Stories – Page 5 – Via Negativa

July 9, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Old farm photos

The Children’s Picnic

Seven girls sit on the lawn around a picnic blanket. The year is 1919 or 1920, so of course they are all wearing dresses. They range in age from three to about fifteen. One girl wears a bow in her hair; she is six years old, and her name is Margaret. We don’t know the names of any of the others, because 81 years later, Margaret can no longer remember who they were. The teenager might have been her cousin Phyllis, she thinks.

The photographer takes three pictures of the children’s picnic, which will make it possible to pinpoint its location — on the lawn above the kitchen — even after eight decades have elapsed and almost everything has changed. In the background of one photo, a martin house and a large bell stand loom above the unfamiliar foliage. In the first two photos, the girls look stiff and serious — all except for Margaret, who grins impishly, at home here on her Great Uncle George’s farm. Then they go back to their picnic, raising spoons to their lips. The pet collie, whose name is Snap, appears as a blur of movement off to the left. Margaret’s eyes follow the dog; you can almost hear her calling for him to come. But he isn’t interested in joining this strange feast, which seems to include nothing but a small pile of oak leaves in the center of the blanket.

Charles in the Garden

Two-year-old Charles stands in a large patch of turnips, or perhaps rutabagas. Behind him, the barn is brand-new, painted a shade of darkness that must be red. Above the corncrib, rows of fruit trees where we have only ever known a field stretch all the way up to Sapsucker Ridge, which is dimly visible in the distance. In dreams, I sometimes visit another version of the hollow that lies right over a ridge we’d somehow overlooked, where the orchard was never bulldozed out in the 1950s and the old farmhouse was spared its extreme makeover into a faux plantation home. Everything is twice as big and twice as far — the way things looked when I was small.

Margaret’s little brother still has uncut, blonde curls and wears a long-sleeved white dress. He stands with his feet planted firmly in the garden path and grins at something off to the photographer’s left. With one arm raised he points high above his head, as if leading the ranks of turnips on to glory.

Light and Shadows

In the middle of the road below and to the right of my front porch, Jacob Plummer stands in his Sunday best with one hand on his hips and the other resting on the rear wheel of an open carriage. His wife Mollie sits up in the carriage holding the reins. They’re hauling what look like steel gates, or perhaps the springs for a child’s crib. The horse has his head up, clearly intent on getting back to the barn. At the top of the photo, a limb from the balm-of-Gilead polar tree that used to stand at the corner of the wall until its death in the early 1970s blocks much of the background. The bottom third of the photo is a double exposure. On the near side of the road, the sky starts over with much less balm-of-Gilead in it — a sky which, judging from the sharpness of the shadows cast by man and horse and carriage, must be a clear blue and not this barren field of white that we see.

Harrowing

The hired man and his son have paused in their harrowing of the freshly plowed field. It’s spring; the trees at the edge of the field still look skeletal, and there are splashes of white that could be shadbush. The newly emancipated stones have dried in the sun, making them clearly visible against the darker soil. The man is bearded under a floppy felt hat, and wears a long-sleeved white shirt and dark pants held up by suspenders. In the first photo, the camera is tilted, making him appear to stand at an angle to the ground, like the gromon on a sundial. In the second photo, they’ve turned away from the photographer and gone back to work, the boy astride the left horse holding a switch, the man behind with one foot on the harrow and his hands on his hips as the iron teeth sink once more into the mountain’s thin red clay.

The Siblings

Richard is twelve, and doesn’t know what to do with his hands. In one photo, we see him in profile against a tree with his hands held stiffly behind his back. In another photo, he stands in the road halfway up the hill toward the barn with his hands thrust into the bib pockets of his overalls, frowning at the camera. In a third photo, taken at the same spot, his little sister has joined him. His hands have now disappeared behind the front of his overalls, elbows a little less awkward at his sides as he stares at the ground to his right. A straw hat nearly hides his new haircut. Margaret appears to imitate his posture, resting her weight on one leg and thrusting a hand into the pleats of her dress. The dog is nowhere to be seen. Stifling the vivacity that will carry her through nearly ninety years of life, she looks as grownup as she can, and gives her best impression of utter boredom.

June 15, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Man on the street

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

My fourth entry in the self-portrait marathon

I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets — but it’s what the people want.
–Turkmenbashi

Never read about the Turkmenbashi right before going to bed. While I slept, a bland, doughy face came looking in the window.

Tink. Tink. Tink. Water dripping on a steel roof in the prison yard.

The golden statue revolves on top of its pedestal not in order to follow the sun, as malicious outsiders claim, but in order to keep from falling into shadow. A positive attitude is a powerful potion, chant the people’s deputies.

Tink, tink, tink: spoons on glasses in the golden-domed palace. The blandest of smiles, announcing the abolition of the death penalty. Across the boulevard at the U.S. embassy, it’s like a group orgasm as cellphones in pants pockets all begin to vibrate at once.

I am a bystander in my own dream. Who are all these blue horsemen flourishing their sabers so cinematically? They gallop into the forest in a large, public park just as some demonstrators — Young Turkmens, I guess — lead a mob of military police into the same forest from the other side.

Is it that I have no stomach for gore, or that, fed on a diet of bloodless history, I lack the mental imagery? The trees hide everything. I hear shots and screams, and the winnying of horses.

Half of the horsemen come out, but none of the police. The voice of the omniscient narrator hesitates, then tells the truth. The horsemen were patriotic defenders of Turkmenistan; the police were vile enemies of the people. There will be democratic elections. Tink, tink, tink.

Now I am there in person, and so are you. We bloggers have chosen Ashgabat as our next gathering spot — it’s centrally located, we say. The elections were a smashing success; they have democracy now. The Turkmenbashi’s head smiles blandly from the top of a revolving stake.

The former secret police have new jobs as pimps and pickpockets, thugs and drug runners. They follow us everywhere. Four of them rob us at knifepoint in a crowded restaurant.

Our shouts for help arouse nothing but studied disinterest from the other diners. Then I get an idea. Tap your spoons against your wineglasses, I urge my companions.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

May 17, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Here there be Squirrels

Monday, 4:40 a.m. I should know better than to try and get started on laundry before daybreak. As I carry the clothesbasket out through the breezeway, I hear a fluttering of wings, and when I open the laundry room door and snap on the light, suddenly something is trying to perch in my hair, which is still wet from the shower, and beating its little wings against the back of my head. Something else is madly circling the tiny room. Carolina wren fledglings! I watched them take their first, do-or-die flights from their natal nest in the eaves just last week. They’ve made it about as far from home as I have.

While the one manages to extract its feet from my hair and flutter over to the window, the other bird falls down behind the dryer. And I no sooner set the basket down than the first one is clinging to the back of my head again. I haven’t had a haircut in about six months, and I guess it makes sense that a terrified and disoriented young wren would seek refuge in the only brown thing in the room. I reach back and shoo it off, and it flies over to the hot water heater and gets tangled up with the pipes.

Neither bird seems likely to go back outside until dawn. The dumber of the two is still fluttering madly in the corner behind the dryer. I could go ahead and start the wash, but the noise and rocking of the machine would probably scare the crap out of them – what crap remains. This has been a real shit storm, did I mention that? I back slowly out of the room, leaving the door open, and snap off the light.

I examine myself in the bathroom mirror. My quilted shirt seems to have taken most of the damage. There’s bird shit on my sleeve and bird shit down my back, but my hair looks O.K. Did St. Francis have days like this? Did he ever just tell the birds to bugger off?

Tuesday, 5:45 a.m. While I drink my coffee and listen to the dawn chorus, I’m watching the smaller of the two porcupines that lives in the crawlspace under the house eat my elm tree. The poor thing looks sparser every year, but what the hell – if the porkies don’t get it, Dutch elm disease will.

By the way, did you ever notice how many weird things we blame on the Dutch? Dutch oven. Dutch courage. Double Dutch. Dutch uncle. What is it with the fucking Dutch? I could go on, but I’d better stop out of respect for my ancestors – who were, I’m sure, quite normal, albeit Dutch.

The porcupine waddles out along a small branch and stands on its hind legs, freeing its forepaws to grab and stuff nearby twigs into its mouth. This reminds of the way the Baltimore oriole that I photographed two weeks ago used one foot to pull leaves in range of its bill. Unlike the porcupine, though, it was interested only in what was on the leaves, not the leaves themselves.

As I watch the porcupine, I find myself imagining in great detail what might happen if it fell. This is not unheard of, and evolutionary biologists hypothesize that the danger of impaling itself is high enough to account for the presence of an antiseptic chemical in the porcupine’s quills. There’s a lesson there, I think: if you write with a poison pen, make sure you have the antidote. There’s nothing that bothers me more than someone who can’t take what they dish out.

Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. Here there be Squirrels. One of them keeps looking in the kitchen window at me while I write; it has to hang upside-down off the drainpipe in order to do so. Every time I hear it rattling against the screen, I whirl around and stare back. Call me paranoid, but I can’t help thinking it’s looking for nesting material. I feel its beady little eyes boring into the back of my head.

May 11, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Medicine

The LPN believes in being firm. Her daughter is five, and she doesn’t allow her to meet her gaze; she always stares back until the daughter looks away. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile, she likes to say.

The woman in the next bed
moans all night: Help me, help me,
somebody, nurse.
The nurse steals in on stockinged feet.

When her four-year-old son was an infant, she would sit on him, straddling his tiny torso while her husband changed the diaper. They’re never too young to learn to lie still, she said.

In the woods behind the hospital,
trilliums bob in the sun, a white mirage.
The moss cracks open from lack of rain.

The 88-year-old great-grandmother looks on with an aching heart. Her mild suggestions carry little weight with her daughter or son-in-law, with her grandson or his wife the nurse. “They all talk to me like a child,” she tells us. “You’re the first people I’ve had an adult conversation with in months.”

Those clouds could be anything:
dogwood, hawthorn,
some wild cherry wrapped in caterpillar webs.

Expected to look after her great-grandchildren half the week, she tries to make them understand that love need not be accompanied by threats or a smothering embrace. When the four-year-old kicks her, much to his outraged surprise, she hits back.

On the abandoned farm, a lawn chair
still sits out under the apple tree.
Petals drift down between the slats.

Back in Pennsylvania for a rare visit, she apologizes for not doing a better job of staying in touch. “I’ve been so exhausted. I can’t remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep.”

Toothwort,
spleenwort,
bleeding-heart,
hepatica:
we might fall forever if not
for that net of roots.

April 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The ugly American Buddhist

I have a new piece up at qarrtsiluni, a (very) short story called Red Letter Day. It’s set in Japan, and I’d like to think it borrows a bit from the modern Japanese aesthetic (I read a shitload of Japanese literature in college), but you can be the judge of that.

January 18, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Graduated

To my knowledge, I am the only person in the hundred-and-fifty-year history of Penn State ever to graduate without knowing it. That was back in 1987. I had just settled into a new sublet in the West End, and after four years of college, I was beginning to get comfortable with my career as a student. My older brother had been in college off and on for six years at that point, and showed no signs of imminent graduation.* We even had a class together – a senior seminar in comparative literature, which we were both majoring in. Things were going smoothly. My only concern was the looming deadline for dropping classes: I couldn’t decide which class to drop. None of them seemed really very strenuous.

One day about three weeks into the spring semester I stopped by my Dad’s office in the university library for some reason. “Guess what?” he said. “You graduated in December!”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “I still need at least three credits in comp lit and a bunch more baccalaureate degree requirements. There must be some mistake.” He dialed the number he’d written down on a little slip of paper. “My son says that’s impossible,” he said into the phone. “It’s the Bursar,” he told me. “He says he has your diploma right in front of him.”

This was already one revelation too many. It had never occurred to me that the Office of the Bursar might contain an actual individual called the Bursar. I had always vaguely assumed “bursar” must be some kind of abstract noun, or at best an omnipotent computer. Picture Maimonides being informed by the angel of death that God was, in fact, an old guy with a beard. It was very disillusioning. In Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, the third definition of “graduate” is “to change gradually.” This was much too sudden.

Over the next couple of days, we pieced it together. It turned out I must’ve checked the wrong box when I sent in the tuition form in August, indicating a desire to graduate that semester. That, combined with the fact that I was nominally an honors student (despite never having taken an honors class, much less signaling any intention to write an honor’s thesis), had set in motion a bureaucratic machinery that proved unstoppable.

A compassionate administrator in the College of Liberal Arts had taken it upon himself to do some creative moving around of credits in order to make up for the missing requirements. Form letters had been sent regarding the December graduation ceremony, but I had pitched them out, assuming it was a slip-up. And of course, unbeknownst to me, a diploma had been generated. On the day I walked into my Dad’s office, he had called about a bill from the university that we had assumed must be erroneous, because it didn’t include the three-quarters tuition break available to all offspring of faculty members.

Dear old State! They were happy to keep processing our checks, but insisted that I must now pay full tuition, as a Continuing Education student. In the process of clearing up the confusion and canceling my classes, I actually got to meet the Bursar, which was pretty exciting, and involved passing through three sets of increasingly more imposing doors guarded by three successively less nervous-looking secretaries. I remember an affable, older gentlemen (no beard), who said he just wanted to meet me, since he was pretty sure this was an unprecedented occurrence. I don’t recall any other specifics of our brief conversation, but I do remember feeling pleased at the attention, and not at all embarrassed. Having satisfied himself that I really existed and that I was going to go quietly, the Bursar extracted my diploma from the bottom drawer of his desk and shook my hand.

It was a mile walk back into the center of campus on a cold afternoon in late January. I headed for the coffee shop in the basement of the Student Union building. I figured I might play video games for a while.
__________

*In fact, he would spend another couple of years as an undergraduate, and over a decade more as a graduate student. Lately he’s been making noises about going back for a law degree.

December 23, 2005 by Dave Bonta