her mother, helping to bring the steers down so they could be vaccinated and castrated. (Today, Ms. Bodden and her husband live in Dallas.)

One recent evening, Ms. West and Mr. and Mrs. Traylor took a drive around the ranch. The steers and heifers trot up as they hear the dinner bell (the honking of the horn).
"You want to feed them just enough to keep them gentle, " says Ms. West, who keeps stopping the truck, giving Mr. Traylor time to rip open sacks of feed and scatter a few morsels on the ground. Mrs. Traylor finally asks, "They already ate this morning, didn't they?"

"I can't help it. I just can't pass them by, " Ms. West confesses.

Most of the cattle come right up. A few wait in the bushes until the truck drives off, but all eventually wade in to get a taste. A little farther down the road, she looks over at a few cattle heading toward the truck. "They have the size but not the "groceries' to put weight on."
"You have about 30 days until sale. They'll put on conservatively 2 pounds a day, " Mrs. Traylor calculates. "I'll be happy if they put on a pound a day, " says Ms. West.

Ms. West sees a spotted steer with a patch around one eye. He's wet and muddy from the drizzle. After getting out of the truck, she strokes his forehead and hand-feeds him a couple of pellets, which he eagerly gobbles. "Hi there, Patches."

"That's one steer that won't go on the cattle truck with the rest, " Mrs. Traylor says.

"I got to keep a couple of the gentle ones around to teach the others, " Ms. West says. She's always had a couple of favorite cows that spend their lives on the ranch. Her soft spot is evident with other animals, too. She's taken in a couple of emus and several stray dogs that were dumped on her property. Wild deer come at dusk and dawn for grain, apples and carrots.

Still, her sure aim has put down more than a few rattlesnakes and a rabid coyote that wandered about 150 yards from her back door. And most of the cattle eventually will head to the meat packers. "That's just the way things are in the country, " Ms. West says.

She's also chased off a few intruders of the two-legged variety, albeit by accident. Not long ago, she was driving through the property and past a few illegal immigrants who were camped out. They weren't hurting anything, so she let them alone.

Just down the road, she saw a rattler and pulled over and shot it. "When I turned around they had all run off in five different directions. I really wasn't trying to scare them, just kill a snake."

Around the state she's been the first woman in many arenas such as the first woman chairman on Texas A&M's board of regents, and the first to serve as President and chairman of S.A.L.E, which puts on the San Antonio Stockshow and Rodeo. She has pushed its growth for 25 years, and currently, she is the chairman of the board.

"She not only worked in a man's world, but in a good old boy's world, " says Keith Martin, executive director of SALE. "If Mary Nan feels strongly about something, she'll get it done."
When she started working with SALE, it had only 300 volunteers compared with more than 3,000 today, and she says it was the first rodeo to pay equally to barrel racers (which is often the only rodeo event women compete in).

Among the many programs she started is the SALE scholarship fund. Since 1984, $11.5 million has been raised to help aspriring agriculture majors. Using her own money, she set up a $40,000 endowment for Mexican citizens to study agriculture at Texas A&M's undergraduate program.
"We should have good relationships with our neighbors, " says Ms. West, who speaks Spanish fluently. She learned Spanish as a girl while playing with the Mexican ranch hands' children.
Ms. West didn't attend college except for a brief stint at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her grandmother wanted her to study liberal arts, not agriculture. So she came home to run the ranch.

"I've been here all my life, and I wouldn't have lived anywhere else, " she says. Still, her life experiences are far from narrow. She's well-read, sophisticated and has seen the world. She's traveled to places such as Africa, England, Ireland, Japan, Antarctica, Easter Island, China and Greenland.

Her eclectic home decor mixes treasures from around the world with Texana such as an antique Colt .45 and an elaborate silver saddle and holster, suitable for Trigger and Roy Rogers.
Ms. West eventually learned to be comfortable in the parlor. Over the years, she has thrown dinners and parties for several foreigners wishing to visit a real Texas ranch.

"She can be in jeans fixing a fence or having dinner at the White House, " Mr. Martin says. "She has friends who are big politicians and others who are clerks at the grocery store. She treats them all the same."

"I don't care when you see Mary Nan - she's always perfectly groomed, even when she's horseback, " Ms. Freeman-Lee says. This trend may have started with her grandfather.
When Mary Nan was about 15, he took her to the Frost Bros. store in San Antonio. "He said since all the women in the family had a mink coat that I should have one, too. Being very female, I thought I should, too." He often would say to her, "You can do anything a man can do and still be a lady doing it."

Perhaps with this in mind he took her to Sol Frank Co. in San Antonio and had khaki pants, with a side zipper, made for her. "Back then they didn't make jeans for girls, and I didn't have the figure for men's jeans, " she says. "I guess that's something I did different than the women of my day. I wore pants. . . . But these were more ladylike."

On the ranch, Ms. West still wears pants, but whenever she goes to town, she slips on a dress and her hair is styled. However, she draws the line at the dressy hats such as those ladies wore during her youth.

"I swore if I ever grew up enough that I would never wear a hat - except for a cowboy hat on the ranch, " she says. And she has stuck by that. All in all, she says, "I've done the best that I can do, and as my grandfather said, "That's all a mule can do.' "

R.C. Hickman Chronicling the black Dallas that many never see

2009-06-13T12:24:00.002-05:00

Publication: THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE

R.C. Hickman hid his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera on the floorboard of the car as he drove past a black man hanging in effigy.

A group of Mansfield residents had strung a life-size cloth doll from the high school's flag pole as a message to three black students who were expected to enroll. On a curb nearby sat a handful of white men threatening violence if they showed.

The year was 1956, and Mr. Hickman's editor wanted a photo for the Star Post, one of Dallas' weekly black newspapers. "I agreed to go if John Mitchell would drive me in his souped-up red Buick, " says Mr. Hickman, now 81. "I knew we might have to outrun someone."

When Mr. Hickman arrived, troublemakers already had forced an Associated Press reporter off the road and smashed another photographer's camera. "At first, we drove carefully by, and the angry whites didn't pay us no mind, " he says. "They had been keeping the white media out, but they didn't see me as the media because I was black."

On the second pass, Mr. Hickman scooped his camera up and, with one foot on the floorboard and one on the ground, he clicked two shots. This time, he got the men's attention. They piled into their car and within seconds were on Mr. Hickman's tail. He told his driver to haul toward Fort Worth. He had a buddy who owned the Pinkston Funeral Home; usually, he kept his garage door open.

"I was sure hoping it was open, " says Mr. Hickman. He and Mr. Mitchell sped through the streets, trying to lose their pursuers. As they pulled onto Terrell Street, Mr. Hickman saw the open garage. Mr. Mitchell swerved in and Mr. Hickman pulled the door shut before the other car arrived. Seconds later, it passed by unaware.

This was probably Mr. Hickman's most dangerous assignment as he covered black Dallas during the 1950s and '60s civil rights movement. "I had an exclusive on that photograph, " Mr. Hickman says. "No one else got that shot."

He not only covered news for his hometown weekly, the Star Post, but also free-lanced for national magazines such as Jet, Sepia and Ebony - covering the same city where, as a boy, he pitched pennies on Thomas Avenue and watched movies at the State Theatre.
"I was the one-shot wonder, " Mr. Hickman says. "I had to be. Film was too expensive."

These days, his photographs have been acquired by the University of Texas at Austin, which in 1994 published Mr. Hickman's book, Behold the People, a photographic chronicle of black Dallas. The university celebrated the acquisition with an exhibit, "Black Dallas in the 1950s: Photographs From the R.C. Hickman Archive."

Since then, his works have been exhibited at several places, including Paul Quinn College, the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library and Fair Park. "We don't have a lot of visual evidence of what it was like for African-Americans during this period - Brown vs. Topeka [Board of Education] and the civil rights movement [1950s-'60s], " says Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History at UT. "It's important to preserve this type of work so it can be made available for research."

By the time Mr. Carleton and Michael Gillette of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum in Austin discovered Mr. Hickman, he had long ago put away his camera. He was selling carpet and living in a one-story, ranch-style home in Oak Cliff. Ruth, his wife of 42 years, had passed away four years before.

It was the summer of '84 when Mr. Carleton and Mr. Gillette arranged to meet Mr. Hickman at his home. They wanted Mr. Hickman's collection for UT. To their delight, they found that Mr. Hickman was a pack rat. All of his negatives had been filed and kept in shoe boxes in the garage.

"It was like uncovering Pompeii, " Mr. Carleton says. With the removal of every layer of dirt, something new was revealed. But for him, the desire to save the photographs went beyond a business deal for the college.

"I grew up in East Dallas, not but about five minutes from R.C., and the only part of his world I knew about was when driving to Fair Park. I only saw it through the window of a car.
"It was a world I wanted to know more about. And - surprise, surprise - his family and neighbors were doing the same things as ours" - the weddings, the homecoming dances, the baptisms, the birthday parties, the parades, the beauty pageants - and Mr. Hickman had recorded it all.

"We covered what was happening in the black neighborhoods, " Mr. Hickman says. "The things that blacks did were ignored by the white papers. They didn't want black faces in their papers."
But the Star Post did (and so did the Dallas Express, the Star's competition). R.C. Hickman was there when notables such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Bunche came to town.

He snapped a shot of a 1958 shotgun murder victim. An ambulance arrived, but because the victim was black he had to wait for one designated specifically for blacks.

He photographed youths at South Dallas' Exline Park during the summer of '55, the first year black children could swim in a Dallas city pool. The kids were lined up with broad smiles, their skin glistening with water.

In October of that same year, Mr. Hickman photographed a young woman picketing on Oakland Avenue. She and several other youths, led by Juanita Craft and the Youth Council of the NAACP, were protesting Negro Achievement Day outside the State Fair. She carried a sign, "It is no achievement to be segregated at the fair. Stay out." He photographed Dollie Miles as she escorted her twins into City Park Elementary, integrating the school in 1961.

When black celebrities came to town, R.C. Hickman was there. He snapped shots of Billy Eckstine, Ruth Brown, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole. When Cole came to perform at the Longhorn Ranch House, a popular Dallas nightclub once owned by Bob Wills, blacks could attend only on Monday nights.
"When I left to shoot Nat King Cole, my editor told me to get him with his mouth open, " Mr. Hickman says. "And see that! His mouth is wide open! He was singing "Mona Lisa.' "

His best photo, he says, was the one he didn't get. Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to protest at E.M. Kahn & Co. and Sanger Harris, neighboring downtown department stores. The stores allowed black women to buy clothes, but they weren't allowed to try them on. At E.M. Kahn & Co., "Mr. King first drank out of the black fountain, then he slowly walked to the white fountain and drank.

"Now, that was my picture, but I didn't get it because I was too shook up. I thought there was going to be a lynching or something, " Mr. Hickman says. "But all that happened was Mr. King said, "You know, that water tastes just the same.' " Later that day, he photographed King at the protest and at a pulpit. Mr. Hickman also did photography for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

After the courts determined that separate schools were acceptable if they were equal, the NAACP hired him to document the differences between the white and black schools. He worked under NAACP notables such as Thurgood Marshall, W.J. Durham and C.B. Bunkley. "The schools were as different as day and night, " Mr. Hickman says. "The black classrooms were dilapidated, toilets dirty, and the benches and books were used. Everything was fine at the white schools - everything was new."

His interest in photography first was piqued during World War II while he was watching a fellow soldier in a foxhole develop reconnaissance pictures. Mr. Hickman was stationed in Saipan. (His division was setting up a base so they could furnished ammo for the 4th Marine division.) He asked his superior if he could make a darkroom, and once he was set up, he began photographing soldiers, trucks or whatever his superiors requested.

After his tour of duty, Mr. Hickman developed film at Hall Gentry Photographic Studio in downtown Dallas. Then he applied for a GI loan and studied photography at Southwest School of Photography in Dallas, graduating in '48. He used borrowed cameras while he made payments on a 4x5 Speed Graphic, a large-format camera.

Although Mr. Hickman established himself as a newspaper and community photographer, he still couldn't earn enough to support his wife and himself. At the Star Post, which was next to the Party Grill and the Laundry-Pal Washateria, he held three jobs: circulation manager, advertising salesman and photographer. He was making $50 a week when he quit because he couldn't get a $10 raise. That didn't last. The paper's owner agreed to his request after being unable to find a suitable replacement.

Mr. Hickman stayed with the paper 10 years. "I got very little sleep, " he says. "My wife would help keep me awake so I could get my photos developed at night. Sometimes I didn't even get to bed."

As the circulation manager, he managed the newspaper boys, who earned a nickel of the 15 cents they charged for each paper. "I told them, if you sell 20 papers, you get 20 nickels. A little boy asked, "How much is 20 nickels?' I said, "You'll find out.' "

Photojournalism His first experience as a photojournalist came when he started taking assignments from the Dallas Express and the then-Kansas City Call. The latter was a weekly Midwestern paper that focused on racial inequalities, not violence. Mr. Hickman was the Dallas agent. He sold papers and took pictures. While he was with the Call, he recruited Dickie Foster, a woman who owned a record shop on the corner of State and Routh, to write a column called "Platter Chatter." "It was a social column, and it talked about top-10 records of the week, " Mr. Hickman says. "She sold a lot of records; I sold a lot of papers."

After the Star Post folded in 1962, Mr. Hickman continued his work as a community photographer, taking pictures of weddings, baptisms and such. He documented the places where blacks lived, worked, played and prayed. His snapshots include gas station attendants standing in front of Mac's Texaco, the first black-owned service station in Dallas; Annie Carr Mercer working under the hood of a car at her service station; three waitresses gabbing at the Aristocrat, a black-owned restaurant; a woman barber trimming a man's hair; Jim Randolph, a KLIF disc jockey, sitting in the radio studio; a shot of the Starlite Theater marquee, "Southwest's Finest for Colored Americans"; and the front of Papa Dad's BBQ, a local hangout.

There's little evidence left of these establishments, Mr. Hickman says. "When integration occurred, black businesses suffered, and the Great White Fathers destroy things so no one knows the history. You see, it's not State-Thomas. That's not what it was called. It was Hall and Thomas."

These days, Mr. Hickman takes his images and his stories to schools around Dallas and tells youths about the history of blacks in Dallas. "R.C. has one of the few records of black people and their accomplishments in this area, " says Earlie Montgomery, a longtime friend of Mr. Hickman's and a retired stock-brokerage manager. "I lived through having to sit on all-black train cars. I lived through not being able to use a bathroom in the downtown department stores. So did R.C.

Youths have no concept of what that was like. These photos tell the stories." And the animated Mr. Hickman loves to reminisce. His face lights up as he recalls being chased out of Mansfield or tells about the photograph of King that he didn't get. But the documentarian has finished recording stories. Since his days as a photographer, he has lived many lives. As a carpet salesman, his old boss, J.D. Hall, says, "He could sell ice to an Eskimo." He's also managed a couple of bowling alleys and was the first black manager at a Skillern's drugstore.

These days, he's retired. "My camera has gone to bed, " Mr. Hickman says. "I'm proud of the work I've done, but now I'm glad to just look at it."

JJ Hampton: Rodeo Champion

2009-06-13T11:58:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE

World champion calf roper JJ Hampton will risk losing rather than come in second. Winning is just her way.

She'll throw her rope far and wild to catch quick. She doesn't care that the extra distance or odd angle might cause her to miss her calf and give her no score.

"A lot of people run up on a calf real close, " says Ms. Hampton, 29. That wastes precious seconds. "You can't win that way."

"I can throw my rope a country mile, " she says without a smidgen of humbleness. "There aren't many men who can throw as far as me."

This 5-foot-5 woman thrives on competition. The tougher the odds, the more she excels.
"You're not safe if I'm behind you. I feed off of that."

Sixteen world titles give Ms. Hampton bragging rights. Eleven are for calf roping and five for all-around cowgirl. That's more roping titles than any other woman active in the Professional Women's Rodeo Association. Historically, the legendary Wanda Bush won 17 roping titles in two decades (1950s and '60s), but Ms. Hampton has only been at this for six years.

"JJ has more heart and try than anyone I've ever met, " says Julie Munnerlyn, a fellow calf roper and friend. "But if anyone needs anything she's the first one to help."

In break-away, the champ has roped 35 calves in under 2 seconds with a personal record of 1.4 seconds. (Break-away refers to how the rope is rigged so it releases the calf as soon as the rope wraps around it.)

"Break-away is my favorite, " says Ms. Hampton. "There's something about trying to rope as fast as I can that I like . . . One day that will be the only way people rope. It's humane."

Last year was Ms. Hampton's most painful and most amazing year of competition. Many of her competitors thought she was finished after Fancy, her beloved world-champion roping mare, was killed. Winning came so easy for Ms. Hampton and her sorrel beauty with the flaxen mane. They moved as one athlete, neither ever a second ahead or behind.

The date was Aug. 15, 1998. Ms. Hampton was still excited from winning a $1,200 roping jackpot in Lusk, Wyoming, when she arrived at the arena in Glenrock, Wyoming. Fancy, still tied in her trailer, was to bed down in one of the pens for the night. The next day the two were to compete in another calf-roping jackpot.

As Ms. Hampton stumbled out of the truck and pulled on her tennis shoes she heard her sister Angie Yates scream, "Noooooooo . . . "

Ms. Yates, who had been driving, saw their fellow traveling companion open the trailer door without untying Fancy. The horse was high strung and easy to spook.

"I had this sick feeling in my gut when I heard her scream, " says Ms. Hampton. "I don't want to use this woman's name. I haven't forgiven her nor will I."

When the trailer door swung open Fancy tried to barrel out as she was prone to do. Fear welled up in her when she couldn't get loose. So she pulled back, physically moving the goose-neck trailer until she ripped off the metal piece she was tied to.

The piece flapped in her face and spooked her even more. Fancy spun around and ran.
"It was pitch dark, " says Ms. Hampton. "I didn't know how I was going to find her." She couldn't see anything but the dust Fancy had stirred up. Without a breeze it just hung in the air.
"I swear a light came out of the sky and lit the spot where Fancy was lying on the ground. I ran to her bawling and screaming."

Blood was coming from Fancy's chest and head. She had slammed into a rusted pipe fence. A piece of her ripped mane was stuck to the piping.

The woman asked Ms. Yates what she could do to help. "I remember hearing Angie say, "You've done enough. Leave us alone.' "

Fancy kept fighting to get up, thrashing her head and bashing it on the ground. To keep her from hurting herself anymore, Ms. Hampton took all the pillows and bedding from the trailer and stuffed them under her head. Ms. Hampton got down on the ground with her and begged her to stop fighting. Fancy had broken her neck and back. The vet said she'd have to be put down. Ms. Hampton wouldn't let her go until a second vet told her the same thing.

Just before she was given the injection, Ms. Hampton said goodbye. " "I love you. You're the best horse I ever had."

"Other than my grandfather dying that was the worse thing I've been through."

The sisters put winter blankets on her and waited for a man to come pick her up.

"That woman never even apologized, " says Ms. Hampton. "At the end of the trip she had the nerve to come up to me to say she wished she hadn't come cause she didn't win any money."

"You think I wouldn't give all my winnings back if I could have Fancy?" Ms. Hampton recalls yelling. "I wish you hadn't come, too. My horse would still be alive."

Ms. Hampton wanted to go home, which was a first for her. She had always been ready to go to the next town to the next competition. "I've been with her where she's driven all night long then she'll compete and drive and compete again, " says Ms. Munnerlyn. "When it was all done she'd say, "Gosh, I wish there was another rodeo to get to.' She loves it."

This time her heart just wasn't in it, but her mom wouldn't let her come home. She told her daughter, "Fancy wouldn't want you to quit."

The next morning Lisa Gasperson, one of Ms. Hampton's biggest competitors, tearfully offered Ms. Hampton her horse Bubba to ride. Ms. Hampton accepted. She had an illegal roping maneuver and didn't score.

For her next few competitions she borrowed horses until her mother bought her a $10,000 chestnut horse named Beethoven.

Ms. Hampton tried to turn him into her Fancy. Her friend with the white blaze running down her face had been replaced by Beethoven, a squat horse with muscles like a prizefighter. They'd place in competitions but only win here and there. Ms. Hampton's winning streak seemed over.
That perfect rhythm she had with Fancy was gone. Beethoven and she were opposites. He was quiet and business-like. She was hyper like Fancy. She missed how Fancy cockily pranced in the box before competition. Ms. Hampton didn't trust Beethoven and fought against him.

"I didn't believe in us, " she says. "We'd catch but not until too far out of the box.
"It's still hard on me. When I go to a rodeo one half of my team is gone."

As Ms. Hampton struggled with her demons she also had to hold down her job as an admissions marketing director at a nursing home in Fort Worth to pay for her roping habit.

"This is what makes me really mad, " says her father Johnny Wayne Hampton. "If she were a man and won all these titles she'd be set up for life." In 1999, Ms. Hampton earned $7,500 and the top male roper, Fred Whitfield, made $191,728. In addition, rodeo cowboys get far more corporate dollars.

Her drive to win has come at a price. She hasn't been able to afford to move out of her parents' home. She has little time to cut up with friends or find a mate. And to the chagrin of her grandmother, Helen Hampton, she gave up law school at the University of Texas at Austin. (Her undergraduate degree is in criminal justice from Tarlton State University in Stephenville, Texas.)

Still, she makes time to teach roping to her 5-year-old nephew Marty Yates Jr. Besides loving him, it's a debt she feels she owes to her coach and brother-in-law, who died in a car accident before the child's birth.

"When Marty Jr. asked me to teach him to rope he told me, "I want to be No. 1 like you.' " These days, he competes in junior rodeos just as Ms. Hampton did as a girl. "If I'm out practicing so is he."

The members of this rodeo family live within a half-mile of each other on an S-curve that runs through their 500-acre ranch. Ms. Hampton and her parents are in one house; her grandmother in another; her sister Ms. Yates and Marty Jr. in another; and her brother Row in yet another.
Just about 100 yards from Ms. Hampton's front door is the arena where she practices. Her parents Barbara and Johnny Wayne or little Marty work the chutes for Ms. Hampton as well as her sister and brother, both of whom rope.

Her father, a former roper, coaches and her mother keeps them mentally strong. "She gets me out of slumps, " says Ms. Hampton.

And it's her mom who gave Ms. Hampton her basic style. "Mother always said, "Nod, kick, swing and throw.' I don't know how she came up with it. She doesn't know the mechanics of roping but instinctively she knows what you're doing wrong."

Mentally, "I have my mother's drive. But I'm built like Dad. "I'm short and chunky, not athletically built. But I make up for it in try. I'm living proof that dreams come true."

At times, people have responded in disbelief when told she roped calves. A guy in bar looked her up and down and then asked her, "What can you do?' Then he told her he knew who could beat her. "JJ Hampton, " he announced. She said, "I am JJ Hampton."

Moments like this make her feel like an underdog. Even after 16 PWRA world championships and countless other titles, that awkward 6-year-old girl, who had trouble learning to rope, still peers through.

"The first three or four months I tried to rope I didn't catch a calf, " she recalls. "I was on too much of a horse for me. Once mom got me Shorty I started catching and never looked back."
At the junior rodeos when she'd do poor in an event she'd get mad.

"At 7 she told a girl, "One day I'm going to beat you. Maybe not today or tomorrow but I will, ' " recalls her mother.

"She wasn't a good loser, " adds her father. But the kid had spunk.

"At 4 years old if they wouldn't saddle a horse for me I'd get a bucket and stand on it and saddle myself." She admits to being a pest. "I refused to be left behind when it came time to pen cattle. They'd try to get up early and leave without me but I'd get up earlier."

Her sister's job was to go after little JJ because the horse she rode, Rerun, was always dumping her. "JJ and the horse would go over a stream or up a hill and the horse would make it and JJ wouldn't, " recalls Ms. Yates.

During her struggle with Beethoven she'd turn to her grandfather, Johnnie Hampton.
"I would go to the cemetery and talk to him, " she says. "I'd pray, "Papa, I'm having a hard time with this. I'm almost out of try. Just let me know I can do this.' "

Growing up, if you found JJ, you found her grandfather. They'd go to junior rodeos together, feed cows together, eat at the coffeehouse together and laugh and cuss together.
"He was always behind me in whatever I did, " she says.

Before he died of cancer July 6, 1992, it was her turn to be behind him. Each Friday for six months she sat with him.

"He had always been a healthy man but he'd drawn up to nothing, " she recalls. The memory still makes her cry. "He'd throw up his teeth. And I'd clean up after him and tell him it was OK and smooth back his bald head."

Without her grandfather and her Fancy she felt lost. She'd call home from the road and would hear doubt in the voices on the other end of the phone line. "I never heard that from my Papa."
Then in August 1999 something clicked. Beethoven and she came together. She was back in Wyoming where all her troubles started. "I guess that's where I had to go to put an end to them."

Her first break-away time was 2.8 seconds even though she drew a bad calf. It went left (which many ropers consider the most difficult catch). The next day, she roped two calves in a row at 2.6 seconds.

"That's when I knew, " she says. "Something released in me. I could relax." She knew the winner in her was back.

Just three months before the November PWRA finals at Fort Worth's Cowtown Coliseum, she and Beethoven started taking home one victory after another. She hoped it would be enough to win finals.

In perfect JJ Hampton form, she didn't want to win one event. She wanted a clean sweep. She intended to win all her events - break-away, team roping, tie-down - and crown the victory with the all-around cowgirl world championship title.

Two weeks before finals this improbable goal looked even more preposterous. Beethoven got sick with a flu that killed her brother's horse. It settled in Beethoven's lungs. Beethoven didn't get it as severe, but it kept him from practice.

Ms. Hampton could only wait and hope as she worked her roping arm and tended to Beethoven. Each day he improved. The day of the rodeo he was ready - or so she hoped. She packed her trailer, loaded Beethoven and headed for Fort Worth. Among her belongings were three pairs of new socks - one for each day of the competition.

"I have to have never-been-worn new socks to compete. It's not so much about luck. It's just one of my pet peeves."

Going into that first day of finals she was leading in break-away calf roping. Still her nerves kept her antsy. All she could do was busy herself with small tasks and watch the clock.
Night one, she missed her first calf in break-away. "That was my event, " she says. "I wasn't happy."

All wasn't hopeless, though. Finals are judged on the best of three runs. Plus, she had two more events to compete in that night. "I won tie-down and took fourth in team roping."
Night two, she won break-away, placed fourth in tie-down and didn't place in team roping. Her horse jumped out from under her.

"I fell off in front of a packed audience, " says Ms. Hampton, still laughing at herself. "Beethoven dumped me on my hip." Her bones ached as she pulled herself up and tipped her hat to the crowd. "A trainer worked on my hips and said I'd be sore." And she was. To walk she had to push her leg forward with her hand, and it was troublesome getting in and out of the car.

But that didn't stop her from going to get the morning's paper to see if it had a picture of her on the ground. To her relief it didn't. She loaded up on aspirin and got ready for the Sunday afternoon competition. Even with her rough start she still had a shot at all her events.
Ms. Hampton was the last roper in break-away. Lisa Gasperson (the woman who let Ms. Hampton borrow her horse) scored 1.9 seconds.

"Lisa threw her hand in her air, " says Ms. Hampton. "She knew she did well."
To win Ms. Hampton needed a 2.1 second time.
"I thought, nonbelievers step back."

Her calf went hard to left. "I had to win, " she says. "I couldn't even see that calf's head. No one would have thrown that rope. They would have run closer and taken a lesser place."
She threw it. The announcer called out 2.1 seconds.

"I stuck my hand up in the air. No. 1. My family was doing the same in the stands."
"I felt unstoppable that day. After that I told Angie I'm going to get all four championships."
And Jackie Johnette Hampton did just that. She took home the World Champion titles in break-away, tie-down, team roping and all-around cowgirl.

It was one of those days when everything went right. "You know when you can draw a bad calf and throw your rope backward and still catch!"

"I don't usually show too much emotion but I couldn't stop smiling for two weeks. I was walking 10 feet off the ground. They tried to beat me but they didn't get it done."

"Don't ever count her out, " says her father. "She's head strong."

After all, for Ms. Hampton winning is the only acceptable outcome.

Kiss of the tiger woman

2009-06-13T11:50:00.003-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DEBORAH VOORHEES

Sara Houcke isn't a typical tiger tamer. The gentle 5-foot-10-inchblonde has been dubbed the Tiger Whisperer because she's more likely to cuddle or kiss than to whip or shout.

She communicates with the tigers by making a "whuffling" sound that's similar to purring.
"I'm a quiet trainer, " says Ms. Houcke, a main attraction in the130th Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. "I'm doing the same things I've been doing for years with other animals."

The 24-year-old trainer grew up working elephants, camels, horses, buffaloes, zebras and rhinos with her father, Sacha. Ms. Houcke comes from seven generations of circus performers. Her first job came at age 2, when she performed in a clown act. At age 6, she rode in an elephant act, and at 11 she performed with camels.

Her career with tigers started two years ago when Ringling Bros. came to court her.
Traveling with the "Greatest Show on Earth" was her dream, but it would mean leaving her beloved home circuit in Europe.

So the recruiters asked, "What's your dream job?" That's when Ms.Houcke, at age 22, became Ringling's youngest tiger trainer.

"I was interested in working with cats because so few women were in the field, " she says. "But I worried I'd chicken out."

Her mentor, Josif Marcan, had a tiger act in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. He tested her right away.

"I had no sooner gotten to his place when he invited me into the cage, " she says. "He wanted to make sure I wasn't afraid."

She traveled with him for three months learning the trade. Then Ringling Bros. drew up an agreement so she could use Mr. Marcan's tigers in her show.

These days, wherever her RV is parked, those eight tigers are right next to her.
Most of her day is spent caring for the cats - cleaning cages as well as feeding and training them.
Plus, she likes "just hanging out with them" and, yes, hugging and kissing them. But Ms. Houcke doesn't cuddle them all the time.

"I respect their moods, " she says. "I pet them and kiss them when they come to me and rub on my leg and purr. Then I know they want attention. If I approach them when they aren't ready, it would cause conflict."

Even Ms. Houcke can't forget that these cats are predators.

"Cats are more dangerous than elephants or horses, " she says. "You can't turn your back on a cat. Sometimes I have to in my act, but I have to stay very aware of my surroundings."

So far she's had no close calls and no injuries. And she hasn't felt fearful in the cage.
"If I was afraid, this would be the wrong job for me, " she says."The cats sense fear."

Life in the Playboy Bunny Suit

2009-06-13T11:31:00.004-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DEBORAH VOORHEES

The Playboy bunny suit may have been the product of the 20thcentury, but I assure you it's quite Victorian. I was cinched into my first bunny suit in 1980 at age 19.

A seamstress measured each curve and angle of my waist, hips, inseam and bust. For the illusion to be perfect the suit had to fitlike a glove. Since the fabrics didn't stretch, the measurements had to be exact.

The bunny suits had rib-smashing metal slats in the body and fit high on the hip - designed to accent long legs, cleavage and smallwaists. As the seamstress at the Dallas Playboy Club measured me, she told me she'd take an inch off my waist. Translation: Don't gain an ounce or breathing will not be an option.

Bunny suits, which were patented, weren't allowed out of the club. Each night the women left them in the dressing room - also called the hutch - to be laundered. I had two suits. One had black- and maroon-colored diamonds. The material resembled something a 15th-century jester might wear. The other - my favorite - was powder blue.

After hair, makeup and nails, the first thing a Playboy bunny puts on was skin-colored stockings, followed by thin black hose. Then she slipped into the bunny suit. This could be tricky. I found the easiest way was to bend slightly at the hips, keeping the torso straight - suck in the stomach and help hold the corseted suit inplace while another bunny zipped. (For this reason bathroom breaks or emergencies such as ripped hose required two bunnies to be pulled from the floor.)

The final touches included clipping on the bunny tail, cuffs and cufflinks, collar and bow tie, the bunny ears and slipping on the arch-breaking 3- to 4-inch black close-toed pumps.
Once the Playboy illusion was complete, it was show time. It was hardly all glamorous, however. Slinging cocktails was hard. The body ached from the heels and the metal slats. Sneezing caused an odd sensation. The first time I did, the tight bodice held the sneeze deep in the torso so nothing but a breathy squeak could comeout. Eating was also problematic. After eating a big meal before working, I was wisely told by a senior bunny not to eat until after I put the suit on. This way I'd know exactly how many teaspoons I could get down before the suit became unbearably uncomfortable.

Still, when you were on the floor or on a bunny promotion, you had celebrity status. Tips far exceeded the standard 20 percent. Limousines were the usual mode of transportation. People stopped you for your autograph.

Like Superman or Wonder Woman, you went into the dressing room as a normal person, but when you put on that costume and stepped out, you were transformed.

Editor's note: Staff writer Deborah Voorhees was a Playboy bunny atthe Dallas club from 1980 to 1982. She attended the reunion.

Head: Playboy bunnies hop down memory lane
DEBORAH VOORHEES
TEXAS LIVING
LAS VEGAS - Las Vegas, the city of glossy surfaces and wildest-dream fantasies, made the perfect backdrop for the first international Playboy Bunny Reunion, held at the glitzy 1960s-style Stardust Resort and Casino in mid-April.

Attractive women of all shapes and sizes - ranging from middle-aged to grandmotherly - came to celebrate their days as Playboy bunnies, when they donned cotton tails and satin ears.

An outsider - if he made it past the event's tuxedoed bouncers -might have mistaken the event for a sorority reunion. Except no one was trying to recall the old school song. Women in sequined, long-flowing gowns laughed and showed off rusty bunny dips. (This was a genteel way to serve drinks without bending over, which required an arched back and knees held together and bent.)

"It doesn't matter if you're a bunny for two months or years, you're part of the family, " says Kelly Morgan, who worked at the New York club in 1976 and is writing a cookbook titled "Bunny Tales: Dishes to Tickle Your Fancy."

For almost three decades (1960-1986) these women took turns embodying a male fantasy at more than 25 Playboy clubs and resorts around the world.

Hugh Hefner's playboy lifestyle and his "Playboy" magazine added to the bunny's allure even though most bunnies never posed nude. The clubs were private. Keys were purchased for the privileged to enter Hef's playground.

These days, the Playboy bunny isn't extinct - but she's on the endangered list. A few women still wear the famous patented outfits for Playboy's 50th Anniversary Club Tour, which is traveling around the United States to celebrate the magazine's benchmark. It stops at the Dallas nightclub Blue tonight.

Back in the City of Sin, those bunnies of yesteryear came by the hundreds for the "After-the-Hutch" reunion, organized by bunnies. These women, once on the cutting-edge of sexual controversy, now embrace a nostalgic innocence.

Actor Michael Turner

2009-06-13T11:25:00.003-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Byline: Deborah Voorhees

Actor and sound designer Michael Turner marvels at the unlikely circumstances that brought him to Kitchen Dog Theater.

Four years ago, he was living in a middle-class Detroit neighborhood where he was a gifted architecture student at Lewis Cass Technical High School, a college preparatory school. He never imagined himself living in Texas or even studying theater.

"Texas was too hot and too far from home, " says the 22-year-old Southern Methodist University theater graduate. But SMU offered him a free ride, and it was there that he met Dan Day, artistic director for Kitchen Dog Theater.

These days, Mr. Turner fills two meaty roles at Kitchen Dog. He not only is the sound designer for "Jesus Hopped The "A" Train" but also plays Lucius Jenkins, a serial killer who finds God and tries to convert a fellow prisoner.

His guide for the sound design was in playwright Stephen AdlyGuirgis' words.
"There's a flow, a rhythm, a pulse to the language, " says the multitalented Mr. Turner, who is also a jazz musician and writer. "I didn't want to be cliché, but I knew hip-hop and rhythm and blues had to play a part in the play's sound."

For information on the play, see the listing under Continuing Theater below or go to www.kitchendogtheater.org.

Horse Gentler: Buck Brannaman

2009-06-13T11:17:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DEBORAH VOORHEES, Staff Writer
TEXAS LIVING

Buck Brannaman is all cowboy, soft-spoken with a tall and lean physique that pours just right into a pair of Wranglers. But when it comes to working horses, he's hardly from the spur-and-jerkschool of training.

"Work with a horse using his language, " says Mr. Brannaman, who wasin Dallas recently to sign his new book. "Horses have a peckingorder, but there is very little violence [between horses]."

The trainer needs to establish himself at the top of the pecking order.The horse has to learn he can't be boss. "Riding should be like dancing with someone who wants to dance withyou, " he says. To accomplish this, a relationship has to be built between the rider and the horse.

Mr. Brannaman is a horse gentler - not breaker. He has become famous as the man Nicholas Evans based his character on in The Horse Whisperer (Mr. Brannaman served as an adviser on Robert Redford's 1998 film of the same name).

Now Mr. Brannaman has written his memoir, "The Faraway Horses" (LyonsPress, $29.95), which explores his early years as a trick roper and rider, his life with an abusive father, and how horses taught him to live a peaceful life.

"A horse responds to calmness, " says Mr. Brannaman. "You have to be able to control your presence. It's not OK to lose your temper."

That doesn't mean everything is always "fuzzy and warm, " though. "Just like with children, sometimes you can't be a best friend, " he says. "You have to enforce the rules. All problems can't be cured with love."

It takes patience, discipline and consistency. "A well-trained, halter-broken horse should be able to be trailer-loaded from the end of a 60-foot rope, " says Mr. Brannaman, who teaches horsemanship classes and trains horses. He swears this isn't just a parlor trick to impress clients. It's a matter of teaching the basics on the ground, or without the horse being mounted (details on this can be found in Mr. Brannaman's Groundwork video and his Trailer Loading and Problem Solving video).

Longeing a horse can help a fiery colt settle down before the rider climbs aboard. (Longeing is when the trainer works a horse in a circle on the end of a long rope, asking the equine to vary its pace.) "But if it's used just to get the horse out of breath, their gas tanks just get bigger, " he says. "I've seen people longe ahorse for two hours just to ride for an hour."

He suggests doing precision groundwork with a shorter halter leadrope instead of a 30-foot longe line. The emphasis is on refining the horse's agility rather than merely tiring the animal. A trainer can expect "a well-trained horse to be pretty solid by the time he's age 5 or 6," he says. "A few horses will take longer.It doesn't make them bad. Sometimes the horse that takes the longest ends up exceptional. I tend to learn a little slow myself, but once I have it down, I got it."

Mr. Brannaman hesitates to tell riders to circle a horse that is running away or bucking. "For someone who doesn't know how to do it, it's a good way to get them hurt or killed. But if you know how to bend a horse and disengage his hindquarters, it can help out intough situations."

One of the most common problems he sees with riders is fear. "I help them understand why the horse is doing what he's doing." "How many times have I heard, 'My horse just started doing this for no reason at all'? "It's never the horse. It's always something the person has done."

Making an artful diagnosis

2009-06-13T11:03:00.002-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DEBORAH VOORHEES
TEXAS LIVING

Art and science are often considered opposites. Science islogical, systematic. Art is free-flowing, inexact. Even Frenchcubist Georges Braque believed that art was meant to disturb andscience to reassure. He may never have imagined a classroomwhere art would be used to teach science.
That's what is happening at a handful of universities around thecountry, including the University of North Texas Health ScienceCenter in Fort Worth.

First-year medical students are learningdiagnostic skills by observing the details in paintings andphotographs as a part of a newly required class, "An Eye forDetail: The Art of Observation, " being presented with the AmonCarter Museum in Fort Worth.

"There is an art to science and science to art, " explains NoraChristie, tour program manager at the museum. "One of the quotes Ilive by is 'Science gives us how to live and art gives us thereason to live.'"

The paintings, the photographs, the portraits become surrogatepatients. Students are given four minutes to observe the physicalclues within the artwork and then write their patient profiles.What is their socioeconomic level? How is their health? How old arethey? How are they emotionally?

"It teaches medical students how much information can be gatheredjust by observing, " says Dr. Bruce Dubin, associate dean of medicaleducation at the University of North Texas' College of OsteopathicMedicine. "The tendency for doctors is to look narrowly at thesymptoms rather than at the broader person. Art educators bring outthe ability to look at things more subtly."

A good physician needs to look for physical clues to diagnose apatient, says Dr. Dubin. For example, "the shape of fingers canpoint to lung problems. Rashes can be indications of gastricproblems. An asthma patient will tend to lean forward, raise hisshoulders and have dark circles. His speech patterns tend to beshort and episodic rather than flowing."

This program, which is based on a collaboration between the FrickCollection and the Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York, wasdeveloped in 2001 and offered to first- and second-year medical students on a volunteer basis. This year, UNT made it arequirement.

Ninety percent of the information a doctor needs to make adiagnosis comes from a patient's nonverbal and verbal cues, saysFred Puckett, a third-year medical student. "Having art as a patient is a creative way to teach, and it allows us to be able to bounce ideas off of each other. With a live person you can't openly discuss the patient without affecting the patient's emotions. The art allows you to explore and discuss topics you would otherwise avoid."

One of the paintings used in the class is John Singer Sargent's1888 painting of the 12- to 13-year-old Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. She's wearing aflowing white shirt and a military-style black jacket with ornateivory-colored buttons. She has a sad, far-off gaze. A pillow propsher up.

Ms. Christie says: "The pillow is an indication that her back maybe hurting her and, in fact, it is. This is a subject we know a lot about. Her mother allowed the portrait to be done if the artist could do it quickly. Her daughter had hurt her back falling out of a tree or off a ladder, and she couldn't sit for long in one place.The clues are in the painting."

In Eliot Porter's photograph Patrick, a young boy from the 1950s is in overalls holding a chicken. He's barefoot and has a stiffcollar.

"His eyes are puffy and he seems to be breathing through his mouth, which may indicate allergy problems." says Ms. Christie. "We don't know a lot about this boy. It's up to the students to figure it out."

Leslie Houston, a third-year medical student, opted to take the course even though it wasn't required for her. "It taught me to observe the details."

An applicable scenario, she says, might play out in real life something like this: A successful businessman walks into a doctor's office. Usually he's well put together. On this day he says he's fine, but his hair isn't combed and his shirt is wrinkled. "These are indications that something may be wrong, " says Ms. Houston.

"This class totally removed the stress of medical school and helped hone my observational skills in a playful way. It's an extra tool for a physician to use. It's a holistic approach - mind, body, spirit."

Opera Diva Susan Graham

2009-06-12T19:14:00.005-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Deborah Voorhees

Section: HIGH PROFILE

NEW YORK - She's a lady who really knows how to wear a pair of trousers. In fact, pants have made mezzo-soprano and Texan Susan Graham famous. Her lanky frame and confident stride give her the physical presence needed to play the teenage boys in opera's "trouser" roles, such as the love-addicted Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and the feisty, gender-bending Octavian in Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier.

"I've watched five nephews grow up, " says the 39-year-old Ms. Graham. "They've made great character studies." She has to watch how she stands, holds her hands and throws her head. "There are a lot of subtle gestures that women do that men just don't."

Off stage, though, she's hardly masculine. Her mannerisms are quite feminine, but her imposing figure, which is pushing 6 feet, makes her perfect for these parts. Yes, she has also played luscious, sexy ladies; it's just that trouser roles have become her calling card of sorts.

"I've had roles where I've had to sword fight, hang from a balcony, climb ladders, scale walls - all while singing, " she says. "Not to mention that my chest and ribs were bound by Lycra to hide my breasts."

In the last decade, Ms. Graham has made herself at home in the world's great opera houses: The Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the Palais Garnier in Paris, La Scala in Milan, Italy, and The Metropolitan Opera in New York. "Susan has become one of the leading mezzo-sopranos of our time, " says Ned Rorem, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer.

"She has a wonderful voice, good diction as well as being a beautiful woman." When a role calls for a mezzo (a voice midway between soprano and contralto ranges), "Susan is on the short list of those being contemplated, " says baritone Thomas Hampson, a longtime friend. "She's certainly opera's premiere Octavian. (For some roles) she may get bumped off because she's too tall or too this or that. But typecasting is a problem we all face at times."

Her recording career has begun to take off as well. A two-CD set of Handel's opera, Alcina, with Renee Fleming and Natalie Dessay, has made it to the top five on the Billboard classical chart. No doubt having the famous Ms. Fleming in the title role propels this one forward. But critics have overwhelmingly praised Ms. Graham's breathtaking "La Belle Epoque: The Songs of Reynaldo Hahn" and her "Songs of Ned Rorem" CDs. The latter marks her solo debut on the Erato record label.

The opera stage and recording studios are far from her days in Midland, Texas, where she was always climbing to the top of the willow tree or pestering her sister, Janet, or trying to play ball with her brother, Alan. She grew up a tomboy in a family that hadn't heard much about opera. Her first exposure to the genre was probably channel surfing past a TV show such as Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Welk.

"I don't remember it leaving much of an impression. Midland isn't exactly opera's epicenter, " she says matter-of-factly. Still her home had music in it. Her mother, Betty Graham, saw to it that she and her sister learned to play the piano. Susan would play and sing along to popular tunes such as "MacArthur Park" and "Moon River." She also loved to spin records and belt out the pop tunes.

"Paul Simon was my first voice teacher, " she recalls while lounging in a cafe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she lives. As a child, she sang in her church and school choirs and later in musicals at her high school, but during this time she never dreamed she'd star in the operas of Mozart, Handel, Massenet, Strauss - among others. But there were telling moments.

"One day, when Susan was 8 or 9, she was singing around the house and she let out this loud trill, " her mother says. "And I thought, "My, she has a big voice.' " In elementary school, she told her choir teacher she didn't want to sing soprano (the range girls covet because it's most often the lead). She preferred alto.

"I didn't want to just sing the melody, " she says. " I wanted to sing harmony. The melody can get boring." This desire made her a perfect fit for a mezzo. " My voice type doesn't give to the major roles because I'm not a soprano or tenor, " she says. "I play mostly secondary roles. My recitals aren't filled with the big crescendos and flashy arias (that sopranos are noted for). Mine is finessed singing - not blow your hair back."

When Ms. Graham decided on her life's work, she had only seen one opera, Cosi fan tutte. She was studying music at Texas Tech University, where she received her bachelor's and master's degrees (the latter in music and vocal performance). At first, she worried because her voice matured late.

"That's common for my voice type, but at the time we didn't know if I was a mezzo or a soprano, " she says. "I worried that I wasn't as good as the young soprano singers whose voices matured at age 20."

By age 25, it became clear that her fears were unfounded. It was 1985, and she packed her belongings and headed for New York, where she was accepted by the Manhattan School of Music. Here she received a second master's degree in opera performance.

"If I was going to be a singer there was no place else to go, " she says. Her big break into opera came in 1988 when on a whim she showed up at a cattle-call-style audition for The Metropolitan Opera. Her hope was to make it to the finals. She never considered she might get hired.

Contestants were to prepare five arias - one in English, one in Italian, one in French, one in German and the fifth was to be in the language of the singer's choice. The first stage was an elimination round where she competed against thousands. As she kept progressing to the next level, she'd run outside to a pay telephone and scream, "I won, I won" to her voice teacher. "She never seemed surprised, " Ms. Graham says, still sounding a bit amazed by her instructor's reaction. Ms. Graham won round after round, until she found herself standing among many of today's opera stars including Renee Fleming. This is where their longtime friendship began.

During the winners' concert, "Renee and I both wore big hair and royal blue dresses, " she says. Ms. Graham was in chiffon and Ms. Fleming in blue sequins. "I remember standing on stage awe-struck, " says Ms. Graham of her debut on the Met stage. "It was so big it looked like the whole state of Texas. Now I'm more used to it; it's like my back yard."

The first time she played a major role with the opera was in 1992. She was the understudy for Cherubino (played by Frederica von Stade) in The Marriage of Figaro. "I knew a week ahead of time that I would have to go on so I called all my family, " she says. They, of course, came.

Still sounding flushed with excitement at the mere prospect of performing, she rattles off all her worries at the time: "I was so scared. I had to jump through a window. I was afraid my legs would get caught and I'd fall. I had to learn how to fence and I had to practice the part. Understudies don't get much time for that. Oh, and I had to remember, I can't run across the stage like a girl!"

Grace under fire is something Ms. Graham handles well. During a performance of Monteverdi's "The Return of Ulysses" in San Francisco she played the goddess Minerva. In Act II when she's to fly the character Telemachus in on her chariot, it got stuck in the middle of the stage. It wouldn't lower to let Telemachus out and it wouldn't fly off stage. The actor jumped but Ms. Graham was left suspended in air in the middle of a scene she wasn't supposed to be in.

"I knew I had to figure a way for it to look like I belonged there, so I decided to act like a puppeteer. I pointed my staff at the performers below and then I pointed to where I knew they'd be going next. It looked like I was making them move."

In another opera in Nice, France, she lost her voice while performing Cherubino. "It went totally dead, " she recalls. "We didn't have an understudy to take my place. By the forth act all I could do was whistle."

In Act II, Ms. Graham was to belt out the bring-the-house-down aria, "Voi che sapete, " but her voice was just a croak by the song's end. Making matters worse, the actress playing opposite her was to exclaim at the end of her solo performance that she had no idea the character could sing so beautifully. Ms. Graham prayed the woman would skip those words but to no avail.

"She was laughing so hard she could barely sing the lines. I wanted the world to open up and swallow me, " she says.

These days her laryngitis is long gone. She's in the middle of a 12-city recital tour, which includes Barcelona, Paris, London, Vienna, Toronto, England and New York.

On a recent rainy day, Ms. Graham walked onto the stage at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall to rehearse for her New York recital. Her pianist Malcolm Martineau had already begun warming the keys. Her presence filled the stage. It's not that irrepressible ego that brings on diva temper tantrums. She charms with her beguiling smile and a playfulness that makes it clear that Ms. Graham is still that hometown girl from Midland. As her mother so aptly expresses "IT, " "She may be a diva but she doesn't act like one." "Susan keeps people guessing, " Mr. Hampson says. "She's very elegant but she also likes to Rollerblade in Central Park. . . . If you're Susan's friend you know trees, seasons change but that will remain constant."

The day before her concert at the Metropolitan Opera, Ms. Graham is all in black on that rainy day - leather jacket, boots, sweater - except for her faded blue jeans. She was wearing little makeup and a pair of dangle earrings. Her look is closer to pop rock singer than opera but her voice is all opera - rich, velvety chocolate. Early on, she cleared her voice every few notes. Even cold, it carried easily through the hall. She helds her head down as if she was mentally going over the words and notes she was singing.

"It feels like 7 a.m., " she says. The time was really 10 a.m. She leaned on the piano and didn't stray far. "At each recital I gradually drift away from the piano. It's my security blanket, " she confesses. As her voice warmed, it gained strength and she moved more freely with the music. Between songs she cuts up with her pianist. They have the rapport of longtime friends. "That one sounds like snow coming off a mountain, " she says jokingly, referring to the note she just sang. Mr. Martineau chuckled at what is clearly an inside joke. Bringing the others in the room in on it, she explained that a woman attending one of her concerts told her that a note she sang sounded like a far off snow-covered mountain. " At least she didn't say it sounded like a train wreck, " she quips. Later, she stopped in mid-song and laughed at herself. "I sound like Barbra Streisand, " she says. She tried again, pulling deeper from her diaphragm. This time there was no mistaking the musical genre.

Tomorrow, she'll look every bit the diva in her violet dress, which will fall slightly off her shoulders and V in the back. The violet will be just the color of Elizabeth Taylor's eyes. Her full skirt with sequins around the hem will swish as she crosses the stage. Her voice will have the sound of a decadent cream as she performs works of several composers including Ned Rorem. Half the recital she will sing in English and half in French. The crowd will give her several standing ovations, each time begging for just a little more cream. She will finally signal to the pleading listeners that there will be no more encores as she leaves the stage with her roses that lay across the black grand piano.

From here she will rest for a few days in New York before leaving on the European portion of her tour. When she first started traveling to new countries, she used to get a stomach ache from nerves. "The first time I was singing in a German-speaking country, I stood in the aisle of the grocery store and cried, " she says. " I couldn't tell laundry soap from dish washing soap, bleach from softener. Nothing was familiar." Each new country had moments of trial by fire. "You don't know their ways - when to and when not to bag your groceries, who to and who not to look at in the eye, who to tip and who you will insult if you try to tip them, " she says.

Still the journey has brought her pinch-me moments, such as the first time she saw the Eiffel Tower. The sight of it made her cry. "It just hit me, the realization that I was little Suzy from Texas in Paris, France, - not as a tourist - but to sing a French opera in their own language. I thought I could never have dreamed this."

First 78 pages from "Memoirs of a Hit Man"

2009-06-12T19:00:00.006-05:00

Jake, a composite character, sprang forth from various mercenaries—some former assassins--that I interviewed as a journalist. "Memoirs of a Hit Man," a novel by Deborah Voorhees, delves into the transformation of one man’s tattered soul. Jake never thought he’d hire a hit man; after all he’s among the best, but his last hit can only be done by his estranged son, a Father in the Catholic Church. Jake’s only hope is to offer him the one thing Father Michael wants—information about how his mother died.

Growing up on an Arizona ranch, Jake knew since the age of four he would take over his father’s cattle empire. Becoming an assassin was far from his consciousness, but a series of tragic events drove him more and more into emotional isolation and down a path he never fathomed. Polio and an iron lung stole him away from his family at age 8. Three years after his recovery, fear of him giving the deadly disease to his siblings kept his parents from allowing him to come home. The Hopi Indians were among the few clans willing to take in “throw-away” children. For three years he lived among the Indians, part outsider, part insider. Most of his time, he spent in seclusion hunting on the reservation and living in a mud hut separated from the rest of the clan. In his early twenties he married the love of his life Rachel and attempted to take over the family ranch. When their first son turned six, his wife was murdered. Jake became more emotionally isolated; he abandoned his son with his Aunt and signed up with the CIA for the secret war in Laos. Gaining control of the Ho Chi Minh trial was the only way for the U.S. to block communist Vietnam’s aggression from the South. Jake was just what the military wanted: a loner and sharpshooter with nothing to lose. His photographic memory perfected his qualifications. Assassins had to memorize all data so documents could be destroyed. This story is about Jake’s fight with evil, the son he left behind, and the fallout of those actions.

Excerpt from the novel:

Chapter 1

"Only the dead have seen the end to war," Plato

"Many have asked why I would write a memoir in third person. The answer is both simple and complex. The man I write about has become so foreign to me that I only know of him. The bones, tendons and muscles that stood him erect, the blood that flowed through his veins and capillaries can no longer be of my flesh. His mind has been so completely altered that the grooves in the brain have been erased and redrawn into who I am today. As surely as if an exorcism had been carried out, his tainted soul had been driven from this sagging, ancient vessel. So you see the hit man can no longer be an I, it has to be a he. Perhaps it's a transformation of the soul or just an old man's longings to have a new past, to be reborn in infant flesh. But the reason goes beyond even this. A life nurtures and destroys many in its direct and indirect path. Consequently, a human can't be accurately judged from his single point of view. A past is not only a collection of one’s memories, but the memories it leaves in others. Destruction, the life a hit man chooses, reaches its tentacles beyond him and even beyond those he kills. It's a chain reaction or more like the fallout of a bomb. No single target can be destroyed without other casualties. So indulge me on our journey into Jake's mind and life, and those left in his wake."

Jake hadn't killed anyone in 24 years. Taking a life, animal or human, never bothered Jake--that is except for his last. After that final hit, all the destruction and pain he'd caused erupted with the force of Mount Vesuvius when it destroyed Pompeii. For the first time, he feared for his immortal soul. Afterwards, he put away his scope and rifle and never made another hit.
When Jake was drafted in the military his coldness unnerved even veteran soldiers. He could leave to go pee, slice a man's throat and come back as if nothing had happened. There was a time when he reasoned that anyone would be blessed if he was the hired gun. After all, the target was going to die anyway. It might as well be by someone who'd do the job efficiently. To him a target was of no more significance than a squashed bug on a sidewalk. Long ago, he switched off his emotions and pain as easily as one might turn off a water faucet or shut a door that was never to be walked through again; his refusal to feel kept him alive.
His father taught him the ethics of a hunter, a code of honor he lived by with the same passion a man of God lives by the commandments. The only difference was instead of 10 commandments he had four: Never pull the trigger unless you have a clear shot. Only shoot if you can take the target down in one shot. Never torment or frighten the mark. Don't let the victim know you're there until the moment of impact. Somehow these rules made him feel virtuous. All men, even Jake, must believe in their innate goodness.

Room 309 at St. Paul's Nursing Home was far from his boy-hood ranch in Arizona, the Indian reservation where he spent half his childhood, and from his life as a hit man. Here, Jake's arm, bruised from repeated pricks of the needle, had an IV attached. His hands gnarled from arthritis, skin thin and as translucent as tissue paper, and as withered as Eos’ Tithonus living long after the “goal of ordinance.” *

His mind was strong, alert. Only his body betrayed him. Two heart attacks and a stroke left the 72-year-old Jake unable to care for himself. In his mind's eye, he was still a youthful man, despite his body’s protest. Each time he saw his reflection, he was startled at the face peering back. It seemed as though someone had stolen his eyes and soul and damned them in wrinkled flesh. Even his bone structure looked different. The sagging skin made his once square jaw appear soft and round. His once solid neck had grown so thin and crinkled that it resembled a vulture's neck rather than a human's. A thin, milky wash dulled the glint in his steel-gray blue eyes, the same glint that once wowed the ladies. Time had become his most ferocious enemy; the first enemy he was helpless to execute.
Surprisingly, Jake's hearing was still keen after all these years. In the distance, Jake could hear footsteps coming down the nursing-home hall, which reeked of urine and antiseptic cleaner.
“He'll be here soon,” Jake thought.
Across the hall, Jake could hear Mr. Lewis moan like a feline in heat. The old man called out when his pain medication wore off. The nurses were slow getting to him. They refused to give him his meds until the allotted time. Jake couldn't understand why they cared if he became a morphine addict at 92. The nurses labored like computerized robots, unable to see beyond the programmed rules to adequately care for the human. Sometimes, Jake considered taking Mr. Lewis out, but Jake's body wouldn't allow it.
Jake heard the footsteps slow. They were now outside his door. When he heard the faint click of the door knob, instinct told him to reach for his gun, but once again his body failed to reply, besides his gun was no longer beneath his pillow. Since he was a teenager, he'd always kept the Colt .45 his father gave him with him. Sleep wouldn't come until he'd wrap his hand around the butt of the gun. He held onto it the way some children coddle a blanket.
When the man first walked in the room, Jake couldn't make out his features. The figure seemed to be nothing more than a shadow, ghostlike. The man stepped closer and moved into the light. Jake could see his black cossack and thin white collar.
“A priest.” Jake smiled with amusement as he pushed the button on his morphine drip. “Nice touch. I suppose you want me to say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Then should I shake and sob? Become Born Again? Oh, no wait. That's the Baptist thing. Catholics sin on Saturday and get forgiveness on Sunday.”
“Your place is waiting,” said the Father in a monotone voice, as he settled into the stiff-back chair next to the bed.
“What if I told you I don't believe in forgiveness?”
“You have much to fear.”
The Priest sat in the dark and lit a cigarette, his face surprisingly youthful for a man in his thirties. The baby fat on his cheeks made him appear childlike. Shakespeare would have derogatorily called him a lackbeard because he had no stubble. A male wasn't considered a man in the 16th century or in Jake's world until he could grow a beard.
“Are you old enough to have sinned?” Jake asked, as he tried to lift his head off the pillow. Once again, his body failed him.
“My sin is yet to come. But it's not my sins we're here to talk about.”
“How can you help sinners, unless you have sinned yourself?”
“I don't need to kill to know it's wrong.”
“You believe you're superior than me.”
“Than I,” said the Priest, as he flicked his ashes in an empty water glass sitting on the table beside Jake's bed.
“I didn't think you'd actually come.”
“I didn't either.”
“Would you help me get a drink?” asked Jake, as he once again attempted to lift himself; failing, Jake flipped a switch on his metal side rail, which elevated his head. The priest lifted the glass to Jake's lips, which shook as he sipped the liquid congealed to the consistency of honey. The aides began putting thickener in his water once his ability to swallow deteriorated. Too often the fluids seeped into his lungs instead of his stomach. The thickener helped his control.
“So was it a calling?” asked Jake, as he pursed his lips, objecting to the water's consistency.
“Becoming a priest?,” he asked rhetorically, as he set the glass down and wiped Jake's lips with a wadded napkin tossed on a tray, which held the remains of a half-eaten dinner. “Perhaps a calling or more likely a damnation.”
“You have more depth than I had imagined.”
“I suppose being a hit man gives you depth,” the priest fired back.
“No, a vast emptiness, like a black hole where not even a spirit can dwell.”
Jake paused, reflecting on a time he had tried to erase, but like Lady Macbeth, the blood still lingered on his hands. When he began again, he spoke more to himself than his audience of one. “In film, a hit man always has a witty quip, but in life, by the time you smart off you're dead. A hit man is more like a mountain lion, a stealth killer, who strikes in silence. The only warning is the sound of the shot a millisecond before impact. A lion doesn't feel anything for its kill, just the pangs of hunger disappearing.”
“Didn't you feel anything when you killed?”
“Recoil.”
The room grew quiet and neither spoke for an uncomfortably long time. Both disappeared into their minds. The priest's mind went to thoughts of escape--Jake was the last man he wanted to see. Jake disappeared into his past. When Jake finally spoke, his words snaked and intertwined with the air as if speaking more to himself, to his past, to the spirits than to the Father.
“When I was sent away to the children's hospital at age 7, I built an imaginary castle around myself, stone by stone and dug a deep mote one shovelful at a time. The mote I filled with water and alligators. Only a few humans have managed to seep inside my walls. Those I've feared the most because they had the power to hurt me.”
Irritated, the Priest interrupted, “Trials are the blood of life. They don't give us a right to kill with impunity.”
Jake continued on as if the Priest had said nothing.
“My Grandmother was the only person inside whom I didn't fear.”
At one time, Jake would have never admitted to his frailties but time had taken away his false pride and left him with only the truth. He spoke not with sadness or regret but merely recited facts. At this point in his life, the only thing he knew for certain was that he would live until he died. Everything else seemed to be a mystery, a huge contrast from his reckless youth when he was certain he understood all.
The Priest wanted to scream at Jake to shut up. The church had taught him that all men could seek absolution, but in his heart he didn't believe in forgiveness for men such as Jake. Yet, he sat idly by and listened to the old man, partially in disgust and partially as a voyeur unable to avert his eyes from some wretched scene. It was as if his soul and mind were at odds.
Jake went on to tell the Father that during the 9 months he spent in an iron lung and the 2 ½ years of rehabilitation, he only saw his mother and father twice, both times at a distance. They would stand at the edge of the hospital lawn and wave from the curb. They had a daughter and a son they feared might catch polio. At that time, no one knew how the polio virus was spread. People feared that this virus, which so viciously attacked the spinal cord, was airborne. Polio was the leprosy of the 1950s. Schools, swimming pools and movie houses were closed during epidemics.
Only Jake's Grandmother visited him regularly. She'd declared in her husky voice, “Something's got to kill me one day. Hell, I'm not afraid of getting polio.” She had a way of sounding as though she was daring death to take her. Jake was certain that the God of death would be too fearful to challenge this tough woman. Even In her 80s, she always said she would live as long as she could chop her own wood.
Young Jake survived the isolation of the iron lung by creating an imaginary world where he lived among sorcerers, knights, kings and queens. The iron lung was suffocating. The mind had to live someplace other than the body or go mad. The large, metal respirator covered everything but his head. His body could move in his imaginary world. There he was as strong and stout as any knight in the kingdom; Jake could wield a sword with ferocious force, slay an enemy in one slice and run with the speed of a horse.
It was a place where legs weren't crippled and shriveled up with atrophy; joints didn't freeze up and refuse to move. Muscles didn't ache, loneliness wasn't his constant companion, and fear of life-long deformities didn't invade his thoughts. Invasions came in the form of enemy armies that were easily slain. Beautiful maidens tossed flowers at his feet in appreciation for his heroic feats, and men drank heartily in honor of his bravery.
The nurses at the children's hospital considered him to be a miracle, filled with a boundlessly positive attitude. They didn't know it was because he no longer could feel pain. Even physical pain was minimal. When other children cried out in agony, Jake did not. His mind somehow shut out the constant pain in his legs and back.
“After I was released from the hospital, I still couldn't go home. My parents couldn't risk the well-being of my siblings. They didn't know the virus had long been eradicated from my system. Monasteries, the Amish and various Indian tribes were often the only people who would take in children with these so-called deadly communicable diseases. Wealthy parents could afford to send their children to Paraguay or Mexico. My parents had little money. The Hopi tribe was their only hope. After several discussions with tribal elders, my parents arranged for me to live on the Hopi reservation at the age of 11. No one else would take me in.”
Even in his later years, Jake considered himself to be half white man and half Indian, though he didn't have a drop of Indian blood. He felt caught between the two worlds, not fully belonging to either. His pale face, blond hair and blue eyes didn't remotely resemble the Indians he lived among. The life his ancestors lived in Spain had nothing to do with him. His siblings and he were fifth-generation Americans. Raised Catholic, Jake attended periodic Sunday masses until he was too ancient to drive. Rituals such as crossing himself with the holy water gave him a sense of balance, order. Yet, he felt little connection to the priests and nuns and even less connection with the church's ideology.
“When I pray, I pray to the Hopi gods and the Christian God. I've lived in both worlds and can't shake either,” continued Jake.
The Priest said nothing, just listened.
“Because I was just a boy when I went to live with the Hopi tribe, the Indians didn't fear me. I was allowed into rituals that no white man had witnessed. Only men were allowed in the kivas, which were underground ceremonial sites. Once boys reach puberty they are inducted into the kivas. I received an invitation, although, I wasn't allowed to stay as long as the Indian boys.”
In the kivas, Jake learned of the Kachinas, which were ancestral spirits that lived at the summit of the ancient volcanic San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona. They were used as intermediaries to the gods. He learned that the Hopis had three types of Kachinas as Christians had the Holy Trinity. For the Hopis, they had the supernatural gods; the carved religious icons, which were sacred tools used to teach children about the Hopi religion; and the humans who personified the gods during spiritual dances and ceremonies. The Hopis believed that once men wore the masks and clothing of the Kachinas, they became the gods. This all felt so familiar to Jake. As a Catholic, he knew the wine and bread blessed during mass became the blood and body of Christ, not just a representation; and Jake knew that when the Pope spoke in ex cathedra he spoke not as himself but as God. And like Catholic priests and nuns, the Kachina carvers and those who became the Kachinas during tribal ceremonies had to have years of religious study. And as with priests, only men could represent the Kachinas, even though many of the spiritual beings were female. The Kachina spirits similarity to Catholic saints helped Jake bond quickly with the Indians and their religion.
When Jake felt sick, he prayed to Skin Walker, who was known for her healing powers. The spirit crawled into the bed of the ill and healed with her touch. As a child, Jake feared the Orge as all Hopi children. When children had been particularly naughty, a man would wear the Orge's mask and go from child to child to warn them to help the tribe cultivate the needed food supply. The Orge would grab the children's feet and threaten to eat them. Parents would beg the Orge to spare the children because they had learned their lessons.
Jake most revered the Left-handed Kachina. Being left-handed, Jake saw himself in this spiritual entity. This warrior was the most feared because enemies expected the blows to come from the dominate right hand. A south-paw had the element of surprise.
Jake had always kept a Left-handed Kachina in his office, which was filled with Hopi religious icons. Many of his Kachinas, carved from cottonwood root, had eagle feathers, which were illegal for a white man to own. The Hopi didn't care. Jake was special to the tribe, an honorary member. Hopi priests, who had blessed each doll, had given Jake the various icons over the years.
Jake smiled as he told the priest about how during the female-spiritual ceremonies, the squaw dances, he'd hide in the mountains for fear that one would pick him to be her mate.
“While I find your troubled life fascinating, I don't see that it's necessary for us to discuss, considering why you've called me here,” interrupted the Priest, who had a slight irritation to his voice.
“No, I suppose you're right, but you're still my son.”
“Only by blood,” fired back the Priest, recoiling against the words as if Jake had shot him in the back.
Anger welled up in the Priest, and at that moment he knew he too had the capacity to take a life. So revolted with himself and Jake, the Priest stormed out of the room.
Jake called after him, “Wait.”
But Jake's words fell on deaf ears; Father Michael bounded down the nursing home's back stairway and ran out into the night. For the first time, the Priest grasped what was meant by “the sins of the father will be passed down...” The idea that any part of him, no matter how small, could be remotely like the man he refused to call father made him feel sick. Jake wanted to take his words back; he knew he'd gone too far. Somehow he had to get Father Michael back. He had a son's duty to perform. After all, Jake had fulfilled his duty to his father; Michael must do the same. There was only one way to get him back. Jake still had something that Father Michael wanted.

Chapter 2

Father Michael had woken up early to finish preparing his sermon for the morning's mass. A breeze blew through the courtyard, where he stretched out on a bench to scrawl notes. A few stars were still in the sky as dawn approached. Looking up from his notepad, he surveyed the courtyard, which the church wrapped around. It was bare except for a few grassy clumps, smatterings of cactus, sagebrush, a small juniper and two Ponderosa pines.
After writing his final notes, he slipped on his black jacket and white collar and rang the church bells, the same bells that Spanish monks had brought more than three hundred years ago from a Mexican monastery. The church was so small Father Michael handled most tasks. That was fine with him. A large congregation, with nameless faces, never appealed to him. This quaint mission-style church on a sparse swathe of red clay between Taos and Red River, New Mexico suited him perfectly.
Not much had changed since the native Indians and Spaniards built the mud walls. The structure was still no bigger than at its inception. Most parishioners had to duck to enter into the house of worship, since its 17th-century mesquite front doors were shaved and carved to an opening only slightly higher than five feet.
After conducting morning mass, Father Michael began taking confessions as usual. In fact, the day was just like most days, but that changed rapidly when an unexpected visitor walked into the parish. At first, the Father only heard footsteps clicking across the wide-planked wood floors. The visitor walked with the same double click that Father Michael walked with. Tired after several hours of confessions, the priest prayed this wasn't a lost soul searching for absolution. Hunger pains were growing stronger and so was the light feeling in his head. Confessions had been the typical transgressions, such as “I took the Lord's name in vain,” “I was disrespectful to my parents” and “I had an affair with my boss' husband.”
Father Michael knew all the predilections of the members of his congregation. Although a partition divided him and those in the confessional, he was intimately familiar with their voices. Besides, parishioners often gave themselves away by mentioning a favorite aunt or some other revealing tidbit. He knew who drank to excess, who was sleeping with whom, who secretly despised whom and who participated in unsavory activities such as shoplifting or voyeurism. He couldn't bear another contrite avowal, and it was a good two hours past his lunch hour.
The priest looked up at the late arrival and felt his legs sway. He knew him immediately. The eyes were the same as his long-departed Emma; he had the same dark features and harsh angles that came from the men on her side of the family. The awkward boy, Father Michael once knew, no longer existed. A man's sinewy body had replaced the freckled-faced, scrawny boy. Stubble had taken the place of pimples. A deep voice spoke through the same lips where a high-pitch once came from. The pants were no longer ripped from scuffling with the neighborhood boys, and he smelled of cologne rather than sour day-old sweat, horse and grime.
Father Michael never intended to become a dad. From the time he was age eight, he could never imagine a life outside the church. The towering ceilings, the crucifixes above the altar, the pews with red-velvet kneeling banisters, and the stained-glass interpretations of the resurrection felt more like home than any Tudor or Colonial-style home ever could. Years ago, shortly after Father Michael's mother was murdered, he was placed in a Catholic orphanage. He was only five. For years, he didn't know what had become of his father. Michael so wanted a father, he latched onto the priests and their teachings with the fervor and conviction of the converted. Soon becoming a priest was all he wanted--that is until Emma. The moment he saw her walk out of the confessional was the first time he'd felt a kinship outside the church. Immediately, he was drawn to Emma's opal-colored skin, heart-shaped face and doe eyes. She became the object of his obsession.
Emma was more than he ever dreamed a woman could be. She made him feel safe and loved. They married only a few weeks after they met, just as soon as they both turned 18. Their birthdays were only days apart. Michael didn't allow her out of the house without him. Jealousy became his albatross. If her eyes met another man's eyes and her lips smiled slightly, it would throw him into a three-day rage. He never raised his hand against her, but he'd break things and punch walls. At times of remorse, he'd lament that he felt like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When his 'evil' side surfaced, he would have heinous thoughts that sickened him, thoughts he dared not tell anyone. So he'd sleep, fearful to go out into the world, fearful that he'd lose control if someone pushed him.
While Emma and Michael's bad moments were intense, there were far more passionately wonderful times, when both were giddy with happiness. Sex was intense and frequent. Michael came to her often. Emma never turned him away from her soft private place where only he could enter, even when she wasn't in good spirits. Somehow it seemed cruel when he looked so vulnerable in his erectness, so naked in his urgency. Still Michael couldn't abide her seducing him. Somehow, he felt it made her dirty, like the aggressive streetwalkers other boys went to for relief. So she waited and learned patience. He was her first and only and she his. She became pregnant right away and gave birth to their son Matthew. Emma was a homebody, so she rarely minded the restrictions her husband put on her. In fact, they made her feel wanted and loved.
When Emma died of cancer, the joy in Michael withered. He returned to the only other place he felt peace, the church. The priesthood was a place where he could hide from his anger: anger at the God who took her away, anger at the doctor who couldn't save her, anger at the disease that chose his beloved, anger at himself for not being able to rescue her… And rage at the harsh sentence he was dealt for his human frailties that he so hated but couldn't escape.
Michael left all that he owned: the house, the car, his clothes, furniture and animals behind. Even their 13-year-old son Matthew was sent to live with Michael's Aunt Jessie. The lie was that Matthew needed a mother figure. The truth, Michael wouldn't admit to himself, was that his son's eyes were impossible to look into without being swallowed up by the pain of losing his Emma.
In the last few years Emma lived, the three resided in a cozy pueblo-style hacienda nestled on 13-wooded acres next to a national park just outside Taos, New Mexico. From their front porch, which wrapped around both sides of the house, they could see the mountains. On cool mornings, Emma would take one of the horses and ride up into the mountains to be alone. This was the only time Michael didn't mind Emma being away from him. He sensed the serenity the horses brought her.
One March morning, Michael went out to feed their four horses. On the ground, he tossed flakes of alfalfa. Their buckets he filled with pellets, oats and slices of carrots and apples and then scratched each one on their necks and chests. Each morning, when the horses heard Michael get up, they'd whinny in low guttural tones outside the bedroom window. On mild nights, when the bedroom window was left open, the four-year-old black-and-white paint, a bay, a red sorrel and a palomino would poke their heads inside the bedroom and if their pawing and vocal tones didn't wake them, sometimes Doc, Emma's favorite horse, would snatch the sheets to coax them out of bed. When the lightning storms came, Doc would whinny and paw at the backdoor. Terrified of storms he’d beg to come in. The first time Michael opened the door to calm him, Doc charged past him and lay on the floor shivering. Ever since then it became a ritual. He’d stay inside until the storm passed.
On this particular morning, an icy glaze was on everything. The water in the horse's trough had frozen. Using an ax with a splintered wooden handle, Michael broke up the ice, which resembled floating shards of glass. The horses pushed at each other to try to sip the cold liquid. Michael expected to have four horses nosing their way to the water, instead he only counted three. Looking up, he searched the pasture for Doc, the black-and-white paint. Michael glanced toward the house and saw Doc saunter up to the water faucet attached to the back of the house next to the spiny cholla cacti. The horse placed his lips over the faucet and turned it until the water ran freely. After the industrious horse drank his fill, he locked his lips around the faucet and turned it off.
Michael laughed from deep in his belly. Who'd ever heard of a horse turning a faucet on, let alone off? He ran into the house to share this astonishing tidbit with Emma, who had been bedridden for months because of cancer's ravaging ways. Michael called out to her as he hurried down the hall. Her door was merely pulled to so he was able to open it without turning the door knob. The room was still dark because the drapes were pulled closed.
Michael and she had always shared the same bed until this last month. Michael had moved Emma into a separate room where he set up a hospital bed that could raise and lower her feet and head. Here, she slept more soundly without his coughing or snoring or restlessly tossing about. The room Michael kept meticulously neat, each ornament dusted and in its proper place, and the paintings on the walls were perfectly straight. Even the bed almost looked made up though Emma was still occupying it: the sheets tucked in on all sides, the comforter folded nearly across her legs, and pillows propped up her head.
When he first stepped inside, Michael thought she was asleep, but once he pulled the curtains open to let the sun in, he saw her pale lifeless face, her upturned hand. If it wasn’t for the blue around her eyes and lips and the wetness of urine between her legs, she would have appeared to be napping.
Years later, the son he’d left behind stood in front of him. Michael felt as though he was peering through a forgotten window, where he could see into someone else’s past life. Emma and Michael’s son had always been a good student, excelling in every subject he tackled. The year his mother died his grades slipped, but he soon recovered and began to master his studies again. Books and learning allowed him solace from the sorrow of losing his parents. Getting lost in literature of Faulkner and Woolf, the history of the War Between the States, the study of periodic tables, or compound fractures were his escapes. His stellar grades earned him a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, where he hoped to study law. Matthew hated the idea of leaving his beloved New Mexico, but he knew he needed a better education than a small-town junior college could offer him. All this Father Michael knew because he had kept in close contact with his Aunt Jessie, making sure Matthew was okay.
Aunt Jessie hadn’t been able to have children and had longed to raise a son or a daughter of her own. When the chance came to take her favorite nephew in, she took it without hesitation. The only condition was she’d have to promise to never tell the boy where his father had gone. The plump woman with soft-blond curls around her cherub face hesitantly agreed.
Father Michael, standing across from his son, had feared this moment for years. How could he ever justify abandoning his son? Father Michael was overcome with emotion: torn between the desire to hold his son and the desire to flee. Even if he could talk himself into running, his feet could no more move than if they had been made of steel and concrete. As if involuntarily, Father Michael reached out to embrace the boy, who was now a man, when Matthew spoke first. Mathew was too preoccupied to notice the emotions that had been altering Father Michael’s expressions.
“Are confessions over with Father?” he asked as he adjusted his red tie and glanced down at his cell phone to check the time.
So taken back by the presence of his son, Father Michael didn’t answer. Instead he just stared as his feelings washed over his numbness, forcing an uncomfortable tingling sensation similar to how a leg feels after the circulation has been cut off. He felt so many things at once; he couldn’t isolate where one began and another ended: The regret of lost time, pain of his wife’s death, the awe of the man standing in front of him. Surreal was the best way to explain it.
Searching his son’s eyes, which were preoccupied with his phone, he saw no sign of recognition. Michael thought his son had come in search of him but quickly realized this was a chance meeting. The Father still didn’t speak. Confused by the Priest’s silence, Matthew looked at the man more closely. The awareness of whom he was speaking to slowly grabbed hold of Matthew. At first, he said nothing then murmured, “Father?”
Matthew had fantasized about this moment many times. In but a few seconds, he felt the boy in him cry out, “Dad,” and the man in him strike out. The boy had so many questions, but the man’s lips didn’t speak.
Matthew remembered all too well that dreadful morning. His father never spoke, not a kind word or caress for the crying boy, only silence. Part of him wanted revenge. The power was in his hands to walk away from the man who now wanted to embrace him. When his father had taken him to his aunt’s house in Albuquerque, his father had promised to return. Michael knew it was a lie, but he just couldn’t walk away from Matthew’s eyes without offering momentary comfort. He didn’t think it through enough to understand the damage that the tender lie would cause; he just grasped for a quick fix.
For weeks the boy kept watch at his aunt’s front bay window as vigilantly as a soldier guarding a fort against enemy troops. The freckled-faced child refused to unpack or sleep in his newly decorated room. Somehow, he feared if he got too comfortable, his father wouldn’t return. Late in the spring, Matthew gave up his post and put his things away. His Great Aunt Jessie's home was strange to him. Matthew had grown up with open land, trees, hills, mountains, rivers, springs and wild animals around him. The sky was a deep blue, the air crisp as summer cucumbers. Here the entire city belched smoke, fumes and exhaust, poisoning all that breathed it. Stars didn't cover the sky. The city lights blotted out all but the brightest stars, and rows and rows of houses, rows and rows of city blocks, patches and patches of apartments and businesses crowded him, pinned him in until he doubted he'd ever feel free again. To him the city was surreal, as if a Monopoly game had somehow sprung to life, slaying the pastures, foliage, streams, wildlife, rolling hills and wide-open land he craved. Still, he was grateful to his Aunt Jessie, who took him in, fed him, clothed him and was kind to him. She gave him everything she could but the two things he wanted most, his father and mother.
Father Michael watched as Matthew's eyes turned to recognition then to confusion, then to pain and finally to anger. Matthew slipped his cell phone into his jacket pocket and turned away.
Father Michael grieved as Matthew hurried out the church doors. His son's heels doubled clicked as he went. Regret washed over the priest like Noah's great flood but still he did nothing.

Chapter 3

Jake never thought he'd hire an assassin. After all, there was no job he couldn't handle, or so he believed in his blind youth. Still, he had one last hit that must be done. The assassin had to be someone close to him. Jake had the necessary skill to kill efficiently, but he was encased in a wasted, shriveled vessel that laid inert in a nursing-home bed. Even if his atrophied muscles could suddenly be infused with enough vigor and dexterity that he could lift himself out of his prison, his mind couldn't bear the inevitable recoil, not even for this last kill. His soul had stolen his blissful numbness and no longer tolerated his self-appointed role as the Grim Reaper.
A nurse walked in and adjusted a valve on Jake's IV; neither spoke, only eyed each other with distrust. The nurse tended to her duties and left, and Jake stared out the window. Below two children played kickball as a group of nursing-home “inmates,” as Jake called them, watched on. Jake yearned to start over, at the boys' ages, and live his life again. He wanted to tell the kids to be wary of choices made. It can haunt you, he thought. You see, Jake doubted that God would forgive him for his blindness, as he couldn't forgive himself. Hell or perhaps purgatory was his next resting place, or perhaps no rest would come for those such as himself. Perhaps his damnation would be to feel the recoil over and over again, until the pain was unbearable.
Outside on the green lawn, the blond boy wearing blue, pin-striped overalls tripped over his red ball and scraped his knee. Crying and limping, the boy hurried to his mother for kisses. Jake wished things were that simple and that his mother was still alive to kiss his hurt away. But, in truth, a mother couldn't really kiss hurts away, he thought bitterly. No human escaped unscathed from pain nor blindness, unless death came before the first breath.
Jake had always argued that even the act of birth was violent: the woman screamed and tore, and the wailing infant had his head squeezed as if in a vise from its natural shape and was ripped from the only warm place he'd known. Jake believed that blindness to physical pain and world suffering drove women to procreate. Blindness seduced men into the military, into the CIA, into illusions of heroism. Jake could remember sitting on a bench in a mess hall, when a superior told Jake and a roomful of men, “Half you men will not come back.” All the men looked around, wondering who. None fathomed that he might be among the fallen, including Jake. Blindness had allowed Jake to kill, to rationalize killing, to even justify it. Blindness had kept him from the fear of living too long. A gun was supposed to take him out decades ago. He never imagined he'd find himself restricted to a bed, unable to the restroom or wipe himself, utterly incapable of sitting up on his own. The isolation was all too familiar to the iron lung, the children's hospital, where his acute state of blindness to pain started. Jake turned away from the window, away from the nurturing mother, away from the boys back at play. He longed for a touch of blindness that would take him to another time and place.
The drug that delivered his bliss was his beloved morphine, which he paid a doctor handsomely for. In the doctor's notes, it said the morphine drip was to control physical pain, but Jake used it to blur his emotional pain. He longed for that eloquent, morphine haze, which took him far from the sad, wretched nursing-home smells, food, aides and worst of all its isolation. Jake's only control was when that blissful haze would come. He couldn't control what he ate, when he ate, when he drank, what he drank, when his medicine came, when he was bathed, what he wore, when he was wheeled out of his room, when he could go outside, nothing. His only control was when the walls would sway, and he'd drift away on the warmth of the morphine. Only occasionally did the morphine betray him. At those moments, like today, the bliss came and went too soon and the fickle drug plunged him into a hell, a reality he was helpless to stop. Reliving the memories were in some ways worse than the actual experience because the mind's ability to shut down was gone, blessed numbness could no longer protect him. The love-hate bond he had for the drug was like the love-hate felt for an inconstant lover, who granted ecstasy and then without warning a violent slap.
In his stillness and quiet, Jake no longer disappeared into fantasy as he did when he lived in the iron lung. Rather, he disappeared into his past. Luring him were the places where he'd been happy and even joyous. Some of Jake's favorite times were when Father and Mother would tell the stories of his great-grandparents, who settled the family ranch just east of Flagstaff. It had been in the family since the 1800s. The cabin where their great-grandparents lived in was only about 10 miles from the current family home. His father always said he looked just like his grandfather Patrick Cauble did as a boy.
The elderly Jake knew the morphine was a roll of the dice. Jake rolled them once more and pressed the button on his pump. At first, the warm bliss took him to his favorite Christmas story.

While most children begged to hear The Night Before Christmas, little Jake and his siblings wanted to hear about their great-grandparents' first Christmas on the family's Arizona ranch. The telling of the story was a Christmas Eve tradition in the Cauble household.
This year was no different. Mother called for Jake, Sarah and Caleb to gather around the fireplace so Father could begin the tale. Father and Mother were as opposites as two people could be. Mary was fair, complicated and petite. She looked as breakable as a crystal vase. The dark-headed Daniel had leathery, sun-baked skin and rippling muscles. Mary's dresses were always meticulously ironed and starched, and her light brown hair was kept in a neat bun on top of her head. She looked out of place in the Arizona landscape. Daniel usually wore overalls and a wrinkled, white-cotton t-shirt, and his hair was always disheveled, except on Sunday mornings when he took the family to church.
Jake's siblings came from the same cloth as their father. The 14-year-old Caleb had red hair and freckles and already had stubble and the muscular body of a man. If they had had a football team at their small rural school, he could be the entire defensive line. The dark-eyed Sarah could out-shoot both her brothers and was handy with training the horses, but she was hardly a tomboy. Her figure was tall and slender yet still boyish at 16. Hours would go by as she primped for a school social or dance, especially if a cute boy might be in attendance. The 8-year-old Jake was still scrawny and as playful and as clumsy as a puppy. He was always tripping over his own feet, which were too big for his body.
Jake always loved Christmas more than anyone else in the family. Giving presents was his favorite part. He'd spend months making the perfect gift for each family member. His presents were always the first ones under the Christmas tree. Each year, he'd beg for everyone to open his first.
This year the family had set up the tree in the corner of the cabin and decorated it with strings of popcorn, red and green bows and hand-made ornaments. As Mary joined the family for the story she could recite herself, she set out a plate filled with sugar cookies in the shape of angels, Christmas trees, stars, snowmen, wreaths and Santa Claus. Each was painted with colored icings, mostly greens and reds. Round red hot candies made Santa's buttons, tiny multi-colored sugar candies were ornaments on the trees and small silver balls outlined the angels' halos and gowns. As soon as the plate reached the hearth, everyone grabbed for the cookies, making “yummy” noises in anticipation of that first bite.
Daniel began the story just as he always did. Jake lay on his belly, his fists under his chin and legs turned up at the knees and crossed in the back. Sarah and Caleb sat cross-legged, leaning anxiously in to hear the tale they'd heard so many times before. Jake loved how Father's voice was slow and deliberate and filled with anticipation.
“It was Christmas morning in 1875 when the Cauble children wiped the sleep out of their eyes and shuffled out of the single room that they shared,” said Daniel, as he scooted closer to the children. Sarah laid her head on his shoulder as she listened, and the boys faces perked up. “Their room had a low, slung ceiling and an iron, potbellied stove. They slept head, toe, head, toe on a single pallet stuffed with hay.
“Megan, the baby, seemed to have enough “nos” for a lifetime stored up in her two years. Everything good and bad received the same response: a big, loud “No!” Patrick, the tow-headed three-year-old, came into the world with a smile and a willingness to accept any lap offered to him,” interjecting, Daniel said, “Patrick was my father and your grandfather. You children never got to meet him, but he looked just like Jake as a boy.”
Caleb and Sarah looked at Jake admiring his features and imagining that he was their grandfather. Jake lifted his head, just a bit prouder. Then their father continued with the story: “Joshua, the eight-year-old, was just experimenting with his independence. He still wanted Mother’s hugs and kisses but fussed plenty when she gave them. The nine-year-old Jonathan could always be found with his nose in a book about knights and sorcerers.
“On this particular morning the children ran out to the kitchen to gather around the stove to get warm, but no one had kept the fire going and icicles had formed on the inside of the windows. Every morning their mother got up before them and would start the fire and cook the morning’s oatmeal. But this morning was special. It was Christmas! This morning there would be fresh eggs from the hen house, ham from the Christmas pig, warm milk from Clara the Cow, and hot biscuits and strawberry jam that their mother made. But things were different this Christmas morning. Things weren't as fine and festive as years before. The kitchen was still cold and dark. Mother hadn't started the fire or lit the lanterns. No biscuits were cooking in the oven. There was no sign of the Christmas goose that was sure to be the family's dinner.
“The four pulled back the curtain to their parent’s room. Mother wasn't putting on her slippers. Father wasn't clipping his red whiskers. The bed had been slept in but no one was there now.
“All the children turned and looked at each other in total surprise. Patrick cried out, “Someone has stolen Christmas.”
“Megan began to cry, Patrick joined in. Joshua and Jonathan felt the lumps gather in the throats but fought them back. Jonathan and Joshua chimed in almost at the same time, “They're probably in the barn.”
“Sure,” Joshua continued, “They probably got up early to do our chores as a Christmas surprise.”
“They wrapped scarves around their necks and slipped on their coats that their mother had made them. Patrick's and Megan’s jackets were made of beaver. Joshua's and Jonathan's coats were deer hide with collars made from the first rabbits the boys skinned. They squeezed out the front door all at once and ran to the barn. Jonathan swung open the barn door. Patrick yelled out, “Is Christmas in here?”
The old sorrel mare, named Auntie, was still in her stall, but no one had given her any hay. Clara the Cow’s udders were still swollen with milk. The eggs were still in the hen’s nests, and Mother and Father were nowhere to be found. The family's wagon and a 10-year-old chestnut horse that Megan named Giddy-up were gone. The children quickly milked the cow and gathered the eggs, hoping Mother and Father would return soon. When the chores were complete their parents still had not returned. Jonathan pulled the mare out of the barn. She had a long back big enough for the four children. The family didn't have a bridle or saddle for her, so Jonathan made a halter with two reins out of a rope for her. He led Auntie to the fence and used the wooden slats to climb on her back. Joshua then handed Megan up to Jonathan. Patrick took a seat behind Jonathan and Joshua got up last. Jonathan took hold of the reins and gave her a gentle prodding with the inside of his legs.
By the time the children got to Flagstaff it was just after 2 p.m. The wet, dirty roads were streaked with prints made from wagon and carriage wheels. The Cauble children could smell the Christmas feasts being prepared inside the homes. They walked through the market, which was filled with meats: deer, buffalo, bear, duck, chicken, grouse, partridge, elk, pig, beefsteaks, roast and even fish and oysters.
The children peered in the window of Douglas, Whitney & Company and saw homemade candies. Their stomachs ached. The day-old biscuits they had packed in their pockets were long gone.
Frustrated, cold, and afraid the four Cauble children sat on a step just across the street from the Market Drug Store. Suddenly, the children looked up. A crowd had gathered outside the drug store. The people were laughing, chatting, and pointing to a window above the store, where a family from Germany lived. Inside the window stood a tree decorated with candles, tinsel, and homemade cookies in the shape of stars, ships and boots; a sight the children had never seen. The crowd became so excited, all began to sing Christmas carols. The Cauble children joined in. To accompany the carolers in Silent Night and Away in a Manger, a woman came out of her home carrying her violin and four men pulled a piano and pianist out of the saloon.
Patrick looked up to Jonathan and Joshua, “We found Christmas.” Pausing slightly he added, “But l miss Mother and Father.”
“Somehow, l just know they'll be home when we get there,” said Jonathan with a smile.
And he was right. As Auntie sauntered up, the kids saw smoke billowing up from the chimney. Sliding down one-at-a-time, Jonathan and Joshua helped the two little kids down, and they all dashed into the house. The aroma of the Christmas goose greeted them as did Mother and Father, who knelt on the floor to hug their children. Everyone talked at once.
Through all the chatter Patrick yelled the loudest, “Mother, Father someone stole Christmas but then we found it.”
Giggling little Jake’s voice burst into the middle of his Father’s story and began telling the end with perfect recollection: “After the kids told their parents about discovering the first Christmas tree, our great grandmother spun the tale of Christmas, which Jonathan and Joshua had heard so many times before. They heard how a baby named Jesus was born in a manger and how a star in East had led three wise men to him. They learned how the child brought the message of love, sharing, and hope. And they all knew this had been the best Christmas ever.”
Turning to his mother, Jake prodded her to take it from there: “Now mother tell us the story of Jesus just like our great-grandmother used to tell her children.”
All three kids draped over each other—a mass of tangled arms and legs--in anticipation for the next family ritual.
“I don’t know Jake, maybe it’s time you told the story,” said his mother with a proud smile.
“No. I like to hear you tell it best.”

After Mother finished the tale, Jake clapped his hands and Sarah and Caleb joined in. Father jumped up and with a sly smile ordered the children to get into bed. All three balked and ran for the front door as their father knew they would. Always after story time, Daniel would take the children outside to listen for the sleigh bells and to watch the sky for Santa's sleigh. Moments after Father and the children hustled outside; Mother slipped out the back door and made her way into the woods. Jake listened intently as did Sarah and Caleb. It was several minutes before anyone heard a jingle. Finally, Jake screamed out, “I hear them, I hear them.” Father and Sarah and Caleb strained to hear the faint bells, which became louder and louder. The children didn't know that back up in the woods, their mother had Christmas bells in her pocket. She rang them several times until the children giggled with pure joy. Jake's laughter was the loudest.
Father gathered up the children and told them to hurry off to bed so Santa would come. Jake and his siblings set out a plate of cookies and a glass of eggnog with a shot of whiskey. Sarah climbed the ladder to her room, and the boys ran out back to their hut, chattering the whole way. The children were so filled with anticipation they could barely sleep, but they closed their eyes and forced the honey dew of slumber* to come.
Little Jake was just falling off to sleep; when suddenly, big Jake was jolted from his dream by the crash of his dinner plate hitting the nursing home floor. Behind the orderly, who had dropped the plate, was a heavy-set nurse with graying teeth. She came to draw blood for routine tests. Jake felt as though he'd been jerked violently from his bliss. He resented the intrusion into his dream. While the orderly busily cleaned up his mess, the nurse pursed her lips and pricked him and thumbed the tube as the blood flowed into it. After the nurse and the orderly left, Jake's eyes fell heavy and he went back into his dreams; this time the morphine betrayed him. It took a sharp turn that plunged him into the day that changed his world forever.
[1]

Chapter 4

Jake and his siblings, Caleb and Sarah, had risen early. They were more excited than usual as they slipped on their rubber boots to do their morning chores. The ground was moist from the light rain the night before. As soon as their chores were done, the three were going to go on a horseback ride and a rabbit hunt. Jake had wanted to ride to the Grand Canyon but it was too far for a one-day ride. Even at age 8, Jake loved how the Arizona ranch changed with each mile: from the desert red-rock formations to the old-growth forests to the steep, lush canyons.
At the ranch's center was their home, a cabin that their Father had built. Daniel, a stout and strict man with black wire-frame glasses, made the roof out of corrugated tin, and the walls out of red rock and logs. The latter, he had hand notched. The covered front porch, which he had braced with log pillars, was where the family most often gathered. Now the porch, with two rocking chairs and a swing, sat empty as Mother prepared breakfast, Father chopped wood, and the children did their chores. The home had no running water, only an outside hand pump, and there was no electricity. They lived too far from the electrical lines. Besides his mother feared the electrical wiring would cause an explosion and burn down their lovely home. So homework was done by kerosene lamps but with two more months of summer, the children didn't worry about the dreary days of school.
Downstairs, where they ate, was a single room with a rock fireplace. At one end were two green recliners and an orange and yellow checkered couch. At the other end, in the corner, was the kitchen, which had a hand-hewed wood table with two family-style benches, a wood-burning stove and oven, and a faucetless sink, which drained out into the yard. The kitchen cupboard fronts were covered with curtains their mother had made from old yellow sheets. The window curtains matched and had leather tie backs. On the counters, three large steel pots of water were kept full: one for drinking, one for washing dishes and scrubbing vegetables and one for cleaning up before meals. A tin cup, which the family shared, hung from the drinking pot.
When the tow-headed Jake, with a mass of curls tickling his brow, finished collecting eggs from the hen house, he placed the basket of eggs in the crook of his arm. As he hurried out into the open, Jake kicked a gray river rock several paces ahead, caught up to it and kicked it again, caught up to it and kicked it again. He repeated the ritual over and over until he reached the corral. Jake's eyes grew wide. Sarah and Caleb were letting the horses out of the corral to graze when they heard Jake call out.
“Sarah, Caleb, come quick.”
“Jacob, we're busy,” said Sarah with a sharp snip.
“You're going to want to see this,” replied Jake with such urgency the other two abandoned their duties and hurried over.
Jake pointed to the huge tracks on the wet ground. Caleb and Sarah abruptly stopped their chattering and eyed the five-padded print with no nails. Jake and his siblings had been on enough hunts with their father to know what that meant but Jake said it aloud anyway.
“That’s not a dog or coyote track, and it’s too large to be a bobcat.”
“Do you think that’s the mountain lion that killed our yearling colt?” asked Sarah.
“The tracks are the same size,” responded Caleb.
All three looked at each other and each knew what the other two were thinking.
“The tracks are fresh,” said Sarah.
“The winds are still,” said Jake.
Jake and his siblings knew still winds gave the best chance for the dogs to pick up a scent. Winds would carry the scent off the cat's tracks. The kids had seen it too often. The dogs would end up frantically sniffing in circles. Jake spit in his hand, Caleb and Sarah did the same, and the three shook, pledging to go after the mountain lion. The colt the lion had killed was to be Jake's next horse, his first to train. He wanted the cat's blood.
“Not a word to Mother or Father,” Jake whispered, although their parents were too far away to hear. Jake knew Father and Mother would forbid them to go alone. He, as well as Sarah and Caleb, fantasized that he or she would be the hero who'd take down the lion.
None of them knew that at the edge of the woods, that same cat purred and swished her tail as she eyed a sorrel-and-white calf suckling on her mother's teat.

At the breakfast table that morning, the kids quickly ate their eggs and biscuits. Not a word was spoken.
“Why are you three so quiet? Must be up to something,” teased their mother as she slipped in a new batch of biscuits in the wood-burning stove.
This soft-spoken woman in her thirties always tended to things in the kitchen, either canning or baking bread or cooking up a rabbit stew or frying elk chops or whipping up a venison roast. She was viewed as delicate, in need of protection. All women were to be protected and revered, even if she was an older sister who shot better than both her brothers. This fact about Sarah vexed Jake and Caleb. Still, Father always had the boys stand when Mother or Sarah walked in the room. If they failed to, they went without the next meal, which was usually an elk, deer or rabbit that Father or one of the three kids shot.
Jake, Caleb and Sarah slipped a couple biscuits and several slices of elk jerky in their saddle bags and lied to their parents, promising rabbit for dinner, when each hoped it would be mountain lion they'd feast on this evening.
Sarah climbed the ladder that led to the upstairs attic to get her wide-brimmed hat and a handkerchief to protect her from the sun. Upstairs, the attic had been divided into two rooms, one for their parents and one for Sarah. At one time, all the siblings shared one room until Sarah got too old to room with the boys. The boys stayed in a detached log hut, which had been the family tool shed. The father sealed the open slits in the wood with cement to keep the wind out, and he put in a pot-bellied stove to warm the room in the winter months. In town, he had a couple pieces of glass cut, which he framed and made into windows for the boys. The mother cut curtains out of an elk hide and used strips of leather, hawk feathers and Indian beads to make the tiebacks. The boys loved the maleness of living in the rugged hut. They liked to pretend they were mountain men, independent and grown up.
Sarah almost ruined their retreat when she begged to live in it. Jake seethed as he watched Sarah work Father. Daniel almost always gave into his daughter's pouty requests, but his innate need to protect his women won. Somehow, he just couldn't allow his daughter to sleep anywhere but under his roof, although, he knew it was somewhat irrational since she'd only be a few feet away. He felt boys were more capable of taking care of themselves if something went awry,
Still, Sarah argued her position with the girlish smile that put a twinkle in her eyes. These weapons Father usually found irresistible. Both boys thought their dream mountain hut was lost and Jake wished he never had a sister.
“Father, I am the oldest, and I can handle a gun better than my brothers. I can hunt, dress a deer, chop wood and find my way in the wilderness as well as they. You know if I was your son you wouldn’t hesitate.”
She had him reconsidering until the last sentence, and for him that was the end of the discussion, “True, but you're not my son. You're my daughter.”
Father so hated to see his girl's eyes dim and her smile fade, but this was one subject he couldn't be swayed on, and Sarah knew it. She had seen that look of finality in his eyes before. Jake silently cheered the victory, but he knew better than to gloat, or he might be relegated to the kitchen floor and Caleb would have the hut to himself.

After breakfast, Jake, Sarah and Caleb saddled up their horses and slipped their rifles into their sheaths. They hadn't been gone from the house for more than a couple hours when the wet tracks they'd been easily following disappeared into the rocks and hard, dusty ground. The rains hadn't hit this far away. Ahead in the woods, Jake could hear the dogs--Lady, Jessie, Hart--working the cat's trail. The low winds were in favor of the young hunters. They stayed back enough to not interfere with the dogs but close enough to catch up if the mountain lion was treed. When necessary, the three hacked through the heavy brush with their bowie knives.
Jake knew by the direction of the barking that the cat had moved east into Dead Man's Canyon with its towering rock walls and spiked vegetation. The canyon was christened this ominous name when a ranch hand, who helped settle the family's land, rode out to gather up a stray calf. His horse reared on a narrow switchback, thrusting them both over the edge. Their remains lay forever in a deep crevice that no man can reach.
As the Cauble siblings began their descent down into the canyon, Sarah was in the lead, Jake in the middle and Caleb brought up the rear. The horses knew the country well and easily maneuvered down the rocky path that their ancestors had long ago worn, the same path that Jake, Sarah and Caleb had traveled many times. Once the three reached the canyon floor, they let the horses stop for a drink in the spring. Each drank their fill and then the kids pushed them on toward the sound of the barking.
Soon the canyon open up into a valley, and the horses perked up their ears and picked up the pace. All the siblings smiled because they knew what the horses wanted. Sarah gave her horse a click of the tongue and leaned forward to give her permission to lope. That was all the invitation her red-roan mare needed. Her back haunches pushed off the ground and moved into a smooth, steady lope that felt like a rocking chair. The boys let their horses take the mare's cue and they too took off. Soon they were in an abandoned apple orchard by the cabin their great-grandparents lived in when they first settled this country.
Jake loved to ride here and pretend it was 1875 and that he had brought his family west to ranch. His great-grandparents had planted the orchard generations ago and sold the apples in Flagstaff. Sometimes they'd trade a bushel of apples for salt pork or flour or sugar. Jake surveyed the fruit. Most of the apples were too puny and green to eat or lay on the ground rotting; their sweet fermented fragrance filled the air. It was too early in the season for the crisp, red apples the horses longed for. The kids wisely passed them by to let them ripen. The horses dropped their heads and dragged their hooves like children forced to walk past a snow cone stand empty-handed. In the fall, Jake vowed to himself to bring the horses back and let them eat their fill. While they ate, he'd gather a bushel to take back to can for the winter and to make pies, apple butter and jelly.
Not long after they rode away from the orchard, the dogs' barking accelerated, faster and faster until they were in a frenzy. Sarah spurred her horse and all three horses took off at a gallop, winding through the trees, pounding the forest's soft ground. The horses kicked up dirt and snorted, and Jake's black gelding threw his head in excitement. Once the dogs were in site, Sarah pulled back on her reins. The dogs were barking below a large pine.
“Does anyone see the mountain lion in the pine?” she asked as she squinted and searched the branches.
The three were quiet as they searched, suddenly Jake cried out, “I do, I do.”
Sarah spurred her horse on and the others followed. When she got within firing range, she pulled her horse to a stop and unsheathed her rifle. All three had agreed she'd take the first shot since she was the best. The boys, especially Jake, didn't like letting a girl have the kill, but they wanted the cat more than their prepubescent pride. The boys unsheathed their rifles as well in case they had a chance to fire. Sarah raised her rifle and just as she squeezed the trigger her horse skittered and spun around. She missed. The cat bowed its back at the blast. Caleb sat stunned in silence and didn't move as the lion leaped toward the dogs. Jake raised his rifle with the skill of a long-time hunter, and fired, hitting the cat before it hit the ground. The dogs scattered, and the cat fell where canines once stood barking. Jake had hit her in the barrel of the chest. She died instantly.
Sarah whirled her horse around, prepared to shoot again. Instead, she called out in amazement, “Caleb, you hit him.”
“I didn't do it. It was Jake,” the two turned to him with a newfound admiration.
“Jake, that was amazing,” stammered Caleb.
“I'll say,” said Sarah in awe.
“Ah, it was nothing,” said Jake, his voice slightly shaking.
Inside, Jake was turning summersaults, but he kept his yippees quiet. Even at his tender age, Jake knew a man didn't gloat. A man doesn't show anger, fear, pain, tears and especially not unabashed joy. Father was most proud when at age 6, Jake didn't scream as the doctor set his broken leg caused from a fall off a horse. Now Jake was as determined to not scream, even if it was in delight. The best way for it to be made a big deal of was to act like it was nothing. So he simply took out his knife and cut it from its throat to its belly. He had helped his father gut and clean game many times, so he knew exactly what to do. When he was finished, Sarah and Caleb helped Jake string the cat up in a tree.
While the blood drained, the three sat down to lunch and let the horses graze. As the kids nibbled on biscuits and elk jerky and the berries and pecans they'd picked along the way, they laughed and told the tale of Jake's first mountain lion. Jake smiled with pride, knowing this tale would be told and embellished for many years to come, perhaps even his grandchildren would hear the story. It would become a part of the family folklore.
After lunch, Jake, Sarah and Caleb gathered several fallen branches, careful to pick out the straightest ones. Then Jake tied the branches together with his rope and Sarah took her lariat and tied the stretcher to the back of her mare. Jake and Caleb lowered the cat from the tree and put it on the stretcher and headed home, victorious and proud. Jake knew Mother and Father would be angry, but the spring's colts would be safe and the meat would feed the family for several weeks. The hide, of course, belonged to Jake. He'd already decided it was going on his bed. It would keep him warm this winter.
Jake daydreamed about the night to come as they traveled home. Tonight, they'd cut the tenderloins out and slow smoke them in the pit. Mother would make her red sauce from dried ancho chiles and smother it over the top. Sarah would pick some fresh greens and dig up some new potatoes out of the garden. The peach pie that Mom had on the window sill this morning would certainly be dessert. They'd pour fresh cream with a touch of sugar and vanilla on top. Father would probably dip into his home-brewed beer he'd made from barley. He never got drunk but at celebratory times such as this, he'd savor a pint of the sweet brew. Yes, the parents might be mad but they'd celebrate after the “talk,” and Sarah would get hugs and the boys a handshake. Mother would sneak hugs to the boys when Father wasn't looking. This would be a joyous celebration. Sarah and Caleb would tell the tale of his first mountain lion, and he'd shrug his shoulders as if it were nothing. He'd be a man on the outside, but inside he'd be a boy and yelling yippee.
And Jake was right, everything went just as he had imagined, that is until nightfall. The parent's did give them a “talk” and then the family celebrated Jake's first mountain lion, but it wasn't long after the celebratory evening that Jake began to shiver with fever, his head ached and his neck stiffened. Within a couple hours, the muscles in his legs ached, and his breathing was labored. Mother looked pale as she eyed her young lad with a dread that comes when one might lose a child. Father tried to hide his fear, but his eyes told what he wouldn't say. The parents looked at each other, and both knew but neither said the dreaded word. Mother and Father sent Sarah and Caleb into the house. Mother told them to boil the sheets, towels, clothes and stuffed animals. Sarah took charge. They both knew this was no time for questions or to cry.
The parents loaded their little hero into the station wagon and rushed him to Flagstaff. There was no one to call for help. Their nearest neighbor was forty miles away. By the time they reached the hospital, Jake had almost quit breathing. Mother had crawled into the back seat and rocked him up and down forcing the air into and out of his lungs. Mary usually flourished in times of crisis. When tragedy hit, her energy multiplied. She could stay up day and night and fight whatever scourge threatened her home or family. A crisis meant a break from the mundane. Her need to rescue was as intense as their Australian shepherd's drive to herd. This time was different. This time, Mary felt helpless. Polio, the word she feared to speak aloud, had its tentacles in her youngest, trying to steal him from the safety of her bosom. A blur of white--nuns, nurses, doctors--rushed around him and placed him on a gurney. Words were spoken but Jake understood nothing. His mind heard nothing but static like a TV station that had gone off air.
A bellow was placed over Jake's mouth; a nun hand-pumped air into his collapsing lungs. All was a blur of activity. Moments later, they were all on top of the hospital roof. The whirl of helicopter blades added to the frenzy. The gust of wind it produced almost knocked Mary off her feet. Jake was torn away from his parents and rushed into the helicopter. Mary's frightened eyes looked to those attending to her son, pleading for some sign that everything would be okay. Finding nothing, her eyes became as empty as her arms, which no longer held her 8-year-old son. Flagstaff didn't have a polio ward. He was being flown to Phoenix. Daniel and Mary weren't allowed to go any further.
Daniel tried to push their way onto the helicopter, but a large black orderly blocked his path. He wanted to deck the man and force his way through, but he knew that would do nothing to help his ailing son. Jake saw his parents, trapped. He wanted to cry out for his mother, but even if he could he wouldn't have shamed his family with such a demonstration.

By the time Jake arrived in Phoenix, his muscles and joints had already seized up; even his facial muscles wouldn't allow him to talk. The hero had been taken down, unable to walk, move his limbs or even breathe on his own. The sound of his parents and the sound of his own breathing were replaced by a great whooshing sound. He darted his eyes from side to side trying to find his mother and father. They were gone. Panic grabbed him, pressing on his throat. He felt as if he was disappearing to all he once knew. The intense fear went as fast as it came and then there was a nothingness, a vastness as dark as a black hole. Everything was too intense, too surreal. Later, he would realize he had gone into blessed shock.
All he could see was a whirl of white, a sea of iron lungs, shiny like a car bumper and shaped like submarines, in a room the size of a gymnasium. The ceiling was high and the lights bright. Jake couldn't see the floor, but he imagined it was white linoleum. He could hear the rubber soles squeak as the nurses and doctors moved across it so he knew it wasn't carpet. His freedom with its wide-open spaces had been stolen in a matter of hours, and he had become a captive submerged in this metal tube. Back in Flagstaff, Jake's parents clung to each other and cried. Daniel was glad of only one thing. His son wasn't there to see him weep.

* From Tenneyson’s poem Tithonus, whose lover requested the Greek gods to give him immortality but neglected to also ask for eternal youth so he was damned to live an eternity of decrepitness.
[1] *Partial quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Chapter 5

When Sister Teresa spoke to Father Michael, her voice rarely went above a whisper, a whisper no louder than a breeze stirring blades of grass. She had a child-like face with a natural-pink blush to her cheeks and round dark eyes that fell to the ground when she spoke. It was as if she was constantly apologizing for speaking, for existing. Michael Angelo could have found no better creature to model as an angel, an angel not yet fitted with a halo.
Last winter, when Sister Teresa first came to St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Father Michael asked her to join him in his sparsely appointed rectory. In the center of the room lay a rugged antique walnut desk with drawers on either side, a mica lamp and two mission-style chairs. On the cracked mud walls was a faded mural of a malnourished Christ nailed to a cross in a field of criminals nailed in the same manner. Above the cedar door was a black cross with a tin-shaped heart at its center, his only remaining material reminder of Emma. She had given it to him Christmas day many years ago. Outside the room's colonial-style windows, the Father and Sister could see snow falling on the church grounds. A wood-burning potbellied stove warmed the room.
The priest motioned for her to sit down and placed a couple more logs in the stove. Snowflakes were melting on her black-wool coat, which was still buttoned.
“Please, take off your wet coat,” he said, as if irritated at her excessive shyness. Hesitantly, she obeyed as a dutiful child might. He took the coatfrom her and shook it. Droplets spotted the floor as he hung it close by the stove to dry. Beside her a duffle bag carried all her belongings: a change of clothes, a photograph of her parents, a bible, a nightgown and a few toiletries and undergarments.
Cold and aloof, Father Michael asked about her background. Shyly, she answered each question in the shortest sentences she could without appearing high-minded. A news reporter would have found her an impossible subject to quote. No question was rewarded with additional details. When asked where she grew up, he only received Hondo, New Mexico, nothing on what it was like in the town or the type of home she lived in. The Sister didn't elaborate on the simplest tidbits, not even adding what month she was born in when asked her age. “Twenty-four” was all she said.
When asked if she like Taos, New Mexico, she simply answered, “Yes, Father Michael;” no elaboration on the sites she had seen or comments on the landscape. Perhaps her shyness was in part because of Father Michael. While he endeavored, albeit half-heartedly, not to show his displeasure with her arrival, the distant manner in which he spoke the simplest pleasantry, told the story. Father Michael had resented the diocese decision to send her; their decision that he needed assistance. For almost a year, the priest ran the church alone, thriving in the solitude. Volunteers helped when needed but were gone when he desired privacy. The truth was that he resented her presence, resented his privacy being intruded on. Once the parishioners left, the church would no longer be all to himself. The secluded walls would no longer comfort him in his self-imposed exile.
Slower than scraping tar off asphalt, Father Michael discovered tidbits about the Sister who had come to his parish. The discovery took months. It was as if her history had been put into a shredder and the pieces thrown to the wind. The strips had to be found and one-by-one pieced together. Direct questions rarely worked. Usually, he'd have to ask almost as if he already knew the answer. She'd confirm or deny his theory. In this manner, he learned that Sister Teresa's decision to become a nun was difficult. Her parents had relied on their only child to give them grandchildren. This was the first time she ever went against their wishes. Her parents rarely came to see her, and the visits usually ended with her mother crying. Two years ago, when she accepted Christ as her husband, they refused to come. This broke the Sister's heart, but the Lord was a calling she couldn't forsake, not even for the parents she loved dearly.
When Father Michael's questions prodded too deeply, she'd change the subject to some need she had for the choir or the children's Sunday school classes. The Sister kept much private. Sister Teresa didn't tell the priest that in high school, she found the dating ritual odd and unfulfilling. When her peers wore short skirts and tight jeans, she preferred modest dresses that buttoned to her throat and hung to her ankles. Other girls would become giddy over this cute boy or that cute boy, spending hours preparing their hair, clothes and makeup. Sister Teresa never experienced this frivolity. She felt like an ocean without a shore among her peers. Nor did she tell the Father that she had never known a man in a womanly way, the intimate way her mother knew her father. She didn't share that when she prayed, the Lord wrapped her in his arms as surely as a husband holds a wife. No mortal man could live up to her God.
Her feelings of being an outcast disappeared when she entered into the nunnery, her home. A peace came over her that she'd never experienced with a boy. None of this she could explain to her parents, nor did she try. These private feelings, longings, she kept guarded with the same affection as a man in love refuses to divulge intimacies about his lover. Shared words would only cheapen the union's sanctity.
As the months passed, her presence troubled Father Michael more and more, even though the Sister rarely spoke and kept to herself. The Father admitted that Sister Teresa's musical background in voice, piano and choral studies made an excellent addition to the parish's choir. She provided the needed accompaniment on the organ, and her patience and experience with children gave much to the Sunday school department, which she ran. And, admittedly, her high-soprano voice was a joyful addition to the religious services. She was a fine cook and kept their private rooms in nice order.
Still, she made him feel restless in a way he wanted to forget. A nun's strident dress couldn't be less comely. Yet, nothing could spoil her natural beauty, curves and delicate features. The rustling of her dress, the swishing of her dusting the furniture and the clinking of her washing dishes upset him. In truth, the sound of her sitting and turning the pages in her book annoyed him.
The Father didn't want to miss the way Emma placed her lips and cheek against his face to calm him, nor the way she knew just when to take his hand. Sister Teresa was a constant reminder of what was gone and could never return. The earth had stolen Emma back into its folds. Leave, Leave, Leave, he wanted to yell at the Sister. Yet, day-after-day, he found himself listening for the rustle of her dress, even while praying she wouldn't show herself. At night, he noticed her light under her door, heard her bare feet move across the floor. At times, her breathing seemed as loud as a storm.
Once, Father Michael even tried to have her removed from his parish. A woman's help wasn't anything he wanted, needed or appreciated. Why couldn't they send a monk? A monk would be more suitable. One man, one woman shouldn't share a home--even a house of worship--unless they were married. At least, that's how the priest saw it. The only response was from the diocese's elder Father, “The priesthood is no place to hide. Look inside yourself and choose your path.”
This only angered Father Michael. “My path is not in question,” he said hotly and then slammed the phone down. For several days, he stayed in his room, saying he was ill. He couldn't imagine life outside the church; he only wanted away from Sister Teresa. Why was this so difficult to understand? Somehow, he had to get Sister Teresa to leave.

Chapter 6

Fifteen-year-old Peter Marshall spoon fed his mother squashed carrots and pureed chicken as he watched a TV flickering through their next-door neighbor's window. He wished he could turn on his idiot box, as his mother called it, but the electricity had been turned off. Peter cared for his mother night and day. Twenty years of smoking had ravished her lungs and his pubescent years. He rarely left her except to attend mass on Sundays and Wednesdays. It wasn't that he was religious. His mother didn't raise him in the church, although she was Catholic; still it comforted him to imagine God as a flesh-and-blood father, who gave him advice and protected him. So for him, church was where his father lived.
Still, Peter no longer had the luxury of being a child. As a parent, he fed his mom, changed her diapers and bathed her. At first, he was embarrassed to see her undressed but as the necessity grew, his discomfort had no choice but to lessen. The sicker his mother became the more child-like were her behaviors. Anne would spit her food out when she didn't like it, knock over her soda when he didn't have bourbon to put in it and throw a temper tantrum when she didn't get chocolate.
School was no longer a concern. Six months ago, when his mother became bedridden with emphysema, he forged a letter from his mother saying they were moving to Texas. No one at school questioned the letter's authenticity, and Peter disappeared from the public-school system. Friends didn't call on him because he didn't really have any. Although, he was a good-looking boy, he preferred being a loner. He shunned all the clicks--the freaks, the jocks, the popular crowd, the shit-kickers and even the band geeks--because they were all about exclusion, cruelty to misfits.
At one time, he thought he could start a click of loners but that would defeat the purpose of being a loner. Clicks vied for the handsome boy's allegiance. The freaks thought he might be one of them because he smoked. The popular crowd wanted him for his beauty, and the jocks tried to claim him because his height, speed and athleticism, but none of that was for Peter. He reviled how the clicks continued into adulthood. The professionals and the educated drank wine and went to trendy restaurants and feared those without. The filthy rich summered in the cooler climates and wintered in the warmer climates and appeased their guilt by attending extravagant charity balls. The blue collar laborers drank beer and laughed at those in the upper classes. Indians stuck to the reservations and decried the misdeeds of the white man. Blacks embraced their own lingo and declared education an affront to their ways, and the homeless congregated together on the city streets, hating all those they begged from. Ultimately, America hadn't fared much better than India's caste system or England's class system in Peter's eyes. Even in his own family, the maid, who had worked for them for 20 years, was never invited to parties. She'd help prepare for them, but no one considered inviting her, not even the maid. Those who crossed the invisible lines were treated with suspicion or at best distant politeness. If the maid had ever been invited to a party, whispering lips would have gossiped about her attendance.
Nothing at school enticed Peter to join up. Girls had yet to make much of an impression on him. To him, they were odd creatures who cried at ridiculous times. As far as Peter was concerned, they were barely tolerable but had to be endured because they reproduced. Only recently, did he decide that, at least, they didn't have cooties. Many girls at his school showed interest in him, but he found their flirting, cooing ways to be as annoying and manipulative as a cat that purrs and rubs on one’s leg to get something rather than to give affection. His mother was the only one he saw differently. To him she was a saint, who dedicated her life to his well-being. Now that she was dying, he couldn't imagine another woman filling the void. It didn't occur to him that another saint might be preparing herself for someone just like him. But then his hormones hadn't aroused him as of yet, either.
Other boys his age were already sexually active or so they bragged. He saw no use for the boys who talked or the girls who did it. The whole idea of sex repulsed him. This was the only thing he couldn't resolve about his own mother. He couldn't imagine her gyrating in such a loathsome manner. So he just chose to believe he must have come about in some other fashion. None of this he could share with his peers. The truth was he liked having secrets even if they weren't really worth being kept secret. His reputation as a loner made him mysterious, an enigma or at least that's what a girl had called him once. Frankly, Peter wasn't sure she even knew what an enigma was; still he liked it.
Since Peter left school, there was one girl who came around to see him. Katie was no more interested in boys than he was in girls. They were both loners and consequently got along. Katie first saw Peter one night when she caught him stealing from the grocery store, where she worked as a bagger. She said nothing to him or the management. Instead, she followed him home and sat and watched him through the window brushing his mother's hair, painting her nails, reading to her and feeding her. This touched her.
The next morning, Katie showed up at his house, carrying a skateboard in one hand and a sack of groceries in the other. Peter, who was sitting on the porch steps, thought she resembled a mouse with her dull-brown hair, button nose and pursed lips. Peter's nerves were frazzled and his hands shook as he smoked a cigarette. His mom was in pain, and he could do nothing to stop it. For the first several months that his mother was ill, he kept the bills paid, but the money in the bank ran out. The telephone and the electricity had been turned off, and bank notices were threatening to repossess the home. There was no money left for her prescriptions. Peter managed only to keep the water and gas going and prayed that he could hold off the bank until his mother passed away. He forged letters from his mother promising payments and asking for a little more time.
“I saw you stealing from the grocery store. I figured you needed these,” Katie said as she handed him the bag of groceries.
Peter eyed her nervously. The last thing he needed was to be arrested when his mother needed him so badly.
“Don't worry; I'm not going to turn you in. I stole these groceries, too.”
Through the window, Katie saw the frail woman he cared for curled up in a ball crying. Loose folds of skin covered her bones like a sheet worn thin from too much use.
“You know doctors prescribe pot for cancer patients to kill pain,” said Katie. “I grow it in my attic. I could bring some for your mom.”
“At this point, I'd try anything. The pain just keeps getting worse and worse, but I don't know how I can get her to try it. She's adamantly against drugs.”
“Maybe she doesn't have to know.”
Motioning for him to follow her, Katie walked up the steps and let herself in the house. She glanced around for the kitchen. Finding it, she pulled open cabinets and drawers. In no time, she had found a mixing bowl, a hand beater, some measuring cups as well as milk, butter and eggs. Peter watched on confused as to why he was letting this stranger go through his kitchen, but at the same time he sensed that she was genuinely trying to help.
“Have you got any flour and cocoa powder?”
“They're above the refrigerator. What are you doing?”
Katie didn't answer. She just kept working, mixing together the flour, cocoa powder, eggs, sugar, milk and butter. Once it was smooth, she zipped open her knapsack and pulled out a bag of leaves and sprinkled some in the mixture. After mixing the brownies a tad more, she spooned the mixture into a greased pan and slipped it into the gas oven. In 20 minutes, Katie had a fresh batch of marijuana brownies cooling on a wire rack. From that day on, Peter's mother became much more agreeable and most importantly pain free. She even craved the pabulum he fed her.
From that day on, Katie and he were friends even though Katie and he were very different. For one, she was a pothead, which Peter didn't usually tolerate, but Katie respected that he didn't do drugs and never tried to persuade him. She only supplied him with enough to help his mother. Peter shared his life with her and in turn Katie helped him. She brought him groceries regularly. At the end of her shift, she'd stuff her coat full of day-old bakery goods and anything else that had passed its expiration date. They could sit and talk for hours or just be silent with each other. Peter had never met anyone he could talk to as much. Somehow or another, they just fit together. She was like a little sister to him. Several weeks after Peter had met Katie, his mother's breathing became even more shallow and raspy than usual. The end was near. He wanted to see Katie, but she'd always come to him so he didn't know where she lived. Since he didn't have a phone, he never asked her for her number. Not knowing what to do, he ran out into the storm.

≈

At the church, Sister Teresa had closed up her bedroom window, which she usually left cracked, and slipped on a fuzzy sweater that her mother had knitted her. A cold, spring storm thundered outside. Her room, which had a corner fireplace, only had space for a child-sized pine dresser, an altar and a twin bed, covered with a quilt she had sewn from scraps. At the head of the bed tilted a single flat pillow enshrouded in dull white linen. On the altar, dedicated to Mary, lay a rosary, a half-melted lavender candle and the image of the Divine Mother.
The Sister had no sooner settled into bed with her reading glasses and book, when a banging on the church's front doors startled her. The night's thunder and lightning made the banging seem all the more intense. The Sister peeked out her door and saw that the Father's light wasn't on. Apparently, he was sleeping so soundly that he failed to hear the thunderous protesting.
Hurriedly, she put on her robe and lit a candle since the light in the hallway was broken. Cupping her hand to protect the flame, she glided quickly down the hall and through the cathedral's aisle. Her shadow, much larger than herself, eclipsed the crucifix hanging above the altar. The banging grew louder and more insistent as she entered into the foyer.
A voice cried out, “Father.”
Taking a deep breath, she unlatched the doors. A chilly wind blew out the flame she had nursed so carefully. An angry young man drenched in rain stood before her. Quickly, his rage changed to despair once he saw the unexpected face. The boy didn't look strong enough to have been banging so loud. In desperation, he grabbed her arms pleading. She pulled back from his touch. Something in his desperation, in his eyes, frightened her or perhaps it wasn't him at all, perhaps it was something in the night, the storm. He blushed as she pulled away.
“Sister, I'm sorry. I need to see Father Michael right away.”
Nodding her head, the Sister let the stranger in and disappeared down the hall toward the Father's room.
Sister Teresa tapped on Father Michael's door so lightly that if he'd been awake he might have mistaken it for a creak in the house. She knocked again, this time slightly louder.
Stirring from his sleep, the priest listened unsure if he'd heard knocking. Once he retired to bed, he wasn't accustomed to visitors. The Sister had never knocked on his bedroom door before. Somehow, she knew to respect the only remaining domain where he could isolate himself. She knocked even louder. This time, he slipped on his robe and came to the door.
“A young man is in the foyer,” whispered the Sister in an apologetic tone. “He seems quite distressed and says he must see you immediately,”
The Father quickly dressed and hurried to the foyer. He wasn't sure what he'd say to his son, but he asked God to help him find the words.
Standing before Father Michael wasn't his dark-headed Matthew. It was a boy of maybe 14, with wet long, blond curls and pleading green eyes.
“Father, please come. My mother is very ill. She will be gone before the night is over. Please read her her last rites.”
The boy wasn't a member of his parish, but the Father had seen him come alone for mass a few times. The boy always rushed out after mass and never spoke to Father Michael nor went to confession or to Sunday school. His eyes weren't like other boys his age, carefree and mischievous; they carried the burden of the weary. The Father wouldn't turn him away. He put on his jacket and hat and disappeared into the darkness with the boy.
As the two walked quickly and quietly, the rain had subsided to a drizzle. About a hundred feet behind them, a man followed. The boy's home stood on a small patch of land a couple blocks away. The church steeple could be seen from over the neighbor's rooftop. When they reached the small stucco home with a terra-cotta roof, there were no lights, only a lantern in the main room, where the mother, gray but no more than 50, lay: her eyes sunken, almost hollow; her lips parched and cracked. The boy gently lifted the mother's head and slipped a small piece of ice in her mouth.
From outside, Matthew watched his father give the dying woman her last rites; he watched as the Father made the sign of the cross on her forehead and on her hands, and he watched as the Father's lips murmured the rites said by so many priests, so many times before. Matthew felt envious that the boy, the members of Father Michael's congregation, had had his father all this time, but a part of Matthew softened as he watched the boy's grateful face admiring his father, the Father.
By the time the Michael returned from his midnight duties, dawn still hadn't come. He had expected the house to be quiet, but Sister Teresa was in the courtyard surveying the damage the storm had done to the geraniums, lantana, sage, moss roses and salvia she had newly planted. She noticed the grass heads were just beginning to poke through the top soil, but the color and grandeur of spring had not yet been unsheathed from its buds.
The Father didn't stop to acknowledge her; he just slipped into his room to rest, disappointed that the late night visitor wasn't his own son.

Chapter 7

On the days Sister Teresa could steal a few moments to herself, she'd sneak over to see her grandmother, Louisa. When Sister arrived at the hacienda-style nursing home, her grandmother stared blankly at the TV screen with no more interest than a cat bored with its ball and string.
In her youth, Louisa was a striking woman with hair as black as a cast-iron skillet and skin as fair as a snowy egret. Each Sunday, she sang lead soprano in her church choir. During the week, she gave voice lessons to have pin money for girlie pretties such as a new pair of gloves or a barrette or a frilly hat to wear about town. Living was her passion. She was always on the go. Getting dolled up to go dancing was among her favorites, but she equally loved to slip on her overalls and dig in the garden.
Her long, black hair now shimmered silver and fell to the center of her back, surprisingly thick for a woman in her 90s. Sister Teresa sat on the edge of the bed and gave her grandmother kisses and told her how much she loved her. Her grandmother had long ago stopped saying she loved Sister Teresa. She no longer knew the woman she had so many years ago cradled and cooed over. Louisa kissed her granddaughter's hand and stroked her arm in response to the affection, but her eyes showed no recognition. Still Louisa loved the attention. Sister Teresa always began each visit by telling Louisa about her day; then she'd hold her hand and read her books by Willa Cather, Louisa May Alcott or D.H. Lawrence. Some days, she'd sing to her or say a prayer with the grandmother, who now thought she was just a nice nun.
On this particular day, as Sister Teresa began to leave, she bent over to kiss her grandmother's cheek goodbye. Louisa grabbed her hand and with surprising strength pulled Teresa close, “If I should die before I see you again, know you've been a joy.” Sister looked in her grandmother's pale gray eyes and for that one sweet moment the grandmother knew her granddaughter. Sister Teresa's eyes filled with tears, as she pushed her veil aside and kissed Louisa again.
Once in the hall, Sister covered her face and wept. The tears flowed easily. From across the hall, an old man called to her from his bed.
“Sister, don't cry.”
The Sister dried her eyes and walked into the man's room.
“This is a place where the mortal body comes to die, but we are the fortunate ones,” he said as his eyes twinkled. “We are closer to our God, just as small children when they first enter the world.”
“Yes, sometimes I forget that,” said Sister Teresa, smiling at the man, who had so graciously spoken the kind words she needed. “Would you like me to pray with you?” she asked.
“Could you stay and visit? I've missed the sound of a woman's soft voice. The women here, if you can call them that, scowl and speak in snips and bites,” he said, grimacing as if his mouth was filled with food as distasteful as the aides he so disliked. “Ah, here's one now. Come to feed me my pabulum, hey.”
The aide was a short, round woman with cornrows and long witch’s nails that curled under. A dinner plate was in her hands and a bib over her shoulder. Her face had a look of disgust as she gnawed on a wad of gum. With spit in her tone, she cooed sarcastically, “Good evening, sir.”
The plate she set down on a tray next to him, and she reached to fit the bib around his neck. The old man grabbed her arm and snatched it away. “I don't need that damn bib, and I can feed myself.”
The aide left, moving the tray just out of his reach. “Fine, feed yourself,” she spewed.
A sense of indignation came over Sister Teresa. In a firm voice that wasn't customary to her normal quiet demeanor, she called out, “Perhaps if you would greet your patients with kindness, they would do the same.”
Furious, the aide spun around to attack the voice behind her, but the sight of the nun flustered her. The aide, who had been so consumed with her own discontent that she hadn't noticed anything more than that another body was in the room, hurried out. Sister Teresa pushed the tray close to the man, who smiled admiringly at her.
“You're gutsy.”
“Not really.”
“Please, sit with me. I can't help but overhear you with your grandmother. The walls are so thin.”
“I apologize for speaking so loud. It's the only way she can hear me.”
“Don't apologize. I enjoy hearing about your day and listening to the stories you read to her. It's as if I too have company. My name is Jake.”
“I'm Sister Teresa.”
In one afternoon, she shared more of her life in Hondo, New Mexico with Jake than she had ever shared with Father Michael. Jake's kind, easy going manners put her at ease. She told him how the church was the first place she belonged.
“Even as a child, I felt the world around me wasn't where I was meant to be,” said the Sister in her quiet, shy way. “In church, I'd watch the nuns glide past me, hear the stories of the Saints, and I knew that was my calling. This may sound stupid, but more than anything I want to learn all I can, so when I pass into heaven I can be one of God's guardian angels, to follow Saint Teresa, who said, ‘Let my heaven be doing good on earth.’”
Jake watched in awe as the gentlewoman spoke and thought how innocent, how unprepared for life she seemed. He wanted to wrap her in his protective arms and keep her safe from the brutality that could rip away her inner kindness. When Sister finished speaking, Jake told her about the ranch he grew up on, his time on the polio ward but mostly about his life on the Hopi reservation.

≈

Eleven-year-old Jake stared out the station wagon window, speaking little to Sister Catherine, who was driving. The sun's harsh gaze had bleached the color from the steep and barren bluffs. The rocky desert around him had little vegetation, only smatterings of grassland and desert scrub. Jake saw no rivers or creeks, only trickles of water running down the washes from the morning's rain. They had passed through the Navajo Nation, which landlocked the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona. The station wagon coughed and sputtered as it attempted to climb thin narrow path.
By the time Jake and the nun arrived on the third mesa, steam drifted up from the car's radiator. The nun patted Jake's hand and gently told him, “Hopi means the People of Peace. The Oraibe clan is among the oldest civilizations in the Americas, dating back to 1100 A.D. It will make a good home.”
Bewildered, Jake searched her face for another meaning to her words. Finding none, he wanted to yell, “No,” but he was a Cauble, and a Cauble man didn't raise a fuss. Sister Catherine swung opened the back of the station wagon and lifted out his suitcase.
Jake felt as if he'd been hurled through a time warp into another realm centuries prior to his birth. The village resembled the medieval townships he had read about, but instead of fortresses with towering stone walls and crocodile-infested moats with draw bridges, the Hopi built their homes on three expansive mesas with steep cliffs and soaring rocky bluffs to protect them from warring tribes. Tumbled ruins of ancient condos tiered one on top of the other. The structures, made of stone and mud, had narrow windows and low-slung doorways. Stairs and wooden juniper ladders led to the upper floors, where large families shared tiny hovels. The lower levels were used for storage. Corn, the tribe's main staple, lay drying on the flat rooftops and roasting in underground pits.

Sister Catherine, who had helped care for him at the hospital, put her arm around Jake's shoulder as they drank in the sights. Men, women and children were milling about the streets. Regardless of their task, all watched the fair-haired child, who had come to live among them, some shyly and some more overtly. A plump young girl glanced up from the vessel she was forming, while a man, presumably her father, abandoned the colorful blanket he wove. A stooped old man slowed from his task of unloading wood from a burro that noshed on spoiled melon rinds thrown in the street. A young Indian girl shyly glanced his way as she bathed a toddler in a tin basin. Women in cotton skirts embroidered with colorful threads whispered among themselves about the blond boy.
Coming forth out of the crowd was a man, taller and slightly fairer than the other Hopi men. Jake thought he might be half white, but as the years past, the man never said and Jake never asked. He wore buckskin leggings, antelope moccasins, a red-velvet shirt and a large turquoise squash blossom around his neck. The Sister and he shook hands, and Jake greeted the man, who called himself Tawa, with a conservative, “Hello, sir.” As if correcting himself, Jake added, “Mr. Tawa.”
Tawa smiled at the polite boy and gently told him, “Just Tawa. The Hopi don't use titles such as Mr. and Mrs.”
Sister laughed at Jake's endearing faux-pas. Her girlish giggle seemed at odds with her masculine features: a harsh tall forehead, a bulbous nose and a wisp of a mustache below her lip. She was careful to tell Tawa about Jake's tendency to keep to himself, and Tawa assured her that he would guide the boy. Her smile spoke of her gratitude. After they lunched and toured the third mesa, the time came for the Sister to say goodbye. Water pooled in her eyes when she kissed Jake on the forehead.
As she drove away, a group of butterfly girls circled Jake and Tawa. Hopi girls, from puberty until marriage, twirled their hair into whorls, pinwheels on the sides of their heads, making them resemble butterflies. The girls giggled and spoke in their native language as they fondled his hair and touched the sockets around his eyes.
“They say your eyes are the color of water,” interpreted Tawa. “This will please the gods and bring rain. Rain is life to us. Without it, the crops die.”
Jake listened politely though he longed to go home, to see the ranch, to see his parents, his siblings or even go back with Sister Catherine. Although he hated the stark hospital, it was familiar, and the other kids were like him. Here, he was an oddity, a freak in a carnival show. Nothing was like anything he'd known before. Age wasn't counted by the year but by the number of corn crops. The songs weren't about she-done-me-wrong, stole-my-dog and wrecked-my-truck. They were about corn and bean blossoms, butterflies and rain.
Dances weren't an event for boys and girls to court. They were rituals to entice the gods to bring rain. Naked little girls would stand in a line below the houses and clap while the elders sprinkled water from the housetops. The girls would sing the Heveb song: “Huebeta, come, come, pour, pour, down. Hither, flying cloud. Sprinkle me, sprinkle me. Cloud come bathe me into a cluster of flowers, into a cluster of showers.”
That first night, the moon was as bright as a street lamp, a perfect half circle, as if someone had sawed the top off. Jake sat on an Indian blanket watching women grind the corn on large metates and fry piki bread, which was made from blue corn and was as thin as a cracker. One of the mothers sang to her infant, who was tightly bound on a board strapped to her back, as she worked. Tawa translated the lullaby for Jake, “Sleep, sleep, sleep. In the trail the beetles. On each others' backs are sleeping. So on mine, my baby, thou, sleep, sleep, sleep.”
Once Jake and the family ate the corn, beans and piki bread that was fixed for dinner, Jake climbed onto a floor pallet. His emotions were so drained; he fell asleep as his head touched the ground. He slept as if drugged.
The next day, once it became light, Tawa showed him to his permanent living quarters and left him on his own to settle in. The hut, made of rock and mud, had a dirt floor and a single slat for a window, where the sun shone through in the morning. The door was made of wood but didn't lock. The ceiling was so low that most grown white men would have had to crouch so not to hit their heads. It was no bigger than a girl's playhouse. At one end was an Indian blanket to sleep on and next to it a tin cup, plate, a fork and knife. In the corner stood a kiva, the embers long gone from the ash, and the bits of burnt wood had turned to charcoal. The bare mud walls had caked-on soot from centuries of fires.
Next to the pallet, Jake knelt beside a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Immediately recognizing the return address, he slipped his hand into his front jean pocket and pulled out his knife. With a flick of his thumb, he snapped it open, cut the string and ripped the brown wrapping. On top, lay a Polaroid photograph, four people waving as if they could see him. A faint smile etched across his face as he waved back, but there was one face Jake didn't recognize. He peered intently at the elderly man, with a shock of white hair, closer and closer. Grandfather had died so it couldn't be him; then Jake dropped down on his haunches as if someone had knocked him over. “Father!”
His father's hand rested on his mother's shoulder. She had always been a slight woman, delicate and frail, but now she had grown so thin she looked as if she could be snapped like a dried twig. Her smile was strained and her cheekbones sunken. Winter's aging hand had brushed crevices and streaks of frost on his mother and father as surely as spring had painted and sculpted Caleb and Sarah into adulthood. Caleb had grown taller and wider in the chest than their father. His face no longer had the impetuous grin of a boy. His chin was strong, and it was apparent that he was now shaving. Sarah's boyish body had been reshaped with the curves of womanhood, and she looked more a wife than child. Jake starred at the changed images over and over as if they could reveal all that had happened since his exile.
In time Jake set the photo on the windowsill, where he could see it from his pallet. Digging into the box, he pulled out his Western paperbacks with their yellowing pages, one earmarked where he had never finished the book. Pressed leaves fell out of the Zane Gray novel. Under the books lay a dozen or so arrowheads he had found on the ranch.
Several years ago, in late spring, he chased a calf deep into a narrowing canyon with rocky fingers towering above. Seeing the calf dash behind some thick brush, Jake jumped from his horse and followed. Peeking through the brush, he saw that it shrouded a cave entrance. Using his knife hanging from his belt, he hacked at the thorny mass and crawled through the narrow opening. When the walls tightened so he could no longer crawl, he lay on his belly and slithered through. The space grew tighter and darker. The tips of his fingers felt wetness on the ground and a trickle of water hit his head.
Turning a tight corner, he suddenly saw a thin ray of light, where the sun had slipped through a crack. The opening grew wide enough for him to crawl and then stand as he entered a large den, where a water pool shimmered in the center and dolomites hung from above. Jake squinted but couldn't make out what was on the walls. Lighting a match, he inched closer to the walls. Bright-red ancient Indian pictographs of running horses covered the cave walls.
Jake recalled his father telling him the Indians made paint with water, an iron-based mineral called ocher and a binder such as urine or blood. Lighting another match, he looked down at his feet and found two arrowheads. Over the next few years, he revisited and revisited the cave and dug and dug and found several more. He kept the arrowheads but never told anyone, not even his family, about his find. That was his private domain.
Jake once again reached into the box and pulled out his rifle, a Winchester 270 lever-action and several boxes of ammo. The rifle felt good in his hands. He lifted it to his shoulder and felt its heft. Lastly, he pulled out a bowie knife sheathed in a dark leather scabbard. The knife had belonged to his father. Jake unbuckled his belt and slipped the leather strap through his belt, then stacked the books on their spine and laid the arrowheads on top. If he could, Jake would have cried. While he was thrilled to have his father's knife and his things again, it also made his exile seem more permanent. He had no idea if he'd ever see his family again.
As a member of the tribe, Jake was expected to work in the fields. Tawa taught him how to tend to the flocks of turkey and sheep and herds of cattle and taught Jake how to dry farm. The tribe relied solely on the summer monsoons and snow during the winter, no irrigation. The arid land demanded the conservation of water so the fields couldn't be plowed. Digging reduced the ground moisture. Instead, Jake learned to use sticks to place the seeds deep in the earth so not to disturb the moisture in the soil. Jake didn't mind the hard work. In the fields, he could keep to himself and disappear into his fantasies, which had become more his life than the here and now.
In time, Jake began to love his new home. Here he grew independent and strong and learned the spiritual ways of the Hopi. He learned that the clans were matriarchal. When a man married, he moved into the woman's home, and she owned all the land. Men handled political and religious affairs, but healers were both male and female. Both sexes were highly respected because both were needed to survive. Jake prayed when the sun rose so it would carry his words to the gods, and prayed for all living things - human, animal, plants--just as the Hopi.
At first glance, the desert seemed void of color to Jake, but as the months passed, Jake began to see the brilliant reds and oranges at sunset and sunrise; the beauty of the rock formations; the snow-topped San Francisco Peaks; and the steep, rocky cliffs with striations of grays, browns and the faint oranges, reds, pinks, yellows and gold.
At the foot of the mesas, the corn and bean fields and the peach orchards added dabs of color as did the corn itself, which came in yellow, white, blue, red, black, spotted, pink and lilac. Even the beauty of the desolate flat mesas with their rocks and sagebrush intrigued him. Something was extraordinary in its plainness, its raw nakedness. At one time he only saw beige but now he saw the subtle shades of opal and bone.
After a year living with the tribe, Jake became as much Hopi as white. Even long after leaving the tribe, Jake blessed the animals he hunted and that gave their nourishment to him. As Tawa had taught him, Jake chanted reverentially and spread feathers on the ground where the hunted died.
Fetishes carved from bone became a part of his hunting rituals. Hopi believed fetishes empowered the hunter with the spirit and strength of the animal or god. Jake carried a hawk fetish when hunting bird, a mountain-lion fetish when hunting mule deer or elk, and much later, a left-handed Kachina fetish when hunting human, but this he didn't tell Sister Teresa. He spoke vaguely of his time in Orient but didn't reveal that he had been a mercenary, a hired assassin and informant, or that he became a professional hit man. She assumed that he had been in the military, and he let that lie lay between them. He desired to be pure, to exist in her eyes without his sins tainting her remembrance of him.
Sister Teresa asked few questions, just listened to as he spoke.
“By the time, I was called home from the reservation, I didn't want to leave; I wanted to see my family, but it felt more like I should visit, not live there. No one was prepared for my return.”
Jake shared his story about his homecoming and of the woman he fell in love with, but he didn't say she was Father Michael's mother, or that she had been murdered, or that he'd almost lost his sanity over her death. When he finished telling about his Rachel, Sister asked, “Why were you so afraid to love?”
Jake kept the truth to himself, that everyone he'd ever loved had forsaken him, and chose a vague response. “Why are any of us afraid? I just always knew I could never live with a woman I was in love with. I thought I would never forsake that vow.”
He didn't say that risking his heart had once been scarier than going back to the jungles of Laos, nor that he felt betrayed when he realized that his Rachel had slipped inside his castle walls like smoke drifting under a door. Betrayed by his own heart, running wasn't an option. He couldn't leave his safe place, his imaginary castle. Once Rachel was inside, he was helpless to protect himself against her, helpless to escape.
“Love came by accident. Rachel was supposed to be a toy, a temporary plaything,” said Jake, bowing his head slightly embarrassed to say this in front of a woman of God. “Sorry, Sister, but that was the reality.”
“How did you know you were in love? What does it feel like?” she quizzed him in the way a child naively questions something wondrous they've never experienced.
“Have you never been in love?”
The Sister didn't speak, but the way she lowered her eyes self consciously told him his answer.
“It's nothing concrete, rather something you feel like a great lake swallowing you into its bowels.”
The Sister blushed, unsure of the answer's meaning.
“Sister, I couldn't help but overhear that you're from Saint Joseph's Catholic Church.”
The Sister bowed her head affirmatively, and Jake pulled a letter out of the drawer next to his bed.
“Could you take this to Father Michael?”
“I'll give it to him this evening, and if you'd like, next time I come I could wheel my grandmother into your room and read to you as well. We've just started Willa Lather's One of Ours.
“I know,” said Jake as he took her hand and kissed it. The Sister blushed once again, and parted, knowing she would see him again.
Chapter 8

Father Michael had just finished evening mass by the time Sister Teresa had returned from the nursing home. He was saying goodbye to the parishioners as she came into the foyer; she bowed her head letting her veil fall across her face. Guilt for her absence made her blush or maybe it was Father Michael. His presence had caused this reaction many times. The flushed, muddled feeling was foreign to her. She likened it to being ill.
“I'm sorry I missed mass. I guess I stayed too long with my grandmother.” Father Michael's eyes twinkled, amused that such a small transgression caused shame to wash over her.
“God forgives.”
Knowing he was mocking her, the soft blush turned to a deep, dark crimson that painted even her ears. She hurried past him into the chapel; she didn't understand why Father Michael had the ability to make her feel like a naughty child. The chapel was empty, except for a boy. Sister Teresa reached into her pocket and found the letter intended for Father Michael. She started to turn to give it to him when she took a second look at the boy, recognizing him from a few weeks ago. Disheveled and dusty, the boy self-consciously brushed off his clothes and tried to flatten his unruly long, blond locks with his hands as he watched the Sister approached him. His clothes were covered in days and days of dirt, his face drawn and his eyes looked uneasy like a lost dog that had been kicked by strangers.
The Sister slipped the letter back in her pocket and asked, “When was the last time you bathed or ate?”
“Three days, Sister,” he murmured, embarrassed by his appearance and the truth he spoke.
The Sister took the boy's hand and led him through the chapel down a long corridor, lined with doors on both sides. Asking him to wait in the hall, she went into a storage closet where she kept donated clothing. When she returned, in one hand were a pair of jeans, a button-down shirt, socks and underwear; and in the other she had shampoo, soap and a towel.
“These should fit,” she said.
Then she led him farther down the corridor and pointed to a door, “Go on in there, at the back are the showers.”
The boy wanted to thank her, but he was so tired and taken aback by her kindness he simply obeyed. When he came out cleaned and dressed, he found Sister Teresa in the kitchen setting a plate of chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans on a linoleum table that had thin chrome legs.
“Have a seat and eat,” she said as she turned off the flame on the gas stove.
Once again, he obeyed. The boy wanted to remember his manners, but his hunger grabbed and tore at the food. The milk she'd placed before him, he gulped down quickly, and she refilled the empty glass. When he began to slow down, she pulled up a chair next to him.
“Where have you been sleeping?”
“Anywhere I can find: a park bench, under a tree, in an alley.”
“I remember you came when your mother passed away. Do you not have any other family?”
“My grandparents are gone, and my mother had no siblings. My father I never knew. He died when I was an infant. I stayed in the house as long as I could, but mother was behind on payments and the bank repossessed it. I ran away when the cops came to pick me up. I was afraid they'd send me to a reformatory or to a foster family. Please, could I stay here? I could do the yard work and help clean.”
“How old are you?” she asked as she scooped more potatoes and chicken onto his plate.
“Fifteen, I'll be 16 next June.”
“We'll see what we can do. For tonight, there's an extra room next door to where you showered. I'll put some clean sheets and pajamas on the bed and talk to Father Michael about this in the morning.” As if forgetting herself, she said, “I'm Sister Teresa.”
“I'm Peter.”
The Sister left the boy to finish eating. After she fixed his bedroom, she went back to the chapel where a handful of people sat waiting for confession. A graying woman, with black lace draped over her head, emerged from the confessional as a teenage boy with ripped jeans and a black Metallica T-shirt walked in. Each nodded to the other in reverential silence.
Outside the low-slung, pueblo-style church, a man had been circling the block for an hour and now he paced up and down the stone steps uncertain whether to enter. Sister Teresa glanced outside the propped open door and saw the fretting young man.
“Are you here for confession?”
Unprepared to answer, he stumbled on his words before he finally asked, “Is Father Michael here?”
“He's taking confessions.”
Following her gesture to enter, he walked inside and took a seat beside a man holding a small-brimmed hat in his lap. Surmising from his dark skin, square face and high cheekbones, he assumed the Indian had come from one of the pueblos. By the time Matthew’s turn came, his heart beat so powerfully in his chest, he was certain others could see his shirt rising and falling to its rhythm. His ears were so filled with the beating sound, dizziness came over him. All was hazy, his vision blurred. As he rose, his legs twitched involuntarily. Matthew hardly noticed the pueblo Indian, who walked out with the help of a cane as Matthew went into the confessional. Shutting the door, he sat down on a wobbly wood stool inside a box no bigger than a telephone booth. Father Michael opened the sliding window that allowed the two to speak. Matthew went to speak but nothing came out.
The Father waited for the customary, “Forgive me Father for I have sinned,” but when it didn't come he asked, “How long has it been since your last confession?”
Still there was silence.
“It’s okay, my child, speak. God forgives all.”
Matthew didn't know what he'd say until the words fell from his mouth. “Forgive you, Father, for you have sinned.”
At first, Father Michael was puzzled by the man's twist on words, then he realized that this low-pitched voice belonged to the son he had only heard speak once since he was a boy of 13.
“Matthew?”
“I prefer to be called Matt. Surely, it's a sin to abandon your son. Do you know how long I waited for you?”
Matthew's voice began to crack and tears pooled in his eyes as he continued, “You didn't even look back. Didn't you think it was enough that I had lost my mother?”
The Father struggled for the words to convey his sorrow, his regrets but nothing could excuse this failing and the truth might hurt him more. How could he tell him what he only just realized himself, that he had so loved Emma and Matthew's eyes so resembled hers.
“And you wear that white collar. These people look up to you. You're a fraud.”
Father Michael's voice barely broke a whisper, “No man is without sin.”
Matthew was so upset he only heard vague mumbling as he shouted, “Do you have nothing to say to me?”
“How do I ask forgiveness from a son for such an unforgivable crime?”
“I guess you don't.”
Matthew ran out of the confessional; rage and hate pushed away his pain.
Father Michael ripped off his white collar and ran after him, “Wait. Please don't go.”
Matthew turned to him and shouted, “I remember saying those words. Now it's your turn to wait for my return.”

≈

By the time Father Michael was ready for bed, Sister Teresa had already retired for the night. The red glow from the fire in his kiva had just taken the chill out of the air. His bare feet swished hurriedly across the cold, wood floor. Shivering, he climbed under layers of blanket and reached for his hot tea. Sleep wouldn't come easy tonight; his mind was too filled with remorse. All these years later, he could still clearly see his 13-year-old son's face, soft and plump with baby fat, as he walked away. Crying had turned Matthew's natural blush ruddy, and his pleading eyes red and swollen. In broken sobs, he begged his father not to leave. Father set down his tea and wished with all he held sacred that he had gone back for him. As he reached to turned turn off the light, he saw a letter addressed to him on his nightstand. Not recognizing the handwriting, he opened it.

Dear Michael,
Hate me if you wish, but I'm the only living person who knows what happened to your mother. You're searching for answers you won't find in newspaper clippings. I'm willing to supply them, but I need something in return. Come soon.
Your father in blood, Jake.

Chapter 9

The sun was nothing more than a thin-yellow line on the horizon when Father Michael woke up startled. His pajamas were damp from sweat and his sheets twisted and tossed at the foot of the bed. A sense of urgency came over him as he looked around the room, as if uncertain of his whereabouts.
Jumping up, he braced his hands on the windowsill and stared blankly through the frosted glass, trying to grasp what had happened. It had to be a dream, he thought, but it seemed so real that his body tingled with the afterglow. His thoughts so consumed him, he didn't notice the light rain had darkened the earth's red and brown tones, nor did he see that the black-and-white magpies had gathered to wash their wings in the newly-formed puddles. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette. Sister Teresa's embrace--her arms, legs, lips and even her breath--were as real to him as his own limbs. So clearly, he could see the moonlight outline her curves as her nightgown slipped off her shoulders and fell to the floor.
Bewildered, he stared at his own hands, which he surely had cupped her soft breasts and stroked her velvety skin. The thrust of her hips, the squeeze of her thighs still lingered on his body. Even her smell, a faint sweetness of gardenias, surrounded him. Several moments past until he assured himself that it was only a dream. Even then, guilt washed over him: guilt at betraying the only woman he'd ever touched in such a private way and guilt at betraying his vows to the church. The fact that it was a dream did not absolve him of sin. The commandment, “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife,” kept going through his mind. How much worse is it to covet a nun? Christ's wife? Wanting her was a sin in Michael's eyes and the church's doctrines. He knew he'd have to appeal to the diocese to remove her from his parish immediately. They couldn't leave her here to torment him, but the question remained: What should he do until then? For now, Father Michael knew he'd be expected at breakfast soon. How could he look at her? Surely something in his face or tone would give his impure thoughts away.
Down the hall, he heard Sister Teresa preparing breakfast. He didn't know she was preparing breakfast for three; he only knew his plate would go untouched. Long ago, he'd put away his desire for a woman, and he didn't want to want again. Both women he had loved had died: first his mother, then Emma. Anger swelled up in him. The priesthood, his white collar, had failed to shield him, to give him a superhuman ability to battle desire, as Samson's hair gave him the strength to slay his enemies. What good was any of this if it couldn't keep him safe? The lie he told himself was that the priesthood was a calling, not a shroud to hide in.
Father Michael told himself many lies, which he had so intricately woven into truth's fragile threads that he didn't know one from the other. Unintentionally, Sister Teresa unraveled his web.
In the kitchen, Sister Teresa filled Peter's plate with pancakes, which he smothered in butter and maple syrup. Dressed in the clothes Sister Teresa had given him, he had his hair neatly combed back in a ponytail, still wet from his morning shower. Beside him laid a sketch pad and a set of charcoal pencils.
“This afternoon, I'd like to hike up into the pines over by Red River to sketch,” said Peter.
“That sounds lovely. How will you get there?”
“I always hitchhike.”
“That's hardly safe. I'll drive you.”
Peter wanted to say “No,” so he could be alone with his drawings, but he could hardly be rude to the woman who'd been so kind. So he thanked her for the offer and sliced off some more butter for his half-eaten pancakes.
Hitchhiking wasn't going to happen today. That was one time he enjoyed talking. Those who stopped he'd never see again and he could be, for a short moment, anyone. Each time, he'd make up a new name and a new life. Sometimes, he was traveling with his father, who was a cowboy working odd jobs at ranches around the country. One time, he was a child-genius, studying geology at the university, and another time a concert pianist, taking a vacation from his heavy touring schedule.
“We'll leave right after I speak to Father Michael about you,” said Sister Teresa as she rinsed off the dishes. “Remember don't say a word about your situation until I have a chance to discuss this issue with him.” Peter agreed and finished his pancakes, making room for more, which Sister Teresa already had ready. Although she had never been a mother, she intuitively knew how to make the boy feel safe.

≈

All morning, Father Michael did his best to avoid Sister Teresa. If he saw her briefly, he'd stutter and make some excuse as to why he had to hurry off, everything from bowel troubles to visitors in his office. She was confused by the way he'd scurry off like a school boy who had done something naughty. His head would bow in a shy, reluctant way that was uncharacteristic of him. In fact, he was acting more like her. In truth, she enjoyed the role reversal.
When Father Michael thought he could avoid her no longer, he disappeared out the backdoor and through the courtyard to seek help from a friend, another priest, in Ranchos de Taos, where he heard the same words he himself had spoken to other priests: “You're a priest, who has made a vow of celibacy, but you're still a mortal man. God brings us trials of the flesh to test our resolve. This isn't something to run from but to embrace and conquer.” The visit only caused his frustration and anguish to grow.
Afterward, he drove for hours down the back roads and circled the block around the nursing home, where Jake stayed, several times. He had even walked into the dimly lit entrance, but when the receptionist asked if she could help him, he turned and left. Jake had been right, he had been searching for the answers to his mother's murder. He had been five at the time, and his memories were sketchy: shadows, smells, voices, a loud crashing, a scream, a door slam. When everything got quiet, he cracked open his bedroom door. In his footed pajamas, he crept down the hall. Something wet and thick seeped through the feet of his pajamas. It was too dark to know it was his mother's blood. That's where his memory ended. When he'd try to go beyond the hall, it would roll and sway like a giant serpent blocking his path. His vision blurred and legs grew heavy as if he were wading through waist-high tar.
In his nightmares, he'd be small, always in those same pajamas, at a cocktail party. The adults would be laughing, talking. Their mouths moved, but he heard no words. He'd run from adult to adult screaming, but no sound came out. He'd slam his fists against their thighs, backs and stomachs, but he couldn't hit hard enough for them to feel him. They'd just keep talking, unaware of his existence. It was as if he were deaf and mute, and they were blind. Yes, he wanted to know the answers but not today. Just the thought of it made him want to crawl in the back of his closet and hide.

≈

By noon, Sister had given up on talking to Father Michael, so she and Peter loaded up the church's station wagon and drove to Red River, New Mexico. She parked the car on the shoulder of a two-lane blacktop, which wound through the mountains. Sister reached in the back seat for the picnic basket, and Peter grabbed an old blanket, his pad and pencils and enough water for the two of them.
Ponderosa pines, with their crisp cool scent, surrounded them; a light haze hovered above the tree tops. At their feet was a floor of needles, soft yet firm like straws of hay. They climbed up a thin, winding dirt path, which had a musky smell. Peter took the basket from Sister Teresa, who had difficulty maneuvering her long skirt around the jagged rocks and protruding branches.
When they descended down the first ridge, a flock of turkey hurriedly waddled or flew into the brush. Not long after that, they reached the top of the third ridge. Below a herd of elk grazed in the lush, green valley. Twigs broke under Sister's feet. The elk bull popped his head up, searching the ridge for a predator. Peter and Sister froze, afraid to breathe and disturb this picturesque scene, but Sister Teresa, precariously balanced on a rock, slipped and the herd took off into the mountains.
Neither had said much on the way up. Both drank in the quiet around them, content to observe the flora and fauna spectacularly displayed. When they reached the highest ridge, Peter leaned against a rock and began to draw Sister Teresa, who had squat down to admire the delicate White Mountain flowers. Sister Teresa loved the mountains and the pines, how noble they looked lording over all that they saw. But as much as she loved this, she preferred the harshness of the low lands, with their sheer cliffs, rugged mesas and narrow canyons dotted with pines, junipers, the long-spindly cholla cactus, prickly pears and yuccas, which she thought resembled Indian war bonnets. Each year, when the prickly pear fruit was ripe, she always made jelly.
'“What are you drawing?,” Sister asked.
“You.”
Flattered and embarrassed she responded, “Surely, we didn't have to travel all this distance for you to sketch me.”
“The light catches your face perfect here.”
As the day went on, Peter became glad that the Sister came. She left him to his thoughts most of the time, and when she did say something it was worth listening to. Besides, at this moment, in this light, she was his perfect subject.
As Sister Teresa watched the boy watching her, she grew to admire his inner strength so evident in his eyes as well as his physical beauty, a striking boy with deep, green eyes and blond curly hair that fell to his waist. Still, something in his demeanor, she sensed, made him unsettled, a kind of restless wanderer, who could be content traveling the rails without attachments. Perhaps it was because he just lost his mom or because he was a loner. While they were climbing, he told her how he preferred books to friends; consequently, he didn't really have any close relationships except his friend Katie. When he wasn't reading, he was sketching or scribbling in his journal, where he wrote about fantasies rather than his life.
After lunch, Peter and Sister Teresa lay down on the grass to nap. Above them, Sister Teresa watched two hawks.
“When I was a girl, I remember lying in the grass just like this with my father. We'd watch the stars or the birds or the clouds go by and talk for hours.”
Pointing to the hawks, Sister Teresa called out with excitement, “Look Peter, its mother is giving her young flight lessons. Watch the mother. See how she flies under the young hawk to lift him up.”
Peter watched in awe as the mother carefully lifted the hawk up and then swooped down to let her young try his wings. As soon as he began to falter, she'd dive under him and lift him up again. She repeated this over and over. Each time, the youth flew just a little more on his own. Peter turned his page on his sketch book to draw the wondrous sight.
“It reminds me,” said Peter affectionately, “of when my mother taught me to swim. She'd move farther and farther away from me until I could swim on my own but always close enough to catch me if I went under.”
≈

Father Michael tried to focus, as he steered his jeep down the road's curves and switch backs. The day was still and the air dry. His headlights flashed past the rocks, trees, fence posts and an occasional empty cigarette pack or beer bottle. He drove through Taos' tourist Mecca with its high-dollar art galleries and trendy eateries. The streets were filled with people milling about the galleries and eateries. Father Michael's hands steered the car, but he wasn't certain where he was going until he got there. Turning up a canyon road, the jeep whined as he shifted down in the gears so it could more easily make the incline. It was prone to overheat at the least exertion. Once at the top, he turned down a road only wide enough for one car to pass and pulled into a small driveway in front of a two-story, pueblo-style nursing home. The clock on his dash read 3:04 p.m.
As usual, Father Michael slipped into the nursing home unquestioned. His white collar gave him a pass into hospitals and nursing homes at all hours. Jake was awake when Father Michael entered the room and tossed the crumbled letter in Jake's lap.
“I don't have anything to say to you.”
“Doesn't look that way; you could have thrown that letter away. You brought it here to talk to me. You're just too stubborn to admit it.”
“Don't call me. Don't write me. Leave me alone.”
“Suit yourself. You can walk out of here.”
Father Michael turned toward the window and combed his fingers through his hair and pulled the roots in frustration. Just walk out, he kept thinking, but his feet didn't move.
“I guess I get my stubborn streak from you,” said Father Michael, in a tone that both surrendered and apologized. “I want to make it clear, I'm not here to bond with you. I'm here for answers.”
Jake nodded yes, and Father Michael sat down and lit a cigarette. “You're really not supposed to smoke in here.”
“You asked me here,” growled Father Michael, as he took another drag.
“If I have to endure the second-hand smoke, at least give me a puff.”
Father Michael placed the butt to Jake's lips. Jake drew in a long breath and held the smoke in his lungs as if taking a hit off a joint. With a slight cough, Jake said, “You think you know who I am.”
“I know all I need to know about you.”
“Before I tell you about your mother, I have so much I need to tell you, to teach you. I want you to learn who I am, and then I want us to go to the ranch, to the homestead where the three of us lived. I understand that your Aunt Sarah and her husband are running it. I want you to see it.”
“I have seen it.”
Jake looked at him, quizzically. Father Michael answered his non-verbal question. “A decade or more ago I went in search of you. I found your parents instead. I wanted to know where my face and hands came from. My memory had so faded from when I was five, I could no longer make out your eyes or mother's mouth. Your features had blurred, indistinguishable. I wouldn't have known you if I'd seen you on the street. You had become as much of a stranger as if I'd never met you.
“When I met my blood grandparents, I thought I'd feel emotional when I saw them; perhaps a gene memory would well up in me, and I'd instantly feel an attachment to them, that somehow my soul would know them, but I felt nothing. They were just an elderly couple I shared a soda with. No deep connection. No inner knowing, they as blank and numb toward me as I to them. They told me you had died, but I never found an obit on you. A couple years later, I learned that you were still alive. I confronted them. They told me that it was best that I didn't know my father. To them you were dead.”
Jake's face remained expressionless, but the words stung, nonetheless. He remembered all too well the day his father said those exact words to him.
“When I insisted that I would find you with or without their help, your father brought out a cardboard box. They showed me photos of you as a boy, as a teen, as a man. If it wasn't for the older style of clothes, I could have passed the photos off as myself. I saw a photo of you and my mother right after you married, and one of the three of us. I was dressed in a cowboy hat and chaps sitting on a pony. You two stood hand-in-hand beside me.”
“That was at the Coconino fairgrounds,” recalled Jake. “We went every year. You were three years old.”
“Mary dug deeper and showed me drawings you made as a child, a pencil container you decorated for her one Mother's Day, your first pair of shoes. Mary said that the last time they heard from you you were in Chicago but, she said, that some things were best left buried. Then they gave me a tour around the ranch and showed me the house where we lived. I wouldn't, I couldn't go inside. As I was leaving, Mary gave me the photo of the three of us.
“Then Daniel took me aside and gave me a manila envelope filled with papers. He said, if I must know read them, but advised me to throw them away. I left and never went back.
“I must have driven a hundred miles from the ranch before I pulled over. Thirty minutes went by while I tried to decide whether to open it. Finally, I dumped it upside down. Several newspaper clippings out of Chicago dropped out. I read and read; each word slapped me: suspected hit man arrested, possibly connected to a dozen other drug and Mafia related hits. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.”
Jake studied his son's face: impassive, angry, self-absorbed.
“That's part of the story. Are you ready to hear the rest?”
Father Michael shifted in his seat considering the question. It wasn't that he didn't know his answer; he just needed to sit quietly to absorb the weight of it.
When Father Michael nodded yes, Jake said, “Good, we'll start in the morning.”

Chapter 10

By the time Father Michael returned, Sister Teresa and Peter had been back for hours. Sister nervously glanced at her watch, checked and rechecked the front and side doors of the chapel. It was only 5 minutes until Father Michael was to conduct mass, and he always came early to greet parishioners. Most had already taken their seats in the pews and had knelt in prayer. The last stragglers hurriedly crossed themselves with holy water and took their seats. Peter handed out the last few flyers with the evening's mass outlined on it. Sister sighed with relief when she saw Father Michael coming down the chapel aisle.
After mass, Father Michael managed to avoid Sister Teresa throughout the evening. It was late when she finally caught him in his slippers and robe coming down the hall for a drink of water. She hadn't been able to sleep, worrying about the boy and wondering what Father Michael would say. After all, this wasn't as simple as asking to keep a puppy, but how could they turn him away when he had nowhere to go?
Father Michael didn't want to talk, but he could see that this time she wouldn't be put off. In her soft, spoken way she told him how the boy had been living on the streets and how he seemed so lost and in need of shelter. The Father listened as she spoke, knowing his answer before she finished.
“You're a nun, I'm a priest. We can't set up house and raise him as if we were his parents,” said the Father in a sarcastic, irritated tone.
“He is a soul in need, Father. Isn't that our calling?”
Peter heard their voices in the hall and cracked his door to listen.
“He can stay for the moment, but the Catholic Church is no longer in the
business of being an orphanage. In the morning, we must call the authorities. They can handle this situation better.”
“Father, he has already lost his mother, should he now be asked to leave the only town he's ever lived in?
“I'm not discussing this anymore.”
Changing the subject, he confronted Sister Teresa with the letter he found on his night stand.
“Where did this letter come from?”
“A man in the nursing home where my grandmother stays.”
“I don't want you to see him again.”
Father Michael didn't know how to tell her Jake was evil. She had an innocence he didn't want to destroy.
The Sister bowed her head in reluctant obedience, but inwardly she knew she would keep her promise to read to Jake, and she'd somehow get the Father to let the boy stay.

≈

Peter wrapped his few things in a blanket and slipped out the window. Not knowing where else to go, he climbed over the fence to his old home, which had been repossessed by the bank. The front and back doors were nailed shut. After finding all the windows locked, he untied his blanket and made himself a pallet, using the blankets he took from the church and the clothes Sister gave him for a pillow.
He brushed his teeth using the backyard hose and sat on the front porch, hoping Katie might come looking for him, but the night and next day came and went without a single visitor. He didn’t know that her mother had moved the two out in the middle of the night because once again she had failed to pay their rent. Katie begged to stop and tell Peter, but the mother said they didn’t have time. By this time Katie was already in Albuquerque.
Still day after day, Peter watched for her. Neighbors didn't bother to ask why he sat on the porch. Across the street, he could see the Snide family sitting down for dinner. He considered knocking at the door in hopes of an invitation to eat, but his pride prevented that. He considered rummaging through the trash but quickly decided he wasn't that desperate yet. So he just climbed back over the fence, covered himself with the blanket and tried to will his stomach pangs away.

Chapter 11

Father Michael only managed an hour nap before his anxious heart prodded him awake. When he went to put his feet on the floor, he almost stepped on Kokopelli, who had curled up beside the bed. At the moment, he couldn’t remember why he allowed Sister Teresa keep the dog. Against Father Michael’s desires the wolf dog took to him rather than Sister Teresa. The dog, of course, loved her, but come nighttime she wanted to be with the Father. So Father Michael carefully stepped over Kokopelli as he scratched her head.
Since Sister Teresa’s arrival, the church had acquired numerous injured rabbits, birds, a dog, two cats, and now she brought in a child. His patience had worn down like brakes grinding on metal.
All was dark outside, as he showered and dressed. As Father Michael headed out, he saw Sister Teresa kneeling at the altar, her face upturned before the icon of the Virgin Mary cradling Christ. The church was dark except for the votive candles parishioners had lit below Mary's bare feet. The Sister wasn't usually up this time of morning, but she hadn't been able to sleep.
Through the entrance behind the lectern, where sermons and masses had been conducted for centuries, Father Michael had walked in expecting to find the chapel empty. He often wandered through the church early in the morning to sort through his thoughts and to listen to the silence. Somehow, he hoped the souls of the priests and monks who came before him would impart their wisdom.
This morning his mind was heavy with thoughts of Sister Teresa, the man he refused to call father and his own son Matthew. Even the sleeping tablet he took didn't helped. Finally, he gave up and flung back the sheets and dressed. Once Father spotted Sister Teresa he turned to slip out unnoticed, but she had heard his steps double click on the wood floors.
Not taking her eyes off the Virgin Mary, she softly called out, “Father, you couldn't sleep either?”
“No.”
Before his mind thought his body moved toward the Virgin Mary, lit a candle and knelt beside the Sister. “Would you pray with me?”
His pleading eyes were foreign to her. She felt a twitch of fear, as a child about to learn her father wasn't bullet proof. Confused, she slowly uttered, “Of course, Father.”
Tears came to the Father Michael's eyes as he began to pray, “Holy Mother of God, hear our prayer. I'm called upon to lead this parish but how can I when I'm lost. Help me to find the words I need to help Sister Teresa understand.”
His words so confused her, she turned her eyes away from the Virgin Mary and stared into his mournful face. She wanted him to look at her directly, but Father Michael kept his eyes closed and enfolded Sister Teresa's hands, cupped in prayer and continued.
“I have sinned, and I will continue to sin as long as Sister Teresa is in this parish. I have fallen in love with her. I covet her. Ask her to search her heart and have pity on me. Ask her to request a reassignment.”
Bewildered, Sister Teresa pulled away. Father Michael dropped his head in disgrace and said barely audibly, “I'm sorry, Sister Teresa.”
Not knowing what to say, feel or do, the Sister gathered up her habit and hurried across the chapel, down the hall to her room.

Father Michael had one more task that couldn't wait for daylight. He set out down the slick, two-lane blacktop toward Taos, New Mexico. Few cars were on the road this early in the morning, as he steered one-handed and sipped black coffee. Kokopelli sat on the seat beside him watching out the window and occasionally sniffing at a brown-paper bag with grease seeping through its sides.

Critque of Chevel

2009-06-12T17:43:00.004-05:00

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
PubDate: 10/11/2002
Byline: DEBORAH VOORHEES Credit: Staff Writer
Section: OVERNIGHT

Everything in Cheval is about the precise collaboration between human and equine athletes.
Cheval isn't a typical horse show. Artistic director GillesSte-Croix gives us humans and horses no less amazing than the performers in now-famous Cirque du Soleil, which he helped start. In an intimate tent with a 46-foot ring, acrobats spin, somersault, dance and do handstands and aerial splits on the backs of theseequine beauties.
Awe intensifies as speeds quicken from trots to canters to gallops.
Among the most extreme performers are the Cossack riders. These daredevils do somersaults atop their mounts and crawl beneath theirbellies - all at a gallop.
At one point an acrobat runs alongside a galloping horse and, without help from a springboard leaps onto the horse's back.Amazingly, he lands on his feet.
One "liberty" act (without a rider or restraints) is worth noting.An Arabian stallion named Dansk gives a commendable performance asa wild, rebel colt. This bridleless horse dances only for himself.He thrashes his mane and paws at the ground, refusing the commandsof his trainer.
In great defiance, he rears over his trainer, his teeth bared andhis hooves in striking position. Unfazed, the trainer continues toask the horse to submit. Gradually and gracefully, the stallionbegins to dance to please the man. He rears and pivots on his hindlegs and finally kneels before him.
The show's first half is the most impressive. The action movessmoothly often without clear stops and starts.
At Wednesday's preview, things came apart a bit in the second half.The show loses some of its edge as the acts became more segmentedand more like traditional circus-horse routines, including theinevitable juggling on horseback.
The performers also begin to rely on a cheesy circus gimmick - theone where broad arm gestures tell the audience that somethingastounding has just happened - ta-da. The cues are hardly necessarywhen acrobats are doing flips on the backs of cantering horses.
The costumes designed by Francois Barbeau help elevate all ofCheval. He mercifully spares viewers from the gaudy and predictablesequined bodices and ridiculous feathered hats. Instead, Mr.Barbeau opts for a combination of old-world elegance and vagabondgypsy attire - often in muted colors. Guy Simard's lighting -mostly violets and blues - adds to the elegance.
E-mail dvoorhees@dallasnews.com
Cheval continues Tuesdays-Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 and 8p.m., Sundays at 1 and 5 p.m. through Oct. 27 in the tent at ValleyView Center, Preston Road and LBJ Freeway. Tickets $39 to $52; discounts for students, seniors and children. Call Ticketmaster at214-373-8000 or metro 972-647-5700, or go to http://www.chevaltheatre.com/.

Launch Text Publication: THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
PubDate: 10/4/2002
Byline: DEBORAH VOORHEES Credit: Staff

Acrobatics was just another circus act until Gilles Ste-Croix and ahandful of street performers revolutionized it in what became theinternational phenomenon of Cirque du Soleil.
Twenty years later Mr. Ste-Croix is tackling another circusmainstay: the horse act. He wants to transform the union of humansand horses into something extraordinary in its own right - and notsimply Cirque du Soleil on horseback.
It took two years to put together his latest creation, ChevalThéâtre, which premiered in Montreal in May 2001. It's now on athree-year tour that comes to Valley View Center startingThursday.
"I wanted to bring the circus back to its origins - a single ringwith horses, " says Mr. Ste-Croix, and then take it to a new level, with cutting-edge choreography, costumes, music and effects.
Like Cirque du Soleil, the show called Cheval, which means horse inFrench, will be performed in a tent. It has been elaboratelypainted to look like a castle, and it has 1,500 seats that surroundthe stage. "I prefer a tent because I have more control of thespace, " says Mr. Ste-Croix.
When he decided to create a horse show, one of his first obstacleswas finding performers. "There aren't that many people who dotricks with horses anymore. It's a dying art, " he says.
Most performers came from Europe, where there are more horse acts.Still, Mr. Ste-Croix found the pool of horse performers so smallthat he had to hire some acrobats without riding experience.
Caroline Macé, for example, has to do tricks on horses that sheonce did on stationary objects. "I had to learn to do acrobatics tothe horse's rhythm, " says Ms. Macé. "It takes total concentration.The horse adds the element of the unknown."
That unknown element drives Cheval in many ways. Few people are asfamiliar with horses today as when they were a chief means oftransporation - they seem like majestic, mysterious creatures.
"I want the audience to see the relationship that exists betweenthe performer and the horse, " says Mr. Ste-Croix. "It's built ontrust.
"When you see the Cossack rider go under the belly of the horse ata gallop, you understand that there is a way of living where youhave to be one with the horse, " he says.
And yet Mr. Ste-Croix's goal is to bring something new to thisancient relationship - something new to the often antiquated bigtop. "I had to push the performers away from the traditional horseact and push them into a new light, " he says.
Besides choreography, the show needed a sound - Cirque du Soleil, of course, is almost as famous for its ethereal world beat soundsas its daredevil feats. Bernard Poirier composed two hours oforiginal music for Cheval.
"I wanted the music to be a blend of old Europe and jazz and rock, "says Mr. Ste-Croix. "Bernard had to consider what rhythm fit awalk, trot, canter. He had to make the music fit the feeling of theperformance."
Cheval is forever evolving. "It's changed so much since we firstopened, and it will continue to do so."
Right now, Mr. Ste-Croix is putting together five paint horses toperform in a fire act. The first hurdle: to train them not to befrightened of a natural enemy - fire.
DETAILS: Opens Thursday at 8 p.m. and continues each Tuesdaythrough Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1and 5 p.m. through Oct. 27 at Valley View Center, Preston Road andLBJ. $39 to $52; discounts for students, seniors and children.
Ticketmaster, 214-373-8000, metro 972-647-5700 orhttp://www.ticketmaster.com/.
E-mail dvoorhees@dallasnews.com

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
PubDate: 3/15/2002
Byline: DEBORAH VOORHEES Credit: Staff WriterSection:

The Texas Storytelling Festival in Denton steps back to the daysof string games, comic books and marbles. The days when stayinginside was a punishment, and no one had dreamed of video games, after-school cartoons or digital anything. Storytelling evengoes back to times when there was little else to do around thecave.
The festival's theme this year is "Storytelling: Southern-fried, Texas-sized, with a Yankee on the side." The name reflects thefestival's headliners: Dallas' Elizabeth Ellis, a veteran of thegranddaddy of all storytelling festivals, the National StorytellingFestival in Jonesboro, Tenn.; North Carolina's David Holt, a GrammyAward-winning folklorist and musician; and New Hampshire's WillyClaflin, who weaves tales with his music.
The headliners will join 87 others to explore topics ranging fromwar to sports, American Indians to Western pioneers, ghosts tospirituality, Southern belles to heroes, Brer Rabbit to the wilycoyote.
Some storytellers quietly spin yarns while propped on a stool.Others take up the whole stage with booming vocals and bodymovements. Some tell their tales as modern-day minstrels. But allhave a knack for luring in the audience with little more than aspotlight and a microphone.
Last year's festival resembled a large family reunion. Many peopleknew each other; some folks come back year after year. They milledabout the park's benches, trees, swings and slides. When schoolbuses arrived with kids on field trips, the air was filled withlaughter and little voices.
Daytime shows are easy to get into, but come early for the nightconcerts. They usually sell out. Vendors will be selling CDs, tapesand books from nationally and regionally known storytellers, manyof whom will be at the festival.
This is an event for which you leave the GameBoy at home and whereyou instead gather 'round for one of the world's oldest forms ofentertainment: spoken word. Close your eyes and you might even seethe blackened cave walls and feel the fire's warmth.
DETAILS: Opens Thursday and continues through March 24 at Denton'sCivic Center Park, 321 E. McKinney. General hours Thursday from10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 7 to 10:30 p.m.; March 22 from 8:30 a.m.to 10:30 p.m., March 23 from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., March 24 from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Events priced individually; $165 weekend passincludes everything except workshop with David Holt and the TaleSpinner Party. 940-387-8336. http://www.tejasstorytelling.com/.